Brond (13 page)

‘Yes.’

‘And you’ll be in the same class as Margaret?’

‘In the same year. We share a couple of subjects.’

‘Do you tell me that?’ He paused, cleared his throat and then asked in a rush, ‘Now, would you say she was doing well? I mean that she was doing
well?
young pretty girl Was she able for it,
would you say?’

‘We’re only in first year,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure how she got on in the degree exams.’

He nodded satisfied as if, without quite realising how, I had answered his questions. Then we were at the University and for the next five minutes we were busy as I called the turns.

‘Left at the next corner. This is me. You could let me out here.’

The car stopped as if he had hit a brick wall. Thrown forward, I caught the padded edge of the dashboard before my head battered the windscreen. Sputtering to the surface again, I saw him gaping
through the windscreen at Kennedy. My landlord had one hand on his gate and in his turn was staring at us. The car must have squealed to a stop.

Kennedy looked at me through the glass. I saw his gaze shift to my companion. He took his hand from the gate and walked towards the car.

‘Mother of God,’ the man beside me whispered. ‘What’s he wanting with us?’

‘It’s Mr Kennedy – he owns the house I stay in.’

Kennedy was almost on us.

‘Don’t tell him who I am or where—’

The door opened and Kennedy bent in to me.

‘It’s yourself. We wondered where you got to last night.’

He was studying Briody across me as he spoke, but unexpectedly a hard fist in my side shoved me out, forcing Kennedy back as I sprawled from the car. The slam of the door made one noise with the
roar of the engine as the car leaped from us.

‘Your friend’s in a hurry,’ Kennedy said. He watched the car squeal round the corner as if chased.

‘I don’t know him.’ Without knowing why, I had decided to do as Liam Briody had asked. ‘He gave me a lift.’

‘Where’d you come by him then?’

We were moving towards the house.

‘I thumbed a lift.’

‘Oh, yes.’

We turned in at the gate and he took out his key to open the door.

‘I finished up at a party last night. Got a bit too merry and stayed the night.’

‘At your age you want to watch the drink,’ he said, but not as if his mind was really on it.

‘I started walking home this morning and discovered I’d no money. Lucky I got a lift.’

‘Lucky,’ he said. He still hadn’t turned the key. His hand rested on it. ‘Especially with him being in such a hurry.’

In the hall, he asked, ‘Where was the party then?’

I started up the stairs.

‘It was a fellow I met,’ I said without looking back. ‘I got a lift to it.’

‘You’ve done well with the lifts,’ he said, but I kept going.

I lay on my bed like a fox gone to earth. There were no bones around to chew but I had found a tin of biscuits in my shirt drawer and lay nibbling custard creams. My best strategy might be to
lie there into the foreseeable future.

Jackie came in without knocking.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t realise you were here.’

She did not look surprised.

‘Do you wander about my room when I’m out?’

‘There’s linen to change.’

‘Is that linen you’re carrying?’

She was not holding anything.

‘You’re in a funny mood,’ she said.

‘Not me.’ I took the corner off a biscuit. ‘I had this crazy notion you might be a foot fetishist. Sneaking in for a quick sniff at my socks.’

She shut the door behind her.

‘You want to watch what you say. You don’t want to let him hear you talking like that.’

‘He’s the one that’s in a funny mood. He was desperate to know where I was last night.’

I had never talked to her like that before. After the last couple of days I felt older – not any wiser, just older.

‘Why should he care?’ she asked.

For no good reason, I took that as an insult.

‘You’re supposed to be shocked at being called a fetishist,’ I said sourly. ‘Assuming you had the foggiest notion what I was talking about.’

‘Aren’t you the arrogant little bugger?’ she said. ‘Six months ago you walk in here not sure which spoon to eat your soup with and now you’re a walking dictionary
and man about bloody town.’

I was getting used to people surprising me. It didn’t mean I had to like it.

‘Do you want a biscuit?’

To my surprise, she came over and sat beside me. I passed her the tin. There were only two biscuits left.

She ate neatly, picking at the edges with her small white teeth.

‘You have some dirty habits. The bed’ll be full of crumbs.’

‘If you’re changing the linen . . .’

‘Where were you last night anyway?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ I rolled out of the bed explosively. ‘Do you know my mother and father couldn’t be worse about checking up? I’m only a lodger, you
know.’

‘Your mother,’ she said, looking at me unperturbed, ‘did she ever sniff your socks?’

‘That’s—’

I really almost said it: That’s dirty!

‘I think you won that one,’ I said. I thought about it for a minute then went on, ‘I was at Margaret’s house last night.’

‘The girl who brought the parcel here?’

‘Margaret Briody. Somebody gave me her address.’

My jacket was lying on the bed and I pulled out the card Brond had given me. She reached out and took it from me. I was anxious that she should believe me.

‘Before that I’d no idea where she lived. I met her in the Reading Room at the University.’

‘And she took you home.’

‘No!’ I said. ‘We went for a coffee and finished up going for a meal and when we came out . . . It’s a long story. I got the address from Brond – the man
who—’

‘That was the fellow was supposed to get the parcel.’ She was quiet, attentive and seemed changed into someone I hadn’t noticed before was there. ‘Did she, this girl
Margaret, take you to his place?’

‘No – nothing like that. When we came out of the restaurant a man was waiting for us. He took me there.’

‘But not the girl?’

‘I think she might have wanted to come but—’

‘How did the man know where you were? Did the girl phone Brond to tell him where to find you?’

I was shocked.

‘No!’ Even as I protested, I discovered that the idea’s shade had been drifting across the back country of my mind. ‘No. She wouldn’t do that.’

‘So anyway Brond got his parcel. What was in it after all the fuss?’

‘I didn’t find out.’

‘He took it and said thank you.’

‘Something like that.’

‘Was part of his thank you the girl’s address? Was it her kept you out all night?’

‘God!’ I said, ‘you and your old man are a pair.’

My voice lingered on ‘old man’. Sometimes I thought he was just past forty; other times with his long face and solemn ways he could have been ninety. She sat quiet. I tried to think
of something to say but my mind was a blank. She stared at the floor, perhaps so she wouldn’t have to look at me.

‘It’s easy to get the wrong idea about him,’ she said. I had to strain to catch her words. ‘I forget too till something makes me remember my last year at school. I was
supposed to go to college afterwards. My da was very proud that way. But all my da’s plans came to nothing that summer. From a child I’d always loved the summer for the town would be
full of people and have a bit of life in it. My mother hated it, though – she would never take a lodger, but the shop did well enough so she didn’t have to. It was the winter she liked
when we had the place to ourselves. In January the foam from the waves would drift down like cotton across our garden. Summer was for the young ones. I fell in love with him that summer.’

Imagining that last schoolgirl summer, it seemed unnatural to think of Kennedy.

‘It was one day I went to the beach. There was a rock stood above the sea at one end and a crowd of young fellows, all visitors, daring one another but none of them would dive from it for
the height and the white water round it. He was lying among the crowd sunbathing and when he sat up we looked at one another and he gave me a wink and got up. I thought the world had stopped
talking when he dived so clean and neat from the very topmost part into that white water.’

‘That was—?’

I didn’t finish but nodded towards the door. I had the stupid idea she might be talking of some lover she had known before Kennedy came into her life.

‘Oh, it’s strange to think of it now,’ she said. ‘We had a wild time. I couldn’t tell you half the things he did. In spite of all my father could do, we were
married by the summer’s end. And then we came here — for he’d bought this house, and was only back to Ireland a short visit on business.’ She shook her head as if in
disbelief. ‘A short visit and him there all summer long . . . until he had me married.’

‘It doesn’t sound like the same man,’ I said, still stupid.

‘He changed,’ and she shivered as if wakening and looked at me sitting beside her on the bed.

‘But,’ she said and stopped as if the word could explain itself. She got up and put half the room between us by going to the window.

‘He’s down there,’ she said, ‘in the garden. He likes to be by himself working among the flowers – especially if he’s worried about anything. I don’t
know if you’ve noticed that. He’s fond of the garden.’

There was no excuse for what came next. I had been through a bad couple of days but that was no excuse. Jackie was a fine-looking woman – somehow better-looking for being serious than
before – who had been talking about her husband and was watching him now as if I didn’t exist; but that was something less than an excuse.

‘Ah,’ I said, ‘he’s a gardener and a worrier, and a high diver since you say so, and a good bookie’s clerk, I’ll believe that, and a nice boring little man
altogether.’

I thought she hadn’t heard me, and then I thought she was ignoring me; and then I hoped she hadn’t heard, but she did answer, quietly, looking down into the garden.

‘It’s easy to make a mistake about him. He’s given me enough cause to forget. Only there are things . . . The year after we were married – when – when my baby had
died. We were not happy – he had become so different. I cried a lot. I would start to cry for no reason and then I wouldn’t be able to stop. One night we went into a cafe and there were
these four young fellows who had been drinking. They had the style, you know, of gang boys. A weak mindless look about two of them, and a lad that might have been simple, and another that had a
face of pure badness. You wouldn’t know which of them would turn nastiest without cause given. They talked at me, not nice talk, until you couldn’t ignore it. He got up and went over to
them and something happened. You don’t need to believe me. I don’t even know if he spoke to them or just looked at them. He came and sat down with his back to them and started talking
to me again, almost as if he hoped I wouldn’t notice what he’d done. And the four of them got up and went out like dogs a man had turned timid with his stick.’

When she tried to smile at me, her lips trembled. I was desolated by something I had not looked for or wanted – an aching flood of tenderness towards her.

‘I remembered then,’ she said, ‘that I had started off being afraid of him.’

The dull blurred Kennedy of every day got in the way so that I could not believe in the reality of those vivid and dangerous memories to which she laid claim. Perhaps that had happened to her
too over a long time. If it had, she must have been lonely: married and lonely. She had stopped believing in her memories and then Kilpatrick had come to lodge; ‘Peter’ with his hard
good looks and sudden temper. That bastard wouldn’t have hesitated about taking her to bed, and if she had gone I couldn’t feel prim any more or disapproving.

What would the husband of her memories have done, though, if he had found out?

TEN

M
uffled against my mid-afternoon pillow, the radio leaked music and then for a while, turn about with the advertisements, an account of the arrival
of my father’s Great Man at the city’s top hotel. I had worked as a relief porter at Christmas at Riggs Lodge and it amused me to think how impressed my father would be if I was there
still to encounter at close quarters the lofty skeletal figure of the old politician, or get from his own hand a gratuity – some appropriately small coin, of course, since they always get
that sort of thing right, those hereditary aristocrats. I thought about that and it stopped being funny and then I fell asleep.

Someone was ringing the front door bell. Late sunlight had slipped from antlers to hooves in the picture above my bed I had christened ‘Son of Stag at Bay.’ The bell went on ringing
after any reasonable person would have given up. When I had that thought, an instinct got me out of bed to answer the door.

‘I thought you’d help me,’ Margaret Briody said.

She was in jeans with some kind of tatty shirt hanging over them, and she was the most desirable thing I had ever been close enough to touch.

‘What kind of help?’ I asked.

I sometimes had these bad attacks of caution.

‘Please,’ she said.

My father had advised me about the dangers of being helpful in an undiscriminating sort of way to girls in the big city.

‘Wait here,’ I told her.

‘If you won’t,’ she called after me, ‘I don’t know what I’ll do.’

I went upstairs at the fast limp and collected the stick and my jacket. After a hesitation, I took all three notes out of their hiding place in the shoe under the bed. It was only money. If
Paris was worth a mass, my father’s advice was a fair swap for Margaret Briody even in a mess.

She made a forlorn figure standing at the door. A gentleman would have asked her in; but then no one had ever mistaken me for one of those.

‘I don’t think my landlady’s too keen on you,’ I said. ‘We can get a seat in the park. It’s not far.’

Before we got there she had told her story. We sat on a bench near the statue of Carlyle; the massive head emerged out of a column of uncut stone like a tethered lion. Behind us, the river made
quiet noises whenever there was a break in the traffic.