The Hill Bachelors

  These days Mrs Kincaid did her best to take the long view, telling herself that what had happened was like a death and that you couldn’t moan about a death for ever, not even to yourself. In her business activities she did not seek vengeance but instead sought to accumulate what was rightfully hers, keeping her accounts in a small red notebook, always with the hope that one day she would not have to do so, that her misfortune in the past would at last free her from its thrall.

  Walking against a steady east wind on the day she saw Blakely for the second time, she recalled his lean face very clearly, his tufty hair, the hanging thread on his jacket where a button had come off. He’d be a bachelor or a widower, else he wouldn’t be taking his dinner in a café every day. You could tell at once the foot he dug with, as decent a Protestant foot as her own, never a doubt about that.

  The room she had taken — not in Bann Street but above a butcher’s shop in Knipe Street — smelt of meat and suet. She had an electric ring to cook on, a sink for the washing of clothes and dishes, lavatory and bathroom a flight up. There was a television, a gas fire, a single bed under the window, and when she fried something on the electric ring the butchery smell disappeared for a while. Mrs Kincaid had been in worse places.

  She brought back from the shops a bar of Kit-Kat, Woman’s Own, Hello!, The Lady, and a film magazine. She ate the chocolate bar, read a story about a late flowering of romance, made tea, slipped out of her skirt and blouse, slept, and dreamed she had married a clergyman to whom she’d once sold back the letters he’d written her. When she woke she washed herself, fried rashers and an egg, and went out again.

  She sat alone at a table in the bar of Digby’s Hotel, listening to tunes of the fifties, all of which she was familiar with. Occasionally someone smiled at her, a man or a woman, the girl behind the bar, but generally they just went by. She heard talk about a dance. She would have gone on her own when she was younger, but those days were over now. She drank vodka with no more than a colouring of port in it, which was her tipple. She bought a packet of cigarettes, although as a general rule she didn’t smoke any more. She wasn’t going to be able to resist what had been put in her path: she knew that perfectly.

  She knew it again when she woke up in the middle of the night and lay for a while awake in the darkness. The smell from the shop below had come back, and when she dropped back into sleep she dreamed that the man she had met in the café was in butcher’s clothes, separating lamb chops with a cleaver.

  *

  There was a traveller on his own by the table at the window, but that was the smallest table in the café and he had his samples’ case on the other chair, out of the way of people passing. Otherwise, Blakely’s was the only table that wasn’t shared.

  ‘Only she said go on over,’ the same woman who’d shared it with him before said.

  ‘You’re welcome. Sure, there’s nowhere else.’

  ‘Isn’t that the bad news?’ She nodded at the headline in his paper. A taxi-driver had been shot dead the evening before, the first murder since the cease-fires.

  ‘Aye,’ Blakely said. ‘It is that.’

  She was dressed as she’d been before, in shades of fawn and brown — a skirt and cardigan, cream blouse, under the coat she’d taken off. There was a brooch, made to look like a flower, in her blouse.

  ‘The plate’s hot, Mr Blakely,’ Nellie warned, placing roast beef and potatoes and cabbage in front of him. She wiped the edge of the plate where gravy had left a residue.

  ‘Bread and butter and tea, Nellie,’ Mrs Kincaid ordered, remembering the name from the last time. ‘I don’t take much,’ she informed Blakely, ‘in the middle of the day. And jam,’ she called after the waitress.

  ‘It’s my main meal,’ Blakely explained, a note of mild justification in his tone.

  ‘Convenient, to go out for it.’

  ‘Ach, it is.’

  ‘You live in the town, Mr Blakely?’

  ‘A bit out.’

  ‘I thought maybe you would. You have the look of the open air.’

  ‘I’m a turkey farmer.’

  ‘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. ‘Th
at’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.’
r />   ‘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.