Clifferty returned the letter to its envelope but didn’t hand it back. ‘These people are a reputable firm of solicitors. We do some business with them. I can write to say the inheritance is an embarrassment if that’s what you’d like me to do. The estate would be wound up in the usual way, with the proposed bequest left in as part of it.’
‘I wouldn’t want to turn my back on the thought that was there. Since I’m mentioned in the will I wouldn’t want to do that.’
‘You’re more than mentioned, Mr Graillis. From what’s indicated in the notification you received, no one much else is. Besides charities.’
Sensing the content of the solicitor’s thoughts, Graillis was aware of an instinct to contradict them. It was understandable that the interest of a country solicitor should be fed by what he assumed, that the routine of family law in a provincial town should make room for a hint of the dramatic. Graillis might have supplied the facts, but did not do so.
‘Maybe some small memento,’ he said. ‘Maybe an ornament or a piece of china. Anything like that.’
‘You’ve been left a sum of money that’s not inconsiderable, Mr Graillis.’
‘That’s why I drove over, though – to see could I accept a little thing instead.’
There’d been an ashtray with a goldfinch on it, but in case it had since been broken, he didn’t like to mention it. And there were dinner plates he’d always liked particularly, with a flowery edging in two shades of blue.
‘Just something, was what I thought. If it would be possible.’
When the snowdrops spread in clumps beneath the trees, she’d said he might like some and would have given him what she had picked already. Wrapped in damp newspaper, they would keep their freshness, she said, and he tried to remember how it was she broke off what she was saying when she realized her suggestion wasn’t possible. She had tried to settle the stems back in the water of the vase she’d taken them from but it was difficult, and then the floor was scattered with flowers gone limp already. It didn’t matter, she could pick some more, she said.
‘Oh, it would be possible, I’m sure,’ Clifferty said, ‘to have what you want. I only mention the other.’
The solicitor had a way of smoothing the wiry, reddish thicket of his eyebrows, a leisurely attention given first to one and then the other. He allowed himself this now, before he continued:
‘But I should tell you I would require a sight of the will before advising you on any part of it.’
‘Would they send it down from Dublin?’
‘They’d send a copy.’
Clifferty nodded saying that, the conversation over. He asked Graillis what line he was in and Graillis said he was in charge of the branch library in the town where he lived. He added that a long time ago he had been employed in the Munster and Leinster Bank there, in the days when the bank was still called that. He stood up.
‘Make an appointment with the girl outside for this day week, Mr Graillis,’ Clifferty said before they shook hands.
He drove slowly through flat, unchanging landscape and stopped when he had almost reached the town he was returning to. No other car was drawn up outside the Jack Doyle Inn, no bicycle leant against the silver-painted two-bar railings that protected its windows. Inside, the woman who served him called him by his name.
She went away when, pouring him a John Jameson, she’d asked him how he was these days. ‘Give a rap on the counter if you’ll want something more,’ she said, a smell of simmering bacon beginning to waft in from the cooking she returned to. There was no one else in the bar.
He should have explained to the solicitor that he was a widower, that there was no marriage now to be damaged by a legacy that might seem to indicate a deception in the past. He should have explained that his doubts about accepting so much, and travelling to seek advice in another town, had only to do with avoiding curiosity and gossip in his own. He didn’t know why he hadn’t explained, why it hadn’t occurred to him that Clifferty had probably taken it upon himself to pity a wronged wife who was now being wronged again, that subterfuge and concealment were again being called upon.
