Love and Summer

‘There’s a Strawberry Fair and people come in for that.’

He had a way of looking at the ground while they were walking as if he’d lost something. Once he stopped to pick something up, but threw it away again.

‘An old man I meet on the streets thinks I’m someone else,’ he said.

‘That’d be Orpen Wren. He’d talk to you about Lisquin, would he?’

‘What’s Lisquin?’

‘The St Johns were there one time. They’re gone from it years ago.’

‘I think Mr Wren is under the impression that I’m one of them come back.’

‘Lisquin isn’t there any more.’

Only the back gate-lodge was left, she said, tumbled down, on the old Kilaney road. She said she went there now and again to cut the lavender.

They were in the poor part of the town. Slums had been cleared, the shoemaker’s the last small shop doing business. They had let him stay where he was, Mr Clancy had told Ellie once; they would allow him to until he was too old to trade. She said that now, explaining all the boarded windows.

‘You don’t live near here, Ellie?’

‘I’m on a farm out at Cnocrea. In the Crilly hills.’

Nothing about him was different. She couldn’t prevent herself from looking at him and once he saw. When he did he smiled at her and she wondered if he knew she had feelings for him. She didn’t want him to know.

‘There’d be butterflies if there’s lavender,’ he said.

‘Oh, there are butterflies all right.’

‘Where did the St Johns go?’

‘Away from Ireland altogether. I don’t know why they would have.’

‘The old man was a servant, was he?’

‘I don’t know is it right, only people say he had charge of a library there.’

‘I think maybe it is right.’

He reached out with his foot and kicked a bottle-top off the edge of the pavement into the gutter. It frightened her almost that they were walking together with their bicycles, not even going in the right direction for Hearn’s, where she had meat to get. She should have said she had shopping to do. She should say it now that she had the meat to get, only she didn’t.

‘Mr Wren has papers he wants me to take from him.’

‘He always has the papers.’

He offered her a cigarette, holding out the packet, the silver paper folded back. She shook her head.

‘Don’t you ever smoke?’

‘I never did.’

He picked a coin up from the pavement.

‘Worth nothing,’ he said, handing it to her. ‘The kind that was minted by a business in the old days.’

Boyce, she read on it, and he said that would be a shop-keeper’s name. ‘Boyces were Wexford people,’ he said.

She’d say she had to go into Corbally’s when they came to Magennis Street: she had that ready, even to mention what she had to get. Press-studs she’d say, needles.

‘I’m alone in the house I got left with,’ he said. ‘Myself and a black dog.’

Florian expected no more of this morning than he had of other casual relationships brought about in the same manner and for the same reason. This beginning was as previous beginnings had been, its distraction potent enough already. Isabella would never be just a shadow, but this morning an artless country girl had stirred a tenderness in him and already his cousin’s voice echoed less confidently, her smile was perhaps a little blurred, her touch less than yesterday’s memory of it. He might, in making conversation, have remarked upon his present companion’s attractions, but he sensed it was better not to, maybe not ever.

‘Shelhanagh the house is called,’ he said instead, and Ellie asked about the dog and he told her, and about the lake, and the garden in the evening, which was when he liked it best. He had never lived anywhere else, he said. He’d never wanted to; nor had his mother or his father since they had come to live in Ireland. His mother had been Italian, he said.

‘When she died, the life went out of my father too. Although he managed. He was always good at managing.’

‘Were you born in that house?’

‘Yes, I was. I was a surprise for them. They’d given up, since they were getting on a bit.’

‘Is it big, the house?’

‘Eighteen dilapidated rooms.’

Ellie saw them, without dilapidation: comfortable rooms with fires and flowers, two people who were his mother and father, the child who’d come as a surprise. She saw him alone there now, his black dog, the eighteen rooms too many since the deaths. There was the still water of a lake. There were a garden’s scents and its delicious twilight air.