Kitty?” you might say to her politely. And she’d open her mouth and you’d see the onion in it.’
‘Kathleen wouldn’t eat onions.’
‘Ah, I’m not saying she would. Des, will you bring Mr Hagerty another bottle of stout? He has a girl for us.’
Looking up from his papers but keeping a finger in place on them, her husband asked her what she was talking about.
‘Kathleen Hagerty would come in and assist me, Des.’
Mr Shaughnessy asked who Kathleen Hagerty was, and when it was revealed that her father was sitting in the bar with a bottle of stout, and in need of another one, he bundled his papers into a pocket and drew the corks from two further bottles. His wife winked at Hagerty. He liked to have a maid about the house, she said. He pretended he didn’t, but he liked the style of it.
All the way back to the farm, driving home the bullocks, Hagerty reflected on that stroke of luck. In poor spirits he’d turned into Shaughnessy’s, it being the nearest public house to the bank. If he hadn’t done so, and if Mrs Shaughnessy hadn’t mentioned her domestic needs, and if her husband hadn’t come in when he had, there wouldn’t have been one bit of good news to carry back. ‘I’m after a field of land,’ he’d said to Mr Shaughnessy, making no bones about it. They’d both listened to him, Mrs Shaughnessy only going away once, to pour herself half a glass of sherry. They’d understood immediately the thing about the field being valuable to him because of its position. ‘Doesn’t it sound a grand bit of land, Des?’ Mrs Shaughnessy had remarked with enthusiasm. ‘With a good hot sun on it?’ He’d revealed the price old Lally’s widow was asking; he’d laid every fact he knew down before them.
In the end, on top of four bottles of stout, he was poured a glass of Paddy, and then Mrs Shaughnessy made him a spreadable-cheese sandwich. He would send Kathleen in, he promised, and after that it would be up to Mrs Shaughnessy. ‘But, sure, I think we’ll do business,’ she’d confidently predicted.
Biddy would see him coming, he said to himself as he urged the bullocks on. She’d see the bullocks and she’d run back into the house to say they hadn’t been sold. There’d be long faces then, but he’d take it easy when he entered the kitchen and reached out for his tea. A bad old fair it had been, he’d report, which was nothing only the truth, and he’d go through the offers that had been made to him. He’d go through his conversation with Mr Ensor and then explain how he’d gone into Shaughnessy’s to rest himself before the journey home.
On the road ahead he saw Biddy waving at him and then doing what he’d known she’d do: hurrying back to precede him with the news. As he murmured the words of a thanksgiving, his youngest daughter again filled Hagerty’s mind. The day Kathleen was born it had rained from dawn till dusk. People said that was lucky for the family of an infant, and it might be they were right.
*
Kathleen was led from room to room and felt alarmed. She had never experienced a carpet beneath her feet before. There were boards or linoleum in the farmhouse, and linoleum in the Reverend Mother’s room at the convent. She found the papered walls startling: flowers cascaded in the corners, and ran in a narrow band around the room, close to the ceiling. ‘I see you admiring the frieze,’ Mrs Shaughnessy said. ‘I had the house redone a year ago.’ She paused and then laughed, amused by the wonder in Kathleen’s face. ‘Those little borders,’ she said. ‘I think they call them friezes these days.’
When Mrs Shaughnessy laughed her chin became long and smooth, and the skin tightened on her forehead. Her very white false teeth – which Kathleen was later to learn she referred to as her ‘delf’ – shifted slightly behind her reddened lips. The laugh was a sedate whisper that quickly exhausted itself.
‘You’re a good riser, are you, Kathleen?’
‘I’m used to getting up, ma’am.’
Always say ma’am, the Reverend Mother had adjured, for Kathleen had been summoned when it was known that Mrs Shaughnessy was interested in training her as a maid. The Reverend Mother liked to have a word with any girl who’d been to the convent when the question of local employment arose, or if emigration was mooted. The Reverend Mother liked to satisfy herself that a girl’s future promised to be what she would herself have chosen for the girl; and she liked to point out certain hazards, feeling it her duty to do so. The Friday fast was not observed in Protestant households, where there would also be an absence of sacred reminders. Conditions met with after emigration left even more to be desired.
‘Now, this would be your own room, Kathleen,’ Mrs Shaughnessy said, leading her into a small bedroom at the top of the house. There was a white china wash-basin with a jug standing in it, and a bed with a mattress on it, and a cupboard. The stand the basin and the jug were on was painted white, and so was the cupboard. A net curtain covered the bottom half of a window and at the top there was a brown blind like the ones in the Reverend Mother’s room. There wasn’t a carpet on the floor and there wasn’t linoleum either; but a rug stretched on the boards by the bed, and Kathleen couldn’t help imagining her bare feet stepping on to its softness first thing every morning.
‘There’ll be the two uniforms the last girl had,’ Mrs Shaughnessy said. ‘They’d easily fit, although I’d say you were bigger on the chest. You wouldn’t be be familiar with a uniform, Kathleen?’
‘I didn’t have one at the convent, ma’am.’
‘You’ll soon get used to the dresses.’
That was the first intimation that Mrs Shaughnessy considered her suitable for the post. The dresses were hanging in the cupboard, she said. There were sheets and blankets in the hot press.
‘I’d rather call you Kitty,’ Mrs Shaughnessy said. ‘If you wouldn’t object. The last girl was Kitty, and so was another we had.’
Kathleen said that was all right. She hadn’t been called Kitty at the convent, and wasn’t at home because it was the pet name of her eldest sister.
‘Well, that’s great,’ Mrs Shaughnessy said, the tone of her voice implying that the arrangement had already been made.
‘I was never better pleased with you,’ her father said when Kathleen returned home. ‘You’re a great little girl.’
When she’d packed some of her clothes into a suitcase that Mary Florence had left behind after a visit one time, he said it was hardly like going away at all because she was only going seven miles. She’d return every Sunday afternoon; it wasn’t like Kilburn or Chicago. She sat beside him on the cart and he explained that the Shaughnessys had been generous to a degree. The wages he had agreed with them would be held back and set against the debt: it was that that made the whole thing possible, reducing his monthly repayments to a figure he was confident he could manage, even with the bank overdraft. ‘It isn’t everyone would agree to the convenience of
