Hurley. He inquired if they’d like another pot of tea, already seizing the metal teapot and moving towards the hatch with it. They’d find St Agnes’s restful, he said, no children for miles around. The hatch opened and Mrs Hurley’s freshly rouged face appeared. She had removed her hairnet, and the hair it had controlled, now seen to be a shade of henna, fluffed elaborately about her head. ‘Have they butter enough?’ she demanded of her husband, in the same uncompromising tone she had employed when protesting about the activities of the greyhound. ‘It’s good country butter,’ she shouted at her guests. ‘Fresh as a daisy.’
‘We have plenty,’ Kitty replied. ‘It’s good butter all right, Mrs Hurley.’
The teapot was handed back through the hatch and placed on the table. ‘There’s a big attraction in Tramore tonight,’ Mr Hurley said. ‘Have you ever heard tell of the Carmodys?’
When they said they hadn’t he told them that the Carmodys ran a Wall of Death that was reputed to be great entertainment. She had never seen a Wall of Death yet, Kitty said when he’d gone. ‘D’you like the sausages, pet?’
He nodded, holding his cup out for tea. Under the table the calves of their legs were pressed together.
‘Coddy Donnegan wanted to take me once, only I said I couldn’t watch it.’
‘Maybe we wouldn’t bother in that case.’
‘I’d watch anything with yourself, Davy. Maybe we’d walk down by the sea as well.’
He nodded again and she leaned forward to say she was feeling fine, a reference to the fact that she had recently been subject to bouts of sickness in her stomach. They’d have a few drinks after the Wall of Death and the walk, she suggested, in case it wouldn’t look good, coming back to the bedroom too soon. She winked and nudged him with her knee. Under the table he put his hand on her lightly stockinged leg. ‘Oh Jesus, lay off now,’ she whispered.
It wasn’t Coddy Donnegan, she’d told him in McHenry Street, standing outside the chemist’s shop. She’d never been in love with Coddy Donnegan. She’d never been in love until the other thing happened, until there was a man taking her hand in a way Coddy Donnegan wouldn’t do in a million years – a cousin of Father Tolan’s, who was destined himself for the priesthood. He’d been about in the parish for the summer holidays; she’d have put down her life for him, she said. ‘He’d marry me if he knew, Davy. He’d give up the priesthood, only I’d never tell him.’
They finished the meal Mrs Hurley had prepared for them. ‘I’ll just go upstairs a minute,’ she said. ‘I won’t be a tick, pet.’
Waiting in the hall, Davy examined the pictures on the walls. A light burned beneath the Virgin and Child; there were reproductions of Victorian paintings, one of a match-seller, another of a shawled woman with a basket of lavender. He turned away from them, and the face of the chemist crept into his recollection: the jaw dark, the chin pimpled beneath a raw shave, eyes magnified behind heavily lensed spectacles, cheeks as pale as the white coat he wore. ‘Come in,’ Mr Minogue had welcomed them that day, knowing what they wanted although nothing had been said yet. It was the afternoon when his shop was closed, and he led them through the stillness of it into a room at the back, where there were no chairs to sit on, only a table with a rubber sheet on it. ‘I take a grave risk,’ Mr Minogue announced without preamble, his unsmiling countenance reflecting eloquently the gravity he spoke of. ‘The assistance I offer you in your distress is offered for humanitarian reasons only. But the risk must be covered, you understand that? It is not of my own volition that I charge a fee.’ While he spoke he did not remove his bulbously magnified eyes from their faces, revolving his stare in a circle around each, sliding it from one to the other. ‘You may know the fee?’ he said, and when Kitty placed the money before him his grey, closely barbered head bowed over the notes he counted. ‘Yes, this is correct,’ he said, speaking directly to Davy, clearly assuming him to be the father of the unwanted child and the source of the fee. He placed the notes in a wallet he’d taken out of the back pocket of his trousers, and jerked his head at Davy, indicating that he should return to the shop and wait there. But before Davy could do so both he and the abortionist were taken by surprise because without any warning whatsoever Kitty cried out that she couldn’t do it. She would burn in hell for it, she shrieked in sudden, shrill, unexpected emotion; she could never confess it, there was no penance she could be given. ‘I’d rather die as I stand, sir,’ she said to Mr Minogue, and gave way to tears. They flooded on her flushed, round cheeks; the humane abortionist stood arrested, one hand still in the back pocket of his trousers. ‘Hail Mary, Mother of God!’ Kitty cried, shrill again. ‘Sweet Mother, don’t abandon me!’ The money was handed back, no further word was spoken. Mr Minogue removed his white coat and led the way to the door of his shop, glancing before he opened it around the edge of an advertisement for liver salts pasted to its glass. The street was empty. As there had been no salutation, so there was no farewell.
‘Are we right so?’ Kitty said, descending the stairs.
He opened the hall door and they stepped out into the evening. It was warm and quiet on the terraced cul- de-sac, in which St Agnes’s was the last house. They still couldn’t hear the sea and Kitty said the waves wouldn’t be big in that case. ‘I’m sorry,’ she’d said outside the chemist’s shop, still sobbing, and then they’d walked for ages through the streets, before having a cup of tea in a cafe. She was calm by that time; it had never for a second occurred to her that she couldn’t do it, she said, but the sin when she’d handed Mr Minogue the money had been like something alive in the room with them. ‘I swear to God, Davy.’ He’d said he understood, but in fact he didn’t. He was confused because there was so much to take in – her being in trouble, the purpose of their journey being revealed, and then the episode with Mr Minogue. He was the man on the farm, the labourer who worked in the yard and the fields: it had been strange enough being asked to go to Cork with her. In the cafe, after she’d drunk two cups of tea, she said she was better. She ate a bun with currants in it, but he couldn’t eat anything himself. Then he brought her to the orphans’ home just to look at the outside of. ‘God, Davy, what am I going to do?’ she suddenly cried when they were standing there, as suddenly as she’d said in the back room of the chemist’s that she couldn’t go through with it.
‘It’s down at the strand,’ a man told them when they asked about the Wall of Death. He pointed out the way, and soon they heard the music that accompanied it and the roar of the motor-cycle’s engine. ‘…
