The next morning we went for breakfast in a café on the square. Your mother was wearing a pair of stylish sunglasses which she had bought the day before from a stall on the Quai des Contes. I gave her the present I had got for her in Dublin, a cheap brooch made of imitation emeralds and shaped like a bird on a twig. A haughty black waiter brought two enormous bowls of coffee, I remember, and I laughed because they were so big but Grace did not laugh back. She did not even smile. We sat and drank our coffee, and after a while your mother took a parcel from her handbag and gave it to me.
‘You may as well have this,’ she said.
I opened the package. Inside was a silver signet ring with our initials engraved on the inside and the words ‘Happy Anniversary’. Underneath this, in tiny Celtic script, was the date of our wedding, 28 October 1968.
When I went to kiss her, she pulled sharply away. ‘Don’t, Billy,’ she said.
I asked her could we not make up our row but she shook her head. She was very close to tears for a while, but managed to swallow them back. I remember her staring away from me across the square. A bell was ringing in the church steeple. People were going to mass. There were fat larks and pigeons splashing in the fountain and whirling around in the air. An old blind woman with a white stick was being helped up the steps by a gendarme in a beautiful, crisp-looking uniform. I remember the scene so clearly, all these things, and the warm, loamy smell of fresh bread rolls and coffee.
‘I think we’re on the slide, Billy,’ she said, quietly. ‘I think our marriage might be in trouble.’
I asked her what she meant.
She told me that a young woman had been telephoning the house during the day to speak to me. She would never say who she was or where she was from. All she ever wanted was to speak to me.
‘You’ve been unfaithful to me, Billy,’ your mother said, in a quaking voice. ‘You may as well tell me the truth now, before I find out from somebody else.’
I had no idea who this woman was. I told your mother this and swore that I had never cheated on her and never would. This was the truth. I loved Grace, I truly did. To read some of what I have told you of those dark times will be to ask yourself how this could be true. And yet it was true, I loved her passionately. When I think back on those years I see your mother and me not as a disaster, but as an absurd concentrate of the coexistences and compromises that grow up over time in every marriage. Perhaps I am justifying yet again when I say this, but I do not think so. Our love began to turn itself inside out, but it still had the same shape and dimension, and something of the same force. Certainly, I loved her in a way that blessed me. Any flickering moment of humanity I had in those years I owe to her, and to the two of you. Any small shred of mercy or compassion in my life I borrowed – I stole – from her. Infidelity had never so much as entered my mind.
I did my best to tell her this. There had to be some innocent explanation for these phone calls. She kept telling me to stop lying and just let her know the truth. When she started to cry, right there in the café, when she took off those beautiful black sunglasses and let me see the tears streaming down her face, I swore on your life, darling, that I had never once cheated on her and never would. When I said this, I think she believed me.
‘I just want you to know,’ she said, ‘that I couldn’t ever forgive you for that. If you ever do that to me, Billy, it’s over. I just couldn’t. That kind of weakness I couldn’t handle. Don’t ever ask me to.’
‘I won’t, love,’ I told her. ‘Jesus, I wouldn’t, I swear it.’
She nodded and let me take her hand.
‘I know I’ve been weak sometimes, Grace,’ I said. ‘I know you can’t stand weakness. That’s because you’re so strong.’ And I tried to laugh then. ‘You’re so strong and precious to me.’
‘No, Billy. I can’t stand weakness because I’m so weak. And I know that scares you half to death.’
Perhaps a month after we had got home I happened to ask where her anniversary brooch was. She confessed to me that she had lost it.
By the first week of June, I began to get the uneasy feeling that the milkman was trying to fool me. There was still no word of his elusive friend, though the seemingly endless stories of his past continued and became, if anything, more chilling. By now he had turned into my friend, for some reason. Nap would come trundling into the lane, peer out of his van in a childishly crestfallen manner and call, ‘How’s she cuttin’ Larry, I’ve no news yet on yer friend.’
Every morning he would tell me that he had left a message or tried to call my friend on his mobile telephone, but without success. My friend was a very difficult person to track down; that was because he was so good at what he did. But really, when we thought about it, we were lucky even to know about my friend. He was a professional, my friend, he was not just any old hatchet man. He was an artist. While he was telling me this I would try to scan his face for evidence of lies or distortions but could see nothing. Again and again he would tell me to be patient. My friend would be in touch soon. I became convinced that he had not tried to find this man. I suspected he had simply taken my money and spent it on ecstasy tablets, the consumption of which, he had let slip one morning, was the nearest thing he had to what you might call a hobby. By midsummer’s day, I began to wonder if my friend existed at all.
By now I had built up a very clear picture of Quinn’s movements. I had watched him as my father used to watch the birds. I knew a great deal about him. He would leave his house around nine or half-nine at night, walk into the town, hang around outside the church and wait for young people to approach him and buy whatever it was he was selling – I assumed it was not holy pictures. When he had finished at the church, there were three or four bars he frequented; I got to know them all. He would drink for an hour or so – he drank lager, always – but would never get drunk. When he left the pub he would go to the snooker hall on Quinnsboro Road or one of the kebab shops or hysterically-coloured ice-cream parlours on the sea front; he was a good snooker player, he had once made a break of a hundred and four. He smoked Rothmann’s and chewed gum. Occasionally he would walk the promenade or the path up to Bray Head. At the weekends he usually went to a late show at the cinema on the main street; he liked horror films. After that he would go to the nightclub in the Starlight Hotel. He would always be sober when he left. Sometimes, if he had met a girl, he would take her back to his house. He seemed to be living alone, although from time to time other men of his own age would come to stay, and when this happened he would take the girls down an alleyway near the harbour. He was never short of female company. Women seemed to like him.
I began to think in a more focused way about the best way of killing him. I had two plans, one which involved the milkman’s friend – my friend – softening him up first, and another more awkward set of arrangements which I would use if I had to do the whole thing myself. I asked myself if I could really attack someone with a knife. One night I got the hunting knife I had bought out of the car and simply looked at it for a while. I found the thought of its serrated blade penetrating flesh sickening and almost unimaginable. But then could I hit a man with a hammer? At one in the morning I walked down to the apple tree and took a few good swings at the trunk with the hammer from my toolbox. The sound drove the birds out of the bushes in fright. It would not be easy, I knew that.
I would rehearse killing him in my dreams and wake up in the mornings saying the words ‘knife’ and ‘hammer’ out loud. I found these thoughts disgusting. For a while I even considered hitting him with my car and claiming it was an accident, but I knew that nobody would believe it.
There were many times when I had serious doubts that I could go through with it at all. One evening in particular, I was almost certain that I could not. I had watched a television documentary about capital punishment in America, poor black men rotting on death row, grim photographs of charred and still-smouldering bodies being hauled out of the electric chair. I was seized by the sheer enormity of ending a human
life, the awesome finality of stamping out that minuscule spark for ever. To think of that tangle of so many millions of impulses, so many possibilities, and to say no, to answer the endless questions posed by another life with the ultimate negation. It appalled me. I listened to the turgid little Texan sheriff who had arrested several of these men saying that it was a relatively straightforward thing to make a murderer confess. Unless he was a psychopath it was easy once you got him into the interrogation room. Actually to end the existence of another human being was such a devastatingly unnatural action that the guilty almost always admitted it within minutes. ‘So what’s your technique?’ the interviewer asked him. ‘Well, sir, y’jus’ sit the sumbitches down and ask ’em if they did it,’ he grinned, ‘and they sing like the goddamm birds. Pardon mah French.’
I felt cold panic deep in my throat. For the very first time it occurred to me that I might be caught. I had planned everything so carefully, but maybe something would go wrong. Perhaps it would be Duignan who would come for me – when Quinn’s body was found would some switch trip on in his policeman’s brain? And if nothing went wrong on the night itself, what about the next morning? How would I actually feel when I woke up at dawn the following day, having committed murder? I had not planned for that. Would this famous desire to scream and blurt out one’s own guilt infect me too? Would I be able to keep silent, or would I run howling to the authorities and plead with them to punish me? Who would speak out for me? Who would tell my story? And if I was found guilty, as I almost certainly would be – as I would deserve to be – would I be sent to prison for the rest of my life, perhaps to the same jail, the very same cell for which Donal Quinn had been destined when his luck had changed? I felt physically sick with fear.
But the next morning that feeling had vanished. I remember getting out my notebook in the kitchen around sunrise and writing for a while. I would have to get out of the house after it was done, that much was absolutely clear to me. I would not want to be alone in the silent house, waiting for that poisonous coruscating wave of guilt to come. I tried to think over my options with some kind of clarity. Where could I go? For five whole minutes, my plan involved flying to Australia the morning after the killing – I can scarcely write the word – to visit Lizzie and Franklin. I had been promising to go for years but had never done it; now I was going to do it before they came home to live in Ireland. I actually got as far as finding the telephone directory and looking up the numbers of long-distance travel agents. But it was ridiculous. It was not the action of a rational man. Suddenly it occurred to me, what Seánie had said about Lourdes! That was it. Here was the solution. I would go to Lourdes the day after the deed, I would help Seánie with the sick pilgrims, I would purge whatever guilt I would inevitably feel by easing the terrible lot of those poor people half in love with death. It was all so laughably simple.
Around nine o’clock I drove down to Monkstown village, where nobody would know me, found a pharmacy and bought a long length of adhesive bandage. All I needed now were the plastic sacks, the fan belts and the handcuffs. I went into work and sold well.
The day after this, Nap did not show up in the lane. I waited for almost half an hour – twenty-eight minutes, to precise – but there was still no sign. By now it was well over a month since I had given him the first of the money. When the milk float finally did appear there was a different milkman behind the wheel, a much older man with large, stupid eyes and a pointed chin. He did not know anything at all about Nap, he told me, had never even heard the name in his life. He had been given this route to do for a few weeks, he had not asked any questions, he was only temporary. If I was interested, he had heard that the regular milkman was away on his holidays. In Rimini. But he did not know for sure.
When he had gone I went down to the Forty Foot and had a quick swim. The water was cold and a little dirty. I visited you in the hospital and then headed in to work, arriving almost twenty minutes late. Hopper and Liam got on my nerves all that morning, arguing and sulking, I think it was the heat and the bad coffee and the fact that the air-conditioner had broken down. At lunch-time I slipped out to the car-parts warehouse down the street and bought two fan belts for a Mini, making a point of paying cash so that there would be no records.
I put the fan belts into the boot of the car, along with the hammer, the hunting knife and the bandage. I covered them all with a blanket.
When I got back to the office there was a message from Seánie about the trip to Lourdes. There was still a place for me if I wanted it. But he would have to know soon.
I found the phone book and looked up the number of the dairy. There it was. ‘Hibernian Milk Ltd.’ I rang the distribution depot and asked if I could speak to Nap.
‘There’s nobody works here by that name,’ the voice said.
‘He’s a milkman,’ I said.
A soft laugh. ‘He isn’t, I’m tellin’ you. We’ve nobody here called that. Hold on.’
He came back a few moments later. ‘Yeah. There was a lad called that right enough, but he’s after leavin’.’
‘Leaving?’
‘Yeah. Jacked it in.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Dunno. Are you a customer or what?’
That night, I could not sleep for thinking about him. I lay on my back, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling with my hands behind my head. It was all I could seem to get fixed on: Nap, my money, the whole dirty business. I had thought that I could trust him but I had had been wrong. I got up and walked around the house for a while, feeling strange and dislocated. It was not the money exactly, but just the way he thought could get away with it. The knowledge of this really did bother me, love. It started to grow into me like a parasite.
I got out of bed and looked out the window for a while. Through the trees, the moon was casting long lines of pale light over the garden. I took a piece of paper from the drawer and wrote down the words ‘hammer’ and ‘knife’. Then I drew a small doodle, the hanging man.
If I am looking for landmarks of the last days of our marriage, I see in an older diary that there was a christening party for your cousin Molly in February 1982. The date is the only thing I need to be reminded about, because the most important things about the night I can still remember very clearly. At some point that morning I recall that I felt nervous about the prospect of the party. I suppose I had never truthfully been what you might call sociable, in the way that your mother was once, but this was a new thing, a kind of vague tension eating at me. I do not know how I would describe it to you.
Imagine, if you can, two pieces of music being played at the same time, one softly melodic, the other even more quiet but ugly and discordant, and that might give you some idea of how I felt. On the way to your Uncle Stevie’s house, anyway, I recall being snappy with your mother in the car. Then, when we got there and went in, I remember feeling very hot, and realising that I was blushing, for no reason, which was a thing I had never done before. Whenever anyone spoke to me – and I knew most of the guests well – I would feel myself blushing hard. People kept asking me if I had been away because, they said, I seemed to have got myself a touch of the sun. The remains of a childhood stammer which I thought I had managed to supress seemed all of a sudden to come back also. After a time I seemed to be stuttering whenever I spoke. It was a very cold February day – I think there might even have been snow on the ground outside – but I was sweating heavily. At one point I went into the bathroom and took off my jacket. My shirt was completely wet through with sweat and dark under the armpits. I stared at myself in the mirror. I looked like a fat, sad oaf who had been beaten up, I thought, jowly and dark-eyed and weak and untrustworthy. I reminded myself of Richard Nixon. I was sure that I was coming down with some kind of flu. I wanted to go home and get into bed.
When I came out of the bathroom your mother was not around. I felt far too anxious to go and look for her or even ask anybody else where she was. That was my overwhelming sensation, just not wanting to attract a
ttention. The room was full and hot and very smoky. I positioned myself at the back, near the door, still feeling shaky and uneasy. There was a bottle of Bushmills on a table near me. When I was sure that nobody was looking I poured out a glass and drank it quickly down. I had another glass and then I remember Stevie getting up to speak. He looked so proud and excited. He threw his arms around your Aunt Catriona and kissed her and everyone clapped. He said something about your mother and me, how he hoped that we too would be hearing the patter of tiny feet again soon. There were cheers. Before the speeches were over I had finished three-quarters of the bottle. Later there was a violent argument between me and a colleague of Stevie’s, a tiny bandy-legged fellow who I was sure had insulted me in some way. I think I even threw a few punches; certainly, I remember sprawling on the landing floor with the contents of a glass all over me.
My face felt as though it was on fire. People around me were laughing. I managed to get to my feet and stumble downstairs. I still could not see your mother anywhere. I went to the kitchen to get a drink of water. My heart was thundering. Two young people with long hair were lying on the floor under the table, moaning softly as they kissed – I remember realising that I did not know which was the man and which the woman. I could not find a glass so I filled a cereal bowl with water and just drank it down. I leaned over the sink and dry-retched a few times. My temples and eyes were pounding with pain.
The Salesman Page 15