Love and Summer (3 page)

He had the room to himself this evening because the notice that offered accommodation had been temporarily taken down. He listened to sounds that were familiar coming from the floor below: his sister bolting the front door, a rattle of cutlery in the dining-room, the sideboard drawer being pushed in, the windows that had been opened for airing closed and latched. There had always been the chance that she would marry, that the past she had never recovered from would at last be forgotten, that Gohery, or Hickey from the watch shop, would show an interest, that one of the men who came regularly for a night would, or one of the older bachelors in the town. She had been young when the trouble happened. She hadn’t let herself go when it was over. She hadn’t since.

He heard her footstep, light on the stairs, the footstep he knew best now that their mother’s would not be heard again. That he should be despised by his sister was one of blaming’s variations; he was aware of that and it made it easier that he was. She crossed the landing and came to stand near where he sat. The two back bedrooms should be decorated before the winter, she said, the same paint as before.

He nodded. Not looking round, not wanting to see the jewellery she wore to provoke him, he said he’d attend to the matter and she went away.

2

Dillahan rose before his wife. Downstairs, he pulled out the dampers of the Rayburn stove and listened for the flutter of flames beginning before he tipped in anthracite. He waited for the kettle to boil, then made tea and shaved himself at the sink. In the yard, when he had opened the back door, his two sheepdogs ambled out of the shed where they slept to greet him. He murmured to them softly, one finger of each hand idly caressing their heads. He could tell from the air that it wasn’t going to rain today.

The dogs fell in behind him when he crossed the yard, unaffected - as he was not - when they passed the bad place. A sheepdog of that time used to make a detour, hardly noticeable, but Dillahan always knew what that dog was uneasy about. On the track to the river-field a rabbit took fright, darting into the undergrowth, and then another did. In the field the ewes were undisturbed.

Dillahan counted them, seventy-four, all of them there. He watched them for a while, leaning on the iron gate, the sheepdogs crouched at his feet. Then he passed on, climbing up to the hill pasture. He called the few cows he kept for milking and they came slowly to him.

 

Ellie pulled back the bedclothes on her husband’s side of the bed, then on hers. When she had washed in the farmhouse’s small bathroom she drew on her nightdress again in order to cross the landing, even though she knew she was alone in the house. She dressed, combed and brushed her hair, bothering with no more than that so early in the day.

Younger by several years than her burly husband, she had something of the demeanour of a child. Yet while childhood still influenced this expression of her nature it was a modest beauty that otherwise, and more noticeably, distinguished her now. It was there in the greyish blue of eyes that had once been anxious, in the composed smile that had once been faltering and uncertain. Soft fair hair, once difficult, was now drawn back, the style that suited it best. But in the farmhouse, and the yard and the dairy, in the crab-apple orchard and the fields, though touched by the grace that time had brought, Ellie Dillahan remained as diffident a presence as she’d been when first she came here as a general maid.

This morning, as every morning in the kitchen, the dripping she had cut from the bowl softened in the frying-pan while she laid out knives and forks on the table. It was another twenty minutes before she heard her husband in the yard, before the latch of the kitchen door was lifted and he brought the milk in. He said the buzzard hawk was circling again. He took his wellington boots off at the door.

‘I’ll be down in the river-field a while.’ He broke a silence to say that when they had fin ished breakfast. He had made sandwiches to take with him, which he did whenever he was likely to be in the fields all day. Making them for himself was something he had become used to during his years as a widower - cheese, tomato, anything there was. Ellie had filled his flask.

‘Thanks,’ he said, picking it up when she was clearing the dishes from the table.

She carried them to the sink, ran in hot water and left them to soak while she moved the chairs out from the table to make sweeping the floor’s uneven surface easier. She prodded a brush as far under the dresser as it would go, reaching for whatever dust had accumulated since yesterday. She added what she’d gathered to the pile she’d made in front of the stove and then scooped everything up in the dustpan. Although her back was to her husband, she knew he was standing by the door, as if about to say something, as if that was why he hesitated there. But all he said was:

‘It’ll take me the day.’

‘Will I bring down a drink?’

‘Do, later on.’

‘I will of course.’ She opened the top of the stove and emptied the dustpan on to the coals.

‘Take care with that,’ he said.

‘I forgot.’ She was cross with herself. It wasn’t that she had forgotten he’d told her not to be always opening the top of the Rayburn, but that she’d thought he wasn’t still in the kitchen. His movements were always quiet: she had thought he was going when he said to bring the drink later.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, turning to face him.

‘Arrah, it doesn’t matter. Take money from the book if the insurance fellow comes. I don’t know has he settled on a day yet?’

‘The second Thursday it was with Mr Cauley.’

‘It was.’ It would be different now, he said, a new man would have his own day. ‘If he calls in today he’ll say what it is.’

‘I’ll ask him if he doesn’t say.’

‘You’d miss old Cauley.’

The door to the yard closed behind him. She heard the tractor started, and listened to the sound fading as he drove it away. He was good to her, not minding when she made mistakes, not saying when she didn’t come up to scratch, still learning the ways of the farmhouse. She told herself that, dropping the iron disc into place on the stove. She hung up the dustpan, and the sweeping brush next to it, in the cupboard under the stairs. She opened the two windows as she did every morning, even when it was raining, to let the air in for a while. She settled the sash props into position and turned back the clock on the dresser, correcting the twelve minutes it had gained since yesterday. Standing on a chair, she took a five-pound note for the insurance man from the pages of an out-of-date
Old Moore’s Almanac
on the top shelf of the dresser, so that she wouldn’t have to do it in front of him if he came.

The kitchen wasn’t large, dominated by the width and length of this big green dresser and the oak table at which all meals were taken. The ceiling was beamed, dark timbers with whitewash between them. All the other woodwork - of the doors and window-frames and skirting-boards - was green to match the dresser. When Ellie had come to this kitchen five years ago she hadn’t known a kitchen she liked as much, or known the comfort of the sitting-room at the front of the farmhouse, cosily cramped, its two armchairs with antimacassars, its brass fender with fire-irons laid out, its ornaments and photographs, flowered wallpaper with a frieze.

She went there now. It smelt pleasantly of summer must, and slightly of soot. Drooping in a white jug on the single windowsill, pink roses were scentless and she took the withered blooms to the kitchen and rinsed the jug out, then went to cut fresh ones from the trellis in the garden at the front. When she had arranged them she fed the hens in the run and collected what eggs there were. She pumped up the back tyre of her bicycle because the valve was faulty. Not that she was going anywhere today.

Content but for her childlessness, Ellie did not complain if time hung heavy when her husband was in the fields. There was the routine of work and once a week she cycled the four and a half miles to Rathmoye with the eggs she regularly delivered, more often if there was further shopping to be done. She loved the journey through the empty countryside, and liked being in the town when she reached it, the bustle when the streets were busy, the different air. She liked being known by the shop people, being greeted by the man with the deaf-aid in English’s hardware, sitting on her own at a table in Meagher’s Café, paying in any cheques there were at the bank, searching for what she wanted in the Cash and Carry. More often than was always necessary, she made another confession. More often than she might have chosen, she heard the plot of the novel Miss Burke at the wool counter in Corbally’s was reading. Old Orpen Wren greeted her, sometimes remembering who she was.

She hosed the dairy out, turned the milk buckets she’d earlier scoured upside down on the slate draining-shelf beside the dairy sink. She put down poison in one of the turf sheds and in the feed shed, where something had been nibbling.

In her vegetable patch she weeded the parsley and thinned her carrots, saving what she pulled out. Tomorrow or the day after, the first of the peas she’d sown might be full enough to pick.

 

When Dillahan had moved his water line to the hill land he drove the tractor, its trailer behind it, down to the river-field. The fence he intended to replace was sagging, gaps here and there in the slack sheep-wire, a few of the posts rotten in the ground. Disturbed by his arrival, his ewes huddled together in the middle of the field before they processed back to the shade of the alders that grew randomly on both riverbanks, occasionally in the water. His sheepdogs settled down, in the shade too.

He wrenched out the staples that secured the barbed wire and the sheep-wire. They came out easily, but even so the work was slow - twenty-two new posts to be driven in, the old ones dug out if they had to be, the wire replaced. It would take him what remained of the morning, and longer after that than he’d thought, maybe even another hour tomorrow.

The time of year was difficult for Dillahan: it was in June seven years ago that the tragedy which had left him both widowed and childless had occurred. Try as he would, he could never prevent the memory from nagging when another June came, and lingering then until summer was finished with and the days were different. It was an October - sixteen months after the accident - when his mother had died, leaving him entirely on his own.

His sisters had found him Ellie. Not telling him, they went down to Templeross, having heard about Cloonhill. They put it to him afterwards in the kitchen, explaining about the institution they’d visited and repeating what he knew: that both of them being married, neither was free to take their mother’s place on the farm. They had already failed in their search for a housekeeper, but did not now see it as failure, since instead of the older woman they were looking for, at Cloonhill they had been offered someone younger, experienced in domestic duties and prepared to take on some farm work: all that seemed more suitable. His sisters handed him a reference from the Reverend Mother in Templeross and he read it while his sisters were silent. When he put it down they said he wouldn’t do better.

Fragments of all this, and what followed the arrangement he had agreed to, floated about Dillahan’s thoughts as his sledgehammer drove in the first of the corner posts. ‘There’s not many as lucky,’ he’d heard one of his sisters say in a telephone call that was made to Cloonhill, and hadn’t known whether it was he or the girl who was referred to. He’d heard himself called a decent man, a man you could trust in the circumstances that had come about, a man who didn’t miss Mass no matter what. Then his older sister drove away to collect the girl and brought her to the farm, her belongings in a white wooden box that had to be returned.

Dillahan was sunburnt, with reddish hair, the skin of his forehead and face freckled, his physical strength suggested by his features and his bulk. Since inheriting the farm he had managed on his own because he wanted to, hiring men only to help with the baling, a few days in September. His land was good, his acreage small; he rented grazing when it was required. He had worked nowhere else and had never wanted to.

He supported the corner post so that it would take the strain of the wire. Two strands of barbed above the squared sheep-wire were necessary if ever he put heifers in the river-field. He attached the second length, keeping it taut with the iron claw he used. He hammered in a staple and then another before he released the claw. He had to move out of the shade and the sun was hot now. His shirt was damp with sweat, a rash of nettle stings reddening one forearm.

Again the accident was there, suddenly, the way it always came. The thump there’d been, the moment of bewilderment, the sun in the yard as fierce as it was today, the moment of realizing. As best he could, he pushed it all away. ‘We’ll try her so,’ he’d said to his sisters, and they’d said he should drive with them to Cloonhill so that he could see what he was getting, but he hadn’t wanted to do that. ‘She’ll be all right,’ he’d said.

He went to the trailer for more posts and carried them to the riverbank one by one. He drove her into Rathmoye when the shopping was more than usual, too heavy or bulky for a bicycle; he didn’t begrudge her the time. He would have kept her company at the funeral yesterday except that he had never got to know Mrs Connulty as she had, delivering the Friday egg order. She hadn’t minded being there on her own, she said, and had brought him back the news, as she always did: who had been at the funeral Mass and what they’d said in English’s about the raddle powder that was ordered and still hadn’t come in. Not for an instant did he imagine, the day she had arrived, that another day would come when he’d marry her, that he’d stand beside her and hear the same words said again, that afterwards he’d have his hand shaken as a husband. The wedding decorations were as they’d been before, the same advertisement for Winter’s Tale sherry on mirrored glass, the noise and laughter, confetti strewn. ‘’Tis better so, ’tis better,’ an old farmer he’d known all his life lowered his voice to approve when there was a private moment, each of them taking a corner at the urinals out the back. He sang for them at the wedding party, for her too, as everyone there knew. They went to Lahinch for three days afterwards, the farm looked after by one of the Corrigans. She’d never seen the sea before.