Stubbornly, Nuala considered that it needn’t be how it was. It was ridiculous that there should live within a mile of one another a barren wife and a statue-maker robbed by adverse circumstances of his purpose in God’s world. It was stupid and silly and perverse, when all that had to be done was to take savings out of a bank. The buttercup-yellow room so lovingly prepared would never now be occupied. In the tarmac surfaces he laid on roads Corry would see the visions he had betrayed.
Nuala nursed her anger, keeping it to herself. She went about her tasks, collecting eggs from where her hens had laid, preparing food, kneading dough for the bread she made every second day; and all the time her anger nagged. It surely was not too terrible a sin, too redolent of insidious presumption, that people should impose an order of their own on what they were given? Had she been clumsy in her manner of putting it to Etty Rynne? Or wrong not to have revealed her intentions to Corry in the hope that, with thought, he would have accepted the sense of them? But doubt spread then: Corry never would have; no matter how it had been put, Etty Rynne would have been terrified.
Corry bought new boots before he went to work on the roads. They were doing a job on the quarry boreen, he said, re-surfacing it because of the complaints there’d been from the lorry drivers. A protective cape was supplied to him in case there’d be rain.
On the night before his new work began Nuala watched him applying waterproof stuff to the boots and rubbing it in. They were useless without it, he’d been told. He took it all in his stride.
‘Things happen differently,’ he said, as if something in Nuala’s demeanour allowed him to sense her melancholy. ‘We’re never in charge.’
She didn’t argue; there was no point in argument. She might have confessed instead that she had frightened Etty Rynne; she might have tried to explain that her wild talk had been an effort to make something good out of what there was, as so often she had seen the spread of angels’ wings emerging from roughly sawn wood. But all that was too difficult, so Nuala said nothing.
Her anger was still merciless when that day ended; and through the dark of the night she felt herself oppressed by it and bleakly prayed, waiting for a response that did not come. She reached out in the morning dusk to hold for a moment her husband’s hand. Had he woken she would have told him all she had kept to herself, unable now to be silent.
But it was Corry’s day that was beginning, and it was he who needed sympathy and support. Making breakfast for him and for her children, Nuala gave him both as best she could, banishing from her mood all outward traces of what she knew would always now be private. When the house was empty again but for herself, she washed up the morning’s dishes and tidied the kitchen as she liked to have it. She damped the fire down in the stove. Outside, she fed her hens.
In Corry’s workshop she remained longer than she usually did on her morning visit to the saints who had become her friends: St Laurence with his gridiron, St Gabriel the messenger, St Clare of Assisi, St Thomas the Apostle and blind St Lucy, St Catherine, St Agnes. Corry had made them live for her and she felt the first faint slipping away of her anger as they returned her gaze with undisturbed tranquillity. Touched by it, lost in its peace, she sensed their resignation too. The world, not she, had failed.
‘How nice all this is!’ Rose’s mother cried, with dishes on the way to the dinner table Rose had laid. ‘What weather, Mr Bouverie, don’t you think? Please sit here next to me.’
Obediently Mr Bouverie did so, replying to the comment about the weather.
‘Can’t stand a heatwave,’ Mr Dakin cheerfully grumbled.
Rose’s father – Mrs Dakin’s better half, so she insisted – was bluff and genial. He spoke with a hoarseness, always keeping his voice down as if saving it for professional use, he being an auctioneer. Apart from her shrillness, there was a similarity about his wife: both were large and shared an ease often to be found in people of their girth and stature. This evening Mr Dakin was sweating, as he tended to in summer; he had taken his jacket off and undone the buttons of the waistcoat he always wore no matter what the temperature.
