‘I’m sorry,’ she said when he told her Jessie had died.
Thrown up by his digging, a scattering of clay had not yet dried on the grass. A blackbird flew away when they went there.
‘I thought your neighbours’ harvesting . . .’ Florian began to say.
Ellie shook her head. All that was over, she said.
‘I couldn’t not come. I couldn’t.’
‘You’ve been crying, Ellie.’
‘I thought you’d gone. I could see that wasn’t the way of it but even so in the quiet I thought you’d gone.’
‘Well, I haven’t. I’m here.’
And there was still all day, Florian said, and all day tomorrow. He put his arms around her. She said she couldn’t bear to think about tomorrow.
‘Ellie . . .’
‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘Please. I’ve come to you.’
27
He was tired. He had met no one on the roads for a long time, no one to ask, no signposts because the roads were small. It wasn’t right where he was now. He felt it wasn’t and he asked in a house he came to, a dark, cement house among trees.
‘I know you,’ the child who opened the door greeted him, and he said he had walked out from Rathmoye, that his name was Orpen Wren.
‘Sometimes I’d forget it. When you get old it isn’t easy.’
‘It’s just I saw you a few times,’ the child said. ‘When we’d be Rathmoye I’d see you.’
Orpen asked for directions. He wasn’t going further, he said. He’d go back now to Rathmoye if he could discover the way. It was the third time he’d come looking for the destination he couldn’t find, but he didn’t say that.
‘There’s no one here only me,’ the child said. ‘They’re out at work.’
He had thought the child was a boy, but he saw now she was a girl wearing trousers. Her hair was cut short, but no shorter than many a boy’s. Her eyes were a light shade of blue.
‘Are you not in a car?’ she asked.
‘I never had a car.’
‘It’s a good step in to Rathmoye.’
‘I walked all Ireland once. Am I near Lisquin?’
‘Ah, no, you’re not.’
‘It isn’t Lisquin I’m after. It’s only I know my bearings from Lisquin. It’s a man I came looking for.’
‘Go down the road till you’ll come to a black-tarred gate. Keep on past the gate till you’ll come to a four-crossroads. Go to your left and go right at the sharp corner. You’ll get on to the big road then and Rathmoye’s marked up on the signpost. Will I tell you again?’
Orpen requested that, and then thanked the child. He found the black gate but when he went on he couldn’t remember the rest of the directions and would have been lost again if a woman on a bicycle hadn’t walked with him to the crossroads.
‘Who were you looking for out this way?’ she asked him and said he had strayed by a fair step when he told her.
She drew a map on a piece of brown paper she tore off a parcel. ‘That’s the best way you’ll do it from Rathmoye,’ she said. ‘Don’t lose it now for another day.’
He rested after she left him, sitting on the grass verge. Then he went on, put right again by tinkers on the side of the road.
28
When Ellie woke up she didn’t know where she was, and then remembered. She heard a car. Coming into the room, Florian said:
‘The men to tow away the Morris Cowley.’
She asked him what time it was. He said half past twelve, or nearly.
‘Have they gone, the men?’
‘They’re going now.’
She closed her eyes, not wanting to be awake. He was in his shirtsleeves, his tweed waistcoat unbuttoned. He was looking down at her.
‘Don’t be upset,’ he said.
Sunlight made a pattern with the shadows on the boards of the floor and on her clothes where she had thrown them, her bangle, and the ring she had taken from her finger. Her blue dress was crumpled. One shoe was on its side.
‘I’ll make tea,’ he said.
When he went downstairs she found a bathroom in a part of the house she hadn’t been in before. It was a bathroom that wasn’t used, the small bath chipped and stained, grit fallen into it from the ceiling. But water came when she turned on the single tap at the wash-basin and she bathed her face.
The water was cold. There were no towels. There wasn’t soap. A cloth had hardened into a bundle on the windowsill and she ran water over it, and washed herself.
She didn’t hurry. She didn’t want tea, she wanted to be alone. A pool gathered on the floor while she washed and she tried to soak it up with the cloth.
A nun had gone to a man at the sawmills in Templeross. Sometimes she was called Roseline after the Blessed Roseline, but that was always known to be made up, for the nun was nameless at Cloonhill, mistily there in whispered tales passed down through generations. The man would come delivering logs in winter and she went to him, her habit folded on her bed, her crucifix , her beads, her missal, her shoes left too. All that was said, although it was forbidden to say anything.
Wondering what to dry herself with, Ellie sat on the edge of the bath. In the round, discoloured mirror above the basin there were glimpses of her nakedness when she moved. She never liked not having clothes on and she looked away. She was cold.
A few said the man wasn’t there when the nun went to him, that she searched for him on the streets of cities, that he was never there again. Some said she begged on the streets and was known to have been a nun. Some said that when she was old she was found in the river at Limerick.
The bolt of the door wouldn’t move at first but did when Ellie tried again. She listened and could hear nothing, not footsteps, not voices. Then she heard the car being towed away.
In the bedroom she dried herself on a sheet she pulled off the bed. Éire, Ireland, Irelande, it said on the passport that was displayed as the postcard of the saint was in the kitchen, more gilded letters bright on its green cover: Pas, Passport, Passeport.
She put her ring on again when she was dressed, secured the clasp of her bangle, tidied her hair as best she could with her fingers because her comb was in her handbag in the hall. A pigeon was murmuring outside the open window and then she heard the rattle of the garage doors being closed. She hung the sheet to dry on hooks that were there for a curtain-rail. She pulled the bedclothes off to air the bed. She didn’t want to go downstairs and didn’t go when he called, but when he called again she went.
‘Stay a bit longer,’ Florian said, and the hall-door bell jangled as he spoke.
He poured two cups of tea before he went to answer it. ‘Forgotten something,’ he said.
It was a wrench, put down somewhere when a bolt on the Morris Cowley had had to be tightened. He helped the two men to look for it and found it in the yard by the garage doors.
‘Devil take it,’ the man he returned it to said. ‘That thing could hide itself in your flannel and you wouldn’t know.’
He was carrying the chair she’d taken to the yard when he came back. He said it was a tool they had left behind.
Better just to go, she thought, but still she didn’t. ‘Things end,’ he’d said the day he told her everything, and she had understood and for a while accepted that.
He had put his tie on, his jacket. A little of her tea had spilt on to the saucer and he wiped it away with a cloth.
‘I’m sorry.’ She whispered, not hearing herself, not knowing what she was apologizing for, then knowing it was for everything. For being a bother with her regrets that weren’t regrets, for her longings and her tears, because she had no courage, because she had come today and made it all worse.
‘I’m sorry too,’ he said. ‘I let things happen. I notice them too late.’