Free Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín Page A

meet no one she knew. In her mind she went through the worst possible encounters, the people who would most deplore the idea that, with her husband six months in the grave, she had dyed her hair a colour it had never been before. She thought of Jim, and knew that she would have to face him and Margaret within a week. They would not know what to think.
    As she saw Mrs. Hogan from John Street walking towards her, Nora could not tell whether Mrs. Hogan simply did not recognise her, or if she wanted to get by her without making any comment. Just as Mrs. Hogan approached her, she seemed almost to jump. Her face quivered and then she stopped.
    “Well, that will take some getting used to,” she said.
    Nora tried to smile.
    “Was it Bernie?” Mrs. Hogan asked.
    Nora nodded.
    “I heard she got some new packets in all right. God, I must go to her myself.”
    If Mrs. Hogan, in her apron and a pair of very worn-looking shoes, felt that she had the right to comment on Nora’s hair, then there was, Nora felt, no reason why she could not comment in reply.
    “Well, you know where she is,” she said drily, looking at Mrs.Hogan’s hair, clearly suggesting that it could benefit from some treatment. It took Mrs. Hogan a moment to take in the possibility that she was being insulted.
    The encounter made Nora feel brave. She would stop for nobody else, but she knew that what had happened was a mistake. She wondered if she had ever done anything like this before in her life, acted on a whim without any thought for the consequences. Before she was married, she remembered, as she came back from work one day at dinner-time, she found a stall of old books outside Warren’s Auctioneers at the bottom of Castle Hill. As she perused the books she found a volume of poems by Browning, one of whose poems she had loved in school. She was flicking through the pages when she was joined by old Mrs. Carty from Bohreen Hill. They both checked the price of the book which was written in pencil on the inside page. It was far too high, and, in any case, she had no money. They both walked away and moved together along Friary Place and up Friary Hill. As they parted at the top of the hill, Mrs. Carty handed her the book from under her coat.
    “No one will miss that,” she said. “But don’t tell anyone where you got it.”
    Walking home with her new hair dye reminded her of walking into her mother’s house with that volume of Browning’s poems. It was the same feeling of guilt, the same feeling that someone would follow her and find her out.
    Quickly, when she arrived home, she boiled some potatoes and opened a tin of peas and put three lamb chops on the pan. When the boys arrived the potatoes were not ready. She waited upstairs, calling down to let them know that their dinner would be a bit late. She sat in front of the mirror at the dressing table and tried to work out if there was anything she could do to her hair to make it lookmore normal. She wished she had told Bernie not to use the lacquer, which was sticky and had a sweet smell.
    As soon as the boys saw her they both became quiet. Donal looked away while Conor moved towards her. He reached up and touched her hair.
    “It’s all hard,” he said. “Where did you get it?”
    “I had my hair done this morning,” she said. “Do you like it?”
    “What’s under there?”
    “Under what?”
    “Under what you have on your head.”
    “What I have on my head is my hair.”
    “Are you going to go out?” he asked.
    Donal glanced at her again and looked away.

    Nora was not sure what she should wear to the Gibneys’. If she dressed up too much then it might look as though she did not need a job and that she was coming to their house as an equal, merely on a social visit. But she could not wear old clothes either. The problem of what to wear would never go away, she realised. If she went back to the office there, she would be seen by everyone as a friend of William and Peggy Gibney. There were still