‘Why did you ask me twice if I possessed a car?’
‘I thought I had misunderstood.’
‘Why did it matter?’
‘Someone with a car would be useful to me in my work. My gear is heavy. I have no transport myself.’
He didn’t know why he said that; he never had before. In response her nod was casual, as if only politeness had inspired the question she’d asked. She nodded again when he said, not knowing why he said it either:
‘Might our dinner be your treat? I’m afraid I can’t pay.’
She reached across the table for the bill the waiter had brought him. In silence she wrote a cheque and asked him how much she should add on.
‘Oh, ten per cent or so.’
She took a pound from her purse, which Jeffrey knew was for the hat-check girl.
They walked together to an Underground station. The townscapes were a weekend thing, he said: he photographed cooked food to make a living. Hearing which tins of soup and vegetables his work appeared on, she wondered if he would add that his book of London would never be completed, much less published. He didn’t, but she had guessed it anyway.
‘Well, I go this way,’ he said when they had bought their tickets and were at the bottom of the escalators.
He’d told her about the photographs he was ashamed of because she didn’t matter; without resentment she realized that. And witnessing her excursion into foolishness, he had not mattered either.
‘Your toothache?’ she enquired and he said it had gone.
They did not shake hands or remark in any way upon the evening they’d spent together, but when they parted there was a modest surprise: that they’d made use of one another was a dignity compared with what should have been. That feeling was still there while they waited on two different platforms and while their trains arrived and drew away again. It lingered while they were carried through the flickering dark, as intimate as a pleasure shared.
He hadn’t meant to break his journey but there was time because he was early, so Graillis made a detour, returning to a house he hadn’t visited for twenty-three years. A few miles out on the Old Fort road, devoured by rust, the entrance gates had sagged into undergrowth. The avenue was short, twisting off to the left, the house itself lost behind a line of willows.
When the woman who’d been left a widow in it had sold up and gone to Dublin, a farmer acquired the place for its mantelpieces and the lead of its roof. He hadn’t ever lived there, but his car had been drawn up on the gravel when the house was first empty and Graillis had gone back, just once. Since then there’d been talk of everything falling into disrepair, not that there hadn’t been signs of this before, the paint of the windows flaking, the garden neglected. The woman on her own hadn’t bothered much; although it had never otherwise been his nature to do so, her husband had seen to everything.
Graillis didn’t get out of his car, instead turned it slowly on the grass that had begun to grow through the gravel. He drove away, cautious on the pot-holed surface of the avenue, then slowed by the bends of a narrow side-road. A further mile on, a signpost guided him to the town he had chosen for his afternoon’s business. An hour’s drive from the town he lived in himself, it was more suitable for his purpose because he wasn’t known there.
Still with time to spare, he parked and took a ticket from a machine. He locked his car and went to look for Davitt Street, where he enquired in a newsagent’s and was told that Lenehan and Clifferty’s office was four doors further on, what used to be the old Co-op Hardware.
‘Mr Clifferty won’t keep you a minute,’ the girl assured him in the spacious reception area where the day’s newspapers were laid out. Only last week’s
‘You were recommended to us, Mr Graillis?’ Clifferty asked, having apologized because there’d been a wait of much longer than a minute. He was a man in a tweed suit, with a tie of the same material, and garnet cufflinks. He was stylish for a country solicitor, his considerable bulk crowned by a full head of prematurely white hair. Graillis was less at ease in comparison, more humbly attired in corduroy trousers and an imitation suede jacket. He was an angular, thin man of fifty-nine, his fair hair receding and touched with grey.
‘You’re in the Golden Pages,’ he responded to the solicitor’s query.
He passed the envelope he’d brought with him across the green leather surface of a tidy desk that was embossed with a pattern at the corners. Clifferty extracted a folded sheet of writing paper and when he’d read its contents made a single note on a pad, then read the letter again.
‘She was a woman a while back,’ Graillis said.
‘Well, if I’ve got this right, you’re not attempting anything illegal, Mr Graillis. A legacy can be rejected.’
‘It’s that I was wondering about.’
