A Bit on the Side

  *

  ‘It’s how it is,’ Corry said when he rejected O’Flynn’s offer of a place in the stoneyard, and he said it again when he agreed to work on the roads.

  Stubbornly, Nuala considered that it needn’t be how it was. It was ridiculous that there should live within a mile of one another a barren wife and a statue-maker robbed by adverse circumstances of his purpose in God’s world. It was stupid and silly and perverse, when all that had to be done was to take savings out of a bank. The buttercup-yellow room so lovingly prepared would never now be occupied. In the tarmac surfaces he laid on roads Corry would see the visions he had betrayed.

  Nuala nursed her anger, keeping it to herself. She went about her tasks, collecting eggs from where her hens had laid, preparing food, kneading dough for the bread she made every second day; and all the time her anger nagged. It surely was not too terrible a sin, too redolent of insidious presumption, that people should impose an order of their own on what they were given? Had she been clumsy in her manner of putting it to Etty Rynne? Or wrong not to have revealed her intentions to Corry in the hope that, with thought, he would have accepted the sense of them? But doubt spread then: Corry never would have; no matter how it had been put, Etty Rynne would have been terrified.

  Corry bought new boots before he went to work on the roads. They were doing a job on the quarry boreen, he said, re-surfacing it because of the complaints there’d been from the lorry drivers. A protective cape was supplied to him in case there’d be rain.

  On the night before his new work began Nuala watched him applying waterproof stuff to the boots and rubbing it in. They were useless without it, he’d been told. He took it all in his stride.

  ‘Things happen differently,’ he said, as if something in Nuala’s demeanour allowed him to sense her melancholy. ‘We’re never in charge.’

  She didn’t argue; there was no point in argument. She might have confessed instead that she had frightened Etty Rynne; she might have tried to explain that her wild talk had been an effort to make something good out of what there was, as so often she had seen the spread of angels’ wings emerging from roughly sawn wood. But all that was too difficult, so Nuala said nothing.

  Her anger was still merciless when that day ended; and through the dark of the night she felt herself oppressed by it and bleakly prayed, waiting for a response that did not come. She reached out in the morning dusk to hold for a moment her husband’s hand. Had he woken she would have told him all she had kept to herself, unable now to be silent.

  But it was Corry’s day that was beginning, and it was he who needed sympathy and support. Making breakfast for him and for her children, Nuala gave him both as best she could, banishing from her mood all outward traces of what she knew would always now be private. When the house was empty again but for herself, she washed up the morning’s dishes and tidied the kitchen as she liked to have it. She damped the fire down in the stove. Outside, she fed her hens.

  In Corry’s workshop she remained longer than she usually did on her morning visit to the saints who had become her friends: St Laurence with his gridiron, St Gabriel the messenger, St Clare of Assisi, St Thomas the Apostle and blind St Lucy, St Catherine, St Agnes. Corry had made them live for her and she felt the first faint slipping away of her anger as they returned her gaze with undisturbed tranquillity. Touched by it, lost in its peace, she sensed their resignation too. The world, not she, had failed.

  Rose Wept

  ‘How nice all this is!’ Rose’s mother cried, with dishes on the way to the dinner table Rose had laid. ‘What weather, Mr Bouverie, don’t you think? Please sit here next to me.’

  Obediently Mr Bouverie did so, replying to the comment about the weather.

  ‘Can’t stand a heatwave,’ Mr Dakin cheerfully grumbled.

  Rose’s father – Mrs Dakin’s better half, so she insisted – was bluff and genial. He spoke with a hoarseness, always keeping his voice down as if saving it for professional use, he being an auctioneer. Apart from her shrillness, there was a similarity about his wife: both were large and shared an ease often to be found in people of their girth and stature. This evening Mr Dakin was sweating, as he tended to in summer; he had taken his jacket off and undone the buttons of the waistcoat he always wore no matter what the temperature.

  His daughter sweltered in her guilt. Rose was eighteen and wished, this evening, she could be somewhere else. She wished she didn’t have to meet Mr Bouverie’s weary eyes or watch him being polite, listening with inclined head to her mother, smiling at her father’s bonhomie. The occasion was a celebration: Rose was to go to university, Mr Bouverie had had a hand in her success. As a tutor, he had made borderline cases his business for more than thirty years, but intended to no longer, Rose being his last. My God, this is appalling, she thought. She had begged her mother not to issue this invitation but Mrs Dakin had insisted that they must. Mr Bouverie had attempted to refuse but had then been offered a choice of evenings.

  ‘How I adore the asparagus season!’ Rose heard her mother cry in her vivacious way, pressing a dish of the vegetable, well buttered, on their visitor.

  Mr Bouverie smiled and murmured his appreciation. He was a man of sixty-odd. Strands of faded hair were hardly noticeable on the freckled pate of his head. There were freckles, also, on the backs of his hands, on old worn skin like dried-out chamois. He wore a pale suit and one of his colourful Italian bow ties.

  ‘And how is your world, Mr Bouverie?’ Mr Dakin civilly enquired.

  ‘Shrinking,’ Mr Bouverie replied. ‘That is something you notice as you age.’

  Mrs Dakin bubbled into good-sort laughter. Mr Dakin poured claret.

  ‘You shrink yourself of course.’ Mr Bouverie obligingly pursued the subject, since it was clear that the Dakins liked to have a conversation going. He smiled at Rose. Half his teeth were still his own, grey and sucked away to crags.

  ‘Good tidings for the obese,’ mumbled Mr Dakin, his features screwed up as they often were when he made a joke. Directed against himself, his banter caused his wife to exclaim:

  ‘Oh, Bobo, you’re not obese!’

  ‘I used to be six foot and half an inch,’ Mr Bouverie laboured on. ‘I’m nothing like that now.’

  ‘But otherwise all is well?’ Mr Dakin enquired.

  ‘Oh, yes, indeed.’

  Mrs Dakin had had her dining-room papered blue, a dark stripe and a lighter one. Curtains matched, the paintwork was white. Mrs Dakin enjoyed this side of things and often said so: leafless delphiniums patterned her drawing-room; her hall and staircase were black and gold.

  ‘I say, this is awfully good.’ Mr Dakin complimented his wife on what she had done with the turkey slices that accompanied the asparagus.

  ‘Delicious,’ Mr Bouverie affirmed.

  Rose wore a slate-grey dress, with a collar that folded back. Unlike her parents, Rose was petite, her fair hair cut short, a fringe following the curve of her forehead, her eyes a forget-me-not shade of blue. Her guilt, this evening, silenced her, and her smile came fleetingly and not often. When it did, her lower lip lost its beesting look and for an instant her white, irregular teeth appeared. She felt awkward and unpretty at the dinner table, sick of herself.

  ‘We cultivate it late in our garden,’ her mother was saying, still talking about the asparagus, of which Rose had taken only a single shoot. ‘Our season runs almost to September.’

  What kind of an ordeal was it for him? Rose wondered. They had invited his wife as well but a message had come the day before to say that Mrs Bouverie was unwell. Rose knew that wasn’t true. His wife had seized the opportunity; she’d said to him she couldn’t be bothered, but that wasn’t true either. His wife would be naked now, Rose thought.

  ‘Extraordinary, what you read on cars’ rear windows,’ her mother suddenly remarked, the subject of a particular season for asparagus now exhausted. ‘Baby on Board, for instance. I mean, why on earth should a total stranger be interested in that?’

  ‘I
think you’re being told not to drive too close,’ Rose’s father suggested.

  Tinkling with unmalicious social laughter, her mother pointed out that it was an enticement to drive too close in order to read what was said.

  ‘They haven’t thought of that, my dear.’

  In all her chosen subjects Rose had been a borderline case and every Thursday afternoon, for almost a year, had gone to Mr Bouverie’s house, where they had sat together in the bow window that looked out into the garden. Mrs Bouverie brought tea as soon as Rose arrived and while they drank it Mr Bouverie didn’t attempt to teach but instead talked about the past, about his own life when he had been about to go to university himself, and later being interviewed for a position in the worsted-cloth business. He had tried the worsted trade for a while and then had turned to schoolmastering. But something about the form of discipline and the tedium of’hobbies time’ – when the boys put together model aeroplanes – caused him to give it up after a year. Ever since, he had received pupils in his house, deciding only a month or so ago that Rose should be the last of them. ‘Anno Domini,’ he’d said, but Rose knew that wasn’t the reason. During all those teatimes he had spun his life out, like a serial story.

  ‘But it’s odd,’ Mrs Dakin lightly persisted. ‘Don’t you agree with me, Mr Bouverie?’

  The old man hesitated, and Rose could see he had momentarily lost track of the conversation. She knew her mother would notice also and not be dismayed. Smoothly her mother said:

  ‘All those personal declarations on motor cars – whom people love, where they’ve been, who occupies the two front seats.’

  ‘Sharon and Liam usually,’ Mr Dakin guffawed.

  Mrs Bouverie, ten years younger than her husband and seeming more, had a lover. Mrs Bouverie, slim and silky, with long legs and a wrinkled pout, too well made up, received a visitor on Thursday afternoons because her husband was occupied with the last of his pupils then, concentrating on a borderline case’s weaknesses. Mrs Bouverie’s visitor came softly, but there were half-muffled sounds, like shadows passing through the house, a pattern of whispers and footfalls, a gently closed door, and always – ten minutes or so before Rose was due to leave the house herself – the lightest of footsteps on the stairs and in the hall. It was a pattern that belonged with Mrs Bouverie’s placing the tea tray on the pale mahogany of the window table, her scent lingering after she left the room, the restlessness in her eyes. But Rose hadn’t entirely guessed the nature of the weekly rendezvous until the afternoon she went to fetch a handkerchief from her coat pocket on the hallstand, and saw a sallow-faced man with a latchkey in his hand breathlessly closing the hall door. Seeing her in turn, he smiled, a brightly secret smile. ‘Younger than her?’ Rose’s friend Caroline, sharp on detail, wanted to know, and Rose said no, not much, but beautifully turned out in a brown linen suit, a grey-haired man, and elegant. ‘Not come to mend something?’ suggested Daisy, who could not help being sceptical when someone else claimed the limelight. Her doubts were scorned at once by Angela and Liz, for why should a repairer of washing machines or television sets be in possession of a latchkey and be dressed so? Why should he come so regularly? Why should he smile a secret smile? In the Box Tree Café where the five girls gossiped and complained of this and that, where they talked about sex and other private matters, where Daisy and Caroline smoked, Mrs Bouverie’s Thursday lover became the subject of intense and specific speculation. He was married, Caroline said, which was why he had to come to her house: in illicit love affairs there was always the difficulty of finding somewhere to go. He came on Thursdays because, Rose being the last of Mr Bouverie’s pupils, there was no other time when Mr Bouverie was fully occupied as perhaps there had been in the past, when there were other pupils. ‘That kind of thing and she’s fifty ? ‘Daisy frowned through the words, but Angela said fifty was nothing. ‘I do not intend to be unfaithful,’ Liz romantically declared, but the others weren’t interested in that, any more than they wished to dwell for long on the advanced age of Mrs Bouverie. What fascinated all of them, Daisy too in the end, was that while Rose sat in a room that had been described to them – a long low-ceilinged room that had once been two, with sofas and armchairs and a circular mirror over the mantelpiece – in a room upstairs a man and a woman got into bed together. ‘I would love to see him,’ Caroline said. ‘Even a glance.’ Was it like, each of them wondered in the Box Tree Café, the lovemaking you saw on the television or in the cinema? Or was, somehow, the real thing quite different? They argued about that. ‘I would not hesitate to be unfaithful,’ Caroline said, ‘if things went stale.’ Caroline was like that, her matter-of-factness sometimes sounding hard. Angela – long black hair, brown eyes, rarely smiling because of her dental wires – was the victim kind, and accident-prone. Liz gave too much, generosity part of her romantic nature. Daisy, red-haired and bespectacled, distrusted the world. Liz was the prettiest of the five, with neat features and flaxen hair in a ponytail and a film star’s mouth, nothing particularly special except for deep-blue eyes, but still the prettiest. Rose thought of herself as ordinary, too quiet, too shy and nervous: Mrs Bouverie and her Thursday visitor were a godsend in her relationship with her friends.

  ‘How nice all this is!’ Mrs Dakin enthused for the second time, the subject of notices on motor cars having run its course. ‘How hugely grateful to you we are, Mr Bouverie!’

  Rose watched him shaking his head, and heard him saying that the credit must wholly go to her.

  ‘No, truly, Mr Bouverie,’ her father insisted with a solemn intonation.

  ‘All her young life before her,’ her mother threw in.

  Rose hadn’t told them, nor told her brother. It wasn’t the sort of thing that was talked about within this family. She would have been embarrassed and would have caused embarrassment – a very different reception from the one there’d been when she had passed the information on in the Box Tree Café with its green-topped tables. After the first time, her friends had always been expectant. ‘It could be any of our mothers,’ Liz whispered, awestruck, once. They had sat there, coffee drunk, Caroline and Daisy with their cigarettes, dwelling upon that, imagining Rose’s sallow-skinned man arriving in the surroundings that had been described to them. ‘Beautifully pressed, his linen suit,’ Rose said. ‘And a plain green shirt.’

  Around the dinner table the conversation, still powered by Mrs Dakin, had changed again. ‘The Kindest Cut,’ she was saying now, drawing Mr Bouverie’s attention to the droll wit of hairdressers as exemplified in the titles chosen for their premises. ‘Nutters I saw the other day!’

  This evening, for the very last time, he would be there. Mr Bouverie did not normally go out to dinner; he’d said as much when joining in the celebratory mood on his arrival. No tea tray had been carried to the window table since Rose had ceased to visit the house. The invitation for this evening must have seemed like a gift, naughtily wrapped, for slim Mrs Bouverie. ‘It’s a Mr Azam,’ her husband had said on the last but one of their Thursdays. ‘In case you are interested in his name.’

  Mr Dakin poured the wine again. He said they’d had the glasses as a wedding present, only four of them left so they couldn’t use them often.

  ‘The Mitages,’ Mrs Dakin murmured softly, the shrillness that whistled through her voice gone from it now, inappropriate because the Mitages were no longer alive. She paused in her eating, inclining her head in memory, slanting it a little to the left, a wistful smile enlivening her reddened lips. Mr Dakin sighed; then death passed on, and Mrs Dakin picked up her fork again and the wine bottle was replaced on its little silver tray, another wedding gift, although this was not said.

  ‘Cuckold.’ In the Box Tree Café the ugly word, spoken first by Caroline, had formed in their minds, its sound acquiring shape and colour. Only Rose knew what Mr Bouverie looked like but he, really, scarcely came into it. It was not an old man who had once planned a future in the cloth trade and had ended as a tutor that was of interest. He was no rival for the dark
ened bedroom above the room that had once been two, or for the scent of Mrs Bouverie or her lover’s suit draped on a chair, or smears of lipstick left on sallow flesh. No one ever interposed a comment while Rose spread out for the delectation of her friends another Thursday harvest. Once, music softly played, ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’. Once the telephone rang and was not answered by Mr Bouverie, although the receiver was only yards from where they sat. Sooner than if he had crossed to it the ringing ceased, answered at the bedside. Not always, but now and again, Mrs Bouverie appeared on the stairs when Rose was putting her coat on at the hallstand; or in summer, when there was no coat, she sometimes called down goodbye when she heard the voices of her husband and his pupil. ‘Vicious,’ Liz said. ‘That’s a vicious woman.’ But Rose said no, you couldn’t call Mrs Bouverie vicious; she didn’t strike you as that. ‘More significant that she’s childless,’ Daisy said. ‘Or at least it could be.’ Caroline disagreed.

  ‘Oh, my golly gosh!’ Rose’s father exclaimed with his auctioneer’s jolliness when gooseberry fool was placed in front of him. Mrs Dakin said the gooseberries had been picked from her own bushes.

  ‘Delicious,’ Mr Bouverie for the second time remarked, and the talk was of gooseberries for a while, of different varieties, one favoured for this purpose, another for that.

  ‘Mr Azam,’ Rose had announced in the Box Tree Café and Daisy had gone at once to the telephone directory to look the name up. ‘Hundreds,’ she’d said, returning. ‘Hundreds of Azams.’ In her absence the conversation had advanced in another direction, the name agreed to be a foreign one and then abandoned as a subject for discussion. ‘When a husband knows,’ Caroline said, ‘he’s not so much a cuckold as complaisant.’ And they talked about the fact that while Mr Bouverie dealt with the last of his borderline cases he knew what was occurring all around him – the nature of the creaking stairs and closing doors, the light tap of footsteps not his wife’s, the snatch of music hushed. ‘Did he seem different when he said the name?’ Caroline sharply asked, and Rose said no.