But do you not have a job? I said.
He'd had a job in maintenance in the computer factory but he'd given it up, he told me when we went inside. I looked closely into his face while he talked. His nose was bigger than I remembered. Bulbous, even. But his eyes were as clear as ever. I could remember them looking out of his fat baby face.
A few of the lads are musicians like myself, he was saying, and if we were playing at a wedding or that, we wouldn't be able to go into work. So I jacked the job in. It didn't pay much after tax, anyway. And I wanted to try selective breeding.
What's that?
You buy pedigree stock in. Then you sell on the young.
Oh, it is! he said. There's great money in it. I'm raising the capital the moment. Annie's getting tired of being on her feet all day in at oul shop, and sure her car nearly takes what she earns. But we're bit stuck at the moment till I get my scheme up and running.
He made tea.
At last, I felt able to look around. I was sitting beside the little square table, under the shelf that held the radio, the Sacred Heart and its red lamp, and the big tin clock. There were biscuits ready on tray, and the good cups. Flowered ones. That's what my uncle would have done for a guest, too.
Are these Uncle Ned's things? I asked. How could they be?
Daddy used to come out here and just mess around the house, Danny said, because the land was let in his day. He never changed anything. And we've left the place much the same. I realised with a start that a thing I thought was a cushion on the chair beside the range was an enormous cat. Annie's, said Danny, following my look. Furriskey by name. The laziest, greediest cat in Ireland. Cat - amach leat! Lil says he understands Irish. The stepmother wouldn't let the old man say anything in Irish, did you know that? She said it put people off her nursing home. He used to speak Irish to me when her back was turned but I could hardly understand him.
I didn't understand him anyway, I said.
Fair enough, he said, vaguely. But he was glad I was playing the old music, the da was. I played at his funeral. It was packed.
I'm out of date, I thought to myself, almost panicking. I thought Danny and he were enemies . . .
We sat and drank our tea. The range was a new oil-fired one, but it squatted where the old one had been, with the dishcloth airing on it in the same place. The lino on the floor was the same kind of lino. The home-made wooden bench I was sitting on I'd sat on as a little girl. It had seemed to me when I was a child that there was an invisible point of peace in the middle of this room, and that everything in the room bent in towards that peace. The new things made no difference to that sense of being in a benign space.
Danny got a dusty pair of rubber boots out from under the stairs for me and we went out to look at the fields. He held the first gate open for me.
You look like you're showing off the country fashions, he said. I never thought that anyone belonging to the Burkes would look like that.
Well, there you are, I said - limply, because I was still feeling the impact of the word he'd used. Belonging.
A few cattle came towards us, ponderous and swaying.
What long eyelashes they have! I said.
We don't talk much about their eyelashes around here, he said, laughing at me.
He took a long time to untwist the bits of wire, or unknot the lengths of baler twine that held his gates together. It wasn't picturesque, the farm. The fields were rutted and thistled. But still, the new foliage on the untidy hawthorn hedges shone emeraldgreen and the air was wonderfully fresh and light.
You must be very grateful to the old man for leaving the place to you.
He didn't leave it to me, Danny said. He left it to the stepmother. She put it up for auction.
I thought it was the family place! I said. I thought it kind of had to go from man to man. Isn't that why Ned left it to Da? And how did you buy it, anyway? Is it not worth a lot of money to a builder?
We were picking our way back across the trampled muddy laneway where his cattle came for feed.
I got it at a very fair price, Danny said. There were no other bidders at the auction. They all know around here that this is the Burkes' place. It was always the Burkes' place. Before the Famine, even, it was in our family.
I'll take you out to Shore Road, he said.
We drove towards the sea. We rattled and whined down the hill in his ancient mudspattered Ford, past Bates's shop and the pub, and along the row of cottages facing the shingle bank where the river spread out into the incoming waves. I got myself ready, and then gathered my courage and glanced at the end cottage. There was nothing to see. Whoever lived there now wasn't like us. There were flowering plants in both the windows, and white blinds, and a glass porch had been built on to the front door.
Half the hill behind the cottages was striped with new houses in geometric ranks. The other half looked for a moment as if it were covered in litter. Then I realised that those were graves - that the old enclosure there had been behind the church had spread up the hill.
She's up there, Danny said. Somewhere in the first row I believe. Sean's in Kilcrennan - they've a special children's bit in the big graveyard. And the oul fella is buried up there, too.
You're not serious! In the same grave as Mammy?
Oh, yes. In Ireland you'd never be buried with the second wife.
And where's Ned?
Ned is out near our place. They opened the old graveyard specially for him because he was a hero in the Small Farmers.
We'll leave it, I said. We won't bother going up there.
I walked a few steps to the end of the road. I closed my eyes and listened to the sound I knew like my own breathing - the river's near, shallow rippling, and the distant chop of the small waves further down the beach. There was an asphalt car park where the thick, green turf and the bunkerlike holes of cold sand used to be.
We'll go back, I said to Danny when I walked back to the car. I'll look for her grave some other time.
That evening I sat at the table in the little kitchen in the familiar smell of boiling bacon, and helped Annie with the Brussels sprouts. I looked at my sister-in-law. Her face was a girl's, except for a deep nicks between the brows.
You look so young, Annie! I said.
Why wouldn't I? Annie said. Haven't I had a great life, thanks to God? Like - for Him to send us Lilian, after we'd waited so long! I've been blessed so I have, in every way. But I put a fierce lot weight on with the IRT. Did you have any trouble with the change of life, Kathleen?
I don't think I'm having it yet, I said. I haven't dried up, anyway.
You didn't bump into your stepmother down the town, did you? she said. You wouldn't know her, but she'd know you - she's not that much older than you and you always stood out, with the hair and all, and being so wild. Kathy Bates they call her around here. You know? That Stephen King one where she won't let the fella get out of the bed? There's a rumour going around that she was cruel to your da - that she made him go to bed after his tea.
At least she didn't have seven or eight children for him, if you count the ones that died, I said. Like my poor mother.
Sure she was a trained nurse, Annie said. If she didn't know how to mind herself, who would? Your Da got very popular - did you know that? He used to run an Irish class and it was mobbed. He used to call in to me in the shop on the way back from it. Half of Sinn Fein was in it but so were lots of different people from the town. I was sorry for him, going home to that one. He was well punished for marrying again.
She paused and then she said, and how about yourself? A catch like you? And such lovely clothes! Well, I don't really know, I said awkwardly. I don't really know what happened, to tell you the truth. If I'd stayed in Ireland I suppose I would have married ...I've been looking around since I came back this time and there's a kind of Irish couple where he trains the GAA team and she's big and good-looking and shy and they have three red-haired little boys all wriggling away in the back of the Toyota. I wish I'd been that woman -
She put down her knife.
Is it joking me you are? Sure - you could never have been like that, Kathleen! It wasn't in you! Taking the mother-in-law out to tea in a hotel every Sunday. Washing the boys' gear. Your husband out every night and talking about football games non-stop as if they were life and death - you'd have gone crazy! I might have settled for that if I hadn't met Danny. But you, Kathleen! You were always going to get out of Kilcrennan. The very first thing you ever said to me, when I was thirteen years old and I'd never met anyone like you, was that you were saving up to run away.
Nuala O'Faolain 2001. www.penguin.co.uk
My Dream of You will be reviewed in The Irish Times books pages next Saturday Biography