‘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 with 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.’
