The Silence in the Garden Page 11

  ‘You can feel it wet in your fingers.’

  ‘Tom felt it often,’ his mother said, and from the tone of her voice Tom knew she was telling his grandmother this so that his grandmother could understand he benefited from the holiness of the well. She’d always been eager herself for him to look after it. ‘Father Pierce was on about you,’ she’d said. ‘I told him you didn’t neglect the well.’ When Father Pierce had arranged with Mrs Rolleston that he should go to the convent nobody had said it was on account of it being necessary for him to be near the holiness of the nuns, but he knew now that was what Father Pierce and his mother considered.

  ‘It’s good you look after the well,’ his grandmother said. ‘That’s grand for me to know.’

  Without warning she wept.

  Tom turned away and gazed over the sea at the island, at the grey bulk of Carriglas, and the green hillsides speckled with yellow. The distress continued beside him. The latest picture on the sand was of a woman holding a bunch of flowers. He watched while colour was smeared over a tulip. His mother’s voice murmured consolation.

  ‘Dear Mother of God,’ his grandmother sobbed, struggling with the words. ‘Dear Mary forgive you, Brigid.’

  He didn’t arrive. She waited until a quarter to five, worrying in case the ferry had sunk. A dozen times she looked from her window but the boat was still chugging back and forth, every hour or so. He must be suffering from something, she thought in the end, summer ‘flu or stomach. Carefully, yet again, she went over his visit of a week ago. There hadn’t been a word between them. He’d come out with only a single one of his hurtful remarks, not that he ever intended to cause pain, inexperience really.

  She worried, knowing it was unreasonable to do so. She worried because it had never happened before, because ever since they’d made the Monday arrangement he’d kept to it, in spite of his boyish touchiness. She always thought of him as a boy, she couldn’t help it. ‘My soldier boy,’ she’d said the first day, when he’d come in to listen to Get Along, Little Doggy on the gramophone. She’d been sorry for him, so young with his limp. When he’d come back another time he’d told her the details of the wound he’d sustained, still downstairs they were in those days. He’d told her about some other poor fellow who’d had the side of his face affected by shrapnel from a shell.

  At five o’clock she heard sounds downstairs, but knew it was only the maid returning after her free afternoon. He wouldn’t come now; he wouldn’t even come in to explain in case he’d be seen by the boarders. He’d refused to take a cheque in any shape or form, so during the week she’d got the money out of the Munster and Leinster and the fellow, Corcoran, had the neck to be inquisitive about it. Ignorant lump of a fellow, telling her not to leave it lying around.

  She dressed. She had seven to cook for. Bacon and eggs and fried tomatoes, a sausage each. Two pots of tea, one for McGrath and Tobin, the other for the family of five from Dunmanway. Tinned pineapple afterwards for the family of five, but McGrath and Tobin wouldn’t be bothered with that. The other houses did something extra for the families, so she’d taken to it herself, something they’d remember. She’d been explaining about that to him the last time, how she liked to offer pineapple pieces or jelly or a jellycream, or a slice of a Scribbin’s Swiss roll if she hadn’t anything else to hand. She’d kept to subjects like that because the other had given him a shock, but of course you couldn’t not mention for ever something that was close to you. If the sister could turn round and marry a string of fish like Balt, the subject could surely be at least raised. The sister was doing it for money, no argument about that; without in any way rushing him into it she’d endeavoured to make it clear that she did not intend to come empty-handed herself.

  Maybe he’d had to go to Cork on the train because a necessity for the sister’s wedding hadn’t arrived. Or he could have tripped over something that was in an unusual place because of the preparations; he could have injured his bad leg. Mrs Moledy straightened the bedclothes and looked out of the window. The sister’s bridegroom went by on the promenade, the family from Dunmanway were sitting on a seat. No point in fretting, though it was hard not to: six days would have to go by before she’d know. The banknotes were in the hat-box on top of the wardrobe, underneath the tissue paper and the hat she’d worn the day she’d got married herself, cordial-green with a veil, hardly ever taken out now.

  Supposing he never came again? Supposing he’d met some Protestant girl and gone for her? You might be standing in Dungan’s and you’d hear about it, the way you always heard about things in shops. One of the Blenner-hassett girls, or one of the Garlands. He’d go with her, having scattered his wild oats, forgetting altogether that he was loved, that his face stayed behind long after he went away on a Monday. She’d told him he was good-looking. She’d told him other things too, but what he’d never understood was how there’d be nothing left of her if he didn’t come any more. She’d said that to him maybe twenty times on a Monday, first thing and last in spite of any words they’d have. But his eyes were sometimes listless, as if the pain in his wound had come on.

  Agitated by her thoughts, Mrs Moledy blew her nose and powdered away the smears on her cheeks. She descended to the hall, and having opened the door that led down to the kitchen, she shouted to her maid, who she knew would be reluctant to get on with anything until she appeared herself. She’d be gone five minutes, she called down, and then hurried out to Myley Flynn’s, for the drink she felt in need of.

  Carriglas, August 22nd, 1931. The wedding-cake arrived today, from Thompson’s in Cork. Miss Laffey, who has constantly been over to take fittings, sent word to say she has completed the dress. We again aired the visitors’ rooms. Brigid came upstairs to polish because Patty is still slow, and Mrs Haverty works morning and afternoon now. There will be six to stay, and almost fifty on the wedding day.

  At dinner tonight there was talk of the bridge, though the subject of the memorial inscription was not touched upon.

  ’I would almost wager,’ John James declared, ‘that some calamity of engineering will befall that bridge. Before it’s completed the structure will collapse and will not afterwards be resumed.’

  ‘Why on earth should that be?’ his grandmother demanded, prompting him to cite examples of abandoned projects in the past: a road in Co. Mayo that was washed away when it was half constructed, a tramway there was to have been in Limerick.

  Villana contributed an observation to the conversation; Lionel none. ‘A statue of O’Connell,’ John James continued, ‘was planned one time for Clonakilty. To be cast in bronze, only they lost the middle part of it and poor O’Connell came out a dwarf.’

  Villana laughed: that was so, she agreed, she had heard the statue talked about. Lionel still said nothing. It surprised me that I had never heard in Bandon this story of Clonakilty’s statue, the two towns being close to one another. But I did not remark on that.

  After dinner I took the ironing to the first-floor hot-press, and then completed my evening tasks in the kitchen. Patty remained for a while, reading Ireland’s Own at the table after Brigid had gone down to the gate-lodge; then she said goodnight. I repaired some pillowslips that would be needed for the visitors. I waited, the kettle boiling on the range, but when Lionel came in he said he was tired tonight and would go to bed at once.

  I feel more than ever that I live in a cobweb of other people’s lives and do not understand the cobweb’s nature. These are the people I knew as children; this is the same house; trees and shrubs are as they were. I remind myself of that when everywhere I sense what I can only call distortion; I know no better word. I tell myself that John James suffers from his wounded leg, that it’s his brother’s choice to live a peasant’s life, that other girls have married sticks for husbands.

  I tell myself, but I feel as though I’m telling lies. The old woman sits austerely at the dinner table, preserving with them a privacy they hardly deign to recognise. I am not worthy of whatever secret there is, only good for the c
hores a poor relation must take on as her due. ‘The place would fall to pieces after I’ve gone,’ the old woman said the day I came back. ‘Thank you for returning, Sarah.’ But at dinner and in the drawing-room I feel trapped by my own weakness, more than ever I was trapped in the boarding-school or in my father’s rectory. I should leave Carriglas, but I cannot find the courage.

  6. Visitors on the Island

  Tom delighted in the kitchen’s turmoil. He kept out of the way, but was allowed to be in the kitchen or its vicinity in case there were errands to be run or a task which might be allocated to him. The house—until recently a wonder to him—became familiar that summer. He carried to the hot-press beside the first-floor bathroom the tins of meringues and brandysnaps and wafer biscuits that had been made. He peeped into rooms when the doors were open—the drawing-room and the dining-room, the breakfast room where the fire smoked, the small study. No one ever asked him where he was going or what he was doing when someone else had commissioned a chore; he did not speak unless he was addressed, which was not often; he felt he was not noticed.

  In the sculleries he was allowed to assist Patty and Mrs Haverty with the washing and drying of china that Mrs Haverty said hadn’t been used for years, to judge from the dust on it. He told Patty about the time the cloths hanging above the range had caught fire, and how a storm had blown the slates off the gate-lodge and Haverty had to climb up and replace them. Once a man had come over on the ferry to repair the banister-rail, and he’d knocked at the gate-lodge door to ask if he was in the right place. ‘Show him the way up the avenue,’ Tom’s mother had said, which was the first time Tom had ever done anything like that. Five he was then.

  For her part, Patty said, if she’d mended one tablecloth she’d mended forty, and confided to Tom that she was exhausted. The wedding lunch was to be laid out on what would seem to be a single long table when it was disguised by the tablecloths, with baize beneath them. Haverty had already arranged the trestles on the lawn bordered by delphinium beds, which was conveniently close to the dining-room French windows. Chairs had been brought from all over the house, some of them by Tom. ‘Would you marry that fellow?’ Patty whispered in the sculleries, I wouldn’t if he’d won the Sweep.’

  Spread out on the kitchen table, silver was cleaned—teapots and trays, cutlery, jugs and gravy boats, embossed napkin-rings, fish knives worn so thin they were almost sharp. In the yard Mrs Haverty beat rugs and carpets. The sideboard door in the dining-room was repaired, a blocked-up lavatory seen to. There was concern about what would happen if the fish went off in the heat, and Tom’s mother said there’d always be the ham to fall back on. Mrs Haverty agreed to kill a few chickens.

  Then the first of the visitors arrived. Tom waited with Haverty at the pier, and a man and a woman stepped off the ferryboat and the ferryman handed their suitcases to Haverty. The visitors tool-their places in the trap. Tom led the horse as Haverty had instructed him, Haverty himself following with the luggage in a cart. The man and the woman laughed and chattered, and when they came to the avenue the woman said she hadn’t been through the gates of Carriglas for thirty-one years. ‘What’s your name?’ the man called out to him, and he said it was Tom. ‘You’re a good boy, Tom,’ the woman said, and Tom heard her whispering to the man to be sure to give him a threepenny-piece. But when they arrived at the house the man forgot about that.

  A clergyman came in the same manner, with his wife, who was a cousin of the late Colonel Rolleston, Haverty said. Tom knew what Colonel Rolleston had looked like from the photograph on the table in the hall, but the woman who was his cousin didn’t have a similar appearance, being as rotund as he’d been tall, her neck lost in the spreading flesh of her chins. The clergyman was severe, his bald head not tanned like the ferryman’s nor pinkly gleaming like Mr Coyne’s: it looked like suet. It was he who would conduct the marriage service, Haverty said, on account of being connected with the family. In the trap this couple did not laugh and chatter as the others had. They didn’t ask Tom his name.

  A woman with a faded face came. She had hair that was faded to a nondescript greyness, and faded clothes, but her voice was different from the rest of her, being shrill and most determined. ‘Can that boy manage?’ she sharply questioned Haverty. ‘Suppose the horse bolts?’

  In the trap she continued to exclaim, shrieking at Tom to take care of the pot-holes. She held on her knees a parcel she had refused to be parted from, a wedding present of great fragility. ‘Something’s up with this place,’ she commented as they approached the avenue gates. ‘They’ve let it go.’ Then she called out that the horse should be made to progress more slowly. ‘Show me where they murdered the butler,’ she peremptorily commanded, and Tom did, when they came to the spot.

  Some time later a young man with glasses arrived and was similarly conveyed. He wore a long black overcoat and a woollen scarf in spite of the heat of the day, and having settled himself into the trap, wrapped a travelling rug around his knees. He told Haverty it had been very expensive for him to come to the wedding, since he’d been obliged to travel from well beyond Athlone, where he was at present staying with an uncle. Young men like that stayed a lot in relations’ houses, Haverty afterwards explained to Tom. The couple who’d arrived first were the Camiers from Unionhall, he said; before their marriage she might have been a Pollexfen, the better-off branch of that family, he wasn’t sure. The clergyman was the Protestant Bishop of Killaloe. The faded woman was Lady Rossboyne.

  Two more traps, and the dog-cart and the governess-car, were to be drawn by the farm horses and a pony on the day of the wedding, so that all these visitors and the Rollestons themselves could be accommodated on the journey to the pier. Tom helped Haverty to wash down the governess-car and the dog-cart in the yard, and then Haverty pushed them about, steering them with their shafts, to make sure the wheels didn’t continue to squeak after he’d greased them. It had been arranged that Mr O’Hagan would drive the dog-cart on the day of the wedding, and Lionel and John James would take a trap each. He’d take the third trap himself. ‘Would you manage the governess-car?’ he suggested to Tom. ‘Come down on the avenue and I’ll show you.’

  Tom, who had learnt the day before how to lead a horse by the bridle, now learnt how to hold the reins and control the pace of the governess-car pony, I’ll be in front of you,’ Haverty said. ‘Just keep her steady.’ When the instruction was over, the pony was allowed to graze on the verge of the avenue and Haverty lit a cigarette and told Tom about a regatta there had been, the last occasion when there’d been as much company at Carriglas as there would be on the wedding day. Yachts and sailing-boats had raced around the island; boats had come up from Dunmore East and Dungarvan; there’d been different coloured sails, and flags along the quaysides. In the evening some of the boats had come in at the old landing-stage and everyone had gone up to the house to make a night of it. Well before the war it would have been, maybe 1905.

  Because his mother didn’t have time to go down to the gate-lodge that evening, she fried Tom slices of griddle bread in the kitchen of the house and made him his cocoa there. Patty came in with the slender-stemmed glasses she’d been sent to collect from the drawing-room, from which sherry had been drunk. ‘God, wouldn’t that crowd frighten the life out of you?’ she whispered to Tom.

  The visitors so observed and remarked upon in turn observed and remarked upon the bridegroom, since none of them had met Finnamore Balt before. Invited to dinner at Carriglas on the first evening of their stay, he was mistaken by Lady Rossboyne for someone else, and in her forthright manner she said so several times before the matter was set right. The Bishop was equally taken aback, having been unaware that his wife’s young relative had become engaged to a man so very much her senior. His wife, he could divine from her expression, had been unaware also.

  Mrs Camier of Unionhall was particularly surprised, for although she and her husband had known that Finnamore was an older man, she had not been prepared for the austerity of his appear
ance and a manner that suggested to her some inner discomfort—possibly digestive troubles. Money must come into it, her husband privately remarked to her as the party moved from the drawing-room to the dining-room. Only the young man with glasses, whose name was Villiers Hadnett, found nothing unusual about Villana’s bridegroom, being mainly interested in himself.

  In the dining-room Patty was nervous with the dishes, even though Brigid had warned her that she mustn’t be. Mrs Haverty carried trays, but advanced into the room no further than the sideboard. ‘Didn’t you replace your butler?’ Lady Rossboyne enquired, noting the rudimentary nature of these arrangements. ‘Very grand we all thought you, having a butler.’

  ‘We hadn’t the heart to replace him,’ Mrs Rolleston replied from her end of the table. ‘And then time went on and we couldn’t afford to.’

  ‘Well, I never! Did you hear that, Bishop?’

  I beg your pardon, Lady Rossboyne?’

  But Lady Rossboyne chose not to supply the Bishop with the information she had drawn his attention to. Instead she related how she herself had been fortunate to escape unharmed on an occasion during the Troubles, when a tar barrel had been set alight in the room beneath the one where she was sleeping. The neighbouring Buttevant Court, as no doubt was well known, had been razed to the ground.

  ‘We were mercifully overlooked,’ the Bishop murmured, but Lady Rossboyne did not wish to hear the details of that. The child with the governess-car had shown her where the outrage had occurred. She’d naturally asked about it.

  ‘Linchy was his father,’ Mrs Rolleston said.

  ‘That child’s father? So Linchy was a married man?’

  ‘He wasn’t. But that didn’t stop him from taking our parlourmaid into his bed.’

  ‘Good Lord!’