Brond

‘It was just a name,’ she said. ‘I had to tell you something.’

I shook my head. ‘No. That’s no good. There has to be a reason. Was it his address Kilpatrick gave you? Were you supposed to take the parcel to Brond? It was him Kilpatrick phoned, wasn’t it?’

For instructions. Because things had gone astray. Because something disastrous had happened. A knock on the door, you open it, smiling probably since it’s this young pretty girl (damn it, beautiful, damn it, damn it) who’s come back with stuff for dinner and herself for afters (no wonder the bastard was smiling), only it wasn’t her but someone else, someone unexpected. The gun must have looked like a cannon. It was the kind of trick they pulled off all the time now in Northern Ireland. Bang! Bang! you’re dead. Only whoever it was must have hesitated since Kennedy had got the gun from him. It hadn’t stopped him getting shot though. Smiling, he had probably gone to the door with an erection. It must have felt strange when he realised it was death that had knocked.

‘He phoned Brond, didn’t he?’ I said.

‘When I went back, he wouldn’t believe that I’d taken it where he told me.’ She gulped and bit her lip in a child-like movement. ‘I had to tell him I’d given the parcel to you. He made me. And then he was angry.’ She made the same child-like and vulnerable movement of her mouth. ‘It was worse than that, he was frightened. He said I’d have to find somewhere else for him to hide.’

‘Because you’d given it to me?’ I didn’t understand.

‘Yes – till the man he’d phoned could help him. And I thought of Daddy’s yard. It’s got a room behind the shop with a bed in it. My father used to sleep there often in the early days – so he could be on top of things.’

She said the last bit like a phrase rehearsed in the house so often it had turned into rote.

‘How long can Kilpatrick stay there?’

‘Till Monday. The men don’t come back from holiday till Monday.’

‘What men, for God’s sake?’

‘My Daddy’s men. He has more than twenty men work for him.’ She glinted lunatic irrelevant pride. ‘He has the demolition contract with the District for that side of the city – after fires and things.’

So much for Daddy. He must be rich beyond the dreams of Annandale – or at least of its farm labourers’ sons.

It seemed the time for irrelevancy.

‘Why don’t we get married?’ I asked her.

She widened those extraordinary eyes at me. For a panic-stricken moment, I thought she was going to accept.

‘I don’t think he’ll be able to stay there all night,’ she said. ‘He’s getting worse. He can’t be there when the men come in on Monday.’

She hadn’t even heard me, it seemed. A number of good things about being married to her came into my head.

‘Come back with me!’ she said. In her concern for emphasis, she leaned close. It reassured me to find that sex put danger out of your head in the real world. ‘He’ll listen to you.’

I had given up trying to explain that Kilpatrick was no friend of mine.

‘Why was he so sure you’d help him?’ I heard myself ask. ‘Why did you?’

She blushed. It was unmistakable. Not, despite the year, merely an allergic reaction or the reflection of a holocaust on the far side of the hill. It started out of sight, under the shirt in the soft dark, and spread up until it warmed her neck and the high bones of her cheeks.

‘You must be pretty close,’ I prompted.

‘We’re good friends.’

There was no answer to that.

‘Come on!’ I got to my feet and she looked up at me without stirring. ‘If we’re going, let’s get started.’

The flush ebbed from her skin and it was white under her mane of black hair.

‘You won’t come?’ she whispered.

It wasn’t what I meant, but her misunderstanding gave me one bonus chance, the last; to be sensible. It was a pity my idea of myself didn’t square with walking off and leaving her to her troubles. The girl being beautiful and frightened and helpless were poor reasons for putting my head on the block.

‘That’s not what I said. Apart from anything else, if we don’t move they’ll lock us in the park.’ I started to walk and she came into step with me. Close to me, even her sweat smelt of tears and honey. She moved with a loose graceful stride that almost matched mine. I wanted to stroke her hair and touch her. It didn’t make any sense, but I felt marvellous. The vast stone head of Thomas Carlyle peered at me across the twilight, and I wanted to yell at the old fraud, You’re dead, but I’m alive! I laughed out loud, and when she stared said to cover it, ‘We’ll have to spend the night in here.’

Innuendo would be my speciality; common sense could be someone else’s.

‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘We could climb the gate. I’m good at climbing.’

I wondered if she could be mentally retarded. Kilpatrick might have won her heart by poking nothing more sinister than Crunchie Bars into her.

I put an arm round her waist. She shied like a skittish horse, then relaxed against me, but when we came into the street she took my hand and lifted it away, not unpleasantly but as if it was the proper thing to do.

We walked until we came to a subway station for she had decided against bringing the car from her father’s yard. Going down the steps, I remembered trips on the subway as a child when we had visited the city.

‘It used to smell differently,’ I said. ‘It used to smell of ozone.’

She looked at me uncomprehendingly as we went down side by side.

‘Stuff that you get at the seaside,’ I explained. ‘You take deep breaths. Makes you feel better.’

Waiting on the platform, I began to laugh. It was as if I had been drinking and had taken too much. She looked at me as if I was mad and I remembered a silly story as an explanation.

‘My Uncle James lived in Largs when he was a boy. Do you know Largs?’

She nodded.

‘I’ve never been there. But he used to tell me how with the other boys he’d walk out to the Pencil – it’s a monument thing outside the town.’

‘It commemorates the Battle of Largs,’ she said seriously. ‘The Scots defeated the King of Norway.’

‘We were the people,’ I said. ‘Anyway, I laughed because I remembered him telling me how the tourists would stand on the sea wall out there and take deep breaths – aa-ah! aa-ah! And in those days the boys knew they were standing right above the pipes where the town’s sewage emptied. So much for ozone.’

The train poked its snout out of the tunnel. We travelled in silence. The walls of the tunnel slid past; then a station, two or three people, an Indian with a whistle who waved the train out again; more walls.

‘This is ours,’ Margaret said.

When we came out of the station, it was night. Between the pools of light from the streetlamps, it was dark. I wondered about putting my arm round her again, but before I could she said, ‘Please God, let him be all right.’

I thought she wanted to draw me into that feeling, but maybe she just wanted to share it. She must have known I would not turn back at this stage. We came into a main road with sulphur lamps set on long swan necks. In that street, her eyes turned some shade from outer space for which the name had yet to be invented. Out of it, we defiled into a wadi of darkened tenements. It was a place for ambushes. I felt endangered.

‘Margaret, he must have told you who hurt him and why?’

‘No.’ She turned her head away from me.

‘That’s hard to believe. Did you ask him?’

‘No.’

She stopped walking and we were outside a shop. I had been looking for a wall or a fence round what she called her father’s yard. There was a lane though at the side big enough for a lorry to go through. Her father’s name was over the door of the shop front.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘Have you a key?’

Her breath hurried in little gasps.