The Railway Station Man (17 page)

‘This place is a pigsty. I'm sorry. Dan always said that I was a slut. He must have been right. I argued with him at the time, but …'

‘Are you going to show me this picture, or have you changed your mind?'

‘Shut your eyes.' Oh God, she groaned. ‘Eye. Shut … listen to that awful rain.' She looked at him. He stood by the door, his eye obediently shut. She walked over to the painting and lifted it up carefully.

‘I wanted to see you,' he repeated.

‘That's nice.'

She carried it across the room and put it standing up on the only chair. ‘You can look now.'

She heard the telephone ringing from across the yard. She considered the possibility of leaving it to ring itself out, but decided against it. She pulled open the door and dashed across the yard. Curiosity killed the cat, Dan would have said coolly. The telephone had held no magic for him at all.

‘Hello.' Puffed.

Crackle.

‘Mother.'

Crackle.

‘Hello.'

‘Hello.'

Crackle.

Miracles of modern science how are ya.

‘Mother, can you hear me?'

‘Yes. Just,' she yelled.

There was a long crackling silence.

‘Jack. Hello. Are you still there?'

She caught the sound of his voice again. A voice drowning in crackles. As it went down for the third time she heard the words, ‘tomorrow evening.'

‘Tomorrow evening?' she shouted back. ‘Is that what you said? You're coming tomorrow evening?'

There was total silence.

‘Hey. Yoohoo. Anyone there?'

It sounded as if someone sighed.

‘Bugger the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs,' she said into the mouthpiece and hung up.

An old respectable umbrella of Dan's stood in a corner of the hall, ready for emergencies. His name was written on a thin gold band around the handle, in neat looping letters. He had always kept it immaculately rolled.

‘Hopeless, hopeless,' she muttered to herself as she picked it up.

Roger was standing looking at the painting.

‘Hopeless,' she repeated to his back. ‘Do you know that the people are leaving this country in thousands because they can't communicate with each other. Thousands. What the hell is the point of paying to have one of those odious little black gadgets in your house, if it doesn't work?'

‘I think it's a very remarkable painting,' Roger said.

She crossed the room and picked up several brushes that were lying on the floor.

She poured some turpentine into a cup and began to clean them.

‘Why do you live alone?'

She rubbed at the handle of one of the brushes with a cloth.

‘I'm not unhappy.'

Blue paint stained two of her fingers.

‘That wasn't what I asked.'

‘I like to be alone. It's funny how long it takes you to learn these things about yourself?

She put the brush into an enamel jug where several others were standing and picked up another.

‘I didn't discover that truth about myself until after Dan was killed. Up until that moment I saw nothing but my own inadequacies.'

She twirled the brush for a moment in the turpentine.

‘I'm not lonely you know,' she said quite firmly, ‘just alone. I like to live on the edge of things.' She sighed. ‘Dan … he was very sane and well balanced. I suppose that was why I married him, I saw the lack of balance in myself. He …' she hesitated.

‘Go on.'

She put the next brush in the jug with the others and turned round to look at him. He was still staring at the painting.

‘He would have considered me to be irresponsible. He believed in structures and hierarchies, responsible involvement.'

She patted the pockets of her overall for a moment, feeling to see if her cigarettes were there. Having found that they were, she didn't need one any longer.

‘Sanity. He believed in sanity.'

‘I'll buy it,' he said.

‘Buy what?'

‘The picture.'

She burst out laughing.

‘Don't be a damn fool.'

‘I'm not. I want to buy it.'

‘Well, I don't want to sell it. I intend to do a series … sequence … call it what you like. I see four in my mind. Then I'll take them up to Dublin. If I finish them I'll feel I really have something to show people. I'll be ready then. So …'

‘So?'

‘No more talk of buying. I don't want …'

He smiled slightly as he waited for her to finish the sentence.

‘… don't get me wrong … kindness, charitable offerings. I don't mean to be rude.'

He nodded. He plucked at his eye-patch and she thought that he was going to pull it off. She didn't want to see an empty socket, or perhaps the eye was still there, threaded with red veins like the blind man who used to tap his way down the street where she had lived as a child. She wouldn't want to see that either.

‘Of course you're right. Absolutely right. Look here, I feel like a drink. How about coming down to the village with me and we'll have a drink?'

‘We could have one here.'

‘No, no, no. Let's get out of here. Mr Kelly's insalubrious bar … or the hotel? Take your pick. A celebration. Both are equally dismal. We could go further afield if you preferred.'

‘The hotel.'

‘Right. The hotel it is. Come along then.'

‘I'm not really fit to be seen.' She laughed nervously. ‘I don't think I've even combed my hair today.'

‘You'll do.' He turned abruptly and walked towards the door. ‘It's not the Ritz. Not even the Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin.'

He opened the door. It was still pouring.

‘Hold on,' she said. ‘I have the umbrella.' He was striding across the yard, impatient to be off on this jaunt.

‘I must wash the paint off my hands.'

‘Don't fuss. You'll do the way you are. Women always fuss so. Prink, pat, fiddle.'

‘I am not going to prink, pat nor fiddle. I'm going to wash the paint off my hands. If that upsets you in any way, you can go to hell.'

She marched past him into the kitchen and turned on both taps with ferocity. He didn't follow her. He walked on down the narrow hall and when she came out of the kitchen he was standing in the porch among the geraniums.

‘Did you have this built?' he asked.

She nodded.

‘I've always had a vision of myself as an old lady sitting wrapped in shawls watching the sun set, in a porch filled with geraniums. The building of the porch was phase one.'

‘Knitting?' he asked.

‘Heavens no. Not doing anything useful at all. I don't see that my personality will change with old age. Staring into space.'

‘A rocking chair?' he suggested.

‘Perhaps.'

They scuttled out to the car through the rain.

‘You don't like women much, do you?' she asked as she settled herself into her seat.

‘I have observed their manipulations from a healthy distance. They tell lies.'

‘Everyone tells lies when it suits them. Dan, who was the soul of honesty, did. Mind you, he pretended he didn't, but he did. And you do too.'

‘I don't tell lies.'

He slammed the car door and began to fiddle around with the keys.

‘Of course you do. What's all this railway nonsense then? Trains? There hasn't been a train here since 1947 or some time like that. Over thirty years. There are no lines. No hope of trains. No more trains. Never.' He didn't say a word. He turned the car very carefully round and they drove in silence down the hill. She took her cigarettes from her pocket and put one in her mouth. He leaned slightly forward as he drove, peering with care through the triangle cleared by the windscreen wiper. She lit the cigarette and took a deep pull.

‘I'm sorry,' she said, as they reached the first house in the long street. ‘I shouldn't have said any of that. I feel dishevelled, mentally as well as physically. I hope you'll forgive me.'

‘There isn't anything to forgive. You have your right like everyone else to your point of view. I see my station working. Trains running through it. Goods. Not many passengers I admit. Most people have cars these days. Moving extensions of their homes; the same sweet papers on the floor, the same music, your old coat on the back seat, your own smell. Trains are different. Trains will run through my station again … That's not a lie, Helen.'

He stopped the car outside the hotel. Macnamara's Hotel was written in black letters over the pillared door. Licensed Bar in smaller letters. Prop. Geo. Hasson, very small indeed. She got out of the car and followed him into the dark hall. The bar was empty. The eight plastic stools waited hopefully, the fire smouldered.

Beer and smoke and a smell of fried fish.

‘Stool or table?' he asked her.

‘Over by the fire, I think.'

He rang the bell on the counter and a voice called something from another room.

‘I met your son here one evening … Jack?'

‘Yes. He mentioned that.'

‘He seemed a nice boy.'

‘I don't think I know him very well.'

Mr Hasson came in, in his shirt sleeves. ‘Well, well,' he said. ‘Sir and madam. How's Mrs Cuffe? Well I hope.'

‘Fine thank you Mr Hasson.'

‘Weather changeable, wouldn't you say?'

‘That's autumn for you. Unreliable.'

And you, sir. All well? I hear the station's coming along nicely. What can I get you?'

‘Helen? What would you like?'

‘The young fella away back to college, is he? We don't get to see very much of him these days. Of course you can't expect young people to stick themselves away in a place like this. Back of beyond.'

‘I think a glass of wine would be nice. If it's possible.'

‘Now I wouldn't hold that view myself mind you. No better place to my way of thinking. Born and reared here … Mr-ah-sir and my mother and father before me. Out of the soil you might say and back into it again one day. The young people don't feel like that at all.'

‘Have you any wine, Mr Hasson? I think we'd like a bottle if you have one.'

‘Away to Dublin they go the minute their ears are dry. I have a son in Saudia Araby. Making a pile. A pile. He'll be able to buy me and sell me when he comes back. Mrs Hasson doesn't take it well at all. Isn't she terrified he'll marry a black girl and come back and make a show of us all? Red or white?'

Roger looked at Helen.

‘Red.'

‘God made us all, I said to her, but she's a hard woman to convince. I had a word with that new young Father Mulcahy about it. Her nerves were getting real bad over the whole thing. Shocking. Wine. I have a few bottles. I always like to keep a few bottles in the place. You never know the moment when someone won't pop in for a meal and ask for a bottle of wine. I have red all right …'

He turned and gazed along the rows of bottles standing on shelves behind the bar.

‘What did Father Mulcahy say?' Helen hated a story to be left in mid-air.

‘Ah, what would he say? She suffers from the exeema you know. The doctor can't do a thing about it. When her nerves get bad it breaks out all over her.'

‘How awful.'

‘Spanish there is. Rio … ja three quid the bottle. Or French. That's more expensive. Four-eighty. The French white is cheaper. We'll cross that river when we come to it, Mrs Hasson. That was what Father Mulcahy said. Standing out there in the hall. I mean what more could he say? Just don't be worrying your head about it, he said that to her.'

‘What more indeed,' murmured Helen.

‘I think we'll have the French red please, Mr Hasson.'

‘Right you be, sir.'

He took down a bottle from the shelf, watching himself all the time in the mirror that duplicated the bottles. He watched Roger and Helen watching him. All tidily duplicated. He wiped the dust from the bottle with a cloth and turned it round and placed it on the counter. He reached under the bar for two glasses which he placed neatly beside the bottle.

‘Never suffered from exeema?' he asked Helen.

She shook her head.

The corkscrew already had a cork impaled on it which he twisted off with his fingers and then threw behind him onto the floor.

‘You were spared.'

He belonged to the old school of those who put the bottle between their knees and withdrew the cork with a certain amount of effort. Helen wondered how Roger managed about things like corks.

‘Not much call for wine.' The word much puffed out of him as he pulled. ‘Take them glasses over to the fire, Mrs Cuffe, and I'll give the gentleman the bottle.' He gave another pull and the cork came away this time. ‘There's a bit of smoke from the fire today. It's the wind in the west. Mrs Hasson always wants to install the electric fires, but there's nothing like the open fire I always think and you don't notice the smoke all that much. There's pleasure in sitting by the open fire.'

Roger followed her over to the fire and put the bottle on the table. He picked up the poker and approached the dismal smoking fire.

‘That's right,' called Mr Hasson across the room. ‘Give it an old wallop with the poker, a good dunt.'

Roger pushed the poker into the sad heart of the fire and tried to raise the sods; ash whirled in the air for a moment with the smoke.

‘I'm not cold anyway,' said Helen.

‘It's the gloom of it,' whispered Roger. ‘Would you rather …?'

‘I'll leave you to your peace.' Mr Hasson retreated from behind the bar back into the hotel again.

‘Never mind the gloom, Roger. Let's try the Léoville Barton 1969.' He laughed and put the poker back in the grate. He poured two glasses of wine and sat down beside her.

‘Cheers.'

‘Cheers.'

The wine was acid.

They grinned almost childishly across the glasses at each other.