She went there now. It smelt pleasantly of summer must, and slightly of soot. Drooping in a white jug on the single windowsill, pink roses were scentless and she took the withered blooms to the kitchen and rinsed the jug out, then went to cut fresh ones from the trellis in the garden at the front. When she had arranged them she fed the hens in the run and collected what eggs there were. She pumped up the back tyre of her bicycle because the valve was faulty. Not that she was going anywhere today.
Content but for her childlessness, Ellie did not complain if time hung heavy when her husband was in the fields. There was the routine of work and once a week she cycled the four and a half miles to Rathmoye with the eggs she regularly delivered, more often if there was further shopping to be done. She loved the journey through the empty countryside, and liked being in the town when she reached it, the bustle when the streets were busy, the different air. She liked being known by the shop people, being greeted by the man with the deaf-aid in English’s hardware, sitting on her own at a table in Meagher’s Cafe, paying in any cheques there were at the bank, searching for what she wanted in the Cash and Carry. More often than was always necessary, she made another confession. More often than she might have chosen, she heard the plot of the novel Miss Burke at the wool counter in Corbally’s was reading. Old Orpen Wren greeted her, sometimes remembering who she was.
She hosed the dairy out, turned the milk buckets she’d earlier scoured upside down on the slate draining-shelf beside the dairy sink. She put down poison in one of the turf sheds and in the feed shed, where something had been nibbling.
In her vegetable patch she weeded the parsley and thinned her carrots, saving what she pulled out. Tomorrow or the day after, the first of the peas she’d sown might be full enough to pick.
When Dillahan had moved his water line to the hill land he drove the tractor, its trailer behind it, down to the river-field. The fence he intended to replace was sagging, gaps here and there in the slack sheep-wire, a few of the posts rotten in the ground. Disturbed by his arrival, his ewes huddled together in the middle of the field before they processed back to the shade of the alders that grew randomly on both riverbanks, occasionally in the water. His sheepdogs settled down, in the shade too.
He wrenched out the staples that secured the barbed wire and the sheep-wire. They came out easily, but even so the work was slow - twenty-two new posts to be driven in, the old ones dug out if they had to be, the wire replaced. It would take him what remained of the morning, and longer after that than he’d thought, maybe even another hour tomorrow.
The time of year was difficult for Dillahan: it was in June seven years ago that the tragedy which had left him both widowed and childless had occurred. Try as he would, he could never prevent the memory from nagging when another June came, and lingering then until summer was finished with and the days were different. It was an October - sixteen months after the accident - when his mother had died, leaving him entirely on his own.
His sisters had found him Ellie. Not telling him, they went down to Templeross, having heard about Cloonhill. They put it to him afterwards in the kitchen, explaining about the institution they’d visited and repeating what he knew: that both of them being married, neither was free to take their mother’s place on the farm. They had already failed in their search for a housekeeper, but did not now see it as failure, since instead of the older woman they were looking for, at Cloonhill they had been offered someone younger, experienced in domestic duties and prepared to take on some farm work: all that seemed more suitable. His sisters handed him a reference from the Reverend Mother in Templeross and he read it while his sisters were silent. When he put it down they said he wouldn’t do better.
Fragments of all this, and what followed the arrangement he had agreed to, floated about Dillahan’s thoughts as his sledgehammer drove in the first of the corner posts. ‘There’s not many as lucky,’ he’d heard one of his sisters say in a telephone call that was made to Cloonhill, and hadn’t known whether it was he or the girl who was referred to. He’d heard himself called a decent man, a man you could trust in the circumstances that had come about, a man who didn’t miss Mass no matter what. Then his older sister drove away to collect the girl and brought her to the farm, her belongings in a white wooden box that had to be returned.
Dillahan was sunburnt, with reddish hair, the skin of his forehead and face freckled, his physical strength suggested by his features and his bulk. Since inheriting the farm he had managed on his own because he wanted to, hiring men only to help with the baling, a few days in September. His land was good, his acreage small; he rented grazing when it was required. He had worked nowhere else and had never wanted to.
He supported the corner post so that it would take the strain of the wire. Two strands of barbed above the squared sheep-wire were necessary if ever he put heifers in the river-field. He attached the second length, keeping it taut with the iron claw he used. He hammered in a staple and then another before he released the claw. He had to move out of the shade and the sun was hot now. His shirt was damp with sweat, a rash of nettle stings reddening one forearm.
Again the accident was there, suddenly, the way it always came. The thump there’d been, the moment of bewilderment, the sun in the yard as fierce as it was today, the moment of realizing. As best he could, he pushed it all away. ‘We’ll try her so,’ he’d said to his sisters, and they’d said he should drive with them to Cloonhill so that he could see what he was getting, but he hadn’t wanted to do that. ‘She’ll be all right,’ he’d said.
He went to the trailer for more posts and carried them to the riverbank one by one. He drove her into Rathmoye when the shopping was more than usual, too heavy or bulky for a bicycle; he didn’t begrudge her the time. He would have kept her company at the funeral yesterday except that he had never got to know Mrs Connulty as she had, delivering the Friday egg order. She hadn’t minded being there on her own, she said, and had brought him back the news, as she always did: who had been at the funeral Mass and what they’d said in English’s about the raddle powder that was ordered and still hadn’t come in. Not for an instant did he imagine, the day she had arrived, that another day would come when he’d marry her, that he’d stand beside her and hear the same words said again, that afterwards he’d have his hand shaken as a husband. The wedding decorations were as they’d been before, the same advertisement for Winter’s Tale sherry on mirrored glass, the noise and laughter, confetti strewn. ‘’Tis better so, ’tis better,’ an old farmer he’d known all his life lowered his voice to approve when there was a private moment, each of them taking a corner at the urinals out the back. He sang for them at the wedding party, for her too, as everyone there knew. They went to Lahinch for three days afterwards, the farm looked after by one of the Corrigans. She’d never seen the sea before.
3
Florian Kilderry skimmed a pebble on the dark surface of water as still as ice. It bounced only once; twice, then three times when he tried again. The silence of early morning was unbroken, the air refreshingly cold. The bird he had been unable to identify this summer wasn’t there again and he waited for it, hoping it would suddenly appear, swooping in just above the water in its particular way. He looked in the sky, but there was still no sign of it. His dog, a black Labrador, no longer young, looked also, her manner suggesting that she knew what for. These days she didn’t do much on her own.
It took an hour to walk around the lake. Here and there a detour had to be made if the land was sodden, but it wasn’t this morning. The upturned boat was still forgotten on the shingle where the stream trickled in, hardly trickling at all now. The reeds flourished best close to the water. They hadn’t been cut for years.
When, in the past, there’d been parties - when people had driven down from Dublin - there was always the walk around the lake, whole processions of people and Florian among them, the child of the house. Cars were parked on the gravel turn-about: battered Dodges and Fords, the solitary Morgan that always came, Morrises and Austins. The emblem on the bonnet distinguished each and he knew the number plates, remembering them from
