teeth. Kitty screamed and closed her eyes again. More coins were thrown.
‘Is she his wife, Davy?’ Kitty asked as they walked away.
‘I’d say she was.’
‘Wouldn’t it be shocking if she came off?’
‘I’d say she wouldn’t.’
‘God, I love the smell of the sea, Davy.’
If she hadn’t been wearing stockings she’d have paddled, she said, and he told her about a time they’d been taken from the orphans’ home to the seaside at Courtmacsherry. He continued to tell her about this while they walked back to the town and went in search of a public house. They found one that was as quiet as St Agnes’s, a murky place that Kitty said was cosy. Two elderly men sat at the counter, steadily drinking, not conversing. The publican was shifting sacks of meal in the grocery that adjoined the bar. Davy called out to him, ordering bottles of stout.
‘Was it terrible in the orphans’ home?’ Kitty asked when he’d carried them to the table she was sitting at. ‘Did you hate it the whole time?’
He said he hadn’t. It hadn’t been bad; he’d never known anywhere else until he came to the farm. ‘Jeez, it looks like a prison,’ she’d said that day, looking up at the orphans’ home from the street.
‘It’s terrible, though, no family to turn to,’ she said now. ‘I have the half of it myself, with no mother.’
‘You get used to the way it is.’
A week after their visit to Cork her aunt said to him in the yard that Kitty would marry him if he asked her. Her aunt stood there in the early - morning sunlight, a heavily made woman who was always dressed in black. She more than anyone, more than her husband or her brother or Kitty herself, knew that ever since he’d arrived at the farm with a label on him he’d had a notion of Kitty. The aunt was the sharpest of them, her eyes as black as her clothes, always watchful. She had noticed him looking at Kitty across the table when they all sat down to their dinner; he’d never been able to help looking at her, and it embarrassed him every time her aunt caught him. Did she guess that he lay in bed at night imagining Kitty’s lips on his own, and the lovely white softness of her? They would have the farm between them was what she omitted to say in the yard because it was not necessary to say it: Kitty would inherit the farm since there was no one else, and if he married her he would no longer be the hired man, with the worst of the work always reserved for him. ‘I’ll ask her so,’ he said, and because of the day there had been in Cork it was easier to pluck up the courage. Before that, Kitty had always ordered him about in the way her father and her uncle did when they all worked together at certain seasons, making hay or lifting the potatoes. He had never disliked her for it, any more than he’d ever felt he had a right to resent Coddy Donnegan’s rusty old Vauxhall arriving in the yard and Coddy Donnegan waiting in it, and the way he’d push open a door of the car when he heard the sound of her heels tip-tapping across the concrete. Father Tolan’s cousin had never come near the farm; all that was a mystery.
‘Would there be anything to eat in here, pet? Would they have biscuits?’
At the bar he ordered two more bottles of stout and inquired if biscuits could be supplied. The publican said he had ginger-snaps and went to the grocery to weigh out half a pound.
‘Oh, great,’ Kitty said. She crumbled one in her mouth. He poured out the stout. The day before her aunt had made her suggestion in the yard he had noticed Kitty going up to Coddy Donnegan after Mass, and Coddy Donnegan had turned away from her as if they’d had a quarrel, which was understandable in view of her friendship with Father Tolan’s cousin. After that, Coddy Donnegan’s Vauxhall never again drove up to the farm.
‘We’ll never forget our honeymoon,’ Kitty said. ‘I wish we had a camera. I’d love to take snaps of Tramore.’
He knew what she meant. For the rest of their lives they’d be at the farm, milking every morning and evening, taking the churns down to the creamery, ploughing and sowing and ditching. No matter how you fixed it there was never enough time, except for the couple of hours you took to go to Mass. He always rode to Mass on his bicycle, and on Sunday afternoons he rode over to Doolin’s at the old railway junction, where no trains came any more. A new road passed by Doolin’s now and on Sunday afternoons there would always be bicycles propped up against its window, and the same dozen or so faces inside. ‘I hear you’re marrying in,’ one of the men said to him on the Sunday after Kitty agreed. ‘More power to your elbow, Davy!’ No one was displeased at his good fortune, in Doolin’s or anywhere else. Father Tolan came up to the farm specially and walked down to the mangold field to shake his hand and to congratulate him. Even Ned Cauley, who rarely had a good word to say on any subject, wagged his head at him in an approving way.
‘I love the taste of ginger-snaps and stout,’ Kitty said. ‘Did you know ginger-snaps were my favourite?’
‘They’re all the man had.’
Suddenly she asked him if he was happy. She repeated the question, putting it differently, asking him if he was contented in himself. He said he was.
‘Will you ever forget the day we went to Cork, Davy?’
From her voice, he thought she was maybe getting drunk, that her condition made the stout go to her head. She was looking at him, giggling. She leaned closer to him and said that on the bus that day she’d thought to herself she wouldn’t mind being married to him.
‘You were good to me that day, Davy, d’you know that?’
‘I always had a notion of you, Kitty.’
‘I never noticed it till that day, pet. That was the first time I knew it.’
He went to the bar for two further bottles of stout. He had wondered if the men in Doolin’s knew the state she was in, and if they imagined he was the man involved. The same applied where her father and her uncle were concerned, and Father Tolan. He didn’t know if there’d been talk or not.
‘Didn’t it work out OK, in the end?’ she said when he returned with the stout. She asked if there were any more biscuits and he went back to buy another quarter pound. When he returned to where they sat she said:
‘Were you ever jealous of Coddy, pet?’
