Love and Summer

  They reached the Square and they stood there, not saying anything. People could see them, she didn’t care.

  ‘I might go looking for your tumbled-down gate-lodge one of these days,’ he said. ‘Since it’s all that’s left of what I’ve been hearing so much about from the old man. I might do that.’

  ‘Three miles out on the old Kilaney road. It’s easy enough to find.’

  ‘I dreamed about you,’ he said.

  11

  Resting after her morning’s work, idling at the window from which so often she viewed the Square, Miss Connulty had noticed the two when they appeared there from Magennis Street. She had seen them hesitating before walking on, seen them stop again, seen Ellie Dillahan eventually scuttling off. Miss Connulty used that word to herself, for scuttling was what Ellie Dillahan’s abrupt breaking away had looked like, a sudden, awkward movement forced upon herself, reluctant yet urgent. She hadn’t mounted her bicycle but had dragged it with her, and the man who’d taken the photographs at the funeral stood where she had left him, taken aback by her hasty departure. Then he rode across the Square and disappeared on to the Castledrummond road.

  There had been something about how they were with one another, something Miss Connulty might not even have noticed - and certainly would not have considered significant - had Ellie Dillahan been a stranger to her. Clearly, the two knew one another better than they had at the time Ellie Dillahan had spoken of, when he had asked her for directions.

  A car with a caravan attached was attempting to reverse and finding it difficult. One of Joseph Paul’s lorries, loaded with turf, passed into Matthew Street. What she had witnessed bewildered Miss Connulty, and now appalled her.

  Ellie Dillahan was a girl it was impossible not to feel protective of because of what her life had been. Her husband was a decent man, respected and sober, and it was understandable that he hadn’t been comfortable in himself since the tragedy he had suffered. But maybe it was no joke for Ellie to be out there in the hills, to have the days passing and not a word exchanged except with a husband who couldn’t forgive himself for an error. It wasn’t easy to blame Ellie; you wouldn’t want to and it didn’t seem natural to do so. Child of an institution, child of need and of humility, born into nothing, expecting nothing, Ellie Dillahan was victim enough without the attentions of a suave photographer. No matter who he was or where he came from, in Miss Connulty’s bristling imagination he was already a plunderer. Still watching the reversing of the caravan, she kept that with her, her outrage becoming an anger that brought two bright flushes to her cheeks.

  The house was silent, the daily girl gone home early since today was the day for that. Miss Connulty remained at the window for a minute or so longer, then went downstairs to make her brother’s lunchtime sandwiches. Her fury had quietened but still was there, as the dead days of finished time were, and tears no longer shed. She felt a wave of pity for Ellie Dillahan, as once, so wretchedly, she had for herself.

  It was unusual for his sister to sit down opposite him in the dining-room when she brought his sandwiches and the strong cup of Bovril Joseph Paul liked to have with them. She had something to say and he knew she had, but when she spoke he didn’t listen. Instead, from time to time he nodded.

  The day their father had taken her to Dublin, their mother had said she hoped they would never come back. Neither of them, she said, not ever. But he had wanted them to come back; no matter how horrible the shame, he had wanted them to be on the evening bus, or on tomorrow’s bus, to come back some time. Waiting, not knowing, the notice in the downstairs window stating that the house was full when it wasn’t, he had thought his mother would cry, but she didn’t; he’d never seen her cry. In the afternoon he brought her tea and made her toast. She couldn’t eat it, and later on she didn’t hear him when he asked her would he go down the town to see if they were on the bus. She said she knew they would be when he asked her again; when they came back to the house with him she said it was the worst day of her life. He brought his sister cocoa. Any mother would be upset, he said, but his sister didn’t answer, the first time she ever didn’t when he spoke to her. Quite often now they didn’t answer one another.

  ‘He made enquiries from Ellie Dillahan about the picture house,’ she said in the dining-room, and he asked her what she was talking about.

  ‘I told you.’

  ‘I know, I know. But it isn’t easy to get at the gist of what you’re saying.’

  ‘He’s hanging about the town. He got into the picture house - I’ve had that said to me. There’s nobody knows who he is.’

  ‘The keys of the picture house are in the yard office. There’s no way you can get into the picture house except you have the keys. I don’t know this man you’re talking about.’

  ‘A pale tweed suit and he’s taken to wearing a hat. He comes in off the Castledrummond road.’

  ‘I don’t know him at all.’

  His lack of interest spread into Joseph Paul’s tone. No one should be listening to this, he said to himself, and aloud said that Bernadette O’Keeffe was making arrangements with Dempsey to have the back bedrooms repainted.

  ‘The back bedrooms have nothing to do with it. There’s no one but yourself hasn’t seen him. He could be shouting from the rooftops and you wouldn’t see him.’

  He said nothing. It was always best to say nothing. He finished the sandwiches she had made for him, and the dregs of the Bovril. He waited for her to go away.

  She took the tray from where she’d left it on the dumb waiter. She put his plate and his cup and saucer on it, with the salt and pepper she always brought him too. She cleared up the crumbs he’d made, brushing them with a dish-cloth on to the tray.

  ‘I’ll tell you another thing,’ she said, as calm as ice, which she could be at will.

  She spoke to his back; he didn’t turn his head. Before he was finished with her, this man would be off with Ellie Dillahan, she said, and then she went away.

  12

  Ellie held the tyre lever in place; he’d shown her how. For five or six inches the tyre had been released from the wheel’s rim and two other levers were holding it there. He worked one of them with his foot, coaxing the tyre, and when he wasn’t successful sliding the other closer to the one she still held. Further inches of the tyre’s grip were released. ‘We have it now,’ he said.

  He ran the lever along, then pulled the tube out. He had jacked the Vauxhall up and taken the wheel off without her help, calling her only a few minutes ago. He’d filled a basin with water. She watched while he pumped the tube up and found the puncture. ‘I’ll manage now,’ he said.

  In the crab-apple orchard she scattered grain and the hens came rushing to her. She hadn’t been aware that she didn’t love her husband. Love hadn’t come into it, had never begun in a way that was different from the love spoken of so often by the nuns at Cloonhill, its brightly visible sign burning perpetually, as it did above the kitchen doorway in the farmhouse, as it had for the woman who once had scoured the saucepans that now were hers, and for other women before that. She closed the hens in and cut two lettuces on her way back to the yard. She picked the best of the chives.

  The wheel had been replaced, the jack wound down. ‘Thanks for that,’ her husband said as she went by. He had that way with him, of thanking her.

  It was a kindness - so it had seemed to her, and still did - when she had been offered marriage; it would have been unkind on her part if she’d said no. Her home was his house, where in kindness, too, she had been called his housekeeper, not a maid. She thought of him, even now, as older than he was, being widowed and knowing more than she did. It would be better if they were married: he hadn’t put it like that, and afterwards, at Lahinch, had said he’d grown close to her and was a lucky man. ‘I’m lucky myself,’ she’d said, and had meant it, for she had never developed the habit of lying. ‘I’m sorry,’ she apologized later when she couldn’t give him children, and he said it didn’t matter. ‘You’ve given me enough,’
he said.

  She laid the table. She washed the lettuce and dried it in a tea-towel. She sliced what remained of the lamb they’d had on Sunday. She chopped the chives, cut up tomatoes.

  He took his wellingtons off at the door; he washed his hands at the sink. Sometimes he washed upstairs and changed his shirt, but he didn’t this evening. She could tell he was tired.

  ‘A bit of a blade,’ he said, explaining the puncture. ‘Vicious little edge to it.’

  Another day had passed, the fifth that had since the encounter outside the shoemaker’s. Nothing was less than it had been; she had imagined that by now it would be. She was contrite, and ashamed, but still her feelings were as they’d been that morning and before it.

  ‘I see we have the raddle powder.’ He piled salad on to his plate. Summer fare, he called it, and never minded when it was there again.

  ‘I forgot to say it came in.’

  ‘No harm. Did you ever notice hook springs in English’s? D’you know do they keep them?’

  ‘I’ll ask.’

  She poured out tea for him, and added milk. She pushed the sugar closer to him. She tried to think of something else to say because talking was a help. ‘He’d do anything for you,’ a woman she didn’t know had said to her at the wedding celebration, as if that should be said, as if it was too easy to take him for granted. The de Valera man in McGovern’s had terrier pups for sale again, she said.

  ‘I think you maybe told me that.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Arrah, no.’

  The woman at the wedding had called her fortunate. Afterwards, when they’d driven off in the Vauxhall, she hadn’t been unhappy. She hadn’t had regrets, either then or in the few days they spent away. She hadn’t when they returned to the farm. In Rathmoye when people called her Mrs Dillahan it pleased her. Only that, and sharing his bedroom with him, had been different. The little room where she’d slept before would have been the child’s, brightly painted, a wallpaper with toys on it. She had never liked to change it and when it was empty he’d said to leave it as it was and she knew what he was thinking.

  He stirred sugar into the tea she’d poured. A silence didn’t matter; he never minded that, he’d often said it.

  ‘We cut the road pasture,’ he said when he had finished what was on his plate. ‘I had Corrigan’s lads over.’

  She watched him removing the silver paper from a triangle of cheese, tidily turning back the folds, then lifting the cheese out on his knife. He liked to do things well, even that. It was impossible to imagine him careless, or casual. And yet, of course, tragically he had been.

  ‘You’re off your food, Ellie,’ he said.

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘I noticed.’

  She cut more bread for him, and reached across the table to fill his cup again. Gahagan was getting closer to letting the field go, he said.

  ‘Contrary as he is, he’s nearly ready to part with it.’

  She tried to think about the field changing hands and the difference it would make, and Gahagan maybe considering the disposal of the woodlands too.

  ‘We’ll mark that day, Ellie.’

  He nodded each word into place as he spoke, then pushed his chair back. When he was tired in the evenings he sat on the sagging couch in the window, his big shoulders relaxed over the paper, the radio on if it was something he wanted. He sat there now, and Ellie cleared the table and carried the dishes to the sink. At first there’d been a photograph of his wife in the other room, a smiling woman, the infant in her arms. But later he had put it in a drawer.

  She ran the hot tap over plates and cutlery and squeezed washing-up liquid into the water when it covered them. His old-time dancing programme was on the radio. There’s nothing only weakness in me: she saw her handwriting, old-fashioned, slanting, influenced by the strictures of Sister Ambrose, who had emphasized the virtues of clarity over flamboyance. ‘Always write to us if you’d need us,’ Sister Ambrose had begged. ‘Always tell us.’ God is your strength: how often a nun’s lips had expressed that!

  More days would pass, and one would come when it would seem as though what had happened hardly had. She would shamefully recount her errors, her deception even of herself, and make her peace and be forgiven through contrition. Time could not but pass, every minute of it a healing.

  ‘I used go to old-time myself,’ her husband said, and she guessed he’d gone with his other wife and hadn’t wanted to since because of what had happened. He said something else, drumming his fingers on the arm of the couch. But the music was suddenly too loud and she didn’t hear what it was.

  ‘I’d better see to the fowls.’

  One of the dogs had barked and there’d been a fox about. But when she went out everything was quiet. It was never dark at this time of year: the green of the tractor hadn’t faded, or the dusty brown of the Vauxhall. The sheepdogs went with her when she made her rounds, and stood beside her, obedient in the gateway when she listened there. His Italian mother would have smoked cigarettes, a tall, still beautiful woman: out of nowhere that image came. In the crab-apple orchard she locked her hens in.

  ‘Sit down and rest yourself,’ her husband said. ‘Sit down and listen to this.’

  ‘I’ve the accounts to look at, though.’

  She went to the other room. The receipts were there and the record she kept in a grey exercise book of cheques that had been paid in at the bank. She turned the light on and took the exercise book from the drawer of the table in the window.

  The accounts were up to date: she’d known they would be. But in the same drawer were the Christmas cards she had received from Sister Ambrose, who had been, more than the other nuns, her friend at Cloonhill. We are delighted, a note recorded in one, that you are to marry and we give thanks for your contentment on the farm. In another there was news of a journey to Lough Derg, and of the Fermoy Retreat. ‘We are here for you if ever you feel called to join us,’ she remembered Sister Ambrose saying on the evening of the day that had been chosen as her birthday. ‘And never forget that we are here for you in other ways too.’ She was eleven then.

  She returned the cards to their envelopes. A few had come with a sacred text, a shiny slip that illustrated a moment from Christ’s Passion. Our sins are His wounds, hard black italic type declared, beneath the bleeding figure. His agony was for us.

  She heard her husband’s footsteps on the stairs, his movements in the room above. She tore a single sheet from the exercise book and took from the drawer the ballpoint pen she always kept there. She wrote to Sister Ambrose, saying she was sorry she hadn’t written at Christmas, saying she was all right. But even so she asked for Sister Ambrose’s prayers. She wrote what she had written in her thoughts and the words did not make sense. Looking at them, she knew they would not unless she revealed why they’d been written, unless she confessed that the nuns, who knew her so well, would not know her now, made different by lies of silence and of deception, and being ashamed. On another page, when she tried again there were no other words, no other way of conveying, while telling too little, the bleakness she felt. And even too little would bewilder and alarm.

  In the silence of the room she sat for another hour, and then for longer. She did not weep, although she wanted to. The sympathy she sought was there, she knew it was; yet she resisted it.

  She unbolted the back door and went outside again. She walked on the road, the night air refreshing, a relief. She walked to tire herself, the sheepdogs going with her. In the kitchen when she returned she opened the stove and dropped the pages she had torn from the exercise book on to black, unglowing anthracite. She pulled the dampers out and listened to the flame beginning.

  13

  Miss Connulty said he was bad news. Taking in the eggs she said it, not looking at Ellie. People were wondering who he was, she said, fiddling with the money she was counting from her purse. Miss Connulty knew.

  More change was added to the coins, the purse zipped up.

  ‘You didn
’t mind me mentioning that?’ Miss Connulty said.

  ‘I only know him on account of he asked me the way that day.’

  He wasn’t bad news. Riding away, Ellie told herself she should have said he wasn’t. How could you call a person bad news when you didn’t know who he was or anything about him? She should have said that too. ‘His name is Florian Kilderry,’ she should have said. ‘He’s half Italian.’

  She went back to the farm the long way, by the old Kilaney road. She had ignored it when he’d shown an interest in the Lisquin gate-lodge. She hadn’t said she liked the quietness there, that she went there more often than she had implied. She wondered if he had sensed that suppression and been hurt by it, and again been hurt when she’d been abrupt, not saying goodbye. Would it have mattered much going to Meagher’s Café with him? Hearing him called bad news made a difference. And how could nuns understand? How could they? And was there harm in talking to a person when nothing wrong was said?

  On the old Kilaney road, used by no one these days, she thought she smelt the cigarettes he smoked. She stopped for a moment, but she was wrong. Going slowly, she passed the high iron gates of the Lisquin avenue, and glanced in at the tumbled-down gate-lodge. No one was there.

  ‘I’m going up the hills,’ Dillahan said. ‘There’s a couple out.’

  Ellie didn’t answer, as if she hadn’t heard.

  ‘You’d tell me, Ellie? You’d tell me if you were troubled?’

  She said she was all right. ‘Really,’ she said.

  He drove out of the yard. Gahagan had told him about the sheep that were wandering. Gahagan went up there sometimes although he didn’t have any stock there. He’d seen two blue-marked sheep, he’d said, not that he was sure of it, his eyes the way they were. But if he didn’t go and look for himself, Dillahan predicted, it would turn out that the two were his.