‘I’m sorry there’s no cake.’ He poured the tea he’d made. He had remembered jam - raspberry from the half- and-half, he explained. He said the bread was fresh.
‘I don’t need anything,’ she said, but she ate the bread he’d cut because he’d cut it, and drank the tea he’d poured. And afterwards, in the drawing-room, he told her how the room had been, describing the furniture that was no longer there. He prised out the drawing-pins that held in place a row of pictures on a wall. Each time smoothing the wrinkled paper, he handed one and then another to her.
‘Their watercolours are what’s left of my mother and my father,’ he said.
He said he had known the name of the strand where people were having a picnic, but had forgotten it. The couple who conversed in an empty theatre were actors who’d been famous in their day. It was at the corner of a Dublin street that the three-card trick was played on an umbrella, the tulip tree was in a Dublin garden. ‘She used to come here,’ he said about a girl in an ivory-white dress who was stretched out on the upturned boat by the lake, her long legs languidly spread, a red scarf knotted at her throat.
‘Have them,’ he said. ‘Please have them.’
She shook her head. To accept what she was offered was to say that she would stay and he would go, that the giving and the taking were the gesture of parting, and parting’s confirmation. As once she would not have, she knew to say no.
She was not pressed and soon afterwards she rode back to Rathmoye. She had meat to get in Hearn’s, and a few groceries in the Cash and Carry. Then she looked up Scandinavia in Hogan’s, where she had once bought a new exercise-book for the accounts. School books were kept too, and she found Scandinavia in an atlas. When she saw its shape, one side of it jagged, she remembered the glossy map draped over the blackboard. A book she took from the shelves said that Norway’s fjords probed deeply inland, that forest and water and coastal archipelagos gave Sweden its brooding nature. ‘Denmark’s the little one,’ she remembered the geography nun saying, and she remembered the mermaid on the rock.
Different languages, not many cities, the book said. Corn was grown. Iron ore was mined at Kiruna. Place names were unpronounceable.
23
Orpen Wren went about the shops. He waited at the railway station. He sat down in the Square, trying to remember who it was he had to see, who it was he had to pass on a message to. The Rakes of Mallow: that came back to him, that being said in the library, but he didn’t know why it came back now. ‘The Rakes of Mallow aren’t in it.’ Her voice faltered when she said it, as any mother’s voice would, and then she cried. Was her son dead in Portumna? she asked Mr Boyle and Mr Boyle said only lamed and she said thank God. The coachman the whole time was silent.
Twilight, then darkness, spread through what Orpen Wren recalled: a thickening fog, sound and faces distorted, then lost. It would lift, today some time, tomorrow. Or maybe it wouldn’t.
The papers were back. The woman had arranged for the coal delivery. The first fires would be lit, you’d hear the pianos played. You’d hear the horses whinnying in the yard, you’d hear the dogs, you’d hear the voices. ‘We’ll go,’ the master said from his bed.
He went again to the railway station. He bought a tin of soup in the corner shop in Hurley Lane. He watched the children at hopscotch.
He set off at once, but after a while the distance seemed too far and he knew he’d have to wait for a better day.
24
Dillahan dismantled the corral he erected every year for the shearing. As always at this busy time, he had put off the dismantling for longer than he’d intended. Weeks had passed and every day he’d told himself that the sprawl of old gates and corrugated iron was unsightly, the garish red binding twine, the swirls of wool scattered.
Ellie gathered the lengths of twine when they were released, pulling apart the knots in them. She raked up the wool, combing it out of the grass. She had brought the fertilizer bag from last year to take it away in.
‘Better we’d get it done early next time,’ her husband said while he stacked the rusting gates on the trailer.
There was withering all around them: of the nettles that had earlier been verdant in the hedges, of drooping foxgloves and cow-parsley. Hard, dry earth was exposed where sheep had congregated, grass was yellowing. But the September air was cool and fresh, pleasanter than August’s brashness.
Ellie hardly noticed all this, but knew from other years that it was there. She tried to think of that, of the first time she had raked up the wool, and getting to know this field; of the first time she’d collected the eggs in the crab-apple orchard, and seeing the hares at night. But Shelhanagh House kept breaking into what she imposed - its shabby, deserted rooms, the tennis court, the quiet old dog resting on the grass, the postcard of St Lucy. And Scandinavia broke in too; and she was there, in its strangeness.
‘Well, it kept fine for us still,’ her husband said. ‘I don’t know did we ever have a dryness like it. Good girl,’ he complimented her, a note of sympathy in his tone, for her task was tedious.
He started the tractor and she heard the clatter of the trailer’s load until it began to fade and then was gone. She tied the lengths of binding twine into a bundle and put it to one side. She filled the fertilizer bag with the pile of wool she’d made. She was all morning in the field.
The small churchyard was shadowy with a twilight of its own, overhung with maple trees and oaks, its dark yews like sentinels among them, old headstones crooked or fallen. How random the chance of circumstance was, Florian reflected, surveying the grass that had grown high on the mound that was his parents’ grave. How much of chance it was that Natalia
