Selected Stories

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 that 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 chair, 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.’

‘Oh, you’re right enough.’

‘I like the brown of a turkey. I’m told that’s unusual.’

‘It’s all white flesh they go for those times.’

‘You’d supply the supermarkets, would you?’

‘The most of it goes that way all right. Though there’s a few outlets locally.’

‘I have a room above Beatty’s.’

‘I sell to Beatty for Christmas.’

‘Well, there’s a coincidence for you!’

‘He’s a decent man, Henry Beatty.’

‘It’s not a bad little room.’

Further details were exchanged – about the room and then about the rearing, slaughtering and plucking of turkeys, the European regulations there were as regards hygiene and refrigeration. Divulging that she was a Belfast woman, Mrs Kincaid talked about the city. Blakely said he hadn’t been there since he lost his wife. She used to go for the shopping, he said. Brand’s, he said.

‘Oh, a great store, was Brand’s. You were always on the farm, Mr Blakely?’

‘Aye, I was.’

‘I was sorry to hear there about your wife.’

‘Aye.’

The plate of bread and butter arrived, with tea, and a small glass dish of gooseberry jam.

‘I’m a widow myself,’ Mrs Kincaid said.

‘Ah, well -’

‘I know, I know.’

That comment, spoken in a whisper, contrived to make one of the two widowings, contrived to isolate with quiet poignancy a common ground. There was for an instant the feeling at the table that death had struck almost simultaneously. This feeling, for Mrs Kincaid, was a theatrical effect, since in her case no death, no widowing, had occurred. For Blakely, it was real. He finished the food he had been brought. Jelly with sponge-cake in it was placed before him, with a pot of tea.

‘Are you far out of the town?’ Mrs Kincaid asked.

‘Ah, no. Not far.’

‘I sometimes come to a quiet town for a rest. A resort most times. But this time of year they’re lonely enough yet.’

‘They would be surely.’

Shortly after that Blakely folded his newspaper into the side pocket of his jacket. He picked up his cap from the knob at the top of his chair. He said good-bye to Mrs Kincaid and went to pay his bill at the counter.

‘Who is she, that woman?’ Mrs Hirrell asked him in a whisper, and he said that Mrs Kincaid was lodging above Beatty’s butcher’s shop. He didn’t know her name, he said, a Belfast woman in the town for a rest.

After that, Blakely found himself running into Mrs Kincaid quite often. She sat at his table in Hirrell’s Café even when on one occasion there was an empty table just inside the door. She was in Blundell’s News and Confectionery when he went in for his paper one day. Another time she was a mile out on the road when he was driving back to the farm and he waved at her and she waved back. A few days later she was there again with an umbrella up and he stopped, feeling he should offer her a lift.

‘Well, now, that’s very nice of you,’ she said.

‘Where’re you heading?’

Mrs Kincaid said nowhere in particular. Just a daunder, she said, to fill in the afternoon. ‘My name’s Mrs Kincaid,’ she added, since this information had not been given before, and went on to enquire if he ever felt that afternoons hung heavy.

Blakely replied that any hour of the day was the same to him. He tried to sound polite, picking out the right words, not wishing to seem brusque. ‘That’s Madole’s,’ he said as they passed a field with the gate wide open. Spring ploughing was in progress, Madole’s man, Quin, on the tractor. Madole had a lot of land, Blakely explained, some of it stretching right back to the town’s outskirts.

‘Here’s my own few acres,’ he said when his pink-washed roadside farmhouse and turkey sheds came into view. ‘Would I drop you? I’d say the rain’s stopped.’ Specks had come on to the windscreen after he’d turned off the wipers five minutes ago, but already they were drying away. There used to be a Kincaid in Lower Bridge Street one time, a dentist, before the present man came.

‘It’ll be a nice walk back,’ she said, getting out of the car when Blakely drew it up before turning into his yard. She thanked him. ‘What’s on ahead, though?’

‘Loughdoon. Three-quarters of a mile.’

‘I’ll take a look at it.’

‘It’s only small.’

‘I like a small place.’

The Lacky sisters – twins of forty-five – were in the plucking shed, with the birds that were ready strung up along a rafter. The sisters were in their similar black and grey overalls, their similarly crowded teeth hugely exposed as soon as their employer entered the shed, their reddish hair bulging out of the cloth caps they wore. They had been plucking Blakely’s turkeys for him for twenty-nine years, since their childhood. Quin came over when Madole gave him his time off, to help around the place in any way that was necessary.

Blakely nodded at the two women. They’d done well. He counted the prepared turkeys, sixteen of them. Two dozen were to be ready for the carrier when he called at four and they’d easily make that. The Lacky sisters threw back their heads and acknowledged his compliment by laughing shrilly. They couldn’t have seen the woman he’d given a lift to, they wouldn’t have heard the voices. People would be talking in Hirrel’s about the way she always sat at his table, but what could he do about it? And he couldn’t have passed her by on the road with rain falling. He put the car away in the lean-to and set off to repair a fence that had been in need of attention for a long while. His two sheepdogs went with him, loping along at his heels.

The job took longer than he’d estimated. By the time he’d finished it the carrier had been and the Lackys had gone home. The dogs began to bark when he was mixing the evening feed.

‘Now that’s for you,’ Mrs Kincaid said, holding out something in a brown-paper bag. It was raining lightly, but she’d taken her umbrella down. ‘I sheltered in Mullin’s,’ she said. ‘That’s a comfy wee bar he has there.’

Blakely stared at the bag she held out to him. ‘What is it?’ he said.

She smiled, shaking her head to indicate he’d have to find out himself. ‘Cheer you up, Mr Blakely.’

He didn’t want to accept a present from her. There was no call for her to give him a present. There was no call for her to come into the yard, looking for him.

‘No need,’ he said, taking a bottle of Bushmills whiskey from the damp paper bag. ‘No,’ he protested. The two sheepdogs, which he had pointed into a corner, had begun to creep forward on their haunches. ‘Ah, no,’ he said, handing back the bottle and the bag. ‘Ah no, no.’

The rain was getting heavier. ‘Would you mind if I stood in your turf shed for a minute?’ she said. ‘You get on with your work, Mr Blakely. The little offering’s for your kindness, letting me share your table and that. Mullin said you took a glass like the next man.’

‘I can’t take this from you.’

‘It’s nothing, Mr Blakely.’

‘Come into the kitchen till it clears.’

She said she didn’t want to interrupt him, but he led the way into the house, not saying anything himself. In the kitchen he pulled the damper out on the Rayburn to warm the place up. The bottle and the bag were on the table.

‘You’re looking frozen, Mr Blakely,’ she said, surprising him by taking two glasses from the dresser. She opened the bottle and poured whiskey for both of them. It was nothing, she said again.

It wasn’t an evening when Quin came, which Blakely was glad about. The Lackys couldn’t have missed her on the road, but they wouldn’t have known who she was and they’d never have guessed she’d turn in to the yard.

‘He told me about you,’ she was saying now. ‘Mr Mullin did.’

‘I go in there the odd time.’

‘He told me about the loss of your wife. How it was. And your daughter, of course.’

Blakely didn’t say anything. The whiskey was warm in his chest. In spite of what Mullin had said he wasn’t a drinking man, but he appreciated a drop of Bushmills. A going-away present, she said.

‘You’re going back soon?’ he asked, not pressing the question, keeping it casual.

She had taken her coat off. She was wearing a blue dress with tiny flashes of red in it, like pencil dots. There was a scarf, entirely red, tucked in at the top. At the table one leg was crossed over the other, both knees shiny because the stocking material was taut. Her umbrella was cocked up on the flags to dry.

‘Sooner or later,’ she said. ‘Cheers!’

She added more to both their glasses when he’d taken another mouthful. She looked round the kitchen and said it was lovely. ‘Mabel,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Mabel Kincaid.’

The rain was heavy now, rattling on the window panes. The Rayburn had begun to roar. He got up to push the damper in a bit.

‘That’s the mother and father of a shower,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘You never smile, Mr Blakely.’

Blakely was embarrassed by that. ‘I think maybe I’m a dour kind of man.’

‘You’re not at all. But after what I heard I wouldn’t blame you.’

She asked if he had always lived in this house, and he said he had. His father bought the few fields from Madole, farming pigs in those days. It was the Madoles who’d built the house and they’d built it without foundations, which his father didn’t know until after he’d bought it, didn’t know that was why he’d got it cheap.

‘A big family was it, Mr Blakely?’

He shook his head. A family of four, he said, one more than his own family, later on. ‘I have a brother, Willie John.’

As soon as he mentioned Willie John’s name Willie John laughed silently in Blakely’s recall, his big jaw split, the freckles around his eyes merging as the flesh puckered. Huge and ungainly, ham-fisted their father called him before the first fruits of those same hands were completed – a twin-engined Dewoitine 510, built from a kit.

‘We used to fly them out in the fields.’ He didn’t know why he told her; he hadn’t meant to, but sometimes, with whiskey, he was garrulous, even though he still hadn’t drunk much. Drink had a way of bringing things to life for him and he felt it doing that now. A Messerschmitt came to rest in a clump of nettles and Willie John gingerly rescued it, noting the damage to the tail-piece and one of the wings. His own Black Widow took off, airborne until the lighter fuel in the engine ran out. It glided down on to the cropped grass. Bloody marvellous, Willie John said.

‘Just the two of you,’ she said. ‘I was an only myself.’

‘Willie John got out when the troubles began. I get a card, Christmas time. Denver, Colorado.’

The telephone rang in the hall. It was Nathan Smith from Ulsterfare with the order for next week. When they finished talking about the turkeys Nathan said his daughter had got herself engaged.

‘I heard it. Isn’t that great, Nathan?’

‘It is surely. All we need now is the quiet’ll last for the wedding. Thursday will we say for the order?’

‘No problem, Nathan.’

In the kitchen she was on her feet with the frying-pan in her hand. The frying-pan had the breakfast fat congealed on it. She’d taken rashers out of the fridge and had lifted up one of the covers of the Rayburn. There were knives and forks on the table.

‘I was hoping you’d be longer,’ she said. ‘I had a surprise planned.’

‘Oh, look -’

‘Sit down and take another drop. It’s still at it cats and dogs. You have sausages in there. Would you take a couple?’

‘The rain’s no worry. I can run you back.’

She shook her head. She’d never ask a man who’d been drinking to drive. She spread four rashers on the fat of the pan and put the pan on the heat. She pricked four sausages on the draining-board. ‘Have you eggs?’ she said.

He brought in a bowl of eggs from the scullery. A woman hadn’t cooked in the kitchen since Hetty and Jacqueline died. He couldn’t remember that a woman had even been in the house since the last of the funeral guests stepped out of it, certainly not the Lackys. He shouldn’t have talked about Willie John like that. Talk had encouraged her. He shouldn’t have taken the Bushmills.

‘When it clears up I’ll walk it,’ she said. ‘I’m only filling in the time, Mr Blakely.’

‘I’ll drive you in,’ he insisted. ‘I’m well known. They won’t stop me.’

Mrs Kincaid undressed herself, thinking about him. He was a finished man. The man in the bar had said as much. He’d been destroyed by the troubles, but even so he kept going, with his turkeys and the two queer-looking women she’d met on the road working for him, feathers all over their overalls. His dinner every day in a café that overcharged you, his memories of toy aeroplanes, the wife and daughter never talked about: that was it for him. A Christmas card from Denver kept his spirits up.

Removing the last of her underclothes, Mrs Kincaid guessed that he was thinking about her also, that he might even be seeing her as she was in this very minute. Finished or not, there was always a spark that could be kindled. An old hand at that, Mrs Kincaid didn’t have to ask herself whether or not, today, she had done so. She had broken her resolve and she wondered as she buttoned her nightdress if she had the will to draw back now, to move on tomorrow, before things went any further. She lay for a moment with the bedside light on, then reached out and turned it off. She felt as she had often felt when she got to this stage in a bit of business - that some shadow of herself was having its way with her, that if eighty-four thousand pounds hadn’t been lifted off her she’d be a different woman entirely.

‘Left high and dry,’ she murmured in the darkness, applying the expression to the turkey farmer, dozily remembering that it was the one she had used about herself when she’d suffered her calamity.

On the morning after the evening of Mrs Kincaid’s visit to his house Blakely was aware of not minding if people had seen her in his car when he’d driven her to her room above Beatty’s shop. Her company in his kitchen had not, in the end, been disagreeable. She had washed up the dishes from which they had eaten the food she’d cooked. She had been sympathetic about several matters, and before they left he had shown her the plucking and dressing sheds even though he’d told himself he shouldn’t. ‘Isn’t it lonely for you?’ she’d said.

She wasn’t in Hirrel’s that day, nor the next. She’ll have gone, Blakely thought. She had bought him the bottle and now she’d gone back to Belfast. He hadn’t been welcoming; he’d been cagey and suspicious, worried in case the Lackys knew she’d cooked his food, worried in case Quin walked in. He was thinking about her when he heard the dogs barking and her voice quietening them.

‘I was passing by,’ she said.

The friendship that began for Blakely when the Bushmills was poured again and when for the second time a meal was shared in his kitchen was later remarked upon in Hirrel’s and in the turkey sheds. Because of his trouble in the past people were pleased, and pleased again when the two were seen together on the steps of the Stella Four-Screen. Reports went round that they’d danced, one Friday night, in the Crest Ballroom; a corner of the bar in Digby’s Hotel became known as theirs.

Soon after that the Lackys met Mrs Kincaid, and Quin did. She was brought to Sunday lunch with the Reverend Johnston. One morning Blakely woke up aware of a deep longing for Mrs Kincaid, aware of a gentleness when he thought about her, of an impatience with himself for not declaring his feelings before this.

‘Oh no, dear, no.’

She said he was too good for her. Too good a man, she said, too steady a man, too well-set-up, too decent a man. She could bring nothing, she said, she would be coming empty-handed and that was never her way. Kincaid had left her no more than a pittance, she said, not expecting to be taken so soon, as no man would in the prime of his life. A few years ago Mrs Kincaid had heard talk of a Belfast man who’d electrocuted himself drilling holes in an outside wall: as the cause of Kincaid’s demise, that did well enough.

‘No, I never could,’ she repeated, surveying the astonishment she had known would appear in the lean features, the flush of the cheeks darkening. ‘You have your life the way it is,’ she said. ‘You have your memories. I’d never upset the way things are with you.’

He went silent. Was he thinking he’d made a fool of himself? she wondered. Would he finish his drink and that would be the end of it?

‘I’m on my own,’ he said.

They were in the bar of the hotel, the quiet time between six and seven. The day before she’d said she’d definitely be off at the end of the week. Refreshed and invigorated, she’d said.

‘I’m alone,’ he repeated.

‘Don’t I know you are? Didn’t I say you’d be lonely?’

‘What I’m saying to you -’

‘I know what you’re saying to me. What I’m saying to yourself is you’re set in your ways. You’re well-to-do, I haven’t much. Isn’t it about that too?’

‘It’s not money -’

‘There’s always money.’

The conversation softly became argument. Affection spread through it, real and contrived. It had been great knowing him, Mrs Kincaid said. You come to a place, you gain a friend; nothing was nicer. But Blakely was stubborn. There were feelings in this, he insisted; she couldn’t deny it.

‘I’m not. I’m not at all. I’m only trying to be fair to you. I have a Belfast woman’s caution in me.’

‘I’m as cautious myself as any man in Ulster. I have a name for it.’

‘You’re trusting the unknown all the same. Fair and square, hasn’t that to be said?’

‘You’re never unknown to me.’

‘When the cards are down I’m a woman you don’t know from a tinker.’

Blakely denied that with a gesture. He didn’t say anything. Mrs Kincaid said:

‘If I asked you for money, why would you give it to me? I wouldn’t do it, but if I did. Who’d blame you for shaking your head? If I said write me a cheque for two thousand pounds who’d blame you for saying no? No man in his senses would say anything else. If I said to you I’d keep that cheque by me, that I’d never pass it into the bank because it was only there as a bond of trust between us, you wouldn’t believe me.’

‘Why wouldn’t I trust you?’

‘That’s what I’m saying to you. I’m a woman turned up in the town to get away for a little while from the noise and bustle of the city. Who’d blame you if you’d say to yourself I wouldn’t trust her as far as an inch? When there’s trust between us, is what I’m saying, we’ll maybe talk about the other. D’you understand me, dear?’

‘We know each other well.’

‘We do and we don’t, dear. Bad things have happened to us.’

Mrs Kincaid spoke then of the trouble in her past, speaking only the truth, as always she did at this stage in the proceedings.

Blakely felt in the inside pocket of his jacket and took out a Northern Bank cheque-book. He wrote the cheque. He dated it and signed it and tore it out. He handed it to her. She took it, staring at it for as long as a minute. Then she tore it up.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘I mean it.’

‘I never knew a straighter man,’ Mrs Kincaid said, and for a moment longer the open cheque-book lay between them on the bar-room table. When he reached for it again she said, ‘I bank under my maiden name.’ She gave him a name, which he added to the Mabel he had written while she was speaking. ‘That will never be cashed,’ she said. ‘I promise you that.’

They would not correspond, she laid down. They would wait two months and then they would meet again at the table they were at now, the table they had made their own. They chose a date and a time, a Tuesday at the end of July.

The cheque was for the amount Mrs Kincaid had mentioned. She paid it into her bank as soon as she was back in Belfast and recorded the amount in her notebook. Two days later it reached Blakely’s bank and was covered by his standing instruction that if his current account ever did not have sufficient funds in it a transfer should be made from his deposit account. He received his next bank statement sixteen days later.

She could have married the man. The clergyman she’d been introduced to would have done the job. She could have been the wife of a turkey farmer for the rest of her days and she wondered about that – about waking in the farmhouse and the sheepdogs in the yard, about conversations there might have been, their common ground as the victims of gangsters.

Regret nagged Mrs Kincaid then. She felt she had missed a chance she hadn’t even known was there. Her instinct was to write a letter, although what she might say in it she didn’t know. The more she wondered if she should or not, the more her confidence grew that inspiration would come to her, that in the end she would fill a page or two as easily as she made an entry in her notebook. Time would pass, and she had faith in the way time had of softening anything which was distressful. Naturally the poor man would have been distressed.

Sadness afflicted Blakely, which eased a little while that time went by. Resignation took its place. It was his fault; he had been foolish. His resistance had been there, he had let it slip away. But even so, on the day they had arranged to meet, he put on his suit and went along to Digby’s Hotel.

He waited for an hour in their corner of the bar, believing that against the odds there might somehow be an explanation. Then he went away.

Somewhere in him as he drove out of the town there was still a flicker of optimism, although he did not know where it came from or even if what it promised was sensible. He did not dwell upon his mood; it was simply there.

The troubles had returned since Mrs Kincaid had travelled back to Belfast. There had been murder and punishment, the burning of churches, the barricades at Drumcree, the destruction of the town of Omagh. Yet belief in the fragile peace persisted, too precious after so long to abandon. Stubbornly the people of the troubles honoured the hope that had spread among them, fierce in their clamour that it should not go away. In spite of the quiet made noisy again, its benign infection had reached out for Blakely; it did so for Mrs Kincaid also, even though her trouble was her own. Weary at last of making entries in a notebook, she wrote her letter.