king 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. He called her a hooer, looking at her over the smoke from the frying pan, not raising his voice. He said he was glad her mother wasn’t alive. No better than a dirty hooer, he furiously repeated.
‘I feel sick in the mornings,’ she said.