Selected Stories

Milton was the family’s hope, now that Garfield had gone to Belfast. Questioned by his father three years ago, Garfield had revealed that if he inherited the farm and the orchards he would sell them. Garfield was urban by inclination; his ambition during his growing-up was to find his feet in Belfast and to remain there. Stewart was a mongol.

‘We’ll fix a day for the upper orchard,’ his father said. ‘I’ll fix with Gladdy about the boxes.’

That night Milton dreamed it was Esme Dunshea who had come to the upper orchard. Slowly she took off her dark coat, and then a green dress. She stood beneath an apple tree, skimpy underclothes revealing skin as white as flour. Once he and Billie Carew had followed his sisters and Esme Dunshea when they went to bathe in the stream that ran along the bottom of the orchards. In his dream Esme Dunshea turned and walked away, but to Milton’s disappointment she was fully dressed again.

The next morning that dream quickly faded to nothing, but the encounter with the stranger remained with Milton, and was as vivid as the reality had been. Every detail of the woman’s appearance clung tightly to some part of his consciousness – the black hair, the frail fingers outstretched, her coat and her scarf.

On the evening of that day, during the meal at the kitchen table, Milton’s father asked him to cut the bramble patch in the upper orchard. He meant the next morning, but Milton went at once. He stood among the trees in the twilight, knowing he was not there at his father’s behest but because he knew the woman would arrive. She entered the upper orchard by the gate that led to the lane and called down to where he was. He could hear her perfectly, although her voice was no more than a whisper.

‘I am St Rosa,’ the woman said.

She walked down the slope toward him, and he saw that she was dressed in the same clothes. She came close to him and placed her lips on his.

‘That is holy,’ she whispered.

She moved away. She turned to face him again before she left the orchard, pausing by the gate to the lane.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ she said, ‘when the moment comes. There is too much fear.’

Milton had the distinct impression that the woman wasn’t alive.

Milton’s sister Hazel wrote every December, folding the pages of the year’s news inside her Christmas card. Two children whom their grandparents had never seen had been born to her in Leicester. Not once since her wedding had Hazel been back to County Armagh.

We drove to Avignon the first day even though it meant being up half the night. The children couldn’t have been better, I think the excitement exhausted them.

On the third Sunday in December the letter was on the mantelpiece of what the household had always called the back room, a room used only on Sundays in winter, when the rest of the year’s stuffiness was disguised by the smoke from a coal fire. Milton’s sister Addy and Herbert Cutcheon were present on the third Sunday in December, and Garfield was visiting for the weekend. Stewart sat on his own Sunday chair, grimacing to himself. Four o’clock tea with sandwiches, apple-pie and cakes, was taken on winter Sundays, a meal otherwise dispensed with.

‘They went travelling to France,’ Mr Leeson stated flatly, his tone betraying the disappointment he felt concerning his older daughter’s annual holiday.

‘France?’ Narrow-jawed and beaky, head cocked out inquisitively, the Reverend Herbert Cutcheon dutifully imbued his repetition of the word with a note of surprised disdain. It was he who had conducted Hazel’s wedding, who had delivered a private homily to the bride and bridegroom three days before the ceremony, who had said that at any time they could turn to him.

‘See for yourself.’ Mr Leeson inclined his tanned pate toward the mantelpiece. ‘Have you read Hazel’s letter, Addy?’

Addy said she had, not adding that she’d been envious of the journey to Avignon. Once a year she and Herbert and the children went for a week to Portrush, to a boarding-house with reduced rates for clergy.

‘France,’ her husband repeated. ‘You’d wonder at that.’

‘Aye, you would,’ her father agreed.

Milton’s eyes moved from face to face as each person spoke. There was fatigue in Addy’s prettiness now, a tiredness in the skin even, although she was only twenty-seven. His father’s features were impassive, nothing reflecting the shadow of resentment in his voice. A thought glittered in Herbert Cutcheon’s pale brown eyes and was accompanied by a private nod: Milton guessed he was saying to himself it was his duty to write to Hazel on this matter. The clergyman had written to Hazel before: Milton had heard Addy saying so in the kitchen.

‘I think Hazel explained in the letter,’ Mrs Leeson put in. ‘They’ll come one of these years,’ she added, although she, more than anyone, knew they wouldn’t. Hazel had washed her hands of the place.