‘Commercial gent,’ Dekko said. ‘Fertilizers.’
‘Good heavens, never. You wouldn’t get a rep in here.’
I took no part in the argument. The lone man didn’t much interest me, but I felt that Strafe was probably right: if there was anything dubious about the man’s credentials he might have found it difficult to secure a room. In the hall of Glencorn Lodge there’s a notice which reads:
‘Ah, thank you,’ Strafe said when Kitty brought his whisky and Dekko’s Cointreau. ‘Sure you won’t have something?’ he said to me, although he knew I never did.
Strafe is on the stout side, I suppose you could say, with a gingery moustache and gingery hair, hardly touched at all by grey. He left the Army years ago, I suppose because of me in a sense, because he didn’t want to be posted abroad again. He’s in the Ministry of Defence now.
I’m still quite pretty in my way, though nothing like as striking as Mrs Malseed, for I’ve never been that kind of woman. I’ve put on weight, and wouldn’t have allowed myself to do so if Strafe hadn’t kept saying he can’t stand a bag of bones. I’m careful about my hair and, unlike Mrs Malseed, I have it very regularly seen to because if I don’t it gets a salt-and-pepper look, which I hate. My husband, Terence, who died of food-poisoning when we were still quite young, used to say I wouldn’t lose a single look in middle age, and to some extent that’s true. We were still putting off having children when he died, which is why I haven’t any. Then I met Strafe, which meant I didn’t marry again.
Strafe is married himself, to Cynthia. She’s small and ineffectual, I suppose you’d say without being untruthful or unkind. Not that Cynthia and I don’t get on or anything like that, in fact we get on extremely well. It’s Strafe and Cynthia who don’t seem quite to hit it off, and I often think how much happier all round it would have been if Cynthia had married someone completely different, someone like Dekko in a way, except that that mightn’t quite have worked out either. The Strafes have two sons, both very like their father, both of them in the Army. And the very sad thing is they think nothing of poor Cynthia.
‘Who’s that chap?’ Dekko asked Mr Malseed, who’d come over to wish us good-night.
‘Awfully sorry about that, Mr Deakin. My fault entirely, a booking that came over the phone.’
‘Good heavens, not at all,’ Strafe protested, and Dekko looked horrified in case it should be thought he was objecting to the locals. ‘Splendid-looking fellow,’ he said, overdoing it.
Mr Malseed murmured that the man had only booked in for a single night, and I smiled the whole thing away, reassuring him with a nod. It’s one of the pleasantest of the traditions at Glencorn Lodge that every evening Mr Malseed makes the rounds of his guests just to say good-night. It’s because of little touches like that that I, too, wished Dekko hadn’t questioned Mr Malseed about the man because it’s the kind of thing one doesn’t do at Glencorn Lodge. But Dekko is a law unto himself, very tall and gangling, always immaculately suited, a beaky face beneath mousy hair in which flecks of grey add a certain distinction. Dekko has money of his own and though he takes out girls who are half his age he has never managed to get around to marriage. The uncharitable might say he has a rather gormless laugh; certainly it’s sometimes on the loud side.
We watched while Mr Malseed bade the lone man good-night. The man didn’t respond, but just sat gazing. It was ill-mannered, but this lack of courtesy didn’t appear to be intentional: the man was clearly in a mood of some kind, miles away.
‘Well, I’ll go up,’ I said. ‘Good-night, you two.’
‘Cheery-bye, Milly,’ Dekko said. ‘Brekky at nine, remember.’
‘Good-night, Milly,’ Strafe said.
The Strafes always occupy different rooms on holidays, and at home also. This time he was in Geranium and she in Fuchsia. I was in Rose, and in a little while Strafe would come to see me. He stays with her out of kindness, because he fears for her on her own. He’s a sentimental, good-hearted man, easily moved to tears: he simply cannot bear the thought of Cynthia with no one to talk to in the evenings, with no one to make her life around. ‘And besides,’ he often says when he’s being jocular, ‘it would break up our bridge four.’ Naturally we never discuss her shortcomings or in any way analyse the marriage. The unwritten rule that exists among the four of us seems to extend as far as that.
He slipped into my room after he’d had another drink or two, and I was waiting for him as he likes me to wait, in bed but not quite undressed. He has never said so, but I know that that is something Cynthia would not understand in him, or ever attempt to comply with. Terence, of course, would not have understood either; poor old Terence would have been shocked. Actually it’s all rather sweet, Strafe and his little ways.
‘I love you, dear,’ I whispered to him in the darkness, but just then he didn’t wish to speak of love and referred instead to my body.
If Cynthia hadn’t decided to remain in the hotel the next morning instead of accompanying us on our walk to Ardbeag everything might have been different. As it happened, when she said at breakfast she thought she’d just potter about the garden and sit with her book out of the wind somewhere, I can’t say I was displeased. For a moment I hoped Dekko might say he’d stay with her, allowing Strafe and myself to go off on our own, but Dekko-who doesn’t go in for saying what you want him to say – didn’t. ‘Poor old sausage,’ he said instead, examining Cynthia with a solicitude that suggested she was close to the grave, rather than just a little lowered by the change of life or whatever it was.
‘I’ll be perfectly all right,’ Cynthia assured him. ‘Honestly.’
‘Cynthia likes to mooch, you know,’ Strafe pointed out, which of course is only the truth. She reads too much, I always think. You often see her putting down a book with the most melancholy look in her eyes, which can’t be good for her. She’s an imaginative woman, I suppose you would say, and of course her habit of reading so much is often useful on our holidays: over the years she has read her way through dozens of Irish guidebooks. ‘That’s where the garrison pushed the natives over the cliffs,’ she once remarked on a drive. ‘Those rocks are known as the Maidens,’ she remarked on another occasion. She has led us to places of interest which we had no idea existed: Garron Tower on Garron Point, the mausoleum at Bonamargy, the Devil’s Backbone. As well as which, Cynthia is extremely knowledgeable about all matters relating to Irish history. Again she has read endlessly: biographies and autobiographies, long accounts of the centuries of battling and politics there’ve been. There’s hardly a town or village we ever pass through that hasn’t some significance for Cynthia, although I’m afraid her impressive fund of information doesn’t always receive the attention it deserves. Not that Cynthia ever minds; it doesn’t seem to worry her when no one listens. My own opinion is that she’d have made a much better job of her relationship with Strafe and her sons if she could have somehow developed a bit more character.
We left her in the garden and proceeded down the cliff path to the shingle beneath. I was wearing slacks and a blouse, with the arms of a cardigan looped round my neck in case it turned chilly: the outfit was new, specially
