After Rain (14 page)

    ‘My husband counted those notes at this very table,’ Catherine said. ‘He took them out of the brown envelope that they were put into at the Nationwide.’

    ‘It’s a mystery so.’

    It wasn’t any such thing; there was no mystery whatsoever. The bill had been paid. Both sisters knew that; in their different ways they guessed that Leary — and presumably his wife as well — had planned this dishonesty as soon as they realized death gave them the opportunity. Matthew had obliged them by paying cash so that they could defraud the taxation authorities. He had further obliged them by dying. Catherine said:

    ‘My husband walked out of this house with that envelope in his pocket. Are you telling me he didn’t reach you?’

    ‘Was he robbed? Would it be that? You hear terrible things these days.’

    ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’

    Leary wagged his head in his meditative way. It was unlikely certainly, he agreed. Anyone robbed would have gone to the Guards. Anyone robbed would have mentioned it when he came back to the house again.

    ‘The bill was paid, Mr. Leary.’

    ‘All the same, we have to go by the receipt. At the heel of the hunt there’s the matter of a receipt.’

    Alicia shook her head. Either a receipt wasn’t issued in the first place, she said, or else it had been mislaid. ‘There’s a confusion when a person dies,’ she said.

    If Catherine had been able to produce the receipt Leary would have blamed his wife. He’d have blandly stated that she’d got her wires crossed. He’d have said the first thing that came into his head and then have gone away.

    ‘The only thing is,’ he said instead, ‘a sum like that is sizeable. I couldn’t afford let it go.’

    Both Catherine and Alicia had seen Mrs. Leary in the shops, red-haired, like a tinker, a bigger woman than her husband, probably the brains of the two. The Learys were liars and worse than liars; the chance had come and the temptation had been too much for them. ‘Ah sure, those two have plenty,’ the woman would have said. The sisters wondered if the Learys had tricked the bereaved before, and imagined they had. Leary said:

    ‘It’s hard on a man that’s done work for you.’

    Catherine moved towards the kitchen door. Leary ambled after her down the hall. She remembered the evening more clearly even than a while ago: a Wednesday it definitely had been, the day of the Sweetman girl’s wedding; and it came back to her, also, Alicia hurrying out on her Legion of Mary business. There’d been talk in McKenny’s about the wedding, the unusual choice of midweek, which apparently had something to do with visitors coming from America. She opened the hall-door in silence. Across the street, beyond the silver-coloured railings, the children were still running about in the convent yard. Watery sunlight lightened the unadorned concrete of the classrooms and the nuns’ house.

    ‘What’ll I do?’ Leary asked, wide-eyed, bloodshot, squinting at her.

    Catherine said nothing.

    They talked about it. It could be, Alicia said, that the receipt had remained in one of Matthew’s pockets, that a jacket she had disposed of to one of her charities had later found itself in the Learys’ hands, having passed through a jumble sale. She could imagine Mrs. Leary coming across it, and the temptation being too much. Leary was as weak as water, she said, adding that the tinker wife was a woman who never looked you in the eye. Foxy-faced and furtive, Mrs. Leary pushed a ramshackle pram about the streets, her ragged children cowering in her presence. It was she who would have removed the flimsy carbon copy from the soiled receipt book. Leary would have been putty in her hands.

    In the kitchen they sat down at the table from which Alicia had cleared away the polished cutlery. Matthew had died as tidily as he’d lived, Alicia said: all his life he’d been meticulous. The Learys had failed to take that into account in any way whatsoever. If it came to a court of law the Learys wouldn’t have a leg to stand on, with the written evidence that the precise amount taken out of the building society matched the amount of the bill, and further evidence in Matthew’s reputation for promptness about settling debts.

    ‘What I’m wondering is,’ Alicia said, ‘should we go to the Guards?’

    ‘The Guards?’

    ‘He shouldn’t have come here like that.’

    That evening there arrived a bill for the amount quoted by Leary, marked
Account rendered.
It was dropped through the letter-box and was discovered the next morning beneath the
Irish Independent
on the hall doormat.

    ‘The little twister!’ Alicia furiously exclaimed.

    From the road outside the house came the morning commands of the convent girl in charge of the crossing to the school. ‘Get ready!’ ‘Prepare to cross!’ ‘Cross now!’ Impertinence had been added to dishonesty, Alicia declared in outraged tones. It was as though it had never been pointed out to Leary that Matthew had left the house on the evening in question with two hundred and twenty-six pounds in an envelope, that Leary’s attention had never been drawn to the clear evidence of the building-society entry.

    ‘It beats me,’ Catherine said, and in the hall Alicia turned sharply and said it was as clear as day. Again she mentioned going to the Guards. A single visit from Sergeant McBride, she maintained, and the Learys would abandon their cheek. From the play-yard the yells of the girls increased as more girls arrived there, and then the hand-bell sounded; a moment later there was silence.

    ‘I’m only wondering,’ Catherine said, ‘if there’s some kind of a mistake.’

    ‘There’s no mistake, Catherine.’

    Alicia didn’t comment further. She led the way to the kitchen and half filled a saucepan with water for their two boiled eggs. Catherine cut bread for toast. When she and Alicia had been girls in that same play-yard she hadn’t known of Matthew’s existence. Years passed before she even noticed him, at Mass one Saturday night. And it was ages before he first invited her to go out with him, for a walk the first time, and then for a drive.

    ‘What d’you think happened then?’ Alicia asked. ‘That Matthew bet the money on a dog? That he owed it for drink consumed? Have sense, Catherine.’

    Had it been Alicia’s own husband whom Leary had charged with negligence, there would have been no necessary suspension of disbelief: feckless and a nuisance, involved during his marriage with at least one other woman in the town, frequenter of race-courses and dog-tracks and bars, he had ended in an early grave. This shared thought — that behaviour which was ludicrous when attached to Matthew had been as natural in Alicia’s husband as breathing — was there between the sisters, but was not mentioned.

    ‘If Father Cahill got Leary on his own,’ Alicia began, but Catherine interrupted. She didn’t want that, she said; she didn’t want other people brought into this, not even Father Cahill. She didn’t want a fuss about whether or not her husband had paid a bill.

    ‘You’ll get more of these,’ Alicia warned, laying a finger on the envelope that had been put through the letter-box. ‘They’ll keep on coming.’

    ‘Yes.’

    In the night Catherine had lain awake, wondering if Matthew had maybe lost the money on his walk to the Learys’ house that evening, if he’d put his hand in his pocket and found it wasn’t there and then been too ashamed to say. It wasn’t like him; it didn’t make much more sense than thinking he had been a secretive man, with private shortcomings all the years she’d been married to him. When Alicia’s husband died Matthew had said it was hard to feel sorry, and she’d agreed. Three times Alicia had been left on her own, for periods that varied in length, and on each occasion they’d thought the man was gone for good; but he returned and Alicia always took him back. Of course Matthew hadn’t lost the money; it was as silly to think that as to wonder if he’d been a gambler.

    ‘In case they’d try it on anyone else,’ Alicia was saying, ‘isn’t it better they should be shown up? Is a man who’d get up to that kind of game safe to be left in people’s houses the way a workman is?’

    That morning they didn’t mention the matter again. They washed up the breakfast dishes and then Catherine went out to the shops, which was always her chore, while Alicia cleaned the stairs and the hall, the day being a Thursday. As Catherine made her way through the familiar streets, and then while Mr. Deegan sliced bacon for her and Gilligan greeted her in the hardware, she thought about the journey her husband had made that Wednesday evening in September. Involuntarily, she glanced into Healy’s, where he had bought the
Evening Press,
and into McKenny’s bar. Every evening except Sunday he had brought back the news, bits of gossip, anything he’d heard. It was at this time, too, that he went to Confession, on such occasions leaving the house half an hour earlier.

    In French Street a countrywoman opened her car door without looking and knocked a cyclist over. ‘Ah, no harm done,’ the youth on the bicycle said, the delivery boy for Lawless the West Street butcher, the last delivery boy in the town. ‘Sure, I never saw him at all,’ the countrywoman protested to Catherine as she went by. The car door was dinged, but the woman said what did it matter if the lad was all right?

    Culliney, the traveller from Limerick Shirts, was in town that day. Matthew had always bought his shirts direct from Culliney, the same striped pattern, the stripe blue or brown. Culliney had his measurements, the way he had the measurements of men all over Munster and Connacht, which was his area. Catherine could tell when she saw Culliney coming towards her that he didn’t know about the death, and she braced herself to tell him. When she did so he put a hand on her arm and spoke in a whisper, saying that Matthew had been a good man. If there was anything he could ever do, he said, if there was any way he could help. More people said that than didn’t.

    It was then that Catherine saw Mrs. Leary. The house-painter’s wife was pushing her pram, a child holding on to it as she advanced. Catherine crossed the street, wondering if the woman had seen her and suspecting she had. In Jerety’s she selected a pan loaf from the yesterday’s rack, since neither she nor Alicia liked fresh bread and yesterday’s was always reduced. When she emerged, Mrs. Leary was not to be seen.

    ‘Nothing only a woman knocked young Nallen off his bike,’ she reported to Alicia when she returned to the house. ‘Is he a Nallen, that boy of Lawless’s?’

    ‘Or a Keane, is he? Big head on him?’

    ‘I don’t think he’s a Keane. Someone told me a Nallen. Who ever he is, there’s no harm done.’ She didn’t say she’d seen Mrs. Leary because she didn’t want to raise the subject of what had occurred again. She knew that Alicia was right: the bill would keep coming unless she did something about it. Once they’d set out on the course they’d chosen, why should the Learys give up? Alicia didn’t refer to the Learys either but that evening, when they had switched off the television and were preparing to go to bed, Catherine said:

    ‘I think I’ll pay them. Simplest, that would be.’

    With her right hand on the newel of the banister, about to ascend the stairs, Alicia stared in disbelief at her sister. When Catherine nodded and continued on her way to the kitchen she followed her.

    ‘But you can’t.’ Alicia stood in the doorway while Catherine washed and rinsed the cups they’d drunk their bedtime tea from. ‘You can’t just pay them what isn’t owing.’

    Catherine turned the tap off at the sink and set the cups to drain, slipping the accompanying saucers between the plastic bars of the drainer. Tomorrow she would withdraw the same sum from the building-society account and take it herself to the Learys in Brady’s Lane. She would stand there while a receipt was issued.

    ‘Catherine, you can’t hand out more than two hundred pounds.’

    ‘I’d rather.’

    As she spoke, she changed her mind about the detail of the payment. Matthew had been obliging Leary by paying cash, but there was no need to oblige him any more. She would arrange for the Irish Nationwide to draw a cheque payable to T. P. Leary. She would bring it round to the Learys instead of a wad of notes.

    ‘They’ve taken you for a fool,’ Alicia said.

    ‘I know they have.’

    ‘Leary should go behind bars. You’re aiding and abetting him. Have sense, woman.’

    A disappointment rose in Alicia, bewildering and muddled. The death of her own husband had brought an end, and her expectation had been that widowhood for her sister would be the same. Her expectation had been that in their shared state they would be as once they were, now that marriage was over, packed away with their similar mourning clothes. Yet almost palpable in the kitchen was Catherine’s resolve that what still remained for her should not be damaged by a fuss of protest over a confidence trick. The Guards investigating clothes sold at a jumble sale, strangers asked if a house-painter’s wife had bought this garment or that, private intimacies made public: Catherine was paying money in case, somehow, the memory of her husband should be accidentally tarnished. And knowing her sister well, Alicia knew that this resolve would become more stubborn as more time passed. It would mark and influence her sister; it would breed new eccentricities in her. If Leary had not come that day there would have been something else.

    ‘You’d have the man back, I suppose?’ Alicia said, trying to hurt and knowing she succeeded. ‘You’d have him back in to paint again, to lift the bits and pieces from your dressing-table ?’

    ‘It’s not to do with Leary.’

    ‘What’s it to do with then?’

    ‘Let’s leave it.’

    Hanging up a tea-towel, Catherine noticed that her fingers were trembling. They never quarrelled; even in childhood they hadn’t. In all the years Alicia had lived in the house she had never spoken in this unpleasant way, her voice rudely raised.

    ‘They’re walking all over you, Catherine.’

    ‘Yes.’

    They did not speak again, not even to say goodnight. Alicia closed her bedroom door, telling herself crossly that her expectation had not been a greedy one. She had been unhappy in her foolish marriage, and after it she had been beholden in this house. Although it ran against her nature to do so, she had borne her lot without complaint; why should she not fairly have hoped that in widowhood they would again be sisters first of all?