Woman of the House Read online

  Mark must have seen her coming and he whipped open the door with a welcoming smile. His clothes always intrigued Kate because they looked as if they had been knitted on him. Agnes loved knitting, and his long, muted-coloured sweaters, threadbare and worn, poured down to his knees. She had often smiled to hear Agnes complain that once he got into a sweater she could not get him out of it until it almost fell apart. His trousers suffered the same fate because they were soft and bleached from over-washing and they skirted his long legs down over soft leather boots. The overall impression was in total contrast to the house because Mark himself looked like a grey shadow.

  Now his warm brown eyes beamed out at her from the midst of soft, flowing, dishevelled hair and put her in mind of a wren peering out of its all-encircling nest.

  “Kate, come in,” he smiled in welcome, opening the door wide so that she stepped straight into the kitchen.

  “I can’t stay a minute,” she told him, “but I thought that I’d let you know that I’m working on that problem and things are o.k. now.”

  “That’s a relief,” he sighed. “Since it happened I haven’t been able to concentrate on anything. It’s blocked off all my thinking.”

  “Well, that’s why I called,” she told him, taking his hands and looking up at him. “I’ve taken steps to keep Kitty safe, so you have no need to worry. You can go back to your own doings and forget about it.” Then she smiled up at him and said admiringly, “Mark, you’re like a tall, willowy tree.”

  “And you, Kate,” he replied, “are like a small, dark, thorny, well-rooted bush that could not be blown over no matter what way the wind blew. A big storm could topple me!”

  “I’m not sure, Mark,” she laughed, “whether that’s a compliment or an insult.”

  “It’s a compliment, Kate,” he assured her, putting his arms around her and drawing her close to him. “There is something so solid and sane about you, Kate, and you make me feel good about myself, whereas some people around here make me feel crazy.”

  “People always feel threatened by things that they cannot understand,” she told him gently; then, putting her nose against his sweater, she sniffed and said, “You smell of Lux flakes.”

  “Kate, there is no romance in your soul!” Holding her back from him and laughing down at her, he asked, “Have you no time for tea?”

  “No,” she answered as she looked around. “Where’s Agnes?”

  “Gone over to Mossgrove,” he told her ruefully. “She’s dreadfully upset by the sale. She thinks that she can change Martha’s mind, but of course she can’t.”

  “Poor Agnes,” Kate sighed, “I suppose she’s worried about the future of the children too.”

  “What about this new school?” Mark asked. “That would be a great help to them if it came.”

  “Hopefully it will work out. Did you ever regret, Mark, that it was not there in your time?” she asked.

  “Maybe I did, because there were so many things that I wanted to find out about. But then Tady Mikey came along and taught me to play, and that was the first ray of light. But it was the Miss Jacksons who really opened doors for me. When they took me on their trips they pretended that it was to help with their luggage, but of course that was only to make me feel good. They changed my life. Then, of course, I had Ned, who was always there for me if the other fellows tried to rough me up.”

  “You were good friends even going to school,” Kate said.

  “I sometimes think that I was the one who brought himself and Martha together, because he used to spend so much time here with me. Looking at how things are turning out, I think that I did him no favours,” he said ruefully.

  “Mark, will you stop it,” Kate demanded. “Ned wouldn’t have married Martha if he had not wanted to. Men were always fascinated by Martha because she was so lovely, and when Ned married he was the envy of every man in the parish.”

  “They didn’t have to live with her,” Mark said simply.

  “She loved Ned a lot.”

  “I suppose so,” he agreed, “but I hated it when she was not kind to Nellie.”

  “How did you know about that?” Kate asked in surprise.

  “Ned and I discussed it often.”

  “Did you really? Ned never discussed it with me, or with Jack either.”

  “That was because he felt so guilty; he felt he’d let you and Jack down,” he told her quietly.

  “Oh, I never knew that,” Kate said sadly. “Poor Ned, he was caught in the middle.”

  “He loved Martha but he wasn’t blind to her faults, and the fact that I was her brother made it possible for him to talk with me about it He didn’t feel disloyal discussing it with me. Ned had a strong sense of loyalty but he had a stronger sense of justice, and he felt that Nellie was being wronged, which she was.”

  “She was indeed,” Kate agreed, “but because of her sense of loyalty to Ned she never discussed it with me. I knew what was going on and I would have tackled Martha myself, but she would have taken it out on Ned and I didn’t want to make things difficult for him. Family relationships are something else, aren’t they?”

  “That’s for sure,” Mark agreed. “She’s my sister, but I could never understand her. She always thought that other people had it better than her.”

  Kate thought of old Molly Conway and wondered if maybe indeed she had Martha read right. But she decided that they could spend the day analysing Martha and be none the wiser, so she smiled at Mark and said, “Now, you’re not to replace one problem with another. You can do nothing about Martha and Mossgrove, so forget about it. You have such wonderful gifts, Mark, that you owe it to yourself, and indeed to us less talented mortals, to follow your star, and that’s the thorny bush advising you now.”

  “Right, mam,” Mark said in mock submission, giving her a military salute.

  “Well, I’m off,” she told him. “And tell Agnes not to worry, it’s bad for her asthma.”

  “Right, nurse,” he smiled.

  As she cycled along the road she thought back over her conversation with Mark. She was glad that Ned had discussed the problem of Martha and Nellie with him. She was very fond of Mark and at one stage when she was younger, before David came on the scene, she had imagined herself in love with him, but she had got over that phase and he had become a second brother in her life.

  When she reached Sarah’s cottage she was standing at the gate waiting for her.

  “Well, how did you get on?” she asked anxiously.

  “Did just as you said,” Kate told her, getting off her bike, “and I think that it worked well.”

  “Thank God,” Sarah said fervently. “At least we are all right for another while. I’ve been thinking since that it might be no harm to mention this to Fr Brady.”

  “Why so?” Kate asked in surprise.

  “Well, he’s fairly sound and he’s pretty tuned in to what’s going on around, and sometimes it’s no harm to have a few reliable people in the know, because you’d never be sure when you’d want a bit of a back up.”

  “That sounds reasonable,” Kate agreed, “and I’ll be meeting him one of these nights about the new school.”

  “I heard rumours about that,” Sarah said. “How far has it gone?”

  “Not very far really,” Kate told her. “David is waiting to hear from the Miss Jacksons’ nephew to know if he would rent the old house in the village.”

  “Well, it would be better if the nephew did something with that house, because it’s no good having it standing there idle,” Sarah said.

  “Hopefully he’ll think of it like that as well,” Kate said, “but apart from that there is a problem with the P.P.”

  “What’s the problem with him?” Sarah asked in surprise.

  “Well, apparently there was an old parochial agreement with the nuns over in Ross that there would be no school opened in the parish in opposition to their commercial school over there.”

  “But that’s daft,” Sarah protested.

  “
I know,” Kate agreed, “but Sarah, I sometimes think that we’re all half daft.”

  “Speak for yourself, my girl,” Sarah told her briskly, and they both smiled.

  “But the P.P. might use that agreement as an excuse because, as you know yourself, the Doc and himself had a bit of a run-in after Joan’s funeral, so the Twomeys are not exactly his favourite parishioners.”

  “You had better watch yourself as well, if you have good-looking men calling late at night,” Sarah teased.

  “Aha, you were gossiping with Julia!” Kate smiled. “The Doc was saying that she was probably on duty that night.”

  “And what about handsome young David on Thursday night,” Sarah smiled.

  “Hope to God that she was asleep at about three o’clock this morning when Mark called.”

  “Oh, I’ll hear it if she wasn’t.”

  “How do you hear everything and tell people nothing?” Kate asked curiously.

  “The easiest thing in the world,” Sarah told her, “because most people are only interested in the sounds of their own voices.”

  “Probably most voices in the parish are talking about the sale of Mossgrove today,” Kate said regretfully.

  “More than likely,” Sarah agreed, “but I haven’t been to the village yet, so I haven’t been in the way of meeting people to talk about it.”

  “Typical of Martha not to tell anybody, isn’t it?” Kate asked. “She is so secretive.”

  “Maybe we should have smelt a rat when she went off in the pony and trap on Monday and was missing for most of the day,” Sarah decided.

  “Was she?” Kate asked with interest. “I didn’t know that. But then I didn’t meet Jack during the week.”

  “He told me last night,” Sarah told her. “He said that she went away early in the day and was not back until evening. She probably went over to Ross and put the ad into the office of the Eagle herself.”

  “We always gave any ad for the Eagle to Joe in the post office,” Kate said, “but she was probably afraid that Joe would say something to myself or Jack.”

  “He probably would have, too. Like most people around here he would hate to see Mossgrove go out of the Phelan name,” Sarah said, then continued thoughtfully: “Strange, you know, though I never owned land myself apart from this acre, I still like to see the farms remain in the same families. It gives a sense of stability to the whole community. They’re like trees that are allowed to reach maturity and to put down deep roots in the one place.”

  “Well, if this goes ahead the Phelan tree in Mossgrove is about to be cut down and a new Conway tree will be planted in there,” Kate said bitterly.

  “I was thinking that the Conways would be the front runners,” Sarah said. “There’s one of Matt’s brothers in the buildings in England and doing well, and another ranching in America. Strange thing about the Conways, when they got out of that hole over there they seemed to blossom.”

  “Pity that Matt Conway did not go away and blossom somewhere else.”

  “He’s about the worst of them.”

  “People don’t come much worse than that creep,” Kate said with venom, “and to think that he might actually own our house makes my skin crawl. If I went down to Mossgrove now I’d be afraid that I’d strangle Martha with my bare hands.”

  “It isn’t sold yet,” Sarah told her, “I’ve seen Mossgrove sail close to the wind before, but it got back on course again.”

  “But if they had sold then it would have been because they had no option, but now it’s being done by choice. It’s a betrayal!”

  “I can understand how you feel,” Sarah said comfortingly. “Jack was saying the same thing last night”

  “Poor Sarah,” Kate said bleakly, “we’re all crying on your shoulder.”

  “Ah well, that’s what I’m here for. Nellie and I often talked ourselves out of a tight corner together. She helped me and I helped her when times were tough. When all mine were small I hadn’t much to put in the wind either, and my fellow liked his drop as well. Now that he’s dead and all my crowd are working, I have it easier than I ever had it. It would be nicer if they were not all in England and America, but what else was there for them only the boat?”

  “That’s why this school is so important,” Kate declared vehemently; “it would give them all a better chance, even if they still had to emigrate.”

  “I’d be very surprised if it didn’t get going in spite of whatever problem there is about parochial agreements. The people here would only oppose the clergy for one reason, and that would be the future of their children, and the old P.P. knows that. I’d say that he won’t push it that far.”

  “Well, Sarah,” Kate said thoughtfully, “we’ll find out over the next few weeks.”

  “He has someone to answer to too, you know,” Sarah remarked enigmatically. “Will you be calling to see Jack?”

  “Will you drop over to him when he comes up and tell him that I’ll call back tonight to talk things over.”

  “I’ll do that,” Sarah told her.

  “The other thing that is worrying me is Nora and Peter,” Kate said. “Surely Martha will tell them before going to mass tomorrow because someone might say it to them. But whatever about tomorrow, they’ll definitely have to know before Monday because the Conways will be bursting to ram it down their throats.”

  “Jack will know whether she told them or not.”

  “That’s right,” Kate said, getting on her bike, “and Sarah, will you say a prayer that I won’t lose my cool and tear the head off Martha when I go to Mossgrove?”

  Though she said it jokingly they both knew that she was half serious. Jack and the children would look to her to try to talk Martha out of her intention. But as Mark, who should know better than anyone, had so wisely remarked, that was not possible.

  As she cycled along the road the whole problem of Mossgrove that she had pushed to the back of her mind returned like a reinforced black cloud. When she came to the entrance to the farm she leaned her bike against the stony ditch of Jack’s cottage and climbed up on to the top of the gate. She sat there and looked down over the fields of Mossgrove. The big well field just inside the gate lay with its brown ploughed bosom turned up to the warm spring sun. She closed her eyes and could visualise it full of waving wheat, barley and oats, and see the pale shades of cream and yellow stretching away across the wide field, different-shaped heads waving in the breeze. She could hear Ned’s voice as he looked at the barley with its bearded heads.

  There’s music in my heart all day,

  I hear it late and early;

  It comes from fields far, far away,

  It’s the wind that shakes the barley.

  He had often stood on the headland looking up the field and recited that poem when the barley was ripe and rippling in the wind. She was able to see over the ditches back into the Clune field. That, too, was ploughed, waiting for the potatoes, turnips and mangles that were meant to feed the people and animals of Mossgrove in the year ahead. Ploughed fields were places full of promise. Jack had told her that when she was a child and she had never forgotten it.

  In the fields below she could see the cows grazing and some of them lying down chewing the cud. She liked to look at a field full of cows: they exuded contentment and wholesomeness. In the field beyond them the sheep were dotted around like soft white cushions and she could see that some new lambs had arrived. The chimney of Mossgrove was barely visible in the trees and the smoke was coming straight up, like the spray from a fountain, and diluting into the clear blue sky.

  She remembered days like this when she had come home on holidays while training in England. She remembered sitting on top of this gate just as she was now, staying there for a long time and simply absorbing the fact that she was back in her own place. There was no place else where she felt as complete as when she walked the fields here. Phelans had lived here for generations and when she came inside the gate she felt encompassed by them. Her grandfather had been so proud of M
ossgrove. Even as a very young child, when he had taken her by the hand and led her out to walk around the farmyard and down the fields, she had sensed his feeling for the place. And yet her father did not have it. Maybe it skipped a generation. Was that why the old man wanted to implant it in his grandchildren? But then Nellie had loved this place too, and that had been a great bond between the old man and herself. When his relations came to visit him, Nellie had entertained them as if they were her own, and indeed she regarded them as such. That was the attitude that had kept Mossgrove going for so long. Great women marrying in here and setting their standards and keeping things going.

  She thought of the women whom she visited around the parish. In many cases those country women were stronger than their menfolk. They handled childbearing and hard work, and many of them managed the money of the farm. Those who were afflicted with troublesome husbands made their own money from the eggs and the fowl around the farmyard. Some of them endured living with difficult mothers-in-law and domineering fathers-in-law. When they married into a house they became “the woman of the house”, but sometimes the title conferred responsibility without authority But they stuck together and helped each other out.

  She remembered Sarah spending long hours talking to Nellie when she was young, and she had always felt a sense of security when they sat across the fire from each other in the kitchen and she was told to play in the garden. She knew that no matter how drunk her father would be when he got home, these two women were equal to it.

  Then of course there was Jack. What would they have done without Jack? He seemed to have an infinite capacity for holding things together. He had been there like a secure anchor all through her childhood. When her father had died she had been heartbroken, because she had loved him despite all his faults, and Jack had understood and comforted her, and he took his place in many ways. She had sensed as a child that he loved Nellie and she took it for granted. When she grew up she realised what he had done for all of them. Ned and himself had been like father and son – maybe closer, she thought, because she knew of many father-son relationships that were fraught with disagreements. Now Ned was gone and Jack was still here. It was extraordinary to think that he had seen three owners of Mossgrove die before him, as well as Nellie. Well, the old man’s death was natural enough, because he was a good age, but her father had been a young man and Nellie had only been in her early sixties, the same age as Jack himself. And now Ned, the generation after him. Jack, she thought, had endured great suffering here.