Woman of the House Read online

  She decided to go to the front door of the house in case it annoyed Martha if she walked in the back door. She knew that Betty Nolan would call this pussy-footing around Martha, but she desperately did not want to get off to a bad start. After knocking on the front door a few times she tried turning the knob, but as she expected the door did not open. Just as she was about to go around and try the back door, Martha’s voice from inside ordered, “Go around to the back door.”

  Here we go again, Kate thought, as she went around to the back and found that door bolted as well. She stood waiting patiently and after a while the door opened and Martha stood there with a questioning look on her face.

  “What do you want?” she asked coldly.

  “I want to talk to you, Martha, please,” Kate said.

  “What about?” Martha demanded.

  “Can I come in?” Kate asked, feeling that they would get nowhere standing on the doorstep.

  “Very well,” Martha said with a sigh of annoyance, opening the door just wide enough for Kate to fit through sideways.

  That’s twice in one week, Kate thought. She went into the kitchen and sat at the table, while Martha turned her back and busied herself at the fire.

  “Martha,” Kate began, “can we sit down and talk this out?”

  “What is there to talk about?” Martha demanded over her shoulder.

  “I want to discuss the selling of Mossgrove,” Kate said quietly.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Martha told her firmly, turning around and standing with her back to the fire.

  “There is no harm in talking it over…”

  “Oh, I know what your talking it over means,” Martha said, her hands on her hips. “You want to talk me out of it, but you’re not going to succeed.”

  “Why are you selling?” Kate asked.

  “That’s none of your business,” Martha told her.

  “Maybe not,” Kate agreed, “but this was once my home and…”

  “Well, it was never mine!” Martha cut in, her face suffusing with anger.

  “But why not?” Kate asked.

  “Because you and your mother made damn sure that it never was!” Martha spat.

  “But how?” Kate asked in bewilderment.

  “Because it was always more yours than mine.” Martha walked across the kitchen and faced Kate. “Phelan furniture, Phelan pictures, Phelan everything in every damn corner!”

  “But what else did you expect?” Kate protested. “We lived here.”

  “I know that, but even when ye were dead ye still lived on.”

  “But how?”

  “Take that old dresser,” Martha said bitterly, pointing to the bottom of the kitchen, “that Grandfather Phelan made, and Ned thought was perfect. I could not even think of throwing it out in the shed where it belonged. We had to keep that old hearse of a dresser that filled the entire wall of the kitchen. Just because it was made by Grandfather Phelan! Phelan pictures everywhere, and your mother with a pained look on her face if I even moved one of them half an inch, and even her bloody roses outside the front door that I could have cheerfully dug up and flung out on to the dung hill. All Phelans, Phelans, Phelans! I’m shit sick of Phelans and everything belonging to you!” she shouted, striding up and down the kitchen.

  “But Martha, we had no idea that you felt like this,” Kate protested.

  “Oh, of course not,” Martha said angrily, “because you were so bloody busy thinking how perfect you all were and how wrong I was. I could do nothing right. I was not good enough for the Phelans. The perfect bloody Phelans.”

  “But we never thought we were perfect.”

  “Don’t you be trying to fool me,” Martha shot at her, standing now with her hands on the table, glaring down at Kate. “From the first day that I came in here I was second best.”

  “But nobody ever said that.”

  “There was no need to say it. It was made clear from the beginning.”

  “But I wasn’t even here at the beginning,” Kate said. “I was working in England.”

  “You mightn’t have been here but you were always talked about here,” Martha told her, “and when the letters arrived your mother had to read them out at the table for Ned and Jack, and you’d swear to God that she was reading the gospel. I sometimes felt that I should be standing up for the reading. We had you for breakfast, dinner and supper until I was tired of the sound of your name.”

  “I could hardly help that,” Kate said in exasperation.

  “No, but your mother could, and she never lost a chance to sing your praises and to belittle me.”

  “I don’t believe that. My mother wouldn’t do that.”

  “Oh no, your mother wouldn’t do that,” Martha said fiercely; “your mother was perfect. But let me tell you that from where I stood she was far from perfect. Her husband might be dead but she turned her son into a substitute husband, and of course she had Jack, who was blind to her faults because she had him wound around her little finger. The sainted Nellie who behind it all was a right bitch. Living in the same house as her was like living in a bloody shrine. The shrine of St Nellie. Why do you think your father drank? He couldn’t stand it, so he buried himself in a whiskey bottle.”

  Kate felt a slow rage beginning to simmer in the pit of her stomach. Old Molly Conway was right. Martha hated them all, and it was part of her reason for selling, if not all of it. How had the old woman worked it out so astutely?

  Martha had gone to the window and was breathing heavily, looking down over the fields.

  “The Conways can have it,” she said bitterly, “but they’ll pay dear for it. They’d pay any price to get Mossgrove and now is their chance, and by God I’ll make them pay dearly for their chance to get even with the Phelans.”

  “And what about the Phelans?” Kate asked bitterly. “Your children are Phelans.”

  “Only in name,” Martha pronounced, still looking out the window. “Your mother tried to come between me and my children, but she failed because I knew what she was at even though I could not make Ned see it.”

  “Maybe there was nothing to see.”

  “Oh yes, there was plenty to see, but she knew that I was clever enough for her and in the end she gave up and withdrew to the parlour entirely, where she should have been put the first day I came here.”

  “So you got your way in the end,” Kate said. “Did that make you happy? She is dead with two years and you’re still full of bitterness. What do you want from her? Do you know that she never once complained about you to me even though I guessed what was going on.”

  “Do you expect me to believe that?” Martha swung around from the window and stood glaring down at her. “As soon as she got sick you were back snooping around here. I had no privacy, my children were not mine any longer…”

  “You wanted to possess your children,” Kate told her angrily. “You were married to a Phelan on Phelan land and you had Phelan children, and yet you wanted to wipe out any trace of Phelan in them. You wanted the impossible. You were the outsider and we were ready to welcome you, but you wanted to make us the outsiders. You had no welcome for us. When you married Ned you became one of our family, but you never wanted that. We never knew what you wanted, and I’m beginning to think that neither did you.”

  “Well, now I know what I want,” Martha told her vehemently, “and it’s to get rid of this place as fast as ever I can and to move away from this hole where everywhere you go everybody knows your business.”

  “You’re full of bitterness, and wherever you go you’ll take it with you,” Kate told her, “because you’re not running from the Phelans or Kilmeen, you’re running from yourself.”

  “So, you’re coming clean at last and laying all the blame with me,” Martha challenged.

  “Maybe that’s where it belongs!” Kate asserted. “Once you got your legs in the door here you were determined to cause trouble, and by God but you caused it. My mother was a saint, so she put up with you. Above all e
lse she wanted you and Ned to be happy, so she was prepared to sacrifice her own dignity or anything else that was necessary to achieve that end. But nothing would satisfy you! You wanted to make her crawl. And you used your emotional blackmail on Ned to bring him to heel. You’re a pathetic bitch with a warped power complex.”

  Kate was standing now facing Martha across the table with all the buried frustration of past years boiling to the surface. So often had she suppressed her unspoken thoughts because she had not wanted to upset Nellie and then Ned. Now there was no more need for restraint. Martha could not damage the dead!

  “Oh, it’s all coming out now,” Martha taunted her.

  “Yes it is,” Kate told her fiercely; “for so long you had the whip hand because you were prepared to hurt Nellie and Ned with anything that I said. You were even prepared to twist it to do damage. But they’re gone now, so I’m free from you petty tyranny. You can no longer hurt them, and by God anything that you say will certainly not hurt me now. I got immune to your jibes years ago, but it broke my heart to see how you hurt Nellie, and I will never forgive you for that.”

  “I don’t need your forgiveness.”

  “Maybe you don’t, but before you’ll ever have peace of mind you need to forgive yourself for the way you treated my family. And selling Mossgrove is not the way to do it. You’re just putting another nail on your martyr’s cross, because that’s what you always thought you were, a bloody martyr.”

  “I don’t have to stand here in my own kitchen,” Martha said angrily, “and listen to this ranting.”

  “Oh yes you do,” Kate shouted at her, “because all this needs to be said. It should have been said a long time ago. Old Molly Conway told me that when we got you in here we got a cuckoo in the nest. By God, but she was right.”

  “So you’re going around discussing me with the neighbours,” Martha said.

  “I wasn’t discussing you.” Kate told her. “Molly Conway was only too happy to voice her opinion when she saw that Mossgrove was for sale. It didn’t surprise her that you were selling. She had your measure from the beginning, and now she’ll have your farm as well. You played it right into their hands.”

  “Stop twisting everything,” Martha cried.

  “Oh, I’m not twisting anything,” Kate told her, “but you don’t want to hear the truth. You never faced the truth – it was always a made-up version of what you wanted to believe.”

  “Oh, and you are so smart, of course, that you could see it all clearly,” Martha declared with rancour.

  “I didn’t have to be very smart to see what was going on. And now in your vindictiveness over your imagined wrongs of the past, you are going to deny your children their birthright. This land is their land. It was the land of generations of Phelans before them and Ned meant Peter to carry on when his time came. Have you no respect for Ned’s wishes?”

  “Ned is dead, dead, dead!” Martha cried. “I can’t spend my life living for the dead. I saw enough of that here. Old Grandfather Phelan was dead and buried before I ever came here, but he was never allowed to die because every day here he was remembered. Ned never said that he wanted Peter to carry on.”

  “Of course he did: he told me the day before he died that he wished that Peter would have the love of Mossgrove that he had.”

  “Typical,” Martha declared; “you poking your nose into the future of Mossgrove when it was none of your business.”

  “I wasn’t poking my nose, as you put it; we were just talking and it came up in the course of the conversation.”

  “And what else came up in the course of that conversation?” Martha demanded.

  “Nothing much, except that Ned wanted Peter to have more schooling than he had.”

  “Fat chance of that in this hole.”

  “If there was a secondary school started in the village…”

  “You put paid to that on Sunday when you insulted the P.P.”

  “News travels fast around here.”

  “That’s right, especially if somebody makes a fool of themselves,” Martha remarked acidly. “You were not content with insulting the parish priest and messing up David Twomey’s plans, you’re trying to mess me around as well.”

  “I was only trying to make you stop and think before you do something that you might later regret,” Kate told her and, suddenly feeling saddened by the whole upheaval, she sat down wearily on the chair.

  “I won’t regret it,” Martha declared.

  “What about Nora and Peter?”

  “Nora and Peter are my responsibility,” she said coldly, “and I will take care of them.”

  “But they don’t want to leave here,” Kate persisted.

  “Don’t you try to make trouble between me and my children. That was always part of your problem. You had none of your own, so you wanted to stick your nose into the rearing of mine. Why don’t you get your hooks into David Twomey now, and get a man and children of your own. Was that what you were at when you offered to intercede for him with the parish priest? That was a laugh, to think that you spoiled whatever chance he had.”

  Kate sat looking at Martha as she strode up and down the kitchen, her normally pale face red with anger. It came into her mind that one of the Spanish nurses in the London hospital had a saying. She could not remember it exactly but the gist of it was that some people only came alive in controversy. It surely applied to Martha. Mark was right: she would not change her mind.

  “It’s been a waste of time coming here,” Kate told her, wearily rising from the chair. “You have no vision of the future; you are blinded by your own narrow-minded prejudices, and there is no love of the land in you.”

  “And you are a self-righteous old spinster trying to live your life through your brother’s children,” Martha retorted. “You have no right to come here again. After the sale I doubt that you will want to come back. So get out now and stay out.”

  Kate walked slowly towards the back door. She stood there and looked around the kitchen and then walked out into the back yard. Martha banged the door shut behind her.

  The yard jobs had been done and a satisfied silence hung over the whole place; only the hens were busy scuffling in the sunshine. The farmyard after feeding time always reminded her of a hospital ward after dinner when all the patients were resting. From here Grandfather Phelan had led her by the hand to see the new calves of the season and then down through the fields of Mossgrove He had done the same with Ned. He had wanted to nurture a love of this place in them and had succeeded. It all seemed so pointless now.

  Suddenly she felt old and tired. There was no good, she thought, in fighting the inevitable any longer. Mossgrove was going to be sold and there was nothing that she or anyone else could do about it. She walked up the boreen feeling utterly dejected. The singing birds and the buzz of spring seemed a contradiction of her mood. How could it all have gone so wrong, she wondered. This place that she had thought about every day during her years in London. She had carried it around in her heart like a hidden garden, knowing that when she came back she would always be welcome here. She thought of Nellie, who had loved this place and sacrificed so much to keep it going. Had she ever thought of selling after Kate’s father had died? She had asked Jack that question once and he had looked at her in surprise. “Nellie sell Mossgrove? The thought never even crossed her mind. The only reason she’d have sold was if we’d gone bankrupt and we had to, but we scrope our way out of that one, thank God.”

  She would have to tell Jack that she had failed, might even have made things worse. That was two things that she had messed up in one week. Martha had heard about the other one pretty fast, but of course Lizzy would have been delighted to spread that news around. Martha had a point about everybody knowing your business around here, she thought, but she preferred it to living somewhere where nobody was interested in you.

  When she reached Jack’s cottage she decided that she would go in and sit down for a while. Jack never locked the door. She sat in the quietness
of his small kitchen and tried to accept the fact that she would never again walk down the boreen to Mossgrove. It would take her a while to get used to the idea. Jack would have to retire, and maybe the time had come for that anyway, though he had always proclaimed that he wanted to die in harness. But that was not to be. Davy would have to go back to England. Poor Davy, he so badly wanted to stay at home, and he was happy in Mossgrove where he got on well with Peter. He was good for Peter right now because Davy understood how he felt, having walked that road himself. Peter is like my father, she thought; if he is not handled properly there will be trouble there yet. Whereas Nora was different: she was like Nellie, always the peacemaker, but she also had the inner resilience of her grandmother.

  Foolish Martha to think that they were Phelans only in name. How could she be so blind? But was she right in other ways? Am I trying to live my life through them? Because if Martha was blind to her own faults there is no reason, Kate thought, why I could not be blind to mine. Should I leave Kilmeen and go away and lead a life totally separate from this place? Am I too wrapped up in Mossgrove and Kilmeen, in the children and Jack, in David and the school?

  The door opened quietly and Jack stood there. Suddenly the sight of Jack was too much for her, and she felt tears course down her face.

  “It was no good, Jack,” she told him tearfully, rising and walking across to him. “There is no more to be done.”

  “I know that you did your best, Kate,” he soothed, putting an arm around her and patting her head as if she was once again a child. “Even the Lord himself advised that having done all we should, then stand still. Maybe we have reached that stage.”