Fury continued to be uncontactable by phone. If Hanna wanted to speak to him she had to drive over to the house, where he and Dan were now working from seven in the morning six days a week. When he wanted to speak to her he rang her cell phone and hung up before she could answer. She complained but he just laughed at her. Sometimes, remembering her first conversation with Brian, she wondered if Fury was illiterate or just canny. Whichever it was, his determination not to put anything in writing extended to texts. That was no way to do business, he told her, or to have a civil conversation either. Couldn’t she see from her phone who it was that had called? And, since she knew where he’d be, couldn’t she come over and talk to him?
She drove over early one morning when the dew was still on the fields. Dan was up on a scaffold, completing the walls of the new extension. The Divil, who was curled on the passenger seat of Fury’s van, was used to her now; when Hanna approached the gate he didn’t even lift his head. Inside the house, Fury was considering Maggie’s dresser, which still stood in its corner by the fireplace. As Hanna stepped across the threshold she drew in her breath. The glass in the dresser doors had been cleaned and polished and the drawers, which had been jammed half-open at angles, now fitted neatly as they should. The contents of the shelves, including Maggie’s old buttermilk measuring cup, had been removed and carefully placed in a box in the corner. And both the interior and exterior of the dresser had been given a new coat of paint.
“So what’s the verdict?”
Fury spoke without turning round, which gave Hanna time to control her reaction. The paint job on the dresser was immaculate. But the color was one that she’d never have considered for a moment.
Fury looked round and, despite Hanna’s polite expression, seemed to sense her response at once.
“Well, clearly Madam’s not happy so what’s the matter?”
“Nothing. It’s great. It’s just . . .”
“Yes?”
“I don’t know that I’d have gone for that exact shade of terra-cotta red.”
“You might not have, but Maggie did.”
He had sanded back the grubby paint, which had turned a muddy shade of brown, he told her, and revealed the original color underneath.
Hanna remembered it all too well. Somewhere between wine and brick red, it was a color that had once been highly popular in Finfarran’s kitchens. In Maggie’s case it had been confined to the dresser, but in other houses on the peninsula Hanna could remember it on every stick of furniture in the room. Since the last time she’d been here, Fury had cleared out the fireplace, sanded the floorboards, and removed layers of grease and dirt from the wide hearthstone. The kitchen units were installed, along with the sink and the slate counter. The high chimney breast above the fireplace was now painted a deep cream that, admittedly, did look well with the color of the dresser beside it.
But this was no time to be thinking about decoration. What she needed to do was revisit the question of money. What if some other arbitrary decision of Fury’s were to end up costing her a fortune? With no contract, no plan, no time frame, and no budget, nothing in this project seemed foreseeable.
Fury took her by the elbow. “And come and look at this!”
Stacked on a pallet in a corner were the fittings he had bought for Hanna’s bathroom. Hanna, who had become accustomed to his upcycling, was taken aback to see that they’d come from the HomeStore in Carrick. Only a while ago her initial instinct would have been to rant at Fury for making design choices without consulting her. Now she looked at the shower, the toilet, and the piping, trying to calculate their cost. Fury saw her reaction and shook his head.
“I know what you’re thinking but that’s not the way to think. Never cobble stuff together when it comes to plumbing. It won’t pay in the long run and it only gives you grief. No, what you want in a bathroom is good middle-of-the-range stuff that goes in the way it was designed to and comes with a guarantee.”
Hanna examined the boxes on the pallet, looking for a washer-dryer.
“Ah, I wouldn’t get one of them at all, girl, I wouldn’t trust them. One machine for each job, that’s what I say. You’ll want a decent make of washing machine and a separate tumble-dryer.” Fury clapped her cheerfully on the back. “But don’t worry about the cost, I’ll find you a couple somewhere. It could be a while, mind, but sure where’s the harm in that? You’ll take your weekly wash back to your mam’s in the meantime, and the pair of you can have great chats together over the cups of tea.”
With that, he jerked his head at her and marched her out into the sunshine. At the bottom of the field, which was now cleared, the boundary wall had been rebuilt. Hanna followed him down the slope to where three stones protruding from the wall made a stile that led to the broad ledge of grass by the clifftop. On that side of the wall, a plank resting on a stone plinth made a bench looking over the ocean. It was painted in the same shade of red as the dresser. Hitching his waxed jacket round his skinny hips, Fury sat down and waited for Hanna to join him. The setting of the bench was perfect, and here on the windy cliff, with a red fishing boat passing in the distance, the color looked fine. Hanna sat down and leaned against the wall. Early though it was in the day, the stone at her back felt warm. At her feet was the cushion of sea pinks she’d rested her muddy shoes on that first day that she’d climbed through the old extension window and found her way down the field.
She glanced at Fury. “You know what I was once told about you?”
“I don’t.”
“That the day would come when you’d give me my house back but that until then it’d be yours.”
Fury leaned back and looked at the sky, his long legs stretching nearly to the edge of the cliff.
“I put the doors on that dresser for Maggie when I was seventeen. She had the old pot of paint behind in the outhouse and it was like glue. But she hadn’t the price of another, so I went at it with turps. These days you’d use white spirit but it wouldn’t be the same. Anyway, I thinned it out and I put a coat on the dresser and, sure, Maggie was made up. She gave me a currany scone.”
Hanna remembered Maggie’s scones, sweetened with currants and raised with buttermilk. The green glass in which Maggie had measured her milk would have stood on the dresser back then. Had the teenage Fury lifted it down and stored it in a box in the corner while he was working on the dresser for Maggie, just as he’d done today?
“And it wasn’t just the scone she gave me, God be good to her. She gave me a passage out of this place to England at a time when I couldn’t bear to stay.”
Fury hunched his shoulders and glared at Hanna. “She was a grand woman to work for. And I’d say she knew what it felt like to want to get away.”
Hanna remembered Mary Casey saying that Maggie had left the peninsula and flounced off to Manchester in the 1920s and stayed there for more than ten years.
“Do you know why she went to England?”
Fury looked poker-faced. “Well, she didn’t tell me, if that’s what you mean.”
Hanna could well believe him. The Maggie she remembered from her childhood was as closemouthed as a woman could be; and there was no reason to think that she’d been any different when Fury was in his teens. But, being older than Hanna was, Fury had heard gossip.
“I suppose you want me to sit here now and pass it on.”
“No, I don’t.”
“No, well, they say you’ve a terrible fear of gossip yourself.”
“Do they?” Hanna raised her eyebrows at him. “And do you listen to them?”
Fury threw back his head and laughed. “Maybe I do! But listening’s one thing. Passing it on is another.”
Still, he said, Maggie’s story was ancient history. Most people on the peninsula had forgotten all about her by now. And, to tell the truth, half of them had forgotten she existed even when she was still alive. That, he told Hanna tartly, was what came of being a recluse.
Hanna remembered the lonely funeral, when the coffin had seemed very small under the high roof of the chapel and most of the mourners who attended hadn’t spoken to Maggie for years. As a child, resentfully carrying turf for the fire or happily eating poreens with butter, she’d never wondered why Maggie was so alone. It was how things were and she’d never thought to question them.
Fury scratched his chin. Apparently there’d been an affair, he said, with a married man from Crossarra. Maggie was only young then, so when he told her they’d run away together she’d believed him. But then the priest beat him back to his wife and Maggie was shamed.
“They say she went off to England the day that he left her. In the end, she came back home, though she never said why. But sure that was in the 1930s, when she’d have got no quarter in Ireland. So I’d say things must have gone badly wrong for her over there to make her turn round and come back.”
Fury looked sideways at Hanna. “By that time yer man had taken his wife and gone away from Finfarran. Maggie had the house here in the field that was left to her by her granny, and that’s where she ended up. She was thirty years here on her own, convinced that the neighbors were talking about her. And by the end of her days I’d say most of them never gave her a single thought.”