Mr Hassett entered the public house after he had paused to speak to the woman sweeping the pavement. Orpen watched the daily girl polishing the brass on the hall door of the Connultys’ bed-and-breakfast house and when a moment later he noticed a stranger in the Square there was no mistaking, even in the distance, the St John straight back and assured comportment. This would be old George Freddie’s grandson, born after the family had gone. George Anthony he’d been christened.
Orpen Wren stood up, saying to himself as soon as he had a clearer view that this was definitely George Anthony. When he saluted him across the Square the stranger didn’t notice at first, and when he did he hesitated. Then Florian Kilderry raised a hand in response.
6
‘Come on out of that.’ Dillahan called up his dogs and they came at once when they saw him going to the Vauxhall, not the tractor. The front tyre that was leaking air a bit hadn’t lost much, but he put the pump in the back anyway in case it played up. Then he drove over to Crilly, where once in a while it was necessary to round up his mountain sheep, to count them and look for any that might have strayed. It was the only time the dogs ever entered the car and they always knew. As much as he did himself, they liked the mountainy land.
He was delayed there because an old ewe had died. He might have left her in the heather, but he found a place that was a better grave for what remained of her. He wasn’t sentimental, but he respected sheep.
He watched his two dogs working them, gathering them and driving them in his direction, holding them while he counted. Misty earlier, the sky had cleared. Fluffy white clouds moved gently; patches of blue appeared in the grey. He didn’t have to climb higher than the beginning of the rock-face.
He drove the Vauxhall slowly down from Crilly, past Gortduff and Baun. He stopped by the gate into a field he was hoping to buy. Its acquisition would make his days easier because of the access through it to his river land, the long way round no longer necessary. He liked the tidiness of that as much as the prospect of increasing the extent of his farm and restoring the field to good heart: Gahagan had let it go.
He left the car in the yard but didn’t go into the house. He hadn’t expected to be back from Crilly so soon or he would have said he’d have something to eat in the kitchen instead of taking sandwiches today. The dogs went with him when he took the tractor to the lower hill fields.
Ellie pulled the sheets of newspaper back, then knelt on them again, applying more Cardinal polish to the scullery floor. She hadn’t ever used Cardinal before, but the concrete surface had been that same red once; she could tell because there were traces of it left behind. The whole scullery looked brighter when she’d finished.
In the kitchen she ran water into a kettle. When it boiled she made tea in the small teapot she used when she was alone. She thought of poaching an egg, but she didn’t because she wasn’t hungry.
She sat in the yard on one of the kitchen chairs, with her tea and the Nenagh News. A pickaxe had been found in the boot of a car when its driver was arrested, declared drunk. Ore had been discovered near Toomyvara; Killeen’s Pride had won twice at Ballingarry. Top prices were being paid for ewes.
The newspaper slipped from her fingers and she didn’t pick it up. She shouldn’t have liked the photographer smiling at her. She shouldn’t have said she’d show him when he said what he was after was chicken-and-ham paste. She had walked about the Cash and Carry with a stranger she didn’t know. She had told him her name. ‘Nothing,’ she’d said when he asked her what Ellie was short for. He laughed and she wanted to laugh herself and didn’t know why.
She picked up the newspaper from where it had fallen on to the concrete surface. She carried the chair and the tray back to the kitchen, the newspaper carelessly folded under one arm. She threw away the dregs in the teapot and washed up her cup and saucer.
‘Hullo,’ a voice called out in the yard.
She hadn’t heard a car. It would be Mrs Hadden for her buttermilk. It was the day she came and she never drove in, preferring to park in the road because she found it difficult to negotiate the turn into the gateway.
Grateful for the distraction, yet resenting it, Ellie pushed the kettle on to the hot ring in case Mrs Hadden wanted tea. She came to the front door, which no one else ever did. ‘I mustn’t disturb you,’ she always said when Ellie opened it and she said it now. Ellie led her to the kitchen.
‘A cup of tea?’ she offered, and Mrs Hadden said no, not adding, as she was inclined to, that she was on a diuretic and had to watch it. What she liked instead of tea was a soda bun if buns were cooling on a wire rack.
Ellie apologized because there were no buns today. She fetched the buttermilk from the scullery, in one of the two jars Mrs Hadden provided herself, and Mrs Hadden began to fish coins out of her purse, at the same time reporting on the condition of an aunt who’d been taken into a home.
‘Heart-rending,’ she said. ‘Not that it isn’t a lively place. It’s the quiet ones you’d be suspicious of.’
There was more, about homes that had been, or should be, closed down because of casualness as regards sedating drugs. ‘It’ll come to all of us, of course,’ Mrs Hadden said.
‘Yes, it will.’
‘I had an uncle-in-law who refused point blank to go in anywhere. Horry Gould.’
Horry Gould had gone on to reach a hundred and one. He had bought a new suit of clothes every birthday for the last ten years of his life. Another way of being defiant, Mrs Hadden said.
‘The day before he went, he was singing “The Wild Colonial Boy” in his bed.’
Mrs Hadden had another aunt, who embroidered purses, but attacks of rheumatism increasingly interfered with that. Ellie had heard before about this curtailment and was now brought up to date, the news being that the affliction eased a little in the summer months.
‘Small mercies,’ Mrs Hadden conceded. ‘We’d call it that, I suppose.’
‘Yes.’
His own name was a mouthful, he’d said: Florian Kilderry. His face crinkled up a bit when he laughed and sometimes it did when he smiled. ‘You’d know everyone in Rathmoye?’ he’d said, the girl at the counter listening. He had walked out of the Cash and Carry beside her.
‘It’s a legend in the family,’ Mrs Hadden said. ‘Singing songs in your bed at a hundred and one!’
‘Yes.’
Because it was heavy, he said when he took the carrier bag from her, and it wasn’t heavy at all. His bicycle was called a Golden Eagle, an eagle on the upright of the handlebars. She’d never seen a bicycle called that before and she wondered if it was special even though the mud-guards were battered and looked old.
‘We saw old Horry into his grave at Ardrony.’
Lost for a moment in the conversation, Ellie nodded anyway, covering her confusion by saying it was good, the summer being a better time for rheumatism. ‘It’s only a handful of people I’d know in Rathmoye,’ she’d said when they were standing outside in the sun, and he said of course. He offered her a cigarette.
‘Are you well yourself, Ellie?’ Mrs Hadden stood up, saying she was on her way.
‘Oh, I am,’ Ellie said, and wondered if Mrs Hadden had noticed something before she remembered that this was a question she was always asked.
‘It’s good you’re well, Ellie.’
They walked to the yard together, and on to where the car was parked, drawn in to the narrow verge of the road.
‘Next week I could be late,’ Mrs Hadden said.
The car was backed slowly, and a little way into the yard gateway, before it was turned. Mrs Hadden settled herself and waved from the window she’d wound down. Ellie stood in the gateway, listening to the sound of the car’s engine until it was no longer there. Cow-parsley was limp among faded foxgloves on the verges of the road. A field-mouse scampered and disappeared. The last of the dust disturbed by the car tyres settled.
If he was there again in Rathmoye she would cross the street. If he spoke to her she would say she had
to get on. She would be ashamed confessing it because it was silly, because all she had to do was to think of something else when he came into her mind. But now, when she tried to, she couldn’t. She kept seeing him, standing against packets of Bird’s jelly in the Cash and Carry, tins of mustard, Saxa salt. As if they meant something, they were stuck in her mind, as if they were more than they could possibly be, and she wondered if they would ever be the same again, if what she’d bought herself would be, the Brown and Polson’s cornflour, Rinso. She wondered if she would be the same herself; if she was no longer - and would not be again - the person she was when she had gone to Mrs Connulty’s funeral and for all the time before that. When he had asked whose funeral it was it had been the beginning but she hadn’t known. When Miss Connulty had drawn her attention to him in the Square she had realized. When he’d smiled in the Cash and Carry she’d known it too. She had been different already when she stood with him in the sunshine, when he offered her the cigarette and she shook her head. Anyone could have seen them and she hadn’t cared.
In the house she put on her farm clothes, a brown overall and wellington boots. She collected the milk buckets and the cans from the dairy and scoured them at the kitchen sink. She hosed the dairy, then brushed the surplus of water into the shallow drain. She laid the buckets and the cans, the scoops and measures, on the long concrete shelf, each in its own position, as she’d once been shown. She couldn’t do anything when first she’d come: she couldn’t tell the breeds of sheep; she’d never collected eggs or cleaned a henhouse, or tethered a goat. She hadn’t known a man before, except for priests and a few workmen and delivery men, and then only knowing them to see, hardly more than that. The first time she’d seen shaving soap turning into a lather that the razor scraped away she’d been astonished. She’d never sat down opposite a man across a table from her. But before she became a wife, when she was still a servant, she was used to everything, except the sharing of a bed.
In the crab-apple orchard the hens ran freely, a few of them clustered beneath the trees, a black one pecking near a tractor tyre that had been split to make a feeder for lambs but had somehow found a place there. On the dry, hard ground there was hardly a blade of grass left. When winter came, grass would grow again; it always did. Fourteen more eggs had been laid and she collected them in the cracked brown bowl that had become part of her daily existence. Closing the gate again when she left the crab-apple orchard, she slipped the loop of chain over the gate-post. He had a way of hesitating before he spoke, of looking away for a moment and then looking back. He had a way of holding a cigarette. When he’d offered her one he’d tapped one out of the packet for himself and hadn’t lit it. The rest of the time he was with her he’d held it, unlit, between his fingers.
Slowly, both hands clasped round the brown egg-bowl, she returned to the house. In the kitchen she mixed Kia-Ora Orange with water as cold as it would come, filling a plastic bottle to the brim. She scraped potatoes and cut up a cabbage before she set off to the hillside land with her husband’s drink.
It was the most distant part of the farm, twenty-two acres on the eastern slope and on the plateau of the unnamed hill, land separated from the rest of the farm-holding by coppices, through which the right-of-way track became an undergrowth, making it difficult for the tractor. He had been cutting it back, she noticed when she reached it, the summer shoots still scattered on the ground, overhead branches sawn. It wasn’t worth it to possess a hedge-cutter, he maintained, with only a few hedges and this half-mile of advancing growth to contend with. On the way back from the top field he would tidy it up as he went; she remembered that from previous summers, piles of logs no more than an inch or so in diameter, and the place where he burnt the brushwood. It wasn’t his obligation to keep the track clear; he did it to avoid an argument with Gahagan, who neglected it. Years ago, birch and ash had become as high as forest trees.
She tried to think about all that, to see before she came to it another blackened area, a different place from last time, his way of keeping the track clear. Badgers had been here once and he had shown her their setts. It was easier not to feel a stranger to herself here, to tell herself that she had allowed a convent-child’s make-belief to have its way with her, to be ashamed and know it was right to be ashamed. It was easier because everything around her made sense in a way she understood. The confusion of thoughts that did not feel her own made no sense at all.
She took the short-cut from the boreen along one side of the small pasture, and passed into the gloom of the wood. He would try to buy the wood, her husband said, if ever it came up for sale, and she’d always hoped it would. Among the trees there was a stillness, without birds, rarely visited by the foxes which went to ground in the banks on either side of the track that petered out when the slope of the hill began. God’s peace they would have called it at Cloonhill, Sister Clare and Sister Ambrose, and the Reverend Mother, who came out once in a while from Templeross. God was never not there for you, wherever you were, however you were. Every minute of your day, every minute of your life. There for your comfort, there to lift from you the awful burden of your sins. Only confess, only speak to God with contrition in your heart: God asked no more than that.
Unhurried in the wood, not wanting to hurry, Ellie reached out for these crowding memories. Cloonhill was gone now, closed down three years ago, the nuns gone back to the convent in Templeross. But you didn’t lose touch with a place when it wasn’t there any more; you didn’t lose touch with yourself as you were when you were part of it, with your childhood, with your simplicity then. That had been said too, still was: Sister Ambrose sent a Christmas card and always put a letter in.
Sunshine began again, flickering through the trees. The two thick banks that protected the foxes’ lairs were tightly grassed, grazed by some creature, hardly enough nourishment for more than one; the buttercups’ long tendrils had been chopped away where the banks weren’t there any more. The tractor tyres left no mark here; the gate to the hillside fields was open. She stood still for a moment, praying for the courage to confess, pleading for protection against her thoughts; and walking on, she remembered how the old priest at Templeross used to rap on the grille and tell you to speak up. Hail, Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now . . . No matter what, you always felt better afterwards.
From where she was the farmhouse, far down below, seemed remote, a place by itself with its yard and cluster of barns. People didn’t come much to the house except for eggs or buttermilk, and her in-laws from Shinrone once a year, on a Sunday afternoon. You couldn’t count the postman or the insurance man. You couldn’t count the artificial-insemination man, or the man to read the meter. Nothing went by on the road except the Corrigans’ tractor, or Gahagan looking for an animal that had strayed. ‘Quiet,’ they had said at Cloonhill, telling her about it. ‘A quiet place.’ She might be asked to wear a uniform, they had said, but that had never been a requirement. It’s not like you’d think, she wrote in her first letter to Sister Ambrose. More easygoing than that.
‘Ah, thanks,’ her husband said, when she was near enough to hear, and reached out for the drink when she was closer. No more than a bit of tidying up, he said; a couple of places where the wire was gone, nothing like by the river. These few weeks of the year he came up every day to turn the grass as soon as he’d cut it. Since he was there, he repaired the fences at the top.
‘Thanks,’ he said again, keeping the bottle by him when he returned to his task, tightening and stapling, weaving in lengths of wire with pliers. Having greeted her, the two sheepdogs slipped back to where they’d chosen to lie.
‘Mrs Hadden came,’ she said.
Dillahan worked for another couple of hours and on the way back looked for Gahagan. He had already made an offer for the field he was after and Gahagan had said he’d think about it. But the pick-up wasn’t in the yard and there was no response when he called out. Widowed for fifteen years, Gahagan lived alone, without help on the farm, and was often difficult to find.<
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Dillahan went on. He stopped to open a gate and drop the dogs off. Every evening now they drove in the cows on their own.
7
In the pantry he had converted to a darkroom Florian Kilderry developed the Rathmoye photographs and took them to the drawing-room, empty but for a trestle-table and the radiogram no one had wanted to buy when his father tried to sell it. Attached with drawing-pins to the walls were watercolour sketches that had been there for years: studies of a peregrine in flight, a picnic on a strand with people bathing, tennis in a garden. Close together, two actors conversed in an empty theatre. The leaves of a tulip tree half obscured the blue façade of a house; a girl gathered washing from a clothes line. At a street corner the three-card trick was played on an opened-out umbrella.
The watercolours were neither as fresh nor as bright as once they’d been. Their paper had curled, was marked with the ravages of flies, affected by sunburn and the rust of the drawing-pins. But even so their faded dazzle belittled the rows of photographs now laid out on the trestle-table. That the camera had failed to convey movingly the bleakness of another disaster was readily confirmed; and with a feeling almost of relief Florian added these photographs to the pile he’d made of all the others.
On his way with them to his garden bonfire he was interrupted by the doorbell and knew who it was. Books were stacked against a wall in the hall, ready for the dealer who had come when he’d said he would. A stranger to Florian, he was a restless man in a brown striped suit, with a narrow fringe of black moustache and a hat he didn’t take off. He made a swift, cursory examination, repeatedly shaking his head. ‘The Razor’s Edge,’ was his only comment. ‘Not many’d read that today.’
‘I would myself,’ Florian mildly protested.
He couldn’t have burnt the books; he couldn’t have so casually destroyed the pages on which he had first encountered Miss Havisham and Mr Verloc, and Gabriel Conroy and Edward Ashburnham and Heathcliff, where first he’d glimpsed Netherfield Park and Barchester.
Love and Summer Page 5
