Sarah’s Story

Only the other day Frank, cruelly paraphrasing, had passed that remark that made him famous forever after for being particularly pass remarkable with Sarah’s family, saying ‘you can take them fine big girls out of the bog but they’ll just bring their bad chests with them’. He had been playing up to Sarah’s sister Helen, whom he well knew to be not exactly enamoured of her brother- in-law’s manner at the best of times, and to her husband Billy. Billy had stood up for her, though, saying that that remark of Frank’s had been in bad taste, what with the boy’s asthma and all. Then Sarah, encouraged by the case Billy had made on her behalf, fought back, claiming Frank forever and always blamed her and her crowd for everything from faults in the plumbing through to wood-louse infestation by way of their children’s physiological shortcomings, darldy adding, having paused first with devastating effect, ‘. . . even for some of his own’. Later that night at home, Helen told Billy how her blood had been boiling watching Frank who had, as usual, been oblivious apparently to the havoc he had wreaked all round.

‘Did you see that, that bastard just sat there.’
‘I know. . .,’ said Billy.
‘Having walked away from the fire he started, and why, why
simply?’
Billy said, ‘Because Sarah happened to have seen the
forecast.’
‘You mean. . ..’ said Helen, ‘because she was stupid enough to happen to mention the fact that she’d seen the forecast and consequently knew the weather for the forthcoming week and what’s wrong with that, that’s the way it was for all of us who were reared in our house and had to be quiet so my father could hear, though by then he was old, and so feeble that he wasn’t going anywhere. My mother could make a joke out of that; that could be funny about my father the way she’d say it, but I can’t because it was hard having to work the farm and Sarah feels the same, same as myself. ’

Sunday, Frank had been having a right go at Sarah, ranting on and on about her being unwilling to break these habits from home. Meanwhile the weather-man, without batting an eyelid, and with a broad, sweeping honest-to-God-We-may-well-have-hay-to-save-today gesture, gave blue sky and stuck cardboard beaming cut-out suns in between clouds and scattered showers, to clear sooner or later, in most parts and to stay much the same for the rest of the day in some. . .

‘He cracked, it’s as simple as that.’
Helen was adamant. ‘And now he is showing signs of starting into the slide again.’ Helen was asking Billy to try to talk some sense into Sarah ‘seeing as y0u’re so fond of her still.’ Billy had serious doubts, he said, about whether anybody’s interfering between a man and a woman would make matters better, ‘or worse, maybe, then where would we be. . . since we’re related . . . I mean now, honestly, Helen, I know your heart’s in the right place but where is your brain. . .’

Frank had had a bad summer, unable to settle in Sarah’s mother’s house for the six weeks or so, though her hospitality had been faultless, though there again, as Sarah herself had put it, it should have been more than enough for him that his wife and his…