me yesterday and beeped the horn. If there had been anyone else there, I mean anyone of his sort, he would have danced with her, but there wasn’t. He was with Jim Farrell, who just stood there looking at us.”
“If his mother finds out, I don’t know what she’ll say,” Annette said. “She’s awful. I hate going into that shop when Jim isn’t there. My mother sent me down once to get two rashers and that old one told me she didn’t sell rashers in twos.”
Eilis then told them that she had been offered a job serving in Miss Kelly’s every Sunday.
“I hope you told her what to do with it,” Nancy said.
“I told her I’d take it. It won’t do any harm. It means I might be able to go to the Athenaeum with you using my own money and prevent you being taken advantage of.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Nancy said. “He was nice.”
“Are you going to see him again?” Eilis repeated.
“Will you come with me on Sunday night?” Nancy asked Eilis. “He mightn’t even be there, but Annette can’t come, and I’m going to need support in case he is there and doesn’t even ask me to dance or doesn’t even look at me.”
“I might be too tired from working for Miss Kelly.”
“But you’ll come?”
“I haven’t been there for ages,” Eilis said. “I hate all those country fellows, and the town fellows are worse. Half drunk and just looking to get you up the Tan Yard Lane.”
“George isn’t like that,” Nancy said.
“He’s too stuck up to go near the Tan Yard Lane,” Annette said.
“Maybe we’ll ask him if he’d consider selling rashers in twos in future,” Eilis said.
“Say nothing to him,” Nancy said. “Are you really going to work for Miss Kelly? There’s a one for rashers.”
Over the next two days Miss Kelly took Eilis through every item in the shop. When Eilis asked for a piece of paper so she could note the different brands of tea and the various sizes of the packets, Miss Kelly told her that it would only waste time if she wrote things down; it was best instead to learn them off by heart. Cigarettes, butter, tea, bread, bottles of milk, packets of biscuits, cooked ham and corned beef were by far the most popular items sold on Sundays, she said, and after these came tins of sardines and salmon, tins of mandarin oranges and pears and fruit salad, jars of chicken and ham paste and sandwich spread and salad cream. She showed Eilis a sample of each object before telling her the price. When she thought that Eilis had learned these prices, she went on to other items, such as cartons of fresh cream, bottles of lemonade, tomatoes, heads of lettuce, fresh fruit and blocks of ice cream.
“Now there are people who come in here on a Sunday, if you don’t mind, looking for things they should get during the week. What can you do?” Miss Kelly pursed her lips disapprovingly as she listed soap, shampoo, toilet paper and toothpaste and called out the different prices.
Some people, she added, also bought bags of sugar on a Sunday, or salt and even pepper, but not many. And there were even those who would look for golden syrup or baking soda or flour, but most of these items were sold on a Saturday.
There were always children, Miss Kelly said, looking for bars of chocolate or toffee or bags of sherbet or jelly babies, and men looking for loose cigarettes and matches, but Mary would deal with those since she was no good at large orders or remembering prices, and was often, Miss Kelly went on, more of a hindrance than a help when there was a big crowd in the shop.
“I can’t stop her gawking at people for no reason. Even some of the regular customers.”
The shop, Eilis saw, was well stocked, with many different brands of tea, some of them very expensive, and all of them at higher prices than Hayes’s grocery in Friary Street or the L&N in Rafter Street or Sheridan’s in the Market Square.
“You’ll have to learn how to pack sugar and wrap a loaf of bread,” Miss Kelly said. “Now, that’s one of the things that Mary is good at, God help her.”
As each customer came into the shop on the days when she was being trained, Eilis noticed that Miss Kelly had a different tone. Sometimes she said nothing at all, merely clenched her jaw and stood