He knew it wasn’t solace, but he could do no better. Despair could not be blown away and, although he didn’t want to, he remembered his when he blurted out what for so long he had concealed. They had been reading in the garden and they went on reading afterwards, and Isabella said nothing.
Above the three small lakes, hardly more than pools, the bleak rockface was sheer. Out of the sun’s reach, the water was dark and icy still. There were no birds, no other life, no sound. It was a place he might have come to when he fumbled with photography, Florian thought. But memory would more tellingly preserve it.
Their faces were cold against each other for a moment before they parted. Where would he go? she asked.
‘Perhaps Scandinavia,’ he said.
On the way back to Shelhanagh, Florian called in at the Dano Mahoney public house. Two drinkers at the bar looked up, interrupting a conversation about greyhounds. The ex-pugilist landlord nodded a curt welcome. Florian took his glass to the corner table he had occupied on the day of Mrs Connulty’s funeral.
His father had first brought him here, the landlord different then, a friendlier man whom his father had seemed to know well. A few days after his mother’s death that was, a time when his father kept saying he needed a drink. There had been reminiscences then too, of Italy, of love, of finding the house when they ran away to Ireland, of the legacy that came eventually from Genoa and how that had felt like being paid to stay away so as not to be an embarrassment to the Verdecchias. ‘I always liked the Verdecchias, though,’ his father confessed. ‘Because they were her people, I think.’
Born a Catholic but lapsing in her faith, Florian’s mother had been buried in the small Protestant churchyard in Castledrummond so that when the time came she and his father would not be separated. ‘We liked arranging things,’ his father said in the Dano Mahoney Bar. ‘We enjoyed all that.’ Isabella hadn’t come to either funeral. Florian had thought she would.
Of the two, he was the less good painter, his father used to say, but Florian now could not separate the watercolours that were left behind into who had painted which. Nor could he, sometimes, separate his mother and father as people, for with the years they had grown alike, although they had themselves insisted that once they’d been quite notably different and given to disagreement.
‘He’s asking near four hundred for his animal.’ The voice of one of the drinkers carried from the bar and then was hushed. Another man came in. He asked to use the telephone because a bullock had fallen down a ravine.
Florian finished his wine and his cigarette and then he cycled on. He would have to see to the grave before he left, and he wondered who would do that when he did go.
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.