Her mother had burnt the sheets, tearing them from the bed, ordering the daily woman out of the house to sweep the yard, then carrying the sheets downstairs and poking them into the range. Her mother had poured scorn on tears and pleading, on the trust placed in Arthur Tetlow’s promises, on his talk about Sheffield and coming back. All of it was pathetic, her mother said: the pair of them would be punished for their craven appetites; both of them would suffer all their lives. The ugly misfortune that had fallen upon the family would always be there, her mother predicted, a consequence that was ugly too.
‘Your daughter’s a hooer,’ her greeting was when her husband came in from the back bar of the public house, the smell of burning sheets still in the air. And when he heard what he had to hear he vowed he would go to Sheffield after Arthur Tetlow and kill him stone dead.
But instead he took his daughter on the bus to Dublin and held her hand the whole time, through Roscrea and Monasterevin and over the Curragh, and when the bus drew up in Naas she had to get off because she was feeling sick. A man came up to him on O’Connell Bridge and asked him how was he and he said grand, although he wasn’t. He gave the man a coin, because it was always his way to give beggars something. He told her to pray as soon as she lay down, before they’d do anything to her.
It was a chemist’s shop he took her to and they closed it before they began. They turned the notice round on the door and pulled the blind down over the glass. They told her father to wait there and he said to her when she came out from the back that they’d have a cup of tea and they had it in the tea lounge of the Adelphi cinema. He got a car to drive them back to the quays and they went on the bus again. Her mother said he was a murderer when they got back, maybe half past ten it was. A bed had been made up for him in an attic and he slept there that night and always afterwards. Nothing more was ever said between her mother and her father.
The events of that day had not receded for Miss Connulty. Her cruelty to the dead was their ceremonial preservation: the time for pain was over, yet her wish was that it should not be, that there should always be something left - a wince, a tremor, some part of her anger that was not satisfied.
10
They asked the same questions. They enquired about the drains, they trudged around the attics. They asked if the soil was alkaline, they wondered about the electric wiring, they noticed ill-fitting windows. A few were alarmed by the water rats. Others turned around and drove away.
Florian had propped up on one of the kitchen windowsills the postcard he hadn’t thrown on to his bonfire. By the lesser Ghirlandaio the painting was, the card’s recipient Miss Mabel Thynne of 21 The Paddocks, Cheltenham.
Weather heavenly
, a message read,
this city too
. Reduced to sepia tints, the innocence Ghirlandaio had painted was not entirely lost, and the resemblance Florian had told himself was imagination he noticed still. Bored by people expressing surprise at the reduced condition of the drawing-room and asking questions he was unable to answer, he returned one morning to Rathmoye.
‘I have them for you,’ Mr Clancy said, a wiry, bustling man who liked to keep a conversation going. ‘Wait now till I’ll see.’
All the boots and shoes that were ready - soled or heeled or both, new laces put in, polished - were on a shelf above the muddle of work yet to be done. None was labelled, nor was there a note on any of what was owing. Mr Clancy always knew.
‘Is himself in form?’ he enquired, finding Dillahan’s black Sunday shoes, new heels on both.
‘He’s all right,’ Ellie said.
‘And yourself, Mrs Dillahan?’
‘I’m all right.’
They waited for her to be pregnant. In the shops, at the presbytery, old Mrs Connulty in her lifetime, her daughter now. Miss Burke at the wool counter often glanced to see. A few had given up, as Ellie had herself.
She paid for the repairs. Those shoes were worn so little they would see him out, Mr Clancy predicted. A shoe wasn’t made like that any more, he added, shining each one of the pair before he put both on the counter.
‘Wait a minute while I’ll get you change,’ he said.
But he didn’t have it and Ellie went away with her ten-shilling note to try the Matthew Street shops.
Without knowing how it had got there, Florian looked down at the tidy sheaf of documents that was already in his hands.
Her Majesty’s Sloop
The Serpent
being designed for a Foreign Voyage
, he read,
you are, by the Board’s direction, to Supply her with additional Ordnance Stores proper for the same
.
‘That’s very interesting,’ he said.
He had been taken unawares by the diminutive presence beside him on the street. ‘I’ve cared for them this long while,’ Orpen Wren was saying. ‘They’ve accompanied me for many a year.’
Florian attempted to return the papers, but the old librarian was reluctant to receive them, and said again that he had cared for them. It was the third George in the family who’d been a naval man, he said.
‘But you’d know, of course, sir.’
Florian didn’t deny that, since there seemed little point in doing so.
‘He was two years in the Ordnance Stores, sir, and longer before he got his command. The St Johns never set themselves up in a naval way.’
‘Of course not.’
‘I mentioned in McGovern’s a while back you’d be in for supplies, sir. I took a liberty with that. You’ll find them expecting you in McGovern’s, sir.’
‘Yes.’
‘The family always insisted on McGovern’s.’
‘Yes, of course.’
Florian gazed into the lined, pouched features, the tired eyes, and saw reflected there a hesitation, a moment of doubt, bewilderment, before the old man again found his way in the conversation.
‘I have the coal ordered,’ he said.
‘Of course, but all the same it might be better if you went on looking after these papers yourself.’
‘The little table beneath the portrait of Lady Eliza is where the papers were always kept. The little table that opens out. Well, you’d know.’
‘Just for the time-being, maybe you wouldn’t mind continuing to look after them?’
‘We’ve had the time-being, sir. The longest time-being there ever was known in Ireland.’
Florian saw the girl then. She was cycling slowly across the Square in the distance. Her blue dress drew his attention, the same dress she’d been wearing before and when he dreamed about her. She passed Bodell’s Bar and turned into a street a few yards on.
‘If you wouldn’t mind,’ he said, ‘another day would be more convenient for me to take the papers.’
They were accepted then, when again Florian held them out.
‘I’ve lent them a few times, sir, because of the interest in the family. But I’ll keep them by me since it’s your instruction. Where I live these days is Morpeth Terrace, the second house along. It does me rightly.’
Florian nodded. In the drawer of that same table, he was reminded, was the catalogue of the library, complete and clearly written out, two thousand and fifty-nine volumes. In case it should ever be mislaid there was a copy in the smaller of the two upstairs drawing-rooms, in the Limerick writing-desk.
‘Mr Macready himself delivered that desk, sir, and said keep it a distance from the fir e-grate. That same time he said he could put secret drawers in the shutters if that would be convenient, but the governess wouldn’t have them. It was a schoolroom, the small drawing-room, temporary when William’s leg went. Miss Batesriff that governess was.’
‘I have to be off now, I’m afraid.’
‘It’s the best thing ever happened in Ireland, sir, yourself come back.’
Ellie put the change she’d been given on the counter. Mr Clancy divided it.
‘Tell your husband I was asking for him, Mrs Dillahan,’ he requested. ‘Not that I ever knew him personally. It was his mother brought in his boots, then again his wife. And these days it’s yourself.’
‘I’ll tell him, Mr Clancy.’
The bell above the door sounded as she left.
‘Hullo,’ a voice said on the street.
She knew before she turned round to look. She had the shoes, unwrapped, still in her hand, about to put them into the basket of her bicycle.
‘Florian Kilderry,’ he said. ‘D’you remember?’
He was standing in front of the window of the closed premises next door to the shoemaker’s, his bicycle beside him. He was wearing a hat. He smiled at her. ‘You’ve forgotten me,’ he said.
She felt the colour mounting in her face, as it had before. Her thoughts became disordered, as they had become then too, perverse and separated from her, as if they were not hers. She wanted to say that of course she remembered him. She wanted to say that she had wondered about him, that she had tried not to, that she had known she should not. She wanted to say she had known immediately who it was when he’d said hullo.
‘A cup of coffee?’ he suggested.
‘No.’ She said it more sharply than she’d intended. She shook her head.
‘I thought you might like a cup of coffee.’
He wheeled his bicycle beside hers when she moved on. ‘It’s just I thought you might,’ he said.
In the silence that came she tried to say she hadn’t meant to sound severe. But she didn’t say that either.
‘I live near Castledrummond,’ he said. ‘My father died a while ago and I got left with a house a few miles out.’
‘I heard of Castledrummond.’
‘D’you like Rathmoye, Ellie?’
‘You get to know a place.’
‘Not much goes on, I imagine.’
‘There’s a Strawberry Fair and people come in for that.’
He had a way of looking at the ground while they were walking as if he’d lost something. Once he stopped to pick something up, but threw it away again.
‘An old man I meet on the streets thinks I’m someone else,’ he said.
‘That’d be Orpen Wren. He’d talk to you about Lisquin, would he?’
‘What’s Lisquin?’
‘The St Johns were there one time. They’re gone from it years ago.’
‘I think Mr Wren is under the impression that I’m one of them come back.’
‘Lisquin isn’t there any more.’
Only the back gate-lodge was left, she said, tumbled down, on the old Kilaney road. She said she went there now and again to cut the lavender.
They were in the poor part of the town. Slums had been cleared, the shoemaker’s the last small shop doing business. They had let him stay where he was, Mr Clancy had told Ellie once; they would allow him to until he was too old to trade. She said that now, explaining all the boarded windows.
‘You don’t live near here, Ellie?’
‘I’m on a farm out at Cnocrea. In the Crilly hills.’
Nothing about him was different. She couldn’t prevent herself from looking at him and once he saw. When he did he smiled at her and she wondered if he knew she had feelings for him. She didn’t want him to know.
‘There’d be butterflies if there’s lavender,’ he said.
‘Oh, there are butterflies all right.’
‘Where did the St Johns go?’
‘Away from Ireland altogether. I don’t know why they would have.’
‘The old man was a servant, was he?’
‘I don’t know is it right, only people say he had charge of a library there.’
‘I think maybe it is right.’
He reached out with his foot and kicked a bottle-top off the edge of the pavement into the gutter. It frightened her almost that they were walking together with their bicycles, not even going in the right direction for Hearn’s, where she had meat to get. She should have said she had shopping to do. She should say it now that she had the meat to get, only she didn’t.
‘Mr Wren has papers he wants me to take from him.’
‘He always has the papers.’
He offered her a cigarette, holding out the packet, the silver paper folded back. She shook her head.
‘Don’t you ever smoke?’
‘I never did.’
He picked a coin up from the pavement.
‘Worth nothing,’ he said, handing it to her. ‘The kind that was minted by a business in the old days.’
Boyce
, she read on it, and he said that would be a shop-keeper’s name. ‘Boyces were Wexford people,’ he said.
She’d say she had to go into Corbally’s when they came to Magennis Street: she had that ready, even to mention what she had to get. Press-studs she’d say, needles.
‘I’m alone in the house I got left with,’ he said. ‘Myself and a black dog.’
Florian expected no more of this morning than he had of other casual relationships brought about in the same manner and for the same reason. This beginning was as previous beginnings had been, its distraction potent enough already. Isabella would never be just a shadow, but this morning an artless country girl had stirred a tenderness in him and already his cousin’s voice echoed less confidently, her smile was perhaps a little blurred, her touch less than yesterday’s memory of it. He might, in making conversation, have remarked upon his present companion’s attractions, but he sensed it was better not to, maybe not ever.
‘Shelhanagh the house is called,’ he said instead, and Ellie asked about the dog and he told her, and about the lake, and the garden in the evening, which was when he liked it best. He had never lived anywhere else, he said. He’d never wanted to; nor had his mother or his father since they had come to live in Ireland. His mother had been Italian, he said.
‘When she died, the life went out of my father too. Although he managed. He was always good at managing.’
‘Were you born in that house?’
‘Yes, I was. I was a surprise for them. They’d given up, since they were getting on a bit.’
‘Is it big, the house?’
‘Eighteen dilapidated rooms.’
Ellie saw them, without dilapidation: comfortable rooms with fires and flowers, two people who were his mother and father, the child who’d come as a surprise. She saw him alone there now, his black dog, the eighteen rooms too many since the deaths. There was the still water of a lake. There were a garden’s scents and its delicious twilight air.