Collected Stories

Mr McNamara

‘How was he?’ my mother asked on the morning of my thirteenth birthday.

She spoke while pouring tea into my father’s extra-large breakfast cup, the last remaining piece of a flowered set, Ville de Lyon clematis on a leafy ground. My father had a special knife and fork as well, the knife another relic of the past, the fork more ordinary, extra-strong because my father was always breaking forks.

‘Oh, he’s well enough,’ he said on the morning of my thirteenth birthday, while I sat patiently. ‘The old aunt’s kicking up again.’

My mother, passing him his tea, nodded. She remarked that in her opinion Mr McNamara’s aunt should be placed in an asylum, which was what she always said when the subject of Mr McNamara’s aunt, reputedly alcoholic, cropped up.

My mother was tallish and slender, but softly so. There was nothing sharp or angular about my mother, nothing wiry or hard. She had misty blue eyes and she seemed always to be on the point of smiling. My father was even taller, a bulky man with a brown face and a brown forehead stretching back where hair once had been, with heavy brown-backed hands, and eyes the same shade of blue mist as my mother’s. They were gentle with one another in a way that was similar also, and when they disagreed or argued their voices weren’t ever raised. They could be angry with us, but not with one another. They meted out punishments for us jointly, sharing disapproval or disappointment. We felt doubly ashamed when our misdemeanours were uncovered.

‘The train was like a Frigidaire,’ my father said. ‘Two hours late at the halt. Poor Flannagan nearly had pneumonia waiting.’ The whole country had ivy growing over, it, he said, like ivy on a gravestone. Eating bacon and sausages with his special knife and fork, he nodded in agreement with himself. ‘Ivy-clad Ireland,’ he said when his mouth was momentarily empty of food. ‘Anthracite motor-cars, refrigerators on the Great Southern Railway. Another thing, Molly: it’s the opinion in Dublin that six months’ time will see foreign soldiers parading themselves on O’Connell Street. German or English, take your pick, and there’s damn all Dev can do about it.’

My mother smiled at him and sighed. Then, as though to cheer us all up, my father told a story that Mr McNamara had told him, about a coal merchant whom Mr McNamara had apparently known in his youth. The story had to do with the ill-fitting nature of the coal merchant’s artificial teeth, and the loss of the teeth when he’d once been swimming at Ringsend. Whenever my father returned from a meeting with Mr McNamara he brought us back such stories, as well as the current opinion of Mr McNamara on the state of the nation and the likelihood of the nation becoming involved in the war. ‘The opinion in Dublin’ was the opinion of Mr McNamara, as we all knew. Mr McNamara drove a motor-car powered by gas because there wasn’t much petrol to be had. The gas, so my father said, was manufactured by anthracite in a burner stuck on to the back of Mr McNamara’s Ford V-8.

Returning each time from Dublin, my father bore messages and gifts from Mr McNamara, a tin of Jacob’s biscuits or bars of chocolate. He was a man who’d never married and who lived on inherited means, in a house in Palmerston Road, with members of his family – the elderly alcoholic aunt who should have been in an asylum, a sister and a brother-in-law. The sister, now Mrs Matchette, had earlier had theatrical ambitions, but her husband, employed in the National Bank, had persuaded her away from them. My father had never actually met Mr McNamara’s insane aunt or Mrs Matchette or her husband: they lived through Mr McNamara for him, at second hand, and for us they lived through my father, at a further remove. We had a vivid image of all of them, Mrs Matchette thin as a blade of grass, endlessly smoking and playing patience, her husband small and solemn, neatly moustached, with dark neat hair combed straight back from what Mr McNamara had called a ‘squashed forehead’. Mr McNamara himself we imagined as something of a presence: prematurely white-haired, portly, ponderous in speech and motion. Mr McNamara used to frequent the bar of a hotel called Fleming’s, an old-fashioned place where you could get snuff as well as tobacco, and tea, coffee and Bovril as well as alcoholic drinks. It was here that my father met him on his visits to Dublin. It was a comfort to go there, my father said, when his business for the day was done, to sit in a leather chair and listen to the chit-chat of his old companion. The bar would fill with smoke from their Sweet Afton cigarettes, while my father listened to the latest about the people in the house in Palmerston Road, and the dog they had, a spaniel called Wolfe Tone, and a maid called Kate O’Shea, from Skibbereen. There was ritual about it, my father smoking and listening, just as a day or so later he’d smoke and we’d listen ourselves, at breakfast-time in our house in the country.

There were my three sisters and myself: I was the oldest, the only boy. We lived in a house that had been in the family for several generations, three miles from Curransbridge, where the Dublin train halted if anyone wanted it to, and where my father’s granary and mill were. Because of the shortage of petrol, my father used to walk the three miles there and back every day. Sometimes he’d persuade Flannagan, who worked in the garden for us, to collect him in the dog-cart in the evening, and always when he went to Dublin he arranged for Flannagan to meet the train he returned on. In the early hours of the morning I’d sometimes hear the rattle of the dog-cart on the avenue and then the wheels on the gravel outside the front of the house. At breakfast-time the next morning my father would say he was glad to be back again, and kiss my mother with the rest of us. The whole thing occurred once every month or so, the going away in the first place, the small packed suitcase in the hall, my father in his best tweed suit, Flannagan and the dog-cart. And the returning a few days later: breakfast with Mr McNamara, my sister Charlotte used to say.

As a family we belonged to the past. We were Protestants in what had become Catholic Ireland. We’d once been part of an ascendancy, but now it was not so. Now there was the income from the granary and the mill, and the house we lived in: we sold grain and flour, we wielded no power. ‘Proddy-woddy green-guts,’ the Catholic children cried at us in Curransbridge. ‘Catty, Catty, going to Mass,’ we whispered back, ‘riding on the devil’s ass.’ They were as good as we were. It had not always been assumed so, and it sometimes seemed part of all the changing and the shifting of this and that, that Mr McNamara, so honoured in our house, was a Catholic himself. ‘A liberal, tolerant man,’ my father used to say. ‘No trace of the bigot in him.’ In time, my father used to say, religious differences in Ireland wouldn’t exist. The war would sort the whole matter out, even though as yet Ireland wasn’t involved in it. When the war was over, and whether there was involvement or not, there wouldn’t be any patience with religious differences. So, at least, Mr McNamara appeared to argue.

Childhood was all that: my sisters, Charlotte, Amelia and Frances, and my parents gentle with each other, and Flannagan in the garden and Bridget our maid, and the avuncular spirit of Mr McNamara. There was Miss Sheil as well, who arrived every morning on an old Raleigh bicycle, to teach the four of us, since the school at Curransbridge was not highly thought of by my parents.

The house itself was a Georgian rectangle when you looked straight at it, spaciously set against lawns which ran back to the curved brick of the kitchen-garden wall, with a gravel sweep in front, and an avenue running straight as a die for a mile and a half through fields where sheep grazed. My sisters had some world of their own which I knew I could not properly share. Charlotte, the oldest of them, was five years younger than I was, Amelia was six and Frances five.

‘Ah, he was in great form,’ my father said on the morning of my thirteenth birthday. ‘After a day listening to rubbish it’s a pleasure to take a ball of malt with him.’

Frances giggled. When my father called a glass of whiskey a ball of malt Frances always giggled, and besides it was a giggly occasion. All my presents were sitting there on the sideboard, waiting for my father to finish his breakfast and to finish telling us about Mr McNamara. But my father naturally took precedence: after all, he’d been away from the house for three days, he’d been cold and delayed on the train home, and attending to business in Dublin was something he disliked in any case. This time, though, as well as his business and the visit to Fleming’s Hotel to see Mr McNamara, I knew he’d bought the birthday present that he and my mother would jointly give me. Twenty minutes ago he’d walked into the dining-room with the wrapped parcel under his arm. ‘Happy birthday, boy,’ he’d said, placing the parcel on the sideboard beside the other three, from my sisters. It was the tradition in our house – a rule of my father’s – that breakfast must be over and done with, every scrap eaten, before anyone opened a birthday present or a Christmas present.

‘It was McNamara said that,’ my father continued. ‘Ivy-clad Ireland. It’s the neutral condition of us.’

It was my father’s opinion, though not my mother’s, that Ireland should have acceded to Winston Churchill’s desire to man the Irish ports with English soldiers in case the Germans got in there first. Hitler had sent a telegram to de Valera apologizing for the accidental bombing of a creamery, which was a suspicious gesture in itself. Mr McNamara, who also believed that de Valera should hand over the ports to Churchill, said that any gentlemanly gesture on the part of the German Führer was invariably followed by an act of savagery. Mr McNamara, in spite of being a Catholic, was a keen admirer of the House of Windsor and of the English people. There was no aristocracy in the world to touch the English, he used to say, and no people, intent on elegance, succeeded as the English upper classes did. Class-consciousness in England was no bad thing, Mr McNamara used to argue.

My father took from the side pocket of his jacket a small wrapped object. As he did so, my sisters rose from the breakfast table and marched to the sideboard. One by one my presents were placed before me, my parents’ brought from the sideboard by my mother. It was a package about two and a half feet long, a few inches in width. It felt like a bundle of twigs and was in fact the various parts of a box-kite. Charlotte had bought me a book called Dickon the Impossible, Amelia a kaleidoscope. ‘Open mine exceedingly carefully,’ Frances said. I did, and at first I thought it was a pot of jam. It was a goldfish in a jar.

‘From Mr McNamara,’ my father said, pointing at the smallest package. I’d forgotten it, because already the people who normally gave me presents were accounted for. ‘I happened to mention,’ my father said, ‘that today was a certain day.’

It was so heavy that I thought it might be a lead soldier, or a horseman. In fact it was a dragon. It was tiny and complicated, and it appeared to be made of gold, but my father assured me it was brass. It had two green eyes that Frances said were emeralds, and small pieces let into its back which she said looked like rubies. ‘Priceless,’ she whispered jealously. My father laughed and shook his head. The eyes and the pieces in the brass back were glass, he said.

I had never owned so beautiful an object. I watched it being passed from hand to hand around the breakfast table, impatient to feel it again myself. ‘You must write at once to Mr McNamara,’ my mother said. ‘It’s far too generous of him,’ she added, regarding my father with some slight disapproval, as though implying that my father shouldn’t have accepted the gift. He vaguely shook his head, lighting a Sweet Afton. ‘Give me the letter when you’ve done it,’ he said. ‘I have to go up again in a fortnight.’

I showed the dragon to Flannagan, who was thinning beetroot in the garden. I showed it to Bridget, our maid. ‘Aren’t you the lucky young hero?’ Flannagan said, taking the dragon in a soil-caked hand. ‘You’d get a five-pound note for that fellow, anywhere you cared to try.’ Bridget polished it with Brasso for me.

That day I had a chocolate birthday cake, and sardine sandwiches, which were my favourite, and brown bread and greengage jam, a favourite also. After tea all the family watched while my father and I tried to fly the kite, running with it from one end of a lawn to the other. It was Flannagan who got it up for us in the end, and I remember the excitement of the string tugging at my fingers, and Bridget crying out that she’d never seen a thing like that before, wanting to know what it was for. ‘Don’t forget, dear, to write to Mr McNamara first thing in the morning,’ my mother reminded me when she kissed me good-night. I wouldn’t forget, I promised, and didn’t add that of all my presents, including the beautiful green and yellow kite, I liked the dragon best.

But I never did write to Mr McNamara. The reason was that the next day was a grim nightmare of a day, during all of which someone in the house was weeping, and often several of us together. ‘My father, so affectionate towards all of us, was no longer alive.

The war continued and Ireland continued to play no part in it. Further accidental German bombs were dropped and further apologies were sent to de Valera by the German Führer. Winston Churchill continued to fulminate about the ports, but the prophecy of Mr McNamara that foreign soldiers would parade in O’Connell Street did not come true.

Knitting or sewing, my mother listened to the BBC news with a sadness in her eyes, unhappy that elsewhere death was occurring also. It was no help to any of us to be reminded that people in Britain and Europe were dying all the time now, with the same sudden awfulness as my father had.

Everything was different after my father died. My mother and I began to go for walks together, I’d take her arm, and sometimes her hand, knowing she was lonely. She talked about him to me, telling me about their honeymoon in Venice, the huge square where they’d sat drinking chocolate, listening to the bands that played there. She told me about my own birth, and how my father had given her a ring set with amber which he’d bought in Louis Wine’s in Dublin. She would smile at me on our walks and tell me that even though I was only thirteen I was already taking his place. One day the house would be mine, she pointed out, and the granary and the mill. I’d marry, she said, and have children of my own, but I didn’t want even to think about that. I didn’t want to marry; I wanted my mother always to be there with me, going on walks and telling me about the person we all missed so much. We were still a family, my sisters and my mother and myself, Flannagan in the garden, and Bridget. I didn’t want anything to change.

After the death of my father Mr McNamara lived on, though in a different kind of way. The house in Palmerston Road, with Mr McNamara’s aunt drinking in an upstairs room, and the paper-thin Mrs Matchette playing patience instead of being successful in the theatre, and Mr Matchette with his squashed forehead, and Kate O’Shea from Skibbereen, and the spaniel called Wolfe Tone: all of them remained quite vividly alive after my father’s death, as part of our memory of him. Fleming’s Hotel remained also, and all the talk there’d been there of the eccentric household in Palmerston Road. For almost as long as I could remember, and certainly as long as my sisters could remember, our own household had regularly been invaded by the other one, and after my father’s death my sisters and I often recalled specific incidents retailed in Fleming’s Hotel and later at our breakfast table. There’d been the time when Mr McNamara’s aunt had sold the house to a man she’d met outside a public house. And the time when Mrs Matchette appeared to have fallen in love with Garda Molloy, who used to call in at the kitchen for Kate O’Shea every night. And the time the spaniel was run over by a van and didn’t die. All of it was preserved, with Mr McNamara himself, white-haired and portly in the smoke-brown bar of Fleming’s Hotel, where snuff could be bought, and Bovril as well as whiskey.

A few months after the death my mother remarked one breakfast-time that no doubt Mr McNamara had seen the obituary notice in the Irish Times.’ Oh, but you should write,’ my sister Frances cried out in her excitable manner. My mother shook her head. My father and Mr McNamara had been bar-room friends, she pointed out: letters in either direction would not be in order. Charlotte and Amelia agreed with this opinion, but Frances still protested. I couldn’t see that it mattered. ‘He gave us all that chocolate,’ Frances cried, ‘and the biscuits.’ My mother said again that Mr McNamara was not the kind of man to write to about a death, nor the kind who would write himself. The letter that I was to have written thanking him for the dragon was not mentioned. Disliking the writing of letters, I didn’t raise the subject myself.

At the end of that year I was sent to a boarding-school in the Dublin mountains. Miss Sheil continued to come to the house on her Raleigh to teach my sisters, and I’d have far preferred to have remained at home with her. It could not be: the boarding-school in the Dublin mountains, a renowned Protestant monument, had been my father’s chosen destiny for me and that was that. If he hadn’t died, leaving home might perhaps have been more painful, but the death had brought with it practical complications and troubles, mainly concerned with the running of the granary and the mill: going away to school was slight compared with all that, or so my mother convinced me.

The headmaster of the renowned school was a small, red-skinned English cleric. With other new boys, I had tea with him and his wife in the drawing-room some days after term began. We ate small ham-paste sandwiches and Battenburg cake. The headmaster’s wife, a cold woman in grey, asked me what I intended to do – ‘in life’, as she put it. I said I’d run a granary and a mill at Curransbridge; she didn’t seem interested. The headmaster told us he was in Who’s Who. Otherwise the talk was of the war.

Miss Sheil had not prepared me well. ‘Dear boy, whoever taught you French?’ a man with a pipe asked me, and did not stay to hear my answer. ‘Your Latin, really!’ another man exclaimed, and the man who taught me mathematics warned me never to set my sights on a profession that involved an understanding of figures. I sat in the back row of the class with other boys who had been ill-prepared for the renowned school.

I don’t know when it was – a year, perhaps, or eighteen months after my first term – that I developed an inquisitiveness about my father. Had he, I wondered, been as bad at everything as I was? Had some other man with a pipe scorned his inadequacy when it came to French? Had he felt, as I did, a kind of desperation when faced with algebra? You’d have to know a bit about figures, I used, almost miserably, to say to myself: you’d have to if you hoped to run a granary and a mill. Had he been good at mathematics?

I asked my mother these questions, and other questions like them. But my mother was vague in her replies and said she believed, although perhaps she was wrong, that my father had not been good at mathematics. She laughed when I asked the questions. She told me to do my best.

But the more I thought about the future, and about myself in terms of the man whose place I was to take, the more curious I became about him. In the holidays my mother and I still went on our walks together, through the garden and then into the fields that stretched behind it, along the banks of the river that flowed through Curransbridge. But my mother spoke less and less about my father because increasingly there was less to say, except with repetition. I imagined the huge square in Venice and the cathedral and the bands playing outside the cafés. I imagined hundreds of other scenes, her own varied memories of their relationship and their marriage. We often walked in silence now, or I talked more myself, drawing her into a world of cross-country runs, and odorous changing-rooms, and the small headmaster’s repeated claim that the food we ate had a high calorific value. School was ordinarily dreary: I told her how we smoked wartime American cigarettes in mud huts specially constructed for the purpose and how we relished the bizarre when, now and again, it broke the monotony. There was a master called Mr Dingle, whose practice it was to inquire of new boys the colour and nature of their mother’s night-dresses. In the oak-panelled dining-hall that smelt of mince and the butter that generations had flicked on to the ceiling, Mr Dingle’s eye would glaze as he sat at the end of a Junior House table while one boy after another fuelled him with the stuff of fantasies. On occasions when parents visited the school he would observe through cigarette smoke the mothers of these new boys, stripping them of their skirts and blouses in favour of the night-clothes that their sons had described for him. There was another master, known as Nipper Achen, who was reputed to take a sensual interest in the sheep that roamed the mountainsides, and a boy called Testane-Hackett who was possessed of the conviction that he was the second son of God. In the dining-hall a gaunt black-clad figure, a butler called Toland, hovered about the high table where the headmaster and the prefects sat, assisted by a maid, said to be his daughter, who was known to us as the Bicycle. There was Fisher Major, who never washed, and Strapping, who disastrously attempted to treat some kind of foot ailment with mild acid. My mother listened appreciatively, and I often saw in her eyes the same look that had been there at breakfast-time when my father spoke of Fleming’s Hotel and Mr McNamara. ‘How like him you are!’ she now and again murmured, smiling at me.

At Curransbridge I stood in his office above the mill, a tiny room now occupied by the man my mother had chosen to look after things, a Mr Myers. In the house I rooted through the belongings he’d left behind; I stared at photographs of him. With Flannagan and my sisters I flew the kite he’d bought me that last time he’d been to Dublin. I polished the small brass dragon that his bar-room companion had given him to give to me. ‘It’s the boy’s birthday,’ I imagined him saying in the brown bar of Fleming’s Hotel, and I imagined the slow movement of Mr McNamara’s hand as he drew the dragon from his pocket. It was inevitable, I suppose, that sooner or later I should seek out Fleming’s Hotel.

‘An uncle,’ I said to the small headmaster. ‘Passing through Dublin, sir.’

‘Passing? Passing?’ He had a Home Counties accent and a hard nasal intonation. ‘Passing?’ he said again, giving the word an extra vowel sound.

‘On his way to Galway, sir. He’s in the RAF, sir. I think he’d like to see me, sir, because my father –’

‘Ah, yes, yes. Back in time for Chapel, please.’

Fleming’s Hotel, it said in the telephone directory, 21 Wheeler Street. As I cycled down from the mountains, I didn’t know what I was going to do when I got there.

It was a narrow, four-storey building in a terrace with others, a bleak-looking stone façade. The white woodwork of the windows needed a coat of paint, the glass portico over the entrance doors had a dusty look. It was on this dusty glass that the name Fleming’s Hotel was picked out in white enamel letters stuck to the glass itself. I cycled past the hotel twice, glancing at the windows – a dozen of them, the four at the top much smaller than the others – and at the entrance doors. No one left or entered. I propped the bicycle against the edge of the pavement some distance away from the hotel, outside what seemed to be the street’s only shop, a greengrocer’s. There were pears in the window. I went in and bought one.

I wheeled the bicycle away from the shop and came, at the end of the street, to a canal. Slowly I ate the pear, and then I took my red-and-green school cap from my head and wheeled my bicycle slowly back to Fleming’s Hotel. I pushed open one of the entrance doors and for a split second I heard my father’s voice again, describing what I now saw: the smokiness of the low-ceilinged hall, a coal fire burning, and a high reception counter with the hotel’s register open on it, and a brass bell beside the register. There were brown leather armchairs in the hall and a brown leather bench running along one wall. Gas lamps were lit but even so, and in spite of the fact that it was four o’clock in the afternoon, the hall was dim. It was empty of other people and quiet. A tall grandfather clock ticked, the fire occasionally hissed. There was a smell of some kind of soup. It was the nicest, most comfortable hall I’d ever been in.

Beyond it, I could see another coal fire, through an archway. That was the bar where they used to sit, where for all I knew Mr McNamara was sitting now. I imagined my father crossing the hall as I crossed it myself. The bar was the same as the hall, with the same kind of leather chairs, and a leather bench and gas lamps and a low ceiling. There were net curtains pulled across the two windows, and one wall was taken up with a counter, with bottles on shelves behind it, and leather-topped stools in front of it. There was a woman sitting by the fire drinking orange-coloured liquid from a small glass. Behind the bar a man in a white jacket was reading the Irish Independent.

I paused in the archway that divided the bar from the hall. I was under age. I had no right to take a further step and I didn’t know what to do or to say if I did. I didn’t know what drink to order. I didn’t know if in the dim gaslight I looked a child.

I went to the bar and stood there. The man didn’t look up from his newspaper. Smithwick’s Ale were words on the labels of bottles: I would ask for a Smithwick’s Ale. All I wanted was to be allowed to remain, to sit down with the beer and to think about my father. If Mr McNamara did not come today he’d come another day. Frances had been right: he should have been written to. I should have written to him myself, to thank my father’s friend for his present.

‘Good evening,’ the barman said.

‘Smithwick’s, please,’ I said as casually as I could. Not knowing how much the drink might be, I placed a ten-shilling note on the bar.

‘Drop of lime in it, sir?’

‘Lime? Oh, yes. Yes, please. Thanks very much.’

‘Choppy kind of day,’ the barman said.

I took the glass and my change, and sat down as far as possible from where the woman was sitting. I sat so that I was facing both the bar and the archway, so that if Mr McNamara came in I’d see him at once. I’d have to leave at six o’clock in order to be safely back for Chapel at seven.

I finished the beer. I took an envelope out of my pocket and drew pieces of holly on the back of it, a simple art-form that Miss Sheil had taught all of us. I took my glass to the bar and asked for another Smithwick’s. The barman had a pale, unhealthy-seeming face, and wire-rimmed glasses, and a very thin neck. ‘You do want the best, don’t you?’ he said in a joky kind of voice, imitating someone. ‘Bird’s Custard,’ he said in the same joky way, ‘and Bird’s Jelly de Luxe.’ My father had mentioned this barman: he was repeating the advertisements of Radio Eireann. ‘You do want the best, don’t you?’ he said again, pushing the glass of beer towards me. By the fire, the woman made a noise, a slight, tired titter of amusement. I laughed myself, politely too.

When I returned to my armchair I found the woman was looking at me. I wondered if she could be a prostitute, alone in a hotel bar like that. A boy at school called Yeats claimed that prostitutes hung about railway stations mostly, and on quays. But there was of course no reason why you shouldn’t come across one in a bar.

Yet she seemed too quietly dressed to be a prostitute. She was wearing a green suit and a green hat, and there was a coat made of some kind of fur draped over a chair near the chair she sat on. She was a dark-haired woman with an oval face. I’d no idea what age she was: somewhere between thirty and forty, I imagined: I wasn’t good at guessing people’s ages.

The Smithwick’s Ale was having an effect on me. I wanted to giggle. How extraordinary it would be, I thought, if a prostitute tried to sell herself to me in my father’s and Mr McNamara’s hotel. After all, there was no reason at all why some prostitutes shouldn’t be quietly dressed, probably the more expensive ones were. I could feel myself smiling, holding back the giggle. Naturally enough, I thought, my father hadn’t mentioned the presence of prostitutes in Fleming’s Hotel. And then I thought that perhaps, if he’d lived, he would have told me one day, when my sisters and my mother weren’t in the room. It was the kind of thing, surely, that fathers did tell sons.

I took the envelope I’d drawn the holly on out of my pocket and read the letter it contained. They were managing, my mother said. Miss Sheil had had a dose of flu, Charlotte and Amelia wanted to breed horses, Frances didn’t know what she wanted to do. His rheumatics were slowing Flannagan down a bit in the garden. Bridget was insisting on sweeping the drawing-room chimney. It’ll be lovely at Christmas, she wrote. So nice being all together again.

The oval-faced woman put on her fur coat, and on her way from the bar she passed close to where I was sitting. She looked down and smiled at me.

‘Hills of the North, rejoice!’ we sang in chapel that night. ‘Valley and lowland, sing!’

I smelt of Smithwick’s Ale. I knew I did because as we’d stood in-line in Cloisters several other boys had remarked on it. As I sang, I knew I was puffing the smell all over everyone else. ‘Like a bloody brewery,’ Gahan Minor said afterwards.

‘… this night,’ intoned the small headmaster nasally, ‘and for ever more.’

‘Amen,’ we all replied.

Saturday night was a pleasant time. After Chapel there were two and a half hours during which you could do more or less what you liked, provided the master on duty knew where you were. You could work in the printing shop or read in the library, or take part in a debate, such as that this school is an outpost of the British Empire, or play billiards or do carpentry, or go to the model-railway club or the music-rooms. At half past nine there was some even freer time, during which the master on duty didn’t have to know where you were. Most boys went for a smoke then.

After Chapel on the Saturday night after I’d visited Fleming’s Hotel I read in the library. I read Jane Eyre, but all the time the oval face of the woman in the hotel kept appearing in my mind. It would stay there for a few seconds and then fade, and then return. Again and again, as I read Jane Eyre, she passed close to my chair in the bar of Fleming’s Hotel, and looked down and smiled at me.

The end of that term came. The Sixth Form and Remove did Macbeth on the last two nights, A. McC. P. Jackson giving what was generally regarded as a fine performance as Banquo. Someone stole the secondhand Penguin I’d bought from Grace Major to read on the train, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? Drumgoole and Montgomery were found conversing in the shower-room in the middle of the night.

On the journey home I was unable to stop thinking about Fleming’s Hotel. A man in the carriage lent me a copy of Barrack Variety, but the jokes didn’t seem funny. It was at moments like these that the truth most harshly mocked me. Ever since I’d found the hotel, ever since the woman had stared at me, it had been a part of every day, and for whole nights in my long, cheerless dormitory I had been unable to sleep. My father’s voice had returned to me there, telling again the stories of his friend, and reminding me of his friend’s opinions. My father had disagreed with my mother in her view that de Valera should not hand over the ports to Churchill, preferring to share the view of his friend. At school and on the train, and most of all when I returned home, the truth made me feel ill, as though I had flu.

That Christmas morning we handed each other our presents, after we’d eaten, still observing my father’s rule. We thought of him then, they in one way, I in another. ‘Oh, my dear, how lovely!’ my mother whispered over some ornament I’d bought her in a Dublin shop. I had thrown the dragon with the green glass eyes far into a lake near the school, unable to understand how my father had ever brought it to the house, or brought bars of chocolate or tins of Jacob’s biscuits. To pass to his children beneath my mother’s eyes the gifts of another woman seemed as awful a sin as any father could commit, yet somehow it was not as great as the sin of sharing with all of us this other woman’s eccentric household, her sister and her sister’s husband, her alcoholic aunt, a maid and a dog. ‘That’s Nora McNamara,’ the barman’s voice seemed to say again at our breakfast table, and I imagined them sitting there, my father and she, in that comfortable bar, and my father listening to her talk of the house in Palmerston Road and of how she admired the English aristocracy. I watched my mother smile that Christmas morning, and I wanted to tell the truth because the truth was neat and without hypocrisy: I wanted carefully to say that I was glad my father was dead.

Instead I left the breakfast table and went to my bedroom. I wept there, and then washed my face in cold water from the jug on my wash-stand. I hated the memory of him and how he would have been that Christmas morning; I hated him for destroying everything. It was no consolation to me then that he had tried to share with us a person he loved in a way that was different from the way he loved us. I could neither forgive nor understand. I felt only bitterness that I, who had taken his place, must now continue his deception, and keep the secret of his lies and his hypocrisy.