THE SPRINGS OF AFFECTION---- by MAEVE BRENNAN

Delia Bagot died suddenly and quietly, alone in her bed, with the door shut, and six years later, after eight months of being bedridden, Martin, her husband, died, attended by a nursing nun and his eighty-seven-year-old twin sister, Min. And at last Min was released from the duty she had imposed on herself, to remain with him as long as he needed her. She could go home now, back to her flat in Wexford, and settle into the peace and quiet she had enjoyed before Delia’s summoned her to the suburbs of Dublin. To the suburbs of Dublin and the freedom of that house where she had wandered so often in her fancy. For fifty years she had reminiscence and imagined about their private lives, ever since Delia appeared out of the blue and fascinated Martin, the born bachelor, into marrying her. Min wasn’t likely to forget that wedding day, the misery of it, the anguish of it, the abomination of deprivation as she and her mother stood together and looked at him, the happy bridegroom, standing there grinning his head off as though he had ascended into heaven. She and her mother and her two sisters, all three of them gone now, and Martin, too, gone. Min thought of the neat graves, one by one—a sister’s grave, a sister’s grave, a mother’s grave, a brother’s grave—all of those people gone, all gone, all present, like medals on the earth. And she thought it was fitting that she should be the one to remain alive, because out of them all she was the one who was always faithful to the family. She was the only one of the lot of them who hadn’t gone of and got married. She had never wanted to assert herself like that, never needed to. She had wondered at their lack of shame as they exhibited themselves, Clare and Polly with their husbands and Martin with poor Delia, the poor thing. They didn’t seem to care what anybody thought of them when they got caught up in that excitement. It was disgusting, and they seemed to know it, the way they pretended their only concern was with the new clothes they’d have and the flowers they’d grow in their very own gardens. And now it was over for them, and they might just as well have controlled themselves, for all the good they had of it. And she, standing alone as always, had lived to sum them all up. It was a great satisfaction to see finality rising up like the sun. Min thought not many people know that satisfaction. To watch the end of all was not much different from watching the beginning of things, and if you weren’t ever going to take part anyway, then to watch the end was far and away better. You could be jealous of people who were starting out, but you could hardly be jealous of the dead.

Not that I was ever jealous, Min thought. God forbid that I should encourage small thoughts in myself, but I couldn’t help bout despise Delia that day, the way she stood looking up at Martin as though she was ready to fall down on her knees before him. She made a show of herself that day. We were late getting out for the wedding. We were late getting started, and then, we were all late getting there and they were all waiting for us. And after it was over and they were married and we were all in the garden, she came running up to my mother and she said, “Oh, I was afraid you weren’t coming. I began to imagine Martin had changed his mind about me. I thought I would burst with impatience and longing. I had such a longing to see his face, and the, when I saw you driving up, I still had a great fear something might come between us. I’ll never forget how impatient I was—I see it would be easy to go mad with love.” She said that to my mother. “Mad with love,” she said. My mother just looked at her, and when she flew off, all full of herself as she was that day, my mother turned and looked at me, and said to me, “Min, I am an old woman, but never in my life have I spoken like that. Never in my life have I said the like of that. All the years I’ve lived, and I’ve never, never showed myself to feel like that about anybody, let alone be that open about it. That girl has something the matter with her. My heart goes out to Martin, I can tell you. there’s something lacking in her.”

Min remembered that Martin’s wedding day was a very long day, with many different views and sense, country roads, country lanes, gardens and orchards and fields and streams, and a house with rooms that multiplied in recollection, because she only visited them that one time, and they attracted her very much—dim, old rooms that maintained the rooms were able to remain unknown even when you were standing in them. it was the same with the people out there in the country—even when they were most friendly and open they kept a lot of themselves hidden. Min thought they were like a strange tribe that only shows up in force on festival days.

The days before the wedding were a great strain, and Min always said she never understood how they got themselves out of the house the morning of the wedding. If it had not been that Markey was standing outside with the horse and car they had hired, they might all have stayed in the house and let Martin find his way out to Oylegate as best he could. He might have changed his mind then, and remained at them where he belonged. Driving out of the town of Wexford, they crossed the bridge at Ferrycarrig and there was Slaney pouring away under them, flowing straight for the harbor as unconcernedly as though it was any old day. And then the long drive out to Oylegate. And when they got to Oylegate the chapel yard was waiting for them, looking more like an arena than a religious place. And the chapel itself, all solemn and hedged in with flowers so full in bloom that they seemed to be overflowing their petals, color flowing freely through the air. Min drew deep breaths, filling her lungs with fright. The fright built up inside her chest—she could feel it beginning to smother her. There was no air in the place. She said to her mother later, “I nearly got a headache in the chapel. I thought I might have to walk outside. It was too close in here. I began to feel weak. I thought we’d never get away out of the place.”

Polly was listening. Polly always seemed to be listening in time to turn your own words against you.

Polly said, “You always tell everybody you never had a headache in your life. You always say you never had time to have a headache. You leave the headaches to the rest of us. Clare and Polly have time for all that nonsense, imagining themselves to be delicate—that’s what you always say. And then in the next breath, every time anything goes against you, you tell us you almost had a headache. If you almost got a headache it would show on your face. You’re overcome by your own bad humor—that’s all that’s the matter with you.”

“In the name of god,” their mother said, “this is ot the time for the two of you to start fighting. Do you want to make a show of us all, have them all laughing at us more than they’re laughing already?”

They were walking though the chapel yard after the wedding and Min went ahead, looking hurried, as though she had left something outside in the road and wanted to look for it. In Polly’s voice she heard the enmity that had been oppressing her all day, enmity that came at her out of the streets of the town as they started to drive out here, distant, incomprehensible enmity that rose up at her from the bridge at Ferrycarrig, and from the road itself, and from the fields and trees and cottages, they passed, and even from the sky itself, blue and white and summery though it was. Even the faraway sky looked satisfied to see her in the condition she was in. Min didn’t know what condition she misunderstood. She knew that something had happened that deprived her of an approbation so natural that she had always taken it for granted. She only noticed it now that she missed it—it was as though the whole world had turned against her. Polly must have rehearsed that speech—Polly was very spiteful. But where had Polly found that tone of voice, so hard and condescending? She’s very sure of herself all of a sudden, Min thought. I must have given myself away, somehow. But what was there to give away—Min knew she had done nothing to earn that tone of contempt from a younger sister. She had an awful feeling of being in disgrace with somebody she had never seen and who had never liked her very much, never, not even when she was a little mite trying to help her mother with the younger children. No, wherever it came from, this impersonal dislike had been lying in wait for her all her life. And it was clear from the way people were looking at her that everybody knew about it. she couldn’t even say a word to her mother about a headache without being attacked as though she was a scoundrel. All the good marks she had won at school were forgotten. Nothing was known about he now except that she had presumed to a place far above her station in life. She had believed she could fly sky-high, with her brains for wings. Nobody notices me as I am, Min though; all they can see is the failure. I was done out of my right, but they’d rather say, She got too big for her boots, and Pride must have a fall. She had to face up to it. there was nothing she could say in her own defense, and she condemned herself if she remained silent. It is impossible to prove you are not a disappointed old maid.

Min remembered Martin’s wedding day as the day when everything changed in their lives at home. My mother was never the same after Martin married, she thought, and it was then, too, that Clare and Polly became restless and hard to get along with, and stopped joining in the conversation we always had about the family fortunes and talked instead about what they were going to do with their own lives. Their lives—and what about sticking together as a family, as we had been brought up to do? They got very selfish all of a sudden, and the house seemed very empty, as though he had died. After the wedding he never came back again except as a visitor. They lived only around the corner but it wasn’t the same, knowing he was not sleeping in his own bed.

There was eight years between Delia and Martin, and then, since he lived six years after her, there was fourteen years between them, and now that they were both gone none of it mattered at all. they might have been born hundreds of years apart, Min thought with satisfaction. But it was not likely that Martin would ever have belonged to any family except his own, or that he would ever have had sisters who were not Min and Clare and Polly, or that he would ever have had another woman for his mother than their own mother, who had sacrificed everything for them and asked them in return only that they stick together as a family, and build themselves up, and make a wall around themselves that nobody could see through, let alone climb. What she had in mind was a fort, a fortress, where they could build themselves up in private and strengthen their hold on the earth, because in the long run that is what matters—a firm foothold and a roof over your head. But all that hope ended and all their hard work was and all their hard work was mocked when Delia Kelly walked into their lives. She smashed us up, Min thought, and got us all out into the open where blood didn’t count anymore, and where blood wasn’t thicker than water, and where the only mystery was, what did he see in her. It was like the end of the world, knowing her was at the mercy of somebody outside the family. A farmer’s daughter is all she was, even if she had attended the Loreto convent and owned certificates to show what a good education she had.

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Min sat beside her own gas fire in her own flat in Wexford and considered life and crime and punishment according to the laws of arithmetic. She counted up and down the years, and added and subtracted the questions and answers, and found that she came out with a very tidy balance in her favor. She glanced over to the old brown chest that now held those certificates, still in the big brown paper envelope that Delia had kept them in. Min intended to do away wit the certificates, but not yet. She liked looking at them—especially at the one given for violin playing. It was strange that in spite of her good memory she had quite forgotten that Delia had a little reputation as a musician when she first met Martin. A very little reputation, and she had come by it easily, because she had been given every chance. All the chanced in Min’s own family had gone to Martin, because he was the boy, and he took all their chances with him when he left. And spoiled his own chances for good, because he did nothing for the rest of his life, tied down as he was, slaving to support a wife and children, turning himself into a nobody. After all that promise and all that talk and all those plans he made nothing of himself. A few pounds in the bank, a few sticks of furniture, a few books, and a garden that still bloomed although it had gone untended for six years—that was the sum of his life, all he had to show for himself. He would have done better to think of his mother, and stay at home, and benefit from the encouragement of his own family, all of them pushing for him in everything he did. With his ability and his brains and the nice way he had about him, he could have done anything. he could have risen to any height, a natural leader like him, able to be at ease anywhere with anybody. As it was he died friendless. How could he have friends when he was ashamed to invite anybody to the house? he was ashamed of Delia and ashamed of the house, and more than anything else, he was unwilling to let people know of his unhappiness. He was like all of us in that. Min thought, proud and sensitive and fond o our privacy. Delia came from another class of people altogether. They were a different breed, more coarse-grained than we are, country people, accustomed to being out in all weathers plowing, and gathering in the hay, and dealing with animals. They had no thoughts in their heads beyond saving the corn. They tried to be friendly; Min gave them that much. She wanted to be fair. But she didn’t trust them, and in any case they were rejoicing over herself and her mother, because martin made himself such an easy catch. Min didn’t like to see mother being made a fool of, and Martin too being made a fool of, because he didn’t know what he was doing when he turned around and got married. He went out of his head about that girl, and with longing, all decency gone. He was like somebody in a delirium. Min couldn’t help feeling a bit contemptuous of him, to see him so helpless. And then the same thing overcame Clare and Polly, Clare marrying a dirty shabby fellow nearly old enough to be her father, and Polly marrying a commercial traveller and having a child after another until she nearly had her mother and Min out in the street with the expense she put on them. But Martin started it all, vanishing out of their lives as casually ass though he had never been more than a lodger in the house.

It was a shame, what happened, all their plans gone for nothing. By that time they were all out working—Polly in the knitting factory, Clare in the newsagent’s, Martin in the Country Surveyor’s office, and Min in the dressmaking business. She was a dressmaker from the beginning, though no choice of her own, and she made a good job out of it. everybody said that she was very reliable and that she had good taste and style. As soon as she could manage it she moved the sewing machine out of her mother’s front parlor and into the rooms on the Main Street, where she now lived on her own, satisfied with how everything had turned out. One way and another, she had had a title to these rooms for almost sixty years. The house changed owners, but Min remained on. She had no intention of giving up her flat, especially since her rent included the three little atticky rooms on the third floor, the uppermost top floor of the house. She showed great foresight when she had those top-floor rooms included in her original arrangement, all those many years ago. Now she had made the top floor into a little flat, makeshift but very nice. She found young couples liked it for the first years or so of their married lives. And she still had the lease o f the little house at the corner of Georges Street and Oliver Plunkett Street, where her mother had taken them all to live when they were still babies. That little house Min had turned, in her informal way, into two flats, and she had the rent from them. and she had her old-age pension, and sometimes in the ban—nobody knew how much, although there were many guesses. Some said she was too clever for her own good, too sharp altogether. The butcher downstairs under her flat hated her. She didn’t care. She had the last laugh. He could stand in the doorway of his shop and watch her coming up the street, and give her all the black looks he liked—she didn’t care. She couldn’t help laughing when she thought of how sure he was when he bought the house that he would be able to get rid of her simply by telling her she wasn’t wanted, and that he needed the whole house for his growing family. She wasn’t going to die to suit him and she didn’t care whether he wanted her or not. It had been presumptuous of him to imagine she would care whether he wanted her there or didn’t want her there. He even had had the impertinence to tell her that he and his wife had the greatest respect for her. Min didn’t know the wife and she knew the people the wife came from. No need to see people of that class to know what they were, and what their “respect” was worth. She told the butcher to his face that he might as well leave her alone. she wasn’t going to budge. Of course, it would be very nice and convenient for him only to have to walk upstairs to his tea at night after he shut up the shop, but he was going to have to wait for his convenience. A narrow gate alongside his shop entrance led into a covered passage, and there was her downstairs front door at the side of the house, as private as you please. She was very well off there. The place was nicely fixed up. she liked being there in the flat alone, with the downstairs door locked and the door of her flat locked and the fire going and the electric reading lamp at her shoulder and an interesting book to read and the day’s paper to hand, in case she felt like going over it again. And she had Delia’s little footstool to keep her feet off the floor. She thought it was like a miracle the way things had evened out in the end. She had gone around and around and up and down for all those years, doing her duty and observing the rules of life as far as she knew them, and her feet had stopped walking on the exact sport where her road ended—here in this room, with everything gathered around her, and everything in its right place. Her mother had always said that Min was the one who would keep the flag flying on matter what. Min had never in her life been content to sit down and do nothing, but now she was quite content to sit idle. What she saw about her in the room was a job well done. She had not known until now that a job well done creates an eminence that you can rest on.

The room where she sat beside the fire, and where she spent nearly all of her time, had been her workroom in the old days. It was the front room, running the whole width of the narrow old house, and it had a high ceiling and three tall windows. Those windows were curtained in thin blue stuff that showed gaps of darkness outside when she pulled them together at night. Min didn’t care. Often she didn’t bother to pull them but just left them open. The house opposite was all given over to offices, dead at night, and in any case, she told herself once and again when she felt anxious in her lonesomeness, she had nothing worth to steal… or hide. It was only a manner of speaking with her that she had noting to hide: she meant that she wasn’t afraid to be alone at night in her dwellings with the windows wide open to the street below.

There were three doors in the wall that faced the three windows. Two of the doors led into the two smaller rooms of the flat, and the middle door led out into the hall. One of the smaller rooms used to be her fitting room, and the tall gilt mirror was still attached to the wall there. It was Min’s bedroom now, although more and more she slept on the narrow studio couch against the wall in her big room. The gas fire was on so much, the big room was always warm. She craved the warmth it provided. She believed the climate in Wexford to be warmer than in Dublin, and she blamed the six years she had spent living with her brother for the colds that plagued her life now. She wore two cardigans and sometimes a shawl as well, over he woollen pullover. She buttoned only the top button of the outer cardigan. The inner cardigan she buttoned from top to bottom. Her pullover had long sleeves, and so she appeared with thick stuffed arms that ended at the wrist in three worn edges—green of the pullover, beige of the inner cardigan, and mottled brown of the outer cardigan, which was of very heavy English wool, an Aran knit, Min called it in her head. Her hands were mottled too, brown on pink, and she had very small yellow nails that were always cut short. She was very small and thin, and only a little stooped, and in the street she walked briskly, with no hesitation. She went out every day to buy a newspaper, and she bought food. Bread, milk, sometimes a slice of cooked ham or a tomato. She liked hard-boiled eggs. She nodded to very few people as she went along on her daily errands, and very few people stopped to speak to her. She was a tiny old woman, dressed in black, wearing a scrap of a hat she had made herself and decorated with an eye veil.

She read a good deal, leaning attentively back toward the weal light given by the lamp she had taken from Delia’s bedside table. Before getting the lamp she had relied on a naked bulb screwed into a socket in the middle of the ceiling. She was extremely frugal in her ways—she aimed to save, she had never lost the habit of rigid economy, and in f act she enjoyed pinching her pennies. She hadn’t amassed a great fortune, but it was the gathering, and amassing she enjoyed as she enjoyed her wealth grow. She looked at people with calculation not for what she might get from them but for what they might take from her if she gave them the chance. She wasn’t inclined to gossip. She admitted to disliking or hating people, only to the degree in which they reminded her of a certain type of class. “Oh! I hates that class of person,” she would say, or sometimes “Oh, that’s not a nice class of person at all.” Grimaces, winks, mock anger and mock piety were her repertoire, together with a collection of sarcastic or humorous phrases she had found useful in her youth. But she saw few people—they could have been invisible.

In the days when this was her workroom, the furniture had been sewing machines, ironing boards in plain colors, storage shelves, storage shelves, and, down the center of the room, the huge cutting table that was always having to be cleared of its litter of fashion books and paper patterns, and cups of cold tea, and scissors, and scraps and ribbons of cloth, and pins, and old safety pins. Underfoot there was always a field of thread and straight pins. Mountains of color and acres of texture were submerged in that room under the flat, tideless peace of min’s old age. The gas fire glowed red and orange—it was her only extravagance. On the floor was a flowered carpet that had once been the pride of Delia’s front sitting room in Dublin, and the room was furnished with Min’s souvenirs—Delia’s books, Martin’s books, Delia’s low chair, Martin’s armchair. She had Delia’s sewing basket, the old one, and Martin’s framed map of Dublin. On the fourth finger of her left hand she wore Martin’s wedding ring. She had slipped it from his dead hand. She told herself she wanted to save it from grave robbers.

If she lifted her eyes from her book she could see, down a length of narrow side street, the sky over the harbor, and if she stood up and walked to the window she could see the water. Below her windows there was the Main Street. The streets in Wexford are very narrow, and crooked rather than winding. At some points the Main Street is only wide enough to allow one car to pass at a time, and the side path for pedestrians shrinks to the width of a plank. There are always children bobbing along with one foot in the street and one off the path, and children dodging and running, making intricacies among the slowly moving bicycles and cars. It is a small, worn, angular town with plain unmatched houses that are dried into color by the sun and washed into color by the rain. There is nothing mysterious or dark about Wexford. The sun comes up very close to the town, and sometimes it seems to be rising from among the houses. The wind scatters seeds against the walls and along the edges of the roofs, so that you can look up and see marigolds blooming between you and the sky.

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Min’s father had been a good deal older than her mother, Bridget, and he could neither read nor write. He was silent with is vivacious, quick-tempered wife, who read Dickens and Scott and Maria Edgeworth with her children, and she worked at odd jobs when she could get them. it was the dream of his life to make money exporting pigs to the English market, and to everyone’s surprise he succeeded on one occasion in getting hold of enough money to buy a few pigs and rent a pen to keep them in. He discovered at once that possession of the pigs brought him automatically into the company of a little crowd of amateurs like himself, who gathered together in serious discussion of their animals, their ambitions, their hopes and their chances. The pigs were young and trim and pink and healthy, and they were very greedy. He found her very much enjoyed giving them their food and that he didn’t mind cleaning up after them. he began talking about how clean they were, and how well-mannered, and how friendly. He marvelled at the way they opened and shut their mouths, and he thought their big round nostrils were very natural-looking, not pig-like at all. He liked to see them lift their heads and look up at him with their tiny, blind-looking eyes. he said a lot of lies had been told about pigs. He interpreted their grunts and squeals as words of affection for him, and after a day or two Bridget told the children their father had gone off to live with the pigs. “He likes the pigs better than he likes his own children,” she said. He did like the pigs. He liked having a place of his own to go to, outside the house. He liked being a man of affairs. He began smiling around at his children, as though he was keeping a little secret from them. Martin kept his accounts for him, writing down the number of pigs, the price he had paid for him, and the price he expected to get from them. Once Martin visited the pen and saw the pigs. He was forbidden to go a second time. Bridget said that one lunatic in the family was enough. Martin cried and said he wanted a dog of his own. He knew better than that. There was never a dog or a cat in that house. Bridget said she had enough to do, keeping their own mouths fed.

The great day dawned when the pigs were to be sold. Their father was gone before any of them were awake, and he didn’t dome home until long after the hour when they were supposed to be in bed. They weren’t in bed. they all waited up for him. When he came in they were all sitting around the stove in the kitchen waiting for him. They heard him coming along the passage from the door at the Georges Street side of the house and, as their mother had instructed them to do, they remained very quiet, so that he thought there was nobody up. at the doorway he saw them all and he looked surprised and not very pleased. Then he put his hand in his top pocket and took out the money, which he had wrapped in brown paper, and he walked over to the kitchen table and put it down.

“There’s the money,” he said to Bridge. “Blood money.”

He looked very cold, but instead of getting near the stove to warm himself he sat down at the table and put his elbows on the table and his head in his hands.

“What sort of acting is this?” Bridget asked. “What ails you now, talking about blood money in front of the children. Will you answer me?”

“I’m no better than a murderer,” he said. “I’ll never forget the look in their eyes till the day I die. I shouldn’t have sold them. I lay awake all last night thinking of ways to keep them, and all day today after I sold them I kept thinking of ways I could have kept them in hiding someplace where nobody would know about them—I got that fond of the. They knew me when they saw me.”

Bridget stood up and walked to the table and picked up the money and put it into her apron pocket. She was a very small, stout, vigorous woman with rond blue eyes and straight black hair, and she was proud of the reputation she had for speaking her mind. She was proud, cunning, suspicious of everything and everybody, and resourceful, and where her slow, stumbling husband was concerned she was pitiless. She didn’t want the children to grow up to be like him. She didn’t want them dragging around after him. She had long ago grown tired of trying to understand, what it was that was holding him back, and so, impending them all. but tonight, for once, it was clear to her that he was going to make an excuse of the pigs for doing nothing at all about anything for weeks or even months to come. It would be laughable if it wasn’t for the bad effect his laziness might have on the children. But he was useful to her around the house, as a bad example. The children were half afraid of him, because they were afraid of being drawn into his bad luck. They were ashamed of him. Min thought anybody could tell by the way her father spoke that he couldn’t read or write. Maybe that was the great attraction between him and the pigs. He always seemed to be begging for time until his speech could catch up with is memory, and he never seemed to have come to any kind of an understanding with himself. He always seemed up to be looking around as though somebody might arrange that understanding for him, and tell him about it.

On the night he came back so late after having sold the pigs, he was so distressed that he forgot to take off his hat. It was a hat he had worn so long as any of the children could remember, and Bridget told them he had been wearing it the first time she ever set eyes on him. She said she was so impressed by the hat that she hardly noticed him at first. It was a big, wide-brimmed black hat, a very distinguished-looking hat, although it was conspicuous now for its shabbiness. It was green with age, and the greenness showed up very much in the lamplight that night as he sat by the table with his face in his hands, grieving for his pigs. He never went out without first putting his hat on. He was never without it. he depended on it, and the children depended on being able to spot it in time to avoid meeting him outside on the street someplace. When the money was safe in Bridget’s deep pocket she reached out and snatched the hat off her husband’s head.

“Haven’t I told you never to wear that hat in the house?” she said.

He looked up at her in bewilderment and then he stood up and reached out his hand for the hat.

“Give me back my hat,” he said, looking at her as though he was ready to smile.

Min hated her father’s weak, foolish smile. Sometimes Martin smiled like that, when he was trying to prove he understood something he couldn’t understand. She thought Martin and her father were both like cowards alongside her mother. She wished her mother would throw the hat in her father’s face and make him go away. She wished everything could be different—no pigs, no old hat, no struggling and scheming. She wished her mother hadn’t snatched the hat off her father’s head. She didn’t like it when her mother started fighting, and sometimes it seemed she was always fighting. She even went out of the house sometimes and went into the house of somebody who had annoyed her and started fighting there. Then she would come home and tell the children what she’d said and what had been said to her.

One time Bridget’s sister Mary came storming into the house. Bridget and Mary hated one another. They began fighting, and then they began hitting one another. Bridget hit the hardest and Mary ran out of the house with her children hollering and crying at her heels. Martin and Min saw it all and they told their mother she was very brave, but they were frightened. Afterward, when Bridget told the story of the battle, she always ended by saying, “And there was my sister Mary with her precious blood running down her face.” Min despised her father, but she hoped her mother wouldn’t hit him. She didn’t want to see his precious blood running down his face. She began to cry, and when Clare and Polly saw their formidable older sister crying they began crying along with her. Martin stood up and begged, “Give him the hat, Mam, give him his hat!” and then he began crying and lifting his feet up and down as though he was getting ready to run a race.

“You’ll frighten the wits out of the children,” their father said, and for once in his life he sounded as though he knew what he was saying.

“Give me that hat this minute. I’m going out. I’m getting out of here!”, and he made a grab for the hat, which Bridget was holding behind her back.

She struck out at him.

“Don’t defy me, I’m warning you!” she screamed.

But he dodged her hand and reached behind her to snatch the hat away, and then he hurried out of the kitchen, and they heard the Georges Street door bang after him.

He didn’t come home again that night, but he was there in the morning, sitting at the kitchen table, and Bridget gave him his tea as usual. The children looked around for the hat. It was in its usual place, where he always left it, on top of a cupboard that stood to one side of the door that led out into the yard. He used to lift the hat from his head and toss it up on top of the cupboard in one gesture. Always, when he walked in from outside, he threw the hat up, as though he was saluting the wall of the house. And when he was going out, in one gesture he lifted his arm to reach the hat and put it on his head, often without even looking at it.

One afternoon, when they were all in the kitchen after school, Bridget decided to play a little trick on their father, a joke. She said he needed a new hat anyway, and that a cap would suit him better. A cap would be better for keeping out the rain—a nice dark-blue or dark-grey cap. He looked a sketch in the old hat, and it was time he got rid of it. Once he was rid of it, he would be glad, and he would thank them all, but there was no use trying to persuade him to get rid of it himself—he would only say no. He could feel loyalty for anything, even an old hat. Look at the way he had gone on about those pigs. He wasn’t able to deal with his own feelings, that was his weakness. There are only certain things a person can be true to, but he didn’t know that. Once the hat was gone he’d soon forget about it, and it was a shame to see him going around with that monstrosity on his head. She had an idea. They would take the hat down and cut the crown away from the brim and then put the whole hat back on the top of the cupboard and see what happened when he lifted it down the next time he was going out. They got the hat down and Bridget cut the brim away, but she left a thin strip of the velours—hardly more than a thread—to the two parts of the hat together when their father lifted it down onto his head. It all happened just as they expected—the brim tumbled down around their father’s face and hung around his neck. He put his hands up and felt around his face and neck to see what had happened, and then he took the hat off and looked at it.

“Which of you did this?” he asked.

“We all did it,” Bridget said.

He held the hat up and looked at it.

“It’s done for,” he said, but he didn’t seem angry—just puzzled. Then he went out, carrying the hat in his hand, and they heard no more about it.

≠

Not long after that, Bridget went to see a man she knew who worked in Vernon’s on the Main Street, and he arranged for her to buy a sewing machine on the installment plan, and she set about teaching herself to make dresses. Min was the one who helped her mother, so Min was sentenced to a lifetime of sewing, when she had her heart set on going to a college and becoming a teacher. Min wanted to teach with all her being. She wanted to have a dignified position in the town, to be appointed secretary to different committees, to meet important people who came to Wexford, and to have numbers of numbers and fathers deferring to her because she had their children under her thumb. But she learned to cut a pattern and run a sewing machine, and the only committee she ever sat on was the Committee of One she established in her own place on the Main Street. She always thought if her father had gone ahead with the pigs, and learned to control his feelings, and if he had cared anything about her, she would have had a better chance. But all the chances in the family had to go to Martin, because he was the boy, and because he had the best brains, and because he was the only hope they had of struggling up out of poverty they lived in. he was doing very well and turning out to have a good business head when he threw it all away to get married. The best part of their lives ended the day Martin met Delia. Min remembered the nights they all used to sit around talking, sometimes till past midnight. They were happy in those years, when they were all out working, and at night they had so much to talk about that they didn’t know where to start or when to stop. Clare used to bring all the new books and papers and weeklies home from the newsagent’s on the sly for them to read. Polly and Martin had joined the Amateur Dramatics and they were always off at rehearsals and recitations, and they began to talk knowledgeably about scenery and costumes and dialogue and backgrounds. They talked about nothing but plays and acting, and they knew everything that was going to happen—they had all the information about concerts and performances and competitions that were coming off, not merely in Wexford but in Dublin. Min thought the future was much more interesting when you knew at least a few of the things that were going to happen. There was something going on every minute, and it was really very nice being in the swim. People went out of their way to say hello to the Bagots in the street. They had a piano now, second-hand but very good. it was the same shape as their tiny parlor and it took up half the space there, making the room feel overcrowded. They took turns picking out tunes, but Clare had the advantage over all, because she had had a few lessons from the daughter of a German family that lived in the street for a short time. The Germans knew their music—you had to admit that. Clare felt that with a few more lessons she might have made a good accompanist. They all liked to sing—they got that from Bridget. Martin went off by himself to Dublin once in a while, just for the night, and he always brought back something new—a song sheet, or a book. He always went to a concert, or a play, or to hear a lecture.

Martin and Polly liked to act out scenes, and Min used to get behind them and imitate their gestures until her mother said that she’d rather watch Min than the real thing any day. Min was glad she had found a way to join in the fun. She hadn’t as much voice as the others and serious acting was beyond her.

In one way it was a pity their father wasn’t there to witness their prosperity, but in another way it was just as well, because he would have done something to spoil things—not meaning any harm but because he couldn’t help himself. Min remembered how irritating it used to be to have him hanging around, like a skeleton at the feast. And he got on their mother’s nerves, because they all knew he didn’t understand a word of what they talked about .and he had a peaceful death. He must have been glad to go. He was never more than a burden to himself and to everybody else.

Min always remembered how stalwart and kind Martin was, comforting her mother after their father’s death, and she never could understand how he could be so thoughtful, and make the promises he made, and pretend the way he did, and then run off and leave them all the first chance he got. She always said, “I can get along without the menfolk. They are more trouble and annoyance than they’re worth.”

But she had liked very much having Martin in her life. She liked it very much when he crept upstairs to her workroom in the Main Street and stood outside the door and called out, “There’s a man in the house. will you let me in, Min?” And he would stand outside making jokes while all the women scurried about pretending to be alarmed and making themselves decent. The women used to tease her about having a handsome brother, and ask her if she wasn’t afraid some girl would steal him away. In those moments, Min always replied that Martin thought far too much of his mother ever to leave home.

“He’s devoted to my mother,” she always said, lowering her eyes to her work in a way that showed Martin’s devotion to be of such magnitude that it was almost sacred, so that the mere mention of it made her want silence in the room. Silence or an end to that kind of careless, meddlesome talk.

“Martin has no time to spend gadding around,” she said to a customer who teased her too pointedly.

“Oh, Min, you’re a real old maid,” the customer said. “Martin’s going to surprise you all one of these days. Some girl will come along and sweep him off his feet. Wait and see.”

Min told her mother about that remark.

“Pay no attention to her, Min,” Bridget said without hesitation. “Martin’s no fool. he knows when he’s well off. He’s too comfortable ever to want to leave home. he’s as set in his ways as a man of forty. Martin’s a born bachelor.”

And of course, the net thing they knew, Martin was married and gone. And then Polly ran off with the commercial traveller, a Protestant, and it turned out he was tired of travelling and wanted to settle down. Being settled didn’t suit him either; he was never able to make a go of anything. And Clare married another President, an old fellow who made a sort of living catching rabbits, and he used to walk into the house as if he owned, with the rabbits hanging from his hand, dripping blood all over Bridget’s clean floor.

Min never understood how things could come to an end so fast and so quietly. It was as I thought a bad trick had been played on them all. there was an end to order and thrift and books and singing, and the house seemed to fill up with detestable confusion and noise. Everywhere you turned, there was Clare’s husband or Polly’s children, he with his dead rabbits and his smelly pipe and the children always wanting a bag of sweets or wanting to go to the lavatory or falling down and having to be picked up screaming. She couldn’t stick any of them, couldn’t stand any of them. and then Martin moved off to Dublin in anger, telling them that his mother wouldn’t let Delia have a minute’s peace, no future in Wexford anyway. Bridget always said that Delia had ruined Martin’s life, and Min agreed with her, except that Min would go further and stress that Delia had ruined all their lives, of all of them. They were a good team before Delia arrived on the scene. The saying was that when a couple got married they went off by themselves and closed the door on the world, but Min thought that in her family what they did was to get married and let the whole world into the house so that there wasn’t a quiet minute or a sensible thought left in this life for anybody. Such a din those marriages made, such racket and confusion and expense and quarrelling. She thought it was awful that brothers and sisters could shape your whole life with doings that had nothing at all to do with you. she felt they were all tugging at her in that direction and the other direction, and that their mother was on their side.

≠

When Min got back to Wexford after Martin’s death, and got her flat all cleared out and arranged with her new acquisitions—Delia’s things, Martin’s things, their set of wedding furniture and their books and pictures and lamps—she suddenly realized that she was at home for good. there was nobody left who mattered to her, nobody to disturb her. The family circle was closed off. she was the only one left of all of them. she could only think of them as the crowd in the kitchen at home long ago, and she felt it was they who had finally died, not the men and women they had turned into, who had been such an aggravation to her. She dismissed Delia. Delia was just a long interlude that had separated Martin from his twin, but the twins were joined at the end as they had been at the beginning. Min was Martin’s family now.

It was hard to believe that only nine years had elapsed between her father’s death and Martin’s marriage. Those were the best years. She remembered the day her father died, giving them all a great fright. None of them really missed him. It was a relief not to have to worry about him—an old man not able to write his name, going around looking for work, or pretending to look for work. He couldn’t stay in the house. he was gone before any of them got up in the morning, but he was always there to spoil their dinnertime, and to spoil their teatime. And often in the evening he was there listening to them, although they all knew he couldn’t understand a word they said. What was most annoying to Min was that he took it for granted he had a right to come in and join them and sit down in the corner and settle himself as though he had something to offer. He had nothing to offer except his restlessness. He always seemed to be on the point of leaving. He even interrupted their conversations to describe long journeys he might take, but he never went anywhere in particular. He put wandered. The restlessness that brought him to Wexford afflicted him till the day he died.

Maybe if he’d learned to read he would have been more content. He could have learned if he’d wanted to. Bridget would have taught him to read when they were first married, but he said no, he’d wait till the children were big enough and then learn when they were learning, studying the same things. But the children weren’t pleased to have him sit down with them when they were doing their homework, and he said himself at that time that he felt in the way. Bridget felt that he was indeed in the way, and that he was depriving the children of a part of something they needed a good deal more than he needed it. Bridget was surprised at how strongly she felt that he should not look into the children’s books. She was afraid he might hold the children back. She despised him, the way he went on talking about his dream of being a sailor, when everybody knew he was afraid of water. Oh, he was a great trial to them all, and toward the end of his life people got to be a bit fearful of him, and even the children seemed to know there was something not quite right about him.

It was probably the same restlessness that made their father queer that drove Martin to go off and get married on impulse, and there was no arguing with him. Min would never forget that wedding day, the struggle they had to get Bridget dressed. She was dressed in black from head to toe, as though she was going to a funeral. She generally wore black, very suitable for a middle-aged woman who was a widow, but that day the black seemed blacker than usual. Min made her a new bonnet for the wedding, of black satin with jet beads, and a shoulder cape of black satin, with jet beads around the neck. It made a very fetching outfit, but Bridget spoiled the effect by carrying her old prayer book stuffed with holy pictures and leaflets and memory cards, and she wound her black rosary beads around the prayer book so that the big metal crucifix dangled free. She looked very smart, quite the chic Parisienne, until she got the prayer book in her hand. Her iron-grey hair was pulled up into a tight knot on top of her head, the same as every day, and the bonnet, skewered with long hatpins, crowned the knot and gave her a few more inches extra height. Min and her sisters wore stiff-brimmed white hats and white blouses with their gray costumes, and Min felt they gave the country wedding a cosmopolitan touch. But of course Clare had to spoil it all by saying to anybody who would listen to her: “We’re Martin’s sisters. We have the name of being short on beauty but long on brains.” Clare always said the wrong thing at the wrong time. It was her way of trying to get on the right side of people. It didn’t matter whether she liked a person or not. Clare had to curry favor—she couldn’t help herself. You could trust her to make a fool not only of herself but of you. And Polly got fed up and said “Oh, it’s well known that Martin is the beauty of the family.” And of course there was no one at the wedding but friends and relatives of Delia and her family; Bridget invited nobody, because it wasn’t at all certain, she said, that Martin would go through it.

It was true that Martin, with his glossy black curls and his bright-blue eyes, was the beauty of the family. On him the features that were angular in Clare and lumpy in Polly and pinched in Min became regular and harmonious. Before he got married, when they all used to go around together, the three girls took lustre from Martin’s face, and that was fair enough, because their faces reflected his so faithfully that one could say, “he shows what they really look like”. But after he left them the likeness between them became one they did not want attention for. Instead of being reflections of Martin they became copies of one another, or three not very fortunate copies of a face that was gone. It was as though Martin was the family silver. They all went down in value when he went out of their lives.

Martin’s wedding day always opened up in Min’s memory as though it had started an explosion. It was because they had been so full of dread driving out in the car they’d hired, and the, when they arrived in Oylegate, there was everybody ready and waiting, the priests and all the strangers and candles and flowers, and the terrible sense of being caught up in the ceremony and of having to go on and on and on, knowing all the time that you had no voice in the matter and that it didn’t matter what you did now. That was a terrible drive out of Oylegate that day. when they finally succeeded in getting their mother out of the house and into the car, she closed her eyes and kept them closed until she got out at the chapel gates. Up to the last minute she had been hoping Martin would change his mind.

“Martin, I’m asking you for your own good,” she said. “Couldn’t you put it off till tomorrow? I’ll never get used to losing my little son, but I might feel stronger tomorrow.”

She even offered Martin the fare to go to Dublin and start up on his own, away from all of them, at least until any fuss there was blew over.

“Ah, what’s the use of this, Mother?” Min said. “Come on now, and we’ll all go out together with big smiles on our faces, not to let everybody in the town know how cut up your are.”

Min was angling for a grateful look from Martin, and she got it. She thought how easily swayed he was, for all his brains. Oh, she could have kept him and given me his chances, she thought. But Min could not really have been accused of holding a drudge against Martin. She could be angry with him, but she couldn’t hate him or even dislike him. He was her twin. There should have been only one of us, she thought, in despair, and saw Delia Kelly making free with a part of Min Bagot, who had known more about hard work when she was ten years old than Delia Kelly could ever know. She wondered what Delia saw and how much she noticed with those queer, cloud green eyes. all the Bagots had bright-blue eyes, very keen eyes, and they all had coal-black hair, but only Martin’s was curly. The Kellys were much fairer in coloring; they didn’t look Irish at all, Bridget said. And except for Delia they were all bigger than the Bagots, big and strong-looking, country people. Min felt defeated by them, and she didn’t know why. She felt that what mattered to her could never matter a bit to them, and she didn’t know what mattered to them; towards the end, she didn’t even want to know. They were friendly enough, and why wouldn’t they be, with Martin taking one of the girls off their hands. They’re not our sort at all, she thought. East is East and West is West. In a way, it was worse than if Martin had married a girl from a foreign country.

On the way out to the wedding Bridget made Markey go slow. They jogged along, and they were late already; they were late leaving the house. the horse kept flicking his tail as though he was impatient with them. Markey was irritated, because he’d had such a long wait outside the house, but he tried to put a good face on it with philosophical chat about weddings and marriages and young men, and on and on. Bridget lost patience with him and asked him whether he charged extra for the conversational accompaniment. Markey was so insulted he started to stand up, which shook the car and made the horse try to turn his head to look back at them, and Polly squealed with fear and asked her mother if she was out to have them all killed with a runaway horse. Bridget replied, “I wouldn’t mind.”

It was an inside car, and they sat three on each seat, Markey and Clare on one side with Min in between, and, facing them, Bridge and Polly with Martin in the middle. Markey looked at Polly when she spoke, and then he winked at her and sat down without saying a word, and they continued on at the same slow rate until they got to the chapel gate.

Entering Oylegate, they passed the top of the lane that led wit hups and downs and various curves to the house where Delia lived. The lane was on their left and on their right there was a prosperous-looking grocery with a public house attached to it. there was a gap between the grocery and a row of whitewashed cottages with thatched roofs. Outside one of these an old white-haired woman sat crouched on a short wooden bench. The narrow door of her cottage stood open behind her, showing how much darkness can gather in a small room on a bright day in June. She had a piece of sacking tied around her waist for an apron, and on her head she wore a man’s cloth cap. She smoked a clay pipe and regarded the carful of Bagots with an amusement that was empty of malice as it was of innocence. Markey touched his hat to her and said, “”Fine da, Ma’am.” The others didn’t notice her—their eyes were ahead to the little knot of people at the chapel gates. Min knew Delia must be waiting, and she thought, “one good thing, we’ve given her a few anxious minutes.” Martin looked as if he had felt a twinge of doubt about what he was doing. He said, “I feel like a great stranger all of a sudden.”

“There’s time yet, Martin,” Min said. “We can hurry the horse and go on past them all and go to Enniscorthy and take the train back to Wexford and never see any of them again.”

Bridget turned her head and opened her eyes and looked at Martin.

“Come on home with us, darling,” she said, “and you’ll never hear another word about it.”

Markey pulled the horse up and said to Martin, “Here you are, now.”

Martin stood up, making the little car suddenly flimsy, and he pushed his way between their skirts and jumped out onto the road. It was at that moment, when she heard his feet land on the ground, that the day began whirling in Min’s memory. She had known perfectly well that the day would be hateful, but she had not known that it would all be so unnatural, or that she herself would feel worn and dry and unable to manage, because the only thing she wanted was to escape from it all, and she couldn’t leave her mother’s side. Min had never felt trapped before that day. She felt like a prisoner. She longed to be back in her workroom, where she was monarch of all she surveyed. She didn’t like the voices of the people out here in the country. They were hard to understand. She knew they were discussing her behind her back and she tried to let them know she was on to them by the knowing way she looked at them. Martin behaved as though he had forgotten she was alive. She thought it was strange that the world lit up in moments of joy but that everything remained exactly the same when disaster struck. Martin turned into a different person when he jumped out of the car at the chapel gate. From now on there would be nothing more between her and him than running into each other in the street once in a while.

After the wedding ceremony was over, they all drove out a very long way along the road to Enniscorthy, and then off that road onto a rough country road that took them to the Slaney River. Delia’s mother’s family, her old brother and her three old sisters, lived by the Slaney in a very big farmhouse, whitewashed, with a towering thatched roof. The size of the house and the prosperous appearance of the place impressed Min. Delia’s aunts and her uncle were all unmarried, and they had all been born here. Min heard the house was very old, and that the family had been in this lovely spot beside the Slaney for centuries. She and her mother were amazed by the furniture they saw in the parlor and in the rooms beyond the parlor. It was grandeur to have furniture like this.

“This house must have a great upstairs,” Bridget whispered to Min, and Min felt very sorry for her mother. The best her mother had been able to do was to struggle out of a district where the people were down and out and into a street where the poor liv ed—self-respecting people, but poor. And here they were, at Martin’s wedding, surrounded by women who were mistresses of farms, some of them owning more than one house, all of them in possession of so many acres, and even the least of them with a firm hold on the house she lived in, even if it was only a cottage, or even a half acre.

Min glanced about. These people out here in the country all belonged to one another and they were related to one another from the distant past. These families went a long way back in time, and they remembered marriages that had taken place a hundred years before. They didn’t talk, as Min understood talk. Here in the country they wove webs with names and dates and places. The dead were mentioned in the same voice with the living, so that fathers and sisters and cousins who had been gone for decades could have trooped through the house and the orchards and gardens and found themselves at home, the same as always, and they could even have counted on finding their own names and their own faces registered faithfully somewhere among the generations that had succeeded them. Min thought of all the dead who had been familiar here, and she wished her name could have been woven into talk somehow. She noticed there were no children in sight—they must have been sent off to play by themselves. There was plenty of room for children here—the farm was big, a hundred acres.

She thought many acres seemed to have been given to the orchard—there was no end to it, and from where she stood the view was more like a forest than like a field of fruit trees, which is what she understood an orchard to be. The ground was uneven, for one thing, slanting this way and that. In her reading, she had always imagined an orchard to be a geometrical place, square or oblong, with the trees spaced evenly. This orchard was wild and looked unknown, as though it had been laid out and cultivated long ago and then forgotten until the wedding day. Min thought of the town of Wexford, of the trees and house and shops, and she thought of the harbor. Even in the dead of night when people were asleep, the town remained alive and occupied, waiting to be reclaimed in the morning, and the harbor was always restless. The town was always the same, very old and always on the go, with people around every corner, and no matter who they were you knew you had as much right there as they had. Min knew every inch of Wexford and every lift of the water in the harbor, and she thought that even if everybody belonging to her was dead and gone she would never feel lost or out of place as long as she could walk about in the streets she had known all her life. Out here in the country, things were different. You had to own your own place—not merely the house but some of the land. And the houses were miles apart from one another, and the families lived according to laws of succession that were known only to them, and people had to depend for recognition on a loose web of relationships, a complicated genealogy that they kept in their heads and reinforced by repetition on days like today when they were all gathered together. Min thought it would be pleasant to walk around the orchard once in a while when the weather was fine, but for a nice interesting walk she would take the streets of Wexford any time.

Min stood on a narrow path that led from the orchard’s entrance to nowhere—it seemed to pause and fade under grass somewhere among the trees. There were rounded grassy banks on either side of the path, but they disappeared into high ground beyond the point where the path gave out. Near the edge of the bank, which was not very remarkable as landscape, Min’s mother sat talking with two of Delia’s aunt—Aunt Mag and Aunt Annie. Some of the lads had carried out three kitchen chairs so that the ladies could rest themselves while they looked at the orchard. The ladies talked comfortably, all of them glad to have something to divert them from marriage that had brought them together. Bridget lost something of her edginess and made complimentary remarks about the house, and said it was a treat to get out into the country on a day like this. The day grew in beauty, coming in like the tide, minute by minute. There were a lot of butterflies. Min saw a bonze-and-gold one she would have liked for a dress, except that she was not likely to have occasion to wear such colors, and it would be hard to find a design like that anyway, even in the best silk.

“Oh, Min has good sense. She is a born old maid. I can always depend on Min.” Her mother had said and she had heard, but she kept her eyes on the ground as though she was deep in thought. She didn’t care what they said and she wasn’t going to be drawn into their talk. She thought of wandering off toward the garden. Most of the younger people were there, and she supposed Martin was there too, with Delia at his side. She wondered when Martin and Delia would be leaving for the station. They were taking the train to Dublin. They were going to a hotel there. Well, she wasn’t going to the station to see them off. She would get out of that little demonstration, even if that meant she had to walk back to Wexford. She would go on toward the garden now, not to have to listen to her mother talking nonsense to these strangers. There were times when her mother was as bad as Clare.

There was a stone wall around the garden and inside the wall a rich green box hedge that grew very tall and was clipped into a round arch over the narrow gate at the garden entrance. A similar green box arch showed the way into the orchard, but the orchard itself had no gate. When Min and her mother walked into the orchard earlier, Min had the impression, just for a second, that she was coming out of a dark tunnel, the green box was so thick at her sides and over her head—so dense, you might say—and that they were walking into an unfamiliar, brilliantly illuminated place full of shadows and green cave and a floor of broken sunlight that seemed to undulate before their dazzled eyes. the boys who carried the chairs out from the kitchen were going to put them in an open space where the ground dipped—a very suitable-looking grassy sward, Min thought it. But Delia’s Aunt Mag wanted to sit close to a particular tree she said was her favorite, and that is where her chair was placed, with the two other chairs nearby. The boys couldn’t get the chair close enough to the tree to suit Delia’s Aunt Mag, and when she sat down she moved her body sideways in a very adroit quick way, and then she put her arm around the tree and her face up against the trunk as though she was cuddling it.

“I love my old tree,” she said. She looked up into the tree, stretching her head back, and she began laughing. “The best parts of the sky show through this tree. Now you know my secret.” Min thought all this was a bit queer.

She told them the tree bore cooking apples that were as big as your head and too sour to eat. Delia’s Aunt Mag and her three sisters, including Delia’s mother, all wore long-sleeved, high-necked black dresses cut to show the rigidity of their busts and waists, and the straightness of their backs. They were big women, and the sweeping motion of their long heavy skirts gave them the appearance of nuns. Yes, they looked like women belonging to a religious order. Min thought them very forbidding, all four of them, and she was surprised at the change in Aunt Mag once she got her arm a big mischievous. She was a strange, wayward old woman, and Min wondered if Delia took after her. There was something dreamy about Delia that Min didn’t trust.

Thirty years later, when Min was obliged to have Clare locked up in the Enniscorthy lunatic asylum, she remembered Delia’s Aunt Mag, and she wondered how people may were abroad in the world who should by rights be locked up out of harm’s way. By the, of course. Bridget was dead. Bridget had always said that their father would have ended up in the poorhouse if he had been left to himself. Min thought he might have been very well off in the poorhouse. Maybe that was where his place was. There were people who couldn’t manage in the world. But Bridget would never have let Clare go into the lunatic asylum. She always said, “Poor Clare, she takes after her father.” Min couldn’t see that at all. Their father had been very silent. But Clare never shut up, and all she did was pray for them all. It got on Min’s nerves to hear the rosary going day and night. Clare’s rabbit-chasing husband was no help at all. he just laughed, probably pleased in his heart to hear the prayers mocked. Min finally lost patience when she found out that Clare had given away every piece but one of the blue-and-white German china their mother had treasured. Only the soup tureen remained, with its heavy lid. Min never got over the loss of that china. She would have gone and demanded it back, but Clare wouldn’t tell her who had it. it was gone for good, no hope of ever seeing it again, was none of Min’s business. Min knew otherwise. Clare didn’t live many years after being shut up, and min brought her body back to Wexford and buried her there where they would all be buried. All but Martin. Martin and Delia were buried together in St. Jerome’s in Dublin.

≠

During the years she lived with him after Delia died, Min found Martin very changed. Fifty years with Delia had left their mark on him. He wasn’t the brother she remembered. She had seen other men like that—so buried in habit that their lives were worth nothing to them when the wife was gone. Martin would begin to read, and then his hand would sink down, with the book in it, and he would stare over to the side of the chair, as though he was trying to remember something. More likely he was trying to understand something, Min thought. He had had a habit like that when he was young, of staring away at the wall, or at nothing, when things were going against him. He didn’t want her in the house with him—that was obvious—but he had to put up with her. She didn’t care. She was being loyal to their mother, that was the main thing. He continued to take his walk every day till his legs gave out. He never want out in the garden, never, but every once in a while he would go to the big window that looked out on the garden and he would stand there staring and always turn away saying, “The garden misses her.”

Min got tired of that, and one day she burst out: “Oh, she was a good gardener. That is what she had a talent for. She was good at gardening.”

He turned from the window and he said to her: “What did you say? What was that you said?”

She repeated what she had said. She wasn’t afraid of him. “I said that she was a good gardener. That is what she was good at, I said.”

Min was shocked at what he said to her then: “And what were you ever good at, may we ask?”

Martin of all people ought to know she had always been good at anything she chose to put her hand to. All the times she came here to visit them, he used to hold her up as an example of Delia. He used to tell Delia that Min could have done wonders if she hadn’t been tied to the sewing machine. Martin ought to be ashamed of himself, but she said nothing to defend herself at that moment. He was an old man, wandering in his mind like their father.

Martin was restless too, and the more feeble he became, the less he wanted to stay in the house. he said he wanted to see the water again. He wanted to go to the sea. He wanted to walk on the strand. He even talked about paying a last visit to the west of Ireland. He wanted to walk by the Atlantic Ocean once again. He said the air there would put new life into him. Once he began talking about Connemara and Kerry there was no stopping him. He liked to recall the adventures he’d had on the holidays he used to take by himself in those places long ago. He used to go on long walking tours by himself. He’d stay away for a week at a time. He liked to recall those days when he was on his own, he seemed so proud of having gone off on his own, away from his house and from Delia and the children, away from all he knew. He sounded like a conjurer describing some magical rope trick when he talked about how he left the house at such and such an hour, and what So-and-So had said to him on the train, and how he carried nothing with him but his knapsack and his blackthorn stick. Min didn’t like hearing about it. she knew his adventures, and she had no sympathy with him. If he was all that anxious to have a change from Delia—and nobody could blame him for that—why hadn’t he come to Wexford to see his mother, and to see his sisters, and to go about the town and have a word with all the old crowd? Most of them were still there at that time.

He could have taken a walk about the town with me, Min thought. It would have set me up, in those days, to be seen with him, show off a bit. Many a time he could have come down to see us, but no, he was off to Connemara, or to Kerry, to enjoy another holiday by himself with the Atlantic Ocean. The Irish Sea wasn’t good enough for him anymore, and Wexford Harbour was nothing compared with the beauties of Galway Bay. He talked about the wild Mayo coast as though wildness was a sort of virtue, and one you didn’t find in the scenery in Wexford. She reminded him that he had once been in love with their own strand at Rosslare, and she described to him how he used to spend half his life out there, riding out on his bicycle every chance he got. Every free minute he could get he spent at Rosslare. He listened to her, but as though he was being patient with her.

“I’d be very glad to see Rosslare again,” he said when she had finished talking.

Then he gave up talking about Connemara and Kerry, and he began to wish for a day out at Dun Laoghaire. And he said he’d like to have a day at Greystones. And he wanted to go out to Killiney for a day. Which would Min like best? Maybe they could manage it. min didn’t see how they were going to manage it. a whole day out of the house, and no guarantee of what the weather might be like. They might not be able to find shelter so easy in case of a sudden shower. If he got his feet wet there’d be the devil to pay. They had no car, even if they could drive, and it was an awful drag out to Killiney and back on the bus, or on the train, if they took the train. It would be foolish to go to the expense of hiring a car. She didn’t see how they were going to do it.

He seemed to let go of the idea, and then one day he said: “Min, do you remember the lovely view of the Slaney from the garden that day? We all stood looking at it, can you remember? I thought of the passage of time. I stood there, and I thought for a minute that the garden was moving along with the river. And then later on when Delia and I were at Edermine station waiting for the train to Dublin, there were all the flowers in the station, and the stationmaster laughing at us and talking to us, and the white stones spelling out the name of the station. Delia said an expert gardener must have planted the bed of flowers beside the station house, and the stationmaster said he’d done it all himself, getting the place ready for her. But the garden they had there by the Slaney—that was magnificent. Wasn’t it, Min?”

Min remembered standing in the garden, surrounded b y roses with big heavy heads, and hearing her mother say that she would like very much to have a bunch of flowers to take back to Wexford with her. They all got bunches of flowers to take home. and thee was a bunch of flowers for Markey to take his wife. The car was filled with flowers, and still the garden looked as though it hadn’t been touched.

“That was a grand place they had there,” Min said, and she was glad to know that the garden was in ruins now, and that the house stood empty with the roof falling in and that the door there stood open to display the vacant rooms and the cold hearth in the kitchen. “It’s all gone now,” she said.

“It was a marvellous day,” Martin said. “I never forget what Delia’s Aunt Mag said to me. Do you remember—she said the air was like mother o’pearl. Wasn’t that a funny thing for an old country woman to say? I wonder what put a thought like that in her head. THE AIR IS LIKE MOTHER O’ PEARL TODAY, she said, looking at me as though we were the same age and had known one another all our lives.”

“She didn’t look at me that way,” Min said. “But I remember her saying that. She was a bit affected, I think—inclined to talk above herself. I didn’t care for her. Something about her made her very uneasy.”

“Ah, no,” Martin said. “Delia was very fond of her.”

“Oh, Delia,” Min said impatiently. “Delia said that first thing that came into her head. You told her so often enough, to her face, with me sitting here in this room listening to you barging at her. She couldn’t open her mouth to suit you. there was no harm in Delia, but she never knew what she said. Half the time she made no sense. There was nothing to Delia.”

The minute she finished speaking, she was sorry. She didn’t want to start a row. But Martin was silent, and then he said: “Nothing to Delia. That’s true. I never thought that. But as Shakespeare says, IT’S TRUE, IT’S TRUE, IT’S A PITY, AND PITY ‘TIS IT’S TRUE. Nothing to Delia. Shakespeare was right that time.”

“Shakespeare didn’t say it. I said it,” Min cried furiously.

“You or Shakespeare, what matter now. It’s true, there was nothing to Delia. Wasn’t she a lovely girl, though.”

“Are you gong to make a song out of it?” Min said. “What’s got into you, Martin?”

She looked at him sitting across the hearth from her. His snowwhite curls floated on his head. His narrow face was the same shape as her own face. His blue eyes watched her though his rimless spectables, and he smiled easily, as though they were discussing something pleasant from the past. She thought of Clare singing

You stick to the bats, lads…

…that morning when she was being driven off in the car that took her to the asylum. They told Min later that Clare stopped singing quick enough when she saw where she was going. Min wondered if the queer strain that was in Clare had touched Martin and she was glad that she herself was free of it. martin seemed to follow her thoughts.

“You put poor Clare into the asylum,” he said gently.

“She was off her head, driving us in all directions, driving us all to distraction, trying to give the house away!” Min said indignantly. “What help were you, up here in Dublin, away from all the unpleasantness?”

“Clare was mad,” Martin said. “There was nothing to Delia. That’s a weight off my mind. I know where I am now. I always knew where I was with her, even though I didn’t know what she was, and now I still don’t know what she was, and god knows I don’t know where I am without her. But there was nothing to her.”

“My mother said Delia didn’t amount to much,” Min said spitefully. “Right from the beginning, she said that.”

“Nothing to her. You said it so yourself!” Martin said. “I’ll show you a picture of her, taken when she was sixteen years old.”

He pulled himself to his feet, and made his way across the room to the cupboard, which had glass doors on top and solid wooden doors underneath. Behind the glass doors Delia’s Waterford glass bowls and her Waterford glass jug shimmered dimly. They had a shelf to themselves. Another shelf held her good Arklow china, Martin bent painfully to open the lower doors, and when they were open wide he reached in and took out a large brown envelope. He pushed the doors shut and made his way back to where Min sat in Delia’s chair on Delia’s side of the fire. He unfastened the envelope and slid the photograph out carefully, holding it as though it was thin glass. His hands are trembling more these days, Min thought. When the photograph was free, he held it up for Min to see.

“There she is,” he said. “That’s what she looked like. Look at the hair she had. Who ever had hair like that, that weird color? Nobody else in that family had hair like that. They said she took after her father. He died young. Look at that, Min.”

“That photograph glorifies her!” Min replied.

“She was very good…” Martin said. “I remember that day we got married. I was standing off to myself, looking at the Slaney. I was lost in admiration. I was looking through a gap in the hedge—one of the children had pulled open a place there, to look through. The river seemed very close up to the garden, under my feet. It was very close. Even then the water was eating in under the garden, and the little strand they told me about they had there at one time it was gone, or nearly gone. I remember I was there by myself—the water was dazzling. I didn’t know where I was. I was inside a dream, and everything was safe, I know. The Slaney was very broad that day, and powerful, sure and strong—you know the way it used to be. An Irish river of great importance, the inspector said the day he visited the school. But I felt grand that day, just looking at the Slaney flow by. To know that it was my own native river and had been for a very long time, that it existed long before I was born. I was standing there like that, not wanting to move at all, just staring at the water and the river Slaney, when Delia’s Aunt Mag came up alongside me. ‘I was looking for you!’ she said. My god, how well I remember her voice! As if she has spoken five minutes ago. She saw the break in the hedge. ‘Ah, you found a spy hole,’ she said. And do you know what she did? She put her arm around my shoulders. She was taller than me—they were big women in that family—and she stuck her face out past me so that she could see what I was looking at. I started to move to the side, to give her room, but she held on to me. ‘Stay where you are!’ she said. I said, ‘I’m in your way.’ ‘You’re not in my way, child,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you more right to stand here than anybody? I only want to have a little look before Willie comes along and finds this hole and starts to patch it up.’ “The lads have been up to mischief again”—that’s what Willie will say. He says they’re tearing down the hedge, helping the garden into the river. The river is eating the garden, you know—if it wasn’t for Willie always on guard, we’d be swallowed up.’ I said, ‘It’s great to see the Slaney like this.’ ‘I have a great fondness for the water,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t be content any place but here where I was born and brought up. I’ve never spent a night where I was born and brought up. I’ve never spent a night away from this house in my life, do you know that? It’s a blessing the day turned out so grand. And nobody was sick or anything. everybody was able to come see Delia married. The Slaney is in full flood, and the springs of affection are rising around us.’ She spoke the truth. The Slaney was in full flood that day.”

“That’s sheer nonsense,” Min said. “How could the Slaney be in full flood on a fine day in June? The Slaney was the same as any other day.”

Martin went to his own chair and sat down. “My legs aren’t getting any better,” he said. “I can’t stand on my own these days!”

“You’ve tired yourself out making speeches,” Min said.

Martin still held the photograph of Delia. He lifted it to see it better. He’s trembling too much, Min thought.

She wondered if she could get to go to his room and lie down.

“You’re wearing yourself out,” she said.

Martin gazed at the shaking photograph. “It’s very like her,” he said. Then he fitted it back into its envelope, pressing his lips together and frowning, like a foolish old man making an effort to do something that was beyond him.

“I’ll do that for you,” she said, getting ready to stand up and go over to him.

“You stay where you are!” he said, and when he had the photograph safe he placed the envelope on the low shelf under his table. “I shouldn’t have stood up so long,” he said, and then he took his book from the table and began reading, but after a minute he got up and went out of the room, carrying the book with him. “I’m going to my room,” he said without looking at her. “I might lie down for a bit.”

Min was glad to see him go. There would be peace now, for a while. She didn’t like to see him getting into these states where he talked so much. All that raking up of the past was a bad sign. She would have asked the priest to come in and talk to him, but she knew Martin would fight the priest’s coming until he could fight no more. Martin didn’t want the priest in the house. His mind was made up to that, and there was no use arguing with him. Min only hoped she would be able to get the priest in time when the time came. She didn’t want her brother dying without the Last Sacraments. She didn’t understand Martin’s bitter attitude toward the Church. Polly went very much the same way, of course. Min would never forget Polly’s blasphemous language when the third-eldest child died, the little one they called Mary. Min was trying to comfort Polly by telling her the baby would be well taken care of in Heaven, when Polly burst out laughing and crying and saying she could take care of her own child better than God and His Blessed Mother and all the saints and angels put together.

“They might have left poor Mary with her own Mammy!” Polly said. “They must have seen the way she was holding on to my hand, wanting to stay with me. they have very hard hearts up there, if you ask me. they have very hard hearts up there, if you ask me.”

Martin had never gone that far in his talk against the Catholic Church. At least, as far as Min knew he’d never gone that far, but she knew she was going to have to do a bit of scheming to get the priest into the house. “The springs of affection are rising.” She didn’t like to hear him talking like that.

What Min remembered of that day in the garden by the Slaney was that she felt worn out and dried up, and trapped, crushed in by people who were determined to see only the bright surface of the occasion. They could call it a wedding or anything they liked, but she knew it was a holocaust and that she was the victim, although nobody would ever admit that.

She thought they were all very clumsy. It wasn’t that she wanted to be noticed. But she knew that any notice she got was pity, or derision. Nothing she could say was right. She was out of it, and nothing could convince those people than she wanted to be out of it. she would ten times rather have been back in Wexford working as usual, but she had to go to the wedding or cause a scandal. Now here they were. Bridget was giving every evidence of enjoying herself, and so were Polly and Clare, and in Min’s opinion they were letting the side down. She had been dragged out here like a victim of war at the back of a chariot, and all to bolster Martin up, and he didn’t need bolstering up.

She stood outside the garden gate. The children had all vanished and she imagined they had gone to play somewhere by themselves, but suddenly the place was full of children running around, and she thought they must have been having their dinner. Children always had to be fed, no matter what. These children were a healthy-looking lot, fair-haired or red-headed, most of them. Min remembered how black she and Martin had been as children, Martin with his black curls and she with her straight black plait. They were a skinny pair, very different from these children.

Once, a little boy ran up to her so suddenly that she thought he was going to crash into her, but he stopped just in time and stared up at her. He was about five years old, a very solid-looking little fellow. His eyes were so blue that it was like two flowers looking at you, and he had a very short nose, and there was sweat on his forehead. His hair was nearly white. He wore a little suit of clothes, a little coat and trousers and a white shirt, and black stockings pulled up on his legs under his trousers. He opened his mouth, but he said nothing, just stared at her. Min gave no encouragement. She didn’t dislike children, but she had no great fondness for them either, and she didn’t want a whole crowd of them trooping along after trooping along after him and asking her questions and making her conspicuous. He turned red, and he threw his arm up over his eyes, and peered up at her from under his sleeve, and began to smile. She smiled at him, trying so hard to look friendly and welcoming. He was a nice little fellow. She ought to say something to him.

“Are you a good boy?” she asked him, still with a big smile on.

He turned around and ran off, flapping his arms at his sides like a farmyard bird, and when he was a little distance away he turned and looked back to see if she was still watching him. Then he ran off out of the garden. She didn’t see him again.

The next thing she remembered was a moment of terrible unhappiness—it gave her a shock. What happened was that Martin and one of Delia’s brothers and a woman she didn’t even know came up to her and began talking about the train. They kept saying that it wouldn’t do for Delia and Martin to miss the train. Min never knew the woman’s name, but she remembered that she made a great fuss, as though she imagined that the day depended on her. There were always people like that everywhere, trying to boss things. She wanted to tell that woman to mind her own business. All these strangers were taking Martin over. They thought they owned him now.

“The springs of affection are rising.” It would be those people who would say a thing like that, including everybody in their aspirations, everybody, even people who didn’t want to be included in the conversation. Min thought of that garden. She thought of the green box hedge and the monkey-puzzle tree and the shaped flowers, and she thought of Delia’s Aunt Mag on the kitchen chair under the cooking-apple tree, and she remembered Delia’s brothers and sisters and Delia’s mother, and the white-haired child. She had forgotten nothing of that glittering day, and she saw it all enclosed in a radiant fountain that rushed up through a rain of sunlight to meet with and rejoice with whatever was up there—Heaven, God the Father, the Good Shepherd, everything everybody ever wanted, wonderful prizes, happiness.

Min knew it was only the transfiguration of memory. She was no fool and she was not likely to mistake herself for a visionary. The lovely fountains were like a mirage, except that it is a mirage people saw what they wanted and were starving for, and in the fountain Min saw what she did not want and never had wanted to see. Why was it nobody ever believed her hullabaloo? The fortunes of war condemned her to a silence that misrepresented her as thoroughly as the words she was too proud to speak would have done, and she knew all that. Martin’s lightmindedness had changed the course of her life, and there wasn’t one single thing she could do about it. He turned all their lives. He cared no more about his mother and sisters and what happened to them than if he had been a stranger passing through the house on his way to a far better place, where the people were more interesting.

He made his mother cry. For a wedding present, Bridget wanted to give Martin the good dining-room set that she had paid for penny by penny at a time when she couldn’t afford it. a big round mahogany table and f our matching chairs that must have had pride of place in some great house at one time. she kept that furniture up to the nines, polished and waxed till you could see to do your hair in it. But Martin turned up his nose at it. No second-hand stuff for him and Delia, and the mahogany was too big and heavy anyway. He didn’t want it. he and Delia went and ordered furniture made just for them; new furniture, all walnut—a bed, a chest of drawers, a wardrobe, a washstand, and two sitting-room chairs so that Delia could hold court in style when they had visitors. Those were Martin’s very words.

“Now Delia can hold court in style,” he said, and never noticed the look on his mother’s face.

Min noticed the bed had vanished out of the house in Dublin and she was never able to find out what happened to it. but the other things were sill there. Above all, the two sitting-room chairs were still there—Martin sat in his own, and she sat in Delia’s. she would take the whole lot back to Wexford when the time came. She would bring the furniture back where it belonged. It was never too late to make things right.

≠

In Wexford, in her own flat, she sat in Delia’s chair, and sometimes, for a change, sat propped up with pillows in Martin’s big chair, his armchair. It was nice to have the two chairs. The wardrobe and the chest of drawers went into her bedroom, and the washstand into the room she used for a kitchen. Delia’s old sitting-room carpet was threadbare, but the colors held up well, and it looked nice on the floor, almost like an antique carpet. And the hearthrug from the house in Dublin looked very suitable in front of Min’s old fireplace, where so many girls and ladies had warmed themselves when they came in to be measured for a dress, or to have a fitting.

Against the end wall, facing down the room to the fireplace, Delia’s bookshelves were ranged along, filled with Delia’s books, and with some of Martin’s books. Some of Martin’s books Min wouldn’t have in the house and she would have sold them. First it was a hypothesis, a threat, then something uneventful that happened. She was glad now that she had never spent money on books; these had been waiting for her. The room looked very distinguished; very literary. It was what she should have ever had. She wished they could all see it. There was room for them, and a welcome. There was even a deep, dim corner there between the end wall and the far window where her father could steal in and sit down and listen to them with his silence, as he used to do. There was a place here for all of them—a place for Polly, a place for poor Clare. A place in the middle for Bridget, a place for Martin in his own chair. They would come in any time and feel right at home, although the room was warmer and the furniture a bit better than anything they had been used to in the old days.