Love and Summer
Page 17
In the kitchen she was guided by the votive gleam above the dresser. She took her shoes off and mounted the narrow stairs, each tread faintly creaking. The bedroom door was open, as she had left it too. She folded her clothes and laid them on the chair between the windows.
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Orpen Wren slept. In Hurley Lane Bernadette O’Keeffe turned off a romantic drama and ended her day with a last long, slow nightcap. It was her happy time, when what she had was enough and enough was what she asked for. The cheques passed across the table, the letters signed, his putting to her this matter or that, his asking her what she thought, his acquiescent nod. Emotion, stalled, was not a nuisance in the night. The bright little screen, and night-caps, made a party of the room, its swaying furniture and uncertain floor, its garbled voices relieving Bernadette of a turmoil they themselves absorbed. That a beloved mother’s death had failed to loosen a lifetime’s iron bond did not in the cheerful night seem more than could be borne: so drowsy peace told Bernadette. And tomorrow - for it was not a dreaded Saturday or Sunday - there would be once more the papers fondly typed and carried to the quiet back bar, once more his commendation, once more their chat.
The Rathmoye street-lights had not yet been extinguished, but the streets themselves had emptied. The last of the public house stragglers had gone, the last of the lovers had parted. Two laundry women hurried away from their night work in Mill Street. Cats stalked the coal yards. Silently in the Square a mongrel dog ransacked a dustbin. Drawing back the curtains of the big front room in readiness for the morning, Miss Connulty watched. The dog - yellowish, its tail cropped close - would be there again, since every night he came. But still she paused to watch, even though the house was full, which meant an early morning. A single shaft of light caught the bony features of Thomas John Kinsella, his gaping shirt, sleeves rolled up. That, too, at this late hour was never different.
Miss Connulty had begun to turn away from the window, about to go upstairs, when a movement that was not the dog’s caught her eye. It alerted the dog too, who at once crept off, cringing, into the shadows. A man on a bicycle rode into the Square.
He was wearing the hat, there was a suitcase tied on to the bicycle’s carrier. He didn’t pause or dismount but went steadily on. Miss Connulty watched him turning out on to the Dublin road, and watched the dog returning to the dustbin. Soon after that the street-lights went out.
So all of it was over for Ellie Dillahan, Miss Connulty said to herself, all of it done with. Quietly ascending the stairs to the bathroom and her bedroom so as not to disturb the sleeping men around her, she remembered the closed sign pulled down over the glass of the chemist’s door, and her father pouring the tea in the café of the Adelphi cinema. ‘All done,’ her father said. ‘All over, girl.’
She washed, quietly running the tap. In her bedroom she undressed and Ellie Dillahan, coming again with her Friday eggs, confided in her; and Miss Connulty said if there’s a child don’t let anyone take the child away from you. Born as Dillahan’s own since he believed it was, the child would make a family man of him again, and make the farmhouse different. And her own friendship with Ellie Dillahan would not be strained, now that the interloper who had ill-used her had at last shaken the dust of Rathmoye off his heels. The friendship would be closer, both of them knowing it could be, neither of them saying what should not be said and never would be.
Miss Connulty turned her bedside light off and a few moments later closed her eyes, though not in sleep. An infant child crawled towards her on the carpet of the big front room, and bricks were kept, and dolls or soldiers in the corner cupboard, rag books, a counting frame. The secret heart of Ellie Dillahan’s life possessed the big front room, and later there were games of Snap and Ludo, and bagatelle, which as a child herself Miss Connulty had enjoyed. None of it was impossible.
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On the streets of darkened towns, on roads that are often his alone, bright sudden moments pierce the dark: reality at second hand spreads in an emptiness.
Among the scattered tools, the nun stares up at nothing from where she lies. Girls close her eyes, although they are afraid. They brush away the sawdust from her habit and her shoes. They go to tell what they have found, then wash white-painted windows, gather wood. They sing in their heads a song they mustn’t sing, and wonder who it is who doesn’t want them. The windscreen wipers slush through rain, the man comes from the house and carries in the box. There is the place in the yard. There are the haunted days of June. She claims no virtue for her compassion, she does not blame a careless lover. She grows her vegetables, collects her eggs.
Horses canter in the breaking dawn, the open landscape fills, Old Kilmainham, Islandbridge. Seagulls rest on river walls, hops enrich the air.
The sea is calm, the engines’ chug the only sound, the chill of autumn morning lingering. You know what you’ll remember, he reflects, you know what fragile memory’ll hold. Again the key falls on the flagstones. Again there are her footsteps on the road.
The last of Ireland is taken from him, its rocks, its gorse, its little harbours, the distant lighthouse. He watches until there is no land left, only the sunlight dancing over the sea.