He gave her more string than she needed, saying it would come in useful. He asked her if she’d be going to the circus and she said she doubted it. He loved a circus, he said.
‘Drop in on me next time you’ll be in the shop,’ he said, ‘till I’d know was it a satisfactory container for you.’
It had still felt a dream all the time she was riding away from Shelhanagh House. It still did now, a salesman who was a stranger to her talking about a circus and bringing her suitcases instead of a holdall, giving her half a ball of string when she asked for just a little.
The Square looked different when she turned into it. It wasn’t crowded, but a lorry was delivering pavement kerbing in Magennis Street, holding everything up. She wheeled her bicycle around it, where people walking were going.
Miss Connulty must have greeted her. She must have said something because she nodded as if she had. And something was missing when so suddenly she whispered that love was a madness.
A restraining hand was on the handlebars of Ellie’s bicycle, and Miss Connulty smiled a little, as if to soften what might have sounded abrupt. The lorry slowly began to move. Standing aside for two other women who were going by, Miss Connulty said nothing else.
31
Dillahan tried to make sense of it. He sat on the tractor in the yard, and after a time the sheepdogs slouched away as if influ enced by his brooding. He went through it all again, every word that had been spoken, even by himself, his interruptions, his efforts to lead the conversation into areas that might be fertile enough to nurture reality in the morass of confusion. He went back, in his thoughts, to other times, searching them in turn for a connection with what had been said, threading fact and fantasy and finding in their conjunction the blemished truth. For everything was blemished in the talk there’d been, and at its best the truth itself might also be.
He climbed down from the tractor seat and slowly walked across the yard to the back door of the farmhouse, his gait affected by the disquiet he took with him. The sheepdogs stayed where they were, their noses stretched forward, resting on the backs of their paws.
32
It was late afternoon, just before five, when Ellie arrived back at the farmhouse with what she’d bought - tins of corned beef as well as the green holdall. As she rode into the yard she saw the tractor there and was surprised. It was parked untidily, crookedly, in the way other vehicles that came into the yard sometimes were. She remembered he’d said he intended to plough the sixteen acres where he’d had a crop of rape this year, and he had a couple of jobs to do if he’d be able to get down to them. He said he’d come in for something to eat between twelve and half past, and she had left out cold meat. He couldn’t, surely, be still here, she thought, and he couldn’t have finished the sixteen acres already. She wondered if the tractor was giving trouble. When the dogs didn’t come to her she knew something was wrong.
The house was silent, as if he wasn’t there. But she knew he was, because the dogs were in the yard. She didn’t put her bicycle away. She undid the knots of the string that held the parcel in place on her carrier, grappling with them where she’d made them too tight, forcing the parcel loose when she couldn’t undo the last one. She pushed open the door of one of the sheds. There was a pile of tarpaulins in a corner. As best she could, she concealed the holdall among them.
She left her bicycle where it was, slipping from the handlebars the carrier bags that contained the tins she’d bought. She didn’t want to go into the house. For a moment she saw the sunlight dappling the boards of the floor, her dress where she had thrown it down, one of her shoes on its side; she heard her own voice asking if the men who’d come had gone. As soon as he saw her he would know, somehow he would. About today, about every day.
She lifted the back-door latch, but something obstructed the door, preventing it from opening as freely as it always did. He would be lying there, the gun he went after the pigeons with when they raided his crops beside him. There’d been a farmer took his life near Donaghmore and they’d prayed for him at Cloonhill. A man who couldn’t right himself after his wife died, Sister Mary Frances had said, a man she’d known. And another farmer not long ago, gone bankrupt in east Kerry, found hanged. But the obstruction at the door was only a wellington boot fallen over.
‘What is it?’ she asked, not wanting to be told.
He was sitting in front of the stove. He had pulled the dampers out although it wasn’t cold today. The plate of meat was where she’d left it on the table, a mesh dome keeping the flies off, the knife and fork where she’d laid them, the bread still wrapped in a tea-towel, the butter covered, the teapot ready for his tea when he made it.
‘What is it?’ she asked again.
He didn’t turn round. He was hunched, his hands pressed together.
‘What’s troubling the dogs?’ she asked.
He turned his head then. He’d upset the dogs, he said. Being upset himself, he had brought that on. They’d been confused: he’d go and settle them.
‘Why are you upset?’
He didn’t answer, as if he hadn’t heard, or as if it was too much to say. He went to the yard and she heard the tractor started. The kitchen door was open, but she didn’t have to look. He was a tidy man even in distress: the tractor was being driven to where it should be. She heard his voice with the dogs, then he came in again.
‘He was talking to me on the road,’ he said. ‘Old Orpen Wren.’
A coldness came in her stomach, her arms felt weak. Orpen Wren wasn’t sane, you couldn’t understand what he was on about. Nobody gave credence to his wild assertions, to his talk about people who were dead; nobody took Orpen Wren seriously. But the chilly feeling was still there, and she willed it in her thoughts that Miss Connulty would not be mentioned also, or someone else whom gossip had reached, someone she didn’t know about. Frantically in a hurry, her snatched words tumbled about, her silent plea made formless, no more than an expression of fear.
‘He talks to everyone.’ She heard her voice as if it came from somewhere else, as if she were not there, as if this were not happening. She tried to pray that it was not, but the words still wouldn’t come properly.
‘I was upset, what he said to me.’
She tried not to hear. She wanted time to go on, emptily to accumulate. She carried the shopping she’d done
