Love and Summer

‘I know you did. I know.’

They climbed through ferns and bracken, the bog-land dry. They skirted an escarpment because it was a shorter way. A distant Angelus bell chimed faintly in the stillness.

He would go and that he was gone would be her first thought every morning, as her first thought now was that he was here. She would open her eyes and see the pink-washed walls as she saw them now, the sacred picture above the empty grate, her clothes on the chair in the window. He would be gone, as the dead are gone, and that would be there all day, in the kitchen and in the yard, when she brought in anthracite for the Rayburn, when she scalded the churns, while she fed the hens and stacked the turf. It would be there in the fields, and with her when she stood with her eggs waiting for the presbytery hall door to open, and while Miss Connulty counted out her coins and the man with the deaf-aid looked for insulation guards or udder pads. It would be there while she lay down beside the husband she had married, and while she made his food and cut his bread, and while the old-time music played.

‘Do you want to go?’ she asked.

‘Everything is over for me in Ireland now.’

‘I wish you weren’t going.’

They reached the corrie lakes. The summer they had known and still knew now would never not be theirs, Florian said - the dusky woods at Lyre, the maze at Olery, the lavender, the butterflies. His Cloonhill, what he had made of it, her Shelhanagh. ‘All that,’ he said. Memory did not let go.

He knew it wasn’t solace, but he could do no better. Despair could not be blown away and, although he didn’t want to, he remembered his when he blurted out what for so long he had concealed. They had been reading in the garden and they went on reading afterwards, and Isabella said nothing.

Above the three small lakes, hardly more than pools, the bleak rockface was sheer. Out of the sun’s reach, the water was dark and icy still. There were no birds, no other life, no sound. It was a place he might have come to when he fumbled with photography, Florian thought. But memory would more tellingly preserve it.

Their faces were cold against each other for a moment before they parted. Where would he go? she asked.

‘Perhaps Scandinavia,’ he said.

On the way back to Shelhanagh, Florian called in at the Dano Mahoney public house. Two drinkers at the bar looked up, interrupting a conversation about greyhounds. The ex-pugilist landlord nodded a curt welcome. Florian took his glass to the corner table he had occupied on the day of Mrs Connulty’s funeral.

His father had first brought him here, the landlord different then, a friendlier man whom his father had seemed to know well. A few days after his mother’s death that was, a time when his father kept saying he needed a drink. There had been reminiscences then too, of Italy, of love, of finding the house when they ran away to Ireland, of the legacy that came eventually from Genoa and how that had felt like being paid to stay away so as not to be an embarrassment to the Verdecchias. ‘I always liked the Verdecchias, though,’ his father confessed. ‘Because they were her people, I think.’

Born a Catholic but lapsing in her faith, Florian’s mother had been buried in the small Protestant churchyard in Castledrummond so that when the time came she and his father would not be separated. ‘We liked arranging things,’ his father said in the Dano Mahoney Bar. ‘We enjoyed all that.’ Isabella hadn’t come to either funeral. Florian had thought she would.

Of the two, he was the less good painter, his father used to say, but Florian now could not separate the watercolours that were left behind into who had painted which. Nor could he, sometimes, separate his mother and father as people, for with the years they had grown alike, although they had themselves insisted that once they’d been quite notably different and given to disagreement.

‘He’s asking near four hundred for his animal.’ The voice of one of the drinkers carried from the bar and then was hushed. Another man came in. He asked to use the telephone because a bullock had fallen down a ravine.

Florian finished his wine and his cigarette and then he cycled on. He would have to see to the grave before he left, and he wondered who would do that when he did go.

He was hungry and went round by the Greenane half-and-half for bread and porksteak, and to arrange with Mrs Carley to leave the hall-door key with her when the day came. Riding on to Shelhanagh afterwards, he realized that his nostalgic reflections in the roadside bar had been an effort to brush away an uneasy day. It was no more than the truth that he had sought to prolong a friendship which summer had almost made an idyll of. But what he had failed to anticipate was the depth of disappointment its inevitable end would bring. He had allowed the simple to be complicated. He had loved being loved, and knew too late that tenderness in return was not enough. ‘Dear Flor, what a muddle you are!’ Isabella’s favourite word for him, repeated often in Italian and in English with cousinly affection. He had liked the word then; he didn’t now.

That night, in her sleep, Ellie wept. She tried to wake up in case her sobs were heard. She could hear them herself but when she managed to rouse herself she found her husband undisturbed. Her pillow was wet and she turned it over, and in the morning her tears had gone as if she had imagined them, but she knew she hadn’t.

20

A few days after his revelation that he was to leave Ireland Florian found, beneath a pile of straw fish baskets in what had once been a pantry, a leatherbound record book he had years ago concealed there. He gathered up the mildewed baskets to take to his garden bonfire and saw again the handsomely embossed lettering: The Huntsman’s Fieldbook. He had hidden it and couldn’t remember where, had repeatedly searched the house before giving up.

He turned pages that were familiar to him, at the bottom of each a tidily boxed paragraph of printed notes, with occasionally an illustration, concerning the nature and habitat of various forms of wildlife, its preservation or destruction. The only handwriting, on faint grey lines, was his own.

He threw the fish baskets on to his fire and, watching the straw blaze up, remembered being ashamed to tell Isabella when she returned to Shelhanagh the following summer that he’d forgotten where he’d hidden the Fieldbook, saying instead that he had thrown it away. Isabella hadn’t been entirely blameless in all this herself. There always was a rush at the end of her July visits. This time, her luggage in the hall, she had left the Fieldbook on her bed and, discovering later that she had, fiercely instructed Florian to see to its concealment. It was important, or seemed so then, since secrecy came into so much of what she and Florian did.

In the kitchen he shook the dust from the pages and wiped the leather cover with a damp cloth. His handwriting hadn’t changed with the passage of time. Square and firm, in clear black ink, it still was that. Seven years ago it was, Florian calculated, and was just beginning to read how he had filled the blankness above some information about the feeding practices of the carp when the hall-door bell sounded, accompanied by a brisk knock ing.