The Disenchanted Widow (6 page)

On the step, the mechanic produced a large key from the depths of his overalls and turned it in the lock.

Bessie stepped inside.

After the sun-filled yard, she was taken aback to find herself in murky darkness. She blinked, heard the swish of drapes, then suddenly, blessedly, daylight was flushing the gloom.

The doll-size living room, all blossoming pinks and chintzy coverings, was crammed. Aunt Dora had either been a house-proud hoarder or a miser who didn’t believe in throwing anything out. Bessie’s bemused eyes took in plump armchairs and
embroidered cushions, trinkets and religious statues made of delft and molded glass. A glossy sideboard with porcelain knobs held a plaster replica of the grotto at Lourdes. In a corner: a spiky plant the height of a six-year-old. On the mantel: oil lamps of tulip-shaped crystal. Framed icons all but obscured the hunting-scene wallpaper.

It did not exactly chime with what the plucky widow aspired to, for, despite her humble background, she had a hankering after style and the finer things in life. In her book, life was too short to frill a cushion, crochet a doily, or stitch felt ducks on a satin pond and pass it off as a fire screen—activities which Aunt Dora had obviously engaged in. Terrible, she thought, what those old spinsters would do to compensate for the lack of a social life.

“I can see your aunt was very good with her hands,” was all she could say.

“Aye, that’s why I’d want all her stuff tae be kept just the way she left it, Mrs. Hailstone, if ye don’t mind. She left it tae me in her will…the house. And she ast specially that nuthin’ be touched.”

As he spoke, he was eyeing young Herkie, who’d lifted an ornament from the windowsill and was earnestly attempting to liberate a purple gnome from its yellow toadstool. So much was there to see in the cramped room that the boy was growing excited, uncertain of what to vandalize first.

“I quite understand, Mr. Grant. Everything will be absolutely safe with me.”

Bessie followed him upstairs, hauling Herkie after her.

Grant showed them the aunt’s bedroom, their sleeping quarters for the night.

The small room was dwarfed by its outsize furniture. A brass bed with a candlewick coverlet took center stage. One wall was given over to a hulking great wardrobe and a chest of drawers.
Before the window: a dressing table embellished with curlicues, its oval mirror marred by a creeping efflorescence round the border.

“As I say, I wouldn’t want any of me aunt’s—”

“Of course not, Mr. Grant! I understand. Completely.” She wished he’d just go and leave them to it.

“There’s a couch bed in the corner there for the wee boy.”

“Did ye kill your aunt in here?” Herkie asked, images of Grant the “cannonball” still very fresh in his mind’s eye.

Grant stared at him.

Bessie gave Herkie a poke in the ribs. “Now, don’t be saying silly things to Mr. Grant, son. I do apologize, Mr. Grant. It’s his age. He reads far too many comics.”

The mechanic adjusted his big glasses and stared sadly at the floor.

“I’m so sorry about your aunt,” Bessie said. “You must have been very close to her.”

“Aye, I was. But she didn’t die up here. No. She tripped on the stairs and fell on her head.”

Herkie was suddenly attentive. “Them stairs out there?”

Bessie coughed loudly. She gave Herkie a look that would curdle cream and pushed him out of the room.

“I’m very sorry to hear that. Must have been a shock for you.”

She was beginning to warm to Mr. Grant and his kindness. If she played her cards right, goodness knew what might ensue from the little mishap with her car. The dark clouds were lifting, their silver linings agleam with fresh promise.

“Now, she was a big age, Mrs. Hailstone. Eighty-nine. So if the stairs hadn’t of tooken her, something else would of. Now I’ll show ye out the back.”

The back door opened onto a sizable gravel yard flanked by rolling fields. An open shed at the side housed a stack of firewood. A stout nylon clothesline was secured to its eaves.

“What’s that?” asked Herkie, pointing at a large stone atop a sheet of corrugated zinc.

“Oh, that’s a well. That cover there has tae stay on it.”

“Do you hear that, son?”

“Aye, Ma.”

“Aye, if ye fell down that well,” Mr. Grant warned, “ye might end up in China, begod, and would nivver be heard of again. So that’s why that big stone’s over the tap of it.”

“You’ve been warned, son. You keep away from that.”

Herkie nodded for appearance’s sake. He was eyeing the big stone, already calculating the amount of effort needed to shift it.

“As I say, I’ll get that fan belt for ye in Willie-Tom’s and have her ready for ye as quick as I can.”

“It’s very kind of you, Mr. Grant. How can we thank you?”

“Oh, that’s all right, Mrs. Hailstone. I wouldn’t see nobody stuck—and me aunt wouldn’t, neither, God rest her. She was a good, religious woman. Went tae Mass every day.”

They followed him round to the front of the house and stood waving goodbye as his truck shuddered off again in the direction of the town.

“Look what I got, Ma,” said Herkie. He was proudly holding a battered leather wallet.

“Where did you get that?”

“On the path, Ma. Maybe Mr. Grant dropped it.”

“Well, whyn’t you give it back to him then?” She snapped it up and began riffling through it.

“’Cos I didn’t know if it was his, Ma.”

“I hope you didn’t steal it, son, for if you did you’ll be gettin’ a warm backside. We can’t be drawing attention to ourselves.”

Inside the wallet she found a novena to St. Anthony—patron saint of lost objects—two five-pound notes, a couple of stamps, and some hayseeds.

“Could I get me Action Man with that?”

“Now, son, are you gonna turn into your da, are you?”

Herkie kicked the ground and sighed. “No, Ma.”

“Good. Next time we see Mr. Grant, I’ll ask him if it’s his. If it’s not, then it means Saint Anthony threw it down from heaven to help us out, and you might—and I mean
just might—
get your Action Man.”

“Och, Ma…” Herkie kicked a stone, grudgingly accepting her verdict. But he wasn’t too disappointed. There was much to explore in this new playground.

After his ma had returned indoors, he made a beeline for the backyard. If China lay at the bottom of that well, he was determined to start at once on the removal of that big stone.

Chapter seven

D
aylight gradually suffused Lorcan’s room, making the ceiling tiles stand clear. He’d had a fitful night and was glad that morning had broken. Wednesday. It would not be an easy day. Wednesday afternoons were largely taken up by the weekly meeting with his superior, Sir Edward Fielding-Payne. Those meetings were generally fraught. And tomorrow evening he had that
other
appointment—the one he didn’t even want to think about. To top it all, the previous evening he’d had a phone call from his ever-fretting mother to say her varicose veins were troubling her, a call that was calculated to make him feel guilty for his neglect of both her and the family business.

He eased himself into a sitting position and glanced at the easel in the corner. Would he ever be rid of the Countess? Her disquieting visage haunted his every waking minute. In the workplace he was retouching her and in his bedroom recreating her against his will. The thought of this dismayed him, as it always did, and he quickly switched his attention to the clock face. He saw it was six thirty. Time to get up. Already the day was rousing itself. The drone of buses was just about audible out on the Antrim Road. A muffled flushing sound from downstairs told him that Mrs. Mavis
Hipple, his landlady, had emerged from her cluttered nest on the ground floor, directly below.

Yes, mornings had become more stressful these days, and he resented that. A couple of weeks back, a new lodger had moved into the room opposite his: an earnest, hymn-singing, tea-drinking Presbyterian lady in hand-knits and sensible shoes who answered to the name of Miss Florence Finch. She was one of those ladies whom his mother might describe as having “missed her markets” in the marriage stakes.

Miss Finch had upset his bathroom routine; a new strategy had to be worked out in order to accommodate her. The difficulty lay in her rodent-like quietness. Lorcan could never tell when she was up and about. They shared a bathroom, off the landing, which as yet—despite his many entreaties to the landlady—had no lock. This deficiency made for a great deal of anxiety and reconnaissance before he could venture forth each morning. Only the previous week, he had, to their mutual embarrassment, surprised Miss Finch in there. The demure lady had beaten a hasty retreat, complete with her knitting and a Victoria Holt doorstop of a paperback pressed to her bosom. The memory of the meeting still had the power to scorch his sensibilities like a gaucho’s branding iron. After much thought, however, he’d solved the problem: he’d invested in a transistor radio.

The radio, unlike a lock, fulfilled three separate functions. First: he could take it with him and listen to the news every time he used the bathroom. Second: the very sound of the radio would deter Miss Finch from entering at an inappropriate moment. Third: a quick twist of the volume knob would generate enough racket to drown out whatever lavatorial tumult he might set in motion.

It was a neat solution to a complex problem. He only wished he could tackle the rest of life’s little difficulties with such aplomb. He thought of his mother and the pub in Tailorstown—and shuddered.

But first things first. He threw back the bedcovers, went to the closet, hauled out a long gray raincoat, and pulled it on over his pajamas. This, again, was done out of consideration for Miss Finch because he sensed that she was a prudish lady, for whom a man wearing pajamas might be as diabolical a sight as seeing Adam in the Garden minus his fig leaf. He gathered up his wash bag and towel and peered out into the corridor. All was quiet; he felt he was safe enough.

Once inside Mrs. Hipple’s Lilliputian bathroom, fetchingly done up in shades of periwinkle blue and whorehouse pink, Lorcan switched on Radio Ulster and set about his ablutions.

The news items were mixed.

“
Pope John Paul’s private secretary will today visit the Maze Prison for a second time. It’s understood that he will again try to persuade hunger striker Bobby Sands and his fellow protesters to call off the strike. President Ronald Reagan stated that the United States would not intervene in the situation, but said that he was deeply concerned at events. Bobby Sands has been on a hunger strike for a total of fifty-nine days, and his condition…
”

Fifty-nine days, Lorcan thought. Fifty-nine days without food of any kind! He couldn’t even begin to imagine how that must be. He’d read somewhere that after only ten days the body begins to eat itself for sustenance; after twenty days toxins have built up in the liver, kidneys, and brain, leading to dehydration, cracked skin, extreme cold intolerance, vital-organ shrinkage, blindness, bleeding joints…the list went on and on. And that was “only” the physical pain. What about the mental torture? Twenty days, thought Lorcan—and tomorrow Bobby Sands will have been on a hunger strike for
three times
that. The man was surely a goner.

He stared at himself in the mirror—lean face, high-domed forehead, Roman nose, eyes the color of ice chips, not unhandsome—and wondered briefly how he might look after fifty-nine days of starvation.

“…
news just in of a security alert on Royal Avenue, Belfast. Police report an incendiary device, discovered in the changing rooms of a boutique close to the City Hall. The area has been cordoned off following a telephone warning, and army experts are examining a package
.”

Lorcan sighed and continued washing.

He pricked up his ears at the third news item. A man named Donal Carmody had been abducted from his home in West Belfast in the early hours of the morning. There was talk of IRA involvement. He thought of the ominous note he’d received yesterday and sighed deeply. The dreaded Thursday evening appointment was nearing. There was no way he could miss it. No way whatsoever. His hands shook as he pulled the plug on the washbasin and dried his face.

Back in the safety of his room, he dressed quickly. He favored a bohemian look: jade-colored pin-cord pants with matching velvet jacket, a white poplin shirt, a satin fleur-de-lis waistcoat in brandy tan twinned with a butterfly bow tie in a similar design. Choosing what to wear to the office was seldom a problem for Lorcan. He’d seven white poplin shirts, one for each working day and two spares for evenings and weekends. Mrs. Hipple very kindly laundered and ironed them, folded them, and placed them in his chest of drawers. He’d three velvet jackets: jade, russet, and black; seven pairs of socks in corresponding hues, and four pairs of black shoes. His main extravagances were his cravats and bow ties, handmade by Robinson & Cleaver. He’d more than twenty. He liked to wear a different one each day.

All thoughts of running into Miss Finch and the ghastly appointment were now being supplanted by snatches of his mother’s phone call. They kept swirling about in his head like laundry on a slow spin.

Was he all right? It wasn’t safe in Belfast: far too many bombs. What if he got caught in one and lost an arm, or a leg, or an
eye—or worse still, both eyes? How would he work then? When was he coming home? Was he getting enough to eat? Did Mrs. Hipple change his bed regularly enough? And finally, the news guaranteed to make him feel guilty: Her legs were playing up. The Crowing Cock was busy at weekends especially, what with Hipster Fred and the Heartbeats doing the Golden Oldie Friday session and the Beardy Boys every other Saturday. Weekdays were manageable, but only just. Bunions
and
varicose veins. She couldn’t be on her feet with those. A clot could go to the heart; Dr. Brewster had said so.

Henrietta Strong had given her son a bad night and a return of his chronic indigestion. Lorcan resented both; they affected his concentration. Concentration was paramount in a job such as his—in his day job
and
his “other” job here in his room. He doubted that Sir Joshua Reynolds ever had a lapse. But then Sir Joshua most likely didn’t have a mother fretting about leg problems, or the threat of having to do stand-in as a bartender whenever family duty called.