He continued on the subject as they walked. He spoke of people with difficult Russian names. He described a man with a long thin face and a tapering, flat-topped nose.
‘Where’re we going?’
‘There’s a graveyard. A most peculiar place.’
He related the plot of a story, so meticulously describing a hero and a heroine that they formed in her mind, their features like features seen on the screen of the Electric, a little more shadowy at first, but then acquiring clarity.
‘I used to think once,’ he confessed, ‘that I might try to write stuff like that.’
‘And did you try?’
‘I wasn’t any good at it.’
‘Oh, I’m sure –’
‘No, I wasn’t any good at it.’
They reached the graveyard, by the side of a lane that appeared to be no longer used. Its small iron gate could not be moved, he said, but the wall was not difficult to clamber over. He took her hand to help her.
‘I’d love to be buried here,’ he said. ‘It isn’t full but no one bothers with it now.’
It was hot among the headstones. The grass was long between the graves, like hay waiting to be cut even though it was spring.
‘A secret place,’ he said.
‘Yes, it is.’
Stunted thorn trees bounded it within its stone wall. If ever there had been paths they were no longer to be discerned. Some headstones lurched crookedly; those flat upon the graves had mostly sunk at one end.
‘I love it here,’ he said.
They sat down on the long grass, leaning against a headstone that recorded a death in the Attridge family. Other Attridges were all around them, other branches of the family, other generations. James Attridge, born 1742, died September 1803, Safe Now in Heavenly Love. Percival Attridge, 1769–1828. Charlotte Jane Attridge, died 1840, aged one year. Susan Emily, wife of Charles. Safe Now in Heaven’s Arms. Peace, Perfect Peace.
‘It’s funny there isn’t a church,’ Mary Louise said.
‘It’s half a mile away. Derelict now.’
‘They’re Protestants buried here, aren’t they?’
‘Yes, they’re Protestants.’
‘A pity about the church.’
‘There’s a rosebush growing all over it. In and out of the windows. June’s the time to see that little church.’
‘I’d like to see it.’
‘I’ll show you some time. And the heron’s really there too, you know. I didn’t make the heron up.’
‘I didn’t think you made the heron up. Why would you do that?’
‘To make you come back.’
She wanted to say she’d thought her ignorance about the things he liked would bore him, but she couldn’t find the courage. She traced a pattern on her pale green skirt with the tip of a forefinger. Her legs were tucked beneath her. The stone was warm on her back.
‘I’d have come back anyway.’
‘When I had to be taken away from Miss Mullover’s because there wasn’t time to drive me I wanted to try cycling. I did one day, but it didn’t work.’ He smiled. He was wearing the same corduroy trousers and the same tweed jacket he’d been wearing last week. His tie was tweed also, quite colourful, greens and reds. ‘I tried to arrange to go in with the milk lorry, but that didn’t work either because it went some roundabout way, and I wouldn’t have been able to get home again.’
‘You see buses for country children these days.’
‘D’you know why I wanted to continue at school so much?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘D’you mind if I tell you?’
‘Why should I mind?’
‘It might embarrass you.’
‘Tessa Enright used to say everything embarrasses me. Miss Embarrassment she called me.’
‘I was fond of you, Mary Louise.’
She closed her eyes. She felt a flush, hot as a red-hot poker, creeping over her neck, into her cheeks, over her forehead, down into her shoulders even. It was so intense it made her skin feel tight. She’d never had one as bad as this, she thought.
‘I have embarrassed you,’ he said, and added hastily: ‘It all belongs to that time. It has nothing to do with now. It was awful not being able to turn my head to look at you, like having part of me cut away. I can’t tell you what it was like. And yet what good would any of it have been?’
‘When you’re that age –’
‘Oh, I know, I know.’
She felt the colour draining away from her face and neck. A drop of perspiration itched on her chin, but she didn’t lift a hand, not wishing to draw attention to it, nor to distract him.
‘I’ve always wanted to tell you,’ he said.
She nodded, not knowing how to respond in any other way. She might have said she had thought herself to be in love with him: it was the natural thing to do, yet she could not. Did she know of his glances in Miss Mullover’s schoolroom without quite realizing it? What connection had there been? Something had been there, between them, something real – even if only for a week or two, before she transferred her affections to James Stewart. Yet a week or two was surely enough: that seemed so now.
‘You’ll still come back, Mary Louise? We’re cousins, after all. And anyway, you’re married now.’
‘Of course I’ll come back.’
‘People should know when they’ve been admired. That’s what I feel.’
‘It’s nice of you to tell me, Robert.’
The conversation ended there. Soon afterwards they walked back to the house, where the binoculars were hung on a hook in the passage outside the kitchen, and then there was tea beside the fire, as there had been the Sunday before. ‘Let me read you this,’ he said, taking a book from one of the piles around him.
It was time for her to go, but instead she watched him, opening the book, smiling, turning a page or two, raising his eyebrows before murmuring something about the length of the introduction, and then beginning:
‘A gentleman in the early forties, wearing check trousers and a dusty overcoat, came out on to the low porch of the coaching-inn…’
She believed she had never listened to a voice as beautiful. Delight caressed each word he uttered, gentleness or vigour matched phrase and sentence. If all he’d read was a timetable she would have been entranced.
‘The date was the twentieth of May in the year 1859…’
It was later than it had been last week by more than two hours when Mary Louise left. On the outskirts of the town she dismounted and unscrewed the valve of her bicycle’s back tyre. She’d had a puncture, she said when she arrived in the dining-room. The meal was over, and had been for some time.
The vet, Dennehy, was attentive. He and Letty saw His Kind of Woman, brought back for a second showing at the Electric, and The Harder They Fall, and Cast a Dark Shadow. Dennehy liked dancing and when he suggested the Dixie dancehall Letty did not demur, as she had in the past. It wasn’t too bad, she even agreed after they’d been there a couple of times.
Dennehy always collected her in his car. He would arrive at the farmhouse, drive into the yard and blow his horn twice, then smoke a cigarette while he waited. If Mr Dallon passed through the yard Dennehy got out and passed the time talking to him, usually about livestock prices. Sometimes Dennehy took Letty to a restaurant that had opened in a town nineteen miles away, the Rainbow Café; sometimes, when it wasn’t a night that the Dixie dancehall was open, or they’d seen the film at the Electric, they spent the evening in MacDermott’s bar. On the way home from wherever they’d been Dennehy invariably made a detour, driving to an unoccupied farm and parking in the yard. The headlights passingly illuminated tattered curtains hanging in the windows of the house, a blue halldoor in a discoloured cement façade. ‘An old fellow died there,’ Dennehy revealed. ‘You’d get a bargain with that place.’ In the yard he turned the headlights off and drew Letty into an embrace. He took liberties she had not permitted Gargan or Billie Lyndon to take. In time she laid her head back against the car seat and gave herself up to them.