Nora Webster (10 page)

“Don’t mention to Dilly I told you this,” Catherine said, “but I went to Dublin with her last week and we stayed with her sister and brother-in-law who’s a barrister. Oh, it’s a fabulous house, Nora, in Malahide, and they have their own boat. It was all modern, I have never seen anything like it. His family are very big in the building trade, and they get a lot of the contracts, but he does very well in his own right. And Dilly’s other sister, who’s very nice, is married to Mr. Justice Murphy of the High Court. They’re very high up in Fianna Fáil. One of the other sisters is married to a Delahunt and they are fabulously wealthy or so Dilly told me.”

Nora had never heard her sister say the word “fabulously” before or discuss families in this way.

“Well, the thing is they took us to the Intercontinental Hotel to have our dinner in the evening. Con and Fergus, who are Dilly’s two brothers-in-law, and her two sisters, just the six of us. I have never seen food like it, and the wine. I wouldn’t tell you what the bill was, but I can read upside down and I nearly had a heart attack. I haven’t even told Mark. He wouldn’t spend that sort of money, you know. At least not on a dinner. And the restaurant was full. There were all sorts of people there. Dilly came in with me the next
day and we bought the washing machine and the drier. I wanted the same one she had.”

Conor appeared and waited until Catherine finished talking.

“What time are we getting our tea?” he asked. “The others have all had their tea. So when are we getting ours?”

Catherine looked at him as though she had not quite heard him. Conor stood his ground and, having got no response from his aunt, he looked at Nora.

“Are you not watching the television?” Catherine asked.

“We didn’t have our tea,” he repeated.

“Did you not?” Catherine asked and looked at Nora, puzzled.

Nora felt as though she was being accused of something.

“We set out as soon as they came home from school. I thought we would have our tea here.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry. Now Dilly will be here before long and Mark will be here too, but I don’t know exactly what time he’ll be home.”

Catherine seemed distracted. Nora was about to say that a sandwich or beans on toast would be enough for them, but she decided to say nothing. She looked into the distance as though this was not her problem. She was almost angry. Conor stayed there, watching both his mother and his aunt.

“I am so sorry,” Catherine said. “I should have thought of this before.”

Catherine suddenly became polite and busy, and so ready to make sure that their every need was met, that it occurred to Nora that something of how she felt, even though she had not spoken, had been transmitted to her sister. Catherine went to a large fridge in the pantry.

“I have hamburgers,” she said, “and I could fry some potatoes. Would they like that? And would you like a steak, Nora, or I could
do a couple of chops? And why don’t the boys have their tea in the television room?”

“Whatever is easy,” Nora said.

When Dilly Halpin arrived, Nora took over the cooking as the other two women studied the instruction manual for the washing machine. She ignored them as they began to manipulate the various knobs and concentrated fully on the task in hand. It would suit Catherine, she saw, were she to offer to have her tea in the room where the children were. She was determined to make no such offer and waited to cook her own food until she had served Donal and Conor and made sure they had everything they needed.

Once the washing machine had been got going, and Dilly Halpin had re-assured Catherine that the drier was simple, that it was merely a question of turning it on and off, Dilly sat down at the kitchen table as Catherine moved about. When Nora offered to make them tea, they accepted. Once the chops were cooked she brought them over to the table with brown bread and butter. She poured the tea when it was ready. She did not know if it was her presence that made the conversation awkward, almost stilted. It seemed to Nora that Catherine and Dilly were performing lines for her benefit rather than actually talking to each other. They discussed an auction they had both attended, an auction of the contents of a large house outside Thomastown.

“You know, I bid for a pair of fire irons,” Dilly said, “they were eighteenth century, but I didn’t get them. There was a dealer from Dublin bidding against me. I gave him the dirtiest looks but it was no use. You did better, Catherine, with that lovely rug. Where are you going to put it?”

“I’m going to surprise Mark,” Catherine said, “and put it in the bedroom. I’ll have to get help, because some of it will have to go under the bed. I hope he notices, that’s all I have to say.”

“And the auction went on so long that I needed to go to the bathroom,” Dilly said, “and I decided I would go into the big house, so I took down the notice that said ‘No Entry. House Strictly Private’ and I marched in and wasn’t I on my way up the stairs looking for a bathroom when I was caught by this old Protestant woman, someone’s maiden aunt by the look of her. I said that I just had to go to the bathroom and I couldn’t find any other convenience and she told me that I could go anywhere I liked between Thomastown and Inistioge, but I was to come down those stairs right now. And she began to move towards me, the old battle-axe. I was in such a rage that when I was driving out of the estate and I saw a field full of sheep, I got out of the car and I opened the gate.”

“You did quite right,” Catherine said.

“I did, and I hope they are still looking for those sheep. The rudeness of that woman! They think they still own the country!”

“You don’t know what it’s like around here,” Catherine said to Nora.

“That woman is lucky I didn’t buy the fire irons and have them with me. I don’t know what I would have done with them.”

As Dilly grew in indignation, and was joined by Catherine, Nora began to laugh.

“It’s just the thought of the fire irons,” she said.

She stood up from the table, still laughing. She saw that Catherine’s face had become red and she seemed to be clenching her jaw. Nora checked that the boys and their cousins were still watching television and then went to the bathroom and stayed there until she was sure that she would not need to laugh again. When she felt
that she could genuinely control herself, she went back to find that Dilly Halpin had left. Catherine became busy around the kitchen, and, even when Mark came in, Nora was aware that Catherine was barely speaking to her. This made Nora decide to be all the friendlier and more animated with Mark. As she did this, she could see how irritated Catherine was.

“Nora, it’s all right for you,” she said. “But we have to live here and even though I meet the Protestants from the big houses in the ICA or the golf club, and even though they know Mark in the IFA and knew his father and mother before him, they would see you coming in Kilkenny on the main street and they wouldn’t even look at you. I don’t know what we went to that auction for.”

“What auction?” Mark asked.

“Catherine’s friend Dilly attacked a Protestant woman with a pair of fire irons,” Nora said.

“She did not!”

“She seemed very nice, Catherine,” Nora said. “But I honestly thought she was joking. I mean between the fire irons and the sheep it was hard to keep a straight face.”

“What sheep?” Mark asked.

They went to bed early. Nora was glad to be away from them and from the talk of auctions and big houses and new washing machines. It was clear to her that there was nothing she could have spoken to Catherine and Dilly about, nothing that would have interested her or them. When she asked herself what she was interested in, she had to conclude that she was interested in nothing at all. What mattered to her now could be shared with no one. Jim and Margaret had been with her when Maurice died, and that meant that all three of them
could talk easily when Jim and Margaret came to the house because, while they did not refer to those days in the hospital, what they went through then underlay every word they said. It was there with them in the same way as the air was in the room, it was so present that no one ever commented on it. For them now conversation was a way of managing things. But for Catherine and Dilly and Mark conversation was normal. She wondered if she would ever again be able to have a normal conversation and what topics she might be able to discuss with ease and interest.

At the moment the only topic she could discuss was herself. And everyone, she felt, had heard enough about her. They believed it was time that she stop brooding and think of other things. But there were no other things. There was only what had happened. It was as though she lived underwater and had given up on the struggle to swim towards air. It would be too much. Being released into the world of others seemed impossible; it was something she did not even want. How could she explain this to anyone who sought to know how she was or asked if she was getting over what happened?

She woke early in the morning, dreading the day ahead. She wondered if the boys felt like this too. Did Fiona and Aine also dread the day ahead when they woke? Jim and Margaret? Perhaps, she thought, they had found other things to preoccupy them. She, too, could find other things to think about—money, for example, or her children, or the job in Gibney’s. Finding things to think about was not the problem for her; the problem for her was that she was on her own now and that she had no idea how to live. She would have to learn, but it was a mistake to try to do so in someone else’s house. It was a mistake to lie here in a strange bed when her own bed at home was strange too. The strangeness of home, however, did not require a bright response from her. It would be a
long time, she thought, before she would leave her own house for a night again.

Downstairs, she found that Catherine and a local woman who came to help her with the housework had decided to do a full clean-out of the kitchen and the pantry before they installed the drier beside the washing machine in the pantry. Every single piece of delft and crockery had been removed from shelves to be dusted and Catherine was in the process of cleaning out drawers and sorting each object, some for discarding and others to be put back. Conor and one of his cousins were helping while Donal sat apart. As soon as Donal saw her, he shrugged as if to say that all this had nothing to do with him.

“Make yourself a cup of tea, Nora,” Catherine said, “and if you can find bread and the toaster . . . God, it’ll be a relief to get this done. But at least I have plenty of help.”

“I’m going out for a walk,” she said.

Catherine turned and looked puzzled.

“It’s very showery now. I don’t think it’s a good day for walking and we’ll be going into Kilkenny later, I have to get detergent for this machine. You know, I’m nearly sorry I bought it. It’s just that Dilly says it halves the work.”

“I’ll find an umbrella,” Nora said.

“The umbrellas are in the stand by the front door,” Catherine said. “Will you mind the front door if you’re using it? It gets very stiff in this damp weather.”

This was what no one had told her about. She could not have ordinary feelings, ordinary desires. Catherine saw this, she thought, and she had no idea how to deal with it, and this made things worse. As Nora walked down the drive towards the road she felt a rage that she could not control. But she would have to control it, she
knew. It made no sense to think that she would not come back here again, to feel a rage against her sister that up to now she had directed solely at the doctor who controlled the ward where Maurice lay in the last days of his life; a rage that caused her to write letters to him in her mind, letters she imagined herself signing and posting, letters that were abusive or coldly factual, letters threatening him that she would let people know wherever he went what he had done when her husband was dying, that he had refused to deal with the pain that caused Maurice to moan. She had sought out the doctor several times, having asked the nurses over and over if they could do anything. All of the nurses had come back with her to the bed and nodded and agreed with her that something would have to be done. But the doctor—the very thought of him made her walk faster and become even more indifferent to the clouds that were gathering overhead—had not come with her to the bed, but had told her that her husband was very sick, that his heart was weak, and so he did not want to prescribe anything to alleviate pain that might affect his heart.