Cheating at Canasta Read online

  She watched while twilight went, and while the dark intensified and the lights came on in the windows of the flat that overlooked the gardens. ‘Oh, a man gets over it.’ Her mother had been sure of that. Her mother said he’d be all right, her father that they’d gone together for the lunchtime beer. She had telephoned because he would have been there; she’d guessed he would. ‘Never your type, he wasn’t,’ her mother said. Her father said stick by what she’d done. ‘Cut up he is, but you were fair and clear with him.’ Her mother said he’d had his innings.

  Eventually they would say he wasn’t much. Often disagreeing, they would agree because it made things easier if that falsity seemed to be the truth. ‘Oh, long ago,’ her mother would say, ‘long ago I remarked to Dad it wasn’t right.’

  A shadow smudged one of the lighted windows, then wasn’t there. The warm day had turned cold, but in the gardens the air was fresh and still. She was alone there now, and she remembered when he’d led her about among the shrubs before she came to live in the flat. ‘Hibiscus,’ he said when she asked, and said another was hypericum, another potentilla, another mahonia. She remembered the names, and imagined she always would.

  When she left the gardens she pulled the gate behind her and heard the lock clicking. She crossed the street and stood in front of the familiar door. All she had to do was to drop the key of the gate into the letterbox: she had come to do that, having taken it away by mistake. It would be discovered in the morning under the next day’s letters and put with them on the shelf in the hall, a found object waiting for whoever might have mislaid it.

  But with the key in her hand, Chloë stood there, not wanting to give it up like this. A car door banged somewhere; faint music came from far away. She stood there for minutes that seemed longer. Then she rang the bell of the flat.

  He heard her footsteps on the stairs when he opened the door. When he closed it behind her she held out the key. She smiled and did not speak.

  ‘It’s good of you,’ he said.

  He had known it was she before she spoke on the intercom. As if telepathy came into this, he had thought, but did not quite believe it had.

  ‘You went down to the Coast.’

  She always called it that—was never more precise—as if the town where she had lived deserved no greater distinction, sharing, perhaps, what she disliked about the house.

  They had been standing and now sat down. Without asking, he poured her a drink.

  ‘I have a room for a few weeks,’ she said. ‘I’ll look round for somewhere.’

  ‘It was just there may be letters to forward. And awkward if people ring up. Awkward, not knowing what to say.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Well, there haven’t been letters so far. And no one has rung up. I shouldn’t have gone to Winchelsea.’

  ‘I should have told you more.’

  ‘Why have you gone away, Chloë?’

  Chloë heard herself answering that, in hardly more than a whisper saying she had been silly. And having said it she knew she had to say more, yet it was difficult. The words were there, and she had tried before. In the long evening hours, alone in the flat while he was at the night school, she had tried to string them together so that, becoming sentences, they became her feelings. But always they were severe, too cruel, not what she wanted, ungrateful, cold. In telling him, she did not mean to hurt, or to convey impatience or to blame. Wearied by introspection, night after night, she had gone to bed and slept; and woken sometimes when he returned, and then was glad to be there with him.

  ‘I didn’t know it was a silliness,’ she said.

  Friendship had drawn them together. Giving and taking, they had discovered one another at a time when they were less than they became. She had always been aware of that and that it was enough, more than people often had. Still in search of somewhere to begin, she said so now. And added after a moment: ‘I want to be here.’

  He didn’t speak. He wasn’t looking at her, not that he had turned away, not that he resented her muddle, or considered that she should not have allowed it to come about: she knew this wasn’t so, he had never been like that.

  ‘I thought it would be easy,’ she said.

  There had been certainty. In her feelings she had been sure even when they were confused, even when she couldn’t think because she’d thought too much and had exhausted reason. She had clung to her certainty, had sensed its truth: that she had lost, and was losing still, a little of herself. With kindness, and delighting her, her life had been arrested, while hungrily she accepted what was on offer. But her certainty was not there as soon as she was on her own.

  ‘You make a mistake,’ she said, ‘and know it when you live with it.’

  Prosper understood because he was quick to understand; and understanding nothing only moments ago, now understood too much. A calmness possessed him, the first time today there had been calmness, the first time since she had packed her things and gone away. He hadn’t known there’d been misgivings.

  He had been jealous in the wine bar: that was what happened when emotions rampaged out of control, what panic and distress could do. It was her fault, she said. No, it was no one’s fault, he contradicted that.

  She said he was forgiving. She said her mother’s contempt was not meant, and that in time her father would be pleased. Mattering so much, he thought, that didn’t matter now.

  She made them scrambled eggs. They drank a little more, and the mood of relief being what it was for Chloë she celebrated their time together, recalling the Chilterns and their walks through the darkened streets in the early hours. And weekend visits to the cinema, her coming to the flat, their living there and never quarrelling, the gardens in summer.

  Prosper didn’t say much and nothing at all of what he might have, not wanting to, although he knew he must. The plates they’d eaten their scrambled eggs from remained on the coffee-table. Their glasses, not yet finished with, were there; her key to the gardens was. And they were shadows in the gloom, the room lit only by a single table-lamp.

  Prosper didn’t want the night to end. He loved her, she gave him back what she could: he had never not known that. Her voice, still reminiscing, was soft, and when it sounded tired he talked himself and, being with her, found the courage she had found and lost. His it was to order now what must be, to say what must be said. There had been no silliness, there wasn’t a mistake.

  The Children

  ‘We must go now,’ Connie’s father said and Connie didn’t say anything.

  The two men stood with their shovels, hesitating. Everyone else, including Mr Crozier, who had conducted the funeral service, had gone from the graveside. Cars were being started or were already being eased out of where they were parked, close to the church wall on the narrow road.

  ‘We have to go, Connie,’ her father said.

  Connie felt in the pocket of her coat for the scarf-ring and thought for a moment she had lost it, but then she felt the narrow silver band. She knew it wasn’t silver but they had always pretended. She leaned forward to drop it on to the coffin and took the hand her father held out to her. By the churchyard gate they caught up with the last of the mourners, Mrs Archdale and the elderly brothers, Arthur and James Dobbs.

  ‘You’ll come to the house,’ her father invited them in case an invitation hadn’t already been passed on to them. But people knew: the cars that were slipping away were all going in the same direction, to the house three and a quarter miles away, still just within the townland of Fara.

  Connie would have preferred this to be different. She would have liked the house to be quiet now and had imagined, this afternoon, her father and herself gathering up her mother’s belongings, arranging them in whatever way the belongings of the dead usually were arranged, her father explaining how they should be as they went along. She had thought of them alone after the funeral, doing all this because it was the time for it, because that was something you felt.

  Her mother’s dying, and the death its
elf, had been orderly and anticipated. Connie had known for months that it would come, for weeks that she would throw her scarf-ring on to the coffin at the very last minute. ‘Brown Thomas’s,’ her mother had said when she was asked where it had been bought, and had given it to Connie because she didn’t want it herself any more. This afternoon, in the quiet bedroom, there would be other things: familiar brooches, familiar earrings, and clothes and shoes, of course; odds and ends in drawers. But she and her father were up to that.

  ‘All right, Connie?’ he asked, turning left instead of taking the Knocklofty road, which was the long way round.

  There’d been no pain; that had been managed well. While she was at the hospice, and when she came home at the end because suddenly she wanted to, you could tell that there had been no pain. ‘Because we prayed for that, I suppose,’ Connie had said when everything was over, and her father said he supposed so too. More important than anything it was that there had been no pain.

  ‘Oh, I’m OK,’ she said.

  ‘They have to come to the house. They won’t stay long.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You’ve been a strength, Connie.’

  He meant it. He himself had been the source of strength at first and had seen her through that time, before she began to give back what he had given her. She had adored her mother.

  ‘She would want us to be hospitable,’ he said, unnecessarily, saying too much.

  ‘I know we have to be.’

  Connie was eleven and had her mother’s faded blue eyes, and hair the colour of corn-stalks, as her mother’s had been too. The freckles on her forehead and on the bridge of her nose were a feature of her own.

  ‘We can get down to it when they’ve gone,’ she said as they drove on, past the two cottages where nobody lived, down the hill that suddenly became almost dark, beech foliage meeting overhead. Mrs Archdale had been given a lift by the Dobbs brothers, their red Ford Escort already turning in at the gates. On the uneven surface of the avenue other cars were progressing cautiously, watched by the fenced sheep on either side.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ Connie’s father invited the mourners who had already left their cars and were conversing in quiet tones on the gravel in front of the house. He was a tall, thin man, dark hair beginning to go grey, a boniness distinguishing his features. Sombrely dressed today, he was quite notably handsome. He had known much longer than his child had that his wife was going to die, but always at first there had been hope of a kind. Connie had been told when there was none.

  The hall door wasn’t locked. He’d left it so, wanting people to go in as soon as they arrived, but no one had. He pushed it open and stood aside. All of them would know the way and Mrs O’Daly would be there, tea made.

  When Teresa was left by her husband she’d felt humiliated by the desertion. ‘You’ll have them to yourself,’ he’d said; with ersatz gentleness, she considered. ‘I promise you I won’t be a nuisance about that.’ He spoke of their two children, whom she had always believed were fonder of him than they were of her. And it seemed wrong that they should be deprived of him: in her lowness at the time she had even said so, had felt she should be punished further for her failure to keep a marriage together, should lose them too. ‘Oh no,’ he had protested. ‘No, I would never do that.’

  Among the mourners in the drawing-room, she remembered that with poignancy, wondering if the pain of death so early in a marriage left behind the same cruel rawness that did not change and lingered for so long. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said when Connie’s father put a hand on her arm and murmured that she was good to have come. ‘I’m awfully sorry, Robert,’ she said again, murmuring also.

  She knew him as Connie’s father, her own daughter, Melissa, being Connie’s particular friend. She didn’t know him well; more often than not he wasn’t there when she brought Melissa to spend the day at the farm. She had liked Connie’s mother but had never had much of a conversation with her, they being different kinds of people, and the house was a busy place. During all the years Teresa had known the house no one was employed to help in it, as no one was—except for odd days during the summer—on the farm itself. Teresa had guessed that the present bleak occasion would be in the hands of Mrs O’Daly, who in her capable countrywoman’s way would have offered to see to things. She poured the tea now, cups and saucers laid out on a table that didn’t belong in the drawing-room. O’Daly, a small, scuttling man who worked on the roads and took on anything else he could get, was handing round plates of biscuits and egg sandwiches.

  ‘He did it very well,’ someone remarked to Teresa. ‘Your rector did.’

  ‘Yes, he did.’

  A couple she couldn’t place, whose way of referring to Mr Crozier suggested they weren’t of the locality, nodded a nervous confirmation of her agreement. Teresa thought she probably would even have known them if they’d come out from Clonmel. Yes, Mr Crozier did funerals well, she said.

  ‘We’re distant cousins,’ the woman said. ‘A generation back.’

  ‘I live quite near.’

  ‘It’s lovely here.’

  ‘Quiet,’ the man said. ‘You’d notice the quiet.’

  ‘We didn’t know until we picked up the Irish Times,’ the woman said. ‘Well, we’d lost touch.’

  ‘Saddens us now, of course.’ The man nodded that into place. ‘To have lost touch.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Teresa was forty-one, still pretty, her round face brightened by a smile that came easily and lingered, as if it belonged to these features in a way as permanent as they were themselves. Her reddish hair was cut quite short; she had to watch her weight and adamantly did so. She shook her head when O’Daly pressed his plate of Bourbon creams on her.

  ‘We drove over,’ the woman she was in conversation with imparted. ‘From Mitchelstown.’

  ‘Good of you to come.’

  They deprecated that, and Teresa looked around. When she woke that morning she’d found herself wondering if her husband would be here, if he’d drive down from Dublin, since the death would have shocked him. But among the mourners in the drawing-room she didn’t see him. It seemed quite a sparse attendance in the large, ordinarily furnished room, for not everyone who’d been at the church had come. But Teresa knew her husband hadn’t been in the church either. It was years now since they’d met; he’d ceased to bother with his children as soon as other children were born to him. As good as his word about not being a nuisance, Teresa supposed.

  Afterwards, when everyone had gone, Connie helped the O’Dalys to clear up and when that was done the O’Dalys went too. She and her father did what her mother had requested then, taking her things from the wardrobe and the dressing-table drawers, disposing of them as she had wished, her charities remembered. It was late before all that was completed, before Connie and her father sat together in the kitchen. He poached their eggs when they’d decided to have eggs. He asked her to watch the toast. ‘We’ll manage,’ he said.

  The farm had come to Robert when he married, introducing him to a way of life he had not sought and which he did not imagine he would take to. In fact, he did, and over the years transformed the farm his wife had not long ago inherited as a sluggish, neglected enterprise into a fairly thriving one. It was a means of livelihood too; and, more than that, a source of personal satisfaction for Robert that he succeeded with crops and stock, about which he had once known nothing.

  All this continued when he was widowed, when the house and land became entirely his. There were no changes on the farm, but in the house—to which Mrs O’Daly now came for three hours every weekday morning—Connie and her father, while slowly coming to terms with the loss they had suffered, shared the awareness of a ghost that fleetingly demanded no more than to be remembered. Life continuing could not fold away what had happened but it offered something, blurring the drama of death’s immediacy. And then, when almost two years had passed since the funeral, Robert asked Teresa to marry him.

  It was a natural thing. Having
known one another through the friendship of their daughters, they had come to know one another better in the new circumstances, Teresa continuing to drive Melissa to the farm, with her much younger brother when he was made welcome there by Connie but was still too young to cycle. And Robert, doing his bit as often as he could, drove the two back to the bungalow at Fara Bridge, where their father in his day had attempted to get a pottery going.

  The day he asked Teresa to marry him, Robert had looked up from the mangels he was weeding and seen her coming towards him, along the verge of the field. She brought him tea in a can, which she often did when she stayed all afternoon in order to save him the journey later to Fara Bridge. A year after the death she had begun to fall in love with him.

  ‘I never knew,’ he said in the mangel field when Teresa’s response to his proposal was to tell him that. ‘I thought you’d turn me down.’

  She took the can of tea from his hand and lifted it to her lips, the first intimacy between them, before their first embrace, before they spoke of love. ‘Oh, Robert, not in a million years would I turn you down,’ she whispered.

  There were difficulties, but they didn’t matter as they would have once. In an Ireland they could both remember it would have been commented upon that she, born into a religious faith that was not Robert’s, had attended a funeral service in his alien church. It would have been declared that marriage would not do; that the divorce which had brought Teresa’s to an end could not be recognized. Questions would have been asked about children who might be born to them: to which belief were they promised, in which safe haven might they know only their own kind? Such difficulties still trailed, like husks caught in old cobwebs, but there were fewer interfering strictures now in how children were brought up, and havens were less often sought. Melissa, a year older than Connie, had received her early schooling from the nuns in Clonmel and had gone on to an undenominational boarding-school in Dublin. Her brother still attended the national school at Fara Bridge. Connie went to Miss Mortimer, whose tiny academy for Protestant children—her mother’s choice because it was convenient—was conducted in an upstairs room at the rectory, ten minutes’ away along the river path. But, in the end, all three would be together at Melissa’s boarding-school, co-educational and of the present.