Woman of the House

by Taylor, Alice

  As she cycled along she was so intent on her thoughts that she had sped past Sarah Jones’ cottage before she realised that Sarah was standing at the gate and looking after her in surprise. Kate braked and swung around, coming to a stop with a scatter of gravel.

  “Sorry, Sarah,” she said, “I almost didn’t see you. I was away in a world of my own.”

  “Not surprising,” Sarah said sympathetically, putting an arm around her shoulders and giving her a soft kiss on the cheek.

  “It’s so good to see you, Sarah,” Kate told her, smiling into the caring face of the little woman who had been her mother’s best friend.

  “How are they below?” Sarah asked, nodding in the direction of the farm.

  “Not bad, I suppose,” Kate answered slowly, “but it’s going to take a long time.”

  “It’s such a relief to Jack to have you back,” Sarah said; “he’s nearly gone demented and poor Agnes Lehane is at her wits’ end over Martha taking to the bed and leaving the children to their own devices.”

  “Well, at least she’s out of the bed now anyway,” Kate told her.

  “And how are you yourself?” Sarah asked kindly.

  “Oh, Sarah, it’s such a relief to be back. I miss him around every corner here, but at least it’s real. Away I felt as if I was living in an artificial bubble.”

  “It’s easier to grieve in you own place,” Sarah said; “it’s more natural somehow. How was the course?”

  “You’d have enjoyed it,” Kate told her; “you could probably have taught them a thing or two with all your experience.”

  “Well, I suppose you learn something about people in thirty years of delivering their babies and laying out their dead,” Sarah admitted.

  “Probably a lot more than I’ll ever know.”

  “Over the years it will come to you too,” Sarah assured her. “In our job you see people stripped of pretence. I’ve seen family funerals where all the hidden cracks opened up and deep-rooted emotions buried for years floated to the surface.”

  “Death and grief throw normal life off the tracks, don’t they,” Kate said thoughtfully. “You’re sort of swimming in uncharted emotional waters and the people around you are doing the same thing.”

  “Something like that,” Sarah agreed, “but I best not be delaying you, you probably have calls to make.”

  “Yes,” Kate said, “I’m going back to Conways’ now.”

  “That should be interesting,” Sarah said evenly.

  “I’ve never been there before,” Kate told her, “but you must have often been called.”

  “Only when they had no other choice,” Sarah told her. “The Conways like to sort out their own problems. That Matt Conway is a strange man.”

  “It’s his mother that I’m calling to see – she cut her leg.”

  “Old Molly is getting on a bit,” Sarah mused, “and she’s not the worst of them. My guess is that they didn’t call the doctor until blood poisoning was threatening.”

  “That’s exactly what Doc Twomey said.”

  “Some things never change. But I won’t delay you any more now, and Kate – it’s such a lovely spring day – try to look around you as you cycle along. No good in having your head down, it will only give you backache.”

  “Right, Sarah,” Kate agreed.

  As she cycled along she took Sarah’s advice. Sarah had been such a staunch friend of Nellie’s. She probably knows more about my family than myself, Kate thought, but unlike Betty Nolan, Sarah was one to keep her opinions to herself.

  She cycled slowly, taking in her surroundings, and her mood lightened a little. She noticed the soft green shoots ready to uncurl on the beech trees that Ned had planted along the boundary ditch. He would never see them fully grown now, but they would reach their full height in Peter’s lifetime. Ned had always said that you planted trees for future generations.

  She came off her bike and stood looking up at the tall young trees and felt that the spirit of Ned was in them. She climbed up on to the ditch and ran her fingers over the cool, smooth bark. From this vantage point she could see along the entire valley. She remembered Mark once telling her that they lived in a horseshoe-shaped valley. He was right. The road curved left above at the school and it ran parallel at the opposite side of the valley, so the houses at both sides looked across at each other with the river in between. He had pointed out that there were seven nails in a horseshoe and there were seven houses in the valley. Starting at the end of the hill there was Nolans’, Jack’s, Mossgrove, and Sarah Jones’ at one side. Then above at the turn stood the school, to match the clip of the horseshoe, and across the river was Shines’, Lehanes’ and Conways’. The full horseshoe! Mark had got his perspective when he was painting a picture of the valley. Since he had told her that she now saw it through his eyes.

  “Kate,” a voice behind her said, “I’m glad you’re back.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Kate gasped, swinging around to look down into the smiling face of Mark, who was clambering up on to the ditch beside her. “Mark, you frightened the living daylights out of me!”

  “Sorry, Kate,” he said, putting his arm around her shoulder and giving her a quick hug. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

  “Oh, I know that,” Kate assured him, “and the strange thing is that I was just thinking of you and your horseshoe theory about the valley.”

  She had to take a step sideways to look up at Mark. Incredibly thin and well over six foot tall, he wore his black hair down around his shoulders, which earned him the title of the Apostle in the locality. Kate often wondered at the mystery that he and Martha were brother and sister. Martha was dark, deep and driven, whereas Mark was gentle and almost childlike in his simplicity. Some of the locals regarded him as a “duine le Dia”, one of “God’s people”, but Kate felt that through some strange mixture of genes he was an artistic genius. He had no interest in farming, so the small family farm was rented out in conacre.

  He was lucky to have been christened Mark because it had changed his life. His maternal grandmother had had two distant relatives living in the village. They were known to everybody as the Miss Jacksons. Kate could remember them as two tall, dignified old ladies dressed in black satin and furs who walked grandly to the front seat of the church every Sunday. They filled the air around them with the smell of faded lavender and mothballs. Jack had always said that the Jacksons had “old money”. They had an older brother in America and a much-loved younger brother who had been lost at sea. This brother had been called Mark, and his death had grieved them deeply. When they became aware that there was another Mark in the family, even though not a close relative, they had taken him under their wing. The name Mark meant a lot to them. They had arranged with an artist friend of theirs to give young Mark special tutoring. They had lived in refined comfort in the largest house in the village and had little to do with the locals. They went away occasionally on foreign trips, often taking Mark with them, which made him the envy of every child in the parish but also set him apart from them. Mark spent his time painting and writing music. Old Tady Mikey, a travelling fiddle player, had taught him to play as a child and it seemed to have awoken a hidden world in Mark’s soul, which had led him on to sketching. It was his sketching that fascinated Kate.

  “Mark, have you been doing any drawing lately?” she asked him now.

  “Yea,” he admitted shyly. “I was actually finishing something that I started a good few years ago.”

  “Will we have a look at it?” she asked.

  Mark pulled the canvas bag on his back around to the front, poked into it and produced a large sketching pad.

  “Ned bought me this,” he told Kate as he turned back the cover.

  The drawing was of Ned planting the trees just beside them. Kate drew in her breath sharply and there was a tightening in her stomach. She felt that Ned could almost step off the page.

  “Mark,” she said, looking at him with awe-filled eyes, “you really captured him.”r />
  “Ned was a good friend,” he said simply.

  “It shows,” said Kate.

  “Would you like to have it?” he asked quietly.

  “Oh Mark,” she said, “I would love it but … but maybe Martha would like it.”

  “You know that Martha doesn’t like my drawings,” he told her, a shadow coming over his face.

  “Mark, I would be so happy to have it,” she said gratefully. “I will have it framed and hang it on my wall. Thank you.”

  “There is nobody that I would prefer to have it than you,” he told her. “You can’t take it now on your bike, but I will drop it in to you some night.”

  She knew that Mark had a habit of walking around by night because, he had told her, he found it easier to think things out in the quietness of the night and sometimes he got inspiration at night.

  “How have you been, Mark?” she asked.

  “A bit bothered,” he admitted.

  “That makes two of us,” she said ruefully.

  “With Ned gone I have no one to talk to,” he told her.

  She knew that Ned and himself used to spend hours walking the fields together talking. Ned would never listen to a word of criticism of Mark, and none of the neighbours would criticise him in Ned’s presence.

  “I can understand that,” she told him. “I feel as if some part of me has died with Ned.”

  “I always envied you and Ned,” he told her.

  “Why?”

  “Because growing up you always had such fun together. Martha and I were poles apart by comparison.”

  “Maybe Ned and I were too close,” she said; “maybe it would be easier now if I had not loved him so much.”

  “Oh, don’t regret it, Kate,” he told her. “It was a great blessing. I wish Martha and I had it. She was always critical of me and I felt threatened by her.”

  “Families are strange things.”

  “They could destroy you.”

  “I’ve seen it happen,” Kate agreed.

  “Joining the Phelans was the best thing that ever happened to us, though I’m not so sure that it worked both ways.”

  “Well, I’d better be going,” Kate told him. “I’ve a good few calls to make.”

  “I’m so glad that we ran into each other, and it’s great to have you back.”

  “We’ll have to keep each other going,” Kate said. “Ned would not have wanted us to fall asunder.”

  “That’s for sure,” he agreed, “so I think that I’ll walk down to the river. I find the sound of the water comforting.”

  She watched him saunter down the fields with his satchel hanging off his shoulder like a fishing bag and his long black hair flowing behind him.

  When she knocked on Shines’ door it was whipped open by Ellen Shine, a dour-faced, sharp-voiced little woman with a cigarette in the corner of her mouth and a skimpy head scarf knotted under a hairy chin.

  “Davy,” she screeched over her shoulder when Kate asked for him.

  Davy appeared with a matching cigarette, but there the resemblance ended because he towered over his mother, was twice her width and had the round moon face of his father and generations of Shines before him.

  “Yerra, Kate, how’re ’ou?” A broad smile lit up his fine, honest face like a semi-circle, and when she asked him about coming to work in Mossgrove the smile became a circle.

  “Grand job,” he told her, which meant that he would be there in the morning bright and early. Ellen Shine did not believe in having any son of hers lying in bed when there was work to be done.

  As she cycled past Mark’s home she decided on impulse that she would call in for a few minutes to see his mother. Nana Lehane, as the children called her, was a small, fine-boned woman with a serene face. It was easy to see where Martha’s beauty had come from, but in personality they were two different types of people. For some reason, Agnes always put Kate in mind of the Virgin Mary. Mark and herself were ideal occupants of the same house.

  “Kate, how nice to see you,” she smiled. “I heard that you were back and that you were straightening things out.”

  “News travels fast.”

  “Jack came and told me the good news because he knew that I was worried. I gave up and came home early in the time because I could make no hand of Martha,” she confessed, “and it was beginning to get me down.”

  “You did right to come home, Agnes,” Kate told her, “and with your asthma you could finish up laid low yourself.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” the older woman confessed, “and I don’t like leaving Mark too long on his own because at times he simply forgets to eat.”

  “I just met him over the road now and he has done the most wonderful drawing of Ned. He really has a great talent.”

  “He has, I suppose,” his mother sighed, “but it’s not much good to him here. But that’s enough about Mark. Will you come in for a cup of tea?”

  “I won’t just now because I must go over to dress Molly Conway’s leg.”

  “Be careful of their dogs,” Agnes warned her. “I always think that they’re dangerous because they’re half-starved.”

  “Thanks for warning me,” Kate said, “and don’t worry about Martha – I think that she’ll be all right now.”

  “Thank God,” her mother said.

  Now, down to business, Kate thought, as she cycled on towards Conways’. She was not looking forward to facing into a house where she knew she would be far from welcome. All her life, standing where it did on the hill across the river valley from Mossgrove, surrounded by sheds and rusty-roofed outhouses, Conways’ had spelt trouble in Mossgrove. She had backed Jack into a corner years ago and demanded the whole story.

  Her grandfather Edward Phelan and Rory Conway had gone to school together and had been close friends. Both farms were doing well, but Rory Conway for some reason hit a bad patch. The Conways had never been great farmers. Grandfather came to his rescue and secured him in the bank for five hundred pounds, which was a lot of money back then. But in farming things always turn around and Grandfather knew that it was only a matter of time before Rory Conway would get straightened out and he would be able to pay off the bank. But when Rory Conway got on his feet he got greedy and did not pay back the bank, and grandfather had to cover the debt.

  A few years afterwards Conway bought two fields from a farmer who bounded them at the far side of the hill away from Mossgrove, and he bought it with the money that should have cleared the debt in the bank. Grandfather had a great heart, but he had a temper to match. There was no one going to treat him like that and get away with it. He went and he measured the two fields that Rory Conway had bought, which were at the other side of the hill and too far away to be any addition to Mossgrove. But he solved that problem by measuring the same amount of Conway land along the riverbank beside his own farm and fencing it off. He decided that it was a fair return for his money. Conway did not take that lying down. Grandfather took Conway to court and won his case, and the land became Mossgrove land, but it had caused trouble ever since.

  Now, as she turned in Conways’ laneway, she told herself to forget past history and just remember that she was the district nurse here to see a patient. As she opened the gate of the farmyard, dogs came bounding in all directions, but she held her ground, and having parked her bike against the wall she walked across the yard with barking dogs all around her. She liked dogs and was never afraid of them, and apart from that there was no way that she was going to give the Conways the satisfaction of calling for help. She guessed that Matt Conway was probably watching her from one of the sheds.

  Then he appeared and lumbered across the yard towards her. He had the gait of a bear because his back sloped forward and a stumpy butt of a neck stuck out. He had a large red face beneath strings of ginger hair combed across a bald head.

  “What do you want?” he growled contemptuously.

  “Nothing,” Kate told him sharply. “I’m here to dress your mother’s leg.”


  “Where’s that other nurse?” he demanded, coming up so close to her that she had to step back to avoid physical contact.

  “She’s finished now,” Kate said icily, drawing herself up to her full height and looking him straight in the eye.

  “Well, we don’t want the likes of you here.”

  “That’s all right,” Kate said, turning to go; “when your mother gets gangrene from the blood poisoning and has to have her leg amputated, you can tell her that.”

  “You’d better go in so,” he snarled, “but no poking around into things that don’t concern you.”

  “I’m here to dress a wound, that’s all,” she told him, and he turned on his heel and, calling the dogs, disappeared back into the shed. Kate knew that he would wait there until she had gone.

  When she knocked on the door it was opened by his wife Biddy, a wizened, nervous little woman who would not look her straight in the face. Does he beat her? Kate wondered. The kitchen was dark, smoky and smelly, and she decided that it was a long time since they had opened the windows. Biddy pointed to a door at the end of the kitchen.

  “She’s down there,” she said.

  When she opened the door her nostrils were assailed with an assortment of stale smells, predominantly of stagnant urine. In the bed old Molly Conway sat like an enormous beached whale.

  “Well, if it isn’t the small dark Phelan one,” she boomed; “how well Matt left you in.”

  “Would you rather get gangrene and have your leg amputated?” Kate asked sharply.

  “Oh, saucy like all the Phelans,” the old lady laughed scornfully, and her huge body shook like a giant jelly. “Come on, my girl, and do what you came for.”

  Kate unrolled the dressing and found the wound to be healing well. As she put on a fresh dressing she remarked, “That was a bad gash. What happened?”

  “Mind your own business,” was the answer.

  “You’re a tough old bird,” Kate told her.

  “Ah! I’d want to be tough to spend my life living across the river from your crowd. But maybe with young Ned gone now ’twill be easier to talk to ye.” There was a veiled threat in the old woman’s voice.