He took his whiskey to a corner. It would not have seemed unusual to speak about his marriage, about love’s transformation within it, about his grief when it was no longer there, about the moments and occasions it had since become. Caught in the drift of memory, he saw – as vividly as if it were still the time when love began – a girl in a convent uniform, green and blue, shyness in her bright, fresh face. Half smiling, she turned her head away, made to blush by her friends when the gawky junior from the Munster and Leinster Bank went by on the street. And she was shy again when, grown up, she walked for the first time into the bank with her father’s weekly cheques and takings. In her middle age, the mother she had twice become made her only a little different, made her the person she remained until there was the tragedy of a winter’s night, on an icy road three years ago.
Graillis sipped his whiskey and lit a cigarette and slowly smoked, then drank some more. Beneath his professional rectitude, the solicitor would naturally have been more interested in the woman of the legacy than in the wife.
The whiskey warmed Graillis, the cigarette was a comfort. He hadn’t explained because you couldn’t explain, because there was too little to explain, not too much. But even so he might have said he was a widower. He sat a little longer, eyeing an ornamental sign near the door – white letters on blue enamel –
‘If it’s possible,’ he said when the same girl answered. ‘Just something I forgot to say to Mr Clifferty.’
Waiting, he lit another cigarette. His glass was on a shelf in front of him, beside an ashtray with
‘Good evening, Mr Graillis.’
‘It’s just I wanted to clear up a detail.’
‘What detail’s that, Mr Graillis?’
‘I don’t think I explained that I’m widowed.’
The solicitor made a sympathetic sound. Then he said he was sorry, and Graillis said:
‘It’s just if you thought my wife’s alive it would have been misleading. ’
‘I follow what you’re saying to me.’
‘I didn’t want a misunderstanding.’
‘No.’
‘It’s difficult, a thing like this coming out of the blue.’
‘I appreciate that, Mr Graillis, and I have your instruction. I’m sanguine it can be met. If there’s anything else, if there’s a worry at all, bring it with you when you come over next week.’
‘It’s only I wanted you to know what I told you just now. There’s nothing else.’
‘We’ll say goodbye so.’
‘Who’d get what I’m handing back?’
‘Whoever’s in line for it. Some grand-nephew somewhere, I’d hazard. There’s often a grand-nephew.’
‘Thanks,’ Graillis said and, not knowing what else to do, returned the receiver to its hook.
He picked up his glass and took it back to the table he’d been sitting at. He had thought he would feel all right after he’d seen a solicitor, and had thought so again when the telephone sign had given him the idea of ringing up. But still there was the unease that had begun when the letter about the legacy came. He didn’t know why he’d gone to the house; he didn’t know why he’d got into a state because he hadn’t told a man who was a stranger to him that he was widowed. It had been the whiskey talking when he’d said he wanted to clear up a detail; it was whiskey courage that had allowed him to dial the number. He was bewildered by the resurrection of a guilt that long ago had softened away to nothing. In that other time no pain had been caused, no hurt; he had managed the distortions that created falsity, the lies of silence; what he had been forgiven for was not seeming to be himself for a while. A crudity still remained in the solicitor’s reading of the loose ends that still were there: the wronged wife haunting restlessly from her grave, the older woman claiming from hers the lover who had slipped away from her.
‘God, we never had it worse!’
‘Oh, we will, boy, we will.’
Deploring the fall in sheep prices, two men settled themselves at the bar. The sleek-haired youth returned to serve them, and then an older man came in, with a white greyhound on a leash. The youth poured Smithwick’s for him and said the
