The Little Red Chairs (25 page)

‘Never puts the teeth in anyone now … or hardly ever,’ she said and Mr Fitzpatrick replied with little taps on her collarbone, like the tapping of a baton.

‘You’ll get to love one of them and that’ll be it … that’s how it happens … you’ll look back on this day as a big stepping stone in your life,’ she said, as she encouraged Fidelma to give Mr Fitzpatrick a petting.

It was time to lock up. Night descending, long before night itself. On their raised beds the dogs lay close to one another, except for Bella who slept apart. Did they dream. According to Tracy, yes. They dreamt, they ran races, their legs jigging, running the Grand National all over again. She said then that they had short memories and would sleep and sleep until the sound of the first car the following morning.

As they tiptoed out, up steps and across the yard, Fidelma looked back at the building, so silent, such a forsaken quality to it now.

*

In the room above the pub Fidelma hears murmurs, but not too loud. There is the steady drone from the two large television screens and being poker night, all is quiet and intent. She bought fish and chips from the van that was parked nearby, a selection of cockles, winkles, prawns and mussels, and ate them quickly, but the chips had gone a bit sodden. Then she takes a slug from the bottle of prune syrup, which she’d bought on the way in the Costcutter where Bluey stopped to get a special honey for his wife, who was finicky. The sweet taste of the syrup brought back memories of home. She had a sudden picture of Jack in their
kitchen, fending for himself and it was like they were two people in some vast ruin, who, although they could not communicate, still knew of each other’s existence and one day would have to meet.
O there above the little grave we kissed again with tears.
She picked up a leaflet from the pile Lara had given her and read about the hounds, pushed to their physical limits, their short careers and injuries from racing on small, tight-cornered tracks and soon, unwanted to face an uncertain future.

She put it down hurriedly and went downstairs.

In the bar, no one bothers her. The poker players are very intense and barely speak, except to acknowledge some annoyance or some coup.

‘Okay darlin’,’ one man called across and his friend told her not to mind him. On the next bench is a woman in an eau de nil dress with short puff sleeves and a frill around the hem. She is a very large woman, sitting so close to her man that she is almost like a jelly, moulded into him. They barely talk, but they are as one. All of it so temperate, so still. Fidelma is drinking a concoction of soda and crème de menthe, which the girl behind the counter recommended to her as a sedative. Behind her, on the windowsill, there are a few flowers in a small vase and when she touches one, she jumps in terror, dismayed by that tenderness, that touch.

A Letter

The letterhead had the name of the convent and the handwriting was scratchy.

Well, my dear Fidelma, you must have wondered what happened to your old Bony, for not being in touch. I nearly left earth for the higher kingdom. What happened was this: I was bringing a beautiful vestment over for a young priest in Manor Hamilton and I stopped off here at the chapel to get some bottles of Holy Water, but when I got into my car to set out I felt very strange in my head, I was sort of out of it. So I said to myself, ‘Don’t drive Bony, just sit and let it pass,’ and so I did and apparently was there for an hour or maybe more. It was the grace of God that Father Eustace happened to be passing by, going into the chapel for Evening Mass and saw me slouched at the wheel. The upshot was I ended up in the regional hospital, not knowing where I was or who I was. I’d had a stroke, which affected the whole right side of my body, including my brain. Couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, couldn’t anything. For two weeks I was out of it and then I was moved to another hospital for the slow recovery, which entailed vigorous physiotherapy and psychotherapy. Learning to walk and talk again, like a child, taught me a lesson, of just how fragile we humans are and how grateful we should be. My illness and the seemingly miraculous recovery was written up in the local paper, along
with
a photograph of yours truly at the car boot sale with my pots of jam and marmalade. I received over one thousand messages of sympathy and Mass cards and as soon as I was able to read them I began to feel better, I realised I was wanted. I believe it was those good wishes, in all their sincerity, along with the marvellous nurses and doctors that implored the Lord for the miracle. After many weeks I am slowly walking and my speech is back, though I can suddenly forget a name and it vexes me. Our Lord and Our Lady were watching over me and my faith is my rock. I have thought of you a lot and the one thing I keep praying for and will not cease to pray for is to see Jack shaking your hand in forgiveness. I pray for that. I believe he has got very thin and often refuses food. Peggy says he is starving himself to punish us. How are you in that big lonely city, where I have heard that over one hundred different languages are spoken? I tend not to look at the prison wall of life, but to look up at the sky, as it is more beautiful and more spacious. Try to do that and remember that you are wanted. Your good friend, old Bonaventure.

James

A man called James had returned to collect his dog, Jenny, who had been boarding for a few days. Jenny fretted, did not eat or mix with the other dogs and constantly listened with eyes and ears for her master’s return. When she saw him, she scaled the wire mesh, both sets of paws thudding on it, delirious to be reunited, and when she was let out, he almost keeled over in the welcome he received. Then she rolled and rerolled on the floor to proclaim her joy. He was a tall, lean man with sallow skin, his hair silvered, and he wore a leather jerkin over his knitted pullover. His eyes, which were deep-set, were grey and yet with a wonderful alertness. The way he broached it was so subtle, stroking Jenny all the while, saying that there was a spare room in his house, which she was welcome to, should she wish it. Had Tracy been talking to him, giving a hint? The pub was friendly but in truth, a bit shambolic and the prospect of a quiet room in a house, and probably the use of the kitchen, appealed to her. He mentioned then that he went away every six weeks and she would be left to herself, to keep watch.

‘His house is ever so lovely,’ Tracy, who had overheard him, said and mentioned a visit one summer, cream tea in the garden and hollyhocks as tall as himself.

‘I’m sure it’s lovely,’ Fidelma said, that bit shy, but inside she was euphoric.

The following Saturday, which was her day off, he came to
pick her up. She had just the one small suitcase, the rest of her clobber in an open basket. The staff in the pub made a point of coming out to see her off, even though she was only going five miles away and the manager had presented her with a bottle of port. James rolled the hood down and soon they were on a narrow road that had once been a highway and was the major route between London and the outback. Trunks of trees from the high bank on one side bent forward, as if they might topple onto the road. Green light and leaves in a ceaseless rustle, as he drove from hamlet to hamlet, all with the long-ago names, Pilgrim’s Hatch, South Weald, Sandpit Lane, and after a few miles they came to his small village, which was a hamlet really. There was a pub, a post office, a few coloured timber houses and a church with its bell tower, built, as he said, from old Roman bricks and stone. His cottage, which was an old almshouse, was one of four, at the very end, by a lane with a public footpath that led to fields and woodlands beyond. The small porch was smothered with wisteria, light blue fobs in thickets of green, with fat bees buzzing inside it.

The kitchen was stone-floored and dark, because not much light came from the mullioned window, and he indicated a few practical things, including where the matches were kept, in an alcove above the gas stove. Then it was into the little pantry, muslin cloths over cheese and butter, because he believed that refrigerators killed the taste of certain things. A little refrigerator stood on a trestle table, bravely emitting the odd juddery lurch. He said that for the most part they would eat separately, since he kept odd hours, stuck in his habits, a bit of a curmudgeon from living alone. However, the place was hers to feel at home in. It was with something of a flourish that he led her to the next room, which he called his ‘snug’. It was cluttered with
books and guide books, papers everywhere, on the table and on a long stool under the table, on a desk, the floor and the one windowsill. He confessed that since retiring as a teacher, he was writing something, which he reckoned would never be finished and which he probably never intended to finish. In one corner, on a whatnot, she saw a silver tray with a whisky bottle, a jug for water and a single cut glass. A fire of sorts flickered in the small grate and he said he always had a peat fire going, because he liked the smell and so did Jenny –
Don’t you
. Jenny leapt and went ahead of them up the steep stairs to the room that was to be for Fidelma.

A small room, it looked out onto a garden, where there were borders of yellow tulips, the centrepiece being a huge boulder, which he told her was of Scottish granite and which he and his wife had hauled from a garden centre, one Saturday. It had been fitted with a fountain and for a time, that fountain flourished. There was a womanly touch to the room, the cotton coverlet on the single bed bleached white, with traces of roses, and a picture of a young barefoot girl in a haze of gold with a mop of golden hair, which must surely be that absent wife. He left the room suddenly, as there was something he had forgotten. Alone, she stood spellbound in front of a little bureau with a lace runner and thought, I can sit here, I can read my books here, I can write my diary here and I can feel safe. Then she touched the various shells in a bowl that other hands had picked on a seashore and put there. He returned with a wooden rocking chair, which he set down to face the window, Jenny all the while frothing with excitement. When she enquired about the rent he was evasive, he said to pay whatever she could afford, to put it in a jug down in the kitchen window, and if there were times that she wanted
to indulge in the haute couture of Brentwood, the rent could be postponed.

*

That summer was scorching. Hotter than the Sahara as people said and the workmen in the kennels were bare-chested, wore shorts, larking and pouring buckets of water over each other. The dogs felt it too. Many sat far back in their beds to escape even a ray of sunlight and some panted and others shivered in the heat. Fidelma had to put wet cloths over them, to keep them cool and strangely, she came to grow a little fonder of them. It was something to do with the cloth between them and her, a shield, as if naked intimacy was once removed and she no longer retched from the pervading smell. She had a soft spot for one called Lola, who was smaller than the others and with affectionate eyes, but the big affiliation, the
You’ll fall in love with one and that’ll be it
that Tracy had predicted, did not transpire. However, she saw the little things that made them happy and the joy each morning when she and Lara arrived at six thirty, that gratitude at night being over. Then it was the brisk morning routine, making sure there were no illnesses, then taking them to an enclosure that overlooked the field, cleaning their beds, forking the shredded paper or removing it, then the floors, first scrubbed and then rinsed one after the other, and finally the entire place hosed down. Volunteers arrived around eight and the front hall was all agog, chatter, cups of tea or coffee, the radio on low, with music and phone-ins and every hour news bulletins, which she did not listen to, because she did not want to engage with the world outside.

*

It was her day off, but she still wakened at five and hurried out to sit in the garden, the grass covered in dew and a small bed of mauve flowers opening their petals to the world, just like daisies. Despite burning the midnight oil, James also rose early, because Jenny wished it, Jenny it seemed was something of a sun worshipper and had to be up in the woods to salute it. Normally he went by with his mug of tea and gave a mere nod, but on this particular morning he had something to show her.

They walked along a track with fields on either side, corn and rapeseed, gold and yellow in a patchwork of glory, Jenny sniffing the ground and every so often turning to her master, with a friendly chattering of her teeth. It was why he had chosen her, having walked several dogs in the kennels, trying to decide which one to adopt, but Jenny bewitched him with this conversational trick of hers.

The wood they came to was immense, a sacred wood as he said, beech, chestnut, ash and most of all oak, in their full splendour, and the ground underneath a carpet of soft wavy young fern. The walk was winding and they were mainly silent, until they came to what he had promised to show her. She recognised it as they approached. It was an oak tree, riven apart by lightning, the bark black and charred, a tree that had died and yet, as he said, in one part of itself it lived. On the opposite side, young branches in leaf extended in all directions, a freak of nature, dead on one side and living on the other, a reason to hope. Circling it were the badger burrows, their round openings clogged with clay, as a decoy and long deep tunnels stretching far within. The badgers themselves were already on the prowl. Jenny whined and chafed
at being tied up, because she could smell prey, but as he said, if she were let loose, she would be gone in ten seconds, her hound’s instinct returned, sprinting like a cheetah.