“It’s very hard to say. Stunned, I should say.”
“Stunned, did you say?”
“Yes. Stunned.”
“You mean … sort of … with grief? Stunned with grief?’ ‘
“Roughly.”
“Of course you would be,” Mr. Parry said, tapping himself here and there in search of his pouch. “Of course you would be. But when that feeling of being stunned wore off, as it’d be bound to do in time, wouldn’t it? I mean … I don’t want you to go and misunderstand me …”
“No, I won’t do that.”
“All right. But … when it wore off, that feeling of being … stunned …”
A kind of cross-facing process brought Harry Bannion in over the top of this. He was saying emphatically:
“… So there he’s lying now, the poor wee man, with his life fast ebbing away from him, and he carls for his best orange sash, do you know, and the fine flag his younger brother’s been carrying on the Twelfth these fifty years and more, with good old King Billy on it crossing of the Boyne and the three drops of water dripping from his horse’s hoof … Do you know?”
Oates, Rosie, de Sousa (laughing noiselessly so as not to miss anything), Bachixa and the tennis coach all did know. At any rate, while remaining expectant, they all five nodded their heads in a satisfied way.
“And then he carls out, ‘Bring me me drum,’ and they brings it to him, and then with his last breath he commends his soul to his Maker, for he raises himself up”—with this Bannion got to his feet—”and he murmurs ‘TO HELL WITH THE POPE!’“ This was yelled at full blast and stopped all conversation in the café. “And with a wee brave dint on his drum he falls bark, straight into the arms of Jesus.” Bannion also fell back, but into his chair, and added in a normal voice: “Get away now you boys round the door.”
There was more uproar, of course, and the tennis coach was for some time most prominent in it. Isabella Bannion smiled another affectionate rebuke at her husband. Bowen admired him very much for telling that story. It had contained a quite legitimately censored version of his own view of His Holiness, and was in all ways what its audience deserved. Though clearly not meant as an anti-papal demonstration, it was far more admirable as such than any of Bowen’s own routines, from the study-group earnestness of “Wouldn’t you perhaps agree that politically the Church has often been unfortunate in its choice of allies ?” to the beery Fabian don’s “Come on, now, you’re not really going to sit there and tell me you take all that stuff seriously, are you?”
Through the ebbing tumult Bowen heard Mr. Parry once more raising his voice. He hoped hard that the fellow was a Catholic. He was saying to Marchant:
“Well, there you are, then.” The offended look he was sending towards Bannion and his group mingled with triumph as from having countered his opponent’s dangerous-looking (14) 0-0 ch by (15) Q x R!! The two expressions struggled laboriously for mastery on his totemic face.
“I’m sorry,” Marchant said, “I must have missed some stage in the argument. Forgive me for being so stupid.’ ‘
“All right … I’ve at last got you to admit that when this … stunned feeling wore off, you’d probably want to kill the brute who’d murdered your wife.”
“But I admitted that straight away. And what about it?”
“It’s what you anti-hanging blokes won’t face up to. All very fine and large to kick up a fuss when they’re going to hang some brute who’s murdered some poor woman at the other end of England, but it’s a different tale to tell when it’s your own wife. If that happened you’d be all for hanging the brute.”
A look of incredulous horror came over Alec Marchant’s face. He said haltingly: “But the bloody laws exist to stop people from killing each other whenever they happen to feel like it. Don’t they?”
Mr. Parry smoked his pipe for a time. Bowen was almost sure by now that the fellow must be Cardiff, if not Newport. “Ah, but that’s only your opinion,” Mr. Parry said at length.
Marchant got up and began repeating “Christ Almighty” somewhere in the counter-tenor range. Everybody else immediately got up too and prepared to leave. He tried to stop them, talking about and then vainly trying to order more coffee, a final drink. Meanwhile Bowen found himself face to face with Mr. Parry.
“You’re from Swansea, aren’t you?”
“Llansamlet.” Bowen tried to sound like a Texan asked if he was from Monterrey.
Mr. Parry did not say where he was from. He and Bowen had already completed what was to be their only sublunary conversation. Mr. Parry turned aside and gave Marchant, now advancing upon him, a kind of diagonal farewell nod, as if to say that the two of them had had a first-class friendly wrangle with, when you came to weigh it up, much good sense talked on both sides. Then he withdrew, wife and all.
Bowen let Marchant express something of what he felt about Mr. Parry. The man was a J.P., he said several times. Not long afterwards Bowen found himself standing in the roadway with Bachixa talking to him. Bachixa said: “Come. I will drive you to the house.”
“Oh, no thank you. My wife …”
“We will make the journey very quickly, sir.”
“I’m afraid it’s quite out of the question.”
A minute later they were moving on to the main road, heeling over to do so at an angle where Bowen could have touched the ground if he had extended his arm, which he did not. Before they had come upright a gust of wind—a frequent phenomenon, Bowen had noted, in that part of Portugal—caught them and sent them staggering towards a large brightly-lit bus. Bowen had time to see a little bald man (not unlike a Portuguese Mr. Parry, only nicer) laughing in it. Then they were past and accelerating freely down a meagre, fluctuating corridor
