City of Hope (2 page)

We breakfasted like farmers, on bacon from our own pigs, which John still salted and cured himself in a small shed out the back of the house. We had sold all our own meat in our shop at the bottom of our lane—but since the electrification of Kilmoy it made more sense to sell the animals live to the local butcher, who kept the meat in fridges and sold it weeks after it had been slaughtered. He provided us with what we needed, but John still preferred to slaughter and butcher a pig himself for our table.

“I'm afraid I'll get soft,” he said. “Farming isn't what it used to be.”

Marriage wasn't what it used to be, either. When we first married I baked my own bread in a cast-iron stove on the fire. Now we bought white bread wholesale from a bakery that delivered every second day to our shop. Veronica, our shopgirl, sliced it on a machine I had shipped in from England.

“I don't know what's wrong with a knife,” John had said when I proudly served him his first slice from the delicate loaf. “It's more like a communion wafer than bread,” he complained.

That was John—he liked things to stay the same, where I was all for mod cons to make life easier. He would have preferred to have less money and just farm himself for our table, and have me at home keeping the house tidy, baking and preparing the food he grew—as his parents Maidy and Paud, and their parents before them, had lived. I liked things to change all the time. He sometimes became frustrated with me always starting up new business ventures, adding modern features and building extensions to the house—but my husband understood my nature. He complained about me working so hard to build the business, and I complained about him being old-fashioned, but we were soft on each other nonetheless. The unspoken shadows of the children we didn't have moved silently between us, their spirits floating through the unused nursery I had decorated during my last failed pregnancy, privately reminding us both that their presence would have changed everything.

For all that, John and I were happy together. We had married for love, not land or money, like many of our neighbors. The feelings we had for each other as teenagers had deepened and grown in adulthood, and although the early years of our marriage had been blighted by poverty and war, and although the years since then had not seen us blessed with the child we longed for, our love for each other had held true.

The sausages browned neatly in the pan and, as I had risen early, I had taken the extra hour to bake John a soda cake. I cut it into rough chunks, buttered it and arranged it on a plate, then filled a saucepan with water to heat on the stove for his shave. I had a freshly ironed shirt and corduroy trousers laid out for him on the bed, with a good Foxford wool jacket. As a working woman, I enjoyed the domestic routine of these early Sunday mornings: getting the house shipshape before dressing up for the day. Our neighbor Mary, Veronica's mother, did all of the heavy housework for me, washing the floors, dusting and polishing the ornaments and trinkets in our drawing room, so that baking the occasional cake and tidying around the place was an indulgence for me, and not the dull hardship I had once found it to be. Today we had arranged to collect John's recently widowed adoptive mother, Maidy, on our way back from Mass. His adoptive father, Paud, had died not six months earlier, and Maidy, a woman in her eighties, was now bereft. While she occasionally came to stay overnight, cooking for us and fussing over us as she did when we were children, she was still too fit a woman and too proud to move in with us.

I heard John lift the latch on the front door and called out, “Take your boots off—the floor is freshly washed!”

Why must he
always
come in through the front door of the house, I thought, on top of the good linoleum flooring, when there is a perfectly good door to the kitchen!

“I've something for you,” he shouted back.

“We'll miss the midday Mass, if you don't get a move on.”

“Hang on . . . hang on.”

John stood in the doorway holding to his broad chest a bundle inside his jacket. His face was reddened with the exertion of the long walk home, the few gray hairs at his temples coarse against the black curls that were stuck with soft rain and sweat to his face. John had seemed tired lately, rising late and without his usual zest. He had taken to bathing in the house with water that had been heated on the stove, rather than outdoors in the yard from a bucket of fresh well water—as had always been his way.

The lambing season had been busy, with many late nights, and he clearly needed more help on the farm. Some of the local boys that he used to help him had taken seasonal jobs in England, potato-picking in Yorkshire most of them. When they returned the young men were put straight to work by their mothers on their own farms, building houses, fixing sheds—they had neither the time nor the need to work on another man's land, even that of a popular figure like John Hogan, but it was too much for him, managing it all on his own.

“There's no need for you to work like this, John—we have enough money coming in, without you killing yourself.”

When I spoke like that, he would rise even earlier the next day and come home looking more worn out and tired than before, so I said nothing. John was a man of the land, and there was no arguing with him over it. Also, he was proud, like all men, and it didn't do for me to be always reminding him that I was earning such a good keep.

However, this morning his blue eyes shone wild with delight. He looked the same as he had done when I had first fallen in love with him at sixteen. Fresh and full of the heart of life, like the outdoors—a man made of earth and air.

He held out the bundle for me to look inside. I peeled back the collars of his worn farming jacket, and inside was the face of a newborn lamb.

“He wouldn't stand like the others to suckle. I think he's sick and I don't know if he'll last. He needs minding.”

My first instinct was irritation. Bringing a farm animal into the house! Would John never grow up and get some sense? But I put away my annoyance and indulged him. It was too early in the day for a fight.

The newborn's eyes were still closed. I put my finger to its protruded mouth, and I was startled when it took the finger and started to suck.

I let out a laugh. “He's alive then!”

“Will you mind him, Ellie?”

John was smiling as if he knew I would. I looked back at him, arching my eyebrows inward to let him know I knew what he was at. Playing the game of a cross wife to his laddish charms.

“Give him here to me—and go and get me some milk. You've no sense, John Hogan—not one ounce.”

I took the animal from him and sat with it on my lap, then peeled back the coarse fabric to look at it properly. Tiny and helpless, its skin was soft and pink, still hairless. I blew on its face and the newborn lazily opened its eyes—two black beads blinked up at me blindly. Its lips pouted for my finger again, “Hurry with that milk, John,” and at the sound of my coarse voice its long legs started to buckle against me, then kicked at my thighs with its sharp hooves.

I put the lamb down just as it started to stand.

“Well now, there's a miracle,” John said as he came back in with the milk.

As the lamb found its feet, it started to cry and staggered around the kitchen like a drunken man.

I laughed as John chased around trying to catch it, eventually picking it up and taking its ankles together in a firm grip.

“I'll carry it back down to its mammy,” he said. “Stick a couple of those sausages and a bit of that bread in my back pocket, like a good woman.”

“Be back in time,” I shouted after him, “or there'll be murder!”

He waved his free hand at me briefly, but even as I said them the stern words crumbled in my mouth.

As I watched my husband and the rescued lamb disappear into the circle of sunshine that blistered off the lake, I felt the hollow darkness of my own womb calling.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

It was Monday, the day after John had rescued the lamb. I rose at eight and was surprised to see him still in the bed beside me. The soft white sheets thrown back from his naked torso, the dark skin of his weathered face stopped in a low V above the whiteness of his broad chest, which rose and fell in long, slow breaths. Usually he was already on his way back from the far fields by the time I woke, and we would breakfast together before he drove me into Kilmoy. This morning he was in a deep sleep.

As well as being tired of late, John had been slightly terse with me over small household matters, which was not his way. Usually I brushed such moods aside. John had encouraged me in all of my ventures, and put up with my unconventional outlook in a way that most men would not, or indeed could not, have tolerated. He hated me being away from him, but he was stoic and forgiving, so the odd outburst over sliced white bread or a repetitive meal neither surprised nor frightened me. Marriage had taught me that love was more substantial than the mere continuing of the yearnings of youth. Our ongoing passion was fueled by everyday tolerance: the challenging dullness of knowing each other too well passed with fortitude and faith, so that when the brightness of first love renewed itself, in the comfort of tears after a loss, the warmth of a hand held at a graveside, the curve of a naked shoulder revealed with the breeze catching a summer dress, it burned brighter and with more arched desire than the innocent voracity of youth could allow.

However, today I was irritated by his laziness. John transported me to and from our business premises in town every day, most of the time in our new Ford car, but sometimes he insisted on taking the old horse and cart so as not to draw attention to our wealth. We were rich by our neighbors' standards, but we remained modest in our outlook—preferring not to take our places in the front pew at Mass, or show ourselves off with flashy trinkets and attitudes like other successful businesspeople in town. Our humility had paid off, as the ordinary people continued to see us as one of them, and supported us with their goodwill and custom. John said that wasn't the point—we were ordinary people ourselves, he reminded me; country people.

This morning I decided to take this change in our routine as an opportunity to do something different. I was more than cap­able of driving the car myself, although John insisted that it was not safe for me to be behind the wheel of a motorized vehicle on our small country roads.

“It's not you I'm worried about—the farmers around here aren't used to cars. You could run into cattle on the road, or steer yourself easily into a ditch. . . .” His objections to me driving myself were, I suspected, more to do with his fear of my independence than fear for my safety. In any case, he didn't like driving much himself. Aside from taking me to work and back, most of the time the dusty black Ford lay idle in the drive while John preferred to take the horse and cart on errands.

So I dressed quickly and left him a note saying “Taken the car” on the kitchen table, grabbing my moment of independence before he woke up.

The car jerked, pushing me forward so that my head almost bashed off the thin steering wheel, my hands sliding off the tan leather. I got a firmer grip on it and wrenched it into first gear, then twisted the key, put my foot on the accelerator and sped out of the yard, barely scraping through the narrow gap in our drive, spitting up a cloud of dry mud and stones behind me.

At the end of the lane I saw Veronica, strolling toward our shop.

The one-story building was built by John with the help of our neighbors on my return from America. For the first few years it was a real hit, with people coming from miles around for the unusual luxuries I provided them with—tinned fruits and spices, as well as fresh vegetables and meat from our own farm. Since electrification, however, business had dropped off and people were choosing to shop in Kilmoy. There were now one or two hackney cars operating in the area, so those people with money to spend on the more expensive imported items I had been offering were able to shop in the auspicious surroundings of the nearest town, especially as the competition had widened the pitiful selection of goods on offer when I first returned from New York. Now our country shop largely provided the poorer rural community with basics such as sugar and tea, and drew only a small, but respectable profit. I spent very little time there myself now, leaving it in the hands of my shop assistant, Veronica.

Poor Veronica was not the brightest of girls, but the locals knew her and she was as much a part of the furniture there as the old oak counter and the stone flagging on the cold-room floor. Her unmarried mother, Mary, was my housekeeper, and the two women's lives had improved immeasurably with my own support and John's. As long as the shop paid their wages, I would keep the small business ticking over for them alone.

Veronica looked so startled when she saw the car speeding toward her with me behind the wheel that she fell against a hedgerow. I steered it to a halt too close beside her, almost sweeping her skirts under the wheels.

“Holy God!” she cried out. “Sorry, Ma'am—you gave me a fright.”

I had long since given up trying to get Veronica to call me Ellie, any more than I could persuade her into my smart hand-me-down clothes, or get her to learn to read. She could do as much counting as the shop needed, given that most of our customers were honest neighbors and left the price of everything in the tin box themselves.

“Oh, here comes John.”

A big smile spread across her face as I looked behind and saw my husband haring down the hill. Veronica loved John. Everybody did. He had a natural, easy way about him; acquiring from Maidy and Paud the gift for knowing how to be with people, it had carried him from childhood to adulthood, gathering a fond reputation that only increased with time. My parents had been reserved outsiders, and while I had rejected their rules and snobbery at a young age, some of their forced propriety was in my blood. I was sharper by nature, and friendships were formed slowly and with a degree of caution. Any ease I had with others came from having known John all my life and learning to emulate him somewhat. Although I worked hard, and tried to be as friendly and accommodating as I could be in business, I knew that my success in Kilmoy was nonetheless largely due to the fact that I was John Hogan's wife.