Bill Kavanagh lived with his wife in a small farmhouse at the end of an unmade road. It was one mile from the heap of chippings that marked the limit of the County Council's jurisdiction. The overgrown shrubs, in what had once been a garden, kept the light from the windows, and access to the back door was by a track through the undergrowth.
Bill's wife was a slight woman in her mid-sixties, who wore her grey hair drawn back off her face into a bun. She had gentle features and her eyes were warm. Despite her gentleness she had a strength and dignity that were evident to the few people who met her. She was seen only once a year in public, when she took a taxi from her door to the town, to get the bus to Dublin to fly for a holiday to meet her sister in London.
Bill set the twenty-four acres that went with the house to one of the farmers from the stretch of good land that ran in a strip across the hill lower down. The farmer came up the hill every day to herd his cattle, and always knocked on the door to know if they wanted anything brought up the following day. Tea was always offered and when it was accepted conversation was general - the weather, shortage of fodder or the price of cattle. Bill's wife always enquired for the children in her own kind way, but never by name. She would make conversation as she walked, with a slight stoop, slowly to and fro across the stone-flagged kitchen between the range, the dresser and the table. When the tea was made she would sit at the end of the scrubbed-top table with her hands in her lap, looking towards the stove, while Bill and the tenant drank tea and discussed the finer points of farming.
Bill was the youngest son off a smallholding near Clough. When he left school there was nothing for him at home so, like many a young man of his age, he had taken the boat to England.
For twenty years he worked as a storeman in a factory, and it was there he met his wife. She worked in the office, and used to go down to the store in the late afternoon every day, to collect the duplicate dockets for the machine room. She was shy at first and said no more than "thank you" on her daily visit. Bill too was shy, but over the years they built up a repertoire of conversation until their afternoon meetings became as natural as the weather.
Things might have gone on like this for ever had it not been for a firm's Christmas party. Bill and his wife met there one year for the first time away from the counter. Their shyness returned, but the years of daily conversation stood to them. They knew each other better than they realised, and within a year they were married.
Both continued to work, but, before they had time to make a home of their tiny flat a bachelor uncle of Bill's died, leaving him the small farm on the side of a hill in Ireland.
At first, the reaction of both to the news was mixed. For Bill twenty years in England had been a long time, but an opportunity to return to his roots stirred feelings deep inside him. His wife had never been outside England; in fact she had never been more than ten or fifteen miles from home, apart from a holiday with her parents to the coast.
She had always been curious about Bill's family, but had met only his older brother who came over for the wedding. She had a sketchy image of Bill's home and early life from his occasional colourful descriptions of childhood threshings and Christmases. On Bill's return from his annual trip home, while his parents were alive, she would try to prod him into talking about his visit. She soon realised, however, that the less she prodded the more she heard.
Shortly after the news of the farm arrived, Bill became withdrawn and silent. His wife tried to get him to talk things over. One morning at breakfast she said, "I think we should go."
"Go where?" he asked.
"To Ireland," she replied.
Bill fell silent again. As he left for work he said, "You're only trying to please me."
"I'm not," she said, and he was gone.
At tea that evening he was noticeably lighter.
"Do you really mean what you said about going home?" he asked.
"I do," she answered.
He knew she meant it because she said it, but he wanted to be assured. He knew too what a big step it would be for her. She had never lived in the country and they had often laughed at her ignorance of animals and country life. "We could go for a holiday and let you see it," said Bill.
"I don't need to see it," she said kindly. "It's right for us to go."
Her first sight of the farm was on a cold, wet October day. Bill's brother drove them from the bus. As their journey slowed across the unmade road, they could see the house above them. In her early forties she was starting a new life.
Strangely the adjustment was greater for Bill than for his wife. They both missed the company at work, but housekeeping was more familiar to her than farming was to him. Despite the fact that he had grown up on a farm, he had never shown interest. In fact, work at home had always been a chore to be done before going to school or when he came home. Now he was faced with twenty-four acres of ground to make a living to keep himself and a wife.
At first she suffered the pain of intense loneliness. She saw nobody from one end of the day to the other, apart from Bill, or perhaps the postman bringing a letter from her sister from some remote part of the world where she travelled as companion to a wealthy lady.
Her loneliness was soon tolerable and they both fell into a routine - Bill outside and his wife in the house and garden. The remoteness of the house meant that few people called, but those that did she received courteously.
Fridays became a ritual when Bill went to town on his bike to bring home the groceries. It was an easy cycle, the three miles more or less down the hill the whole way; but coming home was a day's work which he relieved with a routine of calls. He stopped at three houses on the way home. It was his weekly contact with the outside world, and the cups of tea and local news sustained him on the long push up hill. People were glad to see Bill calling on Fridays, and, in the harsh heart of winter, they missed him if he didn't call. At first they used to enquire for his wife, but, since no one ever saw her, they built a mystique around her that enquiry would have dispelled.
If Bill had a weekly routine, the scale of his wife's routine was longer. Every year, when her sister was on holiday in England, she left the farm for two weeks to stay with her at her employer's house in London.
The years passed and the pace slowed. Bill found it hard to make ends meet so he set the land. His wife, who had all she could do in the house, let the garden go.
Bill became morose with so much time on his hands, and he looked forward to the tenant's daily visit. When he was particularly down, his wife would say, "It's not long till Friday," for she knew what his weekly trip to town and especially his calls on the way back meant to him. He always arrived home tired but in good spirits, and regaled her with the news of the neighbourhood and the concerns of the countryside.
One Friday, as she worked her routine of chores that she kept especially for the hours when Bill was gone, she heard a strange car at the gate. She knew immediately. She was as sure as if she had heard it on the news. Bill had collapsed between the town and his first cup of tea.
It was a big enough funeral, for Bill was well liked in the area and there was a big family connection. Most of the mourners were seeing his wife for the first time. At the graveside she responded to each "sorry for your trouble" with "thank you" and a firm handshake. She had rehearsed the scene in her mind more than once in her hillside kitchen, but the pain in her heart was unrehearsed.
A week to the day after the funeral, she left the lonely farmhouse two suitcases to make her last journey to the airport at Dublin. Three years later she died and, at her own request, she was brought back and buried with Bill in the graveyard at Clough.