himself close against her. She was sweating because of her condition and the July heat. Her face was sticky with perspiration, and small patches of it had developed on her dress, beneath each armpit. ‘Jesus,’ she whispered again. ‘Oh Jesus, go easy now.’
He didn’t want to go easy. They were free of the farm, and of her father and her aunt and her Uncle Ned Cauley. He had a right to his desires.
‘That woman’ll be listening,’ she whispered in the same slurred voice, but it didn’t matter if the woman was listening. It didn’t even matter if the woman opened the door and walked in. The bed made creaking sounds when she wriggled away from him, saying again that he was terrible, giggling as she said it. The bedroom smelt of flies, as if the windows hadn’t been opened for a long time. ‘God, you’re great, Kitty,’ he said, his own voice thickening also.
He was thirty-three, Kitty two years older. At fifteen he had been taken from the orphans’ home in Cork by Kitty’s father and her Uncle Ned Cauley. The two men had let it be known that they could do with a young fellow on the farm, and Father Doran, who was their parish priest at that time, had made inquiries of Father Lyhane at the orphans’ home on their behalf. ‘Davy Toome’s a good lad,’ Father Lyhane had said, and a few weeks later, after the recommendation had been passed on to the farmers and after Father Doran had been assured that the candidate would be strong enough for farm-work, a label with that name on it had been attached to the boy and he’d been forwarded by train. ‘And did you never do farm-work before?’ Kitty’s Uncle Ned Cauley had asked, sitting beside him in the cart as they slowly progressed on the road from the railway junction. But Davy had never even seen fields with corn in them before, let alone taken part in farm-work. ‘I’m thinking,’ said Kitty’s uncle, who’d spent an hour in Doolin’s public house at the railway junction, ‘that it could be we bought a pig in a poke.’ He said it again in the kitchen when they arrived, while his wife and his brother-in-law were examining Davy, silently agreeing that he was not as strong as the priest had claimed. ‘Will you for God’s sake take off that label!’ the woman said to him, and then, in a gentler voice, asked him about his name. She’d never heard of Toome before, she said, so he told them that his name had been given to him when the orphans’ home had taken him in as an infant, that there’d been a priest connected with it then who’d had an interest in naming the orphans. His first name was in memory of St David. Toome meant a burial mound. ‘Is he right in the head?’ he afterwards heard Kitty’s father asking his brother-in-law and her uncle replying that you wouldn’t know, the way he was talking about burial mounds.
‘Will you come on now, for heaven’s sake!’ Kitty rebuked him in the bedroom at St Agnes’s. ‘And let me take off my hat.’
She pushed him away from her and told him to open the window. It was she who had chosen Tramore for the weekend of their honeymoon, saying she’d heard it was lovely, with a sandy little beach. Kitty knew what she wanted, her aunt used to say, and you couldn’t budge her when she made up her mind. ‘Would you accompany me to Cork?’ she had suggested one day four months ago. ‘I’m a stranger to the city, Davy.’ He hadn’t been back to Cork since he’d come to the farm, and he didn’t really know his way around it; but it turned out that Kitty had never been there at all. ‘We’ll fix it to go on a Saturday,’ she said, and on the bus he felt proud to be sitting there with her, a big handsome girl, the daughter of his employer: he hoped that on the streets they’d maybe meet someone from the orphans’ home. She’d looked out the window most of the time, not saying very much to him, her round face pink with excitement. She was good-looking in a way he admired, better-looking than any of the other girls at Mass, or the tinker girls whom he’d caught once stealing turnips from the field, who’d shouted over a hedge at him that their sister would marry him. Her hair was very fine and very black, like a dark mist encircling her face. He’d heard her aunt calling her sullen, but he’d never noticed that himself, even though sometimes a blankness came into her face and stayed there till she roused herself. Her three brothers had all been born with something wrong with them and had died in childhood, before he had come to the farm. Nobody mentioned them; he hadn’t even known about her brothers until one of the men who came to help with the harvest referred to them in passing. Her mother had died giving birth to the last of them.
‘Are you OK, pet?’ Kitty said, putting lipstick on at the dressing-table. ‘Isn’t it great we’re on our own?’
He leaned against the window-frame, looking at her, seeing her in the looking-glass as well. She had to go to see a Mr Minogue, she’d said eventually on the bus, a chemist in McHenry Street.
‘Great,’ he said from the window.
‘Can you hear the sea there?’
He shook his head. They’d found the chemist’s shop, having had to ask for directions to McHenry Street. If her mother was alive she’d have accompanied her, she said all of a sudden, and then she said she couldn’t go into the chemist’s shop alone. Her voice became different. Her legs wouldn’t have taken her, she said, and then she told him she was in trouble. Her aunt had found out about the chemist, she said, only she’d refused to accompany her. ‘Take Toome to show you the way,’ her aunt had said.
‘Will we go down, pet?’
He moved to where she stood by the dressing-table but when he put his arms around her she said sharply that she didn’t want to get messed up again. She’d spilt powder on the glass top of the dressing-table, the same peach shade that was on her cheeks. She’d put on perfume he could smell, a strong sweet smell that made him want to try again to put his arms around her. But already she had crossed the room to the door. She opened it and he followed her downstairs.
‘I’ve done you black puddings,’ Mrs Hurley said in the dining-room, placing before them plates of fried sausages and fried eggs and slices of the delicacy she spoke of.
‘God, I love black pudding,’ Kitty said, and he passed her his because as a boy in the orphans’ home he had developed a revulsion for this dark composition of pig’s blood and entrails. The table they sat at was empty of other guests, as Mrs Hurley had promised. He smiled at his bride across it. On the way downstairs she had kept repeating that this would be their first meal as husband and wife. She attached importance to the fact. She’d said it again as they sat down. Through the wooden hatch that opened into the kitchen the voice of Mrs Hurley could be heard raised in abuse, speaking about a greyhound.
‘Are you hungry, pet?’
He wasn’t; he shook his head.
‘D’you know what it is,’ Kitty said, cutting into a soda farl, ‘I could eat the head off of a horse.’
A low mumble of protest had begun in the kitchen, which he guessed must emanate from Mrs Hurley’s husband. ‘Errah, have a pick of sense, will you?’ the landlady stridently interrupted. ‘Would any animal in its sane mind keep getting into a cement mixer?’
Kitty giggled. She’d nearly died, she said, when Mrs Kilfedder gave her a kiss at the wedding. ‘One thing about Kilfedder,’ she added, ‘he keeps his hands to himself.’
At that moment a man in shirtsleeves entered the dining-room. He greeted them and introduced himself as Mr
