‘We only heard of your trouble Tuesday,’ the thinner and smaller of the two apologized. ‘It does happen the occasional time we wouldn’t hear.’
The other woman, more robust and older, allowed herself jewellery and make-up and took more care with her clothes. But it was her quiet, sharp-featured sister who took the lead.
‘We heard in MacClincy’s,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry you’ve had a wasted journey.’
‘It’s never wasted.’ There was a pause, as if a pause was necessary here. ‘You have our sympathy,’ was added to that, the explanation of why the journey had not been in vain.
The conversation took place entirely at the hall door. Dusk was becoming dark, but over the white-washed wall of the small front garden Emily still could see a car drawn up in the road. It was cold, the wind gone round to the east. They meant well, these women, even if they’d got everything wrong, driving out from Carra to visit a man who wouldn’t have welcomed them and then arriving too late, a man whose death had spared them an embarrassment.
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Emily offered.
She imagined they’d refuse and then begin to go, saying they couldn’t disturb her at a time like this. But the big, wide-shouldered one glanced at her sister, hesitating.
‘If you’re alone,’ the smaller one said, ‘you’d be welcome to our company. If it would be of help to you.’
*
The dead man had been without religion. Anyone could have told them that, Emily reflected, making tea. He would have said that there was more to their sitting at the bedsides of the ill than met the eye, and she wondered if that could possibly be so. Did they in their compassionate travels hope for the first signs of the belief that often came out of nowhere when death declared its intention? Did they drive away from the houses they visited, straight to a presbytery, their duty done? She had never heard that said about the Geraghtys and she didn’t want to believe it. They meant well, she said to herself again.
When they left, she wouldn’t go back upstairs to look at the dead features. She’d leave him now to Keane in the morning. In the brief time that had elapsed a day had been settled for the funeral, Thursday of next week; in the morning she would let a few people know; she’d put a notice in the Advertiser. No children had been born: when Thursday had passed everything would be over except for the unpaid debts. She buttered slices of brack and stirred the tea in the pot. She carried in the tray.
They hadn’t taken their coats off, but sat as still as statues, a little apart from one another.
‘It’s cold,’ she said, Til light the fire.’
‘Ah no. Ah no, don’t bother.’ They both protested, but she did anyway, and the kindling that had been in the grate all summer flared up at once. She poured their tea, asking if they took sugar, and then offering the brack. They began to call her Emily, as if they knew her well. They gave their own names: Kathleen the older sister, and Norah.
‘I didn’t think,’ Kathleen began to say, and Norah interrupted her.
‘Oh, we know all right,’ she said. ‘You’re Protestant here, but that never made a difference yet.’
They had sat with the Methodist minister, the Reverend Wolfe, Kathleen said. They’d read to him, they’d brought in whatever he wanted. They were there when he went.
‘Never a difference,’ Norah repeated, and in turn they took a slice of brack. They commented on it, saying it was excellent.
‘It isn’t easy,’ Kathleen said when the conversation lapsed. ‘The first few hours. We often stay.’
‘It was good of you to think of him.’
‘It’s cheerful with that fire, Emily,’ Kathleen said.
They asked her about the horses because the horses were what they’d heard about, and she explained that they’d become a thing of the past. She’d sell the place now, she said.
‘You’d find it remote, Emily,’ Kathleen said. Her lipstick had left a trace on the rim of the teacup and Norah drew her attention to it with a gesture. Kathleen wiped it off. ‘We’re town people ourselves,’ she said.
Emily didn’t consider the house she’d lived in for nearly thirty years remote. Five minutes in the car and you were in the middle of Carra. Mangan’s Bridge, in the other direction, was no more than a minute.
‘You get used to a place,’ Emily said.
They identified for her the house where they lived themselves, on the outskirts of Carra, on the Athy road. Emily knew it, a pleasant creeper-covered house with silver railings in front of it, not big but prosperous-looking. She’d thought it was Corrigan’s, the surveyor’s.
‘I don’t know why I thought that.’
‘We bought it from Mr Corrigan,’ Norah said, ‘when we came to Carra three years ago.’ And her sister said they’d been living in Athy before that.
‘Carra was what we were looking for,’ Norah said.
They were endeavouring to lift her spirits, Emily realized, by keeping things light. Carra had improved in their time, they said, and it would again. You could tell with a town; some of them wouldn’t rise out of the doldrums while a century’d go by.
‘You’d maybe come in to Carra now?’ Kathleen said.
‘I don’t know what I’ll do.’
She poured more tea. She handed round the brack again. Dr Ann had given her pills to take, but she didn’t intend to take them. Exhausted as she was, she didn’t want to sleep.
‘He went out a week ago,’ she said. ‘He got up and went out to the yard with only a coat over his pyjamas. I thought it was that that hurried it on, but seemingly it wasn’t.’
They didn’t say anything, just nodded, both of them. She said he had been seven months dying. He hadn’t read a newspaper all that time, she said. In the end all the food he could manage was cornflour.
‘We never knew your husband,’ Norah said, ‘any more than yourself. Although I think we maybe met him on the road one day.’
A feeling of apprehension began in Emily, a familiar dread that compulsively caused one hand to clench the other, fingers tightly locking. People often met him, exercising one of the horses. A car would slow down for him but he never acknowledged it, never so much as raised the crop. For a moment she forget that he was dead.
‘He was often out,’ she said.
‘Oh, this was long ago.’
‘He sold the last of the horses twelve months ago. He didn’t want them left.’
‘He raced his horses, we’re to understand?’ Kathleen said.
‘Point-to-points. Punchestown the odd time.’
‘Well, that’s great.’
‘There wasn’t much success.’
‘It’s an up and down business, of course.’
Disappointment had filled the house when yet again a horse trailed in, when months of preparation went for nothing. There had never been much reason for optimism, but even so expectation had been high, as if anything less would have brought bad luck. When Emily married, her husband had been training a string of yearlings on the Curragh. Doing well, he’d said himself, although in fact he wasn’t.
‘You never had children, Emily?’ Kathleen asked.
‘No, we never did.’
‘I think we heard that said.’
The house had been left to her by an aunt on her mother’s side. Forty-three acres, sheep kept; and the furniture had been left to her too. ‘I used come here as a child. A Miss Edgill my aunt was. Did you hear of her?’
They shook their heads. Way before their time, Kathleen said, looking around her. A good house, she said.
‘She’d no one else to leave it to.’ And Emily didn’t add that neither the property nor the land would ever have become hers if her aunt had suspected she’d marry the man she had.
‘You’ll let it go though?’ Kathleen pursued her enquiries, doing her best to knit together a conversation. ‘The way things are now, you were saying you’d let it go?’
‘I don’t know.’