Selected Stories

  In spite of its plaintive note, it was cheerful talk, relegating to its place beneath the surface what had been disguised when Rynne said they were game ball: neither Etty Rynne’s failure to become pregnant nor the emotional toll it had taken of both husband and wife was ever mentioned by them, but the fact and its consequences were well known in the neighbourhood. It was even said that dishearteningly fruitless enquiries had been made regarding the possibility of adoption.

  ‘Goodbye so, Etty.’ Nuala smiled and nodded before she left, the sympathy of a mother in her eyes. She would have liked to commiserate, but spoken words would have been tactless.

  ‘You’re all well above, Nuala?’

  ‘We are.’

  ‘Tell Corry I was asking for him.’

  ‘I will of course.’

  Nuala wheeled her bicycle across the road and propped it against the side wall of Quirke’s SuperValu. While she was shopping – searching for the cheap lines with a sell-by date due, bundling the few items she could afford into a wire basket – she thought about the Rynnes. She saw them almost as visibly as she had ten minutes ago seen the faraway, sorrowful look in Etty’s pale-brown eyes; she heard the unvoiced disappointment that, in both husband and wife, dwindled into weariness. They had given up already, not knowing that they needn’t yet: all that, again, passed through Nuala’s reflections.

  She went on thinking about the Rynnes as she rode away from the crossroads, up the long hill to her house. They were decent people, tied into themselves only because of their childlessness, because of what the longing had done to them. She remembered them as they’d been when first they’d married, the winter card parties they invited people to, Etty like a fashion-plate for each occasion, the stories Rynne brought back from his business travels.

  ‘Would it be wrong?’ Nuala whispered to herself, since there was no one there to hear. ‘Would it be against God?’

  Unhooking her shopping bags from the handlebars when she reached the house, she asked herself the same questions again, her voice loud now in the stillness. If Corry did well with Mrs Falloway there wouldn’t be a need to wonder if it would be wrong. There wouldn’t even be a need – when years had gone by and they looked back to the bad time there’d been – to mention to Corry what had come into her mind. If Mrs Falloway came up trumps you’d make yourself forget it, which was something that could be done if you tried.

  It was a white house for the most part, though grey and green in places where the colourwash was affected. Roches had lived at Mountroche for generations, until the family came to an end in the 1950s; Mrs Falloway had bought it cheaply after it had been empty for seventeen years.

  Corry heard the bell jangling in the depths, but no one answered the summons. On the bus and as he rode across the bog he had worried in case Mrs Falloway had gone, in case years ago she had returned to England; when he jerked the bell-pull for the third time he worried again. Then there was a sound somewhere above where he stood. A window opened and Mrs Falloway’s voice called down.

  ‘Mrs Falloway?’ He stepped backwards on to the gravel in order to look up. ‘Mrs Falloway?’

  ‘Yes, it’s me. Hullo.’

  ‘Hullo, Mrs Falloway.’

  He wouldn’t have recognized her and wondered if she recognized him after so long. He said who he was.

  ‘Oh, of course,’ Mrs Falloway said. ‘Wait a minute for me.’

  When she opened her hall door she was welcoming. She smiled and held a hand out. ‘Come in, come in.’

  They passed through a shabby hall and sat in a drawing-room that smelt of must. The cold ashes of a fire were partly covered with dead hydrangeas, deposited there from a vase. The room seemed choked with what littered its surfaces: newspapers and magazines, drawings, books face downward as if to mark a place, empty punnets, bric-à-brac in various stages of repair, a summer hat, a pile of clothes beside a work-basket.

  ‘You’ve come on a bicycle, Corry?’ Mrs Falloway said.

  ‘Only from Carrick. I got the bus to Carrick.’

  ‘My dear, you must be exhausted. Let me give you tea at the very least.’

  Mrs Falloway was gone for nearly twenty minutes, causing Corry some agitation when he thought of the three o’clock bus. He and Nuala had sat waiting in this room when they’d come to the house the first time, after Corry got the letter. They’d sat together on the sofa that was a receptacle for oddments now; the room had been tidier then, Mrs Falloway had been brisker. She’d talked all the time, full of her plans, a table laid in the big bow window to which she brought corned beef and salad, and toast that was moist with the butter she’d spread, and Kia-Ora orange, and tea and fruitcake.

  ‘Not much, I’m afraid,’ she said now, returning with a plate of biscuits, and cups and saucers and a tea-pot. The biscuits were decorated with a pink mush of marshmallow and raspberry jam.

  Corry was glad of the tea, which was strong and hot. The biscuit he took had gone soft, but even so he liked it. Once in a while Nuala bought the same kind for the children.

  ‘What a lovely surprise!’ Mrs Falloway said.

  ‘I wondered were you still here.’

  ‘I’m here for ever now, I think.’

  A dismal look had crept into her face, as if she knew why he had come. If she’d thought about it, she would have guessed long ago about the plight they were in. He wasn’t here to say it was her fault; he hoped she didn’t think that, because of course it wasn’t. All the blame was his.

  ‘I’m sorry we didn’t manage to pay anything back,’ he said.

  ‘You weren’t expected to, Corry.’

  She was a tall woman, seeming fragile now. When she’d been younger her appearance had been almost intimidating: determination had influenced the set of her features and seemed to be there again in her wide mouth and saucer eyes, in her large hands as they gestured for attention. Swiftly her smile had become stern or insistent; now it was vaguely beseeching; her piled-up hair, which Corry remembered as black with a few strands of grey, had no black left in it. There was a tattered look about her that went with the room they were in.

  ‘You have children now, Corry?’

  ‘We have three. Two boys and a girl.’

  ‘You’re finding work?’

  He shook his head. ‘It never got going,’ he said. ‘All that.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Corry.’

  Soon after Mrs Falloway bought Mountroche House and came to live there she had attended the funeral of the elderly widow who’d been the occupant of the Mountroche gate-lodge. Being, as she put it, a black Protestant from England, who had never, until then, entered an Irish Catholic church, she had not before been exposed to such a profusion of plaster statues as at that funeral Mass. I hope you do not consider it interference from an outsider, she wrote in her first letter to Bishop Walshe, but it is impossible not to be aware of the opportunity there is for young craftsmen and artists. With time on her hands, she roved Bishop Walshe’s diocese in her Morris Minor, taking photographs of grottoes that featured solitary Virgin Marys or pietàs, or towering crucifixions. How refreshing it would be, she enthused to Bishop Walshe when eventually she visited him, to see the art of the great high crosses of Ireland brought into the modern Church, to see nativities and annunciations in stained glass, to have old lecterns and altar furniture replaced with contemporary forms. She left behind in the Bishop’s hall a selection of postcards she had obtained from Italy, reproductions of the bas-reliefs of Mino da Fiesole and details from the pulpit in Siena cathedral. When she had compiled a list of craftsmen she wrote to all of them, and visited those who lived within a reasonable distance of Mountroche House. To numerous priests and bishops she explained that what was necessary was to bring wealth and talent together; but for the most part she met with opposition and indifference. Several bishops wrote back crossly, requesting her not to approach them again.

  Breaking in half another biscuit, Corry remembered the letter he had received himself. ‘Will you look at this!’ he had e
xclaimed the morning it arrived. Since he had begun to carve figures in his spare time at the joinery he had been aware of a vocation, of wishing to make a living in this particular way, and Mrs Falloway’s letter reflected entirely what he felt: that the church art with which he was familiar was of poor quality. ‘Who on earth is she?’ he wondered in bewilderment when he’d read the letter through several times. Less than a week later Mrs Falloway came to introduce herself.

  ‘I’ve always been awfully sorry,’ she repeated now. ‘Sorrier than I can say.’

  ‘Ah, well.’

  When it was all over, all her efforts made, her project abandoned, Mrs Falloway had written in defeat to a friend of her distant schooldays. Well, yes, I am giving up the struggle. There is a long story to tell, which must wait until next you come for a few summer weeks. Enough to say, that everything has changed in holy Ireland. Mrs Falloway spoke of that to Corry now, of her feelings at the time, which she had not expressed to him before. The Church had had enough on its hands, was how she put it; the appearance of things seemed trivial compared with the falling away of congregations and the tide of secular attack. Without knowing it, she had chosen a bad time.

  ‘It was guilt when I gave you that poor little house, Corry. I’d misled you with my certainties that weren’t certainties at all. A galumphing English woman!’

  ‘Ah no, no.’

  ‘Ah yes, I’m afraid. I should have restrained you, not urged you to give up your employment in the joinery.’

  ‘I wanted to.’

  ‘You’re hard up now?’

  ‘We are a bit, to tell the truth.’

  ‘Is that why you’ve come over?’

  ‘Well, it is.’

  She shook her head. There was another pause and then she said: ‘I’m hard up myself, as things are.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that.’

  ‘Are you in a bad way, Corry?’

  ‘O’Flynn’ll give me a place in the stoneyard at Guileen. He’s keen because I’d learn the stone quickly, the knowledge I have with the wood. It’s not like he’d be taking on a full apprentice. It’s not like the delay there’d be until some young fellow’d get the hang of it.’

  ‘You’d be lettering gravestones?’

  ‘I would. He’d put me on wages after a twelve-month. The only thing is, I’d be the twelve-month without a penny. I do a few days on a farm here and there if there’s anything going, but I’d have to give that up.’

  ‘The stoneyard seems the answer then.’

  ‘I’d be in touch with anyone who’d maybe be interested in the statues. I’d have them by me in the yard. A priest or a bishop still looking for something would maybe hear tell I could do a Stations. O’Flynn said that to Nuala.’

  They went on talking. Mrs Falloway poured out more tea. She pressed Corry to have another biscuit.

  ‘I’d have the wages steady behind me,’ Corry said, ‘once we managed the year. I’d ride over to Guileen every morning on the bike we have, no problem at all.’

  ‘I haven’t money, Corry.’

  There was a quietness in the room then, neither of them saying anything, but Corry didn’t go at once. After a few moments they talked about the time in the past. Mrs Falloway offered to cook something, but Corry said no. He stood up as he did so, explaining about the three o’clock bus.

  At the hall door Mrs Falloway again said she was sorry, and Corry shook his head.

  ‘Nuala’s tried for work herself only there’s nothing doing. There’s another baby coming,’ Corry said, feeling he should pass that on also.

  When Nuala heard, she said it had been a forlorn hope anyway, and when Corry described the state of Mountroche House she felt sorry for Mrs Falloway, whose belief in Corry had always seemed to Nuala to be a confirmation of the sacred nature of his gift, as if Mrs Falloway had been sent into their lives to offer that encouragement. Even though her project had failed, it was hardly by chance that she had come to live only fourteen miles from Carrick at a time when Corry was employed in the Riordans’ joinery; and hardly by chance that she’d become determined in her intentions when she saw the first of his saints. He’d made the little figure of St Brigid for Father Ryan to set in the niche in St Brigid’s parish hall even though Father Ryan couldn’t pay him anything for it. Whenever Nuala was in Carrick she called in at the parish hall to look again at it, remembering her amazement – similar to Mrs Falloway’s – when she’d first seen it. ‘He has a right way with a chisel,’ O’Flynn said when he’d made his offer of employment in the stoneyard. ‘I don’t know did I ever see better.’ For Nuala it was all of a piece – the first of the saints, and Mrs Falloway coming to live near by, and O’Flynn’s offer when they’d nearly given up hope. She could feel it in her bones that that was how it was.

  ‘Rest yourself,’ she urged Corry in the kitchen, ‘while I’ll get the tea.’

  ‘They all right?’

  They were out playing in the back field, she said; they’d been no trouble since they’d come in. She spread out rashers of streaky bacon on the pan that was warming on the stove. She’d gone down to the SuperValu, she said, and Corry told her how he’d nearly missed the bus back.

  ‘He was drawing away. I had to stop him.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have sent you over on that awful old trek, Corry.’

  ‘Ah no, no. To tell you the truth, it was good to see her. Except she was a bit shook.’

  He talked about the journey on the bus, the people on it when he was coming back. Nuala didn’t mention the Rynnes.

  ‘Glory be to God!’ Etty Rynne exclaimed. She felt shaky so she sat down, on a chair by the hallstand. ‘I don’t think I understood you,’ she said, although she knew she had.

  She listened, not wanting to, when Nuala went into it. ‘It’d be April,’ Nuala said and repeated the sum of money she had mentioned already. Late April, she thought, maybe just into May. She’d never been early, she said.

  ‘Himself would say it was against the law, Nuala. I’d wonder was it, myself.’

  The daylight in the hall had blurs of blue and pink in it from the coloured panes on either side of the front door. It was a dim, soft light because of that, and while she tried to gather her thoughts together Etty Rynne found herself thinking that its cloudiness was suitable for the conversation that was being conducted – neither of them able to see the other’s face clearly, her own incomprehension.

  ‘It would be confidential between us,’ Nuala said, ‘that there was money.’

  Not meaning to, and in a whisper, Etty Rynne repeated that. A secret was what was meant: a secret kept for ever among the four of them, a secret that was begun already because Nuala had waited for the car to drive off, maybe watching from the SuperValu’s windows. She’d have seen him walking out of the bungalow; when the car had gone she’d have crossed the road.

  ‘Listen to me, Etty.’

  Corry’s statues came into what Nuala said, the wooden figures he made, the Blessed Virgin and the saints, St Brigid in the St Brigid’s Hall in Carrick. And Nuala trying for work in the SuperValu and anywhere she could think of came into it. With the baby due she’d be tied down, but she’d have managed somehow if there was work, only there wasn’t. How Corry had drawn a blank with a woman whose name was unfamiliar came into it. And O’Flynn who had the stoneyard at Guileen did.

  ‘O’Flynn has his insurances with us.’ For a moment in her mind’s eye Etty Rynne saw the bulky grey-haired stonemason, who always dropped the premiums in himself in case they went astray, who afterwards drew his Peugeot pick-up in at the pumps for a fill-up. It was a relief when all that flickered in Etty Rynne’s memory, after the shock that had left her weak in the legs and wanting to gasp and not being able to.

  ‘It’s a long time since you put the room ready, Etty.’

  ‘Did I show it to you?’

  ‘You did one time.’

  She used to show it to people, the small room at the back of the bungalow that she’d painted a bright buttercup shad
e, the door and window-sills in white gloss.

  ‘It’s still the same,’ she said.

  ‘That’s what I was thinking.’

  She’d made the curtains herself, blue that matched the carpet, dolls playing ring-a-roses on them. They’d never bought furniture for the little room. Tempting Providence it would be, he said.

  ‘There’d be no deception,’ Nuala said. ‘No lie, nothing like that. Only the money side kept out of it.’

  Etty nodded. Like a dream, it was disordered and peculiar: the ring at the door and Nuala smiling there, and standing in the hall with Nuala and having to sit down, her face going red and then the blood draining out of it when Nuala asked if she had savings in the bank or in a credit society, and mentioning the sum that would be enough.

  ‘I couldn’t take your baby off of you, Nuala.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be deprived. I’d have another one, maybe two or three. A bit of time gone by and people would understand.’

  ‘Oh God, I doubt they would.’

  ‘It isn’t against the law, Etty. No way.’

  ‘I couldn’t. I never could.’ Pregnancy made you fanciful sometimes and she wondered if it was that that had got at Nuala. She didn’t say it in case it made things worse. Slowly she shook her head. ‘God, I couldn’t,’ she said again.

  ‘Nowadays if a man and woman can’t have a baby there’s things can be done.’

  ‘I know, I know.’

  ‘Nowadays -’

  ‘I couldn’t do what you’re saying, Nuala.’

  ‘Is it the money?’

  ‘It’s everything, Nuala. It’s what people’d say. He’d blow his head off if he knew what you’re after suggesting. It would bring down the business, he’d say. Nobody’d come near us.’

  ‘People -’

  ‘They’d never come round to it, Nuala.’

  A silence came, and the silence was worse than the talk. Then Nuala said:

  ‘Would we sit down to a cup of coffee?’

  ‘God, I’m sorry. Of course we will.’