‘Is it big, the house?’
‘Eighteen dilapidated rooms.’
Ellie saw them, without dilapidation: comfortable rooms with fires and flowers, two people who were his mother and father, the child who’d come as a surprise. She saw him alone there now, his black dog, the eighteen rooms too many since the deaths. There was the still water of a lake. There were a garden’s scents and its delicious twilight air.
The coin he’d picked up was in her hand, pressed into her palm by the rubber grip on the handlebars. She had never seen a coin the same as it before and she knew she wanted to keep it and that she would.
In Hurley Lane they wheeled their bicycles around children playing hopscotch. His cigarette was still unlit between his fin gers, as if he had forgotten it; but he hadn’t because he stopped to light it now.
Striking a match, Florian remembered watching her making room in her basket for the shoes. It might have crossed his mind, scarcely there at all, that they’d be her father’s, or a brother’s, that probably she had several brothers; he couldn’t remember. He hadn’t noticed the ring he saw when he looked for it now - so skimpy, so unemphatic on her finger it could have come out of a Hallowe’en barm brack.
‘I didn’t know,’ he said, gesturing at it.
‘I’m married this good while,’ she said.
They passed Corbally’s. She * wondered if, hardly knowing what she did, she had kept her ring out of sight when they were in the Cash and Carry, if she’d kept it out of sight this morning too. Be careful what you’d do not knowing you were doing it, the nuns would say: no matter what, it was yourself doing it.
They reached the Square and they stood there, not saying anything. People could see them, she didn’t care.
‘I might go looking for your tumbled-down gate-lodge one of these days,’ he said. ‘Since it’s all that’s left of what I’ve been hearing so much about from the old man. I might do that.’
‘Three miles out on the old Kilaney road. It’s easy enough to find.’
‘I dreamed about you,’ he said.
11
Resting after her morning’s work, idling at the window from which so often she viewed the Square, Miss Connulty had noticed the two when they appeared there from Magennis Street. She had seen them hesitating before walking on, seen them stop again, seen Ellie Dillahan eventually scuttling off. Miss Connulty used that word to herself, for scuttling was what Ellie Dillahan’s abrupt breaking away had looked like, a sudden, awkward movement forced upon herself, reluctant yet urgent. She hadn’t mounted her bicycle but had dragged it with her, and the man who’d taken the photographs at the funeral stood where she had left him, taken aback by her hasty departure. Then he rode across the Square and disappeared on to the Castledrummond road.
There had been something about how they were with one another, something Miss Connulty might not even have noticed - and certainly would not have considered significant - had Ellie Dillahan been a stranger to her. Clearly, the two knew one another better than they had at the time Ellie Dillahan had spoken of, when he had asked her for directions.
A car with a caravan attached was attempting to reverse and finding it difficult. One of Joseph Paul’s lorries, loaded with turf, passed into Matthew Street. What she had witnessed bewildered Miss Connulty, and now appalled her.
Ellie Dillahan was a girl it was impossible not to feel protective of because of what her life had been. Her husband was a decent man, respected and sober, and it was understandable that he hadn’t been comfortable in himself since the tragedy he had suffered. But maybe it was no joke for Ellie to be out there in the hills, to have the days passing and not a word exchanged except with a husband who couldn’t forgive himself for an error. It wasn’t easy to blame Ellie; you wouldn’t want to and it didn’t seem natural to do so. Child of an institution, child of need and of humility, born into nothing, expecting nothing, Ellie Dillahan was victim enough without the attentions of a suave photographer. No matter who he was or where he came from, in Miss Connulty’s bristling imagination he was already a plunderer. Still watching the reversing of the caravan, she kept that with her, her outrage becoming an anger that brought two bright flushes to her cheeks.
The house was silent, the daily girl gone home early since today was the day for that. Miss Connulty remained at the window for a minute or so longer, then went downstairs to make her brother’s lunchtime sandwiches. Her fury had quietened but still was there, as the dead days of finished time were, and tears no longer shed. She felt a wave of pity for Ellie Dillahan, as once, so wretchedly, she had for herself.
It was unusual for his sister to sit down opposite him in the dining-room when she brought his sandwiches and the strong cup of Bovril Joseph Paul liked to have with them. She had something to say and he knew she had, but when she spoke he didn’t listen. Instead, from time to time he nodded.
The day their father had taken her to Dublin, their mother had said she hoped they would never come back. Neither of them, she said, not ever. But he had wanted them to come back; no matter how horrible the shame, he had wanted them to be on the evening bus, or on tomorrow’s bus, to come back some time. Waiting, not knowing, the notice in the downstairs window stating that the house was full when it wasn’t, he had thought his mother would cry, but she didn’t; he’d never seen her cry. In the afternoon he brought her tea and made her toast. She couldn’t eat it, and later on she didn’t hear him when he asked her would he go down the town to see if they were on the bus. She said she knew they would be when he asked her again; when they came back to the house with him she said it was the worst day of her life. He brought his sister cocoa. Any mother would be upset, he said, but his sister didn’t answer, the first time she ever didn’t when he spoke to her. Quite often now they didn’t answer one another.
‘He made enquiries from Ellie Dillahan about the picture house,’ she said in the dining-room, and he asked her what she was talking about.
‘I told you.’
‘I know, I know. But it isn’t easy to get at the gist of what you’re saying.’
‘He’s hanging about the town. He got into the picture house - I’ve had that said to me. There’s nobody knows who he is.’
‘The keys of the picture house are in the yard office. There’s no way you can get into the picture house except you have the keys. I don’t know this man you’re talking about.’
‘A pale tweed suit and he’s taken to wearing a hat. He comes in off the Castledrummond road.’
‘I don’t know him at all.’
His lack of interest spread into Joseph Paul’s tone. No one should be listening to this, he said to himself, and aloud said that Bernadette O’Keeffe was making arrangements with Dempsey to have the back bedrooms repainted.
‘The back bedrooms have nothing to do with it. There’s no one but yourself hasn’t seen him. He could be shouting from the rooftops and you wouldn’t see him.’
He said nothing. It was always best to say nothing. He finished the sandwiches she had made for him, and the dregs of the Bovril. He waited for her to go away.
She took the tray from where she’d left it on the dumb waiter. She put his plate and his cup and saucer on it, with the salt and pepper she always brought him too. She cleared up the crumbs he’d made, brushing them with a dish-cloth on to the tray.
‘I’ll tell you another thing,’ she said, as calm as ice, which she could be at will.
She spoke to his back; he didn’t turn his head. Before he was finished with her, this man would be off with Ellie Dillahan, she said, and then she went away.
12
Ellie held the tyre lever in place; he’d shown her how. For five or six inches the tyre had been released from the wheel’s rim and two other levers were holding it there. He worked one of them with his foot, coaxing the tyre, and when he wasn’t successful sliding the other closer to the one she still held. Further inches of the tyre’s grip were released. ‘We have it now,’ he said.