The Silence in the Garden Read online

  The ferryboat drew in and when Tom had clambered on to it he moved down to the front in order to stand beside the ferryman, which he did whenever the boat wasn’t too crowded. The ferryman was old, his hairless dome as brown as the timbers of his boat, his hands massive. A navy-blue jersey stretched over a rounded chest; when it rained he wore a black waterproof and a hat that made him look like the man on the sardine tins which were sometimes stacked up in the window of Meath’s grocery.

  ‘Did you ever hear reference to an animal called The Gullet?’ he enquired of a man who was crossing with a churn, and when the man replied he had not, the ferryman said he had it from Butt Nolan that The Gullet would come in at sixteen to one that same afternoon. ‘If you have a coin to spare,’ the ferryman advised, ‘I’d place it on The Gullet with a certainty of profit.’

  Nothing more was said on the journey to the mainland. Because of the noise of the engines, the fish-shed girls and the convent girls did not speak, nor did the women with their baskets, nor did the ferryman, nor the men with the churns. When the boat had edged its way in to the quay, after its engines had dwindled and the ropes were thrown and tied, the ferryman lit a cigarette and the island women exchanged remarks about the fineness of the morning with the men on the creamery lorry. Loitering, Tom watched the exchange of the full churns for the empty ones, and the arrival of a bale of barbed wire and two calves for transportation to the island. He didn’t want to walk through the town with the four convent girls, which was sometimes unavoidable if they fell into step with him. When they were well ahead he began on the journey himself, turning off the quays into Narrow Lane. They were senior girls at the convent, years older than himself.

  ‘That’s a nice morning,’ remarked the shopman from the London and Newcastle Tea Company in South Main Street. Tom replied, saying he hoped the bright weather would keep up. ‘Ah, it will of course,’ the man predicted.

  Sergeant Kealy propped his bicycle against the lamp-post outside the Guards’ barracks and bent down to take off his bicycle clips. Horses and carts rattled back from the creamery with empty churns, returning to the farms they’d come from. The green wooden shutters had not yet been lifted down from the windows of Meath’s nor the red ones from Dungan’s. The windows of the public houses were empty except for notices that said Guinness is Good for You and John Jameson. Padlocks secured the doors of Traynor’s Picture Palace.

  Further along the street, past Spillane’s public house and Barry’s confectionery and tobacconist’s, Mr Coyne was unlocking the petrol pump outside Jas. Coyne Motors. He didn’t notice Tom, but a shawled woman carrying baskets of fish asked him how his mother was. ‘Ah, the poor creature,’ she said when he replied that his mother was all right. She always asked the same question and made the same comment, and Tom often wondered why she did so. ‘Hey, mister,’ Humpy Geehan called across the street at him, which was what Humpy Geehan shouted at everyone, being half-witted as well as deformed. Briscoe, the porter at the Provincial Bank, sauntered to work, a cigarette hanging from his mouth.

  In the yard at the convent Tom looked around for someone to play with, but only the girls from the island were there, whispering in a corner. If Sister Sullivan saw him she’d say he should sit in the classroom and go over his spellings or his tables even though, when all the others arrived, they’d be allowed to play about outside until the bell went. ‘Didn’t I tell you to go to the classroom?’ Sister Sullivan had reminded him crossly once, after he’d run out to join them, and Tom had felt that that was unfair. He sat on the ledge outside the cloakroom, with his schoolbag beside him, his presence hidden from the windows of the classrooms. He wondered why Sister Sullivan looked at him in that dead way sometimes, as if he had done something wrong. Sister Sullivan was the oldest of the teaching nuns and considered to be the crossest.

  ‘I like the dog,’ Sister Teresa Dolores said later, standing by the blackboard. ‘Now, give me that perfectly, please.’

  The class tried to translate the sentence into Irish, but were not successful. Sister Teresa Dolores deplored her pupils’ efforts and wrote the correct version on the black-board. They repeated it all together, and then repeated it again. Sister Teresa Dolores hung her chart up on the blackboard, with a picture of a rabbit on it, and a picture of a black cat and a blue door and a window. Her pupils learnt the Irish for these nouns and adjectives, writing the words down in their jotters. When the bell went they forgot them.

  Father Pierce came that morning, a special visit, to examine them in catechism. ‘That’s a great dress you’re wearing,’ he said to one girl, and enquired about a boy’s glasses, asking him if he could see better these days and then trying them on himself to make the class laugh. Father Pierce had something to say to everyone. ‘Your father made a great job of the table in the rectory,’ he remarked to a boy whose father was a French polisher. ‘There isn’t a man in County Cork can get a gloss on to a table like your father.’ He inclined his head, slowly wagging it in a complimentary way. He was a big, laughy man, his smooth black hair brushed straight back from his forehead, shiny with the oil he put on it. ‘There isn’t a man in County Cork,’ he told a girl, ‘can cut out a clerical suit like your uncle in Castle-martyr.’ He made Joey Feerick sing a verse of a song. Joey Feerick was another John McCormack, he said.

  The Protestant boy, Derek Birthistle, didn’t remain in the classroom for the catechism examinations, and he didn’t come into prayers either. He waited in the cloakroom, and once when a girl complained that a pair of scissors was missing from her schoolbag Derek Birthistle was sent for by Sister Sullivan because the schoolbag had been hanging in the cloakroom and he’d been sitting beside it for three-quarters of an hour. But Derek Birthistle hadn’t taken the scissors: it turned out in the end that there hadn’t been a pair of scissors in the girl’s schoolbag at all. The girl had developed the habit of telling lies, and her parents said the nuns should have known they wouldn’t have the money for buying scissors.

  ‘Tell Derek Birthistle to come in now,’ Father Pierce commanded at the end of the catechism examination, when Joey Feerick had finished singing. While everyone was waiting he asked a few more catechism questions. Then he said:

  ‘Well, Derek, I hear your father did great work over in Dungarvan last week.’

  Mr Birthistle was a clerk in Burke’s the auctioneers and was often to be seen carrying papers on the quays, hurrying between Burke’s warehouse and the office where he worked. He was small, with a waistcoat, and he had the same clever eyes as his son. Derek Birthistle was the cleverest boy in the class, but it wasn’t because of that that the nuns and Father Pierce reserved a special manner for him. They wanted to save him from perdition, Tom heard a girl saying one day: you moved an inch nearer heaven if you saved a soul from hell.

  ‘Well, we had a great time with the catechism, Derek,’ Father Pierce said now. ‘Were you all right in the cloakroom?’

  ‘I was, Father.’

  ‘Well, that’s great. Joey, will you sing another verse for Derek?’

  Joey Feerick sang another verse of The Meeting of the Waters and Tom wondered what it was like having to spend all that time with the coats in the cloakroom, and the damp smell that was there on a wet day. Derek Birthistle had told him that on one occasion a lay sister brought him down to the kitchen and lifted him up on to a table so that he could watch the bread being made. Sometimes if they passed through the cloakroom the lay sisters would give him raisins or marzipan.

  ‘There’s a terrible old carry-on coming into the town, I hear,’ Father Pierce said when the singing came to an end again and there was time to put in before the bell. ‘I hope none of ye will be begging coppers to spend on the like of that.’

  They knew he was joking. There was no one better than Father Pierce at pretending he was serious.

  ‘Oh, I think coppers will be spent all right.’ Sister Teresa Dolores, though patient and well liked, was not given to making jokes, or recognising them. ‘When they could be saved for
something sensible.’

  The priest wagged his head deploringly, but was unable to control the smile that was wrenching his florid face in half. ‘There’s one boy I’m sure wouldn’t be bothered with it. Isn’t that right, Tom?’

  ‘I’m going, Father.’

  ‘Aren’t you the holy terror, Tom!’

  Derek Birthistle wasn’t going to the knife-throwing. The day before he’d said his father wouldn’t let him. Tom had watched the Protestant boy tightening his lips in disappointment when he’d confessed that. He went red in the face now, fearful in case Father Pierce asked him; he was ashamed because of his father.

  ‘Well, that’s great,’ Father Pierce said instead, and he handed out sweets, one Rainbow Toffee each, to every member of the class. ‘Ye’re great scholars,’ he said.

  They all stood up to receive the sweets and remained standing while the priest was still in the classroom because that was the practice. When he reached the door he turned as though he’d just remembered something, and surprised Tom by addressing him again. It was most unusual for a pupil to be addressed more than once in the same morning by Father Pierce.

  ‘I hear they began work on the bridge,’ he said. ‘First thing they were at it, Tom.’

  Tom hadn’t known that, although he was aware of the talk there’d been about a bridge for the island, just as he’d been aware for so long of the talk about a tinned meat factory.

  ‘I didn’t know they’d started,’ he said.

  Father Pierce made his familiar gesture with his head, inclining it and wagging it at the same time. It would be a great easement for the island people, he said. It was a great decision that had been taken.

  He left the classroom, not closing the door behind him. In the passage one of the senior girls rang the handbell, clanging it noisily the way that particular girl always did. The new bridge wouldn’t make the journey from the gate-lodge easier. It would make it longer and more difficult because the bridge was being built where the water was narrowest, on the east side of the island, a much longer walk from the Carriglas gate-lodge than the walk to the pier. The ferry would cease as soon as the bridge was there, the ferryman said whenever the subject came up, adding that he’d be glad of an excuse to rest his bones.

  ‘Are you looking after the well?’ Sister Teresa Dolores asked, her eye picking Tom out as he began to leave the classroom. ‘You’re not forgetting it now?’

  ‘I go there all right.’

  ‘Stay beside it a long while when you’re there. Touch the holy clay.’

  He did stay a long while, Tom assured her, and he always touched the clay. Sister Teresa Dolores worried about things like that. She was always wanting to make sure that the rosary was being said and that the senior girls under-stood the requirements of Confession. There was worry in her eyes when she looked at you, and in the pull of her mouth, its corners drawn back into her face. She didn’t want anyone to go to hell.

  ‘Don’t ever forget to go there, Tom.’

  The well was at the ruined abbey on the island, where the saint had had his bed long before the abbey had been built to commemorate him. There was a slab of rock you could touch, which had been his pillow, and in a niche in the wall people left coins and rosary beads and crucifixes. You could put your hand down into the well and feel for the slightly moist clay. There wasn’t any water in the well any more.

  ‘I wouldn’t ever forget,’ Tom said.

  He left the classroom and made his way to the Reverend Mother’s house, where Sister Conheady had her library in an upstairs room. The journey was familiar to him; he made it twice a week. He rang the doorbell and then waited until a lay sister opened it and admitted him to the dark, silent hall, the linoleum on its floor sombrely gleaming. He waited in the room where the books were, all of them covered in brown paper by Sister Conheady and arranged on shelves in a glass-fronted bookcase. Hardly making a sound, except for the swish of her habit, Sister Conheady entered a moment later.

  ‘Has she a couple to come back?’ She unlocked a drawer in the bookcase, where details of the borrowing were kept. ‘The Crescent Moon, is it? And Spring of Love?

  Tom examined the handwritten titles on the brown-paper covers and thought they were probably that. ‘Yes,’ he said, handing Sister Conheady the books.

  She was his favourite among the nuns. He considered her gentle, her pale face seeming’ delicate to him, her hands delicately thin. She reminded him of the picture of the glorified St Bernadette above the kitchen door in the gate-lodge. He couldn’t imagine her ever being cross like Sister Sullivan always was or like his mother was sometimes. She didn’t worry you with her eyes like Sister Teresa Dolores did, or not notice you like the Reverend Mother.

  ‘I have this one for her,’ Sister Conheady said.

  She noted the title in a red exercise-book, taking her time because she was never in a hurry. She wrote with a pencil, and when she had finished she said she was sure the book would be enjoyed. ‘Are they well across?’ she enquired, and Tom said that as far as he knew the Rollestons were well.

  It was the Rollestons who paid for Tom to attend the convent: his mother had told him that. Father Pierce had come over to the island specially. He had made the suggestion that in the circumstances it would be a good idea for Tom to go to the nuns until he was ready for the Christian Brothers. He had spoken to old Mrs Rolleston and apparently she had understood and had agreed. ‘They’re good to us, Tom,’ his mother had said, and then had explained how she had been permitted to remain at Carriglas after his father’s death, how Mrs Rolleston had insisted that she should move into the gate-lodge, abiding by the intention there had been. Everyone knew that his father’s death had been an error. The Rollestons had endeavoured to make up for it.

  ‘I’ll be back maybe on Thursday,’ he said to Sister Conheady. ‘Or Wednesday if she’ll have finished it.’

  ‘I’m never far away, Tom.’

  He always wished he could stay longer. A pleasant, shivery feeling sometimes ran through him when he was with Sister Conheady. It wasn’t that he wanted to say anything in particular to her, or to listen to her saying something to him. It was just that being in her presence was nice.

  John James made much the same journey as Tom had made in the early morning. When he stepped off the ferry barefoot children begged from him. Spring cabbages wilted beside turnips and carrots outside the small, poor shops of Narrow Lane. A smell of meal and porter wafted out of open doors. In the gutters there was a sludge of manure from last week’s cattle and sheep fair.

  He cashed a cheque in the Bank of Ireland, then strode the length of the town, out past the convent and the green railings of the Christian Brothers’ school, on to the promenade. He wore a double-breasted flannel suit, his brown shoes shone, his tie and moustache shared a sprightliness. A yellow walking-stick almost disguised the hint of lameness in his gait that was a legacy of the war that had claimed his father.

  Before turning into the Rose of Tralee boarding-house he paused and looked about him, his cigarette-case in one hand so that if necessary he might delay his progress beneath the pretext of selecting and nonchalantly lighting a cigarette. But since there was no one to be seen on the promenade he entered the boarding-house and made his way upstairs.

  Carriglas, April 6th, 1931. It is the dead time of the afternoon between lunch and tea. Lionel is already back in the fields, his three sheepdogs keeping him company. Villana is out for her walk, Mrs Rolleston is resting, John James is visiting the woman he believes we do not know about. The house is always quiet during these afternoon hours—the time when the memories which govern me most persistently tug at my consciousness. I try not to think about the past, and urge myself to write instead that the daffodils bloomed a month ago, that quite soon there will be tulips and the first primroses and cowslips. It is I who arrange the flowers now, for Mrs Rolleston says it is too much for her, and Villana claims to be no good with flowers.

  ‘You do not mind?’ Villana said in a moment
after lunch, ‘You are not hurt by this?’

  She meant by her forthcoming marriage, but why should I be hurt since in the meanwhile my brother has married someone else?

  ‘Of course I am not hurt,’ I replied. ‘You know I wish you only happiness.’

  She smiled gracefully, acknowledging that. They have at last begun to build the bridge, she remarked, and added that at least it would give employment. ‘I dare say it’s been a shock, coming back,’ she added.

  I smiled and shook my head, false in the implication. The avenue gates are now so streaked with green and rust that a camouflage has been formed, drawing them into landscape they once stood palely alien in. Grass is high on the avenue itself; weeds flourish in two rich channels on either side of it. The lawns that flank the house are only roughly cut, and the white paintwork of the hall-door and the windows is as marked and dirtied as the gates. In the drawing-room the chandeliers still hang grandly, the family portraits are as they’ve been before. But water, penetrating the wall of the French windows, has left a brown stain on the wallpaper; and the room is dingy. So, with similar discolouration, is the circular hall, and the empty alcoves of the green staircase wall seem less elegant than they were. Paint flakes away from windowsills. The nursery-schoolroom smells of the sun-scorched butterflies that have accumulated on its boarded floor.

  When I wrote to Hugh to say I had returned to Carriglas he did not reply. In all the years that have gone by Hugh has never referred to the breaking off of the engagement, either in conversation on the few occasions when we’ve met, or in correspondence. Now that I have returned, I believe I may never hear from my brother again, and I do not know why.