The last of the elderly people slowly made their way from the dining-room, saying good-night as they went. A day would come, Dawne thought, when they would go to Venice on their own initiative, with people like the Windsor people. She imagined the Windsor people in the Pensione Concordia, not one of them a day older than themselves. She imagined Signor Bancini passing among them, translating a word or two of Italian as he went. There was laughter in the dining-room of the Pensione Concordia, and bottles of red wine on the tables. The young people’s names were Desiree and Rob, and Luke and Angelique, and Sean and Aimee. ‘Uncle we used to call him,’ her own voice said. ‘He died a while back.’
Keith stood up. Skilful with the tablecloths, the waiter wished them good-night. In the reception area a different receptionist, a girl, smiled at them. Some of the old people were standing around, saying it was too cold to go for a walk. You’d miss the television, one of them remarked.
The warmth of their bodies was a familiar comfort. They had not had children because the rooms above the shop weren’t suitable for children. The crying at night would have driven Uncle mad, and naturally you could see his point of view. There’d been an error when first they’d lived with him; they’d had to spend a bit terminating it.
They refrained from saying that their bodies were a comfort. They had never said so. What they said in their lives had to do with Keith’s hoping for promotion, and the clothes Dawne coveted. What they said had to do with their efforts to make a little extra money, or paying their way by washing the woodwork of an old man’s house and tacking down his threadbare carpets.
When he heard their news he would mention the savings in the Halifax Building Society and the goodwill of the shop and the valuation that had been carried out four years ago. He would mention again that men of all ages should have somewhere to go of an evening, or in the afternoons or the morning, a place to be at peace. He would remind them that a man who had benefited could not pass on without making provision for the rent and the heating and for the replacing of the billiard tables when the moment came. ‘Memorial to a humble man’, he would repeat. ‘Shopkeeper of this neighbourhood’.
In the darkness they did not say to one another that if he hadn’t insisted they needed a touch of the autumn sun they wouldn’t again have been exposed to humiliation. It was as though, through knowing them, he had arranged their failure in order to indulge his scorn. Creatures of a shabby institution, his eyes had so often said, they could not manage on their own: they were not even capable of supplying one another’s needs.
In the darkness they did not say that their greed for his money was much the same as his greed for their obedience, that greed nourished the trinity they had become. They did not say that the money, and the freedom it promised, was the galaxy in their lives, as his cruelty was the last pleasure in his. Scarcely aware that they held on to one another beneath the bedclothes, they heard his teasing little laugh while they were still awake, and again when they slept.
The two men met by arrangement in Buswell’s Hotel. The time and place had been suggested by the man who was slightly the older of the two; his companion had agreed without seeking an adjustment. Half past eleven in the bar: ‘I think we’ll probably spot one another all right,’ the older man had said. ‘Well, she’ll have told you what I look like.’
He was tall, acquiring bulkiness, a pinkish-brown sunburn darkening his face, fair curly hair that was turning grey. The man he met was thinner, with spectacles and a smooth black overcoat, a smaller man considerably. Lairdman this smaller man was called; the other’s name was Boland. Both were in their early forties.
‘Well, we’re neither of us late,’ Boland said in greeting, the more nervous of the two. ‘Fergus Boland. How are you?’
They shook hands. Boland pulled out his wallet. ‘I’ll have a Jameson myself. What’ll I get you?’
‘Oh, only a mineral. This time of day, Fergus. A lemonade.’
‘A Jameson and a lemonade,’ Boland ordered.
‘Sure,’ the barman said.
They stood by the bar. Boland held out a packet of cigarettes. ‘D’you smoke?’
Lairdman shook his head. He cocked an elbow on to the bar, arranging himself tidily. ‘Sorry about this,’ he said.
They were alone except for the barman, who set their two glasses in front of them. They weren’t going to sit down; there was no-move to do so. ‘A pound and tenpence,’ the barman said, and Boland paid him. Boland’s clothes – tweed jacket and corduroy trousers – were wrinkled: he’d driven more than a hundred miles that morning.
‘I mean I’m really sorry,’ Lairdman went on, ‘doing this to anyone.’
‘Good luck.’ Boland raised his glass. He had softened the colour of the whiskey by adding twice as much water. ‘You never drink this early in the day, I suppose?’ he said, constrainedly polite. ‘Well, very wise. That’s very sensible: I always say it.’
‘I thought it mightn’t be a drinking occasion.’
‘I couldn’t face you without a drink in, Lairdman.’
‘I’m sorry about that.’
‘You’ve lifted my wife off me. That isn’t an everyday occurrence, you know.’
‘I’m sorry –’
‘It would be better if you didn’t keep saying that.’
Lairdman, who was in the timber business, acknowledged the rebuke with a sideways wag of his head. The whole thing was awkward, he confessed, he hadn’t slept a wink the night before.
‘You’re a Dubliner, she tells me,’ Boland said, the same politeness to the fore. ‘You make blockboard: there’s money in that, no doubt about it.’
Lairdman was offended. She’d described her husband as clumsy but had added that he wouldn’t hurt a fly. Already, five minutes into the difficult encounter, Lairdman wasn’t so sure about that.
‘I don’t like Dublin,’ Boland continued. ‘I’ll be frank about it. I never have. I’m a small-town man, but of course you’ll know.’
