From force of habit rather than anything else, Mrs Kincaid continued to wonder about Blakely after he’d gone. She wondered if he could be a road surveyor, since something about him reminded her of a road surveyor she’d once briefly known. She imagined him with a road gang, a smell of tar in the air, fresh chippings still pale on the renovated surface. Then Mrs Kincaid reminded herself that she wasn’t here to interest herself in a man she didn’t know, far from it. She had left her two suitcases in the newsagent’s shop where the bus had put her down. When she’d had something to eat and had made enquiries she’d go back and collect them.
‘Try Bann Street,’ the waitress said. ‘There’s a few that lets rooms there.’
Leave it, Mrs Kincaid warned herself again when she noticed Blakely coming out of Hirrel’s Café four days later, repeating her reminder to herself that she was not here for anything like that. She’d stay a month, she had decided; from experience a month was long enough for any bit of trouble to quieten. Talk of solicitors’ letters, of walking straight round to a police station, threats of this and that, all simmered away to nothing when a little time went by. Frayed tempers mended, pride came to terms with whatever foolishness she’d taken advantage of in the way of business. Not that much had mended in her own case, not that pride had ever recovered from the dent it had received, but her own case was different and always had been. Eighty-four thousand pounds the boarding-house had realized in 1960, more like ten times that it would be now. ‘We’d put the little enterprise in your name,’ the man she’d thought of as her fiancé had said. ‘No hanky-panky.’ But somehow in the process of buying what he always called the little enterprise the eighty-four thousand had slipped out of her name. Soon after that it disappeared and he with it. The little enterprise it was to purchase was a bookmaker’s in Argyle Street, an old bookie retiring, two generations of goodwill. A chain took it over a couple of months later.
These days Mrs Kincaid did her best to take the long view, telling herself that what had happened was like a death and that you couldn’t moan about a death for ever, not even to yourself. In her business activities she did not seek vengeance but instead sought to accumulate what was rightfully hers, keeping her accounts in a small red notebook, always with the hope that one day she would not have to do so, that her misfortune in the past would at last free her from its thrall.
Walking against a steady east wind on the day she saw Blakely for the second time, she recalled his lean face very clearly, his tufty hair, the hanging thread on his jacket where a button had come off. He’d be a bachelor or a widower, else he wouldn’t be taking his dinner in a café every day. You could tell at once the foot he dug with, as decent a Protestant foot as her own, never a doubt about that.
The room she had taken – not in Bann Street but above a butcher’s shop in Knipe Street – smelt of meat and suet. She had an electric ring to cook on, a sink for the washing of clothes and dishes, lavatory and bathroom a flight up. There was a television, a gas fire, a single bed under the window, and when she fried something on the electric ring the butchery smell disappeared for a while. Mrs Kincaid had been in worse places.
She brought back from the shops a bar of Kit-Kat, Woman’s Own, Hello!, The Lady, and a film magazine. She ate the chocolate bar, read a story about a late flowering of romance, made tea, slipped out of her skirt and blouse, slept, and dreamed she had married a clergyman to whom she’d once sold back the letters he’d written her. When she woke she washed herself, fried rashers and an egg, and went out again.
She sat alone at a table in the bar of Digby’s Hotel, listening to tunes of the fifties, all of which she was familiar with. Occasionally someone smiled at her, a man or a woman, the girl behind the bar, but generally they just went by. She heard talk about a dance. She would have gone on her own when she was younger, but those days were over now. She drank vodka with no more than a colouring of port in it, which was her tipple. She bought a packet of cigarettes, although as a general rule she didn’t smoke any more. She wasn’t going to be able to resist what had been put in her path: she knew that perfectly.
She knew it again when she woke up in the middle of the night and lay for a while awake in the darkness. The smell from the shop below had come back, and when she dropped back into sleep she dreamed that the man she had met in the café was in butcher’s clothes, separating lamb chops with a cleaver.
There was a traveller on his own by the table at the window, but that was the smallest table in the café and he had his samples’ case on the other chair, out of the way of people passing. Otherwise, Blakely’s was the only table that wasn’t shared.
‘Only she said go on over,’ the same woman who’d shared it with him before said.
‘You’re welcome. Sure, there’s nowhere else.’
‘Isn’t that the bad news?’ She nodded at the headline in his paper. A taxi-driver had been shot dead the evening before, the first murder since the cease-fires.
‘Aye,’ Blakely said. ‘It is that.’
She was dressed as she’d been before, in shades of fawn and brown – a skirt and cardigan, cream blouse, under the coat she’d taken off. There was a brooch, made to look like a flower, in her blouse.
‘The plate’s hot, Mr Blakely,’ Nellie warned, placing roast beef and potatoes and cabbage in front of him. She wiped the edge of the plate where gravy had left a residue.
‘Bread and butter and tea, Nellie,’ Mrs Kincaid ordered, remembering the name from the last time. ‘I don’t take much,’ she informed Blakely, ‘in the middle of the day. And jam,’ she called after the waitress.
‘It’s my main meal,’ Blakely explained, a note of mild justification in his tone.
‘Convenient, to go out for it.’
‘Ach, it is.’
‘You live in the town, Mr Blakely?’
‘A bit out.’
‘I thought maybe you would. You have the look of the open air.’
‘I’m a turkey farmer.’
‘Well, there you are.’
He worried a piece of beef into shreds, piled cabbage and potato on to his fork, soaking up a little gravy before conveying the lot to his mouth.
‘Not bad,’ he responded when he was asked if turkeys were fetching well.
‘Time was when turkeys were a Christmas trade and no more. Amn’t I right? Not that I know a thing about poultry.’
‘Oh, you’re right enough.’
‘I like the brown of a turkey. I’m told that’s unusual.’
‘It’s all white flesh they go for those times.’
‘You’d supply the supermarkets, would you?’
‘The most of it goes that way all right. Though there’s a few outlets locally.’
‘I have a room above Beatty’s.’
‘I sell to Beatty for Christmas.’
‘Well, there’s a coincidence for you!’
‘He’s a decent man, Henry Beatty.’
‘It’s not a bad little room.’
Further details were exchanged – about the room and then about the rearing, slaughtering and plucking of turkeys, the European regulations there were as regards hygiene and refrigeration. Divulging that she was a Belfast woman, Mrs Kincaid talked about the city. Blakely said he hadn’t been there since he lost his wife. She used to go for the shopping, he said. Brand’s, he said.
‘Oh, a great store, was Brand’s. You were always on the farm, Mr Blakely?’
‘Aye, I was.’
‘I was sorry to hear there about your wife.’
‘Aye.’
The plate of bread and butter arrived, with tea, and a small glass dish of gooseberry jam.