‘You can talk here,’ said my mother with severity. I could see her saying to herself that it was the half-day and if my father entered Neenan’s he’d remain there for the afternoon.
‘Hurry up, Henry,’ said my father, scraping his chair as he pushed it back on the flagged floor. ‘A tip-top stew,’ he repeated. He made a noise in his mouth, sucking through his teeth, a noise that was familiar to all of us. He told Mr Dukelow he’d be waiting for him in Neenan’s.
‘Keep an eye on him,’ my mother murmured when he’d gone, and Mr Dukelow nodded.
‘I would have told you that tonight,’ he said to me. ‘I didn’t want to say a thing until I’d mentioned it to your father first.’
‘Mr Dukelow’ll be here a month yet.’ My mother smiled at me. ‘He can tell you a good few stories in that time.’
But Mr Dukelow in fact did not remain in our house for another month. When he returned with my father later that day, my father, in a better mood than ever, said:
‘We’ve come to a good agreement. Henry’s going to pack his traps. He’ll catch the half-seven bus.’
But Mr Dukelow didn’t say anything. He walked from the kitchen without swaying like my father was swaying.
My father had his hat on. and he didn’t take it off. He took his turnip watch from his waistcoat pocket and examined it. ‘I can’t see without my glasses,’ he said to me. ‘Will you take a gander at it, boy?’
He never wore glasses, but he often made the joke when he’d been down to Neenan’s for a while. I told him it was twenty past six. He put the stumps of two fingers on my head and said I was a great boy. Did I know, he asked me, that in six months’ time I’d be an uncle? He had a way of touching me with his stumps instead of with the fingers that remained with him, just as he had a way of pushing from him a plate from which he’d eaten a meal. ‘Don’t forget to tell the teacher,’ he said. ‘It’s not every day he has an uncle to instruct.’
My mother took a barm brack from a tin and began to butter it for Mr Dukelow before he went. Bridget moved a kettle on to the hot area of the stove. It boiled at once. ‘Will I fry him something?’ she asked my mother.
‘There’s rashers there,’ said my mother, ‘and a bit of black pudding. Do him eggs, Bridget, and a few potato-cakes.’
‘He’s going,’ repeated my father. His face, redder than usually it was, had sweat on the sides of it. ‘He’s going,’ he said again.
I was sitting at the end of the table with a comic spread out in front of me. While I gazed at my father half my vision retained the confused mass of cartoon characters.
‘Well, that’s that,’ said my father.
He stood there swaying, his feet rooted to the kitchen floor, like a statue about to topple in a wind. He was wearing the blue-striped suit that he always wore on the half-day; his hands were hanging by his sides.
‘You should be bloody ashamed of yourself,’ he said suddenly, and I thought he was talking to me. He wasn’t looking at any of us; his eyes were turned upwards, regarding a corner of the ceiling. ‘A chancer like that,’ he said, ‘that gives a young fellow two-bob pieces.’ Instinctively I knew then that he was speaking to my mother, even though she did not acknowledge his remarks.
‘Sent up from Satan,’ he said. ‘Sent up to make wickedness. I’m sorry about that thing, Bridget.’
Bridget shook her head, implying that it didn’t matter, and I knew they were referring to what had happened in the hall last night.
‘Tell Henry Dukelow I’ll see him at the bus.’ He moved to the back door, adding that he was returning to Neenan’s until it was time to say goodbye to Mr Dukelow. ‘He’ll never make a butcher,’ he said, ‘Or any other bloody thing either.’
I closed the comic and watched my mother and Bridget preparing Mr Dukelow’s last meal in our house. They didn’t speak and I was afraid to, now. I still couldn’t understand why this series of events was taking place. I tried to connect one occurrence with another, but I failed. I felt forgotten in the house: I might have been dead at the table for all they considered me: they were assuming I had no mind.
Mr Dukelow came into the silence, carrying the suitcase he had first carried into the kitchen six months ago, bound up with what looked like the same piece of string. He ate in silence, and Bridget and my mother sat at the table, not saying anything either. I pretended to read the comic, but all the time I was thinking that I’d rather have Mr Dukelow for my father. I couldn’t help thinking it and I began to imagine my father sitting on the Bantry bus and Mr Dukelow staying where he was, running the shop better than my father had ever run it, cutting the meat better. I thought of Mr Dukelow in the big bed with my mother, lying asleep beside her. I saw his hands on the white sheets, the thin clever hands instead of hands that made you turn your head away. I saw Mr Dukelow and my mother and myself going out for a walk together on a Sunday afternoon, and Mr Dukelow telling us about Vasco da Gama and Columbus. Mr Dukelow could spend the afternoon in Neenan’s and not sway and lurch when he came back. There was no need for Mr Dukelow to go kissing the maid.
‘I’m sorry I upset him,’ said Mr Dukelow suddenly. ‘He’s a decent man.’
‘It has nothing to do with anything,’ said my mother. ‘He’s in a bad way with drink.’
‘Yes,’ said Mr Dukelow.
As out of a fog the truth came in pieces to me, and some of the pieces as yet were missing. In six months Mr Dukelow had become a better butcher than my father and my father was jealous of that. Jealousy had caused him to see Mr Dukelow as a monster; jealousy had spread from him in different directions until it wrapped my mother and myself, and tortured my father’s pride until he felt he must get his own back and prove himself in some way.
‘I’ll say goodbye,’ said Mr Dukelow, and I hated my father then for his silly pettiness. I wanted Mr Dukelow to go to my mother and kiss her as my father had kissed Bridget. I wanted him to kiss Bridget too, in a way more elegant than the way of my father.
But none of that happened, nor did I ask why, in the face of everything, my father was being described as a decent man. Mr Dukelow left the kitchen, having shaken hands with the three of us. I sat down again at the table while my mother and Bridget prepared the tea. They did not say anything, but I thought to myself that I could see in Bridget’s flushed face a reflection of what was passing in her mind: that Mr Dukelow was a nicer man than the porter at the Munster and Leinster Bank. My mother’s face was expressionless, but I thought to myself that I knew what expression would be there if my mother cared to permit its presence.
Again I pretended I was reading the comic, but all the time I was thinking about what had silently occurred in our house and how for no sensible reason at all my father’s rumbustiousness had spoilt everything. No one but my father could not love Mr Dukelow: no one in the wide world, I thought, except that red-faced man with stumps on his hands, who fell over chairs when he’d been down in Neenan’s, who swayed and couldn’t read the time. I thought about the ugliness of my father’s jealous nature and the gentleness it had taken exception to. ‘Sent up from Satan,’ his stumbling voice had ridiculously announced. ‘Sent up to make wickedness.’ How could it be, I wondered, that I was the child of one instead of the other?
‘Well, mister-me-buck,’ said my father, returning to the kitchen after a time. When I looked at him I began to cry and my mother took me up to bed, saying I was tired.
O Fat White Woman
Relaxing in the garden of her husband’s boarding-school, Mrs Digby-Hunter could not help thinking that it was good to be alive. On the short grass of the lawn, tucked out of sight beneath her deck-chair, was a small box of Terry’s All Gold chocolates, and on her lap, open at page eight, lay a paper-backed novel by her second-favourite writer of historical fiction. In the garden there was the pleasant sound of insects, and occasionally the buzzing of bees. No sound came from the house: the boys, beneath the alert tutelage of her husband and Mr Beade, were obediently labouring, the maids, Dympna and Barbara, were, Mrs Digby-Hunter hoped, washing themselves.