She was a busy little item. There was a doll to be fixed up and chastised with a hairbrush that was twice its length. Also a coloring book and a packet of markers, which she took out of the soft plastic sleeve and spilled all down herself so she was in the footwell and up again seventeen times between the Walkinstown roundabout and Newlands Cross. Ivor waited for her to settle, but she was too excited to settle, and he finally said, “Wiggle in there into the back and be quiet.”
She looked over at him.
“Hop in, go on.”
It was her first time sitting in the front seat.
“Or put the things back there. Just throw them in and be quiet.”
The child clambered arse about face, then turned back and sat still for two seconds before lurching forward. She hung there, dangling from the seat belt and making fussed-old-lady noises.
“Uhh. Ahh.”
There was a single marker rolling about the footwell.
“Get up,” he said. “Leave it, leave it.”
Realizing, as he saw her there, that the floor of a car was surprisingly close to the road.
He remembered once getting a lift from a Connemara man who used his car on the beach and its floor was all rotted out by the salt. One summer evening, himself and the lads had their thumbs stuck out for a lift home to Galway, and, when they sat in the back of the Datsun, the seat went under them—two inches, six inches lower. It was not so much a jolt as a subsidence, ending in a creak of agonized metal. When they looked down, they saw that a gash had opened up in the floor by their feet. There was the tarmac scudding along, edged in a filigree of rust-eaten tin, close enough to reach down a toe.
Lose your leg.
You rarely thought about the road as a weapon and yet there it was, tearing along beneath.
He turned the radio on.
The program was all talk about free buses to Phoenix Park for the papal visit. Ivor hit the off button so that Orla would not get excited, but his daughter was looking out over the dash with her chin high. She pointed at the pub with the thatched roof and the cart in front with its wheels painted red, then sat back as though she owned it all. When he next glanced over, she had a strand of black hair pulled into her mouth, in that way that drove her mother mad but which he found pleasantly feral. My little goose, he called her. My own pigeen. Eating at her round tummy with his whole face. Rasping it with his five-o’clock shadow. Or he used to.
She was beyond that now, and not yet somewhere else. She was just turned eleven and still very stuck on her Dada. Last week, she trailed him as he took up the last of the onions, and when he turned up a fat worm—“There’s one for the robin!”—she did not know whether to hunker over it or recoil. The thing twisted about on the clay and she decided on squealing, “Ew, Dada!,” as if it were his fault. At two, she would have eaten the thing; at three, she might have killed it. Now it was “Yuck! Worm!” Learning how to be fake, because fake would soon be required of her.
The robin beady-eyed on the wall.
“Sure, what harm?” he said.
And he turfed it toward the bird with the neat tip of his shovel.
A silent snap of heartbreak in there, for him. His last child on the cusp.
Of the three of them, Orla was the most curious and direct. He sometimes thought she would have made a grand little boy, the way she looked out at the world and not at herself. Then he felt guilty, because his daughters did nothing but spoil and delight him. He was that fool, the father of girls.
“Take Orla with you, sure,” his wife, Emer, had said, because the other two were in secondary school and they could not miss the days. “She’d love it.”
And he was glad to have her as a distraction, not on the road, where the solitude suited him, but for whatever lay ahead in the house to which he had been summoned by his wife’s family, during a school week in September.
It was something to do with the land, Emer said.
“The land?”
This was, Ivor thought, code for “money.”
“Do you think maybe it’s the will?” she said.
Her grandmother had died the year before. But the sums involved could not be large.
“You tell me,” he said.
The issue could not be communicated down a telephone line, being far too private and important. Indeed, that house had only recently got a phone—Seán, his father-in-law, did not believe in them. In the end, his mother-in-law, Melia, had had one installed “on the advice of her G.P.” and she used it whenever her husband was out of the house. If you ever rang the number, you had to wait through many intimate clanks and rustlings before Melia found her own ear and fluted, “Hay . . . loh?”
The child would, indeed, be a welcome distraction.
“Look, look at that.”
“What?”
“That fella undertaking, God almighty.”
Up ahead, a white Fiat was on the hard shoulder, its left wheels right up on the grass, belting along beside an indifferent Ford Capri.
“What’s ‘undertaking’?”
“That, right there.”
“I thought it meant a coffin.”
“It will in a minute,” he said.
She liked the joke.
“Where are we now?”
The answer was that they had barely started.
“We’re a third of the way to Moneygall.”
They did the list of towns together: “Naas, Newbridge, Kildare, Monasterevin, Portlaoise.” She had them all by heart, even the little, in-between ones. “Borris-in-Ossory, Moneygall, Nenagh, Five Alley, Cappadine, Killaloe, Garrenboy.”
It was nice having her on her own. She was usually mixed up with her sisters, who would be so giddy by now he’d have to reach his hand into the back seat to admonish them. They drove this route every summer to spend three weeks or a month—however long he could stand it—all sleeping in his in-laws’ good front room. Ivor dodged back up to Dublin on the excuse of work, or he hacked the sixty miles up to his own father, in Galway, for an awkward couple of evenings spent watching TV. Sometime in July, he brought the family home the long way round, stopping in Galway for sandwiches at the Great Southern Hotel, where his father slipped the girls some paper money and proceeded to ignore them, talking local politics and the recently deceased while they itched and squirmed in velvet button-backed chairs. There was something useless about his father, Ivor thought, in a flash of feeling. He did not know how to talk to people. A game of golf every Thursday. Lunch out, some kind of snack for dinner. Nothing in the fridge except bacon and gin.
Ivor had not told him that he was coming west this week. In every marriage there was the busy side and the boring side, and there was no doubt that he had, some years ago, been taken hostage by the Loughnanes. Swept up. Discussed. Owned. First by his wife and then by Melia, a woman who crooned at men as soon as she saw them, offered chairs and biscuits, as though everything they said was very sad. A great woman for a fancy plate under your actual plate, and maybe a paper doily in between. There was no resisting her. Though her own sons had managed, it had to be said, with the simple ruse of getting on a plane. Still, Melia’s fussing was better than the chink of ice in his father’s glass, a radio in the kitchen giving way to the television in the living room, a kind of static that was his dead mother’s absence, and every light on all the time.
Beside him, Orla was wondering whether a hamster could ever go blind.
“What?”
“I just don’t think that could happen,” she said.
“A hamster?”
She turned to sulk out the window. “Why would she even say that?”
It must have been some pal at school.
“Or maybe they can?” he suggested.
“The vet said that hamsters don’t need to see. They use their whiskers.”
“They took a hamster to the vet?”
“It was sick,” she said.
“They must be made of money.”
After a moment’s regret, he said, “Poor hamster.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about it,” Orla said, grandly. “I honestly think the stupid girl was just looking for attention.”
Ivor leaned in to turn the radio on again and then decided on silence. Somewhere beyond Monasterevin, a flickering line of greenery rose up the window on the passenger side and he had the feeling that the road was sinking under his wheels, that they were sliding underground.
“The bridge stood fast,” he said, as they crossed the Shannon into Killaloe. This was the poem he quoted every time they took the single-lane bridge, with its thirteen arches and recesses in the side walls, for people to stand clear of the traffic. “And nigh and nigher / The foe swarmed darkly, densely on.”
The house was a hop and a skip away now and they reached it just before one. Melia was at the door, undoing her apron at the sound of the car.
“There you are, now.”
She fumbled for Ivor’s two hands and lifted them in hers.
“You’re very welcome.”
Looking up at him with her fervent eyes.
Melia thought him handsome, his wife said, and Ivor found the idea unlikely, but not entirely unpleasant.
“Dotey.” Melia touched a dry knuckle to the child’s cheek. “Look at you.”
Inside, she had the teapot on the table as soon as he had set their bag down. There were plates of triangular sandwiches, scones, cake.
“Will you sit in, Seán?”
On the other side of the kitchen, his father-in-law was pushing out of his easy chair. He came side-on, swinging round for the handshake, putting his shoulder into it, and said, “The rain held off, anyway.”
“It did.”
Seán Loughnane was wiry and a bit bandy and he hitched up his trousers on the way back to the chair.
“Will you sit in, Seán?” Melia said again.
“I won’t.”
Melia scrabbled the bottoms of plates and dishes to free them of cling film and she unscrewed the lid of a jar of mayonnaise, which was set on a saucer with a fancy spoon.
“Be careful, now, I put a bit of scallion in the egg.”
“Lovely. Perfect.”
Ivor looked around the kitchen: the same tiles and little ornaments, the same letters, perhaps, jammed in a wooden holder on the dresser. The calendar on the wall was two years out of date.
“Is that Orla?” Seán said from his corner. The child pulled her hand back from a plate of buns, chewed mightily, and gulped a “Yes.”
“My goodness, you’re as big as your sisters. Tell me, are you nearly as clever?”
She looked at him.
“You are, of course. Up there in that good school.”
He liked to tease his granddaughters.
“It is a good school, isn’t it?”
“I suppose.”
“I suppose. What are they teaching you? Do they teach you maths?”
She nodded.
“And are you any good at it?”
“No.”
They all laughed.
“She’s good at English,” Ivor said.
“Did I tell you,” Melia said. “There’s new kittens in the car house.”
Orla, released, took a big wedge of cake with her as she ran out the back door. After which it was just the adults.
“Will you have a scone, Ivor?” Melia said, sorrowfully, and he said, “Honestly, Melia, I won’t. I’ll stick to the sandwiches for now.”
The hour crept on with How’s this one? and How’s his cousin? Seán had views on local sports teams and the usual politicians, but he also came aslant at issues of the day. Anticlerical, a little scurrilous. He was terrific company.
Sometime around three, Orla’s grandfather drove her to the shop to get ice cream and the papers, and Melia took a turn in the single easy chair. When they came back, Seán read the headlines aloud, commenting on the stories that caught his eye. Later again, the men walked out the road to check on a bullock, and there was more food on the table when they returned. After which Orla cleared plates and dried dishes for Melia, activities unknown to her at home. The television was switched on. The sofa beds fussed over and warmed. Orla said her good nights. A glass of whiskey was twice offered and twice declined, and then, just as the television was switched off, Seán said, “We’ll head over in the morning, so.”
Which was the first mention of whatever crisis had required Ivor to drive down on a Thursday in September, missing two full days of work to see to it.
“Right,” he said. “Whenever.”
In the front room, he undressed by a crack of light from the hall and clambered onto his spongy bed. He could hear Seán finish his round of bolts and locks, and the hall light went, leaving them in country darkness—a black so complete that it was worth keeping your eyes open to look at it. Across the room, the child whimpered some long complaint in her sleep, like a dog dream-barking at rabbits, and then she settled.
“The morning,” for Seán, meant sometime around eleven, after a breakfast both fried and lavish.
“What about me?” Orla hissed, not wanting to be left behind.
“What?” her grandfather said, in mock horror. “There’s blackberries down the side of the long field, sure. Your Nana Melia will give you a bucket. Do you like blackberries? You do. And mushrooms for breakfast tomorrow, in the corner where the ground gets soft, the ones with the big, flat heads.”
Ivor wasn’t keen on her picking mushrooms, but Seán said that there was only one kind. “Don’t eat any till we look at them, sure.”
They sat into Seán’s old banger and belted along the narrow lanes, never indicating left or right. An oncoming tractor was intuited by some mysterious, extra sense, and his father-in-law slammed on the brakes before reversing with enthusiasm, his body twisted to look out the rear window and one hand on the wheel. After twenty minutes, they drew up outside a cottage in the beginnings of dereliction, and Ivor recognized it as the one that had belonged to Melia’s mother.
“I’ll show you, now,” Seán said.
He unstuck the tiny front gate but ignored the path up to the front door, skirting the cottage to go round the back instead. Here, they beat through undergrowth to the place where the ghost of a garden gave way to a prickly wilderness of gorse.
“Look at that.”
“Right,” Ivor said.
His father-in-law spat into the grass.
“How long would you say it’s there?” he said.
Seán reached into his back pocket for a much folded, grubby map of the land they were standing on. Ivor checked it, and then spotted the line of barbed wire threaded through the scrub.
The metal was weathered but not rusted.
“A fair while,” he said.
Melia’s mother was more than a year dead, but she had moved in with her daughter in her final infirmity, so the place had been empty for five years at least. Sometime in her absence, a neighbor had fenced off the bottom ten feet of her land. Maybe twelve.
“Who is he, anyway?”
Seán gave a contemptuous uptick of his head. There was a house on a rise about four fields away.
“He’s on his own up beyond.”
He kept his voice low, though Ivor did not think he could be heard from that distance. He could barely be heard a foot away.
“He has no claim,” Ivor said.
He thought they were going home to Garrenboy, but they drove into Killaloe, where Seán parked by the church and stiff-legged out to the newsagent’s for the paper and a packet of fruit pastilles. These he ate with deliberation in the front seat, leaving the driver’s door open. When there were three sweets left in the roll, Ivor could not take the suspense any longer.
“What are we doing?” he said.
“Sure, what would we be doing?” Seán said. “We’re due to see Matt Thornton.”
From the plaque on the wall, Ivor gleaned that this was the name of a local solicitor, though “Matt Thornton” was now Matt’s daughter, her father being recently retired. She was very young, and she spoke with an odd, puppetlike authority that was, Ivor thought, entirely charm-free. The legal term they were looking for was “adverse possession,” she said, and this could not be argued for another seven years. She advised them simply to put a new fence along the legal boundary, which was fixed and on the deeds.
Seán nodded judiciously.
“He has no claim,” he said.
“Not yet,” she warned.
And Seán stood to go, as though this were what he had come to ascertain. He reached across the desk to shake the girl’s hand.
“I suppose she’ll bill me for that,” he said, when they sat back into the car.
As if he were about to put a fence through gorse, he said, in full view of a man obsessed with shooting crows.
“You could sell as is,” Ivor said. “Let the new owner deal with it.” Though the truth was that no one wanted the place except the man who was causing the trouble. Besides, even the rumor of a boundary dispute could spoil any chance of a sale. The Loughnanes had been outplayed.
Outside the house at Garrenboy, Seán killed the engine and, in the silence, the smells in the car seemed to rise around them; the malt of calf nuts, diesel from an empty jerrican, his father-in-law’s boots and sweat and work clothes.
“He came to the wake,” Seán said, staring at the windscreen. “He leaned over the coffin and he touched her dead hand.”
Then he got out of the car.
Inside, Melia had a tea brack set out, with butter in curls on a glass dish, and she stood stirring blackberries reducing in sugar on the stove. Orla was sitting in the easy chair reading a book and Ivor got a fright when she looked up at him, her smile was so bruised about with berry juice. There was a colander half full of them on the draining board and, as he looked at the tiny flies floating above it, he saw how drowsy and full the air was, on this warm September day. Beside the colander were three enormous mushroom caps.
“The size of a dustbin lid,” he said.
Orla hefted one into his hands and he knocked on top of it, for the hollow sound. Then she showed him the underside, running her finger along the dark, velvety frill.
They mopped up the blackberry sauce with the last of the cake, and Orla was so proud of her day’s haul, the pleasure of eating it made her seem more solid.
“She’s like her mother,” Seán said.
“How do you mean?” Orla said, brightly.
Her grandfather gave her an appraising look.
“You’re not adopted, anyway.”
Ivor had an impulse to protect the child from Seán’s attention. But what harm? he thought, as the phone went off in the hall. They watched Melia get up and make her way out to it. A long silence after she picked up the receiver. More silence.
“Hay . . . loh?”
Ivor recognized Emer’s voice from the tinny sounds in the speaker and he found it strange that he was sitting in her childhood home while she was far away. He missed her. He missed the way she might say, “Oh, for God’s sake, Daddy. Would you leave the child alone.”
He took the receiver.
“Yeah. Hi. How are things?”
Melia did not step back from him in the ordinary way. She turned briefly to the side and seemed to droop over a cloth she held in her hand. And this distracted him so much that he could not understand what Emer was saying. His father was what? he said.
His father was in the Galway Regional Hospital and they were calling the relatives in.
Melia, as though released by this news, launched herself toward the front room, and Emer started all over again. They could not give details, though she had a phone number, if he wanted to ring first. But, really, they said he should just arrive and someone would speak to him. He should go tonight. Her voice was very kind.
When he got to the front room, Melia was at his open suitcase, and the sight of his mother-in-law fumbling through his shirts and underwear was too much for him.
“Leave it, Melia. Just drop it. I’ll do that.”
He put the case up on the bed and pulled Orla’s few bits out of it. And he was slamming the car boot closed before he thought to speak to his daughter—partly because he did not know what to say.
My father is dying.
It seemed an odd thing to tell your child.
“I’ll be back,” he said. “I have to go, love. But I’ll be back tomorrow, or I don’t know. Be good, all right?” Her face in the rearview mirror was a thumbprint in the shadow of the doorway, as he bumped along the boreen to the main road.
“It’s the color of a mouse’s tummy”—that was what she’d said about the mushroom’s underside. As soon as she said it, Ivor had seen it, too: a transparency of pink at the base of the brown gills.
The next few days were lonely ones. Ivor squared his shoulders, kept himself neat; he took the priest’s blessing and the ward maid’s cup of tea. He phoned his brother in Riyadh from the phone in his father’s hall, and he slept in his childhood bedroom for one night and then the next. On the third evening, he left out a note to cancel the milk. The next day, he took his lunch at the hotel where his father liked to go, and he found himself making the same fuss with collar and cuffs that his father made before picking up his silverware. It was as though the dying man had entered him briefly: they were, for a moment, one and the same.
When he got back to the hospital, two women were working fast around the bed, and one of them glanced up and paused. “Ah, you missed him,” she said, as though his father’s death were a departing bus. They left Ivor to sit with the body, now free of tubes and wires. The priest spoke to him in the room, the undertaker in the corridor. His father would repose in the funeral home. There was a hotel by the cemetery, which could take any number for lunch. The gurney arrived, and he was free to go. The staff nurse put her arm around him all the way to the exit. Everyone was great. Everyone knew more than he did. Back in the house, he opened the study door and saw last week’s newspaper on his father’s desk, folded to the crossword, which Ivor had an impulse to finish—“Could a bad legume make ten ill?”—and then did not.
The next day, he thought to go and pick up Orla, but Emer said not to complicate things, and, besides, what would he do with her?
“I suppose,” Ivor said, thinking the better question was what he would do with himself. There was a meeting at the undertaker’s and on the way back he bought a few bits for lunch in the local shop. He went from room to room, feeling slightly indecent—or perhaps the word was “previous.” It was too soon: death had made the place more private, not less. In the utility room, he came across his mother’s flower vases, long unused. In the small conservatory, he picked up and folded again a blanket she had crocheted. He tried the string that pulled down the ladder to the attic and put his head through the hatch. Then he sat on a lower rung and stayed there for a long time.
In the evening, Ivor walked out along Salthill with an old school friend who was always good value. The fine weather was holding, and when he came back he mowed the grass against the coming winter. He wondered about the phone bill, including that last call to Riyadh. He did not sleep, then fell into an unconsciousness so total you could walk around in it.
Emer arrived at the train station the next day with his good suit and the two older girls. Then his brother came in from Saudi, wrecked under his tan, and crawled upstairs to sleep. Suddenly it was tremendously busy. Everyone showed up for the reposal—neighbors and all sorts.
“Now, there’s a blast from the past,” he kept saying; his whole childhood was in the condolence queue.
Ivor was doing up his tie on the morning of the funeral when his father-in-law walked into the living room. The hall door was open; it was like dressing in public, the amount of traffic coming through.
“I am very sorry for your trouble,” Seán said, offering his roughened hand. “I met him only that one time, but he was a gentleman.” He brought his other hand to Ivor’s shoulder. “And a good man, if he made you.”
The compliment hit home. And Ivor felt how weak the last days had left him, physically. How much he wanted to lie down.
“Thank you. Thanks.”
His father-in-law turned away, giving the room a slight, almost furtive nod of approval, and Ivor realized that it was the first time Seán had been in his family home. Melia, too, seemed out of her element, though her manners were as beautiful as ever. She left a trembly light kiss on Ivor’s cheek; she held his hand and petted the back of it.
Meanwhile, Orla was upstairs with her sisters, changing into her good clothes. Ivor thought she might be ignoring him, but after the Mass, as people filled the church porch, she slammed into his chest.
“I am so sorry,” she said. “I am so sorry.”
“What?”
Orla raised a face of tear-stained theatricality.
“About Gramps. I am so, so sorry he died.”
He knew it wasn’t his loss that upset her so much as the fact that she had been left behind in Garrenboy. And, indeed, for the most part, he had forgotten all about her. Ivor clamped her to his shirtfront, tears and all.
“Come here to me,” he said.
The grave was the worst of it. From the other side of the hole, Ivor saw that Seán had showed up in the same bad anorak he always wore. It seemed wrong to notice this, but Melia had a good scarf over a half-decent coat; she had made the effort. Ivor took the offered spade, threw dirt on the coffin lid, passed it to his brother. Then he went over to where his children stood, to be with them and reassure.
There were so many practical issues to be sorted with the Galway house that he was up and down on the train all year. He did not even make it to Garrenboy the following summer: Emer had passed her driving test and she took the girls without him. The next time he made the trip, the two older girls were at the Gaeltacht learning Irish and Orla, nearly thirteen, was digging in her heels. It was not fair, she said. She hated the country, there was nothing to do, she would not go. On the drive down, she sulked in the back seat and ate her hair and drove her mother to such a pitch of distraction that Ivor had to pull off the road at Naas until the pair of them quieted down.
But “the bridge stood fast,” as the poet said. The same thirteen spans across the mighty Shannon. “And nigh and nigher / The foe swarmed darkly, densely on.”
“Da-ad,” Orla said.
“What?”
“I am going to actually kill myself.”
When they reached the house, it looked as though Melia had been standing at the front door for a while.
“You are very welcome.”
She looked up at him with the same ardency, but her trembling vagueness, Ivor saw, was now a definite waggle of the head.
“Come in. Come in.”
In the kitchen, Seán bounded out of his easy chair.
“Is it yourself?”
“You’re looking well,” Ivor said.
“The doctor has me on the beta-blockers.”
“Emer told me.”
“I recommend them,” Seán said. “He’s put me into reverse.”
Ivor fetched the bags and set them in the front room, where the sofa beds had already been folded out and dressed. The kitchen table was laden, as ever. Emer and Melia held hands where they stood, their voices echoing over and back. Orla slid onto a chair, opened a sandwich to look at the contents, then rejected it and opened another.
“Orla,” her mother said, sharply.
“Take what you fancy,” Melia said. “Sure, what harm.”
The room was the same—a little less clean, perhaps. The calendar on the wall, Ivor observed, was now four years out of date.
“Will you sit in, Seán?” Melia said.
“I won’t,” he said.
Somewhere between the first and second cup of tea, Ivor thought he heard the phone ring, but it was just the idea of the phone—quite real—in his head. They moved through scones and jam to shop-bought cake, while, on the other side of the table, Orla picked the ham out of a sandwich and left the bread on the plate.
Seán watched his granddaughter, looking for a way in.
“That’s a grand thing you have on you. What do you call that, now? Is it a dress or dungarees, or what?”
“Sorry?”
“The thing you have on you.”
“Oh. Maybe ‘dungaree dress’?” Orla said, and Ivor was taken by a new, small touch of disdain.
In the afternoon, she did not want to go to the shop to get ice cream with her grandfather, to Melia’s consternation.
“Ah, Dotey.”
“No, thank you,” she said.
Her grandfather ducked as he passed her, and squeezed a bare knee.
“Put a bit of meat on that,” he said.
Perhaps by way of revenge, Orla occupied his easy chair and did not relinquish it when he got back with the paper. This was clearly a new situation for Seán, who stood a moment, nonplussed.
“Would you get up out of that?”
She was sitting sideways and akimbo, one bare leg hooked over the chair arm, knickers on show, the whole nine yards.
“Orla.” Ivor’s tone was more harsh then he had intended. “Get up. Now.”
“Why is there only one chair?” she said, looking up at them, fully aggrieved. “Why isn’t there a chair for Nana Melia?”
“Because there isn’t,” Ivor said.
“Because it’s mine,” her grandfather said. He bopped her briefly on the head with the newspaper, gave a swift poke to her ribs.
“Mine.”
He reached under her knee to tickle it, and she gave a reflex kick. There was a moment’s pause as they looked each other in the eye.
Slowly, Orla unhooked her leg and stood up. She wriggled her outfit straight before stalking across the room and out the door to the hall.
By teatime, Emer was in one of her silences, and Ivor felt the itch to go up to his father in Galway, even though he knew his father was nearly two years gone.
They all sat around the table, waiting to be done.
“Tell me, Seán. Did you ever sort the other thing?”
“Which one is that?’
“The thing beyond.”
“Oh.” Seán rolled his jaw as though tasting something. “Sure, that fella’s gone in the head.”
Melia was up again, waving at a fly.
“You’ve sold your own place,” he said.
“Slow enough to shift,” Ivor said, carefully.
“The interest rates are prohibitive,” Seán said.
Indeed, what had looked like a fortune—the bay window, the fancy bannisters, the evergreen magnolia in the garden, which his mother had grown from a clipping taken in Lissadell—all of it had gone for the price of a fast car.
They sat a moment.
“And tell me,” Seán said. “Did you use an agent, at all?”
“I did,” Ivor said. “I think that would be the normal way now.”
“Sure, they’re queuing up to hand over the money to the middleman.”
Some remnant there, Ivor thought, of the old days and the landlord’s agent. He was trying to ease his way into a useful response when Orla piped up with “It’s not your house.”
Her tone was very cool.
“It was my Gramps’s house.”
“Arragh, what?” Seán said, flustered by her cheek.
“You’re not in charge of it.”
It was then that he lowered his voice and called her a little whore, though Emer heard “hoor,” which was a harmless country term, almost affectionate. Whatever word he used, Orla fled again, this time through the back door of the kitchen, across the yard to the barn. Emer looked down at her lap. After a moment, Ivor got up to follow the child and Seán said, “Sure, let her go.”
And he did.
There was something wrong, Ivor thought later, lying in the country blackout, and he did not know what it was. He recalled his wife’s tinny voice coming through the phone in the hall, how it had felt so strange that he was sitting in her childhood house and she was up in Dublin. The way Melia did not move away when he took the receiver, the oddness of that. And he realized that it was not solicitude that had held his mother-in-law in place but some other problem. Something neurological. The lurch she made toward the door of the front room. Parkinson’s, maybe. Did women get that?
He wondered if Melia had been to the doctor. She had lost quite a lot of her hair, the past couple of years, and Ivor did not know if that was part of the same thing. The loveliest woman on this side of the county.
There was a story that Seán had been due to marry another girl fifty years ago. It was all arranged. But, as she walked up the aisle, he pulled his best man across him. He swapped places with this best man, who was also his brother, so the bride arrived at the altar to the wrong Loughnane and was married to him instead. Afterward, the couple went to America.
Ivor did not think it was true. There might be a germ of truth in it, there might have been a broken engagement or something like it, but at the altar? You’d have to give notice, or whatever they did, back in the day. Call the banns. You’d need a very tame priest.
In any case, Seán got Melia, the woman he had wanted all along.
The next day, Ivor watched Melia’s tremor and he wondered what to say to his wife. But Emer was concerned by the lack of hay in the barn; that was what she asked her sisters about when they came in from Limerick and Carrigaholt. The afternoon was filled with cousins for Orla, who was flying around in her new denim skirt and cheesecloth top.
“What age are you now, Orla?” her aunt Triona asked.
Orla did not seem to hear. The top was gathered in a way that drew attention to her chest.
“I wonder will she be tall,” Triona said, to no one in particular.
The Loughnane women had the food set out on a garden blanket, a chance to speak in the open air. There was no new hay in the barn because Seán had leased out the land, did Emer not know? The stock in the long field belonged to Magennis, from the other side of the river. The farmwork was beyond Seán now, with his dicky heart. He had an appointment every six months up at the hospital and there was talk of a pacemaker further down the line. Though everyone agreed that he looked better and better. One of the brothers-in-law said, “He’s in reverse.”
And then he was there, behind them.
“What does a man have to do around here to get a cup of tea?”
“Will you sit in, Daddy?” Triona said. “Will I get a chair?”
“I won’t,” he said.
He stood where he was and surveyed the scene, empty cup in hand, as the women fussed about him. Triona patted the teapot to see if it was hot enough still.
“Did you catch the match results?” her husband, Brendan, said.
“I did.”
When Ivor went inside to rinse out his cup, the house seemed dark after the sunshine. Melia was sitting on a hard kitchen chair, her hand on the table, the fingers dabbing over and back.
It was only after everyone was gone that they missed Orla, who had vanished into the long summer evening, probably off with the cats, somewhere about the farm. Emer and Melia continued to clear up and the two men watched the news. A little Italian boy who had fallen down a well was declared dead. Melia crossed herself.
“Bless us and save us,” she said.
The weather would continue fine.
Ivor went to use the bathroom and checked the front room as he walked back, in case Orla had come in quietly. Yesterday’s pink dungaree dress, or whatever it was called, was still on the floor: an empty circle of fabric, as though she had just stepped out of it. He picked the thing up and hung it by the straps from a chair. When Orla had come in from the barn after her grandfather had called her a whore, Ivor had tried to touch her, to give her a hug, but she had become untouchable. When had that happened?
He counted the days that she had been left behind, the week his father died, and the number shifted from three to four. The day he had spent going about the house, walking Salthill, mowing the lawn. The day his father’s crossword could be neither finished nor thrown out. He might have fetched her then—two hours down the road, two hours back—but Emer had said no. And she was right. There were a hundred reasons for no.
These are the things that change a child, he thought, but what can you do?
At half nine, her mother called from the back door, and a little later Melia stood in the dusk and banged a pot. It was nearly dark by the time Ivor reached for his car keys, and Seán said, in an oddly indifferent voice, “You might check along the river.”
Which was what Ivor went out to do, not knowing what he was looking for. Orla lost, walking the road. He tried to remember what the child had on her: the flimsy top gathered about her little bust. He found it hard to catch his breath. Something bad had happened to her, the week he’d left her behind. All this time, he thought he had lost his father, and he had lost his daughter instead.
The hedges flared green; the gateposts sprang shadows. A man in a house he passed was drawing the curtains against the dark. Ivor checked the verges to the limit of the headlights, his mind gone lurid and blank.
It was three minutes to the bridge, maybe four. Ivor waited as a car came against him, with another on its tail. As he took his turn to cross, he saw Orla standing in one of the recesses built into the bridge wall. She did not recognize the car. Ivor calmed his voice as he rolled the window down.
“You looking for a lift?”
“You’re going the wrong way.” She was eating crisps.
“Where did you get the money?” he asked.
“I have money.”
“Hop in there,” Ivor said. “Your mother is worried about you.”
She walked around the front to the passenger side, her body lit and then lost by the headlights.
Ivor drove the rest of the bridge and turned the car around at the small shop car park. He waited at the yield sign while a farmer came over in his tractor.
“Probably going to the pub,” Ivor said.
As they recrossed, the Shannon’s broad waters swirled black on either side.
“You should always walk around the back of a car,” he said. “When the engine is on. In case it’s still in gear. In case the driver’s foot slips.”
“When are we going home?”
“What day are we now?” he said.
It was good to have her beside him in the passenger seat: half child and half woman, still the same Orla. They pulled up to the house and sat a moment in the car.
“I just don’t know what you see in him,” she said. “That’s all.”
“Who? Your granda?”
“He’s mean to everyone. Horrible to Nana Melia.”
“Was he mean to you?”
“No.”
But Ivor did not know if she meant “Yes.”
“He’s a character,” he said.
Emer was at the kitchen window, trying to see if Orla was in the car with him. Then she was coming out the front door in a rush, and Orla was reluctantly unclipping the seat belt and opening the door.
Inside, Seán glanced briefly away from the television as the women fussed at Orla’s return.
“Would you keep it down?” he said.
Ivor thought of the story of the swapped groom. That sense he got, when Seán looked at him—or at any of his sons-in-law—that they might be easily replaced.
It was not Melia who had driven their sons away.
Later, on the spongy sofa bed, he turned to face Emer and stroked her hair. The depths of his wife, her silences—it was always hard to tell, with her, when she was awake and when asleep.
“We could send her to the cousins for a few days,” she whispered into the solid blackness of the air between them. “I’ll ask Triona.”
And “Thank you, God,” Orla said from across the room, loud and clear.
That autumn, Ivor waited for the next disaster, whatever it would be. In October, there was a flurry of chat on the phone: the car in Garrenboy had finally given up the ghost and they had no money for another one. Seán did not do the talking; he let Melia fuss and fret through various impossibilities, until her daughter stepped up to suggest a loan. This offer had to be rejected and then made again, personally, by Ivor. The loan then became a gift, one that was accepted with reluctance by Seán, a man who seemed freshly surprised by the concept of money. Ivor wrote the check as though he were telling his father-in-law to go fuck himself. After which he was five hundred quid the poorer, but, for one long minute, rich in hatred and in satisfaction.
The little house with the disputed boundary burned down in the spring, and no one said a thing about it until June, when Emer drove to Garrenboy because Melia had taken a fall. A gorse fire, Triona said. The oul’ bachelor up the hill, though the police could prove nothing and didn’t seem bothered trying. The place was practically a shack, these many years.
“He probably did it himself,” Orla said. “Out of spite.”
There was a lot to be said for ignoring Orla’s large statements these days, but there were times when Ivor saw in her a future woman more interesting, more perceptive, than many of the people he knew.
“You think?” he said.
With Emer gone, the girls were feeding their father and they were all living on cheese on toast. Orla had a new variation involving brown sauce, and as she bent to retrieve it from under the grill her eldest sister lifted the hem of her skirt up high.
“You little hoor,” she crowed, and Orla hit out, screaming. The toast landed cheese down on the floor, and she pounced and lifted it up, aghast, holding it out like an actress with a bloodied dagger.
“Look what you did,” she said. “Look what you’ve done.”
“No harm,” said Ivor, who was, actually, fussy about such things. “No harm. Give it here.”
And he ate the spoiled toast just as it was.
Later, when he sat reading in the comfy chair, Orla climbed in beside him, even though she was far too big to fit anymore. She wriggled in, all elbows and knees, and was quiet.
“Don’t talk to me,” she said. “There’s no point.”
“Fair enough,” Ivor said.
And they stayed awhile without moving, almost like old times. ♦
