Collected Stories

In Love with Ariadne

Images cluster, fragments make up the whole. The first of Barney’s memories is an upturned butter-box – that particular shape, narrower at the bottom. It’s in a corner of the garden where the grass grows high, where there are poppies, and pinks among the stones that edge a flowerbed. A dog pants, its paws stretched out on the grass, its tongue trailing from its mouth. Barney picks the pinks and decorates the dog with them, sticking them into its brindle fur. ‘Oh, you are bold!’ The hem of the skirt is blue, the shoes black. The hat Barney has thrown off is placed again on his head. He has a stick shaped like a finger, bent in the middle. It is hard and shiny and he likes it because of that. The sunshine is hot on his skin. There is a baby’s perspiration.

Barney’s mother died three years after his birth, but even so his childhood was not unhappy. In the garden at Lisscrea there was Charlie Redmond to talk to, and Nuala was in the kitchen. Dr G. T. Prenderville the brass plate on the wall by the hall door said, and all over the neighbourhood Barney’s father was known for his patience and his kindness – a big man in a tweed suit, his greying hair brushed straight back, his forehead tanned, a watch-chain looped across his waistcoat. Charlie Redmond made up doggerel, and twice a day came to the kitchen for cups of tea, leaving behind him a basket of peas, or beetroot, or whatever was in season. Because of the slanderous nature of his doggerel, Nuala called him a holy terror.

Lisscrea House, standing by the roadside, was covered with Virginia creeper. There were fields on one side and on the other the Mulpatricks’ cottage. Beyond that was the Edderys’ cottage, and an iron gate which separated it from Walsh’s public house – single-storeyed and whitewashed like the cottages. Opposite, across the road, were the ruins of a square tower, with brambles growing through them. A mile to the west was the Catholic church, behind white railings, with a shrine glorifying the Virgin just inside the gates. All the rooms at Lisscrea were long and narrow, each with a different, flowered wallpaper. In the hall the patients sat on a row of chairs that stretched between the front door and the stairs, waiting silently until Dr Prenderville was ready. Sometimes a man would draw up a cart or a trap outside, or dismount from a bicycle, and the doorbell would jangle urgently. ‘Always listen carefully to what’s said at the door,’ Dr Prenderville instructed Nuala. ‘If I’m out, write a message down.’

When Barney was seven he went to school in Ballinadra, waiting every morning on the road for Kilroy’s cart on its way to Ballinadra creamery with churns of milk. The bread van brought him back in the afternoon, and none of that changed until he was allowed to cycle – on Dr Prenderville’s old B.S.A. with its saddle and handle-bars lowered. ‘Up the airy mountain,’ Miss Bone’s thin voice enunciated in the schoolroom. Her features were pale, and slight; her fingers stained red with ink. There goes Miss Bone, Charlie Redmond’s cruel doggerel recorded. She’s always alone. Miss Bone was tender-hearted and said to be in love with Mr Gargan, the school’s headmaster, a married man. Quod erat demonstrandum, Mr Gargan regularly repeated in gravelly tones.

On the Sunday before he made the journey to school on the B.S.A. for the first time Barney found his father listening to the wireless in the drawing-room, a thing he never did on a Sunday morning. Nuala was standing in the doorway with a dishcloth in her hand, listening also. They’d have to buy in tea, she said, because she’d heard it would be short, and Dr Prenderville said they’d have to keep the curtains drawn at night as a protection against being bombed from an aeroplane. Charlie Redmond had told Barney a few days before that the Germans were hard cases. The Germans were in league with the Italians, who ate stuff that looked like string. De Valera, Charlie Redmond said, would keep the country out of things.

The war that began then continued for the duration of Barney’s time at school. Lisscrea was affected by the shortages that Nuala had anticipated; and de Valera did not surrender the will to remain at peace. It was during those years that Barney decided to follow in his father’s and his grandfather’s footsteps and become the doctor at Lisscrea.

‘How’re the digs?’ Rouge Medlicott asked, and the Pole, Slovinski, again beckoned the waitress – not because he required more coffee but because he liked the look of her.

‘Awful,’ Barney said. ‘I’m moving out.’

When he’d arrived in Dublin at the beginning of the term he found he had not been allocated a set of College rooms and had been obliged to settle for unsatisfactory lodgings in Dún Laoghaire. Greyhounds cluttered the stairs of this house, and broke into a general barking on imagined provocation. Two occupied a territory they had made their own beneath the dining-room table, their cold noses forever investigating whatever flesh they could find between the top of Barney’s socks and the turn-ups of his trousers. Rouge Medlicott and Slovinski shared College rooms and at night pursued amorous adventures in O’Connell Street, picking up girls who’d been left in the lurch outside cinemas or ice-cream parlours.

‘Why doesn’t she come to me?’ Slovinski demanded crossly, still waving at the waitress.

‘Because you’re bloody ugly,’ Medlicott replied.

Students filled the café. They shouted to one another across plates of iced buns, their books on the floor beside their chairs, their gowns thrown anywhere. Long, trailing scarves in black and white indicated the extroverts of the Boat Club. Scholars were recognized by their earnest eyes, sizars by their poverty. Nigerians didn’t mix. There were tablefuls of engineers and medical practitioners of the future, botanists and historians and linguists, geographers and eager divinity students. Rouge Medlicott and Slovinski were of an older generation, two of the many ex-servicemen of that time. Among these were G.I.s and Canadians and Czechs, a couple of Scots, a solitary Egyptian, and balding Englishmen who talked about Cecil Sharp or played bridge.

‘You meet me tonight,’ Slovinski suggested in a peremptory manner, having at last succeeded in summoning the waitress. ‘What about tonight?’

‘Tonight, sir?’

‘We’ll have oysters in Flynn’s.’

‘Oh God, you’re shocking, sir!’ cried the waitress, hurrying away.

Barney had got to know Slovinski and Rouge Medlicott through sitting next to them in biology lectures. He didn’t think of them as friends exactly, but he enjoyed their company.

Medlicott had acquired his sobriquet because of the colour of his hair, a quiff of which trailed languorously over his forehead. There was a hint of flamboyance in his attire – usually a green velvet suit and waistcoat, a green shirt and a bulky green tie. His shoes were of soft, pale suede. He was English, and notably good-looking. Slovinski was small and bald, and still wore military uniform – a shade of blue – which Medlicott claimed he had bought in a Lost Property office. Slovinski could play part of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on his teeth, with his thumbnails.

‘I heard of digs,’ Medlicott said. ‘Out near the Zoo. That Dutch fellow was after them only he decided to go back to Holland instead.’

It was in this casual way that Barney first came to hear about Sinnott Street, and that evening he went out to inspect the lodgings. A woman with a carefully powdered face and waved black hair opened the door to him. A discreet smear of lipstick coloured her lips, and there was a hint of eye-shadow beneath her myopic seeming eyes. She was wearing a flowered overall, which she removed in the hall. Beneath was a navy-blue skirt and a cream-coloured blouse that had a fox-terrier brooch pinned to it. She folded the overall and placed it on the hall-stand. Normally she would not take in boarders, she explained, but the house was too large, really, for herself and her mother and her daughter, just the three of them. A pity to have rooms and not use them, a pity to have them empty. The trouble was that smaller houses were usually not in districts she cared for. She led the way upstairs while still speaking about the house and household. ‘It’s a residence that’s been in the Lenehan family for three generations,’ she said. ‘That’s another consideration.’

The door of a room on the second floor was opened. ‘Fusty,’ Mrs Lenehan said, and crossed to the window. The bed was narrow, the bedstead of ornamental iron. There was a wash-stand with an enamel basin on it and a shaving mirror above it on the wall. There was a wardrobe, a chest of drawers, two holy pictures, and a chair. Patterned, worn linoleum partially covered the floor, leaving a darkly varnished surround. There were net curtains and a blind.

‘The bathroom and W.C. are off the landing below,’ Mrs Lenehan said. In Mr Lenehan’s childhood there were two maids and a cook in this house, she went on, and in her own day there’d always been a single maid at least, and a scrubbing woman once a fortnight. Now you couldn’t get a servant for love nor money. She noticed Barney glancing at the fireplace, which contained an arrangement of red tissue paper. She said that in the old days there’d have been a fire laid in the grate every morning and coal blazing cheerfully every evening. Now, of course, that was out of the question. ‘Thirty shillings would be fair, would it? Breakfast and six p.m. tea, the extra meal on a Sunday.’

Barney said he thought thirty shillings was a reasonable rent for what was offered.

‘Of a Friday evening, Mr Prenderville. In advance would be fair, I think.’

‘Yes, it would.’

‘Best to have a clear arrangement, I always say. No chance for mis-understandings.’

Two days later Barney moved in. When he’d unpacked his suitcases and was waiting for the gong which Mrs Lenehan had told him would sound at six O’clock there was a knock on his door. ‘I’m Ariadne,’ Mrs Lenehan’s daughter said, standing in the doorway with a bar of yellow soap in her hand. ‘My mother said give you this.’ She was dark-haired, about the same age as Barney. The rather long mauve dress she wore was trimmed with black, and snowy-white beads were looped several times around her neck. Her lips were painted, her hands and wrists delicately slender. Large brown eyes surveyed Barney frankly and with curiosity.

‘Thanks very much,’ he said, taking the bar of soap from her.

She nodded vaguely, seeming to be no longer interested in him. Quietly she closed the door, and he listened to her footfall on the stairs. As light as gossamer, he said to himself. He was aware of a pleasurable sensation, a tingling on the skin of his head. The girl had brought to the room a whiff of perfume, and it remained after she’d gone. Barney wanted to close the window to keep it with him, but he also wanted just to stand there.

The sounding of the gong roused him from this pleasant reverie. He had never much cared for the appearance of the girls – women sometimes – whom Medlicott and Slovinski admired in cafés or on the streets. Ariadne was different. There was an old-fashioned air about her, and an unusualness. As well, Barney considered her beautiful.

‘Fennerty’s the name,’ a small, jaunty old woman said in the dining-room. Wiry white hair grew tidily on a flat-looking head; eyes like beads peered at Barney. ‘Fennerty’s the name,’ she repeated. ‘Mrs Lenehan’s mother.’

Barney told her who he was. The last occupant of his room had been employed in Clery’s bed-linen department, she replied, a youth called Con Malley from Carlow. Now that someone had replaced him, the house would again be full. There had been difficulty in regularly extracting the rent from Con Malley. ‘Mrs Lenehan won’t tolerate anything less than promptness,’ the old woman warned.

A man of about fifty, wearing a navy-blue belted overcoat and tan gloves, entered the dining-room. ‘How’re you, Mr Sheehy?’ Mrs Fennerty inquired.

Divesting himself of his coat and gloves and placing them on the seat of a chair by the door, the man replied that he wasn’t so good. He had a sharply receding chin, with features that had a receding look about them also, and closely clipped hair, nondescript as to colour. The removal of his coat revealed a brown pin-striped suit, with the corner of a handerkerchief peeping from the top pocket, and a tiny badge, hardly noticeable, in the left lapel. This proclaimed Mr Sheehy’s teetotalism, the emblem of the Pioneer movement.

‘I had a bad debt,’ Mr Sheehy said, sitting down at the table. Mrs Fennerty vacated a sagging armchair by the fire and took her place also. Ariadne entered with a laden tray, and placed plates of fried food in front of the three diners. Mrs Fennerty said the thick Yorkshire Relish had been finished the evening before, and when Ariadne returned to the dining-room a minute or so later with a metal teapot she brought a bottle of Yorkshire Relish as well. Neither she nor her mother joined the others at the dining-table.

‘Did you know Mattie Higgins?’ Mr Sheehy inquired of Mrs Fennerty. When he spoke he kept his teeth trapped behind his lips, as though nervous of their exposure. ‘I sold him a wireless set. Three pounds fifteen. I had the price agreed with him, only when I brought it round all he had was a five-pound note. “I’ll have that broken into tonight,” he said. “Come back in the morning.” Only didn’t he die that night in his bed?’

Swiftly, the old woman crossed herself. ‘You got caught with that one,’ she said.

‘I was round there at eight o’clock this morning, only the place was in the hands of five big daughters. When I mentioned the wireless they ate the face off of me. A good Pye wireless gone west.’

Mrs Fennerty, still consuming her food, glanced across the room at the radio on the dumb-waiter in a corner. ‘Is it a Pye Mrs Lenehan has?’

‘It is.’

‘I heard the Pye’s the best.’

‘I told that to the daughters. The one I sold him had only a few fag burns on the cabinet. The five of them laughed at me.’

‘I know the type.’

‘Five fat vultures, and your man still warming the bed.’

‘Strumpets.’

The rest of the meal was taken in a silence that wasn’t broken until Ariadne came to clear the table. ‘I meant to have told you,’ she remarked to Barney. ‘Your window gets stuck at the top.’

He said it didn’t matter. He had noticed her mother opening the bottom sash in preference to the top one, he added conversationally. It didn’t matter in the least, he said.

‘The top’s stuck with paint,’ Ariadne said.

Mrs Fennerty returned to her place by the fire. Mr Sheehy put on his navy-blue overcoat and his gloves and sat on the chair by the door. Skilfully, with the glass held at an angle, Mrs Fennerty poured out a bottle of stout that had been placed in the fender to warm. On her invitation, accompanied by a warning concerning hasty digestion, Barney occupied the second fireside armchair, feeling too shy to disobey. Mrs Fennerty lit a cigarette. She was a boarder the same as Mr Sheehy, she said. She paid her way, Mrs Lenehan’s mother or not. That was why she sat down in the dining-room with Mr Sheehy and whoever the third boarder happened to be.

‘Are you at Dowding’s?’ She referred to a commercial college that offered courses in accountancy and book-keeping, preparing its students for the bank and brewery examinations.

‘No. Not Dowding’s.’ He explained that he was a medical student.

‘A doctor buries his mistakes. Did you ever hear that one?’ Mrs Fennerty laughed shrilly, and in a sociable way Barney laughed himself. Mr Sheehy remained impassive by the door. Barney wondered why he had taken up a position there, with his coat and gloves on.

‘Six feet under, no questions asked,’ Mrs Fennerty remarked, again laughing noisily.

Dressed to go out, Mrs Lenehan entered the dining-room, and Mr Sheehy’s behaviour was explained. He rose to his feet, and when the pair had gone Mrs Fennerty said:

‘Those two are doing a line. Up to the McKee Barracks every evening. Sheehy wouldn’t part with the price of anything else. Turn round at the barracks, back by the Guards’ Depot. Then he’s down in the kitchen with her. That’s Ned Sheehy for you.’

Barney nodded, not much interested in Mr Sheehy’s courtship of Mrs Lenehan. Nevertheless the subject was pursued. ‘Ned Sheehy has a post with the Hibernian Insurance. That’s how he’d be selling wireless sets to people. He calls in at houses a lot.’

‘I see.’

‘He’s keen on houses all right. It’s the house we’re sitting in he has designs on, not Mrs Lenehan at all.’

‘Oh, I’m sure –’

‘If there’s a man in Dublin that knows his bricks and mortar better than Ned Sheehy give me a gander at him.’

Barney said he didn’t think he could supply the old woman with such a person, and she said that of course he couldn’t. No flies on Ned Sheehy, she said, in spite of what you might think to look at him.

‘She made a mistake the first time and she’ll make another before she’s finished. You could turn that one’s head like the wind would turn a weather-cock.’

Ariadne came in with the Evening Herald and handed it to her grandmother. Barney smiled at her, but she didn’t notice. Mrs Fennerty became engrossed in the newspaper. Barney went upstairs.

In time, he heard footsteps in the room above his, and knew they were Ariadne’s. They crossed the room to the window. The blind was drawn down. Ariadne crossed the room again, back and forth, back and forth. He knew when she took her shoes off.

Handwritten notes clamoured for attention on the green baize of the board beside the porters’ lodge: love letters, brief lines of rejection, relationships terminated, charges of treachery, a stranger’s admiration confessed. The same envelope remained on the baize-covered board for months: R.R. Woodley, it said, but R.R. Woodley either did not exist or had long since ceased to be an undergraduate. It is hard to find myself the way I am, and to be alone with not a soul to turn to: a heart was laid bare within the dust-soiled envelope, its ache revealed to the general curiosity. But other notes, on torn half-sheets of exercise-paper, remained on the green board for only a few hours, disappearing for ever while they were still fresh.

Within their fire-warmed lodge the porters were a suspicious breed of men, well used to attempted circumvention of the law that began where their own rule did. They wore black velvet jockey caps; one carried a mace on ceremonial occasions. They saw to it that bicycles were wheeled through the vast archway they guarded, and that female undergraduates passed in and out during the permitted hours only, that their book was signed when this was necessary. In the archway itself, posters advertised dances and theatrical productions. Eminent visitors were announced. Societies’ account sheets were published. There were reports of missionary work in Africa.

Beyond this entrance, dark façades loomed around a cobbled square. Loops of chain protected tidily shorn lawns. The Chapel stared stolidly at the pillars of the Examination Hall. Gold numerals lightened the blue face of the Dining Hall clock. A campanile rose fussily.

Barney attended the lectures of Bore McGusty and Professor Makepeace-Green and the elderly Dr Posse, who had been in the medical school in his father’s time. Bore McGusty was a long-winded young man, Professor Makepeace-Green a tetchily severe woman, who particularly objected to Slovinski reading the Daily Sketch during her lectures. The students of Barney’s age keenly took notes and paid attention, but the recent shedding of years of discipline by the ex-servicemen left them careless of their academic obligations. ‘Listen,’ Slovinski regularly invited, interrupting Bore McGusty’s dissertation on the functioning of the bile-ducts by playing Beethoven on his teeth.

The medical students favoured certain public houses: the International Bar, Ryan’s in Duke Street, McFadden’s. After an evening’s drinking they danced in the Crystal Ballroom, or sat around pots of tea in the café attached to the Green cinema, where the private lives of their mentors were breezily speculated upon, and for the most part scorned. On such occasions Slovinski spoke of his wartime liaisons, and Medlicott retailed the appetites of a baker’s widow, a Mrs Claudia Rigg of Bournemouth. For Barney –years later – this time in his life was as minutely preserved as his childhood at Lisscrea. And always, at the heart of the memory, was Mrs Lenehan’s household in Sinnott Street.

‘You’ve maybe not come across the name Ariadne before,’ Mrs Lenehan said one morning in the hall, adding that she’d found it in a story hi Model Housekeeping. Had a son been born instead of a daughter he’d have been christened Paul, that being a family name on her own side. As soon as she’d seen Ariadne written down she’d settled for it.

Barney liked the name also. He thought it suited Mrs Lenehan’s daughter, whom increasingly he found himself thinking about, particularly during the lectures of Bore McGusty and Professor Makepeace-Green. Ariadne, he soon discovered, didn’t go out to work; her work was in her mother’s house and it was there, during the lectures, that he imagined her. She assisted with the cleaning and the preparation of meals, and the washing-up afterwards. She was often on the stairs with a dust-pan and brush; she polished the brass on the front door. Every morning she set the dining-room fire, and lit it every evening. Once in a while she and her mother cleaned the windows.

Mrs Lenehan occasionally sang while she performed her household tasks. Ariadne didn’t. There was no trace of reluctance in her expression, only a kind of vagueness: she had the look of a saint, Barney found himself thinking once, and the thought remained with him. In the dining-room he was usually the last to finish breakfast, deliberately dawdling. Ariadne came in with a tray and, seeing him still at the table, absorbed the time by damping the fire down with wet slack and picking up the mantelpiece ornaments and dusting them. Her elegant hands were as delicate as the porcelain she attended to, and her clothes never varied: the same shade of mauve combined repeatedly with mourner’s black. ‘Good evening, Mr Prenderville,’ she sometimes whispered in the dusk of the hall, a fleeting figure passing from one closed door to another.

After he’d been in the lodgings a month Barney was familiar with every movement in the room above his. When Ariadne left it and did not return within a few minutes he said to himself that she was washing her hair, which he imagined wrapped in a towel, the way Nuala wrapped hers before she sat down to dry it at the range. He imagined the glow of an electric fire on Ariadne’s long, damp tresses. Staring at a discoloured ceiling, he invaded her privacy, investing every sound she made with his speculations. Would she be sewing or embroidering, as Nuala did in the evening? Nuala pressed flowers between the pages of the medical encyclopaedia in the dining-room at Lisscrea, pansies and primulas she asked Charlie Redmond to bring from the garden. Barney wondered if Ariadne did that also. He guessed the moment when she lay down to sleep, and lay in the darkness himself, accompanying her to oblivion.

He didn’t tell Rouge Medlicott and Slovinski, or anyone else, about Ariadne. In his letters to his father he mentioned Mrs Lenehan and Mrs Fennerty and Mr Sheehy: Ariadne mightn’t have existed. Yet in the noisy cafés and the lecture-halls he continued to feel haunted by her, and wished she was there also. He left the house in Sinnott Street reluctantly each morning, and hurried back to it in the evenings.

‘Ariadne.’

He addressed her on the first-floor landing one Sunday afternoon. His voice was little more than a whisper; they were shadows in the dim afternoon light. ‘Ariadne,’ he said again, delighting, while they were alone, in this repetition of her name.

‘Yes, Mr Prenderville?’

Mrs Lenehan and Mr Sheehy spent Sunday afternoons with Mrs Fennerty in the dining-room, listening to a radio commentary on a hurling or Gaelic football match, the only time the dining-room wireless was ever turned on. When it was over Mr Sheehy and Mrs Lenehan went to the kitchen.

‘Would you like to come for a walk, Ariadne?’

She did not reply at once. He gazed through the gloom, hoping for the gleam of her smile. From the dining-room came the faint sound of the commentator’s rapid, excited voice. Ariadne didn’t smile. She said:

‘This minute, Mr Prenderville?’

‘If you are doing nothing better.’

‘I will put on my coat.’

He thought of her mother and Mr Sheehy as he waited. He didn’t know which direction the McKee Barracks and the Civic Guards’ Depot lay in, but wherever these places were he didn’t want even to see them in the distance. ‘I’m ready,’ Ariadne said, having delayed for no longer than a minute. Barney opened the front door softly, and softly closed it behind them. Damp autumn leaves lay thickly on the pavements, blown into mounds and heaps. When the wind gusted, more slipped from the branches above them and gently descended. Ariadne’s coat was another shade of mauve, matching her headscarf. There’d been no need to leave the house in that secret way, but they had done so nonetheless, without exchanging a look.

‘I love Sunday,’ Ariadne said.

He said he liked the day also. He told her about Sundays at Lisscrea because he didn’t know how else to interest her. His father and he would sit reading in the drawing-room on a winter’s afternoon, or in the garden in the summer. Nuala would bring them tea, and a cake made the day before. His father read books that were sent to him by post from a lending library in Dublin, novels by A.E.W. Mason and E. Phillips Oppenheim and Sapper. Once, laying one down when he had finished it, he changed his mind and handed it to Barney. ‘Try this,’ he said, and after that they shared the books that came by post. Barney was fourteen or fifteen then.

‘Your mother is not there, Mr Prenderville?’

‘My mother died.’

He described Lisscrea to her: the long, narrow rooms of the house, the garden where Charlie Redmond had worked for as long as Barney could remember, the patients in the hall. He mentioned the cottages next to Lisscrea House, and Walsh’s public house, and the ruined tower he could see from his bedroom window. He repeated a piece of Charlie Redmond’s doggerel, and described his prematurely wizened features and Nuala’s countrywoman’s looks. He told Ariadne about school at Ballinadra, the journey on the milk cart when he was small, the return by the bread van in the afternoon, and then the inheriting of his father’s old B.S.A. bicycle. She’d never known a town like Ballinadra, Ariadne said; she only knew Dublin.

‘It isn’t much,’ he said, but she wanted to know, and he tried to make a picture of the place for her: the single street and the square, O’Kevin’s hardware, the grocers’ shops that were bars as well, the statue of Father Mathew.

‘A quiet place,’ Ariadne said.

‘Oh, a grave.’

She nodded solemnly. She could see the house, she said. She knew what he meant by Virginia creeper. She could see his father clearly.

‘What would you have done if I hadn’t suggested a walk?’

‘Stayed in my room.’

‘Doing nothing, Ariadne?’ He spoke lightly, almost teasing her. But she was still solemn and did not smile. Maybe tidying her drawers, she said. She called him Mr Prenderville again, and he asked her not to. ‘My name’s Barney.’

‘Just Barney?’

‘Barney Gregory.’

Again she nodded. They walked in silence. He said:

‘Will you always help your mother in the house?’

‘What else would I do?’

He didn’t know. He wanted to suggest some work that was worthy of her, something better than carrying trays of food to the dining-room and sweeping the stair-carpet. Even work in a shop was more dignified than what she did, but he did not mention a shop. ‘Perhaps a nurse.’

‘I would be frightened to be a nurse. I’d be no good at it.’

‘I’m sure you would, Ariadne.’

She would care tenderly. Her gentleness would be a blessing. Her beauty would cheer the low spirits of the ill.

‘Nuns are better at all that,’ she said.

‘Did you go to a convent, Ariadne?’

She nodded, and for a moment seemed lost in the memory the question inspired. When she spoke again her voice, for the first time, was eager. ‘Will we walk to the convent, Barney? It isn’t far away.’

‘If you would like to.’

‘We have to turn right when we come to Prussia Street,’

No one was about. The front doors of the houses they walked by were tightly closed against the world. Their footsteps were deadened by the sodden leaves.

‘I like that colour you wear,’ he said.

‘An aunt left me her clothes.’

‘An aunt?’

‘A great-aunt, Aunt Loretta. Half of them she never wore. She loved that colour.’

‘It suits you.’

‘She used to say that.’

That was why her dresses, and the coat she wore now, were rather long for her. It was her clothes that gave her her old-fashioned air. Had she no clothes of her own? he wondered, but did not ask.

The convent was a cement building with silver-coloured railings in front of it. The blinds were drawn down in several of its windows; lace curtains ensured privacy in the others. A brass letter-box and knocker gleamed on a green side-door.

‘Did you walk here every morning?’ he asked.

‘When I was small my father used to take me. It wasn’t out of his way.’

She went on talking about that, and he formed a picture of her childhood, just as, a few moments ago, she had of his. He saw her, hand in hand with her father, hurrying through the early-morning streets. Her father had worked in Maguire’s coal office in Easter Street. Sometimes they’d call in at a shop for his tobacco, half an ounce of Digger.

When they crossed the street he wanted to take her arm, but he didn’t have the courage. They could walk to a bus stop, he suggested, and wait for a bus to O’Connell Street. They could have tea somewhere, one of the cinema cafes that were open on a Sunday. But she shook her head. She’d have to be getting back, she said.

They turned and walked the way they’d come, past the silent houses. A drizzle began. They didn’t say much else.

*

‘God, there’s talent for you!’ Medlicott exclaimed in the Crystal Ballroom, surveying the girls who stood against the walls. Slovinski conveyed a willowy woman of uncertain age on to the dance-floor, from which, a few minutes later, they disappeared and did not return. Some of the girls who were standing about glanced back at Medlicott, clearly considering him handsome. He approached a lean-featured one with hair the colour of newly polished brass, not at all pretty, Barney considered.

Because he had no knowledge of dance-steps, the partners Barney chose usually excused themselves after a minute or two. ‘What line are you in?’ a plump one, more tolerant than the others, inquired. He said he worked in a dry-cleaner’s, Slovinski having warned him not to mention being a student in case the girls took fright. ‘You can’t dance,’ the plump girl observed, and commenced to teach him.

When the end of the evening came she was still doing so. Medlicott had remained attached to the lean-featured girl, whom he confidently reported he had ‘got going’. Outside the dance-hall Barney heard him complimenting her on her eyes, and felt embarrassed because he didn’t want to have to tell the plump girl that she, too, had lovely eyes, which wouldn’t have been true. Instead, he asked heir her name. ‘May,’ she said.

Medlicott suggested that they should go out to Goatstown in a taxi, since the city bars were closed by now. There were fields in Goatstown, he reminded his companions: after they’d had a couple of nightcaps they could go for a walk through the fields in the moonlight. But May said her father would skin her if she got in late. She took Barney’s arm. Her father was fierce-tempered, she confided.

The lean-faced girl didn’t want to make the journey to Goatstown either, so Medlicott led her into an alleyway. They kissed one another in a doorway while May and Barney stood some distance away. When her father went wild, May said, nothing could hold him. ‘All right,’ Barney heard the lean-faced girl say.

A battered Ford car was parked at the far end of the alleyway next to a skip full of builder’s rubble. Medlicott and his companion approached it, she teetering on gold-coloured high heels. Medlicott opened one of the back doors. ‘Come on in here, darling,’ he invited.

It was difficult to know what to say to May, so Barney didn’t say anything. She talked about her brothers and sisters; half listening, he imagined Ariadne at Lisscrea. He imagined being engaged to her, and introducing her to Nuala in the kitchen and Charlie Redmond in the garden. He saw himself walking along the road with her, and waiting while she attended Mass in the nearby church. He showed her Ballinadra – the rudimentary shops, the statue of Father Mathew in the square.

He glanced at the car and caught a glimpse of brassy hair through the back window. He would introduce her to the tender-hearted Miss Bone. He imagined Miss Bone dismounting from her bicycle outside O’Kevin’s hardware. ‘Welcome to Ballinadra, Ariadne,’ she murmured in her gentle voice.

Three men had turned into the alleyway, and a moment later shouting began. A door of the car was wrenched open; clothing was seized and flung out. One of the lean girl’s gold-coloured shoes bounced over the surface of the alleyway, coming to rest near the skip. ‘Get that hooer out of my car,’ a voice furiously commanded.

In spite of what was happening, Barney couldn’t properly detach himself from his thoughts. He walked with Ariadne, from the town to Lisscrea House. On the way he showed her the Lackens’ farm and the hay-shed where the Black and Tans had murdered a father and a son, and the ramshackle house at the end of a long avenue, where the bread van used to call every day when he got a lift in it back from school, where mad Mrs Boyce lived. Weeds flowered on the verges; it must have been summer.

‘Get out of that bloody car!’

The garments that lay on the ground were pitched into the skip, with the shoe. Medlicott called out incomprehensibly, a humorous observation by the sound of it. ‘D’you want your neck broken?’ the same man shouted back at him. ‘Get out of my property.’

‘I’m off,’ May said, and Barney walked with her to her bus stop, not properly listening while she told him that a girl who would enter a motor-car as easily as that would come to an unsavoury end. ‘I’ll look out for you in the Crystal,’ she promised before they parted.

On the journey back to Sinnott Street Barney was accompanied by an impression, as from a fantasy, of May’s plump body, breasts pressed against his chest, a knee touching one of his, the moist warmth of her palm. Such physical intimacy was not the kind he had ever associated with Ariadne, but as he approached his lodgings he knew he could not let the night pass without the greater reality of seeing her face, without – even for an instant – being again in her company.

When he arrived at Mrs Lenehan’s house he continued to ascend the stairs after he’d reached the landing off which his room lay. Any moment a light might come on, he thought; any moment he would stand exposed and have to pretend he had made a mistake. But the darkness continued, and he switched on no lights himself. Softly, he turned the handle of the door above his, and closed it, standing with his back to the panels. He could see nothing, but so close did the unspoken relationship feel that he half expected to hear his name whispered. That did not happen; he could not hear even the sound of breathing. He remained where he stood, prepared to do so for however many hours might pass before streaks of light showed on either side of the window blinds. He gazed; at where he knew the bed must be, confirmed in this conjecture by the creeping twilight. He waited, with all the passion he possessed pressed into a longing to glimpse the features he had come to love. He would go at once then. One day, in some happy future, he would tell Ariadne of this night of adoration.

But as the room took form – the wardrobe, the bed, the wash-stand, the chest of drawers – he sensed, even before he could discern more than these outlines, that he was alone. No sleeping face rewarded his patience, no dark hair lay on the pillow. The window blinds were not drawn down. The bed was orderly, and covered. The room was tidy, as though abandoned.

Before the arrival of Professor Makepeace-Green the following morning, the episode in the alleyway and Slovinski’s swift spiriting away of the willowy woman from the dance-hall floor were retailed. Barney was commiserated with because he had failed to take his chances. Rouge Medlicott and Slovinski, and several other ex-servicemen, gave him advice as to amorous advancement in the future. His preoccupied mood went unnoticed.

That evening, it was the old woman who told him. When he remarked upon Ariadne’s absence in the dining-room she said their future needs in this respect would be attended to by a maid called Biddy whom Mrs Lenehan was in the process of employing. When he asked her where Ariadne had gone she said that Ariadne had always been religious.

‘Religious?’

‘Ariadne’s working in the kitchen of the convent.’

Mr Sheehy came into the dining-room and removed his navy-blue overcoat and his tan gloves. A few minutes later Mrs Lenehan placed the plates of fried food in front of her lodgers, and then returned with the metal teapot. Mr Sheehy spoke of the houses he had visited during the day, in his capacity as agent for the Hibernian Insurance Company. Mrs Lenehan put her mother’s bottle of stout to warm in the fender.

‘Is Ariadne not going to live here any more?’ Barney asked Mrs Fennerty when Mr Sheehy and Mrs Lenehan had gone out for their walk to the McKee Barracks.

‘I’d say she’ll stop in the convent now. Ariadne always liked that convent.’

‘I know.’

Mrs Fennerty lit her evening cigarette. It was to be expected, she said. It was not a surprise.

‘That she should go there?’

‘After you took Ariadne out, Barney. You follow what I mean?’

He said he didn’t. She nodded, fresh thoughts agreeing with what she had already stated. She poured her stout. She had never called him Barney before.

‘It’s called going out, Barney. Even if it’s nothing very much.’

‘Yes, but what’s that to do with her working in the convent?’

‘She didn’t tell you about Lenehan? She didn’t mention her father, Barney?’

‘Yes, she did.’

‘She didn’t tell you he took his life?’ The old woman crossed herself, her gesture as swift as it always was when she made it. She continued to pour her stout, expertly draining it down the side of the glass.

‘No, she didn’t tell me that.’

‘When Ariadne was ten years old her father took his life in an upstairs room.’

‘Why did he do that, Mrs Fennerty?’

‘He was not a man I ever liked.’ Again she paused, as though to dwell privately upon her aversion to her late son-in-law. ‘Shame is the state Ariadne lives in.’

‘Shame?’

‘Can you remember when you were ten, Barney?’

He nodded. It was something they had in common, he’d said to Ariadne, that for both of them a parent had died. Any child had affection for a father, Mrs Fennerty was saying.

‘Why did Mr Lenehan take his life?’

Mrs Fennerty did not reply. She sipped her stout. She stared into the glow of the fire, then threw her cigarette end into it. She said Mr Lenehan had feared arrest.

‘Arrest?’ he repeated, stupidly.

‘There was an incident on a tram.’ Again the old woman blessed herself. Her jauntiness had left her. She repeated what she’d told him the first evening he sat with her: that her daughter was a fool where men were concerned. ‘At that time people looked at Ariadne on the street. When the girls at the convent shunned her the nuns were nice to her. She’s never forgotten that.’

‘What kind of an incident, Mrs Fennerty?’

‘A child on a tram. They have expressions for that kind of thing. I don’t even like to know them.’

He felt cold, even though he was close to the fire. It was as though he had been told, not of the death of Ariadne’s father but of her own. He wished he had taken her arm when they went for their walk. He wished she’d said yes when he’d suggested they should have tea in a cinema café. Not so long ago he hadn’t even known she existed, yet now he couldn’t imagine not loving her.

‘It would have been no good, Barney.’

He asked her what she meant, but she didn’t answer. He knew anyway. It would have been no good because what seemed like a marvel of strangeness in Ariadne was damage wrought by shame. She had sensed his love, and fear had come, possibly revulsion. She would have hated it if he’d taken her arm, even if he’d danced with her, as he had with May.

‘Ariadne’ll stay there always now,’ the old woman said, sipping more of her stout. Delicately, she wiped a smear of foam from her lips. It was a silver lining that there’d been the convent kitchen to go to, that the same nuns were there to be good to her.

‘She’d still be here if I hadn’t taken the room.’

‘You were the first young man, Barney. You couldn’t be held to blame.’

When Barney returned to Dublin from Lisscrea at the beginning of his second term he found, unexpectedly, that he had been allocated College rooms. He explained that in Sinnott Street, and Mrs Lenehan said it couldn’t be helped. ‘Mr Sheehy and myself are getting married,’ she added in the hall.

Barney said he was glad, which was not untrue. Mr Sheehy had been drawn towards a woman’s property; for her part, Mrs Lenehan needed more than a man could offer her on walks to the McKee Barracks. Mrs Lenehan had survived the past; she had not been damaged; second time round, she had settled for Mr Sheehy.

In the dining-room he said goodbye to Mrs Fennerty. There was a new young clerk in Ned Sheehy’s office who was looking for digs, she said. He would take the vacant room, it wouldn’t be empty for long. A student called Browder had moved into Ariadne’s a week or so after her going. It hadn’t been empty for long either.

It was snowing that evening. Huge flakes clung to Barney’s overcoat as he walked to the convent, alone in the silence of the streets. Since Ariadne’s going he had endlessly loitered by the convent, but its windows were always blank, as they were on that Sunday afternoon. Tonight, a dim light burned above the green side-door, but no curtain twitched as he scanned the grey façade, no footsteps disturbed the white expanse beyond the railings. In the depths of the ugly building were the strangeness and the beauty as he had known them, and for a moment he experienced what was left of his passion: a useless longing to change the circumstances there had been.

While he was still in Mrs Lenehan’s house he had thought that somehow he might rescue Ariadne. It was a romantic urge, potent before love began to turn into regret. He had imagined himself ringing the convent bell, and again seeing Ariadne’s face. He had imagined himself smiling at her with all the gentleness he possessed, and walking again with her; and persuading her, when time had passed, that love was possible. ‘You’ll get over her,’ his father had said in the holidays, guessing only that there had been some girl.

A bus creeps through the snow: years later, for Barney, there is that image, a fragment in the cluster that makes the whole. It belongs with the upturned butter-box in the grass and the pinks in the brindle hair of the dog, with Rouge Medlicott and Slovinski, and the jockey-capped porters, and the blue-faced Dining Hall clock. A lone figure stares out into the blurred night, hating the good sense that draws him away from loitering gloomily outside a convent.