Free Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín Page B

people there whom she had known all those years before but had not kept in touch with. She was sure that they would resent her or feel strange about her, were she to appear back working with them.
    Once she decided that she would drive across the town and park the car in the Railway Square so that no one could comment on her hair, however, she no longer felt afraid. She looked at her clothes hanging in the wardrobe and selected a grey suit and a dark blueblouse. She would wear her best shoes. She did not know what the Gibneys intended to say to her, or whether they would offer her work. They could, she thought, hardly discuss rates of pay with her over afternoon tea. Whatever they had in mind, she believed now that it was important not to arrive at their large house like someone in need.
    The door was answered by Mrs. Whelan, who led Nora into a big sitting-room on the right-hand side of the hall. It was filled with darkly upholstered furniture and old pictures. Even though it was still the afternoon, the room was filled with shadows; the long window did not let in much light.
    Peggy Gibney rose from her chair. As the cardigan she was wearing around her shoulders slipped, Mrs. Whelan moved hastily to put it back in place. Peggy Gibney did not acknowledge this, but behaved as though it was a normal part of the service offered to her as a woman in a grand room. She motioned to Nora to take an armchair opposite her own and then turned to Mrs. Whelan.
    “Maggie, will you phone across to the office and tell Mr. Gibney that Mrs. Webster has arrived?”
    Nora remembered that, years before, when Peggy found herself pregnant, she was not married to William, and William’s parents had not approved of her. One day, while Nora sat quietly in the outer office, she heard old Mr. Gibney telling William that Peggy could go to England and have the baby and find a home for it there. She had supposed as William walked out of the office that he was going to find Peggy to tell her. But instead he had married Peggy and Peggy had had the baby in a nursing home in the town, and slowly William’s parents had got used to her and grown close to the child. Now Peggy Gibney sat in this house, talking to Nora as though there had never been any doubt about her station in the world.
    Peggy’s voice had none of the old careless intonations of the town. Instead, she spoke in a way that was considered, almost preoccupied.
    “Oh, well,” she said, as though Nora or someone else had raised the subject, “with all the taxes now, and the cost of living, I don’t know how a lot of people manage.”
    When Nora asked her about her brother and her sisters, she realised that she had made a mistake.
    “They are fine, Nora, fine,” she said in an accent that became slightly grand. “We all live our own lives.”
    Nora took this to mean that they were not invited into Peggy’s sitting-room. When she asked about Peggy’s children, however, she brightened up immediately.
    “You know, William wanted each one of them to have a qualification before they came home to work in the firm so that they’d have an expertise.”
    She pronounced the word “expertise” with deliberation.
    “So, William Junior is a fully fledged accountant and Thomas is an efficiency expert and Elizabeth did a commercial course in one of the best colleges in Dublin. So they can all stand on their own feet.”
    “Is that right, Peggy?” Nora asked.
    She thought of old Mrs. Lewis in the Mill Park Road, whose only topic of conversation was her children and their careers, and how she would end each time by saying that she planned to make Christina, her youngest, into a typewriter. Nora found it difficult in the sombre air of Peggy’s sitting-room not to laugh. She had to concentrate fiercely to keep a straight face.
    “There are a lot of changes in the town, they tell me,” Peggy said. “I don’t get out much myself, and, you know, we go to Rosslarewhen we can. It’s very peaceful