‘How nice all this is!’ Mrs Dakin enthused for the second time, the subject of notices on motor cars having run its course. ‘How hugely grateful to you we are, Mr Bouverie!’
Rose watched him shaking his head, and heard him saying that the credit must wholly go to her.
‘No, truly, Mr Bouverie,’ her father insisted with a solemn intonation.
‘All her young life before her,’ her mother threw in.
Rose hadn’t told them, nor told her brother. It wasn’t the sort of thing that was talked about within this family. She would have been embarrassed and would have caused embarrassment – a very different reception from the one there’d been when she had passed the information on in the Box Tree Café with its green-topped tables. After the first time, her friends had always been expectant. ‘It could be any of our mothers,’ Liz whispered, awestruck, once. They had sat there, coffee drunk, Caroline and Daisy with their cigarettes, dwelling upon that, imagining Rose’s sallow-skinned man arriving in the surroundings that had been described to them. ‘Beautifully pressed, his linen suit,’ Rose said. ‘And a plain green shirt.’
Around the dinner table the conversation, still powered by Mrs Dakin, had changed again.
‘The Kindest Cut,’
she was saying now, drawing Mr Bouverie’s attention to the droll wit of hairdressers as exemplified in the titles chosen for their premises.
‘Nutters
I saw the other day!’
This evening, for the very last time, he would be there. Mr Bouverie did not normally go out to dinner; he’d said as much when joining in the celebratory mood on his arrival. No tea tray had been carried to the window table since Rose had ceased to visit the house. The invitation for this evening must have seemed like a gift, naughtily wrapped, for slim Mrs Bouverie. ‘It’s a Mr Azam,’ her husband had said on the last but one of their Thursdays. ‘In case you are interested in his name.’
Mr Dakin poured the wine again. He said they’d had the glasses as a wedding present, only four of them left so they couldn’t use them often.
‘The Mitages,’ Mrs Dakin murmured softly, the shrillness that whistled through her voice gone from it now, inappropriate because the Mitages were no longer alive. She paused in her eating, inclining her head in memory, slanting it a little to the left, a wistful smile enlivening her reddened lips. Mr Dakin sighed; then death passed on, and Mrs Dakin picked up her fork again and the wine bottle was replaced on its little silver tray, another wedding gift, although this was not said.
‘Cuckold.’ In the Box Tree Café the ugly word, spoken first by Caroline, had formed in their minds, its sound acquiring shape and colour. Only Rose knew what Mr Bouverie looked like but he, really, scarcely came into it. It was not an old man who had once planned a future in the cloth trade and had ended as a tutor that was of interest. He was no rival for the darkened bedroom above the room that had once been two, or for the scent of Mrs Bouverie or her lover’s suit draped on a chair, or smears of lipstick left on sallow flesh. No one ever interposed a comment while Rose spread out for the delectation of her friends another Thursday harvest. Once, music softly played, ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’. Once the telephone rang and was not answered by Mr Bouverie, although the receiver was only yards from where they sat. Sooner than if he had crossed to it the ringing ceased, answered at the bedside. Not always, but now and again, Mrs Bouverie appeared on the stairs when Rose was putting her coat on at the hallstand; or in summer, when there was no coat, she sometimes called down goodbye when she heard the voices of her husband and his pupil. ‘Vicious,’ Liz said. ‘That’s a vicious woman.’ But Rose said no, you couldn’t call Mrs Bouverie vicious; she didn’t strike you as that. ‘More significant that she’s childless,’ Daisy said. ‘Or at least it could be.’ Caroline disagreed.
‘Oh, my golly gosh!’ Rose’s father exclaimed with his auctioneer’s jolliness when gooseberry fool was placed in front of him. Mrs Dakin said the gooseberries had been picked from her own bushes.
‘Delicious,’ Mr Bouverie for the second time remarked, and the talk was of gooseberries for a while, of different varieties, one favoured for this purpose, another for that.
‘Mr Azam,’ Rose had announced in the Box Tree Café and Daisy had gone at once to the telephone directory to look the name up. ‘Hundreds,’ she’d said, returning. ‘Hundreds of Azams.’ In her absence the conversation had advanced in another direction, the name agreed to be a foreign one and then abandoned as a subject for discussion. ‘When a husband knows,’ Caroline said, ‘he’s not so much a cuckold as complaisant.’ And they talked about the fact that while Mr Bouverie dealt with the last of his borderline cases he knew what was occurring all around him – the nature of the creaking stairs and closing doors, the light tap of footsteps not his wife’s, the snatch of music hushed. ‘Did he seem different when he said the name?’ Caroline sharply asked, and Rose said no.
Her brother Jason arrived. Like his parents, he was well covered, with a jowl that was identically his father’s and with his mother’s small fat hands, bland in his manner. It was because of Jason that Mr Bouverie had been discovered, for Jason in his time had been a borderline case also. They greeted one another now, shaking hands and enquiring about one another’s well being.
‘How did it do?’ Jason asked Mr Dakin when all that was over.
‘Oh, well enough. The Chippendale fetched a price. A happy day’s business,’ Mr Dakin reported, smiling.
‘How very nice!’ His wife glanced round the table, seeking to share her exultation in the day’s success. ‘All right, dear?’ she asked when her gaze lighted on her daughter. ‘All right, Rose?’
Rose nodded, lying. ‘I do mind, as a matter of fact,’ he had said, as if he knew all about the Box Tree Café and the audience of five crowding the same green-topped corner table, as if he had listened to every word. Guilt had come then, beginning in that moment. His spectacles had slipped to one side and he adjusted them as soon as he had spoken. The cuffs of his blue tweed jacket were trimmed with leather. ‘Yes,’ she’d said, not knowing what else to say, the waves of guilt already a sickness in her stomach. ‘Yes.’ It was as though for all the months that had passed they, too, had shared a secret, the secret of knowing everything that was happening and not saying. When her Thursday visits came to an end a way of life would finish for him also, for Rose knew that Mr Azam would not just come to the house and march upstairs while the old cuckold sighed and blinked. That would not be: all of it had to do with pretence, and deception of a kind. ‘I’m sorry,’ she had wanted to say, and did not know why she would have given anything not to have blurted out so much in the Box Tree Café. She had longed to share his confidences with him, but had betrayed him even before he offered them.
In the lovers’ bedroom Rose saw Mrs Bouverie close her eyes in ecstasy, while the gooseberry fool was finished and Jason spoke of a function he had attended, how one man had gone on and on. Coffee came and was poured at the table. ‘Don’t go yet. Oh, love, don’t go,’ Mrs Bouverie pleaded, and Mr Azam said he didn’t ever want to go.
Across the table, all that was in Mr Bouverie’s face, as so much had been when he gave the man a name and later when he said he minded. It was there behind the spectacles, in the tired skin touched with two crimson wine-blurs above the cheekbones. They shared it, yet they did not. Their sharing was a comfort for him, yet the comfort was as false as his wife’s voice on the stairs.
‘All right, dear?’ her mother asked again, and by way of response Rose reached out for her coffee.
A frown began to knit Mr Dakin’s forehead. Jason coughed and touched his face with a handkerchief, then folded it into his top pocket and began again about the function he had attended, referring to a commercial prospect he had advanced. His father nodded, thankfully diverted. Mrs Dakin tidied the surface up, murmuring to Mr Bouverie that probably he’d never guess she’d been shy herself at Rose’s age.
‘I’m confident we’ll pick it up,’ Jason said. ‘I’ll write tomorrow, see if we can’t clinch.’
Mrs Bouverie clung to her lover, saying no this couldn’t be the last time, sobbing over him, noisily exclaiming that something better was their due. But Mr Azam only shook his head. He was not a man to cause a wife who had borne his children to suffer. ‘We have our dignity, you and I,’ he said. ‘We have been given this much.’ Mr Azam drew on his green shirt, and brushed his hair with a hairbrush on the dressing-table, and saw that the lipstick smears were gone. ‘I saw the pupil once,’ he said, but the woman he spoke to had turned her face to the wall.
‘Sounds promising,’ Mr Dakin complimented Jason. ‘Sure to work out, I’d say.’
Mrs Dakin poured more coffee. She spoke of names, how it had struck her this afternoon that names can inspire the quality they suggest. She described a Prudence she had known when she was Rose’s age, and a Verity. ‘Remember Ernest Calavor?’ she prompted Mr Dakin, and he said yes indeed. Bitter chocolates were passed round in a slim red box. When she’d refused one Rose offered it across the table to Mr Bouverie.
‘Thank you, Rose.’
The lover’s footsteps were on the stairs, and then the front door closed and he was gone.
‘It’s been so good of you,’ Mr Bouverie said. ‘So very kind of you to have me.’
‘I hope your wife,’ Mrs Dakin began.
‘She was so sorry to miss an evening out.’ ‘
There’ll be another time. We’ll keep in touch.’
‘Always good to see you,’ Mr Dakin added. ‘Cheers us no end.’
The old man hesitated before he rose to go. Had he not done so Rose might not have wept. But Mr Bouverie hesitated and Rose wept to exclamations of concern, and fuss and embarrassment, while Mr Bouverie stood awkwardly. She wept for his silent suffering, for his having to accept a distressing invitation because of her mother’s innocent insistence. She wept for the last golden opportunity the occasion provided for two other people, for the woman whose sinning caused her in the end to turn her face to the wall, for the man whom duty bound to a wife. She wept for the
modus vivendi
that was left in the house no pupil or lover would visit again, for the glimpse she had had of it, enough to allow her a betrayal. She wept for her friends – for the unfaithful when things turned stale, and for the accident-prone; for the romantic, who gave too much, and the mistrustful. She wept for the brittle surface of her mother’s good-sort laughter and her father’s jolliness, and Jason settling into a niche. She wept for all her young life before her, and other glimpses and other betrayals.
Big Bucks
Fina waited on the pier, watching the four men dragging the boat on the shingle. She watched while the catch was landed and some damage to the nets examined. At the top of the steps that brought them near to where she stood the men parted and she went to John Michael.
‘Your mother,’ Fina said, and she watched him guessing that his mother was dead now. ‘I’m sorry, John Michael,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’
He nodded, silent, as she knew he would be. It was cold and darkening as they walked together to the cottage where his mother was. Grey on grey, swiftly blown clouds threatened rain. They could go now, Fina’s thought was. They could make a life for themselves.
‘Father Clery was there,’ she said.
*
‘Have you plans?’ John Michael’s uncle – his mother’s brother – enquired after the funeral. Plans were necessary: John Michael’s father had drowned when John Michael was an infant, his fisherman’s cottage then becoming his widow’s by right for her lifetime. In a different arrangement – John Michael being a fisherman himself – a cottage would become his in time, but not yet, he being the youngest, the only young one among older men.
‘I’ll go,’ he said in reply to his uncle’s question.
Fina heard that said, the confirmation given that John Michael had been waiting only for the death. Going was a tradition, time-honoured, the chance of it coming in different ways, the decision long dwelt upon before it was taken. Bat Quinn – who had stayed – had a way of regretfully pointing over the sea to the horizon beyond the two rocks that were islands in the bay. ‘Big bucks,’ he’d say, and name the men of his own generation who had gone in search of them: Donoghue and Artie Hiney and Meagher and Flynn, and Big Reilly and Matt Cready. There were others who’d gone inland or to England, but they hadn’t done as well.
‘A thing I’ll put to you,’ John Michael’s uncle was saying now, ‘is the consideration of the farm.’
‘The farm?’
‘When I’m buried myself.’
‘What about the farm?’
‘I’m saying it’ll be left.’
Still listening, Fina heard a statement made through what was being left out: the farm would pass to John Michael, since there was no one else to inherit it.
‘I get a tiredness those days,’ John Michael’s uncle said. His wasted features and old man’s bloodshot eyes confirmed this revelation. Two years ago he’d been widowed; after a childless marriage he was alone.
‘There’s a while in you yet,’ John Michael said.
‘I can’t manage the acres.’
They could be on the farm already was what was being suggested, and it wouldn’t be hard to pull the place together. Inland from the sea, where the air was softer and you didn’t live in fear of what the sea would take from you, they could make a life there. The heart had gone from the old man, but he wasn’t difficult. He wouldn’t be a burden in the time that was left to him.
‘Ah, no, no.’ John Michael shook his head, his rejection not acknowledging in any other way what was being offered. America was what he and Fina wanted, what they’d always talked about. That evening John Michael said he had the fare saved.
*
The plans that could not be made in the lifetime of John Michael’s mother were made now. John Michael would go soon. In May he would return for the wedding, and take Fina back with him. He didn’t know what work he’d get, but according to Bat Quinn it had never mattered to the men who’d gone before that fishing was all they knew. ‘Leave it open till you’ll get there, boy,’ Bat Quinn advised, the same advice he had been giving for forty years. Matt Cready came back, the only one who did, his big bucks spent like pennies every night in the bar of the half-and-half. ‘Look at that, boy,’ Bat Quinn invited, displaying for John Michael the dollar bill he kept in an inside pocket. Bat Quinn had a niece, a nun in Delaware, and had had a sister in Chicago until her death two years ago. Slouched heavily at the bar of the grocery and public house that Fina’s family kept, his great paunch straining his clothes, his small eyes watery from drink, Bat Quinn showed everyone his dollar. ‘I’ll send you back another,’John Michael always promised, and Fina always giggled.