William Trevor - After Rain

All night, she knew, she would sit there, the muzzy image of Carol Dickson where he had left it, a yard away. She did not want to sleep because sleeping meant waking up and there would be the moment when reality began to haunt again. Her role was only to accept: he had a screw loose, she had willed him to be born. No one would ever understand the mystery of his existence, or the unshed tears they shared.

The Potato Dealer

Mulreavy would marry her if they paid him, Ellie’s uncle said: she couldn’t bring a fatherless child into the world. He didn’t care what was done nowadays; he didn’t care what the fashion was; he wouldn’t tolerate the talk there’d be. ‘Mulreavy,’ her uncle repeated. ‘D’you know who I mean by Mulreavy?’

She hardly did. An image came into her mind of a big face that had a squareness about it, and black hair, and a cigarette butt adhering to the lower lip while a slow voice agreed or disagreed, and eyes that were small, and sharp as splinters. Mulreavy was a potato dealer. Once a year he came to the farm, his old lorry rattling into the yard, then backed up to where the sacks stood ready for him. Sometimes he shook his head when he examined the potatoes, saying they were too small. He tried that on, Ellie’s uncle maintained. Cagey, her uncle said.

‘I’ll tell you one thing, girl,’ her uncle said when she found the strength to protest at what was being proposed. ‘I’ll tell you this: you can’t stay here without there’s something along lines like I’m saying. Nowadays is nothing, girl. There’s still the talk.’

He was known locally as Mr. Larrissey, rarely by his Christian name, which was Joseph. Ellie didn’t call him ‘Uncle Joseph’, never had; ‘uncle’ sometimes, though not often, for even in that there seemed to be an intimacy that did not belong in their relationship. She thought of him as Mr. Larrissey.

‘It’s one thing or the other, girl.’

Her mother - her uncle’s sister - didn’t say anything. Her mother hadn’t opened her mouth on the subject of Mulreavy, but Ellie knew that she shared the sentiments that were being expressed, and would accept, in time, the solution that had been offered. She had let her mother down; she had embittered her; why should her mother care what happened now? All of it was a mess. In the kitchen of the farmhouse her mother and her uncle were thinking the same thing.

Her uncle - a worn, tired man, not used to trouble like this - didn’ t forgive her and never would: so he had said, and Ellie knew it was true. Since the death of her father she and her mother had lived with him on the farm on sufferance: that was always in his eyes, even though her mother did all the cooking and the cleaning of the house, even though Ellie, since she was eleven, had helped in summer in the fields, had collected and washed the eggs and nourished the pigs. Her uncle had never married; if she and her mother hadn’t moved on to the farm in 1978, when Ellie was five, he’d still be on his own, managing as best he could.

‘You have the choice, girl,’ he said now, the repetition heavy in the farmhouse kitchen. He was set in his ways, Ellie’s mother often said; lifelong bachelors sometimes were.

He’d said at first - a fortnight ago - that his niece should get herself seen to, even though it was against religion. Her mother said no, but later wondered if it wasn’t the only way out, the trip across the water that other girls had gone on, what else was there? They could go away and have it quietly done, they could be visiting the Galway cousins, no one would be the wiser. But Ellie, with what spirit was left in her, though she was in disgrace and crying, would not agree. In the fortnight that passed she many times, tearfully, repeated her resolve to let the child be born.

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

‘Mulreavy,’ her uncle said again.

‘I know who he is.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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