Woman of the House (9 page)

She knew that Mark had a habit of walking around by night because, he had told her, he found it easier to think things out in the quietness of the night and sometimes he got inspiration at night.

“How have you been, Mark?” she asked.

“A bit bothered,” he admitted.

“That makes two of us,” she said ruefully.

“With Ned gone I have no one to talk to,” he told her.

She knew that Ned and himself used to spend hours walking the fields together talking. Ned would never listen to a word of criticism of Mark, and none of the neighbours would criticise him in Ned’s presence.

“I can understand that,” she told him. “I feel as if some part of me has died with Ned.”

“I always envied you and Ned,” he told her.

“Why?”

“Because growing up you always had such fun together. Martha and I were poles apart by comparison.”

“Maybe Ned and I were too close,” she said; “maybe it would be easier now if I had not loved him so much.”

“Oh, don’t regret it, Kate,” he told her. “It was a great blessing. I wish Martha and I had it. She was always critical of me and I felt threatened by her.”

“Families are strange things.”

“They could destroy you.”

“I’ve seen it happen,” Kate agreed.

“Joining the Phelans was the best thing that ever happened to us, though I’m not so sure that it worked both ways.”

“Well, I’d better be going,” Kate told him. “I’ve a good few calls to make.”

“I’m so glad that we ran into each other, and it’s great to have you back.”

“We’ll have to keep each other going,” Kate said. “Ned would not have wanted us to fall asunder.”

“That’s for sure,” he agreed, “so I think that I’ll walk down to the river. I find the sound of the water comforting.”

She watched him saunter down the fields with his satchel hanging off his shoulder like a fishing bag and his long black hair flowing behind him.

When she knocked on Shines’ door it was whipped open by Ellen Shine, a dour-faced, sharp-voiced little woman with a cigarette in the corner of her mouth and a skimpy head scarf knotted under a hairy chin.

“Davy,” she screeched over her shoulder when Kate asked for him.

Davy appeared with a matching cigarette, but there the resemblance ended because he towered over his mother, was twice her width and had the round moon face of his father and generations of Shines before him.

“Yerra, Kate, how’re ’ou?” A broad smile lit up his fine, honest face like a semi-circle, and when she asked him about coming to work in Mossgrove the smile became a circle.

“Grand job,” he told her, which meant that he would be there in the morning bright and early. Ellen Shine did not believe in having any son of hers lying in bed when there was work to be done.

As she cycled past Mark’s home she decided on impulse that she would call in for a few minutes to see his mother. Nana Lehane, as the children called her, was a small, fine-boned woman with a serene face. It was easy to see where Martha’s beauty had come from, but in personality they were two different types of people. For some reason, Agnes always put Kate in mind of the Virgin Mary. Mark and herself were ideal occupants of the same house.

“Kate, how nice to see you,” she smiled. “I heard that you were back and that you were straightening things out.”

“News travels fast.”

“Jack came and told me the good news because he knew that I was worried. I gave up and came home early in the time because I could make no hand of Martha,” she confessed, “and it was beginning to get me down.”

“You did right to come home, Agnes,” Kate told her, “and with your asthma you could finish up laid low yourself.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” the older woman confessed, “and I don’t like leaving Mark too long on his own because at times he simply forgets to eat.”

“I just met him over the road now and he has done the most wonderful drawing of Ned. He really has a great talent.”

“He has, I suppose,” his mother sighed, “but it’s not much good to him here. But that’s enough about Mark. Will you come in for a cup of tea?”

“I won’t just now because I must go over to dress Molly Conway’s leg.”

“Be careful of their dogs,” Agnes warned her. “I always think that they’re dangerous because they’re half-starved.”

“Thanks for warning me,” Kate said, “and don’t worry about Martha – I think that she’ll be all right now.”

“Thank God,” her mother said.

Now, down to business, Kate thought, as she cycled on towards Conways’. She was not looking forward to facing into a house where she knew she would be far from welcome. All her life, standing where it did on the hill across the river valley from Mossgrove, surrounded by sheds and rusty-roofed outhouses, Conways’ had spelt trouble in Mossgrove. She had backed Jack into a corner years ago and demanded the whole story.

Her grandfather Edward Phelan and Rory Conway had gone to school together and had been close friends. Both farms were doing well, but Rory Conway for some reason hit a bad patch. The Conways had never been great farmers. Grandfather came to his rescue and secured him in the bank for five hundred pounds, which was a lot of money back then. But in farming things always turn around and Grandfather knew that it was only a matter of time before Rory Conway would get straightened out and he would be able to pay off the bank. But when Rory
Conway got on his feet he got greedy and did not pay back the bank, and grandfather had to cover the debt.

A few years afterwards Conway bought two fields from a farmer who bounded them at the far side of the hill away from Mossgrove, and he bought it with the money that should have cleared the debt in the bank. Grandfather had a great heart, but he had a temper to match. There was no one going to treat him like that and get away with it. He went and he measured the two fields that Rory Conway had bought, which were at the other side of the hill and too far away to be any addition to Mossgrove. But he solved that problem by measuring the same amount of Conway land along the riverbank beside his own farm and fencing it off. He decided that it was a fair return for his money. Conway did not take that lying down. Grandfather took Conway to court and won his case, and the land became Mossgrove land, but it had caused trouble ever since.

Now, as she turned in Conways’ laneway, she told herself to forget past history and just remember that she was the district nurse here to see a patient. As she opened the gate of the farmyard, dogs came bounding in all directions, but she held her ground, and having parked her bike against the wall she walked across the yard with barking dogs all around her. She liked dogs and was never afraid of them, and apart from that there was no way that she was going to give the Conways the satisfaction of calling for help. She guessed that Matt Conway was probably watching her from one of the sheds.

Then he appeared and lumbered across the yard towards her. He had the gait of a bear because his back sloped forward and a stumpy butt of a neck stuck out. He
had a large red face beneath strings of ginger hair combed across a bald head.

“What do you want?” he growled contemptuously.

“Nothing,” Kate told him sharply. “I’m here to dress your mother’s leg.”

“Where’s that other nurse?” he demanded, coming up so close to her that she had to step back to avoid physical contact.

“She’s finished now,” Kate said icily, drawing herself up to her full height and looking him straight in the eye.

“Well, we don’t want the likes of you here.”

“That’s all right,” Kate said, turning to go; “when your mother gets gangrene from the blood poisoning and has to have her leg amputated, you can tell her that.”

“You’d better go in so,” he snarled, “but no poking around into things that don’t concern you.”

“I’m here to dress a wound, that’s all,” she told him, and he turned on his heel and, calling the dogs, disappeared back into the shed. Kate knew that he would wait there until she had gone.

When she knocked on the door it was opened by his wife Biddy, a wizened, nervous little woman who would not look her straight in the face. Does he beat her? Kate wondered. The kitchen was dark, smoky and smelly, and she decided that it was a long time since they had opened the windows. Biddy pointed to a door at the end of the kitchen.

“She’s down there,” she said.

When she opened the door her nostrils were assailed with an assortment of stale smells, predominantly of stagnant urine. In the bed old Molly Conway sat like an enormous beached whale.

“Well, if it isn’t the small dark Phelan one,” she boomed; “how well Matt left you in.”

“Would you rather get gangrene and have your leg amputated?” Kate asked sharply.

“Oh, saucy like all the Phelans,” the old lady laughed scornfully, and her huge body shook like a giant jelly. “Come on, my girl, and do what you came for.”

Kate unrolled the dressing and found the wound to be healing well. As she put on a fresh dressing she remarked, “That was a bad gash. What happened?”

“Mind your own business,” was the answer.

“You’re a tough old bird,” Kate told her.

“Ah! I’d want to be tough to spend my life living across the river from your crowd. But maybe with young Ned gone now ’twill be easier to talk to ye.” There was a veiled threat in the old woman’s voice.

K
ATE DREW THE
comfortable armchair closer to the fire. She watched the flames lick up through the logs and sods of turf, and then, without warning, a wave of utter desolation swept over her. The pain of Ned was like a dark stagnant pool in the middle of her stomach. It had been there since the day of the accident and occasionally it erupted and a black lava of depression flooded through her. She dreaded these times. Her hands started to shake and she thought that her heart was going to pound up her throat and choke her. A cold sweat broke out on her forehead. She sat paralysed in the chair.

“Easy now, Kate,” she told herself, “this will pass. It has passed before.”

Should she have some of Jack’s cure? But she was afraid to open the bottle. Once started, she might not be able to stop. The memory of her father’s drinking, and what it had done to all of them, haunted her. She could not forget lying
in the bed over the kitchen in Mossgrove and listening as he demanded money off her mother, and Nellie’s voice full of anguish trying to reason with him. Then, hearing the knob of her bedroom door turning and seeing the shadow of Ned standing there in the darkness listening as well.

Ned had been part of her life. Every decision she had ever made she had discussed with him. Since he died she felt like a house with no gable end wall, all her securities washed away and all her vulnerabilities exposed. She worried about Mossgrove, Jack, Martha and the children. Jack was getting old and Mossgrove was his whole life. Martha did not share his feeling for the place. Hard to expect that, really, when she had not been brought up there, but then neither had Nellie and she had loved the place and made it her own. Could Mossgrove be kept going now? If Martha wanted to do it she could run Mossgrove as well as Nellie had, but maybe she did not want to? Maybe Betty Nolan was right and she should not think that it was her responsibility. But Ned would have expected her to do it for the memory of the old man and Nellie, but most of all for Jack, who had given his whole life to Mossgrove. Thoughts chased each other around her head.

She looked up at the picture of the old man. You didn’t have it easy either, she told him; the betrayal by Rory Conway over the money must have hurt. It was a lot of money at that time and you wouldn’t have secured him in the bank if you had not trusted him. But you settled that score and moved forward. Jack says that I’m like you. Well, she thought, during the coming months we will find out one way or the other.

She sat for a while and slowly the panic subsided. When she felt a bit easier in herself she went back to the kitchen
to collect her tray to place it on a low table beside her.

When she got home at night the first thing she did was to light the fire, and then when she had her dinner eaten in the kitchen, the front room had warmed up and she liked to bring a pot of tea in here and to sit in the comforting glow and unwind after the day.

She was glad that it was Friday, because now she had the
Kilmeen
Eagle
to distract her from her thoughts. It was the local weekly paper, and while the national papers came daily and were partly read by most people, page after page of the
Kilmeen
Eagle
was absorbed by everybody. It was a window into the activities of the locality. If you made it into the
Kilmeen
Eagle
you became the topic of conversation around the village and parish of Kilmeen and surrounding parishes. She threw an extra log on the fire and, easing off her shoes, placed her tired feet on an old brocade footstool. When Nellie had moved into the parlour in Mossgrove she had used it with her rocking chair. The fact that her mother had used it for so many years made it special.

“Always put your feet up, Kate,” she used to say; “helps your circulation, and as well as that it’s good to have your whole body off the ground.”

Just as Kate settled herself more comfortably back into the chair and opened the paper, there was a knock on the door. Who could that be, she thought wearily, rising reluctantly out of the chair and at the same time doing some mental arithmetic on the babies due and the old people who could have fallen ill.

When she opened the door and saw Dr Twomey on the doorstep she smiled with relief. “Oh, I’m so glad it’s you, Robert, I was just thinking what baby was ready to arrive or if somebody had taken a bad turn.”

“I knew that’s what you’d be thinking,” he smiled.

They had worked together for about seven years. Though in his sixties, he looked far younger with his slight build and pale complexion under an unruly mop of thick black hair that was only slightly flecked with grey. He had been their family doctor in Mossgrove since Kate was a child.

“To what do I owe this pleasure,” she smiled, pleased that he had called. “You’re not given to making house calls after hours unless it’s a special case.”

“Ah, you’re special, Kate.”

“Were you not worried that you’d spoil my good name, calling in the dead of night and me living alone?” she teased.

“I’d say now that Julia across the road has me under surveillance all right,” he told her, “because the usual curtain flicked as I knocked.”

“Julia is my chaperone, watches my comings and my goings, and as well as that she has a detailed record in her head of all the patients coming to the dispensary next door.”

“Such service,” he smiled, “and all for free – you could only get it in Kilmeen.”

“Make yourself comfortable there now and I’ll get another cup,” she told him, going to a china-filled cabinet behind her. It was good to have his comforting presence in the room.

“The best of china,” he smiled when he saw the rose-patterned cup and saucer.

“Only the best for the boss,” she told him.

“I think that you do more bossing than I do,” he smiled, and continued seriously: “These are tough times for you,
Kate, and I know it’s an old cliché, but it will get easier, and with the spring here now you’ll be able to get out into your garden. There’s healing in the earth. I know that when Joan died the garden preserved my sanity.”

“How long is she dead now?” she asked quietly.

“Five years,” he said.

“You know, Robert,” Kate mused, “you sympathise with someone when they have a bereavement and you do feel sorry for them, but it’s only when it’s your own case that you can really understand. I think that I’ll never again say ‘sorry for your trouble’ so casually to anybody. I always thought that it was a pretty stupid phrase, but no longer.”

“You won’t always stay as tuned in to bereavement, Kate, as you are now,” he cautioned. “In a few years time you’ll have lost this sensitivity. Strange thing about grief, it’s almost as if it removes our hard protective layer and makes us very vulnerable, but it also brings about a more open view and awareness of other things.

“We could discuss it for ever,” she told him, “but there is no understanding the mystery of death. I told Nora to pray to Ned and he has solved some problem for her so she is convinced now that she has a man in heaven simply waiting to do her bidding.”

“Well, if it helps her through this time that’s a good thing, and who knows but she’s right!” he smiled and continued, “But Kate, I’m here for a totally selfish reason.”

“I don’t believe that. There isn’t a selfish bone in your body.”

“Well, thank you,” he said in surprise, “but I need to discuss an idea with somebody, though it’s not my idea, it’s David’s. You know he’d love to get out of Dublin and back to Kilmeen.”

“And what’s the idea?” Kate asked, thinking that she too would be interested in having him back.

“What would you think of the idea of starting a secondary school in Kilmeen?” he asked, watching her closely.

Kate’s mouth opened in amazement and then a look of delight washed over her face. She sat up straight in her chair and the
Kilmeen
Eagle
slid to the floor forgotten.

“I think that it would be simply wonderful,” she told him with conviction. “Think of the opportunities it would open up for the children around here. Not everybody can afford boarding school and the nuns over in Ross, where I cycled for two years, can only provide a commercial course and teach music.”

“So you think that it might work?” he asked.

“I don’t see why not,” she declared with enthusiasm. “Oh, I know there will be all the usual oppositions and complaints that go with everything new, but this school can only do good.”

“You think so?”

“Of course,” she said emphatically; “even from my own point of view it would mean that Peter and Nora could have a secondary school education and Peter could still help on the farm at the weekends. I know that Ned was toying with the idea of sending him to boarding school but hated the thought of him being away. As well as that he was worried that he might grow away from the farm in boarding school, but going in and out to Kilmeen every day he would still be in touch with things.”

“That makes sense,” he agreed.

“When is he thinking of starting?” Kate asked.

“Take it easy, Kate,” he smiled, “he’s only thinking about it.”

“This will bring new life into Kilmeen,” Kate declared enthusiastically. “If he got moving now he could open in September. Has he thought of a suitable place?”

“Well, I don’t think that he has thought that far, but I’ve been doing a bit of thinking since I got his letter,” he told her. “What would you say to that old house of the Miss Jacksons up at the cross. It’s a real barracks of a place and it’s been empty since the last one died.”

“Oh, that’s in perfect condition,” she assured him, “because there was money left in the will to maintain it. Julia gives it the once over every couple of weeks. It’s a fine house. As far as I can remember there are four big rooms downstairs and an outside toilet, and upstairs there are three huge rooms and a bathroom.”

“By God, Kate,” he smiled, “but you have the measure of it.”

“You know that I’m interested in old houses,” she told him, “and that’s a particularly grand one. I had it half in mind when I was looking for a house, but it was a bit big, and as well as that the solicitor said that they were not interested in selling, only in renting.”

“You have the homework done on it.”

“Well,” she said, “all I know is that it’s owned by a grandnephew of the Miss Jacksons in America and he thinks that one day he might come to Ireland, but in the meanwhile he would rent it. I wanted to buy, so it was no good to me.”

“How would he feel about a school, though, and a herd of young people charging through his ancestral home?” he mused.

“He might well be horrified,” Kate decided, “but then again it might appeal to his Irish-American sense of
nostalgia to have his house educating the young of Ireland. It could work in David’s favour.”

“It might,” he agreed.

“That nephew should be a nice man,” Kate continued, “because his aunts were two wonderful old ladies. They were very interested in art and had a lot of paintings that were shipped to that grandnephew in America when they died. They were so kind to Mark Lehane when he was young and arranged special art classes for him and took him on trips with them to visit galleries. They thought that he had wonderful talent. So if this grandnephew is anything like them, he should be very easy to deal with.”

“I suppose David’s first step would be to go to old Hobbs the solicitor over in Ross,” he said slowly, “and ask him to get in contact with this nephew.”

“He’d want to put the pressure on old Hobbs,” Kate warned, “because he never heard of hurry and it could take him six months to write to America.” A look of relieved satisfaction came over her face: “Do you know something, Robert, I think that I’ve that nephew’s address upstairs somewhere, because he wrote to me at the time that I was interested in the house.”

“God, that would be great.”

“You sit there now and you can be reading the local scandals in the
Kilmeen
Eagle
and I’ll have a search,” she said, picking the paper up off the floor and handing it to him.

“Local scandals is right,” he smiled; “stolen calves and pub fights won’t do much to raise my blood pressure.”

“Sometimes it can have surprise items,” she told him as she left the room.

Upstairs in her spare back bedroom where she kept all
her old correspondence, she opened the deep press that was full of neatly stacked boxes. Now, she thought, an American letter about that house would have come four years ago, so it would be behind all her mother’s things that were stored away in boxes waiting for the wet day when she would have the courage and the stamina to sort through them. She had kept putting it on the long finger, and now with Ned gone it would be put on a longer finger still. But at least they were safe in the press and one day she would get around to them. She lifted out some of the boxes and moved others around until she found what she was looking for, a tartan tin box with a pipe-smoking man on the hinged cover. It had been her grandfather’s tobacco box and in it he had kept his pipes, tobacco, matches and pipe cleaners; it had sat while he was alive on the shelf over the fireplace in Mossgrove, and as a child she had loved to look into it and to sniff the sweet wild smell of his Garryowen tobacco. Because she was so fond of it, Nellie had given it to her and she had used it for storing old letters. Now as she flicked through the envelopes she could still smell the subdued whiff of aromatic Garryowen. She found the long American envelope with the blue and red edgings. She put it in her pocket, replaced everything as it had been and came downstairs to find Robert deeply immersed in the
Kilmeen
Eagle.

“Any success?” he asked, folding down the paper.

“Here you are,” she told him, holding the envelope aloft.

“God, but you’re one organised woman to be able to put your hands on it so fast,” he declared.

“Not sure that I like the sound of that,” she told him. “Over-tidy people can become a bit of a pain, and I’ve to
watch myself, living alone as I do, that I don’t become paranoid about it.”

He grinned at her and sang: