The Hill Bachelors Page 15

  The hall door bangs softly; he does not call her name. There’s the pause that means he’s hanging up his overcoat and scarf, the papers placed on the table beneath the picture of a café scene. There are his footsteps then.

  ‘I have to tell you,’ her husband says, ‘that I believe I’m drunk.’

  His voice is quiet, the words not slurred. He does not look drunk; he is the same. He doesn’t smile, but then he often doesn’t when he comes in. ‘A sobersides,’ her mother said. ‘Wizened,’ she added, although that wasn’t true.

  ‘I looked in at the St Boniface,’ he says. ‘Understandably, I believe.’

  ‘I’m awfully sorry.’

  ‘Oh Lord, it’s not your fault.’

  ‘I —’

  ‘I know, I know.’

  ‘I couldn’t think.’

  ‘I couldn’t when I heard, myself.’

  ‘They mentioned it?’

  ‘Quicke couldn’t resist a little mention. It didn’t matter. Sooner or later someone would.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The culprits will be exposed, the Master’s view is. Of course he’s wrong.’

  ‘You don’t seem drunk in the least.’ Relief has slipped through Vanessa during these exchanges. For a reason that is obscure to her, and for the first time since she turned the pages of the newspaper while waiting for the early-morning kettle to boil, she feels that nothing is as terrible as it seemed in those awful moments.

  ‘To the best of my knowledge I have never in my life been drunk before. The man poured three double whiskies, and that on top of sherry.’

  She lifts the plates that cover their cold meat. She stirs the oil and vinegar, shakes the salad about when she has added a few spoonfuls, then pours on the rest. Perhaps they’ll go away, Vanessa’s thought is, perhaps he’ll take an early retirement, as one of them so unexpectedly did last year. She’d pack up at once, she wouldn’t hesitate. Liguria, or Sansepolcro, where his favourite paintings are. Hers, too, they have become. ‘I could live here happily,’ he has said, over coffee in Sansepolcro.

  ‘I can tell you how this has happened,’ he says. ‘If you would care to know.’

  ‘Panic,’ she begins to say, and ceases when he shakes his head, grey hair as smooth as a helmet.

  ‘An act of compassion,’ he corrects.

  ‘But it was stupid. To try to suppress what cannot be suppressed —’

  ‘Why cannot an act of compassion be a stupid one? I can tell you,’ he repeats exactly, ‘how this has happened. If you would care to know.’

  ‘Some horrid, wretched student.’

  ‘I am not the sort to inspire a grudge. I am too shadowy and grey, too undramatic. I annoy too little, I do not attack.’

  She watches the buttering of a piece of baguette, the knife laid down, the meticulous loading of tongue and salad on to a fork, the smear of mustard. She pours his coffee; he likes it with his food at this time of day, with French bread in particular, he has often said. My God, Vanessa thinks, it might be true. He might not be here now.

  ‘Imagine Kellfittard opening his paper this morning. Imagine his happy hour or two.’

  For a moment she is confused, thinking he means Kellfittard is responsible for this. He says, ‘And then the rug pulled out from under him. Generations have suffered from Kellfittard’s wit. It passes for that, you know. So much we fusties say passes for wit.’

  ‘But you —’

  ‘They would not mind about me. Whoever they are who got this going would not think twice about reaping me in before I’m due. What’s famous here is Kellfittard’s abiding passion for someone else’s wife.’

  The last time Kellfittard stopped to talk to her yesterday’s garlic was on his breath. Stopping to talk to her has always been his ploy, and smiling in a secretive way — as if, by doing so, secrets are created.

  ‘Fall-guy, do they call it?’ she hears her husband say. ‘I am the fall-guy.’

  He has winkled out the truth, sitting in the public house he gave the name of, which she has often passed. The truth doesn’t make much difference, and certainly is no consolation. Yet for her older husband it had to be established, if only because it’s there somewhere. Students who are no longer students have got their own back. He is an incidental figure, and so is she.

  ‘Well, that is that,’ he says. ‘Four notices in all, Quicke said. Space to spare on a Saturday.’

  ‘There will be letters.’

  ‘Oh, and apologies will be printed. So Quicke says too.’

  Something in his tone, or in what he has said, causes her to realize that she was wrong when she imagined him buying the newspapers. He has not done so. He asks about the coffee and she says Kenya.

  He nods. The coffee’s good, he says. The other matter’s over, he does not add, but Vanessa knows it is. Once Kellfittard gave her a box of chocolates, Bendicks’ Peppermints because he knew she liked them. ‘I bought these by mistake,’ he said, the lie so damaging the gesture that the gesture lost its point. It would have been silly not to accept them.

  ‘Linderfoot’s put on another stone, I’d say. How fortunate the wives are to be left at home!’

  His wisdom was what she loved when first she loved him, when she was still a girl. She called it that, though only to herself. Not brains, they all had brains. Not skill. Not knowing everything, for they knew less than they imagined. His wisdom is almost indefinable, what a roadworker might have, a cinema usher or a clergyman, or a child. Her mother would not understand, and he himself would deny that he is wise. Of course the papers are not on the hall table; of course he hasn’t read a word — the subtle slights wrapped up as worthiness, and qualities he did not possess made his because it is the thing to do, all of valediction’s clichés.

  ‘No, no, a blunder,’ she hears him say when the telephone rings, the first time it has today, the house of mourning left to itself until this moment. ‘No, most ridiculous,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry if I startled you.’

  He laughs, replacing the receiver, and Vanessa does not say she loves him, although she wants to. Absurd, to have thought of hiding away in Italy, packing everything up, leaving for ever his beautiful city just because they have been involved in someone else’s hoax.

  He has worn the better of the two, Vanessa reflects. Age in his features was always there; her beauty loses a little every day. ‘I love your wisdom,’ she wants to say, but still is shy to use that word, fearing a display of her naïvety would make her foolish.

  ‘My dear,’ he murmurs in the calmness they have reached, and holds her as he did the day he first confessed his adoration. It is the wedding of their differences that protects them, steadfast in the debris of the storm.

  Against the Odds

  Mrs Kincaid decided to lie low. There had been a bit of bother, nothing much but enough to cause her to change her address. From time to time she was obliged to do so.

  She wondered about Portrush. It was May, which meant that the holiday accommodation would still be available at low-season terms. She wondered about Cushendall, which she would have preferred because she liked the air there, but only three years had passed since her last visit and somehow three years didn’t feel quite long enough. Cushendun, Bally-galley, Portstewart, Ardglass, Bangor, Kilkeel: Mrs Kincaid had breathed the air in all of them.

  This time, though, she decided on an inland town. She knew many of these also, Armagh and Lisburn in particular, but Ballymena, Magherafelt, Lurgan and Portadown almost as well. She was a Belfast woman herself, but long ago had made all the territory of the Six Counties her business ground. Only once, in 1987, had she strayed outside the North of Ireland, taking the Larne crossing to Stranraer, then travelling on to Glasgow, an episode in her life she regretted and preferred not to dwell upon. Equally regretted was a suspended sentence in the Derry courts in 1981, since it had ruled out as a place to do business in a city she was particularly fond of.

  Mrs Kincaid — with no claim to that name other than her occasional use of it
— was just over eleven stone, and tall. Although well covered, she gave no impression of plumpness; no bloated or sagging flesh seemed superfluous beneath her clothes. Her arms were sturdy, her legs looked strong. In her own opinion her biggish face was something she got away with, no feature in it particularly objectionable, neither a fallen-away chin nor protruding teeth. Modest in her dress, careful not to overdo her use of perfume and make-up, she was sixty years old, admitting to fifty-one. Her easy smile worked wonders.

  ‘Well, isn’t that great?’ she remarked to the driver of the Ulsterbus that was taking her to the inland town she had finally chosen, one she neither knew nor was known in. Her display of elation as she entered the bus had to do with the declaration of peace in the Six Counties. A double ceasefire had been announced in the thirty years’ war that was not called a war; politicians from within the North of Ireland and from London and Dublin, advisers from America, had drawn up a long agenda that had since been agreed to by referendum on both sides of the Border. Mrs Kincaid had not herself suffered more than inconvenience during the years of conflict; the trouble in her life had been a personal one. Yet the havoc that occurred with such weary repetition and for so long had naturally impinged; she would be glad to see its end.

  ‘Great?’ the bus driver responded to her optimism.

  ‘The peace.’

  ‘There’s maybe something in their bits of paper.’ Nonchalantly, the driver turned on the ignition. Windscreen wipers lumbered across the curved glass in front of him, clearing away a few drops of rain. ‘We’ll see,’ he said, a reminder in his tone that whatever agreements had been reached, whatever pledges given, there were gunmen who had not gone away, who still possessed their armoury and were used to calling the tune. ‘We’ll see,’ he said again.

  ‘Hope for the best.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Isn’t it cold, though, for May? Whenever I looked out first thing I said you’ll be needing your wool, Mabel.’

  The bus driver agreed that the weather was unseasonable before starting his engine. Mrs Kincaid passed on to a seat. She never liked leaving Belfast. Its streets were hers, its intonations always a pleasure to hear again when she returned from an exile never made through choice. The bombs that had battered its buildings, blown its motor-cars to pieces, maimed and killed its citizens, had never, in thirty years, caused her to wish to live elsewhere. Child of a Belfast boarding-house, she had salted away the wealth that property had fetched when she inherited it, only later to be parted from her gains, which was the personal circumstance that had coloured her life since.

  She sat alone on the bus, her two brown suitcases on the rack above her. As always, she travelled light. Rented rooms with furniture supplied were what she liked, someone else’s taste. She lived in that way, and although she guessed that in the town she was going to there wouldn’t be a soul who did so too, she would manage not to stand out. Not yet composed, whatever story came to her on her journey would see to that for her.

  *

  Blakely crushed the peas beneath his fork, then mixed them into a mush of potato and gravy. There was one piece of meat left, its size calculated to match what was left of the potatoes and peas. Since first being on his own he had got into this way of eating, of gauging forkfuls in advance, of precisely combining the various items on his plate. It was a substitute for conversation, for invariably, these days, Blakely ate alone.

  Six days a week he drove in from the farm and sat down at the same table in Hirrel’s Café, never looking at a menu but taking whatever was on specially for that day. On Sundays he sat down with the Reverend Johnston in the manse, having brought with him whatever eggs he could spare, or buttermilk, which the Reverend Johnston was partial to, once a month a turkey. In December he supplied Hirrel’s with turkeys also.

  The Belfast Telegraph, folded and propped up against two Yorkshire Relish bottles, was full of the recent political developments and the prospect for the future. Fourteen years ago Blakely’s wife and daughter had been killed in error, a bomb attached to a car similar in make and colour to the would-be victim’s, the registration number varying by only a single digit. Promptly, he had received an apology, a telephone call of commiserations that sounded genuine. Two wreaths were sent.

  He pushed his knife and fork to the side of the plate, and a few minutes later Mrs Hirrel brought him a plate of rhubarb and custard and a pot of tea. He thanked her, folding the newspaper away. The men of violence were still in charge, no doubt about it. He’d said that to Mrs Hirrel the time the cease-fires were predicted, and she’d agreed with him. They’d talked about it for a long while; today, as yesterday and the day before, there was nothing left to say on the subject. Mrs Hirrel remarked instead that the rhubarb was all young shoots, grown under plastic, the first that had come up out the back. ‘See to that woman, Nellie,’ she called out to her waitress, for a woman had entered the café, bringing with her a stream of bitterly cold air.

  All the tables were taken, as they always were at this time. Shop people came to Hirrel’s at lunchtime, commercial travellers took advantage of being in the town in the middle of the day. Toomey from the Northern Bank was always there, with the lady clerk he was doing a line with. Van drivers, occasionally a lorry driver, looked in.

  ‘Can you wait a wee minute?’ Nellie enquired of the newcomer. ‘There’s several finishing up.’

  ‘D’you know who that is, Mr Blakely?’ Mrs Hirrel asked him, and he said he didn’t, and Mrs Hirrel said nor did she. ‘Would she sit there a minute with you while you drink your tea?’

  Sometimes this happened because of the empty chair opposite him. He never minded. Travellers in drapery or hardware items would fall into conversation with him, giving him some idea of the current ups and downs of the commercial world, usually asking him what line he was in himself.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Led to the table, Mrs Kincaid was hesitant before she sat down. ‘I wouldn’t want to butt in on you.’

  ‘You’re doing rightly,’ Blakely reassured her. He was a nervous man with strangers and often expressed himself not quite as he meant to in order to get out any words at all. His tea was hot and he would have liked to pour it on to the saucer. But that wouldn’t do in Hirrel’s.

  ‘Homey,’ Mrs Kincaid remarked, looking around her at a familiar aspect — the laminate tabletops, cheap knives and forks, plates of bread and butter, faces intent on mastication, a toothpick occasionally spearing trapped shreds: many times she had frequented cafés like this. The man opposite her at least had taken off his cap, which often men didn’t when they ate in such places. He had tufty grey hair cut short and a lean, narrow face with a deep flush in both cheeks. A healthy-looking, outside man, well enough dressed, with a collar and tie. In Mrs Kincaid’s childhood if a man not wearing a collar and tie came to the boarding-house after a room he was turned away at once.

  ‘Isn’t it chilly today, though?’ she remarked, noticing that a plate of rhubarb and custard had been finished quite tidily, a little left behind, spoon and fork kept together. Late fifties, she put him down as; fingernails a little grimed but nothing to write home about.

  ‘There’s a few more days of it,’ he said, and then the waitress was there, asking her what she’d like, saying the mutton was finished. Mrs Kincaid ordered a plate of bread and butter, and tea.

  ‘Have we peace at last?’ she asked and the man replied civilly enough that you wouldn’t know. His own opinion was that there was a long way to go, and she could feel him being careful about how he put it, in how he chose his words. Not knowing about her, not knowing which foot she dug with, as her father used to say, he held back. He poured himself another cup of tea, added milk and stirred in sugar, two spoonfuls of granulated.

  ‘Ach, it’s been going on too long,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe it’s the end so.’

  He folded his newspaper into a side pocket of his jacket. The jacket was of dark tweed and needed a press, a thread hanging down where a button had come off. You co
uld tell from his way with the waitress that he was a regular. He counted out the money for his bill and left a 5P piece and some coppers as a tip. ‘Good day,’ he said before he went to pay at the counter.

  From force of habit rather than anything else, Mrs Kincaid continued to wonder about Blakely after he’d gone. She wondered if he could be a road surveyor, since something about him reminded her of a road surveyor she’d once briefly known. She imagined him with a road gang, a smell of tar in the air, fresh chippings still pale on the renovated surface. Then Mrs Kincaid reminded herself that she wasn’t here to interest herself in a man she didn’t know, far from it. She had left her two suitcases in the newsagent’s shop where the bus had put her down. When she’d had something to eat and had made enquiries she’d go back and collect them.

  ‘Try Bann Street,’ the waitress said. ‘There’s a few that lets rooms there.’

  *

  Leave it, Mrs Kincaid warned herself again when she noticed Blakely coming out of Hirrel’s Café four days later, repeating her reminder to herself that she was not here for anything like that. She’d stay a month, she had decided; from experience a month was long enough for any bit of trouble to quieten. Talk of solicitors’ letters, of walking straight round to a police station, threats of this and that, all simmered away to nothing when a little time went by. Frayed tempers mended, pride came to terms with whatever foolishness she’d taken advantage of in the way of business. Not that much had mended in her own case, not that pride had ever recovered from the dent it had received, but her own case was different and always had been. Eighty-four thousand pounds the boarding-house had realized in 1960, more like ten times that it would be now. ‘We’d put the little enterprise in your name,’ the man she’d thought of as her fiancé had said. ‘No hanky-panky.’ But somehow in the process of buying what he always called the little enterprise the eighty-four thousand had slipped out of her name. Soon after that it disappeared and he with it. The little enterprise it was to purchase was a bookmaker’s in Argyle Street, an old bookie retiring, two generations of goodwill. A chain took it over a couple of months later.