He went again to the railway station. He bought a tin of soup in the corner shop in Hurley Lane. He watched the children at hopscotch.
Thomas John Kinsella, he read again when he returned to the Square. He slept for a while and when he woke it was because he was wagging his head, reproving himself for having forgotten what he now remembered: whom it was he had to see and give a message to.
He set off at once, but after a while the distance seemed too far and he knew he’d have to wait for a better day.
24
Dillahan dismantled the corral he erected every year for the shearing. As always at this busy time, he had put off the dismantling for longer than he’d intended. Weeks had passed and every day he’d told himself that the sprawl of old gates and corrugated iron was unsightly, the garish red binding twine, the swirls of wool scattered.
Ellie gathered the lengths of twine when they were released, pulling apart the knots in them. She raked up the wool, combing it out of the grass. She had brought the fertilizer bag from last year to take it away in.
‘Better we’d get it done early next time,’ her husband said while he stacked the rusting gates on the trailer.
There was withering all around them: of the nettles that had earlier been verdant in the hedges, of drooping foxgloves and cow-parsley. Hard, dry earth was exposed where sheep had congregated, grass was yellowing. But the September air was cool and fresh, pleasanter than August’s brashness.
Ellie hardly noticed all this, but knew from other years that it was there. She tried to think of that, of the first time she had raked up the wool, and getting to know this field; of the first time she’d collected the eggs in the crab-apple orchard, and seeing the hares at night. But Shelhanagh House kept breaking into what she imposed - its shabby, deserted rooms, the tennis court, the quiet old dog resting on the grass, the postcard of St Lucy. And Scandinavia broke in too; and she was there, in its strangeness.
‘Well, it kept fine for us still,’ her husband said. ‘I don’t know did we ever have a dryness like it. Good girl,’ he complimented her, a note of sympathy in his tone, for her task was tedious.
He started the tractor and she heard the clatter of the trailer’s load until it began to fade and then was gone. She tied the lengths of binding twine into a bundle and put it to one side. She filled the fertilizer bag with the pile of wool she’d made. She was all morning in the field.
The small churchyard was shadowy with a twilight of its own, overhung with maple trees and oaks, its dark yews like sentinels among them, old headstones crooked or fallen. How random the chance of circumstance was, Florian reflected, surveying the grass that had grown high on the mound that was his parents’ grave. How much of chance it was that Natalia Verdecchia, a child of Genoa, should be here now because she had loved a soldato di ventura . The two names were sharply incised on unpolished limestone, the letterer who had been commissioned chosen for the sensitivity of his touch. All that had mattered - that they should be together, that skill and quality should mark their place in a graveyard, as their devotion to one another and the gift they’d shared had marked their lives. It wasn’t easy to believe that they lay in silence, together yet out of touch.
A man was working with a hoe on the gravel paths and Florian borrowed a pair of shears from him. He cut the grass on the grave, pulled out brambles that hadn’t yet established themselves. The day before he died his father had apologized for what might have seemed to be shared also: disappointment in an only child. He was insistent that there had never been that, and Florian had pretended too.
He returned the shears, and wandered among the graves before he went back to the one he’d tidied. How well they had loved! he reflected, tracing with a finger the two names on the gravestone. How well they had known how to live, how little they’d been a nuisance in other people’s lives. He hoped it would be difficult to forget Ellie Dillahan, that at least there would be that.
He had left his bicycle at the lich-gate. The chain had begun to slip and he took it to be tightened, since he intended to cycle all the way to Dublin when he left. All night it would take if he set out in the evening. ‘Never leave your bicycle on a street in Dublin,’ his father used to say, but he would do that, leaving it for anyone.
He called in at the offic e of the solicitors who had drawn up the conveyance for the sale of Shelhangh House. He requested that what money was owed to him after the numerous deductions were made should be lodged with the Castledrummond branch of the Bank of Ireland. He made arrangements at the bank regarding the availability to him of such funds as soon as he was abroad. He bought a bicycle lamp; he hadn’t possessed one before.
Ellie picked out clothes and put them ready, folded, in one side of a drawer. She bought in food: tins so that there would be something in the house, Three Counties cheese, a cut of bacon that would keep. It was only right that there should be food enough for a while, and a store of tins was always useful anyway.
The zip of the red holdall she had taken to Lahinch years ago was jammed and she couldn’t free it. She had bought it in the second-hand shop and that the zip kept sticking hadn’t mattered then, but it mattered now and she looked in Corbally’s to see what was on offer. She didn’t buy anything, knowing she could come back for one of the holdalls she was shown. She would get in a few more tins when that time came, and vegetables that would keep for a while. She would put out rashers and put out eggs so that there’d be something easy for him at first. She was not unaware that in doing so she was anticipating too much, that what had begun as fantasy was every day acquiring a little more of reality. She tried to prevent herself from allowing this, but couldn’t.
25
The waitress at Olery was talkative. She stood with the checked cloth she always carried with her for wiping the tables. You wouldn’t know where the time went to, she said. Since Easter she’d been at the tearooms and you wouldn’t credit the days going by. A few weeks and she’d be starting her winter job, back in Dublin, where she came from. The Log Cabin, Phibsborough: Leitrim Street, she’d done a winter there before.
‘If ever you’d be passing,’ she invited.
Florian nodded. He had smiled now and then while listening to what they were being told. Ellie was quiet, in a navy-blue anorak he hadn’t seen before.
‘I’ll bring your teas,’ the waitress said, and added that she was a Phibsborough girl herself. ‘I got to know you these past few months,’ she said before she went away.
Theirs was the only table occupied in the tearooms. Outside a man with an electric hedge-trimmer was clipping the maze, the fle x trailing behind him. They’d noticed as they passed it, a sign saying that the maze was closed today. They could hear the hum of the trimmer from where they were.
Two elderly women came in, continuing a conversation. Florian watched them while they sat down, and while they changed their minds and went to another table, giggling a bit.
‘But, Ellie,’ he began to say, reverting to what had been interrupted by the waitress talking about herself. ‘Ellie -’
‘I would go with you. To anywhere.’
The pleasant sound of quietened laughter came from the table where the two women, amusing one another, conversed again. Their tea, a lot of it, was spread out on a paper tablecloth and the waitress with her empty tray flat beneath one arm answered questions about what the scones and iced cakes contained, for it seemed that there were diets to consider.