The Hill Bachelors Read online

  ‘Oh, I’m not sorry it’s gone. It darkened the garden. Sidney, you like some coffee?’ Vera calls from the back door and Sidney waves and says in a minute.

  ‘Is Sidney wearing the garden gloves?’ Mr Schele fusses. ‘You need the gloves with a rose.’

  ‘Sidney knows.’

  Once, working in the garden, sawing up old planks of wood, he got a splinter under a thumbnail and Vera saw to it: Sidney’s hand laid flat on the kitchen worktop, a light brought specially in, a needle sterilized in a match flame, TCP and tweezers. In her night-time fantasies she has comforted Sidney, whispering to him, asking him to talk to her. Sometimes, when he has worked all through a weekend morning, she turns the immersion heater on early in case he’d like to have a bath before he goes. The time he cut his hand she staunched the blood flow with a tourniquet.

  ‘Ready, Sidney,’ Vera calls from the back door. ‘Coffee.’

  Mr Schele senses something in the air. His thoughts reflect Vera’s: unsightly though it is, the thicket of twisted branches on the grass could easily have stayed there for a week. It is Sidney’s pretext, Mr Schele tells himself; it is a reason to come back so soon. He pours hot milk on to his bran flakes and stirs the mixture with his spoon, softening the flakes because he does not like them crispy. Is this, at last, the Sunday of the proposal? He watches Vera at the stove. She remembers her fluffy slippers and hurries away to change them. The glass disc rattles in the milk saucepan and Mr Schele rises to attend to that. He cannot last for ever; each day, at seventy-eight, is borrowed time. What life is it for a woman alone?

  Moving the saucepan to one side of the gas jet, Mr Schele accepts that when he is gone Vera will have no one. Going out with chaps — and there used to be quite a few — has been a thing of the past since the trouble. Vera will be alone for the rest of her days: he understands that, although the subject is never mentioned. He understands that her luck might even change for a while, before some new chap she makes friends with has second thoughts, even though at the time she walked away without a stain. That is how things happen, Mr Schele knows, and knows that Vera has worked it out too. Sidney is different because of coming forward, and in a sense he has been coming forward ever since, as good a friend to Vera as he was at the time, a saviour really: in Mr Schele’s opinion that word is not too strong. It took time for the opinion to form, as naturally it would in a father, the circumstances as they were.

  ‘It’s good of Sidney. Just because that rose blew down.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  Vera nods, saying that, lending the words a little emphasis. Her father knows what other people know, no more. He came in at his usual time, just after half past six. He saw the white police cars outside and was in a state before he passed through the porch. ‘You sit down now,’ she said, and told him, and the policewoman brought him tea. ‘It can’t be,’ he kept saying. Later on, she had kippers to boil in the bag, but they didn’t want them. She folded up the wheelchair and put it in the cupboard under the stairs, not wanting to look at it. Best to get it out of the house, she decided when everything quietened down, a month gone by, and they got a fair price for it.

  ‘You take your chances, Vera.’

  She knows what he means, but Sidney’s not going to propose marriage, this morning or any other time, because marriage isn’t on the cards and never has been. The intruder would not have guessed there was anyone in that room because when he’d watched the house he’d only ever seen two people coming and going: the policemen explained all that. An intruder always sussed a place, they explained, he didn’t just come barging in. Her father out all day from eight-fifteen on, and the villain would have followed her to the cinema and seen her safely in. Cinemas, funerals, weddings: your house-thief loves all that. ‘Oh no, that’s crazy,’ her father kept muttering when they changed their minds, suddenly taking a different line. He had always thought it was crazy, their groundless probing, as he put it. He had always believed their case would fall to bits because it didn’t make sense.

  ‘You know what I’m saying, Vera? You take your chances.’

  She nods. Changing her slippers for shoes because Sidney had come, she decided as well to change her drab Sunday skirt for her dog-tooth. She stood in front of the long wardrobe looking-glass the way she used to in the old days. She liked to be smart in the old days and she still does now. Sometimes a man looks at her in a supermarket or on the street. And Sidney does, when he thinks she isn’t noticing. She heats the milk again and is ready to make fresh coffee.

  ‘You like an egg, Sidney?’ she offers when Sidney comes in. ‘Poached egg? Maybe scrambled?’

  ‘No, honestly. Thanks, Vera.’ It’s too windy to risk burning the rosebush, he says, but he has clipped it up, ready for a calmer day.

  There’s a leaf in his hair, and Vera draws his attention to it. ‘You just sit down.’

  ‘Only a cup of coffee, Vera.’

  That morning Sidney woke when it was half past six, the light just beginning. He thought at once about Vera, although it had been a particularly rough night in the club and usually that comes into his mind first thing. Harry and Alfie had had to separate youths who began to fight, one of them with a knife. Later, after two, a girl who was a stranger in the club collapsed. But in spite of the intervention of that excitement, this morning it was Vera he woke up to, her face as it was when her hair was blonde. Fleshy you’d have called her face then, soft was what he’d thought when he first saw the photograph, in the Evening Standard someone had left behind in the club. It doesn’t matter that Vera is leaner now, it doesn’t matter that her hair is different. Vera’s the same, no way she isn’t.

  ‘Dried out a lovely shade,’ Mr Schele says. ‘The bathroom.’

  ‘There’s half that tin left for touching up.’ The coffee cup is warm in Sidney’s cold hands. He likes that skirt. He’d like to see it folded on a chair and Vera standing in her slip, her jersey still on. The jersey’s buttons are at the top, along one shoulder, four red buttons to match the wool. In the photograph it was a jacket, and white dots on her shirt. A loving sister, the paper said.

  ‘Anything on the News, Sidney?’

  He shakes his head, unable to answer the question because this morning he didn’t turn the radio on. Some expedition reached a mountain top, Vera says.

  ‘Bad night in the club,’ Sidney says, and tells them. He’d had to fish light bulbs and tins out of the toilet when he was closing up, but he doesn’t mention that. The girl who’d collapsed was on Ecstasy, the ambulance men said. There is some way they can tell an Ecstasy collapse, now that they’ve got used to them. Sidney doesn’t know what it is.

  ‘Out of control,’ Mr Schele comments, hearing that. ‘The whole globe out of control.’

  ‘Maybe how they sweat. There’s different ways a person sweats, an ambulance man told me. According to what’s taken.’

  The blow left scarcely a contusion. It was to the neck, the paper said, the side of the neck, no more than a smack. The intruder had lost his head; he’d walked into a room where he wasn’t expecting anyone to be, and there was a figure in a wheelchair. He’d have been seen at once, but what he didn’t know was that he couldn’t ever have been described. Probably he struck the blow to frighten; probably he said if a description was given he’d be back. The room is empty now, even the bed taken away; two years ago Sidney painted out the flowery wallpaper with satin emulsion — Pale Sherbet — the woodwork to match in gloss.

  ‘One thing I hate,’ he says, ‘is when an ambulance has to come.’

  God did not make another man in all His world as gentle: often Vera thinks that, and she thinks it now. His voice was gentle when he said about an ambulance coming to take away the Ecstasy girl, the hands that grasp the coffee cup are gentle. ‘Short of a slate or two,’ they said when they told her a man had come forward. ‘But crystal clear in his statements.’

  The first time she saw him in court his shabby jacket needed a stitch. Yes, what he said was true, she agre
ed when it was put to her, and was told to speak up.

  ‘You see the world at that club, Sidney,’ her father says.

  When she walked free, when she came back to the house, her father didn’t look at her at first. And when he did she could see him thinking that a man who was a stranger to her, whose face she had not even noticed, had reached out to her in the darkness of a cinema, and that she had acquiesced. With her looks, she could have had anyone: that, too, her father didn’t say.

  ‘Yeah, a lot come into the club. Though Monday’s always light. Not much doing on a Monday.’

  She knew he’d visit. She knew in court, something about him, something about the pity that was in his eyes. Nearly a year went by but still she guessed she’d open the porch door and there he’d be, and then he was. He came when he knew her father would be out at work. He stood there tongue-tied and she said come in. ‘I couldn’t face him,’ her father said when she told him, but in the end he did, so much was owing; and now he waits for a proposal. Step by step, time wore away the prejudice any father would have.

  ‘You try that new biscuit, Sidney.’ She pushes the plate towards him and then fills up his coffee cup. Nicer than the ones with the peel in them, she says.

  ‘I met that woman with the dog again. Last night.’

  They don’t know who the woman is. Must be she lives the other side of the green, her father has said when she was mentioned before. On his own walks he has never run into her, preferring to go the other way.

  ‘You think we put in another rose, Sidney?’ her father asks.

  ‘It’s empty, the way it is. You’d notice that.’

  ‘I thought it maybe would be.’

  Mr Schele goes to see for himself, changing his shoes in the shed by the back door. The first time he faced Sidney he kept looking at his hands, unable to keep his eyes off them. He kept thinking of Vera when she was little, when her mother was alive, Mona already confined. Vera always looked out for him, and ran down the garden path to meet him when he came home, and he lifted her up high, making her laugh, the way poor Mona never could, not all her life. The first time he faced Sidney he had to go out and get some air, had stood where he is standing now, near to where the rosebush was. It wasn’t wrong that Vera had left Mona on her own that afternoon. Ever since their mother died he’d kept saying to Vera that she couldn’t be a prisoner in the house. One sister should not imprison another, no matter what the circumstances were; that was not ever meant. The shopping had to be done; and no one could begrudge an hour or so in a cinema. And yet, he thought the first day he faced Sidney, why did it have to be the way it was, poor Mona’s head fallen sideways as though her neck’d been cracked, while that was happening in the cinema’s dark?

  ‘I’m sorry there was that trouble,’ Vera says in the kitchen, referring to the fight in the club, and the girl for whom an ambulance had come.

  ‘On a Saturday you expect it.’ And Sidney says he doesn’t know why that is. Often on a Thursday or a Friday the club’s as full. ‘I like a Sunday,’ he says, quite suddenly, as if he has for the first time realized that. ‘There’s church bells somewhere near the club. Well, anyway they carry. Gould be a mile off.’

  On Sunday evenings Vera goes to church, a Baptist place, but anywhere would do. She says she’s sorry when she kneels, and feels the better for saying it in a church, with other people there. And afterwards she wonders what they’d think if they knew, their faces still credulous following their hour of comfort. She makes herself go through it when she’s on her knees, not permitting the excuses. She wants to draw attention to how awful it was for so long, ever since their mother died, how awful it would always be, the two of them left together, the washing, the dressing, the lifting from the wheelchair, the feeding, the silent gaze. All that, when praying, Vera resists in her thoughts. ‘You want to get turned off?’ a boy said once, she heard him in the play yard when she was fourteen. ‘You take a look at the sister.’ And later, when the wheelchair was still pushed out and about, proposals didn’t come. Later still, when there were tears and protestations on the street, the wheelchair was abandoned, not even pushed into the garden, since that caused distress also: Mona was put upstairs. ‘Vera, take your friend up,’ her father, not realizing, suggested once: an afflicted sister’s due to stare at visitors to the house. On her knees — kneeling properly, not just bent forward — Vera makes herself watch the shadow that is herself, the sideways motion of her flattened hand, some kind of snap she felt, the head gone sideways too.

  ‘The wind’s dropped down. You stay to lunch, Sidney? You could have your fire, eh?’

  In the courtroom people gazed at both of them. Asked again, she agreed again. ‘Yes, that is so,’ she agreed because a man she didn’t know wanted her to say it: that for as long as the film lasted they were lovers.

  ‘I’ll have the fire,’ he says, and when he moves from the window she sees her father, standing by the empty place where the rosebush was. His belief protects them, gives them their parts, restricts to silence all that there is. When her father goes to his grave, will his ghost come back to tell her his death’s the punishment for a bargain struck?

  ‘A loin of lamb,’ Vera says, and takes it from the fridge, a net of suet tied in place to make it succulent in the roasting. Parsnips she’ll roast too, and potatoes because there’s nothing Sidney likes more.

  ‘I left my matches at the club.’

  She takes a box from a cupboard, swinging back the door that’s on a level with her head, reaching in. Cook’s Matches the label says. She hands them to him, their fingers do not touch. In the garden her father has not moved, still standing where his rosebush was. He’s frail, he suffers from the ailments of the elderly. More often than he used to he speaks of borrowed time.

  ‘I’ll get it going now,’ Sidney says.

  There’ll be a funeral, hardly different from her mother’s, not like Mona’s. Their time is borrowed too, the punishment more terrible because they know it’s there: no need for a ghost to spell it out.

  She smears oil on the parsnips she has sliced, and coats with flour the potatoes she has already washed and dried. Sidney likes roast potatoes crispy. There is nothing, Vera sometimes thinks, she doesn’t know about his likes and dislikes. He’ll stand there at the funeral and so will she, other people separating them. The truth restored, but no one else knowing it.

  ‘Colder now,’ her father says when he comes in. The wind turned, and left a chill behind when it dropped.

  He warms himself by standing close to the gas stove, massaging his fingers. Without his presence, there would be no reason to play those parts; no reason to lose themselves in deception. The darkness of their secrets lit, the love that came for both of them through their pitying of each other: all that might fill the empty upstairs room, and every corner of the house. But Vera knows that, without her father, they would frighten one another.

  Of the Cloth

  He was out of touch, and often felt it: out of touch with the times and what was happening in them, out of touch with two generations of change, with his own country and what it had become. If he travelled outside Ireland, which he had never done, he knew he would find the same new mores everywhere, the different, preferred restrictions by which people now lived their lives; but it was Ireland he thought about, the husk of the old, the seed of the new. And often he wondered what that new would be.

  The Rev. Grattan Fitzmaurice, Ennismolach Rectory, his letters were addressed, the nearest town and the county following. His three Church of Ireland parishes, amalgamated over the years, were in a valley of pasture land in the mountains, three small churches marking them, one of them now unattended, each of them remote, as his rectory was, as his life was.

  The town that was nearest was thirteen miles away, where the mountain slope became a plain and the river that flowed through the townland of Ennismolach was bridged. The rectory was reached from Doonan crossroads by taking the road to Corlough Gap and turning right three miles farthe
r on at the Shell petrol pump. A few minutes later there was the big Catholic Church of the Holy Assumption, solitary and splendid by the roadside, still seeming new although it had been there for sixty years. Over the brow of the next hill were the gates to Ennismolach Rectory, its long curving avenue years ago returned to grass.

  This was granite country and Grattan Fitzmaurice had a look of that grey, unyielding stone, visible even in the pasture land of the valley. Thin, and tall, he belonged to this landscape, had come from it and had chosen to return to it. Celibacy he had chosen also. Families had spread themselves in the vast rectory once upon a time; now there was only the echo of his own footsteps, the latch of the back door when Mrs Bradshaw came in the mornings, the yawning of his retriever, the wireless when he turned it on. Emptily, all sound came twice because an echo added a pretence of more activity than there was, as if in mercy offering companionship.

  There was, as well, the company of the past: the family Grattan remembered here was his own, his father the rector of Ennismolach before him, his mother wallpapering the rooms and staining the floorboards to freshen them up, his sisters. The rectory had always been home, a vigour there in his childhood, the expectation that it would continue. Change had come before his birth, and the family was still close to revolution and civil war. The once impregnable estates had fallen back to the clay, their people gone away, burnt-out houses their memorial stones. Rectories escaped because in Ireland men of the cloth would always have a place: as the infant nation was nurtured through the 1930s, it seemed in Ennismolach that ends would forever be made to meet in the lofty rooms, that there would forever be chilblains in winter, cheap cuts from the butcher at Fenit Bridge, the Saturday silence while a sermon was composed. And even as a child Grattan had wanted to follow his father’s footsteps in this parish.

  His father died in 1957, his mother in that year also. By then the congregation at Ennismolach church had dwindled, the chapel of ease near Fenit Bridge hadn’t been made use of for years, and melancholy characterized other far-flung parishes in the county. The big houses, which had supported them, tumbled further into ruin; the families who had fled did not return; and from farm and fields, from townlands everywhere, emigration took a toll. ‘It’ll get worse,’ Grattan’s father said a few weeks before he died. ‘You realize it’ll get worse?’ It wasn’t unexpected, he said, that the upheaval should bring further, quieter upheaval. The designation of the Protestant foundation he served, the ‘Church of Ireland’, had long ago begun to seem too imposing a title, ludicrous almost in its claim. ‘We are a remnant,’ Grattan’s father said.