‘He says anything. It’s different every time what he says. There’s no sense to it. He hasn’t sense left in him.’
‘He was sorry for me on account of the child. It was for that he stopped me on the road. A St John came back, Ellie, the time I was careless with the tractor in my own yard.’
‘There’s nowhere to come back to. These thirty years, there never was.’
‘I didn’t know it that a St John came back. Only myself didn’t know it. He’s saying no more than what’d be said round about.’
‘There’s no talk like that in Rathmoye.’
‘I hate going in there. Ever since the day I hated it.’
‘Would a drop of whiskey do you good? Would I get the bottle from the scullery?’
‘I used wonder would people be thinking I had whiskey taken the time I backed the trailer. Would they be saying I had drink in me? Would they be saying I shouldn’t have backed with the sun in my eyes?’
‘That isn’t said at all.’
‘Better it might be than what was said to me on the road.’
‘Don’t listen to his old rambling.’
‘I never thought it’d be said what was said to me on the road.’
‘You don’t have to think it. It isn’t true.’
‘Did you hear it said yourself, Ellie? Did he say it to you the day I went for the loan and he was talking to you in the Square? Did other people say it to you? Is it that that has you troubled, Ellie?’
She said that no one had repeated a word of anything like it to her. All Orpen Wren ever talked about was the past, she said.
‘It’s the past has him in its grip, Ellie.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘Coming out here, he was further than he ever is beyond the town. He told me that too. It was myself he was looking for, Ellie.’
‘He talks to anyone.’
He shook his head as he stood up. He went to the scullery and came back with the whiskey bottle and a cup.
‘I’m all right when I’m in the fields,’ he said. ‘Or when I’m with yourself in the house. It’d maybe be all right if I was walking in a town where no one’d know me.’
She watched him pouring out some of the whiskey that was kept to offer his relations when they came over from Shinrone once a year on a Sunday afternoon. She’d tasted it herself and hadn’t liked it. She said again that people in Rathmoye weren’t saying what he feared, that everything repeated to him today came out of a distorted mind, that Orpen Wren’s rigmaroles were all his own. He shook his head.
‘It takes a mad man to say it out.’
‘It isn’t true,’ she said again.
‘She came from better people than my own. But she never held it over me, she took me for what I was. I wouldn’t have said she was a flighty woman, I wouldn’t have said she was the kind to go with another man. But if she did who’d blame people for thinking what was said on the road? The age he is and everything, he walked the miles out to say he was sorry about the child. He said it wasn’t good that he never said it before on account of he forgets things. The rest of it slipped out, the way it would when you haven’t a grip on your wits. I always knew there was something. I always knew not to hold my head up in Rathmoye.’
He reached for the bottle on the floor beside where he sat. She thought he was going to pour more whiskey but he didn’t. He said again a St John had come back the time he was careless with the tractor in his own yard. You couldn’t blame people for what they’d think or what they’d say. You couldn’t blame people for reaching a conclusion. You couldn’t blame Orpen Wren.
‘What he said to you is nothing only rubbish.’
Ellie hadn’t sat down herself. All the time they’d been talking she had stood by the table with the knife and fork in her hand. She watched while he crossed the kitchen to return the whiskey bottle to the scullery shelves. He wasn’t a drinking man: that had been discovered by the nuns and passed on to her before she’d come to the farm. He washed the cup out at the sink.
‘I’ll make us something to eat,’ she said again.
She put the knife and fork down where she’d been intending to. There was a numbness in her mind, all panic gone from it. Nothing happening there was what it felt like.
‘He shook hands with me and then he went off,’ her husband said.
He didn’t want to eat, and nor did she. He went away and she heard the tractor again, before he drove it to the fields. In the silent kitchen it came coldly to her that the tragedy of the man who had taken her into his house was more awful by far than love’s denial. It came like clarity in confusion, there was a certainty: it was too late. And it came coldly, too, that the truth she yet might tell to draw the sting of his agony would cause more suffering than she could inflict, more than any man who had done no wrong deserved.
33
Waking the next day, Florian was first of all aware that his dog was dead, and then the day before came jerkily back, like a film carelessly projected. He had woken to panic in the night, but afterwards had slept again and now was calmer. What was done was done, what would happen would happen. He washed and dressed, made coffee, heated milk. He hurried over nothing.
It was eight o’clock when a van came for the furniture and effects that had had to remain until now: his bed, his bedroom cupboard, two dressing-tables and a chest-of-drawers the new owners of Shelhanagh had said they’d like to have, then changed their minds about. The radiogram should have gone earlier but there’d been a misunderstanding and it hadn’t. China was packed into a tea-chest, kitchenware into another. The skip would be there until evening, to take anything else.
The house was bleak, the emptiness complete when the men had gone, his footsteps the only sound. He prised Isabella’s picture from the drawing-room wall. He completed his packing of the small suitcase he hadn’t used since his boarding-school days. On top of what clothes he was taking, in protective cardboard he placed the watercolours, his most valuable possession. A drawer had slipped out of the heavy kitchen table on its way to the furniture van, throwing on to the ground his father’s waistcoat watch, his mother’s only jewelled ring. He found a corner for them.
The pages of the Fieldbook had served their purpose and he relit his garden fire with them. He put away the spade he had used to dig the grave, beside other garden implements that by arrangement were to be left. In the yard he thought he heard a sound, coming from the garden, but there was no one there. At the lake he skimmed pebbles over the water and wondered if, anywhere, he would play this solitary game again.
He missed the rattling in the reeds, the fleeing of the water rats. He smoked a cigarette, leaning against the upturned boat, listening for bicycle wheels on the gravel.
Ellie left the house only to feed her hens and to retrieve the parcel from under the tarpaulins in the turf shed. She took the wrapping paper off and filled the green holdall with stones from the wall of the river-field, then watched it sinking into murky water.
It rained in the afternoon and Dillahan cut the winter’s wood. In the shed he pulled out the boughs he had stacked, trimming them, chopping off brushwood with a hatchet. He had a couple of elm trunks, dead wood, dry as a bone. There was an oak bole he’d had for years.
The belts of the circular saw had slackened; the oil in the cogs was dry. He brushed out grime and sawdust, and his file on the teeth of the saw screeched when he sharpened them. He cleaned the spark plugs he had loosened. When he tried the engine it spluttered and then fired, with wisps of smoke and petrol fumes in the air.
He kept the engine turning over while he put away the tools he had used - wire brush and spanners, the hammer he eased the motor clamp with, screwdriver, his oil can.
When the whine of the sawing began Ellie came out of the house, although he always said he could manage. She passed him each next length of wood, hardly any of them too heavy for her. All afternoon it took, the logs falling to a heap on the ground.