The Little Red Chairs (13 page)

It ends with his scrawling his name on a letter of apology that had already been typed, even with knowing that he probably couldn’t read it. It was to be sent to the doctor, along with a first edition of Yeats’s
Stories of Red Hanrahan
. The edges of the pages are gold-flecked like a prayer book and the manager lets it be known that he is loath to part with it.

In the first dusk he walks back. Flowers and fallen confetti, from a wedding two days earlier, lie trodden on the wet grass and he knows in his heart that he is sure who the man was, but that nobody in the whole world, not even Tommy, not even Ivan, would believe him.

Jack

It was a brown envelope, of the kind circulars come in. My name, Jack Colbert McBride, was typed in full, which I found odd, as Colbert, my mother’s maiden name, was not known to many. Inside a smaller envelope, again with my full name, but written in ink.

Someone, it said, had an important secret to impart to me and confidentiality was essential. All I had to do was reply to a post box above, granting authority for a poste restante letter to be sent to my local post office, where I could pick it up. The secret, it said, was gobsmacking. I had better know before it was too late. I guessed it was something to do with Fidelma, the soft spot she had for the new doctor, that all the women had, but I ignored it, knowing it was a passing fantasy. I hated this threat, so slyly conveyed. I was filled with anger at whoever had sent it and my deepest instinct was to protect her from slander. Yet it shook me. I remembered shortly before I married, when Malachi, my best man, and I went night fishing in a lake in Longford and his saying out of the blue, ‘If you buy a canary, you have got to let it sing.’ Later on, we wound the lines in, put the rods aside, and spread our coats on the grass for the man-to-man conversation, that happens on the brink of marriage. The funny thing is, we said nothing at all about it. I knew he wanted to say things, but hesitated out of loyalty and that it probably concerned the big gap in our ages.

I first saw Fidelma in an orchard, a young girl just ripening, with a crop of black hair and the whitest skin. The face and features that they used to say were descended from the knights who came with the Spanish Armada. She was with her friend Moira, picking raspberries off their canes. It was in the big house where I played tennis with Aubrey the son, and the two girls at first ignored us. I asked Fidelma what she did and she said she worked in a beautician’s, but that it was temporary. It was Moira who spilt the beans, said Fidelma wrote poems and hoped to be a poet one day. Her shyness was touching. She did not act shy, she just was, turning aside from us as if we weren’t there. I wrote to her and surprisingly she replied and so our friendship was epistolary until I plucked up the courage to ask her parents if I could take her out. We met mostly on Sunday afternoons, walked for miles, climbed mountains, searched for the periwinkles in the rocks and later, had tea in a cafe in some town where no one knew us. Getting her to open up was difficult. She talked in bursts, the way shy people do, and she was such a trusting girl and with an innate reserve. If she had written a poem and I had enquired about it, she would tuck it into my pocket as we parted, saying it was never to be mentioned again.

Our honeymoon was in Rome, where it was still warm in November and a flowering creeper bloomed above the entrance door to the hotel. It was an old hotel down a side street, with a plash of fountains not far away, where we had earlier tossed pennies for our marital bliss. The staff were so courteous, that while waiting to be checked in, instead of queuing at the counter, we were seated and given coffee with petits fours, while my passport, with my wife’s name on it, was being studied.

Fidelma was transported, gazing at the paintings and an icon
in darkly hued wood, in a niche just above us, with an image of a mother and child. The whole place exuded grandeur, armchairs covered in red velvet, with gold-threaded braid and small tables for visitors to be entertained at.

Later that night, on the third floor, I sat outside our room on one of those velvet chairs, as Fidelma had gone in to prepare. That landing lives on in my mind. There was an open cabinet lined with embroidered silk, platters on the shelves with designs of cupids and fauns. One platter in vivid colours bore Picasso’s name. I was burning with desire.

When I let myself into the room, Fidelma was not there. Where had she gone to? How had she escaped? I looked in the bathroom, then on the small balcony, where a sensor light had come on the moment I stepped there. The leaves of a little tree, possibly a lemon tree, had plaited themselves into the railing that I leant over, to see if she had climbed down, or worse. Back in the room I searched again and eventually found my frightened wife crouched in a corner, behind a chaise longue, over which a long panel of velvet dipped. She was cowering like a child and like a child she was weeping. She asked me to tie the drawstring of her nightgown, thereby asking me not to violate her, which I did, and then I carried her onto the big four-poster bed.

She insisted on washing the sheet in the early morning. We had breakfast out on that balcony and the faint atlas of discolour, on the otherwise white sheet, that she had hung up, was both a triumph and a rebuke to me.

We came home. I took a lease on a carpet shop that had been empty for years and we refurbished it in order for Fidelma to open her boutique. Soon she was singled out for her flair with
fashion and complimentary articles appeared in local and national newspapers. We gave brunches, I joined a golf club and Fidelma disarmed all those she met.

But alone she withdrew. I felt I never really got to know her. She was elusive, like thistledown.

I folded the anonymous letter and put it in the drawer, between my summer shirts, wishing neither to explore it nor to destroy it, the ditherer’s way, while ringing in my ears were Malachi’s words –
If you buy a canary, you have got to let it sing
.

Where Wolves Fuck

Fidelma stood staring at it, hot and cold by turns, the paint still wet and with a glisten to it –
Where Wolves Fuck
. It was scrawled on the pavement in front of their shop, which was now Vlad’s clinic. The lettering was lopsided. In cardinal red:
Where Wolves Fuck
. Her first instinct was to stamp on it, except the sludges of wet paint stuck to her Sunday shoes. She had been on her way to first Mass, to the chapel five miles away, and had only come into the town, as she did each Sunday, to pick up two papers from the pile that was left in the passage, corded and covered with plastic. She had a prior arrangement with Nora the newsagent, to collect them and pay monthly.

She knew that Vlad coached youngsters in football up at the playing fields, early on Sundays, and she ran towards there. Passing TJ’s she saw that his blue Opel car had its tyres burst and its windows smashed in, the strewn glass on the street, like crushed ice. She kept running and at that moment, just as she neared the bridge, she saw him coming along the road in his togs, with a raincoat over his arms.

The last time they were together was on Muck Island, when he had told her that they could not meet again, as it was becoming too dangerous. That time, he brought a boat on the roof of his car so that they could go to the islands. She sat on the bridge and watched as he undid the ropes and hauled the boat down into the water and she remembered the slip-slop of the water as
she got in and his helping her to her seat. They were the only ones out on the lake. Damselflies, like slivers of blue, darted above the water, and just underneath, as in a mirage, a luxurious green weed, languorous, drifting. Pointing to the ruins of cottages, he said whole communities had lived on those islands and whole communities were buried there, their bones sunken deep down. He had been researching in the library, intending one day to compile a history of the place, the place he had grown so fond of.

They moored at an island further along, where hares, droves of them, were chasing each other in a wild, wanton sport. Yet, at their arrival, the sport stopped, the hares on their hind legs, their dark ears cocked, watched everything that went on, circling around their two half-naked bodies, recumbent in a hollow.

Later, he rowed along the lake, passing the several islands, and when they came to an extremely low bridge, they had to lie flat on the boat and she searched for his hand as the boat idled in, to what would be their last lagoon. He was at his most reachable. The roots of the willows had half collapsed into the water and water lilies lay on the surface that was scummed with willow seed from many years and shrivelled with age. There was such stillness there, everything totally sequestered, nature at her most prodigal, away from the prying world.

As with Dido, birds were singing in her head when they rode back to the shore, but suddenly her mood darkened. Sitting on the bridge was a figure, whose presence somehow struck her as ominous. A stranger in a dark suit, with sunglasses, smoking a cigarette. The way he stared at them unnerved her, following their every move. He watched as Vlad hauled the boat onto the dry land and with the ropes, eased it up on the bonnet, while she
held the other end of the ropes, for him to tie the various knots. For a moment, she thought of approaching this mystery man, but Vlad told her to get in the car. As they drove off, she looked back and saw the silhouette, a harmless tourist on a bridge at eventide, and yet, and yet she flinched.

Ten weeks passed and she knew. In the mornings she went down to the bottom of her garden, so that Jack did not see her vomiting. She was inventing stories to tell him, all of them lacking credence, like a child making sandcastles that the incoming tide will sweep away.

She blurted it out to Vlad, the broken windows of his car, the punctured tyres and worst of all, the graffiti. As he was hearing it, he was already running.

Where Wolves Fuck
. He loomed over it, stared at it, then knelt and smelt it, as if he might guess the perpetrators.

‘It’s someone who knows us,’ she said.

‘You must deny everything, Fidelma.’

‘I can’t … I live here.’

‘I thought I could trust you to be discreet,’ he said with a cold contemptuousness.

‘I am discreet,’ she said far too loudly, hating the hysteria in her voice, in her being, in her headscarf, in all of her.

‘We must go to the guards,’ she said.

‘Don’t be so stupid,’ he said. His plan was already in place. She was to waken one of the local bums and get him to bring black fence paint and erase it completely. He himself would go to Plodder Policeman’s house, report the damage done to his car, but insist that he would not be pressing charges, as it was obviously the work of some passing hooligans in the night.

‘What do I say?’ she asked.

‘Nothing happened … no broken window … no graffiti … no rendezvous … nothing …
ne
…
ne
…
ništa
.’

‘But we’re …’

‘Start forgetting … Fidelma.’

‘Forgetting what?’

‘Everything …’ He was wiping his hands in a gesture of wiping her out. No more letters. No communication. No tears. She is a grown-up lady, she can look after herself.

Then he was gone. Gone to where she would not find him. So this child, this wolf-child, was hers and hers alone to give birth to. Oh Jesus and Mary, she said, as she headed for the squat where Dante and the boys lived.
Start forgetting Fidelma. No rendezvous. No letters. No communication. Ništa
.

Dante brought all the clobber in a wheelbarrow; tools, brushes, rollers and several pots of paint. She stood at the edge of the kerb to deflect pedestrians, but luckily there was not a soul about, only a pair of rasping tomcats on the wall of the crèche. She watched, as first he poured pools of black paint onto the offending red and then with quick, sure strokes he rolled it again and again, black upon black, and then with a thin paintbrush he jabbed and jabbed, so that every speck of red was gone. Who might have done it, Dante wondered. Obviously, it was in the very early hours of the morning, as they were all in the pub until after three, Diarmuid, Plodder Pat, the sisters, Fifi and a big crowd back from a funeral in Manor Hamilton. The buggers must have come after that.

‘Have you an enemy missus … someone with a grudge?’ he asked.

‘I didn’t think I had …’ she said and began to cry, looking down at the black slabs, as at a funeral bier, and pretending
not to notice, Dante began to paint the next and the next set of adjoining pavement, so that it would seem the whole street had been defiled by hooligans in the night.

Not once did he mention Vlad, but she knew then that he knew, just as she knew that day when she came home from her first tryst and Jack held out the glove, smeared with the bloodied pus of the bat, that he had guessed her crime.

Capture

When to everyone’s astonishment Dr Vlad returned and he emerged from the back of the hire car, people were shocked to see the change in him. He looked like a cave man, his hair scruffy and unwashed and he wore thick dark glasses.

The poetry reading had been planned months before, the idea being that he would read his own poetry at the foot of Ben Bulben, in homage to Yeats, and accompany himself on the gusle. Afterwards, there would be a picnic, with others invited to sing or recite as they wished. But since his sudden disappearance, the outing had lost momentum. Were it not for Fidelma, Fifi and an actress from Dublin, the event would have been quashed altogether.