bedad,’ Luke says, with a bemused chuckle, which sounds phoney. He is not cut out for this lark.
‘With two years’ rent up front.’
Luke had heard it the first time and his heart had jumped. He could do with the money. If he doesn’t return to teaching he will have to take the land back and farm it himself. It’s the only solution. Even without livestock, he’d be eligible for several EU grants. In addition, he could sell three or four cuts of silage a year, and, with the forestry grant he gets for the oak trees, he would get by. And the shame of another man – a neighbour – living off the fat of his land would be eliminated. But it would mean, too, forfeiting city life for ever.
‘Ah, sure we’ll stick with the yearly lease, Jim,’ he says. He places a hand under the cat and gently lifts her to the floor. ‘I’ll be taking it back next year anyway, or the year after at the latest.’
The blood flares bright on Jim Lynch’s cheeks. He won’t find another place to rent as convenient as this. He bites his lower lip, livid. Thinking Luke a pup now, a brat. He wants a farm for each son and expects, no doubt, that some day soon he’ll buy Luke out. Well, not if I have to sell the clothes off my back, Luke thinks, will I ever sell an acre of Ardboe.
‘I can give you three years up front, if you like,’ Lynch says then.
Luke drops his hand by the side of his chair, spreads his fingers wide. He had to go to Lynch once for an advance. It was after he had come back to mind Josie. Lynch doesn’t have to look further than Luke’s banger of a car outside or the chipped paint on the front door to know that money is short.
‘Ah, we’ll stick with the arrangement we have, Jim. It has served us well enough this far.’
Luke rises. Lynch, taken by surprise, rises too, his hat almost falling off his knee.
‘I’ll do out the lease in September, as usual,’ Luke says.
There will be hell to pay now for the rest of the summer – tractors revving and roaring up and down the fields around the house. And in the winter, heavy machinery churning up the ground.
Luke watches the jeep roll past the window. He is struck at the sad figure Lynch cuts as he drives away, staring straight ahead, the hat on his head, his broad shoulders and back. He is not the same at all since that fall into the slurry pit. Shook-looking, a haunted look in his eyes. Luke wonders if he saw something. He had the same thought the first time he saw photos of Seamus Heaney in public after his stroke. A changed man, as if he had returned from somewhere.
He paces back and forth on the kitchen floor, addled. Maura Lynch laid out Josie upstairs in her room. The two families were always close. Jim is getting old. What is he doing, after all, except trying to do the best for his family? You can’t fault a man for that.
THE CHURCH BELLS are ringing out the Angelus when he pulls the front door behind him and starts down the avenue. He hates this time of day, the lethargy, the ennui. Six minutes and about a thousand steps, he once calculated, to get to the end of the avenue, though he has never succeeded in counting past two hundred. He should keep a log: record the dates, times, weather conditions, prevailing winds. Ascertain to what degree the time of day and weather conditions affect his speed. Other variables too: type of footwear and clothing worn, state of mind, proximity to sleep, proximity to the consumption of solids and liquids, to intoxicants, to music, sex, literature. He smiles at the thought. Determine the extent, if any, philosophy or poetry or porn affects pedestrian speed.
Lily is beside him, her tail held high and straight. She trots off ahead. He coughs hard, spits out sputum. His throat is dry and sore; he has a touch of heartburn too. Pregnant women get heartburn – caused, his mother used to say, by the hair on the child’s head tickling the mother’s chest. Certain smells sicken them – coffee, fried bacon. It’s worse for some. Maeve didn’t get that far along. The child would be eight years old now. His child. He or she. More males miscarry – the universe is hard on males, in utero, ex utero. We die younger, more suicides too. Up ahead, Lily is stopped at a tree, her backside to the trunk. Pssss-pssss, Luke teases. Mingo Lily. She turns her head away indignantly. Wonder if animals miscarry. Why wouldn’t they? Chromosomal abnormalities in every species. A misbirth with trailing navelcord. Stephen Dedalus, watching the midwife with her bag of tricks coming down the steps onto Sandymount Strand. Mrs Florence McCabe, relict of the late Patrick. Or relic, which is it? Rarely used now. Should’ve put ‘relic of Denis’ in Mammy’s death notice. What had she in the bag? Navelcord. Eve had no navel, a belly without blemish. Gaze in your omphalos. Always love that word omphalos, the sound of it. Wells and pumps and turloughs, hatches into the underworld. Gaze into the astral soul of man.
He turns and looks at the house, walking backwards for a few steps, the sun warm on his back. Such love he feels for this place, for the regular and ceaseless procession of the seasons, watching the growth in trees and plants and fields recede after each summer, recover after each winter. He squints, then closes one eye, testing his vision. The whole house looks neglected. Doors and windows not painted in twenty years. He bought ten litres of white gloss in the spring. New paint brushes, white spirit, masking tape. He only got as far as cleaning and sanding three windows. Nothing to stop him resuming, he thinks. Can start when he gets back. One door a day: wash, sand, undercoat, then two coats of paint. After that, a window a day. He makes the calculation. If he works six days a week he’ll be done by the beginning of September.
His gaze settles on the round windows in the east wing above the kitchen. These four portholes, which pour light into the loft, have always baffled him. Why, twelve miles inland from the sea, did a nineteenth-century architect insert four ship’s windows into the design of a Georgian house? He turns ninety degrees to the left, in the direction of the river and the light reflecting up from the water. Constant river traffic in those days, boats and barges coming up on the tide with supplies for the town. The architect acknowledging the river’s presence, he thinks. More to it than that, something more deliberate and specific. His eyes linger on the portholes, mulling their enigma. Clearly visible to passing vessels. He imagines a head appearing at one of the portholes … a woman’s face. The lady of the house, standing there by prior arrangement maybe. A love sailing away, forbidden love – the architect himself – leaving, and this the last glimpse. Remember me always.
Go home, Lily! He chases the cat back up to the house. Little madam, venturing this far down the avenue. If anything ever happened to her … Above, a fly-past of swallows, or starlings – he can never tell the difference. He watches them for a few moments. No high jinks, no murmurations this time of year. Rounding the last bend on the avenue he steps onto the grass verge and walks between two rows of the oak plantation he planted six years ago. One morning a few months after Josie’s death, four words arrived to him out of sleep: twelve thousand oak saplings. Memorial of Josie. Sequesters of carbon. His mother said nothing when he told her his plan. Thinking, What’ll you plant for me?
Nervously, his eyes scan the tree trunks. He’s barely able to look. He moves along the row. No sign of canker, no oozing. He examines the leaf tips. No dieback. He moves from row to row, going deeper into the plantation. He has avoided checking them for weeks. Fourteen thousand oaks were felled in Guagán Barra last month. He could lose the entire twelve thousand. Phytophthora ramorum is general all over Ireland, one of several plagues arriving from the east. Dutch elm, sudden oak, beech wilt, sweet chestnut blight. Bleeding canker. He can see the future – the end of wood-lined roads, parks, riverbanks, towns no longer sheltered by ash.
He walks on. Trees calm his naked nerves. The sight of a tree, especially in winter, bare against the sky, beautiful. He stands and strokes a trunk. So young and tender and innocent. It’s easy to be innocent when you’re a tree. Maybe he should say a prayer for them. Make a deal with God: Spare my oaks and I’ll cover this land with trees. Trees will be my legacy, like the great oak and beech stands on the Duke’s estate three miles away. A few hundred years from now, someone will stand here before gnarled trees and huge crooked roots and discern something of these times, of this family. That German forester who wrote about the hidden life of trees, how they are bound together in families, communicating through a web of