Free Bend for Home, The by Dermot Healy Page B

bags of tea, oft times chewing a jelly baby. It was a trial for her to go on her hunkers but this she did each day. The fresh buns were moved to the front of the display. Yesterday’s were moved to the back so that she could pick them first.
    Then at half past one the door to the shop flew open and in came the convent schoolchildren. Despite the Breifne being up-market it kept some of the cheapest sweets in town courtesy of Uncle Seamus. But the main requirement was a penny slice of Chester cake. This was a heavy slab of cake mixed from the trimmings of Swiss rolls, Madeiras, buttersponges – anything that came to hand. Then it was topped with a coat of chocolate and a splash of hundreds and thousands.
    A Chester bun, Mrs.
    A flash bar.
    A macaroon.
    Take your turn, Maisie would snarl.
    She took the penny before she handed across the item. The crowd of children would grow. Behind them patiently stood the bankers in their suits and raincoats waiting to pay for their lunch while Maisie opened jars of gobstoppers, handed out bags of broken buns, picked out pink chewing gum or cut ice cream for threepenny wafers. At last she’d reach the bankers and the clerks. With a polite nod she accepted their bill, scrutinized it carefully, then called for what was owing in a sweet voice, and paid out the change, coin by reluctant coin.
    *
    After two-thirty all went quiet. My mother sat down to her dinner, then she’d prop her feet on the ledge above the fireplace. This was to get the circulation going. My mother had trouble with her feet. A few times a month she went off to have her corns paired, her toes done. She’d dip her feet in methylated spirits and wipe them clean with cotton wool.
    In the afternoon a different type of customer appeared in the shop. Country women came for buns. The genteel wives of professional men bought meringues and eclairs. Secretaries bought snacks. Drunks fell into the tearoom for fries. The dummy arrived. Orders came in for birthday cakes. Special consideration was given to wedding cakes. The mother and the bride-to-be would be taken aside to the little room off the shop.
    Here the gold wedding-cake stand was shown. Maisie would be at her most persuasive.
    It’s always such a difficult time, she’d say.
    Sizes and numbers of tiers were discussed. Out came the top ornaments – gold braids, dwarf brides and grooms in silver, bunches of plastic flowers, a couple on a swing.
    Then the order book came down off the nail. The mother would look at the prices while the bride-to-be stood apart from the transaction, awed by the costs and what was in store. As customers waitedoutside in the shop for service, Maisie, unmoved by their impatience, went through the costs of a wedding cake again for the benefit of the mother of the bride-to-be.
    A bargain was struck. The advance was handed over.
    Maisie with a false smile approached the next customer.
    Yes? she enquired, as she put the pile of notes carefully away, and what can I do for you?
    A few weeks later my sisters and I would walk down Main Street carrying the three tiers of the wedding cake to the hotel. The wedding-cake stand, the prized piece of equipment in the Breifne, worth oh hundreds, came on its own later.
    *
    Maisie was relieved at four o’clock.
    The rutting season has started again! barked Maisie. There’s a Madeline Slowey for a wedding cake.
    Good, said my mother.
    Another one, Maisie would reply, ready to breed!
    Have you seen Una?
    I have seen nothing of your offspring.
    And she’d stamp out through the side door and up the entry swinging her elbows with her head down. Maisie in the far past had been let down in love, got engaged and seen the engagement broken, and never kept company again. She’d sit in the dining room till six in a blue daze, contemplating her dinner, contemplating her reflection, a fork lifted in midair or tucked against her cheek as she pondered easy tasks and quiet memories, she’d drift away, but sometimes the wrong