In her middle age, Miss Connulty was known in Rathmoye no more intimately than that - a formality imposed upon her when, twenty years ago, her mother ceased to address her by either of the saints’ names she had been given at her birth. Unconsciously, her brother had followed this example, and when her father died she was nameless in the house. By now, ‘Miss Connulty’ belonged to her more naturally in the town than the form of address she had once enjoyed there.
Thirty-two pieces she counted, not one of them unfamiliar to her, and she would wear them and wear them often, as her mother had. This reflection came coolly, without emotion. Some of the pieces would suit her, some would not. ‘What are you doing, child?’ her mother had long ago sharply demanded, unexpectedly in this same room, her slippered feet making no sound. A garnet necklace draped her child’s neck, not hooked at the back, the clasp held between finger and thumb. It dropped with a clatter on to the dressing-table, and Mrs Connulty, tall and stoutly made, declared that the Guards must be sent for.
‘Don’t get the Guards! Oh, don’t, don’t!’ Her own cry of alarm came back to Miss Connulty from childhood, fear cold again in her stomach. ‘Go out for a Guard, Kitty,’ her mother called down the stairs to a startled maid, and ordered the necklace to be put away. She went through the pieces to see that they were all there. A Guard was in the hall then, and her mother ordered her to tell him, and when she did he shook his head at her.
Less tall than her mother, and not stout at all, Miss Connulty retained the shadow of a prettiness that had enlivened her as a girl. Grey streaked her hair, darkening its fairness, but few lines aged her features. Even so, she often felt old, and resented this reminder that in reaching middle age and passing through most of it she had missed too much of what she might have had. She returned the jewellery to the top drawer of the dressing-table that had been her mother’s and now was hers. She kept out only the garnet necklace, admiring it against the drab shade of her mourning.
Joseph Paul Connulty was a lanky, weasel-faced man with grey hair brushed straight back and gleaming beneath a regular application of Brylcreme. Spectacles dangled on a tape around his neck, falling on to the dark serge of his suit. Two ballpoint pens were clipped into his outside breast pocket. The emblem of the Pioneer movement was prominent on his left lapel.
At a loss after he had been to the cemetery again in order to linger on his own by the closed grave, he went to the coal yards. The sheds were locked, there was a notice on the office door; sacks that bore his name were stacked upright on a lorry, waiting to be delivered. He felt at home here, had all his life known the mounds of slack, the stables where once there’d been horses, the high gates sheeted with corrugated iron, its red paint worn away in places. In childhood he had played here, but had not been allowed in the public house, which even now - teetotaller that he was - felt alien to him, although he spent most of every day there. His hope had been to become a priest, but the vocation had slipped away from him, lost beneath the weight of his mother’s doubt that he would make a success of the religious life. In the end her doubt became his own.
He locked the high gates behind him when he left and did not hurry on his way to Number 4 The Square. He passed the public house, closed also, and the deadness of the place gave him pleasure, for usually music and a muddle of voices spilt out on to the street. It was quiet, too, in the hall of the house where, being a bachelor, he took his meals and slept, where all his life he had lived.
‘A garden of remembrance has been mentioned to me,’ he passed on to his sister when they met on the first-floor landing.
Although they were more than brother and sister, having been born in the same few minutes, they had never shared a resemblance. In childhood they had been close companions but often now did not communicate with one another for weeks on end, though less through not being on speaking terms than having nothing to say.
‘Her standing in the town,’ Joseph Paul went on, answering his sister’s question about the necessity for a garden of remembrance. ‘Her association with the church. The money she gave, as well as everything.’
He didn’t reveal the other suggestions as to a suitable memorial that had been put to him on his walk through the town, since none of them would have been more acceptable to his sister, and he was in favour of a garden himself. ‘How she was,’ he said instead.
Unlike the coal yards and the public house, Number 4 The Square had undergone a transition that reflected the mores of its two generations as a business place. Originally catering for permanent residents, offering three meals a day, it had become a bed-and-breakfast stop-over for commercial travellers. The present Connultys could remember, though faintly, the bank clerks and shopmen who returned each midday to the dining-room and in the evenings shared the same daily newspaper and sat around the same coal fire. McNamara the road surveyor, Superintendent Fee, Miss Neely the lay teacher at the convent, and others in their time had remained as residents until marriage or professional advancement brought a change in their lives. Each had been allocated a distinctive napkin ring; Miss Neely had her iron pills, McNamara his stout, for which there was a charge. Now only Gohery the metalwork instructor - at present away on his summer holidays - was a permanent lodger at Number 4; but the house’s reputation for food and cleanliness saw to it that a room was rarely vacant. A sign in one of the ground-floor windows set out the overnight terms, and the value offered guaranteed brisk business no matter what the season.
In all this, Joseph Paul foresaw little change, the only one being that his sister would run things on her own. A woman or a girl had always come in to clean and wash up, and could not be dispensed with. Nor would his sister wish to do so.
‘It’s only it was raised with me,’ he said. ‘A garden.’
They had played a game with pieces of coal in the yards, five pieces each, to be kicked around the course they set out: to the sack shed and then to the water barrels, to the slack mounds, over the cobbles to where the carts were, beyond them to the pump and the red half-door, back to the beginning. In the town they had knocked on hall doors and run away. They had opened henhouse latches, releasing hens to chase. They had roamed the streets, their father indulgent, their mother occupied with the running of the house. Minutes younger, Joseph Paul had also been the smaller, but he had never considered that a deprivation.
‘What about the gravestone?’ Miss Connulty picked up a used match, overlooked by the daily girl on one of the landing windowsills. He watched her dropping it into the unlit fire in the big front room, cleverly positioning it so that it wouldn’t show. He said: ‘We’ll go to Hegarty for that.’
‘There’ll be talk about the way she wants it done.’
Their mother had laid it down that she did not wish to have her name added to her husband’s gravestone, preferring to have a grave and gravestone to herself.
‘Her own grave’s her due,’ Joseph Paul said.
‘Who mentioned a garden?’
‘Madge Shea in Feeney’s.’
A garden was what there’d never been at Number 4, and it was this that people remembered their mother often saying. A place for meditation, Joseph Paul went on, a way of giving thanks for a life: that was what people were thinking of too, now that this time had come. Behind the church, between the church and the cemetery, there was space enough for a garden.
‘It’s enough we have the peculiarity of the grave,’ his sister countered. ‘It’s the normal thing for a woman to go to rest beside her husband. It’s the normal thing for a husband and a wife to share a tombstone.’