The thought of it made me feel sick with fear.
‘The cameras, Jenny, the cameras,’ he said as he leaned into the back seat and brought out my briefcase and basket. ‘I can’t promise you it won’t be nasty, perhaps very nasty, but the cameras will be some protection.’
He stood looking down at me, a slight reassuring smile on his face. ‘It’s one thing people just hearing about police brutality, it’s another thing when they see it themselves in their own living rooms at teatime. And the B Specials know that now too. It’s some protection. All right, not a lot. But some.’
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.
‘Now don’t worry. I’ll give you a ring Sunday night when we get back,’ he went on, bending down to kiss my cheek. ‘Don’t take the Saturday newspapers too seriously. Wait till you get the Sundays.’
I looked up at him and managed a smile. At least I could try to take the comfort he was offering me. ‘Good luck, Keith. Give Siobhan my love,’ I said firmly. ‘Supper next week. We’ll make a date on Sunday.’
‘Right ye be.’
‘Thanks for running me up.’
‘And good luck to you, too,’ he said, raising his eyes heavenward at the thought of my mother.
‘I’ll need it,’ I said, laughing ruefully as I opened the garden gate and hurried up the crazy paving path between the rosebeds.
George opened his eyes. The log cracked again in the fire and a spark arced through the air and struck the log basket. Lucky it didn’t get as far as the new rug, he thought, as he straightened himself up and reached for the polished brass poker. Edna would not be well pleased if she came home and found a scorch mark on it and the fire so low it was almost out.
He’d been thinking about the specifications for those new tractors Bertie had brought back from the exhibition in Birmingham and the next thing he knew he was away back in Ballymena fitting a new axle on a traction engine with old Willie Prentice. Years ago that was. The only place you’d see that engine now was in a museum. Wasn’t it funny the things that came back to you if you nodded off for a minute or two after your lunch.
He glanced at the clock. It was nearly three. Surely he hadn’t slept that long. He leaned over for another log without getting out of his chair. He tried to place it in the hottest part of the glowing embers but the pain caught him unexpectedly and the log fell short.
‘Bad luck, George, you should’ve stood up in the first place,’ he said aloud. He put a hand to his chest and straightened his shoulders cautiously. ‘And if that’s the way the wind’s blowing you’d better take your pills and forget all about hoeing that rose bed.’
He stood up awkwardly, clutched at the back of his well-worn wing chair and waited for his knee joints to respond to the call for action. His pills were in the drawer of his bureau but as he picked them up he remembered he could never swallow them without water.
The kitchen was empty, spotless and shining. He looked around and shook his head. Surely to goodness the new cleaning lady would suit. He’d heard her working like a Trojan all morning and when she’d brought him his sandwich before she left, it was on a tray with a cloth and had bits of parsley and tomato to make it look nice just like those pictures in the women’s magazines. But there was no pleasing Edna these days. It was a long time since she’d had a good word for him. There wasn’t much he could do about it now.
He swallowed the pills, rinsed the glass and turned it upside down to drain by the sink. Then he looked at it and thought again. He dried it and put it away. As he closed the cupboard door the pain surged. He put out his hand and held on to the sink.
‘Go away,’ he said to it. ‘Come tomorrow, when it doesn’t matter so much.’
He felt the sweat break on his brow and wondered if he should sit down. But the kitchen was not a place where he ever felt comfortable. Edna hated him in the kitchen and if she arrived back from town just now she’d make a fuss and say he’d been doing something he’d been told not to do. How was she to get her jobs done if she couldn’t leave him for five minutes? She always said five minutes when she’d been gone most of the day.
‘Come on, George, get going. Tell yourself it’s downhill.’
He made his way back along the hall and into the dining room. To his surprise the pain began to ease.
‘Great stuff,’ he said triumphantly. ‘Let’s get this fire made up while the going’s good. Shure, what does it matter if I have to sit here the whole afternoon, so long as I’m all right for Jenny coming.’
Gladys would laugh if she could hear him. His secretary for twenty years and his friend and confidante for most of them, she’d told him only last week that he mustn’t talk to himself or people would get the wrong idea.
‘An’ d’ye not talk to yourself, Gladys?’ he asked her teasingly.
‘’Deed I do,’ she replied promptly. ‘But I make sure no one’s listening.’
He made up the fire and sat down gratefully. The pain had eased a lot but it had left him feeling weak. Or maybe that was the tablets. Whatever it was, he’d have to behave himself today. Rest, the doctor said. Rest. There hadn’t been a lot of rest in his life and it didn’t come easy to him now. But he could read. Wasn’t he lucky he had good eyesight and enough books to thatch houses with, as the saying was.
He picked up a small leather-covered volume from his side table. A spot of Goldsmith in the dying months of the year. Sweet Auburn, perhaps. A link with times long past when the world was simpler, if not better. He opened it and looked at the familiar handwriting inside the cover. ‘To Daddy with love, because your old copy is falling apart. Happy Birthday, Jenny.’
‘Daddy, can we go up to Granny’s house before we go home?’
He looked down at the small hand clutching his arm and the earnest regard in the dark eyes. ‘It’s a bit of a walk for you, love, and it’ll be wet after the rain.’
‘But I have my boots, Daddy. Granny McTaggart says I could go anywhere in my seven league boots.’
Mary McTaggart laughed and took the brown teapot from the stove. ‘Have anither drap o’ tea, George. I think ye may go, for she’s talked ‘bout nothin’ else all week. She’s had Lottie gae up there three or four times a’ready. She’d ’ave gone hersel’ if I’d let her.’
He looked at his watch. Edna would be expecting her back for bedtime at seven and the Austin was not exactly the world’s fastest car.
‘Please Daddy. I’ve had such a lovely holiday with Granny McTaggart and she’s told me all about you when you were a little boy.’
‘Oh dear,’ laughed George, looking up at the old woman who had always been so kind to him. ‘Has she told you all my secrets?’
‘Yes,’ said the child promptly. ‘But I can keep a secret, can’t I, Granny?’
‘Oh, ye can do mony a thing, my little lady. I hope yer auld granny is still here in ten years time to see ye.’
‘When I’m sixteen and all grown up?’ she said, as she fetched a small pair of Wellingtons from a corner of the big kitchen where those of Mary’s youngest son and his family were lined up against the wall.
The rain had cleared and the late August sun was warm on their faces as they avoided the puddles in the farmyard, George stepping carefully in the brown leather shoes he wore in town. Five months now since the move. A hard time it had been. Worries about the loan on the showroom, the tractors and trailers he had ordered from England, the cost of the glossy catalogues he’d distributed with reapers and binders and combines too big and too costly to stock. The mortgage on the house in Stranmillis, the only one Edna had liked, was far more than