Love and Summer

The dusk of early morning lightened. Florian slept again, and dreamed again but afterwards did not know he had. He didn’t know when it was he had first loved Isabella and often thought he probably always had. ‘We could be here,’ she used to say, speaking of Shelhanagh and of the future. But love, for Isabella, did not come into it, and there’d been other girls because of that: pretty Rose Mary Darty, who lived not far away, and the girl in the chemist’s in Castledrummond, Noeleen Fahy the station master’s daughter, Ingrid Bergman in For Whom the Bell Tolls. There’d never been much, but what there was had always to do with Isabella - another hopeless effort to tidy her away. He had written to tell her when he was persuaded to sell the house but her spidery handwriting had never, in response, been waiting among the day’s brown envelopes on the floor of the hall.

It wasn’t again this morning. The estate agents wrote to say appointments had been made for would-be purchasers: today at half past two, at four o’clock, at five. We are delighted with this brisk response, the communication ended, and are confident of an offer soon.

After breakfast he brought to life the embers of his bonfire, throwing on to them more photographs he had found, his plaintive school reports, his father’s diaries, and magazines and packs of cards. He watched the photographs becoming wisps of black that floated off to decorate eleagnus and mahonia. He scattered over a blaze of chairs with broken backs or missing legs the postcards of Italian art his mother had collected - five shoeboxes of masterworks in black and white, each with a greeting in a different hand, all of them stamped and franked, job lots found somewhere. When a few fell at his feet he threw them on to the fire and later discovered one where it had dropped, unnoticed, on the grass a few yards away. A monk prayed to a saint who had been stabbed, the dagger that pierced her throat still there. The wound was bloodless, the sacred features unaffected by the ordeal. ‘Santa Lucia,’ he read, and told himself it was imagination that he was reminded of the girl he had talked to in Rathmoye.

8

Days passed, and then a week. A warm June gave way to July heat. Already the land was parched, grass lost its green. Dust gathered in Rathmoye’s streets, litter lay in gutters unwashed by rain.

On a Wednesday morning when the new month was not far advanced, Joseph Paul Connulty walked through the town with a bunch of dahlias and asparagus fern. Since his mother’s death he had done so once a week, his intention being that what he placed on her grave should never be seen to droop and wither. Asparagus fern was consistently the green accompaniment, the choice of flowers depending on what was available in Cadogan’s Vegetables and Floral.

In the cemetery he changed the water in the glass container and dropped the blooms he had taken from it into a wire waste-bin supplied for this purpose. They would have lasted a few more days, even a week, but since he did not consider it fanciful that his mother each time witnessed the purchase made in Cadogan’s and the walk through the town, the changing of the water, the fresh flowers arranged, he did not take chances. It could have been that he had once, when in the cemetery, heard his mother utter - in a murmur no louder than a whisper - an expression of gratitude. But, practical man of business that he was, publican and coal merchant, who paid his debts and charged what he must, he suspected that that had been some errant sound, transformed in his thoughts to seem, momentarily, what it was not: the certainty of his faith and its related beliefs did not ever exceed his own laid-down limits of the likely.

He left the cemetery and returned to his back bar, which was the centre of his business life. In half an hour Bernadette O’Keeffe from the coal office would arrive with cheques for him to sign, with copies of the invoices that had been dispatched for the second or third time and had still failed to elicit a response, with anything of importance that might have come in the morning post. All bills relating to the running of the bed-and-breakfast accommodation at Number 4 The Square were recorded in the office books and settled as soon as they came in. Once a week, on Friday evenings, Joseph Paul removed a sum from the till, its total agreed upon with his mother in her lifetime and paid now to his sister. The notes and loose change were laid out by him on the kitchen windowsill as they always had been.

A fly crept about on the ceiling and idly he watched it while he waited. He had never killed a fly; it wasn’t something he could do. He poured himself a glass of 7-Up, which he found invigorating at this time of day. He continued his observation of the rambling fly as it went about whatever task it had set itself.

That morning Bernadette O’Keeffe was delayed. She was a few minutes late leaving the coal yards and was then importuned by Orpen Wren, who was waiting for her in the doorway of Kissane the jeweller’s.

‘What coal are we talking about, Mr Wren?’ she enquired, knowing they were talking about nothing.

‘It’s the same order as ever it is. Would the winter stocks be in the yards yet?’

‘It’s only July, Mr Wren.’

‘September they light the fires.’

‘Who’s that, then?’ Bernadette asked, knowing the answer to this question too.

‘George Anthony’s come back. Lisquin’s opened up like you’d remember it. Well, you’d know George Anthony’s back.’

‘I’m afraid I didn’t.’

‘Put them down for coal.’

‘I will of course, Mr Wren.’

Stylish, blonded, in her two-piece of flecked cherry-red, Bernadette passed on. She was forty-six, younger than her employer, younger than his sister, who was imperious when they met, which was too often for Bernadette. The imperiousness was the mother’s, although the daughter did not know it or she would have changed her ways. Her employer’s sister was a sinister woman in Bernadette’s opinion.

She passed into the public house and through the long street bar, no one at present in charge of it. There were drinkers at the far end, two men who were always there in the mornings, who never greeted her when she came in, or spoke to her when she passed close to them, whose names she did not know or wish to know.

‘Good morning,’ she said in the back bar, and her employer rose from the small round table where they did their business and she sat down at it. He poured her a 7-Up.

They were alone. There never was anyone else in the back bar when she came, or even later in the day; and in the evenings the street bar was still preferred. At that time the priests frequented the back bar, and Mr McGovern because it was convenient, and Fogarty from the courthouse to play cards if there was anyone to play with.

Bernadette spread out the papers she had brought, the cheques to be signed kept to one side. For a long time