He didn’t deny that, he didn’t argue. The arrangement about the burial had been agreed with Father Millane and carried out as the last wishes of the dead. In the same way, Hegarty in the stoneyard would be instructed when the moment came. There would be a garden of remembrance because the people of the town wanted it.
‘I heard it there was a man photographing the funeral,’ his sister said.
‘I didn’t see that.’
‘It was remarked upon in the house here. It was wondered did we want photographs.’
‘I didn’t see any man.’
‘I’m only telling you what was said.’
She went away without further comment, taking with her a cup and saucer that had been overlooked behind a vase. Joseph Paul passed into the big front room, where the evening lamps had been lit all day, the blinds drawn on two tall windows at each of which tasselled stays were looped around velvet curtains in a shade of russet. A profusion of net provided daytime privacy. Magazines were laid out on tables and on a stool in front of the fireplace. Ornamental elephants and their young strode the white amber-veined marble of the mantelpiece, above which Daniel O’Connell was framed in ebony.
He had been told about photographs being taken because it would worry him to hear it, because there was a lack of respect, a funeral photographed like a carnival would be. He wondered if she’d made it up; she often made things up.
He leafed through the Nationalist, left behind by one of last week’s overnight lodgers. Then, equally without interest, he turned the pages of an old Dublin Opinion. She wasn’t easy. He had watched her becoming devious over the years, and had hoped - had on a few occasions begged in prayer - that time would ease her discontent. When they were children their mother had liked to have her in the kitchen and often he was sent away to play by himself. He had looked through the crack when the kitchen door wasn’t quite closed, as mostly it wasn’t. He had watched her being shown how to tease out fat and sinew and which way to cut the meat, how to dust the pieces with flour, never too thickly. Their mother had instructed her in how long the simmering should be, when to add the dumplings, the Bisto. The day came when she was allowed to make a dumpling herself, another day when she might skin the apples for a pie, another when she might stir the custard and mash potatoes. The kitchen was their place, they were the women of the house - they and whichever maid it was, a girl from the country, or a widow of the town who needed the money.
Becoming used to this woman’s world, Joseph Paul hadn’t minded in the end. He chopped kindling in the outhouse, which their mother said was more a boy’s thing. She took him shopping with her sometimes, she called him her little fellow. He couldn’t make her cross, she said; he hadn’t it in him to make her cross. Every morning after breakfast they had sat together at the fire, not a yard from where he sat now.
He had the room to himself this evening because the notice that offered accommodation had been temporarily taken down. He listened to sounds that were familiar coming from the floor below: his sister bolting the front door, a rattle of cutlery in the dining-room, the sideboard drawer being pushed in, the windows that had been opened for airing closed and latched. There had always been the chance that she would marry, that the past she had never recovered from would at last be forgotten, that Gohery, or Hickey from the watch shop, would show an interest, that one of the men who came regularly for a night would, or one of the older bachelors in the town. She had been young when the trouble happened. She hadn’t let herself go when it was over. She hadn’t since.
He heard her footstep, light on the stairs, the footstep he knew best now that their mother’s would not be heard again. That he should be despised by his sister was one of blaming’s variations; he was aware of that and it made it easier that he was. She crossed the landing and came to stand near where he sat. The two back bedrooms should be decorated before the winter, she said, the same paint as before.
He nodded. Not looking round, not wanting to see the jewellery she wore to provoke him, he said he’d attend to the matter and she went away.
2
Dillahan rose before his wife. Downstairs, he pulled out the dampers of the Rayburn stove and listened for the flutter of flames beginning before he tipped in anthracite. He waited for the kettle to boil, then made tea and shaved himself at the sink. In the yard, when he had opened the back door, his two sheepdogs ambled out of the shed where they slept to greet him. He murmured to them softly, one finger of each hand idly caressing their heads. He could tell from the air that it wasn’t going to rain today.
The dogs fell in behind him when he crossed the yard, unaffected - as he was not - when they passed the bad place. A sheepdog of that time used to make a detour, hardly noticeable, but Dillahan always knew what that dog was uneasy about. On the track to the river-field a rabbit took fright, darting into the undergrowth, and then another did. In the field the ewes were undisturbed.
Dillahan counted them, seventy-four, all of them there. He watched them for a while, leaning on the iron gate, the sheepdogs crouched at his feet. Then he passed on, climbing up to the hill pasture. He called the few cows he kept for milking and they came slowly to him.
Ellie pulled back the bedclothes on her husband’s side of the bed, then on hers. When she had washed in the farmhouse’s small bathroom she drew on her nightdress again in order to cross the landing, even though she knew she was alone in the house. She dressed, combed and brushed her hair, bothering with no more than that so early in the day.
Younger by several years than her burly husband, she had something of the demeanour of a child. Yet while childhood still influenced this expression of her nature it was a modest beauty that otherwise, and more noticeably, distinguished her now. It was there in the greyish blue of eyes that had once been anxious, in the composed smile that had once been faltering and uncertain. Soft fair hair, once difficult, was now drawn back, the style that suited it best. But in the farmhouse, and the yard and the dairy, in the crab-apple orchard and the fields, though touched by the grace that time had brought, Ellie Dillahan remained as diffident a presence as she’d been when first she came here as a general maid.
This morning, as every morning in the kitchen, the dripping she had cut from the bowl softened in the frying-pan while she laid out knives and forks on the table. It was another twenty minutes before she heard her husband in the yard, before the latch of the kitchen door was lifted and he brought the milk in. He said the buzzard hawk was circling again. He took his wellington boots off at the door.
‘I’ll be down in the river-field a while.’ He broke a silence to say that when they had fin ished breakfast. He had made sandwiches to take with him, which he did whenever he was likely to be in the fields all day. Making them for himself was something he had become used to during his years as a widower - cheese, tomato, anything there was. Ellie had filled his flask.
‘Thanks,’ he said, picking it up when she was clearing the dishes from the table.
She carried them to the sink, ran in hot water and left them to soak while she moved the chairs out from the table to make sweeping the floor’s uneven surface easier. She prodded a brush as far under the dresser as it would go, reaching for whatever dust had accumulated since yesterday. She added what she’d gathered to the pile she’d made in front of the stove and then scooped everything up in the dustpan. Although her back was to her husband, she knew he was standing by the door, as if about to say something, as if that was why he hesitated there. But all he said was:
‘It’ll take me the day.’