‘Yes, of course.’
In that same moment Ellie Dillahan passed near them, crossing the street they were in. A van delivering sides of meat was in the way and Florian didn’t see her.
But she saw Florian. She watched him listening, then holding his hand out and Orpen Wren humbly accepting the ending of the encounter. She loved Florian Kilderry: silently she said that, and said it again while he rode off, out of the Square on to the Castledrummond road.
16
Nettles thrived within the walls that remained. A clump of brambles spread from a corner, sorrel flourished, dandelions gave colour. A door-frame had mostly rotted away, joists hung crookedly. The Lisquin gate-lodge had never had stairs.
Outside, a sheet of corrugated iron, in places eaten by rust, leant against a water-pump. The high gates that opened on to a clay side-road were chained, a farmer’s barrier in place across an avenue that went on, to curve away through pasture where cattle grazed.
Florian came often now, but each time saw the lavender still uncut, the grass trodden only where he had walked on it himself. An offer made for the house had been accepted; people no longer came to look it over. He had time on his hands.
Once he rode on to Cnocrea and went by the farmhouse, white and tidy, nobody about. He guessed it was the right one but, fearing again to be a nuisance, he rode on and in a roundabout way returned to the gate-lodge. It didn’t seem much to ask that he should be allowed to say he was sorry before he left Ireland for ever, but every day he was less hopeful than he’d been the day before. He found a piece of iron and rooted out, as best he could, the ivy that was choking the lavender. He wondered if she would guess when he had gone that it was he who had done that but, after all, why should she?
Then, when he had waited for longer than usual one morning and had decided not to come again, a sound on the road disturbed the silence. There’d never been a sound before. There’d never been anything or anyone.
Men clapped while the woman danced. The woman was laughing, her arms thrown out, her scarlet skirt tossed about in the dance, her fair hair wild: the book was face downward on the stubby grass, its coloured cover brightened by the sun. He was kneeling beside it, close to where the lavender grew. He was wearing the hat he’d been wearing the last time.
‘Hullo,’ he said.
Ellie pushed her bicycle through the gap where once there’d been a postern gate. He took it from her and laid it down beside his.
‘Your lavender’s dying, did you know?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘I’ve tried to weed it.’
She was wearing a different dress, green, in stripes. A handbag was in the basket attached to the handlebars of her bicycle, its shiny black surface gone in places. There were freckles on the bridge of her nose, a few on her forehead. He hadn’t noticed them before.
‘I didn’t mean to distress you that day,’ he said. ‘I came here a few times. To say I was sorry in case you were ever here too.’
‘I shouldn’t have gone off like that.’
‘It didn’t matter.’
‘I shouldn’t have, though, without a word.’
As she spoke, Florian realized that Ellie Dillahan loved him, and hesitated. Shelhanagh House was almost sold, his passport on the mantelpiece, a suitcase waiting to be packed: he searched for words to say it might be better to end what had not begun. But words eluded him and it was Isabella - her smile, her voice, and she herself in different places - who crowded his thoughts, not this girl who was saying now that if he liked she would show him where the house the old man talked about had been. Again he hesitated and the silence felt longer than he knew it was.
‘If you have time for it,’ he said at last.
They left their bicycles where they were. Yes, she had time, Ellie said as they walked away from them, time enough. It wasn’t like being in Rathmoye, on the streets, among people, being frightened. There was a calmness and, as if she were alone, she belonged in its quiet.
He held the barbed wire apart while she scrambled through it, and helped her again where a tree had fallen across the avenue. When he gave her his hand to take it was the first time they had touched, and still the calm was there.
‘Did you always live in the hills?’ he asked. ‘Before where you are now?’
‘I came to the farm a servant.’ From Cloonhill, she said, an institution.
‘Are you an orphan?’
‘They called us foundlings. At Cloonhill we all were that. Found somewhere.’
They sat down where there was a gateway in the wire fence that ran along the avenue. They leant their backs against the bars of the gate. The cattle in the fields on either side of the avenue were inquisitive, poking at the wire with their heads before they ambled away. Florian searched for cigarettes but there wasn’t one left in the packet he found.
‘Was it horrible, the institution? Did you hate it?’
‘We were always there. The nuns pretended our birthdays, they gave us our names. They knew no more about us than we did ourselves. No, it wasn’t horrible, I didn’t hate it.’
A horse-dealer’s residence Cloonhill had been, left in a will to the convent in Templeross, to be put to charitable use. Its concrete facade was made uglier by institutional severity, the lower panes of uncurtained windows painted white. The horse-dealer’s ballroom was still called that, the foundling girls of one time or another clustered around its wood stove on winter evenings, or sitting in twos at desks that had been a gift when they’d become too worn and grimy elsewhere. Upstairs the mattresses had been passed on too. The dining-room’s long deal table had, and clothes and tattered schoolbooks had.
Florian entered that cloistered world, footsteps clattering on bare stairs, the murmur of catechism and prayer before another day could properly begin, forgotten porridge acrid on the air. Demure, obedient, fifteen abandoned girls, as many as the house could take, stood silently in line, their washed hands held out, hair cut short, clothes
