He was hungry and went round by the Greenane half-and-half for bread and porksteak, and to arrange with Mrs Carley to leave the hall-door key with her when the day came. Riding on to Shelhanagh afterwards, he realized that his nostalgic reflections in the roadside bar had been an effort to brush away an uneasy day. It was no more than the truth that he had sought to prolong a friendship which summer had almost made an idyll of. But what he had failed to anticipate was the depth of disappointment its inevitable end would bring. He had allowed the simple to be complicated. He had loved being loved, and knew too late that tenderness in return was not enough. ‘Dear Flor, what a muddle you are!’ Isabella’s favourite word for him, repeated often in Italian and in English with cousinly affection. He had liked the word then; he didn’t now.
That night, in her sleep, Ellie wept. She tried to wake up in case her sobs were heard. She could hear them herself but when she managed to rouse herself she found her husband undisturbed. Her pillow was wet and she turned it over, and in the morning her tears had gone as if she had imagined them, but she knew she hadn’t.
20
A few days after his revelation that he was to leave Ireland Florian found, beneath a pile of straw fish baskets in what had once been a pantry, a leatherbound record book he had years ago concealed there. He gathered up the mildewed baskets to take to his garden bonfire and saw again the handsomely embossed lettering: The Huntsman’s Fieldbook. He had hidden it and couldn’t remember where, had repeatedly searched the house before giving up.
He turned pages that were familiar to him, at the bottom of each a tidily boxed paragraph of printed notes, with occasionally an illustration, concerning the nature and habitat of various forms of wildlife, its preservation or destruction. The only handwriting, on faint grey lines, was his own.
He threw the fish baskets on to his fire and, watching the straw blaze up, remembered being ashamed to tell Isabella when she returned to Shelhanagh the following summer that he’d forgotten where he’d hidden the Fieldbook, saying instead that he had thrown it away. Isabella hadn’t been entirely blameless in all this herself. There always was a rush at the end of her July visits. This time, her luggage in the hall, she had left the Fieldbook on her bed and, discovering later that she had, fiercely instructed Florian to see to its concealment. It was important, or seemed so then, since secrecy came into so much of what she and Florian did.
In the kitchen he shook the dust from the pages and wiped the leather cover with a damp cloth. His handwriting hadn’t changed with the passage of time. Square and firm, in clear black ink, it still was that. Seven years ago it was, Florian calculated, and was just beginning to read how he had filled the blankness above some information about the feeding practices of the carp when the hall-door bell sounded, accompanied by a brisk knock ing.
‘Well, here we are!’ A tall man smiled and bowed when Florian opened the door. A woman, brightly dressed, was there also.
‘Here indeed!’ she exclaimed. ‘And poor Mr Kilderry doesn’t know us from Adam!’
They didn’t give a name but Florian remembered seeing their black shooting-brake drawn up a few weeks ago.
‘I think you came to see the house,’ he said.
‘Oh, better than that,’ the tall man corrected him. ‘We bought it.’
He extended a hand. The woman, whom Florian assumed to be his wife, pressed a wine merchant’s carrier bag on him, saying it contained something refreshing.
‘We wondered if we might snoop about a bit,’ she murmured in a tinkling voice.
‘Of course. I’m sorry I couldn’t place you. A lot of people came.’ Champagne he guessed their gift was. He thanked them, although he didn’t like champagne.
‘What a happy day!’ the woman exclaimed. She smiled at Florian, her manner playful. ‘Do please forgive us for being a bore!’
‘Those gorgeous scenes!’ the man contributed, referring to the unframed watercolours in the drawing-room while he unfolded a typewritten sheet. ‘Unforgettable!’
‘What a very happy day!’ his wife continued to enthuse, and Florian wondered if she was drunk.
He left them to look about as they wished and to take measurements. He didn’t return to the Fieldbook he’d found but went on throwing anything that would burn on to his fire and anything that wouldn’t into the skip. He came across his father’s binoculars, which had been lost also, and an umbrella someone had left behind and never come back for. He found the key that wound the clock in the hall but hadn’t done so for years. He found the beads of a necklace in a matchbox.
The afternoon he’d hidden the Fieldbook under the fish baskets he had come down the back stairs with it in his hand, not taking it to his bedroom because there wasn’t time, since Isabella would miss her train if everyone didn’t hurry. The door of the poky room that was then a pantry was open. All that came clearly back again, as if it had never not been there.
He had appropriated the Fieldbook in the first place when it fell out of a stack of National Geographic magazines in the garage. He hadn’t been interested in the wildlife details but the faintly lined pages attracted him as much as the leather cover did and in time he found a use for them. Isabella, who often poked about among his possessions, was surprised by what she found written there. ‘Bizzarro!’ her comment was.
The women passed by Miss Dunlop on their way to the kitchen, both of them smirking a little. The Wing Commander moved close to Miss Dunlop and whispered in her ear some words of love. Miss Dunlop blushed, for the Wing Commander had put his earthy desires regarding Mrs Meade into words. He imagined it was Mrs Meade’s ear he spoke into, and he imagined biting the lobe of the countrywoman’s ear and feeling her coarse hair on his cheek.
‘It’s all very well,’ Miss Dunlop protested, sensing at last that something was amiss. She found a cigarette in the pocket of her suit and lit it.
‘How much you are the world to me!’ the Wing Commander murmured, reaching for her again.
No one else except Isabella had ever known about the writing in the Fieldbook, or even that the Fieldbook still existed. Nor did Florian himself regard his fragments of composition as anything more than the fruits of idleness. Nothing was complete, bits of people, bits of occurrences, and he noticed now that the writing was in places uncertain, his adolescent creations often verging on the affected. Madame Rochas, an old schoolteacher, was ‘haunted by footsteps ceaseless in the night’. Yu Zhang was so delighted by Circus of Horrors that he could not pass a cinema where it was showing without seeing it yet again. The Sunday visitors of Anna Andreyev spoke of St Petersburg and Lermontov. Emmanuel Quin was no more than a name, as Johnny Adelaide was, and Vidler. The Reverend Unmack stole from counters and did not know himself.
‘Mr Kilderry!’
Florian went upstairs.
‘Your hot press,’ the tall man said.
‘The hot press?’
‘It seems a trifle damp.’
‘Well, yes, it is.’
‘A leak? We wondered.’
‘I’m afraid so. I’m sorry about it.’
‘My dear fellow!’
Florian smiled and nodded, and went away. ‘What’d he have to say for himself?’ he heard the woman ask when he was on his way downstairs. ‘Couldn’t care less,’ the man reported.
They stayed all afternoon, but did not again enquire about the defects they came across. Eventually they called out to say they’d finished and were effusive in their gratitude as they said goodbye. Then they drove off in their big black shooting-brake and Florian returned to the pages of the Fieldbook. Most of what he read he had forgotten writing.
On Madole’s wasteland Willie John and Nason didn’t notice the boy at first. Then Willie John did.
‘What’s the kid want?’ he asked.
‘Only to watch,’ Nason said.
The Sky Wasp spluttered and glided back to them, the engine dead because the lighter fuel had run out.
‘We could charge the kid for watching.’ Willie John
laughed, his big jaw split, the freckles around his eyes merging as the flesh puckered. He was red-haired and ungainly. Nason was thin and small, with a lick of black hair trailing over his forehead, his clothes always tidy. He was the younger by a few months.
‘I’ll tell you what it is,’ Nason said. ‘The kid’s over at the gravel pits. He’s run off from the travelling people. There’s underground places at the pits. That kid’s grubbing for food with the rabbits.’
Florian hadn’t liked Isabella reading his jottings. But she had, and wanted to know who the people were and where they had come from, why sentences and words often broke off unfinished when sometimes half a page was filled.
At Euston station Michael decided that this was best: to ask straight out and be told, anything rather than the absurdity of making a journey that was unnecessary.
‘Clione?’ he said when the ringing tone ceased and his sister’s voice came on.
‘You’ll come, Michael? All the time he asks.’
But what on earth good would it do? Either way, what good? The long overnight haul and arriving in the early morning at the dreary railway station with his pyjamas and razor in a carrier bag because he didn’t possess a suitcase. And turning into the driveway. He hated turning into the driveway most of all.
‘He’s dying now,’ his sister said.
But at Euston station people were waiting to use the phone. Michael put the receiver down.
Isabella insisted that Florian abandoned too much too easily, often flippantly. In their disagreement about that, she was cool and unflurried, Florian impatient and at a disadvantage because he was flattered that she minded so much. She quoted back to him with admiration what he had written. About cities he had never been to, misfortunes he hadn’t experienced. About rejection and despair. About Olivia, searching London for a man she loved, who stole from her.
He might have gone to Spain. He’d gone to Spain before without a word. Someone he knew had a house in Spain, or rented a house there, she wasn’t sure which. On the other hand, now and again he left London in order to stay with people in different parts of the country. ‘Hasn’t been in,’ the barman in the George said. Olivia asked other drinkers there and they said they hadn’t seen him. She reassured them because of course it would be all right. It would be Spain and he’d be back. He wasn’t in the Coach and Four. He wasn’t in the Queen and Knave.
A girl suggested the Zinzara Club and they went there with a lanky woman the girl knew, and a man with a bow tie. Derek was on the door tonight, his hair done in a different way, and when Olivia asked the woman behind the bar she shook her head and Olivia went to the Grape and he was there, standing where he’d been standing the night she first saw him. He was with people she didn’t know, as he’d been then. She saw him seeing her, but he didn’t move and then the people he was with stared at her and no one spoke.
Surely, Isabella urged, he could make something of that, since he had made a little of it already? ‘Oh, please, why not?’ she begged, determinedly, repeatedly. ‘Oh, please.’
He knew he couldn’t.
While Jessie scurried among the reeds Florian smoked and watched the night beginning. He wished Isabella could know the huntsman’s book hadn’t been thrown away and now was resurrected. He wished she could be here as so often she had been, by the lake, the dark creeping on, more secrecy pretended than was necessary. He wondered if she had married Signor Canepaci or someone else; he wondered if she was happy. He had exasperated her, not being able to tell her who Olivia was, or who Miss Dunlop was, or any of the others. ‘Did they come to the parties?’ she asked. Were Nason and Willie John boys at school? Was Madole’s wasteland somewhere they could go?
Florian did not try to sleep that night. He didn’t go to bed and in his silent house what he had been separated from for so long seemed tonight more than he had written down. Miss Dunlop’s blouse was pink, a touch of henna transformed her hair. The pale, stretched features of Yu Zhang lost their solemnity in a smile. The Wing Commander had experienced gaol. An injury, not yet healed, was vivid on the forehead of the boy at the gravel pits. The old teacher’s nightly footsteps were the footsteps of a child whose fate she dared not think about. Life wasn’t worth living, Olivia whispered.
Reading and rereading the scraps he had given up on, Florian did not readily conclude that time, in passing, had brought perception, only that his curiosity was stirred by the shadows and half-shadows imagination had once given him, by the unspoken, and what was still unknown. He added nothing to what was written, only murmuring occasionally a line or word that might supply an emphasis or clarify a passage.
But in the early morning, standing at the water’s edge while in vain he scanned the sky for the bird that no longer came, he felt exhilarated, as if something had happened to him that he didn’t entirely know about, or know about at all. This feeling was still there when he returned to the house, while he made coffee and toasted bread, and gave his dog her food. It was there when, later in the morning, he lay down to sleep. He slept all day, and woke to it.
21
Ellie had not been to the gate-lodge since before the day they had climbed up to the corrie lakes at Gortalassa. It was a busy time of year, made more so by helping at the Corrigans’ harvest: it wasn’t as easy as it had been to get away.
Her low spirits at Gortalassa had not revived, although they did a little when, behind the loose stone in the wall at the ruins, she found a note that gave directions of how to get to Shelhanagh House. Come any day you can. Come any time, the message was, on the back of a map, in handwriting she had not known before. The ease with which all this happened - the note written, the directions given, the map drawn, his wanting her to come to the house he talked so much about - gave Ellie more than hope, restoring something at least of what had been taken from her on the slopes of Gortalassa. It had not before been suggested that she should make the journey he suggested now, and she wondered if it could be that for some reason everything was suddenly different. That the sale of the house had fallen through. That the people buying it had made a mistake or, when they calculated, didn’t have the money. Months, maybe a year, might pass while the unsold house kept him in Ireland. She had thought she might never hear from him again. But she had and he wanted her to come to him.
Thursday I’ll come. The afternoon is better.
She left her note where his had been.
To arrange the loan with which he hoped to buy Gahagan’s field Dillahan made one of his rare weekday visits to Rathmoye. In Mr Hassett’s small private office he presented the facts and Mr Hassett said he didn’t think two thousand pounds was going to break the bank. Beneath his small moustache he fleetingly displayed the smile familiar to borrowers when he agreed to make a loan. Dillahan nodded his gratitude.
‘A pity to pass it by,’ he said.
‘It’s always a pity to pass good land by, Mr Dillahan.’
‘The trouble is, one day he’d be on about offers for it, the next he’d be talking about clearing and draining.’
‘He’s neglected it, has he?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘The older a man is the harder it is for him to part with what he has. And the more reason he should. Not that selling out isn’t hard on any man, never mind his years.’
‘Gahagan has a fair bit left, all the same.’
Dillahan stood up. There was a golf cup on the desk and Mr Hassett saw him looking at it. A bit of luck, he said, the Rathmoye Bankers’ Prize. He held the door of his small private office open. The two men shook hands and Dillahan passed through the main offices, out into the sunshine of the Square. He looked to see if Ellie had come back from her shopping. One of the back doors of the Vauxhall was open, a basket and two bags still on the ground beside where she stood. The mad old Protestant was talking to her.
‘They went because of it,’ Orpen Wren said. ‘The St Johns didn’t have control over their sons.’
Ellie nodded. She read her list again, making sure she’d
got everything.
‘The last steward they had at Lisquin was Mr Boyle and the mistress had himself and myself brought to her little room. “Close the door,” she said, and I did and Mr Boyle didn’t say a word. Men coming to the house looking for their women, she said. Wives or daughters, it never mattered. The Rakes of Mallow weren’t in it, she said. “Oh, worse,” she said. “Worse than that any day.”
‘The master had taken to his bed for the shame of it, and she came out with it then: that Elador was gone off with a woman. “All I know is the running of the house,” she said. “I can’t be devising stratagems.” Her two little girls were a few years old and Jack maybe fourteen. What good was she for more besides that, was what she was asking us, and Mr Boyle said he’d scour all Ireland. He’d take a stableman with him and they’d go into every inn and hotel. They’d search the two of them out if it took them a six-month. He wouldn’t spare Elador, he promised her that. He’d have it clear and plain with Elador that he must give the woman back where she belonged. Mr Boyle said to the mistress, “Ma’am, I’d maybe have to thrash it out of Elador.” He said he’d need her permission for laying hands on her boy, and the master’s permission, because he’d be frightened of the law. She said it again that her husband was in his bed. She was beside herself, she didn’t remember telling us before. “Mr Wren will write it down,” Mr Boyle said. “Mr Wren will write it down that Elador came back chastened to Lisquin. Mr Wren will put the date to it. And write it down that permission was given.”’
Ellie tried to detect from her husband’s gait if he’d been allowed the loan, but she couldn’t tell. A shawled woman held out a hand and when he’d reached into his pockets he dropped a coin into it.