Cheating at Canasta Read online

  A couple of steps, contending with the slope of the garden, broke the path they were on. The chair Father Meade had rested on to catch the morning sun was still there, on a lawn more spacious than the strip of grass by the wall with the Virginia creeper.

  ‘Still and all, it’s a good thing to come back to a place when you were born in it. I remember your mother.’

  ‘I’m wondering could you spare me something, Father.’

  Father Meade turned and began the walk back to the house. He nodded an indication that he had heard and noted the request, the impression given to Prunty that he was considering it. But in the room where he had earlier fallen asleep he said there was employment to be had in Gleban and its neighbourhood.

  ‘When you’ll go down past Steacy’s bar go into Kingston’s yard and tell Mr Kingston I sent you. If Mr Kingston hasn’t something himself he’ll put you right for somewhere else.’

  ‘What’s Kingston’s yard?’

  ‘It’s where they bottle the water from the springs up at the Pass.’

  ‘It wasn’t work I came for, Father.’

  Prunty sat down. He took out a packet of cigarettes, and then stood up again to offer it to the priest. Father Meade was standing by the french windows. He came further into the room and stood behind his desk, not wanting to sit down himself because it might be taken as an encouragement by his visitor to prolong his stay. He waved the cigarettes away.

  ‘I wouldn’t want to say it,’ Prunty said.

  He was experiencing difficulty with his cigarette, failing to light it although he struck two matches, and Father Meade wondered if there was something the matter with his hands the way he couldn’t keep them steady. But Prunty said the matches were damp. You spent a night sleeping out and you got damp all over even though it didn’t rain on you.

  ‘What is it you don’t want to say, Mr Prunty?’

  Prunty laughed. His teeth were discoloured, almost black. ‘Why’re you calling me Mr Prunty, Father?’

  The priest managed a laugh too. Put it down to age, he said: he sometimes forgot a name and then it would come back.

  ‘Donal it is,’ Prunty said.

  ‘Of course it is. What’s it you want to say, Donal?’

  A match flared, and at once there was a smell of tobacco smoke in a room where no one smoked any more.

  ‘Things happened the time I was a server, Father.’

  ‘It was a little later on you went astray, Donal.’

  ‘Have you a drink, Father? Would you offer me a drink?’

  ‘We’ll get Rose to bring us in a cup of tea.’

  Prunty shook his head, a slight motion, hardly a movement at all.

  ‘I don’t keep strong drink,’ Father Meade said. ‘I don’t take it myself.’

  ‘You used give me a drink.’

  ‘Ah no, no. What’s it you want, Donal?’

  ‘I’d estimate it was money, Father. If there’s a man left anywhere would see me right it’s the Father. I used say that. We’d be down under the arches and you could hear the rain falling on the river. We’d have the brazier going until they’d come and quench it. All Ireland’d be there, Toomey’d say. Men from all over, and Nellie Bonzer, too, and Colleen from Tuam. The methylated doing the rounds and your fingers would be shivering and you opening up the butts, and you’d hear the old stories then. Many’s the time I’d tell them how you’d hold your hand up when you were above in the pulpit. ‘Don’t go till I’ll give it to you in Irish,’ you’d say, and you’d begin again and the women would sit there obedient, not understanding a word but it wouldn’t matter because they’d have heard it already in the foreign tongue. Wasn’t there many a priest called it the foreign tongue, Father?’

  ‘I’m sorry you’ve fallen on hard times, Donal.’

  ‘Eulala came over with a priest’s infant inside her.’

  ‘Donal—’

  ‘Eulala has a leg taken off of her. She has the crutches the entire time, seventy-one years of age. It was long ago she left Ireland behind her.’

  ‘Donal—’

  ‘Don’t mind me saying that about a priest.’

  ‘It’s a bad thing to say, Donal.’

  ‘You used give me a drink. D’you remember that though? We’d sit down in the vestry when they’d all be gone. You’d look out the door to see was it all right and you’d close it and come over to me. “Isn’t it your birthday?” you’d say, and it wouldn’t be at all. “Will we open the old bottle?” you’d say. The time it was holy wine, you sat down beside me and said it wasn’t holy yet. No harm, you said.’

  Father Meade shook his head. He blinked, and frowned, and for a moment Miss Brehany seemed to be saying there was a man at the front door, her voice coming to him while he was still asleep. But he wasn’t asleep, although he wanted to be.

  ‘Many’s the time there’d be giving out about the priests,’ Prunty said. ‘The hidden Ireland is Toomey’s word for the way it was in the old days. All that, Father. “Close your eyes,” you used say in the vestry. “Close your eyes, boy. Make your confession to me after.”’

  There was a silence in the room. Then Father Meade asked why he was being told lies, since he of all people would know they were lies. ‘I think you should go away now,’ he said.

  ‘When I told my mother she said she’d have a whip taken to me.’

  ‘You told your mother nothing. There was nothing to tell anyone.’

  ‘Breda Flynn’s who Eulala was, only a Romanian man called her that and she took it on. Limerick she came from. She was going with the Romanian. Toomey’s a Carlow man.’

  ‘What you’re implying is sickening and terrible and disgraceful. I’m telling you to go now.’

  Father Meade knew he said that, but hardly heard it because he was wondering if he was being confused with another priest: a brain addled by recourse to methylated spirits would naturally be blurred by now. But the priests of the parish, going back for longer than the span of Prunty’s lifetime, had been well known to Father Meade. Not one of them could he consider, even for a moment, in the role Prunty was hinting at. Not a word of what was coming out of this demented imagination had ever been heard in the parish, no finger ever pointed in the direction of any priest. He’d have known, he’d have been told: of that Father Meade was certain, as sure of it as he was of his faith. ‘I have no money for you, Prunty.’

  ‘Long ago I’d see the young priests from the seminary. Maybe there’d be three of them walking together, out on the road to the Pass. They’d always be talking and I’d hear them and think maybe I’d enter the seminary myself. But then again you’d be cooped up. Would I come back tomorrow morning after you’d have a chance to get hold of a few shillings?’

  ‘I have no money for you,’ Father Meade said again.

  ‘There’s talk no man would want to put about. You’d forget things, Father. Long ago things would happen and you’d forget them. Sure, no one’s blaming you for that. Only one night I said to myself I’ll go back to Gleban.’

  ‘Do you know you’re telling lies, Prunty? Are you aware of it? Evil’s never forgotten, Prunty: of all people, a priest knows that. Little things fall away from an old man’s mind but what you’re trying to put into it would never have left it.’

  ‘No harm’s meant, Father.’

  ‘Tell your tale in Steacy’s bar, Prunty, and maybe you’ll be believed.’

  Father Meade stood up and took what coins there were from his trouser pockets and made a handful of them on the desk.

  ‘Make your confession, Prunty. Do that at least.’

  Prunty stared at the money, counting it with his eyes. Then he scooped it up. ‘If we had a few notes to go with it,’ he said, ‘we’d have the sum done right.’

  He spoke slowly, as if unhurried enunciation was easier for the elderly. It was all the talk, he said, the big money there’d be. No way you could miss the talk, no way it wouldn’t affect you.

  He knew he’d get more. Whatever was in the house he’d go aw
ay with, and he watched while a drawer was unlocked and opened, while money was taken from a cardboard box. None was left behind.

  ‘Thanks, Father,’ he said before he went.

  Father Meade opened the french windows in the hope that the cigarette smoke would blow away. He’d been a smoker himself, a thirty-a-day man, but that was long ago.

  ‘I’m off now, Father,’ Miss Brehany said, coming in to say it, before she went home. She had cut cold meat for him, she said. She’d put the tea things out for him, beside the kettle.

  ‘Thanks, Rose. Thanks.’

  She said goodbye and he put the chain on the hall door. In the garden he pulled the chair he’d been sitting on earlier into the last of the sun, and felt it warm on his face. He didn’t blame himself for being angry, for becoming upset because he’d been repelled by what was said to him. He didn’t blame Donal Prunty because you couldn’t blame a hopeless case. In a long life a priest had many visits, heard voices that ages ago he’d forgotten, failed to recognize faces that had been as familiar as his own. ‘See can you reach him, Father,’ Donal Prunty’s mother had pleaded when her son was still a child, and he had tried to. But Prunty had lied to him then too, promising without meaning it that he’d reform himself. ‘Ah sure, I needed a bit of money,’ he said hardly a week later when he was caught with the cancer box broken open.

  Was it because he clearly still needed it, Father Meade wondered, that he’d let him go away with every penny in the house? Was it because you couldn’t but pity him? Or was there a desperation in the giving, as if it had been prompted by his own failure when he’d been asked, in greater desperation, to reach a boy who didn’t know right from wrong?

  While he rested in the sun, Father Meade was aware of a temptation to let his reflections settle for one of these conclusions. But he knew, even without further thought, that there was as little truth in them as there was in the crude pretences of his visitor: there’d been no generous intent in the giving of the money, no honourable guilt had inspired the gesture, no charitable motive. He had paid for silence.

  Guiltless, he was guilty, his brave defiance as much of a subterfuge as any of his visitor’s. He might have belittled the petty offence that had occurred, so slight it was when you put it beside the betrayal of a Church and the shaming of Ireland’s priesthood. He might have managed to say something decent to a Gleban man who was down and out in case it would bring consolation to the man, in case it would calm his conscience if maybe one day his conscience would nag. Instead he had been fearful, diminished by the sins that so deeply stained his cloth, distrustful of his people.

  Father Meade remained in his garden until the shadows that had lengthened on his grass and his flowerbeds were no longer there. The air turned cold. But he sat a little longer before he went back to the house to seek redemption, and to pray for Donal Prunty.

  Prunty walked through the town Gleban had become since he had lived in it. He didn’t go to the church to make his confession, as he’d been advised. He didn’t go into Steacy’s bar, but passed both by, finding the way he had come in the early morning. He experienced no emotion, nor did it matter how the money had become his, only that it had. A single faint thought was that the town he left behind was again the place of his disgrace. He didn’t care. He hadn’t liked being in the town, he hadn’t liked asking where the priest lived, or going there. He hadn’t liked walking in the garden or making his demand, or even knowing that he would receive what he had come for in spite of twice being told he wouldn’t. He would drink a bit of the money away tonight and reach the ferry tomorrow. He wouldn’t hurry after that. Whatever pace he went at, the streets where he belonged would still be there.

  Cheating at Canasta

  It was a Sunday evening; but Sunday, Mallory remembered, had always been as any other day at Harry’s Bar. In the upstairs restaurant the waiters hurried with their loaded plates, calling out to one another above the noisy chatter. Turbot, scaloppa alla Milanese, grilled chops, scrambled eggs with bacon or smoked salmon, peas or spinaci al burro, mash done in a particularly delicious way: all were specialities here, where the waiters’ most remarkable skill was their changing of the tablecloths with a sleight of hand that was admired a hundred times a night, and even occasionally applauded. Downstairs, Americans and Italians stood three or four deep at the bar and no one heard much of what anyone else said.

  Bulky without being corpulent, sunburnt, blue-eyed, with the look of a weary traveller, Mallory was an Englishman in the middle years of his life and was, tonight, alone. Four of those years had passed since he had last sat down to dinner with his wife in Harry’s Bar. ‘You promise me you’ll go back for both of us,’ Julia had pleaded when she knew she would not be returning to Venice herself, and he had promised; but more time than he’d intended had slipped by before he had done so. ‘What was it called?’ Julia had tried to remember, and he said Harry’s Bar.

  The kir he’d asked for came. He ordered turbot, a Caesar salad first. He pointed at a Gavi that had not been on the wine list before. ‘Perfetto!’ the waiter approved.

  There was a pretence that Julia could still play cards, and in a way she could. On his visits they would sit together on the sofa in the drawing-room of her confinement and challenge one another in another game of Canasta, which so often they had played on their travels or in the garden of the house they’d lived in since their marriage, where their children had been born. ‘No matter what,’ Julia had said, aware then of what was coming, ‘let’s always play cards.’ And they did; for even with her memory gone, a little more of it each day—her children taken, her house, her flowerbeds, belongings, clothes—their games in the communal drawing-room were a reality her affliction still allowed. Not that there was order in their games, not that they were games at all; but still her face lit up when she found a joker or a two among her cards, was pleased that she could do what her visitor was doing, even though she couldn’t quite, even though once in a while she didn’t know who he was. He picked up from the floor the Kings and Jacks, the eights and tens her fumbling fingers dropped. He put them to one side, it didn’t matter where. He cheated at Canasta and she won.

  The promise Julia had exacted from her husband had been her last insistence. Perturbation had already begun, a fringe of the greyness that was to claim her so early in her life. Because, tonight, he was alone where so often she had been with him, Mallory recalled with piercing rawness that request and his assent to it. He had not hesitated but had agreed immediately, wishing she had asked for something else. Would it have mattered much, he wondered in the crowded restaurant, if he had not at last made this journey, the first of the many she had wanted him to make? In the depths of her darkening twilight, if there still were places they belonged in a childhood he had not known, among shadows that were hers, not his, not theirs. In all that was forgotten how could it matter if a whim, forgotten too, was put aside, as the playing cards that fell from her hand were?

  A table for six was lively in a corner, glasses raised; a birthday celebration it appeared to be. A couple who hadn’t booked, or had come too early, were sent away. A tall, thin woman looked about her, searching for someone who wasn’t there. The last time, Mallory remembered, their table had been by the door.

  He went through the contents of his wallet: the familiar cards, the list of the telephone numbers he always brought abroad, some unused tickets for the Paris Métro, scraps of paper with nothing on them, coloured slips unnecessarily retained. Its carte bancaire stapled to it, the bill of his hotel in Paris was folded twice and was as bulky as his tidy wad of euro currency notes. Lisa someone had scribbled on the back of a fifty. His wine came.

  He had travelled today from Monterosso, from the coast towns of the Cinque Terre, where often in September they had walked the mountain paths. The journey in the heat had been uncomfortable. He should have broken it, she would have said—a night in Milan, or Brescia to look again at the Foppas and the convent. Of course he should have arranged that, Mallory
reflected, and felt foolish that he hadn’t, and then foolish for being where he was, among people who were here for pleasure, or reasons more sensible than his. It was immediately a relief when a distraction came, his melancholy interrupted by a man’s voice.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ an American somewhere asked.

  This almost certainly came from the table closest to his own, but all Mallory could see when he slightly turned his head was a salt-cellar on the corner of a tablecloth. There was no response to the question that had been asked, or none that he heard, and the silence that gathered went on. He leaned back in his chair, as if wishing to glance more easily at a framed black-and-white photograph on the wall—a street scene dominated by a towering flat-iron block. From what this movement allowed, he established that the girl who had been asked why she was crying wasn’t crying now. Nor was there a handkerchief clenched in the slender, fragile-seeming fingers on the tablecloth. A fork in her other hand played with the peas on her plate, pushing them about. She wasn’t eating.

  A dressed-up child too young even to be at the beginning of a marriage, but instinctively Mallory knew that she was already the wife of the man who sat across the table from her. A white band drew hair as smooth as ebony back from her forehead. Her dress, black too, was severe in the same way, unpatterned, its only decoration the loop of a necklace that matched the single pearl of each small earring. Her beauty startled Mallory—the delicacy of her features, her deep, unsmiling eyes—and he could tell that there was more of it, lost now in the empty gravity of her discontent.