by Colm Toibin
Once she decided that she would drive across the town and park the car in the Railway Square so that no one could comment on her hair, however, she no longer felt afraid. She looked at her clothes hanging in the wardrobe and selected a grey suit and a dark blue blouse. She would wear her best shoes. She did not know what the Gibneys intended to say to her, or whether they would offer her work. They could, she thought, hardly discuss rates of pay with her over afternoon tea. Whatever they had in mind, she believed now that it was important not to arrive at their large house like someone in need.
The door was answered by Mrs. Whelan, who led Nora into a big sitting-room on the right-hand side of the hall. It was filled with darkly upholstered furniture and old pictures. Even though it was still the afternoon, the room was filled with shadows; the long window did not let in much light.
Peggy Gibney rose from her chair. As the cardigan she was wearing around her shoulders slipped, Mrs. Whelan moved hastily to put it back in place. Peggy Gibney did not acknowledge this, but behaved as though it was a normal part of the service offered to her as a woman in a grand room. She motioned to Nora to take an armchair opposite her own and then turned to Mrs. Whelan.
“Maggie, will you phone across to the office and tell Mr. Gibney that Mrs. Webster has arrived?”
Nora remembered that, years before, when Peggy found herself pregnant, she was not married to William, and William’s parents had not approved of her. One day, while Nora sat quietly in the outer office, she heard old Mr. Gibney telling William that Peggy could go to England and have the baby and find a home for it there. She had supposed as William walked out of the office that he was going to find Peggy to tell her. But instead he had married Peggy and Peggy had had the baby in a nursing home in the town, and slowly William’s parents had got used to her and grown close to the child. Now Peggy Gibney sat in this house, talking to Nora as though there had never been any doubt about her station in the world.
Peggy’s voice had none of the old careless intonations of the town. Instead, she spoke in a way that was considered, almost preoccupied.
“Oh, well,” she said, as though Nora or someone else had raised the subject, “with all the taxes now, and the cost of living, I don’t know how a lot of people manage.”
When Nora asked her about her brother and her sisters, she realised that she had made a mistake.
“They are fine, Nora, fine,” she said in an accent that became slightly grand. “We all live our own lives.”
Nora took this to mean that they were not invited into Peggy’s sitting-room. When she asked about Peggy’s children, however, she brightened up immediately.
“You know, William wanted each one of them to have a qualification before they came home to work in the firm so that they’d have an expertise.”
She pronounced the word “expertise” with deliberation.
“So, William Junior is a fully fledged accountant and Thomas is an efficiency expert and Elizabeth did a commercial course in one of the best colleges in Dublin. So they can all stand on their own feet.”
“Is that right, Peggy?” Nora asked.
She thought of old Mrs. Lewis in the Mill Park Road, whose only topic of conversation was her children and their careers, and how she would end each time by saying that she planned to make Christina, her youngest, into a typewriter. Nora found it difficult in the sombre air of Peggy’s sitting-room not to laugh. She had to concentrate fiercely to keep a straight face.
“There are a lot of changes in the town, they tell me,” Peggy said. “I don’t get out much myself, and, you know, we go to Rosslare when we can. It’s very peaceful down there, but no matter where I am I always find that I have too much to do.”
Nora tried to think who had told her that Peggy had a full-time maid working in the house, as well as Mrs. Whelan.
“But I can’t get William to take a proper holiday. Oh, he’d worry too much about this and that. He drives up and down to Rosslare all right but I don’t call that a holiday.”
When William came into the room he seemed smaller than Nora remembered. He was wearing a three-piece suit. As he shook Nora’s hand, she wondered if he still lived with the memory of how his father had treated him from the time he took him out of school aged sixteen, how badly he had paid him over the years and how he had referred to him in front of anyone who would listen as “the fool.” But William’s father was long dead now, and the firm had passed to him, so perhaps, she thought, all of that had been erased from everyone’s memory except her own.
“It was very good of you to visit,” he said, sitting down, as Mrs. Whelan came in with tea and biscuits.
“Thoughtful, thoughtful,” he added, as though his mind was now on some other, graver subject.
Nora looked at him evenly and did not reply. She was not going to thank him for anything.
“My father always said you were the best and you never made a mistake, you and Greta Wickham. He used to say if only Nora and Greta were here now, we wouldn’t be in this mess, even when there was no mess at all.”
“Oh, he talked very warmly about you,” Peggy interjected, “and William Junior and Thomas had nothing but good words to say about Maurice Webster when he was teaching them. I remember one day Thomas had a temperature and we all wanted him to stay in bed and he wouldn’t, oh no he wouldn’t, because he had a double commerce class with Mr. Webster that he could not miss. You know they wanted Thomas to stay in Dublin when he qualified. Oh, he got offers with very good prospects! We told him he should consider them. But he preferred to come home. That’s the way it was. It was the same with William. With Elizabeth, you’d never know. She might go anywhere. She’s the one to watch.”
There was something in Peggy Gibney’s loquaciousness, in the way she felt free to talk about herself and her family, that Nora found almost deliberately created to undermine her, a way of establishing that Peggy had become someone who had a high opinion of herself and she expected others to feel the same. William, Nora supposed, must employ a hundred people, perhaps more. She understood that it might have been difficult for Peggy Gibney to remain ordinary, but she saw no reason why she should sit opposite her and offer her anything except silence.
With William it was different. He seemed to mumble and had a nervous way of repeating words and then stopping as if in search of another word.
“We’d always have an opening, Nora,” he began, “an opening . . .”
Nora looked at him and smiled.
“Some of the girls in the office can barely spell,” Peggy interjected again, “and can hardly count and yet when it comes to giving cheek and taking sick days—”
“Well now,” William said. “Well now.”
Nora watched William closely, looking for any indication that he found Peggy as irritating as she did, but he appeared too distanced and fidgety to notice his wife at all.
“And the cut of some of them! Elizabeth says—”
“Thomas,” William interrupted, “thinks the world of Miss Kavanagh, and she is the office manager, and perhaps if I can get you and Thomas briefly to go over the details, the details, he knows more than I do.”
He stopped for a moment and looked at Nora, as though unsure what he might say now.
“God knows,” he went on, his eyes on the carpet, “I’m just the manager of the company, the head of the company. But he could introduce you to Miss Kavanagh, and then you could, if you know what I mean, start whenever you wanted. You could start whenever you wanted.”
“Is that Francie Kavanagh?” Nora asked.
“I suppose it is,” William said, “although it might be a while since anyone called her that.”
“Oh, of course,” Peggy said. “You would have known her in the old days. Thomas gives a glowing account of her. And have you two kept in touch?”
“Pardon?” Nora asked sharply.
“I mean have y
ou and Miss Kavanagh stayed friends?”
The question implied that Peggy had not had time herself over the years to bother knowing such things, or to bother staying friends with anyone. Nonetheless, Nora wondered how much she knew, if she was aware, for example, of a Thursday twenty-five years or more earlier—surely it had been talked about—a half-day in Gibney’s, when Nora and Greta Wickham had decided to cycle to Ballyconnigar and how Francie Kavanagh had asked to come with them, and how they had ridden their bicycles fast to get ahead of her and then had gone to Morriscastle instead of Ballyconnigar. And how they had almost laughed openly rather than apologised when they learned that Francie had got a puncture near The Ballagh on the way home and had got drenched in the rain that came after nightfall and then, having sheltered under a tree, did not get back until the early hours of the morning. She had never spoken to them again.
William and Peggy were watching her. She had not answered their question about Francie Kavanagh and it was too late to do so now. In all the years, then, she thought, when she was married and having children, Francie was still in Gibney’s and had become the office manager, just as Peggy Gibney, lifting her teacup in a leisurely manner now, had stayed in this house and gone to Rosslare in the summer, and become falsely grand, modelling herself on her mother-in-law or on one of the other merchants’ wives in the town. Nora felt as far away from both of these women as silence was from sound.
William stood up, and a change came into the room. Somehow, he and Peggy managed to suggest that, since the pleasantries were over, Nora was dismissed. When she stood to go, Peggy remained seated; it was clear that she did not feel it was part of her function to show people out of the house. William shook Nora’s hand.
“Will you come and see Thomas on Monday at two? Ask for him in the outer office, yes, the outer office,” he said and then made his way distractedly out of the room. Nora could hear him closing the front door behind him. Then Mrs. Whelan, who had been hovering in the doorway, led Nora into the hallway.
“She’ll be delighted you came over,” she whispered. “You know, she doesn’t see too many people.”
“Is that right?” Nora asked. She was aware again of her dyed hair as Mrs. Whelan examined it with an almost shameless curiosity.
CHAPTER FOUR
She told no one about the arrangement that she had made with Thomas Gibney or about the first encounter she was going to have with Francie Kavanagh in more than twenty years. She would tell Jim and Margaret soon, she thought, but was grateful to them when they came to the house next for not asking her how her visit to the Gibneys had gone. When her sister Una asked her about it, she merely said that she had not made up her mind yet.
“I heard in the golf club that you are going back to work in the office there,” Una said.
“The golf club is a great place for information,” Nora replied. “I’d join it myself if I could play, or if I was nosey enough.”
When her other sister, Catherine, wrote to her to say that she should come with the boys to stay with her and her family and that any weekend would suit, Nora replied that she would come the following Friday once the boys had finished school and stay until Sunday. Before Maurice became sick he had always enjoyed going on a Saturday night to the farmhouse where they lived outside Kilkenny and talking to Catherine’s husband about crops and prices and arguing about politics with him, and hearing all the news about their neighbours. The two couples often went out to a lounge bar, leaving the children to be minded by Fiona or Aine. The boys also seemed to enjoy the change as they were sleeping in strange rooms in a much larger house than they were used to.
It was true, Nora thought, what her mother had said; they all, including her sisters, preferred Maurice to her and listened more to what he said. When the four of them went out for a drink, the two men talked to each other, but Catherine liked to listen to the men, or ask them questions, or raise topics that she knew would interest them. Nora had never minded; she only half listened because she did not have such strong opinions about what was happening in the country as Maurice did. Also Catherine and her husband, Mark, were religious in the same way as Maurice was. They believed in miracles and the power of prayer, but they also liked the way the church was modernising. None of them had ever asked Nora what she thought about this; she was not sure herself, but she knew that she did not think what they thought and that she was in favour of much more modernisation than they were. She did not take things for granted the way they did. About other things too she had her own thoughts, but was happy to stay outside the conversation. She wondered now that Maurice was dead if this would change, if she would have to start saying more.
By the time the boys came home from school she had packed what things they would need into the car. She made an agreement with them that Donal could sit in the front passenger seat as far as Kiltealy and then they would switch and Conor could sit in the front for the rest of the journey.
In the old days, as they passed a particular farm entrance beyond the Milehouse, Maurice would become tense, absorbed in his own thoughts no matter what was being said in the car. They had never discussed this. It was not something he had ever wanted to talk about. She knew about it because she heard Margaret and one of the cousins discussing it at her mother-in-law’s wake. This was the farm from which, at the end of the last century, Maurice’s grandfather had been evicted. When he and his wife and their children had arrived in the town, Maurice’s grandfather had nothing except a bad reputation with the police for his politics and some books and clothes in an old bag. Nora always wondered at how seriously Maurice took this event, or at least how strangely preoccupied he became anytime they drove by this place, as though mentioning it would be a desecration of some solemn piece of past suffering.
Somewhere beyond Tullow, she knew, there was a house where her own mother had been a servant, and where the man of the house, or his brother, or his son, had come too close to her every day and sometimes at night. Her aunt Josie had told her all the details, and how the priest had to be called in the end and how the priest approached the manager of Cullen’s Department Store in Enniscorthy with a special request to help him save the virtue of a servant girl in some remote farmhouse beyond Tullow. Nora remembered that the idea of her mother’s virtue and the priest and the remote house beyond Tullow, and the owner and his brother and his son, had seemed to her unlikely enough to be funny. When Josie had insisted that it was true, Nora had found herself laughing even more until Josie warned her never to tell anyone else the story, but, if she did, then not to tell them that she laughed at it. People would not think well of her, Josie said, if they knew she thought such things were funny.
The road was narrow and Nora drove with care. These old stories, she thought, would die out soon. Soon no one would even remember or care about an eviction long ago. Maurice’s grandfather and grandmother were buried in an unmarked grave in the cemetery; no one would ever know who they were or had been. And she supposed that neither of her sisters knew about the house beyond Tullow and her mother there and those men. They were likely not even aware that their mother had worked as a servant in the time between leaving her father’s house and coming to work in Cullen’s in Enniscorthy.
Beyond Kiltealy, when Conor was in the front seat, he told her stories about school and classmates and teachers. He seemed to be looking forward to spending time with his cousins and seeing the farm.
“Is Auntie Catherine’s house haunted?” he asked.
“No, Conor, it’s just an old house and bigger than ours but it’s not haunted.”
“But a lot of people died in it?”
“I don’t know.”
“But how would a house get haunted?” Conor asked.
“You know, I think that’s all rubbish about haunted houses.”
“Phelan’s on the Back Road is haunted. Joe Devereux saw a man outside it one night and he had no face. He was lighting a cigarette but
he had no face.”
“But I’d say that was just the shadows,” she said. “If Joe had a flashlight he would have seen the man’s face perfectly.”
“That’s why we all used to walk on the other side of the road on the way home from the Presentation Convent,” Conor continued.
“Well, at least you don’t have to go there anymore.”
“Everyone knows th-th-there’s a ghost there,” Donal said from the back seat.
“Well, I never heard of it,” she replied.
Although the boys said nothing for a while, she knew as she drove through Borris that it was still on their minds.
“I think all that stuff about ghosts is nonsense,” she said.
“But there must have been plenty of people who died in Auntie Catherine’s house. I mean in the rooms upstairs,” Conor continued.
“But there are no such things as ghosts,” she said.
“What about the Holy G-ghost?” Donal asked.
“Donal, you know that’s different.”
“I wouldn’t go upstairs in Auntie Catherine’s house on my own, all the same,” Conor said. “Even during the day I wouldn’t go up there.”
By the time they arrived they had been silent for some time. She had tried to change the subject, but felt that she failed to stop them thinking about ghosts and haunted houses. These narrow roads, she thought, and the sheer isolation of places along them, the lanes leading for miles to lonely farmhouses that could be seen from nowhere, the untidy ditches and the trees that overhung the road, all of this lent itself to the idea of ghosts and sounds in the night. When Catherine first got married, Nora remembered, she talked about a house owned by a cousin of Mark’s, an old place covered in ivy, where the furniture could move or a door open for no reason. Catherine and Mark spoke about it in detail, without any doubt that it was true. Nora wondered if it had something to do with a will, or old money, or a fight, or someone being put out of the house who had a right to be there. In any case, she hoped that neither of them would mention this to the boys over the weekend.