‘I don’t know why I did it, Miss Machaen.’
Sarah tried to smile because she didn’t want to be unkind. She ran her tongue about the inside of her mouth, which was dry, as though she’d eaten salt. She said:
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It does to me. I couldn’t sleep nights.’
‘It was just a misunderstanding.’
Sandra Pond didn’t say anything. She let a silence gather, and Sarah realized that she was doing so deliberately. Sandra Pond had come back to see how things were, to discover if, with time, the idea appealed to Sarah now, if she’d come to terms with the strangeriess of it. As she stood there with the wire basket, she was aware that Sandra Pond had waited for an answer to her letter, that even before that, at the Christmas party, she had hoped for some sign. The girl was staring down at the cream-coloured tiles of the floor, her hands awkwardly by her sides.
The flights of fancy tumbled into Sarah’s mind, jogging each other for precedence. They came in flashes: she and Sandra Pond sitting down to a meal, and walking into the foyer of a theatre, and looking at the Madonna of the Meadow in the National Gallery, and then a scene like the scene with the man called George occurred.
Sandra Pond looked up and at once the flights of fancy snapped out, like lights extinguished. What would people say? Sarah thought again, as she had on the night of the party. What would her brothers say to see passion thumping at their sister from the eyes of Sandra Pond? What would Elizabeth say, or Anne, or Mr Everend, or her dead father and mother? Would they cry out, amazed and yet delighted, that her plainness should inspire all this, that her plainness at last was beauty? Or would they shudder with disgust?
‘I can’t help being,’ Sandra Pond said, ‘the way I am.’
Sarah shook her head, trying to make the gesture seem sympathetic. She wanted to explain that she knew the girl had come specially back, to see what passing time had done, but she could not bring herself to. To have mentioned passing time in that way would have begun another kind of conversation. It was all ridiculous, standing here in the Express Dairy.
‘I just wanted to say that and to say I was sorry. Thank you for listening, Miss Machaen.’
She was moving away, the heels of her shoes making a clicking noise on the cream-tiled floor. The smooth back of her head was outlined against packets of breakfast cereals and then against stacks of Mother’s Pride bread. Something about her shoulders suggested to Sarah that she was holding back tears.
‘Excuse me, dear,’ a woman said, poking around Sarah to reach for oxtail soup.
‘Oh, sorry.’ Mechanically she smiled. She felt shaky and wondered if her face had gone pale. She couldn’t imagine eating any of the food she’d selected. She couldn’t imagine opening a tin or unwrapping butter without being overcome by the memory of Sandra Pond’s sudden advent in the shop. Her instinct was to replace the goods on the shelves and she almost did so. But it seemed too much of a gesture, and too silly. Instead she carried the wire basket to the cashier and paid for what she’d chosen, transferring everything into her shopping-bag.
She walked away from the Express Dairy, by the newsagent’s and the butcher’s and the Martinez Dry Cleaners, who were offering a bargain, three garments cleaned for the normal price of one. She felt, as she had when the man called George had suddenly lost interest in her body, a pain inside her somewhere.
There was a bus stop, but Sandra Pond was not standing by it. Nor was she on the pavements that stretched on either side of a road that was busy with Saturday-morning traffic. Nor did she emerge from the telephone box, nor from the newsagent’s, nor from Walton’s the fruiterer’s.
Sarah waited, still looking about. Sandra Pond had been genuinely sorry; she’d meant it when she’d said she’d hated causing the upset. ‘Please come and have coffee,’ were the words Sarah had ready to say now. ‘It’s really quite all right.’ But she did not say them, because Sandra Pond had not lingered. And in a million years, Sarah thought, she would not ever find her.
Attracta
Attracta read about Penelope Vade in a newspaper, an item that upset her. It caused her to wonder if all her life as a teacher she’d been saying the wrong things to the children in her care. It saddened her when she thought about the faces that had passed through her schoolroom, ever since 1937. She began to feel she should have told them about herself.
She taught in a single schoolroom that hadn’t altered much since the days when she’d been a pupil in it herself. There were portraits of England’s kings and queens around the walls, painted by some teacher in the past. There were other pictures, added at some later date, of Irish heroes: Niall of the Nine Hostages, Lord Edward FitzGerald, Wolfe Tone and Grattan. Maps of Europe and of Ireland and of England, Wales and Scotland hung side by side. A new blackboard, attached to the wall, had ten years ago replaced the old pedestal one. The globe had always been there in Attracta’s time, but since it did not designate political boundaries it wasn’t much out of date. The twenty-five wooden desks more urgently needed to be replaced.
In the schoolroom Attracta taught the sixteen Protestant children of the town. The numbers had been sometimes greater in the past, and often fewer; sixteen was an average, a number she found easy to manage when divided into the four classes that the different ages demanded. The room was large, the desks arranged in groups; discipline had never been a problem. The country children brought sandwiches for lunch, the children of the town went home at midday. Attracta went home herself, to the house in North Street which she’d inherited from her Aunt Emmeline and where now she lived alone. She possessed an old blue Morris Minor but she did not often drive it to and from her schoolroom, preferring to make the journey on foot in order to get fresh air and exercise. She was a familiar figure, the Protestant teacher with her basket of groceries or exercise-books. She had never married, though twice she’d been proposed to: by an exchange clerk in the Provincial Bank and by an English visitor who’d once spent the summer in the area with his parents. All that was a long time ago now, for Attracta was sixty-one. Her predecessor in the schoolroom, Mr Ayrie, hadn’t retired until he was over seventy. She had always assumed she’d emulate him in that.
Looking back on it, Attracta didn’t regret that she had not married. She hadn’t much cared for either of the men who’d proposed to her and she didn’t mind being alone at sixty-one in her house in North Street. She regularly went to church, she had friends among the people who had been her pupils in the past. Now and again in the holidays she drove her Morris Minor to Cork for a day’s shopping and possibly a visit to the Savoy or the Pavilion, although the films they offered were not as good as they’d been in the past. Being on her own was something she’d always known, having been both an only child and an orphan. There’d been tragedy in her life but she considered that she had not suffered. People had been good to her.
English Girl’s Suicide in Belfast the headline about Penelope Vade said, and below it there was a photograph, a girl with a slightly crooked smile and freckled cheeks. There was a photograph of her husband in army uniform, taken a few weeks before his death, and of the house in Belfast in which she had later rented a flat. From the marks of blood on carpets and rugs, the item said, it is deduced that Mrs Vade dragged herself across the floors of two rooms. She appears repeatedly to have fainted before she reached a bottle of aspirins in a kitchen cupboard. She had been twenty-three at the time of her death.