Nora Webster (9 page)

William and Peggy were watching her. She had not answered their question about Francie Kavanagh and it was too late to do so now. In all the years, then, she thought, when she was married and having children, Francie was still in Gibney’s and had become the office manager, just as Peggy Gibney, lifting her teacup in a leisurely manner now, had stayed in this house and gone to Rosslare in the summer, and become falsely grand, modelling herself on her mother-in-law or on one of the other merchants’ wives in the town. Nora felt as far away from both of these women as silence was from sound.

William stood up, and a change came into the room. Somehow, he and Peggy managed to suggest that, since the pleasantries were over, Nora was dismissed. When she stood to go, Peggy remained seated; it was clear that she did not feel it was part of her function to show people out of the house. William shook Nora’s hand.

“Will you come and see Thomas on Monday at two? Ask for him in the outer office, yes, the outer office,” he said and then made his way distractedly out of the room. Nora could hear him closing the front door behind him. Then Mrs. Whelan, who had been hovering in the doorway, led Nora into the hallway.

“She’ll be delighted you came over,” she whispered. “You know, she doesn’t see too many people.”

“Is that right?” Nora asked. She was aware again of her dyed hair as Mrs. Whelan examined it with an almost shameless curiosity.

CHAPTER FOUR

S
he told no one about the arrangement that she had made with Thomas Gibney or about the first encounter she was going to have with Francie Kavanagh in more than twenty years. She would tell Jim and Margaret soon, she thought, but was grateful to them when they came to the house next for not asking her how her visit to the Gibneys had gone. When her sister Una asked her about it, she merely said that she had not made up her mind yet.

“I heard in the golf club that you are going back to work in the office there,” Una said.

“The golf club is a great place for information,” Nora replied. “I’d join it myself if I could play, or if I was nosey enough.”

When her other sister, Catherine, wrote to her to say that she should come with the boys to stay with her and her family and that any weekend would suit, Nora replied that she would come the following Friday once the boys had finished school and stay
until Sunday. Before Maurice became sick he had always enjoyed going on a Saturday night to the farmhouse where they lived outside Kilkenny and talking to Catherine’s husband about crops and prices and arguing about politics with him, and hearing all the news about their neighbours. The two couples often went out to a lounge bar, leaving the children to be minded by Fiona or Aine. The boys also seemed to enjoy the change as they were sleeping in strange rooms in a much larger house than they were used to.

It was true, Nora thought, what her mother had said; they all, including her sisters, preferred Maurice to her and listened more to what he said. When the four of them went out for a drink, the two men talked to each other, but Catherine liked to listen to the men, or ask them questions, or raise topics that she knew would interest them. Nora had never minded; she only half listened because she did not have such strong opinions about what was happening in the country as Maurice did. Also Catherine and her husband, Mark, were religious in the same way as Maurice was. They believed in miracles and the power of prayer, but they also liked the way the church was modernising. None of them had ever asked Nora what she thought about this; she was not sure herself, but she knew that she did not think what they thought and that she was in favour of much more modernisation than they were. She did not take things for granted the way they did. About other things too she had her own thoughts, but was happy to stay outside the conversation. She wondered now that Maurice was dead if this would change, if she would have to start saying more.

By the time the boys came home from school she had packed what things they would need into the car. She made an agreement with them that Donal could sit in the front passenger seat as far as Kiltealy and then they would switch and Conor could sit in the front for the rest of the journey.

In the old days, as they passed a particular farm entrance beyond the Milehouse, Maurice would become tense, absorbed in his own thoughts no matter what was being said in the car. They had never discussed this. It was not something he had ever wanted to talk about. She knew about it because she heard Margaret and one of the cousins discussing it at her mother-in-law’s wake. This was the farm from which, at the end of the last century, Maurice’s grandfather had been evicted. When he and his wife and their children had arrived in the town, Maurice’s grandfather had nothing except a bad reputation with the police for his politics and some books and clothes in an old bag. Nora always wondered at how seriously Maurice took this event, or at least how strangely preoccupied he became anytime they drove by this place, as though mentioning it would be a desecration of some solemn piece of past suffering.

Somewhere beyond Tullow, she knew, there was a house where her own mother had been a servant, and where the man of the house, or his brother, or his son, had come too close to her every day and sometimes at night. Her aunt Josie had told her all the details, and how the priest had to be called in the end and how the priest approached the manager of Cullen’s Department Store in Enniscorthy with a special request to help him save the virtue of a servant girl in some remote farmhouse beyond Tullow. Nora remembered that the idea of her mother’s virtue and the priest and the remote house beyond Tullow, and the owner and his brother and his son, had seemed to her unlikely enough to be funny. When Josie had insisted that it was true, Nora had found herself laughing even more until Josie warned her never to tell anyone else the story, but, if she did, then not to tell them that she laughed at it. People would not think well of her, Josie said, if they knew she thought such things were funny.

The road was narrow and Nora drove with care. These old stories, she thought, would die out soon. Soon no one would even remember or care about an eviction long ago. Maurice’s grandfather and grandmother were buried in an unmarked grave in the cemetery; no one would ever know who they were or had been. And she supposed that neither of her sisters knew about the house beyond Tullow and her mother there and those men. They were likely not even aware that their mother had worked as a servant in the time between leaving her father’s house and coming to work in Cullen’s in Enniscorthy.

Beyond Kiltealy, when Conor was in the front seat, he told her stories about school and classmates and teachers. He seemed to be looking forward to spending time with his cousins and seeing the farm.

“Is Auntie Catherine’s house haunted?” he asked.

“No, Conor, it’s just an old house and bigger than ours but it’s not haunted.”

“But a lot of people died in it?”

“I don’t know.”

“But how would a house get haunted?” Conor asked.

“You know, I think that’s all rubbish about haunted houses.”

“Phelan’s on the Back Road is haunted. Joe Devereux saw a man outside it one night and he had no face. He was lighting a cigarette but he had no face.”

“But I’d say that was just the shadows,” she said. “If Joe had a flashlight he would have seen the man’s face perfectly.”

“That’s why we all used to walk on the other side of the road on the way home from the Presentation Convent,” Conor continued.

“Well, at least you don’t have to go there anymore.”

“Everyone knows th-th-there’s a ghost there,” Donal said from the back seat.

“Well, I never heard of it,” she replied.

Although the boys said nothing for a while, she knew as she drove through Borris that it was still on their minds.

“I think all that stuff about ghosts is nonsense,” she said.

“But there must have been plenty of people who died in Auntie Catherine’s house. I mean in the rooms upstairs,” Conor continued.

“But there are no such things as ghosts,” she said.

“What about the Holy G-ghost?” Donal asked.

“Donal, you know that’s different.”

“I wouldn’t go upstairs in Auntie Catherine’s house on my own, all the same,” Conor said. “Even during the day I wouldn’t go up there.”

By the time they arrived they had been silent for some time. She had tried to change the subject, but felt that she failed to stop them thinking about ghosts and haunted houses. These narrow roads, she thought, and the sheer isolation of places along them, the lanes leading for miles to lonely farmhouses that could be seen from nowhere, the untidy ditches and the trees that overhung the road, all of this lent itself to the idea of ghosts and sounds in the night. When Catherine first got married, Nora remembered, she talked about a house owned by a cousin of Mark’s, an old place covered in ivy, where the furniture could move or a door open for no reason. Catherine and Mark spoke about it in detail, without any doubt that it was true. Nora wondered if it had something to do with a will, or old money, or a fight, or someone being put out of the house who had a right to be there. In any case, she hoped that neither of them would mention this to the boys over the weekend.

One of the things about Catherine was that she hardly ever
sat down. Their mother, Nora remembered, was the same, always bustling about. Nora and Una called it “foostering.” It was worse because their mother disapproved of women sitting down when there was still work to do. All her married life, Nora had made sure that she stayed sitting down for as long as possible each evening once the washing-up after tea had been completed; she tried to make sure that nothing would cause her to stand up again and spend time in the kitchen except perhaps the boiling of a kettle to make a cup of tea for her and for Maurice, or the preparing of a hot water bottle in the winter.

As soon as she carried her bag to the room she had been allocated, the same room where she and Maurice had always stayed, she felt an overwhelming urge not to leave again, to send down word that she was not well and needed to rest. The expression on Catherine’s face when she saw her hair had not helped; the fact that she had not spoken immediately meant that she was saving it up for later, and she would, Nora was sure, have a great deal to say.

Mark’s farm was large; Nora did not know how many acres he had only because Catherine had told no one on her side of the family. This meant that he had more land than Catherine wanted to admit. If the farm had been small, then Catherine would have enjoyed complaining about that. All her life she had bought clothes on sale and she did not change this when she married. But if it was anything other than clothes now, especially if it was something for the house, she spent real money. The phrase of Mark’s that Nora and Maurice had enjoyed most was “a thing is only dear the day you buy it.” Such a concept was entirely foreign to both of them.

This meant that there were two brand-new cars in the drive, and there was always new furniture, or new things for the kitchen, bought in Brown Thomas or Switzer’s in Dublin. Nora was sure
that Catherine had her hair done in Dublin, or somewhere special in Kilkenny that catered to rich farmers’ wives. The idea of letting Bernie Prendergast in Enniscorthy dye your hair was something that would appal Catherine.

If Maurice were with her, she thought, then the focus of attention would be on him, and he would manage with ease and slow charm. As she walked down the well-carpeted stairs, taking in the expensive new wallpaper and the newly framed prints that she knew had belonged to Mark’s mother, she realised that while it might seem as though she was the focus of attention, in fact she was an object of pity. Catherine and Mark would be glad to have her and the boys this weekend, and they would be kind and hospitable, but they would also be glad when she was gone and they had done their duty. Once she began working in Gibney’s, she thought, she would use that as an excuse not to come here for a while again.

Donal and Conor always took time to get used to the farm. There were things they liked. If there was any reason to go to the orchard with their cousins, they would agree as long as no one wanted them to go near any nettles. And there was a manual pump that brought spring water to the house that had to be pulled back and forth, and they both enjoyed playing with this. But if anything involved putting on boots and old clothes and going near farm animals, or going into the milking parlour or up to the haggard, where there was cow dung, they would respond suspiciously. They would watch and wait, checking if they might be allowed to sit with the adults instead and listen to the conversation.

Catherine, Nora discovered, when she came into the kitchen, had bought a new washing machine; it had been delivered from Dublin the previous day and Catherine had the manual on the kitchen table in front of her.

“There’s a drier as well,” she said, “but we haven’t even unpacked that. I thought I’d concentrate on getting the washing machine to work first. I should have asked the man who came to do the plumbing. I thought once he was finished it would work straight away. There’s a friend of mine, Dilly Halpin, and she has one, and when I rang her she told me she nearly had to get a university degree before she could follow the instructions.”

She made space for Nora at the table as Donal and Conor and two of their cousins looked on.

“It would be just my luck now if there’s something wrong with it, and it has to go all the way back. The thing is I can’t even get it to start.”

She pointed to a number of diagrams.

“You see, it has a lot of different ways of washing, for sheets and tablecloths, and then for shirts and blouses, and then for more delicate fabrics. They’re in German and French as well as English, the instructions, but maybe it’s a problem with the translation and it might be clearer in some other language.”

Nora wondered if Catherine and her family had already had their tea. It was after six now and Catherine agreed that the children could watch cartoons on the television and whatever children’s programmes were on afterwards. But there was no mention of tea nor of food. Nora knew that the boys would be hungry soon and wondered if Catherine believed that they had eaten before they set out. What was strange, she noticed, was that Catherine did not give her any opportunity to mention food; instead she spoke to her as though she were not really there.

Once she noticed this, she found that she could notice nothing else. Catherine was not talking to herself, she was fully aware that her sister was in the room, but she had created an atmosphere in
which Nora could have nothing to say. If she had done this deliberately, Nora felt, then it would not work, it could be easily broken. But it seemed to come naturally to Catherine. It was something she had been aware of before, but now, with her sister, it was more intense. It was solid, as the outer wall of a vault is solid, built to withstand rather than support. Nora felt herself sitting in some airless space with her sister as Catherine chattered about her washing machine and her drier and then went to the phone in the hall and called Dilly Halpin, who agreed to come over and see if she could assist Catherine in setting up the new machine.