Oliver Murray

The Promise

"This is what I’m talking about, Peter," Norman said, taking a large red rocket from the sideboard. "Fireworks go back to the Chinese, of course..."
"What’s that?" Peter asked.
"The manufacture of fireworks," Norman explained patiently. "Let me tell you how the laws concerning their use have changed in the last ten years…"
"Will you say grace, Norman," Marcy asked, carrying in the turkey.
"You forgot the knife," Norman said, breaking off from his careful delineation of some subsection of the law on explosives and inflammable substances.
Norman then joined his hands: "Let us be thankful for what we are about to receive, by the grace of Jesus, as it were, Christ."
"Who the hell is Jesus, as it were, Christ?" Peter asked irritably when Marcy had disappeared again. He was a little afraid of Marcy, so he took the opportunity to be nasty to Norman when she was out of the room.
"It’s our Alpha meetings," Norman said. "We do this so that the unbelievers or, as we call them, ‘not yet believers’ will not feel stigmatized."
"Stigmatized?" Peter said in disgust. "We’re all unbelievers. When you die that’s the end of you."
"Now, now, Peter," Marcy said, coming in again with dishes of stuffing and sprouts, "you know very well that Amy is watching over you up there. And she knows what you are up to, Peter."

Christ, Peter thought, does she know something? A lot of talk went on in supermarkets. Those gaggles of women you sometimes saw around the checkout – they weren’t always just helping some old biddy go through her handbag to find her Clubcard.
"A sad time for you, Peter," Marcy said, her moist eyes glistening where he could see them over her misted spectacles.
"Yes, well…" Peter said.
"A lot of readjustment necessary," Norman said, carving industriously.
Peter wished his sister-in-law wouldn’t bring this up. Yes, he missed Amy if he thought about her. So he didn’t think about her – it was as simple as that really.
"I did a lot of the shopping for her for the last couple of years, when she was sick," he said. "And you can get all these dinners and things for one."

Peter ate some of the turkey and ham that Norman carved for him, but set the stuffing resolutely aside.
"Is the wine at the proper temperature, Norman?" Marcia asked, coming in with more roast potatoes. She belonged to the same school of Christmas dinner cookery as her late sister and would not sit down until everyone else was nearly finished. Norman poured a glass of red wine for Peter and stated that the laws on viniculture in France had undergone considerable change since some recent scandals in the wine industry. This wine was cold. Peter could see that the lights of their Christmas tree were reflected more brilliantly now in the bow windows of the front room, against the dark outside, and realized it must be after four o’clock. At the back of every Christmas Day, when you looked closely at it, was just another dull December one.

They pulled crackers and Peter got some sort of a plastic puzzle he couldn’t do.
Norman had put on a paper hat. He looked stupid. They heard a child crying not too far away, then a woman shouting and a door being slammed. Peter remembered, when he was about twelve, trying to fly a rubber-powered model aircraft in the frosty darkness of the back garden on Christmas Day, and how, on its first flight, it had ploughed its nose into the half-frozen mud of the lawn.
"I’ll be letting off a few rockets later on," Norman said. "I strongly advise you to stay."
"It’ll be just a light tea, with turkey sandwiches and a slice of Christmas cake," Marcy said as she offered Norman a choice of custard or brandy sauce on his plum pudding.
Norman sometimes helped to organize little fund-raisers for the rowing club, but surely he wasn’t doing so on Christmas day?
"Just a few neighbors getting together for drinks," Norman said. "A few squibs and bangers. Then the rockets."
"No thanks," Peter said brusquely.

It was almost another hour before Peter was able to grumble his way out of the house, and belch along the damp footpath by the main road. He thought apprehensively about Sheila, the woman he had met at the cold-counter in the supermarket. She had advised him against a frozen Thai curry meal for one, which looked rather nice.
"Gave me wind," she’d said softly with a conspiratorial wink, her little claw-like hand clasping his arm.
He’d been still quite lost in the supermarket even though it was over two years since Amy became ill, but they kept changing things around. Sheila had sometimes helped him, directing him to where the cheese counter had now disappeared to, or telling him they had stopped stocking those buns with the funny little seeds that Peter liked although they used to get under his dental plate. When the Christmas stuff had started to appear, back in October, she had put her little claw on his wrist and shook her head with a sharp intake of breath.
"A very sad time, Mr. Dowling," she’d said with a shudder.
"Eh?" Peter said. He usually tried to keep references to sadness at a distance.
"I usually go to my daughter’s house and I don't really like her husband. He keeps clearing the table during the meal and once he even starting doing the washing up after the second course."
Peter wasn't sure he wanted to hear all this.
"And he mentions money a bit too often for my liking, if you get my meaning," she’d said, nodding significantly.
She was a pleasant little woman, about ten years younger than Peter. He’d been flattered at her attention, but guilty too.

Frost stars were forming on the pavement and the great constellations slowly swung overhead. For a moment, Peter hoped, as he turned towards his own gateway and stopped to unlatch the gate with the broken hinge, that there would be nobody there. But she moved out of the shadow of the porch, her pale face lit by the streetlight. She looked frozen under her little brown woolly cap and she had a pair of unattractive fuzzy boots on her small feet, which she stamped up and down to keep warm.
"I thought you’d forgotten, Mr. Dowling," she said. "Weren’t those old folks lunching at one o’clock?"
She was holding a shopping bag and his heart sank when he saw a turkey’s head hanging out of it on its scrawny neck. She had a smaller transparent plastic bag holding what looked like sprouts and a couple of sticks of celery.
"There was more than just the turkey dinner, you know," Peter said. "Games and activities. Took us longer to get rid of them than we expected."
She laughed and struck him lightly on the arm. She wasn’t all that much to look at, but she had a sweet smile.
"Did they get a nice dinner?" she asked.
"You should have seen them tucking in," Peter said queasily. Perhaps he should have pleaded ‘flu. He could have rung her yesterday. He opened the front door. He could smell the cold air from their clothes but he’d left the central heating on.
"There’s a welcoming touch," she said.

But the state of the kitchen stopped her in her tracks. Before Peter had got around to picking up a new fuse for the cooker, he’d had to use the electric fire turned on its back to heat tins of beans and to fry bacon, and he’d forgotten to take it off the draining board. The sink was full of dishes. You could smell them, and there were several yoghurt cartons full of grease on the windowsill.
"I’ve told my daughter I am having my Christmas dinner with a friend," she’d said, putting her hand on his arm that morning last month in the chilly air near the butchery counter. "I hope I may consider you a friend, Mr. Dowling?" She had outmaneuvered him there, leaving him floundering over the "friend" bit so that the rest slipped under his guard. She had the sort of face that could break up in misery, giving way to tears. Amy’s had been like that too.
He hadn’t had the heart to put her off. But he’d had to go to Marcy’s today – there was no alternative, otherwise Marcy would have been around here, snooping.
Sheila went upstairs to wash her hands and when Peter went upstairs himself he turned on the electric blanket. He wasn’t sure if she’d expect anything, at their age, but it was better to be prepared. He had no idea what was going to happen. At least it would be nice and warm for him when she had gone. When he came downstairs she was sitting at the kitchen table.
"You’ve already had your dinner, haven’t you?" she accused.
"No," he protested.
"I can smell the food on your breath, the wine"
"A Christmas snack," he said.
"Look," she said, "I’m not stupid."
Her face was white and pinched. He tried to prevaricate and she went on, "Do you think I’m a… do you…?" and he was shocked, feeling his heart skip a beat, then a second one, that there was real anger in her voice. He was frightened of a confrontation and for a moment almost felt like walking out of the house and slamming the front door behind him. But he couldn’t leave her here. She’d be still here when he got back!

Then her face crumpled, ugly with tears.
"My late husband…" she said.
"I’m sorry," Peter said. "was he..?”
She looked up at him.
"He was useless! " she said.
If he’d even felt desire for her! But going off the beta-blockers he’d been taking for his blood pressure had had no effect. He felt nothing down there. Absolutely nothing! He just felt cramped with wind. He offered her a drink and she asked for whiskey. She complained she was cold and wouldn’t take her coat off, so he turned on the gas-fire in the front room and they sat in front of the television.

There was one of those comedy repeats on the television that made him feel as if he was in a revolving loop of time, except that Amy wasn’t there. He tried not to think about his promise to her, that he wouldn’t get involved with another woman. Amy was terrified that when Peter died there would be nothing to leave to the children. The sale of the little house would give them a hundred thousand or so each, which, as one of them lived in London, and two in Dublin, would be badly needed. But only if Peter didn’t get caught up with some widow who would later pass it on to her own offspring. Amy had warned him against specific women she was suspicious of – her own cousin Eileen, for example, who always turned up at weddings and funerals in black stockings, heavily made up, and with predatory eyes. In general, women bearing tureens were to be discouraged, that had been her general position, from which she would not waver. A bloating wind was giving him a pain in his chest and Sheila was becoming irritatingly playful, on her second glass of whiskey. All her previous displeasure had apparently gone. It was after Peter finished his second whiskey that he began to feel really bad. And then a lot worse.

When the paramedics lurched out through the front door with the stretcher, almost overturning the umbrella-stand, they left him down on the driveway while one of them lit a cigarette.
"Going off them for the New Year," he said, puffing mightily.
They obviously thought Peter was unconscious, or maybe even dead. But he knew he wouldn’t see Amy just yet. Not tonight, although he still had an unreal feeling in his chest after the thump of the defibrillator, but he didn’t think he was that bad. If he ever saw her, of course.
"You’d think at least they wouldn’t be a problem," the older paramedic said, " but some of the old folk go bananas when there’s holly and mistletoe around."
He sent the glowing butt hurtling into the darkness.
"When the emergency services asked the woman where she was when it happened, she said she’d been sitting in his lap."

A rocket sizzled up into the sky and Peter remembered the Bastille Day firework display at the little harbor near their campsite in Brittany, on a long-ago holiday, and how surprisingly cold it was that July night, down at the harbor. He’d taken the two eldest kids there while Amy was putting the youngest one to bed. During the display, a celebratory rocket had gone astray, and went in through the open balcony window of a second-floor apartment interrupting la belle cuisine, or even, Peter thought, l’amour, because a women in a dressing gown had come out on the balcony and unleashed a stream of abuse on the mayor and dignitaries below, and then a portly man wearing only boxer shorts had appeared on the balcony and fastidiously dropped the charred remains of the rocket into the street below amid cheers and catcalls.

"And the old goat had the electric blanket warming upstairs," the ambulance man said.
The rocket burst in a flower of light. He guessed Sheila, who had gone back to lock up the house, would be trying to force her way into the ambulance with him, or, at the very least, popping in to the hospital with his pajamas and things, probably giving the house the good clean-out it needed. He thought he’d be able to keep her at arm’s length, though. He had sometimes thought Amy was being a little, well, unreasonable– even faithful unto death wasn’t good enough for her, but his promise had been sincerely given. He didn’t want to offend Sheila either, of course. Maybe, if it weren’t for her, he’d be dead by now. He had made his position clear, he thought, perhaps not verbally, but by how he had comported himself. Well, fairly clear, although further clarification might be necessary in due course. He would advise her of his position. Another rocket whooshed and burst overhead and, as he renewed his vows of fidelity to Amy, the men lifted his stretcher and began to carry him towards the ambulance.