Cheating at Canasta (21 page)

But shadowing these reflections, and belittling them, was what Hester bore so stocially. It stalked the past, and was in charge of all the time that now was left. And yet, for Bartholomew, his own trouble was the greater agony; he could not help it that this was so and in a familiar manner guilt began. That day he did more in the house, taking on his sister’s tasks.

‘What courage you have!’ Bartholomew said when autumn had passed, and winter too.

Hester shook her head. Courage came with misfortune; she took no credit for it. She asked for primroses and watched while Bartholomew picked them from the bank where they grew. That night they were on her bedside table, in a glass there’d been at Maunder Street.

‘Why did they give me that awful name?’ she asked when Bartholomew came to her later, to say goodnight. The name had come from somewhere outside the family; she wondered where. When Bartholomew was born they said it was the day the Huguenots had been slaughtered in France.

‘I’ve brought you Ovaltine,’ he said.

It made her sleep, or was supposed to, but when he came with tea in the mornings he didn’t ask if she had lain awake. The nights were long. He brought the tea as early as he could.

On Sundays she could no longer manage the journey to church; but messages came from the Oscarey parishioners, prayers were said for her. ‘O, Lord,’ she imagined Bartholomew pleading on her behalf, ‘look down from heaven, and relieve Thy servant…Look down upon her with the eyes of Thy mercy…give her comfort and sure confidence in Thee…’

This was the form she preferred; and she knew as she lay in her bed in the stillness of the rectory that these were the words said.

Bartholomew wondered if, afterwards, he would want to go away; if, without her, his own misfortune would be a desolation he could not bear. Back to the northside, he thought, which he knew better than the rest of Dublin. There would be employment of some kind; of any kind, he didn’t much mind what, provided only that he was capable of whatever it was. He wondered about helping in one of the shops or a bed-and-breakfast house. Middle-aged now, the youths he had worked among might be able at least to find him something, if not to employ him. And yet it seemed ridiculous that he should even consider such a dramatic move. He knew he would remain, and be silent.

‘How tidy it is!’ Hester murmured. ‘Living for your while, then not being there any more. How well arranged!’

There was contentment in how she put it, and in her tone. Bartholomew sensed that and, concerned with her again, rather than with himself, he was pleased. His deception of her and of his scanty congregations would one day assault his conscience, would one day make continuing impossible, but at least she would not have to know.

When the time came, Hester knew that she would die that night.

Bartholomew was with her. There was no sentiment, she didn’t speak, and Bartholomew sensed that there suddenly was only pain. God’s will, he knew, was what she repeated to herself, as she had since she’d realized her illness was a visitation that would only end as it was ending now. The intensity of her faith, the sureness of her trust, was unaffected by the pain she suffered, and he prayed that she would close her eyes and die. Yet she did not, and Bartholomew telephoned to request that more morphine should be brought.

‘No, I can manage,’ she whispered, hearing this plea, although he had made it in another room. No doctor was available; a message had had to be left. ‘Soon,’ Hester said, her voice just audible, no more. ‘It will be soon.’ She asked for Communion then.

Outside, a frost had stayed all that day and, icing over now, still whitened the small garden, the patch of grass, the fields beyond. Bartholomew stood by the window, watching another dusk becoming dark, wishing there was not now, unknown to her, a gulf between them. Her courage was her belief, a dignity in her need, her eternal life already lit, its stately angels waiting to take her to the mansions of their paradise, and choral voices singing.

When Bartholomew returned to the bedside she was quiet. Then she spoke incomprehensibly. She winced, her closed eyes tightening, her head jerking on the pillow; and he went again to the telephone. ‘Please,’ he begged. ‘Please.’ But there was still a message. He said a little more, whispering now, the desperation in his voice concealed. Outside, a blackbird, tame in the garden, scratched at the frost.

‘Hester,’ he said, again beside her, and there was no response; he had not expected one. She would die and still be here and nowhere else: in his dissent he could not escape that. ‘There will be nothing,’ he might have said, and wanted to share with her his anguish, as she shared the ordeal of death with him.

‘Hester,’ he murmured.

She turned away, shuddering off a convulsion as best she could, but another came and she was restless. Confused, she tried to sit up and he eased her back to the pillows. For a moment then her eyes were clear, her contorted features loosened and were calm. Bartholomew knew that pain was taken from her and that she shed, in this first moment of her eternity, her too-long, gnawing discontent; that peace, elusive for a lifetime, had come at last.

He reached out for her hand and felt it warm in his. ‘Thank you,’ he thought she said, but knew she had not. He gazed for a little longer at the dead features before he drew the sheet up.

He made the telephone calls that were necessary, cancelling the message that requested morphine, informing an undertaker. He tidied the room, clearing away medicine, a cup and saucer.

He sat downstairs, close to the fire, for it was colder now. He remembered days there had been, and Maunder Street, the games they played in the backyard, the afternoon Hester took him into the Botanic Gardens, another time to see a band going by in the streets.

Bartholomew watched the fire become embers, not taking anything to eat, disturbed by no one. That night he slept fitfully and woke often, his sister’s death entangled in his dreams with his own deprivation. He woke often, and soon after dawn he went to Hester’s room.

When he drew down the sheet the moment of calm was still caught in her features. He stayed with her, the mercy of her tranquillity seeming to be a miracle that was real, as it had been in the instant of death. Heaven enough, and more than angels.

Folie à Deux

Aware of a presence close to him, Wilby glances up from the book he has just begun to read. The man standing there says nothing. He doesn’t smile. A dishcloth hangs from where it’s tucked into grubby apron-strings knotted at the front, and Wilby assumes that the man is an envoy sent from the kitchen to apologize for the delay in the cooking of the fish he has ordered.

The place is modest, in rue Piques off rue de Sévres: Wilby didn’t notice what it is called. A café as much as a brasserie, it is poorly illuminated except for the bar, at which a couple are hunched over their glasses, conversing softly. One of the few tables belonging to the café is occupied by four elderly women playing cards and there are a few people at tables in the brasserie.

Still without communicating, the man who has come from the kitchen turns and goes away, leaving Wilby with the impression that he has been mistaken for someone else. He pours himself more wine and reads again. Wilby reads a lot, and drinks a lot.

He is a spare, sharp-faced man in his forties, clean-shaven, in a grey suit, with a striped blue-and-red tie almost but not quite striking a stylish note. He visits Paris once in a while to make the rounds of salerooms specializing in rare postage stamps, usually spinning out his time when he is there, since he can afford to. Three years ago he inherited his family’s wine business in County Westmeath, which he sold eighteen months later, planning to live on the proceeds while he indulged his interest in philately. He occupies, alone now, the house he inherited at that time also, creeper-clad, just outside the Westmeath town where he was born. Marriage failed him there, or he it, and he doubts that he will make another attemptin that direction.

His food is brought to him by a small, old waiter, a more presentable figure than the man who came and went. He is attentive, addressing Wilby in conventional waiter’s terms and supplying, when they are asked for, salt and pepper from another table. ‘
Voilaà, monsieur
,’ he murmurs, his tone apologetic.

Wilby eats his fish, wondering what fish it is. He knew when he ordered it but has since forgotten, and the taste doesn’t tell him much. The bread is the best part of his meal and he catches the waiter’s attention to ask for more. His book is a paperback he has read before,
The Hand of Ethelberta
.

He reads another page, orders more wine, finishes the
pommes frites
but not the fish. He likes quiet places, and doesn’t hurry. He orders coffee and—though not intending to—a calvados. He drinks too much, he tells himself, and restrains the inclination to have another when the coffee comes. He reads again, indulging the pleasure of being in Paris, in a brasserie where Muzak isn’t playing, at a small corner table, engrossed in a story that’s familiar yet has receded sufficiently to be blurred in places, like something good remembered. He never minds it when the food isn’t up to much; wine matters more, and peace. He’ll walk back to the Hôtel Merneuil; with luck he’ll be successful in the salerooms tomorrow.

He gestures for his bill, and pays. The old waiter has his overcoat ready for him at the door, and Wilby tips him a little for that. Outside, being late November, the night is chilly.

The man who came to look at him is there on the street, dressed as he was then. He stands still, not speaking. He might have come outside to have a cigarette, as waiters sometimes do. But there is no cigarette.

‘
Bonsoir
,’ Wilby says.

‘
Bonsoir
.’

Saying that, quite suddenly the man is someone else. A resemblance flickers: the smooth black hair, the head like the rounded end of a bullet, the fringe that is not as once it was but is still a fringe, the dark eyes. There is a way of standing, without unease or agitation and yet awkward, hands lank, open.

‘What is all this?’ Even as he puts the question, Wilby’s choice of words sounds absurd to him. ‘Anthony?’ he says.

There is a movement, a hand’s half gesture, meaningless, hardly a response. Then the man turns away, entering the brasserie by another door.

‘Anthony,’ Wilby mutters again, but only to himself.

People have said that Anthony is dead.

The streets are emptier than they were, the bustle of the pavements gone. Obedient to pedestrian lights at rue de Babylone where there is fast-moving traffic again, Wilby waits with a woman in a pale waterproof coat, her legs slim beneath it, blonde hair brushed up. Not wanting to think about Anthony, he wonders if she’s a tart, since she has that look, and for a moment sees her pale coat thrown down in some small room, the glow of an electric fire, money placed on a dressing-table: now and again when he travels he has a woman. But this one doesn’t glance at him, and the red light changes to green.

It couldn’t possibly have been Anthony, of course it couldn’t. Even assuming that Anthony is alive, why would he be employed as a kitchen worker in Paris? ‘Yes, I’m afraid we fear the worst,’ his father said on the telephone, years ago now. ‘He sent a few belongings here, but that’s a good while back. A note to you, unfinished, was caught up in the pages of a book. Nothing in it, really. Your name, no more.’

In rue du Bac there is a window Wilby likes, with prints of the Revolution. The display has hardly changed since he was here last: the death of Marie Antoinette, the Girondists on their way to the guillotine, the storming of the Bastille, Danton’s death, Robespierre triumphant, Robespierre fallen from grace. Details aren’t easy to make out in the dim street-light. Prints he hasn’t seen before are indistinguishable at the back.

At a bar he has another calvados. He said himself when people asked him—a few had once—that he, too, imagined Anthony was dead. A disappearance so prolonged, with no reports of even a glimpse as the years advanced, did appear to confirm a conclusion that became less tentative, and in the end wasn’t tentative at all.

In rue Montalembert a couple ask for directions to the Métro. Wilby points it out, walking back a little way with them to do so, as grateful for this interruption as he was when the woman at the traffic crossing caught his interest.

‘
Bonne nuit, monsieur
.’ In the hall of the Hôtel Merneuil the night porter holds open the lift doors. He closes them and the lift begins its smooth ascent. ‘The will to go on can fall away, you know,’ Anthony’s father said on the telephone again, in touch to find out if there was anything to report.

Monsieur Jothy shakes his head over the pay packet that hasn’t been picked up. It’s on the windowsill above the sinks, where others have been ignored too. He writes a message on it and props it against an empty bottle.

At this late hour Monsieur Jothy has the kitchen to himself, a time for assessing what needs to be ordered, for satisfying himself that, in general, the kitchen is managing. He picks up Jean-André’s note of what he particularly requires for tomorrow, and checks the shelves where the cleaning materials are kept. He has recently become suspicious of Jean-André, suspecting short-cuts.

His risotto, once an attraction on the menu, is scarcely ever ordered now; and with reason in Monsieur Jothy’s opinion, since it has lost the intensity of flavour that made it popular, and is often dry. But the kitchen at least is clean, and Monsieur Jothy, examining cutlery and plates, fails to find food clinging anywhere, or a rim left on a cup. Once he employed two dish-washers at the sinks, but now one does it on his own, and half the time forgets his wages. Anxious to keep him, Monsieur Jothy has wondered about finding somewhere for him to sleep on the premises instead of having the long journey to and from his room. But there isn’t even a corner of a pantry, and when he asked in the neighbourhood about accommodation near rue Piques he was also unsuccessful.