The Collected Stories

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Hiney said. ‘Lawless never came back here.’

  ‘He came back and told me Bernadette was pregnant, only it wasn’t his child. She tried to get rid of it.’

  Mrs Colleary crossed herself. Hiney’s solemn face was unusually animated. ‘That’s a bloody lie,’ he said.

  ‘He couldn’t control her, Hiney. She was like she always was.’

  The old man asked them what they were talking about, something he rarely did. Nobody answered him. Mrs Colleary said:

  ‘He never told the truth.’

  ‘Never in his life,’ Hiney agreed with harsh vigour. ‘We all know the kind Lawless is.’

  ‘You were always taken in, Maura Brigid. You were always soft.’

  She knew that if she began to cry she wouldn’t be able to stop. But the tears she repressed kept making her blink and she turned her head away. They were the same kind, she and the man who had married her. They’d been companions the way he and her sister had never been, you could tell that from how he spoke of Bernadette. Bernadette had hurt him, too.

  ‘It’s bad enough the way things are,’ Hiney insisted. ‘Keep it to yourself he came back.’

  When he’d first come to the farm to court her they used to walk in the woods and climb down the cliffs to the strand. He’d always been shy, only taking her hand and clumsily kissing her. After they were married there had never been any question about his not coming on to the farm: Hiney needed the assistance and Michael was employe4 on the roads, work he didn’t like. She remembered how she had wondered about a baby being born, her own baby and his on the farm.

  ‘There were girls at the convent,’ she said, ‘used call Bernadette a hooer.’

  Again Mrs Colleary crossed herself. She drew her breath in and held it for a moment. Her eyes were closed.

  ‘What’s the matter with you, Maura Brigid?’ Hiney asked quietly.

  ‘On account of the way she enticed the Christian Brothers’ boys. That’s why they called her that.’

  ‘If Lawless comes back here I’ll take a gun to him,’ Hiney said, still without raising his voice. He stood up, leaving his food untouched. He walked from the kitchen, and the sheepdogs who’d been lying under the table followed him.

  ‘You shouldn’t ever have married that man,’ Mrs Colleary said, opening her eyes. Her face had gone pale. Her mouth was pulled down, as though in weariness, as though she couldn’t be bothered arranging it differently any more. ‘I told you at the time he was rotten to the core.’

  Maura Brigid did not reply. It was not true to say the man she’d married had never told the truth in his life. He was weak, and she was weak herself: she didn’t possess the courage to leave the farm, to run off with him as Bernadette had. She would be frightened, and she was well-behaved by nature. He hadn’t come to the farm to ask her to run off, that wasn’t his way; he’d come to the farm to tell her something, to see how she might feel about it. The priest had written to beg that there might be forgiveness.

  ‘I’ll go down and help them in the fields,’ the old man said, finishing the cup of tea he’d poured himself. ‘I think the pair of them are digging out ditches.’

  The letter she had written would remain in her drawer. In the old man’s senile fantasy her husband would continue to work on the cliff land, to cut timber in the woods, and help her with the Friday shopping, as he had once upon a time. In the old man’s senile fantasy there was repentance, and forgiveness.

  ‘Those are terrible things you said,’ her mother whispered, still sitting at the table, her chop congealed in its fat. ‘Enough has happened to us without that.’

  When the old man died there would be no more talk of her husband, and when her mother died the task of making Hiney’s bed would be hers, and there would only be Hiney and herself to cook for. Hiney would never marry because all Hiney was interested in was work. People would be sorry for her, but they would always say it was her foolishness that had dragged the family through disgrace, her fault for marrying a scoundrel. In the farmhouse and the neighbourhood that was the person she had become.

  Coffee with Oliver

  That is Deborah, Oliver said to himself: my daughter has come to see me. But at the pavement table of the café where he sat he did not move. He did not even smile. He had, after all, only caught a glimpse of a slight girl in a yellow dress, of fair hair, and sunglasses and a profile: it might not be she at all.

  Yet, Oliver insisted to himself, you know a thing like that. You sense your flesh and blood. And why should Deborah be in Perugia unless she planned to visit him? The girl was alone. She had hurried into the hotel next to the café in a businesslike manner, not as a sightseer would.

  Oliver was a handsome man of forty-seven, with greying hair, and open, guileless features. This morning he was dressed as always he was when he made the journey to Perugia: in a pale-cream linen suit, a pale shirt with a green stripe in it, and the tie of an English public school. His tan shoes shone; the socks that matched the cream of his suit were taut over his ankles.

  ‘Signorina!’

  He summoned the waitress who had just finished serving the people at the table next to his and ordered another cappuccino. This particular girl went off duty at eleven and the waitress who replaced her invariably made out the bill for one cappuccino only. It was fair enough, Oliver argued to himself, since he was a regular customer at the café and spent far more there than a tourist would.

  ‘Si, signore. Subito.’

  What he had seen in the girl who’d gone into the hotel was a resemblance to Angelica, who was slight and fair-haired also, and had the same quick little walk and rather small face. If the girl had paused and for some reason taken off her dark glasses he would at once, with warm nostalgia, have recognized her mother’s deep, dark eyes, of that he was certain. He wouldn’t, of course, have been so sure had it not been for the resemblance. Since she’d grown up he’d only seen photographs of his daughter.

  ‘It was best to let whatever Deborah had planned just happen, best not to upset the way she wanted it. He could ask for her at the reception desk of the hotel. He could be waiting for her in the hall, and they could lunch together. He could show her about the town, put her into the picture gallery for an hour while he waited at the café across the street; afterwards they could sit over a drink. But that would be all his doing, not Deborah’s, and it wouldn’t be fair. Such a programme would also be expensive, for Deborah, in spite of being at a smart hotel, might well not be able to offer a contribution: it would not be unlike Angelica to keep her short. Oliver’s own purpose in being in Perugia that morning was to visit the Credito Italiano, to make certain that the monthly amount from Angelica had come. He had cashed a cheque, but of course that had to be made to last.

  ‘Prego, signore,’ the waitress said, placing a fresh cup of coffee in front of him and changing his ashtray for an unused one.

  He smiled and thanked her, then blew gently at the foam of his cappuccino and sipped a little of the coffee. He lit a cigarette. You could sit all day here, he reflected, while the red-haired Perugians went by, young men in twos and threes, and the foreign students from the language schools, and the tourists who toiled up, perspiring, from the car parks. Idling time away, just ruminating, was lovely.

  Eventually Oliver paid for his coffee and left. He should perhaps buy some meat, in case his daughter arrived at his house at a mealtime. Because it was expensive he rarely did buy meat, once in a blue moon a packet of cooked turkey slices, which lasted for ages. There was a butcher’s he often passed in a side street off the via dei Priori, but this morning it was full of women, all of them pressing for attention. Oliver couldn’t face the clamour and the long wait he guessed there’d be. The butcher’s in Betona might still be open when he arrived off the five past twelve bus. Probably best left till then in any case, meat being tricky in the heat.

  He descended from the city centre by a steep short-cut, eventually arriving at the bus stop he favoured.
He saved a little by using this particular fare-stage, and though he did not often make the journey to Perugia all such economies added up. What a marvellous thing to happen, that Deborah had come! Oliver smiled as he waited for his bus in the midday sunshine; the best things were always a surprise.

  Deborah had a single memory of her father. He’d come to the flat one Sunday afternoon and she’d been at the top of the short flight of stairs that joined the flat’s two floors. She hadn’t known who he was but had watched and listened, sensing the charged atmosphere. At the door the man was smiling. He said her mother was looking well. He hoped she wouldn’t mind, he said. Her mother was cross. Deborah had been five at the time.

  ‘You know I mind,’ she’d heard her mother say.

  ‘I was passing. Unfriendly just to pass, I thought. We shouldn’t not ever talk to one another again, Angelica.’

  Her mother’s voice was lowered then. She spoke more than she had already, but Deborah couldn’t hear a word.

  ‘Well, no point,’ he said. ‘No point in keeping you.’

  Afterwards, when Deborah asked, her mother told her who the man was. Her mother was truthful and found deception difficult. When two people didn’t get on any more, she said, it wasn’t a good idea to try to keep some surface going.

  He’d lit a cigarette while they’d been talking. Softly, he’d tried to interrupt her mother. He’d wanted to come in, but her mother hadn’t permitted that.

  ‘I’m here because of a mistake? Is that it?’ Deborah pinned her mother down in a quarrel years after that Sunday afternoon. It was her mother’s way of putting it when her marriage came up: two people had made a mistake. Mistakes were best forgotten, her mother said.

  The dwelling Oliver occupied, in the hills above the village of Betona, was a stone building of undistinguished shape and proportions. It had once housed sheep during the frozen winter months, and wooden stairs, resembling a heavily constructed ladder, led to a single upstairs room, where shepherds had sought privacy from their animals. Efforts at conversion had been made. Electricity had been brought from the village; a kitchen, and a lavatory with a shower in it, had been fitted into the space below. But the conversion had an arrested air, reflecting a loss of interest on the part of Angelica who, years ago, had bought the place as it stood. At the time of the divorce she had made over to him the ramshackle habitation. She herself had visited it only once; soon after the divorce proceedings began she turned against the enterprise, and work on the conversion ceased. When Oliver returned on his own he found the corrugated roof still letting in rain, no water flowing from either the shower or the lavatory, the kitchen without a sink or a stove, and a cesspit not yet dug. He had come from England with his clothes and four ebony-framed pictures. ‘Well, anyway it’s somewhere to live,’ he said aloud, looking around the downstairs room, which smelt of concrete. He sighed none the less, for he was not deft with his hands.

  The place was furnished now, though modestly. Two folding garden chairs did service in the downstairs room. There was a table with a fawn formica surface, and a pitch-pine bookcase. Faded rugs covered most of the concrete floor. The four heavily framed pictures – scenes of Suffolk landscape – adorned the rough stone walls to some effect. Across a corner there was a television set.

  The cesspit remained undug, but in other directions Oliver had had a bit of luck. He’d met an Englishman on one of his visits to the Credito Italiano and had helped with a language difficulty. The man, in gratitude, insisted on buying Oliver a cup of coffee and Oliver, sensing a usefulness in this acquaintanceship, suggested that they drive together in the man’s car to Betona. In return for a summer’s lodging – a sleeping-bag on the concrete floor – the man replaced the damaged corrugated iron of the roof, completed the piping that brought water to the shower and the lavatory, and installed a sink and an antique gas stove that someone had thrown out, adapting the stove to receive bottled gas. He liked to work like this, to keep himself occupied, being in some kind of distress. Whenever Oliver paused in the story of his marriage his companion had a way of starting up about the business world he’d once belonged to, how failure had led to bankruptcy: finding the interruption of his own narration discourteous, Oliver did not listen. Every evening at six O’clock the man walked down to the village and returned with a litre of red wine and whatever groceries he thought necessary. Oliver explained that since he himself would not have made these purchases he did not consider that he should make a contribution to their cost. His visitor was his guest in the matter of accommodation; in fairness, it seemed to follow, he should be his visitor’s guest where the odd egg or glass of wine was concerned.

  ‘Angelica was never easy,’ Oliver explained, continuing the story of his marriage from one evening to the next. There was always jealousy.’ His sojourn in the Betona hills was temporary, he stated with confidence. But he did not add that, with his sights fixed on something better, he often dropped into conversation with lone English or American women in the rooms of the picture gallery or at the café next to the hotel. He didn’t bore his companion with this information because it didn’t appear to have much relevance. He did his best only to be interesting about Angelica, and considered he succeeded. It was a dispute in quite a different area that ended the relationship, as abruptly as it had begun. As well as hospitality, the visitor claimed a sum of money had been agreed upon, but while conceding that a cash payment had indeed been mooted, Oliver was adamant that he had not promised it. He did not greatly care for the man in the end, and was glad to see him go.

  When Angelica died two years ago Deborah was twenty. The death was not a shock because her mother had been ill, and increasingly in pain, for many months: death was a mercy. Nonetheless, Deborah felt the loss acutely. Although earlier, in her adolescence, there had been arguments and occasionally rows, she’d known no companion as constant as her mother; and as soon as the death occurred she realized how patient with her and how fond of her Angelica had been. She’d been larky too, amused by unexpected things, given to laughter that Deborah found infectious. In her distress at the time of her mother’s death it never occurred to her that the man who’d come to the flat that Sunday afternoon might turn up at the funeral. In fact, he hadn’t.

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ Angelica had said before she died, meaning that there was provision for Deborah to undertake the post-graduate work she planned after she took her degree. ‘Don’t worry, darling.’

  Deborah held her hand, ashamed when she remembered how years ago she’d been so touchy because Angelica once too often repeated that her marriage was a mistake. Her mother had never used the expression again.

  ‘I was a horrid child,’ Deborah cried forlornly before her mother died. ‘A horrid little bully.’

  ‘Darling, of course you weren’t.’

  At the funeral people said how much they’d always liked her mother, how nice she’d been. They invited Deborah to visit them at any time, just to turn up when she was feeling low.

  When Oliver stepped off the bus in the village the butcher’s shop was still open but he decided, after all, not to buy a pork chop, which was the choice he had contemplated when further considering the matter on the bus. A chop was suitable because, although it might cost as much as twenty thousand lire, it could be divided quite easily into two. But supposing it wasn’t necessary to offer a meal at all? Supposing Deborah arrived in the early afternoon, which was not unlikely? He bought the bread he needed instead, and a packet of soup, and cigarettes.

  He wondered if Deborah had come with a message. He did not know that Angelica had died and wondered if she was hoping he might be persuaded to return to the flat in the square. It was not unlikely. As he ascended the track that led to his property, these thoughts drifted pleasurably through Oliver’s mind. ‘Deborah, I’ll have to think about that.’ He saw himself sitting with his daughter in what the man who’d set the place to rights had called the patio – a yard really, with two car seats the man had rescued from a dump somew
here, and an old tabletop laid across concrete blocks. ‘We’ll see,’ he heard himself saying, not wishing to dismiss the idea out of hand.

  He had taken his jacket off, and carried it over his arm. ‘Ε caldo! the woman he’d bought the bread from had exclaimed, which indicated that the heat was excessive, for in Betona references to the weather were only made when extremes were reached. Sweat gathered on Oliver’s forehead and at the back of his neck. He could feel it becoming clammy beneath his shirt. Whatever the reason for Deborah’s advent he was glad she had come because company was always cheerful.

  In the upstairs room Oliver took his suit off and carefully placed it on a wire coat-hanger on the wall. He hung his tie over one linen shoulder, and changed his shirt. The trousers he put on were old corduroys, too heavy in the heat, but the best he could manage. In the kitchen he made tea and took it out to the patio, with the bread he’d Bought and his cigarettes. He waited for his daughter.

  After Angelica’s death Deborah felt herself to be an orphan. Angelica’s brother and his wife, a well-meaning couple she hardly knew, fussed about her a bit; and so did Angelica’s friends. But Deborah had her own friends, and she didn’t need looking after. She inherited the flat in London and went there in the university holidays. She spent a weekend in Norfolk with her uncle and his wife, but did not do so again. Angelica’s brother was quite unlike her, a lumpish man who wore grey, uninteresting suits and had a pipe, and spectacles on a chain. His wife was wan and scatter-brained. They invited Deborah as a duty and were clearly thankful to find her independent.

  Going through her mother’s possessions, Deborah discovered neither photographs of, nor letters from, her father. She did not know that photographs of herself, unaccompanied by any other form of communication, had been sent to her father every so often, as a record of her growing up. She did not know of the financial agreement that years ago had been entered into. It did not occur to her that no one might have informed the man who’d come that Sunday afternoon of Angelica’s death. It didn’t occur to her to find some way of doing so herself. None of this entered Deborah’s head because the shadowy figure who had smiled and lit a cigarette belonged as deeply in the grave as her mother did.