‘I can’t do it,’ he said. ‘Not with you looking so Scotch and dismal at me.’ The entire crowd smiled and rippled. ‘Like an ould Protestant minister at a funeral.’
In a leprechaun suit and a green hat, he would have made a splendid undoubting Uncle Thomais.
‘Did you ever hear,’ I asked, ‘about the Irishman who blew up the bus? . . . Got his lips all burnt.’
A determined outbreak of small arms talk peppered me away. I refilled a tumbler and found a chair by the wall.
‘A present.’
Brond sat down and put a bottle of wine between us. I recognised it as the one I had thrust on Primo.
‘The condemned man drank a hearty dinner.’ I topped up my glass.
To my surprise I found that some of the consonants had gone rubbery.
‘Don’t overdo it,’ Brond said. ‘We’ll be leaving soon.’
Across the room, I spotted the Hungarian Cockney talking to a man who looked as if he had passed all his exams a long time ago. She had come back then.
‘Suppose I didn’t leave. Suppose I just sat here and finished this bottle and held on to the seat and screamed if you tried to get me to leave.’
‘You know better than that.’
‘No, I don’t.’
I filled my glass which seemed to be emptying by itself. Soon I would have to find another bottle.
‘Suppose— suppose I shouted out loud – right now – that I saw you throwing that boy from the bridge? I mean, right now!’
The words fell out of my mouth sobering me with terror so that I was unable to look at him.
‘I think it was Primo’s boy you killed. I saw you.’
But of course, he knew that. He must have known that from the beginning.
‘Why did you do it?’ I asked, and then the second question which, though it shouldn’t have done, mattered more to me: ‘Why didn’t you care that I was there?’ Thinking about that, I rushed on my own destruction. ‘Did the boy overhear something that you couldn’t risk him telling to his father? He was only a child. It must have been something simple enough for him to pass on, but you couldn’t let him tell his father. Simple enough to pass on, even if he didn’t understand it. Or maybe it was a letter you had left lying about? But why would you do that? You’re not careless. Nothing happens unless you want it to happen.’
‘You confuse me with God,’ Brond said, purring. ‘I must say I have a weakness for you. And for Belgian chocolate, of course. And boredom – which is another weakness. I get bored easily.’
‘Do you despise us so much?’
‘I don’t despise a bereaved man enough to torment him with fantasies,’ Brond said sharply. ‘Primo – as you call him – lost his son in a silly stunt on a railway bridge. The boy had been challenged by two friends to cross it on the outside by scrambling across the girders. The two boys saw him fall. A group of spectators, including a police constable, saw him fall. One of the neighbours ran to fetch the father – Primo – and he arrived just as his son fell.’
‘But I saw you,’ I said.
I tried to hold on to that; it had been taken from me once; I tried not to let it happen again.
Brond kept silent until I looked back at him. He was smiling.
‘You saw something or imagine you did in some unnamed place at some time which is indeterminate. And now you’re not sure. How can you be since you did nothing at the time? That must make you wonder about yourself. Suppose now you report this extraordinary event, claim that it happened, and there is no death nor any record of one – But that’s what you’re afraid of, isn’t it? You must feel like someone in the process of a mental breakdown.’
He shuffled my certainty from me like a conjuror mixing a card into the pack.
‘Stand up!’ he ordered and waited until I did. ‘Let’s settle this nonsense. Take a deep breath. Now, shout out what you imagine you saw!’
The party washed over me as if he had opened a sluice gate. I drowned in that laughter. He was Brond the good friend of Professor Gracemount who had the power to pull strings. I bent and picked up the bottle. My hand held it at the level of his face. It was heavy glass at the level of a face, which was only bone, after all, and flesh. He hung me from the strings of rage and fear, and the little bald Professor came between us ignoring me and took his seat beside him.
By this time the Irishman was coming on like Brendan Behan. He would probably get two extra credits for this from Social Studies – assignment on living down to expectations.
‘How about,’ I asked in the first pause, ‘the number of Irishmen it takes to screw in a nail? Anyone? Eh? Ready? Five! One to hold the nail and four to spin the wall round.’
I thought that was genuinely funny and laughed for a bit.
When I finished, the place had got quieter.
‘How about you and me going outside?’ Uncle Thomais asked. He had done one of those lightning changes from extrovert good nature to black rage.
‘How about . . . How about the way to make an Irishman burn his ear? Do you know how to make an Irishman burn his ear?’ He watched me dangerously. ‘Anybody? Anybody know how to make an Irishman burn his ear?’
Nobody wanted to play that game.
‘I’ll tell you how to make an Irishman burn his ear . . . Phone him while he’s ironing!’
Somebody laughed. It was good to be a success. I joined him and went on for a while after he’d stopped.
‘Time to go.’
Primo had come for me. When I looked back from the door, the group had dispersed. The Irishman was by himself over at the cabinet of drinks. It looked as if I had altered the mood of his celebration.
In the car, the engine throbbed softly. Lights on the dash threw a dim glow up on Primo’s face. Double rows of headlights flowed at us as we came on to a motorway. The needle climbed and successive silhouettes peeled behind us into the darkness.
‘The Irish joke,’ Brond said conversationally. ‘It’s a shoddy response to the troubles across the water. The flood of jokes about Irish stupidity isn’t really a sign of the fabled British sense of humour.’
In the silence, I thought with the clarity of exhaustion about how often I had heard the word British that day.
‘It’s useful politically to persuade your own public,’ he said, ‘that any people you have to treat firmly are sub-human.’
‘The great British public. Primo and me both,’ I said. ‘Scottish soldiers.’
SIXTEEN
As we followed the path of our lights into darkness, Brond took my stick from where it lay across my knees.
‘Are you afraid,’ I asked remembering the bottle that I had held by his face, ‘I might try to use it as a weapon? It’s too light for that.’
‘So much for curiosity,’he said.
His hands moved and the stick lengthened between them.
‘It’s a piece of craftsmanship,’ he said. ‘You don’t appreciate my gifts. It was cored out on a hollow mandrel lathe using a spoon drill and a hand rest – they bore in about twenty inches from each end to meet – then plug here and hold it with a pinned ferrule; there a double silver fitting on the drawing end; lastly it’s packed with two pieces of split cane to hold . . .’his hands moved apart, ‘twenty-seven inches of tempered German steel.’
It was melodramatic and foolish, a kind of joke, except that nothing Brond did was foolish and if he joked it was in a foreign language about events on another planet. He handed me the stick and I took it, not mine now but his, not a dead thing any longer but like a sleeping servant – or a bad master.
He said, ‘It’s their unexpectedness I treasure.’
I wondered if unexpectedness was his euphemism for treachery.