Every little helped, the charity women said, thanking him before they left. They mentioned the charities they had in mind for the clothes and, of course, there would be the local poor as well. Florian nodded his understanding of the disposal, imagining his mother’s dresses, his father’s suits and shoes worn by other people. He waved when the car drove off and the women waved back.
It was more than a fortnight now since he had said the wrong thing in the square in Rathmoye. His clumsiness still nagged, his crassness, as he thought of it, his foolishness. How careless, too, not to notice a wedding ring that was there for anyone to see. He had been casual, even a nuisance in the end, and his regret brought with it an urge to be forgiven, to say that he was sorry.
He carried tennis racquets and umbrellas to the skip, heaved a paraffin heater to it, and buckets with holes in them, paint tins, fire-irons. Then he spread out on the kitchen table one of his father’s old Ordnance Survey maps he’d been intending to burn and found on it the Crilly hills and the townland of Cnocrea. He found Lisquin, its two avenues, the gate-lodge on the Kilaney road.
Dillahan washed his hands at the sink, scrubbing out the day’s dirt. A split in the flesh beside one of his thumbnails was sore when the soap got in, but he didn’t remark on it. Years ago his mother had kept ointment for that, but he couldn’t remember what it was called.
He asked Ellie if she’d gone in to Rathmoye. He asked about the hook spring in English’s. No hurry, he said, no call to go in specially.
‘They’ve ordered it,’ she said.
He nodded. He asked if there was a fox about and she said there was, the same one still.
‘The dogs were sniffing round the runs first thing. Nothing got in.’
‘You’re troubled, Ellie.’
‘Ah no, no.’
He mentioned Dr Riordan, but she shook her head.
Dillahan was not by nature an inquisitive man, nor did he usually question what bewildered him, accepting his bewilderment for what it was. But it crossed his mind - the first time it ever had - that Ellie was bored, that there was a loneliness about her days at the farmhouse, that housekeeping and eggs, and keeping the dairy spick and span, and whitewashing the turf sheds were not enough. Yet she had never wanted anything besides.
‘It’s quiet for you,’ he said.
‘It’s all right. Honestly, it’s all right.’
‘Any time you’d like I’d drive you over to see the nuns in Templeross. Why wouldn’t we do that?’
The lavender was uncut, the grass untrodden. Waiting at the Lisquin gate-lodge, Florian read The Brothers Karamazov . He read for most of the morning but no one came; and passing through Rathmoye again on his way back to his now almost empty house, he read there too, on the seat by the memorial statue in the Square. He lingered there, then rode about, glancing into the shops. He’d almost given up when he was accosted by Orpen Wren, one hand held up in the middle of a street.
‘A burden lifted from old shoulders, sir.’
Florian dismounted in a hurry.
‘What is, Mr Wren?’
‘You have the records back where they belong, sir. An act of goodness, sir.’
About to remind the old man that he hadn’t, in fact, accepted the documents he’d been shown when they met before, Florian said instead:
‘The drawer of the little table.’
‘I rest easy at night, sir, now that they’re in the drawer again. I do, sir. I do.’
So fierce was this insistence, so brightly lit the weary eyes, all weariness gone, that Florian’s polite lie might have been a statement prompted by the most profound compassion.
‘There isn’t a book in the library isn’t accounted for in the papers, sir. Two years it took me and I mind the time, and the work half done, when the Bishop of Limerick met with a little creature in the salad. The bishop didn’t say a word, sir. He put it on the side of his plate and took no notice, not drawing attention to it, nothing like that at all. I never spoke out at the dinner table, it wasn’t my place to contribute to any conversation. The time Mrs Colonel Palfrey came she wasn’t herself, the Colonel concerned about her. The Misses Uniake wouldn’t be separated at the table. Young Cavendish had to have his meat cut. But I was silent at the table always.’
Not interrupting, Florian nodded his receipt of each item as it was completed.
‘The butler was Standleby then, sir, an Englishman of Norfolk. Wanted, they said in the kitchen, by the Norfolk constabulary, but I didn’t give credit to that. There was resentment in the kitchen quarters, to do with Mr Standleby’s ways. The manner he had they called bumptious, but a butler is privileged as to manner, I said myself when the sculleryman Teague would go on about it. Mr Standleby was replaced in the end and Franklin came from the employ of the Villiers-Stuarts.’
‘I see.’
‘It was indulgence in drink, on Mr Standleby’s part, sir. Well, you’d have heard. As pleasant a disposition as you’d find, but drink was taken on the pantry side of things.’
‘Yes.’
‘There’s never a house the size of Lisquin without you have an upset. The first governess I knew confided that to me. She came into the long room of the library after Macaulay’s Essays, and I led her to where they were and she made that confidence.’
‘I understand.’
‘From up at the top of Hurley Lane, sir, you can see the smoke from the Lisquin grates. It is when the smoke isn’t there you’d know the coal wasn’t delivered, sir.’
‘Yes.’
‘The smoke’s there again, sir.’
‘Yes, of course.’
In that same moment Ellie Dillahan passed near them, crossing the street they were in. A van delivering sides of meat was in the way and Florian didn’t see her.
But she saw Florian. She watched him listening, then holding his hand out and Orpen Wren humbly accepting the ending of the encounter. She loved Florian Kilderry: silently she said that, and said it again while he rode off, out of the Square on to the Castledrummond road.
16
Nettles thrived within the walls that remained. A clump of brambles spread from a corner, sorrel flourished, dandelions gave colour. A door-frame had mostly rotted away, joists hung crookedly. The Lisquin gate-lodge had never had stairs.
Outside, a sheet of corrugated iron, in places eaten by rust, leant against a water-pump. The high gates that opened on to a clay side-road were chained, a farmer’s barrier in place across an avenue that went on, to curve away through pasture where cattle grazed.
Florian came often now, but each time saw the lavender still uncut, the grass trodden only where he had walked on it himself. An offer made for the house had been accepted; people no longer came to look it over. He had time on his hands.
Once he rode on to Cnocrea and went by the farmhouse, white and tidy, nobody about. He guessed it was the right one but, fearing again to be a nuisance, he rode on and in a roundabout way returned to the gate-lodge. It didn’t seem much to ask that he should be allowed to say he was sorry before he left Ireland for ever, but every day he was less hopeful than he’d been the day before. He found a piece of iron and rooted out, as best he could, the ivy that was choking the lavender. He wondered if she would guess when he had gone that it was he who had done that but, after all, why should she?
Then, when he had waited for longer than usual one morning and had decided not to come again, a sound on the road disturbed the silence. There’d never been a sound before. There’d never been anything or anyone.