” he called. He was looking about to see was there anything else. His rosary beads. He reached up quickly to the shelf, and touching them, he glanced on the wall beside where his father’s best coat hung on its hook. It looked so exactly like the back view of his father, it stopped him in his reach. He smiled. It really was like his father, shaped to the exact slope of his shoulders. He looked about the room. There were correspondences everywhere. He knew these things so very well, the fittings and furnishings of his boyhood, yet each particular object appeared clearer and fresher than ever he had known it before, as though they all had been very recently painted, but with a strange and vivid paint that applied no colors but memories. This is my home, he thought. Or rather, as after an absence, This was the home where I grew up. He saw, and necessarily touched, the table and his bench, where he had sat these countless meals. He saw the ghost of him on the match-boarding behind where the varnish had rubbed away. Another ghost showed beside, bigger a bit, where his brother had sat. On the press were his schoolbooks and prizes—The Sieges of Gibraltar, he read—all covered in brown paper and his father’s neat stencil on the spines. He saw the dark disc round the gas-lamp that would widen and deepen till again his father whitewashed the ceiling, for the disc to form and grow and deepen again. Out in the scullery was the sink where his father had scrubbed him, scrubbed him pink with a hard brush, while he sat and shivered on that perilous height. It was all here. He sniffed, catching the smell of his home, cabbagy same like any kitchen in the world, save with something sweeter in it, apples maybe, mouldering in a box. He went to the mantel shelf and lifted the lid off the Huntley and Palmer’s biscuit tin. He looked happily at its contents, pleased they had never changed, all manner of scrip-scrap his father had saved: pins, button, bands, three foreign coins passed for sixpences, a Danish safety-pin. Nothing had changed. And he thought of his father who too had never changed. With his significant looks and his consequential airs, desperate lest any should think him soft. He had left the regiment that was his life to bring his sons home when their mother was dying. Such unselfish love, and oh such bravery. How he loved his father. It was the same huge love he felt for all, for Doyler and MacEmm, for Aunt Sawney and Nancy and Gordie’s baby: how very much he loved them all. How very much indeed.
In the summer of long ago he had heard of Wolfe Tone who gallantly and gay had gone about his deed. He too had loved so well. He too had been so loved.
He went out in the shop. He passed between the narrow shelves and the dusted finicky wares. On the wall he saw the advertisement card for Robin Starch, the new starch, the robin still told—sparrow-dull now so long it had hung. He picked up the rifle and bundled the tunic and hat under his arm. He pulled the door and the bell clinked, and he had the strangest notion standing there that the door had pulled itself.
The door had pulled itself and the bell of its own discretion had clinked. And now it clinked again as the door swung home behind him, and he turned towards Sallynoggin and the unfrequented road to town.
With the last bundle of washing, Nancy heaved backwards in from the yard: through the scullery and into the kitchen where she hefted the washing on the table. “Now,” she said. She took a moment to wipe her forehead, listening to the peevish cries above, then up the box-stairs door, aware of the climb of each stair in her calves. “Well Aunt Sawney,” she said, coming in the room. Aunt Sawney sat in her chair by the window, the babba on her lap. Nancy took the mite in her arms. “What’s this now?” she asked, poking a finger at the screwed-up face, “what’s this has you complaining to your Aunt Sawney about?”
Aunt Sawney thought the way the child was hungering.
“Sure that’s only good complaints.”
She humped the babba, easing the strain afterwards with a hand to her back. She took a corner