dregs of the Bovril. He waited for her to go away.
She took the tray from where she’d left it on the dumb waiter. She put his plate and his cup and saucer on it, with the salt and pepper she always brought him too. She cleared up the crumbs he’d made, brushing them with a dish-cloth on to the tray.
‘I’ll tell you another thing,’ she said, as calm as ice, which she could be at will.
She spoke to his back; he didn’t turn his head. Before he was finished with her, this man would be off with Ellie Dillahan, she said, and then she went away.
12
Ellie held the tyre lever in place; he’d shown her how. For five or six inches the tyre had been released from the wheel’s rim and two other levers were holding it there. He worked one of them with his foot, coaxing the tyre, and when he wasn’t successful sliding the other closer to the one she still held. Further inches of the tyre’s grip were released. ‘We have it now,’ he said.
He ran the lever along, then pulled the tube out. He had jacked the Vauxhall up and taken the wheel off without her help, calling her only a few minutes ago. He’d filled a basin with water. She watched while he pumped the tube up and found the puncture. ‘I’ll manage now,’ he said.
In the crab-apple orchard she scattered grain and the hens came rushing to her. She hadn’t been aware that she didn’t love her husband. Love hadn’t come into it, had never begun in a way that was different from the love spoken of so often by the nuns at Cloonhill, its brightly visible sign burning perpetually, as it did above the kitchen doorway in the farmhouse, as it had for the woman who once had scoured the saucepans that now were hers, and for other women before that. She closed the hens in and cut two lettuces on her way back to the yard. She picked the best of the chives.
The wheel had been replaced, the jack wound down. ‘Thanks for that,’ her husband said as she went by. He had that way with him, of thanking her.
It was a kindness - so it had seemed to her, and still did - when she had been offered marriage; it would have been unkind on her part if she’d said no. Her home was his house, where in kindness, too, she had been called his housekeeper, not a maid. She thought of him, even now, as older than he was, being widowed and knowing more than she did. It would be better if they were married: he hadn’t put it like that, and afterwards, at Lahinch, had said he’d grown close to her and was a lucky man. ‘I’m lucky myself,’ she’d said, and had meant it, for she had never developed the habit of lying. ‘I’m sorry,’ she apologized later when she couldn’t give him children, and he said it didn’t matter. ‘You’ve given me enough,’ he said.
She laid the table. She washed the lettuce and dried it in a tea-towel. She sliced what remained of the lamb they’d had on Sunday. She chopped the chives, cut up tomatoes.
He took his wellingtons off at the door; he washed his hands at the sink. Sometimes he washed upstairs and changed his shirt, but he didn’t this evening. She could tell he was tired.
‘A bit of a blade,’ he said, explaining the puncture. ‘Vicious little edge to it.’
Another day had passed, the fifth that had since the encounter outside the shoemaker’s. Nothing was less than it had been; she had imagined that by now it would be. She was contrite, and ashamed, but still her feelings were as they’d been that morning and before it.
‘I see we have the raddle powder.’ He piled salad on to his plate. Summer fare, he called it, and never minded when it was there again.
‘I forgot to say it came in.’
‘No harm. Did you ever notice hook springs in English’s? D’you know do they keep them?’
‘I’ll ask.’
She poured out tea for him, and added milk. She pushed the sugar closer to him. She tried to think of something else to say because talking was a help. ‘He’d do anything for you,’ a woman she didn’t know had said to her at the wedding celebration, as if that should be said, as if it was too easy to take him for granted. The de Valera man in McGovern’s had terrier pups for sale again, she said.
‘I think you maybe told me that.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Arrah, no.’
The woman at the wedding had called her fortunate. Afterwards, when they’d driven off in the Vauxhall, she hadn’t been unhappy. She hadn’t had regrets, either then or in the few days they spent away. She hadn’t when they returned to the farm. In Rathmoye when people called her Mrs Dillahan it pleased her. Only that, and sharing his bedroom with him, had been different. The little room where she’d slept before would have been the child’s, brightly painted, a wallpaper with toys on it. She had never liked to change it and when it was empty he’d said to leave it as it was and she knew what he was thinking.
He stirred sugar into the tea she’d poured. A silence didn’t matter; he never minded that, he’d often said it.
‘We cut the road pasture,’ he said when he had finished what was on his plate. ‘I had Corrigan’s lads over.’
She watched him removing the silver paper from a triangle of cheese, tidily turning back the folds, then lifting the cheese out on his knife. He liked to do things well, even that. It was impossible to imagine him careless, or casual. And yet, of course, tragically he had been.
‘You’re off your food, Ellie,’ he said.
‘A bit.’
‘I noticed.’
She cut more bread for him, and reached across the table to fill his cup again. Gahagan was getting closer to letting the field go, he said.
‘Contrary as he is, he’s nearly ready to part with it.’
She tried to think about the field changing hands and the difference it would make, and Gahagan maybe considering the disposal of the woodlands too.
