The more time Tom spends on Bill Nevan’s farm, the more time I spend in Betty Nevan’s kitchen. This half an hour at the end of the day, drinking warm tea, watching the sky and talking quietly with Betty. Knowing that every day ends with this half an hour is knowing that life will end with peace. What peace it has brought me. I had forgotten how good it feels to have something to look forward to.
It’s a nice life. Imagine. Something has come into my grey world and settled me. This isn’t the sort of happiness that thinking of you could interrupt. How lucky I feel, here in the slow pace of Betty’s kitchen. The music on the radio and the sea asters painted on her plates. Talking to her makes me feel interesting, like I’m two pints deep, all the time.
I don’t know her age. Forty-four, I’d guess. Maybe forty-five. A very beautiful, well-looked-after forty-four or five. I’d forgotten I had even asked her a question when she answers me.
‘Not always. I was once a blow-in, too. I came here when I married Bill. But that was so long ago, it’s hard to believe I ever lived anywhere else.’
How reassuring, to know that a woman like her was once just like me. A total stranger in Ballycrea, making a new start. Look how well she has done, with her farm and her friends and her sanctuary. It makes me think that perhaps being in Ballycrea could be an opportunity, not a consequence. Isn’t it funny, how easily she has reframed things for me. Without even realising.
‘I would have thought you were always here. Just that, the town seems to really like you.’
She takes in what I’ve said. It’s good to be considered, not just answered. She unties her apron.
‘Well, I like the town. What’s left of it anyway.’
If I stay quiet, she might go on talking. If I listen to what she says, I could learn what she knows. Then I could do what she does, and live as she lives.
Even now, just leaning up against the doorframe with her, I feel closer to calm than I have in so long. Perhaps it’s being in the company of a woman. Perhaps it’s getting a break from my real life. Perhaps if I stay here for long enough, she will heal me. As long as the evening is coming down around me, as long as she will have me, I will stay here with her.
Raking her fingers through her hair, she rolls what she loses into a ball and lets it float off. A bird will use that in its nest. How nice is that?
Looking at me sideways, she realises I’m not going to say anything.She clears her throat and keeps going.
‘Well, you know the way. There’s always youngsters immigrating, there’s always shops closing. Things changing, you know? Bill is always saying I’m no good with change.’
Although she says it in a light, jovial way, there’s nothing light about the way she has seen into my head and spoken my thoughts back to me. Everything is always changing, I can’t cope with it, either.
‘Don’t get me wrong, I understand it, ’tis just sad to see so many going. Did you ever think of it? Immigrating?’
She asks me, presumably wary of me not saying anything. This time, I have every intention to answer her, but just as I open my mouth, I notice the ball of her hair caught on the grass. It takes me for a moment. That is exactly what I want to be. That is the level of peace I have been trying to reach. To exist as nothing more than a loose tangle of hair. Her hair. In the breeze, and then on the grass. Just waiting for a bird. So still and so easy. I am brought back by Betty’s humming.
‘Would I immigrate?’
I try to centre myself again, to bring my mind back into my body, because I’m not a tangle of hair. I’m a person, being spoken to by the creator of the tangle.
‘No, no I couldn’t. Sure who would look after my lot?’
There was a short while when my life was filled with effervescent conversations about going to America with Milly Hayes, the milkman’s wife. We were very good friends, at one time. If she had really wanted to go, I would have gone with her. But, obviously, she wanted to marry the milkman more. It’s a shame when things are one-sided like that. I used to pretend to talk to her sometimes after that. An unhealthy habit, I suppose, that I should never have allowed to develop. It was the loneliness that did it. I must admit it’s come back a bit since you’ve been gone.
After that, with Milly, I never gave any serious consideration to moving out of Kilmarra. But look at me now, long gone from there, and only rarely thinking about Milly and all she once meant to me.
I wonder if Betty would think I was pathetic if I said I can’t envision living anywhere but in a cottage with my siblings. Would she think I was pathetic if I said that I want to move so little that I would be glad to simply stand in this doorway for the rest of my life?
‘The three of my brothers went to New York after I got married. Declan, Michael and Joe. Twenty-five years since I saw them last.’
Betty says, almost sighing, and it feels like I am being fed by the details of her life.
‘I know they’re all there together, sure they’ve all wives and children out there now. But I still get so afraid that they’d be lonely. If I knew one of them was lonely for even a minute my heart would break.’
‘Don’t men always break your heart?’
Something sincere, which makes her laugh. The sound of her soul. When those brothers of hers left, I wonder did they consider her loneliness as much as she considers theirs.
Every day she says a prayer for them, and although it’s been years since she saw them, she says that she knows she will see them again. When you’re lonely for a person in that way, you’ll believe anything to keep yourself going. This would be the right time to tell her that I know what it is to miss somebody, to know that you won’t see them again but to go on behaving like you will.
Bill is the only family she has left. Isn’t it sad for her? But now, she has me. Somebody who understands exactly what she feels. What a blessing.
‘Sure they might as well be on the moon, they’re so far away!’
