READING TURGENEV

A woman, not yet fifty-seven, slight and seeming frail, eats carefully at a table in a corner. Her slices of buttered bread have been halved for her, her fried egg mashed, her bacon cut. ‘Well, this is happiness!’ she murmurs aloud, but none of the other women in the dining-room replies because none of them is near enough to hear. She’s privileged, the others say, being permitted to occupy on her own the bare-topped table in the corner. She has her own salt and pepper.

‘Hurry now.’ Appearing from nowhere, Miss Foye curtly interrupts the woman’s private thought. ‘You have a visitor waiting.’

‘Would be Peter Martyr.’ Another woman, overhearing the news about a visitor, makes this suggestion, but at once there’s a general objection. Why should the visitor be identified so since the lone woman wouldn’t lift a hand to take the knife from his head, Peter Martyr not being of her religion?

‘Heretic!’ a voice calls out.

‘Heathen,’ another mutters.

The woman who eats alone pays no attention. They mean no harm; they are not against her; in their confusion they become carried away. But since she has been interrupted, she must make the best of things, she must consume the food: she will not be permitted into the visitor’s presence until her plate is clean. She swallows a forkful of egg and bacon pieces without chewing. Grease, congealed, adheres to her tongue and the roof of her mouth. If she vomits she will not be permitted into the visitor’s presence. She rinses her mouth with tea. With her fingers she presses more buttered bread between her teeth. The others will tell on her if she does not eat all the bread. They will shout out and she’ll have to march back to the table. She softens the bread with more tea and washes it away. She passes among the women.

‘Tell me about the graveyard.’ A tiny woman, wizen-faced, rises and walks with her, whispering. ‘Tell me, darling, about the graveyard.’

‘Sit down, Sadie,’ Miss Foye commands. ‘Leave her be.’

‘She took off every stitch,’ another voice accuses and is immediately contradicted: Bríd Beamish it was who took off every stitch, who walked the streets for profit.

‘It’s not our business.’ Stately in grey, Miss Foye is brisk. This is her manner. She stands no nonsense. ‘Hurry now,’ she urges.

In the hall there is a disappointment. The visitor is not a stranger. He stands by the window, and speaks when Miss Foye has gone away. He states the purpose of his visit, all he says a repetition. ‘Nowadays it’s what’s being done,’ he explains, the opposite of anything in the old days: for months Miss Foye and the medicals have been saying it too. Those who have somewhere to go are better off in the community, that has been established. In other countries the change came years ago, Italy, America, places like that. We’re always a bit behindhand here.

‘Well, you have somewhere to go,’ the man reminds her. ‘No doubt about that, dear.’

‘I thought you might be Insarov. When I heard I had a visitor I said to myself it must be Insarov. To tell the truth, I was interrupted at my supper.’

She smiles and nods, then walks away.

‘No, come back,’ her husband begs. ‘They’ve asked me to go into it with you.’

Obediently she returns. He means no harm.

Mary Louise Dallon retained in her features the look of a child. In an oval face her blue eyes had a child’s wide innocence. Her fair brown hair was soft, and curled without inducement. Her temperament remained untouched by sophistication. Once in her life she was told she was beautiful, but laughed when the statement was made: she saw ordinariness in her bedroom looking-glass.

In the schoolroom next to the Protestant church Miss Mullover had once taught Mary Louise, and would have retained a memory only of a lively child had it not been for the same child’s sudden interest, at ten, in Joan of Arc – or Jeanne d’Arc, as Miss Mullover insisted upon. The saint was a source of such unusual fascination that Miss Mullover wondered for a while if the child possessed depths she had overlooked: an imagination that would one day bear fruit. But Mary Louise left the schoolroom with no greater ambition than to work in the local chemist’s shop, Dodd’s Medical Hall, and in that she was frustrated. Circumstances obliged her to stay at home, helping in the farmhouse.

In a different generation Miss Mullover had taught Elmer Quarry, who left her schoolroom to board at the Tate School in Wexford, nearly sixty miles away. The three Quarry children – Elmer and his sisters – came of a family that for many decades had been important in the town. The Dallons – out at Culleen – had struggled for as long to keep their heads above water.

In later years Miss Mullover observed from a distance the vicissitudes and worries that governed the family life of the Dallons, and the changeless nature of the Quarrys’ domestic and mercantile routine. She noted that money meant as much to Elmer Quarry in his middle age as it had to his forebears, that generally he was as cautious as his father and his grandfather had been, that he abundantly enhanced the Quarry reputation for good sense and a Protestant order of priorities. In each generation for more than a century the inheritor of Quarry’s drapery had married late in life, establishing himself in the business before he turned his thoughts to the securing of the line: the old house above the shop in Bridge Street had seen more than its share of young wives made widows before their time. So it was that in 1955 Elmer Quarry was still a bachelor and the only well-to-do Protestant for miles around. All over the county wealth had passed into the hands of a new Catholic middle class, changing the nature of provincial life as it did so.

The Dallons’ roadside farmhouse in the townland of Culleen had never been more than modest, and in 1955 even that modesty was considerably eroded: the whitewashed rendering was here and there fallen away, slates that had slipped out of place or cracked in half had not been replaced, a pane in an upstairs window was broken. Within the farmhouse, rooms were in need of redecoration; paint had chipped, damp loosened the tattered wallpaper of the stairway, the unused dining-room smelt of must and soot. Five Dallons lived in the farmhouse – Mary Louise and her sister Letty, her brother James, and her mother and father.

Standing on the edge of the farm’s twenty-seven acres, the house was three miles from the town where Quarry’s drapery had prospered for so long. On Sundays, driving into the town in their black, obsolete Hillman, the Dallons formed almost a quarter of the Protestant congregation; at Christmas and Easter the numbers swelled to thirty-three or -four. Elmer Quarry and his sisters were church-goers only on these festive occasions, but for the Dallons – especially for Mary Louise and Letty – the weekly occasion of worship provided a social outing they enjoyed.

The town was small, its population just over two and a half thousand. A turf-brickette factory had been opened seven years ago, where once there’d been a tannery. There was a ruined mill, a railway station that was no longer in use, green-stained warehouses on either side of the town’s single bridge over its sluggish river. Shops, public houses, the post office, council offices, two banks, and other businesses offered employment, as did Hogan’s Hotel, three builders, a creamery, an egg-packing station and an agricultural machinery depot. The Electric Cinema was a going concern in 1955; the Dixie dancehall continued to attract Friday-night crowds. The Catholic church – on the town’s northern outskirts – was dedicated to the Virgin as Queen of Heaven; a convent – halfway up the town’s only hill – was of the order of the Sacred Heart. Boys were educated behind the silver-painted railings of the Christian Brothers’ School in Conlon Street, and St Fintan’s vocational college offered opportunities to acquire further skills. Bridge Street, where the pink-washed Hogan’s Hotel and the principal shops were, was narrow and brief, becoming South West Street beyond the bridge. The gaunt, grey steeple of the Protestant church rose from a boundary of yew trees that isolated it from its surroundings. A pocket of lanes around the gasworks and Brown’s Yard comprised the slums. A signpost – black letters on a yellow ground – partially obscured a statue of Daniel O’Connell and gave directions to Clonmel and Cappoquin, Cahir and Carrick-on-Suir. People who lived in the town knew it backwards; those from the surrounding neighbourhoods sometimes regarded it with wonder.

Elmer Quarry first noticed that Mary Louise Dallon was an agreeable-looking girl in January of the year in question. He was thirty-five then, Mary Louise twenty-one. Paunchy – and as square-looking as the origins of his name suggested – he was attired invariably in a nondescript suit, mud-coloured, faintly striped. His receding hair, cut short, matched this shade; his features were small and regular, a neat configuration in the pale plumpness of his face. Elmer Quarry was not a tall man, but bulky none the less, an entrepreneurial presence, as his father and grandfather had been before him. He was assisted in the drapery by his sisters, Matilda and Rose, both of them his senior by a few years and possessing a handsomeness that had been denied him. Neither had married and both were displeased when Elmer’s glances were cast in the direction of Mary Louise Dallon. Why should the status quo in the house above the shop, and in the shop itself, be disturbed? Quarry’s would sustain the three of them during their lifetime, withering, then dying, with the Protestants of the neighbourhood. Neither Rose nor Matilda was the kind to avoid facing the facts: already Quarry’s was a relic from another age. If the line came to an end the business would pass to distant cousins in Athy, who would probably sell it.

The present Quarrys remembered the time when there were five assistants behind the counters, and an overhead railway network that linked the shop to the accounting office, carrying money and returning change in hollow wooden spheres. There were just the three Quarrys in the shop now; the overhead system had years ago been dismantled and removed. But the red receipt books were as they’d always been, stacked every evening by the tills that had been fitted. Elmer’s father had entered the accounting office every day only after the shop had closed its doors, when the clerk who returned the change in the wooden containers had gone home. But since there was no clerk now and since Matilda and Rose managed easily behind the counters, Elmer increasingly spent more time in the accounting office. Often he sat there staring down through the small-paned floor-to-ceiling window into the quiet shop below, at the rolls of material stacked on the shelves – nylon, chintz and silk, cotton and linen – at the spools of thread in their shallow glass case, and the dresses and suits on the window dummies. As still as these window dummies his sisters sometimes seemed, one behind either counter, waiting for another customer. Matilda liked to be smart; Rose dressed drearily. Matilda had more of a manner with customers, the best manner of the three, Elmer knew. Rose preferred housework and cooking. He himself belonged more naturally with the ledgers.

The courtship began on 11 January 1955, a Tuesday. Elmer invited Mary Louise to the pictures the following Friday evening. He had no idea what was showing at the Electric, but he considered that didn’t matter. Now and again, perhaps once a year, he and his sisters went to see a film because it had been talked about in the shop. He liked the News best himself, but Rose and Matilda enjoyed something light and musical. He naturally had to tell them he’d invited Mary Louise Dallon. They continued to look displeased, but did not comment.

In the Dallon household the invitation came as a considerable surprise. Mr and Mrs Dallon – a thin, grey pair in their fifties whose appearance was so similar that they might have been twins – recognized all that it implied, and were well aware of the habit among the Quarry men of marrying younger wives. They talked about it in the privacy of their bedroom. Mrs Dallon made a special journey to the town, visited Quarry’s drapery, bought a spool of white thread, and reminded herself of what Elmer looked like by glimpsing him through the panes of the accounting-office window. It might have been worse, she reported to her husband on her return, and later – in their bedroom – they went on talking about the development.

Mary Louise’s older sister, Letty, and her brother James, who was older also, did not react as favourably. James – impetuous, known to be of uncertain temper, and remembered from his schooldays as being a little slow – declared the invitation to be an affront. Elmer Quarry was a man who never laughed and rarely smiled, born to be a draper. Letty – secretly annoyed that her sister had been preferred, not that she’d have set foot in the Electric with Elmer Quarry even if he’d gone down on his knees – warned Mary Louise about what might occur under cover of darkness and advised her to keep handy a safety-pin that could be opened at a moment’s notice. Some of Elmer Quarry’s teeth were false, she declared, a fact she claimed to have culled in the waiting-room of the town’s more reliable dentist, Mr McGreevy.

Mary Louise herself was terrified. When the invitation had come, Elmer Quarry following her out on the street to issue it, she blushed and became so agitated in her speech that she began to stammer. On her bicycle, all the way back to the farmhouse, she kept seeing Elmer Quarry’s square shape, and the balding dome of his head when he’d bent down to pick up the glove she’d dropped. Letty had gone out with a man or two, with Gargan from the Bank of Ireland two years ago, with Billie Lyndon of the radio and electrical shop. She had thought Gargan was going to propose, but unfortunately he got promotion and was moved to Carlow. Billie Lyndon married the younger Hayes girl. Letty had taken to saying she wouldn’t be bothered with that kind of thing any more, but Mary Louise knew it wasn’t true. If Gargan came back for her she’d take him like a shot, and if anyone else who was half possible appeared on the scene she’d start dressing herself up again.

‘What’s showing?’ Letty asked.

‘He didn’t say.’

‘Hmm,’ Letty said.

Beggars couldn’t be choosers, Mr Dallon reflected in the end. To marry either of the girls into the Quarrys would mean you’d breathe more easily, and you’d see the sort of future for the two who were left. Mrs Dallon reached similar conclusions: provided James didn’t marry, the farm would sustain himself and Letty, he working the fields and seeing to the milking, she attending to the fowls. The place was right for two, comfortable enough. Three of them left behind would be noticeable, touched with failure, although no one was to blame; a family growing old together was never a good thing, never a stable thing.

The film was called The Flame and the Flesh and Elmer did not in the least enjoy it. But he bought a carton of Rose’s in the confectioner’s shop next to the Electric, and at least there was the consolation of the chocolates, for he had a sweet tooth. When he offered Mary Louise the carton for the fifth time she shook her head and murmured something, which he took to mean she didn’t want any more. He knew that girls had to watch their figures so he ate the remainder of the chocolates himself, removing the wrappings as quietly as he could in order not to cause a disturbance. The film was all about a woman in Italy, with a number of men interested. ‘Wasn’t the picture great?’ Mary Louise enthused when the lights went up, and he agreed it had been.

It was a cold night. Outside the cinema he belted his overcoat and drew on tan leather gloves; he didn’t wear a hat. He noticed that his companion’s cheeks were flushed from the warmth of the cinema and that she’d put on a blue and white woollen cap, which matched her gloves. She’d have bought the wool in the shop, and he thought he could even remember looking down from the accounting office and seeing her choosing it, last summer it would have been.

‘I’ll walk you out a bit towards Culleen,’ he said.

‘Oh, no need, Mr Quarry. Thanks though.’

In the lane that ran by the side of the Electric there was an ungainly chain and padlock on her bicycle, which she undid and dropped into the basket that was attached to the handlebars. When she leaned down to do this lamplight from the street fell on the back of her legs, and for the first time Elmer experienced physical desire where Mary Louise was concerned. Between the hem of her shabby blue coat and the tops of her boots the silk of her stockings gleamed in a way he found disturbing. Once or twice during the film his attention had been held by Lana Turner’s low-cut bodices.

‘Give me the bike to wheel,’ he urged, ignoring Mary Louise’s protest that there was no need to walk through the streets with her.

The Quarrys did not possess a car. Living in the centre of the town, there had never been a need for one, just as in the past there had been no need for a horse-drawn vehicle of any kind. A bus carried you out of the town and another one brought you back again in the evening. Every December, before Christmas, the Quarry sisters took it to do any seasonal shopping there was. Elmer didn’t bother with that. In winter he played billiards in the YMCA billiard-room, a big coal fire blazing in the grate between two glass-fronted bookcases that held a library of good books: Wild West stories and detective yarns, adventure novels by Sapper and Leslie Charteris, the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Elmer often had the place to himself since not many turned up in the YMCA billiard-room these days, but the caretaker always had the fire going in winter, and copies of the Geographical Magazine and the Illustrated London News were always to hand. In summer Elmer went for walks – Bridge Street, South West Street, Boys’ Lane, Father Mathew Street, Upton Road, home by Kilkelly’s Garage.

Intent upon entertaining Mary Louise, and since they happened to pass the YMCA billiard-room, he retailed some of the detail of these two long-established habits. If he possessed a car, he added, he naturally would have called at the farmhouse for her and would now be driving her home in it. Kilkelly often told him he should have a car. ‘A man in your position, Elmer,’ was how Kilkelly – who had the Ford franchise – put it, but Elmer did not quote this statement since it sounded like showing off. Instead, he asked Mary Louise if she had learned to drive the Hillman he often saw the Dallons in, and she replied that she had. This fact Elmer noted; he was interested in things like that.

‘Well, I’ll leave you here,’ he said when they reached the last bungalow that could claim to belong to the town. A full moon cast a light as bright as daylight. The road sparkled where frost had settled in its crevices. Hedges and verges were already whitening; ice had formed in patches.

‘Your light’s all right, is it?’ Elmer solicitously inquired.

Mary Louise tried it. A beam hardly showed up in the moonlight. ‘Thanks for everything,’ she said.

‘Would next week interest you?’

‘Interest?’

‘Friday again.’ Elmer had once heard in the shop that girls liked to wash their hair on Saturdays, and certainly both Rose and Matilda did, once a fortnight. Thoughtfulness never hurt anyone, his mother used to say, which was why he’d mentioned Friday. His own preference would have been Saturday, since the feeling of relaxation, to do with the weekend, began then. With the shop closed until Monday morning, and the streets more active than on other evenings, Elmer often experienced on a Saturday night an urge to mark in some way the difference there was. Usually, though, he just slipped down to the YMCA and played a solitary game of billiards.

‘Friday?’ Mary Louise said.

‘Is Friday convenient? Would Saturday be better?’

‘No, Friday’s all right.’

‘Will we say half-seven?’

Mary Louise nodded. She mounted her bicycle and rode off. The safety-pin Letty had insisted upon had not been opened. He hadn’t tried to hold her hand. Come to that, she thought, they hadn’t even said good-night to one another. There was a kind of intimacy about saying good-night to a person, and both of them had been shy of it. In the Electric, before the lights went down, she’d noticed people looking at them. By this time tomorrow it would be all round the town.

‘Are you in one piece?’ Letty asked when her sister walked into the kitchen with the bicycle lamp in her hand. Their mother and father had gone to bed, but Mary Louise knew they wouldn’t be sleeping. They’d have lain there waiting for the sound of the bicycle wheels and the clatter of the barn door and her footsteps on the cobbles. They’d go on lying there, probably not communicating with one another, just wondering how she’d got on.

‘What was the flick?’ Letty asked.

‘Lana Turner. The Flame and the Flesh.’

‘Holy God!’

‘Bonar Colleano was in it.’

‘Did your man keep his hands to himself?’

‘Of course he did,’ Mary Louise retorted crossly, for the first time feeling a kinship with the man who’d taken her out. Letty had a tongue like a razor blade.

‘Where’s James?’

‘He’s over playing cards with the Edderys.’

‘I’ll go to bed so.’

‘Is that the end of it, Mary Louise?’

‘How d’you mean, the end of it?’

‘Is he proposing anything further?’

‘He asked me out Friday.’

‘Don’t go, Mary Louise.’

‘I said I would.’

‘He could nearly be your father. For God’s sake, watch your step.’

Mary Louise did. She developed a cold during the week and gave Letty a note to take in to the shop. In the ordinary course of events a cold wouldn’t have prevented her from going to the pictures, and she hoped Elmer Quarry would deduce that. She hoped he’d guess how she felt, not that she was all that certain how she felt herself. When she was alone, especially lying awake in bed, she didn’t want ever again to have to walk up the stairs of the Electric Cinema with him. But when Letty started on with her advice, and when James put in a word or two also, she naturally tended to defy them. Neither her mother nor her father made a comment, beyond asking her what kind of a film it had been. But she knew what they were thinking, and that caused her mood to revert: once more she wished that she might never find herself repeating the experience of sitting in the Electric Cinema with the inheritor of the drapery. No reply to the note Letty delivered came, although Mary Louise expected there’d be something. She didn’t know why it disappointed her that he hadn’t managed to write a line or two.

Arrangements are being explained to her: she doesn’t listen. The words are no more than a gabble, a sound like a dog grieving in the distance or the wail of wind through branches. Jeanne d’Arc worked a plough like a man; she wasn’t a mimsy thing like Possy Luke with her cracked spectacles. Miss Mullover said Jeanne d’Arc’s courage was beyond all comprehension.

‘Good of you to come over.’ Miss Foye has returned. Her strict tone interrupts the visitor’s drone, still going on about the way things are now being done. There is a smile on Miss Foye’s plump face. Forty-two she is, a known fact. Courted by a road surveyor.

‘We’ll take it easy,’ the man remarks, lowering his voice. ‘We won’t rush our fences.’

They glance at her, both of them. She introduces a vacancy into her eyes, staring over their heads, upwards, at the ceiling.

‘It’ll be a saving for you,’ Miss Foye observes.

He shakes his head, implying that that isn’t a consideration. ‘All I want to do is the right thing. Will the house close down, Miss Foye?’

‘We have fourteen to place elsewhere, fourteen that can’t go back where they came from. The house’ll put up its shutters then.’

‘You’ll be OK yourself?’

‘To tell the truth I would be finishing with it anyway.’

Miss Foye looks coy. A month ago a ruby stone appeared on her engagement finger. Miss Foye is to become the wife of the road surveyor, an autumnal romance if ever there was one. ‘There’s juice in the old girl yet,’ Dot Sterne remarked when the news spread. ‘Isn’t that one bold for her age?’

‘Friday week.’ He says it, Miss Foye nods. Friday week’ll be grand. It’ll give everyone time, only fair to an inmate to let her get used to the change in advance. ‘D’you hear us, dear?’ she asks, raising her tone. ‘D’you follow what you’ve been told?’

The woman smiles, first at Miss Foye, then at her visitor. She shakes her head. She hasn’t heard a thing, she says.

The wedding took place on Saturday, 10 September 1955. It was a quiet occasion, but even so Mary Louise had a traditional wedding-dress, and Letty a bridesmaid’s dress in matching style. There was a celebration afterwards in the farmhouse. Everyone sat down in the dining-room, a room otherwise rarely used. Mrs Dallon had roasted three chickens, and there was spiced beef as well as bacon to go with them. Before the meal the health of the bride and groom was drunk in sherry or whiskey. The Reverend Harrington, who had conducted the ceremony, allowed himself a further homily.

Miss Mullover, now nearly seventy, small and slight, affected by arthritis, had a special place at the gathering as the one-time mentor of both bride and groom. She’d been surprised when she heard of Mary Louise’s engagement to the draper, but only because of the difference of generation: nothing else about the present alliance caused her undue apprehension. Other girls had passed through her schoolroom, eventually to marry older men. Marie Yates, not yet thirty at the time of her marriage to Canon Moore at almost eighty, came most swiftly to mind: in all her life Miss Mullover had never witnessed such weeping as Marie’s at the funeral of the old clergyman.

But this sanguine view was not unanimously to be found among the wedding guests. The continuing displeasure of Matilda and Rose was matched by Letty’s, which took the form of a coldly distant manner and the firm rejection of any notion that the occasion was a festive one. When, in March, Mary Louise revealed that Elmer had proposed and that she had accepted him, Letty hadn’t spoken to her for three weeks and when the silence was finally broken Letty was so changed that Mary Louise wondered if she would ever again know the old relationship she’d had with her sister.

‘I’m the lucky man,’ Elmer declared in a speech. ‘There’s no one for ten miles around wouldn’t agree on that.’

That was enough, he considered, so he did not say any more. Last night Rose had actually dropped to her knees, tears streaming, begging him to reconsider at this eleventh hour. Matilda, grim-faced on the first-floor landing, had announced that he would regret this folly for the rest of his days. Mary Louise Dallon hadn’t a brain in her head. She was marrying him for his money, since it was a known fact that the Dallons hadn’t two coins in the house to rub together. There was flightiness in her eyes. She would lead him a dance, if not in one way then in another. She would drain him dry in ways he couldn’t even imagine. She would upset him, and disturb him. His sisters didn’t go to bed until half-past two, and even after he’d lain down, exhausted, Elmer could still hear their ranting, and Rose’s weeping.

In a final passion of energy, the night before also, Letty had sought to dissuade her sister. In the warm darkness of the bedroom they shared Mary Louise listened to the persistent murmur, edged with bitterness one moment and scorn the next. A picture was painted of her future in the house above the shop, the two sisters critical of every move she made, the man she was to marry never taking her side. She’d be no more than a maid in the household and a counter girl in the shop. There would be smells and intimacies no girl would care for in the bedroom she’d have to share with the heavily-made draper; her reluctance to meet his demands would be overruled. The three Quarrys would beadily eye her at mealtimes. Dried-up spinsters were always the worst.

But by midday on 10 September the pair were joined together. The best man was one of Elmer’s cousins from Athy, imported into the parish for the occasion, a man Mary Louise had never seen before. The Reverend Harrington – cherub-cheeked and rotund, not long married himself – had asked the necessary questions slowly and with care, his lingering tone designed to imbue the union with an extra degree of sanctity, or so it seemed. In the vestry while the register was signed Mr and Mrs Dallon stood awkwardly, and Rose and Matilda and Letty stood grimly. Sensing unease, the Reverend Harrington chatted about other weddings he had conducted and then recalled the details of his own.

‘Phew!’ Mary Louise’s brother whispered to one of his Eddery cousins in the dining-room of the farmhouse. The exhalation was a reference, not to the nuptials of his sister, but to the agreeable effect of a second glass of whiskey. James could feel it spreading through his chest, a burning sensation that was new to him.

‘I had two bob on a horse today,’ the older Eddery brother revealed. ‘Polly’s Sweetheart.’

James, who spent all he earned in Kilmartin’s the turf accountant’s, was impressed. He hadn’t gone for anything today, he said. He’d heard about Polly’s Sweetheart.

Letty changed out of her bridesmaid’s dress in order to help her mother in the kitchen. The chickens had roasted during the wedding service, the bacon and the spiced beef were cold, cooked the day before. Mrs Dallon’s cheeks were flushed from the small glass of sherry she’d drunk and from the heat of the range. She strained potatoes and peas. Letty tipped them into warmed dishes and carried the dishes into the dining-room. Mr Dallon began to carve the meats while the guests were seating themselves.

‘A great spread,’ Elmer remarked. He was wearing a carnation in the lapel of a muddy-brown suit, his Sunday suit he called it, much less worn than his usual clothing. His short hair had been cut the day before, and the barber’s application of brilliantine still kept it tidily in place. The back of his neck was a little red.

‘Lovely,’ a woman said. ‘Lovely it all is, Mrs Dallon.’

Mrs Dallon, hurrying with two gravy boats, was too occupied to reply. She whispered to her husband and he paused in his carving to say:

‘I’m told to say, start eating. Don’t let the hot stuff get cold.’

Miss Mullover confided to the clergyman’s wife that she loved a past pupil’s wedding. It was surprising the emotions you felt. Mrs Harrington – who knew that at one stage her husband had had heart-searchings about this match – was relieved that Miss Mullover seemed pleased. He would have liked to say Grace, she thought, but unfortunately he’d had a call of nature.

James and the Eddery brothers poured more whiskey, finding the bottle behind a potted fern on a windowsill. The Eddery brothers were smoking cigarettes. They told Mrs Dallon they wanted to finish them before they sat down. They were in no hurry for the chicken and bacon, they said.

Letty, given the task of moving the vegetables about on the table in case anyone was missed out, thought about Gargan the exchange clerk at the Bank of Ireland who’d been promoted to Carlow. They’d gone out together for two years, to the pictures and on bicycle rides, twice to the Chamber of Commerce dance in Hogan’s Hotel. When Gargan had gone to Carlow and enough time had passed to indicate that he wouldn’t be coming back to see her, Billie Lyndon of the radio shop had suggested an evening at the Dixie dancehall and she’d gone there once with him, but had found it rough. It might have been herself and either of them, she thought as she moved the vegetables about. In this moment she might be sitting at the far end of the table, Mrs Gargan or Mrs Lyndon. They’d both mentioned marriage, not exactly proposals but the next best thing, sounding the notion out. In the Electric they had acted similarly: putting an arm along the back of her seat halfway through the big film and then, after another few minutes, grasping her shoulder. With each of them, she’d felt a knee pressing hers. Their fingers had caressed the side of her face. On the way home there’d been the good-night kiss.

‘You were lovely in that dress, Letty,’ Angela Eddery, still a schoolgirl, complimented while she spooned peas on to her plate. ‘Dead spit of Audrey Hepburn.’

Letty knew that wasn’t true. Either Angela Eddery was confusing Audrey Hepburn with someone else or was simply telling a lie. She looked nothing like Audrey Hepburn; she was a different type altogether.

‘Did you make them yourselves?’ Angela Eddery went on. ‘God, I never saw dresses like them.’

‘We made our dresses.’

When she offered the best man one of the potato dishes he said they were in the same line of business today, bridesmaid and best man. Mary Louise had said he was a bachelor, manager of a creamery near Athy. Letty considered he was familiar with her, calling her Letty straight off and talking the way he did. He was taller than Elmer Quarry, but just as paunchy, and balder.

Rose and Matilda, sitting together, didn’t eat much. ‘Oh, I could never manage all that,’ Rose said as soon as she received her plate, staring at its contents as if making a judgement. The chickens would have cost them nothing, Matilda reflected, running about the yard they’d have been.

The Reverend Harrington spoke to Mr Dallon and again Mr Dallon laid down his carving knife and fork. He said that the clergyman had wanted to say Grace but had been out of the room at the right moment. If nobody objected, he’d say it now, even though some people had started. That didn’t matter at all, the Reverend Harrington added hastily. For what we’re about to receive,’ he added also, ‘the Lord make us truly thankful.’

Mary Louise felt sleepy due to Letty’s keeping her awake half the night with her haranguing. She had taken the plunge, she said to herself; she had made her own mind up and had done it; it was her own business, what she had done, it was her own life. She smiled at Miss Mullover, who was leaning across the table to speak to her.

‘D’you remember,’ the schoolteacher asked her, ‘how you used to want to work in Dodd’s Medical Hall?’

Mary Louise did. She’d wanted to serve in the chemist’s because it was the nicest shop in the town. It had the nicest smell, and everything was clean. To serve there you had to wear a white coat. Everyone knew it was special.

‘It’ll be Quarry’s now,’ Miss Mullover went on, and Mary Louise wondered if the old schoolteacher was ga-ga, since it was apparent to everyone present that she had just married into the drapery. The truth was that the counters of Quarry’s had always been her second choice. She’d clearly never said so to Miss Mullover or there’d have been a reference to it, but she’d said so at home. When she’d finished at school, a shop was the best that could be done for her; her father had said that, and she hadn’t minded, thinking of Dodd’s or Quarry’s or even Foley’s grocery and confectionery, two doors down from the drapery in Bridge Street. Word of her availability was put around the town on the next fair day, but it seemed that no assistance was required. Foley’s was reserved for the Foley girls, Renehan the hardware merchant only had men behind the counters and didn’t have to go outside the family either, with three sons. No daughter of his would go into a public house, Mr Dallon laid down, but that possibility did not arise either. For five years Mary Louise had remained at home, helping generally, waiting for a vacancy. That was what she had to weigh in her mind when Elmer Quarry displayed his interest – the long, slow days at Culleen, the kitchen, the yard, the fowl houses, for weeks on end not seeing anyone outside the family except at church or at the egg-packing station. All that was what Letty appeared to have forgotten.

‘Algebra was Elmer’s stumbling block. He could never get the hang of brackets.’ Miss Mullover nodded repeatedly over her food, lending emphasis to the recollection. ‘Twiddly brackets, square brackets, round brackets. He could never get the order right.’

‘Fat lot of use they were.’ Elmer laughed loudly, taking Mary Louise by surprise and causing her to jump. She tried to think if she’d ever heard him laugh before, and she remembered her brother saying he never did. His small teeth were all on display at once. The fat of his face was bunched up into little bags.

‘Algebra poor,’ Miss Mullover recalled. ‘Arithmetic good. I remember writing that. Nineteen thirty-one or thereabouts.’

Mary Louise imagined her husband at that distant time, a podgy boy, she imagined, with podgy knees. He’d have had long trousers at the boarding-school in Wexford.

‘I saw a lot in the schoolroom,’ Miss Mullover reminded Mr Dallon as he sat down at last, the carving complete.

‘You did a great job in the schoolroom, Miss Mullover.’

Mr Dallon reached for salt and pepper. He remembered Mary Louise’s birth, how he’d been worried because she was late arriving but hadn’t said anything because that would only have made matters worse. Had she been a boy the names they had ready were William or possibly Nevil. She was called Louise after his mother; he couldn’t remember how it was that they began to use both her names. He seemed to recall saying himself that the two names had a ring to them.

‘Full of fun she was,’ Miss Mullover was remembering now – meaning, he supposed, that Mary Louise’s liveliness as a child had occasionally landed her in trouble. She’d thrown a stone once in the school yard and had been kept in; she and Tessa Enright had put worms in Possy Luke’s desk and let down the tyres of bicycles. Occasional bolsterousness, Miss Mullover had written on a report.

He supposed she was his favourite, although he didn’t like having to admit, even to himself, that favourites came into it. But Mary Louise, born when they’d thought the family was complete, had acquired – possibly for no more reason than that – a special place in his heart. Solemn-eyed, she had listened when he reprimanded her for her misdemeanours at school. At hay-making or harvesting she had a way of staying close to him, telling him about the ailments that had befallen a little mechanical chicken. When you wound it up it pecked the ground. ‘Pecker’ she called it.

‘You’re happy for her, Mr Dallon?’ Miss Mullover murmured.

He nodded. When she was older she’d wanted to be in the town, or any town. She began to go out with Elmer Quarry and this was how it had ended. It was a marriage of convenience: she knew that and he knew that and Elmer Quarry knew it. They were aware of it and they accepted it. ‘You’re certain, Mary Louise?’ he’d pressed her, and not for a second had she hesitated with her reassurance. She had an innocent way with her: that had always been her over-riding quality. Innocent of the consequences, she had committed her small, childhood sins; innocently, she had always chattered on. You could silence her in an instant; you could snatch away her confidence, and feel guilty as soon as you did so. ‘You won’t tire of it?’ he’d pressed her further. ‘The town and all that?’ Again there was the eager reassurance, leaving unsaid between them the fear he knew she suffered: of being obliged to remain in the farmhouse for ever, with half a life to live. The pretty chemist’s shop, going to dances with some tweed-jacketed young man: that had not happened, and she had concluded that time would not hesitate long enough to allow it. Alone in their pews in the church of St Giles were the Protestant spinsters of the parish, there to be observed week after week, added to at Christmas and Easter by Elmer Quarry’s sisters and others besides.

‘He’s not a troublesome man,’ Miss Mullover softly remarked, as if detecting what was passing through Mr Dallon’s mind. ‘So often when a girl marries you can see some trouble coming.’

Elmer Quarry was decent and reliable, Mr Dallon replied, his voice kept low also. Mary Louise could do worse, he was about to add, but changed his mind because it didn’t sound quite right. But Miss Mullover nodded all the same, silently agreeing that his daughter could have done worse.

‘Your Ovaltine, dear.’

Miss Foye places a tray containing a mug on the bedside table. The night-time tray is always the same one – made of tin, round and with a lip, blue flowers on a green ground. She asked about the flowers once and Miss Foye said she thought they were hydrangeas, a nice bunch of hydrangeas.

‘Be a good girl now, don’t let it get cold.’

‘What’s it all about, Miss Foye?’

In the dormitory the other women are obediently sipping their Ovaltine. Miss Foye always waits until all of them have finished, then collects the mugs on the tray and turns the light out. There are seven women in the dormitory: ‘Miss Foye’s best girls’ she calls them because they are able to sleep together without disturbing one another. Each night the last one to receive her Ovaltine receives the tray as well. Fairness is important in the house.

‘You know, dear, what it’s all about. I saw you listening to him.’

‘I didn’t understand.’

‘Drink up, love. Please now. Miss Foye is tired.’

‘I don’t want to leave the house.’

‘It’s not for us to say a thing like that. They know better.’

‘Who knows?’

‘The medicals, dear.’

‘They don’t know better where you’d want to be.’

‘Drink your drink, dear. Please now.’

Miss Foye moves away. She collects the empty mugs from the other bedside tables, one between each bed. She bids the women good-night, and each replies. She calls them Miss Foye’s best girls.

‘I remember the day I came to the house,’ the woman who is giving her trouble tonight remarks. ‘A Thursday afternoon.’

‘Good girl now. Finish up. Of course you do.’

‘ “You’ll be happier here, ” you said.’

‘You would say that in those days. Don’t cry, dear. Miss Foye is tired.’

But the woman does cry. She finishes her drink and hands back the mug, and when Miss Foye has turned the light out she sobs beneath the bedclothes so that the others cannot hear her.

Mary Louise served in the shop, instructed by Matilda and Rose. They showed her where everything was, and how to make out a bill, and how to roll and unroll the bolts of material. She heard them muttering to one another about her, Rose saying she was slow to pick things up.

In the kitchen she was allocated certain tasks, specifically to lay the table in the dining-room before each meal and to carry in the plates and dishes when the food was ready, afterwards to wash them while Matilda dried. Rose liked using the vacuum cleaner on the stairs and in the dining-room and the front room, the bedrooms and landings. Matilda dusted and attended to the front-room fire in winter; all the cooking was done by Rose. Mary Louise made the bed she shared with her husband, Matilda and Rose each made her own.

When she’d been a member of the household for a few months Mary Louise explored a narrow staircase behind a door on the upper landing. There were two attics when she reached the top of it. The toys that had belonged to Elmer and his sisters were neatly arranged on the deep shelves of a cupboard, toys that by the look of them might have belonged to an earlier generation of Quarrys also. Framed pictures were stacked against a wall, books piled against another. Outmoded display dummies stood like statues, some of them shrouded with sheets. An old sewing-machine, replaced by the one Matilda used in the dining-room, had been kept. So had sofas and chairs in need of re-upholstering, and a rocking-horse. A tea-chest contained unidentified objects wrapped in yellowing newspaper – china, Mary Louise presumed. In the steeply pitched roof there was a single window in each of the two rooms. There was a stillness up there and the fusty airlessness was somehow comforting. With the door at the bottom of the staircase closed behind her, Mary Louise sensed the only real privacy she was offered, and on occasions when she knew where everyone was she took to quietly slipping up the steep uncarpeted stairs, taking her shoes off so that her footsteps wouldn’t echo through the house. She sat in an armchair, sinking down into its depths. She closed her eyes and thought about things, about how she missed the farmhouse and the fields at Culleen, and riding her bicycle along the familiar roads. She enjoyed serving in the shop, and she knew Rose was wrong to say she was slow. She was quicker than either of the sisters at grasping a customer’s needs. She could already gauge precisely the amount of brown paper required to wrap whatever had been purchased, and her parcels were tidier than theirs, the string looped so that they might easily be carried. When discount was mentioned by a customer she knew better than to quote a figure without consulting Elmer first, but she also knew that soon the day would come when she’d be able to anticipate his wishes down to the last ha’penny. As second-best to Dodd’s Medical Hall, the drapery was interesting enough. It was when the shop closed that melancholy set in.

In the past, in the days when Mary Louise had been a modest customer herself, Matilda and Rose had always been agreeable. She remembered buying hooks and eyes and other necessities in Quarry’s, and groceries in Foley’s during her years at Miss Mullover’s schoolroom. She remembered a time when she could only just see over the counter in Quarry’s, being in the shop with her mother and being lifted on to a round-bottomed chair that was still there. Matilda had once asked her what age she was. Rose had run into the back and returned with a sweet oatcake. Now they were like two other people.

Her mother, in whom she confided during one of her Sunday visits to Culleen, said it maybe wasn’t easy for them, having a newcomer about the place, their long-established routine shaken up. It wasn’t easy for her either, Mary Louise began to reply, but her mother just shook her head. ‘You’re looking well,’ she observed in the silence that developed, implying that that, too, was important.

There were other matters, which Mary Louise did not discuss with her mother, nor with anyone. She would have with Tessa Enright, but Tessa Enright had gone to Dublin to train as a physiotherapist and only returned to the town at Christmas. No correspondence had developed between the two girls, except that Mary Louise had found out her friend’s address and had written to invite her to the wedding. She hadn’t been able to come.

There were other girls, still in the neighbourhood, whom Mary Louise had known well at school, but none had been as close as Tessa Enright, and certainly none would have been a candidate for the confidences Mary Louise felt she couldn’t share with her mother. Nor could she have shared them with Letty, and when she thought about it she wondered about Tessa Enright: even if she had never gone away and their friendship had continued to thrive, this particular subject might have been easier to raise with a girl who was married herself.

So Mary Louise kept to herself an awkwardness that had arisen in the bedroom she shared with her husband. But as the year came to an end, and the spring and summer of the following year passed by, she was increasingly aware of the interest taken in her person by people who came into the shop. As soon as they’d requested whatever it was they needed, women would glance down her body, the movement of their eyes briefly halting when it reached her stomach, then swiftly retracted. She knew what was in their minds. On Sundays she was also aware of it in her mother’s mind, and in Letty’s. ‘You’re looking well’: the repeated observation of her mother’s acquired an edgy significance, seeming now to be a question almost. In the bedroom the matter was not discussed, either: Elmer said nothing, and never had. He watched her brushing her hair, seated in front of the dressing-table mirror, and she could see him also, already in his pyjamas, a vagueness in his eyes that had not been there in the past. At first she smiled into the mirror at him, but she stopped because he didn’t seem to notice.

‘No need to bang that door, Mary Louise,’ Rose reprimanded her one morning when she closed the dining-room door because there was a draught. She had pushed at it with her shoulder because her hands were carrying a tray that contained four plates of porridge. It wasn’t her fault that the door caught in the draught and banged. ‘Close the door after you, Mary Louise,’ Rose had commanded a week before.

‘Sorry,’ she said, passing round the plates of porridge. Any one of the three of them might have risen and closed the door, since it was clear that it had been difficult for her to do so. ‘Sorry,’ she had said on the earlier occasion, not voicing her thoughts then either.

She didn’t like Rose’s food, the fatty chops, the bits of steak fried too hard and too long, the swedes and watery cabbage. Rose only enjoyed making cakes and sweet things and was more successful with them. There was always a cake on the table at the meal they sat down to at six o’clock in the evening, but the brown bread and soda bread were heavy and seemed to Mary Louise not to be baked all the way through. She offended Rose by buying a loaf now and again, and by making toast for breakfast. ‘Her Ladyship,’ she heard Rose saying to her sister, and it occurred to Mary Louise that whenever one of them said something she was apparently not meant to hear it was always said when she was just within earshot.

In the autumn of 1956, when the marriage was just over a year old, Mary Louise awoke one morning in the bleak hour before dawn to find tears on her cheeks. She hadn’t been dreaming; for no specific reason the tears continued to slip out, soundlessly, without sobbing. What she had imagined before her marriage had not come about. Being looked up to in the town, with money to spare for the clothes she wanted, pleasantly going from shop to shop without having to hesitate over the cost, as her mother did: all this had not replaced the long days at Culleen, with nothing to do when the kitchen work was over except to wash the eggs. Vaguely, she had imagined that as Elmer’s wife the house would be hers and that in time she would be deferred to in the shop. On Sunday mornings, since Elmer didn’t accompany her to church, she sat with her family, as if the marriage hadn’t taken place, then stopped going altogether. On Sunday afternoons she continued to cycle out to the farmhouse – a weekly routine that took the place of the Sunday walk she and Elmer had become accustomed to. It was when she found herself so eagerly looking forward to those visits that she realized she missed both the farmhouse and the companionship of her family more than she could ever have believed.

Waking in the very early morning and finding herself melancholy became, after the first time, a familiar repetition. She lay beside her sleeping husband, dwelling on her own stupidity and what she recognized now as her simplicity, her stubbornness in not perceiving a reality that was apparent. Before her marriage the Reverend Harrington had made her call to see him at the rectory. It was a joke among the Protestants of the neighbourhood that he always gave a parishioner raspberry cordial with hot water in it when he wished to be serious, and this he duly did, offering biscuits as well. ‘Do you love Elmer?’ he asked bluntly, a month before the marriage. ‘Please don’t be shy with me, Mary Louise.’ She wasn’t shy; no one ever was with the Reverend Harrington. It was easy to tell him a lie, easy to smile and say she did love Elmer Quarry, since she didn’t want to have a conversation like the ones she had with Letty. When she was fourteen she’d thought she was in love with her delicate cousin, and later with James Stewart. But all that was silly when she looked back on it. It was far more real, going for walks with Elmer Quarry and having him tucking her arm into his. It was far more real to think of herself in the shop on a winter’s evening, when the lights were lit and the radiators were warm, and to see herself the mistress of the house above it. There would be card parties in the huge front room, with its marble fireplace and grey flowered wallpaper. There would be music and even dancing, and a great spread on the dining table, the doors between the two rooms spread wide. ‘I’m glad we’ve had this chat,’ the Reverend Harrington had said.

All those memories and imaginings came back to Mary Louise in her sleepless hours. She had cut photographs of James Stewart out of Letty’s Picturegoer and framed them with passe-partout. The cousin she’d thought she’d been in love with hadn’t been healthy enough in the end to continue coming to the schoolroom every day. Grown up now but still thin and weak-looking, suffering from something that couldn’t be cured, he’d been in the church on the wedding day but not at the farmhouse afterwards. While she lay there in the mornings Mary Louise recalled the benign countenance of the clergyman, his good-natured smile, the glass of pink cordial held out to her, the Everyday biscuits. Why had no one told her that it was a terrible thing she was doing? Only Letty had done that and Letty had rampaged and raved like a mad girl so that you couldn’t listen. Her mother had not said a word, her father only asking her if she was sure. Miss Mullover had congratulated her in a most profuse way. Would Tessa Enright have protested, Tessa who wasn’t easily taken in? If she would, why hadn’t she written a letter? Why hadn’t she sent a wire, or come down on the bus, as any friend might? What was the use of the clergyman only asking if you loved him, nothing more? If his sisters didn’t like her why hadn’t they come up to her and said so? Why hadn’t they warned her of their unpleasant intentions? Why hadn’t she herself noticed how tedious it was when he told her yet again that a draper’s shop couldn’t move with the times? On their Sunday walks he had explained that certain haberdashery lines were being carried these days by the supermarkets and that this would increase. Why had she so foolishly listened instead of walking away?

On their walks she had heard about the shop in the past, about the time the overcoats had been sent to Mrs O’Keefe on approval, when a puppy had torn the fur off four of them. She had heard about bad debts, and the rules there were about the acceptance of cheques from strangers, and how some elderly woman came in from the hills every August and bought an outfit of clothes for a son who’d gone to England in 1941 and hadn’t been back since. She had heard of her fiancé’s astonishment that the YMCA billiard-room was not more frequented. She had apparently listened without it ever occurring to her that the repetition of these conversational subjects would one day grate on her nerves. Letty hadn’t warned her about that; if only Letty knew that what she’d kept on about was the least of anyone’s worries.

‘There’s something dried on to this plate,’ Rose complained one evening in the dining-room. ‘Cabbage it looks like.’

Rose had just eaten sausages and bacon from the plate. About to run a piece of bread over it in order to soak up the tasty fat that remained, she noticed that a shred of cabbage leaf had remained since the last time it was used.

‘It’s greens all right,’ Rose said. She passed the plate to her sister, who scrutinized it in turn. It was definitely the remains of greens, Matilda said.

Elmer took no notice. Often at mealtimes he was lost in the depths of mathematical calculations that had originated in the accounting office.

‘Take a look at that,’ Matilda invited, and handed Mary Louise the plate, on which the well-peppered grease that Rose had been about to consume was now congealing. The offending piece of cabbage was stuck to the rim, its presence made more permanent by the heating of the plate in the oven. Probably it was cabbage, Mary Louise agreed, since cabbage had been the vegetable at the midday meal.

‘I always took the mop to them when I washed the plates,’ Matilda said. ‘I used always to hold them up to see if there was anything like that left.’

‘I could have eaten it,’ Rose said.

‘You would have shifted it wiping with the bread,’ her sister agreed. ‘You’d have eaten it then definitely.’

‘Someone else’s leavings.’

Mary Louise rose from the table and began to clear the supper dishes away. It could happen to anyone that a speck would be left behind on a plate. It wasn’t as though it were poisonous.

‘I wonder you didn’t see it when you were drying,’ she said to Matilda.

‘When you’re drying you take everything to be clean. You take it for granted.’

‘Use a mop in future.’ Rose’s tone was peremptory, and Matilda glanced at Elmer, wondering if he’d heard. It was clear from the excitement in Matilda’s face that she considered Rose had been more than a little daring to issue so direct an order, as to a child or a servant.

Mary Louise left the dining-room without replying but a few minutes later, when she returned from the kitchen with a tray, she heard raised voices before she opened the door.

‘No more than a pigsty,’ Rose was saying.

Elmer mumbled something. Matilda said:

‘The cheek of the creature, saying you’d see it when you were drying.’

‘Knee-deep in manure that yard was! With people attending a wedding reception!’

Again there was a mumble from Elmer, interrupted by sudden shrillness from Rose.

‘What the sister got up to with Gargan was the talk of the town. It’s a wonder you didn’t marry a tinker and have done with it.’

‘Now look here,’ Elmer protested, and Mary Louise heard his chair being pushed back. His voice, too, had become loud.

‘Look nowhere,’ shrieked Rose. ‘We have her under our feet morning, noon and night.’

‘Your own sister could have eaten the dirt on that plate,’ Matilda reminded him. ‘We could be killed dead as we sit here.’

‘Arrah, don’t be talking nonsense,’ Elmer exclaimed crossly. ‘What harm would a bit of cabbage do anyone?’

‘Washed in soap it could do you harm,’ Matilda insisted. ‘And God knows what you’d find on your plate the next time.’

‘The brother’s a half-wit,’ Rose said.

Elmer didn’t reply to that. Matilda said that you might make a rice pudding in a dish that wallpaper paste had been mixed in. If the dish wasn’t washed properly you’d be eating wallpaper paste. She suggested that Elmer should make inquiries as to whether or not wallpaper paste could kill you dead.

‘She sucks up to the customers,’ Rose said. ‘Palavering all over them. D’you want a slice of cake, Elmer?’

There was a rattle of cups on saucers, and the sound of tea being poured.

‘Is it cherry?’ Elmer said.

‘It is.’

‘I’ll take a slice so.’

There was silence then: the interlude was over. Mary Louise did not enter the dining-room, but returned to the kitchen. She was at the sink when the sisters came in ten minutes later with more of the suppertime dishes. They were quite nice to her, not mentioning the shred of cabbage. Rose offered her a slice of cherry cake but Mary Louise shook her head, not turning round from the sink because she didn’t want them to see she’d been crying.

Elmer went out to the YMCA billiard-room that evening and when he returned Mary Louise was already in bed, with the light out, pretending to be asleep. They’d known she’d be coming back to the dining-room just at that moment. They’d known she’d pause outside the door, arrested by the cross voices. Her tears oozed from the corners of her eyes and ran into her hair, damping her ears and her neck. It hurt her most that they had called her brother a half-wit.

The following afternoon, when Rose and Matilda were engaged in the shop and Elmer was in the accounting office, Mary Louise ascended the bare stairs to the attics. There it was possible to weep noisily, sobbing and panting. She clenched her hands and beat the sides of her thighs with them, punishing her foolishness.

She dreams they are eight again, she and Tessa Enright. ‘Once a month you have it,’ Tessa Enright says on a road near Culleen, both of them sent out to look for a ewe that has strayed. ‘You stop it with rags.’

It’s the bane of a girl’s life, Letty says. In the kitchen her mother says to be careful, picking the wedding date. The day she arrives in Miss Foye’s house she has it. ‘Don’t leave me, please,’ she begs that day, but he says he has to.

When they find the sheep it is dead beside a stone. She walks alone out of a wood and there Miss Foye’s house is. ‘You’ll be well off there,’ he says, and she puts her arms around his neck because he is right. He has never been unkind to her.

On Christmas Eve 1956 Elmer accompanied Renehan, the hardware merchant from the premises next door, to Hogan’s Hotel. It was half-past four in the afternoon, as it always was when the two made their way along Bridge Street on Christmas Eve. A street musician who only appeared in the town at this time of year was playing a melodeon. The pavements were lively with people from the poor part of the town who left what shopping they could afford to the last couple of hours on Christmas Eve, hoping for bargains. A drunken man lurched in the street, talking to anyone who would listen.

‘A poor year,’ Renehan remarked as they turned into the side entrance that led to the hotel’s bar. It was what the two men talked about on this Christmas occasion: the fluctuations of business during the previous twelve months, difficulties with suppliers in their two different fields of trade, profit and loss. Renehan was an older man, thin and trimly dressed, with a well-kept moustache and a reputation for personal vanity.

‘Shocking,’ Elmer agreed.

The hotel bar was crowded, as festive as the street outside. People like Elmer, not normally seen there, were standing in groups, talking loudly. Paper decorations were strung diagonally across the ceiling.

‘You’ll take the usual intoxicant, Elmer?’ Renehan was known for his ornate, and in this case inaccurate, way of putting things. In his business life he cultivated a joky manner, believing that it attracted customers.

‘As a matter of fact,’ Elmer said, ‘I’ll take a small one.’

Renehan glanced amusedly at his companion. In all the years of this rendezvous the draper had never requested whiskey, not even the year he’d had a cold that should have kept him in bed. Renehan raised his eyebrows the way he’d once seen an actor doing all through a film.

‘That’s married life for you!’ he suggested and gently touched Elmer’s chest with his elbow.

Elmer didn’t reply; you didn’t have to with Renehan. He remained at the back of the bar while the hardware merchant pushed his way through the crowd. He hadn’t drunk whiskey since the night of his honeymoon; last Christmas he’d had a mineral as usual. It might indeed be married life, he reflected as he stood there. Maybe there was more to Renehan’s facetiousness than the man realized.

Noticing his presence, other men saluted Elmer across the bar, other shopkeepers for the most part, a couple of bank officials, Hanlon the solicitor. He wondered what they thought, or if they thought anything at all. Fifteen months he’d been married.

‘Compliments of the season!’ Renehan raised his glass and Elmer slightly raised his. The last thing he remembered of that Saturday night was the barman insisting that he wanted to close. The walk back to the Strand Hotel, the hall and the stairs, any parting words: none of that had remained with him. The next thing he could recollect after the barman said he had a home to go to himself was waking up with his clothes still on him.

Renehan offered him a cigarette, as if presuming that since Elmer was drinking whiskey he would have taken up tobacco as well. Elmer shook his head. He’d never smoked a cigarette in his life, he said, and didn’t intend to.

‘The better for it.’ Renehan’s thin brown fingers were illuminated by the flare of a match as he lit his own. He inhaled, and blew a smoke-ring. He mentioned a farmer to whom he had refused credit during the year.

‘The same with myself,’ Elmer said.

They hadn’t revisited McBirney’s bar during their remaining days at the Strand Hotel because he considered that going there in the first place had been a mistake. On their last night one of the men who shared their table in the dining-room was persistent with an invitation, and Mary Louise apparently wished to return to the public house, indeed seemed to have agreed that they would do so. But he’d stuck to his guns. For one thing, the episode had cost a fortune.

Renehan spoke of other customers, of possible bad debts in the months to come. He mentioned farmers on whom an eye needed to be kept, whose fortunes were on the wane. As well as the three sons who worked with him in the shop, Renehan had a daughter who attended to the accounts. In the bar of Hogan’s Hotel the two men had many a time agreed that it made a substantial difference, not having to employ anyone.

‘Is it gin?’ Elmer asked.

‘With a drop of hot water.’

He made his way to the bar. The manageress of the hotel was assisting the barman with the Christmas custom. She was an unmarried woman of Elmer’s age, on the stout side, with plucked eyebrows and hair that reminded Elmer of the landlady’s hair at the Strand Hotel, being the same reddish shade. He had remarked on the similarity at the time, but Mary Louise said she didn’t think she’d ever laid eyes on the manageress of Hogan’s. Bridget her name was.

‘What’ll I get you, Mr Quarry?’ She smiled at him, her hands held out for the glasses. She was wearing a black dress, and a necklace that glittered on the flesh that was exposed where the dress ended. One of her teeth was marked with lipstick. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry! I didn’t say Happy Christmas, Mr Quarry.’

‘Happy Christmas, Bridget. A small one for myself. A gin with hot water in it for Mr Renehan.’

Years ago he had wondered about marrying a Catholic. When the time came, he’d thought he might have to if there wasn’t anyone else about. He’d looked down from the accounting office one day and seen the hotel manageress – assistant manageress she’d been then – holding a summer dress up against her. For a couple of weeks he’d considered making an approach, but then he’d decided there was no hurry. Would the whole thing be a different story now, he wondered, if he’d reached a different decision? Mixed marriages were two a penny these days.

‘How’s everything with you, Mr Quarry?’ she asked, taking his money and quickly returning the change.

‘Tumbling along, Bridget, tumbling along.’

‘Well, that’s great.’ She turned, as she spoke, to serve someone else. He didn’t know why she hadn’t married.

‘Good luck,’ Renehan said, raising his glass again.

In previous years Elmer had drunk his second glass of lemonade quickly, gulping it and then putting the glass down on a nearby surface. He’d usually been back in the shop by ten to five. Now he sipped his whiskey slowly, actually savouring the harsh taste. He found it pleasant in the bar, pleasanter in a way than the empty YMCA billiard-room.

‘Isn’t it an extraordinary thing,’ he said, ‘that Bridget never married?’

Renehan told him a long story about Bridget being in love with a young curate when she was young herself, how it had been the passion of her life.

‘Father Curtin. Whippersnapper with sideburns.’

‘I remember the man well.’

‘Changes were made when the p.p. got a whiff of it.’

‘Ah, they would be all right.’

‘There was talk at the time of Father Curtin leaving the priesthood. Anyway, he didn’t and poor Bridget was left high and dry.’

‘Well, I never heard that one.’

‘It was kept under wraps. There’s not many in this town that knows it to this day.’

‘Only Bridget.’

‘Well, Bridget naturally.’

Other scandals from the past, known to both men, were recalled. Renehan bought two more drinks, and then Elmer did.

‘I’d best be getting back,’ he said, realizing that it was almost six o’clock. Renehan moved away to talk to someone else. Elmer returned to the shop.

Something began that Christmas Eve, although Elmer at the time was not aware of it. Halfway through January, instead of looking in at the YMCA billiard-room, he found himself turning into the side entrance that led to Hogan’s bar. It was much emptier on this occasion, but even so there were a couple of regular drinkers there. Knowing them by sight, Elmer nodded in their direction and ordered himself a glass of whiskey from the barman, Gerry, who also acted as the hotel’s porter. He sat on a high stool at the bar, talking to Gerry about the weather.

A few weeks later this visit was repeated. Elmer left the house above the shop with every intention of playing a lone game of billiards for an hour or two, but found himself again turning into the side entrance. On both occasions he made no reference to this change of plan when he later returned home. The whiskey deadened an ache that oppressed him. It lifted a weight from his spirits, if only for an hour or so. Too much, as on his wedding night, would bring a fog of darkness, but often in the accounting room, watching his sisters and his wife in the shop below, such darkness seemed like a balm.

By the spring of that year Elmer’s visits to the billiard-room had dwindled further, but since they had always fallen off when the days lengthened this passed unnoticed by Daly the caretaker. The difference was that with the advent of autumn they were not resumed. During the intervening months Elmer had had no excuse to leave the house in the evenings, for if he stated – as once or twice he did – that he intended to go for a walk Mary Louise prepared herself to accompany him. So instead he took to calling in briefly at Hogan’s bar in the afternoon, and was glad when September came so that he could spend longer there under the pretext of playing billiards. By the end of the year people in the town had begun to notice that Elmer Quarry was often, these days, in Hogan’s.

Memory is sometimes perfect, clear as a light. First thing when she wakes she wallows in it, assisted by the dusky tranquillity of dawn. The morning after the visit she wallows in the favourite year of all her life, the year the Russians put a dog into space, the year of Bill Haley, the year De Valera proclaimed a state of emergency. A nun in the Sacred Heart convent, expected to live to be a hundred, died at ninety-nine. A sewage problem occurred in Conlon Street, necessitating pneumatic drilling, new pipes and re-surfacing. A fawn-coloured tomcat, property of the gasworks manager, attacked a neighbour’s birdcage, detaching it from its hook and provoking threats of legal action. Tyrell’s the vegetable shop closed. Humphrey Bogart, Letty’s favourite – plastered all over the bedroom at Culleen – died. 1957 it was.

‘Mary Louise,’ she whispers in the dawn that comes after the upset of her visitor. ‘Mary Louise Dallon. Mrs Quarry as is.’ He is old now, the sisters older still. He could live for a dozen more years, fourteen or fifteen even, the sisters endlessly. He pays for her keep in Miss Foye’s house, and always has. Years ago the sisters tried to make her father pay but of course there was nothing to spare for that at Culleen. ‘Your husband’s good,’ Miss Foye says often, because not everyone here is paid for. The bigger dormitories are bare; the unpaid-for have enamel mugs and plates. He’s a decent man, driven to drink. It isn’t his fault that they’re closing down the houses. They’ll bundle the obstreperous together, somewhere else will be found for them. She’s never been obstreperous herself.

A figure emerges from the gloom and sits on her bed with a blanket around her: Mrs Leavy from Youghal come over to tell her dreams.

She listens and then she tells her own.

On Sundays, having exchanged what news there was over a cup of tea at Culleen, Mary Louise usually began her journey back to the town at about a quarter to five, her spirits drooping as the journey progressed. But one March afternoon in 1957 she turned off the road that led to the town and cycled aimlessly, exploring a neighbourhood she did not know well. She chose a different direction the following week and when, eventually, all the ways became familiar to her she returned repeatedly to a favourite one. She was ironically reminded of the Sunday walks of her courtship, the bicycle left in a gateway, the crossroads where she and Elmer turned to the right, the woods they passed through, the humped bridge. It seemed like a lifetime ago, as deep in the past as the first day she attended Miss Mullover’s schoolroom. Whenever she crossed the humped bridge on her bicycle she reflected again, each time with greater bitterness, that someone might have warned her. Why had it been only Letty? And why had Letty made her concern sound like envy?

One Sunday, having ridden further than usual, she found herself at the head of a grassy avenue. Rusty iron gates, set in a spacious curve of railings that long ago had lost all signs of paint, seemed as though they had been flung back with a gesture in some other generation, remaining so to support a jungle of brambles, and ivy branches as thick as an arm. From the road Mary Louise could see the stark white house to which the avenue led, the modest property of her Aunt Emmeline. Only once before had she been here, when she and Letty were entrusted with a gift: a pound of the butter their mother used to make. The butter was later sent to the house regularly, but after that single occasion the task of delivering it became James’s because his sisters had complained so about a mile-long hill up which they’d had to push their bicycles. As she stared down the avenue, Mary Louise found herself recalling that her Aunt Emmeline’s only child – the cousin with whom, for a while at school, she had imagined she was in love – had been able to attend the wedding service in spite of his invalid state. If his condition had worsened she’d probably have heard. Robert his name was.

Mary Louise turned away, pedalling back the way she’d come, but had hardly gone more than a few yards when a car, thick with dust, rounded the bend she was approaching. The horn was sounded, her Aunt Emmeline waved, and then the car drew up. Feeling stupid and caught out, cross because she should have avoided this neighbourhood, Mary Louise dismounted. She knew she’d gone red in the face, and hoped it would be assumed that she was simply out of breath.

‘Heavens above!’ her aunt exclaimed, winding down the car window. ‘Are you visiting us, Mary Louise?’

She shook her head. She tried to think of an excuse, but none would come. There was no reason in the world why she should be here on a Sunday evening. She said the first thing that came into her head.

‘I wondered how Robert was.’

‘You’ve been to see him?’

‘No, no. I just wondered –’

‘Robert’s not bad at all these days. Come on down, dear. He’d love to see you.’

The head – shaggy-haired, the skin of the forehead reddened by exposure to the weather, as the cheeks below it were – was withdrawn. The car moved forward, hesitated, then turned in wildly to the entrance, and advanced at speed on the avenue. Mary Louise rode after it.

Robert – a wiry, gangling child with mischievous eyes – was now a pale young man, and the mischief in his eyes had turned into what seemed like amusement. He wore glasses, which he had not in the past; but his spare, bony frame reminded Mary Louise of the child he’d been. A shock of dark hair kept falling over his forehead; an adult’s smile hovered on his lips.

‘Heavens above!’ he exclaimed, exactly as his mother had. ‘Mary Louise!’

He sat by a fire in a large untidy room. Tables and armchairs were covered with drawings of winter trees, and papers with scribbles in green ink on them, and books. In a window alcove battalions of toy soldiers were engaged in warfare. Fishing-rods and nets were a muddle in a corner. Glass doors led to a conservatory where a vine grew.

The time Mary Louise and Letty had cycled over with the butter they had not been invited to penetrate further into this house than the kitchen: all she saw now was strange to her. But she had often heard the house talked about, usually in the same breath as her Aunt Emmeline’s husband, who had died before she was born. Her mother’s sister had married money, it was said, a statement invariably followed by the reminder that the money hadn’t lasted because the man she married was a gambler. ‘Charm to burn,’ Mr Dallon used to say, and – unlike the money – the charm had lasted to the end. Mary Louise never knew what it was her uncle had died of, and had sometimes wondered if it was the same affliction that Robert suffered from.

‘I was out looking for primroses,’ she lied to her cousin in the untidy room, having noticed a few by the side of the avenue. She always went to Culleen on a Sunday, she added, but today she’d ridden about a bit, thinking to pick spring flowers.

Becoming fuller as he listened, her cousin’s smile straightened the line of his lips, which otherwise were on a slant. He didn’t seem interested in the reasons for her presence.

‘I met Aunt Emmeline,’ she doggedly added.

‘Does marriage suit you, Mary Louise?’

She replied that she was used to it by now. The words came scuttling out: she hadn’t meant to answer the question quite like that, and realized he knew she was being evasive.

‘Well, I suppose you would be used to it. What a silly question!’

He took his spectacles off and wiped them on a handkerchief He was wearing brown corduroy trousers and a tweed jacket, and brown brogue shoes. A watch-chain hung from the buttonhole of his left lapel and disappeared into the pocket beneath it. The family rumour was that this watch had been returned from a soft-hearted pawnbroker when he heard that Robert’s father had died without leaving much behind.

‘D’you serve in that shop?’

‘Part of the day I serve there.’

‘I often wondered.’

Her Aunt Emmeline brought in tea. She placed a tray on a small table which she cleared of books and papers, and pulled the table closer to the fire. A dog had followed her, a Kerry Blue.

‘We don’t often have a visitor,’ her aunt said, and Mary Louise could see that she was pleased, delighted even. She eked out a living selling apples and grapes, and the vegetables she grew. The pair of them wouldn’t have survived, Mary Louise had heard her father say, were it not for the apples and the grapes.

‘D’you remember you and Tessa Enright putting worms in that girl’s desk?’ Robert said. ‘Who was that girl?’

‘Possy Luke.’

‘She screeched like she’d been bitten.’

‘Poor Possy! She was afraid of worms.’

Their schooldays were talked about, and her aunt asked after Mary Louise’s family. She’d heard about Letty going out with the vet. She knew him; she said he was likeable.

‘How’s James getting on?’ Robert asked.

‘James is fine.’

This appeared to be true. Her brother didn’t complain as much as he used to; he didn’t fly off the handle so easily. For the first time in his life he seemed to be aware that he was the farm’s inheritor, that the work he did was for himself. This transformation had come about since Mary Louise’s marriage, and had intensified since Letty had begun to go out with the vet.

‘And how are the Quarrys?’ her aunt inquired.

They, too, were fine, Mary Louise replied.

‘Well, that’s good.’

‘I mustn’t stay long.’

‘Oh, don’t be in a hurry, dear. We don’t see much of you.’

Robert laughed. ‘We don’t see her at all.’

She told them how the bicycle ride, and the long hill, had years ago been too much for Letty and herself, how it had jaded them, which was why James had been given the task of delivering the weekly gift of butter. She thought she’d better say that, in case offence had ever been taken.

‘That’s why we know James better,’ her aunt said.

‘He used to play bagatelle with me,’ Robert said. ‘He loved bagatelle.’

‘He plays cards with the Edderys now.’

They laughed. But she wondered if she should have mentioned cards in view of the stories about the gambling that had left her aunt and her cousin penurious. Again she felt warmth creeping into her cheeks, and hoped they wouldn’t notice.

‘Stay and talk to Robert for a little,’ her aunt begged. The soft plea in her tone had an edge of anxiety to it. She rose as she spoke and poured them each another cup of tea. Then she went away, the Kerry Blue ambling sleepily after her.

‘She thinks I don’t see people,’ Robert said when the door closed behind her. ‘Which of course is true.’

‘What do you do all day, Robert?’

‘I come downstairs to this room. I’m very fond of this room. I light the fire when it’s chilly. We have breakfast together in the kitchen. The rest of the day depends on all sorts of things.’

She remembered his being driven to school by his mother when everyone else either walked or cycled. She had always associated him with his mother, that weather-chapped face behind the steering-wheel. She never saw her aunt in the town these days, and she wondered where the shopping was done. She had passed a general store and a petrol pump a couple of miles back. It would be there, she guessed.

‘A quiet life,’ her cousin said.

‘Yes.’

The crooked smile expanded and straightened. He was watching her: all the time he was talking she could feel him watching her.

‘I don’t think I’d have been much good at anything noisier.’

She smiled in turn, not knowing whether to deny that, deciding not to. He said:

‘I used to want to be an auctioneer when I was at Miss Mullover’s. I fancied myself shouting the odds. Can you believe it? I really did.’

‘I can’t see you an auctioneer, Robert.’

‘Useless I’d have been.’

‘I wanted to work in Dodd’s. It seemed like paradise.’

‘You got the next best thing.’

‘I thought of Quarry’s too.’

‘And is it paradise, Mary Louise?’

‘Oh, all that was just a childish thing.’

He laughed, still watching her. His eyes were brown, but very dark, nearly black when they lost their luminosity. His glasses, tortoiseshell-rimmed, perfectly round, suited him.

‘Come and look at another childish thing,’ he said.

He pushed himself out of his armchair and led her to the table in the window where the soldiers were displayed. It was the double battle of the Aisne and Champagne, he said.

‘General Nivelle’s plan was to break through the German line between Vailly and Reims. This cluster of German armies was under the command of the Crown Prince himself.’

He pointed to where the German line had held, between Vendresse and La Ville aux Bois. Elsewhere it had been pushed firmly back. Mary Louise wondered which war was being fought, and for what purpose.

‘The Germans mustered a good counter-attack, but even so the French pressed on, breaking through the Chemin des Dames.’

Arrows with neatly printed names indicated all that. Some of the soldiers were lying down. These were the dead, he said.

She plucked up courage. ‘Which war was this?’

‘The one before last. The double battle took place in the spring of 1917.’

She followed him back to the fire. She began to say again that she must go, but already he was explaining that if the Russians hadn’t been preoccupied with their revolution it would have been a different story. She wanted to tell him that in Miss Mullover’s history lessons she’d been fascinated by Jeanne d’Arc. Shyness held her back again.

‘In the end it was the Germans who emerged victorious from the Aisne and Champagne encounter. I’m sorry: this is boring.’

‘No. No, it isn’t.’

‘I was explaining how I spend the day because you asked. I play with soldiers. And read. I read a very great deal.’

Mary Louise was not much of a one for reading herself. As well as Picturegoer, Letty bought Model Housekeeping, and there used to be the Girl’s Friend years ago, when she and Letty were younger. In the farmhouse there was a bookcase on the landing. Mary Louise had read The Garden of Allah and Greenery Street; at school they’d read Lorna Doone. She had never even looked at the titles of the books in the attics of the Quarrys’ house.

‘When it isn’t winter,’ her cousin said, ‘I do things in the vegetable beds. Sometimes I wander down to the stream. There’s a heron on that stream.’

‘I’ve never seen a heron.’

‘You could see one here, Mary Louise.’

He smiled again, and all of a sudden she wanted him to know that once she’d thought herself to be in love with him. She didn’t know why she had that urge, and of course it couldn’t be realized. But she thought it would be nice if he knew that being an invalid didn’t make him pathetic. He probably did know, she thought then: he seemed extraordinarily happy with the limited life he led.

‘It’s been nice seeing you again,’ was what she said, and before she left the room she promised to return.

‘It would be good of you,’ his mother said in the kitchen. ‘You’ve no idea how much your visit delighted him.’

Mary Louise wanted it to be a secret. She didn’t want it known at Culleen, and certainly not in the Quarrys’ house, that she had spent an hour with her invalid cousin. She almost asked her aunt if they might keep this afternoon as something among the three of them, but she could not find the words. Then it occurred to her that her mother and her aunt were nowadays not often in touch; sometimes a whole year went by. And since her aunt no longer shopped in the town there seemed little likelihood of anything slipping out in conversation there.

As she rode swiftly on the grassy avenue, she tried to remember what being in love with her cousin had felt like. Had it really been much the same, less potent even, than her feelings for the cinema images of James Stewart? For almost twelve years, since she was twelve herself, she had not devoted more than an ordinary, passing thought to the boy who’d been unable to go on attending school, even though he’d been driven in a car. Unfortunate, she had considered him, leaving it at that.

That Sunday evening it was easier in the dining-room when Mary Louise took her usual place between her husband and Matilda. Elmer helped himself to the egg salad Rose had prepared, asking questions about the farm, and vaguely responding to the answers.

‘I hear your sister’s chummed up with Dennehy,’ Matilda said.

‘I think so.’

‘Funny, that.’

The silence that usually followed this favourite comment of Matilda’s did so again. Elmer said eventually:

‘Is that the vet from Ennistane crossroads?’

Rose affirmed this. Dennehy’s father was the publican at Ennistane, she added.

‘Does your mother mind?’ Matilda asked.

‘Mind?’

‘A person like Dennehy.’

‘She didn’t say she minded.’

‘RC of course?’ Elmer always cut lettuce and tomato up very fine, and mashed a hard-boiled egg. Having done so now, he reached out for salad cream.

‘Oh, yes,’ Rose said.

‘They’re not without means, the Dennehys.’ Matilda nodded more than once, to lend significance to this. ‘Perhaps there’s that.’

She spoke lightly, as if she sought to rid her statement of its implication, or to suggest that if the words were examined carefully it would be found that, in spite of the emphasis of her nodding, nothing much was being suggested. Carefully, she scraped butter on to a slice of soda bread. Tidily, she cut the slice in half and then in half again.

‘Even so,’ Rose took up the theme, ‘I’d have thought Mrs Dallon would be concerned.’

Mary Louise looked away. She half-closed her eyes and saw the soldiers on the table, the little printed arrows, the line of cannon. The uniforms were exactly as they’d been in reality, her cousin had explained, every detail right. She wondered where they’d come from. In a poverty-stricken household the wealth of colour seemed quite out of place.

‘Rough,’ Rose said, the word appearing to be thrown out at random, attached to nothing.

Matilda nodded, and again there was a silence. Elmer passed his cup for more tea. Rose poured it. Matilda added milk.

She would go again next Sunday. She would spend no more than ten minutes at Culleen and then ride quickly on. This time she’d find the courage to ask her aunt if it could be a secret. She’d give a reason, she’d think of something during the week.

‘We need to order gimp,’ Elmer was saying. ‘And ticking.’

On Sundays he went through the stock. He had a method, he’d told Mary Louise on one of their pre-marriage walks. Every Sunday morning he took a different line and checked the supply in stock: haberdashery one week, velvets and velveteens the next, chintzes, satins and silks, then hats and dresses, then overcoats, suits, all menswear, socks and braces. On Sunday evenings he went through the books, minutely comparing the entries with last week’s. It wasn’t necessary, any more than it was necessary to keep a record of the particular garments that were repeatedly rejected when sent out on approval. But all this kind of thing interested him. All this was part of trading.

‘I bet a shilling he’ll be in this week,’ Matilda said, referring to the traveller from whom gimp and ticking were ordered. ‘He’s due since February.’

Mary Louise wondered if there’d be a different battle on the table the next time. Would there be two different sides, the uniforms different, the words on the arrows printed in a different language? She imagined her cousin in the vegetable garden that kept his mother and him going. She saw him bent over a bed in the sunshine, weeding between rows of lettuce. How strange his solitary life must be! And how strange for her aunt to have married money that was not there! Was what they implied about Letty true? Was she going out with the vet in the same way as she herself had gone out with Elmer Quarry? Would Letty marry him and sometimes in the night reach out for him, seeking his physical warmth? Or would all that be a different kind of thing for Letty?

‘There’s a couple of those travellers getting slack,’ Elmer said.

She and her cousin had nothing in common; pushed away into a corner, this realization had remained there ever since he’d talked about the battle in France. Reading was what he liked; sometimes when he said something she didn’t understand it. He’d be bored if she kept turning up on Sundays; you could see he liked to be alone in spite of what his mother said.

‘Surprising your mother could accept Dennehy’s roughness,’ Rose said. ‘Surprising, that.’

In time all those who can understand realize that nowadays things are being ordered differently. The three doctors who regularly visit the house talk in turn to those whom they believe would be better off in what they make a point of calling ‘the community’. Where there is no family, or if a family does not wish to cooperate, places will be found in sheltered accommodation.

‘Is it community singing?’ Belle D inquires. ‘Is that what they mean?’ Her name is Belle Dymock, but for reasons of her own she has forbidden her surname’s use, while insisting also that her first name should not be employed on its own.

‘The community’s where you came from,’ the Spanish wife replies. Her surname, too, has caused difficulties, not because she dislikes it but because no one can pronounce it. She is not, in fact, Spanish herself, but has acquired her sobriquet through marrying a Spaniard who deserted her in Gibraltar.

‘Did you ever hear the like?’ another woman asks, a faded woman who speaks only when a subject catches her imagination.

‘It’s the tablets,’ Mrs Leavy explains. ‘Medication works wonders.’

They all say that. They say it and repeat it: the new drugs of the 1980s make the miracle possible. The doctor who cares for Belle D has told her she could easily work in the carpet factory again. Pretty Bríd Beamish – no fault of her own she took a wrong turning – will be adorned in wedding finery yet, no reason in the world why she shouldn’t be. All that must be ensured is that the medication is taken, daily and precisely as prescribed. The assistance of family members will be required, assurances insisted upon. ‘Isn’t it the best leave-taking you could have?’ jovially remarks the doctor who has a beard, smiling at the faces of the unsmiling. Father Malley sits with each departing inmate, recalling Our Lady and her mercy.

‘Mary Louise! Come here, Mary Louise!’ Small Sadie beckons, and questions when she is obeyed: ‘Will you go back to the graveyard, Mary Louise? Will you get up to your tricks?’ Laughter cackles from the tiny woman’s throat. In the house she is often likened to a hen because of that noise she makes.

‘What tricks are those, Sadie?’

But Sadie only shakes her head. At night she is locked away alone. She broke a gardener’s arm one time. She’s in the house because too often she believes she has to break things and tear off wallpaper. A week ago she was told she would remain in care for a while yet.

‘Sadie’s the lucky one!’ she cries in the same shrill way. ‘Poor old eejits, what good is it to you? What good the Holy Apostolic Church? What good the dogs in the traps? Dog eats dog, Thundering Joe and Flashby. Tinned with rabbit.’

‘Oh, hold your damn noise,’ a woman snaps.

He brought binoculars in case the heron was about. The soldiers had been his father’s, he said. There were just those she’d seen, French and German: the battles he could reconstruct were limited.

‘You’ve heard about the watch?’ He lifted it from his jacket pocket. They were standing on the shallow bank of the stream he’d spoken of. If Mary Louise kept watching she’d see tiny trout swimming by.

‘It’s a pretty watch.’ She had admired it without saying anything when she’d first noticed him snapping it open. It was slender, golden, its case engraved, the chain finer than was usual.

‘My father, you know.’ He laughed. ‘You have heard, haven’t you?’

‘People tell a story.’

‘It’s true. If he had remembered the soldiers were still in the house he’d have tried to sell them too. I wish I’d known him.’

He explained that at the time when he’d ceased to come to school it hadn’t been because he was weaker than usual, but because his mother couldn’t any longer spare the time to drive there and back twice a day. She couldn’t afford help in the vegetable garden they made their living from: every hour was precious.

‘She taught me in the evenings. Not that I know much.’

‘Actually, you seem to know a lot.’

‘Certain subjects we didn’t bother with at all. I can hardly count, for instance.’ He lifted the binoculars from around his neck and handed them to her. She focused them and searched the undergrowth, upstream and down. He took them from her, then shook his head.

‘We’re out of luck today.’

But at least they saw the trout going by, a couple at a time. You could catch them with a net, he said.

‘Poor little things. I wouldn’t want to.’

He laughed. He pushed the shock of hair back from his forehead, which was his most familiar gesture. The smaller the trout were, he said, the better they tasted. Then he said:

‘They’re an intimidating pair, aren’t they, your husband’s sisters?’

‘A bit, I suppose.’

‘You live in the same house as them?’

‘Oh, yes. Above the shop.’

‘I’m not so sure I’d entirely care for that.’

They walked back the way they’d come. He said:

‘At your wedding my mother and I were in the second pew. I kept wondering what you’d look like. You passed up the aisle with your father but I only saw your back.’

‘I turned round when the whole thing was over.’

‘You were Mrs Quarry then.’

‘Yes, I was.’

‘I hadn’t seen you before that for ages.’ He paused. ‘Actually, you were beautiful that day. If you want to know, that’s what I thought.’

The flush came into her face. She looked away.

‘To tell you the truth, I’ve always thought you were a beauty.’

‘A beauty! Oh, go away with you, Robert!’

‘I always thought that,’ he repeated evenly.

He didn’t look at her; he wasn’t watching her, as he had on the previous Sunday. He stooped to pick a dandelion.

‘But I’m not in the least –’

‘You are, Mary Louise.’

She wanted him to go on, to say it again, to go into detail. But about to speak, he hesitated and then was silent.

‘I’m not beautiful in the least.’

‘Doesn’t Elmer Quarry think you are?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Ask him and he’ll tell you. Of course he does.’

They were not walking in the direction of the house any more. He had veered off to the left, crossing the slope of a field.

‘Do you ever read Russian novels?’ he suddenly asked, disappointing her with this change of subject.

She shook her head.

‘I have a favourite Russian novelist,’ he said.

He continued on the subject as they walked. He spoke of people with difficult Russian names. He described a man with a long thin face and a tapering, flat-topped nose.

‘Where’re we going?’

‘There’s a graveyard. A most peculiar place.’

He related the plot of a story, so meticulously describing a hero and a heroine that they formed in her mind, their features like features seen on the screen of the Electric, a little more shadowy at first, but then acquiring clarity.

‘I used to think once,’ he confessed, ‘that I might try to write stuff like that.’

‘And did you try?’

‘I wasn’t any good at it.’

‘Oh, I’m sure –’

‘No, I wasn’t any good at it.’

They reached the graveyard, by the side of a lane that appeared to be no longer used. Its small iron gate could not be moved, he said, but the wall was not difficult to clamber over. He took her hand to help her.

‘I’d love to be buried here,’ he said. ‘It isn’t full but no one bothers with it now.’

It was hot among the headstones. The grass was long between the graves, like hay waiting to be cut even though it was spring.

‘A secret place,’ he said.

‘Yes, it is.’

Stunted thorn trees bounded it within its stone wall. If ever there had been paths they were no longer to be discerned. Some headstones lurched crookedly; those flat upon the graves had mostly sunk at one end.

‘I love it here,’ he said.

They sat down on the long grass, leaning against a headstone that recorded a death in the Attridge family. Other Attridges were all around them, other branches of the family, other generations. James Attridge, born 1742, died September 1803, Safe Now in Heavenly Love. Percival Attridge, 1769–1828. Charlotte Jane Attridge, died 1840, aged one year. Susan Emily, wife of Charles. Safe Now in Heaven’s Arms. Peace, Perfect Peace.

‘It’s funny there isn’t a church,’ Mary Louise said.

‘It’s half a mile away. Derelict now.’

‘They’re Protestants buried here, aren’t they?’

‘Yes, they’re Protestants.’

‘A pity about the church.’

‘There’s a rosebush growing all over it. In and out of the windows. June’s the time to see that little church.’

‘I’d like to see it.’

‘I’ll show you some time. And the heron’s really there too, you know. I didn’t make the heron up.’

‘I didn’t think you made the heron up. Why would you do that?’

‘To make you come back.’

She wanted to say she’d thought her ignorance about the things he liked would bore him, but she couldn’t find the courage. She traced a pattern on her pale green skirt with the tip of a forefinger. Her legs were tucked beneath her. The stone was warm on her back.

‘I’d have come back anyway.’

‘When I had to be taken away from Miss Mullover’s because there wasn’t time to drive me I wanted to try cycling. I did one day, but it didn’t work.’ He smiled. He was wearing the same corduroy trousers and the same tweed jacket he’d been wearing last week. His tie was tweed also, quite colourful, greens and reds. ‘I tried to arrange to go in with the milk lorry, but that didn’t work either because it went some roundabout way, and I wouldn’t have been able to get home again.’

‘You see buses for country children these days.’

‘D’you know why I wanted to continue at school so much?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘D’you mind if I tell you?’

‘Why should I mind?’

‘It might embarrass you.’

‘Tessa Enright used to say everything embarrasses me. Miss Embarrassment she called me.’

‘I was fond of you, Mary Louise.’

She closed her eyes. She felt a flush, hot as a red-hot poker, creeping over her neck, into her cheeks, over her forehead, down into her shoulders even. It was so intense it made her skin feel tight. She’d never had one as bad as this, she thought.

‘I have embarrassed you,’ he said, and added hastily: ‘It all belongs to that time. It has nothing to do with now. It was awful not being able to turn my head to look at you, like having part of me cut away. I can’t tell you what it was like. And yet what good would any of it have been?’

‘When you’re that age –’

‘Oh, I know, I know.’

She felt the colour draining away from her face and neck. A drop of perspiration itched on her chin, but she didn’t lift a hand, not wishing to draw attention to it, nor to distract him.

‘I’ve always wanted to tell you,’ he said.

She nodded, not knowing how to respond in any other way. She might have said she had thought herself to be in love with him: it was the natural thing to do, yet she could not. Did she know of his glances in Miss Mullover’s schoolroom without quite realizing it? What connection had there been? Something had been there, between them, something real – even if only for a week or two, before she transferred her affections to James Stewart. Yet a week or two was surely enough: that seemed so now.

‘You’ll still come back, Mary Louise? We’re cousins, after all. And anyway, you’re married now.’

‘Of course I’ll come back.’

‘People should know when they’ve been admired. That’s what I feel.’

‘It’s nice of you to tell me, Robert.’

The conversation ended there. Soon afterwards they walked back to the house, where the binoculars were hung on a hook in the passage outside the kitchen, and then there was tea beside the fire, as there had been the Sunday before. ‘Let me read you this,’ he said, taking a book from one of the piles around him.

It was time for her to go, but instead she watched him, opening the book, smiling, turning a page or two, raising his eyebrows before murmuring something about the length of the introduction, and then beginning:

‘A gentleman in the early forties, wearing check trousers and a dusty overcoat, came out on to the low porch of the coaching-inn…’

She believed she had never listened to a voice as beautiful. Delight caressed each word he uttered, gentleness or vigour matched phrase and sentence. If all he’d read was a timetable she would have been entranced.

‘The date was the twentieth of May in the year 1859…’

It was later than it had been last week by more than two hours when Mary Louise left. On the outskirts of the town she dismounted and unscrewed the valve of her bicycle’s back tyre. She’d had a puncture, she said when she arrived in the dining-room. The meal was over, and had been for some time.

The women talk of different times. For the years they have known one another they have marked out in their conversations certain periods they favour. Just as Mary Louise claims 1957, so Mrs Leavy of Youghal returns regularly to her infancy in 1921 and ‘22, Dot Sterne to 1984, Belle D to the advent of the Beatles, the Spanish wife to destitution in Gibraltar, 1986. Others have more precisely held to themselves days or moments or occasions, the hour of a tragedy or an act of violence.

People are claimed also, special and belonging, the personal baggage of the house’s inmates. To a conversation that is endlessly renewed Mary Louise contributes the people of Culleen and of the town, her cousin and her aunt, her husband and his sisters. In turn she hears about people she does not know. Every day the house is thronged, the crowds impenetrable sometimes.

‘God knows, it’s nothing new,’ the faded woman who is usually silent alleges in a quieter conversation. It’s nothing new, reflection has revealed to her, that mad women should walk the roads and streets of Ireland. Once upon a time they did, in the old times, before the great brick asylums were built, before each town possessed a barracks for hiding the insane in.

‘What’s she talking about?’ Bríd Beamish, wearing lipstick, asks.

‘Loonies on the loose is what.’ Dot Sterne has rolled her stockings down, hoping Miss Foye will notice and not put her back where she came from.

‘Oh, of course,’ Mrs Leavy agrees. ‘We all knew the brickwork asylums. Many’s the time me and Elsie looked over the wall.’

‘I’m saying the time before the asylums were in existence,’ the faded woman corrects her. ‘I’m saying long ago.’

‘Loonies on the loose,’ Belle D repeats.

‘Crazies,’ a woman who was a priest’s housekeeper adds. ‘The brain in tatters.’

‘It’s a different kettle of fish now,’ Mrs Leavy reminds them. ‘The days of the old crazies is over. We don’t use them expressions no more. This day and age, the nurse told me.’

‘Swallow your medication.’ Small Sadie’s laughter cackles. ‘Right eejits if you don’t swallow the medication.’

‘There’s some would never have set foot in this place if the drugs had been to hand. A bottle of medicine would have kept them well.’ Mrs Leavy has taken the lead. She has placed herself at the head of the inmates who are soon to be released. She is stating their case. She is offering the medical evidence as she had it personally from Miss Foye and a doctor, the bald one, not the one with the beard.

‘Mary Louise should never be setting a foot out of it,’ Small Sadie snaps back. ‘Heathen bloody strumpet.’

She cries as soon as she has spoken, putting her arms around Mary Louise and saying she’s sorry.

It seemed natural that her cousin should become Mary Louise’s confidant. In September 1957, two years after her wedding, she told him the details of the courtship there’d been, of the proposal on the humped bridge, of her request for time to think it over, of the engagement and the journey on the wedding day by train and bus, and the arrival at the Strand Hotel.

They had seen, in June, the rose blooming wildly through the tiny derelict church. They had returned repeatedly to the stream, in search of the heron. But Mary Louise’s confidences were offered in the graveyard, among the Attridge headstones.

‘And what were you thinking?’ Robert, fascinated, would interrupt, leading her back to some point that interested him particularly. What had her thoughts been when she sat beside Elmer Quarry for the very first time, during The Flame and the Flesh? Or when she stood in front of the altar? Or when the red-cheeked Reverend Harrington pronounced them man and wife?

She shared with him her emotions during the first few moments in the Strand Hotel, when she experienced misgivings that had not been there before, when her husband said that the place seemed comfortable enough. She described how, in the dining-room, the landlady had indicated a table where three men were already eating. She took him on the walk by the sea, the children collecting shellfish, the dog chasing the seagulls. She led him to McBirney’s bar, told about the cherry brandies she’d drunk, about how Mr Mulholland had called her Kitty, how the bald man had said he had a Woolworth’s bladder.

She’d been drunk in the end, she confessed, and Elmer had been too drunk to take his clothes off. When they’d woken up in the morning they’d both felt terrible. They’d gone for another walk along the strand, during which Elmer said they didn’t feel so hot because they weren’t used to drink. She recalled the remainder of the honeymoon, the same kind of conversations in the dining-room as there’d been in McBirney’s bar on their wedding night. Mr Mulholland said goodbye on the Sunday morning, announcing that it was his due to kiss the bride. After breakfast every day Elmer sat outside the hotel and read the Irish Times from cover to cover while she accompanied to the strand one of the families who were staying at the hotel. She played with the children, helping them to make sandcastles. She bought a bathing-dress and bathed. On the Wednesday the bald man showed them round the animal-foodstuffs place where he worked. On Thursday they watched swing-boats being erected. On Friday they came back.

‘Why did you get married, Mary Louise?’

‘No one knows a thing like that.’

He shook his head. He said that, looking back, people knew.

‘I thought it would be all right. I thought no one else would marry me. I wanted to be in the town.’

‘My God!’

He reached for her hand and held it. He raised it to his cheek. She shouldn’t have told him, she thought, yet in the same moment she knew it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter being here, or letting him take her hand. How could it matter?

‘Tell me anything you want to,’ he urged, and listened, her hand still held.

He heard about a marriage that was unconsummated, about the shock there’d been for husband and wife in the Strand Hotel, about the state they had lived in since. Her voice was a toneless mutter, flattened and dead. Miss Embarrassment her friend had called her; but Mary Louise, who blushed so easily, was pale when she lay bare her confidences. Was it because he was an invalid that she told him? Robert wondered. Was it because he didn’t count, because he seemed to her to be beyond the realm of ordinary humanity, as impotent as her husband?

‘He has begun to drink,’ she said. ‘And I deceive him after only two years by coming here on Sundays.’

‘But I’m your cousin, Mary Louise. Doesn’t he know you come here?’

‘Nobody knows.’

He imagined her in the house, the spinster sisters resenting her presence, hating her even, Elmer Quarry trudging upstairs at mealtimes, drinking his shame away. She told him about the attics, about the toys the Quarry children had played with, all carefully kept in a cupboard. And then she said:

‘I used to think I was in love with you, Robert.’

‘With me?’

‘It might have been the time when you were fond of me. We might both have been in love with one another.’

He remembered again the pain of not being allowed to go to school, his anger with his mother, his refusal to understand. They would starve if things went on like this, his mother had said. No matter how early she rose in the mornings there weren’t enough hours of daylight, especially in wintertime. She hadn’t understood either; he couldn’t tell her.

‘When James came here with the butter every week I used to bring the conversation round to you. I often thought of giving a note to James.’

‘I think I’d turned my attentions to Mr Stewart by then.’

Laughter relieved a constriction. Then he said:

‘I’m in love with you still, to tell the truth. I wait for every Sunday with just the same feelings as I had then.’

In turn, for Robert, it didn’t matter either. Telling more of the truth didn’t matter because she would not come back in any case. After the intimacies she’d shared with him she would find it hard to cycle out next Sunday and the Sunday after, as if nothing different had occurred. She didn’t know this, but it would be so.

‘I couldn’t face the wedding party,’ he said.

‘I thought you weren’t up to it.’

‘No. We were going to go. We intended to. “I’ll wait in the car,” I said. But my mother wouldn’t have that.’

‘You couldn’t love me, Robert.’

‘It’s not a choice that people have.’

Did she mean, he wondered, that she couldn’t love him? Did she mean that even before her marriage there couldn’t have been love between them because he was only half a person? It was different for children was no doubt what she meant also: children didn’t always notice.

But Mary Louise contradicted these thoughts almost as they occurred. She wasn’t worth anyone’s love, she said. She had married a man for gain. She had married out of impatience and boredom, and had been handed both back with interest added. She had calculated; she had coldly examined the pros and cons.

Robert laughed. He took her hand again, and again she permitted him to do so. Anyone would do as she had, he said.

‘I wouldn’t have if there’d been our friendship, Robert.’

‘Then I’d have been insisting I was the guilty one.’

He felt the pressure of her fingers on his palm. Was this a sign, a statement she could not bring herself otherwise to make? Now and again, since the time they had been together in Miss Mullover’s schoolroom, he had glimpsed her in the town when by chance they visited it on the same day, not often. Every autumn his mother drove to the Dallons’ farmhouse with grapes and apples. He might have accompanied her but he’d never wished to, fearful of the renewal of emotions. The wedding had been impossible, entirely, to avoid.

‘I’m sorry I said all that, Robert.’

‘It means everything to me that you did.’

On his side, there were facts he might have added to what she’d said: his gloom and wretchedness while his mother chattered in the car, driving back after the wedding; the pain he experienced because he’d selfishly deprived her of an occasion she would have enjoyed; the greater pain of imagining the radiant happiness of the bride. While Mary Louise drank cherry brandy in McBirney’s she had still been in his thoughts, still in her wedding-dress, as last he’d seen her. He had tortured himself while Mary Louise, in the presence of her already unconscious husband, undressed and crept woozily into her marriage bed. While she slept, virginal and alone, he had descended to the bitterest depths of melancholy.

‘What an irony it is!’ was all he observed in this respect, speaking softly in the graveyard.

‘You are the only person in the world I could have told.’

He kissed her gently, their lips just touching. Then he pushed himself to his feet and held his hands out to her. They walked back towards the house, not saying anything else. Both were possessed by a warmth that delighted them, the warmth of secrets at last shared while still remaining secrets, the intimacy of a private truth.

Crossing the sloping field beyond which the house and garden lay, Robert said:

‘Look! There he is.’

They had not, that day, brought the binoculars. But Mary Louise could see, at the very place where they often watched the fish going by, the grey, angular form of the heron they had hoped for so long to catch a glimpse of. Neck extended, it dipped its long beak into the water, no doubt fishing for the trout, although the distance was too great to allow them to observe how successful these efforts were. It stuttered closer to the water on its ungainly legs, then turned, spread out its wings and flew away.

‘Clever creature,’ Robert said.

In the house he read to Mary Louise from a reference book. It was a common heron they’d seen, not a Great White or a Purple: Ardea cinerea. The common heron wasn’t rare, but even so was not often seen. Anglers had been known to persecute it.

He put the book away and hunted among some others. There were many stories by his favourite Russian novelist, he said, but he possessed only three. He spread these volumes out for her, each open at the title page, as if it was important for her to see them.

‘Why did you do that, Robert?’

‘In case you do not come back.’

‘Of course I’ll come back.’

‘No one can be certain.’

The three volumes were left as he had opened them, on one of the tables that contained stacks of other books. If not because of what had been confided, he thought, then because of what had occurred: she would not return.

‘You’ve been so good to me, Robert. I can’t tell you what it means to have been able to talk to you.’

‘May I kiss you in this room, Mary Louise? Just once?’

‘Yes, you may.’ She spoke quickly, without the slightest hesitation.

This time he put his arms around her and pressed her lips a little closer, then held her hand for a moment after they had parted. He said again that she was beautiful.

‘But I’m not in the least,’ she began, as she had before.

‘Actually you are,’ he repeated too.

They had tea in the kitchen, and when Mary Louise had gone Robert carried a cup out to his mother, who was picking raspberries. Was it enough, he wondered, that they had talked so? Would all they had shared make up for her not returning? As he helped to pick the fruit, it seemed to Robert that his cousin’s abrupt incursion into his life had from the very beginning been part of a pattern that their conversation today completed, with the telling of the truth. It seemed as if, outside their wills, their declaration of affection had been ordained. That his own love had persisted while hers had dwindled was just a circumstance; at least they’d honoured what there had been. But could he, he wondered, live off the moments of an afternoon?

She walks in the garden. She likes it best in the garden and always has, ever since she came to the house. She knows the name of every flower, she has a flowerbed of her own.

No one knows what will become of the place, and maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe a place changing its purpose, maybe a house falling into ruins, is of no possible importance, a grain of sand turning over on a shore, nothing more. Even so, it is sad that her flowerbed may perhaps become choked with weeds.

She does not take the medication and does not intend to; not once does she intend to take it. ‘You’re naughty, you know,’ Miss Foye said once, but she didn’t say it about the medication even though she suspects. Miss Foye likes the paid-for inmates, she likes the cheques coming in. Generally naughty was what Miss Foye meant, a tendency that way. The nurses watch her swallowing it down, but Miss Foye knows there’s more to swallowing than meets the eye. Cute as a fox, Miss Foye is, over a thing like that.

James Dallon was inflating a tractor tyre in the yard when a man he didn’t know got out of a blue van and asked if this was the Dallons’ house. The man said something about having called in for the raspberries and the last of the peas at James’s aunt’s house, but James didn’t know what he was talking about. Then the man said he had a message. He didn’t smile. He didn’t seem happy. James brought him into the kitchen.

Later that morning Mrs Dallon drove over to comfort her sister. They sat together in the kitchen for most of the day, Mrs Dallon making tea and toast in the afternoon, and poaching an egg for each of them. She wanted to spend the night, but her sister wouldn’t permit that. They talked about the time when they were girls together, before their marriages; about when the men they’d married first came into their lives, and the different lives they’d had because of that. They talked about the birth of their children, how Robert had only just survived. They talked about the existence he had had.

A reference to Mary Louise’s Sunday visits did not fall naturally into the conversation, except that her aunt said, ‘Mary Louise was good to him.’ Mrs Dallon took this to mean in the past, when they were children in Miss Mullover’s schoolroom. The small misunderstanding was neither here nor there.

In the room where her nephew had spent most of his time she was shown his books, and the soldiers in the window alcove. ‘Take some grapes back with you,’ her sister offered at the end of the day, for she had come to terms by now with a death that she had always known would be like this, swift and out of the blue.

‘Oh no, dear, please,’ Mrs Dallon protested, but the grapes were cut none the less.

Her flowerbed has always been for him. Being in the house has permitted that, no questions asked, the slow establishment of the chosen plants, the trial and error of their cultivation, buds breaking into colour, the clustering of petals.

‘Oh, I expect it’ll disappear,’ the gardener grumpily replies when she asks about the flowerbed’s fate. He’s not the man whose arm was broken by Sadie swinging a pickaxe. Youngish, unsuited to the place in any case, that one went at once. This man is old; he has been here all her time; no wonder he’s aggrieved. He says the house will become a hotel.

‘My flowerbed is in memory. I hope they’ll keep the garden.’

‘I hear it said they’ll have it up for a car park.’

Slowly she walks about, imagining the cars drawn up in rows, the different colours. Tessa Enright visited her once, Tessa Hospel as she became, mother of four children, wife of an oyster merchant. They strolled these same paths in the heat of an afternoon and suddenly her friend said: ‘I am in love.’ She had not told another soul and never would. ‘No one except for you.’ She wept into a lacy lilac handkerchief. She said she was ashamed that Mary Louise had been in the house for sixteen years before she visited her. She was in love with an Englishman whom she’d met when she and her husband, with all their children, were on holiday by the sea in France. Her husband was rich; there was a girl for the children. The Englishman had said he could not live without her. ‘Imagine that! To say that so soon! He hardly knew me.’ Tessa Enright hadn’t changed. As thin as fuse-wire, high cheekbones, hair like sun-bleached silk. Her eyes had always had a startled look, her lips still lazily pouted. She would never have visited the house if she hadn’t been desperate for a confidante: here, of all places, her secret would be safe.

Alone in the garden fifteen years later, Mary Louise recalls precisely the shade of lilac of the handkerchief. It was lighter than that of the outfit that accompanied it, the blouse that buttoned to the neck, the very short skirt, the chic little shoes. She recalls being told that the oyster merchant had been met at a party. The Englishman was a person who had to do with boats, who delivered them from one harbour to another, acting for other people. Mary Louise imagines this man, as once she imagined Jeanne d’Arc and later her cousin’s father, and later still the people in the novels her cousin read. She sees the children of her friend controlled by a calm nursemaid; she sees the husband. She places the family in a hotel dining-room, among waiters calling out to one another in French and expertly pouring wine. The Englishman approaches, flannels and a blazer with an emblem on it, brown as a nut, a smile lazing through his features. At some later time, when they are private, her friend puts her arms around him, slipping her hands beneath the blazer with the emblem on it, her fingers touching the muscles in his back.

Mary Louise stoops and lifts a rose petal from where it has fallen. Under no circumstances is it permitted to pick the flowers. Bríd Beamish did so once and was not allowed to enter the garden for seven months, seven being the number of flowers she filched. The petal has no scent, but in the palm of Mary Louise’s hand it seems as beautiful as anything she has ever touched, crimson streaked with white. Roses mostly are what she has planted in her flowerbed, with a border of lily of the valley. She’s glad it was not she who married the oyster merchant and had four children. She’s glad she never had to turn with her intimacies to a childhood companion who is safely locked away and would not, anyway, be believed.

The mists of autumn came, clinging to the houses of Bridge Street, smudging the shop windows with drips and rivulets. The smell of the town was of turf smoke mainly, acrid in the damp air. The shortening days were caught between the seasons until November arrived, claiming them for winter.

By the middle of that month, for Mary Louise, the funeral seemed an age ago. She had stood in the small church with her family, in the front pew, across the aisle from the solitary presence of her aunt. There were all sorts of people there – neighbours mainly, a few from the town, Miss Mullover, the Edderys, relations from the other side of the family whom the Dallons had never seen before. In the churchyard the coffin was lowered; the Reverend Harrington intoned; a handful of clay was thrown on the brightly varnished surface. Afterwards nobody knew what to do: the occasion was sad, people felt, so brief a life, too sad for a funeral spread. Yet in the end some of the mourners returned to her aunt’s house.

Ever since the death of her cousin the first thought that entered Mary Louise’s waking consciousness every morning was that the death was a fact. Robert, thin and wiry in the classroom, was no longer there. Robert, smiling in the untidy room he was so fond of, was now a figment in her mind. A shadow pointed at the heron and bent to pick the mushrooms. A shadow kissed her twice. The fading images were not as good as photographs would have been, but she had no photograph of her cousin.

It was because of that that Mary Louise, on a Sunday afternoon in mid-November, cycled again to her aunt’s house. She didn’t quite know what she would say when she arrived, nor what she’d find there. She wondered if she’d be particularly welcome.

In fact she was. Her aunt was in the garden, rooting out her finished runner beans. She wore gum boots and an old mackintosh coat. A fire was smouldering near where she worked.

‘Mary Louise!’

‘Am I interrupting you?’

‘No, no, you’re not. I’m on the last row.’

She pulled out what remained of the row and threw the stalks on to the bonfire. A job she hated, she said, leading the way to the back of the house.

‘I’ve wondered,’ Mary Louise began in the kitchen.

‘Oh, I’m managing all right.’

In the kitchen Mary Louise made tea while her aunt pulled off her boots and hung her mackintosh above the Esse to dry.

‘It’s good of you to come over, Mary Louise.’

‘I was never able to offer you my sympathy.’ She paused, pouring the boiling water into the pot. ‘I needed it all for myself.’

‘Nothing in the world is a greater consolation than that you and Robert were friends those last few months.’

‘I was very fond of Robert, Aunt Emmeline.’

Her aunt had moved to the sink to wash her hands. She ran the taps, scouring her palms and fingers with a brush. Mary Louise poured their two cups of tea.

‘Robert was fond of you too, Mary Louise.’

That was all that was said. The depth of the relationship had clearly not been guessed by her aunt. Nothing about it had worried her in her son’s lifetime. She had seen no reason why a harmless affection should not be permitted in a life that was emotionally deprived.

‘There’s a cake your mother sent over. Your mother has been nice to me.’

An uncut fruitcake was placed on a plate. Mary Louise had hoped she could confide her feelings, that her aunt would understand and listen. But instead she cut slices of the fruitcake, and Mary Louise sensed that the subject should not be pursued. That she and Robert had been fond of each other was one thing; condoning love was quite another.

‘Whenever you feel like it,’ her aunt said, ‘come over and see me.’

The invitation softened what might have seemed like harshness, but being in the house again was painful and Mary Louise knew she would not easily return. The abandoned graveyard and the ruined church through which the rose rambled in high summer were easier places. They were without distractions or voices that did not belong; they did not demand politeness.

‘Might I have a drawing of Robert’s, d’you think?’

‘Oh, of course. Let’s go and see.’

The three books were open on the table, as he had placed them. The French and German battalions were engaged in a conflict he must have arranged after she’d left. The room had been tidied a bit, but not much.

‘I’m getting round to it,’ her aunt said, her tone betraying her failure to find the heart for the task. ‘I don’t come in here much.’

Mary Louise wouldn’t have changed the position of a single thing, not a book or a scribble or a drawing. She wouldn’t have moved by an inch his armchair by the fire. In winter she’d have lit the fire again and kept it going every day.

‘It’s nice you want one,’ her aunt said when a drawing of winter trees had been chosen. ‘Have anything else you’d like.’

Mary Louise looked about her, and the urge not to disturb returned.

‘Maybe these,’ she reluctantly suggested, indicating the three books.

‘Of course you must have them.’

They left the room and in the kitchen had another cup of tea. For a moment they did not speak. Then her aunt said:

‘Your mother said I could live at Culleen. What would you think of that, Mary Louise?’

Her Sunday visits to this house would become known was what Mary Louise thought: daily contact would see to that. But what had mattered in his lifetime didn’t matter now. Even if her revelation of today led in time to the dawning of suspicion in her aunt’s mind, it wouldn’t matter. She only wished she had known, that last Sunday, that she loved her cousin with the passion death had made apparent.

‘It’s lonely for you here, Aunt Emmeline.’

‘Well, that’s what they believe. And yes, it is. Just now it is, though perhaps I’ll get used to it.’

‘It’s sensible.’

‘Yes, it’s sensible. If Letty marries Dennehy there’ll be that bedroom.’

The Bank of Ireland owned more of the house than she did, she added. Getting rid of it would be a weight off her mind. The west side of the roof leaked, gutters needed to be replaced, lead was perforated.

‘I’m fond of James,’ she said. ‘It would be nice to see something of a young person again.’

Mary Louise could discern what was in her aunt’s mind, and in her parents’. The notion there had been – accepted almost as fact in the farmhouse – that Letty and James would see their way into old age together, now that Mary Louise had married, no longer appeared to be valid. More likely, now, it seemed that Letty would marry the vet and James would one day marry also. With a bedroom to spare, in such circumstances it was the natural thing to offer a home to a lone aunt.

‘But I’m not sure, Mary Louise. I’m not sure I wouldn’t be an intrusion.’

Mary Louise shook her head. That was the last thing her aunt would be, she reassured her. If the idea had been put to her the whole family would have discussed it. Her father would have agreed, and so would James. Letty must have made up her mind about Dennehy.

‘Privately between us, I believe she has,’ her aunt said.

‘I didn’t know.’

‘It’s always kept quiet for a while, news of a mixed marriage. Dennehy’s priest will be having a go at Letty.’

‘Letty would never turn.’

‘The priest’ll want the children though.’

Mary Louise felt that none of it concerned her. In the past Letty would have ages ago told her everything. They would have lain awake in the bedroom that soon was to be empty and Letty would have gone through every development in her romance, the nature and circumstances of the proposal, and the persuasion of the parish priest. When Gargan had been taking her out she’d come back to the bedroom at night with all sorts of information, often waking Mary Louise up to tell her: what Gargan had tried on, what he’d confided to her about his boyhood desires, revelations made about the customers at the bank, who was solvent and who was not. Now, apparently, her sister was going to marry a man Mary Louise had only spoken to once or twice and about whom Letty had told her nothing whatsoever. After the wedding everything in the farmhouse would be different – Aunt Emmeline would occupy the bedroom that had been theirs, James might marry the Eddery girl or someone like her. None of it was any longer Mary Louise’s world. Her world was the drapery and the house above it, her sisters-in-law, her husband, the attic rooms, the memory of her cousin’s love. The town she had so longed to live in was hers, its air odorous with turf smoke, its people interested in her seemingly barren state.

‘The priests always have a go for the children,’ her aunt said. ‘Well, understandably, I dare say.’

‘I must get back.’ She hesitated. ‘I don’t suppose there’s a photograph to spare of Robert?’

For the first time her aunt appeared surprised. Then she went away and returned with an album in which a dozen or so photographs were loosely caught between the pages. None was pasted in. ‘The ones of Robert are precious to me,’ she said. ‘There’s none of him grown up.’

Mary Louise looked at one after another: Robert as a baby, Robert at three or four, Robert in an overcoat and cap, much as she remembered him from their childhood. She handed them back.

‘We didn’t go in much for the camera,’ her aunt said.

There were other photographs and she was shown them – of the house and of people she didn’t know, of her aunt when she was a girl, and Robert’s father, with a moustache.

‘Thanks for showing me, Aunt Emmeline.’

Soon after she turned out of the avenue she heard an echo of her cousin’s voice.

‘One hot summer day in 1853 two young men lay in the shade of a tall lime tree by the River Moskva, not far from Kountsovo…’

She packs her things, empty of emotion. How many women have come and gone in thirty-one years? Some of them have died, others been moved because they had to be. The food has been indifferent for thirty-one years, often worse than that. In winter they have felt cold from time to time, due to economies.

‘You’ll be all right,’ Miss Foye reassures. ‘You’ll be OK outside.’

‘I thought I’d die here.’

‘Oh, now, now.’

Miss Foye smiles it all away. It occurs to her that this one has been longer in the house than any of the others. She might say so in a sentimental way, but decides against it. A thought like that can be upsetting.

‘We would not have come,’ Rose said, ‘in normal circumstances.’

‘We didn’t want to come,’ Matilda emphasized.

‘No, we didn’t want to come at all. We held back – oh, for how long, Matilda? Would you say a year?’

‘A good year.’

The panic that the first utterances of the sisters had stirred in Mrs Dallon did not quieten. Even before they stepped into the house, while Kilkelly’s man was turning the car in the yard and bringing it to a halt to wait for them, they had offered an explanation for their unannounced presence, repeating in a different way what Letty had reported: there was something the matter with Mary Louise.

‘She hasn’t been herself, certainly.’ Mr Dallon’s narrow grey face was enlivened by a reflection of his wife’s anxiety.

‘Well, of course we don’t know what being herself is,’ Rose said. ‘Strictly speaking. What I mean, Mr Dallon, is we only know the person Elmer brought into the household. To be candid with you, she was strange from the first.’

‘Though of course, Mr Dallon, not as unusual as she is now. Not of course by a long chalk.’

Distractedly Mrs Dallon poured the tea she’d made, and even asked if the man waiting in the car would like a cup. The sisters said not to bother, but Mr Dallon felt the man should be offered something, and carried a cup out. Certainly Mary Louise had become quieter, he reflected on this journey. Letty had been on about it again last evening: anyone would be quieter, she’d said, married to Quarry. But the marriage had taken place ages ago, she added, and every time she saw her Mary Louise was quieter still. When he returned to the kitchen Rose was saying:

‘We sit in the front room of an evening. There’s the wireless to listen to. Elmer buys the magazines when the YMCA has finished with them, hardly anything they cost him. They’re there in the front room, she could look at them if she wanted to.’

Mr Dallon noticed that his wife’s eyes had a distended look. They bulged and goggled. Never in all the years he’d known her did he remember seeing her eyes like that. Turning to him, she said:

‘Mary Louise is always in that attic. I told you she went up there, the day I called. Apparently she locks herself in.’

‘There’s that and other things, Mr Dallon.’ Rose’s tone was brisk in confirmation. ‘As we’ve been saying.’

‘You’d ask her a question, Mr Dallon, and she’d not reply.’

‘Why does she go up to an attic?’

‘We’ve asked her that, Mr Dallon, Elmer has asked her repeatedly. She doesn’t deign to reply.’

‘Another thing is, there are certain tasks I have myself and certain that Matilda has, and a small number that are Mary Louise’s. We reached that agreement, but to tell you the truth the entire house could be a rubbish dump for all she’d care.’

‘A rubbish dump?’

‘Filthy dirty,’ Rose explained. ‘If she has a mood on she won’t lift a finger. She puts the plates on the table unwashed from the last time. There’s grime and filth on the plates and she doesn’t so much as blink.’

‘Then again, in the shop, Mr Dallon. A person will come in looking for oilcloth and she’ll say we don’t stock it. When the fact of the matter is we have oilcloth in three different weights and more than a dozen patterns.’

‘To tell the truth, we can’t get rid of it.’ Rose allowed herself a deviation, though her lips remained tightened in a knot even as she spoke. ‘Nobody goes much for oilcloth these days, but Elmer says don’t throw it out so we don’t.’

‘Yesterday, for instance, we heard her saying to a person that oilcloth might be obtained next door, in Renehan’s.’

‘Perhaps Mary Louise wasn’t aware –’

‘There is no commodity in the shop we haven’t pointed out to her.’

‘She locks the attic door on herself, Mr Dallon. There’s a lot of property that she’s moved from one attic to the next. It wasn’t hers to touch, as a matter of fact, but never mind that. You rap on the door and ask her if she’s sick. She doesn’t say a word.’

‘Not a word,’ Matilda confirmed.

‘We thought ourselves,’ Mrs Dallon brought herself to say, ‘that Mary Louise was perhaps disappointed because a family hasn’t been started.’

‘Wouldn’t you say it’s a godsend it hasn’t, Mrs Dallon?’

‘I’ll give you an example,’ Matilda offered. ‘I was closing the shop a week or so back and I said to her, “Wait a minute, Mary Louise, I want to try on a few of the skirts that came in this morning. ” All I intended was that she’d give me an opinion – sometimes someone else is better than yourself. Well, she stood as still as a statue at the bottom of the stairs that goes up to the office, like she’d been put into the corner at school. “How’s that? ” I said when I’d slipped on the first one, a blue and mauve dog’s tooth it was. D’you know the reply I received?’

Together, the Dallons indicated they didn’t.

‘She said I looked ridiculous in that skirt. Then she walked away. Ridiculous. No reason given.’

‘Another thing.’ Once more, Rose took up the catalogue of shortcomings. ‘There’s a little porcelain egg-cup our mother had. Now, no one uses that egg-cup except myself. “Rose can have my egg-cup,” my mother said a week before she died. I walked into the kitchen one day and there she was, eating an egg out of it.’

‘These days she sometimes takes her food in the kitchen,’ Matilda explained. ‘She won’t enter the dining-room if she has a mood on.’

‘ “That’s a special egg-cup, Mary Louise,” I said, not cross, just gently. I said it even though I’d told her before. “I’d rather you didn’t use it, Mary Louise,” I said.’

Mrs Dallon was about to say that anyone can forget a request like that, or confuse one egg-cup with another. She began to speak, but Rose shook her head before she’d said more than half a dozen words.

‘A week later I found it chipped on the rim. You couldn’t have it on the table now.’

‘It’s going up to the attic I’d worry about more,’ Mrs Dallon confessed. ‘And eating her food in the kitchen. Why does she do that?’

‘That’s the difficulty we have,’ Matilda said. ‘You wouldn’t know why she’d do anything. That’s why we’re sitting here.’

Mr Dallon asked how Elmer felt.

‘Elmer’s tormented by it,’ Rose replied. ‘You have only to look at the unfortunate man.’

Not here, any more than in the town, did they intend to mention that their brother had been driven to drink. With the girl gone from the house he’d be back to normal within a day, neither had the slightest doubt about that. He’d come and go as he had before the unfortunate entanglement, without bringing the odour of a distillery into the house every time he returned to it. A veil would be spread over the period of unpleasantness.

‘But what on earth d’you think is the matter with Mary Louise?’ Mrs Dallon agitatedly exclaimed. ‘What’s troubling her?’

‘That’s why we’re sitting here, Mrs Dallon,’ Matilda repeated. ‘In order to gain your assistance. We were wondering could it be mental?’

‘Mental?’

‘If you were in the house ten minutes with her the word would come into your head. Is it a normal thing for any person to spend three-quarters of the day in an attic?’

‘I thought it was just the evenings.’

‘The evenings is the main time. But sometimes you look round in the shop and she’s not to be seen. Well, you saw for yourself.’

‘Sundays too,’ Matilda put in. ‘An entire Sunday morning. Many’s the time.’

‘Another thing, she’ll go out on her bicycle on a Sunday after dinner and you’d worry in case she’s ridden into a bog or something. Nine and ten o’clock she’s not back.’

‘She comes over here on a Sunday, but she’s never as late as that.’

‘Nine or ten, isn’t it, Matilda?’

‘Oh, easily. With the long evenings she’s out till all hours.’

‘There was one night she didn’t come in at all.’

‘What?’ Just for an instant Mrs Dallon sounded hysterical. Her husband raised a hand, as though to calm her. ‘What?’ she said again, whispering now.

‘The day you called in she walked out of the house and didn’t come in till six o’clock the next morning.’

‘But where on earth was she?’

‘Matilda and I were all for going to the Guards. “She’s gone over to Culleen,” Elmer said.’

‘She wasn’t here.’

‘Well, there you are then. To tell you the truth, Mrs Dallon, we’re worried the entire time. The state she’s in she could end up anywhere on that cycle. You hear terrible things these days.’

‘We didn’t know any of this.’ Mr Dallon slowly shook his head, the skin of his face puckered with concern.

‘She’s riding wildly about the country, God knows where she goes. There was another time we had to make Elmer go out looking for her.’

Matilda didn’t add that they had watched Elmer going straight to Hogan’s, that he hadn’t returned until after ten, an hour after Mary Louise had returned herself. Neither sister revealed that Elmer had argued that it was up to his wife to decide if she wanted to go for a bicycle ride, and how long she should remain away. Rose said:

‘ “I wouldn’t have it,” she said to Mrs Riordan in the shop a week ago. “The wide lapels don’t suit you.” The woman had her money on the counter. You can’t run a shop like that. If Elmer knew the half of it he’d jump out of his skin.’

It was then that Matilda mentioned a place they’d heard of, an asylum for women who were mentally distressed. They hadn’t made inquiries; a person had mentioned it to them, which told a tale in itself.

‘Very well looked after,’ Rose said. ‘A garden to go into. The food’s second to none.’

‘My God!’ Aghast, Mrs Dallon stared at her visitors. The suggestion was horrible; the thought of it made her feel sick in the stomach. No matter how oddly Mary Louise was behaving, why should she be committed to an asylum?

‘Mary Louise is not mad,’ Mr Dallon protested. ‘That doesn’t come into it.’

‘It wasn’t me who thought of that place,’ Rose reminded him. ‘Another person was trying to help.’

‘She should definitely see Dr Cormican.’ He turned to his wife. ‘We’ll drive in and have a word with Cormican.’

The sisters, feeling themselves dismissed by this decision, rose immediately. But before they left Rose said:

‘Naturally, no one would want the poor girl confined in some place when she could be looked after by her own. We don’t want to leave without saying that.’

‘Her own?’

‘Her family we were thinking.’ Rose looked around the kitchen. ‘Where things are familiar to her.’

Apart from words of leave-taking, nothing further was said. Kilkelly’s car carried the sisters back to the town. The Dallons prepared themselves for an immediate visit to Dr Cormican.

Bríd Beamish is the first to go. Bríd Beamish received messages from U2. She was told U2 were in trouble. She kept contacting the Garda, saying the IRA were after them. Dave Lee Travis spoke personally to her, sending her messages through his disc-jockey chatter. When her father said he wouldn’t have Dave Lee Travis’ name repeated in the house she lit a cigarette and dropped it into the petrol tank of his Ford Cortina. She travelled to Lincolnshire in search of café life and was missing for a month. Afterwards she said she’d been on the game, an expression that confused her family until someone in a bar told her father what it meant. Schizophrenia was the diagnosis. And mild erotomania.

Bríd Beamish waves at the congregated women. She stands by the open back door of the car her father had to buy when she destroyed his Ford Cortina. Right as rain she’ll be, provided she doesn’t fall down on the medication: presentable is what they mean, and looking at her the women agree she’s a lot more presentable now than she was the day she arrived, no reason not to believe she’ll walk up the aisle. ‘Cheers, dear!’ the Spanish wife calls out, and old Sister Hannah, who developed a great affection for Brid Beamish, who was her confidante, is tearful.

The car door bangs, tyres crunch on the gravel.

‘Back to prostitution,’ Small Sadie predicts in her shrill screech.

Letty’s wedding party was very different from Mary Louise’s. It was held in the public house referred to by Rose when the news of Letty’s romance was first mentioned in the dining-room above the shop. As Rose had stated, the public house in question was at a crossroads, a long single-storey building advertised in blue and yellow neon letters as Dennehy’s Lounge. In grey pebble-dash, it stood back from the intersection of roads, with a wide parking space in front of it. Dennehy’s was known for miles around, its regular clientele consisting entirely of country people. Harp Lager had supplied the neon sign, and in return was advertised prominently as well.

After the wedding ceremony a lift was arranged for Mary Louise and Elmer with Bleheen of the artificial-insemination unit, a ferrety man of the same age as Elmer, who was still pursuing his search for a suitable wife. The conversation in the car reminded Mary Louise of the conversation with the three diners at the Strand Hotel on the evening of her own wedding. She sat in the back and didn’t contribute to it.

‘Ah, it’s great you came on out,’ Letty greeted her when they entered the lounge bar. Still in her wedding-dress, Letty was smoking a cigarette.

‘No trouble at all,’ Elmer said.

For some weeks there had been unpleasantness in the house because Rose and Matilda had not been included in the wedding invitation. They were indignant, pointing out that since they were family relations the oversight was hurtful. When he asked Mary Louise if she’d have a word with her sister, all she’d done was to shake her head at him.

‘You’ll take a glass, Mr Quarry?’ the bridegroom’s father offered from behind the bar. ‘What’ll I pour you?’

Elmer replied that he’d like some whiskey. ‘An occasion and a half, sir,’ he added agreeably. ‘Wouldn’t we be correct to call it that?’

‘Oh, we would, Mr Quarry. He’s the lucky man for himself.’

‘He is of course.’

There the exchange of views terminated. Elmer returned to Mary Louise’s side. He shook hands with her father and with her mother. He remarked again upon the importance of the occasion.

‘Once in a lifetime, Elmer,’ Mr Dallon said.

‘That’s true enough, sir.’

Mrs Dennehy came up and reminded them that all drinks were on the house. She wore a lot of lipstick, Elmer noticed, for a woman of her age. Into the bargain her fingernails were scarlet. A huge woman she was, with a brassy voice.

‘What’ll I get you all?’ Mrs Dennehy arched her eyebrows, glancing hospitably from face to face. When a choice was made she turned away to fetch the drinks. Elmer wanted to take a look at her back but thought he’d better not. He said:

‘Wasn’t it great we could let Letty have the dress material at cost, Mr Dallon?’

‘It was good of you, Elmer.’

‘Any time we could oblige you in a matter like that, sir, just walk into the shop.’

The least he could do, Rose had said, was to mention the way they’d been treated to his in-laws. She’d come into the accounting office when he was up to his eyes and started on about it again. She’d wanted to know what Mary Louise had said when he’d put the thing to her, and he’d had to make up an excuse. ‘No more manners to them than tinkers,’ his sister snapped at him in the end. ‘What good did getting in with them do you?’

The good it did was that they had an extra pair of hands in the shop and in the house. He put it like that to her because that was the type of talk she understood. They should be glad of an extra pair of hands, he said, but Rose ignored that completely. She mentioned drink. It was the talk of the town, she said.

He took a drink now and again. He went out to get company, the way any man might. What company was there in the snapping and offence-taking that occurred three times a day in the dining-room? You could spend two hours playing billiards down in the YMCA with no cause to open your mouth except to issue a greeting to an elderly caretaker. ‘You’re drinking like a fish,’ Rose said.

Mrs Dennehy returned with a tray of glasses for Mary Louise and her mother and father. There was one for herself also, but nothing for him.

‘To the pair of them,’ Mrs Dennehy began, and Elmer interrupted. He pointed out that he would be unable to join in the toast, on account of having an empty glass. He began to move towards the bar, but Mrs Dennehy said she wouldn’t hear of it at a private function. She seized his glass, giving him her own to look after.

‘Let everyone hold on a minute!’ she commanded in her rumbustious way. ‘No one touch a drop till Mr Quarry is replenished!’

He couldn’t recall her ever coming into the shop. He’d have noticed her all right, the lipstick and the fingernails. He suddenly remembered walking into the front room when he was no more than fifteen, to find a similar build of woman trying on petticoats.

‘A drop of the hard stuff!’ She handed him his glass, and he noticed that there was more than a small one in it. They all joined in the toast except Mary Louise, who took it into her head to walk away. It embarrassed Elmer that she did so, in the company of her mother and father and Mrs Dennehy.

‘We’re pleased about it, Mrs Dennehy,’ Mr Dallon said, but Elmer doubted it: poor Protestants for donkey’s years, why would they be pleased to see their grandchildren brought up holy Romans?

‘I’m right pleased myself. Right pleased!’ Mrs Dennehy exclaimed. Her teeth were in proportion to the rest of her. When she addressed anyone she opened her mouth very wide, which might have contributed to the loudness of her voice. You could see all the way back to her molars.

‘It was a great spread you laid on for our own wedding,’ Elmer confided quietly to his mother-in-law, who seemed to be a bit out of things. ‘You did wonders that day, Mrs Dallon.’

He listened while Mrs Dallon told him that this wedding party, too, should be taking place at Culleen. But Mrs Dennehy had come over a month ago and put it to her that since such large numbers were expected, and since the Dennehys had such spacious premises and were in the business professionally, it might be in order to reverse the usual procedure. Letty had been in favour of that also, and reluctantly Mrs Dallon had given in.

‘Ah, you would of course. And wouldn’t you save a bit while you were at it?’

A familiar euphoria had begun to flow softly through Elmer. He’d taken to keeping a little John Jameson in the wall-safe in the accounting office, for any man would require a drink in certain circumstances. There was an expression Matilda had used one time: trapped like a squirrel she’d said he was. She was thinking of a time when they were children and a man had come into the shop with three squirrels in a cage, trying to sell them in some ignorant kind of way, beautiful soft fur, he kept saying. Their father had called Elmer and the girls downstairs so that they could get a close look at the creatures, and then had sent the man packing. In Elmer’s view being trapped wasn’t a bad description of his own predicament, but he had no intention of giving Matilda the satisfaction of knowing that he agreed with her. Ridiculous, he’d said when she made her observation. Another thing was that when you’d had a drink or two you got a predicament like that into proportion – which naturally he couldn’t have said to Matilda either.

‘Bullocks are fetching well,’ he remarked to his father-in-law. ‘What’s that I heard a hundredweight?’

‘Thirty-five last week.’

‘You’d not turn up your nose at that, sir.’

Miss Foye kisses her. He carries her two suitcases. The Quarrys are decent people, she hears Mrs Leavy say, they have that reputation. While she was waiting in the hall Mrs Leavy told further stories about the old days in the asylums, relating the frightening scenes she and her friend Elsie witnessed when they looked over the brick wall.

The women wave, as they waved at Bríd Beamish. The asylums were built as charitable institutions, the fashion in mercy then, as the drugs are now. She waves back, and winds the window of the car down and waves again.

She has left the house before, on two occasions: for the funeral of her father, and a year and a half later for that of her mother. At both she’d been reminded of the death of her cousin, not that reminding was necessary; but the words of farewell were the same, the repetition causing her to reflect that the dead become nothing when you weary of doing their living for them. You pick and choose among the dead; the living are thrust upon you.

‘Are they still alive?’ she asks, the silence suddenly broken, the question emerging naturally from her thoughts.

‘Who’s that?’

‘Your sisters.’

The car responds to the shock he experiences, juddering in its motion. He halts it to adjust himself, steering it into the gateway of a field. He turns to look at her.

‘Why shouldn’t my sisters be alive?’

‘We all die some time.’

‘Of course they haven’t died.’

‘I was not to know.’

‘You’d have been told, dear.’

She doesn’t say she might have been told and not been interested. She doesn’t say anything, but listens while he warns her there’ll be changes she’ll notice, in the town and in his daily life.

‘Do you remember what I told you about the shop?’

She considers for a moment, then admits she doesn’t.

‘I sold it out to the Renehans nine years ago. They joined the two premises together.’

‘Yes, I remember that.’

The television tells you what the world is like, old Sister Hannah used to say, the changes that have come. If you can be bothered to pay attention, the television will tell you all you want to know.

‘Over the shop’s the same,’ he says.

‘Yes, I’m sure it is.’

Sister Hannah’s the wise one. A person’s life isn’t orderly, Sister Hannah maintains; it runs about all over the place, in and out through time. The present’s hardly there; the future doesn’t exist. Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person’s life.

On the day of the auction at her aunt’s house Mary Louise cycled out of the town just before eight o’clock. The streets were quiet. Mrs Renehan was out with her cocker spaniel. The bell of the Church of Our Lady was chiming. A lorry with barrels on it was drawn up at the bottom of the town, waiting to make deliveries, its driver and his companion reading newspapers in the cab. Bakers’ shops and paper-shops were open. In the window of Foley’s the elderly assistant was laying out rows of rashers. Two nuns made their way to the new convent classrooms on the Clonmel road.

Mary Louise wondered if he knew. If you believed in heaven there was no reason to suppose that he wouldn’t. She imagined him with his half smile watching her, knowing what she was up to. When she was seven or eight her mother had taken Letty and herself to the auction there’d been when old Colonel Esdaile died, three weeks after his wife had gone. She remembered a white marble statue in the garden, a draped woman. ‘Not another like it in Ireland,’ the auctioneer had bellowed. ‘Every detail in place, down to the toenails.’ And he was right: the toenails were delicately incised, she and Letty had gone to look. Mrs Dallon had hoped to bid for a job lot that consisted of a clothes line, scrubbing brushes and a bucket, but unfortunately the auctioneer, running out of time, placed it beyond her reach by throwing it in with two other selections of household items.

The morning was mild and sunny. Primroses still bloomed on the verges. Buds dotted the hedges, catkins were heavy on the new season’s shoots. Still softly green, cow parsley and elder bided their time.

There was a car ahead of Mary Louise on the green avenue. It moved slowly, as if wary of an unfamiliar surface. She watched it draw away from her and finally turn on to the grass before it reached the house. She could just see figures moving away from it. When she was closer a cardboard sign read Park Here.

‘The sale won’t start till two, miss,’ a man in the kitchen said. He was sitting at the table with another man and a boy. There was a blue Thermos flask on the table, and three cups without saucers. The boy was eating a doughnut he’d taken from a torn-open paper bag beside the flask.

‘I just want to look around,’ Mary Louise said.

The two men seemed doubtful, the boy wasn’t interested. The man who’d spoken said that viewing would commence at ten. Ten was what was advertised, he added.

‘I’m a member of the family,’ Mary Louise explained, and the two men appeared to be relieved.

‘Go ahead for yourself in that case,’ the second man said, and Mary Louise passed through the kitchen.

Her aunt had declared she would herself find the auction too painful to attend, and in the circumstances Mary Louise guessed her mother would not drive over either. Other people she knew would arrive, but that didn’t matter, provided they didn’t bother her with their inquisitiveness. She mounted the stairs and opened the door of the first room she came to. Clearly it had been her aunt’s. The mattress was rolled up on the bed, tied with string. Each piece of furniture had a number stuck on it.

In her cousin’s room there were further numbers, black figures on a small blue rectangle. Framed in badly chipped gilt, a picture on the wall facing the bed was 91: farm workers in old-fashioned dress crowding round one of the wheels of a hay-cart, which had broken beneath the strain; near by, a dog was chasing a rat through the stubble. The mattress on this bed also was rolled up and tied. A china water jug, and the basin it stood in, were numbered 97, the wash-stand 96. There was a sun-bleached wardrobe and a dressing-table without a looking-glass, brown linoleum on the floor. The room’s single window had a view of the distant stream, and Mary Louise remembered her cousin telling her that he’d first seen the heron from his bedroom. On the mantelpiece, seeming as if he might have left them there himself, were his binoculars. A corner press, built into the two walls that formed it, was empty. So was the wardrobe. The dressing-table had a single drawer, lined with old newspaper. It, too, was empty, except for a collar-stud and a bottle of green Stephens’ ink, both of which she took.

Downstairs, in the room he had been so fond of, the scattered papers had been cleared. Books were tied into bundles. The French and German soldiers, still battling as he had left them, were numbered 39. She pulled out drawers and searched in the mahogany cupboards on either side of the door, but her cousin’s papers, his drawings and his scribbles, were not there. She had hoped to find them tied up in a bundle like the books – not an item in the auction but simply tidied away. Her Aunt Emmeline might have kept them by her, she decided; she might have packed them into the luggage she had taken to Culleen. One day, if her aunt didn’t want them any more, she’d ask if she could have them.

To pass the time, Mary Louise walked down to the stream, but today no fish were to be seen. Cars appeared on the avenue, one or two at first, then several at a time. She sat down on the grassy bank and watched them turning at the parking sign, and people getting out of them. The sound of doors banging, and of voices, drifted down to her. She began the walk back to the house.

Some time during her first few weeks in the house above the shop Elmer had thought to amuse her by instructing her in the ingenuity of the wall-safe in the accounting office. It had no key, he began by explaining, but operated by what was known as a combination. Single digits were registered, following one another in rotation to form a given number. A lever was turned, then a second lever, and the door of the safe opened. ‘Have a go,’ Elmer had invited, as if they were two children playing. The combination of numbers had remained in her memory, often recurring to her, as if unconsciously she knew that one day she would need to make use of it.

The evening before, when Elmer was in Hogan’s and her sisters-in-law already in bed, she discovered that a whole week’s takings were there, and, in a strong-box at the back of the safe, hiding the Jameson bottle and a glass, a bundle of five-pound notes with a rubber band around it. She took everything except the coins: £403 she counted afterwards. Anything she didn’t spend she intended to return.

‘Toy soldiers!’ The auctioneer’s tone was wearily impatient, dismissive almost. ‘Colourful set of soldiers! Who’ll start me with a pound?’

No one did. Mary Louise bought the soldiers for ten shillings.

She walks about the town. After thirty-one years she is a stranger and the town has changed, as her husband warned her. There is more of a bustle to it, more vehicles about, people hurry more. The goods in the shop windows look more interesting, French cheese and wines you’d never see in the old days, new kinds of sweets. The bill-posters are different, the old Electric’s gone.

Glances, sometimes a stare, are cast in her direction. No one knows her well enough to address her; a few remember; hearsay attaches her to the town. She doesn’t mind, one way or the other, and concerns herself instead with the place she has left behind. The last of the cars would have arrived by now; those permitted to go would have gone. It was said that the obstreperous were to be moved to a house near Mullingar. She wonders about that: if the remaining inmates have been taken away, if all chatter and arguing have ceased, if the hammering and whistling of workmen have begun. Soon, people who do not suffer from dementia paralytica or morbid impulses or melancholia will sleep in the rooms, men who have spent the day shooting or fishing, women dreaming beside them in chiffon nightdresses. Motor-cars will take up their positions on the smooth tarmac of the car park, a different one from time to time parked on top of his flowerbed.

That’s why she has come back: she nods to herself in Father Mathew Street, reminding herself of her reason. That’s why she didn’t make a fuss or run the risk of being taken to Mullingar with the obstreperous: tomorrow she’ll walk out to the graveyard.

‘It wasn’t because I went there,’ she told them – Sister Hannah and Mrs Leavy, Belle D and all the others. ‘It wasn’t because I went there that I had to leave the town. There was another reason, a worse reason by a long way.’

‘Rats?’ Mr Renehan said.

‘We have them in the attics.’

‘Rats are most unpleasant. Is it a trap you’re thinking of?’

‘Or maybe poison. D’you keep poison, Mr Renehan?’

‘I do of course. Rodenkil. Or Ridemquik. Something like that would do the trick.’

Bleheen the inseminator was in the shop, buying nails from one of the Renehan boys. He smiled blandly at Mary Louise, and she remembered how his car had kept swerving all over the road on the evening of Letty’s wedding party. He asked her how she was keeping and she said all right. In the days when she had gone to the Electric Cinema Bleheen was often there also, either alone or with one of the widows whose company he was investigating in his search for a suitable wife. For reasons of his own he limited himself to widows.

‘And a little yoke for coring apples,’ he said when the Renehan boy had weighed out the nails. ‘I have a weakness for stewed apples,’ he informed Mary Louise, ‘with a drop of Bird’s custard.’

She nodded. A woman buying press-studs in the drapery one day had told her Bleheen would never marry. He could take every widow in Ireland to the pictures but in the end he’d remain the way he was, set in his ways and cautious.

‘I had that little yoke,’ he said, ‘only I threw it out with the apple peelings by mistake.’

Mary Louise imagined him cooking his own meals, peeling apples and potatoes the way a man would. He went on talking to her about domestic matters. She didn’t listen. ‘The whole party gathered in the drawing-room. Arkady picked up the latest number of some journal. Anna Sergeyevna rose, and it was then that he glanced at Katya…’

It was better for Bleheen not to marry if he didn’t love anyone. He was right to be choosy, even if choosiness meant he’d be a bachelor till he died. Suddenly Mary Louise wondered if her mother and father loved one another. Never in her life had she thought about that before. Never before had it been in the scheme of things that love should enter into any consideration of her parents.

‘I’d say the Rodenkil,’ Mr Renehan advised. ‘We sell a lot of Rodenkil.’

She listens to them abusing him. Who’s going to cook for her? Who’s going to clean up after her? They don’t intend to watch her eating. They’ll none of them last a week at the mercy of a mad woman. All these years he paid money for her to exist in luxury: isn’t that enough? Insult on top of injury. Scandalous what he’s done. They don’t intend to lift a finger, why should they? So how’s he going to manage for an instant, the state he’s in?

‘She’s my wife,’ he says.

‘And we’re to go in trembling of her. Your own sisters at the end of their days, driven tormented with fear.’

‘It’s the way things are. They’re closing all those places down.’

‘You’re doing it to spite us.’

He is a seedy figure now, cigarette-burns on his clothes, his shirt-collars frayed, portions of his jowl forgotten when he shaves. Guilt has made him take her in; guilt made him visit her and pay a little so that she wouldn’t have to drink out of an enamel mug. He’d be ashamed of himself if he’d ever struck her.

‘Robert was buried in the wrong graveyard,’ she tells him when the moment seems right for saying it. ‘Will you help me over that, Elmer?’

He doesn’t reply, and she tells him she never hated him. She tells him she thought about him often during her long time in Miss Foye’s house. ‘Include others in your prayers,’ they used to urge, and she included him.

‘I’m sorry I caused you trouble,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry I made things worse.’

Waking in the middle of one night, Elmer found himself thinking about Bridget asleep in Hogan’s Hotel – just as, when a boy, he’d imagined Mrs Fahy and the housekeeper at the school in Wexford asleep. The hotel manageress’s clothes were on a chair in her bedroom, her stockings draped over the top of them. Although Elmer had never said so to his sisters, or in any way intimated it to his wife, he’d been relieved when Mary Louise decided she wanted to sleep in the attic. There was more room in the bed; you could pull the bed-clothes round you when it was cold and not have to leave an area of them for someone else. All in all, he liked it better.

Elmer, when he was a boy also, had often heard about the wife of Hanlon the solicitor, who suffered from a fear of going out. It was necessary for a priest to come to the house to give her Mass, and for a hairdresser to come also. The nun who ran the library at the convent brought books to the house twice a week. ‘The unfortunate woman can’t so much as set foot in her garden,’ Elmer recalled his father saying in the dining-room. ‘Seemingly she’ll spend an hour at the bottom of the stairs, unable to approach the front door. You’d be sorry for poor Hanlon.’

Passing the Hanlons’ house, Elmer had often seen the solicitor’s wife sitting in the bow window of a downstairs room, looking at the robins in the flowerbeds. A scrawn of a woman, his father had described her as, and from what he could see this was correct. She had developed the affliction soon after her marriage, and Elmer wondered if Mary Louise wasn’t suffering from something similar, not that Mary Louise had a fear of going out, far from it.

‘No doctor could treat a condition like that,’ his father had pronounced in the dining-room. ‘A nervous complaint, I’d call it.’ Mr Quarry, as square and bulkily-made as Elmer himself, liked to address his family on such topics of interest in the dining-room. Half your education, he used to say, you received in the home. Elmer knew his father would have designated Mary Louise as one suffering from a nervous complaint also, and he resolved to have the expression ready should he again be approached on the subject by her parents or by the snooty sister. He had been struck by the same misfortune as the solicitor. He had married in good faith, giving a penniless girl a home. You could have Dr Cormican coming and going every day of the week for all the good it would do. A medical man had never once entered the Hanlons’ house, he recalled his father reporting in the dining-room. Money down the drain it would have been.

The despondency Elmer had experienced during the week of the seaside honeymoon, and its continuance after he and Mary Louise returned, had finally lost its bitter pain. It could be muddled away, he had discovered, and though occasionally it distressfully returned, all he had to do was to open the safe in the accounting office and reach behind the strong-box.

‘My God, what’s this?’ Matilda screamed one evening in the dining-room, the first of the three of them to place a forkful of rissole in her mouth. She spat it out immediately. It tasted dreadful, she screamed.

Rose, who had made the rissoles, bridled. There was nothing wrong with them, she maintained. They’d had them yesterday at dinnertime: what they were eating now were those that were left over, heated up. She tasted what was already on her own fork, then spat it out too.

‘They’ve gone bad,’ Matilda said.

‘How could they have gone bad? Weather like this, how could they?’

Elmer pushed his plate away. If the rissoles were bad he had no intention of being foolhardy. Sometimes meat which Rose re-cooked for the second or third time didn’t taste of anything at all.

‘They were perfect yesterday,’ Rose repeated.

Elmer said he would spread cheese on his bread if there was cheese available.

‘Was the sirloin all right when it came in?’ Matilda inquired, and Rose snappishly replied that of course it was. The same sirloin, with an undercut, arrived from the butcher every Friday, was roasted on Sunday, eaten cold on Monday, chopped up for rissoles on Tuesday. What remained of the rissoles appeared on the table again every Wednesday evening. All their lives this had been so; all their lives the Quarrys had consumed the Wednesday-evening rissoles without mishap.

‘Are there maggots in them?’ Matilda pressed apart the mush of potato and meat with her fork. ‘I think something moved in my mouth.’

Rose told her to have sense. There were no maggots in the rissoles. They had been made as they always were, the meat and potato bound together with half a cup of milk, a beaten egg yolk fixing the breadcrumbs around each one of them.

The sisters continued to examine the food on their plates, poking with their forks and peering at the chopped meat and the crisp covering of egg and breadcrumbs. Gingerly, Rose lifted a fragment of this crispness to her lips. It tasted all right, she said.

Since neither sister had heeded Elmer’s request for cheese, he rose and crossed to the sideboard. In the big centre drawer he found a round packet of Galtee spreadable triangles. He returned to the table with two of them and eased away the silver-paper wrapping.

‘Look at this green stuff.’ Matilda’s voice had risen again. ‘For God’s sake, what’s this stuff, Rose?’

She held her plate out. Rose investigated her own rissole further, then cut in half the two on Elmer’s plate. A virulent shade of green tinged the centre of each.

‘Food mildew,’ Matilda said. ‘How long did you keep the potatoes?’

Rose didn’t answer. She’d never heard the expression ‘food mildew’ before and guessed that Matilda had made it up. If the rissoles had gone bad it wasn’t her fault. She cut a slice of bread in half and buttered it. Two rissoles had been kept back in the kitchen by Her Ladyship, as two always were on a Wednesday evening. Rose wondered if she’d eaten them. It would be like her not to notice the taste or the colour they’d gone.

‘You can get poisoned from food mildew,’ Matilda said.

Afterwards, in Hogan’s, those words echoed unpleasantly as Elmer listened to Gerry telling him about a victory achieved by a greyhound that was said to be the fastest animal since Master McGrath. In his mind’s eye he saw again the halved rissoles on the plate in the dining-room. ‘I sold her Rodenkil,’ Renehan’s voice echoed also.

If there were rats in the attics you’d know about it, not a shadow of doubt. She was all over the place due to the nervous complaint. She’d maybe put some of the Rodenkil into a cup and left it around by mistake. It wouldn’t be difficult for Rose, if she was rushed or the light was bad, to get the cup muddled up with another one. Elmer pushed his glass across the bar. There’d be the mother and father of a commotion if he so much as opened his mouth.

‘It’s the way he has of crouching in the trap,’ Gerry said. ‘Off like a bomb he is.’

There was another woman Elmer remembered his father talking about in the dining-room, some woman whose name he couldn’t remember, who lived out in the hills somewhere. She used to hoard fire-lighters. For no rational purpose she had the house filled to the brim with wax fire-lighters. If you’d put a match to the place, his father used to say, it wouldn’t last longer than a minute.

That night Elmer didn’t linger in the hall of the hotel, but hurried back after he’d had one more drink. He waited until he heard his sisters ascending the stairs to their rooms and then made his way to the kitchen. He searched in the cupboards, and then in the adjoining scullery, in the safe and the refrigerator. He lifted plates off bowls and jars, he examined packets and unlabelled paper-bags. In the waste-bin he found the contaminated rissoles, but nowhere was there a supply of the green substance, carelessly left about.

Moving cautiously so as not to rouse his sisters, Elmer descended the stairs again, entered the shop and mounted the brief stairway to the accounting office. He opened the safe and poured himself a measure of whiskey. He sat for a while, then as cautiously as before made his way through the house to the attics.

‘I am back in the town.’

‘You’re back because you’re better these days, dear. Because of the medicine. All the old stuff is over and done with.’

‘I’m back because of the grave.’

‘You can’t touch a grave. You have to leave a grave alone.’

‘You can change things if you want to.’

His hand is on the doorknob. More than anything else, Elmer requires a drink. His want is a need; he has scarcely the strength to stand; he came up with her tray and she smiled at him, delaying him by speaking of a graveyard, a subject she has raised before. ‘Let her back into the attics if she asks for it,’ Miss Foye advised, and duly he made the arrangements, putting sheets on the bed himself.

‘I must go now,’ he says.

‘You can open a grave. You can move the remains. Isn’t it funny, that expression, Elmer – remains? To refer to a human person as remains?’

‘Sure, what would be the point of it, dear?’

The first time he visited her in the asylum she said someone whose name he couldn’t catch had stopped keeping a diary. A thick black line had been drawn and that was that. He asked her if it was herself, nervous about any diaries left lying about, but she didn’t reply.

‘Robert and I loved one another,’ she says.

‘Eat up that plateful before it’s cold. And take the pills when you’ve had it. Put the tray outside and I’ll get it later on.

‘I don’t need to take pills, Elmer.’

‘Ah sure, you have to take them. Aren’t they keeping you cured?’

‘All it is is moving the remains from one graveyard to another. I want to be buried with him, Elmer.’

They maintained they wouldn’t set foot on the attic stairs. They refused to so much as butter a slice of bread for her. They said if she came within ten yards of the pantry or the kitchen they’d walk out of the house. ‘I’ll see to her food,’ he interrupted, and since her return he has done so, carrying her up anything that is left over, frying bacon and eggs for her if that is necessary.

‘I have business down in the town,’ he says. ‘I can’t be delaying.’

‘All I want is to be buried with him.’

‘I’ll organize that. Only take your pills now.’

‘Will you drive me out and I’ll show you where the graveyard is?’

‘The first minute I have to spare we’ll go out there. Myself and yourself.’

‘It’s the place where the Attridges are buried. The Attridge family.’

‘I know it well.’

The desire to be away, to be in the bar at Hogan’s, has developed into a soreness that spreads all over his body. That first time, the first occasion he visited her, he said: ‘Well now, and how are you, dear?’ She shook her head, referring to some beggarwoman with second sight. On later visits he told her the news from the town, how Foley’s had been converted into a self-service, with wire baskets, how Sarsfield’s in Lower Bridge Street was the first bar to have the television installed.

‘I really want it,’ she begs. ‘It’s the only thing I want.’

‘No problem about the grave, dear.’

*

Once she was locked away it would be as though she had died. Her advent had been a destruction, and they imagined a fresh beginning for the three of them. But within ten months he was listening at last to Kilkenny’s sales talk at the garage, and then he bought a car purely so that three or four times a year he could visit her. Not once have they sat in that car; not once have they seen, even in the distance, the house she went to. ‘Come over for the drive,’ he used to offer, but neither cared to reply.

They sit in the big front room, its grey wallpaper unchanged in their lifetime, a room their brother has not entered for almost thirty years. They manage their outrage at their sister-in-law’s presence as best they can; they’re too old now for the vigour of such feelings, Rose seventy-four, Matilda seventy-three. ‘You damn fool,’ Rose said when first he told them she was to all intents and purposes cured due to wonder drugs. He repeated words that had been used to him, ‘caring’, and ‘commitment’ and ‘community’. Ridiculous, it sounded, all that coming out of a grown man. He was finished years ago; until then they had used their energy protesting, in an endeavour to conserve what remained. What does it matter now? The shop has gone and with it their standing in the town. Often he does not wear a tie. They have seen him pass out of the halldoor in his old felt slippers. As if he’s feeding a dog, he gathers up the remains and carries the tray up the attic stairs, or carelessly breaks the egg yolk when he fries it, not noticing the splinters of shell that fall into the fat.

‘You damn fool,’ Rose says again, coldly stating the fact, her tone without the emotion that years ago would have made it shrill. She says it often.

‘She has a brother and a sister,’ Matilda reminds him, often also. ‘It isn’t here she belongs. Who says it’s here?’

‘She is my wife.’

These exchanges, and other passages of conversation, are recalled in the grey front room, but are not dwelt upon in further conversation, are not mulled over aloud. Memories possess the two old women, further souring their bitterness. There are echoes of a time that might so easily and so naturally have continued: he’d been the person in their lives when it seemed clear that no one else was waiting to transform their lives. Making cakes for him, roasting meat, darning and mending, changing his sheets, the presents given and received on Christmas Day, he in the accounting office, they receiving in the shop: once, like a promise, there was the perpetuity of all that. Modest enough, God knows; not much to ask.

Again she is the only one, a slight figure in the corner of the pew. Two colours – black and brown – are arranged, stylishly, in her coat, its fur collar turned up for warmth. They are repeated in her soft suede shoes. The first wrinkles of old age creep around her eyes and the corners of her mouth, but the beauty that only her cousin ever remarked upon has not yet deserted her. A madonna look, her cousin said to himself the night he died while dreaming of her.

‘Amen,’ she murmurs, thin fingers splayed on her forehead, eyes closed.

The clergyman who stands at the altar is tall, a young man still unmarried, not long the inheritor of five far-flung parishes. Every Sunday, from eight o’clock till nightfall, he makes the rounds of his sparse attendances, spreading the Gospel over many miles, among the few. Often now this woman, until recently accounted mad, is the only occupant of these pews.

‘Lighten our darkness…’ he softly pleads. Shades of green and crimson, of blue and yellow, glow dully in the window behind him, scrolls looping, basketwork and swaddling clothes. No hymns are sung when she is the only one, the psalm is not intoned. Instead of a sermon the two converse. ‘The peace of God, which passeth all understanding…’

She remembers how in childhood, and when she was a girl, church services constituted an outing, how after her marriage they provided an opportunity to meet her family. She began to enjoy them for themselves during the years she was away.

‘That was very nice,’ she compliments the clergyman. ‘Beautifully conducted.’

‘It’s good of you to come so often.’

‘I was thinking of Miss Mullover during our Te Deum. I don’t know why.’

The schoolteacher was long before his time, but often on these Sunday occasions her name crops up. In a schoolroom two children glance at one another with curiosity, mildly anticipating the love there is to be: again that picture forms in his mind.

‘It has always surprised me that she didn’t guess. That she didn’t know we belonged to each other.’

He nods, not signifying understanding, only making the gesture because a response is necessary.

‘Robert and I belonged to one another before we could breathe, certainly before either of us knew the other existed.’

‘You’ve told me.’

‘Is that how love starts, belonging without knowing it? When you look back it seems so.’

Again he nods, acknowledging her greater experience. Beneath his surplice there is a shrugging motion also, honestly reflecting his uncertainty.

‘God gives permission: is that it, d’you think?’

‘Possibly.’

‘And perhaps it’s not allowed, either, that someone else may guess?’

‘Perhaps not.’ He lifts the surplice over his head. Her company is like a child’s. Saying at once what occurs to her may have to do with her incarceration, a habit she picked up from her companions. Having not known her before that time, he cannot easily guess.

‘He bought a motor-car so that he could visit me. It’s asking less that he should see to the graves. Is it still too much?’

He drapes the surplice over his left arm, smoothing the creases and watching them return. She has told him about reading the novels of Turgenev among the tombstones. She has told him that for eight years she has flushed the prescribed drugs down the lavatory, that she does not take them now because they are not necessary. As she stands in the pew, smiling up at him, her life seems as mysterious as an act of God, her innocence and her boundless love arbitrarily there, her last modest wish destined to go ungranted. The distress engendered in him by these thoughts turns into a familiar apprehension: contemplation of this woman’s life could tease away his faith more surely than all his empty churches.

‘May I take communion?’

It will make him late, but he does not demur. The surplice is replaced, the bread and wine unlocked, and measured out and offered. ‘Do this,’ he mutters, ‘in remembrance of me…’

She remembers her cousin reading the bit that likened death to a fisherman. She remembers her husband bringing the bars of chocolate on his visits, Crunchie and Caramel Crisp. She remembers his saying that he’d had the front woodwork of the shop repainted blue. Best to stick with blue, he explained, you knew where you were with blue. ‘I hear your sister’s in a certain condition again,’ he said as well. He’d bought the chocolate bars in Foley’s.

There is a final prayer, a whispering sound that reminds her of a breeze. If he feels inclined, the fisherman keeps the caught fish in the water, still swimming although it’s netted.

‘I must go now,’ the clergyman says, but listens while she tells him about Turgenev’s fisherman. Inviting her into the world of a novelist had been her cousin’s courtship, all he could manage, as much as she could accept. Yet passion came, like consummation in the end. For thirty-one years she’d clung to a refuge in which her love affair could spread itself, a safe house offering sanctuary. For thirty-one years she passed as mad and was at peace.

‘I dress for him,’ she says. ‘I make my face up in our graveyard. It is nice I can dress for him again.’

He smiles, recalling how she giggled when she told him that she had never opened the Rodenkil. Still giggling, she said she once had written I must not be mischievous a hundred times. She bought the Rodenkil from her husband’s friend on purpose. She stained the rissoles green with the Stephens’ ink she’d taken from her cousin’s bedroom. ‘People think the worst of you,’ she added when she’d said all that, and added further that you could hardly blame them.

‘I’m sorry I delayed you,’ she apologises before she turns to go. ‘I’m a dreadful old nuisance.’

He watches as she walks away. Prosperous, she strikes him as just for a moment, her pretty shoes, her brown and black coat, a fragile figure, yet prosperous in her love. Does she tell Elmer Quarry that she dresses for her cousin? Does he pay for her clothes without question, because he doesn’t want to think about any of it? Does love like hers frighten everyone just a little?

‘Goodbye,’ the clergyman calls after her, and she turns and waves, and then is gone.

Alone in the cold church he sees her again for an instant, the child in the schoolroom, glancing across the desks at her delicate cousin. In the bedroom she touches the collar-stud with her lips and takes from the dressing-table drawer the bottle of Stephens’ ink. Warmed by sunlight, her finger traces the letters on an Attridge gravestone; in the blue-washed cottage she bargains for her cousin’s clothes. She arranges the soldiers in a battle she does not understand; she hangs the watch on the nail by the fireplace. Their voices join, entangled, reading about Russians.

She’ll outlive the Quarrys, the clergyman reflects, and sees her differently: old and alone, moving about from room to room in the house above the shop. ‘I have arranged it,’ his own voice promises, the least he can surely do.

There is the funeral, and then the lovers lie together.

It is not easy to introduce myself. Gloria Grey, Janine Ann Johns, Cora Lamore: there is a choice, and there have been other names as well. Names hardly matter, I think; it is perhaps enough to say I like Emily Delahunty best. ‘Mrs Delahunty,’ people say, although strictly speaking I have never been married. I am offered the title out of respect to a woman of my appearance and my years; and Quinty – who addresses me more than anyone else – once said when I questioned him on the issue: ‘ “Miss Delahunty” doesn’t suit you.’

I make no bones about it, I am not a woman of the world; I am not an educated woman; what I know I have taught myself. Rumour and speculation – even downright lies ’ have abounded since I was sixteen years old. In any person’s life that side of things is unavoidable, but I believe I have suffered more than most, and take this opportunity to set the record straight. Firstly, my presence on the S.S. Hamburg in my less affluent days was as a stewardess, nothing more. Secondly, it is a mischievous fabrication that at the time of the Oleander Avenue scandal I accepted money in return for silence. Thirdly, Mrs Chubbs was dead, indeed already buried, before I met her husband. On the other hand I do not deny that men have offered me gifts, probably all of which I have accepted. Nor do I deny that my years in Africa are marked, in my memory, with personal regret. Unhappiness breeds confusion and misunderstanding. I was far from happy in Ombubu, at the Café Rose.

In the summer of which I now write I had reached my fifty-sixth year – a woman carefully made up, eyes a greenish-blue. Then, as now, my hair was as pale as sand, as smooth as a seashell, the unfussy style reflecting the roundness of my face. My mouth is a full rosebud, my nose classical; my complexion has always been admired. Naturally, there were laughter lines that summer, but my skin, though no longer the skin of a girl, had worn well and my voice had not yet acquired the husky depths that steal away femininity. In Italy men who were strangers to me still gave me a second look, although naturally not with the same excitement as once men did in other places where I’ve lived. I had, in truth, become more than a little plump, and though perhaps I should have dressed with such a consideration in mind this is something I have never been able to bring myself to do: I cannot resist just a hint of drama in my clothes – though not bright colours, which I abhor. ‘I never knew a girl dress herself up so prettily,’ a man who sat on the board of a carpet business used to say, and my tendency to put on a pound or two has not been without admirers. A bag of bones Mrs Chubbs was, according to her husband, which is why – so I’ve always suspected – he took to me in the first place.

Having read so far, you’ll probably be surprised to learn that I’m a woman who prays. When I was a child I went to Sunday school and had a picture of Jesus on a donkey above my bed. In the Café Rose in Ombubu I interested Poor Boy Abraham in praying also, the only person I have ever influenced in this way. ‘He’s retarded, that boy,’ Quinty used to say in his joky way, careless as to whether or not the boy was within earshot. Quinty’s like that, as you’ll discover.

I am the author of a series of fictional romances, composed in my middle age after my arrival in this house. I am no longer active in that field, and did not ever presume to intrude myself into the world of literature – though, in fairness to veracity, I must allow that my modest works dissect with some success the tangled emotions of which they treat. That they have given pleasure I am assured by those kind enough to write in appreciation. They have helped; they have whiled away the time. I can honestly state that I intended no more, and I believe you’ll find I am an honest woman.

But to begin at the beginning. I was born on the upper stairway of a lodging-house in an English seaside resort. My father owned a Wall of Death; my mother, travelling the country with him, participated in the entertainment by standing upright on the pillion of his motor-cycle while he raced it round the rickety enclosure. I never knew either of them. According to the only account I have – that of Mrs Trice, who had it from the lodging-house keeper – my mother was on her way to the first-floor lavatory when she was taken with child, if you’ll forgive that way of putting it. Within minutes an infant’s cries were heard on the stairway. ‘That was a setback,’ Mrs Trice explained, and further revealed that in her opinion my father and mother had counted on my mother’s continuing performance on the motor-cycle pillion to ‘do the trick’. By this she meant I would be stillborn, since efforts at aborting had failed. It was because I wasn’t that the arrangement was made with Mr and Mrs Trice, of 21 Prince Albert Street, in that same seaside town.

They were a childless couple who had long ago abandoned hope of parenthood: they paid for the infant that was not wanted, the bargain being that all rights were thereby re-linquished and that no visit to 21 Prince Albert Street would ever be attempted by the natural parents. Although nobody understands more than I the necessity that caused those people of a Wall of Death to act as they did, to this day I fear abandonment, and have instinctively avoided it as a fictional subject. The girls of my romances were never left by lovers who took from them what they would. Mothers did not turn their backs on little children. Wives did not pitifully plead or in bitterness cuckold their husbands. The sombre side of things did not appeal to me; in my works I dealt in happiness ever after.

Quinty is familiar with my origins, for nothing can be kept from him. In Africa he knew I had accumulated money, probably how much. In 1978, when we had known one another for some time in Ombubu, it was he who suggested that I should buy a property in Umbria, which he would run for me as an informal hotel – quite different from the Café Rose. Repeatedly he pressed the notion upon me, tiring me with the steel of his gaze. Enough money had been made; there was no need for either of us to linger where we were. That was the statement in his eyes. We could both trade silence for silence in another kind of house. Half a child and half a rogue he is.

Quinty was born in the town of Skibbereen, in Ireland, approximately forty-two years ago. He is a lean man, with a light footstep, gaunt about the features. From the outer corner of each eye two long wrinkles run down his cheeks, like threads. When first I knew him in Ombubu he was shifty and unhealthy-looking. ‘There’s a sick man here,’ Poor Boy Abraham cried, excited because a stranger had arrived at the café. I never knew where it was that Quinty had come from in Africa, or what had brought him to the continent in the first place. But I later heard, the way one does in an outpost like Ombubu, that several years before he’d tricked into marriage the daughter of a well-to-do Italian family, whom he had come across when she was an au pair girl in London. She ran away from him when she discovered that he was not the manager of a meat-extract factory, as he had claimed, and that he stole his clothes from D. H. Evans. He followed her to Modena, bothering her and threatening, until one night her father and two of her brothers drove him a little way towards Parma, pushed him out on to a grass verge and left him there. He did not attempt to return, but that was how he came to be in Italy and learned the language. When first he mentioned Umbria to me I’d no idea where it was; I doubt I’d even heard of it. ‘Let me have just a little money,’ he begged in Ombubu one damply oppressive afternoon. ‘Enough for the journey and then to look about.’ Africa had gone stale for me, he said, which was a delicate way of putting it; the regulars at the Café Rose had not changed for years. In other words, the place had become a bore for both of us.

He sang the praises of Italy; I listened to descriptions of Umbrian landscape and hill-towns, of seasons bringing their variation of food and wine. Quinty can be persuasive, and I was happy enough to agree that a time of my life had come to an end. He’d played a certain role during most of that time, I have to say in fairness, and I have to give him credit for it. When he raised the subject of Italy I did the simplest thing: I gave him the money, believing I’d never see him again. But he returned a fortnight later and spread out photographs of Umbria and of villas that might be purchased. ‘No one would care to die in the Café Rose,’ he pointed out, a sentiment with which I could not but concur. One house in particular he was keen on.

Imagine a yellowish building at the end of a track that is in places like a riverbed. White with dust unless rain has darkened it, this track is two hundred metres long, curving through a landscape of olive trees and cypresses. In summer, broom and laburnum daub the clover slopes, poppies and geraniums sprinkle the meadows. Behind the house the hill continues to rise gently, and there’s a field of sunflowers. The great lake of Trasimeno is on our doorstep; only thirty kilometres to the south there’s a railway junction at Chiusi, which is convenient; and in the same area there’s a health spa at Chianciano. In Quinty’s photographs of the house there were out-buildings, and machinery that had rusted, but all that has changed since.

Of the house itself, the window shutters are a faded green, and the entrance doors – always open in the daytime – are green also. Further doors – glass decoratively framed with metal – separate the outside hall from the inner, and the floors of both, and of the dining-room and drawing-room – called by Quinty the salotto – are tiled, a shade of pale terracotta. Upstairs, on either side of two long, cool corridors, the bedrooms are small and simple, like convent cells. All are cream-distempered, with inside shutters instead of curtains, each with a dressing-table, a wardrobe and a bed, and a reproduction of a different Annunciation above each wash-stand. What luxury there is in my house belongs to the antique furniture of the downstairs rooms and the inner hall: embroidered sofas, pale chairs and tables, inlaid writing-desks, footstools, glass-fronted bookcases, the dining-room’s chandelier.

When the tourists come to my house they pull the bell-chain and the sound echoes from the outer hall. Then Quinty, in his trim white jacket, answers the summons. ‘Well?’ he says in English, for one of his quirks is not immediately to speak Italian to strangers. ‘How can I help you?’ And the tourists cobble together what English they can, if it happens not to be their native tongue.

A handful of travellers is all Quinty ever makes welcome at a time, people who have spilled over from the hotels of the town that lies five kilometres away. A small, middle-aged woman called Signora Bardini, dressed always and entirely in black, is employed to cook. And Quinty found Rosa Crevelli, a long-legged, dark-skinned maid, to assist him in the dining-room. He presents us to our visitors as a private household, not at all in a commercial line of business. From the outset my house was known neither as an albergo nor a pensione, nor a restaurant with rooms, nor an hotel. ‘This is what suits?’ he suggested.

Being profitable, it was what suited Quinty, but for other reasons it suited me also. Once, somewhere, I have seen a painted frieze continuing around the inside walls of a church – people processing in old-fashioned dress, proceeding on their way to Heaven or to Hell, I’m not sure which. Over the years the tourists who have come to my house have lingered in my memory like that. I see their faces, and even sometimes still hear their voices: tall Dutch people, the stylish French, Germans who brought with them jars of breakfast food, Americans delighting in simple things as much as children do, English couples suffering from digestive troubles. Chapters of books have been read, postcards written, bridge played in the evenings, even pictures painted, on the terrace. I have suffered no bad debts, nor have there ever been complaints about the bedrooms or the food. Quinty gave Rosa Crevelli English lessons and took up something else with her in private, but I asked no questions. Instead, within a month of settling in this house, I taught myself to type.

All this began nine years before the summer of which I write – the nine years in which I left the past behind, as title succeeded title: Precious September, Flight to Enchantment, For Ever More, Behold My Heart! and many others. My savings had bought the house; now – though after difficult beginnings – there was wealth. One day it would be Quinty who woke up rich, yet he could not possibly have predicted what would happen here: that I would sit down in my private room and compose romances. As far as Quinty knew, there was nothing in my history to suggest such a development; I was not that kind of woman. To tell the truth, I’d hardly have guessed it myself. As a villa hostess in an idyllic setting, I would make a living for both of us out of a passing tourist trade, as I had made one in a different role in Africa. That’s how Quinty saw the future and as far as it went he was right, of course. He’s cute as a fox when it comes to matters of gain, that being his life really.

Besides the tourists, our visitors are rare: a functionary from the tax office, or would-be thieves arriving with some excuse to look the place over, a traveller in fertilizers seeking directions to a nearby farm. Ever since the summer of 1987, which I think of to this day as the summer of the General and Otmar and the child, and which I remember most vividly of all the seasons of my life, nothing has been quite the same. That summer and for a few summers after it no tourists were received. Yet had you, for some other reason, gained admission during that summer Quinty would have led you through the outer hall and through the inner one and into the salotto, to wait there for me. Depending upon the time of day, the General would probably have been reading his English newspaper in the cool of the shadows, the child engrossed in one of her drawings, Otmar soundlessly tapping a surface with his remaining fingers. Many times that summer I imagined a voice saying: ‘I have come for Otmar,’ or: ‘I understand you are keeping an old Englishman here,’ or: ‘Gather up the child’s belongings.’ Many times I imagined the car that had drawn up, and the dust its wheels had raised. I imagined a little knot of official people outside our entrance doors, one of them lighting a cigarette to pass the time, the butt later thrown down on the gravel. In fact, it wasn’t like that in the least. All that happened was that Thomas Riversmith came.

That summer the child was eight years old, Otmar twenty-seven, the General elderly. They were three people on their own, and so was I. ‘Heart’s companion’ is an expression I used to some effect in Two on a Sunbeam, and the fact that it lingers still in my mind, so long after the last paragraph of that work was completed, is perhaps significant, personally. I have always been the first to admit that in this world we are eternal beggars – yet it is also true that alms are not withheld for ever. When I was in the care of Mr and Mrs Trice I longed for a cowboy to step down from the screen of the old Gaiety Cinema and snatch me on to his saddle, spiriting me away from 21 Prince Albert Street. When I was a girl, serving clerks in a public-house dining-room, I longed for a young man of good family to draw his car up beside me on the street. When I was a woman I longed for a different kind of stranger to appear in the Café Rose. That summer, in Umbria, I had long ago abandoned hope. In my fifty-sixth year I had come to terms with stuff like that. My stories were a help, no point in denying it.

The winter and the spring that preceded that summer had been quiet. From time to time bundles of fan mail had arrived, forwarded by the English publishers. There had been invitations to attend get-togethers of one kind or another – I remember in particular a title that struck me, a ‘Festival of Romance’, in some Iron Curtain country. I have never gone in for that kind of thing, and politely declined. A man wrote from New Zealand, pointing out that he enjoyed the same surname as one of my characters – an unusual name, he suggested, which indeed it was: I imagined I had invented it. A schoolgirl in Stockton-on-Tees poured out her heart, as schoolgirls often do. An elderly person chided me for some historical carelessness or other, too slight to signify.

In January a pet died. Years ago a lame Siamese cat had wandered into the grounds one day, a pathetic creature, all skin and bone. Signora Bardini befriended her. She called the creature Tata and attached a little bell on a chain around her neck so that a gentle tinkling became a feature of my house. We watched her health recovering, her coat becoming silky again, contentment returning. But Tata was never young and never sprightly: we knew from the beginning that all she could give us was what remained of a mostly spent life. She grew old gracefully, which is nice, I think, for any creature, human or otherwise. Signora Bardini put a little wooden board up, that being her way.

Signora Bardini is a widow to whom no children were born. When her husband, a carpenter by trade, died in 1975 she apparently took some time to come to terms with her solitude. Although she speaks no English, I believe she was not happy again until she came to work in my house. Her life might have been perfect here were it not for Quinty, towards whom from the first she displayed an undemonstrative antipathy. Clearly she does not care for his relationship with Rosa Crevelli, nor his cheese-paring in household matters. But Signora Bardini is not, and never was, a woman to raise any kind of fuss.

That, then, was how things were at the beginning of the summer I write of. The house smelt faintly of paint, for some redecoration had recently been completed. ‘We must have a garden,’ I had repeatedly said that winter and spring, saying it mainly to myself. ‘It is ridiculous that a house like this does not have a garden to it.’ That was a little on my mind, as it had been for years. One April, passing through a railway station here in Italy, I noticed a great display of azaleas in pots. I did not then know what that flower is called, but later described it to Quinty, who found out for me. Ever since I had longed for an azalea garden, and for the lawns that I remember in England, and for little flowerbeds edged with pinks.

You may consider I was fortunate to lack only a garden and a particular friend, and of course you are right. I was, and am, immensely fortunate. Not many of us acquire the means necessary to occupy a place such as this, to choose as I may choose, rarely to count the cost. Not many pass a winter and spring with only the death of a lame cat to grieve over. In the eyes of the tourists who came here I was a comfortably-off English-woman, well looked after by my servants. Quinty no doubt struck them as eccentric, if not bizarre. For one thing he has a way of arbitrarily allocating to other people a particular obsession in order to hold forth on it himself. From encyclopaedias and newspapers he has acquired a wealth of chatty information on many subjects – royal families, the Iron Age, sewerage systems, land speed records, the initiation practices of blind Amazon tribes. A score of times I have heard him supplying some unfortunate tourist with the history of the Japanese railways or the nature of the jackal. ‘Giuseppe Garibaldi gave his name to a biscuit,’ he has confided in my hall; ‘the city of Bath to another. Hard tack the first biscuit of all was called, and had to be broken with a hammer.’ Jauntily gregarious, he endlessly leant against a pillar in the salotto that summer to conduct with the General a one-sided conversation about sport. When Mr Riversmith arrived he was imbued with an interest in holy women, although it could hardly have been clearer that Mr Riversmith’s subject was ants.

In other ways Quinty can be dubious to a degree that makes him untrustworthy. One day in the April of that year Rosa Crevelli was rude to me in Italian, scornfully curling down her beautiful lower lip as she muttered something. Quinty observed this, but did not reprimand her. For the first time, I realized, he must have broken the unspoken agreement that had existed between us ever since we’d left the Café Rose: he had told this girl about the past.

Later I taxed him with this treachery. He laughed at first, but then he turned away and his cheeks were damp with tears when again he faced me. ‘How can you make such an accusation?’ he whispered in a broken voice, and went on for so long – professing loyalty and faithfulness, uttering statements to the effect that he and the girl would lay down their lives for me, and protesting their desire to be nowhere else on earth but in my house – that I forgave him. ‘I’ve poured you a nice g and t,’ he said with a smile, coming to find me that evening in the salotto. When I met her next Rosa Crevelli curtsied.

Of course I could not be certain: maybe they sniggered, who can say? That I have a tendency to give the benefit of the doubt is either a weakness or a strength, but whichever it is I certainly don’t claim it as a virtue. In fact, for very good reasons, I claim very little for myself: there’s not much to me, and I’m the first to confess it. Nor do I claim anything mystical for that particular summer, no angels making their presence felt in my house, no voices heard. The child was an ordinary child, and I believe the others were ordinary too. Yet I don’t think anyone would deny that it was a singular summer, and constituted an experience not given to everyone.

‘It’s Quinty come to see you,’ Quinty said. ‘You’re all right. You’re OK.’

He tried to smile. The lines on his cheeks had wrinkled into zigzags, but the smile itself would not properly come.

‘Is it Good Friday?’ I asked, confused, because Good Friday did not come into any of it. I heard myself talking about the Café Rose, how one particular Good Friday the Austrian ivory cutter had been high on the stuff he took, and Poor Boy Abraham had been upset on account of anyone being high on the day when Jesus suffered on the Cross.

There were hours of shadows then – they might have been years for all I knew – and through them moved the white uniforms of the nurses, one nurse in particular, with thinning black hair. ‘You’ve had a bang,’ Quinty said, ‘but thanks be to God you’re progressing well.’ He sniffed the way he sometimes does, a casual, careless sound, disguising something else.

‘What happened?’ I asked, but Quinty’s reply – if he made one at all – eluded me, and when I looked he was no longer there. I didn’t want to think; I allowed my mind to wander where it would, gliding over the past, swooping into it here and there, no effort made on my part, no exhaustion. ‘Have they paid?’ Mrs Trice asked her husband. She was always asking him that, he being a collector of insurance money. ‘You’re weak with them,’ she accused him. ‘Weak as old water.’ As a child, I lived for eight years at 21 Prince Albert Street before I realized that my presence there was the result of a monetary transaction. I’d always addressed the Trices as though they were my mother and father, not knowing about the people of the Wall of Death until Mrs Trice told me in the kitchen one Saturday morning. ‘They were paid a sum by Mr Trice,’ was how she put it. ‘They weren’t people you’d care for.’

Between sleep and consciousness the honest black face of Poor Boy Abraham edged out the Trices, his negroid features intent as he swept the veranda floor at the Café Rose, while the fans whirred and rattled. The four Englishmen played poker at the corner table. ‘Where would I be if I did not come with my woes to you?’ the Austrian ivory cutter asked and, as always, drew the conversation round to his hopeless coveting of some black man’s wife. The aviator who was a regular in the café had been a skywriter, advertising a brand of beer mainly.

I dropped into sleep and dreamed, as I had on the train. ‘Feeling better, girlie?’ Ernie Chubbs was solicitous in Idaho. ‘Fancy a chow mein sent up?’

A nurse spoke kindly in Italian. I could tell she was being kind from her expression. She rearranged my pillows and for a moment held my hand. I think I must have called out in my sleep. When I seemed calm again she went away.

When Ernie Chubbs suggested accompanying him to Idaho I did so because I wanted to see the Old West. To this day, the Old West fascinates me: Claire Trevor in her cowgirl clothes, Marlene Dietrich singing in the saloon. To this day, I close my eyes when a wheel of the stagecoach works itself loose; I’m still not quick enough to see a sheriff draw his gun. Mr Tree took me to the Gaiety Cinema on Sunday afternoons and we would watch the comedy short – Leon Errol or Laurel and Hardy, or Charlie Chase – and then the Gaumont News and the serial episode, and whatever else there was besides the main feature. Sometimes the main feature was a gangster thriller, or an ice-skating drama or a musical, and that was always a disappointment. I longed for the canyons and the ranches, for the sound of a posse’s hooves, the saddles that became pillows beneath the stars.

Idaho was a disappointment too. Ernie Chubbs, who said he knew the region well, assured me it was where the Old West still was; but needless to say that wasn’t true. A lifetime’s dream was shattered – not that I expected to find the winding trails just as they had been shown to me, but at least there might have been something reminiscent of them, at least there might have been a smell of leather. ‘You’re simple, Emily,’ the big doctor who came to the Café Rose used to say. And yes, I suppose I am: I cannot help myself. I’m simple and I’m sentimental.

‘How long is it?’ I asked. ‘How long have I lain here?’

But the Italian nurses only smiled and rearranged my pillows. I worried about how long it was; yet a moment later – or perhaps it wasn’t a moment – that didn’t matter in the least. The Idaho of Ernie Chubbs – his going out on business, the waiting in the motel room – must have made me moan, because the nurses comforted me again. When they did, the Old West filled my thoughts, driving everything else away. In the Gaiety Cinema there were no curtains to the screen. On to the bare, pale expanse came the holsters and the sweat-bands of the huge-brimmed hats, the feathered Indians falling one by one, the rough and tumble of the fist fights. I was seven, and eight, and nine, when Dietrich sang. ‘See what the boys in the back room will have,’ she commanded in her peremptory manner, ‘And tell them I’ll have the same.’ In my sedated tranquillity I heard that song again; and the Idaho of Ernie Chubbs seemed gone for ever. Young men I have myself given life to whispered lines of love to happy girls. The Wedding March played, bouquets were thrown by brides. The Café Rose might not have existed either.

*

‘Quinty.’

‘Rest yourself, now.’

‘There were other people. A young man and his girl who talked in German. Americans. Italians in dark suits. A woman in the fashion business. Three English people. Are they here too, Quinty?’

‘They are of course.’

‘Quinty, will you find out? Find out and tell me. Please.’

‘Don’t upset yourself with that type of thing.’

‘Are they dead, Quinty?’

‘I’ll ask.’

But he didn’t move away from my bedside. He visited me to see if there were grounds for hope, promise of a relapse. His eyes were like two black gimlets; I closed my own. Little Bonny Maye was employed in Toupe’s Better Value Store, attaching prices to the shelved goods with a price-gun. Small discs of adhesive paper, each marked with an appropriate figure, were punched on to the surface of cans and packets. At certain hours of the day she worked a till.

Little Bonny Maye was taken up by Dorothy, an older girl from the table-tennis club. Dorothy was secretary to a financier and had been privately educated. Her voice was beautiful, and so was Dorothy herself. Bonny couldn’t think why she’d been taken up, and even if Dorothy had a way of asking her to do things for her rather a lot Bonny still appreciated the friendship more than any she had known. She was only too grateful: all the time with Dorothy that was what Bonny thought. Her single anxiety was that some silliness on her part would ruin everything.

‘Did you ever read that story of mine, Quinty? Little Bonny Maye? I was surprised to hear myself asking Quinty that. It wasn’t our usual kind of conversation. He said:

‘It’s great you have your stories.’

‘I thought about them in the Café Rose.’

‘You told me that.’

‘I don’t remember telling you.’

‘You had a drink or two in, the time you told me.’

The three words of the title were blue on the amber of the book-jacket, the two girls illustrated below. I must have said so because Quinty nodded. Soon afterwards he went away. He might even have guessed I had begun to hear the girls’ voices.

‘Dear, there is an “h” in “house”, you know.’ Dorothy could bring out Bonny’s blushes, hardly making an effort. When they went on holiday together, while Bonny fetched and carried for the older girl, Dorothy drew up a list of words that Bonny should take special care with. ‘Our fork belongs on our plate, not in the air. I had a nanny who said that.’

When I dozed, the pain in my face sometimes dulled to a tightness and for the first time, probably, I tried to smile. The two girls were on holiday in Menton, and when Blane came into their lives he naturally took Dorothy out, leaving poor Bonny to mooch about on her own, since it wouldn’t have been right for her to tag along. ‘Of course I don’t mind. Of course not.’ She tried to keep her spirits up by eating ice-cream or going to look at the yachts.

I was aware of making no effort whatsoever. I controlled nothing. Faces and words and voices flowed over me. ‘Such an unhappy thing!’ Blane exclaimed. ‘Such rotten luck!’ Dorothy had developed appendicitis. An ambulance had come. ‘You need a cognac,’ Blane insisted. ‘Or a Cointreau. No, Bonny, I absolutely insist. Poor girl, how wretched for you too!’ Dorothy’s holiday was a write-off. Every morning Blane called for Bonny in his Peugeot and drove her to the bedside of her friend, who usually had made a list of things she wanted. Afterwards Blane and Bonny lunched together in the Petit Es-cargot.

Three months ago Blane had inherited Mara Hall, a great house in its own park in Shropshire. But as soon as he had done so he left England, being fearful of the house even though he loved it.

‘My mother died when I was one and a half. There was always just my father and myself.’

‘No brothers or sisters, Blane?’

‘No brothers or sisters.’

Bonny thought how lonely that must have been: a boy growing up in a great house with only his father and the servants for company. His father was severe, expecting a lot of his heir.

‘I’m a coward, I dare say. I’d give the world to take everything in my stride. I’m running away. I know that, Bonny.’

‘Was your father – ’

‘My father did things perfectly. He was a strong man. He married the woman he loved and never looked at another. The servants and his tenants adored him.’

There was a head gardener at Mara Hall, and several under-gardeners. There was a butler and a cook and old retainers in the way of maids, all of whom had been there as long as Blane could remember. Once there’d been footmen, but that was ages ago.

Mara Hall was more vivid than the shadows of nurses whose speech I did not understand, and the odour of an-aesthetic: the lawns and the tea roses, the mellow brick of the house itself and of the kitchen-garden walls, the old ornamental ironwork. I felt as Bonny felt – overawed with wonder. Bonny had not been abandoned in a bleak seaside town by a couple who rode a Wall of Death; but something like it was in Bonny’s past, even if it did not come out in the story. I felt that strongly now; I never had before.

‘It sounds so lovely, Blane. Your home.’

‘Yes, it’s lovely.’

They walked in the evenings on the promenade. He would marry Dorothy, Bonny thought, and take her to Mara Hall. Dorothy was capable as well as beautiful. Dorothy would gently lead him back to his responsibilities. He would become as strong as his father; he would do things as perfectly.

‘Dear Bonny,’ he said, in a tone that made her hold her breath. She could not speak. The sea was a sheet of glass, reflecting the tranquil azure of the sky. ‘Dear Bonny,’ he said again.

The doctors who attended me conferred. One spoke in English, smiling, telling me I had made progress, saying they were pleased.

‘I’m glad you’re pleased,’ I replied.

‘You have been courageous, signora,’ the same doctor said. ‘And patient, signora.’

They passed on, both nodding a satisfied farewell at me. Blane took the modest creature’s arm; she trembled at the touch because no man had ever taken Bonny Maye’s arm before. No man had ever called her dear. She’d never known a heart’s companion.

‘Much better,’ Dorothy said, but it was their last day in Menton. She’d left her dark glasses on her bedside table and Bonny went to fetch them. Blane drove her to Bordighera and Bonny miserably ate an ice-cream on the front. She wrote the postcards she should have written before, to the other girls in Toupe’s Better Value Store. She’d be back before they received them.

Once only the story was interrupted by the ravenous features of Ernie Chubbs, his eyes seeking mine from the shadows of the Al Fresco Club, his fingers undoing my zips in the motel room. There was an old mangle in the motel room, and a tin bath in which kindling was kept. I knew all that was wrong. ‘It wouldn’t do to tell,’ Ernie Chubbs said. ‘Good girls don’t tell, Emily.’ That was wrong also. It wasn’t Ernie who’d ever said good girls don’t tell, and Ernie Chubbs hadn’t been ravenous in that particular way.

The chill fag-end of a nightmare, darkly colourless, something like a rat in a drawing-room, went as quickly as it had arrived, crushed out of existence by a warmer potency. ‘Well, really!’ Dorothy was a little cross when they returned from Bordighera. She lay down to rest and complained that the bedroom was too hot and then, when the window was opened, that the draught was uncomfortable. She wanted Vichy water but they brought her Evian. Impatiently she stubbed out a cigarette she had not yet placed between her lips.

‘Bonny,’ he said, leaning on the open door of the little Peugeot. ‘Oh, Bonny, if I could only make you happy!’

He is the kindest person I have ever known, she thought. He knows I love him; he knows I have been unable to help myself. This is kindness now, to speak of my happiness when it is his and Dorothy’s that is at stake. They have had a little tiff this afternoon, but soon they will make it up. Tonight he will ask Dorothy to marry him, and after tomorrow I shall never in my life see either of them again. Dorothy’ll be too busy and too full of happiness ever to return to the table-tennis club. There’ll be the wedding preparations and then the honeymoon and then the return to Mara Hall.

‘Look, Bonny,’ he said, and in the sunlight sapphires sparkled. He had snapped open a little box; the slender band of gold that held the jewels lay on a tiny cushion. ‘I bought it for her,’ he said, ‘three days after we met.’

‘It’s beautiful.’ The words choked out of her. Tears misted her vision. She tried to smile but could not.

‘I have to tell you that, Bonny. I have to tell you I bought it for Dorothy.’

She nodded bleakly.

‘I might have offered it to Dorothy this afternoon. I could not, Bonny.’

Again she nodded, not understanding, trying to pretend she did.

‘I can only love you, Bonny. I know that, if I know nothing else in this world.’

‘Me? Me?’

‘Yes. Oh yes, my dear.’

His face was smiling down at her bewilderment. His lips were parted. She heard herself saying she was nothing much, while knowing she should not say that. She heard him laugh.

‘Oh, but of course you are, my dear. You are everything in this world to me. Darling, you are the sun and the stars, you are the scent of summer jasmine. Can you understand that?’

She flushed and looked away, thinking of Dorothy and feeling treacherous, and more confused than ever. She wanted to laugh and cry all at once.

‘Darling Bonny, you have the lips of an angel.’

His own touched the lips he spoke of. The gentle pressure was like fire between them.

‘Oh Blane, Blane,’ she murmured.

‘Say nothing, darling,’ he whispered back, and in some secret moment the sapphire ring found her engagement finger.

I would like to have married and had children. But Ernie Chubbs, swearing to me that he took precautions, never did so. In my association with him I had no fewer than four abortions, the last of them in Idaho. I would not have children now, they told me then. ‘Sorry, girlie,’ Ernie Chubbs said. ‘Fancy a chilli con carne sent up?’

Miss Alzapiedi, our Sunday-school teacher, was excessively tall and lanky, with hair that was a nuisance to her, and other disadvantages too. It was she who gave me the picture of Jesus on a donkey to hang above my bed; it was she who taught me how to pray, pointing out that some people are drawn to prayer, some are not. ‘Pray for love,’ Miss Alzapiedi adjured. ‘Pray for protection.’

So before I ran away from 21 Prince Albert Street I prayed for protection because I knew I’d need it. I prayed for protection when I worked in the public-house dining-room and the shoe shop and on the S.S. Hamburg, and when Ernie Chubbs took me to Idaho, and later when he abandoned me in Ombubu. Even though I was trying to be a sophisticate it didn’t embarrass me to get down on my knees the way Miss Alzapiedi had taught us, even if there was a visitor in the room. To be honest, I don’t get down on my knees any more. I pray standing up now, or sitting, and I don’t whisper either; I do it in my mind.

At the end of my first year in this house I finished Precious September. I wrote it just for fun, to pass the time. When it was complete I put it in a drawer and began another story, which this time I called Flight to Enchantment. Then glancing one day through the belongings of a tourist who was staying here, I came across a romance that seemed no better than my own. I noted the publisher’s address and later wrapped Precious September up and posted it to England. So many months passed without a response that I imagined the parcel had gone astray or that the publisher was no longer in business. Then, when I had given up all hope of ever seeing my manuscript again, it was returned. We have no use for material of this nature, a printed note brusquely declared. I knew of no other publisher, so I continued with Flight to Enchantment and after a month or so dispatched it in the same direction. This elicited a note to the effect that the work would only be returned to me if I forwarded a money order to cover the postage. When that wound had healed I completed another story quite quickly and although it, too, was similarly rejected I did not lose heart. There was, after all, consolation to be found in the tapestries I so very privately stitched. They came out of nothing, literally out of emptiness. Even then I marvelled over that.

We are interested in your novelette. I found it hard to believe that I was reading this simple typewritten statement, that I was not asleep and dreaming. The letter, which was brief, was signed J. A. Makers, and I at once responded, impatient to receive what this Makers called ‘our reader’s suggestions for introducing a little more thrust into the plot’. These arrived within a fortnight, a long page of ideas, all of which I most willingly incorporated. Eventually I received from J. A. Makers an effusively complimentary letter. By now many others among his employees had read the work; all, without exception, were overwhelmed. We foretell a profitable relationship, Mr Makers concluded, foretelling correctly. But when I received, after I’d submitted the next title, a list of ‘our reader’s suggestions’ I tore it up and have never been bothered in that way since. That story was Behold My Heart! Its predecessors, so disdainfully rejected once, were published in rapid succession.

Something of all this, in order to keep a conversation going, I passed on to the General. I knew that conversation was what he needed; otherwise I would have been happy to leave him in peace. I wanted to create a little introduction, as it were, so that I might ask him to tell me about his own life.

‘If you would like to,’ I gently added.

He did not at once reply. His gnarled grey head had fallen low between his shoulders. The Daily Telegraph which Quinty had bought for him was open on his knees. My eye caught gruesome headlines. A baby had been taken from its pram outside a shop and buried in nearby woods. A dentist had taken advantage of his women patients. A bishop was in some other trouble.

‘It sometimes helps to talk a bit.’

‘Eh?’

‘Only if you’d like to.’

Again there was a silence. I imagined him in his heyday, leading his men in battle. I calculated that the Second World War would have been his time. I saw him in the desert, a young fox who was now an old one.

‘You’re on your own, General?’

‘Since my wife died.’

His eyes passed over the unpleasant headlines in the newspaper. There was something about a handful of jam thrown at the prime minister.

‘Things were to change when we returned,’ he said.

I smiled encouragingly. I did not say a word.

‘I was to live with my daughter and her husband in Hampshire.’

He was away then, and I could feel it doing him good. Only one child had been born to him, the daughter he spoke of, that faded prettiness on the train. ‘Don’t go spoiling her,’ his wife had pleaded, and he told me of a day when his daughter, at six or seven, had fallen out of a tree. He’d lifted her himself into the dining-room and covered her with a rug on the sofa. She’d been no weight at all. ‘This is Digby,’ she introduced years later while they stood, all four of them drinking gin and French, beneath that very same tree.

‘I couldn’t like him,’ he confessed, his voice gruff beneath the shame induced by death. I remembered the trio’s politeness on the train, the feeling of constraint, of something hidden. I waited patiently while he rummaged among his thoughts and when he spoke again the gruffness was still there. If the outrage hadn’t occurred he would have continued to keep his own counsel concerning the man his daughter had married: you could tell that easily.

He spoke fondly of his wife. When she died there’d been a feeling of relief because the pain was over for her. Her departure from him was part of his existence now, a fact like an appendix scar. When I looked away, and banished from my mind the spare old body that carried in it somewhere an elusive chip of shrapnel, I saw, in sunshine on a shorn lawn, a medal pinned on a young man’s tunic and a girl’s arms around a soldier’s neck. ‘Oh, yes! Oh, yes!’ she eagerly agreed when marriage was proposed, her tears of happiness staining the leather of a shoulder strap. You could search for ever for a nicer man, she privately reflected: I guessed that easily also.

‘No, I never liked him and my wife was cross with me for that. She was a better mother than I ever was a father.’

Again the silence. Had he perished in the outrage he would have rated an obituary of reasonable length in the English newspapers. His wife, no doubt, had passed on without a trace of such attention; his daughter and his son-in-law too.

‘I doubted if I could live with him. But I kept that to myself.’

‘A trial run, your holiday? Was that it?’

‘Perhaps so.’

I smiled and did not press him. Jealousy, he supposed it was. More than ever on this holiday he had noticed it – in pensiones and churches and art galleries, permeating every conversation. No children had been born to his daughter, he revealed; his wife had regretted that, he hadn’t himself.

‘Have you finished with the Telegraph, sir?’ Quinty hovered, not wishing to pick up the newspaper from the old man’s knees. Rosa Crevelli set out the contents of a tea-tray.

‘Yes, I’ve finished with it.’

‘Then I’ll take it to the kitchen, sir, if I may. There’s nothing I like better than an hour with the Telegraph in the cool of the evening. When the dinner’s all been and done with, the Telegraph goes down a treat.’

A glass of lemon tea, on a saucer, was placed on a table within the General’s reach. Rosa Crevelli picked up her tray. Quinty still hovered. Nothing could stop him now.

‘I mention it, sir, so that if you require the paper you would know where it is.’

The General acknowledged this. Quinty softly coughed. He inquired:

‘Do you follow the cricket at all, sir?’

The General shook his head. But noticing that Quinty waited expectantly for a verbal response, he courteously added that cricket had never greatly interested him.

‘Myself, I follow all sport, sir. There is no sport I do not take an interest in. Ice-hockey. Baseball. Lacrosse, both men’s and women’s. I have watched the racing of canoes.’

The General sipped his tea. There were little biscuits, ricci-arelli, on a plate. Quinty offered them. He mentioned the game of boules, and again the racing of canoes. I made a sign at him, endeavouring to communicate that his playfulness, though harmless, was out of place in an atmosphere of mourning. He took no notice of my gesture.

‘To tell you the truth, sir, I’m an armchair observer myself. I never played a ball-game. Cards was as far as I got.’

Quinty’s smile is a twisted little thing, and he was smiling now. Was he aware that the reference to cards would trigger a memory – the Englishmen, and he himself, playing poker at the corner table of the Café Rose? Impossible to tell.

‘I’m afraid he’s a law unto himself,’ I explained as lightly as I could when he had left the room. A tourist had once asked me if Quinty had a screw loose, and for all I knew the General was wondering the same thing, too polite to put it into words. By way of further explanation I might have touched upon Quinty’s unfortunate life, how he had passed himself off as the manager of a meat-extract factory in order to impress an au pair girl. I might have told how he’d been left on the roadside a few kilometres outside the town of Modena, how later he’d turned up in Ombubu. I might even have confessed that I’d once felt so sorry for Quinty I’d taken him into my arms and stroked his head.

‘It’s just his way,’ I said instead, and in a moment Quinty returned and asked me if he should pour me a g and t, keeping his voice low, as if some naughtiness were afoot. He didn’t wait for my response but poured the drink as he stood there. Half a child and half a rogue, as I have said before.

For the first time since the outrage I walked again in the early morning, on the roads that now and again turn into dusty-white tracks, among the olive shrubs and the broom. The line of the hills in the distance was softened by a haze that drained the sky of colour. Tiny clouds, like skilful touches in a painting, stayed motionless above the umbrella pines and cypresses that claim this landscape for Umbria.

I wondered about the American professor. As a name, River-smith had a ring to it, but it told me nothing else. Its bearer was the brother of the dimpled, fair-haired woman on the train, which suggested a man in his thirties. When I thought about him, his face became like hers.

‘Buongiorno, signora!’ an old woman with a stack of wood on her back greeted me. Further on, her husband was cutting the grass of the verge with a hook. You don’t meet many on the white roads; sometimes a young man rides by on an auto-cycle; in autumn the harvesters come for the grapes, in November for the olives. It was pleasant to walk there again.

‘Buongiorno, signora!’ I called back. Once I made a terrible mistake in Sunday school when giving an answer to a question, saying that Joseph was God. Someone began to titter and I could feel myself going red with embarrassment, but Miss Alzapiedi said no, that was an error anyone could make. Miss Alzapiedi’s long chest was as flat as a table-top. Summer or winter, she never wore stockings, her white, bony ankles exposed to all weathers. It seemed a natural confusion to say that Joseph was God, Joseph being Jesus’s father and God being the Father also. ‘Of course.’ Miss Alzapiedi nodded, and the tittering ceased.

I dare say remembering Sunday school was much the same as the General having tea in Mrs Patch’s cottage and Otmar recalling the comfort of his parents’ house. It was a way of coming to terms, of finding something to cling to in the muddle; I dare say it’s natural that people would. In all my time at Miss Alzapiedi’s Sunday school there was only that one uneasy moment, before Miss Alzapiedi stepped in with kindness. Otmar similarly recalled being reprimanded because he’d overturned a tin of paint when the decorators came to paint the staircase wall and the hall, and again when he stole a pear from the sideboard dish. There was a moment of embarrassment in the dormitory the old man had spoken of, with its rows of blue-blanketed beds and little boys in pyjamas. But these instances, dreadful at the time, were pleasant memories now.

‘And they spread out palms before the donkey’s feet,’ Miss Alzapiedi said, and while she spoke you could easily see the figure of Jesus in his robes, with his long hair and his beard. The donkey was a sacred animal. ‘You have only to note the cross on every donkey’s back,’ Miss Alzapiedi said. ‘All your lives please note the black cross on that holy creature.’

The General had led his men to the battle-fronts of the world but always he’d returned to the girl he’d proposed to on a sunlit lawn, whose tears of joy had stained the leather of his uniform. He had not looked at other women. Amid the banter and camaraderie of the barracks his desires had never wandered, not even once, not even in the heat of the desert with the promise of desert women only a day or two away. His happy marriage was written in the geography of the old man’s face, a simple statement: that for nearly a lifetime two people had been as one.

‘Isn’t that much better?’ Otmar’s mother said the first time he wore spectacles, when a world of blurred objects and drifting colours acquired precision. In the oculist’s room he couldn’t read the letters on the charts. The oculist had spectacles, too, and little red marks on the fat of his face, the left-hand side, close to the nose. When Otmar asked his mother if he’d always have to wear the spectacles now she nodded, and the oculist nodded also. When the oculist smiled his white teeth glistened. The mother’s coat was made of fur.

It was Mary who began the business about donkeys, riding on one all the way to the stable of the inn. Joseph walked beside her, guiding the donkey’s head, thinking about carpentry matters. Mary understood the conversation of angels. Joseph sawed wood and planed it smooth. He made doors and boxes and undertook repairs. To this day I can see Joseph’s sandals and Jesus’s bare feet, and the women washing them. To this day I can see Jesus on the holy donkey in the picture above my bed.

‘Fragments make up a life, my dear,’ Lady Daysmith says in Precious September. For the General, bodies lie where they have fallen on the sand, sunburnt flesh stiffening, soldiers from Rochester and Somerset. For the General, there are those gentle Cotswold bells, the organ booming, evening hymns. There is the beauty of virginity specially kept, to be given on a wedding night; and drinks beneath that tree the child fell out of. ‘Darling,’ the well-loved wife returns his love. ‘Darling, you are so sweet to me.’

For me, there is the stolid dog, the dampness of the beach, the seagulls coming nearer. There are the searchlights of Twentieth-Century Fox, the soft roar of the lion, Western Electric Sound. In a room a man removes an artificial leg and pauses to massage the stump. Across a street a neon sign flashes red, then green, all through a half-forgotten night. First thing of all, there’s a broken floor-tile, brownish, smooth.

Why is there fear left over in Otmar’s eyes, behind the spectacles? Does some greater ordeal continue, some private awfulness? In the supermarket the girl’s hand reaches again into the shelves. The adoration in the car park and the café is an ecstasy in its first bright moment. Liebe! Liebe! Eyes close, fingers touch. But something is missing in all this; there is some mystery.

Years after her time as a Sunday-school teacher Miss Alzapiedi becomes Lady Daysmith – shortened to a reasonable height, supplied with hair that isn’t a nuisance, given a bosom. Lady Daysmith is old of course, Miss Alzapiedi was scarcely twenty in the Sunday school. But a plain girl can grow old gracefully, why ever not? ‘The peepshow of memory is what I mean by fragments’: I hadn’t been in my house more than a month before I caused the woman who had been the Sunday-school girl to utter so.

In the soft warmth of that early morning I paused on the track that led to the heights behind my house. I looked back at the house itself, in that moment acutely aware of how the malignancy of the act had reached out into us, draining so much from the old man, rooting itself in Otmar, leaving sickness with the child. Then I pushed all that away from me and tried once more, though without success, to find a beginning for Ceaseless Tears. I strolled on a little way before finally turning back.

‘I have always wanted a garden here,’ I remarked to Otmar on the terrace less than an hour later. We smoked together. I asked him if there’d been a garden at his parents’ house and he said yes, a small back garden, shady in summertime, a place to take a book to. You could tell from the way he spoke that his mother and father were no longer alive. I don’t know why I wondered if this fact was somehow related to the fear that haunted him. I did so none the less.

*

‘Where is this?’ the child asked, suddenly, a week after my first walk on the white roads. She had been engrossed in one of her pictures, stretched out on the floor. The blinds were drawn a little down for coolness, but there was light enough in the salotto.

‘Where is this?’ Aimée asked again.

The General was sitting with his newspaper, near the windows. Otmar had just entered the room. Neither of them spoke. Eventually I said:

‘You are in my house, Aimée. I am Mrs Delahunty.’

She did not directly reply, but said that her mother was cross because there’d been a quarrel in the yard. Girls couldn’t be robbers, her brother Richard insisted, because he wanted to be the robber himself. As if speaking to herself, the child explained that she was to be the old woman who hadn’t the strength to get up from her sun chair when the robber walked in and asked where the safe was. But she was always the old woman; all you did was lie there. She continued to draw the foreleg of a dog that did not seem to be alive. She shaded its hollow stomach. She and her brother had tried to guess, on the train-station platform, what two Italians were saying to one another. The woman of the pair was angry. The man had forgotten to lock the windows of their house, Aimée guessed.

‘I should think that was so,’ I said.

‘That woman was mad at him.’

It was difficult to know if she spoke in response to what I’d said or not. A frown gathered on her freckled forehead. Her flaxen hair, so like her mother’s, trailed smoothly down her back. Her eyes, lit for the while she spoke, went dead again.

‘Your uncle’s coming, Aimée. Mr Riversmith.’

But she was colouring now, lightly passing the crayons over the misshapen limbs and bodies. The tip of her tongue protruded slightly, in concentration.

‘Mr Riversmith,’ I said again.

Still there was no response. Otmar left the room, and I guessed he had gone to ask Quinty to summon Dr Innocenti.

‘Your uncle,’ the General said.

Aimée spoke again, about another game she and her brother had played, and then, with the same abruptness, she ceased. She said nothing more, but those few moments of communication had more than a slight effect on both the General and Otmar, and in a sense on me. This spark had kindled something in us; the brief transformation fluttered life into a hope that had not been there before. At last there was something good, happening in the present. At last we could reach out from our preoccupation with ourselves alone.

The General smiled at Aimée, while she sat there on the floor, lost to us again. Aimée was a lovely name, I said, not knowing what else to say. ‘Thank God for this,’ the General murmured, to me directly.

‘Yes, thank God.’

Otmar returned to the room and sat with us in silence, and in time we heard Dr Innocenti’s car approaching. We didn’t break the silence, but listened to the hum of the engine as it came closer, until eventually the tyres scrunched on the gravel outside.

‘Coraggio!’ Dr Innocenti said, speaking softly from the doorway, not coming quite into the room. ‘Va meglio, vero.’

Later he predicted that Aimée would make progress now, but warned us that on the way to recovery there might be disturbances. It was as well to expect this since often the return to reality could be alarming for a child: you had only to consider what this reality was, he pointed out. His hope was that Aimée would not be too badly affected. He charged us with vigilance.

The telephone in my house rings quietly, but never goes unheard because there is a receiver in the hall and in the kitchen, as well as in my writing-room. It was I myself, in my private room, who answered it when eventually Aimée’s uncle rang.

‘Mrs Delahunty?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mrs Delahunty, this is Thomas Riversmith.’

‘How d’you do, Mr Riversmith.’

‘May I inquire how Aimée is?’ He sounded as if grit had got into his vocal cords – a tight, unfriendly voice, unusual in an American.

‘Aimée is beginning to return to us.’

‘She speaks now every day?’

‘Since the afternoon she spoke she has continued.’

‘I’ve talked with your doctor many times.’ There was a pause and then, with undisguised difficulty: ‘I want to say, Mrs Delahunty, that I appreciate what you have done for my niece.’

‘I have not done much.’

‘May I ask you to tell me what the child says when she speaks to you?’

‘In the first place she asked where she was. Several times she has mentioned her brother by name. And has spoken of being scolded by her mother.’

‘Scolded?’

‘As any child might be.’

‘I see.’

‘If Aimée wakes in the night, if there is a nightmare, anything like that, a cry of distress would be heard at once. Otmar sleeps with his door open. In the daytime there is always someone near at hand.’

At first there was no response. Then: ‘Who is it that sleeps with a door open?’

‘Otmar. A German victim of the outrage. Also in my house is an English general, similarly a victim.’

‘I see.’

‘It’s strange for all of us.’

That observation was ignored. There was another pause, so long I thought we’d been cut off. But in time the gritty voice went on:

‘The doctor seems anxious that the child should make more progress before I come to take her home.’

‘Aimée is welcome to remain as long as is necessary.’

‘I’m sorry. I did not catch that.’

I repeated what I’d said. Then formally, the tone still not giving an inch, socially or otherwise:

‘Our authorities here have informed yours that I will naturally pay all that is owing. Not only the hospital fees, but also what is owing to yourself.’

This sounded like a speech, as though many people were being addressed. I did not explain that that was Quinty’s department. I did not say anything at all. A woman’s voice murmured in the background, and Mr Riversmith – having first questioned some remark made – asked if I, myself, was quite recovered from the ordeal. The background prompt was repeated; the man obediently commiserated. It had been a dreadful shock for him, he confessed. He’d read about these things, but had never believed that he himself could be brought so close to one. You could hear the effort in every word he spoke, as if he resented having to share a sentiment, as if anything as personal as a telephone conversation – even between strangers – was anathema to him.

‘That is true, Mr Riversmith.’

The solemnity and the seriousness made me jittery. He was a man without a word of small talk. I knew he hadn’t smiled during all this conversation. I could tell that smiling didn’t interest him. Again I reflected that he wasn’t at all like an American.

‘If I may, I’ll call again, Mrs Delahunty. And perhaps we might arrange a date that’s convenient to both of us.’

He left a number in case of any emergency, not asking if I had a pencil handy. He had no children of his own: Dr Innocenti hadn’t told me that, but I guessed it easily.

‘Goodbye, Mr Riversmith.’

I imagined him replacing the receiver in its cradle and turning to the woman who had shadowed the encounter for him. In the lives of such men there is always such a woman, covering their small inadequacies.

‘Not an easy person,’ I remarked later to the General and Otmar – which I considered was a fair observation to make. I repeated as much of the conversation as I could recall, and described Thomas Riversmith’s brusqueness. Neither of them said much by way of response, but I sensed immediately their concern that a man whom it was clearly hard to take to should be charged with the care of a tragically orphaned child. Already all three of us knew that that felt wrong.

Dr Innocenti came at once. He was calm, and calmly soothed our anxiety. He placed Aimée under temporary sedation, warning us that its effects would not last long. He maintained from the first that there was no need to take her into hospital again, that nothing would be gained. His strength and his tranquillity allowed me to accompany him to the bedside; afterwards he sat with me in the salotto, sipping a glass of mineral water. He wished to be within earshot when Aimée emerged from her sleep, since each time she did so she would find herself deeper in what seemed like a nightmare.

‘You comprehend, signora? Reversal of waking from bad dreams. For this child such dreams begin then.’

Together we returned to the bedside when the screaming started again, but Dr Innocenti did not administer the drug immediately. Aimée sobbed when the screams had exhausted her, and while she threw her head about on the pillow a dreadful shivering seeming to wrench her small body asunder. I begged him to put a stop to it.

‘We understand, Aimée,’ he murmured instead, in unhurried tones. ‘Here are your friends.’

The child ignored the sympathy. Her eyes stared wide, like those of a creature demented. More sedation was given at last.

‘She will sleep till morning now,’ the doctor promised, ‘and then be drowsy for a little time. I will be here before another crisis.’

From the hall he telephoned Thomas Riversmith to inform him of the development. ‘May I urge you to delay your journey, signore?’ I heard him say. ‘Three weeks maybe? Four? Not easy now to calculate.’

It was impossible not to have confidence in Dr Innocenti. All his predictions came naturally about, as if he and nature shared some knowledge. There was compassion in the cut of his features, and even in the way he moved, yet it never hindered him. Pity can be an enemy, I know that well.

His presence in my house that night was a marvel. It affected Otmar and the General: without speaking a word, as though anxious only to be co-operative, they went to their rooms and closed their doors. I alone bade the doctor good-night and watched the little red tail-light of his car creeping away into the darkness, still glowing long after the sound of the engine had died.

‘Very presentable, the doctor,’ Quinty remarked in the hall, even in these wretched circumstances attempting to be jokey or whatever it was he would have called it.

‘Yes, very.’

‘A different kettle of fish from a certain medical party who had better stay nameless, eh?’

He referred to the doctor who’d been a regular in the Café Rose, a man whose weight was said to be twenty-four stone, whose stomach hung hugely out above the band of his trousers, whose chest was like a woman’s. Great sandalled feet shuffled and thumped; like florid blubber, thick lips were loosely open; eyes, piglike, peered. ‘We could make a go of it,’ was the suggestion he once made to me, and I have no doubt that Quinty knew about this. I have no doubt that the offer was later guffawed over at the card-table.

‘I’ll say good-night so,’ Quinty went on. ‘I think it’ll be best for all of us when Uncle comes.’

‘Good-night, Quinty.’

*

I could not sleep. I could not even close my eyes. I tried not to recall the sound of those screams, that stark, high-pitched shrieking that had chilled me to my very bones. Instead I made myself think about the obese doctor whom Quinty had so conveniently dredged up. You’d never have guessed he was a medical man, more like someone who drilled holes in the street. Yet when an elderly farmer sustained a heart attack in an upstairs room at the café he appeared to know what to do, and there was talk of cures among the natives.

In my continued determination not to dwell on the more immediate past I again saw vividly, as I had on my early-morning walk, the hand of Otmar’s girlfriend reaching for the herbs in the supermarket; I saw the General and his well-loved wife. ‘I’ll get Sergeant Beeds on to you,’ Mrs Trice shouted the day she came back early from the laundry. ‘Lay another finger on her and you’ll find yourself in handcuffs.’ The man I’d once taken to be my father blustered and then pleaded, a kind of gibberish coming out of him.

All through that night my mind filled with memories and dreams, a jumble that went on and on, imaginings and reality. ‘Please,’ Madeleine begged, and Otmar moved his belongings into her flat. When she was out at work he drank a great deal of coffee, and smoked, and typed the articles he submitted to newspapers. Madeleine cooked him moussaka and chicken stew, and once they went to Belgium because he’d heard of an incident which he was convinced would make a newspaper story: how a young man had ingeniously taken the place of a Belgian couple’s son after a period of army service.

‘So’s you can’t see up her skirts,’ a boy who had something wrong with him said, but no one believed that that was why Miss Alzapiedi wore long dresses. Miss Alzapiedi didn’t even know about people looking up skirts. ‘If you close your eyes you can feel the love of Jesus,’ Miss Alzapiedi said. ‘Promise me now. Wherever you are, in all your lives, find time to feel the love of Jesus.’ Nobody liked the boy who had something wrong with him. When he grinned inanely you had to avert your gaze. The girls pulled his hair whenever he made his rude noise, if Miss Alzapiedi wasn’t looking.

‘Ah, how d’you do?’ the General greeted his would-be son-in-law beneath the tree I’d heard about. The drinks were on a white table among the deck-chairs, Martini already mixed, with ice and lemon, in a tall glass jug. ‘So very pleased,’ his wife said, and he watched the face of his daughter’s fiancé, the features crinkling in a polite acknowledgement, the lips half open. The intimacy of kissing, he thought, damp and sensual. His stomach heaved; he turned away. ‘So very pleased,’ he heard again.

The aviator who wrote messages in the sky wanted to marry me before the obese doctor did. He had retired from the skywriting business when I knew him, but often he spoke of it in the Café Rose, repeating the message he had a thousand times looped and dotted high above Africa: Drink Bailey’s Beer. A condition of the inner ear had dictated his retirement, but one day he risked his life and flew again. ‘Look, missy!’ Poor Boy Abraham cried excitedly, pulling me out of the café on to the dirt expanse where the trucks parked. ‘Look! Look!’ And there, in the sky, like shaving foam, was my name and an intended compliment. A tiny aircraft, soundless from where we stood, formed the last few letters and then smeared a zigzag flourish. ‘Oh, that is beautiful!’ Poor Boy Abraham cried as we watched. ‘Oh, my, it’s beautiful!’ Fortunately Poor Boy Abraham could not read.

‘He forgot to lock the windows,’ Aimée repeated firmly at the railway station. The Italian woman was angry and almost stamped her foot; the man was smaller than she was, with oiled black hair brushed straight back. ‘More likely he left something turned on,’ Aimée’s brother suggested. ‘Maybe the stove.’ Aimée disagreed, but then the train came in and they had to find their way to Carrozza 219. When the train moved again Aimée gazed out at the fields of sunflowers, at the green vine shoots in orderly rows and the hot little railway stations. She stared at the pale sky, all the blue bleached out of it. Some of the fields were being sprayed with water that gushed from a jet going round and round. In the far distance there were hills with clumps of trees on them. ‘Cypresses,’ her father said as the bell of the restaurant attendant tinkled and the businessmen and the fashion woman rose. The woman would have turned off the stove herself, Aimée whispered, and her brother turned grumpily away from her. ‘Stop that silly arguing,’ their mother reprimanded.

‘No, of course I don’t mind,’ Madeleine said when Otmar asked if his friends might come to the flat when she was out. His friends were intense young men, students or unemployed, one of them a girl whom Madeleine was jealous of. When Otmar and Madeleine were in Italy two of them came up while they were sitting in the sun outside a café. They gave Otmar the name of a cheap restaurant, but afterwards he lost the piece of paper he’d written it down on. ‘Look, there’re your friends,’ Madeleine said a few days later, pointing to where they sat at a café table with two other men, but Otmar didn’t want to join them, although they could have given him the name of the restaurant again.

‘Rum and Coke,’ Ernie Chubbs ordered in the Al Fresco Club, and the Eastern girl brought it quickly, flashy with him as she always was with the customers. They didn’t put any rum in mine although Ernie paid for it. They never did in the Al Fresco, saying a girl could end up anywhere if she didn’t stay sober. ‘Now then, my pretty maid,’ Ernie Chubbs said in our corner. I couldn’t see his face, I didn’t know what it looked like because it was shadowy where we sat and I’d only caught a glimpse of it on the street. ‘Often come here, darling?’ he chattily questioned me.

Best White Tits in Africa! the writing said in the sky, but in my dream it was different. Angela Fresu, aged three, it said, as it does in marble at Bologna.

Aimée was calm when she awoke, but during the days that followed there were further setbacks, though thankfully none was as alarming as the first one. Her uncle’s departure from America was again delayed to allow her further time to make a recovery. But even so Dr Innocenti was optimistic.

We ourselves – the General, Otmar and I – were naturally apprehensive and each day that ended without incident seemed like a victory of a kind. And for me there was another small source of pleasure, a bolt from the blue as agreeable as any I have experienced. As I recall it now I am reminded, by way of introduction, that overheard conversations do not always throw up welcome truths. ‘Pass on, my dear, for you’ll hear no good,’ Lady Daysmith advises in Precious September, but of course it is not always so. Pausing by the door of the salotto one evening, I overheard Otmar and the General tentatively conversing.

‘Yes, she has mentioned that,’ the old man was saying, and this was when I paused, for I sensed it was I who was referred to, and who can resist a moment’s listening in such circumstances?

‘I would take the chance,’ Otmar said, ‘to pay my debt to her.’

His wife had been quite expert, the old man said next, especially where the cultivation of fritillaries was concerned. Otmar didn’t understand the term; an explanation followed, the plant described. The name came from the Latin: fritillus meant a dice-box. ‘She was always interested in a horticultural derivation. She read Dr Linnaeus.’

Otmar professing ignorance again, there came an explanation. I heard that this Linnaeus, a Swedish person apparently – Linné as he’d been born – had sorted out a whole array of flowers and plants, giving them names or finding Latin roots for existing names, orderliness and Latin being his forte.

‘She wants a garden,’ Otmar said, not interrupting but by the sound of it repeating what he had said already, in an effort to bring the conversation down to earth.

‘Then we must make her one.’

How could they make me a garden? One was too old, the other had but a single arm left! Yet how sweet it was to hear them! As I stood there I felt a throb of warmth within my body, as though a man had said when I was still a girl: ‘I love you…’

‘He’s not the sort of person,’ the old man was observing when next I paid attention. ‘He’s not the sort to be a help or even be much interested.’

I guessed they spoke of Quinty, and certainly what was deduced was true.

‘A machine is there?’ Otmar asked then. ‘An implement to break the earth?’

‘There’s a thing in England called a Merry Tiller. A motorized plough.’

I imagine Otmar nodded. The General said:

‘Heaven knows what grows best in such dry conditions. Precious little, probably. We’d have to read all that up.’

‘I do not know seeds.’

Fuchsias grew in the garden of his parents, Otmar went on. He was not good about the names of plants, but he remembered fuchsias in pots – double headed, scarlet and cream. The geranium family should do well, the General said, and brooms. To my delight he mentioned azaleas. Shade would be important, and would somehow have to be supplied. The azaleas would have to be grown in urns, and moved inside in winter.

‘With one arm,’ Otmar reminded him, ‘I could not dig.’ ‘It is remarkable what can be done, you know. Once you settle to it.’

I moved away because I heard them get to their feet. A few minutes later I saw them at the back of my house, gesturing to one another beside the ruined out-buildings. Their voices drifted to where I watched from; the old man pointed. Here there’d be a flight of steps, leading to a lower level, here four flowerbeds formally in a semi-circle, here a marble figure perhaps. A few days later, when they revealed their secret to me, they showed me the plans they had drawn on several sheets of paper in the meantime. The General promised a herb bed, with thyme and basil and tarragon and rosemary. There would be solitary yew trees or local pines, whichever were advised. They’d try for box hedges and cotoneaster and oleander. There’d be a smoke tree and a handkerchief tree, and roses and peach trees, whatever they could induce to thrive.

On 14 July Thomas Riversmith arrived. Telephoning a few evenings before, he insisted that he did not wish to be met; that he wished to cause the minimum of inconvenience. So he took a taxi from Pisa, which is an extremely long journey, and then there was difficulty finding my house. From an upstairs window I watched him paying his driver in one-hundred-thousand-lire notes. He had black Mandarina Duck bags. I went downstairs, to welcome him in the inner hall.

He was a tall, thickset man, rather heavy about the face, not at all like the young woman on the train. His eyes, between beetle-black brows, were opaque – green or blue, it wasn’t apparent which; his crinkly hair was greyish. Mr Riversmith was indeed as serious and as solemn as he had seemed on the telephone: the surprise was that, in his way, he was a handsome man. He wore a dark suit, which had become creased on his air flight and creased again due to his sitting in a hired car for so long. His wife would have bought him the Mandarina luggage; it didn’t match the rest of him in any way whatsoever.

‘I’m Mrs Delahunty.’

He nodded, not saying who he was because no doubt he assumed that no one else was expected just then. He stood there, not seeming interested in anything, waiting for me to say something else. It was a little after six in the evening; the cocktail hour, as the Americans call it. A certain weariness about his features intimated that Mr Riversmith could do with a drink.

‘Drink?’ he repeated when I suggested this. He shook his head. He had better wash, he said. He had a way of looking at you intently when he spoke, while giving the impression that he didn’t see you. Beneath the scrutiny I felt foolish, the way you do with some people.

‘Quinty’ll take you up, Mr Riversmith.’

‘After that I should see my niece.’

‘Of course. Simply when you’re ready, Mr Riversmith, please join us in the salotto.’

He followed Quinty upstairs. I made my way to my private room. Earlier in the day an accumulation of fan mail had come, forwarded from the publisher’s offices in London. After that brief encounter with Mr Riversmith I found it something of an antidote. People endeavour to explain how much a story means to them, or how they identify. I quite felt I was Rosalind. Years ago, of course. I’m in my eighties now. Occasionally a small gift is enclosed, a papier mâché puzzle from Japan, a pressed flower, inexpensive jewellery. Was Lucinda really furious or just pretending? Will Mark forgive her, utterly and completely? Oh, I do so hope he can! Little adhesive labels come, for autographs. I have all your stories, but dare not trust them to the post. Return postage enclosed. I do my best to reply, aptly, but sometimes become exhausted, faced with so much. What a lovely birthday party Ms Penny Court had! It reminded me so much of my own when I was twenty-one and Dad made a key out of plaster of Paris and silver paint! I’m forty now, with kiddies of my own and Alec (husband) is no longer here so I do my best on my own. I always think of her as Ms Penny Court, I don’t know why. I envy her her independence. Dad and I were close, that’s why he made the key for my twenty-first, you remember things like that. I’m fond of the kiddies of course, it goes without saying, and they wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t married Alec. He went off two years ago, a woman security officer. Often the letters go on for many pages, the ink changing colour more than once, the writing-paper acquiring stains. When gifts of food are sent I am naturally touched, but I throw the food away, having been warned that this is advisable.

Dear Ron, I wrote on the evening of Thomas Riversmith’s arrival, addressing my correspondent so familiarly because I’d been supplied with that name only. Thank you for your nice letter. I am glad you enjoyed ‘More than the Brave.’ It is interesting what you say about Annabella and Roger being acquainted in a previous life. I quite accept this may be so, and I am interested in what you tell me about your pets. I do not believe your wife would be in the least aggrieved to know you find Fred a comfort. In fact, I’m sure she’s delighted. I added another sentence about the ferret, Fred, then placed the letter in an envelope and sealed it. I never supply strangers with my address, having been warned that this is inadvisable also. And some correspondents I really do have to ignore. Correspondence with the disturbed is not a good idea.

Mr Riversmith was standing in silence in the salotto when I entered.

‘Would I mix you a drink, sir?’ Quinty offered.

‘A drink?’

‘Would you care for a refreshment after your journey, sir?’

Mr Riversmith requested an Old Fashioned, then noticed my presence and addressed me. He remarked that his niece was pretty.

‘Yes, indeed.’ But I added that Aimée was still mentally fragile. I said that Dr Innocenti would visit us in the morning. He would explain about that.

‘I greatly appreciate what Dr Innocenti has done for my niece.’ Mr Riversmith paused. ‘And I appreciate your looking after her in her convalescence, Mrs Delahunty.’

I explained about the tourists who stayed in my house when the hotels were full. It was no trouble was how I put it; we were used to visitors.

‘You’ll let me have an account?’ Mr Riversmith went on, as if anxious to deal with all the formalities at once. ‘I would wish to have that in order before we leave.’

I said that was Quinty’s department, and Quinty nodded as he handed Mr Riversmith his glass. ‘G and t would it be tonight?’ he murmured. He rolls that ‘g and t’ off his tongue in a twinkling manner, appearing to take pleasure in the sound, heaven knows why.

‘Thank you, Quinty,’ I said, and as I spoke the General entered the room.

I introduced the two men, revealing in lowered tones that the General had been only a couple of seats away from Aimée on the train. I mentioned Otmar in case Mr Riversmith had forgotten what I’d said on the telephone. Lowering my voice further, I mentioned the old man’s daughter and son-in-law, and Madeleine. In the circumstances I considered that necessary.

‘You’ve come for the child,’ the General said.

‘Yes, I have.’

There was a silence. Quinty poured the General some whisky, and noted the drinks in the little red notebook he keeps by the tray of bottles. The old man nodded, acknowledging what had been said. In order to ease a certain stickiness that had developed I asked a question to which I knew the answer. ‘You do not know Aimée well?’ I remarked to Mr Riversmith.

‘I met my niece for the first time in my life half an hour ago.’

‘What?’ The General frowned. ‘What?’ he said again.

‘I never knew either of my sister’s children.’ He appeared not to wish to say anything more, to leave the matter there. But then, unexpectedly, he added what I knew also: that there’d been a family quarrel.

‘So the child’s a stranger to you?’ the General persisted. ‘And you to her?’

‘That is so.’

His wife would have accompanied him, Mr Riversmith continued, apropos of another question the General asked, but unfortunately it had been impossible for her to get away. He referred to his wife as Francine, a name new to me. In answer to a question of my own he supplied the information that his wife was in the academic world also.

‘We should be calling you professor,’ I put in. ‘We weren’t entirely certain.’

He replied that he didn’t much use the title. Academic distinctions were unimportant, he said. The General asked him what his line of scholarship was, and Mr Riversmith replied – his tone unchanged – that the bark-ant was his subject. He spoke of this insect as if it were a creature as familiar to us as the horse or the dog.

The General shook his head. He did not know the bark-ant, he confessed. Mr Riversmith made a very slight, scarcely perceptible shrugging motion. The interdependency of bark-ant colonies in acacia trees, he stated, revealed behaviour that was similar to human beings’. It was an esoteric area of research where the layman was concerned, he admitted in the end, and changed the subject.

‘My niece will not forget the time she’s spent here.’

‘No, she’ll hardly do that,’ the General agreed.

Otmar came in, his hand grasping one of Aimée’s. I introduced him to Mr Riversmith, and I thought for a moment that he might click his heels, for Otmar’s manner can be formal on occasion. But he only bowed. Quinty, still hovering near the drinks’ tray, poured Aimée a Coca-Cola and Otmar a Stella Artois. He made the entries in the notebook and then sloped away.

‘Those are interesting pictures you drew,’ Aimée’s uncle said.

‘Which pictures?’

‘The ones on your walls.’

‘I didn’t draw them.’

‘I drew the pictures,’ Otmar said.

‘Otmar drew them,’ Aimée said.

For the first time Mr Riversmith was taken aback. I knew that Dr Innocenti would already have spoken to him on the telephone about the pictures. I watched him wondering if he’d misunderstood what he’d been told. He opened his mouth to speak, but Aimée interrupted.

‘When are you taking me away?’

‘We’ll see what Dr Innocenti says when he comes tomorrow.’

‘I’m better.’

‘Of course you are.’

‘Really better.’

Aimée, in a plain red dress that she and Signora Bardini had bought together, took up a position in the centre of the room. Otmar leaned against the pillar of an archway. The fear was still in his eyes, but it had calmed a little.

‘Feel like that long journey soon?’ Mr Riversmith was asking Aimée in the artificial voice some people put on for children. ‘Tiring, you know, being up in the air like that.’

‘You want to rest?’ She stumbled slightly over the words, and then repeated them. ‘You want to rest, Uncle?’

‘It’s just that we mustn’t hurry your uncle,’ I quietly interjected. ‘He needs a little breathing space before turning round to go all that way back again.’

The conversation became ordinary then, the General in his courteous way continuing to ask our visitor the conventional questions that such an occasion calls for: where it was he lived in the United States, if he had children of his own? You’d never have guessed from the way he kept the chat going with Mr Riversmith that the General’s courage had deserted him, that he could not bring himself to visit an empty house or even to expose himself to the talk of solicitors.

‘Virginsville,’ Mr Riversmith responded, giving the name of the town where he resided. ‘Pennsylvania.’

He supplied the name of the nearby university where he conducted his research with the creatures he’d mentioned. I was right in my surmise that no children had been born to Francine and himself.

‘Nor to my daughter,’ the General said.

In response to further politeness, Mr Riversmith revealed that his wife had children, now grown up, by a previous marriage. I asked if he’d been married before himself, and he said he had. Then he went silent again, and the General saved the situation by telling him about the garden that was planned. In a corner Otmar and Aimée were whispering together, playing their game with torn-up pieces of paper. The General mentioned the names of various plants – moss phlox, I remember, and magnolia campbellii. He wondered if tree peonies, another favourite of his wife’s, would thrive in Umbrian soil. Trial and error he supposed it would have to be. Enthusiastically, he added that Quinty had discovered a motorized plough could be hired locally, with a man to operate it.

‘I have little knowledge of horticultural matters,’ Mr Riversmith stated.

As he spoke, for some reason I imagined 5 May in Virginsville, Pennsylvania. I imagined Mr Riversmith entering his residence, and Francine saying: ‘One of those bomb attacks in Italy.’ Easily, still, I visualize that scene. She is drinking orange juice. On the television screen there is a wrecked train. ‘How was your day?’ she asks when he has embraced her, as mechanically as he always does when he returns from his day’s research. ‘Oh, it was adequate,’ he replies. (I’m certain he chose that word.) ‘They’re colonizing quite remarkably at the moment.’ Her day has been exhausting, Francine says. She had difficulty with the hood of the Toyota, which jammed again, the way it has been doing lately. No terrorist group claimed responsibility, the television newscaster is saying.

‘Does your wife research into ants too, Mr Riversmith?’ I asked because another lull hung heavily and because, just then, I felt curious.

Before he replied he drew his lips together – stifling a sigh, it might have been, or some kind of nervous twitch. ‘My wife shares my discipline,’ he managed eventually. ‘Yes, that is so.’

Weeks later, it would have been the local police in Virginsville who supplied the information that those television pictures concerned him more than either he or Francine had thought. That scene came clearly to me also, still does: the officers declining to sit down, sunlight glittering on their metal badges. ‘Italy?’ The staccato tightness of Thomas Riversmith’s voice seems strained to the policemen, and even to himself. ‘The little girl’s out of hospital, sir,’ one of the men informs him. ‘She’s being looked after in a local house.’ Still numbed, Mr Riversmith mumbles questions. Why had the explosion occurred? Had it in any way to do with Americans being on the train? Had those responsible been apprehended? ‘My God!’ Francine exclaims, entering the room just then. ‘My God!’

We had dinner on the terrace. Mr Riversmith stirred himself and with an effort admired the view.

Soon after seven the next morning I observed the General pointing out to Mr Riversmith the features of the motor-car that Quinty has a habit of referring to as his, although, of course, it belongs to me. The old man drew attention to the huge headlights, the chromium fastenings of the luggage-box and of the canvas hood, now folded down. I heard him say that motor-cars were no longer manufactured with such panache and pride. Mr Riversmith no doubt considered it antique. He said something I did not catch.

I had chosen for our excursion a wide-brimmed white hat and a plain white dress, with black and white high-heeled shoes, black belt and handbag. On the gravel expanse in front of my house I greeted the two men, and in a moment Otmar and Aimée appeared, Aimée in the red dress she’d been wearing the evening her uncle arrived. To my amazement, Rosa Crevelli came out of the house also, clearly attired for the outing, in a flowered green outfit with lacy green stockings to match.

‘Look here,’ I began, drawing Quinty aside, but he interrupted before I’d even mentioned the girl’s name.

‘You agreed it was OK,’ he said. ‘When we asked you last night you said the more the merrier.’

‘I said no such thing, Quinty.’

‘You did, you know. I remarked it would make an outing for the girl. I remarked she was looking peaky these days.’

I firmly shook my head. No such conversation had taken place.

‘You had a drink in at the time, signora.’

‘Quinty –’

‘I’m sorry.’

He hung his head the way only Quinty can do. He protested that neither he nor the girl would offend me for the world; he’d maybe misheard when he thought I’d said the more the merrier.

‘You’re coming with us in order to drive the car,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s different altogether for a maid to tag along. There’s neither rhyme nor reason in it.’

‘It’s only I promised her when you said that last night. She said you were kindness itself.’

This spoiled everything. I’d so much wanted things to go nicely. I’d wanted it to be a pleasant day for Aimée and her uncle; I’d wanted to get to know Mr Riversmith better; I’d wanted the General and Otmar to go on pulling themselves together, benefiting from the diversion; I’d wanted everyone to begin to be happy again.

‘It’s peculiar, Quinty, for a maid to mix with house-guests.’

‘I know. I know. We’re servant class. All I’m saying is, since the misunderstanding is there let it stay. It would be a terrible disappointment for the poor creature. She was ironing her clothes till the small hours.’

So in the end I gave in, even though I felt acutely embarrassed. I resolved to apologize to our guests – well, at least to Mr Riversmith and the General – when a suitable moment arrived. I am servant class myself, as Quinty well knows, but with everyone waiting I didn’t want to explain that naturally there was a difference.

‘Sorry,’ he said again.

I did no more than shake my head at him. Rosa Crevelli had been watching us, gauging the content of our exchanges. I saw him glance at her, and the pout that was just beginning to disturb her sallow features turned into a smile. I approached the others and quietly suggested that Aimée and the maid should occupy the two rear seats, which are a feature of the car, the long middle one folding forward to allow access. Otmar, Mr Riversmith and I occupied this centre section, the General sat with Quinty in the front.

‘Andiamo!’ Quinty exclaimed as he engaged the gears, his sombre mood of a moment ago quite vanished. ‘We’re on the off!’

The sky was empty of clouds. The morning air was cool and fresh. As we drove, I pointed out distant hill-towns and avenues of cypresses for Mr Riversmith’s benefit. Sometimes I indicated a church or, if none loomed near, a roadside café or a petrol station, knowing that for the stranger everything is of interest. Mr Riversmith nodded an acknowledgement from time to time, appearing otherwise to be mulling over matters he did not share. ‘Magnificent, this car,’ I heard the General say. Now and again Otmar turned round to exchange a word with Aimée.

‘You may find it strange,’ I remarked to Mr Riversmith, for what I had touched upon the day before had been on my mind in the night, ‘that we should be going out on a jaunt while still in the grip of the horror that has torn our lives asunder.’

He shook his head. In a conventional manner he said it was a sign of healing and recovery.

‘We long to escape our brooding, Mr Riversmith. We stitch together any kind of surface. But when we look into our hearts we see only a grief that is unbearable.’

I chose those words carefully, and did not add that the loss I’d suffered myself had been far less than that of the others because I’d had far less to lose. I didn’t go into detail because it wasn’t the time to do so. All I wished to make clear was that when, today, he observed his niece and Otmar and the old Englishman he was observing a skin drawn over human debris. Mr Riversmith said he wouldn’t put it quite like that, but didn’t offer an alternative form of words.

‘I just thought I’d mention it,’ I said, and left it at that. The debris of our times, I might have added, but I did not do so.

When we reached Siena, Quinty parked just inside the city gates, positioning the car beneath a tree to keep it cool. When he had raised the canvas roof and locked it into place we set off to walk to the café in the Piazza del Campo, where we were to breakfast. It was quite chilly in the narrow streets we passed through.

‘I must apologize,’ I murmured in a private moment to Mr Riversmith.

‘I beg your pardon?’

I smiled, indicating Rosa Crevelli’s presence with a sideways glance. There is something of the gypsy in Rosa Crevelli, which was considerably emphasized by the vivid green of her dress and her lacy stockings.

‘I beg your pardon?’ Mr Riversmith repeated.

I said it didn’t matter because the moment had passed and we could now be overheard. He said yes when I asked him if his wife would care for this city, if the grey alleys in which its natives moved like early-morning ghosts would impress her. When finally we reached our destination the contrast was startling: a bright blaze of sunshine was already baking the paving-stones and terracotta of the elegant, shell-shaped concavity that is the city’s centre. Would that, I wondered, impress Mrs Riversmith also?

He didn’t reply directly. In fact, strictly speaking, he didn’t reply to my question at all. ‘Dr Innocenti gave my niece this guide-book,’ was what he said, and handed the volume to me, unopened.

The great tower of the city-hall rises imperiously to claim a dominance against the plain serenity of the sky. I glanced through the guide-book when we’d settled ourselves at a table in the shade of the café’s awning. Chattering in Italian, Quinty and Rosa Crevelli shook the waiter’s hand. Noisily they ordered coffee and brioches. ‘The journey’s perked her up,’ Quinty whispered when he saw me looking at them.

‘This is very pleasant,’ the General said.

‘Yes, indeed,’ Mr Riversmith agreed, somewhat to my surprise since he had been so taciturn on the walk from the car.

When the coffee came I drew his attention to an entry in the guide-book about the Palio – the horse-race that takes place each summer through the streets of Siena and around the slopes of the Campo where we now sat. I read the entry aloud: that the race was an occasion coloured by feuds and sharp practice, by the vested interests of other cities and the jealousies of local families, that it was wild and dangerous.

‘You’ll notice the decorated lamp standards,’ Quinty interrupted. ‘Tarted up for the big day.’

I wore my dark glasses, and from behind their protection I observed my companions while Quinty continued for a moment about the lamp standards, prompted in what he was saying by the maid. I observed the nervous movement of Otmar’s fingers and the twitch of anxiety that caused him often to glance over his shoulder, as if he distrusted his surroundings. The old man’s masking of his anguish remained meticulously intact. Aimée examined the pictures on the little sachets of sugar that had come with our coffee.

‘The Sienese are renowned for the macaroons they bake,’ I remarked to Mr Riversmith. ‘Those ricciarelli we have at tea-time.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

Later, on the way to the cathedral, we called in at a travel agency, where he confirmed with the clerk the details of the flight back to Pennsylvania. The booking was made for four days’ time, I myself gently pressing that Mr Riversmith should allow his jet-lag to ease before rushing off. ‘I expect you’ve thought about how Aimée’ll settle with you,’ I said when these formalities were completed and we were on the street again. ‘You and your wife.’

Again there was the tightening of the lips, the sharp, swift nod, another silence.

‘Tell me about your sister,’ I invited, tentatively, as we moved on.

Before I’d finished speaking Mr Riversmith stopped in his walk. He turned to me in a deliberate way and said that every time he looked at Aimée he was reminded of his sister. Aimée had Phyl’s hair and her eyes and her freckles. I said yes, I knew, but the observation was ignored. Then, to my astonishment, while still standing on the street, the others now far ahead of us in their climb to the cathedral, Mr Riversmith related the history of the family trouble there had been. His sister had been particularly fond of his first wife. His second, the one called Francine, had somehow discovered this, had even learnt of Phyl’s repeated endeavours to bring the two together again. A couple of months after he married Francine she and Phyl quarrelled so violently that they had avoided speaking to one another since. He had taken Francine’s side and Phyl hadn’t forgiven him. The ugly breach that followed accounted for the fact that her children were unknown to him; he remembered his brother-in-law Jack only from the single occasion he’d met him. A dozen times Mr Riversmith had apparently been on the point of writing to Phyl to see if amends might be made. But he had never done so.

‘Naturally, I was apprehensive, coming out here,’ Mr Riversmith confessed. ‘I’d never even seen a photograph of my niece.’

All the fustiness had gone from him. For the first time he appeared to be a normal human person, endeavouring to contribute to a conversation. He was not a loquacious man; no circumstances in the world would ever alter that. Yet this moving little account of family troubles had tumbled out of him in the most natural way – hesitantly and awkwardly, it’s true, but none the less naturally. I was aware of a pleasant sensation in my head, like faint pins-and-needles, and a pleasant warmth in my body. My first concern was to throw the ball back.

‘Aimée didn’t know she had an uncle,’ I pointed out. ‘So if you and Francine imagine you were condemned in her eyes by your sister that wouldn’t be correct.’

He appeared to be taken aback by that. He even gave a little jump.

‘Of course you weren’t condemned,’ I repeated. ‘Your sister had a generous face.’

He didn’t comment on the observation. I asked when he’d last seen his sister and he said at their mother’s funeral.

‘A long time ago?’

‘1975.’

‘And your father? Yours and Phyl’s?’

Again there was surprise. The father had died when Phyl was an infant, and I imagined the household that was left, he taking the father’s place, much older than the sister. I imagined him mending things about the house the way his father had, cultivating lettuces and eggplant. I wondered if Phyl had thought the world of him, as younger sisters in such circumstances often do.

‘Don’t feel guilty,’ I begged, and told him how the General hadn’t been able to respect his son-in-law and could not find the courage to walk into an empty house or even to cope with solicitors – he whom courage had so characterized. I mentioned Otmar’s Madeleine.

While I was speaking I recalled a dream I’d had the night before. At once I wished to recount it, the way one does, but Mr Riversmith being the man he was, I found myself unable to do so. As you’ve probably deduced by now, dreams have a fascination for me. The Austrian ivory cutter – and, come to that, Poor Boy Abraham – used regularly to seek me out in order to retail a dream, and occasionally I would pass on what I’d dreamed myself. This one, in fact, concerned Mr Riversmith and might indeed have interested him, but still I felt inhibited. In it he was a younger man, little more than a boy. He was repairing a kitchen drawer that had fallen to pieces in Phyl’s hands, the sides dropping away from one another as if the glue that held them had become defective. He scraped away a kind of fungus from the joints and placed the drawer in clamps, with fresh glue replacing the old. ‘You’re clever to do that,’ Phyl said, and the wooden slat of the kitchen blind tapped the window-frame, the way it did in even the slightest breeze when the window was half open. I longed to ask him about that as we climbed the hill to the cathedral, but still I held my peace.

The others were by now out of sight. We found them waiting for us on the cathedral steps, and with Dr Innocenti’s guide-book open the General led the way into the wasp-like building, reading aloud about the floor and the carved pulpit. When we had exhausted the marvels of this most impressive place and had visited the little museum near by, we made for the picture gallery proper. To my considerable relief, Quinty and Rosa Crevelli had disappeared.

In the quiet of the gallery I would have liked to pursue my conversation with Mr Riversmith, but as we made the rounds of the pictures he fell into step with Otmar and the General, leaving me for the moment on my own. Aimée had wandered on ahead.

‘Look at this!’ I heard her cry in another room, and a moment later we were all congregated around the painting that excited her.

It was called Annuncio at pastori, and depicted two shepherds and a rat-like dog crouched by a fire that had been kindled beside carefully penned sheep. The hills around about were the hills of Italy turned into a brown desert, the sky an Italian sky, and the buildings in the background and the foreground were of Italian architecture. But an angel, holding out a sprig of something, was floating in a glow of yellow light, and didn’t, to my untutored eye, seem quite to belong.

‘I’ve never seen a picture as beautiful,’ Aimée said.

It occurred to me, as she spoke, that had the outrage not happened, she would probably have come to this city with her parents and her brother. They would probably have stood in front of this very picture. I looked at her, but her face was radiant. I edged closer to Mr Riversmith, hoping to share this thought with him in a quiet whisper, but unfortunately just as I did so he moved away.

‘Look at how the sheep are fenced,’ she said. ‘Like with a net.’

‘Sano di Pietro was born in Siena in 1406 and died in 1481,’ the General read from Dr Innocenti’s guide-book, and then explained that this was the person who had painted the picture.

‘More than five hundred years ago,’ I pointed out to Aimée, thinking that would interest her.

‘Eight trees,’ she counted. ‘Eight and a half you could say. Nineteen sheep maybe. Or twenty, I guess. It’s hard to make them out.’

‘More like twenty,’ the General estimated.

It was difficult to count them because the shapes ran into one another when two sheep of the same colour were close together. The guide-book, so the General said, suggested that the dog had noticed the angel before the shepherds had. To me that seemed somewhat fanciful, but I didn’t say so.

‘I love the dog,’ Aimée said. ‘I love it.’

Otmar, who had wandered off to examine other pictures, rejoined us now. Aimée took his hand and pointed out all the features she’d enthused over already. ‘Especially the dog,’ she added.

I was quite glad when eventually we descended the stairs again. Pictures of angels and saints, and the Virgin with the baby Jesus, are very pretty and are of course to be delighted in, but one after another can be too much of a good thing. I wondered if Mr Riversmith’s wife would have agreed and, since I very much wanted to establish what this woman was like, I raised the subject with him. I said I had counted more than thirty Virgins.

‘The cathedral would perhaps be more Francine’s kind of thing?’

But Mr Riversmith was buying a postcard at the time and didn’t hear. It was interesting that he’d been married twice. I wondered about that, too.

‘Otmar says you can climb up the town-hall tower,’ Aimée said in the postcards place. ‘We’re going to.’

On the way back to the Piazza del Campo I noticed Quinty and Rosa Crevelli loitering in a doorway. They were smoking and leafing through a photographic magazine, giggling as Quinty turned the pages. I was glad they didn’t see us and that no one happened to be looking in their direction as we went by. You could tell by the cover the kind of magazine it was.

‘Why didn’t I ever see you?’ I heard Aimée ask her uncle. ‘I didn’t even know I had an uncle.’

I didn’t catch his reply, something about the distance between Virginsville, Pennsylvania, and wherever it was she and her family had lived. Clearly he didn’t want to go into it all, but as we turned into the piazza she still persisted, appearing to know something of the truth.

‘Didn’t you like her?’

‘I liked her very much.’

‘Did you have a fight?’

He hesitated. Then he said:

‘A silly disagreement.’

The old man remarked that he would not ascend the tower but instead would search for his gardening manuals. We made an arrangement to meet in an hour’s time at the restaurant next to the café where we’d had breakfast, II Campo. I went off on my own, to look in the shoe shops.

I was after a pair of tan mid-heels, but I wasn’t successful in my search so I slipped into a bar near that square with all the banks in it. ‘Ecco, signora!’ the waiter jollily exclaimed, bringing me what I ordered. It was pleasant sitting there, watching the people. A smartly dressed couple sat near me, the woman subtly made up, her companion elegant in a linen suit, with a blue silk tie. A lone man, bearded, read La Stampa. Two pretty girls, like twins, gossiped. ‘Ecco, signora!’ the waiter said again. It was extraordinary, the dream I’d had about Mr Riversmith, and I kept wondering how on earth I could have come to have such knowledge of anything as private as that, and in such telling detail. I kept hearing his voice telling me about the family dispute, and I rejoiced that we had at last conversed.

‘Bellissima!’ a salesgirl enthused a little later. I held between my hands a brightly coloured hen. I had noticed it in a window full of paper goods, side by side with a strikingly coiled serpent and a crocodile. Each was a mass of swirling, jagged colours on what from a distance I took to be papier mâché. But when I handled the animals I discovered they were of carved wood, with paper pressed over the surface instead of paint.

I bought the hen because it was the most amusing. It was wrapped for me in black tissue paper and placed in a carrier-bag with a design of footprints on it. Did he love Francine? I wondered, and again I tried to visualize her – inspecting insects through a microscope, driving her Toyota. But I did not succeed.

Instead, as I left the shop, I saw Mr Riversmith himself. He was turning a corner and disappeared from view while I watched. I paused for a moment, but in the end I hurried after him.

‘Mr Riversmith!’

He turned and, when he saw who it was, waited. The street we were in was no more than an alley, sunless and dank. If we turned left at the end of it, Mr Riversmith said, we would soon find ourselves in the Campo again.

‘Let’s not,’ I suggested, perhaps a little daringly.

I had noticed, through a courtyard, a small, pretty hotel with creeper growing all over it. I drew Mr Riversmith towards it.

‘This is what we’re after.’ I guided him through the entrance and into a pleasant bar.

‘Are the others coming here? I thought we arranged –‘

‘Let’s just sit down, shall we?’

Imagine a faintly gloomy interior, light obscured by the creeper that trails around the windows. The table-tops are green, chairs and wall-coverings red. The two barmen look like brothers, young and slight, with dark moustaches. Only a sprinkling of other customers occupy tables. There are flowers in vases.

‘Are they coming here?’ Mr Riversmith asked again.

‘A little peace for you,’ I replied, smiling friendlily. ‘I think you’d welcome a bit of peace and quiet, eh? Now, I insist on standing you a cocktail.’

He shook his head. He said something about not drinking in the middle of the day, but recognizing that this was a polite reluctance to accept more hospitality I ignored it. I ordered him an Old Fashioned, since in my house that had been established as his drink.

‘It’s awfully pleasant here,’ I remarked, smiling again in an effort to make him feel at ease. I said there was no reason why he and I shouldn’t be a little late for lunch. If tongues wagged it would be nonsense.

He frowned, as if bewildered by this vernacular expression. I shook my head, indicating that it didn’t matter, that nothing of any import had been said. The barman brought our drinks. I said:

‘I wonder what sort of a person Sano di Pietro was.’

‘Who?’

‘The artist who painted the picture the child was so taken with. Incidentally, I thought it was a bit extravagant, that remark in the guide-book about the dog noticing the angel first.’

He appeared to nod, but the movement was so slight I might have been mistaken.

‘You thought so too? You noticed that?’

‘Well, no, I really can’t say I did.’

The place filled up. I drew Mr Riversmith’s attention to an elderly man with tiny rimless spectacles in the company of a young girl. Lowering my voice, I asked him what he thought the relationship was. He replied, blankly, that he didn’t know.

I asked him about other couples, about a group of men who clearly had some business interest in common. I was reminded of the men in Carrozza 219, but I considered it inappropriate to mention this. One of the group repeatedly took small objects from one of his pockets and placed them for a few moments on the table. I thought they might be buttons. I wondered if the men were in the button business.

‘Buttons?’ Mr Riversmith said.

‘Just a notion,’ I said, and then a Japanese party entered the bar and I said that there was one most noticeable thing about the Japanese – you could never guess a thing about them.

‘Yes,’ Mr Riversmith said.

I kept wanting to reach across the table and touch the back of his hand to reassure him, but naturally I didn’t. ‘What’s the matter?’ I wanted to ask him, simply, without being fussy with the question. He didn’t offer to buy a drink, which was a pity, because for a man like Mr Riversmith the second drink can be a great loosener. All that sense of communication there’d been when he’d talked about his sister a couple of hours ago had gone.

‘I really think we should join the others, Mrs Delahunty.’

Although I’d said it was to be my treat, he had already placed a note on the table and within a few minutes we were back on the street again. I had to hurry to keep up with him.

‘I just thought,’ I said, a little breathless, ‘a few minutes’ rest might be nice for you, Mr Riversmith.’

Although he in no way showed it, I believe he may possibly have appreciated that. I believe his vanity may have been flattered. He slowed his stride, and we stepped together into the bright sunlight of the Campo. The others were seated round an outside table beneath a striped blue and white awning. To my horror, Quinty and the maid were there also. Quinty was boring the General with details of the Tour de France.

‘I see Jean-Francois has taken the Yellow,’ he was saying as we approached them, and the old man nodded agreeably. He showed me a book of flowers he’d bought, the text in Italian but with meticulously detailed illustrations of azaleas. ‘Mollis and Knaphill,’ he said, a forefinger following the outline of the species. ‘Kurume and Glenn Dale. We shall make them grow.’

Otmar and Aimée were looking through their postcards. Rosa Crevelli had opened a powder compact and was applying lipstick. Having given up his effort to interest the General in bicycle-racing, Quinty was smiling his lopsided smile, his head on one side, admiring her.

‘I’ve bought a really gorgeous hen,’ I said.

I carefully unwrapped my prize. Aimée gasped when the pretty thing emerged from its black tissue paper.

‘They have crocodiles and serpents as well, Aimée, but I thought the hen the best.’

‘Wow, it’s fantastic!’

‘ “Who’ll help me grind my corn?” D’you know about the little red hen, Aimée?’

She shook her head.

‘ “I won’t,” said the dog. “I won’t,” said the cat.’ I told the tale in full, as Mrs Trice had related it to me so very long ago, when I was younger than Aimée.

‘Well, I never heard that one,’ Quinty said. ‘Capisci?’ he asked Rosa Crevelli. ‘Signora’s on about a farmyard fowl. Una gallina.’

I leaned toward Mr Riversmith, next to whom I was seated, and said I had hoped Quinty and the girl would have lunch on their own. ‘I must apologize for your having to sit down with servants.’

He shook his head as if to say it didn’t matter. But it did matter. It was presumptuous and distressing. I attracted a waiter’s attention and indicated that Mr Riversmith would be grateful for an Old Fashioned and that I’d like a gin and tonic myself. I did so quietly; but Quinty has an ear for everything.

‘G and t!’ he shouted down the table at the waiter, who repeated the abbreviation, appearing to be amused by it. ‘You like g.t.?’ he offered everyone in turn. ‘I like,’ Rosa Crevelli said. Mr Riversmith said he didn’t want an Old Fashioned.

‘It wasn’t arranged, she invited herself. They’re lame ducks, as you might say.’

Quinty had been down and out, I went on; the girl was of gypsy stock. As I spoke, the waiter returned with my gin and tonic, and one for Rosa Crevelli as well. ‘Due g.t.!’ he shouted, affecting to find the whole episode comic. When taking our orders for lunch he clowned about, striking attitudes and rolling his eyes. All this had been started off by Quinty and the maid. I drew Mr Riversmith’s attention to the fact, but added that they meant no harm.

‘It can be hurtful,’ I said, ‘but there you are.’

The General had put his horticultural manual aside and was describing to Otmar the purpose of different kinds of spades. Quinty joined in the conversation, saying something about a local firm that would supply fertilizer at a good price. When labour was required he advised the General to get estimates. In Italy nothing was done without an estimate. There was a babble of Italian from Rosa Crevelli and everyone had to wait while it was translated. It didn’t amount to much, something to do with where urns for the azaleas might be obtained.

‘A most extraordinary thing,’ I remarked to Mr Riversmith, unable any longer to resist telling him about the dream. While I was speaking the waiter came with bottles of wine and mineral water. He joked again, pouring me two glasses of wine and then, in mock confusion, a third one. Aimée enjoyed his nonsense, and I suppose it was innocent enough.

‘No more than a boy you were,’ I said. ‘Fifteen or so.’

But Mr Riversmith displayed no interest. I asked him if he had dreamed himself the night before and he insisted he hadn’t. He rarely did, he said.

I suggested, though diffidently, that none of us can get through a night’s sleep without the assistance of dreams. Sometimes we forget we dream. We remember briefly and then forget. Or do not remember at all.

‘I am not familiar with the subject,’ Mr Riversmith said.

Hoping to encourage him, I carefully retailed the details of the dream. I described the boy he’d been. I described the child his sister, Phyl, had been. I asked him if he remembered a Venetian blind that on occasion might have rattled, a slat tapping against the kitchen window-frame.

‘No.’

The reply came too quickly. To remember, it is necessary to think for a moment, even for several minutes. But I didn’t want to press any of this. I finished my drink and pushed away a plate of soup, not caring for the taste of it. It was disappointing that Mr Riversmith wasn’t going to bother, but of course it couldn’t be helped.

‘I just thought I’d mention it,’ I said.

I don’t think he spoke again while we had lunch but afterwards, as we walked through the streets to where the car was, I noticed to my surprise that he attempted to engage Rosa Crevelli in conversation. Since her English scarcely exists, it must have been an extremely frustrating experience for him. It was all the more bewildering that he appeared to persevere.

I was a little upset by this and somewhat gloomily walked with the General, whose slow pace suited me. The day before I’d noticed further letters from the two firms of solicitors, so I raised the subject as we made our way together.

‘I’ve written to say I am creating a garden.’

‘Good for you, General!’

‘I’ve been meaning to say, actually: you’ve no objection to Otmar and myself delaying our departure a while, have you?’

‘Of course I haven’t.’

‘He’s nervous to mention it to you, but he’s wondering if the garden could be his way of paying for his board and lodging?’

‘Of course it could be.’

‘From me, it’s a gift, you understand? I shall continue to pay my weekly whack.’

‘That’s as you like, General.’

Since we were passing various small cafés and bars I suggested that he might rest for a few minutes and have another cup of coffee. He readily agreed, and when we found somewhere agreeable I decided not to have more coffee but ordered a glass of grappa instead.

‘A garden can’t make up for anything.’ The old man, quite suddenly, returned to the subject, perhaps feeling that this was the time to say it, now that he had me on my own for a few minutes. ‘But at least it will mark our recovery in your house.’

‘Stay as long as you like.’ I replied softly, knowing that that, really, was what we were talking about.

‘You’re kind,’ he said.

After I’d had my bath that evening I happened to catch a glimpse of myself, as yet unclothed, in my long bedroom mirror. My skin was still mottled from the warm water, the wounds of 5 May healed into vivid scars. A dark splotch of stomach hair emphasized the fleshiness that was everywhere repeated – in cheeks and thighs, breasts, arms and shoulders. To tell you the truth, I think it suits me particularly well in my middle age. I’d feel uneasy scrawny.

I chose that evening a yellow and jade outfit, a pattern of ferns on a pale, cool ground. I added jewellery – simple gold discs as earrings, necklace to match, rings and a bangle. Not hurrying, I made my face up, and applied fresh varnish to my fingernails. My shoes, high-heeled and strapped, matched the jade of my dress.

‘You’re putting us to shame tonight,’ the General remarked as we sat to dinner on the terrace, and you could see that Otmar was impressed as well. But Mr Riversmith reacted in no way whatsoever. All during dinner you could tell that he was worried about the child.

‘You mustn’t be,’ I said when we were alone. A local man who hired machines for ploughing had arrived, and the General and Otmar had gone to talk to him at the back of the house.

‘She’s suffering from a form of amnesia,’ Mr Riversmith said. ‘She draws the pictures and then forgets she’s done them. She’s forgotten a whole day.’

‘We’re lucky to have Dr Innocenti here.’

‘Why did the German say he’d drawn the pictures?’

‘I suppose because there must be an explanation for the pictures’ existence. It would be worrying for Aimée otherwise.’

‘It isn’t true. It causes a confusion.’

Because of his distress he was as forthcoming as he’d been when he’d felt guilty about his sister. Distress brings talk with it. I’ve noticed that. In fairness you couldn’t have called him ambitious now.

‘Look at it this way, Mr Riversmith: an event such as we’ve shared draws people together. It could be that survivors understand one another.’

His dark brows came closer together, his lips pursed, then tightened and then relaxed. I watched him thinking about what I’d said. He neither nodded nor shook his head, and it was then that it occurred to me he bore a very faint resemblance to Joseph Cotten. I didn’t remark on it, but made the point that all four of us would not, ordinarily, have discovered a common ground.

‘D’you happen to know if they’ve given up on the case?’ he asked, not responding to what I’d said.

I didn’t know the answer to this question. Since the detectives had ceased to come to my house we’d been a little out of touch with that side of things. The last I’d heard was that they considered their best hope to be the establishing of a connection between the events of 5 May and some other outrage, even one that hadn’t yet occurred. I repeated all that, and Mr Riversmith drily observed:

‘As detective-work goes, I guess that’s hardly reassuring.’

I sipped my drink, not saying anything. It was Joseph Cotten’s style, rather than a resemblance. A pipe would not have seemed amiss, clenched between his strong-seeming teeth. You didn’t often see those teeth because he so rarely smiled. Increasingly that seemed a pity.

‘There are mysteries in this world,’ I said as lightly as I could. ‘There are mysteries that are beyond the realm of detectives.’

He didn’t deny that, but he didn’t agree either. If he’d had a pipe he would have relit it now. He would have pressed the tobacco into the cherrywood bowl and drawn on it to make it glow again. I was sorry he was troubled, even though it made it easier to converse with him. Around us the fireflies were beginning.

‘I’ve been trying to get to know you, Mr Riversmith.’

Perhaps it was a trick of the twilight but for a moment I thought I saw his face crinkling, and the bright flash of his healthy teeth. I tapped out a cigarette from a packet of MS and held the packet toward him. He hadn’t smoked so far and he didn’t now. I asked him if he minded the smell of a cigarette.

‘Go right ahead.’

‘You brought up mysteries, Mr Riversmith.’ I went on to tell him about the feeling I continued to experience – of a story developing around us, of small, daily details apparently imbued with a significance that was as yet mysterious. I spoke of pieces of a jigsaw jumbled together on a table, hoping to make him see that higgledy-piggledy mass of jagged shapes.

‘I don’t entirely grasp this,’ he said.

‘Survival’s a complicated business.’

From the back of the house the voice of the Italian with the motorized ploughs came to us, a halting line or two of broken English, and then the General’s reply. As soon as possible, the old man urged. It would do no harm to turn the earth over several times, now and in the autumn and the spring. The Italian said there would have to be a water line, a trench dug for a pipe from the well. There would be enough stone in the ruined stables, no need to have more cut. Dates were mentioned, argued about, and then agreed.

‘It’s been a long day.’

As he spoke, Mr Riversmith stood up. I begged him, just for a moment longer, to remain. I poured a little wine into his glass, and a little into mine. Because of his American background, I told him how I’d found myself in Idaho. I mentioned my childhood fascination with the Old West, first encountered in the Gaiety Cinema. I even mentioned Claire Trevor and Marlene Dietrich.

‘Idaho is hardly the Wild West.’

‘I was misled. I was no more than a foolish child.’

I told him how Ernie Chubbs had been going to Idaho in search of orders for sanitary-ware and had taken me with him on expenses; I told him how he’d taken me with him to Africa and then had disappeared. In the Café Rose they said they expected I’d met Mrs Chubbs, and it was clear what they were hinting at. ‘A healthy woman,’ they used to say. ‘Chubbs’s wife was always healthy.’ All I knew myself was that every time Ernie Chubbs referred to his wife he had to cough.

I described Ernie Chubbs because it was relevant, his glasses, and tidy black hair kept down with scented oil. I explained that he didn’t travel with the sanitary-ware itself, just brochures full of photographs. In order to illustrate a point, I was obliged to refer again to the Café Rose, explaining that he took an order there but when the thing arrived eight or so months later it had a crack in it. ‘The place was unfortunate in that respect. “I Speak Your Weight”, a weighing-machine said in the general toilet, but when you put your coin in nothing happened. Chubbs sold them that too. He used to be in weighing-machines.’

‘I see.’

There was another line Chubbs had, what he called the ‘joke flush’. When you pulled the chain, a voice called out, ‘Ha! ha!’ You kept pulling it and it kept saying, ‘Ha! ha!’ What was meant to happen was you’d give up in desperation; then you’d open the door to go out and the thing would flush on its own. But what actually happened was that when people installed the joke flush the voice said, ‘Ha! ha!’ and they couldn’t make it stop, and the flush didn’t work no matter what they did. Another thing was, when the light was turned on in the toilet, music was meant to play but it hardly ever did.

‘In the end the defective goods people caught up with Ernie Chubbs.’

‘I really think I must get along to bed now.’

Women were Ernie Chubbs’s weakness: he was Aries on the cusp with Taurus, a very mixed-up region for a man of his sensual disposition. Before my time he took someone else round with him on expenses, but when she wanted to marry him he couldn’t afford to because of the alimony. It was then that Mrs Chubbs conveniently turned up her toes, and after that the other lady wouldn’t touch him with a pole. Maybe she got scared, I wouldn’t know. I was eighteen years old when I first met Ernie Chubbs, green as a pea. ‘All very different from your ants,’ I said.

The engine of a motor-car started. ‘Buonanotte!’ the old man called out, and then Otmar wished their visitor goodnight also. There was a flash of headlights as the car turned on the gravel before it was driven off.

Again Mr Riversmith stood up and this time I did so too. I led him from the terrace into the house, and to my private room. I switched the desk-light on and pointed at my titles in the glass-faced bookcase. I watched him perusing them, bending slightly.

‘You’re an author, Mrs Delahunty?’

I explained that the collected works of Shakespeare had been part of the furniture at the Café Rose, together with the collected works of Alfred Lord Tennyson. That was my education when it came to writing English. I knew ‘The Lady of Shalott’ by heart, and the part of Lady Macbeth and ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ I said:

‘You might like to call me Emily.’

There was something about his forehead that I liked. And to tell the truth I liked the way, so unaffectedly, he’d said he didn’t grasp what I was endeavouring to relate to him. There was reassurance in his sombre coolness. He kept coming and going, emerging when he was troubled, hiding because of nerviness when he wasn’t. Clever men probably always need drawing out.

‘You’re Capricorn,’ I said, making yet another effort to put him at ease. ‘The moment I heard your voice on the phone I guessed Capricorn.’

He turned the first few pages of Bloom of Love. There was a flicker of astonishment in the eyes that had been so expressionlessly opaque a moment before. He picked up Waltz Me to Paradise, then returned both volumes to where he’d taken them from.

‘Most interesting,’ he said.

‘Your ants are interesting too, Tom.’

Perhaps it was ridiculous to think that a professor of entomology in his middle years would ask if he might take Little Bonny Maye or Two on a Sunbeam to bed with him, but even so it was a disappointment when he didn’t. We stood without saying anything for a moment, listening to the sound of one another’s breathing. I kept seeing his ants, running all over the place, a few carrying others on their backs, all of them intent upon some business or other.

‘I would listen if you told me, Tom. About your ants.’

He shook his head. His research was of academic interest only, and was complex. An explanation of it did not belong in everyday conversation.

‘What was it you didn’t grasp, Tom?’

‘What?’

I smiled encouragingly, wanting to say that if he smiled more himself everything would be easier for both of us, that it was a pity to possess such strong teeth and not ever to display them. I asked him to pick out Precious September. By Janine Ann Johns, I said, and watched him while he did so.

‘Open it, Tom.’

I asked him to look for Lady Daysmith, and to read me a single sentence concerning her. There was an initial hesitation, a shifting of the jaw, the familiar tightening of the lips. I sensed a reminder to himself of the care, and love, that had so cosseted his sister’s child in this house.

‘Lady Daysmith knelt,’ he read eventually. ‘She closed her eyes and her whisper was heard in the empty room, beseeching mercy.’

He replaced the volume on its shelf and closed the glass-paned door on it.

‘Sit down, Tom. Have a glass of grappa with me.’

He rejected this, but I begged him and in the end he did as I wished because I said it was important. I poured us each a glass of grappa. I said:

‘Lady Daysmith had her origins in a Sunday-school teacher.’ I described the humility of Miss Alzapiedi, her gangling height, the hair that should have been her crowning glory. ‘Flat as a table up front. I turned her into an attractive woman, Tom.’

‘I see.’

‘All her life she never wore stockings. Her skirts came down to her shoes.’

He began to rise, his drink untouched.

‘Drink your grappa, Tom. I’ve poured it for you.’

He sipped a little. I told him that that was how it was done: you turned Miss Alzapiedi into elegant Lady Daysmith. I told him how Miss Alzapiedi had come to my assistance when I mixed up God with Joseph. I didn’t claim that making her Lady Daysmith was a reward. It was just something that had occurred.

‘But it’s nice, Tom. And it’s nice that an old man who’s had the stuffing knocked out of him can still find his last reserves in order to create an English garden in the heat of Umbria.’

‘Yes, indeed.’

Illusion came into it, of course it did. Illusion and mystery and pretence: dismiss that trinity of wonders and what’s left, after all? A stick of an old creature in misery as he walks up and down a hospital corridor with a holy statue in it. The suffering in the heart of a Sunday-school teacher who wears her dresses long. Dismiss it and you’re face to face with a violent salesman of sanitary-ware, free-wheeling about with young girls on expenses. Dismiss the conventions of my house in Umbria and Quinty, for one, would be back where he started.

‘If I gave Quinty his marching orders, Tom, he’d take his gypsy with him and they’d end up on a wasteland. They’d make a shack out of flattened oil-drums. They’d thieve from people on the streets.’

‘Mrs Delahunty –’

‘I’ve seen the tourists here looking askance at Quinty, and who on earth can blame them? You must have thought you’d come to a madhouse when he began his talk about holy women. Yet eccentric conversation’s better than being a near criminal. Or so I’d have thought.’

Politely he said he found Quinty not uninteresting on the subject of hagiology. I smiled at him: once again he was doing his best. I remembered him walking beside Rosa Crevelli after we’d had lunch, making an effort to converse with her. He’d had a glass or two of wine, and I wondered if he’d thought to himself that she had an easy look to her. No reason why a reticent man shouldn’t have a fancy, shouldn’t go for that sallow skin and gypsy eyes, a different ball-game from Francine. But this wasn’t the time to wonder for long about any of that.

Perhaps in the morning, I suggested, we might look for a bark-ant together so that he could show me his side of things, since I’d been going on so about my own. For a start, I’d no idea if a bark-ant looked different from the kind of ant that lives beneath a stone. I asked him about that, pouring just a thimbleful more grappa into my glass. I said it was fascinating what he’d said about bark-ants behaving like human beings. I asked him how they came by their name. He didn’t answer, and when I looked up I discovered he was no longer in the room.

The old man showed me what he intended, passing on to me the gist of the deliberations that had taken place the evening before, how the Italian had pointed out that in order to create the different levels a mechanical digger rather than a ploughing machine was necessary. This, too, he could supply and operate himself. The General showed me where the terracing and the flights of steps would be. Part of the garden would be walled: the Italian had machinery for demolishing the half-ruined stables and moving the stone to where it could be attractively put to use.

The General repeated that the garden was a gift. But he did not feel he could make such drastic alterations without my agreement. He showed me where a fountain would be, and where the shade trees would be planted.

‘It’ll be beautiful, General.’

‘A garden should have little gardens tucked away inside it. It should have alcoves and secret places, and paths that make you want to take them even though they don’t lead anywhere. What grows well, you cherish. What doesn’t, you throw out.’

The digger would bite into the slope beside the sunflower field. As well as terraces, there would be sunken areas. The Italian who’d come was a man of imagination; he’d entered into the spirit of the challenge. A separate well for the garden might be necessary, rather than the pipeline he’d first suggested. The old cypress tree beside the stables would remain.

‘This’ll be costly, General. Are you sure –’

‘Yes, I’m sure.’

Then, for the last time in my presence, the old man mentioned his daughter. We stood among the rank growth of that wasted area, to which the dilapidated old buildings and rusty wheels and axles lent a dismal air. The General stared down at the ground of which he expected so much. In his daughter’s lifetime he had resented the fact that what wealth he left behind would be shared with her husband. ‘I would happily give all the days remaining to me if it might be now,’ he murmured, and said no more.

So it was left. I had accepted gifts from men before, but never one like this, and never without strings that tied some grisly package. I was moved afresh by what was happening, by faith being kept in so many directions at once, by frailty turned into strength. The timbers of these useless buildings and the discoloured iron that had sunk into the ground would be scooped away, the fallen walls given an unexpected lease of life; an old man’s dream would spread on the hill beside the sunflower slope. He knew, as I did, that he would not live to see his garden’s heyday. But he knew it didn’t matter.

That day was hotter, even, than the days that had preceded it. At half-past ten Aimée and her uncle went for a walk, advised to do so before the day became oppressive. There is a selection of straw hats in the outer hall, kept for the tourists, since people who come here always want to walk about the hillsides no matter what the temperature. I insisted that Aimée should wear one, and her uncle also; I warned them to keep to the roads and tracks for fear of snakes. For a few moments I watched their slow progress through the clumps of broom and laburnum, Aimée in a light-blue dress, her wide-brimmed panama too big for her, he in shirtsleeves and fawn cotton trousers, and a hat with a brown band. When they passed from sight I hurried into the house and made my way to his bedroom.

I’d hoped to find a photograph of Francine that would confirm the picture I had formed, but there wasn’t one. His clothes hung neatly in the simple wardrobe, a tie was draped over the back of a chair. A sponge-bag contained an electric razor, toothbrush and toothpaste, aspirin and deodorant. Airline tickets and cufflinks were on the dressing-table; soiled laundry had been folded and placed at the bottom of one of the black Mandarina Duck bags. On the bedside table there was a grey-jacketed volume entitled The Case for Differentia. I opened it, but could not understand a word. Convoluted sentences trailed sluggishly down the page. Words were brandished threateningly, and repeated for good measure: empirical, behavioural, delimit, cognitive, validation, determinism, re-endorsement. Can this be designated an urban environment? a question posed, followed by the statement that a quarter of the ‘given population’ are first-generation immigrants. From what I could gather these were ants, not human beings. I closed the volume hastily.

Beneath it there was a blue notebook full of jottings in what I took to be the handwriting of Mr Riversmith. The script was more than a little difficult to read, pinched and without any attempt at an attractive effect. ?Is evidence, co-operation economic activities, exchange goods, service. ?Trade, familial lines. Pilsfer’s recreation theory shaky. Recurrent exchange gifts cannot be taken recreational. ?Sanctions on miscreant. No evidence Pilsfer’s sleep motive. Seasonal migration dubious. No evidence P’s hospital theory. This surely invalid.

I turned the pages. There were diagrams that looked like family trees without names, but with all the lines joined together, suggesting an electrical circuit of unusual elaboration and complexity. There were further references to recreation and to Pilsfer, who didn’t at all appear to know what he was up to. A particular observation caught my eye, since it was heavily underscored. Maeslink’s theory exploded, premises no validity now: 3 April ’87. Impossible extrapolate. By its nature, sensation indefinable. The last entry, marked Italy July ’87, was: Sleeping-bag theory ignores monoist structure. In what I’d read the word theory occurred four times.

All this was what occupied him. All this was what fuelled his ambition. All this was what made him reticent. I knew a man once who was scarcely able to address a word to anyone, but that reserve was as brittle as the ice it seemed like, and when it cracked there was a flow I couldn’t stop: there was little evidence to suggest that Mr Riversmith was like that, even if he was more voluble when upset. He was eminent and distinguished and looked up to. There were people who would listen, intrigued, when he explained the world in terms of ants who bred in bark: you could tell all that by his manner. He was not aware of ordinary matters, as the Italian who was bulldozing out my garden was; in fact, he had so far displayed no signs of awareness whatsoever. His cleverness was there as a substitute and it could hardly be worthless. That’s what I thought as I left his room that morning, 24 July 1987, a date I have never forgotten.

I have not forgotten it because what happened on the afternoon of that day was that I received one of the most unpleasant shocks of my life. Mr Riversmith asked permission to make yet another telephone call to Pennsylvania; I said of course, and went to my room. He was remarking, when I lifted the receiver, that he had never before encountered a romantic novelist. Then, distressing me considerably, he referred to as ‘trash’ what last night he had called most interesting. He referred to the grappa we’d enjoyed together as an unpleasant drink. The word ‘grotesque’ was used in a sentence I couldn’t catch. The brief, and private, revelations I had made – in particular the death of Mrs Chubbs – were described as ‘a drunken fantasy’. He said I’d gone to Idaho thinking I’d find the Wild West there, which had he listened he would have realized wasn’t so. ‘Some honey!’ the hoarse voice at the other end more than once interrupted.

I couldn’t understand it. In good faith I’d shown him my titles. I’d gone to a great deal of trouble to arrange an outing to Siena. I’d given him drink after drink and had not even considered entering them in Quinty’s book. ‘Her imagination has consumed her,’ he said. From his tone, he could have been referring to an ant.

I replaced the receiver and simply sat there, feeling weak, as though I had been bludgeoned. He hadn’t even become familiar with the books’ contents: all he had done was to read a few lines because I asked him to, and to glance at the illustrations on the jackets. I smoked, and drank a little, hardly anything really. Quinty knocked on my door and said there was tea downstairs; I thanked him but did not go down. He knocked again at dinner-time, but again I chose to remain on my own. I watched the dusk gathering and welcomed it, and welcomed darkness even more. When I slept I dreamed a terrible dream:

It was Otmar who brought the thing on to the train. Long before they’d met in the supermarket he and his friends had picked the girl out. They knew all about her. She was suitable for their purpose.

In my dream I saw Otmar as. a child, in the dining-room with his mother and father, Schweinsbrust on the table. There is a sudden crash, the battering down of the outside door; then four men enter the dining-room and greet the diners softly. The tears of Otmar’s mother drop on to the meat and potatoes and little stewed tomatoes. His father stands up; he knows his time has come. For a moment the only sound is the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece, between the two bronze horsemen. Otmar’s mother does not cry out; she does not attempt to fling herself between the men and their prisoner. A long time ago she endeavoured to accept her husband’s fate in anticipation; she, too, knew the men would one day come.

For crimes committed in Hitler’s war he is the four men’s prey, and the clock still ticks when they have taken him away. It ticks even though there will be no trial; the execution will be discreet. It ticks as sportingly as ever, while the tears of Otmar’s mother fall on to the little stewed tomatoes, while she decides she does not wish to live herself. It ticks when she stands up and goes away, and when Otmar finds her, tied up to a light fixture in another room.

‘Otmar it is,’ an unhurried voice states, the children of the fathers locked in another turn of the wheel, a fresh fraternity of vengeance. Broken matchsticks are cast as lots. ‘Otmar is the chosen one.’

In Carrozza 219 he strokes her arm. She’ll carry the vengeance through Linata Airport, on to the plane that’s bound for Tel Aviv. The victim, as Otmar’s father was, is occupied now with other matters; the past is past. In the fields the sunflowers are brilliant against the pale sky. Is it Madeleine’s hand that is like an ornament in the air, the same hand that dislodged the stack of mustard jars?

After that morning’s walk I knew what Francine was.

Francine was a disruptive; she couldn’t help herself. Francine had seen him and had desired him. Francine considered Celeste Adele a nobody, with her too-sweet manner and her looks and her bird-brain. ‘I want Tom Riversmith,’ Francine said aloud, although there was no one in the room except herself. ‘God damn that silly bitch to hell!’ Francine had lost her own husband because he’d been playing around. Fourteen years of marriage, three children conceived and born, and still he came home with someone else’s smell. A girl in a panty-hose department – one o’clock in the morning, he’d confessed to that. Francine didn’t ask him how he’d come across a panty-hose employee. She only wondered if it was true or if he was getting at her by making her second best to such a person. She’d stopped caring years ago.

That was why she was alone when she discovered she was on a wavelength with Tom Riversmith. Celeste Adele gave itsy little cocktail parties because she liked to play at being a hostess. She handed round Japanese crackers shaped like sea-shells; she made Tom cut slivers of lemon and use a shaker. He did his best among the real-estate people she invited, the lawyers and art-gallery people, all of them off-campus, not his type at all.

‘Now join us,’ Celeste Adele would welcome in a sugary gush as soon as you stepped into the room, where the chatter was already like a tumult. She loved noise. Later, when the party really got going, she put on Big Band music. ‘Having a good time’, she called it.

Francine had been taken to the first such occasion by a man who’d once invited her to the movies, and once to the Four Seasons for dinner. She knew that nothing was going to come of the relationship. Over ribs at the Four Seasons he’d talked about a wife he’d left and how he regretted that now. ‘It’s always a gas at the Riversmiths’,’ he promised, adding that Celeste Adele Riversmith loved to see new faces. On the way, driving with the radio on, he extolled the virtues of his ex-wife, so tediously that Francine moved away from him as soon as they reached their destination. ‘I’m Tom Riversmith,’ her host introduced himself, finding her alone.

Vaguely recognizing her from the campus, he was interested in her presence at a party of his wife’s. (Later Francine learnt that Celeste Adele never invited university people to her parties because she considered it did her husband good to mix what she called ‘the real world’.) Francine was working on the newly discovered Kristo papers at the time and he was fascinated: four years of Kristo’s research, thought to be lost in the swamps of Cambodia, had come to light in the safe of a New York hotel.

‘You’re fortunate.’ He sounded envious. For more than eleven years, since Kristo’s death, there’d been the mystery of the missing notes, with nothing to indicate where they might possibly be. Kristo, who’d trusted no one, had been notorious for jealously guarding every detail of the evidence he turned up.

‘Yes, I have been fortunate.’

She liked his reticence. She couldn’t imagine him blustering like the man she’d married and had spent so long with, a campus flop if ever there was one. She couldn’t imagine him lying, or being caught with a girl in the back of a sedan. He’d be grizzled when he was older – grey and grizzled, and that would suit him.

‘I will always despise you for this,’ his sister said when several months had passed.

She stood there, a woman Francine had never seen before, a woman who’d travelled three thousand miles to make that statement. Tom needed Celeste Adele, their marriage was a perfectly satisfactory one. Tom and Celeste Adele were oppo-sites, but as often as not opposites belonged together, and they did in this case.

‘You’ve smashed your way in,’ his sister bitterly accused. ‘You’re taking what you can get. You’re only thinking of yourself.’

There were tears then, but they weren’t Francine’s. They ran, unchecked, on the other woman’s cheeks. Francine didn’t attempt to argue.

‘She’s done so much for you,’ his sister pleaded with Tom. ‘You couldn’t give her children. You used up her best years. Please, Tom, you mustn’t turn around and tell her she doesn’t matter.’

He shook his head. He hadn’t told Adele that.

‘What you’re doing says it.’

She begged him, while Francine watched and listened. He’d never been like this, his sister said, and then repeated it. He’d always had a heart before.

‘It’s best,’ he quietly muttered.

Hopelessly now, she disagreed. More spurts of tears came, but then she calmed. She blew her nose and wiped at her cheeks. Francine thought that with all this guff out of her system she’d accept the inevitable, would realize she’d gone too far and say so. There was a moment for an apology, for a mumbled effort to repair unnecessary damage. But no apology came.

‘You foul bitch,’ his sister snapped, like ice cracking. Then she went.

The old man lolled in the ladder-backed chair, Aimée was perched on one of the peacock stools. Looking down from the top of the stairs, I couldn’t hear what he was murmuring but I was aware of her pleasure in his tenderness.

‘I’d love to see England.’ Just for a moment, Aimée’s voice floated to me, and again the old man murmured.

‘The last day.’ Otmar had quietly joined me and was looking down also. Through the mist of my tears he seemed even more sombre than he’d been of late: a face I can only describe as defeated was turned in my direction when he spoke, as though the prospect of the child’s going left him bereft. Our eyes held, and locked, and the dream I’d had about him took vivid form again. For a moment it seemed like a shaft of truth, coming to complete the story of that summer, illuminating everything. I saw the matchsticks broken, some long, some short. I watched the choice being made. ‘Otmar is the chosen one,’ the unhurried voice said, and I must have swayed, for he put his hand out to assist me.

By now that summer belongs to the shadows of the past.

I watch the videos of old Westerns with the outside shutters of the salotto drawn against the afternoon light. I smoke, and sip a little tonic water livened with just a taste of spirits. The stagecoach horses neigh and judder when they’re pulled up with a jerk. Masked men twitch their guns, indicating how they want the passengers to hand over their valuables. One of the men is nervous, which makes it worse. He spews out chewed tobacco. Far away and unaware, the sheriff puts his feet up.

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