there was no harshness in her contemplation of these people’s lives, only fact and a lacing of speculation. The Skullys would go on ageing and he might never turn to his wife and say he was sorry. The O’Neill sisters would lose their beauty and Bewley Joal his vigour. One day Woolmer-Mills would find that he could no longer launch himself on to the balls of his feet. Kilroy would enter a home for the senile. Death would shatter the cotton-wool cosiness of Honor Hitchcock and the Reverend.
She wondered what would happen if she revealed what she had thought, if she told them that in order to keep her melancholy in control she had played about with their lives, seeing them in childhood, visiting them with old age and death. Which of them would seek to stop her while she cited the arrogance of the Professor and the pusillanimity of his wife? She heard her own voice echoing in a silence, telling them finally, in explanation, of the tragedy in her own life.
‘Please all have a jolly Christmas,’ Mrs Skully urged in the hall as scarves and coats were lifted from the hall-stand. ‘Please now.’
‘We shall endeavour,’ Kilroy promised, and the others made similar remarks, wishing Mrs Skully a happy Christmas herself, thanking her and the Professor for the party, Kilroy adding that it had been most enjoyable. There’d be another, the Professor promised, in May.
There was the roar of Ruth Cusper’s motor-cycle, and the overloading of Kilroy’s Mini, and the striding into the night of Bewley Joal, and others making off on bicycles. Valerie walked with Yvonne Smith through the suburban roads. ‘I quite like Joal,’ Yvonne Smith confided, releasing the first burst of her pent-up chatter. ‘He’s all right, isn’t he? Quite nice, really, quite clever. I mean, if you care for a clever kind of person. I mean, I wouldn’t mind going out with him if he asked me.’
Valerie agreed that Bewley Joal was all right if you cared for that kind of person. It was pleasant in the cold night air. It was good that the party was over.
Yvonne Smith said good-night, still chattering about Bewley Joal as she turned into the house where her lodgings were. Valerie walked on alone, a thin shadow in the gloom. Compulsively now, she thought about the party, seeing again the face of Mrs Skully and the Professor’s face and the faces of the others. They formed, like a backdrop in her mind, an assembly as vivid as the tragedy that more grimly visited it. They seemed like the other side of the tragedy, as if she had for the first time managed to peer round a corner. The feeling puzzled her. It was odd to be left with it after the Skullys’ end-of-term party.
In the garden of the hall of residence the fallen leaves were sodden beneath her feet as she crossed a lawn to shorten her journey. The bewilderment she felt lifted a little. She had been wrong to imagine she envied other people their normality and good fortune. She was as she wished to be. She paused in faint moonlight, repeating that to herself and then repeating it again. She did not quite add that the tragedy had made her what she was, that without it she would not possess her reflective introspection, or be sensitive to more than just the time of year. But the thought hovered with her as she moved towards the lights of the house, offering what appeared to be a hint of comfort.
‘I mean I’m not like I used to be.’
She had married, Norma continued, she had settled down. A young man, sitting beside her on the sofa, agreed that this was so. He was soberly dressed, jolly of manner, not quite fat. His smiling blue eyes suggested that if Norma had ever been flighty and irresponsible she no longer was, due to the influence he had brought into her life.
‘I mean in a way,’ Norma said, ‘things have changed for you too, Mrs Lacy.’
Bridget became flustered. Ever since childhood she had been embarrassed when she found herself the centre of attention, and even though she was forty-nine now none of that had improved. She was plump and black- haired, her manner affected by her dislike of being in the limelight. It was true that things had changed for her also in the last six years, but how had Norma discovered it? Had neighbours been questioned?
‘Yes, things have changed,’ she said, quite cheerfully because she’d become used to the change.
Norma nodded, and so did her husband. Bridget could tell from their faces that although they might not know the details they certainly knew the truth of the matter. And the details weren’t important because strangers wouldn’t be interested in the countryside of Co. Cork where she and Liam had come from, or in the disappointment of their childless marriage. London had become their home, a small house in a terrace, with the
‘Your husband didn’t seem the kind,’ Norma began. ‘I mean, not that I knew him.’
‘No, he didn’t seem like that.’
‘I know what it feels like to be left, Mrs Lacy.’
‘It feels like nothing now.’
She smiled again, but her cheeks had become hot because the conversation was about her. When Norma had phoned a week ago, to ask if they could have a chat, she hadn’t known what to say. It would have been unpleasant simply to say no, nor was there any reason why she should take that attitude, but even so she’d been dreading their visit ever since. She’d felt cross with herself for not managing to explain that Betty could easily be upset, which was why Betty wasn’t in the house that afternoon. It was the first thing she’d said to them when she’d opened the hall door, not knowing if they were expecting to see the child or not. She’d sounded apologetic and was cross with herself for that, too.
All three of them drank tea while they talked. Bridget, who didn’t make cakes because Liam hadn’t liked them and she’d never since got into the way of it, had bought two kinds of biscuits and a Battenburg in Victor Value’s. Alarmed at the last moment in case there wouldn’t be enough and she’d be thought inhospitable, she had buttered some bread and put out a jar of apricot jam. She was glad she had because Norma’s husband made quite a meal of it, taking most of the ginger-snaps and folding the sliced bread into sandwiches. Norma didn’t eat anything.
‘I can’t have another baby, Mrs Lacy. That’s the point, if you get what I mean? Like after Betty I had to have an abortion and then two more, horrible they were, the last one a bit of trouble really. I mean, it left my insides like this.’
‘Oh dear, I’m sorry.’
Nodding, as if in gratitude for this sympathy, Norma’s husband reached for a ginger-snap. He said they had a nice flat, and there were other children living near by for Betty to play with. He glanced around the small living- room, which was choked with pieces of furniture and ornaments which Bridget was always resolving to weed out. In what he said, and in the way he looked, there was the implication that this room in a cramped house was an unsuitable habitat for a spirited four-year-old. There was also the implication that Bridget at forty-nine, and without a husband, belonged more naturally among the sacred pictures on the walls than she possibly could in a
