'Farewell to Mullingar', by Caroline Smith
“Have you met Mrs. James?” asked Bill. Geoff’s stocky, round-faced friend from St. Andrew’s College in Dublin held open the farmyard door and waved Emily through. Geoff strode ahead, flicking on the lights and sending the spiders scurrying. “Yep, good old Mrs. James,” Bill laughed. “I’d say she’s about a hundred.”
Emily, fresh off the ferry from Holyhead, and intrigued by her new surroundings, stepped into a cluttered hallway littered with musty work clothes. To the right, just inside the door, hung a frightening pair of shears and an instrument she later learned was used for castrating bullocks. Along one wall was a massive deep freeze. Above it hung a large wooden cut-out of a Hereford steer and a yellowed calendar.
At the end of the hall was the kitchen. There they found Mrs. James at the table with a cup of tea, country and western music blaring from the radio and a pot of stew bubbling furiously on the stove. The smell of burning turf, or peat, filled the air. As they entered, Mrs. James stood up and stirred the pot, greeting them with a wave of her hand and a croaky hello.
There had been no Mrs. James the last time Emily, on a break from a college semester program in London, had visited the family in Kildare three years before. Henry, Geoff’s father, had been alive, and a woman came in by the day to cook and clean. Emily had spent a quiet New Year on the farm with a houseful of farming men, helping with the chores and sampling hearty meals of freshly killed goose, pheasant, rabbit, and once, memorably, tripe.
Here, in Mullingar, County Westmeath, on a farm Geoff, just 21, had recently inherited from his godfather, a single man with no heirs, Emily was interested to meet this pale, white-haired, long-faced woman with her wrinkled cheeks and twinkling blue eyes. A navy cardigan hung over her bony shoulders, fastened by one button at the neck. Her voice was breathy and confidential, each sentence ending in a raspy chuckle. She did look, as Bill suggested, “about a hundred,” though she confessed, one afternoon, that she was only 60.
Geoff’s farm stood at the end of a long, rutted drive off the Ballinea Road, just after the turning for the bridge. A pair of tall yew trees shadowed the road gate, and off to the right was a small, walled cemetery. Two cattle grids rattled a welcome to approaching cars. If Tibor, the yellow Labrador, Toby, the border collie, and Spot, a one-eyed, limping black scoundrel, were near enough to hear, they bounded out to greet all visitors.
The house, three stories tall with four chimneys and a square, glass-enclosed entry hall jutting off the front, stood in the midst of an overgrown meadow. Off to the left were a dozen knotty apple trees and a patch of windblown berry bushes – the remains of an orchard. To the right, at the top of the drive, was a paved yard with a clothesline, a pair of rusty diesel pumps, and a line of machinery sheds.
That first hot, July night Emily stayed in the “guest room” across the hall from Mrs. James’ room, struggling with a stiff, awkward bolster and a lumpy duvet. The bedclothes smelled musty and Emily wondered when they had last been changed, but somehow it didn’t bother her. Still smarting following a romantic disappointment the winter before, she kept her light on late into the night, clutching a penguin paperback and reading in fits and starts as her eyes grew heavy.
Geoff was the youngest and only unmarried son in the Patterson family—he had stayed with her parents in New Jersey on a U.S. adventure tour a couple of years earlier—so she and he had begun corresponding, especially since his father’s death in February of that year. He was handsome and strapping, but Emily didn’t know quite what to think when he appeared in her room around 2:00 am and suggested they spend the night together. “What?” Emily asked in surprise, to which he replied, “You’re a pretty girl….”
That first night Emily sent him away, but the following day he invited her to share his grander quarters at the back of the house, and she acquiesced. From there they could hear the dogs whining in the yard and the peacocks scuttling and scratching on the corrugated roof of the tractor shed. This was Geoff’s new castle, and though she had not had it in her mind when she took a detour to Ireland following a trip with friends to London and Paris earlier in the month, she couldn’t turn down the opportunity to be the queen, if only for a little while. After a night with him, she had found herself besotted by his virility and earthy charm, and felt more than a smattering of motherly compassion.
During Emily’s week-long visit, she saw little of Mrs. James. She was always off doing laundry, tidying bathrooms, or she and Geoff were out hauling hay, or chasing cattle, or driving into Mullingar to pick up the Irish Times. By Saturday she was gone, and Allison and Geoff joined Bill and Brian, two of his Dublin friends, for a day of water-skiing at nearby Lough Ennell. Wary of the daredevil feats of spirited lads, Emily watched from the shore, and there by the lake they all enjoyed the last of Mrs. James’ tasty fruit flan.
One afternoon, however, circumstances brought Mrs. James and Emily together. She and Geoff had just finished lunch, and Geoff had left the table to tend to some tractor repairs with Barney, the hired man. She could hear them working in the yard, tools clinking on cement in the brilliant sunshine. The cobbles in the kitchen floor were sweating, and outside, Geoff had rolled up his shirtsleeves.
Suddenly Mrs. James appeared from the pantry and began to clear the table, humming softly to herself. “I’m making a new pot of tea,” she announced. “Have some with me.” She liked to talk, I discovered, and Emily found that she liked to listen – especially when the conversation concerned Geoff and the rest of the Patterson clan.
Henry, whom everyone referred to as “the boss,” had been very kind to her. At Allen House, in Kildare, she had nursed him for four months after a stroke left him partially paralysed. There, she said, confined to his bed with a view of the pasture, he had even proposed to her. After his wife, Pauline, had died when Greg was just six, Henry had spoiled the boys, especially Geoff. Cedric, the eldest, was rough and brash, and Eileen, his wife, was “a slut from the North.” The middle son, blonde, mild-mannered Gavin, had been saved by a good woman. Geoff, the youngest—she drew in her breath in mock horror when she mentioned his name—who knows what would become of him…”You’d better watch that one,” she warned.”
This was all news to Emily, whose parents had been friendly with the Pattersons since the early 1960s. On a trip to Ireland to trace her mother’s Irish ancestors—and her ancestral home, Drummond House, which by a fluke had ended up in the hands of another family—they had run into Pauline Patterson, collecting her boys from the village school near the churchyard in Carbury. She had invited them home to tea at Allen House, and Henry had greeted them warmly, declaring, “Ah, the rightful heirs have arrived!”
On two trips to Ireland in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, following Pauline’s untimely death from breast cancer, Emily and her family had visited the Pattersons in Carbury, and kept up a friendly correspondence. At one point, according to her mother, Henry had remarked to her, “Wouldn’t it be nice if Emily could marry one of the boys…” But when Emily mentioned this to Geoff much later, he laughed and denied it. Life had carried on, as it does, and of course that never happened.
Mrs. James herself was from Liverpool – a fan of the original “Silver Beatles.” But her daughter had married an Irishman from County Meath, and when Frank died…. Frank had only been dead two years. One evening he had returned from watching a rugby match in Wrexham, tired but perfectly well. The next morning: “Frank? No answer. Frank…?” He was stone cold dead in the bed beside her. She had moved to Ireland to be near her only daughter.
Every Tuesday around lunchtime, Geoff drove to Mrs. James’ daughter’s house in Derrinturn to collect her. At teatime on Friday, he took her home. This way, she was safely out of his hair on weekends, and he could conduct himself as he pleased.
Mrs. James was washing the dishes when Emily went out to help Geoff bring hay bales into the barn. He drove the hay-lifting machine while Emily stood on the trailer and received the bales, arranging them in rows, according to his instructions.
That hot afternoon, after Geoff and Emily had taken three successive loads into the hayrick, painstakingly pushing each bale into place and stacking them for winter use, Geoff was showing signs of fatigue. He stretched out on a row of bales and Emily went into the kitchen in search of something to drink. In a moment Mrs. James had brewed another pot of tea and sent Emily back to the hayrick with the silver service, a package of ginger biscuits, and two china cups.
For half an hour, Geoff and Emily lay in the hay, drinking tea and munching biscuits, listening to the flies droning in the rafters and the swish of cattle tails. He told her he missed his father, but strongly believed he had gone on to “better things.” Then, his strength renewed, Geoff announced he would do the next load by himself. Emily headed back to the kitchen with the tea tray.
When she entered the kitchen, Mrs. James was loading soiled tea towels into a boiling cauldron on the stove. Tibor lay at her feet, panting foolishly. It was then that Mrs. James turned to Emily and asked, in a conspiratorial whisper, whether she liked to have a “nip” in the afternoon.
At first Emily wasn’t quite sure what she meant. Then Mrs. James leaned closer to her and breathed, “I have a bottle upstairs. He doesn’t approve.” Pleased at the thought of “pulling one over” on the disapproving Geoff, as soon as Mrs. James was finished in the kitchen Emily shewed Tibor into the yard and followed her up the stairs.
Mrs. James kept a flask-sized bottle of Bell’s scotch whiskey in her top dresser drawer, along with her toothbrush and a tattered copy of The News of the World. As Emily seated herself on the bed, Mrs. James poured her a shot in a coffee mug she had nicked from Geoff’s varied assortment. It was a chipped, cream-coloured china cup, and on it were the words: “Old Photographers Never Die, They Just Go Out of Focus.” She had noticed several others from the set in the kitchen cabinet.
Mrs. James brought out a handful of photographs she had collected over the years—prints of varying sizes and qualities, mostly of her daughter, her late husband Frank, a granddaughter, and her sister who had died in Liverpool. The sun shone brilliantly through the end window and they whiled away the minutes sipping whiskey and talking of nothing in particular, listening to the far-off grinding of the tractor.
Suddenly the sound of banging roused them from their quiet chatter. They hurried into the hall to see what it was. A small bird had flown in through the open top of a hall window. It was flying back and forth, back and forth, hitting its head against a lower pane of glass in a frantic effort to free itself. After several clumsy attempts, Emily and Mrs. James managed to drive it out. Emily watched it winging its way across the meadow and into the orchard, where it alighted on an upper branch of a twisted apple tree.
Realising the time, Mrs. James and Emily exchanged confidential glances. She hurried back to her work in the laundry and Emily joined Geoff in the hayrick, where he was busy stacking bales.
Three days later, Geoff drove Emily to the airport in Dublin to catch a flight back to New Jersey. Sweet with the nectar of new love and grasping one of Geoff’s tweed caps, which he had taken off and given to her in a parting gesture, Emily gave him a tearful hug and promised to keep in touch. From America she phoned him from time to time to check on him, and that Christmas she sent him a dark green chamois shirt to keep him warm in the winter. She received a letter or two in his bold, boyish scrawl.
When, a little more than a year later, Emily returned to Ireland to take up a graduate course in Anglo-Irish literature at Trinity College, Dublin, she learned from Geoff’s brother Gavin that Geoff had gone to Cirencester in England for a year to study agriculture. He may have had it in his mind to come back to Mullingar after his course and, in the familiar manner of the Irish ascendancy, increase his fortunes by marrying the girl from the farm across the road.
While staying for a weekend at his brother Gavin’s farm in Carbury that winter, Emily surmised that there was animosity between the Patterson brothers. Beth, Gavin’s wife, told her why. Evidently some years earlier, before Henry died, Cedric, Gavin, and Geoff had become involved in some dispute over land, or something of the sort, and somehow Geoff had managed to shoot Gavin in the arm with a rifle. They never forgave him, and the brothers had been estranged ever since.
The next time Emily visited Geoff’s farm in Churchtown, she came in the late spring, after her course in Dublin had ended, with the friend of a friend who had invited her on a fishing trip to Lough Ennell. Before heading back to Dublin, she stopped in the farmyard and found herself staring wistfully at Geoff’s house and barns – so different, but in many ways the same, as she remembered them. She had an urge to check on the dogs.
When she looked in the hay barn she saw that Tibor was suckling four pups, with Toby standing proudly by. Spot was nowhere to be seen. Two ragged tea towels hung from the clothesline in the side yard. The front meadow was overrun with buttercups and the little orchard was tangled with crab grass and littered with rotten apples from the previous year.
That afternoon Emily ran into Barney outside the machinery shed. He was running water in the cattle trough and filling the tractor with diesel. She greeted him warmly. “What,” she asked, “has become of Mrs. James? I’d like to see her.”
Barney was a man of few words and had a heavy accent, but Irish memories are long, and stories are for the telling. Apparently, shortly after Emily had left the summer before, Geoff had decided that Mrs. James’ services were no longer needed. She had gone back to live with her daughter on a full-time basis. After several weeks, however, she had made a nuisance of herself by nipping into the gin bottle and smoking in her bed.
Next, she went to work as a live-in housekeeper for a widowed doctor in Trim. But after four months there, she had ended up in the hospital in Dublin with bleeding ulcers, greatly aggravated, the doctors said, by her consumption of alcohol. The doctors decided to operate, but her heart wasn’t strong enough. She had died on the operating table.
No Irish story is simple, and in the end there were two deaths. The doctor for whom Mrs. James had worked was driving to her funeral that winter when his car skidded on the icy surface of the Timahoe Road in a blinding snowstorm, crashing headlong into the back of a lorry. He died instantly.
Some three decades later, from her home in London, Emily did a Google search for Geoff’s name and came across a reference to a company called Patterson Fencing, in Mullingar. Looking closer, however, she saw a more recent item. It was an obituary notice for Geoffrey Patterson, Churchtown, Ballinea, who had died on 3rd October, 2012, aged 51. The notice listed the names of his brothers and their wives and those of his two children and their mother, who had a French-sounding name. The obituary referred to his many friends and relations, mentioned his “sad end,” and asked for any memorial contributions to be given to an organisation called “Aware,” which Emily quickly discovered was an Irish mental health charity.
Emily never learned the exact details of Geoff’s passing, as a letter she sent to Gavin and Beth Patterson was never answered, but she learned from their daughter, Emma, who was a Facebook friend, that Geoff had, tragically, taken his own life. Why did he do it? Was he mentally ill? She was shocked and saddened, but didn’t want to pry. How different things would have been, she thought, had Geoff’s mother lived.
When Emily learned about these deaths, first Mrs. James and much later Geoff, a picture of that hot July afternoon, the dusty upstairs bedroom, and the trapped bird, banging its head over and over against the window glass, came into her mind. She was also reminded of the story Geoff had told of a neighbouring farmer named Dick, who had been found dead in a field with a smile on his face. She gave a silent sob and, in a dream, moved slowly down the drive, crossed the cattle grid, and turned her back on Mullingar.