“She’s doing middling,” he admitted reluctantly. “There’s too many around her. She needs to get away.”
“What have you in the box?”
“Money.”
“Why isn’t it in the bank?”
“There’s enough money in the bank,” he said defensively. “The tax man has a habit of peeping into banks.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Leave it here till I get back,” he said, and placed a key beside the box.
“How much is there?”
“There must be near thirty thousand,” he admitted reluctantly.
“We are going to count it,” Ruttledge said decisively. The Shah protested, but Ruttledge was determined: he would not allow room for suspicion.
In the bedroom, with the curtains drawn, they counted out the money like a pair of thieves. The metal box contained more than forty-three thousand pounds.
“You could buy a house and land with this. You could get married. You could start a life. You could go to Africa or America,” Ruttledge said as he prepared to put the box away. “It’s there like strength.”
“It’s better than the other fella having it, anyhow,” the Shah agreed uncertainly; and Ruttledge decided not to protest or joke any further.
There was no time to walk the fields. The time had disappeared in the slow counting.
He ate in silence from a large white plate: sausage, rasher, grilled halves of tomato, mushrooms, onion, black pudding, a thin slice of liver, a grilled lamb chop. From another plate he drew and buttered slices of freshly baked soda bread. By his chair the sheepdog sat in patient expectation. As always, the movements of the Shah’s hands were delicate.
“Is it all right?” he enquired politely when he finished.
“Of course,” Kate nodded and he gave what was left on the plate to the sheepdog.
With an audible sigh of satisfaction he reached for the slice of apple tart, the crust sprinkled with fine sugar. He poured cream from a small white jug. He drank from the mug of steaming tea. “God bless you, Kate,” he said as he rose and reached for his cap. “You’ll not see me now for a while.”
“Have a great time in Burtonport.”
“I doubt if it’ll be great,” he said, “but we’ll be there anyhow.”
With little warning the weather broke, not in the usual summer showers but in a sustained downpour, with rumbles of distant thunder and quick lightning flashes above the fields and lake. The black cat grew agitated and cowered in a corner by the cooker, protected by the rocking chair. Out in the wet air the sound of water rushing towards the lake was loud in all the drains. When the storm ended, the broken weather continued with high winds and showers.
The days disappeared in attendance on small tasks. The fly struck the lambs a second time. An old sheep was found on her back, two small lambs by her side: if she had remained as she was their life was gone. When righted, she staggered around in a circle and fell a number of times. Once she regained her balance, she checked that the lambs were hers before allowing them the joyous frenzy of their suck. Weeds had to be pulled in the garden; carrots, lettuce, onion, beets, parsnips were thinned; the beanstalks supported, the peas staked, the potato stalks and the fruit trees sprayed. These evenings they ate late. In the soft light the room seemed to grow green and enormous as it reached out to the fields and the crowns of the trees, the green banks and the meadow and trees to enter the room with the whole fullness and weight of summer.
“It’s ages since we’ve seen Mary and Jamesie,” Kate said one evening. “Why don’t we walk round the lake? Johnny must have gone back to England by now.”
Below the Ruttledges’ stood the entrance to the house where Mary had grown up on the edge of the lake, its stone walls and outhouses hidden in the tall trees. In the middle of the living room an ash tree had taken root where they had played cards and said the Rosary in the evenings before raking the ashes over the red coals; but it was still easy to see what a charming, beautiful place the living house had been, a stone’s throw from the water. The blue of the pieces of broken delph in the shallows of the lake out from the piers even spoke of prosperity and ease. Cherry and apple and pear trees grew wild about the house, and here and there the fresh green of the gooseberry shone out of a wilderness of crawling blackthorn. Hundreds of daffodils and white narcissi still greeted each spring by the lake with beauty, though there was no one near at hand to notice.
As a schoolgirl Mary had fallen in love with Jamesie and had eyes for no other man. He used to come round the shore on his battered bicycle. She was always waiting. Their courtship could not have been more different from the harsh lesson Johnny had received.
On their marriage she moved to Jamesie’s house across the lake. Jamesie’s father left the upper room where he had slept since his own marriage, to take up Jamesie’s single bed in the lower room, across from where Johnny slept beneath the window.
Vases of flowers appeared on windowsills and tables. There were touches of colour in bedspreads and chair coverings she brought with her from her own house. Linen for the beds was washed and aired and ironed and changed regularly. The meals were suddenly delicious after the old rough cooking. The house had always been cleanly kept but now it sparkled.
For years she had waited for him. Now she was with him. This was her new life, but in her joy she discovered a fresh anxiety. She had to leave that other house she also loved, her father and her young brother. In spite of their insistence that they could manage, she baked bread for the two houses and brought the loaves around the lake a couple of times a week.
Every Thursday her father drove into town in the pony and trap. When he had the shopping done he went to Hoy’s Hotel, which was owned by his cousin, and drank several glasses of their best whiskey, an eighteen-year-old White Powers, while engaged in agreeable conversation with Mister Hoy about politics and the political party to which they both belonged. Then the pony took him home. Unless there was wind or heavy rain he was always seen to be asleep in a corner of the trap as they passed between the two bars in Shruhaun. There was so little traffic on the roads, his nature so unassuming and easygoing, his little weakness so well known, that this quiet passage drew no more attention than affectionate smiles of recognition. No one even shouted a mischievous greeting. Generally, he woke coming in round the shore, the pony’s pace quickening in anticipation of being released from the trap and watered and given hay and oats. If the quick change of pace hadn’t woken him, he would be quickly shaken awake by the rutted road.
On Thursdays, no matter what the weather, she could not resist going out to the brow of the hill with the two dogs about the time the pony was due to turn in round the shore. She would breathe with relief as soon as the trap appeared and the pony started to gallop. She followed it all the way to the house till their dog began to bark: “That will surely wake him now if he’s not awake already. I wish all people knew their business as well as that brown pony.”
When Jamesie teased her about going out to the brow of the hill, she was silent: she was beginning to understand that to be without anxiety was to be without love and that it could not be shared. She was content and happy that her first and older love, who had never spoken a harsh word to her in all the days of her girlhood, was safely home and sleeping off his Thursday in the big bed with the broken brass bells.
Then the world she had left, little by little, began to disappear. On a wet soft evening in October, veils of mist and light rain obscuring the hills as well as the water, the pony trotted safely home from the Thursday outing to the town, but the life in the trap had died somewhere along the road. She had been too young to feel her mother’s death. This was her first great loss, and she was inconsolable.