Collected Stories

A Husband’s Return

As dawn lightened Maura Brigid’s bedroom the eyes of the Virgin Mary surveyed her waking face dispassionately. Two fingers of the Holy Child blessed her from a tiny pedestal above the room’s single window. Sleepily recollected, the routine of the day before passed unobtrusively through her thoughts, prefacing the daytime shadow of her desertion by the man she’d loved. This pall of distress reclaimed its potency in the first moments of every day, establishing itself afresh, as the sacred statues did. Then, this morning, Maura Brigid remembered that her sister Bernadette had died.

In his bedroom across the landing Maura Brigid’s brother, Hiney, awoke with the occasion already alive in his consciousness. In the town the family had travelled to a banner had been suspended high up across a street, offering a welcome on behalf of a carnival in the future. Halfway between white iron railings and the church, on a hill, there was a shrine, a pietà, in white also. The yellow grain of the coffin was bright in the sunshine, the face of the priest wan and strained. Hiney pushed back the bedclothes, the àction assisting him to dispel these recollections of a time spent unhappily in an unfamiliar place. Bernadette had run away from the farmhouse with her sister’s husband: that sin had still been ugly at the funeral.

Affected also by the recent death, Mrs Colleary, the mother of Maura Brigid and Hiney, rose an hour later. She released the two blinds in her bedroom and dressed herself in the nondescript wear of a farmer’s widow. He would have gone after Bernadette, she reflected, thinking of her husband; he would have brought her back, and the danger was that he might even have killed Lawless, for his anger had always been difficult to control. It was as well he’d been spared all of it, because nothing he might have done could have lessened the disgrace into which the family had been dragged. Mrs Colleary told her rosary, and prayed for the soul of her husband, and for her daughter’s soul. It was the morning of a Tuesday in May, a month after the funeral.

In another bedroom an old man, distantly related to the family, remained in his bed. Of everyone in the farmhouse, only he no longer dwelt on the scandal that had occurred. He had been upset by it at the time, but with the passing years it had settled in his mind, as had so much else in a long life. He was a small, wizened man who had spent most of that life on this farm. His relationship to the remaining Collearys was vague.

The house where the family lived was large and square and white, facing a grassy hill, its back to the distant sea. The hall door had been nailed in place a long time ago, to keep out draughts; a slated roof, obtusely pitched, was scarcely visible. The gravel sweep that lay between the house and the hill was weedless; the windows that looked out on it were curtained heavily with net and velveteen. The front of the house was where appearances were kept up. At the back a cobbled yard, with a hay-barn and outhouses, and a feed-shed where potatoes and swill were boiled, was less tidy. A porch in need of repair led to sculleries and kitchen.

Weeding a field of mangolds that ran to the edge of the cliffs, Hiney heard in the distance the engine of the post van, and knew by the direction it came from that the van was on its way to the farmhouse. Would an abrupt, buff-enveloped notice announce the withdrawal of the tillage grant? Or was there at last a communication from the Appeal Commissioners? Sunshine warmed Hiney’s shoulders and his head as he bent over the mangolds, the impassive solemnity of his countenance unaffected by speculation. His waistcoat hung loosely; his collarless shirt was held at the neck by a stud. More likely it was the bill for the diesel that brought the post van down the avenue, he guessed.

The old man was visited in his bedroom by Mrs Colleary. She spoke to him about the weather, reporting that it was a brightly sunny morning. But it was always uncertain whether or not he comprehended what was said to him, and this morning he gave no sign that he did. The old man’s age was as mysterious as his relationship to the family; he was perhaps ninety-four or -five. Mrs Colleary visited him first thing every morning to make sure he was all right.

Maura Brigid fried bacon in the kitchen. She had set the table the night before, the last to leave the kitchen, as she always was. She pushed the bacon to one side of the pan and dropped slices of griddle bread into the fat. She heard her brother’s footsteps in the yard, and for an instant imagined his slow walk and his wide, well-shaved face, his dark hair brushed flat on either side of its parting, his lips set dourly, his blue eyes expressionless. Work was what Hiney thought about, work that had been completed, work that had yet to be done. His life was the fields, and his tractor, and the weather.

The letter that had arrived lay on the stone floor of the scullery passage, just inside the door from the yard. When there was a letter the postman opened the back door and placed it on the passage floor, propped against the wall, since there was no letter-box and nowhere else to put it. Entering the house, Hiney picked up the communication that had just been delivered. It was not the bill for the diesel, nor was it about the tillage grant or the appeal that had been lodged with the tax commissioners. It was a white envelope, addressed in a sloping hand to Maura Brigid. Hiney was curious about it. He turned the envelope over, but nothing was written on the back.

In the kitchen Mrs Colleary said she thought the old man would get up today. She always knew if he intended to get up when she visited him first thing. The anticipation of his intentions might have shown as a glimpse in his eyes or in some variation of the sound he emitted when she spoke to him: she had no idea how the impression was conveyed, only that she received it.

‘I have an egg ready to fry for him,’ Maura Brigid said, that being what the old man had for breakfast. Bacon he couldn’t manage.

Hiney placed the letter on the table beside his sister’s knife and fork. He sat where he always sat, on the chair that had been his father’s in his lifetime. ‘Move into his place, Hiney,’ Mrs Colleary had said a few weeks after her husband’s death in 1969, when Hiney was still a boy.

‘Did Paídín bring a letter?’ Mrs Colleary did not question the delivery of a letter since the letter was clearly there and could have arrived by no other means than with the postman: her query was her way of expressing surprise. She could see that the letter was a personal one, and from where she stood she could see it was addressed to her daughter.

Maura Brigid, having placed three plates of food on the table, sat down herself. Mrs Colleary poured the tea. Maura Brigid examined the envelope much as her brother had done. She did not recognize the handwriting.

Dear Mrs Lawless, I am writing to you from my conscience. There is repentance in Michael, that’s all I’m writing to say to you. There is sorrow in him also, left behind after the death. Poor Michael is tormented in his heart over the way he was tempted and the sin there was. He told me more times than once that he would endeavour to make recompense to you for the pain he inflicted on you. I am writing to advise you to pray to Our Lady for guidance at this time in your life. I am asking you to recollect the forgiveness She displayed in Her Own Life.

‘It’s from Father Mehegan,’ Maura Brigid said, ‘the priest that did the funeral.’

She handed the letter to her mother because all letters that came to the farm were read in that general way. Mrs Colleary noted without comment what Father Mehegan had written. Hiney read the letter in silence also.

‘I hear him on the stairs,’ Mrs Colleary said. A few moments later the old man entered the kitchen, his shirt not yet buttoned, his trousers hitched up with ragged braces. A vest that had been drained of its whiteness through washing was exposed, its two buttons not fastened either. He sat down in his usual place to await his breakfast. Maura Brigid rose to fry his egg.

‘Is he off the hunger strike yet?’ the old man inquired, lost in a confusion that evoked for him a distant past. ‘Will MacSwiney go to the end, Hiney?’

‘He will.’ Hiney nodded in his solemn way. Indulging such dislocation of time was not unusual in the farmhouse.

‘I was saying he would myself.’

Michael does not know I’m writing to you, the priest’s letter ended. That’s in confidence between us. It was three years since Michael Lawless and Bernadette had run off in the middle of a July night. Maura Brigid had been married for six months at the time and no particular lack of accord between husband and wife had warned of what was to occur. No hint as to the direction of her affections had ever slipped from Bernadette. No note had been left behind.

‘Isn’t it a terrible thing, Hiney, that they’d let poor MacSwiney go to the end?’

‘It is all right.’

‘I’d say they’d pay the price of it.’

‘I’d say they would.’

Hiney folded the letter and returned it to its envelope. Bernadette had died of an internal infection; she’d been two days in hospital. A message had come to them through their own priest, Father Brennan, from a parish more than sixty miles away. They had not known that Bernadette and Michael Lawless had been living there. After their flight the two had not been spoken of.

‘I put my faith in Collins to this day,’ the old man said. ‘Won’t Collins have a word to say when Terry MacSwiney goes?’

Hiney nodded, and so did Mrs Colleary. It was she who had led the silence in the house, her anger and her pain eventually becoming creased into her features. She had offered Maura Brigid no comfort. That Lawless had shattered the lives of both her daughters was how she registered what had occurred. Nor was it any consolation that she had never liked Michael Lawless, believing at the time of his marriage to Maura Brigid that he was after what he could extract to his advantage from the farm, while comfortably living as a member of the household. His running away might have seemed to disprove such an intention, but not for Mrs Colleary. In the humiliation of the scandal there was little room for reason, and no desire to pursue it. The Collearys, and the family Mrs Colleary had come from herself, were well known and well respected in the neighbourhood. They farmed their land, they did not miss Mass, there had never been talk of debts to shopkeepers or supply merchants. ‘I would see Lawless hung,’ Mrs Colleary had said, the last time she mentioned her son-in-law’s name.

Maura Brigid tilted the frying pan and spooned fat on to the yolk of the egg. She wondered if Bernadette had been pregnant. Was that the cause of it, something going wrong inside her? At the funeral no details had been given because none had been asked for. Still wondering, she completed the frying of the old man’s egg and scooped it on to a plate. She remembered playing in the yard when she and Bernadette were children, and Berna-dette’s doll being carried off to a hay-barn by one of the sheepdogs, and Bernadette crying. Sawdust had come out of the doll because the dog’s tooth had pierced one of its legs. Margy it had been called.

‘Are you out in the fields, Hiney?’ the old man inquired, returning from his travels through remembered time. ‘Will I lend you a hand?’

‘I’m weeding the mangolds.’

‘I’ll come out so.’

The old man cut his egg into quarters. He removed the centre of a slice of bread and soaked some of the fat on his plate into it. He spooned sugar into his tea.

‘I’m at the bottom of the cliff field,’ Hiney said.

‘It’s a fine day for the cliff field.’

No more was said about the priest’s letter. No more was necessary. The silence it had broken – that had been broken also by Bernadette’s death – would knit together and be as it had been before. Nothing would be said to Father Brennan. The Mass for Bernadette had been offered in the distant town, which was where she would now lie for ever, well separated from the family she had disgraced. No one outside the farmhouse had been told about her death. No one need know, and no one would ask. After Father Brenann had conveyed the message, he had gone quickly away, and they knew he would remain silent on the subject.

Hiney spread sugar on to a piece of buttered bread He was five years older than the sister who had married Michael Lawless, and older by another three than Bernadette. When they were younger he had looked after them, once lying in wait for the two boys who had taken to following them along the road on their way home from school. While he’d cuffed the boys and threatened them with worse Maura Brigid had been demure but Bernadette had laughed. The boys would never have bothered them if Bernadette hadn’t encouraged them in the first place.

Mrs Colleary wondered if Lawless had been as bad to Bernadette as he had been to Maura Brigid. That thought had just come into her mind, suggested somehow by the priest’s letter. A man who’d desert a wife would have other sins up his sleeve, other punishments to mete out before he’d be finished. That had never occurred to her before, not even on the day of the funeral. God’s anger had been assuaged was what she’d thought, wiping her eyes with a sleeve of her black mourning coat.

Maura Brigid wanted to read the letter again, but did not do so. Occasionally during her marriage she had woken up in the middle of the night to find her husband not beside her, and when she’d asked him the next morning he’d said he’d gone out for a walk because he couldn’t sleep. When they’d watched television in the kitchen he usually sat next to Bernadette, though not in any noticeable way at the time. It was the brevity of the marriage, the way it was still something new, with people still coming up to both of them after Mass to give them good wishes, that Maura Brigid hadn’t been able to get out of her mind.

It was not Sunday, the old man was thinking. He knew it wasn’t because she’d have reminded him, when she came into his bedroom, to put on different clothes. If it was a Sunday he’d be on the way to Mass now, sitting in the back of the car with the girl.

They say a man’d be fit for nothing,’ he said, ‘after a hunger strike.’

Four months later Michael Lawless returned. It was September then, the shortening days pleasantly mild, the smell of the season in the woods and the fields. In the twilight of an evening Maura Brigid’s husband advanced cautiously up the avenue on a bicycle. He dismounted before he came within sight of the house and wheeled the bicycle on to the grass verge. He leaned it against the wire of the avenue fence and continued on foot.

In the yard the sheepdogs barked. They licked the hand he held out to them from the shadows where he stood. Ignoring their noise, Hiney emerged from an outhouse with a new shaft fitted into a spade. He passed through the yard, and the sheepdogs ran after him. Ten minutes later Mrs Colleary came out of the house and scattered feed for the fowls.

‘Hullo, Maura Brigid,’ Lawless whispered when his wife appeared later still that evening. ‘Shh, don’t call out,’ he begged when her hand went up to her mouth to stifle a cry. ‘I’m sorry I frightened you, Maura Brigid.’

He’d stepped out of the shadows and she’d seen the movement from the corner of her eye. She’d only recognized him when she turned her head and even then she had to peer. But when her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom she saw her husband clearly: the broad face and the light-brown hair combed and parted, the collar and tie, the dark serge suit, its trouser ends held tidily in place with bicycle-clips.

‘I’ve something I want to say to you, Maura Brigid.’ He reached for her arm and gently guided her into the barn where the summer’s hay was stacked. ‘It wasn’t my fault she died, Maura Brigid. She had an infection like anyone can have.’

‘I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t know what you’re doing here.’

‘Maura Brigid –’

‘Let go of my arm or I’ll shout out.’

‘Don’t shout out, Maura Brigid. Please now. I’m sorry about everything that happened.’

‘It’s too late to be sorry now. You’ve no right to be here.’

‘I only want to talk to you. I cycled the whole sixty miles of it.’

‘We’re troubled enough without you coming here.’

‘I want to be with you, Maura Brigid.’

‘What are you talking about?’ she whispered, staring at him. She felt stupid, as though she had failed to comprehend what had been said to her, or had misunderstood it. She’d been on her way to the feed house to make sure the fire under the swill was damped down for the night, and the sudden presence of her husband both confused and alarmed her. She felt as she often did in a dream, plunged without warning into unreality, unable to escape.

‘I want it to be like it was,’ he said. ‘I feel that way about you, Maura Brigid.’

‘I’m going in now. Take your hand off of my arm and let me go. Don’t ever come back here.’

‘It was never right, Maura Brigid. We were never at ease, Bernadette and myself.’ He paused, as though expecting a response. When none came he said: ‘I wasn’t the father.’

‘Oh, my God!’

‘Bernadette was that way. She led me a dance, Maura Brigid.’

Maura Brigid pulled her arm out of his grasp and ran across the yard. In the scullery passage she bolted the back door behind her. She didn’t enter the kitchen but went straight up to her bedroom. She couldn’t have faced her mother and Hiney, and they’d have known at once by the sight of her that something was the matter. They’d have asked her questions and she’d have told them in the end. Her mother would have sat there, tight-lipped. She knew, without even having to think, that the infection Bernadette had suffered had been due to an effort to prevent the birth. The nuns at the convent had called Bernadette wild.

‘Dear Mother of God, help me,’ Maura Brigid pleaded in her room, her voice distorted by agitation and tears she could no longer stifle. At the funeral she’d known he was trying to talk to her. She’d seen him looking at her, as though begging for mercy, but they’d driven straight off afterwards, not even stopping in a café for a cup of tea. Going away like that was what Hiney and her mother wanted. They’d hardly said thank you to the priest.

She mumbled through her rosary, sitting on the edge of the bed, the beads between her fingers. The first time she’d ever seen him he’d been a boy at the Christian Brothers’, much quieter, more solitary, than the other boys. ‘Who that fellow with his eye on you?’ Bernadette had said. He’d begun to turn up at the farm, asking Hiney for work, coming on a bicycle, as he had tonight. He’d done jobs for Hiney. He was better than Hiney at mending things.

Maura Brigid crossed to the window and slightly pulled aside the edge of the curtain. She had not yet turned on the light, fearful in case he was watching. Her room looked out over the gravel at the front of the house, and just for a moment she imagined she saw the movement of a figure on the avenue. ‘Would you marry me?’ was what he’d said. ‘Am I good enough for you?’

She reached in among the curtains and pulled the blind down, separating herself further from what lay outside. She still did not light the room, but undressed in the darkness and crept into the bed she had shared with him. Her tears began again, a sobbing that was too soft for anyone passing by on the landing to hear.

The last of the potatoes were lifted. The old man and Maura Brigid and Mrs Colleary helped Hiney with them, and then Hiney ploughed the two potato fields. ‘Is Lawless back?’ the old man asked out of the blue, returning to the house with Maura Brigid and her mother.

When the old man walked he became bent, which made him seem even smaller. But he moved quickly, and would have been swifter over the stubble they crossed had he not slackened his pace in order to converse. His motion was a sideways one, the left shoulder hunched upwards and preceding the right, his grizzled head bent into his chest. ‘Sure, a woman would want the man she has,’ he remarked. ‘Sure, why wouldn’t she?’

Mrs Colleary ignored what he said, but Maura Brigid knew he must have seen her husband. He sometimes went wandering about the hill just before nightfall, setting snares. He would have looked down and recognized the familiar figure in the distance. His eyes were particularly sharp.

‘Amn’t I right, Maura Brigid?’

As though humouring him, she agreed that he was, and her mother paid no heed. Even if he’d stated that he’d spoken to her husband it wouldn’t have mattered. Neither her mother nor Hiney would have placed any credence in the claim.

‘He’ll be a help for poor Hiney,’ the old man said. ‘It’s hard going for Hiney sometimes.’

Maura Brigid knew she could write to the priest with a message for her husband. She could say she forgave him and was prepared to have him back. Whenever she thought about what he’d said concerning Bernadette, she had to repress her tears. When she’d known him well he’d never been untruthful. ‘What d’you say that for?’ Bernadette had crossly reprimanded her when she’d told Hiney that the boys who followed them on the road were a nuisance. Her sister’s mood was quite different when she was scolded by the nuns: repentantly she would cast her eyes down. ‘Sure, it was only a bit of fun, Sister,’ she’d say, and probably she’d have made the same excuse to the man she’d led a dance. ‘It won’t happen again,’ Maura Brigid could imagine her saying after she’d got pregnant with someone else. She had the ability to twist people round her little finger – their mother and Hiney and the old man, the nuns, someone in a shop she was bargaining with. She could wheedle her way with anyone.

‘Leave off about him,’ Mrs Colleary said snappishly when the old man again mentioned Michael Lawless. ‘Don’t speak that name, d’you hear?’

They reached the yard and for a moment Maura Brigid thought he might be there, hiding in the hay-barn until darkness came. She imagined his tidy hair and clothes. She remembered the strength of his arms when he put them around her, and the particular smell he had, a brackeny smell with a trace of tobacco in it. It had never occurred to her to say to herself that Bernadette wouldn’t change just because she ran off with someone, just because she’d disgraced a whole family. She’d been the apple of their father’s eye, and of their mother’s until the scandal, and Hiney’s favourite, and the old man’s. She had been turned into a sinful woman by a man you couldn’t mention: that was how they saw it.

Later that evening, when Maura Brigid crossed the yard to damp down the swill fire, no voice whispered her name. Later still, after she’d drawn down the blinds in her bedroom, she realized that her husband would not return unless she summoned him. He had come to make a case for his remorse; the priest had written from his conscience. Unless she chose to, she would hear no more from either of them.

Dear Father Mehegan, she wrote. Thanks for writing to me. Would you tell Michael 1 will meet him halfway, in Cappoquin one Friday. Tell him I understand what he was saying to me.

She addressed the envelope, but did not send the letter. She kept it in a drawer in her bedroom, saying she would post it the next Friday she went in to do the shopping. After that, she would be on the watch for a reply, ready to collect it from the scullery passage before Hiney found it. She’d drive on to Cappoquin on the Friday they arranged, making sure she put more petrol in the car, so that Hiney wouldn’t notice how much had been used. They’d sit in the car in a car park.

‘You’d need the fellow’s assistance, Hiney,’ the old man said. ‘It’s understandable you would.’

The old man sometimes sat in the dining-room, which was nowadays never used, under the impression that a land steward called Mahaffy was about to call to see him. Effortlessly he had created a world made up of random details from the past, and had peopled it as he wished. No one on the farm had ever heard of the land steward, Mahaffy. Terence MacSwiney, Mayor of Cork, had died on his hunger strike sixty-seven years ago.

‘Ah, don’t be silly now,’ Hiney said when the assistance of Michael Lawless was referred to, Hiney as keen as his mother that the name should not be mentioned. The scandal Maura Brigid had inflicted on the family by bringing a scoundrel to the farm was too recent and too painful to be permitted in an old man’s silliness. ‘That man didn’t come back,’ Hiney shouted in the kitchen. ‘D’you understand that now? He’s gone for good.’

But the old man insisted. Michael Lawless had come back up the avenue on a bicycle. The sheepdogs had barked when he walked into the yard. ‘We’ll ask him about it when we see him,’ the old man said. ‘We’ll ask him wasn’t I right.’

All of it was her fault, Maura Brigid could feel her mother and Hiney thinking. If she had not married the man Bernadette would not have been ruined. Bernadette would still be alive. It was her fault that a scoundrel had come and gone, doing the worst that could be done to two sisters, duping them.

‘He did come back,’ she said. ‘A while after the funeral he came back.’

She was on her feet when she spoke, giving them their food, as so often she did. She had fried chops and mashed turnips, and tumbled a saucepan of potatoes on to a sheet of newspaper, which would become accumulated with peelings as the meal progressed. Chops or fried steak, fish or boiled bacon, frozen peas or turnips or cabbage, and potatoes: that was the food she cooked and served for the main meal they ate every day. At half past twelve she placed the newspaper on the centre of the table. At a quarter past one she made tea. She and her mother washed up afterwards.

‘What are you talking about?’ Hiney said. ‘Lawless never came back here.’

‘He came back and told me Bernadette was pregnant, only it wasn’t his child. She tried to get rid of it.’

Mrs Colleary crossed herself. Hiney’s solemn face was unusually animated. ‘That’s a bloody lie,’ he said.

‘He couldn’t control her, Hiney. She was like she always was.’

The old man asked them what they were talking about, something he rarely did. Nobody answered him. Mrs Colleary said:

‘He never told the truth.’

‘Never in his life,’ Hiney agreed with harsh vigour. ‘We all know the kind Lawless is.’

‘You were always taken in, Maura Brigid. You were always soft.’

She knew that if she began to cry she wouldn’t be able to stop. But the tears she repressed kept making her blink and she turned her head away. They were the same kind, she and the man who had married her. They’d been companions the way he and her sister had never been, you could tell that from how he spoke of Bernadette. Bernadette had hurt him, too.

‘It’s bad enough the way things are,’ Hiney insisted. ‘Keep it to yourself he came back.’

When he’d first come to the farm to court her they used to walk in the woods and climb down the cliffs to the strand. He’d always been shy, only taking her hand and clumsily kissing her. After they were married there had never been any question about his not coming on to the farm: Hiney needed the assistance and Michael was employe4 on the roads, work he didn’t like. She remembered how she had wondered about a baby being born, her own baby and his on the farm.

‘There were girls at the convent,’ she said, ‘used call Bernadette a hooer.’

Again Mrs Colleary crossed herself. She drew her breath in and held it for a moment. Her eyes were closed.

‘What’s the matter with you, Maura Brigid?’ Hiney asked quietly.

‘On account of the way she enticed the Christian Brothers’ boys. That’s why they called her that.’

‘If Lawless comes back here I’ll take a gun to him,’ Hiney said, still without raising his voice. He stood up, leaving his food untouched. He walked from the kitchen, and the sheepdogs who’d been lying under the table followed him.

‘You shouldn’t ever have married that man,’ Mrs Colleary said, opening her eyes. Her face had gone pale. Her mouth was pulled down, as though in weariness, as though she couldn’t be bothered arranging it differently any more. ‘I told you at the time he was rotten to the core.’

Maura Brigid did not reply. It was not true to say the man she’d married had never told the truth in his life. He was weak, and she was weak herself: she didn’t possess the courage to leave the farm, to run off with him as Bernadette had. She would be frightened, and she was well-behaved by nature. He hadn’t come to the farm to ask her to run off, that wasn’t his way; he’d come to the farm to tell her something, to see how she might feel about it. The priest had written to beg that there might be forgiveness.

‘I’ll go down and help them in the fields,’ the old man said, finishing the cup of tea he’d poured himself. ‘I think the pair of them are digging out ditches.’

The letter she had written would remain in her drawer. In the old man’s senile fantasy her husband would continue to work on the cliff land, to cut timber in the woods, and help her with the Friday shopping, as he had once upon a time. In the old man’s senile fantasy there was repentance, and forgiveness.

‘Those are terrible things you said,’ her mother whispered, still sitting at the table, her chop congealed in its fat. ‘Enough has happened to us without that.’

When the old man died there would be no more talk of her husband, and when her mother died the task of making Hiney’s bed would be hers, and there would only be Hiney and herself to cook for. Hiney would never marry because all Hiney was interested in was work. People would be sorry for her, but they would always say it was her foolishness that had dragged the family through disgrace, her fault for marrying a scoundrel. In the farmhouse and the neighbourhood that was the person she had become.