‘What was the accident?’
‘The trailer was loaded and he couldn’t see over the top of the load. The fastener of the tail-board was loose and she tried to drop the pin into place while she was holding the baby in her arms.’
He nearly sold up, Sister Ambrose had said, and maybe he wouldn’t mention the accident at all, how it happened or anything about it. So much it distressed him, maybe he wouldn’t.
‘And did he?’
‘That first evening he did.’
He had to, was what he said, not knowing the nuns had told her already. He flashed a torch out of the kitchen window at the place on the concrete, a dark mark on it still. He never walked near it, he said. He showed her where everything in the house belonged - jugs and cups on their hooks, the Old Moore’s Almanac where the insurance money was kept, the keys on the nail by the stairs, the contents of the dresser drawers. He showed her the upstairs, the front sitting-room, the bedroom that would be hers. He asked her could she cook.
A few years went by, Ellie said, and they were like that, only the two of them in the house. Then he asked her would she marry him. He said think it over. He said take her time.
‘I wanted Sister Ambrose at the wedding, and Sister Clare with her. But they couldn’t come, due to a Retreat again at Fermoy.’
Florian didn’t say what he felt: that all that shouldn’t have happened, that she shouldn’t have been sent into the employ of a haunted man. But he thought it, and he wondered if it showed, although he tried not to let it.
‘It’s not a terrible place,’ Ellie said, as if she knew what he was thinking. ‘It’s only something happened there.’
18
The dog days of August came; Rathmoye was quiet. Small incidents occurred, were spoken of, forgotten. When there were races near by the bookies stayed at Number 4 - J. P. Ferris, Gangly, McGregor from Clonmel. The priests of the parish catered for the faithful, heard sins confessed, gave absolution, offered the Host; the Church of Ireland’s skimpy congregation doggedly gathered for weekly worship. The tinker girls brought their babies to the streets from their wasteland caravans and tents. No crime of a serious nature had been committed in Rathmoye during the summer so far; none was now. In all, twenty-one infants had been born.
Two technicians from a stained-glass studio in Dublin measured the windows that were to be replaced in the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer, and sketches of an Annunciation were admired in the presbytery and later approved by the bishop. The paving stones on both sides of Magennis Street were scheduled to be replaced by the end of October. Permission was given for a neon sign at the radio and television shop in Irish Street above which Bernadette O’Keeffe lived. It was agreed that next year’s Strawberry Fair should be one week earlier.
Miss Connulty was right when she’d stated that Florian Kilderry had been noticed in the town, but wrong to suggest there was gossip. There was only her own, her brother its sole recipient. ‘To tell you the truth,’ he complained to Bernadette O’Keeffe in the back bar, ‘she has me demented with it.’ He had at last seen for himself the man his sister objected to and he had allocated to Bernadette O’Keeffe the task of discovering what she could about him. Pleased to do so, she set about this with some vigour, regularly receiving details of further exchanges on the subject in Number 4. ‘The way it’s put to me,’ her employer passed on, ‘this fellow shouldn’t be at large at all.’
The unexpected sympathy for his sister he had experienced on the morning of their first disagreement about Ellie Dillahan had long since receded, to be lost finally in renewed crossness to do with the back bedrooms. Bernadette had not been privy to this particular play of familial emotions; nothing had changed at Number 4 The Square, her view was, except that a man who was unknown in Rathmoye had appeared on the scene. That being so, it seemed relevant to say now that Orpen Wren had identified the man as a member of the St John family, and she said it.
‘Not that it’s likely,’ she added.
The 7-Up already poured, her employer pushed her glass a little closer to her. He displayed no annoyance or concern over this complication in the matter his sister sought information about, and which her perversity would almost certainly make something of.
‘Best we’d keep it from her,’ he decided after a moment of thought. ‘I was saying to her last evening wouldn’t she forget the whole issue. I was saying something new might keep her occupied - maybe leather-craft or a little flower garden out the back.’
‘A flower garden would be nice for Miss Connulty all right.’
‘I could be talking to the cat.’
Miss O’Keeffe nodded. She would have given a lot for a nip of John Jameson in the bitter-sweet cordial, but did not say so. She spread out the unsigned cheques and pushed them across the table. He had been lonely since his mother was taken; every day you could see it. In the evenings he went for a walk out on the Nenagh road and ended up in the cemetery again. Weekends, it was the same.
‘I only mentioned the St Johns thing in case it fitted in.’
‘You were right enough to say it, Miss O’Keeffe. Did McCaffreys’ cheque come?’
‘Well, no, not yet.’
‘We’ll give them another day or two. Would you say we would?’
He always asked for her view. These days he was treated less than an overnight man, she’d heard it said, the maid casual with him. She often wondered did he sleep well.
She gathered her papers together, counting the cheques as she slipped them into a fastener. She would let it go until Thursday, she agreed; then she’d send McCaffreys a reminder.
In time Bernadette’s enquiries bore fruit and through them Miss Connulty learnt that the man she’d taken against went about on a bicycle because it was thought he couldn’t drive a car, that he had no visible means of support, was currently engaged in the selling of a house he had inherited, and was planning to emigrate. His identity was established, his name passed on to her, his connection with the St John family dismissed. In Castledrummond he was said to keep himself to himself.
‘Not in Rathmoye he doesn’t,’ Miss Connulty retorted with razor sharpness. ‘Not by a long chalk.’
‘I’m only telling you what’s reported.’
The conversation took place in the big front room, Joseph Paul in an armchair with the newspaper he’d been reading open on his knees, his sister standing by the mantelpiece.
‘Have you had words with him?’ she asked.
‘I have no intention of approaching this man in any way whatsoever. There isn’t a reason in the wide world why I should cause offence to a man I don’t know just because he rides his bicycle through the town.’
‘He’s trying something on with Ellie Dillahan. You can tell it by the way of her.’
‘There’s no reference in what Miss O’Keeffe found out that this fellow is after any woman.’
‘Whatever state that girl’s in, she’s not in it for nothing. ’
‘We don’t know anything about what state Ellie Dillahan is in. You’re confused about the entire matter. This fellow’s a separate entity altogether from Ellie Dillahan.’
‘Have you no pity in you at all? Have you no pity for Dillahan, what he’s been through? She found a home with him, the two of them suited in misfortune, and the next thing is you have an interloper up to no good.’
Miss Connulty didn’t listen when her brother again refuted that, gesturing with his hands, explaining something she didn’t want to hear. You couldn’t blame him, he understood nothing. Since the day he’d been born he’d been protected and cosseted, the world withheld from him. Word would get to Dillahan about his young wife’s infatuation and who’d blame him for what would happen next?
‘If Dillahan turns her out she’ll come here,’ Miss Connulty promised with sudden, fierce determination. ‘Ellie Dillahan will live in this house and hold her head up.’
19
One of the yard doors had worked itself loose from the higher of its two hinges and Dillahan r
aised it, settling it on a couple of logs and steadying it with a prop.
The screws came out easily. He marked with the point of a bradawl a new position for the hinge and pierced the wood of the jamb just deep enough to hold the screws in place before he drove them in.
‘Come November, we’ll renew the creosote. Did we do it last year? I doubt we did.’ He swung the door. ‘How’s that then?’
But Ellie, who had been in the yard, had gone back to the house. Standing a little to one side of the kitchen window, she watched her husband returning the logs he had used to the woodshed, then gathering up his tools. She willed him to hurry, to get on with it, to go. Impatience kept her at the window, concealed from the yard because of the way she stood, close to the wall. It wouldn’t take a minute, he had said, but he’d been there an hour, his sandwiches made and in the tractor, his flask filled. He would be all day in the fields, he’d said earlier, the brambles to clear, and rotavating the arable.
He came into the kitchen although there was no need to. ‘It’s all there in the tractor,’ Ellie said, thinking when she heard herself that he wouldn’t ever have heard her speaking so curtly before, but he appeared not to notice. He delayed for another ten minutes, looking for something in one of the dresser drawers and not finding it. He said what he had said already about the brambles and the arable.
From the window she watched while he dragged the rotavator out of its shed and coupled it behind the tractor. When he’d driven off, taking the dogs with him, her impatience still lingered. It was alien to her and she hated it.
Florian had not revealed that Shelhanagh had been up for sale and now was sold; or that as soon as it was no longer his he would leave Ireland. Time after time, walking among the monks’ graves or on the Lisquin avenue, or in the tearooms or at Enagh, he had resolved that before they parted he would say at last what must be said. But time after time he hadn’t. Was it reluctance to cause pain that influenced his silence? Or a reluctance to bring abruptly to an end a liaison that had differently begun and now was pleasure? Or was it simply that his fondness for concealment had taken charge, as often in the past it had? He didn’t know. When he procrastinated it felt right to do so, yet he knew that what he withheld did not belong to him and would happen anyway, brushing him aside.
Waiting this morning on the lower slopes of Gortalassa, by the red barn where they had agreed to meet, he became more urgently aware of that, and Ellie’s lateness brought time’s dominance to mind: there was less of it left than he’d imagined.
Still waiting, he saw her in the distance. How well he knew her now, he reflected. Her grey-blue eyes, the softness of her lips, her voice, her smile, her shy composure. Which dress would it be today? he had become used to wondering before they met, and did so again. The blue, the green, the one with the honeysuckle pattern? How well he knew the bangle that had been her husband’s wedding present, the Woolworth’s brooch the nuns had given her, her battered handbag. How well he knew the innocence and the gentleness that first had stirred his sympathy and still did.
They pushed their bicycles on the track that began beside the barn. Today they would climb higher than they had when they’d been to Gortalassa before: they hoped to reach the corrie lakes.
They left their bicycles where the track petered out and climbed up to the ring of standing stones. While they rested there, he told her.
‘But why?’ she asked. ‘Why are you going away?’
‘When the house is sold there’ll be nowhere for me to live in Ireland.’
‘I didn’t know your house was for sale.’
‘There are debts that have to be paid.’ He paused a moment. ‘It would have spoilt our summer if I had told you earlier.’
She looked away and he knew she was afraid to ask how long they had left.
‘The rest of summer,’ he said as if she had. ‘There’ll be a date. Oh, ages off. October perhaps.’
‘Is that when you’ll be going?’
‘Yes, it is.’
He watched a jet plane trailing its ribbon of white against the washed-out paleness of the sky. He watched the white evaporating, the last of its shreds falling apart.
‘Is it for ever you’ll be going?’
‘It is for ever.’
‘Like the St Johns?’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
Larks flitted from one high stone to another. Above a carcass not yet picked over a buzzard was stationary in the air. Higher on the hillside a lone sheep moved slowly.
‘Don’t be unhappy, Ellie.’
She shook her head. She didn’t speak.
‘I had to tell you.’
‘I know you did. I know.’
They climbed through ferns and bracken, the bog-land dry. They skirted an escarpment because it was a shorter way. A distant Angelus bell chimed faintly in the stillness.
He would go and that he was gone would be her first thought every morning, as her first thought now was that he was here. She would open her eyes and see the pink-washed walls as she saw them now, the sacred picture above the empty grate, her clothes on the chair in the window. He would be gone, as the dead are gone, and that would be there all day, in the kitchen and in the yard, when she brought in anthracite for the Rayburn, when she scalded the churns, while she fed the hens and stacked the turf. It would be there in the fields, and with her when she stood with her eggs waiting for the presbytery hall door to open, and while Miss Connulty counted out her coins and the man with the deaf-aid looked for insulation guards or udder pads. It would be there while she lay down beside the husband she had married, and while she made his food and cut his bread, and while the old-time music played.
‘Do you want to go?’ she asked.
‘Everything is over for me in Ireland now.’
‘I wish you weren’t going.’
They reached the corrie lakes. The summer they had known and still knew now would never not be theirs, Florian said - the dusky woods at Lyre, the maze at Olery, the lavender, the butterflies. His Cloonhill, what he had made of it, her Shelhanagh. ‘All that,’ he said. Memory did not let go.
He knew it wasn’t solace, but he could do no better. Despair could not be blown away and, although he didn’t want to, he remembered his when he blurted out what for so long he had concealed. They had been reading in the garden and they went on reading afterwards, and Isabella said nothing.
Above the three small lakes, hardly more than pools, the bleak rockface was sheer. Out of the sun’s reach, the water was dark and icy still. There were no birds, no other life, no sound. It was a place he might have come to when he fumbled with photography, Florian thought. But memory would more tellingly preserve it.
Their faces were cold against each other for a moment before they parted. Where would he go? she asked.
‘Perhaps Scandinavia,’ he said.
On the way back to Shelhanagh, Florian called in at the Dano Mahoney public house. Two drinkers at the bar looked up, interrupting a conversation about greyhounds. The ex-pugilist landlord nodded a curt welcome. Florian took his glass to the corner table he had occupied on the day of Mrs Connulty’s funeral.
His father had first brought him here, the landlord different then, a friendlier man whom his father had seemed to know well. A few days after his mother’s death that was, a time when his father kept saying he needed a drink. There had been reminiscences then too, of Italy, of love, of finding the house when they ran away to Ireland, of the legacy that came eventually from Genoa and how that had felt like being paid to stay away so as not to be an embarrassment to the Verdecchias. ‘I always liked the Verdecchias, though,’ his father confessed. ‘Because they were her people, I think.’
Born a Catholic but lapsing in her faith, Florian’s mother had been buried in the small Protestant churchyard in Castledrummond so that when the time came she and his father would not be separated. ‘We liked arranging things,’ his father said in the Dano Mahoney Bar. ‘We enjoyed all that.’ Isabella hadn’t come to either
funeral. Florian had thought she would.
Of the two, he was the less good painter, his father used to say, but Florian now could not separate the watercolours that were left behind into who had painted which. Nor could he, sometimes, separate his mother and father as people, for with the years they had grown alike, although they had themselves insisted that once they’d been quite notably different and given to disagreement.
‘He’s asking near four hundred for his animal.’ The voice of one of the drinkers carried from the bar and then was hushed. Another man came in. He asked to use the telephone because a bullock had fallen down a ravine.
Florian finished his wine and his cigarette and then he cycled on. He would have to see to the grave before he left, and he wondered who would do that when he did go.
Love and Summer Page 11
