‘Oh no, I love you, Tony.’
All over London, sleeping now, were tomorrow’s wedding guests — her mother and her father, her friends come all the way from Schelesnau. Her sisters’ bridesmaids’ dresses were laid out. Flowers had been ordered, and a be-ribboned car. The grass of the hotel lawns was trimmed for the reception. In her house by the sea Tony’s aunt had ironed the clothes she’d chosen, and Liese imagined them waiting on their hangers. The morning flights would bring more guests from Germany. She had been stubborn about the city of their romance. There would have been no old woman’s sleep disturbed in Schelesnau, no ugly unintended incident. Why did she know that the dead were carried from a house in a plain long box, not a coffin?
‘We are different kinds of people, Tony.’
‘Because you are German and I am English? Is that it? That history means something after all?’
She shook her head. Why did he think that? Why did he go off so much in the wrong direction, seizing so readily a useful cliché?
‘We are not enemies, we are friends.’ She said a little more, trying to explain what did not seem to her to be complicated. Yet she felt she made it so, for the response was bewilderment.
‘Remember that office party?’ Tony said. ‘The quarrelling woman in red? The waitress smiling when we went off together? 00178. Remember that?’
She tried to, but the images would not come as clearly as they usually did. ‘Yes, I remember,’ she said.
The doubt in their exchanges brought hesitation, was an inflexion that could not be disguised. Silences came, chasms that each time were wider.
‘This has to do with us, not with the past we did not know.’ Liese shook her head, firm in her emphasis.
Tony nodded and, saying nothing, felt the weight of patience. He wondered about it in a silence that went on for minutes, before there was the far-off rattle of the human voice, faint and small. He looked from the window to where Liese had laid the receiver on the table. He watched her move to pick it up.
*
They stood together while a clergyman repeated familiar lines. A ring was passed from palm to palm. When the last words were spoken they turned to walk away together from the clergyman and the altar.
The wedding guests strolled on tidy hotel lawns. A photographer fussed beneath a bright blue sky. ‘You are more beautiful than I ever knew,’ Tony whispered while more champagne was drunk and there was talk in German and in English. ‘And I love you more.’
Liese smiled in the moment they had purloined, before another speech was called for, before her father expressed his particular joy that the union of two families brought with it today the union of two nations. ‘We are two foolish people,’ Tony had said when at last the telephone receiver was replaced, after the journey to the loft had been retailed in detail, an apology offered because carrying out the instructions had taken so long. They had embraced, the warmth of their relief sensual as they clung to one another. And the shadow of truth that had come was lost in the euphoria.
‘I’m sorry,’ Liese said in the next day’s sunshine. ‘I’m sorry I was a nuisance.’
Glasses were raised to greater happiness than the happiness of the day. Together they smiled and waved from the car when it came to take them away. Then private at last, they let their tiredness show, each reaching for a hand. Their thoughts were different. He had been right. Yet again, for Tony, that conclusion repeated itself: not for an instant in the night had he doubted that he’d been right. Did love spawn victims? Liese wondered. Had they been warned off a territory of unease that did not yet seem so? Why was it that passing incidents seemed more significant in people’s lives and their relationships than the enmity or amity of nations? For a moment Liese wanted to speak of that, and almost did before deciding not to.
The Hill Bachelors
In the kitchen of the farmhouse she wondered what they’d do about her, what they’d suggest. It was up to them; she couldn’t ask. It wouldn’t be seemly to ask, it wouldn’t feel right.
She was a small woman, spare and wiry, her mourning clothes becoming her. At sixty-eight she had ailments: arthritis in her knuckles and her ankles, though only slightly a nuisance to her; a cataract she was not yet aware of. She had given birth without much difficulty to five children, and was a grandmother to nine. Born herself far from the hills that were her home now, she had come to this house forty-seven years ago, had shared its kitchen and the rearing of geese and hens with her husband’s mother, until the kitchen and the rearing became entirely her own. She hadn’t thought she would be left. She hadn’t wanted it. She didn’t now.
*
He walked into the hills from where the bus had dropped him on the main road, by Caslin’s petrol pumps and shop across the road from the Master McGrath Bar and Lounge, owned by the Caslins also. It was midday and it was fine. After four hours in two different buses he welcomed the walk and the fresh air. He had dressed himself for the funeral so that he wouldn’t have to bring the extra clothes in a suitcase he’d have had to borrow. Overnight necessities were in a ragged blue shopping bag which, every working day, accompanied him in the cab of the lorry he drove, delivering sacks of flour to the premises of bakers, and cartons of pre-packed bags to retailers.
Everything was familiar to him: the narrow road, in need of repair for as long as he had known it, the slope rising gently at first, the hills in the far distance becoming mountains, fields and conifers giving way to marsh and a growth that couldn’t be identified from where he walked but which he knew was fern, then heather and bog cotton with here and there a patch of grass. Not far below the skyline were the corrie lakes he had never seen.
He was a dark-haired young man of twenty-nine, slightly made, pink cheeks and a certain chubbiness about his features giving him a genial, easygoing air. He was untroubled as he walked on, reflecting only that a drink and a packet of potato crisps at the Master McGrath might have been a good idea. He wondered how Maureen Caslin had turned out; when they were both fifteen he’d thought the world of her.
At a crossroads he turned to the left, on to an unmade-up boreen, scarcely more than a track. Around him there was a silence he remembered also, quite different from the kind of silence he had become used to in or around the midland towns for which, eleven years ago, he had left these hills. It was broken when he had walked another mile by no more than what seemed like a vibration in the air, a faint disturbance that might have been, at some great distance, the throb of an aeroplane. Five minutes later, rust-eaten and muddy, a front wing replaced but not yet painted, Hartigan’s old red Toyota clattered over the potholes and the tractor tracks. The two men waved to each other and then the ramshackle car stopped.
‘How’re you, Paulie?’ Hartigan said.
‘I’m all right, Mr Hartigan. How’re you doing yourself?’
Hartigan said he’d been better. He leaned across to open the passenger door. He said he was sorry, and Paulie knew what he meant. He had wondered if he’d be in luck, if Hartigan would be coming back from Drunbeg this midday. A small, florid man, Hartigan lived higher up in the hills with a sister who was more than a foot taller than he was, a lean, gangling woman who liked to be known only as Miss Hartigan. On the boreen there were no other houses.
‘They’ll be coming back?’ Hartigan enquired above the rasping noise of the Toyota’s engine, referring to Paulie’s two brothers and two sisters.
‘Ah, they will surely.’
‘He was out in the big field on the Tuesday.’
Paulie nodded. Hartigan drove slowly. It wasn’t a time for conversation, and that was observed.