‘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 cafe 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
