Lilac Bus by Maeve Binchy Page A

keep in touch even a little bit?’
    ‘No. That was the agreement.’
    If he was ever to know, it would be now. He inclined his head slightly to see if anyone else was listening. But no, Dee was fast asleep with her head at an awkward angle, and that awful Morris girl was asleep too. The others were too far ahead to hear.
    ‘That was a harsh sort of agreement,’ he said tentatively.
    ‘Oh they thought they were justified. People used to think it was quite justifiable to hang a sheep stealer, don’t forget.’
    ‘Is that what you did?’ he asked smiling. ‘Steal a sheep?’
    ‘Would that it had been so simple. No no, I thought you knew, I thought your father might have told you. No, I was a dope peddler. That’s even worse than anything, isn’t it?’
    She looked like a mischievous girl the way she said it. He felt she couldn’t be serious.
    ‘No, what was it about really?’ he laughed.
    ‘I told you. I was the local drugs person.’ She spoke without pride or shame. Just as if she was saying what her name was before she was married. Rupert had never been so startled. ‘You do surprise me,’ he said hoping he was managing to keep the shock out of his voice. ‘But that was YEARS ago.’
    ‘It was the sixties. I suppose it is years ago, but your lot aren’t the first to know about drugs, you know – the sixties had their own scene.’
    ‘But wasn’t that only in America and England? Not like now.’
    ‘Of course it was here too, not in huge housing estates, and not kids and not heroin. But with brightish, youngish things, at dances, and people who just left college who had been abroad, and it was all very silly, and to this day I think perfectly harmless.’
    ‘Hash, was it?’
    ‘Oh yes, Marijuana, pot, a few amphetamines, a bit of LSD.’
    ‘You had acid? YOU had acid?’ He was half-admiring, half-shocked.
    ‘Rupert, what I had was everything that was going, that wasn’t the point. The point was that I was supplying it, and I got caught.’
    ‘Why on earth were you doing that?’
    ‘Out of boredom in a way, I suppose. And the money was nice, not huge but nice. And there was a lot of fun too, you met great people – not dead-wood people like Jack Hickey. I was very stupid really. I deserved all that happened. I often think that.’ She had paused to muse.
    Rupert mused with her for a bit. Then he spoke again:
    ‘Were you doing it for long? Before you were caught?’
    ‘About eighteen months. I was at a party and we all smoked something, Lord knows what it was called – I thought it was great, Jack had said nothing at the time, but when we got home he roared and shouted, and said that if this ever happened again, and what he’d do and what he wouldn’t do.’
    ‘Had he refused it then?’
    ‘Ah you didn’t know our Jack, not at all, he had passed the poor little cigarette with the best but he had kept his mouth closed and only pretended to inhale. He was sober and furious. Oh, there was abarney that went on all week, then the ultimatum: if I ever touched it again . . . curtains, he’d take the children off to America, I’d never see them again, no court in the land . . . you could write it out yourself as a script and it would be right, it would be what he said.’ Rupert listened, fascinated. Judy’s soft voice went on:
    ‘Well, Jack was dealing with the livestock. It wasn’t like a farm, you know, the house then, it was like a ranch: there were only livestock – no milking, no hens, no crops, just beasts in the field – buy them, graze them, sell them. We had poor old Nanny, she had been my Nanny in the days of old decency and she minded Andrew and Jessica, I used to go here and there. Gathering material for a book on the wild flowers of the West. Gathering bad company more likely. Anyway, because I had my little car and because I went here and there what could be more natural than I go to Dublin or to London as I did twice to get some stuff for people. Others suggested it, I took