“Oh, that’s a well. That cover there has tae stay on it.”
“Do you hear that, son?”
“Aye, Ma.”
“Aye, if ye fell down that well,” Mr. Grant warned, “ye might end up in China, begod, and would nivver be heard of again. So that’s why that big stone’s over the tap of it.”
“You’ve been warned, son. You keep away from that.”
Herkie nodded for appearance’s sake. He was eyeing the big stone, already calculating the amount of effort needed to shift it.
“As I say, I’ll get that fan belt for ye in Willie-Tom’s and have her ready for ye as quick as I can.”
“It’s very kind of you, Mr. Grant. How can we thank you?”
“Oh, that’s all right, Mrs. Hailstone. I wouldn’t see nobody stuck—and me aunt wouldn’t, neither, God rest her. She was a good, religious woman. Went tae Mass every day.”
They followed him round to the front of the house and stood waving goodbye as his truck shuddered off again in the direction of the town.
“Look what I got, Ma,” said Herkie. He was proudly holding a battered leather wallet.
“Where did you get that?”
“On the path, Ma. Maybe Mr. Grant dropped it.”
“Well, whyn’t you give it back to him then?” She snapped it up and began riffling through it.
“’Cos I didn’t know if it was his, Ma.”
“I hope you didn’t steal it, son, for if you did you’ll be gettin’ a warm backside. We can’t be drawing attention to ourselves.”
Inside the wallet she found a novena to St. Anthony—patron saint of lost objects—two five-pound notes, a couple of stamps, and some hayseeds.
“Could I get me Action Man with that?”
“Now, son, are you gonna turn into your da, are you?”
Herkie kicked the ground and sighed. “No, Ma.”
“Good. Next time we see Mr. Grant, I’ll ask him if it’s his. If it’s not, then it means Saint Anthony threw it down from heaven to help us out, and you might—and I mean just might—get your Action Man.”
“Och, Ma…” Herkie kicked a stone, grudgingly accepting her verdict. But he wasn’t too disappointed. There was much to explore in this new playground.
After his ma had returned indoors, he made a beeline for the backyard. If China lay at the bottom of that well, he was determined to start at once on the removal of that big stone.
Chapter seven
Daylight gradually suffused Lorcan’s room, making the ceiling tiles stand clear. He’d had a fitful night and was glad that morning had broken. Wednesday. It would not be an easy day. Wednesday afternoons were largely taken up by the weekly meeting with his superior, Sir Edward Fielding-Payne. Those meetings were generally fraught. And tomorrow evening he had that other appointment—the one he didn’t even want to think about. To top it all, the previous evening he’d had a phone call from his ever-fretting mother to say her varicose veins were troubling her, a call that was calculated to make him feel guilty for his neglect of both her and the family business.
He eased himself into a sitting position and glanced at the easel in the corner. Would he ever be rid of the Countess? Her disquieting visage haunted his every waking minute. In the workplace he was retouching her and in his bedroom recreating her against his will. The thought of this dismayed him, as it always did, and he quickly switched his attention to the clock face. He saw it was six thirty. Time to get up. Already the day was rousing itself. The drone of buses was just about audible out on the Antrim Road. A muffled flushing sound from downstairs told him that Mrs. Mavis Hipple, his landlady, had emerged from her cluttered nest on the ground floor, directly below.
Yes, mornings had become more stressful these days, and he resented that. A couple of weeks back, a new lodger had moved into the room opposite his: an earnest, hymn-singing, tea-drinking Presbyterian lady in hand-knits and sensible shoes who answered to the name of Miss Florence Finch. She was one of those ladies whom his mother might describe as having “missed her markets” in the marriage stakes.
Miss Finch had upset his bathroom routine; a new strategy had to be worked out in order to accommodate her. The difficulty lay in her rodent-like quietness. Lorcan could never tell when she was up and about. They shared a bathroom, off the landing, which as yet—despite his many entreaties to the landlady—had no lock. This deficiency made for a great deal of anxiety and reconnaissance before he could venture forth each morning. Only the previous week, he had, to their mutual embarrassment, surprised Miss Finch in there. The demure lady had beaten a hasty retreat, complete with her knitting and a Victoria Holt doorstop of a paperback pressed to her bosom. The memory of the meeting still had the power to scorch his sensibilities like a gaucho’s branding iron. After much thought, however, he’d solved the problem: he’d invested in a transistor radio.
The radio, unlike a lock, fulfilled three separate functions. First: he could take it with him and listen to the news every time he used the bathroom. Second: the very sound of the radio would deter Miss Finch from entering at an inappropriate moment. Third: a quick twist of the volume knob would generate enough racket to drown out whatever lavatorial tumult he might set in motion.
It was a neat solution to a complex problem. He only wished he could tackle the rest of life’s little difficulties with such aplomb. He thought of his mother and the pub in Tailorstown—and shuddered.
But first things first. He threw back the bedcovers, went to the closet, hauled out a long gray raincoat, and pulled it on over his pajamas. This, again, was done out of consideration for Miss Finch because he sensed that she was a prudish lady, for whom a man wearing pajamas might be as diabolical a sight as seeing Adam in the Garden minus his fig leaf. He gathered up his wash bag and towel and peered out into the corridor. All was quiet; he felt he was safe enough.
Once inside Mrs. Hipple’s Lilliputian bathroom, fetchingly done up in shades of periwinkle blue and whorehouse pink, Lorcan switched on Radio Ulster and set about his ablutions.
The news items were mixed.
“Pope John Paul’s private secretary will today visit the Maze Prison for a second time. It’s understood that he will again try to persuade hunger striker Bobby Sands and his fellow protesters to call off the strike. President Ronald Reagan stated that the United States would not intervene in the situation, but said that he was deeply concerned at events. Bobby Sands has been on a hunger strike for a total of fifty-nine days, and his condition…”
Fifty-nine days, Lorcan thought. Fifty-nine days without food of any kind! He couldn’t even begin to imagine how that must be. He’d read somewhere that after only ten days the body begins to eat itself for sustenance; after twenty days toxins have built up in the liver, kidneys, and brain, leading to dehydration, cracked skin, extreme cold intolerance, vital-organ shrinkage, blindness, bleeding joints…the list went on and on. And that was “only” the physical pain. What about the mental torture? Twenty days, thought Lorcan—and tomorrow Bobby Sands will have been on a hunger strike for three times that. The man was surely a goner.
He stared at himself in the mirror—lean face, high-domed forehead, Roman nose, eyes the color of ice chips, not unhandsome—and wondered briefly how he might look after fifty-nine days of starvation.
“…news just in of a security alert on Royal Avenue, Belfast. Police report an incendiary device, discovered in the changing rooms of a boutique close to the City Hall. The area has been cordoned off following a telephone warning, and army experts are examining a package.”
Lorcan sighed and continued washing.
He pricked up his ears at the third news item. A man named Donal Carmody had been abducted from his home in West Belfast in the early hours of the morning. There was talk of IRA involvement. He thought of the ominous note he’d received yesterday and sighed deeply. The dreaded Thursday evening appointment was nearing. There was no way he could miss it. No way whatsoever. His hands shook as he pulled the plug on the washbasin
and dried his face.
Back in the safety of his room, he dressed quickly. He favored a bohemian look: jade-colored pin-cord pants with matching velvet jacket, a white poplin shirt, a satin fleur-de-lis waistcoat in brandy tan twinned with a butterfly bow tie in a similar design. Choosing what to wear to the office was seldom a problem for Lorcan. He’d seven white poplin shirts, one for each working day and two spares for evenings and weekends. Mrs. Hipple very kindly laundered and ironed them, folded them, and placed them in his chest of drawers. He’d three velvet jackets: jade, russet, and black; seven pairs of socks in corresponding hues, and four pairs of black shoes. His main extravagances were his cravats and bow ties, handmade by Robinson & Cleaver. He’d more than twenty. He liked to wear a different one each day.
All thoughts of running into Miss Finch and the ghastly appointment were now being supplanted by snatches of his mother’s phone call. They kept swirling about in his head like laundry on a slow spin.
Was he all right? It wasn’t safe in Belfast: far too many bombs. What if he got caught in one and lost an arm, or a leg, or an eye—or worse still, both eyes? How would he work then? When was he coming home? Was he getting enough to eat? Did Mrs. Hipple change his bed regularly enough? And finally, the news guaranteed to make him feel guilty: Her legs were playing up. The Crowing Cock was busy at weekends especially, what with Hipster Fred and the Heartbeats doing the Golden Oldie Friday session and the Beardy Boys every other Saturday. Weekdays were manageable, but only just. Bunions and varicose veins. She couldn’t be on her feet with those. A clot could go to the heart; Dr. Brewster had said so.
Henrietta Strong had given her son a bad night and a return of his chronic indigestion. Lorcan resented both; they affected his concentration. Concentration was paramount in a job such as his—in his day job and his “other” job here in his room. He doubted that Sir Joshua Reynolds ever had a lapse. But then Sir Joshua most likely didn’t have a mother fretting about leg problems, or the threat of having to do stand-in as a bartender whenever family duty called.
He went downstairs.
“Would tha’ be you, Lorcan?”
He found the landlady hard at work over the stove in the back kitchen.
“Good morning, Mavis.”
“Hey up, Lorcan!” she said cheerfully. No sooner was he seated than she was bearing a fully loaded breakfast plate to the permanently set table: gingham cloth, cups turned bottoms-up, and a cruet set in the form of ceramic squirrels atop a log.
The landlady, a pensioner with maroon hair and no eyebrows, hailed from Yorkshire but had settled in Belfast thirty years earlier, having married a drywall plasterer from Ballymurphy.
“Tha tea’s in ’t pot. And there’s more in ’t oven, if you want ’t.”
“Thanks, Mavis. No, this is quite sufficient.”
“Didn’t hear yer come in yesterday, I didn’t,” she said. “Ye got me note then, from yer mam?”
“Oh, yes. Thanks for that, Mavis.”
“Hope ever’thing’s all right?” She brought her own fry to the table and sat down. “Yer mam must get lonely on her own, she must. Hope she’s not poorly.”
Mavis liked to pick and poke at her lodgers for news. The parlor bay window did not supply enough gossip for her needs. It was at such times that Lorcan realized his life would be infinitely less complicated were he to live alone. But then he’d never lived alone; there’d always been a woman conveniently disposed to do for him. First his mother, followed by Mrs. Campbell, who ran a boarding house for students from the art college. And latterly, Mrs. Hipple.
“My mum poorly?” he said. “Oh, no, not poorly—just the usual. She worries too much.”
“Expect she’d like ye settled. A mam always likes a son to be settled afore she goes, like. You’s a nice catch for a woman, Lorcan.”
Don’t you start, he thought. One middle-aged woman fussing over me is bad enough.
There came a creaking of floorboards from above. The landlady raised her missing eyebrows to the ceiling. “That’ll be Miss Finch, it will,” she said, as she always did.
Lorcan lost his appetite at once. But he knew he couldn’t excuse himself until he’d made suitable inroads into the fry. Mrs. Hipple would otherwise be insulted.
“The tea’s a wee bit strong, Mavis,” he said. “Could I have some hot water, please?”
“Course you can, luv.”
In the thirty seconds or so that it took Mavis to maneuver herself out of the chair and cross to the stove, Lorcan had deftly swept a slice of bacon, a sausage, and half a tomato into the napkin on his lap and stuffed the lot into his pocket.
“God, is that the time?” he said, getting up. “Really got to be going.”
Mavis turned, kettle in hand, mouth open. “But—”
“Not to worry. I’ll save myself for your lovely supper this evening.”
He was down the hallway and out the front door before Miss Finch had time to place the square toe of her vinyl pumps on the first tread of the stairs.
He gave thanks to his gods for yet another escape.
Chapter eight
For all the misfortune and stress they’d encountered in the day, Bessie Halstone and her son slept soundly that night under the fusty covers and creaking timbers of Aunt Dora’s cottage.
They awoke the next morning to the sound of a cock crowing and the drone of a tractor a few fields distant. Never before had they experienced tranquillity to match it.
“Can I go out and play, Ma?” asked Herkie, climbing out from under a tartan rug on his couch bed and pulling on his clothes.
Bessie yawned and threw back the covers.
“Canna, Ma?”
“Can ye what, son?”
“Go out and play!”
“All right,” she said. She pointed to the ottoman at the foot of the bed where her clothing lay. “Hand me them things, there’s a good boy. We have to get breakfast somewhere. You can’t go farther than the garden, d’you hear? If you open that gate and go out on the road, there’ll be no Action Man.”
“Aye, Ma.”
“And don’t go near that well. D’ye hear?”
“Naw, Ma.”
Herkie ran downstairs and Bessie got out of bed. She pulled on her blouse and skirt, then went immediately to the dressing table and sat down.
Whereas other women might start their morning with a cup of tea, Bessie started hers with her makeup routine. Appearances mattered most. Yes, the inner life might be a mess, but the outer packaging must be kept pretty. That’s what people judged you on first. She believed this without question. So every morning without fail she set about the ritual of painting and powdering, yielding, like so many ladies with flimsy self-esteem, to the tyranny of the looking glass.
Her beauty might have coarsened in recent times, the stress and the smokes having done their baleful work. But she managed, through the application of cosmetics and the wearing of figure-hugging garments, to retain a certain kind of gaudy attraction, an attraction that frequently drew caustic looks from women and the glad eye of men—most usually those men of questionable reputation.
It was a bit unsettling to look into Aunt Dora’s misty mirror, but Bessie reckoned her own reflection more pleasing. Oh, yes: more pleasing by far. Down in the living room there was a framed photo of a woman whom she took to be the aunt: a grim-lipped old lady with a frozen perm, sagging jowls, and wire spectacles. “Probably never laughed in her life,” she said to the mirror, and immediately set to work on her face. Zsa Zsa Gabor was her role model. Every morning she’d plumb the depths of her battered makeup bag in an attempt to achieve Ms. Gabor’s sultry look.
She could hear Herkie outside, swinging on the garden gate and imitating a birdcall. Would he ever be able to sit still? Maybe being in the country would settle him. Less distraction, for a start.
A sudden loud thwacking noise from outside made her put down her powder puff. She crossed to the window and looked out. To her consternation, she saw Herkie methodically d
eadheading a line of pink and purple tulips with a stick.
“What the blazes d’ye think yer playin’ at?” she roared.
Herkie did not look up. He dropped the stick and ran out of sight. She sighed and returned to her makeup. Some chance of him settling anytime soon, she thought. No surprise, given what the boy had been through following his father’s death.
She blinked her mascaraed lashes, her makeup complete. Teased her bouffant hairdo into shape with a brush.
All the same, perhaps Packie’s dying had done them both a favor. Now she could do what she wanted. Be what she wanted.
Why, she could even stay here.
The thought struck her as she rose from the dressing table. Yes, in this lovely little cottage, miles away from her old life. The Dentist would never find her in these backwoods. In fact she’d probably be safer hiding out here for a bit. But money was the problem. She had funds to last a month at most. And if she was being brutally realistic, her sister Joan would probably part with only enough to keep her in smokes for a week.
She continued to ponder her dire financial situation as she entered the kitchen. The modest space, with its varnished beauty board, was sparsely appointed: A rusty gas stove. A refrigerator. A Formica table with spindly legs. And on the table, an Oriental tea caddy and a pewter teapot. She lifted the tea caddy. An alarmed spider scurried across the table and vanished. It was bad luck to kill them, she knew. Given her present circumstances, it was better to let the creature be.
She pulled open cupboards and drawers, not really knowing what she was looking for. If the aunt had died two months ago it was unlikely there would be any food.
She crossed to the window. A row of healthy-looking potted plants lined the sill. Mr. Grant must water them. What dedication!
A job is what I need, she thought. Yes, a catering position like the one I left behind. I still have my glowing references. Why not?
The window looked down into a small valley of sorts. At the bottom she was surprised to see an imposing three-story house, painted white and set in its own grounds. It was obvious she was seeing it from the rear. Lines of stone stables skirted the extensive yard, and there was what looked like a well-tended vegetable garden.
The Disenchanted Widow Page 5
