Selected Stories

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.

You could sleep driving here, Eoghan used to say and once, in the heat of an afternoon, had dropped off at the turn to Ana Woods. He’d woken up before the old Austin he had then hit a tree. Not that it would have mattered much if he hadn’t, he always added when he told the story: all the cars he had ever owned were past their best, purchased from Chappie Keogh, who had the wrecking yard at Maire. Easygoing, good-hearted, seeming to be slow but actually rather clever, Eoghan had grown from being a sensitive child into a big, red-haired man, different in appearance from the others of his family, all of whom were noticeably thin. He was content to take second place to Tom. They had all their lives been friends, their friendship knitted closer in each succeeding span of years.

He drove in to where earlier he’d been turning the hay. He finished it within an hour, not hurrying because he never did. Then he went on, to Brea Maguire’s at the cross, where he drank and talked to the men who came there every evening. It would be a bad mistake, disastrous even, to go on doing nothing about Olivehill. They had wanted her to understand that, and hoped she did.

Nine days later James woke up one morning feeling different, and had difficulty on the stairs. His left leg was dragging a bit, a most uncomfortable business, and at breakfast he discovered that his left arm was shaky too. Reaching out was limited; and he couldn’t lift things as easily as he used to. ‘A little stroke,’ Dr Gorevan said when he came.

‘Should he be in his bed?’ Mollie asked, and James said he’d no intention of taking to his bed so Dr Gorevan prescribed instead a walking-stick. When she heard, Loretta came over with a sponge cake.

James died. Not then, but in the winter and of pneumonia. There had not been another stroke and he was less incapacitated than he had been at first from the one he’d had. A fire was kept going in his bedroom, and the family came often, one by one, to talk to him. But he was tired and, two days after his eightieth birthday, when the moment came he was glad to go. It was a good death: he called it that himself.

In the house to which Mollie had come when she was a girl of nineteen, where there’d been servants and where later her children were born, there was only Kitty Broderick now, and Kealy was the last of the outside men. In the bleak dining-room Mollie and Eoghan sat at either end of the long mahogany table and Kitty Broderick brought them the meals she cooked. Everywhere there was the quiet that comes after death, seeming to Mollie to keep at bay what had been withheld from James. But one evening after supper, when the days had already lengthened and there was an empty hour or so, Eoghan said: ‘Come and I’ll show you.’

She went, not immediately knowing what for; had she known she would have demurred. Well, anyone would, she thought, passing from field to field.

‘You can’t do this, Eoghan,’ she protested, having been silent, only listening.

‘We wouldn’t if there was another way.’

‘But Ana Woods, Eoghan!’

They could go on selling timber piecemeal, as had been done in the past, another half-acre gone and replanted every so often, but that hadn’t ever been a solution, and wasn’t a way now in which the family could recover itself. It would tide the family over, but tiding-over wasn’t what was needed. The woods were part of the whole and the whole had to be put right. Doing so on the scale that was necessary meant that the machinery for such an undertaking could be hired at more favourable rates. With more timber to offer it would fetch what it should, not dribs and drabs that added up to nothing much. And the well-cleared land could be put to profitable use. Eoghan explained all that.

‘The Bluebell Walk, though, Eoghan! The beeches, the maples!’

‘I know. I know.’

They went back through the yards and sat down in the kitchen. The setters, who had accompanied them in the fields and were not allowed in the kitchen regions, ambled off into another part of the house.

‘For a long time,’ Eoghan said, ‘there’s been waste. Papa knew that too.’

‘He did his best.’

‘He did.’

Parcels of land had been sold in much the same small way as timber had, a source of funds when need arose. Everything higgledy-piggledy, Eoghan said, the distant future forgotten about. It was an irony for Mollie that James, aware that he’d inherited a run-down estate, had struggled to put things right. The agricultural subsidies of the nineteen eighties and nineties were the saviour of many farms and were a help at Olivehill too, but they were not enough to reverse generations of erosion and mismanagement. ‘It’s maybe we’re old stock ourselves,’ James had said when he became resigned to defeat. ‘It’s maybe that that’s too much for us.’

Often Mollie had heard this tale of woe repeated, although always privately, never said in front of the children. In his later life James’s weariness marked him, as optimism had once. At least the furniture and the pictures were not sold, faith kept with better times.

‘It’s hard,’ Eoghan said. ‘I know all this is hard, Mamma.’ He reached out for her hand, which Tom would have been shy of doing, which Angela might have in a daughterly way.

‘It’s only hard to imagine,’ she said. ‘So big a thing.’

They could keep going in a sort of way, Eoghan said. Tom and his family would come to live at Olivehill, the house they were in now offered to whoever replaced Kealy when the time for that arrived. A woman could come in a few mornings a week when Kitty Broderick went, economies made to offset any extra expense.

‘But Tom’s right,’ Eoghan said, ‘when he’s for being more ambitious. And bolder while we’re at it.’

She nodded, and said she understood, which she did not. The friendship of her sons, their respect for one another, their confidence in their joint ventures had always been a pleasure for her. It was something, she supposed, that all that was still there.

‘And Angela?’ she asked.

‘Angela’s aware of how things are.’

That night Mollie dreamed that James was in the drawing-room. ‘No, no, no,’ he said, and laughed because it was ridiculous. And they went to the Long Field and were going by the springs where men from the county council had sheets of drawings spread out and were taking measurements. ‘Our boys are pulling your leg,’ James told them, but the men didn’t seem to hear and said to one another that Mountmoy wouldn’t know itself with an amenity golf-course.

Afterwards, lying awake, Mollie remembered James telling her that the Olivehill land had been fought for, that during the penal years the family had had to resort to chicanery in order to keep what was rightfully theirs. His father had grown sugar beet and tomatoes at the personal request of de Valera during the nineteen forties’ war. And when she dreamed again James was saying that in an age of such strict regulations no permission would be granted for turning good arable land into a golf-course. History was locked into Olivehill, he said, and history in Ireland was preciously protected. He was angry that his sons had allowed the family to be held up to ridicule, and said he knew for a fact that those county-council clerks had changed their minds and were sniggering now at the preposterousness of a naïve request.

‘We mustn’t quarrel,’ Eoghan said.

‘No, we mustn’t quarrel.’

She had been going to tell him her dream but she didn’t. Nor did she tell Tom when he came at teatime. He was the sharper of the two in argument and always had been; but he listened, and even put her side of things for her when she became muddled and was at a loss. His eagerness for what he’d been carried away by in his imagination was unaffected while he helped her to order her objections, and she remembered him – fair-haired and delicate, with that same enthusiasm – when he was eight.

‘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.

In the drawing-room she closed imagination down, for it was treacherous and without her say-so would take her into the hostile territory. ‘Oh, ma’am, you should see it!’ Kitty Broderick came specially to tell her, and called all that there was to see a miracle. Ten years it would have taken once, Kealy said. Less than eighteen months it had taken now.

One day Mollie drew the curtains on the daylight and did not ever draw them back again. Her meals were brought to the drawing-room when she hinted that she would like that, and when she said that the stairs were getting a bit much her sons dismantled her bed and it was made up beside the prie-dieu. Father Thomas said Mass in the dimly lit room on Saturday evenings and sometimes the family came, Angela if she happened to be in the house, Loretta and the children. Kitty Broderick and Kealy came too, Mass at that time of day being convenient for them.

Tom was disconsolate about the turn of events, but Angela said their mother was as bright as a bee. She said allowances had to be made for ageing’s weariness, for a widow’s continuing sorrow, that being reclusive was really hardly strange.

Eoghan protested. ‘What you’re doing’s not good, Mamma,’ he chided.

‘Ah now, Eoghan, ah now.’

‘We don’t want you to be against us.’

She shook her head. She said she was too old to be against people. And he apologized again.

‘We had to, you know.’

‘Of course you had to. Of course, Eoghan.’

The ersatz landscape took on a character of its own – of stumpy hillocks that broke the blank uniformity, long fairways, sandy bunkers, a marsh created to catch the unwary, flat green squares and little flags. Olivehill Golf Links 1 Km, a sign said, and later the golf-course’s immediate presence was announced, the car park tarred, its spaces marked in white. Completion of the clubhouse dragged but then at last was finished. Nib-licks flashed in the sun of another summer. Mountmoy boys learned how to be caddies.

In her meditative moments Mollie knew that James had been betrayed. His anger had not been allowed, nor had it become her own, for she could not have managed it. With good intentions, he had been deceived, and had he known he might have said the benevolence was as bitter as the treachery. He would have said – for she could hear him – that the awfulness which had come about was no more terrible, no less so either, than the impuissance of Catholic families in the past, when hunted priests were taken from their hiding-places at Olivehill and Mass was fearfully said in the house, when suspicion and distrust were everywhere. Yet through silence, with subterfuge, the family at Olivehill had survived, a blind eye turned to breaches of the law by the men who worked the fields, a deaf ear to murmurs of rebellion.

In the darkened drawing-room, as shielded as James was from the new necessities of survival, Mollie tentatively reflected what she believed he might have reflected himself. In that distant past, misfortune had surely brought confusion, as it had now – and disagreement about how to accept defeat, how best to banish pride and know humility, how best to live restricted lives. And it was surely true that there had been, then too, the anger of frustration; and guilt, and tired despair.

‘I’ve brought your tea.’ Kitty Broderick interrupted the flow of thought. Light from the door she’d left open allowed her to make her way safely into the room, to put the tray she carried down. She pulled the table it was on closer to where Mollie sat.

‘You’re good to me, Kitty.’

‘Ach, not at all. Wouldn’t I pull the curtains back a bit, though?’

‘No. No, the curtains are grand the way they are. Didn’t you bring a cup for yourself?’

‘Oh, I forgot the cup!’ She always did, was never at ease when the suggestion was made that she should sit down and share the mistress’s tea.

‘Kealy got drunk again,’ she said.

‘Is he all right?’

‘I have him in the kitchen.’

‘Kealy likes his glass.’

He wasn’t as particular as Kitty Broderick, always accepting when he came to the drawing-room the whiskey she kept specially for him. When Tom came in the evenings it was for sherry.

‘How silent it can be, Kitty, in the drawing-room. Nearly always silent.’

‘It’s a quiet room, all right. Sure, it always was. But wouldn’t you take a little walk, though, after your tea?’

The bluebells had begun to grow again. They’d told her that. Kitty Broderick knew she wouldn’t go for a walk, that she wouldn’t come out from where she belonged, and be a stranger on her own land. They’d wanted her to have the setters with her for company, but it wasn’t fair to keep dogs closed up all day like that and she said no.

Nothing changed, she thought when the maid had gone; and after all why should it? Persecution had become an ugly twist of circumstances, more suited to the times. Merciless and unrelenting, what was visited on the family could be borne, as before it had been. In her artificial dark it could be borne.