EVENING'S EMPIRE

This story was entered for the Falling Leaves short story competition and broadcast on Cork Local radio in the late nineties.                                                                                

It would probably be the last time he'd see this particular view, sitting on the back porch with the sun setting behind the mountains in a glorious orgy of colour. How often he and Jean had watched it together over the years, one calling the other out.

"You must come and look at this."

And they'd marvel together in silence because words were never enough.

A long time ago Jean had crossed over, to find whatever lay behind those clouds, if anything. Sixteen years since she had died and left him to marvel alone. And now they said he couldn't manage by himself any more, he was too frail.

"Seventy-nine's a great age, Eric," his doctor had told him. "Thank God you still have your wits." But he'd have to leave the house. That or have someone move in with him, which was out of the question.

"Here, dad," his daughter Rita said, coming out to him. "Aren't you cold?"

"Not at all," he replied.

She felt his hand.

"Solid ice!" she commented. "You'd better come inside."

"Decline and fall," he said.  

"What?"

"That's what your mother always said the sunset reminded her of. Decline and fall of the Roman Empire."

Rita glanced with the abstraction of a busy person at the heaps of deep purple streaked with gold, the dark bar of indigo, the smudge of flamboyant scarlet.

"Mm," she replied. "Just a moment or two longer then."

When the last light had gone and the edge of the mountain range was no longer clearly defined, Eric let himself be brought in by the turf fire.

"Maybe you'd do something for me," Rita said.

He looked at her expectantly. It destroyed him to have her lug those great tea chests about, but he couldn't help her: He couldn't even stand up without support any more.

She plonked a box down on his lap.

"Go through that little lot, will you. See what you want to keep. The less the better."

There wasn't going to be much room for his things in the flat Rita's husband Maurice had built for him over their garage. All the big pieces would be left behind for the tenants. Since he couldn't yet bring himself to sell the old house, a Dutch professor on leave to write a book had delightedly agreed to lease it for a year, with her botanist husband.        

Eric fingered the box of carved wood. It was Jean's. She'd asked him to burn all her stuff that last time in the hospital, when it was clear what was going to happen, had made him solemnly promise. He never felt he'd broken his word. It was just that he hadn't burnt anything yet. No doubt intending him to do it at once, she hadn't actually said as much and he'd delayed and then forgotten. Maybe now was the time. But he'd glance through it all first, just in case.

It was a small farm they'd had, small but requiring constant attention. That had been all right by him. He'd liked the life, had travelled as much as he wanted in his youth before he met Jean, had found the world not up to much, was content to work his little plot and on fine days watch the sun rise over the bog in front of the house, travel across the sky and set splendidly behind the mountains at the back. Jean had always been more adventurous, an active member of the countrywomen's association, involved in amateur drama, later in an archaeological group. He hadn't minded. As the three children grew up, she even went away on the occasional trip but came back full of tales, her eyes sparkling mischievously as she told him about her fellow travellers and their misadventures. Once she went to Troy for two weeks with the archaeological group. She brought back a little pot of soil. Now it was buried with her.

At the top of Jean's box were brochures, catalogues, postcards of the places she'd visited. A postcard he'd sent her once when he went on a rare trip alone to Galway. He remembered how lonely he'd felt in the bed-and-breakfast, much more than when he was home and she was away, though he'd felt lonely then, too. Like half a person. The way he always felt now. There was a letter he'd written to her when she was in hospital having Ciarán, their only son, a difficult birth. He smiled, remembering how hard it had been to write the letter, for a man like himself, not at home with expressing his feelings. The letter was almost brusque in its account of happenings on the farm with a note of reproof between the lines: "Rita fell and scraped her knee" (because you weren't there to look after her) "but she's all right, thank God" (no thanks to you). "Miss you," the letter finished wistfully.

There were cards and letters too from Jean's many friends, some of whose names he still recalled from her stories, some he'd met when they'd called to the house to see her, when they'd visited her during those last terrible weeks in hospital.

This wasn't doing him any good. Better to burn the whole lot at once.

At the bottom of the box was a bulky manila envelope stuffed with more letters. Eric drew one out at random. It was from someone called Felix, a name that rang no bells. His eye ran down it. It seemed to be an account of a trip to an archaeological dig in Mayo: "Maura was up to her collops in mud, we all had to pull her out, no easy task, as you can imagine... Betty got shamelessly drunk on poitín and started making passes at young Eamon.... Pity you couldn't come, you'd have loved it." The next letter Eric drew out was also from Felix and the next, written in a fluent, light style that however expressed a certain intimacy. Eric pulled them all out. They were all from Felix and dated over a twenty-five year period, almost up to Jean's death. Eric felt slightly ill, such a close friend, someone he'd never even heard of. He looked through them hungrily, hunting.

Here it was at last, a letter that proved the nature of the relationship, dated when Jean was in her forties. "I can't tell you how much our time together means to me..." The man talked of her body, of his favourite spot, the little pouch of flesh beneath her buttocks, in terms that would have made Eric himself blush. He talked of her smell, that he carried with him all day, of ecstacy, of passion. He reminded her, in a later letter, of the glorious two weeks in Turkey, at Troy, dodging the curious eyes of the Mauras and Bettys. My own lovely Helen, he called her. Jean would have been over fifty by then. It was a time when Eric and his wife hardly ever had intercourse any more though he'd continued to think of their relationship as loving. Thought it but never said it.

"Burn them," she'd demanded urgently, gripping his hand. "Promise."

And he'd promised and broken his word. And this was his punishment.

Jean had always been good-looking, he knew that. Even objectively. Even as she got older. She laughed a lot, which suited her.

"Better than a face lift," she always said.

Rita, dashing around packing, noticed that her father looked distressed. She hoped it wasn't too much for him, the move. Maybe after all it would have been better to leave him alone, let nature take its course. She switched on the radio to distract him. It was Bob Dylan, which was more her taste than his, but it might do the trick.

"Oh I know that evening's empire" the cult singer wailed, "has returned into sand, left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping. My weariness amazes me, I'm branded on my feet, I have no one to meet and my ancient empty streets too dead for dreaming...."

"Hmm," thought Rita, "not terribly cheerful."

But her father didn't seem to notice and she joined in the chorus loudly as she folded his clothes into a suitcase.

"Hey Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me...."

*

The woman at the door was scrutinising her caller, a frail elderly man leaning on two sticks.

"Yes?" she asked.

"I'm looking for Felix," he replied.

"That's my husband," she said. "But he died many years ago."

"Ah," sighed Eric. "Sorry to have troubled you."

"Did you know him?"

"No..."

She looked inquiringly.

"I knew of him."

"Perhaps I can help you?"

"No, it's all right. It doesn't matter."

Eric turned to go but stumbled. The woman hurried out to help him.

"Step inside for a minute," she said. "Have some tea."

How stupid to come. What had he expected after all this? What had he planned? To punch some old man on the nose? He let himself be led inside and collapsed into an armchair.

"I'm Esther," the woman said. She spoke with a slightly foreign accent.

"I'm Eric."

"Oh yes..." she smiled at him. "Felix was close with your wife."

One way of putting it, Eric supposed. "You know about that?" he asked.

"He was not good at keeping the secrets."

"Jean was," Eric said bitterly. "I never suspected until recently. I found some letters. This address was on them..."

"And you came to kill Felix."

"I don't know. I just had to see him."

She made some tea and brought out a heavy but delicious cake.

"Poppy seed strudel," she told him.

They had been refugees. Jews who'd fled the Nazis and ended up in rural Ireland.

"We liked it so we stayed."

She showed him photographs of Felix, no Lothario but a small fat bald man.

"He had great success with women, I think because he could always make them laugh. Not so much Irish women. But then he met Jean."

"You didn't mind?"

"Felix and I, we had a friendship. A deep friendship based on shared experience. If he had left me for Jean, they would have split up in a year. The distance kept it going. The excitement of secrecy."

"All the same..."

"I found letters too. Your wife was certainly fond of Felix. But unlike him, she was a realist - and she wouldn't leave you.  She loved you. That was clear."

Was the woman just saying that, to be kind?

"The letters...?" Eric asked.

"I burned them."

As I should have done, thought Eric.

Felix had died six months after Jean.

"Like an old married man." Esther commented, "He couldn't live without her."

But I could, Eric thought. And did.

"I feel so betrayed," he said. "And bereft. As if I'd never really known her."

"In some ways," Esther commented, "the poet was quite wrong, don't you agree.  "No man is an island," indeed. We are all like islands, standing alone.  We can only hope to be near someone else for a while."

"You must have been very lonely."

"After my parents were taken and killed, yes certainly. But Felix and I were very close in many ways."

The hound, thought Eric, he hadn't deserved her. He regarded Esther, small, dark, still striking, despite the mesh of wrinkles across her face. She looked up at him then, tears brimming her dark brown eyes. At the sight of his lugubrious expression, however, she burst into merry laughter and was transformed. Better than a face lift, he thought.

"I can make a fire if there's anything you wish to burn," she said and offered him another wedge of strudel. And because he hadn't tasted anything so good in years,  and because he thought it was time at last to look forward rather than back, he accepted both her offers.