‘You’re never unknown to me.’
‘When the cards are down I’m a woman you don’t know from a tinker.’
Blakely denied that with a gesture. He didn’t say anything. Mrs Kincaid said:
‘If I asked you for money, why would you give it to me? I wouldn’t do it, but if I did. Who’d blame you for shaking your head? If I said write me a cheque for two thousand pounds who’d blame you for saying no? No man in his senses would say anything else. If I said to you I’d keep that cheque by me, that I’d never pass it into the bank because it was only there as a bond of trust between us, you wouldn’t believe me.’
‘Why wouldn’t I trust you?’
‘That’s what I’m saying to you. I’m a woman turned up in the town to get away for a little while from the noise and bustle of the city. Who’d blame you if you’d say to yourself I wouldn’t trust her as far as an inch? When there’s trust between us, is what I’m saying, we’ll maybe talk about the other. D’you understand me, dear?’
‘We know each other well.’
‘We do and we don’t, dear. Bad things have happened to us.’
Mrs Kincaid spoke then of the trouble in her past, speaking only the truth, as always she did at this stage in the proceedings.
Blakely felt in the inside pocket of his jacket and took out a Northern Bank cheque-book. He wrote the cheque. He dated it and signed it and tore it out. He handed it to her. She took it, staring at it for as long as a minute. Then she tore it up.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘I mean it.’
‘I never knew a straighter man,’ Mrs Kincaid said, and for a moment longer the open cheque-book lay between them on the bar-room table. When he reached for it again she said, ‘I bank under my maiden name.’ She gave him a name, which he added to the Mabel he had written while she was speaking. ‘That will never be cashed,’ she said. ‘I promise you that.’
They would not correspond, she laid down. They would wait two months and then they would meet again at the table they were at now, the table they had made their own. They chose a date and a time, a Tuesday at the end of July.
The cheque was for the amount Mrs Kincaid had mentioned. She paid it into her bank as soon as she was back in Belfast and recorded the amount in her notebook. Two days later it reached Blakely’s bank and was covered by his standing instruction that if his current account ever did not have sufficient funds in it a transfer should be made from his deposit account. He received his next bank statement sixteen days later.
She could have married the man. The clergyman she’d been introduced to would have done the job. She could have been the wife of a turkey farmer for the rest of her days and she wondered about that – about waking in the farmhouse and the sheepdogs in the yard, about conversations there might have been, their common ground as the victims of gangsters.
Regret nagged Mrs Kincaid then. She felt she had missed a chance she hadn’t even known was there. Her instinct was to write a letter, although what she might say in it she didn’t know. The more she wondered if she should or not, the more her confidence grew that inspiration would come to her, that in the end she would fill a page or two as easily as she made an entry in her notebook. Time would pass, and she had faith in the way time had of softening anything which was distressful. Naturally the poor man would have been distressed.
Sadness afflicted Blakely, which eased a little while that time went by. Resignation took its place. It was his fault; he had been foolish. His resistance had been there, he had let it slip away. But even so, on the day they had arranged to meet, he put on his suit and went along to Digby’s Hotel.
He waited for an hour in their corner of the bar, believing that against the odds there might somehow be an explanation. Then he went away.
Somewhere in him as he drove out of the town there was still a flicker of optimism, although he did not know where it came from or even if what it promised was sensible. He did not dwell upon his mood; it was simply there.
The troubles had returned since Mrs Kincaid had travelled back to Belfast. There had been murder and punishment, the burning of churches, the barricades at Drumcree, the destruction of the town of Omagh. Yet belief in the fragile peace persisted, too precious after so long to abandon. Stubbornly the people of the troubles honoured the hope that had spread among them, fierce in their clamour that it should not go away. In spite of the quiet made noisy again, its benign infection had reached out for Blakely; it did so for Mrs Kincaid also, even though her trouble was her own. Weary at last of making entries in a notebook, she wrote her letter.
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.’
They walked about the flat that soon would be their home, going from room to room, although they knew the rooms well. Softly, the music still played, and they danced a little in the small hall, happy to be alone now. The day they’d met there had been an office party in the busy lunchtime restaurant, a lot of noise, and a woman in a spotted red dress quarrelling with her friend at the table next to theirs. How cautious Liese had been that day was afterwards remembered; and how cautious she’d been – much later – when Tony said he loved her. Remembered, too, with that same fondness was how both of them had wanted marriage, not some substitute, how they had wanted the binding of its demands and vows and rigours. London was the city of their romance and it was in London – to the discomfort and annoyance of her parents, defying all convention – that Liese had insisted the marriage should take place.
While they danced, Tony noticed that his telephone receiver was still lying beside the directories. More than half an hour ago he had forgotten about it. He reached to pick it up, bringing their dance to an end. He said:
‘She hasn’t put hers back.’
Liese took the receiver from him. She listened, too, and heard the empty sound of a connected line. ‘Hullo,’ she said. ‘Hullo.’
‘She forgot. She went to bed.’
‘Would she forget, Tony?’
‘Well, something like it.’
‘She give a name? You have the number still?’
Tony shook his head. ‘She didn’t give a name.’ He had forgotten the number; he’d probably never even been aware of it, he said.
‘What did she say, Tony?’
‘Only that she was without a husband.’
‘Her husband was out? At this time?’
They had drawn away from one another. Tony turned the music off. He said:
‘She meant she was widowed. She wasn’t young. Seventy-three or something like that.’
‘This old woman goes to her loft -’
‘Well, I mean, she said she would. More likely, she didn’t believe a word I said.’
‘She went to look for a stepladder and a flashlight. You told us.’
‘I think she said she was cold in her nightdress. More likely, she just went back to bed. I don’t blame her.’
Listening again, Liese said:
‘I can hear the cat.’
But when she passed the receiver over, Tony said he couldn’
t hear anything. Nothing whatsoever, he said.
‘Very far away. The cat was mewing, and suddenly it stopped. Don’t put it back!’ Liese cried when Tony was about to return the receiver to its cradle. ‘She is there in her loft, Tony.’
‘Oh, honestly, I don’t think so. Why should she be? It doesn’t take long to turn a stop-cock off.’
‘What is a stop-cock?’
‘Just a way of controlling the water.’
The mewing of the cat came faintly to him, a single mew and then another. Not knowing why he did so, Tony shook his head again, silently denying this sound. Liese said:
‘She could have fallen down. It would be hard to see with her flashlight and she could have fallen down.’
‘No, I don’t think so.’ For the first time in the year and a half she had known him Liese heard a testiness in Tony’s voice. There was no point in not replacing the receiver, he said. ‘Look, let’s forget it, Liese.’
Solemnly, but in distress, Liese gazed into the features of the man she was to marry in just over twelve hours’ time. He smiled a familiar, easy smile. No point, he said again, more softly. No point of any kind in going on about this.
‘Honestly, Liese.’
They had walked about, that first afternoon. He had taken her through Green Park, then down to the river. She was in London to perfect her English; that afternoon she should have been at another class. And it was a quarter past five before Tony explained, untruthfully, his absence from his desk. The next day they met again.
‘Nothing has happened, Liese.’
‘She could be dead.’
‘Oh, Liese, don’t be silly.’
At once, having said that, Tony apologized. Of course she wasn’t silly. That game was silly. He was sorry they’d played it tonight.
‘But, Tony -’
‘Of course she isn’t dead.’
Selected Stories Page 38
