for him into the scullery, although not everything she’d bought belonged there. He didn’t call her back. He sat where he’d been sitting before and when she returned to the kitchen he spoke again, but she didn’t hear at first and he repeated what he’d said. Orpen Wren had held his hand up for him to stop and he had. He said that sometimes you used to see him on the road beyond the town; but that was long ago.
‘I thought he’d got himself lost,’ he said.
He didn’t go on, as if there was nothing else to say. He stared at the floor, hunched again, his hands together as they had been before. He was so different he seemed a stranger to her and she knew she was to blame for that, not he.
‘You’ve had nothing to eat,’ she said. ‘I left the meat out for you.’
‘I couldn’t take it.’
‘Were you here since the morning?’
‘Ten to twelve I came in. About that.’
‘I’ll make something for us. That meat will keep.’
She turned away, with the knife and fork she was about to lay as a second place in her hand. She didn’t look at her husband, frightened because of what might be in her eyes. He said:
‘Is it put about I could see her behind the trailer? Is it put about that I couldn’t see she had the child in her arms?’
‘What?’ There was only relief in her single, startled ejaculation, hardly even a question in it, hardly even the word itself. ‘What’re you talking about?’
‘Sometimes at Mass I’d know people would be looking at me.’
‘Of course they’re not.’
‘Is it they’re saying in Rathmoye she was going with one of the St Johns?’
‘Of course they aren’t saying that. Why would they be?’
‘He was on about the St Johns going with any handy woman they’d find.’
‘When the accident happened in the yard the St Johns were gone from here. They were ages gone then.’
‘There’s one came back. He saw her with him. A few times he saw the two of them. The old trouble, he called it.’
‘He says anything. It’s different every time what he says. There’s no sense to it. He hasn’t sense left in him.’
‘He was sorry for me on account of the child. It was for that he stopped me on the road. A St John came back, Ellie, the time I was careless with the tractor in my own yard.’
‘There’s nowhere to come back to. These thirty years, there never was.’
‘I didn’t know it that a St John came back. Only myself didn’t know it. He’s saying no more than what’d be said round about.’
‘There’s no talk like that in Rathmoye.’
‘I hate going in there. Ever since the day I hated it.’
‘Would a drop of whiskey do you good? Would I get the bottle from the scullery?’
‘I used wonder would people be thinking I had whiskey taken the time I backed the trailer. Would they be saying I had drink in me? Would they be saying I shouldn’t have backed with the sun in my eyes?’
‘That isn’t said at all.’
‘Better it might be than what was said to me on the road.’
‘Don’t listen to his old rambling.’
‘I never thought it’d be said what was said to me on the road.’
‘You don’t have to think it. It isn’t true.’
‘Did you hear it said yourself, Ellie? Did he say it to you the day I went for the loan and he was talking to you in the Square? Did other people say it to you? Is it that that has you troubled, Ellie?’
She said that no one had repeated a word of anything like it to her. All Orpen Wren ever talked about was the past, she said.
‘It’s the past has him in its grip, Ellie.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘Coming out here, he was further than he ever is beyond the town. He told me that too. It was myself he was looking for, Ellie.’
‘He talks to anyone.’
He shook his head as he stood up. He went to the scullery and came back with the whiskey bottle and a cup.
‘I’m all right when I’m in the fields,’ he said. ‘Or when I’m with yourself in the house. It’d maybe be all right if I was walking in a town where no one’d know me.’
She watched him pouring out some of the whiskey that was kept to offer his relations when they came over from Shinrone once a year on a Sunday afternoon. She’d tasted it herself and hadn’t liked it. She said again that people in Rathmoye weren’t saying what he feared, that everything repeated to him today came out of a distorted
