Chapter Nineteen
Nineteen
The dogs, after so long without a proper walk, are riotous with joy at being out.
They bound like puppies, find sticks for tug-of-war, plunge into ditches and come out muddy and delighted.
Lena takes the longest way, down every back lane and detour, not just for their sake but for her own.
She feels like she’s getting over a bad dose of the flu; her body has that unpracticed, tentative quality that’s not a frustration to her but a pleasure, as it claims back all its resurgent heft and strength.
She’s enjoying her muscles as much as the dogs are; she’d walk all day, if she didn’t have business that needs doing.
The rain, so light it hangs suspended in the air, has a full, nutty smell of turf and gorse.
The townland looks different, in ways she can’t pin down. Part of this, she knows, is in her own eyes. The distance from which she’s seeing this place has changed, whether she likes that or not; it’s going to take a while for her focus to adapt to the altered perspective.
Part of it is real. Men and tractors are moving at a rhythm that’s one beat too fast and grim; even people working side by side aren’t talking. The place has its head down against itself, the dark fissures spreading through its soil.
Lena isn’t headed for Cal’s place, or not yet.
She gave her word that she’d talk to him, and she’ll do it, although she’s not sure what she’s going to say.
He texted her early this morning—All good?
—and she texted back Yeah all grand, but no more than that.
Her anger at him is still there, but it’s changed too.
Cal, like her, brought himself to somewhere that has its own demands, and barring the doors against those hasn’t turned out to be as simple a thing as she believed.
She wants to sit somewhere for a long time, unseen, and watch him go about his business until his unhurried rhythms clear her mind.
There’s someone else she needs to talk to first. She told Julie that no one knows whether Rachel would want her death used against Tommy Moynihan.
It only came to her afterwards that there’s someone who might know.
I been sitting here in this window for weeks now, Mrs. Duggan said, waiting for someone to ask me the right question.
The village street has a weary, down-at-heel look, oil stains rainbowing on the wet tarmac, stray bits of soggy paper scattered from an overturned bin.
The shop is empty except for Noreen, looking up from a column of figures at the ding of the bell.
On the radio a woman’s voice sings something low and melancholy.
Lena says, “Can I leave the dogs here for half an hour?”
She watches while Noreen almost says several different things, and stops herself from saying any of them. In the end she says, “Yeah, no problem. Put them in the back room, where they won’t be sniffing at things.”
Lena takes Nellie and Daisy into the little back room, which is stuffed with cardboard boxes, filing cabinets, tea-making apparatus, and bags that Noreen’s going to take to the charity shop when she gets a chance, and finds a bowl to give them water.
When she comes out, she half-expects Noreen to have turned up the radio and buried herself in her figures, but Noreen is waiting for her.
Noreen says, “Yvonne McCabe was in earlier.”
“Yvonne’s sound,” Lena says. “So are Sheila and Julie.”
“They are, yeah. You’re lucky to have them.”
“I know that,” Lena says. Noreen’s face has sagged, just in the last few weeks.
“You don’t deserve them. I was ringing you. I was texting you. You coulda at least bothered your hole answering.”
“I don’t deserve you either,” Lena says. “How many people are you after barring for talking shite about me?”
“No one talked shite about you to me,” Noreen says.
“They know better. All anyone did was hint; a wee hint here and another one there. I barred them anyhow.” She presses a finger and thumb into her eyes like they’re tired.
“Probably they went off and said I done it for no reason at all, and the whole family of us are after going mental.”
“Well,” Lena says, “you’ll be able to let them back in now, once Yvonne sets them straight. Or will half the place be heading to town for the rest of their lives, every time they want a loaf of bread?”
That gets a startled sound, almost a laugh, out of Noreen. “Ah, I’ll let them off,” she says, after a moment. “The ones that apologize, anyhow. I might make Laura Barry work for it; I never liked her.”
“Neither did I,” Lena says. “Sure, her business won’t make or break you either way; she never eats anything only SlimFast shakes.”
This time Noreen does laugh, but there’s a crack in it. “Jesus, Helena,” she says, on a long shaky breath. “You had the life frightened outa me there.”
“I know,” Lena says. “I wasn’t enjoying myself either. I’ll aim not to do it again, how’s that?”
“You’d better not, my feckin’ heart won’t take it.
Jesus.” Noreen has a hand to her chest. “Go back out there and make us a cuppa tea, go on; I need one. The biscuits are in the second drawer of the gray filing cabinet, Cliona found where I had them hid before, that one’s got some kinda radar for sweet stuff, she’d ate sheep shite if I sprinkled sugar on it. ”
“I’ve to get something done first,” Lena says. “I’ll come back for a cuppa tea after.”
For a moment Noreen looks like she might ask questions, but then she nods and bends over her figures again. “Them dogs better not do their wees on my floor,” she warns, as Lena heads out.
Mrs. Duggan is playing solitaire, but she feels Lena’s shadow block the light in her window. She looks Lena up and down, with a slow smile growing. Then she considers the card in her hand, lays it in its place, and crooks a finger to beckon Lena in.
The house is silent; Lena picked her time right, Dessie and the kids are out about their various business.
In Mrs. Duggan’s room, the light is on against the dimness of the morning and the haze of cigarette smoke.
Mrs. Duggan’s dress is pink today, a thick hot pink churning with big purple flowers.
Her worn slippers poke out from under the hem, but she gives no impression of having been caught unprepared.
Her eyebrows are penciled in, and her hair is pulled back in its tight bun; she’s ready and waiting.
“I toldja I’d see you soon,” she says, without looking up. She moves a stack of cards onto an empty space.
“You did,” Lena says. “And I’m here.”
Mrs. Duggan deliberates and shifts a queen onto a king. “Where’s my jar of jam? I’m almost finished the other one.”
“I brought nothing,” Lena says. “You said if anyone asked you the right question, there’d be no charge.”
Mrs. Duggan looks up. Her eyes, unblinking on Lena’s, slowly light.
“Sit you down there,” she says, nodding to the other chair. She sweeps her cards into a pile. “And pull it close.”
Lena does as she’s told. The room is too hot. The gas fire sings its monotonous note, almost too high to hear, like Mrs. Duggan has a swarm of insects trapped in a jar somewhere among the clutter on her shelves.
“If you get it wrong,” Mrs. Duggan says, “I’ll charge you extra, for wasting my time.”
“I don’t have it wrong,” Lena says. She has no fear that Mrs. Duggan will lie to extract payment. That would take the spice out of things.
Mrs. Duggan nods. “Go on, so,” she says. “Let’s be having you.”
Lena says, “What did you and Rachel Holohan say to each other, the night she died?”
Mrs. Duggan leans back in her armchair and starts to laugh. It’s a deep, hoarse wheezing that goes on and on. Lena waits.
“I knew it,” Mrs. Duggan says in the end, wiping her mouth. “I bet myself that you’d get there in the end, and I win. Reach down that bottle a sherry off the shelf, and go get glasses outa the kitchen. We’ll celebrate.”
Lena finds the bottle and goes to fetch the glasses. The kitchen is all Noreen: big and airy, smelling of toast and cleaning spray, cheerful colors and fruit patterns and kids’ fleeces everywhere. Lena takes two glasses from a cupboard and goes back to the front room.
“You’ll have to do the honors,” Mrs. Duggan says, nodding at the bottle. “My hands haven’t got the strength.”
Lena opens the bottle and pours. The sherry sends out a sweet, thick reek like decaying fruit.
“Here’s to you,” Mrs. Duggan says, raising her glass.
“I’ll save mine,” Lena says.
That gets a chuckle out of Mrs. Duggan. “Are you afraid I’ll poison you? Don’t be worrying; I wouldn’t waste you.”
Lena says, “I’m waiting to see do I have anything to celebrate.”
Mrs. Duggan shrugs. She takes a drink of her sherry, half-closing her eyes while she lets the taste of the triumph move around her tongue. “Now,” she says, lowering the glass. “Here’s your prize.”
Up until this moment, a part of Lena was afraid she was missing the mark—Rachel and Mrs. Duggan said nothing to each other that mattered, and she would leave here holding less than she came with.
By the pale shine of Mrs. Duggan’s eyes when they open, she knows she didn’t get it wrong.
Whatever Mrs. Duggan gave Rachel, it was big enough that Tommy killed her for it.
“That Rachel one waited till your sister and alla them were away to town,” Mrs. Duggan says, “and then she came to me. A wee box of shortbread biscuits, that was all she brought, like something her mammy had in the press for visitors. I mighta told her to come back with something better, only for she was in bits. Makeup all down her face, and sniveling outa her like a child after a bating. So I said she could sit down.”
Lena is under no illusion that this was kindness, and she knows no illusion is intended. A distraught woman offers much more than the same woman the next day, when things will have subsided back into some kind of proportion.