Ellie left the house only to feed her hens and to retrieve the parcel from under the tarpaulins in the turf shed. She took the wrapping paper off and filled the green holdall with stones from the wall of the river-field, then watched it sinking into murky water.
It rained in the afternoon and Dillahan cut the winter’s wood. In the shed he pulled out the boughs he had stacked, trimming them, chopping off brushwood with a hatchet. He had a couple of elm trunks, dead wood, dry as a bone. There was an oak bole he’d had for years.
The belts of the circular saw had slackened; the oil in the cogs was dry. He brushed out grime and sawdust, and his file on the teeth of the saw screeched when he sharpened them. He cleaned the spark plugs he had loosened. When he tried the engine it spluttered and then fired, with wisps of smoke and petrol fumes in the air.
He kept the engine turning over while he put away the tools he had used - wire brush and spanners, the hammer he eased the motor clamp with, screwdriver, his oil can.
When the whine of the sawing began Ellie came out of the house, although he always said he could manage. She passed him each next length of wood, hardly any of them too heavy for her. All afternoon it took, the logs falling to a heap on the ground.
The skip swung a little in the air before it steadied and slowly descended to the lorry. The chains that had lifted it hung loose, and then were wound back into the crane. ‘Good luck to you!’ the driver called out before he drove away.
Florian had left himself without a book and, with nothing to do, he climbed up to the roof to look for the last time at the view it offered. He remembered being brought there the first time for the same purpose; and later, on his own, reading
Coral Island
there. Once Isabella and he had tried to sleep on the roof, but the lead which had been warm at first became cold and they had crept back into the house. And it was there, one summer after Isabella had gone back to Italy, that he fir st became addicted to the detective stories that were his mother’s addiction all her life. Day after day in a heatwave he had read
The Fashion in Shrouds
and
The Crime at Black Dudley
,
Hangman’s Holiday
,
Death and the Dancing Footman
.
From the roof the far-off mountains were unchanged, but the crowded summer fields were earthy now, empty and orderly and the same. Autumn was in the trees, bright berries of cotoneaster in the garden, busy squirrels.
He could see the road and would see her when she came, but still she didn’t and familiar guilt began, without a reason now. It faded while he waited, and on the way down through the house he went from room to room, closing the door of each behind him when he left it. At the bottom of the stairs a figure stood hesitantly in the gathering dusk. ‘I came on in,’ a man said, explaining then that he was here to read the electricity meter.
While this was being done and the electricity turned off, Florian again imagined he heard a sound outside; and listened, but it wasn’t repeated. The bottle of champagne was still on the hall flo or, ignored or forgotten by the front door. ‘Would you like to have this?’ he offered the meter-reader; and as if such generosity demanded that he should be sociable, the man stayed longer than he might have, relating anecdotes connected with houses changing hands. Some people took the lightbulbs when they went, he said.
‘You made it easier for me,’ Dillahan said, saying it suddenly when neither of them had spoken for a while. She had made it less frightening; for you could be frightened, he said, and not know why, only that fear had come from somewhere. You’d see that in an animal.
When the clocks changed next month he’d drive her over to Templeross, he said, and she wondered if, even after she’d been to confession, the nuns would know. Everything was calmer for a penitent, they used to say at Cloonhill, and she accepted that it was. But still she wondered if the nuns would see her as she used to be, or as she had become.
Twilight darkened in Shelhanagh House. Florian threw water on to the glow of his garden fir e and stumbled about the empty kitchen. The tin he’d spoken about to Mrs Carley was already on a shelf in one of the wall-cupboards. He pulled over the shutters in the downstairs rooms. When he had locked the hall door from the outside he dropped the key through the letter-box and heard it fall on the flagstones. By the light of his bicycle lamp he strapped his suitcase on to the carrier.
That night Ellie didn’t sleep. She hadn’t slept the night before either. Not putting on the light she had got up and moved her clothes from the chair by the window and had sat there, looking out into the dark. She did so again, the window open a little as both of them liked it, the air chilly.
It was earlier now than when she’d sat there the night before, the last streaks of filmy moonlight slipping away from the yard below. It was a natural thing for a man who had accidentally killed his wife and child to dread suspicion. It was a natural thing that a tormented mind should be confused. In the single day that had passed Ellie had many times told herself all that; and told herself that if Miss Connulty asked her she would say the man she had been friendly with for a while had left Ireland. She would not deny that she’d been friendly with him. She would say his name and where he had lived.
At the window she began to feel cold, but still sat there. Tired as so often he was, her husband breathed heavily and was not restless. Everything had been easier for him since she came to his house, he had said this evening, everything better for him since she’d married him. There weren’t many who would understand, he’d said.
Somewhere, far off, there was a light. She watched it moving, and knew. She put her clothes on and went downstairs quickly because the dogs would bark. She lifted a coat from one of the hooks on the back door. In the yard both dogs sleepily emerged to greet her.
She could hear nothing on the road. ‘Come back,’ she whispered, and the dog who’d been inclined to investigate obeyed. The other one hadn’t moved from beside her.
The light was there again, coming out of the dip in the road, still far away. Sometimes one of the Corrigan boys went by on a bicycle at night, not often, and they never bothered with lights.
34
They walked away from the house, he pushing his bicycle, the sheepdogs with them.
‘I thought he was dead,’ she said.
She told him. There was a gun kept for rabbits and the pigeons. There had been silence everywhere, the tractor parked like that, the dogs morose. A farmer from near Donaghmore had taken his life, another farmer in east Kerry.
‘All day today I tried to think of nothing,’ she said.
They had not embraced. They did not now. He was a shadow beside her, little more than that.
‘Why have you come?’ she asked.
She felt him staring at her, trying to see her in the dark. When she asked again why he had come, he said because he wanted her to know that he had waited.
‘I’ll never forget being loved by you,’ he said. ‘Don’t hate me, Ellie. Please don’t hate me.’
He reached for her hand, but it wasn’t there.
He would have destroyed her, he said. Not ever meaning to, he would have. He knew it, in the way of knowing something that couldn’t be explained.
‘People run away to be alone,’ he said. Some people had to be alone.
‘It isn’t much of a goodbye,’ he said.
He let a silence gather and so did she. There was a rustle in the undergrowth that might have been a fox’s quick retreat. They paid it no attention.
‘He saved you. That old man,’ he said.
‘It’s cold.’
She turned away and he walked with her, still wheeling his bicycle. Any moment a light would go on in the house, she thought. Any moment her name would be called out, the back door thrown open. That mattered more than understanding. It mattered more than anything, was all that mattered.
She knew that this was so, yet still would have gone with him. She whispered, gathering the dogs to her.
‘I couldn’t hate you,’ she said.
She didn’t speak again, and nor did he.
He cycled slowly, the air raw on his face. The signpost to Crilly was lit up by his lamp as he went by. The road straightened, became a hill to freewheel down, and then the twists and turns began again. How useless being sorry was, and yet that, most of all, was what he felt, a soreness in him somewhere. Her grey-blue eyes had been no more than smudges in the dark.
She listened to the swish of wheels in motion before the sound dimmed away to nothing, before the flicker of light became faint and then was gone. The sheepdogs ambled into their shed. She crossed the yard, her footsteps light on the concrete surface. She lifted the latch of the door she had left unlocked, and closed the door behind her and softly turned the key.
In the kitchen she was guided by the votive gleam above the dresser. She took her shoes off and mounted the narrow stairs, each tread faintly creaking. The bedroom door was open, as she had left it too. She folded her clothes and laid them on the chair between the windows.
35
Orpen Wren slept. In Hurley Lane Bernadette O’Keeffe turned off a romantic drama and ended her day with a last long, slow nightcap. It was her happy time, when what she had was enough and enough was what she asked for. The cheques passed across the table, the letters signed, his putting to her this matter or that, his asking her what she thought, his acquiescent nod. Emotion, stalled, was not a nuisance in the night. The bright little screen, and night-caps, made a party of the room, its swaying furniture and uncertain floor, its garbled voices relieving Bernadette of a turmoil they themselves absorbed. That a beloved mother’s death had failed to loosen a lifetime’s iron bond did not in the cheerful night seem more than could be borne: so drowsy peace told Bernadette. And tomorrow - for it was not a dreaded Saturday or Sunday - there would be once more the papers fondly typed and carried to the quiet back bar, once more his commendation, once more their chat.
The Rathmoye street-lights had not yet been extinguished, but the streets themselves had emptied. The last of the public house stragglers had gone, the last of the lovers had parted. Two laundry women hurried away from their night work in Mill Street. Cats stalked the coal yards. Silently in the Square a mongrel dog ransacked a dustbin. Drawing back the curtains of the big front room in readiness for the morning, Miss Connulty watched. The dog - yellowish, its tail cropped close - would be there again, since every night he came. But still she paused to watch, even though the house was full, which meant an early morning. A single shaft of light caught the bony features of Thomas John Kinsella, his gaping shirt, sleeves rolled up. That, too, at this late hour was never different.
Miss Connulty had begun to turn away from the window, about to go upstairs, when a movement that was not the dog’s caught her eye. It alerted the dog too, who at once crept off, cringing, into the shadows. A man on a bicycle rode into the Square.
He was wearing the hat, there was a suitcase tied on to the bicycle’s carrier. He didn’t pause or dismount but went steadily on. Miss Connulty watched him turning out on to the Dublin road, and watched the dog returning to the dustbin. Soon after that the street-lights went out.
So all of it was over for Ellie Dillahan, Miss Connulty said to herself, all of it done with. Quietly ascending the stairs to the bathroom and her bedroom so as not to disturb the sleeping men around her, she remembered the closed sign pulled down over the glass of the chemist’s door, and her father pouring the tea in the café of the Adelphi cinema. ‘All done,’ her father said. ‘All over, girl.’
She washed, quietly running the tap. In her bedroom she undressed and Ellie Dillahan, coming again with her Friday eggs, confided in her; and Miss Connulty said if there’s a child don’t let anyone take the child away from you. Born as Dillahan’s own since he believed it was, the child would make a family man of him again, and make the farmhouse different. And her own friendship with Ellie Dillahan would not be strained, now that the interloper who had ill-used her had at last shaken the dust of Rathmoye off his heels. The friendship would be closer, both of them knowing it could be, neither of them saying what should not be said and never would be.
Miss Connulty turned her bedside light off and a few moments later closed her eyes, though not in sleep. An infant child crawled towards her on the carpet of the big front room, and bricks were kept, and dolls or soldiers in the corner cupboard, rag books, a counting frame. The secret heart of Ellie Dillahan’s life possessed the big front room, and later there were games of Snap and Ludo, and bagatelle, which as a child herself Miss Connulty had enjoyed. None of it was impossible.
36
On the streets of darkened towns, on roads that are often his alone, bright sudden moments pierce the dark: reality at second hand spreads in an emptiness.
Among the scattered tools, the nun stares up at nothing from where she lies. Girls close her eyes, although they are afraid. They brush away the sawdust from her habit and her shoes. They go to tell what they have found, then wash white-painted windows, gather wood. They sing in their heads a song they mustn’t sing, and wonder who it is who doesn’t want them. The windscreen wipers slush through rain, the man comes from the house and carries in the box. There is the place in the yard. There are the haunted days of June. She claims no virtue for her compassion, she does not blame a careless lover. She grows her vegetables, collects her eggs.
Horses canter in the breaking dawn, the open landscape fills, Old Kilmainham, Islandbridge. Seagulls rest on river walls, hops enrich the air.
The sea is calm, the engines’ chug the only sound, the chill of autumn morning lingering. You know what you’ll remember, he reflects, you know what fragile memory’ll hold. Again the key falls on the flagstones. Again there are her footsteps on the road.