‘It’s a hard day for you’n yer sister. She’s very upset, the young lady is. Yer good man thought he’d best take her back to the house. I daresay they’ll have a nice, hot cup of tea waitin’ for you. You’ll feel more yerself after that.’
That was the only time I lost hold of the proceedings. I mumbled my thanks and as he put me into the back seat of the funeral car I burst into tears and cried the whole way back to Anacarrig. Not for Mother. For a little man with a red nose and a country accent who had held an umbrella over me when he needn’t have bothered.
Beyond my bedroom window the swifts wheel and cry in a clear sky. Blackbirds are hunting on the lawn below. It has been a warm, sunny day and now, when my lamp would be lit if I were in London, it is still bright enough to read. I had forgotten how long the light lingers in Ulster. I am further north and further west. It feels like a different world.
A week now since I arrived with Matthew and Sandy, the house cold and dank, closed up since Sandy’s last visit, the rain pouring down as if it would go on for ever. I’ll never forget that Saturday evening with the phone ringing and visitors arriving and all the awfulness of the funeral still to be faced. Now it seems so far away. Even the person I was that evening, the one who said the right things to neighbours and relatives, who handed round cups of tea and glasses of whiskey, seems someone I hardly recognise.
I am beginning to feel different, but I’m not sure in what way. I do know I don’t feel so panic-stricken when I go into Mother’s room any more, certainly not like that first morning when I was determined to stick it out and then turned tail and ran. I don’t push my luck, I don’t stay in there very long at any one time, but I have been managing better.
I’ve made this long list of things I must do, most of which I dread having to do, but I bribe myself, just as I did during all those years of revision for exams, the mugging up of boring stuff for the sake of the results I needed.
My secret weapon is the garden. Two days after the funeral, I took a mug of tea outside and had a look around while it was cooling. I got a nasty shock. The lawns had been cut and the edges trimmed, but nothing else had been done. Mr Neill, who does the grass, was sure to have offered to keep things tidy, but Mother would have insisted she’d be home in no time, so there was no need at all to bother.
There were huge stems of groundsel poking up through the splashes of purple aubrietia and pink saxifrage. The rockery was full of buttercups and sprouting thistles. Before I quite realised it, I had a pile of weeds on the terrace and my tea was stone cold.
It was that first head of groundsel that did it. ‘Out you come,’ I said, as I tweaked it from the rain-softened earth. That’s what my father always said.
The garden had been Mother’s big thing. Even more than her baking, her tapestry, her pickles and preserves, the immaculateness of her garden was one more demonstration of her superiority over the locals. But it was my father who designed and laid it out.
I always assumed it was because she came from Belfast that she felt she had to show the locals she could do just as well as any country person, but maybe that’s not the reason at all. Certainly, however much anyone might argue for Armagh’s historic status as a city, Mother always insisted it was just a country town and its inhabitants were only country people. When my father commented that Armagh was the ancient capital of Ulster and the ecclesiastical capital of all Ireland, she only laughed. Big words and grand phrases were always ‘a lot o’ nonsense’.
My father, of course, was only a countryman, in her terms. She had been quick to forget that this particular countryman had designed and created both the house and its garden. Indeed, after all the years in which it was ‘her house’ and ‘her garden’, I had almost forgotten myself how much I loved the garden I had helped him to make. Since I stood looking over the familiar flowerbeds, the mug of tea still in my hand, I have wanted to be nowhere else. Through all the hours I’ve spent there, I’ve been so happy, working and listening, remembering things I haven’t thought of for years.
It was Great-aunt Minnie who used to tell me stories about my father. Back in the 1920s, he used to pass the site on which the house is built on his way from the small cottage where he lived to the primary school in Armagh. In the days before school buses, he had plenty of time to think as he walked. She said he started to plan a house on this hillside even then.
The year I was born, 1951, he bought the land. Steeply sloping and without planning permission, it was going cheap. Minnie said my mother thought he was mad. Even if he could ever afford to build on the land, the position was quite unsuitable. It was too far out of town, inconvenient for the shops and school. Worse still, it wasn’t among her own sort. All the neighbours would be Catholic. Later, when building did begin, she said her kitchen would be overlooked by cottages at the top of the hill and that the sitting room had a view of a dreadful old farmyard with a rusting, corrugated-iron hayshed. The other sort, of course. As one would expect.
He met her objections one by one. He bought her a small car and went on using his ancient bicycle to pedal to the shop in English Street where he sold seeds and fertilisers to men in big boots. He worked all the hours there were. If he wasn’t in the shop, he was in the garden. He terraced the slope to the road, built the stonewalls and the rockery, began planting trees and shrubs, laid out the rose garden and the vegetable plot, screened the cottages at the top with willows and the farm at the bottom with chestnuts and sycamores.
I learnt their names before I’d even started school. Sitting on the wheelbarrow drinking tea from his Thermos, I listened while he told me where all the different shrubs and trees were to go, what they liked, how they would grow and what a big girl I would be when they were all just right. That was before the building work started, of course. Once that began, we had our tea with the workmen in their stuffy wooden hut with its paraffin stove. One of them became a great friend of mine, an elderly Catholic called Mick from some unknown place called Mill Row. Until Mother found out, that was.
He was such a silent man, my father. Silent in himself, I mean. Beyond his work and Anacarrig, his greatest pleasure was his books. History and natural history were his great love, but he also enjoyed some poetry. I remember him reciting ‘Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree’, one day when William Coulter from Tamlaght came to call and found us planting saplings down by the road.
The other thing my father enjoyed was talking to country people like William Coulter. He was slow to get started, and so indeed was William, but with a little encouragement they would tell the most marvellous stories. I had no greater delight in those days than to sit in William’s forge, or the garden, or some unfinished room in the new house and listen to them talk of ‘the olden days’. Never ‘the good old days’, always ‘the olden days’.
My mother hated it when my father told his stories. Whether it was about the olden days or the events of everyday, immediately she got irritated, behaved as if he was somehow wasting time, idling when there was work to be done, and not looking to the future, to a bigger shop with a greater turnover and a higher income. Yet all the time he was creating a house well ahead of its time, stocking seeds and tubers of the newest varieties and planting a garden that only the future would reveal in its full character.
I supposed then it was because she was such a townie and so proud of being brought up in the city with all its life and bustle, that she objected to what she thought were ‘country ways’, but I’m not sure any more. Her hostility seems too deep for that. Sometimes I think she was standing over against the man himself, rejecting the deep sense of self from which all his actions flowed. It’s one of the puzzles in my life that I may never resolve.
It is almost dark now and the cars on the road below me are using dipped headlights. I can see them only momentarily as they pass the bottom of the drive. The seclusion of the garden is complete, as he said it would be.
The house was finished in 1958, when I was seven and Sandy just two. A year later, at the beginning of June, with the garden full