‘Oh, it would be possible, I’m sure,’ Clifferty said, ‘to have what you want. I only mention the other.’
The solicitor had a way of smoothing the wiry, reddish thicket of his eyebrows, a leisurely attention given first to one and then the other. He allowed himself this now, before he continued:
‘But I should tell you I would require a sight of the will before advising you on any part of it.’
‘Would they send it down from Dublin?’
‘They’d send a copy.’
Clifferty nodded saying that, the conversation over. He asked Graillis what line he was in and Graillis said he was in charge of the branch library in the town where he lived. He added that a long time ago he had been employed in the Munster and Leinster Bank there, in the days when the bank was still called that. He stood up.
‘Make an appointment with the girl outside for this day week, Mr Graillis,’ Clifferty said before they shook hands.
*
He drove slowly through flat, unchanging landscape and stopped when he had almost reached the town he was returning to. No other car was drawn up outside the Jack Doyle Inn, no bicycle leant against the silver-painted two-bar railings that protected its windows. Inside, the woman who served him called him by his name.
She went away when, pouring him a John Jameson, she’d asked him how he was these days. ‘Give a rap on the counter if you’ll want something more,’ she said, a smell of simmering bacon beginning to waft in from the cooking she returned to. There was no one else in the bar.
He should have explained to the solicitor that he was a widower, that there was no marriage now to be damaged by a legacy that might seem to indicate a deception in the past. He should have explained that his doubts about accepting so much, and travelling to seek advice in another town, had only to do with avoiding curiosity and gossip in his own. He didn’t know why he hadn’t explained, why it hadn’t occurred to him that Cliffeity had probably taken it upon himself to pity a wronged wife who was now being wronged again, that subterfuge and concealment were again being called upon.
He took his whiskey to a corner. It would not have seemed unusual to speak about his marriage, about love’s transformation within it, about his grief when it was no longer there, about the moments and occasions it had since become. Caught in the drift of memory, he saw – as vividly as if it were still the time when love began – a girl in a convent uniform, green and blue, shyness in her bright, fresh face. Half smiling, she turned her head away, made to blush by her friends when the gawky junior from the Munster and Leinster Bank went by on the street. And she was shy again when, grown up, she walked for the first time into the bank with her father’s weekly cheques and takings. In her middle age, the mother she had twice become made her only a little different, made her the person she remained until there was the tragedy of a winter’s night, on an icy road three years ago.
Graillis sipped his whiskey and lit a cigarette and slowly smoked, then drank some more. Beneath his professional rectitude, the solicitor would naturally have been more interested in the woman of the legacy than in the wife. In her sixty-eighth year was the only tit-bit the letter he’d been given to read revealed: she’d been an older woman, he would have realized.
The whiskey warmed Graillis, the cigarette was a comfort. He hadn’t explained because you couldn’t explain, because there was too little to explain, not too much. But even so he might have said he was a widower. He sat a little longer, eyeing an ornamental sign near the door – white letters on blue enamel – You May Telephone From Here. ‘A small one,’ he said when his rapping on the surface of the counter brought a sleek-haired youth he remembered as a child. The girl in Lenehan and Clifferty’s reception had given him a card with his next week’s appointment noted on it, and the telephone number of Lenehan and Clifferty as well. It wasn’t too late, a few minutes past five.
‘If it’s possible,’ he said when the same girl answered. ‘Just something I forgot to say to Mr Clifferty.’
Waiting, he lit another cigarette. His glass was on a shelf in front of him, beside an ashtray with Coca-Cola on it. ‘Mr Clifferty?’ he said when Clifferty said hullo.
‘Good evening, Mr Graillis.’
‘It’s just I wanted to clear up a detail.’
‘What detail’s that, Mr Graillis?’
‘I don’t think I explained that I’m widowed.’
The solicitor made a sympathetic sound. Then he said he was sorry, and Graillis said:
‘It’s just if you thought my wife’s alive it would have been misleading.’
‘I follow what you’re saying to me.’
‘I didn’t want a misunderstanding.’
‘No.’
‘It’s difficult, a thing like this coming out of the blue.’
‘I appreciate that, Mr Graillis, and I have your instruction. I’m sanguine it can be met. If there’s anything else, if there’s a worry at all, bring it with you when you come over next week.’
‘It’s only I wanted you to know what I told you just now. There’s nothing else.’
‘We’ll say goodbye so.’
‘Who’d get what I’m handing back?’
‘Whoever’s in line for it. Some grand-nephew somewhere, I’d hazard. There’s often a grand-nephew.’
‘Thanks,’ Graillis said and, not knowing what else to do, returned the receiver to its hook.
He picked up his glass and took it back to the table he’d been sitting at. He had thought he would feel all right after he’d seen a solicitor, and had thought so again when the telephone sign had given him the idea of ringing up. But still there was the unease that had begun when the letter about the legacy came. He didn’t know why he’d gone to the house; he didn’t know why he’d got into a state because he hadn’t told a man who was a stranger to him that he was widowed. It had been the whiskey talking when he’d said he wanted to clear up a detail; it was whiskey courage that had allowed him to dial the number. He was bewildered by the resurrection of a guilt that long ago had softened away to nothing. In that other time no pain had been caused, no hurt; he had managed the distortions that created falsity, the lies of silence; what he had been forgiven for was not seeming to be himself for a while. A crudity still remained in the solicitor’s reading of the loose ends that still were there: the wronged wife haunting restlessly from her grave, the older woman claiming from hers the lover who had slipped away from her.
*
‘God, we never had it worse!’
‘Oh, we will, boy, we will.’
Deploring the fall in sheep prices, two men settled themselves at the bar. The sleek-haired youth returned to serve them, and then an older man came in, with a white greyhound on a leash. The youth poured Smithwick’s for him and said the Evening Herald hadn’t been dropped off the bus yet. ‘Shocking,’ the old man grumbled, hunching himself over the Tullamore Tribune instead.
Graillis finished what was left of his whiskey. After the accident, when the notice had appeared in the obituary columns of the Irish Times, no lines of condolence had come from the woman whose half-ruined house he had visited. He had thought there might be a note and then had thought it was not appropriate that there should be. She would have thought so too.
He stubbed out his second cigarette. He never smoked at home, continuing not to after he’d found himself alone there, and smoking was forbidden in the branch library, a restriction he insisted upon himself. But in the drawing-room he had sat in so often in the autumn of 1979 and during the winter and spring that followed it, a friendship had developed over cigarettes, touches of lipstick on the cork tips that had accumulated in the ashtray with the goldfinch on it. That settled in his thoughts, still as a photograph, arrested with a clarity that today felt cruel.