‘I’d better see to the fowls.’
One of the dogs had barked and there’d been a fox about. But when she went out everything was quiet. It was never dark at this time of year: the green of the tractor hadn’t faded, or the dusty brown of the Vauxhall. The sheepdogs went with her when she made her rounds, and stood beside her, obedient in the gateway when she listened there. His Italian mother would have smoked cigarettes, a tall, still beautiful woman: out of nowhere that image came. In the crab-apple orchard she locked her hens in.
‘Sit down and rest yourself,’ her husband said. ‘Sit down and listen to this.’
‘I’ve the accounts to look at, though.’
She went to the other room. The receipts were there and the record she kept in a grey exercise book of cheques that had been paid in at the bank. She turned the light on and took the exercise book from the drawer of the table in the window.
The accounts were up to date: she’d known they would be. But in the same drawer were the Christmas cards she had received from Sister Ambrose, who had been, more than the other nuns, her friend at Cloonhill.
We are delighted
, a note recorded in one,
that you are to marry and we give thanks for your contentment on the farm
. In another there was news of a journey to Lough Derg, and of the Fermoy Retreat. ‘We are here for you if ever you feel called to join us,’ she remembered Sister Ambrose saying on the evening of the day that had been chosen as her birthday. ‘And never forget that we are here for you in other ways too.’ She was eleven then.
She returned the cards to their envelopes. A few had come with a sacred text, a shiny slip that illustrated a moment from Christ’s Passion.
Our sins are His wounds
, hard black italic type declared, beneath the bleeding figure.
His agony was for us
.
She heard her husband’s footsteps on the stairs, his movements in the room above. She tore a single sheet from the exercise book and took from the drawer the ballpoint pen she always kept there. She wrote to Sister Ambrose, saying she was sorry she hadn’t written at Christmas, saying she was all right. But even so she asked for Sister Ambrose’s prayers. She wrote what she had written in her thoughts and the words did not make sense. Looking at them, she knew they would not unless she revealed why they’d been written, unless she confessed that the nuns, who knew her so well, would not know her now, made different by lies of silence and of deception, and being ashamed. On another page, when she tried again there were no other words, no other way of conveying, while telling too little, the bleakness she felt. And even too little would bewilder and alarm.
In the silence of the room she sat for another hour, and then for longer. She did not weep, although she wanted to. The sympathy she sought was there, she knew it was; yet she resisted it.
She unbolted the back door and went outside again. She walked on the road, the night air refreshing, a relief. She walked to tire herself, the sheepdogs going with her. In the kitchen when she returned she opened the stove and dropped the pages she had torn from the exercise book on to black, unglowing anthracite. She pulled the dampers out and listened to the flame beginning.
13
Miss Connulty said he was bad news. Taking in the eggs she said it, not looking at Ellie. People were wondering who he was, she said, fiddling with the money she was counting from her purse. Miss Connulty knew.
More change was added to the coins, the purse zipped up.
‘You didn’t mind me mentioning that?’ Miss Connulty said.
‘I only know him on account of he asked me the way that day.’
He wasn’t bad news. Riding away, Ellie told herself she should have said he wasn’t. How could you call a person bad news when you didn’t know who he was or anything about him? She should have said that too. ‘His name is Florian Kilderry,’ she should have said. ‘He’s half Italian.’
She went back to the farm the long way, by the old Kilaney road. She had ignored it when he’d shown an interest in the Lisquin gate-lodge. She hadn’t said she liked the quietness there, that she went there more often than she had implied. She wondered if he had sensed that suppression and been hurt by it, and again been hurt when she’d been abrupt, not saying goodbye. Would it have mattered much going to Meagher’s Café with him? Hearing him called bad news made a difference. And how could nuns understand? How could they? And was there harm in talking to a person when nothing wrong was said?
On the old Kilaney road, used by no one these days, she thought she smelt the cigarettes he smoked. She stopped for a moment, but she was wrong. Going slowly, she passed the high iron gates of the Lisquin avenue, and glanced in at the tumbled-down gate-lodge. No one was there.
‘I’m going up the hills,’ Dillahan said. ‘There’s a couple out.’
Ellie didn’t answer, as if she hadn’t heard.
‘You’d tell me, Ellie? You’d tell me if you were troubled?’
She said she was all right. ‘Really,’ she said.
He drove out of the yard. Gahagan had told him about the sheep that were wandering. Gahagan went up there sometimes although he didn’t have any stock there. He’d seen two blue-marked sheep, he’d said, not that he was sure of it, his eyes the way they were. But if he didn’t go and look for himself, Dillahan predicted, it would turn out that the two were his.
He went a different way from usual, turning off to the right at the Corrigans’ black shed. He skirted Doole, and then ascended, the Vauxhall feeling as if it was only just able for the incline. If his sheep were out they would have broken through on this side of Crilly.
The dogs dozed beside him. The air his wound-down window allowed in was fresh and almost chilly. There was something, he thought. Maybe no more than a mood, but a mood wasn’t like her, never had been. Breakfast again, she’d hardly touched her food.
He drew the car in to where there was a gap and walked on, over the boglands. He saw the two white specks and could tell from where they were that they were his. He sent the dogs and went himself to find the break in the wire, his boots sinking into the water surface. She was often shy about something that was a woman’s thing and he never pressed her because it wasn’t his way to. She wasn’t evasive; all the years she’d been in the house she never had been. She hadn’t known about a farm when she’d first come and she hadn’t pretended she did. He hadn’t expected her to know, but she was more skilled than he was now at what she’d become good at - the hens, the dairy, the vegetables she grew, keeping their accounts in order. He had never been inclined to compare her with his first wife; he’d never wanted to think of them together, and never had. But he knew he had been fortunate twice.
He passed near his turf bog and realized there wasn’t much of it left. But there was turf that could be cut closer to the boundary of his land, a long strip, wide enough to make working it worthwhile. Over marshy ground, the carting would be difficult, but it could be managed at a dry time. Early next summer he’d decide about that.
Larks flew out of the heather, occasionally a snipe. He found the place where the wire had snapped, and whistled up the dogs. They didn’t hurry, knowing not to. He’d thought it was the disappointment of the hens not laying as well as usual. He had asked her if it was that and had watched her forcing herself to smile. She was all right, she’d said then too. It would be nothing, he told himself. She spread the material out on the kitchen table, the paper pattern still pinned to it. She took the pins out and returned the flimsy paper to its folds. The dress was half made, small scarlet rosebuds on a pale ground. She wouldn’t finish it today, but perhaps tomorrow.
The sewing-machine had been in the house for as long as her husband could remember, his mother’s but passed on to her too. It would have been an extravagance to abandon it for a new one, although Ellie had been offered that. The kitchen table, sturdy on its legs, its surface spacious, was where it had always been used.
She changed the spool and rethreaded the needle, then turned the handle to begin the stitching of her seam. She had known how to sew on a machine when she’d come to the farmhouse; she made her own clothes, could turn a shirt collar and put in a pocket. But she didn’t need this dress. She had bought the material and the pattern in Cor-bally’s hardly noticing if she liked either.
Demanding all her attention, which was what she had hoped for, the sewing-machine clattered on. Determinedly, she pushed her seam through, keeping it straight. The afternoon was the worst time. In the morning there were the hens, and Disc of the Day on the radio, a lot of talking between the records. But when it was an afternoon on which Mrs Hadden didn’t come, or one when shy little Tomasina Flynn didn’t come for the few duck eggs there were, she needed something. She had changed her day for going in to Rathmoye to Tuesday because he knew about Fridays. Tuesday afternoons weren’t as convenient as Friday mornings, not for her or for the presbytery, yet she had done it, knowing she should.
She snapped the thread when the seam was finished and reached out for another sleeve. But she didn’t feel like continuing now and she sat for a while longer, her sewing-machine silent, her half-made, unwanted dress spread as she had left it. She heard the tractor in the yard and dreaded the long evening.
14
Miss Connulty’s overnight lodgers one by one awoke in answer to the clamour of the alarm clock supplied in every room. Each stilled the peremptory summons, stretched and yawned, emerged from the bedclothes, drew back the curtains, then went to check the occupancy or otherwise of the lavatory and the bathroom. Twenty minutes later three men in dark business suits, with collar and tie, and shoes that Miss Connulty had the night before picked up from outside their bedroom doors and polished, descended the stairs to the dining-room. A fourth man, Mr Buckley, was still dressing. Gohery, the metalwork instructor, back now from his summer holidays, was already finishing at the breakfast table. Joseph Paul had not yet returned from early Mass.
‘Your eggs?’ Miss Connulty called through the hatch she opened between the kitchen and the dining-room when she heard the murmur of voices. ‘How’ll I do your eggs?’
The men ordered them fried, as usually the preference was. Those of the Horton’s traveller were to be turned, which was usual also. All three said yes to Miss Connulty’s enquiries as to tomato and sausage. That bacon would be on each plate went without saying. The Wolsey (Ireland) man enquired as to the availability of black pudding this morning and Miss Connulty said there was plenty.
There was a brief delay, during which Gohery rose from the table. He nodded without speaking to the three men, as he had when each had entered the dining-room. On the stairs he nodded at Mr Buckley, who was making his slow way to the hall, where every morning of his overnight sojourns at Number 4 he had, for close on thirty-five years, tapped the weather-glass that hung beside the hallstand. In the kitchen Miss Connulty heard him greeted and introduced to the man who was a newcomer in the house. She did not need to open the hatch: these days, Mr Buckley took only Weetabix.
The Horton’s man enquired as to Mr Buckley’s health and was informed that it was first class, which the Horton’s man knew was not true: Mr Buckley was a heavily built, drooping man of yellowish pallor and comatose features, whose pretence, to others and to himself, was that he suffered no ailments and was as sprightly as ever he’d been. But it was said in the shops of the towns he visited that he often, these days, made an error in his orders, that alterations were effected by kindly shopkeepers who knew him well and protected him that he might safely reach the retirement he secretly craved, and the pension that went with it. Stationery and fancy goods were his line; in his decline, as in his heyday, he was fondly respected.
The doors of the hatch opened again and a moment later Miss Connulty entered the dining-room with a rack of toast, and buttered bread. She carried from the hatch the plates she had placed there, enquiring from the man who hadn’t stayed before if his fried bread was brown enough. He said it was.
‘In Rathmoye I wouldn’t stop anywhere only here,’ the Horton’s man informed him when she’d gone. ‘Wouldn’t you agree, Mr Buckley?’
Mr Buckley did so and the Wolsey (Ireland) man said you could travel further and fare worse. Tales were exchanged about unfortunate experiences in this respect - damp beds, food that wasn’t fit for consumption, problems with drains. He’d never known the bathroom at Number 4 in need of a bar of soap, the Horton’s man declared. And heads were nodded when he added that he’d never known the WC without an extra paper roll.
Each man poured tea for himself, passing a metal teapot around the table. Between mouthfuls the Horton’s man tapped a cigarette out of a Gold Flake packet and laid it, with matches, on the tablecloth, ready to ignite when his food was consumed. Shirts mainly he took orders for, he confided to the new man; but, in a general way, men’s apparel of every description formed his remit. The new man said he was in cement.
In the kitchen the daily girl arrived, no later than she should be. The front door banged, which Miss Connulty knew would be Joseph Paul returning from Mass. He hadn’t mentioned the stained-glass windows recently, but she knew that only minutes ago he would have glanced up at the grimy panes which were to be replaced and would have again taken pleasure in Father Millane’s proposal of an Annuciation. In time a brass plaque beside it would request prayers for the soul of Eileen Brigid Connulty.
Miss Connulty didn’t care any more. They could do what they liked: delicious death had been a richer compensation than she had ever dreamed of. She was in charge, and today she wore the pearls.
‘See to the master,’ she instructed the daily girl, and went to put her feet up, having been on them since six. She sat in the big front room, the eye of Daniel O’Connell upon her, and she wondered for a moment what he’d been like and came to no conclusion. She dropped off to sleep, although she had not intended to, and was woken by the men returning to their bedrooms, the thump of their footsteps on the stairs, the Horton’s man saying you’d feel the better for your breakfast.