The Silence in the Garden

by William Trevor

  ‘Will you get the bread, and pork chops in Broderick’s? Get four good chops with the kidney in them.’

  He says he will. She writes down other items on a scrap torn off the edge of a newspaper. He is going over to bet, she guesses: nothing that happens can prevent him from laying down his bets. Still freckled and still incredulous about the eyes, though a grey-haired woman now, Patty has never in her life gambled on a horse or a greyhound: all that is a man’s thing.

  He drives to the town, across the bridge, his black dog sprawled on the seat beside him. Empty trees stand bleakly, against the sharp blue of a sky that is clear of clouds. Smoke from the few houses he passes rises straight; frost lingers beneath the hedges.

  As he approaches the town he raises a hand often in salutation; he is as well known as anyone for miles around. He draws the car up at Spillane’s public house. ‘A bottle of stout,’ he orders at the bar. He greets the men who are there, and nods when the barman says: ‘I hear she died.’

  ‘She did.’

  A man looks up from the Irish Press. He’d heard that too, he says, and decently lets time elapse before he adds: ‘Lashaway to win, Tom?’

  Wiping froth from his lips, Tom nods again. He intends to place a bet on Lashaway: he has a feeling in his bones about that horse. The man with the newspaper laughs. ‘I heard that one before, Tom.’

  ‘She’ll win all right.’

  Ever since he read in the diaries about the events that followed his father’s death Tom has been trying to comprehend them. Dowley found the excuse for his vengeance in the troubles there were, and that was natural enough. But the extraordinariness of what happened next bewilders Tom. There’d always been talk of the Rollestons slaughtering their way to the island, but there’d been talk as well of how they’d been decent at the time of the Famine, and they’d been decent to his mother and they’d been decent to him. Funny the way a thing like the other would afflict them, the way they couldn’t come to terms with it.

  ‘You won’t get much in the way of odds,’ the man with the newspaper warns, and Tom replies that he knows he won’t. Other horses are discussed. Little Jack Horner and Funnyface III. Sky-Writer, Fred Wootton up. ‘Would the funeral be in the morning?’ the barman enquires, drying a glass.

  ‘Eleven o’clock.’

  ‘Ah, well.’

  Tom finishes his drink, and does not speak again except to say he’ll be back later on. In Byrne’s he gets odds of eleven to eight. He takes the ticket and leaves the turf accountant’s, even though he could watch the race if he stayed there. He always prefers not to do that; it’s become a habit with him to place his bet and then to go away, to walk about and do what shopping is necessary while the race is run.

  ‘A good age,’ Esmeralda Coyne remarks, stopping him to say it. ‘Was it peaceful with her?’

  ‘I think maybe she went in her sleep.’ it’s nice like that.’

  He says it is. He knows that Esmeralda Coyne is inquisitive about what is going to happen now. More than ten years have passed since she remarked, meeting him as casually as this, that people couldn’t help how they came into the world, how could they? Nobody these days gave tuppence about a thing like that, she’d said.

  ‘It’s a grand old house they’ve left behind, Tom.’

  ‘It’s shook enough in places.’

  ‘It wouldn’t take much to put it right.’

  She does not disguise her interest. Whenever people in the shops or the public houses look at him in a certain way he knows Esmeralda Coyne has come into their minds. The oldest of her sisters married Slattery, who’d taught Tom how to climb up and look through the billiard-hall windows. They have the garage and the petrol pump now, and Esmeralda lives in the house with them.

  ‘A hotel’s the coming thing in Ireland, Tom. The Yanks are here in droves.’

  I’ve heard it, all right.’

  ‘We’ll pull the blinds down for her funeral.’

  On the promenade two nuns dressed differently from Sister Teresa Dolores and Sister Sullivan walk briskly. It’s hard to become used to the dress they wear now, not to think of them as lay workers of some kind. They glance in his direction, but do not greet him. It’s well known that he puts in time on the promenade while a race is being run, that afterwards he’ll return to Spillane’s for an hour or so, win or lose. He wonders if the nuns remark that he is feckless, wasting time when he should be working. Being unmarried himself, he has something in common with them, but they cannot be expected to see that, any more than Sister Teresa Dolores or Sister Sullivan might once have felt they occupied a common ground with Briscoe or Mr McGrath and Mr Tobin of the Rose of Tralee boardinghouse. Briscoe married in the end, and so did Mr Tobin, but Mr McGrath did not, nor did Mr O’Hagan, and the ferryman was always too old. Tom has never wanted to marry himself, Esmeralda Coyne or anyone else. ‘There’s some like that by nature,’ the ferryman used to say, the subject of bachelors always a favorite with him. He had not meant priests, of course. He had excluded the ruling of a priest’s vocation.

  Shops have crept into the promenade; a supermarket sprawls. The old billiard-hall has been demolished. The wasteland that was to have been the Father Quirke Park is still a wasteland.

  He turns and walks back again, past the brass plates and the window where the white cat stared out disdainfully. Not far from here he had his last conversation with Holy Mullihan before Holy Mullihan left the town. Fifty yards further on, Traynor’s Picture Palace is a furniture store.

  In Byrne’s he collects his winnings and then buys the items on Patty’s list in Meath’s, asking for a plastic bag to carry them in. The woman at the till mentions the death, respectfully commiserating. ‘Lonely for you now,’ she speculates as she punches out the prices on the cash register, and he replies that perhaps it will be. Her eyes pass over his clothes when she turns to tell him what the total is, and he can feel her thinking that Esmeralda Coyne should be looking after them. He has put a jacket on, as he always does when he drives over: with his trousers, it makes a suit, brown, striped, creased and shiny in places. The green jersey he wears is tattered at the elbows but cannot be seen beneath the jacket, is Patty still across?’ the woman casually asks.

  ‘She is.’

  ‘I didn’t see her this long time.’

  The woman is wondering if it is right and proper for Patty and himself to remain under the one roof, now that Sarah Pollexfen has died. She is wondering if Esmeralda Coyne knows enough about the business to take charge of an hotel. She is wondering if Esmeralda Coyne will get him.

  Tom knows all that. He can sense the woman’s thoughts because he has known that woman all his life. He packs the items he has bought into a carrier bag and says goodbye to her. She calls after him to ask the day of the funeral. ‘Tomorrow,’ he says.

  There’s hardly enough land left to scrape a living from. Between them the brothers sold too much after Lionel’s accident with the harvester, and then again when Haverty was too old to work. They had needed the money to keep the household going, and none of it had mattered since there wasn’t going to be another generation. One of these days he will try to buy an acre or two back.

  In Broderick’s he watches the pork chops being cut, a section of kidney left on each. The butcher, son of the Broderick who sent over meat of poor quality to Carriglas, being upset because his wife was pregnant, remarks upon the death, and sympathises. ‘Tomorrow,’ Tom repeats. The doors of the shop will be closed, he is assured.

  ‘No trouble in the world.’ In Spillane’s the barman’s tone is complimentary. ‘An easy length.’

  ‘The going suited her, of course.’

  His stout is poured. The man who’d been reading the Irish Press has gone. What’ll become of the old place? the barman conversationally enquires, and Tom remembers what Haverty said about the lead on the roof being worth a fortune, and Villana saying once: ‘Sell Carriglas for the lead, Tom.’ He doesn’t know, he replies.

  He drinks for a while longer; oth
er matters are talked about. Then he picks up the plastic bag of groceries and makes his way back to where he has parked the car. Dusk is gathering; the air is colder than it has been all day; the sky has reddened in the west. In the car he strokes the dog’s head before he starts the engine. Its tail wags, thumping against the door of the car. ‘Aren’t you the patient fellow?’ he says, the praise the dog likes best.

  Dusk gathers as he drives through the countryside. On the bridge the bronze plate that honours a hero has been dulled by time. Lichen has crept on to the concrete it’s set in. He passes by, unaffected by its presence.

  ‘Is it still cold?’ Patty enquires, unpacking the groceries.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Did you see anyone?’

  He mentions the barman in Spillane’s and the man reading the Irish Press, and the woman who’d engaged him in conversation at the till in Meath’s. He makes no reference to Esmeralda Coyne because there is no need to. ‘Broderick’s will close their doors,’ he says. In the closer of the two sculleries he prepares a plate of food for his dog and then returns to await his own food at the table.

  She opens a tin of peaches he has bought and spoons the fruit on to two plates. The chops are fried, slices of fresh bread cut. Tea is made.

  Patty guesses that Esmeralda Coyne was on the watch out for him. She’d have known he’d be over because she’d have looked in the papers to see what races were running. She’d have said something because the death would have prompted it.

  ‘The horse I had came in,’ he says.

  ‘Did you win much, Tom?’

  ‘Not much. Only it came in when I knew it would. I was pleased about that.’

  He, too, is pondering the future. You could have a hotel and strangers would walk through the rooms that had been the Rollestons’. You would make a profit. The visitors would come with their luggage, as the visitors had at the time of the wedding, only all of it would be easier because of the bridge being there. They would drink whiskey in the hall and sit down to their dinner. You’d grow vegetables for them in the garden. One day, ages ago, Esmeralda Coyne laid it all out for him. The island would be different then, a new place altogether, with all that coming and going. And Esmeralda is young enough to have a child or two.

  ‘Ah, great,’ he says as his chops are placed before him. The black dog is stretched out by the door. An alarm clock ticks on the dresser.

  ‘What was the name of the horse, Tom?’

  ‘Lashaway. A young filly.’

  ‘It’s good she won.’

  As she eats, an irony occurs to Patty: it seems odd that a hearse should take the body back to the mainland when the whole island was a burial place once. It was Sarah Pollexfen herself who’d told her that, who’d explained in the kitchen one afternoon about the standing stones. She’d spoken of the graveyard beneath them, and the boats that carried the dead to this chosen place, the processing of the funerals.

  ‘I never saw the standing stones,’ she says. ‘I never was up there.’

  ‘They’ll be there a while yet.’

  ‘I’ll go up one of these days.’

  Somehow it will be easier now. Sarah Pollexfen was the gentlest of creatures, but she was there to give an order and to restrain. It seems a pity to destroy her diaries, Patty reflects as she clears away the dishes, even though she said they might be destroyed when they were read. Fancy a maid from this kitchen sending in demands for money!

  ‘it’s dry in the cupboard by the range,’ she suggests. ‘As good a place as any.’

  Tom nods in agreement. For an hour he reads the newspaper, spread out on the table where the plates and cups have been. There was an emptiness, too, when the others went, one by one. He sensed it again this morning when he passed through the yard, and when he took the short cut through the garden and walked on the road to the pier. It will last a month or two, and then it won’t be noticeable any more.

  ‘Goodnight so, Tom,’ Patty bids him, taking the alarm clock from the dresser.

  They will live here, changing nothing: they both know that now, though neither says it. He will not sell the lead from the roof, any more than he’ll ask Burke’s to come over and arrange an auction. In time people will become used to the two of them having a home in the same house. In time Esmeralda Coyne’s interest will wither. ‘You are happy, Tom?’ Villana said, the time she asked him to leave the gate-lodge for the house. He wanted nothing more than what he had, he confessed. ‘Oh, that is happiness,’ Villana said.

  ‘Goodnight, Patty.’

  He remains a moment longer, then climbs the back stairs, turning lights on as he goes. In the bedroom that is fusty with the odour of death he folds back the edge of the sheet and gazes into the pallid face. Already it is not Sarah Pollexfen’s, but in the presence of the dwindling likeness he is grateful that she made the contribution of a poor relation to a family’s epitaph. Carriglas will be a place to stroll to on a summer’s afternoon, the tidy script asserts, as we have strolled to the fallen abbey and the burial mound. Absence has gathered in the rooms, and silence in the garden. They have returned Carriglas to its clay. He covers again the still remains and moves to extinguish the light. As he descends through the house those last words echo, lightening his bewilderment: their punishment of themselves seems terrible, yet a marvel also.

  About the Author

  William Trevor KBE was an Irish novelist, playwright, and short story writer. One of the elder statesmen of the Irish literary world, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary writers of short stories in the English language.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1969 by the Estate of William Trevor

  Cover design by Mauricio Díaz

  978-1-5040-5813-1

  This edition published in 2019 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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  WILLIAM TREVOR

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