Love and Summer (16 page)

 

Surely, Isabella urged, he could make something of that, since he had made a little of it already? ‘Oh, please, why not?’ she begged, determinedly, repeatedly. ‘Oh, please.’

He knew he couldn’t.

 

While Jessie scurried among the reeds Florian smoked and watched the night beginning. He wished Isabella could know the huntsman’s book hadn’t been thrown away and now was resurrected. He wished she could be here as so often she had been, by the lake, the dark creeping on, more secrecy pretended than was necessary. He wondered if she had married Signor Canepaci or someone else; he wondered if she was happy. He had exasperated her, not being able to tell her who Olivia was, or who Miss Dunlop was, or any of the others. ‘Did they come to the parties?’ she asked. Were Nason and Willie John boys at school? Was Madole’s wasteland somewhere they could go?

Florian did not try to sleep that night. He didn’t go to bed and in his silent house what he had been separated from for so long seemed tonight more than he had written down. Miss Dunlop’s blouse was pink, a touch of henna transformed her hair. The pale, stretched features of Yu Zhang lost their solemnity in a smile. The Wing Commander had experienced gaol. An injury, not yet healed, was vivid on the forehead of the boy at the gravel pits. The old teacher’s nightly footsteps were the footsteps of a child whose fate she dared not think about. Life wasn’t worth living, Olivia whispered.

Reading and rereading the scraps he had given up on, Florian did not readily conclude that time, in passing, had brought perception, only that his curiosity was stirred by the shadows and half-shadows imagination had once given him, by the unspoken, and what was still unknown. He added nothing to what was written, only murmuring occasionally a line or word that might supply an emphasis or clarify a passage.

But in the early morning, standing at the water’s edge while in vain he scanned the sky for the bird that no longer came, he felt exhilarated, as if something had happened to him that he didn’t entirely know about, or know about at all. This feeling was still there when he returned to the house, while he made coffee and toasted bread, and gave his dog her food. It was there when, later in the morning, he lay down to sleep. He slept all day, and woke to it.

21

Ellie had not been to the gate-lodge since before the day they had climbed up to the corrie lakes at Gortalassa. It was a busy time of year, made more so by helping at the Corrigans’ harvest: it wasn’t as easy as it had been to get away.

Her low spirits at Gortalassa had not revived, although they did a little when, behind the loose stone in the wall at the ruins, she found a note that gave directions of how to get to Shelhanagh House.
Come any day you can
.
Come any time
, the message was, on the back of a map, in handwriting she had not known before. The ease with which all this happened - the note written, the directions given, the map drawn, his wanting her to come to the house he talked so much about - gave Ellie more than hope, restoring something at least of what had been taken from her on the slopes of Gortalassa. It had not before been suggested that she should make the journey he suggested now, and she wondered if it could be that for some reason everything was suddenly different. That the sale of the house had fallen through. That the people buying it had made a mistake or, when they calculated, didn’t have the money. Months, maybe a year, might pass while the unsold house kept him in Ireland. She had thought she might never hear from him again. But she had and he wanted her to come to him.

Thursday I’ll come
.
The afternoon is better
.

She left her note where his had been.

 

To arrange the loan with which he hoped to buy Gahagan’s field Dillahan made one of his rare weekday visits to Rathmoye. In Mr Hassett’s small private office he presented the facts and Mr Hassett said he didn’t think two thousand pounds was going to break the bank. Beneath his small moustache he fleetingly displayed the smile familiar to borrowers when he agreed to make a loan. Dillahan nodded his gratitude.

‘A pity to pass it by,’ he said.

‘It’s always a pity to pass good land by, Mr Dillahan.’

‘The trouble is, one day he’d be on about offers for it, the next he’d be talking about clearing and draining.’

‘He’s neglected it, has he?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘The older a man is the harder it is for him to part with what he has. And the more reason he should. Not that selling out isn’t hard on any man, never mind his years.’

‘Gahagan has a fair bit left, all the same.’

Dillahan stood up. There was a golf cup on the desk and Mr Hassett saw him looking at it. A bit of luck, he said, the Rathmoye Bankers’ Prize. He held the door of his small private office open. The two men shook hands and Dillahan passed through the main offices, out into the sunshine of the Square. He looked to see if Ellie had come back from her shopping. One of the back doors of the Vauxhall was open, a basket and two bags still on the ground beside where she stood. The mad old Protestant was talking to her.

‘They went because of it,’ Orpen Wren said. ‘The St Johns didn’t have control over their sons.’

Ellie nodded. She read her list again, making sure she’d got everything.

‘The last steward they had at Lisquin was Mr Boyle and the mistress had himself and myself brought to her little room. “Close the door,” she said, and I did and Mr Boyle didn’t say a word. Men coming to the house looking for their women, she said. Wives or daughters, it never mattered. The Rakes of Mallow weren’t in it, she said. “Oh, worse,” she said. “Worse than that any day.”

‘The master had taken to his bed for the shame of it, and she came out with it then: that Elador was gone off with a woman. “All I know is the running of the house,” she said. “I can’t be devising stratagems.” Her two little girls were a few years old and Jack maybe fourteen. What good was she for more besides that, was what she was asking us, and Mr Boyle said he’d scour all Ireland. He’d take a stableman with him and they’d go into every inn and hotel. They’d search the two of them out if it took them a six-month. He wouldn’t spare Elador, he promised her that. He’d have it clear and plain with Elador that he must give the woman back where she belonged. Mr Boyle said to the mistress, “Ma’am, I’d maybe have to thrash it out of Elador.” He said he’d need her permission for laying hands on her boy, and the master’s permission, because he’d be frightened of the law. She said it again that her husband was in his bed. She was beside herself, she didn’t remember telling us before. “Mr Wren will write it down,” Mr Boyle said. “Mr Wren will write it down that Elador came back chastened to Lisquin. Mr Wren will put the date to it. And write it down that permission was given.”’

Ellie tried to detect from her husband’s gait if he’d been allowed the loan, but she couldn’t tell. A shawled woman held out a hand and when he’d reached into his pockets he dropped a coin into it.

‘Her heart was broken for Lisquin, Mr Boyle said. Her heart was broken for the St Johns brought low by a son. “It’s in this family always,” she said, and there were tears on her face. For a long time already it was in the family, she said, one generation to the next. “Let me go, ma’am,” Mr Boyle begged her. “Let the stableman and myself make an end of the unworthiness of the whole thing.” If afterwards the story would be told, Mr Boyle said, if afterwards the children of the St Johns would hear before they became men of how Elador St John had been thrashed in Letterkenny or Arklow or by the roadside in County Clare, how he and his woman were hunted down like two wild creatures by dogs - if the children would be told the story, that would be an end to it for ever. And when himself and the stableman went they found the two in Portumna by the river, in lodgings where spalpeens would stay, or labouring men on the repair of a road. They gave the woman back to her husband, and Elador St John was sent out of Ireland. But one night, when years again had passed, a farmer came to Lisquin with a gun, which was taken off him or he’d have shot Jack dead. The day following there was no one in the household that didn’t know the St Johns would go.’

His eyes had become steely and intense. One hand gripped the top of the car’s open door. All during his long monologue Ellie had had the impression that he was trying to say something else and couldn’t manage to because he couldn’t find the words. He asked her if she understood.

‘Lisquin’s gone this long time, Mr Wren,’ she said. ‘The St Johns with it.’

‘“We know old trouble, sir,” I said to George Anthony the first day he was back with us. It was the trouble brought the family down, lady, only that wouldn’t be said unless it was within the walls of Lisquin. That’s how it is to this time, lady.’

‘Yes.’

‘The papers are back where they belong. He was good to take them from me. An old ghost, they’d say, if they saw me coming with them myself. I wouldn’t presume to be welcome in the house. George Anthony saw me right.’

‘Who you’re talking about isn’t a St John, Mr Wren.’

‘There’s your husband coming now, lady. I know your husband well.’

 

Dillahan waited for a car to pass before he began to cross the Square and then was delayed by Fennerty the cattle auctioneer, who told him Con Hannington was dead. ‘Last evening,’ he said.

‘I heard.’

They talked for a few minutes. Poor Con had been shook a long time, Fennerty said, and Dillahan kept nodding, trying to edge away. He didn’t like coming in to Rathmoye because he still sensed the pity of people, and since he continued to blame himself for the accident it came naturally to him to assume that in spite of their sympathy others blamed him too. On Sundays he went to early Mass because it was less crowded.

He said he’d see Fennerty around. When he reached the Vauxhall Ellie was alone again.

‘That’s fixed,’ he said. ‘Have you everything?’

‘I have.’

‘We’ll be off so.’

He eased the Vauxhall through the other cars in the Square and drove across Magennis Street into Cashel Street.

‘What’d the old fellow want?’

‘Only rambling on,’ Ellie said, ‘you wouldn’t know what he was at.’

‘It can’t be much of a joke, your memory turned inside out for you.’ He stopped for a woman and a pram at a crossing. ‘Poor old devil.’

‘Yes.’

They passed the two churches, then left the town behind. They waited at temporary traffic lights where the road was up.

‘Who’s that?’ Dillahan asked when they passed a cyclist.

She wanted to say it was Florian Kilderry and that she was in love with him. She wanted to say the name, to say he was on the road because he was going to the back gate-lodge of Lisquin House, where often they were together. She wanted to say he would find a note from her, that he would have come for that.

‘I don’t know who he is,’ she heard herself saying, and again there was the urge to talk about him. She’d seen him about before, she said. Florian Kilderry she’d heard him called. Near Castledrummond he came from.

The lights changed. They waited for a lorry coming slowly. Dillahan said there used to be a County Council foreman called Kilderry, two fingers gone from his right hand. He said his father once bought a scarifier at a bankrupt sale in Castledrummond.

‘I remember coming back from school and it was in the yard.’ He had never been in Castledrummond himself.

‘No.’

‘It was busy today, was it?’

‘It was, for a Tuesday.’

‘I see there’s posters up, some old circus coming.’

‘They’ve been up a while.’

‘Not Duffy’s, though?’

‘No, not Duffy’s.’

‘I used be taken to Duffy’s.’

He had told her about that when first she came to the farm, how he’d always been impatient, waiting for the elephants to come on, and how a clown had persuaded one of his sisters to give him a kiss. He had told her about Piper’s Entertainments when they’d come to Rathmoye, the roundabouts and bumper cars, the hoopla stall where he’d won a china rabbit.

‘Con Hannington’s funeral’s Friday,’ he said. He drew out to turn to the right, and waited for a tractor to go by. He saluted the man on it.

‘Con lent me fifty pounds one time,’ he said. ‘The barley failed and I was pushed.’

He would have paid the money back, every penny, and Con Hannington would have known he would. The bank wasn’t taking a chance with the loan and the bank would know that too.

‘I’ll go to the funeral,’ he said.

She hadn’t often left a note, always managing to come herself, always wanting to. He’d be there by now and he’d maybe wait a while, then he’d lift out the stone. He hadn’t realized whose car it was when it went by. He didn’t know the car.

They passed Gahagan’s gate, beside the old milk-churn platform that was falling to bits, then the turn-off to the boreen that was the way up to the hills, difficult in winter when a flood came down it.

They had to back for the post van, and the new young postman wound his window down and handed out the bill for the fertilizer that had been delivered a few weeks ago.

‘A decent lad, that,’ her husband said.

The dogs heard the car’s approach and began to bark when it was still far off. As well she’d looked behind the stone; as well he’d come to look there today. A Golden Eagle his bicycle was called, a picture of an eagle on a rock below the handlebars. She’d never known a bicycle called that before.

‘There’s the last of the potatoes to lift,’ her husband said, ‘before we’d get the rain. Only a dozen or so rows.’

‘I’ll help you so.’

‘Arrah, no, you have enough to do.’

‘I never mind.’

‘Ah, well, no.’ He protested softly, shaking his head as he often did when she offered to do what he considered she no longer should.

He turned the car into the yard. The dogs came to greet them.