The two girls sat on the sofa and watched the boy. How middle-aged they seem, Anne thought, how disapproving. Even their plaits looked old as bell pulls. "You don't have to marry him," she thought in irritation; "just to be nice to him."
The boy sat on a hard chair in a corner. The girls stared at him and he tolerated. When Anne had agreed to take him it was meant as a gesture of gratitude for her own secure family life. Now she wondered if she had borrowed the boy at least partly to highlight her own advantages, to make herself feel a gratitude that was not as present as it should be.
They had all been looking forward to having an orphan for the day. The little girls, easily moved to sentiment, had made him a crayon drawing of a demented-looking couple with wings. "Your mammy and daddy, angels in heaven," they wrote underneath.
Anne had managed to confiscate this by saying she wanted to keep it for herself. Instead she helped them make a jelly with marshmallows on top. They had imagined an Oliver Twist little boy, about seven, whereas this child was 10 or 11, raw and silent inside a suit from which his ankles stuck out. His ears stuck out too, as did his red hair. Dense freckles spread like a rust across his pale skin. He had attached himself to the most uncomfortable chair in the room. It was hard and high-backed with knobbed spokes. It came, as most of their furniture did, from auction rooms and this upset Anne, who wanted to display her taste as a home-maker with white sofas and primrose walls and thick rugs patterned in blue. At least her children were pretty.
"Joyce and Mary Clare would love to hear about your life, Declan," she said. "When I was a little girl we lived near an orphanage and I used to envy the children. I sometimes wanted to be one of them."
Declan met this offering with a warily averted gaze.
"What do you get to eat?" Joyce asked.
His red eyebrows responded with alarm. "We get our dinner and our tea," he said in a country voice that was like a donkey braying.
Joyce and Mary Clare giggled and Anne knew that for days afterwards they would imitate his accent.
A visiting priest had set up the scheme whereby families would take an orphan for a day. He had spoken touchingly of children with no one of their own, of the importance of acquainting them with family life. In those days people did not understand about orphans. Orphans were children whose parents had died. It did not occur to people to wonder why so many infants outlived their parents. That these children might have come from broken homes or awful homes was not considered. That they might be helpless at the hands of institutional abusers was not even imagined. Possibly the priest had thought of such a thing and believed that the children might confide in their host families .
"Let's go for a walk," Anne said. "We can get ice-creams."
Joyce and Mary Clare assented greedily but Declan shook his head and then let it hang and she gazed with pity on the hopeless thatch of carroty hair. He began to rub at his knee with a big red hand and she saw that he was wiping away a patch of damp. Was he crying? If it was any other child, she would have gone at once and put her arms around him, but hugging Declan would be like hugging a gate.
"What about the pictures?" she said in desperation. "I think there's a Western."
He did not even look up. This time when he shook his head, it was a turtle movement, as if the effort of moving that bony boulder had worn him out.
Anne glared at her children and they looked sourly back at her. What a bloody awful disaster the day was turning out to be. She considered herself a motherly sort of woman, one who could cope with any sort of child. Now, as the lumpen boy sat in silent misery she could only think that his mother, dead or alive, had had a lucky escape. Never mind. Today he was her responsibility. Sooner or later the day would end. In the meantime, she must somehow get through the hours and without the judgmental presence of her elderly little girls. She sent them to the shops to buy comics and sweets.
"Come to the kitchen with me," she coaxed Declan. "We'll make popcorn." He ignored the hand she extended but clung to the chair he had been sitting on.
"There are chairs in the kitchen," she smiled.
"Dat's my chair," he said. He carried his chair and sat on it suspiciously as she melted butter and poured in the corn. When it began to pop he looked horrified.
"Taste it!" She showed him the transformation of the hard balls into fluffy snacks.
"Jesus, no!"
The girls returned with the sweets and comics. Anne divided them, a comic for each, a careful allocation of bars. The girls sprawled on the floor with their comics but Declan sat in his chair, the sweets stowed in his pocket. After half an hour she noticed that he had not turned the page of his comic.
She made meringues to compensate for the fact that she had given up on him. It was some consolation that he ate all that was put before him and when the taciturn man with the black habit came to collect him, she slipped a 10 shilling note in the child's pocket.
"Have you had a nice day, Declan?" the brother asked.
Declan dropped his head and nodded.
"Look at your benefactors," the boy's guardian instructed. "Say `thank you'." Declan looked at his outsized boots. "Tank you," he said.
"He will write," the brother said curtly. Anne's heart ached for the way the boy was prodded out the door like a beast at a market, but perhaps this was all he understood, all that he felt at home with. In spite of her pity for the child, when the door closed after him she felt relief.
There was no letter from Declan but the project had been a success in a way. It renewed her contentment in her family life. If she had failed with the poor institutional boy, she knew how well she had succeeded with her own children. Now that the awkward boy was gone, they were her lovely little girls again. Now that the alien presence had been withdrawn, her own tribe drew close. She and her husband could find mutual tenderness in their sympathy for the poor foundling. And if the girls' imitation of the child was not quite kind, it made mealtimes merry. When Saturday arrived again, there was a need to celebrate their unity and their freedom. "We'll have a picnic," Anne declared. All the family loved a picnic. Oh, she was good at family life. There was a big stew in the oven and an apple pudding for when they got home.
Home. Hers was the sort of family in which exciting expeditions were partly a flirtation leading to the serious happiness of homecoming. She liked bathing her children. She liked putting them to bed and reading a story to them. She liked the quiet hour that she and Joseph then had together, listening to a play on the radio or some music. If there was a voice that sometimes said, this is too easy; this is a nursery world that shuts out the real one; this is a life that will end when your children grow up; then today that voice was shamed into silence.
Joseph was setting a fire for the evening and the children were packing fruit and buns inside napkins for the picnic when a knock sounded on the door. "It's Declan!" they all said in unison. And it was.
Drab, unrewarding Declan stood on the step refusing to help anyone out.
"Did you forget something, Declan?" Anne said. At once she felt foolish. The child had nothing, so how could he have forgotten something?
"Why are you here?" Joyce demanded in hostile tones.
"I'm here for the Saturday," he stuttered in his donkey voice.
"It's a mistake," Anne said in relief. "That was only last Saturday. My husband will drive you back." She opened her handbag to find some money to put in the poor child's pocket.
At once his pale face and pale eyes were full of panic. "If I go back they'll think I done something wrong."
"It's all right, Declan." Anne ignored the furious looks of her family. "You can come on our picnic." He wore his usual dull and desperate look. "I have to stay here. It's meant to be a visit."
"Come or go," Joseph said and the child looked so utterly hopeless that Anne said: "I'll stay with Declan. I really wouldn't mind a quiet afternoon."
The family drove off resentfully and Anne brought the boy into the house. He looked about for the chair he had sat on the previous Saturday and clamped himself to it.
"We don't know much about boys in this house," she said. "Tell me what you like."
"I'm all right," he said. He looked so solitary, so enduring. He wasn't like an adult or even an adolescent who has learnt to be charmless. He was only a child. Beneath his awful institutional haircut was a boy's hair, soft and fuzzy, curled against the pensive nape of a boy's skull. With an effort of will she touched his hair. Declan shifted uneasily in his chair. "You don't like us very much, do you?" she sighed.
"I don't know," he muttered in confusion.
"You don't have to come here," she said.
"I do!" His cry was lonely and plaintive.
"Declan, I'll talk to Brother Farrelly. I'll blame us - say we've got decorators coming or a sick family member to stay."
"Dat'd be a lie," he said miserably.
"I only want to do what's best for you. Do you understand?"
He nodded faintly and then, realising that this was a lie, he shook his head.
"Maybe we should get a television," she said to her husband when Declan was gone. "That might keep him entertained."
Joseph had not forgiven her for upsetting their picnic. "Look, if you feel compelled to punish yourself that's your own affair, but it's different when the rest of us have to suffer."
Anne resented his stiffness, the absurd male-to-male antipathy for a boy of 10. It was true they had agreed not to get a television until the girls had finished their studies, but they had not foreseen Declan. Joseph thought the whole business was absurd. To him it was a simple matter of going to the orphanage and explaining the misunderstanding. But Anne felt the child was like a stray animal who has learnt a single trick and considers it vital to its survival. He had been told to visit and the way to stay out of trouble was to do as he was told. She did not know if there was cruelty in the orphanage, but she felt certain there wasn't any kindness. "He's just a child," she appealed to her husband's maturity.
"He isn't a child at all. He's an old man," Joseph said. "He's like some old relation that's moved in and nothing's going to shift him."
"He hasn't moved in," Anne argued. "It's only Saturday."
But she began to feel that Joseph was right, that she was wedded to Declan instead of her own husband. Saturday came and her family drifted off to the cinema and she waited with heavy heart for the heavy-hearted child. When he sat on his chair it was like an anchor on time that would stop it from moving and Anne found herself wishing for something - anything - to release her .
It was a shock, though, to hear such urgent banging on the door. Had something happened to her family? A tremor of shock animated Declan's body as she raced outside.
It was Brother Farrelly, who had delivered Declan on the first Saturday. "Is he here?" he said, without any preamble of politeness.
"Of course he's here," Anne was both shocked and relieved.
"You sent him."
The man stormed past her into her house and shouted the boy's name. Declan remained seated on his chair, inert as ever, but there was terror in his eyes.
"What sort of lies have you been telling?" The brother cuffed him with a knuckle. Anne felt her anger rising. "Please don't do that," she said. "No child has ever been hit in my house. Please tell me what is going on?"
He gave her a sardonic look, like a policeman briefly humouring a criminal. "It's obvious, I would say. He ran away."
"What are you talking about?"
"For the past two Saturdays this deceitful child has been coming here with no permission. We have had boys and brothers out searching for him. And all because he preferred your company to ours."
"But that's ridiculous," Anne said. "Declan's miserable here. He only came because he was told to."
"Are you calling me a liar?" Brother Farrelly said. "Lies I abhor above all." He seized the child by an ear. "This is the liar."
In spite of his fear, the boy made no response. She saw him shrink into his chair, digging his body into it as if he might become a part of it, and then the tall country man hefted him across the room like a sack of agricultural produce.
"Wait!" Anne begged.
"What now?" the brother said.
"His chair," she said on impulse. "He can take it with him."
"Do you think we have no chairs?" The brother seemed amused by this. "We're all right for chairs, aren't we boy?" He reached for the child in a manner that seemed almost friendly but then he twisted his ear. "There is no private property in the home. It's share and share alike."
"Please," she said. "Take it." She brought the chair to the door.
"Leave it!" Declan bawled. He tore himself from the brother's grasp and carried the chair back across the room. As he replaced it very gently in its exact position she saw in his back the stiffness of grief, like a child who has to bury his own pet dog. It hurt her to see a child suffering, but when he turned around again his face wore its normal listless expression. He returned to Brother Farrelly and Anne was confused as she got the same look of contempt from the age-old eyes of the two males.
"He ran away," she told the others when they came back. "He ran away from the orphanage to be here with us."
"He must have liked us," Joyce said, guilty and crestfallen.
"Poor Declan." Mary Clare's eyes filled with easy tears. "We'll go and visit him. We'll bring him sweets and comics."
They did not visit Declan. Anne knew their effort at kindness would earn the same contempt as her offer of the chair. It was not them he wanted. It was his place - his own and absolute place - in a family home. He knew nothing of the warmth that holds a family together. Home was a house and each person there had a place in it. By sticking to his chair in its corner he had tried to claim his space.
For a little while they felt sad about the child and then, for relief, they made jokes about him. In due course the tide of family life washed away the small paw prints of his occupation. Except for Anne. She was bound to Declan as he was bound to his chair. As their lives moved on and their circumstances improved her house came to look like the pictures in magazines, with white sofas and primrose walls, but Declan's shabby chair remained in its corner. It was a gesture of faith, a gesture of the spark of faith. The child - an outsider to emotion - believed that the chair preserved his place in the family and she, unable to answer his cold longing, was compelled to honour an unspoken debt.
Then, as her children grew up and left her, she discovered that there was a stronger link. With no family in the house her white sofas stayed pure and silent as snow. It astonished her that she had once believed that pretty furniture could improve what she had had. Her grown-up girls became uncomfortable with her. They thought her a trivial person. It was Declan who kept her company now. She was at home with his silences. And she accepted with gratitude that his kind of love is more tenacious than any other .
Clare Boylan