Mothers and Sons by Colm Tóibín Page B

ground and walked over to pick them up; some of the biscuits were broken and the packets could not be sold. She put them aside and picked up the catalogue of frozen food again and studied it with fierce concentration. No one in the town was interested in frozen food, she thought, except for fish fingers. Still, she flicked through the pages of the catalogue, waiting for her lone customer to come to the cash register. When the woman finally put her basket down on the ledge, her posture suggested that something deeply offensive had been said to her. Nancy hoped that she was not from the Hill, or had not heard her closing remarks to the shoplifter. She had not seen this woman in the shop before. There seemed no point in trying to humour her. Silently, Nancy keyed in the price of each object as her customer emptied the wire supermarket basket and filled her own shopping bag with slow gestures. The woman was wearing a green knitted cap. As Nancy gave her the change, the woman kept her eyes down and her mouth tightly closed. When she had gone, Nancy stood at the window and watched her walking briskly across the square.
    Gerard, when he arrived from school, wanted to drop his school-bag by the side of the cash register and leave immediately without speaking.
    ‘You can’t leave your bag down here,’ she said. ‘Go upstairs with it.’
    ‘They’re all waiting,’ he pointed to a group of boys standing by the monument.
    ‘Go upstairs with it,’ she repeated.
    ‘Where are the girls?’ he asked.
    ‘Music.’
    He made a face and then went out of the shop door and opened the door into the hall. She could hear him running up the stairs and then thumping back down again. When she heard the hall door bang, she went to the window to see which direction he was going in; she noticed a young woman with a pram who was standing staring at her as though she were a dummy or a model wearing the latest fashions. The young woman was chewing gum, and slowly her stare became cheeky, almost malicious. Nancy turned away from her, whoever she was, and walked to the back of the shop.
    T HE SCENE at the bank had remained with her, like a rash, or the side effect of some strong medicine. She knew that George had left no money because just a month before the accident when she had mentioned that they might change the station wagon he had told her bluntly – ‘bluntly’ was one of his words – that they had no money. Whatever tone he had used, it did not leave her free to suggest that he go to the bank and ask for a loan. He would not, she knewnow, have been offered a loan at the bank, because he had mortgaged the shop and the living quarters above it, and the store beside it, and the payments equalled or sometimes exceeded the income from the shop.
    Mr Roderick Wallace, the manager, having written to her, had agreed to see her. She liked his neat moustache and his easy smile. She had never spoken to him before, merely been greeted by him warmly as he walked a Pekinese dog around the square when the bank had finished its business. He apologized several times as she came into his office for keeping her waiting. When she sat down he apologized again.
    ‘No, no,’ she protested. ‘I’ve just arrived this second. I wasn’t waiting.’
    He looked at her with sudden interest and then stared away towards the high windows which gave onto the square.
    ‘Whoever made time did not make enough of it,’ he said.
    ‘Oh, that’s true all right,’ she said.
    He continued to look towards the window, closely examining its upper reaches, as though about to come to a conclusion about something. Nancy saw that his desk was completely bare except for a blotting pad and a pen. There was no paper or file, and there was no telephone to be seen.
    He began by mumbling words that she was so used to hearing.
    ‘I’m so sorry now for your trouble. It must have been a dreadful shock. I could not believe it when I heard it. And so sudden, so sudden. That is a dreadful