Foster was my first contact with Claire Keegan and the work that made me fall in love with her writing. I recently revisited it and felt compelled to write about it here. Originally published as a short story in The New Yorker, Foster was later expanded into a novella and published by Faber. The narrative starts with an apparently straightforward premise: in the early 1980s, a young girl is sent away from home to live on a farm with a couple she doesn’t know well. The arrangement is temporary; she is supposed to stay there for the summer, until her heavily pregnant mother gives birth and school starts again.
Accustomed to living in an impoverished household with more children than her parents can tend to, the girl – never named – must adjust not only to her new environment but also to the fact that, on the Wexford farm, she receives a great deal of attention. While her foster parents take her in as an act of kindness towards her parents, the real interest of the story lies in the growing sense that there is perhaps more of a familial bond between the girl and her temporary foster parents than in her own household.
When putting the child to bed and kissing her goodnight, Mrs Kinsella voices an anxiety that many readers will likely share:
‘God help you, Child,’ she says. ‘If you were mine, I’d never leave you in a house with strangers.’
The Kinsellas grow fond of her, and she grows fond of them. Though their care for her gives the reader a kind of illogical hope that she might possibly stay with them, there is no suggestion that they are, in some way, perfect parents. Since this is a first-person narrative in the voice of the child, we discover the small universe of the farm and the surrounding neighbours alongside her, and signs of an untold past soon become apparent. The narrative is punctuated by the girl’s earnestness, “She says you can keep me for as long as you like,” she tells Mrs Kinsella, referring to her mother, and by the things unsaid about the couple’s past, hinted at by others in a crescendo until the revelation that they did have a child once – a son– but lost him in an accident involving a well on the property.
To the apparently uncomplicated bond between child and foster parents are added the tragic details of their son’s absence. When told that the girl does not have anything to wear after a bath, Mrs Kinsella asks her if “some of our old things would do for now.” Most of the things they give her were, of course, once his:
I wonder at the clothes and how I’d worn them and the boy in the wallpaper and how I never put it all together.
The shadow of the couple’s grief creeps over their fragile happiness in the form of Mildred, an acquaintance whose morbid curiosity about the Kinsellas’ loss leads her to interrogate the young narrator, asking whether “the child’s clothes [were] still hanging in the wardrobe,” and revealing to her, with remarkable insensitivity, that they had lost their boy. Still, the provisional family unit thrives until a letter from the girl’s mother arrives, announcing the birth of her brother. She feels deflated by the prospect of going back:
‘And school starts on Monday,’ she says. ‘Your mother has asked us to leave you up at the weekend so she can get you togged out and all.’
I have to go back then?’
‘Aye,’ she says. ‘But sure didn’t you know that?’
I nod and look at the page in her lap.
‘You couldn’t stay here forever with us two old forgeries.’
I stand there and stare at the fire, trying not to cry. It is a long time since I have done this and, in doing it, remember that it is the worst thing you can possibly do. I don’t so much hear as feel Kinsella leaving the room.
The shadow returns when history threatens to repeat itself, and the girl suffers an accident at the well. Though she is returned to her parents safe and sound, something is irrevocably changed in her, leaving her not only uneasy but desperate not to be left behind by the Kinsellas. In a way, it feels as though the story is beginning again as it comes to its end, with the narrator’s foster – and perhaps, in an emotional level, real – parents taking her to a stranger’s home. The difference here is that parting seems impossible as she clings to Kinsella, whom she calls Daddy, as if begging him to take her back to their home.
There is a tremendous sense of loss as the narrative concludes with this movement: Edna Kinsella crying, the narrator and Mr Kinsella embracing, and her father walking towards them. Foster deserves all its accolades. Its language is succinct, even economical, but it contains multitudes in what is left unsaid. The exploration of a child’s perspective as narrator is seamless in its depiction of a coming of age of sorts, as she learns what to say and what to omit, coming to see her own family and her former self with a fresh outlook.
After reading a few other works by Keegan, I have come to realise that this is one of her greatest strengths as a fiction writer: to avoid overstating and to leave ample room for the reader. While the creative team behind the Small Things Like These film deserve a lot of credit for their brilliant adaptation, I feel Keegan herself was remarkably generous in her writing. The novel offers so many gestures that are simultaneously precise and open to the collaboration of the reader and/or adapter. If you haven’t read anything by Claire Keegan yet, do yourself a favour and pick up one of her books as soon as you can – it doesn’t matter which one.