Treachery was the word he used, in private, the day he knew about his Uncle Wilf. Guide and friend, his Uncle Wilf had called himself, and who could have said it wasn’t true? He’d been the source of knowledge about the regimental life, an inspiration in that respect. ‘Always been an army family,’ his Uncle Wilf said, but he was making it up as he went along. Everything fell to bits then: there’d been no army family, nothing like that; it wasn’t to be a guide and a friend that his Uncle Wilf had been coming to the house all these years, it wasn’t to encourage a vocation. Bit on the side, until he didn’t fancy it any more and never came back again. ‘Be nice, dear,’ the ginny rasp whispers again, that special voice. He bangs his hall door shut as soon as he sees it in the black woman’s eyes. Of course it wasn’t feet and short sight: God knows what talk had got around, God knows what the recruiting officer’s opinion had been. All lies, what the black woman said about not running into the girl again. The black woman knows; that’s why she comes to his door. In her black imagination there is the lipstick tattoo, and the blue ribbon laid out on the dressing-table, and the little-boy hands that always have remained so, clothes falling from a woman’s body, the nakedness beneath. There is that odour of scent, of powder too, in the black woman’s nostrils, and it’s there among the employees, in the canteen and in the kitchens and the painting bays and the offices. There’s the whisper, going on and on, the words there were, his own obedience. ‘Be nice, dear,’ in the special voice, the promise that the request will never be made again, broken every time. It never was his fault that there was prying later on, after years and years; that there is prying still. Each time he hoped there wouldn’t be. Each time he hoped that a friendship would last for ever, that two people could be of help to one another, that strangers seeing them together would say they belonged like that.
No one passing by in Duke of Wellington Road, no hurrying housewife, or child, or business person, no one who can see Number Three from the top of the buses that ply to and fro on a nearby street, has reason to wonder about this house or its single occupant. No one passing is aware that a catering manager from a factory, well liked and without enemies, is capable of suffering no more. In the cavernous kitchen of this house Mr Hilditch’s shoes are neatly laced and the laces neatly tied. His socks are chequered below the turn-ups of his trousers. The suit is his usual blue serge, its waistcoat fastened but for the button at the bottom. His shirt is clean, the cufflinks in the cuffs. The tie is the striped one he always wears. His glasses are in place. He shaved himself an hour ago. The back door is no longer bolted, in fact is slightly open, thoughtfully left so. A light that in the darkness lit the dustbins in the small backyard and glanced over an edge of laurel and mahonia remains unextinguished. In the kitchen there is no sound. When twilight comes again a scavenging cat, earlier attracted by the open door, returns and this time slinks through it. Black, with a collar that once had a bell attached to it, this cat has long ago strayed from a domestic life too soft to satisfy the instincts of its feline nature. Soundlessly, it tours the kitchen, leaping from time to time on to different surfaces until its survey is complete. Its green, lozenge eyes pass over the crockery of the dresser and the white enamel of the electric stove, over wall cupboards and shelves, the taps above the sink, the wooden chairs, the table on which another chair is overturned, a human body hanging. This is suspended from the single ham hook in the wooden ceiling by a length of electric flex, the head slung forward awkwardly, the mound of flesh beneath the chin wedging the sideways tilt. It isn’t of interest to the scavenging cat. Nothing is of interest except a saucepan on the stove, with a little milk left in it.
24
The convent girls climb up St Joseph’s Hill, hurrying while the bell still tolls. Their conversation is breathless as they turn in at the convent gates, feet running now, faces flushed. Sister Benedict awaits them by the window of a classroom, where other girls are already assembled. A distant figure digs the patch where soon the first of the maincrop potatoes will be planted. Reminded by this figure of the missing girl, Sister Benedict prays. In Hickey’s Hotel a traveller in office stationery, coughing through cigarette smoke over the remains of a late breakfast, checks his call-book for the day. Above the cycle and pram shop, Connie Jo experiences the morning nausea that her friend, then newly her sister-in-law, experienced five months ago. At Flanagan’s Quarries the lorries are loaded with chippings while the drivers wait beside them, silently smoking. In the Co-op yard Shay Mulroone fork-lifts bales of sheep wire. ‘God, she’s a cracker,’ Small Crowley confides elsewhere; and Carmel, of whom he speaks, mops a floor at the hospital and worries a little about being a cracker perhaps once too often. The old woman dies on the day before her hundredth birthday. The stiffened body is taken from the bedroom, and the bedroom is empty now. An irony, the general opinion is, being taken at this particular time, but there it is. One night the boots of the big twin brothers thump into Johnny Lysaght’s stomach and his ribs, and he lies insensible in the dark, by the memorial statue in the Square. Blood oozes from his face, an eye is closed beneath contusions. The cigarettes have not been removed from his attackers’ lips while the punishment was meted out. No word has been spoken. The unconscious youth remains where he has fallen, and the glasses that have been left waiting in Myles Brady’s bar are emptied and then replenished. The photograph of a girl in a bridesmaid’s dress has long ago been circulated. In one police station or another it has been perused, and details of the disappearance noted. In time, the details and the photograph are filed away. She will come back, her father believes, guilt assailing him. At Confession he recalls his anger at the time and is forgiven, but feels no forgiveness himself. He makes the bedroom ready for her, arranging her shells on surfaces that are now entirely hers, emptying the drawers of the old woman’s possessions. He dismantles the old woman’s bed and makes room for it in the backyard shed. ‘Have faith,’ the Reverend Mother urges in the convent garden. ‘One day you’ll walk in and she’ll be waiting for you in the kitchen.’ He knows that too, he says; he knows she’ll be there. Hers is the forgiveness that matters. She’ll come back to offer it, that being her simple nature. Mrs Lysaght shops in Chawke’s for thread, a shade of pale blue. She takes the spools she’s offered to the door, to examine them in the daylight, but is not satisfied and returns them. More will be coming in, she is informed, and she says she’ll come back. The unpleasantness is over now and there’s a satisfaction to be found in that: as she leaves the shop she reminds herself of this, which is something she does many times in the course of a day. He has been taught a lesson by the circumstances that developed; in a sense, even, all that has occurred may have been for the best.