Teresa had been polishing the taps again, an endeavour Vince found mystifying. If you wanted to look at your face – and really it was only a necessity for shaving – then you could use the mirror above the basin. He’d screwed it there himself. You’d not gain much from trying to peer at your reflection in the shine of a tap. Though there was no doubt about it: Teresa Hogan’s taps shone. In the old days you’d have been lucky to have such bathroom facilities. When his bachelor uncle Seamus inhabited Dolphin Cottage he’d had to piss into a bucket outside the back door. Come spring he’d soak his winter blankets in the urine for twenty-four hours to kill off the bugs and stretch them on the bushes to dry. The whiff of ammonia when Teresa brought home the dry cleaning would remind Vince of his uncle’s methods.
He emerged from the downstairs toilet drying his hands on the seat of his trousers. She would have reproved him for not using the fluffy apricot towel swinging from its hoop, but she was busy entertaining her friends, Breda Malone and Mary O’Connor. They were perched on easy chairs with their teacups; the three witches, was how he thought of them when they were together. Teresa had been doing more than a bit of unnecessary spit and polish, he could see now – she’d been ferreting through the press cuttings.
She kept them in an old box file: several years’ worth of christenings, weddings and obituaries, accounts of local Field Days and Festivals and the Rose of Tralee snipped from the Kerryman. She’d had them out before, on Sunday, and he’d thought maybe she was after the date of an anniversary of some kind – though it would be unlike Teresa not to have such information written down. Hers was always the first card through the letter box; people said her goodwill was much appreciated.
She had the scissored ribbons spread on the table top – including the thirty-year-old photo of himself when he still had hair on the top of his head and could rise to the challenge of an arm wrestle. And win, mostly. But it wasn’t her younger, fresh-faced husband’s picture Teresa was passing across to Breda Malone; it was the reproduction of a family snapshot: a broad-chested man, a petite woman and a stocky little boy in dungarees.
‘What do you think?’ she was saying. ‘Is there not an incredible likeness?’
Breda adjusted her glasses so she could look more closely at the grainy image. ‘I believe you are right, so,’ she said. ‘The little boy here, he’d be a mite younger, would he not, than the grandson she showed us on Sunday?’
Teresa nodded agreement and lifted her chin in a mulish way as if waiting for Vince to join the discussion.
He said, ‘Who are you talking about?’
‘The lady doctor. The one who stayed here before she moved into Dolphin Cottage.’
‘What about her?’ He recalled the crisp accent, how she was polite but withdrawn as the English tended to be. They’d had a conversation about TB, about whether or not you were safe to drink green milk (which Vince had done all his life, in point of fact). She was very knowledgeable about the TB, which was only to be expected from the medical profession, but she came round in the end to his point of view. Indeed, she had poured the milk on her cereal in the mornings. Nothing else had struck him.
‘You didn’t recognise her?’
‘Should I have done?’
Breda and Mary pursed their lips and continued to pass the press cuttings between them, studying the detail.
‘We were first alerted,’ said Teresa, ‘when we bumped into her after Mass and she’d told us she’d been to the burial ground at St Silas.’ The women nodded to confirm this. ‘She didn’t mention the memorial that Ronnie and Pat put up, but she must have seen it. And it got us thinking. Here—’ She took the black and white photo from Breda and thrust it towards him. ‘Take a good look. Is she not the wife of the man who drowned? Cast your mind back.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Vince.
‘But you saw more of her than any of the rest of us. You were a witness.’
The last person to speak to William Langley alive – what a responsibility that had been. He’d not felt easy about it. How could he have realised its significance at the time? And it was only because he was asked so often afterwards – while it was fresh in his mind – that he could still picture the scene.
It was back when they’d been running the bar, before he and Teresa sold it for redevelopment. The English couple had come in and taken a corner table in the snug with their drinks. The man, neutral, inoffensive: chestnut eyes, beige shirt, brown trousers, like he could blend into the landscape with no trouble at all; the woman’s hair cut so short it cleaved to her skull. They were speaking quietly, but with an intense insistence: a quiet fierce argument. The bar was deserted. Vince didn’t know why they were keeping their voices down, unless on account of the fluffy-haired child they had with them, blowing bubbles in his red lemonade.
He’d been shaking out his damp tea towel and checking the pressure on his barrel taps, when the woman pushed her chair back so it legs grated on the floor. She jumped up and swung a large canvas holdall over her shoulder, like a game bag loaded with duck or rabbit. Then she knocked the boy’s thumb from his mouth and jerked him from his seat, tugging him out through the doors.
At this point Vince met the man’s eyes. His smile was rueful. He was a big fellow, well-built but nimble with it. He leaned his elbow on the bar and glanced at his watch. ‘Might as well have one for the road.’ He took a punt note from his pocket. ‘Bushmills please.’
‘A large one?’
‘Why not? A dose of Dutch courage.’
That was the remark they kept asking Vince about. But it was only an expression, he insisted, it wasn’t significant. One thing he did remember, three decades later, was the hungry way the widow had watched him in the courtroom in Tralee when the Coroner asked: ‘Did William Langley seem agitated at all?’ At that moment Vince had glanced in her direction and seen her crane forward in her seat as if she couldn’t afford to miss whatever he was going to say.
‘No, not particularly.’
She’d relapsed then, slumped like a sack of Kerr’s Pinks. She’d only mentioned the quarrel glancingly herself. They’d had a disagreement, she acknowledged, which was why she’d left the pub ahead of her husband; she’d needed to curb her temper. This fitted with Vince’s view. She had steamed off at a gallop because that’s what some women do, is it not? For a man, a drink can go a long way to soothe a hurt. There was no suggestion that William Langley might take his own life, nothing to indicate suicide. No reason for him to plunge into the sea again after the rescue. The riptide had claimed him. The verdict was accidental death.
Ronnie Farrelly hadn’t brought her sons to the inquest – they were far too young for such proceedings – but she’d brought Anna. The older girls had been minding the little ones that day, beach-combing while the boys fished in the rock pools. Anna had pulled the child from the water and got him breathing again. She had acquitted herself very well, for it was a terrible ordeal and the Coroner had praised her.
Afterwards Vince had spoken to Ronnie and they’d been standing not a yard away from the widow, the pair of them building up the nerve to approach, to shake her hand and tell her how sorry they were for her loss. But she had given them a glittering black-eyed stare, her pupils so dilated Vince felt as if he was looking straight through them into her brain and the torment churning there. She didn’t acknowledge him, or Ronnie.
And then the reporter from the Kerryman had talked him into going for a Guinness at the Grand. They’d sat on high stools at the mahogany counter and he’d repeated his story again – No, he hadn’t been able to hear what they were saying and no, your man hadn’t seemed agitated, although it was true he’d joked about Dutch courage. And Vince finished his jar and the photographer (who’d died since from a severe asthma attack, so there was another life cut short) took his photo, the one that Mary O’Connor was putting back in the box because it wasn’t Vince in his younger days they were interested in.
‘I don’t know,’ he said again. ‘I can’t be certain.’
‘I’ve told Ronnie anyway,’ Teresa said.
‘Told her what?’
‘That we think the widow’s come back.’
‘Isn’t that a bit hasty?’
‘She needed warning,’ said Breda, peering at him over her spectacles like the schoolteacher she had once been. ‘It could come as an awful shock otherwise.’
‘Why put the wind up her? There’s no need for their paths to cross.’
‘It could be helpful for them to meet.’
‘I don’t see how.’ He thought they should leave well alone, but it was hard to get this across to women: meddling was in their bones.
‘Ah well…’ Teresa paused. ‘Because it’s haunted her, has it not, that she was indirectly responsible for the death of a man? And since her own husband…’ Her hand shook a little as she replaced her cup on its saucer, though the Lord knew why, because Vince was in tip-top condition, never a day’s illness – apart from the osteoarthritis in his knee joints. He wasn’t going to leave her anytime soon.
‘And how can you tell what’s inside another person’s head?’
‘She used to have nightmares,’ said Teresa. ‘She told me about them: a man striding out of the ocean dripping with seaweed, coming to claim her boy.’
‘She told you once,’ said Vince. ‘I was there. It was after he’d fallen off the roof of Chrissie O’Grady’s henhouse and concussed himself. There was fear of brain damage or a haemorrhage of some kind, was there not? But he was up and running within hours.’
‘That doesn’t stop a nightmare recurring,’ chirped Mary in her birdlike way.
Vince was outnumbered. He’d known all three of them as girls (four if you counted Ronnie), hanging around the local bars and ballrooms, and they’d been no less terrifying then. Even so, he was not easily pushed around. They shouldn’t have started the conversation if they didn’t want his contribution. ‘And what about her?’ he said, recalling how reserved the lady doctor had been. ‘The widow. If that’s who she is. Do you think she will welcome a meeting?’
‘If she’s been to St Silas, she’ll have realised how much the family cared, how grateful they were. I can’t see that bringing the two of them together would do any harm. People get satisfaction, you know, from closure.’
When Teresa wasn’t reading the romance sagas she borrowed from the library, she’d rummage through her collection of self-help books and read aloud what she considered to be plums and Vince regarded as nonsense. Closure was one of those expressions he was highly suspicious of. It only made sense to him in terms of shutting down: a shop for instance, or a factory producing goods people didn’t need any more.
In the country you had to carry on as best you could – though they were struggling to keep their heads above water. He wouldn’t get involved in the reasons why, but it was generally the wrong fellers lining their pockets and that was the truth of it. People used to oblige each other in return for the side of a cow. They were having to go back to that kind of bartering now to keep the banks at bay.
‘Well,’ he said, folding his arms to give himself a look of authority. ‘I don’t think you should interfere.’
‘You have to ask yourself, don’t you, why else is she here?’
Breda and Mary nodded.
‘But, Teresa, all I’m suggesting—’
‘You’ll not understand, obviously.’
He understood he wasn’t going to get her to change her mind.
‘A simple phone call.’ She collected the scraps of paper from her friends and returned them to the box file. ‘Or rather, two. I shall broach the subject with each of them tactfully. I know how to handle these things.’
‘Well,’ said Vince who knew when he had lost. ‘Let’s hope you’ll not be mistaken.’