‘And everyone at Kilneagh’s nice to you. No one could be nicer than Aunt Pansy. And so’s Aunt Fitzeustace and Philomena, and Father Kilgarriff. So is Mr Derenzy when he comes.’
The fly left the fruit and circled the glass of the lamp on the sideboard. It settled on the stopper of a decanter where another fly already was. The stopper of the! decanter was cracked, a deep, discoloured fissure that spoilt its appearance.
‘Yes,’ Imelda said.
‘Would you rather not five at Kilneagh, Imelda?’
Both flies ceased their interest in the decanter. One disappeared into the shadows of the ceiling, the other crept along the mahogany surface of the sideboard. The gondola in the green picture of Venice seemed, just for an instant, to give the slightest of shivers, as if about to begin its journey. But the figures outside the church by the bridge remained motionless. Imelda said, not looking at her mother: ‘Is he really going to come back?’
‘One day he will.’
‘Sometimes I think it could be all a mistake about what happened. Sometimes I think maybe everyone is wrong.’
‘Mistake?’
‘Like it mightn’t be true that Cuchulainn sent the bodies in a chariot to his enemy. Like it mightn’t be true about the Mitchels-town Martyrs or that priest in Youghal.’
‘But it is true, Imelda,’ her mother said gently. ‘We mustn’t pretend it isn’t.’
Again it seemed to Imelda that the gondola moved very slightly and this time she could have sworn that one of the figures outside the church raised a hand.
‘That lady thought I shouldn’t have been given life.’
‘What lady? What on earth are you talking about, Imelda?’
‘You told me about her: Miss Halliwell.’
‘But I never said anything about—’
‘There is a letter in Aunt Fitzeustace’s writing-desk.’
‘You mean you opened that writing-desk? Imelda, you shouldn’t have done that. Don’t you see you shouldn’t? It’s like listening at doors. It’s horrible. It’s a dreadful thing to read other people’s letters.’
‘I know.’
Philomena’s voice called from the back door, attracting the attention of the hens. It reminded Imelda of how, listening to her mother telling her about the time her parents had come to Kilneagh to persuade her to return to England, she had imagined Philomena passing by the French windows with a raincoat thrown over her head. She repeated that to her mother now, hoping to please her because she was still angry, but her mother regarded her with surprise. As far as she could remember, she said, Philomena had not passed by the windows on that occasion.
‘Oh, I think she did,’ Imelda contradicted. ‘I’m sure she did.’
Greater bewilderment gathered in her mother’s face. Imelda said that Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy had come in from their afternoon outing with the dogs, Aunt Fitzeustace with a spongecake on a plate. Father Kilgarriff had entered the sitting-room also.
‘He put a bit of turf on the fire and blew it with the bellows. He said a day like that would drive the damp into your bones.’
She smiled at her mother, her smile suggesting that there had been no difficulty in the conversation they’d had. It was nicer if they could agree that there had been no difficulty, if they could forget any awkwardness. But her mother didn’t appear to be aware of that. She continued to frown for a moment and then went on with the conversation as it had been. Imelda had to promise all over again that she would not eavesdrop and would not go poking in Aunt Fitzeustace’s writing-desk. She was glad at least that the conversation had not obliged her to reveal that she’d also read the jotter diaries.
In bed that night Imelda thought about the conversation, wishing it had ended in a different manner. She didn’t quite know how it might have ended, only that everything would not have been quite such a jumble. Then she thought about the scarlet drawing-room and the school-books laid out upon the table, and the fair-haired boy, just the same age as she was, being bad at Latin. The scent of sweet-peas wafted in from the garden and the next thing was she was in the garden herself, watching Tim Paddy while he raked the gravel.
It is considered that a butcher’s knife was most likely to have been the type of weapon employed.
Imelda replaced the neatly cut-out piece of paper in the secret drawer and snapped the drawer back into place. In the end it hadn’t really turned out to be very secret: all you had to do was to run your fingers along the little pillar.
Soundlessly she closed the flap of the writing-desk and pushed in the two little supports. The head was partially hacked from the neck, the body stabbed in seventeen places.
‘The head,’ Imelda said aloud, standing with her back to the writing-desk and leaning against it. She imagined the head, its weight tearing the flesh that still attached it to the body. She imagined the eyes and the mouth, and the body twitching the way she’d seen a turkey’s once, for nearly a minute after death.
4
‘Hullo, Imelda,’ Mr Derenzy said.
‘Hullo, Imelda,’ Johnny Lacy said.
She wondered if she liked the mill. She wondered if she liked the green-faced clock or the sound of water, or the autumn russet of the creeper that covered the stone. She thought she didn’t. Abruptly she thought that none of it was nice.
‘We’re busy today, Imelda,’ Johnny Lacy said. ‘Or else I’d tell you a story.’
‘Hurry up now, Johnny,’ Mr Derenzy called.
She sat for a while on the cobbles of the yard, her thin legs stuck out in front of her. ‘Thin shanks,’ Teresa Shea called them. Teresa Shea said they’d never stop getting longer, but Aunt Pansy dismissed that as nonsense. ‘You’ll grow up beautiful, Imelda,’ she’d promised. ‘There’s no doubt about that.’
Funny the way her mother said it so often: one day he will, they only had to wait. Funny the way she wrote things down in an old jotter so’s you could hardly read it. Imelda clambered to her feet and went to talk to Mr Derenzy in the office.
‘Do you like the mill?’ she asked him. ‘D’you think it’s nice?’
‘Oh, I dare say I’m well enough used to the place.’
‘Will it always be here, Mr Derenzy?’
‘I’d say it would be.’
She walked through the birch wood and the fields. It was best to go up to the tree and lean against it like she had the day before yesterday. Best to put her arms around it because it wasn’t its fault; horrid to blame a poor old oak tree, silly being frightened of it. ‘Silly-billy Quinton,’ Teresa Shea used to say, but she hadn’t said it for ages now.
She sat down and closed her eyes and when he stepped off the bus at Driscoll’s she felt like she did when she made herself lean against the tree. ‘Imelda,’ he said. ‘What a lovely name!’ And she told him about the Blessed Imelda and how the Host had come to her. He smiled and stroked her hair.
She jumped up and ran by the edge of the field she was in. Sometimes when she ran what she imagined fell to pieces, shattering into fragments. But this time that didn’t happen. He went on stroking her hair and he told her how he’d stood in a shop where there was dust everywhere, a shop like the pawnbroker’s at the bottom of the steep hill in Cork. An old woman with bad eyes lifted three knives tied together from the shop window, and he undid the hairy string. He had to go to a place like that, he explained: he was no more than a shadow for all the half-blind old woman knew.
Imelda climbed a stone wall and lay on the grass on the other side of it, too breathless to go on running. On the deck of the ship there were people who had been at a wedding, people singing, with confetti on their clothes. A child in white satin had chocolate marks around her mouth, two men danced and drank from bottles. All the time on the journey he kept feeling the blade of the knife in his pocket.
‘And evening,’ Imelda whispered to herself, running again through the fields, ‘full of the linnet’s wings.’ Sometimes it helped when she said the poetry. She crouched in a corner of the ruins, hidden by th
e nettles that had grown. ‘And noon a purple glow,’ she whispered.
Water dripped beside her, and Imelda watched it falling on to stones and plaster. She searched in her mind for the poetry but she could not remember the order of the words. She closed her eyes and in the room above the vegetable shop blood spurted in a torrent, splashing on to the wallpaper that was torn and hung loosely down. The blood was sticky, running over the backs of her hands and splashing on to her hair. It soaked through her clothes, warm when it reached her skin.
Imelda pressed her face into the nettles and did not feel their stinging. She pressed her fists into her ears. She closed her eyes as tightly as she could.
But nothing went away.
The screaming of the children began, and the torment of the flames on their flesh. The dogs were laid out dead in the yard, and the body of the man in the teddy-bear dressing-gown lay smouldering on the stairs. The blood kept running on her hands, and was tacky in her hair.
In the classroom Miss Garvey began to hook up her skirt, for the lesson was almost over. ‘On Thursday we’ll take a look at “The Ballad of Father Gilligan”,’ she said.
She asked for the blackboard to be cleaned and then, to her astonishment, she saw that Imelda Quinton had raised both her arms in front of her and was slowly moving away from the desk she shared with Lottie Reilly, as if walking in her sleep. With hesitant steps, occasionally stumbling, the child walked to a corner of the classroom. She huddled herself into it, crouching on the floor, pressed hard against the two walls that met there. She made a whimpering sound and then was silent.
WILLIE
I received a telegram which simply said, Josephine is dying. Hospital of St Bemadette, it was signed. The nun who sent the message must have known it wouldn’t be necessary to be more precise, and she was right: when I tried to recall Josephine’s other name I could not.
I went immediately when the telegram came. I packed a small white suitcase and from Sansepolcro, where I lived at that time, I took the Arezzo bus, not even pausing to look up the trains from Arezzo to Pisa. ‘This is Josephine’: my mother had stepped ahead of her through the French windows of the morning-room, on to the grass.
The bus moved slowly through sunshine and the soft spring landscape of Umbria. The first green shoots decorated the vines on either side of the road; new growth freshened the olive branches. It seemed preposterous to be leaving behind my Canary roses, my irises and wistaria, I who was so lost in the world of Bellini and Ghirlandaio. Yet even more urgently as I progressed on it I wanted to make the journey.
At Pisa the airport was on strike. I took the Rome Express to Paris and on it att pasta in brodo and scallopine, staring out at orange-tiled roofs and ochre walls. I drank a litre of Brolio and ordered grappa with my coffee. She would be humble in old age, I thought, and felt ashamed that I did not know her other name. I knew nothing of her life since last I’d seen her, so very long ago, how she had spent it, where she had been. I had not said good-bye, which perhaps was why I so determinedly made the journey now.
On the plane the pretty stewardess was attentive, smart in her green uniform. Her voice reminded me of Ireland. ‘Yes please,’ I said. ‘Yes, I think a little whiskey.’ She smiled a soothing, airline smile. ‘Jameson?’ she murmured, caressing me with the familiar name.
In Cork there was a wait before a taxi was available. I drank more whiskey, for how could I soberly arrive at a strange hospital, in this city again after so long?
‘Ah, the traffic’s shocking these days,’ the taxi-driver said. ‘Shocking altogether.’ I had asked him to be as quick about the journey as he could. ‘I understand,’ he replied, and I could feel him guessing what was at stake, since we were going to a hospital. Involuntarily he crossed himself.
‘I haven’t been to Cork for forty years,’ I said.
‘You’d find it changed, sir.’
‘I used to live here.’
‘Is that so, sir? You don’t sound like a Corkman. I took you for a stranger, sir.’
‘I’ve become a stranger.’
‘It wasn’t much of a place, I’d say, forty years ago?’
‘I remember it as thriving. The docks were always busy.’
‘It’s thriving now all right. The Yanks love Cork.’
‘I can imagine that.’
‘There’s a few, sir, put off by the trouble up in the North. There’s a confusion that we might be affected down here. But there’s not so many like that.’
‘I’ve read about the trouble.’
‘Where’re you living now, sir?’
‘In a town called Sansepolcro. In Italy.’
‘I was never in Italy.’
The hospital was of grey, unpainted concrete, dominated by a white cross. In a car-park grotto there was a statue of the Virgin, with flowers in jam-jars on a ledge by her feet. An old woman knelt in prayer.
‘Good luck so, sir,’ the taxi-driver said as I paid him, and I carried my white suitcase through swing-doors and spoke to a nun at a reception desk. The surface beneath my feet was highly polished parquet that stretched away to other swing-doors and beyond them, becoming a corridor. The reception area was enormous, with chairs against cream-coloured walls, and a cross on the wall above the nun’s desk.
‘Please wait a moment,’ she said, smiling with practised, hospital sensitivity: a consoling or a joyful smile, you could take it as circumstances dictated. ‘Take a seat now till I find out.’
I sat among other people, all of them silent, men and women of different ages, two small children. The nun spoke into a telephone but I couldn’t hear what she said. The man beside me took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and then remembered there were signs requesting you not to smoke.
‘Please come with me,’ another nun said, and I followed her through the second set of doors, down the long corridor.
‘I’m not too late, Sister?’
‘No, you’re not too late.’
Josephine was in a dusky room with rosary beads on the table close to her. She was propped up on pillows with her eyes closed, a crucifix on the wall above her. A young nun sat by her bed.
‘I’ll leave you with Sister Power,’ the nun who’d brought me whispered, and Sister Power rose from the bedside. Without making a sound except for the rustle of her habit she crossed the room to where I was standing and led me out into the corridor again. We stood a foot or two from the door, speaking in murmurs.
‘She was brought in a week ago,’ she said. ‘They thought at St Fina’s she might have pneumonia and would need our care.’
‘And has she?’
‘No, just a little cold. But she’s sinking all the time. I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I’m going to ask you to do something. It could upset her when she wakes up if you smell of drink. I’m going to ask you to take a mouth-wash.’
She returned to her duty at the bedside, and I accompanied another nun to a small room where medicines were kept. ‘Don’t mind,’ she said, as if what was happening was quite usual.
I washed my mouth out and spat into a basin, and then drank some water. When Josephine came into the dining-room at Kilneagh to clear away the dinner dishes no one stopped talking, no matter what was being said. First thing every morning she lit the range. After that there was the fire in the drawing-room and then the one in the breakfast-room.
‘Thank you,’ the nun said, and led me back to where Josephine was propped up. I sat down and for the first time I examined her face. All the prettiness had gone. It was a thin face, thinner and more wrinkled than my own, lifeless because her eyes were still closed. The grey hair was scanty, brown blotches marked the skin of the forehead. But on the white candlewick bedspread her hands were not as I remembered them: the skin was marked with elderly freckles also, but the rawness caused by work had gone.
‘Well,’ she said, her eyes abruptly opening. ‘Well.’
Behind a glaze of weariness the same softness lurked in the depths of them. Her fingers twitched on the cand
lewick, her lips slightly parted.
‘You have a visitor, Josephine.’
The eyes closed, and after a moment opened again. They stared ahead of her, between the nun and myself, at the blank wall opposite her bed.
‘A visitor,’ Sister Power repeated, making her nun’s gesture in my direction.
‘Kilneagh,’ Josephine said. Tears oozed from the corners of her eyes. ‘Dear Mary, console them,’ she whispered.
Sister Power placed the rosary beads between the bent fingers, but Josephine didn’t notice. ‘Console them everywhere,’ she said. ‘Console them.’
Her eyes closed again.
‘She’s asleep,’ Sister Power said.
She pressed a bell beside the bed and after a minute or so another nun came in. Sister Power asked her to take her place by the bedside and then nodded to me. I followed her down the corridor to an office that had another crucifix in it, small and black, hanging between two windows. There was a picture of the Sacred Heart as well, and a plaster image of the Virgin.
‘I’m going to have some coffee myself,’ Sister Power said, plugging in an electric kettle. ‘I hope we did right with that telegram?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Would you like some coffee yourself?’
‘Yes, I would please.’
She opened a cupboard and took a tin containing biscuits from it. She placed blue cups and saucers on the desk, among papers and wire trays. She found sugar and a tin of instant milk in the cupboard also.
‘We didn’t know to send for you or not. She mentioned you repeatedly one day, all day long, and then they discovered your address from the solicitors. Italy must be lovely, is it?’
‘I’m fond of it.’
‘I don’t think she was unhappy at St Fina’s. They speak of her with great affection. They ring up every day now that she’s here.’