Collected Stories

August Saturday

‘You don’t remember me,’ the man said.

His tone suggested a statement, not a question, but Grania did remember him. She had recognized him immediately, his face smiling above the glass he held. He was a man she had believed she would never see again. For sixteen years – since the summer of 1972 – she had tried not to think about him, and for the most part had succeeded.

‘Yes, I do remember you,’ she said. ‘Of course.’

A slice of lemon floated on the surface of what she guessed was gin and tonic; there were cubes of ice and the little bubbles that came from tonic when it was freshly poured. It wouldn’t be tonic on its own; it hadn’t been the other time. ‘I’ve drunk a bit too much,’ he’d said.

‘I used to wonder,’ he went on now, ‘if ever we’d meet again. The kind of thing you wonder when you can’t sleep.’

‘I didn’t think we would.’

‘I know. But it doesn’t matter, does it?’

‘Of course not.’

She wondered why he had come back. She wondered how long he intended to stay. He’d be staying with the Prendergasts, she supposed, as he had been before. For sixteen years she had avoided the road on which the avenue that led to the Prendergasts’ house was, the curve of the green iron railings on either side of the open gates, the unoccupied gate-lodge.

‘You weren’t aware that Hetty Prendergast died?’ he said.

‘No, I wasn’t.’

‘Well, she did. Two days ago.’

The conversation took place in the bar of the Tara Hotel, where Grania and her husband, Desmond, dined once a month with other couples from the tennis club – an arrangement devised by the husbands so that the wives, just for a change, wouldn’t have to cook.

‘You don’t mind my talking to you?’ the man said. ‘I’m on my own again.’

‘Of course I don’t.’

‘When I was told about the death I came on over. I’ve just come in from the house to have a meal with the Quiltys.’

‘Tonight, you mean?’

‘When they turn up.’

Quilty was a solicitor. He and his wife, Helen, belonged to the tennis club and were usually present at the monthly dinners in the Rhett Butler Room of the Tara Hotel. The death of old Hetty Prendergast had clearly caught them unawares, and Crania could imagine Helen Quilty sulkily refusing to cancel a long-booked babysitter in order to remain at home to cook a meal for the stranger who had arrived from England, with whom her husband presumably had business to discuss. ‘We’ll take him with us,’ Quilty would have said in his soothing voice, and Helen would have calmed down, as she always did when she got her way.

‘Still playing tennis, Grania?’

‘Pretty badly.’

‘You’ve hardly aged, you know.’

This was so patently a lie that it wasn’t worth protesting about. After the funeral of the old woman he would go away. He hadn’t arrived for the other funeral, that of Mr Prendergast, which had taken place nearly ten years ago, and there wouldn’t be another one because there was no other Prendergast left to die. She wondered what would happen to the house and to the couple who had looked after the old woman, driving in every Friday to shop for her. She didn’t ask. She said:

‘A group of us have dinner here now and again, the Quiltys too. I don’t know if they told you that.’

‘You mean tonight?’

‘Yes.’

‘No, that wasn’t said.’

He smiled at her. He sipped a little gin. He had a long face, high cheekbones, greying hair brushed straight back from a sallow forehead. His blue-green eyes were steady, almost staring because he didn’t blink much. She remembered the eyes particularly, now that she was again being scrutinized by them. She remembered asking who he was and being told a sort of nephew of the Prendergasts, an Englishman.

‘I’ve often wondered about the tennis club, Grania.’

‘It hasn’t changed. Except that we’ve become the older generation.’

Desmond came up then and she introduced her companion, reminding Desmond that he’d met him before. She stumbled when she had to give him a name because she’d never known what it was. ‘Prendergast,’ she mumbled vaguely, not sure if he was called Prendergast or not. She’d never known that.

‘Hetty died, I hear,’ Desmond said.

‘So I’ve been telling your wife. I’ve come over to do my stuff.’

‘Well, of course.’

‘The Quiltys have invited me to your dinner do.’

‘You’re very welcome.’

Desmond had a squashed pink face and receding hair that had years ago been sandy. As soon as he put his clothes on they became crumpled, no matter how carefully Grania ironed them. He was a man who never lost his temper, slow-moving except on a tennis court, where he was surprisingly subtle and cunning, quite unlike the person he otherwise was.

Grania moved away. Mavis Duddy insisted she owed her a drink from last time and led her to the bar, where she ordered two more Martinis, ‘Who was that?’ she asked, and Grania replied that the grey-haired man was someone from England, related to the Prendergasts, she wasn’t entirely certain about his name. He’d come to the tennis club once, she said, an occasion when Mavis hadn’t been there. ‘Over for old Hetty’s funeral, is he?’ Mavis said and, accepting the drink, Grania agreed that was so.

They were a set in the small town; since the time they’d been teenagers the tennis club had been the pivot of their social lives. In winter some of them played bridge or golf, others chose not to. But all of them on summer afternoons and evenings looked in at the tennis club even if, like Francie MacGuinness and the Haddons, they didn’t play much any more. They shared memories, and likes and dislikes, that had to do with the tennis club; there were photographs that once in a blue moon were sentimentally mulled over; friendships had grown closer or apart. Billy MacGuinness had always been the same, determinedly a winner at fourteen and determinedly a winner at forty-five. Francie, who’d married him when it had seemed that he might marry Trish, was a winner also: Trish had made do with Tom Crosbie. There’d been quarrels at the tennis club: a great row in 1961 when Desmond’s father had wanted to raise money for a hard court and resigned in a huff when no one agreed; and nearly ten years later there had been the quarrel between Laverty and Dr Timothy Sweeney which had resulted in both their resignations, all to do with a dispute about a roller. There were jealousies and gossip, occasionally both envy and resentment. The years had been less kind to some while favouring others; the children born to the couples of the tennis club were often compared, though rarely openly, in terms of achievement or promise. Tea was taken, supplied by the wives, on Saturday afternoons from May to September. The men supplied drinks on that one day of the week also, and even washed up the glasses. The children of the tennis club tasted their first cocktails there, Billy MacGuinness’s White Ladies and Sidecars.

A handful of the tennis-club wives were best friends, and had been since their convent days: Grania and Mavis, Francie, Helen, Trish. They trusted one another, doing so more easily now than they had when they’d been at the convent together or in the days when each of them might possibly have married one of the others’ husbands. They told one another most things, confessing their errors and their blunders; they comforted and were a solace, jollying away feelings of inadequacy or guilt. Trish had worried at the convent because her breasts wouldn’t grow, Helen because her face was scrawny and her lips too thin. Francie had almost died when a lorry had knocked her off her bicycle. Mavis had agonized for months before she said yes to Martin Duddy. As girls, they had united in their criticism of girls outside their circle; as wives they had not changed.

‘I heard about that guy,’ Mavis said. ‘So that’s what he looks like.’

That August Saturday in 1972 he’d come to the tennis club on a bicycle, in whites he had borrowed at the house where he was staying, a racquet tied with string to the crossbar. He’d told Grania afterwards that Hetty Prendergast had looked the whites out for him and had lent him the racquet as well. Hetty had mentioned the tennis club, to which she and her husband had years ago belonged themselves. ‘Of course a different kind of lot these days,’ she’d said. ‘Like everywhere.’ He’d pushed the bicycle through the gate and stood there watching a doubles game, not yet untying his racquet. ‘Who on earth’s that?’ someone had said, and Grania approached him after about a quarter of an hour, since she was at that time the club’s secretary and vaguely felt it to be her duty.

Sipping the Martini Mavis had claimed to owe her, Grania remembered the sudden turning of his profile in her direction when she spoke and then his smile. Nothing of what she subsequently planned had entered her head then; she would have been stunned by even the faintest inkling of it. ‘I’m awfully sorry,’ he’d said. ‘I’m barging in.’

Grania had been twenty-seven then, married to Desmond for almost eight years. Now she was forty-three, and her cool brown eyes still strikingly complemented the lips that Desmond had once confessed he’d wanted to kiss ever since she was twelve. Her dark hair had been in plaits at twelve, later had been fashionably long, and now was short. She wasn’t tall and had always wished she was, but at least she didn’t have to slim. She hadn’t become a mother yet, that Saturday afternoon when the stranger arrived at the tennis club. But she was happy, and in love with Desmond.

‘Aisling’s going out with some chartered accountant,’ Mavis said, speaking about her daughter. ‘Martin’s hopping mad.’

The Quiltys arrived. Grania watched while they joined Desmond and their dinner guest. Desmond moved to the bar to buy them drinks. Quilty – a small man who reminded Grania of a monkey – lit a cigarette. Politely, Grania transferred her attention to her friend. Why should Martin be angry? she asked, genuinely not knowing. She could tell from Mavis’s tone of voice that she was not displeased herself.

‘Because he’s nine years older. We had a letter from Aisling this morning. Martin’s talking about going up to have it out with her.’

‘That might make it worse, actually.’

‘If he mentions it will you tell him that? He listens to you, you know.’

Grania said she would. She knew Martin Duddy would mention it, since he always seemed to want to talk to her about things that upset him. Once upon a time, just before she’d become engaged to Desmond, he’d tried to persuade her he loved her.

‘They earn a fortune,’ Mavis said. ‘Chartered accountants.’

Soon after that they all began to move into the Rhett Butler Room. Grania could just remember the time when the hotel had been called O’Hara’s Commercial, in the days of Mr and Mrs O’Hara. It wasn’t all that long ago that their sons, giving the place another face-lift as soon as they inherited it, had decided to change the name to the Tara and to give the previously numbered bedrooms titles such as ‘Ashley’s’ and ‘Melanie’s’. The bar was known as Scarlett’s Lounge. There were regular discos in Belle’s Place.

‘Who’s that fellow with the Quiltys?’ Francie MacGuinness asked, and Grania told her.

‘He’s come back for Hetty Prendergast’s funeral.’

‘God, I didn’t know she died.’

As always, several tables had been pushed together to form a single long one in the centre of the dining-room. At it, the couples who’d been drinking in the bar sat as they wished: there was no formality. Una Carty-Carroll, Trish Crosbie’s sister, was unmarried but was usually partnered on these Saturday occasions by the surveyor from the waterworks. This was so tonight. At one end of the table a place remained unoccupied: Angela, outside the circle of best friends, as Una Carty-Carroll and Mary Ann Haddon were, invariably came late. In a distant corner of the Rhett Butler Room one other couple were dining. Another table, recently occupied, was being tidied.

‘I think it’s Monday,’ Grania said when Francie asked her when the funeral was.

She hoped he’d go away again immediately. That other Saturday he’d said he found it appallingly dull at the Prendergasts’, a call of duty, no reason in the world why he should ever return. His reassurances had in a way been neither here nor there at the time, but afterwards of course she’d recalled them. Afterwards, many times, she’d strained to establish every single word of the conversation they’d had.

‘D’you remember poor old Hetty,’ Francie said, ‘coming in to the club for a cup of tea once? Ages ago.’

‘Yes, I remember her.’

A small woman, they remembered, a frail look about her face. There was another occasion Francie recalled: when the old woman became agitated because one of Wm. Cole’s meal lorries had backed into her Morris Minor. ‘I thought she’d passed on years ago,’ Francie said.

They separated. Helen was sitting next to him, Grania noticed, Quilty on his other side. Presumably they’d talk over whatever business there was, so that he wouldn’t have to delay once the funeral had taken place.

‘How’re you doing, dear?’ Martin Duddy said, occupying the chair on her left. Desmond was on her right; he nearly always chose to sit next to her.

‘I’m all right,’ she replied. ‘Are you OK, Martin?’

‘Far from it, as a matter of fact.’ He twisted backwards and stretched an arm out, preventing the waitress who was attempting to pass by from doing so. ‘Bring me a Crested Ten, will you? Aisling’s in the family way,’ he muttered into Grania’s ear. ‘Jesus Christ, Grania!’

He was an architect, responsible for the least attractive bungalows in the county, possibly in the province. He and Mavis had once spent a protracted winter holiday in Spain, the time he’d been endeavouring to find himself. He hadn’t done so, but that period of his life had ever since influenced the local landscape. Also, people said, his lavatories didn’t work as well as they might have.

‘Do you mean it, Martin? Are you sure?’

‘Some elderly Mr Bloody. I’ll wring his damn neck for him.’

He was drunk to the extent that failing to listen to him wouldn’t matter. No opportunity for comment would be offered. The advice sought, the plea for understanding, would not properly register in the brain that set in motion the requests. It was extremely unlikely that Aisling was pregnant.

‘Old Hetty left him the house,’ Desmond said on her other side. ‘He’s going to live in it. Nora,’ he called out to the waitress, ‘I need to order the wine.’

Martin Duddy gripped her elbow, demanding the return of her attention. His face came close to hers: the small, snub nose, the tightly hunched, heated cheeks, droplets of perspiration on forehead and chin. Grania looked away. Across the table, Mavis was better-looking than her husband in all sorts of ways, her lips prettily parted as she listened to whatever it was Billy MacGuinness was telling her about, her blue eyes sparkling with Saturday-evening vivacity. Francie was listening to the surveyor. Mary Ann Haddon was nervously playing with her fork, the way she did when she felt she was being ignored: she had a complex about her looks, which were not her strong point. Helen Quilty was talking to the man who’d come back for the funeral, her wide mouth swiftly opening and closing. Francie, who’d given up smoking a fortnight ago, lit a cigarette. Billy MacGuinness’s round face crinkled with sudden laughter. Mavis laughed also.

The waitress hurried away with Desmond’s wine order. Light caught one lens of Mary Ann’s glasses. ‘Oh, I don’t believe you!’ Francie cried, her voice for a single instant shrill above the buzz of conversation. The man who’d come back to attend the old woman’s funeral still listened politely. Trish – the smallest, most demure of the wives – kept nodding while Kevy Haddon spoke in his dry voice, his features drily matching it.

There were other faces in the Rhett Butler Room, those of Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh reproduced on mirrored glass with bevelled edges, huge images that also included the shoulders of the film stars, the décolletage of one, the frilled evening shirt of the other. Clark Gable was subtly allowed the greater impact; in Scarlett’s Lounge, together on a single mirror, the two appeared to be engaged in argument, he crossly pouting from a distance, she imperious in close-up.

‘This man here, you mean?’ Grania said to her husband when there was an opportunity. She knew he did; there was no one else he could mean. She didn’t want to think about it, yet it had to be confirmed. She wanted to delay the knowledge, yet just as much she had to know quickly.

‘So he’s been saying,’ Desmond said. ‘You know, I’d forgotten who he was when you introduced us.’

‘But what on earth does he want to come and live in that awful old house for?’

‘He’s on his uppers apparently.’

Often they talked together on these Saturday occasions, in much the same way as they did in their own kitchen while she finished cooking the dinner and he laid the table. In the kitchen they talked about people they’d run into during the day, the same people once a week or so, rarely strangers. When his father retired almost twenty years ago, Desmond had taken over the management of the town’s laundry and later had inherited it. The Tara Hotel was his second most important customer, the Hospital of St Bernadette of Lourdes being his first. He brought back to Grania reports of demands for higher wages, and the domestic confidences of his staff. In return she passed on gossip, which both of them delighted in.

‘How’s Judith?’ Martin Duddy inquired, finger and thumb again tightening on her elbow. ‘No Mr Bloody yet?’

‘Judith’s still at the convent, remember.’

‘You never know these days.’

‘I think you’ve got it wrong about Aisling being pregnant.’

‘I pray to God I have, dear.’

Desmond said he intended to go to Hetty Prendergast’s funeral, but she saw no reason why she should go herself. Desmond went to lots of funerals, often of people she didn’t know, business acquaintances who’d lived miles away. Going to funerals was different when there was a business reason, not that the Prendergasts had ever made much use of the laundry.

‘I have a soft spot for Judith,’ Martin Duddy said. ‘She’s getting to be a lovely girl.’

It was difficult to agree without sounding smug, yet it seemed disloyal to her daughter to deny what was claimed for her. Grania shrugged, a gesture that was vague enough to indicate whatever her companion wished to make of it. There was no one on Martin Duddy’s other side because the table ended there. Angela, widow of a German businessman, had just sat down in the empty place opposite him. The most glamorous of all the wives, tall and slim, her hair the colour of very pale sand, Angela was said to be on the look-out for a second marriage. Her husband had settled in the neighbourhood after the war and had successfully begun a cheese-and-pâté business, supplying restaurants and hotels all over the country. With a flair he had cultivated in her, Angela ran it now. ‘How’s Martin?’ She smiled seductively across the table, the way she’d smiled at men even in her husband’s lifetime. Martin Duddy said he was all right, but Grania knew that only a desultory conversation would begin between the two because Martin Duddy didn’t like Angela for some reason, or else was alarmed by her.

‘Judith always has a word for you,’ he said. ‘Rare, God knows, in a young person these days.’

‘Who’s that?’ Angela leaned forward, her eyes indicating the stranger.

She was told, and Grania watched her remembering him. Angela had been pregnant with the third of her sons that August afternoon. ‘Uncomfortably warm,’ she now recalled, nodding in recollection.

Martin Duddy displayed no interest. He’d been at the club that afternoon and he remembered the arrival of the stranger, but an irritated expression passed over his tightly made face while Grania and Angela agreed about the details of the afternoon in question: he resented the interruption and wished to return to the subject of daughters.

‘What I’m endeavouring to get at, Grania, is what would you say if Judith came back with some fellow old enough to be her father?’

‘Mavis didn’t say Aisling’s friend was as old as that.’

‘Aisling wrote us a letter, Grania. There are lines to read between,’

‘Well, naturally I’d prefer Judith to marry someone of her own age. But of course it all depends on the man.’

‘D’you find a daughter easy, Grania? There’s no one thinks more of Aisling than myself. The fonder you are the more worry there is. Would you say that was right, Grania?’

‘Probably.’

‘You’re lucky in Judith, though. She has a great way with her.’

Angela was talking to Tom Crosbie about dairy products. The Crosbies were an example of a marriage in which there was a considerable age difference, yet it appeared not to have had an adverse effect. Trish had had four children, two girls and two boys; they were a happy, jolly family, even though when Trish married it had been widely assumed that she was not in love, was if anything still yearning after Billy MacGuinness. It was even rumoured that Trish had married for money, since Tom Crosbie owned Boyd Motors, the main Ford franchise in the neighbourhood. Trish’s family had once been well-to-do but had somehow become penurious.

‘What’s Judith going to do for herself ? Nursing, is it, Grania?’

‘If it is she’s never mentioned it.’

‘I only thought it might be.’

‘There’s talk about college. She’s not bad at languages.’

‘Don’t send her to Dublin, dear. Keep the girl by you. D’you hear what I’m saying, Desmond?’ Martin Duddy raised his voice, shouting across Grania. He began all over again, saying he had a soft spot for Judith, explaining about the letter that had arrived from Aisling. Grania changed places with him. ‘Martin’s had a few,’ Angela said.

‘He’s upset about Aisling. She’s going out with an older man.’

She shouldn’t have said it with Tom Crosbie sitting there. She made a face to herself and leaned across the table to tell him he was looking perky. As soon as she’d spoken she felt she’d made matters worse, that her remark could be taken to imply he was looking young for his years.

‘There’s a new place,’ Angela said when Grania asked her about her dress. ‘ “Pursestrings”. D’you know it?’

Ever since she’d become a widow Angela had gone to Dublin to buy something during the week before each Saturday dinner. Angela liked to be first, though often Francie ran her close. Mavis tried to keep up with them but couldn’t quite. Grania sometimes tried too; Helen didn’t mind what she wore.

‘Is Desmond going to the funeral?’ Tom Crosbie asked in his agreeable way – perhaps, Grania thought, to show that no offence had been taken.

‘Yes, he is.’

‘Desmond’s very good.’

That was true. Desmond was good. He’d been the pick of the tennis club when she’d picked him herself, the pick of the town. Looking round the table – at Tom Crosbie’s bald head and Kevy Haddon’s joylessness, at the simian lines of Quilty’s cheeks and Billy MacGuinness’s tendency to glow, Martin Duddy’s knotted features – she was aware that, on top of everything else, Desmond had worn better than any of them. He had acquired authority in middle age; the reticence of his youth had remained, but time had displayed that he was more often right than wrong, and his opinion was sought in a way it once had not been. Desmond was quietly obliging, a quality more appreciated in middle age than in youth. Mavis had called him a dear when he was still a bachelor.

They ate their prawn cocktails. The voices became louder. For a moment Grania’s eye was held by the man who had said, at first, that she didn’t remember him. A look was exchanged and persisted for a moment. Did he suspect that she had learnt already of his intention to live in the Prendergasts’ house? Would he have told her himself if they hadn’t been interrupted by Desmond?

‘Hetty was a nice old thing,’ Angela said. ‘I feel I’d like to attend her funeral myself.’

She glanced again in the direction of the stranger. Tom Crosbie began to talk about a court case that was causing interest. Martin Duddy got up and ambled out of the dining-room, and Desmond moved to where he’d been sitting so that he was next to his wife again. The waitresses were collecting the prawn-cocktail glasses. ‘Martin’s being a bore about this Aisling business,’ Desmond said.

‘Desmond, did Prendergast mention being married now?’

He looked down the table, and across it. He shook his head. ‘He hasn’t the look of being married. Another thing is, I have a feeling he’s called something else.’

‘Angela says she’s going to the funeral.’

One of the waitresses brought round plates of grilled salmon, the other offered vegetables. Martin Duddy returned with a glass of something he’d picked up in the bar, whiskey on ice it looked like. He sat between Desmond and Una Carty-Carroll, not seeming to notice that it wasn’t where he’d been sitting before.

Mavis’s back was reflected in the Rhett Butler mirror, the V of her black dress plunging deeply down her spine. Her movements, and those of Billy MacGuinness next to her, danced over the features of Clark Gable.

‘He might suit Angela,’ Desmond said. ‘You never know.’

That August afternoon Billy MacGuinness, who was a doctor, had been called away from the club, some complication with a confinement. ‘Damned woman,’ he’d grumbled unfeelingly, predicting an all-night job. ‘Come back to the house, Francie,’ Grania had invited when the tennis came to an end, and it was then that Desmond had noticed the young man attaching his tennis racquet to the crossbar of his bicycle and had issued the same invitation. Desmond had said he’d drive him back to the Prendergasts’ when they’d all had something to eat, and together they lifted his bicycle on to the boot of the car. ‘I’ve something to confess,’ Francie had said in the kitchen, cutting the rinds off rashers of bacon, and Grania knew what it would be because ‘I’ve something to confess’ was a kind of joke among the wives, a time-honoured way of announcing pregnancy. ‘You’re not!’ Grania cried, disguising envy. ‘Oh, Francie, how grand!’ Desmond brought them drinks, but Francie didn’t tell him, as Grania had guessed she wouldn’t. ‘February,’ Francie said. ‘Billy says it should be February.’

Billy telephoned while they were still in the kitchen, guessing where Francie was when there’d been no reply from his own number. He’d be late, as he’d predicted. ‘Francie’s pregnant,’ Grania told Desmond while Francie was still on the phone. ‘Don’t tell her I said.’

In the sitting-room they had a few more drinks while in the kitchen the bacon cooked on a glimmer of heat. All of them were still in their tennis clothes and nobody was in a hurry. Francie wasn’t because of the empty evening in front of her. Grania and Desmond weren’t because they’d nothing to do that evening. The young man who was staying with the Prendergasts was like a schoolboy prolonging his leave. The sipping of their gin, the idle conversation – the young man told about the town and the tennis club, told who Angela was, and which the Duddys were: all of it took on the pleasurable feeling of a party happening by chance. Desmond picked up the telephone and rang the Crosbies but Trish said they wouldn’t be able to get a babysitter or else of course they’d come over, love to. Eventually Desmond beat up eggs to scramble and Grania fried potato cakes and soda bread. ‘We’re none of us sober,’ Desmond said, offering a choice of white or red wine as they sat down to eat. Eartha Kitt sang ‘Just an Old-fashioned Girl’.

In the Rhett Butler Room Grania heard the tune again. ‘… and an old-fashioned millionaire’, lisped the cool, sensuous voice, each emphasis strangely accented. They’d danced to it among the furniture, of the sitting-room, Francie and the young man mostly, she and Desmond. ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ Desmond whispered, but she shook her head, refusing to concede that blame came into it. If it did, she might as well say she was sorry herself. ‘I have to get back,’ Francie said. ‘Cook something for Billy.’ Desmond said he’d drop her off on his way to the Prendergasts, but then he changed the record to ‘Love Grows’, and fell asleep as soon as the music began.

Francie didn’t want a lift. She wanted to walk because the air would do her good. ‘D’you trust me?’ Grania asked the young man, and he laughed and said he’d have to because he didn’t have a lamp on his bicycle. She’d hardly spoken to him, had been less aware of him than of Desmond’s apparent liking of him. With strangers Desmond was often like that. ‘What do you do?’ she asked in the car, suddenly shy in spite of all the gin and wine there’d been. He’d held her rather close when he’d danced with her, but she’d noticed he’d held Francie close too. Francie had kissed him goodbye. ‘Well, actually I’ve been working in a pub,’ he said. ‘Before that I made toast in the Marine Hotel in Bournemouth.’

She drove slowly, with extreme caution, through the narrow streets of the town. The public houses were closing; gaggles of men loitered near each, smoking or just standing. Youths thronged the pavement outside the Palm Grove fish-and-chip shop. Beyond the last of its lamp-posts the town straggled away to nothing, solitary cottages and bungalows gave way to fields. ‘I haven’t been to this house before,’ Grania said in a silence that had developed. Her companion had vouchsafed no further information about himself beyond the reference to a pub and making toast in Bournemouth. ‘They’ll be in bed,’ he said now. ‘They go to bed at nine.’

The headlights picked out trunks of trees on the avenue, then urns, and steps leading up to a hall door. White wooden shutters flanked the downstairs windows, the paint peeling, as it was on the iron balustrade of the steps. All of it was swiftly there, then lost: the car lights isolated a rose-bed and a seat on a lawn. ‘I won’t be a minute,’ he said, ‘unshackling this bike.’

She turned the lights off. The last of the August day hadn’t quite gone; a warm duskiness was scented with honeysuckle she could not see when she stepped out of the car. ‘You’ve been awfully good to me,’ he said, unknotting the strings that held the bicycle in place. ‘You and Desmond.’

In the Rhett Butler Room, now rowdy with laughter and raised voices, she didn’t want to look at him again, and yet she couldn’t help herself: waiting for her were the unblinking eyes, the hair brushed back from the sallow forehead, the high cheekbones. Angela would stand at the graveside and afterwards would offer him sympathy. Quilty would be there, Helen wouldn’t bother. ‘I’d say we all need a drink’: Grania could imagine Angela saying that, including Desmond in the invitation, gathering the three men around her. In the dark the bicycle had been wheeled away and propped against the steps. ‘Come in for a minute,’ he’d said, and she’d begun to protest that it was late, even though it wasn’t. ‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ he’d said.

She remembered in the garish hotel dining-room, the flash of his smile in the gloom, and how she’d felt his unblinking eyes caressing her. He reached out for her hand, and in a moment they were in a hall, the electric light turned on, a grandfather clock ticking at the bottom of the stairs. There was a hallstand, and square cream-and-terracotta tiles, brown engravings framed in oak, fish in glass cases. ‘I shall offer you a nightcap,’ he whispered, leading her into a flagged passage and then into a cavernous kitchen. ‘Tullamore Dew is what they have,’ he murmured. ‘Give every man his dew.’ She knew what he intended. She’d known it before they’d turned in at the avenue gates; she’d felt it in the car between them. He poured their drinks and then he kissed her, taking her into his arms as though that were simply a variation of their dancing together. ‘Dearest,’ he murmured, surprising her: she hadn’t guessed that he intended, also, the delicacy of endearments.

Did she, before the car turned in at the avenue gates, decide herself what was to happen? Or was it later, even while still protesting that it was late? Or when he reached up to the high shelf of the dresser for the bottle? At some point she had said to herself: I am going to do this. She knew she had because the words still echoed. ‘How extraordinary!’ he murmured in the kitchen, all his talk as soft as that now. ‘How extraordinary to find you at a tennis club in Ireland!’ Her own arms held him to her; yet for some reason she didn’t want to see his face, not that she found it unattractive.

The empty glasses laid down on the kitchen table, stairs without a carpet, a chest of drawers on a landing, towels in a pile on a chair, the door of his bedroom closing behind them: remembered images were like details from a dream. For a moment the light went on in his room: a pink china jug stood in a basin on a wash-stand, there was a wardrobe, a cigarette packet on the dressing-table, the shirt and trousers he’d changed from into his tennis clothes were thrown on to the floor. Then the light was extinguished and again he embraced her, his fingers already unbuttoning her tennis dress, which no one but Desmond had ever done in that particular way. Before her marriage she’d been kissed, twice, by Billy MacGuinness, and once by a boy who’d left the neighbourhood and gone to Canada. As all the tennis-club wives were when they married, she’d been a virgin. ‘Oh God, Grania!’ she heard him whispering, and her thoughts became worries when she lay, naked, on the covers of his bed. Her father’s face was vivid in her mind, disposing of her with distaste. ‘No, don’t do that, dear,’ her mother used to say, smacking with her tongue when Grania picked a scab on her knee or made a pattern on the raked gravel with a stick.

In the kitchen they ate raspberries and cream. She asked him again about himself but he hardly responded, questioning her instead and successfully extracting answers. The raspberries were delicious; he put a punnet on the seat beside the driving seat in the car. They were for Desmond, but he didn’t say so. ‘Don’t feel awkward,’ he said. ‘I’m going back on Monday.’

A hare ran in front of the car on the avenue, bewildered by the lights. People would guess, she thought; they would see a solitary shadow in the car and they would know. It did not occur to her that if her expedition to the Prendergasts’ house had been as innocent as its original purpose the people who observed her return would still have seen what they saw now. In fact, the streets were quite deserted when she came to them.

‘God, I’m sorry,’ Desmond said, sitting up on the sofa, his white clothes rumpled, the texture of a cushion-cover on his cheek, his hair untidy. She smiled, not trusting herself to speak or even to laugh, as in other circumstances she might have. She put the raspberries in the refrigerator and had a bath.

In the Rhett Butler Room they began to change places in the usual way, after the Black Forest gâteau. She sat by Francie and Mavis. ‘Good for Aisling,’ Francie insisted when Mavis described the chartered accountant; he did not seem old at all. ‘I’ll have it out with Martin when we get back,’ Mavis said. ‘There’s no chance whatsoever she’s been naughty. I can assure you I’d be the first to know.’ They lowered their voices to remark on Angela’s interest in the stranger. ‘The house would suit her rightly,’ Mavis said.

All the rooms would be done up. The slatted shutters that flanked the windows would be repainted, and the balustrade by the steps. There’d be new curtains and carpets; a gardener would be employed. Angela had never cared for the house her well-to-do husband had built her, and since his death had made no secret of the fact.

‘I’ll never forget that night, Grania.’ Francie giggled, embarrassedly groping for a cigarette. ‘Dancing with your man and Desmond going to sleep. Wasn’t it the same night I told you Maureen was on the way?’

‘Yes, it was.’

The three women talked of other matters. That week in the town an elderly clerk had been accused of embezzlement. Mavis observed that the surveyor from the waterworks was limbering up to propose to Una Carty-Garroll. ‘And doesn’t she know it!’ Francie said. Grania laughed.

Sometimes she’d wondered if he was still working in a pub and told herself that of course he wouldn’t be, that he’d have married and settled down ages ago. But when she saw him tonight she’d guessed immediately that he hadn’t. She wasn’t surprised when Desmond had said he was on his uppers. ‘I am going to do this’: the echo of her resolve came back to her as she sat there. ‘I am going to do this because I want a child.’

‘God, I’m exhausted,’ Mavis said. ‘Is it age or what?’

‘Oh, it’s age, it’s age.’ Francie sighed, stubbing out her cigarette. ‘Damn things,’ she muttered.

Mavis reached for the packet and flicked it across the table. ‘Present for you, Kevy,’ she said, but Francie pleaded with her eyes and he flicked it back again. Grania smiled because they’d have noticed if she didn’t.

In the intervening years he would never have wondered about a child being born. But if Angela married him he would think about it; being close by would cause him to. He would wonder, and in the middle of a night, while he lay beside Angela in bed, it would be borne in upon him that Desmond and Grania had one child only. Grania considered that: the untidiness of someone else knowing, her secret shared. There’d been perpetually, every instant of the day it sometimes seemed, the longing to share – with Desmond and with her friends, with the child that had been born. But this was different.

The evening came to an end. Cars were started in the yard of the hotel; there were warnings of ice on the roads. ‘Good-night, Grania,’ the man who’d come for the funeral said. She buckled herself into her seat-belt. Desmond backed and then crawled forward into West Main Street. ‘You’re quiet,’ he said, and immediately she began to talk about the possibility of Una Carty-Carroll being proposed to in case he connected her silence with the presence of the stranger. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said when that subject was exhausted, ‘I met that fellow of Aisling’s once. He’s only thirty-five.’ She opened the garage door and he drove the car in. The air was refreshingly cold, sharper than it had been in the yard of the hotel.

They locked their house. Grania put things ready for the morning. It was a relief that a babysitter was no longer necessary, that she didn’t have to wait with just a trace of anxiety while Desmond drove someone home. He’d gone upstairs and she knew that he’d done so in order to press open Judith’s door and glance in at her while she slept. Whenever they came in at night he did that.

At the sink Grania poured glasses of water for him and for herself, and carried them upstairs. When she had placed them on either side of their bed she, too, went to look in at her daughter – a mass of brown hair untidy on the pillow, eyes lightly closed. ‘I might play golf tomorrow,’ Desmond said, settling his trousers into his electric press. Almost as soon as he’d clambered into bed he fell asleep. She switched out his bedside light and went downstairs.

Alone in the kitchen, sitting over a cup of tea, she returned again to the August Saturday. Two of Trish’s children had already been born then, and two of Mavis’s, and Helen’s first. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ Billy MacGuinness had said, ‘if Angela doesn’t drop this one in a deck-chair.’ Mary Ann Haddon had just started her second. Older children were sitting on the clubhouse steps.

Grania forced her thoughts through all the rest of it, through the party that had happened by chance, the headlights picking out the rose-bed. She savoured easily the solitude she had disguised during the years that had passed since then, the secret that had seemed so safe. In the quiet kitchen, when she had been over this familiar ground, she felt herself again possessed by the confusion that had come like a fog when she’d seen tonight the father of her child. Then slowly it lifted: she was incapable of regret.