The Celtic Knot

Cottage Industry

Polly is as good as her word. The next evening, she brings over one of the curtains and drapes it over Kathleen to see how it suits her. Polly declares it’s terrific. Kathleen is gorgeous. With that hair, the green is perfect. She’d make a lovely colleen.

Da thinks they’re both mad, trying to make a dancing dress out of a perfectly good pair of curtains. Polly tells him they’re not mad. She’s enterprising, as Mr. de Valera would say. She lays the curtain across the kitchen table and snaps her big, sharp shears through the fabric. In fact, Dev would be proud of them, turning out homespun dancing costumes. They’re a proper little cottage industry, so they are. Da snorts and pretends to be irritated, but Kathleen can see he’s really fighting back a laugh.

By the end of the evening, the shape of a dress has emerged, held together with pins, scraps of tissue paper, and lines of white thread marking where the seams should go. Kathleen can’t really follow how it all comes together, since dressmaking is well beyond her. The closest she ever came was a dreadful apron she made in sewing class at school, so badly stitched that Mam eventually cut it up for dusters, so Kathleen leaves the real work to Polly.

Polly asks if Kathleen can embroider, poking at the waist as she tries to gather the pleats in neatly. No, Kathleen has to admit. Kathleen asks if Polly can. Polly says no, but they’ll cross that bridge when they come to it.

Right now, what Polly could really use is a cigarette, she’s fit to commit murder for one. Does Kathleen think Mam would smell it on her?

Of course she would, Kathleen agrees, but she’d guess Mam is past caring by now. All the girls Polly’s age smoke, and Mam has always thought it common and never liked Polly doing it, but lately Mam seems too worn down to mind much of anything. She’s no worse than before, but no better either, still coughing constantly, as if she’s stuck at some fixed stage of the illness and can’t summon the strength to climb back out of it.

Polly remarks that it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and she digs through her handbag, the kind of bag that always seems to hold some new surprise, until she comes up with a cigarette, a bit battered looking but intact, and a piece of Lemon’s toffee, which she hands to Kathleen. “Give us a light there, Tom,” she calls to Da, easy as anything, the way she always talks to him. He twists a scrap of paper, lifts the hot plate off the range to catch a flame, and holds it out to her. Polly bends her head to catch the light and closes her eyes with pleasure at the first puff.

Polly sits there awhile, smoking dreamily, as if she’s drifted off somewhere else entirely. Then, just as suddenly, she looks around, finds a saucer, and quenches the cigarette, though it’s barely smoked. Kathleen has seen people save a half-smoked cigarette that way, to have the other half for later, and asks if that’s what Polly’s doing. Polly murmurs that she just doesn’t feel like it anymore. Then she stops talking altogether, as though she’s forgotten Kathleen is even in the room. She presses a hand to her forehead and sinks back in her chair with her eyes closed.

Kathleen is terrified, her stomach tight with fear. Polly is acting so strangely that Kathleen is sure she’s caught the same illness as Mam. She whispers Polly’s name, asking if she’s all right, but Da doesn’t even notice, absorbed in his evening paper.

After a moment or two, Polly opens her eyes and smiles at Kathleen. She says she’s right as rain, it’s nothing, she’s fine. She calls Kathleen “love” and asks her to put the kettle on for tea so she can get back to the sewing.