LITMIR.BIZ

      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. Her father says nothing but frowns often and one evening before they’re finished he rises suddenly from the table and storms outside. Later, when Miss Tannian is leaving, Tess sees him cross the courtyard and stand talking to her. Miss Tannian looks flustered and lowers her head and seems to shrink and slide into her car. Many weeks pass before she returns and when she has finished testing the hens for pin-feathers she does not linger or enter the house. She rarely visits after that. Once, her father asks, ‘When was Rose here last?’

      It is June and she is in her last week of 6th class, the end of her time in national school. She and Oliver walk home, down the avenue and into the yard. There are men gathered around the old well in the corner. Years ago, long before Tess was born, the well was covered with a flagstone, for fear that the old women from the village who came for water would fall in. For as long as Tess remembers her family has gotten their drinking water from the village pump. On summer evenings the older boys and girls of the village gather there, giddy and tense, something in the air always. One evening her father came over the road and hunted herself and Claire home. ‘Get home out of that, ye.’ His face was red with rage. He did not want them mixing. Now the flagstone is pulled away. He will sink his own pump and men have come to take a sample from the well for testing.