Love and Summer by William Trevor Page A

change it and when it was empty he’d said to leave it as it was and she knew what he was thinking.
    He stirred sugar into the tea she’d poured. A silence didn’t matter; he never minded that, he’d often said it.
    ‘We cut the road pasture,’ he said when he had finished what was on his plate. ‘I had Corrigan’s lads over.’
    She watched him removing the silver paper from a triangle of cheese, tidily turning back the folds, then lifting the cheese out on his knife. He liked to do things well, even that. It was impossible to imagine him careless, or casual. And yet, of course, tragically he had been.
    ‘You’re off your food, Ellie,’ he said.
    ‘A bit.’
    ‘I noticed.’
    She cut more bread for him, and reached across the table to fill his cup again. Gahagan was getting closer to letting the field go, he said.
    ‘Contrary as he is, he’s nearly ready to part with it.’
    She tried to think about the field changing hands and the difference it would make, and Gahagan maybe considering the disposal of the woodlands too.
    ‘We’ll mark that day, Ellie.’
    He nodded each word into place as he spoke, then pushed his chair back. When he was tired in the evenings he sat on the sagging couch in the window, his big shoulders relaxed over the paper, the radio on if it was something he wanted. He sat there now, and Ellie cleared the table and carried the dishes to the sink. At first there’d been a photograph of his wife in the other room, a smiling woman, the infant in her arms. But later he had put it in a drawer.
    She ran the hot tap over plates and cutlery and squeezed washing-up liquid into the water when it covered them. His old-time dancing programme was on the radio. There’s nothing only weakness in me : she saw her handwriting, old-fashioned, slanting, influenced by the strictures of Sister Ambrose, who had emphasized the virtues of clarity over flamboyance. ‘Always write to us if you’d need us,’ Sister Ambrose had begged. ‘Always tell us.’ God is your strength: how often a nun’s lips had expressed that!
    More days would pass, and one would come when it would seem as though what had happened hardly had. She would shamefully recount her errors, her deception even of herself, and make her peace and be forgiven through contrition. Time could not but pass, every minute of it a healing.
    ‘I used go to old-time myself,’ her husband said, and she guessed he’d gone with his other wife and hadn’t wanted to since because of what had happened. He said something else, drumming his fingers on the arm of the couch. But the music was suddenly too loud and she didn’t hear what it was.
    ‘I’d better see to the fowls.’
    One of the dogs had barked and there’d been a fox about. But when she went out everything was quiet. It was never dark at this time of year: the green of the tractor hadn’t faded, or the dusty brown of the Vauxhall. The sheepdogs went with her when she made her rounds, and stood beside her, obedient in the gateway when she listened there. His Italian mother would have smoked cigarettes, a tall, still beautiful woman: out of nowhere that image came. In the crab-apple orchard she locked her hens in.
    ‘Sit down and rest yourself,’ her husband said. ‘Sit down and listen to this.’
    ‘I’ve the accounts to look at, though.’
    She went to the other room. The receipts were there and the record she kept in a grey exercise book of cheques that had been paid in at the bank. She turned the light on and took the exercise book from the drawer of the table in the window.
    The accounts were up to date: she’d known they would be. But in the same drawer were the Christmas cards she had received from Sister Ambrose, who had been, more than the other nuns, her friend at Cloonhill. We are delighted , a note recorded in one, that you are to marry and we give thanks for your contentment on the farm . In another there was news of a journey to Lough Derg, and of the Fermoy Retreat. ‘We