fitting them as best they could. And each girl knelt when another day was over, beside a metal bed, a strip of patterned linoleum tacked down, a single wash-stand shared. Privacy was a nightdress put on before the last of daytime clothes were taken off.
Apples were picked in the horse-dealer’s orchard, blackberries from the fields. Potatoes were cultivated, milk supplied as charity from a farm. No man was employed at Cloonhill, a man’s assistance begged only when the generator failed or chimneys had to be swept, when pipes froze in winter or wasps in summer made their nests.
The Reverend Mother’s visit was in spring; and next there was the August outing, beads told in the sacred ambience of Holycross. They found the carpentry nun: dead in her shed, her eighty-first year not quite achieved, a picture-frame that had come apart still in a vice. You were punished if you repeated bad words. You were punished if you talked to the delivery men, or whispered ‘You Are My Sunshine’ or ‘Besame Mucho’. You were punished if you danced in the ballroom. You accepted what there was. You were fortunate.
Where the avenue ended moss carpeted an empty flatness on which clover was scrappily nourished. Beyond a wicket gate there was a path that disappeared into trees, another way to the house that had been razed. A second avenue, more wildly overgrown, dwindled away, becoming nothing. They went back then.
‘Thank you for showing me,’ Florian said before they parted.
He watched her going, puffs of dust forming where the bicycle wheels disturbed the road’s dried-up surface. She didn’t look back, as she might have. It wasn’t her way; already he knew that. The narrow byroad narrowed further and then she was no longer there.
17
The Lisquin gate-lodge became their place. Behind a loose stone in one of the walls there was a cavity where a note might be left should meeting there not be possible as it had been arranged. They lay in sunshine beside the bicycles that were no longer ordinary, having become the means of their being in one another’s company. They walked again on the avenue that went nowhere, never venturing beyond the emptiness it led them to, since going further in that direction would have brought them to where cars and tractors went by and where the bungalows that were the outskirts of Rathmoye began. It was on the avenue, near the fallen trees, that they first embraced.
While more time passed they discovered the maze at Mount Olery Gardens and the tearooms there which, being for tourists, weren’t frequented by local people. They cycled on unmade-up byroads to Enagh, where the Great Cross of the Field was another tourist attraction. They walked in the woods at Lyre, visited the monks’ graves at Ballyhayes, climbed up to the standing stones at Gortalassa. They were never again seen in each other’s company in Rathmoye.
Although they expected that Orpen Wren would sooner or later appear at Lisquin, he never did. Nor did anyone else, and the sense of being lost in uninterrupted peace became their clandestine sanctuary. And Ellie’s stream of recollection, long undisturbed, found life again.
‘There isn’t much,’ she protested when she was asked about coming to the farmhouse.
‘Tell me, though.’
‘It was the same for all of us when we were sent somewhere. ’
The nuns would enquire around and then they made the arrangements. When the day came the girls would be in the hall to say goodbye to the one who was going. A girl would be lucky when there’d be a place for her.
‘That was said many a time, and you’d always want to go to the house that was got for you. You’d never not want to go. Great store was set on it when everything was fixed, and you’d be excited. We used guess where would it be, a town was what we wanted. Waterford I wanted myself for the sound of it, but they said a farm.’
The more he asked her about her childhood at Cloonhill the more Ellie loved her interrogator. No matter how strange he still sometimes seemed, she felt as if all her life she had known him. The past he talked about himself became another part of her: the games he had played alone, the untidy rooms of the house he described, the parties given, the pictures painted. Being with him in the woods at Lyre, where the air was cold and the trees imposed a gloomy darkness, or walking among the monks’ graves, or being with him anywhere, telling or listening, was for Ellie more than friendship, or living, had ever been before.
‘A farm,’ he prompted in the tearooms at Mount Olery and she said it was Sister Ambrose who told her it was a widowed man she was to go to.
‘She said get the girls down to the hall, half fiv e or six the car would come. So we were in the hall, the rain pelting against the windows and the fanlight, and someone looking out saw the car and then the bell wires rattled before the bell rang, the way that always was. And Sister Clare came hurrying to open the front door and a woman came in, rain dripping off her. “We have her ready for you,” Sister Clare said, and said to me to step forward. “Are you the the girl then?” the woman asked me and Sister Clare said speak up. The box that had my belongings in it had to be returned and she told the woman and the woman said she’d drop it off when next she’d be passing. “Lift out the box to the car for Ellie,” Sister Clare instructed, for that was always done when a girl was going, and it was Rose and Philomena this night who did it. “Ach, you’ll settle in grand,” the woman said in the car, the windscreen wipers going. One of the man’s sisters she was; another of them was waiting in the farmhouse to get a look at me. He carried the box upstairs and his sisters took it away when they left. I knew about the accident at the farm, Sister Ambrose told me. A girl would have to know a thing like that, she said. She’d have to know in case the man would be affected by it. You couldn’t call it fortunate, she said, any man widowed, but wasn’t there good in it all the same, the way things were now? I didn’t mind it was a farm, I never minded that. You get used to a farm’s ways in the end.’
‘What was the accident?’
‘The trailer was loaded and he couldn’t see over the top of the load. The fastener of the tail-board was loose and she tried to drop the pin into place while she was holding the baby in her arms.’
He nearly sold up, Sister Ambrose had said, and maybe he wouldn’t mention the accident at all, how it happened or anything about it. So much it distressed him, maybe he wouldn’t.
‘And did he?’
‘That first evening he did.’
He had to, was what he said, not knowing the nuns had told her already. He flashed a torch out of the kitchen window at the place on the concrete, a dark mark on it still. He never walked near it, he said. He showed her where everything in the house belonged - jugs and cups on their hooks, the
