Selected Stories

by William Trevor

  The husbands of Paulie’s sisters hadn’t come, maybe because of the shortage of sleeping space. They’d be looking after the Dublin children, and it seemed that Kevin’s Sharon had stayed behind with theirs in Carlow. Aidan had come on his own from Boston. Paulie had never met Aidan’s wife and Sharon only once; he’d never met any of the children. They could have managed in a single car, he calculated, watching his brothers and sisters lifting out their suitcases, but it might have been difficult to organize, Kevin having to drive round by Shannon.

  His brothers wore black ties, his sisters were in mourning of a kind, not entirely, because that could wait till later. Mena looked pregnant again. Kevin had a bald patch now. Aidan took off the glasses he had worn to drive. Their suitcases weren’t heavy. You could tell there was no intention to stay longer than was necessary.

  Looking down into the yard, Paulie knew that an assumption had already been made, as he had known it in the kitchen when he sat there with his mother. He was the bachelor of the family, the employment he had wasn’t much. His mother couldn’t manage on her own.

  He had known it in Meagher’s back bar when he told Patsy Finucane he had a funeral to go to. The death had lost him Patsy Finucane: it was her, not his father, he thought about when he heard of it, and in Meagher’s the stout ran away with him and he spoke too soon. ‘Jeez,’ she said, ‘what would I do in a farmhouse!’

  Afterwards – when the journey through the hills had become a funeral procession at the edge of the town, when the coffin had been delivered to its night’s resting place, and later when the burial was complete and the family had returned to the farmhouse and had dispersed the next morning - Paulie remained.

  He had not intended to. He had hoped to get a lift in one of the two cars, and then to take a bus, and another bus, as he had on his journey over.

  ‘Where is it they’ll separate?’ his mother asked in the quietness that followed the departure.

  He didn’t know. Somewhere that was convenient; in some town they would pull in and have a drink, different now that they weren’t in a house of mourning. They would exchange news it hadn’t seemed right to exchange before. Aidan would talk about Boston, offering his sisters and his brother hospitality there.

  ‘Warm yourself at the fire, Paulie.’

  ‘Wait till I see to the heifers first.’

  ‘His boots are there.’

  ‘I know.’

  His brothers had borrowed the gum boots, too; wherever you went, you needed them. Kevin had fixed a fence, Aidan had got the water going again in the pipe up to the sheep. Between them, they’d taken the slack out of the barbed wire beyond the turf bog.

  ‘Put on a waterproof, Paulie.’

  It wasn’t going to rain, but the waterproof kept the wind out. Whenever he remembered the farmhouse from his childhood it was windy – the fertilizer bags blowing about in the yard, blustery on the track up to the sheep hills, in the big field that had been the family’s mainstay ever since his father had cleared the rocks from it, in the potato field. Wind, more than rain or frost, characterized the place, not that there wasn’t a lot of rain too. But who’d mind the rain? his father used to say.

  The heifers didn’t need seeing to, as he had known they wouldn’t. They stood, miserably crouched in against the wall of a fallen barn, mud that the wind had dried hanging from them. His father had taken off the roof when one of the other walls had collapsed, needing the corrugated iron for somewhere else. He’d left the standing wall for the purpose the heifers put it to now.

  Paulie, too, stood in the shelter of the wall, the puddles at his feet not yet blown dry, as the mud had on the animals. He remembered the red roof lifted down, piece by piece, Kevin waiting below to receive it, Aidan wrenching out the bolts. He had backed the tractor, easing the trailer close to where they were. ‘What’s he want it for?’ he’d asked Kevin, and Kevin said the corrugated iron would be used for filling the gaps in the hedges.

  Slowly, Paulie walked back the way he had come. ‘D’you think of coming back?’ Aidan had said, saying it in the yard when they were alone. Paulie had known it would be said and had guessed it would be Aidan who’d say it, Aidan being the oldest. ‘I’m only mentioning it,’ Aidan had said. ‘I’m only touching on it.’

  Blowing at the turf with the wheel-bellows, she watched the glow spread, sparks rising and falling away. It hadn’t been the time to make arrangements or even to talk about them. Nothing could have been more out of place, and she was glad they realized that. Kevin had had a word with Hartigan after the funeral, something temporary fixed up, she could tell from the gestures.

  They’d write. Frances had said she would, and Aidan had. Sharon would write for Kevin, as she always did. Mena would. Wherever it was they stopped to say good-bye to one another they’d talk about it and later on they’d write.

  ‘Sit down, Paulie, sit down,’ she said when her son came in, bringing the cold with him.

  She said again that Father Kinally had done it beautifully. She’d said so yesterday to her daughters in the car, she’d said it to Kevin and to Aidan this morning. Paulie would have heard, yet you’d want to repeat it. You felt the better for it.

  ‘Ah, he did,’ Paulie said. ‘He did of course.’

  He’d taken over. She could feel he’d taken over, the way he’d gone out to see were the heifers all right, the way it was he who remembered, last evening and this morning, that there was the bit of milking to do, that he’d done it without a word. She watched him ease off the gum boots and set them down by the door. He hung the waterproof on the door hook that was there for it and came to the fire in his socks, with his shoes in one hand. She turned away so that he wouldn’t notice she’d been reminded of his father coming into the kitchen also.

  ‘Aren’t the heifers looking good?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, they are, they are.’

  ‘He was pleased with them this year.’

  ‘They’re not bad, all right.’

  ‘Nothing’s fetching at the minute, all the same.’

  He nodded. He naturally would know times were bad, neither sheep nor cattle fetching what they were a year ago, everything gone quiet, the way you’d never have believed it.

  ‘We’re in for the night so,’ she said.

  ‘We are.’

  She washed the eggs Mena had collected earlier, brushing off the marks on them, then wiped the shells clean before she piled them in the bowl. The eggs would keep them going, with the rashers left over and half a saucepan of stew in the fridge. ‘You’ve enough for an army!’ Kevin had said, looking into the deep-freeze, and she reminded him you had to have enough in case the weather came in bad.

  ‘What’d we do without it?’ she said now, mentioning the deep-freeze. They’d had half a pig from the Caslins, only a portion of the belly used up so far. ‘And mutton till Doomsday,’ she said.

  ‘How’re they these days, the Caslins? I didn’t notice Maureen at the funeral.’

  ‘Maureen married a man in Tralee. She’s there since.’

  ‘Who’s the man?’

  ‘He’s in a shoe shop.’

  They could have gone to the wedding only it had been a period of the year when you wouldn’t want to spare the time. The Hartigans had gone. They’d have taken her but she’d said no.

  ‘Hartigan came back drunk, you should have seen the cut of him! And herself with a frost on her that would have quenched the fire!’

  ‘He’s driving down in the morning. He’ll pick me up.’

  Rashers and black pudding and fried bread were ready on the pan. She cracked two eggs into the fat, turned them when they were ready because he liked them turned. When she placed the plate in front of him he took a mouthful of tea before he ate anything. He said:

  ‘You couldn’t manage. No way.’

  ‘It wasn’t a time to talk about it, Paulie.’

  ‘I’ll come back.’

  He began to eat, the yolk of the eggs spreading yellow on the plate. He left the black
pudding and the crisp fat of the bacon until last. He’d always done that.

  ‘Hartigan’d still come down. I’m all right on the bit of milking. I’m all right on most things. The Caslins would come up.’

  ‘You couldn’t live like that.’

  ‘They’re neighbours, Paulie. They got help from himself if they wanted it. I looked over and saw Kevin having a word with Hartigan in the graveyard. It won’t be something for nothing, not with Hartigan. Kevin’ll tell me later.’

  ‘You’d be dependent.’

  ‘You have your own life, Paulie.’

  ‘You have what there is.’

  He ate for several minutes in silence, then he finished the tea that had been poured for him.

  ‘I’d have to give in notice. I’d have to work the notice out. A month.’

  ‘Think it over before you’ll do anything, Paulie.’

  Paulie harboured no resentment, not being a person who easily did: going back to the farmhouse was not the end of the world. The end of the world had been to hear, in Meagher’s back bar, that life on a farm did not attract Patsy Finucane.

  As soon as he’d mentioned marriage that day he knew he shouldn’t have. Patsy Finucane had taken fright like a little young greyhound would. She’d hardly heard him when he said, not knowing what else to say, ‘Ah well, no matter.’ It was a nervousness mixed in with the stout that had caused him to make the suggestion, and as soon as he had there was no regaining her: before she looked away that was there in her soft grey eyes. ‘I won’t go back so,’ he’d said, making matters worse. ‘I won’t go back without you.’

  When they sat again in Meagher’s back bar after the funeral Paulie tried to put things right; he tried to begin again, but it wasn’t any good. During the third week of his working out his notice Patsy Finucane began to go out with a clerk from the post office.

  In the yard she threw down grains for the hens and remembered doing it for the first time, apprehensive then about what she’d married into. Nor had her apprehension been misplaced: more than she’d imagined, her position in the household was one of obedience and humility, and sometimes what was said, or incidents that occurred, left a sting that in private drew tears from her. Yet time, simply in passing, transformed what seemed to be immutable. Old age enfeebled on the one hand; on the other, motherhood nurtured confidence. In the farmhouse, roles were reversed.

  She didn’t want distress like that for any wife Paulie would eventually bring to the kitchen and the house. She would make it easier, taking a back seat from the start and be glad to do so. It was only a pity that Maureen Caslin had married the shoe-shop man, for Maureen Caslin would have suited him well. There were the sisters, of course.

  During the weeks that followed Paulie’s departure, the anticipated letters came from Mena and Frances and from her daughter-in-law Sharon on behalf of Kevin, and from Aidan. The accumulated content was simple, the unstated expectation stated at last, four times over in different handwriting. Aidan said he and Paulie had had a talk about it. You are good to think of me, she wrote back, four times also.

  Hartigan continued to come down regularly and a couple of times his sister accompanied him, sitting in the kitchen while he saw to any heavy work in the yard. ‘Would Mena have room for you?’ she enquired on one of these occasions, appearing to forget that Paulie was due to return when he’d worked out his notice. Miss Hartigan always brought sultana bread when she came and they had it with butter on it. ‘I only mentioned Mena,’ she said, ‘in case Paulie wouldn’t be keen to come back. I was thinking he maybe wouldn’t.’

  ‘Why’s that, Miss Hartigan?’

  ‘It’s bachelors that’s in the hills now. Like himself,’ Miss Hartigan added, jerking her bony head in the direction of the yard, where her brother was up on a ladder, fixing a gutter support.

  ‘Paulie’s not married either, though.’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying to you. What I’m saying is would he want to stop that way?’

  Miss Hartigan’s features were enriched by a keenness to say more, to inform and explain, to dispel the bewilderment she had caused. She did so after a pause, politely reaching for a slice of sultana bread. It might not have been noticed that these days the bachelors of the hills found it difficult to attract a wife to the modest farms they inherited.

  ‘Excuse me for mentioning it,’ Miss Hartigan apologized before she left.

  It was true, and it had been noticed and often remarked upon. Hartigan himself, twenty years ago, was maybe the first of the hill bachelors: by now you could count them – lone men, some of them kept company by a mother or a sister – on the slopes of Coumpeebra, on Slievenacoush, on Knockrea, on Luirc, on Clydagh.

  She didn’t remember putting all that from her mind when Paulie had said he would come back, but perhaps she had. She tried not to think about it, comforting herself that what had been said, and the tone of Miss Hartigan’s voice, had more to do with Miss Hartigan and her brother than with the future in a neighbouring farmhouse. Nor did it necessarily need to be that what had already happened would continue to happen. The Hartigans’ stretch of land was worse by a long way than the land lower down on the hill; no better than the side of Slievenacoush, or Clydagh or Coumpeebra. You did the best you could, you hoped for warm summers. Paulie was a good-looking, decent boy; there was no reason at all why he wouldn’t bring up a family here as his father had.

  ‘There’s two suitcases left down with the Caslins,’ he said when he walked in one Saturday afternoon. ‘When I get the car started I’ll go down for them.’

  They didn’t embrace; there’d never been much of that in the family. He sat down and she made tea and put the pan on. He told her about the journey, how a woman had been singing on the first of the two buses, how he’d fallen asleep on the second. He was serious the way he told things, his expression intent, sometimes not smiling much. He’d always been like that.

  ‘Hartigan started the car a while back,’ she said, ‘to make sure it was in form.’

  ‘And it was? All right?’

  ‘Oh, it was, it was.’

  ‘I’ll take a look at it later.’

  He settled in easily, and she realized as he did so that she had never known him well. He had been lost to her in the family, his shadowy place in it influenced by his father’s lack of interest in him. She had never protested about that, only occasionally whispering a surreptitious word or two of comfort. It was fitting in a way that a twist of fate had made him his father’s inheritor.

  As if he had never been away, he went about his daily tasks knowledge-ably and efficiently. He had forgotten nothing – about the winter feed for the heifers, about the work around the yard or where the fences might give way on the hills or how often to go up there after the sheep, about keeping the tractor right. It seemed, which she had not suspected before, that while his presence was so often overlooked he had watched his father at work more conscientiously than his brothers had. ‘He’d be proud of you these days,’ she said once, but Paulie did not acknowledge that and she resisted making the remark again. The big field, which had been his father’s pride, became his. There was another strip to the south of it that could be cleared and reclaimed, he said, and he took her out to show her where he would run the new wall. They stood in the sunshine on a warm June morning while he pointed and talked about it, the two sheepdogs obedient by him. He was as good with them as his father ever had been.

  He drove her, as his father had, every three weeks down to Drunbeg, since she had never learned to drive herself. His father used to wait in the car park of Conlon’s Supermarket while she shopped, but Paulie always went in with her. He pushed the trolley and sometimes she gave him a list and he added items from the shelves. ‘Would we go and see that?’ he suggested one time when they were passing the Two-Screen Rialto, which used to be just the Picture House before it was given a face-lift. She wouldn’t be bothered, she said. She’d never been inside the cinema, either in the old days or since it had become
a two-screen; the television was enough for her. ‘Wouldn’t you take one of the Caslin girls?’ she said.

  He took the older of them, Aileen, and often after that he drove down in the evenings to sit with her in the Master McGrath. The relationship came to an end when Aileen announced that her sister in Tralee had heard of a vacancy in a newsagent and confectioner’s, that she’d been to Tralee herself to be looked over and in fact had been offered the position.

  ‘And did you know she had intentions that way?’ Paulie’s mother asked him when she heard, and he said he had, in a way. He didn’t seem put about, although she had assumed herself that by the look of things Aileen Caslin – stolid and on the slow side – would be the wife who’d come to the farmhouse, since her sister Maureen was no longer available. Paulie didn’t talk about it, but quite soon after Aileen’s departure he began to take an interest in a girl at one of the pay-outs in Conlon’s.

  ‘Wouldn’t you bring Maeve out one Sunday?’ his mother suggested when the friendship had advanced, when there’d been visits to the two-screen and evenings spent together drinking, as there’d been with Aileen Caslin. Maeve was a fair bit livelier than Aileen; he could do worse.

  But Maeve never came to the farmhouse. In Conlon’s Paulie took to steering the trolley to one of the other pay-outs even when the queue at hers was shorter. His mother didn’t ask why. He had his own life, she kept reminding herself; he had his privacy, and why shouldn’t he? ‘Isn’t he the good boy to you?’ Father Kinally remarked one Sunday after Mass when Paulie was turning the car. ‘Isn’t it grand the way it’s turned out for you?’

  She knew it was and gratefully gave thanks for it. Being more energetic than his father had been at the end, Paulie worked a longer day, far into the evening when it was light enough.