It was the most distant part of the farm, twenty-two acres on the eastern slope and on the plateau of the unnamed hill, land separated from the rest of the farm-holding by coppices, through which the right-of-way track became an undergrowth, making it difficult for the tractor. He had been cutting it back, she noticed when she reached it, the summer shoots still scattered on the ground, overhead branches sawn. It wasn’t worth it to possess a hedge-cutter, he maintained, with only a few hedges and this half-mile of advancing growth to contend with. On the way back from the top field he would tidy it up as he went; she remembered that from previous summers, piles of logs no more than an inch or so in diameter, and the place where he burnt the brushwood. It wasn’t his obligation to keep the track clear; he did it to avoid an argument with Gahagan, who neglected it. Years ago, birch and ash had become as high as forest trees.
She tried to think about all that, to see before she came to it another blackened area, a different place from last time, his way of keeping the track clear. Badgers had been here once and he had shown her their setts. It was easier not to feel a stranger to herself here, to tell herself that she had allowed a convent-child’s make-belief to have its way with her, to be ashamed and know it was right to be ashamed. It was easier because everything around her made sense in a way she understood. The confusion of thoughts that did not feel her own made no sense at all.
She took the short-cut from the boreen along one side of the small pasture, and passed into the gloom of the wood. He would try to buy the wood, her husband said, if ever it came up for sale, and she’d always hoped it would. Among the trees there was a stillness, without birds, rarely visited by the foxes which went to ground in the banks on either side of the track that petered out when the slope of the hill began. God’s peace they would have called it at Cloonhill, Sister Clare and Sister Ambrose, and the Reverend Mother, who came out once in a while from Templeross. God was never not there for you, wherever you were, however you were. Every minute of your day, every minute of your life. There for your comfort, there to lift from you the awful burden of your sins. Only confess, only speak to God with contrition in your heart: God asked no more than that.
Unhurried in the wood, not wanting to hurry, Ellie reached out for these crowding memories. Cloonhill was gone now, closed down three years ago, the nuns gone back to the convent in Templeross. But you didn’t lose touch with a place when it wasn’t there any more; you didn’t lose touch with yourself as you were when you were part of it, with your childhood, with your simplicity then. That had been said too, still was: Sister Ambrose sent a Christmas card and always put a letter in.
Sunshine began again, flickering through the trees. The two thick banks that protected the foxes’ lairs were tightly grassed, grazed by some creature, hardly enough nourishment for more than one; the buttercups’ long tendrils had been chopped away where the banks weren’t there any more. The tractor tyres left no mark here; the gate to the hillside fields was open. She stood still for a moment, praying for the courage to confess, pleading for protection against her thoughts; and walking on, she remembered how the old priest at Templeross used to rap on the grille and tell you to speak up.
Hail, Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now
. . . No matter what, you always felt better afterwards.
From where she was the farmhouse, far down below, seemed remote, a place by itself with its yard and cluster of barns. People didn’t come much to the house except for eggs or buttermilk, and her in-laws from Shinrone once a year, on a Sunday afternoon. You couldn’t count the postman or the insurance man. You couldn’t count the artificial-insemination man, or the man to read the meter. Nothing went by on the road except the Corrigans’ tractor, or Gahagan looking for an animal that had strayed. ‘Quiet,’ they had said at Cloonhill, telling her about it. ‘A quiet place.’ She might be asked to wear a uniform, they had said, but that had never been a requirement.
It’s not like you’d think
, she wrote in her first letter to Sister Ambrose.
More easygoing than that
.
‘Ah, thanks,’ her husband said, when she was near enough to hear, and reached out for the drink when she was closer. No more than a bit of tidying up, he said; a couple of places where the wire was gone, nothing like by the river. These few weeks of the year he came up every day to turn the grass as soon as he’d cut it. Since he was there, he repaired the fences at the top.
‘Thanks,’ he said again, keeping the bottle by him when he returned to his task, tightening and stapling, weaving in lengths of wire with pliers. Having greeted her, the two sheepdogs slipped back to where they’d chosen to lie.
‘Mrs Hadden came,’ she said.
Dillahan worked for another couple of hours and on the way back looked for Gahagan. He had already made an offer for the field he was after and Gahagan had said he’d think about it. But the pick-up wasn’t in the yard and there was no response when he called out. Widowed for fifteen years, Gahagan lived alone, without help on the farm, and was often difficult to find.
Dillahan went on. He stopped to open a gate and drop the dogs off. Every evening now they drove in the cows on their own.
7
In the pantry he had converted to a darkroom Florian Kilderry developed the Rathmoye photographs and took them to the drawing-room, empty but for a trestle-table and the radiogram no one had wanted to buy when his father tried to sell it. Attached with drawing-pins to the walls were watercolour sketches that had been there for years: studies of a peregrine in flight, a picnic on a strand with people bathing, tennis in a garden. Close together, two actors conversed in an empty theatre. The leaves of a tulip tree half obscured the blue façade of a house; a girl gathered washing from a clothes line. At a street corner the three-card trick was played on an opened-out umbrella.
The watercolours were neither as fresh nor as bright as once they’d been. Their paper had curled, was marked with the ravages of flies, affected by sunburn and the rust of the drawing-pins. But even so their faded dazzle belittled the rows of photographs now laid out on the trestle-table. That the camera had failed to convey movingly the bleakness of another disaster was readily confirmed; and with a feeling almost of relief Florian added these photographs to the pile he’d made of all the others.
On his way with them to his garden bonfire he was interrupted by the doorbell and knew who it was. Books were stacked against a wall in the hall, ready for the dealer who had come when he’d said he would. A stranger to Florian, he was a restless man in a brown striped suit, with a narrow fringe of black moustache and a hat he didn’t take off. He made a swift, cursory examination, repeatedly shaking his head. ‘
The Razor’s Edge
,’ was his only comment. ‘Not many’d read that today.’
‘I would myself,’ Florian mildly protested.
He couldn’t have burnt the books; he couldn’t have so casually destroyed the pages on which he had first encountered Miss Havisham and Mr Verloc, and Gabriel Conroy and Edward Ashburnham and Heathcliff, where first he’d glimpsed Netherfield Park and Barchester.
‘I’m a sentimental reader,’ he admitted to his visitor.
‘A general disposal, would it be?’
‘It would. I’ll help you with them to your car.’
He had kept a few books back to read again while the house was being sold, which he assumed would take all summer.
‘Ugly business, emptying a place,’ the man remarked.
‘Yes, it is.’
A modest payment was made and, alone again, Florian put a record on the radiogram. The needle slithered, a dance tune lost and then returning, a woman’s husky voice. He turned the volume up and opened one of the drawing-room windows, picked up
The Beautiful and the Damned
from the trestle-table. Jessie padded behind him to the garden.
‘Falling in love again,’ the woman sang there too, and Florian lay on a patch of grass, his dog stretched out beside him. A tangle of wild sweet pea grew through berberis and fuchsia; deep scarlet peonies poked out of undergrowth. He lit a cigarette, and while the slurp of romance continued he wondered if Scandinavia might be the place of his exile.
The thought was not a new one. He had imagined Scandinavia before, uncluttered, orderly, the architecture of Sweden, Norwegian landscape, Finland in winter. He had seen himself - now saw himself again - in an out-of-the-way town, its houses clustered around a tidy square, a church’s wooden spire. He had a room there, in its gaunt old hotel.
The music ceased, the whine of the needle on the empty centre of the record so faint it was hardly anything. Still dwelling on his exile, Florian finished his cigarette and stubbed it out on the grass. The sun was slipping away, the evening light becoming dusky. Jessie clambered to her feet when he did, went back with him to the drawing-room, where he lifted the needle off. In the kitchen he put sausages on to fry.
He had spoken to the girl in Rathmoye because, seeing her again, he had wanted to. When she’d led him to the shelf he was looking for her voice was soft and shy, unhurried, of the country. He had noticed first her grey-blue eyes, and while they talked had found himself liking, more and more, her unaffected features.
He carried his food, and Jessie’s, back to the garden when the sausages were ready. The air was scented now, as often it was at this time. Not yet silent, the birds were quieter than they had been. Sometimes in the garden on a summer’s evening he fell asleep and woke to the dampness of gathering dew. But tonight he knew he wouldn’t.
She put on a light coat and a quaintly piquant Napoleon-hat of Alice-blue
, he read in bed . . .
and they walked along the Avenue and into the Zoo, where they properly admired the grandeur of the elephant and the collar-height of the giraffe, but did not visit the monkey-house because Gloria said that monkeys smelt so bad
.
Hours later Florian dreamed of the Zoo, and the elephant’s grandeur, and Gloria’s hat. But Gloria was not Gloria, she was his Italian cousin, Isabella, and then she was the girl in Rathmoye. ‘Lovely as an orchid,’ his father said the first time Isabella came to Shelhanagh, but when he said it in the dream he meant the girl.
There were other dreams, but they faded into the darkness, passing outside memory, and when Florian woke, just after dawn, it was his father’s voice that still remained, saying he meant the girl. And Florian’s mother - without insistence, which was particularly her way - said the bird that came in the mornings to the lake was a squacco heron. And somewhere there was Schubert on the piano.
Florian tried to sleep again, to make that dream go on, which often as a child he had tried to do but never with success. His dog was sleeping, undisturbed, on the landing beyond his bedroom door. The details of dreaming blurred, then were gone.
Only Isabella had ever played the piano, which a week ago had been taken from the house. She had been sent from Genoa every summer to perfect her English, although at Shelhanagh her English was considered to be as good as anyone’s. She always came in July, a child at first, younger than Florian but not by much. He was suspicious, resentful of an invasion of his solitude; but growing closer as they grew up, he and Isabella discovered in each other a companionship neither had known before. His cousin was assured, and knowledgeable in ways he wasn’t, and teased a little. ‘
Nella sua mente c’é una gran confusione
,’ she would say as if to herself, and he would shrug when, in translation, he heard himself called muddled. He knew he was, and Isabella only did because by then he told her everything. She lifted loneliness from him, making of the secrets he once had guarded from her curiosity secrets that be l onged to both of them. ‘
Meraviglioso!
’ she cried when he confided that on darkening winter evenings he had stolen out of his one-time boarding-school to follow people on the streets, making of each shadowy presence what he wished it to be. Hunched within themselves, his quarries hurried from their crimes, the pickpocket with his wallets and his purses, the bank clerk with embezzlement’s gain kept safe beneath his clothes, the simple thief, the silent burglar. Sinister at dark hall doors, they took out latchkeys and, curtains drawn, a light went on. The blackmailer wrote his letters, the shoplifter cooked his purloined supper. Saviour of desperate girls, a nurse wiped clean her instruments. A dealer packaged dreams, a killer washed his hands. ‘
Magnifico!
’ Isabella cried.
She brought a real world herself: Cesare and Enrico, Bartolomeo, Giovanni, a different snapshot pinned up each time she came. And Pietro Pallotta in evening dress, worshipped from afar, and Signor Canepaci of Credito Italiano. They broke her heart or she broke theirs; and Florian was her friend and always would be. ‘You let me be myself,’ she complimented him. Two halves of one they were, she used to say, her more precise Italian losing elegance in translation. He knew it was true: they complemented one another.
The dusk of early morning lightened. Florian slept again, and dreamed again but afterwards did not know he had. He didn’t know when it was he had first loved Isabella and often thought he probably always had. ‘We could be here,’ she used to say, speaking of Shelhanagh and of the future. But love, for Isabella, did not come into it, and there’d been other girls because of that: pretty Rose Mary Darty, who lived not far away, and the girl in the chemist’s in Castledrummond, Noeleen Fahy the station master’s daughter, Ingrid Bergman in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. There’d never been much, but what there was had always to do with Isabella - another hopeless effort to tidy her away. He had written to tell her when he was persuaded to sell the house but her spidery handwriting had never, in response, been waiting among the day’s brown envelopes on the floor of the hall.
It wasn’t again this morning. The estate agents wrote to say appointments had been made for would-be purchasers: today at half past two, at four o’clock, at five.
We are delighted with this brisk response
, the communication ended,
and are confident of an offer soon
.