The Old Jest Read online

  ‘She’ll hate a bungalow.’

  ‘Cottage.’

  ‘Cottage. She’ll hate that too.’

  ‘Not once she gets used to it. Cosy, easy, everything at hand. She won’t know herself. She and I can spend our declining years sitting by the fire reading and playing cards. And that sinister cat.’

  ‘It sounds dull.’

  ‘Not at all. The world can go mad and we will sit and make our own quiet comments and back a few horses and sleep and remember things. Bridie and I have a lot of memories in common. I really must either go to bed or have another drink.’

  The last standing piece of turf crumbled inwards on to the glowing ashes.

  ‘Oh bed, I suppose,’ said Nancy.

  13 August

  My dream would be that the wind should catch up this old house and whirl it away as it whirls the seagulls. It could land us gently on the edge of the sea somewhere with a racecourse in easy reach for Aunt Mary and a curving horizon of railway line alive with shining engines, goods trucks, carriages, points, signals, sidings, the whole lot, within nice range of grandfather’s glasses. Nothing but pleasure for his last days, or years as the case may be. No anxiety, no sadness, just a miraculous happening. Silly dream. Still, like a child I have silly dreams. I can see them living here, a lovely pair, as Bridie will undoubtedly call them when the moment comes. He will keep the place up to the mark and she will play her white piano in the drawing room and they will never notice our bruised ghosts lurking in the corners. I suppose in fact that their corners will be too clean and well lit for ghosts to be comfortable in. There will be nothing left of mother or Gabriel or the child who has sat for so many years on the top step of the terrace, not getting piles. There used to be horses in the stables and Uncle Gabriel hunted twice a week, and there was a boy who kept the tack, polished the lovely shiny boots. There was a smell of saddle soap and horse dung. The saddles are flaking now, out in the damp tack room. The little fire in the corner is never lit and birds drop twigs down the empty chimney and they fall out from the fireplace and litter the floor. Sometimes though you can still hear the sound of a horse backing up on the cobbles, the stutter of hooves, a soft whinny. If you’re in the right mood of course. I was always afraid. I remember the thud my heart used to give when one of them would raise its head and move towards me. Martin was the boy’s name. He used to whistle between his teeth as he rubbed and rubbed, curry-combed and polished their gleaming coats. He would lean his head against their warm necks and kiss them with the side of his whistling mouth. He’s in prison in England now. He was caught after a raid on a barracks down near Cork somewhere. He was wounded, I think, and couldn’t get away. Something like that.

  They will make a lovely couple. I don’t suppose he would ever love someone like me, even if I were five years older. She is so new and perfect and polished looking, and she won’t be really kind to him and he’ll probably never notice. They will both accept most graciously what the world has to offer. That’s no crime. It’s more of a crime I suppose to want to mess things up a bit. Oh God, don’t let me be too feeble and please help me to stop biting my nails! Amen.

  The wind got up again during the night, and in the morning the garden was littered with branches and whirling leaves. Nancy saw in her mind the beach strewn with wrack and driftwood. I’ll light a fire, she thought.

  ‘It’s a lovely walking day,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll go for a long long walk. I’ll bring some fruit. I won’t come back for lunch.’

  ‘Mmm!’

  ‘I don’t think it’ll rain, do you?’

  ‘Mmm!’

  ‘You could really stride for miles on a day like this.’

  Aunt Mary never stirred from behind the paper. ‘Tell Bridie before you go.’

  She lit her fire about half a mile on the town side of the hut, halfway between the nuns’ bathing box and the point. She had brought two newspapers and a box of matches as well as two bananas and an apple. She crumpled the paper page by page – crumpled the ‘Fashionable Intelligence’, the sports pages and the advertisements for White’s Wafer Oatmeal and J. W. Elvery and Co. Ltd. ladies’ and gentlemen’s waterproof and rainproof coats, Robt. Roberts’ pure China tea, and a one week sale of Clery’s boots and shoes, the stock exchange reports and the Parliamentary reports and the news. She piled a pyramid of grey driftwood over the whole lot and put a match to it. The fire caught at once, and she sat watching the smoke curling up into the wind and wondered if grandfather were watching it through his glasses and whether a new set of memories curled into his mind with the smoke. She ate her bananas eventually as the fire died down into a pile of simmering ashes, and then she walked along the sea’s edge towards the hut. She became aware suddenly that she was walking along beside someone’s footmarks. Male shoe marks. The heels sank quite deeply into the sand and the soles were criss-crossed patterned. She stopped walking and looked back along the beach. The marks came down from the railway line. Straight and purposeful they marched along the sand. No dog gallivanted beside them. Just a man on his own had walked that way. They moved up to the right and finally disappeared among the blocks of stone. Quite disappeared. She searched around carefully for any signs of them but found none. As she stood up straight again, she saw the man, Cass, watching her from beside a rock.

  ‘Lost something?’

  ‘Those aren’t your footmarks?’ She pointed back along the beach. ‘You don’t wear shoes like that.’

  ‘Bravo, Sherlock Holmes!’

  She blushed.

  ‘There’s been someone here?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Is there … is there …?’

  She looked around.

  ‘No. Come. It’s cold here. Let’s go indoors.’

  They walked towards the hut in silence.

  ‘You’re cross?’ he said as they arrived. He opened the door and held it for her.

  ‘Let’s go in out of the wind.’

  ‘It’s so careless. He left footmarks. Right the way along the beach.’

  ‘There are no footmarks here.’

  ‘A man. I didn’t say you could have visitors. I don’t like millions of people coming here to my …’

  He stood looking at her for a moment and then sat down with his back against the wall. He took a bottle from his pocket and pulled out the cork. ‘It was a messenger. That’s all. He didn’t come here. We met out there among the rocks. I have been waiting for him. He brought me a word or two of importance and some whisky. Have some and don’t be cross.’

  He held the bottle out towards her.

  She shook her head.

  ‘The last time I drank your whisky it had a horrid effect on me. Anyway young ladies of my age are not supposed to drink whisky.’

  He laughed. He reached up to the shelf above his head and took down a mug. Carefully he poured a small amount from the bottle and held the mug out towards her.

  ‘Here, even the most ladylike of young ladies could safely sip at that.’

  She took the mug.

  ‘I’m sorry if I was cross.’

  ‘Come and sit down. I presume it was you in the distance, sending up smoke signals?’

  ‘I love bonfires. Aunt Mary says the smoke kills you.’

  ‘I think it would take a superabundance of bonfire smoke to kill you. Go ahead, taste it. Tell me if you like it.’

  He drank some himself out of the bottle.

  She took a cautious sip.

  ‘It’s good. It’s not a bit like the last lot.’

  ‘It’s very special. It’s not every day you get whisky like that. Only when a messenger of the gods arrives.’

  ‘Messengers of the gods don’t leave huge great footsteps on the sand. Does it have a special name?’

  ‘It’s a Scottish malt. Better than anything else in the world to drink. When you lead the sort of life I do. Somewhat peripatetic. If you lead a rather more stationary life, claret … a good old claret … takes a lot of beating.’

  She lau
ghed. ‘You are a funny man.’

  ‘I haven’t spent my entire life eating bananas out of paper bags, you know.’

  ‘I bet Grandfather saw your messenger coming along the tracks, you know. He doesn’t miss much. He keeps telling us about the people he sees, but no one pays any attention to him. He rambles on, sometimes talking nonsense, sometimes not, only we never really bother to sort it out. Do you have elderly relations?’

  ‘My dear Nancy, I jettisoned all family ties many, many years ago. I like to travel unencumbered.’

  ‘Don’t you get lonely?’

  He shook his head and then took another careful drink from the bottle. He screwed the top on and put it down beside him on the floor.

  ‘At the present time there is no space in my life for such an emotion. Maybe when I become useless … who knows … maybe then I will become lonely. The seagull on the roof isn’t lonely. His eyes are like stones.’

  ‘When you get useless, you can always sit in a chair and think about all the people you’ve killed.’

  ‘My dear young lady …’

  ‘I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean to say that.’

  ‘Of course you did. I feel no guilt about what I do, the way I think, so don’t think you can appeal to what you might consider to be my better nature. There are conscienceless men, utterly unscrupulous, who will go to any lengths to make sure that the world remains the way they want it to remain. No possibility of change. They crush and destroy … aspirations … hope. People must at least be allowed to hope.’

  ‘It’s the killing …’

  ‘After all,’ he said gently, ‘your grandfather was a killer too, and no one makes sarcastic remarks at him for that. Not at all. They gave him medals and a pension. He wasn’t even killing to defend his own fatherland, indeed the very opposite. He was taking other people’s land away from them. Creating an Empire for a little old lady with a thing like a tea cosy on her head. Indeed, had he been a younger man, he would probably be here, down the road somewhere, killing his fellow countrymen, destroying their dream. And yet …’

  ‘Oh dear … oh no …!’

  ‘ … and yet he is a lovable, irritating old man who mumbles and sings and will probably die as every man should, in his own bed, and some people will cry.’

  ‘I get very confused. Is that despicable?’

  He leant back against the wall and began to laugh. As she watched him, she wondered if his own confusion were not almost as great as hers. The blind would always be leading the blind.

  ‘I’m sorry to laugh,’ he said eventually. ‘There is absolutely nothing despicable about you. Believe that.’

  ‘Aunt Mary’s going to sell the house.’

  ‘Oh!’

  She watched his face carefully. The smile slowly left his mouth and his eyes brooded back into the past, seeing groves, paths, sunlight patterning the drawing-room carpet, the blooming of polished wood. Old days, old faces. His fingers fiddled for a moment, uncertainly, with the top of the bottle. ‘Yes. I suppose it had to be like that, sooner or later. You would have had to do it anyway.’

  ‘I don’t think I would have thought of it as a possibility. Aunt Mary’s much more practical than I am.’

  ‘Who …?’

  ‘Houses,’ she said. ‘Lots of houses. Posh houses. It’s … it’s, well, close to the city really. The train …’

  ‘So, my dear, you too will have a chance to travel without encumbrances.’

  ‘I’d rather not.’

  He finally unscrewed the top of the bottle and tilted a drink into his mouth.

  ‘Coward!’

  ‘No, I’m not. I just would have wanted to keep things on …’

  ‘Coward!’

  ‘Yes. I am.’

  A wave crashed suddenly on the beach outside.

  ‘The wind is getting up.’ She couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  ‘I thought the hut might blow away last night. The seagull and I would have been transported to Never Never Land.’

  ‘I wanted your sympathy.’

  ‘Well you won’t get it. Everything has to keep changing. It’s a myth that the things of value get lost with change. That’s not true. Next year will always be a better year than the year before last. You have the whole bloody world waiting for you. Someone has just lifted what could only be an appalling liability from your shoulders and you want sympathy. Oh God!’

  ‘I love it here.’

  ‘You just don’t know any alternative. The sea is cold, the beach is stony, the east wind blows all through the winter. The sooner you get out of it the better. Your nest. Your sensible aunt is throwing you out, like some birds do with their young. Out and either fly or fall. You make me feel very old. I barely remember what it was like to be eighteen. I hunted at least twice a week, and didn’t dare speak to the pretty girls I met at parties in the evenings. Your aunt being one of them.’

  ‘Was she a pretty girl?’

  ‘Very, but a little sharp if I remember correctly. And you must stop biting your nails. It’s a beastly habit. Think what happened to the Venus de Milo.’

  She blushed and curled her fingers into the palms of her hands. ‘Oh, that’s mean!’

  ‘Not at all. It’s only what any self-respecting father would say to his daughter.’

  ‘Have you any children?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘No encumbrances. I had a wife once, but she didn’t really like me very much when she got to know me. That was all in my younger days.’

  ‘Why didn’t she like you?’

  ‘Curiosity killed the cat.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I suppose when I married her, I was a someone. I could have told you my name and address. In fact I used to carry little cards round in my pocket and leave them around for people so that they would know I existed. She liked that. I had a house in London. She liked that too. A recognisable position, fairly well up at the top of the heap. She had been brought up to expect all sorts of lovely things to keep happening to her. She moved on to someone who was able to give her a better life than I could have. After five years of marriage I had merely become an embarrassment to her.’

  ‘Was she beautiful?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. She had a beautiful face and body.’

  ‘That’s important, isn’t it?’

  He smiled slightly at the anxiety in her face.

  ‘Just another sort of encumbrance. A woman can spend years of her life staring at other women and wondering if they’re more beautiful than she is. Years staring at herself in the glass, touching the skin below her eyes with anxious fingers. I used to watch her. I thought, to begin with, it was most lovable … then …’ He shrugged slightly. ‘Just another liability.’

  ‘I wonder,’ was all Nancy said.

  She stood up. He watched her carefully as she unfolded herself from her rather crouched position on the floor. Her limbs as well as her mind were troubled by the approach of adulthood. She moved them from time to time with sombre grace and then, as if aware of the charm that this might have, she seemed deliberately to destroy any false impression she might be making by some crude and clumsy gesture. He was alarmed to find that he was touched by her inexpertise. He took another quick drink from the bottle. The damn stuff, so necessary to him, wouldn’t last long if he went on like this. She stood looking down at him. As always, when she was with him, she was disturbed by how deathly tired he looked.

  ‘Will there be more messengers coming?’ she asked.

  ‘No. He will be the only one. Quite soon I will be going. I have been waiting for him to come.’

  ‘I don’t know whether to take you seriously or not.’

  ‘I take you seriously.’

  ‘Oh shut up!’

  She pushed the door open. The sand and little stones were blowing in savage little gusts just above ground level and then settling for a moment before being whirled on again along the beach.

  ‘Is there anything you want?’

/>   She spoke with her back to him, staring at the sea.

  ‘Do you ever go into town?’

  ‘I can.’

  She turned and looked at him. The hut seemed very dark, his figure almost like a ghost, sitting quite still, one knee bent. Only his eyes glittered with life.

  ‘If I were to ask you to do a message for me …?’

  The afternoon train from Wicklow came round the bend and lurched past on the track above them. Smoke and sparks were tossed inland over the fields. She hoped that grandfather was awake to see it.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, when the noise of the train had passed on down the line. ‘I’d do a message.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll meet you on the railway line tomorrow morning. Up near the bridge. Ten o’clock.’

  ‘I can come here …’

  ‘Near the bridge.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Thank you. You don’t have to worry.’

  ‘No.’

  She flapped a hand awkwardly at him.

  ‘Well …’

  ‘Goodbye, Nancy.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  She closed him into the darkness and climbed up on to the line. Sparks settled on the grass, the smoke still hung above the trees.

  The two Miss Brabazons had been having tea with Aunt Mary and were just on the point of leaving as Nancy came up the avenue.

  ‘Hail,’ shouted the tall Miss Brabazon, waving a hand furiously above her head.

  The small Miss Brabazon, who was very small, put out her hand to be shaken.

  Nancy shook it.

  ‘Good afternoon.’

  ‘We’ve just come back from Marseilles. We thought we’d drop over and tell Mary that we were safely returned. She never thought she’d see us again.’

  ‘Near Marseilles. Not actually Marseilles. It’s a smelly brute of a place.’

  The tall Miss Brabazon moved over to their Daimler and began to pat its bonnet as if it were a horse.

  ‘Which is why we’re so brown.’ The small Miss Brabazon pushed one of her sleeves up and held her arm out for Nancy to inspect.

  ‘Marvellous!’ said Nancy.

  ‘The Camargue. Bullfights and all that. Frightfully exciting. And there was this amazing hot wind. Hot. Golly!’