The Kiss E-Book

Joan Lingard

• Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 338

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Cormac, born and brought up in Belfast, living now in Edinburgh with his wife and children, is an art teacher, an admirer of Rodin and a sculptor himself. When he tries to transmit his enthusiasm for Rodin to his students he finds his words tend to fall on stony ground, except when it comes to Clarinda Bain. Fifteen years old, beautiful and fiercely intelligent, Clarinda is his keenest and most ardent student. On a school trip to Paris she becomes obsessed by the work and life of Gwen John, in particular by her affair with Rodin. She then begins to mirror this relationship by becoming obsessed herself with her own mentor, which throws Cormac's life as a teacher and husband into confusion. Compelling and exquisitely written, The Kiss is a study of artistic and sexual obsession by a writer at the height of her powers.

Leseprobe

The Kiss

JOAN LINGARD

For Francine

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

About the Author

By Joan Lingard

Copyright

Prologue

It is raining, on a November afternoon, and cold. The woman standing in the shadows of the laundry doorway feels the chill of the pavement creeping up into her feet and ankles. From time to time she moves them, just a little, but otherwise she remains still, her bony hands clasped in front of her. Her eyes stay fixed on the large doors opposite. Her gaze is steady, except when a vehicle passes between them, and then it flickers. Occasionally a small cough grazes her throat.

The afternoon wears on, the light fades early, and the gas lamps splutter into life, making her draw further back into her refuge. Now the puddles on the pavement shine. She can hear faint music coming from the building across the street. Someone is playing the piano. It will be warm in that high-vaulted room, with the stove billowing forth heat to the assembled company; he will be there surrounded by women fawning on him, hoping for his favours. Once she, too, was made welcome at these Saturday afternoon receptions, but then she annoyed him and she could not bear the attention he gave to the other women. The attention he gave in particular to her of the glaring hair and the terrible hats calling herself his inner voice. As if he had need of any voice but his own! She looks like a painted weasel, this American, who has ordered all his other models from the studio. His friends detest her. But he appears to be bewitched.

A man stops. His shadow falls across hers and she can smell his breath, heavy with cigar smoke. ‘Mademoiselle?’ She shakes her head and he hesitates for only a moment before moving on. She is often bothered by rôdeurs, men who follow her, who sit at café tables beside her; and she cannot understand why. She does not believe she is flirtatious. Her affections are already engaged.

Across the road, the wide doors suddenly burst open, spilling out yellow light and men and women with flushed faces and ringing voices calling out farewells. Faces turn up to the sky. Umbrellas are unfurled. The women embrace their host; the men wait and idly chat. Two carriages turn into the street and pull up, and when they have moved on there remains only one person on the pavement opposite. Even in this poor light one can see that he has a presence, this broad, well-built man, with the powerful head and full beard streaked with white. He may no longer be young but he emits energy. She can feel his energy in her hands when she holds them out. They tremble as if shot through with a lightning current.

Hesitantly, she moves out of the shadow. Alerted, like an animal sensing another presence, he turns his head. She steps over the flowing gutter and crosses the road. She hears him sigh.

‘You’ll get your death, standing in the cold and wet like that. How many times do I have to tell you?’

She is encouraged. He is not angry; she may walk with him. He unfurls his umbrella and she falls in beside him. Before they reach the corner she manages to slide her hand into the crook of his arm. She loves the smell of his bulky coat and the warmth of it against her fingers. It is a fair step to the station, and of that she is glad, and would willingly walk with him all the way to Meudon, if that were possible. This is her time. She will have him to herself; the red-haired witch cannot claim him now, nor any of his other admirers or former lovers. She is glad, too, of the rain, for it is like a curtain cocooning them from the rest of the world. She finds its gentle patter on the dark arch covering their heads soothing to her nerves. They skirt the edge of the Place de la Résistance and arriving at the Avenue Bosquet turn north into it.

He continues to scold her a little. ‘Are you eating enough? You’re looking thinner again. You must eat. You can’t paint if you don’t eat.’

She is trying, she responds, though often she forgets.

‘Are you still reading?’ He wants to know; his interest is more than passing. She is able to please him there, telling him that she reads every day. He is a keen reader himself though it is a wonder to her that he can find time in his overflowing life. He likes to read the English authors Fielding and Richardson, and is deeply interested in classical Greece. He has been encouraging her to read Greek poetry and drama. Sometimes she retells stories from mythology to him that she hopes might give him ideas for his sculpture. She speaks now of Euripides.

‘Like you,’ she says, ‘he believes that everything has beauty.’

Too soon, they are in the Boulevard de Montparnasse and the station looms ahead. She longs to go home on the train with him, to prepare his evening meal, to sleep with him, to wake with him and rise to warm his morning milk. But there is another woman waiting there for him, his Rose, a peasant woman who has been with him for forty years and has borne him a son. She stays out there, beyond the confines of the city, awaiting his return each evening, stirring her cooking pots.

They enter the gloom of the station. Smoke hangs in the air; on the ground, travellers hurry to their platforms. He must leave her.

‘Will you come to visit me soon?’ She holds her breath. She has hardly dared to ask.

‘I can make no promises,’ he says.

She stays in most mornings sweeping and cleaning her room, going from time to time to the window to look down on the street. Sometimes he does come but she knows not to press him or to rail against the American duchess who distracts him and keeps him from his work. If she does she will only make him angry and her time with him will have been spoilt. She has made a fuss in the past about the woman and after one occasion he told her not to come to his studio again. Now she waits outside and he does not chase her away.

‘Remember to look after yourself,’ he tells her and with a glancing kiss on either cheek he has gone, into the moving mass.

She waits till his train steams out of the station, even though she knows that he will not pull down the window and lean out to wave. In the early days, not so long ago, only a few months, when they were first lovers, he would sometimes come to the window and then she could go home with a smile inside her. Her eyes ache with staring but the train is no longer there; its red rear light has dwindled into nothingness. She turns and makes her way back out of the station, stumbling a little, head bowed, bumping into hastening passengers, having to apologise. Pardon, pardon …

She returns to her quiet grey room in the Hôtel Mont Blanc on the nearby Boulevard Edgar Quinet. She is shivering. She peels off her damp coat, walks out of her shoes. She goes to the table by the window and lights the lamp. Her notepaper is waiting there, the pen is lying where she left it earlier. She lifts it, plunges the nib deep into the inkwell and begins to write.

‘Mon Maître …’

Chapter One

‘Is that it?’ he asks.

‘Seems to be,’ she says.

Together, they take a last look at the bare hall, at the grimy-edged spaces where the pictures used to hang; they glance up the uncarpeted stairs, hear the eerie silence. She moves first, turning her back. He tugs the door shut behind them. The damned thing has always been inclined to stick. They’ve been meaning to do something about it, for months. Years.

She holds up the keys. ‘Will you take them or shall I?’

He shrugs. ‘Doesn’t matter. I could put them through the solicitor’s letter box, if you like.’

‘You won’t forget? You know what you’re—’

‘For Christ’s sake!’

The air between them has become charged, in that split second, has swollen up like a balloon. Then her shoulders slacken.

‘Sorry.’ She tosses the two sets of keys, he catches them against his chest.

He follows her down the path. The street is quiet. Few, if any, will witness their departure. Between drawn curtains the excesses of Old Year’s Night are being slept off.

He goes round to the driver’s side of the self-drive rental van, she makes for the family saloon parked behind it. It is stuffed full with bedding, downies and pillows, still slightly dented, showing where heads have rested, dragged from beds only this morning.

‘See you there,’ he says.

She nods.

In the back of the truck the two children sprawl amid brown grocery cartons. The girl is no longer a child, really, and would resent being called one; she has passed her fifteenth birthday. The boy is seven years her junior.

‘Last run,’ says their father breezily.

He edges the high-sided vehicle out from the kerb, away from the tall, terraced house. Desirable family residence, two reception, four beds, two baths, large kitchen, scullery, laundry room, large attic which may be used for storage or a studio. Garden front and rear. Mature trees. Good neighbourhood. Convenient for schools. Their ad said it all.

The girl, positioned by the window, lifts her head. The boy does not. He continues to gaze at his bunched up knees.

There is almost no traffic. The city seems unnervingly quiet.

‘Fantastic day,’ says the father. The sun is shining out of an ice-blue sky after days of hectic rain and wind. ‘Good day for a walk on the Pentlands.’

There is no response from the back.

The trip takes only five minutes, as the driver is keen to point out. No distance at all. It isn’t as though they’re moving miles away.

‘That’s scarcely the point,’ says the girl, silencing her father.

They are heading for a small enclave of Victorian artisans’ houses known as the Colonies which lie alongside the Water of Leith. He rounds the clock at Canonmills, then swings across into Glenogle Road.

‘You know the Colonies were built by the Co-op in the second half of the nineteenth century? Workers who had never expected to own their own houses were suddenly able to do it on a mortgage-type basis.’

‘You’ve already told us,’ says the girl. ‘What’s so marvellous, anyway, about owning your own house?’

Her father concentrates on the road. Flipping on his indicator, he turns sharply right into one of the short, narrow streets. The road is little more than two car-widths wide, which means that he has to mount the pavement to ease the wide van past the line of parked cars on the left-hand side.

The houses here are terraced, too, but on a different scale; they were built in cottage-style architecture, consisting of an upper and a lower flat, the upper being reached by an outside stone stair. The stair is a distinctive feature of the Colonies, he is about to remark, then closes his mouth.

He pulls up. ‘Well, here we are!’

The girl wrenches open the back door and vaults out, as light as a young roe deer. The boy stays in the van. The following car has stopped behind them.

‘Four of the boxes are yours, I think,’ says the father, heaving them out. ‘Want a hand up the steps?’

‘We can manage,’ says the mother. She ducks her head inside the van and kisses the boy. ‘See you soon, Davy love. OK?’

He nods.

The father kisses the girl. ‘We’ll just be along the road, Sophie, old pal.’

‘It’s all right,’ she says. ‘I don’t mind. Really I don’t.’

He waits until they have climbed the steps to their upper flat, then he jumps back into the driver’s seat and begins to back up, which takes all his attention, with so many cars parked, and space being so tight. The streets are cul-de-sacs, running into the river.

Their upper flat – his and Davy’s – is but two streets away and virtually identical to the other one.

‘Well, son,’ he says as he parks, having managed to squeeze into a space, just, ‘this is it!’ He hears his voice coming over as far too hearty. ‘Our new abode.’ Their flat is close to the river end.

At the top of the stair, he pauses to look over at the Water of Leith, Edinburgh’s waterway. He can smell it, a damp, muddy smell. ‘We might go fishing.’

‘The water’s yucky,’ says Davy.

His father opens the door. The flat has a rather mouldy smell, well, of course it would, wouldn’t it, as he says to his son, since nobody has been living in it for some time and in winter it doesn’t take long for buildings to cool down and the damp to seep in. He is talking too much and his son too little. He wonders if he has talked too much all his life. If he had kept his mouth shut more when conducting his art classes he might not have ended up in this mess. He wishes he could go to the pub.

There are two rooms on the main floor, a sitting room at the front and a dining/kitchen to the rear. The lavatory is under the stairs in what once would have been a cupboard. The ceiling slopes perilously low over the bowl; he will have to mind his head when he gets up. There is no wash-hand basin, no room for one.

‘We’ll just have to wash our hands in the kitchen or nip up the stairs,’ he says jocularly. There is a wash-hand basin and a bath up there, but no lavatory.

They go up the narrow stairs. One bedroom has a dormer window, the other a skylight. Both rooms are small. All the rooms in the flat are small. He wants to kick out the walls but he tells himself that the place will be easily heated which means they can save on fuel bills. One must look on the bright side! The jingle runs through his head, annoying him. He intends to take the dormer window for himself, having reasoned, to himself, that kids don’t notice whether there is a view or not. He’d go nuts if he couldn’t see out.

Davy throws his bag on the bed in the skylight room. The glass is grubby; the sky cannot be seen. They’ll clean it, says his father, once he buys some Windowlene, and then Davy will be able to lie in bed and look at the stars. ‘When “midnight’s all a glimmer”,’ he quotes. ‘Famous Irish poet wrote that.’

Davy shrugs, though his father knows that he likes poetry, but today he is not going to like anything and who could blame him? His father swallows. He sure as heck could use a drink. They didn’t drink much last night, he and Rachel, in spite of it being Hogmanay. They were busy and not in the mood, and old friends stayed away, trying to be tactful, or else just embarrassed. Not that they were doing anything unusual, in this day and age, except in the eyes of a few elderly people like his mother. Ah, yes, his mother. He puts the thought of her out of his mind. He has enough to cope with at the moment.

‘Where will you do your work, Dad?’ asks Davy. ‘There’s no place for a studio here.’

‘We’ll have to see,’ says his father. He hasn’t done anything, anyway, for a long time, forever, so it seems, not since the day he was called into the head’s office.

‘Sit down, Cormac,’ said Archie, without lifting his head. He was fussing about with some papers on his desk, which Cormac could see he was not looking at. They were friends, he and Archie; they’d known each other since their student days, had shared a flat for a while. They often had a pint in the pub together after school and they went to international rugby matches together, enjoying pleasant rivalry when Scotland played Ireland. They ate in each other’s houses. Nothing fancy, no fuss. Kitchen supper, kedgeree, fish pie, that kind of thing. There was no formality between them or their wives. There was no formality between Archie and any of his staff. He was a casual, pullover-wearing, no-standing-on-ceremony head. Popular with both staff and pupils, which took some doing. He had been popular as a student, too. His prowess on the rugby field had contributed to that; he’d played for the university’s first fifteen and represented Scotland in its under twenty-one team. He helped coach the school team and could outrun most of them still. Cormac had never been much of a rugby player himself, had played at school when he couldn’t avoid it but had preferred football which he found less brutal. As for other sports, pool was the only game he occasionally indulged in, whereas Archie played a good game of golf and tennis and was a competent skier. On the surface, then, it did not seem as if he and Archie would have much in common. At university, Archie was studying mathematics; he was doing sculpture. But from the first moment the two men met they hit it off; they seemed to complement each other and there was no element of competition between them since their sights professionally were set on different things. Cormac found Archie’s easy, open manner and self-confidence engaging. He may not be very deep, he had said once to Rachel, but he’s sound. And how reassuring it was to be in the company of someone who was sound, who wasted no time in self-doubt and looking back.

Cormac did not feel happy in Archie’s company now. He edged his chair a little closer to the desk.

‘What’s up, Archie?’ he asked.

Archie sighed again. ‘This isn’t going to be easy for me, Cormac.’ He was twiddling a pen between his thumb and forefinger. He dropped it and had to look Cormac in the eye. ‘We’ve had a complaint made against you, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh no.’ Cormac groaned. ‘Not Clarinda Bain’s mother!’

‘So you know what it’s about then?’ Archie looked taken aback, as if he had expected Cormac to plead total ignorance.

‘I suppose I can guess. Clarinda’s been behaving like an ass so I called on her mother who went on to make wild accusations about the visit to Paris.’

‘They were fairly wild.’ Archie sounded glum.

‘A load of old cobblers. You didn’t believe her, did you?’

‘It’s not up to me to believe or disbelieve, Cormac, not at this juncture. That’ll be for other people to decide. I’m not even allowed to discuss it with you. But why didn’t you come and talk to me about it before?’

‘I did try to, the day after we came back from France, in the pub, after school.’

‘You mentioned Clarinda’s name, I remember that. You said what a keen pupil she was and eager to see everything in Paris, but you didn’t make it clear, at least I didn’t pick up that there were, well, sexual implications.’

‘Maybe I didn’t,’ said Cormac. He’d thought Archie had almost been trying to ward off his confidence, as if he’d heard rumours and didn’t want or didn’t need them to be spelt out. Or maybe he’d thought he’d been going to hear an admission of guilt? It had been an awkward meeting and Cormac had been aware of his own reluctance to spell everything out. Then Ken Mason, another member of staff, had come in and joined them, and so the subject had changed.

‘You should have come back to me on it,’ said Archie.

‘I suppose I thought it would blow over. You know how it is when you don’t quite want to face up to something?’

‘Yes.’ Archie nodded. ‘Yes, I do know. Sometimes life takes odd directions, doesn’t it, when you least expect it?’

Cormac had never known Archie take an odd turning, or act out of character. His very stability was like a rock for school life to revolve around, and he was a sympathetic listener.

‘It wouldn’t have made any difference even if you had talked to me. I’m bound by a set of rules, Cormac, you know that. I have no option but to suspend you, as from now. On full pay of course.’

‘This very minute?’

‘I’m afraid so. There’ll be an inquiry. It has to go through the proper channels. Oh, and by the way, you’re still under contract to the Education Authority so you are obliged to stay put, to be available if called upon.’

‘So there’s to be no skiving off to South America?’ His attempt to make a joke stuck at the back of his throat.

‘I am sorry, Cormac. Deeply sorry.’

Cormac nodded.

‘And I won’t be able to see you socially, either, you realise that, don’t you, until this business is sorted out?’

Cormac sat for a moment, then he stood up, and putting one foot before the other moved as if in a dream from the quiet of the headmaster’s room into the corridor which was alive with the surge of young, vigorous bodies heading for the freedom of the open air. It was the start of morning break. He banged into some of the bodies, did not even hear their yowls of protest. ‘Watch where you’re going, Mr Aherne!’ He should have done that years ago. That’s what his mother would have said to him, had she been there.

It was break-time, for which he was grateful. His art room was empty. Someone had tipped a chair on its side in their hurry to get out. Automatically, he picked it up and set it to rights. He’d been teaching a first-year class when he’d been summoned, trying to enthuse them about Art. Commitment, he had been telling them, that was the key; no artist had ever achieved anything without commitment. And passion. The ultimate stage was obsession. You had to be obsessed, seized by the throat. They had listened to him, mesmerised, or so it had seemed, though perhaps they had just been puzzled. Some of them were obsessed by football, weren’t they? That had got them, the boys who’d been shuffling their feet; that had helped to focus them. They were beginning to see a glimmer of light when the door had opened to admit Miss Dunlop, the school secretary, with her spectacles dangling from a chain around her neck, come to summon him. ‘Mr Aherne, Mr Gibson would like a word.’

Ah, the power of a word. It could change a life.

He would be summoned again, to make his case, perhaps even at the High Court, where he would be compelled to listen to a flow of words, of evidence against him, if, after investigation, it was thought that he had a case to answer. Did he?

He gathered up his papers, shoved books into a carrier bag, unpinned his Rodin posters and photographs from the wall, and left the building where he had been employed, some would say gainfully, for the past fifteen years.

‘I’m going to phone Grandma,’ Cormac shouts up the stairs to Davy, who is moving around in his new room. Stay out of the way, is what he means. ‘Grandma Aherne,’ he adds in a mutter and closes the living room door.

He has decided he’d better do it in case she should ring their old house to wish them a happy New Year. So, all right, maybe she has never done it before but she could decide to do it now, couldn’t she, for the very first time, and if she got the dialling tone going on and on and on without the answering machine chipping in she might begin to wonder? To panic, even. So he has been telling himself. He flexes his fingers and punches out the number.

She answers at once as if the phone has been at her elbow.

‘I thought it might be you,’ she says and waits.

‘Happy New Year, Ma.’

‘Let’s hope it will be a better one than last year.’

He clears his throat and quickly tells her his news.

‘This isn’t your idea of a joke, is it, Cormac?

He tells her it is not. Would that be his idea of a joke, for goodness sake?

‘I never know with you, Cormac. You’re like your da when it comes to joking. You’ve a queer sense of humour at times.’ She sighs and gathers her breath and he keeps his head bowed and the receiver well away from his ear while the storm flashes and the breakers roll relentlessly over him, making, as they crash, a deafening roar. When they have subsided, he hears her say, ‘I always thought it was a mistake for you to marry a Protestant.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Ma, it’s time to give up all that old rubbish!’

‘Rubbish! Is that how you refer to your faith?’

‘I haven’t been a practising Catholic since I was eighteen, and well you know it.’

‘That’s part of your problem, Cormac. Faithless.’

She might well be right; he is not prepared to dispute that. He is conscious of the vacuum inside him which once he could fill with Hail Marys and pleas to God to have mercy on his soul. He still believes he has a soul for inside him somewhere there is something that he can give no other name to and there are times when he has longed to sit in front of a flickering candle and close his eyes. And find peace. That, of course, is the attraction, the notion that seduces. He has done it a couple of times, crept up the steep, exposed steps to St Mary’s Cathedral and lit a candle. And sat there with an empty mind, feeling like a hypocrite, glancing idly round in case his mother or one of his holy aunts might be sitting at the back watching him. Spying on him. There wasn’t much chance of that since the Irish Sea yawned between them, he could thank God for that, at least. But he felt their eyes, nevertheless.

‘Are you still there, Cormac?’ His mother is making the line click at the other end.

‘Yes, I’m still here.’

‘Of course you had to marry her, didn’t you?’

‘I did nothing of the sort. We knew Sophie was on the way but that wasn’t the only reason. We’d been living together for a couple of years.’

He shouldn’t have reminded her of that. Living out of wedlock. In sin. What an eejit he is right enough! Will he never learn to stop passing her the ammunition?

‘Have you another woman?’ Her voice has dropped an octave. He hears the question that lies behind this one. Are you taking after your father in this way too?

‘No, Ma, there’s no one,’ he says and swallows. There is a lie at the heart of the truth he has just told. And each time he remembers it his throat swells. He puts his fingers to his neck, feels the heat gathering. He cannot tell his mother the whole truth.

‘There’s still hope, then?’

‘For Rachel and me? I doubt it.’

‘She was a nice enough girl – I didn’t dislike her – but if you’d married one of your own she might have brought you back to the Faith. Brought up your children in the Faith. And what about the two of them? A broken home is the ruination of children, every mortal knows that.’

Can he lay the blame for his ruination at her door, then, hers and his father’s? She would say their broken marriage was no fault of hers; his father was the sinner who walked away. There’s no point in saying anything, he knows that well enough, so he keeps his mouth closed and makes a face at the wall.

‘Holy mother of God,’ she keens, ‘what did I ever do to deserve this?’

‘Nothing, Ma,’ he assures her. Except bring him, her only son and child, into the world, a child with strange notions and ambitions who was not content to become a clerk and work for the gas board or sell insurance. She got the length of forty without bearing a child and then something weird must have happened. A virgin birth? He tells himself to give over. If she could hear his thoughts she might have a heart attack. But that could have been her mistake: not to have remained childless, like her four holy sisters. Originally there were six of them, but two had passed away. Not that the remaining ones are that holy; Mary, for a while, until she’d undergone treatment, was a kleptomaniac, with a notion for bath salts; Sal runs a pub in Dublin; Kathleen in her youth had a long relationship with a married man, a mortician, that ended with the death of his spouse when he upped and married the fancy woman of at least two other men that they knew. Cormac is not aware of any transgressions on the part of Lily, the remaining one of the four, though he has always wondered about her for she is never out of the confession box. But when it comes to holiness his mother is up front there alongside any of her sisters.

The children are fine, he tells her. Rachel is fine. He is fine. She need not worry though he knows that she will; it is part of her daily life. He has something else to tell her but that will have to wait. The relaying of one piece of bad news is as much as he can cope with in one phone call.

‘When are you coming over to see me, son?’ she asks, her voice wearied now after her outburst and turning querulous.

‘Soon, Ma. As soon as I can.’

‘You said you’d come over during the Christmas holidays but you never came. Before that it was the summer holidays.’

‘We’ve had a lot to sort out, what with moving house and all that. I’d better give you my new address and phone number.’

She repeats the words and numbers as she slowly transcribes them, out of his sight. He can see her fingers, though, moving slowly and painfully over the lined pale-blue paper. Her hands are arthritic and she’s got a touch of it in her knees but there’s nothing wrong with her head. She forgets little. Nevertheless, he wonders if he should be thinking about sheltered housing, trying to persuade her. They’ve got some really nice properties, Ma, well set up, all mod cons, and it’d be your own wee place, with your own furniture and you could suit yourself and there’d be a warden to take care of you if you fell out of bed, answer your bell when you rang. He’d be wasting his breath. The only person for whom she’d toll a bell would be him. She’d say they’d have to take her out in a long box before she’d budge from her own home.

‘I’ll need to go, I hear someone at the door,’ he lies. The afternoon light is waning beyond the window and he has just realised that he is hungry. He’ll have to go out and buy something from the nearest Pakistani for their supper. Fish fingers and oven chips. His mother would have a fit if she knew.

‘Think about what you’re doing, son,’ she implores. ‘Think about it!’

He is thinking about it, all the time, he tells her, and says goodbye, take care, don’t worry, keep warm, make sure you get enough to eat, I’ll send you a couple of tenners next week, maybe a bit more, but I’m strapped for cash at present, Christmas and all that, you know what it’s like, but I’ll be over soon.

She says God bless.

Now he has given his mother another sorrow to nurse. He tries to comfort himself with the thought that she likes sorrows, that without them she’d feel bereft.

So there she sits in the little front parlour of her red-brick terraced house in Belfast, before a two-barred electric fire with only one bar glowing, the other permanently dead, to keep the bills down. Her shoulders are slumped under a heavy jumper, knitted before her hands turned rickety, her pale hair pinned tightly back, not one strand straggling, her thin legs encased in opaque greyish stockings that help her veins. Her back is held straight and her head is cocked as she listens to the sound of feet going by in the street. Kids knuckling the glass as they go past. Rattling the letter box. Shouting obscenities through the slot. Causing mayhem. It is not as it was when she was a child. Or when her son was a child. Then the young had respect.

She abides by the ten commandments without difficulty. Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery. Thou Shalt Not Steal. Thou Shalt Not Kill. Oh dear God, how that commandment has been transgressed in her province! How many doorsteps in the city have been stained with blood? The man who lived next door to her sister Lily came to the door to answer a knock one night. What a mistake to answer a knock. To take your life in your hands and open your own front door. There was a time when the front doors stood open and the kids played in and out. ‘Are you in, Missus?’ You trusted even the hawkers to stand in the hallway while you went to get your purse. The man from the Pru would just walk in. Your neighbour came in and out borrowing a half cup of sugar or a few spoons of tea. When you went up the road to the shops you didn’t lock the door. Trust. Faith. Hope. All gone.

Now he has depressed himself. What’s the point in running through all that old guff in his head? It’s not going to change the world.

He opens his front door and looks out into the unfamiliar street. He wonders what Rachel will be doing. Not standing at her door gazing out at the dark, he’ll lay a wager on that. She’ll be unpacking boxes, hanging up pictures, setting out ornaments, creating a new home. She never lies down under adversity. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, boyo! You know that salt smarts in wounds, that it doesn’t do anything to heal them. Weren’t you told that at your mother’s knee? Come on, pick yourself up and stop making a fuss! You were told a lot at your mother’s knee right enough and the trouble is it’s not easy to forget it.

The houses across the street stand in a regimented row, their staircases lined up in serried ranks, like soldiers on parade. A few lights glow. Lighted windows reassure him. He likes signs of human habitation, is uneasy when he stays too long in country retreats with no other person in sight. What are they doing behind those lit windows? Watching telly. Sleeping off the New Year booze. Playing happy families. Mr Plod the policeman, Mrs Plod and all the little Plods. He wasn’t too good at the Plod bit though he loves his children dearly. You’re too restless for your own good, Cormac, his mother said, when she had him at her knee.

Above the rooftops a few stars are coming into the deepening sky. They haven’t changed. It’s just the bloody earth that has.

He goes inside, calls out again to Davy. ‘We’ll go and see if we can find a Chinese open. Their New Year’s different.’

Chapter Two

Mornings are not Cormac’s best time, unlike his mother who used to be up with the lark, as she termed it, though no larks ever sang in their back yard. He struggles up to quell the alarm, dresses, and prepares his son’s breakfast. Davy is no better than he is in the morning.

‘Come on, Davy,’ he exhorts, ‘eat up your egg! And stop messing around.’

‘You’re not eating anything.’

‘I’m not going to school.’

‘You’re lucky.’

‘There’s different ways of looking at it.’

‘Why aren’t you going?’ The boy is just stalling, he doesn’t really want to know, he senses that it’s difficult ground to tread on and he has been only too ready to accept what he was told: that his father has given up teaching to have more time for his sculpture.

‘I’m not hungry,’ he says finally and pushes the plate away.

‘But I made it specially—’ Cormac removes the mangled egg. He doesn’t know what he’s making so much fuss for; he has given Davy his breakfast on numerous occasions, got him ready for school, taken him there. He doesn’t have to prove anything, not on that score, anyway.

‘Away and get dressed, pronto! You don’t want to be late. You’ll just start the day on the wrong foot.’ He puts the dishes in the sink, on top of last night’s, and runs hot water on them, to be washed properly later. He hasn’t yet adjusted to the idea of no dishwasher. They sold it as a fitment with the house. As Rachel said, neither of them would have room for it in their new kitchens. She has a much more practical outlook on life than he has.

He clears a space on the draining board and quickly makes up two large wholemeal sandwiches, one with cheddar cheese and pickle, the other with peanut butter. That is one thing he is proficient at: making sandwiches. He puts them into a Tupperware box along with an apple and a packet of salt and vinegar crisps.

‘Davy!’ he calls, putting his head round the door. He can’t hear any movement. He climbs the stairs to find Davy sitting on the bed reading Terry Pratchett. ‘Hey, this won’t do!’ He takes the book from the boy’s hands.

‘I’ve got a sore throat.’

‘Tell me another one!’

‘I have! It’s very sore.’ He is prone to sore throats. ‘You can look if you want to.’

‘OK, I will.’ Cormac returns to the kitchen, washes a dessert spoon and rummages amidst the boxes on the floor for his small pocket torch, which cannot be found, and so he settles for the large black rubber one. He goes back up the stairs. ‘Right then, open up! Call that open? I can’t even get the spoon in.’ He places the back of the spoon firmly on Davy’s tongue and clicks on the torch. The beam floods Davy’s face as well as the cavity of mouth, making him yelp and scrunch up his eyes.

‘You’re blinding me.’

‘Looks perfectly all right to me,’ says Cormac, withdrawing the spoon. He hasn’t been able to see a thing. ‘I’ll give you some vitamin C and a drink of orange juice just to make sure.’

‘We haven’t got any orange juice.’

Cormac makes a mental note to add that to his shopping list. Then he tells Davy to finish dressing, fast! His patience is not elastic. ‘You know what happens when a rubber band gets stretched too far.’

Sullenly Davy begins the hunt for socks. ‘Can’t find two that match,’ he announces triumphantly, laying out a red one and a white one with a black and yellow stripe round the top.