‘“We know old trouble, sir,” I said to George Anthony the first day he was back with us. It was the trouble brought the family down, lady, only that wouldn’t be said unless it was within the walls of Lisquin. That’s how it is to this time, lady.’
‘Yes.’
‘The papers are back where they belong. He was good to take them from me. An old ghost, they’d say, if they saw me coming with them myself. I wouldn’t presume to be welcome in the house. George Anthony saw me right.’
‘Who you’re talking about isn’t a St John, Mr Wren.’
‘There’s your husband coming now, lady. I know your husband well.’
Dillahan waited for a car to pass before he began to cross the Square and then was delayed by Fennerty the cattle auctioneer, who told him Con Hannington was dead. ‘Last evening,’ he said.
‘I heard.’
They talked for a few minutes. Poor Con had been shook a long time, Fennerty said, and Dillahan kept nodding, trying to edge away. He didn’t like coming in to Rathmoye because he still sensed the pity of people, and since he continued to blame himself for the accident it came naturally to him to assume that in spite of their sympathy others blamed him too. On Sundays he went to early Mass because it was less crowded.
He said he’d see Fennerty around. When he reached the Vauxhall Ellie was alone again.
‘That’s fixed,’ he said. ‘Have you everything?’
‘I have.’
‘We’ll be off so.’
He eased the Vauxhall through the other cars in the Square and drove across Magennis Street into Cashel Street.
‘What’d the old fellow want?’
‘Only rambling on,’ Ellie said, ‘you wouldn’t know what he was at.’
‘It can’t be much of a joke, your memory turned inside out for you.’ He stopped for a woman and a pram at a crossing. ‘Poor old devil.’
‘Yes.’
They passed the two churches, then left the town behind. They waited at temporary traffic lights where the road was up.
‘Who’s that?’ Dillahan asked when they passed a cyclist.
She wanted to say it was Florian Kilderry and that she was in love with him. She wanted to say the name, to say he was on the road because he was going to the back gate-lodge of Lisquin House, where often they were together. She wanted to say he would find a note from her, that he would have come for that.
‘I don’t know who he is,’ she heard herself saying, and again there was the urge to talk about him. She’d seen him about before, she said. Florian Kilderry she’d heard him called. Near Castledrummond he came from.
The lights changed. They waited for a lorry coming slowly. Dillahan said there used to be a County Council foreman called Kilderry, two fingers gone from his right hand. He said his father once bought a scarifier at a bankrupt sale in Castledrummond.
‘I remember coming back from school and it was in the yard.’ He had never been in Castledrummond himself.
‘No.’
‘It was busy today, was it?’
‘It was, for a Tuesday.’
‘I see there’s posters up, some old circus coming.’
‘They’ve been up a while.’
‘Not Duffy’s, though?’
‘No, not Duffy’s.’
‘I used be taken to Duffy’s.’
He had told her about that when first she came to the farm, how he’d always been impatient, waiting for the elephants to come on, and how a clown had persuaded one of his sisters to give him a kiss. He had told her about Piper’s Entertainments when they’d come to Rathmoye, the roundabouts and bumper cars, the hoopla stall where he’d won a china rabbit.
‘Con Hannington’s funeral’s Friday,’ he said. He drew out to turn to the right, and waited for a tractor to go by. He saluted the man on it.
‘Con lent me fifty pounds one time,’ he said. ‘The barley failed and I was pushed.’
He would have paid the money back, every penny, and Con Hannington would have known he would. The bank wasn’t taking a chance with the loan and the bank would know that too.
‘I’ll go to the funeral,’ he said.
She hadn’t often left a note, always managing to come herself, always wanting to. He’d be there by now and he’d maybe wait a while, then he’d lift out the stone. He hadn’t realized whose car it was when it went by. He didn’t know the car.
They passed Gahagan’s gate, beside the old milk-churn platform that was falling to bits, then the turn-off to the boreen that was the way up to the hills, difficult in winter when a flood came down it.
They had to back for the post van, and the new young postman wound his window down and handed out the bill for the fertilizer that had been delivered a few weeks ago.
‘A decent lad, that,’ her husband said.
The dogs heard the car’s approach and began to bark when it was still far off. As well she’d looked behind the stone; as well he’d come to look there today. A Golden Eagle his bicycle was called, a picture of an eagle on a rock below the handlebars. She’d never known a bicycle called that before.
‘There’s the last of the potatoes to lift,’ her husband said, ‘before we’d get the rain. Only a dozen or so rows.’
‘I’ll help you so.’
‘Arrah, no, you have enough to do.’
‘I never mind.’
‘Ah, well, no.’ He protested softly, shaking his head as he often did when she offered to do what he considered she no longer should.
He turned the car into the yard. The dogs came to greet them.
22
Shelhanagh House was not as Ellie had imagined it. A white hall door was tinged with watery green, the paint worn away in places. On the gravel an iron container was beginning to overflow, heaped with tattered suitcases gnawed by mice, rusty paint tins, an ironing-board, weighing-scales, a typewriter, electric fires, a fender, a press for trousers. The flagstones in the hall weren’t covered, the dining-room contained no furniture, the drawing-room was not a drawing-room.
‘I should have warned you,’ he said.
He led the way upstairs, past empty rooms, to what he called the high attics, to a narrow stairway that then became a ladder to the lofts and the roof. They stood on the warm lead of a gully between two slated inclines, looking down at the garden and, beyond it, to the lake Ellie had been told about, over farmland to the distant mountains. A tractor moved slowly up and down a field, soundless where they stood.
‘I always liked it up here,’ he said and he pointed places out and gave them names - Greenane Crossroads, a bridge a little further off, on the way to Castledrummond, and farms and houses. ‘I used to read here. For hours, you know, in summer.’
‘It’s lovely. Everywhere.’
A dog followed them when they were downstairs again.
‘Jessie she’s called,’ he said, and in the kitchen picked up a book from the table. A long time ago he’d lost it and found it only the other day. He hated losing things, he said.
‘Is the house still being sold?’ Ellie asked, reaching down to stroke the dog’s head when they were in a cobbled yard.
‘Poor old Jessie’s getting on a bit,’ he said. ‘Yes, Shelhanagh is sold.’
If the sale fell through she had promised herself to make her confession. She had promised atonement, and obedience; that she would, for all her life, in every hour of every day, be ordered by obedience.
‘The seventeenth of next month,’ he said.
Ages, he’d said before, since there were so many formalities. October perhaps, and she had imagined the bare trees of autumn, the mists of November gathering while he still was here. September the seventeenth was less than three weeks away.
‘The same afternoon I found that book the people who’ve bought Shelhanagh came. An excitable pair,’ he said.
‘I thought maybe something might go wrong.’
‘No, nothing did.’
In the yard the rickety doors of a garage had to be lifted up when they were being pulled open. It was a long time since this car had been on a road, he said. He called the motor car a Morris Cowley and opened at the back what he called a dicky seat.