The Shelter of Neighbours by Eílís Ní Dhuibhne Page A

to lower it onto a trolley he’s wheeled into the garden.
    The name of the stove is printed on the box in red block letters: yeats . Olivia watches it swinging in the bright air. She has to dodge out of its way as it swings close to her – she doesn’t want to be killed by a cast iron Yeats. A seagull sitting on the roof of the house cocks his head and observes what is going on with great interest.
    â€˜Sixty per cent efficient,’ the man says, as he pushes the Yeats into the house. ‘The fire is only forty per cent. Most of the heat goes up the chimney.’
    Different from what the architect on the television said. Twenty per cent of a difference. And what does it mean, anyway, twenty per cent heat, forty per cent? Olivia feels a pang of doubt.
    But soon the Yeats is in place and the cave where the fire used to burn can be seen no more. Although, as Olivia explained to Alex, the grate will still be there, behind the stove. They can go back to the fire if they don’t like the new arrangement, is what she was implying. But watching the man installing the flue, with much fiddling and the application of bags of cement, she knows going back will not be easy. It never is.

    â€˜There are two things that are good for man,’ Alex says, when he emerges from his study some hours later. He has stayed in there, working on an article for the archaeological and historical journal, for as long as he could before facing the Yeats.
    Olivia has read the instructions and lit a small fire in the stove. Already she is getting used to it. Already, she tells herself, it looks as if it has always been there. She pecks him on the cheek before he can complete the sentence – she knows he’s suffering, but what can she do? – and leads him outside. The sky has clouded somewhat and the fields are now a muted, quiet green. Just a few weeks ago, at midsummer, everything was saturated with colour. Sapphire. Emerald. Purple. Gold. Now you see a gentle fading, the inexorable move towards autumn. The foxgloves, which people here call lady fingers, are almost gone, and the early purple orchids. The montbretia, which will come out soon, like sharp orange flames, and stay in the ditches until the blackberries ripen, have not yet blossomed, although they are gathering, relentlessly, in the damp air, like ears of corn.
    Alex is older. Older than Olivia. Older than most people in the parish now. He looks young for his age, people sometimes take him for sixty-seven, not the age he is. Seventy-seven. He has been in this parish for forty-five years, and would retire if there was anyone to take his place. When he first came to the valley, to the old house that his wife replaced with this one, there was no running water, no electricity, only oil lamps. The women in the valley baked bread in pot ovens, which hung from black iron cranes over the fire on the open hearth, roasted potatoes and lobsters and crab claws in the embers. The men told long stories about ghosts and the fairies, gathered around the same firesides, until the early hours of the morning. And Alex collected a lot of those stories on his tape recorder, and transcribed them, slowly, painstakingly, for hours and days and years, in the study where he spends most of his time. (He stopped collecting stories after Lyndsey’s death. Although they never found the murderer, everyone knew who did it. The son of the best storyteller. He moved to England two days after the funeral, which everyone in the valley, all the Catholics as well as the C of I’s, attended.)
    Now all those people have died, too. The place is full of ghosts. Walking around, Olivia sees dead people regularly – that is, she sees someone and thinks she knows them, then, with a start, remembers that they’re gone. But Alex has survived, to write the articles for the historical journal, to preach his friendly, wise sermons on Sundays to the congregation of a dozen (on good days). He does