Lilac Bus (11 page)

‘Poor stupid woman,’ said Judy. ‘She should have let him install a harem in there if it kept him happy.’

‘You wouldn’t have let him do that, you’d have too much spirit,’ Rupert said admiringly.

‘I don’t know. I let a man walk away with my two babies twenty years ago. That wasn’t showing much spirit, was it?’ Judy said.

Rupert gasped. Never had Judy Hickey mentioned the amazing happening that the whole town knew about in garbled versions. He had asked his mother who had said that nobody knew the whole ins and outs of it, and that Rupert’s father who had been the local solicitor then also, had been very annoyed because nobody consulted him, and he was the obvious person to have been brought in on it. But there had been something about a Garda charge and a lot of conversation and a solicitor from Dublin coming down for Jack Hickey and then documents being drawn up and Jack and the two children going to America and never coming back.

‘But people must know WHY,’ Rupert had insisted.

His mother said there were more explanations than there were days in the year.

She had been only six years married and twenty
now without her man and her children, but she always kept the name Hickey. It was in case the children ever came back, people said. There was a while when she used to go into the town seventeen miles away and ask at the tourist office if you could get the lists of American tourists or just those with children. There was a while she would go up to the bus tours that sometimes came through Rathdoon and scan the seats for nine-year-old boys with seven-year-old sisters. But all that was long in the past. If it was so long in the past, why had she mentioned them now?

‘Are they on your mind then?’ Rupert asked gently. She replied as naturally as if she was in the habit of talking about them. She spoke with no more intensity than she had talked of the mint tea.

‘They are and they aren’t. We’d probably have nothing to say to each other at this stage.’

‘What kind of work does he do now? He’s not retired, is he?’

‘Who? Andrew, he’s only your age. I HOPE he hasn’t retired yet.’ She looked amused.

‘No, I meant your husband. I didn’t know whether your children were boys or girls.’ Rupert felt he had put his foot in it.

‘Boy and girl, Andrew and Jessica. Andrew and Jessica.’

‘Nice names,’ he said foolishly.

‘Yes, they are nice names aren’t they? We spent ages
choosing them. No, I’ve absolutely no idea whether Jack Hickey is working or whether he is lying in a gutter being moved on by big American cops with sticks. And I don’t know if he ever worked in California or whether he lived off his brother. I never cared. Honestly I never gave him a thought. It sounds like someone protesting, I know it does, but it’s funny: I have great trouble remembering what he looked like then and I never until this moment wondered how he’s aged. Possibly got fatter. His elder brother Charlie was a lovely man, he was fat, and there was a family picture I remember, and the parents were fat.’

Rupert was silent for a moment. Such obvious indifference was chilling. You could understand hate or bitterness even. You could forgive a slow fire of rage and resentment. But she talked about him just as you would about some minor celebrity who had been in the news one time. Is he dead or alive? Who knows, who remembers? On to another topic.

‘And do the children, well . . . do Andrew and Jessica keep in touch even a little bit?’

‘No. That was the agreement.’

If he was ever to know, it would be now. He inclined his head slightly to see if anyone else was listening. But no, Dee was fast asleep with her head at an awkward angle, and that awful Morris girl was asleep too. The others were too far ahead to hear.

‘That was a harsh sort of agreement,’ he said tentatively.

‘Oh they thought they were justified. People used to think it was quite justifiable to hang a sheep stealer, don’t forget.’

‘Is that what you did?’ he asked smiling. ‘Steal a sheep?’

‘Would that it had been so simple. No no, I thought you knew, I thought your father might have told you. No, I was a dope peddler. That’s even worse than anything, isn’t it?’

She looked like a mischievous girl the way she said it. He felt she couldn’t be serious.

‘No, what was it about really?’ he laughed.

‘I told you. I was the local drugs person.’ She spoke without pride or shame. Just as if she was saying what her name was before she was married. Rupert had never been so startled. ‘You do surprise me,’ he said hoping he was managing to keep the shock out of his voice. ‘But that was YEARS ago.’

‘It was the sixties. I suppose it is years ago, but your lot aren’t the first to know about drugs, you know – the sixties had their own scene.’

‘But wasn’t that only in America and England? Not like now.’

‘Of course it was here too, not in huge housing estates, and not kids and not heroin. But with brightish, youngish things, at dances, and people who just left college who had been abroad, and it was all very silly, and to this day I think perfectly harmless.’

‘Hash, was it?’

‘Oh yes, Marijuana, pot, a few amphetamines, a bit of LSD.’

‘You had acid? YOU had acid?’ He was half-admiring, half-shocked.

‘Rupert, what I had was everything that was going, that wasn’t the point. The point was that I was supplying it, and I got caught.’

‘Why on earth were you doing that?’

‘Out of boredom in a way, I suppose. And the money was nice, not huge but nice. And there was a lot of fun too, you met great people – not dead-wood people like Jack Hickey. I was very stupid really. I deserved all that happened. I often think that.’ She had paused to muse.

Rupert mused with her for a bit. Then he spoke again:

‘Were you doing it for long? Before you were caught?’

‘About eighteen months. I was at a party and we all smoked something, Lord knows what it was called – I thought it was great, Jack had said nothing at the time, but when we got home he roared and shouted, and said that if this ever happened again, and what he’d do and what he wouldn’t do.’

‘Had he refused it then?’

‘Ah you didn’t know our Jack, not at all, he had passed the poor little cigarette with the best but he had kept his mouth closed and only pretended to inhale. He was sober and furious. Oh, there was a
barney that went on all week, then the ultimatum: if I ever touched it again . . . curtains, he’d take the children off to America, I’d never see them again, no court in the land . . . you could write it out yourself as a script and it would be right, it would be what he said.’ Rupert listened, fascinated. Judy’s soft voice went on:

‘Well, Jack was dealing with the livestock. It wasn’t like a farm, you know, the house then, it was like a ranch: there were only livestock – no milking, no hens, no crops, just beasts in the field – buy them, graze them, sell them. We had poor old Nanny, she had been my Nanny in the days of old decency and she minded Andrew and Jessica, I used to go here and there. Gathering material for a book on the wild flowers of the West. Gathering bad company more likely. Anyway, because I had my little car and because I went here and there what could be more natural than I go to Dublin or to London as I did twice to get some stuff for people. Others suggested it, I took it up like a flash.’

‘It’s like a story out of a book,’ Rupert breathed admiringly.

‘A horror story then. I remember it as if it was yesterday: acting on information received, warrant, deeply embarassed Mr Hickey, a person of such importance as yourself, absolutely sure there’s nothing in it, but have to apply the same laws to the high as to the low, and if we could get it all over as
quickly as possible wouldn’t that be for the best? Dear, dear, heavens above, what have we here, in MRS Hickey’s car, and MRS Hickey’s briefcase in the bedroom. And hidden away behind MRS Hickey’s books. Well, he was at a loss for words and perhaps Mr Hickey could come up with some explanation?’

She was like an actress, Rupert thought suddenly. He could see the Sergeant or the Superintendent or whoever it was. She could do a one-woman show, the way she was telling the story, and it was without gesture or emphasis since it was being told in a low voice not to wake the others as the minibus sped through the evening.

‘It took for ever. And there were people down from Dublin and there was a TD, someone I didn’t even know Jack knew. And Jack said that the whole place was becoming too much for him anyway and he had been thinking about selling it for a while, but if there was this scandal then people would know he was doing it under a cloud and the price of the place would drop right down. They were all businessmen, even the guards, they could understand that.

‘Then the documents. Jack was going to take the children to his brother unless I signed a sworn statement that I agreed I was an unfit person to act as their mother any longer. The Sergeant could charge me, as soon as Jack had the place sold, his plans made and was off to California with the babies. He begged me to think of the children.’

‘He did that and yet took them away from you?’ Rupert was confused.

‘Yes, you see his point was that I was a drugs criminal, that wasn’t a good start for any child: they’d be better without me. A deal had been done, kind wise people had seen extenuating circumstances, it was up to me to make the most of them.’

She looked out the window for a while.

‘I didn’t think it would be for ever. I was frightened, I was sure it would all die down. I said yes. He sold the place, well he sold it to that gangster, remember, who conned everyone and went off with a packet. Then the Liquidator or whatever sold it to the nuns and they made it into the conference centre. So now you know the story of the Big House and all the bad people who lived there until the present day.’ He hadn’t realised that she was once mistress of the big Doon House where she now lived in the gate lodge. Today the house had priests, nuns and laypeople coming to do retreats, have discussions. And sometimes there were ordinary conferences that weren’t religious at all: that’s how the community made the costs of the place. But it was usually a very quiet type of conference where the delegates weren’t expecting much of a night life. Rathdoon could offer Ryan’s Pub and Billy Burns’ chicken and chips; people usually expected more if they came a long way to a conference.

‘I had to leave Doon House within a month. But he
tricked me in one way. Even with the slightest hint of a drugs offence in those days you couldn’t get into the States. They wouldn’t give me a visa. And in order to make the distance as great as possible between poor Andrew and Jessica over there and their mad mother over here Jack arranged that I be charged with a minor offence: possession. It was a nothing, even here, and compared to what I could have been charged with, which was dealing, it was ludicrously light. But then the deal had been done, don’t forget. And even being charged with possession kept me out of the States.’

There was another silence.

‘Wasn’t that a bad trick to play on you?’ Rupert said.

‘Yes. Yes. I suppose he thought like the people who burned people in the Inquisition . . . that they were doing the right thing. You know, rooting out evil.’

‘It was very drastic, even for the sixties wasn’t it?’

‘Will you stop saying the sixties as if it was the stone age. YOU were born in the sixties, don’t forget.’

‘I don’t remember much about them,’ Rupert grinned.

‘No. Well I suppose you’d call it drastic; Jack would have called it effective. He was a great man for getting the job done.’ She spoke with scorn: ‘That’s all he cared about. That’s done, he’d say proudly. It was the same coping with me. But Rupert, did you not know all this before? I mean, I don’t want to
make out that the whole town talks of me morning, noon and night, but I would have thought that you must have heard some drift of it?’

‘No, never. I knew that the children had gone away with their father and I think I asked why but I was never told.’

‘That’s because you’re so nicely brought up! They’re too well bred in your house, they’d never talk of other people’s business.’

‘I think my mother’d be glad to if she knew about it. And it’s not only us. I once asked Celia why you didn’t have your children, and she said there was some desperate row years ago when judges were even worse than they are today. That’s all, nobody knows about the . . . er . . . the smoke and things.’

‘I don’t know whether to be pleased or disappointed,’ Judy laughed. ‘I always thought people believed I was up to no good with all the herbal remedies, bordering on the witch doctor nearly.’

‘I’m afraid people think that’s very worthy, we’ll have to make your image more villainous for you,’ Rupert said.

‘Oh for ages the unfortunate guards used to come and inspect my herb garden. I had a map of it for them in the end, and told them they must come in whenever they liked and that I would explain anything that looked a bit amiss. Then by the time I went to Dublin, they’d more or less written me off as a dangerous drugs pusher.’

‘You mean you’re in the clear at last, after twenty years?’

‘I don’t know: sometimes I see the imprint of heavy boots round the camomile beds. Eternal vigilance.’

‘Do you hate Jack Hickey for it?’

‘No, I said to you I never think of him. But you’d probably find that hard to believe, especially when I think of the children a lot, and to all intents and purposes I don’t know them at all. They’re strangers to me.’

‘Yes,’ Rupert obviously did find it hard to understand.

‘It’s the same with your mother, you know. Even though she doesn’t let on, she thinks of you every day up in Dublin, she is aware of you in a way that it’s hard to explain.’

‘Oh, I don’t think so.’

‘I know it, I asked her once, just to know whether I was odd. She said that when you were away at school it was the same and at university and then when you went into the company. She says that often in her day she pauses and wonders what Rupert’s doing now.’

‘Heavens,’ he said.

‘Not for long, just for a second, you know, not brooding. But I expect you don’t pause and wonder what she’s doing.’