‘It’s lovely. Everywhere.’
A dog followed them when they were downstairs again.
‘Jessie she’s called,’ he said, and in the kitchen picked up a book from the table. A long time ago he’d lost it and found it only the other day. He hated losing things, he said.
‘Is the house still being sold?’ Ellie asked, reaching down to stroke the dog’s head when they were in a cobbled yard.
‘Poor old Jessie’s getting on a bit,’ he said. ‘Yes, Shelhanagh is sold.’
If the sale fell through she had promised herself to make her confession. She had promised atonement, and obedience; that she would, for all her life, in every hour of every day, be ordered by obedience.
‘The seventeenth of next month,’ he said.
Ages, he’d said before, since there were so many formalities. October perhaps, and she had imagined the bare trees of autumn, the mists of November gathering while he still was here. September the seventeenth was less than three weeks away.
‘The same afternoon I found that book the people who’ve bought Shelhanagh came. An excitable pair,’ he said.
‘I thought maybe something might go wrong.’
‘No, nothing did.’
In the yard the rickety doors of a garage had to be lifted up when they were being pulled open. It was a long time since this car had been on a road, he said. He called the motor car a Morris Cowley and opened at the back what he called a dicky seat.
In the garden he pointed at long grass shimmering in the sunlight, swaying a little because a breeze had got up.
‘That’s where the tennis court was.’
He’d had a tutor for a while, he said, who played tennis in his ordinary shoes. His father considered that wasn’t the thing at all. Even with his limp, his father had always won at tennis.
Every summer the man who used to shoot the rabbits took away the dead ones, but others came. In the rhododendron shrubbery there was a secret place and a rabbit would sometimes run out of it as if, for rabbits, it was a secret place too.
‘I had imaginary friends there and once pretended that the rabbit man shot one of them by mistake. I had a funeral, with wreaths of rhododendron.’
Wisps of smoke blew about. In cardboard boxes beside a heap of smouldering ashes separate bundles of papers were held together by rubber bands, and there were cheque-book stubs and letters in their envelopes, and receipts on spikes. Ellie watched a blaze beginning and remembered the letter she’d written to Sister Ambrose, which she had burnt in the Rayburn. Longer ago than three weeks that was, months more like. Three weeks was nothing.
He threw more paper on to the fire, and then the boxes themselves. He pointed at the roof of the house, a different part of it from where they had stood: people who’d come to a party had climbed up there and one of them sang a song there, a man who sang in operas.
‘Is it definite?’ she asked. ‘September the seventeenth?’
‘Yes, it’s definite.’
Wild sweet pea was in bloom, white and faded shades of mauve and pink. Apples were forming on the trees they passed among on their way to the lake. At its edge, water rats scuttled into the water when the dog came snuffling through the reeds.
‘A Thursday,’ she said. ‘The seventeenth of September.’
There was a dullness in her voice. He heard it and wished she was not here, although he wanted her to be. Being here made everything worse for her: he could tell, and knew she couldn’t because she didn’t want to. He hadn’t known himself when he’d suggested that she should come.
‘There wasn’t any other way,’ he said. ‘It had to be sold. I didn’t realize things would go so smoothly.’
Almost everything sounded wrong as soon as he said it and for a moment he felt that he belonged in his own created world of predators, that he was himself a variation of their cruelty. He had taken what there was to take, had exorcized, again, his nagging ghost. And doing so, in spite of tenderness, in spite of affection for a girl he hardly knew, he had made a hell for her.
She watched him rooting for a cigarette and finding one loose in a pocket. She watched him straightening it, packing the shreds of tobacco in. Then they went back the way they had come, through the apple trees. In the garden he threw a ball for his dog. In the kitchen he showed her a faded postcard that had been propped up on a windowsill. A woman in old-fashioned clothes had a quill in one hand and what might have been a saucer in the other. A monk was praying.
‘St Lucy,’ he said.
The handle of a dagger and part of its blade protruded from the saint’s neck. There was no blood. She had a halo.
‘You have a look of this St Lucy,’ he said.
She shook her head. She hadn’t known there was a St Lucy, and that there ever had been did not come into things now. ‘Come with me,’ she had made him say, knowing that it was fantasy. ‘Come with me,’ and he talked to her then about Scandinavia, as now he did about his childhood past. And she stole away from the farmhouse, closing the door on the quietened kitchen, the unlaid table, no saucepans simmering on the stove. People would hear that she wasn’t there, the Corrigans and Gahagan, the shop people in Rathmoye, Mrs Hadden, Miss Connulty, the priests, the Cloonhill nuns. It frightened her to hear herself reviled, but when she heard it often it might not any more.
He took the postcard from her and put it back on the windowsill.
