Selected Stories

‘You’d find it remote, Emily,’ Kathleen said. Her lipstick had left a trace on the rim of the teacup and Norah drew her attention to it with a gesture. Kathleen wiped it off. ‘We’re town people ourselves,’ she said.

Emily didn’t consider the house she’d lived in for nearly thirty years remote. Five minutes in the car and you were in the middle of Carra. Mangan’s Bridge, in the other direction, was no more than a minute.

‘You get used to a place,’ Emily said.

They identified for her the house where they lived themselves, on the outskirts of Carra, on the Athy road. Emily knew it, a pleasant creeper-covered house with silver railings in front of it, not big but prosperous-looking. She’d thought it was Corrigan’s, the surveyor’s.

‘I don’t know why I thought that.’

‘We bought it from Mr Corrigan,’ Norah said, ‘when we came to Carra three years ago.’ And her sister said they’d been living in Athy before that.

‘Carra was what we were looking for,’ Norah said.

They were endeavouring to lift her spirits, Emily realized, by keeping things light. Carra had improved in their time, they said, and it would again. You could tell with a town; some of them wouldn’t rise out of the doldrums while a century’d go by.

‘You’d maybe come in to Carra now?’ Kathleen said.

‘I don’t know what I’ll do.’

She poured more tea. She handed round the brack again. Dr Ann had given her pills to take, but she didn’t intend to take them. Exhausted as she was, she didn’t want to sleep.

‘He went out a week ago,’ she said. ‘He got up and went out to the yard with only a coat over his pyjamas. I thought it was that that hurried it on, but seemingly it wasn’t.’

They didn’t say anything, just nodded, both of them. She said he had been seven months dying. He hadn’t read a newspaper all that time, she said. In the end all the food he could manage was cornflour.

‘We never knew your husband,’ Norah said, ‘any more than yourself. Although I think we maybe met him on the road one day.’

A feeling of apprehension began in Emily, a familiar dread that compulsively caused one hand to clench the other, fingers tightly locking. People often met him, exercising one of the horses. A car would slow down for him but he never acknowledged it, never so much as raised the crop. For a moment she forget that he was dead.

‘He was often out,’ she said.

‘Oh, this was long ago.’

‘He sold the last of the horses twelve months ago. He didn’t want them left.’

‘He raced his horses, we’re to understand?’ Kathleen said.

‘Point-to-points. Punchestown the odd time.’

‘Well, that’s great.’

‘There wasn’t much success.’

‘It’s an up and down business, of course.’

Disappointment had filled the house when yet again a horse trailed in, when months of preparation went for nothing. There had never been much reason for optimism, but even so expectation had been high, as if anything less would have brought bad luck. When Emily married, her husband had been training a string of yearlings on the Curragh. Doing well, he’d said himself, although in fact he wasn’t.

‘You never had children, Emily?’ Kathleen asked.

‘No, we never did.’

‘I think we heard that said.’

The house had been left to her by an aunt on her mother’s side. Forty-three acres, sheep kept; and the furniture had been left to her too. ‘I used come here as a child. A Miss Edgill my aunt was. Did you hear of her?’

They shook their heads. Way before their time, Kathleen said, looking around her. A good house, she said.

‘She’d no one else to leave it to.’ And Emily didn’t add that neither the property nor the land would ever have become hers if her aunt had suspected she’d marry the man she had.

‘You’ll let it go though?’ Kathleen pursued her enquiries, doing her best to knit together a conversation. ‘The way things are now, you were saying you’d let it go?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Anyone would require a bit of time.’

‘We see a lot of widowing,’ Norah murmured.

‘Nearly to the day, we were married twenty-three years.’

‘God took him because He wanted him, Emily.’

The Geraghtys continued to offer sympathy, one following the other in what was said, the difference in tone and manner continuing also. And again – and more often as more solace was pressed upon her – Emily reflected how fortunate it was that they had escaped the awkwardness of attempting to keep company with her husband. He would have called her back as soon as she’d left them with him. He would have asked her who they were, although he knew; he would have told her to take them away. He’d never minded what he said – the flow of coarse language when someone crossed one of the fields, every word shouted out, frighteningly sometimes. It was always that: raising his voice, the expressions he used; not once, not ever, had there been violence. Yet often she had wished that there had been, believing that violence would have been easier to bear than the power of his articulated anger. It was power she had always felt coming from him, festering and then released, his denial of his failure.