William Trevor - Cheating at Canasta

‘You’re looking spry,’ Tom complimented his father.

‘Oh, I’m feeling spry.’

‘Fine weather’s a tonic,’ Mollie said.

And James asked after Loretta, which he always did, and asked about his granddaughters.

‘They have the poor girl demented with their devilment.’ Tom laughed, although it wasn’t necessary, it being known that his demure daughters, twins of four, hadn’t yet reached their mischievous years.

They were an Irish Catholic family, which once had occupied a modest place in an ascendancy that was not Catholic and now hardly existed any more. When Mollie first lived in this house the faith to which she and James belonged connected them with the nation that had newly come about. But faith’s variations mattered less in Ireland all these years later, since faith itself mattered less and influenced less how people lived.

‘Angela wrote,’ Mollie said, finding the letter she’d brought to the garden to show Tom.

He read it and commented that Angela didn’t change.

‘Her men friends do rather,’ James said.

Angela was the youngest of the children, a buyer for a chain of fashion shops. She lived in Dublin. The one that got away, Tom often said.

He and Eoghan hadn’t wanted to. They still didn’t, feeling they belonged here, content to let Angela bring a bit of life into things with her Dublin gossip and her flightiness.

Tom folded the letter into its envelope and handed it back. James slowly finished his tea. Mollie walked round the garden with her older son.

‘You’re good to indulge me, Tom,’ she said, even though she had hoped to hear that what had been kept from their father would not come about at all. It made no sense to her that the greater part of Olivehill should be made into a golf-course in the hope that this would yield a more substantial profit than the land did. It was foolish, Mollie thought after Tom had gone, when she and James were alone again with the setters; yet her sons weren’t fools. It was graceless, even a vulgarity, she thought as they sat there in the evening sun, for no other word was quite as suitable; yet they were not vulgar.

‘Are we at one?’ she heard James ask, and she apologized for being abstracted.

He loved to use that old expression. He loved to be reassured, was reassured now. How profoundly he would hate what she had protected him from, how chilling and loathsome it would seem to him, how disappointing.

‘You’re looking lovely,’ he said, and she heard but pretended not to so that he’d say it again.

Eoghan drove carelessly to the hayfield. There never was other traffic on these byroads, never a lost cyclist or someone who had walked out from Mountmoy. A wandering sheep was always one of their own. But there wasn’t a sheep today, only now and again a rabbit scuttling to safety.

You could sleep driving here, Eoghan used to say and once, in the heat of an afternoon, had dropped off at the turn to Ana Woods. He’d woken up before the old Austin he had then hit a tree. Not that it would have mattered much if he hadn’t, he always added when he told the story: all the cars he had ever owned were past their best, purchased from Chappie Keogh, who had the wrecking yard at Maire. Easygoing, good-hearted, seeming to be slow but actually rather clever, Eoghan had grown from being a sensitive child into a big, red-haired man, different in appearance from the others of his family, all of whom were noticeably thin. He was content to take second place to Tom. They had all their lives been friends, their friendship knitted closer in each succeeding span of years.

He drove in to where earlier he’d been turning the hay. He finished it within an hour, not hurrying because he never did. Then he went on, to Brea Maguire’s at the cross, where he drank and talked to the men who came there every evening. It would be a bad mistake, disastrous even, to go on doing nothing about Olivehill. They had wanted her to understand that, and hoped she did.

Nine days later James woke up one morning feeling different, and had difficulty on the stairs. His left leg was dragging a bit, a most uncomfortable business, and at breakfast he discovered that his left arm was shaky too. Reaching out was limited; and he couldn’t lift things as easily as he used to. ‘A little stroke,’ Dr Gorevan said when he came.

‘Should he be in his bed?’ Mollie asked, and James said he’d no intention of taking to his bed so Dr Gorevan prescribed instead a walking-stick. When she heard, Loretta came over with a sponge cake.

James died. Not then, but in the winter and of pneumonia. There had not been another stroke and he was less incapacitated than he had been at first from the one he’d had. A fire was kept going in his bedroom, and the family came often, one by one, to talk to him. But he was tired and, two days after his eightieth birthday, when the moment came he was glad to go. It was a good death: he called it that himself.

In the house to which Mollie had come when she was a girl of nineteen, where there’d been servants and where later her children were born, there was only Kitty Broderick now, and Kealy was the last of the outside men. In the bleak dining-room Mollie and Eoghan sat at either end of the long mahogany table and Kitty Broderick brought them the meals she cooked. Everywhere there was the quiet that comes after death, seeming to Mollie to keep at bay what had been withheld from James. But one evening after supper, when the days had already lengthened and there was an empty hour or so, Eoghan said: ‘Come and I’ll show you.’

She went, not immediately knowing what for; had she known she would have demurred. Well, anyone would, she thought, passing from field to field.

‘You can’t do this, Eoghan,’ she protested, having been silent, only listening.

‘We wouldn’t if there was another way.’

‘But Ana Woods, Eoghan!’

They could go on selling timber piecemeal, as had been done in the past, another half-acre gone and replanted every so often, but that hadn’t ever been a solution, and wasn’t a way now in which the family could recover itself. It would tide the family over, but tiding-over wasn’t what was needed. The woods were part of the whole and the whole had to be put right. Doing so on the scale that was necessary meant that the machinery for such an undertaking could be hired at more favourable rates. With more timber to offer it would fetch what it should, not dribs and drabs that added up to nothing much. And the well-cleared land could be put to profitable use. Eoghan explained all that.

‘The Bluebell Walk, though, Eoghan! The beeches, the maples!’

‘I know. I know.’

They went back through the yards and sat down in the kitchen. The setters, who had accompanied them in the fields and were not allowed in the kitchen regions, ambled off into another part of the house.

‘For a long time,’ Eoghan said, ‘there’s been waste. Papa knew that too.’

‘He did his best.’

‘He did.’

Parcels of land had been sold in much the same small way as timber had, a source of funds when need arose. Everything higgledy-piggledy, Eoghan said, the distant future forgotten about. It was an irony for Mollie that James, aware that he’d inherited a run-down estate, had struggled to put things right. The agricultural subsidies of the nineteen eighties and nineties were the saviour of many farms and were a help at Olivehill too, but they were not enough to reverse generations of erosion and mismanagement. ‘It’s maybe we’re old stock ourselves,’ James had said when he became resigned to defeat. ‘It’s maybe that that’s too much for us.’

Often Mollie had heard this tale of woe repeated, although always privately, never said in front of the children. In his later life James’s weariness marked him, as optimism had once. At least the furniture and the pictures were not sold, faith kept with better times.