The Disenchanted Widow

by Christina McKenna

  Her nearest neighbor was clearly well-off.

  Interesting.

  “God, Ma, look what I found!”

  She turned back from the window to see an agitated Herkie carrying in what looked like a filthy shinbone.

  “Get that disgusting maggot outta the house this minute, son!”

  “But, Ma, whose is it?”

  “How the hell should I know, son? A horse’s or a cow’s maybe. Get it out.”

  He came and held it under her nose. To Bessie’s horror, a fat red earthworm detached itself and plopped at her feet. “Throw that filthy thing away this minute! D’ye hear?”

  “But, Ma, maybe it’s the aunt, and maybe he cut her up and—”

  “Son, I’ll be cuttin’ you up if ye don’t get rid of that now!”

  She chased him out the door and watched as he threw the bone over a nearby hedge.

  “Now,” she said, taking him by the ear and leading him back into the house. She pulled a tissue from her pocket. “You’re gonna pick up that disgusting thing, throw it outside, and wash your hands. When you’ve done that, we’re goin’ into the town to get something to eat.”

  Twenty minutes later they were sitting at a claggy table in the only eatery in town: the Cozy Corner Café. The place was deserted save for an elderly woman nodding over a cup of tea and whispering animatedly to a bottle of HP Sauce.

  “Ma, why’s that oul’ doll talkin’ till the brown sauce?”

  “’Cos she’s dotin’, son.”

  “What’s dotin’, Ma?” Herkie had started up a rhythmic kicking of the table leg, hungry for sustenance and some distraction.

  “Talkin’ till sauce bottles when ye’re ninety, that’s what dotin’ is. Now, stop askin’ silly questions, and stop kickin’ the table!”

  Herkie curled his lower lip in a sulk. “Canna have some ice cream?” The boy’s taste buds were permanently in sugar-fix mode.

  “Now, son, you’ll be eating a fry, like normal people do this hour of the morning. That’s if we ever get served in here.” She looked about her. “Not as if they’re run off their feet.”

  Finally the proprietor, Josie Mulhearn, a midlife crisis in a soiled overall, emerged through a beaded curtain behind the counter, wiping a dinner plate. Bessie, with half an eye still on the menu, was aware of the plate being slowly set down while she and the boy were scrutinized with almost palpable mistrust.

  It was only when the widow looked at her pointedly, raising an eyebrow, that Josie finally decided to extricate herself from behind the counter and slap her way across the linoleum.

  “What is it yis’ll be wantin’?” she asked, a well-chewed blue ballpoint poised over a grubby note pad.

  No “Good morning; how are yous today?” Bessie noted, feeling that her presence was already causing offense.

  “Two fries, a cup of tea, and a glass of milk for the boy, please.”

  “Now, the fries might take a bit, for I’ve run outta gas, so I have. Had tae cook for a funeral yesterday evenin’, and—”

  “The fries are off then?” Bessie cut in. What in heaven’s name is wrong with these people? You asked a simple question and got a bloody life history.

  “Aye, the fries is off,” said Josie, peeved. She was sizing Bessie up, wondering who this flashy stranger might be. “Are yis just passin’ through, are yis?”

  “In that case we’ll just have the scones.”

  “Right ye be.” Miffed, Josie headed back through the beaded curtain to fix their order.

  There was a notice board near the door. Now, if only to pass the time, Bessie got up to take a closer look at it. Meanwhile, Herkie, bored beyond measure and annoyed that he wasn’t getting his ice cream, pulled the sugar bowl toward him and began pouring salt into it.

  The board played host to a collection of FOR SALE and WANTED notices.

  Missing, spanneil dog brun with white ears and black paws

  Reward oferred

  Kittens FREE to good home.

  Handie Man for higher to do wee odd jobs about the place. Can do plumming, tiling, painting and the like. Ring 226485

  Get your fortune told by Madame Calinda as seen on the TV!!!

  This Thursday one night only in Slope O’Sheas Bar!

  No time waisters

  The usual stuff, Bessie thought to herself, which was more than could be said for the spelling in these parts. But there was one advertisement, neatly typed, that stood out from the rest.

  Wanted: Priest’s Housekeeper

  Temporary position for three months.

  Must have pleasant manner and good catering skills.

  Apply in writing to: Father Connor Cassidy,

  St. Timothy’s Parochial House, Tailorstown.

  The widow found herself scribbling the details in her diary. At that moment, the seed of a plan that might bear fruit had dropped onto the fertile soil of her imagination, almost as though the sower in the parable had cast it, albeit unwittingly.

  She returned to the table just as the tea and scones were arriving. She saw that Herkie had spilled most of the sugar and was busy graffitiing the tabletop with what looked suspiciously like life-size male genitalia, but which he earnestly claimed was the head of Dumbo the Elephant.

  Josie, holding her tray poised above the table, glared at Herkie’s artwork.

  “That table was clean afore yis sat down at it,” she said accusingly. “And look at the state of it now.”

  Bessie Halstone shook her head gravely, determined to humor Josie. “I do apologize,” she said. “It’s the artist in him, I’m afraid.”

  She took the tray from Josie.

  “We’ll just move to another table. Oh, by the way, would you know where I’d find St. Timothy’s parochial house?”

  “Ye might try lookin’ for it beside St. Timothy’s parish church, like a Christian wud.”

  Be gracious, be gracious, Bessie told herself.

  “Thanks.” She eyed the tray of tea and scones. “Oh, those look nice. Did you make them yourself?”

  “Bake everything meself in here. It’s me café, after all.”

  Oh dear! No time at all in the town and she’d made an enemy already.

  Chapter nine

  So, how are you faring with the Reynolds?”

  Sir Edward Fielding-Payne croaked out the query from behind the vast desk in his antiquated, book-lined study. He’d been curator of the museum for so long he was beginning to resemble one of the exhibits, with his world-weary, watery gaze; the cloud of brittle gray hair riding a bony, waxlike visage; the knobbed knuckles like shot scallions. He would linger over words and was so deliberate in his manner that one could be forgiven for believing he was measuring the time left to him and savoring its bald scarcity. Seventy-four years on the planet had earned him that at least.

  “The Reynolds, sir?” replied Lorcan. “Slow, but extremely well nonetheless.”

  “I take it you’re still grappling with her intimates?” Sir Edward, a man of the old school—or, better said, the old-boy school—spoke a form of Victorian English that often made his communication stilted.

  “Sorry, her whats?”

  “Her…her embonpoint, man! Bosoms.”

  “Oh, yes, another week should do it, I’m happy to—”

  “Sir Joshua,” the curator interjected, bringing a crooked forefinger to his mouth to stifle a cough, “was a rather interesting fellow.”

  Being of solid Anglo-Irish stock, Sir Edward did not pay much attention to the opinions of those he considered to be from the “lower orders.” Lorcan Strong fitted into that category—as did practically everyone else who crossed Sir Edward’s path.

  “Rather too largely and strongly limned,” the curator continued, hauling Lorcan out of his reverie like a boatswain weighing anchor.

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  “Boswell said that of him.”

  “Ah. I see.”

  “Yes, a well-born and well-bred English gentleman. One must do right by his m
emory.”

  “Yes indeed, sir.”

  He hated these weekly meetings. Sir Edward, eccentric and a staunch stickler for protocol, could be willfully unpredictable. He’d ramble through thickets of verbiage and fire off arcane quotations simply to try and catch Lorcan out.

  “A bachelor all his life,” he waffled on. “It wasn’t for the want of ladies, I dare say. He had enough of those to paint. A poof. What say you?”

  All bachelors in their thirties—including Lorcan—were homosexuals in Sir Edward’s opinion. He rarely missed an opportunity to vent his views on the subject.

  “I couldn’t really say, sir.”

  “He had all the hallmarks of a queer fellow-me-lad in my book.”

  Lorcan, not wishing to get himself entangled in a parley over the sexual proclivities of a pre-Victorian painter, tried to avoid commenting by feigning a sneeze. He drew a handkerchief from his inside pocket.

  And wished he hadn’t.

  Onto Sir Edward’s desk plopped the remains of Mavis Hipple’s spurned Ulster fry: the charred sausage, the slice of bacon, and the half tomato. The items lay in a neat little group atop the highly polished wood. The artist saw at once an interesting still life worthy of Cézanne himself. Great art could be realized in the most absurd of situations. Was that not its genius?

  The curator stared at the food offerings. His lips were pursed, causing the bristles of his mustache to extend outward. Lorcan was put in mind of a pig, Mrs. Hipple’s favorite barnyard animal. Since becoming her lodger, it seemed he’d been served every part of the humble hog, bar the grunt.

  “Sorry, sir,” he said at last. “My landlady isn’t the greatest of cooks, and one has to be polite.”

  The sausage, bacon, and tomato had come to rest by a framed photo of the formidable Lady Constance Fielding-Payne, the curator’s wife, which took pride of place on the desk.

  “Yes, a queer fellow, I’d say,” Sir Edward continued, his gaze drifting toward a cut-glass decanter to his right. It was clear that the faux pas was being overlooked.

  Lorcan, cheeks burning like a workman’s brazier, seized the opportunity to raise himself discreetly off the chair and briskly brush the food items back into his hankie.

  “Even so, fairy chappie or no, one must do right by his memory. I have no need to tell you how valuable the portrait is. A million pounds would not be an overestimation by any means. So, no fiddling about with bits of her that aren’t there. No surplus rendering. Lady Constance was never one for surplus rendering. Frills belong on cabbages, not on necklines.”

  “I couldn’t agree more, sir.”

  “Your foray with Lady Blessington was…how should one put it…”

  “Too slow? Yes, I apolo—”

  “Too fulsome. It was Lady Fielding-Payne who drew my attention to it.”

  “Oh, really?” said Lorcan, believing that his boss was about to wander off into one of his endless orations on the finer points of eighteenth-century portraiture. He slipped the food into his jacket pocket, prepared to be bored senseless, if only to save his own embarrassment.

  “Lady Fielding-Payne has an eye for the abstruse,” the curator was saying. Lorcan, half-listening, was unprepared for what came next. In his jaded mind’s eye he’d been morphing Sir Edward’s image into that of the victim in Blake’s Satan Smiting Job with Boils. He’d been busy etching in a couple more nasty-looking furuncles on the cheeks when the boss’s tone shifted up a gear.

  “I say, my dear fellow, are you with me?”

  “Yes, yes indeed, sir! Of course, sir.”

  “You seemed a little distant there. Now, what I’m saying is: Proponents of the Grand Style are not to be meddled with.”

  “Oh, yes, I couldn’t agree more. The Grand Style…is what Reynolds is—I mean was—all about.”

  “Exactly! He made his sitters, the ladies especially, more elegant than they actually were. Hence his popularity. I dare say most of them looked like pigs’ bladders, given what we know. Now you, my dear fellow, would appear to be ‘improving’ on his hard work.”

  “Well, thank—”

  “It is meant,” said Sir Edward, holding up a hand, “in the pejorative sense, my boy.”

  He donned his spectacles and checked his timepiece, an ornate fob watch, passed down the generations by his great-great-grandfather, who’d been an equerry to William IV.

  “Almost time for my glass of claret. Will you join me?”

  Never having shared such an intimacy with his employer, Lorcan assented with alacrity. He was still smarting from Sir Edward’s phrase “the pejorative sense”; it had a nasty edge to it. Could the claret, he wondered, be a way of easing the pain for what was in store?

  There was a tense little silence as Sir Edward moved to a side table and applied himself to the decanting process.

  “Thank you, sir,” Lorcan said, accepting a glass, “but I don’t understand.”

  The curator harrumphed. “No, I dare say you don’t.” He raised his own glass briefly. “Chin-chin!” He resumed his seat.

  “You’re not pleased with my work, sir?”

  “Mmmm…Château Tour du Videau. Splendid! I have it on good authority, my boy, that the uplift brassiere was not an undergarment with which ladies in the eighteenth century would have been acquainted. Lady Fielding-Payne knows about such things. We popped into your studio the other evening and she was most displeased by what she saw.”

  “But it’s still a work in progress. I—”

  “And progressing entirely in the wrong direction, it would seem.”

  He consulted his desk diary. “You need a holiday, my dear fellow. I see you haven’t taken one in two years. The work becomes stale if you don’t take a break from it now and then. Recharge the old batteries. Let the wind blow about your vitals.”

  “But I don’t want a holiday. I don’t need a—”

  “Nonsense! Everybody needs a break. What d’you think you’re made of, man? Galvanized tin? Pig iron?” He chortled at his little witticism.

  “Well, no, but—”

  “There’ll be no well-no-buts about it. You’ll take time off when I say so.” He stabbed the diary with a finger. “And I say the day after tomorrow: the first of May. Is that understood? Back here at the end. Hopefully those wretched hunger strikers will start kicking the bucket any day now. And you can be sure that when they do, their Fenian supporters will run riot. You’re best out of it. They tell me that Sands chappie is on his last legs, thank goodness.” He raised his hands. “Imagine electing a ruffian like that to sit in the English Parliament! Worse than Caligula appointing his horse to the Senate of Rome. At least the blessed horse had breeding.” He shook his head and fixed an eye on Lorcan. “So, are we agreed on the first of May? A little leave of absence?”

  Lorcan found himself being bundled off on vacation without having much choice in the matter. He was reflecting on a rumor that was doing the rounds of the museum. Word had gone out that the curator’s niece had just graduated from Cambridge, in archaeology and restoration. It didn’t take an Einstein to figure out what was afoot.

  “Yes sir,” was all Lorcan could say. He was in no position to argue with his supervisor. He thought of his mother and the pub in Tailorstown, and of his dreaded appointment the following evening. Perhaps a month at home was what he needed. Perhaps the gods were trying to tell him something. “If you insist, sir.”

  “I jolly well do insist. Now, here’s to it. Bottoms up!”

  There was a pause while Sir Edward took another calming sip of wine. Lorcan set his glass down with care and stood up.

  “Well, I’ll be going, sir, if that’s all.”

  “You haven’t touched your claret.”

  “No, I’ll pass on the claret if you don’t mind.” He moved to the door. “Bad for the concentration. One needs a clear eye and a steady hand for the work I do. It’s more demanding than, say, being a trainee archaeologist.”

  “Breast flannels!” bellowed Sir Edward. There was a hin
t of triumph—perhaps smugness—in his voice.

  Lorcan turned, nonplussed. “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  “It’s what the ladies wore before the brassiere was invented, according to my wife. The Countess of Clanwilliam had no uplift to speak of; therefore Reynolds wouldn’t have given her one. Mind you don’t, either.”

  Lorcan could hold his tongue no longer. How dare Sir Edward’s snooty wife cast aspersions on his fine restorative work?

  “Perhaps you’d inform your good wife, sir,” Lorcan said slowly and evenly, “that wealthy ladies in those days, and especially those who were able to engage the services of Mr. Reynolds, could afford to wear corsets, which pushed their…their…assets up, as it were. Flannels were for the less well-off.”

  Sir Edward’s mouth fell open. The sheer impertinence of it!

  “I say, steady on, old—”

  “Now, if that is all, I have a lot of work to do before I go. Good day!”

  No one, not even his boss, had the right to show such disrespect.

  Lorcan left the room, not slamming the door but shutting it quietly, as a gentleman would, on such blatant Anglo-Irish disparagement.

  Chapter ten

  As luck—or misfortune—would have it, the repair to Bessie’s car was delayed. According to Mr. Grant, the unexpected death of Willie-Tom’s mother had closed the shop in Killoran for three days, to “get him over the wake and funeral and the like.”

  Deep down, though, Bessie Halstone, with her newly revived surname and unexpected circumstances, was glad of this interlude. It gave her time to think. And the longer she dallied in the lovely, quaint cottage among Aunt Dora’s things, the more she wanted to stay. After all, who would find her there? She was sure that the Dentist would not even have heard of a small place like Tailorstown.

  A place to lay low was one thing. Finding money to live on was quite another. Not that Packie had provided her with much security at any time, but there’d always been something coming in, whether by fair means or foul—mostly foul—to keep the wolf from tearing down the door.