William Trevor - A Bit on the Side

She listened, not wanting to, when Nuala went into it. ‘It’d be April,’ Nuala said and repeated the sum of money she had mentioned already. Late April, she thought, maybe just into May. She’d never been early, she said.

‘Himself would say it was against the law, Nuala. I’d wonder was it, myself.’

The daylight in the hall had blurs of blue and pink in it from the coloured panes on either side of the front door. It was a dim, soft light because of that, and while she tried to gather her thoughts together Etty Rynne found herself thinking that its cloudiness was suitable for the conversation that was being conducted – neither of them able to see the other’s face clearly, her own incomprehension.

‘It would be confidential between us,’ Nuala said, ‘that there was money.’

Not meaning to, and in a whisper, Etty Rynne repeated that. A secret was what was meant: a secret kept for ever among the four of them, a secret that was begun already because Nuala had waited for the car to drive off, maybe watching from the SuperValu’s windows. She’d have seen him walking out of the bungalow; when the car had gone she’d have crossed the road.

‘Listen to me, Etty.’

Corry’s statues came into what Nuala said, the wooden figures he made, the Blessed Virgin and the saints, St Brigid in the St Brigid’s Hall in Carrick. And Nuala trying for work in the SuperValu and anywhere she could think of came into it. With the baby due she’d be tied down, but she’d have managed somehow if there was work, only there wasn’t. How Corry had drawn a blank with a woman whose name was unfamiliar came into it. And O’Flynn who had the stoneyard at Guileen did.

‘O’Flynn has his insurances with us.’ For a moment in her mind’s eye Etty Rynne saw the bulky grey-haired stonemason, who always dropped the premiums in himself in case they went astray, who afterwards drew his Peugeot pick-up in at the pumps for a fill-up. It was a relief when all that flickered in Etty Rynne’s memory, after the shock that had left her weak in the legs and wanting to gasp and not being able to.

‘It’s a long time since you put the room ready, Etty.’

‘Did I show it to you?’

‘You did one time.’

She used to show it to people, the small room at the back of the bungalow that she’d painted a bright buttercup shade, the door and windowsills in white gloss.

‘It’s still the same,’ she said.

‘That’s what I was thinking.’

She’d made the curtains herself, blue that matched the carpet, dolls playing ring-a-roses on them. They’d never bought furniture for the little room. Tempting Providence it would be, he said.

‘There’d be no deception,’ Nuala said. ‘No lie, nothing like that. Only the money side kept out of it.’

Etty nodded. Like a dream, it was disordered and peculiar: the ring at the door and Nuala smiling there, and standing in the hall with Nuala and having to sit down, her face going red and then the blood draining out of it when Nuala asked if she had savings in the bank or in a credit society, and mentioning the sum that would be enough.

‘I couldn’t take your baby off of you, Nuala.’

‘I wouldn’t be deprived. I’d have another one, maybe two or three. A bit of time gone by and people would understand.’

‘Oh God, I doubt they would.’

‘It isn’t against the law, Etty. No way.’

‘I couldn’t. I never could.’ Pregnancy made you fanciful sometimes and she wondered if it was that that had got at Nuala. She didn’t say it in case it made things worse. Slowly she shook her head. ‘God, I couldn’t,’ she said again.

‘Nowadays if a man and woman can’t have a baby there’s things can be done.’

‘I know, I know.’

‘Nowadays –’

‘I couldn’t do what you’re saying, Nuala.’

‘Is it the money?’

‘It’s everything, Nuala. It’s what people’d say. He’d blow his head off if he knew what you’re after suggesting. It would bring down the business, he’d say. Nobody’d come near us.’

‘People –’

‘They’d never come round to it, Nuala.’

A silence came, and the silence was worse than the talk. Then Nuala said:

‘Would we sit down to a cup of coffee?’

‘God, I’m sorry. Of course we will.’

She could feel sweat on the sides of her body and on her neck and her forehead. The palms of her hands were cold. She stood up and it was better than before.

‘Come into the kitchen.’

‘I didn’t mean to upset you, Etty.’

Filling the kettle, spooning Nescafé into two cups, pouring in milk, Etty Rynne felt her jittery unease beginning to recede, leaving her with stark astonishment. She knew Nuala well. She’d known her since they were six, when first they’d been at school together. There had never been any sign whatsoever of stuff like this: Nuala was what she looked like, down-to-earth and sensible, both feet on the ground.

‘The pregnancy? Would it be that, Nuala?’

‘It’s no different from the others. It’s just that I thought of the way things are with you. And with Corry, talking about going to work on the roads.’

Two troubles, Etty Rynne heard then, and something good drawn out of them when you’d put them together. That’s all it was, Nuala said; no more than that.

‘What you said will never go outside these four walls,’ Etty Rynne promised. ‘Nor mentioned within them either,’ It was a woman’s thing, whatever it was. Wild horses wouldn’t drag the conversation they’d had out of her. ‘Didn’t you mean well? Don’t I know you did?’

The coffee calmed their two different moods. They walked through the narrow hall together and a cold breeze blew in when the front door was opened. A car drew up at the petrol pumps and Etty Rynne hurried to attend to it. She waved when Nuala rode away from the crossroads on the bicycle she shared with her husband.

*

‘It’s how it is,’ Corry said when he rejected O’Flynn’s offer of a place in the stoneyard, and he said it again when he agreed to work on the roads.

Stubbornly, Nuala considered that it needn’t be how it was. It was ridiculous that there should live within a mile of one another a barren wife and a statue-maker robbed by adverse circumstances of his purpose in God’s world. It was stupid and silly and perverse, when all that had to be done was to take savings out of a bank. The buttercup-yellow room so lovingly prepared would never now be occupied. In the tarmac surfaces he laid on roads Corry would see the visions he had betrayed.

Nuala nursed her anger, keeping it to herself. She went about her tasks, collecting eggs from where her hens had laid, preparing food, kneading dough for the bread she made every second day; and all the time her anger nagged. It surely was not too terrible a sin, too redolent of insidious presumption, that people should impose an order of their own on what they were given? Had she been clumsy in her manner of putting it to Etty Rynne? Or wrong not to have revealed her intentions to Corry in the hope that, with thought, he would have accepted the sense of them? But doubt spread then: Corry never would have; no matter how it had been put, Etty Rynne would have been terrified.

Corry bought new boots before he went to work on the roads. They were doing a job on the quarry boreen, he said, re-surfacing it because of the complaints there’d been from the lorry drivers. A protective cape was supplied to him in case there’d be rain.

On the night before his new work began Nuala watched him applying waterproof stuff to the boots and rubbing it in. They were useless without it, he’d been told. He took it all in his stride.

‘Things happen differently,’ he said, as if something in Nuala’s demeanour allowed him to sense her melancholy. ‘We’re never in charge.’