Brond (22 page)

‘I love the way you Scots talk,’ she said. ‘Say something else.’

We were sitting on the floor. She was a big girl with a strong face that had something in it to draw me across the room to her.

‘Don’t laugh at my funny accent,’ I said, ‘and I won’t laugh at yours. Where are you from?’

‘London. What do you mean “accent”?’

‘ “Maybe it’s because you’re a Londoner . . .” ’ I crooned to her.

‘But I don’t talk like a Cockney,’ she said. ‘I talk like ordinary people who sound as if they don’t come from anywhere. My mother has an accent, though –
that’s why I wondered.’

‘Your mother?’

‘We came from Hungary. My mother and brother and me. I was only a baby. My brother was shot in the hand. He’s a lot older than me, and until then all he had wanted out of life was to
be a violinist. After he was shot, he couldn’t bend his hand.’

‘That was the Russians?’

‘Yes. It was the second time my mother had left Hungary. She left before to get away from the Germans. This time it was the Russians. I don’t remember any of it. But my older brother
can’t play the violin. If you could believe my mother, he was a child prodigy.’

‘That’s the thing about great disasters. Each one is a mosaic of personal tragedies.’

I was very solemn. I really liked her and her long strong face, her brown Jewish eyes and her long legs curled under the wide skirt that suddenly looked Hungarian. I could have wept for her
brother. I had a desire to stroke her face and talk to her in some private place; something sparked between us and the feeling was not only mine. I really liked her.

A squat red-faced man half stood on me. Instead of apologising, he glared down, a tumbler in each hand.

‘You want to keep your legs in!’ he snarled in a thick brogue.

‘Talking of accents, a boy from the bogs,’ I said.

‘He’s a nasty bit of work,’ she said looking after him. ‘Rosemary – you know Rosemary – said that he walked her back after a lecture she’d given. He was
carrying her books and he tried to touch her up. When she stopped him, he threw her books down. She told him to pick them up and he walked away. But next morning he came and apologised and said he
hoped it wouldn’t prejudice her against his work. He’d been so smarmy to her before that I’d thought it was sickening – like a kid at school sucking up to the
teacher.’

‘ “Servile when you must, insolent when you may.” ’

‘Who is?’

‘That’s what Liam O’Flaherty’s Liverpool landlady wrote to him – “You are like all your race, servile when you must, insolent when you may.” ’

‘Seems rather harsh.’

‘Understandable. He had preferred fleeing as a fugitive from the British army to staying in hiding with her and having to marry her daughter.’

‘They’re a funny crowd the Irish.’

‘Like the Hungarians. You’ve been too long among the English.’

‘Here! – I am English. So’s my husband.’

‘So was O’Flaherty’s landlady. It’s a small world.’

By that time, it didn’t matter too much what we were saying. I was sensitive to everything about her, her eyes and the way one arm took her weight as she leaned towards me. Discreetly, we
fed off a shared excitement.

‘Why don’t we go somewhere private?’ I suggested. ‘Have a drink away from all this racket.’

The Irishman who had offended Rosemary was at the centre of a group just in front of us. The group was laughing at or with him.

‘I’d like that. Shall I bring this?’ She held up her glass of red wine.

‘No problem.’ I reached under the chair and eased out the bottle I’d hidden there earlier. ‘Best wine on the table. I liberated it just after I arrived.’

‘What would happen if everyone did that?’

‘I expect some of them have. Old Scots custom. Necessary foresight of a small nation kept poor by a maniac imperialist next door.’

‘Sad,’ she said mockingly.

‘Don’t cry over my history and I won’t cry over yours.’

We climbed to our feet and stood swaying gently and smiling at one another.

‘Let’s go,’ she said. ‘Is your room in the main building?’

‘I don’t have one. I’m a visitor.’

‘Be my guest.’

At the door Primo materialised.

‘You have to stay here.’

She looked at me as if I had grown horns.

‘Who’s he?’

‘Nobody.’ I half turned from her and muttered desperately, ‘Look. We’re going outside . . . you know. We’ll be back. No funny ideas. Brond said it – where
would I go?’

He looked at me impassively.

‘Back inside.’

‘What is this?’ She touched my arm. ‘Are you coming or not?’

I shrugged.

‘No – it doesn’t look as though I am.’

‘My God!’ she said. ‘I mean I’ve been stood up but . . . Oh, God!’

To my embarrassment, she looked hurt more than angry. As I shuffled, she gave a shiver and turned back inside. She stood looking at the bright room and then swung round and pushed past us. She
vanished into the lengths of the corridor.

‘She thinks you’re my boy friend,’ I said to Primo.

He didn’t react. The idea was too silly to touch him.

‘No, not you,’ I said. ‘Not the Scottish soldier. Jesus! Has nobody told you? There’s no Empire any more and all the Chinks are colonising the restaurants.’

‘I don’t go for that Empire stuff. I’ve seen through all of that,’ he said. ‘But you don’t listen, do you?’

‘Here!’ I shoved the bottle of wine at him. Reflexively, his big hand closed round it. ‘A present. Stick it up your kilt!’

The Irishman was still being the life and soul of the party. Brond was on the edge of the group listening with a little smile.

‘Did you have to spoil my chances?’

‘Chances?’ Tasting the word, Brond found it, like the wine, cheap.

There was so much distraction we exchanged words in a cocoon of privacy.

‘Not for anything you’d understand,’ I complained, sounding petulant.

‘Oh, chances. The girl. Did you try to slip away with her?’

‘Make love not war. Why did you bring me here?’

‘To pass some time. It was too early for where we have to go. Anyway I had been invited and I thought you would enjoy the cultured atmosphere.’

‘Wonderful,’ the girl in front of us said. Like most of the people at the party, she was English by the sound of her. The man who answered was as well.

‘Mm. He tells marvellously funny stories.’

‘Tell us a story,’ the girl called, ‘about your Uncle Danny!’

General laughter.

‘The one about the pig!’

The Irishman grinned vastly. His nose was beaded with sweat.

‘He was known for it in the village,’ he cried. ‘Did I sing you the song about him?’

A rearrangement of the circle left me in front of him. I composed my face into my ethnic interest look – the one that went with visits to folk clubs. As a fellow Celt, I wished him . . .
He looked at me and shook his head.

‘I can’t do it,’ he said. ‘Not with you looking so Scotch and dismal at me.’ The entire crowd smiled and rippled. ‘Like an ould Protestant minister at a
funeral.’

In a leprechaun suit and a green hat, he would have made a splendid undoubting Uncle Thomais.

‘Did you ever hear,’ I asked, ‘about the Irishman who blew up the bus? . . . Got his lips all burnt.’

A determined outbreak of small arms talk peppered me away. I refilled a tumbler and found a chair by the wall.

‘A present.’

Brond sat down and put a bottle of wine between us. I recognised it as the one I had thrust on Primo.

‘The condemned man drank a hearty dinner.’ I topped up my glass.

To my surprise I found that some of the consonants had gone rubbery.

‘Don’t overdo it,’ Brond said. ‘We’ll be leaving soon.’

Across the room, I spotted the Hungarian Cockney talking to a man who looked as if he had passed all his exams a long time ago. She had come back then.

‘Suppose I didn’t leave. Suppose I just sat here and finished this bottle and held on to the seat and screamed if you tried to get me to leave.’

‘You know better than that.’

‘No, I don’t.’

I filled my glass which seemed to be emptying by itself. Soon I would have to find another bottle.

‘Suppose— suppose I shouted out loud – right now – that I saw you throwing that boy from the bridge? I mean, right now!’

The words fell out of my mouth sobering me with terror so that I was unable to look at him.

‘I think it was Primo’s boy you killed. I saw you.’

But of course, he knew that. He must have known that from the beginning.

‘Why did you do it?’ I asked, and then the second question which, though it shouldn’t have done, mattered more to me: ‘Why didn’t you care that I was there?’
Thinking about that, I rushed on my own destruction. ‘Did the boy overhear something that you couldn’t risk him telling to his father? He was only a child. It must have been something
simple enough for him to pass on, but you couldn’t let him tell his father. Simple enough to pass on, even if he didn’t understand it. Or maybe it was a letter you had left lying about?
But why would you do that? You’re not careless. Nothing happens unless you want it to happen.’

‘You confuse me with God,’ Brond said, purring. ‘I must say I have a weakness for you. And for Belgian chocolate, of course. And boredom – which is another weakness. I
get bored easily.’

‘Do you despise us so much?’

‘I don’t despise a bereaved man enough to torment him with fantasies,’ Brond said sharply. ‘Primo – as you call him – lost his son in a silly stunt on a
railway bridge. The boy had been challenged by two friends to cross it on the outside by scrambling across the girders. The two boys saw him fall. A group of spectators, including a police
constable, saw him fall. One of the neighbours ran to fetch the father – Primo – and he arrived just as his son fell.’

‘But I saw you,’ I said.

I tried to hold on to that; it had been taken from me once; I tried not to let it happen again.

Brond kept silent until I looked back at him. He was smiling.

‘You saw something or imagine you did in some unnamed place at some time which is indeterminate. And now you’re not sure. How can you be since you did nothing at the time? That must
make you wonder about yourself. Suppose now you report this extraordinary event, claim that it happened, and there is no death nor any record of one – But that’s what you’re
afraid of, isn’t it? You must feel like someone in the process of a mental breakdown.’

He shuffled my certainty from me like a conjuror mixing a card into the pack.

‘Stand up!’ he ordered and waited until I did. ‘Let’s settle this nonsense. Take a deep breath. Now, shout out what you imagine you saw!’

The party washed over me as if he had opened a sluice gate. I drowned in that laughter. He was Brond the good friend of Professor Gracemount who had the power to pull strings. I bent and picked
up the bottle. My hand held it at the level of his face. It was heavy glass at the level of a face, which was only bone, after all, and flesh. He hung me from the strings of rage and fear, and the
little bald Professor came between us ignoring me and took his seat beside him.

By this time the Irishman was coming on like Brendan Behan. He would probably get two extra credits for this from Social Studies – assignment on living down to expectations.

‘How about,’ I asked in the first pause, ‘the number of Irishmen it takes to screw in a nail? Anyone? Eh? Ready? Five! One to hold the nail and four to spin the wall
round.’

I thought that was genuinely funny and laughed for a bit.

When I finished, the place had got quieter.

‘How about you and me going outside?’ Uncle Thomais asked. He had done one of those lightning changes from extrovert good nature to black rage.

‘How about . . . How about the way to make an Irishman burn his ear? Do you know how to make an Irishman burn his ear?’ He watched me dangerously. ‘Anybody? Anybody know how to
make an Irishman burn his ear?’

Nobody wanted to play that game.

‘I’ll tell you how to make an Irishman burn his ear . . . Phone him while he’s ironing!’

Somebody laughed. It was good to be a success. I joined him and went on for a while after he’d stopped.

‘Time to go.’

Primo had come for me. When I looked back from the door, the group had dispersed. The Irishman was by himself over at the cabinet of drinks. It looked as if I had altered the mood of his
celebration.

In the car, the engine throbbed softly. Lights on the dash threw a dim glow up on Primo’s face. Double rows of headlights flowed at us as we came on to a motorway. The needle climbed and
successive silhouettes peeled behind us into the darkness.

‘The Irish joke,’ Brond said conversationally. ‘It’s a shoddy response to the troubles across the water. The flood of jokes about Irish stupidity isn’t really a
sign of the fabled British sense of humour.’

In the silence, I thought with the clarity of exhaustion about how often I had heard the word British that day.

‘It’s useful politically to persuade your own public,’ he said, ‘that any people you have to treat firmly are sub-human.’

‘The great British public. Primo and me both,’ I said. ‘Scottish soldiers.’

SIXTEEN

A
s we followed the path of our lights into darkness, Brond took my stick from where it lay across my knees.

‘Are you afraid,’ I asked remembering the bottle that I had held by his face, ‘I might try to use it as a weapon? It’s too light for that.’

‘So much for curiosity,’he said.

His hands moved and the stick lengthened between them.

‘It’s a piece of craftsmanship,’ he said. ‘You don’t appreciate my gifts. It was cored out on a hollow mandrel lathe using a spoon drill and a hand rest –
they bore in about twenty inches from each end to meet – then plug here and hold it with a pinned ferrule; there a double silver fitting on the drawing end; lastly it’s packed with two
pieces of split cane to hold . . .’his hands moved apart, ‘twenty-seven inches of tempered German steel.’

It was melodramatic and foolish, a kind of joke, except that nothing Brond did was foolish and if he joked it was in a foreign language about events on another planet. He handed me the stick and
I took it, not mine now but his, not a dead thing any longer but like a sleeping servant – or a bad master.