by Joan Lingard
He took the books from his bag and laid them on the table in front of her.
‘You can dip into some of these.’
‘Fantastic!’
He wondered if any of Alec McCaffy’s pupils had ever pronounced anything to be fantastic in a class of his.
Clarinda opened one of the books and began to study the plates. ‘Looking at these makes me want to get on and do something.’
The door opened at their backs and his friend Ken Mason put his head in. ‘Oh, you’re busy, Cormac.’ He was about to withdraw.
‘No, it’s all right. I’m just coming.’ He’d promised to go for a drink with Ken.
Clarinda was gathering up the books. ‘Thank you very much for these, Mr Aherne,’ she said and clutching them to her bosom, left them.
‘Keen student?’ asked Ken.
‘Very keen.’
‘You can be such a fool at times, Cormac, like an innocent abroad!’ Rachel told him on the day he arrived home to tell her that he had been suspended. Sent home like a recalcitrant schoolboy by the headmaster. He had been sent home once before, when he was a pupil in primary school, for telling a teacher that he liked her blouse. You could see her bra through the gauzy material. The other boys put him up to it. ‘Go on, Cormie, tell her!’ ‘What did I do wrong, sir?’ he asked the headmaster. ‘It’s a nice blouse.’ He was told not to be cheeky and to hold out his hand. Then he was sent home to consider his sin. His mother took the headmaster’s side.
So once again, here he was, considering. Some people never learnt. They were standing in the kitchen, he and Rachel, and Davy was upstairs in his room watching television with the sound turned up too high, which, for once, had its advantages. Rachel had come in only a minute ahead of Cormac and had not even had time to take off her coat when he’d blurted out his news. She was resting her back against the counter top as if her legs were too weak to hold her up. Cormac ran the cold tap and took a long drink. It soured his mouth to think that Archie Gibson had offered no word of support even after they’d concluded the formal part of the proceedings. He’d stopped at the door of his room to give him the opportunity but he’d been hunched over his desk with blank eyes writing a report for some damn fool bureaucrat. That legion of nit-pickers and snoopers that polluted the land. Cormac had seen Archie’s eyes flicker but he hadn’t looked up. So much for friendship. He took another drink of water. And now here was his wife calling him a fool.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, Cormac,’ she said with a sigh, heaving herself off the counter. ‘I didn’t mean it, really I didn’t.’
‘Yes, you did. And perhaps I am.’
She gave her head a quick shake as if to settle what was going on inside it. ‘It was just – well, it was a shock, damn it all! And you’re so impulsive always. You never stop to think and as a result you leave yourself exposed. You’d think you might have learnt to protect yourself a bit better by this time.’
She was not by nature a harsh woman, except in odd moments, when she was exasperated as well as distressed. And this was one of them. She had been taken completely by surprise and so had spoken what was in her mind, without thinking. He didn’t doubt that any woman would be upset to hear that her husband had been accused of making sexual advances to a minor, a pupil in his care, and might even entertain a grain of doubt about his innocence. And what she had to say was true, about protecting himself. Putting up a guard. Covering his flanks. As in war. His trouble was that he was too spontaneous by nature and that on occasions had infuriated her. Like the time when they’d met some people on holiday in Greece (exceedingly boring as well as greedy people, said Rachel, telling the tale to friends afterwards) and he’d said casually that they were welcome to come and stay with them in Edinburgh and they did, two adults and two gargantuan teenagers, for ten whole days of the Festival in August, treating their house like a free B&B, expecting an evening meal thrown in, to which they contributed a cheap bottle of Bulgarian plonk that Rachel saw priced at one pound ninety nine in a supermarket. ‘Why don’t you think, Cormac, before you open your mouth?’ she asked after the freeloaders had departed. It was always said that he was like his father in that respect, as well as being good with his hands. That was his mother’s term for it.
His father had been an ebullient man and liked a good laugh. He had a repertoire of jokes. ‘Have you heard the one about the man coming to the funeral, knocking on the door and asking, “Is this where the dead man lives?”’ He’d throw his head back and laugh till his wife left the room shaking her head. He liked a drink as well, did Pat Aherne, nothing wrong with that for he never drank too much or came home stocious, swearing and falling all over the place and beating up his wife and child, like some, like their next-door neighbour who was a Salvationist when sober. Pat Aherne liked the company as much as the beer and was known in the pub to be good crack.
He gave up the shoemaking since he was an obliging man and his wife thought he could do better for himself, and her. He got a job as a commercial traveller, later to be known as a sales representative, and thereafter he sold shoe polish the length and breadth of Ireland. He liked travelling the country, meeting people, and he liked staying in the cheap bacon-and-egg hotels and bed-and-breakfasts run by soft-bosomed women. It was great, he told his son, getting bacon and egg and fried potato bread set in front of you every morning and no one wanting to nag at you! He got a car, too, and on Sundays he’d take his wife and child and one or two of his wife’s sisters for runs down the coast to Bangor and Donaghadee. The women would sit gossiping in the car while he and the boy kicked a football and built castles on the beach, sculpting the sand carefully, building it up piece by piece, until they could sit back on their hunkers and admire their handiwork. Their work of art. They never jumped on it to flatten the pile. ‘Let the sea take it when it’s ready,’ said Cormac’s father. ‘The main thing is to have built the castle.’
By this time the women would be getting restless and Cormac’s mother would have wound down her window and be calling out, ‘Are the two of youse not done yet? It’s getting chilly.’ To cheer them up Pat would buy them all ice cream sliders and the aunts would curl their tongues round the edge of the ices to stop them dripping on their Sunday clothes and say, ‘You’re in the money, Pat!’ ‘Not that much!’ his wife would retaliate sharply. It was all very well for him to be so open-handed and buy ice creams all round, not to mention standing rounds in the pub but, at the end of the day, it was she who would have to make ends meet.
At the end of the day, Cormac’s father disappeared. He didn’t come home one Friday afternoon as usual.
‘There’ll be a woman involved,’ said his Aunt Lily knowingly. ‘You can take my word for it! There usually is.’
His mother had feared that her son might grow up in the image of his father. He heard her say to her sister Lily in the kitchen one day that maybe it was as well his father had done a bunk. ‘He’d have been a bad influence on the boy so he would.’
‘Cormac, I was talking to you.’ Rachel’s voice had softened. ‘Don’t think you heard me though, did you?’
He blinked. His wife was regarding him quizzically. She had taken off her coat and was sitting at the kitchen table. She looked tired. She’d probably had a hard day at work and the last thing she needed was trouble at home.
‘What did you say the girl’s name was?’
He did not recall saying. ‘Clarinda Bain,’ he said now with some difficulty.
‘What age is she exactly?’
‘Sixteen.’
‘Thank goodness for that! At least she’s past the age of consent.’
‘She was only fifteen when we were in Paris.’ ‘Oh no!’
‘She had her sixteenth birthday the day after we came back.’
‘That won’t be taken into account.’
‘When I am called to account? Rachel, I want you to know that I did not attempt to seduce her.’
‘It’s terrible that you should be suspended on her say-so.’
‘It’s the rules.’
‘Oh, I know Archie wouldn’t have done it if he could have avoided it. But what evidence do the Bains have?’
‘None, except Clarinda’s word. But that is enough. A word from her. And one from her mother.’ He groaned at the thought of her mother. She would not be a reluctant witness in the box, she’d let her imagination take wing and soar into orbit.
‘What are we to tell Sophie? Fourteen is a such a difficult age, especially for coping with something like this. At least Davy’s too young for it to impinge on him.’
‘What will other people think?’ said Cormac, his voice edged with sarcasm which Rachel did not appear to be registering. ‘No smoke, you know.’
‘It’s not going to be very amusing, certainly.’
‘No, not exactly a laugh a minute. I’ll be tarnished.’ He wondered if he should scrub his hands until they were pink and raw and clean. Clean hands, clean heart. His heart didn’t feel clean; it felt murderous. Towards Archie Gibson, which was not rational, and Clarinda Bain, which was.
‘Clarinda Bain,’ said Rachel. ‘Wasn’t she the pretty fair-haired girl who played Ophelia in the school play last year? Good actress.’
‘Yes, she should do well in the witness box.’ Witness box? Was all of this real? He still had the feeling of being caught up in a nightmare that must surely end with the coming of daylight. But no matter which way he turned he could see no light.
‘She looked very mature for her age.’
‘They all do these days.’ He patted his pocket then remembered that he had given up smoking a couple of years ago. Sophie’s nagging had made him give up as much as anything else. She had threatened to leave home for a cleaner environment if he did not.
‘I suppose,’ said Rachel, then stopped.
‘Suppose what?’
‘Well, you didn’t …? No, I’m sure you wouldn’t.’
‘Oh good, I’m glad you have faith in me.’
‘She couldn’t have, well, misread the signals?’
‘What bloody signals? I don’t give out signals, dammit, I’m not a transmitter, I talk to my pupils, I try to educate them. That’s my job. Was my job.’
‘All right, no need to go on! It’s just, knowing you—’
‘Do you?’
‘For God’s sake, Cormac, let me finish!’
‘So what do you wish to say about knowing me?’
‘It’s just that you might have put your arm round her in a fatherly sort of way and she might have misinterpreted that. You are a very tactile person, aren’t you?’
‘I can’t help being tactile. It’s the way I am. You like me touching you, don’t you?’
‘I’m your wife, Cormac. But she—’
‘We are strictly forbidden to lay a finger on our pupils. Sometimes you forget and you put a hand on their shoulders. You might even brush against them, inadvertently. Don’t you ever touch your patients?’
‘Of course I do, when I examine them. It’s part of my job, and that is understood.’
‘But don’t you ever want to lay a hand on them in a purely reassuring way? Don’t you ever want to say to them, “It’s going to be all right?”’
‘Sometimes I might but I’m conscious that there’s a thin dividing line between what is admissible and what is not. I’m very careful, always.’
‘I’m sure you are. Bloody careful! You’d never act without thinking, would you?’
‘I have to be careful. I’d be struck off if I weren’t. But don’t take it out on me, please, Cormac! It’s not my fault.’
There it was: the first crack in their marriage. Not true, of course: with temperaments as diverse as theirs there had inevitably been small cracks and fissures over the years, but they had mostly healed or been plastered over so that the ruptures did not show, except in times of stress.
Rachel yawned suddenly, allowing a wave of tiredness to sweep over her. She stood up. They looked at each other, then he opened his arms to her and she moved into them, letting her head fall against his shoulder. He rested his face in her hair. ‘It’s going to be all right,’ he wanted to tell her, but the words would not come.
Chapter Three
On leaving Clarinda’s tea shop Cormac unlocks his bicycle and cycles back across Princes Street, stopping off to buy two litres of milk which he stows in his wicker basket. The rest of his shopping he did the night before. He finds it a boon that one can shop at all hours of the day and night.
He opens up his shop. Cormac’s Carry-Outs. Come and get them freshly cut! When he started he put leaflets through the letter boxes of various companies in the area. This is his little empire. Here, he can do whatever he wishes. He has freedom of choice. He can make tuna sandwiches with raspberries, smoked mackerel with cream cheese, pork with anchovy, should it take his fancy, which it doesn’t particularly. He doesn’t have to be answerable to anyone but his customers. And if they don’t like what he has on offer they can go elsewhere. The sandwich business is booming. They have grown up around the city like mushrooms. Quick Bites. Better Bites. Food for Thought. And so on, and on. Sometimes there’s just the owner’s name. Quite a few of the names are Irish, Cormac has noted, and is not sure what to make of that. That the Irish are good at making sandwiches or that they’re more often desperate and on their uppers? His mother would go mad if she saw his name emblazoned above a shop selling sandwiches.
So now, instead of nurturing young minds, putting ideas into their heads that won’t lead to secure jobs in the Scottish Office or Scottish Widows, he is feeding the bellies of the citizens of Edinburgh, the bank and insurance clerks, the legal secretaries, the lawyers, the hairdressers and psychotherapists, the slaters and steeple jacks, the road diggers, the traffic wardens, the policemen who pull up in their squad cars on the double yellow line, the occasional housewife who wants to eat someone else’s sandwiches for a change. He gets all kinds. It takes all kinds to put enough money through the till, to fill his belly and that of his son. He is not prepared to be subsidised by his wife. Or ex-wife, as she really is, even though they are not divorced. She offered, but he refused.
He goes through to the kitchen at the back and lays bacon in neat rashers under the grill. BLT is always popular, as is tuna mayonnaise and coronation chicken, though he does do a few more esoteric mixtures using avocados and Chinese gooseberries. He takes the ingredients for today’s fillings out of the fridge, which is everything in the fridge. When Rachel finishes work he will borrow the car and go to Cash and Carry and stock up again.
Selina, his help, arrives. She is a former student, one that did listen to his talk. She is a painter and likes to paint predominantly in oil on large canvases. None of her friends can afford them. She comes in stripping herself of various garments to reveal her usual black garb of black leggings and black T-shirt. She has rings in her ears and rings in her nose and perhaps in other places, too, for all Cormac knows. He is glad that, so far, Sophie has shown no sign of getting pierced. One of her friends got her tongue done and it went septic; he thinks, hopes, that may have put Sophie off.
They set to work and by eleven o’clock have laid out on the shelves their offerings of bread sandwiches, on brown, white and rye, and various shapes, sizes and types of rolls, all tidily wrapped in cling film. Cormac takes satisfaction in the presentation of his sandwiches; he wants each one to look perfectly cut, yes, sculpted. When he sets them out he likes to be able to think, I cannot improve on this, they are everything anyone could wish. When he used to complete a piece of sculpture he would think, it lacks an element, it needs something more, it is not as perfect as I would have wished, as I anticipated, as it was as a concept in my head. ‘So, you see,’ he says to Selina, ‘there is great aesthetic satisfaction to be derived from working in a sandwich bar. And much less trauma than trying to produce a work of art.’
‘You could talk your way round anything, Cormac,’ says Selina. ‘You remind me of my mother’s Uncle Gerry. He was Irish too.’
; They stand behind the counter with their handiwork on show, awaiting customers. They begin to trickle in, without fail, which is another aspect that Cormac appreciates. There is no suspense, no waiting to see if anyone will come, as he has had to do in the past when he had a show. And even then, half of those who did come would turn their backs on the exhibits – his creations – and chat to other inveterate exhibitiongoers whilst downing as much free wine as they could lay hands on. Those who come into his shop come for one purpose only: to purchase sandwiches. The main flood comes normally between twelve and one-thirty, then it dwindles to a dribble again.
At half past two, Gentleman Jock pays them his daily visit in his long tattered overcoat with the newspaper stuffed down the front. He pushes an old bicycle with flat tyres and broken spokes; from its twisted handlebars hang an assortment of old carrier bags. He is one of the old homeless, not the new, who are to be seen dotted at regular intervals along Princes Street with their dogs and pieces of cardboard saying HOMELESS AND HUNGRY. Jock has been on the road for more years than he can remember, though once he worked in a hotel, had a good job, accommodation provided, was working up to be head porter, and then he had a nervous breakdown, and that had more or less been that.
‘What do you fancy today then, Jock?’ asks Cormac. ‘Cheese and pickle? Smoked chicken and salad?’
Jock fancies anything as long as it is edible. He waits on the pavement while Cormac goes to fetch the food. He would never make a move to come inside or expect to be asked. He understands. Nevertheless, Cormac feels badly that he never does ask him to come through to the back kitchen and warm himself. Who does he think he is? Lord Muck doling out hand-outs and feeling pleased with himself? But take care not to pollute my cosy little world! Do not step over the mark. Bloody hypocrisy. ‘But he stinks,’ says Selina. ‘The place would smell like a doss house afterwards. You’d lose customers. You might have to close. You’d be out of work. And so would I.’ In spite of having listened to him during her formative years she is sensible, sharp and streetwise. He makes a mental note to bring in a pair of thick hiking socks for the old fella.
