He returned the shears, and wandered among the graves before he went back to the one he’d tidied. How well they had loved! he reflected, tracing with a finger the two names on the gravestone. How well they had known how to live, how little they’d been a nuisance in other people’s lives. He hoped it would be difficult to forget Ellie Dillahan, that at least there would be that.
He had left his bicycle at the lich-gate. The chain had begun to slip and he took it to be tightened, since he intended to cycle all the way to Dublin when he left. All night it would take if he set out in the evening. ‘Never leave your bicycle on a street in Dublin,’ his father used to say, but he would do that, leaving it for anyone.
He called in at the offic e of the solicitors who had drawn up the conveyance for the sale of Shelhangh House. He requested that what money was owed to him after the numerous deductions were made should be lodged with the Castledrummond branch of the Bank of Ireland. He made arrangements at the bank regarding the availability to him of such funds as soon as he was abroad. He bought a bicycle lamp; he hadn’t possessed one before.
Ellie picked out clothes and put them ready, folded, in one side of a drawer. She bought in food: tins so that there would be something in the house, Three Counties cheese, a cut of bacon that would keep. It was only right that there should be food enough for a while, and a store of tins was always useful anyway.
The zip of the red holdall she had taken to Lahinch years ago was jammed and she couldn’t free it. She had bought it in the second-hand shop and that the zip kept sticking hadn’t mattered then, but it mattered now and she looked in Corbally’s to see what was on offer. She didn’t buy anything, knowing she could come back for one of the holdalls she was shown. She would get in a few more tins when that time came, and vegetables that would keep for a while. She would put out rashers and put out eggs so that there’d be something easy for him at first. She was not unaware that in doing so she was anticipating too much, that what had begun as fantasy was every day acquiring a little more of reality. She tried to prevent herself from allowing this, but couldn’t.
25
The waitress at Olery was talkative. She stood with the checked cloth she always carried with her for wiping the tables. You wouldn’t know where the time went to, she said. Since Easter she’d been at the tearooms and you wouldn’t credit the days going by. A few weeks and she’d be starting her winter job, back in Dublin, where she came from. The Log Cabin, Phibsborough: Leitrim Street, she’d done a winter there before.
‘If ever you’d be passing,’ she invited.
Florian nodded. He had smiled now and then while listening to what they were being told. Ellie was quiet, in a navy-blue anorak he hadn’t seen before.
‘I’ll bring your teas,’ the waitress said, and added that she was a Phibsborough girl herself. ‘I got to know you these past few months,’ she said before she went away.
Theirs was the only table occupied in the tearooms. Outside a man with an electric hedge-trimmer was clipping the maze, the fle x trailing behind him. They’d noticed as they passed it, a sign saying that the maze was closed today. They could hear the hum of the trimmer from where they were.
Two elderly women came in, continuing a conversation. Florian watched them while they sat down, and while they changed their minds and went to another table, giggling a bit.
‘But, Ellie,’ he began to say, reverting to what had been interrupted by the waitress talking about herself. ‘Ellie -’
‘I would go with you. To anywhere.’
The pleasant sound of quietened laughter came from the table where the two women, amusing one another, conversed again. Their tea, a lot of it, was spread out on a paper tablecloth and the waitress with her empty tray flat beneath one arm answered questions about what the scones and iced cakes contained, for it seemed that there were diets to consider.
Florian listened, reluctant to engage in what was being pressed upon him. Alone in the newness of somewhere, he knew now he would exploit imagination’s ragged bits and pieces, tease order out of formless nothings, begin again and then again: how could he say it? That in some small quiet town he would take a room and work, and safely from afar try not to love, for ever, Isabella? How could he say a single word of such confessing when instead he could make a decent lie of the unpitying, unforgiving truth: would it have cost too much to say, or ever to have said, ‘I love you’?
The waitress came again and, surmising something in the silence as she approached, only wrote out her bill and left it on the table.
‘We’ve had our summer, Ellie.’
He said it softly, as gently as he could, rejecting falsity, for time would contradict it, add injury to injury, and pain to pain, and shame to shame. Time’s searching wisdom would punish both of them, and punish ruthlessly.
They began to go. At the door more people were coming in and they stood back to let them pass.
‘Without you there is nothing,’ Ellie said.
The man was taking down the sign about the maze being closed, his long electric flex coiled up. He nodded to them, knowing them as the waitress did.
Clumps of rush had begun to grow and Dillahan knew that the ground in this corner was waterlogged. Broken or clogged land-drains, it would be, more likely broken. He advanced a yard or so further and was in a marsh. But that was all that was wrong with Gahagan’s field, except for the fencing and general neglect, and he had suspected trouble in this corner. He could guess where the drain ran, a single pipe he imagined: he’d be able to dig it out himself. He’d done well out of the purchase, and he knew he had.
He walked around the boundary, rabbit-burrowing everywhere, the worst year for rabbits he’d ever known. He would replace the old wooden gate with an iron one, and the trough while he was at it. There was a dead elm in the road hedge and he was sizing it up, wondering if he could fell it himself, when he heard a bicycle beyond the bend and then Ellie went by. He thought she’d see him there, but she didn’t. He called after her, wanting to show her the marshy corner, but she rode on, not hearing him.
26
No note invited her again to Shelhanagh House. He did not come when she waited at the gate-lodge ruins, where in the beginning so many times he had waited himself. The piece of iron with which he’d dug the ivy out was still on the grass where he had left it.
Ellie went away, returned later that same day. Had he gone already, the formalities completed sooner than the date? Was he there now, in Henne Strand or Finse or Malmö? Was his house already made different with other people’s furniture?
Again she left the gate-lodge ruins, again returned.
Jessie wasn’t there, waking up in the open doorway when Florian did. She wasn’t in the kitchen, and he looked for her in the garden and then walked to the lake, calling her. He was still in his pyjamas, which had become sodden where they trailed through the long grass. He searched the garden again, and then went back to the house, to the sculleries and the unused dining-room, the drawing-room, and what had once been his darkroom. In one of the empty attics, huddled into a corner, she tried to wag her tail at him.
‘Poor Jess,’ he murmured.
He warmed milk in the kitchen and took it back to her but she didn’t want it. He cradled her in his arms but she struggled slightly and kept slipping away. He put her down in the place she’d chosen and crouched beside her.
‘Poor Jess,’ he said again, and she made another effort to move her tail, to thump the floor the way she knew she should. An eye regarded him, demanded nothing, trusting features that had always been trusted. Her tongue lolled tiredly out. She tried to pant. A few minutes later she died.
He dug her grave in a corner where she used to lie when the sun was too hot, or in spring, watching for rabbits. She had been fetched from somewhere a couple of miles away, the last one in a litter. His father had walked there, returning with the small bundle in his arms. ‘Peko,’ his father had suggested. ‘Jessie,’ his mother said.
Florian carried her downstairs, through the kitchen to the garden. He sat on the grass, his arms around her, her body stiffening, still warm. Then he buried her.
Afterwards, in the house, he sensed an eeriness, as if it had been waiting for this particular departure, another in an exodus that was now almost complete. He found it hard to settle and walked to Greenane Crossroads to leave the key of the hall door with Mrs Carley a day early.
‘They’ll find the others in an empty polish tin in the kitchen,’ he said. ‘If you could tell them I’ll leave that tin in one of the cupboards.’
‘I will of course.’
‘Jessie died this morning.’
‘Ah, the dear help poor Jessie!’
‘I was going to ask you if you’d have her. For the bit of time left to her.’
‘Of course I would have. Of course.’
‘Otherwise -’
‘I know, I know.’
They were in the licensed half of the premises and Mrs Carley, on hearing the news, had at once poured Florian a glass of whiskey.
‘You couldn’t but like that dog,’ she said, replacing the bottle on the shelf. ‘Nor the Kilderrys either. We’ll miss the style of the Kilderrys hereabouts.’
Mrs Carley’s plump presence, full of goodwill and fondness for the human race, hadn’t changed in the years Florian had known her. She’d been the last of the maids at Shelhanagh before she married into the half-and-half, and it had never been a source of resentment that her wages were often delayed until another picture was sold. She came back later to preside over tea after both funerals - a huge spread supplied by herself, for a small gathering on each occasion.
Florian stayed, talking about the snow that came unexpectedly and lay on the ground for so long in the winter of nineteen forty-six, about being spared the war, about times he hardly remembered.
‘You’ll be all right, will you?’ Suddenly, almost sharply, there was concern in Mrs Carley’s easygoing tone.
‘I will. Of course I will.’
‘You’re young to go wandering all the same.’
The talk changed again, slipping back into the past, which was Mrs Carley’s favourite conversational period. She had been remembered as Nellie at Shelhanagh, but her time there had for the most part been before Florian’s and he considered the formality of her married name to be her due: he had always called her Mrs Carley.
‘They’ll pull it together again,’ he said, referring to the couple who had bought the house.
Someone came into the grocery as he was speaking and Mrs Carley held her hand out, across the counter.
‘God bless,’ she said.
Ellie waited when she had pulled the bell-chain a couple of times, then she went in. The hall door hadn’t been locked when she’d come before and it wasn’t now.
She called out, but she could tell he wasn’t there. She wheeled her bicycle into the yard. The back door, too, was open.
She walked about the house. Upstairs, she found his bed unmade and made it. An empty suitcase was open on the floor, waiting to be packed. His passport was on the mantelpiece.
In the drawing-room the rickety table was gone, but the pictures he had wanted her to have were still in the pile he’d made of them, on the floor now. The book he’d told her about finding was in the kitchen, on the table, but she didn’t open it.
She washed the dishes in the sink, then took a chair out to the yard. His dog must have gone with him, she thought, wondering where that was.
When Florian returned from Greenane he noticed that one of the two remaining chairs was no longer in the kitchen. He couldn’t remember taking it somewhere else and then he saw the washed dishes on the draining-board. From the window he saw Ellie in the yard.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said when he told her Jessie had died.
Thrown up by his digging, a scattering of clay had not yet dried on the grass. A blackbird flew away when they went there.
‘I thought your neighbours’ harvesting . . .’ Florian began to say.
Ellie shook her head. All that was over, she said.
‘I couldn’t not come. I couldn’t.’
‘You’ve been crying, Ellie.’
‘I thought you’d gone. I could see that wasn’t the way of it but even so in the quiet I thought you’d gone.’
‘Well, I haven’t. I’m here.’
And there was still all day, Florian said, and all day tomorrow. He put his arms around her. She said she couldn’t bear to think about tomorrow.
‘
Ellie . . .’
‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘Please. I’ve come to you.’
27
He was tired. He had met no one on the roads for a long time, no one to ask, no signposts because the roads were small. It wasn’t right where he was now. He felt it wasn’t and he asked in a house he came to, a dark, cement house among trees.
‘I know you,’ the child who opened the door greeted him, and he said he had walked out from Rathmoye, that his name was Orpen Wren.
‘Sometimes I’d forget it. When you get old it isn’t easy.’
‘It’s just I saw you a few times,’ the child said. ‘When we’d be Rathmoye I’d see you.’
Orpen asked for directions. He wasn’t going further, he said. He’d go back now to Rathmoye if he could discover the way. It was the third time he’d come looking for the destination he couldn’t find, but he didn’t say that.
‘There’s no one here only me,’ the child said. ‘They’re out at work.’
He had thought the child was a boy, but he saw now she was a girl wearing trousers. Her hair was cut short, but no shorter than many a boy’s. Her eyes were a light shade of blue.
‘Are you not in a car?’ she asked.
‘I never had a car.’
‘It’s a good step in to Rathmoye.’
‘I walked all Ireland once. Am I near Lisquin?’