by Colm Toibin
“Can we see each of our folders then?” one of the men asked.
“If you come back tomorrow,” Miss Kavanagh said.
“We will see them now and come back tomorrow as well.”
Nora remembered that she had written only initials on the folders and she hoped, were the travellers to see their folders, she would not have to tell them what BT, SB and WLD stood for.
“I’ll get them myself if you tell us what filing cabinet they are in,” Walk-like-a-duck said.
“You will touch nothing here,” Miss Kavanagh said.
“You told us that you didn’t have the information. Now it turns out that you do. We are not moving until we see our folders.”
“Well, you can look now for one minute,” Miss Kavanagh said. “But we don’t have all day to waste.”
She nodded to Nora, who went outside and searched through the cabinet until she found the file on each of the travellers. They cleared space on Miss Kavanagh’s desk without consulting her and opened the three files. On a page stapled to the opening page Nora had set out in very clear large handwriting what each of the men was due. One of the men started to make notes.
“Wait until the others hear about this,” he said.
When they had gone, Miss Kavanagh did not move. Nora returned the files to the cabinet. She felt desperately tired now, as if she could easily fall asleep at her desk. When she looked at her watch she saw that it was only two thirty. She did not know how she was going to get through the afternoon.
“What are you doing now?” Miss Kavanagh’s voice behind her was very quiet and composed.
Nora realised that there was no work on her desk.
“What are you doing now?” Miss Kavanagh repeated, the voice even quieter.
“Well, I was about to check what bonus claims have come in today.”
“I didn’t ask you what you are about to do. That’s a question any idler can answer. I asked you what you are doing now.”
“Miss Kavanagh, what do you think I am doing? I am talking to you.”
Miss Kavanagh walked down the long office and found a young woman who had just started to work there. She led her back to her own office.
“Mrs. Webster, could you bring in all the files you have made on the commercial travellers?” she shouted.
Nora went to the filing cabinet and took out the files and carried them into the office.
“On the desk! Put them on the desk!” Miss Kavanagh shouted.
“Here are some scissors,” she said to the new girl. “I want every one of those files cut up into pieces and put into the wastepaper basket. I have specific instructions from Mr. William Gibney Senior that no files like this are needed or desirable. He knows what each commercial traveller is due. If we had wanted Mrs. Webster to make files we would have asked her to.”
She turned to Nora.
“And what, Mrs. Webster, were you talking to that lorry driver about outside this building? What further mischief were you planning?”
“The topic of our discussion is none of your business, Miss Kavanagh,” Nora said.
“There she is, late for work, parking her car any old way, and spending the morning with Miss Gibney, the laziest girl in Ireland, and then gossiping with a lorry driver. She won’t last long here, you know. Do you understand that, Mrs. Webster?”
“I have no further interest in listening to you, Miss Kavanagh,” Nora said. “And can I suggest that you keep your views on Miss Gibney and perhaps most other matters to yourself?”
Miss Kavanagh took up one of the folders and tried to tear it in two. When the paper proved too tough, she grabbed the scissors from the girl and began to cut the folder up.
“You are not down in your house in Ballyconnigar now, Mrs. Webster, or sitting in the lounge of Etchingham’s pub. You are not Lady Muck anymore. You are here, working for me. And I run this office in the way that I am told by Mr. William Gibney Senior and it is one of the unspoken rules that no one who works here consorts with the lorry drivers unless it is a part of their daily task. You think you can do what you like, with your daughter here and your daughter there, and that sister of yours out in the golf club, a most unpleasant article if ever there was one. And your husband indeed, oh, he was a great man—”
“Don’t speak about my husband!”
Nora took up the scissors. Later, she could not think why she had done this. She walked out of Miss Kavanagh’s office with the scissors in her hand, found her coat and left as though nothing special had happened. Once she was in the car, she checked the time. It was not yet three o’clock. The boys would not even be home.
CHAPTER EIGHT
As she turned the car, she decided that she would go to Ballyconnigar now. The day was fine and the strand at Keatings’ would be empty. She would walk, and maybe the walking would give her an idea what she might do. No matter what happened she would not go back to Gibney’s again. She wondered if she could sell the house in Enniscorthy and rent a smaller house, or move to Dublin. It might be easier to find a proper job in Dublin. Aine would be there next year and maybe Fiona could find a teaching job there, and she could find a school for the boys. As she thought about this, the image of leaving Jim and Margaret, and her sister Una, came to her, and from that she was reminded of what Miss Kavanagh had said about Una in the golf club, “a most unpleasant article if ever there was one,” and she laughed. There was something about the phrase, as there was indeed about Miss Kavanagh knowing that she and Maurice went to Etchingham’s pub in Blackwater some nights in the summer, that made it clear that Francie Kavanagh had been watching her closely.
She remembered the day years ago when Greta had told her that Francie was coming with them to Ballyconnigar and that there was nothing they could do about it. Both she and Greta were determined that they would not be seen with Francie Kavanagh. Even her clothes then, and the look of her bicycle itself, suggested an old house out in the countryside that did not have running water, a house where upstairs was called “the loft.” Her voice, her accent, phrases she used, made them wish to keep away from her. But she wanted to join them that day.
They used all their energy on their lighter bicycles to get ahead of her, out of sight, and then went to Morriscastle. Nora imagined her arriving in Ballyconnigar expecting to find herself and Greta. She must have had some dream of changing herself, becoming like a girl from the town. Greta and herself, Nora thought, were very innocent then, but they had ambitions. Greta’s rule that they would speak only to men who knew syntax and they would ignore anyone who used bad grammar began as a joke, but slowly it became serious for them. They both married educated men and they both learned to drive, and once they had children, they both stayed near the sea in the summer for as long as they could. In trying to join them that day, Francie Kavanagh had maybe also wanted some of what they wanted, little as it seemed at the time. And they had laughed the following day when they heard about her puncture and the rain. They had certainly not apologised to her. And now she ran the office and moved around all day like a madwoman. As she turned at Finchogue, Nora wondered if there was a normal job available, a job she could do without a madwoman who hated her in control of her. But in any interview now, or in any discussion with a prospective employer, she would have to explain why, on a bright October afternoon, she had walked out of Gibney’s with a pair of scissors in her hand.
She stopped in Blackwater and bought a packet of ten Carrolls cigarettes and a box of matches. She had not smoked for years and promised herself that she would not smoke all of these cigarettes either, just two or three before throwing the packet away. When she inhaled, she felt dizzy and that made her remember how tired she was. She threw the cigarette out of the window and then put her head back and fell asleep. When she woke, she spotted a woman standing on the bridge looking over at her car. As the woman approached, she started the engine.
She was tem
pted to drive to Cush and visit the house and see if Jack Lacey had done any work on it. But she was sure that her car would be noticed. She toyed for a moment with the idea of driving home and writing the Gibneys a sharp letter of resignation. She began to compose it in her mind. But then the energy to do that left her and she decided to drive towards the sea at Keatings’.
She had not expected to find a haze over the water. She sat in the car in front of the Keatings’ house and looked down in the direction of Rosslare, taking in the heavy, milky light that lay over the strand going towards Curracloe and Raven Point. When she got out of the car, she felt how unusually close and humid it was, as if there was thunder coming. She put on a pair of flat shoes that she kept in the car. There were no other cars in the car park. She walked carefully on the stony stretch between the grass and the river and crossed the small wooden bridge and made her way south.
In all the years, she thought, she had never come here even as late in the season as October; she imagined now how strange it would be in December and January, how storm-swept and wintry and how biting the cold.
There was hardly any colour. The world in front of her had been washed down. If she moved nearer to the shore, she could look at the small stones that made a rattling sound when the waves broke over them. She saw how exact the colour of each stone was and it allowed her to forget Francie Kavanagh and the Gibneys and stop worrying about what she would do.
She could barely see ahead of her as she walked. It might have been easy to imagine that this was a place that belonged more to Maurice than to her. It was the world filled with absences. There was merely the hushed sound of the water and stray cries of seabirds flying close to the surface of the calm sea. She could make out the sun as it glowed through the curtain of haze. It was unlikely that Maurice was anywhere except buried in the graveyard where she had left him. But nonetheless the idea lingered that if he, or his spirit, was anywhere in the world, then he would be here.
She thought it almost natural that if his spirit were on this stretch of strand he would have his own concerns. The details of her life—her job at Gibney’s, or what might happen in the future with Fiona and Aine, Donal and Conor—these would be matters that would seem as vague to him as the far distance did now to her, things that would pass as his life had passed. What had happened in the days before his death, the blockage in his system that caused him to cry out so his voice could be heard through the hospital, that would be with him now, more than anything else.
It came to her again, his death. She pictured those who were there—Jim and Margaret, Sister Thomas, who had said special prayers, and old Father Quaid. For the last two days Nora herself had stayed by his bedside. But he was already far away from them, so far that they might have been like shadows, people already lost to him. Maybe he could only imagine them all as vague presences, the ones he had loved, but love hardly mattered then, just as the haze here now meant that the line between things hardly mattered.
As she reached Ballyvaloo, and the luminous grey-whiteness was moved down the strand by the mild wind towards Curracloe, she saw that there was a single nun walking back towards the lane that led to the retreat house of the Sisters of St. John of God. Wearing a full black habit, she walked slowly and with difficulty. Nora thought that she must be one of the retired nuns who often came here on holiday or on retreat.
When she was closer she saw that the nun was Sister Thomas. Nora was surprised she was in Ballyvaloo; she had not known that she ever spent time away from her own convent and the town. She moved towards her and when she reached her, Sister Thomas greeted her and put out her hands and took both of Nora’s hands and held them.
Suddenly, Nora felt cold and began to shiver. She could hear a wind blowing, almost whistling, in the distance, but when she looked out at the sea and down the strand it all seemed calm. There was no sign of the haze lifting.
“You shouldn’t be here on your own,” Sister Thomas said. “I was in Blackwater this morning to see a friend. And just a while ago she saw you fast asleep in the car and then driving towards the strand and she phoned me in the convent because she was worried and wanted to know what she should do. So I walked down here in case I would find you.”
“Who saw me?”
“I thought I would come down to the shoreline to see if you were here,” Sister Thomas said quietly. “I don’t often leave the retreat house. Today it’s more like heaven than earth down here.”
“I saw her all right. Someone who can’t mind her own business.”
“That is one way of putting it. Someone who is looking out for you.”
Sister Thomas released Nora’s hands.
“I was not surprised to see you down here,” she said. “It was meant to happen, us meeting like this. This is how the Lord works.”
“Don’t tell me about how the Lord works! Don’t tell me that again!”
“When Maurice was dying I asked the Lord to make it easy for him and for you. I have no needs of my own and I had not asked Him for anything in a long time. But I asked Him for that and He denied me what I asked. There must have been a reason for saying no, and the reason is hidden from us. But I know that He is watching over you, and maybe that is why we met so I could tell you that.”
“He has not been watching over me! No one has been watching over me!”
“I knew when I woke today and said my prayers this morning that I was to see you.”
Nora was silent.
“So turn back now before the fog comes down so hard that you won’t be able to drive home,” Sister Thomas said. “Go home and the boys will be home soon. The boys will be home from school waiting for you.”
“I can’t work in Gibney’s anymore. Miss Kavanagh shouts at me. She said things today that made it impossible for me to stay.”
“It will be all right. It is a small town and it will guard you. Go back to it now. And stop grieving, Nora. The time for that is over. Do you hear me?”
“I felt as I walked along here—”
“We all feel that on days like this,” Sister Thomas interrupted. “And even on other days. It is why we come here. Those who have passed on have it for shelter on their way elsewhere. It is nice to be among them on a day like this.”
“Among them? What do you mean?”
“We walk among them sometimes, the ones who have left us. They are filled with something that none of us knows yet. It is a mystery.”
She held Nora’s two hands again, and then turned and walked slowly, as though in pain, back towards the dunes and the lane leading to the retreat house. Nora waited to see if she would look back, but she did not, so Nora stood for a while without moving, looking out at the sea still covered in haze. And then she began to make her way along the strand towards where she had left the car. Miss Kavanagh’s large scissors were on the front passenger seat beside the packet of cigarettes. She put the cigarettes in the glove compartment, but took the scissors out of the car and left them down on the gravel for someone else to find.
CHAPTER NINE
Nora said nothing to anyone about what had happened at Gibney’s, not even that she was considering selling the house and moving to Dublin with the boys. She smiled at the thought of them seeing a For Sale sign on the house, or an advertisement for it in the newspapers. She had sent a note to Miss Kavanagh saying that she was ill; she would not bother sending another note to William or Peggy or Elizabeth saying that she was not coming back. They would have to find out. For them it would hardly matter, although they might not, she thought, want people in the town to know that she had been badly treated in the office. She knew that Conor had told Fiona that she had not been at work, but Fiona had not asked her about it.
One Friday evening at the end of that October, when Fiona and Aine were both home, Una arrived to show them all her engagement ring. Catherine, when Nora had phoned her a few days earlier from the booth on the Back Road, had t
old her that Una and Seamus had been to stay. She and Mark had liked Seamus. She added that Una had told her how nervous she was about mentioning the engagement to Nora. Una, she said, did not know how Nora would respond, since it was all so soon after Maurice’s death. Nora had a visit too from her aunt Josie, who said that Una was going to marry Seamus in the New Year and her only worry was how Nora would deal with the news.
“Your sisters are afraid of you,” Josie said. “They always have been. I don’t know what it is.”
Nora began to have little patience with her sister and to feel nothing except a dry irritation about her and her fiancé, and a remote amusement at the news she had received from Elizabeth about Una and Seamus in Wexford and Rosslare cavorting like two people half their age.
“Oh, I heard all about the ring,” she said when Una appeared and showed it to her. “I believe Tara Reagan loved it, or so she said.”
“I suppose Elizabeth Gibney told you that.”
“The whole town told me,” Nora said.
“Tara Reagan is such a fool.”
“She knows a good ring when she sees it,” Nora said.
Una looked at Fiona and Aine as if to say that she had always expected this to be difficult.
“Anyway, that is great news. Catherine told me and Aunt Josie told me as well. Everyone told me. So I know all about it. Congratulations!”
Una blushed.
“I was going to tell you a few times when I saw you and then I thought I’d wait and leave it.”
“Oh, no hurry. As I said, the whole town is talking about it, so I only needed to go out of the door to hear about it.”
Una, she saw, wanted to leave, but had come to the house to win Nora’s approval and to do so in the softening presence of Fiona and Aine. She wanted, Nora thought, to be able to phone Catherine and Josie and tell them that she had finally broken the news to her sister and it would all be easy now. Nora felt the weight of them all talking about her, all of them thinking that she might in some way object to her sister getting married or say something stinging to Una about it. She wished now that she felt like saying something helpful, but she could not think what it might be. But she also wished that the three of them might go, the two girls back upstairs or to the other room, and Una to her own house. The longer they stayed expecting something from her, the closer she came to feeling a sort of rage that she knew stemmed from her encounter with Miss Kavanagh and from not sleeping well since she had walked out of the office. But it also came from Una herself, and from Fiona and Aine.
