Wild Decembers (21 page)

T
HE MORNING HE
took down the suitcase from the top of the wardrobe Breege begged Joseph not to go. Word had come of the name of the solicitors who had merged with another firm of solicitors who had acted for his grandfather and where the document might just be. He was surprised at her asking him not to go, and turning to her said with something of the old tenderness, “Don’t worry about me . . . I’ll be all right.” She could not say to him that which she wanted to say, which was that left alone she would find Bugler and Bugler would find her, because since the night in the hayshed it was pending.

When he got to the town it was late, but having thrown his bag down on the bed he went to search for the solicitors’ office, just to know its whereabouts and to be there first thing in the morning and maybe home by evening, home on the evening bus.

But it did not work out like that at all.

Each day he went to the secluded street with its row of stone houses, stone steps up to the hall doors with their highly polished knockers, stiff from non-use because everyone rung the bell. In the downstairs windows on canvas blinds the faded but venerable names of solicitors, six firms in all, side by side and possibly rivals to each other, and each day he curses his luck at being at the mercy of an impostor, a chancer who refuses to see him. He has been three times in as many days, crawling out of the poky room at dawn, to walk, to inhale the fresh air, and to buy a roll when the bakery opens. Each day the same sight, a straggle of people going to convent Mass and a lorry with a double orange yard broom affixed to the back sweeping up the skins and rinds of the night before. Always the same, the chapel bells, pigeons in the convent trees, hooting lorries, and across the broad sweep of the river a view of the hooting courthouse where he once was and will be again, then down to the solicitors with the secretary calling out, “He’s not here,” before he has spoken at all. When he rings Breege at night he says nothing of these frustrations, of being humiliated so, he says that things are progressing slowly, asks if she has counted the cattle and if she has noticed if any of them might be sickly, then promises to ring at the same time the following evening.

Each day he has been made to sit in a waiting room, his eye on the half-opened doorway leading to the hall through which everyone including the impostor must pass. He cannot get to see the man and is not told why. Moira, the secretary, keeps him in the dark, offering no explanation except that her supremo is a law unto himself, can’t be hustled, won’t be hustled, doing one hundred and one things at once.

Moira sits behind the desk feigning surprise at each face, each arrival, people she has lied to or insulted or sent away disheartened.

On the fourth morning he decides to be tough with her, to give her an ultimatum. He decides to go in there and threaten her boss with the Law Society, and he imagines how she will look up with her fat eyes and will get up, go through a door, and presently the double doors leading to the inner sanctum will unfold and he will be brought face to face with Mr. O’Shaughnessy. After some polite exchanges he will tell his story, and before long he will be let rummage in files and boxes, and as certain as he has been in each day’s disappointment he is equally certain that he will find it because it is there. Thinking thus as he walks down the quiet street, he feels buoyant, but then he thinks of the woman he will have to sit next to, steel-grey hair, steel-grey eyes, crocheting a long strip of white lace and counting the stitches to herself. For two days she ignored him, then the third evening just before closing time, with Moira bustling to get rid of them, the woman turned to him and said, “You’re here because of your land,” and before he could even answer she went on, “Go home and forget all about it or you’ll end up like me in the asylum.”

“Are you in the asylum?” he had asked her.

“For fifteen years. I come here days because it was here I came before I lost it all . . . And they won’t help me. And they won’t help you, my dear man.” She did not say it out of sympathy, not out of pity either, but in a kind of ecstatic revenge.

When he arrives determined to tackle Moira, he says, “I’ll wait,” before she even uttered a word.

“Oh, you could be waiting all day.”

“I’ll wait,” Joseph says, and goes towards his usual chair, astounded by the fact that a screen has been erected around it, an ugly oat-coloured raffia screen blocking his view of the open door and the hallway.

“This is new,” he says, and hits it with his elbow, hoping it might topple.

“Good God, no . . . It’s always there,” she says, and as he sits he realises that he will have to crane his neck to communicate with her or else shout underneath it. He has a full view of her feet, one stockinged foot placed on top of the other, massaging and mashing it, a worn court shoe kicked to one side.

“It wasn’t here yesterday,” he says.

“It was away getting fixed,” she says, no longer the smarmy friendliness of other mornings: “Oh, poor you . . . the bother he’s putting you to . . . away from your farm. If only you had a car phone like him, I could phone you the minute he stepped inside that door and you could chase over here and the two of us could nail him . . . get the effing thing out of him and by now all would be roses.”

“I’m not taking it anymore . . . Go in and tell him.”

“Jesus,” she says, and with a hysterical laugh asks how anyone could risk doing that, intruding on a man with six different personalities, leaving herself open to a load of abuse and maybe getting sacked.

“Is he that bad?” he says, realising that she is his one and only chance.

“A divil,” she says, and puts her hand to her upper lip in case the crochet lady overhears.

“You’re not yourself today, Moira,” he says.

“I’m low in energy,” she says, and kicks off the second shoe to show friendliness.

“And why is that?”

“I was out late. I went to listen to this band . . . Marvellous . . . Outstanding, I would say . . . You should go yourself. They’re every Wednesday. They’re two miles outside the town. There’s a pound admission but they’re well worth it; outstanding,” and as she rambles on he hears footsteps, the door being banged, and almost at once she is summoned by telephone. He has to crane to hear what she is saying. He guesses that what she is saying is that the mountainy man is back again and what is she meant to do and what is she meant to say. Her voice gets even lower as she mutters sorry a few times, obviously in answer to a reprimand, and when she replaces the receiver she starts to write very studiously into her big black notebook, ignoring the question he has put to her.

“He’s in there . . . He’s on the other side of those double doors,” Joseph says. He has risen. He is staring lividly into the huge grey fogged eyes.

“He’s with a client,” she says, slightly apprehensive because of his nearness and his fist.

“I’m a client,” he says.

“God’s sake, will you keep your voice down or he’ll flip.”

“That makes two of us . . . Because I’m about to flip.”

“Look,” she says, and it is whispering time again, “I wouldn’t advise it . . . He’s in a foul mood. Effing and blinding. He must have been on a bender . . . Wait till after the weekend and I’ll have talked to him, and with the help of God and St. Anthony I’ll have it for you . . . He’s always sparky on Monday mornings after he’s followed the hunt.”

“How can I believe you.”

“Joseph Brennan, that’s a horrible thing to say,” and as umbrage wells in her she reminds him of the four days when she allowed him to sit and wait, twice making him coffee and listening to rubbish about the countryside, the gold dome of the mountain, bog cotton, and the tasty way his sister poached trout in milk and scallions.

“All I want is my piece of paper with my rights. I don’t care what I pay for it. I don’t care if I have to break his neck in . . . I want it.”

“Oh Jesus, I don’t envy him,” she says, tears of commiseration in her eyes now as he dares her to lift the telephone and announce him, and in the fracas which follows as they call each other names he hears a door, then the hall door being banged, and in an ecstasy of righteousness she jumps up and says, “Mr. O’Shaughnessy has gone a-hunting.”

Later, she finds Joseph walking up and down the street, talking to himself.

“The town crier,” she says, mocking.

“I’m sunk,” he says, making one last and desperate appeal to her. She scolds him, says he should not have spoken to her in that insulting manner, but being a good sport she is prepared to forgive him. She has a brainwave, she had it a minute or two after he left, he is to go down to Daffy’s, the drapers, get himself togged out with cavalry twills, find a horse somewhere, and next morning join the hunt, and out there Mr. O’Shaughnessy is a different man altogether, hot punches, lords and ladies, hills and dales; out there they would be equals and they could do business.

“Where would I get the money for cavalry twills?”

“You have lots of money . . . Farmers always have money. I know that from the boss . . . The money that’s found once they’re dead. In jugs. Under mattresses. Fortunes.”

J
OSEPH STANDS IN
his new shoes, good blazer, and best white shirt already regretting his impudence for having come at all. It was a junior who found him out on the street looking after Moira as she drove off in her bubble car. He was aware of the trouble and said that if it were him he would go and see Mr, Barry, a very highly regarded man who ran the firm before Mr. O’Shaughnessy came and was a sort of father figure to him.

“You think he’d help?”

“I’m sure he would.”

They are out in the grounds, Mr. Barry’s grounds, with Mr. Barry pointing to the cedar tree, taller, more striking than all the other trees, and in the roomy spaces between the paw-like branches, pigeons are rustling and cooing. The house itself is of brick, softly mellowed, the steps up to it covered with mosses and blue flowers faint as drizzle. The setting sun has turned the long windows into panels of fire.

“Would you care to guess how old the cedar is,” Mr. Barry says, and without hesitation goes on to describe how a city man, an arborist, found the precise age by standing next to the trunk, measuring the girth, dividing, multiplying, and by some wizard calculations coming up with the age of the tree, which coincided with the age of the house.

“Arborists!” he said, walking his guest around the grounds as Joseph follows on tiptoe, to smother the sound of the new leather rasping in the piling of gravel and marble chipping.

“I wouldn’t have come to you only I’m desperate,” he says.

“I’m very glad you did . . . I always say,” and here Mr. Barry breaks into song, “if I can help somebody as I pass along, then my living shall not be in vain.”

“You have a fine place,” Joseph says awkwardly.

“Shall we repair to the drawing room?” Mr. Barry says.

“Whatever you say.”

“Damn midges get you out here, it’s why I smoke,” he says, and laughs shallowly at his own mischievousness.

“Sixty fags a day and never felt better.” He leads the way, boyishly, up the steps.

As they step into the drawing room Joseph’s first thought rushes to Breege and how she would love it—the white ceiling, like wedding cake, crisscrosses of carvings the icing, thin branches running in all directions from a centre rosette, and from overturned flower pots heaps of flowers spilling out. On the walls trellises of plaster arbour in between the paintwork, which is a bright saffron colour. Sumptuousness. Leather-bound books, a piano, armchairs, sofas, fresh flowers in several bowls, and music coming from the four corners of the room as if it were coming out of the spheres.

“Beethoven,” Mr. Barry says, and scoffs at the native balladeers with their goatskins and their unwashed locks beating out barbarian tunes. He pours a whiskey each and leads them across to the fire, which as he says burns winter and summer, a ritual of theirs. The fire is his job, the flowers Mrs. B.’s. Yes indeed, he does remember Joseph’s grandparents, especially the mother in her little black bonnet with the chinstrap.