Woman of the House Read online

  “It’s hard to see your mother wronged,” he agreed.

  “But I could say nothing because if I did she took it out on Ned, and that kept my mouth shut.”

  “Well, it’s all over now,” he said, “and Martha’s mourning could be painful because in bereavement the strangest things come back to haunt us.”

  “You know, I would like to be inside in Martha’s head for one day because I feel that if I could understand her it would be a big help,” Kate said.

  “Might not be any great help to you, as some people are not always sure themselves why they behave the way they do,” he told her.

  “You sound like the lecturer on our course,” she smiled.

  “Well, on that note I had better be going,” he told her, rising from the chair, “and let your chaperone from across the road go to bed, because she can’t go until she sees me out first.”

  “Your company did me good,” she told him, rising and putting her hand on his arm. “It was a bad night until you came.”

  “I thought that when I came in,” he said, looking down at her and covering her hand with his, “so I’m glad that I called, even if the purpose was primarily selfish.”

  “I wouldn’t call it selfish,” she said, “because if this works out it will benefit the entire district.”

  “Well,” he said, moving towards the door, “hopefully it will all work out, so I’ll take this letter with me and that will be the first step in the right direction.”

  “Thanks for calling, Robert,” she said. “As well as passing away a bit of the night you’ve given me food for thought. It’s good to have something fresh to think about.”

  “We might have a bit of a struggle on our hands…”

  “Once we get the bit between our teeth, it won’t be easy to stop us.”

  “I’ve always admired that in you, Kate,” he smiled; “you’ve great spunk.”

  “Often got me into hot water,” she told him, “but I’m a great believer that if you want something badly enough you’ve got to be prepared to go for it. This house, for example, was a bit of a struggle, even with help from Ned, but now it’s mine and I’m delighted with it.”

  “You made a great job of it,” he said, looking around in admiration. “I remember coming in here to old Tom, and it was dark and gloomy. It’s very different even though you made no enormous changes.”

  “There was no need to really, because as you know he had some lovely old pieces of furniture that came with the house. When they were cleaned up and polished I was simply delighted with them,” she said, running her hand lovingly over a large oak sideboard that stretched the full length of the wall behind the door.

  “It’s a different house,” he said, opening the door into the hall and standing at the foot of the stairs to admire the warm yellow wood off which Kate had stripped layers of paint. “The entire atmosphere of a house can be changed with a bit of know-how.” They had reached the front door and he stood looking down at her with a concerned look on his face. “Kate, try not to worry too much about Mossgrove,” he advised. “You need time to heal.” He put his arms around her and hugged her before he opened the door and disappeared into the night.

  Kate went back into the front room and sat thinking by the dying fire. So David might be coming back to Kilmeen. There was a time when the news would have put her on cloud nine. That was when she had thought that nothing could ever come between them. They had been such friends growing up, more than friends. He was easy to talk to and they had spent so much time together chatting about everything and laughing at nothing. She smiled to remember the evening that they had walked across the bog and got lost. A mist had come down and darkness had fallen, and Jack had found them in the small hours in a sheltered corner trying to keep each other warm. They had come home to a distracted Nellie and Robert, who had joined forces to trace their whereabouts. They were both seventeen at the time and Ned had lectured her severely about “tearing around the countryside like a March hare”. But not even Ned’s disapproval could dim the glow of their wonderful night. They had spent a lot of time together that summer.

  The following year she had left Kilmeen and slowly got caught up in her new life in London, but she met nobody to compare with David, who had gone to university and made new friends as well. The letters dwindled between them. Nevertheless, she had thought that David would always be in Kilmeen for her when she came back. But on one visit home she ran into him at a local dance with a pretty girl in tow and she was shattered. She had gone home and cried herself to sleep.

  “I was young and foolish,” she advised the photograph of Edward Phelan as she rose from the chair. “I hope that I’ve toughened up a bit since then.”

  Chapter Ten

  JACK STOOD OUTSIDE the back door of Mossgrove and surveyed the farmyard with satisfaction. Things were beginning to look better! Davy Shine was a blessing, a great big, strong lad who worked willingly and did not measure his giving. Having him for the morning and evening milking was a relief, but as well as that he drew hay to the cows and horses and cleaned out the stalls, stables and pigs’ houses. He was a good-natured lad and Peter and himself got on well. If he been inclined to throw his weight around, Peter would have felt threatened by him and probably have been a bit awkward. Peter was particularly sensitive at the moment, but Davy seemed to have a sixth sense where he was concerned and discussed all the goings on of the farm with him. Davy, however, found Martha a bit of a puzzle.

  “There’s very little talk out of her,” he remarked to Jack. “When I was here last she did not say very much but she laid down the law when it suited her. Now she’s like a statue!”

  “A lot has happened since you were here last, lad,” Jack told him, “and she’s going through her own torment.”

  “I know that,” Davy said, “but she’s not talking to the two young ones and that’s not good for them.”

  “Time will solve all that,” Jack told him, trying to convince himself as much as Davy.

  Now Davy appeared out of the potato shed with a bucket swinging off each arm.

  “I’m just finishing off feeding the pigs,” he called across the yard, and asked, “Are you going ploughing the well field today?”

  “I surely am, and isn’t it a grand day for it,” Jack told him, surveying the scene in front of him.

  In the early morning sunshine the hens, ducks and geese were busy around the yard, all emitting their own sound of appreciation. Above them the newly arrived swallows swished in and out of the stables and piggery. Every year the swallows came back to the outhouses around the yard in Mossgrove. He always watched out for the first arrivals, feeling that on the day they arrived the harshness of winter was behind them and that the best of the year stretched ahead. It was good to see the swallows come back. They were sound judges of comfortable corners for nesting, and the outhouses in Mossgrove were fine dry-stone buildings. The old man had built a lot and built well. Jack remembered when they had built the new henhouse at the end of the yard.

  “We’ll put it over there, Jack,” he had said, “with its back to the east and facing south-west, and that way they’ll get the best of the day. They’ll be next to the ducks and the geese and the pigs over there. That way we’ll have all the dirty crowd together. Then we have the horses, calves and the cows with the barn opposite. That’s good planning, Jack: if you don’t plan your farmyard well, you’ll spend the rest of your life going around in circles.”

  Jack had to agree that it was a well-laid-out yard, but when they started on the henhouse he thought that it was a bit bigger and better than necessary. He said so to the boss, but was told, “Jack, lad, we can’t afford to do it cheaply; that’s the most expensive way to do anything. This will be here when I’m growing daisies and my grandchildren after me. That’s the way to build.”

  As he looked around the farmyard now Jack thought that the whole place was evidence of this philosophy. Every year the old man had painted all the farmyard doors a dark red, and
when he had grown too stiff to bend, Nellie had carried on the practice, and then Ned, and now I suppose, Jack thought, it will be Peter or maybe even Nora until she leaves the place, but that was a long time down the road yet.

  “Jack, are you going to stand there all day looking into space?” Davy emerged from the piggery swinging his empty buckets.

  “I suppose,” Jack said, “there isn’t much future in that, or to quote the old man: ‘This will never keep white stockings on the missus.’”

  “Never heard that one before,” Davy smiled.

  “Yea, old Edward Phelan would say that if we were sitting around doing nothing,” Jack told him. “I suppose in his time well-dressed women with well-to-do husbands wore white stockings, and if the income dropped so did the stockings.”

  “Well, whatever about the white stockings,” Davy laughed, “I had better clean out the stalls, or do you want me to get the horses ready for you?”

  “No, you belt away,” Jack told him, “and I’ll look after the horses.”

  Just then the back door opened and Martha came out. Jack could see that she was dressed for going further than Mossgrove and her words confirmed it. “Jack, tackle Paddy to the trap,” she told him, and then went quickly back into the house.

  “Where’s she off to?” Davy questioned in surprise. Jack wondered the same thing himself. She had only gone to mass since the funeral and then he had driven the pony for her, and when they came to that part of the road where the accident had happened he could feel her tension and distress. But it looked as if she was heading off on her own now. Probably something to do with tidying up the affairs of the farm, he thought, and indeed that was a good thing and not before time.

  “I’m off to the cows, so,” Davy told him, deciding that there was no more to be discussed.

  Jack went over to the stables and backed a reluctant Paddy out of his stall. “Come on, old boy, you’re getting a bit of an airing. That’ll be good for you.”

  James and Jerry turned their heads around in curiosity to know where was Paddy off to. “’Twill be our turn in a minute,” he told them, “although I’d say that this boy here is going to have a better day than the two of ye.”

  He lifted Paddy’s harness down off the high hooks on the wall, slipped it on to his brown back and then led him out into the yard. The cart-house was beside the stables and there the brown shining trap sat back on its heel with its slender shafts arching up into the air. He was very proud of his repair work on the trap; he had always loved woodwork, and concentrating on it after the accident had been good for him. Catching Paddy with one hand and the high shaft with the other, he brought down the shafts and backed Paddy in between them, then hitched the harness on to the trap and tied the belly-band under Paddy’s broad belly. He led Paddy by the head over to the back door and tied the reins loosely to a rusty hook on the water barrel. Then he went into the kitchen and up into the parlour, where the cushions for the trap were kept against the kitchen wall to keep them aired. He brought them down and put them into the trap, returning to get the rug out of the bottom of the press beside the fire.

  “All ready for you now, Martha,” he called from the bottom of the stairs.

  She came down the stairs dressed in a dark coat and hat, and he thought that he detected a new vitality about her. The lethargy of the last few months seemed to have lifted a little and her dark eyes had a spark of life in them. There was no doubt, he thought, but she was a fine-looking woman with her high cheekbones and long narrow face, and she carried herself as if she owned the ground that she walked on. She swept past him into the trap. He untied Paddy’s reins and handed them to her. She took them wordlessly and swung Paddy around the yard. Going out the gate she called back over her shoulder, “I’ll be back before the cows.”

  You’re giving yourself plenty of time, Jack thought, not that it mattered as she no longer helped with the milking. He wondered if she had left anything ready for the two young ones. A quick look around the kitchen told him that she had not, but he decided that maybe she intended to be back earlier than she had said.

  In the stable he untied Jerry and James and put on their winkers and tackling. As he led them out of the stable, Jerry danced around a little in protest but Jack rubbed his neck and soothed him down with calming words. Then, standing between their heads, he led them up the boreen into the well field, where an old well lay hidden under bushes in the corner. Every field on the farm had its own name, some in English and others in Irish. The name he liked best was “Mear na hAbhann” – the finger of the river – which was one of the inches along by the river that the old man had wrestled back from the Conways. Jack always believed that those two fields, because they were at the Phelan side of the river, had probably originally been Phelans’ anyway. His father used to say that they had been moonlighted off the Phelans by the Conways back in an earlier generation.

  The plough was lying on its side just inside the gap, where he had pulled it into position on his way down that morning. He hitched the two horses on to it and guided them along the headland until he came to the place that he had already decided was to be the starting point. It took a few minutes to manoeuvre the sock of the plough into the right position and get the first cut going. But soon Jerry and James had their stride in harmony and a thick slice of rich brown earth turned over behind them up the long high field.

  As they went steadily up and down the field the overlapping folds of upturned earth spread out on either side of the plough. Behind them, crows and seagulls squabbled over uprooted snails that were thrust unceremoniously from the safety of the dark earth’s belly into the glaring light of a bright spring day and the merciless beaks of the probing birds. The soil was perfect for ploughing – not too dry and not too damp – and a soft breeze ruffled the manes of the two horses.

  It delighted Jack’s ploughman’s heart to look down the long field and to view the perfectly turned unbroken sod. Ploughing out here in the big quiet field soothed his mind, and as the hours passed he relaxed into complete harmony with himself and his surroundings. He had ploughed this field for many years and always it brought him this feeling of calmness and peace, which he could never have quite put into words. The smell of the red earth took him into a realm beyond his everyday living, and as he ploughed the field he sensed that his mind, too, was being gently ploughed and old strifes and stresses turned up and wiped away as a new ease soaked through his being.

  He had tried once to explain the experience to Ned, who had smiled knowingly. “Me too, Jack,” Ned had said simply, and so he knew that Ned as well had found in the quietness of the fields a whole, untroubled world. If you were not afraid of silence you could come face to face with yourself out here, Jack thought, and maybe out here is the real God.

  “Yoo-hoo, Jack!” Davy called from the gap as he came along the bottom headland swinging a thick grey knitted sock, which Jack knew held a bottle of warm tea. He brought the horses down into the headland where they could have a few mouthfuls of grass while he had his tea.

  He rolled the hand-knitted sock down around the neck of the bottle and took a long satisfying drink. “Davy, that’s fine, hot, sweet tea: just the job for a ploughman’s thirst,” he said appreciatively, sitting on the end of a rusty harrow in the dyke and unwrapping the newspaper from around the thick cuts of brown bread.

  “I was thinking that you’d be getting hungry,” Davy said, joining him on the harrow which sank a little beneath his weight. “And there’s no trace of herself.”

  “Oh, didn’t she come back yet?” Jack asked in surprise.

  “Wouldn’t you have seen her passing down the boreen,” Davy protested.

  “Davy, when I’m ploughing, the world and his wife could go down that boreen and I wouldn’t see them,” Jack told him.

  “I never thought that ploughing was that interesting,” Davy laughed. Looking at his fine honest face, Jack realised that Davy would never understand the feeling for the land that Ned and himself had shared. Bu
t Davy’s next question surprised him. “Do you think that I’ll be kept on here?” he asked.

  “I can’t see why not,” Jack told him. “We need help and you’re a good worker and you like it here, don’t you?”

  “Yerra, ’tis grand here,” Davy declared. “I never settled down in England, couldn’t get used to it: the money was good, but that was all.”

  “Well, that settles it then,” Jack told him.

  “What about herself?” Davy asked.

  “What about her?”

  “I’d say that she could give anyone the road awful fast.”

  “She can’t afford to do that,” Jack told him; “we need you here.”

  “What’s going to happen about Peter in the summer when he finishes?” Davy asked.

  “I know that Ned had it in his head to send him to school,” Jack told him, “but I don’t know what will happen now.”

  “You mean away to boarding school?” Davy asked in dismay.

  “Yea.”

  “God, that would be awful hard on Peter,” Davy decided. “I nearly died with the lonesome in England; that’s one of the reasons that I’d hate to have to go back.”

  “That worried Ned too,” Jack admitted, “but he set great store by learning; he himself didn’t get that chance, and he wanted Peter to have it.”

  “Yerra, I don’t know,” Davy said. “I hated school and was happy to get free of it.”

  “Well, that’s the way of it,” Jack said, “but don’t say anything to Peter because the poor little devil has enough on his mind right now.”

  “Oh God, Jack,” Davy protested with a distressed face, “I wouldn’t say anything to upset Peter. I’m awful fond of him.”

  “I know you are,” Jack smiled into his troubled face, “and he’s much better since you came.” That indeed was the truth. Even though there was about eight years age difference between them, the gap was much closer in reality because Peter was older than his years and Davy much younger than his. Peter was quick-thinking and alert, whereas Davy was easy-going and lighthearted, so they were a good balance for each other.