Foster

I went down and ate macaroons and then two men came to the door selling lines for a raffle whose proceeds, they said, would go towards putting a new roof on the school.

‘Of course,’ Kinsella said.

‘We didn’t really think –’

‘Come on in,’ Kinsella said. ‘Just ’cos I’ve none of my own doesn’t mean I’d see the rain falling in on anyone else’s.’

And so they came in and more tea was made and the woman emptied out the ashtray and dealt the cards and said she hoped the present generation of children in that school, if they were inclined towards cards, would learn the rules of forty-five properly because it was clear that this particular generation was having difficulties, that some people weren’t at all clear on how to play, except for sometimes, when it suited them.

‘Oh, there’s shots!’

‘You have to listen to thunder.’

‘Aisy knowing whose purse is running low.’

‘It’s ahead, I am,’ she said. ‘And it’s ahead I’ll be when it’s over.’

And this, for some reason, made the Ass Casey bray, which made me laugh and then they all started laughing until one of the men said, ‘Is it a tittering match we have here or are we going to play cards?’ which made the Ass Casey bray once more, and it started all over again.

5

One afternoon, while we are topping and tailing gooseberries for jam, when the job is more than half done and the sugar is already weighed and the pots warmed, Kinsella comes in from the yard and washes and dries his hands and looks at me in a way he has never done before.

‘I think it’s past time we got you togged out, Girl.

I am wearing a pair of navy blue trousers and a blue shirt the woman took from the chest of drawers.

‘What’s wrong with her?’ the woman says.

‘Tomorrow’s Sunday, and she needs something more than that for Mass,’ he says. ‘I’ll not have her going as she went last week.’

‘Sure isn’t she clean and tidy?’

‘You know what I’m talking about, Edna.’ He sighs. ‘Why don’t you go up there and change and I’ll run us all into Gorey.’

The woman keeps on picking the gooseberries from the colander, stretching her hand out, but a little more slowly each time, for the next one.

Kinsella looks at me and smiles a hard kind of a smile then looks over to the window ledge where a sparrow has come down to perch and readjust her wings.