House of Memories

by Taylor, Alice

  “Oh, that eases my old bones,” he told her appreciatively.

  “How’s the old ticker doing? Are you taking things any easier?” she asked.

  “Yerra, I’m great for an ould fella,” he told her.

  “Well then,” Kate said as she drew up the rocking chair beside him, “tell me all the news from below.”

  “What kind of news?” Jack teased.

  “You know that anything that moves in Mossgrove is news for me.”

  “Well, all is quiet in Mossgrove. While Martha was in America, Peter got his hands on the control knobs, and I feel that he might keep them there.”

  “Is she satisfied with that?”

  “I’m not sure. You know with Martha you can never be quite sure of anything. She seems satisfied enough, but that might only mean that she is hatching something that might turn us all upside down when she gets going again,” Jack said.

  “Life is never dull around Martha,” Kate mused, “but nothing came of the great romance that we all thought would blossom in New York.”

  “Well, we are assuming that it didn’t, but I suppose when he didn’t come back with them that was that. But it didn’t surprise me that it happened that way. Somehow I can never see Martha getting married again. In many ways Martha is a solo operator,” Jack concluded.

  “I thought that she might have married him for the money,” Kate said thoughtfully. “I know that sounds terrible, but Martha likes power, and think what she could have done as Mrs Rodney Jackson.”

  “Martha would prefer to make her own money,” Jack decided.

  “You are probably right,” Kate agreed. “You know Martha better than any of us.”

  “Hard to know Martha.”

  “Well, I didn’t come to discuss Martha,” Kate told him. “I am here to discuss money problems.”

  “Oh,” Jack said in surprise.

  “Not my money problems,” Kate assured him.

  “Whose then?” Jack looked at her inquiringly.

  “Danny Conway’s,” she told him.

  “Aha! I thought that he couldn’t keep going much longer without needing hard cash at the rate he was doing improvements,” Jack said thoughtfully, “but how did you get involved in it?”

  Kate filled him in, and as he listened he nodded his head slowly and smiled with understanding as she told about the grandmother.

  “So old Molly Barry has left her mark,” he said slowly. “The chances were always there that there was bound to be one throwback. And Danny is the one! I thought that it was looking that way. And he has even resurrected the old name Furze Hill. It was always known as Furze Hill when I was a child, and it was a grand place then. The Barrys were fine people.”

  “But what happened?” Kate’s voice was full of curiosity.

  “Molly Barry married so far beneath her that she could never again straighten up,” Jack told her.

  “Good God, Jack, that’s a deadly pronouncement,” Kate told him in a shocked voice.

  “Just telling it as it was,” Jack declared. “Rory was a blackguard of the highest order. There is no other way to describe him. Molly was a strong-willed only child who had seldom heard the word no. She was very spoilt. Conway could be charming, but there was a bad drop in him. They eloped and were married before anyone knew anything about it. I’d say that the day she got married was the last good day that she had. He was no good, and she discovered it in her own time. But I suppose her biggest disappointment was that their son Matt turned out the same as his father. Matt was a bit of an oddball and pushing on in years when he married Brigid, who was far younger; and then he got worse if anything. He treated Brigid like dirt, and then, of course, there was the business with the daughters. So Molly’s hardship did not die with Rory.”

  “But how come old Rory Conway was so friendly with grandfather if he was that bad?” Kate asked in a puzzled voice.

  “Could never understand it,” Jack told her. “They went to school together, and I think that your grandfather always thought that he could straighten him out. Then he fixed the loan because he did not want to see Furze Hill go to the wall, on account of Molly. The Barrys were the old stock, and your grandfather had great time for them, and he wanted to do everything he could for Molly.”

  “Well, Jack, this is all news to me,” Kate exclaimed. “You live in a place all your life and you think that you know all that there is to know about the people, and then you come on an unopened chapter.”

  “Life is full of unread chapters, Kate,” Jack smiled. They sat quietly together, both occupied with their own thought, and the logs shifted in the fire, sending out a spray of sparks that caused Toby to draw back hurriedly. He looked around, unsure of the safety of the stone floor, and jumped into Jack’s lap where he settled down comfortably. Jack rubbed behind his brown ears, thinking that it was time to put on the kettle, but Kate broke into his thoughts.

  “And while we are at it now, Jack, what is the story of that old stone house beyond Conway’s own house?”

  “That was more of Rory Conway’s madness. He got the daft notion that it would be cheaper to live in a smaller house. The rates were high on Furze Hill and would be less on a smaller house, so he stripped the slates off that fine old house and moved into that other poke of a place. He was friendly with your grandfather then — that was before the split — and the old man made him sheet it afterwards, so at least that kept it from the weather.”

  “And they never used it since?” Kate asked.

  “No. Rory Conway locked it and boarded up the windows, and over the years it got buried in furze bushes and trees. The place is not called Furze Hill for nothing, you know. By then, of course, Molly and himself were having blue murder, so he was probably doing it to spite her as well. She had loved that old house. It was her childhood home, and I suppose we all love our childhood home.”

  “Not I’d say if you were one of the present generation of Conways,” Kate told him.

  “No, I suppose not,” Jack agreed evenly.

  “I’ve always felt sorry for the young Conways. Their father gave them a terrible life, and only for old Molly it would have been worse. Even when she was dying she was looking out for them. I had great time for her.”

  “She was a real Barry,” Jack said, “and it was hard to get to the end of the Barrys. She probably sized up Matt’s clutch and decided which had the most Barry blood in them and primed Danny to be ready if the tide ever turned in his direction.”

  Then Kate took him by surprise: “Jack, did you ever think that there was something strange about the way Matt Conway died?” she asked searchingly.

  “I did,” he admitted reluctantly.

  “Do you think that Martha had something to do with it?” she persisted.

  “She could have,” he told her slowly, remembering the morning beside Yalla Hole, “and I think that Danny might have seen more than was good for him.”

  “How do you mean?” Kate demanded.

  “There are certain things in life, Kate, that are best put behind us, especially when I’m only putting two and two together and not sure of anything; so we’ll let it at that now.”

  Looking into a fire, Jack thought, is a great place to think. You can see the future take shape between the sods and the logs. He knew that Kate was thinking back over all that they had talked about, but he was thinking ahead to the future of Furze Hill. Despite all the bitterness between himself and Rory Conway, old man Phelan had mourned the condition of the house and farm across the river. He had hated to see Molly’s life ruined and good land neglected.

  “So where do I come in to all this?” he asked Kate.

  “Well, Jack, this is your chance to find out if Molly Barry’s instincts were right,” Kate told him with a smile.

  “Doesn’t this put me in a strange situation now,” Jack mused. “I’ve spent my entire life struggling against the Conways, and here I am now being asked to get into their boat and start rowing with them. I suppose the strangest thing of
all is that I’m being asked by a Phelan.”

  “What did you think of Molly Barry, or Molly Conway as I always thought of her, but after this conversation I feel that she was more Barry than Conway,” Kate said.

  “You forget, Kate, that she was a lot older than me, but my mother and herself had been good friends, and I know that your grandfather had great respect for her. Any time that I met her, I’ll have to say that I was always impressed by her. Even though she saw hard times and had come down in the world, she never lost her sense of dignity and pride.”

  “Never forgot that she was one of the Barrys of Furze Hill,” Kate smiled.

  “Maybe that,” Jack agreed, “because despite everything there was always a bit of grandeur about her. Rory tried to drag her into the gutter, but she never quite joined him there.”

  “You know, Jack, when I was nursing her before she died, I must say that I found her a formidable old lady. But there was something admirable about her, too. One thing that sticks in my mind is that she was always hinting that she knew more about us than she was ever prepared to say.”

  “She probably did too, because she was around for a long time, longer than any of us, and she had a mighty memory,” Jack told her. “Anyone around here who wanted to check back on anything asked Molly Barry, and she was always right. She knew everything about everyone, and there was a rumour that she kept a diary. But she was a bit of a closed book.”

  “And now all her secrets are gone with her,” Kate concluded.

  “Secrets have a way of lurking in dark corners,” Jack told her.

  Later, when Kate had gone home, Jack walked across the kitchen into the small parlour. He stood inside the window and looked across the valley at Furze Hill. In the bright moonlight, the sagging rusty roof of the barn was a foxy patch in the surrounding green. Kate’s request had taken him by surprise. The possibility of himself getting involved with Furze Hill was an unexpected turn of events. He smiled to think that Molly Barry was still shaking the dice. She had once said to him, “Remember, Jack Tobin, that you owe the Phelans nothing.” At the time he did not know what she was talking about, but years later he understood.

  CHAPTER THREE

  KATE PUT THE saucepan of strained potatoes to the back of the cooker. Her kitchen was small, and she had painted it a rich yellow to brighten up the quarry-tiled floor. She took a tea towel from a little press beside the Aga and covered the potatoes. They had burst their creamy jackets, and their floury insides smiled out at her. Jack grew great potatoes. She could hear his voice now: “Fine plury spuds breaking their hearts laughing.” Every first Saturday on his way through the village to confession, he brought her a bag of potatoes, vegetables and home-made jams. Over the years he had taken the place of the father who had died when she was young, and in more recent years even filled the gap left by Nellie, and no one else understood her sense of loss after Ned as well as Jack.

  She checked the meat in the top oven and put the potatoes and vegetables into the bottom one to keep warm. Her Aga was very kind to dinners that had to be kept warm for long periods, which often happened in her job and with David, who could be kept late at school or delayed after a match. She took the dishes off the dresser and put one of Emily’s embroidered cloths on the table. Jack had given her some of his mother’s cloths, and she used them constantly because he had advised, “Use them, Kate girlie; no good in keeping them for your wake.” He wanted her to enjoy and appreciate the long hours that his mother had put into them and keep alive the memory of the woman whose photograph was hanging over the fireplace in his parlour, the woman whose faded face was smiling but full of sadness. Kate had often looked at the photograph and wondered about her sad eyes. Once as a little girl she had asked Jack about the pretty lady in the photograph and he told her quietly, “That lady talked very little about herself.” After that she asked no more. If Jack wanted you to know something he told you; otherwise you did not ask questions.

  She respected everything about Jack, especially his sense of decency and integrity and his unlimited kindness. When she had mentioned, after buying this house, that she wished she had a dresser like the one in Mossgrove, Jack had turned up six months later with a smaller replica that fitted perfectly into her kitchen. She had never known until then that he had made the original with her grandfather, old Edward Phelan, and had not forgotten how to carve every minute detail. Later he had made her kitchen table. David and herself spent a lot of time in their kitchen, and she had put a comfortable sofa under the sloping ceiling by the stairs where she sometimes slept if she came back late after a night call and did not want to wake David. Sometimes on a chilly evening if he came home tired from school, he took a short catnap before dinner. Remembering the great use that Ned and herself as children had made out of the old one in Mossgrove, she had bought the sofa thinking that it would be lovely too for her children. But unfortunately that had not happened.

  She walked over to the back door and looked out into her back garden where Jack and herself had spent many evenings digging and planting. When she had bought this house after coming back to Kilmeen, the garden was a jungle, but to Jack it was a challenge. He had rubbed his hands in gleeful anticipation when he saw it.

  “Kate girleen, we can do great things out here.”

  They had shared the joy of creating a little haven where she went if she came home tired from work. Sometimes in her job she had to deal with deaths and tragedies in her patients’ lives, and when she had comforted them she herself needed a quiet place to recover. She recalled a practical sister on the ward in her training hospital in London telling her, “Nurse Phelan, you can’t die with every patient.” That sister had thought that she was too soft to be a good nurse and needed to toughen up a bit, but it was sometimes difficult to stand back from the patients’ problems, so this garden was her healing place. David was not a gardener, but when he came home from school drained after a day’s teaching, she smiled as he headed out into the garden to sit under the old beech tree. They were lucky that someone had planted that tree long before she bought the house. Sometimes when she sat under its sweeping branches, she thought kindly of the person who had planted it and felt that she was sheltering beneath the leaves of their foresight. If she joined David there, he smiled and said, “This place clears my head.” He put all his energy and dedication into the school that he had set up, and it gave him immense satisfaction when his students did well. It was the first secondary school in the parish, and it was giving the children a chance of education and a job at home instead of taking the boat, as Jack called it.

  She would be for ever grateful to Rodney Jackson, who had given his aunts’ old home to house the school, making it possible for David to stay in Kilmeen. The rent that he was paying was nominal, not alone because Rodney was extremely wealthy but because he had a deep interest in Kilmeen, where he had come on holidays to his aunts while growing up in New York. He had also helped Martha’s brother Mark, who had been painting since childhood. They had all taken his talent for granted until Rodney Jackson had seen his possibilities and mounted an exhibition of his pictures in New York, where he had sold out. Now commissions were coming in to Mark’s home, where his mother Agnes was constantly amazed at the prices that Rodney insisted that Mark should charge. Martha, who had never been impressed by her brother’s ability to do anything right, was slightly cynical of his success as an artist. But it had taken them all by surprise the previous summer when Rodney had shown a sudden interest in Martha and invited herself and Nora to attend Mark’s opening in New York. Kate had been filled with curiosity as to how things would develop between them, but Martha and Nora had come home and Rodney had remained on in New York, so she assumed that Martha had declined his proposal. But there was no way that she could ask Martha.

  As Kate dished up the dinner she heard the front door bang. She knew that it could not be David, who always moved quietly, and she smiled when she heard something clatter on to the tiled floor of the hall and Fr Tim Bra
dy burst into the kitchen with pages dropping from an overfull folder. Beneath an unruly mop of black hair, his thin, boyish face smiled ruefully at her. Sometimes when he was training the team he was mistaken for one of them.

  “I thought it might be you,” she told him.

  “How did you know?” he asked breathlessly.

  “You always move as if you are about to catch the last train out of town,” she told him. “And sometime your luggage is not quite going to make it,” she added pointing to the pages on the floor.

  “Never!” he protested. “I always thought that I was the quiet, silent type.”

  “Rather the direct opposite,” she told him, “a volcanic whirlwind of legs, hands and hair flying in all directions.”

  “You make me sound like a lunatic,” he protested.

  “But a nice one,” she told him. “Sit down there now and have dinner with us to see if I can put a bit of fat on those skinny bones.”

  “Your choice of words, Kate, leaves a lot to be desired,” he laughed, sliding into a chair across the table from her, “and somehow I think it is better that the more tactful David rather than you is in charge of our local corner of education. You might not be the best in dealing with a doting mammy who thinks that she is rearing a potential Einstein. You lack a certain delicacy in your choice of delivery, whereas David would soothe her down and she would go home knowing the truth but not blaming him that her son is not a genius.”

  “Yes, my darling husband has the master’s touch with people, and I’m sure that a lot of the mothers feel sorry for him, married to that dark, stubborn Phelan one.”

  “Ah, but Kate, when they get a pain they need you. Did you ever consider that we could run this parish between the three of us. You could deliver them, David could educate them, and I could bury them.”

  “You should tell Fr Burke,” she told him.

  “We’d let that to David. The PP is very impressed with him, but that could be partly because he is the doctor’s son and the PP is a bit of a snob. It goes against the grain with him that his curate was reared in a pub.”