William Trevor - The Hill Bachelors

Blakely replied that any hour of the day was the same to him. He tried to sound polite, picking out the right words, not wishing to seem brusque. ‘That’s Madole’s,’ he said as they passed a field with the gate wide open. Spring ploughing was in progress, Madole’s man, Quin, on the tractor. Madole had a lot of land, Blakely explained, some of it stretching right back to the town’s outskirts.

‘Here’s my own few acres,’ he said when his pink-washed roadside farmhouse and turkey sheds came into view. ‘Would I drop you? I’d say the rain’s stopped.’ Specks had come on to the windscreen after he’d turned off the wipers five minutes ago, but already they were drying away. There used to be a Kincaid in Lower Bridge Street one time, a dentist, before the present man came.

‘It’ll be a nice walk back,’ she said, getting out of the car when Blakely drew it up before turning into his yard. She thanked him. ‘What’s on ahead, though?’

‘Loughdoon. Three-quarters of a mile.’

‘I’ll take a look at it.’

‘It’s only small.’

‘I like a small place.’

The Lacky sisters — twins of forty-five — were in the plucking shed, with the birds that were ready strung up along a rafter. The sisters were in their similar black and grey overalls, their similarly crowded teeth hugely exposed as soon as their employer entered the shed, their reddish hair bulging out of the cloth caps they wore. They had been plucking Blakely’s turkeys for him for twenty-nine years, since their childhood. Quin came over when Madole gave him his time off, to help around the place in any way that was necessary.

Blakely nodded at the two women. They’d done well. He counted the prepared turkeys, sixteen of them. Two dozen were to be ready for the carrier when he called at four and they’d easily make that. The Lacky sisters threw back their heads and acknowledged his compliment by laughing shrilly. They couldn’t have seen the woman he’d given a lift to, they wouldn’t have heard the voices. People would be talking in Hirrel’s about the way she always sat at his table, but what could he do about it? And he couldn’t have passed her by on the road with rain falling. He put the car away in the lean- to and set off to repair a fence that had been in need of attention for a long while. His two sheepdogs went with him, loping along at his heels.

The job took longer than he’d estimated. By the time he’d finished it the carrier had been and the Lackys had gone home. The dogs began to bark when he was mixing the evening feed.

‘Now that’s for you,’ Mrs Kincaid said, holding out something in a brown-paper bag. It was raining lightly, but she’d taken her umbrella down. ‘I sheltered in Mullin’s,’ she said. ‘That’s a comfy wee bar he has there.’

Blakely stared at the bag she held out to him. ‘What is it?’ he said.

She smiled, shaking her head to indicate he’d have to find out himself. ‘Cheer you up, Mr Blakely.’

He didn’t want to accept a present from her. There was no call for her to give him a present. There was no call for her to come into the yard, looking for him.

‘No need,’ he said, taking a bottle of Bushmills whiskey from the damp paper bag. ‘No,’ he protested. The two sheepdogs, which he had pointed into a corner, had begun to creep forward on their haunches. ‘Ah, no,’ he said, handing back the bottle and the bag. ‘Ah no, no.’

The rain was getting heavier. ‘Would you mind if I stood in your turf shed for a minute?’ she said. ‘You get on with your work, Mr Blakely. The little offering’s for your kindness, letting me share your table and that. Mullin said you took a glass like the next man.’

‘I can’t take this from you.’

‘It’s nothing, Mr Blakely.’

‘Come into the kitchen till it clears.’

She said she didn’t want to interrupt him, but he led the way into the house, not saying anything himself. In the kitchen he pulled the damper out on the Rayburn to warm the place up. The bottle and the bag were on the table.

‘You’re looking frozen, Mr Blakely,’ she said, surprising him by taking two glasses from the dresser. She opened the bottle and poured whiskey for both of them. It was nothing, she said again.

It wasn’t an evening when Quin came, which Blakely was glad about. The Lackys couldn’t have missed her on the road, but they wouldn’t have known who she was and they’d never have guessed she’d turn in to the yard.

‘He told me about you,’ she was saying now. ‘Mr Mullin did.’

‘I go in there the odd time.’

‘He told me about the loss of your wife. How it was. And your daughter, of course.’

Blakely didn’t say anything. The whiskey was warm in his chest. In spite of what Mullin had said he wasn’t a drinking man, but he appreciated a drop of Bushmills. A going-away present, she said.

‘You’re going back soon?’ he asked, not pressing the question, keeping it casual.

She had taken her coat off. She was wearing a blue dress with tiny flashes of red in it, like pencil dots. There was a scarf, entirely red, tucked in at the top. At the table one leg was crossed over the other, both knees shiny because the stocking material was taut. Her umbrella was cocked up on the flags to dry.

‘Sooner or later,’ she said. ‘Cheers!’

She added more to both their glasses when he’d taken another mouthful. She looked round the kitchen and said it was lovely. ‘Mabel,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Mabel Kincaid.’

The rain was heavy now, rattling on the window panes. The Rayburn had begun to roar. He got up to push the damper in a bit.

‘That’s the mother and father of a shower,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘You never smile, Mr Blakely.’

Blakely was embarrassed by that. ‘I think maybe I’m a dour kind of man.’

‘You’re not at all. But after what I heard I wouldn’t blame you.’

She asked if he had always lived in this house, and he said he had. His father bought the few fields from Madole, farming pigs in those days. It was the Madoles who’d built the house and they’d built it without foundations, which his father didn’t know until after he’d bought it, didn’t know that was why he’d got it cheap.

‘A big family was it, Mr Blakely?’

He shook his head. A family of four, he said, one more than his own family, later on. ‘I have a brother, Willie John.’

As soon as he mentioned Willie John’s name Willie John laughed silently in Blakely’s recall, his big jaw split, the freckles around his eyes merging as the flesh puckered. Huge and ungainly, ham-fisted their father called him before the first fruits of those same hands were completed — a twin-engined Dewoitine 510, built from a kit.

‘We used to fly them out in the fields.’ He didn’t know why he told her; he hadn’t meant to, but sometimes, with whiskey, he was garrulous, even though he still hadn’t drunk much. Drink had a way of bringing things to life for him and he felt it doing that now. A Messerschmitt came to rest in a clump of nettles and Willie John gingerly rescued it, noting the damage to the tail-piece and one of the wings. His own Black Widow took off, airborne until the lighter fuel in the engine ran out. It glided down on to the cropped grass. Bloody marvellous, Willie John said.

‘Just the two of you,’ she said. ‘I was an only myself.’

‘Willie John got out when the troubles began. I get a card, Christmas time. Denver, Colorado.’

The telephone rang in the hall. It was Nathan Smith from Ulsterfare with the order for next week. When they finished talking about the turkeys Nathan said his daughter had got herself engaged.

‘I heard it. Isn’t that great, Nathan?’

‘It is surely. All we need now is the quiet’ll last for the wedding. Thursday will we say for the order?’