The Upskirt

The Upskirt

Quincas and his wife Celina were in the dining room at home having dinner. She had already given food to the children. Gabriel was three years old and Lilian was one. The children were in the sitting room with the maid.  

An envelope had arrived for Quincas with "Urgent" written on it, something official. Celina had put it on his desk in the study. He asked her why didn't she open it and she said she thought she'd better not. He said she could open all his correspondence, she knew that. She looked at him mildly. 

'I'll have a look at it after dinner,' he said. 

There had been a noise, a sort of strange noise in her car. As if someone had been banging from beneath the car more or less at the front. It had started suddenly as she was coming from work in the afternoon. Quincas told her to take his car to go to work tomorrow and said he'd drive hers, to take it to the garage, maybe at lunchtime to have it checked. 

'Are you sure it won't disturb you, darling?' 

'No, it won't. Leave it with me. It just happened, the knocking?' 

'It just started.' 

The gardener had come in the morning. She had briefed him before going to work, although he knew pretty well what he had to do as he had done it so many times. However, when she came home late in the afternoon, she saw the work had been left unfinished and even flawed. Everything happened on the same day. But she would talk to him next morning if he came at all, or else she would phone him, she had his number. 

Little Gabriel was suspected of having taken the pressure valve from the pressure cooker and hidden it or lost it somewhere.  

Quincas laughed. 

'Have you asked him?' 

'To no effect.' 

'I'll talk to him later,' Quincas laughed still more. 'Have a look in the house. Look under everything and every piece of furniture and appliances in the kitchen. I'll help you. Tell the maid to search in the backyard tomorrow. I know it sounds obvious, but...' 

They had been married for five years. She worked as an architect at a builder and he worked as an advertising man in an agency. He was thinking of starting his own agency in two or three years' time. They had got married soon after they graduated. Quincas was twenty-nine and Celina was thirty.  

They had dinner quietly. Celina herself had cooked part of the dinner: the palm cabbage pie and the rice cooked with butter, to make it yellow. As for the beans, the vegetable salad and the stewed spinach she had given the maid instructions the day before, what she was to do and how.  

After dinner they would go to the sitting room and watch TV. They never went out in the evenings.  

Before going to the sitting room Quincas went to his study to fetch the envelope that had arrived. It was indeed marked "Urgent". He opened it and it was from the city hall of Sao Sebastiao, at the seaside. He had a piece of land there and it seemed the grass had grown too much and he was asked to do something about it. He paid the council tax every month, for that piece of land, but he hadn't bothered about the grass at all. He decided to go there next week to solve the problem. It would take him at least five hours to get there. 

One day when Quincas was seventeen, he got on the bus together with his friend Tomas. It was a quarter past twelve in the afternoon and they were going home from school. Quincas and Tomas were both the same age and they were in the first year of high school. It was more or less after the beginning of the term. The term started in March and this happened in April.