William Trevor - Cheating at Canasta

More and more as the days, and then weeks, of that time went by Mollie clung to the drawing-room. She read there, books she’d read ages ago; played patience there, and a form of whist that demanded neither a partner nor an opponent. Father Thomas came to her there.

When Kealy returned it was in the drawing-room he apologized. His small, flushed face, the smell of sweat and drink, his boots taken off so as not to soil the carpet, all told the story of his retreat from what was happening, so very different from Mollie’s own retreat. He asked that she should put a word in for him with her sons and she said it wasn’t necessary. She said to go and find them and tell them she wanted him to be given back the position he’d had as yard man for thirty-four years. In spite of his dishevelment he went with dignity, Mollie considered.

Every third weekend or so Angela came, and also offered a tour of what was being achieved, but Mollie continued to decline this, making it seem no more than a whim of old age that she did so. Tom came to the drawing-room after his day’s work, to sit with her over a seven o’clock drink, and when his children asked if their grandmother had died too, they were brought to the drawing-room to see for themselves that this was not so.

The pictures that were crowded on the drawing-room walls were of family ancestors—not Mollie’s own but often seeming now as if they were—and of horses and dogs, of the house itself before the creeper had grown, square and gaunt. Among the oil paintings there were a few watercolours: of the Bluebell Walk, the avenue in autumn, the garden. There were photographs too, of Angela and Tom and Eoghan, as babies and as children, of Mollie and James after their marriage, of similar occasions before this generation’s time. The drawing-room was dark even at the height of summer; only at night, with all the lights on, did its record of places and people emerge from the shadowed walls. Rosewood and mahogany were identified then, bookcases yielded the titles of their books. Candlesticks in which candles were no longer lit, snuff-boxes that had become receptacles for pins were given back something of their due.

In this room Mollie had been in awe of James’s father and of his mother, had thought they didn’t take to her, had wondered if they considered the levity of her nature an unsuitable quality in a wife. The prie-dieu—still between the two long windows—had seemed too solemn and holy for a drawing-room, the reproduction of a Mantegna Virgin and Child on the wall above it too serious a subject. But since she had claimed the drawing-room as her sanctuary she often knelt at the prie-dieu to give thanks, for she had ceased, in the peace of not knowing, to feel torn between the living and the dead. Protecting James had not been a sin; nor was it a sin to choose a reality to live by that her mood preferred. There was no fantasy in her solace, no inclination to pretend—companionable and forgiving—the presence with her of her long-loved husband. Memory in its ordinary way summoned harvested fields, and haycocks and autumn hedges, the first of the fuchsia, the last of the wild sweet-pea. It brought the lowing of cattle, old donkeys resting, scampering dogs, and days and places.

In the drawing-room she closed imagination down, for it was treacherous and without her say-so would take her into the hostile territory. ‘Oh, ma’am, you should see it!’ Kitty Broderick came specially to tell her, and called all that there was to see a miracle. Ten years it would have taken once, Kealy said. Less than eighteen months it had taken now.

One day Mollie drew the curtains on the daylight and did not ever draw them back again. Her meals were brought to the drawing-room when she hinted that she would like that, and when she said that the stairs were getting a bit much her sons dismantled her bed and it was made up beside the prie-dieu. Father Thomas said Mass in the dimly lit room on Saturday evenings and sometimes the family came, Angela if she happened to be in the house, Loretta and the children. Kitty Broderick and Kealy came too, Mass at that time of day being convenient for them.

Tom was disconsolate about the turn of events, but Angela said their mother was as bright as a bee. She said allowances had to be made for ageing’s weariness, for a widow’s continuing sorrow, that being reclusive was really hardly strange.

Eoghan protested. ‘What you’re doing’s not good, Mamma,’ he chided.

‘Ah now, Eoghan, ah now.’

‘We don’t want you to be against us.’

She shook her head. She said she was too old to be against people. And he apologized again.

‘We had to, you know.’

‘Of course you had to. Of course, Eoghan.’

The ersatz landscape took on a character of its own—of stumpy hillocks that broke the blank uniformity, long fairways, sandy bunkers, a marsh created to catch the unwary, flat green squares and little flags. Olivehill Golf Links 1 Km , a sign said, and later the golf-course’s immediate presence was announced, the car park tarred, its spaces marked in white. Completion of the clubhouse dragged but then at last was finished. Niblicks flashed in the sun of another summer. Mountmoy boys learned how to be caddies.

In her meditative moments Mollie knew that James had been betrayed. His anger had not been allowed, nor had it become her own, for she could not have managed it. With good intentions, he had been deceived, and had he known he might have said the benevolence was as bitter as the treachery. He would have said—for she could hear him—that the awfulness which had come about was no more terrible, no less so either, than the impuissance of Catholic families in the past, when hunted priests were taken from their hiding-places at Olivehill and Mass was fearfully said in the house, when suspicion and distrust were everywhere. Yet through silence, with subterfuge, the family at Olivehill had survived, a blind eye turned to breaches of the law by the men who worked the fields, a deaf ear to murmurs of rebellion.

In the darkened drawing-room, as shielded as James was from the new necessities of survival, Mollie tentatively reflected what she believed he might have reflected himself. In that distant past, misfortune had surely brought confusion, as it had now—and disagreement about how to accept defeat, how best to banish pride and know humility, how best to live restricted lives. And it was surely true that there had been, then too, the anger of frustration; and guilt, and tired despair.

‘I’ve brought your tea.’ Kitty Broderick interrupted the flow of thought. Light from the door she’d left open allowed her to make her way safely into the room, to put the tray she carried down. She pulled the table it was on closer to where Mollie sat.

‘You’re good to me, Kitty.’

‘Ach, not at all. Wouldn’t I pull the curtains back a bit, though?’

‘No. No, the curtains are grand the way they are. Didn’t you bring a cup for yourself?’

‘Oh, I forgot the cup!’ She always did, was never at ease when the suggestion was made that she should sit down and share the mistress’s tea.

‘Kealy got drunk again,’ she said.

‘Is he all right?’

‘I have him in the kitchen.’

‘Kealy likes his glass.’

He wasn’t as particular as Kitty Broderick, always accepting when he came to the drawing-room the whiskey she kept specially for him. When Tom came in the evenings it was for sherry.

‘How silent it can be, Kitty, in the drawing-room. Nearly always silent.’

‘It’s a quiet room, all right. Sure, it always was. But wouldn’t you take a little walk, though, after your tea?’

The bluebells had begun to grow again. They’d told her that. Kitty Broderick knew she wouldn’t go for a walk, that she wouldn’t come out from where she belonged, and be a stranger on her own land. They’d wanted her to have the setters with her for company, but it wasn’t fair to keep dogs closed up all day like that and she said no.