No one answered, and Attracta was aware of the children’s startled gaze. But the startled gaze was a natural reaction. She said to herself that it didn’t matter.
‘My story is one with hers,’ she said. ‘Horror stories, with different endings only. I think of her now and I can see quite clearly the flat she lived in in Belfast. I can see the details, correctly or not I’ve no idea. Wallpaper with a pattern of brownish-purple flowers on it, gaunt furniture casting shadows, a tea-caddy on the hired television set. I drag my body across the floors of two rooms, over a carpet that smells of dust and cigarette ash, over rugs and cool linoleum. I reach up in the kitchen, a hand on the edge of the sink: one by one I eat the aspirins until the bottle’s empty.’
There was a silence. Feet were shuffled in the schoolroom. No one spoke.
‘If only she had known,’ Attracta said, ‘that there was still a faith she might have had, that God does not forever withhold His mercy. Will those same men who exacted that vengeance on her one day keep bees and budgerigars? Will they serve in shops, and be kind to the blind and the deaf? Will they garden in the evenings and be good fathers? It is not impossible. Oh, can’t you see,’ she cried, ‘what happened in this town? Here, at the back of beyond. Can’t you appreciate it? And can’t you see her lying there, mice nibbling her dried blood?’
The children still were quiet, their faces still not registering the comment she wished to make. It was because she’d been clumsy, she thought. All she’d meant to tell them was never to despair. All she had meant to do was to prepare them for a future that looked grim. She had been happy, she said again. The conversation of Mr Purce had been full of the truth but it hadn’t made sense because the years had turned the truth around.
To the children she appeared to be talking now to herself. She was old, a few of them silently considered; that was it. She didn’t appear to understand that almost every day there was the kind of vengeance she spoke of reported on the television. Bloodshed was wholesale, girls were tarred and left for dead, children no older than they were armed with guns.
‘I only hope,’ they heard her saying, ‘she knows that strangers mourn her.’
Another silence lingered awkwardly and then she nodded at a particular child and the child rose and rang a hand-bell. The children filed away, well-mannered and docile as she had taught them to be. She watched them in the playground, standing in twos and threes, talking about her. It had meant nothing when she’d said that people change. The gleam of hope she’d offered had been too slight to be of use, irrelevant in the horror they took for granted, as part of life. Yet she could not help still believing that it mattered when monsters did not remain monsters for ever. It wasn’t much to put against the last bleak moments of Penelope Vade, but it was something for all that. She wished she could have made her point.
Twenty minutes later, when the children returned to the schoolroom, her voice no longer quivered, nor did it seem to struggle against tears. The older children learnt about agriculture in Sweden, the younger ones about the Pyrenees, the youngest that Munster had six counties. The day came to an end at three o’clock and when all the children had gone Attracta locked the schoolroom and walked to the house she had inherited in North Street.
A week later Archdeacon Flower’s successor came to, see her, his visit interrupting further violence on the television news. He beat about the bush while he nibbled biscuits and drank cups of tea by the fire; then he suggested that perhaps she should consider retiring one of these days. She was over sixty, he pointed out with his clerical laugh, and she replied that Mr Ayrie had gone on until seventy. Sixty, the clergyman repeated with another laugh, was the post’s retirement age. Children were a handful nowadays.
She smiled, thinking of her sixteen docile charges. They had chattered to their parents, and the parents had been shocked to hear that they’d been told of a man decapitated and a girl raped seven times. School was not for that, they had angrily protested to the clergyman, and he had had no option but to agree. At the end of the summer term there’d be a presentation of Waterford glass.
‘Every day in my schoolroom I should have honoured the small, remarkable thing that happened in this town. It matters that she died in despair, with no faith left in human life.’
He was brisk. For as long as most people could remember she had been a remarkable teacher; in no way had she failed. He turned the conversation to more cheerful topics, he ate more biscuits and a slice of cake. He laughed and even made a joke. He retailed a little harmless gossip.
Eventually she stood up. She walked with her visitor to the hall, shook hands with him and saw him out. In the sitting-room she piled the tea things on to a tray and placed it on a table by the door. She turned the television on again but when the screen lit up she didn’t notice it. The face of Penelope Vade came into her mind, the smile a little crooked, the freckled cheeks.
A Dream of Butterflies
Various people awoke with a sense of relief. Sleepily, Colin Rhodes wondered what there was to be relieved about. As he did in the moment of waking every morning, he encased with his left hand one of his wife’s plump breasts and then remembered the outcome of last night’s meeting. Miss Cogings, alone in her narrow bed and listening to a chorus of house-martins, remembered it with the same degree of satisfaction. So did the Poudards when their Teasmade roused them at a quarter to seven. So did the Reverend Feare, and Mr Mottershead and Mr and Mrs Tilzey, and the Blennerhassetts, who ran the Village Stores. Mrs Feare, up since dawn with an ailing child, was pleased because her husband was. There would be peace when there might have been war. A defeat had been inflicted.
The Allenbys, however, awoke in Luffnell Lodge with mixed feelings. What to do with the Lodge now that it remained unsold? How long would they have to wait for another buyer? For having made their minds up, they really wanted to move on as soon as possible. A bridging loan had been negotiated at one point but they’d decided against it because the interest was so high. They planned to buy a bungalow in a part of Cornwall that was noted for its warmth and dryness, both of which would ease Mrs Allenby’s arthritis. Everything that had been said at the meeting made sense to Mr and Mrs Allenby; they quite understood the general point of view. But they wished, that morning, that things might have been different.
‘That’s really bizarre,’ Hugh said in the Mansors’ breakfast-room.
‘Dreams often are.’
‘But butterflies –’
‘It has to do with the meeting.’
‘Ah, of course, the meeting.’
He saw at once what had been happening. He traced quite easily the series of his wife’s thoughts, one built upon the last, fact in the end becoming fantasy.
Emily buttered toast and reached for grapefruit marmalade. ‘Silly,’ she said, not believing that it was.
‘A bit,’ he agreed, smiling at her. He went on to talk of something else, an item in The Times, another airliner hijacked.
The sun filled their breakfast-room. It struck the bones of his compact features; it livened his calm grey hair. It found the strawberry mark, like a tulip, on her neck; it made her spectacles glint. They were the same age, fifty-two, not yet grandparents but soon to be. He dealt in property; she’d once been a teacher of Latin and Greek. She was small and given to putting on weight if she wasn’t carefuclass="underline" dumpy, she considered herself.
‘Don’t let it worry you,’ Hugh said, folding The Times for further perusal on the train.’It’s all over now.’
He was handsome in his thin way, and she was plain. Perhaps he had married her because he had not felt up to the glamour of a beautiful woman: as a young man, unproved in the world, he had had an inferiority complex, and success in middle age had not managed to shake it off. It wouldn’t have surprised him if the heights he’d scaled in his business world all of a sudden turned out to be a wasteland. He specialized in property in distant places, Jamaica, Spain, the Bahamas: some economic jolt could shatter everything. The house they lived in, on the edge of a Sussex village, was the symbol of his good fortune over the years. It was also his due, for he had worked doggedly; only his inferiority complex prevented him from taking it for granted. It puzzled him that he, so unpromising as a boy at school, had done so well; and occasionally, but not often, it puzzled him that they’d made a success of their marriage in times when the failure rate was high. Perhaps they’d made a go of it because she was modest too: more than once he’d wondered if that could be true. Could it be that Emily, so much cleverer than he, had found a level with him because her lack of beauty kept her in her place, as his inferiority complex kept him? She had said that as a girl she’d imagined she would not marry, assuming that a strawberry mark and dumpiness, and glasses too, would be too much for any man. He often thought about her as she must have been, cleverest in the class; while he was being slow on the uptake. ‘You’re very kind’ was what most often, in the way of compliments, Emily said to him.