On their own, they embraced. He put his hand under his wife’s skirt and felt for the warm flesh at the top of her stockings. ‘Jesus, you’re terrible,’ she murmured thickly at him, as she had on the bus when he’d pressed himself close against her. She was sweating because of her condition and the July heat. Her face was sticky with perspiration, and small patches of it had developed on her dress, beneath each armpit. ‘Jesus,’ she whispered again. ‘Oh Jesus, go easy now.’
He didn’t want to go easy. They were free of the farm, and of her father and her aunt and her Uncle Ned Cauley. He had a right to his desires.
‘That woman’ll be listening,’ she whispered in the same slurred voice, but it didn’t matter if the woman was listening. It didn’t even matter if the woman opened the door and walked in. The bed made creaking sounds when she wriggled away from him, saying again that he was terrible, giggling as she said it. The bedroom smelt of flies, as if the windows hadn’t been opened for a long time. ‘God, you’re great, Kitty,’ he said, his own voice thickening also.
He was thirty-three, Kitty two years older. At fifteen he had been taken from the orphans’ home in Cork by Kitty’s father and her Uncle Ned Cauley. The two men had let it be known that they could do with a young fellow on the farm, and Father Doran, who was their parish priest at that time, had made inquiries of Father Lyhane at the orphans’ home on their behalf. ‘Davy Toome’s a good lad,’ Father Lyhane had said, and a few weeks later, after the recommendation had been passed on to the farmers and after Father Doran had been assured that the candidate would be strong enough for farm-work, a label with that name on it had been attached to the boy and he’d been forwarded by train. ‘And did you never do farm-work before?’ Kitty’s Uncle Ned Cauley had asked, sitting beside him in the cart as they slowly progressed on the road from the railway junction. But Davy had never even seen fields with corn in them before, let alone taken part in farm-work. ‘I’m thinking,’ said Kitty’s uncle, who’d spent an hour in Doolin’s public house at the railway junction, ‘that it could be we bought a pig in a poke.’ He said it again in the kitchen when they arrived, while his wife and his brother-in-law were examining Davy, silently agreeing that he was not as strong as the priest had claimed. ‘Will you for God’s sake take off that label!’ the woman said to him, and then, in a gentler voice, asked him about his name. She’d never heard of Toome before, she said, so he told them that his name had been given to him when the orphans’ home had taken him in as an infant, that there’d been a priest connected with it then who’d had an interest in naming the orphans. His first name was in memory of St David. Toome meant a burial mound. ‘Is he right in the head?’ he afterwards heard Kitty’s father asking his brother-in-law and her uncle replying that you wouldn’t know, the way he was talking about burial mounds.
‘Will you come on now, for heaven’s sake!’ Kitty rebuked him in the bedroom at St Agnes’s. ‘And let me take off my hat.’
She pushed him away from her and told him to open the window. It was she who had chosen Tramore for the weekend of their honeymoon, saying she’d heard it was lovely, with a sandy little beach. Kitty knew what she wanted, her aunt used to say, and you couldn’t budge her when she made up her mind. ‘Would you accompany me to Cork?’ she had suggested one day four months ago. ‘I’m a stranger to the city, Davy.’ He hadn’t been back to Cork since he’d come to the farm, and he didn’t really know his way around it; but it turned out that Kitty had never been there at all. ‘We’ll fix it to go on a Saturday,’ she said, and on the bus he felt proud to be sitting there with her, a big handsome girl, the daughter of his employer: he hoped that on the streets they’d maybe meet someone from the orphans’ home. She’d looked out the window most of the time, not saying very much to him, her round face pink with excitement. She was good-looking in a way he admired, better-looking than any of the other girls at Mass, or the tinker girls whom he’d caught once stealing turnips from the field, who’d shouted over a hedge at him that their sister would marry him. Her hair was very fine and very black, like a dark mist encircling her face. He’d heard her aunt calling her sullen, but he’d never noticed that himself, even though sometimes a blankness came into her face and stayed there till she roused herself. Her three brothers had all been born with something wrong with them and had died in childhood, before he had come to the farm. Nobody mentioned them; he hadn’t even known about her brothers until one of the men who came to help with the harvest referred to them in passing. Her mother had died giving birth to the last of them.
‘Are you OK, pet?’ Kitty said, putting lipstick on at the dressing-table. ‘Isn’t it great we’re on our own?’
He leaned against the window-frame, looking at her, seeing her in the looking-glass as well. She had to go to see a Mr Minogue, she’d said eventually on the bus, a chemist in McHenry Street.
‘Great,’ he said from the window.
‘Can you hear the sea there?’
He shook his head. They’d found the chemist’s shop, having had to ask for directions to McHenry Street. If her mother was alive she’d have accompanied her, she said all of a sudden, and then she said she couldn’t go into the chemist’s shop alone. Her voice became different. Her legs wouldn’t have taken her, she said, and then she told him she was in trouble. Her aunt had found out about the chemist, she said, only she’d refused to accompany her. ‘Take Toome to show you the way,’ her aunt had said.
‘Will we go down, pet?’
He moved to where she stood by the dressing-table but when he put his arms around her she said sharply that she didn’t want to get messed up again. She’d spilt powder on the glass top of the dressing-table, the same peach shade that was on her cheeks. She’d put on perfume he could smell, a strong sweet smell that made him want to try again to put his arms around her. But already she had crossed the room to the door. She opened it and he followed her downstairs.
‘I’ve done you black puddings,’ Mrs Hurley said in the dining-room, placing before them plates of fried sausages and fried eggs and slices of the delicacy she spoke of.
‘God, I love black pudding,’ Kitty said, and he passed her his because as a boy in the orphans’ home he had developed a revulsion for this dark composition of pig’s blood and entrails. The table they sat at was empty of other guests, as Mrs Hurley had promised. He smiled at his bride across it. On the way downstairs she had kept repeating that this would be their first meal as husband and wife. She attached importance to the fact. She’d said it again as they sat down. Through the wooden hatch that opened into the kitchen the voice of Mrs Hurley could be heard raised in abuse, speaking about a greyhound.
‘Are you hungry, pet?’
He wasn’t; he shook his head.
‘D’you know what it is,’ Kitty said, cutting into a soda farl, ‘I could eat the head off of a horse.’
A low mumble of protest had begun in the kitchen, which he guessed must emanate from Mrs Hurley’s husband. ‘Errah, have a pick of sense, will you?’ the landlady stridently interrupted. ‘Would any animal in its sane mind keep getting into a cement mixer?’
Kitty giggled. She’d nearly died, she said, when Mrs Kilfedder gave her a kiss at the wedding. ‘One thing about Kilfedder,’ she added, ‘he keeps his hands to himself.’
At that moment a man in shirtsleeves entered the dining-room. He greeted them and introduced himself as Mr Hurley. He inquired if they’d like another pot of tea, already seizing the metal teapot and moving towards the hatch with it. They’d find St Agnes’s restful, he said, no children for miles around. The hatch opened and Mrs Hurley’s freshly rouged face appeared. She had removed her hairnet, and the hair it had controlled, now seen to be a shade of henna, fluffed elaborately about her head. ‘Have they butter enough?’ she demanded of her husband, in the same uncompromising tone she had employed when protesting about the activities of the greyhound. ‘It’s good country butter,’ she shouted at her guests. ‘Fresh as a daisy.’
‘We have plenty,
’ Kitty replied. ‘It’s good butter all right, Mrs Hurley.’
The teapot was handed back through the hatch and placed on the table. ‘There’s a big attraction in Tramore tonight,’ Mr Hurley said. ‘Have you ever heard tell of the Carmodys?’
When they said they hadn’t he told them that the Carmodys ran a Wall of Death that was reputed to be great entertainment. She had never seen a Wall of Death yet, Kitty said when he’d gone. ‘D’you like the sausages, pet?’
He nodded, holding his cup out for tea. Under the table the calves of their legs were pressed together.
‘Coddy Donnegan wanted to take me once, only I said I couldn’t watch it.’
‘Maybe we wouldn’t bother in that case.’
‘I’d watch anything with yourself, Davy. Maybe we’d walk down by the sea as well.’
He nodded again and she leaned forward to say she was feeling fine, a reference to the fact that she had recently been subject to bouts of sickness in her stomach. They’d have a few drinks after the Wall of Death and the walk, she suggested, in case it wouldn’t look good, coming back to the bedroom too soon. She winked and nudged him with her knee. Under the table he put his hand on her lightly stockinged leg. ‘Oh Jesus, lay off now,’ she whispered.
It wasn’t Coddy Donnegan, she’d told him in McHenry Street, standing outside the chemist’s shop. She’d never been in love with Coddy Donnegan. She’d never been in love until the other thing happened, until there was a man taking her hand in a way Coddy Donnegan wouldn’t do in a million years – a cousin of Father Tolan’s, who was destined himself for the priesthood. He’d been about in the parish for the summer holidays; she’d have put down her life for him, she said. ‘He’d marry me if he knew, Davy. He’d give up the priesthood, only I’d never tell him.’
They finished the meal Mrs Hurley had prepared for them. ‘I’ll just go upstairs a minute,’ she said. ‘I won’t be a tick, pet.’
Waiting in the hall, Davy examined the pictures on the walls. A light burned beneath the Virgin and Child; there were reproductions of Victorian paintings, one of a match-seller, another of a shawled woman with a basket of lavender. He turned away from them, and the face of the chemist crept into his recollection: the jaw dark, the chin pimpled beneath a raw shave, eyes magnified behind heavily lensed spectacles, cheeks as pale as the white coat he wore. ‘Come in,’ Mr Minogue had welcomed them that day, knowing what they wanted although nothing had been said yet. It was the afternoon when his shop was closed, and he led them through the stillness of it into a room at the back, where there were no chairs to sit on, only a table with a rubber sheet on it. ‘I take a grave risk,’ Mr Minogue announced without preamble, his unsmiling countenance reflecting eloquently the gravity he spoke of. ‘The assistance I offer you in your distress is offered for humanitarian reasons only. But the risk must be covered, you understand that? It is not of my own volition that I charge a fee.’ While he spoke he did not remove his bulbously magnified eyes from their faces, revolving his stare in a circle around each, sliding it from one to the other. ‘You may know the fee?’ he said, and when Kitty placed the money before him his grey, closely barbered head bowed over the notes he counted. ‘Yes, this is correct,’ he said, speaking directly to Davy, clearly assuming him to be the father of the unwanted child and the source of the fee. He placed the notes in a wallet he’d taken out of the back pocket of his trousers, and jerked his head at Davy, indicating that he should return to the shop and wait there. But before Davy could do so both he and the abortionist were taken by surprise because without any warning whatsoever Kitty cried out that she couldn’t do it. She would burn in hell for it, she shrieked in sudden, shrill, unexpected emotion; she could never confess it, there was no penance she could be given. ‘I’d rather die as I stand, sir,’ she said to Mr Minogue, and gave way to tears. They flooded on her flushed, round cheeks; the humane abortionist stood arrested, one hand still in the back pocket of his trousers. ‘Hail Mary, Mother of God!’ Kitty cried, shrill again. ‘Sweet Mother, don’t abandon me!’ The money was handed back, no further word was spoken. Mr Minogue removed his white coat and led the way to the door of his shop, glancing before he opened it around the edge of an advertisement for liver salts pasted to its glass. The street was empty. As there had been no salutation, so there was no farewell.
‘Are we right so?’ Kitty said, descending the stairs.
He opened the hall door and they stepped out into the evening. It was warm and quiet on the terraced cul-de-sac, in which St Agnes’s was the last house. They still couldn’t hear the sea and Kitty said the waves wouldn’t be big in that case. ‘I’m sorry,’ she’d said outside the chemist’s shop, still sobbing, and then they’d walked for ages through the streets, before having a cup of tea in a café. She was calm by that time; it had never for a second occurred to her that she couldn’t do it, she said, but the sin when she’d handed Mr Minogue the money had been like something alive in the room with them. ‘I swear to God, Davy.’ He’d said he understood, but in fact he didn’t. He was confused because there was so much to take in – her being in trouble, the purpose of their journey being revealed, and then the episode with Mr Minogue. He was the man on the farm, the labourer who worked in the yard and the fields: it had been strange enough being asked to go to Cork with her. In the café, after she’d drunk two cups of tea, she said she was better. She ate a bun with currants in it, but he couldn’t eat anything himself. Then he brought her to the orphans’ home just to look at the outside of. ‘God, Davy, what am I going to do?’ she suddenly cried when they were standing there, as suddenly as she’d said in the back room of the chemist’s that she couldn’t go through with it.
‘It’s down at the strand,’ a man told them when they asked about the Wall of Death. He pointed out the way, and soon they heard the music that accompanied it and the roar of the motor-cycle’s engine. ‘… to see again the moonlight over Clara’, moaned a tenor voice, robbed of its mellifluous quality by the scratching of a gramophone needle. ‘… and to see the sun going down on Galway Bay’. They paid the admission charge and climbed up rickety stairs, like a ladder, that led to the top of the circular wooden wall. A platform ran around the circumference, with a balustrade to prevent the jostling audience from falling into the pit below. ‘God, it’s great,’ Kitty shouted above the noise, and Davy gave her arm a squeeze. A small, wizened man in red gaiters and black leather clothes, with a spotted red neckerchief, mounted the quivering motor-cycle that stood on its pedestal in the centre of the pit. He pushed it forward and ran it on to the incline at the bottom of the wall, gradually easing it on to the wall itself. Each circle he made increased the angle of his machine until in the end, close to the balustrade over which the audience leaned, he and his motor-cycle were horizontal. The timbers of the wall and of the platform shuddered, the roar of the engine was deafening. Waving above his head, the performer descended, the same circular motion in reverse. The audience clapped and threw coins into the pit. ‘Are you OK?’ Davy shouted, for in the excitement Kitty had closed her eyes. In the pit the motor-cycle was returned to its stand. The man bowed his gratitude for the money that still lay on the ground, and then threw out an arm in a sudden, dramatic gesture. He was joined immediately by a woman, dressed in red-and-black clothing also, who climbed on to the pillion of his motor-cycle and when it reached the centre of the wall clambered on to his back. She stood on his shoulders, with his spotted neckerchief streaming from between her teeth. Kitty screamed and closed her eyes again. More coins were thrown.
‘Is she his wife, Davy?’ Kitty asked as they walked away.
‘I’d say she was.’
‘Wouldn’t it be shocking if she came off?’
‘I’d say she wouldn’t.’
‘God, I love the smell of the sea, Davy.’
If she hadn’t been wearing stockings she’d have paddled, she said, and he told her about a time they’d been taken from the orphans’ home to the seaside at Courtmacsherry. He continued t
o tell her about this while they walked back to the town and went in search of a public house. They found one that was as quiet as St Agnes’s, a murky place that Kitty said was cosy. Two elderly men sat at the counter, steadily drinking, not conversing. The publican was shifting sacks of meal in the grocery that adjoined the bar. Davy called out to him, ordering bottles of stout.
‘Was it terrible in the orphans’ home?’ Kitty asked when he’d carried them to the table she was sitting at. ‘Did you hate it the whole time?’
He said he hadn’t. It hadn’t been bad; he’d never known anywhere else until he came to the farm. ‘Jeez, it looks like a prison,’ she’d said that day, looking up at the orphans’ home from the street.
‘It’s terrible, though, no family to turn to,’ she said now. ‘I have the half of it myself, with no mother.’
‘You get used to the way it is.’
A week after their visit to Cork her aunt said to him in the yard that Kitty would marry him if he asked her. Her aunt stood there in the early - morning sunlight, a heavily made woman who was always dressed in black. She more than anyone, more than her husband or her brother or Kitty herself, knew that ever since he’d arrived at the farm with a label on him he’d had a notion of Kitty. The aunt was the sharpest of them, her eyes as black as her clothes, always watchful. She had noticed him looking at Kitty across the table when they all sat down to their dinner; he’d never been able to help looking at her, and it embarrassed him every time her aunt caught him. Did she guess that he lay in bed at night imagining Kitty’s lips on his own, and the lovely white softness of her? They would have the farm between them was what she omitted to say in the yard because it was not necessary to say it: Kitty would inherit the farm since there was no one else, and if he married her he would no longer be the hired man, with the worst of the work always reserved for him. ‘I’ll ask her so,’ he said, and because of the day there had been in Cork it was easier to pluck up the courage. Before that, Kitty had always ordered him about in the way her father and her uncle did when they all worked together at certain seasons, making hay or lifting the potatoes. He had never disliked her for it, any more than he’d ever felt he had a right to resent Coddy Donnegan’s rusty old Vauxhall arriving in the yard and Coddy Donnegan waiting in it, and the way he’d push open a door of the car when he heard the sound of her heels tip-tapping across the concrete. Father Tolan’s cousin had never come near the farm; all that was a mystery.
The Collected Stories Page 156