Chapter Ten
Ten
Mrs. Duggan doesn’t go upstairs, any more than she goes outdoors.
Instead she lives on the ground floor of Noreen and Dessie’s house, down the street from the shop.
The dining-room has been turned into her bedroom; she spends her days in the sitting room, wedged into a massive pink velvet armchair patinated brownish by wear and cigarette smoke, enjoying the wide berth the townland gives her window.
Mrs. Duggan doesn’t have the same kind of power she had back when she ran the shop, but she’s adapted.
Lena goes to see her on Thursday morning, when no one else will be home, and she goes a roundabout way so as not to pass by the shop and Noreen’s sharp eyes.
She’s brought a pot of her blackberry jam.
She’s done this before, and she knows that Mrs. Duggan’s real currency is less tangible and less innocent; the jam is only a preliminary offering, to open the negotiations.
Cal doesn’t know Lena is coming here. Last night—curled up on his sofa with her head on his chest, watching an old cowboy film on the laptop propped on the coffee table—she almost said it to him.
Telling Cal things feels natural, these days; when she met him she was out of the habit of telling anyone anything much, but it’s become one of her accustomed pleasures, the two of them passing small daily finds from hand to hand for the other to examine.
She told him, straightaway, what Sheila said—he was the one who asked her to go to Sheila, she had no right to keep the results from him.
But Mrs. Duggan wasn’t Cal’s idea, and whatever she comes out with, Lena might not want it handed over to Mart Lavin.
She could share it with Cal on condition that he keeps it to himself, but she’s not going to do that.
Cal’s actions are his own; if she makes one move to manage what he can and can’t do, it’ll alter their relationship beyond repair.
Instead she stayed silent and watched the horses gallop across the little screen.
Their hoofbeats muddled the steady rhythm of Cal’s heart under her ear, till she lost track of it.
Mrs. Duggan has filled her sitting room to the brim with herself.
Every wall is crowded with ornate brown furniture stuffed with painted porcelain, silver frames, Sacred Heart statuettes; the carpet and the curtains are a tumult of ferocious purple flowers.
The side table at her elbow is cluttered with small things, pear drops and dominoes and earrings, all of them wearing the furtively sinister air of amulets that could jinx your week if they found their way into your pocket.
Even the air, hot and dry, seethes with the traces of cigarette ash and the faint, high whistling of the gas fire.
At the heart of it all is Mrs. Duggan, vast and formless in a magenta dress coated with swirls of tiny magenta beads, like one of those underwater creatures that lie wide-mouthed on the seabed waiting to receive anyone and anything that comes their way.
“Well done,” she says, taking the jam from Lena and inspecting it. Her slow, heavy voice raises the hair on Lena’s neck. “I thought you’d find one, all right, if you looked hard enough.”
Lena almost wishes she’d told Cal what she’s at. This room feels like the kind of place where you make sure your backup knows you’re going in. “There’s this to go with it,” she says, handing over a loaf of soda bread.
Mrs. Duggan chuckles, weighing the bread in her hand. “To save Noreen having to make me some,” she says. “Aren’t you a great sister altogether. Does she appreciate you like you deserve?”
“She does, yeah,” Lena says. Mrs. Duggan is scavenging for details of her argument with Noreen. She’s not getting them, or anyhow not for free.
“Sit you down,” Mrs. Duggan says, pointing to a spindly chair. And when Lena sits: “Pull it up here, where I can see you. My eyes are going.”
Mrs. Duggan’s eyes could spot a flinch at a hundred yards. Lena pulls the chair closer, till she stops crooking her finger and nods. Her hair, dyed shiny black and pulled back into a bun, is thinning, and she smells of some heavy floral powder.
Her eyes move up and down Lena, assessing. “So you’re back,” she says. “You thought you’d never step foot in this room again till you came to see me laid out, didn’tja?”
Lena is used to being tall and hardy, but this room and this woman strip that away and make her feel slight, soft-muscled. She wants to talk, to find solidity in her own strong voice. She understands that this impulse is well-known to Mrs. Duggan, and is a dangerous one. “I’m back,” she says.
“You might as well, sure. I’m not planning on being laid out any time soon.” Mrs. Duggan fumbles around the side table for her cigarettes. She shakes one out of the packet and taps its end on the table in a slow, maddening rhythm. “Go on, so. What is it you wanta know?”
“You’re the one that told me to call round,” Lena says.
The corner of Mrs. Duggan’s mouth curls at that. “I heard what you’ve been at,” she says. “I was watching you, up in the hotel. You want something big.”
“Tommy Moynihan’s been trying to run the Reddys outa town,” Lena says. “I’d like to know why.”
Mrs. Duggan blows out a scornful puff of air. “That’s not big. That’s a scrap, only. I’d nearly let you have that for nothing, only it’d set a bad example. Let’s be having you: what d’you really want?”
“It might be the same thing,” Lena says. “Or it might not. Tommy and Eugene are up to something that had Rachel Holohan’s head wrecked, before she died. I’d like to know what that was.”
Mrs. Duggan starts a slow wheezing that gradually builds to a deep, hoarse chuckle.
“You’re after letting me down,” she tells Lena, when she can talk again.
“I been sitting here in this window for weeks now, waiting for someone to ask me the right question. When I saw you swanning up to my door, I thought: Here we go now. You were always a clever one, I’ll give you that; too clever for your own good.
And now it turns out all you’re here for is shite that anyone coulda thought of. ”
Lena says, “What’s the right question?”
Mrs. Duggan pushes aside the things on her table till she finds a heavy gold lighter. Her fingers are swollen and stiff, weighed down by rings sunk too deep into the flesh to come off; it takes her a few tries to light up.
“D’you know what ye are, around here?” she says, glancing at Lena over the lighter.
“Ye’re a terrible dull lot altogether. I been answering this place’s questions since before you were born or thought of, and they’re the same questions every time: who’s my man doing the dirt with, what way is my mammy leaving the land, is the youngest mine or not.
And depending on the answer, there’ll be a bit of a spat or else there won’t, and that’ll be the end of it.
I’m sick of the taste of them. I do try to spice things up by having wee bets with myself on who’ll do what and when, but I’m right too often; there’s no flavor in that.
” She breathes out long twin curls of smoke through her nose.
“And the young ones nowadays, they haven’t a notion.
They think I’m some kinda fortune teller, cross my palm with silver.
I’d two of them in here the other week asking how they’ll do in their exams.” Her lip rises with disgust.
Lena says, “What’d you tell them?”
“I took what I wanted offa them,” Mrs. Duggan says, “and then I told them something about their daddies that they didn’t wanta hear, and I sent them off. Next time they’ll think twice. I’m no one’s wee bit of a giggle on a rainy afternoon.”
Lena says nothing. She can’t stop herself from sitting with her back rigid and her feet braced on the carpet, ready. Mrs. Duggan notes that, and lets Lena see her enjoy it.
“I shoulda made Pateen move away,” she says, “as soon as we were married. Somewhere bigger, with enough people to keep me occupied. But now ’tis too late for that, so I haveta make do with what I can get around here.”
She fishes for her ashtray, grunting with the effort of leaning over, and drags it closer on the table.
“If someone comes asking me the right question,” she says, “I’ll be that pleased with them for doing something outa the ordinary, I’ll give them the answer for free.
I’d say I’ll be waiting, but. If even Lena Dunne isn’t clever enough to get it, there might be no hope.
Are you still Lena Dunne? Or did you marry the Yank and no one told me? ”
“Not yet,” Lena says. “You’ll hear when I do.”
“If you do,” Mrs. Duggan says. “Plenty of men’d get cold feet around a widda woman whose first man dropped dead outa the blue before fifty.
” She leans back in her chair and adjusts the folds of her dress around the folds of herself, getting comfortable.
The beads make tiny, dry crunching noises.
“Didja kill the other fella?” she asks, through her cigarette.
This is an easy one, Mrs. Duggan warming up her arm. There have always been rumors; Lena knew that already. “No,” she says.
Mrs. Duggan nods. “I’m playing fair,” she says. “That’s only a scrap of a question, the same as yours. I knew the answer already. But enough people have wondered that I reckoned I’d get it clear for meself, once and for all.”
Lena doesn’t ask who’s wondered. Mrs. Duggan, amused, watches her not asking.
She says, “Did he kill hisself?”
Lena’s mind leaps like a fish inside her, twists, and lands where it was when Sean died, in the dark of their bedroom, reeking of vomit and terror. She can’t see. She can feel Mrs. Duggan watching, sucking up every drop of this.
She won’t give her the pleasure of a long silence. “I don’t know,” she says. She has room for a flicker of surprise at how firm and matter-of-fact her voice comes out. “The coroner brought it in as accidental.”