Collected Stories

The Third Party

The two men met by arrangement in Buswell’s Hotel. The time and place had been suggested by the man who was slightly the older of the two; his companion had agreed without seeking an adjustment. Half past eleven in the bar: ‘I think we’ll probably spot one another all right,’ the older man had said. ‘Well, she’ll have told you what I look like.’

He was tall, acquiring bulkiness, a pinkish-brown sunburn darkening his face, fair curly hair that was turning grey. The man he met was thinner, with spectacles and a smooth black overcoat, a smaller man considerably. Lairdman this smaller man was called; the other’s name was Boland. Both were in their early forties.

‘Well, we’re neither of us late,’ Boland said in greeting, the more nervous of the two. ‘Fergus Boland. How are you?’

They shook hands. Boland pulled out his wallet. ‘I’ll have a Jameson myself. What’ll I get you?’

‘Oh, only a mineral. This time of day, Fergus. A lemonade.’

‘A Jameson and a lemonade,’ Boland ordered.

‘Sure,’ the barman said.

They stood by the bar. Boland held out a packet of cigarettes. ‘D’you smoke?’

Lairdman shook his head. He cocked an elbow on to the bar, arranging himself tidily. ‘Sorry about this,’ he said.

They were alone except for the barman, who set their two glasses in front of them. They weren’t going to sit down; there was no-move to do so. ‘A pound and tenpence,’ the barman said, and Boland paid him. Boland’s clothes – tweed jacket and corduroy trousers – were wrinkled: he’d driven more than a hundred miles that morning.

‘I mean I’m really sorry,’ Lairdman went on, ‘doing this to anyone.’

‘Good luck.’ Boland raised his glass. He had softened the colour of the whiskey by adding twice as much water. ‘You never drink this early in the day, I suppose?’ he said, constrainedly polite. ‘Well, very wise. That’s very sensible: I always say it.’

‘I thought it mightn’t be a drinking occasion.’

‘I couldn’t face you without a drink in, Lairdman.’

‘I’m sorry about that.’

‘You’ve lifted my wife off me. That isn’t an everyday occurrence, you know.’

‘I’m sorry –’

‘It would be better if you didn’t keep saying that.’

Lairdman, who was in the timber business, acknowledged the rebuke with a sideways wag of his head. The whole thing was awkward, he confessed, he hadn’t slept a wink the night before.

‘You’re a Dubliner, she tells me,’ Boland said, the same politeness to the fore. ‘You make blockboard: there’s money in that, no doubt about it.’

Lairdman was offended. She’d described her husband as clumsy but had added that he wouldn’t hurt a fly. Already, five minutes into the difficult encounter, Lairdman wasn’t so sure about that.

‘I don’t like Dublin,’ Boland continued. ‘I’ll be frank about it. I never have. I’m a small-town man, but of course you’ll know.’

He imagined his wife feeding her lover with information about his provincialism. She liked to tell people things; she talked a great deal. Boland had inherited a bakery in the town he had referred to, one that was quite unconnected with the more renowned Dublin bakery of the same name. A few years ago it had been suggested to him that he should consider retitling his, calling it Ideal Bread and Cakes, or Ovenfresh, in order to avoid confusion, but he saw no need for that, believing, indeed, that if a change should come about it should be made by the Dublin firm.

‘I want to thank you,’ Lairdman said, ‘for taking this so well. Annabella has told me.’

‘I doubt I have an option.’

Lairdman’s lips were notably thin, his mouth a narrow streak that smiled without apparent effort. He smiled a little now, but shook his head to dispel any misconception: he was not gloating, he was not agreeing that his mistress’s husband had no option. Boland was surprised that he didn’t have a little chopped-off moustache, as so many Dublin men had.

‘I thought when we met you might hit me,’ Lairdman said. ‘I remarked that to Annabella, but she said that wasn’t you at all.’

‘No, it isn’t me.’

‘That’s what I mean by taking it well.’

‘All I want to know is what you have in mind. She doesn’t seem to know herself.’

‘In mind?’

‘I’m not protesting at your intentions where my wife is concerned, only asking if you’re thinking of marrying her, only asking if you have some kind of programme. I mean, have you a place up here that’s suitable for her? You’re not a married man, I understand? I’ll have another J.J.,’ Boland called out to the barman.

‘No, I’m not a married man. What we were hoping was that – if you’re agreeable – Annabella could move herself into my place more or less at once. It’s suitable accommodation all right, a seven-room flat in Wellington Road. But in time we’ll get a house.’

‘Thanks,’ Boland said to the barman, paying him more money.

‘That was my turn,’ Lairdman protested, just a little late.

She wouldn’t care for meanness, Boland thought. She’d notice when it began to impinge on her, which in time it would: these things never mattered at first.

‘But marriage?’ he said. ‘It isn’t easy, you know, to marry another man’s wife in Ireland.’

‘Annabella and I would naturally like to be married one day.’

‘That’s what I wanted to put to you. How are you suggesting that a divorce is fixed? You’re not a Catholic, I’m to understand?’

‘No.’

‘No more am I. No more is Annabella. But that hardly matters, one way or another. She’s very vague on divorce. We talked about it for a long time.’

‘I appreciate that. And I appreciated your suggestion that we should meet.’

‘I have grounds for divorce, Lairdman, but a damn bit of use they are to me. A divorce’ll take an age.’

‘It could be hurried up if you had an address in England. If the whole thing could be filed over there we’d be home and dry in no time.’

‘But I haven’t an address in England.’

‘It’s only a thought, Fergus.’

‘So she wasn’t exaggerating when she said you wanted to marry her?’

‘I don’t think I’ve ever known Annabella to exaggerate,’ Lairdman replied stiffly.

Then you don’t know the most important thing about her, Boland confidently reflected – that being that she can’t help telling lies, which you and I would politely refer to as exaggerations. He believed that his wife actually disliked the truth, a rare enough attribute, he imagined, in any human being.

‘I’m surprised you never got married,’ he said, genuinely surprised because in his experience cocky little men like this very often had a glamorous woman in tow. He wondered if his wife’s lover could possibly be a widower: naturally Annabella would not have been reliable about that.

‘I’ve known your wife a long time,’ Lairdman retorted softly, and Boland saw him trying not to let his smile show. ‘As soon as I laid eyes on Annabella I knew she was the only woman who would make sense for me in marriage.’

Boland gazed into his whiskey. He had to be careful about what he said. If he became angry for a moment he was quite likely to ruin everything. The last thing he wanted was that the man should change his mind. He lit a cigarette, again offering the packet to Lairdman, who again shook his head. Conversationally, friendlily, Boland said:

‘Lairdman’s an interesting name – I thought that when she told me.’

‘It’s not Irish. Huguenot maybe, or part of it anyway.’

‘I thought Jewish when she told me.’

‘Oh, undoubtedly a hint of that.’

‘You know the way you’re interested when you’re told about a relationship like that? “What’s his name?” It’s not important, it doesn’t matter in the least. But still you ask it.’

‘I’m sure. I appreciate that.’

When she’d said his name was Lairdman, Boland had remembered the name from his schooldays. Vaguely, he’d guessed that the man she was telling him about was a boy he couldn’t quite place. But knowing the name, he’d recognized in Buswell’s bar the adult features immediately.

‘ “Where did you meet him?” That doesn’t matter either. And yet you ask it.’

‘Annabella and I –’

‘I know, I know.’

At school Lairdman had been notorious for an unexpected reason: his head had been held down a lavatory while his hair was scrubbed with a lavatory brush. Roche and Dead Smith had done it, the kind of thing they tended to do if they suspected uppitiness. Roche and Dead Smith were the bullies of their time, doling out admonitions to new boys who arrived at the school in the summer or winter terms rather than the autumn one, or to boys whose faces they found irritating. Lairdman’s head had been scrubbed with the lavatory brush because he kept his hair tidy with perfumed oil that was offensive to Dead Smith.

‘I think we were at school together,’ Boland said.

Lairdman almost gave a jump, and it was Boland, this time, who disguised his smile. His wife would not have remembered the name of the school in question, not being in the least interested: the coincidence had clearly not been established.

‘I don’t recollect a Boland,’ Lairdman said.

‘I’d have been a little senior to yourself.’ Deliberately, Boland sounded apologetic. ‘But when she said your name I wondered. I was one of the boarders. Up from the country, you know. Terrible bloody place.’

Thirteen boarders there’d been, among nearly a hundred day boys. The day boys used to come noisily up the short, suburban avenue on their bicycles, and later ride noisily away. They were envied because they were returning to warmth and comfort and decent food, because after the weekends they’d talk about how they’d been to the Savoy or the Adelphi or even to the Crystal Ballroom. The boarders in winter would crouch around a radiator in one of the classrooms; in summer they’d walk in twos and threes around the playing-fields. The school matron, a Mrs Porter, was also the cook, but regularly burnt both the breakfast porridge and the barley soup she was given to producing as the main source of sustenance in the evening. An old boy of the school, occupying an attic at the top of a flight of uncarpeted stairs that led out of one of the dormitories, was the junior master, but he appeared to have acquired neither privilege nor distinction through that role: he, too, sat by the radiator in the classroom and dreaded the cooking of Mrs Porter. The bachelor headmaster, a boxer in his time – reputed to have been known in ringside circles as the Belted Earl, an obscurely acquired sobriquet that had remained with him – was a Savonarola-like figure in a green suit, sadistically inclined.

‘Oh, I quite liked the place,’ Lairdman said.

‘You were a day boy.’

‘I suppose it made a difference.’

‘Of course it did.’

For the first time Boland felt annoyed. Not only was the man she’d become involved with mean, he was stupid as well. All this stuff about an address in England, all this stuff about giving up a seven-room flat, when if he had an iota of common sense he’d realize you didn’t go buying houses for the likes of Annabella because in no way whatsoever could you rely on her doing what she said she was going to do.

‘I’ve always thought, actually, it supplied a sound education,’ Lairdman was saying.

The awful little Frenchman who couldn’t make himself understood. O’Reilly-Flood, whose method of teaching history was to give the class the textbook to read while he wrote letters. The mathematics man who couldn’t solve the problems he set. The Belted Earl in his foul laboratory, prodding at your ears with the sharp end of a tweezers until you cried out in pain.

‘Oh, a great place,’ Boland agreed. ‘A fine academy.’

‘We’d probably send our children there. If we have boys.’

‘Your children?’

‘You’d have no objection? Lord no, why should you? I’m sorry, that’s a silly thing to say.’

‘I’ll have another,’ Boland requested of the barman. ‘How about your mineral?’

‘No, I’m OK, thanks.’

This time he did not mention, even too late, that he should pay. Instead he looked away, as if wishing to dissociate himself from an over-indulgence in whiskey on an occasion such as this, before it was yet midday. Boland lit another cigarette. So she hadn’t told him? She’d let this poor devil imagine that in no time at all the seven-room flat in Wellington Road wouldn’t be spacious enough to contain the family that would naturally come trotting along once she’d rid herself of her provincial husband. Of course there’d have to be a divorce, and of course it would have to be hurried up: no one wanted a litter of little bastards in a seven-room flat or anywhere else.

‘Good man, yourself,’ he said to the barman when his whiskey came. If he ended up having too much to drink, as indeed might happen, he’d spend the night in the hotel rather than drive back. But it was early yet, and it was surprising what a heavy lunch could do.

‘I’m sorry about that,’ Lairdman repeated, referring again to his slip of the tongue. ‘I wasn’t thinking.’

‘Ah, for heaven’s sake, man!’

Boland briefly touched him, a reassuring tap on the shoulder. He could hear her telling him that the reason for their childless marriage had long ago been established. ‘Poor old fellow,’ she’d probably said, that being her kind of expression. She’d known before their marriage that she couldn’t have children; in a quarrel long after it she’d confessed that she’d known and hadn’t said.

‘Naturally,’ Lairdman blandly continued, ‘we’d like to have a family.’

‘You would of course.’

‘I’m sorry that side of things didn’t go right for you.’

‘I was sorry myself.’

‘The thing is, Fergus, is it OK about the divorce?’

‘Are you saying I should agree to be the guilty party?’

‘It’s the done thing, as a matter of fact.’

‘The done thing?’

‘If you find it distasteful –’

‘Not at all, of course not. I’ll agree to be the guilty party and we’ll work it out from there.’

‘You’re being great, Fergus.’

The way he was talking, Boland thought, he might have been drinking. There were people who became easy-going, who adopted that same kind of tone, even if they’d only been with someone else who was drinking: he’d often heard that but he’d never believed it. A sniff of someone else’s glass, he’d heard, a vapour in the air.

‘D’you remember the cokeman they used to have there? McArdle?’

‘Where was that, Fergus?’

‘At school.’

Lairdman shook his head. He didn’t remember McArdle, he said. He doubted that he’d ever known anyone of that name. ‘A cokeman?’ he repeated. ‘What kind of a cokeman? I don’t think I know the word.’

‘He looked after the furnace. We called him the cokeman.’

‘I never knew that person at all.’

Other people came into the bar. A tall man in a gaberdine overcoat who opened an Irish Times and was poured a glass of stout without having to order it. An elderly woman and two men who appeared to be her sons. A priest who looked around the bar and went away again.

‘You wouldn’t have noticed McArdle because you weren’t a boarder,’ Boland said. ‘When you’re weekends in a place you notice more.’

‘I’m sorry I don’t remember you.’

‘I wouldn’t expect you to.’

She’d be imagining this conversation, Boland suddenly realized. It was she who had suggested this bar for their meeting, speaking as if she knew it and considered it suitable. ‘I think I’ll go up and see Phyllis,’ she used to say, saying it more often as time went by. Phyllis was a friend she had in Terenure, whose own marriage had ended on the rocks and who was suffering from an internal complaint besides. But of course Phyllis had just been a name she’d used, a stalwart friend who would cover up for her if she needed it. For all he knew, Phyllis might never have been married, her internal system might be like iron. ‘Phone me,’ he used to say, and obediently and agreeably his wife would. She’d tell him how Dublin looked and how Phyllis was bearing up. No doubt she’d been sitting on the edge of a bed in the seven-room flat in Wellington Road.

‘It’s really good of you to come all this way,’ Lairdman said with a hint of finality in his voice, an indication that quite soon now the encounter should be brought to an end. ‘I really appreciate it. I’ll ring Annabella this afternoon and tell her we know where we stand. You won’t mind that, Fergus?’

‘Not at all.’

Boland had often interrupted such a telephone conversation. He would walk into the hall and there she’d be, knees drawn up, on the second step of the stairs, the receiver strung through the banisters. She’d be talking quite normally in her slightly high-pitched voice, but when he stepped through the hall door she’d wave a greeting and begin to whisper, the hand that had waved to him now cupped around the mouthpiece. He’d often wondered what she imagined he thought, or if she achieved some tremor of satisfaction from the hushed twilight of this semi-surreptitious carry-on. The trouble with Annabella was that sooner or later everything in the world bored her. ‘Now, I want to hear,’ she would soon be saying to Lairdman, ‘every single thing since the moment you left the house.’ And the poor man would begin a long history about catching a bus and passing through the entrance doors of his blockboard business, how he had said good morning to the typist and listened to the foreman’s complaint concerning a reprehensible employee, how he’d eaten a doughnut with his eleven O’clock coffee, not as good a doughnut as he’d eaten the day before. Later, in a quarrel, she’d fling it all back at him: who on earth wanted to know about his doughnuts? she’d screech at him, her fingers splayed out in the air so that her freshly applied crimson nail varnish would evenly dry. She had a way of quarrelling when she was doing her nails, because she found the task irksome and needed some distraction. Yet she’d have felt half undressed if her fingernails weren’t properly painted, or if her make-up wasn’t right or her hair just as she wanted it.

‘I’ll be able to say,’ Lairdman was stating with what appeared to be pride, ‘that there wasn’t an acrimonious word between us. She’ll be pleased about that.’

Boland smiled, nodding agreeably. He couldn’t imagine his wife being pleased since she so rarely was. He wondered what it was in Lairdman that attracted her. She’d said, when he’d asked her, that her lover was fun; he liked to go abroad, she’d said, he appreciated food and painting; he possessed what she called a ‘devastating’ sense of humour. She hadn’t mentioned his sexual prowess, since it wasn’t her habit to talk in that way. ‘Will you be taking those cats?’ Boland had inquired. ‘I don’t want them here.’ Her lover would willingly supply a home for her Siamese cats, she had replied, both of which she called ‘Ciao’. Boland wondered if his successor even knew of their existence.

‘I wonder what became,’ he said, ‘of Roche and Dead Smith?’

He didn’t know why he said it, why he couldn’t have accepted that the business between them was over. He should have shaken hands with Lairdman and left it at that, perhaps saying there were no hard feelings. He would never have to see the man again; once in a while he would feel sorry for the memory of him.

‘Dead Smith?’ Lairdman said.

‘Big eejit with a funny eye. There’s a barrister called Roche now; I often wonder if that’s the same fellow.’

‘I don’t think I remember either of them.’

‘Roche used to go round in a pin-striped blue suit. He looked like one of the masters.’

Lairdman shook his head. ‘I’ll say cheerio, Fergus. Again, my gratitude.’

‘They were the bright sparks who washed your hair in a lavatory bowl.’

Boland had said to himself over and over again that Lairdman was welcome to her. He looked ahead to an easy widower’s life, the house she had filled with her perversities and falsehoods for the last twelve years as silent as a peaceful sleep. He would clear out the memories of her because naturally she wouldn’t do that herself – the hoarded magazines, the empty medicine bottles, the clothes she had no further use for, the cosmetics she’d pitched into the corners of cupboards, the curtains and chair-covers clawed by her cats. He would get Molloy in to paint out the rooms. He would cook his own meals, and Mrs Coughlan would still come every morning. Mrs Coughlan wouldn’t be exactly sorry to see the back of her, either.

‘I don’t know why,’ Lairdman said, ‘you keep going on about your schooldays.’

‘Let me get you a decent drink before you go. Bring us two big ones,’ he called out to the barman, who was listening to an anecdote the man in the gaberdine coat was retailing at the far end of the bar.

‘No, really,’ Lairdman protested. ‘Really now.’

‘Oh, go on, man. We’re both in need of it.’

Lairdman had buttoned his black overcoat and drawn on a pair of black leather gloves. Finger by finger he drew one of the gloves off again. Boland could feel him thinking that, for the sake of the woman who loved him, he must humour the cuckold.

‘It takes it out of you,’ Boland said. ‘An emotional thing like this. Good luck to you.’

They drank, Lairdman seeming awkward now because of what had been said. He looked a bit like a priest, Boland thought, the black attire and the way he wore it. He tried to imagine the pair of them abroad, sitting down together in a French restaurant, Lairdman being pernickety about a plate of food he didn’t like the look of. It didn’t make sense, all this stuff about a devastating sense of humour.

‘I only mentioned the school,’ Boland said, ‘because it was the other thing we had in common.’

‘As a matter of fact, I’m a governor up there now.’

‘Ah, go on!’

‘That’s why I said we’d maybe send the children there.’

‘Well, doesn’t that beat the band!’

‘I’m pleased myself. I’m pleased they asked me.’

‘Sure, anyone would be.’

Stupid he might be, Boland thought, but he was cute as well, the way he’d managed not to make a comment on the Roche and Dead Smith business. Cuteness was the one thing you could never get away from in Dublin. Cute as weasels they were.

‘You don’t remember it?’ he prompted.

‘What’s that?’

‘The lavatory thing.’

‘Look here, Boland –’

‘I’ve offended you. I didn’t mean that at all.’

‘Of course you haven’t offended me. It’s just that I see no point in harping on things like that.’

‘We’ll talk of something else.’

‘Actually, I’m a bit on the late side.’

The second glove was again drawn on, the buttons of the smooth black overcoat checked to see that all was well for the street. The glove was taken off again when Lairdman remembered there’d have to be a handshake.

‘Thanks for everything,’ he said.

For the second time, Boland surprised himself by being unable to leave well alone. He wondered if it was the whiskey; the long drive and then the whiskey on top of an empty stomach because of course there hadn’t been anything in the house for his breakfast when he’d gone to look, not even a slice of bread. ‘I’ll come down and do you scrambled eggs and a few rashers,’ she’d said the night before. ‘You’ll need something inside you before you set off.’

‘I’m interested in what you say about sending your children there,’ was what he heard himself saying. ‘Would these be your and Annabella’s children you have in mind?’

Lairdman looked at him as if he’d gone out of his senses. His narrow mouth gaped in bewilderment. Boland didn’t know if he was trying to smile or if some kind of rictus had set in.

‘What other children are there?’ Lairdman shook his head, still perplexed. He held his hand out, but Boland did not take it.

‘I thought those might be the children you had in mind,’ he said.

‘I don’t follow what you’re saying.’

‘She can’t have children, Lairdman.’

‘Ah now, look here –’

‘That’s a medical fact. The unfortunate woman is incapable of mothering children.’

‘I think you’re drunk. One after another you’ve had. I thought it a moment ago when you got maudlin about your schooldays. Annabella’s told me a thing or two, you know.’

‘She hasn’t told you about the cats she’s going to spring on you. She hasn’t told you she can’t give birth. She hasn’t told you she gets so bored her face turns white with fury. It’s best not to be around then, Lairdman. Take my tip on that.’

‘She’s told me you can’t stay sober. She’s told me you’ve been warned off every racecourse in Ireland.’

‘I don’t go racing, Lairdman, and apart from occasions like this I hardly drink at all. A lot less than our mutual friend, I can promise you that.’

‘You have been unable to give Annabella children. She’s sorry for you, she doesn’t blame you.’

‘Annabella was never sorry for anyone in her life.’

‘Now look here, Boland –’

‘Look nowhere, man. I’ve had twelve years of the woman. I’m obliging you by stepping aside. But there’s no need for this talk of divorce, Lairdman, in England or anywhere else. I’m just telling you that. She’ll come and live with you in your seven-room flat; she’ll live in any house you care to buy, but if you wait till kingdom come you’ll not find children trotting along. All you’ll have is two Siamese cats clawing the skin off you.’

‘You’re being despicable, Boland.’

‘I’m telling you the truth.’

‘You seem to have forgotten that Annabella and myself have talked about all this. She knew you’d take it hard. She knew there’d be bitterness. Well, I understand that. I’ve said I’m sorry.’

‘You’re a mean little blockboard man, Lairdman. You belong with your head held down in a lavatory bowl. Were you wringing wet when they let go of you? I’d love to have seen it, Lairdman.’

‘Will you keep your damn voice down? And will you stop trying to pick a quarrel? I came out this morning in good faith. I’m aware of the delicacy of the thing, and I’m not saying I’ve been a saint. But I’ll not stand here and be insulted. And I’ll not hear Annabella insulted.’

‘I think Dead Smith became a vet.’

‘I don’t care what he became.’

Abruptly, Lairdman was gone. Boland didn’t turn his head, or otherwise acknowledge his departure. He examined the row of bottles behind the bar, and in a moment he lit a fresh cigarette.

For half an hour he remained on his own where his usurper had left him. All he could think of was Lairdman as he remembered him, a boy who was pointed out because of what two bullies had done to him. The old cokeman, McArdle, used to laugh over the incident. Sometimes, when the classroom radiator wasn’t hot enough, the boarders would go down to McArdle’s cokehole and sit around his furnace. He’d tell them obscene stories, all of them to do with the matron and cook, or else he told them about Lairdman. The more Boland thought about it all the more clearly he remembered Lairdman: not much different in appearance, the same trap of a mouth, a propelling pencil and a fountain pen clipped into the pocket of his jacket. He had a bicycle, Boland could remember, a new one that had perhaps replaced an older one, a Golden Eagle. ‘Oh, we met at a party Phyllis gave,’ she had said, but there was no way of knowing how much truth there was in that, presumably none.

Boland ate his lunch in the dining-room of the hotel, among people he did not know, who gave the impression of lunching there regularly. He didn’t have to say he’d take nothing to drink because the waitress didn’t ask him. There was water in a glass jug on the table; he’d be all right for the journey home, he decided.

‘The cod,’ he ordered. ‘Yes, I’ll have the cod. And the cream of celery.’

He remembered a time when the thirteen boarders had smashed a window in an outhouse that no longer had a purpose. Most of the window-panes were broken already, the roof had long ago tumbled in, and one of the walls was so badly split that it had begun to disintegrate. It was forbidden for any boy to enter this small, crumbling building, and the boarders had not done so. They had stood twenty or so yards away throwing stones at the remaining window-panes, as they might have thrown stones at a cockshot. They had meant no harm, and did not realize that an outhouse which was so badly damaged already might be worthy of preservation. Ceremoniously the following morning the Belted Earl had taken his cane to them in the presence of the assembled day boys. Lairdman would have been watching, Boland reflected as he ate his soup: Lairdman might have brought it up just as he himself had brought up the other matter, but of course that wasn’t Lairdman’s way. Lairdman considered himself a sophisticate; even in the days of his Golden Eagle he would have considered himself that.

Boland crumbled the bread on his side plate, picking up bits of it between mouthfuls of soup. He saw himself, one day in the future, entering the silence of his house. He saw himself on a summer evening pushing open the french windows of the drawing-room and going out into the garden, strolling among its fuchsia bushes and apple trees. He’d known the house all his life; he’d actually been born in it. Opposite O’Connor Motors, it was the last one in the town, yellow-washed and ordinary, but a house he loved.

‘Did you say the fish, sir?’ the waitress inquired.

‘Yes, I did.’

He’d been married in Dublin, she being the daughter of a Dublin wine merchant. The old man was still alive and so was her mother. ‘You’ve taken on a handful,’ the old man once had said, but he’d said it playfully because in those days Annabella had been a handful to delight in. What they thought of her now Boland had no idea.

‘The plate’s hot, sir,’ the waitress warned.

‘Thanks very much.’

People who’d known him in his childhood had been delighted when he brought her to live among them. They’d stopped him on the street and said he was lucky. They were happy for him: he’d come back from Dublin with a crown of jewels, which was how they saw it. And yet those same people would be delighted when she left. The terrible frustration that possessed her – the denial of children through some mischance within her – turned beauty into wanton eccentricity. It was that that had happened, nothing else.

Slowly he ate his cod, with parsley sauce and cabbage and potatoes. Nobody would mention it much; they’d know what had happened and they’d say to one another that one day, probably, he’d marry again. He wondered if he would. He’d spoken airily of divorce to Lairdman, but in truth he knew nothing of divorce in Ireland these days. A marriage should wither away, he somehow felt, it should rot and die; it didn’t seem quite like a cancer, to be swiftly cut out.

He ordered apple tart and cream, and later coffee came. He was glad it was all over: the purpose of his visit to Dublin had been to set a seal on everything that had happened, and in the encounter that had taken place the seal had at some point been set. The air had been cleared, he had accepted the truth it had been necessary to hear from someone else besides his wife. When first she’d told him he’d wondered if she could possibly be making it all up, and he’d wondered it since. Even while he’d waited in Buswell’s bar he’d said to himself he wouldn’t be surprised if no one turned up.

On the way to the car park two tinker children begged from him. He knew it wasn’t coppers they were after, but his wallet or whatever else they could get their fingers on. One held out a cardboard box, the other pressed close to him, with a rug folded over her hands. He’d seen the trick before; Dublin was like that now. ‘Go on, along with you,’ he ordered them as harshly as he could.

It was because there hadn’t been enough for her to do: he thought that as he eased the car through the heavy city traffic. And from the very start she hadn’t taken to provincial life. A childless woman in a provincial town had all the time in the world to study its limitations. She had changed the furniture around, and had chosen the wallpapers that her Siamese cats had later damaged. But she’d resisted bridge and tennis, and had deplored the absence of even a cinema café. He’d thought he’d understood; so well used to the limitations himself, he was nevertheless aware that the society he had plunged her into was hardly scintillating. He’d driven her as often as he could to Dublin, before she’d taken to going on her own to visit Phyllis. For years he’d known she wasn’t happy, but until she told him he’d never suspected she’d become involved with a man.

He stopped in Mullingar and had a cup of tea. The Dublin evening papers had arrived before him. He read in the Herald that the Italian government had been successfully re-formed after the Achille Lauro incident; the dollar was slipping again; a meat-processing plant was to close in Cork. He dawdled over the paper, not wanting to go home. Lairdman would have telephoned her by now. ‘Why don’t you drive up this afternoon?’ he might have said. Maybe she had been packing all day, knowing the encounter was only a formality. ‘He won’t stand in the way,’ Lairdman would have said. ‘He’ll even supply grounds.’ There’d be nothing to keep her, now that all three of them knew where they stood, and it was the kind of thing she’d do, pack up and go when she’d got him out of the way.

A coal fire was burning in the café. A rare welcome these days, he remarked to the woman who’d served him, and pulled a chair up close to it. ‘I’d take another cup of tea,’ he said.

The little white Volkswagen he’d bought her might be on the road to Dublin already. She wouldn’t leave a note because she wouldn’t consider it necessary. If the Volkswagen passed by now she would be puzzled at not meeting him on the road; she’d never notice his own car parked outside the café.

‘Ah well, you’d need a fire,’ the woman said, returning with his tea. ‘A shocking foggy old month we’re having.’

‘I’ve known better certainly.’

He drove on after he’d had a third cup of tea, keeping an eye out for the Volkswagen. Would she greet him with a touch on the horn? Or would he greet her? He didn’t know if he would. Better to wait for the moment.

But over the next fifty or so miles there was no sign of his wife’s car. And of course, he told himself, there was no reason why there should be: it was pure conjecture that she’d depart that afternoon, and the amount she had to pack made it unlikely that she could manage to do so in a day. For the next few miles he speculated on how, otherwise, her departure would be. Would Lairdman drive down to assist her? That had not been agreed upon or even touched upon as a possibility: he would instantly put his foot down if it was suggested. Would Phyllis arrive to help her? He would naturally have no objection to that. Certainly, the more he thought about it, the less likely was it that she could be capable of completing the move on her own. She had a way of calling on other people when something difficult had to be undertaken. He imagined her sitting on the second step of the stairs, chattering on the telephone. ‘Would you ever…?’ she had a way of beginning her demands and her requests.

His headlights caught the familiar sign, in English and Irish, indicating that the town which was his home was the next one. He turned the radio on. ‘Dancing in the dark’, a sensual female voice lilted, reminding him of the world he supposed his wife and Lairdman belonged to; the thrill of illicit love, tête-à-tête dancing, as the song implied. ‘Poor Annabella’, he said aloud, while the music still played. Poor girl, ever to have got herself married to the inheritor of a country-town bakery. Lucky, in all fairness, that cocky little Lairdman had turned up. The music continued, and he imagined them running towards one another along an empty street, like lovers in a film. He imagined their embrace, and then their shared smile before they embraced again. As the dull third party, not even a villain, he had no further part to play.

But as Boland reached the first few houses on this side of the town he knew that none of that was right. Not only had the white Volkswagen not conveyed her to Lairdman in his absence, it would not do so tomorrow or the next day, or next week. It would not do so next month, or after Christmas, or in February, or in the spring: it would not ever do so. It hadn’t mattered reminding Lairdman of the ignominy he had suffered as a boy; it hadn’t mattered reminding him that she was a liar, or insulting him by calling him mean. All that abuse was conventional in the circumstances, an expected element in the man-to-man confrontation, the courage for it engendered by an intake of John Jameson. Yet something had impelled him to go further: little men like Lairdman always wanted children. ‘That’s a total lie,’ she’d have said already on the telephone, and Lairdman would have soothed her. But soothing wasn’t going to be enough for either of them.

Boland turned the radio off. He drew the car up outside Donovan’s public house and sat for a moment, swinging the keys between his thumb and forefinger before going in and ordering a bottle of Smithwick’s with lime. At the bar he greeted men he knew and stood with them drinking, listening to talk of racehorses and politics. They drifted away when a few more drinks had been taken but Boland remained there for a long time, wondering why he hadn’t been able to let Lairdman take her from him.