by Johanna Lane
That night, they took the bus to her parents’ house in Rathmines. John wanted to drive, but Marianne said she missed public transport. Her father collected them from the bus stop and drove them the short distance home. The car was needlessly messy. John had to move a pile of books to get into the front seat and the floor was littered with newspapers and shopping bags.
“So you’re finally getting rid of the place, then?” Patrick said as he put the car into gear.
“Well,” John said, “I wouldn’t…”
Marianne saved him. “No, Dad, the government’s going to run the estate. We still own it.”
Her father concentrated on the road. He chuckled. “Good to hear my grandchildren won’t be homeless, then.”
“No, they certainly won’t be homeless.” Annoyed, John added, “Anyway, the cottage is much more practical…”
Marianne reached over and patted his shoulder. He wasn’t sure if that meant “It’s all right” or perhaps “Calm down.” But it was the first time she’d touched him since they’d arrived, and he was grateful for it.
Marianne had grown up in one of those red-brick terraced houses with large, uneven rooms and a gloomy kitchen on the bottom floor. Like their car, Patrick and Anna White’s house was a mess. Every corner was filled: books, piles of sheet music, walking boots caked in mud, the dog’s toys…It made John feel claustrophobic. He liked his parents-in-law on the whole, though. Patrick was a music teacher in a local secondary school and Anna always had a new project; she had just finished a bachelor’s in modern Irish history. John saw textbooks on the floor by the back door.
His mother-in-law had Marianne’s hair and, for that matter, Kate’s, the little curly wisps around their faces. But Anna was thinner than Marianne, so thin that her wrists didn’t look strong enough to hold the big dish she was lifting off the countertop. John took it out of her hands and laid it on the table.
“I’m afraid it’s just pasta.” She paused. “I would have cooked you something special if I’d known you were coming.”
It wasn’t a rebuke. One of the great blessings of John’s marriage was that Patrick and Anna expected nothing of them. They weren’t even offended when Marianne had told them they wouldn’t be staying. In gratitude, John grasped Anna by the shoulders. He said teasingly, “How’s the scholar of the family?”
“I graduated, wore the cap and gown and everything.” She pointed to a photo on the fridge. He studied it. She was throwing her mortarboard in the air like a young woman.
“How are things up there?” She poured vinaigrette on the salad.
Both she and Patrick always referred to Donegal as if it were the North Pole. John was suddenly aware that Marianne and his father-in-law had deserted them and that they were alone in the kitchen. “Oh, you know.” He wondered whether it would be enough to stave off Anna’s enquiries.
“It can’t be easy,” she said.
Anna was one of those people who liked to talk about things. He was glad his own mother hadn’t known her; they wouldn’t have got on with each other at all.
“It must be hard on you, but it seems a very sensible decision to me. You’ll have the best of both worlds, am I right? You won’t have the worry of the maintenance.”
He nodded glumly. “Shall I retrieve the others?” He told himself that she couldn’t be expected to understand—that she’d never lived in a place like Dulough.
They took one of the last buses back into town. The daytime shoppers had become nighttime revelers. John and Marianne watched a young man lean a hand against a shop window and vomit onto the pavement. When he finished, he wiped his mouth and wandered back into a pub.
In their room, Marianne took her second bath of the day, more, she explained, because of the abundance of hot water than anything else. This time she left the bathroom door open. For a good ten minutes, John wondered whether he should go in or not. At last, he shoved his shoes under the bed and took the chance.
There was a towel rolled up under her head. The bubbles had all but melted and he could see the outline of her body under the water, her breasts and knees breaking the surface. He thought of that exhibition in London, of all those women, all those baths. She opened her eyes and smiled tiredly as he sat down on the loo seat. “Could you shut the door? It’s a little chilly.”
He got up silently, obligingly. She closed her eyes again. He wasn’t sure when the balance of power had shifted. Was it when she’d had Kate? Was it when he’d signed the contract with the government? He hadn’t been watching for it because he hadn’t expected it. He tried to focus, to separate the years of their marriage, but he couldn’t. It was one long, looping roll of film, the same images repeated again and again: house, garden, sea, children.
As he lifted his arm to reach down into the warm water, she got up suddenly and groped for a towel. Her eyes had been closed. She couldn’t have seen his hand rising to touch her, but he wondered whether she had somehow sensed it, whether it was an indication for him to back away. He went into the bedroom and picked up the paper.
He woke before Marianne the next morning and, as he had done the day of the move, he quietly put on his clothes and slipped through the door. Outside, he headed for Stephen’s Green. People crisscrossed it here and there, the early-morning workers of coffee shops and bakeries. Though it was early summer, they dug their hands into their jackets and sank down into their collars. Some were wrapped in scarves. Mostly women, they wore cheap coats and shoes. They had pale, unhealthy-looking skin, the undernourished pallor of Eastern Europeans. This was the new city workforce; like America, Ireland had become rich enough to need such people, who, he imagined, probably lived in tenements on the north side and sent money home. He wondered whether they wanted to stay or whether they were counting the days until they could leave. He couldn’t think what the attractions of this modern Dublin were. To him it had changed for the worse. He could see that Marianne was invigorated by it, though, by the bursting shops and new cosmopolitanism, by the young Irish who looked, in contrast to the immigrants, healthy and confident.
He could have taken up the government’s offer to buy Dulough right out from under them and they could have easily afforded a house in one of the better suburbs: Foxrock, Dalkey, Killiney. Or further out, in Wicklow—Enniskerry, perhaps, where he’d often stayed with his cousins on weekends away from college. But their beautiful old house had been sold years ago. He wondered briefly how they were.
If he’d sold Dulough, they could have sent Kate and Philip to a very good school, and if they had been careful, if he had invested wisely, he may not have had to work. But he had turned the government down. He hadn’t told Marianne. Murphy thought he was crazy; he was incredulous when John handed back the piece of paper with the number on it, a very big number, money that reflected this new Ireland, a figure the likes of which John would never see again. At the time, he had been confident that Marianne would not have wanted him to take it, but now he wasn’t so sure. It was too late anyway. The decision was made. They still owned Dulough and, in a city so full of immigrants, he was grateful that he’d held on to a house that told him who he was, rooting him firmly in his own country.
He rose up off the bench. The newsagent at the top of Grafton Street was pulling up its shutters. A girl set a sign outside: LOTTO JACKPOT! John had never played, but he’d seen many a local in Donegal scratching away at those little cards. He didn’t even know how much it cost to buy a ticket. Grasping about for the notes in his pocket, he asked, “How does it work?”
The sales assistant explained it to him sympathetically, as if he were the foreigner and not her. He would have to choose a set of numbers and watch a television program. He left the counter to consider; the children’s birthdays were an obvious choice, as was the year Dulough was built. He returned to the counter and received his ticket. On the walk back to the hotel he allowed himself to imagine what five million pounds could do for them; he could get the estate back and they’d never have to worry about mon
ey again. He closed his fingers around the ticket, securing it tightly at the bottom of his pocket.
When he got back to the hotel, the room was dark; it smelled unaired, mustily of sleep. He took off his shoes and slipped into bed beside Marianne, wrapping his arms around her waist. It reminded him of college. When he’d had early lectures, he would come back to find her sleeping in exactly this position, her knees pulled up to her chest, her hands gripping the covers tightly under her chin. She loved to sleep; even when they’d had the children it was he who had got out of bed more often than not, to bring them to her for feeding.
She clasped his hands within her own and pulled him in behind her. His knees locked with hers. It was too hot under the covers and he began to sweat. She drifted off again, but when she woke forty-five minutes later, she allowed him to touch her for the first time in months, to run his hands up her legs, to lift her long nightdress, to turn her towards him.
Philip
Philip had to abandon his hut for nearly a fortnight after his mother caught him coming up from the beach. He stayed mostly inside, arranging and rearranging his new room. The toys he’d played with before the move—his soldiers, his Technic Lego—seemed artificial now and required too much imagination compared to the real world of hut building. He wondered how he’d ever thought up battles and expeditions; he longed to go back out to the island.
Finally, he found a day when no one was around. He had read the Irish Times for the tides and watched from the top of the cliff as the sea was sucked away. He had two planks of wood with him, taken from Francis’s shed, each with a layer of creosote to protect it from the rain. There was an urgency to get the hut finished now; he wouldn’t be able to bring these things out once the visitors arrived.
Philip laid the planks across the roof; they were too long and stuck out the sides. He crawled in. Barely any light came through the walls, he’d done a good job of filling the gaps between the big rocks with smaller stones and moss. He hadn’t managed to find a piece of carpet, so he had covered the floor with leaves. Adding his coat to the pile, he lay down with his head towards the door, where the light was best. He propped himself up on his elbows and opened the tin he’d brought out with him today; it held a torch, a Famous Five book that his father had said he’d enjoyed when he was a boy, and some chocolate. He turned onto his back and shone the torch up at the ceiling. A spider, with a tiny body and eight long legs, ran across. He broke off a piece of chocolate, opened his book, and curled into a ball. He could hear the Atlantic in the distance, the waves crashing against the rocks. It would be better to live here than the cottage. Could he manage to spend the night without getting caught? If he went out when they’d all gone to sleep and came back very early in the morning, it might work. But if his mother had been that angry after he’d only been here for a few hours, he didn’t like to think what she would do if she caught him out for a whole night.
The Famous Five wasn’t very good; he’d have to find a different book for next time. On the way back, he knew better than to take the path that ran along the lawn, over his hidden stream. Instead, he climbed up into the forest. Huge ferns grew under the trees, moss clinging to their branches. Water dripped through everything. It was not an old forest, and very few of the trees and plants were native to Ireland. It had been planted by Philip the First. The paths were winding and thin and the undergrowth brushed your ankles as you walked. It was easy to get lost, to forget where the house was, whether the sea was behind or in front of you. He wondered if the visitors would be allowed to walk here. His mother had told him that there were only a few places they weren’t allowed to go: the new cottage, the Connollys’ house, the kitchen of the big house, and the island. Mr. Murphy, the man Mrs. Connolly had poured tea on, decided this, she said. Since then Philip had been repeating these places to himself in his head: their cottage, our cottage, the kitchen, the island. Sometimes the words took on the rhythm of his footfalls as he walked around; other times he matched them to songs he knew, fitting them into the place where the old words had been.
To avoid the workmen, he had deliberately climbed up to the highest point of the forest. Beginning his descent, he noticed that little signs had been planted along the path. A long, thin spike, with a green label at the top, named almost every plant and tree. He bent down to look at one of them: Pinus contorta, lodgepole pine. He knew the small slanted writing to be Latin, but “lodgepole pine” seemed a funny name for the relatively average-looking tree that sprouted high into the air above him. On his way home, he read the labels, then pulled each one out of the ground. When he reached the threshold of the forest, he hid them all under a giant fern.
At the edge of the lawn, he almost tripped over a sign: WELCOME TO DULOUGH. PLEASE DO NOT WALK ON THE GRASS. He stepped back onto the gravel. He thought of all the places he wouldn’t be able to go. But surely this didn’t apply to him? He lived here, he wasn’t just a visitor, he knew how to walk on the grass so as not to ruin it. Bending over, he tugged at the sign, but it was much more substantial than the ones in the forest and it wouldn’t budge. He considered giving it a good kick, but he was in open view of the drawing room window and he thought that it would be too risky. He walked off down the avenue, looking back at it from time to time.
When he got to the cottage, it was earlier than he expected. The kitchen clock said a quarter to five. There was no sound but the crackling of a roast in the oven. He couldn’t believe it; they hadn’t had a roast since before the move and even then it was only on Sundays. Today was Friday. He peered through the oven window and felt the intense heat on his eyelashes and nose. He looked for potatoes and carrots and parsnips; they were all there.
In every room objects from the big house were piled to the ceiling. By his parents’ bed, a stack of old magazines reached over his head and a box of fine white china, wrapped in newspaper, was tucked in under his mother’s dressing table. In their old room, her dressing table had always held the same configuration of perfumes and powders, but they had been swept to the side and an accordion file, jammed with papers, had taken the place of his mother’s things.
He went over to the dresser and ran his finger down the paper accordion’s edge. It made a sound like lots of little guns going off—pap pap pap pap pap. He did it again, more slowly this time, reading the labels as be went: Accounts, Bills, Children, Correspondence, Taxes. He supposed that “Children” meant him and Kate. He lifted the edge of that section and looked in. The note on top said: “Kate, IMMUNIZATIONS: measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus.” He looked for a record of his own injections. It wasn’t there.
He thought about all the barbed wire he’d cut fingers and shins on; you could get tetanus that way, from where the animals rubbed up against the fences. Could he have it now without knowing? Mrs. Connolly had had cancer. He remembered her going to Dublin to see the doctor there; she’d taken to her bed for a long time when she got back. There was a familiarity about the memory, as if it had happened very recently, but it hadn’t; he had been younger, five or six, when she was sick. Then he realized what it was—Mrs. Connolly had not done the cooking while she was getting better and they’d had lots of horrible cold meals, like they were having now.
Shoving the record of Kate’s injections back into the part that said “Children,” he opened “Correspondence.” Pulling out one of the letters, he held it up to the weak light. The type was faint, the paper onion-skin thin:
Dear Sir,
The Office of Public Works read your proposal with great interest. It is part of the mission statement of this organization to save the great houses of Ireland and to allow the Irish people to partake in the full enjoyment of them. We will be sending Mr. Michael Murphy from our Lifford office to inspect the property.
Yours sincerely,
John T. McGrath
The letter was repeated below in Irish, which Philip could recognize but not understand, except for A Chara, which he knew meant “Dear Friend.” He looked at the date; the letter was mor
e than three years old.
A door slammed. He put the letter back. But there was a smear of red along the edge of the file. He had cut himself and trailed blood over it. Jamming his finger into his mouth, he ran quietly to his room, listening to the sounds in the kitchen. It wasn’t Kate because the opening and closing of cupboards was soft and measured. His sister banged things. Getting up off the bed, he went to the door and opened it a crack.
“I hear you, wee mouse.” It was Mrs. Connolly. “Come out here and give me a hand.”
He went into the kitchen, glad to see Mrs. Connolly, relieved that it wasn’t his mother or father. Wearing her old blue housedress and slippers with holes cut in the toes for her bunions, she bent over the oven and asked him what he’d been doing with himself.
“Not much,” he said, suddenly overwhelmed with wanting to tell her about his hut. He knew he couldn’t, though. Instead he asked her quietly, stupidly, “Is that for our dinner?”
Mrs. Connolly pushed the roasting tray back into the oven and turned to face him.
“It is. You could do with a good feeding.” She pinched his side, pretending that there was no flesh to grab.
“Are we having it here?” Philip associated the cottage with picnicky food, the sort of stuff they’d been eating since the move, not with a roast, which, up at the big house, had always been served with a certain amount of ceremony. It would feel strange to have it at the cottage with the Leaning Tower of Pisa boxes, unwrapped china, and water marks on the floor.
Mrs. Connolly sat down slowly, her joints arthritic. Pulling out a second chair, she patted the table in front of it. She waited for him to sit too. “You’ll be having all your meals down here from now on, alannah, you understand that, don’t you?”
Philip nodded and waited for more, but there wasn’t any.
Instead, Mrs. Connolly got up and opened the cutlery drawer. “Now, we’ll need to get the table set before the others come back wanting their dinner.”
