‘We don’t know anything about what state Ellie Dillahan is in. You’re confused about the entire matter. This fellow’s a separate entity altogether from Ellie Dillahan.’
‘Have you no pity in you at all? Have you no pity for Dillahan, what he’s been through? She found a home with him, the two of them suited in misfortune, and the next thing is you have an interloper up to no good.’
Miss Connulty didn’t listen when her brother again refuted that, gesturing with his hands, explaining something she didn’t want to hear. You couldn’t blame him, he understood nothing. Since the day he’d been born he’d been protected and cosseted, the world withheld from him. Word would get to Dillahan about his young wife’s infatuation and who’d blame him for what would happen next?
‘If Dillahan turns her out she’ll come here,’ Miss Connulty promised with sudden, fierce determination. ‘Ellie Dillahan will live in this house and hold her head up.’
19
One of the yard doors had worked itself loose from the higher of its two hinges and Dillahan raised it, settling it on a couple of logs and steadying it with a prop.
The screws came out easily. He marked with the point of a bradawl a new position for the hinge and pierced the wood of the jamb just deep enough to hold the screws in place before he drove them in.
‘Come November, we’ll renew the creosote. Did we do it last year? I doubt we did.’ He swung the door. ‘How’s that then?’
But Ellie, who had been in the yard, had gone back to the house. Standing a little to one side of the kitchen window, she watched her husband returning the logs he had used to the woodshed, then gathering up his tools. She willed him to hurry, to get on with it, to go. Impatience kept her at the window, concealed from the yard because of the way she stood, close to the wall. It wouldn’t take a minute, he had said, but he’d been there an hour, his sandwiches made and in the tractor, his flask filled. He would be all day in the fields, he’d said earlier, the brambles to clear, and rotavating the arable.
He came into the kitchen although there was no need to. ‘It’s all there in the tractor,’ Ellie said, thinking when she heard herself that he wouldn’t ever have heard her speaking so curtly before, but he appeared not to notice. He delayed for another ten minutes, looking for something in one of the dresser drawers and not finding it. He said what he had said already about the brambles and the arable.
From the window she watched while he dragged the rotavator out of its shed and coupled it behind the tractor. When he’d driven off, taking the dogs with him, her impatience still lingered. It was alien to her and she hated it.
Florian had not revealed that Shelhanagh had been up for sale and now was sold; or that as soon as it was no longer his he would leave Ireland. Time after time, walking among the monks’ graves or on the Lisquin avenue, or in the tearooms or at Enagh, he had resolved that before they parted he would say at last what must be said. But time after time he hadn’t. Was it reluctance to cause pain that influenced his silence? Or a reluctance to bring abruptly to an end a liaison that had differently begun and now was pleasure? Or was it simply that his fondness for concealment had taken charge, as often in the past it had? He didn’t know. When he procrastinated it felt right to do so, yet he knew that what he withheld did not belong to him and would happen anyway, brushing him aside.
Waiting this morning on the lower slopes of Gortalassa, by the red barn where they had agreed to meet, he became more urgently aware of that, and Ellie’s lateness brought time’s dominance to mind: there was less of it left than he’d imagined.
Still waiting, he saw her in the distance. How well he knew her now, he reflected. Her grey-blue eyes, the softness of her lips, her voice, her smile, her shy composure. Which dress would it be today? he had become used to wondering before they met, and did so again. The blue, the green, the one with the honeysuckle pattern? How well he knew the bangle that had been her husband’s wedding present, the Woolworth’s brooch the nuns had given her, her battered handbag. How well he knew the innocence and the gentleness that first had stirred his sympathy and still did.
They pushed their bicycles on the track that began beside the barn. Today they would climb higher than they had when they’d been to Gortalassa before: they hoped to reach the corrie lakes.
They left their bicycles where the track petered out and climbed up to the ring of standing stones. While they rested there, he told her.
‘But why?’ she asked. ‘Why are you going away?’
‘When the house is sold there’ll be nowhere for me to live in Ireland.’
‘I didn’t know your house was for sale.’
‘There are debts that have to be paid.’ He paused a moment. ‘It would have spoilt our summer if I had told you earlier.’
She looked away and he knew she was afraid to ask how long they had left.
‘The rest of summer,’ he said as if she had. ‘There’ll be a date. Oh, ages off. October perhaps.’
‘Is that when you’ll be going?’
‘Yes, it is.’
He watched a jet plane trailing its ribbon of white against the washed-out paleness of the sky. He watched the white evaporating, the last of its shreds falling apart.
‘Is it for ever you’ll be going?’
‘It is for ever.’
‘Like the St Johns?’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
Larks flitted from one high stone to another. Above a carcass not yet picked over a buzzard was stationary in the air. Higher on the hillside a lone sheep moved slowly.
‘Don’t be unhappy, Ellie.’
She shook her head. She didn’t speak.
‘I had to tell you.’
