Selected Stories

‘In case they’d try it on anyone else,’ Alicia was saying, ‘isn’t it better they should be shown up? Is a man who’d get up to that kind of game safe to be left in people’s houses the way a workman is?’

That morning they didn’t mention the matter again. They washed up the breakfast dishes and then Catherine went out to the shops, which was always her chore, while Alicia cleaned the stairs and the hall, the day being a Thursday. As Catherine made her way through the familiar streets, and then while Mr Deegan sliced bacon for her and Gilligan greeted her in the hardware, she thought about the journey her husband had made that Wednesday evening in September. Involuntarily, she glanced into Healy’s, where he had bought the Evening Press, and into McKenny’s bar. Every evening except Sunday he had brought back the news, bits of gossip, anything he’d heard. It was at this time, too, that he went to Confession, on such occasions leaving the house half an hour earlier.

In French Street a countrywoman opened her car door without looking and knocked a cyclist over. ‘Ah, no harm done,’ the youth on the bicycle said, the delivery boy for Lawless the West Street butcher, the last delivery boy in the town. ‘Sure, I never saw him at all,’ the countrywoman protested to Catherine as she went by. The car door was dinged, but the woman said what did it matter if the lad was all right?

Culliney, the traveller from Limerick Shirts, was in town that day. Matthew had always bought his shirts direct from Culliney, the same striped pattern, the stripe blue or brown. Culliney had his measurements, the way he had the measurements of men all over Munster and Connacht, which was his area. Catherine could tell when she saw Culliney coming towards her that he didn’t know about the death, and she braced herself to tell him. When she did so he put a hand on her arm and spoke in a whisper, saying that Matthew had been a good man. If there was anything he could ever do, he said, if there was any way he could help. More people said that than didn’t.

It was then that Catherine saw Mrs Leary. The house-painter’s wife was pushing her pram, a child holding on to it as she advanced. Catherine crossed the street, wondering if the woman had seen her and suspecting she had. In Jerety’s she selected a pan loaf from the yesterday’s rack, since neither she nor Alicia liked fresh bread and yesterday’s was always reduced. When she emerged, Mrs Leary was not to be seen.

‘Nothing only a woman knocked young Nallen off his bike,’ she reported to Alicia when she returned to the house. ‘Is he a Nallen, that boy of Lawless’s?’

‘Or a Keane, is he? Big head on him?’

‘I don’t think he’s a Keane. Someone told me a Nallen. Whoever he is, there’s no harm done.’ She didn’t say she’d seen Mrs Leary because she didn’t want to raise the subject of what had occurred again. She knew that Alicia was right: the bill would keep coming unless she did something about it. Once they’d set out on the course they’d chosen, why should the Learys give up? Alicia didn’t refer to the Learys either but that evening, when they had switched off the television and were preparing to go to bed, Catherine said:

‘I think I’ll pay them. Simplest, that would be.’

With her right hand on the newel of the banister, about to ascend the stairs, Alicia stared in disbelief at her sister. When Catherine nodded and continued on her way to the kitchen she followed her.

‘But you can’t.’ Alicia stood in the doorway while Catherine washed and rinsed the cups they’d drunk their bedtime tea from. ‘You can’t just pay them what isn’t owing.’

Catherine turned the tap off at the sink and set the cups to drain, slipping the accompanying saucers between the plastic bars of the drainer. Tomorrow she would withdraw the same sum from the building-society account and take it herself to the Learys in Brady’s Lane. She would stand there while a receipt was issued.

‘Catherine, you can’t hand out more than two hundred pounds.’

‘I’d rather.’

As she spoke, she changed her mind about the detail of the payment. Matthew had been obliging Leary by paying cash, but there was no need to oblige him any more. She would arrange for the Irish Nationwide to draw a cheque payable to T. P. Leary. She would bring it round to the Learys instead of a wad of notes.

‘They’ve taken you for a fool,’ Alicia said.

‘I know they have.’

‘Leary should go behind bars. You’re aiding and abetting him. Have sense, woman.’