In the room she still had to imagine there were books on shelves, the vase of flowers, the pictures of castles. In a courtroom he put a case, his papers in one hand, gesturing with the other. They belonged, he said on the towpath, the rowers going by.
Downstairs something was thrown, and there was Holby’s mumble, the clank of broken china when it was swept up, her mother’s voice going on, her crossness exhausted as the woman’s had been. He had been shamed by the woman getting things wrong and was the kind to mind. He didn’t realize the woman didn’t matter, that her talk and her fury didn’t. He wasn’t the kind to know that. He wasn’t the knowing sort.
Her mother’s voice was different now, caressing, lying. She sent Holby out for beer, which at this stage in the proceedings she always did; Jasmin heard him go. Her mother called up the stairs, calling her Angie, saying to come down. She didn’t answer. She didn’t say that Angie wasn’t her name. She didn’t say anything.
When she went there, he would not be on the seat in the sun. He would not be waiting in the bus station. Nor playing the machines. Nor in the McDonald’s. But when Jasmin closed her eyes again his smile was there and it didn’t go away. She touched with her lips the necklace that had been his gift. She promised she would always keep it by her.
At Olivehill
‘Well, at least don’t tell him,’ their mother begged. ‘At least do nothing until he’s gone.’
But they were doubtful and said nothing. They did not promise, which she had hoped they would. Then, sensing her disappointment, they pacified her.
‘We’d never want to distress him,’ Tom said, and Eoghan shook his head.
She wasn’t reassured, but didn’t say. She knew what they were thinking: that being old you might be aware of death loitering near, but even so death wasn’t always quick about its business. And she hated what had been said to her, out of the blue on such a lovely day.
She was younger by a year than their father, and who could say which would be taken first? Both of them suffered a raft of trivial ills, each had a single ailment that was more serious. In their later seventies, they lived from day to day.
‘We’ll say nothing so,’ she said, still hoping they would promise what she wished for. ‘Promise me,’ she used to say when they were boys, and obediently they always had. But everything was different now. She knew they were doing all they could to keep things going. She knew it was a struggle at Olivehill.
‘Don’t be worrying yourself,’ Eoghan said, his soft blue eyes guilty for a moment. He was given to guilt, she thought. More than Tom was, more than Angela.
‘It’s just we have to look ahead,’ Tom said. ‘We have to see where we’re going.’
They were having tea outside for the first time that summer although the summer was well advanced. The grass of the big lawn had been cut that morning by Kealy, the garden chairs brushed down. What remained of tea, the tablecloth still spread, was on the white slatted table, beneath which two English setters dozed.
‘It’ll be cold. I’ll make some fresh,’ she said when her husband came.
‘No. No such thing.’ Still yards away and advancing slowly, James contradicted that. ‘You’ll rest yourself, lady.’
Having heard some of this, she nodded obligingly. Both of them disregarded a similar degree of deafness and in other ways, too, were a little alike: tall but less tall than they had been, stooped and spare. Their clothes were not new but retained a stylishness: her shades of dark maroon, her bright silk scarf, his greenish tweeds, his careful tie. Their creeper-covered house, their garden here and there neglected, reflected their coming down in the world, but they did not themselves.
‘Thanks, Mollie,’ the old man said when his wife uncovered his toast, folding away the napkin so that it could be used for the same teatime purpose again. His toast was cut into tidy rectangles, three to a slice, and buttered. No one else had toast at this time of day.
‘You’re turning the hay?’ He addressed both sons at once, which was a habit with him. ‘End of the week you’ll bring it in, you think?’
Before Thursday, they said, when there might be a change in the weather. They were more casually turned out, in open-necked white shirts and flannel trousers, working farmers both of them. Tom and his family lived in a house on their land that once had been an employee’s. When he could, which wasn’t every day, he came to Olivehill at this time to be with the old couple for an hour or so. Once in a while his wife, Loretta, came too and brought the children. Eoghan wasn’t married and still lived at Olivehill.
Spreading lemon curd on his toast, James wondered why both his sons were here at teatime; usually Eoghan wasn’t when Tom came. He didn’t ask, it would come out: what change they proposed, what it was that required the arguments of both to convince him. But in a moment Eoghan went away.
‘You’re looking spry,’ Tom complimented his father.
‘Oh, I’m feeling spry.’
‘Fine weather’s a tonic,’ Mollie said.
And James asked after Loretta, which he always did, and asked about his granddaughters.
‘They have the poor girl demented with their devilment.’ Tom laughed, although it wasn’t necessary, it being known that his demure daughters, twins of four, hadn’t yet reached their mischievous years.
They were an Irish Catholic family, which once had occupied a modest place in an ascendancy that was not Catholic and now hardly existed any more. When Mollie first lived in this house the faith to which she and James belonged connected them with the nation that had newly come about. But faith’s variations mattered less in Ireland all these years later, since faith itself mattered less and influenced less how people lived.
‘Angela wrote,’ Mollie said, finding the letter she’d brought to the garden to show Tom.
He read it and commented that Angela didn’t change.
‘Her men friends do rather,’ James said.
Angela was the youngest of the children, a buyer for a chain of fashion shops. She lived in Dublin. The one that got away, Tom often said.
He and Eoghan hadn’t wanted to. They still didn’t, feeling they belonged here, content to let Angela bring a bit of life into things with her Dublin gossip and her flightiness.
Tom folded the letter into its envelope and handed it back. James slowly finished his tea. Mollie walked round the garden with her older son.
‘You’re good to indulge me, Tom,’ she said, even though she had hoped to hear that what had been kept from their father would not come about at all. It made no sense to her that the greater part of Olivehill should be made into a golf-course in the hope that this would yield a more substantial profit than the land did. It was foolish, Mollie thought after Tom had gone, when she and James were alone again with the setters; yet her sons weren’t fools. It was graceless, even a vulgarity, she thought as they sat there in the evening sun, for no other word was quite as suitable; yet they were not vulgar.
‘Are we at one?’ she heard James ask, and she apologized for being abstracted.
He loved to use that old expression. He loved to be reassured, was reassured now. How profoundly he would hate what she had protected him from, how chilling and loathsome it would seem to him, how disappointing.
‘You’re looking lovely,’ he said, and she heard but pretended not to so that he’d say it again.
Eoghan drove carelessly to the hayfield. There never was other traffic on these byroads, never a lost cyclist or someone who had walked out from Mountmoy. A wandering sheep was always one of their own. But there wasn’t a sheep today, only now and again a rabbit scuttling to safety.