The Woman of the House

By Richard Murphy

In memory of my grandmother Lucy Mary Ormsby whose home was in the west of Ireland.

1873-1958

On a patrician evening in Ireland

I was born in the guest-room: she delivered me.

May I deliver her from the cold hand

Where now she lies, with a brief elegy?

It was her house where we spent holidays,

With candles to bed, and ghostly stories:

In the lake of her heart we were islands

Where the wild asses galloped in the wind.

Her mind was a vague and log-warmed yarn

Spun between sleep and acts of kindliness:

She fed our feelings as dew feeds the grass

On April nights, and our mornings were green.

And those happy days, when in spite of rain

We’d motor west where the salmon-boats tossed,

She would sketch on the pier among the pots

Waves in a sunset, or the rising moon.

Indian-meal porridge and brown soda-bread,

Boiled eggs and buttermilk, honey from gorse,

Far more than we wanted she always offered

In a heart-surfeit: she ate little herself.

Mistress of mossy acres and unpaid rent,

She crossed the walls on foot to feed the sick:

Though frugal cousins frowned on all she spent

People had faith in her healing talent.

She bandaged the wounds that poverty caused

In the house that famine labourers built,

Gave her hands to cure impossible wrong

In a useless way, and was loved for it.

Hers were the fruits of a family tree:

A china clock, the Church’s calendar,

Gardeners polite, governesses plenty,

And incomes waiting to be married for.

How the feckless fun would flicker her face

Reading our future by cards at the fire,

Rings and elopements, love-letters, old lace,

A signet of jokes to seal our desire.

‘It was sad about Maud, poor Maud!’ she’d sigh

To think of the friend she lured and teased

Till she married the butler. ‘Starved to death,

No service either by padre or priest.’

Cholera raged in the Residency:

‘They kept my uncle alive on port.’

Which saved him to slaughter a few sepoys

And retire to Galway in search of sport.

The pistol that lost an ancestor’s duel,

The hoof of the horse that carried him home

To be stretched on chairs in the drawing room,

Hung by the Rangoon prints and the Crimean medal.

Lever and Lover, Somerville and Ross

Have fed the same worm as Blackstone and Gibbon,

The mildew has spotted Clarissa’s spine

And soiled the Despatches of Wellington.

Beside her bed lay an old Bible that

Her Colonel Rector husband used to read,

And a new Writers’ and Artists’ Year-book

To bring a never-printed girlhood back.

The undeveloped thoughts died in her head,

But from her heart, through the people she loved

Images sprang, and intuitions lived,

More than the mere sense of what she said.

At last, her warmth made ashes of the trees

Ancestors planted, and she was removed

To hospital, to die there, certified.

Her house, but not her kindness, has found heirs.

Compulsory comforts penned her limping soul:

With all she uttered they smiled and agreed.

When she summoned the chauffeur, no one obeyed,

But a chrome hearse was ready for nightfall.

‘Order the car for nine o’clock tonight!

I must get back, get back. They’re expecting me.

I’ll bring the spiced beef and the nuts and fruit.

Come home and I’ll brew you lime-flower tea!

‘The house in flames and nothing is insured!

Send for the doctor, let the horses go.

The dogs are barking again. The cow

Calved in the night? What is that great singed bird?

‘I don’t know who you are, but you’ve kind eyes.

My children are abroad and I’m alone.

They left me in this goal. You all tell lies.

You’re not my people. My people have gone.’

Now she’s spent everything: the golden waste

Is washed away, silent her heart’s hammer.

The children overseas no longer need her,

They are like aftergrass to her harvest.

People she loved were those who worked the land

Whom the land satisfied more than wisdom:

They’ve gone, a tractor ploughs where horses strained,

Sometimes sheep occupy their roofless room.

Through our inheritance all things have come,

The form, the means, all by our family.

The good of being alive was given through them,

We ourselves limit that legacy.

The bards in their beds once beat out ballads

Under leaky thatch to sea-birds,

But she in the long ascendancy of rain

Served biscuits on a tray with ginger wine.

Time can never relax like this again,

She in her phaeton looking for folk-lore,

He writing sermons in the library

Till lunch, then fishing all the afternoon.

On a wet winter evening in Ireland

I let go her hand, and we buried her

In the family earth beside her husband.

Only to think of her, now warms my mind.