Twice Shy

The bell may have rung somewhere deep inside in response to my finger on the button, but I couldn't hear it. I rang again, and tried a few taps on the inadequate knocker, and when the blank seconds mounted to minutes, I stepped back a few paces, looking up at the windows for signs of life.

I didn't actually see the door open behind the lilac bush, but a sharp voice spoke to me from among the flowers.

'Are you Saint Anthony?' it said.

'Er, no.' I stepped back into the line of sight and found standing in the shadowy half-open doorway a short white-haired old woman with yellowish skin and wild-looking eyes.

'About the fate?' she said.

'Whose fate?' I asked, bewildered.

'The church's, of course.'

'Oh,' I said. The fete:

She looked at me as if I were totally stupid, which from her point of view I no doubt was.

'If you cut the peonies tonight,' she said,'they'll be dead by Saturday.'

Her voice was distinguishably Irish, but with the pure vowels of education, and her words were already a dismissal. She was holding onto the door with one hand and its frame with the other, and was on the point of irrevocably rejoining them,

'Please,' I said hastily, 'show me the peonies… so that I'll know which to pick… on Saturday.'

The half-begun movement was arrested. The old woman considered for a moment and then stepped out past the lilac into full view, revealing a waif-thin frame dressed in a rust-coloured jersey, narrow navy blue trousers, and pink and green checked bedroom slippers.

'Round the back,' she said. She looked me up and down, but apparently saw nothing to doubt. 'This way.'

She led me round the house along a path whose flat sunken paving stones merged at the edges with the weedy overgrowth of what might once have been flowerbeds. Past a shoulder-high stack of sawn logs, contrastingly neat. Past a closed side door. Past a greenhouse filled with the straggly stalks of many dead geraniums. Past a wheelbarrow full of cinders, about whose purpose one could barely guess. Round an unexpected corner, through a too-small gap in a vigorously growing hedge, and finally into the riotous mess of the back garden.

'Peonies,' she said, pointing, though indeed there was no need. Around the ruin of a lawn huge swathes of the fat luxurious blowsy heads, pink, crimson, frilly white, raised themselves in every direction from a veritable ocean of glossy dark leaves, the sinking sun touching all with gold. Decay might lie in the future but the present was a triumphant shout in the face of death.

'They're magnificent,' I said, slightly awed. 'There must be thousands of them.'

The old woman looked around without interest. 'They grow every year. Liam couldn't have enough. You can take what you like.'

'Um.' I cleared my throat. 'I'd better tell you I'm not from the church.'

She looked at me with the same sort of bewilderment as I'd recently bent on her. 'What did you want to see the peonies for, then?'

'I wanted to talk to you. For you not to go inside and shut your door when you learned what I want to talk about.'

'Young man,' she said severely, 'I'm not buying anything. I don't give to charities. I don't like politicians. What do you want?'

'I want to know,' I said slowly, 'about the papers that Chris Norwood stole from you.'

Her mouth opened. The wild eyes raked my face like great watery searchlights. The thin body shook with powerful but unspecified emotion.

'Please don't worry,' I said hastily. 'I mean you no harm. There's nothing at all to be afraid of.'

'I'm not afraid. I'm angry.'

'You did have some papers, didn't you, that Chris Norwood took?'

'Liam's papers. Yes.'

'And you went to Angel Kitchens to complain?'

'The police did nothing. Absolutely nothing. I went to Angel Kitchens to make that beastly man give them back. They said he wasn't there. They were lying. I know they were.'

Her agitation was more than I was ready to feel guilty for. I said calmly. 'Please, could we just sit down…' I looked around for a garden bench, but saw nothing suitable. 'I don't want to upset you. I might even help.'

'I don't know you. It's not safe.' She looked at me for a few more unnerving seconds with full beam, and then turned and began to go back the way we had come. I followed reluctantly, aware that I'd been clumsy but still not knowing what else to have done. I had lost her, I thought. She would go in behind the lilac and shut me out.

Back through the hedge, past the cinders, past the cemetery in the greenhouse: but not past the closed side door. To my slightly surprised relief she stopped there and twisted the knob.

'This way,' she said, going in. 'Come along. I think I'll trust you. You look all right. I'll take the risk.'

The house was dark inside and smelled of disuse. We seemed to be in a narrow passage, along which she drifted ahead of me, silent in her slippers, light as a sparrow.