Cushla’s exclusion from her community and work

Cushla’s exclusion from her community and work is a gradual narrowing of her life after she shelters the McGeown family, even after Tommy McGeown has been arrested for murder. The school treats her association with the family as a threat to her position, while the town’s strained relations turn that act of support into a public liability. The consequences extend beyond her employment: familiar customers and acquaintances fall away, her mother’s business weakens, and Cushla comes to feel that there are few places left where she can go without being judged or unwelcome.

The School’s Decision

Bradley tells Cushla that the school has serious concerns. When she invites him to explain, he sets out the grounds: she befriended a family considered disreputable despite advice not to, and continued to shelter them after one member had been arrested for murder. He links her conduct to the delicacy of community relations and says that her position on the school staff is not tenable at present. The board of governors is to meet in an emergency session, and he warns her to expect the worst.

Cushla understands the implication as a dismissal and asks directly whether she is being sacked. The answer is framed instead as a recommendation that she take a year off. That distinction leaves the decision presented as a temporary leave rather than an unequivocal firing, but it does not soften its immediate effect: she is being removed from the work she has held while the school responds to the controversy around her. Her later description of herself as having lost her job conveys how little practical difference the softer formulation makes to her.

The exchange makes her care for the McGeowns the stated cause of the school’s action. The problem, as Bradley presents it, is not a failure in her teaching but the reputational and communal consequences of her association with a family connected to a murder case. His warning that relations in the town are delicate turns the school’s decision into an institutional expression of the same local pressure that is closing off other parts of Cushla’s life.

Social and Economic Isolation

The loss of work is accompanied by a contraction of Cushla’s social world. After Gerry Devlin leaves, she sees only Gina Lavery and Eamonn Lavery. Even when Eamonn visits with his children, Cushla keeps out of his way and listens to him and her mother from her bedroom doorway. His visits continue, but she does not join the family gathering; the physical separation in the house echoes her retreat from wider contact.

The family business is also deteriorating. Leslie drinks in the bar frequented by soldiers, while Minty no longer acknowledges Gina with a wave in town. Fidel still visits occasionally with the young men he once met privately above the shop. After they leave, Eamonn finds cigarettes ground into the carpet and blackened holes in the upholstery. These details register the cost of a business that remains open to people from different sides of the divided community without escaping the hostility surrounding them.

Catholic customers have drifted away too, unwilling to appear to condone the family’s sheltering of the McGeowns. Their absence makes the social penalty visible in the bar’s dwindling custom, while the contrast with the soldiers’ continued presence underlines how differently the same place is read by different groups. Jimmy is the only person who still comes in every evening. The business’s decline is therefore not merely a change in trade: it reflects the withdrawal of people who might once have belonged to its ordinary daily life.

Cushla’s Restricted World

Cushla later describes herself as having lost her job, being barred from the family pub, and being regarded throughout the town as a Republican sympathizer. She adds that only a limited number of places remain available to her. The statement gathers the effects of her exclusion into a single account: employment, public hospitality, and local reputation have all become connected parts of the same predicament. Her own political allegiance is not established by that label; what is established is that the town assigns it to her because of her actions and associations.

Her proposed response is pointedly ordinary. She suggests walking down High Street, asking the police whether they have found evidence against her, buying an ice cream, and talking with Fidel and his mother. These plans set everyday movement and conversation against her claim that there are few places she can go. The tone is defiant, but the examples also show how much ordinary freedom has come to require deliberate effort and how closely even a walk through town is shadowed by suspicion.

The Cost of Shelter

The novel presents Cushla’s exclusion through several distinct pressures rather than a single formal punishment. The school threatens her livelihood; the pub and town become places of rejection; and the Lavery business loses customers as community members avoid seeming to approve of her decision. At home, Cushla withdraws from Eamonn and the children even while they remain physically near. Each loss makes the others harder to separate: the school invokes fragile community relations, and those same relations shape who will enter the bar or greet Gina in the street.

Cushla’s support for the McGeowns thus carries a consequence beyond the immediate act of sheltering them. It places her outside institutions and routines that had connected her to work, family, and town life. The school’s language of taking a year off cannot contain that wider change. By the time Cushla names herself as isolated and stigmatized, exclusion is no longer only a decision pending before governors; it has become a condition of daily life.