Love and Summer (17 page)

22

Shelhanagh House was not as Ellie had imagined it. A white hall door was tinged with watery green, the paint worn away in places. On the gravel an iron container was beginning to overflow, heaped with tattered suitcases gnawed by mice, rusty paint tins, an ironing-board, weighing-scales, a typewriter, electric fires, a fender, a press for trousers. The flagstones in the hall weren’t covered, the dining-room contained no furniture, the drawing-room was not a drawing-room.

‘I should have warned you,’ he said.

He led the way upstairs, past empty rooms, to what he called the high attics, to a narrow stairway that then became a ladder to the lofts and the roof. They stood on the warm lead of a gully between two slated inclines, looking down at the garden and, beyond it, to the lake Ellie had been told about, over farmland to the distant mountains. A tractor moved slowly up and down a field, soundless where they stood.

‘I always liked it up here,’ he said and he pointed places out and gave them names - Greenane Crossroads, a bridge a little further off, on the way to Castledrummond, and farms and houses. ‘I used to read here. For hours, you know, in summer.’

‘It’s lovely. Everywhere.’

A dog followed them when they were downstairs again.

‘Jessie she’s called,’ he said, and in the kitchen picked up a book from the table. A long time ago he’d lost it and found it only the other day. He hated losing things, he said.

‘Is the house still being sold?’ Ellie asked, reaching down to stroke the dog’s head when they were in a cobbled yard.

‘Poor old Jessie’s getting on a bit,’ he said. ‘Yes, Shelhanagh is sold.’

If the sale fell through she had promised herself to make her confession. She had promised atonement, and obedience; that she would, for all her life, in every hour of every day, be ordered by obedience.

‘The seventeenth of next month,’ he said.

Ages, he’d said before, since there were so many formalities. October perhaps, and she had imagined the bare trees of autumn, the mists of November gathering while he still was here. September the seventeenth was less than three weeks away.

‘The same afternoon I found that book the people who’ve bought Shelhanagh came. An excitable pair,’ he said.

‘I thought maybe something might go wrong.’

‘No, nothing did.’

In the yard the rickety doors of a garage had to be lifted up when they were being pulled open. It was a long time since this car had been on a road, he said. He called the motor car a Morris Cowley and opened at the back what he called a dicky seat.

In the garden he pointed at long grass shimmering in the sunlight, swaying a little because a breeze had got up.

‘That’s where the tennis court was.’

He’d had a tutor for a while, he said, who played tennis in his ordinary shoes. His father considered that wasn’t the thing at all. Even with his limp, his father had always won at tennis.

Every summer the man who used to shoot the rabbits took away the dead ones, but others came. In the rhododendron shrubbery there was a secret place and a rabbit would sometimes run out of it as if, for rabbits, it was a secret place too.

‘I had imaginary friends there and once pretended that the rabbit man shot one of them by mistake. I had a funeral, with wreaths of rhododendron.’

Wisps of smoke blew about. In cardboard boxes beside a heap of smouldering ashes separate bundles of papers were held together by rubber bands, and there were cheque-book stubs and letters in their envelopes, and receipts on spikes. Ellie watched a blaze beginning and remembered the letter she’d written to Sister Ambrose, which she had burnt in the Rayburn. Longer ago than three weeks that was, months more like. Three weeks was nothing.

He threw more paper on to the fire, and then the boxes themselves. He pointed at the roof of the house, a different part of it from where they had stood: people who’d come to a party had climbed up there and one of them sang a song there, a man who sang in operas.

‘Is it definite?’ she asked. ‘September the seventeenth?’

‘Yes, it’s definite.’

Wild sweet pea was in bloom, white and faded shades of mauve and pink. Apples were forming on the trees they passed among on their way to the lake. At its edge, water rats scuttled into the water when the dog came snuffling through the reeds.

‘A Thursday,’ she said. ‘The seventeenth of September.’

 

There was a dullness in her voice. He heard it and wished she was not here, although he wanted her to be. Being here made everything worse for her: he could tell, and knew she couldn’t because she didn’t want to. He hadn’t known himself when he’d suggested that she should come.

‘There wasn’t any other way,’ he said. ‘It had to be sold. I didn’t realize things would go so smoothly.’

Almost everything sounded wrong as soon as he said it and for a moment he felt that he belonged in his own created world of predators, that he was himself a variation of their cruelty. He had taken what there was to take, had exorcized, again, his nagging ghost. And doing so, in spite of tenderness, in spite of affection for a girl he hardly knew, he had made a hell for her.

 

She watched him rooting for a cigarette and finding one loose in a pocket. She watched him straightening it, packing the shreds of tobacco in. Then they went back the way they had come, through the apple trees. In the garden he threw a ball for his dog. In the kitchen he showed her a faded postcard that had been propped up on a windowsill. A woman in old-fashioned clothes had a quill in one hand and what might have been a saucer in the other. A monk was praying.

‘St Lucy,’ he said.

The handle of a dagger and part of its blade protruded from the saint’s neck. There was no blood. She had a halo.

‘You have a look of this St Lucy,’ he said.

She shook her head. She hadn’t known there was a St Lucy, and that there ever had been did not come into things now. ‘Come with me,’ she had made him say, knowing that it was fantasy. ‘Come with me,’ and he talked to her then about Scandinavia, as now he did about his childhood past. And she stole away from the farmhouse, closing the door on the quietened kitchen, the unlaid table, no saucepans simmering on the stove. People would hear that she wasn’t there, the Corrigans and Gahagan, the shop people in Rathmoye, Mrs Hadden, Miss Connulty, the priests, the Cloonhill nuns. It frightened her to hear herself reviled, but when she heard it often it might not any more.

He took the postcard from her and put it back on the windowsill.

‘I’m sorry there’s no cake.’ He poured the tea he’d made. He had remembered jam - raspberry from the half-and-half, he explained. He said the bread was fresh.

‘I don’t need anything,’ she said, but she ate the bread he’d cut because he’d cut it, and drank the tea he’d poured. And afterwards, in the drawing-room, he told her how the room had been, describing the furniture that was no longer there. He prised out the drawing-pins that held in place a row of pictures on a wall. Each time smoothing the wrinkled paper, he handed one and then another to her.

‘Their watercolours are what’s left of my mother and my father,’ he said.

He said he had known the name of the strand where people were having a picnic, but had forgotten it. The couple who conversed in an empty theatre were actors who’d been famous in their day. It was at the corner of a Dublin street that the three-card trick was played on an umbrella, the tulip tree was in a Dublin garden. ‘She used to come here,’ he said about a girl in an ivory-white dress who was stretched out on the upturned boat by the lake, her long legs languidly spread, a red scarf knotted at her throat.

‘Have them,’ he said. ‘Please have them.’

She shook her head. To accept what she was offered was to say that she would stay and he would go, that the giving and the taking were the gesture of parting, and parting’s confirmation. As once she would not have, she knew to say no.

She was not pressed and soon afterwards she rode back to Rathmoye. She had meat to get in Hearn’s, and a few groceries in the Cash and Carry. Then she looked up Scandinavia in Hogan’s, where she had once bought a new exercise-book for the accounts. School books were kept too, and she found Scandinavia in an atlas. When she saw its shape, one side of it jagged, she remembered the glossy map draped over the blackboard. A book she took from the shelves said that Norway’s fjords probed deeply inland, that forest and water and coastal archipelagos gave Sweden its brooding nature. ‘Denmark’s the little one,’ she remembered the geography nun saying, and she remembered the mermaid on the rock.

Different languages, not many cities, the book said. Corn was grown. Iron ore was mined at Kiruna. Place names were unpronounceable.
Gudbrandsdalen
, Ellie read,
Henne Strand
,
Sundsfjord
,
Kittelfjäll
. But easier to say, there were
Gothenburg
and
Malmö
too,
Leksand
,
Finse
.

The Vikings were of Scandinavia
. Neatly in chalk on the blackboard, that came back to her. Sister Agnes the geography nun had been.

23

Orpen Wren went about the shops. He waited at the railway station. He sat down in the Square, trying to remember who it was he had to see, who it was he had to pass on a message to. The Rakes of Mallow: that came back to him, that being said in the library, but he didn’t know why it came back now. ‘The Rakes of Mallow aren’t in it.’ Her voice faltered when she said it, as any mother’s voice would, and then she cried. Was her son dead in Portumna? she asked Mr Boyle and Mr Boyle said only lamed and she said thank God. The coachman the whole time was silent.

Twilight, then darkness, spread through what Orpen Wren recalled: a thickening fog, sound and faces distorted, then lost. It would lift, today some time, tomorrow. Or maybe it wouldn’t.

The papers were back. The woman had arranged for the coal delivery. The first fires would be lit, you’d hear the pianos played. You’d hear the horses whinnying in the yard, you’d hear the dogs, you’d hear the voices. ‘We’ll go,’ the master said from his bed.

Thomas John Kinsella
, was the memorial inscription on the pedestal.
Died for Ireland, 1776-1798
. There was more, the letters small, incised; but the name and the dates were enough. Orpen looked up at the young, bony features, the open shirt and bare forearms, and felt sorry for the hero who had died so early in his life. He often said he was sorry when he sat here in the Square, enjoying the company. He was fond of Thomas Kinsella.

He went again to the railway station. He bought a tin of soup in the corner shop in Hurley Lane. He watched the children at hopscotch.

Thomas John Kinsella
, he read again when he returned to the Square. He slept for a while and when he woke it was because he was wagging his head, reproving himself for having forgotten what he now remembered: whom it was he had to see and give a message to.

He set off at once, but after a while the distance seemed too far and he knew he’d have to wait for a better day.

24

Dillahan dismantled the corral he erected every year for the shearing. As always at this busy time, he had put off the dismantling for longer than he’d intended. Weeks had passed and every day he’d told himself that the sprawl of old gates and corrugated iron was unsightly, the garish red binding twine, the swirls of wool scattered.

Ellie gathered the lengths of twine when they were released, pulling apart the knots in them. She raked up the wool, combing it out of the grass. She had brought the fertilizer bag from last year to take it away in.

‘Better we’d get it done early next time,’ her husband said while he stacked the rusting gates on the trailer.

There was withering all around them: of the nettles that had earlier been verdant in the hedges, of drooping foxgloves and cow-parsley. Hard, dry earth was exposed where sheep had congregated, grass was yellowing. But the September air was cool and fresh, pleasanter than August’s brashness.

Ellie hardly noticed all this, but knew from other years that it was there. She tried to think of that, of the first time she had raked up the wool, and getting to know this field; of the first time she’d collected the eggs in the crab-apple orchard, and seeing the hares at night. But Shelhanagh House kept breaking into what she imposed - its shabby, deserted rooms, the tennis court, the quiet old dog resting on the grass, the postcard of St Lucy. And Scandinavia broke in too; and she was there, in its strangeness.

‘Well, it kept fine for us still,’ her husband said. ‘I don’t know did we ever have a dryness like it. Good girl,’ he complimented her, a note of sympathy in his tone, for her task was tedious.

He started the tractor and she heard the clatter of the trailer’s load until it began to fade and then was gone. She tied the lengths of binding twine into a bundle and put it to one side. She filled the fertilizer bag with the pile of wool she’d made. She was all morning in the field.

 

The small churchyard was shadowy with a twilight of its own, overhung with maple trees and oaks, its dark yews like sentinels among them, old headstones crooked or fallen. How random the chance of circumstance was, Florian reflected, surveying the grass that had grown high on the mound that was his parents’ grave. How much of chance it was that Natalia Verdecchia, a child of Genoa, should be here now because she had loved a
soldato di ventura
. The two names were sharply incised on unpolished limestone, the letterer who had been commissioned chosen for the sensitivity of his touch. All that had mattered - that they should be together, that skill and quality should mark their place in a graveyard, as their devotion to one another and the gift they’d shared had marked their lives. It wasn’t easy to believe that they lay in silence, together yet out of touch.

A man was working with a hoe on the gravel paths and Florian borrowed a pair of shears from him. He cut the grass on the grave, pulled out brambles that hadn’t yet established themselves. The day before he died his father had apologized for what might have seemed to be shared also: disappointment in an only child. He was insistent that there had never been that, and Florian had pretended too.