Antarctica (11 page)

‘Just thinking.’

Betty does not press her: Louisa has always been secretive. When she was beaten in school, she never said one word at home. Being falsely blamed for laughing or talking out of turn, Louisa would blankly kneel down in front of the picture of Saint Anthony and confess and take undue punishment without ever a mention. Once, after the headmaster hit Betty, her nose would not stop bleeding and he sent her out to the stream to wash her face, but she ran home across the fields and told her mother, who walked her back up to the school, into the classroom, and told the headmaster that if he laid so much as another finger on her girls, he’d get a worse death than Billy the Buttermaker (who had been
savagely
murdered down south a few days back). Louisa had jeered her about that, but Betty was unashamed. She would rather tell the truth and face the consequences than get down on her knees before a picture of a saint and confess to things she did not do.

On Sunday morning, Louisa balances their father’s old shaving mirror on the crucifix in Betty’s window and plucks her eyebrows into perfect semi-circles. Betty milks the cow and digs potatoes and gets ready for mass.

A great fuss is made over Louisa in the chapel.
Neighbours
come up to her in the graveyard and shake her hand, and say she’s looking wonderful.

‘Aren’t you looking great?’

‘You haven’t aged one bit.’

‘Sure weren’t you always the apple of everybody’s eye?’

‘Doesn’t she look great, Betty?’

When they go into the grocer’s for messages, Joe Costello, the bachelor who owns the quarry and rents out Betty’s land, corners Louisa between the tinned goods and the cold meats counter and asks is she still fond of the cinema? He’s a great big man with a
pinstripe
suit and a black, pencil moustache. They used to cycle to the pictures together before Louisa went off to England. Edward is setting mousetraps in the hardware shelves and Ruth’s ice-cream cone is dripping down the front of her dress, but Louisa takes no notice.

‘Where’s the hubby?’ Joe Costello is asking Louisa.

‘Oh, he had to work.’

‘Ah yes, I know the feeling. The work never ends.’

When they get home, Betty ties her apron round her waist and puts the dinner on. She likes Sundays, listening to the curate read the gospel, meeting the neighbours, listening to the spit of the roast while she reads the paper, tending the garden in the afternoon and taking a walk around the wood. She always tries to keep it a day of rest, keep it holy.

‘Don’t you ever get lonely up here on your own?’ Louisa asks.

‘No.’ It had never occurred to her to be lonely.

Louisa paces the kitchen floor until dinner time, then takes off down the avenue to visit the neighbours’ houses. Betty stays at home and works out a menu for
the week. Louisa hasn’t given her a penny towards their keep, hasn’t bought so much as a loaf. Betty’s budget is tight enough without feeding three extra people, but she assumes it’s something Louisa will put right when it comes into her mind. Louisa has always been forgetful about the essentials.

Monday is washing day. The Porters don’t believe in wearing the same clothes twice, and since Ruth wets the bed, she needs clean sheets every day. Betty wonders at the child – she’s almost nine years old – but says nothing to Louisa, sensing it would be a sore point. The
clothes-line
hanging between the lime trees is laden, but a strong wind throws the laundry into a horizontal
flapping
state that Betty finds pleasurable. Some of the clothes are delicate and Betty must wash them by hand. As she dips her hands down into the sinkful of soapy water, she begins to wonder when Stanley will arrive. He would take them off to the seaside and skim pebbles across the waves and keep the children occupied. Go fishing for pike in the Slaney, shoot rabbits.

Betty rises earlier to have more time to herself. The summer mornings feel healthy and cool. She sits with her head leant against the warmth of the cow’s side and watches milk dancing in the bucket. She feeds the geese and pulls carrots and parsnips from the vegetable patch. Mount Leinster looks gratifyingly unchanged in the blue distance; swallows are building under the eaves of the granite stables. This is the life she wants to lead, the good life.

She is pouring warm milk through a piece of muslin when Joe Costello blocks the daylight in the doorway.

‘Morning, Betty.’ He tips his hat respectfully.

‘Good morning, Joe!’ She’s surprised to see him, he so seldom drops in, except when a bullock goes missing or to pay the rent on the land.

‘Sit down, won’t you?’

He sits in at the table, all arms and legs. ‘Nice spell of weather we’re having.’

‘Couldn’t ask for nicer.’

She makes tea and sits talking to Joe at the table. He’s a decent sort of man, Betty thinks, the way he takes his hat off and uses the spoon for the jam instead of pushing his knife down into the pot. Table manners say so much. They talk about cattle and the quarry and then Edward appears, pokes his nose into the implements on the sink.

‘Isn’t the milk here pasteurised, Aunt Betty?’

Betty laughs with Joe Costello over the good of it, but when Louisa comes down Joe loses all interest in Betty. Louisa isn’t wearing her nightdress. Her hair is brushed and she’s in her linen butterfly dress, her mouth shiny with Vaseline.

‘Ah, Joe!’ she says, as if she didn’t know he was there.

‘Morning, Louisa.’ He stands up, as if she’s the Queen.

Betty takes it all in, how Louisa flirts: the pout of her lips, the tilt of her hip, the way she lifts and relaxes her bare shoulder. It is a fine art. She leaves them there talking in the kitchen and strides out to the garden for
parsley
. Ruth is standing under the tree, eating her plums.

‘Get away from those plums!’

‘Okay, okay,’ Ruth says. ‘Don’t get your knickers in a knot.’

‘They’re for jam.’

It is an old story. The men flocking round Louisa,
sniffing
her out, always asking her to dance in the old days.

Louisa and Betty had gone to house-dances together when they were young. Betty remembers a fine
summer’s
night, sitting on a wooden bench in Davis’s, just a mile up the road. She was sitting there feeling the grain of the wood under her fingers. The scent of lilacs from the ditch came through the open window. She remembers the happiness of that moment being broken when Louisa leaned over. She can still, to this day, remember her exact words:

‘I’ll give you a piece of advice. You should try not to smile. You look terrible when you smile.’

Betty didn’t smile for years afterwards without remembering this remark. She never had Louisa’s white smile. She’d suffered from bronchitis as a child and had to take cough medicine, which ruined her teeth. So many things, all coming back. Betty feels her blood
racing
when she has such memories. But that is all in the past. She can think for herself now. She has earned that right. Her father is dead. She can see things as they are, not through his eyes, nor Louisa’s.

When she comes back into the kitchen with sprigs of parsley, Joe Costello is pouring tea into her best china cup for Louisa.

‘Say when.’

‘When,’ Louisa says. She is sitting with her back to the harsh morning light, the sun intensifying the gold of her hair.

Betty cooks a leg of lamb the following Sunday. When a trickle of blood runs out on the serving plate while she is carving, she doesn’t care. Nor does she care that the
carrots
are rubbery and overcooked, but nobody makes any mention of the meal, not one word. She’s in no mood to cater for individual tastes. Earlier she had gone down into the parlour and caught Ruth jumping on the armchair. What’s more, there are dog hairs all over the house. Everywhere she looks, dog hairs.

Edward hangs around, silently entering the rooms in which she’s working and startles her. He cannot
entertain
himself.

‘There’s nothing to do,’ he complains. ‘We’re stranded.’

‘You can clean out the hen house if you like,’ Betty says. ‘The sprong’s in the barn.’

But somehow this does not appeal to Edward. He’s not a fellow who believes in earning his appetite. Ruth sings and skips around the garden. Betty feels sorry for her sometimes: Louisa pays her little or no attention and she needs some at her age. So when Betty is finished washing the blood-stained dishes, she reads her
Hansel and Gretel.

‘Why would the father desert his own children?’ Ruth asks.

Betty cannot think of an answer.

Betty makes jam, takes the step-ladder outside, reaches up into the boughs and plucks every single plum off the tree. They are her plums. She washes and stones them, covers the fruit with sugar in the
preserving
pan and shows Ruth and Edward how to wash the jam jars. They haven’t a clue about domestic work. Edward squirts a cupful of Fairy Liquid into the sink and they have to start again.

‘Who does the washing up at home?’ Betty asks. ‘Oh, that’s right: you have a dishwasher, I forgot.’

‘A dishwasher? No we don’t, Aunt Betty,’ Ruth says.

They make the jam and Betty lines up the pots like ammunition in the pantry. She’s wondering how long it will last, when Louisa walks into the kitchen after her day out visiting. Her expression is flushed and radiant like someone who’s been swimming in deep salt waters.

‘Any post?’ she says.

‘No.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Just an ESB bill.’

‘Oh.’

July has passed without a word from Stanley.

In August the weather turns stormy. Rain keeps the Porters indoors, traps them in the rooms. Wet leaves cling to the window panes, black rainwater runs down between the drills in the vegetable patch. Louisa stays in bed reading romantic novels and eating cake, walks
around in her nightdress till well past noon. She washes her hair with rainwater and makes Rice Krispie buns for the children. Edward plays the flute in the parlour. Betty has never heard anything like it; it’s as if somebody has trapped a wild bird or a small reptile in a cage and its despairing little voice is crying out to be freed. Ruth cuts pictures of models and perfume out of magazines with Betty’s good dressmaking scissors and pastes them in her scrapbook.

Betty becomes concerned about the garden. Strong winds have shaken the rose bushes, scattered the blooms across the gravel, and Betty, picking them up, feels sorry and strokes the dusky-pink petals, smooth as eyelids in her fingers. There are greenfly on the leaves; they are spotted and drowsy. She has been too busy with domestic chores to tend her garden.

She is standing there, thinking about her poor flowers, when Edward approaches her. Elderberry blossoms are being cast about like confetti in the wind; a light drizzle is falling from a sky of fragmented, greyish cloud.

‘Aunt Betty?’

‘Yes?’

‘Who will own this place when you die?’

She’s shocked. The words are like a hard, stinging slap.

‘Why? I –’ She can’t think of anything to say.

Edward is standing there looking at her with his hands in the pockets of his linen trousers that are almost impossible to iron. She feels the sudden threat of tears, backs away from him.

‘Go inside and help your mother!’ she barks, but he does not move: he just stands there looking into her eyes. His eyes are narrow and blue. She retreats, walks through the ruined garden, down the avenue, and takes refuge in the woods where she cannot be seen. She sits on a damp, mossy stone under the swaying trees for a long time, thinking.

For the first time since her father’s death she gives in to a flood of warm, salty tears. Things come back to her: she sees herself at Christmas time wringing turkeys’ necks, a mound of feathers at her feet; as a child running in to warm her hands at the fire and running out again, hearing her mother say, ‘She’s such a hardy little girl.’ Her mother going out to the meadow, then laid out so unexpectedly, rosary beads entwined between her fingers. She sees Louisa in a grey suit leaving on the boat to England, coming back with a wealthy husband, pictures of babies in christening robes; her father taking pride in his grandson. She remembers Cyril Dawe
sitting
under the hawthorn in autumn with his arms around her, holding her tight as if he was afraid she would get away. How he reached down and took a stone from under her, an act of tenderness. All her life she’d worked, she’d done the right things, but was it right? She sees herself stooping to pick up the pieces of a china plate her father broke in temper. Is this what she’s become? A woman with broken plates? Is that all?

It seems to her now that there is nothing new under the sun. Edward thinks he’ll step into her shoes, just as
she stepped into her mother’s. Inheritance is not renewal. More than anything, it keeps everything the same. All that is left, all that’s sensible, is to clutch on to what is hers by right. Nothing shall ever stop her.

It is getting dark. How long has she been away? She walks up between the trees. She pacifies herself by
concluding
that it is only a matter of time before Louisa leaves. The children will have to be back to attend school in a fortnight’s time. Come September, Betty will be able to get a good night’s sleep, listen to the wireless, get rid of the dog hairs, cook when and what she likes, not have those awful children asking her what will
happen
when she dies.

When Betty arrives home, Louisa has spread a piece of blue cotton on the parlour floor, is putting an edge on her dressmaker’s scissors with the file Betty keeps for sharpening the knives.

‘I was thinking we could make some new curtains for the bathroom. Those ones you have are ancient,’ she says. She puts the blade to the edge of the fabric and begins to cut.

‘Do as you please,’ Betty says, and goes upstairs to lie down.

The weather does not take up in mid-August. Huge grey clouds provide a sullen parchment overhead. Frogs crawl in under the door on rainy nights, and Betty finds it almost impossible to get the clothes dry. She hangs them on a clothes-horse round the Aga, lights the
parlour 
fire, but a down-draught pushes black smoke into the room. She watches the bees robbing pollen from her crimson flowers outside the door, and counts the days.