The All of It: A Novel by Jeannette Haien Page B

to get in the car. Kevin shouldered our pouches and I saw him wet his lips the way he would when he was full of dread, but, I don’t know, for myself, the minute I was on the seat I couldn’t wait to feel how it would be when we were off and going— it taking us , you know. The speed and all. And it was wonderful, of course. Beyond me to tell of! The trees—there was a great long avenue of them; beech, they were—we railed past them so fast they came together in my eyes. It put me laughing, I loved it so!
    “When we stopped, I just sat, stunned, you know, not thinking of where we were or of Mr. Dunne, just gone over with the joy of the ride. Mr. Dunne,though, he brought me back, asked me, ‘So you liked it, Enda?’ and I told him full-hearted that I did , that as long as I lived I’d not forget it.”
    He allowed himself the image of her young and, in the confusion and charm of her excitement, radiant. He added to the image a docile afternoon sun that warmed her hair….
    “Father?”
    “I was thinking of your pleasure in the ride,” he responded hastily.
    “Mr. Dunne gave me three more before we left the place,” she boasted, “but that first one, well, like I said, it’s beyond me to tell how I loved it.”
    He arched his brows: “You stayed how long on the place?”
    “Near three months…. Mr. Dunne came to speak of Kevin as ‘his other right hand.’”
    “And did you work too, Enda?”
    She nodded. “I started very low on the ladder, at laundering, but in a bit the housekeeper; Mrs. Bowler, a queer one, but fair enough to us girls that did our work well, she put me to being one of the cook’s helpers. I never gave her cause for worry, did everything just as I was told and never raised a tongue about the hours…. When I say she was queer—she’d line us girls up to give us, you know, our orders for the day, and always, somewhere along the way, she’d get in a word about her notions of what she called ‘one’s station in life,’meaning of course ours , not hers. She’d a bit of a pinched face, very like a marten. Haughty. Stuck on herself, as they say.” She smiled. “The people of the world, Father: the variety!”
    “Indeed,” he laughed, “variety is the right word.” Then: “What caused you to leave the place, Enda?”
    She frowned. “It’s hard to put into words, Father…. It was both of us wanted finally to go, not just Kevin, you shouldn’t suppose…. It was several things, starting with the fact of there being so many people forever at our elbows. That , and that all our hours and steps were spelled out for us, that we were told , you know, every move we were to make. And the bells !” she spat out the word.
    “Bells?”
    “All manner of them,” she replied vigorously. “The one rung mornings at half-five in the stable-yard to get the men up and going and again at noon sharp for their dinner-break and again at six, six being their quitting time, and inside the house, every minute, the mistress or guests—there were parties of guests forever coming and going—setting off bells and chimes and gongs, the maids tearing up and down the staircases and through the halls seeing to the answering of a fresh summons before there’d been a chance to finish with the errand of the one before it.”
    “Frantic,” he murmured sympathetically. “Andthe other reasons you left? They’d be ones of a deeper, personal sort, I’d suppose.”
    She let her eyes be still in his gaze, then stated weightedly, “They were.”
    “Tell me, Enda.”
    She didn’t waver: “Mostly, it was the way things that were new to us kept coming at us, no end to them, and—I don’t know—after a while, it wore on us.” She paused, briefly considering, then qualified with: “I have to say, I don’t mean things as things so much; once we were shown the use of something that was new to us, its purpose , you know, that was that as far as we were concerned…. What I’m talking of had more to do with