Florian listened, reluctant to engage in what was being pressed upon him. Alone in the newness of somewhere, he knew now he would exploit imagination’s ragged bits and pieces, tease order out of formless nothings, begin again and then again: how could he say it? That in some small quiet town he would take a room and work, and safely from afar try not to love, for ever, Isabella? How could he say a single word of such confessing when instead he could make a decent lie of the unpitying, unforgiving truth: would it have cost too much to say, or ever to have said, ‘I love you’?
The waitress came again and, surmising something in the silence as she approached, only wrote out her bill and left it on the table.
‘We’ve had our summer, Ellie.’
He said it softly, as gently as he could, rejecting falsity, for time would contradict it, add injury to injury, and pain to pain, and shame to shame. Time’s searching wisdom would punish both of them, and punish ruthlessly.
They began to go. At the door more people were coming in and they stood back to let them pass.
‘Without you there is nothing,’ Ellie said.
The man was taking down the sign about the maze being closed, his long electric flex coiled up. He nodded to them, knowing them as the waitress did.
Clumps of rush had begun to grow and Dillahan knew that the ground in this corner was waterlogged. Broken or clogged land-drains, it would be, more likely broken. He advanced a yard or so further and was in a marsh. But that was all that was wrong with Gahagan’s field, except for the fencing and general neglect, and he had suspected trouble in this corner. He could guess where the drain ran, a single pipe he imagined: he’d be able to dig it out himself. He’d done well out of the purchase, and he knew he had.
He walked around the boundary, rabbit-burrowing everywhere, the worst year for rabbits he’d ever known. He would replace the old wooden gate with an iron one, and the trough while he was at it. There was a dead elm in the road hedge and he was sizing it up, wondering if he could fell it himself, when he heard a bicycle beyond the bend and then Ellie went by. He thought she’d see him there, but she didn’t. He called after her, wanting to show her the marshy corner, but she rode on, not hearing him.
26
No note invited her again to Shelhanagh House. He did not come when she waited at the gate-lodge ruins, where in the beginning so many times he had waited himself. The piece of iron with which he’d dug the ivy out was still on the grass where he had left it.
Ellie went away, returned later that same day. Had he gone already, the formalities completed sooner than the date? Was he there now, in Henne Strand or Finse or Malmö? Was his house already made different with other people’s furniture?
Again she left the gate-lodge ruins, again returned.
Jessie wasn’t there, waking up in the open doorway when Florian did. She wasn’t in the kitchen, and he looked for her in the garden and then walked to the lake, calling her. He was still in his pyjamas, which had become sodden where they trailed through the long grass. He searched the garden again, and then went back to the house, to the sculleries and the unused dining-room, the drawing-room, and what had once been his darkroom. In one of the empty attics, huddled into a corner, she tried to wag her tail at him.
‘Poor Jess,’ he murmured.
He warmed milk in the kitchen and took it back to her but she didn’t want it. He cradled her in his arms but she struggled slightly and kept slipping away. He put her down in the place she’d chosen and crouched beside her.
‘Poor Jess,’ he said again, and she made another effort to move her tail, to thump the floor the way she knew she should. An eye regarded him, demanded nothing, trusting features that had always been trusted. Her tongue lolled tiredly out. She tried to pant. A few minutes later she died.
He dug her grave in a corner where she used to lie when the sun was too hot, or in spring, watching for rabbits. She had been fetched from somewhere a couple of miles away, the last one in a litter. His father had walked there, returning with the small bundle in his arms. ‘Peko,’ his father had suggested. ‘Jessie,’ his mother said.
Florian carried her downstairs, through the kitchen to the garden. He sat on the grass, his arms around her, her body stiffening, still warm. Then he buried her.
Afterwards, in the house, he sensed an eeriness, as if it had been waiting for this particular departure, another in an exodus that was now almost complete. He found it hard to settle and walked to Greenane Crossroads to leave the key of the hall door with Mrs Carley a day early.
‘They’ll find the others in an empty polish tin in the kitchen,’ he said. ‘If you could tell them I’ll leave that tin in one of the cupboards.’
‘I will of course.’
‘Jessie died this morning.’
‘Ah, the dear help poor Jessie!’
‘I was going to ask you if you’d have her. For the bit of time left to her.’
‘Of course I would have. Of course.’
‘Otherwise -’
‘I know, I know.’
They were in the licensed half of the premises and Mrs Carley, on hearing the news, had at once poured Florian a glass of whiskey.
‘You couldn’t but like that dog,’ she said, replacing the bottle on the shelf. ‘Nor the Kilderrys either. We’ll miss the style of the Kilderrys hereabouts.’
Mrs Carley’s plump presence, full of goodwill and fondness for the human race, hadn’t changed in the years Florian had known her. She’d been the last of the maids at Shelhanagh before she married into the half-and-half, and it had never been a source of resentment that her wages were often delayed until another picture was sold. She came back later to preside over tea after both funerals - a huge spread supplied by herself, for a small gathering on each occasion.
Florian stayed, talking about the snow that came unexpectedly and lay on the ground for so long in the winter of nineteen forty-six, about being spared the war, about times he hardly remembered.
‘You’ll be all right, will you?’ Suddenly, almost sharply, there was concern in Mrs Carley’s easygoing tone.
‘I will. Of course I will.’
‘You’re young to go wandering all the same.’
The talk changed again, slipping back into the past, which was Mrs Carley’s favourite conversational period. She had been remembered as Nellie at Shelhanagh, but her time there had for the most part been before Florian’s and he considered the formality of her married name to be her due: he had always called her Mrs Carley.
‘They’ll pull it together again,’ he said, referring to the couple who had bought the house.
Someone came into the grocery as he was speaking and Mrs Carley held her hand out, across the counter.
‘God bless,’ she said.
Ellie waited when she had pulled the bell-chain a couple of times, then she went in. The hall door hadn’t been locked when she’d come before and it wasn’t now.
She called out, but she could tell he wasn’t there. She wheeled her bicycle into the yard. The back door, too, was open.
She walked about the house. Upstairs, she found his bed unmade and made it. An empty suitcase was open on the floor, waiting to be packed. His passport was on the mantelpiece.
In the drawing-room the rickety table was gone, but the pictures he had wanted her to have were still in the pile he’d made of them, on the floor now. The book he’d told her about finding was in the kitchen, on the table, but she didn’t open it.
She washed the dishes in the sink, then took a chair out to the yard. His dog must have gone with him, she thought, wondering where that was.
When Florian returned from Greenane he noticed that one of the two remaining chairs was no longer in the kitchen. He couldn’t remember taking it somewhere else and then he saw the washed dishes on the draining-board. From the window he saw Ellie in the yard.