Collected Stories

Kathleen’s Field

‘I’m after a field of land, sir.’

Hagerty’s tone was modest to the bank agent, careful and cautious. He was aware that Mr Ensor would know what was coming next. He was aware that he constituted a risk, a word Mr Ensor had used a couple of times when endeavouring to discuss the overdraft Hagerty already had with the bank.

‘I was wondering, sir…’ His voice trailed away when Mr Ensor’s head began to shake. He’d like to say yes, the bank agent assured him. He would say yes this very instant, only what use would it be when Head Office wouldn’t agree? They’re bad times, Mr Hagerty.’

It was a Monday morning in 1948. Leaning on the counter, his right hand still grasping the stick he’d used to drive three bullocks the seven miles from his farm, Hagerty agreed that the times were as bad as ever he’d known them. He’d brought the bullocks in to see if he could get a price for them, but he hadn’t been successful. All the way on his journey he’d been thinking about the field old Lally had spent his lifetime carting the rocks out of. The widow the old man had left behind had sold the nineteen acres on the other side of the hill, but the last of her fields was awkwardly placed for anyone except Hagerty. They both knew it would be convenient for him to have it; they both knew there’d be almost as much profit in that single pasture as there was in all the land he possessed already. Gently sloping, naturally drained, it was free of weeds and thistles, and the grass it grew would do you good to look at. Old Lally had known its value from the moment he’d inherited it. He had kept it ditched, with its gates and stone walls always cared for. And for miles around, no one had ever cleared away rocks like old Lally had.

‘I’d help you if I could, Mr Hagerty,’ the bank agent assured him. ‘Only there’s still a fair bit owing.’

‘I know there is, sir.’

Every December Hagerty walked into the bank with a plucked turkey as a seasonal statement of gratitude: the overdraft had undramatically continued for seventeen years. It was less than it had been, but Hagerty was no longer young and he might yet be written off as a bad debt. He hadn’t had much hope when he’d raised the subject of the field he coveted.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Hagerty,’ the bank agent said, stretching his hand across the width of the counter. ‘I know that field well. I know you could make something of it, but there you are.’

‘Ah well, you gave it your consideration, sir.’

He said it because it was his way to make matters easier for a man who had lent him money in the past: Hagerty was a humble man. He had a tired look about him, his spare figure stooped from the shoulders, a black hat always on his head. He hadn’t removed it in the bank, nor did he in Shaughnessy’s Provisions and Bar, where he sat in a corner by himself, with a bottle of stout to console him. He had left the bullocks in Cronin’s yard in order to free himself for his business in the bank, and since Cronin made a small charge for this fair-day service he’d thought he might as well take full advantage of it by delaying a little longer.

He reflected as he drank that he hardly needed the bank agent’s reminder about the times being bad. Seven of his ten children had emigrated, four to Canada and America, the three others to England. Kathleen, the youngest, now sixteen, was left, with Biddy, who wasn’t herself, and Con, who would inherit the farm. But without the Lallys’ field it wouldn’t be easy for Con to keep going. Sooner or later he would want to marry the McKrill girl, and there’d always have to be a home for Biddy on the farm, and for a while at least an elderly mother and father would have to be accommodated also. Sometimes one or other of the exiled children sent back a cheque and Hagerty never objected to accepting it. But none of them could afford the price of a field, and he wasn’t going to ask them. Nor would Con accept these little presents when his time came to take over the farm entirely, for how could the oldest brother be beholden like that in the prime of his life? It wasn’t the same for Hagerty himself: he’d been barefoot on the farm as a child, which was when his humility had been learned.

‘Are you keeping yourself well, Mr Hagerty?’ Mrs Shaughnessy inquired, crossing the small bar to where he sat. She’d been busy with customers on the grocery side since soon after he’d come in; she’d drawn the cork out of his bottle, apologizing for her busyness when she gave it to him to pour himself.

‘I am,’ he said. ‘And are you, Mrs Shaughnessy?’

‘I have the winter rheumatism again. But thank God it’s not severe.’

Mrs Shaughnessy was a tall, big-shouldered woman whom he remembered as a girl before she’d married into the shop. She wore a bit of make-up, and her clothes were more colourful than his wife’s, although they were hidden now by her green shop overall. She had been flighty as a girl, so he remembered hearing, but in no way could you describe her as that in her late middle age; ‘well-to-do’ was the description that everything about Mrs Shaughnessy insisted upon.

‘I was wanting to ask you, Mr Hagerty. I’m on the look-out for a country girl to assist me in the house. If they’re any good they’re like gold dust these days. Would you know of a country girl out your way?’

Hagerty began to shake his head and was at once reminded of the bank agent shaking his. It was then, while he was still actually engaged in that motion, that he recalled a fact which previously had been of no interest to him: Mrs Shaughnessy’s husband lent people money. Mr Shaughnessy was a considerable businessman. As well as the Provisions and Bar, he owned a barber’s shop and was an agent for the Property & Life Insurance Company; he had funds to spare. Hagerty had heard of people mortgaging an area of their land with Mr Shaughnessy, or maybe the farmhouse itself, and as a consequence being able to buy machinery or stock. He’d never yet heard of any unfairness or sharp practice on the part of Mr Shaughnessy after the deal had been agreed upon and had gone into operation.

‘Haven’t you a daughter yourself, Mr Hagerty? Pardon me now if I’m guilty of a presumption, but I always say if you don’t ask you won’t know. Haven’t you a daughter not long left the nuns?’

Kathleen’s round, open features came into his mind, momentarily softening his own. His youngest daughter was inclined to plumpness, but her wide, uncomplicated smile often radiated moments of prettiness in her face. She had always been his favourite, although Biddy, of course, had a special place also.

‘No, she’s not long left the convent.’

Her face slipped away, darkening to nothing in his imagination. He thought again of the Lallys’ field, the curving shape of it like a tea-cloth thrown over a bush to dry. A stream ran among the few little ash trees at the bottom, the morning sun lingered on the heart of it.

‘I’d never have another girl unless I knew the family, Mr Hagerty. Or unless she’d be vouched for by someone the like of yourself.’

‘Are you thinking of Kathleen, Mrs Shaughnessy?’

‘Well, I am. I’ll be truthful with you, I am.’

At that moment someone rapped with a coin on the counter of the grocery and Mrs Shaughnessy hurried away. If Kathleen came to work in the house above the Provisions and Bar, he might be able to bring up the possibility of a mortgage. And the grass was so rich in the field that it wouldn’t be too many years before a mortgage could be paid off. Con would be left secure, Biddy would be provided for.

Hagerty savoured a slow mouthful of stout. He didn’t want Kathleen to go to England. I can get her fixed up, her sister, Mary Florence, had written in a letter not long ago. ‘I’d rather Kilburn than Chicago,’ he’d heard Kathleen herself saying to Con, and at the time he’d been relieved because Kilburn was nearer. Only Biddy would always be with them, for you couldn’t count on Con not being tempted by Kilburn or Chicago the way things were at the present time. ‘Sure, what choice have we in any of it?’ their mother had said, but enough of them had gone, he’d thought. His father had struggled for the farm and he’d struggled for it himself.

‘God, the cheek of some people!’ Mrs Shaughnessy exclaimed, re-entering the bar. ‘Tinned pears and ham, and her book unpaid since January! Would you credit that, Mr Hagerty?’

He wagged his head in an appropriate manner, denoting amazement. He’d been thinking over what she’d put to him, he said. There was no girl out his way who might be suitable, only his own Kathleen. ‘You were right enough to mention Kathleen, Mrs Shaughnessy.’ The nuns had never been displeased with her, he said as well.

‘Of course, she would be raw, Mr Hagerty. I’d have to train every inch of her. Well, I have experience in that, all right. You train them, Mr Hagerty, and the next thing is they go off to get married. There’s no sign of that, is there?’

‘Ah, no, no.’

‘You’d maybe spend a year training them and then they’d be off. Sure, where’s the sense in it? I often wonder I bother.’

‘Kathleen wouldn’t go running off, no fear of that, Mrs Shaughnessy.’

‘It’s best to know the family. It’s best to know a father like yourself.’

As Mrs Shaughnessy spoke, her husband appeared behind the bar. He was a medium-sized man, with grey hair brushed into spikes, and a map of broken veins dictating a warm redness in his complexion. He wore a collar and tie, which Mr Hagerty did not, and the waistcoat and trousers of a dark-blue suit. He carried a number of papers in his right hand and a packet of Sweet Afton cigarettes in his left. He spread the papers out on the bar and, having lit a cigarette, proceeded to scrutinize them. While he listened to Mrs Shaughnessy’s further exposition of her theme, Hagerty was unable to take his eyes off him.

‘You get in a country girl and you wouldn’t know was she clean or maybe would she take things. We had a queer one once, she used eat a raw onion. You’d go into the kitchen and she’d be at it. “What are you chewing, Kitty?” you might say to her politely. And she’d open her mouth and you’d see the onion in it.’

‘Kathleen wouldn’t eat onions.’

‘Ah, I’m not saying she would. Des, will you bring Mr Hagerty another bottle of stout? He has a girl for us.’

Looking up from his papers but keeping a finger in place on them, her husband asked her what she was talking about.

‘Kathleen Hagerty would come in and assist me, Des.’

Mr Shaughnessy asked who Kathleen Hagerty was, and when it was revealed that her father was sitting in the bar with a bottle of stout, and in need of another one, he bundled his papers into a pocket and drew the corks from two further bottles. His wife winked at Hagerty. He liked to have a maid about the house, she said. He pretended he didn’t, but he liked the style of it.

All the way back to the farm, driving home the bullocks, Hagerty reflected on that stroke of luck. In poor spirits he’d turned into Shaughnessy’s, it being the nearest public house to the bank. If he hadn’t done so, and if Mrs Shaughnessy hadn’t mentioned her domestic needs, and if her husband hadn’t come in when he had, there wouldn’t have been one bit of good news to carry back. ‘I’m after a field of land,’ he’d said to Mr Shaughnessy, making no bones about it. They’d both listened to him, Mrs Shaughnessy only going away once, to pour herself half a glass of sherry. They’d understood immediately the thing about the field being valuable to him because of its position. ‘Doesn’t it sound a grand bit of land, Des?’ Mrs Shaughnessy had remarked with enthusiasm. ‘With a good hot sun on it?’ He’d revealed the price old Lally’s widow was asking; he’d laid every fact he knew down before them.

In the end, on top of four bottles of stout, he was poured a glass of Paddy, and then Mrs Shaughnessy made him a spreadable-cheese sandwich. He would send Kathleen in, he promised, and after that it would be up to Mrs Shaughnessy. ‘But, sure, I think we’ll do business,’ she’d confidently predicted.

Biddy would see him coming, he said to himself as he urged the bullocks on. She’d see the bullocks and she’d run back into the house to say they hadn’t been sold. There’d be long faces then, but he’d take it easy when he entered the kitchen and reached out for his tea. A bad old fair it had been, he’d report, which was nothing only the truth, and he’d go through the offers that had been made to him. He’d go through his conversation with Mr Ensor and then explain how he’d gone into Shaughnessy’s to rest himself before the journey home.

On the road ahead he saw Biddy waving at him and then doing what he’d known she’d do: hurrying back to precede him with the news. As he murmured the words of a thanksgiving, his youngest daughter again filled Hagerty’s mind. The day Kathleen was born it had rained from dawn till dusk. People said that was lucky for the family of an infant, and it might be they were right.

*

Kathleen was led from room to room and felt alarmed. She had never experienced a carpet beneath her feet before. There were boards or linoleum in the farmhouse, and linoleum in the Reverend Mother’s room at the convent. She found the papered walls startling: flowers cascaded in the corners, and ran in a narrow band around the room, close to the ceiling. ‘I see you admiring the frieze,’ Mrs Shaughnessy said. ‘I had the house redone a year ago.’ She paused and then laughed, amused by the wonder in Kathleen’s face. ‘Those little borders,’ she said. ‘I think they call them friezes these days.’

When Mrs Shaughnessy laughed her chin became long and smooth, and the skin tightened on her forehead. Her very white false teeth – which Kathleen was later to learn she referred to as her ‘delf’ – shifted slightly behind her reddened lips. The laugh was a sedate whisper that quickly exhausted itself.

‘You’re a good riser, are you, Kathleen?’

‘I’m used to getting up, ma’am.’

Always say ma’am, the Reverend Mother had adjured, for Kathleen had been summoned when it was known that Mrs Shaughnessy was interested in training her as a maid. The Reverend Mother liked to have a word with any girl who’d been to the convent when the question of local employment arose, or if emigration was mooted. The Reverend Mother liked to satisfy herself that a girl’s future promised to be what she would herself have chosen for the girl; and she liked to point out certain hazards, feeling it her duty to do so. The Friday fast was not observed in Protestant households, where there would also be an absence of sacred reminders. Conditions met with after emigration left even more to be desired.

‘Now, this would be your own room, Kathleen,’ Mrs Shaughnessy said, leading her into a small bedroom at the top of the house. There was a white china wash-basin with a jug standing in it, and a bed with a mattress on it, and a cupboard. The stand the basin and the jug were on was painted white, and so was the cupboard. A net curtain covered the bottom half of a window and at the top there was a brown blind like the ones in the Reverend Mother’s room. There wasn’t a carpet on the floor and there wasn’t linoleum either; but a rug stretched on the boards by the bed, and Kathleen couldn’t help imagining her bare feet stepping on to its softness first thing every morning.

‘There’ll be the two uniforms the last girl had,’ Mrs Shaughnessy said. ‘They’d easily fit, although I’d say you were bigger on the chest. You wouldn’t be be familiar with a uniform, Kathleen?’

‘I didn’t have one at the convent, ma’am.’

‘You’ll soon get used to the dresses.’

That was the first intimation that Mrs Shaughnessy considered her suitable for the post. The dresses were hanging in the cupboard, she said. There were sheets and blankets in the hot press.

‘I’d rather call you Kitty,’ Mrs Shaughnessy said. ‘If you wouldn’t object. The last girl was Kitty, and so was another we had.’

Kathleen said that was all right. She hadn’t been called Kitty at the convent, and wasn’t at home because it was the pet name of her eldest sister.

‘Well, that’s great,’ Mrs Shaughnessy said, the tone of her voice implying that the arrangement had already been made.

‘I was never better pleased with you,’ her father said when Kathleen returned home. ‘You’re a great little girl.’

When she’d packed some of her clothes into a suitcase that Mary Florence had left behind after a visit one time, he said it was hardly like going away at all because she was only going seven miles. She’d return every Sunday afternoon; it wasn’t like Kilburn or Chicago. She sat beside him on the cart and he explained that the Shaughnessys had been generous to a degree. The wages he had agreed with them would be held back and set against the debt: it was that that made the whole thing possible, reducing his monthly repayments to a figure he was confident he could manage, even with the bank overdraft. ‘It isn’t everyone would agree to the convenience of that, Kathleen.’

She said she understood. There was a new sprightliness about her father; the fatigue in his face had given way to an excited pleasure. His gratitude to the Shaughnessys, and her mother’s gratitude, had made the farmhouse a different place during the last couple of weeks. Biddy and Con had been affected by it, and so had Kathleen, even though she had no idea what life would be like in the house above the Shaughnessys’ Provisions and Bar. Mrs Shaughnessy had not outlined her duties beyond saying that every night when she went up to bed she should carry with her the alarm clock from the kitchen dresser, and carry it down again every morning. The most important thing of all appeared to be that she should rise promptly from her bed.

‘You’ll listen well to what Mrs Shaughnessy says,’ her father begged her. ‘You’ll attend properly to all the work, Kathleen?’

‘I will of course.’

‘It’ll be great seeing you on Sundays, girl.’

‘It’ll be great coming home.’

A bicycle, left behind also by Mary Florence, lay in the back of the cart. Kathleen had wanted to tie the suitcase on to the carrier and cycle in herself with it, but her father wouldn’t let her. It was dangerous, he said; a suitcase attached like that could easily unbalance you.

‘Kathleen’s field is what we call it,’ her father said on their journey together, and added after a moment: ‘They’re decent people, Kathleen. You’re going to a decent house.’

‘Oh, I know, I know.’

But after only half a day there Kathleen wished she was back in the farmhouse. She knew at once how much she was going to miss the comfort of the kitchen she had known all her life, and the room along the passage she shared with Biddy, where Mary Florence had slept also, and the dogs nosing up to her in the yard. She knew how much she would miss Con, and her father and her mother, and how she’d miss looking after Biddy.

‘Now, I’ll show you how to set a table,’ Mrs Shaughnessy said. ‘Listen to this carefully, Kitty.’

Cork mats were put down on the tablecloth so that the heat of the dishes wouldn’t penetrate to the polished surface beneath. Small plates were placed on the left of each mat, to put the skins of potatoes on. A knife and a fork were arranged on each side of the mats and a spoon and a fork across the top. The pepper and salt were placed so that Mr Shaughnessy could easily reach them. Serving spoons were placed by the bigger mats in the middle. The breakfast table was set the night before, with the cups upside down on the saucers so that they wouldn’t catch the dust when the ashes were taken from the fireplace.

‘Can you cut kindling, Kitty? I’ll show you how to do it with the little hatchet.’

She showed her, as well, how to sweep the carpet on the stairs with a stiff hand-brush, and how to use the dust-pan. She explained that every mantelpiece in the house had to be dusted every morning, and all the places where grime would gather. She showed her where saucepans and dishes were kept, and instructed her in how to light the range, the first task of the day. The backyard required brushing once a week, on Saturday between four o’clock and five. And every morning after breakfast water had to be pumped from the tank in the yard, fifteen minutes’ work with the hand lever.

‘That’s the W.C. you’d use, Kitty,’ Mrs Shaughnessy indicated, leading her to a privy in another part of the backyard. ‘The maids always use this one.’

The dresses of the uniforms didn’t fit. She looked at herself in the blue one and then in the black. The mirror on the dressing-table was tarnished, but she could tell that neither uniform enhanced her in any way whatsoever. She looked as fat as a fool, she thought, with the hems all crooked, and the sleeves too tight on her forearms. ‘Oh now, that’s really very good,’ Mrs Shaughnessy said when Kathleen emerged from her bedroom in the black one. She demonstrated how the bodice of the apron was kept in place and how the afternoon cap should be worn.

‘Is your father fit?’ Mr Shaughnessy inquired when he came upstairs for his six o’clock tea.

‘He is, sir.’ Suddenly Kathleen had to choke back tears because without any warning the reference to her father had made her want to cry.

‘He was shook the day I saw him,’ Mr Shaughnessy said, ‘on account he couldn’t sell the bullocks.’

‘He’s all right now, sir.’

The Shaughnessys’ son reappeared then too, a narrow-faced youth who hadn’t addressed her when he’d arrived in the dining-room in the middle of the day and didn’t address her now. There were just the three of them, two younger children having grown up and gone away. During the day Mrs Shaughnessy had often referred to her other son and her daughter, the son in business in Limerick, the daughter married to a county surveyor. The narrow-faced son would inherit the businesses, she’d said, the barber’s shop and the Provisions and Bar, maybe even the insurances. With a bout of wretchedness, Kathleen was reminded of Con inheriting the farm. Before that he’d marry Angie McKrill, who wouldn’t hesitate to accept him now that the farm was improved.

Kathleen finished laying the table and went back to the kitchen, where Mrs Shaughnessy was frying rashers and eggs and slices of soda bread. When they were ready she scooped them on to three plates and Kathleen carried the tray, with a teapot on it as well, into the dining-room. Her instructions were to return to the kitchen when she’d done so and to fry her own rasher and eggs, and soda bread if she wanted it. ‘I don’t know will we make much of that one,’ she heard Mrs Shaughnessy saying as she closed the dining-room door.

That night she lay awake in the strange bed, not wanting to sleep because sleep would too swiftly bring the morning, and another day like the day there’d been. She couldn’t stay here: she’d say that on Sunday. If they knew what it was like they wouldn’t want her to. She sobbed, thinking again of the warm kitchen she had left behind, the sheepdogs lying by the fire and Biddy turning the wheel of the bellows, the only household task she could do. She thought of her mother and father sitting at the table as they always did, her mother knitting, her father pondering, with his hat still on his head. If they could see her in the dresses they’d understand. If they could see her standing there pumping up the water they’d surely be sorry for the way she felt. ‘I haven’t the time to tell you twice, Kitty,’ Mrs Shaughnessy said over and over again, her long, painted face not smiling in the least way whatsoever. If anything was broken, she’d said, the cost of it would have to be stopped out of the wages, and she’d spoken as though the wages would actually change hands. In Kathleen’s dreams Mrs Shaughnessy kept laughing, her chin going long and smooth and her large white teeth moving in her mouth. The dresses belonged to one of the King of England’s daughters, she explained, which was why they didn’t fit. And then Mary Florence came into the kitchen and said she was just back from Kilburn with a pair of shoes that belonged to someone else. The price of them could be stopped out of the wages, she suggested, and Mrs Shaughnessy agreed.

When Kathleen opened her eyes, roused by the alarm clock at half past six, she didn’t know where she was. Then one after another the details of the previous day impinged on her waking consciousness: the cork mats, the shed where the kindling was cut, the narrow face of the Shaughnessys’ son, the greasy doorknobs in the kitchen, the impatience in Mrs Shaughnessy’s voice. The reality was worse than the confusion of her dreams, and there was nothing magical about the softness of the rug beneath her bare feet: she didn’t even notice it. She lifted her night-dress over her head and for a moment caught a glimpse of her nakedness in the tarnished looking-glass – plumply rounded thighs and knees, the dimple in her stomach. She drew on stockings and underclothes, feeling even more lost than she had when she’d tried not to go to sleep. She knelt by her bed, and when she’d offered her usual prayers she asked that she might be taken away from the Shaughnessys’ house. She asked that her father would understand when she told him.

‘The master’s waiting on his breakfast, Kitty.’

‘I lit the range the minute I was down, ma’am.’

‘If you don’t get it going by twenty to seven it won’t be hot in time. I told you that yesterday. Didn’t you pull the dampers out?’

‘The paper wouldn’t catch, ma’am.’

‘If the paper wouldn’t catch you’ll have used a damp bit. Or maybe paper out of a magazine. You can’t light a fire with paper out of a magazine, Kitty.’

‘If I’d had a drop of paraffin, ma’am –’

‘My God, are you mad, child?’

‘At home we’d throw on a half cup of paraffin if the fire was slow, ma’am.’

‘Never bring paraffin near the range. If the master heard you he’d jump out of his skin.’

‘I only thought it would hurry it, ma’am.’

‘Set the alarm for six if you’re going to be slow with the fire. If the breakfast’s not on the table by a quarter to eight he’ll raise the roof. Have you the plates in the bottom oven?’

When Kathleen opened the door of the bottom oven a black kitten darted out, scratching the back of her hand in its agitation.

‘Great God Almighty!’ exclaimed Mrs Shaughnessy. ‘Are you trying to roast the poor cat?’

‘I didn’t know it was in there, ma’am.’

‘You lit the fire with the poor creature inside there! What were you thinking of to do that, Kitty?’

‘I didn’t know, ma’am –’

‘Always look in the two ovens before you light the range, child. Didn’t you hear me telling you?’

After breakfast, when Kathleen went into the dining-room to clear the table, Mrs Shaughnessy was telling her son about the kitten in the oven. ‘Haven’t they brains like turnips?’ she said, even though Kathleen was in the room. The son released a half-hearted smile, but when Kathleen asked him if he’d finished with the jam he didn’t reply. ‘Try and speak a bit more clearly, Kitty,’ Mrs Shaughnessy said later. ‘It’s not everyone can understand a country accent.’

The day was similar to the day before except that at eleven o’clock Mrs Shaughnessy said:

‘Go upstairs and take off your cap. Put on your coat and go down the street to Crawley’s. A half pound of round steak, and suet. Take the book off the dresser. He’ll know who you are when he sees it.’

So far, that was the pleasantest chore she had been asked to do. She had to wait in the shop because there were two other people before her, both of whom held the butcher in conversation. ‘I know your father,’ Mr Crawley said when he’d asked her name, and he held her in conversation also, wanting to know if her father was in good health and asking about her brothers and sisters. He’d heard about the buying of the Lallys’ field. She was the last uniformed maid in the town, he said, now that Nellie Broderick at Maclure’s had had to give up because of her legs.

‘Are you mad?’ Mrs Shaughnessy shouted at her on her return. ‘I should be down in the shop and not waiting to put that meat on. Didn’t I tell you yesterday not to be loitering in the mornings?’

‘I’m sorry, ma’am, only Mr Crawley –’

‘Go down to the shop and tell the master I’m delayed over cooking the dinner and can you assist him for ten minutes.’

But when Kathleen appeared in the grocery Mr Shaughnessy asked her if she’d got lost. The son was weighing sugar into grey paper bags and tying string round each of them. A murmur of voices came from the bar.

‘Mrs Shaughnessy is delayed over cooking the dinner,’ Kathleen said. ‘She was thinking I could assist you for ten minutes.’

‘Well, that’s a good one!’ Mr Shaughnessy threw back his head, exploding into laughter. A little shower of spittle damped Kathleen’s face. The son gave his half-hearted smile. ‘Can you make a spill, Kitty? D’you know what I mean by a spill?’ Mr Shaughnessy demonstrated with a piece of brown paper on the counter. Kathleen shook her head. ‘Would you know what to charge for a quarter pound of tea, Kitty? Can you weigh out sugar, Kitty? Go back to the missus, will you, and tell her to have sense.’

In the kitchen Kathleen put it differently, simply saying that Mr Shaughnessy hadn’t required her services. ‘Bring a scuttle of coal up to the dining-room,’ Mrs Shaughnessy commanded. ‘And get out the mustard. Can you make up mustard?’

Kathleen had never tasted mustard in her life; she had heard of it but did not precisely know what it was. She began to say she wasn’t sure about making some, but even before she spoke Mrs Shaughnessy sighed and told her to wash down the front steps instead.

‘I don’t want to go back there,’ Kathleen said on Sunday. ‘I can’t understand what she says to me. It’s lonesome the entire time.’

Her mother was sympathetic, but even so she shook her head. ‘There’s people I used to know,’ she said. ‘People placed like ourselves whose farms failed on them. They’re walking the roads now, no better than tinkers. I have ten children, Kathleen, and seven are gone from me. There’s five of them I’ll maybe never see again. It’s that you have to think of, pet.’

‘I cried the first night. 1 was that lonesome when I got into bed.’

‘But isn’t it a clean room you’re in, pet? And aren’t you given food to eat that’s better than you’d get here? And don’t the dresses she supplies save us an expense again? Wouldn’t you think of all that, pet?’

A bargain had been struck, her mother also reminded her, and a bargain was a bargain. Biddy said it sounded great, going out into the town for messages. She’d give anything to see a house like that, Biddy said, with the coal fires and a stairs.

‘I’d say they were well pleased with you,’ Kathleen’s father said when he came in from the yard later on. ‘You’d have been back here inside a day if they weren’t.’

She’d done her best, she thought as she rode away from the farmhouse on Mary Florence’s bicycle; if she’d done everything badly she would have obtained her release. She wept because she wouldn’t see Biddy and Con and her father and mother for another week. She dreaded the return to the desolate bedroom which her mother had reminded her was clean, and the kitchen where there was no one to keep her company in the evenings. She felt as if she could not bear it, more counting of the days until Sunday and when Sunday came the few hours passing so swiftly. But she knew, by now, that she would remain in the Shaughnessys’ house for as long as was necessary.

‘I must have you back by half six, Kitty,’ Mrs Shaughnessy said when she saw her. ‘It’s closer to seven now.’

Kathleen said she was sorry. She’d had to stop to pump the back tyre of her bicycle, she said, although in fact this was not true: what she’d stopped for was to wipe away the signs of her crying and to blow her nose. In the short time she had been part of Mrs Shaughnessy’s household she had developed the habit of making excuses, and of obscuring her inadequacies beneath lies that were easier than the truth.

‘Fry the bread like I showed you, Kitty. Get it brown on both sides. The master likes it crisp.’

There was something Mr Shaughnessy liked also, which Kathleen discovered when seven of her free Sunday afternoons had gone by. She was dusting the dining-room mantelpiece one morning when he came and stood very close to her. She thought she was in his way, and moved out of it, but a week or so later he stood close to her again, his breath warm on her cheek. When it happened the third time she felt herself blushing.

It was in this manner that Mr Shaughnessy rather than his wife came to occupy, for Kathleen, the central role in the household. The narrow-faced son remained as he had been since the day of her arrival, a dour presence, contributing little in the way of conversation and never revealing the fruits of his brooding silence. Mrs Shaughnessy, having instructed, had apparently played out the part she’d set herself. She came into the kitchen at midday to cook meat and potatoes and one of the milk puddings her husband was addicted to, but otherwise the kitchen was Kathleen’s province now and it was she who was responsible for the frying of the food for breakfast and for the six o’clock tea. Mrs Shaughnessy preferred to be in the shop. She enjoyed the social side of that, she told Kathleen; and she enjoyed the occasional half glass of sherry in the bar. ‘That’s me all over, Kitty. I never took to housework.’ She was more amiable in her manner, and confessed that she always found training a country girl an exhausting and irksome task and might therefore have been a little impatient. ‘Kitty’s settled in grand,’ she informed Kathleen’s father when he looked into the bar one fair-day to make a mortgage payment. He’d been delighted to hear that, he told Kathleen the following Sunday.

Mr Shaughnessy never said anything when he came to stand close to her, although on other occasions he addressed her pleasantly enough, even complimenting her on her frying. He had an easy way with him, quite different from his son’s. He was more like his two other children, the married daughter and the son who was in Limerick, both of whom Kathleen had met when they had returned to the house for an uncle’s funeral. He occasionally repeated a joke he’d been told, and Mrs Shaughnessy would laugh, her chin becoming lengthy and the skin tightening on her forehead. On the occasion of the uncle’s funeral his other son and his daughter laughed at the jokes also, but the son who’d remained at home only smiled. ‘Wait till I tell you this one, Kitty,’ he’d sometimes say, alone with her in the dining-room. He would tell her something Bob Crowe, who ran the barber’s shop for him, had heard from a customer, making the most of the anecdote in a way that suggested he was anxious to entertain her. His manner and his tone of voice denied that it had ever been necessary for him to stand close to her, or else that his practice of doing so had been erased from his memory.

But the scarlet complexion of Mr Shaughnessy’s face and the spiky grey hair, the odour of cigarette smoke that emanated from his clothes, could not be so easily forgotten by Kathleen. She no longer wept from loneliness in her bedroom, yet she was aware that the behaviour of Mr Shaughnessy lent the feeling of isolation an extra, vivid dimension, for in the farmhouse kitchen on Sundays the behaviour could not be mentioned.

Every evening Kathleen sat by the range, thinking about it. The black kitten that had darted out of the oven on her second morning had grown into a cat and sat blinking beside her chair. The alarm clock ticked loudly on the dresser. Was it something she should confess? Was it a sin to be as silent as she was when he came to stand beside her? Was it a sin to be unable to find the courage to tell him to leave her alone? Once, in the village, where the convent was, another girl in her class had pointed out a boy who was loitering with some other boys by the sign-post. That boy was always trying to kiss you, the girl said; he would follow you about the place, whispering to you. But although Kathleen often went home alone the boy never came near her. He wasn’t a bad-looking boy, she’d thought, she wouldn’t have minded much. She’d wondered if she’d mind the boys her sisters had complained about, who tried to kiss you when they were dancing with you. Pests, her sisters had called them, but Kathleen thought it was nice that they wanted to.

Mr Shaughnessy was different. When he stood close to her his breathing would become loud and unsteady. He always moved away quite quickly, when she wasn’t expecting him to. He walked off, never looking back, soundlessly almost.

Then one day, when Mrs Shaughnessy was buying a new skirt and the son was in the shop, he came into the kitchen, where she was scrubbing the draining boards. He came straight to where she was, as if between them there was some understanding that he should do so. He stood in a slightly different position from usual, behind her rather than at her side, and she felt for the first time his hands passing over her clothes.

‘Mr Shaughnessy!’ she whispered. ‘Mr Shaughnessy, now.’

He took no notice. Some part of his face was touching her hair. The rhythm of his breathing changed.

‘Mr Shaughnessy, I don’t like it.’

He seemed not to hear her; she sensed that his eyes were closed. As suddenly, and as quickly as always, he went away.

‘Well, Bob Crowe told me a queer one this evening,’ he said that same evening, while she was placing their plates of fried food in front of them in the dining-room. ‘It seems there’s a woman asleep in Clery’s shop window above in Dublin.’

His wife expressed disbelief. Bob Crowe would tell you anything, she said.

‘In a hypnotic trance, it seems. Advertising Odearest Mattresses.’

‘Ah, go on now! He’s pulling your leg, Des.’

‘Not a bit of him. She’ll stop there a week, it seems. The Guards have to move the crowds on.’

Kathleen closed the dining-room door behind her. He had turned to look at her when he’d said there was a woman asleep in Clery’s window, in an effort to include her in what he was retailing. His eyes had betrayed nothing of their surreptitious relationship, but Kathleen hadn’t been able to meet them.

‘We ploughed the field,’ her father said the following Sunday. ‘I’ve never turned up earth as good.’

She almost told him then. She longed to so much she could hardly prevent herself. She longed to let her tears come and to hear his voice consoling her. When she was a child she’d loved that.

‘You’re a great girl,’ he said.

Mr Shaughnessy took to attending an earlier Mass than his wife and son, and when they were out at theirs he would come into the kitchen. When she hid in her bedroom he followed her there. She’d have locked herself in the outside W.C. if there’d been a latch on the door.

‘Well, Kitty and myself were quiet enough here,’ he’d say in the dining-room later on, when the three of them were eating their midday dinner. She couldn’t understand how he could bring himself to speak like that, or how he could so hungrily eat his food, as though nothing had occurred. She couldn’t understand how he could act normally with his son or with his other children when they came on a visit. It was extraordinary to hear Mrs Shaughnessy humming her songs about the house and calling him by his Christian name.

‘The Kenny girl’s getting married,’ Mrs Shaughnessy said on one of these mealtime occasions. ‘Tyson from the hardware.’

‘I didn’t know she was doing a line with him.’

‘Oh, that’s been going on a long time.’

‘Is it the middle girl? The one with the peroxide?’

‘Enid she’s called.’

‘I wonder Bob Crowe didn’t hear that. There’s not much Bob misses.’

‘I never thought much of Tyson. But, sure, maybe they’re well matched.’

‘Did you hear that, Kitty? Enid Kenny’s getting married. Don’t go taking ideas from her.’ He laughed, and Mrs Shaughnessy laughed, and the son smiled. There wasn’t much chance of that, Kathleen thought. ‘Are you going dancing tonight?’ Mr Crawley often asked her on a Friday, and she would reply that she might, but she never did because it wasn’t easy to go alone. In the shops and at Mass no one displayed any interest in her whatsoever, no one eyed her the way Mary Florence had been eyed, and she supposed it was because her looks weren’t up to much. But they were good enough for Mr Shaughnessy, with his quivering breath and his face in her hair. Bitterly, she dwelt on that; bitterly, she imagined herself turning on him in the dining-room, accusing him to his wife and son.

‘Did you forget to sweep the yard this week?’ Mrs Shaughnessy asked her. ‘Only it’s looking poor.’

She explained that the wind had blown in papers and debris from a knocked-over dustbin. She’d sweep it again, she said.

‘I hate a dirty backyard, Kitty.’

Was this why the other girls had left, she wondered, the girls whom Mrs Shaughnessy had trained, and who’d then gone off? Those girls, whoever they were, would see her, or would know about her. They’d imagine her in one uniform or the other, obedient to him because she enjoyed his attentions. That was how they’d think of her.

‘Leave me alone, sir,’ she said when she saw him approaching her the next time, but he took no notice. She could see him guessing she wouldn’t scream.

‘Please, sir,’ she said. ‘Please, sir. I don’t like it.’

But after a time she ceased to make any protestation and remained as silent as she had been at first. Twelve years or maybe fourteen, she said to herself, lying awake in her bedroom: as long as that, or longer. In her two different uniforms she would continue to be the outward sign of Mrs Shaughnessy’s well-to-do status, and her ordinary looks would continue to attract the attentions of a grey-haired man. Because of the field, the nature of the farm her father had once been barefoot on would change. ‘Kathleen’s field,’ her father would often repeat, and her mother would say again that a bargain was a bargain.