The Silence in the Garden Read online

  Neither Villana nor Lionel accompanied us, Villana claiming she’d seen the work at the bridge too often, Lionel unable to spare the time. I found myself walking abreast of the Bishop, who at first did not speak and then remembered who I was and wondered if he had been acquainted with my father.

  The afternoon was warm and sleepy. When we turned to the left on the road beyond the entrance gates, little puffs of dust rose from each footfall, as dust always does when that surface is dry. I watched it rise and settle, and noted how it was agitated particularly by the heels of Mrs Camier. She walked ahead of the Bishop and myself, her husband on one side of her, her arm in his, Lady Rossboyne on the other. John James was further ahead still, with the Bishop’s wife. Villiers Hadnett was on his own, behind us.

  ‘No, I believe I did not,’ the Bishop decided. ‘I believe I did not have the honour of personal acquaintanceship.’ But word had spread to him of my father’s scholarship. The clerical world had long been delighted by my father’s thoughts on the Book of Ruth, the Bishop informed me. He coughed and tightly pursed his mouth, as if to punctuate his flow or indicate a change of interest. ‘If my memory does not deny me, Sarah, you came up from Bandon to be Villana’s governess? Perhaps I take a liberty in saying so, in addressing you as Sarah? None is intended.’

  I reassured him. I agreed that his memory was not at fault. I mentioned, since the continuation of the conversation was preferable to silence, the Misses Goodbody’s suburban boarding-school, and how subsequently I had spent some years there.

  ‘Oh, dear heavens above, the Misses Goodbody! The good Miss Goodbodys! I knew them well.’

  The Bishop in his enthusiasm permitted the sternness that is evident in all the features of his face to slip from most of them at once. It was joyful news, he insisted, that I was not only my father’s daughter but also brought memories of two dear ladies. Then the mask deemed suitable for the Bishop of Killaloe returned.

  ‘Sarah, I would not raise this subject with you if we had not come to know one another well in the last few minutes, as indeed I believe we have. Sarah, since I have arrived at Carriglas I have felt troubled. Do you comprehend me?’

  I replied cautiously, and the Bishop explained that Mrs Rolleston had passed on to him her doubt, which he believed he may even have sensed before she spoke.

  ‘Sarah, it would be a most terrible outcome if Villana turned back in church.’

  I was saved from the obligation of giving an opinion by Villiers Hadnett catching us up. He launched into speech immediately, informing us that one should endeavour to keep the temperature of one’s body constant. Villiers Hadnett is not aware of my dependent position in the household, perhaps even assuming I am another temporary visitor. On the other hand, it is because she does know who I am that Mrs Camier has not addressed me. It is likely that she and I are distantly related: observing me in a role akin to a servant’s, she would prefer vagueness on that score to remain. So would her husband, who has not yet spoken to me, either. ‘I’m thinking of taking a companion-help,’ Lady Rossboyne let fall this morning. ‘Buttevant’s comfier than Carriglas, if ever you thought of it.’ I smiled and murmured gratefully.

  I wear an overcoat for that reason,’ Villiers Hadnett explained. I never travel any distance without an overcoat.’

  John James halted and with a gesture of his arm displayed the half-completed bridge. Steel pillars rose strangely from the water, the criss-cross of girders beginning at last to form a pattern. Lady Rossboyne’s shrill ejaculation was heard, deploring the spoiling of the landscape. The Bishop pontificated for a moment, discovering God’s will in what had come about. The others listened.

  John James did not say: ‘This will be the bridge of Cornelius Dowley.’ Well, naturally he did not. Turning his back upon the workmen and again playfully suggesting that they will not complete their chore, he led the way as we returned to Carriglas, and little puffs of dust again rose from each footfall.

  7. Villana’s Wedding

  Shortly after dawn on the day of the wedding Brigid looked out of the bedroom window of the gate-lodge and said to herself that the weather had held. At Carriglas Patty’s alarm clock sounded, and an hour later Mrs Haverty arrived in the kitchen. She asked Brigid if the fish had kept and Brigid replied that it had. The chickens supplied by Mrs Haverty had been stuffed and roasted the day before, and put to cool in the far larder, beside the hams. Before preparing the breakfast dishes Brigid now removed the skin from the hams and dusted them with breadcrumbs. She told Patty to leave the wedding-cake alone. The wedding-cake would remain where it was until the fish and the meats had been eaten. She herself would then arrange for its conveying to the lawn. She repeated all this so that Patty and Mrs Haverty would understand. She reminded them to have kettles boiling for tea when that moment of the day arrived.

  The ferryman told Tom that the ferryboat was to be waiting at the pier at ten o’clock and that Mr Coyne would be waiting in one of his motor-cars on the quays to drive everyone to the church. He’d have to make a couple of journeys, and a couple of journeys back. At half-past eleven the ferryboat would be waiting to return the wedding party to the island. It, too, would make as many journeys as were necessary to accommodate the extra guests who’d been in the church, ‘I’m invited myself,’ the ferryman reminded Tom.

  Rows of bottles stood on the stone floor of the near larder: red wine, Tom was told, they contained, and champagne. On the kitchen table the glasses were on trays, which would soon be carried up to the delphinium lawn. ‘Did you ever see as much lettuce as that, Tom?’ Mrs Haverty remarked in the sculleries, washing the lettuce, leaf by leaf. Near the cold frames in the walled garden he picked mint.

  ‘Just lead her on,’ Haverty reminded him later that morning. ‘Keep her steady behind me.’

  In the governess-car Tom followed the trap which Haverty drove, gripping the reins as he’d been taught. Mr O’Hagan was directly behind him, then came the other traps. Mr O’Hagan was dressed as he might be for Mass or for a funeral, the paleness of his face and his moustache accentuated by the black material of his suit. ‘Keep her steady, boy,’ Mr O’Hagan said also.

  At the pier the horses’ heads were held while everyone left the conveyances. Over his navy-blue jersey the ferryman was wearing a navy-blue jacket, which he hadn’t been wearing when Tom had talked to him earlier that morning. He held his hand out to receive the passengers, something Tom had never seen him do before.

  Tom watched the ferryboat until it reached the other side. Haverty and Mr O’Hagan intended to remain on the pier until the wedding party returned. They sat on the wall and lit cigarettes. They began a discussion about greyhound racing. Tom went back to the house, where he watched his mother chopping the mint on a board at the kitchen table. Then he helped Patty to carry the cutlery to the delphinium lawn, ‘I’ll show you now, Tom,’ she said, and showed him how the knives and forks were laid at each place, with a spoon and a smaller fork.

  Finnamore changed into the clothes that had been made for him. While he was still eating his breakfast, Eugene Prille had arrived with a rose for his buttonhole. Eugene’s small, round cheeks had been affected by a glow of warmth, and Finnamore had received the impression that the day meant almost as much to his clerk as it did to him. Eugene and his wife, who was in every way her husband’s twin, would enjoy the outing to Carriglas. They would take a certain pride; Eugene had said as much. Finnamore believed they had cultivated the rose specially.

  Items he had read in his newspaper over breakfast had stuck in his mind. A firm of Swedish blanket-manufacturers was seeking representatives to sell its blankets in Ireland. A national government had been formed in England. A meeting of the British Dental Association had taken place in Wales. In Co. Tipperary a man had gone berserk with a pitchfork. A ledger clerk in Arklow had confessed to stealing £15.12s.6d. Lord Fermoy had become engaged.

  He believed he would never forget those items of news because he had read them on this day. Nor would he forget t
he sleepless night he had spent, the doubts that had constantly assailed him, the lingering impression that the Carriglas visitors thought little of him. He would never forget the distressed face of his maid when he had said good morning, nor the way she had smacked down in front of him his two poached eggs. She had not spoken. A week ago he had asked if she intended to stand outside the railings of St Boniface’s, as Catholic women often did at Protestant weddings, waiting for the bride. She had curtly replied that she certainly did not.

  Having dressed, he clipped his moustache with his nail-scissors. Why buy new clothes, an advertisement in the newspaper had asked, when your garments are only soiled and shiny on the one side? A woman in Maryborough had kissed a dog and died. It was the day that honoured St Zephyrinus.

  Seeing the postman pass by, she ran after him, a thing she had never done in her life before. But he only shook his head: that morning he had no letters for the Rose of Tralee.

  The family from Dunmanway spoke to her in the hall but she hardly heard them. All day yesterday she hadn’t been able to eat a thing, the same again at breakfast. ‘You’re looking edgy, Mrs Moledy,’ McGrath had said to her, and she’d told him to mind his own business before she could stop herself.

  A letter could have gone astray, you often heard of it. It could be lying somewhere in the post office, maybe fallen under a shelf. It could have fallen out of a bag. ‘God knows,’ muttered Mrs Moledy distractedly. ‘God alone knows.’

  The banknotes were still under the tissue paper, which was a worry also, day after day in a hat-box. Two lines on a piece of paper was all she required, two lines to say he was busy due to the wedding, understandable that he should be. A minute, she had estimated in the night, a single minute of his time, then give it to the ferryman to post. She’d often mentioned that that was how he should do it; she’d gone through the thing with him in case he’d ever catch a cold and she’d be worried.

  In her bedroom Mrs Moledy tidied her face, and then felt calmer. He’d understand. He’d see at once that the money wasn’t safe in a hat-box, with strangers in the house, and a young maid. She went downstairs again, and opened the door in the hall that led to the basement kitchen, ‘I’m going out,’ she called down to her maid.

  Villana entered the church on John James’s arm. Respectfully, the congregation rose. Eyes noted the simplicity of the bride’s cornflower-blue dress, and the absence of bridesmaids, the modest blue and white sweet-peas she carried. The same eyes followed her progress to the altar, where the two solicitors, bridegroom and best man, were of a height. John James, taller by an inch or so, delivered his sister into the Bishop of Killaloe’s care. Beside the Bishop stood Canon Kinchella, white-haired and cherubic, who had baptised the bride in this church twenty-nine years ago. He had not taken it amiss when he’d been told the Bishop had put in a family claim; with the humility that distinguished his long career in the Church of Ireland he had at once agreed to the arrangements that were being made around him.

  In the body of the church Mrs Camier stood between her husband and Villiers Hadnett, on whose other side stood the Bishop’s wife. Villana was pale, Lady Rossboyne considered, as any girl would be in the circumstances. She wondered if the Pollexfen boy had TB. At Buttevant, six months ago, a wedding had been cancelled because of TB. Generally that was the reason.

  In the pews behind these family connections were the wedding guests of the more immediate neighbourhood, women of all ages attired in a variety of colours and a variety of hats, the men sporting here and there a buttonhole carnation. The Manserghs were there, and the Fuges, and Sir Cedric Goff, whose suit of plus-fours remained unpaid for. Surgeon Woulfe was there, and Miss de Ryal, and old Zeb Sykes, a clergyman who still did summer duty when a parish sent for him. Mrs Commodium squashed her neighbour into a corner of a pew; the agent at the Bank of Ireland sat more sedately, between his daughter and his wife. There were other people also, the remnants of old families whose genealogy was recorded in the mahogany filing-cabinets of Harbinson and Balt, the children of families that had more lately reached a social height not previously attained.

  ‘And therefore is not by any to be enterprised,’ the Bishop of Killaloe reminded his congregation with severity, ‘nor taken in hand unadvisedly, lightly or wantonly; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God.’

  Mrs Rolleston prayed that even in these final moments something would go wrong. She prayed for a silence, in which her granddaughter would slowly turn her back on the altar and, with her glance fixed on some point in the church, solemnly descend the steps to the aisle, not speaking until she reached the font and lightly rested a hand on it. it is only decent to draw back,’ she prayed her granddaughter might murmur, quietly, though with a vigour that she believed could not be denied.

  There is no reason, John James reflected as he stood there, why there shouldn’t be business to do from time to time in Dublin. It would not be difficult to pick up again the family association with Davison’s Hotel. The place would have retained its modest style; there was a cosiness, he recalled, about the polished hall; the waitresses in the small dining-room were pleasantly uniformed. You could sit for hours in the privacy of the smoking-room, with a whiskey and soda or chatting to a friend. There was no reason why he shouldn’t move the bank account to a city branch on the grounds that it would be better looked after by city clerks. The clothes sold in Lett’s Arcade left a bit to be desired. His leg might need to be examined from time to time by someone more expert on legs than a provincial doctor. While the Bishop’s voice continued, John James strolled down a Dublin street and then politely called out because a pretty woman in black had dropped a glove.

  ‘For be ye well assured, that so many as are coupled together otherwise than God’s Word doth allow are not joined together by God; neither is their Matrimony lawful.’

  Lionel tried to listen, but he kept seeing his sister running about the garden, she and he hiding while John James and Hugh counted to a hundred. In some bedroom on the way to Killarney Finnamore Balt would embrace her with lips that were like leather dried in the sun. The uncomfortable-looking moustache above them would roughen her cheeks; in her presence he would take the shoes from his feet. For a moment Lionel wished he had spoken, as once he would have, pleading with her and cajoling. But Villana, of course, would not have listened.

  ‘Wilt thou have this Woman,’ the Bishop enquired of Finnamore, ‘to thy wedded wife, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of Matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honour and keep her, in sickness and in health; and forsaking all others, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live?’

  A child whispered and was hushed. ‘Fortunate I was behind you,’ John James remarked to the woman in black. ‘Another few paces and it would be gone for ever.’ He dusted the glove before returning it to her, and when the woman thanked him and turned into a teashop he allowed a few minutes to go by before turning into it also. ‘Do you terribly mind?’ he said through a smile, ‘I’m afraid there isn’t an empty table.’

  ‘Wilt thou have this Man,’ the Bishop enquired of Villana, ‘to thy wedded husband, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of Matrimony? Wilt thou obey him, and serve him, love, honour and keep him, in sickness and in health; and forsaking all others, keep thee only unto him, so long as ye both shall live?’

  Mrs Rolleston leaned forward. Again she prayed that her granddaughter would draw back. But because there was no immediate response to his question the Bishop pleaded also, that he should not be made a fool of. For a few more moments the clash of these desires hung unresolved above the wedding guests, before the Bishop was rewarded.

  ‘I will,’ Villana promised.

  After she’d had three glasses of whiskey and hot water in Myley Flynn’s Mrs Moledy felt better. She walked down to Coyne’s Garage to make sure the French motor-car was still on the premises, ‘I’m after driving them up to the church in it,’ Mr Coyne said. ‘To
see if they’d like the feel of it.’ She called in to Myley Flynn’s on the way back to the boardinghouse, not taking long about it because the last thing she wanted was to find herself involved with boatloads of Protestants on their way over to the wedding breakfast. What would suit her was to cross over herself while they were still in the church and then be quietly waiting for him somewhere in his gardens, not noticeable because of the crowds. She’d never have thought of doing it if she hadn’t had the few drinks in, she’d never have had the neck for it. In her bedroom she changed into the claret and cream outfit she’d bought in Lett’s a year ago. She transferred the money she’d got for him from the hat-box to her handbag.

  ‘That’s a walk and a half,’ she said, arriving some time later on a lawn with flowers all around it, where a boy and a young maid were laying knives and forks on a table. The pair of them gawked at her, just like the old ferryman had when she’d stepped on to his boat, just like O’Hagan from the post office had when she’d stepped off it. She couldn’t understand what O’Hagan was doing there, sitting on a wall beside a dog-cart. She asked the other man to give her a lift up to the house, but he said he couldn’t unless she waited until after the guests had come across. So she’d had to walk, which hadn’t been easy in the shoes she was wearing.

  ‘Have you a Power’s for me?’ she suggested to the young one and the boy, but they only went on gawking at her, so she sat down at one end of the table with the cutlery on it. The sister would probably be placed there, with Balt down the other end. The sister wasn’t right in the head, getting tied up to the like of Balt.

  ‘I’ll go in and ask my mother,’ the boy said, and she recognised him from seeing him at Mass. He was the misfortune that had resulted after one of the maids got herself up the pole.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asked the young one, who’d begun to put out the forks again.