when the old woman became agitated because one of Wm. Cole’s meal lorries had backed into her Morris Minor. ‘I thought she’d passed on years ago,’ Francie said.
They separated. Helen was sitting next to him, Grania noticed, Quilty on his other side. Presumably they’d talk over whatever business there was, so that he wouldn’t have to delay once the funeral had taken place.
‘How’re you doing, dear?’ Martin Duddy said, occupying the chair on her left. Desmond was on her right; he nearly always chose to sit next to her.
‘I’m all right,’ she replied. ‘Are you OK, Martin?’
‘Far from it, as a matter of fact.’ He twisted backwards and stretched an arm out, preventing the waitress who was attempting to pass by from doing so. ‘Bring me a Crested Ten, will you? Aisling’s in the family way,’ he muttered into Grania’s ear. ‘Jesus Christ, Grania!’
He was an architect, responsible for the least attractive bungalows in the county, possibly in the province. He and Mavis had once spent a protracted winter holiday in Spain, the time he’d been endeavouring to find himself. He hadn’t done so, but that period of his life had ever since influenced the local landscape. Also, people said, his lavatories didn’t work as well as they might have.
‘Do you mean it, Martin? Are you sure?’
‘Some elderly Mr Bloody. I’ll wring his damn neck for him.’
He was drunk to the extent that failing to listen to him wouldn’t matter. No opportunity for comment would be offered. The advice sought, the plea for understanding, would not properly register in the brain that set in motion the requests. It was extremely unlikely that Aisling was pregnant.
‘Old Hetty left him the house,’ Desmond said on her other side. ‘He’s going to live in it. Nora,’ he called out to the waitress, ‘I need to order the wine.’
Martin Duddy gripped her elbow, demanding the return of her attention. His face came close to hers: the small, snub nose, the tightly hunched, heated cheeks, droplets of perspiration on forehead and chin. Grania looked away. Across the table, Mavis was better-looking than her husband in all sorts of ways, her lips prettily parted as she listened to whatever it was Billy MacGuinness was telling her about, her blue eyes sparkling with Saturday- evening vivacity. Francie was listening to the surveyor. Mary Ann Haddon was nervously playing with her fork, the way she did when she felt she was being ignored: she had a complex about her looks, which were not her strong point. Helen Quilty was talking to the man who’d come back for the funeral, her wide mouth swiftly opening and closing. Francie, who’d given up smoking a fortnight ago, lit a cigarette. Billy MacGuinness’s round face crinkled with sudden laughter. Mavis laughed also.
The waitress hurried away with Desmond’s wine order. Light caught one lens of Mary Ann’s glasses. ‘Oh, I don’t
There were other faces in the Rhett Butler Room, those of Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh reproduced on mirrored glass with bevelled edges, huge images that also included the shoulders of the film stars, the
‘This man here, you mean?’ Grania said to her husband when there was an opportunity. She knew he did; there was no one else he could mean. She didn’t want to think about it, yet it had to be confirmed. She wanted to delay the knowledge, yet just as much she had to know quickly.
‘So he’s been saying,’ Desmond said. ‘You know, I’d forgotten who he was when you introduced us.’
‘But what on earth does he want to come and live in that awful old house for?’
‘He’s on his uppers apparently.’
Often they talked together on these Saturday occasions, in much the same way as they did in their own kitchen while she finished cooking the dinner and he laid the table. In the kitchen they talked about people they’d run into during the day, the same people once a week or so, rarely strangers. When his father retired almost twenty years ago, Desmond had taken over the management of the town’s laundry and later had inherited it. The Tara Hotel was his second most important customer, the Hospital of St Bernadette of Lourdes being his first. He brought back to Grania reports of demands for higher wages, and the domestic confidences of his staff. In return she passed on gossip, which both of them delighted in.
‘How’s Judith?’ Martin Duddy inquired, finger and thumb again tightening on her elbow. ‘No Mr Bloody yet?’
‘Judith’s still at the convent, remember.’
‘You never know these days.’
‘I think you’ve got it wrong about Aisling being pregnant.’
‘I pray to God I have, dear.’
Desmond said he intended to go to Hetty Prendergast’s funeral, but she saw no reason why she should go herself. Desmond went to lots of funerals, often of people she didn’t know, business acquaintances who’d lived miles away. Going to funerals was different when there was a business reason, not that the Prendergasts had ever made much use of the laundry.
‘I have a soft spot for Judith,’ Martin Duddy said. ‘She’s getting to be a lovely girl.’
It was difficult to agree without sounding smug, yet it seemed disloyal to her daughter to deny what was claimed for her. Grania shrugged, a gesture that was vague enough to indicate whatever her companion wished to make of it. There was no one on Martin Duddy’s other side because the table ended there. Angela, widow of a German businessman, had just sat down in the empty place opposite him. The most glamorous of all the wives, tall and slim, her hair the colour of very pale sand, Angela was said to be on the look-out for a second marriage. Her husband had settled in the neighbourhood after the war and had successfully begun a cheese-and-pate business, supplying restaurants and hotels all over the country. With a flair he had cultivated in her, Angela ran it now. ‘How’s Martin?’ She smiled seductively across the table, the way she’d smiled at men even in her husband’s lifetime. Martin Duddy said he was all right, but Grania knew that only a desultory conversation would begin between the two because Martin Duddy didn’t like Angela for some reason, or else was alarmed by her.
