The skip swung a little in the air before it steadied and slowly descended to the lorry. The chains that had lifted it hung loose, and then were wound back into the crane. ‘Good luck to you!’ the driver called out before he drove away.
Florian had left himself without a book and, with nothing to do, he climbed up to the roof to look for the last time at the view it offered. He remembered being brought there the first time for the same purpose; and later, on his own, reading Coral Island there. Once Isabella and he had tried to sleep on the roof, but the lead which had been warm at first became cold and they had crept back into the house. And it was there, one summer after Isabella had gone back to Italy, that he fir st became addicted to the detective stories that were his mother’s addiction all her life. Day after day in a heatwave he had read The Fashion in Shrouds and The Crime at Black Dudley, Hangman’s Holiday, Death and the Dancing Footman.
From the roof the far-off mountains were unchanged, but the crowded summer fields were earthy now, empty and orderly and the same. Autumn was in the trees, bright berries of cotoneaster in the garden, busy squirrels.
He could see the road and would see her when she came, but still she didn’t and familiar guilt began, without a reason now. It faded while he waited, and on the way down through the house he went from room to room, closing the door of each behind him when he left it. At the bottom of the stairs a figure stood hesitantly in the gathering dusk. ‘I came on in,’ a man said, explaining then that he was here to read the electricity meter.
While this was being done and the electricity turned off, Florian again imagined he heard a sound outside; and listened, but it wasn’t repeated. The bottle of champagne was still on the hall flo or, ignored or forgotten by the front door. ‘Would you like to have this?’ he offered the meter-reader; and as if such generosity demanded that he should be sociable, the man stayed longer than he might have, relating anecdotes connected with houses changing hands. Some people took the lightbulbs when they went, he said.
‘You made it easier for me,’ Dillahan said, saying it suddenly when neither of them had spoken for a while. She had made it less frightening; for you could be frightened, he said, and not know why, only that fear had come from somewhere. You’d see that in an animal.
When the clocks changed next month he’d drive her over to Templeross, he said, and she wondered if, even after she’d been to confession, the nuns would know. Everything was calmer for a penitent, they used to say at Cloonhill, and she accepted that it was. But still she wondered if the nuns would see her as she used to be, or as she had become.
Twilight darkened in Shelhanagh House. Florian threw water on to the glow of his garden fir e and stumbled about the empty kitchen. The tin he’d spoken about to Mrs Carley was already on a shelf in one of the wall-cupboards. He pulled over the shutters in the downstairs rooms. When he had locked the hall door from the outside he dropped the key through the letter-box and heard it fall on the flagstones. By the light of his bicycle lamp he strapped his suitcase on to the carrier.
That night Ellie didn’t sleep. She hadn’t slept the night before either. Not putting on the light she had got up and moved her clothes from the chair by the window and had sat there, looking out into the dark. She did so again, the window open a little as both of them liked it, the air chilly.
It was earlier now than when she’d sat there the night before, the last streaks of filmy moonlight slipping away from the yard below. It was a natural thing for a man who had accidentally killed his wife and child to dread suspicion. It was a natural thing that a tormented mind should be confused. In the single day that had passed Ellie had many times told herself all that; and told herself that if Miss Connulty asked her she would say the man she had been friendly with for a while had left Ireland. She would not deny that she’d been friendly with him. She would say his name and where he had lived.
At the window she began to feel cold, but still sat there. Tired as so often he was, her husband breathed heavily and was not restless. Everything had been easier for him since she came to his house, he had said this evening, everything better for him since she’d married him. There weren’t many who would understand, he’d said.
Somewhere, far off, there was a light. She watched it moving, and knew. She put her clothes on and went downstairs quickly because the dogs would bark. She lifted a coat from one of the hooks on the back door. In the yard both dogs sleepily emerged to greet her.
She could hear nothing on the road. ‘Come back,’ she whispered, and the dog who’d been inclined to investigate obeyed. The other one hadn’t moved from beside her.
The light was there again, coming out of the dip in the road, still far away. Sometimes one of the Corrigan boys went by on a bicycle at night, not often, and they never bothered with lights.
34
They walked away from the house, he pushing his bicycle, the sheepdogs with them.
‘I thought he was dead,’ she said.
She told him. There was a gun kept for rabbits and the pigeons. There had been silence everywhere, the tractor parked like that, the dogs morose. A farmer from near Donaghmore had taken his life, another farmer in east Kerry.
‘All day today I tried to think of nothing,’ she said.
They had not embraced. They did not now. He was a shadow beside her, little more than that.
‘Why have you come?’ she asked.
She felt him staring at her, trying to see her in the dark. When she asked again why he had come, he said because he wanted her to know that he had waited.
‘I’ll never forget being loved by you,’ he said. ‘Don’t hate me, Ellie. Please don’t hate me.’
He reached for her hand, but it wasn’t there.
He would have destroyed her, he said. Not ever meaning to, he would have. He knew it, in the way of knowing something that couldn’t be explained.
‘People run away to be alone,’ he said. Some people had to be alone.
‘It isn’t much of a goodbye,’ he said.
He let a silence gather and so did she. There was a rustle in the undergrowth that might have been a fox’s quick retreat. They paid it no attention.
‘He saved you. That old man,’ he said.
‘It’s cold.’
She turned away and he walked with her, still wheeling his bicycle. Any moment a light would go on in the house, she thought. Any moment her name would be called out, the back door thrown open. That mattered more than understanding. It mattered more than anything, was all that mattered.
She knew that this was so, yet still would have gone with him. She whispered, gathering the dogs to her.
‘I couldn’t hate you,’ she said.
She didn’t speak again, and nor did he.
He cycled slowly, the air raw on his face. The signpost to Crilly was lit up by his lamp as he went by. The road straightened, became a hill to freewheel down, and then the twists and turns began again. How useless being sorry was, and yet that, most of all, was what he felt, a soreness in him somewhere. Her grey-blue eyes had been no more than smudges in the dark.
She listened to the swish of wheels in motion before the sound dimmed away to nothing, before the flicker of light became faint and then was gone. The sheepdogs ambled into their shed. She crossed the yard, her footsteps light on the concrete surface. She lifted the latch of the door she had left unlocked, and closed the door behind her and softly turned the key.
In the kitchen she was guided by the votive gleam above the dresser. She took her shoes off and mounted the narrow stairs, each tread faintly creaking. The bedroom door was open, as she had left it too. She folded her clothes and laid them on the chair between the windows.