He seemed hardly interested, heavy sleep weighting him down as he drank.
‘Just what I said – impulsive. The country’ll do him good. There’s more important things in life than washing your teeth.’
Like getting rid of this damned parcel before Brond came asking. I had sat too long. I could go to the library and check the back numbers of newspapers to see if the death of a boy had been reported that night.
‘I’ll have to be off.’
I stood up, putting the parcel familiarly under my arm again.
‘Already?’ Kennedy widened both eyes. ‘I thought we would have a wet and a talk. I don’t often have a chance of a talk.’
He followed me out into the hall.
‘Are you not leaving that thing here?’
I was tempted. But I didn’t want Brond anywhere near the house. Anyway Jackie would throw me out if she found I’d palmed it off on him after all she’d said.
‘I’m going to get rid of it. There’s a girl who’ll take it.’
He reached out and touched the parcel.
‘Is that the girl Val was telling me about? What’s her name . . .?’
‘Margaret.’
Suddenly I wanted to get away.
‘Margaret Bridie – was it?’
‘Margaret Briody.’
‘Ah, Val’s no use at names.’ He looked at me sadly. ‘That’s not a Protestant name.’
Tribally, in this city, you could tell.
‘If I were you,’ he tapped the parcel to mark each word, ‘I’d think – twice – in – that – direction. I’ve seen many a lad ruined for life with a hasty marriage.’
Impulse being a funny business.
SIX
The Reading Room consists of a set of concentric circles, the lending counter at the centre, department sub-libraries in rooms round the gallery. The entire structure acts as a reflector of noise; a shuffle echoed round the place. It was such an atrocious drawback in a library I was sure the architects must have won a clutch of awards. On my second circuit, heads came up, signalling fury or hope. At night when everybody was bored or desperate with studying it was a good place to pick up a girl.
As it happened the one I wanted was not there.
I was leaving when I wondered about the department rooms in the gallery. What else had I to do? My first plan had been to go to check the newspapers. The lure of old newspapers was not strong; I was tired and did not want to find out more that night. I was not sure if I wanted to find out more any time or ever. I was walking with only one stick. Properly, they should have a rubber ferrule on the end. Mine did not. My heel came down with a bump; my stick tapped. As I circled the gallery, all the heads below swung up like blind moles sniffing the air.
She was in the history library, a room about fifteen feet long, books on the walls, a table and half a dozen chairs in the middle. I looked at her through the glass. As if feeling my eyes, she glanced up. Her look was not welcoming.
I pushed the door. When it shut behind me, we were alone. All the coughs and sighs from below were shut out. In this echoing house of glass, the department rooms felt deceptively private. A character in one of my classes had claimed that one night about ten to nine, just before the building closed, he had glanced into the theology library and seen a couple on the job under the table. I tended to disbelieve the bit about the theology library – no sense in spoiling a good story.
‘History library,’ I said, ‘or English possibly. Sociology very likely. Theology too good to be true.’
‘What?’ she said looking frightened or maybe just bewildered.
‘I was thinking of something a guy told me.’
Impulse again; or a defence against the look on her face when she had seen me.
The look came back – only worse – when she noticed the parcel. It was still under my free arm; a kind of fixture. I hefted it gently in the air – it was heavy as Jackie had said – and laid it on the table in front of her.
‘Yours, I think.’
She pushed it back at me as if it was hot. Too hard, for it slid off and landed at my feet. I picked it up hoping it had ripped but its web of string and tape was intact. If it was to be opened, it wouldn’t be by accident.
‘I don’t know what you think you’re doing. I told you it would be collected. What’s the point of carrying it around with you?’
‘It started to tick.’
‘What?’
‘You know – tick. As in tick, tick, tock. Tick, tock. If it’s going to explode, I thought I’d bring it along so we could share it together.’
To my astonishment, she went white. Like a rabbit from a conjuror’s hat, instantly white, and ready to disappear. Shame and sympathy took me out of myself so that I went round the table to comfort her. She wrestled away from my arm and my hand took her breast which put me rapidly back into myself.
It was when she pressed back further from me that I realised I was holding the parcel by her head.
‘Please.’ I said. I put it back on the table and pushed it away from us. The memory of her breast’s weight lingered on my palm and fingers. ‘I was just being stupid.’
‘Why would you say it was a bomb? What made you say that?’
Suddenly I was infected by her fright.
‘Jesus! It isn’t, is it? You wouldn’t have—’
The passion of my cowardice persuaded her at once. In a blink, she went from terror to rage.
‘I can’t conceive of a mentality like yours. Do you ever read the papers or look at the television news? And it’s not funny!’ As usual when I was embarrassed, I was grinning. If I had been a puppy, I’d have rolled over to show her my belly. ‘Babies in prams burned. And people all torn to bits. While fools like you make jokes. You’d think God would strike you down!’
I had thought of that myself – about people being struck down all the time and how you could hardly ever see it as God’s work.
A shape moved past on the other side of the glass. If we went on like this a janitor would come up and throw us out. I sat down and tried to still her with my eye. It probably didn’t work with tigers either. She was scrambling up out of her seat when I caught her by the upper arm. For an instant she resisted and I felt the strength of her body and caught its scent, sweet with powder and sweat.
‘Sit down, you bitch!’ I heard myself saying. ‘Just hold everything for a minute.’
On the far side of the gallery, behind the closed doors of another library, a girl stared across for a long moment before she lowered her head. Perhaps she had decided it was all right; perhaps she had not even been aware of us, looking up unseeingly from the book she was studying. I wished I was across there beside her; we could worry together over some textual crux. After all, I had come to the city for the academic life.
‘Go if you want,’ I said without unclenching my fist from her arm. ‘But take your bloody Christmas present with you.’
‘You’re hurting me,’ she said.
At home, they always said I didn’t know my own strength.
‘I didn’t mean to. Will you please sit down?’
She rubbed her arm, pushing up the sleeve of her sweatshirt.
‘You can see the marks of your fingers.’ She turned her arm round and craned to see. ‘And your thumb. It’ll be black and blue.’
By the time she had finished saying all that she sounded judicial, almost cheerful.
‘See?’ she said. ‘I’m not running away.’
‘That’ll be a disappointment to her,’ I said nodding towards the girl across the gallery. She had lifted her head again to watch us. Lots of people were not made for the academic life.
‘She’s getting her eyes filled,’ Margaret said, original as ever.
‘She thinks we’re having a lovers’ quarrel. She’s bored with her book – Anglo-Saxon poetry or, I don’t know, mercantile law, and she’s looking at us and wishing somebody would push open the door and say, Come out of there, and I’ll show you some life.’