Selected Stories

‘They have to come to the house. They won’t stay long.’

‘I know.’

‘You’ve been a strength, Connie.’

He meant it. He himself had been the source of strength at first and had seen her through that time, before she began to give back what he had given her. She had adored her mother.

‘She would want us to be hospitable,’ he said, unnecessarily, saying too much.

‘I know we have to be.’

Connie was eleven and had her mother’s faded blue eyes, and hair the colour of corn-stalks, as her mother’s had been too. The freckles on her forehead and on the bridge of her nose were a feature of her own.

‘We can get down to it when they’ve gone,’ she said as they drove on, past the two cottages where nobody lived, down the hill that suddenly became almost dark, beech foliage meeting overhead. Mrs Archdale had been given a lift by the Dobbs brothers, their red Ford Escort already turning in at the gates. On the uneven surface of the avenue other cars were progressing cautiously, watched by the fenced sheep on either side.

‘Come in, come in,’ Connie’s father invited the mourners who had already left their cars and were conversing in quiet tones on the gravel in front of the house. He was a tall, thin man, dark hair beginning to go grey, a boniness distinguishing his features. Sombrely dressed today, he was quite notably handsome. He had known much longer than his child had that his wife was going to die, but always at first there had been hope of a kind. Connie had been told when there was none.

The hall door wasn’t locked. He’d left it so, wanting people to go in as soon as they arrived, but no one had. He pushed it open and stood aside. All of them would know the way and Mrs O’Daly would be there, tea made.

When Teresa was left by her husband she’d felt humiliated by the desertion. ‘You’ll have them to yourself,’ he’d said; with ersatz gentleness, she considered. ‘I promise you I won’t be a nuisance about that.’ He spoke of their two children, whom she had always believed were fonder of him than they were of her. And it seemed wrong that they should be deprived of him: in her lowness at the time she had even said so, had felt she should be punished further for her failure to keep a marriage together, should lose them too. ‘Oh no,’ he had protested. ‘No, I would never do that.’

Among the mourners in the drawing-room, she remembered that with poignancy, wondering if the pain of death so early in a marriage left behind the same cruel rawness that did not change and lingered for so long. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said when Connie’s father put a hand on her arm and murmured that she was good to have come. ‘I’m awfully sorry, Robert,’ she said again, murmuring also.

She knew him as Connie’s father, her own daughter, Melissa, being Connie’s particular friend. She didn’t know him well; more often than not he wasn’t there when she brought Melissa to spend the day at the farm. She had liked Connie’s mother but had never had much of a conversation with her, they being different kinds of people, and the house was a busy place. During all the years Teresa had known the house no one was employed to help in it, as no one was – except for odd days during the summer – on the farm itself. Teresa had guessed that the present bleak occasion would be in the hands of Mrs O’Daly, who in her capable countrywoman’s way would have offered to see to things. She poured the tea now, cups and saucers laid out on a table that didn’t belong in the drawing-room. O’Daly, a small, scuttling man who worked on the roads and took on anything else he could get, was handing round plates of biscuits and egg sandwiches.

‘He did it very well,’ someone remarked to Teresa. ‘Your rector did.’

‘Yes, he did.’

A couple she couldn’t place, whose way of referring to Mr Crozier suggested they weren’t of the locality, nodded a nervous confirmation of her agreement. Teresa thought she probably would even have known them if they’d come out from Clonmel. Yes, Mr Crozier did funerals well, she said.

‘We’re distant cousins,’ the woman said. ‘A generation back.’

‘I live quite near.’

‘It’s lovely here.’

‘Quiet,’ the man said. ‘You’d notice the quiet.’

‘We didn’t know until we picked up the Irish Times

,’ the woman said. ‘Well, we’d lost touch.’

‘Saddens us now, of course.’ The man nodded that into place. ‘To have lost touch.’

‘Yes.’

Teresa was forty-one, still pretty, her round face brightened by a smile that came easily and lingered, as if it belonged to these features in a way as permanent as they were themselves. Her reddish hair was cut quite short; she had to watch her weight and adamantly did so. She shook her head when O’Daly pressed his plate of Bourbon creams on her.

‘We drove over,’ the woman she was in conversation with imparted. ‘From Mitchelstown.’

‘Good of you to come.’