Love and Summer

  ‘He talks to everyone.’ She heard her voice as if it came from somewhere else, as if she were not there, as if this were not happening. She tried to pray that it was not, but the words still wouldn’t come properly.

  ‘I was upset, what he said to me.’

  She tried not to hear. She wanted time to go on, emptily to accumulate. She carried the shopping she’d done for him into the scullery, although not everything she’d bought belonged there. He didn’t call her back. He sat where he’d been sitting before and when she returned to the kitchen he spoke again, but she didn’t hear at first and he repeated what he’d said. Orpen Wren had held his hand up for him to stop and he had. He said that sometimes you used to see him on the road beyond the town; but that was long ago.

  ‘I thought he’d got himself lost,’ he said.

  He didn’t go on, as if there was nothing else to say. He stared at the floor, hunched again, his hands together as they had been before. He was so different he seemed a stranger to her and she knew she was to blame for that, not he.

  ‘You’ve had nothing to eat,’ she said. ‘I left the meat out for you.’

  ‘I couldn’t take it.’

  ‘Were you here since the morning?’

  ‘Ten to twelve I came in. About that.’

  ‘I’ll make something for us. That meat will keep.’

  She turned away, with the knife and fork she was about to lay as a second place in her hand. She didn’t look at her husband, frightened because of what might be in her eyes. He said:

  ‘Is it put about I could see her behind the trailer? Is it put about that I couldn’t see she had the child in her arms?’

  ‘What?’ There was only relief in her single, startled ejaculation, hardly even a question in it, hardly even the word itself. ‘What’re you talking about?’

  ‘Sometimes at Mass I’d know people would be looking at me.’

  ‘Of course they’re not.’

  ‘Is it they’re saying in Rathmoye she was going with one of the St Johns?’

  ‘Of course they aren’t saying that. Why would they be?’

  ‘He was on about the St Johns going with any handy woman they’d find.’

  ‘When the accident happened in the yard the St Johns were gone from here. They were ages gone then.’

  ‘There’s one came back. He saw her with him. A few times he saw the two of them. The old trouble, he called it.’

  ‘He says anything. It’s different every time what he says. There’s no sense to it. He hasn’t sense left in him.’

  ‘He was sorry for me on account of the child. It was for that he stopped me on the road. A St John came back, Ellie, the time I was careless with the tractor in my own yard.’

  ‘There’s nowhere to come back to. These thirty years, there never was.’

  ‘I didn’t know it that a St John came back. Only myself didn’t know it. He’s saying no more than what’d be said round about.’

  ‘There’s no talk like that in Rathmoye.’

  ‘I hate going in there. Ever since the day I hated it.’

  ‘Would a drop of whiskey do you good? Would I get the bottle from the scullery?’

  ‘I used wonder would people be thinking I had whiskey taken the time I backed the trailer. Would they be saying I had drink in me? Would they be saying I shouldn’t have backed with the sun in my eyes?’

  ‘That isn’t said at all.’

  ‘Better it might be than what was said to me on the road.’

  ‘Don’t listen to his old rambling.’

  ‘I never thought it’d be said what was said to me on the road.’

  ‘You don’t have to think it. It isn’t true.’

  ‘Did you hear it said yourself, Ellie? Did he say it to you the day I went for the loan and he was talking to you in the Square? Did other people say it to you? Is it that that has you troubled, Ellie?’

  She said that no one had repeated a word of anything like it to her. All Orpen Wren ever talked about was the past, she said.

  ‘It’s the past has him in its grip, Ellie.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘Coming out here, he was further than he ever is beyond the town. He told me that too. It was myself he was looking for, Ellie.’

  ‘He talks to anyone.’

  He shook his head as he stood up. He went to the scullery and came back with the whiskey bottle and a cup.

  ‘I’m all right when I’m in the fields,’ he said. ‘Or when I’m with yourself in the house. It’d maybe be all right if I was walking in a town where no one’d know me.’

  She watched him pouring out some of the whiskey that was kept to offer his relations when they came over from Shinrone once a year on a Sunday afternoon. She’d tasted it herself and hadn’t liked it. She said again that people in Rathmoye weren’t saying what he feared, that everything repeated to him today came out of a distorted mind, that Orpen Wren’s rigmaroles were all his own. He shook his head.

  ‘It takes a mad man to say it out.’

  ‘It isn’t true,’ she said again.

  ‘She came from better people than my own. But she never held it over me, she took me for what I was. I wouldn’t have said she was a flighty woman, I wouldn’t have said she was the kind to go with another man. But if she did who’d blame people for thinking what was said on the road? The age he is and everything, he walked the miles out to say he was sorry about the child. He said it wasn’t good that he never said it before on account of he forgets things. The rest of it slipped out, the way it would when you haven’t a grip on your wits. I always knew there was something. I always knew not to hold my head up in Rathmoye.’

  He reached for the bottle on the floor beside where he sat. She thought he was going to pour more whiskey but he didn’t. He said again a St John had come back the time he was careless with the tractor in his own yard. You couldn’t blame people for what they’d think or what they’d say. You couldn’t blame people for reaching a conclusion. You couldn’t blame Orpen Wren.

  ‘What he said to you is nothing only rubbish.’

  Ellie hadn’t sat down herself. All the time they’d been talking she had stood by the table with the knife and fork in her hand. She watched while he crossed the kitchen to return the whiskey bottle to the scullery shelves. He wasn’t a drinking man: that had been discovered by the nuns and passed on to her before she’d come to the farm. He washed the cup out at the sink.

  ‘I’ll make us something to eat,’ she said again.

  She put the knife and fork down where she’d been intending to. There was a numbness in her mind, all panic gone from it. Nothing happening there was what it felt like.

  ‘He shook hands with me and then he went off,’ her husband said.

  He didn’t want to eat, and nor did she. He went away and she heard the tractor again, before he drove it to the fields. In the silent kitchen it came coldly to her that the tragedy of the man who had taken her into his house was more awful by far than love’s denial. It came like clarity in confusion, there was a certainty: it was too late. And it came coldly, too, that the truth she yet might tell to draw the sting of his agony would cause more suffering than she could inflict, more than any man who had done no wrong deserved.

  33

  Waking the next day, Florian was first of all aware that his dog was dead, and then the day before came jerkily back, like a film carelessly projected. He had woken to panic in the night, but afterwards had slept again and now was calmer. What was done was done, what would happen would happen. He washed and dressed, made coffee, heated milk. He hurried over nothing.

  It was eight o’clock when a van came for the furniture and effects that had had to remain until now: his bed, his bedroom cupboard, two dressing-tables and a chest-of-drawers the new owners of Shelhanagh had said they’d like to have, then changed their minds about. The radiogram should have gone earlier but there’d been a misunderstanding and it hadn’t. China was packed into a tea-chest, kitchenware into another. The skip
would be there until evening, to take anything else.

  The house was bleak, the emptiness complete when the men had gone, his footsteps the only sound. He prised Isabella’s picture from the drawing-room wall. He completed his packing of the small suitcase he hadn’t used since his boarding-school days. On top of what clothes he was taking, in protective cardboard he placed the watercolours, his most valuable possession. A drawer had slipped out of the heavy kitchen table on its way to the furniture van, throwing on to the ground his father’s waistcoat watch, his mother’s only jewelled ring. He found a corner for them.

  The pages of the Fieldbook had served their purpose and he relit his garden fire with them. He put away the spade he had used to dig the grave, beside other garden implements that by arrangement were to be left. In the yard he thought he heard a sound, coming from the garden, but there was no one there. At the lake he skimmed pebbles over the water and wondered if, anywhere, he would play this solitary game again.

  He missed the rattling in the reeds, the fleeing of the water rats. He smoked a cigarette, leaning against the upturned boat, listening for bicycle wheels on the gravel.

  Ellie left the house only to feed her hens and to retrieve the parcel from under the tarpaulins in the turf shed. She took the wrapping paper off and filled the green holdall with stones from the wall of the river-field, then watched it sinking into murky water.

  It rained in the afternoon and Dillahan cut the winter’s wood. In the shed he pulled out the boughs he had stacked, trimming them, chopping off brushwood with a hatchet. He had a couple of elm trunks, dead wood, dry as a bone. There was an oak bole he’d had for years.

  The belts of the circular saw had slackened; the oil in the cogs was dry. He brushed out grime and sawdust, and his file on the teeth of the saw screeched when he sharpened them. He cleaned the spark plugs he had loosened. When he tried the engine it spluttered and then fired, with wisps of smoke and petrol fumes in the air.

  He kept the engine turning over while he put away the tools he had used - wire brush and spanners, the hammer he eased the motor clamp with, screwdriver, his oil can.

  When the whine of the sawing began Ellie came out of the house, although he always said he could manage. She passed him each next length of wood, hardly any of them too heavy for her. All afternoon it took, the logs falling to a heap on the ground.

  The skip swung a little in the air before it steadied and slowly descended to the lorry. The chains that had lifted it hung loose, and then were wound back into the crane. ‘Good luck to you!’ the driver called out before he drove away.

  Florian had left himself without a book and, with nothing to do, he climbed up to the roof to look for the last time at the view it offered. He remembered being brought there the first time for the same purpose; and later, on his own, reading Coral Island there. Once Isabella and he had tried to sleep on the roof, but the lead which had been warm at first became cold and they had crept back into the house. And it was there, one summer after Isabella had gone back to Italy, that he fir st became addicted to the detective stories that were his mother’s addiction all her life. Day after day in a heatwave he had read The Fashion in Shrouds and The Crime at Black Dudley, Hangman’s Holiday, Death and the Dancing Footman.

  From the roof the far-off mountains were unchanged, but the crowded summer fields were earthy now, empty and orderly and the same. Autumn was in the trees, bright berries of cotoneaster in the garden, busy squirrels.

  He could see the road and would see her when she came, but still she didn’t and familiar guilt began, without a reason now. It faded while he waited, and on the way down through the house he went from room to room, closing the door of each behind him when he left it. At the bottom of the stairs a figure stood hesitantly in the gathering dusk. ‘I came on in,’ a man said, explaining then that he was here to read the electricity meter.

  While this was being done and the electricity turned off, Florian again imagined he heard a sound outside; and listened, but it wasn’t repeated. The bottle of champagne was still on the hall flo or, ignored or forgotten by the front door. ‘Would you like to have this?’ he offered the meter-reader; and as if such generosity demanded that he should be sociable, the man stayed longer than he might have, relating anecdotes connected with houses changing hands. Some people took the lightbulbs when they went, he said.

  ‘You made it easier for me,’ Dillahan said, saying it suddenly when neither of them had spoken for a while. She had made it less frightening; for you could be frightened, he said, and not know why, only that fear had come from somewhere. You’d see that in an animal.

  When the clocks changed next month he’d drive her over to Templeross, he said, and she wondered if, even after she’d been to confession, the nuns would know. Everything was calmer for a penitent, they used to say at Cloonhill, and she accepted that it was. But still she wondered if the nuns would see her as she used to be, or as she had become.

  Twilight darkened in Shelhanagh House. Florian threw water on to the glow of his garden fir e and stumbled about the empty kitchen. The tin he’d spoken about to Mrs Carley was already on a shelf in one of the wall-cupboards. He pulled over the shutters in the downstairs rooms. When he had locked the hall door from the outside he dropped the key through the letter-box and heard it fall on the flagstones. By the light of his bicycle lamp he strapped his suitcase on to the carrier.

  That night Ellie didn’t sleep. She hadn’t slept the night before either. Not putting on the light she had got up and moved her clothes from the chair by the window and had sat there, looking out into the dark. She did so again, the window open a little as both of them liked it, the air chilly.

  It was earlier now than when she’d sat there the night before, the last streaks of filmy moonlight slipping away from the yard below. It was a natural thing for a man who had accidentally killed his wife and child to dread suspicion. It was a natural thing that a tormented mind should be confused. In the single day that had passed Ellie had many times told herself all that; and told herself that if Miss Connulty asked her she would say the man she had been friendly with for a while had left Ireland. She would not deny that she’d been friendly with him. She would say his name and where he had lived.

  At the window she began to feel cold, but still sat there. Tired as so often he was, her husband breathed heavily and was not restless. Everything had been easier for him since she came to his house, he had said this evening, everything better for him since she’d married him. There weren’t many who would understand, he’d said.

  Somewhere, far off, there was a light. She watched it moving, and knew. She put her clothes on and went downstairs quickly because the dogs would bark. She lifted a coat from one of the hooks on the back door. In the yard both dogs sleepily emerged to greet her.

  She could hear nothing on the road. ‘Come back,’ she whispered, and the dog who’d been inclined to investigate obeyed. The other one hadn’t moved from beside her.

  The light was there again, coming out of the dip in the road, still far away. Sometimes one of the Corrigan boys went by on a bicycle at night, not often, and they never bothered with lights.

  34

  They walked away from the house, he pushing his bicycle, the sheepdogs with them.

  ‘I thought he was dead,’ she said.

  She told him. There was a gun kept for rabbits and the pigeons. There had been silence everywhere, the tractor parked like that, the dogs morose. A farmer from near Donaghmore had taken his life, another farmer in east Kerry.

  ‘All day today I tried to think of nothing,’ she said.

  They had not embraced. They did not now. He was a shadow beside her, little more than that.

  ‘Why have you come?’ she asked.

  She felt him staring at her, trying to see her in the dark. When she asked again why he had come, he said because he wanted her to know that he had waited.

  ‘I’ll never forget being loved by you,’ he said. ‘Don’t hate me, Ellie. Pleas
e don’t hate me.’

  He reached for her hand, but it wasn’t there.

  He would have destroyed her, he said. Not ever meaning to, he would have. He knew it, in the way of knowing something that couldn’t be explained.

  ‘People run away to be alone,’ he said. Some people had to be alone.

  ‘It isn’t much of a goodbye,’ he said.

  He let a silence gather and so did she. There was a rustle in the undergrowth that might have been a fox’s quick retreat. They paid it no attention.

  ‘He saved you. That old man,’ he said.

  ‘It’s cold.’

  She turned away and he walked with her, still wheeling his bicycle. Any moment a light would go on in the house, she thought. Any moment her name would be called out, the back door thrown open. That mattered more than understanding. It mattered more than anything, was all that mattered.

  She knew that this was so, yet still would have gone with him. She whispered, gathering the dogs to her.

  ‘I couldn’t hate you,’ she said.

  She didn’t speak again, and nor did he.

  He cycled slowly, the air raw on his face. The signpost to Crilly was lit up by his lamp as he went by. The road straightened, became a hill to freewheel down, and then the twists and turns began again. How useless being sorry was, and yet that, most of all, was what he felt, a soreness in him somewhere. Her grey-blue eyes had been no more than smudges in the dark.

  She listened to the swish of wheels in motion before the sound dimmed away to nothing, before the flicker of light became faint and then was gone. The sheepdogs ambled into their shed. She crossed the yard, her footsteps light on the concrete surface. She lifted the latch of the door she had left unlocked, and closed the door behind her and softly turned the key.