Love and Summer (13 page)

‘What is, Mr Wren?’

‘You have the records back where they belong, sir. An act of goodness, sir.’

About to remind the old man that he hadn’t, in fact, accepted the documents he’d been shown when they met before, Florian said instead:

‘The drawer of the little table.’

‘I rest easy at night, sir, now that they’re in the drawer again. I do, sir. I do.’

So fierce was this insistence, so brightly lit the weary eyes, all weariness gone, that Florian’s polite lie might have been a statement prompted by the most profound compassion.

‘There isn’t a book in the library isn’t accounted for in the papers, sir. Two years it took me and I mind the time, and the work half done, when the Bishop of Limerick met with a little creature in the salad. The bishop didn’t say a word, sir. He put it on the side of his plate and took no notice, not drawing attention to it, nothing like that at all. I never spoke out at the dinner table, it wasn’t my place to contribute to any conversation. The time Mrs Colonel Palfrey came she wasn’t herself, the Colonel concerned about her. The Misses Uniake wouldn’t be separated at the table. Young Cavendish had to have his meat cut. But I was silent at the table always.’

Not interrupting, Florian nodded his receipt of each item as it was completed.

‘The butler was Standleby then, sir, an Englishman of Norfolk. Wanted, they said in the kitchen, by the Norfolk constabulary, but I didn’t give credit to that. There was resentment in the kitchen quarters, to do with Mr Standleby’s ways. The manner he had they called bumptious, but a butler is privileged as to manner, I said myself when the sculleryman Teague would go on about it. Mr Standleby was replaced in the end and Franklin came from the employ of the Villiers-Stuarts.’

‘I see.’

‘It was indulgence in drink, on Mr Standleby’s part, sir. Well, you’d have heard. As pleasant a disposition as you’d find, but drink was taken on the pantry side of things.’

‘Yes.’

‘There’s never a house the size of Lisquin without you have an upset. The first governess I knew confided that to me. She came into the long room of the library after Macaulay’s
Essays
, and I led her to where they were and she made that confidence.’

‘I understand.’

‘From up at the top of Hurley Lane, sir, you can see the smoke from the Lisquin grates. It is when the smoke isn’t there you’d know the coal wasn’t delivered, sir.’

‘Yes.’

‘The smoke’s there again, sir.’

‘Yes, of course.’

In that same moment Ellie Dillahan passed near them, crossing the street they were in. A van delivering sides of meat was in the way and Florian didn’t see her.

 

But she saw Florian. She watched him listening, then holding his hand out and Orpen Wren humbly accepting the ending of the encounter. She loved Florian Kilderry: silently she said that, and said it again while he rode off, out of the Square on to the Castledrummond road.

16

Nettles thrived within the walls that remained. A clump of brambles spread from a corner, sorrel flourished, dandelions gave colour. A door-frame had mostly rotted away, joists hung crookedly. The Lisquin gate-lodge had never had stairs.

Outside, a sheet of corrugated iron, in places eaten by rust, leant against a water-pump. The high gates that opened on to a clay side-road were chained, a farmer’s barrier in place across an avenue that went on, to curve away through pasture where cattle grazed.

Florian came often now, but each time saw the lavender still uncut, the grass trodden only where he had walked on it himself. An offer made for the house had been accepted; people no longer came to look it over. He had time on his hands.

Once he rode on to Cnocrea and went by the farmhouse, white and tidy, nobody about. He guessed it was the right one but, fearing again to be a nuisance, he rode on and in a roundabout way returned to the gate-lodge. It didn’t seem much to ask that he should be allowed to say he was sorry before he left Ireland for ever, but every day he was less hopeful than he’d been the day before. He found a piece of iron and rooted out, as best he could, the ivy that was choking the lavender. He wondered if she would guess when he had gone that it was he who had done that but, after all, why should she?

Then, when he had waited for longer than usual one morning and had decided not to come again, a sound on the road disturbed the silence. There’d never been a sound before. There’d never been anything or anyone.

 

Men clapped while the woman danced. The woman was laughing, her arms thrown out, her scarlet skirt tossed about in the dance, her fair hair wild: the book was face downward on the stubby grass, its coloured cover brightened by the sun. He was kneeling beside it, close to where the lavender grew. He was wearing the hat he’d been wearing the last time.

‘Hullo,’ he said.

Ellie pushed her bicycle through the gap where once there’d been a postern gate. He took it from her and laid it down beside his.

‘Your lavender’s dying, did you know?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘I’ve tried to weed it.’

 

She was wearing a different dress, green, in stripes. A handbag was in the basket attached to the handlebars of her bicycle, its shiny black surface gone in places. There were freckles on the bridge of her nose, a few on her forehead. He hadn’t noticed them before.

‘I didn’t mean to distress you that day,’ he said. ‘I came here a few times. To say I was sorry in case you were ever here too.’

‘I shouldn’t have gone off like that.’

‘It didn’t matter.’

‘I shouldn’t have, though, without a word.’

As she spoke, Florian realized that Ellie Dillahan loved him, and hesitated. Shelhanagh House was almost sold, his passport on the mantelpiece, a suitcase waiting to be packed: he searched for words to say it might be better to end what had not begun. But words eluded him and it was Isabella - her smile, her voice, and she herself in different places - who crowded his thoughts, not this girl who was saying now that if he liked she would show him where the house the old man talked about had been. Again he hesitated and the silence felt longer than he knew it was.

‘If you have time for it,’ he said at last.

 

They left their bicycles where they were. Yes, she had time, Ellie said as they walked away from them, time enough. It wasn’t like being in Rathmoye, on the streets, among people, being frightened. There was a calmness and, as if she were alone, she belonged in its quiet.

He held the barbed wire apart while she scrambled through it, and helped her again where a tree had fallen across the avenue. When he gave her his hand to take it was the first time they had touched, and still the calm was there.

 

‘Did you always live in the hills?’ he asked. ‘Before where you are now?’

‘I came to the farm a servant.’ From Cloonhill, she said, an institution.

‘Are you an orphan?’

‘They called us foundlings. At Cloonhill we all were that. Found somewhere.’

They sat down where there was a gateway in the wire fence that ran along the avenue. They leant their backs against the bars of the gate. The cattle in the fields on either side of the avenue were inquisitive, poking at the wire with their heads before they ambled away. Florian searched for cigarettes but there wasn’t one left in the packet he found.

‘Was it horrible, the institution? Did you hate it?’

‘We were always there. The nuns pretended our birthdays, they gave us our names. They knew no more about us than we did ourselves. No, it wasn’t horrible, I didn’t hate it.’

A horse-dealer’s residence Cloonhill had been, left in a will to the convent in Templeross, to be put to charitable use. Its concrete façade was made uglier by institutional severity, the lower panes of uncurtained windows painted white. The horse-dealer’s ballroom was still called that, the foundling girls of one time or another clustered around its wood stove on winter evenings, or sitting in twos at desks that had been a gift when they’d become too worn and grimy elsewhere. Upstairs the mattresses had been passed on too. The dining-room’s long deal table had, and clothes and tattered schoolbooks had.

Florian entered that cloistered world, footsteps clattering on bare stairs, the murmur of catechism and prayer before another day could properly begin, forgotten porridge acrid on the air. Demure, obedient, fifteen abandoned girls, as many as the house could take, stood silently in line, their washed hands held out, hair cut short, clothes fitting them as best they could. And each girl knelt when another day was over, beside a metal bed, a strip of patterned linoleum tacked down, a single wash-stand shared. Privacy was a nightdress put on before the last of daytime clothes were taken off.

Apples were picked in the horse-dealer’s orchard, blackberries from the fields. Potatoes were cultivated, milk supplied as charity from a farm. No man was employed at Cloonhill, a man’s assistance begged only when the generator failed or chimneys had to be swept, when pipes froze in winter or wasps in summer made their nests.

The Reverend Mother’s visit was in spring; and next there was the August outing, beads told in the sacred ambience of Holycross. They found the carpentry nun: dead in her shed, her eighty-first year not quite achieved, a picture-frame that had come apart still in a vice. You were punished if you repeated bad words. You were punished if you talked to the delivery men, or whispered ‘You Are My Sunshine’ or ‘Bésame Mucho’. You were punished if you danced in the ballroom. You accepted what there was. You were fortunate.

 

Where the avenue ended moss carpeted an empty flatness on which clover was scrappily nourished. Beyond a wicket gate there was a path that disappeared into trees, another way to the house that had been razed. A second avenue, more wildly overgrown, dwindled away, becoming nothing. They went back then.

‘Thank you for showing me,’ Florian said before they parted.

He watched her going, puffs of dust forming where the bicycle wheels disturbed the road’s dried-up surface. She didn’t look back, as she might have. It wasn’t her way; already he knew that. The narrow byroad narrowed further and then she was no longer there.

17

The Lisquin gate-lodge became their place. Behind a loose stone in one of the walls there was a cavity where a note might be left should meeting there not be possible as it had been arranged. They lay in sunshine beside the bicycles that were no longer ordinary, having become the means of their being in one another’s company. They walked again on the avenue that went nowhere, never venturing beyond the emptiness it led them to, since going further in that direction would have brought them to where cars and tractors went by and where the bungalows that were the outskirts of Rathmoye began. It was on the avenue, near the fallen trees, that they first embraced.

While more time passed they discovered the maze at Mount Olery Gardens and the tearooms there which, being for tourists, weren’t frequented by local people. They cycled on unmade-up byroads to Enagh, where the Great Cross of the Field was another tourist attraction. They walked in the woods at Lyre, visited the monks’ graves at Ballyhayes, climbed up to the standing stones at Gortalassa. They were never again seen in each other’s company in Rathmoye.

Although they expected that Orpen Wren would sooner or later appear at Lisquin, he never did. Nor did anyone else, and the sense of being lost in uninterrupted peace became their clandestine sanctuary. And Ellie’s stream of recollection, long undisturbed, found life again.

‘There isn’t much,’ she protested when she was asked about coming to the farmhouse.

‘Tell me, though.’

‘It was the same for all of us when we were sent somewhere. ’

The nuns would enquire around and then they made the arrangements. When the day came the girls would be in the hall to say goodbye to the one who was going. A girl would be lucky when there’d be a place for her.

‘That was said many a time, and you’d always want to go to the house that was got for you. You’d never not want to go. Great store was set on it when everything was fixed, and you’d be excited. We used guess where would it be, a town was what we wanted. Waterford I wanted myself for the sound of it, but they said a farm.’

The more he asked her about her childhood at Cloonhill the more Ellie loved her interrogator. No matter how strange he still sometimes seemed, she felt as if all her life she had known him. The past he talked about himself became another part of her: the games he had played alone, the untidy rooms of the house he described, the parties given, the pictures painted. Being with him in the woods at Lyre, where the air was cold and the trees imposed a gloomy darkness, or walking among the monks’ graves, or being with him anywhere, telling or listening, was for Ellie more than friendship, or living, had ever been before.

‘A farm,’ he prompted in the tearooms at Mount Olery and she said it was Sister Ambrose who told her it was a widowed man she was to go to.

‘She said get the girls down to the hall, half fiv e or six the car would come. So we were in the hall, the rain pelting against the windows and the fanlight, and someone looking out saw the car and then the bell wires rattled before the bell rang, the way that always was. And Sister Clare came hurrying to open the front door and a woman came in, rain dripping off her. “We have her ready for you,” Sister Clare said, and said to me to step forward. “Are you the the girl then?” the woman asked me and Sister Clare said speak up. The box that had my belongings in it had to be returned and she told the woman and the woman said she’d drop it off when next she’d be passing. “Lift out the box to the car for Ellie,” Sister Clare instructed, for that was always done when a girl was going, and it was Rose and Philomena this night who did it. “Ach, you’ll settle in grand,” the woman said in the car, the windscreen wipers going. One of the man’s sisters she was; another of them was waiting in the farmhouse to get a look at me. He carried the box upstairs and his sisters took it away when they left. I knew about the accident at the farm, Sister Ambrose told me. A girl would have to know a thing like that, she said. She’d have to know in case the man would be affected by it. You couldn’t call it fortunate, she said, any man widowed, but wasn’t there good in it all the same, the way things were now? I didn’t mind it was a farm, I never minded that. You get used to a farm’s ways in the end.’