The Silence in the Garden Read online

  ‘Just a slice of chicken breast,’ the fellow in the overcoat said, handing back his plate of fish.

  ‘I’m Noreen Moledy,’ she said, ‘I married into a house in the town.’

  The young fellow didn’t acknowledge that, but you could see he was worried about all these plates of food, the last thing anyone wanted on a hot day like this. ‘What’s your name?’ she said to him, and he told her but she couldn’t catch it. He had been staying with an uncle near Athlone, he said; he’d had a terrible journey down through the country in order to attend the wedding. He was considered delicate, he told her as well.

  ‘You have a delicate look to you all right.’

  The brother began to go round with a bottle of champagne. Other bottles had been brought out from the house and were standing on the grass at the edge of the flowerbed. ‘Or would you prefer a glass of burgundy?’ the brother said when he came to her, as nice as anything.

  ‘Ah no, no, I must definitely be going.’ She’d have stood up only she was afraid of feeling groggy due to the sun. ‘I was drinking Paddy,’ she explained to the brother. ‘There’s some inside there on the sideboard.’

  She waved down the table again, smiling at everyone in case they hadn’t noticed the little movement of her hand. If he looked up from carving the fish she’d point at the bag, which she’d put on the table in front of her for safety. As soon as she caught his eye she’d get up on to her feet, groggy or not, so that he could see where she was heading and come on after her. Funny the Prille fellow being invited, and the wife with him.

  ‘I’m a widow myself,’ she said to the Bishop, feeling he should know that before they went any further. She told him about the death that had taken place in a back bedroom of the Rose of Tralee, how it had had to be a bedroom at the back owing to the boarding-house proprietor’s aversion to sunlight.

  ‘I said to Woulfe would he operate but you could be talking to the wall.’ She waved across the table at the medical man in question to show that no offence had been taken, then she took the ten-pound notes out of her handbag and counted them again. ‘D’you know Corcoran in the Munster and Leinster?’ she said.

  The Bishop replied that he was not of the neighbourhood. He was not acquainted with the local people. He had noticed the man who’d driven the motor-car to and from the church, but he could not claim that he had in any way got to know him. He hadn’t even spoken to him.

  ‘That’s Coyne you’re talking about. Corcoran’s a different kettle of fish.’

  ‘I am not acquainted with Mr Corcoran either.’

  ‘Are you acquainted with McGrath? Or Tobin?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  She explained to him who they were, quiet and decent the two of them. ‘The foreman out at the bridge is a fellow by the name of Ernie Cassidy.’

  ‘Look, I really don’t know any of these people.’

  ‘Errah, why would you? Isn’t it great about the bridge, though? I was saying the other day they won’t know themselves.’

  ‘The bridge is the wrong side of the island for Carriglas, it seems.’

  ‘They’ve a right to complain about that. Like they have about Corny Dowley’s name going up on it.’

  ‘I doubt very much that the Rollestons would make complaints.’

  ‘Wouldn’t Balt do it for them, though? Didn’t he send a letter to the county council about the Dowley thing?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t follow you.’

  She wondered if the man was affected in the brain. She watched him eating his fish, the fork going up and down, the single face becoming two and then one of the faces sliding away altogether. It was Dowley who killed the butler, she explained in case the man was ignorant. You couldn’t blame Balt for raising the roof over the bridge business.

  He looked at her with his mouth open. He was another of them who was slow on the uptake, which you wouldn’t expect in a bishop of his church. He was slow the way he’d mixed up Corcoran and Coyne, thinking it was Corcoran’s car he’d been given a lift in when it was a known fact that Corcoran didn’t even possess a bicycle.

  ‘You wouldn’t have been acquainted with Dowley,’ she said in case he got into another muddle over that. She didn’t want to continue looking at him because of the way his face was behaving, so she turned her head away. Unfortunately the faces of the wedding guests who were nearest to her became confused in much the same manner. The paleness of Miss de Ryal was suddenly cheered by a florid tinge from her neighbour. The fleshy neck of the Bishop’s wife shifted to the right and ended by dressing the gaunt bones of Surgeon Woulfe, whose own hooked nose was borrowed by Mrs Prille. The unadorned countenance of Sir Cedric Goff acquired the make-up of Mrs Camier, the moustache of the bridegroom crept towards the faded features of Lady Rossboyne. Old Zeb Sykes developed a lopsided look, children aged. Protestants to a man, she said to herself, or said it aloud, she wasn’t sure which. Protestants and none the worse for it: you knew where you were with Protestants.

  ‘Tell him I’ll be in the trees,’ she said to the brother when he came by the next time with his wine bottles. ‘Tell him to give a whistle.’ But when she began to get up she again decided it was foolish to attempt to do so.

  Tom couldn’t bring himself to approach the children, but it didn’t matter because they had thought of playing hide-and-seek themselves. In the left-hand scullery Mrs Haverty and his mother washed the dishes. The ferryman had arrived in the kitchen, and Mr O’Hagan was there, and Haverty. There were glasses on the table, and a bottle that hadn’t been opened yet.

  When the lunch came to an end Tom was allowed to help Patty to carry the food that remained in from the lawn. Fragments of conversation continued to reach him, several of the people talking about Mrs Moledy counting her money. In the kitchen his mother and Mrs Haverty said it was shocking, and Patty said it was shocking also. A child had spilt a glass of lemonade on the tablecloth, Patty said, and the child’s mother had made a fuss, but no one had upbraided Mrs Moledy, and nobody woke her up when she kept falling asleep. She’d applauded loudly when the wedding-cake was cut, but everyone had been very polite about it.

  ‘I shouldn’t have let her sit there in the first place,’ Tom’s mother said, but a few minutes later the bride arrived in the kitchen and the episode appeared to be forgotten. Mr Balt arrived in the kitchen also, standing by the door at first, but then coming further in and proceeding to open the bottle on the table.

  ‘Are there glasses?’ he said.

  The ferryman and Mr O’Hagan and Haverty were on their feet, their cigarettes cupped in hands held behind their backs. There were glasses for everyone, Patty included, but Tom wasn’t noticed until slices of the wedding-cake were passed round and Mrs Haverty pushed him forward.

  ‘Good health to you both.’ The ferryman took the lead, raising his glass in the air, higher than anyone in the garden had raised a glass. ‘Good luck and good health,’ the ferryman said. The others raised their glasses also, and Tom looked from the glasses to the married couple, who had linked arms with one another. It didn’t occur to him that Mr Balt was too old for her, although he could see he was the older of the two. It wasn’t until some years later that he noticed the oddity of it.

  Motoring westward in Finnamore’s motor-car, the married couple did not speak much. Villana endeavoured to sleep, the late afternoon sun warm on her face. Finnamore drove steadily, at thirty-five miles an hour, engrossed in his thoughts. He had often heard of John James’s friendship with the woman from the boarding-house, but as a matter of legal principle had always denied its truth. The counting of the banknotes, the rubber-band temporarily between the woman’s lips: for a long time, Finnamore speculated, that image would haunt his consciousness.

  ‘A pity.’

  ‘Oh, none of it matters.’

  Villana lit a cigarette and within a few moments the confined interior of the car filled with tobacco smoke. Finnamore was about to mention the woman’s waving at people, but desisted in case he should
seem to be complaining overmuch. Instead he said:

  ‘We are alone at last.’

  Villana closed her eyes again. When she felt the ash of her cigarette warm between her fingers she wound down the window and flicked the cork-tipped inch that remained on to the road. They were to spend this night in Cork, the journey all the way to the Killarney lakes being too long an afternoon’s drive: the Imperial Hotel had been recommended by her husband’s partner as being particularly comfortable. She was glad the ferryman had come to the kitchen and that Haverty’s friend, Mr O’Hagan, had been there. It was good of both of them to have helped in the way they had.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We are alone.’

  Miss de Ryal had played the piano in the drawing-room. Quite suddenly there had been the music drifting faintly to the garden, a piece by Schubert, who was the only composer Miss de Ryal ever played. Villana was glad, too, that someone had urged Miss de Ryal to sit down on the old, embroidered piano-stool, as so often she had done in the past. It made things agreeable again after the incident with John James’s woman. There’d been clapping in the drawing-room when a piece came to an end.

  A man wheeling a bicycle saluted them. They passed through a village. A woman waved, driving a cow across the road, in through an open gate.

  ‘I certainly don’t intend to stagnate my days away at Carriglas,’ John James used to say as a boy. And although Lionel had put it differently he, too, had been determined to escape the easy nostalgia of childhood. She herself had never had such feelings.

  The car drew in at the hotel Harbinson had recommended. Suitcases were carried to a bedroom, and unpacked. In a drab dining-room they ate the dinner that had been prepared for them.

  ‘It is an extremely long time,’ Villana said, pushing her knife and fork together, ‘since I spent a night away from Carriglas.’

  ‘You would have been a little girl.’

  He saw her then: in one red dress or another, her plaits of corn-coloured hair, impudence in her eyes when she climbed on to his knees to play with his watch and its chain.

  ‘Yes, I would have been a little girl.’

  Hours later in the darkness, while he slept beside her, Villana caused the day that had passed to pass again. In the long looking-glass of her bedroom at Carriglas the cornflower blue of her wedding-dress was a pale reflection of her eyes. Beneath the hem that almost reached the floor her bare toes protruded. These were her last moments alone, she had thought, sitting on the edge of her bed, the skirt of her dress pulled up just a little in order to cross her legs. She’d lit a Craven A.

  ‘Dear child,’ he whispered in his sleep. ‘My darling girl.’

  Would this make a difference, she wondered, or whenever she entered the ice-house would she still feel the past clinging like lichen to its walls? Hugh’s love had remained at Carriglas like the ghost of a person; it had begun there and been laid to rest there, ‘It is impossible,’ he had adamantly laid down, his firmness of purpose making the sacrifice he insisted upon seem heroic and even beautiful. While they still embraced, the act of destruction had been committed.

  All day, ridiculously, she had believed he might suddenly be there. All day she had believed that she would wake to find herself walking out of a nightmare that had lasted for only a few seconds. But all there’d been was the occasion she had brought upon herself—wedding guests celebrating a marriage that was a local wonder, her brother’s woman drunk. Tomorrow they would continue their journey and then they would walk by the lakes. The affection that cheered her in her desolation would not have departed from her husband’s eyes; reflected in every tone of his voice, in all his glances and his gestures, it would continue to soothe her pain. When the moment was suitable she would gently tell him that it was better to let Carriglas go, that his dream of resurrection was not what anyone wanted. He would be disappointed and bewildered, as he had been when she’d explained about the dedication on the bridge. But in the end he would accept the family’s wishes and abide by them.

  John James refused the incident entry to his mind. He forced his thoughts away from it, bludgeoning them recklessly, tolerating no disobedience. At least he had remembered the carpentry man’s name; at least there was that minuscule mercy. Asquith-Jones had protested that it was common assault to strike anyone with a panel saw, and Spokeshave Billimore had called him a pup, and Asquith-Jones had said he wouldn’t take that from a carpentry instructor. Asquith-Jones had kept a caged rat in his dormitory locker, a tawny-coloured creature that would gnaw the end of your fingers if you put them between the bars. Someone else—Grub Hineforth it would have been—let it out once.

  Tomorrow they would go. The last trapful of them would be on its way down the avenue by half-past ten. He doubted very much that he’d ever lay eyes on Villiers Hadnett or the Camiers, or any of them, again. ‘There’s not a man can hold a candle to you’: the slur of her voice slipped through his lines of defence, her hand on his arm, her body teetering on the heels of her shoes, the banknotes yet again taken from the handbag. Grub Hineforth had gone down at Passchendaele too. He tried to remember his face. Was it he or Barmy Jessop who’d had a peculiar nose? ‘My soldier boy,’ she’d whispered, telling him she was keeping her voice down because she knew it was what he wanted. He’d had to take the money because she’d never have gone. He’d bundled it into a pocket and turned his back on her.

  Again he steadied his thoughts, dragging any protection he could into his mind. ‘No, no, I insist.’ He paid for their tea and then they sauntered on the street since the afternoon was mild. He was staying in Davison’s Hotel, he said; he always stayed there, a family thing really. She had a pretty smile, and grey eyes that were a little nervous. In the teashop, when she’d taken her coat off, there’d been a tiny brooch, a single sapphire in a gold setting, pinned to the black material of her dress. A hat you hardly noticed—black also—was worn a little to one side. ‘I’ve often gone by Davison’s,’ she said. ‘Awfully nice, it seems.’ He told her how he’d stayed there with his brother, on the way back and forth to school in England, how his father had hired one of Davison’s waiters to become the last of their butlers. ‘We might dine together one evening?’ he suggested, and when they did so he told her about the worst day of his life, the day his sister had married an elderly solicitor and how an uninvited guest had become drunk in a way that seemed typical of life as it was nowadays. ‘How horrid for you,’ his companion murmured. ‘How horridly distressing.’

  Carriglas, August 26th, 1931. I remained in the drawingroom, alone, when it was late. The tweed of the jacket I repaired was brown with flecks of grey in it, harsh between my fingers, a smell of the farmyard still adhering to it. Its pockets had been pulled out of shape, two buttons missing, a seam undone at the shoulders. My lips dampened the thread in preparation for the needle’s eye, and then the needle slipped away beneath the pressure of my thimble, the grey thread drawing back and forth. For a moment I seemed to hear again Miss de Ryal’s Schubert pieces although Miss de Ryal had been gone for hours. ‘What a day it’s been, Sarah!’ he said an hour ago, and for a moment I thought he was going to say something else, but he did not.

  8. Carriglas in Autumn

  There was an accident at the bridge. A steel girder, being passed into place, escaped the grasp of two of the men who hoisted it, and fell heavily upon a third man, trapping him beneath it. When the weight was lifted from him the man was found to have injuries to the shoulder and a thigh, later diagnosed, as shattered bones. Work was suspended while his companions awaited the arrival of a doctor, who ordered the construction of a stretcher and the removal of the injured man from the site. The foreman had known accidents before; a bridge was rarely built without one. He drove the lorry in the back of which three men held the stretcher steady, raised between wooden blocks. Half a day’s work was lost but when, that same afternoon, the engineer who had designed the bridge stood discussing its progress with the county council surveyor, they nodded over the half-completed construction,
well pleased with the progress that had been made. They walked together to the foreman’s shed and consulted him. By December—before Christmas, or at least by the end of the year—there would be traffic on the bridge, he guaranteed. Ever since the work had begun he’d said so, whenever he felt a promise was expected of him.

  That same day Tom walked in South Main Street with Neck Daly and Deso Furphy, listening to Deso Furphy’s stories about his crazed aunt in Kanturk. Neck Daly went into Barry’s and asked Mrs Barry for a liquorice pipe on tick and Mrs Barry told him to go away before she called the Guards. Most of the other shops were closed because it was the half day. Deso Furphy and Neck Daly were on their way to the promenade to annoy people by throwing pebbles at them from behind the old billiard-hall. If they were caught the Brothers would give them the strap, they said. They were nonchalant, showing off a bit, but once Tom had seen Brother Crotty cuffing Deso Furphy outside the picture house because he’d been annoying Humpy Geehan, and Deso Furphy had cried. ‘Be seeing you,’ they said, one after the other, in the same nonchalant way, and Tom turned into Narrow Lane and went down to the quays. He had to wait for an hour before the ferryboat set off, the ferryman being delayed in the turf accountant’s, and then in Spillane’s.

  On the island Tom left his schoolbag in the gate-lodge and took the path to the holy well, since he had nothing else to do before his mother came down from the house. Not far from the abbey ruins he heard voices.

  ‘God, you’d torment a man!’ Briscoe, the bank porter, was there with the girl from Renehan’s who’d told Tom she said prayers for him. They were lying on the grass by one of the tumbled-down walls, Briscoe with his jacket off. The girl had her arms around his neck, but now and again she pushed at him, telling him to get off. Tom stood where he was, staring at them. The bank porter’s striped brown jacket was lying on the grass. One of his hands had pulled her skirt’ up. ‘Stop that now,’ she said, but he took no notice. He pushed her further back on the grass, and Tom could see his face coming down close to hers and his mouth kissing her. All the time he was continuing to pull at her skirt and she was trying to stop him, even though she had one arm round his neck. As Tom watched, her underclothes were exposed, and then the flesh of her thighs. ‘Ah, go easy now, for God’s sake!’ she cried out.