‘Ah, no, you’re not.’
‘It isn’t Lisquin I’m after. It’s only I know my bearings from Lisquin. It’s a man I came looking for.’
‘Go down the road till you’ll come to a black-tarred gate. Keep on past the gate till you’ll come to a four-crossroads. Go to your left and go right at the sharp corner. You’ll get on to the big road then and Rathmoye’s marked up on the signpost. Will I tell you again?’
Orpen requested that, and then thanked the child. He found the black gate but when he went on he couldn’t remember the rest of the directions and would have been lost again if a woman on a bicycle hadn’t walked with him to the crossroads.
‘Who were you looking for out this way?’ she asked him and said he had strayed by a fair step when he told her.
She drew a map on a piece of brown paper she tore off a parcel. ‘That’s the best way you’ll do it from Rathmoye,’ she said. ‘Don’t lose it now for another day.’
He rested after she left him, sitting on the grass verge. Then he went on, put right again by tinkers on the side of the road.
28
When Ellie woke up she didn’t know where she was, and then remembered. She heard a car. Coming into the room, Florian said:
‘The men to tow away the Morris Cowley.’
She asked him what time it was. He said half past twelve, or nearly.
‘Have they gone, the men?’
‘They’re going now.’
She closed her eyes, not wanting to be awake. He was in his shirtsleeves, his tweed waistcoat unbuttoned. He was looking down at her.
‘Don’t be upset,’ he said.
Sunlight made a pattern with the shadows on the boards of the floor and on her clothes where she had thrown them, her bangle, and the ring she had taken from her finger. Her blue dress was crumpled. One shoe was on its side.
‘I’ll make tea,’ he said.
When he went downstairs she found a bathroom in a part of the house she hadn’t been in before. It was a bathroom that wasn’t used, the small bath chipped and stained, grit fallen into it from the ceiling. But water came when she turned on the single tap at the wash-basin and she bathed her face.
The water was cold. There were no towels. There wasn’t soap. A cloth had hardened into a bundle on the windowsill and she ran water over it, and washed herself.
She didn’t hurry. She didn’t want tea, she wanted to be alone. A pool gathered on the floor while she washed and she tried to soak it up with the cloth.
A nun had gone to a man at the sawmills in Templeross. Sometimes she was called Roseline after the Blessed Roseline, but that was always known to be made up, for the nun was nameless at Cloonhill, mistily there in whispered tales passed down through generations. The man would come delivering logs in winter and she went to him, her habit folded on her bed, her crucifix , her beads, her missal, her shoes left too. All that was said, although it was forbidden to say anything.
Wondering what to dry herself with, Ellie sat on the edge of the bath. In the round, discoloured mirror above the basin there were glimpses of her nakedness when she moved. She never liked not having clothes on and she looked away. She was cold.
A few said the man wasn’t there when the nun went to him, that she searched for him on the streets of cities, that he was never there again. Some said she begged on the streets and was known to have been a nun. Some said that when she was old she was found in the river at Limerick.
The bolt of the door wouldn’t move at first but did when Ellie tried again. She listened and could hear nothing, not footsteps, not voices. Then she heard the car being towed away.
In the bedroom she dried herself on a sheet she pulled off the bed.
Éire, Ireland, Irelande
, it said on the passport that was displayed as the postcard of the saint was in the kitchen, more gilded letters bright on its green cover:
Pas, Passport, Passeport
.
She put her ring on again when she was dressed, secured the clasp of her bangle, tidied her hair as best she could with her fingers because her comb was in her handbag in the hall. A pigeon was murmuring outside the open window and then she heard the rattle of the garage doors being closed. She hung the sheet to dry on hooks that were there for a curtain-rail. She pulled the bedclothes off to air the bed. She didn’t want to go downstairs and didn’t go when he called, but when he called again she went.
‘Stay a bit longer,’ Florian said, and the hall-door bell jangled as he spoke.
He poured two cups of tea before he went to answer it. ‘Forgotten something,’ he said.
It was a wrench, put down somewhere when a bolt on the Morris Cowley had had to be tightened. He helped the two men to look for it and found it in the yard by the garage doors.
‘Devil take it,’ the man he returned it to said. ‘That thing could hide itself in your flannel and you wouldn’t know.’
He was carrying the chair she’d taken to the yard when he came back. He said it was a tool they had left behind.
Better just to go, she thought, but still she didn’t. ‘Things end,’ he’d said the day he told her everything, and she had understood and for a while accepted that.
He had put his tie on, his jacket. A little of her tea had spilt on to the saucer and he wiped it away with a cloth.
‘I’m sorry.’ She whispered, not hearing herself, not knowing what she was apologizing for, then knowing it was for everything. For being a bother with her regrets that weren’t regrets, for her longings and her tears, because she had no courage, because she had come today and made it all worse.
‘I’m sorry too,’ he said. ‘I let things happen. I notice them too late.’
She shook her head. She sipped the tea he’d poured. It had no taste.
‘I have that way with me,’ he said. ‘I’m reticent when I shouldn’t be.’
The doors of the wall-cupboards were hanging open, yellowing green, as the walls themselves were. There was nothing on the shelves, nothing on the row of hooks above them. The saucepans and china stacked on the floor, the two chairs, the table and what was on it were what was left in the kitchen now.
Better to go, Ellie thought again, and again did not.
‘There was a nun we’d talk about,’ she said.
The bleak recounting of events affected Florian as he listened. It chilled him, but a nun torn from her vows by passion’s torment, and wretched years later her body floating on the water, did not seem to belong, had no place, surely, in a passing summer friendship, even though love came into it, too.
‘I thought of her,’ Ellie said. ‘It’s only that.’
‘You’re not a nun, Ellie. It’s different. All of it is different.’
‘Sometimes a girl would say the nun deserved her fate. Sometimes a girl would cry, and another girl would tell us to be reminded of the nun’s suffering whenever we saw logs blazing. The log man he was called.’
‘Ellie -’
‘How is it different? How is it, though?’
About to answer, Florian hesitated, and then said nothing. Did she understand more than he did because the pain was hers, not his? Accepting the burden of perfect faith, a novice had promised more than she could give; a man delivering fir ewood lured her from her knees because he liked the look of her. Could there really be an echo of that nun’s misery long ago in what so ordinarily had come about this summer and now must end? Was despair, with all its bitterness, governed less by misfortune’s content than by some law of its own?
‘When will you go tomorrow?’
The suddenness of the question, the change of mood, startled Florian and for a moment he didn’t know what he’d been asked. When it was repeated he said he would ride through the night to Dublin, that that was how he’d always wanted to go.
‘Come tomorrow, Ellie. At least to say goodbye.’
She did not immediately respond either. When she did it was to say it would be too much to be with him on the day he went away.
‘I could not.’
Florian sensed the truth of that: it was in her manner, and he heard it in her measured intonation. It was a wince in her face while she spoke, it was in the turn of her head when she looked away from him.
‘I could not,’ she said again, out of a silence.
They sat for longer at the table, the cigarette Florian had put out to smoke unsmoked, the tea he’d made gone cold. This was what he would take with him, he thought. This was what he would leave behind. Tidily laid out, these moments now would haunt whole days.
He had pitied the infant left in a corner of some yard or on a convent step, had pitied the child given a place among the unwanted, the girl who had become a servant. Her loneliness had been his when they were friends - before, too greedily, he asked too much of friendship, and carelessly allowed a treacherous love to flo urish. She had come to him, and pity now was nourished by his greater guilt, and guilt was lent some part of pity’s dignity. A wild delusion seemed - because of what today had happened - to be less wild, a hopeless yearning less intolerant of reason. They sat not speaking, and time seemed not to pass.
The silence held. But when
*
they walked in the garden their choked conversation flickered into life again. The lobelia, the buddleia, the last of the smoke tree’s summer mist, berberis, garrya, mahonia: Ellie learnt the names, she had not known them. And they went to the lake to see if the summer bird had come back, but still it hadn’t. And then, beyond the plum trees, where there’d been raspberries before, they spoke of Scandinavia.
29
Dillahan turned off the ignition of the tractor because he hadn’t been able to hear what the man said.
‘What d’you want?’ he asked again.
The man had come from nowhere. A moment before he appeared he hadn’t seemed to be there. He didn’t reply to what he’d been asked, and Dillahan looked more closely at him. He must have come out of the field that had been Gahagan’s. Then he realized the man was Orpen Wren.
‘Is it Mr Dillahan, sir?’
‘I’m Dillahan.’
‘I know you, sir. I know you well.’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s not often I’m as far abroad as this, sir. It’s not often I stray away from the town. You know where you are within a town, sir.’
‘What d’you want?’
‘No more than a word, sir,’ Orpen Wren said. ‘No more than that, sir.’
30
‘Oh, we do, we do,’ the salesman said. ‘Wait now till I’ll get a few out for you.’
He was an older man, his back a little humped, starched white collar and cuffs, a shop assistant’s dark suit. Ellie hadn’t seen him in Corbally’s before. There hadn’t been anyone in the luggage department when she’d looked at the holdalls a week or so ago.
‘Bear with me a minute,’ he said now.
In the garden it had felt like a dream and it still did when she went back to the house for her handbag. He wheeled her bicycle out of the yard, over the gravel at the front, on to the road. He was waiting for her there and she mentioned the jammed zip of the holdall and he said get a new one. She couldn’t remember if she had looked round when she rode away, but if she had she retained no image of his standing there alone. She remembered noticing the Dano Mahoney as she went by it. There’d been the sign for Rathmoye, in Irish and in English, and then the Ford advertisement and the one for Raleigh Bicycles, and the request to go slowly. ‘Be sure, Ellie. Be certain,’ was what he’d said when they stood on the road. No more than that except to say to get a holdall.
‘We have this fellow.’ The salesman was opening one of the suitcases he’d brought. ‘In a two-tone or the blue,’ he said.
She had asked for a holdall, and described again what she wanted - something that would fold in on itself when it wasn’t in use, something that could be attached to the carrier of a bicycle. She didn’t explain further, she didn’t go into details.
‘Well, I’d say we have that.’ The salesman went away again and returned with two holdalls. He unzipped them on the counter, drawing attention to inside pockets. ‘We have it green. Or a tan with a Rexine trim.’
She wondered if he knew her, or if he’d ask after she’d gone and be told who she was by Miss Burke or the man she bought dress material from. She wondered if they’d talk about it, how she’d bought a holdall, where she was going.
‘I’d rather the green,’ she said.
‘That’s a better bag than the Rexine,’ the man said. ‘The Rexine finish hasn’t the appeal it had one time.’
‘Would you be able to parcel it up for me?’
‘I would, of course. Would I clip off the price tag while I’m at it?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘The latest thing is you have an expansion possibility on the bigger size of suitcase. We have one or two of that type of thing if you’d find the holdall wouldn’t be spacious enough.’
She said she thought it would be and asked if she could have extra string to tie the parcel on to her bicycle.
‘Of course you could.’
He gave her more string than she needed, saying it would come in useful. He asked her if she’d be going to the circus and she said she doubted it. He loved a circus, he said.
‘Drop in on me next time you’ll be in the shop,’ he said, ‘till I’d know was it a satisfactory container for you.’
It had still felt a dream all the time she was riding away from Shelhanagh House. It still did now, a salesman who was a stranger to her talking about a circus and bringing her suitcases instead of a holdall, giving her half a ball of string when she asked for just a little.
The Square looked different when she turned into it. It wasn’t crowded, but a lorry was delivering pavement kerbing in Magennis Street, holding everything up. She wheeled her bicycle around it, where people walking were going.
Miss Connulty must have greeted her. She must have said something because she nodded as if she had. And something was missing when so suddenly she whispered that love was a madness.