‘Maybe I will lie down, then,’ he yielded.
He slept lightly and restlessly. Only a fraction of what was happening surfaced in his dream. A herd of panting cattle was driven past him on a dirt road by a man wheeling a bicycle, their mouths slavering in the heat. Agnes passed by holding breadcrumbs in her apron. A white car came round the lake. As it turned at the gate a child got out and came towards him with a telegram. He was fumbling in his pocket for coins to give to the child when he was woken by Agnes.
‘We’ll be late getting to the Royal if you don’t get up now,’ she was saying.
‘What time is it?’
When she told him the time, he knew they should be leaving in twenty minutes.
‘I don’t know if I want to go out tonight.’
‘Of course you’ll go out tonight. There’s nothing wrong with you, is there?’
When she said that he knew he had to go. He rose and washed, changed into his suit, combed his coarse white hair, and at exactly twenty to nine, as on every evening of their lives, they were closing the 37B door in Ainsworth Road behind them.
All the saloon regulars looked unusually happy and bright as they greeted the old couple in the Royal, and when Michael proffered the coins for the Guinness and pint of Bass, Denis pushed them away. ‘They’re on the house tonight, Michael. You have to make up for that missed bottle of Bass tonight.’
Blindly he carried the drinks towards Agnes at the table. When he turned and sat and faced the room with his raised glass the whole saloon rang with, ‘Cheers, Agnes. Cheers, Michael.’
‘You see it was all in your mind, Michael. Everybody’s the same as usual. Even happier,’ Agnes said afterwards in the quiet of the click of billiard balls coming from the Public Bar.
‘Maybe. Maybe, Agnes.’ Michael drank.
All the people were elated too on the small farms around the lakes for weeks after Fraser Woods had tried to hang himself from a branch of an apple tree in his garden, the unconcealed excitement in their voices as they said, ‘Isn’t it terrible what happened to poor Fraser?’ and the lust on their faces as they waited for their excitement to be mirrored.
‘We’ll go early to Tesco’s in the morning. And then you can come down for your bottle of Bass. And it’ll be the same as if nothing ever happened. What was it anyhow?’ Agnes said, warmed by the Guinness.
‘I suppose it was just a slip-up,’ Michael answered as he sipped slowly at his pint, trying to put off the time when he’d have to go up to the counter for their next round.
All Sorts of Impossible Things
They were out coursing on Sunday a last time together but they did not know it, the two friends, James Sharkey and Tom Lennon, a teacher and an agricultural instructor. The weak winter sun had thawed the fields soft enough to course the hare on, and though it still hung blood-orange above the hawthorns on the hill the rims of the hoof tracks were already hardening fast against their tread.
The hounds walked beside them on slip leashes, a purebred fawn bitch that had raced under the name of Coolcarra Queen, reaching the Final of the Rockingham Stakes the season before, and a wire-haired mongrel, no more than half hound, that the schoolmaster, James Sharkey, borrowed from Charlie’s bar for these Sundays. They’d been beating up the bottoms for some hours. An odd snipe, exploding out of the rushes before zigzagging away, was all that had risen.
‘If we don’t rise something before long we’ll soon have to throw our hats at it,’ Tom Lennon said, and it was a careless phrase. No one had seen the teacher without his eternal brown hat for the past twenty years. ‘I’ve been noticing the ground harden all right,’ the dry answer came.
‘Anyhow, I’m beginning to feel a bit humped.’ Tom Lennon looked small and frail in the tightly belted white raincoat.
‘There’s no use rimming it, then. There’ll be other Sundays.’
Suddenly a large hare rose ahead, bounded to the edge of the rushes, and then looped high to watch and listen. With a ‘Hulla, hulla,’ they slipped the hounds, the hare racing for the side of the hill. The fawn bitch led, moving in one beautiful killing line as she closed with the hare, the head eel-like as it struck; but the hare twisted away from the teeth, and her speed carried the fawn past. The hare had to turn again a second time as the mongrel coming up from behind tried to pick it in the turn. The two men below in the rushes watched in silence as the old dance played itself out on the bare side of the hilclass="underline" race, turn, race again; the hounds hunting well together, the mongrel making up with cunning what he lacked in grace, pacing himself to strike when the hare was most vulnerable — turning back from the fawn. But with every fresh turn the hare gained, the hounds slithering past on the hard ground. They were utterly beaten by the time the hare left them, going away through the hedge of whitethorns.
‘They picked a warrior there.’
‘That’s for sure,’ Tom Lennon answered as quietly.
The beaten hounds came disconsolately down, pausing at the foot of the hill to lap water from a wheelmark and to lick their paws. They came on towards the men. The paws were bleeding and some of the bitch’s nails were broken.
‘Maybe we shouldn’t have raced her on such hard ground,’ the teacher said by way of apology.
‘That’s no difference. She’ll never run in the Stakes again. They say there’s only two kinds to have — a proper dud or a champion. Her kind, the in-between, are the very worst. They’ll always run well enough to tempt you into having another go. Anyhow, there’s not the money for that any more,’ he said with a sad smile of reflection.
Coolcarra Queen was a relic of his bachelor days that he hadn’t been able to bear parting with on getting married and first coming to the place as temporary agricultural instructor.
They’d raced her in the Stakes. She’d almost won. They’d trained her together, turn and turn about. And that cold wet evening, the light failing as they ran off the Finals, they’d stood together in the mud beside the net of torn hares and watched this hare escape into the laurels that camouflaged the pen and the judge gallop towards the rope on the old fat horse, and stop, and lift the white kerchief instead of the red. Coolcarra Queen had lost the Rockingham Silver Cup and twenty-five pounds after winning the four races that had taken her to the Final.
‘Still, she gave us a run for our money,’ the teacher said as they put the limping hounds on the leashes and turned home.
‘Well, it’s over now,’ Tom Lennon said. ‘Especially with the price of steak.’
‘Your exams can’t be far off now?’ the teacher said as they walked. The exams he alluded to were to determine whether the instructor should be made permanent or let go.
‘In less than five weeks. The week after Easter.’
‘Are you anxious about it at all?’
‘Of course,’ he said sadly. ‘If they make me permanent I get paid whether I’m sick or well. They can’t get rid of me then. Temporary is only all right while you’re single.’
‘Do you foresee any snags?’
‘Not in the exams. I know as much as they’ll know. It’s the medical I’m afraid of.’
‘Still,’ the teacher began lamely and couldn’t go on. He knew that the instructor had been born with his heart on the wrong side and it was weak.
‘Not that they’ll pay much heed to instruction round here. Last week I came on a pair of gentlemen during my rounds. They’d roped a horse-mower to a brand new Ferguson. One was driving the Ferguson, the other sitting up behind on the horse machine, lifting and letting down the blade with a piece of wire. They were cutting thistles.’
‘That’s the form all right.’ The teacher smiled.