ffortlessly keeps the girl’s features in his consciousness. He lays the table in the dining-room, carrying in salt and pepper and a few slices of Mother’s Pride on a side plate. He always eats in the dining-room in the evenings.
While waiting for the steak to grill, he scoops two individual trifles on to a plate, pours cream over them and sprinkles a spoonful of caster sugar. He carries the trifles to his long mahogany table, carrying, as well, his biscuit tin – raspberry creams and coffee creams, chocolate digestives, fig rolls, a couple of KitKats. Music plays softly: ‘Bugle Call Rag’.
She walks about, still scanning the faces on the pavements. If the man hadn’t told her what he had, if he hadn’t sounded so certain, she might by now have convinced herself that she should go home in spite of what awaits her there. Again she wonders what they’re thinking now, what conclusions have been reached. Do they dread her return as much as she dreads it herself? That thought strikes her suddenly, not having occurred to her before. Are they hoping she has gone for ever? Is there a plea in Mrs Lysaght’s prayers that she should be lost, or even dead?
‘Did you go out with young Lysaght?’ her father asked, only a few hours after she handed to Mrs Lysaght the letter in a stamped envelope. ‘A while back?’ her father went on, his tone suggesting that some further turn of the screw was in store for her. ‘October?’
A man on the street asks her something, smiling at her. She doesn’t understand; she doesn’t answer. She didn’t answer, either, when her father asked those questions. She was polishing brass at the draining-board, ornaments and ashtrays which her father liked to see gleaming, as he did the brass on people’s hall doors. ‘Around about the time of the wedding?’ he pressed.
‘I know Johnny Lysaght,’ she said. She bent her head over a piece that represented three monkeys, their paws obscuring mouth, ears or eyes. The television, which was on earlier, had been turned off.
‘Did you go out with him, though?’
‘I did.’
‘I would avoid that fellow,’ her father said. ‘I would go out with some other young fellow.’
‘What d’ you mean?’
‘You hear certain remarks made about Lysaght.’ Her father’s grey head was poked out in Felicia’s direction, a habit he had when he was serious or intent upon being understood. ‘I’m not saying it’s gospel. All I’m saying is there are certain statements made.’
‘What statements?’
‘That he joined the British army.’
‘Johnny works in a factory stores. Lawn-mower parts.’
He nodded thoughtfully and slowly, as if agreeing. He was frowning a little, which he tended to when endeavouring to establish an accuracy. He liked to get things right.
‘It’d be a natural enough thing for him to keep it quiet about the army.’
‘He has work in a stores.’
Her father continued to nod in the same slow fashion, and when he spoke the pace of his speech was unhurried also. He wondered, he remarked, where something without foundation would have come from, and added:
‘There’s better boys round here than that, girl. Irish boys belong in Ireland.’
‘Johnny went to England because he couldn’t get work here.’
‘A member of the British forces could be sent into the North. He could be set to killing our own.’
‘Johnny’s not in any army. It’s someone else you heard about.’
‘There’s plenty of decent Irish boys you could go to Sheehy’s public house with, girl. That’s all I’m saying to you.’
There was a silence in the kitchen then. Her father sat straight and upright in his chair, not doing anything with his hands, gazing in front of him at nothing. Felicia picked up another piece of brass.
‘Johnny and myself love one another.’ The words came tonelessly, when several minutes had passed. She didn’t cease to polish the brass while she spoke. ‘There’s no one can do anything about that.’
There was no reply. Had she still been employed she might have brought up with one of the women at Slieve Bloom Meats the plight she found herself in, a plight that could not be mentioned in the kitchen. She remembered the women’s lowered tones when they spoke of such a predicament, or joked about it. She could have said she had a friend who was in trouble; anything like that would have done. Instead she had still told no one that punctually every day, at eleven o’clock in the morning, nausea afflicted her. Not Carmel nor Rose nor Connie Jo, nor Sister Benedict, who always listened to your troubles; naturally not her brothers. The very thought of confiding in someone she knew well made her feel nervous all over, prickles on her skin.
But while waiting that evening for her father to launch into further condemnation of Johnny Lysaght, and perhaps because the women at the canning factory had come into her thoughts, she remembered Miss Furey. ‘You’re no more than a child, Felicia,’ her father commented eventually, on his feet and already going from the kitchen. He hesitated by the door, as if about to say something else, and just then her brothers returned from Myles Brady’s and sat down at the table to eat slices of a pan loaf and spreadable cheese, which every night at this time they did. Her father closed the door behind him.
Would she have been able to confide in her mother? Would she have confessed and said that an error had occurred, that there was no doubt? Would her mother have gone silent, and been unable to disguise her disappointment, have even cried for a while, but then have known what to do? Would she have cried herself, and been comforted in the end?
She pushes her way into a public house, the Pride of Lions, still pondering that. It’s crowded and noisy: drinkers are flushed with laughter and good humour; the barmaids hurry with glasses. The surface of the bar is marble, brown flecked with green and grey. There are shaded lamps on the walls between dark-framed mirrors, and green velvet on the banquettes that stretch beneath them. Glass-topped tables have ornamental metal clasps at the corners. On one of them, beside her, a lipstick-stained cigarette is smouldering in an ashtray. At the bar a man is demonstrating a mechanical chimpanzee in a tartan dress.
No one notices her, standing there with her bags. Music is playing, the air is smoky. There are football colours, red and white; a gang of youths. ‘Here we go! Here we go!’ their song begins, and a voice calls out that singing’s not permitted, not tonight or any other night. A black girl leans against the bar, her head thrown back in amusement. Felicia stays a moment longer, making certain: he isn’t there.
Cold on the street again, she picks up the thread of thought this conviviality has interrupted. There is no way she can know if she would have confessed to her mother. Her mother is too far away now, too shadowy and lost, little remaining of her besides that last glimpse of her features, and the memory of running to keep up with Father Kilgallen in the Square, and her father being there when the moment came, and the old woman saying she has outlived another one. ‘Excuse me, miss,’ a bearded face begs. ‘Bit of loose change at all?’
Strange to think it was Miss Furey she confessed to, or as good as confessed to: a stranger who once a fortnight sold duck eggs and turkey eggs in the shops. Middle-aged, unmarried, a woman to whom no man had been known to pay attentions, yet about whom there had once been a rumour that she was pregnant. When abruptly her condition changed and she returned to normal it was said with certainty that no child existed in the farmhouse where she lived.
Felicia drops a coin on to the proffered palm. The man looks at it, not thanking her, not saying anything. Guiltily, she adds a second coin, still thinking about Miss Furey. She hadn’t hesitated when she remembered the story that had got about: the night after her father brought up the subject of her love affair she rode out to Miss Furey’s farmhouse, a frosty night, the moon almost full. Dogs barked as she approached the yard. Miss Furey herself opened the back door.
‘I’m sorry to come like this,’ Felicia said, and gave her name. ‘Could I ask you something, Miss Furey?’
Miss Furey was a big-shouldered woman, with large and protrudent teeth. Her nose was large also, heavy about the nostrils. These were her dominant features. Her hair, cut short, was sandy.
‘Are you lost?’ she asked in reply to Felicia’s query.
‘No, no, it’s not that. I think maybe you could help me.’
‘Come in.’
She held the door back and Felicia walked straight into a big, cluttered kitchen. Miss Furey’s brother, heavily made also, was seated in an armchair by a Rayburn cooker, watching television. Cats slept at his feet. The dogs that had barked were sheepdogs, one of them diseased, something the matter with the skin of its head, around its eyes. Four dogs in all there were, and as many cats.
‘I don’t know do I know you?’ Miss Furey’s bewilderment, mingled with the curiosity of a woman who did not have many visitors, had not abated.
‘No, you don’t. I hope you don’t mind me coming out.’
‘Why’d I mind?’
There were unwashed dishes on a table in the centre of the kitchen, and saucepans and a frying pan piled up in the sink. All the surfaces – windowsills, shelves, table-tops – were untidy. Two pairs of Wellington boots stood by a door that was half open at the far end of the kitchen. Coats hung on hooks; there were sacred pictures, and a calendar. Dishes of food for the cats littered the soiled linoleum on the floor.
‘We paid that tax thing,’ Miss Furey’s brother said. He didn’t take his eyes from the television screen. His clothes were ragged, as Miss Furey’s were, cardigans and jumpers with holes in them. Both of them wore trousers.
‘Sit down at the table,’ Miss Furey invited, and Felicia could feel her curiosity getting the better of her suspicion. She wanted to hear; already there was an eagerness about her. It was the News on the television.
‘I have a cheek coming here,’ Felicia said.
‘Well, you’re here now. Don’t mind him,’ Miss Furey added, for Felicia had glanced in the direction of the man in the armchair. ‘He’s deaf on the left side.’
Felicia let it all tumble out. She wanted to close her eyes while she did so in order not to have to see the woman’s reactions, in order not to have to pay attention to them when Miss Furey took offence. At the time it had been said that Miss Furey had travelled to Dublin to consult a chemist who performed operations. The women at Slieve Bloom Meats said her brother was the father. One of them contradicted the theory that a Dublin chemist had been involved, claiming that the infant had been got rid of more crudely and been buried on the Fureys’ land.
‘God above us!’ Miss Furey exclaimed. ‘What are you telling me this for?’
‘I remember years ago –’
‘That’s a slander you’re about to say. Don’t say it.’
Miss Furey kept her voice down, even though it was thick with emotion. Deaf on the left side or not, the man hunched in the armchair had sharply turned his head when she exclaimed.
‘Could you help me, Miss Furey?’
‘People will say anything. Any lies that will come to their lips. Go home now.’
Miss Furey rose. In her tattered garments she hastened to the door that led to the yard, the four sheepdogs roused by her movement.
‘Take care I wouldn’t go to the Guards,’ she threatened. ‘Get off our property now.’
Riding back, Felicia wept and the oozing of her tears became a flow that blinded her. When finally they ceased she dismounted in order to wipe away the traces from her cheeks and to blow her nose. ‘Please, God,’ she prayed. ‘Please, God, help me.’
But no help came. Instead, on her return, her father pursued his harangue. ‘Now, listen to me, girl,’ he began the moment he saw her, a hardness distinguishing his features and his tone as he advanced on to the territory that mattered to him most, territory on which he was unable to believe he could ever be wrong, on which his own expertise was unassailable. Her face tingling with cold, the rims of her eyes raw from her tears and the chill night air, Felicia listened.
‘You will not live in this house and keep company with a member of the occupying forces. This family knows where it stands, and always has done. Your great-grandfather and his patriot companions journeyed from this small community to the cockpit of war, and perished in their valiant efforts. For eight centuries, not an hour less, the Irish people have known only the suppression of language, religion and human freedom. A vision was born on the streets of Dublin seventy-five years ago during those Easter days. It was not fulfilled, the potential has not been realized: you have only to look around you. On top of that the jackboot of the British bully is still in six of our counties; there is still the spectre of death and torture on the streets of towns as humble as our own. No child of mine will ever be on that side of things, girl.’
Felicia said nothing, and for a moment closed her eyes. What was being said about soldiers was pathetically irrelevant.
‘This fellow’ll be back, girl, but associate with him and you’ll leave this house. That’s said and it needn’t be said again.’ Her father paused, then went on less harshly. ‘You’re at the beginning of things, girl. One of these days there’ll be work for you to go out to again. I heard yesterday a farmers’ co-op might be set up, with every item stocked that a farmer would want – gum boots, pig-wire, roofing felt, all that type of article and more. Within a six month there could be as many employed as there used be in the canning, maybe twice the number. When you’re a child you take advice, girl. That’s what I’m saying to you now. I’ve said it and we can leave it.’
Felicia did not acknowledge this either. She remembered, years ago, when she was too young to understand, her father playfully drawing her attention to a little Union Jack that was the trade mark on the bonnet of Miss Gwynn’s old Wolseley car. She had been holding his hand, out for a walk with him on a Sunday morning. ‘A good thing the Wolseley went out of business,’ her father had remarked with humorous satisfaction, and at the time it had seemed a natural thing to say. Yet now, just because someone worked in England, just because he had an English accent, he had to be condemned, and lies made up about him.
‘I’ll say one last thing to you, girclass="underline" look no further than that brave old woman who sleeps across the room from you. Not much older than yourself she was when the lads went off, knowing the colour of their duty. Three days later and she’s a widow. She wasn’t married a month and he was gone. Don’t talk to me of some back-street romance, girl.’
He nodded in his emphatic manner, still lost in the fervour that inspired his statements. Then he rose and left the kitchen, as he had the evening before. But when she was cooking the breakfast the next morning he suddenly said:
‘Has Lysaght got you pregnant?’
She didn’t pretend otherwise. There was no point in pretending anything. No point in telling a downright lie now that the word was there between them.
‘We’re both responsible,’ she said.
‘How long are you gone?’
‘I’ve missed a few times.’
‘How many?’
‘There’s no doubt about it.’
He crossed himself.