The Private Wound Read Online Free PDF Page B

Kevin?”
    â€œA bit of exaggeration, I agree.”
    â€œ
What
is?” asked Harry.
    â€œYou should tell your husband not to spread malicious gossip.”
    â€œMy dear Maire, I’d never dare order
my
husband about,” replied Harry, with an innocent stare. Maire’s handsome face flushed.
    â€œIf you’re suggesting—”
    â€œAh, will you stop pecking at each other, you two,” said Flurry. He turned to me. “The Father found Eamonn and Clare having a roll in the hay. He drove the girl back home with strokes of his ash-plant on her bum. And young Eamonn lost his job and had to leave the town. He’s a holy terror, the Father. The purity of Irish womenfolk has him frothing with zeal.”
    â€œAnd why wouldn’t it?” exclaimed Maire angrily. “Isn’t he your parish priest? A priest has a duty, under God, to keep his flock from straying.”
    â€œHe has a duty to keep his temper too, not go lashing out at young girls. Isn’t that so, Kevin?”
    â€œWell now, I don’t—”
    â€œThe Father has a right to rebuke sin.
Wherever
he finds it.” There was something in Maire’s emphasis which stopped the talk in its tracks. Kevin at last broke the embarrassed silence by turning to me and asking what stores I’d need for the cottage: he would have them sent from his shop if I’d let him have a list. I arranged to move in the day after to-morrow.
    Presently I took my leave. Outside the front door I turned left on an impulse instead of going straight to mycar. I wanted to look at the river and the garden that bordered it at the back of the house. As I approached the bow window, which was half open, I heard voices from within.
    â€œFive pounds a
month
! What came over you, Kevin?”
    â€œI want him under my eye, that’s all, Flurry. For a bit.”
    The two men moved away from the window. I could hear no more, so I returned to the car, baffled and disquieted by Kevin’s extraordinary remark. I might have pulled up my stakes and left Charlottestown for ever the next morning: but, just as I was starting the car, Harry ran out.
    â€œYou left your cigarette case behind.”
    â€œI didn’t,” said I, feeling in my coat pocket.
    â€œThat was just my excuse.” She put her head in at the window. “You
are
going to take the cottage?”
    â€œDo you want me to?”
    â€œYes, Dominic.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œYou will, then?”
    Her cheap perfume blew into the car.
    â€œI expect so.”
    â€œGoody. Don’t believe everything they tell you.” On which enigmatic statement, Harry waved and went back to the house.

Chapter 3
    A week later I was sitting at my desk in the cottage. The fuchsia hedge blocked out the far mountains. My work had been going well, and I enjoyed the simple task of cooking for myself. Kevin had arranged for a neighbour to look after me, but one of Brigid’s efforts had been quite enough, so I kept her now to bed-making and cleaning. It was nice to be off the telephone, to take long solitary walks over the countryside and an occasional drink in the Colooney bar.
    Contrary to anticipation, Flurry and Harry had not encroached on my privacy. I’d had dinner with them once—a meal Harry ate with curiously self-conscious, gingerly movements of the mouth, as if she had a set of ill-fitting dentures. There was no complicity in her looks at me, and only a sort of boyish forthrightness in her remarks: Flurry kept up his usual flow of badinage. It was a dull evening. I can only remember two things out of it. I discovered that Harry was the daughter of a shopkeeper in a town on the Gloucestershire-Warwickshire border, which accounted for her countrified English accent.
    â€œHarry’s dad went broke. I picked her up out of the gutter,” said Flurry, with an affectionate glance at his wife.
    â€œYou make it sound as if I was on the streets,”