The Silence in the Garden

by William Trevor

  Carriglas, November 30th, 1931. ‘I beg you,’ I said. ‘I beg you to tell me.’ I could not prevent those words. It was, indeed, all I could do to prevent myself from saying more, from confessing that I had loved him since the day he’d complimented me on the tennis-court. I waited, looking at him, willing him to speak to me. He smiled and only said, most sadly: ‘Dear Sarah. Dear, generous Sarah.’

  9. Tom and Mrs Rolleston

  Tom waited for Sister Conheady to appear. The linoleum of the floor had been waxed that morning and the smell of polish was still in the air. It was never warm in the room, and the glass-paned bookcase doors were never unlocked when the lay sister showed him in to wait for Sister Conheady. He wondered how many books there were. He wondered who else ever borrowed them. He’d never seen another person in the room.

  ‘Ah, Tom, where’d we be without you?’ Sister Conheady said, soundlessly arriving. Her grasp of the doorhandle, and the movement of the door itself, had not betrayed her entrance: only her greeting ever did that. She unlocked the bookcase and then the drawer where she kept her red exercise-book.

  ‘Has she read Darkened Rooms? D’you remember that name?’

  He examined the title, printed in ink on the brown-paper cover; he opened the book. By Philip Gibbs, it said inside.

  ‘That’s not one I’ve brought over,’ he said.

  Sister Conheady replaced on a shelf the book he had returned to her. Miss V. Rolleston, she wrote in the red exercise-book, and then made a cross sound with her tongue. She corrected the entry to Mrs. V. Balt. It was the eighth time she’d made that slip. Tom had counted.

  ‘Now,’ she said, handing the book to him.

  As he received it, he tried to touch her fingers with his, to see if she’d draw them away. He didn’t manage to do so because she was holding the other side of the book. He wondered if she was holding it there on purpose, because a nun had to be extra careful.

  ‘You get used to writing down a name,’ she said, which was what she’d said on the seven previous occasions, is Mrs Balt well these days?’

  ‘I think she is.’

  ‘Bring her this one too. I have it put by in the drawer for her.’

  Again there was a chance to discover if she would permit his hand to touch hers. Out of the Ruins, he read on the cover of the book she handed him. But she held it in the same way, the fingers grasping it well away from his.

  She locked the glass-paned door, and then she locked the drawer where she kept the red exercise-book and the books she sometimes put aside. He liked the smell of cloth that always came from her, and the way it rustled sometimes, and the way her beads jangled when she reached up to a high shelf. Deso Furphy said a nun had no hair on her head.

  ‘Sister Conheady,’ he said, ‘would you be frightened to touch me?’

  Her high, smooth forehead, a shade less white than the wimple that framed it, wrinkled immediately. The empty eyes, that had never in his presence betrayed emotion, clouded perceptibly. A hand searched for the beads that hung within the folds of her habit.

  ‘To touch you, Tom?’

  ‘Because of the way I am.’

  She did not move. She stood by the bookcase, with her back pressed into it. The agitation in her face increased. Tom could sense her telling him to go away, even though she didn’t say it. He didn’t want to go away. He wanted to explain that he had understood why people thought of him like that ever since he’d seen Briscoe with the girl, Briscoe trying to do what Mr O’Hagan had kicked the dog for. He wanted to tell Sister Conheady about Dorrie Deavy repeating what her father had said, and how Mr Coyne had changed his mind about inviting him into his house, and how his grandmother had been going to kiss him and then hadn’t. He wanted to tell her that people didn’t object to being in a room with him, that only the Deavy boys moved to the other side of the street. The woman on the cart had been sorry for him but she didn’t want to contaminate herself. He began again about Briscoe and the girl, how Briscoe’s coat had been lying beside them on the grass.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ She crossed herself. He mustn’t say that, she said. She told him to go to Confession. She asked him if he was looking after the holy well.

  ‘I keep an eye on it all right.’

  ‘When you put your hand down into the clay keep it there for a long while. Don’t talk about those other things.’

  He could see that she was praying. Her lips weren’t moving, no sound came from her, but he was aware that she was interceding for him. When he guessed she had finished he said:

  ‘I only wanted to ask you.’

  ‘As soon as you’ll get across to the island go up to that place and put your hand down into the moisture. Say your rosary there.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  He began to go away, but she called him back when he’d reached the door and told him to wait there a minute. She opened the drawer and took out the exercise-book. She tore a page out and wrote on it, then searched impatiently for an envelope. Failing to find one, she folded the page several times and wrote on the outside of it. ‘Give that to Mrs Balt,’ she said. ‘Put it inside one of the books, only draw her attention to it. Don’t forget now.’

  ‘I’m sorry I said that to you.’

  Sister Conheady did not reply. Her head was bowed, and he left the room not knowing if the agitation had gone from her face. In the hall the Reverend Mother was unhurriedly pacing up and down, talking quietly to a young nun Tom had never seen before. Engrossed in their conversation, they didn’t speak to him as he went by. He reached up and unlatched the door, and closed it softly behind him.

  ‘How’re you doing, Tom?’ Mr Coyne said as he passed the petrol pump, and he replied that he was doing all right. All the way to the quays there wasn’t a chance to read the note Sister Conheady had written because someone might have seen him at it and guessed he was doing something wrong. On the ferryboat he wasn’t able to read it in front of the ferryman, but on the island, when he was out of sight of the boat, he lifted the two books from his schoolbag and took the note from where he’d placed it between the pages of one of them. Please in future send one of the maids for the books, Sister Conheady’s handwriting instructed, nothing else.

  He replaced the note between the pages of Out of the Ruins and walked on, passing the gate-lodge by because he always delivered the library books to the kitchen of the house as soon as he’d collected them. He should have known something as bad as this would happen if he was outspoken with Sister Conheady. ‘That’ll be the first one you’ll read yourself,’ she’d said once, taking a book down from the shelves, and reading a few lines about a shipwreck.

  In the kitchen of the house he wanted to tell his mother what had happened, but he knew she’d be cross so he didn’t. He placed the books on the table as he always did, and placed the note on top of them so that it would be seen. His mother called out from the sculleries, asking if it was Tom who had come in.

  ‘I’m leaving the books here, and a note Sister Conheady wrote.’

  ‘Tom, Mrs Rolleston wants you. Will you go up to her bedroom?’

  It would be to buy another postal order. He thought that all the way up the back stairs, imagining Mr O’Hagan’s face in the post office and the way he had of whispering to himself while he slowly leafed through the box of postal orders.

  ‘Ah, Tom.’

  ‘Hullo, Mrs Rolleston.’

  She was in bed, sitting up against her pillows. She smiled at him. She pointed at the money on the dressing-table, the envelope already addressed beside it. When he was over at the convent tomorrow, she began, and did not have to continue because he understood.

  ‘Tom,’ she said when he was about to go. ‘Come here beside me, Tom.’

  He crossed to her bedside and stood there. She looked at him with a trace of a smile on her lips, her eyes brighter than he had ever noticed them before, her cheeks more lined and sunken than he had ever noticed them either.

  ‘Tom,’ she said again, and to his
astonishment she held her arms out, wanting him to come closer to her. She repeated his name, and then he felt the wrinkled skin of her face on his cheek, and her lips kissing him, as softly and as warmly as his mother did when she said goodnight. Her hands held on to his shoulders, her grasp tightened around him. ‘Say goodbye to me, Tom,’ she whispered, but he didn’t say anything, fearing that if he did she’d let him go.

  In the dark of another night, thoughts and memories mingled. They ran about and would not flow together. Sunshine was warm on her forehead. She watched her breath on the chill air. She heard her laughter when two men on horseback rode among the furniture of the drawing-room, two rakes from Mallow or wherever. A band played in the alcove on the stairs, her own feet danced. Only I had bad luck a week ago, the familiar loops of Kathleen Quigley’s handwriting reminded her.

  As fragile as the veins of a fallen leaf, all of it would be shattered by the same idle touch that had reached for her husband and her son and her grandchildren’s mother, for Linchy, and for Dowley in the end. Wouldn’t you wonder how a person could get the way Corny Dowley was when he could have made some girl a decent husband? But I’m telling you the truth saying there’s no hard feelings. There’s no one doesn’t know you were always goodness itself to Kathleen Quigley. He had lain in wait at Lahane crossroads, for men whom in other times he might have smoked a cigarette with. He had lain in wait on the billiard-hall steps, and become the victim of his own trap. His mother walked out into the sea on the day of his funeral.

  A fire burned in the bedroom, as it always did during the winter months. The lamp on the dressing-table cast a soft, yellow light. For more than seventy years she had slept in this room. The son she had outlived had been conceived and born here. Her tears had dampened the yielding warmth of the bed she lay down in now, tears of pleasure often, ‘I’m so sorry, Brigid,’ she tried to comfort when Brigid had wept also, ‘I’m so very sorry.’ The remains had lain with a sheet drawn over them, one sheet replaced by another because the blood still oozed. Mightn’t it appease the conscience if you sent a few shillings? But conscience had stayed to mock, and to insist upon as its greater due.

  ‘Mrs Rolleston.’

  Sarah Pollexfen stood with a lamp in the open doorway. ‘You said to come and say goodnight.’

  ‘Did I? D’you know, I’d quite forgotten that.’

  ‘I woke you. I’m very sorry.’

  ‘No, you didn’t, not at all. Sit down, Sarah. Sit where I can see you. We have not talked to one another for years.’

  From her bed she watched while the lamp was placed on the dressing-table, not close to the one that was no longer alight but on the other side of the ornate looking-glass. Sarah Pollexfen sat within the glow the single lamp threw, her back to the scent bottles and the ivory hairbrushes of the dressing-table, her fingers touching on her lap.

  ‘The wretched journey to a woman’s bed, the empty marriage, guilt begetting guilt. Sarah, do you understand?’

  She must have closed her eyes because when she opened them she saw that Sarah Pollexfen was shaking her head. She said she wanted it written down. She wanted it in Sarah Pollexfen’s diaries, so that the truth could be passed on. Or left behind, whichever way you looked at it.

  ‘They terrified him, Sarah. Day after day, all summer long, they hunted that child as an animal is hunted.’

  Carriglas, December 12th, 1931. Earlier, that morning, she had told me of a dream: about being in a gondola in Venice on her honeymoon and how the gondola had become the boat, bedecked with ribbons, that took her back to the island which was to be her home. One after another, she shook the servants’ hands on the steps of the house. ‘All that you found lovely about Carriglas was lovely for me too, Sarah.’ There was no ferryboat then; when people fell ill on the island they came to the house and the house looked after them. She described the town as it had been, its business premises thriving, the pretty bandstand given by the Rollestons to decorate the promenade.

  But when I sat with her in the evening her mood was different. I knew, of course, about the occurrence that appeared to haunt her. After all, I had been here at the time. And I, too, had been angry with the children.

  ‘“Come and get the rabbits,” their father used to say when they were tiny. And then he’d lift Villana up so that she could reach the shotgun down from the wall. Off they’d go, he and his children.’

  ‘It’s best forgotten, Mrs Rolleston. It’s all too long ago.’

  Her breathing softened; her eyes closed. Gently I put more logs on the fire and when they blazed up my own eyes faltered also. For a minute or two I dozed.

  ‘I’ have dreamed too often of that red-haired child. Too often, Sarah.’

  Her voice woke me. She paused and then she spoke again, asking me if I, too, dreamed about what I had sought to banish from my memory years ago. I shook my head, but as I did so all that had distressed me then returned. The red-haired child ran over heather and rocks, chased out of a hovel that smelt of turf smoke and potatoes boiling. His feet were bare, his jersey ragged. He ran as swiftly as a hare.

  ‘Did you ever know, Sarah, that his father had long ago gone from the island to find a passage to America? A half-witted uncle—Drunk Paddy they call him now—shared that hovel with the child and his mother. God knows what became of the father, a lot of them just disappeared.’

  ‘Mrs Rolleston, all this is over and done with. It’s really best forgotten.’

  ‘My grandchildren hunted a child, Sarah. My grandchildren and your brother. As of right, they hunted. They were the children of Carriglas.’

  I rose and moved across the room. I took her hands, hoping my touch would shake her melancholy off. But she repeated what she had said already, her voice unwavering and strong. I knew the details she pressed so urgently upon me. I did not want to hear them.

  ‘Shall I fetch you something warm? Milk? Or cocoa?’

  ‘As soon as their father returned to the regiment the shotgun was taken from the wall. As soon as there were only two women to deceive.’

  ‘They did not realise. Children often don’t.’

  ‘How often, that summer, did the thought of their game excite Villana while she recited her poetry for you in the nursery-schoolroom, or bent her head over the sums you set? Do you wonder about that, Sarah? Do you lie awake and wonder?’

  I placed her hands beneath the bedclothes, and settled her pillows. As I returned to the fire, goose pimples ran over my arms and legs. In a moment she said:

  ‘One of them drove him on to where another waited. His feet bled on the gorse he ran through. He stumbled and fell down. Is that as you have seen it, too? In dreams, Sarah?’

  I did not reply. I steadied a shaking in my hands by pressing them into my thighs. It was not something I had ever dreamed about.

  ‘Exhausted among the rocks, his fearful tears, the shotgun aimed. Is that what you have seen, Sarah? And have you heard the children’s laughter?’

  ‘Of course I haven’t.’ My voice rose, almost shrill in the quiet room. ‘You punished the children. They understood.’

  ‘Yet they did not obey me. They obeyed neither of us, Sarah.’

  ‘Mrs Rolleston, do please try to rest. No matter how it was, it belongs to the past now.’

  ‘The past has no belongings. The past does not obligingly absorb what is not wanted.’

  Did I excuse it still? she asked me. Did I call it a sport for a summer’s day and excuse it because those summer days were long ago? I would have given anything I possessed to make her cease, but she murmured on, wandering back through the years of her life, rambling sometimes in what she said, but always returning to the red-haired child.

  ‘What did they do to him that summer, Sarah?’

  ‘Please don’t talk like this, Mrs Rolleston. Please. I beg you.’

  She paid me no attention. She had no interest in my answers, even though she asked me questions. She was aware of little in her bedroom except that someone of my name was there.

>   ‘What monstrousness was bred in him that summer, Sarah?’

  It was I who had seen the children returning to the garden with the shotgun. I had run towards them in agitation, knowing the weapon should not have been taken from the study in their father’s absence. ‘Don’t tell Grandmamma,’ Villana had pleaded, and then Hugh appeared and I knew he had been with them. ‘Sarah, we were only playing,’ he said, but none of them told me what their game had been. It was Haverty, afterwards, who did that, asking me to speak to them. Later, when my remonstrances proved ineffective, he complained to Mrs Rolleston that their game was continuing.

  She murmured from her sleep and soon afterwards her eyes opened. She sighed, a whispering exhalation that hardly stirred the silence. A moment later she said:

  ‘How convenient revolution is for men like Cornelius Dowley! What balm for the bitter heart!’

  I did not understand, and when I tried to think I felt my mind oppressed. Cornelius Dowley had to do with the tragedy on the avenue, and with the bridge that was being built. We had been talking about the children.

  ‘There are moments you cannot ever forget, Sarah. No matter how long you live. I stood there in the dawn, waiting for them to return from their party, and heard their voices on the sea. When I spoke they guessed immediately. “Dowley,” John James said.’

  No one had ever told me this. No one had ever even faintly hinted. I heard her saying that Linchy’s murder belonged in a thread of carnage that was unbearable even to think about. She mused to herself. I could not hear, until she said:

  ‘I don’t know why I send that woman money except, perhaps, to buy more pain. For what on earth would it matter if people knew that a childhood cruelty has turned around and damned a household?’

  ‘I did not ever know.’ I meant to continue but did not do so. Instead, again, I asked her to rest, repeating my offer to fetch her cocoa or warm milk. I begged her to say no more tonight. She paid me no heed.

  ‘When those brutes of soldiers shot down Dowley they came over to tell us. Delighted with themselves.’