by Colm Toibin
One of the things about Catherine was that she hardly ever sat down. Their mother, Nora remembered, was the same, always bustling about. Nora and Una called it “foostering.” It was worse because their mother disapproved of women sitting down when there was still work to do. All her married life, Nora had made sure that she stayed sitting down for as long as possible each evening once the washing-up after tea had been completed; she tried to make sure that nothing would cause her to stand up again and spend time in the kitchen except perhaps the boiling of a kettle to make a cup of tea for her and for Maurice, or the preparing of a hot water bottle in the winter.
As soon as she carried her bag to the room she had been allocated, the same room where she and Maurice had always stayed, she felt an overwhelming urge not to leave again, to send down word that she was not well and needed to rest. The expression on Catherine’s face when she saw her hair had not helped; the fact that she had not spoken immediately meant that she was saving it up for later, and she would, Nora was sure, have a great deal to say.
Mark’s farm was large; Nora did not know how many acres he had only because Catherine had told no one on her side of the family. This meant that he had more land than Catherine wanted to admit. If the farm had been small, then Catherine would have enjoyed complaining about that. All her life she had bought clothes on sale and she did not change this when she married. But if it was anything other than clothes now, especially if it was something for the house, she spent real money. The phrase of Mark’s that Nora and Maurice had enjoyed most was “a thing is only dear the day you buy it.” Such a concept was entirely foreign to both of them.
This meant that there were two brand-new cars in the drive, and there was always new furniture, or new things for the kitchen, bought in Brown Thomas or Switzer’s in Dublin. Nora was sure that Catherine had her hair done in Dublin, or somewhere special in Kilkenny that catered to rich farmers’ wives. The idea of letting Bernie Prendergast in Enniscorthy dye your hair was something that would appal Catherine.
If Maurice were with her, she thought, then the focus of attention would be on him, and he would manage with ease and slow charm. As she walked down the well-carpeted stairs, taking in the expensive new wallpaper and the newly framed prints that she knew had belonged to Mark’s mother, she realised that while it might seem as though she was the focus of attention, in fact she was an object of pity. Catherine and Mark would be glad to have her and the boys this weekend, and they would be kind and hospitable, but they would also be glad when she was gone and they had done their duty. Once she began working in Gibney’s, she thought, she would use that as an excuse not to come here for a while again.
Donal and Conor always took time to get used to the farm. There were things they liked. If there was any reason to go to the orchard with their cousins, they would agree as long as no one wanted them to go near any nettles. And there was a manual pump that brought spring water to the house that had to be pulled back and forth, and they both enjoyed playing with this. But if anything involved putting on boots and old clothes and going near farm animals, or going into the milking parlour or up to the haggard, where there was cow dung, they would respond suspiciously. They would watch and wait, checking if they might be allowed to sit with the adults instead and listen to the conversation.
Catherine, Nora discovered, when she came into the kitchen, had bought a new washing machine; it had been delivered from Dublin the previous day and Catherine had the manual on the kitchen table in front of her.
“There’s a drier as well,” she said, “but we haven’t even unpacked that. I thought I’d concentrate on getting the washing machine to work first. I should have asked the man who came to do the plumbing. I thought once he was finished it would work straight away. There’s a friend of mine, Dilly Halpin, and she has one, and when I rang her she told me she nearly had to get a university degree before she could follow the instructions.”
She made space for Nora at the table as Donal and Conor and two of their cousins looked on.
“It would be just my luck now if there’s something wrong with it, and it has to go all the way back. The thing is I can’t even get it to start.”
She pointed to a number of diagrams.
“You see, it has a lot of different ways of washing, for sheets and tablecloths, and then for shirts and blouses, and then for more delicate fabrics. They’re in German and French as well as English, the instructions, but maybe it’s a problem with the translation and it might be clearer in some other language.”
Nora wondered if Catherine and her family had already had their tea. It was after six now and Catherine agreed that the children could watch cartoons on the television and whatever children’s programmes were on afterwards. But there was no mention of tea nor of food. Nora knew that the boys would be hungry soon and wondered if Catherine believed that they had eaten before they set out. What was strange, she noticed, was that Catherine did not give her any opportunity to mention food; instead she spoke to her as though she were not really there.
Once she noticed this, she found that she could notice nothing else. Catherine was not talking to herself, she was fully aware that her sister was in the room, but she had created an atmosphere in which Nora could have nothing to say. If she had done this deliberately, Nora felt, then it would not work, it could be easily broken. But it seemed to come naturally to Catherine. It was something she had been aware of before, but now, with her sister, it was more intense. It was solid, as the outer wall of a vault is solid, built to withstand rather than support. Nora felt herself sitting in some airless space with her sister as Catherine chattered about her washing machine and her drier and then went to the phone in the hall and called Dilly Halpin, who agreed to come over and see if she could assist Catherine in setting up the new machine.
“Don’t mention to Dilly I told you this,” Catherine said, “but I went to Dublin with her last week and we stayed with her sister and brother-in-law who’s a barrister. Oh, it’s a fabulous house, Nora, in Malahide, and they have their own boat. It was all modern, I have never seen anything like it. His family are very big in the building trade, and they get a lot of the contracts, but he does very well in his own right. And Dilly’s other sister, who’s very nice, is married to Mr. Justice Murphy of the High Court. They’re very high up in Fianna Fáil. One of the other sisters is married to a Delahunt and they are fabulously wealthy or so Dilly told me.”
Nora had never heard her sister say the word “fabulously” before or discuss families in this way.
“Well, the thing is they took us to the Intercontinental Hotel to have our dinner in the evening. Con and Fergus, who are Dilly’s two brothers-in-law, and her two sisters, just the six of us. I have never seen food like it, and the wine. I wouldn’t tell you what the bill was, but I can read upside down and I nearly had a heart attack. I haven’t even told Mark. He wouldn’t spend that sort of money, you know. At least not on a dinner. And the restaurant was full. There were all sorts of people there. Dilly came in with me the next day and we bought the washing machine and the drier. I wanted the same one she had.”
Conor appeared and waited until Catherine finished talking.
“What time are we getting our tea?” he asked. “The others have all had their tea. So when are we getting ours?”
Catherine looked at him as though she had not quite heard him. Conor stood his ground and, having got no response from his aunt, he looked at Nora.
“Are you not watching the television?” Catherine asked.
“We didn’t have our tea,” he repeated.
“Did you not?” Catherine asked and looked at Nora, puzzled.
Nora felt as though she was being accused of something.
“We set out as soon as they came home from school. I thought we would have our tea here.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. Now Dilly will be here before long and Mark will be here too, but I don’t
know exactly what time he’ll be home.”
Catherine seemed distracted. Nora was about to say that a sandwich or beans on toast would be enough for them, but she decided to say nothing. She looked into the distance as though this was not her problem. She was almost angry. Conor stayed there, watching both his mother and his aunt.
“I am so sorry,” Catherine said. “I should have thought of this before.”
Catherine suddenly became polite and busy, and so ready to make sure that their every need was met, that it occurred to Nora that something of how she felt, even though she had not spoken, had been transmitted to her sister. Catherine went to a large fridge in the pantry.
“I have hamburgers,” she said, “and I could fry some potatoes. Would they like that? And would you like a steak, Nora, or I could do a couple of chops? And why don’t the boys have their tea in the television room?”
“Whatever is easy,” Nora said.
When Dilly Halpin arrived, Nora took over the cooking as the other two women studied the instruction manual for the washing machine. She ignored them as they began to manipulate the various knobs and concentrated fully on the task in hand. It would suit Catherine, she saw, were she to offer to have her tea in the room where the children were. She was determined to make no such offer and waited to cook her own food until she had served Donal and Conor and made sure they had everything they needed.
Once the washing machine had been got going, and Dilly Halpin had re-assured Catherine that the drier was simple, that it was merely a question of turning it on and off, Dilly sat down at the kitchen table as Catherine moved about. When Nora offered to make them tea, they accepted. Once the chops were cooked she brought them over to the table with brown bread and butter. She poured the tea when it was ready. She did not know if it was her presence that made the conversation awkward, almost stilted. It seemed to Nora that Catherine and Dilly were performing lines for her benefit rather than actually talking to each other. They discussed an auction they had both attended, an auction of the contents of a large house outside Thomastown.
“You know, I bid for a pair of fire irons,” Dilly said, “they were eighteenth century, but I didn’t get them. There was a dealer from Dublin bidding against me. I gave him the dirtiest looks but it was no use. You did better, Catherine, with that lovely rug. Where are you going to put it?”
“I’m going to surprise Mark,” Catherine said, “and put it in the bedroom. I’ll have to get help, because some of it will have to go under the bed. I hope he notices, that’s all I have to say.”
“And the auction went on so long that I needed to go to the bathroom,” Dilly said, “and I decided I would go into the big house, so I took down the notice that said ‘No Entry. House Strictly Private’ and I marched in and wasn’t I on my way up the stairs looking for a bathroom when I was caught by this old Protestant woman, someone’s maiden aunt by the look of her. I said that I just had to go to the bathroom and I couldn’t find any other convenience and she told me that I could go anywhere I liked between Thomastown and Inistioge, but I was to come down those stairs right now. And she began to move towards me, the old battle-axe. I was in such a rage that when I was driving out of the estate and I saw a field full of sheep, I got out of the car and I opened the gate.”
“You did quite right,” Catherine said.
“I did, and I hope they are still looking for those sheep. The rudeness of that woman! They think they still own the country!”
“You don’t know what it’s like around here,” Catherine said to Nora.
“That woman is lucky I didn’t buy the fire irons and have them with me. I don’t know what I would have done with them.”
As Dilly grew in indignation, and was joined by Catherine, Nora began to laugh.
“It’s just the thought of the fire irons,” she said.
She stood up from the table, still laughing. She saw that Catherine’s face had become red and she seemed to be clenching her jaw. Nora checked that the boys and their cousins were still watching television and then went to the bathroom and stayed there until she was sure that she would not need to laugh again. When she felt that she could genuinely control herself, she went back to find that Dilly Halpin had left. Catherine became busy around the kitchen, and, even when Mark came in, Nora was aware that Catherine was barely speaking to her. This made Nora decide to be all the friendlier and more animated with Mark. As she did this, she could see how irritated Catherine was.
“Nora, it’s all right for you,” she said. “But we have to live here and even though I meet the Protestants from the big houses in the ICA or the golf club, and even though they know Mark in the IFA and knew his father and mother before him, they would see you coming in Kilkenny on the main street and they wouldn’t even look at you. I don’t know what we went to that auction for.”
“What auction?” Mark asked.
“Catherine’s friend Dilly attacked a Protestant woman with a pair of fire irons,” Nora said.
“She did not!”
“She seemed very nice, Catherine,” Nora said. “But I honestly thought she was joking. I mean between the fire irons and the sheep it was hard to keep a straight face.”
“What sheep?” Mark asked.
They went to bed early. Nora was glad to be away from them and from the talk of auctions and big houses and new washing machines. It was clear to her that there was nothing she could have spoken to Catherine and Dilly about, nothing that would have interested her or them. When she asked herself what she was interested in, she had to conclude that she was interested in nothing at all. What mattered to her now could be shared with no one. Jim and Margaret had been with her when Maurice died, and that meant that all three of them could talk easily when Jim and Margaret came to the house because, while they did not refer to those days in the hospital, what they went through then underlay every word they said. It was there with them in the same way as the air was in the room, it was so present that no one ever commented on it. For them now conversation was a way of managing things. But for Catherine and Dilly and Mark conversation was normal. She wondered if she would ever again be able to have a normal conversation and what topics she might be able to discuss with ease and interest.
At the moment the only topic she could discuss was herself. And everyone, she felt, had heard enough about her. They believed it was time that she stop brooding and think of other things. But there were no other things. There was only what had happened. It was as though she lived underwater and had given up on the struggle to swim towards air. It would be too much. Being released into the world of others seemed impossible; it was something she did not even want. How could she explain this to anyone who sought to know how she was or asked if she was getting over what happened?
She woke early in the morning, dreading the day ahead. She wondered if the boys felt like this too. Did Fiona and Aine also dread the day ahead when they woke? Jim and Margaret? Perhaps, she thought, they had found other things to preoccupy them. She, too, could find other things to think about—money, for example, or her children, or the job in Gibney’s. Finding things to think about was not the problem for her; the problem for her was that she was on her own now and that she had no idea how to live. She would have to learn, but it was a mistake to try to do so in someone else’s house. It was a mistake to lie here in a strange bed when her own bed at home was strange too. The strangeness of home, however, did not require a bright response from her. It would be a long time, she thought, before she would leave her own house for a night again.
Downstairs, she found that Catherine and a local woman who came to help her with the housework had decided to do a full clean-out of the kitchen and the pantry before they installed the drier beside the washing machine in the pantry. Every single piece of delft and crockery had been removed from shelves to be dusted and Catherine was in the process of cleaning out drawers and sorting each object, some for discardi
ng and others to be put back. Conor and one of his cousins were helping while Donal sat apart. As soon as Donal saw her, he shrugged as if to say that all this had nothing to do with him.
“Make yourself a cup of tea, Nora,” Catherine said, “and if you can find bread and the toaster . . . God, it’ll be a relief to get this done. But at least I have plenty of help.”
“I’m going out for a walk,” she said.
Catherine turned and looked puzzled.
“It’s very showery now. I don’t think it’s a good day for walking and we’ll be going into Kilkenny later, I have to get detergent for this machine. You know, I’m nearly sorry I bought it. It’s just that Dilly says it halves the work.”
“I’ll find an umbrella,” Nora said.
“The umbrellas are in the stand by the front door,” Catherine said. “Will you mind the front door if you’re using it? It gets very stiff in this damp weather.”
This was what no one had told her about. She could not have ordinary feelings, ordinary desires. Catherine saw this, she thought, and she had no idea how to deal with it, and this made things worse. As Nora walked down the drive towards the road she felt a rage that she could not control. But she would have to control it, she knew. It made no sense to think that she would not come back here again, to feel a rage against her sister that up to now she had directed solely at the doctor who controlled the ward where Maurice lay in the last days of his life; a rage that caused her to write letters to him in her mind, letters she imagined herself signing and posting, letters that were abusive or coldly factual, letters threatening him that she would let people know wherever he went what he had done when her husband was dying, that he had refused to deal with the pain that caused Maurice to moan. She had sought out the doctor several times, having asked the nurses over and over if they could do anything. All of the nurses had come back with her to the bed and nodded and agreed with her that something would have to be done. But the doctor—the very thought of him made her walk faster and become even more indifferent to the clouds that were gathering overhead—had not come with her to the bed, but had told her that her husband was very sick, that his heart was weak, and so he did not want to prescribe anything to alleviate pain that might affect his heart.