Lilac Bus by Maeve Binchy

auctioneer’s and enquired politely about the location of her husband’s new flat. Somehow they all knew that this flat was not a joint undertaking and that the wife was trying to find out. Everyone in the place had copped on and they all became vaguer and more unhelpful by the minute. Eventually the womanhad stormed out in a rage. And they had drafted an immensely tactful letter to the politican pointing out that his nest had not been revealed but was in danger of coming under siege.
    ‘Poor stupid woman,’ said Judy. ‘She should have let him install a harem in there if it kept him happy.’
    ‘You wouldn’t have let him do that, you’d have too much spirit,’ Rupert said admiringly.
    ‘I don’t know. I let a man walk away with my two babies twenty years ago. That wasn’t showing much spirit, was it?’ Judy said.
    Rupert gasped. Never had Judy Hickey mentioned the amazing happening that the whole town knew about in garbled versions. He had asked his mother who had said that nobody knew the whole ins and outs of it, and that Rupert’s father who had been the local solicitor then also, had been very annoyed because nobody consulted him, and he was the obvious person to have been brought in on it. But there had been something about a Garda charge and a lot of conversation and a solicitor from Dublin coming down for Jack Hickey and then documents being drawn up and Jack and the two children going to America and never coming back.
    ‘But people must know WHY,’ Rupert had insisted.
    His mother said there were more explanations than there were days in the year.
    She had been only six years married and twentynow without her man and her children, but she always kept the name Hickey. It was in case the children ever came back, people said. There was a while when she used to go into the town seventeen miles away and ask at the tourist office if you could get the lists of American tourists or just those with children. There was a while she would go up to the bus tours that sometimes came through Rathdoon and scan the seats for nine-year-old boys with seven-year-old sisters. But all that was long in the past. If it was so long in the past, why had she mentioned them now?
    ‘Are they on your mind then?’ Rupert asked gently. She replied as naturally as if she was in the habit of talking about them. She spoke with no more intensity than she had talked of the mint tea.
    ‘They are and they aren’t. We’d probably have nothing to say to each other at this stage.’
    ‘What kind of work does he do now? He’s not retired, is he?’
    ‘Who? Andrew, he’s only your age. I HOPE he hasn’t retired yet.’ She looked amused.
    ‘No, I meant your husband. I didn’t know whether your children were boys or girls.’ Rupert felt he had put his foot in it.
    ‘Boy and girl, Andrew and Jessica. Andrew and Jessica.’
    ‘Nice names,’ he said foolishly.
    ‘Yes, they are nice names aren’t they? We spent ageschoosing them. No, I’ve absolutely no idea whether Jack Hickey is working or whether he is lying in a gutter being moved on by big American cops with sticks. And I don’t know if he ever worked in California or whether he lived off his brother. I never cared. Honestly I never gave him a thought. It sounds like someone protesting, I know it does, but it’s funny: I have great trouble remembering what he looked like then and I never until this moment wondered how he’s aged. Possibly got fatter. His elder brother Charlie was a lovely man, he was fat, and there was a family picture I remember, and the parents were fat.’
    Rupert was silent for a moment. Such obvious indifference was chilling. You could understand hate or bitterness even. You could forgive a slow fire of rage and resentment. But she talked about him just as you would about some minor celebrity who had been in the news one time. Is he dead or alive? Who knows, who remembers? On to another topic.
    ‘And do the children, well . . . do Andrew and Jessica