then, but it’s different now and I wouldn’t want to be always tagging along in Liam’s wake. It passes, the twined-fingers stage. You don’t see it going till it’s gone.
I’m getting ahead of myself again. When first he came to Kilkenny, Liam stayed with Dermot Power and his wife, Marie, the same two who’d lent him the house on Achill. Dermot was a painter, his oldest friend, so Liam wasn’t shy about cluttering up their living-room floor while he looked around for a house he liked at a rent he could scrape together. He was in no hurry, so he stretched his welcome. It’s a good story now—they laugh in the telling—but by all accounts he wore their patience thin.
Liam knew what he wanted, you see, and he wasn’t about to compromise just to have somewhere to live. He wasn’t like Robbie, saying yes to the first place we saw that wasn’t a total dump. Liam watched and waited, taking his time. At last he found a stone-built farmhouse with outbuildings and an owner willing to rent at a price he could afford. There was even talk of a lease, but it was only talk, the documents never appeared. Liam said quietly that he might be interested should Mr. Fitzgerald ever be thinking of selling. Mr. Fitzgerald let on not to have heard, but Liam knew well that he had. They understood each other. He would live there, and if it worked out to their mutual satisfaction it might come to a sale.
Back then that was part of buying a house—goodwill and compatibility were valid currency, to be taken into account. Not now. These days no one cares who you are so long as there’s a bank to come up with the mortgage. And neighbours don’t matter the way they used to now that everyone has a car.
For two years Liam had rented, but by the time I stepped off the bus he was already mired in the long, slow business of buying. It all took forever. Mortgages were hard to come by, and he’d no fixed income to show. His family helped: his father stood guarantor with the bank, and Connor and Kathleen lent him money for the deposit. The worst part was getting permission from Pat Fitzgerald’s five siblings. Pat (he’d long ceased being “Mr. Fitzgerald”) was the oldest son, so he had the farm, but the house had passed to them all when the old people died and emigration had scattered the rest to England or America. Two of them were hard to find but easy enough to persuade. The other three had done well for themselves, they’d no urgent need, so they couldn’t quite make up their minds to the sale.
“It’s only natural,” Pat said. “It’s where they were reared, so they’ll take their time. Push, and they’ll dig in their heels; we have only to leave them be and they’ll come round.”
So they were let be, and they came round. I wasn’t surprised, I’d been watching Liam, and I knew well he’d have his way. Robbie could want something and there’d be hell on if he didn’t get it. Then he’d spot something else and away he’d go, the first thing entirely forgotten and left behind. Not Liam. Liam knew when to push, and he knew when to wait, it was nearly sinister, this relentless patience. It shocked me a bit. I had thought him all ease and good nature, but it seemed there was a whole lot more to him than I’d let myself notice.
It’s a narrow house, two storeys high, tucked sideways into a steep treed hillside with a muddy half-cobbled yard at the back and a mesh of fields at the front. A lovely place, secret and domestic, the small, ambling meadows like thrown-down cloths scattered over with horses and sheep.
There’s a few other houses around the place, but nothing too close. I can hear Haydn’s dogs at night, and a voice if it’s raised to a shout. In winter there’s the shine of Fitzgeralds’ lights through the empty trees when I’m bringing in fuel from the yard. Quiet. That’s how it was when I came here, that’s how it is still in spite of the cars drawing up to bring folk for my hands. A quiet green place of spring wells and stone walls studded with white thorn and ash. About as far from Derry as the moon.
Around the yard there are outbuildings in different stages of dilapidation. There’s a gate at the side that leads to a bit of an orchard with old, twisty trees climbing the slope, and behind them the land rising steeply up to the ridge. Below the house the land slopes gently down, and off in the distance the Blackstairs Mountains walk the horizon. The main gate from the yard opens into our boreen, which gives onto a single-track road, which gives onto another road where two cars can pass if you’re careful.
There are more houses now. Coady’s empty dwelling-house by the spring well has been renovated, and there are new bungalows here and there on the road that leads up to the ridge. I don’t mind it, though at first I did. I’d got used to solitude; I didn’t want neighbours.
When first I came here the place was more like a barn than a house. The roof leaked, the plaster walls blossomed with damp, the windows rattled at every breeze. Liam saw none of its defects. He showed me around like a man showing off a mansion; I might have been looking at antique rugs stretched on polished wood floors, at traceried ceilings, at mahogany sideboards laden with fine bone china. He had all sorts of plans for the house—its potential had long since changed in his mind into fact.
The front door opened directly into what had once been a traditional farm kitchen, with a flight of stairs climbing up the back wall, and two small rooms opening off it at either end. But time passed, Pat married, his new wife had set about making changes as new wives do. When she’d finished, the old range had gone and the big room had been divided. In the poky, wee kitchen an electric stove stood on rickety legs, and a miserable one-bar heater burned pound notes if you turned it on, which we rarely did, for we’d no pound notes to burn. Somewhere along the line Pat and his wife had built themselves a new bungalow three fields away and put the house up for rent. The bungalow was double glazed with fitted everything. Liam was planning to undo most of the changes and bring the house back to what it had been.
Upstairs there were three bedrooms and a makeshift bathroom that took up part of the landing. It had a sink, a toilet, a rust-stained bath, and a paraffin stove that took the edge from the cold. The bedrooms were small and low-ceilinged, their rectangular windows set low down near the floor so you had to kneel on the boards to look out. In the biggest bedroom was a double iron bedstead with an old feather mattress, the sort with a hollow in the middle that you both fall into no matter how far apart you’ve started out. Not that I minded until I was pregnant. I liked sleeping sprawled over Liam.
So it was no palace, but that didn’t bother me. The flat in Belfast hadn’t exactly been Ideal Home country either, and there I’d opened my eyes every morning on Robbie’s bony shoulders, which never quite lost their tension, even in sleep. Here I would open my eyes and there would be Liam, flat on his back and snoring his head off, his brown curls rising and falling with every breath. I’d wriggle and squirm myself closer into his arms, then lie there smiling like an idiot until I grew bored with contentment and kicked him awake.
There was an ash tree outside the window and on windy nights in summer it swished and tapped on the glass, and on windy nights in winter it rattled and banged, and there was nothing I loved more than its lonely, companionable sound. Liam loved it too, he would never have cut it down, but when Andrew was four he was plagued with dark dreams and he’d wake in fear at the sound and the shadows moving across the wall. So the ash tree went, and I had to content myself with the one further round to the side of the house, which kept a civil distance and was never intimate with us. I’m sorry now that I let Liam cut it down, I should have taken time with Andrew and brought him back to loving the tree, for from that day he wanted everything that frightened him removed from him and there’s no peace in living like that.
But all that was a long way off. It was autumn when I came here, and I was stunned by this bosomy, treed land with the blue hills rising up from its plains and the march of bluer mountains away to the east. I had never been to “the South” that was south, I thought it would all look like Achill or Donegal—acid land, wild and empty, all wind and sky and that haunted light. Nothing had prepared me for the ease of this place, its soft skies and luxuriant growth, its wide meadows and its loose brown rivers.
Settled weather. There never was an autumn like it. Day followed day, week followed week, we would wake to mist like a wraith at the window, breath-thin, a wash of moisture drifting about the house, the sheds, the trees. The fields were heavy with dew; the horses