specific. His eyes linger on the portholes, mulling their enigma. Clearly visible to passing vessels. He imagines a head appearing at one of the portholes … a woman’s face. The lady of the house, standing there by prior arrangement maybe. A love sailing away, forbidden love – the architect himself – leaving, and this the last glimpse. Remember me always.
Go home, Lily! He chases the cat back up to the house. Little madam, venturing this far down the avenue. If anything ever happened to her … Above, a fly-past of swallows, or starlings – he can never tell the difference. He watches them for a few moments. No high jinks, no murmurations this time of year. Rounding the last bend on the avenue he steps onto the grass verge and walks between two rows of the oak plantation he planted six years ago. One morning a few months after Josie’s death, four words arrived to him out of sleep: twelve thousand oak saplings. Memorial of Josie. Sequesters of carbon. His mother said nothing when he told her his plan. Thinking, What’ll you plant for me?
Nervously, his eyes scan the tree trunks. He’s barely able to look. He moves along the row. No sign of canker, no oozing. He examines the leaf tips. No dieback. He moves from row to row, going deeper into the plantation. He has avoided checking them for weeks. Fourteen thousand oaks were felled in Guagán Barra last month. He could lose the entire twelve thousand. Phytophthora ramorum is general all over Ireland, one of several plagues arriving from the east. Dutch elm, sudden oak, beech wilt, sweet chestnut blight. Bleeding canker. He can see the future – the end of wood-lined roads, parks, riverbanks, towns no longer sheltered by ash.
He walks on. Trees calm his naked nerves. The sight of a tree, especially in winter, bare against the sky, beautiful. He stands and strokes a trunk. So young and tender and innocent. It’s easy to be innocent when you’re a tree. Maybe he should say a prayer for them. Make a deal with God: Spare my oaks and I’ll cover this land with trees. Trees will be my legacy, like the great oak and beech stands on the Duke’s estate three miles away. A few hundred years from now, someone will stand here before gnarled trees and huge crooked roots and discern something of these times, of this family. That German forester who wrote about the hidden life of trees, how they are bound together in families, communicating through a web of underground fungi. Mycelium. Sending warning signals when danger approaches, feeding the weak with nutrients. He squats down, listening. Around him, the trees are alert, leaves talking, roots entwining, branches bowing down in grief for lost loved ones.
As he makes his way out of the plantation he is gripped by a spasm of pain. The pain is behind, in the vicinity of his kidneys. He rubs his back. If he dropped dead now, he might not be found for days. No one would miss him. After a day or two of not hearing from him Ellen would be worried and walk up to the house and let herself in, and, finding the remains of his breakfast on the table and the scavenging cats, she would raise the alarm.
At the end of the avenue he turns left and walks along the road towards the town. To his right the glitter of water, familiar, beautiful, unknown too. You get used to beauty, he thinks, you grow immune, you devour it with greedy eyes. On the other side of the stone wall, little black and white, thin-legged birds hop along the riverbank, turning their heads jerkily to the right and left. Some kind of tits or finches or wagtails. The luckiest of all creatures, birds. Escaped from reptilian existence eons ago to flit through sunlit meadows and rise into the heavens. Soul carriers in the running sky, translating nature’s vibrations into song for human ears. No worries either, God will always provide. The way they fly down and befriend captive men, men in camps, men at the edge of reason.
He looks across the river to the Boathouse on the wharf, and beside it, among the willows, eight architect-designed houses with exposed stone and glass walls and red cladding. Built during the boom five or six years ago and over-priced at the time, scarcely half of them are occupied now. Susceptible to gleam and glass and glossy brochures, he almost bought one as an investment. Up above the town, Clonduff House, partly concealed behind trees, nestles into the hill. From this perch the Blake family look down on the town and the surrounding countryside. If they deign to look at all, that is. Behind the house and the sloping lawn, the barns, stables, milking parlour, glasshouses and poly-tunnels are well hidden from the town. Unmarked trucks with their cargo of Clonduff Farm organic fruit and vegetables come and go through the back gates of the estate, the fruit and veg destined for the shelves of Fortnum & Mason’s and Harrods. Modelled on the Prince of Wales’s enterprise in Cornwall, Luke thinks, though more discreet and with not as much as a nod to the townspeople below. Still, the Blake place is not a patch on Dunmore Castle and estate, the Duke of Berkshire’s place three miles away. There are hierarchies everywhere and, compared to the Berkshires, the Blakes are only second-fiddle aristocrats. As a young man Luke’s father and grandmother were invited for the pre-hunt hot toddies on the lawn of Clonduff House every St Stephen’s Day – a nod, Luke supposes, to their almost castle-Catholic status. From up there, his father told him, there’s a splendid view out over the town and surrounding countryside and Ardboe House – their house – below on the river plain, the closest of all the big houses in the valley.
A car drives out of the town along the Dunmore road, then slows and turns left onto the bridge. Luke salutes the driver, then walks on. As he enters the town, a huge SuperValu truck edges its way up Main Street between parked cars. A band of gulls passes over the rooftops, a long way from the sea at Errish now. Luke pauses on the footpath outside SuperValu and the glass doors slide open. A jeep turns into the yard of O’Donnell’s Hardware and, as it disappears, the grey double doors of O’Grady’s garage next door open and John O’Grady secures the bolt in the ground. There’s no stir yet at either the Tavern Bar or the Sportsman’s Inn across the street.
‘Luke O’Brien, you should fuck off back to Dublin.’
Startled, he turns. Dilly Madden is beside him. Wild snow-white hair, pale face, red lipstick, red dress, pink beads – in full manic regalia today. She puts a hand on his arm. She must feel the hop in his nerves. Still, he welcomes this intrusion into his thoughts. This is my life now, he muses, when the yelp of a madwoman and the clasp of a madwoman’s hand are the most welcome things in my day. He has a soft spot for Dilly. She was his mother’s only friend in her last years. Two brazen, broken, outspoken women. Drinking, throwing back their heads laughing. Sans decorum.
She is clacking her tongue now. ‘What’s keeping you here, Luke?’ She sounds sane. Her voice is soft, concerned. ‘In the name of God will you go back to Dublin, like a good lad. Sure there’s nothing for you here.’ The tiny lines of a smoker radiate out from her mouth. She’s whiskery too. His mother was the same. Hormonal, more testosterone in some women, or something to do with the menopause maybe. Josie was the worst, always sprouting tough black hairs. ‘Hairy baconface’, Lucy called her. His cruel sister.
‘I know, Dilly, I know. You’re right.’
He wonders when she got out of St Declan’s. She was sectioned in April – the daughter put her in. Sometimes she goes in of her own accord, taking Dillon’s hackney into Waterford. In for the shelter, she says. She was inside when his mother died. He visited her a few weeks later, having a great need to talk to someone who knew and loved his mother. Dilly didn’t want to hear about the funeral. She wanted only to talk about herself. She told him things that day that he wishes he never heard.
‘Lock up that house, Luke, and go back to your teaching job. This bloody town’ll kill you if you don’t. I’m telling you, it’ll eat you alive. Mark my words.’ She had cancer a few years ago and wore a bad wig for a while. ‘Above there in that big house on your own … A young man like you? It’s not right! You should be living your life.’
He nods. Wonders if she remembers what she told him that day in Declan’s.
‘I will, Dilly, I’ll go back at some stage. But … ah, you know yourself, I don’t like leaving Ellen.’
‘Don’t mind Ellen. Ellen is grand, there’s not
