The more he asked her about her childhood at Cloonhill the more Ellie loved her interrogator. No matter how strange he still sometimes seemed, she felt as if all her life she had known him. The past he talked about himself became another part of her: the games he had played alone, the untidy rooms of the house he described, the parties given, the pictures painted. Being with him in the woods at Lyre, where the air was cold and the trees imposed a gloomy darkness, or walking among the monks’ graves, or being with him anywhere, telling or listening, was for Ellie more than friendship, or living, had ever been before.
‘A farm,’ he prompted in the tearooms at Mount Olery and she said it was Sister Ambrose who told her it was a widowed man she was to go to.
‘She said get the girls down to the hall, half fiv e or six the car would come. So we were in the hall, the rain pelting against the windows and the fanlight, and someone looking out saw the car and then the bell wires rattled before the bell rang, the way that always was. And Sister Clare came hurrying to open the front door and a woman came in, rain dripping off her. “We have her ready for you,” Sister Clare said, and said to me to step forward. “Are you the the girl then?” the woman asked me and Sister Clare said speak up. The box that had my belongings in it had to be returned and she told the woman and the woman said she’d drop it off when next she’d be passing. “Lift out the box to the car for Ellie,” Sister Clare instructed, for that was always done when a girl was going, and it was Rose and Philomena this night who did it. “Ach, you’ll settle in grand,” the woman said in the car, the windscreen wipers going. One of the man’s sisters she was; another of them was waiting in the farmhouse to get a look at me. He carried the box upstairs and his sisters took it away when they left. I knew about the accident at the farm, Sister Ambrose told me. A girl would have to know a thing like that, she said. She’d have to know in case the man would be affected by it. You couldn’t call it fortunate, she said, any man widowed, but wasn’t there good in it all the same, the way things were now? I didn’t mind it was a farm, I never minded that. You get used to a farm’s ways in the end.’
‘What was the accident?’
‘The trailer was loaded and he couldn’t see over the top of the load. The fastener of the tail-board was loose and she tried to drop the pin into place while she was holding the baby in her arms.’
He nearly sold up, Sister Ambrose had said, and maybe he wouldn’t mention the accident at all, how it happened or anything about it. So much it distressed him, maybe he wouldn’t.
‘And did he?’
‘That first evening he did.’
He had to, was what he said, not knowing the nuns had told her already. He flashed a torch out of the kitchen window at the place on the concrete, a dark mark on it still. He never walked near it, he said. He showed her where everything in the house belonged - jugs and cups on their hooks, the Old Moore’s Almanac where the insurance money was kept, the keys on the nail by the stairs, the contents of the dresser drawers. He showed her the upstairs, the front sitting-room, the bedroom that would be hers. He asked her could she cook.
A few years went by, Ellie said, and they were like that, only the two of them in the house. Then he asked her would she marry him. He said think it over. He said take her time.
‘I wanted Sister Ambrose at the wedding, and Sister Clare with her. But they couldn’t come, due to a Retreat again at Fermoy.’
Florian didn’t say what he felt: that all that shouldn’t have happened, that she shouldn’t have been sent into the employ of a haunted man. But he thought it, and he wondered if it showed, although he tried not to let it.
‘It’s not a terrible place,’ Ellie said, as if she knew what he was thinking. ‘It’s only something happened there.’
18
The dog days of August came; Rathmoye was quiet. Small incidents occurred, were spoken of, forgotten. When there were races near by the bookies stayed at Number 4 - J. P. Ferris, Gangly, McGregor from Clonmel. The priests of the parish catered for the faithful, heard sins confessed, gave absolution, offered the Host; the Church of Ireland’s skimpy congregation doggedly gathered for weekly worship. The tinker girls brought their babies to the streets from their wasteland caravans and tents. No crime of a serious nature had been committed in Rathmoye during the summer so far; none was now. In all, twenty-one infants had been born.
Two technicians from a stained-glass studio in Dublin measured the windows that were to be replaced in the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer, and sketches of an Annunciation were admired in the presbytery and later approved by the bishop. The paving stones on both sides of Magennis Street were scheduled to be replaced by the end of October. Permission was given for a neon sign at the radio and television shop in Irish Street above which Bernadette O’Keeffe lived. It was agreed that next year’s Strawberry Fair should be one week earlier.
Miss Connulty was right when she’d stated that Florian Kilderry had been noticed in the town, but wrong to suggest there was gossip. There was only her own, her brother its sole recipient. ‘To tell you the truth,’ he complained to Bernadette O’Keeffe in the back bar, ‘she has me demented with it.’ He had at last seen for himself the man his sister objected to and he had allocated to Bernadette O’Keeffe the task of discovering what she could about him. Pleased to do so, she set about this with some vigour, regularly receiving details of further exchanges on the subject in Number 4. ‘The way it’s put to me,’ her employer passed on, ‘this fellow shouldn’t be at large at all.’
The unexpected sympathy for his sister he had experienced on the morning of their first disagreement about Ellie Dillahan had long since receded, to be lost finally in renewed crossness to do with the back bedrooms. Bernadette had not been privy to this particular play of familial emotions; nothing had changed at Number 4 The Square, her view was, except that a man who was unknown in Rathmoye had appeared on the scene. That being so, it seemed relevant to say now that Orpen Wren had identified the man as a member of the St John family, and she said it.
‘Not that it’s likely,’ she added.
The 7-Up already poured, her employer pushed her glass a little closer to her. He displayed no annoyance or concern over this complication in the matter his sister sought information about, and which her perversity would almost certainly make something of.
‘Best we’d keep it from her,’ he decided after a moment of thought. ‘I was saying to her last evening wouldn’t she forget the whole issue. I was saying something new might keep her occupied - maybe leather-craft or a little flower garden out the back.’
‘A flower garden would be nice for Miss Connulty all right.’
‘I could be talking to the cat.’
Miss O’Keeffe nodded. She would have given a lot for a nip of John Jameson in the bitter-sweet cordial, but did not say so. She spread out the unsigned cheques and pushed them across the table. He had been lonely since his mother was taken; every day you could see it. In the evenings he went for a walk out on the Nenagh road and ended up in the cemetery again. Weekends, it was the same.
‘I only mentioned the St Johns thing in case it fitted in.’
‘You were right enough to say it, Miss O’Keeffe. Did McCaffreys’ cheque come?’
‘Well, no, not yet.’
‘We’ll give them another day or two. Would you say we would?’
He always asked for her view. These days he was treated less than an overnight man, she’d heard it said, the maid casual with him. She often wondered did he sleep well.
She gathered her papers together, counting the cheques as she slipped them into a fastener. She would let it go until Thursday, she agreed; then she’d send McCaffreys a reminder.
In time Bernadette’s enquiries bore fruit and through them Miss Connulty learnt that the man she’d taken against went about on a bicycle because it was thought he couldn’t drive a car, that he had no visible means of support, was currently engaged in the selling of a house he had inherited, and was planning to emigrate. His identity was established, his name passed on to her, his connection with the St John family dismissed. In Castledrummond he was said to keep himself to himself.