Cheating at Canasta - Couverture souple

Chapter One

The Dressmaker’s Child

Cahal sprayed WD-40 on to the only bolt his spanner wouldn’t shift. All the others had come out easily enough but this one was rusted in, the exhaust unit trailing from it. He had tried to hammer it out, he had tried wrenching the exhaust unit this way and that in the hope that something would give way, but nothing had. Half five, he’d told Heslin, and the bloody car wouldn’t be ready.

The lights of the garage were always on because shelves had been put up in front of the windows that stretched across the length of the wall at the back. Abandoned cars, kept for their parts, and cars and motor-cycles waiting for spares, and jacks that could be wheeled about, took up what space there was on either side of the small wooden office, which was at the back also. There were racks of tools, and workbenches with vices along the back wall, and rows of new and reconditioned tyres, and drums of grease and oil. In the middle of the garage there were two pits, in one of which Cahal’s father was at the moment, putting in a clutch. There was a radio on which advice was being given about looking after fish in an aquarium. ‘Will you turn that stuff off ?’ Cahal’s father shouted from under the car he was working on, and Cahal searched the wavebands until he found music of his father’s time.

He was an only son in a family of girls, all of them older, all of them gone from the town — three to England, another in Dunne’s in Galway, another married in Nebraska. The garage was what Cahal knew, having kept his father company there since childhood, given odd jobs to do as he grew up. His father had had help then, an old man who was related to the family, whose place Cahal eventually took.

He tried the bolt again but the WD-40 hadn’t begun to work yet. He was a lean, almost scrawny youth, darkhaired, his long face usually unsmiling. His garage overalls, over a yellow T-shirt, were oil-stained, gone pale where their green dye had been washed out of them. He was nineteen years old.

‘Hullo,’ a voice said. A man and a woman, strangers, stood in the wide open doorway of the garage.

‘Howya,’ Cahal said.

‘It’s the possibility, sir,’ the man enquired, ‘you drive us to the sacred Virgin?’

‘Sorry?’ And Cahal’s father shouted up from the pit, wanting to know who was there. ‘Which Virgin’s that?’ Cahal asked.

The two looked at one another, not attempting to answer, and it occurred to Cahal that they were foreign people, who had not understood. A year ago a German had driven his Volkswagen into the garage, with a noise in the engine, so he’d said. ‘I had hopes it’d be the big end,’ Cahal’s father admitted afterwards, but it was only the catch of the bonnet gone a bit loose. A couple from America had had a tyre put on their hired car a few weeks after that, but there’d been nothing since.

‘Of Pouldearg,’ the woman said. ‘Is it how to say it?’

‘The statue you’re after?’

They nodded uncertainly and then with more confidence, both of them at the same time.

‘Aren’t you driving, yourselves, though?’ Cahal asked them.

‘We have no car,’ the man said.

‘We are travelled from Avila.’ The woman’s black hair was silky, drawn back and tied with a red and blue ribbon. Her eyes were brown, her teeth very white, her skin olive. She wore the untidy clothes of a traveller: denim trousers, a woollen jacket over a striped red blouse. The man’s trousers were the same, his shirt a nondescript shade of greyish blue, a white kerchief at his neck. A few years older than himself, Cahal estimated they’d be.

‘Avila?’ he said.

‘Spain,’ the man said.

Again Cahal’s father called out, and Cahal said two Spanish people had come into the garage.

‘In the store,’ the man explained. ‘They say you drive us to the Virgin.’

‘Are they broken down?’ Cahal’s father shouted.

He could charge them fifty euros, Pouldearg there and back, Cahal considered. He’d miss Germany versus Holland on the television, maybe the best match of the Cup, but never mind that for fifty euros.

‘The only thing,’ he said, ‘I have an exhaust to put in.’

He pointed at the pipe and silencer hanging out of Heslin’s old Vauxhall, and they understood. He gestured with his hands that they should stay where they were for a minute, and with his palms held flat made a pushing motion in the air, indicating that they should ignore the agitation that was coming from the pit. Both of them were amused. When Cahal tried the bolt again it began to turn.

He made the thumbs-up sign when exhaust and silencer clattered to the ground. ‘I could take you at around seven,’ he said, going close to where the Spaniards stood, keeping his voice low so that his father would not hear. He led them to the forecourt and made the arrangement while he filled the tank of a Murphy’s Stout lorry.

*

When he’d driven a mile out on the Ennis road, Cahal’s father turned at the entrance to the stud farm and drove back to the garage, satisfied that the clutch he’d put in for Father Shea was correctly adjusted. He left the car on the forecourt, ready for Father Shea to collect, and hung the keys up in the office. Heslin from the court-house was writing a cheque for the exhaust Cahal had fitted. Cahal was getting out of his overalls, and when Heslin had gone he said the people who had come wanted him to drive them to Pouldearg. They were Spanish people, Cahal said again, in case his father hadn’t heard when he’d supplied that information before.

‘What they want with Pouldearg?’

‘Nothing only the statue.’

‘There’s no one goes to the statue these times.’

‘It’s where they’re headed.’

‘Did you tell them, though, how the thing was?’

‘I did of course.’

‘Why they’d be going out there?’

‘There’s people takes photographs of it.’

Thirteen years ago, the then bishop and two parish priests had put an end to the cult of the wayside statue at Pouldearg. None of those three men, and no priest or nun who had ever visited the crossroads at Pouldearg, had sensed anything special about the statue; none had witnessed the tears that were said to slip out of the downcast eyes when pardon for sins was beseeched by penitents. The statue became the subject of attention in pulpits and in religious publications, the claims made for it fulminated against as a foolishness. And then a curate of that time demonstrated that what had been noticed by two or three local people who regularly passed by the statue — a certain dampness beneath the eyes — was no more than raindrops trapped in two over-defined hollows. There the matter ended. Those who had so certainly believed in what they had never actually seen, those who had not noticed the drenched leaves of overhanging boughs high above the statue, felt as foolish as their spiritual masters had predicted they one day would. Almost overnight the weeping Virgin of Pouldearg became again the painted image it had always been. Our Lady of the Wayside, it had been called for a while.

‘I never heard people were taking photographs of it.’ Cahal’s father shook his head as if he doubted his son, which he often did and usually with reason.

‘A fellow was writing a book a while back. Going around all Ireland, tracking down the weeping statues.’

‘It was no more than the rain at Pouldearg.’

‘He’d have put that in the book. That man would have put the whole thing down, how you’d find the statues all over the place and some of them would be okay and some of them wouldn’t.’

‘And you set the Spaniards right about Pouldearg?’

‘I did of course.’

‘Drain the juice out of young Leahy’s bike and we’ll weld his leak for him.’

*

The suspicions of Cahal’s father were justified: the truth had no more than slightly played a part in what Cahal had told the Spanish couple about Pouldearg. With fifty euros at the back of his mind, he would have considered it a failure of his intelligence had he allowed himself to reveal that the miracle once claimed for the statue at Pouldearg was without foundation. They had heard the statue called Our Lady of Tears as well as Our Lady of the Wayside and the Sacred Virgin of Pouldearg by a man in a Dublin public house with whom they had drifted into conversation. They’d had to repeat this a couple of times before Cahal grasped what they were saying, but he thought he got it right in the end. It wouldn’t be hard to stretch the journey by four or five miles, and if they were misled by the names they’d heard the statue given in Dublin it was no concern of his. At five past seven, when he’d had his tea and had had a look at the television, he drove into the yard of Macey’s Hotel. He waited there as he’d said he would. They appeared almost at once.

They sat close together in the back. Before he started the engine again Cahal told them what the cost would be and they said that was all right. He drove through the town, gone quiet as it invariably did at this time. Some of the shops were still open and would remain so for a few more hours — the newsagents’ and tobacconists’, the sweet shops and small groceries, Quinlan’s supermarket, all the public houses — but there was a lull on the streets.

‘Are you on holiday?’ Cahal asked.

What remains to be said about William Trevor – except the oft-repeated truth that he is not just a master but the master of the narrative form ... True to such maturity and control, the stories are suffused with radiant and effortless majesty; a comprehensive ease of speaking about spaces in the human heart and mind that remains out of reach for most writers.'

The Times 7 July 2007

All the stories in this book are good, but two of them are outstanding ... The final tale, in particular, is a work of perfect control and balance ... This is the twelfth story in Trevor's twelfth collection: an almost magical number for what could be his most mesmerising and haunting story. William Trevor is the greatest living exponent of the form.

Cressida Connolly, The Literary Review July 2007

These stories are formally perfect ... As with Chekov – and the comparison is almost inevitable – they leave space for the reader to ruminate and in that way achieve their aim, which is to underline the solitary nature, almost the impermeability, of individual experience.

Anita Brookner, the Spectator 21 July 2007

Some of the stories here can stand with his best... even more than most collections it should be taken slowly, measured out at a story or two at a day. Read in that way, some of these little epiphanies can still slice off the top of your head.

TLS 20 July 2007

Slyly humorous, thoughtful, rich in pathos, wonderfully harmonic in spirit and mood, and above all, hugely enjoyable, these tales confirm what we already knew: that Trevor is an absolute master of the genre.

Daily Mail 13 July 2007