William Trevor - The Hill Bachelors

These days Mrs Kincaid did her best to take the long view, telling herself that what had happened was like a death and that you couldn’t moan about a death for ever, not even to yourself. In her business activities she did not seek vengeance but instead sought to accumulate what was rightfully hers, keeping her accounts in a small red notebook, always with the hope that one day she would not have to do so, that her misfortune in the past would at last free her from its thrall.

Walking against a steady east wind on the day she saw Blakely for the second time, she recalled his lean face very clearly, his tufty hair, the hanging thread on his jacket where a button had come off. He’d be a bachelor or a widower, else he wouldn’t be taking his dinner in a café every day. You could tell at once the foot he dug with, as decent a Protestant foot as her own, never a doubt about that.

The room she had taken — not in Bann Street but above a butcher’s shop in Knipe Street — smelt of meat and suet. She had an electric ring to cook on, a sink for the washing of clothes and dishes, lavatory and bathroom a flight up. There was a television, a gas fire, a single bed under the window, and when she fried something on the electric ring the butchery smell disappeared for a while. Mrs Kincaid had been in worse places.

She brought back from the shops a bar of Kit-Kat, Woman’s Own, Hello!, The Lady , and a film magazine. She ate the chocolate bar, read a story about a late flowering of romance, made tea, slipped out of her skirt and blouse, slept, and dreamed she had married a clergyman to whom she’d once sold back the letters he’d written her. When she woke she washed herself, fried rashers and an egg, and went out again.

She sat alone at a table in the bar of Digby’s Hotel, listening to tunes of the fifties, all of which she was familiar with. Occasionally someone smiled at her, a man or a woman, the girl behind the bar, but generally they just went by. She heard talk about a dance. She would have gone on her own when she was younger, but those days were over now. She drank vodka with no more than a colouring of port in it, which was her tipple. She bought a packet of cigarettes, although as a general rule she didn’t smoke any more. She wasn’t going to be able to resist what had been put in her path: she knew that perfectly.

She knew it again when she woke up in the middle of the night and lay for a while awake in the darkness. The smell from the shop below had come back, and when she dropped back into sleep she dreamed that the man she had met in the café was in butcher’s clothes, separating lamb chops with a cleaver.

*

There was a traveller on his own by the table at the window, but that was the smallest table in the café and he had his samples’ case on the other chair, out of the way of people passing. Otherwise, Blakely’s was the only table that wasn’t shared.

‘Only she said go on over,’ the same woman who’d shared it with him before said.

‘You’re welcome. Sure, there’s nowhere else.’

‘Isn’t that the bad news?’ She nodded at the headline in his paper. A taxi-driver had been shot dead the evening before, the first murder since the cease-fires.

‘Aye,’ Blakely said. ‘It is that.’

She was dressed as she’d been before, in shades of fawn and brown — a skirt and cardigan, cream blouse, under the coat she’d taken off. There was a brooch, made to look like a flower, in her blouse.

‘The plate’s hot, Mr Blakely,’ Nellie warned, placing roast beef and potatoes and cabbage in front of him. She wiped the edge of the plate where gravy had left a residue.

‘Bread and butter and tea, Nellie,’ Mrs Kincaid ordered, remembering the name from the last time. ‘I don’t take much,’ she informed Blakely, ‘in the middle of the day. And jam,’ she called after the waitress.

‘It’s my main meal,’ Blakely explained, a note of mild justification in his tone.

‘Convenient, to go out for it.’

‘Ach, it is.’

‘You live in the town, Mr Blakely?’

‘A bit out.’

‘I thought maybe you would. You have the look of the open air.’

‘I’m a turkey farmer.’

‘Well, there you are.’

He worried a piece of beef into shreds, piled cabbage and potato on to his fork, soaking up a little gravy before conveying the lot to his mouth.

‘Not bad,’ he responded when he was asked if turkeys were fetching well.

‘Time was when turkeys were a Christmas trade and no more. Amn’t I right? Not that I know a thing about poultry.’

‘Oh, you’re right enough.’

‘I like the brown of a turkey. I’m told that’s unusual.’

‘It’s all white flesh they go for those times.’

‘You’d supply the supermarkets, would you?’

‘The most of it goes that way all right. Though there’s a few outlets locally.’

‘I have a room above Beatty’s.’

‘I sell to Beatty for Christmas.’

‘Well, there’s a coincidence for you!’

‘He’s a decent man, Henry Beatty.’

‘It’s not a bad little room.’

Further details were exchanged — about the room and then about the rearing, slaughtering and plucking of turkeys, the European regulations there were as regards hygiene and refrigeration. Divulging that she was a Belfast woman, Mrs Kincaid talked about the city. Blakely said he hadn’t been there since he lost his wife. She used to go for the shopping, he said. Brand’s, he said.

‘Oh, a great store, was Brand’s. You were always on the farm, Mr Blakely?’

‘Aye, I was.’

‘I was sorry to hear there about your wife.’

‘Aye.’

The plate of bread and butter arrived, with tea, and a small glass dish of gooseberry jam.

‘I’m a widow myself,’ Mrs Kincaid said.

‘Ah, well —’

‘I know, I know.’

That comment, spoken in a whisper, contrived to make one of the two widowings, contrived to isolate with quiet poignancy a common ground. There was for an instant the feeling at the table that death had struck almost simultaneously. This feeling, for Mrs Kincaid, was a theatrical effect, since in her case no death, no widowing, had occurred. For Blakely, it was real. He finished the food he had been brought. Jelly with sponge-cake in it was placed before him, with a pot of tea.

‘Are you far out of the town?’ Mrs Kincaid asked.

‘Ah, no. Not far.’

‘I sometimes come to a quiet town for a rest. A resort most times. But this time of year they’re lonely enough yet.’

‘They would be surely.’

Shortly after that Blakely folded his newspaper into the side pocket of his jacket. He picked up his cap from the knob at the top of his chair. He said good-bye to Mrs Kincaid and went to pay his bill at the counter.

‘Who is she, that woman?’ Mrs Hirrell asked him in a whisper, and he said that Mrs Kincaid was lodging above Beatty’s butcher’s shop. He didn’t know her name, he said, a Belfast woman in the town for a rest.

*

After that, Blakely found himself running into Mrs Kincaid quite often. She sat at his table in Hirrell’s Café even when on one occasion there was an empty table just inside the door. She was in Blundell’s News and Confectionery when he went in for his paper one day. Another time she was a mile out on the road when he was driving back to the farm and he waved at her and she waved back. A few days later she was there again with an umbrella up and he stopped, feeling he should offer her a lift.

‘Well, now, that’s very nice of you,’ she said.

‘Where’re you heading?’

Mrs Kincaid said nowhere in particular. Just a daunder, she said, to fill in the afternoon. ‘My name’s Mrs Kincaid,’ she added, since this information had not been given before, and went on to enquire if he ever felt that afternoons hung heavy.