Selected Stories

They deprecated that, and Teresa looked around. When she woke that morning she’d found herself wondering if her husband would be here, if he’d drive down from Dublin, since the death would have shocked him. But among the mourners in the drawing-room she didn’t see him. It seemed quite a sparse attendance in the large, ordinarily furnished room, for not everyone who’d been at the church had come. But Teresa knew her husband hadn’t been in the church either. It was years now since they’d met; he’d ceased to bother with his children as soon as other children were born to him. As good as his word about not being a nuisance, Teresa supposed.

Afterwards, when everyone had gone, Connie helped the O’Dalys to clear up and when that was done the O’Dalys went too. She and her father did what her mother had requested then, taking her things from the wardrobe and the dressing-table drawers, disposing of them as she had wished, her charities remembered. It was late before all that was completed, before Connie and her father sat together in the kitchen. He poached their eggs when they’d decided to have eggs. He asked her to watch the toast. ‘We’ll manage,’ he said.

The farm had come to Robert when he married, introducing him to a way of life he had not sought and which he did not imagine he would take to. In fact, he did, and over the years transformed the farm his wife had not long ago inherited as a sluggish, neglected enterprise into a fairly thriving one. It was a means of livelihood too; and, more than that, a source of personal satisfaction for Robert that he succeeded with crops and stock, about which he had once known nothing.

All this continued when he was widowed, when the house and land became entirely his. There were no changes on the farm, but in the house - to which Mrs O’Daly now came for three hours every weekday morning - Connie and her father, while slowly coming to terms with the loss they had suffered, shared the awareness of a ghost that fleetingly demanded no more than to be remembered. Life continuing could not fold away what had happened but it offered something, blurring the drama of death’s immediacy. And then, when almost two years had passed since the funeral, Robert asked Teresa to marry him.

It was a natural thing. Having known one another through the friendship of their daughters, they had come to know one another better in the new circumstances, Teresa continuing to drive Melissa to the farm, with her much younger brother when he was made welcome there by Connie but was still too young to cycle. And Robert, doing his bit as often as he could, drove the two back to the bungalow at Fara Bridge, where their father in his day had attempted to get a pottery going.

The day he asked Teresa to marry him, Robert had looked up from the mangels he was weeding and seen her coming towards him, along the verge of the field. She brought him tea in a can, which she often did when she stayed all afternoon in order to save him the journey later to Fara Bridge. A year after the death she had begun to fall in love with him.

‘I never knew,’ he said in the mangel field when Teresa’s response to his proposal was to tell him that. ‘I thought you’d turn me down.’

She took the can of tea from his hand and lifted it to her lips, the first intimacy between them, before their first embrace, before they spoke of love. ‘Oh, Robert, not in a million years would I turn you down,’ she whispered.

There were difficulties, but they didn’t matter as they would have once. In an Ireland they could both remember it would have been commented upon that she, born into a religious faith that was not Robert’s, had attended a funeral service in his alien church. It would have been declared that marriage would not do; that the divorce which had brought Teresa’s to an end could not be recognized. Questions would have been asked about children who might be born to them: to which belief were they promised, in which safe haven might they know only their own kind? Such difficulties still trailed, like husks caught in old cobwebs, but there were fewer interfering strictures now in how children were brought up, and havens were less often sought. Melissa, a year older than Connie, had received her early schooling from the nuns in Clonmel and had gone on to an undenominational boarding-school in Dublin. Her brother still attended the national school at Fara Bridge. Connie went to Miss Mortimer, whose tiny academy for Protestant children – her mother’s choice because it was convenient – was conducted in an upstairs room at the rectory, ten minutes’ away along the river path. But, in the end, all three would be together at Melissa’s boarding-school, co-educational and of the present.

‘How lovely all that is!’ Teresa murmured.