She shook her head. She sipped the tea he’d poured. It had no taste.
‘I have that way with me,’ he said. ‘I’m reticent when I shouldn’t be.’
The doors of the wall-cupboards were hanging open, yellowing green, as the walls themselves were. There was nothing on the shelves, nothing on the row of hooks above them. The saucepans and china stacked on the floor, the two chairs, the table and what was on it were what was left in the kitchen now.
Better to go, Ellie thought again, and again did not.
‘There was a nun we’d talk about,’ she said.
The bleak recounting of events affected Florian as he listened. It chilled him, but a nun torn from her vows by passion’s torment, and wretched years later her body floating on the water, did not seem to belong, had no place, surely, in a passing summer friendship, even though love came into it, too.
‘I thought of her,’ Ellie said. ‘It’s only that.’
‘You’re not a nun, Ellie. It’s different. All of it is different.’
‘Sometimes a girl would say the nun deserved her fate. Sometimes a girl would cry, and another girl would tell us to be reminded of the nun’s suffering whenever we saw logs blazing. The log man he was called.’
‘Ellie -’
‘How is it different? How is it, though?’
About to answer, Florian hesitated, and then said nothing. Did she understand more than he did because the pain was hers, not his? Accepting the burden of perfect faith, a novice had promised more than she could give; a man delivering fir ewood lured her from her knees because he liked the look of her. Could there really be an echo of that nun’s misery long ago in what so ordinarily had come about this summer and now must end? Was despair, with all its bitterness, governed less by misfortune’s content than by some law of its own?
‘When will you go tomorrow?’
The suddenness of the question, the change of mood, startled Florian and for a moment he didn’t know what he’d been asked. When it was repeated he said he would ride through the night to Dublin, that that was how he’d always wanted to go.
‘Come tomorrow, Ellie. At least to say goodbye.’
She did not immediately respond either. When she did it was to say it would be too much to be with him on the day he went away.
‘I could not.’
Florian sensed the truth of that: it was in her manner, and he heard it in her measured intonation. It was a wince in her face while she spoke, it was in the turn of her head when she looked away from him.
‘I could not,’ she said again, out of a silence.
They sat for longer at the table, the cigarette Florian had put out to smoke unsmoked, the tea he’d made gone cold. This was what he would take with him, he thought. This was what he would leave behind. Tidily laid out, these moments now would haunt whole days.
He had pitied the infant left in a corner of some yard or on a convent step, had pitied the child given a place among the unwanted, the girl who had become a servant. Her loneliness had been his when they were friends - before, too greedily, he asked too much of friendship, and carelessly allowed a treacherous love to flo urish. She had come to him, and pity now was nourished by his greater guilt, and guilt was lent some part of pity’s dignity. A wild delusion seemed - because of what today had happened - to be less wild, a hopeless yearning less intolerant of reason. They sat not speaking, and time seemed not to pass.
The silence held. But when * they walked in the garden their choked conversation flickered into life again. The lobelia, the buddleia, the last of the smoke tree’s summer mist, berberis, garrya, mahonia: Ellie learnt the names, she had not known them. And they went to the lake to see if the summer bird had come back, but still it hadn’t. And then, beyond the plum trees, where there’d been raspberries before, they spoke of Scandinavia.
29
Dillahan turned off the ignition of the tractor because he hadn’t been able to hear what the man said.
‘What d’you want?’ he asked again.
The man had come from nowhere. A moment before he appeared he hadn’t seemed to be there. He didn’t reply to what he’d been asked, and Dillahan looked more closely at him. He must have come out of the field that had been Gahagan’s. Then he realized the man was Orpen Wren.
‘Is it Mr Dillahan, sir?’
‘I’m Dillahan.’
‘I know you, sir. I know you well.’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s not often I’m as far abroad as this, sir. It’s not often I stray away from the town. You know where you are within a town, sir.’
‘What d’you want?’
‘No more than a word, sir,’ Orpen Wren said. ‘No more than that, sir.’
30
‘Oh, we do, we do,’ the salesman said. ‘Wait now till I’ll get a few out for you.’
He was an older man, his back a little humped, starched white collar and cuffs, a shop assistant’s dark suit. Ellie hadn’t seen him in Corbally’s before. There hadn’t been anyone in the luggage department when she’d looked at the holdalls a week or so ago.
‘Bear with me a minute,’ he said now.
In the garden it had felt like a dream and it still did when she went back to the house for her handbag. He wheeled her bicycle out of the yard, over the gravel at the front, on to the road. He was waiting for her there and she mentioned the jammed zip of the holdall and he said get a new one. She couldn’t remember if she had looked round when she rode away, but if she had she retained no image of his standing there alone. She remembered noticing the Dano Mahoney as she went by it. There’d been the sign for Rathmoye, in Irish and in English, and then the Ford advertisement and the one for Raleigh Bicycles, and the request to go slowly. ‘Be sure, Ellie. Be certain,’ was what he’d said when they stood on the road. No more than that except to say to get a holdall.
‘We have this fellow.’ The salesman was opening one of the suitcases he’d brought. ‘In a two-tone or the blue,’ he said.
She had asked for a holdall, and described again what she wanted - something that would fold in on itself when it wasn’t in use, something that could be attached to the carrier of a bicycle. She didn’t explain further, she didn’t go into details.
‘Well, I’d say we have that.’ The salesman went away again and returned with two holdalls. He unzipped them on the counter, drawing attention to inside pockets. ‘We have it green. Or a tan with a Rexine trim.’
She wondered if he knew her, or if he’d ask after she’d gone and be told who she was by Miss Burke or the man she bought dress material from. She wondered if they’d talk about it, how she’d bought a holdall, where she was going.
‘I’d rather the green,’ she said.
‘That’s a better bag than the Rexine,’ the man said. ‘The Rexine finish hasn’t the appeal it had one time.’
‘Would you be able to parcel it up for me?’
‘I would, of course. Would I clip off the price tag while I’m at it?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘The latest thing is you have an expansion possibility on the bigger size of suitcase. We have one or two of that type of thing if you’d find the holdall wouldn’t be spacious enough.’
She said she thought it would be and asked if she could have extra string to tie the parcel on to her bicycle.
‘Of course you could.’
He gave her more string than she needed, saying it would come in useful. He asked her if she’d be going to the circus and she said she doubted it. He loved a circus, he said.
‘Drop in on me next time you’ll be in the shop,’ he said, ‘till I’d know was it a satisfactory container for you.’
It had still felt a dream all the time she was riding away from Shelhanagh House. It still did now, a salesman who was a stranger to her talking about a circus and bringing her suitcases instead of a holdall, giving her half a ball of string when she asked for just a little.