Selected Stories, Volume 2

by William Trevor

  ‘Of course.’ Catherine stood aside while Leary passed into the long, narrow hall. She led the way down it, to the kitchen because it was warm there. Alicia was polishing the cutlery at the table, a task she undertook once a month.

  ‘Sit down, Mr Leary,’ Catherine invited, pulling a chair out for him.

  ‘I was saying I was sorry,’ he said to Alicia. ‘If there’s any way I can assist at all, any little job, I’m always there.’

  ‘It’s kind of you, Mr Leary,’ Catherine said swiftly, in case her sister responded more tartly.

  ‘I knew him since we were lads. He used be at the Christian Brothers’.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Great old days.’

  He seemed embarrassed. He wanted to say something but was having difficulty. One hand went into a pocket of his jacket. Catherine watched it playing with the little contrivance he used for rolling his cigarettes. But the hand came out empty. Nervously, it was rubbed against its partner.

  ‘It’s awkward,’ Leary said.

  ‘What’s awkward, Mr Leary?’

  ‘It isn’t easy, how to put it to you. I didn’t come before because of your trouble.’

  Alicia laid down the cloth with which she had been applying Goddard’s Silver Polish to the cutlery and Catherine watched her sister’s slow, deliberate movements as she shined the last of the forks and then drew off her pink rubber gloves and placed them one on top of the other beside her. Alicia could sense something; she often had a way of knowing what was coming next.

  ‘I don’t know are you aware,’ Leary enquired, addressing only Catherine, ‘it wasn’t paid for?’

  ‘What wasn’t?’

  ‘The job I done for you.’

  ‘You don’t mean painting the front?’

  ‘I do, ma’am.’

  ‘But of course it was paid for.’

  He sighed softly. An outstanding bill was an embarrassment, he said. Because of the death it was an embarrassment.

  ‘My husband paid for the work that was done.’

  ‘Ah no, no.’

  The frown Catherine had checked a few moments ago wrinkled her forehead. She knew the bill had been paid. She knew because Matthew had said Leary would want cash, and she had taken the money out of her own Irish Nationwide account since she had easy access to it. ‘I’ll see you right at the end of the month,’ Matthew had promised. It was an arrangement they often had; the building-society account in her name existed for this kind of thing.

  ‘Two hundred and twenty-six pounds is the extent of the damage.’ Leary smiled shiftily. ‘With the discount for cash.’

  She didn’t tell him she’d withdrawn the money herself. That wasn’t his business. She watched the extreme tip of his tongue licking his upper lip. He wiped his mouth with the back of a paint-stained hand. Softly, Alicia was replacing forks and spoons in the cutlery container.

  ‘It was September the account was sent out. The wife does all that type of thing.’

  ‘The bill was paid promptly. My husband always paid bills promptly.’

  She remembered the occasion perfectly. ‘I’ll bring it down to him now,’ Matthew had said, glancing across the kitchen at the clock. Every evening he walked to McKenny’s bar and remained there for three-quarters of an hour or so, depending on the company. That evening he’d have gone the long way round, by French Street, in order to call in at the Learys’ house in Brady’s Lane. Before he left he had taken the notes from the brown Nationwide envelope and counted them, slowly, just as she’d done herself earlier. She’d seen the bill in his hand. ‘Chancing his arm with the taxman,’ she remembered his remarking lightly, a reference to Leary’s preference for cash.

  On his return he would have hung his cap on its hook in the scullery passage and settled down at the kitchen table with the Evening Press, which he bought in Healy’s sweetshop on his way back from McKenny’s. He went to the public house for conversation as much as anything, and afterwards passed on to Alicia and herself any news he had gleaned. Bottled Smithwick’s was his drink.

  ‘D’you remember it?’ Catherine appealed to her sister because although she could herself so clearly recall Matthew’s departure from the house on that particular September evening, his return eluded her. It lay smothered somewhere beneath the evening routine, nothing making it special, as the banknotes in the envelope had marked the other.

  ‘I remember talk about money,’ Alicia recalled, ‘earlier that day. If I’ve got it right, I was out at the Legion of Mary in the evening.’

  ‘A while back the wife noticed the way the bill was unpaid,’ Leary went on, having paused politely to hear these recollections. ‘“It’s the death that’s in it,” the wife said. She’d have eaten the face off me if I’d bothered you in your trouble.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ Catherine said.

  She left the kitchen and went to look on the spike in the side-cupboard in the passage, where all receipts were kept. This one should have been close to the top, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t further down either. It wasn’t in the cupboard drawers. She went through the contents of three box-files in case it had been bundled into one in error. Again she didn’t find it.

  She returned to the kitchen with the next best thing: the Nationwide Building Society account book. She opened it and placed it in front of Leary. She pointed at the entry that recorded the withdrawal of two hundred and twenty-six pounds. She could tell that there had been no conversation in her absence. Leary would have tried to get some kind of talk going, but Alicia wouldn’t have responded.

  ‘September the eighth,’ Catherine said, emphasizing the printed date with a forefinger. ‘A Wednesday it was.’

  In silence Leary perused the entry. He shook his head. The tight features of his face tightened even more, bunching together into a knot of bewilderment. Catherine glanced at her sister. He was putting it on, Alicia’s expression indicated.

  ‘The money was taken out all right,’ Leary said eventually. ‘Did he put it to another use in that case?’

  ‘Another use?’

  ‘Did you locate a receipt, missus?’

  He spoke softly, not in the cagey, underhand tone of someone attempting to get something for nothing. Catherine was still standing. He turned his head to one side in order to squint up at her. He sounded apologetic, but all that could be put on also.

  ‘I brought the receipt book over with me,’ he said.

  He handed it to her, a fat greasy notebook with a grey marbled cover that had The Challenge Receipt Book printed on it. Blue carbon paper protruded from the dog-eared pages.

  ‘Any receipt that’s issued would have a copy left behind here,’ he said, speaking now to Alicia, across the table. ‘The top copy for the customer, the carbon for ourselves. You couldn’t do business without you keep a record of receipts.’

  He stood up then. He opened the book and displayed its unused pages, each with the same printed heading: In account with T. P. Leary. He showed Catherine how the details of a bill were recorded on the flimsy page beneath the carbon sheet and how, when a bill was paid, acknowledgement was recorded also: Paid with thanks, with the date and the careful scrawl of Mrs Leary’s signature. He passed the receipt book to Alicia, pointing out these details to her also.

  ‘Anything could have happened to that receipt,’ Alicia said. ‘In the circumstances. ’

  ‘If a receipt was issued, missus, there’d be a record of it here.’

  Alicia placed the receipt book beside the much slimmer building-society book on the pale surface of the table. Leary’s attention remained with the former, his scrutiny an emphasis of the facts it contained. The evidence offered otherwise was not for him to comment upon: so the steadiness of his gaze insisted.

  ‘My husband counted those notes at this very table,’ Catherine said. ‘He took them out of the brown envelope that they were put into at the Nationwide.’

  ‘It’s a mystery so.’

  It wasn’t any such thing; there was no mystery whatsoever. The bil
l had been paid. Both sisters knew that; in their different ways they guessed that Leary – and presumably his wife as well – had planned this dishonesty as soon as they realized death gave them the opportunity. Matthew had obliged them by paying cash so that they could defraud the taxation authorities. He had further obliged them by dying. Catherine said:

  ‘My husband walked out of this house with that envelope in his pocket. Are you telling me he didn’t reach you?’

  ‘Was he robbed? Would it be that? You hear terrible things these days.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’

  Leary wagged his head in his meditative way. It was unlikely certainly, he agreed. Anyone robbed would have gone to the Guards. Anyone robbed would have mentioned it when he came back to the house again.

  ‘The bill was paid, Mr Leary.’

  ‘All the same, we have to go by the receipt. At the heel of the hunt there’s the matter of a receipt.’

  Alicia shook her head. Either a receipt wasn’t issued in the first place, she said, or else it had been mislaid. ‘There’s a confusion when a person dies,’ she said.

  If Catherine had been able to produce the receipt Leary would have blamed his wife. He’d have blandly stated that she’d got her wires crossed. He’d have said the first thing that came into his head and then have gone away.

  ‘The only thing is,’ he said instead, ‘a sum like that is sizeable. I couldn’t afford let it go.’

  Both Catherine and Alicia had seen Mrs Leary in the shops, red-haired, like a tinker, a bigger woman than her husband, probably the brains of the two. The Learys were liars and worse than liars; the chance had come and the temptation had been too much for them. ‘Ah sure, those two have plenty,’ the woman would have said. The sisters wondered if the Learys had tricked the bereaved before, and imagined they had. Leary said:

  ‘It’s hard on a man that’s done work for you.’

  Catherine moved towards the kitchen door. Leary ambled after her down the hall. She remembered the evening more clearly even than a while ago: a Wednesday it definitely had been, the day of the Sweetman girl’s wedding; and it came back to her, also, Alicia hurrying out on her Legion of Mary business. There’d been talk in McKenny’s about the wedding, the unusual choice of mid-week, which apparently had something to do with visitors coming from America. She opened the hall-door in silence. Across the street, beyond the silver-coloured railings, the children were still running about in the convent yard. Watery sunlight lightened the unadorned concrete of the classrooms and the nuns’ house.

  ‘What’ll I do?’ Leary asked, wide-eyed, bloodshot, squinting at her.

  Catherine said nothing.

  They talked about it. It could be, Alicia said, that the receipt had remained in one of Matthew’s pockets, that a jacket she had disposed of to one of her charities had later found itself in the Learys’ hands, having passed through a jumble sale. She could imagine Mrs Leary coming across it, and the temptation being too much. Leary was as weak as water, she said, adding that the tinker wife was a woman who never looked you in the eye. Foxy-faced and furtive, Mrs Leary pushed a ramshackle pram about the streets, her ragged children cowering in her presence. It was she who would have removed the flimsy carbon copy from the soiled receipt book. Leary would have been putty in her hands.

  In the kitchen they sat down at the table from which Alicia had cleared away the polished cutlery. Matthew had died as tidily as he’d lived, Alicia said: all his life he’d been meticulous. The Learys had failed to take that into account in any way whatsoever. If it came to a court of law the Learys wouldn’t have a leg to stand on, with the written evidence that the precise amount taken out of the building society matched the amount of the bill, and further evidence in Matthew’s reputation for promptness about settling debts.

  ‘What I’m wondering is,’ Alicia said, ‘should we go to the Guards?’

  ‘The Guards?’

  ‘He shouldn’t have come here like that.’

  That evening there arrived a bill for the amount quoted by Leary, marked Account rendered. It was dropped through the letter-box and was discovered the next morning beneath the Irish Independent on the hall doormat.

  ‘The little twister!’ Alicia furiously exclaimed.

  From the road outside the house came the morning commands of the convent girl in charge of the crossing to the school. ‘Get ready!’ ‘Prepare to cross!’ ‘Cross now!’ Impertinence had been added to dishonesty, Alicia declared in outraged tones. It was as though it had never been pointed out to Leary that Matthew had left the house on the evening in question with two hundred and twenty-six pounds in an envelope, that Leary’s attention had never been drawn to the clear evidence of the building-society entry.

  ‘It beats me,’ Catherine said, and in the hall Alicia turned sharply and said it was as clear as day. Again she mentioned going to the Guards. A single visit from Sergeant McBride, she maintained, and the Learys would abandon their cheek. From the play-yard the yells of the girls increased as more girls arrived there, and then the hand-bell sounded; a moment later there was silence.

  ‘I’m only wondering,’ Catherine said, ‘if there’s some kind of a mistake. ’

  ‘There’s no mistake, Catherine.’

  Alicia didn’t comment further. She led the way to the kitchen and half filled a saucepan with water for their two boiled eggs. Catherine cut bread for toast. When she and Alicia had been girls in that same play-yard she hadn’t known of Matthew’s existence. Years passed before she even noticed him, at Mass one Saturday night. And it was ages before he first invited her to go out with him, for a walk the first time, and then for a drive.

  ‘What d’you think happened then?’ Alicia asked. ‘That Matthew bet the money on a dog? That he owed it for drink consumed? Have sense, Catherine.’

  Had it been Alicia’s own husband whom Leary had charged with negligence, there would have been no necessary suspension of disbelief: feckless and a nuisance, involved during his marriage with at least one other woman in the town, frequenter of race-courses and dog-tracks and bars, he had ended in an early grave. This shared thought – that behaviour which was ludicrous when attached to Matthew had been as natural in Alicia’s husband as breathing – was there between the sisters, but was not mentioned.

  ‘If Father Cahill got Leary on his own,’ Alicia began, but Catherine interrupted. She didn’t want that, she said; she didn’t want other people brought into this, not even Father Cahill. She didn’t want a fuss about whether or not her husband had paid a bill.

  ‘You’ll get more of these,’ Alicia warned, laying a finger on the envelope that had been put through the letter-box. ‘They’ll keep on coming.’

  ‘Yes.’

  In the night Catherine had lain awake, wondering if Matthew had maybe lost the money on his walk to the Learys’ house that evening, if he’d put his hand in his pocket and found it wasn’t there and then been too ashamed to say. It wasn’t like him; it didn’t make much more sense than thinking he had been a secretive man, with private shortcomings all the years she’d been married to him. When Alicia’s husband died Matthew had said it was hard to feel sorry, and she’d agreed. Three times Alicia had been left on her own, for periods that varied in length, and on each occasion they’d thought the man was gone for good; but he returned and Alicia always took him back. Of course Matthew hadn’t lost the money; it was as silly to think that as to wonder if he’d been a gambler.

  ‘In case they’d try it on anyone else,’ Alicia was saying, ‘isn’t it better they should be shown up? Is a man who’d get up to that kind of game safe to be left in people’s houses the way a workman is?’

  That morning they didn’t mention the matter again. They washed up the breakfast dishes and then Catherine went out to the shops, which was always her chore, while Alicia cleaned the stairs and the hall, the day being a Thursday. As Catherine made her way through the familiar streets, and then while Mr Deegan sliced bacon for her and Gilligan greeted her in the
hardware, she thought about the journey her husband had made that Wednesday evening in September. Involuntarily, she glanced into Healy’s, where he had bought the Evening Press, and into McKenny’s bar. Every evening except Sunday he had brought back the news, bits of gossip, anything he’d heard. It was at this time, too, that he went to Confession, on such occasions leaving the house half an hour earlier.

  In French Street a countrywoman opened her car door without looking and knocked a cyclist over. ‘Ah, no harm done,’ the youth on the bicycle said, the delivery boy for Lawless the West Street butcher, the last delivery boy in the town. ‘Sure, I never saw him at all,’ the countrywoman protested to Catherine as she went by. The car door was dinged, but the woman said what did it matter if the lad was all right?

  Culliney, the traveller from Limerick Shirts, was in town that day. Matthew had always bought his shirts direct from Culliney, the same striped pattern, the stripe blue or brown. Culliney had his measurements, the way he had the measurements of men all over Munster and Connacht, which was his area. Catherine could tell when she saw Culliney coming towards her that he didn’t know about the death, and she braced herself to tell him. When she did so he put a hand on her arm and spoke in a whisper, saying that Matthew had been a good man. If there was anything he could ever do, he said, if there was any way he could help. More people said that than didn’t.

  It was then that Catherine saw Mrs Leary. The house-painter’s wife was pushing her pram, a child holding on to it as she advanced. Catherine crossed the street, wondering if the woman had seen her and suspecting she had. In Jerety’s she selected a pan loaf from the yesterday’s rack, since neither she nor Alicia liked fresh bread and yesterday’s was always reduced. When she emerged, Mrs Leary was not to be seen.