He went to the trailer for more posts and carried them to the riverbank one by one. He drove her into Rathmoye when the shopping was more than usual, too heavy or bulky for a bicycle; he didn’t begrudge her the time. He would have kept her company at the funeral yesterday except that he had never got to know Mrs Connulty as she had, delivering the Friday egg order. She hadn’t minded being there on her own, she said, and had brought him back the news, as she always did: who had been at the funeral Mass and what they’d said in English’s about the raddle powder that was ordered and still hadn’t come in. Not for an instant did he imagine, the day she had arrived, that another day would come when he’d marry her, that he’d stand beside her and hear the same words said again, that afterwards he’d have his hand shaken as a husband. The wedding decorations were as they’d been before, the same advertisement for Winter’s Tale sherry on mirrored glass, the noise and laughter, confetti strewn. ‘’Tis better so, ’tis better,’ an old farmer he’d known all his life lowered his voice to approve when there was a private moment, each of them taking a corner at the urinals out the back. He sang for them at the wedding party, for her too, as everyone there knew. They went to Lahinch for three days afterwards, the farm looked after by one of the Corrigans. She’d never seen the sea before.
3
Florian Kilderry skimmed a pebble on the dark surface of water as still as ice. It bounced only once; twice, then three times when he tried again. The silence of early morning was unbroken, the air refreshingly cold. The bird he had been unable to identify this summer wasn’t there again and he waited for it, hoping it would suddenly appear, swooping in just above the water in its particular way. He looked in the sky, but there was still no sign of it. His dog, a black Labrador, no longer young, looked also, her manner suggesting that she knew what for. These days she didn’t do much on her own.
It took an hour to walk around the lake. Here and there a detour had to be made if the land was sodden, but it wasn’t this morning. The upturned boat was still forgotten on the shingle where the stream trickled in, hardly trickling at all now. The reeds flourished best close to the water. They hadn’t been cut for years.
When, in the past, there’d been parties - when people had driven down from Dublin - there was always the walk around the lake, whole processions of people and Florian among them, the child of the house. Cars were parked on the gravel turn-about: battered Dodges and Fords, the solitary Morgan that always came, Morrises and Austins. The emblem on the bonnet distinguished each and he knew the number plates, remembering them from the last time. At night when there were parties he had never wanted to go to sleep, the music and the laughter always faintly reaching him in his bedroom. In the morning he crept about the house through silence that felt as if it would never cease.
Florian Kilderry - called Florian after a grandfather he hadn’t known - was the sole relic of an Italian mother and an Anglo-Irish father, a couple whose devotion to one another had illuminated a marriage in which their foibles were indulged and their creditors charmed as part of everyday life. His mother had been a Verdecchia of Genoa, his father born into an army family originally of County Galway but long established in Somerset. The well-to-do Verdecchias had not approved of their daughter’s romance with a wandering soldier who had become separated from his regiment as war was ending in 1918 and was certainly not aristocratic, as they themselves were. Soldato di ventura was the term that expressed their distaste; and too much, otherwise, was said, causing Natalia Verdecchia - several years younger than her suitor - to marry surreptitiously and flee with him to Ireland. ‘I was never more than penniless,’ Florian’s father used to say, and was particularly so at that time, having managed to live from hand to mouth since his right leg was severely injured during the Battle of the Lys. But in spite of the Verdecchias’ displeasure, in time there was a Genoese legacy - less than it might have been but enough to buy the house where the Kilderrys were to live for the remainder of their lives, where their only child was born and which on his father’s recent death he had inherited.
Shelhanagh it was called, a country house of little architectural distinction, looking down on its own wide lake, two miles from Greenane Crossroads, five from the town of Castledrummond. It was now in a state of some decay, for in the Kilderrys’ lifetime there had rarely been money to pay for its structural upkeep; and with the house itself, Florian had inherited a mass of debts and ongoing legal disputes. His father had been skilful to the end at procrastinating when the bills came in, good at knowing which to pay and which to leave. Florian was not. He had had no success at keeping things going, at growing vegetables to sell or coaxing plums from the trees before they fell and were lost in the long grass. The telephone had recently been cut off, cheques were referred back to him. Regularly a debt collector called.
Had the circumstances been less diffic ult, Florian would have remained for ever at Shelhanagh, but since there was no indication that anything would change and since he knew he did not possess the courage to suffer the indignities of poverty on his own, he had decided to take the advice he was offered, to sell the house and - child of exiles as he was - to become an exile himself. A fortnight ago the clergyman in Castledrummond had signed his application for a passport.
Born into the solitude of an only child, he had passed undemandingly through the years of early youth and those that followed it to become in manhood tempera-mentally hardly different from the boy he’d been: a polite, unpretending presence, given to reticence. ‘He’s shy a little of himself,’ Natalia Kilderry in her lifetime often commented, though with the affection that always accompanied a reference to her child. They were an affectionate family.
In his walk this morning Florian stood still for a moment, looking back at the tranquil orderliness of the lake. Then he made his way to the garden, high with artichokes that had become weeds among elder growth and convolvulus, and raspberry shoots that flourished only to be stifled, and last year’s apples rotting where they lay. Beyond this lush wasteland there was a small cobbled yard. He passed through it and entered his unlocked house by the back door.
In the kitchen he made coffee and toasted bread. He didn’t hurry. Reading The Beautiful and the Damned, he lingered over the last of the coffee and his first cigarette of the day. Then he washed some of the clothes that had accumulated and hung them out to dry among the plum trees. He tried to repair the water pump but again didn’t succeed, as he’d known he wouldn’t. From the kitchen, he heard what the postman had brought clattering through the letter-box and dropping on to the stone-paved floor. Passing through the hall a few minutes later, he found only brown-enveloped bills and threw them away unopened.
‘She’ll fetch a bit, I’d reckon,’ the man from the estate agents’ office had said when he’d finished with his tape-measure; and the Bank of Ireland thought so too. With the debts paid, there would be enough to live on, if not in splendour at least in comfort for a while. Enough to be a stranger somewhere else, although Florian didn’t yet know where. He had never been outside Ireland.
Upstairs, he went about the rooms, assessing what might be of interest to dealers. There was a lot less than once there’d been because during his last years his father had begun to sell the furniture, as already he had sold Shelhanagh’s gorse-laden rocky little fields. But even without much furniture, here and there the house’s better days held on. Pictures that had once cheered the walls were no more than a deeper shade of wallpaper now; yet each, for Florian, was perfectly a reminder. Ewers and the flowery bowls they’d stood in, wash-stands and dressing-tables, were gone, but he remembered where they had belonged and how they’d been arranged. Stale sunshine in the air had always been a summer smell and was again; the Schubert pieces his Italian cousin played when she came to Shelhanagh echoed; voices murmured. A ceiling had given way above the windows of a bedroom not slept in since the time of the parties, specks of plaster clinging to its threadbare carpet, the flies of some other summer darkening its windowsills. His father’s typewriter, an antique Remington, was on a rickety table in an alcove, where his diaries were also, stacked in a corner.