‘He lived in a strangeness of his own,’ Emily said to the sister who was left in the room with her. ‘Even when he was old, he believed a horse could still reclaim him. Even when the only one left was diseased and fit for nothing. When there was none there at all he scoured the empty stables and got fresh straw in. He had it in mind to begin all over again, to find some animal going cheap. He never said it, but it was what he had in mind.’
The house wasn’t clean. It hadn’t been clean for years. She’d lost heart in the house, and in herself, in the radio that didn’t work, her bicycle with the tyres punctured. These visitors would have noticed that the summer flies weren’t swept up, that nowhere was dusted.
‘Three spoons and one for the pot,’ Kathleen said, setting the teapot down in the hearth. ‘Is that about right, Emily? Will we let it draw a minute?’
She had cut more brack, finding it on the breadboard, the bread saw beside it, the butter there too. She hoped it wasn’t a presumption, she hoped it wasn’t interference, she said, but all that remained unanswered.
‘He’d sit there looking at me,’ Emily said. ‘His eyes would follow me about the kitchen. There was a beetle got on the table once and he didn’t move. It got into the flour and he didn’t reach out for it.’
‘Isn’t it a wonder,’ Norah said, ‘you wouldn’t have gone off, the way things were, Emily? Not that I’m saying you should have.’
Emily was aware that that question was asked. She didn’t answer it; she didn’t know why she hadn’t gone off. Looking back on it, she didn’t. But she remembered how when she had thought of going away what her arguments to herself had been, how she had wondered where she could go to, and had told herself it would be wrong to leave a house that had been left to her in good faith and with affection. And then, of course, there was the worry about how he’d manage.
‘Will you take another cup, Emily?’
She shook her head. The wind had become stronger. She could hear it rattling the doors upstairs. She’d left a light burning in the room.
‘I’m wrong to delay you,’ she said.
But the Geraghtys had settled down again, with the fresh tea to sustain them. She wasn’t delaying them in any way whatsoever, Kathleen said. In the shadowy illumination of the single forty-watt bulb the alarm clock on the mantelpiece gave the time as twenty past eleven, although in fact it was half an hour later.
‘It’s just I’m tired,’ Emily said. ‘A time like this, I didn’t mean to go on about what’s done with.’
Kathleen said it was the shock. The shock of death changed everything, she said; no matter how certainly death was expected, it was always a shock.
‘I wouldn’t want you to think I didn’t love my husband.’
The sisters were taken aback, Kathleen on her knees adding turf to the fire, Norah pouring milk into her tea. How could these two unmarried women understand? Emily thought. How could they understand that even if there was neither grief nor mourning there had been some love left for the man who’d died? Her fault, her foolishness from the first it had been; no one had made her do anything.
The talk went on, back and forth between the widow and the sisters, words and commiseration, solace and reassurance. The past came into it when more was said: the wedding, his polished shoes and shiny hair, the party afterwards over on the Curragh, at Jockey Hall because he knew the man there. People were spoken of, names known to the Geraghtys, or people before their time; occasions were spoken of – the year he went to Cheltenham, the shooting of the old grey when her leg went at Glanbyre point-to-point. The Geraghtys spoke of their growing up in Galway, how you wouldn’t recognize the City of the Tribes these days so fashionable and lively it had become; how later they had lived near Enniscorthy; how Kathleen had felt the draw of the religious life at that time but then had felt the receding of it, how she had known ever since that she’d been tested with her own mistake. In this way the Geraghtys spread themselves into the conversation. As the night went on, Emily was aware that they were doing so because it was necessary, on a bleak occasion, to influence the bleakness in other ways. She apologized for speaking ill of the dead, and blamed herself again. It was half past three before the Geraghtys left.
‘Thank you,’ she said, holding open the hall door. The wind that had been slight and then had got up wasn’t there any more. The air was fresh and clean. She said she’d be all right.
Light flickered in the car when the women opened the doors. There was the red glow of the tail-light before the engine started up, a whiff of exhaust before the car moved slowly forward and gathered speed.
