Florian didn’t deny that, since there seemed little point in doing so.
‘He was two years in the Ordnance Stores, sir, and longer before he got his command. The St Johns never set themselves up in a naval way.’
‘Of course not.’
‘I mentioned in McGovern’s a while back you’d be in for supplies, sir. I took a liberty with that. You’ll find them expecting you in McGovern’s, sir.’
‘Yes.’
‘The family always insisted on McGovern’s.’
‘Yes, of course.’
Florian gazed into the lined, pouched features, the tired eyes, and saw reflected there a hesitation, a moment of doubt, bewilderment, before the old man again found his way in the conversation.
‘I have the coal ordered,’ he said.
‘Of course, but all the same it might be better if you went on looking after these papers yourself.’
‘The little table beneath the portrait of Lady Eliza is where the papers were always kept. The little table that opens out. Well, you’d know.’
‘Just for the time-being, maybe you wouldn’t mind continuing to look after them?’
‘We’ve had the time-being, sir. The longest time-being there ever was known in Ireland.’
Florian saw the girl then. She was cycling slowly across the Square in the distance. Her blue dress drew his attention, the same dress she’d been wearing before and when he dreamed about her. She passed Bodell’s Bar and turned into a street a few yards on.
‘If you wouldn’t mind,’ he said, ‘another day would be more convenient for me to take the papers.’
They were accepted then, when again Florian held them out.
‘I’ve lent them a few times, sir, because of the interest in the family. But I’ll keep them by me since it’s your instruction. Where I live these days is Morpeth Terrace, the second house along. It does me rightly.’
Florian nodded. In the drawer of that same table, he was reminded, was the catalogue of the library, complete and clearly written out, two thousand and fifty-nine volumes. In case it should ever be mislaid there was a copy in the smaller of the two upstairs drawing-rooms, in the Limerick writing-desk.
‘Mr Macready himself delivered that desk, sir, and said keep it a distance from the fir e-grate. That same time he said he could put secret drawers in the shutters if that would be convenient, but the governess wouldn’t have them. It was a schoolroom, the small drawing-room, temporary when William’s leg went. Miss Batesriff that governess was.’
‘I have to be off now, I’m afraid.’
‘It’s the best thing ever happened in Ireland, sir, yourself come back.’
Ellie put the change she’d been given on the counter. Mr Clancy divided it.
‘Tell your husband I was asking for him, Mrs Dillahan,’ he requested. ‘Not that I ever knew him personally. It was his mother brought in his boots, then again his wife. And these days it’s yourself.’
‘I’ll tell him, Mr Clancy.’
The bell above the door sounded as she left.
‘Hullo,’ a voice said on the street.
She knew before she turned round to look. She had the shoes, unwrapped, still in her hand, about to put them into the basket of her bicycle.
‘Florian Kilderry,’ he said. ‘D’you remember?’
He was standing in front of the window of the closed premises next door to the shoemaker’s, his bicycle beside him. He was wearing a hat. He smiled at her. ‘You’ve forgotten me,’ he said.
She felt the colour mounting in her face, as it had before. Her thoughts became disordered, as they had become then too, perverse and separated from her, as if they were not hers. She wanted to say that of course she remembered him. She wanted to say that she had wondered about him, that she had tried not to, that she had known she should not. She wanted to say she had known immediately who it was when he’d said hullo.
‘A cup of coffee?’ he suggested.
‘No.’ She said it more sharply than she’d intended. She shook her head.
‘I thought you might like a cup of coffee.’
He wheeled his bicycle beside hers when she moved on. ‘It’s just I thought you might,’ he said.
In the silence that came she tried to say she hadn’t meant to sound severe. But she didn’t say that either.
‘I live near Castledrummond,’ he said. ‘My father died a while ago and I got left with a house a few miles out.’
‘I heard of Castledrummond.’
‘D’you like Rathmoye, Ellie?’
‘You get to know a place.’
‘Not much goes on, I imagine.’
