lesson begins Mr Clarke the headmaster picks up an egg from his desk and turns his back on the children and cracks it open. He throws back his head and swallows the raw egg in one gulp. A rainbow appears in the sky and he writes the seven colours on the blackboard and raps his cane as the children chant out the words. She sits close to Maeve, their arms touching. She is stiff with fear. She cannot read so she tries hard to remember the colours. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet, she calls, flinching at each rap of the cane.
On the way home they pass the tinkers’ camp at the Black Bend. The dogs start to bark. The trees are leaning low and dark, but she can see the tents and the fires and children crying and running around in their bare feet. A man is sitting on an upside-down bucket, hammering a tin can. There are rags drying on bushes, and a horse and a donkey tied to a tree. ‘Hurry on,’ Maeve says in a low voice and they walk quickly. Then Tess sees the girl from the day before, standing outside a tent. She looks smaller, paler. The girl sees Tess too. Tess has the feeling that they know each other, or that they are somehow close, the way sisters are close, and that the girl understands this too. She wants to smile, to show that they are friends. Then she does something – she sticks her tongue out at the tinker girl, just like the girl did yesterday. The girl frowns and looks sad and Tess feels bad. Her heart feels sick. It was only a game, she wants to say. But the girl is turning away. She lifts the flap of the tent and enters.
On the avenue they kick at the fallen leaves. A black car drives out of the yard towards them. It is Miss Tannian. She rolls down the window, smiles, asks about their day. She is wearing red lipstick. Tess can feel the eyes of her father and Mike Connolly from over the wall in the potato field, watching. Denis is bending over the pit in the corner of the field. He is as tall as her father now, but thinner.
‘That one is after Dadda,’ Evelyn says before the men come in to their dinner. ‘And Mother not cold in her grave.’ They are talking about Miss Tannian.
‘Don’t be daft,’ Claire says. ‘She only came to take the blood and check for reactors.’
‘Reactors, my eye! Did you see the get-up of her – in the costume and lipstick? And she’s no spring chicken either, let me tell you.’
Once, last summer, they had to lock up the hens in the hen-house for testing. It was a big job. Her mother held up each hen and Miss Tannian drew out blood in a little syringe and squirted it into small bottles to take away. Then her mother opened the hatch at the bottom of the hen-house door and flung the hen out into the yard. Rhode Island Reds and Leghorns. Leghorns are the best for laying, her mother said.
‘Anyway, doesn’t she know well Dadda is only after burying his wife?’ Claire said.
‘Mark my words – that one is setting her cap at him. She’s after this place. Herself and her cocked nose.’
After the dinner Tess goes out to the back hall, past the tap room and the apple room. She is searching again. She wants to leave down this secret weight, everything she is carrying in her heart. She thinks of the tinker girl inside her tent, and she knows, somehow, that the girl is thinking of her too at this moment. She goes to the dark space under the back stairs, where the incubator stands empty now. In spring the eggs hatched out there under a Tilley lamp. She loved the warmth and the glow of the red lamp. There, she was happy. Every day Evelyn or Claire or her mother turned the eggs over carefully. Then, one morning, a miracle – two yellow chicks had broken through during the night, and were staggering around on thin shaky legs. One day, she stood looking in at the eggs. She had a sudden longing to climb in, fold herself up, lie down under the lovely warm light. Then her mother appeared and leaned in and picked up an egg. She held it up to the window-light. ‘Tess,’ she whispered. ‘Come, look at the little birdie inside!’ Tess moved close against her mother’s body. For a moment she pressed her face against her mother’s stomach and closed her eyes and kissed it, and breathed in her smell and she could taste her mother in the smell. When she drew away, her mother was holding the egg up to the light and Tess saw a shadow, the shape of a tiny sleeping bird, inside the shell. She could not speak. Her mother smiled and stroked her head and her heart filled up. Together they stood in a stream of light watching the shadow and then her mother placed the egg back on the straw. She picked up another egg and held it up to the light and frowned, and sighed.
‘What’s wrong, Momma?’ Tess asked.
‘No birdie here, sweetheart, no birdie here,’ she said sadly. ‘This one’s a glugger.’ She threw it in a bucket for the pigs’ feed, and when it burst a terrible rotten smell filled the air.
Two strange men come to the house and fumigate her mother’s and father’s room. They are all tested, even Mike Connolly. That night in bed she remembers Miss Tannian – they have forgotten to test Miss Tannian. She might be their new mother. She does not want a new mother. She misses Oliver. He has come only once since Aunt Maud took him away. Claire made a lovely currant cake for the visit. He had a frown, a new little wrinkle on his forehead. He had looked at Maeve’s face, then at Tess’s, and back at Maeve’s again. They kept smiling and flapping at him but he wasn’t sure who they were any more. Suddenly Tess misses her mother like never before. It is like a huge wave flowing over her. She misses her mother for herself, and for Oliver too. He does not remember, or understand, why everything is different now. It hurts her heart to think of his small head waking up in Aunt Maud’s house, in a room full of cousins and different walls, different voices. A different mother. She thinks of him waking, looking up at the ceiling, or out at the rain. His little heart jumping when a door bangs or a strange face appears, looking in at him through the bars of his cot. That evening of the visit she could not eat the currant cake. It would not go down her throat.
In school she grows to love Mrs Snee, her teacher, and she knows Mrs Snee loves her too. Every day she gives her jobs to do. On cold days Mrs Snee lets the children leave their bottles of milk beside the fire to warm them. Tess doesn’t mind leaving home each morning. The house is too quiet now. It is worse when her father comes inside. The wireless has not been turned on since the funeral. Denis cycled to the town one day and got the batteries recharged, but that night when he went to turn it on her father said, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ in a cold hard voice and Denis backed away without a word. She had always been afraid of her father but now it is worse. His face is dark and cross all the time. One night when the priest came to visit she heard her father say, ‘What’s gone is gone.’ At night he stares into the fire. He does not seem to like anyone – not Denis or Claire or her – except maybe Evelyn. She is the eldest. He gives her housekeeping money every Saturday. She keeps the ration book and sells eggs to the egg-man from Henaghan’s, and swaps some of the butter she churns for sugar and jam and other groceries that John Joe Donnellan sells in his travelling shop. She sends Denis to the post office, or to town to order chicken-feed. Denis is seventeen. He has blue eyes and thick black hair. When he was a baby he was blond like Oliver. They were all blond at the start, her mother said. Denis sits in the kitchen at night, his arms folded, his long legs thrown out in front of him, not saying anything. No one says much any more. A silence came on the house the day of the funeral and it has stayed. Tess thinks that they would all like the silence to end now, but no one knows how to put an end to it. She looks at their faces at night. She hears her own heart beating in her chest, in her head and ears too, thump, thump, thump, deafening her. She watches Denis’s chest rising and falling. He can hear his own heart too, she thinks. They can all hear their hearts – Claire and Evelyn and her father – making an awful racket, thumping inside them, like hers.
In the cold, Maeve’s feet break out with chilblains and she cries at night. Claire rubs on Zam-Buk and she is kept home from school for two days. Tess goes alone and stays back after school to help Mrs Snee tidy up. The light is fading when she leaves and her boots begin to hurt. She hurries along the road, almost running, pulling her coat tight. Up ahead is the Black Bend and the tinkers’ camp under the trees. She sees the flames of a fire rising and people gathered around – more people than she has
