Selected Stories

  ‘Prego, signore.’ The arrival of Mallory’s Caesar salad shattered this interference with the truth, more properly claiming his attention and causing him to abandon his pretence of an interest in something that wasn’t there. It was a younger waiter who brought the salad, who might even be the boy – grown up a bit – whom Julia had called the primo piatto boy and had tried her Italian on. While Mallory heard himself wished buon appetito, while the oil and vinegar were placed more conveniently on the table, he considered that yes, there was a likeness, certainly of manner. It hadn’t been understood by the boy at first when Julia asked him in Italian how long he’d been a waiter, but then he’d said he had begun at Harry’s Bar only a few days ago and had been nowhere before. ‘Subito, signore,’ he promised now when Mallory asked for pepper, and poured more wine before he went away.

  ‘I didn’t know Geoffrey got up early.’ At the table that was out of sight her voice was soft, the quietness of its tone registering more clearly than what it conveyed. Her husband said he hadn’t caught this. ‘I didn’t know he got up early,’ she repeated.

  ‘It’s not important that he does. It doesn’t matter what time the man gets up. I only said it to explain that he and I aren’t in any way alike.’

  ‘I know you’re not like Geoffrey.’

  ‘Why were you crying?’

  Again there was no answer, no indistinct murmur, no lilt in which words were lost.

  ‘You’re tired.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘I keep not hearing what you’re saying.’

  ‘I said I wasn’t tired.’

  Mallory didn’t believe she hadn’t been heard: her husband was closer to her than he was and he’d heard the ‘Not really’ himself. The scratchy irritation nurtured malevolence unpredictably in both of them, making her not say why she had cried and causing him to lie. My God, Mallory thought, what they are wasting!

  ‘No one’s blaming you for being tired. No one can help being tired.’

  She didn’t take that up and there was silence while, again, the surface held and Mallory finished his Caesar salad. He was the only diner on his own in the upstairs restaurant, where for a moment on his arrival he had been faintly disappointed not to be recognized. He had recognized, himself, the features of the waiter who had led him to his table; there had later been that familiarity about the younger one; nor could he help remembering, from four years ago, the easy warmth of the welcome that had suggested stirrings of recognition then. But he hadn’t been a man on his own four years ago, and naturally it was difficult for restaurant waiters when they were presented with only part of what there’d been before. And perhaps he was a little more crumpled than before; and four years was a longer lapse of time than there ever was in the past.

  ‘My sister married Geoffrey,’ the girl at the table behind him was saying.

  ‘Yes, she did. And all I’m trying to say -’

  ‘I know what you’re saying.’

  ‘It’s just I wonder if you do.’

  ‘You’re saying I thought it would be like Geoffrey and Ellen. That I was looking forward to what isn’t there.’

  ‘It’s hard to understand why anyone married Geoffrey.’

  Tonight it didn’t matter what they said. Dreary Geoffrey, who rose early to read his emails or scrutinize his bank statements, who liked to lead an ordered life, was enough tonight to nourish their need to punish one another. That her sister’s marriage wasn’t much was something to throw into their exchanges, to comment on tonight because it hadn’t, perhaps, been touched upon before. ‘Now, we don’t know one single bit of that,’ Julia in her occasionally stern way might have said, and seemed to say it now. ‘Talk to me instead.’

  He smiled. And across the restaurant a woman in the jolly birthday party waved at him – as if she thought he’d smiled at her, or imagined she must know him and couldn’t place him, or just felt sorry for him, alone like that in such convivial surroundings. He nodded, not letting his smile go, then looked away. For all her moments of sternness, how often on their travels had Julia speculated as wildly as he ever had himself about people they didn’t know! Lovers embracing in the Fauchon tea-rooms, the Japanese at the Uffizi, Germans in the Lido sun, or café-table chatterers anywhere. And they’d been listened to themselves, that stood to reason - he taken for a country doctor, Julia had maintained, and she an almoner or something like it. English both of them, of course, for anyone could tell, their voices confirmed as upper class when there’d been curiosity as to that.

  ‘Va bene?’ the waiter who’d been the primo piatto boy enquired, lifting away the Caesar-salad plate. ‘Was fine?’

  ‘Va bene. Va bene.’

  ‘Grazie, signore.’

  San Giovanni in Bragora was where the Cima Baptism they liked was: elusive on the train that morning and ever since, the name of the church came back. Sometimes when you looked it seemed that Christ was still in the shallow water, but looking again it wasn’t so: the almost naked figure stood on dry land at the water’s edge. The church of the Frari had Bellini’s triptych; the saints he’d painted when he was over eighty were in San Giovanni Crisostomo. How could it make a difference, not going again, alone, to admire them? Or standing or not standing before the Vivarini Annunciation in San Giobbe and whatever there was in Madonna dell’Orto? She’d be asleep now. As early as five o’clock they were put to bed sometimes.

  ‘I’m not,’ the girl was saying. ‘If we’re telling the truth, I’m not.’

  ‘No one can expect to be happy all the time.’

  ‘You asked me. I’m telling you because you asked me.’

  Their waiter brought them raspberries, with meringue and ice-cream. Mallory watched the confections going by and heard the murmurs of the husband.

  ‘Why have we ordered this?’ the girl complained when the waiter had gone.

  ‘You wanted it.’

  ‘Why did you say I should have married Geoffrey?’

  ‘I didn’t say -’

  ‘Well, whatever.’

  ‘Darling, you’re tired.’

  ‘Why did we come here?’

  ‘Someone told us it was good.’

  ‘Why did we come to Venice?’

  It was his turn not to reply. Marriage was an uncalculated risk, Mallory remembered saying once. The trickiest of all undertakings, he might have called it, might even have suggested that knowing this was an insurance against the worst, a necessary awareness of what unwelcome surprises there might be. ‘At least that’s something,’ Julia had agreed, and said she hoped it was enough. ‘Love’s cruel angels at play,’ she called it when they upset one another.

  The quiet at the other table went on. ‘Grazie mille, signore,’ Mallory heard when eventually it was broken, the bill paid then. He heard the chairs pulled back and then the couple who had quarrelled passed close to where he sat and on an impulse he looked up and spoke to them. He wondered as he did so if he had already had too much to drink, for it wasn’t like him to importune strangers. He raised a hand in a gesture of farewell, hoping they would go on. But they hesitated, and he sensed their realization that he, who so clearly was not American, was English. There was a moment of disbelief, and then acceptance. This registered in their features, and shame crept in before the stylishness that had dissipated in the course of their quarrel returned to come to their rescue. His polite goodwill in wishing them good evening as they went by was politely acknowledged, smiles and pleasantness the harmless lies in their denial of all he’d heard. ‘Its reputation’s not exaggerated,’ the husband commented with easy charm. ‘It’s good, this place.’ Her chops had been delicious, she said.

  Falling in with this, Mallory asked them if it was their first time in Venice. Embarrassment was still there, but they somehow managed to make it seem like their reproval of themselves for inflicting their bickering on him.

  ‘Oh, very much so,’ they said together, each seeming instinctively to know how their answer should be given.

  ‘No
t yours, I guess?’ the husband added, and Mallory shook his head. He’d been coming to Venice since first he’d been able to afford it, he said. And then he told them why he was here alone.

  While he did so Mallory sensed in his voice an echo of his regret that foolishness had brought him here. He did not say it. He did not say that he was here to honour a whim that would have been forgotten as soon as it was expressed. He did not deplore a tiresome, futile journey. But he’d come close to doing so and felt ashamed in turn. His manner had dismissed the scratchiness he’d eavesdropped on as the unseemly stuff of marriage. It was more difficult to dismiss his own sly aberration, and shame still nagged.

  ‘I’m sorry about your wife.’ The girl’s smile was gentle. ‘I’m very sorry.’

  ‘Ah, well.’ Belittling melancholy, he shook his head.

  Again the playing cards fall. Again he picks them up. She wins and then is happy, not knowing why.

  The party at the corner table came to an end, its chatter louder, then subdued. A handbag left behind was rescued by a waiter. Other people came.

  Tomorrow what has been lost in recollection’s collapse will be restored as she has known it: the pink and gold of Sant Giobbe’s Annunciation, its dove, its Virgin’s features, its little trees, its God. Tomorrow the silenced music will play in the piazza of San Marco, and tourists shuffle in the calles, and the boats go out to the islands. Tomorrow the cats of Venice will be fed by ladies in the dried-out parks, and there’ll be coffee on the Zattere.

  ‘No, no,’ he murmured when the husband said he was sorry too. ‘No, no.’

  He watched the couple go, and smiled across the crowded restaurant when they reached the door. Shame isn’t bad, her voice from somewhere else insists. Nor the humility that is its gift.

  Bravado

  The leaves had begun to fall. All along Sunderland Avenue on the pavement beneath the beech trees there was a sprinkling, not yet the mushy inconvenience they would become when more fell and rain came, which inevitably would be soon. Not many people were about; it was after midnight, almost one o’clock, the widely spaced lampposts casting pools of misty yellow illumination. A man walked his dog in Blenning Road in the same blotchy lamplight, the first of autumn’s leaves gathering there also. An upstairs window opened in Verdun Crescent, hands clapped to dismiss a cat rooting in a flowerbed. A car turned into Sunderland Avenue, its headlights dimmed and then extinguished, its alarm set for the night with a flurry of flashing orange and red. The traffic of the city was a hum that only faintly reached these leisurely streets, the occasional distant shriek of a police siren or an ambulance more urgently disturbing their peace.

  Less than half a mile away, the night was different. Young people prowled about outside the Star nightclub, its band – Big City – taking a break. A late shop was still open, a watchful Indian at the door noting who came and went. A few cars drew away, but more remained. Then, with a thump of such suddenness that for a moment it might have been taken as a warning of emergency or disaster, music again burst from the Star nightclub.

  By half past one this neighbourhood, too, had quietened. The bouncers at the Star drove off, couples made their way to the dark seclusion of the nearby canal bank. Others stood about, groups forming and dispersing. Locking up his shop, the Indian was argued with, and abused when demands for alcohol and potato crisps were refused. The last of the parked cars were driven off.

  Two youths who were friends went together, undaunted by the prospect of an hour’s walk to where they lived. One was in shirtsleeves although it was chilly, the arms of a red anorak tied around his shoulders; the other wore a black woollen jersey above ragged jeans. They talked about the girls they had come across on the dance-floor, one in particular, well known to them both, the others strangers. They talked about their intentions for the future: in the Merchant Navy and in car sales, an uncle’s business. These were the changes that were soon to come about, when education ended, when so much they had known for so long was to be left behind for ever: the Brothers and the lay teachers, the cramped desks scratched with entwined initials and hearts and arrows, all they had learned of self-preservation and of survival’s cunning. There was, in their conversation, an absence of regret.

  They paused in their walk while the anorak was unknotted and put on, zipped up and buttoned. Their evening out had been a good one, they agreed while this was being done. ‘Kicking,’ one said. ‘Big City can do it.’ They walked on, talking about that band’s touch of genius.

  With his mobile telephone close to his mouth, the Indian loudly demanded the police: his usual ploy at this hour, speaking to no one. His tormentors swore at him, then tired of their invective and went away. Five there were, two of them girls, neither of whom had taken part in the abuse of the Indian; which had surprised him, for girls were often the worst. He kept an eye on the five when they moved off in a bunch, causing an oncoming car to slow down to a crawl as they crossed the street. Then he locked his shop, thankful that there hadn’t been an incident.

  ‘Howya doin’?’ Manning shouted at the driver of the car. He drummed on the bonnet with his fists and, joining in, his companions – but not the girls – did the same. The car kept moving, then stopped and reversed. It went another way.

  ‘Could you beat that?’ Manning laughed, watching the car from the middle of the road. He was tallest of the bunch, his reddish hair falling over his forehead in a floppy shock that he was said to be proud of. An air of insouciance distinguished his manner, was there again in the lazy saunter of his walk, in his smile. Manning led when he was with Donovan and Kilroy, which he was most of the time, and was tonight. Aisling was his girl, fair-haired and pretty, with expressive blue eyes, younger than Manning by more than a year. The second girl wasn’t known to the others; earlier she had asked which way they were going and then asked if she could go with them because she lived in that direction. Francie she was called.

  Aisling clung to Manning as they walked. With his arm round Francie, Kilroy tried to slow her down, in the hope of setting up an opportunity for something when they had fallen far enough behind. But Francie, aware of his intention, kept up a steady pace. She was small, often called a little thing, but deliberate and determined in her manner. She, too, was pretty, but less dramatically so than Aisling, whom Manning liked to describe as drop-dead gorgeous. She denied that she was, but Manning’s regular repetition of the compliment did not displease her.

  She listened to him now, saying he didn’t intend to set foot in the Star again, objecting to the way the shaven-headed bouncers had frisked him for miniatures. They had taken one from him and afterwards said they hadn’t: they thought they owned you, louts like that. ‘Did you ever do a line, cowboy?’ he called across Aisling to Donovan.

  ‘Amn’t I doing one with Emir Flynn?’

  ‘You eejit!’

  Laughing again, Manning sounded drunk. Not very, Aisling thought, but a little. She’d been drunk once or twice herself but hadn’t liked it, everything slipping about, and the way you felt in the morning.

  ‘Did you ever, though?’ Manning pressed, offering Donovan a cigarette.

  Donovan said he had of course, many a time, and Aisling knew all this was for her and for the girl who’d tagged along, whose name she had forgotten. ‘Fanbloodytastic,’ Donovan said, he and Manning lighting their cigarettes, sharing the match. No one else was a smoker.

  They were going by the dyeworks now, where Manning had once climbed over the high spiked railings. That had been for Aisling too, and a girl called Maura Bannerman. The security lights had been triggered and through the railings they had watched Manning roaming about, from time to time peering in at the downstairs windows of the lumpy red-brick building that was said to have been a lunatic asylum once.

  Behind her Aisling heard Kilroy telling the girl he had monopolized about that night. At the top of the railings, razor-wire was woven through the spikes, adding to the hazards: none of them knew how Manning had done it, but somehow he had, even tho
ugh he was a bit drunk then too.

  Kilroy had slit eyes that aptly suggested an untrustworthy nature. Donovan was considered to be dense: almost as tall as Manning, he was bulkier, clumsy in his movements, slow of speech. Kilroy had a stunted appearance, accentuated by oiled black hair sleekly brushed straight back, making the top of his head seem flat. Aisling didn’t much like either of them.

  The first time she’d been in the Star – the first time she’d seen Manning, no more than a face in the crowd – she had admired him. He’d noticed her interest, he told her afterwards; he said she was his kind, and she didn’t hesitate when he asked her to go out with him. Mano he was called in the Dublin manner, Martin John his given names. Martin was what his family called him and Aisling thought of him as that when she was in her convent classroom, and every night before she went to sleep. She and he were an item, he said, which Aisling had never been with anyone before.

  ‘I’d give a thousand bucks for a snort,’ he was saying now, his voice slightly raised, a laugh in it again. ‘Where’d we get ourselves a snort, cowboy?’

  Donovan said maybe Dirty Doyle’s, Kilroy suggested Capel Street. It was a kind of play; Martin Manning doing the big fellow, her father would have said. Aisling had become used to it ages ago.

  They reached the quiet streets, St Stephen’s Church at the corner of Goodchild Street, the shadowy sprawl of trees on either side of Sunderland Avenue ahead of them.

  ‘Who’re those geeks?’ Donovan suddenly exclaimed and they all stopped, not knowing where to look at first. But when Francie pointed they saw the red anorak.

  ‘It’s bloody Dalgety,’ Manning said.

  The two parted in Sunderland Avenue, Dalgety turning into Blenning Road. On his own, he went a little faster, but paused when he noticed that one of the garden gates he was passing was invitingly open. He went through it and crossed a lawn to a corner near the house where he couldn’t be seen from the windows. He urinated in the shadow of an eleagnus bush.