Colm Tóibín - Brooklyn

"She only got off with Jim Farrell as a dare," Nancy said. "He was being as rude to her as he was to you that night, do you remember how rude he was? And we all bet money that she wouldn't get off with him. And then she did. But she couldn't bear him in the end, she said he was a terrible pain in the neck, even though George says he's really a nice fellow if you get to know him, and George was in school with him."

"George is very charitable," Annette said.

Jim Farrell, Nancy said, was coming to the wedding as a friend of George, but her sister was demanding that her new boyfriend from Ferns also be invited. In all this talk of boyfriends and plans for the wedding, Eilis realized that if she were to tell Nancy or Annette about her own secret wedding, attended by no one except her and Tony, they would respond with silence and bewilderment. It would seem too strange.

For the next few days as she moved around the town, and on Sunday, when she went to eleven o'clock mass with her mother, people commented on Eilis's beautiful clothes, her sophisticated hairstyle and her suntan. She tried to make plans to see Annette or Nancy either together or separately every day, telling her mother in advance what she intended to do. On the following Wednesday, when she told her mother that, if it was fine, she was going the next day in the early afternoon to Curracloe with George Sheridan and Nancy and Annette, her mother demanded that she cancel her outing that evening and begin the task of going through Rose's belongings, deciding what to keep and what to give away.

They took out the clothes hanging in the wardrobe and put them on the bed. Eilis wanted to make clear that she did not need any of her sister's clothes and that it would be best to give away everything to a charity. But her mother was already setting aside Rose's winter coat, so recently acquired, and a number of frocks that she said could easily be altered to fit Eilis.

"I won't have much room in my suitcase," Eilis said, "and the coat is lovely but the colour is too dark for me."

Her mother, still busy sorting the clothes, pretended that she had not heard her.

"What we'll do is we'll take the frocks and the coat to the dressmaker's in the morning and they'll look different when they are the proper size, when they match your new American figure."

Eilis, in turn, began to ignore her mother as she opened the bottom drawer of the chest and poured its contents on to the floor. She wanted to make sure that she found her letters to Rose, if they were here, before her mother did. There were old medals and brochures, even hairnets and hairpins, which had not been used for years, and folded handkerchiefs and some photographs that Eilis put aside, as well as a large number of score cards for golf. But there was no sign in this drawer, or in any of the others, of the letters.

"Most of this is rubbish, Mammy," she said. "It'll be best just to keep the photographs and throw the rest away."

"Oh, I'll need to look at all that, but come over here now and help me fold these scarves."

Eilis refused to go to the dressmaker's the following morning, telling her mother finally and emphatically that she did not want to wear any of Rose's frocks or coats, no matter how elegant they were or how much they cost.

"Do you want me to dump them, then?"

"There are a lot of people would love them."

"But they are not good enough for you?"

"I have my own clothes."

"Well, I'll leave them in the wardrobe in case you change your mind. You could give them away and then find someone you didn't know at mass on Sunday wearing them. That'd be nice now."

In the post office Eilis had bought enough stamps and special envelopes for letters to America. She wrote to Tony explaining that she was staying a few weeks extra and to the shipping company at the office in Cobh cancelling the return passage she had booked and asking them to let her know how to arrange a later date for her return. She thought that she would wait until closer to the date to alert Miss Fortini and Mrs. Kehoe to her late arrival. She wondered if it would be wise to use illness as an excuse. She told Tony about the visit to Rose's grave and about Nancy's engagement, assuring him that she kept his ring close to her so that she could think about him when she was alone.

At lunchtime she put a towel and her bathing costume and a pair of sandals into a bag and walked to Nancy's house, where George Sheridan was going to collect them. It had been a beautiful morning, the air sweet and still, and it was hot, almost stifling in the house as they waited for George to arrive. When they heard the sound of the horn beeping in the station wagon he used to make deliveries they went outside. Eilis was surprised to see Jim Farrell as he held the door open for her and then got in beside her, allowing Nancy to sit beside George in the front passenger seat.

Eilis nodded coldly at Jim and sat as far away from him as she could. She had spotted him at mass the previous Sunday but had been careful to avoid him. As they moved out of the town, she realized that he, and not Annette, was coming with them; she was angry with Nancy for not having told her. She would have cancelled had she known. She was further infuriated when George and Jim began a discussion about some rugby game as the car made its way along the Osbourne Road towards Vinegar Hill and then turned right towards Curracloe. She thought for a moment of interrupting the two men to tell them that in Brooklyn there was a Vinegar Hill too but that it was nothing like the Vinegar Hill that overlooked Enniscorthy, even though it was called after it. Anything, she thought, to shut them up. Instead, she decided that she would not speak once to Jim Farrell, not even acknowledge his presence, and that as soon as there was a gap in the conversation she would introduce a topic on which he could not contribute.

When George had parked the car and George and Nancy moved ahead towards the boardwalk that led over the sand dunes to the beach, Jim Farrell spoke to her very quietly, asking her how her mother was, saying that he and his mother and father had been to Rose's funeral mass. His mother, he said, had been very fond of her in the golf club. "All in all," he said, "it was the saddest thing that has happened in the town for a long time."

She nodded. If he wanted her to think well of him, she thought, then she should let him know as soon as possible that she had no intention of doing so, but this was hardly the moment.

"It must be difficult being home," he said. "Although it must be nice for your mother."

She turned and smiled sadly at him. They did not speak again until they reached the strand and caught up with George and Nancy.

Jim, it turned out, had not brought a towel or his togs and said that the water was, in any case, probably too cold. Eilis looked at Nancy and then shot a withering glance at Jim for Nancy to witness. As Jim removed his shoes and socks and rolled up the bottoms of his trousers and went down to the water, the other three began to change. If this had been years ago, Eilis thought, she would have worried during the entire journey from Enniscorthy about her swimsuit and its style, about whether she was too unshapely or awkward on the beach, or what George and Jim would think of her. But now, however, that she was still suntanned from the boat and from her trips to Coney Island with Tony, she felt oddly confident as she walked down the strand, passing Jim Farrell paddling at the edge of the water without saying a word to him, wading out and then, as the first high wave approached, swimming into it as it broke and then out beyond it.

She knew he was watching her and the idea that she should really have splashed him as she passed him made her smile. For a second it came into her mind as something she could tell Rose and that Rose would love, but then she realized with a sense of regret close to an actual pain that Rose was dead and there were things like this, ordinary things, that she would never know, that would not matter to her now.