William Trevor - The Hill Bachelors

‘No problem, Nathan.’

In the kitchen she was on her feet with the frying-pan in her hand. The frying-pan had the breakfast fat congealed on it. She’d taken rashers out of the fridge and had lifted up one of the covers of the Rayburn. There were knives and forks on the table.

‘I was hoping you’d be longer,’ she said. ‘I had a surprise planned.’

‘Oh, look —’

‘Sit down and take another drop. It’s still at it cats and dogs. You have sausages in there. Would you take a couple?’

‘The rain’s no worry. I can run you back.’

She shook her head. She’d never ask a man who’d been drinking to drive. She spread four rashers on the fat of the pan and put the pan on the heat. She pricked four sausages on the draining-board. ‘Have you eggs?’ she said.

He brought in a bowl of eggs from the scullery. A woman hadn’t cooked in the kitchen since Hetty and Jacqueline died. He couldn’t remember that a woman had even been in the house since the last of the funeral guests stepped out of it, certainly not the Lackys. He shouldn’t have talked about Willie John like that. Talk had encouraged her. He shouldn’t have taken the Bushmills.

‘When it clears up I’ll walk it,’ she said. ‘I’m only filling in the time, Mr Blakely.’

‘I’ll drive you in,’ he insisted. ‘I’m well known. They won’t stop me.’

*

Mrs Kincaid undressed herself, thinking about him. He was a finished man. The man in the bar had said as much. He’d been destroyed by the troubles, but even so he kept going, with his turkeys and the two queer-looking women she’d met on the road working for him, feathers all over their overalls. His dinner every day in a café that overcharged you, his memories of toy aeroplanes, the wife and daughter never talked about: that was it for him. A Christmas card from Denver kept his spirits up.

Removing the last of her underclothes, Mrs Kincaid guessed that he was thinking about her also, that he might even be seeing her as she was in this very minute. Finished or not, there was always a spark that could be kindled. An old hand at that, Mrs Kincaid didn’t have to ask herself whether or not, today, she had done so. She had broken her resolve and she wondered as she buttoned her nightdress if she had the will to draw back now, to move on tomorrow, before things went any further. She lay for a moment with the bedside light on, then reached out and turned it off. She felt as she had often felt when she got to this stage in a bit of business — that some shadow of herself was having its way with her, that if eighty-four thousand pounds hadn’t been lifted off her she’d be a different woman entirely.

‘Left high and dry,’ she murmured in the darkness, applying the expression to the turkey farmer, dozily remembering that it was the one she had used about herself when she’d suffered her calamity.

*

On the morning after the evening of Mrs Kincaid’s visit to his house Blakely was aware of not minding if people had seen her in his car when he’d driven her to her room above Beatty’s shop. Her company in his kitchen had not, in the end, been disagreeable. She had washed up the dishes from which they had eaten the food she’d cooked. She had been sympathetic about several matters, and before they left he had shown her the plucking and dressing sheds even though he’d told himself he shouldn’t. ‘Isn’t it lonely for you?’ she’d said.

She wasn’t in Hirrel’s that day, nor the next. She’ll have gone, Blakely thought. She had bought him the bottle and now she’d gone back to Belfast. He hadn’t been welcoming; he’d been cagey and suspicious, worried in case the Lackys knew she’d cooked his food, worried in case Quin walked in. He was thinking about her when he heard the dogs barking and her voice quietening them.

‘I was passing by,’ she said.

The friendship that began for Blakely when the Bushmills was poured again and when for the second time a meal was shared in his kitchen was later remarked upon in Hirrel’s and in the turkey sheds. Because of his trouble in the past people were pleased, and pleased again when the two were seen together on the steps of the Stella Four-Screen. Reports went round that they’d danced, one Friday night, in the Crest Ballroom; a corner of the bar in Digby’s Hotel became known as theirs.

Soon after that the Lackys met Mrs Kincaid, and Quin did. She was brought to Sunday lunch with the Reverend Johnston. One morning Blakely woke up aware of a deep longing for Mrs Kincaid, aware of a gentleness when he thought about her, of an impatience with himself for not declaring his feelings before this.

*

‘Oh no, dear, no.’

She said he was too good for her. Too good a man, she said, too steady a man, too well-set-up, too decent a man. She could bring nothing, she said, she would be coming empty-handed and that was never her way. Kincaid had left her no more than a pittance, she said, not expecting to be taken so soon, as no man would in the prime of his life. A few years ago Mrs Kincaid had heard talk of a Belfast man who’d electrocuted himself drilling holes in an outside wall: as the cause of Kincaid’s demise, that did well enough.

‘No, I never could,’ she repeated, surveying the astonishment she had known would appear in the lean features, the flush of the cheeks darkening. ‘You have your life the way it is,’ she said. ‘You have your memories. I’d never upset the way things are with you.’

He went silent. Was he thinking he’d made a fool of himself? she wondered. Would he finish his drink and that would be the end of it?

‘I’m on my own,’ he said.

They were in the bar of the hotel, the quiet time between six and seven. The day before she’d said she’d definitely be off at the end of the week. Refreshed and invigorated, she’d said.

‘I’m alone,’ he repeated.

‘Don’t I know you are? Didn’t I say you’d be lonely?’

‘What I’m saying to you —’

‘I know what you’re saying to me. What I’m saying to yourself is you’re set in your ways. You’re well-to-do, I haven’t much. Isn’t it about that too?’

‘It’s not money —’

‘There’s always money.’

The conversation softly became argument. Affection spread through it, real and contrived. It had been great knowing him, Mrs Kincaid said. You come to a place, you gain a friend; nothing was nicer. But Blakely was stubborn. There were feelings in this, he insisted; she couldn’t deny it.

‘I’m not. I’m not at all. I’m only trying to be fair to you. I have a Belfast woman’s caution in me.’

‘I’m as cautious myself as any man in Ulster. I have a name for it.’

‘You’re trusting the unknown all the same. Fair and square, hasn’t that to be said?’

‘You’re never unknown to me.’

‘When the cards are down I’m a woman you don’t know from a tinker.’

Blakely denied that with a gesture. He didn’t say anything. Mrs Kincaid said:

‘If I asked you for money, why would you give it to me? I wouldn’t do it, but if I did. Who’d blame you for shaking your head? If I said write me a cheque for two thousand pounds who’d blame you for saying no? No man in his senses would say anything else. If I said to you I’d keep that cheque by me, that I’d never pass it into the bank because it was only there as a bond of trust between us, you wouldn’t believe me.’

‘Why wouldn’t I trust you?’

‘That’s what I’m saying to you. I’m a woman turned up in the town to get away for a little while from the noise and bustle of the city. Who’d blame you if you’d say to yourself I wouldn’t trust her as far as an inch? When there’s trust between us, is what I’m saying, we’ll maybe talk about the other. D’you understand me, dear?’