Love and Summer

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 widow 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.