The Silence in the Garden Read online

  ‘Patty, ma’am.’

  ‘D’you know who I am, Patty? Did you recognise me when you saw me?’

  ‘You’re Mrs Moledy from the boarding-house.’

  ‘Did you ever hear me mentioned in the kitchen, Patty? What type of thing would they say?’

  ‘I never heard you mentioned, Mrs Moledy.’

  She eyed the girl doubtfully. Full of lies they were mostly. She’d said it to him only a week ago, but he’d shown no sympathy. She’d told him about a lie concerning fly-papers, told to her in her own kitchen. But when she’d looked at him again he was asleep.

  ‘Good morning to you, Mrs Moledy.’ The boy had returned with his mother, who looked flustered, with her sleeves rolled up. She was wearing a blue overall, not as smartly turned out as the young one in the uniform. These were the two trollops he’d said he might as well be married to when she’d made the suggestion to him. Ridiculous talk that was, a man of his years. ‘Were you looking for someone?’ the one who’d got herself up the pole was asking, as bold as brass.

  She laughed, considering a laugh the best answer to give to a serving woman who was standing in the company of her disgrace. The woman asked the question again, and she replied that she was looking for a drink on account of having time to put in.

  ‘There’s no Power’s in the house. Only Jameson or Paddy.’

  ‘What’s wrong with a Paddy?’

  The woman went away, and returned with such a modest quantity of whiskey in a glass that Mrs Moledy had to laugh again, not that she drank much as a rule. ‘I want you in the kitchen,’ the woman told the young one, and told the boy to look out the top landing window and see if the ferry was coming with the visitors. She told him not to be late down at the pier. Then all three of them disappeared.

  Mrs Moledy took a mouthful of whiskey, wishing there was hot water to go with it, but you couldn’t expect everything. You had to be fair about a thing like that, but even so she saw no harm in resting herself, the condition her feet were in. She’d slip away into the trees long before the crowd arrived. She’d call out to him softly and give him the notes, explaining that she was worried because of the strangers in the house. She would explain to him that you couldn’t leave a thimble about these days. Better to be safe than sorry, she’d say, and after that she wouldn’t delay him. ‘I hear Coyne drove to the church in the car,’ she’d say, only that and nothing else.

  It was pleasant in the sunshine. Bees were humming near to where she sat. The flowers that were all around her gave off a heady fragrance. Pleasurably, she savoured another mouthful of whiskey. He’d never seen her claret before and she wondered what he’d think of it, not that he ever remarked on clothing. She remembered telling him about it at the time, and how she’d had to stand on the counter after the shop was closed while Mrs Lett and Lett got the hem right. She’d wanted to take it out of the wardrobe and put it on for him but she never had.

  Noticing that her glass had become empty, Mrs Moledy rose and made her way into the house through the open French windows. ‘There’s nothing can’t be put right with a drop of Paddy,’ was a favourite axiom of the big trawler-man who came into Myley Flynn’s, a fresh-faced man with exploded veins all over his nose and cheeks. In her own view Power’s was the better drink, but what wasn’t there you couldn’t have. She found the bottle of Paddy among the sherry decanters on the sideboard.

  Afterwards Mrs Moledy recalled making several journeys to the sideboard. She recalled saying to herself how partylike the flowers were, and how the long table looked lovely with its clean white tablecloths. Three old sheepdogs came and slumped down beside her, as tame and friendly as you could ask for. ‘Isn’t it nice here?’ she said whenever the young one appeared with something else for the table, but the only response she received was a giggle.

  In time other people appeared. His brother peered out of the dining-room, dressed up in fancy togs. A female with forget-me-nots on her dress came out and spoke to her. She thought it was the sister so she held out her hand, even though she was puzzled by the reduced size of her and wondered if she’d suffered an attack of something.

  ‘I’m Noreen Moledy,’ she said. ‘We never met.’

  But she realised while she was speaking that this wasn’t the sister at all. This was a serious-faced little creature, not smiling like a bride would be. ‘Haven’t I seen you in the shops?’ she said, and some kind of reply was made, only the poor creature’s voice was so low no one could have heard it. In an effort at friendliness, she patted the chair beside her, remarking how pleasant it was, with the smell of the flowers and the dogs fast asleep. Then she remembered that this was the female who’d been hanging about the place for years, some type of poor relation. She closed her eyes in order to rest them, resolving to give herself another five minutes before she slipped away into the trees. When she opened them she found herself alone, which she considered rude because she’d been thinking of something to say that would interest the female with the forget-me-nots on her clothing. She had it on the tip of her tongue to tell her about the altering of the hem, only you couldn’t talk to someone who wasn’t there so she made her way to the dining-room. She approached the sideboard, once more recalling the trawler-man who came into Myley Flynn’s. She filled her glass to the brim.

  ‘She must have gone,’ the old grandmother was saying when she returned to the lawn, a woman she knew well by sight. ‘Thank God for that.’

  Mrs Moledy sat down on a chair and carefully placed her glass on the table. The female had gone all right, she said; one minute she was there and the next she’d walked off. She closed one eye because all of a sudden there appeared to be two of the old grandmothers in front of her. She wondered if the other female was suffering from toothache, which would account for being so serious in the face. She asked about that, but although she could see the women’s lips moving, she couldn’t hear what they said. She couldn’t understand why none of these people would speak up, and then she wondered if they were able to hear what she was saying herself.

  ‘Excuse me, were we ever introduced? Noreen Moledy, originally of Cahir.’

  She held out her hand in the direction of the two women, but by mistake she closed her eyes for a minute and the next thing was they weren’t there any more. She felt tired so she went to sleep.

  The governess-car and the dog-cart and the traps journeyed repeatedly between the pier and the house, ‘If I may assist,’ Eugene Prille offered, and John James was relieved of his trap. Mr O’Hagan succeeded in making his horse trot. Haverty shook the reins to make his hurry up. Tom didn’t dare do that.

  Eugene Prille resembled an egg, Deso Furphy had once said. Mrs Prille, whom Tom had only occasionally seen before, resembled an egg also. ‘Don’t leave me,’ he heard her begging her husband when he made his offer, and seemed happy to accompany him back and forth in the trap, both of them smiling all the time.

  ‘You were not made a fool of,’ the Bishop’s wife observed as Tom turned the governess-car into the avenue.

  ‘A bishop should not be,’ came the retort, pointed with asperity. ‘That was all I ever meant.’

  ‘No further exchange took place between them, but on the next journey Villiers Hadnett, at very great length, recalled for Miss de Ryal and old Zeb Sykes the wedding of his sister. The ceremony had been interrupted by an objector, a young man who had. been a suitor of Villiers Hadnett’s sister in the past. This youth had shouted out from the back of the church, announcing that he intended to burn it down unless matters were halted.

  ‘Dear me.’ Miss de Ryal, who had once given Tom a penny she’d found on the street, was all in white, her reddened lips standing out because her face was white also. She was older than she looked, Mrs Haverty had been saying to Tom’s mother only the other morning.

  ‘He was seized hold of by the arms,’ Villiers Hadnett went on. ‘He had matches secreted all over him and two tins of petrol in the vestry.’

  ‘How horrid for your sister!’

&
nbsp; ‘My sister is injudicious.’

  ‘In all my years in the Church of Ireland,’ old Zeb Sykes contributed, ‘I did not have an experience like that.’

  Tom listened while the further details of the events were recounted, the seizing of the ex-suitor, the removal of boxes of matches from his pockets, his subsequent escape from custody in the vestry, the second interruption of the ceremony, the discovery of more petrol and matches.

  ‘How very dreadful!’ politely murmured Miss de Ryal, but Villiers Hadnett, warmly wrapped in his overcoat and muffler, had already changed the subject and was telling his companions about the expense and discomfort of his journey from Athlone. i don’t know if you’re aware,’ he said, ‘that especially when travelling the body temperature must be constant.’

  Some of the guests began to walk from the pier and hailed Tom as he came towards them on his way back from the house. Haverty had showed him how to turn the pony round, which he managed to do if he took it slowly. ‘Can you hurry up a bit?’ a woman urged on the avenue, but Haverty had told him he mustn’t so he pretended not to understand her.

  When all the wedding guests had been delivered, the traps and the governess-car and the dog-cart stood in the yard, waiting until they were again required. ‘You’re offered a glass of sherry,’ Haverty informed Mr O’Hagan, adding that when the time came there’d be a place for him at the kitchen table. He’d try the sherry, Mr O’Hagan cautiously assented.

  Tom watched the party from the side of the house, where he couldn’t be seen. People stood with glasses in their hands beneath the strawberry trees, or strolled out of sight round the corner of the conservatory. Their laughter and their raised voices carried to where he watched. Children who were older than he was stood obediently by their parents, younger ones ran about on the grass. Two men came out of the house and crossed the gravel, both of them smoking cigarettes, with glasses in their hands, it’d be ripe if he turned out not to have a fluke,’ one of them said, and the other laughed.

  When everyone sat down at the table on the delphinium lawn Tom’s task would be to go all over the garden in search of any glasses that had been put down. He was to carry them to the kitchen, two at a time, not running in case he tripped. Patty wouldn’t have time to do that, nor would Mrs Haverty. There would be no one to help him, and the glasses would have to be collected so that they could be washed in case there was a shortage afterwards. Later on it would be the same with the teacups.

  ‘Fish,’ the man who had forgotten to give him the threepenny-piece said to the woman who had reminded him that he should. ‘And a couple of seedy-looking chickens.’

  Speculating on the quality of the hams that accompanied the chickens, the Camiers passed as close to Tom as the two men with the cigarettes had. In the greater distance he watched Mrs Rolleston moving among her guests, shaking their hands and pausing to talk to them. Some of them he had never seen before.

  He went all the way round the house until the people standing beneath the strawberry trees came into view again. Mrs Rolleston was still going from one person to another. Cautiously he moved closer, making his way through the shrubbery that skirted one side of the grass. Towering rhododendron bushes and bamboos kept him concealed. He gazed through foliage at silk dresses and dark suits. The laughter and voices had become louder. Villiers Hadnett was telling Miss de Ryal about his lung.

  ‘She keeps a boarding-house,’ another voice said, but Tom was unable to ascertain who was speaking because he couldn’t see around a clump of bamboo canes. It might be Mrs Commodium, he thought, because the voice was what you’d expect from her: gruff and heavy. Mrs Commodium was a statuesque woman who moved very slowly down South Main Street, calling in at the shops and ordering goods to be sent to her house. Once, in Meath’s, Tom had heard two other women agreeing that she had driven her husband to his grave. Tom remembered seeing Mr Commodium in his lifetime, a man with a dog on a lead.

  ‘But what on earth is she doing here?’ someone else enquired, sounding like the woman who’d asked him to show her the place his father had been killed.

  ‘He visits her, you know. You could set your clocks by him.’ Tom heard a gasp, and an effort at speech failing, another effort made and again failing. ‘Oh, indeed he does,’ the voice he guessed to be Mrs Commodium’s insisted. ‘Everyone knows that.’

  The conversation drifted away from Tom, the voices unintelligibly continuing for a moment longer. He slipped through the shrubbery, making his way to another edge of it. ‘Tom!’ he heard Mrs Rolleston calling, and then he saw her on the delphinium lawn. ‘Patty, tell Tom I want him,’ she said as Patty went by with a jug of lemonade he had watched being made in the kitchen.

  He ran out on to the short grass of the lawn, pursuing Mrs Rolleston, who had passed into the house. In the dining-room he said:

  ‘I’m here, Mrs Rolleston.’

  Apart from the sculleries and the kitchen, his mother didn’t allow him to go into any room of the house unless he was sent on a message, but he knew it was all right to be in the dining-room because Mrs Rolleston wanted him. She didn’t hear him at first so he repeated her name more loudly. She turned round just as she was about to pass through the door to the inner hall.

  ‘Tom, would you do something for me?’

  She paused the way she did when she asked him to buy a postal order, not taking it for granted that he’d agree before he said so. He liked her the best of them, Tom thought.

  ‘I will, Mrs Rolleston,’ he said.

  ‘Tom, after lunch, will you show the children places to hide? Make them play a game of hide-and-seek.’

  He nodded, although he felt shy at the thought of approaching the children.

  ‘And make sure you get your own lunch in the kitchen, Tom.’

  She passed into the inner hall and Tom left the diningroom by the French windows. Mrs Moledy was still sitting on her own at the long table; other people were standing near it. He skirted the lawn, then re-entered the shrubbery to continue his observation. The Bishop was talking while his wife and another woman listened. Old Zeb Sykes was sitting down on the grass and children were playing some kind of game around him, decorating him with daisy chains. Eugene Prille and his wife were arm in arm.

  ‘I need to get into the trees,’ Mrs Moledy said to the Bishop of Killaloe. ‘I shouldn’t be loitering here.’

  ‘Trees?’

  ‘I’m here on business, as a matter of fact.’

  The glass she’d filled to the brim was still on the table in front of her. She lifted it to her lips and found that the whiskey it contained had been pleasantly warmed by the sun. She remarked upon this to the Bishop, adding that she always preferred the addition of a drop of warm water, although she hadn’t asked for it, not being in a public house. ‘Haven’t they a lovely place here, though?’ she said, endeavouring to be friendly.

  Other people were beginning to sit down. She waved at a man from the Bank of Ireland, whom she knew to talk to, and at Miss de Ryal, whom she knew by sight. The Commodium female was there, extraordinary that they’d invite the like of that.

  ‘Well, isn’t this great?’ she remarked to the Bishop.

  ‘Isn’t what great?’

  ‘Errah, go on with you!’ She nudged his elbow with her own. As soon as she’d finished the contents of her glass she’d slip away, no trouble to anyone. At the far end of the table, where the old grandmother was being assisted on to a chair, the sister was directing people to other chairs. He was standing just behind her, directing people also. She waved at him when he was looking straight at her, but he took no notice.

  Someone sat down on her other side, a young fellow with glasses. She gave a laugh because he was wearing an overcoat on a day that would bake the bones in your back. She asked him about it and he said that everyone should put an overcoat on before sitting down outside.

  ‘Errah, go on with you!’ She nudged him also. ‘Don’t be codding me,’ she said, and then forgot about him because for an unpleasant moment
she thought she’d lost her bag with the money in it. She felt for it at her feet and to her relief found that it was safely there. She opened it and counted the notes. ‘I have money for a motor-car,’ she explained to the clergyman, ‘I’m not due at the breakfast, to tell you the truth. Only there’s business to be fixed.’ She tried to explain the same thing to the young fellow in the overcoat, but he was slow on the uptake so she left it.

  ‘Motor-car?’ the clergyman said.

  ‘There’s a French car that Coyne has. D’you know Coyne at all?’

  She described the garage man in case the clergyman would have seen him on the streets—the rosary-bead eyes and the way his head shone, and his paunchiness. He kept the little strands of his moustache tidy with hair oil, she said. He had a wife and eleven daughters.

  ‘I’m in no way acquainted with this man,’ the clergyman said, and she agreed that he probably wouldn’t be. She explained that the car they’d come from the church in was the vehicle in question. According to Coyne, there wasn’t one to touch it on the roads of Ireland. According to what he’d said to her, you couldn’t beat the Frenchman when it came to building a motor-car. The Frenchman reigned supreme in the motor-car department.

  ‘I see,’ was the reply she received, without an accompanying smile.

  ‘Balt has a Ford. You see it in the streets. IF 92.’

  ‘I know nothing about motor-cars.’

  The notes were all present, still held by the rubber-band Corcoran in the Munster and Leinster had put around them. She thought about asking the man if he knew Corcoran at all, but she changed her mind and asked him his name instead.

  ‘I’m the Bishop of Killaloe.’

  ‘Well, glory be to God!’

  The maid placed a plate of food in front of her, not that she was hungry. Down at the end of the table he was carving a fish, and the brother was cutting at a ham and a couple of chickens. The brother was good-looking in his way. No doubt about it, all three of them had looks.