A restraining hand was on the handlebars of Ellie’s bicycle, and Miss Connulty smiled a little, as if to soften what might have sounded abrupt. The lorry slowly began to move. Standing aside for two other women who were going by, Miss Connulty said nothing else.
31
Dillahan tried to make sense of it. He sat on the tractor in the yard, and after a time the sheepdogs slouched away as if influ enced by his brooding. He went through it all again, every word that had been spoken, even by himself, his interruptions, his efforts to lead the conversation into areas that might be fertile enough to nurture reality in the morass of confusion. He went back, in his thoughts, to other times, searching them in turn for a connection with what had been said, threading fact and fantasy and finding in their conjunction the blemished truth. For everything was blemished in the talk there’d been, and at its best the truth itself might also be.
He climbed down from the tractor seat and slowly walked across the yard to the back door of the farmhouse, his gait affected by the disquiet he took with him. The sheepdogs stayed where they were, their noses stretched forward, resting on the backs of their paws.
32
It was late afternoon, just before five, when Ellie arrived back at the farmhouse with what she’d bought - tins of corned beef as well as the green holdall. As she rode into the yard she saw the tractor there and was surprised. It was parked untidily, crookedly, in the way other vehicles that came into the yard sometimes were. She remembered he’d said he intended to plough the sixteen acres where he’d had a crop of rape this year, and he had a couple of jobs to do if he’d be able to get down to them. He said he’d come in for something to eat between twelve and half past, and she had left out cold meat. He couldn’t, surely, be still here, she thought, and he couldn’t have finished the sixteen acres already. She wondered if the tractor was giving trouble. When the dogs didn’t come to her she knew something was wrong.
The house was silent, as if he wasn’t there. But she knew he was, because the dogs were in the yard. She didn’t put her bicycle away. She undid the knots of the string that held the parcel in place on her carrier, grappling with them where she’d made them too tight, forcing the parcel loose when she couldn’t undo the last one. She pushed open the door of one of the sheds. There was a pile of tarpaulins in a corner. As best she could, she concealed the holdall among them.
She left her bicycle where it was, slipping from the handlebars the carrier bags that contained the tins she’d bought. She didn’t want to go into the house. For a moment she saw the sunlight dappling the boards of the floor, her dress where she had thrown it down, one of her shoes on its side; she heard her own voice asking if the men who’d come had gone. As soon as he saw her he would know, somehow he would. About today, about every day.
She lifted the back-door latch, but something obstructed the door, preventing it from opening as freely as it always did. He would be lying there, the gun he went after the pigeons with when they raided his crops beside him. There’d been a farmer took his life near Donaghmore and they’d prayed for him at Cloonhill. A man who couldn’t right himself after his wife died, Sister Mary Frances had said, a man she’d known. And another farmer not long ago, gone bankrupt in east Kerry, found hanged. But the obstruction at the door was only a wellington boot fallen over.
‘What is it?’ she asked, not wanting to be told.
He was sitting in front of the stove. He had pulled the dampers out although it wasn’t cold today. The plate of meat was where she’d left it on the table, a mesh dome keeping the flies off, the knife and fork where she’d laid them, the bread still wrapped in a tea-towel, the butter covered, the teapot ready for his tea when he made it.
‘What is it?’ she asked again.
He didn’t turn round. He was hunched, his hands pressed together.
‘What’s troubling the dogs?’ she asked.
He turned his head then. He’d upset the dogs, he said. Being upset himself, he had brought that on. They’d been confused: he’d go and settle them.
‘Why are you upset?’
He didn’t answer, as if he hadn’t heard, or as if it was too much to say. He went to the yard and she heard the tractor started. The kitchen door was open, but she didn’t have to look. He was a tidy man even in distress: the tractor was being driven to where it should be. She heard his voice with the dogs, then he came in again.
‘He was talking to me on the road,’ he said. ‘Old Orpen Wren.’
A coldness came in her stomach, her arms felt weak. Orpen Wren wasn’t sane, you couldn’t understand what he was on about. Nobody gave credence to his wild assertions, to his talk about people who were dead; nobody took Orpen Wren seriously. But the chilly feeling was still there, and she willed it in her thoughts that Miss Connulty would not be mentioned also, or someone else whom gossip had reached, someone she didn’t know about. Frantically in a hurry, her snatched words tumbled about, her silent plea made formless, no more than an expression of fear.
‘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.