Cheating at Canasta

  In the dark Cahal tried to work it out. They would have heard the bump. They wouldn’t have known what it was, but they’d have heard it while they were kissing one another. They would remember how much longer it was before they got out of the car in Macey’s yard. It hadn’t been a white dress, Cahal realized suddenly: it trailed on the ground, too long for a dress, more like a nightdress.

  He’d seen the woman who lived there a few times when she came in to the shops, a dressmaker they said she was, small and wiry with dark inquisitive eyes and a twist in her features that made them less appealing than they might have been. When her child had been born to her the father had not been known—not even to herself, so it was said, though possibly without justification. People said she didn’t speak about the birth of her child.

  As Cahal lay in the darkness, he resisted the compulsion to get up in order to go back and see for himself; to walk out to the blue cottage, since to drive would be foolish; to look on the road for whatever might be there, he didn’t know what. Often he and Minnie Fennelly got up in the middle of the night in order to meet in the back shed at her house. They lay on a stack of netting there, whispering and petting one another, the way they couldn’t anywhere in the daytime. The best they could manage in the daytime was half an hour in the Ford Cortina out in the country somewhere. They could spend half the night in the shed.

  He calculated how long it would take him to walk out to where the incident had occurred. He wanted to; he wanted to get there and see nothing on the road and to close his eyes in relief. Sometimes dawn had come by the time he parted from Minnie Fennelly, and he imagined that too, the light beginning as he walked in from the country feeling all right again. But more likely he wouldn’t be.

  ‘One day that kid’ll be killed,’ he heard Fitzie Gill saying, and someone else said the woman wasn’t up to looking after the kid. The child was left alone in the house, people said, even for a night while the woman drank by herself in Leahy’s, looking around for a man to keep her company.

  That night, Cahal didn’t sleep again. And all the next day he waited for someone to walk into the garage and say what had been found. But no one did, and no one did the next day either, or the day after that. The Spaniards would have gone on from Galway by now, the memories of people who had maybe noticed the Ford Cortina would be getting shaky. And Cahal counted the drivers whom he knew for a fact had experienced similar incidents with the child and said to himself that maybe, after all, he’d been fortunate. Even so, it would be a long time before he drove past that cottage again, if ever he did.

  Then something happened that changed all that. Sitting with Minnie Fennelly in the Cyber Cafe´ one evening, Minnie Fennelly said, ‘Don’t look, only someone’s staring at you.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘D’you know that dressmaker woman?’

  They’d ordered chips and they came just then. Cahal didn’t say anything, but knew that sooner or later he wasn’t going to be able to prevent himself from looking around. He wanted to ask if the woman had her child with her, but in the town he had only ever seen her on her own and he knew that the child wouldn’t be there. If she was it would be a chance in a thousand, he thought, the apprehension that had haunted him on the night of the incident flooding his consciousness, stifling everything else.

  ‘God, that one gives me the creeps!’ Minnie Fennelly muttered, splashing vinegar on to her chips.

  Cahal looked round them. He caught a glimpse of the dressmaker, alone, before he quickly looked back. He could still feel her eyes on his back. She would have been in Leahy’s; the way she was sitting suggested drunkenness. When they’d finished their chips and the coffee they’d been brought while they were waiting, he asked if she was still there.

  ‘She is, all right. D’you know her? Does she come into the garage?’

  ‘Ah no, she hasn’t a car. She doesn’t come in.’

  ‘I’d best be getting back, Cahal.’

  He didn’t want to go yet, while the woman was there. But if they waited they could be here for hours. He didn’t want to pass near her, but as soon as he’d paid and stood up he saw they’d have to. When they did she spoke to Minnie Fennelly, not him.

  ‘Will I make your wedding-dress for you?’ the dressmaker offered. ‘Would you think of me at all when it’ll be the time you’d want it?’

  And Minnie Fennelly laughed and said no way they were ready for wedding-dresses yet.

  ‘Cahal knows where he’ll find me,’ the dressmaker said. ‘Amn’t I right, Cahal?’

  ‘I thought you didn’t know her,’ Minnie Fennelly said when they were outside.

  Three days after that, Mr Durcan left his pre-war Riley in because the hand-brake was slipping. He’d come back for it at four, he arranged, and said before he left: ‘Did you hear that about the dressmaker’s child?’

  He wasn’t the kind to get things wrong. Fussy, with a thin black moustache, his Riley sports the pride of his bachelor life, he was as tidy in what he said as he was in how he dressed.

  ‘Gone missing,’ he said now. ‘The gardaí´ are in on it.’

  It was Cahal’s father who was being told this. Cahal, with the cooling system from Gibney’s bread van in pieces on a workbench, had just found where the tube had perished.

  ‘She’s backward, the child,’ his father said.

  ‘She is.’

  ‘You hear tales.’

  ‘She’s gone off for herself anyway. They have a block on a couple of roads, asking was she seen.’

  The unease that hadn’t left him since the dressmaker had been in the Cyber Cafe´ began to nag again when Cahal heard that. He wondered what questions the gardaí´ were asking; he wondered when it was that the child had taken herself off; although he tried, he couldn’t piece anything together.

  ‘Isn’t she a backward woman herself, though?’ his father remarked when Mr Durcan had gone. ‘Sure, did she ever lift a finger to tend that child?’

  Cahal didn’t say anything. He tried to think about marrying Minnie Fennelly, although still nothing was fixed, not even an agreement between themselves. Her plump honest features became vivid for a moment in his consciousness, the same plumpness in her arms and her hands. He found it attractive, he always had, since first he’d noticed her when she was still going to the nuns. He shouldn’t have had thoughts about the Spanish girl, he shouldn’t have let himself. He should have told them the statue was nothing, that the man they’d met had been pulling a fast one for the sake of the drinks they’d buy him.

  ‘Your mother had that one run up curtains for the back room,’ his father said. ‘Would you remember that, boy?’

  Cahal shook his head.

  ‘Ah, you wouldn’t have been five at the time, maybe younger yet. She was just after setting up with the dressmaking, her father still there in the cottage with her. The priests said give her work on account she was a charity. Bedad, they wouldn’t say it now!’

  Cahal turned the radio on and turned the volume up. Madonna was singing, and he imagined her in the get-up she’d fancied for herself a few years ago, suspenders and items of underclothes. He’d thought she was great.

  ‘I’m taking the Toyota out,’ his father said, and the bell from the forecourt rang, someone waiting there for petrol. It didn’t concern him, Cahal told himself as he went to answer it. What had occurred on the evening of Germany and Holland was a different thing altogether from the news Mr Durcan had brought, no way could it be related.

  ‘Howya,’ he greeted the school-bus driver at the pumps.

  The dressmaker’s child was found where she’d lain for several days, at the bottom of a fissure, partly covered with shale, in the exhausted quarry half a mile from where she’d lived. Years ago the last of the stone had been carted away and a barbed-wire fence put up, with two warning notices about danger. She would have crawled in under the bottom strand of wire, the gardaí said, and a chain-link fence replaced the barbed wire within a day.

  In the town the dressm
aker was condemned, blamed behind her back for the tragedy that had occurred. That her own father, who had raised her on his own since her mother’s early death, had himself been the father of the child was an ugly calumny, not voiced before, but seeming now to have a natural place in the paltry existence of a child who had lived and died wretchedly.

  ‘How are you, Cahal?’ Cahal heard the voice of the dressmaker behind him when, early one November morning, he made his way to the shed where he and Minnie Fennelly indulged their affection for one another. It was not yet one o’clock, the town lights long ago extinguished except for a few in Main Street. ‘Would you come home with me, Cahal? Would we walk out to where I am?’

  All this was spoken to his back while Cahal walked on. He knew who was there. He knew who it was, he didn’t have to look.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ he said.

  ‘Many’s the night I rest myself on the river seat and many’s the night I see you. You’d always be in a hurry, Cahal.’

  ‘I’m in a hurry now.’

  ‘One o’clock in the morning! Arrah, go on with you, Cahal!’

  ‘I don’t know you. I don’t want to be talking to you.’

  ‘She was gone for five days before I went to the guards. It wouldn’t be the first time she was gone off. A minute wouldn’t go by without she was out on the road.’

  Cahal didn’t say anything. Even though he still didn’t turn round he could smell the drink on her, stale and acrid.

  ‘I didn’t go to them any quicker for fear they’d track down the way it was when the lead would be fresh for them. D’you understand me, Cahal?’

  Cahal stopped. He turned round and she almost walked into him. He told her to go away.

  ‘The road was the thing with her. First thing of a morning she’d be running at the cars without a pick of food inside her. The next thing is she’d be off up the road to the statue. She’d kneel to the statue the whole day until she was found by some old fellow who’d bring her back to me. Some old fellow’d have her by the hand and they’d walk in the door. Oh, many’s the time, Cahal. Wasn’t it the first place the guards looked when I said that to the sergeant? Any woman’d do her best for her own, Cahal.’

  ‘Will you leave me alone!’

  ‘Gone seven it was, maybe twenty past. I had the door open to go into Leahy’s and I seen the black car going by and yourself inside it. You always notice a car in the evening time, only the next thing was I was late back from Leahy’s and she was gone. D’you understand me, Cahal?’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with me.’

  ‘He’d have gone back the same way he went out, I said to myself, but I didn’t mention it to the guards, Cahal. Was she in the way of wandering in her nightdress? was what they asked me and I told them she’d be out the door before you’d see her. Will we go home, Cahal?’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere with you.’

  ‘There’d never be a word of blame on yourself, Cahal.’

  ‘There’s nothing to blame me for. I had people in the car that evening.’

  ‘I swear before God, what’s happened is done with. Come back with me now, Cahal.’

  ‘Nothing happened, nothing’s done with. There was Spanish people in the car the entire time. I drove them out to Pouldearg and back again to Macey’s Hotel.’

  ‘Minnie Fennelly’s no use to you, Cahal.’

  He had never seen the dressmaker close before. She was younger than he’d thought, but still looked a fair bit older than himself, maybe twelve or thirteen years. The twist in her face wasn’t ugly, but it spoilt what might have been beauty of a kind, and he remembered the flawless beauty of the Spanish girl and the silkiness of her hair. The dressmaker’s hair was black too, but wild and matted, limply straggling, falling to her shoulders. The eyes that had stared so intensely at him in the Cyber Café were bleary. Her full lips were drawn back in a smile, one of her teeth slightly chipped. Cahal walked away and she did not follow him.

  That was the beginning; there was no end. In the town, though never again at night, she was always there: Cahal knew that was an illusion, that she wasn’t always there but seemed so because her presence on each occasion meant so much. She tidied herself up; she wore dark clothes, which people said were in mourning for her child; and people said she had ceased to frequent Leahy’s public house. She was seen painting the front of her cottage, the same blue shade, and tending its bedraggled front garden. She walked from the shops of the town, and never now stood, hand raised, in search of a lift.

  Continuing his familiar daily routine of repairs and servicing and answering the petrol bell, Cahal found himself unable to dismiss the connection between them that the dressmaker had made him aware of when she’d walked behind him in the night, and knew that the roots it came from spread and gathered strength and were nurtured, in himself, by fear. Cahal was afraid without knowing what he was afraid of, and when he tried to work this out he was bewildered. He began to go to Mass and to confession more often than he ever had before. It was noticed by his father that he had even less to say these days to the customers at the pumps or when they left their cars in. His mother wondered about his being anaemic and put him on iron pills. Returning occasionally to the town for a couple of days at a weekend, his sister who was still in Ireland said the trouble must surely be to do with Minnie Fennelly.

  During all this time—passing in other ways quite normally—the child was lifted again and again from the cleft in the rocks, still in her nightdress as Cahal had seen her, laid out and wrapped as the dead are wrapped. If he hadn’t had to change the wheel he would have passed the cottage at a different time and the chances were she wouldn’t have been ready to run out, wouldn’t just then have felt inclined to. If he’d explained to the Spaniards about the Virgin’s tears being no more than rain he wouldn’t have been on the road at all.

  The dressmaker did not speak to him again or seek to, but he knew that the fresh blue paint, and the mourning clothes that were not, with time, abandoned, and the flowers that came to fill the small front garden, were all for him. When a little more than a year had passed since the evening he’d driven the Spanish couple out to Pouldearg, he attended Minnie Fennelly’s wedding when she married Des Downey, a vet from Athenry.

  The dressmaker had not said it, but it was what there had been between them in the darkened streets: that he had gone back, walking out as he had wanted to that night when he’d lain awake, that her child had been there where she had fallen on the road, that he had carried her to the quarry. And Cahal knew it was the dressmaker, not he, who had done that.

  He visited the Virgin of the Wayside, always expecting that she might be there. He knelt, and asked for nothing. He spoke only in his thoughts, offering reparation and promising to accept whatever might be visited upon him for associating himself with the mockery of the man the Spaniards had met by chance in Dublin, for mocking the lopsided image on the road, taking fifty euros for a lie. He had looked at them kissing. He had thought about Madonna with her clothes off, not minding that she called herself that.

  Once when he was at Pouldearg, Cahal noticed the glisten of what had once been taken for tears on the Virgin’s cheek. He touched the hollow where this moisture had accumulated and raised his dampened finger to his lips. It did not taste of salt, but that made no difference. Driving back, when he went by the dressmaker’s blue cottage she was there in the front garden, weeding her flowerbeds. Even though she didn’t look up, he wanted to go to her and knew that one day he would.

  The Room

  ‘Do you know why you are doing this?’ he asked, and Katherine hesitated, then shook her head, although she did know.

  Nine years had almost healed a soreness, each day made a little easier, until the balm of work was taken from her and in her scratchy idleness the healing ceased. She was here because of that, there was no other reason she could think of, but she didn’t say it.

  ‘And you?’ she asked instead.

  He was forthcoming, or sounded so; he?
??d been attracted by her at a time when he’d brought loneliness upon himself by quarrelling once too often with the wife who had borne his children and had cared for him.

  ‘I’m sorry about the room,’ he said.

  His belongings were piled up, books and cardboard boxes, suitcases open, not yet unpacked. A word-processor had not been plugged in, its flexes trailing on the floor. Clothes on hangers cluttered the back of the door, an anatomical study of an elephant decorated one of the walls, with arrows indicating where certain organs were beneath the leathery skin. This grey picture wasn’t his, he’d said when Katherine asked; it came with the room, which was all he had been able to find in a hurry. A sink was in the same corner as a wash-basin, an electric kettle and a gas-ring on a shelf, a green plastic curtain not drawn across.

  ‘It’s all a bit more special now that you’re here,’ he said.

  When she got up to put on her clothes, Katherine could tell he didn’t want her to go. Yet he, not she, was the one who had to; she could have stayed all afternoon. Buttoning a sleeve of her dress, she remarked that at least she knew now what it felt like to deceive.

  ‘What it had felt like for Phair,’ she said.

  She pulled the edge of the curtain back a little so that the light fell more directly on the room’s single looking-glass. She tidied her hair, still brown, no grey in it yet. Her mother’s hadn’t gone grey at all, and her grandmother’s only when she was very old, which was something Katherine hoped she wouldn’t have to be; she was forty-seven now. Her dark eyes gazed back at her from her reflection, her lipstick smudged, an emptiness in her features that had not to do with the need to renew her makeup. Her beauty was ebbing—but slowly, and there was beauty left.

  ‘You were curious about that?’ he asked. ‘Deception?’

  ‘Yes, I was curious.’

  ‘And shall you be again?’

  Still settling the disturbances in her face, Katherine didn’t answer at once. Then she said: ‘If you would like me to.’