necessary to bolt and saw that all the windows were secure. She banged the hall door behind her and for the last time walked through the avenues and crescents she knew so well, on her way to drop the keys through the estate agents’ letter-box. The cardboard carton containing her father’s work, and her mother’s achievement in completing it, remained in a corner of an empty bedroom. When the house was sold and the particulars completed the estate agents would telephone her in the kitchens at Veitch and Company to point out that this carton had been overlooked. Busy with meat or custard tart, she’d say it didn’t matter, and give the instruction that it should be thrown away.
At fifty-nine, she was on her own, the widow of the O’Neill who had inherited the town’s coal business, who had started, as an enterprise of his own, the toy factory. Her children had flown the nest, her parents and her parents-in-law were no longer alive. Her husband had been in his lifetime a smallish though heavily built man, with wide shoulders and an unrelenting, cropped head, like a battering wedge. His cautious eyes had been set well apart beneath woolly eyebrows; small veins had reddened his nose. He had died at the age of sixty-three, falling down in the big, airy hall of Arcangelo House and afterwards not regaining any real awareness of who he was or what had happened. He had built Arcangelo House after he and his wife had stayed in an Italian hotel of that name when they visited Rome on the occasion of Holy Year.
A beauty once, she was a handsome woman still, tall and imposing in her middle age, with a well-covered look that reflected her liking for sweet things. Her grey hair was shaded towards its original brown, and discreetly burnished; she bought clothes extravagantly. She made up her face with precision, taking her time over it; and attended similarly to her fingernails and, in season, her toenails. She had borne four children in all, two of her three daughters being married now, one in Dublin, the other in Trim; the third was a nurse in Philadelphia. Her son, married also, ran the coal business but was more interested in developing a thousand acres of turf-bog he had bought and which he saw as the beginning of an enterprise that he believed would in time outstrip his father’s and his grandfather’s already established empire. He had inherited their entrepreneur’s spirit, and since he’d first been aware of the role laid down for him he had seen himself as their rival. He was married to Thelma, daughter of a Portarlington publican, a girl whom Mrs O’Neill did not care for, considering her common. Particularly she did not care for the thought that one day Thelma would take her own place in Arcangelo House.
From the garden and the upstairs windows the house offered, over fields, a view of the town that was interrupted only by the toy factory. When the wind blew from the south it carried sounds rendered faint over the distance: the cries of children, a car being started somewhere, the saws in the timber works, the grind of a heavy lorry on Daly’s Hill. And no matter where the wind came from there was always the bell at the convent, and the bell of Our Lady in Glory, and the Protestant bell on Sundays. At night the street lights and the lights of houses were spread out prettily – the town seen at its best, as Mrs O’Neill often reflected. But increasingly in the vacuum that Arcangelo House had become she reflected also that she felt like a pebble in a drum, and said as much to her bridge companions. They urged her to sell it and build a bungalow, but privately she felt that a bungalow was not her style.
When her husband had died Mrs O’Neill had been fifty-six, and although they had regularly disagreed in their thirty-seven years of marriage they had more often been affectionate companions. They had shared two interests in particular: golf and their children. Together they had attended the occasional race-meeting; and while her husband had not played bridge, she in turn had not inclined to join him in the bar of the Commercial Hotel, where he liked to spend an evening or two a week. Every summer they went to Lahinch or Bundoran for the golf, and for several years after Holy Year they had returned to Rome, to the hotel which had given their house its character and its name. Often, on a night which wasn’t a bridge night, Mrs O’Neill wondered about the future and whether she should indeed sell Arcangelo House. When the television came to an end she sat alone in the big open drawing-room, feeling just a little lonely and vaguely wishing that there was another interest in her life besides bridge and golf and her grown-up family. Time had dulled the loss that widowhood had brought, but in no way had it filled the vacuum that was somehow more apparent as time progressed. Once she’d been the centre of things in Arcangelo House, looking after everyone, in charge of other people’s lives. ‘Ah, come on now,’ she’d said a thousand times to the husband who’d died on her. ‘You’re as big a baby as any of them.’ In her days as a beauty she had more or less designed the house herself, standing over MacGuire the architect and endeavouring to picture for him a cool, well-organized hotel in Rome. It still pleased her that she had succeeded so well, not that Arcangelo House was to everyone’s taste, she was well aware of that: it was too different, too modern, in a way too grand. But old Canon Kenny, the most educated man for miles about, said he would wager money that the house was the most interesting to be found outside Dublin. It had been featured in
Occasionally, pursuing such lines of thought, she wondered if she would marry again. She couldn’t help herself; she had no desire to remarry, yet widows did so, it was something that quite often occurred. At the golf club there was Sweetman, a few years younger than herself, a bachelor all his life, pleasantly sociable but bleary when he had drink taken, and according to Dolores Fitzfynne a tightwad. There was Corkin, who was her own age, but it was hard to think of Corkin without thinking also of the Mrs Corkin there had been, a drear of a woman who had played neither golf nor bridge, who hadn’t even had children: Corkin had been infected by her dreariness or else had infected her in the first place. There was no one else, except perhaps Agnew, with his sallow face and his hands, which were sallow also, gesturing in the air, and his faintly high-pitched voice. He was younger than the others, younger than she was herself by seven or eight years, yet she often thought of him in this connection. She thought about him in a different way on the morning her son, Cathal, decreed that the toy factory would have to go. For seventeen years Agnew had been its manager.
In a blue-and-yellow paisley dressing-gown which she’d had all her married life she sat on the edge of her bed, listening to her son on the telephone saying that the people at the toy factory could easily be absorbed elsewhere, that for a long time now he had systematically been running the business down. The toy factory had been profitable only in the immediate postwar years, unable ultimately to sustain the competition which had so ominously built up: long before his death her husband had threatened that it would sooner or later have to close. It was a tiny concern, the loss would not be great.
‘All they’re making now are the fox-terriers,’ Cathal said on the telephone, referring to wooden dogs on wheels.
‘The building?’ she said. ‘Best to have it down, wouldn’t it?’
‘I could bale garden peat there. I’m going into that, you know.’
She did not say anything. She did not trust this dark-faced son she’d given birth to. Ceasing to be a toy factory, the building would be expanded when it became the location for one of his enterprises. There might be noise, even a smell of chemicals. You simply couldn’t guess what would come along in order that more money might be made. And why should it matter since only a lone woman lived near by?
‘We’ll have to see,’ she said.
‘Ah, of course, of course. No hurry at all.’
