“Don’t worry about writing back.”
“She never said she was ill.”
“That wouldn’t be her way, Harry.”
He strode away, dapper in his German clothes, the shine of his gaiters catching the sunlight. Later that morning, in Nagle Street, he waved to me from his car. I wished he’d said that I might visit her in her bedroom. I had thought he might say that: it would be ages now before I saw her.
For her sake I welcomed the mild weather of spring that year, and the warmth of early summer. During the dragging weeks of June there was a heatwave. Was it in June that anemones came? I had no idea.
“You will remember for ever your days in the rectory,” the Reverend Wauchope finally predicted, which were the words of his parting to all the pupils who boarded there. He was, of course, right. “We will pray to God,” he said, and together he and I did so, he speaking for me, requesting guidance and the blessing of humility in the days of my future. “I am to understand that you have failed to find affinity with scholarship,” he remarked. “Nor have you otherwise achieved distinction. Your father is a draper, is he?”
“He has a timberyard, sir.”
“And a place for yourself in it? You are most fortunate. More fortunate than most.”
I did not reply. After we have died, the first letter I received during that term had asked, do you believe there will be a heaven? Subsequent letters referred to the possibility of this future also; the past, always previously her subject, was not touched upon. Nor was the present: for all the mention there was of it, the building of the cinema might have been defeated by the builder’s lassitude and the shortages of the Emergency. The more I searched the lines of the letters for any hint of progress the more I experienced bleak dismay. Instead, repeated often, Frau Messinger had written: I have never understood how it is we shall be separated, some of us for heaven, some for hell.
“I have asked you a question,” the Reverend Wauchope said.
“I'm sorry, sir.”
“Do you intend to honour me with an answer?” “I did not hear the question, sir.”
Only three letters had come; all had to do with life after death. A week ago the last one had arrived, urging a visit from me as soon as I returned.
The sweet-pea will be in flower and we might walk in the garden.
“You appear to be inane,” the Reverend Wauchope said. His dry, scratchy voice querulously dismissed me without my having said—as I think I had intended to—that the timberyard did not attract me. But the silence surrounding the Alexandra cinema made me apprehensive about continuing to consider it an alternative. Already I had convinced myself that it had been abandoned because of the illness that was not mentioned. Herr Messinger had lost heart in his gift.
“You are suitable for work with timber,” was the clergyman’s final insult, the last thing he ever said to me.
With my three companions of the rectory I walked around the field where the cows grazed, Mandeville confessing that he’d been offered a position in a seed firm, Houriskey and Mahoney-Byron that they’d be going on to their fathers’ farms. “Oh yes, the timberyard,” I said. Mandeville wondered if we’d ever meet again: we thought we probably wouldn’t.
Later, in an empty classroom of the school, I gathered together the dog-eared textbooks that had also been my companions for so long and returned them to Mr. Conron. Staring hard at some point of interest on the floor, he warned me to be careful in Dublin if one day I should visit it. “Take care with the women of the quays. Don’t be tempted by quayside women.” With these words he offered an explanation for the torment that haunted his features. He lived with shame, yet some part of him was obliged surreptitiously to display its source, half proud confession, half punishment of himself. “I’ll take care all right,” I promised.
I tipped Lottie Belle the two shillings the Reverend Wauchope laid down as a suitable sum for all his boarders to pass on to her, the accumulation of such amounts reputed to constitute the major part of her wages. Mrs. Wauchope, who had not addressed me during my years in the rectory, did not do so now.
On a morning in the middle of that same June heatwave I left Lisscoe for ever. The bus halted to drop off bundles of newspapers or to pick up the passengers who stood waiting at a crossroads or outside wayside public houses, or nowhere in particular. Towns passed through were similar to my own or just a little larger. Cattle drowsed in the fields, familiar landmarks slipped by. The bus was dusty and hot, its air pungent with the fumes of petrol; once it stopped because a woman was feeling sick. I wondered if I would ever make a journey anywhere again, if I was seeing for the last time the ruins by the river, the bungalow embedded with seaside shells, the green advertisement for Raleigh bicycles on the gable-end of a house: my father boasted that he was none the worse for having never in his life been on a bus. We live and then we are forgotten, she had written. Surely that cannot be the end of us? In the bus I reread the three letters I had most recently received, phrases and paragraphs already known to me by heart. A gravestone gathers lichen, flowers rot in the grave-vase. In her drawing-room I could not recall her having once even touched upon this subject. She had not, for instance, speculated on the after-life of her dead mother, even though it was apparent from all she said that she had been more than ordinarily fond of her. She had not, when deploring the deaths of so many young soldiers in the war, ever wondered if that was truly the end of them.
The bus drew up by the martyr’s statue in the square, taking me unawares because the melancholy nature of my thoughts still absorbed me. The bus conductor handed down my single, heavy suitcase from the luggage rack on the roof, and then I was aware of the reddish tinge of a building that made the square seem different. In bright sunlight I gazed at a fa9ade that was exactly as it had been on the architect’s sketch, the baskets of flowers hanging from a hugely jutting ledge that formed a roof above the marble steps. The Alexandra proclaimed stylish blue letters, as if her hand had written them across the concrete.
FOUR
The flush in her cheeks was like the pink that may creep into the petals of a rose that should be purely white. She lay on her sofa, exactly as she had in the past, smoking and dispensing tea. It was a Sunday afternoon.
“I think you understand everything now, Harry?”
I shook my head but today she did not, as in the past, ignore my responses in our conversation. She observed my gesture, and smiled a little. She said:
“Everything here, Harry? All there has been at Cloverhill?”
“No,” I said.
“The cinema will open in a fortnight. With Rebecca. Harry, do you know Rebecca?”
She spoke lightly and with her usual casualness, but already I knew that death was everywhere in the drawing-room, and when I walked with her in the garden it was present also. The sweet-pea blooms were a trellis of colour—a dozen shades of purple and mauve, reds lightening and deepening, pinks and whites. Yellow hung from the laburnum shrubs, scarlet dotted the rose bushes. Yet the beauty of the Englishwoman chilled the blaze. Like a ghost sensed coldly, the melancholy of time deserting her was everywhere in the garden, as it had been in the drawing-room.