Selected Stories

His wisdom was what she loved when first she loved him, when she was still a girl. She called it that, though only to herself. Not brains, they all had brains. Not skill. Not knowing everything, for they knew less than they imagined. His wisdom is almost indefinable, what a roadworker might have, a cinema usher or a clergyman, or a child. Her mother would not understand, and he himself would deny that he is wise. Of course the papers are not on the hall table; of course he hasn’t read a word – the subtle slights wrapped up as worthiness, and qualities he did not possess made his because it is the thing to do, all of valediction’s clichés.

‘No, no, a blunder,’ she hears him say when the telephone rings, the first time it has today, the house of mourning left to itself until this moment. ‘No, most ridiculous,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry if I startled you.’

He laughs, replacing the receiver, and Vanessa does not say she loves him, although she wants to. Absurd, to have thought of hiding away in Italy, packing everything up, leaving for ever his beautiful city just because they have been involved in someone else’s hoax.

He has worn the better of the two, Vanessa reflects. Age in his features was always there; her beauty loses a little every day. ‘I love your wisdom,’ she wants to say, but still is shy to use that word, fearing a display of her naïvety would make her foolish.

‘My dear,’ he murmurs in the calmness they have reached, and holds her as he did the day he first confessed his adoration. It is the wedding of their differences that protects them, steadfast in the debris of the storm.

Against the Odds

Mrs Kincaid decided to lie low. There had been a bit of bother, nothing much but enough to cause her to change her address. From time to time she was obliged to do so.

She wondered about Portrush. It was May, which meant that the holiday accommodation would still be available at low-season terms. She wondered about Cushendall, which she would have preferred because she liked the air there, but only three years had passed since her last visit and somehow three years didn’t feel quite long enough. Cushendun, Ballygalley, Portstewart, Ardglass, Bangor, Kilkeel: Mrs Kincaid had breathed the air in all of them.

This time, though, she decided on an inland town. She knew many of these also, Armagh and Lisburn in particular, but Ballymena, Magherafelt, Lurgan and Portadown almost as well. She was a Belfast woman herself, but long ago had made all the territory of the Six Counties her business ground. Only once, in 1987, had she strayed outside the North of Ireland, taking the Larne crossing to Stranraer, then travelling on to Glasgow, an episode in her life she regretted and preferred not to dwell upon. Equally regretted was a suspended sentence in the Derry courts in 1981, since it had ruled out as a place to do business in a city she was particularly fond of.

Mrs Kincaid – with no claim to that name other than her occasional use of it – was just over eleven stone, and tall. Although well covered, she gave no impression of plumpness; no bloated or sagging flesh seemed superfluous beneath her clothes. Her arms were sturdy, her legs looked strong. In her own opinion her biggish face was something she got away with, no feature in it particularly objectionable, neither a fallen-away chin nor protruding teeth. Modest in her dress, careful not to overdo her use of perfume and make-up, she was sixty years old, admitting to fifty-one. Her easy smile worked wonders.

‘Well, isn’t that great?’ she remarked to the driver of the Ulsterbus that was taking her to the inland town she had finally chosen, one she neither knew nor was known in. Her display of elation as she entered the bus had to do with the declaration of peace in the Six Counties. A double cease-fire had been announced in the thirty years’ war that was not called a war; politicians from within the North of Ireland and from London and Dublin, advisers from America, had drawn up a long agenda that had since been agreed to by referendum on both sides of the Border. Mrs Kincaid had not herself suffered more than inconvenience during the years of conflict; the trouble in her life had been a personal one. Yet the havoc that occurred with such weary repetition and for so long had naturally impinged; she would be glad to see its end.

‘Great?’ the bus driver responded to her optimism.

‘The peace.’

‘There’s maybe something in their bits of paper.’ Nonchalantly, the driver turned on the ignition. Windscreen wipers lumbered across the curved glass in front of him, clearing away a few drops of rain. ‘We’ll see,’ he said, a reminder in his tone that whatever agreements had been reached, whatever pledges given, there were gunmen who had not gone away, who still possessed their armoury and were used to calling the tune. ‘We’ll see,’ he said again.

‘Hope for the best.’

‘Aye.’

‘Isn’t it cold, though, for May? Whenever I looked out first thing I said you’ll be needing your wool, Mabel.’