Collected Stories

Bodily Secrets

At fifty-nine, she was on her own, the widow of the O’Neill who had inherited the town’s coal business, who had started, as an enterprise of his own, the toy factory. Her children had flown the nest, her parents and her parents-in-law were no longer alive. Her husband had been in his lifetime a smallish though heavily built man, with wide shoulders and an unrelenting, cropped head, like a battering wedge. His cautious eyes had been set well apart beneath woolly eyebrows; small veins had reddened his nose. He had died at the age of sixty-three, falling down in the big, airy hall of Arcangelo House and afterwards not regaining any real awareness of who he was or what had happened. He had built Arcangelo House after he and his wife had stayed in an Italian hotel of that name when they visited Rome on the occasion of Holy Year.

A beauty once, she was a handsome woman still, tall and imposing in her middle age, with a well-covered look that reflected her liking for sweet things. Her grey hair was shaded towards its original brown, and discreetly burnished; she bought clothes extravagantly. She made up her face with precision, taking her time over it; and attended similarly to her fingernails and, in season, her toenails. She had borne four children in all, two of her three daughters being married now, one in Dublin, the other in Trim; the third was a nurse in Philadelphia. Her son, married also, ran the coal business but was more interested in developing a thousand acres of turf-bog he had bought and which he saw as the beginning of an enterprise that he believed would in time outstrip his father’s and his grandfather’s already established empire. He had inherited their entrepreneur’s spirit, and since he’d first been aware of the role laid down for him he had seen himself as their rival. He was married to Thelma, daughter of a Portarlington publican, a girl whom Mrs O’Neill did not care for, considering her common. Particularly she did not care for the thought that one day Thelma would take her own place in Arcangelo House.

From the garden and the upstairs windows the house offered, over fields, a view of the town that was interrupted only by the toy factory. When the wind blew from the south it carried sounds rendered faint over the distance: the cries of children, a car being started somewhere, the saws in the timber works, the grind of a heavy lorry on Daly’s Hill. And no matter where the wind came from there was always the bell at the convent, and the bell of Our Lady in Glory, and the Protestant bell on Sundays. At night the street lights and the lights of houses were spread out prettily – the town seen at its best, as Mrs O’Neill often reflected. But increasingly in the vacuum that Arcangelo House had become she reflected also that she felt like a pebble in a drum, and said as much to her bridge companions. They urged her to sell it and build a bungalow, but privately she felt that a bungalow was not her style.

When her husband had died Mrs O’Neill had been fifty-six, and although they had regularly disagreed in their thirty-seven years of marriage they had more often been affectionate companions. They had shared two interests in particular: golf and their children. Together they had attended the occasional race-meeting; and while her husband had not played bridge, she in turn had not inclined to join him in the bar of the Commercial Hotel, where he liked to spend an evening or two a week. Every summer they went to Lahinch or Bundoran for the golf, and for several years after Holy Year they had returned to Rome, to the hotel which had given their house its character and its name. Often, on a night which wasn’t a bridge night, Mrs O’Neill wondered about the future and whether she should indeed sell Arcangelo House. When the television came to an end she sat alone in the big open drawing-room, feeling just a little lonely and vaguely wishing that there was another interest in her life besides bridge and golf and her grown-up family. Time had dulled the loss that widowhood had brought, but in no way had it filled the vacuum that was somehow more apparent as time progressed. Once she’d been the centre of things in Arcangelo House, looking after everyone, in charge of other people’s lives. ‘Ah, come on now,’ she’d said a thousand times to the husband who’d died on her. ‘You’re as big a baby as any of them.’ In her days as a beauty she had more or less designed the house herself, standing over MacGuire the architect and endeavouring to picture for him a cool, well-organized hotel in Rome. It still pleased her that she had succeeded so well, not that Arcangelo House was to everyone’s taste, she was well aware of that: it was too different, too modern, in a way too grand. But old Canon Kenny, the most educated man for miles about, said he would wager money that the house was the most interesting to be found outside Dublin. It had been featured in Social and Personal and MacGuire, who was inordinately proud of it, had asked if a German architect, on a motoring holiday, might come and see it. How could she just leave it all? The garden, once little better than waste-land, had gorgeously matured. The portico, with its clean white arches, was rich with different clematis from June to August. The patio was warm enough to have breakfast on in March. Yet the accomplishing of what she’d wanted in the house and in the garden belonged to the time when she’d been in charge, and was a reminder that nothing now was changing or taking shape due to her efforts.

Occasionally, pursuing such lines of thought, she wondered if she would marry again. She couldn’t help herself; she had no desire to remarry, yet widows did so, it was something that quite often occurred. At the golf club there was Sweetman, a few years younger than herself, a bachelor all his life, pleasantly sociable but bleary when he had drink taken, and according to Dolores Fitzfynne a tightwad. There was Corkin, who was her own age, but it was hard to think of Corkin without thinking also of the Mrs Corkin there had been, a drear of a woman who had played neither golf nor bridge, who hadn’t even had children: Corkin had been infected by her dreariness or else had infected her in the first place. There was no one else, except perhaps Agnew, with his sallow face and his hands, which were sallow also, gesturing in the air, and his faintly high-pitched voice. He was younger than the others, younger than she was herself by seven or eight years, yet she often thought of him in this connection. She thought about him in a different way on the morning her son, Cathal, decreed that the toy factory would have to go. For seventeen years Agnew had been its manager.

In a blue-and-yellow paisley dressing-gown which she’d had all her married life she sat on the edge of her bed, listening to her son on the telephone saying that the people at the toy factory could easily be absorbed elsewhere, that for a long time now he had systematically been running the business down. The toy factory had been profitable only in the immediate postwar years, unable ultimately to sustain the competition which had so ominously built up: long before his death her husband had threatened that it would sooner or later have to close. It was a tiny concern, the loss would not be great.

‘All they’re making now are the fox-terriers,’ Cathal said on the telephone, referring to wooden dogs on wheels.

‘The building?’ she said. ‘Best to have it down, wouldn’t it?’

‘I could bale garden peat there. I’m going into that, you know.’

She did not say anything. She did not trust this dark-faced son she’d given birth to. Ceasing to be a toy factory, the building would be expanded when it became the location for one of his enterprises. There might be noise, even a smell of chemicals. You simply couldn’t guess what would come along in order that more money might be made. And why should it matter since only a lone woman lived near by?

‘We’ll have to see,’ she said.

‘Ah, of course, of course. No hurry at all.’

She did not ask about Agnew. She could not see him being absorbed into the turf business or the coal business, and in any case Cathal didn’t like him. Cathal would have him out on the street while you’d wink.

Cathal had his father’s wedge of a head, his forehead and wide-apart, narrow eyes. He was the first of their children to be born, the one who had received most attention because the others were girls. Heir to so much, he had been claimed by a thrusting entrepreneur’s world from infancy. The girls, except for Siobhan in Philadelphia, had been more mundanely claimed by men.

She wouldn’t have minded any of the others being in Arcangelo House, but Thelma had a greedy way of looking at her, as if she couldn’t wait to get into the place. Mrs O’Neill dearly wished that her son hadn’t married this girl, but he had and that was that. She sighed as she replaced the receiver, seeing Thelma’s slightly puffy face, her nose too small for the rest of it. She sat for a moment longer, endeavouring to release her imagination of that face and in the end succeeding. Then she dressed herself and went down to the toy factory. Agnew was in the inner office, standing by the window, his back to her as she entered.

‘Mr Agnew.’

‘Ah, Mrs O’Neill. Come in, come in, Mrs O’Neill.’ He moved so swiftly in turning to greet her that she was reminded of the assured way he danced the quickstep. He came every December to the Golf Club Dance even though he was not a club member and had once confided to her that he had never played the game. ‘Croquet,’ he’d confided also. ‘I used to be quite snappy at croquet.’ He had his own expressions, a way of putting things that sometimes sounded odd. Typical that he should mention an old-fashioned game like croquet.

‘I hope you’re not busy, Mr Agnew. I’m not disturbing you, am I?’

‘Heavens above, why would you be? Won’t you take a chair, Mrs O’Neill? A cup of tea now?’

There was always this formality. He offered it and seemed shyly to demand it. Her husband had always used his surname, and so did Cathal; at the Golf Club Dance she’d heard other men call him by his initials, B.J. She couldn’t in a million years imagine him addressing her as Norah.

‘No, I won’t have tea, thank you.’

‘A taste of sherry at all? I have a nice sweet little sherry –’

‘No, thanks. Really, Mr Agnew.’

He smiled, gently closing a glass-fronted cabinet he had opened in expectation of her accepting his hospitality. He was wearing a brown suit chalked with a pinstripe, and a green silk tie. He said:

‘Well, it seems we have come to the end of the road.’

‘I know. I’m awfully sorry.’

‘Mr O’Neill saw it coming years ago.’

‘Yes, I’m afraid he did.’

He smiled again; his voice was unperturbed. ‘The first day I came up to Arcangelo House I was terrified out of my wits. D’you remember, Mrs O’Neill? Your husband had an advertisement for the job in the Irish Times.’

‘It seems an age ago.’

‘Doesn’t it, though? An age.’

His face had acquired a meditative expression. He drew a packet of cigarettes from a pocket of his jacket and opened it slowly, folding back the silver paper. He advanced a single cigarette by knocking the packet on the surface of his desk. He leaned towards her, offering it. His wrists were slim: she had never noticed his wrists before.

‘Thank you, Mr Agnew.’

He leaned across the desk again, holding the flame of a cigarette-lighter to the tip of her cigarette. It gleamed with the dull patina of gold, as slender as a coin.

‘No, I don’t entirely know what I’ll do.’ He lit his own cigarette and then held it, dangling, in his long fingers.

‘Cathal should have something for you. It was my husband’s intention, you know, that everyone at the toy factory should be offered something.’

She wanted to make that clear; she wanted to record this unequivocal statement in the inner office so that later on, if necessary, she could quote herself to Cathal. She inhaled some smoke and released it luxuriously through her nostrils. She was fond of the occasional cigarette, although she never smoked when she was on her own.

‘I’m not so sure I’d entirely fit in, Mrs O’Neill. I don’t know anything about selling turf.’

She mentioned coal, which after all was the fuel that had made the O’Neills wealthy. There was still a thriving coal business, the biggest in the county.

He shook his head. His hair, once black, was almost completely grey now. ‘I don’t think,’ he said, ‘I’d be at home in coal.’

‘Well, I only thought I’d mention it.’

‘It’s more than kind, Mrs O’Neill.’

‘My husband wouldn’t have wanted anyone not looked after.’

‘Oh, indeed I know it.’

She stared at the lipstick mark on her cigarette and then raised the cigarette to her mouth again. It was awkward because she didn’t want to walk out of the factory smoking a cigarette, yet it was too soon to crush it out on the ashtray in front of her.

‘If there’s any way the family can help, you’ll say, Mr Agnew?’

‘I suppose I’ll go to Dublin.’

The remark was not accompanied by one of his glancing smiles; he gave no sign whatsoever that he’d touched upon a fascinating topic. No one knew why he spent weekends occasionally in Dublin, and a certain curiosity had gathered round the mystery of these visits. There was some secret which he kept, which he had not even confided to her husband in his lifetime. He came back melancholy was all her husband had ever reported, and once or twice with bloodshot eyes, as if he had spent the time drinking.

‘Though I’d rather not end up in Dublin,’ he added now. ‘To tell you the full truth, Mrs O’Neill, it’s not a city I entirely care for.’

She bent the remains of her cigarette in half, extinguishing it on the ashtray. She stood up, thinking it odd that he’d said Dublin wasn’t somewhere he cared for since he visited it so regularly.

‘The toy factory was a favourite of my husband’s. It saddened him to see it decline.’

‘It had its heyday.’

‘Yes, it had its day.’

She went, walking with him from the office, through a shed full of unassembled terriers on wheels. The white cut-out bodies with a brown spot around the tail, the brown heads, the little platforms that carried the wheels, the wheels themselves: all these dislocated parts lay about in stacks, seeming unwanted. No one was working in the shed.

He walked with her through other deserted areas, out on to the gravel forecourt that stretched in a semicircle around the front of the small factory. A man loaded wired cartons on to a lorry. They were still meeting orders in England, Agnew told her. The paint shop was as active as ever, three girls on full time.

He held his hand out, his sallow features illuminated by another smile. His palm was cool, his grip gentle. He asked her not to worry about him. He assured her he’d be all right.

There were gusts of laughter in the clubhouse. Dessie Fitzfynne had told a Kerry joke, concerning eight Kerry gardai and a cow. Dolores Fitzfynne, who’d just gone round in eighty-two and wanted to talk about that instead, requested that he shouldn’t tell another. Sweetman was talking about horses, arranging something about going to the Curragh. Sweetman loved getting parties together to go racing or to Lansdowne Road, or for a weekend down in Kelly’s at Rosslare. Paunchy and rubicund, Flanagan kept saying it was his turn and what did anyone want?

‘I heard the factory’s winding up,’ the solicitor, Butler-Regan, remarked in his rowdy voice and she nodded, suddenly feeling dismal. She had forgotten about the toy factory while she’d been on the golf-course, going round in ninety-one, taking three to get out of the rough at the eighth. She’d been playing with Dessie Fitzfynne, opposing Dolores and Flanagan. They’d been beaten, of course.

It was silly to feel dismal just because the facts of commerce dictated the closure of an unprofitable concern. As both Cathal and Agnew had intimated, the end had been a matter of anticipation for years. Only sentiment had prevented such a decision in the lifetime of her husband.

‘Ah well, there you are,’ Butler-Regan said noisily. ‘’Tis better let it go, Norah.’

Flanagan handed her another gin and French even though she hadn’t asked for one. Overhearing the reference to the toy factory, he said:

‘I hear Agnew’s wondering what to do with himself.’

‘The bold Agnew!’ Butler-Regan laughed. He, too, was paunchy and rubicund. He added, laughing again, shouting through this laughter: ‘Oh, Master Agnew’ll fall on his feet, I’d say.’

They all liked Agnew even though he was so different. He was an easy companion for half an hour or so if you happened to run into him in the bar of the Commercial Hotel; he was always willing to drop into conversation with you on the street. He had digs with the Misses McShane in a house called St Kevin’s, where he was regularly to be seen tending the front garden, behind silver-painted railings set in a low concrete wall. He also walked the Misses McShane’s dog, Mandy, about the town, and on Sundays he attended the Protestant church unless he happened to be in Dublin.

‘We’d all miss Agnew,’ Flanagan said. ‘That wild Protestant man.’ He laughed, making much the same explosive sound that the solicitor did. Did any of them realize, she wondered, that Agnew’s quickstep put them all to shame every December?

‘Oh, wild is right,’ Butler-Regan agreed. ‘Wasn’t he in the city again a week ago?’

The two men laughed in unison, the burst of noise causing Rita Flanagan to glance sharply across the bar to ascertain if her husband was already drunk. In dog’s-tooth skirt and soft fawn golfing-jacket, Mrs O’Neill wondered what any of them would think if they knew that, quite involuntarily as she stood there, she had again begun to speculate on the possibility of not remaining for ever the widow she presently was. She sipped her gin and French, not taking part in a conversation about Sweetman’s outing to the Curragh. In the same involuntary manner she found herself following a thread of thought that led her back to her wedding-day. The O’Neills had insisted on paying for the reception, since her own family were not well-to-do. Old Canon Kenny – neither old nor a canon then – had conducted the service, assisted by a curate called Colquhoun, who had later left the priesthood. They had gone to Bray for their honeymoon and on their first night in the International Hotel she had been jittery. She hadn’t known how it should be, whether she should simply take her clothes off or wait for him to say something, whether or not there was going to be preliminary kissing. She’d gone as red as anything after they’d come up from the restaurant. ‘I think that waiter knew,’ she’d whispered on the stairs, not noticing there was a maid just behind them. He’d been jittery too, and in the end it was she who inaugurated the kissing and in fact had taken his tie off. What on earth would it be like being in a bedroom in Bray with Agnew? There was fat on her shoulders now, which hadn’t been there before, and naturally her thighs and her hips were no longer the same. Her body had been forgotten in that particular way for many years before her husband’s death, almost since the birth of Siobhan. They had come to occupy separate bedrooms in Arcangelo House, having reached the decision that Cathal and the three girls were enough. At first, when it was safe to do so, she had visited the other bedroom, but the habit had dwindled and then ceased. Would it be a form of unfaithfulness to resume it in different circumstances now? It wasn’t easy to guess how such things stood at fifty-nine.

Corkin, the widower of the woman who’d been a drear, approached her with the usual sorrowful look in his eyes, as if he still mourned the wife who had played neither bridge nor golf. The eyes themselves, lurking in their despondent wateriness behind spectacles, had pinkish rims and were the only feature you noticed in Corkin’s flat face, except possibly his teeth, which moved uncomfortably in his jaw when he ate. He was eating now, chewing crisps from a transparent Tayto bag. His hair was like smooth lead; his limbs jutted from his clothes. There was no doubt whatsoever that Corkin, the manager of a butter business, was looking for a housekeeper in the form of a second wife. There was always a nudge or two in the clubhouse when he approached Mrs O’Neill for a chat.

‘Ah, didn’t I have a terrible round? Did you see me in front of you, Norah? Wasn’t I shocking?’

She denied that. She hadn’t noticed his misfortunes, she said, which indeed she hadn’t. She might have added that the butter manager couldn’t be shocking if he tried for the rest of his life.

‘I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ he said. ‘Would you be interested in a bunch of delphiniums from the garden, Norah?’

She drank more gin and French. She had plenty of delphiniums at Arcangelo House, she replied, though it was very good of him to offer her more.

‘Or the asparagus fern? D’you grow that stuff?’

‘I grow asparagus all right. Only I eat it before the fern comes.’

‘Ah well, why wouldn’t you, Norah,’

Sweetman, at the bar, was sweating like an animal. No woman in her senses would want to marry Sweetman. His trouble with perspiration ironically denied his name, and the caginess Dolores Fitzfynne claimed for him would hardly have been easy to live with. He had a tendency towards forgetfulness when his round came up in the clubhouse and, according to Dolores, the parties he organized for race-meetings or Lansdowne Road were done so to his own pecuniary advantage. ‘Too mingy with himself to look sideways at a woman,’ Dolores had said, and probably she was right. He was a surveyor with the county council; and if he gave you a lift in his car he had a way of mentioning the high price of petrol.

She watched Sweetman while Corkin continued in his tedious manner, offering her marigold plants. It had surprised her when Agnew had said he’d never in his life played golf. She’d thought afterwards that he would probably have been good. He had the look of someone who had been athletic in his time. His dancing suggested ball sense, she didn’t know why.

‘To tell you the honest truth, I don’t much care for marigolds.’

‘The wife loved them. Give Mrs Corkin a box of marigolds arid she’d be pricking them out till Kingdom come.’

He wagged his head; she nodded hers. She allowed a silence to develop in the hope that he’d go away. He said eventually:

‘D’you ever watch that thing they have, Dynasty is it called?’

‘I watched it the odd time.

‘Will you tell me this, Norah: where do they get the stories?’

‘I suppose they invent them.’

‘Isn’t America the shocking place though?’

‘I have a daughter there.’

‘Ah, sure, of course you have.’

At the bar Butler-Regan looked as though he might sing. Very occasionally he did, striking the bar rhythmically with his fist, trying to make people join in. The club secretary, Dr Walsh, had had to speak to him, explaining that it wasn’t usual to sing in a golf club, even adding that he didn’t think it quite the thing for a solicitor to sing anywhere. But Butler-Regan had done so again, and had again to be warned. It was said that his wife, who like the late Mrs Corkin played neither bridge nor golf, had a terrible time with him.

‘Does your girl ever remark on the Dynasty thing to you?’ Corkin was inquiring. ‘I mean, if it might be accurate?’

‘Siobhan has never mentioned Dynasty.’

‘Well, isn’t that extraordinary?’

Ten minutes later the drinking in the clubhouse broke up and Mrs O’Neill drove back to Arcangelo House. She made scrambled egg and watched a film about drug-running on the television. The police of several nations pursued a foursome of gangsters and finally ran the ringleader to earth in Los Angeles. She dozed off, and when she woke up a priest with a Cork accent was talking about the feast of Corpus Christi. She listened to him until he’d finished and then turned the television off.

In her bedroom she did something she had not done for ten years at least: before she slipped into her night-dress she paused in front of the long looking-glass of her wardrobe and surveyed her naked body. It was most certainly no longer her best feature, she said to herself, remembering it when she was a child, standing up in the bath to be dried. She remembered being naked at last in the bedroom of the International Hotel in Bray, and the awkward voluptuousness that had followed. The bearing of four children, her fondness for sweet things, the insidious nips of gin in the clubhouse – in combination they had taken a toll, making clothes as necessary as all that meticulous care with make-up and hair. The first time she’d been pregnant, with Cathal, she had looked at herself in this same looking-glass, assuring herself that the enormous swelling would simply go away, as indeed it had. But nothing would go away now. Flesh hung loosely, marked with pink imprints of straps or elastic. If she slimmed herself to the bone there would be scrawny, empty skin, loops and pockets, hollows as ugly as the bulges. She drew her night-dress over her head and a pattern of pink roses in tight little bunches hid what she preferred not to see, transforming her again into a handsome woman.

Agnew had sensitive skin, yet could not resist the quality of finely woven tweed. He chose the sober colours, the greys and browns and inconspicuous greens. He bought his Donegal tweed in Kevin and Howlin’s in Dublin and had the suits made up by a tailor in Rathmines. Because of his sensitive skin he had the trousers lined.

Agnew had never worn these suits to his office in the toy factory, for they did not seem to him to be sufficiently matter-of-fact for business. He wore them at weekends, when he went to church and on Sunday afternoons when he drove out to Rathfarran and walked around the cliffs, ending up in Lynch’s Bar down by the strand, where by arrangement he took his Sunday supper. He wore them also on the weekends when he went to Dublin.

He would miss the cliffs and the strand, he reflected at breakfast one morning, a few weeks after his visit from Mrs O’Neill. He would miss the toy factory too, of course, and the people he had come to know in a passing kind of way, without intimacy or closeness but yet agreeably. In the snug, overcrowded dining-room of the terraced house called St Kevin’s he broke a piece of toast in half and poured himself more tea. He had been fortunate in St Kevin’s, fortunate because he was the only lodger and because the Misses McShane had never sought to share a meal with him, fortunate that the house was clean and the cooking averagely good. He’d been fortunate that his interest had never flagged in the job at the toy factory. He would take away with him a sample of every single wooden toy that had been manufactured during his time there: the duck with the quivering bill, the kangaroos, the giraffes, the little red steam engines, the donkeys and carts, the bricks, the elephants, the fox-terriers on wheels, and all the others. He was proud of these toys and of his part in their production. They were finer in every possible way – more ingeniously designed, constructed with greater craftsmanship, more fondly finished – than the torrent of shoddiness that had flooded them out of existence.

‘I’ll miss you too,’ he said aloud in the overcrowded dining-room, staring down at the spaniel, Mandy, who was wagging her tail in the hope of receiving a rind of bacon. She would eat rinds only if they were so brittle that they broke between her teeth. This morning, Agnew knew, what he had left would not satisfy her: the bacon had not been overdone. He lit a cigarette, folded the Irish Times, which earlier he had been reading, and left the dining-room, pursued by the dog. ‘I’m off now, Miss McShane,’ he called out in the hall, and one of the sisters called back to him from the kitchen. Mandy, as she always did, followed him through the town to the toy factory, turning back when he reached the forecourt.

A woman called Mrs Whelan, who came to the factory three mornings a week to attend to whatever typing there was and to keep the books up to date, was to finish at the end of the week. She was there this morning, a prim, trim presence in navy-blue, conscientiously tapping out the last of the invoices. The final delivery was due to be dispatched that afternoon, for Cathal O’Neill had already laid down the peremptory instruction that further orders must not be accepted.

‘Good morning, Mrs Whelan.’

‘Good morning, sir.’

Interrupted for the briefest of moments, she went on typing. She would be extremely useful to someone else, Agnew reflected, if she managed to find a position that suited her. ‘I think I’m going to start clearing out the inner office,’ he said, passing into it reluctantly, for it was not a task he anticipated with any pleasure. What on earth was he going to do with himself? Fifty-one was far too young simply to retire, even if he could afford to. It was all very well saying he couldn’t see himself in the fuel business, either coal or turf, but what alternative was there going to be? In the failing toy factory he had had a position, he had been of some small importance, and he had often wondered if he himself–and the predicament he must find himself in when the factory closed – hadn’t been an element in his late employer’s sentiment. Had Mr O’Neill lived, the toy factory might have struggled on until a convenient moment was reached, when its manager might gracefully retire. Still, a father’s sentiment rarely passed to a son, nor could it be expected to.

He took his jacket off and hung it up. As he did so the telephone rang and the widow of his late and sentimental employer invited him to what she described as a very small party on Friday evening. It would be in his honour, he said to himself after he had politely accepted. It was the kind of thing people did; there might even be a presentation, in the conventional way, of cutlery or Waterford glass or a clock.

‘Now, this is bloody ridiculous!’ Cathal glared at his mother, squinting in his extreme rage.

She remembered that squint in his pram. She remembered how his face would turn scarlet before exploding like a volcano, how he would beat his fists against her when she tried to lift him up. His father had had a bad temper also, though over the years she had learnt to ignore it.

‘It isn’t ridiculous at all, Cathal,’

‘You are fifty-nine years of age.’

‘I’m only too well aware of that.’

‘Agnew’s our employee, for God’s sake!’ He said something else and then broke off, his shout becoming an incomprehensible stutter. He began again, calming down and collecting himself. ‘My God, when I think of Agnew!’

‘I invited Basil Agnew –’

‘Basil? Basil?’

‘You knew his name was Basil. B.J. Agnew. It’s oh all the letters.’

‘In no way did I know the man’s name was Basil. I didn’t know what his bloody name was.’

‘Don’t be violent, Cathal.’

‘Aw, for God’s sake now!’ He turned away from her. He crossed the Italianate drawing-room and stood with his back to her, morosely looking out of the window.

‘I invited Basil Agnew to a little evening I had and he stayed on afterwards to help me clear up a bit. The Flanagans were there, and the Fitzfynnes and a few others. It was all quite above board, Cathal. Father Doherty was there, quite happy with the arrangement.’

‘You were seen out at Rathfarran with Agnew. You were in Lynch’s with him.’

‘That was later on, the following Sunday week it was. And of course we were in Lynch’s. We had two glasses of whiskey each in Lynch’s, and then we had our supper there.’

‘Will you for God’s sake examine what you’re doing? You hardly know Agnew.’

‘I’ve known him for seventeen years.’

Cathal mentioned his father, who, God rest him, would be disgusted if he knew, and probably he did know. He could not understand, Cathal repeated for the third time in this tempestuous conversation, how any sane woman could behave like this.

‘Well, I have behaved like this, Cathal. I have been asked a question by Basil Agnew and I have answered in the affirmative. I wanted to tell you before I spoke a word to Father Doherty.’

‘Agnew’s a Protestant.’

‘We’ll be married by Father Doherty. Basil isn’t the least particular about matters like that.’

‘I bet he isn’t. The bloody man –’

‘I must ask you, Cathal, not to keep referring to Basil Agnew as a bloody man. I do not refer to Thelma as a bloody woman. When you informed me in this very room that you intended to marry her I held my peace.’

‘The man’s after your money and that’s all there’s to it.’

‘You’re being unpleasant, Cathal.’

He almost spat. As a child, he had had a most disagreeable habit of spitting. His eyes savaged her as he continued violently to upbraid her and to insult the man she had agreed to marry. He left eventually, barging his way out of the drawing-room, shouting back at her from the hall before he barged his way out of the house.

That evening her two married daughters, Eileen in Dublin and Rose in Trim, telephoned her. They were more diplomatic than Cathal, as they had always been. They beseeched her not to be hasty; both offered to come and talk it over with her. She had written to them, she said; she was sorry Cathal had taken it upon himself to get in touch also, since she had particularly asked him not to. ‘It’s all in my letter,’ she assured her daughters in turn. ‘Everything about how I feel and how I’ve thought it carefully over.’ The two men they’d married themselves were, after all, no great shakes. If you were honest you had to say that, one of them little better than a commercial traveller, the other reputed to be the worst veterinary surgeon in Trim. Yet she hadn’t made much of a fuss when Eileen first brought her mousy little Liam to Arcangelo House, nor over Rose’s Eddie, a younger version of Dessie Fitzfynne, with the same stories about Kerrymen and the same dull bonhomie. ‘It’ll work out grand,’ she said to her daughters in turn. ‘Was I ever a fool in anything I did?’

The following morning Thelma came round and in her crude way said how flabbergasted she was. She sat there with her vacant expression and repeated three times that you could have knocked her down with a feather when Cathal had walked in the door and informed her that his mother was intending to marry Agnew. ‘I couldn’t close my mouth,’ Thelma said. ‘I was stirring custard in the kitchen and declare to God didn’t the damn stuff burn on me. “She’s after getting engaged to Agnew,” he said, and if you’d given me a thousand pounds I couldn’t go on with the stirring.’

Thelma’s rigmarole continued, how Cathal had stormed about the kitchen, how he’d shouted at the children and knocked a pot of black-currant jam on to the floor with his elbow, how she’d had to sit down to recover herself. Then she lowered her voice as if there were other people in her mother-in-law’s drawing-room. ‘Isn’t there a lot of talk, though, about what Agnew gets up to when he goes off to Dublin for the two days? Is it women he goes after?’ While she spoke, Thelma nodded vehemently, answering her own question. She’d heard it for certain, she continued in the same subdued voice, that Agnew had women of a certain description up in Dublin.

‘That’s tittle-tattle, Thelma.’

‘Ah sure, I’d say it was, all right. Still and all, Mrs O’Neill.’

‘What Mr Agnew does with his own time is hardly the business of anyone except himself.’

‘Ah sure, of course ’tisn’t. It’s only Cathal and myself was wondering.’

The moon that was Thelma’s face, its saucer eyes and jammy red mouth, the nose that resembled putty, was suddenly closer than Mrs O’Neill found agreeable. It was a way that Thelma had when she was endeavouring to be sincere.

‘I had an uncle married late. Sure, the poor man ended demented.’

You are the stupidest creature God ever put breath into, Mrs O’Neill reflected, drawing herself back from her daughter-in-law’s advancing features. She did not comment on Thelma’s uncle any more than she had commented on the burning of the custard or the loss of the pot of blackcurrant jam.

‘You know what I mean, Mrs O’Neill?’ The subdued tones became a whisper. ‘A horse-trainer’s widow in Fortarlingtôn that went after the poor old devil’s few pence.’

‘Well, I’m most certainly not after Mr Agnew’s few pence.’

‘Ah no, I’m not saying that at all. I’d never say a thing like that, Mrs O’Neill, what you’d be after or what he’d be after. Sure, where’d I find the right to make statements the like of that?’

Thelma eventually went away. She would have been sent by Cathal, who would also have written to Siobhan. But Siobhan had always possessed a mind of her own and in due course a letter arrived from Philadelphia. I’m delighted altogether at the news. I kind of hoped you’d do something like this.

It had never, in the past, occurred to Agnew to get married. Nor would he have suggested it to his late employer’s wife if he hadn’t become aware that she wished him to. Marriage, she had clearly decided, would be the rescuing of both of them: she from her solitariness in Arcangelo House, he from the awkwardness of being unemployed. She had said she would like him to oversee the demolition of the toy factory and the creation of an apple orchard in its place. This enterprise was her own and had nothing to do with Cathal.

The women she played bridge with still addressed him friendlily when he met them on the street or in a shop. Her golfing companions – especially Flanagan and Fitzfynne – had even been enthusiastic. Butler-Regan had slapped him on the shoulders in the bar of the Commercial Hotel and said he was glad it hadn’t been Corkin she’d gone for. Only Corkin had looked grumpy, not replying to Agnew’s greeting when they met in Lawlor’s one morning, both of them buying cigarettes. Dolores Fitzfynne telephoned him at the toy factory and said she was delighted. It was a good idea to plant an apple orchard on the site of the factory – Cox’s and Beauty of Bath, Russets and Bramleys and Worcesters. In the fullness of time the orchard would become her own particular interest, as the toys had been her husband’s and the turf-bogs were her son’s. It was a pity the family were almost all opposed to the match, but naturally such a reaction was to be expected.

She was aware of eyes upon them when they danced together in the clubhouse bedecked with Christmas decorations. What did these people really think? Did all of them share, while appearing not to, the family’s disapproval? Did fat Butler-Regan and fat Flanagan think she was ridiculous, at fifty-nine years of age, to be allowing a man to marry her for her money? Did Dolores Fitzfynne think so? Mrs Whelan, who had been his secretary for so long at the toy factory, always attended the Golf Club Annual Dance with her husband; the Misses McShane, his landladies for the same period of time in the terraced house called St Kevin’s, came to help with the catering. Did these three women consider her beneath contempt because she’d trapped a slightly younger, attractive man as a companion for her advancing years?

‘I’ve always liked the way you dance the quickstep,’ she whispered.

‘Always?’

‘Yes, always.’

The confession felt disgraceful. Cathal and Thelma, dancing only yards away, would talk all night about it if they knew. With Corkin, she wouldn’t have had to be unfaithful in that way.

‘You’re not entirely devoid of rhythm yourself.’

‘I’ve always loved dancing, actually.’

Corkin would have asked for more, and for less. Some hint of man’s pride would have caused him scrupulously to avoid touching a penny of her money, nor would he have wanted to go planting apple trees under her direction. But Corkin would have entered her bedroom and staked his claim there, and she could not have borne that.

‘We’ll be married this time next week,’ he said, ‘Do you realize that?’

‘Unless you decide to take to the hills.’

‘No, I’ll not do that, Norah.’

The Artie Furlong Band, new to the clubhouse this year and already reckoned to be a success, played an old tune she loved, ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’. His step changed easily, he scarcely touched her as he guided her through the other dancers. Sweetman was appalling to dance with because of his perspiration troubles, Dessie Fitzfynne’s knees were always driving themselves into you, Butler-Regan held you far too tight. She’d go on playing bridge and golf after they were married, no reason not to. He’d said he intended to continue exercising the Misses McShane’s spaniel.

‘You’re sure about this?’ he whispered, bending his long face closer to hers, smiling a little. ‘You’re absolutely sure, Norah?’

She remembered thinking how she couldn’t imagine him ever calling her Norah, and how strange his own Christian name had felt when first she’d used it. She would never know him, she was aware of that; nor could he ever fully know her. There would never be the passion of love between them; all that must be done without.

‘I’m sure all right.’

The music ceased. They went to get a drink and were joined immediately by the Fitzfynnes and Rita Flanagan. Thelma came up and said one of the children had spots all over his stomach. Cathal kept his distance.

‘We’re drinking to the happy couple,’ Dessie Fitzfynne shouted, raising his glass. Thelma scuttled away, as if frightened to be seen anywhere near such a toast.

‘Cheers to the both of you,’ Rita Flanagan shrilled, and in another part of the decorated clubhouse Butler-Regan began to sing.

She smiled at the glasses that were raised towards them. ‘That’s very kind of you,’ he said quietly. ‘We’re touched.’

She would have liked to add something, to have sorted out falsity from the truth. He was indeed marrying her for her money. But he, in return, was giving her a role that money could not purchase. Within a week the family would no longer possess her. Cathal’s far-apart eyes would no longer dismiss her as a remnant of the dead.

‘We’re going to have an orchard, you know, where the toy factory is now.’

They looked a bit surprised, at first not quite grasping her meaning and then wondering why she should mention an orchard just then.

‘Our wedding present to one another,’ he explained. ‘Norah’s trees and I shall tend them.’

The band struck up again, drowning the raucous singing of Butler-Regan. Cathal at last approached his mother and asked her to dance, as every year he did on this Christmas occasion. But he did not at last say that he hoped it would work out all right, Agnew and herself in Arcangelo House. She had paid some price, Cathal believed, apart from the financial one. But Cathal, really, was not right and for him, too, she would have liked to sort out falsity from the truth.

‘Well, that is that,’ he said, turning off the television on a Sunday night, after he had returned from Dublin. He lurched a little as he moved towards her, holding out his packet of cigarettes. He had said, before their marriage, that he often became intoxicated in the course of these weekends. He met his friends and they went from place to place, all of them men who enjoyed the company of men. Sometimes, left alone, or unlucky in the new companions he had met, he wandered the quaysides of the city, thinking about the sailors on the ships. On the strand at Rathfarran his face had been averted when he told her this, and when he finished she had not spoken. Dessie Fitzfynne and Sweetman liked men’s company also, she had thought, and so had her husband in his lifetime. But that, of course, was not the same.

‘I don’t think I’ll go back there.’ He swayed, like Flanagan did in drink. ‘God knows, I don’t want to.’

He always said that. He always offered her a cigarette after turning off the Sunday television. A moment later he made the renunciatory statement.

‘It doesn’t matter.’ She tried to smile, imagining him in the public houses he had told her about, his dignified presence mocked by a man who was once particularly his friend, a waiter who no longer liked him.

‘I dread for your sake that someone will find out one of these days. I hadn’t thought of that when we married.’

‘I knew what I was doing. You told me the truth, and you’re honourable for that.’

When he’d told her she had not confessed a truth as well: that clothes and make-up disguised a loss she found it hard to bear. She was haunted by herself, by the beauty that had been there in a hotel in Bray. Lingering in the clubhouse on these Sunday nights, she drank more gin and French than usual, knowing he would be tipsy, too, when he returned. Once they’d fallen asleep in their chairs, and she’d woken up at twenty past three and crept away to bed. He’d seemed like a child, one arm hanging down, fingers resting on the carpet. On the strand at Rathfarran he’d told her he never wanted to go to sleep on these Sunday nights because he hated waking up so. In his bedroom at St Kevin’s, the door locked against indiscreet entrance by one or other of the Misses McShane, he had sat with the whiskey bottle he’d bought for the purpose in Dublin. She’d listened while he’d told her that; concerning herself, there’d been no need to say what she might have said because, being the man he was, he guessed.

They passed together through the hall of Arcangelo House and mounted the stairs to their separate bedrooms. They paused before they parted, offering in their tipsiness a vague, unstated reassurance. Tomorrow none of this would be mentioned; their common ground would not be traversed on a mundane Monday morning. For a moment on the landing outside their bedrooms they spoke of the orchard that would replace the toy factory, and the trees they would watch growing up.