Selected Stories

They were in the bar of the hotel, the quiet time between six and seven. The day before she’d said she’d definitely be off at the end of the week. Refreshed and invigorated, she’d said.

‘I’m alone,’ he repeated.

‘Don’t I know you are? Didn’t I say you’d be lonely?’

‘What I’m saying to you -’

‘I know what you’re saying to me. What I’m saying to yourself is you’re set in your ways. You’re well-to-do, I haven’t much. Isn’t it about that too?’

‘It’s not money -’

‘There’s always money.’

The conversation softly became argument. Affection spread through it, real and contrived. It had been great knowing him, Mrs Kincaid said. You come to a place, you gain a friend; nothing was nicer. But Blakely was stubborn. There were feelings in this, he insisted; she couldn’t deny it.

‘I’m not. I’m not at all. I’m only trying to be fair to you. I have a Belfast woman’s caution in me.’

‘I’m as cautious myself as any man in Ulster. I have a name for it.’

‘You’re trusting the unknown all the same. Fair and square, hasn’t that to be said?’

‘You’re never unknown to me.’

‘When the cards are down I’m a woman you don’t know from a tinker.’

Blakely denied that with a gesture. He didn’t say anything. Mrs Kincaid said:

‘If I asked you for money, why would you give it to me? I wouldn’t do it, but if I did. Who’d blame you for shaking your head? If I said write me a cheque for two thousand pounds who’d blame you for saying no? No man in his senses would say anything else. If I said to you I’d keep that cheque by me, that I’d never pass it into the bank because it was only there as a bond of trust between us, you wouldn’t believe me.’

‘Why wouldn’t I trust you?’

‘That’s what I’m saying to you. I’m a woman turned up in the town to get away for a little while from the noise and bustle of the city. Who’d blame you if you’d say to yourself I wouldn’t trust her as far as an inch? When there’s trust between us, is what I’m saying, we’ll maybe talk about the other. D’you understand me, dear?’

‘We know each other well.’

‘We do and we don’t, dear. Bad things have happened to us.’

Mrs Kincaid spoke then of the trouble in her past, speaking only the truth, as always she did at this stage in the proceedings.

Blakely felt in the inside pocket of his jacket and took out a Northern Bank cheque-book. He wrote the cheque. He dated it and signed it and tore it out. He handed it to her. She took it, staring at it for as long as a minute. Then she tore it up.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘I mean it.’

‘I never knew a straighter man,’ Mrs Kincaid said, and for a moment longer the open cheque-book lay between them on the bar-room table. When he reached for it again she said, ‘I bank under my maiden name.’ She gave him a name, which he added to the Mabel he had written while she was speaking. ‘That will never be cashed,’ she said. ‘I promise you that.’

They would not correspond, she laid down. They would wait two months and then they would meet again at the table they were at now, the table they had made their own. They chose a date and a time, a Tuesday at the end of July.

The cheque was for the amount Mrs Kincaid had mentioned. She paid it into her bank as soon as she was back in Belfast and recorded the amount in her notebook. Two days later it reached Blakely’s bank and was covered by his standing instruction that if his current account ever did not have sufficient funds in it a transfer should be made from his deposit account. He received his next bank statement sixteen days later.

She could have married the man. The clergyman she’d been introduced to would have done the job. She could have been the wife of a turkey farmer for the rest of her days and she wondered about that – about waking in the farmhouse and the sheepdogs in the yard, about conversations there might have been, their common ground as the victims of gangsters.

Regret nagged Mrs Kincaid then. She felt she had missed a chance she hadn’t even known was there. Her instinct was to write a letter, although what she might say in it she didn’t know. The more she wondered if she should or not, the more her confidence grew that inspiration would come to her, that in the end she would fill a page or two as easily as she made an entry in her notebook. Time would pass, and she had faith in the way time had of softening anything which was distressful. Naturally the poor man would have been distressed.

Sadness afflicted Blakely, which eased a little while that time went by. Resignation took its place. It was his fault; he had been foolish. His resistance had been there, he had let it slip away. But even so, on the day they had arranged to meet, he put on his suit and went along to Digby’s Hotel.

He waited for an hour in their corner of the bar, believing that against the odds there might somehow be an explanation. Then he went away.