Cheating at Canasta (11 page)

They turned off the towpath into a lane with a row of garage doors running along it, and walled back gardens on the other side. They came out on to a suburban road, and crossed it to a crescent. He dropped her hand before they reached it and pulled down the back of his jacket where it had ridden up a bit. He buttoned all three buttons.

‘Would you wait five minutes, Jas?’

It was as if she knew about that, as if she knew why she had to wait and why it should be five minutes, as if he’d told her something she’d forgotten. She knew he hadn’t. It didn’t matter.

‘You be all right, Jas?’

‘Course I will.’

She watched him walking off and when he reached a front gate painted blue. She watched him as she had when he crossed the street to the off-licence. She waited, as she had waited then too, seeing again the little tortoises and the racing cars, hearing the Spice Girls. Across the road a delivery van drew up. No one got out, and a minute or so later it drove off. A dog went by. A woman started a lawnmower in one of the front gardens.

She waited for longer than he’d said, for ages it felt like, but when he came back he was hurrying, as if he was making up for that. He almost ran, his flannel trousers flapping. He was out of breath when he reached her. He shook his head and said they’d best go back.

‘Back?’

‘Best to go back, Jas.’

He took her arm, but he was edgy and didn’t take it as he had before. He didn’t search for her hand. He pulled her anorak when it was difficult for her to keep up with him. Behind them somewhere a car door banged.

‘Oh God,’ he said.

A red car slowed down beside them as they were turning into the lane with the garage doors. When it stopped a woman with glasses on a string around her neck got out. She was wearing a brown skirt, and a cardigan that matched it over a pale silk blouse. Her dark hair was coiled round her head, her lipstick glistened, as if she hadn’t had time to powder it over or had forgotten to. The glasses bobbed about on her blouse and then were still. Her voice was angry when she spoke but she kept it low, giving the impression that her teeth were clenched.

‘I don’t believe this,’ she said.

She spoke as if Jasmin wasn’t there. She didn’t look at her, not even glancing in her direction.

‘For God’s sake!’ she almost shouted, and slammed the door of the car shut, as if she had to do something, as if only noise could express what she felt. ‘For God’s sake, after all we’ve been through!’

Her face was quivering with rage, one hand made into a fist that struck the roof of the car once and then opened, to fall by her side. There was silence then.

‘Who is she?’ The woman spoke when the silence had gone on, at last recognizing Jasmin’s presence. Her question came wearily, in a bleak, dull tone. ‘You’re on probation,’ she said. ‘Did you forget somehow that you were on probation?’

The man whom she abused had not attempted to speak, had made no protestation, but words were muttered now.

‘She was looking for the towpath. She asked me where it was. I don’t know who she is.’

The long, peaky features might never that afternoon, or any afternoon, have been other than they had become in the brief time that had passed: devoid of all expression, dead, a dribble of tears beginning.

Then Jasmin’s companion of so many conversations, and whom she had begun to love, shambled off, and the woman said nothing until he reached the blue-painted ornamental gate and again disappeared around the side of the house.

‘Was there anything?’ she asked then. She stared at Jasmin. Slowly she looked her up and down. Jasmin didn’t know what her question meant.

‘Did he do anything to you?’ the woman asked, and Jasmin understood and yet did not. What mattered more was that he had cried, his happiness taken from him, his smile too. He had cried for her. He had cried for both of them. All that she understood too well.

‘Who are you?’ the woman asked. Her clenched-back voice, deprived of the energy of its anger, was frightened, and fear clung to the tiredness in her face.

‘Clive’s my friend,’ Jasmin said. ‘There wasn’t nothing wrong. We done nothing wrong.’

‘That’s not his name.’

‘Clive, he said.’

‘He says anything. Did he give you drink?’

Jasmin shook her head. Why should she say? Why should she get him into trouble?

‘You reek of drink,’ the woman said. ‘Every time he gives them drink.’

‘He done nothing.’

‘His mother was my sister. He lives with us.’

If she’d asked him, Jasmin said, he would have explained about his name. But the woman just stared at her when she began to tell her that she, also, had given herself a name, that sometimes people wanted to.

‘My sister died,’ the woman said. ‘He’s been living with us since that. He thought the house would be empty this afternoon but it wasn’t because I changed my mind about going out. You worry and you change your mind. Quite often you do. Well, naturally, I suppose. He’s been on charges.’

‘He was only going to show me, like, where it is he lived.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Jasmin.’

‘If this is known they’ll take him in again.’

Jasmin shook her head. There was a mistake, she said. The woman said there wasn’t.

‘We look after him, we lie for him, my husband and I. We’ve done our best since my sister died. A family thing, you do your best.’

‘There wasn’t anything.’

‘My sister knew his chance would come. She knew there’d be a day that would be too terrible for her to bear. He was her child, after all, it was too much. She left a note.’

‘Honestly, I promise you.’

‘I know, I know.’

The woman got into her car and wound the window down as if she intended to say something else but she said nothing. She turned in the quiet road and drove back to her house.

Frying chops, Holby prodded them occasionally with a fork. He liked to blacken them, to see the smoke rising while still not turning down the gas. It got into her hair, Jasmin’s mother maintained. Smoke like that was greasy, she insisted, but Holby said it couldn’t be. He heard the door when Jasmin came into the kitchen and he called out to her, knowing it wasn’t her mother who’d come in.

‘How you doing, girl?’

All right, Jasmin said, and then her mother was there, back from her time with her betting-shop friend. Even through the smoke, her entrance brought a gush of the perfume she so lavishly applied when she met her men.

‘What’re you frying, Holby?’ She shouted above the sizzling of the meat, and Jasmin knew there was going to be a quarrel.

In her room, even with the door closed she heard it beginning, her mother’s noisy criticisms, Holby’s measured drone of retaliation. She didn’t listen. Probably he had guessed at last about the betting-shop man, as her father had once guessed about him. Probably it had come to that—the frying of the chops, the smoke, the grease no more than a provocation, a way of standing up for himself. And Holby—today or some other day—would walk out, saying no man could stand it, which Jasmin remembered her father saying too.

She pulled the curtains over and lay down on her bed. She liked the twilight she had induced; even on better days than this she did. Tired after the walk to the house with the man she had begun to love, and after that the walk alone to where she lived herself, she closed her eyes. ‘You like to go in here?’ he asked again. He carried her coffee to where she waited. She felt the touch of his fingers when he put the necklace on for her. ‘The sun all right for you?’ he said.

In the room she still had to imagine there were books on shelves, the vase of flowers, the pictures of castles. In a courtroom he put a case, his papers in one hand, gesturing with the other. They belonged, he said on the towpath, the rowers going by.

Downstairs something was thrown, and there was Holby’s mumble, the clank of broken china when it was swept up, her mother’s voice going on, her crossness exhausted as the woman’s had been. He had been shamed by the woman getting things wrong and was the kind to mind. He didn’t realize the woman didn’t matter, that her talk and her fury didn’t. He wasn’t the kind to know that. He wasn’t the knowing sort.

Her mother’s voice was different now, caressing, lying. She sent Holby out for beer, which at this stage in the proceedings she always did; Jasmin heard him go. Her mother called up the stairs, calling her Angie, saying to come down. She didn’t answer. She didn’t say that Angie wasn’t her name. She didn’t say anything.

When she went there, he would not be on the seat in the sun. He would not be waiting in the bus station. Nor playing the machines. Nor in the McDonald’s. But when Jasmin closed her eyes again his smile was there and it didn’t go away. She touched with her lips the necklace that had been his gift. She promised she would always keep it by her.

At Olivehill

‘Well, at least don’t tell him,’ their mother begged. ‘At least do nothing until he’s gone.’

But they were doubtful and said nothing. They did not promise, which she had hoped they would. Then, sensing her disappointment, they pacified her.

‘We’d never want to distress him,’ Tom said, and Eoghan shook his head.

She wasn’t reassured, but didn’t say. She knew what they were thinking: that being old you might be aware of death loitering near, but even so death wasn’t always quick about its business. And she hated what had been said to her, out of the blue on such a lovely day.

She was younger by a year than their father, and who could say which would be taken first? Both of them suffered a raft of trivial ills, each had a single ailment that was more serious. In their later seventies, they lived from day to day.

‘We’ll say nothing so,’ she said, still hoping they would promise what she wished for. ‘Promise me,’ she used to say when they were boys, and obediently they always had. But everything was different now. She knew they were doing all they could to keep things going. She knew it was a struggle at Olivehill.

‘Don’t be worrying yourself,’ Eoghan said, his soft blue eyes guilty for a moment. He was given to guilt, she thought. More than Tom was, more than Angela.

‘It’s just we have to look ahead,’ Tom said. ‘We have to see where we’re going.’

They were having tea outside for the first time that summer although the summer was well advanced. The grass of the big lawn had been cut that morning by Kealy, the garden chairs brushed down. What remained of tea, the tablecloth still spread, was on the white slatted table, beneath which two English setters dozed.

‘It’ll be cold. I’ll make some fresh,’ she said when her husband came.

‘No. No such thing.’ Still yards away and advancing slowly, James contradicted that. ‘You’ll rest yourself, lady.’

Having heard some of this, she nodded obligingly. Both of them disregarded a similar degree of deafness and in other ways, too, were a little alike: tall but less tall than they had been, stooped and spare. Their clothes were not new but retained a stylishness: her shades of dark maroon, her bright silk scarf, his greenish tweeds, his careful tie. Their creeper-covered house, their garden here and there neglected, reflected their coming down in the world, but they did not themselves.

‘Thanks, Mollie,’ the old man said when his wife uncovered his toast, folding away the napkin so that it could be used for the same teatime purpose again. His toast was cut into tidy rectangles, three to a slice, and buttered. No one else had toast at this time of day.

‘You’re turning the hay?’ He addressed both sons at once, which was a habit with him. ‘End of the week you’ll bring it in, you think?’

Before Thursday, they said, when there might be a change in the weather. They were more casually turned out, in open-necked white shirts and flannel trousers, working farmers both of them. Tom and his family lived in a house on their land that once had been an employee’s. When he could, which wasn’t every day, he came to Olivehill at this time to be with the old couple for an hour or so. Once in a while his wife, Loretta, came too and brought the children. Eoghan wasn’t married and still lived at Olivehill.

Spreading lemon curd on his toast, James wondered why both his sons were here at teatime; usually Eoghan wasn’t when Tom came. He didn’t ask, it would come out: what change they proposed, what it was that required the arguments of both to convince him. But in a moment Eoghan went away.

‘You’re looking spry,’ Tom complimented his father.

‘Oh, I’m feeling spry.’

‘Fine weather’s a tonic,’ Mollie said.

And James asked after Loretta, which he always did, and asked about his granddaughters.

‘They have the poor girl demented with their devilment.’ Tom laughed, although it wasn’t necessary, it being known that his demure daughters, twins of four, hadn’t yet reached their mischievous years.

They were an Irish Catholic family, which once had occupied a modest place in an ascendancy that was not Catholic and now hardly existed any more. When Mollie first lived in this house the faith to which she and James belonged connected them with the nation that had newly come about. But faith’s variations mattered less in Ireland all these years later, since faith itself mattered less and influenced less how people lived.

‘Angela wrote,’ Mollie said, finding the letter she’d brought to the garden to show Tom.

He read it and commented that Angela didn’t change.

‘Her men friends do rather,’ James said.

Angela was the youngest of the children, a buyer for a chain of fashion shops. She lived in Dublin. The one that got away, Tom often said.

He and Eoghan hadn’t wanted to. They still didn’t, feeling they belonged here, content to let Angela bring a bit of life into things with her Dublin gossip and her flightiness.

Tom folded the letter into its envelope and handed it back. James slowly finished his tea. Mollie walked round the garden with her older son.

‘You’re good to indulge me, Tom,’ she said, even though she had hoped to hear that what had been kept from their father would not come about at all. It made no sense to her that the greater part of Olivehill should be made into a golf-course in the hope that this would yield a more substantial profit than the land did. It was foolish, Mollie thought after Tom had gone, when she and James were alone again with the setters; yet her sons weren’t fools. It was graceless, even a vulgarity, she thought as they sat there in the evening sun, for no other word was quite as suitable; yet they were not vulgar.