第24章 TWO 1921-1928 Ralph(4)

"When I married I was quite without worldly goods. I knew I'd never marry well in Ireland, where a woman has to have breeding and background to catch a rich husband. So I worked my fingers to the bone to save my passage money to a land where the rich men aren't so fussy. All I had when I got here were a face and a figure and a better brain than women are supposed to have, and they were adequate to catch Michael Carson, who was a rich fool. He doted on me until the day he died."

"And your brother?" he prompted, thinking she was going off at a tangent. "My brother is eleven years younger than I am, which would make him fifty-four now. We're the only two still alive. I hardly know him; he was a small child when I left Galway. At present he lives in New Zealand, though if he emigrated to make his fortune he hasn't succeeded. "But last night when the station hand brought me the news that Arthur Teviot had packed his traps and gone, I suddenly thought of Padraic. Here I am, not getting any younger, with no family around me. And it occurred to me that Paddy is an experienced man of the land, without the means to own land. Why not, I thought, write to him and ask him to bring himself and his sons here? When I die he'll inherit Drogheda and Michar Limited, as he's my only living relative closer than some unknown cousins back in Ireland." She smiled. "It seems silly to wait, doesn't it? He might as well come now as later, get used to running sheep on the black soil plains, which I'm sure is quite different from sheep in New Zealand. Then when I'm gone he can step into my shoes without feeling the pinch." Head lowered, she watched Father Ralph closely.

"I wonder you didn't think of it earlier," he said. "Oh, I did. But until recently I thought the last thing I wanted was a lot of vultures waiting anxiously for me to breathe my last. Only lately the day of my demise seems a lot closer than it used to, and I feel . . . oh, I don't know. As if it might be nice to be surrounded by people of my own flesh and blood."

"What's the matter, do you think you're ill?" he asked quickly, a real concern in his eyes.

She shrugged. "I'm perfectly all right. Yet there's something ominous about turning sixty-five. Suddenly old age is not a phenomenon which will occur; it has occurred."

"I see what you mean, and you're right. It will be very pleasant for you, hearing young voices in the house."

"Oh, they won't live here," she said. "They can live in the head stockman's house down by the creek, well away from me. I'm not fond of children or their voices."

"Isn't that a rather shabby way to treat your only brother, Mary? Even if your ages are so disparate?"

"He'll inherit-let him earn it," she said crudely.

Fiona Cleary was delivered of another boy six days before Meggie's ninth birthday, counting herself lucky nothing but a couple of miscarriages had happened in the interim. At nine Meggie was old enough to be a real help. Fee herself was forty years old, too old to bear children without a great deal of strength-sapping pain. The child, named Harold, was a delicate baby; for the first time anyone could ever remember, the doctor came regularly to the house.

And as troubles do, the Cleary troubles multiplied. The aftermath of the war was not a boom, but a rural depression. Work became increasingly harder to get.

Old Angus MacWhirter delivered a telegram to the house one day just as they were finishing tea, and Paddy tore it open with trembling hands; telegrams never held good news. The boys gathered round, all save Frank, who took his cup of tea and left the table. Fee's eyes followed him, then turned back as Paddy groaned. "What is it?" she asked.

Paddy was staring at the piece of paper as if it held news of a death. "Archibald doesn't want us."

Bob pounded his fist on the table savagely; he had been so looking forward to going with his father as an apprentice shearer, and Archibald's was to have been his first pen. "Why should he do a dirty thing like this to us, Daddy? We were due to start there tomorrow."

"He doesn't say why, Bob. I suppose some scab contractor undercut me." "Oh, Paddy!" Fee sighed.

Baby Hal began to cry from the big bassinet by the stove, but before Fee could move Meggie was up; Frank had come back inside the door and was standing, tea in hand, watching his father narrowly. "Well, I suppose I'll have to go and see Archibald," Paddy said at last. "It's too late now to look for another shad to replace his, but I do think he owes me a better explanation than this. We'll just have to hope we can find work milking until Willoughby's shed starts in July."

Meggie pulled a square of white towel from the huge pile sitting by the stove warming and spread it carefully on the work table, then lifted the crying child out of the wicker crib. The Cleary hair glittered sparsely on his little skull as Meggie changed his diaper swiftly, and as efficiently as her mother could have done.

"Little Mother Meggie," Frank said, to tease her. "I'm not!" she answered indignantly. "I'm just helping Mum." "I know," he said gently. "You're a good girl, wee Meggie." He tugged at the white taffeta bow on the back of her head until it hung lopsided. Up came the big grey eyes to his face adoringly; over the nodding head of the baby she might have been his own age, or older. There was a pain in his chest, that this should have fallen upon her at an age when the only baby she ought to be caring for was Agnes, now relegated forgotten to the bedroom. If it wasn't for her and their mother, he would have been gone long since. He looked at his father sourly, the cause of the new life creating such chaos in the house. Served him right, getting done out of his shed.