her could she cook.
A few years went by, Ellie said, and they were like that, only the two of them in the house. Then he asked her would she marry him. He said think it over. He said take her time.
‘I wanted Sister Ambrose at the wedding, and Sister Clare with her. But they couldn’t come, due to a Retreat again at Fermoy.’
Florian didn’t say what he felt: that all that shouldn’t have happened, that she shouldn’t have been sent into the employ of a haunted man. But he thought it, and he wondered if it showed, although he tried not to let it.
‘It’s not a terrible place,’ Ellie said, as if she knew what he was thinking. ‘It’s only something happened there.’
18
The dog days of August came; Rathmoye was quiet. Small incidents occurred, were spoken of, forgotten. When there were races near by the bookies stayed at Number 4 - J. P. Ferris, Gangly, McGregor from Clonmel. The priests of the parish catered for the faithful, heard sins confessed, gave absolution, offered the Host; the Church of Ireland’s skimpy congregation doggedly gathered for weekly worship. The tinker girls brought their babies to the streets from their wasteland caravans and tents. No crime of a serious nature had been committed in Rathmoye during the summer so far; none was now. In all, twenty-one infants had been born.
Two technicians from a stained-glass studio in Dublin measured the windows that were to be replaced in the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer, and sketches of an Annunciation were admired in the presbytery and later approved by the bishop. The paving stones on both sides of Magennis Street were scheduled to be replaced by the end of October. Permission was given for a neon sign at the radio and television shop in Irish Street above which Bernadette O’Keeffe lived. It was agreed that next year’s Strawberry Fair should be one week earlier.
Miss Connulty was right when she’d stated that Florian Kilderry had been noticed in the town, but wrong to suggest there was gossip. There was only her own, her brother its sole recipient. ‘To tell you the truth,’ he complained to Bernadette O’Keeffe in the back bar, ‘she has me demented with it.’ He had at last seen for himself the man his sister objected to and he had allocated to Bernadette O’Keeffe the task of discovering what she could about him. Pleased to do so, she set about this with some vigour, regularly receiving details of further exchanges on the subject in Number 4. ‘The way it’s put to me,’ her employer passed on, ‘this fellow shouldn’t be at large at all.’
The unexpected sympathy for his sister he had experienced on the morning of their first disagreement about Ellie Dillahan had long since receded, to be lost finally in renewed crossness to do with the back bedrooms. Bernadette had not been privy to this particular play of familial emotions; nothing had changed at Number 4 The Square, her view was, except that a man who was unknown in Rathmoye had appeared on the scene. That being so, it seemed relevant to say now that Orpen Wren had identified the man as a member of the St John family, and she said it.
‘Not that it’s likely,’ she added.
The 7-Up already poured, her employer pushed her glass a little closer to her. He displayed no annoyance or concern over this complication in the matter his sister sought information about, and which her perversity would almost certainly make something of.
‘Best we’d keep it from her,’ he decided after a moment of thought. ‘I was saying to her last evening wouldn’t she forget the whole issue. I was saying something new might keep her occupied - maybe leather-craft or a little flower garden out the back.’
‘A flower garden would be nice for Miss Connulty all right.’
‘I could be talking to the cat.’
Miss O’Keeffe nodded. She would have given a lot for a nip of John Jameson in the bitter-sweet cordial, but did not say so. She spread out the unsigned cheques and pushed them across the table. He had been lonely since his mother was taken; every day you could see it. In the evenings he went for a walk out on the Nenagh road and ended up in the cemetery again. Weekends, it was the same.
‘I only mentioned the St Johns thing in case it fitted in.’
‘You were right enough to say it, Miss O’Keeffe. Did McCaffreys’ cheque come?’
‘Well, no, not yet.’
‘We’ll give them another day or two. Would you say we would?’
He always asked for her view. These days he was treated less than an overnight man, she’d heard it said, the maid casual with him. She often wondered did he sleep well.
She gathered her papers together, counting the cheques as she slipped them into a fastener. She would let it go until Thursday, she agreed; then she’d send McCaffreys a reminder.
In time Bernadette’s enquiries bore fruit and through them Miss Connulty learnt that the man she’d taken against went about on a bicycle because it was thought he couldn’t drive a car, that he had no visible means of support, was currently engaged in the selling of a house he had inherited, and was planning to emigrate. His identity was established, his name passed on to her, his connection with the St John family dismissed. In Castledrummond he was said to keep himself to himself.
‘Not in Rathmoye he doesn’t,’ Miss Connulty retorted with razor sharpness. ‘Not by a long chalk.’
‘I’m only telling you what’s reported.’
The conversation took place in the big front room, Joseph Paul in an armchair with the newspaper he’d been reading open on his knees, his sister standing by the mantelpiece.
‘Have you had words with him?’ she asked.
‘I have no intention of approaching this man in any way whatsoever. There isn’t a reason in the wide world why I should cause offence to a man I don’t know just because he rides his bicycle through the town.’
‘He’s trying something on with Ellie Dillahan. You can tell it by the way of her.’
‘There’s no reference in what Miss O’Keeffe found out that this fellow is after any woman.’
‘Whatever state that girl’s in, she’s not in it for nothing. ’
