mention: that was how they saw it.
Later that evening, when Maura Brigid crossed the yard to damp down the swill fire, no voice whispered her name. Later still, after she’d drawn down the blinds in her bedroom, she realized that her husband would not return unless she summoned him. He had come to make a case for his remorse; the priest had written from his conscience. Unless she chose to, she would hear no more from either of them.
She addressed the envelope, but did not send the letter. She kept it in a drawer in her bedroom, saying she would post it the next Friday she went in to do the shopping. After that, she would be on the watch for a reply, ready to collect it from the scullery passage before Hiney found it. She’d drive on to Cappoquin on the Friday they arranged, making sure she put more petrol in the car, so that Hiney wouldn’t notice how much had been used. They’d sit in the car in a car park.
‘You’d need the fellow’s assistance, Hiney,’ the old man said. ‘It’s understandable you would.’
The old man sometimes sat in the dining-room, which was nowadays never used, under the impression that a land steward called Mahaffy was about to call to see him. Effortlessly he had created a world made up of random details from the past, and had peopled it as he wished. No one on the farm had ever heard of the land steward, Mahaffy. Terence MacSwiney, Mayor of Cork, had died on his hunger strike sixty-seven years ago.
‘Ah, don’t be silly now,’ Hiney said when the assistance of Michael Lawless was referred to, Hiney as keen as his mother that the name should not be mentioned. The scandal Maura Brigid had inflicted on the family by bringing a scoundrel to the farm was too recent and too painful to be permitted in an old man’s silliness. ‘That man didn’t come back,’ Hiney shouted in the kitchen. ‘D’you understand that now? He’s gone for good.’
But the old man insisted. Michael Lawless had come back up the avenue on a bicycle. The sheepdogs had barked when he walked into the yard. ‘We’ll ask him about it when we see him,’ the old man said. ‘We’ll ask him wasn’t I right.’
All of it was her fault, Maura Brigid could feel her mother and Hiney thinking. If she had not married the man Bernadette would not have been ruined. Bernadette would still be alive. It was her fault that a scoundrel had come and gone, doing the worst that could be done to two sisters, duping them.
‘He did come back,’ she said. ‘A while after the funeral he came back.’
She was on her feet when she spoke, giving them their food, as so often she did. She had fried chops and mashed turnips, and tumbled a saucepan of potatoes on to a sheet of newspaper, which would become accumulated with peelings as the meal progressed. Chops or fried steak, fish or boiled bacon, frozen peas or turnips or cabbage, and potatoes: that was the food she cooked and served for the main meal they ate every day. At half past twelve she placed the newspaper on the centre of the table. At a quarter past one she made tea. She and her mother washed up afterwards.
‘What are you talking about?’ Hiney said. ‘Lawless never came back here.’
‘He came back and told me Bernadette was pregnant, only it wasn’t his child. She tried to get rid of it.’
Mrs Colleary crossed herself. Hiney’s solemn face was unusually animated. ‘That’s a bloody lie,’ he said.
‘He couldn’t control her, Hiney. She was like she always was.’
The old man asked them what they were talking about, something he rarely did. Nobody answered him. Mrs Colleary said:
‘He never told the truth.’
‘Never in his life,’ Hiney agreed with harsh vigour. ‘We all know the kind Lawless is.’
‘You were always taken in, Maura Brigid. You were always soft.’
She knew that if she began to cry she wouldn’t be able to stop. But the tears she repressed kept making her blink and she turned her head away. They were the same kind, she and the man who had married her. They’d been companions the way he and her sister had never been, you could tell that from how he spoke of Bernadette. Bernadette had hurt him, too.
‘It’s bad enough the way things are,’ Hiney insisted. ‘Keep it to yourself he came back.’
When he’d first come to the farm to court her they used to walk in the woods and climb down the cliffs to the strand. He’d always been shy, only taking her hand and clumsily kissing her. After they were married there had never been any question about his not coming on to the farm: Hiney needed the assistance and Michael was employe4 on the roads, work he didn’t like. She remembered how she had wondered about a baby being born, her own baby and his on the farm.
‘There were girls at the convent,’ she said, ‘used call Bernadette a hooer.’
Again Mrs Colleary crossed herself. She drew her breath in and held it for a moment. Her eyes were closed.
‘What’s the matter with you, Maura Brigid?’ Hiney asked quietly.
‘On account of the way she enticed the Christian Brothers’ boys. That’s why they called her that.’
‘If Lawless comes back here I’ll take a gun to him,’ Hiney said, still without raising his voice. He stood up, leaving his food untouched. He walked from the kitchen, and the sheepdogs who’d been lying under the table followed him.
‘You shouldn’t ever have married that man,’ Mrs Colleary said, opening her eyes. Her face had gone pale. Her mouth was pulled down, as though in weariness, as though she couldn’t be bothered arranging it differently any more. ‘I told you at the time he was rotten to the core.’
Maura Brigid did not reply. It was not true to say the man she’d married had never told the truth in his life. He was weak, and she was weak herself: she didn’t possess the courage to leave the farm, to run off with him as Bernadette had. She would be frightened, and she was well-behaved by nature. He hadn’t come to the farm to ask her to run off, that wasn’t his way; he’d come to the farm to tell her something, to see how she might feel about it. The priest had written to beg that there might be forgiveness.
‘I’ll go down and help them in the fields,’ the old man said, finishing the cup of tea he’d poured himself. ‘I think
