When Kathleen opened her eyes, roused by the alarm clock at half past six, she didn’t know where she was. Then one after another the details of the previous day impinged on her waking consciousness: the cork mats, the shed where the kindling was cut, the narrow face of the Shaughnessys’ son, the greasy doorknobs in the kitchen, the impatience in Mrs Shaughnessy’s voice. The reality was worse than the confusion of her dreams, and there was nothing magical about the softness of the rug beneath her bare feet: she didn’t even notice it. She lifted her night-dress over her head and for a moment caught a glimpse of her nakedness in the tarnished looking-glass – plumply rounded thighs and knees, the dimple in her stomach. She drew on stockings and underclothes, feeling even more lost than she had when she’d tried not to go to sleep. She knelt by her bed, and when she’d offered her usual prayers she asked that she might be taken away from the Shaughnessys’ house. She asked that her father would understand when she told him.
‘The master’s waiting on his breakfast, Kitty.’
‘I lit the range the minute I was down, ma’am.’
‘If you don’t get it going by twenty to seven it won’t be hot in time. I told you that yesterday. Didn’t you pull the dampers out?’
‘The paper wouldn’t catch, ma’am.’
‘If the paper wouldn’t catch you’ll have used a damp bit. Or maybe paper out of a magazine. You can’t light a fire with paper out of a magazine, Kitty.’
‘If I’d had a drop of paraffin, ma’am –’
‘My God, are you mad, child?’
‘At home we’d throw on a half cup of paraffin if the fire was slow, ma’am.’
‘Never bring paraffin near the range. If the master heard you he’d jump out of his skin.’
‘I only thought it would hurry it, ma’am.’
‘Set the alarm for six if you’re going to be slow with the fire. If the breakfast’s not on the table by a quarter to eight he’ll raise the roof. Have you the plates in the bottom oven?’
When Kathleen opened the door of the bottom oven a black kitten darted out, scratching the back of her hand in its agitation.
‘Great God Almighty!’ exclaimed Mrs Shaughnessy. ‘Are you trying to roast the poor cat?’
‘I didn’t know it was in there, ma’am.’
‘You lit the fire with the poor creature inside there! What were you thinking of to do that, Kitty?’
‘I didn’t know, ma’am –’
‘Always look in the two ovens before you light the range, child. Didn’t you hear me telling you?’
After breakfast, when Kathleen went into the dining-room to clear the table, Mrs Shaughnessy was telling her son about the kitten in the oven. ‘Haven’t they brains like turnips?’ she said, even though Kathleen was in the room. The son released a half-hearted smile, but when Kathleen asked him if he’d finished with the jam he didn’t reply. ‘Try and speak a bit more clearly, Kitty,’ Mrs Shaughnessy said later. ‘It’s not everyone can understand a country accent.’
The day was similar to the day before except that at eleven o’clock Mrs Shaughnessy said:
‘Go upstairs and take off your cap. Put on your coat and go down the street to Crawley’s. A half pound of round steak, and suet. Take the book off the dresser. He’ll know who you are when he sees it.’
So far, that was the pleasantest chore she had been asked to do. She had to wait in the shop because there were two other people before her, both of whom held the butcher in conversation. ‘I know your father,’ Mr Crawley said when he’d asked her name, and he held her in conversation also, wanting to know if her father was in good health and asking about her brothers and sisters. He’d heard about the buying of the Lallys’ field. She was the last uniformed maid in the town, he said, now that Nellie Broderick at Maclure’s had had to give up because of her legs.
‘Are you mad?’ Mrs Shaughnessy shouted at her on her return. ‘I should be down in the shop and not waiting to put that meat on. Didn’t I tell you yesterday not to be loitering in the mornings?’
‘I’m sorry, ma’am, only Mr Crawley –’
‘Go down to the shop and tell the master I’m delayed over cooking the dinner and can you assist him for ten minutes.’
But when Kathleen appeared in the grocery Mr Shaughnessy asked her if she’d got lost. The son was weighing sugar into grey paper bags and tying string round each of them. A murmur of voices came from the bar.
‘Mrs Shaughnessy is delayed over cooking the dinner,’ Kathleen said. ‘She was thinking I could assist you for ten minutes.’
‘Well, that’s a good one!’ Mr Shaughnessy threw back his head, exploding into laughter. A little shower of spittle damped Kathleen’s face. The son gave his half-hearted smile. ‘Can you make a spill, Kitty? D’you know what I mean by a spill?’ Mr Shaughnessy demonstrated with a piece of brown paper on the counter. Kathleen shook her head. ‘Would you know what to charge for a quarter pound of tea, Kitty? Can you weigh out sugar, Kitty? Go back to the missus, will you, and tell her to have sense.’
In the kitchen Kathleen put it differently, simply saying that Mr Shaughnessy hadn’t required her services. ‘Bring a scuttle of coal up to the dining-room,’ Mrs Shaughnessy commanded. ‘And get out the mustard. Can you make up mustard?’
Kathleen had never tasted mustard in her life; she had heard of it but did not precisely know what it was. She began to say she wasn’t sure about making some, but even before she spoke Mrs Shaughnessy sighed and told her to wash down the front steps instead.
‘I don’t want to go back there,’ Kathleen said on Sunday. ‘I can’t understand what she says to me. It’s lonesome the entire time.’
Her mother was sympathetic, but even so she shook her head. ‘There’s people I used to know,’ she said. ‘People placed like ourselves whose farms failed on them. They’re walking the roads now, no better than tinkers. I have ten children, Kathleen, and seven are gone from me. There’s five of them I’ll maybe never see again. It’s that you have to think of, pet.’
‘I cried the first night. 1 was that lonesome when I got into bed.’
‘But isn’t it a clean room you’re in, pet? And aren’t you given food to eat that’s better than you’d get here? And don’t the dresses she supplies save us an expense again? Wouldn’t you think of all that, pet?’
A bargain had been struck, her mother also reminded her, and a bargain was a bargain. Biddy said it sounded great, going out into the town for messages. She’d give anything to see a house like that, Biddy said, with the coal fires and a stairs.
‘I’d say they were well pleased with you,’ Kathleen’s father said when he came in from the yard later on. ‘You’d have been back here inside a day if they weren’t.’
She’d done her best, she thought as she rode away from the farmhouse on Mary Florence’s bicycle; if she’d done everything badly she would have obtained her release. She wept because she wouldn’t see Biddy and Con and her father and mother for another week. She dreaded the return to the desolate bedroom which her mother had reminded her was clean, and the kitchen where there was no one to keep her company in the evenings. She felt as if she could not bear it, more counting of the days until Sunday and when Sunday came the few hours passing so swiftly. But she knew, by now, that she would remain in the Shaughnessys’ house for as long as was necessary.
‘I must have you back by half six, Kitty,’ Mrs Shaughnessy said when she saw her. ‘It’s closer to seven now.’
Kathleen said she was sorry. She’d had to stop to pump the back tyre of her bicycle, she said, although in fact this was not true: what she’d stopped for was to wipe away the signs of her crying and to blow her nose. In the short time she had been part of Mrs Shaughnessy’s household she had developed the habit of making excuses, and of obscuring her inadequacies beneath lies that were easier than the truth.
‘Fry the bread like I showed you, Kitty. Get it brown on both sides. The master likes it crisp.’
There was something Mr Shau
ghnessy liked also, which Kathleen discovered when seven of her free Sunday afternoons had gone by. She was dusting the dining-room mantelpiece one morning when he came and stood very close to her. She thought she was in his way, and moved out of it, but a week or so later he stood close to her again, his breath warm on her cheek. When it happened the third time she felt herself blushing.
It was in this manner that Mr Shaughnessy rather than his wife came to occupy, for Kathleen, the central role in the household. The narrow-faced son remained as he had been since the day of her arrival, a dour presence, contributing little in the way of conversation and never revealing the fruits of his brooding silence. Mrs Shaughnessy, having instructed, had apparently played out the part she’d set herself. She came into the kitchen at midday to cook meat and potatoes and one of the milk puddings her husband was addicted to, but otherwise the kitchen was Kathleen’s province now and it was she who was responsible for the frying of the food for breakfast and for the six o’clock tea. Mrs Shaughnessy preferred to be in the shop. She enjoyed the social side of that, she told Kathleen; and she enjoyed the occasional half glass of sherry in the bar. ‘That’s me all over, Kitty. I never took to housework.’ She was more amiable in her manner, and confessed that she always found training a country girl an exhausting and irksome task and might therefore have been a little impatient. ‘Kitty’s settled in grand,’ she informed Kathleen’s father when he looked into the bar one fair-day to make a mortgage payment. He’d been delighted to hear that, he told Kathleen the following Sunday.
Mr Shaughnessy never said anything when he came to stand close to her, although on other occasions he addressed her pleasantly enough, even complimenting her on her frying. He had an easy way with him, quite different from his son’s. He was more like his two other children, the married daughter and the son who was in Limerick, both of whom Kathleen had met when they had returned to the house for an uncle’s funeral. He occasionally repeated a joke he’d been told, and Mrs Shaughnessy would laugh, her chin becoming lengthy and the skin tightening on her forehead. On the occasion of the uncle’s funeral his other son and his daughter laughed at the jokes also, but the son who’d remained at home only smiled. ‘Wait till I tell you this one, Kitty,’ he’d sometimes say, alone with her in the dining-room. He would tell her something Bob Crowe, who ran the barber’s shop for him, had heard from a customer, making the most of the anecdote in a way that suggested he was anxious to entertain her. His manner and his tone of voice denied that it had ever been necessary for him to stand close to her, or else that his practice of doing so had been erased from his memory.
But the scarlet complexion of Mr Shaughnessy’s face and the spiky grey hair, the odour of cigarette smoke that emanated from his clothes, could not be so easily forgotten by Kathleen. She no longer wept from loneliness in her bedroom, yet she was aware that the behaviour of Mr Shaughnessy lent the feeling of isolation an extra, vivid dimension, for in the farmhouse kitchen on Sundays the behaviour could not be mentioned.
Every evening Kathleen sat by the range, thinking about it. The black kitten that had darted out of the oven on her second morning had grown into a cat and sat blinking beside her chair. The alarm clock ticked loudly on the dresser. Was it something she should confess? Was it a sin to be as silent as she was when he came to stand beside her? Was it a sin to be unable to find the courage to tell him to leave her alone? Once, in the village, where the convent was, another girl in her class had pointed out a boy who was loitering with some other boys by the sign-post. That boy was always trying to kiss you, the girl said; he would follow you about the place, whispering to you. But although Kathleen often went home alone the boy never came near her. He wasn’t a bad-looking boy, she’d thought, she wouldn’t have minded much. She’d wondered if she’d mind the boys her sisters had complained about, who tried to kiss you when they were dancing with you. Pests, her sisters had called them, but Kathleen thought it was nice that they wanted to.
Mr Shaughnessy was different. When he stood close to her his breathing would become loud and unsteady. He always moved away quite quickly, when she wasn’t expecting him to. He walked off, never looking back, soundlessly almost.
Then one day, when Mrs Shaughnessy was buying a new skirt and the son was in the shop, he came into the kitchen, where she was scrubbing the draining boards. He came straight to where she was, as if between them there was some understanding that he should do so. He stood in a slightly different position from usual, behind her rather than at her side, and she felt for the first time his hands passing over her clothes.
‘Mr Shaughnessy!’ she whispered. ‘Mr Shaughnessy, now.’
He took no notice. Some part of his face was touching her hair. The rhythm of his breathing changed.
‘Mr Shaughnessy, I don’t like it.’
He seemed not to hear her; she sensed that his eyes were closed. As suddenly, and as quickly as always, he went away.
‘Well, Bob Crowe told me a queer one this evening,’ he said that same evening, while she was placing their plates of fried food in front of them in the dining-room. ‘It seems there’s a woman asleep in Clery’s shop window above in Dublin.’
His wife expressed disbelief. Bob Crowe would tell you anything, she said.
‘In a hypnotic trance, it seems. Advertising Odearest Mattresses.’
‘Ah, go on now! He’s pulling your leg, Des.’
‘Not a bit of him. She’ll stop there a week, it seems. The Guards have to move the crowds on.’
Kathleen closed the dining-room door behind her. He had turned to look at her when he’d said there was a woman asleep in Clery’s window, in an effort to include her in what he was retailing. His eyes had betrayed nothing of their surreptitious relationship, but Kathleen hadn’t been able to meet them.
‘We ploughed the field,’ her father said the following Sunday. ‘I’ve never turned up earth as good.’
She almost told him then. She longed to so much she could hardly prevent herself. She longed to let her tears come and to hear his voice consoling her. When she was a child she’d loved that.
‘You’re a great girl,’ he said.
Mr Shaughnessy took to attending an earlier Mass than his wife and son, and when they were out at theirs he would come into the kitchen. When she hid in her bedroom he followed her there. She’d have locked herself in the outside W.C. if there’d been a latch on the door.
‘Well, Kitty and myself were quiet enough here,’ he’d say in the dining-room later on, when the three of them were eating their midday dinner. She couldn’t understand how he could bring himself to speak like that, or how he could so hungrily eat his food, as though nothing had occurred. She couldn’t understand how he could act normally with his son or with his other children when they came on a visit. It was extraordinary to hear Mrs Shaughnessy humming her songs about the house and calling him by his Christian name.
‘The Kenny girl’s getting married,’ Mrs Shaughnessy said on one of these mealtime occasions. ‘Tyson from the hardware.’
‘I didn’t know she was doing a line with him.’
‘Oh, that’s been going on a long time.’
‘Is it the middle girl? The one with the peroxide?’
‘Enid she’s called.’
‘I wonder Bob Crowe didn’t hear that. There’s not much Bob misses.’
‘I never thought much of Tyson. But, sure, maybe they’re well matched.’
‘Did you hear that, Kitty? Enid Kenny’s getting married. Don’t go taking ideas from her.’ He laughed, and Mrs Shaughnessy laughed, and the son smiled. There wasn’t much chance of that, Kathleen thought. ‘Are you going dancing tonight?’ Mr Crawley often asked her on a Friday, and she would reply that she might, but she never did because it wasn’t easy to go alone. In the shops and at Mass no one displayed any interest in her whatsoever, no one eyed her the way Mary Florence had been eyed, and she supposed it was because her looks weren’t up to much. But they were good enough for Mr Shaughnessy, wit
h his quivering breath and his face in her hair. Bitterly, she dwelt on that; bitterly, she imagined herself turning on him in the dining-room, accusing him to his wife and son.
‘Did you forget to sweep the yard this week?’ Mrs Shaughnessy asked her. ‘Only it’s looking poor.’
She explained that the wind had blown in papers and debris from a knocked-over dustbin. She’d sweep it again, she said.
‘I hate a dirty backyard, Kitty.’
Was this why the other girls had left, she wondered, the girls whom Mrs Shaughnessy had trained, and who’d then gone off? Those girls, whoever they were, would see her, or would know about her. They’d imagine her in one uniform or the other, obedient to him because she enjoyed his attentions. That was how they’d think of her.
‘Leave me alone, sir,’ she said when she saw him approaching her the next time, but he took no notice. She could see him guessing she wouldn’t scream.
The Collected Stories Page 170