Selected Stories

  ‘Well, there you are.’

  He worried a piece of beef into shreds, piled cabbage and potato on to his fork, soaking up a little gravy before conveying the lot to his mouth.

  ‘Not bad,’ he responded when he was asked if turkeys were fetching well.

  ‘Time was when turkeys were a Christmas trade and no more. Amn’t I right? Not that I know a thing about poultry.’

  ‘Oh, you’re right enough.’

  ‘I like the brown of a turkey. I’m told that’s unusual.’

  ‘It’s all white flesh they go for those times.’

  ‘You’d supply the supermarkets, would you?’

  ‘The most of it goes that way all right. Though there’s a few outlets locally.’

  ‘I have a room above Beatty’s.’

  ‘I sell to Beatty for Christmas.’

  ‘Well, there’s a coincidence for you!’

  ‘He’s a decent man, Henry Beatty.’

  ‘It’s not a bad little room.’

  Further details were exchanged – about the room and then about the rearing, slaughtering and plucking of turkeys, the European regulations there were as regards hygiene and refrigeration. Divulging that she was a Belfast woman, Mrs Kincaid talked about the city. Blakely said he hadn’t been there since he lost his wife. She used to go for the shopping, he said. Brand’s, he said.

  ‘Oh, a great store, was Brand’s. You were always on the farm, Mr Blakely?’

  ‘Aye, I was.’

  ‘I was sorry to hear there about your wife.’

  ‘Aye.’

  The plate of bread and butter arrived, with tea, and a small glass dish of gooseberry jam.

  ‘I’m a widow myself,’ Mrs Kincaid said.

  ‘Ah, well -’

  ‘I know, I know.’

  That comment, spoken in a whisper, contrived to make one of the two widowings, contrived to isolate with quiet poignancy a common ground. There was for an instant the feeling at the table that death had struck almost simultaneously. This feeling, for Mrs Kincaid, was a theatrical effect, since in her case no death, no widowing, had occurred. For Blakely, it was real. He finished the food he had been brought. Jelly with sponge-cake in it was placed before him, with a pot of tea.

  ‘Are you far out of the town?’ Mrs Kincaid asked.

  ‘Ah, no. Not far.’

  ‘I sometimes come to a quiet town for a rest. A resort most times. But this time of year they’re lonely enough yet.’

  ‘They would be surely.’

  Shortly after that Blakely folded his newspaper into the side pocket of his jacket. He picked up his cap from the knob at the top of his chair. He said good-bye to Mrs Kincaid and went to pay his bill at the counter.

  ‘Who is she, that woman?’ Mrs Hirrell asked him in a whisper, and he said that Mrs Kincaid was lodging above Beatty’s butcher’s shop. He didn’t know her name, he said, a Belfast woman in the town for a rest.

  After that, Blakely found himself running into Mrs Kincaid quite often. She sat at his table in Hirrell’s Café even when on one occasion there was an empty table just inside the door. She was in Blundell’s News and Confectionery when he went in for his paper one day. Another time she was a mile out on the road when he was driving back to the farm and he waved at her and she waved back. A few days later she was there again with an umbrella up and he stopped, feeling he should offer her a lift.

  ‘Well, now, that’s very nice of you,’ she said.

  ‘Where’re you heading?’

  Mrs Kincaid said nowhere in particular. Just a daunder, she said, to fill in the afternoon. ‘My name’s Mrs Kincaid,’ she added, since this information had not been given before, and went on to enquire if he ever felt that afternoons hung heavy.

  Blakely replied that any hour of the day was the same to him. He tried to sound polite, picking out the right words, not wishing to seem brusque. ‘That’s Madole’s,’ he said as they passed a field with the gate wide open. Spring ploughing was in progress, Madole’s man, Quin, on the tractor. Madole had a lot of land, Blakely explained, some of it stretching right back to the town’s outskirts.

  ‘Here’s my own few acres,’ he said when his pink-washed roadside farmhouse and turkey sheds came into view. ‘Would I drop you? I’d say the rain’s stopped.’ Specks had come on to the windscreen after he’d turned off the wipers five minutes ago, but already they were drying away. There used to be a Kincaid in Lower Bridge Street one time, a dentist, before the present man came.

  ‘It’ll be a nice walk back,’ she said, getting out of the car when Blakely drew it up before turning into his yard. She thanked him. ‘What’s on ahead, though?’

  ‘Loughdoon. Three-quarters of a mile.’

  ‘I’ll take a look at it.’

  ‘It’s only small.’

  ‘I like a small place.’

  The Lacky sisters – twins of forty-five – were in the plucking shed, with the birds that were ready strung up along a rafter. The sisters were in their similar black and grey overalls, their similarly crowded teeth hugely exposed as soon as their employer entered the shed, their reddish hair bulging out of the cloth caps they wore. They had been plucking Blakely’s turkeys for him for twenty-nine years, since their childhood. Quin came over when Madole gave him his time off, to help around the place in any way that was necessary.

  Blakely nodded at the two women. They’d done well. He counted the prepared turkeys, sixteen of them. Two dozen were to be ready for the carrier when he called at four and they’d easily make that. The Lacky sisters threw back their heads and acknowledged his compliment by laughing shrilly. They couldn’t have seen the woman he’d given a lift to, they wouldn’t have heard the voices. People would be talking in Hirrel’s about the way she always sat at his table, but what could he do about it? And he couldn’t have passed her by on the road with rain falling. He put the car away in the lean-to and set off to repair a fence that had been in need of attention for a long while. His two sheepdogs went with him, loping along at his heels.

  The job took longer than he’d estimated. By the time he’d finished it the carrier had been and the Lackys had gone home. The dogs began to bark when he was mixing the evening feed.

  ‘Now that’s for you,’ Mrs Kincaid said, holding out something in a brown-paper bag. It was raining lightly, but she’d taken her umbrella down. ‘I sheltered in Mullin’s,’ she said. ‘That’s a comfy wee bar he has there.’

  Blakely stared at the bag she held out to him. ‘What is it?’ he said.

  She smiled, shaking her head to indicate he’d have to find out himself. ‘Cheer you up, Mr Blakely.’

  He didn’t want to accept a present from her. There was no call for her to give him a present. There was no call for her to come into the yard, looking for him.

  ‘No need,’ he said, taking a bottle of Bushmills whiskey from the damp paper bag. ‘No,’ he protested. The two sheepdogs, which he had pointed into a corner, had begun to creep forward on their haunches. ‘Ah, no,’ he said, handing back the bottle and the bag. ‘Ah no, no.’

  The rain was getting heavier. ‘Would you mind if I stood in your turf shed for a minute?’ she said. ‘You get on with your work, Mr Blakely. The little offering’s for your kindness, letting me share your table and that. Mullin said you took a glass like the next man.’

  ‘I can’t take this from you.’

  ‘It’s nothing, Mr Blakely.’

  ‘Come into the kitchen till it clears.’

  She said she didn’t want to interrupt him, but he led the way into the house, not saying anything himself. In the kitchen he pulled the damper out on the Rayburn to warm the place up. The bottle and the bag were on the table.

  ‘You’re looking frozen, Mr Blakely,’ she said, surprising him by taking two glasses from the dresser. She opened the bottle and poured whiskey for both of them. It was nothing, she said again.

  It wasn’t an evening when Quin came, which Blakely was glad about. The Lackys couldn’t have missed her
on the road, but they wouldn’t have known who she was and they’d never have guessed she’d turn in to the yard.

  ‘He told me about you,’ she was saying now. ‘Mr Mullin did.’

  ‘I go in there the odd time.’

  ‘He told me about the loss of your wife. How it was. And your daughter, of course.’

  Blakely didn’t say anything. The whiskey was warm in his chest. In spite of what Mullin had said he wasn’t a drinking man, but he appreciated a drop of Bushmills. A going-away present, she said.

  ‘You’re going back soon?’ he asked, not pressing the question, keeping it casual.

  She had taken her coat off. She was wearing a blue dress with tiny flashes of red in it, like pencil dots. There was a scarf, entirely red, tucked in at the top. At the table one leg was crossed over the other, both knees shiny because the stocking material was taut. Her umbrella was cocked up on the flags to dry.

  ‘Sooner or later,’ she said. ‘Cheers!’

  She added more to both their glasses when he’d taken another mouthful. She looked round the kitchen and said it was lovely. ‘Mabel,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mabel Kincaid.’

  The rain was heavy now, rattling on the window panes. The Rayburn had begun to roar. He got up to push the damper in a bit.

  ‘That’s the mother and father of a shower,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You never smile, Mr Blakely.’

  Blakely was embarrassed by that. ‘I think maybe I’m a dour kind of man.’

  ‘You’re not at all. But after what I heard I wouldn’t blame you.’

  She asked if he had always lived in this house, and he said he had. His father bought the few fields from Madole, farming pigs in those days. It was the Madoles who’d built the house and they’d built it without foundations, which his father didn’t know until after he’d bought it, didn’t know that was why he’d got it cheap.

  ‘A big family was it, Mr Blakely?’

  He shook his head. A family of four, he said, one more than his own family, later on. ‘I have a brother, Willie John.’

  As soon as he mentioned Willie John’s name Willie John laughed silently in Blakely’s recall, his big jaw split, the freckles around his eyes merging as the flesh puckered. Huge and ungainly, ham-fisted their father called him before the first fruits of those same hands were completed – a twin-engined Dewoitine 510, built from a kit.

  ‘We used to fly them out in the fields.’ He didn’t know why he told her; he hadn’t meant to, but sometimes, with whiskey, he was garrulous, even though he still hadn’t drunk much. Drink had a way of bringing things to life for him and he felt it doing that now. A Messerschmitt came to rest in a clump of nettles and Willie John gingerly rescued it, noting the damage to the tail-piece and one of the wings. His own Black Widow took off, airborne until the lighter fuel in the engine ran out. It glided down on to the cropped grass. Bloody marvellous, Willie John said.

  ‘Just the two of you,’ she said. ‘I was an only myself.’

  ‘Willie John got out when the troubles began. I get a card, Christmas time. Denver, Colorado.’

  The telephone rang in the hall. It was Nathan Smith from Ulsterfare with the order for next week. When they finished talking about the turkeys Nathan said his daughter had got herself engaged.

  ‘I heard it. Isn’t that great, Nathan?’

  ‘It is surely. All we need now is the quiet’ll last for the wedding. Thursday will we say for the order?’

  ‘No problem, Nathan.’

  In the kitchen she was on her feet with the frying-pan in her hand. The frying-pan had the breakfast fat congealed on it. She’d taken rashers out of the fridge and had lifted up one of the covers of the Rayburn. There were knives and forks on the table.

  ‘I was hoping you’d be longer,’ she said. ‘I had a surprise planned.’

  ‘Oh, look -’

  ‘Sit down and take another drop. It’s still at it cats and dogs. You have sausages in there. Would you take a couple?’

  ‘The rain’s no worry. I can run you back.’

  She shook her head. She’d never ask a man who’d been drinking to drive. She spread four rashers on the fat of the pan and put the pan on the heat. She pricked four sausages on the draining-board. ‘Have you eggs?’ she said.

  He brought in a bowl of eggs from the scullery. A woman hadn’t cooked in the kitchen since Hetty and Jacqueline died. He couldn’t remember that a woman had even been in the house since the last of the funeral guests stepped out of it, certainly not the Lackys. He shouldn’t have talked about Willie John like that. Talk had encouraged her. He shouldn’t have taken the Bushmills.

  ‘When it clears up I’ll walk it,’ she said. ‘I’m only filling in the time, Mr Blakely.’

  ‘I’ll drive you in,’ he insisted. ‘I’m well known. They won’t stop me.’

  Mrs Kincaid undressed herself, thinking about him. He was a finished man. The man in the bar had said as much. He’d been destroyed by the troubles, but even so he kept going, with his turkeys and the two queer-looking women she’d met on the road working for him, feathers all over their overalls. His dinner every day in a café that overcharged you, his memories of toy aeroplanes, the wife and daughter never talked about: that was it for him. A Christmas card from Denver kept his spirits up.

  Removing the last of her underclothes, Mrs Kincaid guessed that he was thinking about her also, that he might even be seeing her as she was in this very minute. Finished or not, there was always a spark that could be kindled. An old hand at that, Mrs Kincaid didn’t have to ask herself whether or not, today, she had done so. She had broken her resolve and she wondered as she buttoned her nightdress if she had the will to draw back now, to move on tomorrow, before things went any further. She lay for a moment with the bedside light on, then reached out and turned it off. She felt as she had often felt when she got to this stage in a bit of business - that some shadow of herself was having its way with her, that if eighty-four thousand pounds hadn’t been lifted off her she’d be a different woman entirely.

  ‘Left high and dry,’ she murmured in the darkness, applying the expression to the turkey farmer, dozily remembering that it was the one she had used about herself when she’d suffered her calamity.

  On the morning after the evening of Mrs Kincaid’s visit to his house Blakely was aware of not minding if people had seen her in his car when he’d driven her to her room above Beatty’s shop. Her company in his kitchen had not, in the end, been disagreeable. She had washed up the dishes from which they had eaten the food she’d cooked. She had been sympathetic about several matters, and before they left he had shown her the plucking and dressing sheds even though he’d told himself he shouldn’t. ‘Isn’t it lonely for you?’ she’d said.

  She wasn’t in Hirrel’s that day, nor the next. She’ll have gone, Blakely thought. She had bought him the bottle and now she’d gone back to Belfast. He hadn’t been welcoming; he’d been cagey and suspicious, worried in case the Lackys knew she’d cooked his food, worried in case Quin walked in. He was thinking about her when he heard the dogs barking and her voice quietening them.

  ‘I was passing by,’ she said.

  The friendship that began for Blakely when the Bushmills was poured again and when for the second time a meal was shared in his kitchen was later remarked upon in Hirrel’s and in the turkey sheds. Because of his trouble in the past people were pleased, and pleased again when the two were seen together on the steps of the Stella Four-Screen. Reports went round that they’d danced, one Friday night, in the Crest Ballroom; a corner of the bar in Digby’s Hotel became known as theirs.

  Soon after that the Lackys met Mrs Kincaid, and Quin did. She was brought to Sunday lunch with the Reverend Johnston. One morning Blakely woke up aware of a deep longing for Mrs Kincaid, aware of a gentleness when he thought about her, of an impatience with himself for not declaring his feelings before this.

  ‘Oh no, dear, no.’


  She said he was too good for her. Too good a man, she said, too steady a man, too well-set-up, too decent a man. She could bring nothing, she said, she would be coming empty-handed and that was never her way. Kincaid had left her no more than a pittance, she said, not expecting to be taken so soon, as no man would in the prime of his life. A few years ago Mrs Kincaid had heard talk of a Belfast man who’d electrocuted himself drilling holes in an outside wall: as the cause of Kincaid’s demise, that did well enough.

  ‘No, I never could,’ she repeated, surveying the astonishment she had known would appear in the lean features, the flush of the cheeks darkening. ‘You have your life the way it is,’ she said. ‘You have your memories. I’d never upset the way things are with you.’

  He went silent. Was he thinking he’d made a fool of himself? she wondered. Would he finish his drink and that would be the end of it?

  ‘I’m on my own,’ he said.

  They were in the bar of the hotel, the quiet time between six and seven. The day before she’d said she’d definitely be off at the end of the week. Refreshed and invigorated, she’d said.

  ‘I’m alone,’ he repeated.

  ‘Don’t I know you are? Didn’t I say you’d be lonely?’

  ‘What I’m saying to you -’

  ‘I know what you’re saying to me. What I’m saying to yourself is you’re set in your ways. You’re well-to-do, I haven’t much. Isn’t it about that too?’

  ‘It’s not money -’

  ‘There’s always money.’

  The conversation softly became argument. Affection spread through it, real and contrived. It had been great knowing him, Mrs Kincaid said. You come to a place, you gain a friend; nothing was nicer. But Blakely was stubborn. There were feelings in this, he insisted; she couldn’t deny it.

  ‘I’m not. I’m not at all. I’m only trying to be fair to you. I have a Belfast woman’s caution in me.’

  ‘I’m as cautious myself as any man in Ulster. I have a name for it.’

  ‘You’re trusting the unknown all the same. Fair and square, hasn’t that to be said?’