Glenn Patterson - Gull

It was DeLorean himself on his next but one trip across — he had flown into London from Salt Lake City, whatever had him in Utah — who suggested that Randall move in, temporarily of course, while the renovations were still being carried out. ‘There is nothing brings a house to life like human beings in it.’

‘It’s a really kind offer, but…’

DeLorean stopped him. ‘Really kind offers never require a but. Besides, you would be doing me a big, big favour.’

And big, big favours, Randall knew, did not admit of refusals, however polite.

*

Friday night in the Conway Hotel was supper dance night. Saturday was wedding day. The former varied little, only the name on the pegboards outside the function room doors distinguished this week’s brown suits and fur stoles (Friends School Old Girls Association) from last’s (Derriaghy & District Indoor Bowling League); the latter, between the white tuxedos and the blue velvet, the peach organza and the turquoise tulle, to say nothing of the hats, the hats, the hats , were an advertisement for the inexhaustible variety of the human imagination.

Randall was sitting in a secluded corner of the lounge bar late on the rainy Saturday afternoon before he moved across to Warren House, reading a magazine he had picked up in the lobby, when a man in a grey morning suit, an arrangement of a white rose and something purple in his buttonhole, rested his whiskey tumbler on the edge of the table.

‘Do you mind?’ he said, his hand on the back of the seat facing Randall. He could have had his pick of two dozen others.

‘Not at all.’

‘I was worried I might be disturbing you.’

He gestured towards the magazine. Randall showed him the cover. Homes and Gardens . He laughed. ‘Actually, you’re saving me. You’re with the wedding party, I take it.’

The man looked down the length of himself, as though surprised all over again by his get-up and the reason for it. ‘It’s my daughter’s getting married.’

‘Well that’s great.’

‘Better now the speech is out of the way,’ said the man, shaking the hand that Randall had offered in congratulation.

‘I should buy you a drink.’

‘Thanks, but I’m OK with this. I have a long night of it ahead of me.’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘To tell you the truth, it was the wife’s sister asked me to come over.’

Randall looked past him, half expecting to see a face he recognised (though whose that would be he couldn’t think), half dreading the one he did not. All he saw, though, was the archway through to the rest of the bar, the doors to the function room beyond.

‘She’s’ — picking his words with care — ‘on her own.’

‘Oh, listen, that’s really thoughtful,’ Randall said, then worried that even that could be construed as an acceptance. This guy was — what? Fifty? Fifty-five? And he was trying to set him up with his spinster sister-in-law? ‘I mean, it’s just, I have a couple of calls I have to make back home, to the US.’

The man held up his hands. ‘You don’t have to say anything more. Totally understand. I told her I would come over and I did. No harm done, I hope.’

‘None at all.’

The man pushed back his chair, but only, it seemed, to inspect his shoes. Shiny like he clearly didn’t believe.

‘Have you children yourself?’

‘One,’ said Randall, ‘but…’

‘Wee boy, wee girl?’

‘Girl, but…’

‘That’s lovely.’ It was worse than trying to deflect DeLorean in full flow. Randall gave up trying. ‘You know though you’ll get your eye wiped, don’t you? You tell yourself you won’t, but you will, guaranteed.’ He leaned forward and clicked the rim of his glass against Randall’s. ‘Girls. They’re too well able for us.’

The man returned to the wedding, Randall to his magazine, although he was barely even looking at the pictures. A little later, passing the doors of the function room, he saw the man dancing with his daughter (ivory taffeta with lace neck) and, truly, a prouder man never trod a dance floor. Randall lingered a while in the doorway trying to imagine. Tamsin had still been at the clomping stage the last time he had led her round a floor — round and round and round and round — to… what? ‘Our House’? Surely not. Too neat, though she had loved it then: ‘Now everything is easy ’cause of you and our la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la…’

He actually shook his head to wipe the picture.

At a table at the top of the room a woman was sitting alone, wearing the same corsage as the bride’s father, but younger than him by a good twenty years, and beautiful. She caught Randall’s eye, held it a moment. His hand started up in a wave but before it had arrived she had set her mouth and looked away. Sorry, buster, no second chances.

The warren from which the name derived faced his new home across a steep-sided valley, the shallow Derriaghy River making its unhurried way across the bottom. Randall quickly realised that this was the hill where he had seen the teenage boys passing the bottles between them on the day he arrived in Belfast. Most weekend mornings and a fair few mornings in between he awoke to the sight of their debris — theirs or their fellow enthusiasts — the green glass, the empty tins, bent in the middle — and once saw a rabbit, as though remotely conjured, appear out of a striped plastic bag into which it had apparently crawled in hopes of grass greener than that which lay all around it.

On another side of the house work had already begun to clear the ground for a new private road giving direct access to the factory site, in contravention, no doubt, of all Brethren strictures about raising any one man above another, though not — Randall had sought reassurance from Jennings on the point — of the terms of the British government’s grants. ‘I suppose if it improves efficiency…’

‘And security,’ said Randall, who could not help but see the lane up from the main road through DeLorean’s eyes, although he had once or twice on his own account wished as he turned on to it that he had about him the lump hammer from the Conway’s security hut.

He had been in the house little more than a fortnight when the Labour Prime Minister, Callaghan, lost a vote of confidence in the British Houses of Parliament and was forced to call an election for the start of May.

Several times during the campaign Randall, remembering Jennings’s warning, voiced his concerns to DeLorean as poll after poll suggested the Conservatives were winning over voters with their ad campaign, a long serpentine line of the unemployed dwarfed by the slogan ‘Labour Isn’t Working.’

‘It is in Belfast,’ DeLorean said.

Randall pointed out that, from what he had seen of it, Belfast, Northern Ireland generally, was incidental to the election campaign, aside from promises — stock-sounding even to a newcomer and varying little from party to party — to get tougher with the IRA. Neither Labour, nor the Tories, nor the smaller Liberal Party were fielding candidates in the Northern Irish constituencies.

‘Which kind of makes you wonder what they wanted with it in the first place,’ said DeLorean.

Randall listened to the radio long into the election night as the results came in, first a trickle then a torrent, entranced by both the place names — the Wrekin, Sutton Coldfield, Epping Forest, Thanet East, Thanet West, Angus South, Clitheroe, Cirencester and Tewkesbury — and by the repetition of the commentary: Conservatives gain, Conservatives hold, Conservatives hold on an increased majority, swing of 9.9 per cent from Labour red to Tory blue. The outcome was beyond doubt long before sun-up. Jennings and the opinion polls were right. Callaghan — Mason — and Labour were out, the Conservatives, Thatcher and whoever she decided on as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland were in.