The Disenchanted Widow (16 page)

A squeaking sound above could only mean one thing: The woman with the white shoes was coming down again. Quickly he stuffed the envelope back in the bag, snapped it shut, and slipped out the back door.

The ducks set up a quacking at the sight of him, but in seconds Herkie was over the gate and up the field, richer by £2.60, with his sweet ration and comics assured for another week.

His ma would be pleased.

Chapter eighteen

W
here were ye goin’ when I saw ye comin’ back yesterday?” asked Socrates O’Sullivan, shiftless loudmouth and regular patron of the Crowing Cock. “I shouted after ye but ye didn’t turn round. I thought maybe ye didn’t hear me and that’s why ye went on…Jezsis, now that I come tae think about it, maybe ye thought I was shoutin’ at somebody else, ’cos I shouted brave and loud…aye, I shouted brave and loud. Loud enough, begod, that a body could-a heard me in fuckin’ Cork…so how come
you
couldn’t hear me?”

Socrates had been sitting in the bar for well over an hour, bum cheek going numb on the vinyl stool; one foot asleep, the other on its way. On his fourth beer, his logic and capacity for rational discourse, never great at the best of times, were steadily diminishing.

“What time would that-a been?” Gusty Grant asked idly, well used to O’Sullivan’s oath-laden rants and not in the least offended. Fulfilling his role as substitute bartender for Etta Strong, he was perched behind the counter, breaking the afternoon with a filched Guinness and a Woodbine cigarette. Above his head a TV set was tuned to horse racing at Down Royal.

“Wait tae we see now. I was only after me tea, so it must-a been around half five.”

“Can’t mind,” Gusty said. “Whaddya wanna know where I was goin’ for, anyway?”

“Don’t know…just wundered.”

There was an uncomfortable silence.

“
Yes!
…
Arrgh!
” The shouts from the back room came from youthful layabouts, Chuck Sproule and Kevin Flood, playing darts.

“D’ye know how long it takes the average man tae take an egg outta the fridge?” Gusty asked suddenly, recalling the interesting factoid from his latest reading, a 250-page compendium with the title
A Thousand Useless Things You Never Needed to Know
.

“Nah…how the fuck would-a know the like o’ that?”

“Nought point seven nine two seconds—that’s how long.”

“Right.” Socrates swigged from the pint and sucked on the last of his smoke.

“And d’ye know how many eggs the average man ates in a year?”

“Nah, but you’re gonna tell me.”

“Two hundred and eighty-six. That means he’ll spend three minutes and forty-six point five seconds a year takin’ eggs outta the fridge.”

“I don’t have a fridge, so I don’t give a fuck,” said Socrates, restless now.

“Aye, but if ye
had
a fridge, that’s how long it would take ye, ’cos—”

At that point, much to Socrates’s relief, the door opened and in stepped Lorcan Strong.

“All right, Lorcan?” Gusty said in greeting, getting up and trying to conceal his illicit half pint under the counter. “Yer mammy said ye’d be home.”

“Yes indeed, Gusty.” Lorcan’s keen eyes scanned the place. They registered a fine powdering of dust on several liqueur bottles, a cloudy mirror that had rarely seen a cloth, and, on a shelf
above it, two spiders busily weaving webs within the handles of his father’s silver golf trophy. “Just arrived yesterday.” He nodded at Socrates.

“How do, Lorcan? Keepin’ all right?”

“The best, Socrates. Can’t complain. Just thought I’d drop in to see how things are goin’.” He might have grown up and gone away, but a few days back home and he was already cutting his language to suit the terrain, recasting himself as a publican’s son. “Everything all right, is it?”

“Oh, grand, Lorcan, grand. Don’t ye worry yerself too much about this place. You look after yer mammy. I’ll take care of everything here, so I will.”

“Thanks. That’s good to hear.”

At that moment the dart throwers emerged, bleary-eyed, from the back room. Kevin Flood: nineteen, tall and gangly, with acne-raked cheeks. Chuck Sproule: a reedy twenty-eight with the bravado and swagger of the ill-disposed and cocky.

“Be seein’ ye, Gusty,” said Kevin, rubbing his nose and leaving his empty glass on the counter.

“Hiya, Lorcan,” said Chuck. “How’s she cuttin’?” He banged his glass down in front of Socrates and elbowed him in the back. “Sock it to me, Socco. You still fuckin’ here?”

“What’s it tae you?” said Socrates. “Stay here as-long-as-a-want. If ye don’t watch, I’ll knock yer—”

“That’s
enough
, lads,” Lorcan told them. “Now, off you go, you two.” He pulled the door open demonstratively.

Sproule straightened up and glared at Lorcan. “Keep yer arty-farty hair on. We were goin’ anyway.”

Lorcan shut the door on the pair, hoping it would be the last he’d see of the bold Chuck. The hoodlum had recently been released from Maghaberry Prison. The crime on this occasion: stealing a liter of white spirit and ten packets of Hot Rod condoms
from a Protestant pharmacy in Killoran. He knew precisely what Sproule had stolen because Etta, unfortunately, had kept the newspaper cutting for his delectation.

“Aye, that’s the thing,” said Gusty. “Seen a big change in them since they joined the Temp’ance Club.”

“The what?”

“Aye, it’s not great news for you or your mammy, Lorcan,” Socrates put in. “That Father Cassidy’s vast against the drink, ye know.”

“Sorry, am I missing something? If they’re in a Temperance Club, what are they doing in a bar?”

“Oh, they come in for the darts,” said Gusty. “That was lemonade and lime they were drinkin’. Aye, the darts and…”

There was an awkward pause, which Socrates felt moved to fill. “Isn’t that the way of it, Lorcan? Give me another wee one there, Gusty.”

“Well, I’ll just check out the back. Don’t mind me,” Lorcan said, heading for the adjoining lounge.

He noted that the gloomy room was in need of a good scrubbing. Obviously Gusty’s promise to “take care of everything here” didn’t stretch to cleaning the place. No surprises there. The tables had not been cleared from the previous night, and the place smelled musty. He crossed to the windows to let in the light and some much-needed fresh air, then proceeded to empty ashtrays and collect glasses.

In the background he could hear Gusty doing what he was best at: sharing his seemingly endless store of useless and irrelevant knowledge.

“Then there’s what’s called the African Clawed and the African Dwarf…”

“Aye, so.”

“Y’know the word that’s used for that thing frogs do when they’re matin’ with themselves?”

“Nah, what’s that?”

“Amplexin’, that’s what it’s called. They usually do it in the watter, but the bufo frog, now, he would do it anywhere…in the watter, on the ground, even up trees, begod.”

“Sounds like your oul’ boy.”

Gusty ignored the insult and took another swig of Guinness.

“What about this new wommin from Belfast that’s in your aunt’s house anyway? Are ye not lookin’ tae do a bitta amplexin’ with her? I hear she looks like a film star.” Socrates’s attitude to women was still in the larval stage.

At that point Lorcan decided to fetch a dishcloth, and his reappearance brought a halt to the conversation. He was intrigued but pretended he’d heard nothing. He wrung out the cloth and went back to the lounge.

“She’s a well-lookin’ wommin right enuff,” Gusty continued. “But there’s no Cathlick frogs left in Australia now, as far as I know, so they mustn’t of went in for much of that amplexin’ tomfoolery. Well, I suppose being Cathlick, they maybe wouldn’t of anyway. Then there’s a lizard in the Amazon called the Jesus Christ. Ye see, it’s called that ’cos it can run like the Divil on the watter when…”

Lorcan smiled to himself as he wiped a table. A good-looking city woman “like a film star” choosing to live here,
in Tailorstown
. My, my, things had changed since his last visit. Lorcan now realized what his mother meant by Gusty Grant’s liking for weird conversation. He was a walking encyclopedia of crazy facts.

Still, he would not be complaining. He was glad to have Grant manning the bar because it saved him the trouble. He had ample trouble upstairs. Between his mother and the portrait, life was complicated enough.

“Hi, turn that up, will ye?”

Lorcan halted the dishcloth midwipe. The serious tones of a newscaster were filling the room. He put his head round the
doorframe as the cadaverous features of Bobby Sands flashed up on the screen.

“
We interrupt this broadcast to bring you some breaking news. The hunger striker Bobby Sands has died.
”

“Christ, he’s gone,” said Socrates.

“Shush!”

“
…just under an hour ago after sixty-six days of refusing food. The twenty-seven-year-old Republican spent the last days of his life on a water bed to protect his fragile bones.

“
Mr. Humphrey Atkins, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, issued a statement shortly after the death. He said: ‘I regret this needless and pointless death. Too many have died by violence in Northern Ireland. In this case it was self-inflicted. We should not forget the many others who have died. It is my profound hope and prayer that the people of Northern Ireland will recognize the futility of violence and turn their faces away from it.
’”

“There’ll be hell tae pay now,” Gusty said.

Lorcan flung the cloth aside. He had to get away from the bar. He knew the regulars of the Crowing Cock. Could guess the prophecies of doom the martyr’s death would let loose. A walk in the fresh air was called for. It was as good a time as any to reacquaint himself with the district.

In the hallway the artist donned his hat, picked up his sketchbook and his umbrella. It would double as a walking stick. A clear blue sky seen from the window promised a day that would remain dry.

He shut the front door and stepped out onto the street. The sun was strong, the day calm; there was nobody about and it was good to be free.

He shrugged, tipped the brim of his Borsalino against the sun, and set off in a southerly direction. He decided to head out the Killoran Road, knowing that a little way along lay a track to a stone circle. It was a favorite spot from boyhood, holding a charm
that never failed to fire his artistic imagination. He tried to visit it whenever he returned home. Perhaps being in such a place would wash away the image of Sands and the prospect of what the man’s death would bring.

On the outskirts of town, he passed the cemetery and struggled to keep the image of the hunger striker from his mind. Death was never easy, no matter who the victim might be. He thought of his Uncle Rupert. He lay somewhere in there among the silent majority; felled at sixty-two by a not inconsiderable heart attack, which had been spectacularly misdiagnosed by the local GP, Humphrey Brewster. Just a “little touch of indigestion,” the good doctor had opined. Lorcan wondered now how many other poor souls lay there in the boneyard due to just a little touch of indigestion.

Soon the town was feeding into fields, as easy as dusk into night, and from then on it was open country and silence. The hedgerows hummed and the tarmac bubbled. The sky was vast and cloudless. The more he pushed into nature, the more Lorcan felt like a trespasser; the beat of his heels and umbrella point on the hard road caused cows to stir and sheep to stare.

He was glad he’d decided on the walk. The countryside he was striding through was raising his spirits. The artist in him valued nature above all else, the majesty of it. He recalled with a smile something Marc Chagall once said: “Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers—and never succeeding.” How true that is, he thought; how true.

He rounded a bend in the road and found himself on a gradual uphill pull under thrush-song. He paused, marveling at the sheer power of memory now drawing him back to his boyhood. A ten-year-old Lorcan in short pants and plastic sandals, dawdling on his way home from school. The hedgerows held him back then just as much as they did now: the loosestrife, the cockscomb, and round-leafed clover creating in his mind’s eye the urge to remember. And
he would carry those images with him, carefully, like a bowl of precious oil brimmed full, to spill out onto paper when he reached home.

Every farm, every dip and rise on the road, every tree, every rippling creek held a memory for him. Art, he mused, is the only way to run away without leaving home. He understood the truth of that statement every time he returned to the rural terrain.

He quickened his step, impatient to reach the stone circle. His sketch pad and pencils weighted his pocket but lifted his heart. If there was one great benefit to the whole practice of art, it was to focus him in the “now,” where the ugly past and uncertain future could not touch him.

Or could they?

Chapter nineteen

A
t a loose end, his chores done, Gusty decided to head up to the Turret Room. If he got the timing right, maybe—just maybe—he’d catch a glimpse of Mrs. Hailstone getting ready for work.

The only obstacle: stealing past his uncle’s room without being seen or heard. Gusty had never bought into the hard-of-hearing story. It was simply another ruse the oul’ boy used to gain sympathy. And Ned was an erratic sleeper. Sometimes wide awake, making a nuisance of himself from six in the morning. At other times dead to the world until well after eleven.

The bedroom door, too, was a real threat. Ned was inclined to keep it open, not wanting to miss anything.

Gusty tiptoed up the stairs and peered into the room.

Luck was on his side. The oul’ boy lay conked out, eyes shut, mouth agape, emitting rafter-rattling snores to the accompaniment of a monotonous news broadcast.

Reassured, Gusty turned and beckoned to Veronica. She was sitting at the bottom of the stairs, awaiting instruction.

Together, master and piglet bounded up the next three flights to Lucien’s chamber.

Once through the door, Veronica made for her favorite spot, a Victorian daybed of watermarked silk, and settled down for a postprandial snooze.