Read No Enemy but Time for Free Online Page B

taste. ‘Mine’s better,’ she thought. ‘But I can never go into my kitchen and cook for my husband. I can’t stand and gossip with Dadda’s old cousin and make a fruit cake from Mammy’s recipe. I’m Mrs Arbuthnot and my whole life is changed for ever. Thank God I love him, or I’d be out of this house and home before you could say “knife”. And I can’t talk like that any more either.’
    â€˜Phil,’ she said softly. ‘Let’s go on that tour. I want to see our bedroom.’
    Only it wasn’t theirs. It was a big room with a high, moulded ceiling and a draped bed that stood in the middle of it like a throne. The surfaces were bare; the mahogany gleamed with fresh polish. His mother had left nothing of herself behind. No photographs, no knick-knacks gathered over the years. But it was still her room.
    â€˜Mother didn’t change things much,’ he said. ‘The room could do with a turn-out.’
    â€˜Blue is a dark colour,’ Eileen said at last. ‘It could be prettier a pale shade. A new carpet maybe …’
    Anything to take the presence of the Hon. Blanche Arbuthnot of Dankelly Castle, Co. Louth, out of the room where Eileen was expected to lie in bed with her son.
    There was a conference going on in the kitchen. Tea had been made and a big cake like the one served in the library was cut up in thick slices on the table. Lily was holding forth, her pinched face sallow with indignation. The expression ‘white-livered’ was an apt description of her nature.
    â€˜And there she was, sittin’ there playing the high an’ mighty madam, cocked up in Mrs Arbuthnot’s chair. Eight o’clock please, Lily …’ She mimicked Eileen’s voice. ‘Mrs Gerard was right to pack her bag and go. If ye’d seen the airs and graces of her!’
    She drank her tea and held out the cup for one of the under-maids to fill. She was a tyrant to the girls. Doyle, who tipped his tea into a saucer, looked up over the rim of it.
    â€˜I mind her father,’ he said. ‘Dirty as the auld pigs he tended to, not a penny to bless himself, till his auld skinflint uncle died and he got a hold of the place. He married a bit o’ money though. Sure an’ they must be pleased seein’ the geddle come up in the world like she has.’
    He wasn’t a malicious man. The searing jealousy of the women didn’t affect him. He liked a good gossip and knew something about everybody in the area. He was the same age as old Jack Ryan and well remembered the smell of the pigs he brought with him into the pub of an evening. Jack had been his uncle’s heir. He was a rich farmer now, while Doyle was still dirt poor and broke his back in the Arbuthnots’ garden with only a lazy boy to help him. If he resented anything it was Jack Ryan’s meanness. If he saw Doyle in the pub he’d slide out of buying him a drink.
    Mary sat with her elbows on the kitchen table. Her arms were plump and mottled, fat hands cradled the teacup.
    â€˜They even brought Father Dowd to her,’ she announced. ‘Divil a bit of good it did. She ran off breakin’ my poor cousin’s heart.’ She slipped in her relationship to the new mistress with a mixture of satisfaction and gloom. It didn’t please Lily or the other maids to hear her claim superiority over them.
    â€˜Ye must be shamed out of yer life, Mrs Donovan,’ Bernadette piped up from her corner of the table. She was next in line to Lily, five years older than the girl who had come to Riverstown and had the whole world in her pocket, so far as Bernadette could see. All that money, and the fine clothes on her, and a gentleman for a husband. She was damned to hell, of course, she comforted herself. Marrying outside her faith.
    â€˜Ah, well.’ Mary decided privately that that Bernadette needed putting in her place. ‘I’ve dinner to get