But on the night of her second marriage the baggage she’d taken on was suddenly more complicated. When they returned from the celebrations in the Queen’s Regiment and Bruce’s Platter her husband of half a day didn’t want to go to bed. He said it was hardly worth it, since he had to get up soon after five. But it was not yet eleven when he said that.
Still vacuuming the office floors, Cheryl remembered the unflurried timbre of his voice when he offered this explanation, a matter-of-factness that, quite suddenly, made her feel cold. She remembered turning on the single bar of the electric fire she had brought upstairs from the room she no longer occupied. She remembered lying awake, wondering if the darkness of the bedroom would draw him to her, wondering if he was a man like that, not that she had ever heard of being like that before. But nothing happened except what was happening in her mind, the realization that she had made a mistake.
As she slid her vacuum cleaner into corners and under desks, all that was there again, as often it was when, on the streets, her ex-husband once more attempted to enter her life. A man who was hurt was what he’d seemed to be during the time they had been getting to know one another. She’d told him about times in her childhood, about her marriage, and the shock of widowhood; he’d spoken of the censure he’d always felt himself subjected to, culminating in the lunchtime complaint he’d taken so hard. Small rebukes, reproof, blame in its different forms affected him – she was sure – more than ever was intended: from the first she had known that, when each new shade of his accumulated pain was revealed to her. Then, too, she had believed that the pain would ease, as it seemed to when she was with him. But even before she packed her things to go, Daph said, ‘Your guy’s doolally.’
Cheryl turned the cleaner off and wound the flex back into place. She straightened the chairs she had had to move out of the way, finishing one office at a time and closing the door of each behind her. She took her coat and scarf from the hooks in the passage and carried downstairs the black plastic bag in which she’d collected the waste-paper. She re-set the night alarm. She banged the door behind her and began to walk away.
‘They ignored Mr Simoni,’ he said in the empty dark. ‘Mr Simoni tried to shake hands with them but he needn’t have bothered.’
She looked at him with nothing in her eyes. There was no flicker that they were man and wife, as if she had forgotten. She had been everything to him; she could have sensed it from the way he’d been with her. When they’d gone for a walk together, the second time they had, she’d put a hand on his arm. A Sunday that had been, a cold afternoon and she’d been wearing gloves, red and blue. Just a touch of pressure from her fingers, no more than that, nothing forward, but he’d felt the understanding there was. A waiter could tell you how people were, he had explained to her another time. She hadn’t known it; she hadn’t known how you could feel insulted, the amount people left beside a plate. Not that a breakfast waiter got anything at all.
‘I don’t want to stand here listening to you,’ she said, and then she said he should see someone; she said she had asked him to leave her alone.
‘It’s just I wondered if I’d ever told you that, how Mr Simoni held out his hand.’
‘Please leave me alone,’ she said, walking on.
Every plea she made was a repetition, already stale before she made it, and sounding weary when she did. She had lost touch with Daph when she’d moved to another district but Daph had made her promise to go to the police if she became frightened.
‘You could tell she was the kind of woman who complained,’ he said. He’d put the coffee ready for her to pour out, but when he walked away she called after him that it was cold. You didn’t expect there’d be a waiter with soiled cuffs in this dining-room, she said when Mr Simoni came.
Cheryl tried not to see when he rooted in a pocket for his wallet. It was worst of all, the grubby paper taken from his wallet and carefully unfolded, its tattered edges and the blue letters of the address offered to her as a gift might be. Dear Sirs, I believe an electric fire I purchased . . . In the dark she couldn’t see but she knew the words were there, as the shopping list had been there too, before its pencilled items had all but disappeared.
‘Please leave me alone,’ she said.
Walking with her, he said the café by the launderette was always open, people waiting there for their washing to be ready. ‘Quiet,’ he said. ‘Never less than quiet, that café.’
She could tell from his movements beside her that the paper was being folded again and then returned to the right compartment of his wallet. His wallet was small, black, its plastic coating worn away in places.
‘It’s hardly out of your way,’ he said.
They were alone on the street; they had been since she’d heard his voice behind her saying that the people who’d complained had ignored Mr Simoni’s wish to shake hands with them. He always spoke first from behind her on a street, his footsteps silent.
‘I thought I might run into you today,’ he said. ‘She’ll want to know about this morning, I thought.’
He mentioned tea and she said she didn’t want tea at this hour. And then she thought that in a café she could raise her voice, drawing attention to his harassing of her. But she didn’t want to go to a café with him. When she’d found things he’d stolen he’d said nothing, not even shaking his head. When she’d packed her belongings he’d been silent too, as if expecting nothing better, humiliation self-inflicted now.
‘Straight after I’d done at the hotel I went out there,’ he said. ‘This morning.’
He told her about the hotel people who’d had breakfast, a slack morning, being a Monday. He remembered the orders; he always could afterwards, even on a busy day, a waiter’s skill, he called it. He told her about the bus he’d taken, out through Shepherd’s Bush and Hammersmith and then the green of trees and grass beginning when Castelnau was left behind. Someone called out for the Red Rover and the driver shouted back that the Red Rover had gone years ago. There was a traffic hold-up at Upper Richmond Road and he got off and walked a bit. He’d been out there before, he said: Priory Lane, then left by a letter-box. A dozen times, he said, he’d checked it out.
They turned a corner and she could see the lit-up window of the launderette. She remembered the café he was talking about then, a little further along with a 7-Up sign in the window.
‘I’ve something to get washed,’ he said.
She didn’t go into the launderette with him. While he was there she could have hurried on, past the café, to where the buses ran. Any bus would have done, even one going in the wrong direction. But in the café, where an elderly man and two women on their own were the only customers, she carried from the counter a pot of tea and two glass cups and saucers, and went back for milk.
She waited then, blankly staring at the tea she’d poured, taking the first sip, tasting nothing. No thoughts disturbed her. She did not feel she was in a café, only that she was alone, anywhere it could have been; and then her thoughts began again. She had been drawn to him; that reminder echoed, hardly anything else made sense.
She watched him coming in, the door slipping closed behind him. He looked about, knowing she would be there, knowing she wouldn’t have disappeared.
On the table he laid out what he had taken from the pockets of his jacket before he’d put it into a washing machine: keys, his wallet, a ballpoint. He had thought she would ask about his jacket, where it was, why he wasn’t wearing it, but she didn’t. He stirred the tea she’d poured for him. It didn’t matter that she didn’t ask; his overcoat was open, she could see the jacket wasn’t there.
‘Three hours ago he’ll have found her,’ he said. ‘A quarter past seven every evening he gets back to that house.’
Cheryl stared at a cigarette burn on the table’s surface while he told her. He had rung the bell, he said, and the woman hadn’t recognized him when she opened the door. He’d said he’d come to read the meter, not saying which one. The gas man had been, no longer than a
week ago, the woman had said, and he’d apologized for not having his badge on display. He’d pulled aside his overcoat to show the electricity badge on his left lapel. The woman hadn’t closed the door when he walked into the hall. A good ten minutes it was open before his hands were free to close it.
‘I blame myself,’ he said, ‘for being stupid like that.’ He added that he didn’t blame himself for anything else; he had stood there, not blaming himself, remembering the woman saying that his cuffs were grimy, complaining that the coffee was cold. He had stood there, hearing her voice, and the telephone rang on a small table near the hallstand. When it stopped he went to wash his hands in the downstairs lavatory, where coats and the man’s hats and a cap hung on hooks. In the hall he draped a tissue over the Yale latch before he turned it; and afterwards dropped the scrunched-up tissue into a waste-bin on a lamp post.
Cheryl didn’t say anything; she never did. She watched while his overcoat was buttoned again after she’d seen he wasn’t wearing his jacket. A dribble of blood from the woman’s mouth had got on to his sleeve, he said, the kind of thing that was discernible beneath a microscope, easy to overlook.
Once he’d shown her a bruise he’d acquired on a finger while he was committing his crime, another time he’d shown her the tissue he had draped over the Yale, forgotten in his pocket all day. Once he’d said the second post had come while he was there, brown envelopes mostly, clattering through the letter-box. While the woman was on the floor there’d been the postman’s whistling and his footsteps going away.
‘I didn’t take a bus,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want that, sitting on a bus. The first food I had afterwards was liver and peas.’
The last time it had been a packet of crisps; another time, a chicken burger. Still silent, Cheryl listened while his voice continued, while he explained that ever since this morning he’d felt she was his only friend, ever since he’d washed his hands, with the man’s coats on coat-hangers and the scented soap on its own special little porcelain shelf. A cat had jumped on to the windowsill outside and begun to mew, as if it knew what had occurred. He had thought of opening the back door to let it in, so that it would be in the hall when the man returned, and its bloody footsteps all over the house.
She had never told Daph that it wasn’t fear she experienced when she was with him, that it wasn’t even disquiet. She had never said she knew there was cunning in his parade of what hadn’t happened, yet that it hardly seemed like cunning, so little did he ask of her. She had never said she knew it was her nature that had drawn her to go for walks with him and to accept his reticent embrace, that her pity was his nourishment. She had never wanted to talk to Daph about him. The Warkelys didn’t know he existed.
He lifted the glass cup to his lips. She still did not speak. It was not necessary to speak, only to remain a little longer, the silence an element in being with him. He did not follow her when she walked away.
He would finish his tea and pour another cup: on the streets again she imagined that. In the launderette he would open the door of a machine and release his sodden jacket from where it clung to the drum. He would spread out the sleeves and pull the material back into shape before he began his journey to the rooms where so briefly they had lived together. He would not, tonight, be offended by the glare of neon beneath which she now walked herself. Nor by the cars that loitered in their search for what the night had to offer. Nor by the voices of the couples pressed close to one another as they went by. Her tears, tonight, allowed him peace.
The Dancing-Master’s Music
Brigid’s province was the sculleries, which was where you began if you were a girl, the cutlery room and the boot room if you weren’t. Brigid began when she was fourteen and she was still fourteen when she heard about the dancing-master. It was Mr Crome who talked about him first, whose slow, lugubrious delivery came through the open scullery door from the kitchen. Lily Geoghegan said Mr Crome gave you a sermon whenever he opened his mouth.
‘An Italian person, we are to surmise. From the Italian city of Naples. A travelling person.’
‘Well, I never,’ Mrs O’Brien interjected, and Brigid could tell she was busy with something else.
The sculleries were low-ceilinged, with saucepans and kettles hanging on pot-hooks, and the bowls and dishes and jelly-moulds which weren’t often in use crowding the long shelf that continued from one scullery to the next, even though there was a doorway between the two. Years ago the door that belonged in it had been taken off its hinges because it was in the way, but the hinges were left behind, too stiff to move now. Flanked with wide draining-boards, four slate sinks stretched beneath windows that had bars on the outside, and when the panes weren’t misted Brigid could see the yard sheds and the pump. Once in a while one of the garden boys drenched the cobbles with buckets of water and swept them clean.
‘Oh, yes,’ Mr Crome went on. ‘Oh, yes, indeed. That city famed in fable.’
‘Is it Italian steps he’s teaching them, Mr Crome?’
‘Austria is the source of the steps, we have to surmise. I hear Vienna mentioned. Another city of renown.’
Mr Crome’s sermon began then, the history of the waltz step, and Brigid didn’t listen. From the sound of the range dampers being adjusted, the oven door opened and closed, she could tell that Mrs O’Brien wasn’t listening either.
Nobody listened much to Mr Crome when he got going, when he wasn’t cross, when he wasn’t giving out about dust between the banister supports or the fires not right or a staleness on the water of the carafes. You listened then all right, no matter who you were.
Every morning, early, Brigid walked from Glenmore, over Skenakilla Hill to Skenakilla House. She waited at the back door until John or Thomas opened it. If Mr Crome kept her on, if she gave satisfaction and was conscientious, if her disposition in the sculleries turned out to be agreeable, she would lodge in. Mr Crome had explained that, using those words and expressions. She was glad she didn’t have to live in the house immediately.
Brigid was tall for her age, surprising Mr Crome when she told him what it was. Fair-haired and freckled, she was the oldest of five, a country girl from across the hill. ‘Nothing much in the way of looks,’ Mr Crome confided in the kitchen after he’d interviewed her. Her mother he remembered well, for she had once worked in the sculleries herself, but unfortunately had married Ranahan instead of advancing in her employment, and was now – so Mr Crome passed on to Mrs O’Brien – brought low by poverty and childbirth. Ranahan was never sober.
Brigid was shy in the sculleries at first. The others glanced in when they passed, or came to look at her if they weren’t pressed. When they spoke to her she could feel a warmth coming into her face and the more she was aware of it the more it came, confusing her, sometimes making her say what she didn’t intend to say. But when a few weeks had gone by all that was easier, and by the time the dancing-master arrived in the house she didn’t find even dinnertime the ordeal it had been at first.
‘Where’s Naples, Mr Crome?’ Thomas asked in the servants’ dining-room on the day Mr Crome first talked about Italy. ‘Where’d it be placed on the map, Mr Crome?’
He was trying to catch Mr Crome out. Brigid could see Annie-Kate looking away in case she giggled, and Lily Geoghegan’s elbow nudged by the tip of John’s. Nodding and smiling between her mouthfuls, deaf to all that was said, but with flickers of ancient beauty still alive in her features, Old Mary sat at the other end of the long table at which Mr Crome presided. Beside him, Mrs O’Brien saw that he was never without mashed potato on his plate, specially mashed, for Mr Crome would not eat potatoes served otherwise. The Widow Kinawe, who came on Mondays and Thursdays for the washing and was sometimes on the back avenue when Brigid reached it in the mornings, sat next to her at the table, with Jerety from the garden on the other side, and the garden boys beside him.
‘Naples is washed by the sea,’ Mr Crome said.
‘I’d say I heard a river mentioned, Mr Crome. It wouldn’t be a r
iver it’s washed by?’
‘What you heard, boy, was the River Danube. Nowhere near.’ And Mr Crome traced the course of that great river, taking a chance here and there in his version of its itinerary. It was a river that gave its name to a waltz, which would be why Thomas heard it mentioned.
‘Well, that beats Banagher!’ Mrs O’Brien said.
Mrs O’Brien often said that. In the dining-room next to the kitchen the talk was usually of happenings in the house, of arrivals and departures, news received, announcements made, anticipations: Mrs O’Brien’s expression of wonderment was regularly called upon. John and Thomas, or the two bedroom maids, or Mr Crome himself, brought from the upper rooms the harrowings left behind after drawing-room conversation or dining-room exchanges, or chatter anywhere at all. ‘Harrowings’ was Mrs O’Brien’s word, servitude’s share of the household’s chatter.
It was winter when Brigid began in the sculleries and when the dancing-master came to the house. Every evening she would return home across the hill in the dark, but after the first few times she knew the way well, keeping to the stony track, grateful when there was moonlight. She took with her, once in four weeks, the small wage Mr Crome paid her, not expecting more until she was trained in the work. When it rained she managed as best she could, drying her clothes in the hearth when she got home, the fire kept up for that purpose. When it rained in the mornings she could feel the dampness pressed on her all day.
The servants were what Brigid knew of Skenakilla House. She heard about the Master and Mrs Everard and the family, about Miss Turpin and Miss Roche, and the grandeur of the furniture and the rooms. She imagined them, but she had not ever seen them. The reality of the servants when they sat down together at dinnertime she brought home across Skenakilla Hill: long-faced Thomas, stout John, Old Mary starting conversations that nobody kept going, Lily Geoghegan and Annie-Kate giggling into their food, the lugubriousness of Mr Crome, Mrs O’Brien flushed and flurried when she was busy. She told of the disappointments that marked the widowhood of the Widow Kinawe, of Jerety wordless at the dinner table, his garden boys silent also.
Selected Stories Page 56
