‘Sometimes I have been. But not always. Not always at all. I –’
‘ “Let’s go for a stroll,” the algebra teacher said. His clothes were stained with beer. “Let’s go up there,” he said. “It’s nice up there.” And in the pitch dark we climbed to the loft where the Wolf Cubs meet. He lit his cigarette-lighter and spread the tent out. I don’t mind what happens, I thought. Anything is better than nothing happening all my life. And then the man was sick.’
‘You told me that, Miss Fanshawe.’
‘ “You’re getting fat,” my mother might have said. “Look at Dora, Dad, getting fat.” And I would try to laugh. “A drunk has made me pregnant,” I might have whispered in the bungalow, suddenly finding the courage for it. And they would look at me and see that I was happy, and I would kneel by my bed and pour my thanks out to God, every night of my life, while waiting for my child.’ She paused and gave a little laugh. ‘They are waiting for us, those people, Carruthers.’
‘Yes.’
‘The clock on the mantelpiece still will not chime. “Cocoa,” my mother’ll say at half past nine. And when they die it’ll be too late.’
He could feel the train slowing, and sighed within him, a gesture of thanksgiving. In a moment he would walk away from her: he would never see her again. It didn’t matter what had taken place, because he wouldn’t ever see her again. It didn’t matter, all she had said, or all he had earlier said himself.
He felt sick in his stomach after the beer and the wine and the images she’d created of a life with her in a seaside bungalow. The food she’d raved about would be appalling; she’d never let him smoke. And yet, in the compartment now, while they were still alone, he was unable to prevent himself from feeling sorry for her. She was right when she spoke of her craziness: she wasn’t quite sane beneath the surface, she was all twisted up and unwell.
‘I’d better go and brush my teeth,’ he said. He rose and lifted his overnight case from the rack.
‘Don’t go,’ she whispered.
His hand, within the suitcase, had already grasped a blue sponge-bag. He released it and closed the case. He stood, not wishing to sit down again. She didn’t speak. She wasn’t looking at him now.
‘Will you be all right, Miss Fanshawe?’ he said at last, and repeated the question when she didn’t reply. ‘Miss Fanshawe?’
‘I’m sorry you’re not coming back to Ashleigh, Carruthers. I hope you have a pleasant holiday abroad.’
‘Miss Fanshawe, will you –’
‘I’ll stay in England, as I always do.’
‘We’ll be there in a moment,’ he said.
‘I hope you won’t go to the bad, Carruthers.’
They passed by houses now; the backs of houses, suburban gardens. Posters advertised beer and cigarettes and furniture. Geo. Small. Seeds, one said.
‘I hope not, too,’ he said.
‘Your mother’s on the platform. Where she always stands.’
‘Goodbye, Miss Fanshawe.’
‘Goodbye, Carruthers. Goodbye.’
Porters stood waiting. Mail-bags were on a trolley. A voice called out, speaking of the train they were on.
She didn’t look at him. She wouldn’t lift her head: he knew the tears were pouring on her cheeks now, more than before, and he wanted to say, again, that he was sorry. He shivered standing in the doorway, looking at her, and then he closed the door and went away.
She saw his mother greet him, smiling, in red as always she was. They went together to collect his luggage from the van, out of her sight, and when the train pulled away from the station she saw them once again, the mother speaking and Carruthers just as he always was, laughing his harsh laugh.
A Choice of Butchers
The upper landing of our house had brown linoleum on it and outside each of the bedroom doors there was a small black mat. From this square landing with its three mats and its window overlooking the backyard there rose a flight of uncarpeted steps that led to the attic room where Bridget, who was our maid, slept. The stairs that descended to the lower landing, where the bathroom and lavatory were and where my mother and father slept, were carpeted with a pattern of red flowers which continued down wards to a hall that also had brown linoleum on its floor. There was a hall-stand in the hall and beside it a high green plant in a brass pot, and a figure of the Holy Mother on a table, all by itself. The walls of the landings, and of the hall and the staircase, were papered gloomily in an oatmeal shade that had no pattern, only a pebbly roughness that was fashionable in my childhood in our West Cork town. On this hung two brown pictures, one of oxen dragging a plough over rough ground at sunrise, the other of a farmer leading a working horse towards a farmyard at the end of the day. It was against a background of the oatmeal shade and the oxen in the dawn that I, through the rails of the banisters on the upper landing, saw my father kissing Bridget at the end of one summer holiday.
I had come from my room on that warm September evening to watch for Henry Dukelow, who came up every night to say good-night to me. I had knelt down by the banisters, with my face against them, pressing hard so that I might be marked, so that Mr Dukelow would laugh when he saw me. ‘God, you’re tip-top,’ my father said in a whisper that travelled easily up to me, and then he put his arms round her shoulders and roughly hugged her, with his lips pressed on to her lips.
I was seven years of age, the afterthought of the family, as my father called me. My brothers and sisters were all grown up, but I didn’t feel then, not yet, that my parents had given so much to them that there wasn’t a lot left to give me. Once upon a time they had all been a family like any other family: the children in turn had left home, and then, when my mother should have been resting and my father finding life less demanding, I had arrived. I did not ever doubt my parents’ concern for me, but for the six months that he was in our house I felt that Mr Dukelow loved me as much as they did. ‘Say good-night to him for me,’ I often heard my mother calling out to him as he mounted the stairs to tell me my night-time story, and I grew up thinking of my mother as a tired person because that was what she was. Her hair was going grey and her face bore a fatigued look: Mr Dukelow said she probably didn’t sleep well. There were a lot of people who didn’t sleep well, he told me, sitting on my bed one night when I was seven, and I remember he went on talking about that until I must have fallen asleep myself.
Mr Dukelow, who occupied the room next to mine, taught me to play marbles on the rough surface of our backyard. He made me an aeroplane out of heavy pieces of wood he found lying about, and he explained to me that although a star could fall through the sky it would never land on the earth. He told me stories about Columbus and Vasco da Gama, and about the great emperors of Europe and the Battle of the Yellow Ford. He had a good memory for what had interested him at school, but he had forgotten as easily the rest: he had been a poor scholar, he said. He told me the plots of films he’d seen and of a play called Paddy the Next Best Thing. He spoke very quietly and he always answered my questions: a small man, as thin as a willow, bony and pale-faced and supposed to be delicate, different from my father. He was fifty-seven; my father was fifty-nine.
In the middle of the night that my father kissed Bridget Mr Dukelow came to my room again. He switched the light on and stood there in grey-striped pyjamas that were badly torn.
‘I could hear you crying,’ he said. ‘What’s the trouble with you?’
He wore spectacles with fine wire rims, and all his face seemed to have gone into his nose, which was thin and tapering. His greased hair was black, his hands were like a skeleton’s. The first night Mr Dukelow arrived in our house my father brought him into the kitchen, where my mother was reading the Irish Press at the table and Bridget was darning one of her black stockings. ‘I’ve employed this man,’ my father said, and as he stepped to one side of the doorway the bent figure of Mr Dukelow appeared suddenly and silently, and my father gestured in the manner of a ringmaster introducing a circus act. Mr Dukelow was carrying a cardboard suitcase that had too many clothes in it. I remember seeing the flannel material of a shirt protruding, for the case was not fastened as it was meant to be.