Brond Read online

  ‘Put it on the floor,’ Kennedy said, rubbing his hand over his face. ‘Filthy habit.’

  I had seen Jackie smoking but so fastidiously I could not imagine her building that mash of blackened ends.

  ‘You’ve a grip like death on that. Is it University stuff?’

  He tapped a finger in the direction of the parcel. I was holding it on my knee with one hand cupped over it protectively.

  ‘It’s not mine. I’m supposed to be keeping it for Peter Kilpatrick.’

  ‘You’d better let him have it then.’

  That sounded simple.

  ‘I would if I knew where he was.’

  ‘Upstairs snoring if he’s on form.’

  ‘Didn’t you know either? He’s gone off to some uncle in the country.’

  ‘Either?’

  ‘Jackie.’ I was so involved I used her joke name without thinking; but he paid no heed. He must have been used to us calling her that. ‘She hadn’t heard either. She thought he might have skipped his rent.’

  ‘She wouldn’t like that. It’s a big upkeep this place. Still, I wouldn’t worry. He seems honest enough. Bit impulsive maybe – but then he’s young.’

  He irritated me blethering on without an idea in his head.

  ‘Impulsive isn’t the name for it. Jackie checked his room and he hasn’t even taken a toothbrush with him.’

  He seemed hardly interested, heavy sleep weighting him down as he drank.

  ‘Just what I said – impulsive. The country’ll do him good. There’s more important things in life than washing your teeth.’

  Like getting rid of this damned parcel before Brond came asking. I had sat too long. I could go to the library and check the back numbers of newspapers to see if the death of a boy had been reported that night.

  ‘I’ll have to be off.’

  I stood up, putting the parcel familiarly under my arm again.

  ‘Already?’ Kennedy widened both eyes. ‘I thought we would have a wet and a talk. I don’t often have a chance of a talk.’

  He followed me out into the hall.

  ‘Are you not leaving that thing here?’

  I was tempted. But I didn’t want Brond anywhere near the house. Anyway Jackie would throw me out if she found I’d palmed it off on him after all she’d said.

  ‘I’m going to get rid of it. There’s a girl who’ll take it.’

  He reached out and touched the parcel.

  ‘Is that the girl Val was telling me about? What’s her name . . .?’

  ‘Margaret.’

  Suddenly I wanted to get away.

  ‘Margaret Bridie – was it?’

  ‘Margaret Briody.’

  ‘Ah, Val’s no use at names.’ He looked at me sadly. ‘That’s not a Protestant name.’

  Tribally, in this city, you could tell.

  ‘If I were you,’ he tapped the parcel to mark each word, ‘I’d think – twice – in – that – direction. I’ve seen many a lad ruined for life with a hasty marriage.’

  Impulse being a funny business.

  SIX

  The Reading Room consists of a set of concentric circles, the lending counter at the centre, department sub-libraries in rooms round the gallery. The entire structure acts as a reflector of noise; a shuffle echoed round the place. It was such an atrocious drawback in a library I was sure the architects must have won a clutch of awards. On my second circuit, heads came up, signalling fury or hope. At night when everybody was bored or desperate with studying it was a good place to pick up a girl.

  As it happened the one I wanted was not there.

  I was leaving when I wondered about the department rooms in the gallery. What else had I to do? My first plan had been to go to check the newspapers. The lure of old newspapers was not strong; I was tired and did not want to find out more that night. I was not sure if I wanted to find out more any time or ever. I was walking with only one stick. Properly, they should have a rubber ferrule on the end. Mine did not. My heel came down with a bump; my stick tapped. As I circled the gallery, all the heads below swung up like blind moles sniffing the air.

  She was in the history library, a room about fifteen feet long, books on the walls, a table and half a dozen chairs in the middle. I looked at her through the glass. As if feeling my eyes, she glanced up. Her look was not welcoming.

  I pushed the door. When it shut behind me, we were alone. All the coughs and sighs from below were shut out. In this echoing house of glass, the department rooms felt deceptively private. A character in one of my classes had claimed that one night about ten to nine, just before the building closed, he had glanced into the theology library and seen a couple on the job under the table. I tended to disbelieve the bit about the theology library – no sense in spoiling a good story.

  ‘History library,’ I said, ‘or English possibly. Sociology very likely. Theology too good to be true.’

  ‘What?’ she said looking frightened or maybe just bewildered.

  ‘I was thinking of something a guy told me.’

  Impulse again; or a defence against the look on her face when she had seen me.

  The look came back – only worse – when she noticed the parcel. It was still under my free arm; a kind of fixture. I hefted it gently in the air – it was heavy as Jackie had said – and laid it on the table in front of her.

  ‘Yours, I think.’

  She pushed it back at me as if it was hot. Too hard, for it slid off and landed at my feet. I picked it up hoping it had ripped but its web of string and tape was intact. If it was to be opened, it wouldn’t be by accident.

  ‘I don’t know what you think you’re doing. I told you it would be collected. What’s the point of carrying it around with you?’

  ‘It started to tick.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know – tick. As in tick, tick, tock. Tick, tock. If it’s going to explode, I thought I’d bring it along so we could share it together.’

  To my astonishment, she went white. Like a rabbit from a conjuror’s hat, instantly white, and ready to disappear. Shame and sympathy took me out of myself so that I went round the table to comfort her. She wrestled away from my arm and my hand took her breast which put me rapidly back into myself.

  It was when she pressed back further from me that I realised I was holding the parcel by her head.

  ‘Please.’ I said. I put it back on the table and pushed it away from us. The memory of her breast’s weight lingered on my palm and fingers. ‘I was just being stupid.’

  ‘Why would you say it was a bomb? What made you say that?’

  Suddenly I was infected by her fright.

  ‘Jesus! It isn’t, is it? You wouldn’t have—’

  The passion of my cowardice persuaded her at once. In a blink, she went from terror to rage.

  ‘I can’t conceive of a mentality like yours. Do you ever read the papers or look at the television news? And it’s not funny!’ As usual when I was embarrassed, I was grinning. If I had been a puppy, I’d have rolled over to show her my belly. ‘Babies in prams burned. And people all torn to bits. While fools like you make jokes. You’d think God would strike you down!’

  I had thought of that myself – about people being struck down all the time and how you could hardly ever see it as God’s work.

  A shape moved past on the other side of the glass. If we went on like this a janitor would come up and throw us out. I sat down and tried to still her with my eye. It probably didn’t work with tigers either. She was scrambling up out of her seat when I caught her by the upper arm. For an instant she resisted and I felt the strength of her body and caught its scent, sweet with powder and sweat.

  ‘Sit down, you bitch!’ I heard myself saying. ‘Just hold everything for a minute.’

  On the far side of the gallery, behind the closed doors of another library, a girl stared across for a long moment before she lowered her head. Perhaps she had decided it was all right; perhaps she had not even been aware of us, looking up unseeing
ly from the book she was studying. I wished I was across there beside her; we could worry together over some textual crux. After all, I had come to the city for the academic life.

  ‘Go if you want,’ I said without unclenching my fist from her arm. ‘But take your bloody Christmas present with you.’

  ‘You’re hurting me,’ she said.

  At home, they always said I didn’t know my own strength.

  ‘I didn’t mean to. Will you please sit down?’

  She rubbed her arm, pushing up the sleeve of her sweatshirt.

  ‘You can see the marks of your fingers.’ She turned her arm round and craned to see. ‘And your thumb. It’ll be black and blue.’

  By the time she had finished saying all that she sounded judicial, almost cheerful.

  ‘See?’ she said. ‘I’m not running away.’

  ‘That’ll be a disappointment to her,’ I said nodding towards the girl across the gallery. She had lifted her head again to watch us. Lots of people were not made for the academic life.

  ‘She’s getting her eyes filled,’ Margaret said, original as ever.

  ‘She thinks we’re having a lovers’ quarrel. She’s bored with her book – Anglo-Saxon poetry or, I don’t know, mercantile law, and she’s looking at us and wishing somebody would push open the door and say, Come out of there, and I’ll show you some life.’

  ‘And she says, being a lawyer, caveat emptor.’

  My mind went blank on the Latin tag then cleared. “Let the buyer beware.” I didn’t see the joke, but it sounded dangerously close to being witty. Of course, Kennedy would have explained, the RCs did a lot of Latin at school.

  I indicated the parcel, cautiously so as not to upset her.

  ‘It’s not a bomb and so why not take it back?’

  ‘No one in his right mind would have thought it was so why don’t you keep it?’ she said.

  It was a good question.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind. Why should I? Only I’m thinking of going back home. I can’t get a job so I’ll go home. No use Brond coming to collect it, if I’m not there. That’s all I was thinking . . .’

  I trailed off. It would have made a reasonable story if I had worked it out before seeing her. Now, after all the melodrama, my reasonableness sounded weirdly unreasonable.

  ‘Why don’t you leave it with the people in the house? I can’t see why they’d mind.’

  ‘I tried that. My landlady wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole. To tell you the truth, she told me to get rid of it.’

  Margaret had forgotten all about wanting to get away. She fixed those enormous eyes on my mouth as if she could read the words as well as hear them.

  ‘That’s terribly strange,’ she said. ‘What did you say that made her feel that way?’

  ‘Nothing. I told her you’d met Peter Kilpatrick; he’d given you it and asked you to give it to me. And I told her somebody was to call for it.’

  ‘Did you tell her Brond would send for it?’

  I thought about that. I could remember Jackie’s arm and the knife chopping down on to the wooden board. Funny, I had caught hold of Jackie by the arm too.

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘I can’t see why it should.’ She looked offended. ‘It’s just very strange that she should talk that way.’

  ‘Maybe not. Since I was ill, they’ve decided to adopt me.’ I appointed Jackie an honorary member in Kennedy’s concern. ‘She was just being protective.’

  ‘Your landlady, you mean? Was that her that opened the door to me?’

  ‘That’s her. We call her Jackie. As a joke, you know . . . because her name’s Kennedy. It’s not very funny.’

  As she showed no reaction, I thought it would be like her never to have heard of the ex-Mrs Onassis.

  But when she did speak it was on a different track altogether.

  ‘If you think she’s old enough to be your mother, your eyes want tested. And another thing,’ she went on without taking a breath – inadvertently I kept monitoring the extraordinary evidences of her taking one – ‘where do you get off swearing at me?’

  ‘Me?’ I was astonished. ‘When have I sworn at you?’

  ‘Just now. You called me a— you know what you called me.’

  We discussed lady dogs and then we found we were both ravenously hungry. Excitement does that to you. I had no money but she said it would be her treat. As we left, the girl in the other library watched us wistfully, which was a consolation although I still had the parcel under my arm.

  SEVEN

  The parcel lay on the bench seat between Primo and me. When it had occurred to me that it was still a fixture under my off-side arm, I had put it there between us as a gesture of goodwill. Looking at Primo's fingers on the steering wheel like a bunch of bananas, I felt goodwill was in season.

  ‘Primo?’

  ‘Uh–huh.’

  ‘I never did thank you for getting between me and that maniac Davie.’

  The car swung into the side and stopped as abruptly as that length of executive metal could.

  ‘Don’t whine,’ Primo said seriously. ‘You were beginning to whine there. Sometimes it’s more dignified to say nothing. Believe me, ‘sincere advice.’

  That was a long speech for him. Even when he had appeared outside the restaurant, he had only grunted what amounted to an invitation to climb in. He hadn’t explained why but then I hadn’t asked him. I had sat in the passenger seat looking up at Margaret.

  ‘Not you,’ Primo said to her. ‘Let’s keep it simple.’

  When I twisted to look back, she was alone on the pavement like a girl who had been stood up by her date.

  Now, as we drove, curry and two glasses of wine rumbled in my stomach. ‘My treat,’ Margaret had said. ‘I’m hungry too.’ She even beat me to paying for the wine; which was easy since I only had the price of a coffee. I had begun to ask myself what my chances were of getting somewhere with her. Why else, I asked, tossing my head, should a girl ply me with wine? Well, two glasses. After that Primo appeared with an invitation to join him that only his size prevented me from refusing. He had been sitting in the car waiting for us to come out.

  After a while, I recognised a street like the one where Andy had collected Primo in the mornings, then another one like it and another. We rolled across potholes in an alley like a cart track and came into a street surrounded by black space. Tenements had been knocked down and, as the main beam flicked on, light lanced out across a plain of rubble. The road took a long curve uphill and we were back among decayed tenements with bricked-over windows like old men’s filmy eyes. When he switched off the ignition, it was very quiet. He came round the front of the car and opened the door on my side, which made it seem that he wanted me to get out. I got out.

  ‘Don’t forget the parcel,’ he said.

  I had left it on the seat. He was holding the door open with his hand folded over the top. With all my strength I kicked the door shut and in the same movement turned to run for it. A vice caught me by the shoulder and turned me back. The door swung juddering.

  ‘Get your parcel,’ he said.

  His voice sounded the same, no louder than before. I scrabbled inside and reached out the package. Curry and wine came up at the back of my throat.

  We climbed the stairs. On the first and second landings the bulbs were out, probably smashed. Primo’s voice came out of the darkness.

  ‘I’ll say this for you,’ he said. ‘You can listen to advice.’

  On the top landing, a gas jet flared blue. Primo laid the palm of his hand across the rough holes where a nameplate might have been torn out. He didn’t knock. Across the fingers under the first knuckles a welt of black and purple flesh was rising. It didn’t make him more human. I could hardly imagine how he had ignored the shock and pain or how fast he must have reacted to catch me. His voice had been level and low but as he bent his head, waiting, I saw sweat glitter on his cheeks.

  In the flickering glare of the broken gas mantle, raw tears sh
owed on the panels of the door. It looked as if it had been attacked with an axe. Squalor, poverty, I could imagine the flat behind the door. I was wrong though. Certainly the hall we entered, when the door had been opened by someone who went off too quickly for me to see him, was bare enough; but the first room into which Primo led me was comfortably furnished and the remnant of a meal showed where someone had eaten; wine glasses chimed as I brushed past the table. Primo nodded me towards the door into the next room.

  Brond got up out of a deep armchair. He was wearing slippers and had the air of a man at home. There was a decanter on the little table beside the chair and he had a glass in his hand. He held out the other to me in what I thought was greeting until he tugged the parcel from under my arm.

  ‘You’ve brought my little surprise at last.’

  I felt an astonishing relief at parting with it.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ I said. ‘I’m glad to be shot of it.’

  I assumed the demeanour of someone getting ready to leave, but he offered me a drink in a tone that didn’t allow for refusal.

  I sat in the chair facing his. My feet gave me messages about the depth of the carpet and between the curtained windows there was a tower system hi-fi deck flanked by tapes and records, lots of them. He seemed to be a man who was fond of music.

  ‘Whisky?’ he asked again patiently.

  ‘Please.’

  ‘You have a preference?’

  I didn’t understand.

  ‘A favourite blend or a malt perhaps?’

  ‘A malt,’ I said.

  He smiled.

  I twisted in my chair to watch him. There were shelves of bottles.

  ‘Water, soda . . .?’

  ‘Water,’ I said.

  Usually when I drank whisky I filled up with lemonade – a very sound lemonade. Just recently I had discovered tonic water and liked better than anything the odd sharpness it added.

  ‘Ideally,’ Brond said, ‘the water should be from the burn that feeds the distillery. I had business once with the managing director of—one of the malt whiskies, and he took a flask out of the safe in his office. It was water from the well in Ross-shire they used in reducing the malt for maturing.’ As he spoke, he poured a little water from a tall beaker into each glass. ‘Is that admirable or fanaticism? Either way we can only manage water from the tap here. Fortunately, it’s the softest city water in the world.’