Bad Things Happen by Tim Buckley

Author:Tim Buckley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
Published: 2019-01-25T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20

I picked up the empty bottle and glasses from the desk, walked with her to the gate, and went into the kitchen. I was putting the glasses in the dishwasher when Pauline came in with a basket of laundry. I had only just been forgiven for my non-appearance at dinner earlier in the week, and Pauline had remained a little bit cool with me. Still, she was warming again and she recoiled in mock-shock at the sight of the wine bottle.

“Bit early for that, isn’t it?” she laughed. “Still, drinking wine in the garden with a pretty French girl – nice work if you can get it, eh?” She nudged me with an elbow and, giggling at her own wit, started loading the washing machine.

“Very funny,” I smiled. “I’m about to make some coffee – would you like some?”

“D’you know I’ve been dying for a cup of tea, Aengus,” she said. “Good lad.”

I made Pauline’s tea and some coffee for myself to offset the effects of the wine and made my way back to the studio. I picked up the sketch pad and held it up again to the easel and the canvas board. The easiest thing for me to have altered would have been the window, but its scale looked fine relative to Hélène’s outline and the room’s dimensions. The ceiling height, too, looked in balance with the room. But somehow the walls and the window looked too close to her back, like she was in a cell. And that in turn gave the walls an ominous appearance, as though they were closing in on her.

I thought about Hélène’s veiled criticism of Aoife – that she was perhaps wrapped up in her own world – with a pang of guilt, and about my own tendency to intolerance of those who seemed preoccupied with their own travails, to the exclusion of any concern for others. It was, I think, an intolerance that had lain dormant during my university years, but took firm root when we moved to London. Dublin, or that piece of it that I inhabited, was a small enough city – and Howth a small enough village – that people knew you, or they knew your parents or your grandparents. And they asked them about you or you about them. Maybe it was a feigned interest, I don’t know, and maybe it got a bit irritating from time to time when their earnest concern seemed more like nosey curiosity. But it was a reassuring trait of community to feel that people cared. It was, I suppose, part of my father’s almost-celebrity status, particularly in Howth, but I could not walk down the street in the village without fielding enquiries as to his well-being.

The corollary was also true: a consistent humility, a determination not to trouble others with one’s own difficulties. An expression of concern or a simple enquiry would rarely uncover a problem, even when you knew all was not well.

“Grand, grand – sure you know yourself,” they would reply to a “how are you?”.

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