Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín Page A

in the ditch. Through another window she saw an unmade double bed, and random books on the floor that looked as though they had fallen from the bed. Josie must be enjoying her retirement, she thought, and smiled.
    She rapped on the kitchen door but there was no answer. It was the stillness that struck her now, the silence broken only by the cawing of crows in the distance and then the faint sound of a tractor that at first seemed as though it was approaching but then seemed to be moving away. She looked around her at the larch and birch trees that almost masked the galvanised sheds in the haggard. There was a pathway leading across the grass to what she knew had once been an orchard. She remembered years before an unexpected harvest of pears and apples, which had come in such abundance only because no one had been tending to the trees, no one had been pruning them, or so Josie had told her, and then after their huge yield the trees had died, or some of them did, and the others yielded no more fruit except some crab apples that no one wanted. It was easier, or less trouble, Josie had told her, to buy apples in the supermarket and no one liked the hard pears that had grown here, even when they were left to soften.
    Josie had decided in any case to devote her attention to a new garden she had made beyond the orchard to the side of the haggard. John dug it out for her and she had bought books and manuals on how to grow flowers and vegetables. In her old age, as she enjoyed explaining, she had gradually seen a good reason to live on a farm and had understood for the first time the point not only of manure but of the soil itself and, indeed, the seasons. Nora could almosthear her voice saying all of this, as she ducked under the branches of trees and avoided thorny brambles to see if she would find her aunt in the garden.
    She stepped over the stile towards the vegetable garden. Josie was growing something that required lines of wire and bamboo cane. Nora was not sure if these were raspberry bushes. To the side, there were neat ridges where potatoes had been planted. Beyond them were the flower beds but there were no flowers now. It looked as though a great deal of work went on here and she wondered how Josie’s back withstood the strain. Just then, as she turned, she saw her aunt and realised that Josie had been quietly observing her for some time.
    “Nora, your shoes will be ruined,” Josie said. She had a small garden fork and some stalks in her hand. She was wearing garden gloves that seemed too big for her.
    “I didn’t see you there.”
    “I thought I’d leave you for a moment to look at all my hard work.”
    In Josie’s tone, there was an edge of challenge as though her territory had been invaded. She must wonder, Nora thought, why she had visited and yet she spoke as though they had been in mid-conversation.
    “I think I’ve done enough now for the day,” Josie said. “I often start early, I’m getting everything ready so I can start sowing a few annuals when the weather gets better. And then I go and read the paper and have my breakfast and then come up again to look at what I did. By this time of the day, I’ve finished. I just came up now to admire my own handiwork and tidy the place.”
    As she moved towards Nora, she seemed preoccupied by something. Her walk was slow and deliberate, her lips pursed.
    “Wait until you’re old, Nora,” she said, “and then you’ll know. It’s the mixture of being content with even the smallest thing and then feeling a great dissatisfaction with everything. I don’t know what it is. I’m not even tired a lot of the time, and all the same I’m half exhausted if I even stand up.”
    She leaned on her as she made her way over the stile and pulled her gloves off as they walked through the orchard.
    “Now, we’ll go upstairs,” she said when they got to the house. “It’s tidier and I have a new tea-making apparatus up there and a little fridge on the landing and