The Kiss

by Joan Lingard

  At three, Cormac has to go, to leave Selina to do the final clearing up. He jumps back on his bike and heads for the school playground where he joins the gaggle of mothers and grandmothers and the occasional father and grandfather clustered round the gate.

  The phone is ringing as they come in. Davy drops his bags and goes ahead to answer it.

  ‘Oh, hi, Grandma!’ he says. ‘We were at the Cash and Carry. You know, where you get cheap stuff. For Dad’s sandwiches. He thought he’d best get it today even though he doesn’t open on Saturdays, so he’ll be all set for Monday.’

  Cormac can imagine his mother’s reaction at the other end of the line. ‘Sandwiches, Davy? What sandwiches?’

  ‘For his sandwich bar. He makes all kinds. I like BLT the best.’

  ‘Better give me the phone.’ Cormac holds out his hand.

  ‘You’re working in a sandwich bar,’ says his mother, her incredulity travelling across the Irish sea. What an amazing thing science is, Cormac reflects, and what a damned nuisance it can be too. Oh for the days when letters went to and fro bobbing about on the waves taking days, weeks, to reach their targets. Or perhaps, if one was lucky, going soggy on the sea crossing, and sinking without trace.

  ‘I’m not working in one, Ma. It’s mine. I’m the proprietor.’

  ‘What is a sandwich bar?’ she demands to know. Of course she is out of touch with modern life. How could she not be sitting there in her terraced house, leaving it only to venture to the corner shop and the church? Sandwich bars don’t touch her life, God may be praised for that.

  ‘A place that sells sandwiches,’ he explains patiently. ‘It’s got nothing to do with a pub. I only sell orange and apple juice in cartons and Coca-Cola, Seven-Up and Irn-Bru in tins.’

  ‘You’re running one of these things? When I think—’

  ‘I know, I know!’ He can follow her thoughts. She will be relishing the memory of every sacrifice, every cream bun passed over, every holiday not taken, so that he could get a good education. And then he went to Art College! He might have been better leaving school at sixteen and learning a trade. He could have had his own plumbing business by now and be driving a BMW. But he is being too cynical. She’s a decent woman, after all. And it’s indecent of him to be lampooning her, even in his head. She’s got courage and nerve and holds steady to her beliefs, qualities not to be dismissed. And she brought him up, fed him and cared for him. He sighs and says he’s sorry.

  ‘But why aren’t you at the school?’ When he went into teaching, giving way, on marriage, to realism, she thought he had come to his senses. ‘You never got the sack, did you?’

  He is only half listening. He has been thinking about Rachel on their wedding day, her dark head sleek under a white veil – both mothers had been so happy that it had been a proper church wedding with all the trimmings, even though the bride was five months pregnant – and how she looked up at him with her calm grey eyes and agreed to take him on for better or worse. He thought then that there was no way this bond between them could ever be rent asunder.

  ‘Did you get the sack, Cormac?’

  ‘No, Ma, nothing like that. I just decided to leave.’

  ‘To leave! Don’t you realise how lucky you were to be having such a good job? And to exchange it for a sandwich bar!’

  ‘I always liked cooking,’ he says defensively. ‘It’s creative.’ And easier than sculpture, he adds, and more lucrative, but too quietly for her to hear.

  ‘Making sandwiches is not what I’d call cooking!’

  He remembers hers as white-breaded, triangular, daintily cut, and crustless, with thin fillings of fish paste, egg and cress, ham, and something called sandwich spread which was a kind of salad cream with bits in it. The sandwiches rested on snowy white doilies and were served up when the priest or her sisters came to call. Cormac tells her that sandwiches are a different affair entirely these days; they’re hearty, offered up on long slices of baguette or in thick Italian rolls, and bursting with filling. He rattles off a list of fillings, hoping to stun her into silence, or perhaps even impress her. Tuna mayonnaise, coronation chicken, brie and lettuce, smoked salmon and cream cheese, Stilton and celery, ham and pineapple, turkey and avocado, BLT—At that she stops him in his tracks, demanding to know what BLT means.

  ‘Bacon, lettuce and tomato. Very popular. Mine is an upmarket sandwich bar, Ma. No greasy fried egg rolls for my customers.’

  ‘Who buys these sandwiches of yours?’

  ‘The hungry. Working men and women.’

  ‘Why don’t they bring their sandwiches with them from home? It doesn’t take a minute to spread a piece of bread and put a filling in. Any fool could do that. They must have money to burn. Or else they’re too lazy, more like.’

  ‘Convenience food, Ma. It’s a new age.’

  She sighs. ‘It’s time I was away.’ Her voice goes down like a gas flame dwindling to a peep.

  ‘Come on now, Ma, there’s plenty life in you yet.’

  Silence. He thinks he can hear the waves sloshing.

  ‘Are you all right, Ma?’ He rattles the receiver rest.

  ‘How can I be all right?’ It is barely a whisper.

  ‘Will Aunt Lily be coming over to see you?’

  ‘Lily has her own life to lead. She has her own friends.’

  ‘Well, listen, just you hang in there and I …’ This is a repeat message. ‘Ma, are you listening? Are you?’

  The next day being Saturday, it is his turn to have Sophie, and for Davy to go to his mother. The boy goes eagerly, getting up at the first call, dressing swiftly and packing his overnight bag without being chivvied. Cormac tries not to feel depressed. Sophie, by contrast, when she arrives, shows no sign of eagerness. She can’t stop yawning and when he asks her what she would like to do she lifts one shoulder in a shrug. To make anything of the day they need an uplift and so he decides to take her out for lunch to a small French bistro in the old town, even though he can’t really afford it. That’s you all over, Cormac, his mother would say. Oh shut up, Ma, he says silently, can’t you let me get me on with my own life!

  They walk up to Princes Street, cutting across the stream of Saturday shoppers that eddies and flows along it carrying multitudes of carrier bags. The new leisure activity, Cormac murmurs. New since he was a boy, he means. He and his mother went downtown only when he needed a new blazer or school shoes. Nowadays, the shoppers are out even on Sundays thronging the malls and carpet warehouses. Shopping has replaced Sunday worship, he comments, as they wait in the middle of a restless group for the red man to change to green. It is an activity that can be done en famille.

  ‘It’s disgusting,’ says Sophie in a loud voice. ‘Spending all that money when half the world is starving. It’s not as if they need all those things.’

  That draws a few dirty looks from those around them. Fortunately the light changes at this point and they all surge forward. Cormac is surprised himself by Sophie’s remark. It wasn’t long ago that she was out with everyone else on a Saturday rummaging for cheap earrings and eyeliner and the latest hit single, spending every penny she could lay hands on, trying to cadge more when she came home. He notices that she is not wearing eye make-up today and is dressed in some long woollen garment that has seen brighter days. She must have entered a new phase. Surely not in the two weeks they’ve been living apart! Can she have changed that quickly? Or has he been so preoccupied with his own affairs that he hasn’t even noticed? He is cheered, however, to know that Sophie is developing a social conscience. The young are so materialistic now, compared with when he was a student. A pompous thought, but he can’t help thinking it. It’s not their fault: they are products of the market economy.

  They pass along by the side of the art gallery and come to the steep rise of the Playfair steps which will take them up to the shoulder of the Mound. As usual there is a grubby young man sitting at the foot of the steps guarded by some sort of German wolf hound slavering unpleasantly between yellow teeth. C
ormac has never been fond of dogs since one bit him on the calf when he was a boy. He is an urban man, likes streets and lights and people, and feels that animals have no place in the city fouling its pavements and green spaces. The path along the Water of Leith is littered with dog turds for children to slip and slide on, mess up their hands with, and infect their eyes. Recently a boy, after falling on dog shit on the riverside pathway, has gone blind. Cormac wonders how this young man manages to feed the dog, though not out loud, for Sophie would certainly counter with a quick attack.

  ‘Give him something, Dad,’ she says.

  He tosses a twenty p coin into the young man’s cap.

  ‘Give him some more,’ she urges. ‘Twenty p is nothing.’

  He throws down a pound coin and the young man winks at Sophie. He has a rather distinctive mark below his left eye. Looking closer, Cormac sees that it is a birthmark shaped like a kite. He puts a proprietorial hand under his daughter’s elbow, not that she would be likely to need his protection. She would probably be readier than he to deliver a swift kick to the man’s shins should he become obnoxious. They begin their ascent of the steps.

  ‘That doesn’t solve the problem, you know,’ he says.

  ‘I’m aware of that.’

  ‘Some of them could get jobs if they tried.’

  ‘They could always open sandwich bars. If they had the dosh.’

  He makes no reply. It would be too boring to pursue the conversation. And he doesn’t want to have any arguments with his daughter on the one day in the week that they spend together. This is supposed to be what is known as ‘quality time’. Another phrase that makes him shudder.

  They reach the High Street and turn down the narrow Fishmonger’s Close, watching their feet on the cobblestones slippery with bird shit. He loves the mediaeval old town, would have liked to have lived in it if it were not for the children and their schools. He likes the closed-in feeling of the streets, its areas of secret darkness, and the way the buildings huddle together, whereas Rachel prefers the space and light of the Georgian New Town. It was amazing that they had ever got on together, and yet not. Their recognition of each other was immediate and explosive, a meeting of minds and bodies. He remembers it vividly, the sudden wonder of it, the laughter, their inability to let go of each other. And now … He almost slips and is saved by Sophie’s hand.

  ‘Thanks, my love. I always knew a daughter would come in useful one day.’

  The bistro, which is housed in a seventeenth-century building, lies at the foot of the alleyway. The low-ceilinged rooms are bustling and cheerful with the sound of talk and clink of glasses and cutlery and Cormac is delighted to be taking his daughter out to lunch. He holds her chair.

  ‘Can you afford this?’ she asks, peeling off her mittens and unwinding two long woollen scarves from around her neck. ‘Are sandwiches selling like hot cakes?’

  ‘Sure! No problem.’

  He orders a bottle of house red with their food.

  ‘Will you have a glass?’ He doesn’t need to ask. She has two glasses, might have three if she were given the chance. But she is only fifteen. She leans her elbows on the table. She becomes talkative. She talks of going to Greece, of wandering from island to island. All normal teenage stuff. Dreams of freedom, casting off the parental shackles. Cormac is reassured. Rachel was saying that Sophie has been behaving oddly and playing hookey from school. She asked him to try to find out what Sophie is up to. ‘She talks to you more than to me,’ said Rachel.

  ‘How’s school?’ he asks.

  She wrinkles her nose. ‘It’s so cut off.’

  ‘From what?’

  ‘The real world.’

  He could start up a little homily on the value of education but decides against it. She knows what he thinks on the subject, anyway. And he is less sure about the value of anything now. What has it ever done for you? she might ask. Look at you, forty-four years old, all that taxpayers’ money spent on you, and there you are making sandwiches which any fool could do. You might as well have left school at sixteen. You might have worked your way up to owning a chain of sandwich bars by this time with other people doing the cutting and slicing.

  ‘How’s your mother?’ he asks casually.

  ‘Seems OK. Busy. She’s always busy, isn’t she, with all her committees and whatnot? As if she’s afraid to stop.’

  They have finished the wine. Cormac turns to catch the waiter’s eye and catches the eye of Clarinda Bain instead.

  The police came to interview him the day after he was suspended. Two constables arrived, a man and a woman. He felt the woman’s aggression the moment he opened the door; it hit him like a slap in the face with a wet cloth. It was the first of many such looks he would encounter.

  ‘Cormac Aherne?’

  He admitted his identity.

  ‘May we come in?’

  He held open the door. He was prepared to co-operate; it would be foolish not to. He’d do anything to get out of this hellhole that he had been dropped into. Anything? That remained to be seen.

  ‘Look,’ he said to the constables as soon as they’d taken off their hats and seated themselves side by side on the pale-blue leather settee that he and Rachel had purchased just before he’d taken off for Paris. Paris! His favourite city! Would he ever be able to go there again? ‘Look,’ he said again, extending his hand, appealing to them, ‘this whole business has got out of proportion.’

  It was not for them to make any judgement on that; a complaint had been made against him by a minor, of a serious nature. She was not a minor now, he pointed out. But she was then, they retaliated. By a week, he countered futilely, but all this was just by way of being a red herring, of playing for time that was not available.

  ‘Can I just say that I did not attempt to seduce her!’

  ‘She claims that you did.’

  ‘She bloody well made advances to me.’

  The policewoman looked at him stonily. Did he expect her to believe that? That a fifteen-year-old pupil would try to seduce her forty-four-year-old teacher who was already sporting a number of grey hairs and who was carrying more weight than when he was in his prime?

  ‘I’m not the first poor sod to be dumped in the shit like this,’ he told them. ‘It’s happened before. You must read the papers?’ Careful now, Cormac. He could hear Rachel’s voice in his ear. Don’t say anything that will antagonise them further.

  They were perfectly polite, he couldn’t complain about that. They asked him to come down to the station with them and make a statement.

  ‘You’ll get your chance to put your side of the story then,’ said the male constable.

  ‘So it’ll be my word against hers?’

  ‘Unless there are witnesses,’ said the woman.

  ‘Witnesses?’

  ‘Other pupils. Teachers.’

  He thought of Alec McCaffy, the teacher who had accompanied him on the school trip to Paris, standing in his felt slippers and paisley dressing gown in the rain outside their hotel watching him hand Clarinda Bain out of a taxi, and his spirit fell even lower. Rachel was right when she told him he could be such a fool.

  ‘I’ll take my own car if you don’t mind,’ he said.

  But they did mind. They preferred him to come in theirs.

  ‘So that I won’t do a bunk?’

  They smiled non-committally.

  They escorted him down his garden path, one going out in front, the other bringing up the rear. He felt as if he were being frogmarched. A dangerous criminal, a sex maniac, who might leap out of the bushes at any young girl who happened to be passing. He did not dare look to right or left for fear of encountering a neighbouring eye. The presence of the well-marked police car in the street would not have gone unnoticed.

  After he’d made his statement he half expected to be charged but they said he might go. They would be continuing their investigations, interviewing witnesses, before deciding if there was a case to answer. There would be a case, he didn’t doubt that.
The Bains, mother and daughter, would stretch their considerable imaginations to the limit. They wanted his blood. How was it that he used to extol the imagination at every opportunity? Use your imagination! he would tell his classes. Don’t just sit there like turnip heads! Some of them had listened.

  He went for a walk in the Botanic Garden. He badly needed air and room to breathe. There was space here in this quiet oasis with its wide views of the city skyline. At this time of the morning few people were about except for the occasional mother with a pushchair. The day was fresh but mild and the colours were just beginning to take on the first tinges of autumn. A swirl of wind ruffled the dry leaves, sending a bright scatter across the grass in front of him. For a moment, his mind, like his sight, was taken by the colourful pattern of the leaves on the green sward, then it was swamped again by the knowledge that was cutting into the very centre of his being: he was a man under suspicion and, if found guilty, might go to prison, as a sex offender. He stumbled into the rock garden. The gentians were blooming vividly. Flowers that he loved for their intensity of colour. But he had to turn away. The very intensity of that deep blue was making his eyes water. God damn her! Everything he saw or did brought him back to her, and to Paris.

  Chapter Four

  They set off on their Rodin pilgrimage on the first morning of their stay in Paris. It was Robbie who dubbed it a pilgrimage.

  Clarinda, they were soon to find, had an additional agenda. ‘Can we go first to the rue du Cherche-Midi?’ she asked. She had her own map and a notebook in which she had written down the various places in Paris she wanted to see, most of them having come from books lent to her by Cormac.