The Collected Stories

More interesting than Helena’s own household were the households round about. The death that had taken place, the honouring of the unfinished work, her mother’s seriousness, were far less fascinating than the gaudy hair and dresses of Mrs Archingford or the arguments of the elderly couple in the garden of the house next door. Sometimes a son visited this couple, an unkempt figure who intrigued Helena most of all. Now and again she noticed him in the neighbourhood, usually carrying a cage with a bird in it. On one occasion he sat in the garden next door with a cage on either side of him, and Helena watched from a window while he pointed out to his mother the features of the budgerigars these cages contained. His mother poured tea and his father read a newspaper or protested, in a voice loud enough to carry to Helena’s window, that the conversation about budgerigars was inane. On another occasion Helena saw the unkempt son entering Mrs Archingford’s house with a cage and later leaving empty-handed, having presumably made a successful sale. She would have liked to report these incidents to her mother, but when once she referred to the elderly couple’s son her mother stared at her in astonishment.

When she was twelve, Helena brought a girl called Judy Smeeth back to tea. She had asked her mother if she might, since she had herself been to tea several times with Judy Smeeth, who was considered at school to be stupid. She was stout, with spectacles, and experienced difficulty in covering her large thighs with her gymslip. When teachers drew attention to this immodest display she laughed and said she did the best she could.

Helena’s mother looked at Judy Smeeth blankly, and afterwards said she didn’t think she’d ever met a more unattractive person.

‘She’s my friend at school,’ Helena explained.

‘Biscuit after biscuit. No wonder she’s the size she is.’

‘She invited me to her house five times.’

‘You mean by that, do you, Helena, that when she comes here she must make up for all those visits by grabbing as much as she can, by filling herself with biscuits and Swiss roll? Is there not a more attractive girl you could have as a companion?’

‘No, there isn’t.’

‘That was said roughly, Helena.’

‘She’s my best friend.’

Helena’s mother vaguely shook her head. She never talked about friends, any more than she talked about her mother or her father. Helena didn’t know if she’d had brothers or sisters, and certainly that was not a question she could ask. ‘Gosh, your mother!’ Judy Smeeth said in her amazed way. ‘Didn’t half give me the jitters, your mother.’

Many months later, in answer to Helena’s repeated pleas, Judy Smeeth was permitted to come to the house again. On this occasion they played with a tennis ball in the garden, throwing it to one another. Unfortunately, due to a clumsy delivery of Judy’s, it crossed the fence into Mrs Archingford’s garden. ‘Hey!’ Judy cried, having climbed on to a pear tree that grew beside the fence. ‘Hey, lady, could we have the ball back?’

Her plump hams, clad only partially in navy-blue school-regulation knickers, were considerably exposed as she balanced herself between the pear tree and the fence. She shouted again, endeavouring to catch the attention of Mrs Archingford, who was reading a magazine beneath her verandah.

‘Hey! Yoo-hoo, lady!’

Mrs Archingford looked up and was surprised to see the beaming face of Judy Smeeth, bespectacled and crowned with frizzy hair. Hearing the sound, she had expected the tidier and less extrovert presence of the girl next door. She rose and crossed her garden.

‘It’s only the ball, missus. We knocked the ball a bit hard.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Mrs Archingford. ‘D’you know, dearie, for a minute I thought your appearance had changed most peculiarly.’

‘Eh?’

Mrs Archingford smiled at Judy Smeeth, and asked her what her name was. She picked the tennis ball out of her lupins.

‘Judy the name is. Smeeth.’

‘Mine’s Mrs Archingford. Nice to meet you, Judy. Come to tea, have you?’

‘That’s right. Thanks for the ball,’

‘Tell you what, why don’t you and what’s-her-name climb over that fence and have a glass of orangeade? Like orangeade, do you?’

‘Yeah. Sure.’

‘Tell you what, I’ve got a few Danish pastries. Almond and apple. Like Danish pastries, Judy?’

‘Hey, Helena, the woman wants us to go over her place.’

‘No,’ Helena said.

‘Why not?’

‘Just no.’

‘Sorry, missus. Cheerio then.’

Judy descended, having first thrown the ball to Helena.

‘Hey, look,’ she said when she was standing on the lawn, ‘that woman was on about pastries. Why couldn’t we?’

‘Let’s go into the house.’

Her mother would have observed the incident. She would have noticed the flesh of Judy’s thighs and Judy’s tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth as she struggled to retain her balance. Two of a kind, she’d probably say when Judy had gone, she and vulgar Mrs Archingford. Her lips would tighten, her whole face would look like iron.

‘I don’t want that girl here again, Helena,’ was what in fact she did say. ‘She is far from suitable.’

Helena did not protest, nor attempt to argue. She had long since learnt that you could not win an argument with her mother because her mother refused to engage in arguments. ‘Gor, she don’t half frighten me,’ Judy Smeeth remarked after that second visit to the house. Helena had realized a long time ago that she was frightened of her also.

‘The completion of your father’s work,’ her mother announced one day, ‘is taking a great deal longer than I had anticipated, even though he left such clear and copious notes. I am unworthy and ill-equipped, but it is a task that must be undertaken. So much begun, so much advanced. Someone must surely carry it to fruition.’

‘Yes,’ Helena said.

‘I cannot manage you and the work together, child. I do not wish you to go away to school, I prefer to have you by me. But circumstances dictate. I have no choice.’

So Helena went to a boarding-school in Sussex, and it never at that time occurred to her to wonder how the fees at this expensive place were afforded, or indeed to wonder where any money at all came from. She returned at the end of that first term to find her mother more deeply involved in the unfinished work and also somewhat changed in her manner, as if affected by the lack of a companion. Sarcasm snapped more freely from her. Her voice had become like a whip. She hates me, Helena thought, because I am a nuisance.

The house had become even more exclusive than it had been, no friend from school could ever be invited there now. The wireless, which had occasionally been listened to, was silent. The telephone was used only to order food and household goods from Barker’s of Kensington. Letters rarely came.

Then one afternoon just after Easter, when Helena was fifteen, a visitor arrived. She heard the doorbell from her bedroom and went to answer it because her mother wouldn’t bother to. It would be an onion-seller, she thought, or one of those people who pressed the Encyclopaedia Britannica on you.

‘Hullo,’ a middle-aged man said, smiling at her from a sandy face. His short hair was sandy also. He wore a greenish suit. ‘Are you Helena?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I’m your uncle. One of your mother’s brothers. Did you know you had uncles and an aunt?’

She shook her head. He laughed.

‘I was the one who made up the games we used to play. Different games for different parts of the garden. Aren’t you going to let me in?’

‘I’m sorry.’

He stepped into the hall, that awful, fusty hall she hated so, its grim brown curtains looping in the archway at the bottom of the stairs, its grim hallstand, the four mezzotints of Australian landscape, the stained ceiling.

She led him into the sitting-room, which was awful also, cluttered with tawdry furniture her mother didn’t notice had grown ugly with wear and time, the glass-fronted cabinets full of forgotten objects, the dreary books drearily filling bookcase after bookcase.

‘I heard about your father’s death, Helena. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s ages ago now. Seven years actually. He died on my birthday.’

‘I only met your father once.’ He paused. ‘We’ve often wondered about you, you know.’

‘Wondered?’

‘The family have. We’ve known of course that your mother wouldn’t be short, but even so.’

He smiled his easy smile at her. It was her mother who had supplied the money there had been, Helena intuitively realized. Something about the way he had mentioned the family and had said her mother wouldn’t be short had given this clear impression. Not just obsessive in his scholarship, her father had been needy also.

‘I thought I’d call,’ he said. ‘I’ve written of course, but even so I just thought I’d call one of these days.’

She left him and went to knock on the study door, as her mother liked her to do. There was no reply, and when she knocked a second time her mother called out in irritation.

‘An uncle has come,’ Helena said.

‘Who?’

‘Your brother.’

‘Is here, you mean?’ Her mother, wearing reading-glasses on a chain, which she had recently taken to, had a finger marking the point on a page at which she had been interrupted. She was seated at the desk, papers and books all around her, the desk light turned on even though it was the middle of the afternoon.

‘He’s downstairs.’

Her mother said nothing, nor did she display further surprise, or emotion. She stared at Helena, her scrutiny suggesting that Helena was somehow to blame for the presence of this person, which in a sense Helena was, having opened the hall door to him and permitted his entrance. Her mother drew a piece of paper towards her, at the same time releasing her finger from the place it marked. She picked up a fountain pen and then opened a drawer and found an envelope.

‘Give him this,’ she said, and returned to her books.

Helena carried the missive to the sitting-room. The man had pulled back an edge of the grubby lace curtain and was gazing out into the empty street. He took the envelope from Helena and opened it.

‘Well, there you are,’ he said when he had read the message, and sighed. He left the note behind when he went. Her mother had simply ordered him to go away. Please me by not returning to this house, her mother had added, signing her full name.

In the dormitory called the Upper Nightingale Helena retailed the excesses of her mother. How the elderly couple in the house next door had been written to and requested to make less noise. How Mrs Archingford had been snubbed. How Judy Smeeth had been forbidden the house, how her mother’s sandy-faced brother had been summarily dismissed. She told how her mother had never visited the grinning little grandparents, and how they had never come to the house. She described the house – the Australian mezzotints, the fustiness, the dim lights and curtained windows, the dirtiness that was beginning to gather. In their beds, each with a pink lover, other girls of Upper Ni|htingale listened with delight. None of them had a mother whose tongue was like a whip. None feared a mother’s sarcasm. None dreaded going home.

When she closed her eyes after lights-out Helena saw her mother in the dark study, listing words and derivations, finding new words or words no longer used, all in loving memory. ‘Oh God,’ pleaded Helena in those moments given up to private prayer at the beginning and end of church. ‘Oh God, please make her different.’

Her mother supplied her with money so that at the end of each term she could make her way from the school by train and then across London in a taxi-cab. It was not her mother’s way to stand waiting at a railway station; nor, indeed, when Helena did arrive, to answer the doorbell until it had been rung twice or three times. It was not her way to embrace Helena, but instead to frown a little as if she had forgotten that her advent was due on a particular day. ‘Ah, Helena,’ she would say eventually.

These holiday periods were spent by Helena in reading, cleaning the kitchen, cooking and walking about the avenues and crescents of the neighbourhood. When she painted the shelves in her bedroom, her mother objected to the smell of paint, causing Helena to lose her temper. In awkward, adolescent rage, unreasonably passionate, she shouted at her mother. The matter was petty, she was being made petty herself, yet she could not, as she stood there on the landing, bear for a second longer her mother’s pretence that the smell of paint could not possibly be coming from within the house since no workman had been employed to paint anything. There was astonishment in her mother’s face when Helena said she had been painting her shelves.

‘I went out and bought paint,’ she cried, red-faced and furious. ‘Is there something sinful in that? I went into a shop and bought paint.’

‘Of course there’s nothing sinful, Helena.’

‘Then why are you blaming me? What harm is there in painting the shelves in my bedroom? I’m seventeen. Surely I don’t have to ask permission for every single action I take?’

‘I merely wondered about the smell, child.’

‘You didn’t wonder. You knew about the smell.’

‘I do not care for that, Helena.’

‘Why do you hate me?’

‘Now, Helena, please don’t be tiresome. Naturally I do not hate you.’

‘Everyone knows you hate me. Everyone at school, even Mrs Archingford.’

‘Mrs Archingford? What on earth has Mrs Archingford to do with it?’

‘She is a human being, that’s all.’

‘No one denies that Mrs Archingford is a human being.’

‘You never think of her like that.’

‘You are in a tiresome mood, Helena.’

Her mother turned and went away, descending the stairs to the study. Without a show of emotion, she closed the door behind her, quietly, as if there had not been an angry scene, or as if no importance could possibly attach to anything that had been said.

In her bedroom, that afternoon, Helena wept. She lay on her bed and pressed her face into her pillow, not caring how ugly she was making herself, for who was there to see? In waves of fury that came and calmed, and then came on again, she struck at her thighs with her fists until the repeated impact hurt and she guessed there would be black and blue marks. She wished she had reached out and struck her mother as she stood at the top of the stairs. She wished she had heard the snap of her mother’s neck and had seen her body lifeless, empty of venom in the hall.

Twilight was gathering when she got up and washed her face in the bathroom. She held a sponge to each puffed-up eye in turn, and then immersed her whole face in a basin of cold water, holding it there for as long as she could. Her hair was bedraggled as a result, clinging to her damp face. She looked awful, she thought, her mouth pulled down with wretchedness, but she didn’t care.

She walked along the crescents and the avenues, and down by the river, finding a common she’d only visited once before. She wished she could simply go on walking through the evening, and never return to her mother’s house. She wished that some young man in a motor-car would call out to her and ask her where she was going and say jump in. She would have, she knew she would have.

Instead she turned around and found her way back to the house, her footsteps dawdling and reluctant the closer she came to it. It was ten past nine by the clock in the sitting-room. Her mother, sitting by the electric fire, did not ask where she’d been.

‘He will be forgotten,’ she said instead, ‘if I cannot complete his work.’

She spoke in a voice so matter-of-fact, so dry and spiritless that she might have been reciting a grocery list. Vaguely, Helena had listened when once she’d been told that the work consisted of the completion of a scholarly book, an investigation into how, over centuries, the meanings of words had altered. ‘Difficult as it is,’ her mother vowed, still without emotion, ‘it shall not go unfinished.’

Helena nodded, for some reason feeling sorry she’d been so cross. There was a silence. Her mother stared without interest at the electric fire.

‘When you were little,’ Helena dared to begin.

‘Little?’

‘A child.’

‘I didn’t much care for being a child.’

‘I just wondered if –’

‘When you don’t much care for something you prefer not to dwell upon it, Helena.’

The conversation ended, as abruptly as other attempts to elicit information always had. ‘Of course I shall endeavour,’ her mother said. ‘I intend to continue to make an effort. He would consider it pusillanimous if I did not.’

Helena tried to imagine her as a child and then as an older girl but in neither of these efforts was she successful. The only photograph in the house was of her mother and her father on their wedding-day, standing against an undefined background. Her father was smiling because, Helena had always guessed, the photographer had asked him to. But her mother had not heeded this request.

‘I’ve cooked us moussaka,’ Helena said the next day, wanting to make up for her outburst. ‘A kind of shepherd’s pie.’

‘Good heavens, child, how very ambitious of you!’

Her mother left most of it on her plate and went away to find herself a slice of bread. Some time later they spoke again of cooking. Helena said:

‘There’s a course you can take.’

‘A course, Helena?’

She explained, her mother carefully listened. Her mother said:

‘But surely you can take a more interesting course? What would be at the end of this, for instance?’

‘A job, if I am lucky.’

‘You would cook in some kitchen, is that it? Other people’s food? Food for mouths in a hotel – or a hospital or a school? Is that it?’

‘Well, perhaps.’

‘I can only call it pathetic, Helena, to cook food for people in an institution.’

‘Cooking is something I like.’

‘I do not understand that.’

Genuinely, Helena knew, her mother didn’t. The meals they ate – which as a child she had assumed to be as all meals were – had never been prepared with interest. Meat and vegetables arrived from the food department of the Kensington store and had, with as scant attention as possible, found their way on to the mahogany surface of the dining-table.

‘The course doesn’t cost a lot.’

‘Child, it doesn’t matter what it costs. Your father would be disappointed is what matters.’

There was resentment in her mother’s voice. There was astonished disbelief, as if Helena had confessed to a crime. ‘I’m glad he’s dead,’ her mother said, ‘so that he need not suffer to see his only child becoming a cook.’

‘I’m sorry it’s such a tragedy.’

‘It makes no sense, child.’

Her mother turned away, leaving the sitting-room, where the brief conversation had taken place. Helena might have told the truth: that any course, in cooking, in typing and shorthand, in nursery management, in accountancy or gardening, would have fulfilled her need, which was to close the door of the house behind her and never to return.

She worked in the kitchens of Veitch and Company, paper manufacturers, helping to cook canteen food for two hundred employees. Braised steak, silverside, gammon, beef, roast potatoes or mashed, peas, carrots, Brussels sprouts, broad beans in season, trifle or Black Forest gâteau, stewed plums or custard tart: they were dishes and tastes which represented a world as distant as it could possibly be from her mother’s and father’s. ‘Helena!’ a voice shouted in the kitchens one day and there was Mrs Archingford on the telephone, talking about the police and how the name of Veitch and Company had been discovered on a postcard in the dark study, where Helena’s mother had been found also. It was Mrs Archingford who had noticed the curtains not drawn back in the sitting-room of her mother’s house, who had worried and had finally spoken to a policeman on the beat. Starvation was given as the cause of death on the death certificate: still struggling with the work in the study, Helena’s mother had not bothered to eat. Not having visited her for more than three years, Helena had tried not to think about her while that time passed.

‘You’ll forgive me, dear, if I fail to attend the funeral,’ Mrs Archingford requested. ‘She didn’t care for the look of me and no bones about it. Would be a trifle hypocritical, should we say?’

Helena was the only person who did attend the funeral. While a clergyman who had never known her mother spoke his conventional farewell she kept thinking of the busy kitchens of Veitch and Company–all that mound of food, while her mother had absentmindedly starved.

She cleared the house, taking a week off from the kitchens. She gathered together her mother’s clothes – and her father’s, which still remained – and placed them ready in the hall, to be collected by a charitable organization. She telephoned a firm which a girl in the kitchens had told her about, which purchased the contents of uninhabited houses. She telephoned a house agents’ and put the house on the market.

She found nothing, in her mother’s bedroom or the study, that belonged to the past, before the time of the marriage. There were no personal letters of any kind, no photographs privately kept, no diaries. There was dust everywhere, some of her mother’s clothes were unwashed; the gas cooker in the kitchen, the refrigerator and the kitchen cupboards, were all filthy. But the order which was absent elsewhere dominated the study. The papers and notebooks dealing with lexicographic matters were arranged tidily on the long rectangular table beneath the window, and on the desk itself were two stacks of lined foolscap, one covered with the tiny handwriting of Helena’s father, the other with her mother’s, larger and firmer. The pages were numbered: there were seven hundred and forty-six of them. I do not know about a title for the work, her mother had written in the draft of a letter she had clearly been intending to dispatch to a publisher. My husband left no instruction, but some phrase may particularly strike you from what he has written himself, and a title thus emanate. The work is now complete, in the form my husband wished it. Had her mother put aside all other form of life as the final pages were composed, pathetically clinging to the relationship her wealth had bought? Helena wondered if she had bothered to go to bed since she had not bothered with food. She might have died of exhaustion as well as of starvation. She might have lost track of day and night, afraid to leave the study in case the long task should by some awful mischance be lost when the end was so very close. She imagined her mother struggling with sleep, weak in her body, the clarity of her bold handwriting now the most important fragment of her existence. She imagined her blinking away a sudden dizziness, and then moving in the room, one hand still on the desk to balance her progress, another reaching out into the gloom. She imagined her dead, lying on the unclean carpet.

On the foolscap pages there were underlined words, printed in capital letters: Nympholepsy. Disembogue. Graphotype. Imagist. Macle. Ram-bunctious. The precision of alphabetical order, the endlessly repeated reflections of her mother’s seriousness, the intensity of her devotion to the subject out of which she and the man she’d married had spun a life together: all that lingered in the study, alive in the conjoined handwriting on the foolscap pages and the notebooks. The explanations of the paragraphs were meaningless to Helena and the burden of reading them caused her head to ache. She didn’t know what to do with all the paper and the writing that had been left so purposefully behind. She didn’t know what to do about the letter to a publisher, probably the last effort her mother had made. She closed the study door on all of it.

She did not sleep in the house. Each evening she returned to her two-room flat near Shepherd’s Bush, where she turned the television on immediately to drive the house out of her thoughts. She sat in front of the bustling little screen with a glass of whisky and water, hoping that it, too, would help to cloud the images of the day. She longed to be back in her noisy kitchens, surrounded by different kinds of food. Sometimes, when she’d had a second and a third glass of whisky, the catalogue of the food which had become her life reminded her in a wry way of the catalogue of words in the study, one so esoteric, one so down-to-earth. Toad-in-the-hole, cabinet pudding, plaice and chips, French onion soup, trifle, jelly surprise.

One morning she arrived at the house with a cardboard carton into which she packed the foolscap pages. She carried it upstairs and placed it in a corner of the bedroom that had been her parents’, with a note to the effect that it should not be taken away by the firm she had employed to take everything else. The books in the study would go, of course. In her small flat she could not possibly store them, and since they were of no possible interest to her what was the point?

Mrs Archingford kept ringing the doorbell, to ask if she would like a cup of tea or if she could help with anything. Mrs Archingford was, not unnaturally after the years that had gone by, curious. She told Helena that at Number 10 the elderly couple’s son had moved in, to look after them in their now extreme old age. Birds flew about the rooms, so Mrs Archingford reported; the son was odd in the extreme.

‘I dare say you’ll be relieved to turn your back on the house?’ she probed. ‘No place for a young person, I shouldn’t wonder?’

‘Well, I don’t want to live here, certainly.’

‘My dear, however could you?’

Mrs Archirigford’s tone implied a most distressful childhood. She wouldn’t be surprised to hear, her tone suggested, that Helena had been beaten and locked in cupboards, just to teach her. ‘Most severe, your mother was, I always thought.’

‘It was her way.’

‘Forgive a nosy neighbour, dear, but your mother didn’t look happy. Her own worst enemy, as I said one time to the gas man. “Be brisk about it,” she ordered him, really sharply, you know, when the poor fellow came to read the meter. Oh, years ago it must have been, but I often remember it. Imagine that said to a meter man, when all the time he has to go careful in case of errors! And of course if he had made an error she’d be the first –’

‘Actually, my mother wouldn’t have noticed.’

‘Why don’t you slip in for a Nescafe and a Danish, eh? Smells like a morgue this hall does – oh, there, what a clumsy I am! Now, take that as unsaid, dear!’

Helena replied that it was quite all right, as indeed it was, Mrs Archingford pressed her invitation.

‘What about a warming cup, though? D’you know, I’ve never in all my days been inside this house? Not that I expected to, I mean why should I? But really it’s interesting to see it.’

Mrs Archingford poked a finger into the dust on the hallstand, and as she did so the doorbell rang. Women from the charitable organization had come for the clothes, so Helena was saved from having to continue the conversation about Nescafe and Danish pastries. That morning, too, a man arrived to estimate the value of the house and its contents so that death duties might be calculated. Then a man who was to purchase the contents came. He looked them over and suggested a figure far below that of the death duties man, but he pointed out that he was offering a full removal service, that in some unexplained way Helena was saving a fortune. She didn’t argue. In the afternoon Mrs Archingford rang the bell again to say the estate agents Helena had chosen were not the best ones, so the woman in the Corner Shop had told her when she’d happened to allude to the matter while buying smoked ham. But Helena replied that the choice had been made.

A few days later she watched the furniture being lifted away, the books and ornaments in tea-chests, the crockery and saucepans and cutlery, even the gas cooker and the refrigerator. When everything was gone she walked about the empty rooms. Why had she not asked the sandy-haired man who had come? Why had she not made tea for him and persuaded him to tell her anything at all? Through a blur of mistiness she saw her mother as a child, playing with her brother in the garden he had mentioned. Helena stood in the centre of the room that had been her mother’s bedroom and it seemed to her then that there were other children in the garden also, and voices faintly echoing. Trees and shrubs defined themselves; a house had lawns in front of it. ‘Come on!’ the children good-naturedly cried, but her mother didn’t want to. Her mother hated playing. She hated having to laugh and run about. She hated being exposed to a jolliness that made her feel afraid. She wanted peace, and the serious silence of her room, but they always came in search of her and they always found her. Laughing and shouting, they dragged her into their games, not understanding that she felt afraid. She stammered and her face went white, but still they did not notice. Nobody listened when she tried to explain, nobody bothered.

These shadows filled her mother’s bedroom. Helena knew that the playing children were a figment without reality, yet some instinct informed her that such shadows had been her mother’s torment, that their dreaded world had accompanied her even after she had hidden from them in a suburban house where the intolerable laughter was not allowed. Companions too ordinary to comprehend her mother’s different nature had left her afraid of ordinariness, and fear was what she had passed on to an ordinary daughter. Helena knew she would never marry; as long as she lived she would be afraid to bring a child into the world, and reflecting on that now she could feel within her the bitterness that had been her mother’s, and even the vengeful urge to destroy that had been hers also.

Curtains had been taken down, light-shades removed. Huge patches glared from ancient wallpaper where furniture had stood or pictures hung. The bare boards echoed with Helena’s footsteps. She bolted what it was necessary to bolt and saw that all the windows were secure. She banged the hall door behind her and for the last time walked through the avenues and crescents she knew so well, on her way to drop the keys through the estate agents’ letter-box. The cardboard carton containing her father’s work, and her mother’s achievement in completing it, remained in a corner of an empty bedroom. When the house was sold and the particulars completed the estate agents would telephone her in the kitchens at Veitch and Company to point out that this carton had been overlooked. Busy with meat or custard tart, she’d say it didn’t matter, and give the instruction that it should be thrown away.

Bodily Secrets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘We’ll have to see,’ she said.

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

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

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

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

‘Mr Agnew.’

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

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

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

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

‘No, I won’t have tea, thank you.’

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

‘No, thanks. Really, Mr Agnew.’

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

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

‘I know. I’m awfully sorry.’

‘Mr O’Neill saw it coming years ago.’

‘Yes, I’m afraid he did.’

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

‘It seems an age ago.’

‘Doesn’t it, though? An age.’

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

‘Thank you, Mr Agnew.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It’s more than kind, Mrs O’Neill.’

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

‘Oh, indeed I know it.’

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

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

‘I suppose I’ll go to Dublin.’

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

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

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

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

‘It had its heyday.’

‘Yes, it had its day.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Ah well, why wouldn’t you, Norah,’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I watched it the odd time.

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

‘I suppose they invent them.’

‘Isn’t America the shocking place though?’

‘I have a daughter there.’

‘Ah, sure, of course you have.’

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

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

‘Siobhan has never mentioned Dynasty.’

‘Well, isn’t that extraordinary?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Good morning, Mrs Whelan.’

‘Good morning, sir.’

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

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

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

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

‘It isn’t ridiculous at all, Cathal,’

‘You are fifty-nine years of age.’

‘I’m only too well aware of that.’

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

‘I invited Basil Agnew –’

‘Basil? Basil?’

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

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

‘Don’t be violent, Cathal.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’ve known him for seventeen years.’

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

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

‘Agnew’s a Protestant.’

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

‘I bet he isn’t. The bloody man –’

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

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

‘You’re being unpleasant, Cathal.’

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

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

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

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

‘That’s tittle-tattle, Thelma.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Always?’

‘Yes, always.’

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

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

‘I’ve always loved dancing, actually.’

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

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

‘Unless you decide to take to the hills.’

‘No, I’ll not do that, Norah.’

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

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

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

‘I’m sure all right.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two More Gallants

You will not, I believe, find either Lenehan or Corley still parading the streets of Dublin, but often in the early evening a man called Heffernan may be found raising a glass of Paddy in Toner’s public house; and FitzPatrick, on his bicycle, every working day makes the journey across the city, from Ranelagh to the offices of McGibbon, Tait & FitzPatrick, solicitors and commissioners for oaths. It is on his doctor’s advice that he employs this mode of transport. It is against the advice of his that Heffernan continues to indulge himself in Toner’s. The two men no longer know one another. They do not meet and, in order to avoid a confrontation, each has been known to cross a street.

Thirty or so years ago, when I first knew Heffernan and FitzPatrick, the relationship was different. The pair were closely attached, Heffernan the mentor, FitzPatrick ready with a laugh. All three of us were students, but Heffernan, a Kilkenny man, was different in the sense that he had been a student for as long as anyone could remember. The College porters said they recalled his presence over fifteen years and, though given to exaggeration, they may well have been accurate in that: certainly Heffernan was well over thirty, a small ferrety man, swift to take offence.

FitzPatrick was bigger and more amiable. An easy smile perpetually creased the bland ham of his face, causing people to believe, quite incorrectly, that he was stupid. His mouse-coloured hair was kept short enough not to require a parting, his eyes reflected so profound a degree of laziness that people occasionally professed surprise to find them open. Heffernan favoured pin-striped suits, FitzPatrick a commodious blue blazer. They drank in Kehoe’s in Anne Street.

‘He is one of those chancers,’ Heffernan said, ‘we could do without.’

‘Oh, a right old bollocks,’ agreed FitzPatrick.

‘ “Well, Mr Heffernan,” ’ he says, ‘ “I see you are still with us.” ’

‘As though you might be dead.’

‘If he had his way.’

In the snug of Kehoe’s they spoke of Heffernan’s bête noire, the aged Professor Flacks, a man from the North of Ireland.

‘ “I see you are still with us,” ‘ Heffernan repeated. ‘Did you ever hear the beat of that?’

‘Sure, Flacks is senile.’

‘The mots in the lecture giggle when he says it.’

‘Oh, an ignorant bloody crowd.’

Heffernan became meditative. Slowly he lit a Sweet Afton. He was supported in his continuing studentship by the legacy left to him for that purpose by an uncle in Kilkenny, funds which would cease when he was a student no longer. He kept that tragedy at bay by regularly failing the Littlego examination, a test of proficiency in general studies to which all students were obliged to submit themselves.

‘A fellow came up to me this morning,’ he said now, ‘a right eejit from Monasterevin. Was I looking for grinds in Little-go Logic? Five shillings an hour.’

FitzPatrick laughed. He lifted his glass of stout and drank from it, imposing on his upper lip a moustache of foam which was permitted to remain there.

‘A minion of Flacks’,’ Heffernan continued. ‘A Flacks boy and no mistake, I said to myself.’

‘You can tell them a mile off.’

‘ “I know your father,” I said to him. “Doesn’t he deliver milk?” Well, he went the colour of a sunset. “Avoid conversation with Flacks,” I told him. “He drove a wife and two sisters insane.” ’

‘Did your man say anything?’

‘Nothing, only “Gripes”,’

‘Oh, Flacks is definitely peculiar,’ FitzPatrick agreed.

In point of fact, at that time FitzPatrick had never met Professor Flacks. It was his laziness that caused him to converse in a manner which suggested he had, and it was his laziness also which prevented him from noticing the intensity of Heffernan’s grievance. Heffernan hated Professor Flacks with a fervour, but in his vague and unquestioning way FitzPatrick assumed that the old professor was no more than a passing thorn in his friend’s flesh, a nuisance that could be exorcised by means of complaint and abuse. Heffernan’s pride did not at that time appear to play a part; and FitzPatrick, who knew his friend as well as anyone did, would not have designated him as a possessor of that quality to an unusual degree. The opposite was rather implied by the nature of his upkeep and his efforts not to succeed in the Littlego examination. But pride, since its presence might indeed be questioned by these facts, came to its own support: when the story is told in Dublin today it is never forgotten that it has roots in Professor Flacks’s causing girls to giggle because he repeatedly made a joke at Heffernan’s expense.

Employed by the University to instruct in certain aspects of literature, Professor Flacks concentrated his attention on the writings of James Joyce. Shakespeare, Tennyson, Shelley, Coleridge, Wilde, Swift, Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, and many another familiar name were all bundled away in favour of a Joycean scholarship that thirty or so years ago was second to none in Irish university life. Professor Flacks could tell you whom Joyce had described as a terrified YMCA man, and the date of the day on which he had written that his soul was full of decayed ambitions. He spoke knowledgeably of the stale smell of incense, like foul flowerwater; and of flushed eaves and stubble geese.

‘Inane bloody show-off,’ Heffernan said nastily in Kehoe’s.

‘You’ll see him out, Heff.’

‘A bogs like that would last for ever.’

Twelve months later, after he and Heffernan had parted company, FitzPatrick repeated all that to me. I didn’t know either of them well, but was curious because a notable friendship had so abruptly come to an end. FitzPatrick, on his own, was inclined to talk to anyone.

We sat in College Park, watching the cricket while he endeavoured to remember the order of subsequent events. It was Heffernan who’d had the idea, as naturally it would be, since FitzPatrick still knew Professor Flacks only by repute and had not suffered the sarcasm which Heffernan found so offensive. But FitzPatrick played a vital part in the events which followed, because the elderly woman who played the main part of all was a general maid in FitzPatrick’s digs.

‘Has that one her slates on?’ Heffernan inquired one night as they passed her by in the hall.

‘Ah, she’s only a bit quiet.’

‘She has a docile expression all right.’

‘She wouldn’t damage a fly.’

Soon after that Heffernan took to calling in at FitzPatrick’s digs in Donnybrook more often than he had in the past. Sometimes he was there when FitzPatrick arrived back in the evening, sitting in the kitchen while the elderly maid pricked sausages or cut up bread for the meal that would shortly be served. Mrs Maginn, the landlady, liked to lie down for a while at that time of day, so Heffernan and the maid had the kitchen to themselves. But finding him present on several occasions when she came downstairs, Mrs Maginn in passing mentioned the fact to her lodger. FitzPatrick, who didn’t himself understand what Heffernan’s interest in the general maid was, replied that his friend liked to await his return in the kitchen because it was warm. Being an easy-going woman, Mrs Maginn was appeased.

‘There’s no doubt in my mind at all,’ Heffernan stated in Kehoe’s after a few weeks of this behaviour. ‘If old Flacks could hear it he’d have a tortoise’s pup.’

FitzPatrick wagged his head, knowing that an explanation was in the air. Heffernan said: ‘She’s an interesting old lassie.’

He then told FitzPatrick a story which FitzPatrick had never heard before. It concerned a man called Corley who had persuaded a maid in a house in Baggot Street to do a small service for him. It concerned, as well, Corley’s friend, Lenehan, who was something of a wit. At first FitzPatrick was confused by the story, imagining it to be about a couple of fellow-students whom he couldn’t place.

‘The pen of Jimmy Joyce,’ Heffernan explained. ‘That yarn is Flacks’s favourite of the lot.’

‘Well, I’d say there wasn’t much to it. Sure, a skivvy never would.’

‘She was gone on Corley.’

‘But would she steal for him?’

‘You’re no romantic, Fitz.’

FitzPatrick laughed, agreeable to accepting this opinion. Then, to his astonishment, Heffernan said: ‘It’s the same skivvy Mrs Maginn has above in your digs.’

FitzPatrick shook his head. He told Heffernan to go on with himself, but Heffernan insisted.

‘She told me the full story herself one night I was waiting for you –maybe the first night I ever addressed a word to her. “Come into the kitchen outa the cold, Mr Heffernan,” she says. D’you remember the occasion it was? Late after tea, and you didn’t turn up at all. She fried me an egg.’

‘But, holy Christ, man –’

‘It was the same night you did well with the nurse from Dundrum.’

FitzPatrick guffawed. A great girl, he said. He repeated a few details, but Heffernan didn’t seem interested.

‘I was told the whole works in the kitchen, like Jimmy Joyce had it out of her when she was still in her teens. A little gold sovereign was what she fecked for your man.’

‘But the poor old creature is as honest as the day’s long.’

‘Oh, she took it all right and she still thinks Corley was top of the bill.’

‘But Corley never existed –’

‘Of course he did. Wasn’t he for ever entertaining that fine little tart with the witticisms of Master Lenehan?’

The next thing that happened, according to FitzPatrick, was that a bizarre meeting took place. Heffernan approached Professor Flacks with the information that the model for the ill-used girl in Joyce’s story ‘Two Gallants’ had come to light in a house in Donnybrook. The Professor displayed considerable excitement, and on a night when Mrs Maginn was safely at the pictures he was met by Heffernan at the bus stop and led to the kitchen.

He was a frail man in a tweed suit, not at all as FitzPatrick had imagined him. Mrs Maginn’s servant, a woman of about the same age, was slightly deaf and moved slowly owing to rheumatism. Heffernan had bought half a pound of fig-roll biscuits which he arranged on a plate. The old woman poured tea.

Professor Flacks plied her with questions. He asked them gently, with courtesy and diplomacy, without any hint of the tetchiness described so often by Heffernan. It was a polite occasion in the kitchen, Heffernan handing round the fig-rolls, the maid appearing to delight in recalling a romance in her past.

‘And later you told Mr Joyce about this?’ prompted Professor Flacks.

‘He used come to the house when I worked in North Frederick Street, sir. A dentist by the name of O’Riordan.’

‘Mr Joyce came to get his teeth done?’

‘He did, sir.’

‘And you’d talk to him in the waiting-room, is that it?’

‘I’d be lonesome, sir. I’d open the hall door when the bell rang and then there’d be a wait for maybe an hour before it’d ring again, sir. I recollect Mr Joyce well, sir.’

‘He was interested in your – ah – association with the fellow you mentioned, was he?’

‘It was only just after happening, sir. I was turned out of the place in Baggot Street on account of the bit of trouble. I was upset at the time I knew Mr Joyce, sir.’

‘That’s most understandable.’

‘I’d often tell a patient what had happened to me.’

‘But you’ve no hard feelings today? You were badly used by the fellow, yet –’

‘Ah, it’s long ago now, sir.’

Heffernan and FitzPatrick saw the Professor on to a bus and, according to FitzPatrick, he was quivering with pleasure. He clambered into a seat, delightedly talking to himself, not noticing when they waved from the pavement. They entered a convenient public house and ordered pints of stout.

‘Did you put her up to it?’ FitzPatrick inquired.

‘The thing about that one, she’d do anything for a scrap of the ready. Didn’t you ever notice that about her? She’s a right old miser.’

It was that that Heffernan had recognized when first he’d paid a visit to Mrs Maginn’s kitchen: the old maid was possessed of a meanness that had become obsessional with her. She spent no money whatsoever, and was clearly keen to add to what she had greedily accumulated. He had paid her a pound to repeat the story he had instructed her in.

‘Didn’t she say it well? Oh, top of the bill, I’d say she was.’

‘You’d be sorry for old Flacks.’

‘Oh, the devil take bloody Mr Flacks.’

Some months went by. Heffernan no longer visited the kitchen in Donnybrook, and he spoke hardly at all of Professor Flacks. In his lazy way FitzPatrick assumed that the falsehoods which had been perpetrated were the be-all and end-all of the affair, that Heffernan’s pride – now clearly revealed to him – had somehow been satisfied. But then, one summer’s afternoon while the two idled in Stephen’s Green in the hope of picking up girls, Heffernan said: ‘There’s a thing on we might go to next Friday.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Mr Flacks performing. The Society of the Friends of James Joyce.’

It was a public lecture, one of several that were to be delivered during a week devoted by the Society to the life and work of the author who was its raison d’être. The Society’s members came from far afield: from the United States, Germany, Finland, Italy, Australia, France, England and Turkey. Learned academics mingled with less learned enthusiasts. Mr James Duffy’s Chapelizod was visited, and Mr Power’s Dublin Castle. Capel Street and Ely Place were investigated, visits were made to the renowned Martello Tower, to Howth and to Pim’s. Betty Bellezza was mentioned, and Val from Skibbereen. The talk was all Joyce talk. For a lively week Joyce reigned in Dublin.

On the appointed evening FitzPatrick accompanied his friend to Professor Flacks’s lecture, his premonitions suggesting that the occasion was certain to be tedious. He had no idea what Heffernan was up to, and wasn’t prepared to devote energy to speculating. With a bit of luck, he hoped, he’d be able to have a sleep.

Before the main event a woman from the University of Washington spoke briefly about Joyce’s use of misprints; a bearded German read a version of ‘The Holy Office’ that had only recently been discovered. Then the tweeded figure of Professor Flacks rose. He sipped at a tumbler of water, and spoke for almost an hour about the model for the servant girl in the story, ‘Two Gallants’. His discovery of that same elderly servant, now employed in a house in Donnybrook, engendered in his audience a whisper of excitement that remained alive while he spoke, and exploded into applause when he finished. A light flush enlivened the paleness of his face as he sat down. It was, as Heffernan remarked to his dozy companion, the old man’s finest hour.

It was then that FitzPatrick first became uneasy. The packed lecture-hall had accepted as fact all that had been stated, yet none of it was true. Notes had been taken, questions were now being asked. A voice just behind the two students exclaimed that this remarkable discovery was worth coming two thousand miles to hear about. Mental pictures of James Joyce in a dentist’s waiting-room flashed about the hall. North Frederick Street would be visited tomorrow, if not tonight.

‘I’d only like to ask,’ Heffernan shouted above the hubbub, ‘if I may, a simple little question.’ He was on his feet. He had caught the attention of Professor Flacks, who was smiling benignly at him. ‘I’d only like to inquire,’ Heffernan continued, ‘if that whole thing couldn’t be a lot of baloney.’

‘Baloney?’ a foreign voice repeated.

‘Baloney?’ said Professor Flacks.

The buzz of interest hadn’t died down. Nobody was much interested in the questions that were being asked except the people who were asking them. A woman near to FitzPatrick said it was extraordinarily moving that the ill-used servant girl, who had been so tellingly presented as an off-stage character by Joyce, should bear no grudge all these years later.

‘What I mean, Professor Flacks,’ said Heffernan, ‘is I don’t think James Joyce ever attended a dentist in North Frederick Street. What I’m suggesting to you, sir, is that the source of your information was only looking for a bit of limelight.’

FitzPatrick later described to me the expression that entered Professor Flacks’s eyes. ‘A lost kind of look,’ he said, ‘as though someone had poked the living daylights out of him.’ The old man stared at Heffernan, frowning, not comprehending at first. His relationship with this student had been quite different since the night of the visit to Mrs Maginn’s kitchen: it had been distinguished by a new friendliness, and what had seemed like mutual respect.

‘Professor Flacks and myself,’ continued Heffernan, ‘heard the old lady together. Only I formed the impression that she was making the entire matter up. I thought, sir, you’d formed that opinion also.’

‘Oh, but surely now, Mr Heffernan, the woman wouldn’t do that.’

‘There was never a dentist by the name of O’Riordan that practised in North Frederick Street, sir. That’s a fact that can easily be checked.’

Heffernan sat down. An uneasy silence gripped the lecture-hall. Eyes turned upon Professor Flacks. Weakly, with a hoarseness in his voice, he said: ‘But why, Mr Heffernan, would she have made all that up? A woman of that class would hardly have read the story, she’d hardly have known –’

‘It’s an unfortunate thing, sir,’ interrupted Heffernan, standing up again, ‘but that old one would do anything for a single pound note. She’s of a miserly nature. I think what has happened,’ He went on, his tone changing as he addressed the assembly, ‘is that a student the Professor failed in an examination took a chance to get his own back. Our friend Jas Joyce,’ he added, ‘would definitely have relished that.’

In misery Professor Flacks lifted the tumbler of water to his lips, his eyes cast down. You could sense him thinking, FitzPatrick reported, that he was a fool and he had been shown to be a fool. You could sense him thinking that he suddenly appeared to be unreliable, asinine and ridiculous. In front of the people who mattered to him most of all he had been exposed as a fraud he did not feel himself to be. Never again could he hold his head up among the Friends of James Joyce. Within twenty-four hours his students would know what had occurred.

An embarrassed shuffling broke out in the lecture-hall. People murmured and began to make their way into the aisles. FitzPatrick recalled the occasion in Mrs Maginn’s kitchen, the two elderly puppets on the end of Heffernan’s string, the fig-rolls and the tea. He recalled the maid’s voice retailing the story that he, because he knew Heffernan so well, had doubted with each word that was uttered. He felt guilty that he hadn’t sought the old man out and told him it wasn’t true. He glanced through the throng in the lecture-hall at the lone figure in porridgy tweeds, and unhappily reflected that suicide had been known to follow such wretched disgrace. Outside the lecture-hall he told Heffernan to go to hell when a drink in Anne Street was suggested – a remark for which Heffernan never forgave him.

‘I mean,’ FitzPatrick said as we sat in College Park a long time later, ‘how could anyone be as petty? When all the poor old fellow ever said to him was “I see you are still with us?” ’

I made some kind of reply. Professor Flacks had died a natural death a year after the delivery of his lecture on ‘Two Gallants’. Earlier in his life he had not, as Heffernan had claimed, driven a wife and two sisters mad: he’d been an only child, the obituary said in the Irish Times, and a bachelor. It was an awkward kind of obituary, for the gaffe he’d made had become quite famous and was still fresh in Dubliners’ minds.

We went on talking about him, FitzPatrick and I, as we watched the cricket in College Park. We spoke of his playful sarcasm and how so vehemently it had affected Heffernan’s pride. We marvelled over the love that had caused a girl in a story to steal, and over the miserliness that had persuaded an old woman to be party to a trick. FitzPatrick touched upon his own inordinate laziness, finding a place for that also in our cobweb of human frailty.

The Smoke Trees of San Pietro

My father was a great horseman. My mother was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. I was taken to watch my father jumping as a member of the military team in Linvik when I was five years old. The team did not win that afternoon but my father’s performance was faultless and he himself received a personal award. I remember the applause and his saluting, and my mother’s fingers tightening; on my arm. ‘Oh, how deserved that is!’ she whispered, and when my father joined us later you could see that he was proud. He smelt of horses and of leather, as he always did when he’d been jumping: to this day, I can evoke that smell at will.

That is the most vivid memory of that early time in my childhood. We drove away from the stadium and then there was my first dinner in a restaurant, my mother and father on either side of me, red roses in a vase, a candle burning in a wooden candlestick that was painted blue and green. ‘One day,’ my father predicted, anticipating that in time I, too, would be a member of the military team. Already I was promising: so he insisted when he watched me cantering with my mother along the grassy path beside the birch woods. In the restaurant they touched their wine-glasses and my father requested the waiter to pour me just a little wine so that on this particular occasion I might have my first taste of it. Johan my father called the waiter, while I wondered which feature it was that in particular made my mother’s beauty so remarkable. One moment it seemed to be the candlelight gleaming on her pale hair, the next the blue of her eyes, and then her lips and the tiny wrinkle on her forehead, and then the graceful way she held her head. My father’s hand reached across the tablecloth for one of hers, and there that memory ceases.

There is another one. In his surgery Dr Edlund probed my eyes with the beam of a torch that was as slim as a pencil. The disc of his stethoscope lingered on my back and chest, my reflexes were tested, my throat examined, my blood gathered in a capsule, the cavities of my body sounded. And afterwards, when weeks had passed, it was declared that I was not strong. Tiredness in future was to be avoided; I must canter more gently; becoming hot was not good. ‘He will be different from what we imagined,’ my father said. ‘That is all.’ I did not, then, sense the disappointment in his voice.

It was because of my delicate constitution that my mother first took me to San Pietro al Mare, initiating a summer regime that was to continue throughout my childhood. We went by train and because of my delicate constitution more time was devoted to the journey than might otherwise have been considered necessary. A night was spent in Hamburg, at the Hotel Kronberg, then by day and night we went slowly on, the air noticeably warmer each time we stopped at a station. A final night was spent at Milan, at the Hotel Belvedere. We arrived at San Pietro al Mare in the early afternoon.

I think, that first evening, my mother was a little nervous. She addressed the hotel staff in English and was apprehensive lest she was not correctly understood. In the restaurant, at dinner, she spoke very slowly to the waiter and I did not entirely follow what was said because I did not yet understand much English. But the waiter, who was extremely rapid in all he did –flicking open our napkins and expertly covering our knees with them, running his finger down the menu to make a suggestion, noting my mother’s order on his pad – did not once request her to repeat a word. When he had gone my mother asked me if I felt tired, but I was not in the least. From the moment the train had begun to slow down for San Pietro I’d felt exhilarated. I was supposed not to carry heavy luggage but I had done so none the less, assisting the porter at the station to pack our suitcases into the taxi while my mother was at the Cambio. We had driven by palm trees – the first time I had ever seen such trees – and beyond them the sea was a shimmer of blue, just like the sky. Then the taxi turned abruptly, leaving behind the strolling couples on the promenade – the men in white suits, women in beach dresses – and the coloured umbrellas that offered each café table a pool of shade. For a very short time, no more than half a minute perhaps, the taxi climbed a hill which became quite steep and then drew up at the Villa Parco. The palm trees and the promenade were far below, the limpid sea appeared to stretch for ever.

At dinner I said I had never been in such an exotic place. The dining-room where we sat was more elegant and gracious, and a great deal larger, than the restaurant my father had taken us to on the evening of his triumph with the military team. I had never before seen so many people dining at the same time, many of them in evening dress. Spirit stoves burned at each table. Glass doors which stretched from the ceiling to the floor were thrown wide open to a terrace with a decorated balustrade – coloured medallions set among its brief, grey pillars. Beyond that the garden of the Villa Parco was spread with flowers that were quite unfamiliar to me: burgeoning shrubs of oleander and bougainvillaea, and trees called smoke trees, so my mother said. In the hotel I loved the sound of Italian, the mysterious words and phrases the chambermaids and the waiters called out to one another. And I loved the hesitant English of my mother.

The next morning – and every morning after that – my mother and I bathed among the rocks because Dr Edlund had prescribed as advantageous the exercise of unhurried swimming. We took the lift that descended to the bathing place from the hotel garden and afterwards we lay for a short time in the sun, covered with protecting creams, before walking to a café for an albicocca. We watched the people sauntering by, remarking on them when they were unusual. In this connection my mother taught me English words: ‘haughty’, ‘wan’, ‘abstracted’, and made me say in English, ‘Thank you very much’, when the waitress brought our albicocca. Then we would return to the hotel garden where, until lunchtime, my mother read to me from Kidnapped. I drew the faces of the waiters and the hall-porters, and the façade of the Villa Parco, and the white-painted chairs among the smoke trees. A visitor at the hotel would take one of these iron chairs and carry-it to a secluded place and later idly leave it there. Or a tête-à-tête would occur, two of the chairs drawn away in the same manner and then vacated, two empty glasses left on a table. After lunch we rested, then swam again, and again visited the town. ‘We must complete our postcard,’ my mother would say on the way in to dinner or during the meal itself, and afterwards we would do so before dropping the postcard into the letter-box in the hall. Sometimes I made a drawing on it for my father, a caricature of a face or the outline of a shell we’d found, and from my mother there would always be a reference to my health.

That pattern of our holiday, established during our first summer at San Pietro, remained to influence the subsequent years. We always left Linvik on a Tuesday and stayed, en route, at the Hotel Kronberg in Hamburg and the Belvedere in Milan: we always remained for July and August at San Pietro. But on the later occasions there were differences also: my mother was no longer nervous about her English; the staff at the Villa Parco remembered us and welcomed us with increasing warmth; some of the other visitors, familiar from previous years, would greet us when we arrived. This pleased my mother but, for myself, I preferred the novelty of strangers. I liked to watch the laden taxis draw up, the emergence of a man and woman or a family, an elderly person of either sex issuing orders to a younger companion, or the arrival of a solitary figure, always the most interesting from the point of view of speculation. Monsieur Paillez was one of these: he appeared at the Villa Parco for the first time during our third summer, to be assessed by us, and no doubt by other regulars as well, when he strolled down the terrace steps late one afternoon, a thin, tall, dark-haired man in a linen suit. He sat not far from where we were and a moment later a waiter brought him a tray of tea. He smoked while he drank it, taking no interest either in his surroundings or the other people in the garden.

‘A town called Linvik,’ my mother said, and two ladies in the garden listened while she described it. The ladies were Italian, Signora Binelli and her daughter Claudia. They came from Genoa, they told my mother, which was a city renowned for its trade associations and its cuisine. They spoke of formidable grey stone and formidable palaces, stirring in the false impression that the palaces had been carved out of the side of an immense grey mountain. A passenger lift went up and down all day long between the heights of Genoa and its depths, making its passage through the mountain rock. This information the Italian ladies repeated, remarking that the lift was a great deal larger and more powerful than the one that conveyed us from the garden of the Villa Parco to the bathing place. The palaces of Genoa were built of rectangular blocks and decoratively finished, they said, and the earlier imprecision was adjusted in my mind.

Signora Binelli was very stout. She had smooth white skin, very tight, that seemed to labour under as much strain as her silk dresses did. She knew, my mother murmured once as we walked away from the two Italian ladies, not to wear over-bright clothes. There was always some black in them – in the oak leaves that patterned dark maroon or green, behind swirls of blue or brown. The Italians knew about being fat, my mother said.

Signora Binelli’s daughter, Claudia, was not at all like that. She was a film star we were told, and certainly she presented that appearance, many of her fingers displaying jewelled rings, her huge red lips perpetually parted to display a glistening flash of snowy teeth. Her eyes were huge also, shown off to best effect by the dark saucers beneath them. Her clothes were more colourful than Signora Binelli’s, but discreetly so. My mother said Claudia had taste.

‘Buon giorno,’ Monsieur Paillez greeted my mother and these ladies one morning in the garden, inclining his head as he went on his way to the lift. We sat at one of the tables, shaded by its vast blue-and-grey umbrella. Claudia’s swimming bag hung from the arm of her chair; sunglasses obscured her magnificent eyes. A yellow-backed book, Itinerario Svizzero, was on the table beside the ashtray; she smoked a cigarette. Signora Binelli wore a wide-brimmed white hat that protected the skin of her face from the sunshine. The sleeves of her dark dress were buttoned at her wrists; her shoulders and much of her neck were covered.

‘Paillez,’ Signora Binelli said. ‘Is it in France a name to know? Count Paillez?’ Bewildered by these questions, my mother only smiled in reply. Claudia removed the cigarette from between her lips. She did not think Monsieur Paillez was a count, she said. She had not heard that in the hotel.

‘We do not have counts in my country,’ my mother contributed.

‘In Italian we say conte,’ Signora Binelli explained. ‘So also contessa.’

‘I take my swim,’ Claudia said.

My mother said we would take ours soon. In prescribing this form of exercise for me Dr Edlund had reminded my mother that it must not be indulged in while food was in the early stages of digestion: we always permitted two hours at least for my breakfast of tea and brioche to settle itself before I entered the sea. Others, I noticed, were not so meticulous about such matters, but I had become used to being different where health was concerned. A day would come, Dr Edlund had confidently assured me, when I would look back on all this mollycoddling with amusement – and with gratitude also, he hastily added, for I would be the stronger for it. He was not telling the truth, as doctors sometimes cannot. My life was confined to childhood, was what he’d told my mother and my father: it would not reach beyond it. ‘We do not speak much of this,’ my father had said in a moment when he did not know I could hear. My grandmother had come to Linvik for a few days: it was she he told, and he’d been wise enough to keep the news from her until her departure was quite imminent. Care and attention saw to it that my childhood continued to advance without mishap, my father said, but even so my grandmother hugged me tearfully before she went, pressing me so tightly into her arms that I thought my end would come there and then. That was some time before my mother and I spent our first summer at San Pietro al Mare. I was eleven the summer Monsieur Paillez arrived at the Villa Parco.

‘Well, we might go now,’ my mother said, and we gathered up our things and descended the slope of the lawn to the lift that took us to the bathing place. Signora Binelli, in search of deeper shade, had moved to a table beneath the trees.

There is very little I have since liked better than swimming among the rocks at San Pietro. The water was of a tranquillity and a clear blueness that made it seem more like a lake than the sea. The rocks were washed white, like smooth, curved bones that blissfully held your body when you lay on them. Two small bathing huts – in blue-and-grey canvas similar to the lawn umbrellas – became a world, my mother’s and mine, safely holding our belongings while we swam or floated.

‘T’amuses-tu?’ Monsieur Paillez slipped by me, his overarm strokes hardly rippling the surface. ‘Ti’ diverti?’ And finally translating into the language I had become familiar with: ‘You enjoy yourself?’

‘Oh yes, of course. Yes, thank you.’

‘C’est bon,’ he called back, over his shoulder. ‘We are here to enjoy ourselves, eh?’

An attendant supplied my mother with inflated cushions to lie on, but I myself preferred the bonelike rock. Claudia had made a personal territory of a narrow little cape, spreading on it her towels and various possessions from her bathing bag, then stretching herself prone, and slumbering. The other bathers disposed themselves in similar ways, oiling the skin of their legs and backs. Monsieur Paillez briskly dried himself and went away.

That same day, an hour before dinner, my mother and I were returning from our evening walk around the town when a taxi drew up beside us and Monsieur Paillez said:

‘May I offer you a lift?’

When my mother explained that our walk was taken for pleasure the Frenchman paid the driver and fell into step with us. This was a considerable surprise. (‘I was quite astounded,’ my mother remarked later, as we went over the incident during dinner.)

‘I have a little business to conduct in Triora,’ Monsieur Paillez said. ‘How cool it is now!’

It had been oppressive in Triora, he said. How pleasant it always was to return to San Pietro! ‘I greatly admire the smoke trees of San Pietro. Do you not also, madame?’

My mother said she did, and a conversation ensued between them concerning shrubs and horticulture. After that my mother revealed that she and I had been coming to San Pietro al Mare for three years, and Monsieur Paillez confessed that he did not know it as well as we did, this being his first visit. He had decided he might prefer the sea and a good hotel to what Triora had to offer. Triora he knew particularly well.

‘We have always been happy at the Villa Parco,’ my mother said.

Monsieur Paillez asked questions in a polite manner: if our journey to San Pietro was a long one, how we made it, where we stayed en route. My mother answered, equally politely.

‘You have travelled from Paris, Monsieur Paillez?’

‘Ah, no. Not Paris. I travel from Lille. Have you by chance heard of Lille?’

My mother had and when he questioned her again she mentioned Linvik, repeating the name because Monsieur Paillez had difficulty in understanding it at first. He had not known of our town’s existence.

‘Well, quite like Lille maybe,’ my mother said. ‘With manufacturing interests.’

‘Though less extensive in size I would suggest?’

‘Oh yes, much less extensive.’

‘The scent in the air is the evening scent of the smoke trees,’ Monsieur Paillez said. (Afterwards – over dinner – my mother confessed to me that she had only been aware of the familiar scent of bougainvillaea, and had never before heard that smoke trees gave off a perfume of any kind.)

‘Such a place!’ Monsieur Painez enthused as we passed through the gardens of the hotel. ‘Such a place!’

That was the beginning of Monsieur Paillez’s friendship with my mother. The following morning, when we were resting after breakfast on the lawn, he did not pass our table by but again dropped into conversation and then inquired if he might sit down. Signora Binelli and Claudia, emerging from the hotel ten minutes later and about to join us, as on other days, did not do so. Signora Binelli settled herself beneath the smoke trees, Claudia went straight to the lift. It was clear to me – though possibly not to my mother and Monsieur Paillez, who by now were exchanging views on Mozart’s operas – that the Italian ladies were displeased.

‘What fun Così fan Tutte is!’ Monsieur Paillez later exclaimed in the lift. ‘It is the fun of it I love.’

The excursion to the bathing place, and the routine that followed it, did not vary from day to day. Everything was the same: my mother and I swimming for twenty minutes or so, then lying in the sunshine before swimming again, Claudia claiming her private territory, other swimmers occupying their places of the day before, Monsieur Paillez briskly drying himself and going away, as if suddenly in a hurry.

‘Business in Triora!’ Signora Binelli remarked one evening when he did not return to the hotel at his usual time. It was not yet too cool for me to be permitted to remain on the terrace with my mother while she took her aperitif. Signora Binelli and Claudia occupied the table next to ours, as always they did. Since the evening Monsieur Paillez had halted his taxi it had become his habit to join my mother while she had her aperitif and he his. A general conversation then took place, the Binellis drawn into it because it was natural that they should be, I the only silent one.

‘There is not much business, I would have thought, in Triora,’ Claudia said, placing her cigarette on the table’s ashtray in order to select an olive. ‘Not business to attract a Frenchman.’

‘Monsieur Paillez visits his wife,’ my mother said. ‘It is his manner of speech to call it business.’

‘Wife!’ Signora Binelli repeated sharply. ‘Moglie,’ she translated, visibly annoying her daughter.

‘I am not uneducated,’ Claudia retorted. ‘So Monsieur Paillez is married, signora?’

‘His wife is an Italian lady.’ My mother paused. ‘She is in the care of nuns.’

‘Le suore,’ Signora Binelli supplied, and Claudia crossly sighed.

‘An asylum for the afflicted in Triora,’ my mother said. ‘She being of Triora originally. I think aristocratic.’

Abruptly Signora Binelli changed the subject. She did so in a manner that suggested the one engaging our attention required thinking about before it might profitably be continued. ‘Claudia is to have a part,’ she announced. ‘We hear today. A fine part, in Il Marito in Collegio.’

‘It’s just a possibility,’ Claudia corrected, retaining the crossness in her voice. ‘First the film must be financed.’

Monsieur Paillez did not join us that evening, nor did he appear in the dining-room. My mother did not remark on this, but when we left our table we had to pass close to the Binellis’. ‘He would not surely have gone without saying goodbye?’ Signora Binelli said. With small, beady eyes she peered from the fatness of her face, searching my mother’s expression for the explanation she clearly believed her to possess. ‘Monsieur Paillez said nothing to me,’ my mother replied, but when we had reached my room she quietly murmured, almost to herself: ‘His wife has not been well today.’

After breakfast the next morning he did not join us, nor did he arrive at the bathing place. My mother, I thought, became a little disconsolate, as if some flickering of doubt had crept into her mind, as if she’d begun to imagine that she was wrong in the explanation that had occurred to her. But if this doubt had indeed begun to haunt her it was soon dissipated.

‘This has been a sorrowful time for me,’ Monsieur Paillez said in the town that evening, appearing suddenly beside us as we left the pharmacy where one of my prescriptions had been renewed. ‘Since yesterday at midday it has been unhappy.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

‘From time to time this has to be.’

Monsieur Paillez had a mobile face. His expressions changed rapidly, his dark eyes conveying the mood that possessed him, even before the line of his lips did. His wife was mad, my mother had told me when I’d asked her the evening before, not quite understanding the exchanges with Signora Binelli. It was not easy for Monsieur Paillez, my mother had added.

He walked with us back to the hotel and then sat on the terrace, ordering the aperitifs for my mother and himself and an albicocca for me. He had bought a linen hat in Triora, to match his suit. The sun was always fierce in Triora, he said.

‘You have returned to us!’ Signora Binelli cried as soon as she saw him sitting there.

‘Ah,oui,’ he replied. ‘I have returned.’

In English he had difficulty with his h’s, but only when they came at the beginning of a word. Sometimes he repeated what he’d just said, in order to set that right. He nodded after he’d agreed he had returned. He listened while Signora Binelli said everyone had missed him.

‘Monsieur Paillez is safely here again,’ she pointed out to her daughter when she arrived on the terrace. ‘He has not gone without farewells.’

‘Never,’ Monsieur Paillez protested. ‘Never would I be guilty.’

That evening – no doubt because of his low spirits – Monsieur Paillez sat with us for dinner. ‘I do not intrude?’ he said. ‘I would not wish to.’ My mother assured him he did not, and I do not believe she once observed the staring of Signora Binelli across the crowded dining-room, or Claudia’s pretence that she had not noticed.

‘Tell me what you like best to draw,’ Monsieur Paillez invited me, ‘here in San Pietro.’

I could not think what to reply – the rocks where we bathed? the waiters? the promenade when we sat outside a café? Claudia or Signora Binelli? So I said:

‘The smoke trees because they are so difficult.’ It was true. Try as I would, I could not adequately represent the misty foliage or catch the subtlety of its colours.

‘And no drawing of course,’ my mother said, ‘could ever convey the smoke trees’ evening scent.’

She laughed, and Monsieur Paillez laughed: at some time or another, although I could not guess when, his error in imagining that the smoke trees gave off a night-time perfume had become a joke between them. Sitting there not saying anything further, I received the impression that my mother had come to know Monsieur Paillez better than the moments after breakfast on the lawn, and the whiling away of their aperitifs, allowed. I experienced the bewildering feeling that their exchanges – even those in which I had taken part – conveyed more than the words were called upon to communicate.

‘My dear, go up,’ my mother said. ‘I’ll follow in a moment.’

I was a little shy, having to leave the dining-room on my own, which I had never done before. People always looked at my mother and myself when we did so together, some of them inclining their heads as a way of bidding us good-night, others actually saying ‘Buona notte’ or ‘Bon nuit’. No one bothered with me on my own, except of course Signora Binelli, who remarked: ‘So they have packed you off!’

‘Buona notte, signora.’

Claudia clapped together the tips of her fingers, pleased that I spoke in Italian because she had taught me a few phrases. I had said good evening beautifully, she complimented, calling after me that certainly I had an ear.

‘That poor child,’ her mother tartly deplored as I pushed at the dining-room’s swing-doors. ‘What a thing for a child!’

That night I had a nightmare. My father and I were in the rector’s house in Linvik. The purpose of our being there was mysterious, but having eaten something with the rector we were taken to a small room which was full of the clocks he collected and repaired as a pastime. Here, while he and my father were in conversation, I stole a clock face, attempting to secrete it in my clothes. Then it seemed that I had stolen more than that: springs and cogs and wheels and hands had been lifted from the blue baize of the table and filled all my pockets. ‘I insist on the police,’ the rector said, and I was made to sit down on a chair to which my father tied me with a rope. But it was not the police who came, only the old man who delivered firewood to us. ‘This is a new treatment,’ he said, taking from the blue baize cover on the table the minute hand of a grandfather clock and inserting its point beneath one of my eyelids.

‘Now, now,’ my mother said. ‘It’s only a nightmare.’

Her embrace protected me; her lips were cool on my cheek. The garlic in the veal escalope had made it rich, she said, and begged me to tell her the dream. But already it seemed silly to have been frightened by such absurdity, and although I told her about the woodseller’s punishment I was ashamed that in my dream I had not been able to recognize this for what it was.

Behind my mother as she bent over me there was an upright rectangle of light. It came from the open doorway of her bedroom: because of my delicate constitution we always had adjoining rooms in the hotels where we stayed. ‘Shall we have it like that tonight?’ she suggested, but I shook my head, and rejected also her suggestion that my bedside light should be left burning. It was cowardly to capitulate to the threat of fantasies: my father may once have said so, although if he had he would not have said it harshly, for that was not my father’s way.

I believe I slept for a while, impossible to gauge how long. I awoke abruptly and recalled at once the rector’s clock-room and the fear that had possessed me. Without my mother’s consoling presence, I did not wish to return to sleep, cowardice notwithstanding, and was immediately more wide awake than I had been when she’d come to put her arms around me. I lay in the darkness, fearful only of closing my eyes.

I heard the murmur of voices. A crack of light showed beneath the door that led to my mother’s room. I stared at it and listened: my mother was speaking to someone, and being spoken to in return. There would be a silence for a while and then the murmur would begin again.

When the door unexpectedly opened I closed my eyes, not wishing my mother to know I was frightened of sleeping. She came softly to my bedside, stood still, and then re-crossed the room. Before she closed the door she said: ‘He is sleeping.’ Monsieur Paillez’s voice replied that that was good.

Their quiet exchanges began again. What did they say to one another? I wondered. Had she told him about my delicate constitution? Had she said that in spite of Dr Edlund’s bluff pretence it was accepted by everyone that I would not live beyond my childhood? I imagined her telling him, and Monsieur Paillez commiserating, as my mother would have over his mad Italian wife. I was glad for her that she had found such a friend at San Pietro, for she was so very kind to me, travelling this great distance down through Europe just for my sake, with nothing much to do when she arrived except to read and swim and exchange politenesses. I was aware that it had not been possible for my mother to have other children, for once I had asked her about the brothers and sisters who were not there. I was aware that sacrifices had been made for me, and of the sadness there would one day be for both my mother and my father, when my life came to an end. I should feel no sadness myself, since of course I should not know; I expected nothing more, beyond what I’d been promised.

I slept and dreamed again, but this time pleasantly: my mother and father and I were in the restaurant I had been taken to after my father’s success in the jumping ring. Around us people were laughing and talking, and so were my mother and father. There was no more to the dream, but I felt happy when I remembered it in the morning.

‘There is a fine Deposition in Triora,’ Monsieur Paillez said on the lawn after breakfast. ‘You might find it worth the journey.’

My mother answered as though she’d been expecting the suggestion. She answered quickly, almost before Monsieur Paillez had ceased to speak, and then she turned to me to say a visit to Triora might make an outing.

‘There is a pretty trattoria not far from that church,’ Monsieur Paillez said. ‘Its terrace is shaded by a vine. Once or twice I have had lunch there.’

And so, after our swim that day, my mother did not lie on the inflated cushions nor I on the white rock I had made my own, but dressed ourselves and were as swift as Monsieur Paillez about it. The taxi he took every day to Triora was waiting outside the hotel.

I enjoyed the change in our routine, though not the Deposition, nor the church which housed it. We didn’t spend long there, hardly more than a minute, finding instead a café where we wrote our daily postcard to my father. We have come today to Triora, I wrote, with Monsieur Paillez, who is visiting his mad Italian wife. We have seen a picture in a church. At last there was something different to write and for once the words came easily. I was smiling when I handed the postcard to my mother, anticipating her surprise that I had completed my message so quickly. She read it carefully, but did not immediately add her own few sentences. She would do that later, she said, placing the postcard in her handbag. (I afterwards found it, torn into little pieces, in the wastepaper basket in her room.)

‘At peace today,’ Monsieur Paillez reported in the trattoria with the vine. ‘Yes, more at peace today.’

It was usually so, he explained: when his wife had had a bad spell there was often a period of tranquillity. Because of it he did not visit the asylum in the afternoon, but returned with us to the Villa Parco and joined us when we swam again.

‘It is almost certain that Claudia has secured the part,’ Signora Binelli announced on the terrace before dinner. ‘All day long the telephone has been ringing for her.’

My mother and Monsieur Paillez smiled, though without exchanging a look. Claudia, arriving on the terrace, said the part in Il Marito in Collegio was far from certain. The telephone ringing was always a bad sign, implying indecision.

Just for a moment on the way in to dinner Monsieur Paillez’s hand gently cupped my mother’s elbow. Tonight he sat with us also, even though his spirits were no longer low, and as he and my mother conversed I again felt happy that she had a friend in San Pietro, one who could be called that more than the Binellis or any of the other guests could. That night I woke up once, and listened, and heard the murmuring.

On the way back to Linvik – in Hamburg, I believe it was – my mother said:

‘Let’s forget about that day we went to Triora.’

‘Forget it?’

‘Well, I mean, let’s have it as a secret.’

I asked her why we should do that. She did not hesitate but said that on that day, passing a shop window, she had seen in it what she wished to buy my father for Christmas. She had not bought it at the time, but had asked Monsieur Paillez to do so when he was next in Triora.

‘And did he?’

‘Yes, he did.’

Monsieur Paillez was just my father’s size, she said: whatever the garment was (my mother didn’t identify it), he had kindly tried it on. ‘I shall not say much about Monsieur Paillez,’ my mother said, ‘in case I stupidly divulge that little secret. When you talk about a person you sometimes do so without thinking. So perhaps we should neither of us much mention Monsieur Paillez.’

As I listened, I knew that I had never before heard my mother say anything as silly. Every evening after the day of our excursion to Triora Monsieur Paillez had stepped out of his taxi in front of the hotel and had joined us on the terrace. On none of these occasions had he carried a parcel, let alone handed one to my mother. In Triora I could not recollect her pausing even once by a shop window that contained men’s clothes.

‘Yes, all right,’ I said.

That was the moment my childhood ended. It is the most devious irony that Dr Edlund’s bluff assurances – certainly not believed by him – anticipated the circumstance that allows me now to look back to those summers in San Pietro al Mare, and to that summer in particular. It is, of course, the same circumstance that allows me to remember the rest of each year in Linvik. I did not know in my childhood that my mother and father had ceased to love one another. I did not know that it was my delicate constitution that kept them tied to one another; a child who had not long to live should not, in fairness, have to tolerate a family’s disruption as well as everything else.

At the Villa Parco, when we returned the following summer, Monsieur Paillez was already there, visiting his mad Italian wife. The very first night he shared our table, and after that we did everything together. Signora Binelli and her daughter were not at the hotel that year. (Nor were they again at the Villa Parco when we were. My mother and Monsieur Paillez were relieved about that, I think, although they often mentioned Signora Binelli and her daughter and seemed amused by the memory of them.)

‘We had snow in Lille as early as October,’ Monsieur Paillez said, and so the conversation was on this night, and on other nights – conducted in such a manner because my presence demanded it. Later my mother did not say that we should avoid mentioning Monsieur Paillez when we returned to Linvik. She knew it was not necessary to go through another palaver of silliness.

When I was sixteen and seventeen we still returned to San Pietro. What had begun for my mother as a duty, taking her weakling child down through Europe to the sun, became the very breath of her life. Long after it was necessary to do so we continued to make the journey, our roles reversed, I now being the one inspired by compassion. The mad wife of Monsieur Paillez, once visited in compassion, died; but Monsieur Paillez did not cease to return to the Villa Parco. In the dining-room I sometimes observed the waiters repeating what there was to repeat to younger waiters, newly arrived at the hotel. As I grew older, my mother and I no longer had adjoining rooms.

In Linvik my father had other women. After my childhood ended I noticed that sometimes in the evenings he was drunk. It won’t be long, he and my mother must have so often thought, but they were steadfast in their honourable resolve.

Slow years of wondering washed the magic from my childhood recollections and left them ordinary, like pallid photographs that gracelessly record the facts. Yet what a memory it was for a while, his hand reaching across the tablecloth, the candlelight on her hair. What a memory the smoke trees were, and Signora Binelli, and Claudia, and the sea as blue as the sky! My father was a great horseman, my mother the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. ‘Ti diverti?’ Monsieur Paillez’s voice was hardly raised as he swam by: how pleased I was that he had chosen to address me!

In my borrowed time I take from an ebony box my smudged attempts to draw the smoke trees of San Pietro and reflect that my talent did not amount to much. Silly, it seems now, to have tried so hard to capture the elusive character of that extraordinary foliage.

Virgins

Like a wasp, Laura says to herself, as she invariably does in the cathedral of Siena, with its violent argument of stripes. An uneasy place, her husband had been remarking only the other night, informing some other tourists in the Palazzo Ravizza.

In several languages, guides draw attention to the pulpit and Pastorino’s Last Supper. Wilting Americans rest on chairs, Germans work their cameras. An old Italian woman lights a candle, children chatter and are silenced. With dark glasses dangling from her fingers, Laura makes her way through the cathedral crowds, having quickly verified that Francesco Piccolomini became Pius III. She knew she’d been right; her husband had said it was Pius II Her husband is often wrong, about all sorts of things.

‘Laura? Is it Laura?’

She stares at the round face, flushed from the August heat. Hair, once coppery red, Laura guesses, is peppered now with grey; a dress is less elegantly striped than the architecture, in lettuce-green and blue. Laura smiles, but shakes her head. She passes her glance down the tired dress, to legs on which mosquitoes have feasted, to sandals whose shade of blue once matched the blue of the cotton above. She smiles again, knowing she knows this woman of fifty or so.

‘You haven’t changed a bit!’ the woman says, and immediately Laura remembers because the voice is as it has always been. Polite to say she hasn’t changed a bit; politely she lies herself.

‘Nor you, now that I look, Margaretta.’

But her tone is nervous, and her confidence melts as they stand among the tourists and the angry stripes. How odd to meet here, she says, knowing it is not odd at all, since everyone’s a tourist nowadays. She wishes they had not met like this; why could not Margaretta just have seen her and let her pass by?

‘It’s lovely to see you,’Margaretta says.

They continue to look at one another, and simultaneously, in their different moods, their distant friendship possesses them. Two marriages and their children are irrelevant.

The Heaslips’ house was in a straggling grassy square, dusty in summer. A brass plate announced the profession of Dr Heaslip; the oak-grained hall door was heavy and impressive, with brass that matched in weight and tone the nameplate. Near by, the Bank of Ireland was ivy-covered, less gaunt because of it than the Heaslips’ grey stone façade. Other houses, each detached from its neighbour, were of grey stone also, or colourwashed in pink or cream or white. In the approximate centre of an extensive area of shorn grass, green railings protected an empty pedestal, which Queen Victoria in her day had dominated. A cinema – the De Luxe Picture House, as antique as its title – occupied a corner created by the edge of the square and the town’s main street. Hogan’s Hotel filled the corner opposite.

One day in June, during the Second World War, a day when the brass plate shimmered in warm sunshine, a day Laura for all her life did not forget, Mrs Heaslip said in the drawing-room of the house:

‘Laura, this is Margaretta.’

Laura held out her hand, as she had been taught, but Margaretta giggled, finding it amusing that two small girls should be so formal.

‘Margaretta! Really, what will Laura think? Now, do at once apologize.’

‘We’re all like that in Ireland,’ Margaretta pronounced instead. ‘Bog-trotters, y’know.’

‘Indeed we’re not,’ protested Mrs Heaslip, a thin, tall woman in a flowery dress. With some panache she wore as well a straw hat with a faded purple ribbon on it. The skin of her face, and of her arms and legs, was deeply brown, as if she spent the greater part of her time outside. ‘Indeed, indeed, we’re not,’ she repeated, most emphatically. ‘And do not say “y’know”, Margaretta.’

They were nine, the girls, in 1941. Laura had been sent from England because of the war, called in Ireland ‘the emergency’: there was more nourishment to be had in Ireland, and a feeling of safety in an Irish provincial town. Years before Laura had been born, her mother, living in Ireland then, had been at a boarding-school in Bray with Mrs Heaslip. ‘I think you’ll like it in Ireland,’ her mother had promised. ‘If I didn’t have this wretched job I’d come with you like a shot.’ They lived in Buckinghamshire, in a village called Anstey Rye. In December 1939, when the war had scarcely begun, Laura’s father had been killed, the Spitfire he’d been piloting shot down over the sea. Her mother worked in the Anstey Rye clothes shop, where she was responsible for the accounts, for correspondence with wholesalers and for considerable formalities connected with clothing coupons. It was all very different from Ireland.

‘That’s what’s called a monkey puzzle, y’know,’ Margaretta said in the garden, and Laura quietly replied that she knew a monkey puzzle when she saw one.

Unlike Mrs Heaslip, Margaretta wasn’t thin. Nor was she brown. She was pretty in a sleepy, careless kind of way: her eyes were sleepily blue, her cheeks carelessly dimpled, her red jumble of hair the most beautiful Laura had ever seen. Margaretta would be astonishing when she grew up –what, Laura imagined, looking at her on that first afternoon, Helen of Troy must have been like. She felt jealous of the promise that seemed to be in every movement of Margaretta’s body, in every footstep that she took as she led the way through the garden and the house.

‘I am to show you everything,’ Margaretta said. ‘Would you be enormously bored to see the town?’

‘No, no, of course not. Thank you, Margaretta.’

‘It isn’t much, I’ll tell you that.’

The girls walked slowly through the wide main street, Margaretta drawing attention to the shops. All of them were cluttered, Laura noticed, except one, connected with a bakery, which seemed to sell, not bread, but only flour and sugar. They passed Martell’s Café, Jas. Ryan’s drapery and Medical Hall, Clancy’s grocery, which Margaretta said was a public house as well as a grocer’s, the Home and Colonial, a hardware shop and a shoe shop, other public houses. They paused by a window full of exercise-books and bottles of Stephens’ ink, which Margaretta said was her favourite shop of all. The window was strewn with packets of nibs and pencils, packets of rubber bands, rulers, pencil-sharpeners, and Waterman fountain pens in different marbled colours. There was an advertisement for Mellifont Books, and some of the books themselves, with garish paper covers: Angela and the Pixies in the Children’s Series, Murder from Beyond in Crime and Detection. The shop, Margaretta said, was called Coffey’s although the name over the door was T. MacCarthy. She liked it because it smelt so pleasantly of paper. Clancy’s smelt of whiskey and sawdust, the butcher’s of offal.

‘How’re you, Margaretta?’ Mr Hearne greeted her from his doorway, a heavy man in a blood-stained apron.

‘Laura’s come from England,’ Margaretta said by way of reply.

‘How’re you, Laura?’ Mr Hearne said.

In the weeks and months that followed, Laura came to know Mr Hearne well, for she and Margaretta did all the shopping for the household. ‘Meat and women,’ the butcher had a way of saying, ‘won’t take squeezing.’ He used to ask riddles, of which he did not know the answers. His wife, Mrs Heaslip said, was frequently pregnant.

The sweetshops of the town became familiar to Laura also, Murphy’s, O’Connor’s, Eldon’s, Morrissey’s, Mrs Finney’s. Different brands of icecream were sold: H.B., Lucan, Melville, and Eldon’s own make, cheaper and yellower than the others. Murphy’s sold fruit as well as confectionery, and was the smartest of the sweetshops. Margaretta said it smelt the nicest, a mixture of vanilla and grapes. They all sold scarlet money-balls, in which, if you were lucky, you got your money back, a brand-new ha’penny wrapped in a piece of paper. They all sold boxes of Urney chocolates, and liquorice pipes and strips, and Lemon’s Nut-Milk Toffees and Rainbow Toffees. In their windows, boxes of Willwood’s Dolly Mixtures were laid out, and slabs of Mickey Mouse Toffee, and jelly babies. Best value of all was the yellow lemonade powder, which Margaretta and Laura never waited to make lemonade with but ate on the street.

That first summer in Ireland was full of such novelty, but most fascinating of all was the Heaslip family itself. Dr Heaslip related solemn jokes in an unhurried voice, and his equally unhurried smile came to your rescue when you were flustered and didn’t know whether it was a joke or not. Mrs Heaslip read in the garden – books that had their covers protected with brown paper, borrowed from the library the nuns ran. Margaretta’s two younger brothers, six and five, were looked after by Francie, a crosseyed girl of nineteen who came every day to the house. Eileen and Katie between them did the cooking and cleaning, Katie for ever up and down the basement stairs, answering the hall door to Dr Heaslip’s patients. Eileen was quite old – Margaretta said sixty, but Mrs Heaslip, overhearing that, altered the estimation to forty-five – and made brown bread that Laura thought delicious. Katie was keeping company with Wiry Bohan from the hardware’s. Margaretta said she’d seen them kissing.

Dr Heaslip’s motor-car, unlike the others in the town, which for the most part were laid up because of the emergency, was driven every day out of the garage at the back by a man called Mattie Devlin. He parked it in front of the house so that Dr Heaslip could hasten to it and journey out into the country to attend a childbirth or to do his best when there’d been an accident on a farm. ‘Ah, well, we’ll do our best’ was a much-employed expression of his, issued in a tone of voice that did not hold out much hope of success though in fact, as Laura learnt, he often saved a life. ‘She’s out there ready, Doctor,’ Mattie Devlin every morning shouted up through the house at breakfast-time. He then began his day’s work in the garden, where, to Mrs Heaslip’s displeasure, he refused to grow peas, broad beans or spinach, claiming that the soil was unsuitable for them. He grew instead a great number of turnips, both swedes and white, potatoes, and a form of kale which nobody in the family liked. He was a man in a striped brown suit who wore both belt and braces and tucked the ends of his trousers into his socks when he worked in the garden. He never took off either his jacket or his hat.

Sometimes when Dr Heaslip was summoned on a call that involved a journey in his car he would invite the girls to accompany him, but he was insistent that they should make themselves as inconspicuous as possible on the back seat in case their presence should be regarded as a misuse of his petrol allowance. When they arrived at whatever house it was that required his skill he relaxed this severity and permitted them to emerge. ‘Go and look at the chickens and cows,’ he’d urge. ‘Show Laura what a chicken is, Margaretta.’ If the day was fine and the farmhouse not too far from the town, they’d ask if they might walk home. Later he would pass them on the road and would blow his horn, slowing down to give them a lift if they wanted one. But they usually walked on and no one particularly minded when they were late for whatever meal it was. Their plates of meat and vegetables would be taken from the oven and they’d eat at the kitchen table, gravy dried away to nothing, mashed potatoes brown. Or tea, at teatime, would have gone black almost, keeping hot on the range.

Headstrong and impetuous, Dr Heaslip described his daughter as. ‘Not like yourself, Laura. You’re the wise virgin of the two.’ He repeated this comparison often, asking Mrs Heaslip and sometimes Katie or Eileen, even Mattie Devlin, if they agreed. Margaretta ignored it, Laura politely smiled. Nothing much upset the Heaslip household and nothing hurried it. Mrs Heaslip’s only complaints were the manner in which her daughter spoke and Mattie Devlin’s ways with vegetables.

‘The Rains Came,’ Margaretta said. ‘All about India, y’know.’

They went to it, as they did to all the films at the De Luxe Picture House, which hadn’t yet acquired Western Electric Sound, so that the voices were sometimes difficult to hear. Dr Heaslip and Mrs Heaslip attended the De Luxe almost as regularly as Margaretta and Laura, who went three times a week, every time there was a change of programme. At breakfast the next day the girls reported on what they’d seen; Dr and Mrs Heaslip then made up their minds. Mr Deeds Goes to Town had for years been Mrs Heaslip’s favourite and The House of Rothschild her husband’s. Margaretta thought The House of Rothschild the most enormously boring picture she’d ever seen in her life, worse even than The Hunchback of Notre Dame. For her, and for Laura, the highlights of that first summer were Fast and Loose, Dodge City, His Butler’s Sister and Naughty Marietta; and best of all, they easily agreed, was The Rains Came. On Saturdays there was a serial called Flaming Frontiers, and there were travelogues and the news, and shorts with Charlie Chase or Leon Errol. ‘Don’t you love the smell of the De Luxe?’ Margaretta used to say after they’d dwelt at length on a performance by Franchot Tone or Deanna Durbin, exhausting the subject and yet unwilling to leave it. ‘Hot celluloid, I think it is, and cigarette-butts.’

The war ended in May 1945 and Laura brought back to England these memories of the family and the town, of the school she had attended with Margaretta, of the people and the shops. Margaretta wrote from time to time, a huge sprawling hand, words grotesquely misspelt: Mrs Hearne had called her latest baby Liam Pius, after the Pope; Cry Havoc was on at the De Luxe, The Way to the Stars was coming.

Laura wrote neatly, with nothing to say because Margaretta couldn’t be expected to be interested in all the talk about building things up again and descriptions of utility clothes. Margaretta had become her best friend and she Margaretta’s. They had decided it the night before she’d returned. They’d shared Margaretta’s bed, talking in whispers from ten o’clock until the Donald Duck clock said it was twenty past two. ‘We’d better go to sleep, y’know,’ Margaretta had said, but Laura had wanted to continue talking, to make the time go slowly. After Margaretta put the light out she lay in the darkness thinking she’d never had a friend like Margaretta before, someone who found the same things as boring as you did, someone you didn’t have to be careful with. A wash of moonlight for a moment lightened the gloom, catching the untidy mass of Margaretta’s hair on the pillow. She was breathing heavily, already asleep, smiling a little as if from some amusing dream. Then a cloud slipped over the moon again and the room abruptly darkened.

It was that night that Laura afterwards remembered most. ‘You can’t find friends in a town the like of this,’ Margaretta had said. ‘Well, I mean you can, y’know. Only it’s different.’ And she mentioned the girls she knew in the town, whom Laura knew also. None of them would have been, fascinated, as they were, by the way Mrs Eldon of the sweetshop made her lips seem larger with the outline of her lipstick. None of them would have wondered how it was that Mr Hearne always had the same amount of stubble on his face. ‘One day’s growth,’ Dr Heaslip had said when they’d asked him. How could a man, every day, have one day’s stubble? ‘They want to be nuns and things,’ Margaretta said. These girls went to the De Luxe also, but they didn’t take much interest in the performances, nor in the trademarks of the films, the roaring lion, the searchlights, the statue with the torch, the snow-capped mountain, the radio aerial with electricity escaping from it. The girls of the town didn’t go in for finding things funny. Sometimes Laura and Margaretta found a remark a shopkeeper had made so funny that they had to lean against some other shopkeeper’s window, laughing so much it gave them a stitch. Sometimes the very sight of people made them laugh. Entranced, Margaretta listened when Laura had told her how her Uncle Gilbert had taken her on to his bony knee on her sixth birthday and softly spanked her for no reason whatsoever. Afterwards he’d given her a sweet and said it was their secret. ‘Keep well away from that fellow,’ Margaretta had sharply advised, and both of them had giggled, not quite knowing what they were giggling at. It was something Laura had never told anyone else.

It is so drab, Laura wrote. As you would say, enormously drab. Everyone said at first, you know, that the war would be over by Christmas. I remember people saying Hitler was a knut and didn’t know what he was doing. But now everything’s so drab after Ireland that you’d think he had won the thing. I haven’t had an egg for months.

And so, for nourishment only, since safety wasn’t in question any more, Laura’s mother sent her to stay again with the Heaslips. Mrs Heaslip had pressed for this, had pressed that Laura’s mother should accompany her.

‘They can’t spare her,’ Laura explained when she arrived, reiterating what her mother had written. ‘She’d really have loved to come.’ The drab austerity was as confining as the war there had been.

For Laura, that summer had the pleasure of familiarity revisited in place of the novelty there had been when she’d first arrived in the town. Mrs Hearne might possibly be pregnant again, Mrs Eldon’s lipstick still generously recreated her lips, Murder from Beyond, with curling, yellowed edges, was still in the window among the nibs and rubber bands.

Margaretta had acquired a bicycle during the year, and the saddle of Mrs Heaslip’s Humber was lowered for Laura. For mile after mile of flat, undramatic landscape they talked, as they cycled, of the past performances at the De Luxe Picture House: Claudette Colbert in Boom Town, William Powell and Myrna Loy in The Shadow of the Thin Man, Ray Milland in The Doctor Takes a Wife. They turned off the tarred roads that were so easy to go fast on and explored countryside that was hilly and more interesting. Eileen made them sandwiches, which they carried in Margaretta’s saddle-bag, and they were given money for lemonade. They usually ate the sandwiches in a field, leaving their bicycles by the roadside and chattering for ages in the sunshine. Once they took their clothes off and bathed in a stream, shrieking because it was so cold. But what they liked best of all was to call in at some cottage and ask for a drink of water. They would be invited into the kitchen and two cups of water would be fetched from a bucket or a pump. On one occasion a very old woman insisted on giving them tea, with boiled eggs and bread, although they kept telling her they’d just eaten a lot of sandwiches. She showed them photographs of her son, who was in Chicago, and made them promise they would call at her cottage again. But even if all they received was the water they asked for there was always the excitement, afterwards, of talking about whoever had given it to them. Scrutinizing people, remembering every word that was spoken and every detail of a kitchen: that became a kind of game. If they were far enough away from the town they called themselves by names that were not their own. ‘Annabella Colman,’ Margaretta replied when asked, and Laura gave the name of a girl she knew in England, Isabel Batchelor-Tate. They were Dublin girls, Margaretta once added, on holiday in Hogan’s Hotel. Her father was a hay merchant and Laura’s a taster of teas. ‘I shouldn’t tell people stuff like that,’ Dr Heaslip reprimanded them one lunchtime. ‘I’m quite well known, you know.’ He went on humming after he’d spoken and they were unable to hide their fiery red faces, made to feel foolish because he had not been cross. Afterwards Mrs Heaslip looked at them amusedly, and suggested they should visit the de Courcys if they were bored.

‘Oh, but we’re not, Mrs Heaslip,’ Laura protested vehemently. ‘Not in the very least.’

‘Take her to the de Courcys, Margaretta. I don’t know what we’ve been thinking of not to introduce Laura to the de Courcys before this.’

‘But, God, they’re miles away.’

‘Do not say “God”, Margaretta. There is an invalid in that house. Of course a visit must be made. Eileen will make you salad sandwiches.’

They went the next morning. They cycled for nine miles and then they turned into an avenue with a gate-lodge from which a man carefully eyed them, from their sandals and white socks to their straw hats. He stood in the doorway, seeming to be listening to their conversation about Wiry Bohan’s courtship of Katie. He was wearing a Guard’s uniform, the coarse navy-blue tunic open at the neck, a cigarette in the middle of his mouth. He had grey hair and a grey, mournful face. When Margaretta said hullo he wagged his head but did not speak. They began to giggle when they’d cycled on a bit.

The avenue was long, its surface badly broken, but pleasantly cool because the trees that lined it kept out the sun. Laura considered it romantic, like the avenue in Rebecca. But Margaretta said that was only Wishful thinking: there hadn’t been an avenue in Rebecca encased with trees and foliage. An argument began, which continued until the pink-washed house appeared, with white hydrangeas on either side of it, and tall windows, and an open hall door. The bicycles crunched over gravel that made cycling difficult. The girls dismounted and walked the last bit.

‘I’m Margaretta Heaslip,’ Margaretta informed a maid who was winding a clock in the hall. ‘We’ve been sent to see the de Courcys.’

The maid stared, appearing to be alarmed. She continued to wind the clock, which was on a table at the bottom of the stairs, and then she closed the glass of its face and put the key on a brass hook in an alcove; the time was half past eleven.

Tapestries hung by the staircase, curving with it as it ascended. Rugs were scattered on the darkly stained boards of the floor, as threadbare as the stair carpet and the tapestries, which were so faded that whatever scenes they depicted had been lost. There was a smell in the hall, as Margaretta said afterwards, of flowers and bacon.

‘Will you tell the de Courcys?’ she suggested to the maid, since the maid appeared hesitant about how to proceed. ‘Just say Margaretta Heaslip and a friend are here.’

‘The de Courcys went up to Punchestown races, miss.’

‘Is Ralph de Courcy here?’

‘He is of course.’

‘Will you tell him then?’

‘He didn’t go up to the races, miss, in case they’d strain him.’

‘Will you tell him Margaretta Heaslip and a friend are here?’

The maid was as young as Katie, but not as pretty. She had protruding teeth and hair that was in disarray beneath her white cap. She hesitated again, and then visibly reached a decision.

‘I’ll tell him so, miss. Will ye sit in the drawing-room?’

She left them where they stood. One door they opened led to a panelled room, too small and businesslike for a drawing-room. Another, with blue blinds pulled down, had dining-chairs arranged around a long table, its other furniture shadowy in the gloom. The drawing-room itself had a fire, although the day was so exceedingly warm that the windows were open. There were vases of flowers on the mantelpiece and on tables and on a grand piano, and family portraits were close to one another on the walls. An old black-and-white dog was lying on the hearthrug and did not move when the girls entered. It was the most beautiful room, Laura considered, she had ever been in.

They sat cautiously on the edge of a sofa that was striped in two shades of faded pink. They spoke in whispers, discussing the maid: would she be keeping company with the uniformed man at the gate-lodge?

‘Will ye wait a while?’ the maid invited, appearing at the door.

Margaretta giggled and put her hand up to her mouth; Laura said they’d wait. ‘I wonder what her name is,’ she added when the maid had gone.

‘Ludmilla, I’d say.’

The giggling began again, the dog snorted in his sleep. Through the open windows came the sound of pigeons.

‘Well, this is an honour,’ a voice said. ‘How do you do?’

He was older than they were by maybe as much as three years. He was pale and dark-haired, his eyes brown. He was dressed in flannel trousers and a green tweed jacket.

‘Margaretta Heaslip,’ he continued, smiling extravagantly. ‘I remember you when you were little.’

He spoke as if she still were, as if they were both not in the least grown up. His manner insisted that he himself belonged to the adult world, that he had long ago passed through theirs.

‘My mother said to call,’ Margaretta explained, disowning responsibility for their presence. ‘To inquire how you were, and to introduce Laura.’

‘How do you do, Laura?’

He held out a hand, which Laura received, allowing her own to be briefly clasped. His touch was cold. Like marble, she thought.

‘Laura’s English, y’know.’

‘Well now, and whereabouts in England, Laura?’

‘A village called Anstey Rye. In Buckinghamshire.’

‘How attractive that sounds!’

‘Dead as old mutton, Laura says. The war, y’know.’

‘Ah, yes. The horrible war. But at least the Allies won. You’re pleased, Laura?’

He had a precise way of speaking, his Irish accent drawling out his sentences, a smile rarely absent from his face. Set in hollows, his dark eyes were fixed on Laura’s, insistent that his interest in all she had to say was genuine.

‘Well yes, I am pleased.’

‘I used to listen to Lord Haw-Haw. He’s most amusing.’

The maid returned with a tray of teacups, a teapot and biscuits on a plate.

‘Thank you, Mary.’

As he spoke, Margaretta put her hand up to her face. But already he had noticed.

‘What’s the joke?’ he politely inquired.

The maid left the room, and because she knew that she, too, would begin to giggle if she did not speak Laura said:

‘Margaretta thought her name was Ludmilla.’

‘Ludmilla?’

It wasn’t funny any more, as it hadn’t been when Dr Heaslip had not been cross. Politely, Ralph de Courcy handed them their cups of tea. He was right: they were children and he was not.

‘Have a Marietta biscuit?’

They each took one. They felt silly and ashamed. Margaretta said:

‘Are you feeling better these days?’

‘I never feel ill at all.’ He turned to Laura. ‘My heart was weakened when I stupidly caught rheumatic fever as a boy. I’m meant to go carefully in case I die.’

They wanted to gasp in wonder at this reference to death, but they did not do so. Margaretta said:

‘Are you getting better all the time?’

‘Indubitably. I’m reading Thomas Mann. Buddenbrooks. Do you like Thomas Mann?’

They had never heard of this German author. Vaguely, they shook their heads. They had not yet read, Laura admitted, the book called Buddenbrooks:

‘Shall I show you about the garden when you’ve finished your Marietta biscuits?’

‘Yes, please,’ Laura said. ‘If you don’t think the strain –’

‘Strain is just a word they use. Your father came here once or twice, Margaretta, when I was at death’s door – called in to offer a second opinion. It wasn’t as disagreeable as it sounds, you know, being at death’s door. Though nicer, perhaps, to be a few footsteps further off.’

His conversation was extraordinary, Laura considered. In a way everything about him was extraordinary, not least his detached smile and his eyes. His eyes did not flit about. They were the steadiest eyes she had ever seen, especially when he spoke of death.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘they make a frightful fuss. Do you play tennis? You could stay to lunch and then we might play tennis.’

‘But surely –’ Margaretta began.

‘I may play a little tennis. If I agree, and promise, not to sit about afterwards without a sweater and a blazer, then I may play a little tennis. Or at least that’s what I say.’

Suppose he dies? Laura thought. Suppose he falls down on the tennis court and is unable to get up again? Imagine having to tell about that! Imagine Dr Heaslip saying nothing, but thinking what fools they were and how much they were to blame!

He took them to the garden. He didn’t appear to know the names of any plants or flowers, but with his pale, cold hands he pointed about. He led them through a glasshouse full of tomatoes and out the other end. He pointed again: peaches flourished on a brick-lined wall. ‘A la Dean Swift,’ he said: they’d no idea what, he was talking about.

He sat between them on a wooden seat. A lawn stretched all around, bounded by white hydrangeas in front of towering cedar trees. Another dog, a brown spaniel, ambled from some corner and sat with them. Margaretta said the garden was beautiful.

‘Sergeant Barry does it. Did you see Sergeant Barry by the gate-lodge?’

They said they had.

‘He resigned from the force because he couldn’t learn the Irish. He feared they might demote him and he couldn’t bear the thought of that. So he resigned as sergeant.’

In the drawing-room, when she’d brought the tea and biscuits, he’d told the maid that they would stay to lunch. They hadn’t dared to say that there were salad sandwiches in Margaretta’s saddle-bag.

‘You must be starving,’ he said now, ‘after such a journey. Heaven knows what they’ve managed to scrape together. Shall we go and see?’

He led the way back to the house and to the dining-room. The blinds had been raised, and places laid at the table. He pulled at a bell in the wall and some minutes later the maid brought in three soup plates on a tray.

‘Crosse and Blackwell’s,’ he said. ‘Leave it if you don’t like kidneys.’

All through the meal he asked questions, about Buckinghamshire and Anstey Rye, and if bombs had fallen near by; about the De Luxe Picture House, which he had been to once. There was a larger town, nearer to the de Courcys’ house than their own, which had a cinema called the Palace, with Western Electric Sound. He’d seen Gone with the Wind there, which he described as ‘light’. He’d like to see some German films, which he’d read about, but he doubted that they’d ever come to the Palace or the De Luxe. He related the plot of one, to do with the crimes committed by a man who was not sane, and enthusiastically they both said it sounded interesting. Perhaps now that the war was over these German films might be on in England, Laura added, and he agreed that that might be so. Then, quite abruptly, when they had all three finished their sago and stewed gooseberries, he said he was feeling a little tired. His smile continued. He was supposed to rest after lunch, he explained. It would perhaps be asking for trouble not to, today.

They stood up. They thanked him and hoped he would be completely better soon. It was as though tennis had never been mentioned; it was as though he had never said that people made a fuss. He did not move from where he sat at the head of the long table, but said that he had enjoyed their visit, that they were good to come all this way to bore themselves with the company of an invalid. Would they come again? he almost meekly asked.

‘Yes, of course,’ Laura replied, her assurance only moments ahead of Margaretta’s.

‘Please be careful,’ Margaretta said. ‘Please take a good rest.’

They rode in silence down the avenue, past the gate-lodge, where Sergeant Barry was reading a newspaper in his garden. He looked up from it to scrutinize them, another cigarette in the middle of his mouth. Again he wagged his head at them but did not attempt to speak.

‘God!’ Margaretta said when they were out of earshot. ‘God, did you ever!’

‘I hope we didn’t cause a strain.’

‘God, I know! I thought of that.’

When they next saw Dr Heaslip they asked him. ‘Oh no, no,’ he said. ‘Company probably does the poor fellow good.’ But neither Laura nor Margaretta could think of Ralph de Courcy as a poor fellow. A fortnight later they rode over to the de Courcys’ house again, and Sergeant Barry, apprehending them as they turned into the avenue, told them the de Courcys were all away in Dublin.

‘When will they be back?’ Margaretta asked.

‘Ah, not for a while. Not till the end of the month.’

A week later Laura returned to England. This time among the images she carried with her were ones of the hours they had spent in the de Courcys’ house and in their garden. The indistinct tapestries, the key of the clock hanging in the alcove in the hall, the black-and-white dog asleep on the hearthrug: such images came and went in her mind, giving way to the face of the maid, and the sergeant at the gate-lodge, and Ralph de Courcy in his flannels and green tweed jacket. She dreamed that she and Margaretta walked among the white hydrangeas and the cedar trees, that they sat again on the pink-striped sofa. In her dream the hands fell off the clock in the hall, which Dr Heaslip said sometimes happened, owing to strain.

Margaretta wrote to say that the de Courcys had returned from Dublin, so she’d heard, but on her own she naturally hadn’t had the nerve to cycle over. The De Luxe had at last acquired Western Electric Sound and the difference was tremendous. Wiry Bohan had been to the house to see about marrying Katie, and when Mrs Heaslip suggested that they should wait a little longer he’d gone red in the face and said he thought waiting wasn’t a good idea. Mr Hearne was dealing in black-market sugar and tea, making more than he’d ever made out of meat. But soon, so people said, he’d be arrested.

The following summer, to her great disappointment, and to Margaretta’s, Lauira did not visit Ireland. The reason for this was that her mother, suffering a bout of pneumonia in the early part of the year, did not recover quickly. She struggled back to her desk in the cubbyhole behind the Anstey Rye clothes shop, but an exhaustion that the illness had left her with would not lift, and when Laura’s summer holidays came Dr Farquhar advised that she should be responsible for all the housework and all the cooking, taking this burden at least from her mother. Had it not been for the postwar effort that was still required of everyone, he would have stipulated total rest for her mother, three months simply doing nothing. And he knew that ends had to be made to meet.

So Laura cooked her mother’s meals and her own, and Hoovered the rooms of their cottage. She made her mother rest on Sundays, bringing her trays in bed. She was conscientious about taking the wet battery of the wireless to be recharged once a week, she weeded the garden and transplanted the lettuce plants. All the time she cherished the hope that at the end of the summer, even for a week, she might be permitted to visit Margaretta. Her mother was clearly regaining her strength. She stopped spending Sundays in bed and instead sat in the garden. By mid-August she began to do the cooking again.

Letters from Margaretta asked if there was any chance, but in Anstey Rye Ireland was not mentioned. Instead, Laura’s mother spoke of their straitened circumstances this year: because of her pneumonia, she had not earned as much for those few months as she might have; ends had not yet begun to meet again. So Laura wrote to Margaretta, explaining.

Isn’t it strange, Margaretta herself wrote, long after that summer had passed and Laura’s mother had entirely recovered, that there should have been two invalids, your mother and Ralph de Courcy? Her handwriting was less wild than once it had been, her spelling much improved. My father says he’s only slowly mending. And in a daydream Laura allowed herself to pretend that it was he she had looked after, carrying trays up the curving staircase, carrying cushions to a chair in the garden. She wondered if she’d ever see that house again, and Sergeant Barry at the gate-lodge. Isn’t Linda Darnell beautiful? Margaretta wrote. I’d love to look like that. Have you seen Tortilla Flat?

In 1948 Laura went again to Ireland. Katie had married Wiry Bohan and had had a baby. There was a new maid with Eileen in the kitchen, Mattie Devlin’s daughter, Josie. The shopkeepers said Laura was getting prettier all the time, but Laura knew that it was Margaretta who was the beautiful one and always would be, her marvellous hair and her headstrong manner that Laura admired so. She’d been going to a boarding-school ever since Laura had last visited the Heaslips, the one in Bray where Mrs Heaslip and Laura’s mother had met. ‘You’re better looking than Linda Darnell,’ Laura said, meaning it.

They were too shy to cycle to the de Courcys’ house. They didn’t realize at first that such a shyness had developed in them, but when they talked about that warm day two summers ago they realized that they could not attempt to repeat it. Two children, with white socks and straw hats, had cycled up the avenue, chattering and giggling: it would be awkward now. But one evening, watching Thunder Rock at the De Luxe, they saw Ralph de Courcy two rows in front of them, with a blonde-haired girl. ‘You’re never Margaretta and Laura?’ he said when the film had come to an end and they met him face to face in the aisle.

‘Yes,’ Laura said, aware that she reddened as she spoke. When she glanced at Margaretta she saw that she had reddened also.

‘This is a sister of mine,’ he introduced. ‘Hazel.’

Margaretta said:

‘I think I met you, Hazel, years ago when we were kids.’

‘Yes, you did.’

‘This is my friend Laura.’

‘I’ve heard about the day you both came to see us, when we were all at Punchestown except Ralph.’

‘You never came again,’ he chided, through the smile that was always there. ‘You said you would, you know.’

‘Laura didn’t stay with us last year.’

‘You could have come on your own.’

Margaretta laughed, blushing again.

‘That was really an appalling film,’ he said. ‘A waste of money.’

‘Yes,’ Laura agreed, although she did not think so. ‘Yes, it was.’

The de Courcys had driven to town in a car powered by propane gas, a relic of the emergency. To Laura and Margaretta it looked like any other car except for an attachment at the back. Although the night was warm, Ralph put on a muffler and an overcoat before taking his place at the driver’s wheel. Unlike her mother, Laura thought, he was not totally well again.

‘Come and play tennis one day,’ his sister invited. ‘Come in the morning and stay to lunch.’

‘Come on Friday,’ he said.

‘My husband is an eye specialist,’ Laura says in the cathedral.

‘Mine makes radio components.’

Margaretta had remained in the town, marrying Shulmann, who had set up his factory there in 1955. Shulmann was with her in Siena, resting now in their pensione. Their three children are grown up.

‘I guessed you would have married,’ Laura says.

‘And I you.’

What does the eye-specialist look like? Is Shulmann thin or fat? Laura remembers Margaretta’s hair on the pillow, spread out in the moonlight, and Margaretta saying that the smell in the De Luxe Picture House was of hot celluloid and cigarette-butts, and how they giggled because they’d considered Sergeant Barry comic. How different would their lives have been if the friendship had continued? Some instinct tells her as they stand there among the tourists that their friendship in its time went deeper than the marriages they have mentioned. She sees them on their bicycles, and the curiosity of Sergeant Barry passing from their sandals and their white socks to their beribboned straw hats. ‘Ludmilla’, Margaretta says on the pink-striped sofa. Is friendship more fragile, Laura wonders, the more precious it is? And Margaretta reflects that in the thirty-eight years that have passed the friendship might have made a difference in all sorts of ways. They are tourists like the others now, strangers among strangers.

They rode over early on the Friday of the tennis party, but as they arrived at the de Courcys’ house rain began to fall. Other people were there, friends of Hazel de Courcy who had also come to play tennis but who now stood about forlornly because the rain persisted. Then someone suggested whist and the occasion became a different one from the occasion the visitors had anticipated. The fire blazed in the drawing-room, there was tea and Marietta biscuits at eleven o’clock, and lunch at one; there was tea and cake, with bread and butter and scones, at four. Ralph de Courcy rested after lunch, but soon appeared again. He talked to Margaretta alone, questioning her about the boarding-school at Bray, about the buildings and the playing-fields and the food. He asked her if she was happy there.

‘Oh, it’s all right,’ Margaretta replied, and she described the big assembly hall that was known as the ballroom because that was what it had been before the house became a school. A draughty conservatory served as the senior lounge; cold, gaunt dormitories contained rows of beds, each with its narrow pine cupboard and wash-stand. The two headmistresses were sisters, in tweed skirts and jumpers on which necklaces bounced. The food was inedible.

‘Poor Margaretta,’ he murmured.

She was about to say it wasn’t as awful as it sounded but changed her mind because his sympathy was pleasant. He said he Would think of her at the school, eating the inedible food, being polite to the headmistresses. She felt a shiver of warmth, in her head or her body, she wasn’t sure which: a delicious sensation that made her want to close her eyes.

‘It’ll be lovely for me,’ Ralph de Courcy said, ‘being able to imagine you there, Margaretta.’

The rain ceased after tea but the tennis court was too sodden by now to permit play that day, and soon afterwards the party broke up. Hardly speaking at all – not once commenting as they might have on Hazel de Courcy’s friends – the girls cycled back to the town, and when Dr Heaslip asked at supper how Ralph de Courcy had seemed neither at first replied. Then Margaretta said that he was quite recovered from his illness, even though he’d had his usual rest. Every day he was recovering a little more. Soon he would be just like anyone else, she said.

Laura cut her ham and salad into tiny shreds, not wanting to hear anything in the dining-room in case it impinged on what the day already meant to her. The sun had been warm during their ride back from the de Courcys’ house; the damp fields and hedges had acquired a beauty as if in celebration of what had happened. ‘Shall we write to one another?’ he had suggested in the moments when they’d been alone. He had asked her about England, about Anstey Rye and her mother. He smiled more than ever while he spoke, making her feel complimented, as if smiling was natural in her presence.

‘I didn’t know till now,’ Margaretta said a few days later, ‘that I fell in love with him the first time we rode out there.’

They were walking together on a dull road, just beyond the town. Margaretta did not add that he’d asked her about her school, that he had been interested in all that ordinary detail so that he could picture her there that autumn. She refrained from this revelation because she knew that Laura was in love with him also. Laura had not said so but you could see, and it would hurt her horribly to know that he had asked – passionately almost – about the gaunt dormitories and the ballroom that had become an assembly hall.

‘Well, of course,’ Laura said, ‘he’s very nice.’

There was nothing else she could say. Bidding her goodbye, he had clasped her hand as though he never wanted to let it go. His deep, brown eyes had held hers in a way she knew she would never forget; she was certain he had almost kissed her. ‘Are you good at secrets?’ he had asked. ‘Are you, Laura?’ She had only nodded in reply, but she’d known that what he meant was that all this should be kept between themselves, and she intended to honour that.

‘I simply think he’s a marvellous person,’ Margaretta said, possessively.

‘Oh, yes, of course.’

Already it was September, and they did not speak of him again. Laura within a week returned to England and a few, days after that Margaretta began another term at the boarding-school in Bray.

I see you so very clearly, he wrote. I think of you and wonder about you. I’ll never forget our being in the garden that day, I sometimes imagine I can still taste the tinned soup we had for lunch. Whatever can you have thought of me, going away to rest like that? Was it rude? Please write and tell me it wasn’t rude and that you didn’t mind. I rested, actually, with your face beside me on the cushion.

He did not beg for love in vain, and in Bray and Buckinghamshire they exulted in their giving of it, though both felt saddened that in their own communications, one to another, they did not mention Ralph de Courcy or his letters. I was glad when it rained because, actually, I don’t play much tennis. Oh, heavens, how I should love to be walking with you beneath the beech trees! Did you think I was at death’s door that first day – the day when I said to myself you were an angel sent to me? When we met in the De Luxe it was marvellous. Was it for you? Please write. I love your letters.

In Bray and Buckinghamshire they loved his letters also. They snatched at them impatiently: from the letter table in the senior lounge, from the hallstand in Anstey Rye. They bore them away to read in private, to savour and learn by heart. They kept them hidden but close at hand, so that when the yearning came they could raise them to their lips. Shall I come and see you in the holidays? Margaretta wrote. Or could you drive over in your father’s gas contraption and maybe we’d go to the De Luxe? I can’t wait till the holidays, to tell the truth. December the 16th.

These suggestions provoked a swift response. Their friendship was a secret. If Margaretta came to the de Courcys’ house would they be able to disguise it beneath the eye of the family? Of all absurd things, the family might mention strain, and a visit to the picture house was out of the question. Dear Margaretta, we must wait a little while yet. Please wait. Please let’s just write our letters for the moment.

But Margaretta, on the 18th of that December, was unable to prevent herself from cycling out of the town in the direction of the de Courcys’ house. It was a cold morning, with frost heavy on the hedges and beautifully whitening the fields. All she wanted was a single glimpse of him.

I cannot tell you the confusion it caused, he wrote, weeks later, to Laura, and how great the unhappiness has been for me. It was so sad because she looked bulky and ridiculous in the trousers she had put on for cycling. They thought she was a thief at least. Why on earth did she come?

Sergeant Barry found her among the rhododendrons and led her, weeping, to the house. ‘Goodness, Margaretta!’ Hazel de Courcy exclaimed in the hall while Margaretta tried to pull herself together. She said she’d just been passing by.

She seemed a different person from the girl who’d first come here with you, but that was perhaps because you were with her then. No one knew what to say when she stood there in the hall. I turned away and went upstairs. What else could I do?

Margaretta rode miserably back to the house in the square. She wrote immediately, apologizing, trying to explain, but her letter elicited no reply. She was unable to eat properly all the holidays, unable in any way to comfort herself. No letter arrived at the boarding-school in Bray. No letter, ever again, arrived for Margaretta from Ralph de Courcy.

Oafish, my sister said, and although it’s hard I thought the same. Not beautiful in the least, her cheeks all red and ugly. I had never thought Margaretta was stupid before.

Laura was hurt by this description of her friend, and she wished she might have sent her a line of consolation. Poor Margaretta had ridden out that day with no companion to lend her courage, and to everyone in the de Courcys’ house it must have been obvious that she was a lovesick girl. But by the summer she would have recovered, and Laura could gently tell her then that she and Ralph loved one another, because secrets could not remain secrets for ever.

But the summer, when it came, was not like that. In the February of that year Laura had become upset because her letters from Ralph de Courcy had ceased. A month later she received a note from Margaretta. I thought I’d better tell you. Ralph de Courcy died.

That summer, Margaretta and Laura were sixteen; and Mr Hearne, who had survived his years as a black-marketeer, was once again an ordinary butcher. ‘Women and meat won’t take squeezing,’ he said, eyeing the girls with lasciviousness now. At the De Luxe Picture House they saw Blithe Spirit and Green for Danger. Laura asked about Ralph de Courcy’s grave.

‘God knows where it is,’ Margaretta replied. ‘He could be buried under a road for all I care.’

‘We liked him.’

‘He was cheap.’

‘He’s dead, Margaretta.’

‘I’m glad he’s dead.’

Still Margaretta had not told her about her cycle ride on that bitter morning. She offered no explanation for this violent change of heart, so Laura asked her.

‘Well, something happened if you must know.’

She related all of it, telling how she had begun to receive letters from Ralph de Courcy, how they had come, two and three a week sometimes, to the boarding-school at Bray.

‘I didn’t mean any harm, Laura. All I wanted was a glimpse of him. Of course I should have gone at night, but how could I? Nine miles there and nine miles back?’

Laura hardly heard. ‘Letters?’ she whispered in a silence that had gathered. ‘Love letters, you mean?’

The conversation took place in Margaretta’s bedroom. She unlocked a drawer in her dressing-table and produced the letters she spoke of, tied together with a piece of red string.

‘You can read them,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind.’

I rested, actually, with your face beside me on the cushion. In Laura’s own bedroom, among the love letters she had so sadly and so fondly brought with her to Ireland, were those words also. I said to myself you were an angel sent to me.

‘What kind of love was it,’ Margaretta cried, ‘that could evaporate in a second? Just because I made a mistake?’

The letters were returned to the dressing-table drawer, the key turned in the lock, the key itself secreted beneath a frilled cloth. Laura, catching a reflection of herself in the dressing-table looking-glass, saw that she had turned as white as powder. She felt weak, and imagined that if she stood up she would faint.

‘I don’t know why I keep his old letters,’ Margaretta said. ‘I honestly don’t know.’

That it had been Margaretta and not she who had been foolish was no consolation for Laura. That it was she, not Margaretta, to whom he had written for longer, until the day before his death, was none either. His protestations of passion seemed like mockery now.

‘Except I suppose,’ said Margaretta, ‘that I went on loving him. I always will.’

And I, too, thought Laura. She would love him in spite of the ugly pain she felt, in spite of not understanding why he had behaved so. Had two girls’ longing simply been more fun than one’s? Had he been as cruel as that?

‘I have a headache,’ she said, ‘I think I’ll lie down for a little.’

The days that followed were as unbearable for Laura as the days that followed her foolishness had been for Margaretta. Dr Heaslip said twice that their guest was looking peaky; she did her best to smile, ‘It’s all right, really,’ Margaretta reassured her, assuming that Laura’s lowness was a kind of sympathy. ‘It’s over now. He’s dead and gone.’

He was buried in a country churchyard a mile or so from the de Courcys’ house: that much at least Laura had elicited from Margaretta. One early morning, as dawn was just beginning to glimmer, she let herself out of the tall wooden doors through which Matt Devlin every day drove Dr Heaslip’s car, arid cycled out into the countryside. Trees that were at first only shadows acquired foliage as dawn advanced, hedges and fields softened into colour, stone walls and gates offered again the detail that night had claimed. Around the churchyard, rooks were noisy, and on the grave of Ralph de Courcy there were fresh flowers that Laura knew were Margaretta’s, conveyed there secretly also. She picked honeysuckle and laid it on the earth above his head. She knelt and spoke his name; she repeated what so often she had written in her letters. She couldn’t help loving him in spite of still not understanding.

‘You went, didn’t you?’ Margaretta accused. ‘You went in the middle of the night?’

‘In the early morning.’

‘He loved me, y’know, before I was so stupid. It was me he wrote letters to.’

The summer crept by. They talked much less than they had talked before. Politeness began between them, and smiles that were not meant. They missed the past but did not say so, and then – on the night before Laura was to return to England – Margaretta said:

‘I’ve hated you this summer.’

‘There is no reason to hate me, Margaretta.’

‘It has to do with him. I don’t know what it is.’

‘Well, I don’t hate you, Margaretta, and I never could.’

‘That’s nice.’

‘Don’t be unhappy, Margaretta.’

Why could she not have shared the truth? Why could she not have said that in the game he’d played he’d wanted to know all about Anstey Rye also? She might have pointed out that when you scraped away the superficialities of her early-morning journey – the peaceful dawn, the rooks, the honeysuckle – it had been less honourable and less courageous than Margaretta’s. In her wise virgin way, she had taken no chances in visiting only the dead.

‘Margaretta…’

She hesitated, unable to go on. And Margaretta said:

‘I’ll never forgive you for going to his grave.’

‘I only went to say goodbye.’

‘It was me he wrote to.’

Again Laura tried to say that she, as much as Margaretta, had been shamed. Sharing their folly, would they have laughed in the end over Ralph de Courcy, she wondered, as they had laughed over so much else? Would they have talked for half the night in Margaretta’s bedroom, exorcizing that lingering pain?

‘Margaretta,’ Laura began, but still could not go on.

The De Luxe Picture House has gone. Mr Hearne is dead. So is Mrs Eldon, her lips trimmed down to size. But Coffey’s still smells pleasantly of paper, and Murphy’s of vanilla and grapes. Wiry Bohan and Katie are grandparents now.

‘But oh, it’s not much changed, y’know,’

Dr Heaslip and his wife might or might not be dead also: this is not mentioned in Margaretta’s news. Her voice is spiritless, and Laura has to think as each name is mentioned. Margaretta’s features mourn the loss: a conversation, through desuetude, has lost its savour. It was harsh, so casually and so swiftly to have considered her bland and fat, implying insensitivity. Laura should reach out and kiss her, but the gesture would be false.

Margaretta remembers the flowers that year after year she has placed on the grave, and the bitterness she felt when she thought of Laura. She cycled in that same secret way to the churchyard, not caring if the de Courcys guessed that it was she who had picked the weeds from the mound that marked his presence. When she ceased to make the journey she had at first felt faithless, but the feeling had worn away with time.

For Laura there is the memory of the guilt that had remained for so long, the letters she had tried to compose, her disappointment in herself. Dear Margaretta: so many times she had begun her message, certain that there were words to soften her treachery and then discovering that there were not. In time she ceased also, weary of the useless effort.

Regret passes without words between them; they smile a shrugging smile. If vain Ralph de Courcy had chosen their girlish passion as a memorial to himself he might have chosen as well this rendezvous for their middle age, a waspish cathedral to reflect a waspish triumph. Yet his triumph seems hollow now, robbed by time of its drama and the heady confusions of an accidental cruelty. Death’s hostage he had been, a ghost who had offered them a sleight of hand because he hadn’t the strength for love. They only smile again before they part.

Music

At thirty-three Justin Condon was a salesman of women’s undergarments, regularly traversing five counties with his samples and his order book in a Ford Fiesta. He had obediently accepted this role, agreeing when his father had suggested it to him. His father in his day had been a commercial traveller also and every Friday Justin returned to the house his father had returned to, arriving at much the same hour and occupying a room he had in childhood shared with his three brothers. His mother and his father still lived in the house, in the Dublin suburb of Terenure, and were puzzled by their youngest son because he was so unlike their other children, both physically and in other ways. His dark-haired head was neat; remote, abstracted eyes made a spherical, ordinary face seem almost mysterious. At weekends Justin took long walks on his own, all the way from Terenure to the city, to St Stephen’s Green, where he sat on a seat or strolled among the flowerbeds, to Herbert Park, where he lay in the sunshine on the grass: people had seen him and remarked upon it. He had never in his life been known to listen to the commentary on a hurling match or a Gaelic match, let alone attend such an event. When he was younger he had come back one Friday with a greyhound, an animal he had proceeded to rear as a pet, apparently not realizing that such creatures had been placed in the world for the purpose of racing one another. ‘Ah, poor Justin’s the queer old flute,’ his father had more than once privately owned in McCauley’s public house. His mother wished he’d get married.