On Sunday morning, anxious to test whether the calm surface beguiling his eye since Friday hid any treacherous currents in his marriage, Jack told Emma he intended to visit McKenna.
‘Why don’t you ask him over for a meal this evening?’ Emma suggested. ‘He’s probably fed up with cooking for himself.’
‘What?’
‘I said invite him for a meal tonight.’
‘Right.’ Jack watched her face, her eyes, and found nothing save a bland smile.
Emma watched him back the car from the garage and turn into the road. As soon as he put his feet back under the table from where she had kicked them last week, Jack would want an explanation for her unexpected kindness towards McKenna, for Jack and anything approaching tact or subtlety were uneasy bedfellows. She would simply put forward a change of heart, Emma decided, an access of commonsense. He might not believe her, but the best of marriages had a few white lies billowing somewhere in the passageways of their history. It was strange, she reflected, clearing the breakfast table, how some little thing, some tiny thing, could force a person so violently into your thoughts you couldn’t prise them out again, and you spent your days engaged in normal trivial activity while the mind engaged itself with an excess of fantasy.
The twins began fighting in their bedroom. Emma went upstairs, summoned by rising voices, and screams of ‘Mummy!’ from both, and stood in the bedroom doorway, wishing it was McKenna who stared back at her, waiting and wanting.
Jack followed McKenna, still in pyjamas, puffy-eyed and dishevelled, down the stairs. The cat, curled up in front of the unlit fire, head tucked under paws, opened her eyes, yawned hugely, stretched, and returned to sleep.
‘Looks like she’s moved in,’ Jack commented. ‘Denise won’t like that.’
‘Denise won’t have to live with her. How are things at home?’
Jack sat at the kitchen table, watching McKenna make toast and scrambled egg and put the kettle on to boil. ‘Emma’s back to her old self. Or nearly. She wants to know if you’d like to come for a meal tonight.’
‘That’s very kind of her.’ McKenna made tea, lit the small burner on the gas stove, and put the teapot back to brew. ‘Tell her I’d like that. Very much.’
McKenna let the cat out, washed up, vacuumed the house, and spent the afternoon happily uprooting weeds, trimming back the few shrubs, stopping every so often to gaze at the beguiling view of a city studded with burgeoning trees, sunlight glittering on the waters of the Straits where yachts tacked slowly back and forth, their sails slack. The cat went backwards and forwards, climbing trees, basking on the wall. A large and beautiful tabby leapt over the wall into the garden, to rub itself around McKenna’s legs, and to flee screeching as the piebald stray came after her.
After a poor Sunday dinner of sausage and mashed potatoes, coloured with a dribble of thin gravy, Beti Gloff went out on her afternoon walk: three hours to herself before she must make tea for John Jones then leave dutifully for chapel. Some days, she roamed the city streets; on others, she would crab along the pathways of the mountain, staring down upon the little back streets, envy biting into her heart. She dwelt on the estate because John Jones odd-jobbed for the owners, his meanness too huge to pay rent on another house when one came free with his wages. That the house was little better than a hovel worried him not at all. Mary Ann and her cronies said among themselves that John Jones was too mean in every way, and that was the reason why no child added riches to Beti’s impoverished existence. He gave no thought to Beti’s comfort, to the pain her crippled body thrust upon her night and day, year in and year out. He sluiced himself down at the stone sink in the kitchen once a week in winter, twice each summer week, stood upright in the ramshackle privy hidden in blackthorn and bramble bushes at the bottom of their overgrown garden, and strung torn-up newspapers on a hook behind the privy door. Never once in the long dreariness of their marriage had John Jones thought his wife might like an indoor toilet, might need a warm bath to ease her poor body and its pain.
This fine Sunday, when the first real sunshine of the year warmed her twisted bones and caressed her ugly features as no man’s hand had ever done, Beti took a turn around the cemetery before making her way into Bangor. Happy to see those whose memory was bedecked with fresh flowers, she fretted for the others forgotten, graves untended, sour with weed and mossy gravel. She read again the inscription on the elegant marble gravestone guarding the mortal remains of Councillor Hogan: fine verse, she thought, without understanding of its meaning, but taking comfort from the instruction that ‘All Shall Be Well’. In her chapel prayers, she tried not to ask God too often when exactly that perfection might manifest itself.
She made her way up the High Street to the Town Clock, and sat to rest her aching legs on a bench outside Woolworths, watching pigeons scavenge in Saturday’s litter, staring at the overhanging escarpments of Bangor Mountain, butter-yellow with gorse. There would be bluebells under the trees, she thought, enough to pick a bunch to set on her window ledge. The sweet scent of gorse and fresh green leaves drifted on the breeze, and Beti wondered absently why no bluebells grew in the woods around the village, why her cottage stayed dusky dark even on the most brilliant summer’s day.
Sighing with pain and the misery of it all, she rose, and began limping back the way she had come, into the little lanes behind the High Street, where she and Mary Ann and countless other girls had dreamed and played long summers past. The rows of two-up, two-down terraces were gone, bulldozed to make way for new brick dwellings, lining each side of the lanes, filling every available space: houses without gardens, merely concrete yards just large enough to turn a car. The builders had cut deep into the lower slopes of the mountain, leaving raw wounds in the soil, exposing tree roots to frost and rains; and looking upon this little Eden of the twentieth century, Beti felt a grief so deep and harsh she wanted to weep.
At the lower end of High Street she turned on to the long road leading down to the distant sparkling sea, a road once called Margarine Street, Beti remembered, laughing a little amid her tears, because the folk trying to better themselves in the fancy terraces beggared themselves simply to pay the fancier rents. She roamed further, criss-crossing the warren of old streets higgledy-piggledy behind Margarine Street, past cars parked bumper to bonnet where once a bicycle would be a luxury. Her legs hurt, more than usual, although the warmth of spring always burnt deep in her bones, as if this gentle heat swelled badness deep within, drew it out and cast it behind her in the long shadow that, in the dark days of winter, moved back inside her body, hiding itself and its pain and ugliness, running with the thin marrow in her bones. She rested briefly, leaning on someone’s garden wall, an unkempt garden behind, where an unpruned rosebush, spiky and sickly and feeble, yielded all its strength to vicious green thorns. Grass straggled around the bush, dandelions blossomed in the grass, weeds forced their glory through cracks in the front path, and Beti eyed the sleek smart car at the kerbside, its grey paintwork glittering like the distant sea.
Under the heat of a brilliant sun, the car reeked of heavy enamel and chemicals, resembled some nasty dangerous animal, come to rest for a while, but sleeping with one eye open, ready to pounce and kill. Beti peered inside, slumping a little further down on the wall to do so, and saw upholstery like smooth grey suede. In the rear window, an ugly furry object of many colours hung on a length of black and yellow elastic, and she felt the blood run from her face so fast she expected to see it gush from the toes of her twisted shoes and pool on the pavement. All thoughts of tea and chapel driven from her mind, she yawed back up the road, stopping at the top to catch rasping breaths, glancing with terror over her hunched shoulder in case the owner of the car knew, by some mystical process, what had taken place on the sunlit street, and should even now be coming to shut her mouth for ever, to do to her what had been done to the woman in the woods.
Listening to a late concert on Classic FM, McKenna thought about the family whose evening he had shared, where the tensions beneath the surface ran like heavy currents in water, pushing the flow towards its destination, unlike the taut and vicious stresses which flowed between Denise and himself. The cat jumped on his knee, pushing her nose into his hand, and burrowed into his lap, her bones fragile and limp.