The Silence in the Garden Page 2

  The orderly household, belonging with other households of its kind, is interrupted by the regular departure of Colonel Rolleston to his regiment. He descends to the kitchen to say goodbye to Linchy and Mrs Gerrity and the maids, and then goes in search of the gardeners. His family, and Sarah too, stand on the steps to see him off. It is always a surprise when he returns, and for days afterwards in the dining-room he tells of his adventures and experiences, passing on to Linchy what news there is in Dublin, where usually he has spent a night. There is never talk of his re-marrying.

  In a lesser way there is the interruption of the boys going back to school in England, and then returning. They, too, have their stories to tell; but once they are told, that is that. Even though she is so much younger, Villana is their leader again when they are back at Carriglas, organising the games they play, all of them roaming in summer over the island, climbing up and down the cliffs, discovering new caves. When, every August, Sarah’s brother comes she feels more than ever a poor relation because Hugh by now belongs so easily with the family. For her own part, she is still beholden, and she has duties. She worries when the children do not return from their excursions on the island and sets out in the evening to look for them, hearing with relief their voices on the cliff path or among the rocks. In their father’s absence they are reprimanded by their grandmother for the wildness of one of their games. This is an agitated entry in the diaries because Sarah has spoken to the children on the score and her strictures have been ignored. But to Mrs Rolleston she claims there’d been a misunderstanding, and in the end the matter is passed over.

  ‘There is to be a war, you know,’ Mrs Rolleston said this morning, and did not add anything to that. Linchy is courting Brigid, another diary states at a time when that war was well advanced. John James follows in his father’s footsteps when he is old enough, finding himself almost at once in the trenches. There is the news of Colonel Rolleston’s death. There is the news of Villana’s engagement to Hugh, received after Sarah has left Carriglas and is back at Dunadry Rectory.

  Carriglas does not let go of Sarah. The idyll of those years, passed with a family she came to find so attractive, haunts the grim rectory that becomes her home again. It also haunts the establishment where she is next employed. The Misses Goodbody’s School for Protestant Girls is recorded as occupying a notable position in a prosperous Dublin suburb: a house built by a cooper who’d become an alderman of the city, a plain brick building, new classrooms in an annexe, a brown dining-room that smells of old bread. The Misses Goodbody are likened to elderly horses who have rummaged for their clothing at a jumble sale; Miss Fawson, who assists them, ‘her lips drawn back from large teeth’, is reported to utter generously whenever she has occasion to speak, as if ‘keen to offer value’. Thirty-five Protestant girls at a time grow through their difficult years at the Misses Goodbody’s: daughters of hardware merchants and coal merchants, of bank managers and grocers, farmers’ daughters and drapers’ daughters, clergymen’s daughters at reduced fees. ‘Tenants of a landless empire,’ one of them colourfully remarks. ‘We are the Jews of Ireland.’ The city suburb oppresses Sarah Pollexfen, its terraces dull and similar, its hall-doors tightly closed, the blank stare of its windows seeming like eyes gone blind.

  The Misses Goodbody’s, March 2nd, 1919. Their two horselike heads touched over a tea-tray as they chided me. ‘Ivanhoe’, the older said. ‘We would rather you read the girls Ivanhoe on Sundays.’ In their fusty study the dark-blue blinds are always three-quarters drawn; there is an odour of rotting flower-stems from the vases. ‘Another matter,’ the younger said. ‘The Pollack girl has been keeping a private journal. I have it here. You will take it to Mr Leary’s furnace, Miss Pollexfen.’ The older smeared blackberry jam on a slice of fruitcake. Together they lifted their teacups, their grey heads close again.

  The Miss Goodbody’s, June 6th, 1920. A letter from Carriglas says that Linchy has been murdered. All day long I cannot come to terms with it. ‘Bless for us this food and drink,’ intoned the older Miss Goodbody this evening in the dining-room, and when her Grace ended the girls conversed in the permitted docile manner, none noticing my distress. Plates of bread were passed about, thickly cut and soaked in milk to keep it seeming fresh. Bread taken with meat must not be cut, but broken between the fingers. ‘Chilly it was on the walk today,’ Miss Fawson remarked, and then went on to repeat what various girls said on the walk, and how the east wind was like a wind in March, and how really one didn’t know whether to wear an extra cardigan or not, and how delicious the scrambled egg was. (An opinion, incidentally, shared by no one else, certainly not by the Misses Goodbody, who were served with two platefuls of steaming haddock.) I could not concentrate on Miss Fawson’s chatter, nor give my full attention to the headmistresses’ ritual interrogation as to classroom progress during the day. I remembered Mrs Rolleston explaining to me what Villana had meant when she’d said that Colonel Rolleston had stolen Linchy in Dublin: he’d been a waiter in Davison’s Hotel, where the Colonel often stayed. ‘The children were fond of Linchy, you know,’ Mrs Rolleston’s letter went on. ‘Your brother was too.’ I remembered how the butler had told them stories about the visitors who’d stayed at Davison’s Hotel, the eccentric Lord Mountbellew who liked to begin his dinner with coffee and end it with a plate of soup, and Father Ponsonby who walked in his sleep but always into chambermaids’ bedrooms, and Mr Staverling of Galway who was said to be a woman. An inebriated chefs assistant had once added Vim instead of salt to a pheasant casserole. The wooden leg of a Major Flaherty had fallen from an open window and been carted away by dustmen. ‘I would expect your brother to have written to you, but somehow I feel he may not have. Hugh was staying here when all this occurred; that night, all four of them had crossed over to a party near Kilmore. It was a terrible horror for them of course, but then a strange thing happened. Before he left Carriglas—it was a week after Linchy’s funeral—your brother’s engagement to Villana was declared to be broken off. That is the other piece of unhappy news I have to impart to you. Perhaps, on reflection, you will not find it strange.’

  The Misses Goodbody’s, June 9th, 1920. Hugh has not written, but today I received a letter from the rectory, imparting the information that the engagement has indeed been broken off. No reason has been given. No reason is known, as far as I can see.

  When her mother died Sarah left the boarding-school and returned to Dunadry Rectory to look after her father. She cooked for him, and cleaned, and attended to the back-yard fowls—her mother’s chores when she had been alive. In winter the moisture that had gathered on the inside of the rectory’s window-panes froze. In autumn the gutters dripped and the dank kitchen smelt for a while of some penetrating decay. In spring the wind rattled the doors and gusted beneath the threadbare carpets on the bedroom floors. In summer Sarah walked alone on meadow paths or lanes decorated with cowparsley as lacy as the First Communion dresses of the Catholic children on their way to summer Mass in Bandon. It was then that she missed Carriglas most, as she had missed it among the suburban roads and crescents that lay about the Misses Goodbody’s School for Protestant Girls. For ever, it seemed to her, she and her father would journey on Sundays in the pony and trap to Dunadry church, where his scratchy voice would deliver yet another sermon that bewildered his parishioners. For ever she would re-darn the old darns in his clothes, her only excitement the weekly shopping in Bandon.

  Dunadry Rectory, November 6th, 1928. The days are heavy with the weight of their dragging. Invariably in silence, we sit over the food I cook. Father is abstracted, his thoughts occupied by the progress of his scholarship. He makes no reference to it, nor does he seek to know if I have spoken to anyone particular in Bandon. I believe I might cut my hair down to the roots and still he would not comment. It is not his way. I cannot unfairly blame him.

  Dunadry Rectory, February 10th, 1929. Sometimes I hear the chatter of the girls. The brown school diningroom, with its gaslight softly hissing, seems not as awful a
s once I thought it. The faces of the girls pass through my mind, and one by one I attach remembered names to them. Even the towns they came from return to me: New Ross and Navan, Corey and Sligo and Dundalk, Bruff and Thurles, Birr and Cappoquin. They came from country places too, and still I clearly see the addresses on the envelopes of their letters home, which every Saturday I inspected for smudges of ink or a poorly formed script. This evening, while serving some dish or other I had cooked, I heard again Miss Fawson’s voice. It went on, and on again, about the weather. I listened with nostalgia.

  ‘A pity there’s no prettiness in her,’ her father had said when she was five or six, her first awareness of a chilly truth. Yet later, when she lifted her clothes from her body and stood naked by a looking-glass, some quality was borrowed by her carelessly endowed features. In that, Sarah was certain she was not mistaken: hair and eyes, lips and nose, became part of a pleasing whole with her soft and economically distributed flesh.

  This secret, shared only with herself, is a secret no longer; nor is her despair in her father’s rectory. The pages of those years of resignation reveal that she believed she would not, even once again, pass through the white gates of Carriglas, nor sit beneath the strawberry trees. She believed she would not enter the drawing-room, nor see the island’s fuchsia hedges in bloom, nor open the door of the icehouse, nor watch the waves breaking on the rocks at Elador’s Bay. But in all those gloomy prognostications Sarah misled herself.

  Dunadry Rectory, December 13th, 1930. Today my father died.

  Within a month she was invited to return to Carriglas in a capacity that was not quite defined, and later was not either, housekeeper of a kind. ‘Poor wretched Sarah!’ Mrs Rolleston has no doubt said. ‘She’ll be quite penniless.’

  That, in fact, was so; and her diaries tell how in the spring of 1931 Sarah repeated the journey she had first made almost twenty-three years earlier. She was even met, in much the same way, by Haverty at the railway station. ‘I wonder what you’ll think of the place these days,’ he remarked, and from his tone of voice she knew at once that everything was going to be different. That, of course, was only to be expected: Villana and her brothers were no longer children; revolution had drifted into civil war since Colonel Rolleston’s death at Passchendaele, though peace seemed generally to prevail now; Mrs Rolleston was approaching her ninetieth year. ‘D’you remember Balt the solicitor?’ Haverty said. ‘He’s courting Villana. Another thing is, there’s talk of a bridge.’

  He did not add that a child had been born to the maid who’d been searching the dresser drawers in the kitchen on Sarah’s first evening at Carriglas, the child of the butler, who had not lived to marry the mother.

  ‘You’ll remember Brigid?’ was all Haverty said. ‘She’s the cook these days, after old Gerrity was taken.’ His wife was employed in the kitchen also, he said. ‘A slip of a thing you’ll remember her as.’ He did not touch upon the woman Villana had become, nor even mention John James or Lionel, or their grandmother. She would see it all, he intimated without words: all of it was waiting for her.

  2. The Bridge

  On April 6th, 1931, work began on the construction of a bridge across the strait of water that separated the island from the mainland. That day was a Monday. In the early morning, soon after eight o’clock, the first pickaxes were driven into the ground on the mainland side, a mile to the east of the town. A breeze blew lightly, welcomed by the men as they worked. The morning would be fine, they said to one another, thankful for that also.

  On the island the people of Carriglas began their day. Propped up on her pillows, Mrs Rolleston wondered if the post would bring another letter demanding money: such a communication, regularly received from Kathleen Quigley, was overdue. ‘Oh God, ma’am, I’ve a terrible toothache,’ Kathleen Quigley had once piteously complained, and she’d accompanied her to the dentist because she’d felt she should. ‘Oh, ma’am, ma’am, I’ll never forget how you did that for me!’ the girl afterwards exclaimed. ‘Not till my dying day, ma’am!’ Mrs Rolleston smiled and closed her eyes again. Perhaps once, in sending the postal order, she should put a note in, a reminder of that small resolve.

  In a bedroom on the same floor Villana reflected on an agreement that had been reached the afternoon before. As usual on Sunday, her fiancé had crossed on the ferry, arriving in the drawing-room at teatime. Afterwards they had walked to the standing stones. ‘You are punishing yourself,’ her grandmother had coolly observed a month ago, when she’d announced that she’d accepted him. But of course, no matter what it seemed like, that was quite untrue. People could conjecture as they wished, it did not signify in the least. He was nineteen years her senior; he was awkwardly stiff in his presentation and conveying of himself, like starched string, she once had thought. And for the curious she could add that she remembered from her childhood the boniness of his knees because often she had clambered on to them, attracted by his watch-chain. ‘Oh, do say you’ll come to Carriglas when we are married,’ she had implored again on their walk the previous afternoon. ‘That would mean so much to me.’ And he, though remaining taken aback, had in the end agreed. That was what mattered.

  In the bedroom next door John James opened an eye and at once remembered the day was a Monday, which meant he would visit the Rose of Tralee boarding-house. The thought both excited and displeased him. ‘Bloody woman,’ he muttered to himself, and went to sleep again.

  Half a mile away Lionel began the ploughing of a field.

  In the kitchen Brigid laid rashers of bacon on a pan, while in the gate-lodge at the end of the avenue the child who had been illegitimately born to her spread sugar on a slice of buttered bread. Tom had the same round face as his mother and the same dark hair. Hers was soft, like a mist about her head, his smooth and straight except for the curve of his fringe. When Tom had asked his mother about his birth—not understanding what Holy Mullihan, an older boy, had been hinting at—she’d told him that the wedding ring, and bits and pieces of furniture for the gate-lodge, had been bought; that the wedding would have taken place within a week. She’d reminded him that it was the time of the Troubles: late one night his father walked into the wires of a mine that had been trailed across the avenue of Carriglas. They’d been as good as married.

  The gate-lodge kitchen, where Tom ate the bread and drank the milk that had been left for him, was small, with a red-painted cupboard opposite the range. It contained a sink, a mangle, a table with three chairs around it, a statue of the Holy Child over one of its two doors and a picture of St Bernadette in glory over the other. A window, its frame red-painted also, looked out into an area of grass and weeds, with a privy in a corner.

  Tom finished his breakfast, gathered up his schoolbooks and the two romantic novels that Miss Rolleston had given to his mother for returning to Sister Conheady’s library at the convent. He bundled them into his schoolbag and left the gate-lodge, running on the road that led to the pier even though he knew he was early. He always arrived at the pier before the ferryboat had begun its journey from the quays on the other side. A couple of donkey-carts were usually there before him, their churns of milk unloaded and waiting. The donkeys would nibble the short grass, or stand patiently, until their owners returned with an empty churn from the creamery lorry. Often when they had no meal or other purchases to collect in the town, the men would wait on the island also, and the empty churn would come over on its own, in the charge of the ferryman. The island women brought their baskets of eggs to the shops on this ferry, which was the first of the day. Sometimes they brought live chickens or turkeys, which they would sell if they were offered a good enough price; if they weren’t they would bring them back again. Drunk Paddy was occasionally on the early-morning ferry, but at that time of day he didn’t shout at the seagulls, telling them he was penniless, like he did on the way back. Red-eyed and wild, he made the journey to the mainland when he had smoked enough fish to sell to Renehan’s fish sheds on the quays. Three girls went over to work in Renehan’s
fish sheds and another four to attend the convent school that Tom would continue to attend himself until he was old enough to pass into the Christian Brothers’.

  Neither Drunk Paddy nor any of these girls was there when Tom arrived that morning, but the usual row of churns was on the pier, the men who had brought them standing silently near by. Two women in shawls conversed quietly some distance away, their baskets at their feet. Tom climbed on to the low stone wall that protected a field where a couple of the Rollestons’ cattle would graze later in the year but which now was empty. He jumped down again and kicked a pebble, trying to send it the same distance each time, moving it in a square. He heard the engines of the ferryboat cough into life, and a moment later saw it and its wake of foam.

  Tom swung his schoolbag, trying not to let it touch the concrete surface of the pier. When that was no longer interesting he surveyed the familiar landscape of the town: the dark slate roofs huddled above. the quaysides, the colour-washed façades like neat smudges of paint randomly arranged, the spires of two churches, one fat and seeming nourished, the other slender and more delicate. Quays and warehouses gave way to a shore, and a promenade; break-waters staggered crookedly over sand; low, round hills began where the houses ended. Two thousand and twenty-seven people lived in the town, Sister Teresa Dolores said. There was a gasworks and a slaughterhouse, thirty-seven public houses and three banks, as well as assorted shops. There was a coal business and a meal business, and Lett’s Drapery Arcade and a picture house. For years on the ferryboat Tom had heard talk of a tinned meat factory coming to the town, but it never had.

  As he waited, Tom thought about the knife-throwing act that was advertised on bills stuck up on telegraph poles in South Main Street. ‘Will we go?’ Haverty had said to him. ‘Would it be a thing yourself and myself would do?’ Once, when Toft’s Roundabouts and Bumper Cars had come, Haverty had taken him. They’d driven a bumper car and gone on to the roundabout, both of them sitting on a single horse, ‘I never saw knife-throwing,’ he’d said when Haverty asked him, and when he told his mother about it she agreed that he could go. She wouldn’t like it herself, his mother said, even though it was reputed to be Ireland’s greatest. The Zodiacs it said on the advertising bills, and this was the day they were to perform.