The Collected Stories

‘So he’s been saying,’ Desmond said. ‘You know, I’d forgotten who he was when you introduced us.’

‘But what on earth does he want to come and live in that awful old house for?’

‘He’s on his uppers apparently.’

Often they talked together on these Saturday occasions, in much the same way as they did in their own kitchen while she finished cooking the dinner and he laid the table. In the kitchen they talked about people they’d run into during the day, the same people once a week or so, rarely strangers. When his father retired almost twenty years ago, Desmond had taken over the management of the town’s laundry and later had inherited it. The Tara Hotel was his second most important customer, the Hospital of St Bernadette of Lourdes being his first. He brought back to Grania reports of demands for higher wages, and the domestic confidences of his staff. In return she passed on gossip, which both of them delighted in.

‘How’s Judith?’ Martin Duddy inquired, finger and thumb again tightening on her elbow. ‘No Mr Bloody yet?’

‘Judith’s still at the convent, remember.’

‘You never know these days.’

‘I think you’ve got it wrong about Aisling being pregnant.’

‘I pray to God I have, dear.’

Desmond said he intended to go to Hetty Prendergast’s funeral, but she saw no reason why she should go herself. Desmond went to lots of funerals, often of people she didn’t know, business acquaintances who’d lived miles away. Going to funerals was different when there was a business reason, not that the Prendergasts had ever made much use of the laundry.

‘I have a soft spot for Judith,’ Martin Duddy said. ‘She’s getting to be a lovely girl.’

It was difficult to agree without sounding smug, yet it seemed disloyal to her daughter to deny what was claimed for her. Grania shrugged, a gesture that was vague enough to indicate whatever her companion wished to make of it. There was no one on Martin Duddy’s other side because the table ended there. Angela, widow of a German businessman, had just sat down in the empty place opposite him. The most glamorous of all the wives, tall and slim, her hair the colour of very pale sand, Angela was said to be on the look-out for a second marriage. Her husband had settled in the neighbourhood after the war and had successfully begun a cheese-and-pâté business, supplying restaurants and hotels all over the country. With a flair he had cultivated in her, Angela ran it now. ‘How’s Martin?’ She smiled seductively across the table, the way she’d smiled at men even in her husband’s lifetime. Martin Duddy said he was all right, but Grania knew that only a desultory conversation would begin between the two because Martin Duddy didn’t like Angela for some reason, or else was alarmed by her.

‘Judith always has a word for you,’ he said. ‘Rare, God knows, in a young person these days.’

‘Who’s that?’ Angela leaned forward, her eyes indicating the stranger.

She was told, and Grania watched her remembering him. Angela had been pregnant with the third of her sons that August afternoon. ‘Uncomfortably warm,’ she now recalled, nodding in recollection.

Martin Duddy displayed no interest. He’d been at the club that afternoon and he remembered the arrival of the stranger, but an irritated expression passed over his tightly made face while Grania and Angela agreed about the details of the afternoon in question: he resented the interruption and wished to return to the subject of daughters.

‘What I’m endeavouring to get at, Grania, is what would you say if Judith came back with some fellow old enough to be her father?’

‘Mavis didn’t say Aisling’s friend was as old as that.’

‘Aisling wrote us a letter, Grania. There are lines to read between,’

‘Well, naturally I’d prefer Judith to marry someone of her own age. But of course it all depends on the man.’

‘D’you find a daughter easy, Grania? There’s no one thinks more of Aisling than myself. The fonder you are the more worry there is. Would you say that was right, Grania?’

‘Probably.’

‘You’re lucky in Judith, though. She has a great way with her.’

Angela was talking to Tom Crosbie about dairy products. The Crosbies were an example of a marriage in which there was a considerable age difference, yet it appeared not to have had an adverse effect. Trish had had four children, two girls and two boys; they were a happy, jolly family, even though when Trish married it had been widely assumed that she was not in love, was if anything still yearning after Billy MacGuinness. It was even rumoured that Trish had married for money, since Tom Crosbie owned Boyd Motors, the main Ford franchise in the neighbourhood. Trish’s family had once been well-to-do but had somehow become penurious.

‘What’s Judith going to do for herself ? Nursing, is it, Grania?’

‘If it is she’s never mentioned it.’

‘I only thought it might be.’

‘There’s talk about college. She’s not bad at languages.’

‘Don’t send her to Dublin, dear. Keep the girl by you. D’you hear what I’m saying, Desmond?’ Martin Duddy raised his voice, shouting across Grania. He began all over again, saying he had a soft spot for Judith, explaining about the letter that had arrived from Aisling. Grania changed places with him. ‘Martin’s had a few,’ Angela said.

‘He’s upset about Aisling. She’s going out with an older man.’

She shouldn’t have said it with Tom Crosbie sitting there. She made a face to herself and leaned across the table to tell him he was looking perky. As soon as she’d spoken she felt she’d made matters worse, that her remark could be taken to imply he was looking young for his years.

‘There’s a new place,’ Angela said when Grania asked her about her dress. ‘ “Pursestrings”. D’you know it?’

Ever since she’d become a widow Angela had gone to Dublin to buy something during the week before each Saturday dinner. Angela liked to be first, though often Francie ran her close. Mavis tried to keep up with them but couldn’t quite. Grania sometimes tried too; Helen didn’t mind what she wore.

‘Is Desmond going to the funeral?’ Tom Crosbie asked in his agreeable way – perhaps, Grania thought, to show that no offence had been taken.

‘Yes, he is.’

‘Desmond’s very good.’

That was true. Desmond was good. He’d been the pick of the tennis club when she’d picked him herself, the pick of the town. Looking round the table – at Tom Crosbie’s bald head and Kevy Haddon’s joylessness, at the simian lines of Quilty’s cheeks and Billy MacGuinness’s tendency to glow, Martin Duddy’s knotted features – she was aware that, on top of everything else, Desmond had worn better than any of them. He had acquired authority in middle age; the reticence of his youth had remained, but time had displayed that he was more often right than wrong, and his opinion was sought in a way it once had not been. Desmond was quietly obliging, a quality more appreciated in middle age than in youth. Mavis had called him a dear when he was still a bachelor.

They ate their prawn cocktails. The voices became louder. For a moment Grania’s eye was held by the man who had said, at first, that she didn’t remember him. A look was exchanged and persisted for a moment. Did he suspect that she had learnt already of his intention to live in the Prendergasts’ house? Would he have told her himself if they hadn’t been interrupted by Desmond?

‘Hetty was a nice old thing,’ Angela said. ‘I feel I’d like to attend her funeral myself.’

She glanced again in the direction of the stranger. Tom Crosbie began to talk about a court case that was causing interest. Martin Duddy got up and ambled out of the dining-room, and Desmond moved to where he’d been sitting so that he was next to his wife again. The waitresses were collecting the prawn-cocktail glasses. ‘Martin’s being a bore about this Aisling business,’ Desmond said.

‘Desmond, did Prendergast mention being married now?’

He looked down the table, and across it. He shook his head. ‘He hasn’t the look of being married. Another thing is, I have a feeling he’s called something else.’

‘Angela says she’s going to the funeral.’

One of the waitresses brought round plates of grilled salmon, the other offered vegetables. Martin Duddy returned with a glass of something he’d picked up in the bar, whiskey on ice it looked like. He sat between Desmond and Una Carty-Carroll, not seeming to notice that it wasn’t where he’d been sitting before.

Mavis’s back was reflected in the Rhett Butler mirror, the V of her black dress plunging deeply down her spine. Her movements, and those of Billy MacGuinness next to her, danced over the features of Clark Gable.

‘He might suit Angela,’ Desmond said. ‘You never know.’

That August afternoon Billy MacGuinness, who was a doctor, had been called away from the club, some complication with a confinement. ‘Damned woman,’ he’d grumbled unfeelingly, predicting an all-night job. ‘Come back to the house, Francie,’ Grania had invited when the tennis came to an end, and it was then that Desmond had noticed the young man attaching his tennis racquet to the crossbar of his bicycle and had issued the same invitation. Desmond had said he’d drive him back to the Prendergasts’ when they’d all had something to eat, and together they lifted his bicycle on to the boot of the car. ‘I’ve something to confess,’ Francie had said in the kitchen, cutting the rinds off rashers of bacon, and Grania knew what it would be because ‘I’ve something to confess’ was a kind of joke among the wives, a time-honoured way of announcing pregnancy. ‘You’re not!’ Grania cried, disguising envy. ‘Oh, Francie, how grand!’ Desmond brought them drinks, but Francie didn’t tell him, as Grania had guessed she wouldn’t. ‘February,’ Francie said. ‘Billy says it should be February.’

Billy telephoned while they were still in the kitchen, guessing where Francie was when there’d been no reply from his own number. He’d be late, as he’d predicted. ‘Francie’s pregnant,’ Grania told Desmond while Francie was still on the phone. ‘Don’t tell her I said.’

In the sitting-room they had a few more drinks while in the kitchen the bacon cooked on a glimmer of heat. All of them were still in their tennis clothes and nobody was in a hurry. Francie wasn’t because of the empty evening in front of her. Grania and Desmond weren’t because they’d nothing to do that evening. The young man who was staying with the Prendergasts was like a schoolboy prolonging his leave. The sipping of their gin, the idle conversation – the young man told about the town and the tennis club, told who Angela was, and which the Duddys were: all of it took on the pleasurable feeling of a party happening by chance. Desmond picked up the telephone and rang the Crosbies but Trish said they wouldn’t be able to get a babysitter or else of course they’d come over, love to. Eventually Desmond beat up eggs to scramble and Grania fried potato cakes and soda bread. ‘We’re none of us sober,’ Desmond said, offering a choice of white or red wine as they sat down to eat. Eartha Kitt sang ‘Just an Old-fashioned Girl’.

In the Rhett Butler Room Grania heard the tune again. ‘… and an old-fashioned millionaire’, lisped the cool, sensuous voice, each emphasis strangely accented. They’d danced to it among the furniture, of the sitting-room, Francie and the young man mostly, she and Desmond. ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ Desmond whispered, but she shook her head, refusing to concede that blame came into it. If it did, she might as well say she was sorry herself. ‘I have to get back,’ Francie said. ‘Cook something for Billy.’ Desmond said he’d drop her off on his way to the Prendergasts, but then he changed the record to ‘Love Grows’, and fell asleep as soon as the music began.

Francie didn’t want a lift. She wanted to walk because the air would do her good. ‘D’you trust me?’ Grania asked the young man, and he laughed and said he’d have to because he didn’t have a lamp on his bicycle. She’d hardly spoken to him, had been less aware of him than of Desmond’s apparent liking of him. With strangers Desmond was often like that. ‘What do you do?’ she asked in the car, suddenly shy in spite of all the gin and wine there’d been. He’d held her rather close when he’d danced with her, but she’d noticed he’d held Francie close too. Francie had kissed him goodbye. ‘Well, actually I’ve been working in a pub,’ he said. ‘Before that I made toast in the Marine Hotel in Bournemouth.’

She drove slowly, with extreme caution, through the narrow streets of the town. The public houses were closing; gaggles of men loitered near each, smoking or just standing. Youths thronged the pavement outside the Palm Grove fish-and-chip shop. Beyond the last of its lamp-posts the town straggled away to nothing, solitary cottages and bungalows gave way to fields. ‘I haven’t been to this house before,’ Grania said in a silence that had developed. Her companion had vouchsafed no further information about himself beyond the reference to a pub and making toast in Bournemouth. ‘They’ll be in bed,’ he said now. ‘They go to bed at nine.’

The headlights picked out trunks of trees on the avenue, then urns, and steps leading up to a hall door. White wooden shutters flanked the downstairs windows, the paint peeling, as it was on the iron balustrade of the steps. All of it was swiftly there, then lost: the car lights isolated a rose-bed and a seat on a lawn. ‘I won’t be a minute,’ he said, ‘unshackling this bike.’

She turned the lights off. The last of the August day hadn’t quite gone; a warm duskiness was scented with honeysuckle she could not see when she stepped out of the car. ‘You’ve been awfully good to me,’ he said, unknotting the strings that held the bicycle in place. ‘You and Desmond.’

In the Rhett Butler Room, now rowdy with laughter and raised voices, she didn’t want to look at him again, and yet she couldn’t help herself: waiting for her were the unblinking eyes, the hair brushed back from the sallow forehead, the high cheekbones. Angela would stand at the graveside and afterwards would offer him sympathy. Quilty would be there, Helen wouldn’t bother. ‘I’d say we all need a drink’: Grania could imagine Angela saying that, including Desmond in the invitation, gathering the three men around her. In the dark the bicycle had been wheeled away and propped against the steps. ‘Come in for a minute,’ he’d said, and she’d begun to protest that it was late, even though it wasn’t. ‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ he’d said.

She remembered in the garish hotel dining-room, the flash of his smile in the gloom, and how she’d felt his unblinking eyes caressing her. He reached out for her hand, and in a moment they were in a hall, the electric light turned on, a grandfather clock ticking at the bottom of the stairs. There was a hallstand, and square cream-and-terracotta tiles, brown engravings framed in oak, fish in glass cases. ‘I shall offer you a nightcap,’ he whispered, leading her into a flagged passage and then into a cavernous kitchen. ‘Tullamore Dew is what they have,’ he murmured. ‘Give every man his dew.’ She knew what he intended. She’d known it before they’d turned in at the avenue gates; she’d felt it in the car between them. He poured their drinks and then he kissed her, taking her into his arms as though that were simply a variation of their dancing together. ‘Dearest,’ he murmured, surprising her: she hadn’t guessed that he intended, also, the delicacy of endearments.

Did she, before the car turned in at the avenue gates, decide herself what was to happen? Or was it later, even while still protesting that it was late? Or when he reached up to the high shelf of the dresser for the bottle? At some point she had said to herself: I am going to do this. She knew she had because the words still echoed. ‘How extraordinary!’ he murmured in the kitchen, all his talk as soft as that now. ‘How extraordinary to find you at a tennis club in Ireland!’ Her own arms held him to her; yet for some reason she didn’t want to see his face, not that she found it unattractive.

The empty glasses laid down on the kitchen table, stairs without a carpet, a chest of drawers on a landing, towels in a pile on a chair, the door of his bedroom closing behind them: remembered images were like details from a dream. For a moment the light went on in his room: a pink china jug stood in a basin on a wash-stand, there was a wardrobe, a cigarette packet on the dressing-table, the shirt and trousers he’d changed from into his tennis clothes were thrown on to the floor. Then the light was extinguished and again he embraced her, his fingers already unbuttoning her tennis dress, which no one but Desmond had ever done in that particular way. Before her marriage she’d been kissed, twice, by Billy MacGuinness, and once by a boy who’d left the neighbourhood and gone to Canada. As all the tennis-club wives were when they married, she’d been a virgin. ‘Oh God, Grania!’ she heard him whispering, and her thoughts became worries when she lay, naked, on the covers of his bed. Her father’s face was vivid in her mind, disposing of her with distaste. ‘No, don’t do that, dear,’ her mother used to say, smacking with her tongue when Grania picked a scab on her knee or made a pattern on the raked gravel with a stick.

In the kitchen they ate raspberries and cream. She asked him again about himself but he hardly responded, questioning her instead and successfully extracting answers. The raspberries were delicious; he put a punnet on the seat beside the driving seat in the car. They were for Desmond, but he didn’t say so. ‘Don’t feel awkward,’ he said. ‘I’m going back on Monday.’

A hare ran in front of the car on the avenue, bewildered by the lights. People would guess, she thought; they would see a solitary shadow in the car and they would know. It did not occur to her that if her expedition to the Prendergasts’ house had been as innocent as its original purpose the people who observed her return would still have seen what they saw now. In fact, the streets were quite deserted when she came to them.

‘God, I’m sorry,’ Desmond said, sitting up on the sofa, his white clothes rumpled, the texture of a cushion-cover on his cheek, his hair untidy. She smiled, not trusting herself to speak or even to laugh, as in other circumstances she might have. She put the raspberries in the refrigerator and had a bath.

In the Rhett Butler Room they began to change places in the usual way, after the Black Forest gâteau. She sat by Francie and Mavis. ‘Good for Aisling,’ Francie insisted when Mavis described the chartered accountant; he did not seem old at all. ‘I’ll have it out with Martin when we get back,’ Mavis said. ‘There’s no chance whatsoever she’s been naughty. I can assure you I’d be the first to know.’ They lowered their voices to remark on Angela’s interest in the stranger. ‘The house would suit her rightly,’ Mavis said.

All the rooms would be done up. The slatted shutters that flanked the windows would be repainted, and the balustrade by the steps. There’d be new curtains and carpets; a gardener would be employed. Angela had never cared for the house her well-to-do husband had built her, and since his death had made no secret of the fact.

‘I’ll never forget that night, Grania.’ Francie giggled, embarrassedly groping for a cigarette. ‘Dancing with your man and Desmond going to sleep. Wasn’t it the same night I told you Maureen was on the way?’

‘Yes, it was.’

The three women talked of other matters. That week in the town an elderly clerk had been accused of embezzlement. Mavis observed that the surveyor from the waterworks was limbering up to propose to Una Carty-Garroll. ‘And doesn’t she know it!’ Francie said. Grania laughed.

Sometimes she’d wondered if he was still working in a pub and told herself that of course he wouldn’t be, that he’d have married and settled down ages ago. But when she saw him tonight she’d guessed immediately that he hadn’t. She wasn’t surprised when Desmond had said he was on his uppers. ‘I am going to do this’: the echo of her resolve came back to her as she sat there. ‘I am going to do this because I want a child.’

‘God, I’m exhausted,’ Mavis said. ‘Is it age or what?’

‘Oh, it’s age, it’s age.’ Francie sighed, stubbing out her cigarette. ‘Damn things,’ she muttered.

Mavis reached for the packet and flicked it across the table. ‘Present for you, Kevy,’ she said, but Francie pleaded with her eyes and he flicked it back again. Grania smiled because they’d have noticed if she didn’t.

In the intervening years he would never have wondered about a child being born. But if Angela married him he would think about it; being close by would cause him to. He would wonder, and in the middle of a night, while he lay beside Angela in bed, it would be borne in upon him that Desmond and Grania had one child only. Grania considered that: the untidiness of someone else knowing, her secret shared. There’d been perpetually, every instant of the day it sometimes seemed, the longing to share – with Desmond and with her friends, with the child that had been born. But this was different.

The evening came to an end. Cars were started in the yard of the hotel; there were warnings of ice on the roads. ‘Good-night, Grania,’ the man who’d come for the funeral said. She buckled herself into her seat-belt. Desmond backed and then crawled forward into West Main Street. ‘You’re quiet,’ he said, and immediately she began to talk about the possibility of Una Carty-Carroll being proposed to in case he connected her silence with the presence of the stranger. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said when that subject was exhausted, ‘I met that fellow of Aisling’s once. He’s only thirty-five.’ She opened the garage door and he drove the car in. The air was refreshingly cold, sharper than it had been in the yard of the hotel.

They locked their house. Grania put things ready for the morning. It was a relief that a babysitter was no longer necessary, that she didn’t have to wait with just a trace of anxiety while Desmond drove someone home. He’d gone upstairs and she knew that he’d done so in order to press open Judith’s door and glance in at her while she slept. Whenever they came in at night he did that.

At the sink Grania poured glasses of water for him and for herself, and carried them upstairs. When she had placed them on either side of their bed she, too, went to look in at her daughter – a mass of brown hair untidy on the pillow, eyes lightly closed. ‘I might play golf tomorrow,’ Desmond said, settling his trousers into his electric press. Almost as soon as he’d clambered into bed he fell asleep. She switched out his bedside light and went downstairs.

Alone in the kitchen, sitting over a cup of tea, she returned again to the August Saturday. Two of Trish’s children had already been born then, and two of Mavis’s, and Helen’s first. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ Billy MacGuinness had said, ‘if Angela doesn’t drop this one in a deck-chair.’ Mary Ann Haddon had just started her second. Older children were sitting on the clubhouse steps.

Grania forced her thoughts through all the rest of it, through the party that had happened by chance, the headlights picking out the rose-bed. She savoured easily the solitude she had disguised during the years that had passed since then, the secret that had seemed so safe. In the quiet kitchen, when she had been over this familiar ground, she felt herself again possessed by the confusion that had come like a fog when she’d seen tonight the father of her child. Then slowly it lifted: she was incapable of regret.

Children of the Headmaster

The greater part of the house was shabby from use. The white paintwork of the corridors and the rooms had been chipped and soiled. Generations of feet had clattered against skirting-boards; fingers had darkened an area around door-handles; shoulders had worn patches on walls. The part of the house known as ‘Private Side’ was in better decorative repair, this being the wing occupied by the Headmaster’s family – six people in contrast to the hundred and twenty-odd boys who comprised the boarding-school. In the holidays the house regained its unity, and the Headmaster’s children were together again. Jonathan returned to his own room from whichever dormitory he had occupied during the term, and was glad to do so. Margery, Georgina and Harriet explored the forbidden territory of the last few months.

Mr Arbuary, the children’s father, had bought the house with money left to his wife in a will. On learning about the legacy, the Arbuarys returned to England from Hong Kong, where Mr Arbuary had been a police officer. The legacy allowed them the first chance in their married life to ‘do something’, as they put it privately to one another. In those days Mrs Arbuary was on for anything, but had since developed a nervous condition that drained her energy. Only the two older children were born before the family’s return to England, Jonathan and Margery.

Mr Arbuary was a tall, bespectacled man with a sandy moustache, increasing in stoutness as the years advanced, and balding at about the same rate. His wife, once stout herself, was skin and bone due to her nervous complaint, with lank fair hair and eyes as darting as a rabbit’s. Their combination had produced children who were physically like neither of them except that they were blue-eyed and were not sallow-skinned or black-haired. Yet among the children there was a distinct family resemblance: a longish face in which the features were cut with a precision that lent them an aristocratic air, a tendency to stare. Margery and Georgina, when they were ten and nine respectively, were pretty. Harriet, at eight, gave little indication of how she would be in the future. Jonathan, the oldest, had already been told by the Classics master, Old Mudger, that he was not without good looks.

The house that was both school and home was on the outskirts of a seaside town, at the end of a brief, hydrangea-laden drive. In purchasing it and deciding to start a boarding-school, Mr Arbuary did his homework carefully. He recalled his own schooldays and all that had gone with them in the name of education and ‘Older values’. He believed in older values. At a time when the country he returned to appeared to be in the hands of football hooligans and trade unionists such values surely needed to be reestablished, and when he thought about them Mr Arbuary was glad he had decided to invest his wife’s legacy in a preparatory school rather than an hotel, which had been an alternative. He sought the assistance of an old schoolfellow who had spent the intervening years in the preparatory-school world and was familiar with the ropes. This was the Classics master whom generations of boys came to know as Old Mudger when Mr Arbuary had enticed him to the new establishment. Mrs Arbuary – presenting in those days a motherly front – took on the responsibility of catering and care of the boys’ health. The boarding-school began with three pupils, increasing its intake slowly at first, later accelerating.

‘Now,’ Georgina prompted on the first afternoon of the Easter holidays in 1988. ‘Anything good?’

The furniture-room, in the attics above the private part of the house, was the children’s secret place. They crouched among the stored furniture that, ten years ago, their mother had inherited with the legacy. That morning the boys had gone, by car mostly, a few by train. In contrast to the bustle and the rush there’d been, the house was as silent as a tomb.

‘Nothing much,’ Jonathan said. ‘Really.’

‘Must have been something,’ Harriet insisted.

Jonathan said that the winter term in the other side of the house had been bitterly cold. Everyone had chilblains. He recounted the itching of his own, and the huddling around the day-room fire, and his poor showing at algebra, geometry and Latin. His sisters were not much impressed. He said:

‘Half Starving got hauled up. He nearly got the sack.’

Three times a year Jonathan brought to his sisters the excitement of the world they were protected from, for it was one of the Headmaster’s rules that family life and school life should in no way impinge upon one another. The girls heard the great waves of noise and silence that came whenever the whole school congregated, a burst of general laughter sometimes, a masters voice raised to address the ranks of boys at hand-inspection times in the hall, the chatter of milk-and-biscuits time. They saw, from the high windows of the house, the boys in their games clothes setting off for the playing-fields. Sometimes, when an emergency arose, a senior boy would cross to Private Side to summon their father. He would glance at the three girls with curiosity, and they at him. On Sundays the girls came closer to the school, walking to church with their mother and the undermatron, Miss Mainwaring, behind the long crocodile of boys, and sitting five pews behind them.

‘Why did Half Starving get hauled up?’ Georgina asked.

The junior master was called Half Starving because of his unhealthily pallid appearance. As such, he had been known to the girls ever since their brother had passed the nickname on. By now they’d forgotten his real name.

‘Because of something he said to Haxby,’ Jonathan said. At lunch one day Half Starving had asked Haxby what the joke was, since the whole table had begun to snigger. ‘No joke, sir,’ Haxby replied, and Half Starving said: ‘What age are you, Haxby?’ When Haxby said nine, Half Starving said he’d never seen a boy of nine with grey hair before.

Georgina giggled, and so did Harriet. Margery said: ‘What happened then?’

‘Another boy said that wasn’t a very nice thing to say because Haxby couldn’t help his hair. The boy – Temple, I think it was – said it was a personal remark, and Half Starving Said he hadn’t meant to make a personal remark. Then he asked Haxby if he’d ever heard of the Elephant Man.’

‘The what?’ Harriet stared at Jonathan with her mouth open, the way her father said she never in any circumstances whatsoever should.

‘A man in a peepshow who looked like an elephant. Someone asked Half Starving if Haxby reminded him of this elephant person and Half Starving said the elephant person had had grey hair when he was a boy also. Then someone said Haxby might be good in a peepshow and Half Starving asked Haxby if travelling about sounded like a life he’d enjoy. Everyone laughed and afterwards Cuthbert hauled Half Starving up because of the noise.’

Cuthbert was the school’s nickname for the children’s father. Jonathan had felt embarrassed about using it to his sisters at first, but he’d got over that years ago. For his own part, Mr Arbuary liked simply to be known as ‘the Headmaster’.

‘I think I know which Haxby is,’ Margery said. ‘Fupny-looking fish. All the same, I doubt anyone would pay to see him in a peepshow. Anything else?’

‘Spencer II puked in the dorm, first night of term. All the mint chocs he brought back and something that looked like turnips. Mange-coloured.’

‘Ugh!’ Harriet said.

Baddle, Thompson-Wright and Wardle had beep caned for giving cheek. Thompson-Wright had blubbed, the others hadn’t. The piano master had been seen on the promenade with one of the maids, Reene.

Jonathan’s sisters were interested in that. The piano master’s head sloped at an angle from his shoulders. He dressed like an undertaker and did not strike the girls as the kind to take women on to the promenade.

‘Who saw them?’ Georgina asked.

‘Pomeroy when he was going for Old Mudger’s tobacco.’

‘I don’t like to think of it,’ Margery said. ‘Isn’t the piano master meant to smell?’

Jonathan said the piano master himself didn’t smell: more likely it was his clothes. ‘Something gets singed when it’s ironed.’

‘A vest,’ Harriet suggested.

‘I don’t know what it is.’

‘I think a vest probably.’

Soon after that the children left the furniture-room. There was tea in the dining-room then, a daily ritual in the holidays, the long mahogany table with curved ends lard for six. The Headmaster liked it to be so. He liked Mrs Arbuary to make sandwiches: sardine and egg in winter, in summer cucumber and tomato. The Headmaster’s favourite cake was fruit-cake, so there was fruitcake as well.

The dining-room was a darkish room, wallpaper in crimson-and-black stripes combining with two pairs of curtains – velvet, in crimson also, and net – to set this sombre tone. The grained paintwork was the same deep brown as the curlicued sideboard, on which were arrayed the silver teapots and water-jugs, the gravy boats and loving cups, that Mrs Arbuary had inherited at the same time as the furniture and her legacy. It was an aunt who had died.

The children took their places at the table. Mrs Arbuary poured tea. The maid who had been observed in the piano master’s company brought in a plate of buttered toast. She and the other domestic staff – Monica and Mrs Hodge and Mrs Hodge’s husband, who was the general handyman –continued to come daily to the school during the holidays, but for much shorter hours. That was the only way the Arbuarys could keep them.

‘Thank you, Reene,’ the Headmaster said, and the girls began to giggle, thinking about the piano master. He was a man who had never earned a nickname, and it was a tradition at the school not ever to employ his surname. Since Jonathan had passed that fact on to his sisters they had not, even in their thoughts, done so either.

‘Well,’ the Headmaster said next. ‘We are en famille.’

Mrs Arbuary, who rarely instigated conversations and only occasionally contributed to them, did not do so now. She smeared raspberry jam on a finger of toast and raised it to her lips. The school was a triumph for her husband after a lustreless career in Hong Kong, but it had brought her low. Being answerable to often grumpy parents, organizing a kitchen and taking responsibility during epidemics did not suit her nature. She had been happier before.

‘A good term,’ the Headmaster said. ‘I think we might compliment ourselves on a successful term. Eh, Jonathan?’

‘I suppose so.’ The tone was less ungracious than the sentiment. Jonathan drummed as much cheeriness into it as he could muster, yet felt the opinion must be expressed honestly in those words. He had no idea if the term had been successful or not; he supposed so if his father claimed so.

‘A single defeat on the hockey field,’ the Headmaster reminded him. ‘And your own report’s not half bad, old chap.’

‘Georgina got a frightful one,’ Harriet said.

The girls attended a day school in the town, St Beatrice’s. When the time came they would be sent away to boarding-school, but at the preparatory stage funds could not be stretched. Once, years ago, Mrs Arbuary had suggested that the girls might receive their preparatory education at her husband’s school, but this was before she appreciated that the older values did not permit this.

‘Georgina,’ Mr Arbuary said, in his Headmaster’s rather than his father’s voice, ‘has much to mend this holidays. So, too, has Harriet.’

‘My report wasn’t too awful,’ Harriet insisted in an unconvincing mutter meant mainly for herself.

‘Speak clearly if you wish to be heard, Harriet. Reports are written to be assessed by parents. I would remind you of that.’

‘I only meant –’

‘You are a chatterbox, Harriet. What should be placed on chatterboxes?’

‘Lids.’

‘Precisely so.’

A silence fell around the table. Mrs Arbuary cut the fruitcake. The Headmaster passed his cup for more tea. Eventually he said:

‘It is always a pity, I think, when Easter is as early as it is this year.’

He gave no reason for this view, but elicited none the less a general response – murmurs of agreement, nods. Neither Mrs Arbuary nor the children minded when Easter fell, but in the dining-room responses were required.

Increasingly, there was much that Jonathan did not pass, on to his sisters. Mrs Arbuary’s nickname, for instance, was the Hen because a boy called McAtters had said she was like a hen whose feathers had been drenched in a shower of rain – a reference to what McAtters, and others, considered to be a feeble manner. It had been noticed that Mrs Arbuary feared not just her husband, but Miss Mainwaring the undermatron and most of the assistant masters. It had been noticed that she played obsessively with one of heir forefingers whenever parents engaged her in conversation. A boy called Windercrank said that once when she looked up from a flowerbed she was weeding there were soil-stained tears on her cheeks.

Jonathan had not passed on to his sisters the news that their father was generally despised. It had been easier to tell them about Old Mudger, how he sometimes came into the dorm if a boy had been sent to bed before prep because Miss Mainwaring thought he was looking peaky. ‘Well, friendly, I Suppose,’ Jonathan had explained to Georgina and Harriet. ‘Anyway, that’s what we call it. Friendly.’ Margery had an inkling: he’d seen it in her eyes. All three of them had laughed over the Mudger being friendly, Georgina and Harriet knowing it was funny because no one would particularly want to be friendly with their father’s old schoolfellow. But they wouldn’t laugh – nor would he – if he told them their mother was called the Hen. They wouldn’t laugh if he told them their father was scorned for his pomposity, and mocked behind his back as a fearsome figure of fun.

And now – these Easter holidays – there was something else. A boy Jonathan did not like, who was a year older than he was, called Tottle, had sent a message to Margery. All term he had been bothering Jonathan with his messages, and Jonathan had explained that because of the Headmaster’s rules he would have no opportunity to deliver one until the holidays. Tottle had doubted his trustworthiness in the matter, and two days before the term ended he pushed him into a corner in the lavatories and rammed his fist into Jonathan’s stomach. He kept it there, pressing very hard, until Jonathan promised that he would deliver the message to Margery as soon as possible in the holidays. When Jonathan had first been a pupil in his father’s school, when he was seven, no one had even seemed to notice his sisters, but during the last year or so – because they were older, he supposed – all that had changed. Boys he wasn’t friends with asked questions about them, boys who’d never spoken to him before. Once, at lunch, Half Starving had warned a boy not to speak like that about the Headmaster’s daughters. ‘Fancy them yourself, sir?’ someone else shouted down the table, and Half Starving went red, the way he always did when matters got out of hand.

‘Tell her to meet me, first night of term,’ Tottle’s message was. ‘Round by the carpentry hut. Seven.’

Tottle claimed that he had looked round and smiled at Margery in church. The third Sunday he’d done it she’d smiled back. Without any evidence to the contrary, Jonathan had denied that. ‘You bloody little tit,’ Tottle snapped, driving his fist further into Jonathan’s stomach, hurting him considerably.

Tottle was due to leave at the end of next term, but Jonathan guessed that after Tottle there would be someone else, and that soon there would be messages for Georgina as well as Margery, and later for Harriet. He wouldn’t have to be involved in that because he’d have left himself by then, but some other means of communication would be found, through Reene or Mrs Hodge or Hodge. Jonathan hated the thought of that; he hated his sisters being at the receiving end of dormitory coarseness. In the darkness there’d been guffaws when the unclothing of Reene by the piano master had been mooted – and sly tittering which he’d easily joined in himself. Not that he’d even believed Pomeroy when he said he’d seen them on the promenade. Pomeroy didn’t often tell the truth.

But it wasn’t the pursuit of his sisters that worried Jonathan most: it was what they would learn by the carpentry shed or in the seclusion of the hydrangeas. It stood to reason that their pursuers would let things slip. ‘Cuthbert’, Tottle would say, and Margery would laugh, saying she knew her father was called Cuthbert, Then, bit by bit, on similar occasions, all the rest of it would tumble out. You giggled when the Hen was imitated, the stutter she’d developed, her agitated playing with a forefinger. Cuthbert’s walk was imitated, his catchphrases concerning the older values repeated in self-important tones. ‘Bad taste’ another catchphrase was. When the pomposity was laid aside and severity took its place he punished ruthlessly, his own appointed source of justice. When the rules were broken he showed no mercy. Other people’s fathers were businessmen or doctors, Bakinghouse’s was a deep-sea salvage operator. No one mentioned what they were like; no one knew.

‘Margery,’ Jonathan said in the furniture-room when Georgina and Harriet were receiving tuition from their father. ‘Margery, do you know what a boy called Tottle looks like?’

Margery went pink. ‘Tottle?’ she said.

‘He’s one of the first three leading into church. There’s Reece and Greated, then usually Tottle.’

‘Yes, I know Tottle,’ Margery admitted, and Jonathan knew from her casual tone that what Tottle had said about Margery smiling back was true.

‘Tottle sent you a message,’ Jonathan said.

‘What kind of a message?’ She turned her head away, trying to get her face into the shadows.

‘He said to meet him by the carpentry shed next term. Seven O’clock the first evening.’

‘Blooming cheek!’

‘You won’t, will you, Margery? He made me promise I’d tell you, otherwise I wouldn’t have.’

‘Of course I won’t.’

‘Tottle’s not all that nice.’

‘He’s not bad-looking if he’s the one I’m thinking of.’

Jonathan didn’t say anything. Bakinghouse’s father might turn into some kind of predator when he was at the bottom of the sea, quite different from the person Bakinghouse knew. A businessman mightn’t be much liked by office people, but his family wouldn’t know that either.

‘Why d’you think Mummy’s so nervy, Margery?’

‘Nervy?’

‘You know what I mean.’

Margery nodded. She didn’t know why their mother was nervy, she said, sounding surprised. ‘When did Tottle give you the message, Jonathan?’

‘Two days before the end of term.’

Lying in bed the night before, he had made up his mind that he would pass the message on when Georgina and Harriet were occupied in one of the classrooms the next day. Best to get it over, he’d thought, and it was then that he began to wonder about their mother. He never had before and clearly Margery hadn’t either. He remembered someone saying that the Hen was probably the way she was because of Cuthbert. ‘Poor old Hen,’ a voice in the dorm had sympathized.

‘Don’t tell the others,’ Margery pleaded. ‘Please.’

‘Of course not.’

Their mother overheard things in the laundry-room when boys came for next week’s sheet and clean pyjamas, and in the hall when she gave out the milk. As someone once said, it was easy to forget the poor old Hen was there.

‘Don’t meet him, Margery.’

‘I told you I wouldn’t.’

‘Tottle’s got a thing on you.’

Again Margery reddened. She told her brother not to be silly. Else why would Tottle want to meet her by the carpentry shed? he replied; it stood to reason. Tottle wasn’t a prefect; he hadn’t been made a prefect even though he was one of the oldest boys in the school. Had he been a prefect he wouldn’t have been the third boy to enter the church on Sundays; he’d have led a battalion, as the five houses into which the school was divided were called. He wasn’t a prefect because the Headmaster didn’t consider him worthy and made no secret of the fact.

‘It’s nothing like that,’ Margery persisted.

Jonathan didn’t want to argue. He didn’t even want to think about Tottle now that the message had been delivered. He changed the conversation; he asked Margery about Miss Mole, one of the mistresses who taught her, and about whom Margery was sometimes funny. But he hardly listened when she told him. It hadn’t occurred to him before that Tottle was in some way attempting to avenge himself.

There was roast lamb for lunch. The Headmaster carved it. There was mint sauce, and carrots and mashed potatoes.

‘I think we learned a thing or two this morning,’ the Headmaster said, ‘I hope we can compliment ourselves on that.’

Was he as bad as they said? Jonathan wondered. It was ridiculous to say he was like Mussolini, yet it had been said. ‘Bully-boys are always a bit comic,’ a boy called Piercey had suggested. ‘Hitler. Mussolini. Cromwell. The Reverend Ian Paisley.’

‘Jonathan.’ His mother smiled at him, indicating that he should pass a dish to Harriet. By the end of the holidays she would be far less taut; that was always so. She and Mrs Hodge and Monica would launder blankets and clean the dormitory windows and polish the linoleum and wash down walls where it was necessary. Then all the beds had to be made and the dining-hall given a cleaning, the tables scrubbed and the serving range gone over with steel-wool. Hodge would clean the dining-hall windows because they were awkwardly placed. Crockery that had been broken during term would be replaced.

‘Sorry,’ Jonathan said, moving the dish of carrots towards his youngest sister. By the end of the holidays, though still subdued and jumpy, Mrs Arbuary would be more inclined to take part in mealtime conversation. Her hands would not quiver so much.

‘Mrs Salkind telephoned in the middle of our labours,’ the Headmaster reported. ‘Apparently the Salkinds are being posted abroad. Did you know this, Jonathan? Did Salkind say?’

Jonathan shook his head.

‘Apparently to Egypt. Some business thing.’

‘Did Mrs Salkind give notice?’ The hopeful note in his mother’s tone caught in Jonathan’s imagination. With a bit of luck all the other parents might give notice also. Again and again, that very afternoon, the telephone might ring and the news would be that father after father had been posted to distant parts. The school would close.

On the contrary,’ the Headmaster replied. ‘No, quite the contrary. Our Master Salkind will be flown back and forth at the expense of some manufacturing company. Heavy-duty vehicle springs, I believe it is, that pay the piper where Salkind senior is concerned. I recall correctly, Jonathan?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know.’

‘No cause for fear, old chap. Heavy-duty vehicle springs, if I am not wildly astray, once featured long in a conversation with the senior Salkind. Buses, lorries, military transports. Now, it seems, the good man is to instruct the Egyptians in their manufacture, or else to set up a factory, or generally to liaise. The good Mrs Salkind did not reveal.’

While speaking, the Headmaster cut the meat on his plate, adding potatoes and carrots to each forkful. He paused to eat between sentences, so that what he said came slowly from him. When the children were younger they had fidgeted during their father’s mealtime dissertations. They had since learned not to.

‘No, the reason for the good lady’s telephone call was to inquire if Master Salkind might have extra French.’

Not wishing to listen, Jonathan thought of Tottle again. The older boy’s rather big, handsome face appeared clearly in his mind, a smile slung lazily across it. He glanced at Margery, seated opposite him, Was she, too, thinking about her admirer, visualizing him also? Was she wondering what it would be like to meet him as he’d suggested, what he’d say, how he’d act?

‘French, apparently, is commercially de rigueur in Egypt, or at least in the Salkinds’ corner of it.’

In the darkness of the dormitory there were confessions of desire. When one voice left off another began. Tales were told of what had been seen or heard. Intentions were declared, pretences aired.

‘Though, truth to tell, I can hardly think of a reason why French should feature in any way whatsoever since the Egyptians have a perfectly good language of their own.’

The confessions of desire had to do with film stars usually, occasionally with Lady Di or Fergie, less often with Reene or Monica.

‘Were you aware of that, old chap? French in Egypt?’

‘No.’

‘I think, you know, the good lady may have got it wrong.’

Tottle intended to try it on, and then to laugh in that way he had. He would put his big face close to Margery’s, he’d put his big lips on to hers, and his hands would go all over her, just as though it wasn’t real, just as though he was pretending. And later on, with someone else, it would be the same for Georgina, and for Harriet.

‘But since Master Salkind’s French is shaky an extra hour a week will hardly come amiss, eh?’

Everyone agreed.

The days of those Easter holidays went similarly by. The children of the Headmaster spent long afternoons on the grey sands that stretched beyond the shingle and the sea-front promenade. They sat in the Yew Tree Café sipping Coca-Cola and nibbling cheap biscuits. When their week’s pocket-money ran out they crouched instead among the furniture of the furniture-room. Every morning Georgina and Harriet were given tuition by their father, and Jonathan and Margery read, alone in their rooms.

Tottle was not again mentioned, but as the weeks passed Jonathan found himself more and more dismayed by all that his imagination threw at him. It felt like that: as though heavy lumps of information were being lobbed in his direction, relentlessly and slowly. They dropped into the pond of his consciousness, creating little pictures. They nagged at him, and the intensity of colour in the pictures increased, and faces and expressions acquired greater distinctness.

Two nights before the holidays ended, restlessly awake, Jonathan arrived at a decision. The next afternoon he did not accompany his sisters to the sea-front and the Yew Tree Café, presenting them with the unlikely excuse that he had some history to read. He watched them set off from the window of his bedroom, delayed another twenty minutes, and then went slowly downstairs. He paused again, in doubt and trepidation, before he found the courage to knock on his father’s study door. He had no idea how he might express himself.

‘Yes?’ the Headmaster responded.

Jonathan closed the door behind him. The study smelt, as always, of his father’s pipe tobacco and a mustiness that could not be identified. Glasspaned cupboards were full of textbooks, There were supplies of chalk and geometrical instruments, globes of the world, cartridges for fountain pens, stacks of new exercise-books, blotting paper, pencils. His father sat behind his desk, a pipe in his mouth, the new term’s timetables spread out before him.

‘Well, old chap? Come to lend a hand?’

Beyond the geniality lay the ghost of the Headmaster’s termtime self, of severity and suspicion. Pomposity wasn’t what mattered most; talk of ‘Older values’ and ‘bad taste’ was only tedious on its own. ‘Bloody hypocrite’, some boy – neither Tottle nor Piercey – had said once. ‘Nasty brute’.

‘Always tricky, the summer timetables.’

Jonathan nodded.

‘Cricket’s greedy,’ the Headmaster said. ‘Where time’s concerned.’

‘Yes, it is.’

His father knocked the ashes out of his pipe and drew a tin of tobacco towards him. All his life, Jonathan had been familiar with these tins: Three Nuns the tobacco was called, orange lettering on a creamy ground. He watched his father pressing the coiled shreds into the bowl of his pipe. His father knew: that was what Jonathan had at length deduced. His father had so determinedly separated Private Side from the school because he knew the girls must not be exposed to crudities. His father knew, but he didn’t know enough. You couldn’t insist there was a shutter that came down just because you pretended it did. You couldn’t insist Old Mudger was a Mr Chips just because he looked like one.

‘Girls out somewhere?’ his father said.

‘I think so.’

A match was struck, the tobacco caught. Jonathan watched it reddening, and smoke streaming from between his father’s tightly clenched teeth. There was no conversation they could have. He could not mention the voices in the darkness of the dormitory, the confessions of desire, the declarations of intention. He could not tell his father he was despised for being the person he was, that boys were sorry for a woman they likened to a hen. He could not warn him of Tottle’s revenge, nor suggest what lay ahead for Georgina and Harriet. Lying awake the night before, he had wanted to protect his sisters, and his mother also, because they were not to blame. And in a way he had even wanted to protect his father because he didn’t know enough, because he blustered and was oppressive, and went about things stupidly.

‘Well, I’d best get on, old chap,’ his father said, applying himself once more to the sheets of paper that constituted the summer timetables. The balding head was bent again. Smoke eddied about it complacently.

Jonathan went away, softly closing the study door behind him. He ran through the empty corridors of the school, and down the hydrangea drive. He ran along the sea-front, looking for his sisters.

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.

Acknowledgements

These stories first appeared in the following publications: Antaeus, Antioch Review, Atlantic Monthly, Best Irish Stories 2, A Book of Contemporary Nightmares, The Eighth Ghost Book, The Eleventh Ghost Book, Encounter, Good Housekeeping, Grand Street, Harper’s, Irish Ghost Stories, Irish Press, Irish Times, James Joyce and Modern Literature, Listener, Literary Review, London Magazine, New Review, New Yorker, Nova, Observer, Penguin Modern Short Stories, The Real Thing: Seven Stories of Love (The Bodley Head), Redbook, Spectator, The Times, Town, Transatlantic Review, Voices 2 (Michael Joseph), Winter’s Tales (Macmillan, London), Winter’s Tales from Ireland, Woman’s Journal.

‘Going Home’ and ‘Attracta’ first appeared as radio plays on Β Β C Radio Three.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to A T V Music Group for permission to quote from ‘Yesterday’ by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Copyright © Maclen Music, Inc., 1965. ATV Music Corp., 6255 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90028, for the USA, Canada, Mexico and the Philippines. Northern Songs Ltd for the rest of the world. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright Page

Contents

The Collected StoriesA Meeting in Middle AgeAccess to the ChildrenThe General’s DayMemories of YoughalThe TableA School StoryThe Penthouse ApartmentIn at the BirthThe Introspections of J. P. PowersThe Day We Got Drunk on CakeMiss SmithThe Hotel of the Idle MoonNice Day at SchoolThe Original Sins of Edward TrippThe Forty-seventh SaturdayThe Ballroom of RomanceA Happy FamilyThe Grass WidowsThe Mark-2 WifeAn Evening with John Joe DempseyKinkiesGoing HomeA Choice of ButchersO Fat White WomanRaymond Bamber and Mrs FitchThe Distant FastIn IsfahanAngels at the RitzThe Death of Peggy MeehanMrs SillyA Complicated NatureTeresa’s WeddingOffice RomancesMr McNamaraAfternoon DancingLast WishesMrs Acland’s GhostsAnother ChristmasBroken HomesMatilda’s EnglandTorridgeDeath in JerusalemLovers of Their TimeThe Raising of Elvira TremlettFlights of FancyAttractaA Dream of ButterfliesThe Bedroom Eyes of Mrs VansittartDownstairs at Fitzgerald’sMulvihill’s MemorialBeyond the PaleThe Blue DressThe Teddy-hears’ PicnicThe Time of YearBeing Stolen FromMr TennysonAutumn SunshineSunday DrinksThe Paradise LoungeMagsThe News from IrelandOn the ZattereThe Wedding in the GardenLunch in WinterThe Property of Colette NerviRunning AwayCocktails at Doney’sHer Mother’s DaughterBodily SecretsTwo More GallantsThe Smoke Trees of San PietroVirginsMusicEvents at DrimaghleenFamily SinsA TrinityThe Third PartyHoneymoon in TramoreThe PrintmakerIn Love with AriadneA Husband’s ReturnCoffee with OliverAugust SaturdayChildren of the HeadmasterKathleen’s Field

Acknowledgements

Table of Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright Page

Contents

The Collected Stories

A Meeting in Middle Age

Access to the Children

The General’s Day

Memories of Youghal

The Table

A School Story

The Penthouse Apartment

In at the Birth

The Introspections of J. P. Powers

The Day We Got Drunk on Cake

Miss Smith

The Hotel of the Idle Moon

Nice Day at School

The Original Sins of Edward Tripp

The Forty-seventh Saturday

The Ballroom of Romance

A Happy Family

The Grass Widows

The Mark-2 Wife

An Evening with John Joe Dempsey

Kinkies

Going Home

A Choice of Butchers

O Fat White Woman

Raymond Bamber and Mrs Fitch

The Distant Fast

In Isfahan

Angels at the Ritz

The Death of Peggy Meehan

Mrs Silly

A Complicated Nature

Teresa’s Wedding

Office Romances

Mr McNamara

Afternoon Dancing

Last Wishes

Mrs Acland’s Ghosts

Another Christmas

Broken Homes

Matilda’s England

Torridge

Death in Jerusalem

Lovers of Their Time

The Raising of Elvira Tremlett

Flights of Fancy

Attracta

A Dream of Butterflies

The Bedroom Eyes of Mrs Vansittart

Downstairs at Fitzgerald’s

Mulvihill’s Memorial

Beyond the Pale

The Blue Dress

The Teddy-hears’ Picnic

The Time of Year

Being Stolen From

Mr Tennyson

Autumn Sunshine

Sunday Drinks

The Paradise Lounge

Mags

The News from Ireland

On the Zattere

The Wedding in the Garden

Lunch in Winter

The Property of Colette Nervi

Running Away

Cocktails at Doney’s

Her Mother’s Daughter

Bodily Secrets

Two More Gallants

The Smoke Trees of San Pietro

Virgins

Music

Events at Drimaghleen

Family Sins

A Trinity

The Third Party

Honeymoon in Tramore

The Printmaker

In Love with Ariadne

A Husband’s Return

Coffee with Oliver

August Saturday

Children of the Headmaster

Kathleen’s Field

Acknowledgements