The Little Red Chairs (10 page)

It was followed by an awkward silence. Rain was pelting on the flat tarmac roof and plopping into the bucket left in the passage, as Sister Bonaventure, looking heavenwards, said, ‘I thought it was supposed to be scattered showers and now it’s the Flood again.’

Phyllida, wishing for things to end on a high note, held up her phone and walked around, for everyone to see the picture of a new foal, biscuit-coloured, standing on its wobbly legs – ‘I was feeding the horses a few weeks back and I thought, that mare Tessie is awful fat … little did I know she was on the increase, so we’ve called our little arrival Brio, because brio she is and full of life and I want to tell you, I couldn’t do it without Samantha, we’re not well to do, but we’re full of love, we love our animals, our geese and our hens and our chickens and our dogs and we love each other and I’d like to close the proceedings, to give the yea vote to love and to hell with the begrudgers.’

To everyone’s surprise, Dr Vlad took the floor and walked forward to the centre. With deference, he then asked Fidelma’s permission to say a few words. He began by saying he understood why some readers were disappointed in Dido, her self-immolation, her negativity, but suggested they might give the story some
further thought and place it in its historical context. Dido, as he reminded them, was widowed young, her husband poisoned by an avaricious brother and subsequently she was driven from the lands of Tyre, and had to make her way to Carthage. There, as he said, using torn pieces from the hide of a bull, she mapped out and procured her territory. She trained armies, she built walls and defences, she created governments and she gave orders to men. It was the woman in her that gave shelter to Aeneas and the Trojans and could she be blamed if the flame of love had consumed her, and which, in all seriousness, she regarded as a kind of marriage. This was her downfall and became an excuse for all the African chieftains, who had been jealous anyhow, to seize back territories and usurp her powers. Her added crime had been that she had fallen in love with a foreigner. When Aeneas abandoned her to continue his quest for a homeland, she had not only lost him, she had lost the admiration of the citizens of Carthage.

‘Pity my sinking house’ were among her last fateful words, he said.

By damning her, he suggested that they had perhaps been too hasty and that love was of far greater consequence than they had deemed it to be. He reminded them then that when Achilles, the Trojan hero, lived among women, he had taken another name, because of the softening influence of woman’s love.

You could hear a pin drop.

Those who had disdained Dido now found merit in her and some of the women detected in his address an oblique compliment to Fidelma.

To her surprise, he stayed on while she cleared up, and he helped her to gather the Xeroxed pages of Virgil, which had been relegated to the floor.

‘Why such antagonism?’ he asked.

‘Oh … it’s like that around here … lies … hypocrisy … bitterness … we don’t trust one another … we get depressed … blame the weather … we book a package tour to somewhere sunny … we come home … it’s not the weather … it’s us.’

‘So literature is not enough,’ he says.

‘I wish it was … but it isn’t … sometimes I think I’m choking … choking,’ and she put her hand to her throat to contain her gasps.

He looked at her for a long moment, then stood before her, her hands wringing, as a colour rose in ripples from the V of her neckline, to the neck itself, and to her face, so many hues of red, in a wandering, dappled enchantedness.

‘At the risk of being too blunt … it seems to me Mrs McBride … that what you want is a lover.’

‘It is,’ she said, surprised at her boldness and putting it down to the chaotic evening.

They went out together and she put the key under a pot, on the windowsill, where Florrie would find it.

Just by the schoolhouse at the top of the town, a sprig of forsythia, the first of the season, had branched over the wall and he broke off a spray.

‘What was the name Achilles had, when he lived among women?’ she asked.

‘We don’t know … we will have to think of one,’ he said, and put the forsythia into a side comb, that held up her hair.

Surfing

Fidelma had the bench to herself. It was at Strandhill, where he often came, as she knew from Father Damien. On the horizon, the water was a baby blue, same colour as the sky, but as it travelled in, it was grey, and nearer still, where the waves whooshed and gathered, it was indigo, like the dye in the lovely shawls that were so popular in her boutique.

The surfers were watching for their moment, to disappear, to be lost from sight and then to reappear, like marionettes, arms, legs, torsos, flying and flailing, as they reached for their surfboards. In the brief lull, white foam carried on into the rocky shore, where it spent itself and went back out, leaving behind lazy pools and patterns, so that the foreshore seemed as if tubs of suds had been emptied into it.

A surfer, slippery as a seal and dripping wet, stood near where she was sitting, just to observe the ocean, his last view of it before he left.

‘You’re not local,’ she said.

‘No ma’am. I am from the United States of America.’

‘And you’ve come all this way …’

‘This beach brings folks from all over. It’s the topography … the land under the sea here is perfect for the surf waves.’

‘Can I ask you something? What do you feel when you go under?’

‘Scary … scared.’

‘So why do you do it?’

‘It’s kinda mystical … it’s the nearest I know to God.’

Dr Vlad appeared at that moment, with the swiftness of an apparition and gave her a single, knowing glance. He did not stop to talk, but it did not matter.

It was not long after that when she broached the matter of a child, though very obliquely. She went, as usual, for her supply of powders and tinctures that he had prescribed for her and in answer to his question, if she felt better, she said yes, but she was not complete. He knew what she meant and in a voice both quiet and regretful, he said, ‘In the past I would have said yes … But I am a monk now.’

And yet she did not give up. If anything, her perseverance made her more determined.

It was Ash Wednesday and she was the last to run up the chapel to the rails, in order for the penitential ash to be put on her forehead. Dr Vlad was kneeling nearby, which came as a surprise, since he never attended Sunday Mass. The parish priest was in a hurry, probably dying for his breakfast, so much so that he put a load of ashes on her and it flaked down her face. In the porch, as she began to wipe it off, Vlad came out, looked quickly around and then grasped her arm, to stay her the bother of doing it. He touched her cheeks all over, his fingers deciphering the untamed passions within and as his palm moved downwards, she heard
Ssh, ssh
, and silencing her lips with his forefinger, to her utter amazement, he said ‘Yes.’ Yes.

Clouds

Clouds chased each other across the heavens that bright afternoon, when she drove into the hotel car park. It was much further south and the air was balmy. Yes, clouds on a great maraud, up there staging a tournament.

The elderly porter came forward and greeted her effusively. He wore grey coat tails and a grey top hat and on his lapel were numerous badges of distinction and a turquoise fishing fly.

‘A hundred thousand welcomes madam,’ he said, translating directly from the Irish, then with a practised deference, he touched her arm and led her in. The front hall was of pale stone slabs, bordered with diamonds of terracotta and as it was just after four o’clock, the lobby had a tea-time flurry, with waiters carrying trays, wheeling trolleys of cakes and gateaux, as the porter extolled the ‘haute cuisine’. In tall glass cabinets were knickknacks, pearls and pendants set among the several framed photographs of Grace Kelly, who was also wearing pearls.

Fidelma had come alone. It was how they had planned it.

The suite was opulent, French windows opened onto a lush garden, tall cedars at each of the four corners, flowering trees and shrubs in different clusters and the stone wall that led to a kitchen garden had thick copings of ivy.

Through the open window and as in a distant memory, she heard the lilts and hollers of children. Little girls in white Holy Communion dresses, with coloured sashes around the waist and
matching ribbons in their hair, ran in and out under the shade of the trees, hiding from the boys, also in their best Holy Communion attire. At first, the girls hid and the boys pretended not to see them and then suddenly, at a certain enlightened moment, they did see them, caught them and squeezed them amidst hallelujahs of triumph and mock terror. Then the game was reversed, the boys hid and the girls sought them, pretending not to see them, then saw them and amidst hoops of resistance and name-calling made them prisoners. When it began to spatter with rain, their elders called them from inside, pleaded with them, but they ran recklessly, as the rain plopped onto their best clothes and into the numerous flowerbeds planted with white and purple flowers. It fell also onto an ivory plaster lady, safe on her pedestal, her robes gathered up and kilted around her, a figure which the porter pronounced earlier as ‘Greek and Roman to the core’.

She ran around to familiarise herself with things, the light switches, the window latches, the wardrobe, with its nest of side drawers and various side tables. Someone had put yellow roses in a white enamel jug with the name of a bakery on it, the very thing she would have wished for. The bathroom was almost as big as the bedroom, mirrors everywhere, mirrors watching her every move. Various essences, soaps and talcum powders were placed beside each of the two washbasins and quaintly, little sewing kits in embroidered pouches. At the side of the bath were three long loofahs and she wondered if he would bathe there or in the separate room that she had booked for him. All the arrangements were done by her.

Then she sat on one of the high chairs, far too restless to read the book she had opened –
The Kreutzer Sonata
. She could hardly believe that it was happening, that they were actually
going to meet here, incognito, that he had yielded after so many refusals. She remembered the impassioned letter she had improvised asking for a child, and the recurring dream she had had of his delivering that same child. Then the cheese straws and pies and trifles that she had left on the stairs of his consulting rooms, hoping that he would guess they had come from her. What had made him change his mind. Her pleading, her openness, or maybe he was lonely for a bit of tenderness. He said it would be a question of three or four assignations, as they were not going to embark on a seedy, clandestine affair and he hinted at commitments of his own. He made her swear to secrecy, which she did, crossing her heart, yet full of illogical hope and happiness. Had she not heard Jack say more than once that a house without a child was an empty nest. Yes, carried away in the rapids. She was already dressed for dinner, a russet dress of shot silk, with a pleated skirt that opened and closed concertina-wise. The cameo brooch at the cleavage had belonged to Jack’s Aunt Violet.

The room was almost in darkness when she heard the knock, jumped up and it was in near-darkness that they met, then the voice of which she was enraptured – ‘I am here Fidelma, I have come.’ From the slant of the hall light she saw a spray of rain on his hair and thought how much younger he looked, almost jauntier, no longer the healer in the loose smock and the bandana, a huntsman, in his high black polished riding boots. He wore no shirt, instead a green, knitted sleeveless sweater and she reckoned that when he took off the jacket, she would see his armpits and for the first time she was overcome with a terrible shyness. His lateness was due to the fact that the signposts were awry, pointing left when they should be right and moreover, all
the names were written in Gaelic. He talked of the changing landscape, the poorish soil from where he set out, the dry stone walls dividing the small fields and further south, lush land, the black-and-white cows, their udders pink and pendulous, barely able to walk to the milking station.

Opening his arms very wide, he gauges how many metres is the width of the four-poster bed, so inviting, with its canopy of soft pink silks and a snow-white counterpane. Then he spies a miniature golf club and golf ball, which he hits, the ball arriving on a little tray that serves as a putting hole and she watches as he does it. The golf club, small though it is, unsettlingly reminds her of Jack’s, propped in the corner of the sitting room at home. He says that for dinner he must put on a good shirt and taking one from his bag, he sets her the task of lifting off the knitted sweater and putting on the clean, starched white shirt. She ties the cuff buttons, the two tiny buttons to fasten the collar, then he tells her to tuck the tail of the shirt inside his trousers to his ‘
boule
d’amour
’, which she does. She blushes, burying her face in the crook of her elbow, and seeing this, he remarks how especially beautiful she is looking, like a contessa, with all the intrigue of a mistress.

The bottle of wine was already open and pouring two glasses, he raises his to hers and says, ‘Let us hope for good results Fidelma.’ Then he sat back on the reclining armchair and raised his legs onto a stool, for her to take off his boots. She imagined that if someone were to look in that window, it would be like some painting in a grand house, the huntsman home from the chase, the wife with her sleeves rolled up, doing the bidding of her master, an intimacy that was a prelude to love.