Brooklyn (28 page)

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.

Later, Nancy and George walked together towards Ballyconnigar, leaving Eilis and Jim to follow. Jim began to ask her questions about America. He said he had two uncles in New York and he used to imagine them among the skyscrapers of Manhattan until he found out that they were two hundred miles from New York City. It was in New York State, he said, and the village one of them was in was smaller than Bunclody. When she told him that a priest, who had been a friend of her sister, had encouraged her to go and helped her there, he asked her the name of the priest. When she said Father Flood, she was taken aback for a moment when Jim Farrell said that his parents knew him well; his father, he thought, had been in St. Peter's College with him.

Later, they drove to Wexford and had their tea in the Talbot Hotel, where the wedding party was going to be held. When they got back to Enniscorthy, Jim invited them to have a drink in his father's pub before going home. His mother, who was serving behind the bar, knew all about their outing and greeted Eilis with an effusive warmth that Eilis found almost unsettling. Before they parted, they agreed that they would repeat the outing the following Sunday. George mentioned the possibility of going from Curracloe to the dance in Courtown.

Eilis had no key to the front door of the house in Friary Street so she had to knock; she hoped that her mother was not asleep. She could hear her coming slowly to answer the door and thought she must have been in the kitchen. Her mother spent some time opening locks and pulling back bolts.

"Well, here you are," her mother said, and smiled. "I'll have to get you a key."

"I hope I didn't wake you."

"No, when I saw you going off I thought to myself that you'd be back late, but it isn't that late because there's still a bit of light in the sky."

Her mother closed the door and led her towards the kitchen.

"Now, tell me something," she said, "did you have a great outing?"

"It was nice, Mammy, and we went to Wexford for our tea."

"And I hope that Jim Farrell wasn't too ignorant?"

"He was fine. Minding his manners."

"Well, the big news is that Davis's offices sent up for you and they have a crisis because all the lorry drivers have to be paid tomorrow and so do all the men working in the mill and one girl is on her holidays and Alice Roche is sick and they were at their wits' end when someone thought of you. And they want you to be there at half past nine in the morning, and I said you would be. It was better to say yes than no."

"How did they know I was here?"

"Sure the whole town knows you're here. So I'll have your breakfast on the table at half past eight and you'd better wear sensible clothes. Nothing too American now."

Her mother had a smile of satisfaction on her face and this came as a relief to Eilis, who had, over the previous days, begun to dread the silences between them and resent her mother's lack of interest in discussing anything, any single detail, about her time in America. They spoke now in the kitchen about Nancy and George and the wedding and arranged to go to Dublin the following Tuesday to buy an outfit for the day. They discussed what they should buy Nancy as a wedding present.

When Eilis went upstairs she felt, for the first time, less uneasy about being home and found that she was almost looking forward to the day dealing with wages at Davis's and then the weekend. As she was undressing, however, she noticed a letter on the bed and instantly saw that it was from Tony, who had put his name and address on the envelope. Her mother must have left it there, having decided not to mention it. She opened it with a feeling close to alarm, wondering for a second if there was anything wrong with him, relieved when she read the opening sentences that declared his love for her and emphasized how much he missed her.

As she read the letter she wished that she could take it downstairs and read it to her mother. The tone was stiff, formal, old-fashioned; the letter was clearly by someone not used to writing letters. Yet Tony managed to put something of himself into it, his warmth, his kindness and his enthusiasm for things. And there was also something there all the time in him, she thought, that was in this letter too. It was a feeling that were he to turn his head, she might be gone. That afternoon, as she had enjoyed the sea and warm weather and the company of Nancy and George and even, towards the end, Jim, she had been away from Tony, far away, basking in the ease of what had suddenly become familiarity.

She wished now that she had not married him, not because she did not love him and intend to return to him, but because not telling her mother or her friends made every day she had spent in America a sort of fantasy, something she could not match with the time she was spending at home. It made her feel strangely as though she were two people, one who had battled against two cold winters and many hard days in Brooklyn and fallen in love there, and the other who was her mother's daughter, the Eilis whom everyone knew, or thought they knew.

She wished she could go downstairs now and tell her mother what she had done, but she knew she would not. It would be simpler to claim that work called her back to Brooklyn and write then, when she had returned, to say that she was seeing a man whom she loved and hoped to get engaged to and married to. She would only be home for less than two more weeks. As she lay in bed she thought it would be wise to make the best of it, take no big decisions in what would be an interlude. A chance to be at home like this would be unlikely to come her way again ever. In the morning, she thought, she would get up early and write to Tony and post the letter on her way to work.

In the morning it was hard not to think that she was Rose's ghost, being fed and spoken to in the same way at the same time by her mother, having her clothes admired using the same words as were used with Rose, and then setting out briskly for work. As she took the same route Eilis had to stop herself walking with Rose's elegant, determined walk, and move more slowly.

In the office Maria Gethings, about whom Rose used to talk, was waiting for her and brought her into the inner sanctum where the cash was kept. The problem was, Maria said, that this was the busy season and all the lorry drivers and the men working in the mill had done overtime the previous week. They had filled out their hours but no one had worked out the money they were due, which was set out on a special form and added to their usual wages, which came with another form, a wage slip. They were not even in alphabetical order, Maria said.

Eilis said that if Maria left her alone for about two hours with all the information about the rates at which overtime was paid, she would work out a system, as long as she could ask Maria questions whenever she needed. She said that she would function best on her own but she would let Maria know if she had even the smallest query. Maria said that she would close the door and leave her undisturbed in this office, mentioning on her way out that the men usually came for their wage packets at around five and the money was in cash in the safe to pay them with.

Eilis found a stapler and began to attach the overtime form for each man to his normal wage sheet. She put them in alphabetical order. When she had all of them done, she went through each overtime form, calculating from the list of rates, which varied considerably depending on years of service and levels of responsibility, how much each man was owed and then adding this to his wages on the wage sheet, so that there was a single figure for each man. She wrote this figure on a separate list, which she then had to tot up to find out how much money was needed to pay the men everything they were owed. The work was straightforward because the terms were clear, and, so long as she concentrated on making no mistakes in the addition, she thought she would be able to complete the task, provided there were enough loose notes and coins in the safe.

She took a short lunch break, insisting to Maria that she would not need any help, just a pile of envelopes and someone to open the safe and run to the bank or the post office for loose change if there was not enough. By four o'clock she had everything done and the amount of cash used up equalled the amount in her original tot. She had given each man a slip in his envelope that included details of the money due, and had also kept a copy of each for the office files.

This was the work she had been dreaming about as she had stood on the shop floor in Bartocci's, seeing the office workers walking in and out as she was telling customers that the Sepia- and Coffee-coloured stockings were for lighter skin and the Red Fox for darker, or as she had sat listening to the lectures and preparing for the exams in Brooklyn College. She knew that once she and Tony were married she would stay at home, cleaning the house and preparing food and shopping and then having children and looking after them as well. She had never mentioned to Tony that she would like to keep working, even if just part time, maybe doing the accounts from home for someone who needed a bookkeeper. In Bartocci's she did not think any of the women in the office were married. She wondered, as she came to the end of her day's work at Davis's, if maybe she could do the bookkeeping for the company that Tony was going to set up with his brothers. As she thought about this, she realized that she had forgotten to write to him that morning and resolved that she would make time that evening and write to him then.

On Sunday, just after lunch, with the weather still warm, George and Nancy and Jim pulled up in front of her house on Friary Street. Jim held the back door of the car open for her while she got in. He had a white shirt on with the sleeves rolled up; she noticed the black hair on his arms and the whiteness of his skin. He was wearing hair oil; she thought that he had made a real effort in how he dressed. As they left the town, he spoke to her quietly about how the pub had been the previous night and how lucky he was that, even though his parents had made it over to him, they were still willing to work there when he wanted to go out.

George said that Curracloe might be too crowded and he thought they should go to Cush Gap instead and make their way down the cliff. This was where Eilis had come with Rose and her brothers and her parents when they were children, but she had not been there for years nor thought about it. As they drove through Blackwater village she almost pointed out the places she knew, such as Mrs. Davis's pub where her father had gone in the evenings, or Jim O'Neill's shop. But she stopped herself. She did not want to sound like someone who had come back home after a long time away. And, she thought, this was something that she might never see again on a summer Sunday like this, but for the others it was nothing, just a decision George had made to go to a quieter place.

She was sure that if she began to talk about her memories of this place, they would notice the difference. Instead, she took in each building as they drove up the hill before the turn to Ballyconnigar, remembering things that had happened, small outings to the village with Jack, or a day when their cousins the Doyles had come to visit. This made her silent and made her feel withdrawn from the ease and the quiet sense of comfort and cheer in the car as it turned left and made its way along the narrow sandy lane to Cush.

Once they had parked the car, George and Nancy walked ahead towards the cliff, leaving Jim and Eilis walking behind. Jim was carrying his own togs and towel as well as her bag with her swimsuit and towel. When they came halfway down the lane, they stopped for a moment at Cullens' house, in front of which Jim's old teacher Mr. Redmond was sitting wearing a straw hat. He was clearly on his holidays.

"This might be the only summer we'll get, sir," Jim said.

"Best take full advantage of it so," Mr. Redmond replied. Eilis noticed that his speech was slurred.

As they moved on, Jim said in a low voice that Mr. Redmond was the only teacher he had ever liked and it was a pity he had had the stroke.

"Where's his son?" Eilis asked.

"Eamon? He's studying, I'd say. That's what he usually does."

When they came to the bottom of the lane and peered over the edge of the cliff, they saw that the sea below them was calm, almost smooth. The sand close to the water's edge was a dark yellow. There was a line of sea birds flying low over the waves, which seemed barely to swell before they broke quietly, almost noiselessly. There was a vague mist that masked the line between the horizon and the sky but otherwise the sky was a pure blue.

George had to run down the last stretch of sand at the gap in the cliff; he waited for Nancy to follow and held her in his arms. Jim did the same, and Eilis found that, when he caught her, he held her in an embrace that was almost too close and he did this as though it was something they were used to doing. She shivered for a second at the thought of Tony seeing her now.

They spread two rugs out on the sand as Jim took off his shoes and socks and went down to test the water, returning to say that it was almost warm, much better than the previous day, and he was going to change and go in for a swim. George said he would go with him. The last to get down in the water, they agreed, would have to buy dinner. Nancy and Eilis put on their swimsuits but stayed sitting on the rugs.

"They're like a pair of children sometimes," Nancy said as they watched George and Jim involved in horseplay in the sea. "If they had a ball, they'd spend an hour playing with it."

"Whatever happened to Annette?" Eilis asked.

"I knew you wouldn't come on Thursday if I told you Jim was coming, and I knew you wouldn't come with just me and George, so I told you Annette was coming; it was a white lie," Nancy said.