He nods. The coffee’s good, he says. The other matter’s over, he does not add, but Vanessa knows it is. Once Kellfittard gave her a box of chocolates, Bendicks’ Peppermints because he knew she liked them. ‘I bought these by mistake,’ he said, the lie so damaging the gesture that the gesture lost its point. It would have been silly not to accept them.
‘Linderfoot’s put on another stone, I’d say. How fortunate the wives are to be left at home!’
His wisdom was what she loved when first she loved him, when she was still a girl. She called it that, though only to herself. Not brains, they all had brains. Not skill. Not knowing everything, for they knew less than they imagined. His wisdom is almost indefinable, what a roadworker might have, a cinema usher or a clergyman, or a child. Her mother would not understand, and he himself would deny that he is wise. Of course the papers are not on the hall table; of course he hasn’t read a word – the subtle slights wrapped up as worthiness, and qualities he did not possess made his because it is the thing to do, all of valediction’s clichés.
‘No, no, a blunder,’ she hears him say when the telephone rings, the first time it has today, the house of mourning left to itself until this moment. ‘No, most ridiculous,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry if I startled you.’
He laughs, replacing the receiver, and Vanessa does not say she loves him, although she wants to. Absurd, to have thought of hiding away in Italy, packing everything up, leaving for ever his beautiful city just because they have been involved in someone else’s hoax.
He has worn the better of the two, Vanessa reflects. Age in his features was always there; her beauty loses a little every day. ‘I love your wisdom,’ she wants to say, but still is shy to use that word, fearing a display of her naïvety would make her foolish.
‘My dear,’ he murmurs in the calmness they have reached, and holds her as he did the day he first confessed his adoration. It is the wedding of their differences that protects them, steadfast in the debris of the storm.
Against the Odds
Mrs Kincaid decided to lie low. There had been a bit of bother, nothing much but enough to cause her to change her address. From time to time she was obliged to do so.
She wondered about Portrush. It was May, which meant that the holiday accommodation would still be available at low-season terms. She wondered about Cushendall, which she would have preferred because she liked the air there, but only three years had passed since her last visit and somehow three years didn’t feel quite long enough. Cushendun, Ballygalley, Portstewart, Ardglass, Bangor, Kilkeel: Mrs Kincaid had breathed the air in all of them.
This time, though, she decided on an inland town. She knew many of these also, Armagh and Lisburn in particular, but Ballymena, Magherafelt, Lurgan and Portadown almost as well. She was a Belfast woman herself, but long ago had made all the territory of the Six Counties her business ground. Only once, in 1987, had she strayed outside the North of Ireland, taking the Larne crossing to Stranraer, then travelling on to Glasgow, an episode in her life she regretted and preferred not to dwell upon. Equally regretted was a suspended sentence in the Derry courts in 1981, since it had ruled out as a place to do business in a city she was particularly fond of.
Mrs Kincaid – with no claim to that name other than her occasional use of it – was just over eleven stone, and tall. Although well covered, she gave no impression of plumpness; no bloated or sagging flesh seemed superfluous beneath her clothes. Her arms were sturdy, her legs looked strong. In her own opinion her biggish face was something she got away with, no feature in it particularly objectionable, neither a fallen-away chin nor protruding teeth. Modest in her dress, careful not to overdo her use of perfume and make-up, she was sixty years old, admitting to fifty-one. Her easy smile worked wonders.
‘Well, isn’t that great?’ she remarked to the driver of the Ulsterbus that was taking her to the inland town she had finally chosen, one she neither knew nor was known in. Her display of elation as she entered the bus had to do with the declaration of peace in the Six Counties. A double cease-fire had been announced in the thirty years’ war that was not called a war; politicians from within the North of Ireland and from London and Dublin, advisers from America, had drawn up a long agenda that had since been agreed to by referendum on both sides of the Border. Mrs Kincaid had not herself suffered more than inconvenience during the years of conflict; the trouble in her life had been a personal one. Yet the havoc that occurred with such weary repetition and for so long had naturally impinged; she would be glad to see its end.
‘Great?’ the bus driver responded to her optimism.
‘The peace.’
‘There’s maybe something in their bits of paper.’ Nonchalantly, the driver turned on the ignition. Windscreen wipers lumbered across the curved glass in front of him, clearing away a few drops of rain. ‘We’ll see,’ he said, a reminder in his tone that whatever agreements had been reached, whatever pledges given, there were gunmen who had not gone away, who still possessed their armoury and were used to calling the tune. ‘We’ll see,’ he said again.
‘Hope for the best.’
‘Aye.’
‘Isn’t it cold, though, for May? Whenever I looked out first thing I said you’ll be needing your wool, Mabel.’
The bus driver agreed that the weather was unseasonable before starting his engine. Mrs Kincaid passed on to a seat. She never liked leaving Belfast. Its streets were hers, its intonations always a pleasure to hear again when she returned from an exile never made through choice. The bombs that had battered its buildings, blown its motor-cars to pieces, maimed and killed its citizens, had never, in thirty years, caused her to wish to live elsewhere. Child of a Belfast boarding-house, she had salted away the wealth that property had fetched when she inherited it, only later to be parted from her gains, which was the personal circumstance that had coloured her life since.
She sat alone on the bus, her two brown suitcases on the rack above her. As always, she travelled light. Rented rooms with furniture supplied were what she liked, someone else’s taste. She lived in that way, and although she guessed that in the town she was going to there wouldn’t be a soul who did so too, she would manage not to stand out. Not yet composed, whatever story came to her on her journey would see to that for her.
Blakely crushed the peas beneath his fork, then mixed them into a mush of potato and gravy. There was one piece of meat left, its size calculated to match what was left of the potatoes and peas. Since first being on his own he had got into this way of eating, of gauging forkfuls in advance, of precisely combining the various items on his plate. It was a substitute for conversation, for invariably, these days, Blakely ate alone.
Six days a week he drove in from the farm and sat down at the same table in Hirrel’s Café, never looking at a menu but taking whatever was on specially for that day. On Sundays he sat down with the Reverend Johnston in the manse, having brought with him whatever eggs he could spare, or butter-milk, which the Reverend Johnston was partial to, once a month a turkey. In December he supplied Hirrel’s with turkeys also.
The Belfast Telegraph, folded and propped up against two Yorkshire Relish bottles, was full of the recent political developments and the prospect for the future. Fourteen years ago Blakely’s wife and daughter had been killed in error, a bomb attached to a car similar in make and colour to the would-be victim’s, the registration number varying by only a single digit. Promptly, he had received an apology, a telephone call of commiserations that sounded genuine. Two wreaths were sent.
He pushed his knife and fork to the side of the plate, and a few minutes later Mrs Hirrel brought him a plate of rhubarb and custard and a pot of tea. He thanked her, folding the newspaper away. The men of violence were still in charge, no doubt about it. He’d said that to Mrs Hirrel the time the cease-fires were predicted, and she’d agreed with him. They’d talked about it for a long while; today, as yesterday and the day before, there was nothing left to say on the subject. Mrs Hirrel remarked instead t
hat the rhubarb was all young shoots, grown under plastic, the first that had come up out the back. ‘See to that woman, Nellie,’ she called out to her waitress, for a woman had entered the café, bringing with her a stream of bitterly cold air.
All the tables were taken, as they always were at this time. Shop people came to Hirrel’s at lunchtime, commercial travellers took advantage of being in the town in the middle of the day. Toomey from the Northern Bank was always there, with the lady clerk he was doing a line with. Van drivers, occasionally a lorry driver, looked in.
‘Can you wait a wee minute?’ Nellie enquired of the newcomer. ‘There’s several finishing up.’
‘D’you know who that is, Mr Blakely?’ Mrs Hirrel asked him, and he said he didn’t, and Mrs Hirrel said nor did she. ‘Would she sit there a minute with you while you drink your tea?’
Sometimes this happened because of the empty chair opposite him. He never minded. Travellers in drapery or hardware items would fall into conversation with him, giving him some idea of the current ups and downs of the commercial world, usually asking him what line he was in himself.
‘Are you sure?’ Led to the table, Mrs Kincaid was hesitant before she sat down. ‘I wouldn’t want to butt in on you.’
‘You’re doing rightly,’ Blakely reassured her. He was a nervous man with strangers and often expressed himself not quite as he meant to in order to get out any words at all. His tea was hot and he would have liked to pour it on to the saucer. But that wouldn’t do in Hirrel’s.
‘Homey,’ Mrs Kincaid remarked, looking around her at a familiar aspect – the laminate tabletops, cheap knives and forks, plates of bread and butter, faces intent on mastication, a toothpick occasionally spearing trapped shreds: many times she had frequented cafés like this. The man opposite her at least had taken off his cap, which often men didn’t when they ate in such places. He had tufty grey hair cut short and a lean, narrow face with a deep flush in both cheeks. A healthy-looking, outside man, well enough dressed, with a collar and tie. In Mrs Kincaid’s childhood if a man not wearing a collar and tie came to the boarding-house after a room he was turned away at once.
‘Isn’t it chilly today, though?’ she remarked, noticing that a plate of rhubarb and custard had been finished quite tidily, a little left behind, spoon and fork kept together. Late fifties, she put him down as; fingernails a little grimed but nothing to write home about.
‘There’s a few more days of it,’ he said, and then the waitress was there, asking her what she’d like, saying the mutton was finished. Mrs Kincaid ordered a plate of bread and butter, and tea.
‘Have we peace at last?’ she asked and the man replied civilly enough that you wouldn’t know. His own opinion was that there was a long way to go, and she could feel him being careful about how he put it, in how he chose his words. Not knowing about her, not knowing which foot she dug with, as her father used to say, he held back. He poured himself another cup of tea, added milk and stirred in sugar, two spoonfuls of granulated.
‘Ach, it’s been going on too long,’ she said.
‘Maybe it’s the end so.’
He folded his newspaper into a side pocket of his jacket. The jacket was of dark tweed and needed a press, a thread hanging down where a button had come off. You could tell from his way with the waitress that he was a regular. He counted out the money for his bill and left a 5p piece and some coppers as a tip. ‘Good day,’ he said before he went to pay at the counter.
From force of habit rather than anything else, Mrs Kincaid continued to wonder about Blakely after he’d gone. She wondered if he could be a road surveyor, since something about him reminded her of a road surveyor she’d once briefly known. She imagined him with a road gang, a smell of tar in the air, fresh chippings still pale on the renovated surface. Then Mrs Kincaid reminded herself that she wasn’t here to interest herself in a man she didn’t know, far from it. She had left her two suitcases in the newsagent’s shop where the bus had put her down. When she’d had something to eat and had made enquiries she’d go back and collect them.
‘Try Bann Street,’ the waitress said. ‘There’s a few that lets rooms there.’
Leave it, Mrs Kincaid warned herself again when she noticed Blakely coming out of Hirrel’s Café four days later, repeating her reminder to herself that she was not here for anything like that. She’d stay a month, she had decided; from experience a month was long enough for any bit of trouble to quieten. Talk of solicitors’ letters, of walking straight round to a police station, threats of this and that, all simmered away to nothing when a little time went by. Frayed tempers mended, pride came to terms with whatever foolishness she’d taken advantage of in the way of business. Not that much had mended in her own case, not that pride had ever recovered from the dent it had received, but her own case was different and always had been. Eighty-four thousand pounds the boarding-house had realized in 1960, more like ten times that it would be now. ‘We’d put the little enterprise in your name,’ the man she’d thought of as her fiancé had said. ‘No hanky-panky.’ But somehow in the process of buying what he always called the little enterprise the eighty-four thousand had slipped out of her name. Soon after that it disappeared and he with it. The little enterprise it was to purchase was a bookmaker’s in Argyle Street, an old bookie retiring, two generations of goodwill. A chain took it over a couple of months later.
These days Mrs Kincaid did her best to take the long view, telling herself that what had happened was like a death and that you couldn’t moan about a death for ever, not even to yourself. In her business activities she did not seek vengeance but instead sought to accumulate what was rightfully hers, keeping her accounts in a small red notebook, always with the hope that one day she would not have to do so, that her misfortune in the past would at last free her from its thrall.
Walking against a steady east wind on the day she saw Blakely for the second time, she recalled his lean face very clearly, his tufty hair, the hanging thread on his jacket where a button had come off. He’d be a bachelor or a widower, else he wouldn’t be taking his dinner in a café every day. You could tell at once the foot he dug with, as decent a Protestant foot as her own, never a doubt about that.
The room she had taken – not in Bann Street but above a butcher’s shop in Knipe Street – smelt of meat and suet. She had an electric ring to cook on, a sink for the washing of clothes and dishes, lavatory and bathroom a flight up. There was a television, a gas fire, a single bed under the window, and when she fried something on the electric ring the butchery smell disappeared for a while. Mrs Kincaid had been in worse places.
She brought back from the shops a bar of Kit-Kat, Woman’s Own, Hello!, The Lady, and a film magazine. She ate the chocolate bar, read a story about a late flowering of romance, made tea, slipped out of her skirt and blouse, slept, and dreamed she had married a clergyman to whom she’d once sold back the letters he’d written her. When she woke she washed herself, fried rashers and an egg, and went out again.
She sat alone at a table in the bar of Digby’s Hotel, listening to tunes of the fifties, all of which she was familiar with. Occasionally someone smiled at her, a man or a woman, the girl behind the bar, but generally they just went by. She heard talk about a dance. She would have gone on her own when she was younger, but those days were over now. She drank vodka with no more than a colouring of port in it, which was her tipple. She bought a packet of cigarettes, although as a general rule she didn’t smoke any more. She wasn’t going to be able to resist what had been put in her path: she knew that perfectly.
She knew it again when she woke up in the middle of the night and lay for a while awake in the darkness. The smell from the shop below had come back, and when she dropped back into sleep she dreamed that the man she had met in the café was in butcher’s clothes, separating lamb chops with a cleaver.
There was a traveller on his own by the table at the window, but that was the smallest table in the café and he had his samples’ case on the other c
hair, out of the way of people passing. Otherwise, Blakely’s was the only table that wasn’t shared.
‘Only she said go on over,’ the same woman who’d shared it with him before said.
‘You’re welcome. Sure, there’s nowhere else.’
‘Isn’t that the bad news?’ She nodded at the headline in his paper. A taxi-driver had been shot dead the evening before, the first murder since the cease-fires.
‘Aye,’ Blakely said. ‘It is that.’
She was dressed as she’d been before, in shades of fawn and brown – a skirt and cardigan, cream blouse, under the coat she’d taken off. There was a brooch, made to look like a flower, in her blouse.
‘The plate’s hot, Mr Blakely,’ Nellie warned, placing roast beef and potatoes and cabbage in front of him. She wiped the edge of the plate where gravy had left a residue.
‘Bread and butter and tea, Nellie,’ Mrs Kincaid ordered, remembering the name from the last time. ‘I don’t take much,’ she informed Blakely, ‘in the middle of the day. And jam,’ she called after the waitress.
‘It’s my main meal,’ Blakely explained, a note of mild justification in his tone.
‘Convenient, to go out for it.’
‘Ach, it is.’
‘You live in the town, Mr Blakely?’
‘A bit out.’
‘I thought maybe you would. You have the look of the open air.’
‘I’m a turkey farmer.’
‘Well, there you are.’
He worried a piece of beef into shreds, piled cabbage and potato on to his fork, soaking up a little gravy before conveying the lot to his mouth.
‘Not bad,’ he responded when he was asked if turkeys were fetching well.
‘Time was when turkeys were a Christmas trade and no more. Amn’t I right? Not that I know a thing about poultry.’
Selected Stories, Volume 2 Page 36