I lay on my bed like a fox gone to earth. There were no bones around to chew but I had found a tin of biscuits in my shirt drawer and lay nibbling custard creams. My best strategy might be to lie there into the foreseeable future.
Jackie came in without knocking.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t realise you were here.’
She did not look surprised.
‘Do you wander about my room when I’m out?’
‘There’s linen to change.’
‘Is that linen you’re carrying?’
She was not holding anything.
‘You’re in a funny mood,’ she said.
‘Not me.’ I took the corner off a biscuit. ‘I had this crazy notion you might be a foot fetishist. Sneaking in for a quick sniff at my socks.’
She shut the door behind her.
‘You want to watch what you say. You don’t want to let him hear you talking like that.’
‘He’s the one that’s in a funny mood. He was desperate to know where I was last night.’
I had never talked to her like that before. After the last couple of days I felt older – not any wiser, just older.
‘Why should he care?’ she asked.
For no good reason, I took that as an insult.
‘You’re supposed to be shocked at being called a fetishist,’ I said sourly. ‘Assuming you had the foggiest notion what I was talking about.’
‘Aren’t you the arrogant little bugger?’ she said. ‘Six months ago you walk in here not sure which spoon to eat your soup with and now you’re a walking dictionary and man about bloody town.’
I was getting used to people surprising me. It didn’t mean I had to like it.
‘Do you want a biscuit?’
To my surprise, she came over and sat beside me. I passed her the tin. There were only two biscuits left.
She ate neatly, picking at the edges with her small white teeth.
‘You have some dirty habits. The bed’ll be full of crumbs.’
‘If you’re changing the linen . . .’
‘Where were you last night anyway?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ I rolled out of the bed explosively. ‘Do you know my mother and father couldn’t be worse about checking up? I’m only a lodger, you know.’
‘Your mother,’ she said, looking at me unperturbed, ‘did she ever sniff your socks?’
‘That’s—’
I really almost said it: That’s dirty!
‘I think you won that one,’ I said. I thought about it for a minute then went on, ‘I was at Margaret’s house last night.’
‘The girl who brought the parcel here?’
‘Margaret Briody. Somebody gave me her address.’
My jacket was lying on the bed and I pulled out the card Brond had given me. She reached out and took it from me. I was anxious that she should believe me.
‘Before that I’d no idea where she lived. I met her in the Reading Room at the University.’
‘And she took you home.’
‘No!’ I said. ‘We went for a coffee and finished up going for a meal and when we came out . . . It’s a long story. I got the address from Brond – the man who—’
‘That was the fellow was supposed to get the parcel.’ She was quiet, attentive and seemed changed into someone I hadn’t noticed before was there. ‘Did she, this girl Margaret, take you to his place?’
‘No – nothing like that. When we came out of the restaurant a man was waiting for us. He took me there.’
‘But not the girl?’
‘I think she might have wanted to come but—’
‘How did the man know where you were? Did the girl phone Brond to tell him where to find you?’
I was shocked.
‘No!’ Even as I protested, I discovered that the idea’s shade had been drifting across the back country of my mind. ‘No. She wouldn’t do that.’
‘So anyway Brond got his parcel. What was in it after all the fuss?’
‘I didn’t find out.’
‘He took it and said thank you.’
‘Something like that.’
‘Was part of his thank you the girl’s address? Was it her kept you out all night?’
‘God!’ I said, ‘you and your old man are a pair.’
My voice lingered on ‘old man’. Sometimes I thought he was just past forty; other times with his long face and solemn ways he could have been ninety. She sat quiet. I tried to think of something to say but my mind was a blank. She stared at the floor, perhaps so she wouldn’t have to look at me.
‘It’s easy to get the wrong idea about him,’ she said. I had to strain to catch her words. ‘I forget too till something makes me remember my last year at school. I was supposed to go to college afterwards. My da was very proud that way. But all my da’s plans came to nothing that summer. From a child I’d always loved the summer for the town would be full of people and have a bit of life in it. My mother hated it, though – she would never take a lodger, but the shop did well enough so she didn’t have to. It was the winter she liked when we had the place to ourselves. In January the foam from the waves would drift down like cotton across our garden. Summer was for the young ones. I fell in love with him that summer.’
Imagining that last schoolgirl summer, it seemed unnatural to think of Kennedy.
‘It was one day I went to the beach. There was a rock stood above the sea at one end and a crowd of young fellows, all visitors, daring one another but none of them would dive from it for the height and the white water round it. He was lying among the crowd sunbathing and when he sat up we looked at one another and he gave me a wink and got up. I thought the world had stopped talking when he dived so clean and neat from the very topmost part into that white water.’
‘That was—?’
I didn’t finish but nodded towards the door. I had the stupid idea she might be talking of some lover she had known before Kennedy came into her life.
‘Oh, it’s strange to think of it now,’ she said. ‘We had a wild time. I couldn’t tell you half the things he did. In spite of all my father could do, we were married by the summer’s end. And then we came here — for he’d bought this house, and was only back to Ireland a short visit on business.’ She shook her head as if in disbelief. ‘A short visit and him there all summer long . . . until he had me married.’
‘It doesn’t sound like the same man,’ I said, still stupid.
‘He changed,’ and she shivered as if wakening and looked at me sitting beside her on the bed.
‘But,’ she said and stopped as if the word could explain itself. She got up and put half the room between us by going to the window.
‘He’s down there,’ she said, ‘in the garden. He likes to be by himself working among the flowers – especially if he’s worried about anything. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that. He’s fond of the garden.’
There was no excuse for what came next. I had been through a bad couple of days but that was no excuse. Jackie was a fine-looking woman – somehow better-looking for being serious than before – who had been talking about her husband and was watching him now as if I didn’t exist; but that was something less than an excuse.
‘Ah,’ I said, ‘he’s a gardener and a worrier, and a high diver since you say so, and a good bookie’s clerk, I’ll believe that, and a nice boring little man altogether.’
I thought she hadn’t heard me, and then I thought she was ignoring me; and then I hoped she hadn’t heard, but she did answer, quietly, looking down into the garden.
‘It’s easy to make a mistake about him. He’s given me enough cause to forget. Only there are things . . . The year after we were married – when – when my baby had died. We were not happy – he had become so different. I cried a lot. I would start to cry for no reason and then I wouldn’t be able to stop. One night we went into a cafe and there were these four young fellows who had been drinking. They had the style, you know, of gang boys. A weak mindless look about two of them, and a lad that might have been simple, and another that had a face of pure badness. You wouldn’t know which of them would turn nastiest without cause given. They talked at me, not nice talk, until you couldn’t ignore it. He got up and went over to them and something happened. You don’t need to believe me. I don’t even know if he spoke to them or just looked at them. He came and sat down with his back to them and started talking to me again, almost as if he hoped I wouldn’t notice what he’d done. And the four of them got up and went out like dogs a man had turned timid with his stick.’