‘You’ve spoken to them, have you?’ her husband asked when she said what she intended.
‘No, only you.’
‘I wouldn’t want the girl told.’
He turned away in the potato shed, to heft a sack on to the lorry. She felt uneasy in herself, she said, the way things were, and felt that more and more. That feeling wasn’t there without a reason. It was a feeling she was aware of most at Mass and when she prayed at night.
Mulreavy didn’t reply. He had never known the identity of the father. Some runaway fellow, he had been told at the time by Mr. Larrissey, who had always considered the shame greater because a priest was involved. ‘No need Mulreavy should know that,’ Ellie had been instructed by her mother, and had abided by this wish.
‘It was never agreed,’ Mulreavy maintained, not pausing in his loading. ‘It wasn’t agreed the girl would know.’
Ellie spoke of a priest then; her husband said nothing. He finished with the potato sacks and lit a cigarette. That was a shocking thing, he eventually remarked, and lumbered out of the barn.
‘Are you mad, girl?’ Her mother rounded on her in the kitchen, turning from the draining-board, where she was shredding cabbage. Mr. Larrissey, who was present also, told her not to be a fool. What good in the world would it do to tell a child the like of that?
‘Have sense, for God’s sake,’ he crossly urged, his voice thick with the bluster that obscured his confusion.
‘You’ve done enough damage, Ellie,’ her mother said, all the colour gone from her thin face. ‘You’ve brought enough on us.’
When Mulreavy came into the kitchen an hour later he guessed at what had been said, but he did not add anything himself. He sat down to wait for his food to be placed in front of him. It was the first time since the arrangement had been agreed upon that any reference to it had been made in the household.
‘That’s the end of it,’ Ellie’s mother laid down, the statement made as much for Mulreavy’s benefit as for Ellie’s. ‘We’ll hear no more of this.’
Ellie did not reply. That evening she told her child.
People knew, and talked about it now. What had occurred ten years ago suddenly had an excitement about it that did not fail to please. Minds were cast back, memories ransacked in a search for the name and appearance of the summer priest who had been and gone. Father Mooney, who had succeeded old Father Hanlon, spoke privately to Ellie, deploring the exposure she had ‘so lightly’ been responsible for.
With God’s grace, he pointed out, a rough and ready solution had been found and disgrace averted ten years ago. There should have been gratitude for that, not what had happened now. Ellie explained that every time she looked at her child she felt a stab of guilt because a deception of such magnitude had been perpetrated. ‘Her life was no more than a lie,’ Ellie said, but Father Mooney snappishly replied that that was not for her to say.
‘You flew in the face of things once,’ he fulminated, ‘and now you’ve done it again.’ When he glared at her. it showed in his expression that he considered her an unfit person to be in his parish. He ordered Hail Marys to be repeated, and penitence practised, with humility and further prayer.
But Ellie felt that a weight had been lifted from her, and she explained to her child that even if nothing was easy now, a time would come when the difficulties of the moment would all be gone.
Mulreavy suffered. His small possession of pride was bruised; he hardly had to think to know what people said. He went about his work in the fields, planting and harvesting, spreading muck and fertilizer, folding away cheques until he had a stack ready for lodgement in Moyleglass. The sour atmosphere in the farmhouse affected him, and he wondered if people knew, on top of everything else, that he occupied a bedroom on his own and always had, that he had never so much as embraced his wayward young bride. Grown heavier over the years, he became even heavier after her divulgence, eating more in his despondency.
He liked the child; he always had. The knowledge that a summer priest had fathered her caused him to like her no less, for the affection was rooted in him. And the child did not change in her attitude to him, but still ran to him at once when she returned from school, with tales of how the nuns had been that day, which one bad-tempered, which one sweet. He listened as he always had, always pausing in his work to throw in a word or two. He continued to tell brief stories of his past experiences on the road: he had traded in potatoes since he was hardly more than a child himself, fifteen when he first assisted his father.
But in the farmhouse Mulreavy became silent. In his morose mood he blamed not just the wife he’d married but her elders too. They had deceived him. And knowing more than he did about these things, they should have foreseen more than they had. The child bore his name. ‘Mrs. Mulreavy’ they called his wife. He was a laughing-stock.
‘I don’t remember that man,’ he said when almost a year had passed, a September morning. He had crossed the furrows to where she was picking potatoes from the clay he’d turned, the plough drawn by the tractor. ‘I don’t know did I ever see him.’
Ellie looked up at the dark-jowelled features, above the rough, thick neck. She knew which man he meant. She knew, as well, that it had required an effort to step down from his tractor and cross to where she was, to stand unloved in front of her. She said at once:
‘He was here only a summer.’
‘That would be it so. I was always travelling then.’
She gave the curate’s name and he nodded slowly over it, then shook his head. He’d never heard that name, he said.
The sun was hot on her shoulders and her arms. She might have pointed across the ploughed clay to the field that was next to the one they were in. It was there, below the slope, that the conception had taken place. She wanted to say so, but she didn’t. She said:
‘I had to tell her.’
He turned to go away, then changed his mind, and again looked down at her.
‘Yes,’ he said.
She watched him slowly returning to where he’d left the tractor. His movements were always slow, his gait suggesting an economy of energy, his arms loose at his sides. She mended his clothes, she kept them clean. She assisted him in the fields, she made his bed. In all the time she’d known him she had never wondered about him.
The tractor started. He looked behind to see that the plough was as he wanted it. He lit another cigarette before he set off on his next brief journey.
Lost Ground
On the afternoon of September 14th 1989, a Thursday, Milton Leeson was addressed by a woman in his father’s upper orchard. He was surprised. If the woman had been stealing the apples she could easily have dodged out of sight around the slope of the hill when she heard his footfall. Instead, she came forward to greet him, a lean-faced woman with straight black hair that seemed too young for her wasted features. Milton had never seen her before.
Afterwards he remembered that her coat, which did not seem entirely clean, was a shade of dark blue, even black. At her throat there was a scarf of some kind. She wasn’t carrying anything. If she’d been stealing the apples she might have left whatever contained her takings behind the upper orchard’s single growth of brambles, only yards from where she stood.