Woman of the House Read online

  As he passed the kitchen window he stopped and looked in at them. They needed more than he was providing. He remembered when Billy died how anxious Nellie had been about Ned and Kate – especially Kate, who had been so attached to him. Now Nora was trying to battle through this ordeal on her own, and he was more worried about her than Peter, because Peter was lashing out and complaining while Nora was trying to help him and to look after Martha as well. It was a heavy load for young shoulders.

  When he got back down to the stall Daisy was prancing around, so he knew that things were starting to move. He lit the storm lantern and hung it carefully off a hook in the ceiling. The rest of the cows, who were placidly chewing the cud, looked around curiously but were in no way disturbed. They were accustomed to the yellow rays of the lamp roaming nightly over their heads when they were checked before the farmyard settled down for the night. He collected a big bundle of hay from the barn and made a comfortable seat for himself against the wall behind her. The lantern only partially lit the stall but thankfully there was a good moon which poured bright pools of light through the narrow windows. He could see the grey cobwebs hanging off the low ceiling and sometimes a slight breeze disturbed them which cast floating shadows along the stone walls. In the silence he could hear the occasional rustling of mice who had colonised the thick walls over the years.

  Daisy scrope her two front legs off the stone floor and danced her hindquarters back and forth in an agony of protestation, and then a violent contraction forced her back legs to skid forward and she moaned in pain as two small hooves appeared beneath her arching tail, only to disappear again when the contraction subsided. Jack nestled down into the hay as the cold of the night settled in around him. This is a right good place to get a fine belter of a cold, he thought, so he pulled an old bran bag around his shoulders. Daisy moaned mournfully and, swinging her neck around, she looked back at Jack and rolled large reproachful eyes in his direction. He swung his legs off the hay and went over to rub his hand knowingly into the cleft between her flank and udder.

  “Not long more now, old girl,” he told her, massaging her back, but Daisy decided that maybe lying down might be an easier way to handle this new painful experience. She threw her enlarged body awkwardly on to the floor, grunting and trying to make herself comfortable, but her swollen belly threw her off balance and her legs stuck out rigidly like the legs of a corpse.

  “Well, Daisy,” he told her, “if you’re going to lie down on the job I might as well do the same.” He returned to his hay bed and pulled the bags up around him.

  It was a long time since he had done this night vigil and he had almost forgotten the sounds of the farmyard at night. The occasional grunt came from the piggery across the yard and now and then the horses’ hooves clanked off the cobbled floor as they moved their weight from one leg to the other. The ducks gave an odd quack as they jockeyed for a more comfortable space in their communal bed. The cows around him chewed contentedly, and he felt himself dozing off to the crunching rhythm of their jaws.

  Daisy woke him as she made a convulsive movement to swing her giant belly into a better position so that she could stand upright, but she failed and tilted backwards again. Then with a mighty effort she rocked herself sideways and with a great heave scrambled into a kneeling position on her two front legs, and as she straightened them beneath her she hoisted her hindquarters upwards. When she was on all fours she swished her tail in preparation for the oncoming contraction, and Jack knew that his night vigil was drawing to a close.

  He was stiff with the cold and he thought longingly of a hot glass of the cure. Always during night calvings Nellie would arrive at some stage with a hot steaming mug with cloves floating on top like black imps. That was the boy to heat you up on a frosty night! Daisy brought him back to reality with a bellow of anguish and with a convulsive heaving motion forced her hind quarters to eject a small brown head that rested on two white hooves that had appeared and disappeared earlier. Now Jack grasped the hooves and pulled steadily until the clinging calf slithered on to the sodden straw behind her. He rolled the calf over and was pleased to see that it was a sturdy heifer. He helped it to its feet. It wobbled drunkenly against its mother’s belly and he lifted it firmly and placed it beneath her head; her long, grating tongue licked away its slimy coat and yellow beastings dripped from her overflowing udder on to the stone floor. He straightened himself up and walked out into the quiet farmyard.

  The dark sky was shot with light behind the bare branches of his oak tree at the top of the haggard and the birds were gently waking each other up for the start of a new day. It was times like this, Jack thought, that made all the hardship worthwhile. A new birth, a new day and a feeling that all was well with the world. But the problem was that at the moment all was far from well in the world of Mossgrove.

  He looked across the shadowy farmyard and down over the fields where the grey morning mists were rising and swirling along the hedges. You could pray on a morning like this, he thought, because you could feel God in your bones.

  “Ned, old friend,” he said, “wherever you are, keep an eye over us because we’re in a right mess since you left.”

  Chapter Seven

  KATE TURNED THE key in the lock and pushed open the door of her house. Before turning on the light she stood with her back against the door and savoured the essence of her own home. The warm whiff of polish permeated the air, and she knew that Julia Deasy had given everything an overhaul to greet her return. The smell brought the sense of Mark’s gentle spirit into the house. He made his own furniture polish from his beeswax, which fed the wood and gave it a deep rich glow. The streetlight shone through the fan slash over the door, bathed the stairway in green light and threw shadows along the corridor that led back to the kitchen. At the foot of the stairs the door into the front room was ajar. She pushed it open and stood there looking at the familiar room partly lit by the streetlight outside the window. She knew by the warm fresh air in the room that Julia had lit the fires and looked after the house well in her absence.

  Along the back wall, the mantelpiece was cluttered with much-loved objects from her childhood in Mossgrove. On winter nights when she sat by the fire it was good to run her eye over them and to look up at the large photograph of Grandfather Phelan. She went over now and studied it above the fireplace. The face was in shadow, but she knew every familiar curve: the broad forehead beneath the thick thatch of white hair, the strong aquiline nose and shrewd eyes that seemed to see through to the back of your head. His presence was almost real because Jack had kept him alive with his constant reference to him. She was so glad that she had brought his picture from Mossgrove. There had been a reluctance on her part to take it at the time, feeling that it belonged in the family home. But Jack had counselled, “Take it. You can always bring it back afterwards, but you could never take it away.”

  How wise he had been. She had often thought of his advice in later years as she had watched in silence old familiar photographs disappear from the walls of Mossgrove. She would have so loved to have had them, but she had not taken them when she could have, before Ned got married, because she had felt that they belonged in Mossgrove. How stupid she had been. Jack had been for wiser. She had never mentioned it to Ned because she did not want to cause any trouble. He had always been so good to her. When she had got the job here as district nurse and this house had come on the market, he had helped her to buy it. When she had protested and said that she could go to the bank, he had told her, “You worked hard in Mossgrove when times were tough. Mossgrove owes you this.”

  When he put it like that she did not feel under a compliment, and it meant that she could afford to spend more on the restoration of the house.

  She walked into the kitchen where the fire still glowed behind the bars of the old black range, glinting off its heavy brass door knobs. The range had been in the house when she bought it and it still served her well by keeping the place warm and providing a plentiful supply of hot water as
well as doing all the cooking. She had made very few changes in the kitchen because she liked the old dresser and the heavy-beamed ceiling. She had just thrown a large rug in the centre of the quarry-tiled floor and put a comfortable armchair by the range. The chair had been her grandfather’s, and she remembered him sitting in it beside the parlour window in Mossgrove. The springs had collapsed, but she had got them resprung and covered it in the same old rose velvet. Sometimes coming home on cold nights it was a relief to fall into its deep warm cushions and put her feet up on the range. She had enjoyed working on the house and maybe when she was younger she would have seen a house like this as part of a package with husband and children, but they had not become part of the scene. Only once had there been somebody with whom this might have been possible, but that was in the past. Now at thirty-two she had almost decided that the single state was her chosen path.

  As she put on the kettle to make a cup of tea she thought about Mossgrove and wondered how things were going on out there. It was hard to imagine it without Ned. The dull pain that was now her constant companion welled up inside. She had cried long into the nights in this old chair during those first heart-breaking days. The course had partly occupied her mind but the crying had gone on inside. She sat into the chair now and ran her hand over the soft, warm arms. Grandfather and Nellie had sat for many hours in this chair. Neither of them had had easy lives, but they had both possessed the spirit of survival and neither had bowed down under calamity. She was the product of strong, resilient people, so she too would straighten up and keep going. It would be bleak in Mossgrove without Ned’s sunny, calming presence. She had always looked forward to the times when he had called in here for a chat. She was going to miss those visits. Thank God that they still had Jack on the farm. He had brought it through tricky times before. She had thought, from the letter that she had got in answer to hers, that he was worried about something, but Jack was not one to spell out problems when you were too far away to be able to help. The little note that Nora had sent had somehow worried her as well. She knew that they were devastated, but somehow she felt that something else was wrong. If she only had a car she would run back there now, but she was dependent on her bike. A two-mile cycle after a long day travelling was too much. She decided that a good night’s rest was a better option before she faced Mossgrove.

  The following day when she stood in the cold of the grey morning light in the yard of Mossgrove and surveyed the condition of the place, she was glad that she had a good night’s rest behind her. Bran, who was chewing a bone on the step of the back door, was the only sign of life and he welcomed her with a joyous wagging tail and a few high jumps to lick her face.

  “Bran,” she questioned, “where is everybody?”

  The yard showed signs of neglect. Martha had never allowed dirty buckets at the back door, but now there were several scattered in disarray. Some were turned sideways with hens’ tails protruding and others had cackling hens perched on their rims. These are hungry hens, Kate thought, so she picked up one of the buckets and went to the feed house where she filled it with oats. The hens followed, squawking in anticipation, as she swished the oats around the far corner of the yard, and with heads down and tails bobbing they gobbled it up in sharp pecks.

  Dog bones were strewn around the scullery. It was unheard of previously that Bran would be allowed to put his nose inside the back door. It was obvious from the smell that it had become a second home to him. She opened the door into the kitchen and stood transfixed.

  “Good God!” she gasped.

  It was incredible that Martha, who was so house-proud, could tolerate these conditions. It was difficult to know where to begin.

  She decided that she would make a start with the ashes that were piled high. She went out to get the ash bucket, but even that was missing from its usual place. She found it eventually outside the duck’s house where it had obviously been used to carry their feed. It took two fills of the bucket to clear the ashes around the fire before she could clear out the ash hole that was packed to capacity. Soon a blazing fire roared up the chimney. She hung the large black pot off the crane and filled it with water from the timber barrel outside the back door.

  When Jack come in an hour later there was a stream of sudsy water rushing out the back door against him. He had seen Kate’s bike at the gable end and a weight had lifted off his shoulders.

  “Kate,” he said with fervour, his face alight with welcome, “thank God you’re back.”

  “Jack,” she said, “oh, it’s so good to see you again.” At a glance she saw that the weeks had taken their toll.

  Jack had always looked the same to Kate: neither old nor young, just hardy and ageless. Now he looked old and worn. He had loved Ned deeply, much more than he had herself. She had known it but had never resented it, just as she had known that his love of her mother had gone above and beyond the call of duty and she had loved him for that. He had said often that Ned was like Nellie but that she herself had a lot of their grandfather in her. It was one of the reasons that he had wanted her to have the picture. All these thoughts ran through her mind as they looked at each other across the kitchen and she felt her eyes fill with tears. This great little man who had always put her family before himself. She ran across the wet floor and put her arms around him and she knew that he understood that she was wordlessly thanking him for many things.

  “We’ve let ourselves get into a bit of a rí-rá,” Jack said gruffly, clearing his throat to cover his emotion.

  “Where is Martha?” she asked, although she had already guessed, and in reply Jack pointed a finger towards the ceiling.

  “All day, every day?” she asked.

  “Almost,” he answered, and then in desperation: “Can you sort her out, Kate, because we can’t go on like this. It’s very hard on the two young ones.”

  And on you, too, she thought.

  “We’ll get it sorted out, Ned,” she assured him, though she had no idea how, because she had never really understood Martha. But she felt that Jack needed reassurance. “Are you going to the creamery?” she asked.

  “In a few minutes,” he told her.

  “Call in to Danny the butcher and get a good big lump of boiling beef.”

  “That’s the job,” he said smiling; “that will put hair on our chest and pep in our step.”

  When she had the table and chairs scrubbed and the floor washed, she cleaned the smoky windows. When the glass was sparkling she opened them top and bottom to air out the kitchen while she tackled the ware in the dresser. To her disgust she saw mouse droppings when she opened the small press where Martha kept the bread and butter. She poked around in the drawer of the dresser and found two mouse traps and, having cleared the press, she put them into action.

  The kitchen finished, she went up into the parlour. It smelt of stale musty air. She opened the windows wide and threw the mats out on to the hedge in the garden. When she had the floor brushed and the furniture polished, she closed the windows and lit the fire. The garden outside was full of daffodils, so she picked a big bunch when she went out to bring in the mats. She left half of them on the kitchen table to be arranged later and put the rest into an old glass jug of Nellie’s and stood it in the centre of the parlour table. Daffodils, she thought, belong in a glass jug where you can see their vivid green stems glistening in the clear water. She stood back to admire the effect. They were vibrant and brought new life into the room. There was something encouraging about daffodils, she thought; they spoke of a new beginning and the resurrection. They hung out over the sides of the jug, admiring their reflections in the polished table top. She had always liked this room and had spent a lot of time here in her mother’s last years.

  On the morning of her First Holy Communion they had had a special breakfast around this big table. Grandfather had been alive then and he sat at the head of the table while she sat at the other end. She had laughed up at him, saying that she was actually at the head and he was at the bottom. Her
father and mother had been to the left and right of the old man and Ned and Jack on her left and right. She must have been about seven then, so Ned would have been twelve. She had always been proud of Ned’s good looks, and that morning with his new dark suit and blond hair he had looked very handsome. She had felt pretty herself in her all-white outfit, though nobody had ever described her as pretty because she had the strong, dark features of the Phelans. She had once heard old Molly Conway remark, “You couldn’t say that one was good looking but she is attractive in a strange dark way.” The statement had occupied her teenage mind for weeks trying to figure out if it was a compliment or an insult.

  “Memories, memories,” she sighed aloud; “that’s the problem with old houses, they’re full of memories. But I suppose that’s what makes them interesting.”

  Tongues of fire were licking around the sods of turf and warming up the room, so the time had come to face upstairs and see Martha. She was very nervous of the reception that awaited her. The kettle over the fire in the kitchen was boiling, so she made a fresh pot of tea and sat it on some hot coals to draw. Martha liked her tea strong and hot. She dressed a tray with a clean cloth that she poked out of the back of a press and set it with fine china from the parlour and then toasted bread to the glowing fire. Then, with nothing further to be done, she opened the door at the foot of the stairs and climbed upwards.

  The stairs were covered in dust. When she reached the top step she could see at a glance that the narrow landing had not been brushed with weeks and that Peter en route to his room past Martha’s door had dropped clothes along the way. There was a time, Kate thought, when he would not have got away with that. The door to Nora’s room was open and she saw that Nora had kept it as tidy as possible, but from where she stood Kate’s nurse’s eye judged the sheets to be grey rather than white. Probably not changed since the funeral, Kate thought. She went past Nora’s door on to Martha’s room and knocked gently. There was no sound from inside. She waited for a few minutes and tried again. When there was still no response she decided that her best approach was to adopt her professional attitude and treat the situation as if she was the district nurse and that Martha was just another patient.