‘The master’s waiting on his breakfast, Kitty.’
‘I lit the range the minute I was down, ma’am.’
‘If you don’t get it going by twenty to seven it won’t be hot in time. I told you that yesterday. Didn’t you pull the dampers out?’
‘The paper wouldn’t catch, ma’am.’
‘If the paper wouldn’t catch you’ll have used a damp bit. Or maybe paper out of a magazine. You can’t light a fire with paper out of a magazine, Kitty.’
‘If I’d had a drop of paraffin, ma’am –’
‘My God, are you mad, child?’
‘At home we’d throw on a half cup of paraffin if the fire was slow, ma’am.’
‘Never bring paraffin near the range. If the master heard you he’d jump out of his skin.’
‘I only thought it would hurry it, ma’am.’
‘Set the alarm for six if you’re going to be slow with the fire. If the breakfast’s not on the table by a quarter to eight he’ll raise the roof. Have you the plates in the bottom oven?’
When Kathleen opened the door of the bottom oven a black kitten darted out, scratching the back of her hand in its agitation.
‘Great God Almighty!’ exclaimed Mrs Shaughnessy. ‘Are you trying to roast the poor cat?’
‘I didn’t know it was in there, ma’am.’
‘You lit the fire with the poor creature inside there! What were you thinking of to do that, Kitty?’
‘I didn’t know, ma’am –’
‘Always look in the two ovens before you light the range, child. Didn’t you hear me telling you?’
After breakfast, when Kathleen went into the dining-room to clear the table, Mrs Shaughnessy was telling her son about the kitten in the oven. ‘Haven’t they brains like turnips?’ she said, even though Kathleen was in the room. The son released a half-hearted smile, but when Kathleen asked him if he’d finished with the jam he didn’t reply. ‘Try and speak a bit more clearly, Kitty,’ Mrs Shaughnessy said later. ‘It’s not everyone can understand a country accent.’
The day was similar to the day before except that at eleven o’clock Mrs Shaughnessy said:
‘Go upstairs and take off your cap. Put on your coat and go down the street to Crawley’s. A half pound of round steak, and suet. Take the book off the dresser. He’ll know who you are when he sees it.’
So far, that was the pleasantest chore she had been asked to do. She had to wait in the shop because there were two other people before her, both of whom held the butcher in conversation. ‘I know your father,’ Mr Crawley said when he’d asked her name, and he held her in conversation also, wanting to know if her father was in good health and asking about her brothers and sisters. He’d heard about the buying of the Lallys’ field. She was the last uniformed maid in the town, he said, now that Nellie Broderick at Maclure’s had had to give up because of her legs.
‘Are you mad?’ Mrs Shaughnessy shouted at her on her return. ‘I should be down in the shop and not waiting to put that meat on. Didn’t I tell you yesterday not to be loitering in the mornings?’
‘I’m sorry, ma’am, only Mr Crawley –’
‘Go down to the shop and tell the master I’m delayed over cooking the dinner and can you assist him for ten minutes.’
But when Kathleen appeared in the grocery Mr Shaughnessy asked her if she’d got lost. The son was weighing sugar into grey paper bags and tying string round each of them. A murmur of voices came from the bar.
‘Mrs Shaughnessy is delayed over cooking the dinner,’ Kathleen said. ‘She was thinking I could assist you for ten minutes.’
‘Well, that’s a good one!’ Mr Shaughnessy threw back his head, exploding into laughter. A little shower of spittle damped Kathleen’s face. The son gave his half-hearted smile. ‘Can you make a spill, Kitty? D’you know what I mean by a spill?’ Mr Shaughnessy demonstrated with a piece of brown paper on the counter. Kathleen shook her head. ‘Would you know what to charge for a quarter pound of tea, Kitty? Can you weigh out sugar, Kitty? Go back to the missus, will you, and tell her to have sense.’
In the kitchen Kathleen put it differently, simply saying that Mr Shaughnessy hadn’t required her services. ‘Bring a scuttle of coal up to the dining-room,’ Mrs Shaughnessy commanded. ‘And get out the mustard. Can you make up mustard?’
Kathleen had never tasted mustard in her life; she had heard of it but did not precisely know what it was. She began to say she wasn’t sure about making some, but even before she spoke Mrs Shaughnessy sighed and told her to wash down the front steps instead.
‘I don’t want to go back there,’ Kathleen said on Sunday. ‘I can’t understand what she says to me. It’s lonesome the entire time.’
Her mother was sympathetic, but even so she shook her head. ‘There’s people I used to know,’ she said. ‘People placed like ourselves whose farms failed on them. They’re walking the roads now, no better than tinkers. I have ten children, Kathleen, and seven are gone from me. There’s five of them I’ll maybe never see again. It’s that you have to think of, pet.’
‘I cried the first night. 1 was that lonesome when I got into bed.’
‘But isn’t it a clean room you’re in, pet? And aren’t you given food to eat that’s better than you’d get here? And don’t the dresses she supplies save us an expense again? Wouldn’t you think of all that, pet?’
A bargain had been struck, her mother also reminded her, and a bargain was a bargain. Biddy said it sounded great, going out into the town for messages. She’d give anything to see a house like that, Biddy said, with the coal fires and a stairs.
‘I’d say they were well pleased with you,’ Kathleen’s father said when he came in from the yard later on. ‘You’d have been back here inside a day if they weren’t.’
She’d done her best, she thought as she rode away from the farmhouse on Mary Florence’s bicycle; if she’d done everything badly she would have obtained her release. She wept because she wouldn’t see Biddy and Con and her father and mother for another week. She dreaded the return to the desolate bedroom which her mother had reminded her was clean, and the kitchen where there was no one to keep her company in the evenings. She felt as if she could not bear it, more counting of the days until Sunday and when Sunday came the few hours passing so swiftly. But she knew, by now, that she would remain in the Shaughnessys’ house for as long as was necessary.
‘I must have you back by half six, Kitty,’ Mrs Shaughnessy said when she saw her. ‘It’s closer to seven now.’
Kathleen said she was sorry. She’d had to stop to pump the back tyre of her bicycle, she said, although in fact this was not true: what she’d stopped for was to wipe away the signs of her crying and to blow her nose. In the short time she had been part of Mrs Shaughnessy’s household she had developed the habit of making excuses, and of obscuring her inadequacies beneath lies that were easier than the truth.
‘Fry the bread like I showed you, Kitty. Get it brown on both sides. The master likes it crisp.’
There was something Mr Shaughnessy liked also, which Kathleen discovered when seven of her free Sunday afternoons had gone by. She was dusting the dining-room mantelpiece one morning when he came and stood very close to her. She thought she was in his way, and moved out of it, but a week or so later he stood close to her again, his breath warm on her cheek. When it happened the third time she felt herself blushing.
It was in this manner that Mr Shaughnessy rather than his wife came to occupy, for Kathleen, the central role in the household. The narrow-faced son remained as he had been since the day of her arrival, a dour presence, contributing little in the way of conversation and never revealing the fruits of his brooding silence. Mrs Shaughnessy, having instructed, had apparently played out the part she’d set herself. She came into the kitchen at midday to cook meat and potatoes and one of the milk puddings her husband was addicted to, but otherwise the kitchen was Kathleen’s province now and it was she who was responsible for the frying of the food for breakfast and for the six o’clock tea. Mrs Shaughnessy preferred to be in the shop. She enjoyed the social side of that, she told Kathleen; and she enjoyed the occasional half glass of sherry in the bar. ‘That’s me all over, Kitty. I never took to housework.’ She was more amiable in her manner, and confessed that she always found training a country girl an exhausting and irksome task and might therefore have been a little impatient. ‘Kitty’s settled in grand,’ she informed Kathleen’s father when he looked into the bar one fair-day to make a mortgage payment. He’d been delighted to hear that, he told Kathleen the following Sunday.