Love and Summer (6 page)

‘You noticed it?’

‘Oh, I did, I did.’

‘Would Mr McGovern remember the occasion?’

‘To tell you the truth, he said he didn’t.’

The documents that were carried twice a day to the railway station - notes kept of births and deaths, receipts for burial charges at the Church of Ireland graveyard at Lisquin, papers relating to the purchase or sale of land, records of maintenance and repairs at the house - made turgid reading for the most part. But there were a few personal letters that were of greater interest, that touched upon life during the years of Lord Townshend’s viceroyalty, or related details of the rebellion of 1798, or told of the Famine years. In shops Orpen sometimes left one for perusal.

Carefully now, he tucked what had been returned to him into his clothes and continued on his way. Sometimes his name eluded him, but returned when it was used by someone on the streets, or by the post-office clerks when he went to collect his pension. They chided him in the post office because the greater part of what he received there was given away to the tinker girls who held out to him their rag-wrapped infants, or was dropped into the palms of the tramps who now and again passed through the town, or slipped to shame-faced men who mumbled tales of misfortune and bad luck.

Greeted by none of these this morning, Orpen reached the Square, where cars were untidily parked and a woman in an overall was sweeping the pavement outside Bodell’s Bar. Windows bore the names of solicitors and accountants on pebbled glass or sunburnt mesh; more brashly, various other services were offered. The brass plates of doctors and the town’s dentist had for the most part lost their pristine shine; a fortnightly chiropodist relied for custom on a handwritten postcard beside his bell. Hall doors were green or red, black or shades of blue.

One house was derelict. Weeds sprouted from chutes that had rusted, an aerial drooped crookedly from the masonry of a chimney-stack. But next door a credit company was spruce and, further on, the steps and pillars of the grey courthouse struck an important note, although today no court was in session.

The curator of the St John papers rested on the seat beside the Square’s tribute to a rebel hero, a resolute, shirtsleeved figure with his right arm raised in a gesture of command, the unfurled flag he held draping folds of bronze over the stone of his monument’s pedestal. Whenever he was in the Square, Orpen rested on this seat, the colours of the hall doors impinging a little on his reflections, the derelict house occasionally seeming hostile. He watched Mr Hassett from the bank making his way in the direction of Bodell’s Bar. There were references in the papers to the bank when it had been the Valley Hotel: how the St John family of that time had left their trap or dog-cart in the hotel yard when they came in to Rathmoye.

Mr Hassett entered the public house after he had paused to speak to the woman sweeping the pavement. Orpen watched the daily girl polishing the brass on the hall door of the Connultys’ bed-and-breakfast house and when a moment later he noticed a stranger in the Square there was no mistaking, even in the distance, the St John straight back and assured comportment. This would be old George Freddie’s grandson, born after the family had gone. George Anthony he’d been christened.

Orpen Wren stood up, saying to himself as soon as he had a clearer view that this was definitely George Anthony. When he saluted him across the Square the stranger didn’t notice at first, and when he did he hesitated. Then Florian Kilderry raised a hand in response.

6

‘Come on out of that.’ Dillahan called up his dogs and they came at once when they saw him going to the Vauxhall, not the tractor. The front tyre that was leaking air a bit hadn’t lost much, but he put the pump in the back anyway in case it played up. Then he drove over to Crilly, where once in a while it was necessary to round up his mountain sheep, to count them and look for any that might have strayed. It was the only time the dogs ever entered the car and they always knew. As much as he did himself, they liked the mountainy land.

He was delayed there because an old ewe had died. He might have left her in the heather, but he found a place that was a better grave for what remained of her. He wasn’t sentimental, but he respected sheep.

He watched his two dogs working them, gathering them and driving them in his direction, holding them while he counted. Misty earlier, the sky had cleared. Fluffy white clouds moved gently; patches of blue appeared in the grey. He didn’t have to climb higher than the beginning of the rock-face.

He drove the Vauxhall slowly down from Crilly, past Gortduff and Baun. He stopped by the gate into a field he was hoping to buy. Its acquisition would make his days easier because of the access through it to his river land, the long way round no longer necessary. He liked the tidiness of that as much as the prospect of increasing the extent of his farm and restoring the field to good heart: Gahagan had let it go.

He left the car in the yard but didn’t go into the house. He hadn’t expected to be back from Crilly so soon or he would have said he’d have something to eat in the kitchen instead of taking sandwiches today. The dogs went with him when he took the tractor to the lower hill fields.

 

Ellie pulled the sheets of newspaper back, then knelt on them again, applying more Cardinal polish to the scullery floor. She hadn’t ever used Cardinal before, but the concrete surface had been that same red once; she could tell because there were traces of it left behind. The whole scullery looked brighter when she’d finished.

In the kitchen she ran water into a kettle. When it boiled she made tea in the small teapot she used when she was alone. She thought of poaching an egg, but she didn’t because she wasn’t hungry.

She sat in the yard on one of the kitchen chairs, with her tea and the
Nenagh News
. A pickaxe had been found in the boot of a car when its driver was arrested, declared drunk. Ore had been discovered near Toomyvara; Killeen’s Pride had won twice at Ballingarry. Top prices were being paid for ewes.

The newspaper slipped from her fingers and she didn’t pick it up. She shouldn’t have liked the photographer smiling at her. She shouldn’t have said she’d show him when he said what he was after was chicken-and-ham paste. She had walked about the Cash and Carry with a stranger she didn’t know. She had told him her name. ‘Nothing,’ she’d said when he asked her what Ellie was short for. He laughed and she wanted to laugh herself and didn’t know why.

She picked up the newspaper from where it had fallen on to the concrete surface. She carried the chair and the tray back to the kitchen, the newspaper carelessly folded under one arm. She threw away the dregs in the teapot and washed up her cup and saucer.

‘Hullo,’ a voice called out in the yard.

She hadn’t heard a car. It would be Mrs Hadden for her buttermilk. It was the day she came and she never drove in, preferring to park in the road because she found it difficult to negotiate the turn into the gateway.

Grateful for the distraction, yet resenting it, Ellie pushed the kettle on to the hot ring in case Mrs Hadden wanted tea. She came to the front door, which no one else ever did. ‘I mustn’t disturb you,’ she always said when Ellie opened it and she said it now. Ellie led her to the kitchen.

‘A cup of tea?’ she offered, and Mrs Hadden said no, not adding, as she was inclined to, that she was on a diuretic and had to watch it. What she liked instead of tea was a soda bun if buns were cooling on a wire rack.

Ellie apologized because there were no buns today. She fetched the buttermilk from the scullery, in one of the two jars Mrs Hadden provided herself, and Mrs Hadden began to fish coins out of her purse, at the same time reporting on the condition of an aunt who’d been taken into a home.

‘Heart-rending,’ she said. ‘Not that it isn’t a lively place. It’s the quiet ones you’d be suspicious of.’

There was more, about homes that had been, or should be, closed down because of casualness as regards sedating drugs. ‘It’ll come to all of us, of course,’ Mrs Hadden said.

‘Yes, it will.’

‘I had an uncle-in-law who refused point blank to go in anywhere. Horry Gould.’

Horry Gould had gone on to reach a hundred and one. He had bought a new suit of clothes every birthday for the last ten years of his life. Another way of being defiant, Mrs Hadden said.

‘The day before he went, he was singing “The Wild Colonial Boy” in his bed.’

Mrs Hadden had another aunt, who embroidered purses, but attacks of rheumatism increasingly interfered with that. Ellie had heard before about this curtailment and was now brought up to date, the news being that the affliction eased a little in the summer months.

‘Small mercies,’ Mrs Hadden conceded. ‘We’d call it that, I suppose.’

‘Yes.’

His own name was a mouthful, he’d said: Florian Kilderry. His face crinkled up a bit when he laughed and sometimes it did when he smiled. ‘You’d know everyone in Rathmoye?’ he’d said, the girl at the counter listening. He had walked out of the Cash and Carry beside her.

‘It’s a legend in the family,’ Mrs Hadden said. ‘Singing songs in your bed at a hundred and one!’

‘Yes.’

Because it was heavy, he said when he took the carrier bag from her, and it wasn’t heavy at all. His bicycle was called a Golden Eagle, an eagle on the upright of the handlebars. She’d never seen a bicycle called that before and she wondered if it was special even though the mud-guards were battered and looked old.

‘We saw old Horry into his grave at Ardrony.’

Lost for a moment in the conversation, Ellie nodded anyway, covering her confusion by saying it was good, the summer being a better time for rheumatism. ‘It’s only a handful of people I’d know in Rathmoye,’ she’d said when they were standing outside in the sun, and he said of course. He offered her a cigarette.

‘Are you well yourself, Ellie?’ Mrs Hadden stood up, saying she was on her way.

‘Oh, I am,’ Ellie said, and wondered if Mrs Hadden had noticed something before she remembered that this was a question she was always asked.

‘It’s good you’re well, Ellie.’

They walked to the yard together, and on to where the car was parked, drawn in to the narrow verge of the road.

‘Next week I could be late,’ Mrs Hadden said.

The car was backed slowly, and a little way into the yard gateway, before it was turned. Mrs Hadden settled herself and waved from the window she’d wound down. Ellie stood in the gateway, listening to the sound of the car’s engine until it was no longer there. Cow-parsley was limp among faded foxgloves on the verges of the road. A field-mouse scampered and disappeared. The last of the dust disturbed by the car tyres settled.

If he was there again in Rathmoye she would cross the street. If he spoke to her she would say she had to get on. She would be ashamed confessing it because it was silly, because all she had to do was to think of something else when he came into her mind. But now, when she tried to, she couldn’t. She kept seeing him, standing against packets of Bird’s jelly in the Cash and Carry, tins of mustard, Saxa salt. As if they meant something, they were stuck in her mind, as if they were more than they could possibly be, and she wondered if they would ever be the same again, if what she’d bought herself would be, the Brown and Polson’s cornflour, Rinso. She wondered if she would be the same herself; if she was no longer - and would not be again - the person she was when she had gone to Mrs Connulty’s funeral and for all the time before that. When he had asked whose funeral it was it had been the beginning but she hadn’t known. When Miss Connulty had drawn her attention to him in the Square she had realized. When he’d smiled in the Cash and Carry she’d known it too. She had been different already when she stood with him in the sunshine, when he offered her the cigarette and she shook her head. Anyone could have seen them and she hadn’t cared.

In the house she put on her farm clothes, a brown overall and wellington boots. She collected the milk buckets and the cans from the dairy and scoured them at the kitchen sink. She hosed the dairy, then brushed the surplus of water into the shallow drain. She laid the buckets and the cans, the scoops and measures, on the long concrete shelf, each in its own position, as she’d once been shown. She couldn’t do anything when first she’d come: she couldn’t tell the breeds of sheep; she’d never collected eggs or cleaned a henhouse, or tethered a goat. She hadn’t known a man before, except for priests and a few workmen and delivery men, and then only knowing them to see, hardly more than that. The first time she’d seen shaving soap turning into a lather that the razor scraped away she’d been astonished. She’d never sat down opposite a man across a table from her. But before she became a wife, when she was still a servant, she was used to everything, except the sharing of a bed.

In the crab-apple orchard the hens ran freely, a few of them clustered beneath the trees, a black one pecking near a tractor tyre that had been split to make a feeder for lambs but had somehow found a place there. On the dry, hard ground there was hardly a blade of grass left. When winter came, grass would grow again; it always did. Fourteen more eggs had been laid and she collected them in the cracked brown bowl that had become part of her daily existence. Closing the gate again when she left the crab-apple orchard, she slipped the loop of chain over the gate-post. He had a way of hesitating before he spoke, of looking away for a moment and then looking back. He had a way of holding a cigarette. When he’d offered her one he’d tapped one out of the packet for himself and hadn’t lit it. The rest of the time he was with her he’d held it, unlit, between his fingers.

Slowly, both hands clasped round the brown egg-bowl, she returned to the house. In the kitchen she mixed Kia-Ora Orange with water as cold as it would come, filling a plastic bottle to the brim. She scraped potatoes and cut up a cabbage before she set off to the hillside land with her husband’s drink.