The Disenchanted Widow (2 page)

It was April 1981, and Belfast was burning: a seething cauldron of hatred and division where down back alleys IRA gunmen performed impromptu knee surgery on informers, where no-warning bombs exploded in carrier bags and British soldiers kept eyes alert, Bullpup rifles at the ready. Margaret Thatcher was in Downing Street, Charles Haughey leading the Dáil. In the Maze prison H-Blocks, a succession of young men were starving themselves to death for the cause of Irish freedom.

The widow negotiated a warren of narrow streets, all decked out in tricolors and murals to the patriotic martyrs. Racing down Rossapena Street, she hit a ramp, causing Herkie’s head to bounce off the ceiling, before turning right onto Cliftonville Road. She was glad to be avoiding the rush-hour traffic. With luck, they’d reach the border before nightfall.

“Where we goin’, Ma?”

“As far away from this bloody place as possible. Who knows, son, if we can get the money together, maybe all the way till Amerikay till see the Statue of Liberry. But first—”

“I’d love till see the Statue of Liberry, Ma!”

“I know, son, but first we’ve got till earn us some money for the passage. Now, yer Auntie Joan in Sligo might help us out. Failing that, yer Uncle Bert in Hackney. But for now, son, light me a fag there like a good boy.”

Herkie reached below the dashboard and picked up the Park Drives. He liked sitting on top of the record player (now that the ride was smoother) because it gave him a commanding view and made him feel as big as any adult.

Screechh-h-h.

She’d slammed on the brakes. At a zebra crossing—which she hadn’t even noticed, her eyes being mostly on the rearview mirror for fear of the Dentist—an old lady was tottering out. Bessie fumed, annoyed at the delay, and pressed the horn.

The pensioner did a double take. On seeing Herkie with fag in hand, she waved her stick, appalled. The nine-year-old added to her dismay by dragging deeply on the cigarette and blowing the smoke out the window.

“Stop yer clownin’, son.” She snatched up the cigarette.

“Yer a disgrace!” the old lady called out. “I have the right o’ way.”

“Well, away on with ye then!” the mother shouted, revving the engine.

“Aye, away on with ye!” echoed the son.

Bessie shifted the car into first gear and roared off, causing Herkie to topple from his perch.

“Serves ye right for being a cheeky monkey. Now, make yerself useful and tell me if ye see any Brits from up there. This bloody thing isn’t taxed.”

“I think I see one,” he said. He’d clambered back onto the record player and was holding on tight to the knobs.

“Don’t be daft, son. The Brits are like friggin’ blackheads. Ye never get one but a whole bloody rash—
and
when ye don’t bloody want them…like
now
.”

She slowed the car to a crawl and joined the queue as four members of the Queen’s Own Highlander Regiment, in fatigues and tartan berets, sprang out of an army truck and began setting up a checkpoint.

“See, what did I tell ye? Now, you behave yerself, ye hear, and let yer ma do the talkin’.”

“Aye, Ma.”

The car in front was waved through, and Bessie moved forward, drawing even with a soldier. He’d an automatic weapon slung over his right shoulder, and its muzzle was now pointing menacingly close to her right ear. She instinctively raised a protective hand.

“Where’s you off to then, luv?” the soldier inquired, chewing vigorously on a piece of gum and aiming the query at her bosom.

None of your bloody business.
“Oh, just going out for the day…with my son.”

He glanced into the back. “You take the whole ’ouse wiff you every time you goes out then?” He eyed Herkie. “What’s that fing you’re sittin’ on, sonny?”

“What’s a ‘fing,’ Ma?”

Bessie shot Herkie a baleful glance. The last thing she wanted was Soldier Boy going through her stuff. She’d have to nudge him off balance with a bit of the old girlie charm.

“It’s my record player, sir. Helps me unwind in the evening…you know how it is.” She was glad she’d reapplied her lipstick as she simpered up at him, fully aware that the three-quarter profile she was presenting was most alluring.

The soldier reddened, a vision of a
Playboy
centerfold rearing up at him—that was Bessie’s idea, anyway, and she imagined she’d struck close enough to the mark.

The walkie-talkie in his breast pocket squawked, breaking the fantasy.

“Mind how you go then,” he said, embarrassed, and waved them through.

No worries there, thought Bessie Lawless: she’d every intention of minding how she went.

She was in the driver’s seat for the very first time in her life. She put the car in gear and sped off—away from the soldier, away from the bloody Dentist, her dead husband, and, with a bit of luck, the dreadful past.

Chapter two

L
orcan Strong was having no end of trouble with the bosom of Miss Theodosia Magill, Countess of Clanwilliam. She was showing far too much cleavage, for a start, which always made life difficult. He thought back to another lady he’d touched up only the year before: Harriet Anne Butler, a Belfast aristocrat. Miss Butler had been a joy to handle, she being more demure and less obviously endowed.

Flesh was always a problem for Lorcan. All that blending of zinc buffs, cadmium yellows, and canton roses made him giddy at times, and no more so than when he was dealing with an expanse of bosom. What you could get away with in a face or hand in a portrait you couldn’t palm off so easily with a bosom. Everyone—male and female alike—was drawn, consciously or subconsciously, to that part of a painting more than any other.

Even though the air temperature and humidity levels in the restoration room were perfectly controlled, Lorcan found the atmosphere on that fine April day oppressive. This had nothing to do with climate and everything to do with the tension he was feeling. For these days he was a troubled man living in a very troubled city. People were being slain with a depressing regularity. The “wrong” name, workplace, or address was enough to condemn you.

In the general run of things, the conservator could remain on the periphery, an observer of events rather than a part of them. But all that had changed a month before when he, the idle spectator, had been dragged, through no fault of his own, into the fray.

His hand quivered and he drew back from the canvas. He’d never experienced such upset to his routine before, and he resented it. Repairing an Old Master and keeping true to the spirit of its creator was not the preserve of the cack-handed or faint of heart. But of late his heart and hand, steady and assured for so many years, were failing him.

He dipped a brush into a jar of thinner and stirred it, pondering his lot.

By rights you should not be here at all. You should be home fulfilling your duty to your dear old mother.
He was addressing the unspoken to the equally silent Countess as she gazed serenely out at the cluttered workroom.

Yes, home: seeing to things in the family bar and on the land. You should have the malty whiff of stout in your nostrils, not the odor of linseed, and in your hand a dirt-grimed shovel instead of that very fine Siberian squirrel paintbrush. You’re a fraud, Strong. And if you’d stayed at home and done as your mother wished, you wouldn’t be in this mess now.

In disgust, he threw the brush down and got up to stand by the window.

Belfast was spewing its workers onto the streets. He could hear the muffled stamp of feet, the exhaling breath of air brakes, and the all-too-familiar strains of sirens wailing their way to yet another atrocity.

Perhaps he should return home. Escape. Save himself. Save his mother. After all, he owed her.

Oh, yes, he did owe his poor mother. He knew that all too well. His father, a farmer and publican, had died ten years earlier, and she’d been depending on her only son to come home and continue
where her husband had left off. But Lorcan had let it be known that he was interested in neither the land nor the pub business.

“Mother, I’m not cut out for tramping fields and serving drunks.” He’d meant “drinks” but hadn’t bothered correcting himself. “I have an imagination.” The young, defiant artist was unrepentant.

“Are you saying your poor father had no imagination?”

“Strictly speaking, only artists have imagination, and I can’t afford to have mine stifled. This is not
me
.” He’d swept an arm majestically with that last remark, to encompass not only the Crowing Cock pub and their outlying farm but the entire population of Tailorstown and the mountains beyond.

“I’m very disappointed in you, Lorcan. Just so long as you remember that your father’s pub and the people of this town put food on our table and clothes on your back and funded your education.”

But he’d won the day nonetheless, had rented out the land to local farmers, employed a bartender to assist his mother, and returned to Belfast. After graduation, he’d pursued a career as a painter and printer before finally fetching up in the conservation room of the Ulster Museum.

Now thirty-seven and considerably wiser, he winced at the arrogance of that younger self, turned away from the window, and sat down before the Countess once more. An act of justification, if nothing else.

These days, instead of toiling over his own canvases, he bent over the work of others. Not that he was bitter, for he was, quite literally, having a hand in the work of the great innovators. The Turners, the Reynoldses, the Laverys: all were revivified under his expert hand. One week in the Barbizon, the next in the Rococo, Lorcan moved between schools and periods and styles with the ease of a quick-change artist. It was fulfilling—and lucrative—work.

He considered the image on the canvas once again, flexed the fingers of his right hand several times, and took a deep breath. Sufficiently calmed to continue, he laid a speck of cadmium on a soupçon of white and blended the minute quantities to the required hue before taking the brush to the canvas again.

The Countess was a plain woman whom Reynolds had flattered as far as he dared, his brush more forgiving than a camera lens could ever be. There was little the great painter could have done about that nose, though: much too long. Each time Lorcan contemplated it, the perfectionist in him wanted to shorten it, to make her perfect.

That was his problem and he knew it: the quest for perfection, that unattainable moving target. But the chase brought excellence, and that realization was
his
prize.

Thump! Thump! Thump!
His reverie was broken by a boisterous knocking on the door.

The insufferable Stanley from Fossils, no doubt.

“Are ye not finished with that oul’ doll’s hooters yet?” Stanley shouted, peering through the glass door-panel and trying the handle.

Lorcan did not flinch. Stanley was another good reason for keeping his door locked.

“I’m goin’ for a drink. Wanna come?”

“No, I’ve no time. Away—back to your old crustaceans.”

“Och, away with
you
. Ye’re too involved with that woman. She’s only been dead two hundred years.”

“And your fossils have been dead fifty
million
years. See you tomorrow, Stanley.”

“Ye can have more fun with a pair of the real ones, ye know…down the Empire.”

“
Bye
, Stanley.”

“Never know who ye’d meet…”

“Good
bye
, Stanley.”

“Ah, right. Suit yerself. See ye the marra. But if ye change yer mind, ye know where I’ll be.”

“I won’t change my mind!” He heard Stanley’s footsteps retreating down the corridor, then hurrying back again.

For heaven’s sake, what now?

“Hi, I forgot. Catherine gave me a note for ye. Said somebody left it in for ye at reception.”

Lorcan tensed. He paused before answering, fearful that his voice might betray him. “Really?”

“Well, are ye gonna open the door so I can give it to ye?”

“Yes…I mean no. Just…just push it under the door, Stanley, please.”

“God, you’re a right queer one, Strong.”

He waited for Stanley’s departing footsteps, for the outer door to bang shut, before rising. He knew what the note contained. He knew who it was from.

Action was needed now. Yes, action. Anything to delay opening it. He checked his watch. Time to finish up for the day.

At the sink, he cleaned his brushes with turpentine. The remaining oils on the palette were sheathed in polythene and tightly secured to keep the air out.

He pulled on his green velvet jacket and positioned his Borsalino at just the right angle. Only then did he feel brave enough to bend down and pick up the wretched thing.

It was written in heavy, black pencil, as though by a child’s hand. The import of the words, however, was far from childish.

Dont forget your wee dental appointment. Thursday 8 pm sharp. Therell be consawquences if you miss it Lorcan my oul son.

Chapter three

B
eing a city girl, Bessie Lawless was not used to reading road maps; never had much cause to. On leaving Belfast she’d headed northwest, toward the town of Ballymena, then followed a more westerly route because it looked more direct on the map. Since she was in a hurry to get away from Belfast, this seemed the sensible thing to do.

Her plan was to visit her sister, Joan, in Sligo and get a loan from her to help fund their passage to Uncle Bert in England. She’d already written to Bert, a former drains inspector from the Short Strand. Five years before, he’d come into unexpected wealth via the death of a maiden aunt. The windfall had enabled him to make flesh a long-cherished dream of owning a townhouse pub in Hackney.

If Joan loaned her the fare—and that was a big “if” indeed—Bessie’s plan could work. But Joan had no idea that she was on her way, and Bessie had no intention of telling her. They didn’t get on, and giving notice of her arrival would only mean offering Joan the excuse of being conveniently out when she called. Or hiding in a cupboard at the sound of the car drawing up. She knew her older sibling all too well.