‘We take in a film today?’ Dickie suggested. ‘Meet Me in St Louis’s come back.’ In the cinema, listening to the songs, Bea tried not to think about being bored again tomorrow or Mr Hance making her nervous in the coach. She tried not to see the moisture on his squashed forehead when he knelt down by the sofa and asked her to forgive him. She tried not to hear him saying something she couldn’t hear in the coach, or not saying anything when he gazed at her.
‘Wasn’t that grand!’ Dickie said when Judy Garland sang for the last time and The End went up on the screen. ‘I’ve got some hot-cross buns,’ he said when they were on the street, although it wasn’t Easter, the wrong time of year by ages. In his bedsitting-room they toasted the hot-cross buns because they were a bit on the stale side. They squatted on the floor, each of them with a fork, poking their buns at the bar of the electric fire.
It was warm in the bedsitting-room, Dickie’s overcoat hanging from the hook on the back of the door, his bed under the sloping windows, a curtain drawn over so you wouldn’t know the sink was there. He had little sachets of jam, blackcurrant and strawberry, and he offered her a choice.
‘There’s Swiss roll,’ he said, and he laughed. What was left of one, he meant. He’d kept it for her. ‘Iris busy this evening?’ he asked when they had finished everything. ‘Going out, is she?’
Bea shook her head, but when they got to the flat Iris didn’t ask him in. Iris wasn’t sure yet, Bea said to herself, and later on, when she was in bed, she went over the signs there’d been – Iris saying they must tell Dickie about the audition and then about Ann-Marie and the newspapers, and the canary singing. But when Bea fell asleep it wasn’t Dickie being back that came into her dreams. In the room with the milk bottles on the window-sill Mr Hance was showing her the label on his scarf and she kept saying she must go now. She kept trying to get up from the sofa but she couldn’t.
‘It’s like you pity Mr Hance,’ Roland said, turning a chair round so that he was facing Bea in the viewing-room. He dangled a leg over one of the chair’s arms, which was his favourite way of sitting. His earrings were crucifixes, Bea noticed, which she hadn’t before. ‘The piece is about stuff like that, chick.’
Yesterday on the screen Mr Hance had walked away from the funeral and then walked on, through the streets by the river and the gasometers. In a startling way his features had suddenly filled the screen, tears glistening on his lean cheeks.
‘We’re into compassion here,’ Roland said.
Bea tried to blank out Mr Hance’s weeping face, which she could still see even though the screen was empty now. The tears ran down to the corners of his mouth, droplets becoming snagged there or slipping on, into the crevices of his chin.
‘Like some poor wounded bird,’ Roland said. ‘Some little sparrow with a smashed-up wing. And you’d be sorry for it because maybe the other sparrows would be quicker and take the crumbs. You’re with us here, Bea?’
Her mother looked sharply at her, which quite reminded her of a sparrow’s beady gaze. Bea knew Iris was being sharp because she didn’t want her to say she didn’t like feathers, that they never put crumbs out because of that. The time in Trafalgar Square the pigeons were frightening the way they rushed by you, their wings crashing into your face. ‘Never again,’ Dickie had promised. ‘You give your nuts to that little boy there.’ But she hadn’t wanted even to do that. She didn’t want to have the nuts in her hand for a minute longer.
‘Try for it, shall we?’ Roland said. ‘The pity thing?’
Bea began to nod. ‘Why’d he have to murder her?’ she asked, because she had always wondered that.
‘Because the friendship’s going to be taken from him.’ Roland swung his leg off the arm of the chair. ‘Because the old lady’s got the wrong end of the stick. OK, chick?’
Bea said it was, because there didn’t seem much point in saying anything else. She had asked Iris where the dog’s carcass on the tip came into it, if the dog had been the old woman’s or what, and Iris said they would understand that when the film was put together. They would understand where Ann-Marie arranging the newspapers came into it, and the bag-lady looking in the lamp-post bins for any food that was thrown away, and the workmen repairing a pavement, and the man in a maroon-coloured car. The trouble was, Iris said, that the scenes hadn’t been shot in the right order, which naturally made it difficult. The yoghurt the poison had been put in was banana and guava, and Bea said to herself that never in her whole life would she eat banana and guava yoghurt again. One morning on the coach Mr Hance asked her what colour her school uniform was and she felt panicky when he did although she didn’t know why, just a simple question it was. She wanted to get up, to find some place else to sit, but moving about the coach would draw attention to her and she didn’t want that. ‘It’s all just pretend,’ Mr Hance said another day. ‘Only pretend, Bea.’ It seemed strange to say that, to say what she already knew, and she wondered if she’d misheard because of Mr Hance’s quiet voice.
Once when the coach drew up and they all got out, when Bea was walking with Iris to the location, she wanted so much to say she was frightened of Mr Hance that she almost did. She began to, but Iris luckily wasn’t listening. Bea realized at once that it was lucky. Everything would have been ruined.
‘Let’s go for it this time, chick,’ Roland said on the last day, going for the final take. Bea could hear the soft whirring of the camera when the fuzzy-haired boy had given the take number and clapped the clapperboard. They had practised the scene before the coffee break and again after it, when Roland had repeated all he’d said about pity.
Bea couldn’t do it in the take any more than she’d been able to when they’d practised. ‘Cut!’ the fuzzy-haired boy had to keep exclaiming, and Roland came on to the set and talked to Bea again, and Iris came on because he asked her to. ‘Sorry,’ Bea kept saying.
The make-up girls came on in the end. They gave her artificial tears, and the cameraman said that was better by a long chalk. The lighting man changed the lighting, softening it considerably.
‘We’ll go for it this time,’ Roland said, and the fuzzy-haired boy held up the clapperboard and called out another number. ‘One more time,’ Roland said when Bea had lost count of the takes.
They ran fifteen minutes into the lunch break before they dispersed and made their way to the mobile canteen. Over a chicken salad with chips, Iris recalled for the bag-lady and the police inspector the part she’d had – a child herself then – in an episode of Z Cars, 1962 it was. Bea had heard this a few times before and, since she didn’t like the bean-and-sausage bake she’d helped herself to, she looked around for somewhere to get rid of it without anyone, especially Iris, noticing. Iris always said to eat well at the mobile canteen so that there wouldn’t have to be much cooking when they got back to the flat. But there was no convenient vase or fire bucket into which to tip the load on Bea’s cardboard plate. Outside, where the cars were parked, she found the dustbins.
After that she didn’t want to go back to where the mobile canteen was set up because they’d see she wasn’t eating anything and press a lot of stuff she didn’t want on her. She walked about the empty set, which she had never had to herself before. She wandered from room to room, thinking it was a pity that soon it would all be dismantled when the homeless who slept in doorways could do with it, even if only for a night.
‘Hullo,’ a voice said just before Bea heard Mr Hance’s footstep, and she knew he had come looking for her.
That evening Dickie came to the party. ‘You ask your father,’ Iris had said. ‘Only fair.’ Dickie had said yes at once.
‘Under time, under budget!’ Roland announced in his speech of gratitude to the cast, and everyone clapped.
They were all there on the set – the bag-lady, Ann-Marie, the police inspector, the old woman, the man in the maroon car, the workmen who’d been repairing a pavement, the policemen who’d searched the tip, Mr Hance.
They made a fuss of Mr Hance. It was his
piece, they said, his show. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you,’ Dickie said to him, and Bea thought he hadn’t really, but Dickie was good at being polite. The tear by his jacket pocket hadn’t been repaired. Bea had seen Iris noticing it when Dickie came over to say hullo.
‘So what’s next on the agenda?’ the police inspector asked Bea. ‘Another part lined up, have we?’
‘Spoilt for choice,’ Iris said, but Bea wondered about that, and Dickie said what’s this then? A certain little lady on her way was what, the police inspector said.
All the technicians and production people were at the party – the sound man, the cameraman and the assistant cameraman, the set designer, the make-up girls, the costume girls, the continuity girl. They drank wine, red or white, and there was Coca Cola or orange juice to go with the plates of cold food. Dickie asked who the big woman with the glasses on a chain was and Iris said the producer. ‘Remember that producer on Emergency Ward 10?’ Dickie said.
‘Oh, my God, don’t!’
Music began. Bea showed Dickie about the set: Mr Hance’s room with the cat litter still there, the stairs, the hall with the antlers, the living-room of the other house, where the old woman rapped the window with her walking-stick. ‘Marvellous,’ Dickie kept saying. One part of the set had been dismantled already and Iris came along to explain all that.
Andi and the boy with fuzzy hair brought round the wine and the food. Roland knocked on the floor with the old woman’s walking-stick: early as it was, he said, he had to be going. They’d been great, he complimented everyone. Pure electricity this production was, the Good Housekeeping Seal.
There was laughter, and more applause. Roland waved good-bye with the walking-stick, then handed it to Andi. After he’d gone someone turned the music up.
When no one was looking, Bea opened the sandwich she had taken. There seemed to be scrambled egg in it so she dropped it into an empty cardboard box beside where she was standing. She was alone there, obscured by the pot plants that had been gathered together on a table, ready to go back to Flowers Etc, which was what was scrawled on a piece of paper tied around one of them. She could see Dickie and Iris and Mr Hance, the sound man seeming to be telling them a story. When he came to the end of it they laughed, Iris particularly, throwing back her head in a way she had. Still pouring wine, the boy with the fuzzy hair looked to where the laughter had come from and laughed himself, then moved over to fill their glasses up.
Peeping through the fleshy green leaves, Bea watched Mr Hance earnestly talking now, Dickie’s head bent to listen. A moment ago Iris had held on to Dickie’s arm, just for a second when one of her high heels let her down. She had reached out and clutched at him and he had smiled at her and she had smiled herself. Where they were standing was quite near where Bea had been when Mr Hance had said hullo that afternoon.
Across the set the old woman was sitting on her own, a cigarette alight, her wine glass half full. With her painted features and bright dyed hair she didn’t at all look like the old woman by the window, but in spite of that she still was, and suddenly Bea wanted to go over to her and say she’d been right. She wanted her to know. She wanted just one person to know.
‘Hi, Bea,’ Andi said. ‘That your dad, then?’
‘Yes.’
‘He looks nice. Nice way he has.’
‘Yes.’
‘Not in the profession, though? Not like your mum?’ Andi reached out to feel one of the leaves, softly caressing it between forefinger and thumb. ‘He could get a walk-on, your dad. You never know.’
Andi seemed forlorn without her clipboard and mobile telephone, wearing the same blue jumper she’d worn for all six weeks of the production. She wasn’t drinking wine; she wasn’t eating anything, but that would be because of her slimming.
‘You going for it, Bea? You reckon?’ She’d gone for it herself only it hadn’t worked out. She wasn’t right for the acting side of the business, although it was what she’d wanted at first. ‘Different for you,’ Andi said.
‘Yes.’
It would be better to tell Andi. It would be easier to say it had to be a secret, that all she wanted was one person to know. It seemed mean not to tell Andi when she’d come over specially to be friendly.
‘Maybe our paths’ll cross again,’ Andi said. ‘Anyway I hope they do.’
‘Yes.’
‘You did fine.’
Bea shook her head. Through the foliage she saw Mr Hance’s hand held out, to her mother and then to Dickie. They smiled at him, and then he made his way through the other people at the party, stepping over the electrical cables that stretched from one room of the set to another. Occasionally he stopped to shake hands or to be embraced. The old woman laughed up at him, sharing some joke.
‘I must make my farewells.’ Andi kissed Bea and said again she hoped their paths would cross some time.
‘So do I.’ Bea tried to tell Andi then. But if Andi knew it might show in her face even if she didn’t want it to. It mightn’t be easy for her not to let it, and when someone asked her what the matter was it could slip out when she wasn’t thinking.
‘Cheers,’ Andi said.
The bag-lady was going also. In the corner where the cameras still were, outside the set itself, Ann-Marie was dancing with one of the policemen. Dickie was holding up Iris’s see-through plastic mackintosh, waiting for Iris to step into it. ‘See you on the ice,’ the fuzzy-haired boy called after Mr Hance, and Mr Hance waved back at him before he walked out of the brightness that was the party.
On the train Iris told Dickie who everyone was, which part each had played, who was who among the technicians. Dickie asked questions to keep her going.
It was the first time Bea had made the journey in from the studios by train. There had always been the coach before, to the studios and back, to whatever the location was. The train was nicer, the houses that backed on to the railway line lit up, here and there people still in their gardens even though it was dark. Sometimes the train stopped at a suburban station, the passengers who alighted seeming weary as they made their way along the platform. ‘I must say, I enjoyed that,’ Dickie said.
They got the last bus to Chalmers Street and walked, all three of them, to the flat. ‘Come in, Dickie?’ Iris invited.
She’d got in the cereal he liked and it was there on the kitchen table, ready for breakfast. Bea saw him noticing it.
‘Good night, old girl,’ he said, and Bea kissed him, and kissed Iris too, for Iris had said she was too tired to come in to say good-night.
Bea washed, and folded her clothes, and brushed her teeth. She turned the light out, wondering in what way her dreams would be different now, reminding herself that she mustn’t cry out in case, being sleepy, she ruined everything.
The Mourning
In the town, on the grey estate on the Dunmanway road, they lived in a corner house. They always had. Mrs Brogan had borne and brought up six children there. Brogan, a council labourer, still grew vegetables and a few marigolds in its small back garden. Only Liam Pat was still at home with them, at twenty-three the youngest in the family, working for O’Dwyer the builder. His mother – his father, too, though in a different way – was upset when Liam Pat said he was thinking of moving further afield. ‘Cork?’ his mother asked. But it was England Liam Pat had in mind.
Dessie Coglan said he could get him fixed. He’d go himself, Dessie Coglan said, if he didn’t have the wife and another kid expected. No way Rosita would stir, no way she’d move five yards from the estate, with her mother two doors down. ‘You’ll fall on your feet there all right,’ Dessie Coglan confidently predicted. ‘No way you won’t.’
Liam Pat didn’t have wild ambitions; but he wanted to make what he could of himself. At the Christian Brothers’ he’d been the tidiest in the class. He’d been attentive, even though he often didn’t understand. Father Mooney used to compliment him on the suit he always put on for Mass, handed down through the family, and the tie he always wore on Sundays. ‘The respect, L
iam Pat,’ Father Mooney would say. ‘It’s heartening for your old priest to see the respect, to see you’d give the boots a brush.’ Shoes, in fact, were what Liam Pat wore to Sunday Mass, black and patched, handed down also. Although they didn’t keep out the wet, that didn’t deter him from wearing them in the rain, stuffing them with newspaper when he was home again. ‘Ah, sure, you’ll pick it up,’ O’Dwyer said when Liam Pat asked him if he could learn a trade. He’d pick up the whole lot – plumbing, bricklaying, carpentry, house-painting. He’d have them all at his fingertips; if he settled for one of them, he wouldn’t get half the distance. Privately, O’Dwyer’s opinion was that Liam Pat didn’t have enough upstairs to master any trade and when it came down to it what was wrong with operating the mixer? ‘Keep the big mixer turning and keep Liam Pat Brogan behind it,’ was one of O’Dwyer’s good-humoured catch-phrases on the sites where his men built houses for him. ‘Typical O’Dwyer,’ Dessie Coglan scornfully pronounced. Stay with O’Dwyer and Liam Pat would be shovelling wet cement for the balance of his days.
Selected Stories, Volume 2 Page 26