Kevin Barry - There Are Little Kingdoms

‘I don’t believe any more,’ said Angelica.

‘You will again,’ said Freddie. ‘Of course I forget sometimes, at night, which is natural. I think she’s gone to the loo. I shout out: Lucia! Hurry up, darling! You’ll get your end! It’s bloody freezing in there. Carpets rather than tiles, maybe?’

‘I’m going to take my pulse,’ said Angelica.

‘Actually it’s probably what put me off the dozing,’ said Freddie. ‘But of course there’s always Italy, as well, isn’t there? To be honest, Angel, I don’t talk about it much. Not a great distance from Bolzano, I think. Oh! Difficult. Think about something else, that’s what I say.’

‘One hundred and four!’ said Angelica.

‘I don’t know about you, dear, but I’m about ready for another.’

The night progressed as the nights did. He talked of the trade in antiques among the long gone intimates of its northwestern scene. He talked of Charlie Bamber and Ambrose Poll. He confided the racetrack intrigue of the Skipton Fancy. He rescued the reputation of Freddie Bliss from the hammering it had taken in the infamous gypsy trial of ’74. He grew agitated when he told of the snubbing his wife had received from some of the other ladies — so-called! — of the area. Alice Hemshaw? Snivelling old trout, with her pearls and her bony elbows, with her gums. He paced the floor, with a glass of ancient Madeira to hand.

‘We were blow-ins,’ he said. ‘You never get over that. We were never churchy, of course, and that didn’t help. Never played golf. Never sailed. We liked a drink. We liked a flutter. We had fun! Is that a crime? Well string me up and flay me!’

Outside, the tawnies were hunting. It was quickening June, and there was an urgency. It was almost four o’clock in the northern summer. The house had settled over its long years, it had hunkered down into the Cumbrian shale. To achieve great age requires constant negotiation, and all of the late night groans and creaks were no more than the wheedling of the dispute. But lately there was a new nervousness to the house’s soundings. It had not reckoned on the return of a grown Angelica.

She went to the kitchen and booted the laptop and the whoosh and the whumpf as it took life was so familiar, a reassurance. She went to eBay and increased her bid for some ochre-coloured tiles reclaimed from the palace of a Carpathian count. She went to her usual chatroom and flirted a little with a reformed arsonist from the Black Country. He had been coming on fruity these past nights: she would have to dampen his ardour. She was spoken for. She checked her mail: nothing much. She took strangely, then: she was at once in the damp and green of anxiety.

In the dining room, Freddie Bliss stood by the bay window and spoke to the last of the night.

‘The immediate concern was footwear,’ he said. ‘Boots, plain as. A stout pair of boots can save a man. And under the circumstances, we knew that, with the what-you-call-it coming… what do you call it? In winter? The shortest day? What do you call it?’

He turned to an empty room, and smiled.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Never mind. I know! Solstice.’

He set to writing some notes. He still had a supply of the letterhead paper from Bliss Antiques, which had gone out of business in 1975. If the television people finished up early, Angelica might manage a trip to the village. Freddie didn’t go so much now. He sent down notes instead. He wrote one for the video man.

‘Please,’ it said, ‘nothing else with this Tom Hanks person,’ and the name was twice underlined.

Angelica returned. She appeared to be having trouble breathing.

‘You look gaunt, darling.’

‘I’ve got NIGHT FEAR!’ she cried.

She picked up the mallet and slapped at the wall. This was the wall that divided the pantry from the dining room. The plaster crumbled, willingly enough, but the brickwork was stubborn. Angelica was fagged out — she hadn’t the strength for large-scale destruction at this hour. She was determined, however, to keep busy.

‘This old rad,’ she said, ‘how long since we’ve had heat out of it?’

Freddie Bliss considered the rusty, leak-stained radiator and thought for a moment.

‘The sixties?’ he tried.

‘Right,’ said Angelica, and fetched the claw hammer.

Freddie Bliss made some fresh drinks. He always kept a little of the good stuff back for late on. The fizz of the tonic quieted by the dash of the gin. The glass clouding up as the limes cut in. Poetry, and Angelica, panting, attempted to wrench the rad from the wall. She got it part ways out, and then stopped.

‘What’s this?’

‘What’s what, Angel?’

She yanked up a clutch handbag, so old to be almost fashionable, its grey leather softened and cracked with age.

‘Must be one of your mother’s. It must have fallen down there. Show!’

She opened the bag and spread its contents on the dining-room table. Freddie Bliss was rapt with attention: he was half thinking there might be an old tenner forgotten. But it was mostly photographs, from the war years and before. Training at Carlisle. The weekend trips home before shipping out. Arm in arm in a pub, the pair of them shining with youth and love, in the autumn of 1942. There were a few of his letters home, those that had got through, with lines of neat Xs for kisses. There was the notification of dishonourable discharge from His Majesty’s Forces.

‘Why has she got all this here?’

‘It’s what she’d have hidden on me,’ said Freddie Bliss.

‘Why not just burn the stuff?’

‘It’s important,’ he said, and he shrugged. ‘But it doesn’t matter now.’

It didn’t matter. Enough time had passed. These were the remnants of another life, and he could look on that life as a stranger would. Angelica sobbed.

‘Courage, dear,’ he said.

‘Courage!’

‘I never had any,’ he said. ‘I think you’ve shown some, I really do. But not me. Ambrose Poll? Yes. Charlie Bamber? Charlie absolutely dripped with the stuff. But Freddie Bliss? No. I scampered!’

He moved through the woods. This was Italy, 1943. He had a flame of colour in his cheeks, and the ice had formed into a webbing between the black bones of the trees. The sun through the ice made a palatial blue light, and he winced. At each crack of the ice, he jumped from his skin. He had lost his coat. In the panic of his flight, everything had got thrown in the air. His old boots had split open. He felt the cold come in. His fingertips blackened with bite. There were moments he thought he had passed over. He had to fight hard to distinguish himself as a living thing, among the trees and the ice, beneath the sky. His vision started to blur. His fear went. He fell down in the snow. Smiling, he lifted his head from the ground. In the near distance, the whites and blues of winter were disturbed by a shape that had a smokiness to it, a dark shimmering, and he crawled to it and found that it was a horse. It had been slit along its belly and it lay dead in the snow but it had its heat still. He lay with it. He huddled as close to it as he could get. He scolded himself. He said you shan’t, oh you can’t, and then he did. He put his hands into the wound and dug them deep. He forced his arms in, past the elbows. The organ heat saved him but his mind became unseated. He became weightless, untethered. It was as if he had stepped off a plane.

He confronted the lifeless gin in his hand. The limes were no use. They were past their best and shrivelled quickly in the alcohol. They spoiled the drink with a sour green tinge. There would have to be a note for the grocer.

‘We’d go down The Philly,’ he said. ‘Every single night, we’d be on the tiles. She insisted. We’d go down The Chophouse. She’d bloody well drag me! I’d whimper! I was rattling, Angel! I wasn’t right for donkey’s! But she’d say get this into you, sweetness. Chin up now!’