He taps her rump as if to prove his point, then settles back down to the checkbook. Lottie pours the tea, the greatest Irish art of them all. She has learned through the years to get the best of the leaves, to soak, to stew, to pour. Even when she lived in England there was never as much fuss made of the tea. She drags a chair beside him, to peer around his shoulder. The linen business went bust a long time ago. Nothing now but empty halls and broken pails and the ghosts of some ancient looms. They inherited it all. The curse of privilege. Janitors for the ambitions of the dead.
Still and all, there’s just enough in the kitty to get by. His RAF pension. The cottage out at Strangford Lough. The investments, the savings. She wishes Ambrose wouldn’t worry so much, that she could coax a longer laugh out of him, that he would rise from the desk and leave it behind, if only for a moment or two, but he is a secret worrier. The crash of ’29. They were hardly out of their wedding clothes. The Great Slump. He left the RAF, returned to Belfast. Linen for parachute harnesses and airplane wings. Military gliders, light reconnaissance. They soon disappeared. The business took a nosedive. Then it was linen for the war effort. An ill-advised venture into lacy handkerchiefs. Her photography fell by the wayside after the war, dissolving away in the chemicals of the time, a child, a business, a marriage. Lottie even worked in the factory office in the 1950s and early ’60s, plied her way amongst the looms and the lonesome pitch of the afternoon factory horn, sad beyond all telling.
She drains the last of her tea and puts her arm around the back of his chair. A clockchime from the hallway.
— Our Tomas might have a girlfriend.
— Is that so?
— Maybe, maybe not.
— Is that a hint?
She laughs, takes his arm and he rises. His cardigan, his open shirt, the sag of his trousers. In every pocket he carries pencils and pads of paper, crumbs of yesterday and tomorrow. The little tuft of gray hair at his chest. Still, there is something impish about him yet. An ability for youth. He caps the fountain pen and shuts the account books, and they move out into the dark of the corridor, towards the stairs.
TWICE BY SHIP, once by plane. They traveled together. The first was to visit her mother, back in the Cochrane Hotel. A vicious wind blew off the Atlantic. They stood on the deck, wrapped in blankets. Lottie leaned against the railing. Ambrose stood behind her. He never cared that she was a full head taller than him. There were times she worried that he was just holding some secret grief, burying his head against her shoulder, that they were locked in an interdependence that would someday shatter in sorrow. They docked in Boston and then rode the railroad along the Eastern Seaboard. Her mother was virtually immobile then: she lived in a chair in her room, but still wrote — plays mostly. Short, sharp, funny pieces that were performed by a troupe on Gilbert Street. An immigrant theater. Macedonians, Irish, Turks. Her mother sat in the rear seats in her knit hat, watching, hands folded into one another, white on her dark dress. Theater was a new form for Emily. She enjoyed it immensely, though the seats were mostly empty. One afternoon they drove together to Lester’s Field and paced the length of the overgrown grass. The runway was inhabited now by sheep.
The second visit was in 1934, two months after her mother’s death, to clear up her affairs. Lottie couldn’t bring herself to throw away the boxes of Emily’s papers. She packed them in the trunk of a car and drove all the way to northern Missouri. There were no ice farms anymore. She and Ambrose slept in a small roadside motel. She left the boxes on the steps of a local library. She wondered for years what had happened to the papers. Most likely burned, or blown away. When she returned to Belfast she took along her own negatives, watched Alcock climb from a bath of chemicals. She liked the notion of him rising from the dark.
Their last journey was in 1959, on their thirtieth wedding anniversary, when they took a plane from London to Paris, then Paris to Toronto, then Toronto to New York, where Ambrose had business with the linen dealers on White Street. They spent much of their savings on a first-class ticket. They tucked the serviettes at their throats and looked out the window at the shifting cloth of cloud. It amazed Lottie to think that she could get a gin and tonic at twenty thousand feet in the air. She lit a cigarette, nestled close to Ambrose, fell asleep with her head against his shoulder. She took no photographs on that trip. She wanted to see how well it could be put together by memory alone.
THE SKY LIFTS the hem of Belfast. At the window she looks out over the rooftops. The endless slate and chimneyscape. It’s a dreary city, but there is something about it that charges her in the early morning.
She knots the belt of her dressing gown. Down the stairs towards the kitchen. Cold rises through the linoleum floor. She finds her slippers at the base of the stove. Lord, but they’re still cold. So much for the last of summer. She opens the front panel of the stove to spread the heat, sits down at the wooden counter that looks out into the rear garden, scoots her feet back and forth to warm them up. The roses are in bloom and there is a spot of dew on the grass. There was a legend long ago that if you rubbed the early morning dew on your face you would stay forever young.
She takes two slices from the loaf in the bread bin, pops them in their new silver toaster, fills the kettle for some instant coffee. Mixes the milk in first and whisks it around. A fine frothy concoction. She is wary of bringing the radio to life. It’s always a temptation to see how the world itself has frothed up during the night: what riot took place across town, what election was rigged, what poor barman had to broom up the bodies. Seldom a week goes by without some calamity or other. Been that way since the days of the Blitz. One of the things she noticed early on about the women of Belfast, even back during the war, was that they all carried a lace handkerchief in the sleeve of their dresses. An odd fashion statement if ever there was one. A glance at the wrist, a little time capsule of grief. She took to carrying one herself, but the fashion has waned now over the years. Less sleeve, more sorrow. The skies, in those days, were a candelabra of violence. She and Ambrose retreated to Strangford where they watched as the planes turned the night sky into a giant orange bloom.
The pop of the toaster startles her: why such an insistent jump? Out hop the slices, like pole vaulters or prison escapees. One of them even reaches the countertop. She rummages around in the fridge, butters both slices, reaches for the marmalade and spreads it thickly. She spoons her coffee and carries it to the counter.
Her favorite moment, this. Perched on the wooden stool, looking out. The small window of silence. The sky lightening. The roses opening. The dew burning off the grass. The house still cold enough to feel that there is yet a purpose to the day. She has taken to painting watercolors in recent years: a pleasurable pursuit, she rises in the morning, a few strokes of the brush, and soon it is evening. Vast seascapes, the lough, the Causeway, the rope bridge at Carrick-a-Rede. She has even taken her camera out to Rathlin Island, working afterwards from photographs. There are times she paints herself all the way back to St. John’s, the footnote the town made to the sea, Water Street, Duckworth, Harbour Drive, all the little houses propped on the cliff as if in a last-ditch attempt to remember where they came from.
THE TAP OF his cane on the floor. The clank of the water pipes. She is wary of making too much of a fuss. Doesn’t want to embarrass him, but he’s certainly slowing up these weathers. What she dreads is a thump on the floor, or a falling against the banisters, or worse still a tumble down the stairs. She climbs the stairs before Ambrose emerges from the bathroom. A quick wrench of worry when there is no sound, but he emerges with a slightly bewildered look on his face. He has left a little shaving foam on the side of his chin, and his shirt is haphazardly buttoned.