“And did you see? Himself – with the sandwiches, in the brown paper bags? For all the world…”
          Too much, too much. Grace can manage no more. He laughs as if it’s too much to bear, just saying it.
          “Aye,” says Blackie, “aye. ‘The common man,’ am I right, with his Big House? One of the boys, no less.”
          Grace takes a swill of his drink. Blackie follows. Quietly, then, they watch the
open hearth where a meagre fire smokes. As though there were in it something unbelievable.
          “Yes but,” Grace goes on, now more dourly, “difference is we’ve not all ‘avocado’ and fuckin’ olives between our flaps of bread.”
          He sits his glass back on the bar. No bubbles form. It’s long turned flat, but he will not order another.
          "Is that what it is, now? ‘Avocado’?” Blackie smacks his knee as he says it, getting a real kick out of the word, out of just pronouncing it. Grace doesn’t pick him up.
          “Sure I don’t know what he puts in his fuckin’ sandwiches, do I? I’m guessing, is all. And do you see me asking now, to be honest? Sure he’d have me there till the market was closed up and the cows had made their own arrangements: tell me where the wheat was ‘sourced’ for the bread. The cows for his butter as well. Even the fuckin’ trees for the brown paper bag, probably… No, you don’t make friendly overtures, not to a man of his sort.”
          “That you don’t, by any token.” Blackie nods in easy, general assent. Talk like this can last the evening out. Already the night’s come on and there’s a howl of a wind. But within the pub at least you’ve the comfort. The sense no wrong can happen while the day lasts. Every week they meet, the same. In talk they run back over the day’s course, the Tuesday cattle mart off the Castletown Road: losses sustained, gains, any empty stalls on the site, the missing, the failing, the dead. Every week the same. As if just going the day were not enough.
          “If you’ll pardon me lads,” O’Dwyer excuses himself. He’s others yet to see to, drinks to pour. They wait and don’t say either of them another word until he’s taken his towel and gone.
          Blackie gives the end of his thumb a sniff, the brown of pipe tobacco. “I suppose it’d be to Agnes he’d want to talk,” says he, “if it’s about the sandwiches.” He’s sniffing for something, hanging on like a dog at the end of the dinner table. Grace can tell it straight off now. He says nothing. But Blackie is undeterred.
          “And how is herself keeping these days, anyway? I didn’t see her there today at all.”
          “That’ll be down to the fact,” says Grace, “that she wasn’t.” He’s giving nothing away.
          Blackie nods – commiserating. “And is she coping well enough up there?” He is quiet. “With your Francis gone?” he says. Like some old woman with no more in her life than stories to keep her going from one day to the next.
          “She was standing on her own two feet, Blackie, the last time I checked. And what’s this, anyway? Do you think I want to be sitting here talking about Agnes for the night? To you?”
          Blackie had been hasty. Frank Grace is a devilish difficult man, always has been. No point pressing here. Blackie takes a sniff of his whiskey now, gives it a swirl, but does not taste it. He puts his glass back on the coaster.
          “Funny isn’t it,” he says. “Hundred years ago you’d never see the likes of – himself, out on the mart with the rest of us. Often I think that. How he’d have just watched it carrying on below, out the window, like something he’d never associate with. Something altogether out of his world… Do you remember the father, back years ago?”
          “O yes,” Grace snorts his laughter. “‘Jolly fine,’ he was. Do you remember? Could’ve asked him how’s the smell of the wife’s backside. ‘O it’s jolly fine! Jolly fine, thank you.’”
          They both laugh. By the fire Mackay laughs too. It’s a well-honed joke here, a common prize: something to be shared.

1

 

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