The Misremembered Man

by Christina McKenna

  He climbed the stairs two at a time and pushed into the dusty bedroom. He could not remember the last time he’d been in there, but it was probably just after Mick’s death; he’d no reason or desire to visit it since. The place held too many recollections of his ailing uncle in the big bed. He could still see Mick’s stricken face sunk into the fat bolster, like a wizened pear in a gift box, and could hear the rasping voice, vainly battling with the throat cancer that would finally claim him.

  Jamie stood in the doorway, subdued by the memories of that awful time, somehow afraid to tread the unwalked floor, breathe the unshared air. This was Mick’s room, and it seemed that even in death he was still here.

  Everything was as it had been left: the stripped bed in the corner, the dark dresser with its cloudy mirror, a cracked bowl and pitcher on the small table by the window. Then, all at once, as he stood there, a shaft of cloud-freed sun threw a bandage of light across the floorboards, as if in warning, as if to thwart his trespass.

  Jamie could see the shabby suitcase under the bed, its secrets secure behind the rusted hasps, and he knew with mounting apprehension that he could not cross the floor to open it. Out of respect for his uncle, he changed his mind. He’d buy a pad of writing paper of his own. Sure he’d probably be needing a fair few pages, because he felt certain that he’d make some mistakes, him not being used to the writing down of things and all.

  He shut the door quietly and turned the key. He’d go out straightaway to Doris Crink at the post office and get some.

  “The post’s rather late,” Lydia murmured to herself and checked her watch against Cousin Ethel’s clock on the far wall. “Quarter past one…Probably no delivery now at this time.”

  Elizabeth Devine, sitting at the other end of the table, in a Naples yellow sweater dress, left off eating her apple crumble and custard, and looked up suspiciously at her daughter.

  “Why are you so interested in the postman all of a sudden? He’s a married man too, you know…and I should hope you wouldn’t even be considering anyone from the common classes—not even in your dreams.”

  She resumed eating. Her purple-pansy rinse had turned out a deeper shade than expected. She’d blamed Susan for neglecting her. But the fact of the matter was that Susan could not get Elizabeth to come out from under the dryer until she’d finished reading an article in Cosmopolitan entitled, “Does He Only Want You for Your Breasts? 10 Ways to Tell.”

  “Mother, please…” Lydia continued to eat her pudding, sitting straight-backed in the bentwood chair, chewing each mouthful slowly and thoroughly, her silver spoon dipping in and out of the bowl at regular intervals.

  “You haven’t told me much about your Women’s Institute outing. Ballymena can’t have been that uninteresting.” Lydia was steering the subject away from the post. Her mother could be a proper old Miss Marple when she applied herself—a tendency which, to Lydia’s dismay, seemed to grow stronger with age.

  “What’s any town like these days: only full of shops and vulgar pubs? And Beatrice couldn’t walk too far with her corns, so we had to sit down most of the time in tea rooms. And you know most of these places don’t know how to make a proper cup of tea. They don’t warm the pot first. Beattie and me, we could always tell right away after the first sip.”

  “Didn’t you complain?”

  “We did the first time, and the manager came out. Oh, you know the type: not long out of short trousers…a young galoot in a ready-made suit and rubber slip-ons. And he looked at Beattie and me as if we were crazy and said: ‘Ladies, where d’you think we are, Victorian England? This is a cafeteria and d’you see that big five-gallon steel vat over there that’s boilin’ and bubblin’ away? That’s the twentieth-century version of the teapot, and that big teapot serves everyone who comes in here, and I’ve never hey any complaints till now.’ (You know how they have trouble with their vowel sounds in County Antrim). And it was terrible because his voice was rising and his face was getting red and people started looking. Beattie and me were mortified.”

  “How awful.” Lydia reached for her napkin. “So what did you do?”

  “Well, I thought I’m not going to let the young pup away with that, so I said, ‘I’ll thank you to mind your manners, young man.’”

  “Good for you! And what did he say to that?”

  “Oh, he got worse. He said: ‘May I suggest that if you don’t like my tea you take your custom elsewhere, because I hey a business to run and no time to stand around here discussin’ the virtues of tea-making with a couple of oul’ buzzards like you.’”

  “The cheek of him!”

  “Exactly: the cheek of him. So we got up, and poor Beattie with her corns and all could hardly walk, and she said: ‘Don’t worry, we’re going. You’re badly brought up and I don’t mind saying it, and if you were a son of mine, I’d box the ears off you!’ And d’you know what, the people in the café gave us a round of applause as we left, and he was livid, so he was.” Elizabeth pushed the dessert bowl aside. “Is there any tea?”

  “Of course there is. I’ll make it now and I promise to heat the pot,” said Lydia, smiling. “I am sorry, Mother. That doesn’t sound as though you had such a good day after all.”

  “Oh, we got over it soon enough. We weren’t going to let that young rascal spoil the rest of our day. We treated ourselves to a few wee things. Beattie got a nice paint-by-numbers set called Horse and Foal by Lake and I bought that cottage tapestry and that pair of elastic stockings, the Wolford ones with the reinforced toes. The ones I showed you. And then later on we had a nice spread in the Lakeside Hotel. Oh, they know how to do things there…”

  Lydia got up to prepare the tea.

  “…Georg Jensen silver and that Blushing Rose china your Aunt Hattie adored. You know, she took a liking for it in Belgium when she was there in nineteen thirty-one. She went to work as an au pair to the Vansittart family. Oh, they were very grand you know, aristocratic I believe…”

  “Really…?” Lydia scarcely listened. She was used to her mother’s ramblings, and as she reached for the teapot and the tea caddy, gazed out the window to remind herself of how beautiful the garden looked. She was proud of her vegetable patch, where the rows of carrots, potatoes, cauliflowers and sprouts expressed her unstinting devotion to the soil, and her confidence in the power of Mother Nature to provide all goodness. Because for Lydia, order and neatness did not stop at the boundaries of one’s home; they extended to the scrubbed paving, trimmed hedges and carefully cropped lawns that lay beyond it.

  “…and after that we did pass-the-parcel, and then Mrs. Leslie Lloyd-Peacock showed us slides from her trip to Canada. Oh, Mrs. Lloyd-Peacock is such a lady! She would be connected to the Rickman-Ritchies, you know, the linen people. Oh, very grand, very well off and such good friends of your father’s….”

  “Mmm…,” murmured Lydia. She noticed a scattering of naughty dandelions between the rows of vegetables, nodding their little heads in the noon breeze, and wondered how on earth she could have missed them thus far. She made a mental note to pluck them immediately after tea.

  She carried the teapot to the table and stole a quick glance down the hallway, but there was no mail as yet. She could not afford to have her mother collect any letters, because her ad had already appeared and she hoped and expected an envelope of replies soon, even though it was very early days.

  Elizabeth was examining the cabled cuffs of her sweater dress. “…oh terrible good with her hands, could tackle any Aran stitch put in front of her; cables, garters, fagots, twists, the chunky bead, fisherman ribs, and y’know her bunny bobbles were the talk of the country. You name it and she could do it…”

  She left off the examination and studied Lydia, who, having placed the teapot on the table was fetching Auntie Dot’s tea cozy, a wondrous item crocheted in the shape of a purple strawberry.

  “You know, Mrs. Leslie Lloyd-Peacock’s slides put me in mind of the sea.”

  “Oh really,” said Lydia, half listening. �
�How’s that?”

  “Made me long to go on holiday. Portaluce, that’s where I want to go. Why don’t we go and stay with Gladys next week?”

  “Really!” Lydia was suddenly alert. She’d no wish to go anywhere until she’d received that all-important letter. “Gosh, Mother, if memory serves, you and Gladys always end up fighting.”

  “Gladys is the one who starts it! But then she never was anything but impetuous.” Mrs. Devine addressed the sugar bowl, suddenly thoughtful. “Takes after her Aunt Millicent.” Lydia could see another reminiscence coming on.

  “Look, I’ll tell you what, Mother: We’ll go the week after next. How’s that?”

  “Why not next week?”

  “Well…” Lydia didn’t know what to say. “I’m just not ready yet. I’m…tired.”

  “I thought that was the reason one went on holiday: because one was tired.” Elizabeth’s eyes narrowed. “You’re up to something.”

  “No, Mother, I’m not up to anything, and anyway Auntie Gladys would need a week’s notice. It’s high season, you know.” Lydia proffered a plate of cherry slices. “Now, some cake.”

  Doris Crink, the postmistress, was an attractive widow in her early fifties—petite, slim, well groomed—who still felt it necessary to make an effort, especially with her appearance. Her dear husband’s death had been premature. They’d only been married four years when he was hit by a delivery van, driven by a shortsighted retiree, whose attention had been momentarily diverted whilst wresting a barley-sugar from its wrapper. Since that fateful occurrence, the mere sight of the said sweets could trigger in Doris an immeasurable panic. Such a catastrophe had not put her off, however, and as the years passed she never lost hope of marrying again. By tending to her looks she kept that flame of hope alive. You just never knew when the right man might come along and fan the flame into a roaring fire.

  Doris was surprised to see Jamie McCloone coming through her door. He had little reason to visit her establishment because he rarely sent or received letters. He did have a savings account, however, which, she was glad to see, was seldom debited (or for that matter credited). It held quite a healthy sum, too: £3,129 and fippence to be exact, which had been lodged soon after his uncle’s death.

  Ms. Crink had inherited the business from her parents and had run it for as long as anyone could remember. Consequently, she knew the intimate goings-on of most members of that small community. As the shrewd clairvoyant can determine a person’s future from the clothes they wear and the things they say, so Doris could judge the state of a marriage or a person’s circumstances through the mail they received and the transactions they conducted over her woodwormed counter.

  “Another red reminder from the gas board for the Kennedys at number nine, I see,” she’d say. “Thomas must be hitting the bottle.”

  “That daughter of Betsy Bap’s out of work again,” she’d observe on another occasion. “That’s the third welfare check she’s cashed this month. Oh, she takes after her mother, that one: a strumpet, the temper of a billy goat. The Lord himself couldn’t work with her.”

  All such speculations and slanders about the people of Tailorstown would be relayed to Mildred, her sister, who worked in the clothing store next door: Harvey’s, Purveyors of Ladies and Gentlemen’s Fashions. At supper in the evenings, in the cramped kitchen behind the post office, the ladies would mull over the day’s events, sifting through the evidence of what was said, done and bought by their customers, in order to build a case against them. Sometimes the purchase of a pair of silk stockings and a withdrawal from a savings account on the same day—and by the same person—could fire their imaginations with the fury of a Cape Canaveral rocket, before returning them to earth like a damp squib.

  “Oh, she couldn’t be having an affair. She’s only just married,” a Crink sister might observe. To which the other would respond with: “Well, I can’t see a hellion like Mickey McCourt allowing his wife to buy, let alone notice, she was wearing a pair a them, can you? Oh, something’s going on there, you can be sure.”

  As Jamie McCloone approached her counter, Doris Crink removed her spectacles, believing she looked better without them.

  “Jamie, haven’t seen you in a long while. How’ve you been keepin’?”

  “I’m not so bad atall, Doris. But me back’s givin’ me a bit of bother, so it is.”

  “Ach, I’m sorry to hear that. Y’know that back’s goin’ round. Aggie Coyle is nearly kilt with it.” Doris was studying Jamie sympathetically. He might not be an oil painting but he was a civil enough creature, and he did have £3,129 and fippence in his savings book, and no wife to be whittling away at it…or, Doris mused idly, not yet anyway. “Is it the rheumatism, is it?”

  “No, Doris, it’s the lambago, the doctor says. And he give me tablets to take and wants me to take a rest by the seaside, so he does.”

  “Well, so you should, Jamie. That’s very good advice. You’re liftin’ too many heavy things on the farm, no doubt.” She placed her elbows on the counter and leaned confidentially toward him. “Y’know I had a bit a bother with me ears last winter, and Dr. Brewster told me the exact same thing. He said: ‘Doris d’you know what you need?’”

  “God-oh, did he tell you the same thing, did he?”

  “He did indeed. He said: ‘Doris, you need a good rest by the sea in Portaluce with them ears of yours.’ And you know, I took his advice and went for a week and came back,” Doris gave the counter a triumphant slap, “as right as rain with no ears atall.”

  Jamie pushed up the bill of his cap to air his scalp a bit, both flustered and flattered that a woman of Doris’s sensibilities would confide as much in him.

  “Boys-o, that’s a good one—he told you the same thing. Oh, he’s a smart man, Dr. Brewster. He knows what’s wrong with you by just lookin’ at you, so he does.”

  “Oh, a gentleman.” Doris inhaled deeply and shook her head. “None of that pokin’ and proddin’ at a person. Oh, a very decent man…couldn’t get the better of him, so you couldn’t.”

  “Aye, yes, you couldn’t get the better of him, that’s right. I know what you’re sayin’ right enough.” Jamie pulled on his ear and righted his cap again.

  “Was it the stamps you were lookin’, Jamie?” she asked, opening her book, suddenly officious. Another customer had just entered the premises and she didn’t want to be seen to be getting too friendly with Jamie, lest rumors started circulating.

  “Yes, Doris, a coupla stamps and a coupla them envelopes. And a need a pad a that Basildon Bond over there.”

  Doris lifted an eyebrow at such a list, wondered what Jamie McCloone might be up to, and quickly filed away the tantalizing snippet for discussion with Mildred later on.

  She began totting up the cost with her pencil. Jamie lowered his face to Doris’s left ear.

  “And I’ll be needin’ to take out a wee bit a money for the wee trip y’know,” he whispered.

  “Certainly, Jamie. If you’d just fill this wee form out, and while you’re doing that, I’ll let this customer away.” Doris looked up expectantly at the waiting youth behind him, all thoughts of romance shelved for the time being.

  Chapter eight

  He scrubbed the floor on his bony knees; his purpled hands clamped on the wire-bristled brush. He was doing four big tiles at a time, his body shuttling back and forth, machine-like, mopping up the sludge with a greasy rag that he’d rinse out in the bucket. Four hundred and fifty tiles in the cold refectory; only a hundred more to go.

  Every five minutes he’d stop and move to the next set, hauling the bucket with a screech farther along the speckled terrazzo, positioning his knees on the sodden towel, rinsing and wringing and scrubbing—scrubbing, scrubbing until the gray flecks flashed white under his determined strokes, until his heart beat too rapidly and his arms went numb.

  Mother Vincent timed him with her fob watch, appearing sporadically at the open door, either withdrawing satisfied or advancing enraged. He dreaded her coming
, the hard heels cracking across the empty room, a hail of hammer blows to his heart.

  “Not good enough, Eighty-Six! I told you five minutes exactly per section.” Her words struck the walls like rifle shots, and made the floor beneath him sway.

  He knelt before her with his face upraised, his swollen hands crossed in a penitential pose: Saint Francis Beholding the Afflicted.

  “S-sorry, Sister,” he stammered.

  “How old are you now, Eighty-Six?”

  He did not know his age, but knew that such an admission would earn him a ringing slap; maybe just one, maybe several, depending on how Mother Vincent felt. He thought hard. He remembered the time he’d entered the refectory, 7.30 P.M. He shifted his knees on the soggy cloth, kept looking up, seeking out her face so as not to linger at the tooled leather belt that swung at her waist, the cane in her hand.

  “Seven and a half, Sister.”

  “Quite,” she said, sneering at the inaccuracy of the guess. She’d noted him from the day he’d arrived on her step five years earlier, but why should she tell him his real age? These sons of whores deserved nothing.

  “Do you see that clock down there?” and she pointed needlessly at the far wall. “That clock is there so you can time yourself. Now reverse three sections and start again.” She drove the last words down, bending low to level with him. The air vibrated with her anger. Fear crushed his throat. Her eyes locked with his.

  “Remind me why you’re here, Eighty-six?”

  “Because…’ He swallowed back the tears. “Because I’m bad and me mammy d-didn’t want me…and she put me h-here because…’

  He stopped, terrified. Her unblinking eyes and doughy face made him think of hooded figures in the forest, death and buried bones, a headstone-crowded darkness.