Selected Stories

Big Bucks

Fina waited on the pier, watching the four men dragging the boat on the shingle. She watched while the catch was landed and some damage to the nets examined. At the top of the steps that brought them near to where she stood the men parted and she went to John Michael.

‘Your mother,’ Fina said, and she watched him guessing that his mother was dead now. ‘I’m sorry, John Michael,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

He nodded, silent, as she knew he would be. It was cold and darkening as they walked together to the cottage where his mother was. Grey on grey, swiftly blown clouds threatened rain. They could go now, Fina’s thought was. They could make a life for themselves.

‘Father Clery was there,’ she said.

‘Have you plans?’ John Michael’s uncle – his mother’s brother – enquired after the funeral. Plans were necessary: John Michael’s father had drowned when John Michael was an infant, his fisherman’s cottage then becoming his widow’s by right for her lifetime. In a different arrangement – John Michael being a fisherman himself – a cottage would become his in time, but not yet, he being the youngest, the only young one among older men.

‘I’ll go,’ he said in reply to his uncle’s question.

Fina heard that said, the confirmation given that John Michael had been waiting only for the death. Going was a tradition, time-honoured, the chance of it coming in different ways, the decision long dwelt upon before it was taken. Bat Quinn – who had stayed – had a way of regretfully pointing over the sea to the horizon beyond the two rocks that were islands in the bay. ‘Big bucks,’ he’d say, and name the men of his own generation who had gone in search of them: Donoghue and Artie Hiney and Meagher and Flynn, and Big Reilly and Matt Cready. There were others who’d gone inland or to England, but they hadn’t done as well.

‘A thing I’ll put to you,’ John Michael’s uncle was saying now, ‘is the consideration of the farm.’

‘The farm?’

‘When I’m buried myself.’

‘What about the farm?’

‘I’m saying it’ll be left.’

Still listening, Fina heard a statement made through what was being left out: the farm would pass to John Michael, since there was no one else to inherit it.

‘I get a tiredness those days,’ John Michael’s uncle said. His wasted features and old man’s bloodshot eyes confirmed this revelation. Two years ago he’d been widowed; after a childless marriage he was alone.

‘There’s a while in you yet,’ John Michael said.

‘I can’t manage the acres.’

They could be on the farm already was what was being suggested, and it wouldn’t be hard to pull the place together. Inland from the sea, where the air was softer and you didn’t live in fear of what the sea would take from you, they could make a life there. The heart had gone from the old man, but he wasn’t difficult. He wouldn’t be a burden in the time that was left to him.

‘Ah, no, no.’ John Michael shook his head, his rejection not acknowledging in any other way what was being offered. America was what he and Fina wanted, what they’d always talked about. That evening John Michael said he had the fare saved.

The plans that could not be made in the lifetime of John Michael’s mother were made now. John Michael would go soon. In May he would return for the wedding, and take Fina back with him. He didn’t know what work he’d get, but according to Bat Quinn it had never mattered to the men who’d gone before that fishing was all they knew. ‘Leave it open till you’ll get there, boy,’ Bat Quinn advised, the same advice he had been giving for forty years. Matt Cready came back, the only one who did, his big bucks spent like pennies every night in the bar of the half-and-half. ‘Look at that, boy,’ Bat Quinn invited, displaying for John Michael the dollar bill he kept in an inside pocket. Bat Quinn had a niece, a nun in Delaware, and had had a sister in Chicago until her death two years ago. Slouched heavily at the bar of the grocery and public house that Fina’s family kept, his great paunch straining his clothes, his small eyes watery from drink, Bat Quinn showed everyone his dollar. ‘I’ll send you back another,’ John Michael always promised, and Fina always giggled.

They knew one another well, had gone together to school, picked up on the pier every morning by the bus, the only two from the village at that time. Concerned about the adventure that was being embarked upon, Fina’s father had protested more than once that they were still no more than the children they’d been then. ‘Oh, John Michael’ll fall on his feet,’ her mother predicted, fond of John Michael, optimistic on his behalf. ‘But isn’t he welcome to move in with us all the same?’ Fina’s father had offered when John Michael’s mother died, and Fina passed that on, knowing that John Michael wouldn’t ever consider serving in the half-and-half, drawing pints or checking the shelves for which grocery items were running out.

‘Sure, we have to go,’ was all John Michael said himself. Fina’s own two brothers had gone, one to Dublin, the other to England. One or other of them would have had the inheritance of the half-and-half but both had turned their backs on it.

A few evenings before they were to be parted, they walked through the twilight on the strand, talking about what they intended to reject for ever: the sea and the fishing, or John Michael being beholden in the half-and-half, his uncle’s farm. Eleven miles away, beyond the town of Kinard – which had a minimarket, a draper’s, five public houses, a hardware, and Power’s Medical Hall – the farmhouse was remote, built without foundations according to John Michael. Slated and whitewashed, it was solitary where it stood except for the yard sheds, its four fields stretching out behind it, as far as the boglands that began with the slope of the mountain. The mountain had no name, John Michael said, or if it had it was forgotten now, and there wasn’t a gate that swung. Old bedsteads blocked the holes in the hedges, there was a taste of turf on the water you drank. Damp brought on mildew in the rooms.

‘Even if you could get the place up on its feet again,’ John Michael said, ‘it’s never what we want.’

‘No way.’ Vehemently Fina shook her head, reassurance and agreement bright in her eyes. ‘No way,’ she said again.

Physically, there was a similarity about them, both of them slightly made, John Michael hardly a head taller. Both were dark-haired, with a modesty in their features, as there was in their manner. They seemed more vulnerable when they were together than when they were on their own.

‘Did you ever think it, though, Fina? That we’d be on our way?’

Her hand was warm in his, and his felt strong, although she knew it wasn’t particularly. Since they were children they had belonged to one another. On this same strand two years ago, in the twilight of an evening also, they had first spoken of love.

‘I only wish I’d be going with you,’ she said now.

‘Ah sure, it’s not long.’

He was gone, quite suddenly. For two hundred and one days they would be parted: already Fina had counted them. She thought at first that maybe at the last moment he’d be sent back, that the immigration-control men at Shannon wouldn’t let him on to the plane because he didn’t possess a work permit. But he’d said he’d be ready for that and he must have been. You had to be up to the tricks, he’d said.

The first day without him passed and when it was the evening of the next one Bat Quinn was talking about big bucks again, his small eyes squinting at Fina from the red fat of his face. Only Jamesie O’Connor was ever sent back, he said, on account of his dead leg. ‘Don’t worry, girl,’ Bat Quinn consoled, and began about the schooner that was pitched up on the rocks when he was five years old, twelve foreign men taken in for burial. ‘Sure, what’s here for John Michael only the like of that? And isn’t he safe with the mighty dollar to watch over him?’ Bat Quinn had more talk in him than anyone who ever came into the half-and-half. If exile or shipwrecks weren’t his subject it would be the Corpus Christi he had walked to in his childhood, twenty-three miles to Kinard, twenty-three miles back again, or how an old priest used to bless the hurley sticks of the team he favoured, or the firing of Lisreagh House. Bat Quinn had been a fisherman himself, going out with the boats for more than fifty years. He’d never worn a collar or tie in his life, he shaved himself once a week and had never had the need of a wife; he washed his clothes when they required it. All that Bat Quinn would tell you, having told you most of it before. He had stayed at home when the others went, but even so he insisted that Boston’s long, straight streets were a wonder when the evening sun shone down them. You’d go into McDaid’s and there was shamrock in pots and a photo of Christy Ring. He had it as a fact that Donoghue got to be a candy king before he went to his grave in a green-upholstered coffin. Artie Hiney made his stack in the wheatfields of Kansas. Big Reilly rose high in the Frisco police force and ran it in the end.

I missed you the minute I left, John Michael wrote. There was a lot to tell her, his first letter went on, but even so it was short. He wasn’t used to writing letters, he’d said before he went away, he’d do his best. I have work with a gang, he wrote when three weeks had gone by, and unable to help herself Fina thought of gangsters. She laughed, as though John Michael were there to laugh with her.

There were tourists here last week, she wrote herself. Italian people who asked Mary Doleen would there be fish today. They came into the shop and we thought they were German but they said Italian. They’d be back for fish in the morning, they said, but they never came. Bat Quinn was on the pier waiting, wanting to know was it Rome they were from. There were never Italians here before, he said, the time of the wreck it was Spaniards washed up. He was down on the pier the next few mornings, but they never came back.

John Michael replied directly to that, saying he was working with an Italian but he didn’t know his name. It was labouring work, he said. ‘Give him time, girl,’ Bat Quinn advised, but when more weeks went by there was no mention of the streets of Boston or the Kansas wheatlands. Then a letter came that asked Fina not to write because there wouldn’t be an address to write to for a while. John Michael said he’d let her know when he had one again.

In this way Fina and John Michael began to lose touch. You had to lodge where you could, John Michael had explained; you wouldn’t earn a penny if you paid regular rent. Fina didn’t entirely understand this. She couldn’t see that you could lodge anywhere without paying rent, and it was too late now to ask. John Michael had to take what he could get, she of course could see that. He had to move about if it was the only way; if he said so it must be right.

A cold, sunny November began, but the pattern of the days themselves didn’t change much. Fina served in the shop, slicing rashers on the machine, adding up bills, unpacking the items that were delivered – the jams and meat pastes and tinned goods, the porridge meal and dried goods, the baking ingredients in their bulky cartons. O’Brien’s bread van brought the bread from Kinard on Tuesdays and Fridays, milk came on alternate days and there was the longlife if it was held up, which sometimes it was. Experience had taught the family of the half-and-half the business, what to order and when, what to keep in stock both in the shop and in the bar. You could be caught out if you didn’t know what you were doing, Fina’s mother used to say; you could have stuff on the shelves for a generation or find yourself running out because you hadn’t looked ahead. Her mother ran the shop and took a rest in the evenings when the men came into the bar and Fina’s father was in charge. Her mother was as lightly made as Fina was, small and busy, with a certain knowledge of where everything was on the crowded shelves of the grocery, quick with figures, spectacles suspended on a chain. Fina’s father – assisted in the bar by Fina, as her mother was in the shop – was a big man, slow of movement and thought, silver-haired, always in his shirtsleeves, the sleeves themselves rolled up. He put on a black suit to go to Mass, and a tie with a tiepin, and wore a hat for the walk through the village. Fina’s mother dressed herself carefully also, in a coat and hat that were not otherwise worn. The three of them went together on Sundays and separately at other times, to confession or confraternity.

John Michael didn’t write when he had no address, and Fina fell back on her imagination. The world of America, which she and John Michael had talked about and wondered about for so long, was spiced with the yarns of Bat Quinn, his exaggeration and fantasy steadied by facts remembered from the days when Mr Horan unrolled the map of the continent and hung it on the blackboard. On the glossy surface the states were shown in shades of brown and green and yellow, the Great Lakes blue. Iron came from Minnesota and Michigan and Pennsylvania, uranium from Colorado. Cotton and tobacco belonged to the south.

The tip of Mr Horan’s cane moved in a straight line, horizontally, up and down, dividing Nebraska from South Dakota, Oregon from Idaho. It rapped the dates of admission to the Union, it traced the course of the long Mississippi, it touched the Rockies. You listened because you had to, stifling yawns of tedium, thankfully forgetting what the Louisiana Purchase was. The scissor-tailed flycatcher was the state bird of Oklahoma, the peony was the flower of Indiana. It was in Milwaukee that Donoghue became a candy king.

The tattered schoolroom cane picking out the facts had failed to create much of a reality. Bat Quinn’s second-hand information didn’t inspire Fina as it did John Michael. But America lived for both of them on the screen high up above the bar of the half-and-half or the one in John Michael’s kitchen. For two years before she died his mother had to be helped to go to bed and as often as she could Fina assisted. Afterwards she sat with John Michael in the kitchen, with tea and pink Mikado biscuits and the sound turned low. They watched America, they heard its voices. Its ballgame heroes battled, rigid in their padding and their helmets. Steam swirled above the night-time gratings of its city streets. Legs wide, eyes dead, its gangsters splayed their fingers on precinct walls.

Fina liked it when the doormen greeted the yellow cabs, and the quick talk in the skyscraper lifts, and Christmas in the stores. She liked the lone driver on the highway, music on his radio, the wayside gas station he drew up at, its attendant swatting flies. She liked the boy who drilled for oil too near the old-time ranch, everything changing because the gush of oil was what mattered now, the boy in the end a bigtime millionaire. College days, Thanksgiving, Robert E. Lee: she liked all that. ‘You want to?’ John Michael would whisper and Fina always nodded, never hesitating.

I got work in a laundry, the next letter said, slow in coming. Bat Quinn wagged his head in admiration when he heard. There were big bucks in the laundry business, no doubt about it. The President’s shirts would have to go to a laundry, and Bat Quinn twisted round on his barstool, exclaiming loudly that John Michael Gallagher was in charge of the shirts of the President of the United States. ‘I’ll tell you a thing, girl, you hit it lucky with John Michael Gallagher.’

Fina put all that in a letter, making a joke of it, as they would have in the past. It was a long letter, with bits of news saved up from the period when they’d been out of touch: O’Brien’s bread van breaking down, the boats unable to go out for four days, the widow dancing at Martin Shaul’s wake. She wondered if John Michael had an accent now, like Bat Quinn said Matt Cready acquired.

A Christmas card came in January and a fortnight later a letter with an address, 2a Beaver Street, a room that was big enough for both of them. I painted it out, John Michael wrote. I cleaned the windows. Ninety-one days had passed and the ones that were passing now had begun to lengthen. In Kinard a week ago Fina had chosen the material for her dress. She kept telling herself it wouldn’t be all that long before the first banns were called.

The morning the letter about the room came there was an iciness in the air when she walked on the strand, thinking about the banns and thinking about Beaver Street. She imagined a fire escape zig-zagging on an outside wall, a big metal structure she had seen in a film, windows opening on to it. She imagined a poor neighbourhood because that was what John Michael could afford, spindly trees struggling to grow along a sidewalk. She wouldn’t object to a poor neighbourhood, she knew he’d done his best.

The strand was empty that morning. The fishing boats were still out, there had been no one on the pier when she went by it. New shells were embedded in the clean, damp sand where she walked, washed by the waves that lapped softly over them. Once upon a time, so the story was told in the village, a woman had walked all the way to Galway, going after the man she loved. Missing John Michael more than ever, even though the time was shortening with every day, Fina understood that now. Slowly, she made her way back to the village, the room he had found for them more vivid in her consciousness than anything she saw.

She knew when her father called her. She had heard the ringing of the telephone above the clatter of voices in the bar, and her father’s surprise when he responded. ‘Well, b’the holy farmer! How are you at all?’ She pushed the glass she’d just filled across the counter. ‘Wait’ll I get Fina for you,’ she heard her father say, and when she picked the receiver up John Michael’s voice was there at once.

‘Hullo, Fina.’

He didn’t sound distant, only unusual, because in all the time of their friendship they had never spoken on the telephone to one another.

‘John Michael!’

‘Did you get my letter, Fina? About the room?’

‘I got it yesterday.’

‘Are you OK, Fina?’

‘Oh, I am, I am. Are you, yourself?’ There wouldn’t be telephone calls, he’d said before he went, and she agreed: telephone calls would eat up what he earned. But hearing his voice was worth every penny they’d lose.

‘I’m good, Fina.’

‘It’s great to hear you.’

‘Listen, Fina, there’s a thing we have to think about.’ He paused for a second or two. ‘A difficulty about May, Fina.’

‘Difficulty?’

‘About coming back.’

He paused again, and then he had to repeat some of what he said because she couldn’t follow it. It was why he had phoned. Because he knew it would sound complicated, but actually it wasn’t: it was best he didn’t come back in May for the wedding. It was best because once you’d got to where he was now, once you’d got into steady work, it wasn’t easy to come and go. He shouldn’t be working at all, he said. Like hawks, he said they were.

‘You understand, Fina?’

She nodded in the darkened shop, where the telephone was. There was a smell of bacon, and of stout and spirits drifting in from the other side of the half-and-half. The deep-freeze began to sound, registering its periodic intake of electricity. Chef Soups, a point-of-sale inducement read, close enough to discern, the rest of its message lost in the gloom.

‘If I was to come over I wouldn’t get back in again.’

It would be better to be married in America. It would be better if she came over and he stayed where he was. He asked her if she understood and she felt as if she were stumbling about, in some kind of a dream without sense in it, but even so she said she understood.

‘I think of you all the time, John Michael. I love you.’

‘It’s the same way with me. We’ll work something out. Only it’s different than we thought.’

‘Different?’

‘All the time you’re thinking would you be sent back.’

‘We’ll be married in America, John Michael.’

‘I think of you too, Fina. I love you too.’

They would work something out, he said again, and then there was the click of the receiver replaced. Fina wondered where he was, in what kind of room, and if he was still standing as she was, beside the telephone. Once there had been voices in the background. It would be half past four, still daylight there, and she wondered if he was at work in the laundry and if he’d taken a risk, using the phone like that.

‘How’s John Michael Gallagher?’ Bat Quinn asked, slouched in his corner, on the stool that over the years had become his own. In the dimly illuminated bar the expression on his face was as lost as the words on the Chef point-of-sale had been, but Fina could guess at what was there – the small eyes would be reflecting his excitement because all those miles away John Michael Gallagher had touched success.

‘He’s doing well, girl. Isn’t it grand for the pair of ye?’

By the door of the bar there was a game of twenty-one. The men John Michael had fished with were silent, as they often were. Fina’s father washed glasses at the sink.

‘He can’t come back for the wedding,’ Fina said to Bat Quinn. She moved closer to him, drawn to him because with his knowledge of America he would know about the anxiety that was worrying John Michael.

‘It’s understandable,’ Bat Quinn said.

The porter he was drinking was drained away, the glass edged toward her on the scrubbed surface of the bar. Fina refilled it and scooped up the coins that had been counted out.

‘It’s never as easy as they think,’ Bat Quinn said.

Chance had always played a part, ever since the Famine years, that first great exodus from the land, the ships called coffin ships. As often as the good side of it was there, so were misfortune and desperation and failure.

‘Never was easy, never will be, girl.’

‘Will they take it back?’ Fina’s mother wondered about the wedding-dress material. All but the yard she had begun to cut the arms out of was untouched. Scally wouldn’t return the full price because what was left would have to be sold as a remnant. You couldn’t expect the full price from a draper like Scally, but an agreement might be reached to make up for the disappointment. Fina’s mother had sat for a while not saying anything when she heard the news, and then she sighed and cheered up, for that was her way. She’d assumed at first that she’d finish the dress anyway, that Fina would need it when she married John Michael in America. But Fina explained it wouldn’t be that kind of wedding now.

‘They gave an amnesty a while back,’ Fina’s father said. He remembered a figure, something like a hundred and twenty thousand Irish immigrants outside the system in New York. But it could be a while before there’d be an amnesty again. ‘Go easy now, Fina,’ he advised, not elaborating on that. ‘John Michael’ll fix something,’ her mother said.

Ten days later John Michael phoned again. He’d thought more about it, he said; and listening to him, Fina realized he wasn’t just talking about not coming home for the wedding.

‘Don’t you want me?’ she asked, meaning to add something to that, to ask if he’d changed his mind about her coming over. But she left it as she’d said it, and John Michael reassured her. It was just that he was wondering would it be too much for them, the uncertainty there’d be, the hole-in-corner existence; too much for any wife, was what he was wondering. It was all right for some young fellow on his own, who could scuttle around, dodging the bit of trouble. If she was there with him now she’d see what he meant, and Fina imagined that, being with him in the room with the clean windows and the freshly painted walls, all of it ready for her.

‘I’ll come back,’ John Michael said.

‘But you said -’

‘I’ll come back altogether. I’ll come back and we’ll stay where we are.’

She couldn’t say anything. She tried to, but the words kept becoming muddled before she got them out. John Michael said:

‘I love you, Fina. Isn’t it that that matters? The two of us loving one another?’

It was, she agreed. Of course it was.

‘I’ll work out the time I’m taken on for.’

They said goodbye. It was a shock for her, he said, and he was sorry. But it was better, no way it wasn’t better. Again he said he loved her, and then the line went dead.

It would be his uncle’s farm. She guessed that; it hadn’t been said. They’d pull the place together; his uncle would stay there with them until he died. John Michael would rather that than going on with the fishing. He’d prefer it to being beholden in the half-and-half.

‘There’s the odd one comes back all right,’ Bat Quinn said, having listened to Fina’s side of the telephone conversation.

Fina nodded, not saying anything, and that same week she went out to the farm. She took the Kinard bus and walked the last two miles from where it dropped her off. Sheepdogs barked when she turned in to the yard, but the barking was ignored by John Michael’s uncle, as if it didn’t matter to him that someone had come, as if all curiosity about visitors had long ago expired. Grass grew through the cobbles, a solitary hen pecked at the edge of a dung pile.

‘I was wondering how you were,’ Fina said in the kitchen, and the haggard countenance that the farm had defeated was lifted from a perusal of Ireland’s Own. Boiled potatoes had been tumbled out on to a newspaper, the skins of those eaten in a pile, peas left in a tin. A plate with a knife and fork on it was pushed to one side.

‘Sit down, Fina,’ the old man invited. ‘Wait till I make a cup of tea.’

Life seemed to return to him while he half filled a kettle and put it on a ring of his electric stove. He spooned tea into an unheated pot and set out cups and saucers, and milk in a milking can. He offered bread but Fina shook her head. He took a heel of butter from a safe on the dresser.

‘John Michael went over,’ he said.

‘Yes, he did. A while back.’

‘He’s settled so.’

‘He hasn’t the right papers,’ Fina said.

She watched while the butter was spread on a slice of bread, and sugar sprinkled over it. It wouldn’t take long to set the kitchen to rights. It wouldn’t take long to paint over the dingy ceiling, to take up the linoleum from the floor and burn it, to wash every cup and knife and fork, to scrub the grease from the wooden tabletop, to fix the taps that were hanging from the wall, to replace the filthy armchair.

‘You were never here before,’ the old man said, and led her upstairs to dank bedrooms, an image of Our Lady on the wall opposite each bed. A forgotten cat rushed, hissing, from a windowsill. Electric wire hung crookedly from a fallen-in ceiling, mould was grey on the faded flowers of wallpaper. Downstairs, ivy crept over panes of glass.

A digger would take out those rocks, Fina thought, surveying the fields. Half a day it would take with a digger. John Michael’s uncle said they’d be welcome if it was something they’d consider. When the wedding would be over, he said, when they’d have gathered themselves together.

‘It’s different why you’d go into exile these days,’ Bat Quinn said in the half-and-half. ‘A different approach you’d have to it.’

You made a choice for yourself now. The way the country was doing well, you could stay where you were or you could travel off. A different thing altogether from the old days, when you had no choice at all.

‘Yes,’ Fina said.

I went over to see the farm, she wrote. No way we wouldn’t be able to get it up and going. He’d be no trouble to us. Her mother finished the wedding dress. Fina imagined John Michael, any day now, walking in with the red holdall they’d bought together in Kinard. They’d bought her own at the same time, the same colour and size. She imagined going back with him to Scally’s and explaining to Scally that they wouldn’t want it now. John Michael would be better at that than she’d be.

Fina’s feelings bewildered her. She kept hoping that out of the blue the phone would ring and John Michael would say it was all right, that he’d wangled a work permit, that the boss he was working for had put a word in, that there’d been a further amnesty. But then another while would pass and there’d be no hope at all. John Michael would walk in and she’d be shy of him, the way she’d never been. She imagined herself on the farm as she used to imagine herself in the room John Michael had described, the silence of the fields instead of the noise on the streets and the yellow cabs flashing by. When she wondered if she still loved John Michael, she told herself not to be a fool. He was right when he said that it was loving one another that mattered. But then the confusion began again.

No phone call came. We’ll sort things out when I’m back, another letter said. We’ll have it done before the wedding. The banns had long ago been called. The half-and-half would be closed for the day. People had been invited to the house. If she had a number, she would telephone herself, Fina thought, not that she’d say anything about how she felt. She woke up in the middle of one night feeling afraid. In the dark she knew she didn’t love John Michael.

It’s only I’m ruining everything for you, she wrote when there was hardly time for him to receive the letter before he’d have to set out. I have it on my mind, John Michael. Alone on the strand, she had decided on that way of putting things. Five days later, two before he was due back, John Michael phoned. He’d got her letter, he said, and then he said he loved her.

‘I always will, Fina.’

He could tell: she heard it in his voice. Always quick on the uptake, always receptive of her emotions, even in a letter, even on the long-distance telephone, he knew more than she did herself.

‘I don’t know what it is,’ she said.

‘You’re uncertain.’

She began to say it wasn’t that, but she stumbled and hesitated. She wanted to cry.

‘You have to be guided by yourself, Fina. You’re doubtful about the wedding.’

She said what she had in her letter, that she was ruining things for him. ‘It wouldn’t be right to wait until you got here.’

‘Better to wait all the same,’ he said. ‘It’s not long.’

‘I don’t want you to come.’

‘You don’t love me, Fina?’

He asked that again when she didn’t reply.

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

John Michael did not come back. For Fina, the pain lasted for the empty weeks that followed the day that had been set for the wedding, and then for all the summer. September was balmy, thirty days of a clear blue sky, the days gently slipping away as they shortened. In October a year had passed since the death of John Michael’s mother. By October John Michael’s scant letters didn’t come any more.

‘I’d say he’d walk in in the time ahead,’ Bat Quinn said on a night his intake had exceeded what he allowed himself. Squinting blearily up at Fina, he added, as if the two observations somehow belonged together: ‘Haven’t you the delicate way with you, pouring that stout, girl?’

‘Oh, I have all right.’

Bat Quinn was right. It was likely enough that in the time ahead, when John Michael had made his money, he would return, to look about him and remember.

‘An amnesty’ll bring him,’ Bat Quinn said, heaving himself off his stool to lead the exodus from the bar. ‘Good night to you so, girl.’

She was better at pouring the stout than her father was, even though he’d been at it for longer. Her hands were steadier, not yet roughened. She had the delicacy of the young, she’d heard her mother say when the disappointment about John Michael had become known.

‘Good night, Fina,’ the men called out, one after another before they left, and when the last of them had gone she bolted the door and urged her father to go upstairs to bed. She cleared up the glasses and knocked the contents of the ashtrays into a bowl. She wondered if they were sorry for her, Bat Quinn and the men John Michael had fished with, her mother and her father. Did they think of her as trapped among them, thrown there by the tide of circumstances, alone because she had misunderstood the nature of her love?

They could not know she had come to realize that she was less alone than if she were with John Michael now. The long companionship, their future planned, their passion and their embraces, were marked in memory with a poignancy from which the sting had been drawn. It was America they had loved, and loved too much. It was America that had enlivened love’s fantasies, America that had enriched their delight in one another. He’d say that too if he came back when he’d made his money. They would walk again on the strand, neither of them mentioning the fragility of love, or the disaster that had been averted when they were young.