Collected Stories

The Wedding in the Garden

Ever since Dervla was nine the people of the hotel had fascinated her. Its proprietor, Mr Congreve, wore clothes that had a clerical sombreness about them, though they were of a lighter hue than Father Mahony’s stern black. Mr Congreve was a smiling man with a quiet face, apparently not in the least put out by reports in the town that his wife, in allying herself with a hotel proprietor, had married beneath her. Ladylike and elegant, she appeared not to regret her choice. Mrs Congreve favoured in her dresses a distinctive blend of greens and blues, her stylishness combining with the hotel proprietor’s tranquil presence to lend the couple a quality that was unique in the town. Their children, two girls and an older boy, were imbued with this through the accident of their birth, and so were different from the town’s other children in ways that might be termed superficial. ‘Breeding,’ Dervla’s father used to say, ‘The Congreves have great breeding in them,’

She herself, when she was nine, was fair-haired and skinny, with a graze always healing on one knee or the other because she had a way of tripping on her shoelaces. ‘Ah, will you tie up those things!’ her mother used to shout at her: her mother, big-faced and red, blinking through the steam that rose from a bucket of water. Her brothers and sisters had all left the house in Thomas MacDonagh Street by the time Dervla was nine; they’d left the town and the district, two of them in America even, one in London. Dervla was more than just the baby of the family: she was an afterthought, catching everyone unawares, born when her mother was forty-two. ‘Chance had a hand in that one,’ her father liked to pronounce, regarding her affectionately, as if pleased by this intervention of fate. When his brother from Leitrim visited the house in Thomas MacDonagh Street the statement was made often, being of family interest. ‘If her mother didn’t possess the strength of an ox,’ Dervla’s father liked to add, ‘God knows how the end of it would have been.’ And Dervla’s Leitrim uncle, refreshing himself with a bottle of stout, would yet again wag his head in admiration and wonder at his sister-in-law’s robust constitution. He was employed on the roads up in Leitrim and only came to the town on a Sunday, drawn to it by a hurling match. Dervla’s father was employed by O’Mara the builder.

Even after she went to work in the Royal Hotel and came to know the family, her first image of them remained: the Congreves in their motorcar, an old Renault as she afterwards established, its canvas hood folded back, slowly making the journey to the Protestant church on a sunny Sunday morning. St Peter’s Church was at one end of the town, the Royal Hotel at the other. It had, before its days as an hotel, apparently been owned by Mrs Congreve’s family, and then people in the grocery business had bought it and had not lived there, people who had nothing to do with the town, who were not well known. After that Mr Congreve had made an offer with, so it was said, his wife’s money.

The motor-car in the sunlight crept down Draper’s Street, the bell of St Peter’s Church still monotonously chiming. The boy – no older than Dervla herself – sat between his sisters in the back; Mr Congreve turned his head and said something to his wife. Daddy Phelan, outside Mrs Ryan’s bar, saluted them in his wild way; Mrs Congreve waved back at him. The boy wore a grey flannel suit, the girls had fawn-coloured coats and tiny bows in their pigtails. The motor-car passed from view, and a moment later the bell ceased to chime.

Christopher couldn’t remember the first time he’d been aware of her. All he knew was that she worked in the kitchen of the hotel, walking out from the town every day. Playing with Molly and Margery-Jane in the shrubberies of the garden, he had noticed now and again a solitary figure in a black coat, with a headscarf. He didn’t know her name or what her face was like. ‘Count to ten, Chris,’ Margery-Jane would shrilly insist. ‘You’re not counting to ten!’ Some game, rules now forgotten, some private family game they had invented themselves, stalking one another among the bamboos and the mahonias, Molly creeping on her hands and knees, not making a sound, Margery-Jane unable to control her excited breathing. The girl passed through the yard near by, a child as they were, but they paid her no attention.

A year or so later Mary, the elderly maid whose particular realm was the dining-room, instructed her in the clearing of a table. ‘Dervla,’ his mother said when the older waitress had led her away with cutlery and’ plates piled on to her tray. ‘Her name is Dervla.’ After that she was always in the dining-room at mealtimes.

It was then, too, that she began to come to the hotel on a bicycle, her day longer now, arriving before breakfast, cycling home again in the late evening. Once there was talk about her living there, but nothing had come of that. Christopher didn’t know where she did live, had never once noticed Thomas MacDonagh Street in his wanderings about the town. Returning from boarding-school in Dublin, he had taken to going for walks, along the quay of the river where the sawmills were, through the lanes behind Brabazon’s Brewery. He preferred to be alone at that time of his growing up, finding the company of his sisters too chattery. The river wound away through fields and sometimes a dog from the lanes or the cottages near the electricity plant would follow him. There was one in particular, a short-tailed terrier, its smooth white coat soiled and uncared for, ears and head flashed with black. There was a mongrel sheepdog also, an animal that ceased its customary cringing as soon as it gained the freedom of the fields. When he returned to the town these animals no longer followed him, but were occasionally involved in fights with other dogs, as though their excursion into the country had turned them into aliens who were no longer to be trusted. He went on alone then, through darkening afternoons or spitting rain, lingering by the shops that sold fruit and confectionery. There’d been a time when he and Margery-Jane and Molly had come to these shops with their pocket-money, for Peggy’s Leg or pink bon-bons. More affluent now, he bought Our Boys and Film Fun and saved up for the Wide World.

His sisters had been born in the Royal Hotel, but he – before his father owned the place – in Dublin, where his parents had then lived. He did not remember Dublin: the hotel had become his world. It was a white building, set back a little from the street, pillars and steps prefacing its entrance doors. Its plain façade was decorated with a yellow AA sign and a blue RIAC one; in spring tulips bloomed in window-boxes on the downstairs windowsills. The words Royal Hotel were painted in black on this white façade and repeated in smaller letters above the pillared porch. At the back, beyond the yard and the garden, there was a row of garages and an entrance to them from Old Lane. The hotel’s four employees came and went this way, Mrs O’Connor the cook, whatever maids there were, and Artie the boots. There was a stone-flagged hallway with doors off it to the kitchen and the larders and the scullery, and one to the passage that led to the back staircase. It was a dim hallway, with moisture sometimes on its grey-distempered walls, a dimness that was repeated in the passage that led to the back staircase and on the staircase itself. Upstairs there was a particular smell, of polish and old soup, with a tang of porter drifting up from the bar. The first-floor landing – a sideboard stretching along one wall, leather armchairs by the windows, occasional tables piled with magazines, a gold-framed mirror above the fireplace – was the heart of the hotel. Off it were the better bedrooms and a billiard-room where the YMCA held a competition every March; above it there was a less impressive landing, little more than a corridor. On the ground floor the dining-room had glass swing-doors, twelve tables with white tablecloths, always set for dinner. The family occupied a corner one between the fire and the dumb-waiter, with its array of silver-plated sugar castors and salt and pepper and mustard containers, bottles of Yorkshire Relish, thick and thin, mint sauce in cut-glass jugs, and Worcester sauce, and jam and marmalade.

When Christopher was younger, before he went away to school, he and Margery-Jane and Molly used to play hide-and-seek in the small, cold bedrooms at the top of the house, skulking in the shadows on the uncarpeted stairs that led to the attics. Occasionally, if a visitor was staying in the hotel, their father would call up to them to make less noise, but this didn’t happen often because a visitor was usually only in the hotel at night. They were mainly senior commercial travellers who stayed at the Royal, representatives of Wills or Horton’s or Drummond’s Seeds, once a year the Urney man; younger representatives lodged more modestly. Insurance men stayed at the hotel, and bank inspectors had been known to spend a fortnight or three weeks. Bord na Mona men came and went, and once in a while there was an English couple or a couple from the North, touring or on their honeymoon. When Miss Gilligan, who taught leatherwork at the technical college, first came to the town she spent nearly a month in the Royal before being satisfied with the lodging she was offered. Artie the boots, grey-haired but still in his forties, worked in the garden and the yard, disposed of empty bottles from the bar and often served there. Old Mary served there too, and at a busy time, which only rarely occurred, Mrs O’Connor would come up from the kitchen to assist. Dr Molloy drank at the Royal, and Hogarty the surveyor, and the agent at the Bank of Ireland, Mr McKibbin, and a few of the other bank men in the town. The bar was a quiet place, though, compared with the town’s public houses; voices were never raised.

The main hall of the hotel was quiet also, except for the ticking of the grandfather clock and its chiming. There was the same agreeable smell there, of soup and polish, and porter from the bar. A barometer hung beneath a salmon in a glass case, notices of point-to-point races and the Dublin Spring Show and the Horse Show hung from hooks among coloured prints of Punchestown. The wooden floor was covered almost completely with faded rugs, and the upper half of the door to the bar was composed of frosted glass with a border of shamrocks. There were plants in brass pots on either side of a wide staircase with a greenish carpet, threadbare in parts.

‘Your inheritance one day,’ Christopher’s father said.

It was very grand, Dervla considered, to have your initials on a green trunk, and on a wooden box with metal brackets fixed to its edges. These containers stood in the back hall, with a suitcase, at the beginning of each term, before they were taken to the railway station. They stood there again when Christopher returned, before Artie helped him to carry them upstairs. On his first day back from school there was always a great fuss. His sisters became very excited, a special meal was prepared, Mr Congreve would light cigarette after cigarette, standing in front of the fire on the first-floor landing, listening to Christopher’s tale of the long journey from Dublin. He always arrived in the evening, sometimes as late as seven o’clock but usually about half past five. In the dining-room when the family had supper he would say he was famished and tell his sisters how disgraceful the food at the school was, the turnips only half mashed, the potatoes with bits of clay still clinging to their skins, and a custard pudding called Yellow Peril. His mother, laughing at him, would say he shouldn’t exaggerate, and his father would ask him about the rugby he had played, or the cricket. ‘Like the game of tennis it would be,’ Artie told her when Dervla asked him what cricket was. ‘The way they’d wear the same type of clothing for it.’ Miss Gillespie, the matron, was a tartar and Willie the furnace man’s assistant told stories that couldn’t be repeated. Dervla imagined the big grey house with a curving avenue leading up to it, and bells always ringing, and morning assemblies, and the march through cloisters to the chapel, which so often she had heard described. She imagined the boys in their grey suits kneeling down to say their prayers, and the ice on the inside of the windows on cold days. The chemistry master had blown his hair off, it was reported once in the dining-room, and Dervla thought of Mr Jerety who made up the prescriptions in the Medical Hall. Mr Jerety had no hair either, except for a little at the sides of his head.

Dervla managed the dining-room on her own now. Mary had become too rheumaticky to make the journey at any speed from the kitchen and found it difficult to lift the heavier plates from the table. She helped Mrs O’Connor with the baking instead, kneading dough on the marble slab at the side table in the kitchen, making pastry and preparing vegetables. It took her half a day, Dervla had heard Mr Congreve say, to mount the stairs to her bedroom at the top of the hotel, and the other half to descend it. He was fond of her, and would try to make her rest by the fire on the first-floor landing but she never did: ‘Sure, if I sat down there, sir, I’d maybe never get up again.’ It was unseemly, Dervla had heard old Mary saying in the kitchen, for an employee to be occupying an armchair in the place where the visitors and the family sat. Mr Congreve was devil-may-care about matters like that, but what would a visitor say if he came out of his bedroom and found a uniformed maid in an armchair? What would Byrne from Horton’s say, or Boylan the insurance man?

In the dining-room, when she’d learnt how everything should be, ‘the formalities’, as Mr Congreve put it, Dervla didn’t find her duties difficult. She was swift on her feet, as it was necessary to be, in case the food got cold. She could stack a tray with dishes and plates so economically that two journeys to the kitchen became one. She was careful at listening to what the visitors ordered and without writing anything down was able to relay the message to the kitchen. The family were never given a choice.

Often Christopher found himself glancing up from the food Dervla placed in front of him, to follow with his eyes her progress across the dining-room, the movement of her hips beneath her black dress, her legs clad in stockings that were black also. Once he addressed her in the backyard. He spoke softly, just behind her in the yard. It was dark, after seven, an evening in early March when a bitter wind was blowing. ‘I’ll walk with you, Dervla,’ he said.

She wheeled her bicycle in Old Lane and they walked in silence except that once he remarked upon the coldness of the weather and she said she disliked rain more. When they reached the end of the lane he went one way and she the other.

‘Hullo, Dervla,’ he said one afternoon in the garden. It was late in August. He was lying on a rug among the hydrangeas, reading. She had passed without noticing that he was there; she returned some minutes later with a bunch of parsley. It was then that he addressed her. He smiled, trying to find a different intonation, trying to make his greeting softer, less ordinary than usual. He wanted her to sit down on the brown checked rug, to enjoy the sun for a while, but of course that was impossible. He had wanted to wheel her bicycle for her that evening, as he would have done had she been another girl, Hazel Warren or Annie Warren, the coal merchant’s daughters, or a girl he’d never even spoken to, someone’s cousin, who used to visit the town every Christmas. But it hadn’t seemed natural in any way at all to wheel the bicycle of the dining-room maid, any more than it would have been to ask a kitchen maid at school where she came from or if she had brothers and sisters.

‘Hullo,’ she said, replying to his greeting in the garden. She passed on with her bunch of parsley, seeming not to be in a hurry, the crisp white strings of her apron bobbing as she walked.

In her bedroom in the house in Thomas MacDonagh Street she thought of him every night before she went to sleep. She saw him as he was when he returned from his boarding-school, in his grey long-trousered suit, a green-and-white-striped tie knotted into the grey collar of his shirt. When she awoke in the morning she thought of him also, the first person to share the day with. In winter she lay there in the darkness, but in summer the dawn light lit the picture of the Virgin above the door, and when Dervla felt the Virgin’s liquid eyes upon her she prayed, asking the Holy Mother for all sorts of things she afterwards felt she shouldn’t have because they were trivial. She pleaded that he might smile when he thanked her for the rashers and sausages she put in front of him, that his little finger might accidentally touch her hand as only once it had. She pleaded that Mr Congreve wouldn’t engage her in conversation at lunchtime, asking how her father was these days, because somehow – in front of him – it embarrassed her.

There was a nightmare she had, possessing her in varied forms: that he was in the house in Thomas MacDonagh Street and that her mother was on her knees, scrubbing the stone floor of the scullery. Her mother didn’t seem to know who he was and would not stand up. Her father and her uncle from Leitrim sat drinking stout by the fire, and when she introduced him they remarked upon his clothes. Sometimes in the nightmare her uncle nudged him with his elbow and asked him if he had a song in him.

‘That young Carroll has an eye for you,’ her father said once or twice, drawing her attention to Buzzy Carroll who worked in Catigan’s hardware. But she didn’t want to spend Sunday afternoons walking out on the Ballydrim road with Buzzy Carroll, or to sit with his arms around her in the Excel cinema. One of the Christian Brothers had first called him Buzzy, something to do with the way his hair fluffed about his head, and after that no one could remember what Buzzy Carroll’s real name was. There were others who would have liked to go out with her, on walks or to the pictures, or to the Tara Dance Hall on a Friday night. There was Flynn who worked in Maguire’s timber yard, and Chappie Reagan, and Butty Delaney. There was the porter at the auction rooms who had something the matter with his feet, the toes joined together in such a peculiar way that he showed them to people: And there was Streak Dwyer. ‘You’re nothing only a streak of woe,’ the same Christian Brother had years ago pronounced. Streak Dwyer had ever since retained the sobriquet, serving now in Rattray’s grocery, sombrely weighing flour and sugar. Dervla had once or twice wondered what walking out on the Ballydrim road with this melancholy shopman would be like and if he would suggest turning into one of the lanes, as Butty Delaney or Buzzy Carroll would have. She wouldn’t have cared for it in the Excel cinema with Streak Dwyer any more than she cared for the idea of being courted by a man who showed people his toes.

*

‘Dervla.’

On a wet afternoon, a Tuesday in September, he whispered her name on the first-floor landing. He put his arm around her, and she was frightened in ease someone would come.

‘I’m fond of you, Dervla.’

He took her hand and led her upstairs to Room 14, a tiny bedroom that was only used when the hotel was full. Both of them were shy, and their shyness evaporated slowly. He kissed her, stroking her hair. He said again he was fond of her. ‘I’m fond of you too,’ she whispered.

After that first afternoon they met often to embrace in Room 14. They would marry, he said at the end of that holidays; they would live in the hotel, just like his parents. Over and over again in Room 14 the afternoon shadows gathered as sunlight slipped away. They whispered, clinging to one another, the warmth of their bodies becoming a single warmth. She sat huddled on his knee, holding tightly on to him in case they both fell off the rickety bedroom chair. He loved the curve of her neck, he whispered, and her soft fair hair, her lips and her eyes. He loved kissing her eyes.

Often there was silence in the bedroom, broken only by the faraway cries of Molly and Margery-Jane playing in the garden. Sometimes it became quite dark in the room, and she would have to go then because Mrs O’Connor would be wanting her in the kitchen.

‘Not a bad fella at all,’ her father said in Thomas MacDonagh Street. ‘Young Carroll.’ She wanted to laugh when her father said that, wondering what on earth he’d say if he knew about Room 14. He would probably say nothing; in silence he would take his belt to her. But the thought of his doing so didn’t make her afraid.

‘Oh, Dervla, how I wish the time would hurry up and pass!’

Over the years he had come to see the town as little better than a higgledy-piggledy conglomeration of dwellings, an ugly place except for the small bridge at the end of Mill Street. But it was Dervla’s town, and it was his own; together they belonged there. He saw himself in middle age walking through its narrow streets, as he had walked during his childhood. He saw himself returning to the hotel and going at once to embrace the wife he loved with a passion that had not changed.

‘Oh, Dervla,’ he whispered in Room 14. ‘Dervla, I’m so fond of you.’

‘Well, now, I think we must have a little talk,’ Mrs Congreve said.

They were alone in the dining-room; Dervla had been laying the tables for dinner. When Mrs Congreve spoke she felt herself reddening; the knives and forks felt suddenly cold in her hands.

‘Finish the table, Dervla, and then we’ll talk about it.’

She did as she was bidden. Mrs Congreve stood by a window, looking out at people passing on the street. When Dervla had finished she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror over the fireplace. Her thin, pretty face had a frightened look, and seemed fragile, perhaps because she had paled. She averted her gaze almost as soon as the mirror reflected it. Mrs Congreve said:

‘Mr Congreve and I are disappointed that this has happened. It’s most unfortunate.’

Turning from the window, Mrs Congreve smiled a lingering, gracious smile. She was wearing one of her green-and-blue dresses, a flimsy, delicate garment with tiny blue buttons and a stylishly stiff white collar. Her dark hair was coiled silkily about her head.

‘It is perhaps difficult for you to understand, Dervla, and certainly it is unpleasant for me to say: But there are differences between you and Christopher that cannot be overlooked or ignored.’ Mrs Congreve paused and again looked out of the window, slightly drawing the net curtain aside. ‘Christopher is not of your class, Dervla. He is not of your religion. You are a maid in this hotel. You have betrayed the trust that Mr Congreve and I placed in you. I’m putting it harshly, Dervla, but there’s no point in pretending.’

Dervla did not say anything. She felt desolate and alone. She wished he wasn’t away at school. She wished she could run out of the dining-room and find him somewhere, that he would help her in this terrifying conversation.

‘Oh, Christopher has done wrong also. I can assure you we are aware of that. We are disappointed in Christopher, but we think it better to close the matter in his absence. He will not be back for another three months almost; we think it best to have everything finished and forgotten by then. Mr Congreve will explain to Christopher.’

Again there was the gracious smile. No note of anger had entered Mrs Congreve’s voice, no shadow of displeasure disrupted the beauty of her features. She might have been talking about the annual bloodstock dinner, giving instructions about how the tables should be set.

‘We would ask you to write a note now, to Christopher at school. Mr Congreve and I would like to see it, Dervla, before it goes on its way. That, then, would be the end of the matter.’

As she spoke, Mrs Congreve nodded sympathetically, honouring Dervla’s unspoken protest: she understood, she said. She did not explain how the facts had come to be discovered, but suggested that in the note she spoke of Dervla should write that she felt in danger of losing her position in the Royal Hotel, that she was upset by what had taken place and would not wish any of it to take place again.

‘That is the important aspect of it, Dervla. Neither Mr Congreve nor I wish to dismiss you. If we did, you – and we – would have to explain to your parents, even to Father Mahony, I suppose. If it’s possible, Dervla, we would much rather avoid all that.’

But Dervla, crimson-faced, mentioned love. Her voice was weak, without substance and seeming to be without conviction, although this was not so. Mrs Congreve replied that that was penny-fiction talk.

‘We want to get married, ma’am.’ Dervla closed her eyes beneath the effort of finding the courage to say that. The palms of her hands, chilled a moment ago, were warmly moist now. She could feel pinpricks on her forehead.

‘That’s very silly, Dervla,’ Mrs Congreve said in the same calm manner. ‘I’m surprised you should be so silly.’

‘I love him,’ Dervla cried, all convention abruptly shattered. Her voice was shrill in the dining-room, tears ran from her eyes and she felt herself seized by a wildness that made her want to shriek out in fury. ‘I love hint,’ she cried again. ‘It isn’t just a little thing.’

‘Don’t you feel you belong in the Royal, Dervla? We have trained you, you know. We have done a lot, Dervla.’

There was a silence then, except for Dervla’s sobbing. She found a handkerchief in the pocket of her apron and wiped her eyes and nose with it. In such silly circumstances, Mrs Congreve said, Christopher would not inherit the hotel. The hotel would be sold, and Christopher would inherit nothing. It wasn’t right that a little thing like this should ruin Christopher’s life. ‘So you see, you must go, Dervla. You must take your wages up to the end of the month and go this afternoon.’

The tranquillity of Mrs Congreve’s manner was intensified by the sadness in her voice. She was on Dervla’s side, her manner insisted; her admonitions were painful for her. Again she offered the alternative:

‘Or simply write a few lines to him, and we shall continue in the hotel as though nothing has happened. That is possible, you know. I assure you of that, my dear.’

Miserably, Dervla asked what she could say in a letter. She would have to tell lies. She wouldn’t know how to explain.

‘No, don’t tell lies. Explain the truth: that you realize the friendship must not continue, now that you and he are growing up. You’ve always been a sensible girl, Dervla. You must realize that what happened between you was for children only.’

Dervla shook her head, but Mrs Congreve didn’t acknowledge the gesture.

‘I can assure you, Dervla – I can actually promise you – that when Christopher has grown up a little more he will see the impossibility of continuing such a friendship. The hotel, even now, is everything to Christopher. I can actually promise you, also, that you will not be asked to leave. I know you value coming here.’

At school, when he received the letter, Christopher was astonished. In Dervla’s rounded handwriting it said that they must not continue to meet in Room 14 because it was a sin. It would be best to bring everything to an end now, before she was dismissed. They had done wrong, but at least they could avoid the worst if they were sensible now.

It was so chilly a letter, as from a stranger, that Christopher could hardly believe what it so very clearly said. Why did she feel this now, when a few weeks ago they had sworn to love one another for as long as they lived? Were all girls’ as fickle and as strange? Or had the priests, somehow, got at her, all this stuff about sin?

He could not write back. His handwriting on the envelope would be recognized in the hotel, and he did not know her address since she had not included it in her letter. He had no choice but to wait, and as days and then weeks went by his bewilderment turned to anger. It was stupid that she should suddenly develop these scruples after all they’d said to one another. The love he continued to feel for her became tinged with doubt and with resentment, as though they’d had a quarrel.

‘Now, I don’t want to say anything more about this,’ his father said at the beginning of the next holidays. ‘But it doesn’t do, you know, to go messing about with the maids.’

That was the end of the unfortunateness as far as his father was concerned. It was not something that should be talked about, no good could come of that.

‘It wasn’t messing about.’

‘That girl was very upset, Christopher.’

Three months ago Christopher would have said he wanted to marry Dervla, forced into that admission by what had been discovered. He would have spoken of love. But his father had managed to draw him aside to have this conversation before he’d had an opportunity even to see her, let alone speak to her. He felt confused, and uncertain about his feelings.

‘It would be hard on her to dismiss her. We naturally didn’t want to do that. We want the girl to remain here, Christopher, since really it’s a bit of a storm in a teacup.’

His father lit a cigarette and seemed more at ease once he had made that pronouncement. There was a lazier look about his face than there had been a moment ago; a smile drifted over his lips. ‘Good term?’ he said, and Christopher nodded.

‘Is it the priests, Dervla?’ They stood together in a doorway in Old Lane, her bicycle propped against the kerb. ‘Did the priests get at you?’

She shook her head.

‘Did my mother speak to you?’

‘Your mother only said a few things.’

She went away, wheeling her bicycle for a while before mounting it. He watched her, not feeling as miserable as when her letter had arrived, for during the months that had passed since then he had become reconciled to the loss of their relationship: between the lines of her letter there had been a finality.

He returned to the hotel and Artie helped him to carry his trunk upstairs. He wished that none of it had ever happened.

Dervla was glad he made no further effort to talk to her, but standing between courses by the dumb-waiter in the dining-room, she often wondered what he was thinking. While the others talked he was at first affected by embarrassment because at mealtimes in the past there had been the thrill of surreptitious glances and forbidden smiles. But after a week or so he became less quiet, joining in the family conversation, and she became the dining-room maid again.

Yet for Dervla the moment of placing his food in front of him was as poignant as ever it had been, and in her private moments she permitted herself the luxury of dwelling in the past. In her bedroom in Thomas MacDonagh Street she closed her eyes and willed into her consciousness the afternoon sunlight of Room 14. Once more she was familiar with the quickening of his heart and the cool touch of his hands. Once more she clung to him, her body huddled into his on the rickety chair in the corner, the faraway cries of Molly and Margery-Jane gently disturbing the silence.

Dervla did not experience bitterness. She was fortunate that the Congreves had been above the pettiness of dismissing her, and when she prayed she gave thanks for that. When more time had gone by she found herself able to confess the sinning that had been so pleasurable in Room 14, and was duly burdened with a penance for both the misdemeanours and her long delay in confessing them. She had feared to lose what there had been through expiation, but the fear had been groundless: only reality had been lost. ‘Young Carroll was asking for you,’ her father reported in a bewildered way, unable to understand her reluctance even to consider Buzzy Carroll’s interest.

Everything was easier when the green trunk and the box with the metal brackets stood in the back hall at the beginning of another term, and when a few more terms had come and gone he greeted her in the hotel as if all she had confessed to was a fantasy. Like his parents, she sensed, he was glad her dismissal had not been necessary, for that would have been unfair. ‘Did my mother speak to you?’ The quiet vehemence there had been in his voice was sweet to remember, but he himself would naturally wish to forget it now: for him, Room 14 must have come to seem like an adventure in indiscretion, as naturally his parents had seen it.

Two summers after he left school Dervla noticed signs in him that painfully echoed the past. An archdeacon’s daughter sometimes had lunch with the family: he couldn’t take his eyes off her. Serving the food and in her position by the dumb-waiter, Dervla watched him listening while the archdeacon’s daughter talked about how she and her parents had moved from one rectory to another and how the furniture hadn’t fitted the new rooms, how there hadn’t been enough stair-carpet. The archdeacon’s daughter was very beautiful. Her dark hair was drawn back from a centre parting; when she smiled a dimple came and went in one cheek only; her skin was like the porcelain of a doll’s skin. Often in the dining-room she talked about her childhood in the seaside backwater where she had once lived. Every morning in summer and autumn she and her father had gone together to the strand to bathe. They piled their clothes up by a breakwater, putting stones on them if there was a wind, and then they would run down the sand to the edge of the sea. A man sometimes passed by on a horse, a retired lighthouse keeper, a lonely, widowed man. Christopher was entranced.

Dervla cleared away the dishes, expertly disposing of chop bones or bits of left-behind fat. Mary had years ago shown her how to flick the table refuse on to a single plate, a different one from the plate you gathered the used knives and forks on to. Doing so now, she too listened to everything the archdeacon’s daughter said. Once upon a time the Pierrots had performed on the strand in August, and Hewitt’s Travelling Fun Fair had come; regularly, June to September, summer visitors filled the promenade boarding-houses, arriving on excursion trains. Garish pictures were painted with coloured powders on the sand, castles and saints and gardens. ‘I loved that place,’ the archdeacon’s daughter said.

Afterwards Dervla watched from an upstairs window, the window in fact of Room 14. The archdeacon’s daughter sat with him in the garden, each of them in a deck-chair, laughing and conversing. They were always laughing: the archdeacon’s daughter would say something and he would throw his head back with appreciation and delight. Long before the engagement was announced Dervla knew that this was the girl who was going to take her place, in his life and in the hotel.

The Archdeacon conducted the service in St Peter’s, and then the guests made their way to the garden of the hotel. That the wedding reception was to be at the hotel was a business arrangement between the Archdeacon and Mr Congreve, for the expenses were to be the former’s, as convention demanded. It was a day in June, a Thursday, in the middle of a heatwave.

Dervla and a new maid with spectacles handed round glasses of champagne. Artie saw to it that people had chairs to sit on if they wished to sit. The archdeacon’s daughter wore a wedding-dress that had a faint shade of blue in it, and a Limerick lace veil. She was kissed by people in the garden, she smiled while helping to cut the wedding cake. Her four bridesmaids, Molly and Margery-Jane among them, kept saying she looked marvellous.

Speeches were made in the sunshine. Dr Molloy made one and so did the best man, Tom Gouvernet, and Mr Congreve. Dr Molloy remembered the day Christopher was born, and Mr Congreve remembered the first time he’d set eyes on the beauty of the Archdeacon’s daughter, and Tom Gouvernet remembered Christopher at school. Other guests remembered other occasions; Christopher said he was the lucky man and kissed the archdeacon’s daughter while people clapped their hands with delight. Tom Gouvernet fell backwards off the edge of a raised bed.

There was an excess of emotion in the garden, an excess of smiles and tears and happiness and love. The champagne glasses were held up endlessly, toast after toast. Christopher’s mother moved among the guests with the plump wife of the archdeacon and the Archdeacon himself, who was as frail as a stalk of straw. In his easy-going way Christopher’s father delighted in the champagne and the sunshine, and the excitement of a party. Mr McKibbin, the bank agent, was there, and Hogarty the surveyor, and an insurance man who happened to be staying at the hotel. There was nothing Mr Congreve liked better than standing about talking to these barroom companions.

‘Thanks, Dervla.’ Taking a glass from her tray, Christopher smiled at her because for ages that had been possible again.

‘It’s a lovely wedding, sir.’

‘Yes, it is.’

He looked at her eyes, and was aware of the demanding steadiness of her gaze. He sensed what she was wondering and wondered it himself: what would have happened if she’d been asked to leave the hotel? He guessed, as she did: they would have shared the resentment and the anger that both of them had separately experienced; defiantly they would have continued to meet in the town; she would have accompanied him on his walks, out into the country and the fields. There would have been talk in the town and scenes in the hotel, their relationship would again have been proscribed. They would have drawn closer to one another, their outraged feelings becoming an element in the forbidden friendship. In the end, together, they would have left the hotel and the town and neither of them would be standing here now. Both their lives would be quite different.

‘You’ll be getting married yourself one of these days, Dervla.’

‘Ah, no no.’

She was still quite pretty. There was a simplicity about her freckled features that was pleasing; her soft fair hair was neat beneath her maid’s white cap. But she was not beautiful. Once, not knowing much about it, he had imagined she was. It was something less palpable that distinguished her.

‘Oh, surely? Surely, Dervla?’

‘I don’t see myself giving up the hotel, sir. My future’s here, sir.’

He smiled again and passed on. But his smile, which remained while he listened to a story of Tom Gouvernet’s about the hazards to be encountered on a honeymoon, was uneasy. An echo of the eyes that had gazed so steadily remained with him, as did the reference she had made to her future. That she had not been turned out of the hotel had seemed something to be proud of at the time: a crudity had been avoided. But while Tom Gouvernet’s lowered voice continued, he found himself wishing she had been. She would indeed not ever marry, her eyes had stated, she would not wish to.

A hand of his wife’s slipped into one of his; the voice of Tom Gouvernet ceased. The hand was as delicate as the petal of a flower, the fingers so tiny that involuntarily he lifted them to his lips. Had Dervla seen? he Wondered, and he looked through the crowd for a glimpse of her but could not see her. Hogarty the surveyor was doing a trick with a handkerchief, entertaining the coal merchant’s daughters. Mr McKibben was telling one of his stories.

‘Ah, he’s definitely the lucky man,’ Tom Gouvernet said, playfully winking at the bride.

It had never occurred to Christopher before that while he and his parents could successfully bury a part of the past, Dervla could not. It had never occurred to him that because she was the girl she was she did not appreciate that some experiences were best forgotten. Ever since the Congreves had owned the Royal Hotel a way of life had obtained there, but its subtleties had naturally eluded the dining-room maid.

‘When you get tired of him,’ Tom Gouvernet went on in the same light manner, ‘you know who to turn to.’

‘Oh, indeed I do, Tom.’

He should have told her about Dervla. If he told her now she would want Dervla to go; any wife would, in perfect reasonableness. An excuse must be found, she would say, even though a promise had been made.

‘But I won’t become tired of him,’ she was saying, smiling at Tom Gouvernet. ‘He’s actually quite nice, you know.’

In the far distance Dervla appeared, hurrying from the hotel with a freshly laden tray. Christopher watched her, while the banter continued between bride and best man.

‘He had the shocking reputation at school,’ Tom Gouvernet said.

‘Oh? I didn’t know that.’ She was still smiling; she didn’t believe it. It wasn’t true.

‘A right Lothario you’ve got yourself hitched to.’

He would not tell her. It was too late for that, it would bewilder her since he had not done so before. It wouldn’t be fair to require her not to wish that Dervla, even now, should be asked to go; or to understand that a promise made to a dining-room maid must be honoured because that was the family way.

Across the garden the Archdeacon lifted a glass from Dervla’s tray. He was still in the company of his plump wife and Christopher’s mother. They, too, took more champagne and then Dervla walked towards where Christopher was standing with his bride and his best man. She moved quickly through the crowd, not offering her tray of glasses to the guests she passed, intent upon her destination.

‘Thank you, Dervla,’ his wife of an hour said.

‘I think Mr Hogarty,’ he said himself, ‘could do with more champagne.’

He watched her walking away and was left again with the insistence in her eyes. As the dining-room maid, she would become part of another family growing up in the hotel. She would listen to a mother telling her children about the strand where once she’d bathed, where a retired lighthouse keeper had passed by on a horse. For all his life he would daily look upon hers, but no words would ever convey her undramatic revenge because the right to speak, once his gift to her, had been taken away. He had dealt in cruelty and so now did she: her gift to him, held over until his wedding day, was that afternoon shadows would gather for ever in Room 14, while she kept faith.