Chapter 7 What a Table Costs

The man from the auction house came up the yard of Gort on a fine June morning in a car that was not built for the lane, and Niamh showed him through the house the way she had shown the tax man and the water board man before him, with a courtesy that cost her nothing and revealed less. He wrote in a small notebook with a pencil he licked, and he went through the rooms at a professional pace, and he was properly polite about the bay window and properly silent about the smell of the damp that had come up the back room the winter before, and he stood in the kitchen the longest of any of the rooms, not because the kitchen was worth the most but because it was the room he was least prepared for. It was the table, of course. He ran a thumbnail along the seam of the leaves, and he squatted to look at the underside of the boards, and he rocked the whole length of it with his palms spread on the first and last boards, and he stood up and looked at Niamh with the particular respect that valuers reserve for the one object in a house that has any true value, and he said, "You know what this is." "It's our table," Niamh said. "It's a rare thing," the man said, and gave her a price that she heard, and set down, and did not repeat to anyone for a week. He sketched the history of it for her the way such men sketch history — the oak from the wood behind Carra, the quarter-sawn boards, the married legs, the kind of piece that the big houses along the coast were selling off in these same years — and he took the old knife from the drawer and turned the table's leaves up one by one in his hands, reading the notches and the letters in the end grain without once asking what they meant, because they did not need to mean anything to him; they were, to his eye, provenance, which is the trade's word for the marks of a life. Eamon came in at the end of it, from the yard, and found the man with the table's leaves in his hands, and stood in the doorway of his own kitchen the way outsiders always stood in that doorway, looking at the long table and the man who was pricing it. The arithmetic was done at the table that night, with the lamp between the two of them and the river of grain running from Niamh's plate to her son's. She put it plainly, the way she put all the house's hard things: the roof wanted reslating or the house wanted selling, and the man from the auction house had offered her the table's price for the table alone, and the flat on the main street of Carra had a kitchen the width of a door, and there was a dealer who telephoned from the city who was willing to pay more than the auction estimate, cash, because he collected for a hotel in the south. "It's the difference," she said, "between fixing the roof and not having to fix anything." "No," Eamon said. "You haven't heard the number," she said. "I heard the number. You said it twice. I heard the idea," he said. "The idea is that the table is a price. It was never a price. It was the thing the family sat around. If the family kept the count, the table kept the family — it's the same count, and you don't sell that, whatever the roof costs. We'll take the flat. We'll find a way. A table that stands in a shed is still a table." Niamh looked at him across the boards and said nothing for a long while. She had raised him not to sentimentalise the furniture, and it had not taken, and she could not decide — that night, at her end, with the lamp low and the closed-eye knot keeping watch between their plates — whether it was the house that had raised him properly or the house that had damaged him, and she did not trust herself to know the difference at that hour and in that light. She said only, "Then you tell me what it's worth." And she pushed back from the table and went to the scullery, and Eamon sat alone at the long table in the lamp's circle, and for a long time he did not move, and then he reached under the leaf and put his thumb into the small deep print his great-grandmother had left in the wood the day his mother was born, and held it there, and the house was silent around him except for the drip of the tap in the scullery and the far, faint turning of the sea at the edge of the night. The letter came a fortnight later, on the house's own paper, addressed to them both, and it was the auction catalogue, and Eamon read it at the window end of the table while Niamh stood at the range, and the entry was at the bottom of the second column of the second page, and it described the table in the trade's careful language: a long oak farmhouse table, quarter-sawn, with original leaves and period legs, the top with old marks and deep patination throughout, the end grain inscribed with the initials O, C, N, and E, the property of the estate of Gort. It listed a date, and a lot number, and an estimate in figures that Eamon read twice and then did not look at again, because the figures made the count of the family into a price, and a price, once made, is a thing you can underbid or overbid, and the table had never once in its life been for sale, and the house had never once in its life called it anything but ours. He looked up at his mother across the boards, and she looked back, and the lamp that they had lit without deciding was burning its little circle around the two of them, and the river of grain ran on through the dark beyond it, patient, running to the sea at the far end of the table where the chair stood empty now, and neither of them said the word that would have settled it, and the date on the catalogue sat quiet on the boards between the salt and the bread, waiting to be reached.