The Martins

Arthur Broomfield

Dr Arthur Broomfield is a poet, short story writer, essayist and Beckett scholar from County Laois, Ireland.

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He watched the car heading down the avenue. It picked up speed despite the occasional pothole as it drove between the two patches of lawn he’d promised her he’d keep mown but hadn’t. Her blue Ford Fiesta, crammed with Dunnes Stores travel bags, and cases inherited from her dowager Aunt Felicity, disappeared behind the overhanging Cypresses that gave shade on the rare days that promised a good summer. It nosed out between the Hawthorn hedge on the passenger side, its white blossoms now fading to pink, and the wire fence on the driver’s side, where he could see her head, rigid, faced ahead of her.  The fence, six strands of plain wire, he'd put up round the acre or so paddock to hold the Suffolk sheep in upwards of one failed venture into livestock farming, continued alongside the remaining hundred yards of avenue. Her car rose a trail of dust that clouded the low ridge of grass and clovers that separated the car tracks. He watched till it passed through the two ivy clad limestone pillars, reminders that had stood there for over a hundred years, and paused before turning left onto the narrow road, to disappear from his view.

He hadn’t waved towards the retreating car, just stood still, arms folded across his chest. Only his eyes wavered as they followed the movement of the Fiesta. Now he turned towards the hall door that she’d painted a shade of bottle green on Saint Patrick’s Day. He pulled a plastic armchair out to the sunlight from under the slated canopy where the House Martins had nested and reared three clutches last summer. Parents or young hadn’t returned.

He slumped into the chair; arms strewn along each sloping arm rest. A stand of seven Marine Pines, scattered along the bottom edge of the paddock, framed jagged scenes of the hazy Mullenagh hills : a patch of green fields, grass for silage, a field of  winter barley swaying to a dirge, a plantation of Sitka spruce, a farmhouse, that rose above the intervening  Moss bog and Ballinacrag village where the nosey Madge Muldoon would, by now, surely have been made aware of the packed Fiesta speeding past her grocery shop and sub post office.

A   warm breeze swayed the head of a lone strand of Cocksfoot that stood above the surrounding grass on the lawn beyond his outstretched feet. It nodded back and forth in a hypnotic rhythm, its moves mimicked by his upper body and head. He was faced towards the east, through the Pine stand towards Mullenagh. His eyes were glazing, slowly, becoming one with the ethereal haze on the distant hills.

It was the noisy chatter chatter that called him out of his trance. He blinked a few times, sat upright, raised his hands so his index fingers could rub his eyes. His head turned both ways a few times. The chatters grew louder. His hands gripped the arms of the chair.

‘Ah! you’ve come back to me.’  He rose slowly, eyes sparkling as he gazed at the two Martins perched on the bar beside their old nest; reconciled lovers in animated discussion on plans to reconstruct their old home.

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Setu, July 2024