Verdecchia, a child of Genoa, should be here now because she had loved a
A man was working with a hoe on the gravel paths and Florian borrowed a pair of shears from him. He cut the grass on the grave, pulled out brambles that hadn’t yet established themselves. The day before he died his father had apologized for what might have seemed to be shared also: disappointment in an only child. He was insistent that there had never been that, and Florian had pretended too.
He returned the shears, and wandered among the graves before he went back to the one he’d tidied. How well they had loved! he reflected, tracing with a finger the two names on the gravestone. How well they had known how to live, how little they’d been a nuisance in other people’s lives. He hoped it would be difficult to forget Ellie Dillahan, that at least there would be that.
He had left his bicycle at the lich-gate. The chain had begun to slip and he took it to be tightened, since he intended to cycle all the way to Dublin when he left. All night it would take if he set out in the evening. ‘Never leave your bicycle on a street in Dublin,’ his father used to say, but he would do that, leaving it for anyone.
He called in at the offic e of the solicitors who had drawn up the conveyance for the sale of Shelhangh House. He requested that what money was owed to him after the numerous deductions were made should be lodged with the Castledrummond branch of the Bank of Ireland. He made arrangements at the bank regarding the availability to him of such funds as soon as he was abroad. He bought a bicycle lamp; he hadn’t possessed one before.
Ellie picked out clothes and put them ready, folded, in one side of a drawer. She bought in food: tins so that there would be something in the house, Three Counties cheese, a cut of bacon that would keep. It was only right that there should be food enough for a while, and a store of tins was always useful anyway.
The zip of the red holdall she had taken to Lahinch years ago was jammed and she couldn’t free it. She had bought it in the second-hand shop and that the zip kept sticking hadn’t mattered then, but it mattered now and she looked in Corbally’s to see what was on offer. She didn’t buy anything, knowing she could come back for one of the holdalls she was shown. She would get in a few more tins when that time came, and vegetables that would keep for a while. She would put out rashers and put out eggs so that there’d be something easy for him at first. She was not unaware that in doing so she was anticipating too much, that what had begun as fantasy was every day acquiring a little more of reality. She tried to prevent herself from allowing this, but couldn’t.
25
The waitress at Olery was talkative. She stood with the checked cloth she always carried with her for wiping the tables. You wouldn’t know where the time went to, she said. Since Easter she’d been at the tearooms and you wouldn’t credit the days going by. A few weeks and she’d be starting her winter job, back in Dublin, where she came from. The Log Cabin, Phibsborough: Leitrim Street, she’d done a winter there before.
‘If ever you’d be passing,’ she invited.
Florian nodded. He had smiled now and then while listening to what they were being told. Ellie was quiet, in a navy-blue anorak he hadn’t seen before.
‘I’ll bring your teas,’ the waitress said, and added that she was a Phibsborough girl herself. ‘I got to know you these past few months,’ she said before she went away.
Theirs was the only table occupied in the tearooms. Outside a man with an electric hedge-trimmer was clipping the maze, the fle x trailing behind him. They’d noticed as they passed it, a sign saying that the maze was closed today. They could hear the hum of the trimmer from where they were.
Two elderly women came in, continuing a conversation. Florian watched them while they sat down, and while they changed their minds and went to another table, giggling a bit.
‘But, Ellie,’ he began to say, reverting to what had been interrupted by the waitress talking about herself. ‘Ellie -’
‘I would go with you. To anywhere.’
The pleasant sound of quietened laughter came from the table where the two women, amusing one another, conversed again. Their tea, a lot of it, was spread out on a paper tablecloth and the waitress with her empty tray flat beneath one arm answered questions about what the scones and iced cakes contained, for it seemed that there were diets to consider.
Florian listened, reluctant to engage in what was being pressed upon him. Alone in the newness of somewhere, he knew now he would exploit imagination’s ragged bits and pieces, tease order out of formless nothings, begin again and then again: how could he say it? That in some small quiet town he would take a room and work, and safely from afar try not to love, for ever, Isabella? How could he say a single word of such confessing when instead he could make a decent lie of the unpitying, unforgiving truth: would it have cost too much to say, or ever to have said, ‘I love you’?
The waitress came again and, surmising something in the silence as she approached, only wrote out her bill and left it on the table.
‘We’ve had our summer, Ellie.’
He said it softly, as gently as he could, rejecting falsity, for time would contradict it, add injury to injury, and pain to pain, and shame to shame. Time’s searching wisdom would punish both of them, and punish ruthlessly.
They began to go. At the door more people were coming in and they stood back to let them pass.
‘Without you there is nothing,’ Ellie said.
The man was taking down the sign about the maze being closed, his long electric flex coiled up. He nodded to them, knowing them as the waitress did.
Clumps of rush had begun to grow and Dillahan knew that the ground in this corner was waterlogged. Broken or clogged land-drains, it would be, more likely broken. He advanced a yard or so further and was in a marsh. But that was all that was wrong with Gahagan’s field, except for the fencing and general neglect, and he had suspected trouble in this corner. He could guess where the drain ran, a single pipe he imagined: he’d be able to dig it out himself. He’d done well out of the purchase, and he knew he had.
He walked around the boundary, rabbit-burrowing everywhere, the worst year for rabbits he’d ever known. He would replace the old wooden gate with an iron one, and the trough while he was at it. There was a dead elm in the road hedge and he was sizing it up, wondering if he could fell it himself, when he heard a bicycle beyond the
