Selected Stories

As months and then years went by, the child walked and spoke and suffered childhood ills, developed preferences, acquired characteristics that slipped away again or stubbornly remained. Ellie watched her mother and her uncle ageing, while they in turn were reminded by the child’s presence of their own uneasy companionship in the farmhouse when they were as young as the child was now. Mulreavy, who did not go in for nostalgia or observing changes in other people, increased his potato yield. Like Mr Larrissey, he would have preferred the child who had been born to be a boy since a boy, later on, would be more useful, but he did not ever complain on this count. Mr Larrissey himself worked less, in winter often spending days sitting in the kitchen, warm by the Esse stove. For Ellie’s mother, passing time did not alter her belief that the bought husband was her daughter’s reprimand on earth.

All that was how things were on the farm and in the farmhouse. A net of compromise and acceptance and making the best of things held the household together. Only the child was aware of nothing, neither that a man had been bought to be her father nor that her great-uncle had benefited by the circumstances, nor that her grandmother had come to terms with a punishment, nor that her mother still kept faith with an improper summer love. The child’s world when she was ten had more to do with reading whole pages more swiftly than she had a year ago, and knowing where Heligoland was, and reciting by heart The Wreck of the Hesperus.

But, without warning, the household was disturbed. Ellie was aware only of some inner restlessness, its source not identified, which she assumed would pass. But it did not pass, and instead acquired the intensity of unease: what had been satisfactory for the first ten years of her child’s life was strangely not so now. In search of illumination, she pondered all that had occurred. She had been right not to wish to walk the roads with her fatherless infant, she had been right to agree to the proposal put to her: looking back, she could not see that she should, in any way whatsoever, have done otherwise. A secret had been kept; there were no regrets. It was an emotion quite unlike regret that assailed her. Her child smiled back at her from a child’s innocence, and she remembered those same features, less sure and less defined, when they were newly in the farmhouse, and wondered how they would be when another ten years had passed. Not knowing now, her child would never know. She would never know that her birth had been accompanied by money changing hands. She would never know that, somewhere else, her father forgave the sins of other people, and offered Our Saviour’s blood and flesh in solemn expiation.

‘Can you manage them?’ Ellie’s husband asked when she was loading sacks on to the weighing scales, for she had paused in the work as if to rest.

‘I’m all right.’

‘Take care you don’t strain yourself.’

He was often kind in practical ways. She was strong, but the work was not a woman’s work and, although it was never said, he was aware of this. In the years of their marriage they had never quarrelled or even disagreed, not being close enough for that, and in this way their relationship reflected that of the brother and sister they shared the house with.

‘They’re a good size, the Kerrs,’ he said, referring to the produce they worked with. ‘We hit it right this year.’

‘They’re nice all right.’

She had loved her child’s father for every day of their child’s life and before it. She had falsified her confessions and a holy baptism. Black, ugly lies were there when their child smiled from her innocence, nails in another cross. It hadn’t mattered at first, when their child wouldn’t have understood.

‘I’ll stop now,’ Ellie said, recording in the scales book the number of sacks that were ready to be sealed. ‘I have the tea to get.’

Her mother was unwell, confined to her bedroom. It was usually her mother who attended to the meals.

‘Go on so, Ellie,’ he said. He still smoked forty cigarettes a day, his life’s indulgence, a way to spend a fraction of the money he accumulated. He had bought no clothes since his purchase of the christening suit except for a couple of shirts, and he questioned the necessity of the clothes Ellie acquired herself or for her child. Meanness was a quality he was known for; commercially, it had assisted him.

‘Oh, I got up,’ Ellie’s mother said in the kitchen, the table laid and the meal in the process of preparation. ‘I couldn’t lie there.’

‘You’re better?’

‘I’d say I was getting that way.’

Mr Larrissey was washing traces of fertilizer from his hands at the sink, roughly rubbing in soap. From the yard came the cries of the child, addressing the man she took to be her father as she returned from her evening task of ensuring that the bullocks still had grass to eat.