‘Left high and dry,’ she murmured in the darkness, applying the expression to the turkey farmer, dozily remembering that it was the one she had used about herself when she’d suffered her calamity.
*
On the morning after the evening of Mrs Kincaid’s visit to his house Blakely was aware of not minding if people had seen her in his car when he’d driven her to her room above Beatty’s shop. Her company in his kitchen had not, in the end, been disagreeable. She had washed up the dishes from which they had eaten the food she’d cooked. She had been sympathetic about several matters, and before they left he had shown her the plucking and dressing sheds even though he’d told himself he shouldn’t. ‘Isn’t it lonely for you?’ she’d said.
She wasn’t in Hirrel’s that day, nor the next. She’ll have gone, Blakely thought. She had bought him the bottle and now she’d gone back to Belfast. He hadn’t been welcoming; he’d been cagey and suspicious, worried in case the Lackys knew she’d cooked his food, worried in case Quin walked in. He was thinking about her when he heard the dogs barking and her voice quietening them.
‘I was passing by,’ she said.
The friendship that began for Blakely when the Bushmills was poured again and when for the second time a meal was shared in his kitchen was later remarked upon in Hirrel’s and in the turkey sheds. Because of his trouble in the past people were pleased, and pleased again when the two were seen together on the steps of the Stella Four-Screen. Reports went round that they’d danced, one Friday night, in the Crest Ballroom; a corner of the bar in Digby’s Hotel became known as theirs.
Soon after that the Lackys met Mrs Kincaid, and Quin did. She was brought to Sunday lunch with the Reverend Johnston. One morning Blakely woke up aware of a deep longing for Mrs Kincaid, aware of a gentleness when he thought about her, of an impatience with himself for not declaring his feelings before this.
*
‘Oh no, dear, no.’
She said he was too good for her. Too good a man, she said, too steady a man, too well-set-up, too decent a man. She could bring nothing, she said, she would be coming empty-handed and that was never her way. Kincaid had left her no more than a pittance, she said, not expecting to be taken so soon, as no man would in the prime of his life. A few years ago Mrs Kincaid had heard talk of a Belfast man who’d electrocuted himself drilling holes in an outside wall: as the cause of Kincaid’s demise, that did well enough.
‘No, I never could,’ she repeated, surveying the astonishment she had known would appear in the lean features, the flush of the cheeks darkening. ‘You have your life the way it is,’ she said. ‘You have your memories. I’d never upset the way things are with you.’
He went silent. Was he thinking he’d made a fool of himself? she wondered. Would he finish his drink and that would be the end of it?
‘I’m on my own,’ he said.
They were in the bar of the hotel, the quiet time between six and seven. The day before she’d said she’d definitely be off at the end of the week. Refreshed and invigorated, she’d said.
‘I’m alone,’ he repeated.
‘Don’t I know you are? Didn’t I say you’d be lonely?’
‘What I’m saying to you —’
‘I know what you’re saying to me. What I’m saying to yourself is you’re set in your ways. You’re well-to-do, I haven’t much. Isn’t it about that too?’
‘It’s not money —’
‘There’s always money.’
The conversation softly became argument. Affection spread through it, real and contrived. It had been great knowing him, Mrs Kincaid said. You come to a place, you gain a friend; nothing was nicer. But Blakely was stubborn. There were feelings in this, he insisted; she couldn’t deny it.
‘I’m not. I’m not at all. I’m only trying to be fair to you. I have a Belfast woman’s caution in me.’
‘I’m as cautious myself as any man in Ulster. I have a name for it.’
‘You’re trusting the unknown all the same. Fair and square, hasn’t that to be said?’
‘You’re never unknown to me.’
‘When the cards are down I’m a woman you don’t know from a tinker.’
Blakely denied that with a gesture. He didn’t say anything. Mrs Kincaid said:
‘If I asked you for money, why would you give it to me? I wouldn’t do it, but if I did. Who’d blame you for shaking your head? If I said write me a cheque for two thousand pounds who’d blame you for saying no? No man in his senses would say anything else. If I said to you I’d keep that cheque by me, that I’d never pass it into the bank because it was only there as a bond of trust between us, you wouldn’t believe me.’
‘Why wouldn’t I trust you?’
‘That’s what I’m saying to you. I’m a woman turned up in the town to get away for a little while from the noise and bustle of the city. Who’d blame you if you’d say to yourself I wouldn’t trust her as far as an inch? When there’s trust between us, is what I’m saying, we’ll maybe talk about the other. D’you understand me, dear?’
‘We know each other well.’
‘We do and we don’t, dear. Bad things have happened to us.’
Mrs Kincaid spoke then of the trouble in her past, speaking only the truth, as always she did at this stage in the proceedings.
*
Blakely felt in the inside pocket of his jacket and took out a Northern Bank cheque-book. He wrote the cheque. He dated it and signed it and tore it out. He handed it to her. She took it, staring at it for as long as a minute. Then she tore it up.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘I mean it.’
‘I never knew a straighter man,’ Mrs Kincaid said, and for a moment longer the open cheque-book lay between them on the bar-room table. When he reached for it again she said, ‘I bank under my maiden name.’ She gave him a name, which he added to the Mabel he had written while she was speaking. ‘That will never be cashed,’ she said. ‘I promise you that.’
They would not correspond, she laid down. They would wait two months and then they would meet again at the table they were at now, the table they had made their own. They chose a date and a time, a Tuesday at the end of July.
*
The cheque was for the amount Mrs Kincaid had mentioned. She paid it into her bank as soon as she was back in Belfast and recorded the amount in her notebook. Two days later it reached Blakely’s bank and was covered by his standing instruction that if his current account ever did not have sufficient funds in it a transfer should be made from his deposit account. He received his next bank statement sixteen days later.
*
She could have married the man. The clergyman she’d been introduced to would have done the job. She could have been the wife of a turkey farmer for the rest of her days and she wondered about that — about waking in the farmhouse and the sheepdogs in the yard, about conversations there might have been, their common ground as the victims of gangsters.
Regret nagged Mrs Kincaid then. She felt she had missed a chance she hadn’t even known was there. Her instinct was to write a letter, although what she might say in it she didn’t know. The more she wondered if she should or not, the more her confidence grew that inspiration would come to her, that in the end she would fill a page or two as easily as she made an entry in her notebook. Time would pass, and she had faith in the way time had of softening anything which was distressful. Naturally the poor man would have been distressed.
*
Sadness afflicted Blakely, which eased a little while that time went by. Resignation took its place. It was his fault; he had been foolish. His resistance had been there, he had let it slip away. But even so, on the day they had arranged to meet, he put on his suit and went along to Digby’s Hotel.
He waited for an hour in their corner of the bar, believing that against the odds there might somehow be an explanation. Then he went away.
Somewhere in him as he drove out of the town there was still a flicker of optimism, although he did not kn
ow where it came from or even if what it promised was sensible. He did not dwell upon his mood; it was simply there.
*
The troubles had returned since Mrs Kincaid had travelled back to Belfast. There had been murder and punishment, the burning of churches, the barricades at Drumcree, the destruction of the town of Omagh. Yet belief in the fragile peace persisted, too precious after so long to abandon. Stubbornly the people of the troubles honoured the hope that had spread among them, fierce in their clamour that it should not go away. In spite of the quiet made noisy again, its benign infection had reached out for Blakely; it did so for Mrs Kincaid also, even though her trouble was her own. Weary at last of making entries in a notebook, she wrote her letter.
The Telephone Game
Since the conventional separation of the sexes on the evening before a wedding did not appeal to Liese, Tony agreed that there should be a party to which both sides of the wedding came instead. A party was necessary because the formalities of the day would not allow for much of a reunion with friends they had not seen for some time, but they did not wish the reception to be an occasion that went on and on in order to cater for this: they wanted to be in Venice in time for the first dinner of their marriage. So in Tony’s flat, already re-arranged for married life, his friends and Liese’s mixed jollily in advance, while wine flowed generously and there was background music that was danced to, while tomorrow’s bride and groom learnt a little more about one another from what was said. Friendships here were longer than their own.
Tonight, there was a solemnity about Liese’s manner that softened further the beauty of her features: her mind was on her marriage. Smooth, pale as wheat, her hair fell to her shoulders; her light-blue eyes were a degree less tranquil than usually they were, but when she smiled all that tranquillity came back. ‘Oh, Tony, you are lucky,’ a cousin who had not met Liese before remarked, and Tony said he knew it. He was fair-haired too, by nature insouciant and humorous, handsome in his way.
In Germany Liese’s father was a manufacturer of gloves. In England Tony had been looked after by an aunt ever since his parents died in the worst air disaster of 1977 — the runway collision of two jumbo-jets — when Tony was six, an only child. Nineteen years later he and Liese had met by chance, in a bustling lunchtime restaurant, not far from Victoria Station. ‘D’you think we could meet again?’ he had pleaded, while a tubby, middle-aged waitress, bringing their coffee in that moment, approved of his boldness and let it show. 00178 was the number on the back of the driver’s seat in the first taxi they sat in together, black digits on an oval of white enamel. Afterwards, romantically, they both remembered that, and the taxi-driver’s conversation, and the tubby waitress.
Already in love, Liese had heard about the tragedy in 1977, Tony about the gloves that had been the source of livelihood in Liese’s family for generations, lambskin and pigskin, goatskin and doeskin. Hand-stitching and dyeing skills, a different way with gussets for the different leathers, were talked about when for the first time Tony visited Schelesnau, when he was shown the long rows of templates and the contented workforce, the knives and thonging tools tidily on their racks. In Schelesnau, driven by love, he played the part required of him, asking questions and showing an interest. Liese was nervous in anticipation before meeting Tony’s aunt, who was getting on a bit now in a small South Coast resort with a distant view of the ferries plying back and forth to France. But Liese needn’t have been apprehensive. ‘She’s lovely,’ Tony’s aunt said, and in Schelesnau — where there were Liese’s two younger sisters and a busy family life — Tony was considered charming. There was at first — in Schelesnau and in England — a faint concern that the marriage was taking on a burden that marriage did not always have to, that would have been avoided if Liese had chosen to marry a German or Tony an English girl: after all, there had been enmity in two terrible wars. It was a vague feeling, very much at odds with the sentiments of the time, and although it hovered like some old, long-discredited ghost, it failed in the end to gain a place in the scheme of things. What did, instead, was the telephone game.
On the night before the wedding it was Tony who suggested playing it. Afterwards, he hardly knew why he did, why he had imagined that Germans would understand the humour of the game, but of course he’d had a certain amount to drink. For her part, Liese wished she had insisted that her wedding party wasn’t an occasion for this kind of diversion. ‘Oh, Tony!’ was her single, half-hearted protest, and Tony didn’t hear it.
Already he had explained to Liese’s sisters — both of whom were to be bridesmaids — that strangers were telephoned, that you won if you held a stranger in conversation longer than anyone else could. The information was passed around the bewildered Germans, who politely wondered what was coming next.
‘I am in engine boats,’ a man who had been a classmate of Liese’s in Fräulein Groenewold’s kindergarten was saying when the music was turned off. ‘Outboards, you say?’
He, and all the others — more than thirty still left at the party — were asked to be silent then. A number was dialled by Tony’s best man and the first of the strangers informed that there was a gas leak in the street, asked to check the rooms of his house for a tell-tale smell, then to return to the phone with information as to that. The next was told that an external fuse had blown, that all electrical connections should be unplugged or turned off to obviate danger. The next was advised to close and lock his windows against a roving polecat.
‘The Water Board here,’ Tony said when his turn came. ‘We’re extremely sorry to ring you so late. We have an emergency.’
Some of the German visitors were still perplexed. ‘So they are all your friends?’ a girl with a plait asked, in spite of what had been said. ‘This is a joke with friends?’
Liese explained again that the people who were telephoned were just anyone. The game was to delay, to keep a conversation going. She whispered, in case her voice should carry to Tony’s victim. ‘Was? Stimmt irgendwas nicht?’ her friend whispered back, and Liese said it was all just for fun. The last call had lasted three and three-quarter minutes, the one before only a few seconds.
‘What we would like you to do,’ Tony said, ‘is to make your way to the water tanks in your loft and turn off the inlet tap. This tap is usually red, madam, but of course the colour may have worn off. What we’re endeavouring to do is to prevent the flooding of your house.’
‘Flooding?’ the woman he spoke to repeated, her voice drowsy with sleep. ‘Eh?’
‘One of our transformer valves has failed. We have a dangerously high pressure level.’
‘I can’t go up into the loft at this hour. It’s the middle of the night.’
‘We’re having to ask everyone in the area, madam. Perhaps your husband —’
‘I ain’t got no husband. I ain’t got no one here. I’m seventy-three years of age. How d’you think I’d know about a tap?’
‘We’re sorry for the inconvenience, madam. We naturally would not ask you to do this if it were not necessary. When a transformer valve goes it is a vital matter. The main articulated valve may go next and then of course it is too late. When the articulated valve goes the flood-water could rise to sixteen feet within minutes. In which case I would advise you to keep to the upstairs rooms.’
Tony put the palm of his hand over the mouthpiece. She had beetled off to get a stepladder, he whispered, and a flashlight. He listened again and said there was the mewing of a cat.
‘It’ll be all right now?’ another German girl leaned forward to ask Liese, and the German who was in outboard engines, who perfectly understood the game, gestured with a smile that it would be. The game was amusing, he considered, but not a game to play in Schelesnau. It was sophisticated. It was the famous English sense of humour.
Tony heard the shuffle of footsteps, a door closing in the distance, and in the distance also the mewing of the cat again. Then there was silence.
Tony looked round his guests, some of them, as he was,
a little drunk. He laughed, careless now of allowing the sound to pass to the other house, since its lone occupant was presumably already in her loft. He put the receiver down beside the directories on the narrow telephone table, and reached out with a bottle of Sancerre to attend to a couple of empty glasses. A friend he’d been at school with began to tell of an occasion when a man in Hoxton was sent out on to the streets to see if a stolen blue van had just been parked there. He himself had once posed as the proprietor of a ballroom-dancing school, offering six free lessons. Some of the Germans said they must be going now.
‘Shh.’ Listening again, Tony held up a hand. But there was no sound from the other end. ‘She’s still aloft,’ he said, and put the receiver down beside the directories.
‘Where’re you staying?’ the best man asked, his lips brushing the cheek of the girl with the plait as they danced, the music there again. The telephone game had run its course.
‘In Germany,’ it was explained by the man in outboard motors, ‘we might say this was Ärgernis.’
‘Oh, here too,’ an English girl who did not approve of the telephone game said. ‘If that means harassment.’
Those who remained left in a bunch then, the Germans telling about Wasservexierungsport, a practical joke involving jets of water. You put your ten pfennigs into a slot machine to bring the lights on in a grotto and found yourself drenched instead. ‘Water-vexing,’ the outboard-motors man translated.
*
‘You could stay here, you know,’ Tony said when he and Liese had collected the glasses and the ashtrays, when everything had been washed and dried, the cushions plumped up, a window opened to let in a stream of cold night air.
‘But I have yet to finish packing up my things. The morning will be busy.’
The Hill Bachelors Page 17
