They would manage, Nuala had always said when there had been difficulties before. Each time it was she who saw the family through: her faith in Corry, her calmness in adversity, her stubborn optimism were the strengths she brought to the marriage.
‘Would you try Mrs Falloway?’ she suggested when, more seriously than ever in the past, their indigence threatened to defeat them. It was a last resort, the best that desperation could do. ‘Wouldn’t you, Corry?’
Corry said nothing and Nuala watched him feeling ashamed, as he had begun to these last few weeks. It wouldn’t be asking much of Mrs Falloway, she said. Tiding them over for a year while he learnt the way of it in the stoneyard wouldn’t be much; and after that he’d be back on wages. The chance in the stoneyard was made for him; didn’t O’Flynn say it himself?
‘I couldn’t go near Mrs Falloway. I couldn’t at all.’
‘Only to put it to her, Corry. Only to say out what’s the truth.’
‘It came to nothing, what she was doing that time. Why’d she be interested in us now?’
‘All she saw in you’ll be lost if we don’t get assistance, Corry. Why wouldn’t she still take an interest?’
‘It’s all in the past, that.’
‘I know. I know.’
‘I’d be embarrassed going over there.’
‘Don’t I know that too, Corry?’
‘There’s work going on the roads.’
‘You’re not a roadworker, Corry.’
‘There’s things we have to do.’
Deliberately Nuala let a silence gather; and Corry broke it, as she knew he would.
‘I’d be a day going over there,’ he said, and might have added that there’d be the bus fare and something to pay for the loan of a bicycle in Carrick, but he didn’t.
‘A day won’t hurt, Corry.’
They were a couple of the same age – thirty-one – who’d known one another since childhood, Corry tall and bony, Nuala plumper and smaller, with a round, uncomplicated face, her fair hair cut shorter than it had been when she’d first become a wife. The youngest of their children, a girl, took after her in appearance; the boys were both as lean and gangling as their father.
‘You always did your best, Corry.’ The statement hung there, concluding their conversation, necessary because it was true, its repetition softening the crisis in their lives.
Corry’s workshop was a shed, all his saints in a row on a shelf he had put up. Beneath them were his Madonnas, his John the Baptist, and a single Crucifixion. His Stations were there too, propped against the rough concrete wall. Limewood and ash the woods were, apple and holly and box, oak that had come from a creamery paddle.
When the children left the house in the mornings to be picked up at Quirke’s crossroads and driven on to school, when Corry was out looking for work on a farm, Nuala often took pride in her husband’s gift; and in the quiet of his workshop she wondered how it would have been between them if he did not possess it, how she would feel about him if he’d been the master in a school or a counter-hand in one of the shops in Carrick, or permanently on a farm.
Corry’s saints had become her friends, Nuala sometimes thought, brought to life for her, a source of sympathy, and consolation when that was necessary.
Nuala closed the shed door behind her. She fed her hens and then walked through the vegetable patch she cultivated herself. Mrs Falloway would understand; she had before, she would again. The living that Corry’s gift failed to make for him would come naturally when he had mastered the craft of cutting letters on head-stones in O’Flynn’s yard. The headstones were a different kind of thing from his sacred statues but they’d be enough to bring his skill to people’s notice, to the notice of bishops and priests as well as anyone else’s. Sooner or later everyone did business in a stoneyard; when he’d come to the house to make the offer O’Flynn had said that too.
