A Bit on the Side Read Online Free PDF Page B

that. And he would be silent among the churchyard yews, and would say nothing while she went by. Then when she had brought the tea upstairs and had sat a while to watch the old eyelids droop, she’d slide back the wooden bolt and move the curtain an inch to the right, leaving it for just a moment. He would come in without a knock.
    Someone leaving the Railwayman called after her, saying good night, and she called back. She could have had any of them; she still could, for all she knew. My God, she thought, the stifled life it would have been, with any one of them!
    She didn’t mind the short cut by the churchyard, not any more. She’d passed through the lines of gravestones too often, the Greshams’ great family vault damaged and open in one place, the smashed, forgotten wreaths eerie when there was moonlight. The odour she’d once associated with the dead was old leaves rotting.
    The cottage where all her life she’d lived was the last in the village. Her father had left it every morning of her childhood to go to work at the quarry; he’d died upstairs, where her mother had too. A boy had come on the day her mother died and she’d had to send him away, head of St Andrew’s he’d been, Tateman. La même chose : it was he who’d taught her that, and chacun à son goût, making her pout her lips to get the sounds. Long afterwards she’d imagined travelling with him, all over France and Germany, saying la même chose herself when she was offered a dessert, wanting what he’d had. Fair-haired he’d been, not at all like the present one, whose name she did not know.
    She turned the latchkey in her front door and drew the curtains in the room she’d walked straight into, the heavy one over the door to keep the draught out. Two bars of the electric fire warmed her ankles when she sat down, with tea and Petit Beurre. The secret side of it they’d always relished, as much as the other in a way. And she had, too – not quite as much but almost.
    *
    When the dormitory had quietened Olivier thought about her again. He wondered how, when she was young, her expression had changed when her mood did. He imagined her demure, for there was about her sometimes in the dining hall a trace of that as she stood waiting for Grace to be said, while the others were impatient. Conjecturing again, he saw her in a different coat, without a headscarf, hair blown about. He saw her uniform laid out, starched and ready on an ironing board, a finger damped before the iron’s heat was tested. He saw her stockinged feet and laughter in her eyes, and then her nakedness.

Justina’s Priest
    Only Justina Casey made sense, Father Clohessy reflected yet again, shaking his head over the recurrence of the thought, for truth to tell the girl made no sense at all. The contradiction nagged a little in a familiar way, as it did whenever Justina Casey, sinless as ever, made her confession. It caused Father Clohessy to feel inadequate, foolish even, that he failed to understand something that as a priest he should have.
    Leaving the confessional she had just left herself, he looked around for her: at the back, near the holy-water stoup, she trailed her rosary through her fingers. ‘Father, I’m bad,’ she had insisted and, allotting her her penance, he had been again aware that she didn’t even know what badness was. But without the telling of her beads, without the few Hail Marys he had prescribed, she would have gone away unhappy. Of her own volition, every few days she polished the brass of the altar vases and the altar cross. She would be there on Saturday evening, a bucket of scalding water carried through the streets, the floor mop lifted down from its hook in the vestry cupboard. On Fridays she scraped away the week’s accumulation of candle grease and arranged to her satisfaction the out-of-date missionary leaflets.
    Fifty-four and becoming stout, his red hair cut short around a freckled pate, Father Clohessy watched while Justina Casey dipped