Horace Winter Says Goodbye

by Conor Bowman

Genres: General Fiction; Friendship

Synopsis

Meet Horace Winter and fall in love with life again in this bestselling novel - perfect reading for fans of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine 'Horace Winter is a character who will linger long after you've finished this highly original, moving, funny and elegant book' Irish Independent 'A journey that is both tender and sad, but a joy to witness. A moving and truly absorbing read' Image 'A quirky, tender and compulsive read. Horace Winter will win your heart' Irish Examiner Horace Winter doesn't have friends. Ever since the long-ago day when the Very Bad Thing happened, he prefers to spend his time studying butterflies - less intimidating, less likely to disappoint. The last thing he wants is to retire from his job at the bank, but he has no choice - and now faces an endless number of empty days where he has nowhere to go and no one to need him. Then he receives some surprising news. And he meets Amanda, and Max, and discovers a mysterious letter his father never posted. Suddenly he finds his previously unexceptional life filled with important things to do. Before he'd thought he had too much time. Now he may be looking at not enough. But can he find the courage he's sought for so long to finally start living?

Release date: April 6, 2017

Publisher: Hachette Ireland

Print pages: 400

Sample

Large Oakblue (Arhopala amantes)

‘Don’t replace the gutters unless it’s absolutely essential’, were the last words Horace Winter’s mother had said to him. She’d died at home in the big bedroom at the front of the house, taken in the night without pain or warning. She had been ill on and off for the last twenty years of her life, but not with anything Horace thought would result in his losing her. They had drifted along for the greatest of time and then, one morning, he’d woken to find himself utterly alone in the world at the age of sixty-two. He’d delayed for hours before phoning for an ambulance. What was the point, he’d thought, of having a crew race out through the morning rush-hour traffic? There was nothing they could do, so why not wait until things were less hectic?

First, he’d telephoned the bank, one of the few occasions when he had ever lifted the receiver of the telephone on the hall table and dialled a number. It was caked with dust and cobwebs. He’d spoken to Sarah, his secretary, and told her he was taking one of his annual leave days, rather than burdening her with the reality. After that he’d made himself a pot of tea and some toast, and carried it into his mother’s room. He’d sat in the armchair by the bed, surrounded by the television schedules she’d insisted on keeping, and had his breakfast.

In the hours that followed, he’d sat in silence, hearing nothing but the sound of his own breathing and the snap, at precisely 2.49 p.m., of a mousetrap in the airing cupboard. He had been too upset to cry. He knew that his mother had been a ‘difficult’ woman and, on occasion, she had even been a little unkind in what she had said to him. He remembered an incident when, a week after receiving his Leaving Certificate results, he’d spent an age trying to find the butterfly and moth collection he’d begun some years earlier. He’d turned his room upside-down and eventually had gone downstairs to ask his mother whether she’d seen it.

‘I’m not having dead insects cluttering up the house, Horace. It’s unhygienic. Death, death and more death. It’s about time you grew up. Bedrooms are for sleeping in.’

All the same, a person had only one mother and, to Horace, grief seemed the appropriate response to her death. He knew, though, that he felt a different species of grief from that he’d experienced in the aftermath of his father’s departure. His father had been taken from the world unexpectedly. He hadn’t had any opportunity to say goodbye or – or anything.

Horace had had the house to himself for three years now. He turned the key in the front door and listened for the comforting rustle of post under the wood as it swept all before it in its journey across the red and white diamond tiles in the hall. Home was a Victorian redbrick terrace house. Fifty-seven Edenvale Road had been his mother’s family home and she had bequeathed it to him, along with the contents of a post-office savings account and some Guinness shares.

He picked up the small heap of paper and recognised an electricity bill as the only item that wasn’t junk. He discarded the pizza leaflets and other flyers in the bin under the kitchen sink. As the lid began to close, something caught his eye and he rescued a sheet of yellow paper. He smoothed it out on the kitchen surface before reading it aloud: ‘“Gutters replaced: free quotation.”’

Horace stood at the window and looked out onto the street through a gap in the curtains. The sides of Edenvale Road were lined with parked cars, and the neighbourhood itself was as silent as a cloud or a library. He noticed something different about the house directly across the road. In the front garden, bathed in the backhanded illumination of a streetlamp, there was a large For Sale sign. Horace tried to recall who the owners of the house were or, if they’d already left, whether they had had children or a dog. He couldn’t.

He knew very few people who lived on the street, apart from a couple of neighbours with whom he was on nodding terms. Somehow, when his mother had been alive, it had often seemed to him that no one else in the surrounding houses mattered. She had never encouraged him to mix with local children when he was growing up.

‘They think they’re better than us because we’re not Catholic,’ she had said frequently, in response to his requests to go out and play in the street. Horace often felt that perhaps his mother had meant the opposite of what she said.

Those other children had grown up and moved away. Many of the houses had been sold and turned into flats or bedsits inhabited by even more strangers, who stayed only for a year at a time. Suddenly, when he was about twenty-five, Horace had realised he knew no one else in the street to talk to. Even the few he did know to see began to dwindle in number. For that reason, the changing guard of inhabitants announced by For Sale or To Let signs were on the absolute periphery of his world.

He patted his clean cheeks with a dash of aftershave that had lasted years after he’d received it as a gift one Christmas from a pharmacy that banked at his branch. The scent was sweet and sour and reminded him of old but interesting books, the type you might find in an antiquarian bookshop where they knew the value of leather binding and gold-leaf inlay. In the en-suite bathroom, he brushed his teeth and then gargled some mouthwash before going downstairs to have his breakfast.

After the meal, he brushed his teeth again in the tiny downstairs bathroom, then straightened his tie in the hall mirror and left the house. He walked in the cold sunshine down Beechwood Avenue and into Ranelagh. Dublin, like Horace, was going to work on just another Friday morning. At the newsagent/deli’s beside the bus stop, the clock on the wall said thirteen minutes past eight. The headline in The Irish Times concerned some new revelation about a politician’s life, dredged up by one or other of the ongoing tribunals. A tiny photograph of a man in a pink shirt caught Horace’s eye in the left-hand front-page miscellaneous column. It was of a cyclist in last year’s Tour de France who had tested positive for some substance with three ps in its name. He thought of his aftershave. He picked up a copy and flicked through the pages. Inside, a lady was pictured with a monkey in a cage on the back of a huge tricycle, as a street festival raged in a country town.

‘Hello, Horace,’ said the shopkeeper. He intruded every single day with his voice, his smile and his bonhomie, and Horace didn’t even know his name. He had been greeting Horace for years now, and his tone and demeanour had barely wavered. Horace had an idea that the proprietor was driven by the pursuit and accumulation of wealth: two assistants in green smocks manned the deli counter and busied themselves whenever their employer looked their way. The man reminded Horace of the caterpillar of the Large Oakblue butterfly, attended invariably by green tree ants.

His left hand shook slightly as he began to fold the newspaper. He lined up the pages exactly, then swooped it shut. Outside, a bus was stopping with a gush of air brakes.

Horace Winter joined the queue to get on, found his monthly ticket in his wallet and set out for the city centre, surrounded by dozens of strangers who were all travelling in the same direction as himself. From the top of the double-decker, he watched as Dubliners went about their everyday business. He felt in his suit pocket for a hanky in case a sneeze came, but it didn’t. Along the Liffey boardwalk, couples strolled hand in hand and tourists studied maps they perhaps didn’t understand. An adventurous lady with a double buggy containing sleeping twins crossed to the Italian Quarter when the pedestrian lights forbade it. The surprising November sun had drawn people out of doors, and they speckled in the light in wild yet gentle colours, flitting from door to kerb and on and on and on. Their individual patterns marked each out as different and vital. Horace looked down at his blue suit trousers. All butterflies and moths were different, he thought. Each had its own particular mix of colours, markings and habits that rendered it unique. Even within the same species, he doubted whether two specimens would be identical in every respect. Could you have twin butterflies?

Horace thought about the day trips he and his father had sometimes taken during the school holidays, out to Howth or down to Wicklow, in search of elusive species. Once they’d actually seen a Gatekeeper and a Silver-washed Fritillary on the same afternoon in a wooded clearing just south of Powerscourt waterfall. It had been a Saturday in August and Horace had been thirteen years old. They’d hidden themselves under a green rug and taken turns with his dad’s old army binoculars. Horace recalled that, as they’d lain there in the shade, his father had talked about things he’d never mentioned before.

‘The last time I did this it was under a camouflage net in a forest in Germany. A long time ago, Horace.’

‘During the war, Dad?’

‘Yes, Horace, during the bloody war. That forest was so dark in places that even in the daytime you sometimes couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of you.’

‘So why did you need to hide?’

A sad look had passed over his father’s face. ‘We were hiding from ourselves, I suppose, and from what was to come. War makes people different from how they would have been without it,’ he said wistfully.

‘Tell me more about the war, Dad,’ Horace had said. ‘Did you ever shoot anyone?’

‘Ssh,’ his father had cautioned. ‘You’ll scare away the Gatekeeper.’



Gum Snout Moth: (Entometa apicalis): displays black patches when threatened; rests by day on bark where camouflage is plentiful

Common Brownie(Miletus chinensis learchus)

It was Friday, 16 November. Horace Winter was retiring. He had worked at the bank for forty-eight years.

The solid partner’s desk, with its brown leather cover and fantail gold edge design, was drawer-empty of contents. Only an emerald reading lamp bothered the vast expanse of its surface. He had sat at this desk for more than eighteen years. Three months and nine days more, to be accurate. He was certain that his calculations were precise. On the pale blue carpet, he could see the faint but definite path worn, from the coatstand to the window, by his routine each morning after he had closed the door on the world. He recalled the drip of raincoats and his attempts to save the carpet with the Health or Motoring or Property supplements from his daily paper. He went to the coatstand and turned right, skirting the bookcase filled with the black edges of ledgers and reports he would never read again. Seven steps carried him to the depression beneath the radiator adjacent to the window. The white-painted ropes slept in their pulleys and hung in two loops like wintering twine. He heard the scrape overhead of chairs in the boardroom being pulled out or pushed back into place. The view from his office was unchanging: a narrow glimpse of the universe between the corners of two very plain buildings. His office was across the corridor from that of the manager, which was entrusted with a view of the river. Long ago, Horace had expected to make the natural move to the other office but, after being passed over twice, he had eventually understood that he would never be promoted.

When he got to the boardroom, he took up a position by the window. It was a dull day. On the pavement outside the bank, a bevy of schoolchildren, on a tour of the capital, stood in a chitter of excitement as two teachers counted heads. A seagull squawked in the air over the river, then ambushed a discarded sandwich crust sitting in a tawdry tin-foil coat on the knobbled wall of Capel Street Bridge. A green-topped hotel, the Clarence, stood impassively in the lunchtime light and, like a colourful poster on a notice board, Sunlight Chambers guarded the right side of the horizon. Horace shaded his eyes and tried to look beyond the horror of the moment.

‘Well done,’ Sennan Callaghan said, as he offered his hand. Horace turned away from the window and deliberately misread the gesture.

‘Thank you, Sennan,’ he replied, as he lifted his untouched glass of champagne from the windowsill and handed it to the man who would replace him on Monday as assistant manager (branch). Callaghan was left with no choice but to take the glass, in much the same way as Horace had been left with no choice but to leave the bank. He had reached the magic age of uselessness: sixty-five.

This man is a moth rather than a butterfly, Horace thought, as his replacement brought the glass to his lips and drank when he clearly didn’t wish to.

‘Butterflies at rest hold their wings together over their back,’ Horace said accidentally, with little enough volume to carry past his immediate company.

‘Oh, yes, I’d forgotten – you’re a butterfly buff, aren’t you? What is it again? It’s not ornithology, that’s—’

‘Lepidopterology,’ Horace said, with a smile. ‘The study of butterflies and moths.’

‘Well, you’ll have plenty of time for that now,’ Sennan said, between sips of the fizzy wine he was now apparently starting to enjoy.

Butterflies and Moths: A Beginner’s Guide had been a gift from his father when Horace had had mumps at Christmas in his last year of primary school. Until then, he hadn’t really been an expert on anything, but during those two weeks in bed with a swollen throat, he’d devoured the book from cover to cover dozens of times. He’d been fascinated by the vast number of different species that existed. Horace’s father had been an expert on butterflies and moths for years. It was an interest he said he’d taken up ‘during the war’.

Horace thought it unusual that anyone would develop a hobby as gentle as the observation of butterflies during a war. He tried to imagine a Titania’s Fritillary appearing on the Russian Front and capturing the attention of thousands of troops who were just about to attack each other. Perhaps it was precisely because of its incongruity that his father had developed his interest. Horace wished he’d asked.

Peter Lannigan, the branch manager, was deep in conversation at the other end of the room with the regional head of sales and marketing. Horace had mixed feelings about Peter Lannigan. He was a good deal younger than Horace and had started working in the bank many years after him, yet had been Horace’s boss for almost a decade now. Lannigan was good at his job, though. Horace couldn’t deny that.

Sarah, Horace’s secretary, edged towards them through the sparse crowd, carrying a tray of canapés. Sennan Callaghan stepped out from in front of Horace and positioned himself where she would have to speak to both of them, if she dared to speak at all. Oh, yes, thought Horace Winter, definitely a moth. A Gum Snout, he reckoned. He could feel the energy draining from his soul as his rival finished the champagne, and the girl, who answered to the assistant manager (branch) in the Ormond Quay outlet of the Leinster Bank, leaned ever so slightly towards his rival. Horace wanted to cry out or to pull her his way but, of course, did neither. The smell of pâté on slightly stale salt biscuits invaded his nostrils, and he closed his eyes for an instant as though delaying the shutter speed to take a better photograph. He had spent long stretches of time in the company of Sarah Carolan. She was an excellent secretary, and knew his every habit and requirement. There had been times when he had wondered whether they could ever become something more than work colleagues. Of course, on grounds of impropriety and age, he’d pushed those thoughts away – but they had occurred to him. Even assistant bank managers were human. From today, however, he would no longer be her boss. Notwithstanding that, Horace doubted his feelings were reciprocated.

Horace Winter was five foot six in height and still had more hair than half the men he could think of who were years younger. ‘It’s not all about the hair, though, is it?’ he imagined a sober voice saying.

‘What will you do with yourself on Monday?’ she asked, as she lowered the tray (to a point where Sennan Callaghan found it awkward to reach). It was clear from the combination of her actions that her question was directed at Horace, but before he could reply his successor interposed.

‘I shall continue to wonder how I can ever fill the shoes of Horace Winter.’ This was delivered with a supercilious smile flecked with biscuit crumbs. Horace was at once disheartened by the intervention and relieved at not having to answer the question.

‘I was asking Mr Winter, actually,’ Sarah rallied, in a minor display of mutiny. And Horace was reminded for some reason of the mating rituals of the Pale Clouded Yellow or Colias hyale …

A cackle of laughter, from the back of the room, impeded his thinking. He’d always imagined that somehow he never would retire from the bank. It was that sort of life, wasn’t it, one that went on and on, in and around the legs of other people’s lives, without having to stop and examine itself? He’d been in the boardroom before: disciplinary hearings, warnings from the heart of Europe about interest rates, staff appraisals, occasional social events. This was the very room in which Anthony Avery had had his heart attack on the Saturday morning of a rugby international when the bank had entertained some wealthy account holders with drinks and smoked salmon. The death of the manager of another branch in their boardroom had shaken everyone.

Over the heads of two people talking, he saw the regional manager approach the lectern at the other end of the room and tap the microphone, which was obviously not turned on.

‘Could I have everyone’s attention, please?’

Horace Winter did not want to hear these words, not now and not ever. He’d hoped the people at Head Office would reconsider, ask him to stay on. Of course they hadn’t.

*

Back in his office after the presentation, Horace clutched the wrapped gift with reluctance as he looked around for the very last time.

On the top shelf of the bookcase, between the ledgers, there was a space that had held the few personal belongings Horace had allowed to cross into his professional life: a framed photograph of a Red Admiral, a Bath White and a Monarch butterfly (simultaneously at rest on a whitethorn) and a model of HMS King George V. He’d carried the battleship carefully from home and into work on the bus one damp February morning some years earlier. If he were honest, this addition to the décor of his office had been an act of defiance. It was a statement of intent in the wake of his realisation that promotion was a mechanism he had exhausted. That small-scale reminder of battles fought at sea had been his way of telling himself and others that the fight was not over. But he had known in his heart that it was over, and that he had lost. One other personal effect had been ever-present in his office: the book about butterflies and moths he’d had since he was a child.

Adorning the wall opposite the bookcase, there was a large framed aerial photograph of the city of Dublin. In a way, it depicted an overview of Horace’s life, showing, as it did, the parameters of his existence: from his house on Edenvale Road in Ranelagh to the bank, and beyond to the North Circular Road, the Phoenix Park and the zoo. With little variation, his world and his time were contained within the frame. Old buildings, old things and old people, he thought. What else is there?

He had been born in the Coombe Hospital and presumed he might die in another hospital in Dublin. He walked to the photograph and ran his finger in a direct line across the glass from his home to the river and the building in which he now stood. It struck him that, with all of the certainty he had enjoyed in this room, he had no idea where next to direct his finger or his feet. In that instant, he grasped that within a few minutes, when he left the bank for the last time, he had absolutely no idea where he would go or what he would do. Until that moment, he had not believed that he would ever have to retire.

‘There could be twenty years or more ahead,’ he muttered, and was filled with fear and isolation. What exactly were you expected to do when you stopped expecting to do what you’d always done? Horace felt the beginning of a headache and tried to think of cool water, a soothing stream, to carry off the pain. He didn’t much like water, but he felt hot.

A hesitant knock on the door heralded the arrival of Sarah Carolan. Horace hadn’t expected to see her again.

‘I thought you’d gone, Mr Winter. This was the only place left to look,’ she said, with a shy smile, as she entered the room.

‘No, not gone yet, Sarah,’ he said sadly. He pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket and dabbed his forehead. He was mildly angry with her for having a life at the bank that would endure beyond his, but he was overwhelmed at that moment by a sense of loss.

‘I knew you wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye, Mr Winter.’ She smiled again, uncertain now, as if she recalled the instant in the room above them when she’d leaned her body, and consequently her life, towards his s. . .