‘What are you crying for?’ he asked me on that later occasion. ‘What’s up with you?’
‘Go away, Mr Dukelow.’
A frown appeared on his white forehead. He went away, leaving the light on, and he returned within a minute carrying a packet of cigarettes and a cigarette-lighter. He always smoked Craven A, claiming that they were manufactured from a superior kind of tobacco. He lit one and sat on my bed. He talked, as often he did, about the moment of his arrival at our house and how he had paused for a moment outside it.
Looking at our house from the street, you saw the brown hall door, its paintwork grained to make it seem like mahogany. There was a brass knocker and a letter-box that every morning except Sunday were cleaned with Brasso by Bridget. To the right of the hall door, and dwarfing it, were the windows of my father’s butcher shop, with its sides of mutton hanging from hooks, tripe on a white enamel dish, and beef and sausages and mince and suet.
Afterwards, when he became my friend, Mr Dukelow said that he had stood on the street outside the shop, having just got off the Bantry bus. With his suitcase weighing him down, he had gazed at the windows, wondering about the shop and the house, and about my father. He had not come all the way from Bantry but from a house in the hills somewhere, where he had been employed as some kind of manservant. He had walked to a crossroads and had stood there waiting for the bus: there had been dust on his shoes that night when first he came into our kitchen. ‘I looked at the meat in the window,’ he told me afterwards, ‘and I thought I’d rather go away again.’ But my father, expecting him, had come out of the shop and had told him to come on in. My father was a big man; beside Mr Dukelow he looked like a giant.
Mr Dukelow sat on my bed, smoking his Craven A. He began to talk about the advertisement my father had placed in the Cork Examiner for an assistant. He repeated the words my father had employed in the advertisement and he said he’d been nervous even to look at them. ‘I had no qualifications,’ Mr Dukelow said. ‘I was afraid.’
That night, six months before, there’d been that kind of fear in his face. ‘Sit down, Mr Dukelow,’ my mother had said. ‘Have you had your tea?’ He shook hands with my mother and myself and with Bridget, making a great thing of it, covering up his shyness. He said he’d had tea, although he confessed to me afterwards that he hadn’t. ‘You’ll take a cup, anyway,’ my mother offered, ‘and a piece of fruit-cake I made?’ Bridget took a kettle from the range and poured boiling water into a teapot to warm it. ‘Errah, maybe he wants something stronger,’ my father said, giving a great gusty laugh. ‘Will we go down to Neenan’s, Henry?’ But my mother insisted that, first of all, before strong drink was taken, before even Mr Dukelow was led to his room, he should have a cup of tea and a slice of fruit-cake. ‘He’s hardly inside the door,’ she said chidingly to my father, ‘before you’re lifting him out again.’ My father, who laughed easily, laughed again. ‘Doesn’t he have to get to know the people of the town?’ he demanded. ‘It’s a great little town,’ he informed Mr Dukelow. ‘There’s tip-top business here.’ My father had only six fingers and one thumb: being a clumsy man, he had lost the others at different moments, when engaged in his trade. When he had no fingers left he would retire, he used to say, and he would laugh in his roaring way, and add that the sight of a butcher with no fingers would be more than customers could tolerate.
‘I often think back,’ said Mr Dukelow, ‘to the kindness of your mother that first time.’
‘He kissed Bridget in the hall,’ I said. ‘He said she was looking great.’
‘Ah, no.’
‘I saw him through the banisters.’
‘Is it a nightmare you had? Will I get your mammy up?’
I said it wasn’t a nightmare I had had: I said I didn’t want my mother. My mother was sleeping beside him in their bed and she didn’t know that he’d been kissing the maid.
‘She’d go away,’ I said. ‘My mother would go away.’
‘Ah no, no.’
‘He was kissing Bridget.’
Once, saying good-night to me, Mr Dukelow had unexpectedly given me a kiss, but it was a kiss that wasn’t at all like the kiss I had observed in the hall. Mr Dukelow had kissed me because my mother was too tired to climb the stairs; he had kissed me in case I felt neglected. Another time, just as unexpectedly, he had taken a florin from his waistcoat pocket and had put it under my pillow, telling me to buy sweets with it. ‘Where d’you get that from?’ my father had demanded the next day, and when I told him he hit the side of his leg with his fist, becoming angry in a way that puzzled me. Afterwards I heard him shouting at my mother that Henry Dukelow had given me a two-bob bit and had she anything to say to that? My father was sometimes so peculiar in his behaviour that I couldn’t make him out. My mother’s quietness was always more noticeable when he was present; I loved her for her quietness.
‘He had a few jars in tonight.’
‘Was he drunk, Mr Dukelow?’
‘I think he was.’
‘My mother –’
‘Will I tell you a story?’
‘No, no.’
I imagined Bridget, as I had been imagining her while I lay awake, thinking to herself that she’d give my mother her marching orders. I imagined, suddenly, my mother doing Bridget’s work in the kitchen and Bridget standing at the door watching her. She was a plump girl, red-cheeked, with black curly hair. She had fat arms and legs, and she wasn’t as tall as my mother. She must have been about twenty-five at the time; Mr Dukelow had told me that my mother was fifty-one. Bridget used to bring me the green glass balls that fishermen use for floating their nets, because she lived by the sea and often found them washed up on the strand. She didn’t tell me stories like Mr Dukelow did, but sometimes she’d read to me out of one of the romances she borrowed from a library that the nuns ran. All the books had brown paper covers on them to keep them from getting dirty, with the titles written in ink on the front. I couldn’t remember a time that Bridget hadn’t been in the house, with those brown-covered volumes, cycling back from her Sunday afternoon off with fish and vegetables in a basket. I had always liked her, but she was different from my mother: I was fonder of my mother.
‘If my mother died,’ I said, ‘he would be married to Bridget. She didn’t mind it when he kissed her.’
Mr Dukelow shook his head. She might have been taken unawares, he pointed out: she might have minded it and not been able to protest owing to surprise. Maybe she’d protested, he suggested, after I’d run back to bed.
‘She’s going out with the porter in the Munster and Leinster Bank,’ he said. ‘She’s keen on that fellow.’
‘My father’s got more money.’
‘Don’t worry about your father now. A little thing like that can happen and that’s the end of it. Your father’s a decent man.’
It was typical of Mr Dukelow to say that my father was a decent man, even though he knew my father didn’t like him. In the shop Mr Dukelow outclassed him: after he’d recovered from his initial nervousness, he’d become neater with the meat than my father was, and it was impossible to imagine Mr Dukelow banging through his thin fingers with the cleaver, or letting a knife slip into his flesh. My father said Mr Dukelow had a lot to learn, but it was my father really who had a lot to learn, since he hadn’t been able to learn properly in the first place. Once, a woman called Mrs Tighe had returned a piece of meat to the shop, complaining that it had a smell. ‘Will you watch that, Henry?’ my father expostulated after Mrs Tighe had left the shop, but Mrs Tighe hadn’t said it was Mr Dukelow who had sold her the meat. I was there myself at the time and I knew from the expression on Mr Dukelow’s face that it was my father who had sold the bad meat to Mrs Tighe. ‘Any stuff like that,’ my father said to him, ‘mince up in the machine.’ I could see Mr Dukelow deciding that he intended to do no such thing: it would go against his sensitivity to mince up odorous meat, not because of the dishonesty of the action but because he had become a more prideful butcher than my father, even though he was only an assistant. Mr Dukelow would throw such a piece of meat away, hiding it beneath offal so that my father couldn’t accuse him of wasting anything.