After Rain

Widows

Waking on a warm, bright morning in early October, Catherine found herself a widow. In some moment during the night Matthew had gone peacefully: had there been pain or distress she would have known it. Yet what lay beside her in the bed was less than a photograph now, the fallen jaw harshly distorting a face she’d loved.

Tears ran on Catherine’s cheeks and dripped on to her nightdress. She knelt by the bedside, then drew the sheet over the still features. Quiet, gently spoken, given to thought before offering an opinion, her husband had been regarded by Catherine as cleverer and wiser than she was herself, and more charitable in his view of other people. In his business life — the sale of agricultural machinery — he had been known as a man of his word. For miles around — far beyond the town and its immediate neighbourhood — the farm people who had been his customers repaid his honesty and straight dealing with respect. At Christmas there had been gifts of fowls and fish, jars of cream, sacks of potatoes. The funeral would be well attended. ‘There’ll be a comfort in the memories, Catherine,’ Matthew had said more than once, attempting to anticipate the melancholy of their separation: they had known that it was soon to be.

He would have held the memories to him if he’d been the one remaining. ‘Whichever is left,’ he reminded Catherine as they grew old, ‘it’s only for the time being.’ And in that time-being one of them would manage in what had previously been the other’s domain: he ironing his sheets and trousers, working the washing-machine, cooking as he had watched her cook, using the Electrolux; she arranging for someone to undertake the small repairs he had attended to in the house if she or her sister couldn’t manage them, paying the household bills and keeping an eye on the bank balance. Matthew had never minded talking about their separation, and had taught her not to mind either.

On her knees by the bedside Catherine prayed, then her tears came again. She reached out for his hand and grasped the cold, stiff fingers beneath the bedclothes. ‘Oh, love,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, love.’

The three sons of the marriage came for the funeral, remaining briefly, with their families, in the town where they had spent their childhood. Father Cahill intoned the last words in the cemetery, and soon after that Catherine and her sister Alicia were alone in the house again. Alicia had lived there since her own husband’s death, nine years ago; she was the older of the two sisters — fifty-seven, almost fifty-eight.

The house that for Catherine was still haunted by her husband’s recent presence was comfortable, with a narrow hall and a kitchen at the back, and bedrooms on two floors. Outside, it was colour-washed blue, with white window-frames and hall-door, the last house of the town, the first on the Dublin road. Opposite was the convent school, behind silver-painted railings, three sides enclosed by the drab concrete of its classrooms and the nuns’ house, its play-yard often bustling into noisy excitement. Once upon a time Catherine and Alicia had played there themselves, hardly noticing the house across the road, blue then also.

‘You’re all right?’ Alicia said on the evening of the funeral, when together they cleared up the glasses sherry had been drunk from, and cups and saucers. On the sideboard in the dining-room the stoppers of the decanters had not yet been replaced, crumbs not yet brushed from the dining-table cloth. ‘Yes, I’m all right,’ Catherine said. In her girlhood she had been pretty — slender and dark, and shyly smiling, dimples in both cheeks. Alicia, taller, dark also, had been considered the beauty of the town. Now, Catherine was greying, and plump about the face, the joints of her fingers a little swollen. Alicia was straight-backed, her beauty still recalled in features that were classically proportioned, her hair greyer than her sister’s.

‘Good of them all to come,’ Catherine said.

‘People liked Matthew.’

‘Yes.’

For a moment Catherine felt the rising of her tears, the first time since the morning of the death, but stoically she held them in. Their marriage had not gone. Their marriage was still there in children and in grandchildren, in the voices that had spoken well of it, in the bed they had shared, and in remembering. The time-being would not be endless: he had said that too. ‘You’re managing, Catherine?’ people asked, the same words often used, and she tried to convey that strength still came from all there had been.

The day after the funeral Fagan from the solicitors’ office explained to Catherine the contents of the few papers he brought to the house. It took ten minutes.

‘Well, that’s that,’ he said, and for a moment the finality with which he spoke reminded Catherine of the coffin slipping down, filling the hole that had been dug for it. The papers lay neatly on the well-polished surface of the dining-room table, cleared now of the debris of the day before, and of the cloth that had protected it. Fagan drank a cup of instant coffee and said she had only to pick up the phone if ever there was anything.

‘I’ll help you,’ Alicia said later that same morning when Catherine mentioned Matthew’s personal belongings. Clothes and shoes would be accepted gratefully by one of the charities with which Alicia was connected. The signet ring, the watch, the tie-pin, the matching fountain-pen and propelling pencil were earmarked for the family, to be shared among Catherine’s sons. Shaving things were thrown away.

Recalling the same sorting out of possessions at the time of her own loss, Alicia was in no way distressed. She had experienced little emotion when her husband’s death occurred: for the last nineteen years of her marriage she had not loved him.

‘You’ve been a strength,’ Catherine said, for her sister had been that and more, looking after her as she used to, years ago, when they were children.

‘Oh no, no,’ came Alicia’s deprecation.

Thomas Pius John Leary was by trade a painter and decorator. He had, for this work, no special qualifications beyond experience; he brought to it no special skill. As a result, he was often accused of poor workmanship, which in turn led to disputes about payment. But he charged less than his competitors and so ensured a reasonably steady demand for his services. When for one reason or another the demand wasn’t there he took on any kind of odd job he was offered.

Leary was middle-aged now, married, the father of six children. He was a small, wiry man with tight features and bloodshot eyes, his spareness occasionally reminding people of a hedgerow animal they could not readily name. Sparse grey hair was brushed straight back from the narrow dome of his forehead. Two forefingers, thumbs, middle fingers, upper lip and teeth, were stained brown from cigarettes he manufactured with the aid of a small machine. Leary did not wear overalls when at work and was rarely encountered in clothes that did not bear splashes of paint.

It was in this condition, the damp end of a cigarette emerging from a cupped palm, that he presented himself to Catherine and Alicia one afternoon in November, six weeks after the death. He stood on the doorstep, declaring his regrets and his sympathy in a low voice, not meeting Catherine’s eye. In the time that had passed, other people had come to the door and said much the same thing, not many, only those who found it difficult to write a letter and considered the use of the telephone to be inappropriate in such circumstances. They’d made a brief statement and then had hurried off. Leary appeared inclined to linger.

‘That’s very good of you, Mr. Leary,’ Catherine said.

A few months ago he had repainted the front of the house, the same pale blue. He had renewed the white gloss of the window-frames. ‘Poor Leary’s desperate for work,’ Matthew had said. ‘Will we give the rogue a go?’ Alicia had been against it, Leary not being a man she’d cared for when he’d done other jobs for them. Catherine, although she didn’t much care for Leary either, felt sorry for anyone who was up against it.

‘Could I step in for a minute ?’

Across the street the convent children were running about in the play-yard before their afternoon classes began. Still watching them, Catherine was aware of checking a frown that had begun to gather. He was looking for more work, she supposed, but there was no question of that. Alicia’s misgivings had been justified: there’d been skimping on the amount and quality of the paint used, and inadequate preparation. ‘We’ll know not to do that again,’ Matthew had said. Besides, there wasn’t anything else at present.

‘Of course.’ Catherine stood aside while Leary passed into the long, narrow hall. She led the way down it, to the kitchen because it was warm there. Alicia was polishing the cutlery at the table, a task she undertook once a month.

‘Sit down, Mr. Leary,’ Catherine invited, pulling a chair out for him.

‘I was saying I was sorry,’ he said to Alicia. ‘If there’s any way I can assist at all, any little job, I’m always there.’

‘It’s kind of you, Mr. Leary,’ Catherine said swiftly, in case her sister responded more tartly.

‘I knew him since we were lads. He used be at the Christian Brothers’.’

‘Yes.’

‘Great old days.’

He seemed embarrassed. He wanted to say something but was having difficulty. One hand went into a pocket of his jacket. Catherine watched it playing with the little contrivance he used for rolling his cigarettes. But the hand came out empty Nervously, it was rubbed against its partner.

‘It’s awkward,’ Leary said.

‘What’s awkward, Mr. Leary?’

‘It isn’t easy, how to put it to you. I didn’t come before because of your trouble.’

Alicia laid down the cloth with which she had been applying Goddard’s Silver Polish to the cutlery and Catherine watched her sister’s slow, deliberate movements as she shined the last of the forks and then drew off her pink rubber gloves and placed them one on top of the other beside her. Alicia could sense something; she often had a way of knowing what was coming next.

‘I don’t know are you aware,’ Leary enquired, addressing only Catherine, ‘it wasn’t paid for?’

‘What wasn’t?’

‘The job I done for you.’

‘You don’t mean painting the front?’

‘I do, ma’am.’

‘But of course it was paid for.’

He sighed softly. An outstanding bill was an embarrassment, he said. Because of the death it was an embarrassment.

‘My husband paid for the work that was done.’

‘Ah no, no.’

The frown Catherine had checked a few moments ago wrinkled her forehead. She knew the bill had been paid. She knew because Matthew had said Leary would want cash, and she had taken the money out of her own Irish Nationwide account since she had easy access to it. ‘I’ll see you right at the end of the month,’ Matthew had promised. It was an arrangement they often had; the building-society account in her name existed for this kind of thing.

‘Two hundred and twenty-six pounds is the extent of the damage.’ Leary smiled shiftily. ‘With the discount for cash.’

She didn’t tell him she’d withdrawn the money herself. That wasn’t his business. She watched the extreme tip of his tongue licking his upper lip. He wiped his mouth with the back of a paint-stained hand. Softly, Alicia was replacing forks and spoons in the cutlery container.

‘It was September the account was sent out. The wife does all that type of thing.’

‘The bill was paid promptly. My husband always paid bills promptly.’

She remembered the occasion perfectly. ‘I’ll bring it down to him now,’ Matthew had said, glancing across the kitchen at the clock. Every evening he walked to McKenny’s bar and remained there for three-quarters of an hour or so, depending on the company. That evening he’d have gone the long way round, by French Street, in order to call in at the Learys’ house in Brady’s Lane. Before he left he had taken the notes from the brown Nationwide envelope and counted them, slowly, just as she’d done herself earlier. She’d seen the bill in his hand. ‘Chancing his arm with the taxman,’ she remembered his remarking lightly, a reference to Leary’s preference for cash.

On his return he would have hung his cap on its hook in the scullery passage and settled down at the kitchen table with the Evening Press, which he bought in Healy’s sweetshop on his way back from McKenny’s. He went to the public house for conversation as much as anything, and afterwards passed on to Alicia and herself any news he had gleaned. Bottled Smithwick’s was his drink.

‘D’you remember it?’ Catherine appealed to her sister because although she could herself so clearly recall Matthew’s departure from the house on that particular September evening, his return eluded her. It lay smothered somewhere beneath the evening routine, nothing making it special, as the banknotes in the envelope had marked the other.

‘I remember talk about money,’ Alicia recalled, ‘earlier that day. If I’ve got it right, I was out at the Legion of Mary in the evening.’

‘A while back the wife noticed the way the bill was unpaid,’ Leary went on, having paused politely to hear these recollections. ‘ “It’s the death that’s in it,” the wife said. She’d have eaten the face off me if I’d bothered you in your trouble.’

‘Excuse me,’ Catherine said.

She left the kitchen and went to look on the spike in the side-cupboard in the passage, where all receipts were kept. This one should have been close to the top, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t further down either. It wasn’t in the cupboard drawers. She went through the contents of three box-files in case it had been bundled into one in error. Again she didn’t find it.

She returned to the kitchen with the next best thing: the Nationwide Building Society account book. She opened it and placed it in front of Leary. She pointed at the entry that recorded the withdrawal of two hundred and twenty-six pounds. She could tell that there had been no conversation in her absence. Leary would have tried to get some kind of talk going, but Alicia wouldn’t have responded.

‘September the eighth,’ Catherine said, emphasizing the printed date with a forefinger. ‘A Wednesday it was.’

In silence Leary perused the entry. He shook his head. The tight features of his face tightened even more, bunching together into a knot of bewilderment. Catherine glanced at her sister. He was putting it on, Alicia’s expression indicated.

‘The money was taken out all right,’ Leary said eventually. ‘Did he put it to another use in that case?’

‘Another use?’

‘Did you locate a receipt, missus?’

He spoke softly, not in the cagey, underhand tone of someone attempting to get something for nothing. Catherine was still standing. He turned his head to one side in order to squint up at her. He sounded apologetic, but all that could be put on also.

‘I brought the receipt book over with me,’ he said.

He handed it to her, a fat greasy notebook with a grey marbled cover that had The Challenge Receipt Book printed on it. Blue carbon paper protruded from the dog-eared pages.

‘Any receipt that’s issued would have a copy left behind here,’ he said, speaking now to Alicia, across the table. ‘The top copy for the customer, the carbon for ourselves. You couldn’t do business without you keep a record of receipts.’

He stood up then. He opened the book and displayed its unused pages, each with the same printed heading: In account with T. P. Leary. He showed Catherine how the details of a bill were recorded on the flimsy page beneath the carbon sheet and how, when a bill was paid, acknowledgement was recorded also: Paid with thanks, with the date and the careful scrawl of Mrs. Leary’s signature. He passed the receipt book to Alicia, pointing out these details to her also.

‘Anything could have happened to that receipt,’ Alicia said. ‘In the circumstances.’

‘If a receipt was issued, missus, there’d be a record of it here.’

Alicia placed the receipt book beside the much slimmer building-society book on the pale surface of the table. Leary’s attention remained with the former, his scrutiny an emphasis of the facts it contained. The evidence offered otherwise was not for him to comment upon: so the steadiness of his gaze insisted.

‘My husband counted those notes at this very table,’ Catherine said. ‘He took them out of the brown envelope that they were put into at the Nationwide.’

‘It’s a mystery so.’

It wasn’t any such thing; there was no mystery whatsoever. The bill had been paid. Both sisters knew that; in their different ways they guessed that Leary — and presumably his wife as well — had planned this dishonesty as soon as they realized death gave them the opportunity. Matthew had obliged them by paying cash so that they could defraud the taxation authorities. He had further obliged them by dying. Catherine said:

‘My husband walked out of this house with that envelope in his pocket. Are you telling me he didn’t reach you?’

‘Was he robbed? Would it be that? You hear terrible things these days.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’

Leary wagged his head in his meditative way. It was unlikely certainly, he agreed. Anyone robbed would have gone to the Guards. Anyone robbed would have mentioned it when he came back to the house again.

‘The bill was paid, Mr. Leary.’

‘All the same, we have to go by the receipt. At the heel of the hunt there’s the matter of a receipt.’

Alicia shook her head. Either a receipt wasn’t issued in the first place, she said, or else it had been mislaid. ‘There’s a confusion when a person dies,’ she said.

If Catherine had been able to produce the receipt Leary would have blamed his wife. He’d have blandly stated that she’d got her wires crossed. He’d have said the first thing that came into his head and then have gone away.

‘The only thing is,’ he said instead, ‘a sum like that is sizeable. I couldn’t afford let it go.’

Both Catherine and Alicia had seen Mrs. Leary in the shops, red-haired, like a tinker, a bigger woman than her husband, probably the brains of the two. The Learys were liars and worse than liars; the chance had come and the temptation had been too much for them. ‘Ah sure, those two have plenty,’ the woman would have said. The sisters wondered if the Learys had tricked the bereaved before, and imagined they had. Leary said:

‘It’s hard on a man that’s done work for you.’

Catherine moved towards the kitchen door. Leary ambled after her down the hall. She remembered the evening more clearly even than a while ago: a Wednesday it definitely had been, the day of the Sweetman girl’s wedding; and it came back to her, also, Alicia hurrying out on her Legion of Mary business. There’d been talk in McKenny’s about the wedding, the unusual choice of midweek, which apparently had something to do with visitors coming from America. She opened the hall-door in silence. Across the street, beyond the silver-coloured railings, the children were still running about in the convent yard. Watery sunlight lightened the unadorned concrete of the classrooms and the nuns’ house.

‘What’ll I do?’ Leary asked, wide-eyed, bloodshot, squinting at her.

Catherine said nothing.

They talked about it. It could be, Alicia said, that the receipt had remained in one of Matthew’s pockets, that a jacket she had disposed of to one of her charities had later found itself in the Learys’ hands, having passed through a jumble sale. She could imagine Mrs. Leary coming across it, and the temptation being too much. Leary was as weak as water, she said, adding that the tinker wife was a woman who never looked you in the eye. Foxy-faced and furtive, Mrs. Leary pushed a ramshackle pram about the streets, her ragged children cowering in her presence. It was she who would have removed the flimsy carbon copy from the soiled receipt book. Leary would have been putty in her hands.

In the kitchen they sat down at the table from which Alicia had cleared away the polished cutlery. Matthew had died as tidily as he’d lived, Alicia said: all his life he’d been meticulous. The Learys had failed to take that into account in any way whatsoever. If it came to a court of law the Learys wouldn’t have a leg to stand on, with the written evidence that the precise amount taken out of the building society matched the amount of the bill, and further evidence in Matthew’s reputation for promptness about settling debts.

‘What I’m wondering is,’ Alicia said, ‘should we go to the Guards?’

‘The Guards?’

‘He shouldn’t have come here like that.’

That evening there arrived a bill for the amount quoted by Leary, marked Account rendered. It was dropped through the letter-box and was discovered the next morning beneath the Irish Independent on the hall doormat.

‘The little twister!’ Alicia furiously exclaimed.

From the road outside the house came the morning commands of the convent girl in charge of the crossing to the school. ‘Get ready!’ ‘Prepare to cross!’ ‘Cross now!’ Impertinence had been added to dishonesty, Alicia declared in outraged tones. It was as though it had never been pointed out to Leary that Matthew had left the house on the evening in question with two hundred and twenty-six pounds in an envelope, that Leary’s attention had never been drawn to the clear evidence of the building-society entry.

‘It beats me,’ Catherine said, and in the hall Alicia turned sharply and said it was as clear as day. Again she mentioned going to the Guards. A single visit from Sergeant McBride, she maintained, and the Learys would abandon their cheek. From the play-yard the yells of the girls increased as more girls arrived there, and then the hand-bell sounded; a moment later there was silence.

‘I’m only wondering,’ Catherine said, ‘if there’s some kind of a mistake.’

‘There’s no mistake, Catherine.’

Alicia didn’t comment further. She led the way to the kitchen and half filled a saucepan with water for their two boiled eggs. Catherine cut bread for toast. When she and Alicia had been girls in that same play-yard she hadn’t known of Matthew’s existence. Years passed before she even noticed him, at Mass one Saturday night. And it was ages before he first invited her to go out with him, for a walk the first time, and then for a drive.

‘What d’you think happened then?’ Alicia asked. ‘That Matthew bet the money on a dog? That he owed it for drink consumed? Have sense, Catherine.’

Had it been Alicia’s own husband whom Leary had charged with negligence, there would have been no necessary suspension of disbelief: feckless and a nuisance, involved during his marriage with at least one other woman in the town, frequenter of race-courses and dog-tracks and bars, he had ended in an early grave. This shared thought — that behaviour which was ludicrous when attached to Matthew had been as natural in Alicia’s husband as breathing — was there between the sisters, but was not mentioned.

‘If Father Cahill got Leary on his own,’ Alicia began, but Catherine interrupted. She didn’t want that, she said; she didn’t want other people brought into this, not even Father Cahill. She didn’t want a fuss about whether or not her husband had paid a bill.

‘You’ll get more of these,’ Alicia warned, laying a finger on the envelope that had been put through the letter-box. ‘They’ll keep on coming.’

‘Yes.’

In the night Catherine had lain awake, wondering if Matthew had maybe lost the money on his walk to the Learys’ house that evening, if he’d put his hand in his pocket and found it wasn’t there and then been too ashamed to say. It wasn’t like him; it didn’t make much more sense than thinking he had been a secretive man, with private shortcomings all the years she’d been married to him. When Alicia’s husband died Matthew had said it was hard to feel sorry, and she’d agreed. Three times Alicia had been left on her own, for periods that varied in length, and on each occasion they’d thought the man was gone for good; but he returned and Alicia always took him back. Of course Matthew hadn’t lost the money; it was as silly to think that as to wonder if he’d been a gambler.

‘In case they’d try it on anyone else,’ Alicia was saying, ‘isn’t it better they should be shown up? Is a man who’d get up to that kind of game safe to be left in people’s houses the way a workman is?’

That morning they didn’t mention the matter again. They washed up the breakfast dishes and then Catherine went out to the shops, which was always her chore, while Alicia cleaned the stairs and the hall, the day being a Thursday. As Catherine made her way through the familiar streets, and then while Mr. Deegan sliced bacon for her and Gilligan greeted her in the hardware, she thought about the journey her husband had made that Wednesday evening in September. Involuntarily, she glanced into Healy’s, where he had bought the Evening Press, and into McKenny’s bar. Every evening except Sunday he had brought back the news, bits of gossip, anything he’d heard. It was at this time, too, that he went to Confession, on such occasions leaving the house half an hour earlier.

In French Street a countrywoman opened her car door without looking and knocked a cyclist over. ‘Ah, no harm done,’ the youth on the bicycle said, the delivery boy for Lawless the West Street butcher, the last delivery boy in the town. ‘Sure, I never saw him at all,’ the countrywoman protested to Catherine as she went by. The car door was dinged, but the woman said what did it matter if the lad was all right?

Culliney, the traveller from Limerick Shirts, was in town that day. Matthew had always bought his shirts direct from Culliney, the same striped pattern, the stripe blue or brown. Culliney had his measurements, the way he had the measurements of men all over Munster and Connacht, which was his area. Catherine could tell when she saw Culliney coming towards her that he didn’t know about the death, and she braced herself to tell him. When she did so he put a hand on her arm and spoke in a whisper, saying that Matthew had been a good man. If there was anything he could ever do, he said, if there was any way he could help. More people said that than didn’t.

It was then that Catherine saw Mrs. Leary. The house-painter’s wife was pushing her pram, a child holding on to it as she advanced. Catherine crossed the street, wondering if the woman had seen her and suspecting she had. In Jerety’s she selected a pan loaf from the yesterday’s rack, since neither she nor Alicia liked fresh bread and yesterday’s was always reduced. When she emerged, Mrs. Leary was not to be seen.

‘Nothing only a woman knocked young Nallen off his bike,’ she reported to Alicia when she returned to the house. ‘Is he a Nallen, that boy of Lawless’s?’

‘Or a Keane, is he? Big head on him?’

‘I don’t think he’s a Keane. Someone told me a Nallen. Who ever he is, there’s no harm done.’ She didn’t say she’d seen Mrs. Leary because she didn’t want to raise the subject of what had occurred again. She knew that Alicia was right: the bill would keep coming unless she did something about it. Once they’d set out on the course they’d chosen, why should the Learys give up? Alicia didn’t refer to the Learys either but that evening, when they had switched off the television and were preparing to go to bed, Catherine said:

‘I think I’ll pay them. Simplest, that would be.’

With her right hand on the newel of the banister, about to ascend the stairs, Alicia stared in disbelief at her sister. When Catherine nodded and continued on her way to the kitchen she followed her.

‘But you can’t.’ Alicia stood in the doorway while Catherine washed and rinsed the cups they’d drunk their bedtime tea from. ‘You can’t just pay them what isn’t owing.’

Catherine turned the tap off at the sink and set the cups to drain, slipping the accompanying saucers between the plastic bars of the drainer. Tomorrow she would withdraw the same sum from the building-society account and take it herself to the Learys in Brady’s Lane. She would stand there while a receipt was issued.

‘Catherine, you can’t hand out more than two hundred pounds.’

‘I’d rather.’

As she spoke, she changed her mind about the detail of the payment. Matthew had been obliging Leary by paying cash, but there was no need to oblige him any more. She would arrange for the Irish Nationwide to draw a cheque payable to T. P. Leary. She would bring it round to the Learys instead of a wad of notes.

‘They’ve taken you for a fool,’ Alicia said.

‘I know they have.’

‘Leary should go behind bars. You’re aiding and abetting him. Have sense, woman.’

A disappointment rose in Alicia, bewildering and muddled. The death of her own husband had brought an end, and her expectation had been that widowhood for her sister would be the same. Her expectation had been that in their shared state they would be as once they were, now that marriage was over, packed away with their similar mourning clothes. Yet almost palpable in the kitchen was Catherine’s resolve that what still remained for her should not be damaged by a fuss of protest over a confidence trick. The Guards investigating clothes sold at a jumble sale, strangers asked if a house-painter’s wife had bought this garment or that, private intimacies made public: Catherine was paying money in case, somehow, the memory of her husband should be accidentally tarnished. And knowing her sister well, Alicia knew that this resolve would become more stubborn as more time passed. It would mark and influence her sister; it would breed new eccentricities in her. If Leary had not come that day there would have been something else.

‘You’d have the man back, I suppose?’ Alicia said, trying to hurt and knowing she succeeded. ‘You’d have him back in to paint again, to lift the bits and pieces from your dressing-table ?’

‘It’s not to do with Leary.’

‘What’s it to do with then?’

‘Let’s leave it.’

Hanging up a tea-towel, Catherine noticed that her fingers were trembling. They never quarrelled; even in childhood they hadn’t. In all the years Alicia had lived in the house she had never spoken in this unpleasant way, her voice rudely raised.

‘They’re walking all over you, Catherine.’

‘Yes.’

They did not speak again, not even to say goodnight. Alicia closed her bedroom door, telling herself crossly that her expectation had not been a greedy one. She had been unhappy in her foolish marriage, and after it she had been beholden in this house. Although it ran against her nature to do so, she had borne her lot without complaint; why should she not fairly have hoped that in widowhood they would again be sisters first of all?

In her bedroom Catherine undressed and for a moment caught a glimpse of her nakedness in her dressing-table looking-glass. She missed his warmth in bed, a hand holding hers before they slept, that last embrace, and sometimes in the night his voice saying he loved her. She pulled her nightdress on, then knelt to pray before she turned the light out.

Some instinct, vague and imprecise, drew her in the darkness on to the territory of Alicia’s disappointment. In the family photographs — some clearly defined, some drained of detail, affected by the sun — they were the sisters they had been: Alicia beautiful, confidently smiling; Catherine in her care. Catherine’s first memory was of a yellow flower, and sunlight, and a white cloth hat put on her head. That flower was a cowslip, Alicia told her afterwards, and told her that they’d gone with their mother to the ruins by the river that day, that it was she who found the cowslip. ‘Look, Catherine,’ she’d said. ‘A lovely flower.’ Catherine had watched in admiration when Alicia paraded in her First Communion dress, and later when boys paid her attention. Alicia was the important one, responsible, reliable, right about things, offered the deference that was an older sister’s due. She’d been a strength, Catherine said after the funeral, and Alicia was pleased, even though she shook her head.

Catherine dropped into sleep after half an hour of wakefulness. She woke up a few times in the night, on each occasion to find her thoughts full of the decision she had made and of her sister’s outraged face, the two tiny patches of red that had come into it, high up on her cheeks, the snap of disdain in her eyes. ‘A laughing-stock,’ Alicia said in a dream. ‘No more than a laughing-stock, Catherine.’

As Catherine lay there she imagined the silent breakfast there would be, and saw herself walking to Brady’s Lane, and Leary fiddling with his cigarette-making gadget, and Mrs. Leary in fluffy pink slippers, her stockingless legs mottled from being too close to the fire. Tea would be offered, but Catherine would refuse it. ‘A decenter man never stood in a pair of shoes,’ Leary could be counted upon to state.

She did not sleep again. She watched the darkness lighten, heard the first cars of the day pass on the road outside the house. By chance, a petty dishonesty had made death a potency for her sister, as it had not been when she was widowed herself. Alicia had cheated it of its due; it took from her now, as it had not then.

Catherine knew this intuition was no trick of her tired mind. While they were widows in her house Alicia’s jealousy would be the truth they shared, tonight’s few moments of its presence lingering insistently. Widows were widows first. Catherine would mourn, and feel in solitude the warmth of love. For Alicia there was the memory of her beauty.