He was distracted because his daughter is pregnant by a negro.”
Mr. Jessop would see that the policy paid. There would be red
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tape, to be sure. It was not the best one on offer, ornamental—to
show that he, too, was a client of the firm—but, in a sense, that
was all the more reason why it would pay.
He counted the cash in his wallet, surprised to see how little
remained. He ought to have left by now, on to the next place, a
more distant town where odd jobs might be found. It was all being
put into jeopardy. He would have been long gone, if not for the
girl. Again he told himself that, though he feared something else: a kind of creeping paralysis, a slow failure of will.
On the clothes hanger he replaced his own tattered shirt; he
would wear the pink and blue one out of the shop. He did the
same thing with a pair of brown leather oxfords, his own shoes dis-creetly returned to the rack. The suit was too expensive to buy and too fine to be swapped for without drawing notice, so he returned
that as well to where he had found it. Unfortunate, because it was slim fitting and stylish. The shopkeeper had seen him come out
of the room, had nodded when he held up the items in his hands,
when he shrugged to indicate that they hadn’t fit. Now her back
was turned and she whispered into the phone, saying that what
she was being told beggared belief. He took a chance, a risk he
knew he should not have, and let the suit fall from the hanger into his briefcase. It gave him no pleasure at all. But the woman did not turn around, not even when he rapped a good-bye on the counter,
not even when the bell sounded his step through the door.
She made her way to the place they’d arranged, walking
quickly, afraid that he might not be there: half six was what they’d agreed, and the clock on the bank said six forty-two.
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All day she had been marking the time, scarcely saying a word
in the shop. At home, there had been the usual fuss, her mother
clucking like a hen through the kitchen.
“Your father’s destroyed my best saucepan,” she said.
The air was hazy with smoke.
“High time he opened a tin around here, but didn’t he fall
asleep with his soup on the stove? Old fool. Lucky thing he didn’t burn the place down.”
“He’s all right then?” Abigail said. She could not help the
love she felt for her father. Married once before meeting Abigail’s mother, he was, at seventy, as she might have imagined a grand-dad: kind, only vaguely engaged. Sometimes, coming into a room,
she would find him daydreaming, caught unawares. “Right,
Abigail?” he would say, as if he were startled by her very existence.
She liked to think he might once have been different—hand-
some, untimid—and that some vestige of that better self might
still prove to be latent in her.
“Oh, fine. Out the door before the fire was doused. He’ll be
down the Green Man for a pint.”
Her mother’s hands had gripped the edge of the counter.
“As if I won’t be widowed soon enough as it is.”
Now, along Douglass, her spirits recovered; all thoughts of
home simply floated away. Milk bottles chimed in the bed of a
truck. Holly blues flitted from flower to bush. He was there, just as he’d said he would be, a kept promise on the library steps. Her whole body might have been a pool of warm liquid into which a
stone had been dropped. The brown suit he was wearing flattered
his height; she would tell him it did when she got up the courage.
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She wore a pink blouse and pale yellow skirt. They were the best
bits of clothing she owned; once, when she’d worn them, she’d
heard Aubrey Gillingham say, “God’s truth, like she’s choking
on tits.”
“Am I late? I couldn’t get away from the house. My mum and
dad were having a row.”
She’d left her mother alone in the kitchen, bent over, frantically scrubbing the pan.
He looked up. Blue sky persisted yet overhead, it being the
height of the season. On the steps, all around them, seagulls had
gathered. The sun was pleasant on the side of her face.
He’d seemed to smile when she mentioned the row, and she
wondered if it amused him that she lived with her parents.
“Not late at all,” he said. “Not at all. I’d have waited a good
deal longer than this.”
She chewed at the nail of her thumb.
“I thought we’d see a film. You like movies, Abbie?”
“I like them, sure.”
“There’s a film at the Gem.”
“Maybe we’d walk a bit first?”
She did not mind being bold in this way. She knew that
he would do what she liked, because he was the sort of person
who would. With another sort of person—one her own age, for
instance—she would have gone to the film without taking a walk.
Boys her age couldn’t wait for an hour. He would pay for the
movie: he was that sort as well.
“Sure. That’s a fine idea. Good we should talk. By the sea,
maybe? Not so many people around.”
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They walked west until they reached the marina, through cob-
bled streets in the old part of town. The sounds there were of boats in the dock, masts whipped by rigging moved in the wind. On the
footpaths between small parks they went on. He was relieved she
hadn’t spoken of dinner and hoped she might have eaten at home.
“You look nice in your sweater,” he said.
She looked at his eyes, which seemed to linger over her body,
but not indecently, before rising again to meet hers.
“I knew we’d get on as soon as we met.”
“I thought it strange at first, your looking at me. I was told to
stay away from men who hang about like you were.”
“And do you still think it strange?”
“No. Not anymore.”
“I’d taken a fancy to you.”
On a bench at the crest of a hill, two women were sitting and
sharing ice cream. Abigail looked at them, puzzled somehow. They
were silhouetted against the sky, backlit by residual glow from the sun, which had a few moments earlier dipped into the sea. In the
farther distance someone was flying a kite.
“Come off it,” she said.
“You were a sight for sore eyes.”
It was far too early in the encounter for crying. She looked
away from him because she did not trust herself. It happened this
way: somebody would say something kind, and instead of grati-
tude, she would be overcome with this sadness.
“Was it a laugh for you when I said about living at home? I
mean to move out as soon as I can.”
He touched her arm at the underside of the wrist. He touched
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it there and lifted it, so that her forearm fell along the length of his own.
“Not a laugh,” he said. “No, not at all. When I’m home I take
care of my mother, in fact. I’ve had to since my old dad died in a fall.”
It was the first bit of truth he had spoken to her, and with it
the accent he’d been affecting began to fall away and d
iminish.
She did not seem to take any notice, but in his own ear it sounded alien, strange.
“My dad’s old,” she said. “But I like him.”
“I’ll bet he’s nice.”
“I’ll be moved out any time now,” she said.
“Do you like it, working in the gown shop, Abbie?”
“Not very much. Mrs. L favors Bethany as a matter of fact.
Anyone would. Well, you saw her, I guess.”
“She doesn’t measure to you.”
“Stop it,” she said, really wanting him to.
“Is your skirt from the shop? It suits you,” he said.
She pulled her arm away, not completely but a little, so that
her hand rested nearer his elbow. She knew he would understand
from the gesture that she’d prefer to talk about anything else.
“When you’ve moved out will you go away from here, Abbie?”
“I’d like to.”
“Is there a dream you’ve got? You could do anything you
wanted, I’ll bet.”
She blushed. “When I was little I wanted to be a veterinarian.
For horses and things. But I don’t really want to be one anymore.
Now I only want a chance to travel, like you’ve got.”
“You get to where you’re missing a home.”
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It was becoming difficult to see on the path. In the distance
their view opened onto the sea, which was opalescent in the last
of the light. The beach itself was visible only where it had been
washed with the water, and there it was opalescent as well. A dog
was fetching a stick in the surf.
“I don’t think I would miss it,” she said.
They turned around and this time when they walked past the
bench the two women who had earlier been there were gone.
“We could sit a while.” A breeze had sharpened, and she moved
so that she was closer to him.
“You’ve given up on a film?” He wondered if she was feeling
afraid. For his part, he was, inexplicably so. It was as if, with the one true statement about the death of his father, he had pulled a
single stone from the base of a tower. All the many lies he had told, most of all the ones he had told to himself, fell and clattered, an empty ruin inside him.
“The cinema’s where the kids go to be alone. We could find
someplace a bit quieter, Archie.”
She had led him to the bench, and they sat in the dark.
“It’s quiet in the cinema,” he said.
“I’m not a child. It wouldn’t be my first time.”
She was kissing his neck. Her mouth was warm and search-
ing. He was accustomed to the expert movements of whores with
whom he spent nights in unfamiliar cities; now his heart was
breaking for her, the desperate and curious way that she kissed
him, her mouth opening and closing like something just born.
“My name is Tim Garvey,” he said, the voice and the accent
now wholly his own.
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He felt her pause almost imperceptibly, a single tremor, a single
missed beat of the heart. Then she pressed herself further against him and brushed a lock of hair from his face.
“I’ve run away from my life.”
She was on top of him. Their faces were touching, but she
would not open her eyes.
“Abbie, I never played ball. I’m a salesman.”
“Please stop it,” she said. “I wish you would stop.”
He put his arms, which had hung at his sides, around her. He
held her there, arrested, her chin on his shoulder. Her body was
plump, but he could sense it was fragile. Her breath seemed to
rattle the cage of her ribs. Lorna had been like that when afraid
in the night.
After the fall, his father lived seventeen days. He had not
woken up. In bed he’d lain all the time without moving, a bur-
bling sound escaping his lips. His mother, having no place else to go, had spent those last nights in bed with Tim.
Her breath, too, had been rather like this.
From the bus stop in Colby he walked to his car. In an
unpaved lot near the roadway it sat, canted where one of its tires was low. It seemed absurd now. The whole plan seemed absurd: the bags
left behind, the checking account emptied and the cards thrown
away. An absurdity, too, fal ing in love with the girl, but even before that there had been no real hope of success. He simply did not have courage enough; his mother would die poor because of his fear.
He had left almost no fuel in the tank, that being part of the
foolish plan, too, but had bought a can and a funnel at the garage
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in Glass. He poured this in; it took longer than he had expected.
In the sun he felt himself terribly wearied.
It had been midnight before they were parted.
In Wexford, he stopped for more fuel and a bite. He ordered
soup and a sandwich but didn’t eat very much. From a box he
telephoned to his mother.
“Where had you got?” she said. “I’d about given up.”
He leaned against the glass wall of the box. In the background
he could hear the white noise of the TV.
“I’ve got a mystery on, but it doesn’t matter. I already know it’s the daughter. Give me two secs, I’ll turn off the sound. It’s always the one you think couldn’t have done it.”
He could see her there, leaning forward a bit in her chair. She
wore the same pale blue night dress as she had for years. She hardly ever wore anything else. Every Christmas he bought her another
to replace what invariably had grown soiled or torn.
“All right, Ma?”
“I’m out of milk. I can’t drink my coffee without it.”
“I’ll be back by the end of the week. We can watch your hos-
pital show.”
“Ah, good,” she said. “I’ll have to tell you about it. There’s a lot that’s gone on since the last time you saw.”
Abigail folded and refolded the clothes. She had not
slept; her eyes were swollen and red. Bethany looked at her from
time to time, intently, searching her face.
“It didn’t go well, Abbie?” she said at last, because the silence
had festered between them.
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“It was grand.”
“I’m glad. What did you wear? I think you would have looked
nice in this.” She held up a green muslin frock.
“I wore a skirt and a blouse, as a matter of fact. Not that it’s
your business and not that it matters. He was more interested in
what I had on underneath.”
Bethany blushed. “Abbie! I told you to watch out for an ath-
lete. Did he have only one thing on his mind?”
“I had only one thing on mine. He’s a grown man, and I’m a
grown woman. He wasn’t at all like the other boys I’ve been with.
He wasn’t at all like Clifford Price, if you wanted to know.”
“It’s better not to, Abbie,” Garvey had said when she pleaded
with him to bring her back to his rooms, and again when she sug-
gested they run off together. She did not care that things he had
said were untrue, did not care that his life had been perfectly plain.
When he told her about the man falling from a scaffold, about
how he had died on the seventeenth day, she knew t
hat this time
he was telling the truth. That he had lied before only heightened
her affection; he had done that because he thought he was not
grand enough for her, but in fact she loved him more for not being grand. “It’s better we should imagine what it would have been like.
You can live a great deal longer on something imagined.”
On her lunch break she walked the short block to the chemist.
Her strength was coming back by degrees. Harold looked up as
she stepped through the door. She ignored him and stood by the
tall rack of stockings, touching them with the backs of her hands.
At the counter he asked her how she was faring.
“Fine, Harold,” she said. “Everything’s fine.”
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She could not bring herself to look at his face, so full, always,
of ludicrous hope.
“I’ll have a box of those,” she said with a gesture.
She was pointing to the small shelf behind the till. Harold
glanced briefly over his shoulder. When he turned back, his
expression was blank.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Which ones did you say?”
“In the blue box, Harold. The blue condoms, I said.”
He turned again, his whole body this time, and was turned for
rather longer than was needed to retrieve them.
Harold knew well what people said about him: that he was
simple, that he hadn’t been a promising student. It was why he
took pride in his job at the chemist, why he dreamed also of a
turn on the screen: because each small accomplishment of that
kind gave the lie to what talk there had been all his life. In fact, he perceived more than people imagined. He had known at once, for
instance, when she walked in today, that things with the pitcher
had come to an end. He had known and had been sympathetic;
even now he was still sympathetic. While she paid, despite every-
thing and beneath all the pain, there remained a vague thrill at the thought of the condoms. That couldn’t be helped, though he knew
it was shameful, pathetic, to be thrilled by such a small thing.
“Thank you, Harold,” Abigail said.
Under a moonless sky they had stopped near her house. Tim
said the street she lived on was pretty. Looking up and down it, she supposed he was right. Chestnut trees formed a leafy promenade;
old sodium lights caught wisps of a fog that had descended after
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