She always gave her entire wages, seven shillings, and Harry always sent up what he could but the trouble was to get any money from her father. Besides, the invariable squabble for money on Saturday nights had begun to weary her unspeakably. Ernest was dead and Harry, who was in the church decorating business, was nearly always down somewhere in the country. When they were growing up he had never gone for her like he used to go for Harry and Ernest, because she was a girl but latterly he had begun to threaten her and say what he would do to her only for her dead mother’s sake. She knew it was that that had given her the palpitations. Even now, though she was over nineteen, she sometimes felt herself in danger of her father’s violence.
She would not be treated as her mother had been. People would treat her with respect then. She would not cry many tears at leaving the Stores.īut in her new home, in a distant unknown country, it would not be like that. “Miss Hill, don’t you see these ladies are waiting?” She had always had an edge on her, especially whenever there were people listening. What would they say of her in the Stores when they found out that she had run away with a fellow? Say she was a fool, perhaps and her place would be filled up by advertisement. O course she had to work hard, both in the house and at business. In her home anyway she had shelter and food she had those whom she had known all her life about her. Was that wise? She tried to weigh each side of the question. She had consented to go away, to leave her home. Whenever he showed the photograph to a visitor her father used to pass it with a casual word: He had been a school friend of her father. And yet during all those years she had never found out the name of the priest whose yellowing photograph hung on the wall above the broken harmonium beside the coloured print of the promises made to Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque.
Perhaps she would never see again those familiar objects from which she had never dreamed of being divided. Home! She looked round the room, reviewing all its familiar objects which she had dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came from. Now she was going to go away like the others, to leave her home. Tizzie Dunn was dead, too, and the Waters had gone back to England. That was a long time ago she and her brothers and sisters were all grown up her mother was dead. Her father was not so bad then and besides, her mother was alive. Still they seemed to have been rather happy then. Her father used often to hunt them in out of the field with his blackthorn stick but usually little Keogh used to keep nix and call out when he saw her father coming. Ernest, however, never played: he was too grown up. The children of the avenue used to play together in that field, the Devines, the Waters, the Dunns, little Keogh the cripple, she and her brothers and sisters.
Then a man from Belfast bought the field and built houses in it, not like their little brown houses but bright brick houses with shining roofs. One time there used to be a field there in which they used to play every evening with other people’s children.
The man out of the last house passed on his way home she heard his footsteps clacking along the concrete pavement and afterwards crunching on the cinder path before the new red houses. Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue.
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