He ran the lever along, then pulled the tube out. He had jacked the Vauxhall up and taken the wheel off without her help, calling her only a few minutes ago. He’d filled a basin with water. She watched while he pumped the tube up and found the puncture. ‘I’ll manage now,’ he said.
In the crab-apple orchard she scattered grain and the hens came rushing to her. She hadn’t been aware that she didn’t love her husband. Love hadn’t come into it, had never begun in a way that was different from the love spoken of so often by the nuns at Cloonhill, its brightly visible sign burning perpetually, as it did above the kitchen doorway in the farmhouse, as it had for the woman who once had scoured the saucepans that now were hers, and for other women before that. She closed the hens in and cut two lettuces on her way back to the yard. She picked the best of the chives.
The wheel had been replaced, the jack wound down. ‘Thanks for that,’ her husband said as she went by. He had that way with him, of thanking her.
It was a kindness - so it had seemed to her, and still did - when she had been offered marriage; it would have been unkind on her part if she’d said no. Her home was his house, where in kindness, too, she had been called his housekeeper, not a maid. She thought of him, even now, as older than he was, being widowed and knowing more than she did. It would be better if they were married: he hadn’t put it like that, and afterwards, at Lahinch, had said he’d grown close to her and was a lucky man. ‘I’m lucky myself,’ she’d said, and had meant it, for she had never developed the habit of lying. ‘I’m sorry,’ she apologized later when she couldn’t give him children, and he said it didn’t matter. ‘You’ve given me enough,’ he said.
She laid the table. She washed the lettuce and dried it in a tea-towel. She sliced what remained of the lamb they’d had on Sunday. She chopped the chives, cut up tomatoes.
He took his wellingtons off at the door; he washed his hands at the sink. Sometimes he washed upstairs and changed his shirt, but he didn’t this evening. She could tell he was tired.
‘A bit of a blade,’ he said, explaining the puncture. ‘Vicious little edge to it.’
Another day had passed, the fifth that had since the encounter outside the shoemaker’s. Nothing was less than it had been; she had imagined that by now it would be. She was contrite, and ashamed, but still her feelings were as they’d been that morning and before it.
‘I see we have the raddle powder.’ He piled salad on to his plate. Summer fare, he called it, and never minded when it was there again.
‘I forgot to say it came in.’
‘No harm. Did you ever notice hook springs in English’s? D’you know do they keep them?’
‘I’ll ask.’
She poured out tea for him, and added milk. She pushed the sugar closer to him. She tried to think of something else to say because talking was a help. ‘He’d do anything for you,’ a woman she didn’t know had said to her at the wedding celebration, as if that should be said, as if it was too easy to take him for granted. The de Valera man in McGovern’s had terrier pups for sale again, she said.
‘I think you maybe told me that.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Arrah, no.’
The woman at the wedding had called her fortunate. Afterwards, when they’d driven off in the Vauxhall, she hadn’t been unhappy. She hadn’t had regrets, either then or in the few days they spent away. She hadn’t when they returned to the farm. In Rathmoye when people called her Mrs Dillahan it pleased her. Only that, and sharing his bedroom with him, had been different. The little room where she’d slept before would have been the child’s, brightly painted, a wallpaper with toys on it. She had never liked to change it and when it was empty he’d said to leave it as it was and she knew what he was thinking.
He stirred sugar into the tea she’d poured. A silence didn’t matter; he never minded that, he’d often said it.
‘We cut the road pasture,’ he said when he had finished what was on his plate. ‘I had Corrigan’s lads over.’
She watched him removing the silver paper from a triangle of cheese, tidily turning back the folds, then lifting the cheese out on his knife. He liked to do things well, even that. It was impossible to imagine him careless, or casual. And yet, of course, tragically he had been.
‘You’re off your food, Ellie,’ he said.
‘A bit.’
‘I noticed.’
She cut more bread for him, and reached across the table to fill his cup again. Gahagan was getting closer to letting the field go, he said.
‘Contrary as he is, he’s nearly ready to part with it.’
She tried to think about the field changing hands and the difference it would make, and Gahagan maybe considering the disposal of the woodlands too.
‘We’ll mark that day, Ellie.’
He nodded each word into place as he spoke, then pushed his chair back. When he was tired in the evenings he sat on the sagging couch in the window, his big shoulders relaxed over the paper, the radio on if it was something he wanted. He sat there now, and Ellie cleared the table and carried the dishes to the sink. At first there’d been a photograph of his wife in the other room, a smiling woman, the infant in her arms. But later he had put it in a drawer.
She ran the hot tap over plates and cutlery and squeezed washing-up liquid into the water when it covered them. His old-time dancing programme was on the radio. There’s nothing only weakness in me: she saw her handwriting, old-fashioned, slanting, influenced by the strictures of Sister Ambrose, who had emphasized the virtues of clarity over flamboyance. ‘Always write to us if you’d need us,’ Sister Ambrose had begged. ‘Always tell us.’ God is your strength: how often a nun’s lips had expressed that!
More days would pass, and one would come when it would seem as though what had happened hardly had. She would shamefully recount her errors, her deception even of herself, and make her peace and be forgiven through contrition. Time could not but pass, every minute of it a healing.
‘I used go to old-time myself,’ her husband said, and she guessed he’d gone with his other wife and hadn’t wanted to since because of what had happened. He said something else, drumming his fingers on the arm of the couch. But the music was suddenly too loud and she didn’t hear what it was.
‘I’d better see to the fowls.’
One of the dogs had barked and there’d been a fox about. But when she went out everything was quiet. It was never dark at this time of year: the green of the tractor hadn’t faded, or the dusty brown of the Vauxhall. The sheepdogs went with her when she made her rounds, and stood beside her, obedient in the gateway when she listened there. His Italian mother would have smoked cigarettes, a tall, still beautiful woman: out of nowhere that image came. In the crab-apple orchard she locked her hens in.
‘Sit down and rest yourself,’ her husband said. ‘Sit down and listen to this.’
‘I’ve the accounts to look at, though.’
She went to the other room. The receipts were there and the record she kept in a grey exercise book of cheques that had been paid in at the bank. She turned the light on and took the exercise book from the drawer of the table in the window.
The accounts were up to date: she’d known they would be. But in the same drawer were the Christmas cards she had received from Sister Ambrose, who had been, more than the other nuns, her friend at Cloonhill. We are delighted, a note recorded in one, that you are to marry and we give thanks for your contentment on the farm. In another there was news of a journey to Lough Derg, and of the Fermoy Retreat. ‘We are here for you if ever you feel called to join us,’ she remembered Sister Ambrose saying on the evening of the day that had been chosen as her birthday. ‘And never forget that we are here for you in other ways too.’ She was eleven then.