House of Memories (3 page)

“But how come old Rory Conway was so friendly with grandfather if he was that bad?” Kate asked in a puzzled voice.

“Could never understand it,” Jack told her. “They went to school together, and I think that your grandfather always thought that he could straighten him out. Then he fixed the loan because he did not want to see Furze Hill go to the wall, on account of Molly. The Barrys were the old stock, and your grandfather had great time for them, and he wanted to do everything he could for Molly.”

“Well, Jack, this is all news to me,” Kate exclaimed. “You live in a place all your life and you think that you know all that there is to know about the people, and then you come on an unopened chapter.”

“Life is full of unread chapters, Kate,” Jack smiled. They sat quietly together, both occupied with their own thought, and the logs shifted in the fire, sending out a spray of sparks that caused Toby to draw back hurriedly. He looked around, unsure of the safety of the stone floor, and jumped into Jack’s lap where he settled down comfortably. Jack rubbed behind his
brown ears, thinking that it was time to put on the kettle, but Kate broke into his thoughts.

“And while we are at it now, Jack, what is the story of that old stone house beyond Conway’s own house?”

“That was more of Rory Conway’s madness. He got the daft notion that it would be cheaper to live in a smaller house. The rates were high on Furze Hill and would be less on a smaller house, so he stripped the slates off that fine old house and moved into that other poke of a place. He was friendly with your grandfather then — that was before the split — and the old man made him sheet it afterwards, so at least that kept it from the weather.”

“And they never used it since?” Kate asked.

“No. Rory Conway locked it and boarded up the windows, and over the years it got buried in furze bushes and trees. The place is not called Furze Hill for nothing, you know. By then, of course, Molly and himself were having blue murder, so he was probably doing it to spite her as well. She had loved that old house. It was her childhood home, and I suppose we all love our childhood home.”

“Not I’d say if you were one of the present generation of Conways,” Kate told him.

“No, I suppose not,” Jack agreed evenly.

“I’ve always felt sorry for the young Conways. Their father gave them a terrible life, and only for old Molly it would have been worse. Even when she was dying she was looking out for them. I had great time for her.”

“She was a real Barry,” Jack said, “and it was hard to get to the end of the Barrys. She probably sized up Matt’s clutch and decided which had the most Barry blood in them and primed
Danny to be ready if the tide ever turned in his direction.”

Then Kate took him by surprise: “Jack, did you ever think that there was something strange about the way Matt Conway died?” she asked searchingly.

“I did,” he admitted reluctantly.

“Do you think that Martha had something to do with it?” she persisted.

“She could have,” he told her slowly, remembering the morning beside Yalla Hole, “and I think that Danny might have seen more than was good for him.”

“How do you mean?” Kate demanded.

“There are certain things in life, Kate, that are best put behind us, especially when I’m only putting two and two together and not sure of anything; so we’ll let it at that now.”

Looking into a fire, Jack thought, is a great place to think. You can see the future take shape between the sods and the logs. He knew that Kate was thinking back over all that they had talked about, but he was thinking ahead to the future of Furze Hill. Despite all the bitterness between himself and Rory Conway, old man Phelan had mourned the condition of the house and farm across the river. He had hated to see Molly’s life ruined and good land neglected.

“So where do I come in to all this?” he asked Kate.

“Well, Jack, this is your chance to find out if Molly Barry’s instincts were right,” Kate told him with a smile.

“Doesn’t this put me in a strange situation now,” Jack mused. “I’ve spent my entire life struggling against the Conways, and here I am now being asked to get into their boat and start rowing with them. I suppose the strangest thing of all is that I’m being asked by a Phelan.”

“What did you think of Molly Barry, or Molly Conway as I always thought of her, but after this conversation I feel that she was more Barry than Conway,” Kate said.

“You forget, Kate, that she was a lot older than me, but my mother and herself had been good friends, and I know that your grandfather had great respect for her. Any time that I met her, I’ll have to say that I was always impressed by her. Even though she saw hard times and had come down in the world, she never lost her sense of dignity and pride.”

“Never forgot that she was one of the Barrys of Furze Hill,” Kate smiled.

“Maybe that,” Jack agreed, “because despite everything there was always a bit of grandeur about her. Rory tried to drag her into the gutter, but she never quite joined him there.”

“You know, Jack, when I was nursing her before she died, I must say that I found her a formidable old lady. But there was something admirable about her, too. One thing that sticks in my mind is that she was always hinting that she knew more about us than she was ever prepared to say.”

“She probably did too, because she was around for a long time, longer than any of us, and she had a mighty memory,” Jack told her. “Anyone around here who wanted to check back on anything asked Molly Barry, and she was always right. She knew everything about everyone, and there was a rumour that she kept a diary. But she was a bit of a closed book.”

“And now all her secrets are gone with her,” Kate concluded.

“Secrets have a way of lurking in dark corners,” Jack told her.

Later, when Kate had gone home, Jack walked across the kitchen into the small parlour. He stood inside the window and
looked across the valley at Furze Hill. In the bright moonlight, the sagging rusty roof of the barn was a foxy patch in the surrounding green. Kate’s request had taken him by surprise. The possibility of himself getting involved with Furze Hill was an unexpected turn of events. He smiled to think that Molly Barry was still shaking the dice. She had once said to him, “Remember, Jack Tobin, that you owe the Phelans nothing.” At the time he did not know what she was talking about, but years later he understood.

K
ATE PUT THE
saucepan of strained potatoes to the back of the cooker. Her kitchen was small, and she had painted it a rich yellow to brighten up the quarry-tiled floor. She took a tea towel from a little press beside the Aga and covered the potatoes. They had burst their creamy jackets, and their floury insides smiled out at her. Jack grew great potatoes. She could hear his voice now: “Fine plury spuds breaking their hearts laughing.” Every first Saturday on his way through the village to confession, he brought her a bag of potatoes, vegetables and home-made jams. Over the years he had taken the place of the father who had died when she was young, and in more recent years even filled the gap left by Nellie, and no one else understood her sense of loss after Ned as well as Jack.

She checked the meat in the top oven and put the potatoes and vegetables into the bottom one to keep warm. Her Aga was very kind to dinners that had to be kept warm for long periods, which often happened in her job and with David, who could be
kept late at school or delayed after a match. She took the dishes off the dresser and put one of Emily’s embroidered cloths on the table. Jack had given her some of his mother’s cloths, and she used them constantly because he had advised, “Use them, Kate girlie; no good in keeping them for your wake.” He wanted her to enjoy and appreciate the long hours that his mother had put into them and keep alive the memory of the woman whose photograph was hanging over the fireplace in his parlour, the woman whose faded face was smiling but full of sadness. Kate had often looked at the photograph and wondered about her sad eyes. Once as a little girl she had asked Jack about the pretty lady in the photograph and he told her quietly, “That lady talked very little about herself.” After that she asked no more. If Jack wanted you to know something he told you; otherwise you did not ask questions.

She respected everything about Jack, especially his sense of decency and integrity and his unlimited kindness. When she had mentioned, after buying this house, that she wished she had a dresser like the one in Mossgrove, Jack had turned up six months later with a smaller replica that fitted perfectly into her kitchen. She had never known until then that he had made the original with her grandfather, old Edward Phelan, and had not forgotten how to carve every minute detail. Later he had made her kitchen table. David and herself spent a lot of time in their kitchen, and she had put a comfortable sofa under the sloping ceiling by the stairs where she sometimes slept if she came back late after a night call and did not want to wake David. Sometimes on a chilly evening if he came home tired from school, he took a short catnap before dinner. Remembering the great use that Ned and herself as children had made out
of the old one in Mossgrove, she had bought the sofa thinking that it would be lovely too for her children. But unfortunately that had not happened.

She walked over to the back door and looked out into her back garden where Jack and herself had spent many evenings digging and planting. When she had bought this house after coming back to Kilmeen, the garden was a jungle, but to Jack it was a challenge. He had rubbed his hands in gleeful anticipation when he saw it.

“Kate girleen, we can do great things out here.”

They had shared the joy of creating a little haven where she went if she came home tired from work. Sometimes in her job she had to deal with deaths and tragedies in her patients’ lives, and when she had comforted them she herself needed a quiet place to recover. She recalled a practical sister on the ward in her training hospital in London telling her, “Nurse Phelan, you can’t die with every patient.” That sister had thought that she was too soft to be a good nurse and needed to toughen up a bit, but it was sometimes difficult to stand back from the patients’ problems, so this garden was her healing place. David was not a gardener, but when he came home from school drained after a day’s teaching, she smiled as he headed out into the garden to sit under the old beech tree. They were lucky that someone had planted that tree long before she bought the house. Sometimes when she sat under its sweeping branches, she thought kindly of the person who had planted it and felt that she was sheltering beneath the leaves of their foresight. If she joined David there, he smiled and said, “This place clears my head.” He put all his energy and dedication into the school that he had set up, and it gave him immense satisfaction when his students did well. It
was the first secondary school in the parish, and it was giving the children a chance of education and a job at home instead of taking the boat, as Jack called it.

She would be for ever grateful to Rodney Jackson, who had given his aunts’ old home to house the school, making it possible for David to stay in Kilmeen. The rent that he was paying was nominal, not alone because Rodney was extremely wealthy but because he had a deep interest in Kilmeen, where he had come on holidays to his aunts while growing up in New York. He had also helped Martha’s brother Mark, who had been painting since childhood. They had all taken his talent for granted until Rodney Jackson had seen his possibilities and mounted an exhibition of his pictures in New York, where he had sold out. Now commissions were coming in to Mark’s home, where his mother Agnes was constantly amazed at the prices that Rodney insisted that Mark should charge. Martha, who had never been impressed by her brother’s ability to do anything right, was slightly cynical of his success as an artist. But it had taken them all by surprise the previous summer when Rodney had shown a sudden interest in Martha and invited herself and Nora to attend Mark’s opening in New York. Kate had been filled with curiosity as to how things would develop between them, but Martha and Nora had come home and Rodney had remained on in New York, so she assumed that Martha had declined his proposal. But there was no way that she could ask Martha.

As Kate dished up the dinner she heard the front door bang. She knew that it could not be David, who always moved quietly, and she smiled when she heard something clatter on to the tiled floor of the hall and Fr Tim Brady burst into the kitchen with pages dropping from an overfull folder. Beneath an unruly
mop of black hair, his thin, boyish face smiled ruefully at her. Sometimes when he was training the team he was mistaken for one of them.

“I thought it might be you,” she told him.

“How did you know?” he asked breathlessly.

“You always move as if you are about to catch the last train out of town,” she told him. “And sometime your luggage is not quite going to make it,” she added pointing to the pages on the floor.

“Never!” he protested. “I always thought that I was the quiet, silent type.”

“Rather the direct opposite,” she told him, “a volcanic whirlwind of legs, hands and hair flying in all directions.”

“You make me sound like a lunatic,” he protested.

“But a nice one,” she told him. “Sit down there now and have dinner with us to see if I can put a bit of fat on those skinny bones.”

“Your choice of words, Kate, leaves a lot to be desired,” he laughed, sliding into a chair across the table from her, “and somehow I think it is better that the more tactful David rather than you is in charge of our local corner of education. You might not be the best in dealing with a doting mammy who thinks that she is rearing a potential Einstein. You lack a certain delicacy in your choice of delivery, whereas David would soothe her down and she would go home knowing the truth but not blaming him that her son is not a genius.”

“Yes, my darling husband has the master’s touch with people, and I’m sure that a lot of the mothers feel sorry for him, married to that dark, stubborn Phelan one.”

“Ah, but Kate, when they get a pain they need you. Did you
ever consider that we could run this parish between the three of us. You could deliver them, David could educate them, and I could bury them.”

“You should tell Fr Burke,” she told him.

“We’d let that to David. The PP is very impressed with him, but that could be partly because he is the doctor’s son and the PP is a bit of a snob. It goes against the grain with him that his curate was reared in a pub.”

“I’m sure that he finds you a great trial, but then he does not love me either since that run-in we had about the trees around the church … Oh, that’s David now,” she finished.

“I didn’t hear a thing,” Fr Tim decided, having listened.

“No, David is the quiet type,” Kate told him.

“Hello, quiet man,” he called out.

Kate smiled, and she thought how different these two men were and yet what a strong friendship had developed between them. Fr Tim was a great support to David, giving all his free time to training the school teams. He was good with the young because he had a great zest for life. Kate felt that the older people in the parish did not appreciate him fully because he lacked a certain gravitas. But as she had stood with him by the bedsides of the sick and dying, she had discovered that he had unplumbed depths of spirituality. There he was a different person from the laughing, vivacious tearaway who outran the footballers up and down the playing field. Any family who had him with them for a death and bereavement saw the other side of him, and they never forgot his goodness.

As David came into the room with a stack of copybooks under his arm, Kate felt the usual warm glow enfold her. She was always more complete in his loving presence. Now his dark
eyes were full of amusement as he viewed Fr Tim and herself.

“What’s all this about the quiet man?”

“Your wife has been busy undermining my self-confidence by telling me what a big-mouthed, long-legged, awkward galoot I am and what a nice, quiet, gentle soul you are,” Fr Tim told him.

“Well, isn’t it nice to be appreciated,” David said, ruffling Kate’s hair as he passed behind her chair.

“You must be the most appreciated man in the parish,” Fr Tim told him, “all the mothers thinking that you’re wonderful and the leaving cert girls hanging off your every word.”

“Oh, the first years might be impressed by me, but by the time they come to leaving cert they have gone off me because by then they have discovered that I’m a slave driver,” David told him, “but it’s you, Tim, that the leaving certs girls think is great.”

“Do you think that it has anything to do with my half-starved look?” he joked.

“Not really; just a case of any half-respectable-looking male under forty and teenagers full of awakening hormones,” David said ruefully as he joined them at the table. “But enough of that rubbish. Have you the Kilmeen team made out for Sunday or did you forget?”

“Forget! You know that I never forget anything,” he protested much to their amusement. “It’s right here, boss,” he said, bringing a page out of his folder on the floor and waving it in front of David, who took it and studied the list.

“I see that you have Danny Conway in goal again,” David said thoughtfully.

“Why, what’s wrong with that?”

“He nearly fell asleep there last Sunday. Only for Davey
Shine we were wiped out,” David said ruefully.

“I suppose he wasn’t up to his usual, but then Shiner, as the lads call him, covered well.”

“But Shiner should not have to be carrying Danny. You can’t win matches with fellows trying to cover for each other,” David protested.

“Yes, but Shiner won’t play as well in front of any other goalie, because himself and Danny understand each other and can anticipate each other’s thinking.”

“I think that Danny’s lapse could be temporary,” Kate cut in. The two men looked at her in surprise. In their world of GAA, she seldom voiced an opinion.

“How do you know?” Fr Tim asked with surprise.

“Well, it’s a long story. Have you both the time to listen?” she asked them.

“As long as it takes,” Fr Tim told her. “Don’t you know that the GAA is the second religion in Kilmeen, so it’s my second job. We’re all ears.”

When she had finished there was silence for a moment as they digested the story. “What will Jack be able to do for him?” Fr Tim wondered.

“Kate thinks that Jack can raise the dead,” David smiled.

“Well, he raised Mossgrove from the dead when Dad died,” Kate told them. “I know that money is all-important to Danny now, but an experienced head is a great thing in farming and could spare him a lot of money in the long run.”

“Somehow I don’t think that it’s the long run that Danny is worried about right now,” Fr Tim said. “Has he anyone to help him at the moment?”

“As far as I know, Davey Shine goes over every evening when
he is finished in Mossgrove. Danny didn’t tell me that, but I heard Martha complaining about it.”

“How did she know, because I doubt that Shiner told her?” Fr Tim asked.

“She probably saw him across the fields. You can see Furze Hill quite clearly from Mossgrove, and much doesn’t go on unknown to Martha,” Kate told him.

“That’s typical of Shiner now to help out; he has a great heart. Of course, himself and Danny always stuck together. I remember him the time of Matt Conway’s funeral; he was never far away from Danny,” Fr Tim said.

“It’s Rory that I’d be worried about,” David broke in. “When we had him playing with us he was nothing but trouble. Money could solve the first problem, but there are some problems that nothing can solve, and Rory I think could be one of them.”

“We’ll have to wait and see how it all turns out,” Kate concluded, “but I thought that I’d fill you in so that you’d understand Danny, and maybe you might get a chance to help in some way.”

“A rescue team?” Fr Tim smiled.

“More than Danny needs a rescue team,” David told him.

“How come?”

“The Kilmeen club is going to grind to a halt without funds, and we can’t expect the likes of Danny and others like him who have nothing to put on the wind to buy jerseys and hurleys.”

“You’re right there,” Fr Tim agreed.

“Well, how do we make money?” David asked him.

“You’re asking the wrong man,” Fr Tim told him. “My brothers got all the money brains in our family. I was the
academic.”