up under stones and hedges and bushes. She can see them all. She imagines herself small, so small that she can see everything, hear everything, hear the blades of grass whispering, the pebbles laughing in the dark. She strokes Captain and he sighs. She can feel the beat of his heart against her. She is amazed at how happy she is. In her bed, in this house. With the lawn and the barns and the fields around her. There is nowhere else she wants to be. In her most secret heart she knows there is nowhere she loves more.
When morning breaks she walks outside and crosses the courtyard. It is Saturday and no one is up yet. The sky is blue and the sun has reached the orchard wall. The coach-house door is open and inside someone is moving in the shadowy darkness. She looks in and sees Mike Connolly reaching to hang the horse collar up on a hook. When he turns and sees her he gets a little fright. Then his eyes soften, but he says nothing. A time will come when no one will talk to her at all, or even look at her. She is a disappearing girl.
In the darkness her eye is caught by something bright and shiny on the floor, a coin maybe. She steps inside and as she runs towards it she hits off the corner of the work bench. She cries out. Ow. She holds her side and rubs her hip and, when she looks at Mike, the tears come.
‘Aw, now, come here to me, a stór.’ He kneels beside her. He puts an arm around her and makes a pitying sound with his tongue. ‘Where’s it sore?’ he asks.
She mumbles through the tears, and keeps rubbing her side. He gets up and goes to where his old coat hangs from a nail and comes back with two toffees. ‘Now,’ he says. ‘Here. Eat this and you’ll be better in no time. Sure, you’ll be better before you get married!’ He takes the paper off and her mouth starts to water. As soon as she tastes the toffee she smiles.
‘Now! What did I tell you, what did I tell you! Of course, now you’ll have to marry me!’
It was a game he used to play with herself and Maeve when they were small. Whenever they fell or cut themselves or got upset he’d say, ‘You’ll be better before you get married.’ She would wipe away the tears and say, ‘I’m going to marry you when I grow up, Mike.’
‘I’m going to marry you when I grow up, Mike.’
It is the look on his face that tells her he has heard her. She has heard herself too. The sound has come out of her mouth, the words are working. They look at each other. He bites his bottom lip. She holds her breath.
‘Well, are you now, Missy!’ he says, smiling. ‘Are you indeed! And who says I’ll have you? Hmm? Who says I’ll marry you?’
‘I say.’
‘Sure, I might be long married by then. I might have a wife of my own by the time you grow up,’ he says. ‘Mmm . . . Unless you marry me now.’ And he turns and looks around. ‘Where’s the broom at all?’
She had forgotten that part of the wedding game, that the bride and groom have to step over the broom to get married. He walks into the darkness and brings out an old yard brush.
‘Now, Missy, I think we’re all set. Except for the priest!’ He goes outside and lays the brush flat on the gravel. Then he whistles and Captain appears and he says, Sit, and Captain sits still and obedient.
Mike comes and gives her his arm. Through the open door she walks beside him into the winter sun. Captain is there, waiting. Mike begins to hum. She looks up at the sky and hums too and then Mike hums louder as he skips along, almost dancing, with her arm through his. And then they stand before Captain, and Mike tells her what to do, what to say, when to jump over the broom.
‘And you, too,’ she says. ‘You’ve to jump over the broom too, or else you’re not married.’
‘Oh, I’ll jump, I’ll jump, to be sure.’
‘And then will we go and live in your house in Connemara?’
‘We will. We’ll go and live in Connemara.’
And so, standing side by side, they begin. He takes her hand, and bows and says, ‘Miss Teresa Lohan, do you take me, Michael Joseph Connolly, to be your husband, for better, for worse, in sickness and in health, all the days of our lives?’
Captain cocks his head and whines and she laughs and says, ‘I do,’ and jumps over the broom. And then it is her turn.
‘Will you, do you, Mike Jophus Connolly take me Tess Lohan as your wife?’
‘I do.’
He jumps over the broom to her side, and puts his hand in his pocket and brings out hay seeds and chaff and tosses them over their heads. And just as he takes her two hands in his and begins to dance her around the yard, Claire walks out of the house onto the front step and sees them and smiles and comes towards them. Tess waves, calls out, and Claire begins to run, the morning sun on her back.
3
AND THEN, when Tess is ten, there is a real wedding in the house. It is summer again, after a long winter when animals died in the fields and snow fell in May, and Oliver came home. There is something about each day now that she holds dear. Oliver’s return for one thing, and something she noticed on those winter nights when she would kneel on her bed and melt a peep-hole on the frozen window pane and view everything under snow – the lawn and the trees, the walls and barns and outhouses – all still and beautiful in the moonlight: the feeling that she has grown older and stronger, and safer, and the world has survived and become a little lovelier.
On the morning of Evelyn’s wedding Denis drives them all to the church in the new Hillman Minx saloon her father bought that spring. Maeve, who is home from boarding school for the holidays, and Tess are wearing new frocks. In the chapel there are bog asphodels on the altar. The bridegroom sits in the first pew with his brother. It is only the second time that Tess has seen him and he seems to her almost as old as her father.
The wedding breakfast is held at Easterfield. The guests sit at the long table in the dining room. The rations have ended and there is a great spread of food and more talk and laughter in the house than Tess can ever remember. Your mother would be very proud today, someone tells Evelyn. Tess has not given much thought to her mother in recent times. Her face is fading from memory. She tries to picture her mother in these rooms, touching and dusting things, curtains, cushions, softly closing doors. She glances around the room. A feeling sometimes rises in her: the sense of things being alive. When she walks into the coach-house or the cow-house she has the feeling of having just interrupted something. Lately the thought that all the things around her, the things that matter, and move her – the trees and fields and animals – have their own lives, their own thoughts, has planted itself in her. If a thing has a life, she thinks, then it has a memory. Memories and traces of her mother must linger all over the house – in rooms and halls and landings. The dent of her feet on a rug. On a cup, the mark of her hand. She wonders if on certain warm nights, when the whole house is sleeping, her mother’s soothing self returns, or memories of her return, bringing comfort to things, and promise for their patient waiting. Outside too, the small yard, the fowl-house – do they miss her? Does the laurel tree remember sheltering her? Tess looks down at her hands. Even as she has these thoughts she knows they are not something she will ever put into words.
After Evelyn’s marriage Miss Tannian comes more often, bringing cakes and tarts she has baked, sometimes arriving just before teatime so that she has to be invited to eat with them. She cuts up Oliver’s food and butters his bread and tries to wipe his face, before he bats her away. Everyone grows nervous. Tess feels sorry for her.
