Mothers and Sons (7 page)

‘Are you still selling the Woodbines in ones and twos?’ the woman asked. She was ready to go. Her face was red with rage.

There was one other customer, a woman, moving quietly in the centre aisle of the supermarket, pretending not to listen.

‘Not one of you wiped your arse up there. I don’t know how the Sheridans ever put up with you,’ the woman shouted.

Nancy moved towards her and pushed her out into the Monument Square.

‘Go on now,’ she said. ‘Go on up to the Hill with you where you belong.’

Nancy closed the door and went back quietly to the cash register as though she had an urgent task in hand. She noticed the packets of shortbread biscuits on the ground and walked over to pick them up; some of the biscuits were broken and the packets could not be sold. She put them aside and picked up the catalogue of frozen food again and studied it with fierce concentration. No one in the town was interested in frozen food, she thought, except for fish fingers. Still, she flicked through the pages of the catalogue, waiting for her lone customer to come to the cash register. When the woman finally put her basket down on the ledge, her posture suggested that something deeply offensive had been said to her. Nancy hoped that she was not from the Hill, or had not heard her closing remarks to the shoplifter. She had not seen this woman in the shop before. There seemed no point in trying to humour her. Silently, Nancy keyed in the price of each object as her customer emptied the wire supermarket basket and filled her own shopping bag with slow gestures. The woman was wearing a green knitted cap. As Nancy gave her the change, the woman kept her eyes down and her mouth tightly closed. When she had gone, Nancy stood at the window and watched her walking briskly across the square.

Gerard, when he arrived from school, wanted to drop his school-bag by the side of the cash register and leave immediately without speaking.

‘You can’t leave your bag down here,’ she said. ‘Go upstairs with it.’

‘They’re all waiting,’ he pointed to a group of boys standing by the monument.

‘Go upstairs with it,’ she repeated.

‘Where are the girls?’ he asked.

‘Music.’

He made a face and then went out of the shop door and opened the door into the hall. She could hear him running up the stairs and then thumping back down again. When she heard the hall door bang, she went to the window to see which direction he was going in; she noticed a young woman with a pram who was standing staring at her as though she were a dummy or a model wearing the latest fashions. The young woman was chewing gum, and slowly her stare became cheeky, almost malicious. Nancy turned away from her, whoever she was, and walked to the back of the shop.

T
HE SCENE
at the bank had remained with her, like a rash, or the side effect of some strong medicine. She knew that George had left no money because just a month before the accident when she had mentioned that they might change the station wagon he had told her bluntly – ‘bluntly’ was one of his words – that they had no money. Whatever tone he had used, it did not leave her free to suggest that he go to the bank and ask for a loan. He would not, she knew
now, have been offered a loan at the bank, because he had mortgaged the shop and the living quarters above it, and the store beside it, and the payments equalled or sometimes exceeded the income from the shop.

Mr Roderick Wallace, the manager, having written to her, had agreed to see her. She liked his neat moustache and his easy smile. She had never spoken to him before, merely been greeted by him warmly as he walked a Pekinese dog around the square when the bank had finished its business. He apologized several times as she came into his office for keeping her waiting. When she sat down he apologized again.

‘No, no,’ she protested. ‘I’ve just arrived this second. I wasn’t waiting.’

He looked at her with sudden interest and then stared away towards the high windows which gave onto the square.

‘Whoever made time did not make enough of it,’ he said.

‘Oh, that’s true all right,’ she said.

He continued to look towards the window, closely examining its upper reaches, as though about to come to a conclusion about something. Nancy saw that his desk was completely bare except for a blotting pad and a pen. There was no paper or file, and there was no telephone to be seen.

He began by mumbling words that she was so used to hearing.

‘I’m so sorry now for your trouble. It must have been a dreadful shock. I could not believe it when I heard it. And so sudden, so sudden. That is a dreadful bend in the road.
I’ve observed it myself. But I never thought … Oh I never thought … Anyway, I’m very sorry for your trouble.’

‘Thank you,’ she said and looked down at her handbag and her high-heeled shoes.

Mr Wallace studied the wall behind her for a few moments before he spoke again.

‘I suppose you are busy now and would like to get down to business.’

‘Yes,’ she said and smiled.

‘Now,’ he said, still looking towards the wall, ‘I received the cheque from the car dealers, Messrs Rowe. You seem to have bought a second-hand car.’

He said the words with an emphasis which she thought strange. He pursed his lips. His eyebrows, she felt, were too bushy.

‘Well, we’re going to honour that cheque. I should let you know that.’

She tried to think if she had written any other cheques recently. Two or three, she thought, in the past few days. Mr Wallace puckered up his face and knitted his brow as though a difficult thought had occurred to him. She watched him, waiting to see what he was going to say, but he turned his face towards the window again and said nothing. Later, she wished she had spoken to him about what was needed or what she was going to do, and a few times over the days that followed she wished she had stealthily tiptoed out of his office at this point of their interview and closed the door behind her, leaving him to his thoughts.

He straightened himself in his chair.

‘The problem we have is that the repayments are not
coming in. Instead, we are getting cheques, written on the account, and there’s no money in the account, there’s less than no money.’

He stopped and smiled as if the thought of less than no money amused him.

‘And if we were a charity,’ he went on, ‘of course, it would be a lovely situation, because then we’d dole out the money to our hearts’ content.’

He took her in, watching her response as he covered his mouth with his hand.

‘That’s right about the cheques,’ she said. ‘You see, I have to keep the business going.’

‘Oh, it’s going all right,’ Mr Wallace said drily.

She made an effort to sound more businesslike.

‘I mean if I were to sell it, it would be better to sell as a going concern.’

The longest silence was now. She reverted to something she had not done for years. She had done it when her mother had irritated her, and she had done it when she went to work first, and she had done it also to George, but not since the first year or two of their marriage. She traced the word
FUCK
on her skirt with her finger, quietly, unobtrusively, but deliberately. And then she did it again. And when she had finished, she traced other words, words that she had never in her life said out loud. She kept her eyes firmly on the bank manager as, unnoticed, she continued to write these words, invisibly, with her finger.

‘A going concern,’ he said, but he left no room for her to reply. It was neither a comment nor a question, but it was left hanging in the air above them both. He stared at it now until he said it again.

‘A going concern.’

This time, there was a hint of doubt, disapproval even, in his voice.

‘I mean, that it would be easier to sell it as a business,’ she said.

‘Have you sought advice?’ he asked.

‘No. I have been running the business as best I can and now, since I got a letter from you, I have come to see you.’

Speaking like this gave her courage, made her feel almost defiant.

‘Running is a good word all right,’ he said, pursing his lips again. ‘Now if the manager of Dunne’s Stores or Davis’s Mills or Buttle’s Barley Fed Bacon came in here and told me they were running a business then I would know exactly what they meant.’

His voice tapered off, but not before she had detected for the first time a Cork accent. She held his gaze as she wrote another word, the rudest she had ever attempted, beginning at her knee and moving upwards.

‘One of my problems, and I hope you understand it,’ he began again, joining his hands in front of him like a man being interviewed on television, ‘is that I don’t have all day. Now I have three cheques with your signature on them out there somewhere, and they might seem for small amounts to you, but those amounts are not small to us. However, we will honour them too. And that’s the end, no more cheques. And instead of cheques, what I’d like to see are repayments every month on the dot without fail. That’s the sort of business I run.’

He opened a drawer in his desk and found a diary or an address book, he put it in front of him and flicked through
it. He became absorbed in it for several minutes before he looked up at her.

‘Do you get me, Mrs Sheridan, do you get me?’

It did not occur to her to cry, but later she wondered if she had broken down at this point and become the stricken widow whether he would have stood up and comforted her and suggested a more lenient policy. Instead, she became more aggressive.

‘So I go now, is that right?’ she asked.

‘Well, if you don’t mind,’ he said, his Cork accent suddenly sounding pronounced.

S
HE WENT HOME
and wrote down the names of all her suppliers, deciding which of them was most likely to tolerate late payment, and which of them she most needed to continue supplies. She marked them in order of priority. She thought first of opening another bank account in Bunclody or Wexford, and getting a chequebook from them and cashing her cheques there. But it occurred to her that all these bank managers would be in cahoots; they would know what she was trying to do. Instead, she took fifty pounds from the cash register the following day and, leaving Catherine in the shop, she drove to Wexford, walked into the Munster and Leinster Bank and asked for a bank draft for fifty pounds in favour of Erin Creamery, her milk supplier. The assistant made out the draft without asking any questions, charging her two pounds extra. She went home and posted the draft to the creamery. This, she thought, would keep them quiet for a while.

She waited for days to see if she would catch a glimpse
of Betty Farrell from the Croppy Inn wandering past her window. Or if she would meet her in the square. Betty had come to her several times at the cash register when there was no one in the shop and held her hand and looked into her eyes and told her that if she ever needed anything, she was just to ask. Nancy had thought of it as a kind way of expressing sympathy, but she had been struck, nonetheless, by Betty’s saying the same thing each time.

In the end she phoned her and arranged that she would call into Farrells’ at the end of business the following day.

She was surprised, when Betty answered the door, by her clothes, and wondered if she had specially dressed up because she knew Nancy was visiting. She was wearing a thin loose woollen suit in a sort of light purple colour that Betty had never seen before. And when Betty led her upstairs to the floor over the pub she was surprised by the largeness of the two rooms with interconnecting doors, and the newness and brightness of everything. There was a tray on a side table with china.

‘You sit down there now, Nancy,’ Betty said, ‘and I’ll go and wet the tea.’

Nancy had never been upstairs in this house before. She knew Betty from the street or the square or the cathedral or whist drives. She had known Jim, Betty’s husband, all her life, but Betty was not, she knew, from the town. As Nancy looked around, she noticed that the rug on the floor was faded, yet the fading seemed to have added to the richness. The wallpaper was the same; it looked old and faded without looking shabby, and this meant, she thought, that it was new and had cost money.

‘I put my foot down, Nancy,’ Betty said when the tea
was poured. ‘I said to Jim: “We’re doing up this house, or we’re building out the country where no one will know our business.” But sure Jim was born here and wouldn’t budge. So I brought in the decorators and I looked around a few auctions. There’s a very good dealer in Kilkenny. He’s the best.’

Nancy observed that Betty’s nylon stockings were sheer and were a strange no-colour, neither dark nor completely see-through. When they had spoken for a while about their children, and about the problem of living in the town where you had no garden, Nancy knew it was time to tell Betty why she had wanted to see her. She began by recounting her visit to the bank manager.

‘Oh, he’s a so-and-so,’ Betty said.

‘So you don’t bank with him?’

‘No, Jim has always been with the Provincial.’

‘Betty, I don’t want to explain the ins and outs of this, but I need someone to cash cheques for me, not my own cheques, but customers’ cheques, people I know.’

‘Bring them up here, Nancy,’ Betty said, ‘or send Catherine up with them, or we’ll send down for them, as often as you like, or whenever you like, and we’ll cash them. That’s what neighbours are for.’

‘Are you sure now?’

‘Well, I should ask Jim,’ Betty said, ‘but I know what he’ll say. He’ll say exactly what I just said. He was in school with George and sure he’s known you since you were born. Wasn’t he great with your sister in England?’

‘Oh, he was,’ Nancy said, ‘but that was a long time ago.’

‘Well, we’d like to help you, that’s all,’ Betty said.

‘I’d be very thankful and it won’t be for long.’

‘You were always very capable, Nancy,’ Betty said. ‘Jim always told me that, since the time you were on the Cathedral Committee, that you had the makings of a real businesswoman.’

‘Did he say that?’ Nancy asked sharply, but Betty did not answer her, instead smiled vaguely and crossed her legs and sat back in her armchair with a warm sigh.