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In February, Jane’s mother died. That spring, the tantalising expectation of land coming on the market, like the unignorable reek of sprayed manure, rose in the air above the fields, twisted its way through the hedges, beneath the branches and entered the nostrils of several farmers.
Once David Kelly got wind of Maggie Mooney’s death, he wasted no time in offering to come down from Tyrone. It was too soon, Jane said on the phone in April. Her mother was hardly buried. She hadn’t made up her mind about what to do. Perhaps in the autumn, he could call again.
She was in no hurry. She could do as she wished with the small farm of sweet, green fields with road frontage on both sides of the hill it spread across. There was even a lake, with fishing rights. Years before, Jane had planned on building a wood-cladded house with two huge bedrooms, an open plan layout downstairs and a separate room for her architectural practice. In a high corner of the lake field, with the choicest view of the lake itself. There would be geothermal heating, solar power, and to hell with the cost. She would move back to her home county, settle in, design for a new clientele near the border, and watch sunsets till she dropped.
But the reality of Maggie’s death changed her thinking over the summer as she packed up the old house, as her heart creaked and flaked with absence. Thoughts of her silver-haired mother churned constantly in her brain. She had lain, a small, patient form awaiting release, in the downstairs sitting-room for three months before the end, stiffening, her voice weakening, although there was nothing in particular wrong with her apart from the arrival of death. There was also the material loss of things she now had no room for. Attachments, even if useless. She learned more about people’s tastes. How nobody wanted brown furniture or beautiful old china, nor did they have any appetite for chased silver. Maggie’s dark and gleaming mink coat had gone to one of her carers, who liked such things, even if it would never fit her and would probably be sold. Everything came down to bucks and advantage.
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At work, she designed houses. If people were happy, then her job was done. Clients wanted sun-and-light attracting shapes as extensions so that they could bring the garden in, whatever that actually meant. They wanted modern leathers and marble and granite and polished concrete, they wanted brushed brass taps and Belfast sinks. She watched as several of her mother’s Edwardian dressing-tables and wardrobes entered the skip at the back of the house. Some pieces she gave away to younger people who would upcycle them, which meant eau-de-nil paint and then a bit of sanding to make them look worn and antique although they already were feckin antique.
The place sold quickly, apart from the other farm, which was on the other side of the road, and a separate matter. In no time, the new couple informed her they’d be demolishing the house. What they were on the brink of building wasn’t so different from what she favoured in her practice in Drogheda. High contemporary. White. Black. Grey. Elements of rusted cladding as a feature down the west elevation. She suppressed an ironic smile when the new owner informed her that she’d be ordering a pair of peacocks, that it would be lovely to have them around the place in such a mature garden. She wondered what she would think when they began shitting everywhere, which they would, squawking around the place night and day.
The land was another matter. David Kelly, true to his word, phoned again in September. One Friday, they met in the café of a general hardware store. It was full of timber-faced women leaning in closely together, some of them masked, others not. The noise of the coffee machine was deafening, but the Greek salad she stuffed into herself reminded her of the last holiday she’d spent with Maggie, in Rhodes. That was before travelling with her mother would have required an army of helpers, before it all became too much for Jane, who used to travel with tranquillisers in her bag.
Kelly had it in mind to join her land up with his other holding, recently purchased after the farmer McGrory died, leaving a bungalow with a view of the same lake Jane’s adjacent land overlooked. He had ready money, he told her ...
‘I can pay you fifteen smackeroos, no bother, no bother at all to start with.’
She said nothing, conscious of eyes here and there flickering in their direction.
‘I’ll need the weekend to have a wee think,’ she told him.
‘Grand,’ he said. ‘I’m in no hurry, don’t get me wrong, Jane.’
She liked the way he pronounced her name, slowly and carefully.
By Monday she called him and said her head was clear.
‘What can I do with this place by myself,’ she repeated her thoughts aloud on the phone. ‘With my husband gone and my daughter in Perth, I can’t manage. If I still lived in this area it wouldn’t matter, but Drogheda is where I live.’
‘Well, whatever you think, Jane, I’m not rushin’ you by any means, understand? No pressure at all.’
‘Oh, I do, Joe, but it’s me, I can’t see any other way. This is for the best.’
They agreed to meet again, this time outside the hardware store in one of the specially built coffee cabins that had been assembled because of Covid. People could still be together but not in one another’s faces. This time he brought a wad of cash. Her eye followed his hand as he withdrew the thick bulk of notes from his denims, she could smell the fetid odour of used money, the stench of things found mostly in the human and animal gut. But the notes were good, and in no time, she’d slid fifteen thousand Euros worth into her straw shopper.
He had to arrange the rest of the money and would be in touch the following week. Could she come? She could, she assured him. He’d bring another tranche, another twenty thou as an assurance. The rest she’d have to wait for but if she could take this in good faith, he’d be grateful.
‘So we’re going ahead?’ He asked this suddenly, still in need of reassurance.
‘We are,’ she said quietly.
He wasn’t tall. His hair was raven black and he wore his creased jeans well, even with wellies. He was clean too, smelling of fresh sweat. She liked a man who washed and sweated and then washed again. She wondered in a slightly guilty way, what Maggie would think of all this wheeling and dealing. Or her father, who’d always hoped she’d move back to build on the opposite hill from the home house.
People came and went through the hardware centre. It was a wet day. Around them as they sipped their coffee quickly, puddles filled and a curling wet mist wandered the air. A woman she knew greeted her.
‘Sure, I haven’t seen you since your Mammy passed,’ she said, smiling.
‘Ah, no worries,’ Jane answered, anxious that there would be no misunderstanding about why she was speaking to a stranger in such an intimate setting. ‘She slipped away in the end, helped by the morphine nurse I have to say. '
‘Ah, is that so, into the arms of Morpheus, as they say,’ the other woman mused. Jane waited for her to leave.
Kelly and Jane watched as the woman hurried to her car, umbrella open.
‘There’s one wee thing though,’ he said. ‘I’d like to have the land cleared before the end of next month. I need to get moving on clearing it all, trimming them hedges.’
He explained that he didn’t want any animosity with the tenant farmer who had used the fields for eighteen years. But it would have to be cleared. There were cattle and sheep and did she realise that Ivor Wilson had been sub-letting to Seymour Baldwin? She stared at him blankly. He nodded to reinforce his point.
‘There’s a wee path along the top of the high field, you know it, a wee worn path? Fenced off on both sides?’ She nodded. ‘That’s where Baldwin ran his sheep across to get into the lake field. That’s been going on this long time, oh I’m surprised neither you nor the Mammy knew.’
He let that sit with her for a few moments. It irked her rightly, partly because Kelly thought he had one over on her, though she didn’t react much beyond remarking that Wilson hadn’t even sympathised with her when her mother died. As in, he hadn’t driven the two miles across the road to call to the house in person. Instead, he’d sent a floppy thin card with the words Deepest sympathies. Ivor Wilson. She hadn’t thought much of that when she read it.
They agreed that their solicitors would be writing to one another. There would be deed maps to scrutinise, but all would be well. She knew it would. Then she tantalised him with an extra two acres that belonged officially to the tranche of land he was after, but situated on the opposite side of the road, thanks to road realignment five years before. He could have that too, she assured him. She watched his eyes brighten. He wasn’t getting it for nothing. It would cost a further twenty thousand. A fair price, he’d see that, with no middle men or prats-in-offices looking for fees and percentages.
*
She returned to the town five days later and drove out to Wilson’s place. He was always a name, and little else. He used to deliver the annual rent promptly each November through her mother’s front door in a thin envelope with no note attached. His signature on the cheque was his word. As far as she was concerned, Wilson was fairly invisible, a tenant farmer.
It was a high and twisty road, with lusty fields on either side that belonged to her. Wilson hadn’t taken any particular care with the boundaries or hedges. There’d been no trimming or shaping, but he fertilised the fields and the grass was rich and green. She’d never noticed where exactly he lived, never having had to call on him before.
She found herself before a square stone-fronted house with granite quoins and a deep lead-slated roof. Around the door, a rambling rose she recognised as Albertine was coming into bloom. Could this be Wilson’s home? She’d had no idea he lived in such a place. The glass on the windows was leaded, and the deep porch led to teak double-doors. There was a shining brass knocker with a lion’s head, just like the less polished knocker on their own door in the old house across the hill. Below it sat a round brass doorknob with a floral motif. Thought and money had gone into the construction of the place, which was modern. Wilson had prospered.
She knocked lightly. The sound echoed within, and she could tell that the hallway was large. The door opened. The young woman who greeted her with a vague expression had to be the daughter of the house. Married, she noted from the gold ring and large diamond on her left hand.
‘Is this Ivan Wilson’s house?’
The girl held a mobile phone in one hand, waved it casually at Jane and said she’d call Daddy. She was pleasant but not remotely interested in her, that much was clear. Wrapped up in her own day, not unreasonably. A teacher, Jane suspected, possibly a primary teacher in the Model School, judging by the time in the afternoon, and therefore free to be home by four o’clock. Everything tickety-boo about her appearance too. The short skirt, slim legs in snug brown suede ankle boots, a tight-fitting green top with a frill on each shoulder, and hair that flowed out and round her shoulders in an auburn mass.
No sooner had the daughter phoned her father, than Ivan Wilson appeared as if out of nowhere. She assumed he must have been down in one of the barns with the fancy metal flashing towards the back of the property, and heard her car approach. He had the face of a traditional farmer. A solid face. An honest face. An I’m-no-fool flat clock face. But equally, she could imagine him in a farmer’s smock, the kind of attire worn in the wilds of Sussex in the nineteenth century. At this, she suppressed a smile.
‘Yes?’ He faced her and waited.
‘You probably know who I am,’ she replied, reaching to shake his hand. His quick clasp was firm and dry, neither weak nor overbearing.
‘I do indeed,’ he answered politely. He waited. That made her slightly nervous. There was no follow-up, no pleasant cotton-wool kind of sentence like the kind that she was accustomed to. No oh, you’re JD’s daughter, a true gentleman if ever there was one, no ah, wasn’t I sorry your dear mammy passed, though quickly from what I hear. None of that. So she turned square to him.
‘It’s about the land,’ she began. ‘I’ll be selling.’ She sounded more abrupt than she’d intended. He held her gaze in calm blue eyes which gave nothing away. It seemed this was neither good nor bad news to him.
‘You have a buyer,’ he stated carefully. It was not an enquiry. She nodded.
‘You may know of him. He bought the adjacent fields last year. David Kelly?’
Wilson nodded. ‘I know of him,’ he replied quietly, shutting his lips as if afraid of letting too many words escape.
‘And—’ this was where she felt awkward, ‘I’m afraid he’ll be looking to have the land cleared of all beasts.’
‘You’re selling soon then?’ he asked, as if something else had struck him.
‘As soon as possible.’
He gathered his words like a prospector, dragging them up from some deep mine. ‘It’ll take me a while to get things sorted, some of the cows are in calf, and the sheep—’
‘Ah yes, the sheep,’ she moved quickly. ‘I am aware that you’ve been sub-letting to Seymour Baldwin these past years.’ Let that sit, she thought. It was her land. Time to assert herself. His eyebrows rose slightly. She hoped she’d caught him unawares, to teach him. He needn’t think she was anybody’s fool.
Infuriatingly, he gave a slight shrug. ‘Your father knew about this, I told him twenty-five years ago that Seymour would be using a few o’ them fields. Your father knew.’
‘But my mother didn’t,’ Jane countered, caught off guard. ‘I don’t believe you ever informed her. And if she didn’t know, neither could I have known. I knew nothing of this arrangement until two days ago.’
‘It was no secret. Who informed you? Kelly, I suppose,’ he remarked with another flicker of his brow. ‘This’ll be hard on Seymour,’ he murmured then. ‘He’s an old man. Needs that land to graze his sheep.’
It was her turn to shrug. ‘Well that’s not really my concern, I’m afraid.’ She heard herself, she sounded like a heartless bitch. She didn’t like to think of Seymour Baldwin being stuck for grazing. There really was such a thing as a poor farmer, she knew, when old age arrived and the grants dried up. It struck her that she could still ask Kelly to hold off. Maybe he was pushing the whole deal through too quickly. Maybe he was too quick, and she too. On the make like the greedy shit she suspected he might be, from across the border in the North, scooping up as many acres as he could to build his little empire. Oh, they were all hopeless, these men, none of them happy, all of them grasping. Herself perhaps no better.
‘I don’t like selling the land, she went on, trying to adjust her tone, ‘But the fact is I can’t look after it. I don’t live here. I’m over in Drogheda.’
‘I know that,’ Wilson practically whispered. ‘Drogheda, by the Boyne,’ he went on as if deep in thought.
‘By the green grassy slopes of the Boyne, indeed.’ The lyric slipped out before she could stop herself or the deep blush that rose to her face. That sectarian song she’d heard frequently in the past. The Battle of the Boyne, 1690, root of so much hatred when William of Orange defeated the Catholic King James. A right bloodbath, the fields steeped in it, in blood and skin and human ordure, so that the place was fertilised for the coming centuries, some said, and filled with walking ghosts.
‘Sorry,’ she remarked. ‘That song . . . I always liked that air, you know? It means nothing, just a pretty air with a sweet lyric, don’t you think?’ Stop digging, Jane, stop now, stop, you twat of a woman.
Now he was staring hard at her, his blue eyes boring into her, face like a slate of incomprehension. She’d insulted him. It was unintentional, but there was insult in those words, called up so easily, like a bunker of shit from the past ready to explode over the present in the most meddlesome of ways.
‘Either way,’ she tried to recover ground, ‘if you could ask Seymour to please remove his sheep whenever he can. Say, within two months?’
Wilson didn’t reply. He nodded and turned away from her, and she turned away from him and walked briskly to her car. She didn’t feel brisk though. She didn’t feel much except confusion and annoyance. At herself mostly, for not understanding the ways of people who worked the land. Her late father would not have been happy at how she’d handled things.
She glanced in the car mirror as she pulled out the drive, and noticed Wilson’s daughter in the porch now, watering a granite trough full of pansies. Her hair fell casually forward from her shoulders as she bent down, water spraying lightly on the spring plantings. Again, that remoteness. Her world was secure. Her father owned land, and had rented theirs, but all was well and they had prospered. If she sold to Kelly, she’d be landless herself. She’d have nothing but the money. She needed to think. Keep Kelly at a distance. She could always return the money he’d slipped her.
For months afterwards, every time she sat blow-drying her own hair, an image of Wilson’s married daughter’s big head of auburn hair would float up in her mind. She couldn’t for the life of her understand why.
Mary O’Donnell’s new poetry Outsiders, Always, will be published by Southword Editions in September. Her selected short stories will be published by Arte y Lettras in Argentina in October.
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