Selected Stories

Belle made herself remember all that. She made herself see the bottle of John Jameson taken from a cupboard in the lighthouse, and hear the boarding-house voices. He understood, he did his best to comfort her; his affection was in everything he did. But Violet would have told him which leaves were on the turn. Violet would have reported that the tide was going out or coming in. Too late Belle realized that. Violet had been his blind man’s vision. Violet had left her no room to breathe.

One day, coming away from the house that was the most distant they visited, the first time Belle had been there, he said:

‘Did you ever see a room as sombre as that one? Is it the holy pictures that do it?’

Belle backed the car and straightened it, then edged it through a gateway that, thirty years ago, hadn’t been made wide enough.

‘Sombre?’ she said on a lane like a riverbed, steering around the potholes as best she could.

‘We used wonder could it be they didn’t want anything colourful in the way of a wallpaper in case it wasn’t respectful to the pictures.’

Belle didn’t comment on that. She eased the Vauxhall out on to the tarred road and drove in silence over a stretch of bogland. Vividly she saw the holy pictures in the room where Mrs Grenaghan’s piano was: Virgin and Child, Sacred Heart, St Catherine with her lily, the Virgin on her own, Jesus in glory. They hung against non-descript brown; there were statues on the mantelpiece and on a corner shelf. Mrs Grenaghan had brought tea and biscuits to that small, melancholy room, speaking in a hushed tone as if the holiness demanded that.

‘What pictures?’ Belle asked, not turning her head, although she might have, for there was no other traffic and the bog road was straight.

‘Aren’t the pictures still in there? Holy pictures all over the place?’

‘They must have taken them down.’

‘What’s there then?’

Belle went a little faster. She said a fox had come from nowhere, over to the left. It was standing still, she said, the way foxes do.

‘You want to pull up and watch him, Belle?’

‘No. No, he’s moved on now. Was it Mrs Grenaghan’s daughter who played that piano?’

‘Oh, it was. And she hasn’t seen that girl in years. We used say the holy pictures maybe drove her away. What’s on the walls now?’

‘A striped paper.’ And Belle added: ‘There’s a photograph of the daughter on the mantelpiece.’

Some time later, on another day, when he referred to one of the sisters at the convent in Meena as having cheeks as flushed as an eating apple, Belle said that that nun was chalky white these days, her face pulled down and sunken. ‘She has an illness so,’ he said.

Suddenly more confident, not caring what people thought, Belle rooted out Violet’s plants from the flowerbeds at the back, and grassed the flowerbeds over. She told her husband of a change at Doocey’s garage: Texaco sold instead of Esso. She described the Texaco logo, the big red star and how the letters of the word were arranged. She avoided stopping at Doocey’s in case a conversation took place there, in case Doocey were asked if Esso had let him down, or what. ‘Well, no, I wouldn’t call it silvery exactly,’ Belle said about the peacock in the hall of Barnagorm house. ‘If they cleaned it up I’d say it’s brass underneath.’ Upstairs, the sofas at each end of the landing had new loose covers, bunches of different-coloured chrysanthemums on them. ‘Well no, not lean, I wouldn’t call him that,’ Belle said with the photograph of her husband’s father in her hand. ‘A sturdy face, I’d say.’ A schoolteacher whose teeth were once described as gusty had false teeth now, less of a mouthful, her smile sedate. Time had apparently drenched the bright white of the McKirdys’ façade, almost a grey you’d call it. ‘Forget-me-not blue,’ Belle said one day, speaking of the mountains that were blue when the weather brought that colour out. ‘You’d hardly credit it.’ And it was never again said in the piano tuner’s house that the blue of the mountains was the subtle blue of smoke.

Owen Dromgould had run his fingers over the bark of trees. He could tell the difference in the outline of their leaves; he could tell the thorns of gorse and bramble. He knew birds from their song, dogs from their bark, cats from the touch of them on his legs. There were the letters on the gravestones, the stops of the organ, his violin. He could see red, berries on holly and cotoneaster. He could smell lavender and thyme.

All that could not be taken from him. And it didn’t matter if, overnight, the colour had worn off the kitchen knobs. It didn’t matter if the china light-shade in the kitchen had a crack he hadn’t heard about before. What mattered was damage done to something as fragile as a dream.