Free Love and Summer by William Trevor Page A

Wren.’
    Stylish, blonded, in her two-piece of flecked cherry-red, Bernadette passed on. She was forty-six, younger than her employer, younger than his sister, who was imperious when they met, which was too often for Bernadette. The imperiousness was the mother’s, although the daughter did not know it or she would have changed her ways. Her employer’s sister was a sinister woman in Bernadette’s opinion.
    She passed into the public house and through the long street bar, no one at present in charge of it. There were drinkers at the far end, two men who were always there in the mornings, who never greeted her when she came in, or spoke to her when she passed close to them, whose names she did not know or wish to know.
    ‘Good morning,’ she said in the back bar, and her employer rose from the small round table where they did their business and she sat down at it. He poured her a 7-Up.
    They were alone. There never was anyone else in the back bar when she came, or even later in the day; and in the evenings the street bar was still preferred. At that time the priests frequented the back bar, and Mr McGovern because it was convenient, and Fogarty from the courthouse to play cards if there was anyone to play with.
    Bernadette spread out the papers she had brought, the cheques to be signed kept to one side. For a long time this had been a morning routine, the 7-Up, and watching while the top of her employer’s ballpoint was removed, his signature inscribed. This declaration of his identity was as meticulous and tidy as he was himself, a man who resp ected restraint, who never raised his voice or displayed anger, who lost nothing because he would not let himself lose things. Bernadette loved him.
    ‘We’re low on Hennessy,’ he said.
    ‘I’ll give them a ring.’
    She didn’t have to make a note; she never forgot. He said Father Millane had been in last evening. An awkwardness had arisen in connection with the garden of remembrance: an old right-of-way over the piece of ground that had been earmarked was going to make its purchase troublesome.
    ‘I think I heard,’ she said.
    ‘Father Millane is set on stained glass instead. Seemingly, he has always had an Annunciation in mind for the three empty windows in the north wall.’
    ‘How’s Miss Connulty on that, though?’
    ‘She isn’t keen.’
    ‘An Annunciation would be lovely.’
    ‘There’s a place in the cemetery fence where Magourtey’s bullocks get in. My sister is saying we could improve the fence.’
    ‘In memory of your mother, is it?’
    ‘My sister has a wild way of talking.’
    ‘Still and all, a fence isn’t much. A wire fence, is it? I don’t think I ever noticed it.’
    ‘Wire on concrete posts.’
    ‘Your mother was practical in her ways. Miss Connulty is thinking of that.’
    ‘Oh, you can’t have bullocks hammering away at people’s graves, no doubt about that at all. There’ll be a job done on the fence as a matter of course. But seemingly the bishop would like to see the north wall given significance, too. So Father Millane’ll be speaking to her.’
    Bernadette agreed that a few words from the priest would be the way to go about it.
    ‘The latest thing she’s got into her head,’ Joseph Paul said, ‘is that a fellow was taking photographs at the funeral.’
    Bernadette, who had observed the taking of the photographs and had heard this spoken about with disapproval afterwards, who had been informed that the same man had been to the coal yards in her absence, that he’d been given the keys of the Coliseum in order to take further photographs, nevertheless agreed that Miss Connulty imagined things. She watched her employer reading through a reference offered by a man who had applied for work in the yards, a communication that had come this morning. He nodded, satisfie d, as he folded it into its envelope. He asked her to write and thank whoever it was who had communicated so helpfully.
    ‘No, I’ve done that,’ she said,