The Collected Stories

Eleanor slipped her night-dress over her head and looked at her naked body. She didn’t herself see much beauty in it, but she knew that the breasts were the right size for the hips, that arms and legs nicely complemented each other. She dressed and went into the kitchen, where her father was making tea and her mother was reading the Daily Express. Her father hadn’t been to bed all night. He slept during the day, being employed by night as a doorman in a night-club called Daisy’s, in Shepherd Market. Once upon a time her father had been a wrestler, but in 1961 he’d injured his back in a bout with a Japanese and had since been unfit for the ring. Being a doorman of a night-club kept him in touch, so he claimed, with the glamorous world he’d been used to in the past. He often saw familiar faces, he reported, going in and out of Daisy’s, faces that once had been his audience. Eleanor felt embarrassed when he talked like that, being unable to believe much of what he said.

‘You’re in for a scorcher,’ he said now, placing a pot of tea on the blue formica of the table. ‘No end to the heatwave, they can’t see.’

He was a large, red-faced man with closely cut grey hair and no lobe to his right ear. He’d put on weight since he’d left the wrestling ring and although he moved slowly now, as though in some way compensating for years of nimbleness on the taut canvas, he was still, in a physical sense, a formidable opponent, as occasional troublemakers at the night-club had painfully discovered.

Eleanor knocked Special Κ into a dish and added milk and sugar.

‘That’s a lovely young girl,’ her father said. ‘Mia Farrow. She was in last night, Eleanor.’

His breakfast-time conversation was always the same. Princess Margaret had shaken him by the hand and Anthony Armstrong-Jones had asked if he might take his photograph for a book about London he was doing. The Burtons came regularly, and Rex Harrison, and the Canadian Prime Minister whenever he was in London. Her father had a way of looking at Eleanor when he made such statements, his eyes screwed up, almost lost in the puffed red flesh of his face: he stared unblinkingly and beadily, as if defying her to reply that she didn’t for a moment accept that Princess Margaret’s hand had ever lain in his or that Anthony Armstrong-Jones had addressed him.

‘Faceful of innocence,’ he said. ‘Just a faceful of innocence, Eleanor. “Good-night, Miss Farrow,” I said, and she turned the little face to me and said to call her Mia.’

Eleanor nodded. Her mother’s eyes were fixed on the Daily Express, moving from news item to news item, her lips occasionally moving also as she read. ‘Liz Jones,’ Eleanor wanted to say. ‘Could you complain to the school about Liz Jones?’ She wanted to tell them about the fashion in Class 2, about Miss Whitehead, and how everyone was afraid of Liz Jones. She imagined her voice speaking across the breakfast table, to her father who was still in his doorman’s uniform and her mother who mightn’t even hear her. There’d be embarrassment as her father listened, her own face would be as hot as fire. He’d turn his head away in the end, like the time she’d had to ask him for money to buy sanitary towels.

‘Lovely little fingers,’ he said, ‘like a baby’s fingers, Eleanor. Little wisps of things. She touched me with the tips.’

‘Who?’ demanded her mother, suddenly sharp, looking up. ‘Eh, then?’

‘Mia Farrow,’ he said. ‘She was down in Daisy’s last night. Sweetest thing; sweetest little face.’

‘Ah, yes, Peyton Place,’ her mother said, and Eleanor’s father nodded.

Her mother had spectacles with swept-up, elaborately bejewelled frames. The jewels were made of glass, but they glittered, especially in strong sunlight, just like what Eleanor imagined diamonds must glitter like. Her mother, constantly smoking, had hair which she dyed so that it appeared to be black. She was a thin woman with bones that stuck out awkwardly at the joints, seeming as though they might at any moment break through the surface of taut, anaemic skin. In Eleanor’s opinion her mother had suffered, and once she had had a dream in which her mother was fat and married to someone else, a man, as far as Eleanor could make out, who ran a vegetable shop.

Her mother always had breakfast in her night-dress and an old fawn-coloured dressing-gown, her ankles below it as white as paper, her feet stuck into tattered slippers. After breakfast, she would return to bed with Eleanor’s father, obliging him, Eleanor knew, as she had obliged him all her life. During the school holidays, and on Saturdays and Sundays when Eleanor was still in the flat, her mother continued to oblige him: in the bedroom he made the same kind of noise as he’d made in the wrestling ring. The Prince of Hackney he’d been known as.

Her mother was a shadow. Married to a man who ran a vegetable shop or to any other kind of man except the one she’d chosen, Eleanor believed she’d have been different: she’d have had more children, she’d have been a proper person with proper flesh on her bones, a person you could feel for. As she was, you could hardly take her seriously. She sat there in her night-clothes, waiting for the man she’d married to rise from the table and go into their bedroom so that she might follow. Afterwards she cleared up the breakfast things and washed them, while he slept. She shopped in the Express Dairy Supermarket, dropping cigarette ash over tins of soup and peas and packets of crisps, and at half past eleven she sat in the corner of the downstairs lounge of the Northumberland Arms and drank a measure of gin and water, sometimes two.

‘Listen to this,’ her mother said in her wheezy voice. She quoted a piece about a fifty-five-year-old woman, a Miss Margaret Sugden, who had been trapped in a bath for two days and three nights. ‘It ended,’ read Eleanor’s mother, ‘with two burly policemen – eyes carefully averted – lifting her out. It took them half an hour of gentle levering, for Miss Sugden, a well-rounded sixteen stone, was helplessly stuck’

He laughed. Her mother stubbed her cigarette out on her saucer and lit a fresh one. Her mother never ate anything at breakfast-time. She drank three cups of tea and smoked the same number of cigarettes. He liked a large breakfast, eggs and bacon, fried bread, a chop sometimes.

‘History’s longest soak,’ her mother said, still quoting from the Daily Express. Her father laughed again.

Eleanor rose and carried the dish she’d eaten her Special Κ out of to the sink, with her cup and her saucer. She rinsed them under the hot tap and stacked them on the red, plastic-covered rack to dry. Her mother spoke in amazed tones when she read pieces out of the newspaper, surprised by the activities of people and animals, never amused by them. Some part of her had been smashed to pieces.

She said goodbye to both of them. Her mother kissed her as she always did. Winking, her father told her not to take any wooden dollars, an advice that was as regular and as mechanical as her mother’s embrace.

‘Netball is it?’ her mother vaguely asked, not looking up from the newspaper. There wasn’t netball, Eleanor explained, as she’d explained before, in the summer term: she wouldn’t be late back.

She left the flat and descended three flights of concrete stairs. She passed the garages and then the estate’s playground, where Liz Jones had first of all been done. ‘Good-morning, Eleanor,’ a woman said to her, an Irish woman called Mrs Rourke. ‘Isn’t it a great day?’

Eleanor smiled. The weather was lovely, she said. Mrs Rourke was a lackadaisical woman, middle-aged and fat, the mother of eight children. On the estate it was said that she was no better than she should be, that one of her sons, who had a dark tinge in his pallor, was the child of a West Indian railway porter. Another of Mrs Rourke’s children and suspect also, a girl of Eleanor’s age called Dolly, was reputed to be the daughter of Susie Crumm’s father. In the dream Eleanor had had in which her own mother was fat rather than thin it had seemed that her mother had somehow become Mrs Rourke, because in spite of everything Mrs Rourke was a happy woman. Her husband had a look of happiness about him also, as did all the Rourke children, no matter where they’d come from. They regularly went to Mass, all together in a family outing, and even if Mrs Rourke occasionally obliged Susie Crumm’s father and others it hadn’t taken the same toll of her as the obliging of Eleanor’s-father by her mother had. For years, ever since she’d listened to Liz Jones telling the class the full facts of life, Eleanor had been puzzled by the form the facts apparently took when different people were involved. She’d accepted quite easily the stories about Mrs Rourke and had thought no less of the woman, but when Dolly Rourke had said, about a month ago, that she’d been done by Rogo Pollini, Eleanor had felt upset, not caring to imagine the occasion, as she didn’t care to imagine the occasion that took place every morning after breakfast in her parents’ bedroom. Mrs Rourke didn’t matter because she was somehow remote, like one of the people her mother read about in the Daily Express or one of the celebrities her father told lies about: Mrs Rourke didn’t concern her, but Dolly Rourke and Rogo Pollini did because they were close to her, being the same as she was and of the same generation. And her parents concerned her because they were close to her also. You could no longer avoid any of it when you thought of Dolly Rourke and Rogo Pollini, or your parents.

She passed a row of shops, Len Parrish the baker, a dry cleaner’s, the Express Dairy Supermarket, the newsagent’s and post office, the off-licence attached to the Northumberland Arms. Girls in the grey-and-purple uniform of Springfield Comprehensive alighted in numbers from a bus. A youth whistled at her. ‘Hi, Eleanor,’ said Gareth Swayles, coming up behind her. In a friendly manner he put his hand on her back, low down, so that, as though by accident, he could in a moment slip it over her buttocks.

There’s a new boy in Grimes the butcher’s, Liz Jones wrote on a piece of paper. He’s not on the estate at all. She folded the paper and addressed it to Eleanor. She passed it along the row of desks.

‘Je l’ai vu qui travaillait dans la cour,’ said Miss Whitehead.

I saw him in Grimes, Eleanor wrote. Funny-looking fish. She passed the note back and Liz Jones read it and showed it to her neighbour, Thelma Joseph. Typical Eleanor, Liz Jones wrote and Thelma Joseph giggled slightly.

‘Un anglais qui passait ses vacances en France,’ said Miss Whitehead.

Miss Whitehead lived in Esher, in a bed-sitting-room. Girls had sometimes visited her there and those who had done so described for others what Miss Whitehead’s residence was like. It was very clean and comfortable and neat. White paint shone on the window ledges and the skirting-boards, lace curtains hung close to sparkling glass. On the mantelpiece there were ornaments in delicate ceramic, Highland sheep and cockerels, and a chimney sweep with his brushes on his back. A clock ticked on the mantelpiece, and in the fireplace – no longer used – Miss Whitehead had stood a vase of dried flowers. Her bed was in a recess, not at all obtrusive in the room, a narrow divan covered in cheerful chintz.

‘Le pêcheur,’ said Miss Whitehead, ‘est un homme qui… Eleanor?’

‘Pêche?’

‘Très bien. Et la blanchisseuse est une femme qui…?’

‘Lave le linge.’

Liz Jones said it must be extraordinary to be Miss Whitehead, never to have felt a man’s hand on you. Gareth Swayles said he’d give it to her, she’d written on one of the notes she was constantly passing round the class. Imagine Swayles in bed with Whitehead!

‘La mère n’aime pas le fromage,’ said Miss Whitehead, and Liz Jones passed another note to Eleanor. The new boy in Grimes is called Denny Price, it said. He wants to do you.

‘Eleanor,’ said Miss Whitehead.

She looked up from the elaborately looped handwriting of Liz Jones. In their bedroom her father would be making the noises he used to make in the wrestling ring. Her mother would be lying there. Once, when she was small, she’d gone in by mistake and her father had been standing without his clothes on. Her mother had pulled a sheet up to cover her own nakedness.

‘Why are you writing notes, Eleanor?’

‘She didn’t, Miss Whitehead,’ Liz Jones said. ‘I sent her –’

‘Thank you, Elizabeth. Eleanor?’

‘I’m sorry, Miss Whitehead.’

‘Were you writing notes, Eleanor?’

‘No, I –’

‘I sent her the note, Miss Whitehead. It’s a private matter –’

‘Not private in my class, Elizabeth. Pass me the note, Eleanor.’

Liz Jones was sniggering: Eleanor knew that she’d wanted this to happen. Miss Whitehead would read the note out, which was her rule when a note was found.

‘The new boy in Grimes is called Denny Price,’ Miss Whitehead said. ‘He wants to do you.’

The class laughed, a muffled sound because the girls’ heads were bent over their desks.

‘He wants to have sexual relations with Eleanor,’ Liz Jones explained, giggling more openly. ‘Eleanor’s a –’

‘Thank you, Elizabeth. The future tense, Elizabeth: s’asseoir.’

Her voice grated in the classroom. Her voice had become unattractive also, Eleanor thought, because she’d never let herself be loved. In her clean bed-sitting-room she might weep tonight, recalling the insolence of Liz Jones. She’d punish Liz Jones when the bell went, the way she always inflicted punishment. She’d call her name out and while the others left the room she’d keep the girl longer than was necessary, setting her a piece of poetry to write out ten times and explaining, as if talking to an infant, that notes and conversation about sexual matters were not permitted in her classroom. She’d imply that she didn’t believe that the boy in Grimes’ had said what Liz Jones had reported he’d said. She’d pretend it was all a fantasy, that no girl from Springfield Comprehensive had ever been done in the playground of the estate or anywhere else. It was easy for Miss Whitehead, Eleanor thought, escaping to her bed-sitting-room in Esher.

‘It’s your bloody fault,’ Liz Jones said afterwards in the washroom. ‘If you weren’t such a curate’s bitch –’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, shut up about it!’ Eleanor cried.

‘Denny Price wants to give you his nine inches –’

‘I don’t want his bloody nine inches. I don’t want anything to do with him.’

‘You’re under-sexed, Eleanor. What’s wrong with Denny Price?’

‘He’s peculiar-looking. There’s something the matter with his head.’

‘Will you listen to this!’ Liz Jones cried, and the girls who’d gathered round tittered. ‘What’s his head got to do with it for God’s sake? It’s not his head that’s going to –’ She broke off, laughing, and all the girls laughed also, even though several of them didn’t at all care for Liz Jones.

‘You’ll end like Whitehead,’ Liz Jones said. ‘Doing yourself in Esher.’ The likes of Whitehead, she added, gave you a sickness in your kidneys. Eleanor had the same way of walking as Whitehead had, which was a way that dried-up virgins acquired because they were afraid to walk any other way in case a man touched their dried-up bottoms.

Eleanor went away, moving through the girls of other classes, across the washroom.

‘Liz Jones is a nasty little tit,’ a girl called Eileen Reid whispered, and Joan Moate, a fair-haired girl with a hint of acne, agreed. But Liz Jones couldn’t hear them. Liz Jones was still laughing, leaning against a wash-basin with a cigarette in her mouth.

For lunch that day at Springfield Comprehensive there was stew and processed potatoes and carrots, with blancmange afterwards, chocolate and strawberry.

‘Don’t take no notice,’ Susie Crumm said to Eleanor. The way Liz Jones went on, she added, it wouldn’t suprise her to hear that she’d contracted syphilis.

‘What’s it like, Susie?’ Eleanor asked.

‘Syphilis? You get lesions. If you’re a girl you can’t tell sometimes. Fellas get them all over their equipment –’

‘No, I mean what’s it like being done?’

‘’Sail right. Nice really. But not like Jones goes for it. Not all the bloody time.’

They ate spoonfuls of blancmange, sucking it through their teeth.

‘’Sail right,’ Susie Crumm repeated when she’d finished. ‘’Sail right for an occasion.’

Eleanor nodded. She wanted to say that she’d prefer to keep it for her wedding night, but she knew that if she said that she’d lose Susie Crumm’s sympathy. She wanted it to be special, not just a woman lying down waiting for a man to finish taking his clothes off; not just a fumbling in the dark of the estate playground, or something behind the Northumberland Arms, where Eileen Reid had been done.

‘My dad said he’d gut any fella that laid a finger on me,’ Susie Crumm said.

‘Jones’s said the same.’

‘He done Mrs Rourke. Jones’s dad.’

‘They’ve all done Mrs Rourke.’ For a moment she wanted to tell the truth: to add that Susie Crumm’s dad had done Mrs Rourke also, that Dolly Rourke was Susie’s half-sister.

‘You’ve got a moustache growing on you,’ Liz Jones said, coming up behind her and whispering into her hair.

The afternoon of that day passed without incident at Springfield Comprehensive, while on the estate Eleanor’s father slept. He dreamed that he was wrestling again. Between his knees he could feel the ribs of Eddie Rodriguez; the crowd was calling out, urging him to give Eddie Rodriguez the final works. Two yards away, in the kitchen, Eleanor’s mother prepared a meal. She cut cod into pieces, and sliced potatoes for chips. He liked a crisply fried meal at half past six before watching a bit of television. She liked cod and chips herself, with tinned peas, and bread and butter and apricot jam, and Danish pastries and tea, and maybe a tin of pears. She’d bought a tin of pears in the Express Dairy: they might as well have them with a tin of Carnation cream. She’d get everything ready and then she’d run an iron over his uniform, sponging off any spots there were. She thought about Crossroads on the television, wondering what would happen in the episode today.

‘I’d remind you that the school photographs will be taken on Tuesday,’ Miss Whitehead said. ‘Clean white blouses, please.’

They would all be there: Eleanor, Liz Jones, Susie Crumm, Eileen Reid, Joan Moate, Mavis Temple, and all the others: forty smiling faces, and Miss Whitehead standing at the end of the middle row. If you kept the photograph it would be a memory for ever, another record of the days at Springfield Comprehensive. ‘Who’s that with the bow legs?’ her father had asked a few years ago, pointing at Miss Homber.

‘Anyone incorrectly dressed on Tuesday,’ Miss Whitehead said, ‘will forfeit her place in the photo.’

The bell rang for the end of school. ‘Forfeit her bloody knickers,’ said Liz Jones just before Miss Whitehead left the classroom.

The girls dispersed, going off in twos and threes, swinging the briefcases that contained their school books.

‘Walk with you?’ Susie Crumm suggested to Eleanor, and together they left the classrooms and the school. ‘Baking, innit?’ Susie Crumm remarked.

They walked slowly, past concrete buildings, the Eagle Star Insurance Company, Barclays Bank, the Halifax Building Society. Windows were open, the air was chalky dry. Two girls in front of them had taken off their shoes but now, finding the pavement too hot to walk on, had paused to put them on again. The two girls shrieked, leaning on one another. Women pushed prams around them, irritation in their faces.

‘I want to get fixed in a Saxone,’ Susie Crumm said. ‘Can’t wait to leave that bloody place.’

An Evening Standard van swerved in front of a bus, causing the bus-driver to shout and blow his horn. In the cab of the van the driver’s mate raised two fingers in a gesture of disdain.

‘I fancy selling shoes,’ Susie Crumm said. ‘Fashion shoes type of thing. You get them at cost if you work in a Saxone.’

Eleanor imagined the slow preparation of the evening meal in her parents’ flat, and the awakening of her father. He’d get up and shave himself, standing in the bathroom in his vest, braces hanging down, his flies half open. Her mother spent ages getting the evening meal, breaking off to see to his uniform and then returning to the food. He couldn’t bear not being a wrestler any more.

‘What you going to do, Eleanor?’

She shook her head. She didn’t know what she was going to do. All she wanted was to get away from the estate and from Springfield Comprehensive. She wondered what it would be like to work in the Eagle Star Insurance Company, but at the moment that didn’t seem important. What was important was the exact present, the afternoon of a certain day, a day that was like others except for the extreme heat. She’d go home and there the two of them would be, and in her mind there’d be the face of Miss Whitehead and the voice of Liz Jones. She’d do her homework and then there’d be Crossroads on the TV and then the fried meal and the washing-up and more TV, and then he’d go, saying it was time she was in bed. ‘See you in the morning,’ he’d say and soon after he’d gone they’d both go to bed, and she’d lie there thinking of being married in white lace in a church, to a delicate man who Wouldn’t hurt her, who’d love the virginal innocence that had been kept all these years for him alone. She’d go away in a two-piece suit on an autumn afternoon when the leaves in London were yellow-brown. She’d fly with a man whose fingers were long and thin and gentle, who’d hold her hand in the aeroplane, Air France to Biarritz. And after wards she’d come back to a flat where the curtains were the colour of lavender, the same as the walls, where gas-fires glowed and there were rugs on natural-wood floors, and the telephone was pale blue.

‘What’s matter?’ Susie Crumm asked.

‘Nothing.’

They walked past Len Parrish the baker, the dry cleaner’s, the Express Dairy Supermarket, the newsagent’s and post office, the off-licence attached to the Northumberland Arms.

‘There’s that fella,’ Susie Crumm said. ‘Denny Price.’

His head was awkwardly placed on his neck, cocked to one side. His hair was red and long, his face small in the midst of it. He had brown eyes and thick, blubbery lips.

‘Hullo,’ he said.

Susie Crumm giggled.

‘Like a fag?’ he said, holding out a packet of Anchor. ‘Smoke, do you, girls?’

Susie Crumm giggled again, and then abruptly ceased. ‘Oh God!’ she said, her hand stretched out for a cigarette. She was looking over Denny Price’s shoulder at a man in blue denim overalls. The man, seeing her in that moment, sharply called at her to come to him.

‘Stuff him,’ she said before she smiled and obeyed.

‘Her dad,’ said Denny Price, pleased that she had gone. ‘You want a fag, Eleanor?’

She shook her head, walking on. He dropped into step with her.

‘I know your name,’ he said. ‘I asked Liz Jones.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m Denny Price. I work in Grimes’.’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re at the Comprehensive.’

‘Yes.’

She felt his fingers on her arm, squeezing it just above the elbow. ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ he said. ‘Come down by the river, Eleanor.’

She shook her head again and then, quite suddenly, she didn’t care what happened. What harm was there in walking by the river with a boy from Grimes’? She looked at the fingers that were still caressing her arm. All day long they had handled meat; the fingernails were bitten away, the flesh was red from scouring. Wasn’t it silly, like an advertisement, to imagine that a man would come one day to marry her in white lace in a church and take her, Air France, to Biarritz?

‘We’ll take a bus to the bridge,’ he said. ‘A thirty-seven.’

He sat close to her, paying her fare, pressing a cigarette on her. She took it and he lit it for her. His eyes were foxy, she noticed; she could see the desire in them.

‘I saw you a week back,’ he said.

They walked by the river, away from the bridge, along the tow-path. He put his arm around her, squeezing a handful of underclothes and flesh. ‘Let’s sit down here,’ he said.

They sat on the grass, watching barges going by and schoolboys rowing. In the distance traffic moved, gleaming, on the bridge they’d walked from. ‘God,’ he said, ‘you have fantastic breasts.’

His hands were on them and he was pushing her back on to the grass. She felt his lips on her face, and his teeth and his tongue, and saliva. One hand moved down her body. She felt it under her skirt, on the bare flesh of her thigh, and then on her stomach. It was like an animal, a rat gnawing at her, prodding her and poking. There was no one about; he was muttering, his voice thickly slurred. ‘Take down your knickers,’ he said.

She pushed at him and for a moment he released his hold, imagining she was about to undo some of her clothing. Instead she ran away, tearing along the tow-path, saying to herself that if he caught up with her she’d hit him with the briefcase that contained her school books.

But he didn’t follow her and when she looked back he was lying where she had left him, stretched out as though wounded on the grass.

Her father talked of who might come that night to Daisy’s. He mentioned Princess Margaret. Princess Margaret had seen him wrestling, or if it hadn’t been Princess Margaret it had been a face almost identical to hers. The Burtons might come tonight; you never knew when the Burtons were going to pop in.

Her mother placed the fried fish, with chips and peas, in front of him. She never really listened to him when he went on about the night-club because her mind was full of what had happened on Crossroads. She put her cigarette on a saucer on the draining-board, not extinguishing it. She remembered the news items she’d read at breakfast-time and wondered about them all over again.

Tomorrow would be worse, Eleanor thought. Even at this very moment Denny Price’s blubber lips might be relating the incident to Liz Jones, how Eleanor had almost let him and then had drawn back. ‘I went down by the river with a boy,’ she wanted to say. ‘I wanted to get done because it’s the Class 2 fashion. I’m tired of being mocked by Liz Jones.’ She could say it with her eyes cast down, her fork fiddling with a piece of cod on her plate. She wouldn’t have to see the embarrassment in her father’s face, like she’d seen it when she’d asked for money for sanitary towels. Her mother wouldn’t hear at first, but she’d go on saying it, repeating herself until her mother did hear. She longed for the facts to be there in the room, how it disgusted her to imagine her father taking off his uniform in the mornings, and Rogo Pollini doing Dolly Rourke. She wanted to say she’d been disgusted when Denny Price had told her to take down her knickers.

‘Extraordinary, that woman,’ her mother said. ‘Fancy two days stuck in a bath.’

Her father laughed. It could be exaggerated, he said: you couldn’t believe everything you read, not even in the newspapers.

‘Extraordinary,’ her mother murmured.

Her mother was trapped, married to him, obliging him so that she’d receive housekeeping money out of which she could save for her morning glass of gin. He was trapped himself, going out every night in a doorman’s uniform, the Prince of Hackney with a bad back. He crushed her mother because he’d been crushed himself. How could either of them be expected to bother if she spoke of being mocked, and then asked them questions, seeking reassurance?

They wouldn’t know what to say – even if she helped them by explaining that she knew there was no man with delicate hands who’d take her away when the leaves in London were yellow-brown, that there were only the blubber lips of Denny Price and the smell of meat that came off him, and Susie Crumm’s father doing Mrs Rourke, and Liz Jones’s father doing her also, and the West Indian railway porter, and Mr Rourke not aware of a thing. They wouldn’t know what she was talking about if she said that Miss Whitehead had divorced herself from all of it by lying solitary at night in a room in Esher where everything was clean and neat. It was better to be Miss Whitehead than a woman who was a victim of a man’s bad back. In her gleaming room Miss Whitehead was more successful in her pretence than they were in theirs. Miss Whitehead was complete and alone, having discarded what she wished to discard, accepting now that there was no Mr Right.

‘Nice day at school?’ her mother inquired suddenly in her vague manner, as though mistily aware of a duty.

Eleanor looked up from her fish and regarded both of them at once. She smiled, forcing herself to, feeling sorry for them because they were trapped by each other; because for them it was too late to escape to a room in which everything was clean.

The Original Sins of Edward Tripp

Edward Tripp had often noticed Mrs Mayben at her sitting-room window, putting bread on the window-sills for the birds. Her hair was white and she was dressed always in the same way, in several shades of grey. She had, he considered, the kindest face in all Dunfarnham Avenue, and when she saw him she would nod at him in a dignified manner, befitting a woman of her years. He had never rung the bell of Mrs Mayben’s house as he had rung the bells of the other houses; he had never held her in conversation on her doorstep, but he knew that the day would come when his sister would ask him to cross the road and speak to the old woman. Edward was notorious in Dunfarnham Avenue, yet he felt whenever he considered the fact that Mrs Mayben, who kept herself to herself and did not gossip with the other people, was perhaps – just possibly – unaware of his notoriety. He thought, too, that when the time came, when eventually he found himself face to face with Mrs Mayben, he would tell her the truth: he would speak to her bluntly, and Edward guessed that an old woman with Mrs Mayben’s dignity, who was a Christian and who never forgot the birds, would listen to him and would say a word or two of comfort. He imagined how things would be after that visit, he himself passing by Mrs Mayben’s house and the truth hanging between them, she nodding with a smile from her window and he giving thanks to God for her understanding heart.

On Sunday August 26th Edward Tripp’s sister, Emily, spoke of Mrs Mayben and Edward knew that on this morning he would hear himself protesting in a familiar way and that in the end he would cross the road to Mrs Mayben’s house.

‘We have watched the neighbourhood go down,’ said Emily. ‘Mrs Mayben was the last who was a decent sort of person. And now she’s gone too. In cold blood.’

Edward, slicing some ham that he had purchased the day before in Lipton’s, had been thinking to himself that the piece of gammon was not as satisfactory as usual: there was, for instance, a certain stringiness and a confusion about the direction of the grain. Before his sister had mentioned Mrs Mayben he had been allowing his thoughts to consider the meat as once it had been, an area of living flesh on the thigh of a pig. He imagined that something might have troubled that pig, some physical disorder that caused it to wriggle and dash about its sty, banging itself against the concrete sides and causing the stringiness to develop in its flesh.

‘In cold blood,’ said Emily again.

Edward looked up and regarded her back. He stared at the blackness of the material of which her long, old-fashioned dress was composed and at the roll of her hair, neat and formal on her neck.

‘No, no,’ said Edward. ‘Not dead, dear. Not dead.’

But his sister nodded, denying his denial, and Edward shook his head with firmness.

‘I remember when she came,’ said Emily. ‘Fourteen years ago. Her husband with her.’

Edward agreed with that. ‘Her husband,’ he said, ‘died in 1955.’

‘Death again,’ murmured Emily, and Edward sighed. His sister was standing by their dining-room window, observing through it the house of Mrs Mayben opposite. Her left hand gripped the grey curtain that had flanked the window for almost thirty years, her right hung limply by her side. Edward guessed what was in her mind and did not care to consider it, since soon, he knew, he would be obliged to consider it whether he wished to or not. Attempting to keep the workings of his sister’s brain at bay, he cut deeply into the ham. The image of the living animal appeared again before him. He said:

‘After lunch why don’t we try to repair the sitting-room carpet? It gets worse, you know. Quite a hole has worn through. It seems a pity.’

‘The carpet?’ said Emily, and Edward added:

‘Father used to talk about that carpet, d’you remember? About its quality. The years have proved him right.’

Emily, continuing to stare through the window, made no comment.

‘It’s lasted a couple of lifetimes,’ Edward said quickly. ‘It’s a shame to let it go.’ His eyes again travelled over his sister’s back, moving upwards, to the roll of her hair. Emily said:

‘There was a man here yesterday. Looking at Mrs Mayben’s windows.’

‘A robber,’ suggested Edward, again slicing the ham, and in an automatic way beginning to feel sick in his stomach. He said, in a slow, low voice, that Mrs Mayben was probably now in church, or else within her house, cooking a simple lunch for herself.

‘She hasn’t been about,’ said Emily. ‘I haven’t seen Mrs Mayben for four days.’

‘I thought I saw her yesterday. I’m sure, you know.’

‘He came,’ said Emily, ‘in a light-blue motor-car. The kind that’s called a tourer, is it? Out of that he stepped at a quarter to four and stood on the pavement gazing up at her house – returning to his scene, God knows. He was indecently dressed, Edward: canvas shoes and light-weight trousers that matched the blue paintwork of his motor-car, and nothing at all where a shirt should have been. He was like a lunatic, I’ll tell you that, walking on the edge of the pavement in the August sunshine, his eyes uplifted to the house. And I said to myself: “There’s evil there”.’

‘Mrs Mayben’s in church,’ repeated Edward, ‘or maybe home already, doing her Sunday chores.’

His sister shook her head. ‘It’s past her time for returning from church. She hasn’t returned today, for I have watched at the window, being worried about her. Mrs Mayben, as well you know, Edward, is by now in two places at once.’

Edward imagined old Mrs Mayben delayed in a traffic jam in the hired car that called for her every Sunday at half past eleven to take her to church. He imagined the chauffeur, the sallow-faced man who always came, with a green peaked cap, apologizing to her about the delay, apologizing about all the traffic, since she was the kind of woman who inspired apology, he imagined. Emily said:

‘You know what I mean, don’t you, when I say she’s in two places at once? In heaven and in some cupboard, Edward; strung to a hook.’

There was a look, Edward knew, that must be there by now in his sister’s eyes as she stared through the glass, ready to inflict her punishment. He thought, as he had thought before on similar occasions, that she was like a woman entering a fit.

‘Now, now,’ said Edward softly.

‘Read the papers,’ cried his sister, turning about to face him and speaking with emotion. ‘A man has killed eight nurses in Chicago.’

‘Oh no,’ began Edward.

‘Prize-fighters turn on their children. Mothers go out with the tide.’

Edward placed the ham knife on the polished mahogany of the dining-room table. Slowly, he raised his eyes to meet his sister’s.

‘An old woman living alone,’ said Emily.

Edward watched her tongue moving over her lips, begining at one corner and returning to it. The tip of her tongue protruded at that corner for a moment and was then withdrawn. Again he raised his eyes to hers and they looked at one another in silence for a while, a brother and a sister who had lived all their lives in this house in Dun-farnham Avenue, Number Seventeen. Edward remembered the past and he knew that his sister was remembering it too. In the past were the children they had been, two other people, a different relationship: a girl thin and tall, four years older than the brother, he a boy who had laughed and had had his way, who had grown to be a man of slight build, permitting a small moustache to accumulate on his upper lip. The house that had been the house of their parents had changed only a little over the years. Wallpaper, the colour of good oatmeal, had hung all over it for three decades, placed there one spring when Emily was fourteen. Large engravings that featured the bridges of London decorated the hall and the stairs, and in dark bookcases, dustless behind glass, were volumes by Sapper, and The Life of a Bengal Lancer, and poems by Austin Dobson, and the collected works of Kipling and Scott. Edward often felt strange in the house now, feeling the present dominated by the past, remembering everything. From her own private flowerbed he had pulled her pansies, roots and all, when he was five years old; and with a pair of scissors he had cut through the centre of the buds of her roses. ‘I have played a trick on you,’ he used to say, sidling close to her. He had given two of her books away to an old woman who came seeking alms at the door. He had lit a fire in a fireplace of her doll’s house, and had been punished because it was, so they said, a dangerous thing to do. He had taken one of her guinea-pigs and put it in her bed, where by mischance it had died. ‘I have played a trick on you’: he had said it repeatedly, bringing out her temper and her tears and running away himself. In middle age Emily was still taller than her brother, and had a hint of beauty about her features that was not reflected in his. Edward had developed a stoop in early manhood, and the child who had been bright with darting mischief became, in his own opinion, a shrimpish creature, fond of the corners of rooms.

On that Sunday morning, August 26th, Emily continued to speak about the man who had loitered in Dunfarnham Avenue in the sunshine. She spoke of the baldness of his head and the evil that she had recognized in the pupils of his eyes. He had worn no shirt, she repeated, emphasizing the fact, and she said again that his shoes, placed over bare feet, had been of light-blue canvas, the same colour as his trousers and his car.

Listening to his sister’s voice, Edward prayed in his mind. He prayed that she might turn from the window and walk away from the room, saying that she was going to the kitchen to make mustard, since mustard would be necessary with the ham. But his sister only stood before him, strange and thin as she had been as a child.

‘I wish you could have seen him,’ said Emily. ‘I think I dreamed of him last night. The man is on my mind.’

‘Why not sit down, my dear? Why not rest and try to forget?’ As he spoke, Edward prayed for a day that was to come, a day that God, he felt, had promised him. His sister said:

‘Perhaps on Wednesday night it was, or early on Thursday morning, that he slipped into the old woman’s house to do what he had to do. And in his madness, Edward, he could not resist returning later to the scene of all the violence. I have read of this kind of thing. It has happened with other men.’

‘Come along now –’

‘Not at all unusual,’ said Emily. ‘Criminal history is not being made in Dunfarnham Avenue, if that’s what you’re thinking. He came and acted and returned, as others have in a similar way. D’you understand? D’you follow me?’

What was there to follow? Edward thought. What was there to understand except the facts from the past? – the quiet child of four and the son who was suddenly born in the house and allowed to go his way. The son growing up and his sport becoming the game he played with her, until her days were filled to the brim with his cunning smile and the baby tricks that everyone excused. Wasn’t the simple truth that those cruelties in their thousands had fallen like a blight upon her nature in the end, wrenching some bit of it out of shape, embittering the whole?

When Edward was seventeen their parents had died, one after the other within a month. He remembered still standing at his mother’s funeral, the second funeral of the pair, and seeing on his sister’s face the look that by now he had become familiar with, a look of reproach and sorrow. They had returned together to the dark house with the oatmeal wallpaper and Emily had said: ‘There was a woman in a red coat, Edward. Did you see her? I thought it odd, you know, a woman dressed in red at the grave of another woman.’ Edward had seen no woman in red and had said so at once, but Emily, making tea, had continued about this figure, and then had ceased to make tea and had stood quite still, gazing at him and talking at length, on and on, about the woman. ‘What should we do?’ she said. ‘Shouldn’t we try to find out a thing or two?’ And then, in a moment, she had seemed to forget about the woman and had poured boiling water into a china teapot that both of them had known as a family possession all their lives. Afterwards, in the back garden, Edward had examined in detail his early sins against his sister, and he had closed his eyes and prayed to God. He prayed for forgiveness and he prayed that she in turn might forgive him and he prayed that the damage might not mark her for ever. From the garden, that day, he returned to the house, having found his duty, to live there with her, in that cool and silent place, to keep an eye on her for ever, and to atone as best he might. God had spoken harshly to Edward in the garden, and God had spoken harshly since. Every morning and evening Edward Tripp prayed at length, kneeling by his bed, and during the day he prayed as well, seeing her before him, she who never now walked out into Dunfarnham Avenue, who dressed herself in black and forgot her beauty. No longer children, they were reticent now in what they said one to another; they were polite in their relationship as their thoughts filled the rooms of the house and were not spoken. She played her game in a vengeful way, acting a madness and saying to him in silence that this was the state she should be in, warning him that her bitter nature needed his tenderness. And Edward prayed and often wept, accepting the punishment as his due.

‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ said Edward now. ‘Mrs Mayben is quite all right.’

‘You have a callous mind,’ murmured Edward’s sister, looking at him. ‘You can know of a thing like this and stand there cutting ham and saying it doesn’t matter that a lunatic has walked in Dunfarnham Avenue and brought an old woman to a grim full-stop. It doesn’t matter what’s in that house this morning, is that it? Edward, she has not come back from church because today she’s never been there; because she’s been dead and rotting for eighty-four hours. We have buried our parents: we know about the deceased. They’re everywhere, Edward. Everywhere.’

‘Please,’ muttered Edward. ‘Please now, my dear.’

‘Death has danced through Dunfarnham Avenue and I have seen it, a man without socks or shirt, a man who shall fry in the deep fat of Hell. For you, Edward, must put a finger on him.’

‘There’s nothing I can do,’ said Edward, feeling his size, five foot four, as his sister towered in the room with him.

‘Cross the road,’ said Emily, ‘and go to the back of Mrs Mayben’s house. Climb through some small window and walk through the rooms until you come to the woman.’

Edward sighed. He would cross the road, he knew, as he had known when first she mentioned Mrs Mayben, and he would tell Mrs Mayben the truth because she had a face that was kind. He would not stand on her doorstep and make some lame excuse, as he had with all the others. He would not today prevaricate and pretend; he would not dishonour the woman by meting out dishonest treatment to her. ‘I will ease your mind,’ he said to his sister. ‘I’ll go and see that Mrs Mayben’s quite all right.’

‘Carry that ham knife with you, that you may cut her down. It’s wrong, I think, don’t you, that we should leave her as she is?’

‘Stand by the window,’ said Edward, already moving to the door, ‘and watch me as I cross the road to ring her bell. You’ll see her appear, my dear, and if you strain your ears you may even hear her voice.’

Emily nodded. She said:

‘Telephone the police when you have cut the cord. Dial 999 and ask to speak to a sergeant. Tell him the honest truth.’

Edward walked from the room and descended the stairs of the house. He opened the front door and crossed Dunfarnham Avenue, to the house of Mrs Mayben. He rang the bell, standing to one side so that his sister, from the dining-room window, would be able to see the old woman when she opened the door.

‘I was trying to repair this thing,’ said Mrs Mayben, holding out an electric fuse, ‘with a piece of silver paper. You’ve been sent to me, Mr Tripp. Come in.’

Edward entered the house of Mrs Mayben, carrying the ham knife. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘to bother you.’ But Mrs Mayben seemed not to question his presence on her property. ‘My husband could mend a fuse,’ she said, ‘with silver paper; yet I can make no hand of this.’ Edward placed the ham knife on a table in the hall and took the ineffective fuse from her hand. He said there was stuff called fuse wire, and Mrs Mayben led him to a cupboard where the electric meters were and in which he discovered the wire he sought. ‘I was cooking a chop,’ said Mrs Mayben, a woman of eighty-two, ‘when all the heat went off.’

‘I was cutting ham,’ said Edward, ‘and I was interrupted too.’ He repaired the fuse and replaced it in its socket. ‘Let’s go and see,’ said Mrs Mayben, and led the way to her kitchen. They watched the chop for a moment, still and uninviting in the centre of a frying pan on the electric stove. In a moment a noise came from it, a spurt of sizzling that indicated to them that Edward had been successful with the fuse. ‘You must take a glass of sherry,’ said Mrs Mayben. ‘I have one always myself, on Sundays.’

Edward followed the old woman to her sitting-room and sat down, since she wished that he should, in a comfortable armchair. She poured two glasses of Dry Fly sherry and then, holding hers formally in the air, she reminded Edward that she had lived in Dunfarnham Avenue for fourteen years and had never actually spoken to him before.

‘I see you feeding the birds,’ said Edward, ‘from your sitting-room window.’

‘Yes, I feed the local sparrows,’ said Mrs Mayben. ‘I do my bit.’

A silence fell between them, and then Mrs Mayben said:

‘It is odd to have lived opposite you for all these years and yet not to have spoken. I have seen you at the windows, as you have seen me. I have seen the lady too.’

Edward felt the blood moving into his face. He felt again a sickness in his stomach and thought his hands were shivering.

‘You have heard of me,’ he casually said. ‘I dare say you have. I am notorious in Dunfarnham Avenue.’

‘I know your name is Tripp,’ said Mrs Mayben. ‘I know no more.’

‘She is my sister, the woman you see in that house. She and I were born there, and now she never leaves it. I go out to do the shopping – well, you’ve seen me.’

‘I have seen you, certainly,’ said Mrs Mayben, ‘returning from the shops with a string bag full of this and that, potatoes and tins, lettuces in season. I do not pry, Mr Tripp, but I have seen you. Have more sherry?’

Edward accepted another glass. ‘I am known to every house in the road,’ he said. ‘Parents warn their children to cross to the other side when they see me coming. Men have approached me to issue rough warnings, using language I don’t much care to hear. Women move faster when Edward Tripp’s around.’

Mrs Mayben said that she was not deaf but wondered if she quite understood what Edward was talking about. ‘I don’t think I follow,’ she said. ‘I know nothing of all this. Like your sister, I don’t go out much. I’ve heard nothing from the people of Dunfarnham Avenue about you, Mr Tripp, or how it is you have become notorious.’

Edward said he had guessed that might be so, and added that one person at least in Dunfarnham Avenue should know the truth, on this Sabbath day.

‘It’s very kind of you to have repaired my fuse,’ said Mrs Mayben a little loudly. ‘I’m most obliged to you for that.’ She rose to her feet, but did not succeed in drawing her visitor to his. Edward sat on in the comfortable armchair holding his sherry glass. He said:

‘It is a hell for me, Dunfarnham Avenue, walking down it and feeling all eyes upon me. I have rung the bells of the houses. I have trumped up some story on the doorsteps, even on the doorsteps she cannot see from the dining-room window. She always knows if I have talked to someone and have been embarrassed: I come back in a peculiar state. I suffer from nerves, Mrs Mayben.’

‘Thank you,’ said Mrs Mayben more loudly still. ‘And how nice to meet you after all these years.’

‘I am going to tell you the truth,’ explained Edward, ‘as I have never told a soul in my life. It is an ugly business, Mrs Mayben. Perhaps you should sit down.’

‘But, Mr Tripp,’ protested the old woman, greatly puzzled, ‘what on earth is all this?’

‘Let me tell you,’ said Edward, and he told her of his sister standing at the top of the stairs while their mother broke to her the news that her two coloured story-books had been handed out to a beggar at the front door. ‘He’s only little,’ their mother had explained to Edward’s sister. ‘Forgive an imp, my dear.’ But Emily had not found it in her heart to forgive him and he had sniggered at the time.

‘I see,’ said Mrs Mayben.

‘I knew you would,’ cried Edward, smiling at her and nodding his head several times. ‘Of course you see. You have a kindly face; you feed the birds.’

‘Yes, but –’ said Mrs Mayben.

‘No,’ said Edward. ‘Listen.’

He told her about the woman in red at the funeral of their mother, the woman his sister had seen, and how he afterwards prayed in the back garden and had been sternly answered by Almighty God. He explained how he had come upon his duty then and had accepted all that was required of him.

‘It has nothing to do with the present,’ said Edward. ‘Do not see my sister and myself as we stand today, but as two children playing in that house across the road. I sinned against my sister, Mrs Mayben, every hour of my early life. She was stamped into the ground; she was mocked and taunted.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Mrs Mayben. ‘I’m sorry there have been these troubles in your life. It’s difficult to accept adversity and unhappiness, I know that.’

‘I was cutting ham,’ repeated Edward, ‘when my sister turned to me and said you had been murdered by a man in canvas shoes.’

‘Murdered?’ repeated Mrs Mayben, opening the door of her sitting-room and appearing to be nervous.

‘She’s affected by the past,’ said Edward. ‘You understand it?’

Mrs Mayben did not reply. Instead she said:

‘Mr Tripp, you have been most gallant. I wish you would now return to your home. I have my lunch to prepare and eat.’

‘ “I saw a dog today,” my sister said, “a vicious dog abroad in Dunfarnham Avenue. Go to the houses, Edward, and tell the mothers to look to their children until the dog is captured and set to rest.” She talked for seven hours, Mrs Mayben, about that dog, one day in 1951, and in the end she watched me move from house to house ringing the bells and warning the people about a vicious animal.’

‘This is no concern of mine. If your sister is unwell –’

‘My sister is not unwell. My sister pretends, exacting her revenge. God has told me, Mrs Mayben, to play my part in her pretended fantasies. I owe her the right to punish me, I quite understand that.’

Mrs Mayben shook her head. She said in a quiet voice that she was an old woman and did not understand much of what went on in the world. She did not mind, she said, Edward ringing her doorbell, but she wished now that he would leave her house since she had much to do.

‘I have never told anyone else,’ said Edward. ‘Years ago I said to myself that when I had to come to your house I would tell you the truth about everything. How I have grown up to be an understanding man, with the help of God. How the punishment must be shared between us – well, she has had hers. D’you see?’

Mrs Mayben shook her head and was about to speak again. Edward said:

‘ “There’s a smell of burning,” my sister said to me in 1955. “It comes from the house with the three Indian women in it.” She had woken me up to tell me that, for it was half past two in the morning. “They are women from the East,” she said. “They do not understand about precautions against fire as we do.” In my dressing-gown, Mrs Mayben, I walked the length of Dunfarnham Avenue and rang the bell of that house. “May I use your telephone?” I said to the Indian woman who opened the door, for I could think of nothing else to say to her. But she said no, I could not; and rightly pointed out that she could not be expected to admit into her house a man in pyjamas at half past two in the morning. I have never told anyone because it seemed to be a family thing. I have never told the truth. It is all pretence and silence between my sister and myself. We play a game.’

‘I must ask you to go now. I really must. An old woman like me can’t be expected to take a sudden interest. You must do the best you can.’

‘But I am telling you terrible things,’ cried Edward. ‘I killed my sister’s guinea-pig, I pulled her pansies by the roots. Not an hour passed in my early childhood, Mrs Mayben, but I did not seek to torment her into madness. I don’t know why I was given that role, but now I have the other since I’ve been guided towards it. She is quite sane, you know. She plays a part. I am rotten with guilt.’

Mrs Mayben clapped her hands sharply together. ‘I cannot have you coming here,’ she said, ‘telling me you are rotten with guilt, Mr Tripp. You are a man I have seen about the place with a string bag. I do not know you. I do not know your sister. It’s no concern of mine. Not at all.’

‘You have a kind face to live up to,’ said Edward, bowing and smiling in a sad way. ‘I have seen you feeding the sparrows, and I’ve often thought you have a kind face.’

‘Leave me alone, sir. Go from this house at once. You speak of madness and death, Mr Tripp; you tell me I’ve been murdered: I am unable to think about such things. My days are simple here.’

‘Since I was seventeen, Mrs Mayben, since the day of my mother’s funeral, I have lived alone with all this horror. Dunfarnham Avenue is the theatre of my embarrassment. You feed the sparrows, Mrs Mayben, yet for me it seems you have no crumb of comfort.’

‘I cannot be expected –’ began Mrs Mayben.

‘I am forty-one this month. She is four years older. See us as children, Mrs Mayben, for it’s absurd that I am here before you as a small man in a weekend suit. We are still children in that house, in our way: we have not grown up much. Surely you take an interest?’

‘You come here saying you are notorious, Mr Tripp –’

‘I am notorious, indeed I am, for God is a hard master. The house is dark and unchanged. Only the toys have gone. We eat the same kind of food.’

‘Go away,’ cried Mrs Mayben, her voice rising. ‘For the sake of God, go away from me, Mr Tripp. You come here talking madly and carrying a ham knife. Leave my house.’

Edward rose to his feet and with his head bowed to his chest he walked past Mrs Mayben into her hall. He picked up the ham knife from the table and moved towards the front door.

‘I’m sorry I can’t interest myself in you and your sister,’ said Mrs Mayben. ‘I am too old, you see, to take on new subjects.’

Edward did not say anything more. He did not look at Mrs Mayben, but into his mind came the picture of her leaning from her sitting-room window putting crumbs of bread on the window-sills for the birds. He walked from her house with that picture in his mind and he heard behind him the closing of her hall door.

Edward crossed Dunfarnham Avenue and entered the house he had always known, carrying the ham knife in his left hand. He moved slowly to the dining-room and saw that the table was neatly laid for lunch. The sliced ham had been placed by his sister on two blue-and-white plates. Salt and pepper were on the table, and a jar of pickles that he himself had bought, since they both relished them. She had washed a lettuce and cut up a few tomatoes and put chives and cucumber with the salad. ‘I’ve made the mustard,’ said Emily, smiling at him as he sat down, and he saw, as he expected, that the look had gone from her face. ‘We might repair the sitting-room carpet this afternoon,’ said Emily, ‘before that hole becomes too large. We could do it together.’

He nodded and murmured, and then, although he was awake and eating his lunch, Edward dreamed. It seemed to him that he was still in Mrs Mayben’s sitting-room and that she, changed in her attitude, was murmuring that of course she understood, and all the better because she was old. She placed a hand on Edward’s shoulder and said most softly that he had made her feel a mother again. He told her then, once more, of the pansies plucked from the flowerbed, and Mrs Mayben nodded and said he must not mind. He must suffer a bit, she said in a gentle way, since that was his due; he must feel his guilt around him and know that it was rightly there. In Edward’s dream Mrs Mayben’s voice was soothing, like a cool balm in the sunshine that came prettily through her sitting-room window. ‘My dear, do not weep,’ said the voice. ‘Do not cry, for soon there is the Kingdom of Heaven.’ The birds sang while the sun illuminated the room in which Mrs Mayben stood. ‘I will go now,’ said Edward in his dream, ‘since I have mended your fuse and had my sherry. We’ve had a lovely chat.’ He spoke in a peculiar voice and when he rose and walked away his feet made little sound as they struck the floor. ‘Come when you wish,’ invited Mrs Mayben with tears in her eyes. ‘Cross the road for comfort. It’s all you have to do.’

Edward chewed lettuce and ham and a piece of tomato, staring over his sister’s shoulder at the grey curtains that hung by the window. His eyes moved to his sister’s face and then moved downwards to the table, towards the knife that lay now on the polished wood. He thought about this knife that he had carried into a neighbour’s house, remembering its keen blade slicing through the flesh of a pig. He saw himself standing with the knife in his hand, and he heard a noise that might have been a cry from his sister’s throat. ‘I have played a trick on you,’ his own voice said, tumbling back to him over the years.

‘A pity if that carpet went,’ said Emily.

Edward looked at her, attempting to smile. He heard her add:

‘It’s always been there. All our lives, Edward.’ And then, without meaning to say it, Edward said:

‘She was harsh in how she looked. Too old to take on new subjects: she was making excuses.’

‘What?’ murmured Emily, and Edward sighed a little, eating more of the food she had prepared. Vaguely, he told her not to worry, and as he spoke he imagined them that afternoon, sitting on the floor of the other room stitching the carpet they had always known, not saying much except to comment perhaps upon the labour and upon the carpet. And as they worked together, he knew that he would go on praying, praying in his mind for the day to come: a day when old Mrs Mayben and all the people of Dunfarnham Avenue would see his sister walking lightly in the Kingdom of Heaven. In their presence she would smile as once she had smiled as a child, offering him her forgiveness while saying she was sorry too, and releasing in sumptuous glory all the years of imprisoned truth.

The Forty-seventh Saturday

Mavie awoke and remembered at once that it was Saturday. She lay for a while, alone with that thought, considering it and relishing it. Then she thought of details: the ingredients of a lunch, the cleaning of the kitchen floor, the tidying of her bedroom. She rose and reached for her dressing-gown. In the kitchen she found a small pad of paper and wrote in pencil these words: mackerel, parmesan cheese, garlic. Then she drew back the curtains, placed a filled kettle over a gas-jet and shook cornflakes on to a plate.

Some hours later, about midday, Mr McCarthy stood thoughtfully in a wine shop. He sighed, and then said:

‘Vin rosé. The larger size. Is it a litre? I don’t know what it’s called.’

‘Jumbo vin rose,’ the assistant murmured, ignoring the demands of the accented word. ‘Fourteen and seven.’

It was not a wine shop in which Mr McCarthy had ever before made a purchase. He paused, his hand inside his jacket, the tips of his fingers touching the leather of his wallet.

‘Fourteen and seven?’

The assistant, perceiving clearly that Mr McCarthy had arrested the action with which he had planned to draw money from within his clothes, took no notice. He blew on the glass of the bottle because the bottle was dusty. Whistling thickly with tongue and lips, he tore a piece of brown paper and proceeded to wrap with it. He placed the parcel in a carrier bag.

‘I thought it was ten shillings that size,’ Mr McCarthy said. ‘I have got it in another place for ten shillings.’

The assistant stared at him, incredulous.

‘I buy a lot of vin rosé,’ Mr McCarthy explained.

The assistant, a man of thirty-five with a face that was pock-marked, spoke no word but stared on. In his mind he was already retailing the incident to his superior when, an hour or so later, that person should return. He scrutinized Mr McCarthy, so that when the time came he might lend authority to his tale with an accurate description of the man who had demanded vin rosé and then had argued about the charged price. He saw before him a middle-aged man of medium height, with a hat and spectacles and a moustache.

‘Well, I haven’t time to argue.’ Mr McCarthy handed the man a pound note and received his change. ‘Threepence short, that is,’ he said; and the assistant explained:

‘The carrier bag. It’s necessary nowadays to charge. You understand?’

But Mr McCarthy lifted the wine out of the bag, saying that the brown paper wrapping was quite sufficient, and the assistant handed him a threepenny piece.

‘I take a taxi,’ Mr McCarthy explained. ‘It’s no hardship to carry.’

In the flat Mavie laid two mackerel on the smoking fat of the frying pan and sniffed the air. A plastic apron covered her navy-blue, well-worn suit. Her fair hair, recently released from curling-pins, quivered splendidly about her head; her bosom heaved as she drew the tasty air into her lungs. She walked from the stove to the kitchen table, seeking a glass of medium dry sherry that a minute or two previously she had poured and placed somewhere.

‘Ta-ra-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta,’ tuned Mr McCarthy in his taxi-cab, trying to put from his mind the extra four and sevenpence that he had been obliged to spend on the wine. ‘A basement place,’ he called to the driver. ‘You’ll know it by a motor-cycle and side-car parked outside.’ The driver made no response.

‘Motor-bike and side-car,’ repeated Mr McCarthy. ‘Parked by a lamp-post, number twenty-one. D’you understand?’

‘Twenty-one, Roeway Road,’ said the driver. ‘We’ll endeavour.’

Mr McCarthy closed his eyes and stretched his legs stiffly in front of him. He thought of Mavie, as was suitable at that moment. He saw her standing by the edge of the kitchen table, with a cigarette protruding from the left-hand extremity of her mouth, and the thumb and forefinger of her right hand grasping a glass which contained sherry and which bore, painted around it on the outside, two thin lines, one in red, the other in gold. It was the forty-seventh time that Mr McCarthy had made this midday journey, in a taxi-cab with a bottle of wine.

‘Doesn’t he want you to dress up?’ the girls had asked when first she had told them. ‘Pith helmets, chukka boots?’ Mavie had found that funny. She had laughed and said: ‘Dress up? Rather the opposite!’ But that was at the very beginning of the affair, before she had fallen so deeply in love with him.

‘Hullo.’ Mavie, holding the sherry glass before her, struck a pose in the basement kitchen. She had taken off her plastic apron.

‘Hullo, Mavie.’ He held out the bottle, his hat still upon his head, his soft raincoat creased and seeming unclean. ‘I’ve brought some wine. A little wine. I thought it would cheer us up.’ He had let himself in, for the door was always on the latch. He had clicked the Yale catch behind him, as he had long since learned she liked him to do, so that no disturbances might later take place. ‘I don’t care for disturbances,’ Mavie had said on the fifth occasion: an embarrassing time, when a coal-heaver, mistaking the basement for the basement next door, had walked into her bedroom with a sack on his back to find Mr McCarthy and herself playing about on the covers of her bed.

‘My, my, you’re looking sweet.’ He removed his hat and overcoat and cast his eye about for a corkscrew. It was his policy on these visits to prime himself beforehand with two measures of brandy and, having made his entry, to take an immediate glass of vin rosé. He did not care for Mavie’s sherry. British sherry was how the label described it; a qualification that put Mr McCarthy off.

‘I love that costume.’ He had said this before, referring to Mavie’s navy-blue coat and skirt. In reply she had once or twice pointed out that it had been, originally, the property of her sister Linda.

Mr McCarthy could smell the fish. He could sense the atmosphere rich with mackerel and the perfumed mist with which Mavie had sprayed the room.

‘I’m doing a nice fresh mackerel in a custard sauce,’ Mavie announced, moving towards the stove. She had been closely embraced by Mr McCarthy, who was now a little shaken, caught between the promise of the embrace and the thought of mackerel in a sauce. He imagined he must have heard incorrectly: he could not believe that the sauce was a custard one. ‘Custard!’ he said. ‘Custard?’

Mavie stirred the contents of a bowl. She remembered the first time: she had made an omelette; the mushrooms with which she had filled it had not cooked properly and Mr McCarthy had remarked upon the fact. She could have wept, watching him move the mushrooms to the side of his plate. ‘Have them on toast,’ she had cried. ‘I’ll cook them a bit more, love, and you can have them on a nice piece of toast.’ But he had shaken his head, and then, to show that all was well, he had taken her into his arms and had at once begun to unzip her skirt.

‘Custard?’ said Mr McCarthy again, aware of some revulsion in his bowels.

‘A garlic custard sauce. I read it in that column.’

‘My dear, I’d as soon have a lightly boiled egg. This wretched old trouble again.’

‘Oh, you poor thing! But fish is as easy to digest. A small helping. I’d have steamed had I known. You poor soul. Sit down, for heaven’s sake.’

He was thinking that he would vomit if he had to lift a single forkful of mackerel and garlic custard sauce to his lips. He would feel a retching at the back of his throat and before another second passed there would be an accident.

‘Love, I should have told you: I am off fish in any shape or form. The latest thing, I am on a diet of soft-boiled eggs. I’m a terrible trouble to you, Mavie love.’

She came to where he was sitting, drinking his way through the wine, and kissed him. She said not to worry about anything.

Mr McCarthy had told Mavie more lies than he had ever told anyone else. He had invented trouble with his stomach so that he could insist upon simple food, even though Mavie, forgetfully or hopefully, always cooked more elaborately. He had invented a Saturday appointment at four o’clock every week so that no dawdling would be required of him after he had exacted what he had come to look upon as his due. He had invented a wife and two children so that Mavie might not get ideas above her station.

‘Brush your teeth, Mavie, like a good girl.’ Mr McCarthy was being practical, fearful of the garlic. He spoke with confidence, knowing that Mavie would see it as reasonable that she should brush her teeth before the moments of love.

While she was in the bathroom he hummed a tune and reflected on his continuing good fortune. He drank more wine and when Mavie returned bade her drink some, too. It could only happen on Saturdays because the girl whom Mavie shared the flat with, Eithne, went away for the weekends.

‘Well, this is pleasant,’ said Mr McCarthy, sitting her on his knee, stroking her navy-blue clothes. She sat there, a little heavy for him, swinging her legs until her shoes slipped off.

This Saturday was Mavie’s birthday. Today she was twenty-seven, while Mr McCarthy remained at fifty-two. She had, the night before and for several other nights and days, considered the fact, wondering whether or not to make anything of it, wondering whether or not to let Mr McCarthy know. She had thought, the Saturday before, that it might seem a little pushing to say that it was her birthday in a week; it might seem that her words contained the suggestion that Mr McCarthy should arm himself with a present or should contrive to transform the day into a special occasion. She thought ecstatically of his arriving at the house with a wrapped box and sitting down and saying: ‘What lovely mackerel!’ and putting it to her then that since this was her twenty-seventh birthday he would arrange to spend the whole afternoon and the night as well. ‘We shall take to the West End later on,’ Mr McCarthy had said in Mavie’s mind, ‘and shall go to a show, that thing at the Palladium. I have the tickets in my wallet.’

‘What terrible old weather it is,’ said Mr McCarthy. ‘You wouldn’t know whether you’re coming or going.’

Mavie made a noise of agreement. She remembered other birthdays: a year she had been given a kite, the time that her cake, its flavour chosen by her, had not succeeded in the oven and had come to the table lumpy and grey, disguised with hundreds and thousands. She had cried, and her mother had picked up a teaspoon and rapped her knuckles. ‘After the show,’ said Mr McCarthy, ‘what about a spot of dinner in a little place I’ve heard of? And then liqueurs before we return in style to your little nest.’ As he spoke Mr McCarthy nuzzled her neck, and Mavie realized that he was, in fact, nuzzling her neck, though he was not speaking.

‘Today is a special day,’ said Mavie. ‘It’s a very special November day.’

Mr McCarthy laughed. ‘Every Saturday is a special day for me. Every Saturday is outlined in red on my heart.’ And he initiated some horseplay, which prevented Mavie from explaining.

Born beneath the sign of Scorpio, she was meant to be strong, fearless and enterprising. As a child she had often been in trouble, not because of naughtiness but because she had been dreamy about her work. She dreamed now, dominated by an image of Mr McCarthy rushing out for flowers. She saw him returning, blooms everywhere, saying he had telephoned to put off his Saturday appointment and had telephoned his home to say he had been called away on vital business. She felt his hands seeking the outline of her ribs, a thing he liked to do. They lay in silence for a while, and increasingly she felt low and sad.

‘How lovely you are,’ murmured Mr McCarthy. ‘Oh, Mavie, Mavie.’

She squeezed the length of pale flesh that was Mr McCarthy’s arm. She thought suddenly of the day the coal-heaver had arrived and felt her neck going red at the memory. She remembered the first day, rolling down her stockings and seeing her lover watching her, he already naked, standing still and seeming puzzled, near the electric fire. She had not been a virgin that day, but in the meanwhile she had not once been unfaithful to him.

‘Tell me you love me,’ Mavie cried, forgetting about her birthday, abruptly caught up in a new emotion. ‘Tell me now; it worries me sometimes.’

‘Of course it does. Of course I do. I’m all for you, Mavie, as I’ve said a thousand times.’

‘It’s not that I doubt you, honey, only sometimes between one Saturday and another I feel a depression. It’s impossible to say. I mean, it’s hard to put into words. Have you got a fag?’

Mr McCarthy shook his head on the pillow. She knew he did not smoke: why did she ask? It was like the custard sauce all over again. When he went to the trouble of inventing stomach trouble, you’d think she’d take the trouble to remember it.

‘You don’t smoke. I always ask and you always don’t say anything and I always remember then. Am I very irritating to you, honey? Tell me you love me. Tell me I’m not irritating to you.’

‘Mavie.’

‘You don’t like me today. I feel it. Jesus, I’m sorry about the mackerel. Tell the truth now, you don’t like me today.’

‘Oh yes, I do. I love you. I love you.’

‘You don’t like me.’ She spoke as though she had not heard his protestations; she spaced the words carefully, giving the same emphasis to each.

‘I love you,’ said Mr McCarthy. ‘Indeed I do.’

She shook her head, and rose and walked to the kitchen, where she found cigarettes and matches.

‘My Mavie,’ said Mr McCarthy from the bed, assuring himself that he was not finished yet, that he had not fully exacted his pleasurable due. ‘Mavie, my young heart,’ he murmured, and he began to laugh, thinking that merriment in the atmosphere would cheer matters up. ‘Shall I do a little dance for you?’

Mavie, cigarette aglow, pulled the sheets around her as Mr McCarthy vacated the bed and stood, his arms outstretched, on the centre of the floor. He began to dance, as on many occasions before he had danced, swaying about without much tempo. When first he had performed in this way for her he had explained that his dance was an expression of his passion, representing, so he said, roses and presents of jewellery and lamé gowns. Once Mr McCarthy had asked Mavie to take the braces off his trousers and strike him with them while he acted out his dance. He was guilty, he said, because in their life together there were neither roses nor jewels, nor restaurant dinners. But Mavie, shocked that he should feel like that, had refused his request, saying there was no cause for punishment. Sulkily, he had maintained otherwise, though he had not ever again suggested chastisement.

‘How’s that?’ said Mr McCarthy, ending with a gesture. Mavie said nothing. She, threw back the bed-clothes and Mr McCarthy strode jauntily towards her, a smile shaping beneath his moustache.

‘I often wonder about her,’ Mavie said a moment later. ‘It’s only natural. You can’t help that.’

Mr McCarthy said: ‘My wife’s a hard case. She’s well able to take care of herself. I’m on a leash where the wife is concerned.’

‘I don’t even know her name.’

‘Oh, Mavie, Mavie. Isn’t Mrs McCarthy enough?’

‘I’m jealous. I’m sorry, honey.’

‘No bother, Mavie. No bother, love.’

‘I see her as a black-haired woman. Tall and sturdy. Would you rather we didn’t speak of her?’

‘It would be easier, certainly.’

‘I’m sorry, honey.’

‘No bother.’

‘It’s only jealousy. The green-eyed monster.’

‘No need to be jealous, Mavie. No need at all. There’s no love lost between Mrs McCarthy and myself. We never go together nowadays.’

‘What sign is she under?’

‘Sign, love?’

‘Sagittarius? Leo? When’s her birthday?’

Mr McCarthy’s small eyes screwed up.

He looked through the lashes. He said:

‘The 29th of March.’

‘You make an occasion of it, do you? In the home, with the children around? You all give her presents, I suppose. Is there a special cake?’

‘The wife likes a jam-roll. She buys one at Lyons.’

‘And the children get her little gifts? Things from Woolworth’s?’

‘Something like that.’

‘When I was little I used to buy presents in Woolworth’s. My dad used to take me by the hand. I suppose you did, too. And your wife.’

‘Yes, love, I suppose so.’

‘I often think of your wife. I can’t help it. I see her in my mind’s eye.’

‘She’s a big woman,’ said Mr McCarthy meditatively. ‘Bigger than you, Mavie. A big, dark woman – more than that I won’t say.’

‘Oh, honey, I never meant to pry.’

‘It’s not prying I mind, Mavie. No, you’re not prying. It’s just that I don’t wish to soil the hour.’

When Mr McCarthy had said that, he heard the words echoing in his mind as words occasionally do. I don’t wish to soil the hour. Mavie was silent, feeling the words to be beautiful. I don’t wish to soil the hour, she thought. She drew her fingernails along the taut skin of Mr McCarthy’s thigh. ‘Oh God,’ said Mr McCarthy.

She knew that when he left, at twenty to four, she would sit alone in her dressing-gown and weep. She would wash the dirty dishes from lunch and she would wash his lovingly: she would wash and dry his egg-cup and be aware that it was his. She knew that that was absurd, but she knew that it would happen because it had happened before. She did not think it odd, as Mr McCarthy had often thought, that she, so pretty and still young, should love so passionately a man of fifty-two. She adored every shred of him; she longed for his presence and the touch of his hand. ‘Oh, my honey, my honey,’ cried Mavie, throwing her body on the body of Mr McCarthy and wrapping him up in her plump limbs.

At half past three Mr McCarthy, who had dropped into a light doze, woke to the awareness of a parched throat and a desire for tea. He sighed and caressed the fair hair that lay on the pillow beside him.

‘I’ll make a cup of tea,’ said Mavie.

‘Merci,’ whispered Mr McCarthy.

They drank tea in the kitchen while Mr McCarthy buttoned his waistcoat and drew on his socks. ‘I’ve bought a bow tie,’ he confided, ‘though I’m still a little shy in it. Maybe next week I’ll try it out on you.’

‘You could ask me anything under the sun and I’d do it for you. You could ask me anything, I love you that much.’

Hearing this, Mr McCarthy paused in the lacing of a boot. He thought of his braces, taut now about his shoulders; he thought of a foot fetish he had read about in the public library.

‘I love you that much,’ whispered Mavie.

‘And I you,’ said Mr McCarthy.

‘I dream of you at nights.’

‘I dream of you, my dear,’

Mavie sighed and looked over her shoulder, ill at ease. ‘I cannot think of you dreaming of me.’

‘I dream of you in my narrow twin bed, with that woman in the twin beside it.’

‘Don’t speak like that. Don’t talk to me of the bedroom.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I can’t bear the thought of the twin beds in that room. I’ve told you before, honey.’

‘Oh, Mavie, Mavie, if we could be together.’

‘I love you that much.’

For a moment there was silence in the kitchen. Then, having tilted his cup to drain it of tea, Mr McCarthy rose to go.

As he crossed the floor his eyes fell on a birthday card propped up on the mantelshelf. It registered with him at once that the day was Mavie’s birthday, and for a moment he considered remarking on that fact. Then he remembered the time and he kissed her on the head, his usual form of farewell. ‘The forty-seventh time,’ he murmured. ‘Today was the forty-seventh.’

She walked with him along the passage to the door of the flat. She watched him mount the basement steps and watched his legs move briskly by the railings above. His footsteps died away and she returned to the kitchen and poured herself a cup of tea. She thought of him keeping his Saturday appointment, a business appointment he had always called it, and afterwards returning on a bus to his suburb. She saw him entering a door, opening it with a latchkey, being greeted by a dog and two children and the big, dark woman who was his wife. The dog barked loudly and the woman shrilled abuse, upbraiding her husband for a misdemeanour or some piece of forgetfulness or some small deceit discovered. Marie could feel his tiredness as he stood in his own hall, the latchkey still poised between his fingers, like a man at bay. Her eyes closed as she held that image in her mind; tears slipped from beneath their lids.

The bus let Mr McCarthy down at an Odeon cinema. He moved rapidly, checking his watch against a brightly lit clock that hung out over a shop. He was reckoning as he walked that there was time to have another cup of tea, with a Danish pastry perhaps, because he felt quite peckish. Afterwards, as always on a Saturday, he’d go to the pictures.

The Ballroom of Romance

On Sundays, or on Mondays if he couldn’t make it and often he couldn’t, Sunday being his busy day, Canon O’Connell arrived at the farm in order to hold a private service with Bridie’s father, who couldn’t get about any more, having had a leg amputated after gangrene had set in. They’d had a pony and cart then and Bridie’s mother had been alive: it hadn’t been difficult for the two of them to help her father on to the cart in order to make the journey to Mass. But two years later the pony had gone lame and eventually had to be destroyed; not long after that her mother had died. ‘Don’t worry about it at all,’ Canon O’Connell had said, referring to the difficulty of transporting her father to Mass. ‘I’ll slip up by the week, Bridie.’

The milk lorry called daily for the single churn of milk, Mr Driscoll delivered groceries and meal in his van, and took away the eggs that Bridie had collected during the week. Since Canon O’Connell had made his offer, in 1953, Bridie’s father hadn’t left the farm.

As well as Mass on Sundays and her weekly visits to a wayside dance-hall Bridie went shopping once every month, cycling to the town early on a Friday afternoon. She bought things for herself, material for a dress, knitting wool, stockings, a newspaper, and paper-backed Wild West novels for her father. She talked in the shops to some of the girls she’d been at school with, girls who had married shop-assistants or shopkeepers, or had become assistants themselves. Most of them had families of their own by now. ‘You’re lucky to be peaceful in the hills,’ they said to Bridie, ‘instead of stuck in a hole like this.’ They had a tired look, most of them, from pregnancies and their efforts to organize and control their large families.

As she cycled back to the hills on a Friday Bridie often felt that they truly envied her her life, and she found it surprising that they should do so. If it hadn’t been for her father she’d have wanted to work in the town also, in the tinned-meat factory maybe, or in a shop. The town had a cinema called the Electric, and a fish-and-chip shop where people met at night, eating chips out of newspaper on the pavement outside. In the evenings, sitting in the farmhouse with her father, she often thought about the town, imagining the shop-windows lit up to display their goods and the sweet-shops still open so that people could purchase chocolates or fruit to take with them to the Electric cinema. But the town was eleven miles away, which was too far to cycle, there and back, for an evening’s entertainment.

‘It’s a terrible thing for you, girl,’ her father used to say, genuinely troubled, ‘tied up to a one-legged man.’ He would sigh heavily, hobbling back from the fields, where he managed as best he could. ‘If your mother hadn’t died,’ he’d say, not finishing the sentence.

If her mother hadn’t died her mother could have looked after him and the scant acres he owned, her mother could somehow have lifted the milk-churn on to the collection platform and attended to the few hens and the cows. ‘I’d be dead without the girl to assist me,’ she’d heard her father saying to Canon O’Connell, and Canon O’Connell replied that he was certainly lucky to have her.

‘Amn’t I as happy here as anywhere?’ she’d say herself, but her father knew she was pretending and was saddened because the weight of circumstances had so harshly interfered with her life.

Although her father still called her a girl, Bridie was thirty-six. She was tall and strong: the skin of her fingers and her palms were stained, and harsh to touch. The labour they’d experienced had found its way into them, as though juices had come out of vegetation and pigment out of soil: since childhood she’d torn away the rough scotch grass that grew each spring among her father’s mangolds and sugar beet; since childhood she’d harvested potatoes in August, her hands daily rooting in the ground she loosened and turned. Wind had toughened the flesh of her face, sun had browned it; her neck and nose were lean, her lips touched with early wrinkles.

But on Saturday nights Bridie forgot the scotch grass and the soil. In different dresses she cycled to the dance-hall, encouraged to make the journey by her father. ‘Doesn’t it do you good, girl?’ he’d say, as though he imagined she begrudged herself the pleasure. ‘Why wouldn’t you enjoy yourself?’ She’d cook him his tea and then he’d settle down with the wireless, or maybe a Wild West novel. In time, while still she danced, he’d stoke the fire up and hobble his way upstairs to bed.

The dance-hall, owned by Mr Justin Dwyer, was miles from anywhere, a lone building by the roadside with treeless boglands all around and a gravel expanse in front of it. On pink pebbled cement its title was painted in an azure blue that matched the depth of the background shade yet stood out well, unfussily proclaiming The Ballroom of Romance. Above these letters four coloured bulbs – in red, green, orange and mauve – were lit at appropriate times, an indication that the evening rendezvous was open for business. Only the façade of the building was pink, the other walls being a more ordinary grey. And inside, except for pink swing-doors, everything was blue.

On Saturday nights Mr Justin Dwyer, a small, thin man, unlocked the metal grid that protected his property and drew it back, creating an open mouth from which music would later pour. He helped his wife to carry crates of lemonade and packets of biscuits from their car, and then took up a position in the tiny vestibule between the drawn-back grid and the pink swing-doors. He sat at a card-table, with money and tickets spread out before him. He’d made a fortune, people said: he owned other ball-rooms also.

People came on bicycles or in old motor-cars, country people like Bridie from remote hill farms and villages. People who did not often see other people met there, girls and boys, men and women. They paid Mr Dwyer and passed into his dance-hall, where shadows were cast on pale-blue walls and light from a crystal bowl was dim. The band, known as the Romantic Jazz Band, was composed of clarinet, drums and piano. The drummer sometimes sang.

Bridie had been going to the dance-hall since first she left the Presentation Nuns, before her mother’s death. She didn’t mind the journey, which was seven miles there and seven back: she’d travelled as far every day to the Presentation Nuns on the same bicycle, which had once been the property of her mother, an old Rudge purchased originally in 1936. On Sundays she cycled six miles to Mass, but she never minded either: she’d grown quite used to all that.

‘How’re you, Bridie?’ inquired Mr Justin Dwyer when she arrived in a new scarlet dress one autumn evening. She said she was all right and in reply to Mr Dwyer’s second query she said that her father was all right also. ‘I’ll go up one of these days,’ promised Mr Dwyer, which was a promise he’d been making for twenty years.

She paid the entrance fee and passed through the pink swing-doors. The Romantic Jazz Band was playing a familiar melody of the past, ‘The Destiny Waltz’. In spite of the band’s title, jazz was not ever played in the ballroom: Mr Dwyer did not personally care for that kind of music, nor had he cared for various dance movements that had come and gone over the years. Jiving, rock and roll, twisting and other such variations had all been resisted by Mr Dwyer, who believed that a ballroom should be, as much as possible, a dignified place. The Romantic Jazz Band consisted of Mr Maloney, Mr Swanton, and Dano Ryan on drums. They were three middle-aged men who drove out from the town in Mr Maloney’s car, amateur performers who were employed otherwise by the tinned-meat factory, the Electricity Supply Board and the County Council.

‘How’re you, Bridie?’ inquired Dano Ryan as she passed him on her way to the cloakroom. He was idle for a moment with his drums, ‘The Destiny Waltz’ not calling for much attention from him.

‘I’m all right, Dano,’ she said. ‘Are you fit yourself? Are the eyes better?’ The week before he’d told her that he’d developed a watering of the eyes that must have been some kind of cold or other. He’d woken up with it in the morning and it had persisted until the afternoon: it was a new experience, he’d told her, adding that he’d never had a day’s illness or discomfort in his life.

‘I think I need glasses,’ he said now, and as she passed into the cloakroom she imagined him in glasses, repairing the roads, as he was employed to do by the County Council. You hardly ever saw a road-mender with glasses, she reflected, and she wondered if all the dust that was inherent in his work had perhaps affected his eyes.

‘How’re you, Bridie?’ a girl called Eenie Mackie said in the cloakroom, a girl who’d left the Presentation Nuns only a year ago.

‘That’s a lovely dress, Eenie,’ Bridie said. ‘Is it nylon, that?’

‘Tricel actually. Drip-dry.’

Bridie took off her coat and hung it on a hook. There was a small wash-basin in the cloakroom above which hung a discoloured oval mirror. Used tissues and pieces of cotton-wool, cigarette-butts and matches covered the concrete floor. Lengths of green-painted timber partitioned off a lavatory in a corner.

‘Jeez, you’re looking great, Bridie,’ Madge Dowding remarked, waiting for her turn at the mirror. She moved towards it as she spoke, taking off a pair of spectacles before endeavouring to apply make-up to the lashes of her eye. She stared myopically into the oval mirror, humming while the other girls became restive.

‘Will you hurry up, for God’s sake!’ shouted Eenie Mackie. ‘We’re standing here all night, Madge.’

Madge Dowding was the only one who was older than Bridie. She was thirty-nine, although often she said she was younger. The girls sniggered about that, saying that Madge Dowding should accept her condition – her age and her squint and her poor complexion – and not make herself ridiculous going out after men. What man would be bothered with the like of her anyway? Madge Dowding would do better to give herself over to do Saturday-night work for the Legion of Mary: wasn’t Canon O’Connell always looking for aid?

‘Is that fellow there?’ she asked now, moving away from the mirror. ‘The guy with the long arms. Did anyone see him outside?’

‘He’s dancing with Cat Bolger,’ one of the girls replied. ‘She has herself glued to him.’

‘Lover boy,’ remarked Patty Byrne, and everyone laughed because the person referred to was hardly a boy any more, being over fifty it was said, a bachelor who came only occasionally to the dance-hall.

Madge Dowding left the cloakroom rapidly, not bothering to pretend she wasn’t anxious about the conjunction of Cat Bolger and the man with the long arms. Two sharp spots of red had come into her cheeks, and when she stumbled in her haste the girls in the cloakroom laughed. A younger girl would have pretended to be casual.

Bridie chatted, waiting for the mirror. Some girls, not wishing to be delayed, used the mirrors of their compacts. Then in twos and threes, occasionally singly, they left the cloakroom and took their places on upright wooden chairs at one end of the dance-hall, waiting to be asked to dance. Mr Maloney, Mr Swanton and Dano Ryan played ‘Harvest Moon’ and ‘I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now’ and ‘I’ll Be Around’.

Bridie danced. Her father would be falling asleep by the fire; the wireless, tuned in to Radio Eireann, would be murmuring in the background. Already he’d have listened to Faith and Order and Spot the Talent. His Wild West novel, Three Rode Fast by Jake Matall, would have dropped from his single knee on to the flagged floor. He would wake with a jerk as he did every night and, forgetting what night it was, might be surprised not to see her, for usually she was sitting there at the table, mending clothes or washing eggs. ‘Is it time for the news?’ he’d automatically say.

Dust and cigarette smoke formed a haze beneath the crystal bowl, feet thudded, girls shrieked and laughed, some of them dancing together for want of a male partner. The music was loud, the musicians had taken off their jackets. Vigorously they played a number of tunes from State Fair and then, more romantically, ‘Just One of Those Things’. The tempo increased for a Paul Jones, after which Bridie found herself with a youth who told her he was saving up to emigrate, the nation in his opinion being finished. ‘I’m up in the hills with the uncle,’ he said, ‘labouring fourteen hours a day. Is it any life for a young fellow?’ She knew his uncle, a hill farmer whose stony acres were separated from her father’s by one other farm only. ‘He has me gutted with work,’ the youth told her. ‘Is there sense in it at all, Bridie?’

At ten o’clock there was a stir, occasioned by the arrival of three middle-aged bachelors who’d cycled over from Carey’s public house. They shouted and whistled, greeting other people across the dancing area. They smelt of stout and sweat and whiskey.

Every Saturday at just this time they arrived, and, having sold them their tickets, Mr Dwyer folded up his card-table and locked the tin box that held the evening’s takings: his ballroom was complete.

‘How’re you, Bridie?’ one of the bachelors, known as Bowser Egan, inquired. Another one, Tim Daly, asked Patty Byrne how she was. ‘Will we take the floor?’ Eyes Horgan suggested to Madge Dowding, already pressing the front of his navy-blue suit against the net of her dress. Bridie danced with Bowser Egan, who said she was looking great.

The bachelors would never marry, the girls of the dance-hall considered: they were wedded already, to stout and whiskey and laziness, to three old mothers somewhere up in the hills. The man with the long arms didn’t drink but he was the same in all other ways: he had the same look of a bachelor, a quality in his face.

‘Great,’ Bowser Egan said, feather-stepping in an inaccurate and inebriated manner. ‘You’re a great little dancer, Bridie.’

‘Will you lay off that!’ cried Madge Dowding, her voice shrill above the sound of the music. Eyes Horgan had slipped two fingers into the back of her dress and was now pretending they’d got there by accident. He smiled blearily, his huge red face streaming with perspiration, the eyes which gave him his nickname protuberant and bloodshot.

‘Watch your step with that one,’ Bowser Egan called out, laughing so that spittle sprayed on to Bridie’s face. Eenie Mackie, who was also dancing near the incident, laughed also and winked at Bridie. Dano Ryan left his drums and sang. ‘Oh, how I miss your gentle kiss,’ he crooned, ‘and long to hold you tight.’

Nobody knew the name of the man with the long arms. The only words he’d ever been known to speak in the Ballroom of Romance were the words that formed his invitation to dance. He was a shy man who stood alone when he wasn’t performing on the dance-floor. He rode away on his bicycle afterwards, not saying good-night to anyone.

‘Cat has your man leppin’ tonight,’ Tim Daly remarked to Patty Byrne, for the liveliness that Cat Bolger had introduced into foxtrot and waltz was noticeable.

‘I think of you only,’ sang Dano Ryan. ‘Only wishing, wishing you were by my side.’

Dano Ryan would have done, Bridie often thought, because he was a different kind of bachelor: he had a lonely look about him, as if he’d become tired of being on his own. Every week she thought he would have done, and during the week her mind regularly returned to that thought. Dano Ryan would have done because she felt he wouldn’t mind coming to live in the farmhouse while her one-legged father was still about the place. Three could live as cheaply as two where Dano Ryan was concerned because giving up the wages he earned as a road-worker would be balanced by the saving made on what he paid for lodgings. Once, at the end of an evening, she’d pretended that there was a puncture in the back wheel of her bicycle and he’d concerned himself with it while Mr Maloney and Mr Swanton waited for him in Mr Maloney’s car. He’d blown the tyre up with the car pump and had said he thought it would hold.

It was well known in the dance-hall that she fancied her chances with Dano Ryan. But it was well known also that Dano Ryan had got into a set way of life and had remained in it for quite some years. He lodged with a widow called Mrs Griffin and Mrs Griffin’s mentally affected son, in a cottage on the outskirts of the town. He was said to be good to the affected child, buying him sweets and taking him out for rides on the crossbar of his bicycle. He gave an hour or two of his time every week to the Church of Our Lady Queen of Heaven, and he was loyal to Mr Dwyer. He performed in the two other rural dance-halls that Mr Dwyer owned, rejecting advances from the town’s more sophisticated dance-hall, even though it was more conveniently situated for him and the fee was more substantial than that paid by Mr Dwyer. But Mr Dwyer had discovered Dano Ryan and Dano had not forgotten it, just as Mr Maloney and Mr Swanton had not forgotten their discovery by Mr Dwyer either.

‘Would we take a lemonade?’ Bowser Egan suggested. ‘And a packet of biscuits, Bridie?’

No alcoholic liquor was ever served in the Ballroom of Romance, the premises not being licensed for this added stimulant. Mr Dwyer in fact had never sought a licence for any of his premises, knowing that romance and alcohol were difficult commodities to mix, especially in a dignified ballroom. Behind where the girls sat on the wooden chairs Mr Dwyer’s wife, a small stout woman, served the bottles of lemonade, with straws, and the biscuits, and crisps. She talked busily while doing so, mainly about the turkeys she kept. She’d once told Bridie that she thought of them as children.

‘Thanks,’ Bridie said, and Bowser Egan led her to the trestle table. Soon it would be the intermission: soon the three members of the band would cross the floor also for refreshment. She thought up questions to ask Dano Ryan.

When first she’d danced in the Ballroom of Romance, when she was just sixteen, Dano Ryan had been there also, four years older than she was, playing the drums for Mr Maloney as he played them now. She’d hardly noticed him then because of his not being one of the dancers: he was part of the ballroom’s scenery, like the trestle table and the lemonade bottles, and Mrs Dwyer and Mr Dwyer. The youths who’d danced with her then in their Saturday-night blue suits had later disappeared into the town, or to Dublin or Britain, leaving behind them those who became the middle-aged bachelors of the hills. There’d been a boy called Patrick Grady whom she had loved in those days. Week after week she’d ridden away from the Ballroom of Romance with the image of his face in her mind, a thin face, pale beneath black hair. It had been different, dancing with Patrick Grady, and she’d felt that he found it different dancing with her, although he’d never said so. At night she’d dreamed of him and in the daytime too, while she helped her mother in the kitchen or her father with the cows. Week by week she’d returned to the ballroom, delighting in its pink façade and dancing in the arms of Patrick Grady. Often they’d stood together drinking lemonade, not saying anything, not knowing what to say. She knew he loved her, and she believed then that he would lead her one day from the dim, romantic ballroom, from its blueness and its pinkness and its crystal bowl of light and its music. She believed he would lead her into sunshine, to the town and the Church of Our Lady Queen of Heaven, to marriage and smiling faces. But someone else had got Patrick Grady, a girl from the town who’d never danced in the wayside ballroom. She’d scooped up Patrick Grady when he didn’t have a chance.

Bridie had wept, hearing that. By night she’d lain in her bed in the farmhouse, quietly crying, the tears rolling into her hair and making the pillow damp. When she woke in the early morning the thought was still naggingly with her and it remained with her by day, replacing her daytime dreams of happiness. Someone told her later on that he’d crossed to Britain, to Wolverhampton, with the girl he’d married, and she imagined him there, in a place she wasn’t able properly to visualize, labouring in a factory, his children being born and acquiring the accent of the area. The Ballroom of Romance wasn’t the same without him, and when no one else stood out for her particularly over the years and when no one offered her marriage, she found herself wondering about Dano Ryan. If you couldn’t have love, the next best thing was surely a decent man.

Bowser Egan hardly fell into that category, nor did Tim Daly. And it was plain to everyone that Cat Bolger and Madge Dowding were wasting their time over the man with the long arms. Madge Dowding was already a figure of fun in the ballroom, the way she ran after the bachelors; Cat Bolger would end up the same if she wasn’t careful. One way or another it wasn’t difficult to be a figure of fun in the ballroom, and you didn’t have to be as old as Madge Dowding: a girl who’d just left the Presentation Nuns had once asked Eyes Horgan what he had in his trouser pocket and he told her it was a penknife. She’d repeated this afterwards in the cloakroom, how she’d requested Eyes Horgan not to dance so close to her because his penknife was sticking into her. ‘Jeez, aren’t you the right baby!’ Patty Byrne had shouted delightedly; everyone had laughed, knowing that Eyes Horgan only came to the ballroom for stuff like that. He was no use to any girl.

‘Two lemonades, Mrs Dwyer,’ Bowser Egan said, ‘and two packets of Kerry Creams. Is Kerry Creams all right, Bridie?’

She nodded, smiling. Kerry Creams would be fine, she said.

‘Well, Bridie, isn’t that the great outfit you have!’ Mrs Dwyer remarked. ‘Doesn’t the red suit her, Bowser?’

By the swing-doors stood Mr Dwyer, smoking a cigarette that he held cupped in his left hand. His small eyes noted all developments. He had been aware of Madge Dowding’s anxiety when Eyes Horgan had inserted two fingers into the back opening of her dress. He had looked away, not caring for the incident, but had it developed further he would have spoken to Eyes Horgan, as he had on other occasions. Some of the younger lads didn’t know any better and would dance very close to their partners, who generally were too embarrassed to do anything about it, being young themselves. But that, in Mr Dwyer’s opinion, was a different kettle of fish altogether because they were decent young lads who’d in no time at all be doing a steady line with a girl and would end up as he had himself with Mrs Dwyer, in the same house with her, sleeping in a bed with her, firmly married. It was the middle-aged bachelors who required the watching: they came down from the hills like mountain goats, released from their mammies and from the smell of animals and soil. Mr Dwyer continued to watch Eyes Horgan, wondering how drunk he was.

Dano Ryan’s song came to an end, Mr Swanton laid down his clarinet, Mr Maloney rose from the piano. Dano Ryan wiped sweat from his face and the three men slowly moved towards Mrs Dwyer’s trestle table.

‘Jeez, you have powerful legs,’ Eyes Horgan whispered to Madge Dowding, but Madge Dowding’s attention was on the man with the long arms, who had left Cat Bolger’s side and was proceeding in the direction of the men’s lavatory. He never took refreshments. She moved, herself, towards the men’s lavatory, to take up a position outside it, but Eyes Horgan followed her. ‘Would you take a lemonade, Madge?’ he asked. He had a small bottle of whiskey on him: if they went into a corner they could add a drop of it to the lemonade. She didn’t drink spirits, she reminded him, and he went away.

‘Excuse me a minute,’ Bowser Egan said, putting down his bottle of lemonade. He crossed the floor to the lavatory. He too, Bridie knew, would have a small bottle of whiskey on him. She watched while Dano Ryan, listening to a story Mr Maloney was telling, paused in the centre of the ballroom, his head bent to hear what was being said. He was a big man, heavily made; with black hair that was slightly touched with grey, and big hands. He laughed when Mr Maloney came to the end of his story and then bent his head again, in order to listen to a story told by Mr Swanton.

‘Are you on your own, Bridie?’ Cat Bolger asked, and Bridie said she was waiting for Bowser Egan. ‘I think I’ll have a lemonade,’ Cat Bolger said.

Younger boys and girls stood with their arms still around one another, queuing up for refreshments. Boys who hadn’t danced at all, being nervous because they didn’t know any steps, stood in groups, smoking and making jokes. Girls who hadn’t been danced with yet talked to one another, their eyes wandering. Some of them sucked at straws in lemonade bottles.

Bridie, still watching Dano Ryan, imagined him wearing the glasses he’d referred to, sitting in the farmhouse kitchen, reading one of her father’s Wild West novels. She imagined the three of them eating a meal she’d prepared, fried eggs and rashers and fried potato-cakes, and tea and bread and butter and jam, brown bread and soda and shop bread. She imagined Dano Ryan leaving the kitchen in the morning to go out to the fields in order to weed the mangolds, and her father hobbling off behind him, and the two men working together. She saw hay being cut, Dano Ryan with the scythe that she’d learned to use herself, her father using a rake as best he could. She saw herself, because of the extra help, being able to attend to things in the farmhouse, things she’d never had time for because of the cows and the hens and the fields. There were bedroom curtains that needed repairing where the net had ripped, and wallpaper that had become loose and needed to be stuck up with flour paste. The scullery required whitewashing.

The night he’d blown up the tyre of her bicycle she’d thought he was going to kiss her. He’d crouched on the ground in the darkness with his ear to the tyre, listening for escaping air. When he could hear none he’d straightened up and said he thought she’d be all right on the bicycle. His face had been quite close to hers and she’d smiled at him. At that moment, unfortunately, Mr Maloney had blown an impatient blast on the horn of his motor-car.

Often she’d been kissed by Bowser Egan, on the nights when he insisted on riding part of the way home with her. They had to dismount in order to push their bicycles up a hill and the first time he’d accompanied her he’d contrived to fall against her, steadying himself by putting a hand on her shoulder. The next thing she was aware of was the moist quality of his lips and the sound of his bicycle as it clattered noisily on the road. He’d suggested then, regaining his breath, that they should go into a field.

That was nine years ago. In the intervening passage of time she’d been kissed as well, in similar circumstances, by Eyes Horgan and Tim Daly. She’d gone into fields with them and permitted them to put their arms about her while heavily they breathed. At one time or another she had imagined marriage with one or other of them, seeing them in the farmhouse with her father, even though the fantasies were unlikely.

Bridie stood with Cat Bolger, knowing that it would be some time before Bowser Egan came out of the lavatory. Mr Maloney, Mr Swanton and Dano Ryan approached, Mr Maloney insisting that he would fetch three bottles of lemonade from the trestle table.

‘You sang the last one beautifully,’ Bridie said to Dano Ryan. ‘Isn’t it a beautiful song?’

Mr Swanton said it was the finest song ever written, and Cat Bolger said she preferred ‘Danny Boy’, which in her opinion was the finest song ever written.

‘Take a suck of that,’ said Mr Maloney, handing Dano Ryan and Mr Swanton bottles of lemonade. ‘How’s Bridie tonight? Is your father well, Bridie?’

Her father was all right, she said.

‘I hear they’re starting a cement factory,’ said Mr Maloney. ‘Did anyone hear talk of that? They’re after striking some commodity in the earth that makes good cement. Ten feet down, over at Kilmalough.’

‘It’ll bring employment,’ said Mr Swanton. ‘It’s employment that’s necessary in this area.’

‘Canon O’Connell was on about it,’ Mr Maloney said. ‘There’s Yankee money involved.’

‘Will the Yanks come over?’ inquired Cat Bolger. ‘Will they run it themselves, Mr Maloney?’

Mr Maloney, intent on his lemonade, didn’t hear the questions and Cat Bolger didn’t repeat them.

‘There’s stuff called Optrex,’ Bridie said quietly to Dano Ryan, ‘that my father took the time he had a cold in his eyes. Maybe Optrex would settle the watering, Dano.’

‘Ah sure, it doesn’t worry me that much –’

‘It’s terrible, anything wrong with the eyes. You wouldn’t want to take a chance. You’d get Optrex in a chemist, Dano, and a little bowl with it so that you can bathe the eyes.’

Her father’s eyes had become red-rimmed and unsightly to look at. She’d gone into Riordan’s Medical Hall in the town and had explained what the trouble was, and Mr Riordan had recommended Optrex. She told this to Dano Ryan, adding that her father had had no trouble with his eyes since. Dano Ryan nodded.

‘Did you hear that, Mrs Dwyer?’ Mr Maloney called out. ‘A cement factory for Kilmalough.’

Mrs Dwyer wagged her head, placing empty bottles in a crate. She’d heard references to the cement factory, she said: it was the best news for a long time.

‘Kilmalough won’t know itself,’ her husband commented, joining her in her task with the empty lemonade bottles.

‘’Twill bring prosperity certainly,’ said Mr Swanton. ‘I was saying just there, Justin, that employment’s what’s necessary.’

‘Sure, won’t the Yanks –’ began Cat Bolger, but Mr Maloney interrupted her.

‘The Yanks’ll be in at the top, Cat, or maybe not here at all – maybe only inserting money into it. It’ll be local labour entirely.’

‘You’ll not marry a Yank, Cat,’ said Mr Swanton, loudly laughing. ‘You can’t catch those fellows.’

‘Haven’t you plenty of homemade bachelors?’ suggested Mr Maloney. He laughed also, throwing away the straw he was sucking through and tipping the bottle into his mouth. Cat Bolger told him to get on with himself. She moved towards the men’s lavatory and took up a position outside it, not speaking to Madge Dowding, who was still standing there.

‘Keep a watch on Eyes Horgan,’ Mrs Dwyer warned her husband, which was advice she gave him at this time every Saturday night, knowing that Eyes Horgan was drinking in the lavatory. When he was drunk Eyes Horgan was the most difficult of the bachelors.

‘I have a drop of it left, Dano,’ Bridie said quietly. ‘I could bring it over on Saturday. The eye stuff.’

‘Ah, don’t worry yourself, Bridie –’

‘No trouble at all. Honestly now –’

‘Mrs Griffin has me fixed up for a test with Dr Cready. The old eyes are no worry, only when I’m reading the paper or at the pictures. Mrs Griffin says I’m only straining them due to lack of glasses.’

He looked away while he said that, and she knew at once that Mrs Griffin was arranging to marry him. She felt it instinctively: Mrs Griffin was going to marry him because she was afraid that if he moved away from her cottage, to get married to someone else, she’d find it hard to replace him with another lodger who’d be good to her affected son. He’d become a father to Mrs Griffin’s affected son, to whom already he was kind. It was a natural outcome, for Mrs Griffin had all the chances, seeing him every night and morning and not having to make do with weekly encounters in a ballroom.

She thought of Patrick Grady, seeing in her mind his pale, thin face. She might be the mother of four of his children now, or seven or eight maybe. She might be living in Wolverhampton, going out to the pictures in the evenings, instead of looking after a one-legged man. If the weight of circumstances hadn’t intervened she wouldn’t be standing in a wayside ballroom, mourning the marriage of a road-mender she didn’t love. For a moment she thought she might cry, standing there thinking of Patrick Grady in Wolverhampton. In her life, on the farm and in the house, there was no place for tears. Tears were a luxury, like flowers would be in the fields where the mangolds grew, or fresh whitewash in the scullery. It wouldn’t have been fair ever to have wept in the kitchen while her father sat listening to Spot the Talent: her father had more right to weep, having lost a leg. He suffered in a greater way, yet he remained kind and concerned for her.

In the Ballroom of Romance she felt behind her eyes the tears that it would have been improper to release in the presence of her father. She wanted to let them go, to feel them streaming on her cheeks, to receive the sympathy of Dano Ryan and of everyone else. She wanted them all to listen to her while she told them about Patrick Grady who was now in Wolverhampton and about the death of her mother and her own life since. She wanted Dano Ryan to put his arm around her so that she could lean her head against it. She wanted him to look at her in his decent way and to stroke with his road-mender’s fingers the backs of her hands. She might wake in a bed with him and imagine for a moment that he was Patrick Grady. She might bathe his eyes and pretend.

‘Back to business,’ said Mr Maloney, leading his band across the floor to their instruments.

‘Tell your father I was asking for him,’ Dano Ryan said. She smiled and she promised, as though nothing had happened, that she would tell her father that.

She danced with Tim Daly and then again with the youth who’d said he intended to emigrate. She saw Madge Dowding moving swiftly towards the man with the long arms as he came out of the lavatory, moving faster than Cat Bolger. Eyes Horgan approached Cat Bolger. Dancing with her, he spoke earnestly, attempting to persuade her to permit him to ride part of the way home with her. He was unaware of the jealousy that was coming from her as she watched Madge Dowding holding close to her the man with the long arms while they performed a quickstep. Cat Bolger was in her thirties also.

‘Get away out of that,’ said Bowser Egan, cutting in on the youth who was dancing with Bridie. ‘Go home to your mammy, boy.’ He took her into his arms, saying again that she was looking great tonight. ‘Did you hear about the cement factory?’ he said. ‘Isn’t it great for Kilmalough?’

She agreed. She said what Mr Swanton and Mr Maloney had said: that the cement factory would bring employment to the neighbourhood.

‘Will I ride home with you a bit, Bridie?’ Bowser Egan suggested, and she pretended not to hear him. ‘Aren’t you my girl, Bridie, and always have been?’ he said, a statement that made no sense at all.

His voice went on whispering at her, saying he would marry her tomorrow only his mother wouldn’t permit another woman in the house. She knew what it was like herself, he reminded her, having a parent to look after: you couldn’t leave them to rot, you had to honour your father and your mother.

She danced to ‘The Bells Are Ringing’, moving her legs in time with Bowser Egan’s while over his shoulder she watched Dano Ryan softly striking one of his smaller drums. Mrs Griffin had got him even though she was nearly fifty, with no looks at all, a lumpish woman with lumpish legs and arms. Mrs Griffin had got him just as the girl had got Patrick Grady.

The music ceased, Bowser Egan held her hard against him, trying to touch her face with his. Around them, people whistled and clapped: the evening had come to an end. She walked away from Bowser Egan, knowing that not ever again would she dance in the Ballroom of Romance. She’d been a figure of fun, trying to promote a relationship with a middle-aged County Council labourer, as ridiculous as Madge Dowding dancing on beyond her time.

‘I’m waiting outside for you, Cat,’ Eyes Horgan called out, lighting a cigarette as he made for the swing-doors.

Already the man with the long arms – made long, so they said, from carrying rocks off his land – had left the ballroom. Others were moving briskly. Mr Dwyer was tidying the chairs.

In the cloakroom the girls put on their coats and said they’d see one another at Mass the next day. Madge Dowding hurried. ‘Are you OK, Bridie?’ Patty Byrne asked and Bridie said she was. She smiled at little Patty Byrne, wondering if a day would come for the younger girl also, if one day she’d decide that she was a figure of fun in a wayside ballroom.

‘Good-night so,’ Bridie said, leaving the cloakroom, and the girls who were still chatting there wished her good-night. Outside the cloakroom she paused for a moment. Mr Dwyer was still tidying the chairs, picking up empty lemonade bottles from the floor, setting the chairs in a neat row. His wife was sweeping the floor. ‘Good-night, Bridie,’ Mr Dwyer said. ‘Good-night, Bridie,’ his wife said.

Extra lights had been switched on so that the Dwyers could see what they were doing. In the glare the blue walls of the ballroom seemed tatty, marked with hair-oil where men had leaned against them, inscribed with names and initials and hearts with arrows through them. The crystal bowl gave out a light that was ineffective in the glare; the bowl was broken here and there, which wasn’t noticeable when the other lights weren’t on.

‘Good-night so,’ Bridie said to the Dwyers. She passed through the swing-doors and descended the three concrete steps on the gravel expanse in front of the ballroom. People were gathered on the gravel, talking in groups, standing with their bicycles. She saw Madge Dowding going off with Tim Daly. A youth rode away with a girl on the crossbar of his bicycle. The engines of motor-cars started.

‘Good-night, Bridie,’ Dano Ryan said.

‘Good-night, Dano,’ she said.

She walked across the gravel towards her bicycle, hearing Mr Maloney, somewhere behind her, repeating that no matter how you looked at it the cement factory would be a great thing for Kilmalough. She heard the bang of a car door and knew it was Mr Swanton banging the door of Mr Maloney’s car because he always gave it the same loud bang. Two other doors banged as she reached her bicycle and then the engine started up and the headlights went on. She touched the two tyres of the bicycle to make certain she hadn’t a puncture. The wheels of Mr Maloney’s car traversed the gravel and were silent when they reached the road.

‘Good-night, Bridie,’ someone called, and she replied, pushing her bicycle towards the road.

‘Will I ride a little way with you?’ Bowser Egan asked.

They rode together and when they arrived at the hill for which it was necessary to dismount she looked back and saw in the distance the four coloured bulbs that decorated the façade of the Ballroom of Romance. As she watched, the lights went out, and she imagined Mr Dwyer pulling the metal grid across the front of his property and locking the two padlocks that secured it. His wife would be waiting with the evening’s takings, sitting in the front of their car.

‘D’you know what it is, Bridie,’ said Bowser Egan, ‘you were never looking better than tonight.’ He took from a pocket of his suit the small bottle of whiskey he had. He uncorked it and drank some and then handed it to her. She took it and drank. ‘Sure, why wouldn’t you?’ he said, surprised to see her drinking because she never had in his company before. It was an unpleasant taste, she considered, a taste she’d experienced only twice before, when she’d taken whiskey as a remedy for toothache. ‘What harm would it do you?’ Bowser Egan said as she raised the bottle again to her lips. He reached out a hand for it, though, suddenly concerned lest she should consume a greater share than he wished her to.

She watched him drinking more expertly than she had. He would always be drinking, she thought. He’d be lazy and useless, sitting in the kitchen with the Irish Press. He’d waste money buying a secondhand motor-car in order to drive into the town to go to the public houses on fair-days.

‘She’s shook these days,’ he said, referring to his mother. ‘She’ll hardly last two years, I’m thinking.’ He threw the empty whiskey bottle into the ditch and lit a cigarette. They pushed their bicycles. He said:

‘When she goes, Bridie, I’ll sell the bloody place up. I’ll sell the pigs and the whole damn one and twopence worth.’ He paused in order to raise the cigarette to his lips. He drew in smoke and exhaled it. ‘With the cash that I’ll get I could improve some place else, Bridie.’

They reached a gate on the left-hand side of the road and automatically they pushed their bicycles towards it and leaned them against it. He climbed over the gate into the field and she climbed after him. ‘Will we sit down here, Bridie?’ he said, offering the suggestion as one that had just occurred to him, as though they’d entered the field for some other purpose.

‘We could improve a place like your own one,’ he said, putting his right arm around her shoulders. ‘Have you a kiss in you, Bridie?’ He kissed her, exerting pressure with his teeth. When his mother died he would sell his farm and spend the money in the town. After that he would think of getting married because he’d have nowhere to go, because he’d want a fire to sit at and a woman to cook food for him. He kissed her again, his lips hot, the sweat on his cheeks sticking to her. ‘God, you’re great at kissing,’ he said.

She rose, saying it was time to go, and they climbed over the gate again. ‘There’s nothing like a Saturday,’ he said. ‘Good-night to you so, Bridie.’

He mounted his bicycle and rode down the hill, and she pushed hers to the top and then mounted it also. She rode through the night as on Saturday nights for years she had ridden and never would ride again because she’d reached a certain age. She would wait now and in time Bowser Egan would seek her out because his mother would have died. Her father would probably have died also by then. She would marry Bowser Egan because it would be lonesome being by herself in the farmhouse.

A Happy Family

On the evening of Thursday, May 24th 1962, I returned home in the usual way. I remember sitting in the number 73 bus, thinking of the day as I had spent it and thinking of the house I was about to enter. It was a fine evening, warm and mellow, the air heavy with the smell of London. The bus crossed Hammersmith Bridge, moving quite quickly towards the leafy avenues beyond. The houses of the suburbs were gayer in that evening’s sunshine, pleasanter abodes than often they seemed.

‘Hullo,’ I said in the hall of ours, speaking to my daughter Lisa, a child of one, who happened to be loitering there. She was wearing her nightdress, and she didn’t look sleepy. ‘Aren’t you going to bed?’ I said, and Lisa looked at me as if she had forgotten that I was closely related to her. I could hear Anna and Christopher in the bathroom, talking loudly and rapidly, and I could hear Elizabeth’s voice urging them to wash themselves properly and be quick about it. ‘She’s fourteen stone, Miss MacAdam is,’ Christopher was saying. ‘Isn’t she, Anna?’ Miss MacAdam was a woman who taught at their school, a woman about whom we had come to know a lot. ‘She can’t swim,’ said Anna.

Looking back now, such exchanges come easily to my mind. Bits of conversations float to the surface without much of a continuing pattern and without any significance that I can see. I suppose we were a happy family: someone examining us might possibly have written that down on a report sheet, the way these things are done. Yet what I recall most vividly now when I think of us as a family are images and occasions that for Elizabeth and me were neither happy nor unhappy. I remember animals at the Zoo coming forward for the offerings of our children, smelling of confinement rather than the jungle, seeming fierce and hard done by. I remember birthday parties on warm afternoons, the figures of children moving swiftly from the garden to the house, creatures who might have been bored, with paper hats on their heads or in their hands, seeking adventure in forbidden rooms. I remember dawdling walks, arguments that came to involve all of us, and other days when everything went well.

I used to leave the house at half past eight every morning, and often during the day I imagined what my wife’s day must be like. She told me, of course. She told me about how ill-tempered our children had been, or how tractable; about how the time had passed in other ways, whom she had met and spoken to, who had come to tea or whom she had visited. I imagined her in summer having lunch in the garden when it was warm, dozing afterwards and being woken up by Lisa. In turn, she would ask me how the hours had gone for me and I would say a thing or two about their passing, about the people who had filled them. ‘Miss Madden is leaving us,’ I can hear myself saying. ‘Off to Buenos Aires for some reason.’ In my memory of this, I seem to be repeating the information. ‘Off to Buenos Aires,’ I appear to be saying. ‘Off to Buenos Aires. Miss Madden.’ And a little later I am saying it again, adding that Miss Madden would be missed. Elizabeth’s head is nodding, agreeing that that will indeed be so. ‘I fell asleep in the garden,’ Elizabeth is murmuring in this small vision. ‘Lisa woke me up.’

My wife was pretty when I married her, and as the years passed it seemed to me that she took on a greater beauty. I believed that this was some reflection of her contentment, and she may even have believed it herself. Had she suddenly said otherwise, I’d have been puzzled; as puzzled as I was, and as she was, on the evening of May 24th, when she told me about Mr Higgs. She sat before me then, sipping at a glass of sherry that I’d poured her and remembering all the details: all that Mr Higgs had said and all that she had said in reply.

She had been listening to a story on the radio and making coffee. Christopher and Anna were at school; in the garden Lisa was asleep in her pram. When the telephone rang Elizabeth walked towards it slowly, still listening to the wireless. When she said ‘Hullo’ she heard the coins drop at the other end and a man’s voice said: ‘Mrs Farrel?’

Elizabeth said yes, she was Mrs Farrel, and the man said: ‘My name is Higgs.’

His voice was ordinary, a little uneducated, the kind of voice that is always drifting over the telephone.

‘A very good friend,’ said Mr Higgs.

‘Good-morning,’ said Elizabeth in her matter-of-fact way. ‘Are you selling something, Mr Higgs?’

‘In a sense, Mrs Farrel, in a sense. You might call it selling. Do I peddle salvation?’

‘Oh, I am not religious in the least –’

‘It may be your trouble, Mrs Farrel.’

‘Yes, well –’

‘You are Elizabeth Farrel. You have three children.’

‘Mr Higgs –’

‘Your father was a Captain Maugham. Born 1892, died 1959. He lost an arm in action and never forgave himself for it. You attended his funeral, but were glad that he was dead, since he had a way of upsetting your children. Your mother, seventy-four a week ago, lives near St Albans and is unhappy. You have two sisters and a brother.’

‘Mr Higgs, what do you want?’

‘Nothing. I don’t want anything. What do you want, Mrs Farrel?’

‘Look here, Mr Higgs –’

‘D’you remember your tenth birthday? D’you remember what it felt like being a little girl of ten, in a white dress spotted with forget-me-not, and a blue ribbon tying back your hair? You were taken on a picnic. “You’re ten years old,” your father said. “Now tell us what you’re going to do with yourself.” “She must cut the chocolate cake first,” your mother cried, and so you cut the cake and then stood up and announced the trend of your ambitions. Your brother Ralph laughed and was scolded by your father. D’you remember at all?’

Elizabeth did remember. She remembered playing hide-and-seek with her sisters after tea; she remembered Ralph climbing a tree and finding himself unable to get down again; she remembered her parents quarrelling, as they invariably did, all the way home.

‘Do I know you, Mr Higgs? How do you manage to have these details of my childhood?’

Mr Higgs laughed. It wasn’t a nasty laugh. It sounded even reassuring, as if Mr Higgs meant no harm.

On the evening of May 24th we sat for a long time wondering who the odd individual could be and what he was after. Elizabeth seemed nervously elated and naturally more than a little intrigued. I, on the other hand, was rather upset by this Mr Higgs and his deep mine of information. ‘If he rings again,’ I said, ‘threaten him with the police.’

‘Good-morning, Mrs Farrel.’

‘Mr Higgs?’

‘My dear.’

‘Well then, Mr Higgs, explain.’

‘Ho, ho, Mrs Farrel, there’s a sharpness for you. Explain? Why, if I explained I’d be out of business in no time at all. “So that’s it,” you’d say, and ring off, just like I was a salesman or a Jehovah’s Witness.’

‘Mr Higgs –’

‘You was a little girl of ten, Mrs Farrel. You was out on a picnic. Remember?’

‘How did you know all that?’

‘Why shouldn’t I know, for heaven’s sake? Listen now, Mrs Farrel. Did you think then what you would be today? Did you see yourself married to a man and mothering his children? Have you come to a sticky end, or otherwise?’

‘A sticky end?’

‘You clean his house, you prepare his meals, you take his opinions. You hear on the radio some news of passing importance, some bomb exploded, some army recalled. Who does the thinking, Mrs Farrel? You react as he does. You’ve lost your identity. Did you think of that that day when you were ten? Your children will be ten one day. They’ll stand before you at ten years of age, first the girl, then the boy. What of their futures, Mrs Farrel? Shall they make something of themselves? Shall they fail and be miserable? Shall they be unnatural and unhappy, or sick in some way, or perhaps too stupid? Or shall they all three of them be richly successful? Are you successful, Mrs Farrel? You are your husband’s instrument. You were different at ten, Mrs Farrel. How about your children? Soon it’ll be your turn to take on the talking. I’ll listen like I was paid for it.’

I was aware of considerable pique when Elizabeth reported all this to me. I protested that I was not given to forcing my opinions on others, and Elizabeth said I wasn’t either. ‘Clearly, he’s queer in the head,’ I said. I paused, thinking about that, then said: ‘Could he be someone like a window-cleaner to whom you once perhaps talked of your childhood? Although I can’t see you doing it.’

Elizabeth shook her head; she said she didn’t remember talking to a window-cleaner about her childhood, or about anything very much. We’d had the same window-cleaners for almost seven years, she reminded me: two honest, respectable men who arrived at the house every six weeks in a Ford motor-car. ‘Well, he must be someone,’ I said. ‘Someone you’ve talked to. I mean, it’s not guesswork.’

‘Maybe he’s wicked,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Maybe he’s a small wicked man with very white skin, driven by some force he doesn’t understand. Perhaps he’s one of those painters who came last year to paint the hall. There was a little man –’

‘That little man’s name was Mr Gipe. I remember that well. “Gipe,” he said, walking into the hall and saying it would be a long job. “Gipe, sir; an unusual name.’ ”

‘He could be calling himself Higgs. He could have read through my letters. And my old diaries. Perhaps Mr Gipe expected a tip.’

‘The hall cost ninety pounds.’

‘I know, but it didn’t all go to Mr Gipe. Perhaps nobody tips poor Mr Gipe and perhaps now he’s telephoning all the wives, having read through their letters and their private diaries. He telephones to taunt them and to cause trouble, being an evil man. Perhaps Mr Gipe is possessed of a devil.’

I frowned and shook my head. ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘It’s a voice from the past. It’s someone who really did know you when you were ten, and knows all that’s happened since.’

‘More likely Mr Gipe,’ said Elizabeth, ‘guided from Hell.’

‘Daddy, am I asleep?’

I looked at her wide eyes, big and blue and clear, perfect replicas of her mother’s. I loved Anna best of all of them; I suppose because she reminded me so much of Elizabeth.

‘No, darling, you’re not asleep. If you were asleep you couldn’t be talking to me, now could you?’

‘I could be dreaming, Daddy. Couldn’t I be dreaming?’

‘Yes, I suppose you could.’

‘But I’m not, am I?’

I shook my head. ‘No, Anna, you’re not dreaming.’

She sighed. ‘I’m glad. I wouldn’t like to be dreaming. I wouldn’t like to suddenly wake up.’

It was Sunday afternoon and we had driven into the country. We did it almost every Sunday when the weather was fine and warm. The children enjoyed it and so in a way did we, even though the woods we went to were rather tatty, too near London to seem real, too untidy with sweet-papers to be attractive. Still, it was a way of entertaining them.

‘Elizabeth.’

She was sitting on a tree-stump, her eyes half-closed. On a rug at her feet Lisa was playing with some wooden beads. I sat beside her and put my arm about her shoulders.

‘Elizabeth.’

She jumped a little. ‘Hullo, darling. I was almost asleep.’

‘You were thinking about Mr Higgs.’

‘Oh, I wasn’t. My mind was a blank; I was about to drop off. I can do it now, sitting upright like this.’

‘Anna asked me if she was dreaming.’

‘Where is she?’

‘Playing with Christopher.’

‘They’ll begin to fight. They don’t play any more. Why do they perpetually fight?’

I said it was just a phase, but Elizabeth said she thought they would always fight now. The scratching and snarling would turn to argument as they grew older and when they became adults they wouldn’t ever see one another. They would say that they had nothing in common, and would admit to others that they really rather disliked one another and always had. Elizabeth said she could see them: Christopher married to an unsuitable woman, and Anna as a girl who lived promiscuously and did not marry at all. Anna would become a heavy drinker of whisky and would smoke slim cigars at forty.

‘Heavens,’ I said, staring at her, and then looking at the small figure of Anna. ‘Why on earth are you saying all that?’

‘Well, it’s true. I mean, it’s what I imagine. I can see Anna in a harsh red suit, getting drunk at a cocktail party. I can see Christopher being miserable –’

‘This is your Mr Higgs again. Look, the police can arrange to have the telephone tapped. It’s sheer nonsense that some raving lunatic should be allowed to go on like that.’

‘Mr Higgs! Mr Higgs! What’s Mr Higgs got to do with it? You’ve got him on the brain.’

Elizabeth walked away. She left me sitting there with her frightening images of our children. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Lisa was eating a piece of wood. I took it from her. Anna was saying: ‘Daddy, Christopher hurt me.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. He just hurt me.’

‘How did he hurt you?’

‘He pushed me and I fell.’ She began to cry, so I comforted her. I called Christopher and told him he mustn’t push Anna. They ran off to play again and a moment later Anna was saying: ‘Daddy, Christopher pushed me.’

‘Christopher, you mustn’t push Anna. And you shouldn’t have to be told everything twice.’

‘I didn’t push her. She fell.’

Anna put her thumb in her mouth. I glanced through the trees to see where Elizabeth had got to, but there was no sign of her. I made the children sit on the rug and told them a story. They didn’t like it much. They never did like my stories: Elizabeth’s were so much better.

‘I’m sorry.’ She stood looking down on us, as tall and beautiful as a goddess.

‘You look like a goddess,’ I said.

‘What’s a goddess?’ Anna asked, and Christopher said: ‘Why’s Mummy sorry?’

‘A goddess is a beautiful lady. Mummy’s sorry because she left me to look after you. And it’s time to go home.’

‘Oh, oh, oh, I must find Mambi first,’ Anna cried anxiously. Mambi was a faithful friend who accompanied her everywhere she went, but who was, at the moment of departure, almost always lost.

We walked to the car. Anna said: ‘Mambi was at the top of an old tree. Mambi’s a goddess too. Daddy, do you have to be beautiful to be a goddess?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Then Mambi can’t be.’

‘Isn’t Mambi beautiful?’

‘Usually she is. Only she’s not now.’

‘Why isn’t she now?’

‘Because all her hair came off in the tree.’

The car heaved and wobbled all the way home as Christopher and Anna banged about in the back. When they fought we shouted at them, and then they sulked and there was a mile or so of peace. Anna began to cry as I turned into the garage. Mambi, she said, was cold without her hair. Elizabeth explained about wigs.

I woke up in the middle of that night, thinking about Mr Higgs. I kept seeing the man as a shrimpish little thing, like the manager of the shop where we hired our television set. He had a black moustache – a length of thread stuck across his upper lip. I knew it was wrong, I knew this wasn’t Mr Higgs; and then, all of a sudden, I began to think about Elizabeth’s brother, Ralph.

A generation ago Ralph would have been called a remittance man. Just about the time we were married old Captain Maugham had packed him off to a farm in Kenya after an incident with a hotel receptionist and the hotel’s account books. But caring for nothing in Kenya, Ralph had made his way to Cairo, and from Cairo on the long-distance telephone he had greeted the Captain with a request for financial aid. He didn’t get it, and then the war broke out and Ralph disappeared. Whenever we thought of him we imagined that he was up to the most reprehensible racket he could lay his hands on. If he was, we never found out about it. All we did know was that after the war he again telephoned the Captain, and the odd thing was that he was still in Cairo. ‘I have lost an arm,’ Captain Maugham told him testily. ‘And I,’ said Ralph, ‘have lost the empire of my soul.’ He was given to this kind of decorated statement; it interfered so much with his conversation that most of the time you didn’t know what he was talking about. But the Captain sent him some money and an agreement was drawn up by which Ralph, on receipt of a monthly cheque, promised not to return to England during his father’s lifetime. Then the Captain died and Ralph was back. I gave him fifty pounds and all in all he probably cleaned up quite well. Ralph wasn’t the sort of person to write letters; we had no idea where he was now. As a schoolboy, and even later, he was a great one for playing practical jokes. He was certainly a good enough mimic to create a Mr Higgs. Just for fun, I wondered? Or in some kind of bitterness? Or did he in some ingenious way hope to extract money?

The following morning I telephoned Elizabeth’s sisters. Chloe knew nothing about where Ralph was, what he was doing or anything about him. She said she hoped he wasn’t coming back to England because it had cost her fifty pounds the last time. Margaret, however, knew a lot. She didn’t want to talk about it on the telephone, so I met her for lunch.

‘What’s all this?’ she said.

I told her about Mr Higgs and the vague theory that was beginning to crystallize in my mind. She was intrigued by the Higgs thing. ‘I don’t know why,’ she said, ‘but it rings a queer sort of bell. But you’re quite wrong about Ralph.’ Ralph, it appeared, was being paid by Margaret and her husband in much the same way as he had been paid by the Captain; for the same reason and with the same stipulation. ‘Only for the time being,’ Margaret said a little bitterly. ‘When Mother dies Ralph can do what he damn well likes. But it was quite a serious business and the news of it would clearly finish her. One doesn’t like to think of an old woman dying in that particular kind of misery.’

‘But whatever it was, she’d probably never find out.’

‘Oh yes, she would. She reads the papers. In any case, Ralph is quite capable of dropping her a little note. But at the moment I can assure you that Ralph is safe in Africa. He’s not the type to take any chances with his gift horses.’

So that was that. It made me feel even worse about Mr Higgs that my simple explanation had been so easily exploded.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘and what did he have to say today?’

‘What did who say?’

‘Higgs.’

‘Nothing much. He’s becoming a bore.’

She wasn’t going to tell me any more. She wasn’t going to talk about Mr Higgs because she didn’t trust me. She thought I’d put the police on him, and she didn’t want that, so she said, because she had come to feel sorry for the poor crazed creature or whatever it was he happened to be. In fact, I thought to myself, my wife has become in some way fascinated by this man.

I worked at home one day, waiting for the telephone call. There was a ring at eleven-fifteen. I heard Elizabeth answer it. She said: ‘No, I’m sorry; I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong number.’ I didn’t ask her about Mr Higgs. When I looked at her she seemed a long way away and her voice was measured and polite. There was some awful shaft between us and I didn’t know what to do about it.

In the afternoon I took the children for a walk in the park.

‘Mambi’s gone to stay in the country,’ Anna said. ‘I’m lonely without her.’

‘Well, she’s coming back tonight, isn’t she?’

‘Daddy,’ Christopher said, ‘what’s the matter with Mummy?’

I’m not very sure when it was that I first noticed everything was in rather a mess. I remember coming in one night and stumbling over lots of wooden toys in the hall. Quite often the cornflakes packet and the marmalade were still on the kitchen table from breakfast. Or if they weren’t on the table the children had got them on to the floor and Lisa had covered most of the house with their mixed contents. Elizabeth didn’t seem to notice. She sat in a dream, silent and alone, forgetting to cook the supper. The children began to do all the things they had ever wanted to do and which Elizabeth had patiently prevented, like scribbling on the walls and playing in the coal-cellar. I tried to discuss it with Elizabeth, but all she did was to smile sweetly and say she was tired.

‘Why don’t you see a doctor?’

She stared at me. ‘A doctor?’

‘Perhaps you need a tonic’ And at that point she would smile again and go to bed.

I knew that Elizabeth was still having her conversations with Mr Higgs even though she no longer mentioned them. When I asked her she used to laugh and say: ‘Poor Mr Higgs was just some old fanatic’

‘Yes, but how did he –’

‘Darling, you worry too much.’

I went to St Albans to see old Mrs Maugham, without very much hope. I don’t know what I expected of her, since she was obviously too deaf and too senile to offer me anything at all. She lived with a woman called Miss Awpit who was employed by the old woman’s children to look after her. Miss Awpit made us tea and did the interpreting.

‘Mr Farrel wants to know how you are, dear,’ Miss Awpit said. ‘Quite well, really,’ Miss Awpit said to me. ‘All things being equal.’

Mrs Maugham knew who I was and all that. She asked after Elizabeth and the children. She said something to Miss Awpit and Miss Awpit said: ‘She wants you to bring them to her.’

‘Yes, yes,’ I shouted, nodding hard. ‘We shall come and see you soon. They often,’ I lied, ‘ask about Granny.’

‘Hark at that,’ shouted Miss Awpit, nudging the old lady, who snappishly told her to leave off.

I didn’t quite know how to put it. I said: ‘Ask her if she knows a Mr Higgs.’

Miss Awpit, imagining, I suppose, that I was making conversation, shouted: ‘Mr Farrel wants to know if you know Mr Higgs.’ Mrs Maugham smiled at us. ‘Higgs,’ Miss Awpit repeated. ‘Do you know Mr Higgs at all, dear?’

‘Never,’ said Mrs Maugham.

‘Have you ever known a Mr Higgs?’ I shouted.

‘Higgs?’ said Mrs Maugham.

‘Do you know him?’ Miss Awpit asked. ‘Do you know a Mr Higgs?’

‘I do not,’ said Mrs Maugham, suddenly in command of herself, ‘know anyone of such a name. Nor would I wish to.’

‘Look, Mrs Maugham,’ I pursued, ‘does the name mean anything at all to you?’

‘I have told you, I do not know your friend. How can I be expected to know your friends, an old woman like me, stuck out here in St Albans with no one to look after me?’

‘Come, come,’ said Miss Awpit, ‘you’ve got me, dear.’

But Mrs Maugham only laughed.

A week or two passed, and then one afternoon as I was sitting in the office filing my nails the telephone rang and a voice I didn’t recognize said: ‘Mr Farrel?’

I said ‘Yes’, and the voice said: ‘This is Miss Awpit. You know, Mrs Maugham’s Miss Awpit.’

‘Of course. Good afternoon, Miss Awpit. How are you?’

‘Very well, thank you. I’m ringing to tell you something about Mrs Maugham.’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, you know when you came here the other week you were asking about a Mr Higgs?’

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘Well, as you sounded rather anxious about him I just thought I’d tell you. I thought about it and then I decided. I’ll ring Mr Farrel, I said, just to tell him what she said.’

‘Yes, Miss Awpit?’

‘I hope I’m doing the right thing.’

‘What did Mrs Maugham say?’

‘Well, it’s funny in a way. I hope you won’t think I’m being very stupid or anything.’

I had the odd feeling that Miss Awpit was going to die as she was speaking, before she could tell me. I said:

‘I assure you, you are doing the right thing. What did Mrs Maugham say?’

‘Well, it was at breakfast one morning. She hadn’t had a good night at all. So she said, but you know what it’s like with old people. I mean, quite frankly I had to get up myself in the night and I heard her sleeping as deep and sweet as you’d wish. Honestly, Mr Farrel, I often wish I had her constitution myself –’

‘You were telling me about Mr Higgs.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You were telling me about Mr Higgs.’

‘Well, it’s nothing really. You’ll probably laugh when you hear. Quite honestly I was in two minds whether or not to bother you. You see, all Mrs Maugham said was: “It’s funny that man suddenly talking about Mr Higgs like that. You know, Ethel, I haven’t heard Mr Higgs mentioned for almost thirty years.” So I said “Yes”, leading her on, you see. “And who was Mr Higgs, dear, thirty years ago?” And she said: “Oh nobody at all. He was just Elizabeth’s little friend!” ’

‘Elizabeth’s?’

‘Just what I said, Mr Farrel. She got quite impatient with me. “Just someone Elizabeth used to talk to,” she said, “when she was three. You know the way children invent things.” ’

‘Like Mambi,’ I said, not meaning to say it, since Miss Awpit wouldn’t understand.

‘Oh dear, Mr Farrel,’ said Miss Awpit, ‘I knew you’d laugh.’

I left the office and took a taxi all the way home. Elizabeth was in the garden. I sat beside her and I held her hands. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘Let’s have a holiday. Let’s go away, just the two of us. We need a rest.’

‘You’re spying on me,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Which isn’t new, I suppose. You’ve got so mean, darling, ever since you became jealous of poor Mr Higgs. How could you be jealous of a man like Mr Higgs?’

‘Elizabeth, I know who Mr Higgs is. I can tell you –’

‘There’s nothing to be jealous about. All the poor creature does is to ring me up and tell me about the things he read in my diaries the time he came to paint the hall. And then he tries to comfort me about the children. He tells me not to worry about Lisa. But I can’t help worrying because I know she’s going to have this hard time. She’s going to grow big and lumpy, poor little Lisa, and she’s not going to be ever able to pass an exam, and in the end she’ll go and work in a post office. But Mr Higgs –’

‘Let me tell you about Mr Higgs. Let me just remind you.’

‘You don’t know him, darling. You’ve never spoken to him. Mr Higgs is very patient, you know. First of all he did the talking, and now, you see, he kindly allows me to. Poor Mr Higgs is an inmate of a home. He’s an institutionalized person, darling. There’s no need to be jealous.’

I said nothing. I sat there holding her two hands and looking at her. Her face was just the same; even her eyes betrayed no hint of the confusion that held her. She smiled when she spoke of Mr. Higgs. She made a joke, laughing, calling him the housewife’s friend.

‘It was funny,’ she said, ‘the first time I saw Christopher as an adult, sitting in a room with that awful woman. She was leaning back in a chair, staring at him and attempting to torture him with words. And then there was Anna, half a mile away across London, in a house in a square. All the lights were on because of the party, and Anna was in that red suit, and she was laughing and saying how she hated Christopher, how she had hated him from the first moment she saw him. And when she said that, I couldn’t remember what moment she meant. I couldn’t quite remember where it was that Anna and Christopher had met. Well, it goes to show.’ Elizabeth paused. ‘Well, doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘I mean, imagine my thinking that poor Mr Higgs was evil! The kindest, most long-suffering man that ever walked on two legs. I mean, all I had to do was to remind Mr Higgs that I’d forgotten and Mr Higgs could tell me. “They met in a garden,” he could say, “at an ordinary little tea-party.” And Lisa was operated on several times, and counted the words in telegrams.’

Elizabeth talked on, of the children and of Mr Higgs. I rang up our doctor, and he came, and then a little later my wife was taken from the house. I sat alone with Lisa on my knee until it was time to go and fetch Christopher and Anna.

‘Mummy’s ill,’ I said in the car. ‘She’s had to go away for a little.’ I would tell them the story gradually, and one day perhaps we might visit her and she might still understand who we were. ‘Ill?’ they said. ‘But Mummy’s never ill.’ I stopped the car by our house, thinking that only death could make the house seem so empty, and thinking too that death was easier to understand. We made tea, I remember, the children and I, not saying very much more.

The Grass Widows

The headmaster of a great English public school visited every summer a village in County Galway for the sake of the fishing in a number of nearby rivers. For more than forty years this stern, successful man had brought his wife to the Slieve Gashal Hotel, a place, so he said, he had come to love. A smiling man called Mr Doyle had been for all the headmaster’s experience of the hotel its obliging proprietor: Mr Doyle had related stories to the headmaster late at night in the hotel bar, after the headmaster’s wife had retired to bed; they had discussed together the fruitfulness of the local rivers, although in truth Mr Doyle had never held a rod in his life. ‘You feel another person,’ the headmaster had told generations of his pupils, ‘among blue mountains, in the quiet little hotel.’ On walks through the school grounds with a senior boy on either side of him he had spoken of the soft peace of the riverside and of the unrivalled glory of being alone with one’s mind. He talked to his boys of Mr Doyle and his unassuming ways, and of the little village that was a one-horse place and none the worse for that, and of the good plain food that came from the Slieve Gashal’s kitchen.

To Jackson Major the headmaster enthused during all the year that Jackson Major was head boy of the famous school, and Jackson Major did not ever forget the paradise that then had formed in his mind. ‘I know a place,’ he said to his fiancée long after he had left the school, ‘that’s perfect for our honeymoon.’ He told her about the heathery hills that the headmaster had recalled for him, and the lakes and rivers and the one-horse little village in which, near a bridge, stood the ivy-covered bulk of the Slieve Gashal Hotel. ‘Lovely, darling,’ murmured the bride-to-be of Jackson Major, thinking at the time of a clock in the shape of a human hand that someone had given them and which would naturally have to be changed for something else. She’d been hoping that he would suggest Majorca for their honeymoon, but if he wished to go to this other place she didn’t intend to make a fuss. ‘Idyllic for a honeymoon,’ the headmaster had once remarked to Jackson Major, and Jackson Major had not forgotten. Steady but unimaginative were words that had been written of him on a school report.

The headmaster, a square, bald man with a head that might have been carved from oak, a man who wore rimless spectacles and whose name was Angusthorpe, discovered when he arrived at the Slieve Gashal Hotel in the summer of 1968 that in the intervening year a tragedy had occurred. It had become the custom of Mr Angusthorpe to book his fortnight’s holiday by saying simply to Mr Doyle: ‘Till next year then,’ an anticipation that Mr Doyle would translate into commercial terms, reserving the same room for the headmaster and his wife in twelve months’ time. No letters changed hands during the year, no confirmation of the booking was ever necessary: Mr Angusthorpe and his wife arrived each summer after the trials of the school term, knowing that their room would be waiting for them, with sweet-peas in a vase in the window, and Mr Doyle full of welcome in the hall. ‘He died in Woolworth’s in Galway,’ said Mr Doyle’s son in the summer of 1968. ‘He was buying a shirt at the time.’

Afterwards, Mr Angusthorpe said to his wife that when Mr Doyle’s son spoke those words he knew that nothing was ever going to be the same again. Mr Doyle’s son, known locally as Scut Doyle, went on speaking while the headmaster and his small wife, grey-haired, and bespectacled also, stood in the hall. He told them that he had inherited the Slieve Gashal and that for all his adult life he had been employed in the accounts department of a paper-mill in Dublin. ‘I thought at first I’d sell the place up,’ he informed the Angusthorpes, ‘and then I thought maybe I’d attempt to make a go of it. “Will we have a shot at it?” I said to the wife, and, God bless her, she said why wouldn’t I?’ While he spoke, the subject of his last remarks appeared behind him in the hall, a woman whose appearance did not at all impress Mr Angusthorpe. She was pale-faced and fat and, so Mr Angusthorpe afterwards suggested to his wife, sullen. She stood silently by her husband, whose appearance did not impress Mr Angusthorpe either, since the new proprietor of the Slieve Gashal, a man with shaking hands and a cocky grin, did not appear to have shaved himself that day. ‘One or other of them, if not both,’ said Mr Angusthorpe afterwards, ‘smelt of drink.’

The Angusthorpes were led to their room by a girl whose age Mr Angusthorpe estimated to be thirteen. ‘What’s become of Joseph?’ he asked her as they mounted the stairs, referring to an old porter who had always in the past been spick-and-span in a uniform, but the child seemed not to understand the question, for she offered it no reply. In the room there were no sweet-peas, and although they had entered by a door that was familiar to them, the room itself was greatly altered: it was, to begin with, only half the size it had been before. ‘Great heavens!’ exclaimed Mr Angusthorpe, striking a wall with his fist and finding it to be a partition. ‘He had the carpenters in,’ the child said.

Mr Angusthorpe, in a natural fury, descended the stairs and shouted in the hall. ‘Mr Doyle!’ he called out in his peremptory headmaster’s voice. ‘Mr Doyle! Mr Doyle!’

Doyle emerged from the back regions of the hotel, with a cigarette in his mouth. There were feathers on his clothes, and he held in his right hand a half-plucked chicken. In explanation he said that he had been giving his wife a hand. She was not herself, he confided to Mr Angusthorpe, on account of it being her bad time of the month.

‘Our room,’ protested Mr Angusthorpe. ‘We can’t possibly sleep in a tiny space like that. You’ve cut the room in half, Mr Doyle.’

Doyle nodded. All the bedrooms in the hotel, he told Mr Angusthorpe, had been divided, since they were uneconomical otherwise. He had spent four hundred and ten pounds having new doorways made and putting on new wallpaper. He began to go into the details of this expense, plucking feathers from the chicken as he stood there. Mr Angusthorpe coldly remarked that he had not booked a room in which you couldn’t swing a cat.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ interrupted Doyle. ‘You booked a room a year ago: you did not reserve a specific room. D’you know what I mean, Mr Angusthorpe? I have no note that you specified with my father to have the exact room again.’

‘It was an understood thing between us –’

‘My father unfortunately died.’

Mr Angusthorpe regarded the man, disliking him intensely. It occurred to him that he had never in his life carried on a conversation with a hotel proprietor who held in his right hand a half-plucked chicken and whose clothes had feathers on them. His inclination was to turn on his heel and march with his wife from the unsatisfactory hotel, telling, if need be, this unprepossessing individual to go to hell. Mr Angusthorpe thought of doing that, but then he wondered where he and his wife could go. Hotels in the area were notoriously full at this time of year, in the middle of the fishing season.

‘I must get on with this for the dinner,’ said Doyle, ‘or the wife will be having me guts for garters.’ He winked at Mr Angusthorpe, flicking a quantity of cigarette ash from the pale flesh of the chicken. He left Mr Angusthorpe standing there.

The child had remained with Mrs Angusthorpe while the headmaster had sought an explanation downstairs. She had stood silently by the door until Mrs Angusthorpe, fearing a violent reaction on the part of her husband if he discovered the child present when he returned, suggested that she should go away. But the child had taken no notice of that and Mrs Angusthorpe, being unable to think of anything else to say, had asked her at what time of year old Mr Doyle had died. ‘The funeral was ten miles long, missus,’ replied the child. ‘Me father wasn’t sober till the Monday.’ Mr Angusthorpe, returning, asked the child sharply why she was lingering and the child explained that she was waiting to be tipped. Mr Angusthorpe gave her a threepenny-piece.

In the partitioned room, which now had a pink wallpaper on the walls and an elaborate frieze from which flowers of different colours cascaded down the four corners, the Angusthorpes surveyed their predicament. Mr Angusthorpe told his wife the details of his interview with Doyle, and when he had talked for twenty minutes he came more definitely to the conclusion that the best thing they could do would be to remain for the moment. The rivers could hardly have altered, he was thinking, and that the hotel was now more than inadequate was a consequence that would affect his wife more than it would affect him. In the past she had been wont to spend her days going for a brief walk in the morning and returning to the pleasant little dining-room for a solitary lunch, and then sleeping or reading until it was time for a cup of tea, after which she would again take a brief walk. She was usually sitting by the fire in the lounge when he returned from his day’s excursion. Perhaps all that would be less attractive now, Mr Angusthorpe thought, but there was little he could do about it and it was naturally only fair that they should at least remain for a day or two.

That night the dinner was well below the standard of the dinners they had in the past enjoyed in the Slieve Gashal. Mrs Angusthorpe was unable to consume her soup because there were quite large pieces of bone and gristle in it. The headmaster laughed over his prawn cocktail because, he said, it tasted of absolutely nothing at all. He had recovered from his initial shock and was now determined that the hotel must be regarded as a joke. He eyed his wife’s plate of untouched soup, saying it was better to make the best of things. Chicken and potatoes and mashed turnip were placed before them by a nervous woman in the uniform of a waitress. Turnip made Mrs Angusthorpe sick in the stomach, even the sight of it: at another time in their life her husband might have remembered and ordered the vegetable from the table, but what he was more intent upon now was discovering if the Slieve Gashal still possessed a passable hock, which surprisingly it did. After a few glasses, he said:

‘We’ll not come next year, of course. While I’m out with the rod, my dear, you might scout around for another hotel.’

They never brought their car with them, the headmaster’s theory being that the car was something they wished to escape from. Often she had thought it might be nice to have a car at the Slieve Gashal so that she could drive around the countryside during the day, but she saw his argument and had never pressed her view. Now, it seemed, he was suggesting that she should scout about for another hotel on foot.

‘No, no,’ he said. ‘There is an excellent bus service in Ireland.’ He spoke with a trace of sarcasm, as though she should have known that no matter what else he expected of her, he did not expect her to tramp about the roads looking for another hotel. He gave a little laugh, leaving the matter vaguely with her, his eyes like the eyes of a fish behind his rimless spectacles. Boys had feared him and disliked him too, some even had hated him; yet others had been full of a respect that seemed at times like adoration. As she struggled with her watery turnips she could sense that his mind was quite made up: he intended to remain for the full fortnight in the changed hotel because the lure of the riverside possessed him too strongly to consider an alternative.

‘I might find a place we could move to,’ she said. ‘I mean, in a day or so.’

‘They’ll all be full, my dear.’ He laughed without humour in his laugh, not amused by anything. ‘We must simply grin and bear it. The chicken,’ he added, ‘might well have been worse.’

‘Excuse me,’ Mrs Angusthorpe said, and quickly rose from the table and left the dining-room. From a tape-recorder somewhere dance music began to play.

‘Is the wife all right?’ Doyle asked Mr Angusthorpe, coming up and sitting down in the chair she had vacated. He had read in a hotelier’s journal that tourists enjoyed a friendly atmosphere and the personal attention of the proprietor.

‘We’ve had a long day,’ responded the headmaster genially enough.

‘Ah well, of course you have.’

The dining-room was full, indicating that business was still brisk in the hotel. Mr Angusthorpe had noted a familiar face or two and had made dignified salutations. These people would surely have walked out if the hotel was impossible in all respects.

‘At her time of the month,’ Doyle was saying, ‘the wife gets as fatigued as an old horse. Like your own one, she’s gone up to her bed already.’

‘My wife –’

‘Ah, I wasn’t suggesting Mrs Angusthorpe, was that way at all. They have fatigue in common tonight, sir, that’s all I meant.’

Doyle appeared to be drunk. There was a bleariness about his eyes that suggested inebriation to Mr Angusthorpe, and his shaking hands might well be taken as a sign of repeated over-indulgence.

‘She wakes up at two a.m. as lively as a bird,’ said Doyle. ‘She’s keen for a hug and a pat –’

‘Quite so,’ interrupted Mr Angusthorpe quickly. He looked unpleasantly at his unwelcome companion. He allowed his full opinion of the man to pervade his glance.

‘Well, I’ll be seeing you,’ said Doyle, rising and seeming to be undismayed. ‘I’ll tell the wife you were asking for her,’ he added with a billowing laugh, before moving on to another table.

Shortly after that, Mr Angusthorpe left the dining-room, having resolved that he would not relate this conversation to his wife. He would avoid Doyle in the future, he promised himself, and when by chance they did meet he would make it clear that he did not care to hear his comments on any subject. It was a pity that the old man had died and that all this nastiness had grown up in his place, but there was nothing whatsoever that might be done about it and at least the weather looked good. He entered the bar and dropped into conversation with a man he had met several times before, a solicitor from Dublin, a bachelor called Gorman.

‘I was caught the same way,’ Mr Gorman said, ‘only everywhere else is full. It’s the end of the Slieve Gashal, you know: the food’s inedible.’

He went on to relate a series of dishes that had already been served during his stay, the most memorable of which appeared to be a rabbit stew that had had a smell of ammonia. ‘There’s margarine every time instead of butter, and some queer type of marmalade in the morning: it has a taste of tin to it. The same mashed turnip,’ said Gorman, ‘is the only vegetable he offers.’

The headmaster changed the subject, asking how the rivers were. The fishing was better than ever he’d known it, Mr Gorman reported, and he retailed experiences to prove the claim. ‘Isn’t it all that matters in the long run?’ suggested Mr Gorman, and Mr Angusthorpe readily agreed that it was. He would refrain from repeating to his wife the information about the marmalade that tasted of tin, or the absence of variation where vegetables were concerned. He left the bar at nine o’clock, determined to slip quietly into bed without disturbing her.

In the middle of that night, at midnight precisely, the Angusthorpes were awakened simultaneously by a noise from the room beyond the new partition.

‘Put a pillow down, darling,’ a male voice was saying as clearly as if its possessor stood in the room beside the Angusthorpes’ bed.

‘Couldn’t we wait until another time?’ a woman pleaded in reply. ‘I don’t see what good a pillow will do.’

‘It’ll lift you up a bit,’ the man explained. ‘It said in the book to put a pillow down if there was difficulty.’

‘I don’t see –’

‘It’ll make entry easier,’ said the man. ‘It’s a well-known thing.’

Mrs Angusthorpe switched on her bedside light and saw that her husband was pretending to be asleep. ‘I’m going to rap on the wall,’ she whispered. ‘It’s disgusting, listening to this.’

‘I think I’m going down,’ said the man.

‘My God,’ whispered Mr Angusthorpe, opening his eyes. ‘It’s Jackson Major.’

At breakfast, Mrs Angusthorpe ate margarine on her toast and the marmalade that had a taste of tin. She did not say anything. She watched her husband cutting into a fried egg on a plate that bore the marks of the waitress’s two thumbs. Eventually he placed his knife and fork together on the plate and left them there.

For hours they had lain awake, listening to the conversation beyond the inadequate partition. The newly wed wife of Jackson Major had wept and said that Jackson had better divorce her at once. She had designated the hotel they were in as a frightful place, fit only for Irish tinkers. ‘That filthy meal!’ the wife of Jackson Major had cried emotionally. ‘That awful drunk man!’ And Jackson Major had apologized and had mentioned Mr Angusthorpe by name, wondering what on earth his old headmaster could ever have seen in such an establishment. ‘Let’s try again,’ he had suggested, and the Angusthorpes had listened to a repetition of Mrs Jackson’s unhappy tears. ‘How can you rap on the wall?’ Mr Angusthorpe had angrily whispered. ‘How can we even admit that conversation can be heard? Jackson was head boy.’

‘In the circumstances,’ said Mrs Angusthorpe at breakfast, breaking the long silence, ‘it would be better to leave.’

He knew it would be. He knew that on top of everything else the unfortunate fact that Jackson Major was in the room beyond the partition and would sooner or later discover that the partition was far from soundproof could be exceedingly embarrassing in view of what had taken place during the night. There was, as well, the fact that he had enthused so eloquently to Jackson Major about the hotel that Jackson Major had clearly, on his word alone, brought his bride there. He had even said, he recalled, that the Slieve Gashal would be ideal for a honeymoon. Mr Angusthorpe considered all that, yet could not forget his forty years’ experience of the surrounding rivers, or the information of Mr Gorman that the rivers this year were better than ever.

‘We could whisper,’ he suggested in what was itself a whisper. ‘We could whisper in our room so that they wouldn’t know you can hear.’

‘Whisper?’ she said. She shook her head.

She remembered days in the rain, walking about the one-horse village with nothing whatsoever to do except to walk about, or lie on her bed reading detective stories. She remembered listening to his reports of his day and feeling sleepy listening to them. She remembered thinking, once or twice, that it had never occurred to him that what was just a change and a rest for her could not at all be compared to the excitements he derived from his days on the river-bank, alone with his mind. He was a great, successful man, big and square and commanding, with the cold eyes of the fish he sought in mountain rivers. He had made a firm impression on generations of boys, and on parents and governors, and often on a more general public, yet he had never been able to give her children. She had needed children because she was, compared with him, an unimportant kind of person.

She thought of him in Chapel, gesturing at six hundred boys from the pulpit, in his surplice and red academic hood, releasing words from his throat that were as cold as ice and cleverly made sense. She thought of a time he had expelled two boys, when he had sat with her in their drawing-room waiting for a bell to ring. When the chiming had ceased he had risen and gone without a word from the room, his oaken face pale with suppressed emotion. She knew he saw in the crime of the two boys a failure on his part, yet he never mentioned it to her. He had expelled the boys in public, castigating them with bitterness in his tone, hating them and hating himself, yet rising above his shame at having failed with them: dignity was his greatest ally.

She sat with him once a week at the high table in the dining-hall, surrounded by his prefects, who politely chatted to her. She remembered Jackson Major, a tall boy with short black hair who would endlessly discuss with her husband a web of school affairs. ‘The best head boy I remember,’ her husband’s voice said again, coming back to her over a number of years: ‘I made no mistake with Jackson.’ Jackson Major had set a half-mile record that remained unbroken to this day. There had been a complaint from some child’s mother, she recalled, who claimed that her son had been, by Jackson Major, too severely caned. We must not forget, her husband had written to that mother, that your son almost caused another boy to lose an eye. It was for that carelessness that he was punished. He bears no resentment: boys seldom do.

Yet now this revered, feared and clever man was suggesting that they should whisper for a fortnight in their bedroom, so that the couple next door might not feel embarrassment, so that he himself might remain in a particularly uncomfortable hotel in order to fish. It seemed to Mrs Angusthorpe that there were limits to the role he had laid down for her and which for all her married life she had ungrudgingly accepted. She hadn’t minded being bored for this fortnight every year, but now he was asking more than that she could continue to feel bored; he was asking her to endure food that made her sick, and to conduct absurd conversations in their bedroom.

‘No,’ she said, ‘we could not whisper.’

‘I meant it only for kindness. Kindness to them, you see –’

‘You have compensations here. I have none, you know.’

He looked sharply at her, as at an erring new boy who had not yet learnt the ways of school.

‘I think we should leave at once,’ she said. ‘After breakfast.’

That suggestion, he pointed out to her, was nonsensical. They had booked a room in the hotel: they were obliged to pay for it. He was exhausted, he added, after a particularly trying term.

‘It’s what I’d like,’ she said.

He spread margarine on his toast and added to it some of the marmalade. ‘We must not be selfish,’ he said, suggesting that both of them were on the point of being selfish and that together they must prevent themselves.

‘I’d be happier,’ she began, but he swiftly interrupted her, reminding her that his holiday had been spoilt enough already and that he for his part was intent on making the best of things. ‘Let’s simply enjoy what we can,’ he said, ‘without making a fuss about it.’

At that moment Jackson Major and his wife, a pretty, pale-haired girl called Daphne, entered the dining-room. They stood at the door, endeavouring to catch the eye of a waitress, not sure about where to sit. Mrs Jackson indicated a table that was occupied by two men, reminding her husband that they had sat at it last night for dinner. Jackson Major looked towards it and looked impatiently away, seeming annoyed with his wife for bothering to draw his attention to a table at which they clearly could not sit. It was then, while still annoyed, that he noticed the Angusthorpes.

Mrs Angusthorpe saw him murmuring to his wife. He led the way to their table, and Mrs Angusthorpe observed that his wife moved less eagerly than he.

‘How marvellous, sir,’ Jackson Major said, shaking his headmaster by the hand. Except for a neat moustache, he had changed hardly at all, Mrs Angusthorpe noticed; a little fatter in the face, perhaps, and the small pimples that had marked his chin as a schoolboy had now cleared up completely. He introduced his wife to the headmaster, and then he turned to Mrs Angusthorpe and asked her how she was. Forgetfully, he omitted to introduce his wife to her, but she, in spite of that, smiled and nodded at his wife.

‘I’m afraid it’s gone down awfully, Jackson,’ Mr Angusthorpe said. ‘The hotel’s changed hands, you know. We weren’t aware ourselves.’

‘It seems quite comfortable, sir,’ Jackson Major said, sitting down and indicating that his wife should do the same.

‘The food was nice before,’ said Mrs Angusthorpe. ‘It’s really awful now.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say awful, dear,’ Mr Angusthorpe corrected her. ‘One becomes used to a hotel,’ he explained to Jackson Major. ‘Any change is rather noticeable.’

‘We had a perfectly ghastly dinner,’ Daphne Jackson said.

‘Still,’ said Mr Angusthorpe, as though she had not spoken, ‘we’ll not return another year. My wife is going to scout around for a better place. You’ve brought your rod, Jackson?’

‘Well, yes, I did. I thought that maybe if Daphne felt tired I might once or twice try out your famous rivers, sir.’

Mrs Angusthorpe saw Mrs Jackson glance in surprise at her new husband, and she deduced that Mrs Jackson hadn’t been aware that a fishing-rod had comprised part of her husband’s luggage.

‘Capital,’ cried Mr Angusthorpe, while the waitress took the Jacksons’ order for breakfast. ‘You could scout round together,’ he said, addressing the two women at once, ‘while I show Jackson what’s what.’

‘It’s most kind of you, sir,’ Jackson Major said, ‘but I think, you know –’

‘Capital,’ cried Mr Angusthorpe again, his eyes swivelling from face to face, forbidding defiance. He laughed his humourless laugh and he poured himself more tea. ‘I told you, dear,’ he said to Mrs Angusthorpe. ‘There’s always a silver lining.’

In the hall of the Slieve Gashal Doyle took a metal stand from beneath the reception desk and busied himself arranging picture postcards on it. His wife had bought the stand in Galway, getting it at a reduced price because it was broken. He was at the moment offended with his wife because of her attitude when he had entered the hotel kitchen an hour ago with a number of ribs of beef. ‘Did you drop that meat?’ she had said in a hard voice, looking up from the table where she was making bread. ‘Is that dirt on the suet?’ He had replied that he’d been obliged to cross the village street hurriedly, to avoid a man on a bicycle. ‘You dropped the meat on the road,’ she accused. ‘D’you want to poison the bloody lot of them?’ Feeling hard done by, he had left the kitchen.

While he continued to work with the postcards, Mr Angusthorpe and Jackson Major passed before him with their fishing-rods. ‘We’ll be frying tonight,’ he observed jollily, wagging his head at their two rods. They did not reply: weren’t they the queer-looking eejits, he thought, with their sporty clothes and the two tweed hats covered with artificial flies. ‘I’ll bring it up, sir,’ Jackson Major was saying, ‘at the Old Boys’ Dinner in the autumn.’ It was ridiculous, Doyle reflected, going to that much trouble to catch a few fish when all you had to do was to go out at night and shine a torch into the water. ‘Would you be interested in postcards, gentlemen?’ he inquired, but so absorbed were Mr Angusthorpe and Jackson Major in their conversation that again neither of them made a reply.

Some time later, Daphne Jackson descended the stairs of the hotel. Doyle watched her, admiring her slender legs and the flowered dress she was wearing. A light-blue cardigan hung casually from her shoulders, its sleeves not occupied by her arms. Wouldn’t it be great, he thought, to be married to a young body like that? He imagined her in a bedroom, taking off her cardigan and then her dress. She stood in her underclothes; swiftly she lifted them from her body.

‘Would you be interested in postcards at all?’ inquired Doyle. ‘I have the local views here.’

Daphne smiled at him. Without much interest, she examined the cards on the stand, and then she moved towards the entrance door.

‘There’s a lovely dinner we have for you today,’ said Doyle. ‘Ribs of beef that I’m just after handing over to the wife. As tender as an infant.’

He held the door open for her, talking all the time, since he knew they liked to be talked to. He asked her if she was going for a walk and told her that a walk would give her a healthy appetite. The day would keep good, he promised; he had read it in the paper.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

She walked through a sunny morning that did little to raise her spirits. Outside the hotel there was a large expanse of green grass, bounded on one side by the short village street. She crossed an area of the grass and then passed the butcher’s shop in which earlier Doyle had purchased the ribs of beef. She glanced in and the butcher smiled and waved at her, as though he knew her well. She smiled shyly back. Outside a small public house a man was mending a bicycle, which was upturned on the pavement: a child pushing a pram spoke to the man and he spoke to her. Farther on, past a row of cottages, a woman pumped water into a bucket from a green pump at the road’s edge, and beyond it, coming towards her slowly, she recognized the figure of Mrs Angusthorpe.

‘So we are grass widows,’ said Mrs Angusthorpe when she had arrived at a point at which it was suitable to speak.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m afraid it’s our fault, for being here. My husband’s, I mean, and mine.’

‘My husband could have declined to go fishing.’

The words were sour. They were sour and icy, Mrs Angusthorpe thought, matching her own mood. On her brief walk she had that morning disliked her husband more than ever she had disliked him before, and there was venom in her now. Once upon a time he might at least have heard her desires with what could even have been taken for understanding. He would not have acted upon her desires, since it was not in his nature to do so, but he would not have been guilty, either, of announcing in so obviously false a way that they should enjoy what they could and not make a fuss. There had been a semblance of chivalry in the attitude from which, at the beginning of their marriage, he had briefly regarded her; but forty-seven years had efficiently disposed of that garnish of politeness. A week or so ago a boy at the school had been casual with her, but the headmaster, hearing her report of the matter, had denied that what she stated could ever have occurred: he had moulded the boy in question, he pointed out, he had taken a special interest in the boy because he recognized in him qualities that were admirable: she was touchy, the headmaster said, increasingly touchy these days. She remembered in the first year of their marriage a way he had of patiently leaning back in his chair, puffing at the pipe he affected in those days and listening to her, seeming actually to weigh her arguments against his own. It was a long time now since he had weighed an argument of hers, or even devoted a moment of passing consideration to it. It was a long time since he could possibly have been concerned as to whether or not she found the food in a hotel unpalatable. She was angry when she thought of it this morning, not because she was unused to these circumstances of her life but because, quite suddenly, she had seen her state of resignation as an insult to the woman she once, too long ago, had been.

‘I would really like to talk to you,’ Mrs Angusthorpe said, to Daphne Jackson’s surprise. ‘It might be worth your while to stroll back to that hotel with me.’

On her short, angry walk she had realized, too, that once she had greatly disliked Jackson Major because he reminded her in some ways of her husband. A priggish youth, she had recalled, a tedious bore of a boy who had shown her husband a ridiculous respect while also fearing and resembling him. On her walk she had remembered the day he had broken the half-mile record, standing in the sports field in his running clothes, deprecating his effort because he knew his headmaster would wish him to act like that. What good was winning a half-mile race if he upset his wife the first time he found himself in a bedroom with her?

‘I remember your husband as a boy,’ said Mrs Angusthorpe. ‘He set an athletic record which has not yet been broken’

‘Yes, he told me.’

‘He had trouble with his chin. Pimples that wouldn’t go away. I see all that’s been overcome.’

‘Well, yes –’

‘And trouble also because he beat a boy too hard. The mother wrote, enclosing the opinion of a doctor.’

Daphne frowned. She ceased to walk. She stared at Mrs Angusthorpe.

‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Angusthorpe.

They passed the butcher’s shop, from the doorway of which the butcher now addressed them. The weather was good, the butcher said: it was a suitable time for a holiday. Mrs Angusthorpe smiled at him and bowed. Daphne, frowning still, passed on.

‘You’re right,’ Mrs Angusthorpe said next, ‘when you say that your husband could have declined to go fishing.’

‘I think he felt –’

‘Odd, I thought, to have a fishing-rod with him in the first place. Odd on a honeymoon.’

They entered the hotel. Doyle came forward to meet them. ‘Ah, so you’ve palled up?’ he said. ‘Isn’t that grand?’

‘We could have sherry,’ Mrs Angusthorpe suggested, ‘in the bar.’

‘Of course you could,’ said Doyle. ‘Won’t your two husbands be pegging away at the old fish for the entire day?’

‘They promised to be back for lunch,’ Daphne said quickly, her voice seeming to herself to be unduly weak. She cleared her throat and remarked to Doyle that the village was pretty. She didn’t really wish to sit in the hotel bar drinking sherry with the wife of her husband’s headmaster. It was all ridiculous, she thought, on a honeymoon.

‘Go down into the bar,’ said Doyle, ‘and I’ll be down myself in a minute.’

Mrs Angusthorpe seized with the fingers of her left hand the flowered material of Daphne’s dress. ‘The bar’s down here,’ she said, leading the way without releasing her hold.

They sat at a table on which there were a number of absorbent mats that advertised brands of beer. Doyle brought them two glasses of sherry, which Mrs Angusthorpe ordered him to put down to her husband’s account. ‘Shout out when you’re in need of a refill,’ he invited. ‘I’ll be up in the hall.’

‘The partition between our bedrooms is far from soundproof,’ said Mrs Angusthorpe when Doyle had gone. ‘We were awakened in the night.’

‘Awakened?’

‘As if you were in the room beside us, we heard a conversation.’

‘My God!’

‘Yes.’

Blood rushed to Daphne Jackson’s face. She was aware of an unpleasant sensation in her stomach. She turned her head away. Mrs Angusthorpe said:

‘People don’t speak out. All my married life, for instance, I haven’t spoken out. My dear, you’re far too good for Jackson Major.’

It seemed to Daphne, who had been Daphne Jackson for less than twenty-four hours, that the wife of her husband’s headmaster was insane. She gulped at the glass of sherry before her, unable to prevent herself from vividly recalling the awfulness of the night before in the small bedroom. He had come at her as she was taking off her blouse. His right hand had shot beneath her underclothes, pressing at her and gripping her. All during their inedible dinner he had been urging her to drink whiskey and wine, and drinking quantities of both himself. In bed he had suddenly become calmer, remembering instructions read in a book.

‘Pack a suitcase,’ said Mrs Angusthorpe, ‘and go.’

The words belonged to a nightmare and Daphne was aware of wishing that she were asleep and dreaming. The memory of tension on her wedding-day, and of guests standing around in sunshine in a London garden, and then the flight by plane, were elements that confused her mind as she listened to this small woman. The tension had been with her as she walked towards the altar and had been with her, too, in her parents’ garden. Nor had it eased when she escaped with her husband on a Viscount: it might even have increased on the flight and on the train to Galway, and then in the hired car that had carried her to the small village. It had certainly increased while she attempted to eat stringy chicken at a late hour in the dining-room, while her husband smiled at her and talked about intoxicants. The reason he had talked so much about whiskey and wine, she now concluded, was because he’d been aware of the tension that was coiled within her.

‘You have made a mistake,’ came the voice of Mrs Angusthorpe, ‘but even now it is not too late to rectify it. Do not accept it, reject your error, Mrs Jackson.’

Doyle came into the bar and brought to them, without their demanding it, more sherry in two new glasses. Daphne heard him remarking that the brand of sherry was very popular in these parts. It was Spanish sherry, he said, since he would stock nothing else. He talked about Spain and Spaniards, saying that at the time of the Spanish Armada Spanish sailors had been wrecked around the nearby coast.

‘I love my husband,’ Daphne said when Doyle had gone again.

She had met her husband in the Hurlingham Club. He had partnered her in tennis and they had danced together at a charity dance. She’d listened while he talked one evening, telling her that the one thing he regretted was that he hadn’t played golf as a child. Golf was a game, he’d said, that must be started when young if one was ever to achieve championship distinction. With tennis that wasn’t quite so important, but it was, of course, as well to start tennis early also. She had thought he was rather nice. There was something about his distant manner that attracted her; there was a touch of arrogance in the way he didn’t look at her when he spoke. She’d make him look at her, she vowed.

‘My dear,’ said Mrs Angusthorpe, ‘I’ve seen the seamy side of Jackson Major. The more I think of him the more I can recall. He forced his way up that school, snatching at chances that weren’t his to take, putting himself first, like he did in the half-mile race. There was cruelty in Jackson Major’s eye, and ruthlessness and dullness. Like my husband, he has no sense of humour.’

‘Mrs Angusthorpe, I really can’t listen to this. I was married yesterday to a man I’m in love with. It’ll be all right –’

‘Why will it be all right?’

‘Because,’ snapped Daphne Jackson with sudden spirit, ‘I shall ask my husband as soon as he returns to take me at once from this horrible hotel. My marriage does not concern you, Mrs Angusthorpe.’

‘They are talking now on a riverside, whispering maybe so as not to disturb their prey. They are murmuring about the past, of achievements on the sports field and marches undertaken by a cadet force. While you and I are having a different kind of talk.’

‘What our husbands are saying to one another, Mrs Angusthorpe, may well make more sense.’

‘What they are not saying is that two women in the bar of this hotel are unhappy. They have forgotten about the two women: they are more relaxed and contented than ever they are with us.’

Mrs Angusthorpe, beady-eyed as she spoke, saw the effect of her words reflected in the uneasy face of the woman beside her. She felt herself carried away by this small triumph, she experienced a headiness that was blissful. She saw in her mind another scene, imagining herself, over lunch, telling her husband about the simple thing that had happened. She would watch him sitting there in all his dignity: she would wait, until he was about to pass a forkful of food to his mouth and then she would say: ‘Jackson Major’s wife has left him already.’ And she would smile at him.