He slit open the brown envelope with his penknife and sat on the edge of the single bed. The cheque, made out in his father’s hand and carefully crossed ‘Account payee only’, was for £10,000. It was more than he’d expected; large enough to be taken seriously, yet not so large as to demand to be taken solemnly. It would be foolish to compete with Jack, though. Better to treat the money as a windfall, use it only for convenience and pleasure. He could buy a sports car like Jack’s and still have enough left over to cut a dash at weekends till he landed a job. With a car he would be able to enjoy the summer and perhaps find a summery girl to share his enjoyment.
He raised the lower sash and placed Clarissa, Or the History of a Young Lady underneath for support. The room was lined with books, and on a little table in one corner lay his Ph.D. thesis on the idea of seduction as extended metaphor in the works of Samuel Richardson. The window faced north. He looked down on a bumpy stretch of brown moorland with a black coastline and a lazy green sea beyond. There was not a house, road or tree to alleviate the inhospitable bleakness of the scene. Gulban and Pauline had their rooms in the front. Pauline’s was the best. She had the large corner room with a south window facing the river and the mountain, and a west window looking out on the island, the lighthouse and the widening bay.
Chapter 2
She glided silently from the mirror to the window, as if reluctant to end a protracted dream. A man with a dog was gathering sheep on the hill. The dog herded the sheep into a corner between two dry-stone walls, then waited till the man came up. One of the sheep broke loose and the dog pursued, going wide in a semicircle at full stretch, while the man kept the rest together with a wave of his stick. The sheep slithered to a stop when it saw the dog in front, and the man watched without a movement as the dog brought back the straggler to the flock.
She returned to the mirror and tied a lavender ribbon in her hair. After a warm day in the stuffy back office poring over accounts, checking invoices and statements, and making out the cheques which Gulban would sign before bedtime, her mind was a whirligig, unable to think. Now the cool, leisurely evening lay ahead. Already it had taken possession of both land and sea. The whole promontory and the wider bay were suffused with a golden brightness that had invaded her bedroom, flinging a thousand stippled reflections on the cream-coloured walls.
A double knock made her turn to the door. ‘Pauline!’
‘Just give me five minutes, Jack. I’m almost ready.’
‘I’ll wait for you in the car.’
That morning Gulban had spoken. At last he had admitted that he did not expect to go on for ever.
‘This calls for a celebration,’ Jack told her afterwards. ‘This evening we’ll go to town and have dinner in the Atlantic Grill.’
She had watched the brothers waiting like schoolboys outside Gulban’s office. He loved to keep them dangling, and Cookie and Joey made jokes to conceal from themselves the knowledge that they depended on him. Surely, it was all a sham, the pretence that Bosco, Cookie and Joey had a chance. On their own they seemed sound enough, but in Jack’s company they looked alien and unassimilated, as if they dyed their hair red. They lived on the periphery. They would never change a particle of the world because they did not believe in the world. Yet, they considered themselves a cut above Jack who had slaved for his father since he was sixteen, while the pampered three had been sent to boarding school ‘to have the corners knocked off them’, as Gulban had put it.
Jack was thirty, nearly four years older than her. Unlike the others, he was serious, strong-minded and self-reliant. Everyone said that he was the only one of them who had inherited Gulban’s doggedness and drive. If he had a fault, it was his uncritical response to Gulban, which had kept him treading water at the hotel while other men of his age had already settled down with a clear goal to pursue.
From the window she watched a red Mini leave the village for Fort Knox. It skimmed the surface of the narrow road, a light aircraft gathering speed for take-off, then vanished through the gate, only to reappear between the low bushes on either side of the driveway beyond. The house, the grounds and the high surrounding wall were the dream of a man who could not bear to live in the glasshouse his wife inhabited. As the car pulled up and the driver got out, Pauline herself lived for a moment on the edge of a dream that threatened to curdle into nightmare. She saw Mrs Bugler in the hotel lounge rising from her chair and turning to inspect the empty seat. The memory was sharp and unsettling: the impulsiveness of the getting up, the condescending backward glance, and then the affectation of the turning away, conveying to the irreverent observer that life was altogether predictable, that, at least for her, there was never any real need to glance backwards.
Mr Bugler had been a quiet, civilised man who found life and Mrs Bugler more than he could cope with. The Sunday before his final breakdown he went to church in his pyjamas. Few thought it strange. Some concluded that it must be the new fashion. Flanagan, the schoolmaster, had said that ‘Knox’ should be spelt ‘Nox’ because the fame of the house had little to do with anything that happened there during the day.
Jack was waiting for her in the lobby, having parked his gleaming sports car at the front entrance. They nosed out between the white piers of the concealed gateway. As they picked up speed on the straight road, she visualised a sea bird flying over a smooth expanse of water.
‘What did he really say?’ she asked.
‘Just what I told you.’
‘You’re no good at reporting. Tell me everything. I want to hear his exact words.’
He recounted what his father had said that morning, without mentioning Father Bosco, Cookie or Joey.
‘And you say that’s cause for celebration! It’s a bit thick if you ask me. After keeping you dangling for ten years without even paying you a proper salary. He treats me better than he does you.’
‘What he said this morning was a declaration of intent.’
‘It’s hardly a declaration, only a suggestion.’
‘Everything will be resolved. Within a year all the uncertainty will come to an end.’
‘You should have demanded to know what he’s up to.’
‘I had a word with him in private after the others left. He’s nobody’s fool. Everything he does is for a sound business reason. He takes the view that nothing should come to a man either too early or too easily. He said that he did not expect me to understand, that all would become clear only a twelvemonth from today.’
‘You read that to mean that you’ll inherit.’
‘There’s no one else. Any other reading is out of the question.’
‘I don’t understand you. You’re hard as rock with everyone else, but when it comes to Gulban – ’
‘The day was long enough. Let’s put it behind us and enjoy the evening.’
She sensed a note of annoyance in his voice. Though forthright himself, from her he preferred obliquity.
The road ahead ran through a cutting with a narrow drain on either side, the smooth-worn surface concealing little undulations that kept them jouncing ever so slightly as they sped along. She stared out over the bonnet, bound by the cutting and his deliberate silence. The warm day was somewhere behind, the best of the evening was yet to come. She should have been serenely happy, relaxing in the release from paperwork. Instead she had an uneasy sense of diminishment, as if the choices made for her far outnumbered those she had made herself. They emerged from the cutting into a basin of greenish-brown moorland with a glinting lough and an angler in grey waders knee-deep among reeds.
‘It’s too early to eat,’ he said. ‘We might stop at the Spoke and Felly for a drink. I like the landlord. He’s a Dubliner called Forker, and the best bridge-player in the county.’
‘Does Mrs Bugler go there?’
‘Now and again.’
‘Tell me something, Jack. Do you go to Fort Knox for Mrs Bugler’s company or Alicia’s?’
‘I go for the bridge. There’s Forker, Flanagan, Mrs Bugler a
nd myself.’
‘Lucky Mrs Bugler.’
‘As a player, she’s less than brilliant.’
‘I want you to promise me something. If she comes into Forker’s, say we’re in a hurry. Don’t mention the Atlantic Grill in case we end up in a threesome – or worse.’
‘I can tell you don’t like her.’
‘I’m too young to remember her as a woman. What I see now is a monster.’
‘Forker says that in her middle age she’s midway to being a man.’
The Spoke and Felly was set on a slope among trees overlooking a glen with a stony river. The low sunlight struck through the open door, sharpening the tiles of he There hallway and the faded green of the skirting beyond. There was no one in the bar, so they waited on high stools before an altar of old-fashioned shelves, empty except for a row of upturned glasses. On one wall was a cream-coloured tray with the likeness of a mallard so perfect in its plumage that you could not imagine it alive and quacking, and on the opposite wall was a handwritten notice which said, ‘Please don’t ask for champagne. We don’t stock it.’
The sense of time passing in a motionless world made her slightly dizzy. Jack placed his watch on the counter and counted the revolutions of the wheel inside the black meter above the window.
‘Twelve to the minute,’ he said. ‘He’s using electricity, but not a lot.’
A short, fat man waddled in from the back and shook hands with them both. As he joked with Jack, his breath exploded in little puffs from between tight lips and fine perspiration laminated his pale forehead. He looked distinctly vulnerable, the picture of mortal humanity faint from overeating and overexertion, and he quickly filled the small bar with a damp, sharp smell more appropriate to a rainy day.
Jack ordered sherry for Pauline and whiskey for himself. Forker coughed and seemed to lose his breath, then ran his hand across his forehead to arrest a trickle of sweat before it had time to enter his left eyebrow.
‘Would you believe it?’ he smiled. ‘There isn’t a drink on the premises. I’ve been waiting for a delivery for the past month; but don’t worry, I’ll nip down to the village for a bottle this minute. It would be simpler if we could all settle for the same drink. I shall be having a drop myself, of course. There’s tenpence off Bell’s in the supermarket till Saturday.’
He looked at Pauline who didn’t seem in the least impressed with his show of initiative.
‘I’ve got a bottle of Scotch in the car,’ said Jack. ‘We’ll all drink that. I’m sure Pauline won’t mind.’
While Jack went to the car, Forker laid out three glasses, a jug of water, and a bottle of milk on the counter. He poured two large measures of the Scotch for Pauline and Jack and an even larger one for himself, which he whitened with a splash of milk from the bottle.
‘The Scotch is for my nerves, the milk for my ulcer,’ he explained.
The two men discussed bridge while Pauline stood by the window gazing down the slope to the stony river below the trees. Jack looked flushed and elated when at last he said goodbye to Forker. He drove quickly and aggressively, telling stories about Forker’s drunkenness and fecklessness, while she studied the swarthy hills to the right and left. They turned a corner above a wide bay with a rocky island close to the shore and a row of seagulls perched on its jagged crest.
‘There isn’t a soul on the beach,’ she said. ‘Let’s stop and go down for a walk.’ The urgency of the words surprised her. It was her way of saying, ‘Let’s stop the evening and start again from a new and better place.’
The sand at the upper end of the beach was coarse, silvery and soft. Along the water’s edge it was finer and firmer, and darker too. A single seagull rose ahead of them screaming at the sun. They skirted clumps of strong-smelling wrack, thick with sandhoppers, and a complex network of canals which could only have been dug by a boy who was already an engineer. They came to a rocky spit with a high stone wall running down to the edge of the beach. They climbed up the slope in its shadow, which reminded her of the lengthening shadow of Fort Knox as the sun went down behind the sea cliffs. Round the corner was another wall and a rusty gate with a stile of jutting stones beside it.
‘I never knew there was a graveyard here,’ she said.
‘It’s no longer in use, except by courting couples in search of sanctuary. You can see it’s old. There are no crosses, only plain rectangular headstones.’
They walked between the graves, reading lapidary inscriptions: Edith Ann Hudson, died 1761; David Rammage, died 1902; William Tremayne, died 1779. The mossy headstones leant this way and that: some forwards, some backwards, and one or two sideways in the attitude of a headless man with one high shoulder. In the corner at the far end, blown sand had partly covered a limestone slab, obscuring the worn inscription. As she removed the sand with her hand, he leant against the wall and lit a cigarette.
‘It’s a foreign name,’ she told him. ‘“Giacomo” is all I can make out.’
‘Foreigner or native, he’s a sitting tenant. I don’t think he need have any fear of eviction.’
‘Do you ever feel that you’d like to be away?’ she asked.
‘We are away. Gulban and the hotel are in a different parish.’
‘I meant away, away.’
‘No, I’ve never wanted to be away, away. This is far enough away for me.’
A cuckoo called behind them. They both looked over the wall and listened. She called four times in succession, pausing between calls to imprison the air in a cupola of mysterious clarity. They looked all round, she sounded so tantalisingly near.
‘The best of a summer day, I always think, is hearing the cuckoo in late evening,’ Pauline said.
‘Seeing is better than hearing. I should have brought my new binoculars.’
‘I want to hear her one more time. If she calls again, I shall never forget this evening.’
‘We’ll walk back now,’ he said after a silence.
‘I’d like to come again some time.’
‘We could bring a packed lunch and make a day of it.’
‘I often think men are brutes.’
‘Not all men,’ he smiled. ‘Only those that are brutal.’
With a laugh he helped her down from the stile, then kissed her precisely on the mouth, as if to prove a theorem. Quod erat demonstrandum. Q.E.D. Quite Easily Done, as Cookie would have it. She paused to look at three seagulls on a rock, two white-breasted adults with their greyish-brown offspring crouching between them. The adults rose effortlessly into the breeze, wheeling out wide over the flat water. The youngster screamed for them, lowering its head and raising its beak to the sky with an ugly swelling of the neck. Its thin, reedy shriek split the air, piercing her through and through with intimations of loss and discord. The parents returned and the young one approached them gingerly on tender feet.
‘It’s the youngster that looks old,’ she said. ‘It’s walking like Gulban, with just that hint of care.’
‘You must have keen sight to notice that. I should have brought my binoculars. In future I must keep them in the car.’
He was silent for the remainder of the journey. She turned her head so that the breeze brushed back her hair, and she thought of summer twilight in a cool room with a pendulum clock ticking precisely and time passing imperceptibly.
‘She’ll never get anywhere with Jack, he’s too fond of women,’ one of the waitresses had said last week when she wasn’t meant to be listening. She herself knew that she wouldn’t get anywhere with Jack, and she also knew that somehow it didn’t matter.
The Atlantic Grill was a circus of clattering plates, bustling waitresses and noisy conversation. They waited half an hour for the hors-d’oeuvre, and they had finished a bottle of wine before the main course arrived – the meat first, followed five minutes later by the vegetables. Jack, relaxed and happy after the Scotch and the wine, began telling her about his plans for the hotel.
‘It’s a stuffy old crypt,’ he said. ‘On my first day I shall ope
n one window and let in a little eddy of fresh air.’
‘Gulban may close it again.’
‘Not if he sees profit in fresh air.’
‘Your brothers may have something to say as well.’
‘“Say” is the word. They’re only talkers, less interested in profit than in an audience. Joey lectures us on science, Cookie on literature, and Father Bosco on God. Of the three, Bosco makes most sense. Now, he could run a business if only he wasn’t so obsessed with things that money can’t buy.’
‘Have you ever thought about why he became a priest? Growing up, he was more devilish than any of you.’
‘He grew up too quickly. He had exhausted us all before he was fourteen.’
‘It’s a lonely life being a priest. Maybe it was the extra loneliness that attracted him.’
‘Marriage is the only certain cure for loneliness. Pauline, we’ll get married. We’ve been courting long enough.’
He reached across the table and locked her fine-boned wrist in the vice of his forefinger and thumb.
‘It isn’t a good enough reason to get married,’ she smiled.
‘I’m serious. I’ve thought of nothing else since Gulban showed his hand this morning. We’ve been wasting valuable time. I’ll say it again, and I’ll say it properly. Pauline, will you marry me?’
‘It’s all a bit sudden. I’d like time to think.’
‘How much time?’
‘A week.’
‘I know what you’re up to. You’re going to do a novena, God preserve me.’
‘A novena takes nine days, not seven. No, I’m just going to think it over, and I want you to be sober when I give my answer.’
Jack responded by ordering another bottle of wine.
‘Why are you intent on getting drunk this evening? It’s not like you,’ she said.
The Red Men Page 2