House of Memories (2 page)

He remembered his grandmother talking about the way things were when she was a child in Furze Hill. It had been a thriving place then. He had loved the way she had always called it Furze Hill, with a note of pride in her voice. No one else but Nana Molly called their farm Furze Hill. She had made it sound like a good place, and as a child he had felt a swell of pride in his chest. But as he grew older there came a sense of unease when he heard the neighbours refer to it as Conways’ place with a touch of contempt in their voices. His father had earned that contempt, but as a young fellow growing up it had been hard to swallow the shame.

So much suffering and anguish had taken place in their house that he sometimes wondered if he could ever wipe out the memory of it. But if he could only build up the farm, he might in some way wash away the shame and bring back a sense of pride to the family. He wanted his mother to be able to dress well and walk tall down the street of Kilmeen as if she owned half of it, like Martha Phelan from Mossgrove.

Mossgrove, across the river from Furze Hill, was a well-run
farm. It had always been a thorn in his father’s side, and in later years it had turned into an obsession which in the end had led to his death. Not that Danny regretted his death, although sometimes he felt guilty to be so relieved that he was gone. He was grateful to Martha Phelan for that, but she would never know that he knew. Would never know that he had watched her that night on the river bank when she had set the old fellow up. What she had done had required nerves of steel, and on that night she had given them all their freedom.

He was so intent on his thoughts that at first he did not hear when a voice called to him from a car parked beside the kerb, but when a horn beeped beside him, he swung around to see Kate Phelan smiling at him through the car window. Oh God! He needed a Phelan now like a hole in the head, but she leant across and opened the car door.

“Danny,” she smiled, “would you like a lift back to Kilmeen?”

It was the last thing that he wanted, but it would be awkward to refuse Kate Phelan, who had always been decent to him. Despite the trouble between the families, Kate had a strange friendship with his grandmother, which had annoyed his father intensely. But because Kate Phelan was the district nurse, he could not prevent her calling to Nana Molly when she was sick. Kate had been there the night Nana died and had been instrumental in getting Kitty out of the house and up to Dublin to Mary. Kate Phelan probably knew more about his family than he did himself.

“I’ll be glad of it,” he lied, slipping into the seat of her small Morris Minor where his legs were too long and his head dented the roof.

“How are you, Danny?” she asked as she eased the small car
away from the kerb and headed down the main street home towards Kilmeen.

“I’m fine,” he told her grimly.

“You didn’t look too fine as you came down the street right now,” she said quietly.

“I suppose,” he agreed.

“Danny, I don’t want to pry, but I saw you come out of the bank. Is that why you’re so miserable looking?” she asked bluntly.

“Well, I don’t want to …” he began, but she cut in before he could go any further.

“Danny, I’ve watched you over the last year and seen what you have done with that farm across the river. You are beginning to work miracles.”

Her sympathetic tone was his undoing.

“Well, the miracles are going to stop,” he blurted out angrily, “because the bloody bank manager won’t give me money to keep going.”

“I thought that might be it,” she said evenly.

“All that hard work,” he raged, “and now I can’t go any further without money. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy the work, because I did. For years, when the old fellow was alive, I had dreamed of pulling the place together. My grandmother had told me about the way it used to be as if she had wanted to put it into my head so that one day I would know what to do when the time came. Now the time has come. I have the freedom now that he is gone. It was great to get started, but now I want to go further,” he finished, thumping his fists together with frustration. He had not meant to tell Kate Phelan all his troubles, but once started he could not stop.

“You know my father ruined all our lives. He couldn’t keep his bloody paws off my sisters, and he beat the spirit out of my mother, and he ruined the farm. Now I want to undo some of that harm. But I can’t do it without money, money, money,” he finished angrily.

“Danny, you can’t carry the burden of your father,” Kate told him gently. “He’s dead, and try to let his sins die with him.”

“Die with him?” he cried. “Every day I walk in the awful shadows that he left behind. We had no childhood. We lived with a brute. You know what my mother is like. She’s afraid to open her mouth because every time she did she got a belting. I want to give her back something that she lost when she came to Furze Hill. Do you know that she was in the same class in school as Martha Phelan and look at the difference. Martha looks like her daughter.”

“None of us look as good as Martha,” Kate assured him. “I am a good few years younger than my sister-in-law, but she looks better than I do.”

He wished that he had the courage to tell her that he preferred the way she looked, small, dark and friendly, unlike the elegant, aloof Martha who always made him feel uncomfortable.

“I know what you are telling me is true,” Kate was continuing, “and …”

“Oh and there was much more than anyone will ever know,” he cut in, “but now we are free of him! Every day I am grateful for that, and the more improvements I do in Furze Hill, the more I wipe him out of there. That day last year when he fell into Yalla Hole was the best day of our lives.”

“Well, it’s best to put it all behind you,” Kate advised gently.

“That’s why I’m working so hard on the farm,” he told her
desperately. “It’s making me feel free of him, apart from the satisfaction of seeing it coming right. That’s why I need the money so badly.”

“Did you ever think of talking to Jack about it?” Kate asked.

“Jack Tobin?” he said in surprise. “Sure, what would Jack know about being short of money?”

“Mossgrove went through tough times when Ned and I were young and my father drank too much. Jack was there and got us through. My mother and himself slaved to keep Mossgrove going then.”

It surprised Danny to hear that they ever had money problems in Mossgrove. To him the Phelans in the farm across the river always seemed to have everything. It was hard to imagine that they had had hard times at any stage.

“So Jack could give you sound advice,” Kate told him, “if you don’t mind discussing your problems with him.”

He wondered what Jack Tobin could tell him that would solve his problem. Advice was not much good when it was money you wanted, but then on the other hand, what had he to lose? After almost sixty years working with the Phelans, Jack must have learned a lot about farming, and if they had been short of money, he knew about this problem too. As well as that, when Kate Phelan was so nice, he would not like to throw her advice back in her face.

“Will I call to Jack some night?” he asked.

“Would you like me to tell him about your situation so that he could have a think about it before you come?” Kate asked.

“That might be a good idea,” he agreed.

“Well, that’s a step in the right direction anyway,” Kate said with relish.

“I don’t seem to have that many directions open to me,” he told her grimly.

Kate dropped him off at the end of the road up to Furze Hill. When her car had disappeared around the corner, he walked across the road to the little stone bridge, leant over the bridge and watched the water. There was a pool of despair inside in him. Over the years whenever he was coming home from the village on his own he leant over this bridge, and sometimes the water had a soothing effect on him. But on bad days when his father had been on a rampage, with his mother showing evidence of his violence, or if he had heard the door of Kitty’s room opening stealthily in the night, he had sometimes looked at the swirling water and thought that to sink down into it would have been a way out of all the terrible things that were happening. But it had always been only a fleeting thought because he knew that to do it would be giving in to his father. He could not let his father win. If he had given in he would not have been there for Nora that night in the wood. His father hated him for that.

Next to his mother he was the prime target for his father’s rages. He would crash his fist into his face shouting, “You’re no Conway.” When he was very young he had taken that as an insult, but as he grew up he felt otherwise. Now he looked down at the calm water swirling out from under the bridge and wondered what it would be like to sink into its swirling current. He would not jump in from this height but climb over the stone wall further down, then walk through the soft high grass and over the bank and into the water. Walk until it was deep enough that he could lie down slowly. It would be such a tranquil ending. Their lives had been so violent that he did not
want a violent end. Just oblivion! He knew that his mother had survived her ordeals by the power of her belief in something above and beyond his understanding. But he knew that hers was a different God from his father’s. When they were young his father had marched them up all up to a front seat in the church every Sunday, and as he grew older and listened to Fr Tim’s sermons on love and kindness, he wondered if his father ever heard them.

As he walked up the hill, he tried not to think about the implications of his visit to the bank. Would Jack be able to advise him in any way? That was the only flicker of light at the end of a dark tunnel. But as well as the money problem, there was the other niggling worry that he had tried not to think about but which the bank man had pulled up front. Ownership of the farm had to be sorted out. His mother and the girls had tried to arrange the signing over after the funeral, but Rory was the one who would not agree. Liam and Matty had not even come home from America for the funeral and were happy to go along with whatever their mother and the girls decided, but Rory wanted to stick in there for everything. Being the eldest he felt that he had prior claim, but he was like the old fellow and was not a farmer or a worker. If Rory muscled in they were all back to square one. After the funeral last year, he had returned to England, but Danny knew that he would be back.

J
ack sat thinking by his cottage fire. After supper he loved to sit smoking his pipe in the quiet kitchen and listen to the clock ticking. He seemed to spend a lot of time reflecting these days. Is it a sign of old age? he wondered. But he did not feel old, although lately when he went to lift a heavy bag of spuds or oats, he had to have a second go at it before he succeeded, but it annoyed him if Peter rushed to help. It was the last straw altogether if Nora thought that she should come to his assistance. He wished that they would not do it even though he knew that it was kindness on their part. Their mother Martha, on the other hand, never interfered, and he did not know whether it was because she did not care or because she understood. With Martha you were never quite sure of anything. Over the years, just when he had decided that he had her measure, she made another move which turned his entire reckoning upside down. Over twenty years ago she had married Ned and moved into Mossgrove. During that time they
had worked together but had not become friends. Maybe he could never quite forgive the anguish that she had caused to Nellie, whom he had loved dearly, and the wedge that she had tried to drive between Ned and his mother. The Phelans were his family, and anything that upset them upset him. He had been with them since he was a lad of fifteen and had worked there with four generations of Phelans. During those years, his roots had grown deep down into the soil of the farm that he always regarded as his homeplace.

He closed his eyes and thought back to the first day that he had gone down to begin work in Mossgrove. That morning he had been as happy as a bird because Billy Phelan and himself had gone to school together and were best friends, so the idea of working together every day was an enjoyable prospect. But the old man, Edward Phelan, was a stern taskmaster, determined to train them well. At first he was so tired at night that he wondered if he would ever be able to keep going, but gradually, almost without realising it, he fell in love with the land. It was a love affair that began for him as a teenager and never wavered but grew deeper with the passing years. For Billy that love affair never began, and from the beginning he battled against the land and his father, and the only good thing that he did for Mossgrove was to marry Nellie, who loved the place like old Edward.

In later years, Ned had grown up and followed in his grandfather’s footsteps. They had great days in Mossgrove then before Ned married Martha and she had moved in and tried to wrong-foot them all. But Nellie would not hear a word against her and bent over backwards not to rock the boat. It had made him sad that after all her years of dedication to Mossgrove she
had finished up like a shadow in her own house. It had annoyed Kate as well, but, of course, by then Kate had left Mossgrove and gone to England where she had trained as a nurse. When she came back as district nurse to Kilmeen, she bought her own house in the village.

But at least at the end of her days Nellie had the joy of her two grandchildren, Peter and Nora. The irony of the whole thing was that even though Martha had resented Nellie, she had now in Nora a daughter who was a carbon copy of Nellie. Life had a tendency to level things out as it went along. But the one thing that he felt it could never level out was Ned’s accident. That had been a crippling blow. He had loved Ned like a son, and his death had been an earthquake in the midst of them all.

But in time things had settled down again, and now Martha and Peter were doing a great job, with occasional fireworks between them. Matt Conway’s death last year had made things easier. He did not like to write off a death as a blessing, but in this case he had to be honest with himself and admit that it was hard to view it as anything else. That fellow had been a thorn in the side of Mossgrove for years. As long as it had been the land and animals that he threatened, it was in some way bearable, but when he had attacked Nora last year it was too much. Matt Conway had been worse than his father Rory, for whom old Edward Phelan had guaranteed the bank loan. But, of course, Conway did the devil when he would not pay it back though he had enough money to do so. Instead he had bought extra fields near the village with the money. That had driven Edward Phelan mad. He had felt betrayed. So he had hauled Rory Conway to court and beaten him and got the two river
fields off him which were judged to be the equivalent of the two that he had bought. By God, but those two fields had caused trouble down through the years!

All water under the bridge now, he thought as he put a few extra sods on the fire. The February evening was turning chilly. He had spent too much time thinking and let the fire run down. Now as the flames licked up between the sods, he stretched out his stockinged feet beside the warmth. Toby shifted himself to become more comfortable and curled up again beside the soft socks and was soon shivering in his sleep as he chased imaginary rabbits. While he had been sitting lost in thought, dusk had crept into the cottage, and now the fire sent leaping shadows dancing up the walls. The lustre jugs on his mother’s dresser glinted gold in the glow of the fire, and the only sound apart from the crackling of the logs was the soothing tick-tock of the clock. The clock was older than himself and had hung above the fire since he was a child. Every Saturday night after the ten o’clock news on Radio Éireann, just as the Hospital Sweepstakes programme began, his mother had wound that clock. She had waited until Bart Bastable began, “Makes no difference where you are, you can wish upon a star,” and then she had reached into the clock for the key. For years after her sudden death, he sometimes thought that he could hear the sound of the clock being wound.

He loved his kitchen with its door opening straight out into the garden and narrow window looking down over Nolan’s fields. At night the lights of Kilmeen twinkled in the distance. At the northern side by the road, he had planted trees giving complete shelter to the cottage. But behind those trees, he kept his hedges cut low so that he could enjoy the rolling
countryside and see the cows in the fields around the cottage. The surrounding view was a wide backdrop to his garden. My garden, he thought, is as far as my eye can see. It was the joy of his life. Mossgrove was the big picture, but his own acre around the cottage was his private little cameo. The patch at the front facing west was his flower garden which he walked through every time he left the cottage, and when he sat inside the window having his meals he could look out into it. In this way he felt that his flowers gave him double delight. But the long acre at the southern side of the cottage was his harvesting area where he grew his own fruits. When his mother Emily was alive, she had made all kinds of preserves, and when she had died he missed the pot of home-made jam on the table. When he had found her old dog-eared Mrs Beeton and had started to make his own, it doubled once again his satisfaction in fruit growing. When he had all his vegetables and potatoes sown in the early spring, it was a great feeling to stand at the top of his acre and admire the long straight drills full of buried promise. That promise was realised later when he eased the spade under his early potato stalks and their pale perfection burst out of the dark brown earth. It was a resurrection! That evening when he put those early potatoes on to boil, he felt a deep gratitude for the plenitude of his little corner of God’s earth.

His bedroom at the back of the cottage faced east. Every morning the early light poured in, and during the summer he could watch the sunrise. After his mother died, he had planned to take down the wall between the two bedrooms so that he would have two east-facing windows, but for years he had put it on the long finger. Then one morning last year Peter had come up from the farm with Davey Shine, and by evening he
had one big room with two windows facing east. It was a source of wonder to him to watch the light changing in the morning sky. These windows also looked out over his haggard where his hens and ducks were housed. At first light the rooster was his alarm clock. The windows of his little parlour faced over the vegetable garden. The parlour was for special occasions, and every Christmas he lit the fire in there. In the small sideboard he kept the set of china that old Mrs Phelan had given his mother when she got married, and in the tall linen press by the fire he kept the tablecloths that his mother had embroidered. At night when her darning was done, she had picked up her embroidery. He knew that of all the things she did with her hands her embroidery gave her the greatest pleasure. In the winter she did it by the fire, but when the light was good in the spring and summer she sat in her rocking chair inside the kitchen window. She loved that view and used to say, “It is good to have your evening window facing west to say goodbye to the day and the morning window facing east to welcome in the new day.” Now he knew what she was talking about. It was one of the pleasures of growing older that your sense of appreciation broadened and deepened. Now he too was glad that the front of the cottage faced west, because every evening he sat inside the kitchen window and watched the sunset, and every evening it was different. Then the cottage gathered itself around him like a soft shawl.

Long ago old Edward Phelan had told him, “Jack lad, always be guided by nature when you plan your building because we can never improve on her. When we work in harmony with her she will repay us, but if we wrong her we will pay a terrible price.” He was right. The old man had so much wisdom and he
had passed it all on. He had been good to him in so many ways. Every spring he was given a calf and a lamb; they were reared in Mossgrove and were known as Jack’s calf or Jack’s lamb, and when they were sold he got the money. As well as that, when the big sow farrowed he got a bonham, and when it was later sold as a fattened pig he got the money too. He had discontinued this practice himself when the going was tough during Billy’s time, but Ned, remembering it since he was a child, began it again when he was in charge. It had finished when Martha took over, but by then he no longer needed it. He had a reserve for a rainy day. He was grateful to the old man for that security.

When his mother had died suddenly when he was eighteen, the old man had stepped in and paid for the funeral and later put up a headstone, and no one knew about it but the two of themselves. Jack had missed his mother dreadfully: his father had died when he was a baby and he was an only child, so when she went he was on his own. The months after her death were raw and hard. Often the old man had called at night and stayed for hours. That support in his bereavement had welded a deep bond between them. Sometimes he found a bunch of flowers on his mother’s grave, and he knew that it was the old man remembering.

Suddenly he felt a soft cheek against his and was startled into wakefulness, causing him to straighten up, moving his feet and disturbing Toby, who looked up at him in annoyance.

“Kate,” he said with delight. “I must have dozed off.”

“You must indeed,” Kate laughed from behind him as she put her hands on his shoulders and began to massage between his shoulder blades.

“Oh, that eases my old bones,” he told her appreciatively.

“How’s the old ticker doing? Are you taking things any easier?” she asked.

“Yerra, I’m great for an ould fella,” he told her.

“Well then,” Kate said as she drew up the rocking chair beside him, “tell me all the news from below.”

“What kind of news?” Jack teased.

“You know that anything that moves in Mossgrove is news for me.”

“Well, all is quiet in Mossgrove. While Martha was in America, Peter got his hands on the control knobs, and I feel that he might keep them there.”

“Is she satisfied with that?”

“I’m not sure. You know with Martha you can never be quite sure of anything. She seems satisfied enough, but that might only mean that she is hatching something that might turn us all upside down when she gets going again,” Jack said.

“Life is never dull around Martha,” Kate mused, “but nothing came of the great romance that we all thought would blossom in New York.”

“Well, we are assuming that it didn’t, but I suppose when he didn’t come back with them that was that. But it didn’t surprise me that it happened that way. Somehow I can never see Martha getting married again. In many ways Martha is a solo operator,” Jack concluded.

“I thought that she might have married him for the money,” Kate said thoughtfully. “I know that sounds terrible, but Martha likes power, and think what she could have done as Mrs Rodney Jackson.”

“Martha would prefer to make her own money,” Jack decided.

“You are probably right,” Kate agreed. “You know Martha better than any of us.”

“Hard to know Martha.”

“Well, I didn’t come to discuss Martha,” Kate told him. “I am here to discuss money problems.”

“Oh,” Jack said in surprise.

“Not my money problems,” Kate assured him.

“Whose then?” Jack looked at her inquiringly.

“Danny Conway’s,” she told him.

“Aha! I thought that he couldn’t keep going much longer without needing hard cash at the rate he was doing improvements,” Jack said thoughtfully, “but how did you get involved in it?”

Kate filled him in, and as he listened he nodded his head slowly and smiled with understanding as she told about the grandmother.

“So old Molly Barry has left her mark,” he said slowly. “The chances were always there that there was bound to be one throwback. And Danny is the one! I thought that it was looking that way. And he has even resurrected the old name Furze Hill. It was always known as Furze Hill when I was a child, and it was a grand place then. The Barrys were fine people.”

“But what happened?” Kate’s voice was full of curiosity.

“Molly Barry married so far beneath her that she could never again straighten up,” Jack told her.

“Good God, Jack, that’s a deadly pronouncement,” Kate told him in a shocked voice.

“Just telling it as it was,” Jack declared. “Rory was a blackguard of the highest order. There is no other way to describe him. Molly was a strong-willed only child who had seldom heard the
word no. She was very spoilt. Conway could be charming, but there was a bad drop in him. They eloped and were married before anyone knew anything about it. I’d say that the day she got married was the last good day that she had. He was no good, and she discovered it in her own time. But I suppose her biggest disappointment was that their son Matt turned out the same as his father. Matt was a bit of an oddball and pushing on in years when he married Brigid, who was far younger; and then he got worse if anything. He treated Brigid like dirt, and then, of course, there was the business with the daughters. So Molly’s hardship did not die with Rory.”