‘But surely, Tom,’ she began again.
‘It’s unusual in a town the size of Mountmoy that there isn’t a golf-course. ’
She didn’t mention permission because during the day she had realized that that side of things would already have been explored; and this present conversation would be different if an insurmountable stumbling-block had been encountered.
‘In the penal years, Tom -’
‘That past is a long way off, Mamma.’
‘It’s there, though.’
‘So is the future there. And that is ours.’
She knew it was no good. They had wanted their father’s blessing, which they would not have received, but still they had wanted to try for it and perhaps she’d been wrong to beg them not to. His anger might have stirred their shame and might have won what, alone, she could not. That day, for the first time, her protection of him felt like betrayal.
At the weekend Angela came down from Dublin, and wept a little when they walked in the woods. But Angela wasn’t on her side.
The front avenue at Olivehill was a mile long. Its iron entrance gates, neglected for generations, had in the end been sold to a builder who was after something decorative for an estate he had completed, miles away, outside Limerick. The gates’ two stone pillars were still in place at Olivehill, and the gate-lodge beside them was, though fallen into disrepair. Rebuilt, it would become the club-house; and gorse was to be cleared to make space for a car park. A man who had designed golf-courses in Spain and South Africa came from Sussex and stayed a week at Olivehill. A planning application for the change of use of the gate-lodge had been submitted; the widening of access to and from the car park was required. No other stipulations were laid down.
Mollie listened to the golf-course man telling her about the arrangements he had made for his children’s education and about his wife’s culinary successes, learning too that his own interest was water-wheels. She was told that the conversion of Olivehill into a golf-course was an imaginative stroke of genius.
‘You understand what’s happening, Kitty?’ Mollie questioned her one-time parlourmaid, whose duties were of a general nature now.
‘Oh, I have, ma’am. I heard it off Kealy a while back.’
‘What’s Kealy think of it then?’
‘Kealy won’t stay, ma’am.’
‘He says that, does he?’
‘When the earth-diggers come in he won’t remain a day. I have it from himself.’
‘You won’t desert me yourself, Kitty?’
‘I won’t, ma’am.’
‘They’re not going to pull the house down.’
‘I wondered would they.’
‘No, no. Not at all.’
‘Isn’t it the way things are though? Wouldn’t you have to move with the times?’
‘Maybe. Anyway, there’s nothing I can do, Kitty.’
‘Sure, without the master to lay down the word, ma’am, what chance would there be for what anyone would do? You’d miss the master, ma’am.’
‘Yes, you would.’
When February came Mollie took to walking more than she’d ever walked in the fields and in the woods. By March she thought a hiatus had set in because there was a quietness and nothing was happening. But then, before the middle of that month, the herd was sold, only a few cows kept back. The pigs went. The sheep were kept, with the hens and turkeys. There was no spring sowing. One morning Kealy didn’t come.
Tom and Eoghan worked the diggers themselves. Mollie didn’t see that because she didn’t want to, but she knew where a start had been made. She knew it from what Eoghan had let drop and realized, too late, that she shouldn’t have listened.
That day Mollie didn’t go out of the house, not even as far as the garden or the yards. Had she been less deaf, she would have heard, from the far distance, rocks and stones clattering into the buckets of the diggers. She would have heard the oak coming down in the field they called the Oak Tree Field, the chain-saws in Ana Woods. A third digger had been hired, Eoghan told her, with a man taken on to operate it, since Kealy had let them down. She didn’t listen.
It was noticed then that she often didn’t listen these days and noticed that she didn’t go out. She hid her joylessness, not wishing to impose it on her family. Why should she, after all, since she was herself to blame for what was happening? James would have had papers drawn up, he would have acted fast in the little time he’d had left, clear and determined in his wishes. And nobody went against last wishes.
‘Come and I’ll show you,’ Eoghan offered. ‘I’ll take you down in the car.’
‘Oh now, you’re busy. I wouldn’t dream of it.’
‘The fresh air’d do you good, Mamma.’
She liked that form of address and was glad it hadn’t been dropped, that ‘master’ and ‘mistress’ had lasted too. The indoor servants had always been given their full names at Olivehill, and Kitty Broderick still was; yard men and gardeners were known by their surnames only. Such were the details of a way of life, James had maintained – like wanting to be at one, which he himself had added to that list.
More and more as the days, and then weeks, of that time went by Mollie clung to the drawing-room. She read there, books she’d read ages ago; played patience there, and a form of whist that demanded neither a partner nor an opponent. Father Thomas came to her there.
When Kealy returned it was in the drawing-room he apologized. His small, flushed face, the smell of sweat and drink, his boots taken off so as not to soil the carpet, all told the story of his retreat from what was happening, so very different from Mollie’s own retreat. He asked that she should put a word in for him with her sons and she said it wasn’t necessary. She said to go and find them and tell them she wanted him to be given back the position he’d had as yard man for thirty-four years. In spite of his dishevelment he went with dignity, Mollie considered.
Every third weekend or so Angela came, and also offered a tour of what was being achieved, but Mollie continued to decline this, making it seem no more than a whim of old age that she did so. Tom came to the drawing-room after his day’s work, to sit with her over a seven o’clock drink, and when his children asked if their grandmother had died too, they were brought to the drawing-room to see for themselves that this was not so.
The pictures that were crowded on the drawing-room walls were of family ancestors – not Mollie’s own but often seeming now as if they were – and of horses and dogs, of the house itself before the creeper had grown, square and gaunt. Among the oil paintings there were a few water-colours: of the Bluebell Walk, the avenue in autumn, the garden. There were photographs too, of Angela and Tom and Eoghan, as babies and as children, of Mollie and James after their marriage, of similar occasions before this generation’s time. The drawing-room was dark even at the height of summer; only at night, with all the lights on, did its record of places and people emerge from the shadowed walls. Rosewood and mahogany were identified then, bookcases yielded the titles of their books. Candlesticks in which candles were no longer lit, snuff-boxes that had become receptacles for pins were given back something of their due.
In this room Mollie had been in awe of James’s father and of his mother, had thought they didn’t take to her, had wondered if they considered the levity of her nature an unsuitable quality in a wife. The prie-dieu – still between the two long windows – had seemed too solemn and holy for a drawing-room, the reproduction of a Mantegna Virgin and Child on the wall above it too serious a subject. But since she had claimed the drawing-room as her sanctuary she often knelt at the prie-dieu to give thanks, for she had ceased, in the peace of not knowing, to feel torn between the living and the dead. Protecting James had not been a sin; nor was it a sin to choose a reality to live by that her mood preferred. There was no fantasy in her solace, no inclination to pretend – companionable and forgiving – the presence with her of her long-loved husband. Memory in its ordinary way summoned harvested fields, and haycocks and autumn hedges, the first of the fuchsia, the last of the wild sweet-pea. It brought the lowing of cattle, old donkeys resting, scampering dogs, and days and places.