In the Middle of the Fields

by Mary Lavin

  From that day the silence between the two of them grew until it was as thick as the grass in the understocked fields, the ragged scutch that invaded the driveway and pushed up between the cobbles in the yard. Looking out sometimes at this neglect and decay, Miss Lomas muttered to herself. But if Christy heard her, he shut her up quick. ‘Put a sock in it, will you, for God’s sake,’ he’d say.

  Yet, sometimes he too muttered to himself as he shuffled about.

  Miss Lomas never rightly knew what he did all day long, although she had to admit he kept himself occupied. Sometimes she’d see him with a hammer in his hand bending over a piece of farm machinery. At another time, she’d hear him driving in a paling post into the ground in a far field, the blows of the mallet echoing back, heavy but irregular, and with long intervals between blows. Or else he might come into the kitchen and rummage about for a bit of string to patch up the harness of an ass he’d got somewhere or other. She grudgingly admitted he was making as good a fist of things as could be made, all in all.

  In the old days farm horses and carts, the pony and trap and all the farm machinery, had been kept at Garretstown, and it had been workmen from Garretstown who cut the hedges at Brook Farm, weeded the garden and scuffled the paths. As for odd jobs like taking a jackdaw’s nest out of a chimney, cleaning the gutters, opening a blocked drain or cutting timber and splitting it into logs for the fire, who else would have done these things?

  Now such jobs had to be left undone. At first, Miss Lomas was only concerned about the neglect inside the house, but gradually she realised that the neglect outdoors had a more direct bearing on her domain than she’d taken into account. When the drainpipe over the back door got blocked, she had to step through a puddle as big as a lake every time she went in or out. And when a slate blew off the roof just over her own bedroom, the rain came down in a waterfall on to her bed and she had to move the bed in the middle of the room. Inside and out, the place was becoming a shambles. It was no worse, of course, than the small farmhouses round about, but if Christy was satisfied with this comparison, she was not.

  Once, as she stood in the doorway looking out at the dandelions and nettles that had sprung up in every crack and crevice of the yard, she couldn’t control her tongue. ‘That’s a nice sight,’ she spat out at Christy.

  ‘At least it’s more natural to see things growing outdoors than indoors,’ said Christy, and following his glance Miss Lomas saw a dirty big toadstool sprouting in the corner of the kitchen ceiling. Speechless, she stared up at the ugly sight. Then, getting a broom handle she hit at it as if it was a living creature. When it splattered all over the floor, she felt like a murderer.

  Strange to say, the house had deteriorated faster inside than outside. The yard didn’t really look much worse after six months, for whereas weeds wither and die, and each Spring they had to make a fresh start, the dirt and grime indoors was cumulative, and in places that she could not reach, like the top of presses and cupboards, dust lay as thick as plush.

  As well as that, Miss Lomas would have thought that it would have taken centuries before her large stock of linen and crockery would be exhausted, but as the kitchen cups got cracked and plates got chipped, it wasn’t long until she had to draw on the good china that was hitherto kept in the dining-room cupboard. Upstairs too, when a sheet tore, or wore thin in the middle, there was no one to mend it and she had to encroach on the bed linen kept for the spare rooms. Then came the terrible day when she found that damp had mildewed even the unused sheets, and they too had rotted. Damp was eating up everything, even the plaster from the walls. She felt it could eat the flesh from one’s bones.

  The first winter of their unhappy partnership, Christy cut down any trees that were not too big for him to fell alone. These logs had to be used for fuelling the range and so the kitchen was the only part of the house that was reasonably warm. At night the only way Miss Lomas could get warm was to sleep between the blankets, which meant that these too in time got discoloured and threadbare. As for Christy’s room, now that he kept it locked there was no knowing its condition. As she hurried past it a smell came out under the door, but soon this smell was indistinguishable from the smell all over the house. She had almost given up scrubbing and washing, for her labours seemed only to hasten disintegration. Curtains and loosecovers at first faded, then frayed, and finally they flittered into ribbons that fluttered about in the constant draughts that went criss cross through every room.

  One day as Christy and herself were eating the pot-full of potatoes which had become their staple food, there was a clatter in the dining-room, and when, wordlessly, they ran in there they saw that a piece of the plaster cornice had fallen from the ceiling. Christy looking morosely upward, ‘The roof will fall in on us next. We’ll be driven out by the rain and the weather.’

  ‘Not me!’ cried Miss Lomas stubbornly. ‘I’ll stand on my rights to the end.’

  ‘Begod, that won’t be long now by the look of you!’ he said cruelly.

  Miss Lomas had not heard him however. Picking up a piece of the fallen plaster she’d gone back into the kitchen with the tears pouring down her face. ‘Poor Brook Farm,’ she said to herself. ‘Poor, poor Brook Farm.’

  It was a long time since Miss Lomas had cried and even now she did so silently and hopelessly. Not till a ray of sun came through the grimy windows, did she take heart from the fact that the fine weather had come. She went out into the yard. Alas the bright sunlight only showed up the utter desolation of the land. The fields were as bare and trodden as a strip of commons. The hedges were woody and gapped at the bottom and their tops reared up into the sky as if to fence out the birds. A few scrawny cattle came and went where they liked. The wire mesh that had once enclosed the flower garden in front of the house was long rusted away. Now the little garden was palisaded only by nettles. At that moment there was a beast standing under the dining-room window.

  ‘One of those bullocks will put his horns through the window yet!’ she said out loud, not knowing or caring if Christy had heard her or not. He had heard her alright and when he went out, although there was a leer on his face, she thought he was maybe going to mend the fence. But it was to scull whatever few cattle he had left.

  The sculling of cattle was always done at Brook Farm, but in deference to the susceptibility of the women in the house, even the servant girl, the beasts were done in a shed and put out in a far field till their poor heads healed, although George and Joss always did it as humanely as possible. Now Christy did it himself, and he did it in the yard, clumsily and cruelly, and afterwards, smeared with gore, the beasts blundered around the place where Miss Lomas could not but see them and share in their agony.

  That afternoon when she had occasion to go into the parlour, looking out the window, she saw the same poor beast of the morning, his head glittering with dried blood, his eyes blinded with clipped hair. Unnerved she ran back into the kitchen where Christy was washing his hands in a basin at the table. ‘Oh, take him away! Take him away!’ she screamed with her hands to her own head.

  ‘He’ll be taken away soon enough,’ Christy replied.

  Miss Lomas took her hands down from her head. Lately the fields had seemed more silent and empty than ever. Was that poor beast the last on the land?

  ‘Won’t you be buying more cattle?’ she asked. The next minute she could have bitten off her tongue. Her own small store of money was long gone. It was Christy now who provided them both with tea and bread, and the odd bit of meat or bacon that kept them alive. It was he who had paid the rates and the interest on the mortgage. Moreover he was smoking now as well as drinking, and he was never without a copy of the Racing Gazette sticking up out of his pocket. Where could he find the money for all this save by selling beast after beast?

  With no cattle on the land, the real despoiling of Brook Farm would begin. Now he would start to sell anything he could lay hands on.


  At first Christy only sold the grain-bins and feed-troughs, turnip slicers and tree guards, articles that he could take away in a wheel-barrow. Then he pulled the corrugated iron off the sheds and sold it for scrap. Then except for one at the road, he sold the gates. What next, Miss Lomas wondered, as she watched these items being wheeled down the drive. Searching the house, she found a key that would lock the dining-room door. But a month or so later she heard a splintering sound one day and found Christy had put his shoulder to the door and got in. He came out with two chairs.

  ‘Well?’ he said, confronting her. ‘Which do you want, an empty house or an empty belly?’ After that, every piece of furniture in the house went the way of the chairs. And as the days got cold and winter advanced, he pulled up paling posts and sold them for firewood.

  Another day standing at the window pinched with cold, Miss Lomas saw him trundle off to town with a barrow of rotten stumps he’d dug out of the ground. She wished she herself had the strength to drag up a few roots because the only fire they ever had now was a blaze of twigs she pulled out of the hedges, or a branch brought down by the wind from high trees on the mearing which he hadn’t dared to cut. She let the blaze die down when she’d boiled the kettle or got the spuds cooked. Staring into the cold and empty grate one evening although it was only five or six o’clock she went to bed to try and keep the life in her body. The thought of the winter was unbearable to her. It was not so bad for Christy who was still young and had no aches and pains in his bones.

  But one morning on waking, she was startled to hear a roar in the flue of the dining-room chimney which ran up behind the mantlepiece in her own room. She jumped out of bed in a cold sweat thinking the house was on fire. There was a smell of smoke and she could hear a crackle of sparks. She ran down the stairs, but halfway down she heard Christy moving about below, and her panic was allayed. At the same time she saw that the door of his bedroom was open and she couldn’t resist looking into the room as she passed. She hadn’t seen into it for years.

  Compared with the general neglect of the house the neglect in Christy’s room was classic. The floor was carpeted with butts, and there were so many old yellowed copies of the Racing Calendar piled in the corners they acted as tables and chairs, of which there were none. But it was the bed that struck Miss Lomas. She knew that no more than herself, Christy could not have much left in the way of blankets to put over him at night. His coverings, like hers, would be mostly made up of old jackets and coats. But this morning his mattress was bare. She hurried on downstairs, although she couldn’t hear her own footsteps for the roar of the fires, because through the banister rail she could see that the kitchen range, too, was blazing like a furnace, although its roar stopped for a moment as Christy who stood in front of it stuffed another armload of paper on top of what was already fiercely burning.

  ‘What are you doing? You’ll set the chimney alight,’ she cried but she got her answer from an old straw suitcase open on the floor. She hadn’t seen it since the day Christy first came to Brook Farm. But she remembered it well. Only an orphan would have had luggage like it. Now, with its webbing ravelled, its strap as hard as iron, and the catches red with rust, it was a stranger sight than ever. But into it Christy had stuffed all his worldly goods, among which she saw with concern the stub of a shaving stick. ‘You’re not leaving, Christy?’ she cried, but to Christy, intent on trying to get the catches to fasten, this question seemed so superfluous he laughed.

  ‘Maybe you didn’t hear the news,’ he said, knowing well she had no way of hearing anything except through him. ‘The old one up at Garretstown was taken to hospital to a public ward in a public hospital,’ he added with an emphasis on some of the words the significance of which escaped Miss Lomas.

  It was so long since Miss Lomas had thought about Miss Garret she didn’t at once know to whom he so vulgarly referred. ‘Oh, is she dying?’ she cried.

  ‘No such luck,’ said Christy. ‘It’s not a real hospital, it’s an old people’s home where she’ll be preserved like a mummy for another half a century. There can’t be much left of the Garret estate, at this rate there’ll be nothing at all for me. The game is up at last. I listened to you long enough, I’m getting out of here. I’ll be gone to Dublin on the next train and I’ll be there in time to catch the night boat for England. I know Parr!’ He looked at her viciously. ‘He could have the law on us for the damage that’s been done here.’

  Miss Lomas quailed before the spiteful look he gave her but his words themselves she regarded as rubbish. ‘Any damage that has been done is only the result of neglect,’ she said with dignity. ‘And whose fault is that?’

  ‘Ah, you’re a bad case,’ Christy said and he gave a laugh. Having got the catches on his case closed, he hoisted the case under his arm, like he must have caught up the clucking hen on the day of the Mock Auction, then, leaving it down again for a minute he took out a cigarette and going over to the range he lit it from the dying embers. Miss Lomas felt he would as lightheartedly lit it from the flames of the house. For a minute they stood looking at each other. Then, on an impulse, Christy put his hand in his pocket and threw down on the table a ten shilling note so dirty and crumpled it was almost objectionable. ‘That might hold your bones together till they come and take you away,’ he said, as, with another laugh he went off.

  It was all so sudden. Miss Lomas stood in an empty house, outside which were the empty fields, and a terrible panic seized her. Christy had become almost as much a part of Brook Farm as herself, and at night when she used to lie in bed in the house that had lost most of its window catches and locks, she had nevertheless felt lapped around with a strange protectiveness that emanated from him, even if, as often as not, he was half a mile away stuck in a furze-bush, dead-drunk.

  He mustn’t go, she thought, and she ran to stop him. But Christy had already got as far as the road where a dilapidated motor car was waiting for him. When it started up it made such a racket her cry to him was lost. She went back to the house in a daze.

  All Miss Lomas could think to do at first was make a cup of tea, but like the day after George’s funeral when she looked into the tea canister there was only tea-dust in it. Dully she stared at the ten shilling note that lay among the crumbs on the table, but it was so long since she had handled money it seemed of no more use than a toffee-wrapper. Disdaining it, she looked away. Had she not always been above money? Indeed it seemed to her at that moment that the world had really no need for it. She felt sure that if only people would behave properly money could be done without. Had she herself not proved this? But to whom? Only to herself, she thought sadly. Suddenly the scales fell from her eyes. They had all of them, Parr and Miss Garret and Christy, they had all thought it was money she wanted. Oh, what a dreadful mistake! What a terrible misapprehension! She must remedy it at once, she thought. Immediately! She must go to town and have it out with Parr.

  Climbing the stairs, Miss Lomas for the first time in a long while, felt purposeful and confident, and when she opened her closet door it gave a great lift to her spirit to smell the camphor that had successfully battled for so long against destructive moths. That smell was like a promise that all would in the end be well.

  How wise she had been to spare her best garments and not put them over her in bed at night as she had often been tempted to do. Fumbling among the clothes, she pulled out the last costume she had bought. It was the smartest, the most high-class, the most costly costume she had ever bought. Stepping into the skirt she pulled it up proudly. She felt she was being proved right in one thing anyway; good quality garments never lost their shape. That was true, but alas, she herself had lost shape. She might as well have stepped into a rain-water barrel. For a moment she almost gave way to despair. But diving into the closet again she brought to light the old costume she had worn the day she first walked in the door of Brook Farm. Hadn’t she always said that if you kept a thing for long enough you’d
find a use for it in the end? Everything seemed to be working to a pattern. When last she wore this suit she was as slim as a stem, and now, again, she was as thin as a stalk. Except for the padded shoulders and the fact that the skirt was hobbled, the costume looked very well on her, she thought. The skirt was a bit long, but considering that she was wearing Christy’s shoes, this was an advantage. Her feet were so swollen there was no question of trying to squeeze them into any of the neat little shoes that had stood patiently for so long on the floor of the closet. Hats were a different matter though. And gloves. And handbags. Taking down a hatbox covered with wallpaper patterned with violets faded but recognisable, the dear little flowers, she selected accessories to match the costume. It was a pity that every looking-glass in the house had been broken or sold and the one in her own room so spotty there was no seeing oneself in it. So although she couldn’t appraise her appearance, she drew herself up and confidently went downstairs. To give an auspicious start to her mission, she tugged at the front door till she got it open.

  It was many years since Miss Lomas had been on the public road. Motor cars now, and not traps, flashed past. She was a bit put out when people she met did not appear to recognise her but she gave no sign of caring. And when three or four small children, open-mouthed fell into step behind her, she would not have sent them back if she had not feared their mothers might miss them and worry on their account.

  It was a long walk to the town. It was tiring too, but like an engine excitement drove her onward, and at last she got to the outskirts of the town. But so many new houses had been built in the town since she’d last been there she doubted whether she’d find her way to the main street so when, passing a row of dismal cottages, recollecting that in one of them the widowed sister of Mr Parr used to reside, she had an impulse to stop and enquire if the lawyer’s office was still in the same place. But she decided against stopping, thinking that having prospered he would no doubt have arranged for his nieces and nephews to reside in a better quarter. Anyway she had seen a very common looking girl standing in the doorway with curling pins in her hair. Certainly Mr Parr’s dependants no longer lived there. She hurried on.