It was from Barney that I also learned that Fitz and Councillor Noades were having dinner that evening with Clive White.
‘I didn’t know Fitz and your Clive were such big buddies,’ Barney said.
Neither did I, though, if I’d thought about it, I suppose it could only ever have been a matter of time.
Clive White’s parents, my own parents told me, had nothing, and their parents before them had even less than that. This was not intended as a put-down, but as a testimony to my second cousin’s pedigree. They were good people, Clive’s people, was what I was asked to understand. In working-class Belfast, poverty and purity went hand in hand and the highest tribute you could pay a family was that they were poor, but they were honest. Clive early on arrived at the conclusion that being the second was scant compensation for being the first. Honesty, he thought, ought to earn its crust like everything else. He ran errands for elderly neighbours, helped out in corner shops; he played the comb and paper for cinema queues on the Oldpark and Crumlin Roads. The earnings he sank into clothes pegs, bought off a tinker for a penny-ha’penny a dozen and sold door to door for a modest tuppence. Before he was quite twelve years old he was already lending money to school friends, charging interest at a strictly biblical five per cent, but he realised he would be a long time becoming rich by being scrupulous. He started to explore honesty’s outer limits, a territory where the pure light that had guided his forebears turned distinctly shady. On leaving school, at the earliest opportunity, he toured the country with a man called Titch, selling crockery from the tailboard of a lorry. Titch supplied the lorry and the crockery, Clive the innocent salesman’s face. Titch’s own face carried a scar running from the corner of his mouth to his left earlobe, an early lesson in the necessity of shutting up shop and driving the minute your wares were shifted.
Clive learned fast; fast enough to figure out he could do better on his own, though he stayed with Titch almost four years, by which time he knew Northern Ireland inside out. He developed a special fondness for border towns and border people. He admired the pragmatism that could wish the boundary away at the same time as profiting from its existence; he loved the way a cow, say, became less and more than itself when translated across the invisible line and concluded that the only worth a thing had was the amount you could persuade a body to part with for it. Still only twenty, he took the lease on a second-hand shop in Belfast’s Gresham Street – a sign above the door said ‘Since 1850’, which was possibly true for the building itself – and quickly gained the reputation of not caring too much how long the goods he bought had been in their current owner’s possession, nor how they came to be there to begin with. Early enquiries from the police revealed a willingness to cut profit margins to the bone when dealing with members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Naturally he prospered. At twenty-five he became licensee of his first bar, a dingy but popular affair in the heart of Belfast’s docks. The clientele was rarely the same two nights running. Ships and crews came and went, opening Clive’s eyes and ears to as yet undreamed of ways of making money. He provided a little side room, at a price of course, to people passing through with business to conduct. Boxes and crates came in by the back door full, and empty were broken up for the barroom fire. He was flexible about closing time, never more so than when the docks’ police, finishing a late shift, were in need of a place to have a drink and unwind. Other, bigger premises followed – there was a short-lived interest in a nightclub – but Second Cousin Clive was still of the opinion that he was seeing too little return for his hard work. He decided that the real money lay not in selling the drink over the counter but in selling it into the bars. Using some of the contacts he had picked up during his time in the docks – and renewing old acquaintances along the border – he now established himself as an importer of wines, beers and spirits. His own drinking was increasingly confined to hotel lounge bars, many of which he was, before long, supplying. Barely out of his twenties, he mixed with the better class of businessmen, comfortable in the knowledge that their arrival at respectability, like his own, had not been achieved without cutting a corner or two along the way. Even then, he knew, they were not above doing a deal if one was going. He let it be known that he was broad-minded about the use of his firm’s lorries and cultivated certain city councillors whose brief included road construction and slum clearance. (He had made a nice few bob out of the Ml extensions around Portadown and his appetite was whetted.) So, when Fitz landed into town with his talk of investment and the Belfast Urban Motorway, it was not long before Clive White got to hear of it and not long after that before he made an appearance at the International. I think the expression is like a fly to shite.
I later found out that he had been hovering around as early as Tuesday morning, though it was Friday afternoon before I saw him myself. Business had just been wound up for the week across the road in City Hall and notice posted for the monthly council meeting the following Wednesday. Both the hotel’s bars were loud with the indiscreet conversations of local politicians, all block loans and valuation lists … and Malvern Street. A motion had been proposed to start clearing houses there. Road-widening for the B.U.M., was what I gathered. I didn’t enquire too much. Malvern Street was not a subject anyone in the International wanted to dwell on, though we didn’t always have a say in the matter. Only the day before, Rocky Burns, a crony of Peter Ward’s killers, had been back in court appealing a firearms conviction.
Fitz was in the thick of the councillors, being tugged this way and that, from Blue Bar to Cocktail Bar and back, looking, I thought, for once a little bewildered. I seemed to hear with his ears all those harsh importuning Belfast voices, C’m’ere … Fitz! C’m’ere I want you … C’m’ere now. Clive White could not have timed his entrance any better. Materialising just inside the door, drink already in hand, with many smiles and nods to the left of him and the right, he steered his unhurried, unwavering course to Fitz’s side. Within minutes neither man was anywhere to be seen.
It turns out, though I did not discover this until some days after, that the two spent most of the rest of Friday evening in the lounge bar of the Royal Avenue Hotel. Padraig Nolan, a barman there, told me they were joined late on by a couple of young women.
‘And I mean young. If they hadn’t been sitting with Clive, I’d have asked to see their birth certificates.’
A taxi arrived around midnight and the four left together, Fitz linking arms with both girls: party, Padraig got the impression, which perhaps accounted for Fitz’s great good humour that Saturday morning when I saw him again in the Blue Bar. Clive White, by all accounts, was in even better humour. He had strolled into the lobby a little before lunch and flirted with Marian. He asked her was I behaving myself and told her she wanted to keep her eye on me. Marian, who had apologised to me once, unnecessarily, that my second cousin gave her the creeps, told him she was well able to look out for herself and Clive White said he didn’t doubt it, didn’t doubt it for a minute. Nicola got the same charm treatment when Clive returned for dinner. She was still a little agitated by the commotion with the woman in pink and was not displeased by the attention. She looked at Clive in his handsome grey suit, a precise triangle of white hanky peeping from the breast pocket, the camel-hair overcoat that hadn’t cost him fourpence over his arm, and she thought how nice it was to see someone who had made the effort. He put her in mind of that English actor who was forever in the papers these days – Oliver Reed; not her type exactly, but impressive nonetheless. It would have been an insult to ask a man like that if he was dressed up for a special occasion; even so something in his manner suggested that tonight was a bit out of the ordinary.
‘Shall I get someone to take your coat down to the cloakroom?’ she asked.
Clive White squeezed the camel hair a little closer to his side.
‘No, don’t bother yourself,’ he said. ‘I’ll just keep it with me.’
It was shortly after this that Barney, his shift finished, stopped in at the Blue Bar to fill me in on all that I had been missing upstairs.
‘I wouldn’t like to be picking up that one,’ he said. He meant the bill for the dinner Fitz and Noades and Clive White were just tucking into. ‘They’ve two bottles of champagne ordered up.’
‘Ah,’ said Hugh, nudging past me to the till, ‘the world is ill-divid.’
‘Isn’t it just,’ Barney said, and tugging his scarf up round his ears walked to the door, looking poor but honest and pleased enough with everything except the weather.
*
The bar had begun to fill again. The air was rich with the Saturday night smell of soaps and unguents and slim panatellas. Hugh’s mate Liam Strong was back in with his wife, Rita. Rita’s hair, set that morning, had an armour-plated look about it. I tried to imagine Liam running his hand through it and then looked at Liam and tried to imagine Rita wanting him to. There had been talk when they first came in this evening of them going to see Dr Zhivago.
‘Again,’ said Liam.
‘What do you mean, again. We missed the first half-hour the last time because I couldn’t get you out of here.’
‘So,’ said Liam, lifting their drinks and winking at Hugh, ‘we’ll go and see the first half-hour.’
Already though they were installed in their corner like people who had no intention of moving for the rest of the night. Another couple, Acheson I think their name was, had taken the table next to them, the husband shoulder to shoulder with Liam. The two men dropped the odd comment to each other out the sides of their mouths, the women leaning in every so often to talk across them. And there were other familiar faces; at certain moments in the Blue Bar it was easy to forget that there were four storeys of hotel above your head, and residents wandering in looked now and then like people who had turned up at the wrong party. I was beginning to let myself relax into the flow of the evening when Stanley was there again before me, glancing all around the room, not so much for a free seat I guessed as for one that was occupied by a person he recognised. Recognising no one, he perched on the end of a banquette next to two old boys from the Markets who came in every weekend to argue with each other.
‘I don’t like to tell you,’ Hugh said, ‘but you just topped that pint of stout up with ale.’
‘Frig.’
I poured the head of the pint into the slops tray and then the whole lot down the sink. I put another tumbler under the tap and by the time I was able to leave it settle Jamesie already had Stanley in his sights and was striding down the bar towards him.
‘Have you change for the cigarette machine?’ the woman I was serving asked.
‘What?’
‘Change for the cigarette machine.’
I took the money from her open palm.
‘You might have said.’
‘I did, just there now.’
Jamesie was leaning across the counter, chin resting casually on his hand.
‘And a box of matches,’ the woman said.
I nodded, said nothing. It was too late now. I put as much distance between myself and Jamesie as I could possibly manage.
‘Who’s next?’ I called, louder than was necessary. When I dared look again Jamesie was dribbling lager into a half pint glass which he gripped in his right hand so tight I thought he might break it. Catching my eye he softened his hold and extended his little finger effeminately.
‘Next!’ I shouted.
When we met at the till a minute or two later, Jamesie told me the whole story.
‘Recognise that fella?’
It was useless to pretend.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Remember this morning?’ Jamesie was going for the full build-up. ‘Remember I said he never bought a drink? So I seen him sitting down there now …’
We moved apart briefly, went to our customers, returned.
‘… sitting there like a drink was the last thing on his mind, and I thought, no you don’t, it’s Saturday fucking night. So I leans across and I says, Can I help you?’
Hugh walked by with four pints in his hands.
‘Are you two on go-slow?’ he asked.
‘Do you see anybody waiting?’ Jamesie said, then in the next breath, ‘And do you know what he said?’
‘A glass of lager,’ I said, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of a punch line.
‘Did he fuck!’ Jamesie was delighted. ‘Do you know what he said? A glass of water. A glass of fucking water!’
Oh, Stanley, I thought, you absolute prick. Jamesie carried on talking and serving.
‘Here’s me to him … Four shillings, thanks … Here’s me, a glass of water? Certainly. Would you like that in Irish whiskey or in Scotch?’ Jamesie broke off a moment to savour his riposte. ‘Irish or Scotch. Pick the bones out of that!
‘Anyway, he thinks a minute, his hands jigging about the way they do, and then he says, Actually, I think I’ll have a half of lager. Actually, I think you’re right, I said. Well I could’ve but I didn’t, I was letting him off.’
And for the next few minutes each time I passed him, Jamesie was muttering to himself: ‘A glass of water. A glass of fucking water.’
Stanley sat by the old boys from the Markets, fidgeting with his drink, an expression on his face of the purest misery. If I could have gone out there I would have given him a shake and told him to stop making it so hard for me to fall in love with him.
Len’s nephew, the tiddler, slipped in behind the bar for a word with Hugh.
‘Somebody should put a bell on that wee fella,’ Jamesie said. ‘I was nearly picking Brylcreem out of the sole of my shoe there.’
Tim Cassidy was taken bad with the flu and was asking to be sent home. Len wanted somebody from the Blue Bar to go up and lend a hand in the Damask Room. Hugh had to bend down to reply.
‘Tell Len … Tell your uncle I can’t spare anyone. It’s going to be mustard in here, you can see yourself.’
(‘Maybe if you lift him,’ Jamesie whispered.)
The kid shrugged and left. Hugh slapped the tap down over a pint pot.
‘Tiptoes,’ I said to Jamesie and we both crept around him, shushing the till, the optics and our squeaking shoes for making too much noise.
‘Yous’re very funny,’ Hugh said. ‘I’m not having some squirt giving me orders in my bar.’
A minute later the squirt was back. Hugh leaned over again, listened grimly, then straightened.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘But as long as it’s only an hour.’
He turned to the sink, flipped on the cold water and let it run over his wrists and along his manicured fingers.
‘Jamesie, Danny, toss a coin,’ he said, and we knew better this time than to make fun.
Jamesie called heads, the penny came down tails.
‘Jammy bastard.’
‘You can go if you want.’
‘Wise up,’ Jamesie said. ‘You won, didn’t you?’
There was no point arguing with him. They mightn’t have been obvious to everyone, but Jamesie had rules and you had to abide by the decision of the coin. Besides, the tips were now up in the function rooms and I could talk my way out of all the nurses’ parties in the world, but Jamesie would never have forgiven me for not accepting my luck in getting a cut of a second pool. I left Stanley with his quarter-pint of lager, still waiting for whoever it was he had been waiting for since half-eleven this morning (I let myself believe his face fell further as I rounded the corner out of the bar), and hopped up the stairs to the Long Corridor.
Cecil the night porter was standing by the cloakroom hatch fumbling at the knobs of a large tape recorder, watched by old Hamish the cloakroom attendant. As I approached, Cecil, his ear resting almost on top of the machine, jabbed the play button. There was a loud hiss. Cecil jerked back. A woman said, Cecil, you’ve that too far away from the TV.
‘Norma,’ Cecil explained. ‘And I had not it too far away.’
He turned the volume to a whisper, jabbed another button and the tape ran forward from one rickety spool to the other. The next time he pressed play he took care to listen in first before turning the volume back up.
‘ … engines from as far away as Lisburn …’
‘That’s Ivor Mills,’ I said. Cecil grimaced at me and I fell quiet looking with him and Hamish at the flittering brown tape.
‘Cecil Parker,’ (Hamish glanced up at him, Cecil nodded) ‘you arrived on the scene shortly after the fire broke out?’
A boy’s voice shouted Linfield, there was a scuffle, Cecil said, ‘I did, yes’. There was a moment’s silence.
‘And the fire had already taken quite a hold?’
‘It had, yes.’
‘So …’ Ivor Mills searched for a question. ‘Would you say the people inside had a lucky escape?’
‘I would, yes.’
Cecil stopped the tape. Hamish gave an appreciative whistle.
‘Is that it?’ I asked.
‘What do you mean, is that it?’ Cecil placed a protective hand on the tape recorder. ‘That was on the news.’
‘They’ll have heard that all the way over in Omagh,’ Hamish said. If it had been anyone else I would have suspected a joke, but jokes were not in Hamish’s nature.
‘Strabane,’ he added helpfully, though it was clear from Cecil’s expression that this was no help at all.
(He was in a world of his own in that cloakroom, Marian said. Jamesie, more direct, would shout sometimes from the bottom of the stairs, ‘Hamish, you can come out, the war’s over!’)
The door of the Damask Room opened. A plump man with a napkin still tucked into his belt made haste for the adjacent toilets. His lead was followed a second or two later by four more men in a tight pack. The formalities were over. By the time I entered, the lower tables were already being cleared away and the guests were dragging their chairs towards the sides of the room. Those guests, that is, who weren’t already at the bar. I ducked under that counter like Audie Murphy.
‘Sorry, I’m late,’ I told Lar the lone barman. ‘Heard you were having a spot of bother.’
Flashes came from the far end of the room where the photographer was still busy with the top table. I could make out neither bride nor groom, but saw Michael and Janet standing on the sidelines, watching over proceedings like a third set of parents.
The band began tuning up to the left of the bar, a drummer, a seated guitarist, a double bass player and a singer I thought I recognised from the entertainments pages, who sat for the moment beside the guitarist, the bulbous end of a microphone resting on her knees. A saxophone lay across a third chair and a man, dressed like the other musicians in a pale-blue shirt and knitted tie, hunkered in a corner of the low stage adjusting the tripod of a music stand.
‘Who’s the group?’ I asked Lar.
‘Thelma Beckett. Apparently the groom wanted Deirdre and the Defenders, but the bride’s father wouldn’t hear of it.’
‘You wouldn’t get music stands with Deirdre and the Defenders,’ I said.
‘Some would say you wouldn’t even get music,’ said Lar.
The main lights went down on the room and there was a second rush for the bar as guests tried to get a drink in before the dancing started. Thelma Beckett rose to her feet. They were small feet and made to seem even smaller by the back-lift of her stiletto heels on which she stood a touch over five-feet tall. Two bluish spotlights fell together on her microphone, catching the sequins stitched into her dress, another came to rest just short of the room’s central pillars and waited there until the bride and groom walked into it at the same moment as Thelma began to sing ‘Moon River’. The couple waltzed, happier than any couple might think they have a right to expect, the spotlight followed them down the maple floor towards Lar and me, then drifted with them across the face of the stage where the band played and Thelma sang, dream-makingly, heart-achingly, and the rainbow’s end was her dress as she moved her weight from one minute foot to the other and back, and the rainbow’s end was the slow-turning mirror-ball suspended above the heads of the four parents as they swapped partners and joined their children on the dance floor.
It was a relief when the saxophone at last let go of the melody and the drums and double bass upped the tempo. The floor filled with shuffling couples, leaving me to get on with the business of selling drink to men who would not or could not dance.
The groom had been separated from his new wife and after being passed from one mother to the next and dallying briefly to twist with a dubious but finally delighted aunt, he arrived in the middle of a ruck of his mates at the bar.
‘Congratulations,’ I said.
He grinned in a way I could imagine would inspire devotion.
‘Give this man a pint before he dies of thirst,’ one of his mates said, and half a dozen hands vied to pay for it.
‘The first one’s on the house,’ I said.
‘You’ll not be getting out for too many more of those!’
‘Not at all! He’ll put his foot down from the start, won’t you, Joe?’
Joe only grinned again. He brought the glass to his lips and kissed the rim like he might the back of his bride’s neck, the insteps of her stockinged feet. The friends cheered and he drank.
The bride arrived a minute later hitching her crystal nylon shoulder straps as Joe’s friends made way.
‘See your Uncle Fred,’ she said.
Lar poured her a Babycham and she said, ‘I shouldn’t,’ and lifted it anyway. Little clots of make-up had formed in the damp creases at the sides of her nose. I imagined the slope of her bottom under her dress where the groom’s hand rested, the cool clamminess of exertion, and I envied them each the other when they kissed.
After an hour, the bar traffic became more sedate and one of the waiters came in behind the counter with Lar to let me away. Half-talking, half-singing, Thelma Beckett told how the candy-coloured clown they call the sandman tiptoed into her room every night. I never heard her dreams begin.