Nora Webster (2 page)

What surprised her was the hardness of her resolve, how easy it seemed to turn her back on what she had loved, leave this house on the lane to the cliff for others to know, for others to come to in the summer and fill with different noises. As she sat looking out at the bruised sky over the sea, she sighed. Finally, she let herself feel how much she had lost, how much she would miss. She got out of the car, steadying herself against the wind.

The front door opened on to a tiny hall. There were two rooms on each side, the rooms on the left with bunk beds, a living room on the right with a tiny kitchen and bathroom behind it, and their room beside it, peaceful, away from the children.

Each year in early June they came here, all of them, on a Satur
day and Sunday, even if the weather was not good. They brought scrubbing brushes and mops and detergent and cloths for cleaning windows. They brought mattresses that had been well aired. It was a turning point, a mark on the calendar that meant the beginning of summer, even if summer was going to be grey and misty. The children, in the years she wanted to remember now, were noisy and excited at the start, as though they were an American family from
The Donna Reed Show.
They imitated American accents and gave each other instructions, but they soon grew tired and bored and she let them play or go down to the strand or walk into the village. And this was when the serious work began. When the children were out of the way, Maurice could do things like paint the woodwork, use distemper on the cement; the lino on a floor could be covered in the places where there were holes and she could patch the wallpaper where there was mould or too many stains, and for this she would need silence and concentration. She enjoyed measuring down to the last fraction of an inch, making the paste to the right consistency, and cutting up bright new patches of wallpaper in floral patterns.

Fiona hated spiders. That was something Nora remembered now. And cleaning the house meant, more than anything, displacing spiders and beetles and clocks and all types of creepy-crawlies. The boys loved Fiona screaming, and Fiona herself enjoyed screaming too, especially as her father would protect her with elaborate gestures. “Where is it?” he would shout, mimicking the giant in “Jack and the Beanstalk,” and Fiona would run to him and hold him.

That was the past, then, she thought as she walked into the living room, and it cannot be rescued. The smallness and coldness of the room gave her an odd satisfaction now. There was clearly a leak in the galvanised tin roof because there was a fresh stain on the ceiling. The house rattled as a gust of wind brought a hard sheet of rain
against the glass. The windows would have to be repaired soon, and the wood had begun to rot. And who knew how long it would take for the cliff to be eaten away as far back as here and their house to be dismantled on the orders of the county council? Someone else could worry now. Someone else could repair the leaks and treat the walls for damp. Someone else could rewire and repaint this house, or abandon it to the elements when the time came.

She would sell it to Jack Lacey. Nobody who lived locally would want to buy it; they knew what a bad investment it would be, compared to houses in Bentley or Curracloe or Morriscastle. No one from Dublin who saw the house in this state would make an offer for it. She looked around the room and shuddered.

She walked into the children’s bedrooms and into their own bedroom, and she knew that for Jack Lacey in Birmingham owning this would be a dream, part of a memory of scorching hot Sundays, and boys and girls on bicycles, and bright, open possibilities. On the other hand, she imagined him coming into the house in a year or two, when he was back for a fortnight in Ireland, with the ceiling half fallen in and cobwebs everywhere and the wallpaper peeling and the windows broken and the electricity cut off. And the summer’s day all drizzly and dark.

She looked through drawers, but there was nothing that she wanted. Only yellow newspaper and bits of twine. Even the crockery and kitchen utensils seemed not worth taking home. In the bedroom, she found some photographs and some books in a locker and she gathered these to take with her. Nothing else. The furniture was worthless, the lightshades were already dingy and worn. She remembered buying them in Woolworth’s in Wexford only a few years earlier. Everything rotted and faded in this house.

The rain began to pour down. She took a mirror from the bed
room wall, noting how clean the space it covered had remained, compared to the discoloured, dirty wallpaper all around.

At first she thought the knocking she heard was something banging against the door or the window in the wind. But when it persisted and she heard a voice, she realised that she had a visitor. She was surprised because she had thought that no one had noticed her approach and no one could see the car. Her first instinct was to hide, but she knew that she had already been seen.

As she opened the latch, the front door blew in towards her. The figure outside was wearing an oversized anorak, the large hood of which was half covering the face.

“Nora, I heard the car. Are you all right?”

Once the hood was pulled down, she recognised Mrs. Darcy, whom she had not seen since the funeral. Mrs. Darcy followed her inside as she closed the door.

“Why didn’t you call in first?” she asked.

“I’m just here for a few minutes,” Nora said.

“Get into the car and come on up to the house. You can’t stay here.”

Once more she noted the hectoring tone, as though she were a child, unable to make proper decisions. She had tried since the funeral to ignore this tone, or tolerate it. She had tried to understand that it was shorthand for kindness.

Just now, she would have relished taking her few possessions from the house, putting them in the car and driving out of Cush. But it could not be done, she would have to accept Mrs. Darcy’s hospitality.

Mrs. Darcy would not get into the car with her, insisting that she was too wet. She would walk back to her house, while Nora drove, she said.

“I’ll be a few more minutes. I’ll follow you up,” Nora said.

Mrs. Darcy looked at her puzzled. Nora had tried to sound casual, but she had succeeded instead in sounding secretive.

“I just want to collect a few things to bring home,” she said.

Her visitor’s eyes lit on the books and photographs and the mirror resting against the wall, then she swiftly took in everything else in the room. And Nora felt that Mrs. Darcy understood immediately what she was doing.

“Don’t be long now,” she said. “I’ll have the tea ready for you.”

When Mrs. Darcy had left, Nora closed the door and went back into the house.

It was done. In her all-embracing glance around the room, Mrs. Darcy had made it seem real. Nora would leave this house and never come back. She would never walk these lanes again and she would let herself feel no regret. It was over. She took up the few things she had collected and put them in the boot of the car.

Mrs. Darcy’s kitchen was warm. She put fresh scones on a plate with melting butter and poured the tea.

“We were wondering how you were getting on but Bill Parle told us the night he went in that your house was full of people. Maybe we should have gone in all the same, but we thought we’d leave it until after Christmas when you might like the company more.”

“There have been a lot of visitors,” Nora said. “But you know you’re welcome any time.”

“Well, there are a lot of people who are very fond of you,” Mrs. Darcy said. She took off her apron and sat down. “And we were all worried about you, that you wouldn’t come down here anymore. Carmel Redmond, you know, was away when it happened and she was shocked.”

“I know. She wrote to me,” Nora said, “and then she called in.”

“So she told us,” Mrs. Darcy said, “and Lily was here that day and she said that we should be looking out for you. And I used to wait for that day when you’d all come down and do up the house. For me, it was the beginning of the fine weather. My heart would lift when I’d see you coming.”

“I remember one year,” Nora said, “it was raining so hard you took pity on us and made us all come up here for our tea.”

“And you know,” Mrs. Darcy said, “your children have the best manners. They are so well reared. Aine used to love coming to see us. All of them did, but she was the one we knew best. And Maurice used to come on a Sunday if there was a match on the wireless.”

Nora looked out at the rain. It was tempting now to mislead Mrs. Darcy, to tell her that they were going to keep coming down here, but she could not do that. And she felt that Mrs. Darcy understood her silence, had been watching for some clue, something said or left unsaid, to confirm her impression that Nora was going to sell the house.

“Now, what we decided,” Mrs. Darcy said, “was that next year we’d do up the house for you. I was looking at it just now, and it could do with some patching on the galvanise, and we’ll be getting that done on the barn here anyway, and so they might as well go down to you. And we’ll take turns to do the rest of it. I have a key, and we could have surprised you, but Lily said that I was to ask you, and I was going to do that after Christmas. She said it was your house, and we shouldn’t be intruding.”

Nora knew that she should tell her now, but there was something too effusive and warm in Mrs. Darcy’s tone that stopped her.

“But I thought it would be nice for you,” Mrs. Darcy went on, “to come down and have it all done. So don’t say anything now, but let me know if you don’t want us to do it. And I’ll hold on to the key unless you want it back.”

“No. Of course not, Mrs. Darcy. I’d like you to hold on to the key.”

Maybe, she thought as she drove towards Blackwater, maybe Mrs. Darcy had presumed all along that she was going to sell the house, and realised that cleaning it up would increase its value; or maybe Mrs. Darcy had presumed nothing, maybe Nora herself was watching everyone too closely to see what they thought of her. But she knew she had behaved strangely in closing the gates when she had parked the car in front of the house, in seeming almost furtive when Mrs. Darcy called, and in not instantly accepting or turning down her offer to help with the house.

She sighed. It had been awkward and difficult, and now it was finished. She would write to Mrs. Darcy and Lily Devereux and Carmel Redmond. Often in the past, when she made a decision like this, she changed her mind the next morning, but this time it was not like that, she would not change her mind.

On the road back to Enniscorthy, she began to calculate. She did not know how much the house was worth. She would think of a figure and send it to Jack Lacey in a sealed envelope—she did not want to negotiate with May Lacey—and if he offered less than she asked for, she would accept it as long as it was reasonable. She did not want to have to advertise the house in the newspaper.

The car was taxed and insured until Christmas. She had planned to give it up then, but if she sold the house, she thought, she would keep the car or buy a newer model. The house money would also pay for the black marble gravestone for Maurice that she wanted, and she would be able to rent a caravan in Curracloe for a week or two next summer. What she had left she could use for household expenses and to buy some new clothes for herself and the girls. And then keep something for an emergency.

The house—she smiled to herself—would become like the two
and sixpence a man had given Conor a few summers earlier. She could not remember which summer it was, but it was before his father was sick and it was before he really understood the value of money. Conor had given the two and sixpence to Maurice to mind for him and then all summer, every time they went to Blackwater, he drew on this money, confidently demanding a fresh instalment from his father. When they told him it was all gone, he had refused to believe them.

She wrote to May Lacey, enclosing a letter for Jack. Within a short time, she had a letter from him agreeing to the price she had suggested. She replied with the name of a solicitor in the town who would draw up the contract of sale.

She waited for the right moment to tell the boys about selling the house in Cush, and when she began, she was shocked at how concerned they both seemed, how attentive, as though by listening carefully they might hear something that would have a serious effect on their future. As she spoke to them about how useful the money would be, she learned that they already knew that she had planned to sell the car, although she had not told them this. They did not smile, or even appear relieved, when she said that they were going to keep the car.

“Will we still be able to go to the university?” Conor asked.

“Of course,” she said. “What made you think about that?”

“Who will pay?”

“I have other money saved up for that.”

She did not want to say that maybe their uncle Jim and aunt Margaret would pay. They were Maurice’s older brother and sister who had not married and lived together in the old family house
in the town. The boys remained absolutely still; they watched her intently. She went out to the kitchen and turned on the kettle and when she came back into the room, they had not moved.