‘I looked in at the St Boniface,’ he says. ‘Understandably, I believe.’
‘I’m awfully sorry.’
‘Oh Lord, it’s not your fault.’
‘I -’
‘I know, I know.’
‘I couldn’t think.’
‘I couldn’t when I heard, myself.’
‘They mentioned it?’
‘Quicke couldn’t resist a little mention. It didn’t matter. Sooner or later someone would.’
‘Yes.’
‘The culprits will be exposed, the Master’s view is. Of course he’s wrong.’
‘You don’t seem drunk in the least.’ Relief has slipped through Vanessa during these exchanges. For a reason that is obscure to her, and for the first time since she turned the pages of the newspaper while waiting for the early-morning kettle to boil, she feels that nothing is as terrible as it seemed in those awful moments.
‘To the best of my knowledge I have never in my life been drunk before. The man poured three double whiskies, and that on top of sherry.’
She lifts the plates that cover their cold meat. She stirs the oil and vinegar, shakes the salad about when she has added a few spoonfuls, then pours on the rest. Perhaps they’ll go away, Vanessa’s thought is, perhaps he’ll take an early retirement, as one of them so unexpectedly did last year. She’d pack up at once, she wouldn’t hesitate. Liguria, or Sansepolcro, where his favourite paintings are. Hers, too, they have become. ‘I could live here happily,’ he has said, over coffee in Sansepolcro.
‘I can tell you how this has happened,’ he says. ‘If you would care to know.’
‘Panic,’ she begins to say, and ceases when he shakes his head, grey hair as smooth as a helmet.
‘An act of compassion,’ he corrects.
‘But it was stupid. To try to suppress what cannot be suppressed -’
‘Why cannot an act of compassion be a stupid one? I can tell you,’ he repeats exactly, ‘how this has happened. If you would care to know.’
‘Some horrid, wretched student.’
‘I am not the sort to inspire a grudge. I am too shadowy and grey, too undramatic. I annoy too little, I do not attack.’
She watches the buttering of a piece of baguette, the knife laid down, the meticulous loading of tongue and salad on to a fork, the smear of mustard. She pours his coffee; he likes it with his food at this time of day, with French bread in particular, he has often said. My God, Vanessa thinks, it might be true. He might not be here now.
‘Imagine Kellfittard opening his paper this morning. Imagine his happy hour or two.’
For a moment she is confused, thinking he means Kellfittard is responsible for this. He says, ‘And then the rug pulled out from under him. Generations have suffered from Kellfittard’s wit. It passes for that, you know. So much we fusties say passes for wit.’
‘But you -’
‘They would not mind about me. Whoever they are who got this going would not think twice about reaping me in before I’m due. What’s famous here is Kellfittard’s abiding passion for someone else’s wife.’
The last time Kellfittard stopped to talk to her yesterday’s garlic was on his breath. Stopping to talk to her has always been his ploy, and smiling in a secretive way – as if, by doing so, secrets are created.
‘Fall-guy, do they call it?’ she hears her husband say. ‘I am the fall-guy. ’
He has winkled out the truth, sitting in the public house he gave the name of, which she has often passed. The truth doesn’t make much difference, and certainly is no consolation. Yet for her older husband it had to be established, if only because it’s there somewhere. Students who are no longer students have got their own back. He is an incidental figure, and so is she.
‘Well, that is that,’ he says. ‘Four notices in all, Quicke said. Space to spare on a Saturday.’
‘There will be letters.’
‘Oh, and apologies will be printed. So Quicke says too.’
Something in his tone, or in what he has said, causes her to realize that she was wrong when she imagined him buying the newspapers. He has not done so. He asks about the coffee and she says Kenya.
He nods. The coffee’s good, he says. The other matter’s over, he does not add, but Vanessa knows it is. Once Kellfittard gave her a box of chocolates, Bendicks’ Peppermints because he knew she liked them. ‘I bought these by mistake,’ he said, the lie so damaging the gesture that the gesture lost its point. It would have been silly not to accept them.
‘Linderfoot’s put on another stone, I’d say. How fortunate the wives are to be left at home!’
His wisdom was what she loved when first she loved him, when she was still a girl. She called it that, though only to herself. Not brains, they all had brains. Not skill. Not knowing everything, for they knew less than they imagined. His wisdom is almost indefinable, what a roadworker might have, a cinema usher or a clergyman, or a child. Her mother would not understand, and he himself would deny that he is wise. Of course the papers are not on the hall table; of course he hasn’t read a word – the subtle slights wrapped up as worthiness, and qualities he did not possess made his because it is the thing to do, all of valediction’s clichés.
‘No, no, a blunder,’ she hears him say when the telephone rings, the first time it has today, the house of mourning left to itself until this moment. ‘No, most ridiculous,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry if I startled you.’
He laughs, replacing the receiver, and Vanessa does not say she loves him, although she wants to. Absurd, to have thought of hiding away in Italy, packing everything up, leaving for ever his beautiful city just because they have been involved in someone else’s hoax.
He has worn the better of the two, Vanessa reflects. Age in his features was always there; her beauty loses a little every day. ‘I love your wisdom,’ she wants to say, but still is shy to use that word, fearing a display of her naïvety would make her foolish.
‘My dear,’ he murmurs in the calmness they have reached, and holds her as he did the day he first confessed his adoration. It is the wedding of their differences that protects them, steadfast in the debris of the storm.
Against the Odds
Mrs Kincaid decided to lie low. There had been a bit of bother, nothing much but enough to cause her to change her address. From time to time she was obliged to do so.
She wondered about Portrush. It was May, which meant that the holiday accommodation would still be available at low-season terms. She wondered about Cushendall, which she would have preferred because she liked the air there, but only three years had passed since her last visit and somehow three years didn’t feel quite long enough. Cushendun, Ballygalley, Portstewart, Ardglass, Bangor, Kilkeeclass="underline" Mrs Kincaid had breathed the air in all of them.
This time, though, she decided on an inland town. She knew many of these also, Armagh and Lisburn in particular, but Ballymena, Magherafelt, Lurgan and Portadown almost as well. She was a Belfast woman herself, but long ago had made all the territory of the Six Counties her business ground. Only once, in 1987, had she strayed outside the North of Ireland, taking the Larne crossing to Stranraer, then travelling on to Glasgow, an episode in her life she regretted and preferred not to dwell upon. Equally regretted was a suspended sentence in the Derry courts in 1981, since it had ruled out as a place to do business in a city she was particularly fond of.
Mrs Kincaid – with no claim to that name other than her occasional use of it – was just over eleven stone, and tall. Although well covered, she gave no impression of plumpness; no bloated or sagging flesh seemed superfluous beneath her clothes. Her arms were sturdy, her legs looked strong. In her own opinion her biggish face was something she got away with, no feature in it particularly objectionable, neither a fallen-away chin nor protruding teeth. Modest in her dress, careful not to overdo her use of perfume and make-up, she was sixty years old, admitting to fifty-one. Her easy smile worked wonders.