Selected Stories

‘Ah sure, it doesn’t suit everyone,’ Dessie Coglan said in Brady’s Bar. Any day now it was for Rosita and he was full of that. He never knew a woman get pregnant as easy as Rosita, he said. He didn’t ask Liam Pat if he’d used the telephone number he’d given him, if that was how he’d got work. ‘You could end up with fourteen of them,’ he said. Rosita herself was one of eleven.

Liam Pat didn’t say much, either to O’Dwyer or at home or to Dessie Coglan. Time hung heavy while old Hoyne worked out the few months left of his years with O’Dwyer. Old Hoyne had never risen to being more than a general labourer, and Liam Pat knew he never would either.

He walked out along the Mountross road every afternoon, the icy air of a bitterly cold season harsh on his hands and face. Every day of January and a milder February, going by the rusted gates of Mountross Abbey and the signpost to Ballyfen, he thought about the funeral at which there’d been the unwanted presence of the lads, and sometimes saw it as his own.

All his life he would never be able to tell anyone. He could never describe that silent house or the stolid features of Mr McTighe or repeat Feeny’s talk. He could never speak of the girls on the bus, how he hadn’t been able to light a match, or how so abruptly he realized that this was the second attempt. He could never say that he’d stood with the sports bag on the river wall, that nothing had happened when it struck the water. Nor that he cried when he walked away, that tears ran down his cheeks and on to his clothes, that he cried for the bomber who might have been himself.

He might have left the bag on the bus, as he had thought he would. He might have hurried down the stairs and jumped off quickly. But in his fear he had found a shred of courage and it had to do with the boy: he knew that now and could remember the feeling. It was his mourning of the boy, as he might have mourned himself.

On his walks, and when he sat down to his meals, and when he listened to his parents’ conversation, the mourning was still there, lonely and private. It was there in Brady’s Bar and in the shops of the town when he went on his mother’s messages. It would be there when again he took charge of a concrete-mixer for O’Dwyer, when he shovelled wet cement and worked in all weathers. On the Mountross road Liam Pat didn’t walk with the stride of Michael Collins, but wondered instead about the courage his fear had allowed, and begged that his mourning would not ever cease.

A Friend in the Trade

They fell in love when A Whiter Shade of Pale played all summer. They married when Tony Orlando sang Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree

. These tunes are faded memories now, hardly there at all, and they’ve forgotten Procol Harum and Suzi Quatro and Brotherhood of Man, having long ago turned to Brahms.

The marriage has managed well, moving with ease through matrimony’s stages, weathering its storms. It seems absurd to Clione when she looks back that she fussed so because at their first dinner party her husband of a month innocently remarked that she hadn’t made the profiteroles herself. It was ridiculous in turn, James has apologized, that he banged out of the house when coffee was spilt over Pedbury’s The Optimistic Gardener, ridiculous that he had not been calm when they missed the night train at the Gare de Lyon, ridiculous that they’d rowed about it when the workmen laid the wrong tiles.

The intensity of passion, and touchiness surfacing quickly, gave way to familial pleasure and familial pressures – three children growing up, their grandparents growing old. Tranquillity came when the children grew up a little more, when a Sunset Home took in a grandfather, a Caring Fold a grandmother. Give and take ruled the middle years; the marriage took on the odds and won. Passed through the battle, surviving dog days’ ennui, love now seems surer than before.

Clione is still as slender as ever she was, with wide blue eyes that still, occasionally, have a startled look. Beauty has not finished with her: her delicately made features – straight classic nose and sculptured lips – are as they always were, and cobweb wrinkles have an attraction of their own. She is glad she did not marry someone else and could not ever have considered being unfaithful. She knows – she doesn’t have to ask – that her husband has not been faithless either.