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 Hoteclass="underline" 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.