In the house she put on her farm clothes, a brown overall and wellington boots. She collected the milk buckets and the cans from the dairy and scoured them at the kitchen sink. She hosed the dairy, then brushed the surplus of water into the shallow drain. She laid the buckets and the cans, the scoops and measures, on the long concrete shelf, each in its own position, as she’d once been shown. She couldn’t do anything when first she’d come: she couldn’t tell the breeds of sheep; she’d never collected eggs or cleaned a henhouse, or tethered a goat. She hadn’t known a man before, except for priests and a few workmen and delivery men, and then only knowing them to see, hardly more than that. The first time she’d seen shaving soap turning into a lather that the razor scraped away she’d been astonished. She’d never sat down opposite a man across a table from her. But before she became a wife, when she was still a servant, she was used to everything, except the sharing of a bed.
In the crab-apple orchard the hens ran freely, a few of them clustered beneath the trees, a black one pecking near a tractor tyre that had been split to make a feeder for lambs but had somehow found a place there. On the dry, hard ground there was hardly a blade of grass left. When winter came, grass would grow again; it always did. Fourteen more eggs had been laid and she collected them in the cracked brown bowl that had become part of her daily existence. Closing the gate again when she left the crab-apple orchard, she slipped the loop of chain over the gate-post. He had a way of hesitating before he spoke, of looking away for a moment and then looking back. He had a way of holding a cigarette. When he’d offered her one he’d tapped one out of the packet for himself and hadn’t lit it. The rest of the time he was with her he’d held it, unlit, between his fingers.
Slowly, both hands clasped round the brown egg-bowl, she returned to the house. In the kitchen she mixed Kia-Ora Orange with water as cold as it would come, filling a plastic bottle to the brim. She scraped potatoes and cut up a cabbage before she set off to the hillside land with her husband’s drink.
It was the most distant part of the farm, twenty-two acres on the eastern slope and on the plateau of the unnamed hill, land separated from the rest of the farm-holding by coppices, through which the right-of-way track became an undergrowth, making it difficult for the tractor. He had been cutting it back, she noticed when she reached it, the summer shoots still scattered on the ground, overhead branches sawn. It wasn’t worth it to possess a hedge-cutter, he maintained, with only a few hedges and this half-mile of advancing growth to contend with. On the way back from the top field he would tidy it up as he went; she remembered that from previous summers, piles of logs no more than an inch or so in diameter, and the place where he burnt the brushwood. It wasn’t his obligation to keep the track clear; he did it to avoid an argument with Gahagan, who neglected it. Years ago, birch and ash had become as high as forest trees.
She tried to think about all that, to see before she came to it another blackened area, a different place from last time, his way of keeping the track clear. Badgers had been here once and he had shown her their setts. It was easier not to feel a stranger to herself here, to tell herself that she had allowed a convent-child’s make-belief to have its way with her, to be ashamed and know it was right to be ashamed. It was easier because everything around her made sense in a way she understood. The confusion of thoughts that did not feel her own made no sense at all.
She took the short-cut from the boreen along one side of the small pasture, and passed into the gloom of the wood. He would try to buy the wood, her husband said, if ever it came up for sale, and she’d always hoped it would. Among the trees there was a stillness, without birds, rarely visited by the foxes which went to ground in the banks on either side of the track that petered out when the slope of the hill began. God’s peace they would have called it at Cloonhill, Sister Clare and Sister Ambrose, and the Reverend Mother, who came out once in a while from Templeross. God was never not there for you, wherever you were, however you were. Every minute of your day, every minute of your life. There for your comfort, there to lift from you the awful burden of your sins. Only confess, only speak to God with contrition in your heart: God asked no more than that.
Unhurried in the wood, not wanting to hurry, Ellie reached out for these crowding memories. Cloonhill was gone now, closed down three years ago, the nuns gone back to the convent in Templeross. But you didn’t lose touch with a place when it wasn’t there any more; you didn’t lose touch with yourself as you were when you were part of it, with your childhood, with your simplicity then. That had been said too, still was: Sister Ambrose sent a Christmas card and always put a letter in.
Sunshine began again, flickering through the trees. The two thick banks that protected the foxes’ lairs were tightly grassed, grazed by some creature, hardly enough nourishment for more than one; the buttercups’ long tendrils had been chopped away where the banks weren’t there any more. The tractor tyres left no mark here; the gate to the hillside fields was open. She stood still for a moment, praying for the courage to confess, pleading for protection against her thoughts; and walking on, she remembered how the old priest at Templeross used to rap on the grille and tell you to speak up.
From where she was the farmhouse, far down below, seemed remote, a place by itself with its yard and cluster of barns. People didn’t come much to the house except for eggs or buttermilk, and her in-laws from Shinrone once a year, on a Sunday afternoon. You couldn’t count the postman or the insurance man. You couldn’t count the artificial-insemination man, or the man to read the meter. Nothing went by on the road except the Corrigans’ tractor, or Gahagan looking for an animal that had strayed. ‘Quiet,’ they had said at Cloonhill, telling her about it. ‘A quiet place.’ She might be asked to wear a uniform, they had said, but that had never been a requirement.
‘Ah, thanks,’ her husband said, when she was near enough to hear, and reached out for the drink when she was closer. No more than a bit of tidying up, he said; a couple of places where the wire was gone, nothing like by the river. These few weeks of the year he came up every day to turn the grass as soon as he’d cut it. Since he was there, he repaired the fences at the top.
‘Thanks,’ he said again, keeping the bottle by him when he returned to his task, tightening and stapling, weaving in lengths of wire with pliers. Having greeted her, the two sheepdogs slipped back to where they’d chosen to lie.
‘Mrs Hadden came,’ she said.
Dillahan worked for another couple of hours and on the way back looked for Gahagan. He had already made an offer for the field he was after and Gahagan had said he’d think about it. But the pick-up wasn’t in the yard and there was no response when he called out. Widowed for fifteen years, Gahagan lived alone, without help on the farm, and was often difficult to find.
Dillahan went on. He stopped to open a gate and drop the dogs off. Every evening now they drove in the cows on their own.
7
In the pantry he had converted to a darkroom Florian Kilderry developed the Rathmoye photographs and took them to the drawing-room, empty but for a trestle-table and the radiogram no one had wanted to buy when his father tried to sell it. Attached with drawing-pins to the walls were watercolour sketches that had been there for years: studies of a peregrine in flight, a picnic on a strand with people bathing, tennis in a garden. Close together, two actors conversed in an empty theatre. The leaves of a tulip tree half obscured the blue facade of a house; a girl gathered washing from a clothes line. At a street corner the three-card trick was played on an opened-out umbrella.
The watercolours were neither as fresh nor as bright as once they’d been. Their paper had curled, was
