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Clare, February 2016

We rounded a corner, turned off the narrow country lane and onto a gravel track, drove past a little copse of birch trees and there it was. Clonamurty Farm, County Meath, Ireland. Old, tired, dilapidated and in urgent need of repair. But it was mine. All mine, and only mine, or soon would be. A little shudder of excitement ran through me, and I turned my face away so that Paul, my husband, would not see the smile that had crept onto my face.

I think it was in that moment that I first realised my life could change, for the better. If only I was brave enough to seize the day.

‘What a godforsaken mess of a place. Good job this is a hire car. That track’ll be trashing the tyres,’ Paul grumbled, as he parked the car beside a rusty old piece of farm machinery that had waist-high thistles growing up through it.

‘I expect it could be renovated, with a bit of money and a lot of effort,’ I said. Already I could see its potential. With the weeds cleared, the stonework repointed, the rotten windowsills replaced and painted, and a new porch built around the front door it would be beautiful. A lazy Labrador sunning himself in the yard and a couple of cats nonchalantly strolling around owning the place would complete the picture.

As if I’d conjured them up, two tabbies appeared around the corner, mewing loudly, tails held high, coming to see who we were and whether we had any food for them, I suspected. I smiled to see them, and bent down, hand outstretched, to make their acquaintance.

‘Clare, for God’s sake don’t touch them. They’ll be ridden with fleas and Lord knows what else.’

‘Aw, they’re fine. Aren’t you, my pretties? Who’s been looking after you then, since your daddy died?’ I felt a pang of worry for these poor, beautiful creatures. Though they weren’t especially thin, and their coats seemed in good condition.

‘Their daddy. Oh grow up, will you?’ Paul stomped away from me, towards the front door, and fished in his pocket for the key we’d picked up from the solicitor in nearby Blackstown. Actually the solicitor, Mr Greve, had handed the key to me. It was my uncle Pádraig who’d left me the farm in his will, after all. But Paul had reached out and snatched the key before I’d had the chance to take it. The farm wasn’t quite mine yet. I needed to wait for probate to be completed, but we’d had the chance to come over to Ireland for a weekend to view the property and make a decision about what to do with it.

I followed Paul across the weed-infested gravel to the peeling, blue-painted front door, and watched as he wrestled with the lock. ‘Damn key doesn’t fit. That idiot solicitor’s given us the wrong one.’

I peered through a filthy window beside the front door. ‘Paul, there are boxes and stuff leaning against this door. I reckon Uncle Pádraig didn’t use it. Maybe that key’s for another door, round the back, perhaps?’

‘The solicitor would have told us if it was,’ Paul said, continuing to try to force the key into the lock. I left him to it and walked around the side of the house to the back of the building. There was a door at the side, which looked well used. A pair of wellington boots, filled with rain water, stood beside the step. I called Paul, and he came around the house, his lips pinched thin. He never liked to be proved wrong.

The key fitted this door and we entered the house. It smelled musty and unaired. It had been last decorated at some point in the 1970s, I’d say. I tried to bring to mind my memories of the house, from visits to Uncle Pádraig and Aunt Lily when I was a child, but it was a long time ago and I’d been very young then. My maternal grandmother – Granny Irish as I called her – lived here too in those days. I have clear memories of one of my cousins: David (or Daithí as he renamed himself after he became a committed Republican), hazy memories of his two older brothers but only vague impressions of a large rambling house. I have better memories of the barn where I used to love playing hide-and-seek with David among the bales of straw. Sadly, David and his brothers had all died young, which was why the farmhouse had been passed down to me.

The door led into a corridor, with a grubby kitchen off to the right and a boot-room to the left. Straight ahead a wedged-open door led to the main hallway, which in turn led to the blocked-off front door, the sitting room and dining room. This area looked familiar. There’d been a grandfather clock – I looked around and yes, it was still there! – standing in the hallway. A memory surfaced of listening to it chiming the hour when I was supposed to be asleep upstairs. I’d count the chimes, willing it to chime thirteen like the clock in my favourite book – Tom’s Midnight Garden – and was always disappointed when it stopped at twelve.

We peered into each room. Upstairs there were four bedrooms, a box-room and a bathroom. All felt a little damp, as though it had been months since they’d been aired or heated. As with the downstairs rooms, the decor was horribly dated. I expected Paul to make sneering comments about the state of the place – and to be fair, it was in a total mess – but he surprised me by commenting favourably on the layout, the size of the rooms, the amount of light that flooded through the large front windows. ‘It could be quite a house, this,’ he said.

‘It certainly could,’ I replied. ‘And we could come for holidays, let the boys use it and perhaps rent it as a holiday home in between, after we’ve done it up.’ I could see it now. Long, lazy weeks, using this house as a base to explore this part of Ireland. It was within easy reach of Dublin and the east coast, and the surrounding countryside of rolling farmland was peacefully attractive.

‘Don’t be ridiculous. We can’t do this place up. We live in London. And why on earth would anyone want to come here for a holiday? There’s nothing to do. No. Like I said earlier, we’ll sell it to some developer or other, and I have plans for what to do with the money.’

‘Can we at least discuss it?’ I couldn’t believe he was dismissing the idea of keeping the farm, just like that.

‘What’s to discuss? I’ve made up my mind. As soon as probate comes through, I’ll put it on the market. We can find suitable estate agents to handle it for us while we’re here.’ He smiled at me – a smile that did not reach his eyes but which told me the matter was closed. ‘Come on. Let’s go and find somewhere we can have a cup of tea. I’ve got to get out of this depressing house.’ Paul turned and walked along the passage towards the back door. Somewhere upstairs a door banged, as though the farmhouse was voicing its own disapproval of his words.

As I followed Paul out, knowing there was no point arguing with him when he was in this kind of mood, I realised that he would not be able to do anything without my say-so. The house and all its outbuildings, Uncle Pádraig’s entire estate, had been left to me. Not to Paul, just to me. So if I wanted, I could refuse to sell it, and there’d be nothing Paul could do about it. Except to moan and snipe and make my life a misery, of course.

It hadn’t always been like this. We’d been married twenty-five years. He swept me off my feet when I first met him. I was fresh out of university with a degree in textile design but not enough talent to make it as a designer, and was working in a shoe shop by day and a pub by night to make ends meet. It was not what I’d dreamed of for myself.

Then one day, the best-looking man I’d ever set eyes on came into the pub and ordered himself a gin and tonic, and ‘whatever you’re having, love’. Usually I turned down these offers – the bar staff were not allowed to drink alcohol while on shift although we were allowed to accept soft drinks from customers. But this time, something about his sparkly eyes that seemed to look deep into the heart of me, something about his melodious voice and cultivated manner, something about his sharp suit and immaculate shirt made me accept, and then spend the rest of the evening between customers (it was a quiet night) leaning on the bar chatting to him.

He was in the area for a work conference, staying in a hotel just up the road, but couldn’t stand the company of his colleagues another moment so had escaped from the hotel bar and into the nearest pub. By the end of the evening we’d swapped phone numbers and agreed to meet up the following day when I wasn’t working, for a drink. He turned up that second night with a gift of the best box of chocolates I’d ever had, and a perfect single stem red rose in a plastic tube. My previous boyfriends had all been impoverished arts students. No one had ever treated me like that before.

He used to sing that Human League song to me – you know the one: ‘Don’t You Want Me, Baby’. I wasn’t exactly working as a waitress in a cocktail bar when he met me, but pretty close. And he liked to tell people he’d pulled me up, out of the gutter. ‘Who knows where she’d have ended up without me, eh?’ he’d say, patting my arm while I grimaced and tried not to wonder the same thing.

Paul had been kind in those early days. Thoughtful, considerate, and nothing was too much trouble for him. He was always planning extravagant little treats for me – a surprise picnic on the banks of the Thames, a hamper complete with bright white linen napkins all packed and ready in his car; tickets to Wimbledon centre court on the ladies’ final day; a night away in the Manoir aux Quat’Saisons. All would be sprung on me as a surprise.

It was exciting, but looking back, perhaps slightly unnerving in the way that it left me with no control over my life. I’d have to cancel any plans I had made myself, to go along with his surprises. And any twinge of resentment I felt would turn quickly into guilt – how could I resent him doing such lovely things for me? When I told my friends of his latest surprise treat, they’d all sigh and tell me how lucky I was, and ask could I clone him for them.

Gradually I’d stopped making my own plans, at least not without checking with Paul that it’d be all right for me to see my parents, or spend a day shopping with a girlfriend, in case he had something up his sleeve for us. And so as Paul and I became closer, my old friends had drifted away as I’d rarely seemed to have time to see them and had cancelled on them too many times.

We left the farm in silence, and got back in the car to return to Blackstown in search of a café. I spent the journey wondering what plans Paul had made for the money if we sold the farm. Perhaps he’d surprise me, the way he so often used to, and present me with round-the-world cruise tickets, or keys to a luxury holiday home in Tuscany.

It was the sort of thing he might have done in the early days of our relationship. He’d stopped the surprises after the boys were born – it wasn’t so easy to swan off on weekends away with toddlers in tow. But the boys were in their twenties now and had left home – Matt had a job and Jon was a student. Perhaps Paul did want to rekindle the spirit of our early relationship. I resolved to try to keep an open mind about the farm, but I would certainly want to know his plans before I agreed to sell it.

There’s something funny about being at my stage of life. OK, spare the jokes about the big change, but being 49 and having the big five-oh looming on the horizon does make you re-evaluate who you are, what your life is like, and whether you’ve achieved your life’s dreams or not. Ever since my last birthday I’d been doing a lot of navel-gazing. What had I done with my life? I’d brought up two wonderful sons. That had to count as my greatest achievement.

I say ‘I’ had brought them up although of course it was both of us. Paul wasn’t as hands-on as I was – it was always me who took them to Scouts, attended school sports day, sat with them overnight when they were ill. But then, Paul would always say his role was to be the breadwinner, mine was to be the mother and homemaker.

I’ve tried to list more achievements beyond being the mother of well-adjusted, fabulous young men, but frankly I can’t think of any. We have a beautiful house – that’s down to me. Maybe that can count? I decorated it from top to bottom, made all the curtains, renovated beautiful old furniture for it. I did several years of upholstery evening classes and have reupholstered chairs, sofas and a chaise longue. But all this doesn’t feel like something that could go on my gravestone, does it? Here lies Clare Farrell, mourned by husband, sons and several overstuffed armchairs.

We arrived in Blackstown, and Paul reversed the car into a parking space outside a cosy-looking tea shop. I shook myself out of my thoughts. They were only making me bitter. Who knew, perhaps he did have plans for the proceeds of the sale of the farm that would help rekindle our relationship. Surely a marriage of over twenty-five years was worth fighting for? I should give him a chance.

‘Well? Does this place look OK to you?’ he asked, as he unclipped his seatbelt.

I smiled back as we entered the café. ‘Perfect. I fancy tea and a cake. That chocolate fudge cake looks to die for.’ Huge slices, thick and gooey, just how I liked it. I was salivating already.

‘Not watching your figure then? You used to be so slim,’ Paul replied. He approached the counter and ordered two teas and one slice of carrot cake – his favourite, but something I can’t stand. ‘No, love, that’s all,’ he said, when the waitress asked if he wanted anything else. ‘The wife’s on a diet.’

I opened my mouth to protest but Paul gave me a warning look. I realised if I said anything he’d grab me by the arm and drag me back to the car, where we’d have a row followed by stony silence for the rest of the day. And I wouldn’t get my cup of tea. Easier, as on so many other occasions, to stay quiet, accept the tea and put up with the lack of cake.

It was so often like this. Once more I wondered whether I’d ever have the courage to leave him. But was this kind of treatment grounds enough for a separation? It sounded so trivial, didn’t it – I’m leaving him because he won’t let me eat cake and I’ve had enough of it. Well, today wasn’t the day I’d be leaving him, that was for certain, so I smiled sweetly, sat at a table by the window, meekly drank my cup of tea and watched Paul eat his carrot cake with a fork, commenting occasionally on how good it was.