‘Mrs Rolleston—’
‘As of right again, Dowley had been hunted, this time to the kill. That same week the engagement was broken off.’
I felt myself shaking my head without knowing why I was doing so. I tried to contradict without knowing what I was contradicting. I said my brother and Villana had been engaged and then decided not to be. It was a usual thing to happen.
‘No, Sarah. No, not at all. Your brother and Villana turned away from all they felt for one another, and perhaps they had to. For how could their children play in that same garden and not ever be told of what had festered so horribly in a wound? How could the reason for the tragedy on the avenue not ever be revealed? Was it to be kept from them that the cornering of Cornelius Dowley on the steps of a billiard-hall was an irony and a repetition? Was it to be kept from them that his mother walked out into the waves? And that all of it began in the idyll of a lazy summer?’
Her voice went on, speaking now of fate; how her grandchildren and my brother, in luckier circumstances, would have escaped their conscience. Chance had supplied a gruesome plot: in another place and another time they would have grown up healthily to exorcise their aberrations by shrugging them away. She lost the thread of what she was trying to communicate, was incoherent, then spoke again of Dowley’s mother walking into the sea.
‘Can you imagine her, Sarah? That tormented woman begging for the sea’s oblivion? Her husband gone and now her son. Life with a half-wit in a hovel was what she faced. How much nicer, Sarah, the future was for me!’
Again coherence went. She spoke of the dogs there’d been at Carriglas in her time. And then about the day a chaffinch had flown about the drawing-room, and the day the family had posed for the silver-framed photograph in the hall, and the day she’d been glad Lionel was declared unfit for service in the war. Time had tamed the Rollestons, who had come to the island with slaughter in their wake, but time could not be trusted.
‘It never just passes, Sarah. It is always on one side or the other. Women huddled in their corners, children begged, men disappeared. Would their time ever come? How could it come? And yet it did.’
How often, that summer, had I convinced myself it was nothing worse than taking out a boat without permission, or climbing the dead tree in the hillfield? How often had I said to myself, as I had to Mrs Rolleston just now, that children don’t realise? ‘Your father will be ashamed of you,’ I’d crossly reminded them, ‘and I am too.’ Their grandmother had meted out the sternest punishment she could devise; I’d made Hugh promise separately that nothing like this would ever happen again. In the end, after their initial disobedience, they’d been contrite, all four of them. Their high spirits had been abandoned for a quieter charm; the household returned to normal. When, later, the episode was retailed to Colonel Rolleston, as it had to be, there were silent mealtimes, and gifts, brought back to Carriglas, were not given. Then the pall of disapproval lifted. In retrospect, at the Misses Goodbody’s and in Dunadry Rectory, I convinced myself again that children are wild and often primitive. I did not believe there was some extra wickedness in the children of Carriglas, some harshness beneath the attractions of the surface. I did not think of the misdemeanour as ‘hunting a child’ and I don’t believe, at that time, Mrs Rolleston did either. The shadow of that summer faded beneath my own insistence that it should; and no doubt it did so for her too.
‘Am I right in what I say, Sarah, about another place and another time?’
I did not answer because I did not, any more, know how to. The rambling whisper began again, ceased, and was again renewed. A silence became prolonged.
‘Please look after them, Sarah. Please don’t desert us.’
I moved to the bedside, and reassured her. The myrtles and the little hebes must be protected when the first hard frosts of January came. It was always she who had remembered that. Her voice, speaking still of the garden, dwindled and then gathered strength again. She would remain in her bedroom now. She would not ever again go outside, she sensed that in her bones. She would not again descend the stairs, to the kitchen or the dining-room. But what she waited for would not come quickly: she sensed that too.
A small crowd, composed mainly of tinker children, stood in a perishing wind while the courage of Cornelius Dowley was recalled. Brother Meagher was there, and the men who had been Cornelius Dowley’s companions eleven years ago at Lahane crossroads. Attention was drawn to the carved inscription, in both Irish and English, that gave the dates of birth and death, and praised a hero’s gallantry. The bridge was blessed, as Holy Mullihan had said it would be. The engineer and the surveyor who had worked together on the project were present, though more to satisfy themselves with a final inspection than to take part in the modest ceremony. The workmen who had set the girders in concrete beneath the surface of the water, who had laid the bridge’s surface down and built the pillars at either end, were clearing out ditches by a road to the west of the town.
Tom ran back across the bridge when everyone had gone. He’d seen Brother Meagher looking at him, the straight line of his eyebrows bisecting his face below the forehead. Brother Meagher considered he should not be there: Tom even thought he had observed an involuntary gesture of the Christian Brother’s hand, the hand flicked dismissively backwards as a signal that he should go away, and then the gesture checked. ‘When you come to the Brothers’,’ Holy Mullihan had predicted, ‘Brother Meagher will be keeping an eye on you. It would be his duty, Tom.’
Soon it would be Christmas. Always on Christmas Day Tom went up to the house and had his dinner in the kitchen. In the middle of it Mrs Rolleston came down with presents for his mother and himself and for anyone else in the kitchen. There were sprigs of holly on the dresser, and plum pudding that his mother made. It was dark when they went down the avenue to the gate-lodge.
But this year it would be different. His mother had said it would because Mrs Rolleston no longer came downstairs. Tom didn’t think he’d see her again, but he often thought of her, in her armchair by the window in her room. She wouldn’t bother with the postal orders any more, he imagined.
In the gate-lodge Tom sat close to the range, warming his hands on the hot metal. It was too cold to go to the saint’s place; they didn’t want him today in the kitchen or the sculleries.
‘Tom!’ Patty’s voice called, and then she pushed open the door from the yard, in her hand the Irish Times she’d been sent down to the pier to collect. ‘How’re you doing, Tom?’
She sat with him, warming herself too. After St Stephen’s Day the ferryboat wouldn’t make the journey any more, the ferryman had told her. It was the only news she had, so they talked about that.
10. Sarah Depart
‘I’ll take them downstairs,’ Patty says in the pink-distempered bedroom where Sarah’s death has taken place and where her diaries are stacked beneath the window-shelf.
‘Did she want them destroyed, Patty?’
‘She only said we could when we had read them. If we wanted to.’
Tom nods. Both of them are saddened by their loss. There was a tidiness about the household as it had become: for the last few years it has seemed right that there should be the three of them, the family gone and its attendants left.
‘She had a lovely hand,’ Patty remarks as she gathers up the diaries. Already some entries have been read. Patty has a picture in her mind which she did not have before: of the plain child growing up in a cheerless rectory, of a teacher in a boarding-school, of a woman painfully in love. In the kitchen she releases the pulley that keeps the drying-rack suspended, and picks the garments off it one by one. Folding each as she does so, she stacks them ready for ironing. It is odd, she thinks, that Sarah Pollexfen should have wanted all that to be known.
In the town on the mainland, people learn of the death. Esmeralda, youngest of the Coyne daughters, hears the news in Meath’s, while filling a wire basket with groceries. It will make a difference, she considers. Tom will be affected: it will be Tom’s
house now, just as the land is Tom’s Mr O’Hagan hears the news and remembers Sarah Pollexfen entering the kitchen with a tray while he and the ferryman toasted Villana Rolleston on her wedding day. Sister Conheady, who suffered a stroke a month ago, attempts to cross herself but cannot. Her face has frozen into a tranquil smile which does not reflect the nature of her thoughts. I was uncharitable, her thoughts accuse. She should have given the child the books and only smiled, never writing what she did: she envies Sarah Pollexfen her release. ‘God rest the soul,’ Mrs Moledy remarks to the postman who rings her bell to inform her, knowing she has had a connection with the family. Mrs Moledy—a great age now—lives in the basement flat of what used to be her boarding-house, which she sold in 1959 to an insurance company. Two streets away, in the offices of Harbinson and Balt, Eugene Prille attends to the sparse legalities that the death necessitates.
Her skin tightens in the pink-distempered bedroom, her blood is as cold as water. The rictus that shadows the slackened jaw is pressed away by the woman who has come to lay the body out. Familiar obsequies are observed, arrangements made.
‘A good soul,’ the undertaker murmurs on the way upstairs to take his measurements.
‘Yes, she was that.’
Tom’s black hair is brushed back now, touched here and there with grey; his childhood fringe has gone. The face that was round in childhood and once resembled his mother’s is irregular, its skin toughened from exposure to the weather. But his eyes have retained the innocence that was there in the past, contributing to the youthfulness that persists in his agility as he goes about his work in the fields.
‘Well, that’s it,’ the undertaker remarks, with professional finality.
‘Thanks for coming over.’
Together they leave the room, joined on the landing by Tom’s black terrier. They descend the curving staircase, where family portraits still hang. The corpse will remain in the bedroom until an hour before the funeral, since that has always been the family way.
‘That’s a bitter wind,’ the undertaker conversationally observes as they pass through the hall-door and stand for a moment on the steps.
‘She hated cold,’ Tom recalls. ‘She often said it.’
Later, other people learn of the death of the Rollestons’ poor relation, and note from the newspaper obituary the date and the time of the funeral. In Unionhall the sons of the Camiers who attended Villana Rolleston’s wedding display no interest in the death. In Buttevant a granddaughter of Lady Rossboyne tries to remember who Sarah Pollexfen was but cannot. In England the children of Sarah Pollexfen’s brother telephone each other to say that the aunt they have never met has apparently died in the house they’d always heard so much about, on an island off the coast of Co. Cork, i am too old for funerals now,’ Villiers Hadnett says in the house he inherited near Athlone. ‘Treacherous things, funerals.’ And in Unionhall and Buttevant and England no plans are made to attend the funeral, either.
In the kitchen, during the days that pass, the perusal of the diaries continues: a solemn task, since last wishes come into it. And the revelations that were not allowed in a lifetime continue also, though often the ground is familiar.
Carriglas, January 18th, 1938. We have painted the conservatory. John James brought back putty and Villana and I pressed it in with kitchen knives. I never thought we could do it, but Villana said of course we could.
Carriglas, March 9th, 1947. A portrait on the staircase wall fell in the night, splinters of glass everywhere. Both frame and canvas are damaged and John James says there is no one in the vicinity who could properly restore them. So we have taken the picture to one of the visitors’ rooms, leaning it against the wall in the long cupboard.
Carriglas, June 14th, 1953. For two days Lionel and Haverty and Tom have been trying to repair the water-ram and in the meanwhile we have had no water in the house. But this evening it began to trickle again.
Carriglas, November 3rd, 1968. ‘D’you remember my sick hen?’ Villana suddenly said at dinner, and in fact I did not at first remember and had to think for several minutes. Damp has spread on the ceiling of the bedroom that was Mrs Rolleston’s. Patty and I moved the dressing-table from beneath it. I put away the ivory hairbrushes and the scent bottles, which have remained there since December 1931. I wonder if anyone will ever use that scent again. Perhaps one day there will be an auction in this house, and someone then may buy these small remains.
As a tapestry of domestic detail, the years that separate Tom and Patty from 1931 are spread before them in the record that has been kept. In other upstairs rooms bedclothes are taken from the mattresses, furniture covered. A crack occurs in the cast-iron of the kitchen range. Villana drives the big black Renault, its hood drawn back in summer. Haverty climbs on to the roof to install an aerial for a wireless set; one autumn night a strawberry tree slumps against its neighbour. There are references to the Shannon Scheme of electrification, to Lionel’s wartime crop of sugar beet, to the snow of 1946, Arthritis affects John James’s leg. In the drawing-room the piano Miss de Ryal played on the afternoon of the wedding slips out of tune. Dawn lightens yet another sky. Curtains are drawn against another night, and then another.
There is hardly a word that is not easily read, no error of spelling or grammar remains uncorrected. The handwriting is like the woman: the flow of prose recalls her also. Patty has forgotten that when first she came to Carriglas she assumed Sarah Pollexfen to be Villana’s sister, until Brigid explained that she was not. Neither Patty nor Tom has known of her attachment to Lionel. Sarah Pollexfen was a woman who went about the house; her story, of duty and unrequited love, was shaped by other people’s greater claims. They never saw her angry or emotional. Yet in her diaries she wrote about her naked body.
Affected by these memories, they reflect upon their own. They remember the night of the Zodiacs, how Patty had heard about the entertainment and Tom had gone to it. Tom remembers Derek Birthistle banished to the cloakroom during catechism, and Neck Daly and Deso Furphy giving the Mussolini salute in South Main Street, and the ebony ruler of Brother Meagher furiously rapping the blackboard. The first picture Patty ever saw in Traynor’s Picture Palace was The Girl of the Golden West ‘I never use the old cycle,’ Haverty said, and showed Tom how to oil the hubs and the chain, and how to raise and lower the saddle and handlebars. ‘They eat meat themselves on a Friday,’ Brigid explained when Patty had been at Carriglas a week, i’ll fry you an egg.’ Clonmel Countess won the Convivial Plate, and Haverty and Mr O’Hagan had her backed at forty to one. Mr Coyne had gone for Sally’s Pippin. In the outhouse that is still a workshop the mahogany dressing-table, once taken from Colonel Rolleston’s bedroom to have a leg repaired, is lost beneath the paint tins and bottles that clutter it. ‘This stuff’s worth a fortune, you know,’ Haverty said on one of the occasions he and Tom had to go on to the roof to repair the lead. You could repair a pinprick perforation by touching it with Seccotine or Durafix, but when the perforations were larger, or there were cracks, there wasn’t much you could do except to catch the drips. ‘We’d feel happier if you were in the house with us,’ Villana said when only she and Sarah Pollexfen were left. Tom sleeps in the room that was his father’s, and sits with Patty in the kitchen in the evenings. Six months ago the slates began to fall away from the roof of the gate-lodge.
‘I have things to do,’ Tom says in the kitchen, and is followed by his dog to the fields. The ground is hard, like iron beneath his feet. When he feels for the moist clay of the well he finds it turned to ice. On the ledge of rock that was once level with his eye, but which he looks down on now, the cache of crucifixes and coins has been added to over the years, but those he remembers from his childhood are still there. Every year still, in high summer, the women come. Ever since the death occurred he has been intending to make this visit.
Near by, his sheep huddle under a broken wall; he counts them as he passes. Five there are; fifteen he has counted on the side of the hill; others graze the grass beneath t
he monkey puzzle and the strawberry trees. His cattle winter in the cobbled yard.
He walks the fields, examining his fences. In the crook of his arm, protected by a piece of sacking, he carries a coil of barbed wire. A gate, rotten twelve months ago, collapses when he attempts to move it on its hinges; there are places where the posts must be renewed. The grass may perhaps be better this year than it was last if the ragwort does not increase. Little yellow boy, Sister Teresa Dolores called it, touching with the tip of her cane the chart on the blackboard. Buachallan but.
He pulls a length of wire taut, gripping it with his pliers, then hammers in another staple. The frost which had earlier been white on the grass has gone; his footsteps, to and from the fence, have marked a path. He has always known that he would have the house when Sarah Pollexfen died.
In the kitchen Patty cuts slices of yesterday’s bacon. On the electric stove that has replaced the range a saucepan of potatoes boils. The dresser and the long oak table are as they’d been for as long as she can remember, the same icy draught blowing in from the scullery passage. Since the death, Patty has been quiet, not saying much to Tom. Her knuckles on the panels of Sarah Pollexfen’s door had resounded without response, the cup of tea she carried steaming in the cold air. She had not opened the door when there was no reply to her raised voice, but had gone for Tom instead.
She lays two places at the kitchen table and turns the radio on. Men’s voices argue about farm prices; she does not listen, and in a moment turns it off again. What will Tom do now? It is no secret that Esmeralda Coyne would marry him. Many times after Mass on Sundays, when people stand about and talk, Patty has heard it said that Esmeralda Coyne would marry him and try to turn Carriglas into some kind of hotel.
‘I have to go over this afternoon,’ Tom says when they have eaten the food that has been prepared.
Patty does not care for being left alone in the house with the body still laid out, but she does not say so. She will remain in the kitchen. She will not leave it until he returns.
The Silence in the Garden Page 18