The Collected Stories

Justin’s reason for remaining in his parents’ house had not been shared with them, although it was a simple one: he considered that any other dwelling would be of a temporary nature and not worth the nuisance of moving to because one day he would leave, not just the suburb of Terenure but Dublin, and Ireland, for ever. He would leave his samples in the Ford Fiesta; he would leave the Ford Fiesta in a lay-by. He was not truly a purveyor of garments in imitation silk, his destiny was not the eternal entering of drapers’ shops. He would escape as others had escaped before him; James Joyce he thought of particularly in this respect, and Gauguin. He liked the photograph of James Joyce in the broad-brimmed black hat, with the black coat reaching to his ankles; Gauguin had been a businessman. When Joyce had left Ireland he’d had to borrow a pair of boots. Later he’d tried to sell tweed to the Italians.

Dwelling on such matters, Justin watched the light of a May morning from a bed in Co. Waterford. There wasn’t much to see: streaks of brightness along the edges of the drawn curtains, the ceiling of the bedroom mistily illuminated through rosy fabric. A man called Fahy, travelling in fertilizers, had assured him that when he stayed in this house he occupied the bed of Mrs Keane, its widowed landlady. When Garda Bevan, who lodged on a more permanent basis in the house, drank his eleven o’clock Bournville and stated his intention of retiring for the night, Fahy would rise from the kitchen table also, saying he’d had a long day. He would mount the stairs a few paces behind Garda Bevan and in full view of the policeman would enter the bedroom known as the ‘overnight room’ because it was set aside by Mrs Keane for her casual trade among commercial travellers. Garda Bevan, long since retired from the force, a lifelong bachelor, was a moral presence in Mrs Keane’s house, a man who could be relied upon by Father Grennan or Father Reedy, selflessly working behind the scenes for the Pioneer cause and organizing the tug of war at the Nore Fête every Whit. Fahy said he gave him a quarter of an hour and then listened on the landing to the depth of his snoring. He smoked a final cigarette in the overnight bedroom, taking a good ten minutes over it, before listening again at the panels of Garda Bevan’s door. If the rhythm of sleep had not altered, he made his way to the bed of Mrs Keane.

Justin supposed it was true. With some precision, Fahy had described the body of the widow, a woman of fifteen stone and in her sixty-first year. The hair that was grey about her head sprouted blackly and abundantly, according to the traveller in fertilizers, on other areas of her. Buttocks and stomach were vast; Hail Marys were repeated after sinning.

In the overnight room Justin imagined without pleasure the scenes Fahy described. Fahy was a little runt of a Dublin man, married with five or six children, always sticking his elbow into you to make a point. Sometimes in his ramblings he mentioned Thomasina Durcan, the dentist, who was the only other lodger in Mrs Keane’s house. She had a great notion of Justin, Fahy insisted, the implication being that Justin could easily arrive at the same arrangement with Thomasina Durcan as he himself had arrived at with Mrs Keane. No man was an island was a repeated observation of Fahy’s.

Justin rose in order to break his train of thought, and crossed to the window. He drew back the curtains and stood in his pyjamas looking out at the line of houses across the street. No blind had yet been released, no curtain or shutter opened. A cat crept along the grey pavement, interested in the empty bottles outside each door. The houses themselves were colourwashed in pink or cream, in yellow, grey or blue, their hall doors painted in some contrasting shade, or grained. The street was wide, with lampposts between every second house, and a single visible telegraph pole. Just visible also, where the street met another as it curved away to the left, was Hayes’s shop, which traded in newspapers, tobacco and confectionery. The sight of it, with its hanging Players Please sign, reminded Justin that he was in need of a cigarette himself. He left the window and crossed to the bedside table.

Inhaling, he slipped out of his pyjamas and dressed himself in shirt and trousers, preparatory to making his way to Mrs Keane’s bathroom. Still intent on keeping Fahy’s reports and innuendoes at bay, he dwelt upon his earliest memory, which was the leg of a chair. That same chair was still in the house in Terenure and he often found himself looking at it, his eye travelling down one particular leg, to the rings cut into the timber, the varnish worn partially away. With three brothers and three sisters, he had grown up the baby of the family, surrounded by people who shouted more than he did, who were for ever arguing and snatching. At school the textbooks were inkstained and dirty, the blackboards so pitted you could hardly read the chalk marks on them, the desk-tops slashed with messages and initials. ‘Come here and I’ll show you,’ Shay McNamara used to whisper; and forcibly he’d insist, no choice about it, on displaying the promise of his sexuality. Ikey Breen had been paid a threepenny piece by a woman under cover of darkness in the Stella cinema. All Riordan’s jokes had to do with excrement.

Justin shaved in Mrs Keane’s bathroom, hurrying to finish before Garda Bevan came rattling at the door. Long before he began to go to school he remembered his father driving away from the house in Terenure on a Monday morning. His father had taught him how to strike a match, and would let him hold it over the tobacco in his pipe while he sucked at the smoke, making a bubbling noise. His father used to take him on to his knee and ask him if he’d been a good boy, but Justin always had to turn his head away because of the whiff on his father’s breath. The stench of stout, his mother said it was, bottle after bottle of stout that made the whole house stink like a brewery. He associated his father particularly with Sundays, with leading the family into Mass, with saying he was starving on the walk home. Sunday dinner was different from ordinary dinner, always meat and a pudding. Afterwards his father had his bath, with the door of the bathroom open so that he could listen to whatever sporting commentary there was on the radio. Justin’s sisters were forbidden to go upstairs at this time in ease they’d catch a glimpse from the landing. His brothers roller-skated in the yard.

Justin washed the remains of the shaving foam from his face. It was on a Sunday that his Aunt Roche had first put a record on her gramophone: John Count McCormack singing ‘The Rose of Tralee’. After that he had begun to visit her sitting-room regularly, a room full of ferns in pots and framed embroideries. It was she and Father Finn who had given him faith in himself and in his musical aptitude, who hadn’t laughed when he’d hinted that Mahler was his hero.

He dried his face and left the bathroom. Somewhere in the house he could hear the heavy tread of Garda Bevan. The smell of frying rashers and the chatty voice of a radio disc-jockey drifted from the kitchen.

‘Mr Condon!’ called Thomasina Durcan. ‘Mr Condon, Mrs Keane has the breakfast ready.’

In her tiny sitting-room she dusted the ornaments on the mantelpiece: the brass gondola, the tuskless elephants, the row of trinket containers, the framed photograph of Justin as a child, specially taken by Mr Boland the insurance man, whose hobby was photography. She was not really his aunt: when he was six he had stood by the railings of her front garden, staring at her while she cut the grass. ‘What’s your name?’ she’d asked, and he’d said it was Justin Condon. ‘Ah now, isn’t that a great name?’ She’d smiled at him, knowing he was shy. Her face had been damp with perspiration due to the exertion of pushing the lawn-mower. He had watched her closely while she took her glasses off and wiped them on her apron.

She was a slight, frail woman of seventy-nine, with thin hands, and hair the colour of the ashes she now carried in a cardboard box from her sitting-room. She moved slowly, suffering a little from arthritis in one of her knees and in her arms. ‘I think I have some Mi-Wadi,’ she’d said that first day. ‘D’you like Mi-Wadi lemonade, Justin?’

He had followed her into the house and in the kitchen she had poured an inch or two of Mi-Wadi into two glasses and filled them with water from the cold tap. She’d found some biscuits, raspberry wafers she’d bought for the weekend. He had three brothers and three sisters, he said; his father was in business and was never at home during the week. When he was older he told her about the Christian Brothers’ school, the white-painted windows and the rowdy, concrete playground. He said that Brother Walsh had picked him out as someone who was useless.

The Sunday when she’d wound up the gramophone and put on the record of John Count McCormack was a special memory for her because she always thought of the occasion as marking the beginning of his interest in music. Later she had played him her selected arias from La Traviata and Carmen and Il Trovatore – on the same Sunday in September when he had posed for Mr Boland in the garden. He’d had to stand in front of the laurel bushes but Mr Boland hadn’t been happy with that so he’d had to sit on a chair on the front-door step. In the end the photograph had been taken against the rose trellis.

‘Well, that’s disgraceful!’ Father Finn had said on another Sunday, when he heard how a Christian Brother had described the child as useless.

‘That’s a right bit of bacon,’ Garda Bevan complimented Mrs Keane. ‘Isn’t bacon in this country a greatly improved commodity?’

Neat as a napkin across the table from him, Thomasina Durcan smiled shyly at Justin, as if they shared some private opinion. Justin pretended not to notice. He bent his head over the bacon on his plate, over the slices of black pudding and the fried bread and the egg. Garda Bevan would think Stravinsky was the name of a racehorse, and so would Mrs Keane. ‘Ah, sure, I knew all right,’ Thomasina Durcan would protest, lying because she couldn’t help herself. Her two prominent front teeth were like an advertisement for her trade; her eyes were prominent also, her nose and chin slight. She wore clothes in pastel shades, pale blues and pinks and greens. Like himself, she returned every weekend to Dublin, to stay with her parents.

‘It’s a sign of the advance the country has made,’ continued Garda Bevan, ‘the way the bacon is better these days.’

‘The price of it would murder you,’ Mrs Keane reminded him.

He nodded and continued to nod, dwelling on that. ‘Well, isn’t it another sign in that case,’ he suggested eventually, ‘the way the people would have the means for it?’

‘Nearly a pound a pound. Sure, it’s a holy disgrace.’

Mrs Keane’s dining-room was heavy with furniture: rexine-covered chairs, a large ornate sideboard, a great mahogany dining-table, wax fruit on occasional tables, armchairs with antimacassars, pictures of forest scenes. Bottles of sauce stood on the sideboard, and empty decanters, and a pile of tablemats. Shells decorated the mantelpiece, and small cups and saucers, gifts from Tramore and Youghal.

‘Well, it’s the same way that’s, in it with everything.’ The policeman’s delivery of this statement was ponderous, the words punctuated by the munching of his jaws. He was a match for Mrs Keane in size, his rounded hill of a stomach tightly engaging the buttons of his waistcoat. A bulbous nose was set carelessly in a crimson countenance, short hair was as spiky as a hedgehog’s.

‘Wouldn’t you say the prices is shocking?’ Mrs Keane inquired of Thomasina Durcan, in a voice that insisted women knew best.

‘Ah, they are of course.’

Garda Bevan turned to Justin, a piece of egg, already dipped in mustard, on the end of his fork. ‘Have they inflation beat? Fahy was here last week and said inflation was beat.’

Justin shook his head. He didn’t know, he said. He’d heard somewhere that, far from being defeated, inflation was gaining ground.

‘Has your father a word to say on it? I remember a thing about your father when he used to stay with us here. He had a keen sense of politics.’

‘I don’t think I heard him mention inflation.’

‘Give him a message from me, will you? Tell him Garda Bevan was asking for him.’

‘I will of course.’

‘Oh, Mr Condon, I meant to tell you: I saw you in Stephen’s Green on Sunday.’ Thomasina Durcan’s two large teeth announced interest in him; the eyes blinked rapidly. Her pastel-green suit was trim on her trim form; he imagined her fingers, trim also, in a patient’s mouth.

‘I’m often in Stephen’s Green.’

‘I thought you lived in Terenure, Mr Condon.’

‘I walk into the city.’

‘God, I love walking.’

The fingers, in a hurry, would layer a gum with cotton-wool; sharply, they’d jab a hypodermic needle home. She’d talk to you when your mouth was full of implements; she’d tell you to have a wash-out with the pink stuff, and say she was nearly finished. Fahy said she had an eye on a bungalow out on the Cappoquin road. ‘Wouldn’t the two of you be snug in a bed there?’ Fahy had said.

‘I have a few friends coming in, Saturday fortnight. Would you care to join us, Mr Condon?’

He felt a tightening in the atmosphere. Both Garda Bevan and Mrs Keane were aware of the implication of what had just been said. An attempt was being made to develop the casual acquaintanceship that existed between Justin and the dentist in Mrs Keane’s house; the relationship was to be extended to Dublin. Fahy would be told; so would Father Grennan and Father Reedy. ‘Sure, if some girl like Thomasina Durcan doesn’t do something about it that fellow’ll be a bachelor at seventy’: he could hear Mrs Keane saying that, or his father or his mother. Fahy would put it differently.

‘Saturday fortnight?’

‘About a quarter to eight. You know Clontarf? 21 Dunlow Road. Just a few friends and a bit of dancing.’

‘I don’t dance at all.’

‘I’m not much at it myself.’

Garda Bevan and Mrs Keane were pleased. They had enjoyed this flutter of excitement. They would think about the party at 21 Dunlow Road, and discuss it. They would be unpleasantly agog after it had taken place.

‘21 Dunlow Road,’ Thomasina Durcan repeated, writing it clearly on a piece of paper she’d found in her handbag.

‘You might ask him that,’ requested Garda Bevan. ‘Does he consider inflation beat? If there’s one man in Ireland would know, it’s your father.’

Justin nodded again, finishing the fried food on his plate. He promised to discuss the matter with his father and to obtain his father’s opinion. He wouldn’t turn up at 21 Dunlow Road, he said to himself. When he next spent a night at Mrs Keane’s he’d say he’d lost the address.

When he was ten she had asked him if he’d like to learn how to play the piano and when he’d said yes she’d arranged for Father Finn to give him lessons in her sitting-room. She had paid for them and when she’d asked him not to tell his family he had eagerly agreed because apparently his family would have laughed at the idea of a boy playing a musical instrument. ‘It’s a great thing for him,’ Father Finn later reported. ‘And hasn’t he a rare aptitude for it?’ In the circumstances Father Finn wasn’t averse to keeping the knowledge of the lessons from the Condons, and after a while he refused to accept any fee for the tuition. ‘Well, that’s one thing at any rate he’s not useless at,’ he remarked, later still.

God had arranged it, she often thought during those years that went by. God had arranged for the child to come by her gate that first afternoon, and for the music she played him on her gramophone to delight him. God had arranged a way for the three of them, Father Finn and herself and Justin. When the Condons had eventually discovered about the piano lessons they’d been bewildered but not cross, mainly because it was Father Finn who was giving them. And as well as for the lessons every Wednesday, Father Finn began to come round on Sunday afternoons, when they all three listened to John Count McCormack or the operatic arias. It was a natural thing for the priest to do since everyone knew now of the musical aptitude of Justin Condon and how it needed to be fostered and encouraged.

The sun warmed his exposed chest; beside him his shirt was laid out on the grass; his eyes were closed. Faintly the sound of the river by which he lay penetrated his sleep.

He dreamed of the queen who had inspired the choral symphony he was attempting to write. In his dream she led wolfhounds on leather thongs through her garden and listened to the spirits of the otherworld. From among them one took visible form: a young girl rose from the mists and the flowers and warned the queen of her folly.

Two flies tormented Justin’s plump chin. Their tickling silenced music that had the resonance of music composed by Mahler. He smacked at his face but already the flies had gone.

The symphony told of a journey from the royal palaces in the West to the territory of Cúchulainn in Ulster. The queen’s great army, fattened with the soldiers of her allies, with the long line of camp followers, with druids and jesters, storytellers, soothsayers, military men and servitors, travelled into heroic battle, while the mystical hero awaited their arrival. Sometimes, on Saturdays, Justin hired a piano cubicle in a music shop and spent the morning there, advancing his composition. Shortly after the death of Father Finn the piano in his Aunt Roche’s sitting-room had gone hopelessly out of tune and apparently couldn’t be much improved.

Justin reached for his shirt. When he had buttoned it he neatly tightened the knot of his tie. Since breakfast-time in Mrs Keane’s dining-room he had visited sixteen drapers in seven different towns. He had O’Leary’s and Callaghan’s to call on yet, and then that would be that for the day. He drove on and did the business he had to do. He spent the night in Dungarvan in a room above a fish-and-chip café. The smell of the frying wafted up and through his open window. From his bed he listened to people talking about the film they had been to, and to a drunk man who proclaimed that he intended to stand no nonsense from his wife. He fell asleep at half past eleven and dreamed of the journey in his symphony, of the queen in her magnificence, and the chorus of otherworld spirits.

‘Wait now till I get the brother,’ said Mr McGurk, the joint proprietor of McGurk’s Arcade, the following day. He left the shop and called up through the house. In a moment the older Mr McGurk appeared.

Justin’s samples were laid out on the counter. Some were familiar to the McGurks and presented no problem when it came to deciding the size of the order. Others, lines that were new this spring, had to be considered with care.

‘Would a woman of this area dress herself in that?’ inquired the younger Mr McGurk, poking at a black garment trimmed flimsily with lace of the same colour.

‘I don’t know would she.’

‘The gusset is strong,’ Justin pointed out, since it said so on his sales sheet. ‘A man-made fibre.’

‘It isn’t the gusset would sell that article,’ replied the older Mr McGurk. ‘What I’m thinking is, is it too ritzy for this area?’

‘Will we call down Elaine?’ suggested his brother.

‘I’d say we would.’

Elaine, wife of the older Mr McGurk, was summoned from the house. She picked up the garment in question and meticulously examined it.

‘Would you wear it?’ her husband demanded.

‘I would in a shade of peach. Does it come in a peach?’

Justin said it did, and in a shade of coffee.

‘Order it in the peach,’ advised Mrs McGurk. ‘Black’s not the tone for stuff the like of that.’

‘Too ritzy,’ agreed her husband. ‘I’m just after saying it.’

‘How’s your father?’ Mrs McGurk asked Justin.

‘He’s grand.’

‘Has he still got the hilarious way with him?’

Justin replied that he supposed his father had. One after the other, the McGurk brothers said they’d never laughed at any traveller’s jokes the way they’d laughed at Justin’s father’s. Justin could feel them thinking that he himself wasn’t half the man his father was, that he didn’t enter into the spirit of things, that all he seemed concerned with was writing down orders in his book. ‘I’ll tell you a thing about Thomasina Durcan,’ Fahy had said. ‘She has a notion of making a man of you. There’s women like that around.’

He left the McGurks’ shop and drove out to the estuary. He walked by the green, seaweedy water, wondering if Mahler would have composed a note if he’d been incarcerated in a bungalow on the Cappoquin road, listening every night to talk about cavity linings.

‘Now, there never was,’ she remembered Father Finn saying when Justin was thirteen, ‘a great man of music that came out of Ireland.’

He made the pronouncement while eating a slice of buttered toast she had prepared for him. She had loved doing that, toasting the bread and spreading the butter on it, arranging blackcurrant jam in a glass dish. Blackcurrant was Father Finn’s favourite, raspberry was Justin’s.

‘We had singers and harpists. We had all classes of instrumentalists. We have a proud tradition, but we never yet had a composer that could rank with the Germans. To this day, Justin, we have to turn to Germany for musical composition.’

Pouring tea for both of them, she mentioned Italy and the priest agreed that the Italians had made a contribution. He told the story of Puccini’s life. He referred to the burden of a musical gift and to the reward it brought in time. ‘A precious freedom of the spirit. A most glorious thing.’

She had delighted in listening to him. She was never happier than on those Sunday afternoons when he and Justin sat together by her fire or on the Wednesdays when she made a cup of tea after the piano lesson. No admission of affection had ever been made by the priest or by herself; no admission could be. Until Justin arrived in her life there had been no way of creating a relationship that went beyond that of priest and parishioner.

‘There’s a little thing Justin composed for me,’ Father Finn said one Sunday, ‘A short little piece, but I’d say it displayed promise.’

‘We had a complaint, Mr Condon,’ Miss Murphy reported in Castlemartyr.

‘We had this slip brought back to us after it fell into holes.’

Only Thomasina Durcan and Miss Murphy called him Mr Condon, Thomasina Durcan because any other mode of address might have sounded forward, Miss Murphy for reasons he had never been able to fathom.

‘Would it be the way it was washed, Miss Murphy? Was it put into a machine?’

‘Oh, it would have been washed all right, Mr Condon. Naturally you’d expect it to have been washed.’

‘No, I mean in a machine though. Or maybe it got boiled in error. It’s all tinged with blue, look. Some blue garment has run into it.’

‘It would save an argument with the customer, Mr Condon, if you replaced it. It’s good for business when something gets replaced.’

Justin made a note in his order book and said that Miss Murphy would have a replacement within a fortnight. He had a new line he wanted to show her, he added, and displayed for her the sample he had displayed for fifty-seven other drapers, including the McGurks, since he’d left Dublin. Miss Murphy picked it up gingerly.

‘It comes in a peach, Miss Murphy, and a coffee. The gusset is guaranteed sturdy. Man-made fibre.’

‘I never saw that type of cut before.’

‘It’s the fashion in Dublin.’

Miss Murphy shook her head. She folded the piece of clothing in a professional manner and Justin returned it to the suitcase in which he carried his samples. Miss Murphy ordered a supply of summer vests and made arrangements to replenish her stock of first-communion stockings. ‘Is your father fit?’ she asked as Justin closed his order book, and for the first time since he had known Miss Murphy it idly occurred to him that she and his father might have had the same relationship as Fahy claimed to have with Mrs Keane. Miss Murphy was elderly now, a woman with a face like an arrow, with spectacles on a chain. Once she might have been pretty; it was odd that she had never married.

‘He’s grand,’ Justin said.

‘Remember me to him, will you?’

Her tone was different from Garda Bevan’s when he mentioned Justin’s father, different from the McGurks’ and all the other drapers’. Had there always been a hint of bitterness in Miss Murphy’s voice when she sent this message to his father? He looked up from the suitcase he was fastening and found her eyes upon him. They held his own until he felt embarrassed. He had noticed before that there was a similarity between his father and Fahy. They were both small men, rotund, bald-headed, pink-skinned, given to banter. He snapped the clasps on his suitcase and Miss Murphy turned away to attend another customer.

She made a cake, the banana cake he liked. Usually she wrapped in tinfoil what remained of it after their Sunday tea and he took it away to eat during the week, on his travels. She enjoyed thinking of him eating the cake, sitting out in the sunshine as he liked to do, in some quiet place.

Slowly she chopped up two bananas. He had belonged to them as he never had to his parents. On Sunday afternoons and again on Wednesdays they had been a family. She left the kitchen and in her sitting-room she delicately placed the needle on the same worn record of John Count McCormack singing ‘The Rose of Tralee’. Soon she would die, as the old priest had, six months ago. She would fall down, or she would die in her sleep. And before any of it happened she might become muzzy in her thoughts, unable to explain to Justin Condon and properly to ask for his forgiveness. Father Finn had known also in the end, death banishing his illusions. ‘We did a terrible thing,’ the old priest had said, sending for her specially.

The record came to an end and she sat there for a moment longer, listening to the scratchy sound of the needle. She had once, long before the child had come into her life, tried to become Father Finn’s housekeeper. ‘Ah no, no,’ he had murmured, gently rejecting her because it wouldn’t have done.

‘Arid how were things in West Waterford?’ his father inquired. ‘Has Joe Bolger retired from Merrick’s?’

Glistening, as if he had just scrubbed his face with a nailbrush, Mr Condon held a glass of whiskey in his right hand. As well as his face, the backs of his hands glistened, as did his glasses, his even false teeth, the dome of his hairless head. Justin imagined him with Miss Murphy in her shop, telling a joke, driving out into the country with Miss Murphy when it was dark, the way Fahy said he’d had to with some woman in Claremorris before he got going with Mrs Keane.

‘I didn’t see Joe Bolger,’ Justin said. ‘I think maybe he’s retired.’

‘I always liked West Waterford.’

They were in the sitting-room. His father was standing in front of a coal fire that was too hot for the time of year. In the kitchen Justin’s mother was frying their evening meal. Recently Mr Condon had taken to giving himself a glass of whiskey at a quarter to six in the evening instead of making his usual journey to McCauley’s at the corner. When he’d eaten his food he returned to the sitting-room and occupied the chair nearest the television, pouring himself another glass of whiskey at a quarter past seven. Justin’s mother said the whiskey was bad for him but he said it was doctor’s orders. ‘It’s ready for you,’ she shouted from the kitchen, reminding Justin of Thomasina Durcan calling out in Mrs Keane’s that the breakfast was ready.

‘I could eat an elephant,’ said Mr Condon, swallowing the last of his whiskey.

Between them, his brothers and sisters had brought thirty-seven children into existence: Justin often thought of that. At Christmas they all crowded into the house, shouting and quarrelling and reminding Justin of what the house had been like in his childhood. On Saturdays there were visits from one or another of those families, and on Sundays also.

‘There was a time I was below in Dungarvan,’ Mr Condon recalled in the kitchen, ‘the day Golden Miller won at Fairyhouse. Joe Bolger was footless behind the counter.’

Mrs Condon cut slices of loaf bread, and pushed the butter past her husband in Justin’s direction. Mr Condon had never been known to pass anyone anything.

‘God, you’d have died laughing.’ As if to lend greater verisimilitude to this claim, Mr Condon laughed rumbustiously himself, exposing egg and bread partially chewed. ‘He was handing out skeins of wool and not charging for it. He gave a gross of safety-pins to a farmer’s wife by the name of Mrs Quinn. “Sure, aren’t they always handy,” he said, “in case you’d have something falling down?” ’

Mrs Condon, who did not always care for her husband’s humour, asked what the weather had been like down the country. Justin replied that it had been fine.

‘There was another time,’ Mr Condon went on, ‘when the boys in the digs took poor Joe’s clothes when he was asleep in bed. I didn’t see it myself but didn’t he have to descend the stairs with the sheets on him?’

‘It rained on Wednesday,’ Mrs Condon said. ‘It didn’t cease the whole day.’

‘There Wasn’t a drop down the country.’

‘Well, isn’t that strange?’

‘It’s often that way.’

‘They say it’s settled in Dublin for the weekend.’

Mrs Condon was as thin as his Aunt Roche, with a worried look that Justin couldn’t remember her ever having been without. She wore flowered overalls even when she went shopping, beneath her black coat.

‘The wildest lads in West Waterford was in Joe Bolger’s digs,’ continued Mr Condon. ‘There wasn’t a trick they didn’t have knowledge of.’

Justin, who had heard about these exploits in West Waterford before, nodded. Mrs Condon poured more tea.

‘They went into the Bay Hotel one night when a pile of boxes containing young chicks had just come off the bus. Your men had them released in the hall before anyone could lift a hand. They had them flying up and down the stairs and into the dining-room, knocking down the sauce bottles. The next thing is, didn’t they have them fluttering about the bedrooms?’

‘You told us, Ger,’ Mrs Condon said.

‘I did of course. Didn’t I come back that Friday and go through the whole thing? It could kill you stone dead to wake up in your bedroom and find chickens squawking all over you.’

‘It must have been unpleasant certainly.’

‘Well, that’s West Waterford for you. Are you still telling that story, Justin?’

Justin nodded again. He wouldn’t have known how to begin telling such a story, and he had never attempted to. He thought about the symphony, hearing the theme that the queen and her consort in their palace bed had inspired. A slow movement, lyrical in tone.

‘Is that girl still stopping at Mrs Keane’s?’ his mother inquired. ‘The dentist.’

He’d once mentioned Thomasina Durcan in order to fill a gap in some conversation; he wished he hadn’t because his mother had somehow sensed his apprehension and appeared to have mistaken it for interest.

‘Yes, she’s still there.’

‘Sounds a nice type of girl.’

Fortunately, Mr Condon had begun to laugh in anticipation of some further antics on the part of the lodgers in Joe Bolger’s digs. When his laughter ceased he retailed them, as he had many times done in the past. Obediently Justin and his mother laughed in turn.

‘There was a curate from Milecross,’ Mr Condon said, ‘a Father Dolan. Well, the lads in the digs had him tied in knots.’

‘You told us about Father Dolan, Ger.’

‘He was down at his tea and when he went upstairs there wasn’t a stick of furniture left in the room. They had the bed and the wardrobe carried out, and the pictures off the walls. They took the wash-stand, and the Holy Mother off of the mantelpiece. The poor man thought he’d gone insane.’

The music was different now: brassy and wild as the journey across Ireland began. While it echoed, Justin saw for a moment his favourite picture of James Joyce, in the broad-brimmed hat and the long black coat. He wondered what Mahler had been like.

‘Another time those eejits drew a sideboard across the entrance to the Gents, the day of Slip Hennessy’s wedding. There wasn’t a man in the place knew what to do with himself.’ Mr Condon threw his head back and laughed, permitting his teeth to move about in his open mouth. When he’d finished, Mrs Condon said:

‘Didn’t you say the dentist was a Dublin girl?’

‘I think she is,’

‘It’s nice she’s at Mrs Keane’s.’

He did not reply. His father said again that you’d have died laughing, and his mother rose from the table. Justin began to gather up the dishes, resolving that tomorrow he would spend the morning in the piano cubicle of the music shop. Afterwards he’d walk out to Herbert Park and lie in the sun, with a new bit of music lingering the way it always did.

On Sunday afternoon he told her about his time in West Waterford and East Cork, about the McGurk brothers and all the other drapers he had visited. He mentioned Garda Bevan and Mrs Keane and Miss Murphy. He spoke of Thomasina Durcan’s party at 21 Dunlow Road, but he didn’t go into details and he didn’t retail what had passed through his mind concerning any of these people. He’d spent four hours yesterday in the piano cubicle, he said, and he’d lain down in Herbert Park.

‘It’s nice to get the sun,’ she said, offering him a piece of the banana cake.

‘Sure, we don’t get enough of it.’

She nodded and then, to his astonishment, she spoke of his simplicity. It was that, she said, that the priest and she should have pointed out to him; it was that that was notable.

He sipped his tea, wondering if she was rambling in her elderliness. She never had done so before, she’d always been as sharp as a needle.

‘Simplicity?’ he said. ‘Are you feeling yourself?’

‘Father Finn liked to come here on a Sunday. He liked it particularly and I liked it myself. With the piano lessons on a Wednesday it was the same.’

He frowned, then nodded. He’d watched the tennis-players in Herbert Park, he said, after it had become too chilly to go on lying on the grass. It would be a long time yet, he said, before the symphony was complete; there’d be years in the piano cubicle and years lying out in the sun, letting the music run through his head. It was no good being in a hurry; you knew instinctively the pace that suited you.

‘You were like a child to us all those years, Justin.’

‘Ah, sure, it was enjoyable all round.’

He reached for another slice of cake. His teacup was empty and he wondered why she didn’t fill it. He looked at her closely and saw that she had begun to weep, something she had never done in his presence before.

‘My father was telling us last night,’ he said, ‘about a time some lads let a crate of chickens loose in the Bay Hotel, Dungarvan.’

He spoke in desperation: he wanted to stop her talking about Father Finn and about his own simplicity, how he’d been a child to them all those years. Her voice had a peculiar note in it.

‘It’s gone now,’ he said, ‘the old Bay Hotel.’

He knew she had no interest in a hotel she’d never seen nor heard of before; why should she have? Yet he went on talking about it, about the barricading of the Gents at the time of Slip Hennessy’s wedding, and the removal of the furniture from Father Dolan’s bedroom while he was having his tea. He spoke hurriedly, his words tumbling and juddering. Urgently they rushed from him, preventing her from speaking. But when he paused for breath she said:

‘We damaged you between us, Justin. We took advantage of your simplicity.’

‘Ah no, no.’

Again he spoke swiftly, endeavouring to convey through his agitation that he did not want to hear; that once she had spoken, the words could not be undone. For a long time now he had known he could play the piano in a tidy, racy way, that possibly he possessed no greater gift. It was his longing to walk away from his Ford Fiesta, from his parents’ house and from Ireland, that made him different from his father, not his modest musical aptitude. And yet his fantasy sprang from a lingering sliver of hope, from words that had once been spoken in his Aunt Roche’s sitting-room. He had clutched at the straw they had offered him and it had kept him going. He had played his part, not knowing what it was, offering them a straw also: for the first time, he realized that.

‘Father Finn couldn’t die guilty,’ she said. ‘No more than I can. He asked me to tell you the truth before he went, Justin, and I have to do that. No harm or damage was ever intended.’

Justin put down his teacup and saucer on a round, glass-topped table as familiar to him as any piece-of furniture in his parents’ house. She was right to have mentioned his simplicity: she might as easily have called him a fool. He felt ashamed of being in the room with her since she knew so much about his foolishness; she might even have guessed that he had seen himself in the broad-brimmed hat and the long black overcoat, or on an island with Gauguin’s dark-skinned girls.

‘I’d have deprived you of the piano and the gramophone if I’d sent you away.’

He stared at her. She should have sent him away all the same, she said, she should have sent him off to play with other children; and in time she should have urged him to embark on a friendship with a girl.

He stood up. ‘That’s a nice little piece you composed for me,’ Father Finn had said, and he saw again the priest’s face as he spoke those words, seeing it differently now. He saw his Aunt Roche’s differently also, with anxiety twitching in it as the priest murmured his praise and his encouragement, both of them fearful for the safety of their Wednesday and Sunday afternoons.

‘Don’t go, Justin. Don’t go.’

But there was no point in staying, any more than there was a point in saying he would end by marrying Thomasina Durcan. His Aunt Roche, who had seemed to understand so much, wouldn’t understand that such things happened when you had nothing to keep you going. He had thought the world of her, just as he had of Father Finn, but she wouldn’t understand if he said that in time he would acquire his father’s bonhomie, even his popularity with the drapers of the provinces. A woman like Miss Murphy might enter his life, or a woman like Mrs Keane.

He did not look again at the frail presence in the room he had come to know so well. She cried out at him, only repeating that she’d had to tell the truth, that the truth was more important than anything. She caught at the sleeve of his jacket, begging him to forgive her for the past. He pushed her hand away, and swore at her before he went.

Events at Drimaghleen

Nothing as appalling had happened before at Drimaghleen; its people had never been as shocked. They’d had their share of distress, like any people; there were memories of dramatic occurrences; stories from a more distant past were told. In the 1880s a woman known as the Captain’s wife had run away with a hunchbacked pedlar. In 1798 there’d been resistance in the hills and fighting in Drimaghleen itself. During the Troubles a local man had been executed in a field by the Black and Tans. But no story, and no long memory, could match the horror of the tragedy that awaited the people of Drimaghleen on 22 May 1985, a Wednesday morning.

The McDowds, that morning, awoke in their farmhouse and began the day as they always did, McDowd pulling on his shirt and trousers and lifting down a black overcoat from the pegs beside the kitchen door. He fastened it with a length of string which he kept in one of its pockets, found his socks in his gum-boots and went out with his two sheepdogs to drive the cows in for milking. His wife washed herself, put the kettle on the stove, and knocked on her daughter’s door. ‘Maureen!’ she called. ‘Come on now, Maureen!’

It was not unusual that Maureen failed to reply. Mrs McDowd re-entered her bedroom and dressed herself. ‘Get up out of that, Maureen!’ she shouted, banging again on her daughter’s door. ‘Are you sick?’ she inquired, puzzled now by the lack of movement from within the room: always at this second rousing Maureen yawned or spoke. ‘Maureen!’ she shouted again, and then opened the door.

McDowd, calling in the cattle, was aware that there had been something wrong in the yard as he’d passed through it, but an early-morning torpor hindered the progression of his thoughts when he endeavoured to establish what it was. His wife’s voice shouting across the field at him, and his daughter’s name used repeatedly in the information that was being inadequately conveyed to him, jolted him into an awareness that what had been wrong was that Maureen’s bicycle had not been leaning against the kitchen window-sill. ‘Maureen hasn’t come back,’ his wife repeated again when he was close enough to hear her. ‘She’s not been in her bed.’

The cows were milked because no matter what the reason for Maureen’s absence they had to be. The breakfast was placed on the kitchen table because no good would come of not taking food. McDowd, in silence, ate with an appetite that was unaffected; his wife consumed less than usual. ‘We will drive over,’ he said when they had finished, anger thickening his voice.

She nodded. She’d known as soon as she’d seen the unused bed that they would have to do something. They could not just wait for a letter to arrive, or a telegram, or whatever it was their daughter had planned. They would drive over to the house where Lancy Butler lived with his mother, the house to which their daughter had cycled the evening before. They did not share the thought that possessed both of them: that their, daughter had taken the law into her own hands and gone off with Lancy Butler, a spoilt and useless man.

McDowd was a tallish, spare man of sixty-two, his face almost gaunt, grey hair ragged on his head. His wife, two years younger, was thin also, with gnarled features and the hands of a woman who all her life had worked in the fields. They did not say much to one another, and never had; but they did not quarrel either. On the farm, discussion was rarely apt, there being no profit in it; it followed naturally that grounds for disagreement were limited. Five children had been born to the McDowds; Maureen was the youngest and the only one who had remained at home. Without a show of celebration, for that was not the family way, her twenty-fifth birthday had passed by a month ago.

‘Put your decent trousers on,’ Mrs McDowd urged. ‘You can’t go like that.’

‘I’m all right the way I am.’

She knew he would not be persuaded and did not try, but instead hurried back to her bedroom to change her shoes. At least he wouldn’t drive over in the overcoat with the string round it: that was only for getting the cows in from the field when the mornings were cold. He’d taken it off before he’d sat down to his breakfast and there would be no cause to put it on again. She covered up her own old skirt and jumper with her waterproof.

‘The little bitch,’ he said in the car, and she said nothing.

They both felt the same, anxious and cross at the same time, not wanting to believe the apparent truth. Their daughter had ungratefully deceived them: again in silence the thought was shared while he drove the four miles to the Butlers’ house. When they turned off the tarred road into a lane, already passing between the Butlers’ fields, they heard the dog barking. The window of the Volkswagen on Mrs McDowd’s side wouldn’t wind up, due to a defect that had developed a month ago: the shrill barking easily carried above the rattle of the engine.

That was that, they thought, listening to the dog. Maureen and Lancy had gone the night before, and Mrs Butler couldn’t manage the cows on her own. No wonder the old dog was beside himself. Bitterly, McDowd called his daughter a bitch again, though only to himself. Lancy Butler, he thought, my God! Lancy Butler would lead her a dance, and lead her astray, and lead her down into the gutters of some town. He’d warned her a thousand times about Lancy Butler. He’d told her the kind of fool he was.

‘His father was a decent man,’ he said, breaking at last the long silence. ‘Never touched a drop.’

‘The old mother ruined him.’

It wouldn’t last long, they both thought. Lancy Butler might marry her, or he might wriggle out of it. But however it turned out she’d be back in six months’ time or at any rate a year’s. There’d probably be a baby to bring up.

The car turned into the yard, and neither McDowd nor his wife immediately saw their daughter lying beside the pump. For the first few moments of their arrival their attention was claimed by the distressed dog, a black-and-white sheepdog like their own two. Dust had risen from beneath the Volkswagen’s wheels and was still thick in the air as they stepped from the car. The dog was running wildly across a corner of the yard, back and forth, and back and forth again. The dog’s gone mad, Mrs McDowd thought, something’s after affecting it. Then she saw her daughter’s body lying by the pump, and a yard or so away her daughter’s bicycle lying on its side, as if she had fallen from it. Beside the bicycle were two dead rabbits.

‘My God,’ McDowd said, and his wife knew from his voice that he hadn’t seen his daughter yet but was looking at something else. He had walked to another part of the yard, where the dog was. He had gone there instinctively, to try to calm the animal.

She knelt down, whispering to Maureen, thinking in her confusion that her daughter had just this minute fallen off her bicycle. But Maureen’s face was as cold as stone, and her flesh had already stiffened. Mrs McDowd screamed, and then she was aware that she was lying down herself, clasping Maureen’s dead body. A moment later she was aware that her husband was weeping piteously, unable to control himself, that he was kneeling down, his hands on the body also.

Mrs McDowd did not remember rising to her feet, or finding the energy and the will to do so. ‘Don’t go over there,’ she heard her husband saying to her, and saw him wiping at his eyes with the arm of his jersey. But he didn’t try to stop her when she went to where the dog was; he remained on his knees beside their daughter, calling out to her between his sobs, asking her not to be dead.

The dog was crouched in a doorway, not barking any more. A yard or so away Mrs Butler lay with one of her legs twisted under her, blood on the ground already turned brown, a pool of it still scarlet. Looking down at her, Mrs McDowd thought with abrupt lucidity: Maureen did not fall off her bicycle. She went back to where her daughter lay and behind the two tin barrels that stood by the pump she saw the body of Lancy Butler, and on the ground not far from it the shotgun that must have blown off Mrs Butler’s face.

O’Kelly of the Garda arrived at a swift conclusion. Old Mrs Butler had been as adamant as the McDowds in her opposition to the match that her son and Maureen McDowd had planned for themselves. And there was more to it than that: Mrs Butler had been obsessively possessive, hiding from no one her determination that no other woman should ever take her son away from her. Lancy was her only child, the single one to survive years of miscarrying. His father had died when Lancy was two years old, leaving mother and child to lead a lonely life on a farm that was remote. O’Kelly knew that Mrs Butler had been reputed to be strange in the head, and given to furious jealousies where Lancy was concerned. In the kind of rage that people who’d known her were familiar with she had shot her son’s sweetheart rather than suffer the theft of him. He had wrenched the shotgun from her and by accident or otherwise it had exploded. A weak man at the best of times, he had turned it upon himself rather than face the reality of what had happened. This deduction, borne out by the details in the yard, satisfied O’Kelly of the Garda; the people of Drimaghleen arrived themselves at the same conclusion. ‘It was always trouble,’ McDowd said on the day of the funerals. ‘The minute she went out with Lancy Butler it was trouble written down for poor Maureen.’

Drimaghleen was a townland, with nothing to mark it except a crossroads that was known as Drimaghleen Crossroads. The modest farms that comprised it, each of thirty or so acres, were scattered among bogland, one separated from the next by several miles, as the McDowds’ and the Butlers’ were. The village of Kilmona was where the people of Drimaghleen went to Mass, and where they confessed to Father Sallins. The children of the farms went to school in the small town of Mountcroe, driven each morning in a yellow bus that drove them back to the end of their lanes or farm tracks in the afternoon. Milk churns were collected in much the same way by the creamery lorry. Bread and groceries were bought in the village; fresh meat in Mountcroe. When the men of Drimaghleen got drunk they did so in Mountcroe, never in the village, although often they took a few bottles of stout there, in the bar beside the grocery counter. Hardware and clothes were bought in Mountcroe, which had had a cinema called the Abbey Picture House until the advent of television closed it in the early 1960s. Drimaghleen, Kilmona and Mountcroe formed a world that bounded the lives of the people of the Drimaghleen farms. Rarely was there occasion to venture beyond it to the facilities of a town that was larger – unless the purpose happened to be a search for work or the first step on the way to exile.

The children of the McDowds, whose search for such work had taken them far from the townland, returned heartbroken for their sister’s Mass. All four of them came, two with husbands, one with a wife, one on her own. The weddings which had taken place had been the last family occasions, two of them in Kilmona, the third in distant Skibbereen, the home of the girl whom the McDowds’ son had married a year ago. That wedding was on their minds at Maureen’s Mass – the long journey there had been in the Volkswagen, the night they had spent in Tierney’s Hotel, the farewells the next day. Not in the wildest horror of a nightmare could any of the McDowds have guessed the nature of the occasion destined to bring them together next.

After the funeral the family returned to the farm. The younger McDowds had known of Maureen’s and Lancy Butler’s attachment, and of their parents’ opposition to it. They had known as well of Mrs Butler’s possessive affection for her son, having grown up with stories of this maternal eccentricity, and having witnessed Lancy himself, as a child and as a boy, affected by her indulgence. ‘Oh, it can wait, Lancy, it can wait,’ she would say a dozen times an hour, referring to some necessary chore on the farm. ‘Ah, sure, we won’t bother with school today,’ she had said before that, when Lancy had complained of a difficulty he was experiencing with the seven-times table or Brother Martin’s twenty weekend spellings. The people of Drimaghleen used to wonder whether the farm or Lancy would suffer more in the end.

‘What did she see in him?’ Mrs McDowd mused sadly at the funeral meal. ‘Will anyone ever tell me what she saw in him?’

They shook their heads. The cheeks of all of them were still smeared with the tears they had shed at the service. Conversation was difficult.

‘We will never recover from it,’ the father said, with finality in his voice. It was all that could be said, it was all they knew with certainty: for as long as the older McDowds remained in this farmhouse – which would be until their own deaths – the vicious, ugly tragedy would haunt them. They knew that if Maureen had been knocked from her bicycle by a passing motor-car they could have borne her death with greater fortitude; or if she had died of an illness, or been the victim of incurable disease. The knife that turned in their pain was their memory of the Butlers’ farmyard, the barking dog running back and forth, the three still bodies. There was nothing but the waste of a life to contemplate, and the cruelty of chance – for why should it have been simple, pretty Maureen whose fate it was to become mixed up with so peculiar a couple as that mother and son? There were other girls in the neighbourhood – underhand girls and girls of doubtful character – who somehow more readily belonged with the Butlers: anyone would tell you that.

‘Why don’t you drive over and see us?’ one of the daughters invited. ‘Can’t we persuade you?’

Her father stared into the table without trying to reply. It was unnecessary to say that a drive of such a distance could only be contemplated when there was a wedding or a funeral. Such journeys had not been undertaken during Maureen’s lifetime, when she might have looked after the farm for a day; in no way could they be considered now. Mrs McDowd tried to smile, making an effort to acknowledge the concern that had inspired the suggestion, but no smile came.

Being of a nature that might interest strangers, the deaths were reported in the newspapers. They were mentioned on the radio, and on the television news. Then everything became quiet again at Drimaghleen, and in the village and in the town. People wrote letters to the McDowds, expressing their sorrow. People came to see them but did not stay long. ‘I am always there,’ Father Sallins said. ‘Kilmona 23. You have only to summon me. Or call up at the rectory.’

The McDowds didn’t. They watched the summer going by, taking in their hay during the warm spell in June, keeping an eye on the field of potatoes and the ripening barley. It began to rain more than usual; they worried about the barley.

‘Excuse me,’ a man said in the yard one afternoon in October. ‘Are you Mr McDowd?’

McDowd said he was, shouting at the dogs to behave themselves. The stranger would be a traveller in fertilizers, he said to himself, a replacement for Donoghue, who had been coming to the farm for years. Then he realized that it was the wrong time of year for Donoghue.

‘Would it be possible to have a word, Mr McDowd?’

McDowd’s scrawny features slowly puckered; slowly he frowned. He lifted a hand and scratched at his grey, ragged hair, which was a way he had when he wished to disguise bewilderment. Part of his countryman’s wiliness was that he preferred outsiders not to know, or deduce, what was occurring in his mind.

‘A word?’ he said.

‘Could we maybe step inside, sir?’

McDowd saw no reason to step inside his own house with this man. The visitor was florid-faced, untidily dressed in dark corduroy trousers and a gaberdine jacket. His hair was long and black, and grew coarsely down the sides of his face in two brushlike panels. He had a city voice; it wasn’t difficult to guess he came from Dublin.

‘What d’you want with me?’

‘I was sorry to hear that thing about your daughter, Mr McDowd. That was a terrible business.’

‘It’s over and done with.’

‘It is, sir. Over and done with.’

The red bonnet of a car edged its way into the yard. McDowd watched it, reminded of some cautious animal by the slow, creeping movement, the engine purring so lightly you could hardly hear it. When the car stopped by the milking shed nobody got out of it, but McDowd could see a figure wearing sunglasses at the wheel. This was a woman, with black hair also, smoking a cigarette.

‘It could be to your advantage, Mr McDowd.’

‘What could be? Does that car belong to you?’

‘We drove down to see you, sir. That lady’s a friend of mine, a colleague by the name of Hetty Fortune.’

The woman stepped out of the car. She was taller than the man, with a sombre face and blue trousers that matched her blue shirt. She dropped her cigarette on to the ground and carefully stubbed it out with the toe of her shoe. As slowly as she had driven the car she walked across the yard to where the two men were standing. The dogs growled at her, but she took no notice. ‘I’m Hetty Fortune,’ she said in an English accent.

‘I didn’t tell you my own name, Mr McDowd,’ the man said. ‘It’s Jeremiah Tyler.’

‘I hope Jeremiah has offered you our condolences, Mr McDowd. I hope both you and your wife will accept our deepest sympathy.’

‘What do you want here?’

‘We’ve been over at the Butlers’ place, Mr McDowd. We spent a long time there. We’ve been talking to a few people. Could we talk to you, d’you think?’

‘Are you the newspapers?’

‘In a manner of speaking. Yes, in a manner of speaking we represent the media. And I’m perfectly sure,’ the woman added hastily, ‘you’ve had more than enough of all that. I believe you’ll find what we have to say to you is different, Mr McDowd.’

‘The wife and myself have nothing to say to the newspapers. We didn’t say anything at the time, and we have nothing to say since. I have things to do about the place.’

‘Mr McDowd, would you be good enough to give us five minutes of your time? Five minutes in your kitchen, talking to yourself and your wife? Would you give us an opportunity to explain?’

Attracted by the sound by voices, Mrs McDowd came out of the house. She stood in the doorway, not quite emerging from the kitchen porch, regarding the strangers even more distrustfully than her husband had. She didn’t say anything when the woman approached her and held out a hand which she was obliged to shake.

‘We are sorry to obtrude on your grief, Mrs McDowd. Mr Tyler and I have been keen to make that clear to your husband.’

Mrs McDowd did not acknowledge this. She didn’t like the look of the sombre-faced woman or her unkempt companion. There was a seediness about him, a quality that city people seemed often to exude if they weren’t smartly attired. The woman wasn’t seedy but you could see she was insincere from the way her mouth was. You could hear the insincerity when she spoke.

‘The full truth has not been established, Mrs McDowd. It is that we would like to discuss with you.’

‘I’ve told you no,’ McDowd said. ‘I’ve told them to go away,’ he said to his wife.

Mrs McDowd’s eyes stared at the woman’s sunglasses. She remained where she was, not quite coming into the yard. The man said:

‘Would it break the ice if I took a snap? Would you mind that, sir? If I was to take a few snaps of yourself and the wife?’

He had spoken out of turn. A shadow of anger passed over the woman’s face. The fingers of her left hand moved in an irritated wriggle. She said quickly:

‘That’s not necessary at this stage.’

‘We’ve got to get the pictures, Hetty,’ the man mumbled, hushing the words beneath his breath so that the McDowds wouldn’t hear. But they guessed the nature of his protest, for it showed in his pink face. The woman snapped something at him.

‘If you don’t leave us alone we’ll have to get the Guards,’ McDowd said. ‘You’re trespassing on this land.’

‘Is it fair on your daughter’s memory that the truth should be hidden, Mr McDowd?’

‘Another thing is, those dogs can be fierce if they want to be.’

‘It isn’t hidden,’ Mrs McDowd said. ‘We all know what happened. Detectives worked it out, but sure anyone could have told them.’

‘No, Mrs McDowd, nothing was properly worked out at all. That’s what I’m saying to you. The surface was scarcely disturbed. What seemed to be the truth wasn’t.’

McDowd told his wife to lock the door. They would drive over to Mountcroe and get a Guard to come back with them. ‘We don’t want any truck with you,’ he harshly informed their visitors. ‘If the dogs eat the limbs off you after we’ve gone don’t say it wasn’t mentioned.’

Unmoved by these threats, her voice losing none of its confidence, the woman said that what was available was something in the region of three thousand pounds. ‘For a conversation of brief duration you would naturally have to be correctly reimbursed. Already we have taken up your-working time, and of course we’re not happy about that. The photograph mentioned by Mr Tyler would naturally have the attachment of a fee. We’re talking at the end of the day of something above a round three thousand.’

Afterwards the McDowds remembered that moment. They remembered the feeling they shared, that this was no kind of trick, that the money spoken of would be honestly paid. They remembered thinking that the sum was large, that they could do with thirty pounds never mind three thousand. Rain had destroyed the barley; they missed their daughter’s help on the farm; the tragedy had aged and weakened them. If three thousand pounds could come out of it, they’d maybe think of selling up and buying a bungalow.

‘Let them in,’ McDowd said, and his wife led the way into the kitchen.

The scene of the mystery is repeated all over rural Ireland. From Cork to Cavan, from Roscommon to Rosslare you will come across small, tucked-away farms like the Butlers’ and the McDowds’. Maureen McDowd had been gentle-natured and gentle-tempered. The sins of sloth and greed had not been hers; her parents called her a perfect daughter, close to a saint. A photograph, taken when Maureen McDowd was five, showed a smiling, freckled child; another showed her in her First Communion dress; a third, taken at the wedding of her brother, was of a healthy-looking girl, her face creased up in laughter, a cup of tea in her right hand. There was a photograph of her mother and father, standing in their kitchen. Italicized beneath it was the information that it had been taken by Jeremiah Tyler. The Saint of Drimaghleen, Hetty Fortune had written, never once missed Mass in all her twenty-five years.

The story was told in fashionably faded pictures. ‘You know our Sunday supplement?’ Hetty Fortune had said in the McDowds’ kitchen, but they hadn’t: newspapers from England had never played a part in their lives. They read the Sunday Independent themselves.

The Butlers’ yard was brownly bleak in the pages of the supplement; the pump had acquired a quality not ordinarily noticed. A bicycle similar to Maureen’s had been placed on the ground, a sheepdog similar to the Butlers’ nosed about the doors of the cowshed. But the absence of the three bodies in the photographed yard, the dust still rising where the bicycle had fallen, the sniffing dog, lent the composition an eerie quality – horror conveyed without horror’s presence. ‘You used a local man?’ the supplement’s assistant editor inquired, and when informed that Jeremiah Tyler was a Dublin man he requested that a note be kept of the photographer’s particulars.

The gardai – in particular Superintendent O’Kelly – saw only what was convenient to see. Of the three bodies that lay that morning in the May sunshine they chose that of Lancy Butler to become the victim of their sluggish imagination. Mrs Butler, answering her notoriously uncontrollable jealousy, shot her son’s sweetheart rather than have him marry her. Her son, so Superintendent O’Kelly infers from no circumstantial evidence whatsoever, wrenched the shotgun out of her hands and fired on her in furious confusion. He then, within seconds, took his own life. The shotgun bore the fingerprints of all three victims: what O’Kelly has signally failed to explain is why this should be so. Why should the Butlers’ shotgun bear the fingerprints of Maureen McDowd? O’Kelly declares that ‘in the natural course of events’ Maureen McDowd would have handled the shotgun, being a frequent visitor to the farm. Frequent visitors, in our experience, do not, ‘in the natural course of events’ or otherwise, meddle with a household’s firearms. The Superintendent hedges the issue because he is himself bewildered. The shotgun was used for keeping down rabbits, he states, knowing that the shotgun’s previous deployment by the Butlers is neither here nor there. He mentions rabbits because he still can offer no reasonable explanation why Maureen McDowd should ever have handled the death weapon. The fingerprints of all three victims were blurred and ‘difficult’, and had been found on several different areas of the weapon. Take it or leave it is what the Superintendent is saying. And wearily he is saying: does it matter?

We maintain it does matter. We maintain that this extraordinary crime – following, as it does, hard on the heels of the renowned Kerry Babies mystery, and the Flynn case – has not been investigated, but callously shelved. The people of Drimaghleen will tell you everything that O’Kelly laboured over in his reports: the two accounts are identical. Everyone knows that Lancy Butler’s mother was a sharp-tongued, possessive woman. Everyone knows that Lancy was a ne’er-do-well. Everyone knows that Maureen McDowd was a deeply religious girl. Naturally it was the mother who sought to end an intrusion she could not bear. Naturally it was slow, stupid Lancy who didn’t pause to think what the consequences would be after he’d turned the gun on his mother. Naturally it was he who could think of no more imaginative way out of his dilemma than to join the two women who had dominated his life.

The scenario that neither O’Kelly nor the Butlers’ neighbours paused to consider is a vastly different one. A letter, apparently – and astonishingly – overlooked by the police, was discovered behind the drawer of a table which was once part of the furniture of Lancy Butler’s bedroom and which was sold in the general auction after the tragedy – land, farmhouse and contents having by this time become the property of Allied Irish Banks, who held the mortgage on the Butlers’ possessions. This letter, written by Maureen McDowd a week before the tragedy, reads:

Dear Lancy, Unless she stops I can’t see any chance of marrying you. I want to, Lancy, but she never can let us alone. What would it be like for me in your place, and if I didn’t come to you where would we be able to go because you know my father wouldn’t accept you here. She has ruined the chance we had, Lancy, she’ll never let go of you. I am always cycling over to face her insults and the way she has of looking at me. I think we have reached the end of it.

This being a direct admission by Maureen McDowd that the conclusion of the romance had been arrived at, why would the perceptive Mrs Butler – a woman who was said to ‘know your thoughts before you knew them yourself’ – decide to kill Lancy’s girl? And the more the mental make-up of that old woman is dwelt upon the more absurd it seems that she would have destroyed everything she had by committing a wholly unnecessary murder. Mrs Butler was not the kind to act blindly, in the fury of the moment. Her jealousy and the anger that protected it smouldered cruelly within her, always present, never varying.

But Maureen McDowd – young, impetuous, bitterly deprived of the man she loved – a saint by nature and possessing a saint’s fervour, on that fatal evening made up for all the sins she had ever resisted. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned – except perhaps a woman unfairly defeated. The old woman turned the screw, aware that victory was in sight. The insults and ‘the way of looking’ became more open and more arrogant; Mrs Butler wanted Maureen McDowd out, she wanted her gone for ever, never to dare to return.

It is known that Lancy Butler found two rabbits in his snares that night. It is known that he and Maureen often made the rounds of the snares when she visited him in the evenings. He would ride her bicycle to the field where they were, Maureen sitting side-saddle on the carrier at the back. Lancy had no bicycle of his own. It is our deduction that the reason the shotgun bore Maureen’s fingerprints is because they had gone on a shooting expedition as well and when they returned to the yard she was carrying both the shotgun and the snared rabbits. It is known that Maureen McDowd wept shortly before her death. In the fields, as they stalked their prey, Lancy comforted her but Maureen knew that never again would they walk here together, that never again would she come over to see him in the evening. The hatred his mother bore her, and Lancy’s weakness, had combined to destroy what most of all she wanted. Mrs Butler was standing in the yard shouting her usual abuse and Maureen shot her. The rabbits fell to the ground as she jumped off the bicycle, and her unexpectedly sudden movement caused the bicycle itself, and Lancy on it, to turn over. He called out to her when it was too late, and she realized she could never have him now. She blamed him for never once standing up to his mother, for never making it easier. If she couldn’t have this weak man whom she so passionately loved no one else would either. She shot her lover, knowing that within seconds she must take her own life too. And that, of course, she did.

There was more about Maureen. In the pages of the colour supplement Mrs McDowd said her daughter had been a helpful child. Her father said she’d been his special child. When she was small she used to go out with him to the fields, watching how he planted the seed-potatoes. Later on, she would carry out his tea to him, and later still she would assist with whatever task he was engaged in. Father Sallins gave it as his opinion that she had been specially chosen. A nun at the convent in Mountcroe remembered her with lasting affection.

O’Kelly fell prey to this local feeling. Whether they knew what they were doing or not, the people of Drimaghleen were protecting the memory of Maureen McDowd, and the Superintendent went along with the tide. She was a local girl of unblemished virtue, who had been ‘specially chosen’. Had he publicly arrived at any other conclusion Superintendent O’Kelly might never safely have set foot in the neighbourhood of Drimaghleen again, nor the village of Kilmona, nor the town of Mountcroe. The Irish do not easily forgive the purloining of their latter-day saints.

‘I wanted to tell you this stuff had been written,’ Father Sallins said. ‘I wanted it to be myself that informed you before you’d get a shock from hearing it elsewhere.’

He’d driven over specially. As soon as the story in the paper had been brought to his own notice he’d felt it his duty to sit down with the McDowds. In his own opinion, what had been printed was nearly as bad as the tragedy itself, his whole parish maligned, a police superintendent made out to be no better than the criminals he daily pursued. He’d read the thing through twice; he’d looked at the photographs in astonishment. Hetty Fortune and Jeremiah Tyler had come to see him, but he’d advised them against poking about in what was over and done with. He’d explained that people wanted to try to forget the explosion of violence that had so suddenly occurred in their midst, that he himself still prayed for the souls of the Butlers and Maureen McDowd. The woman had nodded her head, as though persuaded by what he said. ‘I have the camera here, Father,’ the man had remarked as they were leaving. ‘Will I take a snap of you?’ Father Sallins had stood by the fuchsias, seeing no harm in having his photograph taken. ‘I’ll send it down to you when it’s developed,’ the man said, but the photograph had never arrived. The first he saw of it was in the Sunday magazine, a poor likeness of himself, eyelids drooped as though he had drink taken, dark stubble on his chin.

‘This is a terrible thing,’ he said in the McDowds’ kitchen, remembering the photograph of that also: the cream-enamelled electric cooker, the Holy Child on the green-painted dresser, beside the alarm clock and the stack of clothes-pegs, the floor carpeted for cosiness, the blue, formica-topped table, the radio, the television set. In the photograph the kitchen had acquired an extraneous quality, just as the photograph of the Butlers’ yard had. The harsh, ordinary colours, the soiled edges of the curtains, the chipped paintwork, seemed like part of a meticulous composition: the photograph was so much a picture that it invited questioning as a record.

‘We never thought she was going to say that about Maureen,’ Mrs McDowd said. ‘It’s lies, Father.’

‘Of course it is, Mrs McDowd.’

‘We all know what happened that night.’

‘Of course we do.’

McDowd said nothing. They had taken the money. It was he who had said that the people should be allowed into the house. Three thousand, one hundred and fifty pounds was the sum the woman had written the cheque for, insisting that the extra money was owed.

‘You never said she’d been specially chosen, Father?’

‘Of course I didn’t, Mrs McDowd.’

He’d heard that Superintendent O’Kelly had gone to see a solicitor to inquire if he’d been libelled, and although he was told he probably had been he was advised that recourse in the courts would be costly arid might not be successful. The simple explanation of what had happened at the Butlers’ farm had been easy for the people of Drimaghleen and for the police to accept because they had known Mrs Butler and they had known her son. There’d been no mystery, there’d been no doubt.

‘Will we say a prayer together?’ the priest suggested.

They knelt, and when they rose again Mrs McDowd began to cry. Everyone would know about it, she said, as if the priest had neither prayed nor spoken. The story would get about and people would believe it. ‘Disadvantaged people’, she quoted from the newspaper. She frowned, still sobbing, over the words. ‘It says the Butlers were disadvantaged people. It says we are disadvantaged ourselves.’

‘That’s only the way that woman has of writing it down, Mrs McDowd. It doesn’t mean much.’

‘These simple farm folk,’ Mrs McDowd read, ‘of Europe’s most western island form limited rural communities that all too often turn in on themselves.’

‘Don’t pay attention,’ Father Sallins advised.

‘Does disadvantaged mean we’re poor?’

‘The way that woman would see it, Mrs McDowd.’

There was confusion now in Drimaghleen, in Kilmona and Mountcroe; and confusion, Father Sallins believed, was insidious. People had been separated from their instinct, and other newspaper articles would follow upon this one. More strangers would come. Father Sallins imagined a film being made about Maureen McDowd, and the mystery that had been created becoming a legend. The nature of Maureen McDowd would be argued over, books would be written because all of it was fascinating. For ever until they died her mother and her father would blame themselves for taking the money their poverty had been unable to turn away.

‘The family’ll see the pictures.’

‘Don’t upset yourself, Mrs McDowd.’

‘No one ever said she was close to being a saint. That was never said, Father.’

‘I know, I know.’

Mrs McDowd covered her face with her hands. Her thin shoulders heaved beneath the pain of her distress; sobs wrenched at her body. Too much had happened to her, the priest thought; it was too much for any mother that her murdered daughter should be accused of murder herself in order to give newspaper-readers something to think about. Her husband had turned away from the table she sat at. He stood with his back to her, looking out into the yard. In a low, exhausted voice he said:

‘What kind of people are they?’

The priest slowly shook his head, unable to answer that, and in the kitchen that looked different in Jeremiah Tyler’s photograph Mrs McDowd screamed. She sat at the blue-topped table with her lips drawn back from her teeth, one short, shrill scream following fast upon another. Father Sallins did not again attempt to comfort her. McDowd remained by the window.

Family Sins

A telegram arrived out of the blue. Come for the weekend, Hubert’s message read, and I remember the excitement I felt because I valued his friendship more than anyone else’s, I had no money for the train journey and had to raise the matter with my father. ‘It’s hard to come by these days,’ my father said, giving me only what he could easily spare. I increased it playing rummy with McCaddy the courthouse clerk, who had a passion for the game.

It was the summer of 1946. Long warm days cast an unobtrusive spell, one following another in what seemed like orderly obedience. The train I took crept through a landscape that was just beginning to lose its verdancy but was not yet parched. The railway for the last few miles of the journey ran by the sea, which twinkled brilliantly, sunlight dancing on it.

‘There’s someone called Pamela,’ Hubert said, greeting me in no other way. ‘Probably I mightn’t have mentioned her.’

We walked from Templemairt railway station, away from the sea, into a tangle of small suburban roads. Everywhere there were boarding-houses, cheaper than those by the promenade, Hubert said. Bookies’ families stayed there, he said: Sans Souci, Freshlea House, Cois na Farraige. We climbed a hill and passed through iron gates into a garden that was also on a hill, steep rockeries on either side of a path with occasional steps in it. I could see the house above us, through hollyhocks and shrubs, a glass veranda stretching the length of its façade.

‘Who’s Pamela?’

‘She spends the summers here. My cousin.’

We entered the house and a voice at once called out. ‘Hubert, I should like to meet your friend.’

‘Hell,’ Hubert muttered. He led me into a small room, its burnt-brown blinds half drawn against the sun. An old woman sat at a piano, turning on the stool as we entered. She was dressed severely, in long, old-fashioned black clothes; her grey hair was swept up and neatly rolled. You could tell she had once been beautiful; and in the wrinkled tiredness of her face her eyes were still young.

‘You are very welcome,’ she said. ‘Hubert does not often invite a friend.’

‘It’s nice of you to have me, Mrs Plunkett.’

The piano stool swivelled again. The first notes of a Strauss waltz were played. I picked my suitcase up and followed Hubert from the room. In the hall he threw his eyes upwards, but did not speak. Silently we mounted the stairs, and when we reached the first-floor landing a woman’s voice called up from some lower part of the house: ‘Hubert, don’t tell me you forgot the honeycomb?’

‘Oh, God!’ Hubert muttered crossly. ‘Leave your case. We’ll have to go back for the damn thing.’

I placed my suitcase on the bed of the room we’d entered: a small cell of a place, masculine in character. Just before we left it Hubert said:

‘My grandfather had a stroke. You won’t be bothered with him. He doesn’t come downstairs.’

On a table in the hall there was a dark-framed photograph of the man he spoke of, taken earlier in his lifetime: a stern, blade-like face with a tidy grey moustache, hair brushed into smooth wings on either side of a conventional parting, pince-nez, a watch-chain looping across a black waistcoat. At school Hubert had spoken a lot about his grandfather.

‘That was Lily who was on about the honeycomb,’ Hubert said as we descended the path between the rockeries. ‘A kind of general maid I think you call her. They work the poor old thing to the bone.’

We passed out of the garden and walked back the way we’d come. Hubert talked about boys we’d been at school with, in particular Ossie Richpatrick and Gale and Furney. He’d had news of all three of them: Ossie Richpatrick had become a medical student, Gale had joined the British army, Furney was in a handkerchief business.

‘The Dublin Handkerchief Company,’ Hubert said. ‘He wrote me a letter on their writing-paper.’

‘Does he make the handkerchiefs? I can’t see Furney making handkerchiefs.’

‘He sells them actually.’

Ossie Richpatrick and Gale and Furney had left school the previous summer; Hubert and I more recently, only a matter of weeks ago. It was now August; in October I was, like Ossie Richpatrick, to become a student, though not of medicine. Hubert was uncertain about his future.

‘This is the place,’ he said. We passed through high wooden doors into what appeared to be a builder’s yard. Bricks were stacked, lengths of plumber’s piping were tied together with cord. In a shed there was a circular saw. ‘This woman sells honey,’ Hubert said.

He knocked on a half-open door and a moment later a woman arrived with a honeycomb already in her hand. ‘I saw you turning in,’ she said. ‘How are you, Hubert?’

‘I’m all right. Are you well yourself, Mrs Hanrahan?’

‘I am of course, Hubert.’

She examined me with curiosity, but Hubert made no attempt to introduce me. He gave the woman some money and received the honeycomb in return. ‘I picked that comb out for them. It’s good rich honey.’

‘You can tell by the look of it.’

‘Is your grandmother well? Mr Plunkett no worse, is he?’

‘Well, he’s still ga-ga, Mrs Hanrahan. No worse than that.’

The woman had placed her shoulder against the door jamb so that she could lean on it. You could see she wanted to go on talking, and I sensed that had I not been there Hubert would have remained a little longer. As we made our way through the yard he said: ‘She lives in ignorance of Hanrahan’s evil ways. He died a while back.’

Hubert didn’t elaborate on Mr Hanrahan’s evil ways, but suggested instead that we go down to the sea. He led the way to a sandy lane that twisted and turned behind small back gardens and came out eventually among sand dunes. He held the honeycomb by one side of its wooden frame. Wind would have blown sand into it, but the day was still, late-afternoon sunshine lightening an empty sky. We walked by the edge of the sea; there was hardly anyone about.

‘What’s your cousin like?’

‘You’ll see soon enough.’

Hubert had a face to which a faintly melancholy expression seemed naturally to belong. But when he laughed, or smiled, its bony landscape changed dramatically, delight illuminating every crevice, eyes sparkling like excited sapphires. Hair the colour of wheat was smoothly brushed, never untidy. ‘Fancies himself a dandy, does he?’ a disagreeable teacher of Greek and Latin had once remarked.

‘I’m thinking of going to Africa,’ he revealed when we’d turned and begun to make our way back to the house.

Hubert’s mother and father had been killed in a car accident in England. ‘The last thing that happened before the war,’ Hubert used to say, regaling us at school with the story of the tragedy. On Saturday September 2nd, 1939, late at night, they had driven away from a roadhouse near Virginia Water and unfortunately had had a head-on collision with a lorry belonging to a travelling zoo. There’d been a cage full of apes on the back of the lorry, Hubert subsequently reported, which the impact had caused to become unfastened. He himself had been ten at the time, at a preparatory school in the suburbs of Oxford, and he told how the headmaster had broken the news to him, introducing it with references to courage and manliness. These had failed to prepare him for the death of his parents, because he’d imagined that what was coming next was the news that he would have to be sent home on the grounds that, yet again, the fees hadn’t been paid. Already there had been the wireless announcement about the declaration of war, the whole school assembled to hear it. ‘You will know no blacker day, Hubert,’ the headmaster had asserted before releasing the more personal tidings. ‘Take strength at least from that.’

We delivered the honeycomb to the kitchen. ‘Lily,’ Hubert said, by way of introducing the wiry little woman who was kneading bread on a baking board at the table. ‘Mrs Hanrahan says it’s good rich honey.’

She nodded in acknowledgement, and nodded a greeting at me. She asked me what kind of a journey I’d had and when I said it had been unremarkable she vouchsafed the information that she didn’t like trains. ‘I always said it to Hubert,’ she recalled, ‘when he was going back to school. I suffer on a train.’

‘Have you a fag, Lily?’ Hubert asked, and she indicated with a gesture of her head a packet of Player’s on the dresser. ‘I’ll pay you back,’ he promised. ‘I’m taking two.’

‘That’s seven you owe the kitchen, mind, and I don’t want money. You go and buy a packet after supper.’

‘I was going to say, Lily, could you lend me a pound?’ As he spoke he opened a green purse beside the Player’s packet. ‘Till Tuesday that would be.’

‘It’s always till Tuesday with you. You’d think the kitchen was made of Her Ladyships.’

‘If Lily was a few years younger,’ Hubert said, addressing me, ‘I’d marry her tomorrow.’

He removed a pound note from the purse and smoothed it out on the surface of the dresser, examined the romantic countenance of Lady Lavery, raised it to his lips, and then carefully secreted the note in an inside pocket. ‘We’re going dancing tonight,’ he said. ‘Did you ever dance in the Four Provinces Ballroom, Lily?’

‘Oh, don’t be annoying me.’

We smoked in Hubert’s room, a tidily kept place with Leonardo da Vinci’s Annunciation on the wall between the windows. Hubert wound up a gramophone and then lay on his bed. I sat on the only chair. Frank Sinatra sang.

‘They’re trying to grow groundnuts in Africa,’ Hubert said. ‘I think I’d be interested in that.’

‘What are groundnuts?’

‘The groundnut is a nut they have an idea about. I think they’ll pay my fare.’

He was vague about which African country he referred to, replying when I asked him that it didn’t matter. There was another scheme he’d heard about, to do with supplying telephone-boxes, and a third one that involved teaching selected Africans the rudiments of hydraulic engineering. ‘You have to go on a course yourself, naturally enough,’ Hubert explained. ‘Personally I favour the nuts.’

He turned the record over. Sinatra sang ‘Begin the Beguine’. Hubert said:

‘We can go in on the half-seven train. We’ll have to try for a lift back. Don’t dawdle in the dining-room.’

At school Hubert had been thought of as ‘wild’, a reputation he had to some extent inherited from his father’s renown at the same school twenty-five years before. For his own part, it was not that he was constantly in breach of the rules, but rather that he tended to go his own way. Short of funds, which regularly he was, he had been known to sell his clothes. The suit of ‘sober colouring’ which we were permitted to wear on weekend exeats, and for Chapel on Sunday evenings, with either a school, House or Colours tie, he sold in a Dublin secondhand-clothes shop and, never known to go out on exeats himself, managed for Sunday Chapel with the black serge jacket and trousers that was our normal everyday wear. He sold his bicycle to Ossie Richpatrick for eleven shillings, and a suitcase for eightpence. ‘I don’t understand why that should be,’ Hubert had a way of saying in class, voicing what the rest of us felt but didn’t always have the courage to say. He didn’t mind not understanding; he didn’t mind arguing with the Chaplain about the existence of the Deity; he didn’t mind leaving an entire meal untouched and afterwards being harangued by the duty prefect for what was considered to be a form of insolence. But, most of all, what marked Hubert with the characteristics of a personality that was unusual were the stories he repeated about his relationship with his grandfather, which was not a happy one. Mr Plunkett’s strictures and appearance were endlessly laid before us, a figure emerging of a tetchy elder statesman, wing-collared and humourless, steeped in the Christian morality of the previous century. Mr Plunkett said grace at mealtimes, much as it was said at school, only continuing for longer; he talked importantly of the managerial position he had reached, after a lifetime of devotion and toil, in Guinness’s brewery. ‘Never himself touches a drop of the stuff, you understand. Having been an abstainer since the age of seven or something. A clerky figure even as a child.’ Since Hubert’s reports allowed Mrs Plunkett so slight a place in the household, and Lily none at all, his home life sounded spiky and rather cold. At the beginning of each term he was always the first to arrive back at school, and had once returned a week early, claiming to have misread the commencing date on the previous term’s report.

‘OΚ, let’s go,’ he said when a gong sounded, and we swiftly descended the stairs, Hubert setting the pace. I caught a brief glimpse of a door opening and of a girl. In the hall Hubert struck the gong again as he passed.

‘No need for that,’ his grandmother gently reprimanded in the dining-room. ‘We are all present and correct.’

The girl smiled at me, so shyly that I was made to feel shy myself. In the absence of her husband Mrs Plunkett said grace while we stood with our hands resting on the backs of our chairs. ‘We are quite a houseful now,’ she chattily remarked as she sat down. ‘Pamela, please pass that salad along to our visitor.’

‘Yes, of course.’

Pamela blushed as she spoke, her eyes flittering for a moment in my direction. Hubert, silent beside me, was relishing her discomfiture: I knew that, I could feel it. He and I and his cousin were aware that we had not met; the old woman imagined we had.

‘I hope you are a salad-eater.’ Mrs Plunkett smiled at me. ‘Hubert does not much go in for salad. I’m not sure why.’

‘Because Hubert doesn’t like the taste,’ Hubert replied. ‘Lettuce does not seem to him to taste at all. The skin of tomatoes catches in his throat. Chives hang about on his breath. Radishes are nasty little things. And so on.’

His cousin laughed. She was a pretty girl, with dark bobbed hair and blue eyes: I didn’t, that evening, notice much else about her except that she was wearing a pale pink dress with white buttons down the front. She became even prettier when she smiled, a dimple appearing in one of her cheeks, her nose wrinkling in a way that became her.

‘Well, that’s most interesting,’ Mrs Plunkett said, a little stiffly, when Hubert ceased to talk about his dislikes.

There was corned beef with the salad. Hubert buttered two slices of brown bread to make a sandwich of his, and all the time he was preparing this his grandmother watched him. She did so uncomfortably, in an odd, dutiful kind of way, and I received the impression that she would have preferred not to. It was what her husband would have done, I suddenly realized: as if guided by his silent presence in an upstairs room she was honourably obeying him, keeping faith with his wishes. Mustard was spread on the corned beef, pepper was sprinkled. Mrs Plunkett made no comment. The slow movements of Hubert’s knife, a faint whispering under his breath of one of the songs Frank Sinatra had sung, contributed to the considerable unease of both Hubert’s cousin and myself. Pamela reddened when she accidentally knocked the little silver spoon out of the salt cellar.

‘You’re not in a public house, Hubert,’ Mrs Plunkett said when he lifted the sandwich to his mouth. ‘Pamela, please pour the tea.’

Hubert ignored the reference to a public house. ‘Don’t dawdle,’ he reminded me. ‘If we miss the seven-thirty we’ll have to cadge a lift and that takes ages.’

Pamela poured the tea. Mrs Plunkett cut her lettuce into fine shreds. She added salad cream, meticulously mixing everything up. She said eventually:

‘Are you going in to Dublin?’

‘We’re going dancing,’ Hubert said. ‘The Four Provinces Ballroom in Harcourt Street. Music tonight by Ken Mackintosh.’

‘I don’t think I’ve heard of Mr Mackintosh.’

‘Celebrity spot, the Inkspots.’

‘Inkspots?’

‘They sing songs.’

On a large round breadboard beside Mrs Plunkett there were several kinds of bread, which she cut very slowly with a battered breadsaw. On the table there was plum jam and raspberry jam, and the honeycomb we had bought from Mrs Hanrahan. There was a fruitcake and a coffee cake, biscuits and shortbread, and when we’d finished our corned beef Lily came in and added to this array a plate of éclairs. She lifted away the plates and dishes we’d finished with. Mrs Plunkett thanked her.

‘Mrs Hanrahan said she picked that honeycomb out for you,’ Hubert said.

‘Well, that was most kind of her.’

‘She’s lonely since Hanrahan died. She’d talk the legs off you.’

‘It’s hard for the poor woman. A builder’s widow.’ Mrs Plunkett explained to me what I already knew. ‘He fell off a roof six weeks ago.’

‘As a matter of fact,’ Hubert said, ‘she’s better off without him.’

‘What on earth d’you mean, Hubert?’

‘Hanrahan went after shop girls. Famous for it.’

‘Don’t speak so coarsely, Hubert.’

‘Is Pam shocked? Are you shocked, Pam?’

‘No, no, not at all.’ Pamela swiftly replied before her grandmother could answer for her. She had reddened again in her confusion, but being flustered made her more vivacious and was not unattractive.

‘Mr Hanrahan was a perfectly decent man,’ Mrs Plunkett insisted. ‘You’re repeating tittle-tattle, Hubert.’

‘There’s a girl serves in Binchy’s, another in Edwards’ the cake shop. Hanrahan took both of them to the dunes. D’you remember Hanrahan, Pam?’

She shook her head.

‘He painted the drain-pipes one time.’

‘You’ll need to hurry if you wish to catch the train,’ Mrs Plunkett said. As she spoke she drew back the cuff of her sleeve to consult a wristwatch that had not been visible before. She nodded in agreement with the statement she’d just made. Addressing her granddaughter, she said:

‘It doesn’t matter if you don’t finish.’

Doubtfully, Pamela half smiled at Mrs Plunkett. She began to say something, then changed her mind. Vaguely, she shook her head.

‘Is Pamela going in to Dublin too?’ Hubert said. ‘Going to the flicks, Pamela?’

‘Isn’t she accompanying you? Don’t you want to go dancing with the boys, Pamela?’

‘No, no.’ She shook her head, more vehemently than before. She was going to wash her hair, she said.

‘But surely you’d like to go dancing, Pamela?’

Hubert stood up, half a piece of shortbread in one hand. He jerked his head at me, indicating that I should hurry. Pamela said again that she wanted to wash her hair.

‘Jesus Christ!’ Hubert murmured in the hall. He stifled laughter. ‘I’m bloody certain,’ he said as we hurried through the garden, ‘she remembers Hanrahan. The man made a pass at her.’

In the train he told me when I asked that she was the child of his father’s sister. ‘She comes over every summer from some back-of-beyond rectory in Roscommon.’ He was vague when I asked further questions, or else impatiently brushed them aside. ‘Pam’s dreary,’ was all he said.

‘She doesn’t seem dreary to me.’

‘The old man worships her. Like he did her mother by all accounts.’

In the Four Provinces Ballroom we met girls who were quite different from Hubert’s cousin. Hubert said they came from the slums, though this could not have been true since they were fashionably dressed and had money for soft drinks and cigarettes. Their legs were painted – the liquid stockings of that time – and their features were emphasized with lipstick and mascara. But each one I danced with was either stunted or lumpy, and I kept thinking of Pamela’s slim figure and her pretty face. Her lips, in particular, I remembered.

We danced to ‘As Time Goes By’ and ‘Autumn Leaves’ and ‘Falling in Love with Love’. The Inkspots sang. One of the partners I danced with said: ‘Your friend’s very handsome, isn’t he?’

In the end Hubert picked up two girls who were agreeable to being seen home when the evening came to an end.

Ken Mackintosh and his band began to pack away their instruments. We walked a little way along Harcourt Street and caught a number 11 bus. The girls were nurses. The one allocated to me, being bouncy and talkative, wanted to know what it was like living in a provincial town, as I did, and what my plans were for getting out of it. When I told her she said: ‘Maybe I’ll run into you when you’re a student,’ but her voice wasn’t exactly loaded with pleasurable anticipation. She was wearing a thick, green woollen coat even though it was August. Her face was flat and pale, her lips garish beneath a fresh coating of lipstick. She had to get up at five o’clock every morning, she said, in order to get to the ward on time. The Sister was a tartar.

When we arrived at the girls’ flat Hubert suggested that we might be offered a cup of tea, but the girls would permit us no further than the doorstep of the house. ‘I thought we were away,’ he murmured disconsolately. His father would have got in, he said. They’d have cooked a meal for his father, anything he wanted. We walked to where we hoped to get a lift to Templemairt. Two hours later a lorry driver picked us up.

The next day being a Saturday, Hubert and I went to Phoenix Park races. We missed breakfast and due to pressure of time we missed lunch also – and, in fact, the first race. ‘The old man’ll have been livid,’ Hubert said. ‘You understand he takes in what’s going on?’ Mrs Plunkett and Pamela would have sat waiting for us in the dining-room, he said, then Pamela would have been sent up to see if we were still asleep, and after that Mrs Plunkett would have gone up herself. ‘They’ll have asked Lily and she’ll have told them we’ve hooked it to the races.’ He neither laughed nor smiled, even though he seemed amused. Another two pounds had been borrowed from Lily before we left.

‘He’ll be livid because he’ll think we should have taken Pam with us.’

‘Why don’t you like Pamela?’

Hubert didn’t reply. He said instead: ‘I’d love to have heard Hanrahan putting a proposition to her.’

At school all of it would have sounded different. We’d have laughed – I more than anyone – at the report of the lively builder attempting to seduce Hubert’s cousin. And somehow it would have been funnier because this had occurred in his grandfather’s house, his grandfather being the sort he was. We would have imagined the embarrassment of Hubert’s cousin, and Hanrahan saying what harm was a little kiss. We would have imagined the old man oblivious of it all, and would have laughed because Hubert’s cousin couldn’t bring herself to say anything about it afterwards. Hubert told his stories well.

‘He may not,’ I said, ‘have had a go at her.’

‘He couldn’t leave them alone, that man. I’m going for this Summer Rain thing.’

We stood in the crowd, examining the list of runners. Announcements were made over loudspeakers; all around us people were talking furiously. Men were in shirt-sleeves, women and girls in summer dresses. It was another sunny day.

‘Paddy’s Pride no good?’ I said.

‘Could be.’ But we both put our bets on Summer Rain and to my surprise the horse won at nine to one. ‘Let’s have a drink,’ Hubert said. Without asking me what I wanted he ordered stout at the bar.

We won again with Sarah’s Cottage, lost with Mohaghan Lad and King of Them All. We drank further bottles of stout. ‘Take Gay Girl for a place,’ a man who had dropped into conversation with us in the bar advised. We did so and were again successful. Between us we were now almost seventeen pounds richer than when we started. We watched the last race in high spirits, grasping glasses of stout and urging on a horse called Marino. We hadn’t backed it; we hadn’t backed anything because Hubert said he could tell our luck had come to an end. Marino didn’t win.

‘We’ll have something to eat and then go to the pictures,’ Hubert said.

The grass beneath our feet was littered with discarded race tickets and programmes. The bookmakers were dismantling their stands. Pale evening sunlight slanted over the drifting crowds; voices were more subdued than they had been. I kept thinking of Pamela in the house in Templemairt, of Mrs Plunkett saying grace again in the dining-room, the old man sensing that we weren’t present for yet another meal.

‘What about The Moon and Sixpence?’ Hubert suggested, having bought an Evening Herald as we left the racecourse. ‘George Sanders?’

We ordered two mixed grills at the cinema restaurant, and tea and cakes. We both bought packets of cigarettes. When The Moon and Sixpence came to an end we went to an ice-cream parlour and then we caught a Saturday-night bus that brought us almost as far as Templemairt. We walked the last bit, Hubert talking about Africa. Before we reached the town he said:

‘He disowned my father, you know. When my father got involved with my mother that was the end of that. My mother was a barmaid, you understand.’

I nodded, having been informed of that before. Hubert said:

‘I didn’t know that old man existed until I was told after the funeral. He didn’t even come to it.’

I didn’t say it must have been awful, having both your parents killed at once. We’d often thought so at school and had said it when Hubert wasn’t there. We’d often considered it must have affected him, perhaps made him the way he was – careless, it seemed, of what people thought of him.

‘You should have heard him when he could talk, laying into me because he thinks I’m like my father. A chip off the old block is what he thinks. My father lived on his wits. A con man, you understand.’

Hubert had often told us this also. His father had briefly been a racing correspondent, had managed a night-club, had apparently worked in a bank. But none of these forays into the realm of employment had lasted long; each had been swiftly terminated, either on the grounds of erratic service or for liberties taken with funds. Hubert, at school, had made no bones about his father’s reprehensible tendencies, nor about his mother’s background. On the contrary, he had taken a certain pride in the fact that his father, in later life, had lived up to the reputation he had established when a schoolboy himself. The apes that had escaped from the circus cage at the time of the tragedy had chattered with delight, scampering over the wreckage. His father would have appreciated that, he said.

A weak crescent moon lightened the darkness as we walked towards Templemairt. The stars were out in force. No car passed us, but even if we’d been aware of headlights behind us I doubt that we’d have bothered to try for a lift. We smoked one cigarette after another, still exhilarated by our triumphant afternoon, and in the circumstances it seemed natural that Hubert should talk about his parents, who had spent a lot of time on racecourses.

‘They were drunk, of course, when they crashed that car.’

It was not difficult to believe they were, but none the less I did not feel that hearty agreement was in order. I nodded briefly. I said:

‘Were you born in England?’

‘I believe in the back row of a cinema.’

I had never heard that before, but there was something about Hubert’s honesty in other matters that prevented me from suspecting invention. The photograph of his grandfather in the hall was precisely as Mr Plunkett had so often been described, down to his eyebrows being almost a single horizontal line, and the celluloid collar of his shirt.

‘When the lights went up she couldn’t move. They had to send for a doctor, but before the ambulance arrived she popped me.’

We entered the house quietly and went to our rooms without further conversation. I had hoped that Pamela might still be up since it wasn’t as late as last night. I had even prepared a scene that I felt could easily take place: Pamela in the hall as we closed the front door behind us, Pamela offering us tea in the kitchen and Hubert declining while I politely accepted.

*

‘Pam, do you want to play tennis?’

She was as astonished as I was to hear this. A startled look came into her face. She stammered slightly when she replied.

‘Three of us?’ she said.

‘We’ll show you how three can play.’

Sunday lunch had already taken place, a somewhat silent occasion because Hubert and I were more than ever out of favour. Mrs Plunkett said quietly, but in the firm tones of one conveying a message as a matter of trust, that her husband had been disappointed because we hadn’t accompanied Pamela and herself to church. I did my best to apologize; Hubert ignored the revelation. ‘We won a fortune at the races,’ he said, which helped matters as little as it would have had the old man been present.

‘Tennis would be lovely,’ Pamela said.

She added that she’d change. Hubert said he’d lend me a pair of tennis shoes.

A remarkable transformation appeared to have overtaken him, and for a moment I thought that the frosty lunchtime and his grandfather’s reported distress had actually stirred his conscience. It then occurred to me that since there was nothing else to do on a Sunday afternoon, tennis with Pamela was better than being bored. I knew what he meant when he said we’d show her how three could play: on the tennis court Hubert belonged in a class far more exalted than my own, and often at school Ossie Richpatrick and I had together played against him and still not managed to win. It delighted me that Pamela and I were to be partners.

Hubert’s tennis shoes didn’t fit me perfectly, but I succeeded in getting them on to my feet. There was no suggestion that he and I should change our clothes, as Pamela had said she intended to. Hubert offered me a choice of several racquets and when I’d selected one we made our way to the tennis court at the back of the house. We raised the net, measured its height, and knocked up while we waited.

‘I’m afraid we can’t,’ Pamela said.

She was wearing a white dress and tennis shoes and socks of the same pristine freshness. There was a white band in her hair and she was wearing sunglasses. She wasn’t carrying her tennis racquet.

‘Can’t what?’ Hubert said, stroking a ball over the net. ‘Can’t what, Pam?’

‘We’re not allowed to play tennis.’

‘Who says we’re not allowed to? What d’you mean, allowed?’

‘Grandmother says we mustn’t play tennis.’

‘Why on earth not?’

‘Because it’s Sunday, because you haven’t been to church.’

‘Oh, don’t be so bloody silly.’

‘He asked her what we were doing. She had to tell him.’

‘The idiotic old brute.’

‘I don’t want to play, Hubert.’

Hubert stalked away. I wound the net down. I was glad he hadn’t insisted that he and I should play on our own.

‘Don’t be upset by it.’ I spoke apologetically. I didn’t know what else to say.

‘There won’t be a quarrel,’ she reassured me, and in fact there wasn’t. The raised voices of Hubert and his grandmother, which I thought we’d hear coming from the house, didn’t materialize. Pamela went to change her dress. I took off Hubert’s tennis shoes. In the drawing-room at teatime Mrs Plunkett said:

‘Hubert’s turned his face to the wall, has he?’

‘Shall I call him?’ Pamela offered.

‘Hubert knows the hour of Sunday tea, my dear.’

Lily brought more hot water. She, too, seemed affected by what had occurred, her mouth tightly clamped. But I received the impression that the atmosphere in the drawing-room was one she was familiar with.

‘A pity to turn one’s face to the wall on such a lovely day,’ Mrs Plunkett remarked.

Silence took over then and was not broken until Mrs Plunkett rose and left the room. Strauss began on the piano, tinkling faintly through the wall. Lily came in to collect the tea things.

‘Perhaps we should go for a walk,’ Pamela said.

We descended the stepped path between the rockeries and strolled past Hanrahan’s yard. We turned into the sandy lane that led to the dunes and made our way on to the strand. We didn’t refer to what had occurred.

‘Are you still at school?’ I asked.

‘I left in July.’

‘What are you going to do now?’

‘I’m hoping to study botany.’

She was shyer than I’d thought. Her voice was reticent when she said she hoped to study botany, as if the vaunting of this ambition constituted a presumption.

‘What are you going to do?’

I told her. I envied Hubert going to Africa, I said, becoming garrulous in case she was bored by silence. I mentioned the cultivation of groundnuts.

‘Africa?’ she said. When she stopped she took me unawares and I had to walk back a pace or two. Too late, I realized I had inadvertently disclosed a confidence.

‘It’s just an idea he has.’

I tried to change the subject, but she didn’t seem to hear, or wasn’t interested. I watched while she drew a pattern on the sand with the toe of her shoe. More slowly than before, she walked on again.

‘I don’t know why,’ I said, ‘we don’t have a bathe.’

She didn’t reply. Children were running into and out of the sea. Two men were paddling, with their trousers rolled up to their knees. A girl was sunbathing on a li-lo, both hands in the water, resisting the tide that would have carried her away from the shore.

‘My bathing-dress is in the house,’ Pamela said at last. ‘I could get it if you like.’

‘Would you like?’

She shrugged. Perhaps not, she said, and I wondered if she was thinking that bathing, as much as tennis, might be frowned upon as a breach of the Sabbath.

‘I don’t think, actually,’ she said, ‘that Hubert will ever go to Africa.’

Lily stood beside my deck-chair, a bunch of mint she’d picked in one hand. I hadn’t known what else to do, since Hubert had not come out of his room, so I’d wandered about the garden and had eventually found the deck-chair on a triangle of grass in a corner. ‘I’m going to read for a while,’ Pamela had said when we returned from our walk.

‘It’s understandable they never had to be so severe with Pamela,’ Lily said. ‘On account of her mother being sensible in her life. Different from Hubert’s father.’

I guessed she was talking to me like this because she’d noticed I was bewildered. The pettiness I had witnessed in my friend was a shock more than a surprise. Affected by it, I’d even wondered as I’d walked with Pamela back from the strand if I’d been invited to the house in order to become an instrument in her isolation. I’d dismissed the thought as a ridiculous flight of fancy: now I was not so sure.

‘It’s understandable, Hubert being bad to her. When you think about it, it’s understandable.’

Lily passed on, taking with her the slight scent of mint that had begun to waft towards me because she’d crushed a leaf or two. ‘He tried to beat me with a walking-stick,’ Hubert had reported at school, and I imagined the apprehension Lily hinted at – the father of the son who’d gone to the bad determined that history should not be repeated, the mother anxious and agreeing.

‘I was looking for you,’ Hubert said, sitting down on the grass beside me. ‘Why don’t we go down to the hotel?’

I looked at him, his lean face in profile. I remembered Pamela drawing the pattern on the sand, her silence the only intimation of her love. When had an intonation or a glance first betrayed it to him? I wondered.

Hubert pushed himself to his feet and we sauntered off to the lounge-bar of the hotel beside the railway station. Without asking me what I would like, Hubert ordered gin and orange. The tennis we hadn’t played wasn’t mentioned, nor did I say that Pamela and I had walked on the strand.

‘No need to go tomorrow,’ Hubert said. ‘Stay on a bit.’

‘I said I’d be back.’

‘Send them a wire.’

‘I don’t want to over-stay, Hubert. It’s good of your grandmother to have me.’

‘That girl stays for three months.’

I’d never drunk gin before. The orange made it pleasantly sweet, with only a slight aftertaste, I liked it better than stout.

‘My father’s drink,’ Hubert said. ‘My mother preferred gimlets. A gimlet,’ he added, ‘is gin with lime in it. They drank an awful lot, you understand.’

He confided to me that he intended to slip away to England himself. He was softening Lily up, he said, with the intention of borrowing a hundred pounds from her. He knew she had it because she never spent a penny; a hundred pounds would last him for ages, while he found out more about the prospects in Africa.

‘I’ll pay her back. I’d never not.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Anything would be better than the Dublin Handkerchief Company. Imagine being in the Dublin Handkerchief Company when you were fifty years of age! A lifetime of people blowing their noses!’

We sat there, talking about school, remembering the time Fitzherbert had dressed himself up in the kind of woman’s clothes he considered suitable for a streetwalker and demanded an interview with Farquie, the senior languages master; and the time the Kingsmill brothers had introduced a laxative into the High Table soup; and when Prunty and Tatchett had appropriated a visiting rugby team’s clothes while they were in the showers. We recalled the days of our first term: how Hubert and I had occupied beds next to one another in the junior dormitory, how Miss Fanning, the common-room secretary, had been kind to us, thinking we were homesick.

‘One pour la route,’ Hubert said.

He held the man who served us in conversation, describing the same mixture of gin and orangeade as he’d had it once in some other bar. There had been iced sugar clinging to the rim of the glass; delicious, he said. The man just stared at him.

‘I’ll fix it up with Lily tonight,’ Hubert said on the way back to the house. ‘If she can’t manage the hundred I’d settle for fifty.’

We were still talking loudly as we mounted the stepped path between the rockeries, and as we passed through the hall. In the dining-room Mrs Plunkett and Pamela had clearly been seated at the table for some time. When we entered the old woman rose without commenting on our lateness and repeated the grace she had already said. A weary expression froze Hubert’s features while he waited for her voice to cease.

‘We were down in the hotel,’ he said when it did, ‘drinking gin and orange. Have you ever wandered into the hotel, Pam?’

She shook her head, her attention appearing to be occupied with the chicken leg on her plate. Hubert said the hotel had a pleasant little lounge-bar, which wasn’t the description I’d have chosen myself. A rendezvous for the discriminating, he said, even if one encountered difficulty there when it came to a correctly concocted gin and orange. He was pretending to be drunker than he was.

‘A rather dirty place, Dowd’s Hotel,’ Mrs Plunkett interposed, echoing what I knew would have been her husband’s view.

‘Hanrahan used to drink there,’ Hubert continued. ‘Many’s the time I saw him with a woman in the corner. I’ve forgotten if you said you remembered the late Hanrahan, Pam?’

She said she didn’t. Mrs Plunkett held out her cup and saucer for more tea. Pamela poured it.

‘Hanrahan painted the drain-pipes,’ Hubert said. ‘D’you remember that time, Pam?’

She shook her head. I wanted to tell him to stop. I wanted to remind him that he had already asked his cousin if she remembered Hanrahan painting the drain-pipes, to point out that it wasn’t she who had caused the difficulty that afternoon, that it wasn’t she who had made us stand there while grace was said again.

‘I’m surprised you don’t,’ Hubert said. ‘I’m really very surprised, Pam.’

Mrs Plunkett didn’t understand the conversation. She smiled kindly at me, and briefly indicated dishes I might like to help myself to. She lifted a forkful of cold chicken to her mouth.

‘It’s only that he mentioned you once in Dowd’s,’ Hubert said. He laughed, his eyes sparkling, as if with delight. ‘He asked how you were getting on one time. A very friendly man.’

Pamela turned away from the table, but she couldn’t hide what she wished to hide and she couldn’t control her emotions. Her cheeks were blazing now. She sobbed, and then she pushed her chair back and hurried from the room.

‘What have you said to her?’ Mrs Plunkett asked in astonishment.

I could not sleep that night. I kept thinking about Pamela, unhappy in her bedroom, and Hubert in his. I imagined Hubert’s father and Pamela’s mother, children in the house also, the bad son, the good daughter. I imagined the distress suffered in the house when Hubert’s father was accused of some small theft at school, which Hubert said he had been. I imagined the misdemeanour forgotten, a new leaf turned, and some time later the miscreant dunned by a debt collector for a sum he could not pay. Letters came to the house from England, pleading for assistance, retailing details of hardship due to misfortune. When I closed my eyes, half dreaming though I was not yet asleep, Mrs Plunkett wept, as Pamela had. She dreaded the letters, she sobbed; for a day or two she was able to forget and then another letter came. ‘I will write a cheque’: the man I had not seen spoke blankly, taking a cheque-book from his pocket and, at the breakfast table, writing it immediately.

I opened my eyes; I murmured Pamela’s name. ‘Pamela,’ I whispered because repeating it made her face more vivid in my mind. I might have told her that Hubert, at school, had been sought out and admired more than any other boy because he was not ordinary, that he’d been attractive and different in all sorts of ways. I might have begged her not to hate the memory of him when she ceased to love him.

I fell asleep. We played tennis and Hubert easily beat us. A car lay on its side, headlights beaming on the apes that scampered from the broken cage. On the bloody grass of the roadside verge the two dead faces still smiled. ‘You will know no blacker day,’ the voice of a schoolmaster promised.

In the morning, after breakfast, I packed my suitcase while Hubert sat smoking a cigarette in silence. I said goodbye to Lily in the kitchen, and to Mrs Plunkett. Pamela was in the hall when we passed through it.

‘Goodbye,’ she said. At breakfast she had seemed to have recovered her composure. She smiled at me now, saying she was sorry I was going.

‘Goodbye, Pamela.’

Hubert stood by the open hall door, not looking at her, gazing out into the sunlit garden. On the way to the railway station we talked again about incidents at school. He mentioned the two nurses we’d accompanied to their doorstep and the luck we’d had at the races. ‘A pity we wouldn’t have time for a gin and orange,’ he said as we passed the hotel.

On the slow train, close at first to the sea and then moving into the landscape that was just beginning to seem parched because of the heatwave, I knew that I would never see Hubert again. A friendship had come to an end because when a little more time went by he would be ashamed, knowing I would not easily forget how he had made his cousin a casualty of the war with his grandfather. There would always be an awkwardness now, and the memory of Hubert at home.

A Trinity

Their first holiday since their honeymoon was paid for by the elderly man they both called Uncle. In fact, he was related to neither of them: for eleven years he had been Dawne’s employer, but the relationship was more truly that of benefactor and dependants. They lived with him and looked after him, but in another sense it was he who looked after them, demonstrating regularly that they required such care. ‘What you need is a touch of the autumn sun,’ he had said, ordering Keith to acquire as many holiday brochures as he could lay his hands on. ‘The pair of you’re as white as bedsheets.’

The old man lived vicariously through aspects of their lives, and listened carefully to all they said. Sharing their anticipation, he browsed delightedly through the pages of the colourful brochures and opened out on the kitchen table one glossy folder after another. He marvelled over the blue of the Aegean Sea and the flower markets of San Remo, over the Nile and the pyramids, the Costa del Sol, the treasures of Bavaria. But it was Venice that most instantly caught his imagination, and again and again he returned to the wonder of its bridges and canals, and the majesty of the Piazza San Marco.

‘I am too old for Venice,’ he remarked a little sadly. ‘I am too old for anywhere now.’

They protested. They pressed him to accompany them. But as well as being old he had his paper-shop to think about. He could not leave Mrs Withers to cope on her own; it would not be fair.

‘Send me one or two postcards,’ he said. ‘That will be sufficient.’

He chose for them a package holiday at a very reasonable price: an air flight from Gatwick Airport, twelve nights in the fairyland city, in the Pensione Concordia. When Keith and Dawne went together to the travel agency to make the booking the counter clerk explained that the other members of that particular package were an Italian class from Windsor, all of them learning the language under the tutelage of a Signor Bancini. ‘It is up to you if you wish to take the guided tours of Signor Bancini,’ the counter clerk explained. ‘And naturally you have your own table for breakfast and for dinner.’

The old man, on being told about the party from Windsor, was well pleased. Mixing with such people and, for just a little extra, being able to avail themselves of the expertise of an Italian language teacher amounted to a bonus, he pointed out. ‘Travel widens the mind,’ he said. ‘I deplore I never had the opportunity.’

But something went wrong. Either in the travel agency or at Gatwick Airport, or in some anonymous computer, a small calamity was conceived. Dawne and Keith ended up in a hotel called the Edelweiss, in Room 212, in Switzerland. At Gatwick they had handed their tickets to a girl in the yellow-and-red Your-Kind-of-Holiday uniform. She’d addressed them by name, had checked the details on their tickets and said that that was lovely. An hour later it had surprised them to hear elderly people on the plane talking in North of England accents when the counter clerk at the travel agency had so specifically stated that Signor Bancini’s Italian class came from Windsor. Dawne had even remarked on it, but Keith said there must have been a cancellation, or possibly the Italian class was on a second plane. ‘That’ll be the name of the airport,’ he confidently explained when the pilot referred over the communications system to a destination that didn’t sound like Venice. ‘Same as he’d say Gatwick. Or Heathrow.’ They ordered two Drambuies, Dawne’s favourite drink, and then two more. ‘The coach’ll take us on,’ a stout woman with spectacles announced when the plane landed. ‘Keep all together now.’ There’d been no mention of an overnight stop in the brochure, but when the coach drew in at the Edelweiss Hotel Keith explained that that was clearly what this was. By air and then by coach was how these package firms kept the prices down, a colleague at work had told him. As they stepped out of the coach it was close on midnight: fatigued and travel-stained, they did not feel like questioning their right to the beds they were offered. But the next morning, when it became apparent that they were being offered them for the duration of their holiday, they became alarmed.

‘We have the lake, and the water-birds,’ the receptionist smilingly explained. ‘And we may take the steamer to Interlaken.’

‘An error has been made,’ Keith informed the man, keeping the register of his voice even, for it was essential to be calm. He was aware of his wife’s agitated breathing close beside him. She’d had to sit down when they realized that something was wrong, but now she was standing up again.

‘We cannot change the room, sir,’ the clerk swiftly countered. ‘Each has been given a room. You accompany the group, sir?’

Keith shook his head. Not this group, he said, a different group; a group that was travelling on to another destination. Keith was not a tall man, and often suffered from what he considered to be arrogance in other people, from officials of one kind or another, and shop-assistants with a tendency to assume that his lack of stature reflected a diminutive personality. In a way Keith didn’t care for, the receptionist repeated:

‘This is the Edelweiss Hotel, sir.’

‘We were meant to be in Venice. In the Pensione Concordia.’

‘I do not know the name, sir. Here we have Switzerland.’

‘A coach is to take us on. An official said so on the plane. She was here last night, that woman.’

‘Tomorrow we have the fondue party,’ the receptionist went on, having listened politely to this information about an official. ‘On Tuesday there is the visit to a chocolate factory. On other days we may take the steamer to Interlaken, where we have teashops. In Interlaken mementoes may be bought at fair prices.’

Dawne had still not spoken. She, too, was a slight figure, her features pale beneath orange-ish powder. ‘Mingy’, the old man had a way of saying in his joky voice, and sometimes told her to lie down.

‘Eeh, idn’t it luvely?’ a voice behind Keith enthused. ‘Been out to feed them ducks, ’ave you?’

Keith did not turn round. Speaking slowly, giving each word space, he said to the receptionist: ‘We have been booked on to the wrong holiday.’

‘Your group is booked twelve nights in the Edelweiss Hotel. To make an alteration now, sir, if you have changed your minds –’

‘We haven’t changed our minds. There’s been a mistake.’

The receptionist shook his head. He did not know about a mistake. He had not been told that. He would help if he could, but he did not see how help might best be offered.

‘The man who made the booking,’ Dawne interrupted, ‘was bald, with glasses and a moustache.’ She gave the name of the travel agency in London.

In reply, the receptionist smiled with professional sympathy. He fingered the edge of his register. ‘Moustache?’ he said.

Three aged women who had been on the plane passed through the reception area. Had anyone noticed, one of them remarked, that there were rubber linings under the sheets? Well, you couldn’t be too careful, another agreeably responded, if you were running a hotel.

‘Some problem, have we?’ another woman said, beaming at Keith. She was the stout woman he had referred to as an official, flamboyantly attired this morning in a two-tone trouser-suit, green and blue. Her flesh-coloured spectacles were decorated with swirls of metal made to seem like gold; her grey hair was carefully waved. They’d seen her talking to the yellow-and-red girl at Gatwick. On the plane she’d walked up and down the aisle, smiling at people.

‘My name is Franks,’ she was saying now. ‘I’m married to the man with the bad leg.’

‘Are you in charge, Mrs Franks?’ Dawne inquired. ‘Only we’re in the wrong hotel.’ Again she gave the name of the travel agency and described the bald-headed counter clerk, mentioning his spectacles and his moustache. Keith interrupted her.

‘It seems we got into the wrong group. We reported to the Your-Kind-of-Holiday girl and left it all to her.’

‘We should have known when they weren’t from Windsor,’ Dawne contributed. ‘We heard them talking about Darlington.’

Keith made an impatient sound. He wished she’d leave the talking to him. It was no good whatsoever going on about Darlington and the counter clerk’s moustache, confusing everything even more.

‘We noticed you at Gatwick,’ he said to the stout woman. ‘We knew you were in charge of things.’

‘I noticed you. Well, of course I did, naturally I did. I counted you, although I dare say you didn’t see me doing that. Monica checked the tickets and I did the counting. That’s how I know everything’s OK. Now, let me explain to you. There are many places Your-Kind-of-Holiday sends its clients to, many tours, many different holidays at different prices. You follow me? Something to suit every pocket, something for every taste. There are, for instance, villa holidays for the adventurous under-thirty-fives. There are treks to Turkey, and treks for singles to the Himalayas. There is self-catering in Portugal, November reductions in Casablanca, February in Biarritz. There’s Culture-in-Tuscany and Sunshine-in-Sorrento. There’s the Nile. There’s Your-Kind-of-Safari in Kenya. Now, what I am endeavouring to say to you good people is that all tickets and labels are naturally similar, the yellow with the two red bands.’ Mrs Franks suddenly laughed. ‘So if you simply followed other people with the yellow-and-red label you might imagine you could end up in a wildlife park!’ Mrs Franks’ speech came hurriedly from her, the words tumbling over one another, gushing through her teeth. ‘But of course,’ she added soothingly, ‘that couldn’t happen in a million years.’

‘We’re not meant to be in Switzerland,’ Keith doggedly persisted.

‘Well, let’s just see, shall we?’

Unexpectedly, Mrs Franks turned and went away, leaving them standing. The receptionist was no longer behind the reception desk. The sound of typing could be heard.

‘She seems quite kind,’ Dawne whispered, ‘that woman.’

To Keith it seemed unnecessary to say that. Any consideration of Mrs Franks was, in the circumstances, as irrelevant as a description of the man in the travel agent’s. He tried to go over in his mind every single thing that had occurred: handing the girl the tickets, sitting down to wait, and then the girl leading the way to the plane, and then the pilot’s voice welcoming them aboard, and the air hostess with the smooth black hair going round to see that everyone’s seat-belt was fastened.

‘Snaith his name was,’ Dawne was saying. ‘It said Snaith on a plastic thing in front of him.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘The man in the travel place was called Snaith. G. Snaith it said.’

‘The man was just a clerk.’

‘He booked us wrong, though. That man’s responsible, Keith.’

‘Be that as it may.’

Sooner or later, Dawne had guessed, he’d say ‘Be that as it may’. He put her in her place with the phrase; he always had. You’d make an innocent remark, doing your best to be helpful, and out he’d come with ‘Be that as it may’. You expected him to go on, to finish the sentence, but he never did. The phrase just hung there, making him sound uneducated.

‘Are you going to phone up that man, Keith?’

‘Which man is this?’

She didn’t reply. He knew perfectly well which man she meant. All he had to do was to get through to Directory Inquiries and find out the number of the travel agency. It was no good complaining to a hotel receptionist who had nothing to do with it, nor to a woman in charge of a totally different package tour. No good putting the blame where it didn’t belong.

‘Nice to have some young people along,’ an elderly man said. ‘Nottage the name is.’

Dawne smiled, the way she did in the shop when someone was trying to be agreeable, but Keith didn’t acknowledge the greeting because he didn’t want to become involved.

‘Seen the ducks, ’ave you? Right champion them ducks are.’

The old man’s wife was with him, both of them looking as if they were in their eighties. She nodded when he said the ducks were right champion. They’d slept like logs, she said, best night’s sleep they’d had for years, which of course would be due to the lakeside air.

‘That’s nice,’ Dawne said.

Keith walked out of the reception area and Dawne followed him. On the gravel forecourt of the hotel they didn’t say to one another that there was an irony in the catastrophe that had occurred. On their first holiday since their honeymoon they’d landed themselves in a package tour of elderly people when the whole point of the holiday was to escape the needs and demands of the elderly. In his bossy way Uncle had said so himself when they’d tried to persuade him to accompany them.

‘You’ll have to phone up Snaith,’ Dawne repeated, irritating Keith further. What she did not understand was that if the error had occurred with the man she spoke of it would since have become compounded to such a degree that the man would claim to be able to do nothing about their immediate predicament. Keith, who sold insurance over the counter for, the General Accident insurance company, knew something of the complications that followed when even the slightest uncertainty in a requirement was passed into the programme of a computer. Somewhere along the line that was what had happened, but to explain it to Dawne would take a very long time. Dawne could work a till as well as anyone; in the shop she knew by heart the price of Mars bars and the different kinds of cigarettes and tobacco, and the prices of all the newspapers and magazines, but otherwise Keith considered her slow on the uptake, often unable to follow simple argument.

‘Hi, there!’ Mrs Franks called out, and they turned and saw her picking her way across the gravel towards them. She had a piece of pink paper in her hand. ‘I’ve been doing my homework!’ she cried when she was a little closer. She waved the pink paper. ‘Take a look at this.’

It was a list of names, a computer print-out, each name a series of tiny dots. K. and H. Beale, they read, T. and G. Craven, P. and R. Feinman. There were many others, including B. and Y. Nottage. In the correct alphabetical position they were there themselves, between J. and A. Hines and C. and L. Mace.

‘The thing is,’ Dawne began, and Keith looked away. His wife’s voice quietly continued, telling Mrs Franks that their holiday had been very kindly paid for by the old man whom they lived with, who had been her employer before they ever moved in to live with him, who still was. They called him Uncle but he wasn’t a relation, a friend really – well, more than that. The thing was, he would be angry because they were not in Venice, he having said it should be Venice. He’d be angry because they were in a package for the elderly when he wanted them to have a rest from the elderly, not that she minded looking after Uncle herself, not that she ever would. The person in the travel agency had said the Windsor people were quite young. ‘I always remember things like that,’ Dawne finished up. ‘Snaith he was called. G. Snaith.’

‘Well, that’s most interesting,’ Mrs Franks commented, and added after a pause: ‘As a matter of fact, Dawne, Mr Franks and myself are still in our fifties.’

‘Be that as it may,’ Keith said. ‘At no time did we book a holiday in Switzerland.’

‘Well, there you are, you see. The ticket you handed to me at Gatwick is as clear as daylight, exactly the same as the Beales’ and the Maces’, the same as our own, come to that. Not a tither of difference, Keith.’

‘We need to be conveyed to our correct destination. An arrangement has to be made.’

‘The trouble is, Keith, I don’t know if you know it but you’re half a continent away from Venice. Another thing is, I’m not employed by Your– Kind, nothing like that. They just reduce our ticket a bit if I agree to keep an eye. On location we call it.’ Mrs Franks went on to say that her husband had also scrutinized the piece of pink paper and was in complete agreement with her. She asked Keith if he had met her husband, and said again that he was the man with the bad leg. He’d been an accountant and still did a lot of accountancy work one way or another, in a private capacity. The Edelweiss Hotel was excellent, she said. Your-Kind would never choose an indifferent hotel.

‘We are asking you to get in touch with your firm in London,’ Keith said. ‘We do not belong with your group.’

In silence, though smiling, Mrs Franks held out the pink list. Her expression insisted that it spoke for itself. No one could gainsay the dotted identification among the others.

‘Our name is there by mistake.’

A man limped across the gravel towards them. He was a large man of shambling appearance, his navy-blue pin-striped jacket and waistcoat at odds with his brown trousers, his spectacles repaired with Sellotape. The sound of his breath could be heard as he approached. He blew it through half-pursed lips in a vague rendition of a Gilbert and Sullivan melody.

‘These are the poor lost lambs,’ Mrs Franks said. ‘Keith and Dawne.’

‘How do?’ Mr Franks held a hand out. ‘Silly thing to happen, eh?’

It was Mr Franks who eventually suggested that Keith should telephone Your-Kind-of-Holiday himself, and to Keith’s surprise he got through to a number in Croydon without any difficulty. ‘Excuse me a minute,’ a girl said when he finished. He heard her talking to someone else and he heard the other person laughing. There was a trace of laughter in the girl’s voice when she spoke again. You couldn’t change your mind, she said, in the middle of a package. In no circumstances whatsoever could that be permitted. ‘We’re not changing our minds,’ Keith protested, but while he was explaining all over again he was cut off because he hadn’t any more coins. He cashed a traveller’s cheque with the receptionist and was supplied with a number of five-franc pieces, but when he re-dialled the number the girl he’d spoken to couldn’t be located so he explained everything to another girl. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ this girl said, ‘but if we allowed people to change their minds on account of they didn’t like the look of a place we’d be out of business in no time.’ Keith began to shout into the telephone, and Dawne rapped on the glass of the booth, holding up a piece of paper on which she’d written G. Snaith the name was. ‘Some sort of loony,’ Keith heard the girl say in Croydon, the mouthpiece being inadequately muffled. There was an outburst of giggling before he was cut off.

It was not the first time that Keith and Dawne had suffered in this way: they were familiar with defeat. There’d been the time, a couple of years after their marriage, when Keith had got into debt through purchasing materials for making ships in bottles; earlier – before they’d even met –there was the occasion when the Lamb and Flag had had to let Dawne go because she’d taken tips although the rules categorically forbade it. Once Keith had sawn through the wrong water pipe and the landlords had come along with a bill for nearly two hundred pounds when the ceiling of the flat below collapsed. It was Uncle who had given Dawne a job in his shop after the Lamb and Flag episode and who had put them on their feet by paying off the arrears of the handicraft debt. In the end he persuaded them to come and live with him, pointing out that the arrangement would suit all three of them. Since his sister’s death he had found it troublesome, managing on his own.

In Interlaken they selected a postcard to send him: of a mountain that had featured in a James Bond film. But they didn’t know what to write on it: if they told the truth they would receive the old man’s unspoken scorn when they returned – a look that came into his eyes while he silently regarded them. Years ago he had openly said – once only – that they were accident-prone. They were unfortunate in their dealings with the world, he had explained when Dawne asked him; lame ducks, he supposed you could say, if they’d forgive the expression, victims by nature, no fault of their own. Ever since, such judgements had been expressed only through his eyes.

‘You choose your piece of gâteau,’ Dawne said, ‘up at the counter. They put it on a plate for you. Then the waitress comes along and you order the tea. I’ve been watching how it’s done.’

Keith chose a slice of glazed greengage cake and Dawne a portion of strawberry flan. As soon as they sat down a waitress came and stood smiling in front of them. ‘Tea with milk in it,’ Dawne ordered, because when she’d said they were going abroad someone who’d come into the shop had warned her that you had to ask for milk, otherwise the tea came just as it was, sometimes no more than a tea-bag and a glass of hot water.

‘A strike?’ Dawne suggested. ‘You’re always hearing of strikes in airports.’

But Keith continued to gaze at the blank postcard, not persuaded that an attempt at falsehood was wise. It wasn’t easy to tell the old man a lie. He had a way of making such attempts feel clumsy, and in the end of winkling out the truth. Yet his scorn would continue for many months, especially since he had paid out what he would call – a couple of hundred times at least – ‘good money’ for their tickets. ‘That’s typical of Keith, that is,’ he’d repeatedly inform his customers in Dawne’s hearing, and she’d pass it on that night in bed, the way she always passed his comments on.

Keith ate his greengage slice, Dawne her strawberry flan. They did not share their thoughts, although their thoughts were similar. ‘You’ve neither of you a head for business,’ he’d said after the ships-in-bottles calamity, and again when Dawne unsuccessfully attempted to make a go of dressmaking alterations. ‘You wouldn’t last a week in charge of things downstairs.’ He always referred to the shop as ‘downstairs’. Every day of his life he rose at five o’clock in order to be downstairs for the newspapers when they arrived. He’d done so for fifty-three years.

The plane couldn’t land at the Italian airport, Keith wrote, owing to a strike. So it had to come down here instead. It’s good in a way because we’re seeing another country as well! Hope your cold’s cleared up, Dawne added. It’s really lovely here! XXX

They imagined him showing the postcard to Mrs Withers. ‘That’s typical, that is,’ they imagined him saying and Mrs Withers jollying him along, telling him not to be sarky. Mrs Withers was pleased about earning the extra; she’d been as keen as anything when he’d asked her to come in fulltime for a fortnight.

‘Could happen to anyone, a strike,’ Dawne said, voicing Mrs Withers’ response.

Keith finished his greengage slice. ‘Call in to Smith’s for a will form,’ he imagined the cross, tetchy voice instructing Mrs Withers, the postcard already tucked away on the Embassy Tipped shelf. And when she arrived with the will form the next morning he’d let it lie around all day but have it in his hand when she left, before he locked the shop door behind her. ‘Silly really,’ Mrs Withers would say when eventually she told Dawne about it.

‘I’d just as soon be here,’ Dawne whispered, leaning forward a bit, daring at last to say that. ‘I’d just as soon be in Switzerland, Keithie.’

He didn’t reply, but looked around the teashop: at the display of cake in the long glass cabinet that served also as a counter – apricot and plum and apple, carrot-cake and Black Forest gâteau, richly glazed fruitcake, marzipan slices, small lemon tarts, orange éclairs, coffee fondants. Irritated because his wife had made that statement and wishing to be unpleasant to her by not responding, he allowed his gaze to slip over the faces of the couples who sat sedately at round, prettily arranged tables. In a leisurely manner he examined the smiling waitresses, their crimson aprons matching the crimson of the frilled tablecloths. He endeavoured to give the impression that the waitresses attracted him.

‘It’s really nice,’ Dawne said, her voice still shyly low.

He didn’t disagree; there was nothing wrong with the place. People were speaking in German, but when you spoke in English they understood you. Enoch Melchor, in Claims, had gone to somewhere in Italy last year and had got into all sorts of difficulties with the language, including being-given the head of a fish when he thought he’d ordered peas.

‘We could say we liked it so much we decided to stay on,’ Dawne suggested.

She didn’t seem to understand that it wasn’t up to them to decide anything. Twelve days in Venice had been chosen for them; twelve days in Venice had been paid for. ‘No better’n a sewer,’ Enoch Melchor had said, not that he’d ever been there. ‘Stinks to high heaven,’ he’d said, but that wasn’t the point either. Memories of Venice had been ordered, memories that were to be transported back to London, with glass figurines for the mantelpiece because Venice was famous for its glass. The menus at the Pensione Concordia and the tunes played by the café orchestras were to be noted in Dawne’s day-to-day diary. Venice was bathed in sunshine, its best autumn for years, according to the newspapers.

They left the teashop and walked about the streets, their eyes stinging at first, until they became used to the bitter breeze that had got up. They examined windows full of watches, and went from one to another of the souvenir shops because notices said that entrance was free. There was a clock that had a girl swinging on a swing every hour, and another that had a man and a woman employing a cross-saw, another that had a cow being milked. All sorts of tunes came out of different-shaped musical boxes: ‘Lily Marlene’, ‘The Blue Danube’, ‘Lara’s Theme’ from Doctor Zhivago, the ‘Destiny Waltz’. There were oven gloves with next year’s calendar printed on them in English, and miniature arrangements of dried flowers, framed, on velvet. In the chocolate shops there were all the different brands, Lindt, Suchard, Nestle, Cailler, and dozens of others. There was chocolate with nuts, and chocolate with raisins, with nougat and honey, white chocolate, milk or plain, chocolate with fudge filling, with cognac or whisky or chartreuse, chocolate mice and chocolate windmills.

‘It’s ever so enjoyable here,’ Dawne remarked, with genuine enthusiasm. They went into another teashop, and this time Keith had a chestnut slice and Dawne a blackcurrant one, both with cream.

At dinner, in a dining-room tastefully panelled in grey-painted wood, they sat among the people from Darlington, at a table for two, as the clerk in the travel agency had promised. The chicken-noodle soup was quite what they were used to, and so was the pork chop that followed, with apple sauce and chipped potatoes. ‘They know what we like,’ the woman called Mrs Franks said, making a round of all the tables, saying the same thing at each.

‘Really lovely,’ Dawne agreed. She’d felt sick in her stomach when they’d first realized about the error; she’d wanted to go to the lavatory and just sit there, hoping it was all a nightmare. She’d blamed herself because it was she who’d wondered about so many elderly people on the plane after the man in the travel place had given the impression of young people, from Windsor. It was she who had frowned, just for a moment, when the name of the airport was mentioned. Keith had a habit of pooh-poohing her doubts, like when she’d been doubtful about the men who’d come to the door selling mattresses and he’d been persuaded to make a down-payment. The trouble with Keith was, he always sounded confident, as though he knew something she didn’t, as though someone had told him. ‘We’ll just be here for the night,’ he’d said, and she’d thought that was something he must have read in the brochure or that the clerk in the travel place had said. He couldn’t help himself, of course; it was the way he was made. ‘Cotton-wool in your brain-box, have you?’ Uncle had rudely remarked, the August Bank Holiday poor Keith had got them on to the slow train to Brighton, the one that took an hour longer.

‘Silver lining, Keithie.’ She put her head on one side, her small features softening into a smile. They’d walked by the lakeside before dinner. Just by stooping down, she’d attracted the birds that were swimming on the water. Afterwards she’d changed into her new fawn dress, bought specially for the holiday.

‘I’ll try that number again tomorrow,’ Keith said.

She could see he was still worried. He was terribly subdued, even though he was able to eat his food. It made him cross when she mentioned the place they’d bought the tickets, so she didn’t do so, although she wanted to. Time enough to face the music when they got back, better to make the best of things really: she didn’t say that either.

‘If you want to, Keithie,’ she said instead. ‘You try it if you’ve a call to.’

Naturally he’d feel it more than she would; he’d get more of the blame, being a man. But in the end it mightn’t be too bad, in the end the storm would be weathered. There’d be the fondue party to talk about, and the visit to the chocolate factory. There’d be the swimming birds, and the teashops, and the railway journey they’d seen advertised, up to the top of an alp.

‘Banana split?’ the waiter offered. ‘You prefer meringue Williams?’

They hesitated. Meringue Williams was meringue with pears and icecream, the waiter explained. Very good. He himself would recommend the meringue Williams.

‘Sounds lovely,’ Dawne said, and Keith had it too. She thought of pointing out that everyone was being nice to them, that Mrs Franks was ever so sympathetic, that the man who came round to ask them if the dinner was all right had been ever so pleasant, and the waiter too. But she decided not to because often Keith just didn’t want to cheer up. ‘Droopy Drawers’, Uncle sometimes called him, or ‘Down-in-the-Dumps Donald’.

All around them the old people were chattering. They were older than Uncle, Dawne could see; some of them were ten years older, fifteen even. She wondered if Keith had noticed that, if it had added to his gloom. She could hear them talking about the mementoes they’d bought and the teashops they’d been to; hale and hearty they looked, still as full of vim as Uncle. ‘Any day now I’ll be dropping off my twig,’ he had a way of saying, which was nonsense of course. Dawne watched the elderly mouths receiving spoonfuls of banana or meringue, the slow chewing, the savouring of the sweetness. A good twenty years Uncle could go on for, she suddenly thought.

‘It’s just bad luck,’ she said.

‘Be that as it may.’

‘Don’t say that, Keithie.’

‘Say what?’

‘Don’t say “Be that as it may”.’

‘Why not?’

‘Oh just because, Keithie.’

They had in common an institution background: they had not known their parents. Dawne could remember Keith when he was eleven and she was nine, although at that time they had not been drawn to one another. They’d met again later, revisiting their children’s home for the annual dance, disco as it was called these days. ‘I got work in this shop,’ she’d said, not mentioning Uncle because he was only her employer then, in the days when his sister was alive. They’d been married for a while before he became an influence in their lives. Now they could anticipate, without thinking, his changes of heart and his whims, and see a mile off another quarrel with the Reverend Simms, whose church occasionally he attended. Once they’d tried to divert such quarrels, to brace themselves for changes of heart, to counter the whims that were troublesome. They no longer did so. Although he listened carefully, he took no notice of what they said because he held the upper hand. The Smith’s will forms and an old billiard-room – ‘the happiest place a man could spend an hour in’ – were what he threatened them with. He met his friends in the billiard-room; he read the Daily Express there, drinking bottles of Double Diamond, which he said was the best bottled beer in the world. It would be a terrible thing if men of all ages could no longer play billiards in that room, terrible if funds weren’t available to keep it going for ever.

Mrs Franks made an announcement. She called for silence, and then gave particulars of the next day’s programme. There was to be a visit to the James Bond mountain, everyone to assemble on the forecourt at half past ten. Anyone who didn’t want to go should please tell her tonight.

‘We don’t have to, Keithie,’ Dawne whispered when Mrs Franks sat down. ‘Not if we don’t want to.’

The chatter began again, spoons excitedly waved in the air. False teeth, grey hair, glasses; Uncle might have been among them except that Uncle never would because he claimed to despise the elderly. ‘You’re telling me, are you? You’re telling me you got yourselves entangled with a bunch of O.A.P’s?’ As clearly as if he were beside her Dawne could hear his voice, enriched with the pretence of amazement. ‘You landed up in the wrong country and spent your holiday with a crowd of geriatrics! You’re never telling me that?’

Sympathetic as she was, Mrs Franks had played it down. She knew that a young couple in their thirties weren’t meant to be on a package with the elderly; she knew the error was not theirs. But it wouldn’t be any use mentioning Mrs Franks to Uncle. It wouldn’t be any use saying that Keith had got cross with the receptionist and with the people in Croydon. He’d listen and then there’d be a silence. After that he’d begin to talk about the billiard-room.

‘Had a great day, did you?’ Mrs Franks said on her way out of the dining-room. ‘All’s well that ends well, eh?’

Keith continued to eat his meringue Williams as if he had not been addressed. Mr Franks remarked on the meringue Williams, laughing about it, saying they’d all have to watch their figures. ‘I must say,’ Mrs Franks said, ‘we’re lucky with the weather. At least it isn’t raining.’ She was dressed in the same flamboyant clothes. She’d been able to buy some Madame Rochas, she said, awfully good value.

‘We don’t have to say about the old people,’ Dawne whispered when the Frankses had passed on. ‘We needn’t mention that.’

Dawne dug into the deep glass for the ice-cream that lay beneath the slices of pear. She knew he was thinking she would let it slip about the old people. Every Saturday she washed Uncle’s hair for him since he found it difficult to do it himself. Because he grumbled so about the tepid rinse that was necessary in case he caught a cold afterwards, she had to jolly him along. She’d always found it difficult to do two things at once, and it was while washing his hair that occasionally she’d forgotten what she was saying. But she was determined not to make that mistake again, just as she had ages ago resolved not to get into a flap if he suddenly asked her a question when she was in the middle of counting the newspapers that hadn’t been sold.

‘Did you find your friends from Windsor then?’ an old woman with a walking frame inquired. ‘Eeh, it were bad you lost your friends.’

Dawne explained, since no harm was meant. Other old people stood by to hear, but a few of them were deaf and asked to have what was being said repeated. Keith continued to eat his meringue Williams.

‘Keithie, it isn’t their fault,’ she tentatively began when the people had passed on. ‘They can’t help it, Keithie.’

‘Be that as it may. No need to go attracting them.’

‘I didn’t attract them. They stopped by. Same as Mrs Franks.’

‘Who’s Mrs Franks?’

‘You know who she is. That big woman. She gave us her name this morning, Keithie.’

‘When I get back I’ll institute proceedings.’

She could tell from his tone that that was what he’d been thinking about. All the time on the steamer they’d taken to Interlaken, all the time in the teashop, and on the cold streets and in the souvenir shops, all the time they’d been looking at the watch displays and the chocolate displays, all the time in the grey-panelled dining-room, he had been planning what he’d say, what he’d probably write on the very next postcard: that he intended to take legal proceedings. When they returned he would stand in the kitchen and state what he intended, very matter of fact. First thing on Monday he’d arrange to see a solicitor, he’d state, an appointment for his lunch hour. And Uncle would remain silent, not even occasionally inclining his head, or shaking it, knowing that solicitors cost money.

‘They’re liable for the full amount. Every penny of it.’

‘Let’s try to enjoy ourselves, Keithie. Why don’t I tell Mrs Franks we’ll go up the mountain?’

‘What mountain’s that?’

‘The one she was on about, the one we sent him a postcard of.’

‘I need to phone up Croydon in the morning.’

‘You can do it before ten-thirty, Keithie.’

The last of the elderly people slowly made their way from the dining-room, saying good-night as they went. A day would come, Dawne thought, when they would go to Venice on their own initiative, with people like the Windsor people. She imagined the Windsor people in the Pensione Concordia, not one of them a day older than themselves. She imagined Signor Bancini passing among them, translating a word or two of Italian as he went. There was laughter in the dining-room of the Pensione Concordia, and bottles of red wine on the tables. The young people’s names were Désirée and Rob, and Luke and Angélique, and Sean and Aimée. ‘Uncle we used to call him,’ her own voice said. ‘He died a while back.’

Keith stood up. Skilful with the tablecloths, the waiter wished them good-night. In the reception area a different receptionist, a girl, smiled at them. Some of the old people were standing around, saying it was too cold to go for a walk. You’d miss the television, one of them remarked.

The warmth of their bodies was a familiar comfort. They had not had children because the rooms above the shop weren’t suitable for children. The crying at night would have driven Uncle mad, and naturally you could see his point of view. There’d been an error when first they’d lived with him; they’d had to spend a bit terminating it.

They refrained from saying that their bodies were a comfort. They had never said so. What they said in their lives had to do with Keith’s hoping for promotion, and the clothes Dawne coveted. What they said had to do with their efforts to make a little extra money, or paying their way by washing the woodwork of an old man’s house and tacking down his threadbare carpets.

When he heard their news he would mention the savings in the Halifax Building Society and the goodwill of the shop and the valuation that had been carried out four years ago. He would mention again that men of all ages should have somewhere to go of an evening, or in the afternoons or the morning, a place to be at peace. He would remind them that a man who had benefited could not pass on without making provision for the rent and the heating and for the replacing of the billiard tables when the moment came. ‘Memorial to a humble man’, he would repeat. ‘Shopkeeper of this neighbourhood’.

In the darkness they did not say to one another that if he hadn’t insisted they needed a touch of the autumn sun they wouldn’t again have been exposed to humiliation. It was as though, through knowing them, he had arranged their failure in order to indulge his scorn. Creatures of a shabby institution, his eyes had so often said, they could not manage on their own: they were not even capable of supplying one another’s needs.

In the darkness they did not say that their greed for his money was much the same as his greed for their obedience, that greed nourished the trinity they had become. They did not say that the money, and the freedom it promised, was the galaxy in their lives, as his cruelty was the last pleasure in his. Scarcely aware that they held on to one another beneath the bedclothes, they heard his teasing little laugh while they were still awake, and again when they slept.

The Third Party

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

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

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

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

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

‘A Jameson and a lemonade,’ Boland ordered.

‘Sure,’ the barman said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’m sorry about that.’

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

‘I’m sorry –’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I doubt I have an option.’

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

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

‘No, it isn’t me.’

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

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

‘In mind?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘No.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘It’s only a thought, Fergus.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I thought Jewish when she told me.’

‘Oh, undoubtedly a hint of that.’

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

‘I’m sure. I appreciate that.’

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

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

‘Annabella and I –’

‘I know, I know.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You were a day boy.’

‘I suppose it made a difference.’

‘Of course it did.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Your children?’

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

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

‘No, I’m OK, thanks.’

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

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

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

‘Ah, for heaven’s sake, man!’

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

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

‘You would of course.’

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

‘I was sorry myself.’

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

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

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

‘The done thing?’

‘If you find it distasteful –’

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

‘You’re being great, Fergus.’

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

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

‘Where was that, Fergus?’

‘At school.’

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

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

‘I never knew that person at all.’

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

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

‘I’m sorry I don’t remember you.’

‘I wouldn’t expect you to.’

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

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

‘Not at all.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Dead Smith?’ Lairdman said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Ah, go on!’

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

‘Well, doesn’t that beat the band!’

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

‘Sure, anyone would be.’

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

‘You don’t remember it?’ he prompted.

‘What’s that?’

‘The lavatory thing.’

‘Look here, Boland –’

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

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

‘We’ll talk of something else.’

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

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

‘Thanks for everything,’ he said.

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

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

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

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

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

‘I don’t follow what you’re saying.’

‘She can’t have children, Lairdman.’

‘Ah now, look here –’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Now look here, Boland –’

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

‘You’re being despicable, Boland.’

‘I’m telling you the truth.’

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

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

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

‘I think Dead Smith became a vet.’

‘I don’t care what he became.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes, I did.’

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

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

‘Thanks very much.’

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

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

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