affairs, he got on his high horse a bit. 'A man has to mind his own business in another man's house' says he.'
Minogue shook his head.
'And that was it?'
'Well, you were only gone the twenty minutes, sir. I took your cue and let him blather away for fear he might clam up and forget something. I had to go over dates with him. The man has no idea what a calendar is, I'm thinking. I think he believes us about Combs' being dead now, but he doesn't want to believe it. He'd probably believe it if anyone other than a policeman-a peeler-told him.'
'Never bumped into the housekeeper, Mrs Hartigan?'
'He said he was turned away from the door by her once. After that, nothing.'
Keating fell upon the remaining chips.
'So they'd have a few jars and yap. Did Joyce stay late?' asked Minogue.
'No. He made a remark about that. That Combs didn't want him getting jarred and into trouble, so he used to ration him with the drink and send him home. After their chat, like. He says that Combs used to like to hear about what went on around the place; you know, people in the area, the weather, the local goings-on. He was interested in where Joyce had travelled, all over the country. That class of talk.'
'I see,' Minogue murmured.
'And what it was like living by the side of the road; had, em, travellers anyone to stand up for them as regards housing or trouble with the law?' Keating was saying.
'Joyce didn't think that the man was a bit nosey to be asking him things like that? Prying, maybe?'
'You know how it is with this bloody country, sir. Even with the tink-travellers. Sure don't we pour our hearts out to Yankee anthropologists who'd be asking us about sex or the like, before we'd say a word beyond the weather to the man next door.'
Minogue half-smiled at Keating's truth, a sizeable mental benchmark for living in this country. Keating had finished the chips.
'Do you know, but it's true for you,' Minogue concluded.
He remained outside the door while Keating went to the toilet downstairs. He heard Joyce cough once behind the door. Minogue realised that he was tired now, irritable even. He watched Keating plod back up the stairs. Then Minogue opened the door to find Joyce standing by the table.
'Come on, we'll go home now,' he said to Joyce. 'I'll drop you off.'
Joyce's suspicion gave way to a cautious relief.
'Are we done, sirs?'
Minogue gave his Fiat a tall order on his way home. He had left Joyce by the side of the road at Heronsford Lane. Joyce looked like a man who hadn't slept all night. He stood in the ditch, gathering his jacket around him, his shoulders hunched. Home was a cream-coloured caravan, still on its wheels but thrust into the brambles. A face appeared at the window, Joyce's wife. A child with a mop of red hair ran out onto the road from behind the caravan, a dog following. More faces appeared in the window. The dog sniffed one of Minogue's tires and lifted a leg. Joyce shouted at the dog and startled it away. He picked up the child. Boy or girl, Minogue couldn't tell. The child's belly- button peeped out as its jumper rose. A face streaked with dirt, a runny nose, an expression curious and defiant. Minogue saw the dog in his mirror this time as it made to piss on his car again. He drove off. A last glimpse of Joyce hoisting another one of his children, the two figures one now, becalmed in the wet squalor, surrounded by discarded clothes and bits of metal. Joyce half-waved.
Minogue knew what few others knew: there was a short-cut up this lane over a rocky track and down a worse piece of road back to the tarred lane which led by Tully. The closed gates might dissuade faint-hearted people if the potholes did not. Minogue knew what right-of-way was, so he unlatched the wide farm gate, drove through, parked and returned to secure the gate again. He stopped, his hand on the bolt, and looked down the fields. Three horses were grazing by a clump of trees in the middle distance. Minogue saw no harnesses or nose- gear on any of the animals. Free, to the edges of these fields anyway.
His mind swung gently from raiding chieftains on horseback to Joyce, a disinherited Irishman, but regal with a horse; perhaps Combs had savoured that irony, sympathised. Tinkers, we call them, men and women who sleep by the roadside but cling to their horses and let them graze by the sides of the road, while the motorised Irish look down their passing noses at these horsemen. Landless but horse-mad. His hand on the wet gate, another hand pushing home the bolt so hard that it shook raindrops off the bars, Minogue was surprised by the rush of anger. If he were Joyce, he'd steal Jags and Mercedes and money and anything, all day and all night until someone stopped him.
The Fiat wallowed and bottomed on its struts four times before Minogue reached the tarred part of the road. Keating was probably back in the city now, getting up a press release to appeal for scraps of information they hadn't trawled yet.
Minogue and Kathleen had but themselves for company at tea-time.
'And did I tell you that his bank already has a legal eagle here to close up the house and run up a list of pots and pans and knives and forks?'
'Go on,' Kathleen said. 'That's banks for you. Scavengers.'
'I suppose. No relatives, so what do you expect? That's how they make their money and do their business.'
'Maybe he came over to make friends. Someone may have told him how friendly we are over here,' Kathleen offered.
'Nosey, you mean.'
'But you say he kept to himself. So he didn't come here for the company, did he? Unless it was just to be with people without being too personal.'
Minogue had no reply for that. He decided to leave the matter. They sat through a second pot of tea and listened to the half-past-six news on the radio. He rose from the chair and began to clear the table in advance of washing the dishes.
Iseult breezed in the back door. She switched off the tape-machine which was draped across her shoulder. She yanked off the headphones but caught a strand of hair to one side.
'Ow!' She drew her hair gently through to free the apparatus.
'Why are you shouting?' asked Kathleen.
'I had the volume up. I must be deaf. Ow.'
'Can you still breathe with that thing unplugged?' Minogue asked.
'Nice welcome. Am I interrupting a comedians' convention?'
'I'll bet your head is like a washing machine inside after listening to one of those things. And you probably walking into walls and hopping along the street with your head full of that stuff,' Kathleen observed.
'It's great stuff. It helps me think.'
Iseult plonked down a bag with hairy tassels.
'I have presents for you. The both of you,' Iseult said. She rummaged in the bag and drew out two postcards. She handed one to Kathleen, the other to Minogue. Kathleen turned hers over. It was a Modigliani, head and shoulders, a woman. Minogue snorted when he saw his.
'Isn't that the limit?' he smiled. 'I've seen that one in the books but I never thought I'd ever get a postcard of it.'
'Do you dig the title, though?' Iseult asked.
Minogue laughed again. Magritte had called his painting of a glass of water balancing on an open umbrella, Hegel's Holiday.
'Is it the right way up? Maybe it's upside down. What's the idea of the glass of water?' Kathleen asked.
Recovered a little, Minogue said that it was a cavil.
'How do you mean?'
'I think that Monsieur M. was taking a poke at Hegel and Idealists in general.'
'I thought it was contrary enough for you, all right, Da.'
'I think it has to do with standing things on their head,' she added.
'Or on their ear, drunk,' Kathleen said.
'Karl Marx stood Hegel on his head, you see,' Iseult replied airily.
'He did what?' Minogue asked.
