A Bit on the Side Read online

  ‘He was a difficult man. People would have told you.’

  They did not contradict that. They did not say anything. She said:

  ‘He put his trust in the horses. Since childhood what he wanted was to win races, to be known for it. But he never managed much.’

  ‘Poor man,’ Kathleen murmured. ‘Poor man.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She shouldn’t have complained, she hadn’t meant to: Emily tried to say that, but the words wouldn’t come. She looked away from the women who had visited her, gazing about her at the furniture of a room she knew too well. He had been angry when she’d taken the curtains down to wash them; everyone staring in, he’d said, and she hadn’t known what he’d meant. Hardly anyone passed by on the road.

  ‘He married me for the house,’ she said, unable to prevent herself from saying that too. The women were strangers, she was speaking ill of the dead. She shook her head in an effort to deny what she’d said, but that seemed to be a dishonesty, worse than speaking ill.

  The women sipped their tea, both lifting the cups to their lips in the same moment.

  ‘He married me for the forty acres,’ Emily said, compelled again to say what she didn’t want to. ‘I was a Protestant girl that got passed by until he made a bid for me and I thought it was romantic, like he did himself-the race cards, the race ribbons, the jockeys’ colours, the big crowd there’d be. That’s how it happened.’

  ‘Ah now, now,’ Kathleen said. ‘Ah now, dear.’

  ‘I was a fool and you pay for foolishness. I was greedy for what marriage might be, and you pay for greed. We’d a half acre left after what was paid back a year ago. There’s a mortgage he took out on the house. I could have said to him all the time he was dying, “What’ll I do?” But I didn’t, and he didn’t say anything either. God knows what his last thoughts were.’

  They told her she was upset. One after the other they told her any widow would be, that it was what you had to expect. Norah said it twice. Kathleen said she could call on them in her grief.

  ‘There’s no grief in the house you’ve come to.’

  ‘Ah now, now,’ Kathleen said, her big face puckered in distress. ‘Ah, now.’

  ‘He never minded how the truth came out, whether he’d say it or not. He didn’t say I was a worthless woman, but you’d see it in his eyes. Another time, I’d sweep the stable-yard and he’d say what use was that. He’d push a plate of food away untouched. We had two collies once and they were company. When they died he said he’d never have another dog. The vet wouldn’t come near us. The man who came to read the meter turned surly under the abuse he got for driving his van into the yard.’

  ‘There’s good and bad in everyone, Emily.’ Norah whispered that opinion and, still whispering, repeated it.

  ‘Stay where you are, Emily,’ Kathleen said, ‘and I’ll make another pot of tea.’

  She stood up, the teapot already in her hand. She was used to making tea in other people’s kitchens. She’d find her way about, she said.

  Emily protested, but even while she did she didn’t care. In all the years of her marriage another woman hadn’t made tea in that kitchen, and she imagined him walking in from the yard and finding someone other than herself there. The time she began to paint the scullery, it frightened her when he stood in the doorway, before he even said a thing. The time she dropped the sugar bag and the sugar spilt out all over the floor he watched her sweeping it on to the dustpan, turf dust going with it. He said what was she doing, throwing it away when it was still fit to stir into your tea? The scullery had stayed half-painted to this day.

  ‘He lived in a strangeness of his own,’ Emily said to the sister who was left in the room with her. ‘Even when he was old, he believed a horse could still reclaim him. Even when the only one left was diseased and fit for nothing. When there was none there at all he scoured the empty stables and got fresh straw in. He had it in mind to begin all over again, to find some animal going cheap. He never said it, but it was what he had in mind.’

  The house wasn’t clean. It hadn’t been clean for years. She’d lost heart in the house, and in herself, in the radio that didn’t work, her bicycle with the tyres punctured. These visitors would have noticed that the summer flies weren’t swept up, that nowhere was dusted.

  ‘Three spoons and one for the pot,’ Kathleen said, setting the teapot down in the hearth. ‘Is that about right, Emily? Will we let it draw a minute?’

  She had cut more brack, finding it on the breadboard, the bread saw beside it, the butter there too. She hoped it wasn’t a presumption, she hoped it wasn’t interference, she said, but all that remained unanswered.

  ‘He’d sit there looking at me,’ Emily said. ‘His eyes would follow me about the kitchen. There was a beetle got on the table once and he didn’t move. It got into the flour and he didn’t reach out for it.’

  ‘Isn’t it a wonder,’ Norah said, ‘you wouldn’t have gone off, the way things were, Emily? Not that I’m saying you should have.’

  Emily was aware that that question was asked. She didn’t answer it; she didn’t know why she hadn’t gone off. Looking back on it, she didn’t. But she remembered how when she had thought of going away what her arguments to herself had been, how she had wondered where she could go to, and had told herself it would be wrong to leave a house that had been left to her in good faith and with affection. And then, of course, there was the worry about how he’d manage.

  ‘Will you take another cup, Emily?’

  She shook her head. The wind had become stronger. She could hear it rattling the doors upstairs. She’d left a light burning in the room.

  ‘I’m wrong to delay you,’ she said.

  But the Geraghtys had settled down again, with the fresh tea to sustain them. She wasn’t delaying them in any way whatsoever, Kathleen said. In the shadowy illumination of the single forty-watt bulb the alarm clock on the mantelpiece gave the time as twenty past eleven, although in fact it was half an hour later.

  ‘It’s just I’m tired,’ Emily said. ‘A time like this, I didn’t mean to go on about what’s done with.’

  Kathleen said it was the shock. The shock of death changed everything, she said; no matter how certainly death was expected, it was always a shock.

  ‘I wouldn’t want you to think I didn’t love my husband.’

  The sisters were taken aback, Kathleen on her knees adding turf to the fire, Norah pouring milk into her tea. How could these two unmarried women understand? Emily thought. How could they understand that even if there was neither grief nor mourning there had been some love left for the man who’d died? Her fault, her foolishness from the first it had been; no one had made her do anything.

  The talk went on, back and forth between the widow and the sisters, words and commiseration, solace and reassurance. The past came into it when more was said: the wedding, his polished shoes and shiny hair, the party afterwards over on the Curragh, at Jockey Hall because he knew the man there. People were spoken of, names known to the Geraghtys, or people before their time; occasions were spoken of–the year he went to Cheltenham, the shooting of the old grey when her leg went at Glanbyre point-to-point. The Geraghtys spoke of their growing up in Galway, how you wouldn’t recognize the City of the Tribes these days so fashionable and lively it had become; how later they had lived near Enniscorthy; how Kathleen had felt the draw, of the religious life at that time but then had felt the receding of it, how she had known ever since that she’d been tested with her own mistake. In this way the Geraghtys spread themselves into the conversation. As the night went on, Emily was aware that they were doing so because it was necessary, on a bleak occasion, to influence the bleakness in other ways. She apologized for speaking ill of the dead, and blamed herself again. It was half past three before the Geraghtys left.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, holding open the hall door. The wind that had been slight and then had got up wasn’t there any more. The air was fresh and clean. She said she’d be all righ
t.

  Light flickered in the car when the women opened the doors. There was the red glow of the tail-light before the engine started up, a whiff of exhaust before the car moved slowly forward and gathered speed.

  *

  In the room upstairs, the sheet drawn up over the raddled, stiffening features, Emily prayed. She knelt by the bedside and pleaded for the deliverance of the husband who had wronged her for so long. Fear had drained to a husk the love she had spoken of, but she did not deny that remnant’s existence, as she had not in the company of her visitors. She could not grieve, she could not mourn; too little was left, too much destroyed. Would they know that as they drove away? Would they explain it to people when people asked?

  Downstairs, she washed up the cups and saucers. She would not sleep. She would not go to bed. The hours would pass and then the undertaker’s man would come.

  *

  The headlights illuminated low stone walls, ragwort thriving on the verges, gorse among the motionless sheep in gated fields. Kathleen drove, as she always did, Norah never having learnt how to. A visit had not before turned out so strangely, so different from what had been the sisters’ familiar expectation. They said all that, and then were silent for a while before Kathleen made her final comment: that what they had heard had been all the more terrible to listen to with a man dead in an upstairs room.

  Hunched in the dark of the car, Norah frowned over that. She did not speak immediately, but when they’d gone another mile she said:

  ‘I’d say, myself, it was the dead we were sitting with.’

  *

  In the house the silence there had been before the visitors disturbed it was there again. No spectre rose from the carnal remains of the man who was at last at peace. But the woman sitting by the turf fire she kept going was aware, as dawn lightened the edges of the curtains, of a stirring in her senses. Her tiredness afflicted her less, a calm possessed her. In the neglected room she regretted nothing now of what she had said to the women who had meant well; nor did it matter if, here and there, they had not quite understood. She sat for a while longer, then pulled the curtains back and the day came in. Hers was the ghost the night had brought, in her own image as she once had been.

  Traditions

  They came in one by one as they always did. Hambrose, then Forrogale; Accrington, Olivier, Maduse, New-combe, Napier. Each in turn saw the jackdaws dead on the earthen floor: seven, as there were seven of them.

  ‘It’s Leggett,’ Macluse said and the others were silent. Only Napier also suspected Leggett. The others were bewildered, except for Olivier. The birds’ necks had been snapped, one of the heads twisted off. Lying in the dust, their feathers already had a lank look; their beady gaze had dulled. ‘Some bloody people,’ New-combe said flatly, his tone empty of protest or emotion. Olivier knew it was the girl.

  A bell was chiming, calling them to Chapel. In the morning there was never longer than those few minutes, just time enough to get to the barn and make sure the birds were all right. Usually the chiming started when the seven were already on the way back. Earlier they’d had their morning smoke.

  ‘Oh, God!’ Macluse spat out as they hurried. Forrogale and Accrington said they now agreed: it was Leggett. No one else said anything.

  They taught their birds to talk. Generations had before them. They enticed the very young ones; they clipped their wings and tamed them. There were other places where they might have kept them but the barn was the most suitable, spacious and empty, chicken-wire drawn over the aperture that was a kind of window, tacked on to the bottom of the doors. It was used for no other purpose, derelict and forgotten until a reminder that this whole area was out-of-bounds was again issued – an edict that regularly became forgotten also. So it had been for generations. But never before had there been a slaughter.

  The jackdaws did not speak clearly when they were taught. They did not converse with one another, nor even release a single utterance that might be called a word. The sounds that came from them after hours of instruction were approximate, meaning interpreted by the listener. More satisfactory results might have been obtained, it was said, if the tongues were slit, and in the past that had been done, but not for many years now. It was felt to be not quite the thing.

  With scarcely a minute to spare the seven boys arrived at the Chapel precincts, passed the line of masters waiting to make an entrance from the cloisters, and took their places, all of them sitting together. That something was wrong this morning was at once apparent to their peers; curiosity was whetted as prayers were mumbled, and hymns sung with roistering enthusiasm. The grave-faced chaplain conducted the service, briefly touching upon the temptations in the wilderness, since it was the time of year to do so. His gravity was a familiar quality in him, in no way caused by what had occurred in the night, which he did not know about. ‘For it is written,’ he quoted, ‘He shall give his angels charge over thee.’ Tidily with that, he brought his exposition to an end. As boys and masters, all formally gowned, filed back into the fresh air, the organ voluntary was by Handel.

  There was a general dispersal while, increasing in volume, talk began. Boys went several ways, to widely scattered classrooms, the masters in one direction only, to collect from their common-room what books were immediately needed. Hambrose and Accrington remained together, as did Maduse and Napier and Newcombe, all three of whom belonged in a cleverer set. Forrogale had a piano lesson; Olivier had been summoned by the Headmaster. Each of the seven had on his mind the outrage that had occurred, and neither resentment nor anger had receded.

  Forrogale practised while he waited, since he had not practised much in the time that had passed since he and Mr Hancock last had met. In the Headmaster’s house the blue light above the drawing-room door was extinguished when the school butcher and handyman, Dynes, left the room. He winked at Olivier in a sinister manner, implying that he knew more than he did about Olivier’s summons. The winking went unacknowledged, since it was one of Dynes’s usual ploys. Olivier rapped lightly on a panel of the door and was told to come in.

  ‘I am disappointed,’ the Headmaster declared at once, leading the way from the fire against which he had been warming himself to a small adjoining room untidy with books and papers and confiscated objects. A burly, heavily made man, he sat down behind a desk while Olivier stood. ‘Disappointed to note,’ he went on, ‘that you have failed to come up to scratch in any one of the three scientific subjects. Yet it seems you yourself had chosen the scientific side of things.’ He broke off to peer at a piece of paper he had drawn towards him. ‘Your ambitions are in that direction?’

  ‘I was curious to know more about science, sir.’

  ‘Sit down, Olivier.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘You say curious?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Now tell me why you are curious in that way. Remember I have a duty – and a conscience if I knowingly release upon the innocent world the ignorant and the inept. The fees at this school are high, Olivier. They are high because expectations are high. Your housemaster has said this to you. You are here this morning to be made aware of the seriousness we attach to it. When you went on to the scientific side you were not driven by vocation?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘You indulged a curiosity. You indulged yourself: that can be dangerous.’

  Why did the man have to speak in that pompous, prissy way? Olivier asked himself. If it was self-indulgence simply to wish to learn more since he knew so little, then it was self-indulgence. In what way dangerous? he wondered, but did not ask. That he had failed to perform adequately in the laboratory had not surprised him, nor did it now.

  He said he was sorry, and the Headmaster spoke of the school’s belief in tradition, which he did on all convenient occasions. What he extolled had little, if anything at all, to do with Olivier’s failure. That this was so was a tradition in itself, all deviations from required behaviour assumed to have a source in careless disregard of time-hardened pre
cepts and mores. This Headmaster’s predecessors had in their day advocated such attention to the past, to the achievements of boys when they became men, to the debts they owed. In turn, Olivier’s predecessors had listened with the same degree of scepticism and disdain.

  ‘Shall we put it like this,’ the present Headmaster suggested, ‘that you promise me this morning to knuckle down? That we review the circumstances in, say, five weeks’ time?’

  ‘Or I could give up science, sir.’

  ‘Give up? I hardly like the sound of that.’

  ‘I made a mistake, sir.’

  ‘Do not compound it, Olivier. Failure is a punishment in itself. Perhaps you might dwell on that?’

  With this suggestion Olivier was dismissed. In the great stone-paved hall beyond the study and the drawing-room he forgot at once all that had been said and returned to the subject of the slaughtered birds. Again he reached the conclusion he had reached already: that the culprit was not another boy. Leggett would be seized after the games practices this afternoon and accused under duress. Dawdling on the journey to his classroom, Olivier anticipated that unfair revenge but knew he would still not reveal what he suspected. There was pleasure in not doing so, in holding things back, in knowing what others didn’t.

  *

  Wednesdays until tea were hers. They always had been and she would have hated a change. That middle-of-the-week day she had come to regard as her private Sunday – when her alarm didn’t go off, when the Chapel bell and First School bell, sounding in the distance, could be ignored. Even her unconscious knew what to do: to sleep on until the morning was half gone. It was ragged sleep, made restless with dreams that were always vivid at this time, but that never mattered. Nothing was more luxurious than Wednesday mornings, than imagining between dozing and waking the untidy after-breakfast dining hall, and the silence that came suddenly when classes began, the cutlery carried to the pantries, polished clean there, carried back again, the big oak tables laid for lunch. She had Saturday evening off as well but it wasn’t the same, nothing much really and often she stood in for one of the others, not even wanting to be paid back.