‘I’ll make tea,’ he said.
When he went downstairs she found a bathroom in a part of the house she hadn’t been in before. It was a bathroom that wasn’t used, the small bath chipped and stained, grit fallen into it from the ceiling. But water came when she turned on the single tap at the wash-basin and she bathed her face.
The water was cold. There were no towels. There wasn’t soap. A cloth had hardened into a bundle on the windowsill and she ran water over it, and washed herself.
She didn’t hurry. She didn’t want tea, she wanted to be alone. A pool gathered on the floor while she washed and she tried to soak it up with the cloth.
A nun had gone to a man at the sawmills in Templeross. Sometimes she was called Roseline after the Blessed Roseline, but that was always known to be made up, for the nun was nameless at Cloonhill, mistily there in whispered tales passed down through generations. The man would come delivering logs in winter and she went to him, her habit folded on her bed, her crucifix , her beads, her missal, her shoes left too. All that was said, although it was forbidden to say anything.
Wondering what to dry herself with, Ellie sat on the edge of the bath. In the round, discoloured mirror above the basin there were glimpses of her nakedness when she moved. She never liked not having clothes on and she looked away. She was cold.
A few said the man wasn’t there when the nun went to him, that she searched for him on the streets of cities, that he was never there again. Some said she begged on the streets and was known to have been a nun. Some said that when she was old she was found in the river at Limerick.
The bolt of the door wouldn’t move at first but did when Ellie tried again. She listened and could hear nothing, not footsteps, not voices. Then she heard the car being towed away.
In the bedroom she dried herself on a sheet she pulled off the bed.
She put her ring on again when she was dressed, secured the clasp of her bangle, tidied her hair as best she could with her fingers because her comb was in her handbag in the hall. A pigeon was murmuring outside the open window and then she heard the rattle of the garage doors being closed. She hung the sheet to dry on hooks that were there for a curtain-rail. She pulled the bedclothes off to air the bed. She didn’t want to go downstairs and didn’t go when he called, but when he called again she went.
‘Stay a bit longer,’ Florian said, and the hall-door bell jangled as he spoke.
He poured two cups of tea before he went to answer it. ‘Forgotten something,’ he said.
It was a wrench, put down somewhere when a bolt on the Morris Cowley had had to be tightened. He helped the two men to look for it and found it in the yard by the garage doors.
‘Devil take it,’ the man he returned it to said. ‘That thing could hide itself in your flannel and you wouldn’t know.’
He was carrying the chair she’d taken to the yard when he came back. He said it was a tool they had left behind.
Better just to go, she thought, but still she didn’t. ‘Things end,’ he’d said the day he told her everything, and she had understood and for a while accepted that.
He had put his tie on, his jacket. A little of her tea had spilt on to the saucer and he wiped it away with a cloth.
‘I’m sorry.’ She whispered, not hearing herself, not knowing what she was apologizing for, then knowing it was for everything. For being a bother with her regrets that weren’t regrets, for her longings and her tears, because she had no courage, because she had come today and made it all worse.
‘I’m sorry too,’ he said. ‘I let things happen. I notice them too late.’
She shook her head. She sipped the tea he’d poured. It had no taste.
‘I have that way with me,’ he said. ‘I’m reticent when I shouldn’t be.’
The doors of the wall-cupboards were hanging open, yellowing green, as the walls themselves were. There was nothing on the shelves, nothing on the row of hooks above them. The saucepans and china stacked on the floor, the two chairs, the table and what was on it were what was left in the kitchen now.
Better to go, Ellie thought again, and again did not.
‘There was a nun we’d talk about,’ she said.
The bleak recounting of events affected Florian as he listened. It chilled him, but a nun torn from her vows by passion’s torment, and wretched years later her body floating on the water, did not seem to belong, had no place, surely, in a passing summer friendship, even though love came into it, too.
‘I thought of her,’ Ellie said. ‘It’s only that.’
‘You’re not a nun, Ellie. It’s different. All of it is different.’
‘Sometimes a girl would say the nun deserved her fate. Sometimes a girl would cry, and another girl would tell us to be reminded of the nun’s suffering whenever we saw logs blazing. The log man he was called.’
‘Ellie -’
‘How is it different? How is it, though?’
About to answer, Florian hesitated, and then said nothing. Did she understand more than he did because the pain was hers, not his? Accepting the burden of perfect faith, a novice had promised more than she could give; a man delivering fir ewood lured her from her knees because he liked the look of her. Could there really be an echo of that nun’s misery long ago in what so ordinarily had come about this summer and now must end? Was despair, with all its bitterness, governed less by misfortune’s content than by some law of its own?
‘When will you go tomorrow?’
The suddenness of the question, the change of mood, startled Florian and for a moment he didn’t know what he’d been asked. When it was repeated he said he would ride through the night to Dublin, that that was how he’d always wanted to go.
