Anna
‘HAVE YOU ALWAYS LIVED HERE?’
I ask Betty, from where we lean against the door frame, watching the lads in the field.
The sky, gone the colour of buttercream and rose.
The night will be in soon. A tiny birdsong starts, and the chickens are clucking in the coop.
A yard cat passes us by, here to walk around in the last colour of the day.
Briefly bewildered by the beauty of it all, I take a moment to breathe deeply.
I didn’t realise how badly I needed to take a proper breath.
A minute of quiet, in a perfect place. A pretty evening and somebody good by my side.
I feel like I could fall asleep. I feel safe. A feeling I had forgotten.
The more time Tom spends on Bill Nevan’s farm, the more time I spend in Betty Nevan’s kitchen.
This half an hour at the end of the day, drinking warm tea, watching the sky and talking quietly with Betty.
Knowing that every day ends with this half an hour is knowing that life will end with peace.
What peace it has brought me. I had forgotten how good it feels to have something to look forward to.
It’s a nice life. Imagine. Something has come into my grey world and settled me.
This isn’t the sort of happiness that thinking of you could interrupt.
How lucky I feel, here in the slow pace of Betty’s kitchen.
The music on the radio and the sea asters painted on her plates.
Talking to her makes me feel interesting, like I’m two pints deep, all the time.
I don’t know her age. Forty-four, I’d guess. Maybe forty-five. A very beautiful, well-looked-after forty-four or five. I’d forgotten I had even asked her a question when she answers me.
‘Not always. I was once a blow-in, too. I came here when I married Bill. But that was so long ago, it’s hard to believe I ever lived anywhere else.’
How reassuring, to know that a woman like her was once just like me.
A total stranger in Ballycrea, making a new start.
Look how well she has done, with her farm and her friends and her sanctuary.
It makes me think that perhaps being in Ballycrea could be an opportunity, not a consequence.
Isn’t it funny, how easily she has reframed things for me. Without even realising.
‘I would have thought you were always here. Just that, the town seems to really like you.’
She takes in what I’ve said. It’s good to be considered, not just answered. She unties her apron.
‘Well, I like the town. What’s left of it anyway.’
If I stay quiet, she might go on talking. If I listen to what she says, I could learn what she knows. Then I could do what she does, and live as she lives.
Even now, just leaning up against the doorframe with her, I feel closer to calm than I have in so long.
Perhaps it’s being in the company of a woman.
Perhaps it’s getting a break from my real life.
Perhaps if I stay here for long enough, she will heal me.
As long as the evening is coming down around me, as long as she will have me, I will stay here with her.
Raking her fingers through her hair, she rolls what she loses into a ball and lets it float off. A bird will use that in its nest. How nice is that?
Looking at me sideways, she realises I’m not going to say anything. She clears her throat and keeps going.
‘Well, you know the way. There’s always youngsters immigrating, there’s always shops closing. Things changing, you know? Bill is always saying I’m no good with change.’
Although she says it in a light, jovial way, there’s nothing light about the way she has seen into my head and spoken my thoughts back to me. Everything is always changing, I can’t cope with it, either.
‘Don’t get me wrong, I understand it, ’tis just sad to see so many going. Did you ever think of it? Immigrating?’
She asks me, presumably wary of me not saying anything.
This time, I have every intention to answer her, but just as I open my mouth, I notice the ball of her hair caught on the grass.
It takes me for a moment. That is exactly what I want to be.
That is the level of peace I have been trying to reach.
To exist as nothing more than a loose tangle of hair.
Her hair. In the breeze, and then on the grass.
Just waiting for a bird. So still and so easy. I am brought back by Betty’s humming.
‘Would I immigrate?’
I try to centre myself again, to bring my mind back into my body, because I’m not a tangle of hair. I’m a person, being spoken to by the creator of the tangle.
‘No, no I couldn’t. Sure who would look after my lot?’
There was a short while when my life was filled with effervescent conversations about going to America with Milly Hayes, the milkman’s wife.
We were very good friends, at one time. If she had really wanted to go, I would have gone with her.
But, obviously, she wanted to marry the milkman more.
It’s a shame when things are one-sided like that.
I used to pretend to talk to her sometimes after that.
An unhealthy habit, I suppose, that I should never have allowed to develop.
It was the loneliness that did it. I must admit it’s come back a bit since you’ve been gone.
After that, with Milly, I never gave any serious consideration to moving out of Kilmarra. But look at me now, long gone from there, and only rarely thinking about Milly and all she once meant to me.
I wonder if Betty would think I was pathetic if I said I can’t envision living anywhere but in a cottage with my siblings. Would she think I was pathetic if I said that I want to move so little that I would be glad to simply stand in this doorway for the rest of my life?
‘The three of my brothers went to New York after I got married. Declan, Michael and Joe. Twenty-five years since I saw them last.’
Betty says, almost sighing, and it feels like I am being fed by the details of her life.
‘I know they’re all there together, sure they’ve all wives and children out there now. But I still get so afraid that they’d be lonely. If I knew one of them was lonely for even a minute my heart would break.’
‘Don’t men always break your heart?’
Something sincere, which makes her laugh. The sound of her soul. When those brothers of hers left, I wonder did they consider her loneliness as much as she considers theirs.
Every day she says a prayer for them, and although it’s been years since she saw them, she says that she knows she will see them again.
When you’re lonely for a person in that way, you’ll believe anything to keep yourself going.
This would be the right time to tell her that I know what it is to miss somebody, to know that you won’t see them again but to go on behaving like you will.
Bill is the only family she has left. Isn’t it sad for her? But now, she has me. Somebody who understands exactly what she feels. What a blessing.
‘Sure they might as well be on the moon, they’re so far away!’
Once more, she echoes my thoughts, and somehow manages to laugh, even when she is sad.
When people are far away like that, how can we be sure that they even exist anymore?
Perhaps she has an answer for that. Perhaps she could let me know whether anybody from Kilmarra is still in Kilmarra, if it exists as it did, or if it still exists at all.
You know? Like does the butcher still open for an hour on Sundays, and do your sisters still remember my name?
I look at her for a long moment and allow myself to move a little bit closer to her warmth.
Betty shifts her weight, moves away from me, out of the doorframe to step onto the grass, bending down to stroke the yard cat and then leaning against the house.
‘If you were to go, I’m sure Tom and Jack would look after themselves. They might be encouraged to be married.’
Something about this puts a twinge of insecurity through me. As though Tom and Jack don’t really need me, as though they could replace me with any woman they came by. And I’m sure it means nothing, but I feel it as something.
No, she wouldn’t want me to leave the country. As unknown as we are to each other, she would miss me calling down in the evenings. This new and precious routine is all that is pulling us out of the winter. She would miss me. And I would miss her.
‘Tom used to talk about going off somewhere, I don’t know why he never did.’
This seems to intrigue her, but I don’t want to tell her all the reasons that Tom’s life hasn’t worked out the way that he wanted it to. There isn’t time. Moreover, I don’t know if I’m allowed. Before she can ask about it, I put the topic of conversation back to myself.
‘I wouldn’t want to go all that way just to find myself in the same situation as I’m in here. Cooking and cleaning and looking after people. Even if it was as someone’s wife.’
Surprising, how quickly that came to me. It seems rather a fully formed opinion to have spat out. I didn’t know I felt that way.
‘What harm is it being someone’s wife?’
She asks, and I wonder what other opinions would come out if I let myself speak.
The truth is too embarrassing. That I’ve never had a chance at being somebody’s wife, and so the idea of it has made me bitter.
I wonder if she would still want to be my friend if she knew what a failure my romantic life has been.
Would she understand it if I said there was never anyone with enough patience for me? That there was never anyone worth my patience? When I can scarcely hold on to friends, what chance have I with a lover?