She dabbed on eau-de-Cologne in case the onions lingered on her clothes; reflected in the dressing-table looking-glass, she settled pins into her hair and applied a little powder to her nose and cheeks. A few days after the death she had moved into this room - out of the smaller one where she’d been visited by Arthur Tetlow. Traveller in veterinary requirements, trapped in a marriage in Sheffield, Arthur Tetlow had gone to fight in the war that was already threatening when he’d stayed in the house for the last time. She knew he had, and when peace eventually came there had been the hope that he would once more drive into the Square as so often he had, in the same green English-registered Ford, its celluloid rear window repaired with tape; that he would look up and see her, and hurry to the house. But instead Arthur Tetlow had disappeared into the war, taking with him the promises he had made in good faith and the future they had talked about. No man could help being caught up in a war.
Honouring that time, Miss Connulty lifted her choice for today from the cushion of a tiny velvet-clad box: the sapphire earrings. She took a sleeper from each ear and replaced them with the glittering blue clusters. A ceremony her afternoon adorning of herself had become this summer, the occasion each time finished with another dab of eau-de-Cologne, another touch of lip salve. She stayed a little longer when she’d completed all that, contemplating without emotion her reflected image in the looking-glass. Then she settled everything back where it belonged on the dressing-table, the jewellery in the shallow top drawer.
On the way downstairs she stood looking out into the Square from the window he would have seen her at if he had come back instead of having to fight for his country. ‘Talk sense,’ her mother had ridiculed all that: back to some strumpet of a wife was where he’d gone; a man like that would only have a strumpet for a wife.
Her mother had burnt the sheets, tearing them from the bed, ordering the daily woman out of the house to sweep the yard, then carrying the sheets downstairs and poking them into the range. Her mother had poured scorn on tears and pleading, on the trust placed in Arthur Tetlow’s promises, on his talk about Sheffield and coming back. All of it was pathetic, her mother said: the pair of them would be punished for their craven appetites; both of them would suffer all their lives. The ugly misfortune that had fallen upon the family would always be there, her mother predicted, a consequence that was ugly too.
‘Your daughter’s a hooer,’ her greeting was when her husband came in from the back bar of the public house, the smell of burning sheets still in the air. And when he heard what he had to hear he vowed he would go to Sheffield after Arthur Tetlow and kill him stone dead.
But instead he took his daughter on the bus to Dublin and held her hand the whole time, through Roscrea and Monasterevin and over the Curragh, and when the bus drew up in Naas she had to get off because she was feeling sick. A man came up to him on O’Connell Bridge and asked him how was he and he said grand, although he wasn’t. He gave the man a coin, because it was always his way to give beggars something. He told her to pray as soon as she lay down, before they’d do anything to her.
It was a chemist’s shop he took her to and they closed it before they began. They turned the notice round on the door and pulled the blind down over the glass. They told her father to wait there and he said to her when she came out from the back that they’d have a cup of tea and they had it in the tea lounge of the Adelphi cinema. He got a car to drive them back to the quays and they went on the bus again. Her mother said he was a murderer when they got back, maybe half past ten it was. A bed had been made up for him in an attic and he slept there that night and always afterwards. Nothing more was ever said between her mother and her father.
The events of that day had not receded for Miss Connulty. Her cruelty to the dead was their ceremonial preservation: the time for pain was over, yet her wish was that it should not be, that there should always be something left - a wince, a tremor, some part of her anger that was not satisfied.
10
They asked the same questions. They enquired about the drains, they trudged around the attics. They asked if the soil was alkaline, they wondered about the electric wiring, they noticed ill-fitting windows. A few were alarmed by the water rats. Others turned around and drove away.
Florian had propped up on one of the kitchen windowsills the postcard he hadn’t thrown on to his bonfire. By the lesser Ghirlandaio the painting was, the card’s recipient Miss Mabel Thynne of 21 The Paddocks, Cheltenham. Weather heavenly, a message read, this city too. Reduced to sepia tints, the innocence Ghirlandaio had painted was not entirely lost, and the resemblance Florian had told himself was imagination he noticed still. Bored by people expressing surprise at the reduced condition of the drawing-room and asking questions he was unable to answer, he returned one morning to Rathmoye.
‘I have them for you,’ Mr Clancy said, a wiry, bustling man who liked to keep a conversation going. ‘Wait now till I’ll see.’
All the boots and shoes that were ready - soled or heeled or both, new laces put in, polished - were on a shelf above the muddle of work yet to be done. None was labelled, nor was there a note on any of what was owing. Mr Clancy always knew.
‘Is himself in form?’ he enquired, finding Dillahan’s black Sunday shoes, new heels on both.
‘He’s all right,’ Ellie said.
‘And yourself, Mrs Dillahan?’
‘I’m all right.’
They waited for her to be pregnant. In the shops, at the presbytery, old Mrs Connulty in her lifetime, her daughter now. Miss Burke at the wool counter often glanced to see. A few had given up, as Ellie had herself.
She paid for the repairs. Those shoes were worn so little they would see him out, Mr Clancy predicted. A shoe wasn’t made like that any more, he added, shining each one of the pair before he put both on the counter.
‘Wait a minute while I’ll get you change,’ he said.
But he didn’t have it and Ellie went away with her ten-shilling note to try the Matthew Street shops.
Without knowing how it had got there, Florian looked down at the tidy sheaf of documents that was already in his hands. Her Majesty’s Sloop The Serpent being designed for a Foreign Voyage, he read, you are, by the Board’s direction, to Supply her with additional Ordnance Stores proper for the same.
‘That’s very interesting,’ he said.
He had been taken unawares by the diminutive presence beside him on the street. ‘I’ve cared for them this long while,’ Orpen Wren was saying. ‘They’ve accompanied me for many a year.’
Florian attempted to return the papers, but the old librarian was reluctant to receive them, and said again that he had cared for them. It was the third George in the family who’d been a naval man, he said.
‘But you’d know, of course, sir.’
Florian didn’t deny that, since there seemed little point in doing so.
‘He was two years in the Ordnance Stores, sir, and longer before he got his command. The St Johns never set themselves up in a naval way.’
‘Of course not.’
‘I mentioned in McGovern’s a while back you’d be in for supplies, sir. I took a liberty with that. You’ll find them expecting you in McGovern’s, sir.’
‘Yes.’
‘The family always insisted on McGovern’s.’
‘Yes, of course.’
Florian gazed into the lined, pouched features, the tired eyes, and saw reflected there a hesitation, a moment of doubt, bewilderment, before the old man again found his way in the conversation.
‘I have the coal ordered,’ he said.