In the quiet lounge of a hotel a clock was ticking softly. A waitress in black and white stood by a window, the lace of the curtain pulled back a little. They took their coats off, piling them with their scarves on an empty sofa. They sat in armchairs and when the waitress came to them they ordered coffee.
‘And something – biscuits perhaps?’ Lucy’s father said.
‘I’ll bring you biscuits, sir.’
The clock struck twelve. The waitress returned with a coffee pot and a jug of milk, and a plate of pink-iced biscuits. An elderly couple came in, the woman holding on to her companion’s arm. They sat near the window where the waitress had been standing. ‘We need more nails,’ the man remembered when they were settled. ‘And Keating’s Powder.’
Lucy broke a biscuit in half. The coffee had a scalded taste; the sweetness of the icing was a help. Marriage was not for ever any more. Marriage could be set aside, as often these days it was: in Ireland too it could be set aside.
‘That guide didn’t know much,’ her father said.
‘Not much.’
The waitress brought tea for the couple who had come in. It was fair day in Fermoy, she said, and the old woman said they knew: you couldn’t not, the state of the streets. Oh, something shocking, the waitress agreed. Six o’clock in the morning the cattle started to come in: she was watching them earlier. She came from Glanworth herself, she said before she went away; she often used see the cattle driven on the roads all night, going to the Fermoy fair.
‘We’re old familiars here,’ the old woman called across the lounge and Lucy tried to smile. Her father said he’d known the hotel a long time ago.
‘Everything’s long ago now,’ the old woman said.
Teaspoons rattled on their saucers. The clock ticked in a silence; then the old man’s whisper became loud because his companion had indicated that she couldn’t hear. He was ashamed that they had fleas in the house, he said. Coming in off the fowls or not, he was ashamed.
‘Lady.’
Already, a moment ago, her father had tried for her attention; she’d been aware of that.
‘Sorry,’ she said.
‘Early on, I wrote letters I didn’t post.’
She didn’t understand; she didn’t know what letters he meant. She shook her head.
Enquiries had been natural in the circumstances, her father explained, and told how he had stamped each envelope, how he had afterwards kept the letters by him. Years later he had dropped them, one by one, into the fire and watched the blackened paper curling before it fell away.
‘All that,’ he said, and there was something about her mother not wanting ever to know the news from Ireland, and how his love had caused him too assiduously to protect her and take from her a greater marvel than she saw in pictures. He sought no sympathy but blankly laid out these facts as if apologizing for some failure in himself.
She nodded. In novels people ran away. And novels were a reflection of reality, of all the world’s desperation and of its happiness, as much of one as of the other. Why should mistakes and foolishness – in reality too – not be put right while still they might be? The pleas there’d been, the certainty that this was what mattered most, everything so often repeated, the longing, the begging: word for word, spoken, written, all became a torrent in Lucy’s head while her father was silent and she was silent too. She heard the old man complaining that when people went away from the house they noticed they had fleas in their clothes. You couldn’t hold your head up.
‘I can’t not tell you,’ her father said, ‘that the guilt your mother felt was a bit too much for her.’
‘I’m glad you’ve told me.’
The old man stood up. The rain had stopped, he said, and the two gathered up their belongings. Coins were left on the table before, slowly, the old couple went away, clinging to one another again. The Captain and his daughter sat in silence then.
*
Back and forth, back and forth, the digger crossed Malley’s slope, prodding at the rocks, lifting one to the pile when it was loose enough. Against the rabbits, every inch of the fencing would have to be renewed, the mesh at the bottom dug six inches in. Yesterday Ralph had ordered the saplings. Ashes and maples would change the landscape, seen for miles around when they strengthened and spread.
From where he stood at the edge of the steeply sloping field he could see a rabbit, and then another one, scuttling into a clump of undergrowth. So often you have wanted to come back to Lahardane. So many times I was foolish. Already, perfectly, he could remember where each word fell, how the lines broke on the single page that had been his for only a day, How could it be wrong of us?
How could it be? To sit down at the slatted table on the lawn, to walk once more on the strand, to meet her father and then to drive away? The digger’s engine spluttered before it gathered strength again. Undisturbed, the rabbits ran about.
Another Wednesday afternoon; by chance it would be that and they would notice and would say it. There’d be the sunlight through the chestnut branches, the white hall door half open. There’d be the silence of the cobbled yard, the rooks as still as stone on the high chimneys. There’d be her laughter and her smile, there’d be her voice. He wouldn’t want to go away. In all his life remaining he wouldn’t want to.
The digger’s driver clambered down and crossed the slope to say he’d come back and shoot the rabbits. Catch them in his tractor’s headlights and then begin to pick them off, maybe a hundred you’d catch in a night. A lifetime otherwise it would take to rid the place of them.
Ralph nodded. ‘Thanks,’ he said, and the man lit a cigarette, wanting to talk about the rabbits, wanting to have a break. ‘Come over any time,’ Ralph said. Next week, the man promised, and ambled back to his machine.
Even for a few minutes, even just to look in. How could it be wrong? ‘Lemybrien,’ he could say. ‘There’s been a felling of old oaks at Lemybrien.’ Casually at breakfast over the last cup of tea, the dishes not yet gathered from the table, he could say he should maybe go over and take a look at what there was. ‘While we’re still slack. I wouldn’t want to miss that timber.’ And sandwiches would be made to see him through the journey, and he’d wait for them, a flask filled too. Clonroche, then Ballyanne, not in a hurry passing through Lemybrien, because it would feel wrong to be in a hurry. He’d have no appetite for the sandwiches when he stopped and he’d wonder what to do with them and would throw them down for the birds before he drove on. Her father’s hand would be held out when he drove up and she wouldn’t be there at first and then would come from the house. He closed his eyes, yet none of it went away, and when it did he didn’t want it to.
Still playfully, the rabbits scampered. Back and forth the digger went. Another rock was added to the pile.
‘Oh, God!’ Ralph crunched the invocation out and felt tears warm behind his eyes. ‘Oh God, where is your pity now?’
7
Henry saw the visitor and wondered who it was. From among the trees high above the hydrangea lawn, where he was breaking twigs for kindling and tying them into bundles, he saw the figure at the hall door as hardly more than a shadow. While Henry watched, it passed through the open door, into the house.
Later that afternoon when Lucy brought mushrooms to the kitchen, Bridget said:
‘There’s a man come.’
Lucy had gathered the mushrooms in the orchard. She emptied them from a battered punnet on to the draining-board.
‘Who is it?’
Kneading dough for the bread she baked, Bridget shook her head. The front-door bell hadn’t sounded, she said.
‘Your father called down from the hall for me to bring in tea when I’d be ready with it.’ Whoever it was, she said, had maybe just walked in. ‘Your father was asking were you around.’
‘Me?’
‘He asked were you about.’
Visitors weren’t frequent. More than a year ago Mr Sullivan had ceased to drive his car. The man who’d arrived one morning to demonst
rate the vacuum cleaner the Captain later bought had been the first stranger for months. When O’Reilly’s man came, or Mrs O’Reilly with a bottle at Christmas, or the E.S.B. man to read the meter, it wasn’t to the front door. Sometimes, not often, the postman didn’t arrive until late in the day, but the postman wouldn’t have been invited into the drawing-room for tea.
‘I have the kettle on to boil,’ Bridget said, wiping her floury hands on her apron.
‘I’ll take in the tea.’
She didn’t trust herself to say more. Had Bridget heard a voice? Had any bit of conversation reached her from the drawing-room before the door was closed? Lucy didn’t ask. Shivers of excitement, cool and pleasurable, came and went all over her body, gently pricking her skin. Who else would just walk in?
*
Henry carried his bundles of twigs into the shed that had been the feed shed when hens and turkeys were kept in greater numbers. He loosened the string he’d used to bind them and slipped it off. He stacked them tidily with those he’d stacked already.
‘Who’s after coming?’ he asked in the kitchen, picking shreds of brushwood from the sleeves of his jersey.
Bridget said she didn’t know. She didn’t pause in her task of filling two tins with the mixture she had prepared.
She opened the oven door. The tray of tea things for the drawing-room was ready, the kettle beginning to sing on the range.
‘Good mushrooms, those,’ Henry said, picking one up from beside the sink.
*
Brushing her hair in her bedroom, Lucy didn’t hurry. From her dressing-table looking-glass her eyes stared back at her, so bright and so intent they seemed almost to belong to someone else. Her lips were parted in the beginning of a smile; her hair hung loosely, the ivory-backed brush still raised to it. Both heads would turn at once when she carried in the tray. ‘Well, we have met at last.’ The words were what she heard, not which voice said them; but it would be her father’s.
It could not spoil everything to look from the window, to see the car that had come, not that the sight of it would tell her anything; and not of course that it could be the old car with the dickey. But when she looked there was no car.
She changed her skirt and jumper for a dress. Would he have come by train to Enniseala? Or to Dungarvan, which would be a shorter journey? She tried to remember if there was a railway station at Dungarvan. More likely, he would have come by bus to Waterford and then on to Creally’s Crossroads. He would have walked the rest; more than an hour that would have taken, but quicker in the end than taking a train even if there was one.
She tied the belt of her dress and found a necklace. Again at her looking-glass, she smeared away the lipstick she had applied and changed it for a different shade. Would he be shy of her father? Would her father take to him? No one could not take to him; in spite of the trouble his presence brought, her father would want her happiness. Her father would want everything to be all right again.
She touched her cheeks with powder. She had been flushed but that was gone now. She wondered if Bridget guessed what had come into her thoughts, if she had noticed those moments of confusion. She wondered how he’d have changed.
She closed the door softly behind her and went downstairs. They looked at her, surprised, when she walked into the kitchen. Bridget had just replaced on its shelf the big brown bowl she used for mixing her bread ingredients, Henry was standing with his back to the range.
‘Did you wet the tea yet?’ she asked Bridget and Bridget said she hadn’t.
‘I’ll do it so.’
It would shock them, his coming to the house. And dressing up for him, for a married man, was more shocking still. She hadn’t thought of that, of how in their simple, uncomplicated lives they would feel.
She made the tea. Bridget had buttered bread and put more jam into the filling of a cake that had been bought in Kilauran, only half of it left. There was a bicycle outside the front door, Henry said, and Lucy imagined the conductor handing it down from the roof of the bus at Creally’s Crossroads, and Ralph’s hands reaching up for it. Of course he would have come with a bicycle. Knowing how long the journey from the crossroads was, of course he would have.
‘That’s lovely, Bridget,’ she said, picking up the tray. She carried it from the kitchen, along the passage to the hall. The front door was still open; her father had a way of leaving it like that, even when the weather was cold. She caught sight of the back wheel of the bicycle as she put the tray down on the long hall table that had become cluttered since her father’s return. It was his place for the white hat he wore when it was sunny; he threw his tie down there when he took it off on his way to work in the orchard. Bills had accumulated there, their torn brown envelopes beside them. Loose change and keys were scattered.
In the mirror that hung in the alcove at the bottom of the stairs she straightened the collar of her dress and pushed a strand of hair into place. Then she opened the drawing-room door, the tea-tray balanced on her free arm.
*
‘I saw the bicycle there and I coming down out of the woods,’ Henry said in the kitchen. ‘Sergeant Foley’s, I said to myself.’
‘What’s Foley want?’
‘It wasn’t his at all. When I examined it, it wasn’t.’
Henry described the bicycle: its dull black ironwork, mudguards peaked, the springs of the saddle a heavy coil, jutting out in front. Bridget didn’t listen. He’d thought it was the sergeant’s, Henry said, because it had the look of a Guard’s bicycle.
‘The next thing I thought it was maybe young O’Reilly’s. Until I looked in the window.’
Bridget paused in the washing of her baking board. ‘It’s never who she thinks?’
Slowly Henry shook his head. ‘I’ll tell you who it is,’ he said.
*
‘Come in, come in, lady,’ her father said.
The man in the armchair by the bagatelle table didn’t look in her direction. His manner was nervous, the fingers of one hand rubbing the knuckles of the other, his head held at a slant. His suit was of black serge, the badge of the Pioneer temperance movement in one of the lapels. A tie was knotted tightly into a shabby collar. Bicycle-clips still gripped the turn-ups of the dark serge trousers.
‘Tea’ She dragged the word out of herself, and was aware that the man had raised his head to look at her. His eyes were empty of expression; a hollowness in his features gave him a distinctive look. His hands reached down to pull his bicycle-clips off.
‘Ah, tea,’ her father said, and there was the rattle of the cups as they were settled on their saucers. ‘Or would you prefer a glass of whiskey, Mr Horahan?’
He couldn’t take whiskey, the man said, and seemed not to notice that tea had been brought in. Her father was saying that the man’s shoulder was all right, telling her that he had asked about it, that he’d been told it had never been a hindrance. He hadn’t recognized their visitor when he’d found him in the hall, her father said, but he remembered the name as soon as he heard it. ‘Mr Horahan,’ he said, and added that he’d just been telling Mr Horahan that bygones were bygones.
She didn’t understand. She didn’t know who the man was. She didn’t understand what was being said. She’d never seen the man before.
‘A mineral if you’d have it,’ he said, touching the badge on his lapel.
She turned and went away then. She heard her father calling after her. He opened the door she had closed. He called out again in the hall, saying it was all right. But she was outside by then, running over the gravel.
*
‘But in the name of God,’ Bridget distractedly repeated, ‘what’s he want? Why’s he come here?’
She reached up to the mantel-shelf for the rosary beads she kept there. She closed her eyes, leaning against the wall where she stood, her face as white as the flour that still powdered the black material of her dress.
From a chair drawn out from the table Henry watched her fingers working the beads, her lips silently besee
ching. Then the drawing-room bell shook on its coiled spring, summoning attention. Bridget opened her eyes. She couldn’t enter that room, she said, and Henry went instead. It was the first time any bell except the hall-door bell had sounded in the house since the Captain and his wife had left it twenty-nine years ago. That registered in Bridget’s consciousness, slipping through her perplexity and her outraged sensibilities.
‘He’s t.t.,’ Henry said when he returned. ‘He wants lemonade.’ He rooted in one of the wall cupboards for lemonade crystals.
‘They’re old,’ Bridget said when he found a bottle in which there were some left.
‘They’ll do.’ Henry tipped what there was into a glass, which he filled up with cold water from the tap. It should be hot, Bridget said, in order to dissolve the crystals.
‘But Mother of God,’ she suddenly cried out, ‘what are we thinking of to be giving the man lemonade?’
*
‘I’m afraid you’ve upset my daughter,’ the Captain said in the drawing-room. ‘To tell you the truth I still didn’t know who you were when I brought you in from the hall.’
‘These times I’ve no employment, sir. The day you were out on the promenade with Mr Sullivan, sir, I was after finishing at the Camp.’
‘You were a soldier?’
‘I had no employment the day I seen you, sir. I got employment with Ned Whelan since. He took me on with him on account I would have experience with laying roads up at the Camp.’
Henry came with the lemonade, but it seemed to the Captain that it was not required after all. The loquaciousness of the man who’d been wandering about in the hall ceased abruptly. He shrank back into his chair when Henry approached him. Not knowing what to do, Henry put the glass of lemonade on the floor.
‘We’re in the kitchen, if you’d pull the bell again,’ he said before he went. He had taken his hat off. He glanced back apprehensively before he closed the door.
‘Who’s that man, sir?’
‘Henry works for us.’
‘I’m careful with a stranger, sir.’