From the kitchen window Philippa saw Tom in the garden again. He often returned from a walk like that, by the side door, not coming into the house at once, strolling about, dead-heading if the season called for that. She washed the parsley he’d earlier picked for her, and chopped it finely, ready for the carrots, the two bright colours of the tricolour – she’d never noticed that until Tom said one suppertime. He’d taken her away from the window and she’d whispered, ‘Poor Joe Paddy!’ because she was confused, and he said no, it wasn’t Joe Paddy who’d been shot. She asked him then and he said: because he had to, because she had to know. He hadn’t let her look.
‘Would you like a sherry?’ Tom was suddenly there, as earlier he’d been when he’d told her he’d finished his book.
‘Sherry would be nice,’ she said.
Anglesea Street, she thought, a little flat in Anglesea Street, plumb in the middle of Dublin. She’d always been attracted by that narrow street, not far from Tom’s office, not far from Jury’s Hotel, where sometimes they met for a cup of coffee in his lunchtime. They’d still do that, of course, and as often as she was welcome she’d visit Rathfarnham – at weekends, Saturday lunch, whatever was convenient. She could say so now; it was a time to do so, while they drank their sherry.
‘There was an old man I don’t remember seeing before,’ Tom said. ‘By the bridge.’
‘He’s come to live with the Mulcahys. Her father.’
‘Ah.’
Children would run about the garden again. There would be their laughter, and family birthdays. She would bring her presents, and with the years Tom would slip into their father’s role and be like him too, easygoing, with jokes to tell. The children would tell her things, have secrets with her, as sometimes children did with an aunt.
She heard the clink of the decanter’s stopper, the sherry poured, and then Tom brought the two glasses from the dining-room. It was extraordinary that the officer who came had wept in front of them. He had alarmed them, weeping so suddenly, so unnaturally, the brick-hued flesh of his heavy face crumpling into dismay and grief. ‘The waste of it,’ he mumbled. ‘The waste of it.’ The soldier who had gone berserk in mistaking Joe Paddy for someone else had suffered shell-shock. His officer – in charge of him, responsible, he wretchedly insisted – could hardly explain, so clogged with emotion his voice was. He did not know, for it did not concern him, that Joe Paddy’s connection with the house he’d sought refuge in when he was pursued through the streets was as tenuous as the unbalanced soldier’s was with Joe Paddy: once every two months or so Joe Paddy came to clean its windows. Madness and death: that’s how it was in war, this big, ruddy officer had said. As long as he lived, he made a kind of promise, he would not be able to forget what had happened in a suburban garden.
‘We’re nearly ready,’ Philippa said in the kitchen, but her brother made her pause for a moment to sip her sherry while he mashed the potatoes and sprinkled in the chopped-up chives.
‘Tom,’ she said and found it difficult to continue, and he smiled at her as if he perfectly divined her thoughts. He even slightly shook his head, although she was not entirely sure about that and perhaps he didn’t. Intent upon his task again, he turned away and she did not continue.
She imagined, in a small low-ceilinged sitting-room a coal fire spluttering a bit, a single blue flame among insipid spurts of orange. People didn’t live much in Anglesea Street, it wasn’t that kind of street, but that would suit her – the sound of handcarts down below, voices faintly calling out.
‘Thank you,’ she said, finishing her sherry when she saw that Tom had finished his. She rinsed the glasses. Thirty-four years, she calculated; she would be seventy-three when the same time had passed again, Tom would be seventy-six. 1984 it would be, sixteen years from the century’s end, as 1916 had been from the beginning.
He helped her carry the dishes into the dining-room and then he poured the wine. It did not seem an error now, that he had bought it. The wine would make it easier to say, the sherry and the wine together.
‘There’s talk of a new road,’ he said. ‘Out near Marley.’
‘I hadn’t heard that.’
‘Oh, some time well into the future they’re talking of.’
‘Maybe it won’t happen.’
Once on this Sunday he had predicted more war and more war had come; he had predicted Ireland’s wise neutrality and had been right. He would hate a big new road out there. He hated the motorcycles that roared up Tibradden, that crashed through fern and undergrowth and little woods, that muddied the streams. One day the crawl of lorries would take the freshness from the air.
‘Tom,’ she said again. She was wondering, she began, and paused, a natural pause it seemed. 13 Anglesea St, it said on an envelope, and they crossed College Green from Trinity, and then she heard their footsteps on the stairs. She made them coffee because coffee was what they liked, and cut the Bewley’s cake, ready for them. Why thirteen? she wondered, and wondered then if even now there was an empty flat there, if some premonition had winkled that out for her. Long legs her nephew had, like his father; her niece was beautiful already.
‘This summer?’ Tom said. ‘Port-na-Blagh, d’you think?’ He had been patient, not saying anything. A kindness that was, and his smile was a kindness too. ‘Port-na-Blagh?’ he said again.
She nodded, making herself because he had been kind. She talked about the summer because he wanted to. Three weeks away from Dublin and Rathfarnham, the sands at Port-na-Blagh unchanged, the white farmhouse, the hens that pecked about its yard. She loved it too, as much as he did, when they locked up and went away to Donegal. Even when it rained and her summer dresses remained unpacked, when they gazed from the windows at their ruined days or crunched over pebbles that never dried. They always brought more books than they could read, denuding the shelves of the Argosy Lending Library, owing a bit on them when they returned.
‘Or somewhere else, d’you think?’ he said.
They’d gone to Glandore once, another year to Rossleague, but Port-na-Blagh they still liked best. ‘I wonder what became of those widowed brothers,’ Tom said, and she knew at once whom he meant: two Guinness clerks who’d been widowed in the same year, who hardly spoke in the boarding-house dining-room; on Achill that was. And the school inspector who spoke in Irish came for a few nights to Glandore.
‘July again?’ she said.
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘It’s often fine enough.’
He nodded, and she could tell he was longing for a cigarette. But it wasn’t his way to smoke during a meal; she’d never seen him doing that.
‘Yes, of course it is,’ he said.
He saw, again, the effort in her eyes, and sensed her saying to herself that it would not be difficult, that he would listen, that the words were simple. Once, a while ago, maybe as long ago as fifteen years, she had said it; and again, more recently, had come closer to saying it than she had tonight.
‘Low Sunday it is called, you know,’ he said.
‘Yes, I did know.’
He poured the last of the wine in the silence that had gathered. Once she had wept when he was not there; he knew because her smile was different when he returned, the marks of tears powdered over. Now, it was easier. Only Low Sunday held them in its thrall, her head pressed into the wool of his jersey, his voice not letting her look. Pity for his romantic ghosts still kept the moment at bay; she had her fantasy of the future. Fragments of intuition were their conversation, real beneath the unreal words. No one else would understand: tomorrow, she would once more know that.