By the Lake (22 page)

“The man who made the money is buying,” Jamesie rubbed his hands vigorously together. Through the bar window they could see all the way across the street to where a man was laying out trays of potted plants on a long trestle table. Jamesie wandered over to talk to the tinkers.

“Mister and Missus McDonough. You are most welcome to the town,” he said expansively, holding out his hand. They were delighted. Neither seemed to mind that they lived closer to the town than he did and were in the bar and the town long before he arrived.

“Good health, Luke.”

“Good luck and a long life,” Luke said. “I see your friend has left you.”

“He’ll be back,” Ruttledge said.

Ruttledge picked a time when he was fairly sure of finding Frank Dolan alone to see if he was interested in taking over the Shah’s business. At six the scrapyard would be closed. The Shah would be enthroned at his table in the Central. The men who waited about the sheds and scrapyard all day would have retired to their cottages. The little shops were already closed or closing as he drove through the town.

He found Frank Dolan in the main shed. He was in one of the deep pits examining an old JCB, the sheepdog lying close to his head on the edge of the pit. Recognizing him at once, the dog ran forward.

“He knows, he knows,” Frank Dolan said of the sheepdog
as he climbed the steps out of the deep pit. He was as besotted with the dog as his master was.

“If anybody else had walked up like that he’d have devoured them. In another hour there won’t be sight or light of him round the place. He’ll have disappeared to meet Himself coming from the Central. Isn’t that right?” he caught and roughed the dog playfully, who growled in turn and caught and held Frank Dolan by the wrist. When the dog released his hand, he wiped it with a cloth and offered Ruttledge a little finger in a gentle, comic apology for the oil-and-grease-stained hands.

The two men were friendly. They had known each other a long time without ever having been close. Frank’s grey eyes were humorous and sharply intelligent and over the years he had acquired a striking resemblance to his master, so much so that he was sometimes taken for his son by inexperienced commercial travellers. This was seen by both as highly compromising.

There was little similarity of feature but they had grown alike in the way they moved and stood and talked and listened. Through night classes and reading and the practical work of the shed, Frank had become knowledgeable and skilled. The Shah knew little about the newer machines; what he could do well was rough welding, meet customers he liked and buy and sell shrewdly. Each stayed well clear of the other’s territory.

“His lordship asked me to have a word with you on a small business matter,” Ruttledge said when pauses began to occur in the polite conversation.

Immediately, Frank Dolan assumed an apprehensive formality.

“It’s nothing unpleasant,” Ruttledge hastened to say. “Is it all right to talk here?”

“We’d be safer further back.” He was reassured but still apprehensive. He and the Shah shared a dislike of anything new or strange entering their world.

They moved through a clutter of old engines, cars, tractors,
machines, tools, benches, Frank Dolan patting the dog’s head as if for comfort. From the back it was possible to see how enormous the shed was, all the way out to the huge rounded arch.

“He wants to retire and is thinking of selling. Would you be interested?”

Frank Dolan’s face registered shock, washed clean of its everyday watchful expression, and was replaced by an intensity of feeling that was close to innocence. Ruttledge still hadn’t any idea what his response might be.

He looked long and seriously into Ruttledge’s face as he answered, “I would be very interested,” with a mixture of iron dignity and humility.

Ruttledge hadn’t been expecting anything as straightforward and uncomplicated. “He’s not too hard in what he’s asking,” he said and told him the price the Shah had agreed.

Frank Dolan looked steadily into Ruttledge’s face but did not make any comment on the price. “The big question: Can it be afforded? Can I get money?” he said as if thinking aloud to himself out of unnerving silence. “To be interested is the easy part.”

“Only you could know that, Frank.”

“How?” he asked bluntly and without guile.

“Do you have any savings or property?”

He had no property but had considerable savings, much more than Ruttledge would have guessed. “How though will the rest be got?” His tone changed, asking humbly, almost hopelessly.

“The way everybody else gets that sort of money. Apply for a loan. You must know all this yourself. I shouldn’t be telling you.”

“I don’t,” he said simply. “Would you help me?”

“Of course I would—as far as I’m able—but wouldn’t you be better with people closer to yourself?”

“Who?”

“Your family … relations … friends.”

“They can be the very worst,” he laughed. “You’d be better on your own than with some of that crowd.”

“I’ll help you if you want. I told his lordship that he should speak to you about this himself but he wouldn’t hear. Anyhow it’s done now.”

“That’s him all over,” he said with open confidence. “In some ways he’s the most terrible coward you could meet in a day’s walk. He’s a great show till something awkward turns up. Then he runs to other people. He’ll face nothing.”

Ruttledge smiled at the accuracy of the description that went beneath the surface and said, “God knows you have been observing him long enough to know. With all that I’m very fond of him.”

“We all are—except betimes—but you wouldn’t want to let on,” Frank Dolan said with emotion.

“I’ll tell him, then, that you
are
interested and we’ll go ahead from there,” Ruttledge said.

“If you wait another half-hour you’ll meet him coming from the hotel. Soon you’ll see the dog going to meet him. You and me won’t exist then.”

“I’ll tell him another time. There’s no use rushing anything with him. I hope it will all turn out lucky.”

“Please God,” Frank Dolan said as he walked him to the car, and for the first time it struck Ruttledge that there was something of an unorthodox monastic community about the ramshackle scrapyard and pumps and sheds and the small cottages. There wasn’t a woman anywhere in sight or in any of the small houses.

There were many days of wind and rain. Uneasy gusts ruffled the surface of the lake, sending it running this way and that. Occasionally, a rainbow arched all the way across the lake. More often the rainbows were as broken as the weather, appearing here and there in streaks or brilliant patches of colour in the unsettled sky. When rain wasn’t dripping from leaves or eaves, the air was so heavy it was like breathing rain. The hives were quiet. Only the midges swarmed.

The hard burnt colour of the freshly cut meadows softened and there was a blue tinge in the first growth of aftergrass that shone under the running winds. The bullfinch disappeared with the wild strawberries from the bank. The little vetches turned black. The berries on the rowans along the shore glowed with such redness it was clear why the rowan berry was used in ancient song to praise the lips of girls and women. The darting swifts and swallows hunted low above the fields and the half-light brought out the noisy blundering bats.

There was little outside work. The sheep and cattle were heavy and content on grass. Radish, lettuce, scallions, peas, broad beans were picked each day with the new potatoes. In the mornings Ruttledge worked at the few advertising commissions he had until they were all finished. Then he read or fished from the boat. Kate read or drew and sometimes walked or cycled round the shore to Mary and Jamesie.

Even more predictable than the rain, Bill Evans came every day. All his talk now was of the bus that would take him to the town. For some reason it had been postponed or delayed for a few weeks but each day he spoke of the imminent arrival of the bus. They were beginning to think of it as illusory as one of the small rainbows above the lake, when a squat, yellow minibus came slowly in around the shore early on Thursday morning and waited. In the evening the bus climbed past the alder tree and gate, and went all the way up the hill.

He had always been secretive about what happened in his
house or on the farm unless there was some glory or success that he could bask in; it was no different with the welfare home.

What he was forthcoming about was the bus and the people on the bus and the bus driver, Michael Pat. Already, he had become Michael Pat’s right-hand man: the two of them ran the bus together and he spoke of the other passengers with lordly condescension.

“I give Michael Pat great help getting them off the bus. Some of them aren’t half there. They’d make you laugh. Michael Pat said he wouldn’t have got on near as well without me and that I’m a gift. He’s calling for me first thing next Thursday. I sit beside him in the front seat and keep a watch.”

If a strange bird couldn’t cross the fields without Jamesie knowing, a big yellow minibus coming in round the shore wasn’t going to escape his notice, but he didn’t want to seem too obviously curious. He took a couple of days before cycling in round the shore. The Ruttledges knew at once what brought him and told him what they knew. They were inclined to make light of Bill Evans’s boasting.

He held up his hand in disagreement, knowing several people on the bus. “Take care. He may not be that far out. With people living longer there’s a whole new class who are neither in the world or the graveyard. Once they were miles above poor Bill in life. Some of them would have tossed him cigarettes after Mass on a Sunday. Now they are in wheelchairs and hardly able to cope. The bus takes them into town. It’s a great idea. They get washed and fed and attended to and it gives the relatives looking after them at home a break for the day. People fall very low through no fault of their own. Compared to some of the souls in that bus, Bill Evans is a millionaire.”

The bus was a special bus, with safety belts and handrails and a ramp for wheelchairs. The following Thursday Bill Evans sat in the front seat beside Michael Pat and waved and laughed towards the Ruttledges as the bus went slowly down to the
lake. Under the “No Smoking” sign he sat puffing away like an ocean-going liner. The faces that appeared at the other windows were strained with age and illness and looked out impassively. Many did not look out at all.

The Shah tried but could not conceal his impatience when he arrived at the house on Sunday. “Have you managed to get in to see that man yet on that business?”

“Did you not hear? Did he not tell you?”

“You must be joking. He’d tell you nothing. You might as well be dealing with a wall.”

“I was in. You had gone to the hotel. The place was practically closed.”

“Why didn’t you come down to the hotel? Herself is always asking. You could have had something to eat after your trouble.”

“It wasn’t any trouble.”

“Did you get a word out of him at all? It must have been like pulling teeth.”

“He was agreeable and sensible. He had plenty to say.”

“Well?” he demanded impatiently.