UNIT 3 FICTION


The following short story, written by Irish author Claire Keegan, takes place over the summer months in rural Ireland.


Sisters


It is customary for the Porters to send a postcard to say when they will be arriving. Betty waits. Each time the dog barks she fi nds herself going to the window at the foot of the stairs, looking out through the maidenhair fern to see if the postman is cycling up the avenue. It is almost June. The chill has slackened off; plums are getting plumper on the trees. The Porters will soon come, demanding strange food, fresh handkerchiefs, hot-water bottles, ice.


Louisa, Betty’s sister, went away to England when she was young and married Stanley Porter, a salesman who fell for her, he said, because of the way her hair fell down her back. Louisa always had beautiful hair. When they were young, Betty brushed it every night, one hundred strokes, and secured the gold braid with a piece of satin ribbon.


Betty’s own hair is, and always has been, an unremarkable brown. Her hands were always her best feature, white, lady-like hands that played the organ on Sundays. Now, after years of work, her hands are ruined, the skin on her palms is hard and masculine, the knuckles enlarged; her mother’s wedding band cannot be removed.


Betty lives in the homestead, the big house, as it is called. It once belonged to a Protestant landlord who sold up and moved away after a childless marriage ended. The Land Commission, who bought the estate, knocked down the three-storey section of the house and sold the remaining two-storey servants’ quarters and the surrounding seventy acres to Betty’s father for a small sum when he married. The house looks too small for the garden and too close to the yard, but its ivy-covered walls look handsome nonetheless. The granite archway leads to a yard with stables, a barn and lofty sheds, coach houses, kennels and a spout- house. There’s a fi ne walled orchard at the back in which the landlord grazed an Angus bull to keep the children out, seeing as he had none of his own. The place has a history, a past. People said Parnell had a tooth pulled in the parlour. The big kitchen has a barred window, an Aga and the deal table Betty scrubs on Saturdays. The white, marble fi replace in the parlour suits the mahogany furniture. A staircase curves on to a well-lighted landing with oak doors opening into three large bedrooms overlooking the yard, and a bathroom Betty had plumbed in when her father became ill.


Betty, too, had wanted to go to England, but she stayed back to keep house. Their mother died suddenly when Betty and Louisa were small. She went out to gather wood one afternoon and dropped dead coming back through the meadow. It seemed natural for Betty, being the eldest, to step into her mother’s shoes and mind her father, a humoursome man given to violent fi ts of temper. She hadn’t an easy life. There were cattle to be herded and tested, pigs to fatten, turkeys to be sent off on the train to Dublin before Christmas. They cut the meadow in summer and harvested a fi eld of oats in autumn.


Her father gave instructions and did less and less, paid a man to come in and do the hardest work. He criticised the veterinary bills, insulted the priest who came to anoint him when he was ill, belittled Betty’s cooking and claimed that nothing was as it should have been. Nothing was the way it used to be, he meant. He hated change. Towards the end he’d put on his black overcoat and walk the fi elds, seeing how tall the grass was in the meadow, counting the grains of corn on the stalks, noting the thinness of a cow or the rust on a gate. Then he would come inside just before dark and say, ‘Not much time left. Not much time.’


‘Don’t be morbid,’ Betty used to answer, and continued on; but last winter her father took to his bed, and for the three days preceding his death he lay there roaring and kicking his feet, calling for ‘Buttermilk! Buttermilk!’ When he died on a Tuesday night, by willing himself to die, Betty was more relieved than sorry.


Betty kept track of Louisa’s progress through the years; her wedding, which she did not attend, the birth of her children, one boy and one girl, what Louisa had wanted. She sent a


159


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130  |  Page 131  |  Page 132  |  Page 133  |  Page 134  |  Page 135  |  Page 136  |  Page 137  |  Page 138  |  Page 139  |  Page 140  |  Page 141  |  Page 142  |  Page 143  |  Page 144  |  Page 145  |  Page 146  |  Page 147  |  Page 148  |  Page 149  |  Page 150  |  Page 151  |  Page 152  |  Page 153  |  Page 154  |  Page 155  |  Page 156  |  Page 157  |  Page 158  |  Page 159  |  Page 160  |  Page 161  |  Page 162  |  Page 163  |  Page 164  |  Page 165  |  Page 166  |  Page 167  |  Page 168  |  Page 169  |  Page 170  |  Page 171  |  Page 172  |  Page 173  |  Page 174  |  Page 175  |  Page 176  |  Page 177  |  Page 178  |  Page 179  |  Page 180  |  Page 181  |  Page 182  |  Page 183  |  Page 184  |  Page 185  |  Page 186  |  Page 187  |  Page 188  |  Page 189  |  Page 190  |  Page 191  |  Page 192  |  Page 193  |  Page 194  |  Page 195  |  Page 196  |  Page 197  |  Page 198  |  Page 199  |  Page 200  |  Page 201  |  Page 202  |  Page 203  |  Page 204  |  Page 205  |  Page 206  |  Page 207  |  Page 208  |  Page 209  |  Page 210  |  Page 211  |  Page 212  |  Page 213  |  Page 214  |  Page 215  |  Page 216  |  Page 217  |  Page 218  |  Page 219  |  Page 220  |  Page 221  |  Page 222  |  Page 223  |  Page 224  |  Page 225  |  Page 226  |  Page 227  |  Page 228  |  Page 229  |  Page 230  |  Page 231  |  Page 232  |  Page 233  |  Page 234  |  Page 235  |  Page 236  |  Page 237  |  Page 238  |  Page 239  |  Page 240  |  Page 241  |  Page 242  |  Page 243  |  Page 244  |  Page 245  |  Page 246  |  Page 247  |  Page 248  |  Page 249  |  Page 250  |  Page 251  |  Page 252  |  Page 253  |  Page 254  |  Page 255  |  Page 256  |  Page 257  |  Page 258  |  Page 259  |  Page 260  |  Page 261  |  Page 262  |  Page 263  |  Page 264  |  Page 265  |  Page 266  |  Page 267  |  Page 268  |  Page 269  |  Page 270  |  Page 271  |  Page 272  |  Page 273  |  Page 274  |  Page 275  |  Page 276  |  Page 277  |  Page 278  |  Page 279  |  Page 280  |  Page 281  |  Page 282  |  Page 283  |  Page 284  |  Page 285  |  Page 286  |  Page 287  |  Page 288  |  Page 289  |  Page 290  |  Page 291  |  Page 292