Love and Summer Read online

  Joseph Paul Connulty was a lanky, weasel-faced man with grey hair brushed straight back and gleaming beneath a regular application of Brylcreme. Spectacles dangled on a tape around his neck, falling on to the dark serge of his suit. Two ballpoint pens were clipped into his outside breast pocket. The emblem of the Pioneer movement was prominent on his left lapel.

  At a loss after he had been to the cemetery again in order to linger on his own by the closed grave, he went to the coal yards. The sheds were locked, there was a notice on the office door; sacks that bore his name were stacked upright on a lorry, waiting to be delivered. He felt at home here, had all his life known the mounds of slack, the stables where once there’d been horses, the high gates sheeted with corrugated iron, its red paint worn away in places. In childhood he had played here, but had not been allowed in the public house, which even now - teetotaller that he was - felt alien to him, although he spent most of every day there. His hope had been to become a priest, but the vocation had slipped away from him, lost beneath the weight of his mother’s doubt that he would make a success of the religious life. In the end her doubt became his own.

  He locked the high gates behind him when he left and did not hurry on his way to Number 4 The Square. He passed the public house, closed also, and the deadness of the place gave him pleasure, for usually music and a muddle of voices spilt out on to the street. It was quiet, too, in the hall of the house where, being a bachelor, he took his meals and slept, where all his life he had lived.

  ‘A garden of remembrance has been mentioned to me,’ he passed on to his sister when they met on the first-floor landing.

  Although they were more than brother and sister, having been born in the same few minutes, they had never shared a resemblance. In childhood they had been close companions but often now did not communicate with one another for weeks on end, though less through not being on speaking terms than having nothing to say.

  ‘Her standing in the town,’ Joseph Paul went on, answering his sister’s question about the necessity for a garden of remembrance. ‘Her association with the church. The money she gave, as well as everything.’

  He didn’t reveal the other suggestions as to a suitable memorial that had been put to him on his walk through the town, since none of them would have been more acceptable to his sister, and he was in favour of a garden himself. ‘How she was,’ he said instead.

  Unlike the coal yards and the public house, Number 4 The Square had undergone a transition that reflected the mores of its two generations as a business place. Originally catering for permanent residents, offering three meals a day, it had become a bed-and-breakfast stop-over for commercial travellers. The present Connultys could remember, though faintly, the bank clerks and shopmen who returned each midday to the dining-room and in the evenings shared the same daily newspaper and sat around the same coal fire. McNamara the road surveyor, Superintendent Fee, Miss Neely the lay teacher at the convent, and others in their time had remained as residents until marriage or professional advancement brought a change in their lives. Each had been allocated a distinctive napkin ring; Miss Neely had her iron pills, McNamara his stout, for which there was a charge. Now only Gohery the metalwork instructor - at present away on his summer holidays - was a permanent lodger at Number 4; but the house’s reputation for food and cleanliness saw to it that a room was rarely vacant. A sign in one of the ground-floor windows set out the overnight terms, and the value offered guaranteed brisk business no matter what the season.

  In all this, Joseph Paul foresaw little change, the only one being that his sister would run things on her own. A woman or a girl had always come in to clean and wash up, and could not be dispensed with. Nor would his sister wish to do so.

  ‘It’s only it was raised with me,’ he said. ‘A garden.’

  They had played a game with pieces of coal in the yards, five pieces each, to be kicked around the course they set out: to the sack shed and then to the water barrels, to the slack mounds, over the cobbles to where the carts were, beyond them to the pump and the red half-door, back to the beginning. In the town they had knocked on hall doors and run away. They had opened henhouse latches, releasing hens to chase. They had roamed the streets, their father indulgent, their mother occupied with the running of the house. Minutes younger, Joseph Paul had also been the smaller, but he had never considered that a deprivation.

  ‘What about the gravestone?’ Miss Connulty picked up a used match, overlooked by the daily girl on one of the landing windowsills. He watched her dropping it into the unlit fire in the big front room, cleverly positioning it so that it wouldn’t show. He said: ‘We’ll go to Hegarty for that.’

  ‘There’ll be talk about the way she wants it done.’

  Their mother had laid it down that she did not wish to have her name added to her husband’s gravestone, preferring to have a grave and gravestone to herself.

  ‘Her own grave’s her due,’ Joseph Paul said.

  ‘Who mentioned a garden?’

  ‘Madge Shea in Feeney’s.’

  A garden was what there’d never been at Number 4, and it was this that people remembered their mother often saying. A place for meditation, Joseph Paul went on, a way of giving thanks for a life: that was what people were thinking of too, now that this time had come. Behind the church, between the church and the cemetery, there was space enough for a garden.

  ‘It’s enough we have the peculiarity of the grave,’ his sister countered. ‘It’s the normal thing for a woman to go to rest beside her husband. It’s the normal thing for a husband and a wife to share a tombstone.’

  He didn’t deny that, he didn’t argue. The arrangement about the burial had been agreed with Father Millane and carried out as the last wishes of the dead. In the same way, Hegarty in the stoneyard would be instructed when the moment came. There would be a garden of remembrance because the people of the town wanted it.

  ‘I heard it there was a man photographing the funeral,’ his sister said.

  ‘I didn’t see that.’

  ‘It was remarked upon in the house here. It was wondered did we want photographs.’

  ‘I didn’t see any man.’

  ‘I’m only telling you what was said.’

  She went away without further comment, taking with her a cup and saucer that had been overlooked behind a vase. Joseph Paul passed into the big front room, where the evening lamps had been lit all day, the blinds drawn on two tall windows at each of which tasselled stays were looped around velvet curtains in a shade of russet. A profusion of net provided daytime privacy. Magazines were laid out on tables and on a stool in front of the fireplace. Ornamental elephants and their young strode the white amber-veined marble of the mantelpiece, above which Daniel O’Connell was framed in ebony.

  He had been told about photographs being taken because it would worry him to hear it, because there was a lack of respect, a funeral photographed like a carnival would be. He wondered if she’d made it up; she often made things up.

  He leafed through the Nationalist, left behind by one of last week’s overnight lodgers. Then, equally without interest, he turned the pages of an old Dublin Opinion. She wasn’t easy. He had watched her becoming devious over the years, and had hoped - had on a few occasions begged in prayer - that time would ease her discontent. When they were children their mother had liked to have her in the kitchen and often he was sent away to play by himself. He had looked through the crack when the kitchen door wasn’t quite closed, as mostly it wasn’t. He had watched her being shown how to tease out fat and sinew and which way to cut the meat, how to dust the pieces with flour, never too thickly. Their mother had instructed her in how long the simmering should be, when to add the dumplings, the Bisto. The day came when she was allowed to make a dumpling herself, another day when she might skin the apples for a pie, another when she might stir the custard and mash potatoes. The kitchen was their place, they were the women of the house - they and whichever maid it was, a girl from the country, or a wi
dow of the town who needed the money.

  Becoming used to this woman’s world, Joseph Paul hadn’t minded in the end. He chopped kindling in the outhouse, which their mother said was more a boy’s thing. She took him shopping with her sometimes, she called him her little fellow. He couldn’t make her cross, she said; he hadn’t it in him to make her cross. Every morning after breakfast they had sat together at the fire, not a yard from where he sat now.

  He had the room to himself this evening because the notice that offered accommodation had been temporarily taken down. He listened to sounds that were familiar coming from the floor below: his sister bolting the front door, a rattle of cutlery in the dining-room, the sideboard drawer being pushed in, the windows that had been opened for airing closed and latched. There had always been the chance that she would marry, that the past she had never recovered from would at last be forgotten, that Gohery, or Hickey from the watch shop, would show an interest, that one of the men who came regularly for a night would, or one of the older bachelors in the town. She had been young when the trouble happened. She hadn’t let herself go when it was over. She hadn’t since.

  He heard her footstep, light on the stairs, the footstep he knew best now that their mother’s would not be heard again. That he should be despised by his sister was one of blaming’s variations; he was aware of that and it made it easier that he was. She crossed the landing and came to stand near where he sat. The two back bedrooms should be decorated before the winter, she said, the same paint as before.

  He nodded. Not looking round, not wanting to see the jewellery she wore to provoke him, he said he’d attend to the matter and she went away.

  2

  Dillahan rose before his wife. Downstairs, he pulled out the dampers of the Rayburn stove and listened for the flutter of flames beginning before he tipped in anthracite. He waited for the kettle to boil, then made tea and shaved himself at the sink. In the yard, when he had opened the back door, his two sheepdogs ambled out of the shed where they slept to greet him. He murmured to them softly, one finger of each hand idly caressing their heads. He could tell from the air that it wasn’t going to rain today.

  The dogs fell in behind him when he crossed the yard, unaffected - as he was not - when they passed the bad place. A sheepdog of that time used to make a detour, hardly noticeable, but Dillahan always knew what that dog was uneasy about. On the track to the river-field a rabbit took fright, darting into the undergrowth, and then another did. In the field the ewes were undisturbed.

  Dillahan counted them, seventy-four, all of them there. He watched them for a while, leaning on the iron gate, the sheepdogs crouched at his feet. Then he passed on, climbing up to the hill pasture. He called the few cows he kept for milking and they came slowly to him.

  Ellie pulled back the bedclothes on her husband’s side of the bed, then on hers. When she had washed in the farmhouse’s small bathroom she drew on her nightdress again in order to cross the landing, even though she knew she was alone in the house. She dressed, combed and brushed her hair, bothering with no more than that so early in the day.

  Younger by several years than her burly husband, she had something of the demeanour of a child. Yet while childhood still influenced this expression of her nature it was a modest beauty that otherwise, and more noticeably, distinguished her now. It was there in the greyish blue of eyes that had once been anxious, in the composed smile that had once been faltering and uncertain. Soft fair hair, once difficult, was now drawn back, the style that suited it best. But in the farmhouse, and the yard and the dairy, in the crab-apple orchard and the fields, though touched by the grace that time had brought, Ellie Dillahan remained as diffident a presence as she’d been when first she came here as a general maid.

  This morning, as every morning in the kitchen, the dripping she had cut from the bowl softened in the frying-pan while she laid out knives and forks on the table. It was another twenty minutes before she heard her husband in the yard, before the latch of the kitchen door was lifted and he brought the milk in. He said the buzzard hawk was circling again. He took his wellington boots off at the door.

  ‘I’ll be down in the river-field a while.’ He broke a silence to say that when they had fin ished breakfast. He had made sandwiches to take with him, which he did whenever he was likely to be in the fields all day. Making them for himself was something he had become used to during his years as a widower - cheese, tomato, anything there was. Ellie had filled his flask.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, picking it up when she was clearing the dishes from the table.

  She carried them to the sink, ran in hot water and left them to soak while she moved the chairs out from the table to make sweeping the floor’s uneven surface easier. She prodded a brush as far under the dresser as it would go, reaching for whatever dust had accumulated since yesterday. She added what she’d gathered to the pile she’d made in front of the stove and then scooped everything up in the dustpan. Although her back was to her husband, she knew he was standing by the door, as if about to say something, as if that was why he hesitated there. But all he said was:

  ‘It’ll take me the day.’

  ‘Will I bring down a drink?’

  ‘Do, later on.’

  ‘I will of course.’ She opened the top of the stove and emptied the dustpan on to the coals.

  ‘Take care with that,’ he said.

  ‘I forgot.’ She was cross with herself. It wasn’t that she had forgotten he’d told her not to be always opening the top of the Rayburn, but that she’d thought he wasn’t still in the kitchen. His movements were always quiet: she had thought he was going when he said to bring the drink later.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, turning to face him.

  ‘Arrah, it doesn’t matter. Take money from the book if the insurance fellow comes. I don’t know has he settled on a day yet?’

  ‘The second Thursday it was with Mr Cauley.’

  ‘It was.’ It would be different now, he said, a new man would have his own day. ‘If he calls in today he’ll say what it is.’

  ‘I’ll ask him if he doesn’t say.’

  ‘You’d miss old Cauley.’

  The door to the yard closed behind him. She heard the tractor started, and listened to the sound fading as he drove it away. He was good to her, not minding when she made mistakes, not saying when she didn’t come up to scratch, still learning the ways of the farmhouse. She told herself that, dropping the iron disc into place on the stove. She hung up the dustpan, and the sweeping brush next to it, in the cupboard under the stairs. She opened the two windows as she did every morning, even when it was raining, to let the air in for a while. She settled the sash props into position and turned back the clock on the dresser, correcting the twelve minutes it had gained since yesterday. Standing on a chair, she took a five-pound note for the insurance man from the pages of an out-of-date Old Moore’s Almanac on the top shelf of the dresser, so that she wouldn’t have to do it in front of him if he came.

  The kitchen wasn’t large, dominated by the width and length of this big green dresser and the oak table at which all meals were taken. The ceiling was beamed, dark timbers with whitewash between them. All the other woodwork - of the doors and window-frames and skirting-boards - was green to match the dresser. When Ellie had come to this kitchen five years ago she hadn’t known a kitchen she liked as much, or known the comfort of the sitting-room at the front of the farmhouse, cosily cramped, its two armchairs with antimacassars, its brass fender with fire-irons laid out, its ornaments and photographs, flowered wallpaper with a frieze.

  She went there now. It smelt pleasantly of summer must, and slightly of soot. Drooping in a white jug on the single windowsill, pink roses were scentless and she took the withered blooms to the kitchen and rinsed the jug out, then went to cut fresh ones from the trellis in the garden at the front. When she had arranged them she fed the hens in the run and collected what eggs there were. She pumped up the back tyre of her bicycle because the valve was fa
ulty. Not that she was going anywhere today.

  Content but for her childlessness, Ellie did not complain if time hung heavy when her husband was in the fields. There was the routine of work and once a week she cycled the four and a half miles to Rathmoye with the eggs she regularly delivered, more often if there was further shopping to be done. She loved the journey through the empty countryside, and liked being in the town when she reached it, the bustle when the streets were busy, the different air. She liked being known by the shop people, being greeted by the man with the deaf-aid in English’s hardware, sitting on her own at a table in Meagher’s Café, paying in any cheques there were at the bank, searching for what she wanted in the Cash and Carry. More often than was always necessary, she made another confession. More often than she might have chosen, she heard the plot of the novel Miss Burke at the wool counter in Corbally’s was reading. Old Orpen Wren greeted her, sometimes remembering who she was.

  She hosed the dairy out, turned the milk buckets she’d earlier scoured upside down on the slate draining-shelf beside the dairy sink. She put down poison in one of the turf sheds and in the feed shed, where something had been nibbling.

  In her vegetable patch she weeded the parsley and thinned her carrots, saving what she pulled out. Tomorrow or the day after, the first of the peas she’d sown might be full enough to pick.

  When Dillahan had moved his water line to the hill land he drove the tractor, its trailer behind it, down to the river-field. The fence he intended to replace was sagging, gaps here and there in the slack sheep-wire, a few of the posts rotten in the ground. Disturbed by his arrival, his ewes huddled together in the middle of the field before they processed back to the shade of the alders that grew randomly on both riverbanks, occasionally in the water. His sheepdogs settled down, in the shade too.