Love and Summer Read Free

aged her features. Even so, she often felt old, and resented this reminder that in reaching middle age and passing through most of it she had missed too much of what she might have had. She returned the jewellery to the top drawer of the dressing-table that had been her mother’s and now was hers. She kept out only the garnet necklace, admiring it against the drab shade of her mourning.
     
    Joseph Paul Connulty was a lanky, weasel-faced man with grey hair brushed straight back and gleaming beneath a regular application of Brylcreme. Spectacles dangled on a tape around his neck, falling on to the dark serge of his suit. Two ballpoint pens were clipped into his outside breast pocket. The emblem of the Pioneer movement was prominent on his left lapel.
    At a loss after he had been to the cemetery again in order to linger on his own by the closed grave, he went to the coal yards. The sheds were locked, there was a notice on the office door; sacks that bore his name were stacked upright on a lorry, waiting to be delivered. He felt at home here, had all his life known the mounds of slack, the stables where once there’d been horses, the high gates sheeted with corrugated iron, its red paint worn away in places. In childhood he had played here, but had not been allowed in the public house, which even now - teetotaller that he was - felt alien to him, although he spent most of every day there. His hope had been to become a priest, but the vocation had slipped away from him, lost beneath the weight of his mother’s doubt that he would make a success of the religious life. In the end her doubt became his own.
    He locked the high gates behind him when he left and did not hurry on his way to Number 4 The Square. He passed the public house, closed also, and the deadness of the place gave him pleasure, for usually music and a muddle of voices spilt out on to the street. It was quiet, too, in the hall of the house where, being a bachelor, he took his meals and slept, where all his life he had lived.
    ‘A garden of remembrance has been mentioned to me,’ he passed on to his sister when they met on the first-floor landing.
    Although they were more than brother and sister, having been born in the same few minutes, they had never shared a resemblance. In childhood they had been close companions but often now did not communicate with one another for weeks on end, though less through not being on speaking terms than having nothing to say.
    ‘Her standing in the town,’ Joseph Paul went on, answering his sister’s question about the necessity for a garden of remembrance. ‘Her association with the church. The money she gave, as well as everything.’
    He didn’t reveal the other suggestions as to a suitable memorial that had been put to him on his walk through the town, since none of them would have been more acceptable to his sister, and he was in favour of a garden himself. ‘How she was,’ he said instead.
    Unlike the coal yards and the public house, Number 4 The Square had undergone a transition that reflected the mores of its two generations as a business place. Originally catering for permanent residents, offering three meals a day, it had become a bed-and-breakfast stop-over for commercial travellers. The present Connultys could remember, though faintly, the bank clerks and shopmen who returned each midday to the dining-room and in the evenings shared the same daily newspaper and sat around the same coal fire. McNamara the road surveyor, Superintendent Fee, Miss Neely the lay teacher at the convent, and others in their time had remained as residents until marriage or professional advancement brought a change in their lives. Each had been allocated a distinctive napkin ring; Miss Neely had her iron pills, McNamara his stout, for which there was a charge. Now only Gohery the metalwork instructor - at present away on his summer holidays - was a permanent lodger at Number 4; but the house’s reputation for food and cleanliness saw