Selected Stories

Loving the father, Ellie already loved the child. If they turned her out, if she had to walk the roads, or find work in Moyleglass or some other town, she would. But Ellie didn’t want to do that; she didn’t want to find herself penniless because it would endanger the birth. She would never do that was the decision she had privately reached the moment she was certain she was to have a child.

‘Mulreavy,’ her uncle said again.

‘I know who he is.’

Her mother sat staring down at the lines of grain that years of scrubbing had raised on the surface of the kitchen table. Her mother had said everything she intended to say: disgrace, shame, a dirtiness occurring when people’s backs were turned, all the thanks you get for what you give, for sacrifices made. ‘Who’d want you now?’ her mother had asked her, more than once.

‘Mind you, I’m not saying Mulreavy’ll bite,’ Ellie’s uncle said. ‘I’m not saying he’d take the thing on.’

Ellie didn’t say anything. She left the kitchen and walked out into the yard, where the turkeys screeched and ran towards her, imagining she carried meal to scatter, as often she did. She passed them by, and let herself through the black iron gate that led to the sloping three-cornered field beyond the outbuildings, the worst two acres of her uncle’s property. Rag-weed and gorse grew in profusion, speckled rock-surfaces erupted. It was her favourite field, perhaps because she had always heard it cursed and as a child had felt sorry for it. ‘Oh, now, that’s nice!’ the father of her unborn baby said when she told him she felt sorry for the three-cornered field. It was then that he’d said he wished he’d known her as a child, and made her describe herself as she had been.

When it was put to Mulreavy he pretended offence. He didn’t expostulate, for that was not his way. But as if in melancholy consideration of a personal affront he let the two ends of his mouth droop, as he sometimes did when he held a potato in his palm, shaking his head over its unsatisfactory size or shape. Ash from his cigarette dribbled down his shirt-front, the buttons of a fawn cardigan open because the day was warm, his shirt-collar open also and revealing a line of grime where it had been most closely in contact with the skin of his neck.

‘Well, that’s a quare one,’ Mulreavy said, his simulated distaste slipping easily from him, replaced by an attempt at outraged humour.

‘There’s a fairish sum,’ Mr Larrissey said, but didn’t say what he had in mind and Mulreavy didn’t ask. Nor did he ask who the father was. He said in a by-the-way voice that he was going out with a woman from Ballina who’d come to live in Moyleglass, a dressmaker’s assistant; but the information was ignored.

‘I only thought it was something would interest you,’ Mr Larrissey said.

Their two vehicles were drawn up on the road, a rusting Ford Cortina and Mulreavy’s lorry, the driving-side windows of both wound down. Mulreavy offered a cigarette. Mr Larrissey took it. As if about to drive away, he had put his hand on the gear when he said he’d only thought the proposition might be of interest.

‘What’s the sum?’ Mulreavy asked when the cigarettes were lit, and a horn hooted because the vehicles were blocking the road. Neither man took any notice: they were of the neighbourhood, local people, the road was more theirs than strangers’.

When the extent of the money offered was revealed Mulreavy knew better than to react, favourably or otherwise. It would be necessary to give the matter thought, he said, and further considerations were put to him, so that at leisure he could dwell on those also.

Ellie’s mother knew how it was, and how it would be: her brother would profit from the episode. The payment would be made by her: the accumulated pension, the compensation from the time of the accident in 1978. Her brother saw something for himself in the arrangement he hoped for with the potato dealer; the moment he had mentioned Mulreavy’s name he’d been aware of a profit to be made. Recognizing at first, as she had herself, only shame and folly in the fact that his niece was pregnant, he had none the less explored the situation meticulously: that was his way. She had long been aware of her brother’s hope that one day Ellie would marry some suitable young fellow who would join them in the farmhouse and could be put to work, easing the burden in the fields: that was how the debt of taking in a sister and a niece might at last be paid. But with a disaster such as there had been, there would be no young fellow now. Instead there was the prospect of Mulreavy, and what her brother had established in his mind was that Mulreavy could ease the burden too. A middle-aged potato dealer wasn’t ideal for the purpose, but he was better than nothing.