ii

‘That's not what I said,' Larry interrupted. ‘I said that you guys used to eat each other.'

‘But when?' Eilis asked.

‘I told you. In the Famine. In the Great Hunger.'

As soon as they set out from the airport, Larry, in the back seat, told Eilis about the book that Mr Dakessian had given him.

‘He gave Rosella a book too but she didn't bring it with her.'

‘It was too heavy. I'll read it when I get back. But Uncle Frank gave me another book and I read that on the plane.'

‘It's by this woman,' Larry said.

‘Larry, I can tell my mother about the book myself.'

Rosella rummaged in her bag.

‘It's called The Price of My Soul by Bernadette Devlin,' she said, producing a paperback.

‘Mine is called The Great Hunger,' Larry said. ‘And it says that you guys ate anything you could find at that time, including each other.'

‘What do you mean, "you guys"?' Eilis asked. ‘Honestly, Larry!'

‘That's what it says. Don't shoot me, I'm just reading the book.'

‘He read the worst bits out in a loud voice so the whole plane could hear.'

‘And what is your book like?' Eilis asked.

‘It's really sad at the start and then I really wanted to meet Bernadette Devlin. I admire her. If she came to Enniscorthy while we were there it would be amazing.'

Beyond Ashford, Eilis found a safe place to pull in.

‘There's something I need to say to you both. Your Enniscorthy grandmother knows nothing about what is going on at home. Nothing! She's old and it would upset her too much. So, not a word! Not a single word! And her house has not been decorated for years. I'm not sure what rooms we will all be sleeping in. But no complaining. Your grandmother is very proud and very sensitive.'

‘How did she get that house?' Rosella asked as they were on the road again.

‘What do you mean?'

‘Bernadette Devlin says it was impossible for Catholics to get houses.'

‘That's in the North.'

‘But not in the South?'

‘No. There's nothing like that.'

By the time Eilis had driven through Arklow, Rosella and Larry were both asleep. They had been careful not to mention their father or their grandmother. Eilis wondered if they knew that Tony had not written to her.

—

As she ran her tongue along her teeth, she could still taste Jim Farrell's mouth. That morning, in the hotel room, she had promised him that she would soon call him, using the phone box at the bottom of Parnell Avenue, even though she had explained how hard it might be to find an excuse to leave her mother's house.

At the reception desk of the Montrose Hotel, the day before, when Eilis had asked for Mr Farrell, Mr Jim Farrell, the young receptionist had immediately directed her to a room on the top floor.

The day was bright and warm; it would make sense for them to go for a walk, but she imagined that they would stay in their room until she left in the morning. Jim came awkwardly to the door in his shirtsleeves and socks.

‘I was having a little lie-down,' he said.

‘Don't let me . . .' she began.

She saw that there was a double bed. She smiled at how easy it had been.

‘I hope the room is all right,' he said. ‘It might be a bit small compared to American hotels.'

She did not want to say to him that she had never stayed in an American hotel.

She took off her shoes and, after a while, lay on the bed with him. She kissed him. As he fumbled with the buttons on her blouse, Eilis was tempted to whisper to him that there was no rush, she would be with him until the morning.

—

In the early evening, Jim dialled a number from the phone beside the bed. She heard him booking a table for two at eight.

‘Are we going out to a restaurant?' she asked.

‘It's a quiet place. Italian. It'll be all right. I often go there when I am up on Thursdays.'

In the city, Jim seemed confident with the flow of traffic and found a parking space in a side street. In the restaurant, he asked for a table at the back that was free.

Since the place was lit only by table-lamps, no one would ever notice them, Eilis realised, once they were sitting down.

Jim left her to order for both of them.

‘Nothing too fancy, but surprise me. I always order the same things. But now that I am with an expert . . .'

‘That's a good name for me.'

‘I still don't know if you're an American now,' he asked when the wine and the first course came.

‘I think I became one when I got to vote against Nixon. I felt like an American then.'

‘I had a group of old timers in the pub. They were all clued-in to politics, English politics, the North, American politics. So I heard a lot about Nixon.'

‘What did you think of him?' Eilis asked.

‘I was surprised by one thing,' Jim said. ‘I was surprised that they got him on something small. I mean, considering all the other things he did –'

‘You mean they got him on Watergate?'

‘It mightn't seem small, but it looked small from my perspective. Maybe if you were in America, it was different. And Ireland must look different from the American side.'

‘I don't understand how little I see and hear just now about Derry and Belfast,' Eilis said. ‘I thought there would be flags and marches down here too. In America, it's what everyone wants to talk to you about if you are Irish.'

‘At the beginning,' Jim said, ‘the subject of the North was very heated. There was a shouting match one night in the pub with fellows demanding we should invade the North. And then later people who were burned out of their houses in Belfast, Catholic people, came to the town. Everyone bought drinks for them and they had terrible stories. But not long after, they were huddled in a group together with no one paying any attention to them. And then we never saw them again. They must have gone back to the North.'

When the bill was paid and Jim went to the bathroom, Eilis had a moment where she felt surprised at herself. She realised that she was actually looking forward to the rest of the evening, to being in the car with Jim, to returning to the room with him, to resuming this conversation, and then to spending the night in bed with him.

—

Rosella and Larry were still asleep in the car. By now, Jim would be home, she thought as she drove towards Enniscorthy. She had asked him not to contact her but to wait, let her be the one to get in touch.

‘When?' he had asked her.

‘Soon,' she had replied.

‘What kind of soon?'

‘I don't know yet.'

‘I want to know if you're free.'

‘We can talk about that.'

‘But you must know. You yourself must know!'

She did know. In that second, she was convinced that, if she could, she wanted to be with him. But she needed to be certain that she would feel the same that night or in the morning.

‘Don't press me too hard,' she said.

‘If you're free, then I –'

‘Don't say it just yet.'

‘I would like to be with you, no matter what, even if I had to –'

‘You've said enough!'

‘This time, I would follow you to New York. That is what I want to do. That is what I am asking you if I can do.'

She had to hold herself back from saying that she would like that too. Instead, she smiled and left silence and held his gaze.

—

‘Not a word,' Eilis said when she had parked the car in Court Street. ‘And no complaining. Be nice to her. Put up with things you mightn't put up with at home.'

‘You make her sound very difficult,' Rosella said.

‘She is difficult,' Eilis said. ‘Or she has been since I arrived.'

Once the front door was opened by her mother, Eilis noticed that the fridge and washing machine and cooker were no longer blocking the hallway.

‘Well,' her mother said, with her grandchildren standing on the pavement outside her house, ‘you don't take after our side at all. You are a pair of Italians. Come in, come in, the whole town'll be talking about how I left you standing on the street.'

In the kitchen, their grandmother put them sitting at the table. Ignoring Eilis's surprise at the installation of the fridge and washing machine and cooker, she opened the fridge which was empty except for a bottle of milk and a pound of butter.

‘In a minute we'll have the dinner,' she said. ‘It will all be a bit rough and ready. But let you first get settled.'

They followed her up the stairs. She showed Larry the way to his bedroom in the attic and then explained that she had made the front room downstairs into a bedroom and that could be used by Rosella.

‘Why don't you take my room,' Eilis said to Rosella, ‘and I'll sleep downstairs.'

‘Why would I take your room?' Rosella asked.

‘Because it's beside your grandmother's room and she would like to have you close to her.'

‘It would be a lovely change,' Eilis's mother said.

When Martin arrived and questioned them about their journey, Eilis went to the hallway and opened the front door and closed it again as quietly as she could. It would be easy to slip in and out of the house without being noticed while everyone was sleeping.

Martin and her mother were telling the children about Eilis's efforts, as soon as she arrived, to make the house more modern.

‘All the things were wrong,' her mother said. ‘Too big, too small, the wrong colour, the wrong make. I had to send them all back.'

Eilis decided not to point out that the fridge, washing machine and cooker were precisely the ones she had bought. They had not been sent back.

Larry had a way of becoming instantly friendly with most people, but there were others of whom he was wary. It had taken him a year or more, for example, to warm to Mr Dakessian and he could even be distant with his uncle Frank if he had not seen him for a while. Eilis now watched him taking the measure of Martin who was offering to accompany him on a tour of the pubs of the town.

‘They don't mind fellows your age coming in and having a mineral. They don't mind them at all.'

‘What's a mineral?'

‘You don't have minerals in America?'

‘It's a soft drink,' his grandmother said.

‘So, any time you're ready,' Martin said, ‘let's hit the pubs. Look out, pubs of Enniscorthy!'

‘I think I'll stick around for a bit,' Larry said. ‘I haven't seen my Irish grandmother for a while.'

‘You've never seen her before,' Rosella said.

‘That's what I mean.'

Once they had eaten and Martin had disappeared, Eilis went into the sitting room and wrote a short note on aerogramme paper to Tony to let him know that Rosella and Larry had arrived safely and were now in Enniscorthy in her mother's house.

She did not know what to put at the end of the letter. It could not be anything as formal as ‘yours sincerely' or as clear as ‘love'. Instead, she wrote, ‘Will be in touch again soon' and added her name. She went with the aerogramme to the post office.

—

In the first week, Eilis took her mother, who had no problem at all getting in and out of the car, and Rosella for a drive each afternoon, leaving Larry to explore the town. They went to Wexford and walked along the quays and they drove to Rosslare where they had tea in Kelly's Hotel. They went as far as Waterford and even to Kilkenny.

After the first day, her mother asked if Eilis would mind if she and Rosella sat in the back of the car as she wanted to hear everything her granddaughter said.

‘You have her all the time,' her mother said. ‘Now Rosella and myself have to make up for what we've missed out on.'

Later, Rosella explained to Eilis that she thought this arrangement strange.

‘I'm perfectly happy for her to sit in the front and I'll shout if she can't hear what I'm saying.'

‘Best give her what she wants.'

In the mornings, as soon as breakfast was over, Rosella and her grandmother went to the shops, Mrs Lacey pausing to introduce her granddaughter to anyone she knew. Rosella was tall and suntanned. While she had brought a few pairs of jeans, she did not wear them since her grandmother had expressed her disapproval of young women in jeans. She had also packed some simple dresses that her grandmother thought were stylish.

‘You are the most elegant girl to set foot in this town,' her grandmother said, ‘since your mother came back from America a quarter of a century ago.'

‘Was she that elegant?'

‘She broke many hearts before she ever went to America.'

There was nothing about Rosella's life that her grandmother did not want to know. Rosella explained the American education system to her and went through her own grades, appearing not to grow weary of the constant questioning. At times, Eilis found herself listening to her daughter, noting the reticence about Tony or indeed about Rosella's other grandmother. Rosella was being cautious, Eilis saw, and realised that her mother would see this too and it would not satisfy her.

Within two days, Larry had been in most of the pubs in the town.

‘They don't ask my age or anything. And you never told me about cheese and onion crisps or salt and vinegar. I order one soda and one packet of crisps and then I look around. And I can go on to another pub if anyone asks me too many questions. But most people are nice. They all want to know where I'm from.'

‘And what is your favourite bar?' his grandmother asked.

‘I like Stamps,' Larry said. ‘I like the Antique Tavern. I like the Club and I like Jimmy Farrell's.'

‘Jimmy Farrell's?' his grandmother asked.

‘Andy who works there is going to take me to a hurling match. Aidan's are playing the Starlights.'

‘It's Jim Farrell, not Jimmy,' his grandmother said.

‘Andy calls him Jimmy.'

‘Not to his face, I'm sure.'

On the Saturday, they came home early from a drive to Curracloe to find Martin in the kitchen.

‘Did you know that Larry has been in every pub in the town?'

‘We did,' Mrs Lacey said.

‘He's telling our business to everyone,' Martin said.

‘What kind of business?'

‘All about your eightieth birthday.'

‘What about it?'

‘How that's what they're here for.'

‘But that's true,' Eilis said.

‘And there are all sorts of other things that are none of anyone's business.'

‘Like what?'

‘There are a lot of people curious about how you could have a rented car for so long. So some busybody asked Larry in Larkin's pub and he told them that his uncle Frank gave you money so you could rent a car.'

‘How did he know that?' Eilis asked. ‘Who told him that?'

‘My other grandmother,' Rosella said.

‘But why would he give you money?' Mrs Lacey asked.

‘He has plenty of it,' Rosella said.

‘It's a pity he didn't come with you, so,' Mrs Lacey said. ‘Plenty of money! That's a good one.'

All of them could see, Eilis knew, how embarrassed she was.

‘Now, the minute Larry comes in,' Mrs Lacey said, ‘I'll talk to him and I'll let him know how nosey the whole town is.'

Larry appeared in time for his tea.

‘Now, where have you been, you little imp,' Mrs Lacey said, ‘with your grandmother expecting you to take her down the Prom for a walk. I've been sitting here waiting for you.'

‘I didn't know . . .' he began.

‘Well, you know now. So I have my walking stick ready. We can go down by the Folly but, mind you, we have to go very slowly. If I fall, they'll blame you and we wouldn't want that.'

‘I'll make sure you don't fall.'

‘You see,' Mrs Lacey said, ‘he is a perfect American gentleman.'

Once they disappeared, Martin went out again, leaving Eilis and Rosella alone together.

‘I wish your grandmother hadn't told you about the money,' Eilis said. ‘In fact, I wish Frank hadn't shared the news with his mother.'

‘She was trying to reassure us that everything would be nice in Ireland.'

‘Were you worried about that?'

‘I think you know what we're worried about.'

‘They make things very difficult, your father and your grandmother.'

‘Aren't you going back to him?'

‘I wish I could tell you that it's all going to be fine.'

‘So it isn't?'

‘I don't want . . . you know what I don't want.'

‘So what should happen?'

‘It's not my business. I told your father and your grandmother my views and it's up to them. If they want to pretend that I don't matter, then . . .'

She broke off.

‘Then what?'

‘Then I don't know.'

‘My father asked me to tell you that he wants you to come home.'

‘He's using you to pass on messages?'

‘Shouldn't I have told you?'

‘I need to keep in mind what you and Larry want.'

‘What Larry wants is simple. He doesn't want any change.'

‘And you?'

‘I don't want you to be unhappy. And I am going to college. From next month I will be away most of the time. But I'd like to come home and find you and Dad and Larry there. Of course I would!'

—

At night, Eilis considered sneaking out of the house and walking to the phone box and calling Jim.

Both Rosella and Larry complained about not sleeping. All it would take would be for one of them to hear a sound and come downstairs to find that her bed was empty.

She was worrying too much, she thought, about being discovered. It might be simple: she could go to the phone box at the bottom of Parnell Avenue and call Jim. He would answer the phone. And they could arrange to meet. She could go to his door, as she had done on the night of the wedding, and join him in the upstairs room.

In the morning at breakfast, her mother asked Larry to lift one of the large cardboard boxes that were in the corner of the living room onto a side table. She busied herself for a while rummaging through the box and then called on Rosella to come and help her. When Larry went out, Eilis could hear her mother and her daughter talking quietly. It struck her that if she told them she was going out to get a newspaper, she could get as far as the Market Square without being missed.

She would walk by Jim's pub which would not yet be open. He would probably be still upstairs but it was not impossible that he, too, would go out and get a newspaper or some groceries.

She headed towards Rafter Street, watching out for him.

Having bought a newspaper in Godfrey's, she crossed the Market Square again. She could linger at one or two shopfronts but not for long. If he looked from his upstairs windows, Jim would see her now.

—

In the house, Rosella met her in the hallway.

‘She's gone upstairs. Come and look.'

On the side table and spread out on the floor, Eilis saw piles of photographs, some black-and-white, some colour, all small in size.

‘There are hundreds and hundreds of photographs. She has them in order. I've never seen any of them before.'

In all the years, Eilis thought, her mother had never acknowledged that she had received these photographs sent month by month as the children grew up.

‘She has everything dated,' Rosella said.

Eilis picked up a group of photographs and flicked through them. In one, Larry was a baby in his father's arms on Jones Beach. Tony was wearing a bathing suit that she thought she recognised. In another, Eilis herself was holding Rosella by the hand, Rosella squinting at the camera. Eilis supposed that Tony must have taken this and she must have taken the one of Tony throwing Larry in the air. The next photograph puzzled her. It was Tony on his own, bare-chested, smiling, the ocean behind him. Why would she have sent this to her mother?

When her mother came back, she pointed at other boxes in the corner.

‘I thought Rosella would like to see those photos but maybe she has them at home.'

‘I don't,' Rosella said. She lifted one of the other boxes onto the seat of an armchair and began to take out the small folders that held each set of photos.

‘I usually sent ten or twelve at a time,' Eilis said, ‘but I never knew you were keeping them.'

‘Would I throw them out?'

As she looked through the folders, Eilis saw that she had, in the early years of her marriage, included some of Tony's family in photos she took.

‘I got to know them all,' her mother said, ‘the uncles and the two wives and the grandmother and grandfather. And I watched you all growing up.'

The next afternoon, because the weather was overcast, they decided to stay at home and go through another box of photographs while Martin was in Cush and Larry was at a hurling match.

Eilis noticed, as they found photographs of Rosella as a young teenager, how self-conscious she was and how much she posed for the camera. Larry was more natural. He laughed or made funny faces if he knew she was taking a picture.

She made to put aside a few photos for Larry when he came home, but her mother stopped her.

‘I've always kept them in order. If you do that, I'll never be able to find them again.'

When Larry came in, Eilis tried to interest him in the photographs.

‘Andy took me to this hurling match where the two teams started to beat the shite out of each other.'

Her son's own accent, Eilis noticed, was merging with the accent of the town.

‘Larry, you can't use bad language in front of your grandmother.'

Larry was breathless with excitement.

‘And there was a man standing beside me. He was a big Starlights supporter and one of the Aidan's players had his back to him, so he went right up behind him and gave him an almighty kick up the arse.'

‘Larry!'

‘And Andy says there's going to be an enquiry so I should pretend I didn't see it at all. But I did see it and the weirdest part was the man just walked quickly back to where he'd been and stood there like he'd done nothing wrong. The player he kicked was on the ground moaning. Your man's boot went right up his arse.'

‘Larry!'

Eilis made Larry look at photographs she had taken at Christmas when he was six or seven.

‘Dad has long hair.'

‘Everyone did then,' Eilis said. ‘Enzo and Mauro did too.'

‘I often meant to write and say that their hair was far too long,' her mother said. ‘One brother, I don't know which of them, looked like the Beatles.'

‘That would be Enzo,' Eilis said.

Larry found photographs of his tenth birthday party.

‘Look, there's the bicycle I got.'

‘The one you fell off?' Rosella asked.

‘I just fell off it once.'

Later, in the evening, when they came to the last box, Eilis's mother asked, ‘Did you stop having parties?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘All the photographs in this box are of Rosella and Larry and there are some of you. Did all of the others become camera shy?'

‘I suppose I wanted to show you the kids growing up. But, to be honest, I didn't even know you ever looked at these photographs.'

‘I suppose they tell their own story,' her mother said.

‘What do you mean by that?'

Her mother shrugged and looked into the distance.

When Larry had gone out to a pub to discuss the match and her mother had gone to bed, Eilis noticed that Rosella was starting to say something and then stopping, interrupting herself by finding another photograph to comment on.

‘There's something I was trying to tell you yesterday when you came back in, but I didn't know whether I should or not. Do you remember when Larry took Granny for a walk? She was meant to warn him not to speak so freely in the pubs. Instead, she forced him to reveal what was wrong at home. She promised to tell no one. But she told me while you were out getting the newspaper yesterday. She knows everything.'

‘Everything?'

‘She knows that there's a baby coming.'

‘Does she know that your Italian grandmother is planning to take the baby in?'

‘I don't think he told her that.'

Over the following days, Eilis waited for her mother to say something. Her mother, she thought, must want to know what her plans were. Now, of course, it would make sense why Tony had not travelled with them and why she had so little to say about him when she arrived.

Her mother would blame her, she thought, for not confiding in her, as she, in turn, blamed her mother for taking advantage of Larry who had trouble keeping secrets. Her mother, perhaps, was waiting for her to discuss the problem, but there was nothing she could say. She could hardly tell her that she had spent a night the previous week in a room in the Montrose Hotel in Dublin with Jim Farrell. Nor could she tell her what she intended to do about Tony since she did not know herself.

—

She began to piece together how she and Jim might live. She imagined a small bedroom in a bungalow in one of the towns near Lindenhurst. She dreamed of waking to find him beside her.

But what she could not envisage, as she surveyed this house they might rent, was where Larry would sleep or a room for Rosella. Tony's family would do everything to lure both Rosella and Larry to their Sunday gatherings. Larry would not want to move in with his mother and Jim. If Jim came, she believed, she would lose Larry, and Rosella too.

She came to see that there were too many uncertainties. She could not make her mind up now. She would have to tell Jim that she needed more time.

One night, when the house was quiet and they were all, she hoped, asleep, Eilis dressed and then slipped out of the house. She moved along John Street and went into the phone box at Parnell Avenue. She had Jim's house number with her. But then she saw that a coin was stuck in the slot so she could not make a call.

Since there was, she remembered, another phone box at the top of Cathedral Street, she walked quickly across the Back Road. It was almost one o'clock in the morning.

She put her coin in and dialled the number, but when she heard Jim's voice she could not bring herself to press button A and get through to him. She heard him saying hello a number of times and saying ‘Press button A.' And then she put down the receiver. She stood in the booth trying to think of reasons why she should and why she shouldn't call again, but the reasons she thought of made no difference.

She left the booth and went by the Green towards Weafer Street. If she walked down to the Square and then turned into Rafter Street, she might cross the street and knock on Jim's door. She imagined herself frozen on the pavement opposite his house, looking up at the lights in the main room. She would not cross the street. It would be best, she decided, not to go down to Rafter Street. She made up her mind to return home and try to get some sleep so that the next day she and Rosella and her mother could go on another drive.