After breakfast he brought to life the embers of his bonfire, throwing on to them more photographs he had found, his plaintive school reports, his father’s diaries, and magazines and packs of cards. He watched the photographs becoming wisps of black that floated off to decorate eleagnus and mahonia. He scattered over a blaze of chairs with broken backs or missing legs the postcards of Italian art his mother had collected - five shoeboxes of masterworks in black and white, each with a greeting in a different hand, all of them stamped and franked, job lots found somewhere. When a few fell at his feet he threw them on to the fire and later discovered one where it had dropped, unnoticed, on the grass a few yards away. A monk prayed to a saint who had been stabbed, the dagger that pierced her throat still there. The wound was bloodless, the sacred features unaffected by the ordeal. ‘Santa Lucia,’ he read, and told himself it was imagination that he was reminded of the girl he had talked to in Rathmoye.
8
Days passed, and then a week. A warm June gave way to July heat. Already the land was parched, grass lost its green. Dust gathered in Rathmoye’s streets, litter lay in gutters unwashed by rain.
On a Wednesday morning when the new month was not far advanced, Joseph Paul Connulty walked through the town with a bunch of dahlias and asparagus fern. Since his mother’s death he had done so once a week, his intention being that what he placed on her grave should never be seen to droop and wither. Asparagus fern was consistently the green accompaniment, the choice of flowers depending on what was available in Cadogan’s Vegetables and Floral.
In the cemetery he changed the water in the glass container and dropped the blooms he had taken from it into a wire waste-bin supplied for this purpose. They would have lasted a few more days, even a week, but since he did not consider it fanciful that his mother each time witnessed the purchase made in Cadogan’s and the walk through the town, the changing of the water, the fresh flowers arranged, he did not take chances. It could have been that he had once, when in the cemetery, heard his mother utter - in a murmur no louder than a whisper - an expression of gratitude. But, practical man of business that he was, publican and coal merchant, who paid his debts and charged what he must, he suspected that that had been some errant sound, transformed in his thoughts to seem, momentarily, what it was not: the certainty of his faith and its related beliefs did not ever exceed his own laid-down limits of the likely.
He left the cemetery and returned to his back bar, which was the centre of his business life. In half an hour Bernadette O’Keeffe from the coal office would arrive with cheques for him to sign, with copies of the invoices that had been dispatched for the second or third time and had still failed to elicit a response, with anything of importance that might have come in the morning post. All bills relating to the running of the bed-and-breakfast accommodation at Number 4 The Square were recorded in the office books and settled as soon as they came in. Once a week, on Friday evenings, Joseph Paul removed a sum from the till, its total agreed upon with his mother in her lifetime and paid now to his sister. The notes and loose change were laid out by him on the kitchen windowsill as they always had been.
A fly crept about on the ceiling and idly he watched it while he waited. He had never killed a fly; it wasn’t something he could do. He poured himself a glass of 7-Up, which he found invigorating at this time of day. He continued his observation of the rambling fly as it went about whatever task it had set itself.
That morning Bernadette O’Keeffe was delayed. She was a few minutes late leaving the coal yards and was then importuned by Orpen Wren, who was waiting for her in the doorway of Kissane the jeweller’s.
‘What coal are we talking about, Mr Wren?’ she enquired, knowing they were talking about nothing.
‘It’s the same order as ever it is. Would the winter stocks be in the yards yet?’
‘It’s only July, Mr Wren.’
‘September they light the fires.’
‘Who’s that, then?’ Bernadette asked, knowing the answer to this question too.
‘George Anthony’s come back. Lisquin’s opened up like you’d remember it. Well, you’d know George Anthony’s back.’
‘I’m afraid I didn’t.’
‘Put them down for coal.’
‘I will of course, Mr Wren.’
Stylish, blonded, in her two-piece of flecked cherry-red, Bernadette passed on. She was forty-six, younger than her employer, younger than his sister, who was imperious when they met, which was too often for Bernadette. The imperiousness was the mother’s, although the daughter did not know it or she would have changed her ways. Her employer’s sister was a sinister woman in Bernadette’s opinion.
She passed into the public house and through the long street bar, no one at present in charge of it. There were drinkers at the far end, two men who were always there in the mornings, who never greeted her when she came in, or spoke to her when she passed close to them, whose names she did not know or wish to know.
‘Good morning,’ she said in the back bar, and her employer rose from the small round table where they did their business and she sat down at it. He poured her a 7-Up.
They were alone. There never was anyone else in the back bar when she came, or even later in the day; and in the evenings the street bar was still preferred. At that time the priests frequented the back bar, and Mr McGovern because it was convenient, and Fogarty from the courthouse to play cards if there was anyone to play with.
Bernadette spread out the papers she had brought, the cheques to be signed kept to one side. For a long time this had been a morning routine, the 7-Up, and watching while the top of her employer’s ballpoint was removed, his signature inscribed. This declaration of his identity was as meticulous and tidy as he was himself, a man who resp ected restraint, who never raised his voice or displayed anger, who lost nothing because he would not let himself lose things. Bernadette loved him.
‘We’re low on Hennessy,’ he said.
‘I’ll give them a ring.’
She didn’t have to make a note; she never forgot. He said Father Millane had been in last evening. An awkwardness had arisen in connection with the garden of remembrance: an old right-of-way over the piece of ground that had been earmarked was going to make its purchase troublesome.
‘I think I heard,’ she said.
‘Father Millane is set on stained glass instead. Seemingly, he has always had an Annunciation in mind for the three empty windows in the north wall.’
‘How’s Miss Connulty on that, though?’
‘She isn’t keen.’
‘An Annunciation would be lovely.’
‘There’s a place in the cemetery fence where Magourtey’s bullocks get in. My sister is saying we could improve the fence.’
‘In memory of your mother, is it?’
‘My sister has a wild way of talking.’
‘Still and all, a fence isn’t much. A wire fence, is it? I don’t think I ever noticed it.’
‘Wire on concrete posts.’
‘Your mother was practical in her ways. Miss Connulty is thinking of that.’
‘Oh, you can’t have bullocks hammering away at people’s graves, no doubt about that at all. There’ll be a job done on the fence as a matter of course. But seemingly the bishop would like to see the north wall given significance, too. So Father Millane’ll be speaking to her.’
Bernadette agreed that a few words from the priest would be the way to go about it.
‘The latest thing she’s got into her head,’ Joseph Paul said, ‘is that a fellow was taking photographs at the funeral.’
Bernadette, who had observed the taking of the photographs and had heard this spoken about with disapproval afterwards, who had been informed that the same man had been to the coal yards in her absence, that he’d been given the keys of the Coliseum in order to take further photographs, nevertheless agreed that Miss Connulty imagined things. She watched her employer reading through a reference offered by a man who had applied for work in the yards, a communication that had come this morning. He nodded, satisfie d, as he folded it into its envelope. He asked her to write and thank whoever it was who had communicated so helpfully.
‘No, I’ve done that,’ she said, and found what she had written for him to sign. He shifted slightly on his chair while he reached for it and for a moment Bernadette was aware of the edge of a trouser turn-up on the calf of her leg and knew that it was accidentally there.
‘Well, we’re all in order,’ her employer said, which was how he always concluded their morning sessions.
When he had again spoken to Bernadette O’Keeffe, on her way back to the coal yards, Orpen Wren remained for a little longer in Kissane’s doorway before going to the post office, where he made enquiries about George Anthony St John, whether or not he had been in since his return. The woman there shook her head and Orpen made similar enquiries at the barber’s in Cashel Street and Mac’s Hairdressing in Irish Street. He asked in McGovern’s. Then he sat in the Square.
He spread the papers he always carried on the seat beside him, smoothed them, and read their contents. For all the years of his travels he had daily read what was written there, had nodded his agreement and been reassured by his own divinations. Resting this morning, he was reassured again.
George Anthony would be occupied at Lisquin. He naturally would be. All the family would be; you couldn’t expect different. There’d be rooks in the chimneys, the windows stuck, the locks gone rusty. It would take more than a month, more than two, even three, to get a big house going again, and all you could do was to have the papers ready. Sooner or later, when the air was fresher in the rooms and any window bars had been replaced where they’d become unsafe, when the chimneys had been swept and painters brought in, the busy time would come to an end and George Anthony would have a moment to accept the papers and return them to the drawer where they belonged. Sooner or later he would be in the town again with business to do - advice to get from a solicitor, or to have a tooth extracted, or have his hair cut. He’d maybe have to be measured for a suit of clothes; or there’d be valuables to take out of safe-keeping, provisions to order. It wasn’t a hardship for Orpen Wren to wait.
9
Later that same day Miss Connulty prepared beef for a stew, cutting it into oblong pieces, dusting them with flour when she had teased out what fat and sinew she could, then laying them ready on a dinner-plate while she diced carrots and onions. She seared and browned the meat, turning the pieces over once and then sliding them into the saucepan in which the vegetables were. She poured on boiling water, added salt and Bisto and put the lid on. She scrubbed her chopping-board, washed bowls and knives in the sink. The saucepan lid rattled; she turned the heat down.
It was half past four. The meat would be tender, or tender enough, by seven, which was when an evening meal was served, the house being back to normal after the death. A change was that Miss Connulty now took her own meals with the daily girl in the kitchen, and gave her brother his either alone or with the overnight lodgers in the dining-room. Before that, a table had always been laid for three in what her mother had called the family room, adjoining the kitchen and so cramped and small you could hardly get round the table with the dishes. It would be used as a store now, and already tins were stacked on the mantelpiece and on the table itself. It was a much more sensible arrangement, which Miss Connulty had repeatedly suggested and had each time been ignored.
She set out plates and dishes ready for the oven later. She mixed mustard and filled the salt cellars. Gohery was still away on his summer holidays. The Clover Meats traveller was due, and the Drummond’s Seeds man. She doubted there’d be anyone else. She counted knives and forks and put them ready, with a jug of water and glasses. She left the kitchen then and made her way upstairs, as every afternoon at this time she did, to the bedroom that now was hers, the largest, airiest room in the house, catching the best of the morning sun.
She dabbed on eau-de-Cologne in case the onions lingered on her clothes; reflected in the dressing-table looking-glass, she settled pins into her hair and applied a little powder to her nose and cheeks. A few days after the death she had moved into this room - out of the smaller one where she’d been visited by Arthur Tetlow. Traveller in veterinary requirements, trapped in a marriage in Sheffield, Arthur Tetlow had gone to fight in the war that was already threatening when he’d stayed in the house for the last time. She knew he had, and when peace eventually came there had been the hope that he would once more drive into the Square as so often he had, in the same green English-registered Ford, its celluloid rear window repaired with tape; that he would look up and see her, and hurry to the house. But instead Arthur Tetlow had disappeared into the war, taking with him the promises he had made in good faith and the future they had talked about. No man could help being caught up in a war.
Honouring that time, Miss Connulty lifted her choice for today from the cushion of a tiny velvet-clad box: the sapphire earrings. She took a sleeper from each ear and replaced them with the glittering blue clusters. A ceremony her afternoon adorning of herself had become this summer, the occasion each time finished with another dab of eau-de-Cologne, another touch of lip salve. She stayed a little longer when she’d completed all that, contemplating without emotion her reflected image in the looking-glass. Then she settled everything back where it belonged on the dressing-table, the jewellery in the shallow top drawer.
On the way downstairs she stood looking out into the Square from the window he would have seen her at if he had come back instead of having to fight for his country. ‘Talk sense,’ her mother had ridiculed all that: back to some strumpet of a wife was where he’d gone; a man like that would only have a strumpet for a wife.