The Silence in the Garden Page 8

  ‘It was here it happened,’ she said, pointing at a spot a few yards away, it was here your father was killed.’

  There was nothing different about that part of the avenue. The moss on the surface was the same shade of green as it was elsewhere. The rhododendrons on either side looked as though they had never been disturbed by an explosion.

  ‘I didn’t know it was here.’

  His mother was still staring at the place, and he realised now that she was upset because the bridge was to be called after Corny Dowley. You could tell it by the way she touched her cheeks with the tops of her fingers, and walked away without saying anything else.

  In the outhouse that was his workshop a paraffin lamp burned steadily on the old mahogany dressing-table Lionel remembered in his father’s room when he was a child. He and Haverty had carried it out of the back scullery a year ago so that he might repair one of its legs, but he had not yet done so. He wasn’t sure that he could; in the end he would probably abandon it.

  He picked up the lamp and shone it about him before he left the outhouse. Seed-boxes were stacked in a corner. A new cross-shaft for a gate was still clamped in the vice, where he’d been planing it. The potato sacks which Mrs Haverty had recently patched hung from a hook, tied together in a bundle.

  He closed the outhouse door and crossed the yard with the lamp still alight, his sheepdogs close behind him. He said goodnight to them and watched them disappear in the gloom before he passed into the scullery corridor. ‘You’ll have heard about the bridge?’ Haverty had said as they walked back from the fields that evening. ‘They’re going to remember Dowley with it.’

  At dinner that news had been present at the table, though mentioned by no one. Villana had spoken of something the dressmaker had passed on when she’d visited the house that morning, to do with a nephew’s promotion in the Guards. John James, as always on a Monday evening, had not said much. ‘Have you the hay in cocks?’ his grandmother had asked him, and Lionel had replied that the hay was safe.

  In the silent, empty kitchen he made tea, pouring boiling water from the kettle that had been left for him on the range, and rooting in a tin box for the biscuits he liked. He had been in the town on the day of Dowley’s funeral. He had watched the cheap cortège going slowly to the church, the blinds of shops and houses drawn, men pulling off their caps and blessing themselves. That morning Cornelius Dowley’s mother had drowned herself, as if she’d been unable to bear the ordeal of this occasion. He’d thought of that as he stood there, and then had been overcome by a strange confusion. He had wanted to walk at the end of the procession.

  He broke another biscuit in half and ate it slowly.

  Carriglas, July 14th, 1931. I dreamed last night of an afternoon one summer when Hugh was here. They were not children any more, and I had become their companion rather than being in charge of them. We walked, all of us, to the tennis-court among the trees, and later the maids brought lemonade and stood to watch. ‘How greatly Sarah has improved!’ Lionel said. I was first aware then that Villana and my brother were in love.

  Nothing was different in my dream from the afternoon itself. John James was carefree and had the manner of his father, and in my dream I was reminded how I had imagined him one day the master of Carriglas, and had imagined the household as it would be, another family growing up.

  ‘Do you remember,’ I asked Lionel tonight, ‘that afternoon years ago when you complimented me on my tennis?’ I reminded him of the maids bringing the lemonade and then remaining. He smiled obligingly, but clearly he has no memory for such occasions. I was in love myself that afternoon.

  ‘Lett’s have sent over these summer shirts,’ he said tonight, spreading them out on the kitchen table. He would take the first one, not even unfolding the others. I laughed at him and he laughed too. Together we choose two, both of them green, the colour that suits him best.

  Mrs Rolleston sat in the armchair by her window, looking out over the sea at the dwindling lights of the town. On the dressing-table at the far end of the room a lamp burned beside an oval looking-glass, its light gleaming on her scent bottles and on the ivory backs of her hairbrushes.

  I heard about the bridge, the letter she’d just opened informed her. Quite often she didn’t open the letters immediately, but put them aside until she’d gathered strength. That’s great for Corny but there is only sympathy in my heart for yourselves, the way things are. I wouldn’t ask you for it at a time like this but fifteen shillings in an envelope would be an act of charity. Only I had bad luck a week ago.

  When the Black and Tans shot Dowley on the billiard-hall steps Kathleen Quigley had wept as inconsolably as Brigid had less than a month earlier. It would have been unthinkable to allow them to go on working side by side in the same kitchen, and in Brigid’s condition it would have been a cruelty to turn her out. ‘D’you understand?’ she said, but Kathleen Quigley had crossly shaken her head.

  Mrs Rolleston rose and prepared herself for bed. As she washed she wondered if the woman managed to live on the money sent her. The letters sometimes mentioned the hens she kept, and they had also mentioned the death of her father and, some years later, of her mother. The Havertys had insisted at the time that Dowley would never have looked at a girl like Kathleen Quigley, that it was only her hopes that had been destroyed, not any kind of reality. There was never hard feelings on my side, all the letters ended. And never will be.

  The maid’s elongated face came into Mrs Rolleston’s mind, and her thin nose and her long front teeth. Trying not to see it, she brushed her hair in front of the looking-glass, gazing instead at her own reflection. ‘There’s a telegram after coming, ma’am’: it was that same maid who had held it towards her, standing in the drawing-room in her afternoon black. She hadn’t opened it until the girl had gone, until she’d heard her footsteps passing through the hall. ‘This isn’t true,’ she’d whispered before she read the message, knowing what the message contained. In the drawing-room she had sat with the piece of paper between her fingers, and then had torn it in half and then into quarters and then into tiny scraps. A chaffinch had flown through the open French windows and she had watched it flying about the room.

  She carried the lamp to the table beside her bed and turned the wick down. When Villana had come into the drawing-room the bird was perched on a picture. She had told Villana immediately that her father was no longer alive, and later Lionel had come to where she sat on the sofa, with the torn-up telegram still in her lap. The news had been sent by the regiment, she explained to them. John James, probably not far from where the death had occurred, would have been informed by the regiment also: when there was a war you had always to be prepared for news from the regiment. She had gone with his children to the study where every day he had read the Irish Times, where his things were as he’d left them-the shotgun on the wall, the fishing-rods in the corner, the bric-à-brac on the ochre-coloured table cover. ‘I don’t know what we’ll do,’ she said, unable to think of anything else to say.

  The sheets of her bed were cold. She pulled a shawl about her shoulders. Was it because of all that, her only child taken from her, that she had shared so acutely Brigid’s distress years later, and Kathleen Quigley’s distress also? She sighed, not answering her question, only knowing that three men had died unnecessarily, all of them connected with Carriglas. Best not to dwell too long on it; these were not thoughts for night-time. The Camiers of Unionhall had been invited to the wedding, and Lady Rossboyne and the Bishop of Killaloe. She’d been a Camier herself, though not of Unionhall. Tattie Rossboyne had been a Camier too; the woman who’d married the clergyman an Ennis. Villiers Hadnett had been invited from Athlone, her side of the family also. All these people would have to stay in the house. Heaven alone knew why Villana was bothering with Villiers Hadnett, or the Camiers of Unionhall if it came to that. No Rolleston was coming because none was left. Sarah and Hugh were the only connected Pollexfens, apart from Hugh’s children. Naturally Hugh wouldn’t come.
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  She dozed, and then fell into a deeper sleep. She dreamed that Villana came into the room to play with the scent bottles on the dressing-table, lifting from them their glass stoppers, her sharply blue eyes lost in concentration when, one by one, she smelt the perfumes. Then Villana was dusting ornaments in Finnamore Balt’s house and the ash from her cigarette kept falling on to them and Villana kept laughing, saying it didn’t matter. ‘This poor dear man,’ she said. ‘I’m ruining his peace of mind.’

  A child ran across the island, but it was not one of her grandchildren, nor her son, and it was not Tom. The child had red hair. He ran over the rocks and the heather and the gorse. He clambered down a cliffside and ran on the shingle of the shore and then on the sand. ‘What’s his name?’ Finnamore Balt said, serving the food in the dining-room, holding out a dish of carrots to her. The red-haired boy hid himself in a cave, but then he had to run on again. He had to climb up the cliff at Elador’s Bay because there was nowhere else to go. ‘That boy was killed at Passchendaele,’ Finnamore Balt said, but she contradicted that, reminding him that it was Villana’s father who had been killed at Passchendaele. ‘Then he was killed on your avenue,’ Finnamore Balt said, but she knew that was wrong also. ‘Mr Balt asked me to marry him,’ Brigid said, looking up from the bread she was making, her face delighted in the kitchen. And Linchy came in and said the man who’d taken his life from him had had his name put on a metal plaque. He died for our fair land, the pronouncement declared, and Kathleen Quigley said it was a holy disgrace, that Brigid was staying on and she was being asked to leave.

  Abruptly, Mrs Rolleston awoke, her dream still vivid. Recently, Finnamore Balt had begun to haunt her dreams, appearing in all sorts of roles, like a figure in a fantastic comedy. It would be after midnight by now. The last twinkle of lights on the sea would be extinguished, and darkness would be there until dawn. She imagined the silent town, and walking from the quays to church, of going into Meath’s, which she used to quite often, of walking up to the bandstand.

  Again she closed her eyes, hoping that sleep would come, but it didn’t immediately. The red-haired boy ran over the rocks again, his feet bare, the jersey he wore ragged. He ran on the paths the sheep made in the heather, and by the edge of the sea because the sand was easier to run on than the shingle was. ‘He is myself when young,’ Finnamore Balt said in another dream, and everyone in the dining-room laughed.

  4. Wedding Preparations

  ‘It’s like you’d walk up to the Cross and spit on Our Lord,’ Holy Mullihan said. ‘When your mother committed the sin, Tom, another thorn was established in the crown.’

  A sin of that type, Holy Mullihan added, would afflict the child who came out of it. The sin would only go from a person after death, and then only if there’d been penance enough and sufficient Hail Marys said. ‘There would be people who’d be frightened of the sin, Tom. They wouldn’t mean harm to an afflicted person, only it’s the way they’d see it. You might see them crossing a street if they saw you coming. Another thing is, they mightn’t like to touch you.’

  In the town the summer crowds increased. They spread themselves on the sand, each family claiming a length of breakwater to hang their bathing towels on. They spent all day in the sunshine, were cooled by the seaside breeze, and returned at half-past five to the boarding-houses of the promenade. Bookmakers and publicans, insurance salesmen, commercial travellers: all came with their families and stayed a week. St Vincent de Paul excursions brought trains full of slum children for a day by the sea.

  When they tired of the strand the visitors climbed the sandhills beyond the promenade, where an old woman kept a shop during the summer months. This was a small black hut of corrugated iron standing by itself and selling whatever the old woman wheeled in her pram to it each day, usually an assortment of Willwood’s sweets and the rock-cakes she sold at two a penny. She was accompanied by a small dog with a yapping bark that most of the time frightened the visitors away. Sometimes a lone man would walk among the pampas grass of the hills, with a newspaper like a baton under his arm. Sometimes a couple would wander in search of seclusion.

  The people of the town varied in their reception of the visitors and were affected differently by the summer weather that attracted them. The poor remained in their lanes and cottages, their half-doors closed, their babies impatient for food. On Sundays the poor brought the smell of poverty to Mass, but they did not ever choose to venture on to the promenade, nor to mingle with the visitors.

  Those more fortunately placed had no such inhibitions. Mrs Coyne, the garage proprietor’s wife, gathered her eleven girls around her and took them to play on the sands. Sister Teresa Dolores and Sister Sullivan moved discreetly through the sunshine, their beads and crucifixes dangling, their habits rustling. Mr O’Hagan from the post office was seen on the seafront every Sunday evening; Finnamore Balt walked the length of the promenade every day. Guard Ryan and Willie Troy from Meath’s raced their bicycles on the damp sand in the early morning, and at that time of day also three priests went swimming. Father Pierce called out warnings about jellyfish or the lowness of the sea’s temperature, but his companions kept their voices quiet. They were older, pale-skinned men, the smaller of them with a head shaped like a bullet, a resemblance that was more noticeable when he was denuded of his black clothes. The head of the other was a tiny knob at the top of his white body and was more noticeable then also, like the head of a pin.

  The Pierrots came to perform on the sands. Duffy’s Circus came and went, and then Toft’s Roundabouts and Bumper Cars attracted the visitors to the wasteland that might one day become the Father Ignatius Quirke Park. In Traynor’s Picture Palace tales of romance and gangsters and the Wild West unfolded nightly. In the Protestant church of St Boniface Canon Kinchella preached sermons that had become familiar to his congregation. In the Church of Our Lady the summer feast days were celebrated. ‘Take a gander at that, sir,’ invited Mr Coyne, drawing John James by the sleeve of his jacket into his garage. He pointed at a large vehicle with its roof folded down. Of French manufacture, he declared, owned in the past by a titled person. But John James replied that he had no money.

  Eugene Prille, the solicitor’s clerk, found homes for both the solicitor’s maid and his white cat. Harbinson, the solicitor’s partner, agreed to be his best man. The dressmaker, Miss Laffey, completed the wedding dress that Villana had ordained should be simple. ‘I often see you alone,’ Brother Meagher accused Tom in South Main Street, i see you about, you’re never out with a gang. Mahoney and John Joe Reilly are boys of your own age. Why aren’t you out with them?’

  He peered at Tom from beneath the eyebrows that met across his forehead, and Tom said to himself that Brother Meagher was already waiting for him behind the green railings of the Christian Brothers’. Already he was looking forward to the day when he could knock the badness out of him.

  ‘I don’t belong to a gang,’ Tom said, i’m saying that to you, boy.’

  ‘I go about alone.’

  ‘I’m saying that to you too. Are you stupid, boy?’

  Tom didn’t know if he was stupid or not. He didn’t mind not belonging to a gang. Holy Mullihan didn’t belong to a gang and no one thought the worse of him for that. Neck Daly and Deso Furphy went around together, but just the two of them could hardly be called a gang.

  ‘I’ll be looking for improvement in you,’ Brother Meagher warned.

  In Spillane’s public house further racing tips were deplored; Butt Nolan was abused in his absence. In Myley Flynn’s, Briscoe, the porter at the Provincial Bank, heard how a woman, swimming on her own one midday, had swum into difficulties and been rescued. She’d lain unconscious for twenty minutes on the sand, her face gone blue, but in the end recovered. Afterwards, hurrying about his business on the streets, Briscoe told of this, exaggerating the drama only slightly.

  Few of the summer visitors took the ferry to the island in order to wander along the cliffs, or to view the abbey ruins or climb up to the sta
nding stones. But some women of the town, at the end of the first week in August, made their annual pilgrimage to the holy well. The saint whose hermit habitation the place had been, whose life there had inspired the lives of the abbey monks, was venerated on a day associated with his memory. The stone reputed to have been his pillow was touched by the women; rosaries were told above the moist clay.

  Villana, wearing a plain yellow dress, passed through the gates of Carriglas on the afternoon following the day of the summer’s pilgrimage. She turned from the road to follow the stream that ran down to the abbey, where sheep nibbled the grass between the stones that had fallen from the walls. Here and there remained the shape of a gothic window. Steps led halfway up a tower, dwindling to nothing, as the tower itself did. There was a cell of discernible proportions. Once upon a time plots had been tilled in a surrounding garden, bees kept, fish brought from the river and the sea. The monks had sheltered quietly, fearful of invasion, while the lords of the mainland boisterously argued at a distance. But the shattering of that tranquillity had come; the monks had disappeared, the walls had fallen down.

  On her unchanging walk Villana passed through the abbey, and by the holy well. She climbed through woodland to emerge at the foot of a grassy hillock, and then climbed on, to its summit and the ring of slender stones on the burial ground that pre-dated by centuries the achievement of the monks. From here she could see the sea again, the grey shadow of Carriglas, and in the greater distance the clutter of the town. After she had stood for a moment she picked some sea-pinks. They grew differently on the island, deeper in colour than she had ever seen them elsewhere, and seeming to go well with the black rock of its promontories and the stunted little oaks of its windswept cliffs. On maps she had seen that the island was shaped like a snail, curling in the grey-green water, at its heart this grave where kings were laid. She sat on the grass with her back against one of the standing stones, and felt in the pocket of her dress for her cigarettes and lighter. Smoking, she gave herself up to the warmth of the sun on her skin and the shimmer of the distant water. The sky was cloudless; there was no wind.