The old man hesitated before he rose to go. Had he not done so Rose might not have wept. But Mr Bouverie hesitated and Rose wept to exclamations of concern, and fuss and embarrassment, while Mr Bouverie stood awkwardly. She wept for his silent suffering, for his having to accept a distressing invitation because of her mother’s innocent insistence. She wept for the last golden opportunity the occasion provided for two other people, for the woman whose sinning caused her in the end to turn her face to the wall, for the man whom duty bound to a wife. She wept for the
Fina waited on the pier, watching the four men dragging the boat on the shingle. She watched while the catch was landed and some damage to the nets examined. At the top of the steps that brought them near to where she stood the men parted and she went to John Michael.
‘Your mother,’ Fina said, and she watched him guessing that his mother was dead now. ‘I’m sorry, John Michael,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’
He nodded, silent, as she knew he would be. It was cold and darkening as they walked together to the cottage where his mother was. Grey on grey, swiftly blown clouds threatened rain. They could go now, Fina’s thought was. They could make a life for themselves.
‘Father Clery was there,’ she said.
‘Have you plans?’ John Michael’s uncle – his mother’s brother – enquired after the funeral. Plans were necessary: John Michael’s father had drowned when John Michael was an infant, his fisherman’s cottage then becoming his widow’s by right for her lifetime. In a different arrangement – John Michael being a fisherman himself – a cottage would become his in time, but not yet, he being the youngest, the only young one among older men.
‘I’ll go,’ he said in reply to his uncle’s question.
Fina heard that said, the confirmation given that John Michael had been waiting only for the death. Going was a tradition, time-honoured, the chance of it coming in different ways, the decision long dwelt upon before it was taken. Bat Quinn – who had stayed – had a way of regretfully pointing over the sea to the horizon beyond the two rocks that were islands in the bay. ‘Big bucks,’ he’d say, and name the men of his own generation who had gone in search of them: Donoghue and Artie Hiney and Meagher and Flynn, and Big Reilly and Matt Cready. There were others who’d gone inland or to England, but they hadn’t done as well.
‘A thing I’ll put to you,’ John Michael’s uncle was saying now, ‘is the consideration of the farm.’
‘The farm?’
‘When I’m buried myself.’
‘What about the farm?’
‘I’m saying it’ll be left.’
Still listening, Fina heard a statement made through what was being left out: the farm would pass to John Michael, since there was no one else to inherit it.
‘I get a tiredness those days,’ John Michael’s uncle said. His wasted features and old man’s bloodshot eyes confirmed this revelation. Two years ago he’d been widowed; after a childless marriage he was alone.
‘There’s a while in you yet,’ John Michael said.
‘I can’t manage the acres.’
They could be on the farm already was what was being suggested, and it wouldn’t be hard to pull the place together. Inland from the sea, where the air was softer and you didn’t live in fear of what the sea would take from you, they could make a life there. The heart had gone from the old man, but he wasn’t difficult. He wouldn’t be a burden in the time that was left to him.
‘Ah, no, no.’ John Michael shook his head, his rejection not acknowledging in any other way what was being offered. America was what he and Fina wanted, what they’d always talked about. That evening John Michael said he had the fare saved.
