Cheating at Canasta (16 page)

Afterwards, when everyone had gone, Connie helped the O’Dalys to clear up and when that was done the O’Dalys went too. She and her father did what her mother had requested then, taking her things from the wardrobe and the dressing-table drawers, disposing of them as she had wished, her charities remembered. It was late before all that was completed, before Connie and her father sat together in the kitchen. He poached their eggs when they’d decided to have eggs. He asked her to watch the toast. ‘We’ll manage,’ he said.

The farm had come to Robert when he married, introducing him to a way of life he had not sought and which he did not imagine he would take to. In fact, he did, and over the years transformed the farm his wife had not long ago inherited as a sluggish, neglected enterprise into a fairly thriving one. It was a means of livelihood too; and, more than that, a source of personal satisfaction for Robert that he succeeded with crops and stock, about which he had once known nothing.

All this continued when he was widowed, when the house and land became entirely his. There were no changes on the farm, but in the house—to which Mrs O’Daly now came for three hours every weekday morning—Connie and her father, while slowly coming to terms with the loss they had suffered, shared the awareness of a ghost that fleetingly demanded no more than to be remembered. Life continuing could not fold away what had happened but it offered something, blurring the drama of death’s immediacy. And then, when almost two years had passed since the funeral, Robert asked Teresa to marry him.

It was a natural thing. Having known one another through the friendship of their daughters, they had come to know one another better in the new circumstances, Teresa continuing to drive Melissa to the farm, with her much younger brother when he was made welcome there by Connie but was still too young to cycle. And Robert, doing his bit as often as he could, drove the two back to the bungalow at Fara Bridge, where their father in his day had attempted to get a pottery going.

The day he asked Teresa to marry him, Robert had looked up from the mangels he was weeding and seen her coming towards him, along the verge of the field. She brought him tea in a can, which she often did when she stayed all afternoon in order to save him the journey later to Fara Bridge. A year after the death she had begun to fall in love with him.

‘I never knew,’ he said in the mangel field when Teresa’s response to his proposal was to tell him that. ‘I thought you’d turn me down.’

She took the can of tea from his hand and lifted it to her lips, the first intimacy between them, before their first embrace, before they spoke of love. ‘Oh, Robert, not in a million years would I turn you down,’ she whispered.

There were difficulties, but they didn’t matter as they would have once. In an Ireland they could both remember it would have been commented upon that she, born into a religious faith that was not Robert’s, had attended a funeral service in his alien church. It would have been declared that marriage would not do; that the divorce which had brought Teresa’s to an end could not be recognized. Questions would have been asked about children who might be born to them: to which belief were they promised, in which safe haven might they know only their own kind? Such difficulties still trailed, like husks caught in old cobwebs, but there were fewer interfering strictures now in how children were brought up, and havens were less often sought. Melissa, a year older than Connie, had received her early schooling from the nuns in Clonmel and had gone on to an undenominational boarding-school in Dublin. Her brother still attended the national school at Fara Bridge. Connie went to Miss Mortimer, whose tiny academy for Protestant children—her mother’s choice because it was convenient—was conducted in an upstairs room at the rectory, ten minutes’ away along the river path. But, in the end, all three would be together at Melissa’s boarding-school, co-educational and of the present.

‘How lovely all that is!’ Teresa murmured.

There was a party at which the engagement was announced—wine in the afternoon, and Mrs O’Daly’s egg sandwiches again, and Teresa’s sponge cakes and her brandy-snaps and meringues. The sun came out after what had been a showery morning, allowing the celebration to take place in the garden. Overgrown and wild in places, the garden’s neglect went back to the time of the death, although sometimes when she’d come to keep an eye on the children Teresa had done her best with the geranium beds, which had particularly been the task of Connie’s mother.

She would do better now, Teresa promised herself, looking about among the guests as she had among the mourners, again half expecting to see the man who had left her, wanting him to be there, wanting him to know that she was loved again, that she had survived the indignity he had so casually subjected her to, that she was happy. But he wasn’t there, as naturally he wouldn’t be. All that was over, and the cousins from Mitchelstown with whom she had conversed on the afternoon of the funeral naturally weren’t there either.

Robert was happy too—because Teresa was and because, all around him at the party, there were no signs of disapproval, only smiles of approbation.

Because the wedding was not to take place until later in the summer, after Melissa’s return for the holidays, Connie and her father continued for a while to be alone together, managing, as he had said they would. Robert bought half a dozen Charollais calves, a breed he had never had on the farm before. He liked, every year, doing something new; and he liked the calves. Otherwise, his buying and selling were a pattern, his tasks a repetition. He repaired the fences, tightening the barbed wire where that was possible, renewing it when it wasn’t. He looked out for the many ailments that beset sheep. He lifted the first potatoes and noted every day the ripening of his barley.

Teresa dragged clumps of scotch grass and treacherous little nettles out of the sanguineum and the sylvaticum, taking a trowel to the docks. She cut down the Johnson’s Blue, wary of letting it spread too wildly, but wouldn’t have known to leave the Kashmir Purple a little longer, or that
pratense
’s sturdy roots were a job to divide. A notebook left behind instructed her in all that.

Miss Mortimer closed her small school for the summer and Connie was at home all day then. Sometimes Melissa’s brother was there, a small thin child called Nat, a name that according to Melissa couldn’t be more suitable, since he so closely resembled an insect.

‘You want to come with us?’ Teresa invited Connie when Melissa’s term had ended and Teresa was setting off to meet her at the railway station in Clonmel. Connie hesitated, then said she didn’t.

That surprised Teresa. She had driven over specially from Fara Bridge, as she always did when Melissa came back for the holidays. It surprised her, but afterwards she realized she’d somehow sensed before she spoke that Connie was going to say no. She was puzzled, but didn’t let it show.

‘Come back here, shall we?’ she suggested, since this, too, was what always happened on Melissa’s first evening home.

‘If that’s what you’d like,’ Connie said.

The train was twenty minutes late and when Teresa returned to the farm with Melissa and Nat, Connie wasn’t in the house, and when her father came in later she wasn’t with him either, as she sometimes was. ‘Connie!’ they all called in the yard, her father going into some of the sheds. Melissa and her brother went to the end of the avenue and a little way along the road in both directions. ‘Connie!’ they called out in the garden, although they could see she wasn’t there. ‘Connie!’ they called, going from room to room in the house. Her father was worried. He didn’t say he was but Melissa and her brother could tell. So could Teresa.

‘She can’t be far,’ she said. ‘Her bicycle’s here.’

She drove Melissa to Fara Bridge to unpack her things, and Nat went with them. She telephoned the farm then. There wasn’t any answer and she guessed that Robert was still looking for his child.

The telephone was ringing again when Connie came back. She came downstairs: she’d been on the roof, she said. You went up through the trapdoor at the top of the attic stairs. You could lie down on the warm lead and read a book. Her father shook his head, saying it wasn’t safe to climb about on the roof. He made her promise not to again.

‘What’s the matter, Connie?’ he asked her when he went to say goodnight. Connie said nothing was. Propped up in front of her was the book she’d been reading on the roof,
The Citadel
by A. J. Cronin.

‘Surely you don’t understand that, Connie?’ her father said, and she said she wouldn’t want to read a book she didn’t understand.

Connie watched the furniture being unloaded. The men lifted it from the yellow removal van, each piece familiar to her from days spent in the bungalow at Fara Bridge. Space had been made, some of the existing furniture moved out, to be stored in one of the outhouses.

Melissa wasn’t there. She was helping her mother to rearrange in the half-empty rooms at Fara Bridge the furniture that remained, which would have to be sold when the bungalow was because there wasn’t room for it at the farm. There had been a notice up all summer announcing the sale of the bungalow, but no one had made an offer yet. ‘Every penny’ll go into the farm,’ Connie had heard Teresa saying.

Nat, whom Teresa had driven over earlier, watched with Connie in the hall. He was silent this morning, as he often was, his thin arms wrapped tightly around his body in a way that suggested he suffered from the cold, although the day was warm. Now and again he glanced at Connie, as if expecting her to say something about what was happening, but Connie didn’t.

All morning it took. Mrs O’Daly brought the men tea and later, when they finished, Connie’s father gave them a drink in the kitchen: small glasses of whiskey, except for the man who was the driver, who was given what remained in the bottle to take away with him.

‘That’s a lovely piece of delft,’ Mrs O’Daly commented in the hall, referring to a blue-and-white soup tureen that the men had placed on the shelf of the hallstand. Having finished her morning’s work, she had gone from room to room, inspecting the furniture that had come, and the glass and china in the hall. ‘Isn’t that really lovely!’ she exclaimed again about the soup tureen.

It was cracked, Connie saw, a long crack in the lid. It used to be on the sideboard of the dining-room in the bungalow. She’d never much noticed it then, but in the hall it seemed obtrusive.

Melissa was pretty, tall and slender, with long fair hair and greenish eyes. She liked jokes, and was clever although she didn’t want to be and often pretended she wasn’t.

‘Time to measure the maggot,’ she said later that same day. Her contention was that her brother had ceased to grow and would grow no more. She and Connie regularly made him stand against the door jamb of Connie’s bedroom in the hope of finding an increase in his modest stature.

But Connie shook her head when this was again suggested. She was reading
London Belongs to Me
and went on doing so. Nat, on his way upstairs already, for he enjoyed this ceremonial attention, looked disappointed.

‘Poor little maggot,’ Melissa said. ‘Poor little maggot, Connie. You’ve gone and upset it.’

‘You shouldn’t call your brother a maggot.’

‘Hey!’ Outraged, Melissa stared disbelievingly at Connie’s calm features. ‘Hey, come on!’

Connie turned down the corner of a page and began to walk away.

‘It’s only a blooming word,’ Melissa ran after her to protest. ‘He doesn’t mind.’

‘This isn’t your house,’ Connie said.

The day Connie’s mother came back from the hospice Miss Mortimer had pinned up pictures of flowers. Miss Mortimer painted her pictures herself; before the flowers there’d been clowns. ‘Foxglove,’ Connie had said when Miss Mortimer asked.

Going home on the river path, she’d been thinking of that, of the four new pictures on the schoolroom wall, of Miss Mortimer saying that soon there wouldn’t be a cowslip left anywhere. The schoolroom stayed on in her mind nearly always when she was going home, the writing on the blackboard, the tattered carpet, the boards showing all around it, the table they sat at, Miss Mortimer too. The rectory itself stayed in her mind, the two flights of stairs, the white hall door, three steps, the gravel.

Her father didn’t wave when she saw him coming towards her. It was drizzling and she thought that was maybe why he was coming to meet her. But often in winter it rained and he didn’t; it was her mother who used to. ‘Hullo, Connie,’ he said, and she knew then that her mother had come back from the hospice, as she had said she would.

He took her hand, not telling her because she knew. She didn’t cry. She wanted to ask in case it was different from what she guessed, but she didn’t because she didn’t want to hear if it was. ‘It’s all right,’ her father said. He went with her to the room that had become her mother’s, overlooking the garden. She touched her mother’s hand and he lifted her up so that she could kiss her cheek, as often he’d done before. Mr Crozier was standing by the windows in the drawing-room when they went downstairs again. She hadn’t known he was there. Then the O’Dalys came.

‘You stay here with me,’ Mrs O’Daly said in the kitchen. ‘I’ll hear you your reading.’ But it wasn’t reading on a Tuesday, another verse to learn instead, and six sentences to write. ‘You going to write them then?’ Mrs O’Daly asked. ‘You going to think them up?’

She didn’t want to. She learned the verse and said it to her father when he came to sit beside her, but the next day she didn’t have to go to Miss Mortimer’s. People came in the morning. She could hear their footsteps in the hall and on the stairs; she couldn’t hear voices. It was in the afternoon that her mother died.

‘That’s not like Connie,’ Robert said.

‘No, it isn’t.’

When Teresa had been told by her children what Connie had said to them she had guessed, with sudden, bitter intuition, that everything going well was over. And she had wondered where she and Robert had gone wrong. Robert was simply bewildered.

The wedding—to be conducted by Mr Crozier as a purely family occasion—was less than three weeks off. No going away afterwards, no honeymoon because the time of year on the farm wasn’t right for that.