Cheating at Canasta

by William Trevor

  ‘She was looking for the towpath. She asked me where it was. I don’t know who she is.’

  The long, peaky features might never that afternoon, or any afternoon, have been other than they had become in the brief time that had passed: devoid of all expression, dead, a dribble of tears beginning.

  Then Jasmin’s companion of so many conversations, and whom she had begun to love, shambled off, and the woman said nothing until he reached the blue-painted ornamental gate and again disappeared around the side of the house.

  ‘Was there anything?’ she asked then. She stared at Jasmin. Slowly she looked her up and down. Jasmin didn’t know what her question meant.

  ‘Did he do anything to you?’ the woman asked, and Jasmin understood and yet did not. What mattered more was that he had cried, his happiness taken from him, his smile too. He had cried for her. He had cried for both of them. All that she understood too well.

  ‘Who are you?’ the woman asked. Her clenched-back voice, deprived of the energy of its anger, was frightened, and fear clung to the tiredness in her face.

  ‘Clive’s my friend,’ Jasmin said. ‘There wasn’t nothing wrong. We done nothing wrong.’

  ‘That’s not his name.’

  ‘Clive, he said.’

  ‘He says anything. Did he give you drink?’

  Jasmin shook her head. Why should she say? Why should she get him into trouble?

  ‘You reek of drink,’ the woman said. ‘Every time he gives them drink.’

  ‘He done nothing.’

  ‘His mother was my sister. He lives with us.’

  If she’d asked him, Jasmin said, he would have explained about his name. But the woman just stared at her when she began to tell her that she, also, had given herself a name, that sometimes people wanted to.

  ‘My sister died,’ the woman said. ‘He’s been living with us since that. He thought the house would be empty this afternoon but it wasn’t because I changed my mind about going out. You worry and you change your mind. Quite often you do. Well, naturally, I suppose. He’s been on charges.’

  ‘He was only going to show me, like, where it is he lived.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Jasmin.’

  ‘If this is known they’ll take him in again.’

  Jasmin shook her head. There was a mistake, she said. The woman said there wasn’t.

  ‘We look after him, we lie for him, my husband and I. We’ve done our best since my sister died. A family thing, you do your best.’

  ‘There wasn’t anything.’

  ‘My sister knew his chance would come. She knew there’d be a day that would be too terrible for her to bear. He was her child, after all, it was too much. She left a note.’

  ‘Honestly, I promise you.’

  ‘I know, I know.’

  The woman got into her car and wound the window down as if she intended to say something else but she said nothing. She turned in the quiet road and drove back to her house.

  Frying chops, Holby prodded them occasionally with a fork. He liked to blacken them, to see the smoke rising while still not turning down the gas. It got into her hair, Jasmin’s mother maintained. Smoke like that was greasy, she insisted, but Holby said it couldn’t be. He heard the door when Jasmin came into the kitchen and he called out to her, knowing it wasn’t her mother who’d come in.

  ‘How you doing, girl?’

  All right, Jasmin said, and then her mother was there, back from her time with her betting-shop friend. Even through the smoke, her entrance brought a gush of the perfume she so lavishly applied when she met her men.

  ‘What’re you frying, Holby?’ She shouted above the sizzling of the meat, and Jasmin knew there was going to be a quarrel.

  In her room, even with the door closed she heard it beginning, her mother’s noisy criticisms, Holby’s measured drone of retaliation. She didn’t listen. Probably he had guessed at last about the betting-shop man, as her father had once guessed about him. Probably it had come to that—the frying of the chops, the smoke, the grease no more than a provocation, a way of standing up for himself. And Holby—today or some other day—would walk out, saying no man could stand it, which Jasmin remembered her father saying too.

  She pulled the curtains over and lay down on her bed. She liked the twilight she had induced; even on better days than this she did. Tired after the walk to the house with the man she had begun to love, and after that the walk alone to where she lived herself, she closed her eyes. ‘You like to go in here?’ he asked again. He carried her coffee to where she waited. She felt the touch of his fingers when he put the necklace on for her. ‘The sun all right for you?’ he said.

  In the room she still had to imagine there were books on shelves, the vase of flowers, the pictures of castles. In a courtroom he put a case, his papers in one hand, gesturing with the other. They belonged, he said on the towpath, the rowers going by.

  Downstairs something was thrown, and there was Holby’s mumble, the clank of broken china when it was swept up, her mother’s voice going on, her crossness exhausted as the woman’s had been. He had been shamed by the woman getting things wrong and was the kind to mind. He didn’t realize the woman didn’t matter, that her talk and her fury didn’t. He wasn’t the kind to know that. He wasn’t the knowing sort.

  Her mother’s voice was different now, caressing, lying. She sent Holby out for beer, which at this stage in the proceedings she always did; Jasmin heard him go. Her mother called up the stairs, calling her Angie, saying to come down. She didn’t answer. She didn’t say that Angie wasn’t her name. She didn’t say anything.

  When she went there, he would not be on the seat in the sun. He would not be waiting in the bus station. Nor playing the machines. Nor in the McDonald’s. But when Jasmin closed her eyes again his smile was there and it didn’t go away. She touched with her lips the necklace that had been his gift. She promised she would always keep it by her.

  At Olivehill

  ‘Well, at least don’t tell him,’ their mother begged. ‘At least do nothing until he’s gone.’

  But they were doubtful and said nothing. They did not promise, which she had hoped they would. Then, sensing her disappointment, they pacified her.

  ‘We’d never want to distress him,’ Tom said, and Eoghan shook his head.

  She wasn’t reassured, but didn’t say. She knew what they were thinking: that being old you might be aware of death loitering near, but even so death wasn’t always quick about its business. And she hated what had been said to her, out of the blue on such a lovely day.

  She was younger by a year than their father, and who could say which would be taken first? Both of them suffered a raft of trivial ills, each had a single ailment that was more serious. In their later seventies, they lived from day to day.

  ‘We’ll say nothing so,’ she said, still hoping they would promise what she wished for. ‘Promise me,’ she used to say when they were boys, and obediently they always had. But everything was different now. She knew they were doing all they could to keep things going. She knew it was a struggle at Olivehill.

  ‘Don’t be worrying yourself,’ Eoghan said, his soft blue eyes guilty for a moment. He was given to guilt, she thought. More than Tom was, more than Angela.

  ‘It’s just we have to look ahead,’ Tom said. ‘We have to see where we’re going.’

  They were having tea outside for the first time that summer although the summer was well advanced. The grass of the big lawn had been cut that morning by Kealy, the garden chairs brushed down. What remained of tea, the tablecloth still spread, was on the white slatted table, beneath which two English setters dozed.

  ‘It’ll be cold. I’ll make some fresh,’ she said when her husband came.

  ‘No. No such thing.’ Still yards away and advancing slowly, James contradicted that. ‘You’ll rest yourself, lady.’

  Having heard some of this, she nodded obligingly. Both of them disregarded a similar degree of deafness and in
other ways, too, were a little alike: tall but less tall than they had been, stooped and spare. Their clothes were not new but retained a stylishness: her shades of dark maroon, her bright silk scarf, his greenish tweeds, his careful tie. Their creeper-covered house, their garden here and there neglected, reflected their coming down in the world, but they did not themselves.

  ‘Thanks, Mollie,’ the old man said when his wife uncovered his toast, folding away the napkin so that it could be used for the same teatime purpose again. His toast was cut into tidy rectangles, three to a slice, and buttered. No one else had toast at this time of day.

  ‘You’re turning the hay?’ He addressed both sons at once, which was a habit with him. ‘End of the week you’ll bring it in, you think?’

  Before Thursday, they said, when there might be a change in the weather. They were more casually turned out, in open-necked white shirts and flannel trousers, working farmers both of them. Tom and his family lived in a house on their land that once had been an employee’s. When he could, which wasn’t every day, he came to Olivehill at this time to be with the old couple for an hour or so. Once in a while his wife, Loretta, came too and brought the children. Eoghan wasn’t married and still lived at Olivehill.

  Spreading lemon curd on his toast, James wondered why both his sons were here at teatime; usually Eoghan wasn’t when Tom came. He didn’t ask, it would come out: what change they proposed, what it was that required the arguments of both to convince him. But in a moment Eoghan went away.

  ‘You’re looking spry,’ Tom complimented his father.

  ‘Oh, I’m feeling spry.’

  ‘Fine weather’s a tonic,’ Mollie said.

  And James asked after Loretta, which he always did, and asked about his granddaughters.

  ‘They have the poor girl demented with their devilment.’ Tom laughed, although it wasn’t necessary, it being known that his demure daughters, twins of four, hadn’t yet reached their mischievous years.

  They were an Irish Catholic family, which once had occupied a modest place in an ascendancy that was not Catholic and now hardly existed any more. When Mollie first lived in this house the faith to which she and James belonged connected them with the nation that had newly come about. But faith’s variations mattered less in Ireland all these years later, since faith itself mattered less and influenced less how people lived.

  ‘Angela wrote,’ Mollie said, finding the letter she’d brought to the garden to show Tom.

  He read it and commented that Angela didn’t change.

  ‘Her men friends do rather,’ James said.

  Angela was the youngest of the children, a buyer for a chain of fashion shops. She lived in Dublin. The one that got away, Tom often said.

  He and Eoghan hadn’t wanted to. They still didn’t, feeling they belonged here, content to let Angela bring a bit of life into things with her Dublin gossip and her flightiness.

  Tom folded the letter into its envelope and handed it back. James slowly finished his tea. Mollie walked round the garden with her older son.

  ‘You’re good to indulge me, Tom,’ she said, even though she had hoped to hear that what had been kept from their father would not come about at all. It made no sense to her that the greater part of Olivehill should be made into a golf-course in the hope that this would yield a more substantial profit than the land did. It was foolish, Mollie thought after Tom had gone, when she and James were alone again with the setters; yet her sons weren’t fools. It was graceless, even a vulgarity, she thought as they sat there in the evening sun, for no other word was quite as suitable; yet they were not vulgar.

  ‘Are we at one?’ she heard James ask, and she apologized for being abstracted.

  He loved to use that old expression. He loved to be reassured, was reassured now. How profoundly he would hate what she had protected him from, how chilling and loathsome it would seem to him, how disappointing.

  ‘You’re looking lovely,’ he said, and she heard but pretended not to so that he’d say it again.

  Eoghan drove carelessly to the hayfield. There never was other traffic on these byroads, never a lost cyclist or someone who had walked out from Mountmoy. A wandering sheep was always one of their own. But there wasn’t a sheep today, only now and again a rabbit scuttling to safety.

  You could sleep driving here, Eoghan used to say and once, in the heat of an afternoon, had dropped off at the turn to Ana Woods. He’d woken up before the old Austin he had then hit a tree. Not that it would have mattered much if he hadn’t, he always added when he told the story: all the cars he had ever owned were past their best, purchased from Chappie Keogh, who had the wrecking yard at Maire. Easygoing, good-hearted, seeming to be slow but actually rather clever, Eoghan had grown from being a sensitive child into a big, red-haired man, different in appearance from the others of his family, all of whom were noticeably thin. He was content to take second place to Tom. They had all their lives been friends, their friendship knitted closer in each succeeding span of years.

  He drove in to where earlier he’d been turning the hay. He finished it within an hour, not hurrying because he never did. Then he went on, to Brea Maguire’s at the cross, where he drank and talked to the men who came there every evening. It would be a bad mistake, disastrous even, to go on doing nothing about Olivehill. They had wanted her to understand that, and hoped she did.

  Nine days later James woke up one morning feeling different, and had difficulty on the stairs. His left leg was dragging a bit, a most uncomfortable business, and at breakfast he discovered that his left arm was shaky too. Reaching out was limited; and he couldn’t lift things as easily as he used to. ‘A little stroke,’ Dr Gorevan said when he came.

  ‘Should he be in his bed?’ Mollie asked, and James said he’d no intention of taking to his bed so Dr Gorevan prescribed instead a walking-stick. When she heard, Loretta came over with a sponge cake.

  James died. Not then, but in the winter and of pneumonia. There had not been another stroke and he was less incapacitated than he had been at first from the one he’d had. A fire was kept going in his bedroom, and the family came often, one by one, to talk to him. But he was tired and, two days after his eightieth birthday, when the moment came he was glad to go. It was a good death: he called it that himself.

  In the house to which Mollie had come when she was a girl of nineteen, where there’d been servants and where later her children were born, there was only Kitty Broderick now, and Kealy was the last of the outside men. In the bleak dining-room Mollie and Eoghan sat at either end of the long mahogany table and Kitty Broderick brought them the meals she cooked. Everywhere there was the quiet that comes after death, seeming to Mollie to keep at bay what had been withheld from James. But one evening after supper, when the days had already lengthened and there was an empty hour or so, Eoghan said: ‘Come and I’ll show you.’

  She went, not immediately knowing what for; had she known she would have demurred. Well, anyone would, she thought, passing from field to field.

  ‘You can’t do this, Eoghan,’ she protested, having been silent, only listening.

  ‘We wouldn’t if there was another way.’

  ‘But Ana Woods, Eoghan!’

  They could go on selling timber piecemeal, as had been done in the past, another half-acre gone and replanted every so often, but that hadn’t ever been a solution, and wasn’t a way now in which the family could recover itself. It would tide the family over, but tiding-over wasn’t what was needed. The woods were part of the whole and the whole had to be put right. Doing so on the scale that was necessary meant that the machinery for such an undertaking could be hired at more favourable rates. With more timber to offer it would fetch what it should, not dribs and drabs that added up to nothing much. And the well-cleared land could be put to profitable use. Eoghan explained all that.

  ‘The Bluebell Walk, though, Eoghan! The beeches, the maples!’

  ‘I know. I know.’

  They went back through the yards and s
at down in the kitchen. The setters, who had accompanied them in the fields and were not allowed in the kitchen regions, ambled off into another part of the house.

  ‘For a long time,’ Eoghan said, ‘there’s been waste. Papa knew that too.’

  ‘He did his best.’

  ‘He did.’

  Parcels of land had been sold in much the same small way as timber had, a source of funds when need arose. Everything higgledy-piggledy, Eoghan said, the distant future forgotten about. It was an irony for Mollie that James, aware that he’d inherited a run-down estate, had struggled to put things right. The agricultural subsidies of the nineteen eighties and nineties were the saviour of many farms and were a help at Olivehill too, but they were not enough to reverse generations of erosion and mismanagement. ‘It’s maybe we’re old stock ourselves,’ James had said when he became resigned to defeat. ‘It’s maybe that that’s too much for us.’

  Often Mollie had heard this tale of woe repeated, although always privately, never said in front of the children. In his later life James’s weariness marked him, as optimism had once. At least the furniture and the pictures were not sold, faith kept with better times.

  ‘It’s hard,’ Eoghan said. ‘I know all this is hard, Mamma.’ He reached out for her hand, which Tom would have been shy of doing, which Angela might have in a daughterly way.

  ‘It’s only hard to imagine,’ she said. ‘So big a thing.’

  They could keep going in a sort of way, Eoghan said. Tom and his family would come to live at Olivehill, the house they were in now offered to whoever replaced Kealy when the time for that arrived. A woman could come in a few mornings a week when Kitty Broderick went, economies made to offset any extra expense.

  ‘But Tom’s right,’ Eoghan said, ‘when he’s for being more ambitious. And bolder while we’re at it.’

  She nodded, and said she understood, which she did not. The friendship of her sons, their respect for one another, their confidence in their joint ventures had always been a pleasure for her. It was something, she supposed, that all that was still there.