Colm Tóibín

House For Sale - Colm Toibin

A short story published in the Dublin Review

She drove to Cush in the old A-40 one Saturday that October, leaving the boys playing with friends and telling no one where she was going. Her aim in those months, autumn leading to winter, was to learn for the boys’ sake and maybe her own sake too to hold back tears. Her crying as though for no reason frightened the boys and disturbed them as they slowly became used to their father not being there. She realized now that they had come to behave as if everything were normal, as if nothing were really missing. They had learned to disguise how they felt. She, in turn, had learned to bite her lip, to recognize danger signs, thoughts that would lead to other thoughts. She had come to measure her success with the boys by how much she could control her feelings.
As she drove down the hill outside The Ballagh and caught her first glimpse of the sea, it struck her that she had never been alone before on this road. In all the years, one of the boys, or the girls when they were younger, would shout out ‘I can see the sea’ just here and she would have to make them sit down and quieten. This, she thought, was the last time she would drive to Cush alone. She would not put herself through it again.
In Blackwater, she thought of stopping for cigarettes or chocolate or anything to postpone her arrival at Cush. But she was sure that someone she knew would see her and want to sympathize with her. It would be easy for them. The words came easy: ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘I’m sorry for your trouble.’ They all said the same thing, but there was no formula for replying. ‘I know’ or ‘Thank you’ sounded cold, almost hollow. And they would stand looking at her until she could not wait to get away from them. There was something hungry, almost greedy in the way they held her hand or looked into her eyes. She wondered if she in turn had ever done this to anybody, and she thought that she had not. But as she turned right towards Ballyconnigar she realized that she would probably feel much worse if people began to avoid her.
The sky had darkened now and drops of rain hit the windscreen. It seemed much barer here, more wintry than the countryside on the road to Blackwater. She turned left at the ball alley for Cush and she allowed herself the brief respite of imagining that this was some time in the recent past, a dark summer’s day with a threatening sky and she had gone into Blackwater for messages, meat and bread and a newspaper. She had thrown them lightly on the back seat, and the family were all in Cush, Maurice and the children, and maybe one or two friends were with them, and the children had slept late, and they would be disappointed now that the day was so bad, but it wouldn’t stop them playing rounders or messing in front of the house. But if the rain was down for the day, of course, they’d stay in and play cards, and eventually they’d shout and bang the table until the two boys would grow irritable and come to her to complain.
She let herself imagine all of this for as long as she liked. But as soon as she caught a view of the sea and the horizon beyond Corrigans’ roof, such imaginings were no use to her, she was back in the hard world again.
She drove the car down the lane and opened the side gate and unlocked the large galvanized gates in front of the house. Parking in front of the house, she closed the gates again so that no one could see the car. She would have loved it had one of her friends been here, Carmel Redmond or Lily Devereux, who could talk to her sensibly not about what she had lost or how sorry they were, but about the children, money, part-time work, how to live now. They would have listened to her, but Carmel only came in the summer and Lily only came from time to time to see her mother.
Nora waited in the car as the wind from the sea howled around her. The house would be cold. She wished she had taken a heavier coat with her. But she knew that wishing that friends were here or allowing herself to shiver in the car like this, these were ways of postponing the moment when she would have to open the door and walk into the empty house.
And then a fierce whistling wind blew up and seemed as though it would lift the car. Something she had not allowed herself to think before but had known for some days now came into her mind and she made a promise to herself. She would not come here again. This was the last time she would visit this house. She would go in now and walk through these few rooms. She would take with her whatever was personal and could not be left behind, and then she would close this door and drive back to the town, and, in future, she would never take that turn at the ball alley on the road between Blackwater and Ballyconnigar.
What surprised her was the hardness of her resolve, how easy now it seemed to turn her back on what she had loved, leave this house on the edge of the cliff for others to know, for others to come to in the summer, fill the house with different noises. As she sat looking out at the bruised sky over the sea, she sighed as, finally, she let herself feel how much she had lost, how much she would miss it. She got out of the car, steadying herself against the wind.
The door opened on to a tiny hall. There were two rooms on each side, the rooms on the left with bunk beds, a living room on the right with a kitchen and bathroom behind it, and their room at the end, peaceful, away from the children.
Each year in May they came here, all of them, on a Saturday and Sunday, even if the weather was not good. They brought scrubbing brushes and mops and detergent and cloths for cleaning windows. They brought mattresses which had been well aired. It was a turning point, a mark on the calendar that meant the beginning of summer, even if summer was going to be damp and grey and misty. The children, in the years she wanted to remember now, were noisy and excited at the beginning, as though they were an American family from ‘The Donna Reed Show’. They imitated American accents and gave each other instructions, but they soon grew tired and bored and she let them play or go down to the strand or walk into the village. And this was when the serious work began. When the children were out of the way, Maurice could paint the woodwork, the lino on the cement floor could be replaced and she could hang the wallpaper, and for this she would need silence and concentration.
She loved it then, measuring down to the last fraction of an inch, making the paste to the right consistency, and the bright new wallpaper with its floral patterns which would cover damp patches and blemishes and breaks in the thin layer of styrofoam with which she had lined the walls when the damp became too much.
Fiona hated spiders. That was something Nora remembered now. And cleaning the house meant, more than anything, displacing spiders and beetles and clocks and all types of creepy-crawlies. The boys loved Fiona screaming, and Fiona herself, she thought, enjoyed screaming too, especially as her father would protect her with elaborate gestures. ‘Where is it?’ he would shout, mimicking the giant in ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’, and Fiona would run to him and hold him.
That was the past, then, she thought as she walked into the living room, and it cannot be rescued. The smallness and coldness of the room gave her an odd satisfaction now. There was clearly a leak in the galvanized tin roof because there was a fresh, spreading stain on the ceiling. The house rattled as a gust of wind brought a hard sheet of rain against the glass. The windows, she saw, would have to be repaired soon, as the wood had begun to rot. And who knew how long it would take for the cliff to be eaten away and their house to be dismantled on the orders of the county council? Someone else could worry now. Someone else could repair the leaks and treat the house for damp. Someone else could rewire and repaint this house.
She would sell it to Frank Larkin. Nobody who lived locally would want to buy it; they knew what a bad investment it would be, compared to houses in Bentley or Curracloe or Morriscastle. No one from Dublin who saw the house in this state would make an offer for it. She looked around the room and shuddered.
She walked into the children’s bedrooms and into their own bedroom, and she knew that for Frank Larkin owning this would be a dream, part of a memory of scorching hot Sundays, and boys and girls on bicycles, and bright, open possibilities that maybe buying this house would recover for a while. On the other hand, she imagined him coming into the house in a year or two, back for a fortnight in Ireland, with the ceiling half fallen in and cobwebs everywhere and the wallpaper peeling and the windows broken and the electricity cut off. And the summer’s day all drizzly and dark.
She began to look through drawers, but there was nothing that she wanted. Only yellow newspaper and bits of twine. Even the crockery and kitchen utensils seemed not worth taking home. In the bedroom, she found some damp and faded photographs and some books in a locker and she gathered these to take with her. Nothing else. The furniture was worthless, the light-shades were already dingy and worn. She remembered buying them in Woolworth’s in Wexford only a few years earlier. Everything rotted and faded in this house.
The rain began to pour down. She took a mirror from the bedroom wall, noting how clean the space it covered had remained, compared to the discoloured, dirty wallpaper all around.

At first she thought the knocking was something banging against the door or the window in the wind. But when it persisted and she heard a voice, she realized that she had a visitor. She was surprised because she had thought that no one had noticed her approach and no one could see the car. Her first instinct was to hide, stand out of sight, but she knew that she had already been seen.
She opened the latch and the front door blew in towards her on its hinges. The figure outside was wearing an oversized anorak, the large hood of which was half-covering the face.
‘Nora, I heard the car. Are you all right?’
Once the hood was pulled down, she recognized Mrs Darcy, whom she had not seen since the funeral.
‘Why didn’t you call in first?’ Mrs Darcy asked her.
‘I’m just here for a few minutes,’ Nora said.
Mrs Darcy glanced at the gates.
‘I’ll open the gates for you now, get into the car and come on up to the house. You can’t stay here.’
Once more she noted the hectoring tone, as though she were a child, unable to make proper decisions. She had tried since the funeral to ignore the tone, or tolerate it. She had tried to understand that it was a shorthand for kindness.
Just now, she would have relished taking her few possessions from the house, putting them in the car and driving out of Cush. But it could not be done, she would have to accept Mrs Darcy’s hospitality.
Mrs Darcy would not get into the car, insisting that she was too wet. She would walk back to her house, while Nora drove, she said.
‘I’ll be a few more minutes. I’ll follow you up,’ Nora said.
Mrs Darcy looked at her puzzled. Nora had tried to sound casual, but she had succeeded, instead, in sounding secretive.
‘I just want to collect a few things to bring home,’ she said.
Her visitor’s eyes lit on the books and photographs and the mirror resting against the wall, then she swiftly took in everything else in the room. And Nora felt that Mrs Darcy understood immediately what she was doing.
‘Don’t be long now,’ she said. ‘I’ll have the tea ready for you.’
Nora stood at the door and watched Mrs Darcy walk slowly through the wind and the rain. When she was out of sight, Nora closed the door and put her back to it, as though to prevent anyone else from entering.
It was done. In her all-embracing glance around the room, Mrs Darcy had made it seem real. Nora would leave this house and never come back again. She would never walk these lanes again and she would let herself feel no regret, only resolve never to think about it again, never allow herself to imagine that the ordinary, sweet days of the past could be recovered. It was over. She took up the few things she had collected and went out and put them in the boot of the car.
She was tempted, then, to close the door suddenly and turn her back on the place, but she was not ready for it yet. One more time, she went into the house, stood in each room, closed her eyes, opened them again and prepared herself for walking away from here. In the bathroom, she flushed the toilet one last time and waited there listening to the cistern filling up again. And then she left the house.

Mrs Darcy’s kitchen was warm. She put fresh scones on a plate with melting butter and poured the tea.
‘We were wondering how you were getting on but Bill Parle told us the night he went in that it was full of people. Maybe we should have gone in all the same, but we thought we’d leave it until after Christmas when you might like the company more.’
‘There have been a lot of visitors,’ Nora said. ‘But you know you’re welcome any time.’
‘Well, there are a lot of people who are very fond of you,’ Mrs Darcy said.
She took off her apron and sat down.
‘And we were all worried about you, that you wouldn’t come down here any more. Carmel Redmond, you know, was away when it happened and she was shocked.’
‘I know. She wrote to me,’ Nora said, ‘and then she called in.’
‘So she told us,’ Mrs Darcy said, ‘and Lily was here that day and she said that we should be looking out for you. And I used to love that day when you’d all come down and do up the house. For me, it was the beginning of the fine weather. My heart would lift when I’d see you coming.’
‘I remember one year,’ Nora said, ‘it was raining so hard you took pity on us and made us all come up here for our tea.’
‘And you know,’ Mrs Darcy said, ‘your children have the best manners. They are so well-reared, all of them.’
Nora looked out at the rain. It was tempting now to mislead Mrs Darcy, to tell her how much they loved coming down here and how they were looking forward to it in the future, but she could not do that. And she felt that Mrs Darcy understood her silence, had been watching for some clue, something said or left unsaid, to confirm her impression that Nora was going to sell the house.
‘Now what we decided’, Mrs Darcy said, ‘was that this year we’d do up the house for you. I was looking at it just now, and it could do with some patching on the galvanize, and we’ll be getting that done on the barn here anyway, and so they might as well go down to you. And we’ll take turns to do the rest of it. Now, I have a key, and we could surprise you, but Lily said that I was to ask you, and I was going to do that after Christmas. She said it was your house, and we shouldn’t be intruding.’
Nora knew that she should tell her now, but there was something too effusive and warm in Mrs Darcy’s tone which stopped her.
‘But I thought it would be lovely for you’, Mrs Darcy went on, ‘to come down and have it all done. So don’t say anything now, but let me know if you don’t want us to do it. And I’ll hold on to the key unless you want it back.’
‘No, of course not, Mrs Darcy, I’d like you to hold on to the key.’

Maybe, she thought as she drove towards Blackwater, maybe Mrs Darcy had presumed all along that she was going to sell the house, and realized that cleaning it up would increase its value; or maybe Mrs Darcy had presumed nothing, maybe Nora herself was watching everyone too closely to see what they thought of her now. But she knew she had behaved strangely in closing the gates when she had parked the car in front of the house, in seeming almost furtive when Mrs Darcy called, and in not instantly accepting or turning down her offer to help with the house.
She knitted her brow and sighed. It had been awkward and difficult, and now it was finished. She would write to Mrs Darcy and Lily Devereux and her mother and Carmel Redmond but she would not go back there again. Often in the past, when she made a decision like this, she changed her mind the next morning, but this time it was not like that, she would not change her mind.
On the road back to Enniscorthy, she began to calculate. She did not know how much the house was worth. Clearly, it would be worth more to someone in America who could not see it. She would think of a figure and write to Frank a sealed envelope - she did not want to negotiate with May Larkin - and if he offered less than she asked for, she would accept it as long as it was reasonable. She did not want to have to advertise the house in the newspaper.
The car was taxed and insured until Christmas. She had planned to give it up then, but if she sold the house, she thought, she would keep the car or buy a newer model. The house money would also pay for the black marble gravestone for Maurice that she wanted, and she would be able to rent a caravan in Curracloe for a week or two next summer. With what she had left she could buy some new clothes for herself and the girls. And then keep something for an emergency.
The house, she smiled to herself, would become like the two and sixpence a man had given Conor a few summers earlier. She could not remember which summer it was, but it was before his father was sick and it was before he really understood the value of money. Conor had given the two and sixpence to Maurice to mind for him and then all summer, every time they went to Blackwater, he drew on this money, confidently demanding a fresh instalment from his father. When they told him it was all gone, he had refused to believe them.

[< 2. > >]