‘She’s not in the house,’ he said. ‘But I can see her bed’s been slept in. Is this yours?’
My tie had turned up again.
I put my hand up to my neck, not claiming the tie but as if to indicate the benefits of an open collar in summer, while, under the circumstances, avoiding any suggestions that the practice might be associated with virility.
‘Where’s she got to? I want a word before,’ he jerked his chin in the direction of the kitchen, ‘the wife realises what’s been going on.’
A set of responses clattered through my head like lemons in a fruit machine.
‘Look now,’ he said. ‘Let’s be straight. I know these things happen. There aren’t many young saints around. But I don’t want needless hurt. You tell me where Margaret’s got to – and then we’ll get you out of here before the wife has a chance to see you.’
He was so reasonable I wondered what Margaret got up to usually. I had been too timorous perhaps about delving into that cornucopia.
‘Ah,’ I said wittily, ‘she’s not here.’
‘I told you that,’ he said.
The accent was not just Irish but southern Irish. He was a man from Eire, and one who signalled to a lad born at the sharny end of a country lane that he was a bloody peasant like my father, uncles and so forth.
‘You did,’ I said. ‘You did surely,’ I heard myself say with just the fatal hint of an inadvertent brogue.
‘So?’
‘Yes. Well, I was . . . at a party. At a party here. Very nice – well behaved. No nonsense. A party – with records and . . . soft drinks. Yes, well. My foot – I injured it—’
‘At the party.’
‘No–no, to be honest with you, shifting a wardrobe. A while ago. But someone stood on it last night. And Margaret said, you’re in no state to go home. My parents are away. You sleep in their bed – my bed. You sleep in my bed, she said, and I’ll sleep in their bed,’ I finished hopefully.
‘She’s not in their bed,’ he said.
‘No, she wouldn’t be. She’s at work.’
‘Where? Work?’
‘A summer job. She got it yesterday. That’s what she held the party for – to celebrate getting the job.’
‘And she’ll have made up the bed before she left.’ He nodded seriously. ‘She was always a tidy girl.’
He stood up and I took a grip on the stick.
‘You won’t mind going before the wife comes.’
Nodding enthusiastically, I levered myself up.
Softly, at the front door, still with that serious look, he said, ‘It’s best that you’re away before the wife comes through. You wouldn’t want to go through all that stuff again about the job and the party – not to speak of the wardrobe on your foot. That’s a cruel thing – a wardrobe.’ I edged away from him down the steps. ‘It must,’ he said solemnly, ‘have leaped like lightening.’
As a father, he struck me as being on the eerie side.
In daylight, being lost and without money presented no problems. After a sleep I could walk from now till tomorrow even if I had to hop the last hours one-legged. If I kept going I might spot a taxi and he could wait at the Kennedys’ while I fetched the fare. Three notes were tucked in the toe of a shoe under my bed so I wasn’t flat yet. There was a bye-law too, someone had told me, to the effect that you could ride a bus as long as you gave your name and address so the fare could be collected later. Or was that only children? Anyway the chances were that nobody would ever have told the hard-faced bus conductress.
‘Who’s boss!’
I glanced up and there was an old lady before a gate smiling complacently at a woman lugging a howling child up the steps. What I’d heard was the splash of the old lady shoving her oar in: Show him who’s boss: don’t let him dominate you. Him looked about three years old. As they struck a tableau on the top step, you could see her underskirt was grubby, and her legs just legs with the usual taut strings behind the knees, but still it never failed to be interesting how far up they went. Bent over, she let her irritation get the better of her and smacked the boy’s face. The howl shrilled up from assertion to outrage. And at that second he writhed round and saw my grinning face. It was the kind of straw that might help set a character for life. How could I explain to him that I wasn’t joining in the female conspiracy against him but only looking up his mother’s skirt?
‘Hey! you there!’ A remembered brogue turned me in my tracks.
A car had pulled up beside me. Mr Briody was leaning across the passenger seat. The door clicked open and he beckoned to me. ‘Get in!’
I had a conviction this was the pay off. Like most Irish, he would have been in America. He had been a slater in Chicago and learned from some Sicilian how to avenge the family honour by taking you for a ride.
Since my foot hurt, I got in.
‘Where to?’ he asked.
‘I’m going back to my digs, but anywhere—’
‘Would they be near the University?’
‘Two or three streets away.’
‘Right then. I can find my way to the University. I’ve given Margaret a run there. You can guide me from that. Right?’
‘Great. Thanks a lot.’
He put the car in gear and pulled away.
‘It occurred to me you might really have a bad foot and since I’m on holiday with nothing to hurry for I came after you.’
‘That was decent of you.’
After a time, I recognised a corner, then some shops. My neck was stiff with not looking in Briody’s direction.
‘Nearly there,’ he said, and added casually, ‘I wouldn’t have been surprised to see you running up the road like a two-year-old.’
‘Mr Briody,’ I said with a world of sincerity, ‘believe me – I mean Margaret and I haven’t – I’m trying to say that I’ve nothing but respect for your daughter.’
‘Margaret? Daughter?’ He twisted round to look at me while the car took care of itself. ‘You must think I’m a boy from the bogs or the greatest Christian since Matt Talbot gave up the drink. If it had been my daughter, I’d have degutted you.’
‘You’re not Margaret’s father.’
No slouch, I had worked it out.
‘Not an unwashed glass or a crumpled crisp bag the length and breadth of the house. But there, I suppose as well as making her bed she tidied up this morning before she went to work. It must have been a hell of a party.’ He made a creaking noise and I realised he was laughing. ‘Hand it to you for a quick tongue and the devil’s cheek. It beats Flaherty running bare-arsed up the lane from the widow’s.’
The moment for explaining how shamefully innocent I was seemed to have gone.
‘I’m Danny Briody’s cousin. Liam. He and Mary are over staying at the farm and we’ll be at their house a day or two. Then on to London and home again.’ He grinned. ‘And it’s nice to meet you too since you’re a friend of the family, as you might say . . . Don’t misunderstand me, mind. Danny’s a good skin. It’s not the first time Danny’s helped with the farm rent in a bad year. And there’s never a Christmas but I send over the plump birds that make a holiday a feast . . . It’s just that Mary and him go on about that girl of theirs until you’d have thought she was another Alfred Einstein.’
I didn’t correct him, reckoning that I’d drawn heavily enough for one day on my good luck account. Anyway for all I knew he might be thinking of another Einstein: Alfred the shyster lawyer or one-armed sheep-gelding champion of County Clare. Something like that.
‘Mind you,’ he went on, ‘I’m fond of Margaret. It’s just that I’ve wondered if she was as quick on the uptake as they say . . . You’ll be at the University yourself?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’ll be in the same class as Margaret?’
‘In the same year. We share a couple of subjects.’
‘Do you tell me that?’ He paused, cleared his throat and then asked in a rush, ‘Now, would you say she was doing well? I mean that she was doing wel
l? young pretty girl Was she able for it, would you say?’
‘We’re only in first year,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure how she got on in the degree exams.’
He nodded satisfied as if, without quite realising how, I had answered his questions. Then we were at the University and for the next five minutes we were busy as I called the turns.
‘Left at the next corner. This is me. You could let me out here.’
The car stopped as if he had hit a brick wall. Thrown forward, I caught the padded edge of the dashboard before my head battered the windscreen. Sputtering to the surface again, I saw him gaping through the windscreen at Kennedy. My landlord had one hand on his gate and in his turn was staring at us. The car must have squealed to a stop.
Kennedy looked at me through the glass. I saw his gaze shift to my companion. He took his hand from the gate and walked towards the car.
‘Mother of God,’ the man beside me whispered. ‘What’s he wanting with us?’
‘It’s Mr Kennedy – he owns the house I stay in.’
Kennedy was almost on us.
‘Don’t tell him who I am or where—’
The door opened and Kennedy bent in to me.
‘It’s yourself. We wondered where you got to last night.’
He was studying Briody across me as he spoke, but unexpectedly a hard fist in my side shoved me out, forcing Kennedy back as I sprawled from the car. The slam of the door made one noise with the roar of the engine as the car leaped from us.
‘Your friend’s in a hurry,’ Kennedy said. He watched the car squeal round the corner as if chased.
‘I don’t know him.’ Without knowing why, I had decided to do as Liam Briody had asked. ‘He gave me a lift.’
‘Where’d you come by him then?’
We were moving towards the house.
‘I thumbed a lift.’
‘Oh, yes.’
We turned in at the gate and he took out his key to open the door.
‘I finished up at a party last night. Got a bit too merry and stayed the night.’
‘At your age you want to watch the drink,’ he said, but not as if his mind was really on it.
‘I started walking home this morning and discovered I’d no money. Lucky I got a lift.’
‘Lucky,’ he said. He still hadn’t turned the key. His hand rested on it. ‘Especially with him being in such a hurry.’
In the hall, he asked, ‘Where was the party then?’
I started up the stairs.
‘It was a fellow I met,’ I said without looking back. ‘I got a lift to it.’
‘You’ve done well with the lifts,’ he said, but I kept going.
I lay on my bed like a fox gone to earth. There were no bones around to chew but I had found a tin of biscuits in my shirt drawer and lay nibbling custard creams. My best strategy might be to lie there into the foreseeable future.
Jackie came in without knocking.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t realise you were here.’
She did not look surprised.
‘Do you wander about my room when I’m out?’
‘There’s linen to change.’
‘Is that linen you’re carrying?’
She was not holding anything.
‘You’re in a funny mood,’ she said.
‘Not me.’ I took the corner off a biscuit. ‘I had this crazy notion you might be a foot fetishist. Sneaking in for a quick sniff at my socks.’
She shut the door behind her.
‘You want to watch what you say. You don’t want to let him hear you talking like that.’
‘He’s the one that’s in a funny mood. He was desperate to know where I was last night.’
I had never talked to her like that before. After the last couple of days I felt older – not any wiser, just older.
‘Why should he care?’ she asked.
For no good reason, I took that as an insult.
‘You’re supposed to be shocked at being called a fetishist,’ I said sourly. ‘Assuming you had the foggiest notion what I was talking about.’
‘Aren’t you the arrogant little bugger?’ she said. ‘Six months ago you walk in here not sure which spoon to eat your soup with and now you’re a walking dictionary and man about bloody town.’
I was getting used to people surprising me. It didn’t mean I had to like it.
‘Do you want a biscuit?’
To my surprise, she came over and sat beside me. I passed her the tin. There were only two biscuits left.
She ate neatly, picking at the edges with her small white teeth.
‘You have some dirty habits. The bed’ll be full of crumbs.’
‘If you’re changing the linen . . .’
‘Where were you last night anyway?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ I rolled out of the bed explosively. ‘Do you know my mother and father couldn’t be worse about checking up? I’m only a lodger, you know.’
‘Your mother,’ she said, looking at me unperturbed, ‘did she ever sniff your socks?’
‘That’s—’
I really almost said it: That’s dirty!
‘I think you won that one,’ I said. I thought about it for a minute then went on, ‘I was at Margaret’s house last night.’
‘The girl who brought the parcel here?’
‘Margaret Briody. Somebody gave me her address.’
My jacket was lying on the bed and I pulled out the card Brond had given me. She reached out and took it from me. I was anxious that she should believe me.
‘Before that I’d no idea where she lived. I met her in the Reading Room at the University.’
‘And she took you home.’
‘No!’ I said. ‘We went for a coffee and finished up going for a meal and when we came out . . . It’s a long story. I got the address from Brond – the man who—’
‘That was the fellow was supposed to get the parcel.’ She was quiet, attentive and seemed changed into someone I hadn’t noticed before was there. ‘Did she, this girl Margaret, take you to his place?’
‘No – nothing like that. When we came out of the restaurant a man was waiting for us. He took me there.’
‘But not the girl?’
‘I think she might have wanted to come but—’
‘How did the man know where you were? Did the girl phone Brond to tell him where to find you?’
I was shocked.
‘No!’ Even as I protested, I discovered that the idea’s shade had been drifting across the back country of my mind. ‘No. She wouldn’t do that.’
‘So anyway Brond got his parcel. What was in it after all the fuss?’
‘I didn’t find out.’
‘He took it and said thank you.’
‘Something like that.’
‘Was part of his thank you the girl’s address? Was it her kept you out all night?’
‘God!’ I said, ‘you and your old man are a pair.’
My voice lingered on ‘old man’. Sometimes I thought he was just past forty; other times with his long face and solemn ways he could have been ninety. She sat quiet. I tried to think of something to say but my mind was a blank. She stared at the floor, perhaps so she wouldn’t have to look at me.
‘It’s easy to get the wrong idea about him,’ she said. I had to strain to catch her words. ‘I forget too till something makes me remember my last year at school. I was supposed to go to college afterwards. My da was very proud that way. But all my da’s plans came to nothing that summer. From a child I’d always loved the summer for the town would be full of people and have a bit of life in it. My mother hated it, though – she would never take a lodger, but the shop did well enough so she didn’t have to. It was the winter she liked when we had the place to ourselves. In January the foam from the waves would drift down like cotton across our garden. Summer was for the young ones. I fell in love with him that summer.’
Imagining that last schoolgirl summer, it seemed unnatural to think of Kennedy
.
‘It was one day I went to the beach. There was a rock stood above the sea at one end and a crowd of young fellows, all visitors, daring one another but none of them would dive from it for the height and the white water round it. He was lying among the crowd sunbathing and when he sat up we looked at one another and he gave me a wink and got up. I thought the world had stopped talking when he dived so clean and neat from the very topmost part into that white water.’
‘That was—?’
I didn’t finish but nodded towards the door. I had the stupid idea she might be talking of some lover she had known before Kennedy came into her life.
‘Oh, it’s strange to think of it now,’ she said. ‘We had a wild time. I couldn’t tell you half the things he did. In spite of all my father could do, we were married by the summer’s end. And then we came here — for he’d bought this house, and was only back to Ireland a short visit on business.’ She shook her head as if in disbelief. ‘A short visit and him there all summer long . . . until he had me married.’
‘It doesn’t sound like the same man,’ I said, still stupid.
‘He changed,’ and she shivered as if wakening and looked at me sitting beside her on the bed.
‘But,’ she said and stopped as if the word could explain itself. She got up and put half the room between us by going to the window.
‘He’s down there,’ she said, ‘in the garden. He likes to be by himself working among the flowers – especially if he’s worried about anything. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that. He’s fond of the garden.’
There was no excuse for what came next. I had been through a bad couple of days but that was no excuse. Jackie was a fine-looking woman – somehow better-looking for being serious than before – who had been talking about her husband and was watching him now as if I didn’t exist; but that was something less than an excuse.
‘Ah,’ I said, ‘he’s a gardener and a worrier, and a high diver since you say so, and a good bookie’s clerk, I’ll believe that, and a nice boring little man altogether.’
I thought she hadn’t heard me, and then I thought she was ignoring me; and then I hoped she hadn’t heard, but she did answer, quietly, looking down into the garden.
Brond Page 10
