The Collected Stories

by William Trevor

  ‘I am,’ he said. ‘And are you, Mrs Shaughnessy?’

  ‘I have the winter rheumatism again. But thank God it’s not severe.’

  Mrs Shaughnessy was a tall, big-shouldered woman whom he remembered as a girl before she’d married into the shop. She wore a bit of make-up, and her clothes were more colourful than his wife’s, although they were hidden now by her green shop overall. She had been flighty as a girl, so he remembered hearing, but in no way could you describe her as that in her late middle age; ‘well-to-do’ was the description that everything about Mrs Shaughnessy insisted upon.

  ‘I was wanting to ask you, Mr Hagerty. I’m on the look-out for a country girl to assist me in the house. If they’re any good they’re like gold dust these days. Would you know of a country girl out your way?’

  Hagerty began to shake his head and was at once reminded of the bank agent shaking his. It was then, while he was still actually engaged in that motion, that he recalled a fact which previously had been of no interest to him: Mrs Shaughnessy’s husband lent people money. Mr Shaughnessy was a considerable businessman. As well as the Provisions and Bar, he owned a barber’s shop and was an agent for the Property & Life Insurance Company; he had funds to spare. Hagerty had heard of people mortgaging an area of their land with Mr Shaughnessy, or maybe the farmhouse itself, and as a consequence being able to buy machinery or stock. He’d never yet heard of any unfairness or sharp practice on the part of Mr Shaughnessy after the deal had been agreed upon and had gone into operation.

  ‘Haven’t you a daughter yourself, Mr Hagerty? Pardon me now if I’m guilty of a presumption, but I always say if you don’t ask you won’t know. Haven’t you a daughter not long left the nuns?’

  Kathleen’s round, open features came into his mind, momentarily softening his own. His youngest daughter was inclined to plumpness, but her wide, uncomplicated smile often radiated moments of prettiness in her face. She had always been his favourite, although Biddy, of course, had a special place also.

  ‘No, she’s not long left the convent.’

  Her face slipped away, darkening to nothing in his imagination. He thought again of the Lallys’ field, the curving shape of it like a tea-cloth thrown over a bush to dry. A stream ran among the few little ash trees at the bottom, the morning sun lingered on the heart of it.

  ‘I’d never have another girl unless I knew the family, Mr Hagerty. Or unless she’d be vouched for by someone the like of yourself.’

  ‘Are you thinking of Kathleen, Mrs Shaughnessy?’

  ‘Well, I am. I’ll be truthful with you, I am.’

  At that moment someone rapped with a coin on the counter of the grocery and Mrs Shaughnessy hurried away. If Kathleen came to work in the house above the Provisions and Bar, he might be able to bring up the possibility of a mortgage. And the grass was so rich in the field that it wouldn’t be too many years before a mortgage could be paid off. Con would be left secure, Biddy would be provided for.

  Hagerty savoured a slow mouthful of stout. He didn’t want Kathleen to go to England. I can get her fixed up, her sister, Mary Florence, had written in a letter not long ago. ‘I’d rather Kilburn than Chicago,’ he’d heard Kathleen herself saying to Con, and at the time he’d been relieved because Kilburn was nearer. Only Biddy would always be with them, for you couldn’t count on Con not being tempted by Kilburn or Chicago the way things were at the present time. ‘Sure, what choice have we in any of it?’ their mother had said, but enough of them had gone, he’d thought. His father had struggled for the farm and he’d struggled for it himself.

  ‘God, the cheek of some people!’ Mrs Shaughnessy exclaimed, re-entering the bar. ‘Tinned pears and ham, and her book unpaid since January! Would you credit that, Mr Hagerty?’

  He wagged his head in an appropriate manner, denoting amazement. He’d been thinking over what she’d put to him, he said. There was no girl out his way who might be suitable, only his own Kathleen. ‘You were right enough to mention Kathleen, Mrs Shaughnessy.’ The nuns had never been displeased with her, he said as well.

  ‘Of course, she would be raw, Mr Hagerty. I’d have to train every inch of her. Well, I have experience in that, all right. You train them, Mr Hagerty, and the next thing is they go off to get married. There’s no sign of that, is there?’

  ‘Ah, no, no.’

  ‘You’d maybe spend a year training them and then they’d be off. Sure, where’s the sense in it? I often wonder I bother.’

  ‘Kathleen wouldn’t go running off, no fear of that, Mrs Shaughnessy.’

  ‘It’s best to know the family. It’s best to know a father like yourself.’

  As Mrs Shaughnessy spoke, her husband appeared behind the bar. He was a medium-sized man, with grey hair brushed into spikes, and a map of broken veins dictating a warm redness in his complexion. He wore a collar and tie, which Mr Hagerty did not, and the waistcoat and trousers of a dark-blue suit. He carried a number of papers in his right hand and a packet of Sweet Afton cigarettes in his left. He spread the papers out on the bar and, having lit a cigarette, proceeded to scrutinize them. While he listened to Mrs Shaughnessy’s further exposition of her theme, Hagerty was unable to take his eyes off him.

  ‘You get in a country girl and you wouldn’t know was she clean or maybe would she take things. We had a queer one once, she used eat a raw onion. You’d go into the kitchen and she’d be at it. “What are you chewing, 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 pre
cede 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 that, Kathleen.’

  She said she understood. There was a new sprightliness about her father; the fatigue in his face had given way to an excited pleasure. His gratitude to the Shaughnessys, and her mother’s gratitude, had made the farmhouse a different place during the last couple of weeks. Biddy and Con had been affected by it, and so had Kathleen, even though she had no idea what life would be like in the house above the Shaughnessys’ Provisions and Bar. Mrs Shaughnessy had not outlined her duties beyond saying that every night when she went up to bed she should carry with her the alarm clock from the kitchen dresser, and carry it down again every morning. The most important thing of all appeared to be that she should rise promptly from her bed.

  ‘You’ll listen well to what Mrs Shaughnessy says,’ her father begged her. ‘You’ll attend properly to all the work, Kathleen?’

  ‘I will of course.’

  ‘It’ll be great seeing you on Sundays, girl.’

  ‘It’ll be great coming home.’

  A bicycle, left behind also by Mary Florence, lay in the back of the cart. Kathleen had wanted to tie the suitcase on to the carrier and cycle in herself with it, but her father wouldn’t let her. It was dangerous, he said; a suitcase attached like that could easily unbalance you.

  ‘Kathleen’s field is what we call it,’ her father said on their journey together, and added after a moment: ‘They’re decent people, Kathleen. You’re going to a decent house.’

  ‘Oh, I know, I know.’

  But after only half a day there Kathleen wished she was back in the farmhouse. She knew at once how much she was going to miss the comfort of the kitchen she had known all her life, and the room along the passage she shared with Biddy, where Mary Florence had slept also, and the dogs nosing up to her in the yard. She knew how much she would miss Con, and her father and her mother, and how she’d miss looking after Biddy.

  ‘Now, I’ll show you how to set a table,’ Mrs Shaughnessy said. ‘Listen to this carefully, Kitty.’

  Cork mats were put down on the tablecloth so that the heat of the dishes wouldn’t penetrate to the polished surface beneath. Small plates were placed on the left of each mat, to put the skins of potatoes on. A knife and a fork were arranged on each side of the mats and a spoon and a fork across the top. The pepper and salt were placed so that Mr Shaughnessy could easily reach them. Serving spoons were placed by the bigger mats in the middle. The breakfast table was set the night before, with the cups upside down on the saucers so that they wouldn’t catch the dust when the ashes were taken from the fireplace.

  ‘Can you cut kindling, Kitty? I’ll show you how to do it with the little hatchet.’

  She showed her, as well, how to sweep the carpet on the stairs with a stiff hand-brush, and how to use the dust-pan. She explained that every mantelpiece in the house had to be dusted every morning, and all the places where grime would gather. She showed her where saucepans and dishes were kept, and instructed her in how to light the range, the first task of the day. The backyard required brushing once a week, on Saturday between four o’clock and five. And every morning after breakfast water had to be pumped from the tank in the yard, fifteen minutes’ work with the hand lever.

  ‘That’s the W.C. you’d use, Kitty,’ Mrs Shaughnessy indicated, leading her to a privy in another part of the backyard. ‘The maids always use this one.’

  The dresses of the uniforms didn’t fit. She looked at herself in the blue one and then in the black. The mirror on the dressing-table was tarnished, but she could tell that neither uniform enhanced her in any way whatsoever. She looked as fat as a fool, she thought, with the hems all crooked, and the sleeves too tight on her forearms. ‘Oh now, that’s really very good,’ Mrs Shaughnessy said when Kathleen emerged from her bedroom in the black one. She demonstrated how the bodice of the apron was kept
in place and how the afternoon cap should be worn.

  ‘Is your father fit?’ Mr Shaughnessy inquired when he came upstairs for his six o’clock tea.

  ‘He is, sir.’ Suddenly Kathleen had to choke back tears because without any warning the reference to her father had made her want to cry.

  ‘He was shook the day I saw him,’ Mr Shaughnessy said, ‘on account he couldn’t sell the bullocks.’

  ‘He’s all right now, sir.’

  The Shaughnessys’ son reappeared then too, a narrow-faced youth who hadn’t addressed her when he’d arrived in the dining-room in the middle of the day and didn’t address her now. There were just the three of them, two younger children having grown up and gone away. During the day Mrs Shaughnessy had often referred to her other son and her daughter, the son in business in Limerick, the daughter married to a county surveyor. The narrow-faced son would inherit the businesses, she’d said, the barber’s shop and the Provisions and Bar, maybe even the insurances. With a bout of wretchedness, Kathleen was reminded of Con inheriting the farm. Before that he’d marry Angie McKrill, who wouldn’t hesitate to accept him now that the farm was improved.

  Kathleen finished laying the table and went back to the kitchen, where Mrs Shaughnessy was frying rashers and eggs and slices of soda bread. When they were ready she scooped them on to three plates and Kathleen carried the tray, with a teapot on it as well, into the dining-room. Her instructions were to return to the kitchen when she’d done so and to fry her own rasher and eggs, and soda bread if she wanted it. ‘I don’t know will we make much of that one,’ she heard Mrs Shaughnessy saying as she closed the dining-room door.

  That night she lay awake in the strange bed, not wanting to sleep because sleep would too swiftly bring the morning, and another day like the day there’d been. She couldn’t stay here: she’d say that on Sunday. If they knew what it was like they wouldn’t want her to. She sobbed, thinking again of the warm kitchen she had left behind, the sheepdogs lying by the fire and Biddy turning the wheel of the bellows, the only household task she could do. She thought of her mother and father sitting at the table as they always did, her mother knitting, her father pondering, with his hat still on his head. If they could see her in the dresses they’d understand. If they could see her standing there pumping up the water they’d surely be sorry for the way she felt. ‘I haven’t the time to tell you twice, Kitty,’ Mrs Shaughnessy said over and over again, her long, painted face not smiling in the least way whatsoever. If anything was broken, she’d said, the cost of it would have to be stopped out of the wages, and she’d spoken as though the wages would actually change hands. In Kathleen’s dreams Mrs Shaughnessy kept laughing, her chin going long and smooth and her large white teeth moving in her mouth. The dresses belonged to one of the King of England’s daughters, she explained, which was why they didn’t fit. And then Mary Florence came into the kitchen and said she was just back from Kilburn with a pair of shoes that belonged to someone else. The price of them could be stopped out of the wages, she suggested, and Mrs Shaughnessy agreed.