Selected Stories

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.

‘I don’t know did I ever speak a word to her,’ she said when he began to go out with the remaining Caslin daughter. Sensible, she looked.

‘Ah, sure, anything,’ the youngest of the three Caslin girls always said when Paulie told her what films were on and asked which she’d like to see. When the lights went down he waited a bit before he put an arm around her, as he always had with her sisters and with Maeve. He hadn’t been able to wait with Patsy Finucane.

The sensible look that Paulie’s mother had noted in Annie Caslin was expressed in a matter-of-fact manner. Sentiment played little part in her stalwart, steady nature. She was the tallest and in a general way the biggest of the three Caslin girls, with black hair that she curled and distinctive features that challenged one another for dominance – the slightly large nose, the wide mouth, the unblinking gaze. Paulie took her out half a dozen times before she confessed that what she wanted to do was to live in a town. She’d had the roadside Master McGrath, she said; she’d had serving petrol at the pumps. ‘God, I don’t know how you’d stand it up in the bogs,’ she said before Paulie had a chance to ask her if she’d be interested in coming up to the farmhouse. Even Drunbeg would do her, she said, and got work six months later in the fertilizer factory.

Paulie asked other girls to go out with him, but by then it had become known that what he was after was marriage. One after another, they made excuses, a fact that Hartigan was aware of when he pulled up the Toyota one morning beside a gateway where Paulie was driving in posts. He didn’t say anything, but often Hartigan didn’t.

‘Will it rain, Mr Hartigan?’ Paulie asked him.

‘The first time I saw your mammy,’ Hartigan said, rejecting a discussion about the weather, ‘she was stretching out sheets on the bushes. Six years of age I was, out after a hare.’

‘A while ago, all right.’

‘Amn’t I saying it to you?’

Not understanding the conversation, Paulie vaguely shook his head. He struck the post he was easing into the ground another blow. Hartigan said:

‘I’d take the big field off you.’

‘Ah no, no.’

That was why he had stopped. It might even have been that he’d driven down specially when he heard the thud of the sledgehammer on the posts, saying to himself that it was a good time for a conversation.

‘I wouldn’t want to sell the field, Mr Hartigan.’

‘But wouldn’t you do well all the same if you did? Is it a life at all for a young fellow?’