“And did you see? Himself – with the sandwiches, in the brown paper bags? For all the world…”
          Too much, too much. Grace can manage no more. He laughs as if it’s too much to bear, just saying it.
          “Aye,” says Blackie, “aye. ‘The common man,’ am I right, with his Big House? One of the boys, no less.”
          Grace takes a swill of his drink. Blackie follows. Quietly, then, they watch the
open hearth where a meagre fire smokes. As though there were in it something unbelievable.
          “Yes but,” Grace goes on, now more dourly, “difference is we’ve not all ‘avocado’ and fuckin’ olives between our flaps of bread.”
          He sits his glass back on the bar. No bubbles form. It’s long turned flat, but he will not order another.
          "Is that what it is, now? ‘Avocado’?” Blackie smacks his knee as he says it, getting a real kick out of the word, out of just pronouncing it. Grace doesn’t pick him up.
          “Sure I don’t know what he puts in his fuckin’ sandwiches, do I? I’m guessing, is all. And do you see me asking now, to be honest? Sure he’d have me there till the market was closed up and the cows had made their own arrangements: tell me where the wheat was ‘sourced’ for the bread. The cows for his butter as well. Even the fuckin’ trees for the brown paper bag, probably… No, you don’t make friendly overtures, not to a man of his sort.”
          “That you don’t, by any token.” Blackie nods in easy, general assent. Talk like this can last the evening out. Already the night’s come on and there’s a howl of a wind. But within the pub at least you’ve the comfort. The sense no wrong can happen while the day lasts. Every week they meet, the same. In talk they run back over the day’s course, the Tuesday cattle mart off the Castletown Road: losses sustained, gains, any empty stalls on the site, the missing, the failing, the dead. Every week the same. As if just going the day were not enough.
          “If you’ll pardon me lads,” O’Dwyer excuses himself. He’s others yet to see to, drinks to pour. They wait and don’t say either of them another word until he’s taken his towel and gone.
          Blackie gives the end of his thumb a sniff, the brown of pipe tobacco. “I suppose it’d be to Agnes he’d want to talk,” says he, “if it’s about the sandwiches.” He’s sniffing for something, hanging on like a dog at the end of the dinner table. Grace can tell it straight off now. He says nothing. But Blackie is undeterred.
          “And how is herself keeping these days, anyway? I didn’t see her there today at all.”
          “That’ll be down to the fact,” says Grace, “that she wasn’t.” He’s giving nothing away.
          Blackie nods – commiserating. “And is she coping well enough up there?” He is quiet. “With your Francis gone?” he says. Like some old woman with no more in her life than stories to keep her going from one day to the next.
          “She was standing on her own two feet, Blackie, the last time I checked. And what’s this, anyway? Do you think I want to be sitting here talking about Agnes for the night? To you?”
          Blackie had been hasty. Frank Grace is a devilish difficult man, always has been. No point pressing here. Blackie takes a sniff of his whiskey now, gives it a swirl, but does not taste it. He puts his glass back on the coaster.
          “Funny isn’t it,” he says. “Hundred years ago you’d never see the likes of – himself, out on the mart with the rest of us. Often I think that. How he’d have just watched it carrying on below, out the window, like something he’d never associate with. Something altogether out of his world… Do you remember the father, back years ago?”
          “O yes,” Grace snorts his laughter. “‘Jolly fine,’ he was. Do you remember? Could’ve asked him how’s the smell of the wife’s backside. ‘O it’s jolly fine! Jolly fine, thank you.’”
          They both laugh. By the fire Mackay laughs too. It’s a well-honed joke here, a common prize: something to be shared.

          “But then the ould fella was harmless,” Grace goes on. “And he’d his family keeping him, didn’t he? He’d at least some reason for staying on. It’s what’s himself still doing here is what I can’t make out. No kin. No ties. Just that big old Manor house and, between you and me, it falling away between his fingertips.”
          “Is that so, now, Grace? On whose authority have you that? I did hear something of the sort, alright. But then d’you know I’ve never been up in the inside of it? Would you believe that? In all these years, I’ve never set foot... Still, it looks to be standing up straight enough from what I can see of it, between the trees. And aren’t there more houses than his falling apart in this blessed county of ours?”
          “Aye there are I suppose,” says Grace. “But then the rest of us have families within these houses to keep. Generations of them. Part of the bricks they are now, part of the land.”
          “Well, I wasn’t exactly talking about your house now,” says Blackie. “There’s no fear of you going homeless anyway…”
          He stops. A moment passes while there’s nothing at all to say.
          “I wonder where they came out with that, though,” Blackie goes on. “Calling them ‘Big Houses.’ It’s a bit rich of them now, isn’t it, if they’re the first to fall apart?”
          “English craftsmanship,” says Grace.
          “And isn’t it funny,” says Blackie, “the Whelans’ House out in Bawn is as big as the biggest of ‘em?”
          “The Whelans’ is a fine home,” says Grace, very grave now, not laughing anymore. “All laid out for the neighbours to see – not a tree blocking things from view. They’ve nothing to hide from the people around them, I can tell you. But then Whelan is a church-going man. Did it all himself. Put the money aside even when the rest of us was starving. Cute as a fox now, Whelan was, always.”
          He folds his arms, affirming with his body what his mind’s long since already decided.
          “But there’s something up,” says Blackie, unable to hold it in, “when a man can put aside what others around him are hungering after, surely.”
          Grace grunts. “But there’ll always be someone hungering, Blackie. Someone not able to stand on their own two feet. And have we always to be helping them up?”
          Blackie says nothing. The heat and the whiskey now have him red around the cheeks. As he passes O’Dwyer puts in a word.
          “It’s a fierce storm cutting out there ye know, lads?”
          “Is it, now?” Blackie asks. “Is it really?”
          A patch of quiet follows.
          “And did you sell many yourself today, then, Frank?” says Blackie. Resolute to keep the spirits up.
          “Ah the usual. The usual. I’m not a man to brag.”
          “And Morris? And Doherty I saw was there?”
          Grace nods, says nothing.
          “And what about – himself?”
          As if waiting for just this Grace snorts, spits; but he doesn’t answer right away. He takes another swig, the glass closing on empty.
          A draught in the chimney moans: a sudden burst of wind. The fire gets big for a second, blows up as if the bellows were pressed. Then the fire shrinks.

The rock-face of Keeper Hill at least keeps the rain off them on the way home, but the noise of the gale is loud in their ears and they’ve to shout to one another across the dark.
          “Any luck on the grant then, Blackie?”
          “Sure you know I hadn’t. Doesn’t everyone know in this place – before I know myself, even?”
          “There’s great money to be had, Blackie, if you can get your foot in. Great money. Sure they’re throwing it at us.” He laughs then, into the wind, a hoarse hating laugh. “It’s just a question of phrasing, Blackie, phrasing. Though of course they call it ‘ethics.’ ‘Ethical farming!’ Well.”
          “Ah, that’s rich. That’s rich alright.” Blackie laughs in turn. “A new name, just. A new name for the same old thing.”
          Through the cluster of oaks swaying across the way now a glimpse of the Manor roof comes into sight, then again goes away. Every night – every night – their walk brings them by the Manor walls.
          “They think,” says Grace, still smirking at it, still mocking, “we’re going to sort the planet out for ‘em. Just by keeping on doing what we’ve always done. A couple of grants out of Europe and they think it’s the problem solved. And we’re the heroes. That’s as good as what they say. May as well come out and say the truth, what they said about the grandparents two centuries ago. It was ‘peasants’ that time they called us. Couldn’t put a foot wrong, then as now. Sure they used think the peasants were a ‘fine folk’ to do their bidding. Spent our lifetimes dancing at the crossroads, waiting for Bridget with the fine red hair to come of age! Celibate till the night of our wedding. Good honest thoroughgoing people, us…”
          They both crack up at that. The dark’s gotten heavier around them. So that they can sense now rather than see the old Manor house as they get closer. The battlements. The stained-glass windows. In living memory, the flags.
          The house whose life was spared.
          “Well let ‘em,” says Grace, bringing to a close his talk, for the turn is less than twenty yards off now and he’s a mile yet to walk, into the rain. “Not one to look a gift-horse, am I?”
          “O certainly not,” says Blackie. “Certainly not.”
          In silence Grace takes his road, but turns around before he’s gone too far.
          “Will you be up to give a hand for the shearing then, Blackie?” says he. “Agnes and I could use you.”
          Blackie stops, waits his second, then laughs. “Well I’ll have to get my look in at this gift horse somehow, won’t I? I can be up this week,” he says, “if you want.”
          “This week. Right you are,” says Grace, concluding, stepping away.
          But Blackie shouts it after him, needing to say to him one last thing. “We can leave the saving of the world, sure, to men such as himself!”
          A cackle is all Grace manages: something grim and glaring. “And I wish him the best of it,” says he. “For he’s never going to save that house.”
          It sounds as he says it almost like a threat. Thrown into the dark. Together they turn, facing where the house should be, and when it goes quiet, even after they’ve gone and no-one is left to hear, it seems as though the threat were still left there hanging. Grace the aggressor, challenging some midnight duel. And the old house, half-concealed but impassive, grand, and silently taking him up.

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