I rose to my feet and walked inside to tell her I was on my way. I stopped at the door to see her turning around to look at me from the chair she’d placed between the coffins. She’d lit a pair of candles on the mantelpiece, which gave the room a soft, glowing light. I was going to tell her that I’d left the estimate on the table for her and that I’d see her tomorrow, but as I stood there looking at her in the flickering candlelight, her eyes glistening with sorrow and love and longing and loss, I found myself completely disarmed by her beauty and wanted nothing more than to stay there looking at her.
“I’ll leave you, Brigid,” I said softly.
“Are you on call?”
“No, I’m off duty,” I said, delighted to be able to tell the truth.
“Then stay awhile.”
“You’ve probably got people coming over; I’d only be in the way.”
“There’s nobody coming over. Can you do something for me?”
“Sure.”
“Pour two glasses of wine and bring them in.”
I sourced the wine, a 2010 Châteauneuf-du-Pape, walked back in, and handed her a glass. She took it in both hands and sipped from it while looking up at me. It didn’t seem odd that the silence was comfortable. As if appreciating the taste of the wine, she closed her eyes and rolled her head back on her shoulders. The desire to reach out and touch her, to kiss her and undress her and explore her body, was becoming more difficult to resist and I had to battle it. Why couldn’t I just take her away from her dead parents, from my dead life, to a place where nothing mattered, where we could love each other freely and just start again? She was beautiful and wonderful and obviously aware of the burgeoning feelings between us, and maybe waiting for me to make a play, however small—a sign, a gesture—to let her know that I liked her, that I was willing to acknowledge the obvious, however bizarre the situation.
I took my glass and walked to the couch, where I sat down and looked at the floor. As much as I liked her, I couldn’t help vacillating between warning myself against what seemed to be growing between us and feeling like an intrusive pervert. I didn’t want to hurt or confuse her or lead her somewhere I knew I could never go myself. I was dancing close to the fire as it was, but toying with something sacred, something that was in my custody, however briefly, that I was honor bound to protect, went against the grain of my character, never mind my duty.
I drank down my wine and felt a wave of tiredness and regret sweep over me. After five minutes of looking through the floor into my soul, I sat up, put my elbows on my knees, and looked over to Brigid.
“I feel a strange kind of comfort when you’re here,” she said quietly, still looking at her father’s remains. “I don’t know if it’s because you were here when my mother died or because you were the one to tell me that she’d died or if it’s because of something else, but that solace you talked of before you left the last time”—she turned to look at me—“I feel it whenever you’re around me.”
“I feel it, too,” I said, willing to confess that much at least. She closed her eyes.
“Just the strangest circumstances,” she said, so softly I could barely hear her.
I wanted more than ever to embrace her but, like opposing magnets, felt myself polarized and negated from being able to do so.
She got up from her chair and walked into the kitchen. I checked my watch: half seven. Time to go. As I was getting out of my seat, Brigid walked back in with the bottle of wine, not stopping until she was standing beside me, refilling my glass.
“Stay a little longer,” she said, sitting down on the couch beside me. I sat back down, finding myself closer to her than ever before. There was no denying it: She was doing to my heart what only Eva had done before her. And it was becoming pretty clear that the feeling was mutual. Sublimation was futile, regardless of how compromised my morals were.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said, with no more than three veils on. “Tomorrow evening when the coffins are in the church for the prayers, nobody will know which coffin is which, will they?”
“You’re right. No one will know, apart from those close enough to read the nameplates.”
“Would it be odd if we were to place a picture of them on top of their coffins while they’re in the church?”
“Wouldn’t be odd at all,” I said.
“I think I’d like to do that. Will you help me pick out the photographs?”
“I will,” I said, and placed my glass on the floor before following her out to the wall with the photographs. There must have been fifty or sixty in all, a lot of them black-and-white. Michael looked like Richard Burton in many of them, and Lucy looked as beautiful and bohemian in them all as I’m sure she had throughout her life. Brigid stood with her weight on one hip, holding her wine with her head to one side, nearly swaying in relaxed consideration. She had a sensuality to her movements that was both sultry and alluring.
“Your father reminds me of Richard Burton,” I said.
“He always did me, too,” she said softly with a smile. “And he had a similar voice, but with an Irish accent, of course.”
It was a little spooky standing behind Brigid while being smiled at by Lucy, albeit from pictures of her, but not so much that it was off-putting.
“I think that picture of my mum is possibly the one,” she said, pointing to a color photograph probably taken five years ago. I’d always paid particular attention to women’s hands, and Brigid’s had an elegance to them, along with a vitality that made them even more attractive. I got a flash of her hand taking coins out of a purse to give to a five-year-old for ice cream.
“She looks beautiful. And maybe that one of your dad.” I pointed to one that looked like it had been taken around the same time. Our proximity, not to mention the swelling intimacy, had brought our voices down to whispers.
“That was the year before his stroke. They’d go well together, wouldn’t they?”
She rolled her head back on her shoulders again, closer to me than ever now. We were centimeters from each other. I cupped her elbow in my hand, and she moved back into me so that I could touch and smell her hair. She turned slowly in my arms, and then we kissed. It was soft and exquisite and dizzying. There was an unspoken understanding and tenderness between us that transcended the myriad reasons I shouldn’t be anywhere near her. I knew I was getting into something that would ultimately lead to pain for both of us; I simply couldn’t undo what had happened with Lucy and the lies it had precipitated, yet neither could I deny the potency and immediacy of the feelings between Brigid and me. She broke out of the kiss and looked at me. I felt like I was made of endorphins.
“Is this two veils?” I said.
“Getting there,” she whispered, and we kissed again. I moved my hands down her sides, over her hips, and just as they reached her jeans, the doorbell rang. We both sighed through our noses as the kiss ended.
“Saved by the bell,” I said, only half joking. She smiled while fixing herself up.
“I’ve no idea who that could be.”
While she went to open the door, I put my coat on. The sound of a sympathetic male voice came traveling in from the front door: the priest. I fixed my tie and moved out to the hallway where Brigid stood with the priest from Haddington Road church.
“Hello, Father,” I said, offering my hand. “Paddy Buckley from Gallagher’s.” The priest, bent over with age, smelled of altar wine and decaying teeth, and had little tufts of unshaved stubble under his nose and at the sides of his mouth.
“Hello, Paddy,” he said, with a gaping smile.
“I’ll leave you to it, Father. I know you’ve things to discuss with Ms. Wright.”
I turned to Brigid, taking her hand briefly in mine.
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow, Brigid,” I said, moving to the door. She looked back at me a little disappointed, but also with the yearning that had been awake
ned in us both.
“Goodnight,” she said.
—
BY THE TIME I got home, I was exhausted and still slightly love drunk. I rested my head down on my pillow and was fast asleep in moments. And then I dreamed, not of Brigid, but of being back on James’s Street, driving, just as I had been on Monday night, only in the dream it was twilight and the road was flooded with rain, my car cutting through it like a slow-moving speedboat. I gripped the wheel, focusing madly on the street outside, filled with the dreadful feeling that something horrible was about to happen. I searched and scanned the street, but it was deserted. And then, just as I neared the accident spot, I noticed the church to my left had its doors open with the most beautiful pink and yellow shafts of light beaming out onto the street accompanied by strangely familiar and comforting music. This reduced the dread factor before replacing it with feelings of warmth and curiosity, which were dashed quickly by the dark figure rushing across my path from the other side of the street like a racing squirrel. I pounded my foot to the brake and pulled the wheel down, but to no avail: I kept careering towards him at increasing speed. I frantically looked to the floor and saw that there were no pedals anywhere, just carpet. I swerved again but the wheels stayed locked on course, moving ever closer to Donal’s figure. And then, just at the unbearable point of impact, I sat bolt upright in my bed, saturated with sweat. There was a fleeting moment where I thought it was just a dream, but then reality came rushing, and I collapsed back on my bed. It’s over, I told myself, and there’s nothing you can do to change it. Just bury him well.
Wednesday
EIGHTEEN
October 15, 2014,
9:30 a.m.
If it weren’t for one significant detail, being embraced into Vincent Cullen’s world would have been a warm if slightly disquieting experience. But what I’d done had left me feeling like a fraud, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and not much of a wolf at that. If I was to be found out, I knew my days would end with a torture motif. And that was my sobering and very present reality.
I stepped out of the hearse to see Richie waiting by Cullen’s front door, squinting at me. I noticed there were more cars than yesterday. Apart from Vincent’s maroon Jag parked nose out, ready to go, there were two Subaru Imprezas and a navy Range Rover.
“He’s waiting for you round the back,” said Richie.
“Okay,” I said, not sure if I was to walk through the house or around it. Richie jerked his thumb towards the side of the house like he was talking to a moron.
“Go round the side.”
I walked by the front bay windows around the side of the house, where I saw a hardwood kennel with a pitched tile roof and red door standing proudly beside a coal bunker. It was so grand, I had to look twice to make sure it was for a dog, which on closer inspection it must have been as the floor inside was lined with straw.
It was a big back garden and well loved. There were plum trees and apple trees and an abundance of roses and flowers. Vincent stood over by the greenhouse talking with another man. He waved me over. I was down to drive the hearse for the ten o’clock Mass in Walkinstown and had timed it so I’d have plenty of margin in making the twenty-minute trip from Cullen’s.
Reaching the greenhouse, I stopped dead as I recognized the man sitting on the bench, smiling warmly at me. I’d made arrangements with Chris O’Donoghue seven years ago. A big round man with Celtic coloring and penetrating mystic blue eyes, Chris had come into Gallagher’s in Uriel Street unannounced after his three-month-old son had suffered a cot death, and I’d looked after the arrangements for him. It was policy in Gallagher’s not to charge for baby funerals, so I’d done everything for him gratis, Frank Gallagher believing a family suffering the loss of an infant had more to be troubling themselves with than having to consider what nobody should ever have to: buying a coffin for their baby. Out of the thousands of funerals I’d arranged over the years, there was only a handful that stood out in my mind, and my experience with Chris was one of them.
“Chris,” I said, breaking into an easy smile. “What a surprise.”
Chris got to his feet and ignored my outstretched hand, pulling me into an embrace instead. We slapped each other on the back affectionately.
“Good to see you,” he said, and then pointed at Vincent. “When Vincent phoned me yesterday asking about you, I was only too glad to tell him what kind of man he’s dealing with.”
“I’d never have put you together,” I said.
“He’s my accountant,” said Vincent. “You’ll have a cup of coffee, Paddy,” he said then, more as a statement than an invitation.
“I’d love to, Vincent, but I’m driving a hearse on a ten o’clock Mass and—”
“You’ll have a cup of coffee, Paddy,” said Vincent again.
“Well, I’ll have a quick cup then.”
“Sit down,” said Vincent, gesturing to the bench. Chris and I sat down as Vincent looked to the back door of the house where Richie stood, playing with his phone.
“Richie,” said Vincent, no louder than he’d been talking to us. He held up three fingers. “Coffee.”
“Do you have a garden at home, Paddy?” asked Vincent.
“A small one,” I said. He reached down to beside the greenhouse wall and picked up a potted sapling.
“Here,” he said, handing it to me. “It’s a medlar tree, good for October planting.”
“Thanks, Vincent,” I said, touched by the gesture.
“Get your hands in the dirt, Paddy. It’ll pull you into your boots.”
As I wondered was this kindness because of my sweaty panic yesterday, the dog came to the door of the greenhouse and fixed her focus on me. I was glad to be able to return the dog’s interest this time without the fear and panic. I leaned forward, nodding her over and watched her come willingly. I rubbed behind her ears and the side of her snout, listening to her groan as she moved her face to facilitate a good scratch.
Chris looked up to Vincent, who matched his surprised expression.
“She likes you, Paddy,” said Chris, looking increasingly confounded.
“Do you think?” I said, enjoying the interaction as much as the dog.
“I’ve never seen her like that with anyone,” said Vincent.
“Neither have I,” said Chris.
I didn’t understand what the big deal was. I’d always had a way with dogs, as did many people.
“Who’s a good old bowler?” I said to the dog.
“That’s no ordinary bowler,” said Chris, looking to Vincent, who gave him silent permission to continue.
“What kind of a dog is it?”
“It’s a K1.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Nor are you likely to again,” said Chris, like he was holding a precious secret. “A K1 is a hybrid never believed possible before, but with the patience and tenacity of a Scottish friend of ours, it was brought into being twenty years ago. What you’re looking at there is a mixture of wolf, fox, and Alsatian.”
I was able to see little bits of every breed mentioned.
“Dechtire here is expecting eight pups in a month’s time.”
“Could you put me down for one?” I said, making both men laugh, but the joke was lost on me.
“I’ll leave Chris to explain the story to you, Paddy. I’ll grab you some clothes for Donal.” Vincent walked away while Chris momentarily held my arm.
“What I’m about to explain to you, Paddy, is highly confidential and can’t ever be talked about to anyone. All right?”
“All right,” I said, massaging the dog’s chest.
“Wolves have been crossed with plenty of dogs over the years, Alsatians among them, but never with a fox. It’s still thought to be impossible, and if it wasn’t for Angus Fitzconor, what’s standing there beside you probably still wouldn’t exist.”
Richi
e arrived with a tray of coffee and biscuits, which he set down on a little table beside the bench.
“I’ll leave that there with you, gents,” he said, and left us.
“Thanks, Richie,” said Chris, picking up a biscuit.
“Who’s Angus Fitzconor?” I said.
“A stubborn bollocks and a great man; a man who’s become very dear to Vincent and me. He was a prominent figure in Glasgow in the seventies, responsible for a large portion of the prostitution and racketeering, building himself an empire and the fortune to go with it. He retired in the late eighties, leaving his sons to look after his business interests, which they’d largely legitimized by that stage, leaving Angus free to go to the Highlands, where he lives today in an old castle. He embraced the country life and got stuck into managing the hundreds of acres he had, getting to know over the years where the different birds had their nests and where the foxes had their dens. He became one with the place.
“One morning in 1990 he heard shots fired and went out to investigate. He found the hunters in question, made it clear to them they were never to trespass again by shooting over their heads, and sent them on their way. Then, while taking a walk later, he came across the fox they’d killed, or the vixen, to be precise, and took in her kits, four of them, and decided to raise them himself.”
I sipped my coffee while listening to his story, occasionally looking down to Dechtire, who was practically purring beside me.
“And that’s when he got the idea. He’d a friend with a pet wolf and so organized himself a couple of wolf cubs that he put in with the fox kits.”
The Last Four Days of Paddy Buckley Page 11