A Bit on the Side (9 page)

Still with time to spare, he parked and took a ticket from a machine. He locked his car and went to look for Davitt Street, where he enquired in a newsagent’s and was told that Lenehan and Clifferty’s office was four doors further on, what used to be the old Co-op Hardware.

‘Mr Clifferty won’t keep you a minute,’ the girl assured him in the spacious reception area where the day’s newspapers were laid out. Only last week’s
Irish Field
had been unfolded.

‘You were recommended to us, Mr Graillis?’ Clifferty asked, having apologized because there’d been a wait of much longer than a minute. He was a man in a tweed suit, with a tie of the same material, and garnet cufflinks. He was stylish for a country solicitor, his considerable bulk crowned by a full head of prematurely white hair. Graillis was less at ease in comparison, more humbly attired in corduroy trousers and an imitation suede jacket. He was an angular, thin man of fifty-nine, his fair hair receding and touched with grey.

‘You’re in the Golden Pages,’ he responded to the solicitor’s query.

He passed the envelope he’d brought with him across the green leather surface of a tidy desk that was embossed with a pattern at the corners. Clifferty extracted a folded sheet of writing paper and when he’d read its contents made a single note on a pad, then read the letter again.

‘She was a woman a while back,’ Graillis said.

‘Well, if I’ve got this right, you’re not attempting anything illegal, Mr Graillis. A legacy can be rejected.’

‘It’s that I was wondering about.’

Clifferty returned the letter to its envelope but didn’t hand it back. ‘These people are a reputable firm of solicitors. We do some business with them. I can write to say the inheritance is an embarrassment if that’s what you’d like me to do. The estate would be wound up in the usual way, with the proposed bequest left in as part of it.’

‘I wouldn’t want to turn my back on the thought that was there. Since I’m mentioned in the will I wouldn’t want to do that.’

‘You’re more than mentioned, Mr Graillis. From what’s indicated in the notification you received, no one much else is. Besides charities.’

Sensing the content of the solicitor’s thoughts, Graillis was aware of an instinct to contradict them. It was understandable that the interest of a country solicitor should be fed by what he assumed, that the routine of family law in a provincial town should make room for a hint of the dramatic. Graillis might have supplied the facts, but did not do so.

‘Maybe some small memento,’ he said. ‘Maybe an ornament or a piece of china. Anything like that.’

‘You’ve been left a sum of money that’s not inconsiderable, Mr Graillis.’

‘That’s why I drove over, though – to see could I accept a little thing instead.’

There’d been an ashtray with a goldfinch on it, but in case it had since been broken, he didn’t like to mention it. And there were dinner plates he’d always liked particularly, with a flowery edging in two shades of blue.

‘Just something, was what I thought. If it would be possible.’

When the snowdrops spread in clumps beneath the trees, she’d said he might like some and would have given him what she had picked already. Wrapped in damp newspaper, they would keep their freshness, she said, and he tried to remember how it was she broke off what she was saying when she realized her suggestion wasn’t possible. She had tried to settle the stems back in the water of the vase she’d taken them from but it was difficult, and then the floor was scattered with flowers gone limp already. It didn’t matter, she could pick some more, she said.

‘Oh, it would be possible, I’m sure,’ Clifferty said, ‘to have what you want. I only mention the other.’

The solicitor had a way of smoothing the wiry, reddish thicket of his eyebrows, a leisurely attention given first to one and then the other. He allowed himself this now, before he continued:

‘But I should tell you I would require a sight of the will before advising you on any part of it.’

‘Would they send it down from Dublin?’

‘They’d send a copy.’

Clifferty nodded saying that, the conversation over. He asked Graillis what line he was in and Graillis said he was in charge of the branch library in the town where he lived. He added that a long time ago he had been employed in the Munster and Leinster Bank there, in the days when the bank was still called that. He stood up.

‘Make an appointment with the girl outside for this day week, Mr Graillis,’ Clifferty said before they shook hands.

*

He drove slowly through flat, unchanging landscape and stopped when he had almost reached the town he was returning to. No other car was drawn up outside the Jack Doyle Inn, no bicycle leant against the silver-painted two-bar railings that protected its windows. Inside, the woman who served him called him by his name.

She went away when, pouring him a John Jameson, she’d asked him how he was these days. ‘Give a rap on the counter if you’ll want something more,’ she said, a smell of simmering bacon beginning to waft in from the cooking she returned to. There was no one else in the bar.

He should have explained to the solicitor that he was a widower, that there was no marriage now to be damaged by a legacy that might seem to indicate a deception in the past. He should have explained that his doubts about accepting so much, and travelling to seek advice in another town, had only to do with avoiding curiosity and gossip in his own. He didn’t know why he hadn’t explained, why it hadn’t occurred to him that Cliffeity had probably taken it upon himself to pity a wronged wife who was now being wronged again, that subterfuge and concealment were again being called upon.

He took his whiskey to a corner. It would not have seemed unusual to speak about his marriage, about love’s transformation within it, about his grief when it was no longer there, about the moments and occasions it had since become. Caught in the drift of memory, he saw – as vividly as if it were still the time when love began – a girl in a convent uniform, green and blue, shyness in her bright, fresh face. Half smiling, she turned her head away, made to blush by her friends when the gawky junior from the Munster and Leinster Bank went by on the street. And she was shy again when, grown up, she walked for the first time into the bank with her father’s weekly cheques and takings. In her middle age, the mother she had twice become made her only a little different, made her the person she remained until there was the tragedy of a winter’s night, on an icy road three years ago.

Graillis sipped his whiskey and lit a cigarette and slowly smoked, then drank some more. Beneath his professional rectitude, the solicitor would naturally have been more interested in the woman of the legacy than in the wife.
In her sixty-eighth year
was the only tit-bit the letter he’d been given to read revealed: she’d been an older woman, he would have realized.

The whiskey warmed Graillis, the cigarette was a comfort. He hadn’t explained because you couldn’t explain, because there was too little to explain, not too much. But even so he might have said he was a widower. He sat a little longer, eyeing an ornamental sign near the door – white letters on blue enamel –
You May Telephone From Here
. ‘A small one,’ he said when his rapping on the surface of the counter brought a sleek-haired youth he remembered as a child. The girl in Lenehan and Clifferty’s reception had given him a card with his next week’s appointment noted on it, and the telephone number of Lenehan and Clifferty as well. It wasn’t too late, a few minutes past five.

‘If it’s possible,’ he said when the same girl answered. ‘Just something I forgot to say to Mr Clifferty.’

Waiting, he lit another cigarette. His glass was on a shelf in front of him, beside an ashtray with
Coca-Cola
on it. ‘Mr Clifferty?’ he said when Clifferty said hullo.

‘Good evening, Mr Graillis.’

‘It’s just I wanted to clear up a detail.’

‘What detail’s that, Mr Graillis?’

‘I don’t think I explained that I’m widowed.’

The solicitor made a sympathetic sound. Then he said he was sorry, and Graillis said:

‘It’s just if you thought my wife’s alive it would have been misleading.’

‘I follow what you’re saying to me.’

‘I didn’t want a misunderstanding.’

‘No.’

‘It’s difficult, a thing like this coming out of the blue.’

‘I appreciate that, Mr Graillis, and I have your instruction. I’m sanguine it can be met. If there’s anything else, if there’s a worry at all, bring it with you when you come over next week.’

‘It’s only I wanted you to know what I told you just now. There’s nothing else.’

‘We’ll say goodbye so.’

‘Who’d get what I’m handing back?’

‘Whoever’s in line for it. Some grand-nephew somewhere, I’d hazard. There’s often a grand-nephew.’

‘Thanks,’ Graillis said and, not knowing what else to do, returned the receiver to its hook.

He picked up his glass and took it back to the table he’d been sitting at. He had thought he would feel all right after he’d seen a solicitor, and had thought so again when the telephone sign had given him the idea of ringing up. But still there was the unease that had begun when the letter about the legacy came. He didn’t know why he’d gone to the house; he didn’t know why he’d got into a state because he hadn’t told a man who was a stranger to him that he was widowed. It had been the whiskey talking when he’d said he wanted to clear up a detail; it was whiskey courage that had allowed him to dial the number. He was bewildered by the resurrection of a guilt that long ago had softened away to nothing. In that other time no pain had been caused, no hurt; he had managed the distortions that created falsity, the lies of silence; what he had been forgiven for was not seeming to be himself for a while. A crudity still remained in the solicitor’s reading of the loose ends that still were there: the wronged wife haunting restlessly from her grave, the older woman claiming from hers the lover who had slipped away from her.

*

‘God, we never had it worse!’

‘Oh, we will, boy, we will.’

Deploring the fall in sheep prices, two men settled themselves at the bar. The sleek-haired youth returned to serve them, and then an older man came in, with a white greyhound on a leash. The youth poured Smithwick’s for him and said the
Evening Herald
hadn’t been dropped off the bus yet. ‘Shocking,’ the old man grumbled, hunching himself over the
Tullamore Tribune
instead.

Graillis finished what was left of his whiskey. After the accident, when the notice had appeared in the obituary columns of the
Irish Times,
no lines of condolence had come from the woman whose half-ruined house he had visited. He had thought there might be a note and then had thought it was not appropriate that there should be. She would have thought so too.

He stubbed out his second cigarette. He never smoked at home, continuing not to after he’d found himself alone there, and smoking was forbidden in the branch library, a restriction he insisted upon himself. But in the drawing-room he had sat in so often in the autumn of 1979 and during the winter and spring that followed it, a friendship had developed over cigarettes, touches of lipstick on the cork tips that had accumulated in the ashtray with the goldfinch on it. That settled in his thoughts, still as a photograph, arrested with a clarity that today felt cruel.

He carried his glass back to the bar. He talked for a moment about the weather to the sleek-haired youth before he left. ‘Take care, Mr Graillis,’ the boy called after him, and he said he would.

Driving on, he tried to think of nothing, not of the girl who had become his wife when he was still a junior in the Munster and Leinster Bank, not of the woman he’d got to know when she borrowed novels from his branch library. The landscape he passed through was much the same as the landscape had been before he’d called in at the public house. It didn’t change when a sign in Irish and English indicated the town ahead, only doing so when the town’s outskirts began: the first few bungalows, summer blossom in their trim gardens. Cars with prices on their windscreens crowded Riordan’s forecourt,
Your Nissan Dealer
a reminder of the franchise. He passed the electricity works and then the rusty green Raleigh sign, the two figures and their bicycles only there in places.

Evening traffic slowed his progress on the town’s main street. He wound down the window beside him and rested his elbow on it. He had intended to go straight to where he lived but changed his mind and instead turned into Cartmill Street, where the branch library was. No traffic disturbed the quiet here. Sometimes boys rattled up and down on their skate-boards, but there were no boys now, and hardly a pedestrian. He parked beneath the lime trees where the walk by the river began and crossed the street to a small building crouched low among the abandoned warehouses that ran the length of Cartmill Street and gave it character, as the lime trees and the river did.

Today he had closed the library at one o’clock, the only weekday it was shut in the afternoon, when some of the main-street shops were also. He turned a key in the deadlock, another in the Yale, then pushed the pale-blue door open. It was a Mr Haverty – failed grocer of Lower North Street, lifelong bachelor, aficionado of Zane Grey among Wild West storytellers – who had nagged the county library service into letting the town have a branch library, who had become, in fact, its first librarian. Since those early days, when he was a borrower himself, Graillis had felt at home in these modest premises, the walls entirely shelves, a narrow counter near the door. He had been the branch library’s most frequent visitor then, and when galloping arthritis made Mr Haverty’s duties increasingly a burden it was Mr Haverty who nominated him as his successor, enticing him away from the superior prospects of the bank. And Graillis said yes before he had a chance to dwell on all the disadvantages. ‘But why on earth?’ the girl he’d married cried out in bewilderment and disappointment. His safe employment had been taken for granted; in time promotion would mean occupancy of a squat grey landmark in the town, the house above the bank, with railings and a grained hall door. She had married into that; books had never been an interest they shared, had never been, for her, a need.