‘Did you ever see a room as sombre as that one? Is it the holy pictures that do it?’
Belle backed the car and straightened it, then edged it through a gateway that, thirty years ago, hadn’t been made wide enough.
‘Sombre?’ she said on a lane like a riverbed, steering around the potholes as best she could.
‘We used wonder could it be they didn’t want anything colourful in the way of a wallpaper in case it wasn’t respectful to the pictures.’
Belle didn’t comment on that. She eased the Vauxhall out on to the tarred road and drove in silence over a stretch of bogland. Vividly she saw the holy pictures in the room where Mrs. Grenaghan’s piano was: Virgin and Child, Sacred Heart, St Catherine with her lily, the Virgin on her own, Jesus in glory. They hung against nondescript brown; there were statues on the mantelpiece and on a corner shelf. Mrs. Grenaghan had brought tea and biscuits to that small, melancholy room, speaking in a hushed tone as if the holiness demanded that.
‘What pictures?’ Belle asked, not turning her head, although she might have, for there was no other traffic and the bog road was straight.
‘Aren’t the pictures still in there? Holy pictures all over the place ?’
‘They must have taken them down.’
‘What’s there then?’
Belle went a little faster. She said a fox had come from nowhere, over to the left. It was standing still, she said, the way foxes do.
‘You want to pull up and watch him, Belle ?’
‘No. No, he’s moved on now. Was it Mrs. Grenaghan’s daughter who played that piano ?’
‘Oh, it was. And she hasn’t seen that girl in years. We used say the holy pictures maybe drove her away. What’s on the walls now ?’
‘A striped paper.’ And Belle added: ‘There’s a photograph of the daughter on the mantelpiece.’
Some time later, on another day, when he referred to one of the sisters at the convent in Meena as having cheeks as flushed as an eating apple, Belle said that that nun was chalky white these days, her face pulled down and sunken. ‘She has an illness so,’ he said.
Suddenly more confident, not caring what people thought, Belle rooted out Violet’s plants from the flowerbeds at the back, and grassed the flowerbeds over. She told her husband of a change at Doocey’s garage: Texaco sold instead of Esso. She described the Texaco logo, the big red star and how the letters of the word were arranged. She avoided stopping at Doocey’s in case a conversation took place there, in case Doocey were asked if Esso had let him down, or what. ‘Well, no, I wouldn’t call it silvery exactly,’ Belle said about the peacock in the hall of Barnagorm house. ‘If they cleaned it up I’d say it’s brass underneath.’ Upstairs, the sofas at each end of the landing had new loose covers, bunches of different-coloured chrysanthemums on them. ‘Well no, not lean, I wouldn’t call him that,’ Belle said with the photograph of her husband’s father in her hand. ‘A sturdy face, I’d say.’ A schoolteacher whose teeth were once described as gusty had false teeth now, less of a mouthful, her smile sedate. Time had apparently drenched the bright white of the McKirdys’ façade, almost a grey you’d call it. ‘Forget-me-not blue,’ Belle said one day, speaking of the mountains that were blue when the weather brought that colour out. ‘You’d hardly credit it.’ And it was never again said in the piano tuner’s house that the blue of the mountains was the subtle blue of smoke.
Owen Dromgould had run his fingers over the bark of trees. He could tell the difference in the outline of their leaves; he could tell the thorns of gorse and bramble. He knew birds from their song, dogs from their bark, cats from the touch of them on his legs. There were the letters on the gravestones, the stops of the organ, his violin. He could see red, berries on holly and cotoneaster. He could smell lavender and thyme.
All that could not be taken from him. And it didn’t matter if, overnight, the colour had worn off the kitchen knobs. It didn’t matter if the china light-shade in the kitchen had a crack he hadn’t heard about before. What mattered was damage done to something as fragile as a dream.
The wife he had first chosen had dressed drably: from silence and inflexions - more than from words - he learned that now. Her grey hair straggled to her shoulders, her back was a little humped. He poked his way about, and they were two old people when they went out on their rounds, older than they were in their ageless happiness. She wouldn’t have hurt a fly, she wasn’t a person you could be jealous of, yet of course it was hard on a new wife to be haunted by happiness, to be challenged by the simplicities there had been. He had given himself to two women; he hadn’t withdrawn himself from the first, he didn’t from the second.
Each house that contained a piano brought forth its contradictions. The pearls old Mrs. Purtill wore were opals, the pallid skin of the stationer in Kiliath was freckled, the two lines of oaks above Oghill were surely beeches ? ‘Of course, of course,’ Owen Dromgould agreed, since it was fair that he should do so. Belle could not be blamed for making her claim, and claims could not be made without damage or destruction. Belle would win in the end because the living always do. And that seemed fair also, since Violet had won in the beginning and had had the better years.
Friendship
Jason and Ben — fair-haired, ten and eight respectively — found that a bucketful of ready-mixed concrete was too heavy to carry, so they slopped half of it out again. Sharing the handle of the bucket, they found they could now manage to convey their load, even though Ben complained. They carried it from the backyard, through the kitchen and into the hall, to where their father’s golf-bag stood in a corner. The bag, recently new, contained driver, putter and a selection of irons, as well as tees, balls and gloves in various side pockets. A chair stood in front of the bag, on to which both boys now clambered, still precariously grasping the bucket. They had practised; they knew what they were doing.
After five such journeys the golf-bag was half full of liquid concrete, the chair carried back to the kitchen, and small splashes wiped from the tiles of the hall. Then the workmen who were rebuilding the boiler-shed returned from the Red Lion, where they had spent their lunchtime.
‘We know nothing about it,’ Jason instructed his brother while they watched the workmen shovelling more sand and cement into the concrete-mixer.
‘Nothing about it,’ Ben obediently repeated.
‘Let’s go and watch Quick Draw.’
‘OK.’
When their mother returned to the house half an hour later, with her friend Margy, it was Margy who noticed the alien smell in the hall. Being inquisitive by nature she poked about, and was delighted when she discovered the cause, since she considered that the victim of the joke would benefit from the inroads it must inevitably make on his pomposity She propped the front door open for a while so that the smell of fresh concrete would drift away The boys’ mother, Francesca, didn’t notice anything.
‘Come on!’ Francesca called, and the boys came chattering into the kitchen for fish fingers and peas, no yoghurt for Ben because someone had told him it was sour milk, Ribena instead of hot chocolate for Jason.
‘You did your homework before you turned on that television?’ Francesca asked.
‘Yes,’ Ben lied.
‘I bet you didn’t,’ Margy said, not looking up from the magazine she was flipping through. Busy with their food, Francesca didn’t hear that.
Francesca was tall, with pale, uncurled hair that glistened in the sunlight. Margy was small and dark, brown-eyed, with thin, fragile fingers. They had known one another more or less all their lives.