The Collected Stories

  ‘It’s from Father Mehegan,’ Maura Brigid said, ‘the priest that did the funeral.’

  She handed the letter to her mother because all letters that came to the farm were read in that general way. Mrs Colleary noted without comment what Father Mehegan had written. Hiney read the letter in silence also.

  ‘I hear him on the stairs,’ Mrs Colleary said. A few moments later the old man entered the kitchen, his shirt not yet buttoned, his trousers hitched up with ragged braces. A vest that had been drained of its whiteness through washing was exposed, its two buttons not fastened either. He sat down in his usual place to await his breakfast. Maura Brigid rose to fry his egg.

  ‘Is he off the hunger strike yet?’ the old man inquired, lost in a confusion that evoked for him a distant past. ‘Will MacSwiney go to the end, Hiney?’

  ‘He will.’ Hiney nodded in his solemn way. Indulging such dislocation of time was not unusual in the farmhouse.

  ‘I was saying he would myself.’

  Michael does not know I’m writing to you, the priest’s letter ended. That’s in confidence between us. It was three years since Michael Lawless and Bernadette had run off in the middle of a July night. Maura Brigid had been married for six months at the time and no particular lack of accord between husband and wife had warned of what was to occur. No hint as to the direction of her affections had ever slipped from Bernadette. No note had been left behind.

  ‘Isn’t it a terrible thing, Hiney, that they’d let poor MacSwiney go to the end?’

  ‘It is all right.’

  ‘I’d say they’d pay the price of it.’

  ‘I’d say they would.’

  Hiney folded the letter and returned it to its envelope. Bernadette had died of an internal infection; she’d been two days in hospital. A message had come to them through their own priest, Father Brennan, from a parish more than sixty miles away. They had not known that Bernadette and Michael Lawless had been living there. After their flight the two had not been spoken of.

  ‘I put my faith in Collins to this day,’ the old man said. ‘Won’t Collins have a word to say when Terry MacSwiney goes?’

  Hiney nodded, and so did Mrs Colleary. It was she who had led the silence in the house, her anger and her pain eventually becoming creased into her features. She had offered Maura Brigid no comfort. That Lawless had shattered the lives of both her daughters was how she registered what had occurred. Nor was it any consolation that she had never liked Michael Lawless, believing at the time of his marriage to Maura Brigid that he was after what he could extract to his advantage from the farm, while comfortably living as a member of the household. His running away might have seemed to disprove such an intention, but not for Mrs Colleary. In the humiliation of the scandal there was little room for reason, and no desire to pursue it. The Collearys, and the family Mrs Colleary had come from herself, were well known and well respected in the neighbourhood. They farmed their land, they did not miss Mass, there had never been talk of debts to shopkeepers or supply merchants. ‘I would see Lawless hung,’ Mrs Colleary had said, the last time she mentioned her son-in-law’s name.

  Maura Brigid tilted the frying pan and spooned fat on to the yolk of the egg. She wondered if Bernadette had been pregnant. Was that the cause of it, something going wrong inside her? At the funeral no details had been given because none had been asked for. Still wondering, she completed the frying of the old man’s egg and scooped it on to a plate. She remembered playing in the yard when she and Bernadette were children, and Berna-dette’s doll being carried off to a hay-barn by one of the sheepdogs, and Bernadette crying. Sawdust had come out of the doll because the dog’s tooth had pierced one of its legs. Margy it had been called.

  ‘Are you out in the fields, Hiney?’ the old man inquired, returning from his travels through remembered time. ‘Will I lend you a hand?’

  ‘I’m weeding the mangolds.’

  ‘I’ll come out so.’

  The old man cut his egg into quarters. He removed the centre of a slice of bread and soaked some of the fat on his plate into it. He spooned sugar into his tea.

  ‘I’m at the bottom of the cliff field,’ Hiney said.

  ‘It’s a fine day for the cliff field.’

  No more was said about the priest’s letter. No more was necessary. The silence it had broken – that had been broken also by Bernadette’s death – would knit together and be as it had been before. Nothing would be said to Father Brennan. The Mass for Bernadette had been offered in the distant town, which was where she would now lie for ever, well separated from the family she had disgraced. No one outside the farmhouse had been told about her death. No one need know, and no one would ask. After Father Brenann had conveyed the message, he had gone quickly away, and they knew he would remain silent on the subject.

  Hiney spread sugar on to a piece of buttered bread He was five years older than the sister who had married Michael Lawless, and older by another three than Bernadette. When they were younger he had looked after them, once lying in wait for the two boys who had taken to following them along the road on their way home from school. While he’d cuffed the boys and threatened them with worse Maura Brigid had been demure but Bernadette had laughed. The boys would never have bothered them if Bernadette hadn’t encouraged them in the first place.

  Mrs Colleary wondered if Lawless had been as bad to Bernadette as he had been to Maura Brigid. That thought had just come into her mind, suggested somehow by the priest’s letter. A man who’d desert a wife would have other sins up his sleeve, other punishments to mete out before he’d be finished. That had never occurred to her before, not even on the day of the funeral. God’s anger had been assuaged was what she’d thought, wiping her eyes with a sleeve of her black mourning coat.

  Maura Brigid wanted to read the letter again, but did not do so. Occasionally during her marriage she had woken up in the middle of the night to find her husband not beside her, and when she’d asked him the next morning he’d said he’d gone out for a walk because he couldn’t sleep. When they’d watched television in the kitchen he usually sat next to Bernadette, though not in any noticeable way at the time. It was the brevity of the marriage, the way it was still something new, with people still coming up to both of them after Mass to give them good wishes, that Maura Brigid hadn’t been able to get out of her mind.

  It was not Sunday, the old man was thinking. He knew it wasn’t because she’d have reminded him, when she came into his bedroom, to put on different clothes. If it was a Sunday he’d be on the way to Mass now, sitting in the back of the car with the girl.

  They say a man’d be fit for nothing,’ he said, ‘after a hunger strike.’

  Four months later Michael Lawless returned. It was September then, the shortening days pleasantly mild, the smell of the season in the woods and the fields. In the twilight of an evening Maura Brigid’s husband advanced cautiously up the avenue on a bicycle. He dismounted before he came within sight of the house and wheeled the bicycle on to the grass verge. He leaned it against the wire of the avenue fence and continued on foot.

  In the yard the sheepdogs barked. They licked the hand he held out to them from the shadows where he stood. Ignoring their noise, Hiney emerged from an outhouse with a new shaft fitted into a spade. He passed through the yard, and the sheepdogs ran after him. Ten minutes later Mrs Colleary came out of the house and scattered feed for the fowls.

  ‘Hullo, Maura Brigid,’ Lawless whispered when his wife appeared later still that evening. ‘Shh, don’t call out,’ he begged when her hand went up to her mouth to stifle a cry. ‘I’m sorry I frightened you, Maura Brigid.’

  He’d stepped out of the shadows and she’d seen the movement from the corner of her eye. She’d only recognized him when she turned her head and even then she had to peer. But when her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom she saw her husband clearly: the broad face and the light-brown hair combed and parted, the collar and tie, the dark serge suit, its trouser ends held tidily in place wit
h bicycle-clips.

  ‘I’ve something I want to say to you, Maura Brigid.’ He reached for her arm and gently guided her into the barn where the summer’s hay was stacked. ‘It wasn’t my fault she died, Maura Brigid. She had an infection like anyone can have.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t know what you’re doing here.’

  ‘Maura Brigid –’

  ‘Let go of my arm or I’ll shout out.’

  ‘Don’t shout out, Maura Brigid. Please now. I’m sorry about everything that happened.’

  ‘It’s too late to be sorry now. You’ve no right to be here.’

  ‘I only want to talk to you. I cycled the whole sixty miles of it.’

  ‘We’re troubled enough without you coming here.’

  ‘I want to be with you, Maura Brigid.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ she whispered, staring at him. She felt stupid, as though she had failed to comprehend what had been said to her, or had misunderstood it. She’d been on her way to the feed house to make sure the fire under the swill was damped down for the night, and the sudden presence of her husband both confused and alarmed her. She felt as she often did in a dream, plunged without warning into unreality, unable to escape.

  ‘I want it to be like it was,’ he said. ‘I feel that way about you, Maura Brigid.’

  ‘I’m going in now. Take your hand off of my arm and let me go. Don’t ever come back here.’

  ‘It was never right, Maura Brigid. We were never at ease, Bernadette and myself.’ He paused, as though expecting a response. When none came he said: ‘I wasn’t the father.’

  ‘Oh, my God!’

  ‘Bernadette was that way. She led me a dance, Maura Brigid.’

  Maura Brigid pulled her arm out of his grasp and ran across the yard. In the scullery passage she bolted the back door behind her. She didn’t enter the kitchen but went straight up to her bedroom. She couldn’t have faced her mother and Hiney, and they’d have known at once by the sight of her that something was the matter. They’d have asked her questions and she’d have told them in the end. Her mother would have sat there, tight-lipped. She knew, without even having to think, that the infection Bernadette had suffered had been due to an effort to prevent the birth. The nuns at the convent had called Bernadette wild.

  ‘Dear Mother of God, help me,’ Maura Brigid pleaded in her room, her voice distorted by agitation and tears she could no longer stifle. At the funeral she’d known he was trying to talk to her. She’d seen him looking at her, as though begging for mercy, but they’d driven straight off afterwards, not even stopping in a café for a cup of tea. Going away like that was what Hiney and her mother wanted. They’d hardly said thank you to the priest.

  She mumbled through her rosary, sitting on the edge of the bed, the beads between her fingers. The first time she’d ever seen him he’d been a boy at the Christian Brothers’, much quieter, more solitary, than the other boys. ‘Who that fellow with his eye on you?’ Bernadette had said. He’d begun to turn up at the farm, asking Hiney for work, coming on a bicycle, as he had tonight. He’d done jobs for Hiney. He was better than Hiney at mending things.

  Maura Brigid crossed to the window and slightly pulled aside the edge of the curtain. She had not yet turned on the light, fearful in case he was watching. Her room looked out over the gravel at the front of the house, and just for a moment she imagined she saw the movement of a figure on the avenue. ‘Would you marry me?’ was what he’d said. ‘Am I good enough for you?’

  She reached in among the curtains and pulled the blind down, separating herself further from what lay outside. She still did not light the room, but undressed in the darkness and crept into the bed she had shared with him. Her tears began again, a sobbing that was too soft for anyone passing by on the landing to hear.

  The last of the potatoes were lifted. The old man and Maura Brigid and Mrs Colleary helped Hiney with them, and then Hiney ploughed the two potato fields. ‘Is Lawless back?’ the old man asked out of the blue, returning to the house with Maura Brigid and her mother.

  When the old man walked he became bent, which made him seem even smaller. But he moved quickly, and would have been swifter over the stubble they crossed had he not slackened his pace in order to converse. His motion was a sideways one, the left shoulder hunched upwards and preceding the right, his grizzled head bent into his chest. ‘Sure, a woman would want the man she has,’ he remarked. ‘Sure, why wouldn’t she?’

  Mrs Colleary ignored what he said, but Maura Brigid knew he must have seen her husband. He sometimes went wandering about the hill just before nightfall, setting snares. He would have looked down and recognized the familiar figure in the distance. His eyes were particularly sharp.

  ‘Amn’t I right, Maura Brigid?’

  As though humouring him, she agreed that he was, and her mother paid no heed. Even if he’d stated that he’d spoken to her husband it wouldn’t have mattered. Neither her mother nor Hiney would have placed any credence in the claim.

  ‘He’ll be a help for poor Hiney,’ the old man said. ‘It’s hard going for Hiney sometimes.’

  Maura Brigid knew she could write to the priest with a message for her husband. She could say she forgave him and was prepared to have him back. Whenever she thought about what he’d said concerning Bernadette, she had to repress her tears. When she’d known him well he’d never been untruthful. ‘What d’you say that for?’ Bernadette had crossly reprimanded her when she’d told Hiney that the boys who followed them on the road were a nuisance. Her sister’s mood was quite different when she was scolded by the nuns: repentantly she would cast her eyes down. ‘Sure, it was only a bit of fun, Sister,’ she’d say, and probably she’d have made the same excuse to the man she’d led a dance. ‘It won’t happen again,’ Maura Brigid could imagine her saying after she’d got pregnant with someone else. She had the ability to twist people round her little finger – their mother and Hiney and the old man, the nuns, someone in a shop she was bargaining with. She could wheedle her way with anyone.

  ‘Leave off about him,’ Mrs Colleary said snappishly when the old man again mentioned Michael Lawless. ‘Don’t speak that name, d’you hear?’

  They reached the yard and for a moment Maura Brigid thought he might be there, hiding in the hay-barn until darkness came. She imagined his tidy hair and clothes. She remembered the strength of his arms when he put them around her, and the particular smell he had, a brackeny smell with a trace of tobacco in it. It had never occurred to her to say to herself that Bernadette wouldn’t change just because she ran off with someone, just because she’d disgraced a whole family. She’d been the apple of their father’s eye, and of their mother’s until the scandal, and Hiney’s favourite, and the old man’s. She had been turned into a sinful woman by a man you couldn’t mention: that was how they saw it.

  Later that evening, when Maura Brigid crossed the yard to damp down the swill fire, no voice whispered her name. Later still, after she’d drawn down the blinds in her bedroom, she realized that her husband would not return unless she summoned him. He had come to make a case for his remorse; the priest had written from his conscience. Unless she chose to, she would hear no more from either of them.

  Dear Father Mehegan, she wrote. Thanks for writing to me. Would you tell Michael 1 will meet him halfway, in Cappoquin one Friday. Tell him I understand what he was saying to me.

  She addressed the envelope, but did not send the letter. She kept it in a drawer in her bedroom, saying she would post it the next Friday she went in to do the shopping. After that, she would be on the watch for a reply, ready to collect it from the scullery passage before Hiney found it. She’d drive on to Cappoquin on the Friday they arranged, making sure she put more petrol in the car, so that Hiney wouldn’t notice how much had been used. They’d sit in the car in a car park.

  ‘You’d need the fellow’s assistance, Hiney,’ the old man said. ‘It’s understandable you would.’

  The old man someti
mes sat in the dining-room, which was nowadays never used, under the impression that a land steward called Mahaffy was about to call to see him. Effortlessly he had created a world made up of random details from the past, and had peopled it as he wished. No one on the farm had ever heard of the land steward, Mahaffy. Terence MacSwiney, Mayor of Cork, had died on his hunger strike sixty-seven years ago.

  ‘Ah, don’t be silly now,’ Hiney said when the assistance of Michael Lawless was referred to, Hiney as keen as his mother that the name should not be mentioned. The scandal Maura Brigid had inflicted on the family by bringing a scoundrel to the farm was too recent and too painful to be permitted in an old man’s silliness. ‘That man didn’t come back,’ Hiney shouted in the kitchen. ‘D’you understand that now? He’s gone for good.’

  But the old man insisted. Michael Lawless had come back up the avenue on a bicycle. The sheepdogs had barked when he walked into the yard. ‘We’ll ask him about it when we see him,’ the old man said. ‘We’ll ask him wasn’t I right.’

  All of it was her fault, Maura Brigid could feel her mother and Hiney thinking. If she had not married the man Bernadette would not have been ruined. Bernadette would still be alive. It was her fault that a scoundrel had come and gone, doing the worst that could be done to two sisters, duping them.

  ‘He did come back,’ she said. ‘A while after the funeral he came back.’

  She was on her feet when she spoke, giving them their food, as so often she did. She had fried chops and mashed turnips, and tumbled a saucepan of potatoes on to a sheet of newspaper, which would become accumulated with peelings as the meal progressed. Chops or fried steak, fish or boiled bacon, frozen peas or turnips or cabbage, and potatoes: that was the food she cooked and served for the main meal they ate every day. At half past twelve she placed the newspaper on the centre of the table. At a quarter past one she made tea. She and her mother washed up afterwards.