Love and Summer

his eyes merging as the flesh puckered. He was red-haired and ungainly. Nason was thin and small, with a lick of black hair trailing over his forehead, his clothes always tidy. He was the younger by a few months.

‘I’ll tell you what it is,’ Nason said. ‘The kid’s over at the gravel pits. He’s run off from the travelling people. There’s underground places at the pits. That kid’s grubbing for food with the rabbits.’

Florian hadn’t liked Isabella reading his jottings. But she had, and wanted to know who the people were and where they had come from, why sentences and words often broke off unfinished when sometimes half a page was filled.

At Euston station Michael decided that this was best: to ask straight out and be told, anything rather than the absurdity of making a journey that was unnecessary.

‘Clione?’ he said when the ringing tone ceased and his sister’s voice came on.

‘You’ll come, Michael? All the time he asks.’

But what on earth good would it do? Either way, what good? The long overnight haul and arriving in the early morning at the dreary railway station with his pyjamas and razor in a carrier bag because he didn’t possess a suitcase. And turning into the driveway. He hated turning into the driveway most of all.

‘He’s dying now,’ his sister said.

But at Euston station people were waiting to use the phone. Michael put the receiver down.

Isabella insisted that Florian abandoned too much too easily, often flippantly. In their disagreement about that, she was cool and unflurried, Florian impatient and at a disadvantage because he was flattered that she minded so much. She quoted back to him with admiration what he had written. About cities he had never been to, misfortunes he hadn’t experienced. About rejection and despair. About Olivia, searching London for a man she loved, who stole from her.

He might have gone to Spain. He’d gone to Spain before without a word. Someone he knew had a house in Spain, or rented a house there, she wasn’t sure which. On the other hand, now and again he left London in order to stay with people in different parts of the country. ‘Hasn’t been in,’ the barman in the George said. Olivia asked other drinkers there and they said they hadn’t seen him. She reassured them because of course it would be all right. It would be Spain and he’d be back. He wasn’t in the Coach and Four. He wasn’t in the Queen and Knave.

A girl suggested the Zinzara Club and they went there with a lanky woman the girl knew, and a man with a bow tie. Derek was on the door tonight, his hair done in a different way, and when Olivia asked the woman behind the bar she shook her head and Olivia went to the Grape and he was there, standing where he’d been standing the night she first saw him. He was with people she didn’t know, as he’d been then. She saw him seeing her, but he didn’t move and then the people he was with stared at her and no one spoke.

Surely, Isabella urged, he could make something of that, since he had made a little of it already? ‘Oh, please, why not?’ she begged, determinedly, repeatedly. ‘Oh, please.’

He knew he couldn’t.

While Jessie scurried among the reeds Florian smoked and watched the night beginning. He wished Isabella could know the huntsman’s book hadn’t been thrown away and now was resurrected. He wished she could be here as so often she had been, by the lake, the dark creeping on, more secrecy pretended than was necessary. He wondered if she had married Signor Canepaci or someone else; he wondered if she was happy. He had exasperated her, not being able to tell her who Olivia was, or who Miss Dunlop was, or any of the others. ‘Did they come to the parties?’ she asked. Were Nason and Willie John boys at school? Was Madole’s wasteland somewhere they could go?

Florian did not try to sleep that night. He didn’t go to bed and in his silent house what he had been separated from for so long seemed tonight more than he had written down. Miss Dunlop’s blouse was pink, a touch of henna transformed her hair. The pale, stretched features of Yu Zhang lost their solemnity in a smile. The Wing Commander had experienced gaol. An injury, not yet healed, was vivid on the forehead of the boy at the gravel pits. The old teacher’s nightly footsteps were the footsteps of a child whose fate she dared not think about. Life wasn’t worth living, Olivia whispered.

Reading and rereading the scraps he had given up on, Florian did not readily conclude that time, in passing, had brought perception, only that his curiosity was stirred by the shadows and half-shadows imagination had once given him, by the unspoken, and what was still unknown. He added nothing to what was written, only murmuring occasionally a line or word that might supply an emphasis or clarify a passage.

But in the early morning, standing at the water’s edge while in vain he scanned the sky for the bird that no longer came, he felt exhilarated, as if something had happened to him that he didn’t entirely know about, or know about at all. This feeling was still there when he returned to the house, while he made coffee and toasted bread, and gave his dog her food. It was there when, later in the morning, he lay down to sleep. He slept all day, and woke to it.

21

Ellie had not been to the gate-lodge since before the day they had climbed up to the corrie lakes at Gortalassa. It was a busy time of year, made more so by helping at the Corrigans’ harvest: it wasn’t as easy as it had been to get away.

Her low spirits at Gortalassa had not revived, although they did a little when, behind the loose stone in the wall at the ruins, she found a note that gave directions of how to get to Shelhanagh House. Come any day you can. Come any time, the message was, on the back of a map, in handwriting she had not known before. The ease with which all this happened - the note written, the directions given, the map drawn, his wanting her to come to the house he talked so much about - gave Ellie more than hope, restoring something at least of what had been taken from her on the slopes of Gortalassa. It had not before been suggested that she should make the journey he suggested now, and she wondered if it could be that for some reason everything was suddenly different. That the sale of the house had fallen through. That the people buying it had made a mistake or, when they calculated, didn’t have the money. Months, maybe a year, might pass while the unsold house kept him in Ireland. She had thought she might never hear from him again. But she had and he wanted her to come to him.

Thursday I’ll come. The afternoon is better.

She left her note where his had been.

To arrange the loan with which he hoped to buy Gahagan’s field Dillahan made one of his rare weekday visits to Rathmoye. In Mr Hassett’s small private office he presented the facts and Mr Hassett said he didn’t think two thousand pounds was going to break the bank. Beneath his small moustache he fleetingly displayed the smile familiar to borrowers when he agreed to make a loan. Dillahan nodded his gratitude.

‘A pity to pass it by,’ he said.

‘It’s always a pity to pass good land by, Mr Dillahan.’

‘The trouble is, one day he’d be on about offers for it, the next he’d be talking about clearing and draining.’