“Sexy. He was the sleepy fox lying in the grass, all that time waiting to pounce,” Jamesie said.
“He’d disgrace you,” Mary said.
“Don’t tell him, Kate,” Ruttledge said. “It’ll be all over the country.”
“Pay no heed to him either. It’s a charity to show them up,” Mary said.
“You can’t get on without us either,” Jamesie asserted.
“Then we met in the lift on the way out of work — I think I might have engineered that — and he invited me for a drink. It was November, it was raining. We went to the Old Wine Shades, a wine bar near the river, not far from the office. We had a bottle of red wine — I hardly ever took a drink then — with a plate of white cheddar and crackers.”
“I don’t know how you can drink that red wine. It tastes like pure poison. Yer man here was trying to get behind the fence.”
“I think I was doing the same, Jamesie.”
He gave a small cheer of approval.
“And then that was Him who was married to Her. Margaret will be heading out into all this soon. All those boys, nice and cuddly.” The granddaughter gave him a light blow and he pretended to hide behind the shield of his huge arms.
“Margaret must think us all a terrible crowd of donkeys,” Mary said and drew her into the crook of her arm. “What would her father and mother say?”
All through the evening the pendulum clocks struck. There were seven or eight in the house, most of them on the walls of the upper room. The clocks struck the hours and half-hours irregularly, one or other of them chiming every few minutes.
“Are any of those clocks telling the right time?” Ruttledge asked, looking up, when he felt it was time to leave.
“What hurry’s on you?” Jamesie countered quickly. “Isn’t the evening long? It’s ages since ye were over.”
Unnoticed, Mary had made sandwiches with ham and lettuce and tomato, cut into small squares. As they were handed round, Ruttledge joined Jamesie in another whiskey. Kate and Mary had tea with Margaret.
“I keep those clocks wound,” Mary said. “I don’t know how to set them. We should get the little watchmaker to the house one of these days to clean and oil the parts and to set all the clocks. Jamesie’s father was a sight for clocks. He’d go to hell if there was one at an auction. He was able to set them perfect. I just keep them wound. You get used to the sound.”
“Who cares about time? We know the time well enough,” Jamesie said. “Do you have any more news now before you go?”
“None. Unless the Shah going on holidays qualifies for news.”
“The Shah gone on his holidays. Lord bless us,” Jamesie said in open amazement.
“Did he ever go on holidays in his life before?” Mary asked, the more sharply amused.
“Once, to Lough Derg years ago. This time he’s gone in the same direction but to an hotel beside the ocean.”
“He must be surely ravelling in spite of his money. He won’t know what to do with himself.”
“He went with Monica, that cousin of mine who lost her husband. The four children are going as well. He’s taking them.”
“I’d praise him for that,” Jamesie said.
Ruttledge lifted the little girl high and gave her coins and asked her and Mary to come round the lake on a visit. The child, holding Mary’s hand, Jamesie and the two dogs walked them all the way out to the brow of the hill.
“I’ll be over with the mower as soon as there’s any stretch of settled weather,” Ruttledge said.
“Whenever it suits,” Jamesie answered with the most studied casualness, though for him it was the most important news in the whole of the evening.
Three days before the planned end of the holiday the Mercedes was back in round the shore followed by Monica’s large red Ford. The eldest boy travelled with the Shah, the girl and two younger boys with their mother. The old man and the boy were chatting as the Mercedes rolled past the porch and getting on wonderfully well together.
“This man is going to be an aeroplane pilot,” he said expansively, and put his hand proudly on the boy’s shoulder outside the porch. The boy was already taller than the stout old man. All the children were casually, expensively dressed; they were bright-looking, confident.
Their mother was wearing a simple green dress, the first time since the funeral they had seen her out of black. She was tall, with a natural elegance, and her face was humorous and kind.
“You came home a little early?”
“We did,” the Shah answered defensively, while Monica raised her eyes to the ceiling in eloquent silence. “We had long enough.”
They all had tea with fresh apple tart. By the time tea was over the younger children discovered the black cat. The eldest boy stood beside his mother’s chair as if he was now the support and hope of an ancient house.
“What was the hotel like?” Ruttledge asked his uncle when they were alone together outside the house.
“Good enough. It was right beside the front. You had only to cross the road to get to the ocean. Every day I had a dip. I tried to get Monica to go in but she wouldn’t hear.”
“Was the food good?”
“Good enough.”
“They didn’t mind your leaving early?”
“They were decent. They gave money back. Not that it would have mattered. The Northerners are all good business people.”
“How did you find Monica?” Ruttledge asked, wanting to know how she was recovering from the death.
“I noticed she’s that little bit fond of the bar. She was in it every evening. That or she’s on the lookout for men,” he started to shake.
“I find that hard to believe.”
“There’s nothing worse than widows. Even priests will tell you that.”
“Do you want me to put the box quietly in the boot of the car?” Ruttledge wanted to change the conversation.
“No. Leave it. I’ll be out on Sunday,” he said, and Ruttledge saw how strained he was.
“I suppose it’ll be a while before you go away again,” he said sympathetically.
“Wild horses wouldn’t drag me. You’d wonder what all those silly fools are doing rushing off to places.”
“Maybe it renews and restores a sense of their own place?”
“Then they’re welcome to it,” he said dismissively.
“Still, it was a very decent thing for you to do,” Ruttledge said with feeling, knowing how much it had cost him.
Within the house Monica spoke of the days in the hotel. “You know, he did his very best. It must have been hard. He spoiled the children. He couldn’t do enough for us.” At first her shoulders shook with laughter but then the laughter appeared only in the smile. “At eleven each day he went for a swim. He changed in his room into a faded pair of old trunks that must have been in fashion at the time of the Boer War. If he’d pulled on a dressing gown or even a raincoat it wouldn’t have been too bad but he marched through the hotel in nothing but the trunks and an old pair of sandals, carrying a towel — through the hotel lobby and out into the middle of the road, with cars honking and people splitting themselves — and then into the ocean like a whale.
“You know, you don’t notice how big he is in his clothes but in the trunks he was like a walking barrel. I kept well out of sight after the first day. A crowd gathered. Eamon here came to me and said, ‘You know, Mother, if Uncle was a funny man we could make money out of him.’ ”
“It’s all true,” the boy said. “There was a bigger crowd every day.”
“Be careful,” Monica warned. “I think I would have died if I had been in the lobby but all he did was wave to the people like a cardinal. He was so unbothered and so much himself that people began to take to him in the end. Before we left I saw him get all sorts of looks — people laughing and amused — but also attracted. People are funny. They look down from all sorts of heights and then if the looking down has no effect they get unsure.