Chapter 6 #8
Phina turns away. She makes a beckoning gesture that brings Liam and Enda to her side with uncharacteristic swiftness, for they can see when their mother means business, and with her children gathered about her, she descends the hill.
She has no idea where she is going, what she will do now, because she cannot go back to their tenement in the Lanes: the upstairs back room is no longer theirs.
She has no home and nowhere to go, but she will walk away, her head held high, grasping the hands of her children, her dignity intact.
Tomás, standing in the cottage he has leased, must watch as the figures of the four people dearest to him recede into the distance, until the mist swallows them whole.
The widow is outside her house when the woman and her children reach the cart. She has on her headscarf, knotted firmly under the chin, and her apron; the milking pail rests at her feet. She makes no pretence that she’s not been waiting for them to come back.
She looks at the map-maker’s wife, five months gone if she’s a day, her face sallow with exhaustion and something else as well.
She takes in the woman’s shawl, knitted in an intriguing slanted pattern, her mud-encrusted boots, the way she puts a hand to the boxes and bundles on the cart, as if to steady herself.
The man must have stayed up on the hill again, and how the widow would like to say to this woman, his wife: It’s no use, they will never be told, that one least of all, and we will always be pulled along in their wake, buffeted this way and that.
There is the boy, Liam, for whom she feels a particular dart of fondness, a little girl-child with dark hair straggling over her eyes, quite unusually pretty but this, of course, must never be mentioned, and another girl, nearly as tall as her mother, all knobbed elbows and knees, a scowling set to her mouth, the same copper hair as her brother.
“Well, now,” the widow addresses them.
She regards the wife, the wife regards her, the cart between them, and she sees that the woman could burst into tears with one ill-placed word or one wrong gesture, and who can blame her?
“You’d better come in so.”
The widow observes that the wife, without being asked, makes sure the children remove their boots before they step over her threshold; she bends, despite her advanced state, to untie her own.
From the corner of her eye, as the widow fusses with kettle and water, she watches the wife making sure the children’s hands are clean, wiping them with her damp apron, the way she gets them all sitting down in a row on the bench.
The widow swings the kettle over the fire.
The wife takes cups from the shelf. The widow places half a loaf on the table.
The wife takes up a knife and cuts thin and even slices.
She gets the children to say grace; she ensures they say please and thank you.
When the boy reaches out his hand for a fourth slice, he is stopped in his tracks by an imperceptible shake of her head.
The widow and the wife sit on opposite sides of the table, each eyeing the other with what they believe are secret, assessing glances, steam curling up from their cups.
“A peculiar notion,” the widow ventures, “of your husband’s. To be taking you from the city and bringing you all out here.”
The wife considers this with a sigh, then gives a short nod.
“When most,” the widow continues, “are going in the opposite direction.”
“True.”
“You,” the widow says, “will stay here.”
“We won’t.”
“You will.”
“We couldn’t put you out.”
“You must.”
“But there are so many of us and—”
“I have room for you all and plenty more.”
“It’s good of you but we couldn’t, really. The children and I will…” the wife casts around, despairingly, for what they might do “…we will…”
“You will stay here, with me, until himself has fixed up that house. That place has been a ruin for years. I don’t know what that husband of yours was thinking, or the viscount for that matter, but then, of course, he and his kind are a law unto themselves.
It’s the work of weeks to get that cabin to a state where you can keep the rain off.
And you can’t be delivering that child up there in a roofless cottage. ”
The wife casts her eyes down, and the widow sees that she has her. “You’ll stay here with me and there’s an end to it.”
When Tomás returns down to the shore, he finds his children at play: Enda has Rose on her back, with Rose’s hands over her eyes, and Liam leading them around and around the widow’s house.
Inside, Phina and the widow are standing over a steaming laundry pot, laughing at something, their four hands employed in scrubbing.
There is a general air of mutual approval, of female complicity.
He glances at the long table, then away, feeling oddly wrong-footed, for he had expected to find Phina sitting forlornly by the cart in the mizzle, surrounded by miserable children, grateful that he’d returned, in a perhaps more pliant frame of mind.
He had not counted on this situation: Phina finding a place at the widow’s side.
“I thought,” Tomás began, “that if we fixed up a sheet from the gable wall, then—”
The two women look up with identical scornful gazes.
“I’ll not go back,” Phina says.
“They’re stopping here,” the widow says.
“What?” Tomás says, astonished. “But we agreed—”
“We did not agree,” Phina says, wringing out a cloth, twisting it into a rope between her hands.
“Far from it. You took the money. Without telling me. You said there was a house for us. That,” she dips her chin in the direction of the hill, “is not a house. I will not live in an eviction ruin. How could you ask me to do such a thing? I’ll not have this baby on a hillside. I will not—”
“All right, all right,” he cuts across her testily. “If I mend it? If I put on a roof?”
Phina seems to consider this. She slaps the wet, steaming garment back into the water. Tomás is sure he sees the widow mutter something to her, from the corner of her mouth. Phina gives her an answering flex of her eyebrow.
“There must be a roof,” she says, pointing at him in a way he has never seen before, one hand on her hip. “Windows. A door. A proper floor. A clean chimney that draws the smoke. And,” she says, delivering her trump card, “you’re to go back to making maps for the redcoats.”
Tomás is aghast. “Never,” he says heatedly, shifting from foot to foot. “I will never do that again. I told you—I’ll not take their money, I’ll not be in their pay, in their—”
“Then I will not live in that place.”
“Phina—”
“And neither will the children.”
Tomás grips at his jacket cuffs with tense hands. He glances from one woman to the other and sees that they have cooked up these terms between them. Why did he ever let her come down here on her own? Why hadn’t he followed her when she walked off?
“Come away outside,” he says gruffly, “just the two of us, and we’ll talk all this over.”
“Oh,” she murmurs, “now you want to talk.”
The widow bows her head, as if to hide a smile, and Tomás cannot believe that this alliance has been formed so swiftly, so completely, in the time he was up the hill. How do women do that?
Phina lifts her chin, wiping her wet hands on her apron, and advances upon him.
“Listen to me, Tomás,” she says, in a soft and—to him—menacing voice.
“I know you want this life, with your own land, your own little house, beholden to no one. But that is not really how things are, is it? We will still be beholden, will we not? To the viscount, because we’ll owe him rent, every single month.
And we’ll be at the mercy of the land, all its ups and downs.
We,” she circles a hand to include him, herself, the widow, “know only too well how that can end. I will not let my children go hungry. I will not be turfed out of my home. You may fix the cottage, you may sow your crops, you may keep a cow, and I will milk it for you, and I will put your dinner on the table, every day, but I will only live here on this peninsula if you continue to bring in those wages. If you won’t do that, I will not stay. ”
Tomás stares at his wife, so diminutive and determined, her belly pushed out with their unborn child.
He opens his mouth to speak, then closes it again.
He removes the scarf from around his neck and, for want of anything better to do, throws it down on the table. Phina gives her husband a final nod.
“A roof, mind,” she says. “A hearth. A chimney. And you working on the maps. Then,” she finishes, turning back to the laundry, “we’ll see.”
The house on the hillside, ruined and empty, has waited a long time.
Rain and sun and wind have acted upon it in the last few years, winter storms finishing what the eviction men started, sweeping away the remaining thatch and the mud sealing the holes between the stones.
Once a roof is gone, a house is vulnerable to all manner of abuse.
It can simply disappear, dissolving into the soil, to be covered by greenery.
Not this house, however. Ravaged but standing, it still possesses, lurking in its structure, signs of its provenance: a strut cut from the copse in the time of the monasteries, a siltstone threshold taken from the rath, compacted earth containing the lifeblood of Brith, and bundled rags above a window, stuffed there in wintertime by the eldest child of the last family to call it home.
This house is a thing both ancient and disjointed, an entity of addition and subtraction, a palimpsest of stone and wood and caulk and mud.
Its existence here, on the peninsula, is proof that everything was once something else: nothing goes away.