The Silence in the Garden Read online

  ‘Keep an eye on her all the same, Brigid. It isn’t easy for the young ones sometimes.’

  As she left the kitchen, she realised that that was why she had paid the visit: she had been worried about the new maid because she was so young. Some time or other, perhaps yesterday or the day before, she had woken out of a dream, feeling sorry for somebody and knowing it was Patty. She’d been sorry for the others too, all the new girls who had come to Carriglas, only fifteen or sixteen years old most of them. ‘God, ma’am, it’s a great house you have,’ Kathleen Quigley had said, and she, too, had been lonesome. ‘It’s only I miss the fields, ma’am,’ Kathleen Quigley had said, it’s only I miss the ways we have at home.’

  Brigid followed Patty to the scullery and worked beside her at the draining-board, peeling apples for a charlotte. She had become used over the years to Mrs Rolleston’s tenderness, indeed she had benefited from it herself, but she often reflected that what the old woman didn’t realise, and never would, was that compassion was sometimes inappropriately extended. Girls like this raw creature beside her knew better where they were with regular scolding. Concern for their well-being only led to confusion, and then the bouts of weeping began.

  ‘Did you hear the music Mrs Haverty was on about?’ she enquired with a briskness she considered suitable.

  Patty shook her head again. No music had penetrated to the depths of the kitchen quarters and, unlike Brigid, she had not been out in the yard. She hadn’t understood the information imparted by Mrs Haverty about the entertainment, but she brushed the clay from another carrot before she asked about it. Brigid said:

  ‘He has a woman standing up against a board and then he pitches knives at her. He has twenty knives stuck into the board before he’s finished.’

  ‘Glory be to God, are you serious, Brigid?’ Scrubbing-brush and carrot dropped into the sink. Open-mouthed, her jaw slackened to its extent, Patty stared at her kitchen superior.

  ‘If you could see yourself,’ Brigid sharply admonished her. ‘Don’t look like a fool, girl.’

  ‘But isn’t it shocking all the same? Wouldn’t you think she’d get cut?’

  ‘Get on with your work, girl.’

  On the way upstairs Mrs Rolleston’s train of thought continued. The memory of Kathleen Quigley became the memory of Haverty saying, ‘I haven’t told Brigid.’ Just for a moment she had closed her eyes and then had gone to the kitchen to tell Brigid herself, while Haverty and another man gathered up the remains of the body on the avenue. Mrs Haverty had stayed in the kitchen because she’d asked her to and she’d gone herself to the pier. She’d waited there through a night that never became dark and saw them as the birds began to sing—Hugh and her grandsons rowing the boat they had earlier rowed across to the party, four uniforms in a second boat, a third one trailing behind. She heard their laughter and their voices becoming louder. There were other girls besides Villana: people had been invited to breakfast at Carriglas. If you persist in fraternising with the barracks, a message received a week ago had threatened, measures will be taken. Villana had laughed.

  She entered her bedroom and pulled open the drawer of her dressing-table. She took the letter to the chair by the window. When she’d told them they had remained as they were, arrested in their movements, a girl about to step out of a boat, John James and Lionel already on the pier. One of the other men swore. ‘We can guess who our visitor was,’ she’d said before she walked away.

  Fifteen shillings would see me right, she read.

  She spoke from her afternoon bed, paying him a compliment, saying he was her king. He, naked by the window though obscured from the promenade by double net curtains, lit a cigarette. She preferred him not to smoke when he lay beside her, and so obligingly he rose when the moment for a cigarette arrived.

  ‘Darling, you’re cross about that bridge.’

  He shook his head, then changed his mind and said the bridge was inconveniently placed. No proper thought had been given to the matter.

  ‘A conveyance’ll be necessary, pet. You’ll need a motor-car.’

  ‘I have no money for a motor-car.’

  ‘Come back into bed, honey, and warm me up.’

  The boarding-house proprietress’s bedroom had pink, striped wallpaper on its walls, with bunches of pinkish lilies cascading in each corner and running along in a frieze below the picture rail. There was a wash-stand with a basin and jug on it, and a large wardrobe and a table with a mirror propped against a vase, in front of which Mrs Moledy’s cosmetics, hairpins and other aids to beauty were laid out. A crucifix hung between the curtained windows, and on the floor beneath it a rubber plant stood in a brass container. Sacred statues elsewhere adorned the room. At the foot of the bed were the two chairs on which Mrs Moledy laid her clothes when she divested herself of them.

  ‘Come on, my honey,’ she urged again. Her fleshy, powdered face simpered from the pillows, her double chin bunched into pale folds. Mrs Moledy had been widowed for seven years and John James’s friend for five. Her bulk beneath the sheet and blankets was considerable, by chance reflecting the appetite of her passion. ‘I would advance you the money for a motor-car,’ she offered when she had settled his limbs about her pin-cushion plumpness. An arrangement could easily be drawn up: it was not unusual for a woman in her position to lend money. Her fingers, as she spoke, explored the flesh of her companion. They traced the outline of his ribs, loitering on his stomach. They touched his region of reproduction. ‘Oh, you are my king!’ she murmured.

  The boarding-house on that April afternoon was quiet. Its two permanent lodgers were at work and it was too early by a month or so for the first of its seasonal visitors. Mrs Moledy’s maid was given Monday afternoons off.

  ‘King!’ Mrs Moledy suddenly cried out. ‘King of my castle!’

  She dozed, and he thought how much he disliked her. Five years ago, one warm midday, he had been sitting on a seat on the promenade, watching the fishing boats returning one by one. She had addressed him by name, had walked by, and on her way back had sat down beside him. Afterwards she confessed that she’d seen him from the boarding-house and had come out specially. She played him a record on her gramophone. ‘Get along, little doggy,’ a tinny voice had sung. ‘Get along, get along.’

  Beside him, she awoke. Her mood had changed, as it often did in the course of an afternoon. He recognised even before she spoke the mood he disliked most of all.

  ‘Oh, I would love it if we could go to a show like that!’ She pouted. She protruded her lower lip beyond the upper one. She sniffed, as if tearful. She wasn’t good enough, she supposed.

  ‘It isn’t that at all.’

  ‘It’s always no with you, darling.’

  John James, drawing upon his experience of the relationship, tightened his face and remained silent.

  ‘I thought you might say yes for once, darling.’

  It was always best to keep as quiet as possible, not to argue. Last week she’d mentioned the entertainment that was advertised, some dreadful kind of circus sideshow. She’d hinted at first, not making much of the possibility, which was always her way. Now she was suggesting that they should walk together along the promenade, with the whole town watching, in order to attend it.

  ‘No,’ he repeated, and he tried to think of other times in his life, of being at school, of conversations with his father. Had his father, widowed all those years, visited a Catholic woman somewhere? Had he, too, experienced the torment of remorse and resolved never to return? It was hard to imagine his father suffering like that. It was hard to imagine his father in the company of such a woman, black hair sprouting from her armpits. His father had gone to his death thinking the world of him, the eldest of his children, and his inheritor: John James believed that.

  ‘You’d hate the whole thing,’ he forced himself to say. ‘Some poor woman within a hair’s breadth of her death.’

  But Mrs Moledy protested that she would enjoy the entertainment like any other person would. She had no
life, waiting from one week to the next, everything underhand. Declare to God, she stated, she only felt herself when she was confessing her sins. ‘This one the worst of them,’ she said.

  ‘You’re not telling me you let on about this at your Confessions?’

  Sulkily, she did not reply. But when he repeated the question his tone of voice betrayed his alarm. Pleased, she said:

  ‘It’s a mortal sin, pet. I have to arrange redemption.’

  ‘Redemption?’

  ‘I have to atone, darling. Penance and forgiveness: you don’t have it in your church.’

  ‘Which priest do you go to?’

  ‘It’s not like that, darling. It’s different than going to a doctor. Usually, though, it’s Father Pierce.’

  He could sense her enjoying herself. He could sense her punishing him. I will not return to this room, he said to himself. Next Monday she can lie there with her powder on her and cry her bloody liver out.

  ‘No need to fret, darling. Father Pierce hears all sorts.’

  ‘My God!’

  He rose from the bed, the floor cold on the soles of his feet. He remembered his father going to Dublin on his own, remaining for a few days in Davison’s Hotel: he wondered again about a woman. Sometimes on their way back from school in Shropshire he and Lionel would spend a night in Davison’s, all of it arranged for them. He remembered Barmy Jessop claiming he’d gone with a woman of the streets, and wondering himself if such women were to be found in Dublin. He and Barmy Jessop and Asquith-Jones used to talk about things like that. He remembered how the three of them had drunk communion wine with the night-watchman in his boiler room, and how Barmy Jessop had rung the Chapel bell in the middle of the night, raising a fire alarm.

  ‘Darling, I’m only codding you.’ She giggled from the pillows. ‘Come on back in.’

  She swore it wasn’t true. She made him take the statue of the Virgin from the shelf on the wall and he held it while she swore. ‘Janey Mack!’ she exclaimed, laughing. ‘If anyone could see us!’

  She attempted more cajoling, but he said it was time to go. He fiddled with his studs and cufflinks, hurrying to get them into place, knowing her good mood wouldn’t last. He could sense her searching her mind for some new shaft of attack.

  ‘One of the boarders’ll take me,’ she finally threatened. ‘We’ll make an evening of it.’ She mentioned Myley Flynn’s public house, saying an hour or so would probably be spent there. ‘You’d never know what would happen on a night like that,’ she casually remarked, ‘with everyone excited by the show.’

  Villana stood in the ice-house, where Hugh Pollexfen had first kissed her. No longer used for any purpose, grimy and cobwebbed, the ice-house had been their secret place. A brick ledge ran round the walls, almost a bench. You could sit on it, crouching beneath the first of the grey marble shelves that ran from wall to wall also. The first time she and Hugh had found privacy in the ice-house they had not sat down, but on subsequent occasions they had huddled together in a corner, their arms around one another. ‘Oh, Hugh,’ she murmured now, wondering what he was doing at this moment. She did not know the name of the girl he had married because she had never wanted to, nor the names of his children, of which there were three. England was not a place she would care to find herself in, formal and polite, its landscape said to be like that also. She had never been there but could easily guess. At this moment his wife was perhaps calling him into whatever house they lived in, where the children would be primly waiting around a tea table. ‘Hugh,’ she murmured again. ‘Oh, Hugh, how ridiculous!’

  Ploughing, Lionel walked patiently, the horse’s weariness at the end of the day dictating their shared pace. Almost as tall and thin as his father had been, a little stooped even though he was only a few years into his thirties, Lionel at a distance presented the impression of wiry strength: seen closer, the cast of his face suggested vulnerability, as it had in childhood. He was aware of his brother’s liaison with the boarding-house keeper but did not ever think about it. He was bewildered by his sister’s forthcoming marriage and by the fact, an hour ago revealed to him, that her husband was to live at Carriglas. He regretted the building of the bridge, but what concerned him more were the crops he sowed, and his animals, and the trees on the skyline. That was his life.

  The evening sun, slanting across the furrows, caught for an instant the blade of the plough. Some distance away Lionel’s three sheepdogs, crouched around an open gate, suggested protection, although he in no way required it. They were dogs who disdained the attentions, and the commands, of others; they followed him wherever he went. He called them now, and they came to him swiftly. ‘Good girl, good girl,’ he murmured to the horse, releasing it of its burden and leading it from the field.

  On the ferryboat Haverty and the ferryman talked about racehorses. The Gullet had failed, making it three times in a row. Market Rasen was mentioned, and Towcester and Aintree, which Tom at first assumed to be the names of other horses and then realised were English race-courses. Butt Nolan was advising Persian Prince, the ferryman said.

  ‘I have to go down the town first,’ Haverty revealed when he and Tom stepped on to the quay. ‘I have five minutes of business.’

  So they turned to the right when they came to South Main Street, and entered Spillane’s public house at the bottom of Michael Davitt Hill. ‘Lemonade and biscuits for the boy,’ Haverty ordered, having also delivered his own requirement. Tom had never been in a public house before although he had once or twice been in the grocery attached to one. Often when something his mother wanted for cooking wasn’t available in Meath’s or Dungan’s or the London and Newcastle he had to try in other places, usually unsuccessfully. Very little had ever been available in Spillane’s grocery, no rashers because there wasn’t a bacon machine, no jams or jellies, no packets of peas or cornflour. But in the bar lemonade and biscuits were supplied without difficulty.

  Men were standing at the counter, leaning their elbows on it; a few were sitting at tables. Mr Coyne, of the garage, was there; and Mr O’Hagan from the post office. There were other men whom Tom did not recognise. The exterior of Spillane’s—its blue paintwork and the raised marbled letters that spelt out its title, the advertisements for tea and Bisto in one window, whiskey and porter in the other—suggested a greater promise than either grocery or bar fulfilled. A murkiness prevailed in the latter, and its occupants as a result had acquired the nature of shadows. Exposed to the daylight, those men whom Tom did not recognise might have at once become familiar.

  Mr O’Hagan, seated with Mr Coyne, spoke to Haverty about the racehorse called The Gullet. Butt Nolan deserved hanging, he said. Butt Nolan had sold him inside information for the usual consideration, the result of which being he’d placed money on an animal that had difficulty in walking let alone winning a race. The skin of Mr O’Hagan’s face was white, his pale moustache was lank; he wore wire-rimmed spectacles, behind which his eyes were melancholy. Mr Coyne had a stomach that protruded, a gleaming bald head and a small moustache. His eyes were like two rosary beads, so minute that they disappeared into the fat of his face when he laughed or frowned. He had eleven children, all of them girls. Mr O’Hagan was a bachelor.

  ‘Persian Prince’s your man,’ Haverty said. He drew a hand across his face, wiping away froth left behind by his stout. ‘John Joe Shevlin up. Unbeatable.’

  ‘No better man,’ Mr Coyne contributed.

  ‘He has England defeated.’

  ‘I would agree with that.’

  But Mr O’Hagan gloomily shook his head. If Butt Nolan advised Persian Prince he wouldn’t touch the animal with a pole, John Joe Shevlin notwithstanding. ‘Another two bob gone west on The Gullet. Does Nolan think they grow in the woods?’

  No reply was offered. If there was a young fellow that ever sat on a horse with the skill of John Joe, Haverty continued, he had yet to be shown him. All animals acquired quality under John Joe.

  ‘I would agree with that,’ said Mr Coyne.

&nb
sp; Other horses were mentioned, Happy Honeymoon and Fancy Cottage, and other jockeys. Haverty ceased to wipe the froth from around his mouth. Mr Coyne whistled for a moment beneath his breath. ‘All I’m saying,’ said Mr O’Hagan, ‘is Butt Nolan’s a chancer. I’ve nothing against young Shevlin.’

  In his mouth the lemonade turned the biscuits into a sweet mush which Tom held there for as long as he could. It surprised him that the men remained where they were instead of going to see the knife-throwing. You could hear the music from it on the quays and in South Main Street, much louder than it had been on the island. The ferryman said the entire town was going to it.

  I’m not saying for a moment,’ Mr O’Hagan lugubriously persisted, ‘that Persian Prince isn’t a well-bred animal. I’m not saying that at all.’

  ‘Wasn’t he bred in Tipperary? Amn’t I right in that?’ Mr Coyne enquired.

  Haverty said he was. Born and bred in Tipperary, as fine a young horse as ever left the county. A horse you’d like to see doing well.

  ‘I have nothing against the horse,’ insisted Mr O’Hagan. I’m not saying I have.’

  ‘Ah sure, we know you haven’t.’ To Tom’s dismay Mr Coyne rapped on the pebbly glass between the bar and the grocery and called out an order for further refreshment. ‘Another lemonade for the boy,’ he instructed, drawing from his glass the dregs of its black liquid. Watching this, Tom felt uneasy in his stomach because the smell the stout gave off made him think that something in it had gone bad. Haverty and Mr O’Hagan drained their glasses also.

  ‘John Joe’s from Carlow,’ Mr Coyne stated when the freshly poured drinks were placed on the table. ‘Amn’t I right in that?’

  Haverty said he believed that was so. A credit to Carlow, he said. And wasn’t the young horse a credit to Tipp?

  ‘Oh, credit certainly. Credit where credit’s due.’