An End and a Beginning (40 page)

“It's not very good of me at all, the stuff's lying there, and I hate to see it wasted.”

“You wouldn't suppose the nuns would like a drop when they gets here?”

“That is not amusing, Mr. Cullen. Not amusing at all. Sit down,” and he sat down.

She left him sitting in the hall, and went away to get him his glass of whisky. When she returned she was carrying two glasses. “I shall not drink your health,” she said. “Get it down, and then get off about your business.”

“As you wish. Tell me, Miss Fetch, was there anything between them?”

“I think she's very unhappy. The poor thing. I was sorry for her. I think she's had a tiff with that elephant of a husband of hers. You'll mind he was over here some years ago, and I never met a more clumsy man in all my days. But I expect she'll get over it. She come up to me last evening, up to my room, think of that, a thing she's never done in all the time I've known her. She simply said good-bye, and that was all, and walked right out of the house.”

“And the feller?”

“He went off yesterday, and didn't say goodbye to a soul.”

“Poor man, he was just out so I heard.”

“He was just out,” she said, She drank her whisky and put down the glass.

“You think you can manage to come up this afternoon for an hour or so, Mr. Cullen?”

“I think I can.”

“Then come along now, and I'll show you what we have to do.”

“I will, indeed, anything to oblige a lady,” he said, and he got up and followed her across the hall.

She talked as she preceded him. “She was only here a few hours before she was giving me my orders to go, and she knew I wouldn't. Perhaps she enjoyed it, I don't know. She told me she'd written to her old father asking him to come home, and I knew she hadn't, for that man was always better off out of the country than he was in it.”

“But she knew her father had no power at all any more, surely. 'Twas the son that married away in Singapore months and months ago that arranged with the Carmelites to take over the property.”

“She knew it all along,” Miss Fetch said.

“Ah! The poor woman. I mind the time she ran away, a lovely girl.”

Miss Fetch paused by the study door. She threw it open.

“All the things that she uncovered will be covered again,” she said. She went on to the dining-room. “And here the same.”

“Yes, I understand,” Mr. Cullen said.

“'Twas a queer family indeed, don't you think so yourself, Miss Fetch?”

“'Twas.”

And at still another door. “And this room also,” she said.

Mr. Cullen trotted along at her heels. “The lashings of money they had,” he said. “Wasn't it out of India or some foreign part. It kept coming like water out of the tap?”

“I rather think it was,” Miss Fetch said.

“Ah! The village misses them all the same. And I don't mind teling you that the parts they left behind, them's dead parts now, and will never rise up to nothing at all, nothing at all. And them lovely things they had in the stables. Many's the one I backed indeed. Though they didn't all have golden hooves.”

“And in here,” Miss Fetch said, and then began climbing the long staircase. “And here also.”

And throwing open door after door, “And this,” she said. “And that will be covered up, and this, and those things can be thrown out.”

“I see.”

“They'd a fairytale for each other in this room,” Miss Fetch said.

She walked into Sheila's bedroom, and Cullen followed. “Ah, sure this was the grandest place that ever stood up on stone in these parts. Oh, the lovely scent,” he said, “the bee-ut-ful smell.”

“Careful where you walk, Mr. Cullen, there's been some smashing of glass here, and that's why some of what come out of it got up that big nose of yours.”

“A lovely room, indeed. Why you could put your father's cottage inside it,” he said.

“She told me my sister was waiting for me, but she wasn't really and never was. She walked about these rooms telling herself fairy-tales. Ah! God help her, I was sorry for her, and three times in one morning I come across her stood in a dark corner and sobbing her heart out. I wanted to hold her in my arms like I used to do as a young girl. If only she'd done what her poor mother wanted her to do, and gone off and married that nice gentleman that waited ten years for her in the heat of India, and never did, and only five years ago the poor man died in the very same place that he'd waited in with the patience of Job.

“Not there,” Miss Fetch said, “not there.”

“No, of course not,” replied Cullen, “isn't that your own little room? I mind I was in it on one or two occasions.”

“I remember them with shame,” Miss Fetch said.

They went downstairs.

“I couldn't help seeing that name on the postcard,” he said. “Why, that fine Mother Superior is a close friend of my sister, Mary Dunphy. Ah, I'm glad they didn't burn down the old place, for it'll make a fine home indeed for good women.”

“It will,” said Miss Fetch, showing him to the door.

“Two o'clock then,” she said. And watched him go, and turned, and began climbing the stairs again, “And every window will be closed again, and the curtains will be drawn by me like they always was, and every door will be shut again, and I'll turn the key in the locks, and I won't open them again till I hears the sound of those holy women coming to their new home.” She went up, and up.

“'Twas nice of Mother Geraghty to write to me and tell me that I could stay where I was, and I'm grateful to a good woman that this is still my room, and that I can stay in it, and that I can do all the things I'm best fitted for, and can help them in all the ways I know, and I'll have my baskets and my wool, my needles and my books and all the things I held to me in my life.”

She opened the door of her room. She went in and looked about her. “'Twas always my room,” she thought, walking about, lovingly touching the objects in it. This was her cell, this was her happiness. She knelt down by the bed, and she thanked God for her great content, and she said a special prayer for the woman who had taken one road and for the man who had taken another.

“God help them,” she said. She got up and went to her dressing-table, and from it she picked up the still unopened letter.

“I wonder why he never opened it? And she's left this little Diary behind here. I expect she dropped it in her hurry. I'll have to ask Mr. Cullen to deal with the matter.”

About the Author

James Hanley (1897–1985) was born in Liverpool, England, to an Irish Catholic family. He spent time in the merchant navy and served with the Canadian Infantry during World War I. From 1930 to 1981 Hanley published forty-eight books, including the novels
Boy, The Furys, The Ocean, Another World, and Hollow Sea
. He penned plays for radio, television, and theater and published a work of nonfiction,
Grey Children
, on the plight of coal miners. Hanley died in London but was buried in Wales, the setting for many of his works.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1958, 1990 by Liam Hanley

Cover design by Jamie Keenan

ISBN: 978-1-5040-0506-7

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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New York, NY 10014

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