The Collected Stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’ve known better certainly.’

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

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

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

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

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

Honeymoon in Tramore

They stayed in a boarding-house, St Agnes’s, run by a Mrs Hurley. ‘You have it written all over you!’ this woman said when she opened the door to them. She eyed a speck of confetti on the lapel of his navy-blue suit and then glanced briefly at the rounding of Kitty’s stomach. It was the summer of 1948, a warm afternoon in July.

Mrs Hurley was a middle-aged landlady in a brown coat, who apologized for the Wellington boots she was wearing: she’d been brushing down the yard. Her fingernails were enamelled a vivid shade of pink, her hair was contained by a tidy blue hairnet which partially disguised an arrangement of pins and curling papers. They would be very happy in St Agnes’s, she said; they’d have the place to themselves because there was no one else stopping in the house at the moment. When they were carrying their two suitcases upstairs she said that marriage was a God-given institution and added that her husband went to Mass every morning of his life, on his way to work with the county council. ‘Your tea’ll be on the table at six on the dot,’ she said.

On their own, they embraced. He put his hand under his wife’s skirt and felt for the warm flesh at the top of her stockings. ‘Jesus, you’re terrible,’ she murmured thickly at him, as she had on the bus when he’d pressed himself close against her. She was sweating because of her condition and the July heat. Her face was sticky with perspiration, and small patches of it had developed on her dress, beneath each armpit. ‘Jesus,’ she whispered again. ‘Oh Jesus, go easy now.’

He didn’t want to go easy. They were free of the farm, and of her father and her aunt and her Uncle Ned Cauley. He had a right to his desires.

‘That woman’ll be listening,’ she whispered in the same slurred voice, but it didn’t matter if the woman was listening. It didn’t even matter if the woman opened the door and walked in. The bed made creaking sounds when she wriggled away from him, saying again that he was terrible, giggling as she said it. The bedroom smelt of flies, as if the windows hadn’t been opened for a long time. ‘God, you’re great, Kitty,’ he said, his own voice thickening also.

He was thirty-three, Kitty two years older. At fifteen he had been taken from the orphans’ home in Cork by Kitty’s father and her Uncle Ned Cauley. The two men had let it be known that they could do with a young fellow on the farm, and Father Doran, who was their parish priest at that time, had made inquiries of Father Lyhane at the orphans’ home on their behalf. ‘Davy Toome’s a good lad,’ Father Lyhane had said, and a few weeks later, after the recommendation had been passed on to the farmers and after Father Doran had been assured that the candidate would be strong enough for farm-work, a label with that name on it had been attached to the boy and he’d been forwarded by train. ‘And did you never do farm-work before?’ Kitty’s Uncle Ned Cauley had asked, sitting beside him in the cart as they slowly progressed on the road from the railway junction. But Davy had never even seen fields with corn in them before, let alone taken part in farm-work. ‘I’m thinking,’ said Kitty’s uncle, who’d spent an hour in Doolin’s public house at the railway junction, ‘that it could be we bought a pig in a poke.’ He said it again in the kitchen when they arrived, while his wife and his brother-in-law were examining Davy, silently agreeing that he was not as strong as the priest had claimed. ‘Will you for God’s sake take off that label!’ the woman said to him, and then, in a gentler voice, asked him about his name. She’d never heard of Toome before, she said, so he told them that his name had been given to him when the orphans’ home had taken him in as an infant, that there’d been a priest connected with it then who’d had an interest in naming the orphans. His first name was in memory of St David. Toome meant a burial mound. ‘Is he right in the head?’ he afterwards heard Kitty’s father asking his brother-in-law and her uncle replying that you wouldn’t know, the way he was talking about burial mounds.

‘Will you come on now, for heaven’s sake!’ Kitty rebuked him in the bedroom at St Agnes’s. ‘And let me take off my hat.’

She pushed him away from her and told him to open the window. It was she who had chosen Tramore for the weekend of their honeymoon, saying she’d heard it was lovely, with a sandy little beach. Kitty knew what she wanted, her aunt used to say, and you couldn’t budge her when she made up her mind. ‘Would you accompany me to Cork?’ she had suggested one day four months ago. ‘I’m a stranger to the city, Davy.’ He hadn’t been back to Cork since he’d come to the farm, and he didn’t really know his way around it; but it turned out that Kitty had never been there at all. ‘We’ll fix it to go on a Saturday,’ she said, and on the bus he felt proud to be sitting there with her, a big handsome girl, the daughter of his employer: he hoped that on the streets they’d maybe meet someone from the orphans’ home. She’d looked out the window most of the time, not saying very much to him, her round face pink with excitement. She was good-looking in a way he admired, better-looking than any of the other girls at Mass, or the tinker girls whom he’d caught once stealing turnips from the field, who’d shouted over a hedge at him that their sister would marry him. Her hair was very fine and very black, like a dark mist encircling her face. He’d heard her aunt calling her sullen, but he’d never noticed that himself, even though sometimes a blankness came into her face and stayed there till she roused herself. Her three brothers had all been born with something wrong with them and had died in childhood, before he had come to the farm. Nobody mentioned them; he hadn’t even known about her brothers until one of the men who came to help with the harvest referred to them in passing. Her mother had died giving birth to the last of them.

‘Are you OK, pet?’ Kitty said, putting lipstick on at the dressing-table. ‘Isn’t it great we’re on our own?’

He leaned against the window-frame, looking at her, seeing her in the looking-glass as well. She had to go to see a Mr Minogue, she’d said eventually on the bus, a chemist in McHenry Street.

‘Great,’ he said from the window.

‘Can you hear the sea there?’

He shook his head. They’d found the chemist’s shop, having had to ask for directions to McHenry Street. If her mother was alive she’d have accompanied her, she said all of a sudden, and then she said she couldn’t go into the chemist’s shop alone. Her voice became different. Her legs wouldn’t have taken her, she said, and then she told him she was in trouble. Her aunt had found out about the chemist, she said, only she’d refused to accompany her. ‘Take Toome to show you the way,’ her aunt had said.

‘Will we go down, pet?’

He moved to where she stood by the dressing-table but when he put his arms around her she said sharply that she didn’t want to get messed up again. She’d spilt powder on the glass top of the dressing-table, the same peach shade that was on her cheeks. She’d put on perfume he could smell, a strong sweet smell that made him want to try again to put his arms around her. But already she had crossed the room to the door. She opened it and he followed her downstairs.

‘I’ve done you black puddings,’ Mrs Hurley said in the dining-room, placing before them plates of fried sausages and fried eggs and slices of the delicacy she spoke of.

‘God, I love black pudding,’ Kitty said, and he passed her his because as a boy in the orphans’ home he had developed a revulsion for this dark composition of pig’s blood and entrails. The table they sat at was empty of other guests, as Mrs Hurley had promised. He smiled at his bride across it. On the way downstairs she had kept repeating that this would be their first meal as husband and wife. She attached importance to the fact. She’d said it again as they sat down. Through the wooden hatch that opened into the kitchen the voice of Mrs Hurley could be heard raised in abuse, speaking about a greyhound.

‘Are you hungry, pet?’

He wasn’t; he shook his head.

‘D’you know what it is,’ Kitty said, cutting into a soda farl, ‘I could eat the head off of a horse.’

A low mumble of protest had begun in the kitchen, which he guessed must emanate from Mrs Hurley’s husband. ‘Errah, have a pick of sense, will you?’ the landlady stridently interrupted. ‘Would any animal in its sane mind keep getting into a cement mixer?’

Kitty giggled. She’d nearly died, she said, when Mrs Kilfedder gave her a kiss at the wedding. ‘One thing about Kilfedder,’ she added, ‘he keeps his hands to himself.’

At that moment a man in shirtsleeves entered the dining-room. He greeted them and introduced himself as Mr Hurley. He inquired if they’d like another pot of tea, already seizing the metal teapot and moving towards the hatch with it. They’d find St Agnes’s restful, he said, no children for miles around. The hatch opened and Mrs Hurley’s freshly rouged face appeared. She had removed her hairnet, and the hair it had controlled, now seen to be a shade of henna, fluffed elaborately about her head. ‘Have they butter enough?’ she demanded of her husband, in the same uncompromising tone she had employed when protesting about the activities of the greyhound. ‘It’s good country butter,’ she shouted at her guests. ‘Fresh as a daisy.’

‘We have plenty,’ Kitty replied. ‘It’s good butter all right, Mrs Hurley.’

The teapot was handed back through the hatch and placed on the table. ‘There’s a big attraction in Tramore tonight,’ Mr Hurley said. ‘Have you ever heard tell of the Carmodys?’

When they said they hadn’t he told them that the Carmodys ran a Wall of Death that was reputed to be great entertainment. She had never seen a Wall of Death yet, Kitty said when he’d gone. ‘D’you like the sausages, pet?’

He nodded, holding his cup out for tea. Under the table the calves of their legs were pressed together.

‘Coddy Donnegan wanted to take me once, only I said I couldn’t watch it.’

‘Maybe we wouldn’t bother in that case.’

‘I’d watch anything with yourself, Davy. Maybe we’d walk down by the sea as well.’

He nodded again and she leaned forward to say she was feeling fine, a reference to the fact that she had recently been subject to bouts of sickness in her stomach. They’d have a few drinks after the Wall of Death and the walk, she suggested, in case it wouldn’t look good, coming back to the bedroom too soon. She winked and nudged him with her knee. Under the table he put his hand on her lightly stockinged leg. ‘Oh Jesus, lay off now,’ she whispered.

It wasn’t Coddy Donnegan, she’d told him in McHenry Street, standing outside the chemist’s shop. She’d never been in love with Coddy Donnegan. She’d never been in love until the other thing happened, until there was a man taking her hand in a way Coddy Donnegan wouldn’t do in a million years – a cousin of Father Tolan’s, who was destined himself for the priesthood. He’d been about in the parish for the summer holidays; she’d have put down her life for him, she said. ‘He’d marry me if he knew, Davy. He’d give up the priesthood, only I’d never tell him.’

They finished the meal Mrs Hurley had prepared for them. ‘I’ll just go upstairs a minute,’ she said. ‘I won’t be a tick, pet.’

Waiting in the hall, Davy examined the pictures on the walls. A light burned beneath the Virgin and Child; there were reproductions of Victorian paintings, one of a match-seller, another of a shawled woman with a basket of lavender. He turned away from them, and the face of the chemist crept into his recollection: the jaw dark, the chin pimpled beneath a raw shave, eyes magnified behind heavily lensed spectacles, cheeks as pale as the white coat he wore. ‘Come in,’ Mr Minogue had welcomed them that day, knowing what they wanted although nothing had been said yet. It was the afternoon when his shop was closed, and he led them through the stillness of it into a room at the back, where there were no chairs to sit on, only a table with a rubber sheet on it. ‘I take a grave risk,’ Mr Minogue announced without preamble, his unsmiling countenance reflecting eloquently the gravity he spoke of. ‘The assistance I offer you in your distress is offered for humanitarian reasons only. But the risk must be covered, you understand that? It is not of my own volition that I charge a fee.’ While he spoke he did not remove his bulbously magnified eyes from their faces, revolving his stare in a circle around each, sliding it from one to the other. ‘You may know the fee?’ he said, and when Kitty placed the money before him his grey, closely barbered head bowed over the notes he counted. ‘Yes, this is correct,’ he said, speaking directly to Davy, clearly assuming him to be the father of the unwanted child and the source of the fee. He placed the notes in a wallet he’d taken out of the back pocket of his trousers, and jerked his head at Davy, indicating that he should return to the shop and wait there. But before Davy could do so both he and the abortionist were taken by surprise because without any warning whatsoever Kitty cried out that she couldn’t do it. She would burn in hell for it, she shrieked in sudden, shrill, unexpected emotion; she could never confess it, there was no penance she could be given. ‘I’d rather die as I stand, sir,’ she said to Mr Minogue, and gave way to tears. They flooded on her flushed, round cheeks; the humane abortionist stood arrested, one hand still in the back pocket of his trousers. ‘Hail Mary, Mother of God!’ Kitty cried, shrill again. ‘Sweet Mother, don’t abandon me!’ The money was handed back, no further word was spoken. Mr Minogue removed his white coat and led the way to the door of his shop, glancing before he opened it around the edge of an advertisement for liver salts pasted to its glass. The street was empty. As there had been no salutation, so there was no farewell.

‘Are we right so?’ Kitty said, descending the stairs.

He opened the hall door and they stepped out into the evening. It was warm and quiet on the terraced cul-de-sac, in which St Agnes’s was the last house. They still couldn’t hear the sea and Kitty said the waves wouldn’t be big in that case. ‘I’m sorry,’ she’d said outside the chemist’s shop, still sobbing, and then they’d walked for ages through the streets, before having a cup of tea in a café. She was calm by that time; it had never for a second occurred to her that she couldn’t do it, she said, but the sin when she’d handed Mr Minogue the money had been like something alive in the room with them. ‘I swear to God, Davy.’ He’d said he understood, but in fact he didn’t. He was confused because there was so much to take in – her being in trouble, the purpose of their journey being revealed, and then the episode with Mr Minogue. He was the man on the farm, the labourer who worked in the yard and the fields: it had been strange enough being asked to go to Cork with her. In the café, after she’d drunk two cups of tea, she said she was better. She ate a bun with currants in it, but he couldn’t eat anything himself. Then he brought her to the orphans’ home just to look at the outside of. ‘God, Davy, what am I going to do?’ she suddenly cried when they were standing there, as suddenly as she’d said in the back room of the chemist’s that she couldn’t go through with it.

‘It’s down at the strand,’ a man told them when they asked about the Wall of Death. He pointed out the way, and soon they heard the music that accompanied it and the roar of the motor-cycle’s engine. ‘… to see again the moonlight over Clara’, moaned a tenor voice, robbed of its mellifluous quality by the scratching of a gramophone needle. ‘… and to see the sun going down on Galway Bay’. They paid the admission charge and climbed up rickety stairs, like a ladder, that led to the top of the circular wooden wall. A platform ran around the circumference, with a balustrade to prevent the jostling audience from falling into the pit below. ‘God, it’s great,’ Kitty shouted above the noise, and Davy gave her arm a squeeze. A small, wizened man in red gaiters and black leather clothes, with a spotted red neckerchief, mounted the quivering motor-cycle that stood on its pedestal in the centre of the pit. He pushed it forward and ran it on to the incline at the bottom of the wall, gradually easing it on to the wall itself. Each circle he made increased the angle of his machine until in the end, close to the balustrade over which the audience leaned, he and his motor-cycle were horizontal. The timbers of the wall and of the platform shuddered, the roar of the engine was deafening. Waving above his head, the performer descended, the same circular motion in reverse. The audience clapped and threw coins into the pit. ‘Are you OK?’ Davy shouted, for in the excitement Kitty had closed her eyes. In the pit the motor-cycle was returned to its stand. The man bowed his gratitude for the money that still lay on the ground, and then threw out an arm in a sudden, dramatic gesture. He was joined immediately by a woman, dressed in red-and-black clothing also, who climbed on to the pillion of his motor-cycle and when it reached the centre of the wall clambered on to his back. She stood on his shoulders, with his spotted neckerchief streaming from between her teeth. Kitty screamed and closed her eyes again. More coins were thrown.

‘Is she his wife, Davy?’ Kitty asked as they walked away.

‘I’d say she was.’

‘Wouldn’t it be shocking if she came off?’

‘I’d say she wouldn’t.’

‘God, I love the smell of the sea, Davy.’

If she hadn’t been wearing stockings she’d have paddled, she said, and he told her about a time they’d been taken from the orphans’ home to the seaside at Courtmacsherry. He continued to tell her about this while they walked back to the town and went in search of a public house. They found one that was as quiet as St Agnes’s, a murky place that Kitty said was cosy. Two elderly men sat at the counter, steadily drinking, not conversing. The publican was shifting sacks of meal in the grocery that adjoined the bar. Davy called out to him, ordering bottles of stout.

‘Was it terrible in the orphans’ home?’ Kitty asked when he’d carried them to the table she was sitting at. ‘Did you hate it the whole time?’

He said he hadn’t. It hadn’t been bad; he’d never known anywhere else until he came to the farm. ‘Jeez, it looks like a prison,’ she’d said that day, looking up at the orphans’ home from the street.

‘It’s terrible, though, no family to turn to,’ she said now. ‘I have the half of it myself, with no mother.’

‘You get used to the way it is.’

A week after their visit to Cork her aunt said to him in the yard that Kitty would marry him if he asked her. Her aunt stood there in the early - morning sunlight, a heavily made woman who was always dressed in black. She more than anyone, more than her husband or her brother or Kitty herself, knew that ever since he’d arrived at the farm with a label on him he’d had a notion of Kitty. The aunt was the sharpest of them, her eyes as black as her clothes, always watchful. She had noticed him looking at Kitty across the table when they all sat down to their dinner; he’d never been able to help looking at her, and it embarrassed him every time her aunt caught him. Did she guess that he lay in bed at night imagining Kitty’s lips on his own, and the lovely white softness of her? They would have the farm between them was what she omitted to say in the yard because it was not necessary to say it: Kitty would inherit the farm since there was no one else, and if he married her he would no longer be the hired man, with the worst of the work always reserved for him. ‘I’ll ask her so,’ he said, and because of the day there had been in Cork it was easier to pluck up the courage. Before that, Kitty had always ordered him about in the way her father and her uncle did when they all worked together at certain seasons, making hay or lifting the potatoes. He had never disliked her for it, any more than he’d ever felt he had a right to resent Coddy Donnegan’s rusty old Vauxhall arriving in the yard and Coddy Donnegan waiting in it, and the way he’d push open a door of the car when he heard the sound of her heels tip-tapping across the concrete. Father Tolan’s cousin had never come near the farm; all that was a mystery.

‘Would there be anything to eat in here, pet? Would they have biscuits?’

At the bar he ordered two more bottles of stout and inquired if biscuits could be supplied. The publican said he had ginger-snaps and went to the grocery to weigh out half a pound.

‘Oh, great,’ Kitty said. She crumbled one in her mouth. He poured out the stout. The day before her aunt had made her suggestion in the yard he had noticed Kitty going up to Coddy Donnegan after Mass, and Coddy Donnegan had turned away from her as if they’d had a quarrel, which was understandable in view of her friendship with Father Tolan’s cousin. After that, Coddy Donnegan’s Vauxhall never again drove up to the farm.

‘We’ll never forget our honeymoon,’ Kitty said. ‘I wish we had a camera. I’d love to take snaps of Tramore.’

He knew what she meant. For the rest of their lives they’d be at the farm, milking every morning and evening, taking the churns down to the creamery, ploughing and sowing and ditching. No matter how you fixed it there was never enough time, except for the couple of hours you took to go to Mass. He always rode to Mass on his bicycle, and on Sunday afternoons he rode over to Doolin’s at the old railway junction, where no trains came any more. A new road passed by Doolin’s now and on Sunday afternoons there would always be bicycles propped up against its window, and the same dozen or so faces inside. ‘I hear you’re marrying in,’ one of the men said to him on the Sunday after Kitty agreed. ‘More power to your elbow, Davy!’ No one was displeased at his good fortune, in Doolin’s or anywhere else. Father Tolan came up to the farm specially and walked down to the mangold field to shake his hand and to congratulate him. Even Ned Cauley, who rarely had a good word to say on any subject, wagged his head at him in an approving way.

‘I love the taste of ginger-snaps and stout,’ Kitty said. ‘Did you know ginger-snaps were my favourite?’

‘They’re all the man had.’

Suddenly she asked him if he was happy. She repeated the question, putting it differently, asking him if he was contented in himself. He said he was.

‘Will you ever forget the day we went to Cork, Davy?’

From her voice, he thought she was maybe getting drunk, that her condition made the stout go to her head. She was looking at him, giggling. She leaned closer to him and said that on the bus that day she’d thought to herself she wouldn’t mind being married to him.

‘You were good to me that day, Davy, d’you know that?’

‘I always had a notion of you, Kitty.’

‘I never noticed it till that day, pet. That was the first time I knew it.’

He went to the bar for two further bottles of stout. He had wondered if the men in Doolin’s knew the state she was in, and if they imagined he was the man involved. The same applied where her father and her uncle were concerned, and Father Tolan. He didn’t know if there’d been talk or not.

‘Didn’t it work out OK, in the end?’ she said when he returned with the stout. She asked if there were any more biscuits and he went back to buy another quarter pound. When he returned to where they sat she said:

‘Were you ever jealous of Coddy, pet?’

He nodded, pouring his stout from the bottle, and she laughed because she’d made him feel awkward. He looked away, wishing she hadn’t brought up Coddy Donnegan. Then he turned and clumsily attempted to kiss her on the lips, but found them gritty with biscuit crumbs.

‘Oh, Coddy’s the right romantic! It was maybe ten or eleven times he said would we get married.’

He frowned, feeling that something wasn’t quite right, yet for the moment uncertain as to what it was.

‘Did I tell you poor Coddy cried?’ she said. ‘The day I told him I was marrying yourself?’

After that the conversation became confused. Kitty again mentioned her surprise when Mrs Kilfedder had embraced her at the wedding. She counted up the wedding guests, and said it must have been the biggest wedding for a long time. Her father had had to sell two bullocks to pay for it. ‘Did you see the cut of old Feehy, without a collar or tie?’ She went through all the guests then, commenting or their dress and wondering why other women hadn’t embraced her. ‘Will we take back a few bottles?’ she suggested, nudging him and winking. ‘Hey!’ she called out to the publican. ‘Put a dozen stout in a bag for us, Mister.’

When Davy had paid for them they left the public house, Kitty talking about a girl called Rose she’d been at the national school with, wondering where she was now. She hung on to his arm; he listened vaguely. Turning into the cul-de-sac, they met Mr Hurley exercising a greyhound, a dejected animal which in the course of conversation Mr Hurley said was worth a fortune. ‘Is it the one that gets into the cement mixer?’ Kitty asked, and Mr Hurley explained that the greyhound only got into the cement mixer the odd time.

Kitty laughed shrilly. The trouble with a habit like that, she pointed out, was that the creature might get turned into concrete. ‘Will you take a stout, Mr Hurley? We brought home a few bottles.’

Mr Hurley instantly fell into step with them and when they arrived at the house he led them round to the back, incarcerating the greyhound in a shed on the way. ‘Sit down on a chair,’ he said in the kitchen and his wife produced glasses, saying it was unusual to have guests bringing drink back to St Agnes’s, but where was the harm in it? ‘Good luck!’ said Mr Hurley.

Details of the Wall of Death were given, and details of the wedding. The unexpected embrace of Mrs Kilfedder was retailed, and reference made to Kitty’s father singing ‘Lily of Laguna’ and to old Feehy without his collar or tie. ‘Poor Coddy Donnegan hadn’t the heart to attend,’ Kitty said. ‘He’s a fellow from the slaughterhouse, Mrs Hurley. I went out with poor Coddy for three years.’

‘They take it hard,’ agreed Mrs Hurley.

‘He cried, poor Coddy.’

‘I had a similar case myself. A fellow by the name of O’Gorman.’

‘A chancer,’ said Mr Hurley beneath his breath. ‘A real oiler.’

‘O’Gorman could have charmed the leaves off the trees. I heard him called the handsomest man in Tramore.’

‘The story is told,’ Mr Hurley said in the same low voice, ‘that he fecked a crucifix off a nun.’

‘ “Well, I’ll never marry now,” was what poor Coddy came out with when I told him. “I’ll keep myself by for you, Kitty.” ’

‘Where’d the point be in that, though?’ Mrs Hurley interposed. ‘Is poor Coddy a bit slow?’

‘It’s only his way of putting the thing, Mrs Hurley.’

The dozen bottles took an hour to drink, during which time Mr Hurley gave Davy a number of racing tips. He talked about famous greyhounds he had known or had even had a hand in the breeding of, but Davy was more interested in what the two women were discussing and was unable to prevent himself from listening. He heard Kitty saying the husband she’d married would do anything for you. He watched her leaning closer to Mrs Hurley and heard her referring to the cousin of Father Tolan. ‘Errah, go on, are you serious?’ Mrs Hurley exclaimed, glancing across at him, and he guessed at once what she’d been told – that the lapse of the priest’s cousin had determined him in his vocation, that God had gained in the end.

‘Held back all summer,’ Mr Hurley continued. ‘Put every penny in your pocket on him.’

Davy promised he would, although he had never in his life backed a horse and hadn’t heard what the one Mr Hurley recommended was called. Kitty stood up and was swaying back and forth, her eyes blearily staring. ‘I don’t know should I have eaten the ginger-snaps,’ she muttered uneasily, but Mrs Hurley said a ginger-snap never did anyone any harm. Mr Hurley was talking about another horse, and Davy kept nodding.

‘You’re a good man,’ the landlady whispered as he went by her. He had one arm around Kitty, holding her up. He shook his head, silently disclaiming the goodness Mrs Hurley imbued him with.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked Kitty on the stairs, and she didn’t reply until they were in the bedroom, when she said she wasn’t. He lifted the china jug out of the basin on the wash-stand and after she had finished being sick he carried the basin across the landing to the lavatory.

‘God, I’m sorry, pet,’ she managed to say before she fell asleep, lying across the bed.

Even though she couldn’t hear him, he said it didn’t matter. It had never occurred to him before that a cousin of Father Tolan’s who came to the parish for his holidays must have attended Mass on Sundays, yet he had never seen him there. Nor had he ever heard anyone else but Kitty mention him. She had painted a picture of a saintly young man who had since become a priest, and in her befuddled state she’d wanted Mrs Hurley to know about him too. She had wanted Mrs Hurley to know that it wasn’t anything crude that had occurred, like going with Coddy Donnegan in the back of a bloodstained Vauxhall.

‘It’s all right, Kitty.’ He spoke aloud, sitting beside her on the bed, looking down into her face. In the bedroom there was the rancid smell of her vomit; her breath as he pulled the dress over her head was cloyed with it. Again he looked down into her face, understanding why she had told the lies. When she’d approached Coddy Donnegan after Mass that day he’d probably retorted that she’d let herself get into that condition in order to catch him.

Davy stood up and slowly took his clothes off. He was lucky that she had gone with Coddy Donnegan because if she hadn’t she wouldn’t now be sleeping on their honeymoon bed. Once more he looked down into her face: for eighteen years she had seemed like a queen to him and now, miraculously, he had the right to kiss her. He straightened her slackened body, moving her arms and legs until she was lying comfortably. Slowly he pulled the bed-clothes up and turned the light out; then he lay beside her and caressed her in the darkness. He had come to the farm with a label round his neck; he had come out of nowhere, from rooms and corridors that were as bleakly anonymous as the orphan home’s foundling inmates. He had been known as her father’s hired man, but now he would be known as her husband. That was how people would refer to him, and in the end it wouldn’t matter when she talked about Coddy Donnegan, or lowered her voice to mention the priest’s cousin. It was natural that she should do so since she had gained less than he had from their marriage.

The Printmaker

In the large room Charlotte hangs her prints to dry, like clothes on clothes lines. Three crows, framed by the legs and belly of a cow, have rested for an instant beneath its udder: all over the room this stark image is multiplied, in black and white and tones of green.

The reality was years ago, in France: Charlotte senses that confidently, without being able to recall the moment of observation. Familiar to her is the feeling that a glance from the window, or from a motor-car, has been retained for half a lifetime. ‘This is still the Langevins’ land,’ Monsieur Langevin said in English, the first time he drove her in his white Citroën the fifteen kilometres from Massuery to St Cérase. Obediently she inspected the fields to her right, treeless and uninteresting, cattle grazing. Perhaps there were three crows also.

In the room the suspended sheets are scrutinized, and one in every seven or eight rejected. Fragile, tapering fingers loosen the tiny, variously coloured pegs that hold the prints in place; each inferior reproduction floats softly to the bare-wood floor. Intent upon her task, Charlotte moves silently in the room, seeming almost a ghost among the ubiquitous repetition of what she has created. At thirty-nine she is as slender as ever, her bones as apparent as her flesh. Bright azure eyes illuminate a face that is still a girl’s. Shattered only twice in Charlotte’s appearance is the illusion that time has been defeated; grey strands creep through hair that once was as pale as corn, and on the backs of her hands are the reminders that sun and weather do not pass gently by.

One by one, she picks up the rejected prints where they have dropped. She tears each in half and bundles it into the wooden box that is the room’s repository for wastepaper. Then she examines one of the. suspended sheets, holding it obliquely against the light to see if it has wholly dried. Satisfied that this is so, she releases the pegs and trims the paper in her guillotine. She signs it and writes in pencil 1/50, then places it in a pale green portfolio. She repeats all this with each remaining print, then loosely ties the folder’s tattered ribbons.

‘To look at, there is l’église St Cérase,’ Monsieur Langevin said, that first Wednesday afternoon. He stopped the car in the Place de la Paix and pointed out the way. There was nothing much else in the town, he warned. A park beside the Maison de la Presse, tea-rooms and cafés, the Hostellerie de la Poste. But the church was quite impressive. ‘Well, anyway, the façade,’ Monsieur Langevin added.

Charlotte walked to it, admired the façade and went inside. There was a smell of candle grease and perhaps of incense: it was difficult precisely to identify the latter. Charlotte was seventeen then, her presence in the Langevin household arranged by her father, who set great store by what he referred to as ‘perfect French’. Some acquaintance of his had a connection with a cousin of Madame Langevin; an arrangement had been made. ‘I’ve been good about your drawing,’ her father had earlier claimed, in the parental manner of that time. ‘I’m only asking in return that you acquire the usefulness of perfect French.’ Her father did not believe in her talent for drawing; a businessman himself, he anticipated for his only child a niche in some international commercial firm, where the French she had perfected would float her to desirable heights. Charlotte’s father had her interests – as he divined them – at heart. A prosperous marriage would come latter. He was a conventional man.

In the church of St Cérase she walked by confessionals and the Stations of the Cross, taking no interest at seventeen, only wishing her father hadn’t been insistent on sending her to Massuery. She had every Wednesday afternoon to herself, when Madame Langevin took her children riding. She had Sunday afternoons as well, and every evening when the children had gone to bed. But what on earth could she do on Sunday afternoons except go for a walk in the woods? And in the evenings the family seemed surprised if she did not sit with them. There were in all five children, the youngest still an infant. The twins were naughty and, though only six, knew how to tease. Colette sulked. Guy, a dark-haired boy of ten, was Charlotte’s favourite.

This family’s details were recorded in an unfinished letter in Charlotte’s handbag: the sulking, the teasing, Guy’s charm, the baby’s podginess. Her mother would read between the lines, winkling out an unhappiness that had not been stated; her father would skip a lot. Madame Langevin’s sister is here on a visit. She is tall and languid, an incessant smoker, very painted up, beautifully dressed. Madame Langevin’s quite different, smartly dressed too, and just as good-looking in her way, only nicer in the sense that she wants people to he all right. She smiles a lot and worries. Monsieur Langevin does not say much.

Outside a café in the square she completed the letter, pausing often to make the task last. It was July and necessary to sit in the shade. There hasn’t been a cloud in the sky since I arrived. She drank tea with lemon and when she’d sealed the envelope and written the address she watched the people going by. But there were few of them because of the heat of the afternoon – a woman in a blue dress, with sunglasses and a poodle, a child on a bicycle, a man delivering shoe-boxes from a van. Charlotte bought a stamp in a tabac and found the park by the Maison de la Presse. The seats were dusty, and whitened with bird droppings; sunlight didn’t penetrate the foliage of the trees, but at least the place was cool and empty. She read the book she’d brought, The Beautiful and Damned.

Twenty-two years later Charlotte sees herself sitting there, and can even recall the illustration on the cover of the novel – a girl with a cigarette, a man in evening dress. Madame Langevin’s conscientious about speaking French to me, a line in her letter reported. Monsieur practises his English. Charlotte was timid then, and innocent of almost all emotion. In her childhood she’d been aware of jealousy, and there’d always been the affection she felt for her father and her mother; but she had no greater experience of the vagaries of her heart, or even of its nature, and only loneliness concerned her at first at Massuery.

In the room set aside for her work Charlotte slips a green Loden overcoat from a coat-hanger and searches for her gloves, the park at St Cérase still vividly recurring. She might have wept that afternoon, protected by the human absence around her; she rather thought she had. After an hour she had gone to the museum, only to find it shut. Beneath a flamboyant female figure representing Eternal Peace she had waited in the Place de la Paix for the bus that would take her back to the gates of Massuery.

‘Describe to me England,’ Madame Langevin’s sister requested that evening, practising her English also. ‘Describe to me the house of your father. The food of England is not agreeable, n’est-ce pas?’

Replying, Charlotte spoke in French, but the tall, beautifully dressed woman stopped her. She wanted to hear the sound of English, it made a change. She yawned. The country was tedious, but so was Paris in July.

So Charlotte described the house where she lived, and her mother and her father. She explained how toast was made because Madame Langevin’s sister particularly wanted to know that, and also how English butchers hung their beef. She wasn’t sure herself about the beef and she didn’t know the names of the various joints, but she did her best. Madame Langevin’s sister lay listening on a sofa, her cigarette in a black holder, her green silk dress clinging to her legs.

‘I have heard of Jackson’s tea,’ she said.

Charlotte had not. She said her parents did not have servants. She did not know much about the Royal Family, she confessed.

‘Pimm’s Number One,’ Madame Langevin’s sister prompted. ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?’

The Massuery estate was extensive. Beyond the gardens there were fields where sheep grazed, and beyond the fields there were plantations of young trees, no more than a foot high. On the slopes beyond them, firs grew in great profusion, and sometimes the chain-saws whirred all day long, an ugly sing-song that grated on Charlotte’s nerves.

In front of the house, early every morning, gardeners raked the gravel. An old man and a boy, with rakes wider than Charlotte had ever seen before, worked for an hour, destroying every suspicion of a weed, smoothing away the marks of yesterday’s wheels. The same boy brought vegetables to the house an hour or so before lunch, and again in the evening.

Marble nymphs flanked the front door at Massuery. A decorated balustrade accompanied the steps that rose to the left and right before continuing grandly on, as a single flight. The stone of the house was greyish-brown, the slatted shutters of its windows green. Everything at Massuery was well kept up, both inside and out. The silver, the furniture, the chandeliers, the tapestries of hunting scenes, the chessboard marble of the huge entrance hall, were all as lovingly attended to as the gravel. The long, slender stair-rods and the matching brass of the banister were regularly polished, the piano in the larger of the two salons kept tuned, the enamel of the dining-room peacocks never allowed to lose its brilliance. Yet in spite of all its grandeur, Massuery possessed only one telephone. This was in a small room on the ground floor, specially set aside for it. A striped wallpaper in red and blue covered the walls, matching the colours of an ornate ceiling. A blue-shaded light illuminated the telephone table and the chair in front of it. There were writing materials and paper for noting messages on. Madame Langevin’s sister, with the door wide open, sat for hours in the telephone room, speaking to people in Paris or to those who, like herself, had left the city for the summer months.

‘Mon Dieu!’ Monsieur Langevin would sometimes murmur, passing the open door. Monsieur Langevin was grey at the temples. He was clean-shaven, of medium height, with brown eyes that became playful and indulgent in his children’s presence. But the children, while agreeable to their father’s spoiling of them, were equally fond of their mother, even though it was she who always punished them for their misdemeanours. There was the day the twins put the cat in the chimney, and the day the bough of the apricot tree collapsed beneath their weight, and the morning old Jules couldn’t find his shoes, not a single pair. There were occasions when Colette refused to speak to anyone, especially to Charlotte, when she lay on her bed, her face turned to the wall, and picked at the wallpaper. Monsieur Langevin was as angry about that as he was about the cat in the chimney, but in each case it was Madame Langevin who arranged for whatever deprivation appeared to her to be just.

Madame Langevin’s sister was having an affair. Her husband arrived at the house every Thursday night, long after dinner, close on midnight. He came on the Paris train and remained until Sunday evening, when he took a sleeper back again. He was a vivacious man, not as tall as his wife, with a reddish face and a small black moustache. After his first weekend Madame Langevin told Charlotte that her sister had married beneath her, but even so she spoke affectionately of her brother-in-law, her tone suggesting that she was relaying a simple fact. Madame Langevin would not speak ill of anyone, nor would she seek, maliciously, to wound: she was not that kind of woman. When she mentioned her sister’s love affair, she did so with a shrug. On her sister’s wedding-day she had guessed that there would be such a development: with some people it was a natural thing. ‘Le monde,’ Madame Langevin said, her tone neither condemning her sister nor dis-paraging her brother-in-law in his cuckold role.

Charlotte descends dimly lit stairs from her flat to the street, the green portfolio under her arm. The chill of a December morning has penetrated the house. The collar of her Loden overcoat is turned up, a black muffler several times wound round her neck. Does it happen, she wonders in other people’s lives that a single event influences all subsequent time? When she was five she was gravely ill, and though she easily remembers the drama there was, and how she sensed a closeness to death and was even reconciled to it, the experience did not afterwards pursue her. She left it, snagged in its time and place, belonging there while she herself went lightly on. So, too, she had left behind other circumstances and occurrences, which had seemed as if they must surely cast perpetually haunting shadows: they had not done so. Only that summer at Massuery still insistently accompanies her, established at her very heart as part of her.

‘It is the yellow wine of the Jura,’ Monsieur Langevin said, in English still. ‘Different from the other wines of France.’

From the windows of Massuery you could see the mountains of the Jura. Spring and early summer were sometimes cold because of wind that came from that direction. So they told her: the Jura was often a conversational topic.

‘Is there a doctor at hand?’ Madame Langevin’s sister inquired, quoting from an English phrase-book she had made her husband bring her from Paris. ‘What means “at hand”? Un médian sur la main? C’est impossible!’ With the precision of the bored, Madame Langevin’s sister selected another cigarette and placed it in her holder.

‘The lover is a younger man,’ Madame Langevin passed on in slowly articulated French. ‘Assistant to a pharmacist. One day of course he will wish to marry and that will be that.’

First thing in the morning, as soon as I open my eyes, the smell of coffee being made wafts through my open window. It is the servants’ breakfast, I think. Later, at half past eight, ours is served in an arbour in the garden, and lunch is taken there too, though never dinner, no matter how warm the evening. On Sundays Monsieur Langevin’s mother comes in a tiny motor-car she can scarcely steer. She lives alone except for a housekeeper, in a village thirty kilometres away. She is small and formidable, and does not address me. Sometimes a man comes with her, a Monsieur Ogé with a beard. He speaks to me in detail about his health, and afterwards I look up the words 1 do not know. Other relations occasionally come on Sundays also, Madame’s cousin from Saulieu and her husband, and the widow of a general.

During the war, when there were only women and children at Massuery, a German soldier was discovered in the grounds. He had made himself a shelter and apparently lived on the remains of food thrown out from the house. He would not have been discovered had he not, in desperation, stolen cheese and bread from a larder. For more than a week the women lived with the knowledge of his presence, catching glimpses of him at night, not knowing what to do. They assumed him to be a deserter and yet were not certain, for he might as easily have been lost. In the end, fearing they were themselves being watched for a purpose they could not fathom, they shot him and buried him in the garden. ‘Ici,’ Madame Langevin said, pointing at a spot in the middle of a great oval flowerbed where roses grew. ‘C’était moi,’ she added, answering Charlotte’s unasked question. On a wet night she and her mother-in-law and a maidservant had waited for the soldier to emerge. Her first two shots had missed him and he’d advanced, walking straight towards them. Her third shot made him stagger, and then she emptied both barrels into his body. She’d only been married a few months, not much older than Charlotte was now. She seems so very gentle, Charlotte wrote. You can’t imagine it.

On 14 August, a date that was to become enshrined in Charlotte’s consciousness, she was driven again to her Wednesday-afternoon freedom by Monsieur Langevin. But when they came to the Place de la Paix, instead of opening the car door as usual and driving on to his mid-week appointment, he said:

‘I have nothing to do this afternoon.’

He spoke, this time, in French. He smiled. Like her, he said, he had hours on his hands. He had driven her to St Cérase specially, she realized then. On all previous Wednesday afternoons it had been convenient to give her a lift and, now, when it was not, he felt some kind of obligation had been established.

‘I could have caught the bus at the gates,’ she said.

He smiled again. ‘That would have been a pity, Charlotte.’

This was the first intimation of his feelings for her. She didn’t know how to reply. She felt confused, and knew that she had flushed. He’s such a charming man, she’d written. Both Monsieur and Madame are charming people. There’s no other word for it.

‘Let me drive you some place, Charlotte. There’s nothing to do here.’

She shook her head. She had a few things to buy, she said, after which she would return to Massuery as usual, on the bus. She would be all right.

‘What will you do, Charlotte? Look at the front of the church again? The museum isn’t much. It doesn’t take long to drink a cup of coffee.’

The French her father wished her to perfect was far from perfect yet. Haltingly, she replied that she enjoyed her Wednesday afternoons. But even as she spoke she knew that what she’d come to enjoy most about them was the drive with Monsieur Langevin. Before, she hadn’t dared to allow that thought to form. Now, she could not prevent it.

‘I’ll wait,’ Monsieur Langevin said, ‘while you do your shopping.’

When she returned to the car he drove to a country hotel, almost fifty kilometres away. It was ivy-covered, by a river, with doves in the garden and a stream near by. They sat at a table beneath a beech tree, but nobody came hurrying out to ask them what they’d like. The garden was deserted; the hotel seemed so too. Everyone was sleeping, Monsieur Langevin said.

‘Are you happy at Massuery, Charlotte?’

She was three feet away from him, yet she could feel a fondness that made her faintly dizzy. Her flesh tingled, as though the tips of his fingers had touched her forearm and were sending reverberations through her body. Yet they hadn’t. She tried to think of his children, endeavouring to imagine Colette and the twins at their most tiresome. She tried to think of Madame Langevin, to hear her soft, considerate voice. But nothing happened. All there was was the presence of the man she was with, his white car drawn up in the distance, the small round table at which they sat. A deception was taking place. Already they were sharing a deception.

‘Yes, I am happy at Massuery now.’

‘You were not at first?’

‘I was a little lonely.’

Charlotte walks swiftly through the grey December streets with her port-folio. There was another print, a long time ago, of that round white table, and two faceless figures sitting at it. There was one of three women blurred by heavy rain, waiting among the dripping shrubs. There was one of Massuery caught in dappled sunlight, another of children playing, another of a white Citroën with nobody in it.

They like you, Charlotte. Guy most of all perhaps.’

‘I like them now too.’

They returned to the car when they had talked a while. Only, perhaps, an hour had passed: afterwards she calculated it was about an hour. No one had served them.

‘Everyone is still asleep,’ he said.

How had it happened that he put his arms around her? Had they stopped in their walk across the grass? Afterwards she realized they must have. But in her memory of the moment she was only aware that she had murmured protests, that the palms of both her hands had pressed against his chest. He hadn’t kissed her, but the passion of the kiss was there. Afterwards she knew that too.

‘Dear Charlotte,’ he said, and then: ‘Forgive me.’

She might have fainted and, as though he sensed it, he took her arm, his fingers lightly supporting her elbow, as a stranger on the street might have. He told her, as he drove, about his childhood at Massuery. The old gardener had been there, and nothing much had changed in the house. A forest of birches that had been sold for timber after the war had been replanted. In the fields where sunflowers were grown for their oil now there had been wheat before. He remembered carts and even oxen.

The white Citroën turned in at the gates and glided between the plane trees on the drive, its tyres disturbing the gravel. There’d been an oak close to the house, but its branches had spread too wide and it had been felled. He pointed at the place. They walked up the steps together, and into the hall.

That evening at dinner Madame Langevin’s sister tried out a new phrase. ‘My friend and I desire to attend a theatre,’ she repeated several times, seeking guidance as to emphasis and pronunciation. No one remarked upon the fact that Charlotte had returned in the car with Monsieur Langevin, when always previously on Wednesdays she had arrived back on the bus. No one had noticed; no one was interested. It had been just a moment, she told herself, just the slightest thing. She hadn’t been able to reply when he asked her to forgive him. He hadn’t even taken her hand.

When Sunday came, Monsieur Langevin’s mother brought the bearded Monsieur Ogé who talked about his health, and the widow of the general was there also. The deceived husband was in particularly good spirits that day. ‘Mow chéri,’ Madame Langevin’s sister murmured on the telephone after he’d left for the railway station in the evening. ‘C’est trop cruel.’

When Wednesday came Madame Langevin asked Charlotte if she’d mind taking the bus to St Cérase today because her husband was not going in that direction. And the following Wednesday, as though a precedent had been set by that, it seemed to be assumed that she would take the bus also. Had Madame Langevin somehow discovered? Her manner did not suggest it, but Charlotte remembered her philosophical tone when she’d first spoken of her sister’s relationship with the pharmacist’s assistant, her matter-of-fact acceptance of what clearly she considered to be an absurdity.

Sitting at the café where her solitary presence had become a Wednesday-afternoon feature, Charlotte tried to feel relieved that she’d been saved a decision. But would she really have said no if he’d offered, again, to drive her somewhere pleasant, or would her courage have failed her? Alone at the café, Charlotte shook her head. If he’d asked her, her longing to be with him would have quenched her conventional protests: courage did not come into it.

That day, she went again to the museum and sat in the dusty park. She sketched a hobby-horse that lay abandoned by a seat. The deception was still there, even though he’d changed his mind. Nothing could take it from them.

‘Tu es triste,’ Guy said when she bade him good-night that evening. ‘Pourquoi es-tu triste, Charlotte?’ Only three weeks were left of her time at Massuery: that was why she was sad, she replied, which was the truth in part. ‘Mais tu reviendras,’ Guy comforted, and she believed she would. It was impossible to accept that she would not see Massuery again.

The man nods appreciatively. He knows what he wants and what his clients like. The décor he supplies is enhanced by a pale-framed pleasantry above a minibar or a television set. In the bedrooms of fashionable hotels –and in boardrooms and directors’ dining-rooms and the offices of industrial magnates – Charlotte’s summer at Massuery hangs.

While her patron examines what she has brought him today, she sees herself walking in the Massuery woods, a lone, slight figure among the trees. What was it about her that had made a man of the world love her? She’d not been without a kind of beauty, she supposes, but often she’d been awkward in her manner and certainly ill-informed in conversation, naïve and credulous, an English schoolgirl whose clothes weren’t smart, who hardly knew how to make up her face and sometimes didn’t bother. Was it her very artlessness that had attracted his attention? Had he somehow delighted in the alarmed unease that must have been displayed in her face when he said he’d wait for her to finish her shopping? With long hindsight, Charlotte believes she had noticed his attention from the very first day she arrived at Massuery. There was a fondness in the amused glances he cast at her, which she had not understood and had not sought to. Yet as soon as he permitted the frisson between them, as soon as his manner and his words created it, she knew that being in his company was in every way different from being in Madame Langevin’s, though, before, she had assumed she liked them equally. With that same long hindsight, Charlotte believes she came to love Monsieur Langevin because of his sense of honour and his strength, yet she knows as well that before she was aware of these qualities in him her own first stirrings of emotion had surfaced and, with unconscious propriety, been buried.

Madame Langevin’s sister embraced her warmly the day Charlotte left Massuery. ‘Farewell,’ she wished her, and inquired if that was what was said on such occasions in England. The children gave her presents. Monsieur Langevin thanked her. He stood with his hands on Colette’s shoulders, removing one briefly to shake one of Charlotte’s. It was Madame Langevin who drove her to the railway station, and when Charlotte looked back from the car she saw in Monsieur Langevin’s eyes what had not been there a moment before: the anguish of the sadness that already claimed their clandestine afternoon. His hands remained on his daughter’s shoulders but even so it was as if, again, he’d spoken. At the railway station Madame Langevin embraced her, as her sister had.

Journeying through late September sunshine, Charlotte wept in a corner of her compartment. He respected Madame Langevin too much to betray her in the way her sister betrayed the husband she’d once chosen. Nor was he a man to cause his children pain in order to gratify a selfishness in himself. She knew all that, and in turn respected him. Her resignation was melancholy on that train journey, but with the balm of passing time it became more bearable.

‘You’re miles away, Charlotte,’ young men would later amusedly accuse, and she’d apologize, already back at Massuery. Listening to the young men’s chatter, she descended again the wide staircase, and walked in the woods. Such memories made it easier when with embarrassed gaucheness the young men seized her hand, or kissed her. When proposals came, her private reply was to see the white car waiting for her in the Place de la Paix, while aloud she apologized to whoever had got it into his head that she was free to love him.

‘These’ll ring the changes,’ the man who has commissioned the new prints says. When a business-room or the bedrooms of a hotel are repainted he always likes to have fresh curtains and fresh prints as well; it’s something that’s expected. In six months’ time, he says, he may be ready for another contribution from her. ‘That’s something to be thinking about, my love.’ He always calls her that. He has mahogany-coloured hair with a spring in it; the stubble on his chin and neck grows so slightly and so softly that he hardly has to shave. ‘We’ll send a cheque,’ he says.

Charlotte thanks him. There are other such men, and women too, who remember her when they want something new and unexacting for their décor. They admire her prints more than Charlotte does herself; for her the prints are by the way. What matters more is the certainty of her faith: even without thinking she knows that time, for her lover also, has failed to absorb the passion that was not allowed. For all the years that have passed she has thought of him as that; and dwelling on the nature of love during all that time she has long ago concluded that it’s a mystery, appearing to come from nowhere, no rhyme nor reason to it. The truth will not yield: why did so unsuitably, so cruelly almost, two people love?

Daylight hasn’t properly penetrated the December drabness. Fog shrouds the streets; the pavements are dampened by it. Busy with their assets and takeovers, the men of the business-rooms have probably never noticed the prints that hang there. ‘How charming that is!’ a woman, half-dressed in a hotel bedroom, may have remarked after the scurry of afternoon love or in some idle moment during a weekend’s deceit.

Charlotte sits for a while in the corner of a bar, her green portfolio empty beside her. No one else, except two barmen, are there so early in the day. She sips with pleasure the glass of red wine that has been brought to her; she lights a cigarette and with slow deliberation drops the spent match into the discoloured plastic ashtray in front of her. Then idly, on the cover of her folder, she sketches a funeral procession, sombre between two lines of plane trees. When eventually he sees it the man with the mahogany hair will display no curiosity, for he never does; in the rooms destined for her funeral scene no one will wonder either.

She finishes her wine and catches the eye of the taller barman. He brings her another glass. She remembers her father being angry, and her mother frowning in bewilderment. She never told them what she might have; but her father was angry because she had no ambition, because one young man after another was so summarily rejected. ‘You’re alone so,’ her mother sadly observed. Charlotte did not attempt to explain, for how could happily married people understand that such flimsiness could become the heart of a human existence? Ambitions in this direction or that, and would-be husbands keenly persuading, seemed empty of seriousness, ludicrous almost, compared with what she had.

She has never seen Monsieur Langevin’s handwriting, but imagines it is large and sloping, a little like Guy’s was. She knows she’ll never see it, for the thoughts that occur to her from time to time leave no illusions behind them: no letter will ever inform her that Madame Langevin, a month or so ago, was thrown from her horse – as once, unable to help herself, she dreamed. The funeral is not a hope, only another image from her printmaker’s stock. Why should an honourable deception end in romance? Rewards for decency are not duly handed out.

Their love affair, for her, is there among the memories of a summer, with the people of a household, the town she visited, Guy saying she will return, the sound of the gravel raked, the early-morning smell of coffee. For Monsieur Langevin, the deception is lived with every day, pain blinked away, words bitten back. For both of them, the pattern of their lives has formed around a moment in an afternoon. It is not often so, her lover tells her in yet another silent conversation. He, too, is grateful.

In Love with Ariadne

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Tonight, sir?’

‘We’ll have oysters in Flynn’s.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes, it would.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It is.’

‘I heard the Pye’s the best.’

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

‘I know the type.’

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

‘Strumpets.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I see.’

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

‘Oh, I’m sure –’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Ariadne.’

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

‘Yes, Mr Prenderville?’

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

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

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

‘This minute, Mr Prenderville?’

‘If you are doing nothing better.’

‘I will put on my coat.’

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

‘I love Sunday,’ Ariadne said.

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

‘Your mother is not there, Mr Prenderville?’

‘My mother died.’

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

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

‘A quiet place,’ Ariadne said.

‘Oh, a grave.’

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

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

‘Stayed in my room.’

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

‘Just Barney?’

‘Barney Gregory.’

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

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

‘What else would I do?’

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

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

‘I’m sure you would, Ariadne.’

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

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

‘Did you go to a convent, Ariadne?’

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

‘If you would like to.’

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

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

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

‘An aunt left me her clothes.’

‘An aunt?’

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

‘It suits you.’

‘She used to say that.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Get out of that bloody car!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Religious?’

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

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

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

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

‘I know.’

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

‘That she should go there?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes, she did.’

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

‘No, she didn’t tell me that.’

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

‘Why did he do that, Mrs Fennerty?’

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

‘Shame?’

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

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

‘Why did Mr Lenehan take his life?’

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

‘Arrest?’ he repeated, stupidly.

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

‘What kind of an incident, Mrs Fennerty?’

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

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

‘It would have been no good, Barney.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Husband’s Return

As dawn lightened Maura Brigid’s bedroom the eyes of the Virgin Mary surveyed her waking face dispassionately. Two fingers of the Holy Child blessed her from a tiny pedestal above the room’s single window. Sleepily recollected, the routine of the day before passed unobtrusively through her thoughts, prefacing the daytime shadow of her desertion by the man she’d loved. This pall of distress reclaimed its potency in the first moments of every day, establishing itself afresh, as the sacred statues did. Then, this morning, Maura Brigid remembered that her sister Bernadette had died.

In his bedroom across the landing Maura Brigid’s brother, Hiney, awoke with the occasion already alive in his consciousness. In the town the family had travelled to a banner had been suspended high up across a street, offering a welcome on behalf of a carnival in the future. Halfway between white iron railings and the church, on a hill, there was a shrine, a pietà, in white also. The yellow grain of the coffin was bright in the sunshine, the face of the priest wan and strained. Hiney pushed back the bedclothes, the àction assisting him to dispel these recollections of a time spent unhappily in an unfamiliar place. Bernadette had run away from the farmhouse with her sister’s husband: that sin had still been ugly at the funeral.

Affected also by the recent death, Mrs Colleary, the mother of Maura Brigid and Hiney, rose an hour later. She released the two blinds in her bedroom and dressed herself in the nondescript wear of a farmer’s widow. He would have gone after Bernadette, she reflected, thinking of her husband; he would have brought her back, and the danger was that he might even have killed Lawless, for his anger had always been difficult to control. It was as well he’d been spared all of it, because nothing he might have done could have lessened the disgrace into which the family had been dragged. Mrs Colleary told her rosary, and prayed for the soul of her husband, and for her daughter’s soul. It was the morning of a Tuesday in May, a month after the funeral.

In another bedroom an old man, distantly related to the family, remained in his bed. Of everyone in the farmhouse, only he no longer dwelt on the scandal that had occurred. He had been upset by it at the time, but with the passing years it had settled in his mind, as had so much else in a long life. He was a small, wizened man who had spent most of that life on this farm. His relationship to the remaining Collearys was vague.

The house where the family lived was large and square and white, facing a grassy hill, its back to the distant sea. The hall door had been nailed in place a long time ago, to keep out draughts; a slated roof, obtusely pitched, was scarcely visible. The gravel sweep that lay between the house and the hill was weedless; the windows that looked out on it were curtained heavily with net and velveteen. The front of the house was where appearances were kept up. At the back a cobbled yard, with a hay-barn and outhouses, and a feed-shed where potatoes and swill were boiled, was less tidy. A porch in need of repair led to sculleries and kitchen.

Weeding a field of mangolds that ran to the edge of the cliffs, Hiney heard in the distance the engine of the post van, and knew by the direction it came from that the van was on its way to the farmhouse. Would an abrupt, buff-enveloped notice announce the withdrawal of the tillage grant? Or was there at last a communication from the Appeal Commissioners? Sunshine warmed Hiney’s shoulders and his head as he bent over the mangolds, the impassive solemnity of his countenance unaffected by speculation. His waistcoat hung loosely; his collarless shirt was held at the neck by a stud. More likely it was the bill for the diesel that brought the post van down the avenue, he guessed.

The old man was visited in his bedroom by Mrs Colleary. She spoke to him about the weather, reporting that it was a brightly sunny morning. But it was always uncertain whether or not he comprehended what was said to him, and this morning he gave no sign that he did. The old man’s age was as mysterious as his relationship to the family; he was perhaps ninety-four or -five. Mrs Colleary visited him first thing every morning to make sure he was all right.

Maura Brigid fried bacon in the kitchen. She had set the table the night before, the last to leave the kitchen, as she always was. She pushed the bacon to one side of the pan and dropped slices of griddle bread into the fat. She heard her brother’s footsteps in the yard, and for an instant imagined his slow walk and his wide, well-shaved face, his dark hair brushed flat on either side of its parting, his lips set dourly, his blue eyes expressionless. Work was what Hiney thought about, work that had been completed, work that had yet to be done. His life was the fields, and his tractor, and the weather.

The letter that had arrived lay on the stone floor of the scullery passage, just inside the door from the yard. When there was a letter the postman opened the back door and placed it on the passage floor, propped against the wall, since there was no letter-box and nowhere else to put it. Entering the house, Hiney picked up the communication that had just been delivered. It was not the bill for the diesel, nor was it about the tillage grant or the appeal that had been lodged with the tax commissioners. It was a white envelope, addressed in a sloping hand to Maura Brigid. Hiney was curious about it. He turned the envelope over, but nothing was written on the back.

In the kitchen Mrs Colleary said she thought the old man would get up today. She always knew if he intended to get up when she visited him first thing. The anticipation of his intentions might have shown as a glimpse in his eyes or in some variation of the sound he emitted when she spoke to him: she had no idea how the impression was conveyed, only that she received it.

‘I have an egg ready to fry for him,’ Maura Brigid said, that being what the old man had for breakfast. Bacon he couldn’t manage.

Hiney placed the letter on the table beside his sister’s knife and fork. He sat where he always sat, on the chair that had been his father’s in his lifetime. ‘Move into his place, Hiney,’ Mrs Colleary had said a few weeks after her husband’s death in 1969, when Hiney was still a boy.

‘Did Paídín bring a letter?’ Mrs Colleary did not question the delivery of a letter since the letter was clearly there and could have arrived by no other means than with the postman: her query was her way of expressing surprise. She could see that the letter was a personal one, and from where she stood she could see it was addressed to her daughter.

Maura Brigid, having placed three plates of food on the table, sat down herself. Mrs Colleary poured the tea. Maura Brigid examined the envelope much as her brother had done. She did not recognize the handwriting.

Dear Mrs Lawless, I am writing to you from my conscience. There is repentance in Michael, that’s all I’m writing to say to you. There is sorrow in him also, left behind after the death. Poor Michael is tormented in his heart over the way he was tempted and the sin there was. He told me more times than once that he would endeavour to make recompense to you for the pain he inflicted on you. I am writing to advise you to pray to Our Lady for guidance at this time in your life. I am asking you to recollect the forgiveness She displayed in Her Own Life.

‘It’s from Father Mehegan,’ Maura Brigid said, ‘the priest that did the funeral.’

She handed the letter to her mother because all letters that came to the farm were read in that general way. Mrs Colleary noted without comment what Father Mehegan had written. Hiney read the letter in silence also.

‘I hear him on the stairs,’ Mrs Colleary said. A few moments later the old man entered the kitchen, his shirt not yet buttoned, his trousers hitched up with ragged braces. A vest that had been drained of its whiteness through washing was exposed, its two buttons not fastened either. He sat down in his usual place to await his breakfast. Maura Brigid rose to fry his egg.

‘Is he off the hunger strike yet?’ the old man inquired, lost in a confusion that evoked for him a distant past. ‘Will MacSwiney go to the end, Hiney?’

‘He will.’ Hiney nodded in his solemn way. Indulging such dislocation of time was not unusual in the farmhouse.

‘I was saying he would myself.’

Michael does not know I’m writing to you, the priest’s letter ended. That’s in confidence between us. It was three years since Michael Lawless and Bernadette had run off in the middle of a July night. Maura Brigid had been married for six months at the time and no particular lack of accord between husband and wife had warned of what was to occur. No hint as to the direction of her affections had ever slipped from Bernadette. No note had been left behind.

‘Isn’t it a terrible thing, Hiney, that they’d let poor MacSwiney go to the end?’

‘It is all right.’

‘I’d say they’d pay the price of it.’

‘I’d say they would.’

Hiney folded the letter and returned it to its envelope. Bernadette had died of an internal infection; she’d been two days in hospital. A message had come to them through their own priest, Father Brennan, from a parish more than sixty miles away. They had not known that Bernadette and Michael Lawless had been living there. After their flight the two had not been spoken of.

‘I put my faith in Collins to this day,’ the old man said. ‘Won’t Collins have a word to say when Terry MacSwiney goes?’

Hiney nodded, and so did Mrs Colleary. It was she who had led the silence in the house, her anger and her pain eventually becoming creased into her features. She had offered Maura Brigid no comfort. That Lawless had shattered the lives of both her daughters was how she registered what had occurred. Nor was it any consolation that she had never liked Michael Lawless, believing at the time of his marriage to Maura Brigid that he was after what he could extract to his advantage from the farm, while comfortably living as a member of the household. His running away might have seemed to disprove such an intention, but not for Mrs Colleary. In the humiliation of the scandal there was little room for reason, and no desire to pursue it. The Collearys, and the family Mrs Colleary had come from herself, were well known and well respected in the neighbourhood. They farmed their land, they did not miss Mass, there had never been talk of debts to shopkeepers or supply merchants. ‘I would see Lawless hung,’ Mrs Colleary had said, the last time she mentioned her son-in-law’s name.

Maura Brigid tilted the frying pan and spooned fat on to the yolk of the egg. She wondered if Bernadette had been pregnant. Was that the cause of it, something going wrong inside her? At the funeral no details had been given because none had been asked for. Still wondering, she completed the frying of the old man’s egg and scooped it on to a plate. She remembered playing in the yard when she and Bernadette were children, and Berna-dette’s doll being carried off to a hay-barn by one of the sheepdogs, and Bernadette crying. Sawdust had come out of the doll because the dog’s tooth had pierced one of its legs. Margy it had been called.

‘Are you out in the fields, Hiney?’ the old man inquired, returning from his travels through remembered time. ‘Will I lend you a hand?’

‘I’m weeding the mangolds.’

‘I’ll come out so.’

The old man cut his egg into quarters. He removed the centre of a slice of bread and soaked some of the fat on his plate into it. He spooned sugar into his tea.

‘I’m at the bottom of the cliff field,’ Hiney said.

‘It’s a fine day for the cliff field.’

No more was said about the priest’s letter. No more was necessary. The silence it had broken – that had been broken also by Bernadette’s death – would knit together and be as it had been before. Nothing would be said to Father Brennan. The Mass for Bernadette had been offered in the distant town, which was where she would now lie for ever, well separated from the family she had disgraced. No one outside the farmhouse had been told about her death. No one need know, and no one would ask. After Father Brenann had conveyed the message, he had gone quickly away, and they knew he would remain silent on the subject.

Hiney spread sugar on to a piece of buttered bread He was five years older than the sister who had married Michael Lawless, and older by another three than Bernadette. When they were younger he had looked after them, once lying in wait for the two boys who had taken to following them along the road on their way home from school. While he’d cuffed the boys and threatened them with worse Maura Brigid had been demure but Bernadette had laughed. The boys would never have bothered them if Bernadette hadn’t encouraged them in the first place.

Mrs Colleary wondered if Lawless had been as bad to Bernadette as he had been to Maura Brigid. That thought had just come into her mind, suggested somehow by the priest’s letter. A man who’d desert a wife would have other sins up his sleeve, other punishments to mete out before he’d be finished. That had never occurred to her before, not even on the day of the funeral. God’s anger had been assuaged was what she’d thought, wiping her eyes with a sleeve of her black mourning coat.

Maura Brigid wanted to read the letter again, but did not do so. Occasionally during her marriage she had woken up in the middle of the night to find her husband not beside her, and when she’d asked him the next morning he’d said he’d gone out for a walk because he couldn’t sleep. When they’d watched television in the kitchen he usually sat next to Bernadette, though not in any noticeable way at the time. It was the brevity of the marriage, the way it was still something new, with people still coming up to both of them after Mass to give them good wishes, that Maura Brigid hadn’t been able to get out of her mind.

It was not Sunday, the old man was thinking. He knew it wasn’t because she’d have reminded him, when she came into his bedroom, to put on different clothes. If it was a Sunday he’d be on the way to Mass now, sitting in the back of the car with the girl.

They say a man’d be fit for nothing,’ he said, ‘after a hunger strike.’

Four months later Michael Lawless returned. It was September then, the shortening days pleasantly mild, the smell of the season in the woods and the fields. In the twilight of an evening Maura Brigid’s husband advanced cautiously up the avenue on a bicycle. He dismounted before he came within sight of the house and wheeled the bicycle on to the grass verge. He leaned it against the wire of the avenue fence and continued on foot.

In the yard the sheepdogs barked. They licked the hand he held out to them from the shadows where he stood. Ignoring their noise, Hiney emerged from an outhouse with a new shaft fitted into a spade. He passed through the yard, and the sheepdogs ran after him. Ten minutes later Mrs Colleary came out of the house and scattered feed for the fowls.

‘Hullo, Maura Brigid,’ Lawless whispered when his wife appeared later still that evening. ‘Shh, don’t call out,’ he begged when her hand went up to her mouth to stifle a cry. ‘I’m sorry I frightened you, Maura Brigid.’

He’d stepped out of the shadows and she’d seen the movement from the corner of her eye. She’d only recognized him when she turned her head and even then she had to peer. But when her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom she saw her husband clearly: the broad face and the light-brown hair combed and parted, the collar and tie, the dark serge suit, its trouser ends held tidily in place with bicycle-clips.

‘I’ve something I want to say to you, Maura Brigid.’ He reached for her arm and gently guided her into the barn where the summer’s hay was stacked. ‘It wasn’t my fault she died, Maura Brigid. She had an infection like anyone can have.’

‘I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t know what you’re doing here.’

‘Maura Brigid –’

‘Let go of my arm or I’ll shout out.’

‘Don’t shout out, Maura Brigid. Please now. I’m sorry about everything that happened.’

‘It’s too late to be sorry now. You’ve no right to be here.’

‘I only want to talk to you. I cycled the whole sixty miles of it.’

‘We’re troubled enough without you coming here.’

‘I want to be with you, Maura Brigid.’

‘What are you talking about?’ she whispered, staring at him. She felt stupid, as though she had failed to comprehend what had been said to her, or had misunderstood it. She’d been on her way to the feed house to make sure the fire under the swill was damped down for the night, and the sudden presence of her husband both confused and alarmed her. She felt as she often did in a dream, plunged without warning into unreality, unable to escape.

‘I want it to be like it was,’ he said. ‘I feel that way about you, Maura Brigid.’

‘I’m going in now. Take your hand off of my arm and let me go. Don’t ever come back here.’

‘It was never right, Maura Brigid. We were never at ease, Bernadette and myself.’ He paused, as though expecting a response. When none came he said: ‘I wasn’t the father.’

‘Oh, my God!’

‘Bernadette was that way. She led me a dance, Maura Brigid.’

Maura Brigid pulled her arm out of his grasp and ran across the yard. In the scullery passage she bolted the back door behind her. She didn’t enter the kitchen but went straight up to her bedroom. She couldn’t have faced her mother and Hiney, and they’d have known at once by the sight of her that something was the matter. They’d have asked her questions and she’d have told them in the end. Her mother would have sat there, tight-lipped. She knew, without even having to think, that the infection Bernadette had suffered had been due to an effort to prevent the birth. The nuns at the convent had called Bernadette wild.

‘Dear Mother of God, help me,’ Maura Brigid pleaded in her room, her voice distorted by agitation and tears she could no longer stifle. At the funeral she’d known he was trying to talk to her. She’d seen him looking at her, as though begging for mercy, but they’d driven straight off afterwards, not even stopping in a café for a cup of tea. Going away like that was what Hiney and her mother wanted. They’d hardly said thank you to the priest.

She mumbled through her rosary, sitting on the edge of the bed, the beads between her fingers. The first time she’d ever seen him he’d been a boy at the Christian Brothers’, much quieter, more solitary, than the other boys. ‘Who that fellow with his eye on you?’ Bernadette had said. He’d begun to turn up at the farm, asking Hiney for work, coming on a bicycle, as he had tonight. He’d done jobs for Hiney. He was better than Hiney at mending things.

Maura Brigid crossed to the window and slightly pulled aside the edge of the curtain. She had not yet turned on the light, fearful in case he was watching. Her room looked out over the gravel at the front of the house, and just for a moment she imagined she saw the movement of a figure on the avenue. ‘Would you marry me?’ was what he’d said. ‘Am I good enough for you?’

She reached in among the curtains and pulled the blind down, separating herself further from what lay outside. She still did not light the room, but undressed in the darkness and crept into the bed she had shared with him. Her tears began again, a sobbing that was too soft for anyone passing by on the landing to hear.

The last of the potatoes were lifted. The old man and Maura Brigid and Mrs Colleary helped Hiney with them, and then Hiney ploughed the two potato fields. ‘Is Lawless back?’ the old man asked out of the blue, returning to the house with Maura Brigid and her mother.

When the old man walked he became bent, which made him seem even smaller. But he moved quickly, and would have been swifter over the stubble they crossed had he not slackened his pace in order to converse. His motion was a sideways one, the left shoulder hunched upwards and preceding the right, his grizzled head bent into his chest. ‘Sure, a woman would want the man she has,’ he remarked. ‘Sure, why wouldn’t she?’

Mrs Colleary ignored what he said, but Maura Brigid knew he must have seen her husband. He sometimes went wandering about the hill just before nightfall, setting snares. He would have looked down and recognized the familiar figure in the distance. His eyes were particularly sharp.

‘Amn’t I right, Maura Brigid?’

As though humouring him, she agreed that he was, and her mother paid no heed. Even if he’d stated that he’d spoken to her husband it wouldn’t have mattered. Neither her mother nor Hiney would have placed any credence in the claim.

‘He’ll be a help for poor Hiney,’ the old man said. ‘It’s hard going for Hiney sometimes.’

Maura Brigid knew she could write to the priest with a message for her husband. She could say she forgave him and was prepared to have him back. Whenever she thought about what he’d said concerning Bernadette, she had to repress her tears. When she’d known him well he’d never been untruthful. ‘What d’you say that for?’ Bernadette had crossly reprimanded her when she’d told Hiney that the boys who followed them on the road were a nuisance. Her sister’s mood was quite different when she was scolded by the nuns: repentantly she would cast her eyes down. ‘Sure, it was only a bit of fun, Sister,’ she’d say, and probably she’d have made the same excuse to the man she’d led a dance. ‘It won’t happen again,’ Maura Brigid could imagine her saying after she’d got pregnant with someone else. She had the ability to twist people round her little finger – their mother and Hiney and the old man, the nuns, someone in a shop she was bargaining with. She could wheedle her way with anyone.

‘Leave off about him,’ Mrs Colleary said snappishly when the old man again mentioned Michael Lawless. ‘Don’t speak that name, d’you hear?’

They reached the yard and for a moment Maura Brigid thought he might be there, hiding in the hay-barn until darkness came. She imagined his tidy hair and clothes. She remembered the strength of his arms when he put them around her, and the particular smell he had, a brackeny smell with a trace of tobacco in it. It had never occurred to her to say to herself that Bernadette wouldn’t change just because she ran off with someone, just because she’d disgraced a whole family. She’d been the apple of their father’s eye, and of their mother’s until the scandal, and Hiney’s favourite, and the old man’s. She had been turned into a sinful woman by a man you couldn’t mention: that was how they saw it.

Later that evening, when Maura Brigid crossed the yard to damp down the swill fire, no voice whispered her name. Later still, after she’d drawn down the blinds in her bedroom, she realized that her husband would not return unless she summoned him. He had come to make a case for his remorse; the priest had written from his conscience. Unless she chose to, she would hear no more from either of them.

Dear Father Mehegan, she wrote. Thanks for writing to me. Would you tell Michael 1 will meet him halfway, in Cappoquin one Friday. Tell him I understand what he was saying to me.

She addressed the envelope, but did not send the letter. She kept it in a drawer in her bedroom, saying she would post it the next Friday she went in to do the shopping. After that, she would be on the watch for a reply, ready to collect it from the scullery passage before Hiney found it. She’d drive on to Cappoquin on the Friday they arranged, making sure she put more petrol in the car, so that Hiney wouldn’t notice how much had been used. They’d sit in the car in a car park.

‘You’d need the fellow’s assistance, Hiney,’ the old man said. ‘It’s understandable you would.’

The old man sometimes sat in the dining-room, which was nowadays never used, under the impression that a land steward called Mahaffy was about to call to see him. Effortlessly he had created a world made up of random details from the past, and had peopled it as he wished. No one on the farm had ever heard of the land steward, Mahaffy. Terence MacSwiney, Mayor of Cork, had died on his hunger strike sixty-seven years ago.

‘Ah, don’t be silly now,’ Hiney said when the assistance of Michael Lawless was referred to, Hiney as keen as his mother that the name should not be mentioned. The scandal Maura Brigid had inflicted on the family by bringing a scoundrel to the farm was too recent and too painful to be permitted in an old man’s silliness. ‘That man didn’t come back,’ Hiney shouted in the kitchen. ‘D’you understand that now? He’s gone for good.’

But the old man insisted. Michael Lawless had come back up the avenue on a bicycle. The sheepdogs had barked when he walked into the yard. ‘We’ll ask him about it when we see him,’ the old man said. ‘We’ll ask him wasn’t I right.’

All of it was her fault, Maura Brigid could feel her mother and Hiney thinking. If she had not married the man Bernadette would not have been ruined. Bernadette would still be alive. It was her fault that a scoundrel had come and gone, doing the worst that could be done to two sisters, duping them.

‘He did come back,’ she said. ‘A while after the funeral he came back.’

She was on her feet when she spoke, giving them their food, as so often she did. She had fried chops and mashed turnips, and tumbled a saucepan of potatoes on to a sheet of newspaper, which would become accumulated with peelings as the meal progressed. Chops or fried steak, fish or boiled bacon, frozen peas or turnips or cabbage, and potatoes: that was the food she cooked and served for the main meal they ate every day. At half past twelve she placed the newspaper on the centre of the table. At a quarter past one she made tea. She and her mother washed up afterwards.

‘What are you talking about?’ Hiney said. ‘Lawless never came back here.’

‘He came back and told me Bernadette was pregnant, only it wasn’t his child. She tried to get rid of it.’

Mrs Colleary crossed herself. Hiney’s solemn face was unusually animated. ‘That’s a bloody lie,’ he said.

‘He couldn’t control her, Hiney. She was like she always was.’

The old man asked them what they were talking about, something he rarely did. Nobody answered him. Mrs Colleary said:

‘He never told the truth.’

‘Never in his life,’ Hiney agreed with harsh vigour. ‘We all know the kind Lawless is.’

‘You were always taken in, Maura Brigid. You were always soft.’

She knew that if she began to cry she wouldn’t be able to stop. But the tears she repressed kept making her blink and she turned her head away. They were the same kind, she and the man who had married her. They’d been companions the way he and her sister had never been, you could tell that from how he spoke of Bernadette. Bernadette had hurt him, too.

‘It’s bad enough the way things are,’ Hiney insisted. ‘Keep it to yourself he came back.’

When he’d first come to the farm to court her they used to walk in the woods and climb down the cliffs to the strand. He’d always been shy, only taking her hand and clumsily kissing her. After they were married there had never been any question about his not coming on to the farm: Hiney needed the assistance and Michael was employe4 on the roads, work he didn’t like. She remembered how she had wondered about a baby being born, her own baby and his on the farm.

‘There were girls at the convent,’ she said, ‘used call Bernadette a hooer.’

Again Mrs Colleary crossed herself. She drew her breath in and held it for a moment. Her eyes were closed.

‘What’s the matter with you, Maura Brigid?’ Hiney asked quietly.

‘On account of the way she enticed the Christian Brothers’ boys. That’s why they called her that.’

‘If Lawless comes back here I’ll take a gun to him,’ Hiney said, still without raising his voice. He stood up, leaving his food untouched. He walked from the kitchen, and the sheepdogs who’d been lying under the table followed him.

‘You shouldn’t ever have married that man,’ Mrs Colleary said, opening her eyes. Her face had gone pale. Her mouth was pulled down, as though in weariness, as though she couldn’t be bothered arranging it differently any more. ‘I told you at the time he was rotten to the core.’

Maura Brigid did not reply. It was not true to say the man she’d married had never told the truth in his life. He was weak, and she was weak herself: she didn’t possess the courage to leave the farm, to run off with him as Bernadette had. She would be frightened, and she was well-behaved by nature. He hadn’t come to the farm to ask her to run off, that wasn’t his way; he’d come to the farm to tell her something, to see how she might feel about it. The priest had written to beg that there might be forgiveness.

‘I’ll go down and help them in the fields,’ the old man said, finishing the cup of tea he’d poured himself. ‘I think the pair of them are digging out ditches.’

The letter she had written would remain in her drawer. In the old man’s senile fantasy her husband would continue to work on the cliff land, to cut timber in the woods, and help her with the Friday shopping, as he had once upon a time. In the old man’s senile fantasy there was repentance, and forgiveness.

‘Those are terrible things you said,’ her mother whispered, still sitting at the table, her chop congealed in its fat. ‘Enough has happened to us without that.’

When the old man died there would be no more talk of her husband, and when her mother died the task of making Hiney’s bed would be hers, and there would only be Hiney and herself to cook for. Hiney would never marry because all Hiney was interested in was work. People would be sorry for her, but they would always say it was her foolishness that had dragged the family through disgrace, her fault for marrying a scoundrel. In the farmhouse and the neighbourhood that was the person she had become.

Coffee with Oliver

That is Deborah, Oliver said to himself: my daughter has come to see me. But at the pavement table of the café where he sat he did not move. He did not even smile. He had, after all, only caught a glimpse of a slight girl in a yellow dress, of fair hair, and sunglasses and a profile: it might not be she at all.

Yet, Oliver insisted to himself, you know a thing like that. You sense your flesh and blood. And why should Deborah be in Perugia unless she planned to visit him? The girl was alone. She had hurried into the hotel next to the café in a businesslike manner, not as a sightseer would.

Oliver was a handsome man of forty-seven, with greying hair, and open, guileless features. This morning he was dressed as always he was when he made the journey to Perugia: in a pale-cream linen suit, a pale shirt with a green stripe in it, and the tie of an English public school. His tan shoes shone; the socks that matched the cream of his suit were taut over his ankles.

‘Signorina!’

He summoned the waitress who had just finished serving the people at the table next to his and ordered another cappuccino. This particular girl went off duty at eleven and the waitress who replaced her invariably made out the bill for one cappuccino only. It was fair enough, Oliver argued to himself, since he was a regular customer at the café and spent far more there than a tourist would.

‘Si, signore. Subito.’

What he had seen in the girl who’d gone into the hotel was a resemblance to Angelica, who was slight and fair-haired also, and had the same quick little walk and rather small face. If the girl had paused and for some reason taken off her dark glasses he would at once, with warm nostalgia, have recognized her mother’s deep, dark eyes, of that he was certain. He wouldn’t, of course, have been so sure had it not been for the resemblance. Since she’d grown up he’d only seen photographs of his daughter.

‘It was best to let whatever Deborah had planned just happen, best not to upset the way she wanted it. He could ask for her at the reception desk of the hotel. He could be waiting for her in the hall, and they could lunch together. He could show her about the town, put her into the picture gallery for an hour while he waited at the café across the street; afterwards they could sit over a drink. But that would be all his doing, not Deborah’s, and it wouldn’t be fair. Such a programme would also be expensive, for Deborah, in spite of being at a smart hotel, might well not be able to offer a contribution: it would not be unlike Angelica to keep her short. Oliver’s own purpose in being in Perugia that morning was to visit the Credito Italiano, to make certain that the monthly amount from Angelica had come. He had cashed a cheque, but of course that had to be made to last.

‘Prego, signore,’ the waitress said, placing a fresh cup of coffee in front of him and changing his ashtray for an unused one.

He smiled and thanked her, then blew gently at the foam of his cappuccino and sipped a little of the coffee. He lit a cigarette. You could sit all day here, he reflected, while the red-haired Perugians went by, young men in twos and threes, and the foreign students from the language schools, and the tourists who toiled up, perspiring, from the car parks. Idling time away, just ruminating, was lovely.

Eventually Oliver paid for his coffee and left. He should perhaps buy some meat, in case his daughter arrived at his house at a mealtime. Because it was expensive he rarely did buy meat, once in a blue moon a packet of cooked turkey slices, which lasted for ages. There was a butcher’s he often passed in a side street off the via dei Priori, but this morning it was full of women, all of them pressing for attention. Oliver couldn’t face the clamour and the long wait he guessed there’d be. The butcher’s in Betona might still be open when he arrived off the five past twelve bus. Probably best left till then in any case, meat being tricky in the heat.

He descended from the city centre by a steep short-cut, eventually arriving at the bus stop he favoured. He saved a little by using this particular fare-stage, and though he did not often make the journey to Perugia all such economies added up. What a marvellous thing to happen, that Deborah had come! Oliver smiled as he waited for his bus in the midday sunshine; the best things were always a surprise.

Deborah had a single memory of her father. He’d come to the flat one Sunday afternoon and she’d been at the top of the short flight of stairs that joined the flat’s two floors. She hadn’t known who he was but had watched and listened, sensing the charged atmosphere. At the door the man was smiling. He said her mother was looking well. He hoped she wouldn’t mind, he said. Her mother was cross. Deborah had been five at the time.

‘You know I mind,’ she’d heard her mother say.

‘I was passing. Unfriendly just to pass, I thought. We shouldn’t not ever talk to one another again, Angelica.’

Her mother’s voice was lowered then. She spoke more than she had already, but Deborah couldn’t hear a word.

‘Well, no point,’ he said. ‘No point in keeping you.’

Afterwards, when Deborah asked, her mother told her who the man was. Her mother was truthful and found deception difficult. When two people didn’t get on any more, she said, it wasn’t a good idea to try to keep some surface going.

He’d lit a cigarette while they’d been talking. Softly, he’d tried to interrupt her mother. He’d wanted to come in, but her mother hadn’t permitted that.

‘I’m here because of a mistake? Is that it?’ Deborah pinned her mother down in a quarrel years after that Sunday afternoon. It was her mother’s way of putting it when her marriage came up: two people had made a mistake. Mistakes were best forgotten, her mother said.

The dwelling Oliver occupied, in the hills above the village of Betona, was a stone building of undistinguished shape and proportions. It had once housed sheep during the frozen winter months, and wooden stairs, resembling a heavily constructed ladder, led to a single upstairs room, where shepherds had sought privacy from their animals. Efforts at conversion had been made. Electricity had been brought from the village; a kitchen, and a lavatory with a shower in it, had been fitted into the space below. But the conversion had an arrested air, reflecting a loss of interest on the part of Angelica who, years ago, had bought the place as it stood. At the time of the divorce she had made over to him the ramshackle habitation. She herself had visited it only once; soon after the divorce proceedings began she turned against the enterprise, and work on the conversion ceased. When Oliver returned on his own he found the corrugated roof still letting in rain, no water flowing from either the shower or the lavatory, the kitchen without a sink or a stove, and a cesspit not yet dug. He had come from England with his clothes and four ebony-framed pictures. ‘Well, anyway it’s somewhere to live,’ he said aloud, looking around the downstairs room, which smelt of concrete. He sighed none the less, for he was not deft with his hands.

The place was furnished now, though modestly. Two folding garden chairs did service in the downstairs room. There was a table with a fawn formica surface, and a pitch-pine bookcase. Faded rugs covered most of the concrete floor. The four heavily framed pictures – scenes of Suffolk landscape – adorned the rough stone walls to some effect. Across a corner there was a television set.

The cesspit remained undug, but in other directions Oliver had had a bit of luck. He’d met an Englishman on one of his visits to the Credito Italiano and had helped with a language difficulty. The man, in gratitude, insisted on buying Oliver a cup of coffee and Oliver, sensing a usefulness in this acquaintanceship, suggested that they drive together in the man’s car to Betona. In return for a summer’s lodging – a sleeping-bag on the concrete floor – the man replaced the damaged corrugated iron of the roof, completed the piping that brought water to the shower and the lavatory, and installed a sink and an antique gas stove that someone had thrown out, adapting the stove to receive bottled gas. He liked to work like this, to keep himself occupied, being in some kind of distress. Whenever Oliver paused in the story of his marriage his companion had a way of starting up about the business world he’d once belonged to, how failure had led to bankruptcy: finding the interruption of his own narration discourteous, Oliver did not listen. Every evening at six O’clock the man walked down to the village and returned with a litre of red wine and whatever groceries he thought necessary. Oliver explained that since he himself would not have made these purchases he did not consider that he should make a contribution to their cost. His visitor was his guest in the matter of accommodation; in fairness, it seemed to follow, he should be his visitor’s guest where the odd egg or glass of wine was concerned.

‘Angelica was never easy,’ Oliver explained, continuing the story of his marriage from one evening to the next. There was always jealousy.’ His sojourn in the Betona hills was temporary, he stated with confidence. But he did not add that, with his sights fixed on something better, he often dropped into conversation with lone English or American women in the rooms of the picture gallery or at the café next to the hotel. He didn’t bore his companion with this information because it didn’t appear to have much relevance. He did his best only to be interesting about Angelica, and considered he succeeded. It was a dispute in quite a different area that ended the relationship, as abruptly as it had begun. As well as hospitality, the visitor claimed a sum of money had been agreed upon, but while conceding that a cash payment had indeed been mooted, Oliver was adamant that he had not promised it. He did not greatly care for the man in the end, and was glad to see him go.

When Angelica died two years ago Deborah was twenty. The death was not a shock because her mother had been ill, and increasingly in pain, for many months: death was a mercy. Nonetheless, Deborah felt the loss acutely. Although earlier, in her adolescence, there had been arguments and occasionally rows, she’d known no companion as constant as her mother; and as soon as the death occurred she realized how patient with her and how fond of her Angelica had been. She’d been larky too, amused by unexpected things, given to laughter that Deborah found infectious. In her distress at the time of her mother’s death it never occurred to her that the man who’d come to the flat that Sunday afternoon might turn up at the funeral. In fact, he hadn’t.

‘You’ll be all right,’ Angelica had said before she died, meaning that there was provision for Deborah to undertake the post-graduate work she planned after she took her degree. ‘Don’t worry, darling.’

Deborah held her hand, ashamed when she remembered how years ago she’d been so touchy because Angelica once too often repeated that her marriage was a mistake. Her mother had never used the expression again.

‘I was a horrid child,’ Deborah cried forlornly before her mother died. ‘A horrid little bully.’

‘Darling, of course you weren’t.’

At the funeral people said how much they’d always liked her mother, how nice she’d been. They invited Deborah to visit them at any time, just to turn up when she was feeling low.

When Oliver stepped off the bus in the village the butcher’s shop was still open but he decided, after all, not to buy a pork chop, which was the choice he had contemplated when further considering the matter on the bus. A chop was suitable because, although it might cost as much as twenty thousand lire, it could be divided quite easily into two. But supposing it wasn’t necessary to offer a meal at all? Supposing Deborah arrived in the early afternoon, which was not unlikely? He bought the bread he needed instead, and a packet of soup, and cigarettes.

He wondered if Deborah had come with a message. He did not know that Angelica had died and wondered if she was hoping he might be persuaded to return to the flat in the square. It was not unlikely. As he ascended the track that led to his property, these thoughts drifted pleasurably through Oliver’s mind. ‘Deborah, I’ll have to think about that.’ He saw himself sitting with his daughter in what the man who’d set the place to rights had called the patio – a yard really, with two car seats the man had rescued from a dump somewhere, and an old tabletop laid across concrete blocks. ‘We’ll see,’ he heard himself saying, not wishing to dismiss the idea out of hand.

He had taken his jacket off, and carried it over his arm. ‘Ε caldo! the woman he’d bought the bread from had exclaimed, which indicated that the heat was excessive, for in Betona references to the weather were only made when extremes were reached. Sweat gathered on Oliver’s forehead and at the back of his neck. He could feel it becoming clammy beneath his shirt. Whatever the reason for Deborah’s advent he was glad she had come because company was always cheerful.

In the upstairs room Oliver took his suit off and carefully placed it on a wire coat-hanger on the wall. He hung his tie over one linen shoulder, and changed his shirt. The trousers he put on were old corduroys, too heavy in the heat, but the best he could manage. In the kitchen he made tea and took it out to the patio, with the bread he’d Bought and his cigarettes. He waited for his daughter.

After Angelica’s death Deborah felt herself to be an orphan. Angelica’s brother and his wife, a well-meaning couple she hardly knew, fussed about her a bit; and so did Angelica’s friends. But Deborah had her own friends, and she didn’t need looking after. She inherited the flat in London and went there in the university holidays. She spent a weekend in Norfolk with her uncle and his wife, but did not do so again. Angelica’s brother was quite unlike her, a lumpish man who wore grey, uninteresting suits and had a pipe, and spectacles on a chain. His wife was wan and scatter-brained. They invited Deborah as a duty and were clearly thankful to find her independent.

Going through her mother’s possessions, Deborah discovered neither photographs of, nor letters from, her father. She did not know that photographs of herself, unaccompanied by any other form of communication, had been sent to her father every so often, as a record of her growing up. She did not know of the financial agreement that years ago had been entered into. It did not occur to her that no one might have informed the man who’d come that Sunday afternoon of Angelica’s death. It didn’t occur to her to find some way of doing so herself. None of this entered Deborah’s head because the shadowy figure who had smiled and lit a cigarette belonged as deeply in the grave as her mother did.

She had no curiosity about him, and her uncle did not mention him. Nor did any of Angelica’s friends on the occasions when they invited Deborah to lunch or drinks, since she had not just turned up as they’d suggested at the funeral. In reply to some casual query by a stranger, she once replied that her father was probably dead. The happiness of her relationship with Angelica was what she thought about and moodily dwelt upon, regretting that she had taken it for granted.

The heat was at its most intense at three o’clock, but afterwards did not lose its fervour. The concrete blocks of Oliver’s patio, the metal ribs of the car chairs, the scorching upholstery, the stone of the house itself, all cancelled the lessening of the sun’s attack by exuding the heat that had been stored. By half past five a kind of coolness was beginning. By seven it had properly arrived. By half past eight there was pleasure in its relief.

Perhaps he had been wrong, Oliver thought later, not to approach the girl: thoughtfulness sometimes was misplaced. If she had waited for the day to cool she would have found herself too late for the last bus to Betona, and a taxi would have been outrageously expensive. Angelica would have taken a taxi, of course, though in other ways, as he well knew, she could be penny-pinching.

But Deborah didn’t come that evening, nor the next day, nor the day after that. So Oliver made the journey into Perugia again, long before it was time for his next visit to the Credito Italiano. The only explanation was that the girl had not been Deborah at all. But he still felt she was, and was bewildered. He even wondered if his daughter was lying low because she’d been sent to spy on him.

‘Si, signore?’ The clerk in the reception of the hotel smiled at him, and in slow Italian Oliver made his query. He wrote down Deborah’s name on a piece of paper so that there could be no confusion. He remembered the date of the day he’d last sat at the café. From the photograph he had of her he described his daughter.

‘Momento, signore. Scusi.’ The clerk entered a small office to one side of the reception desk and returned some minutes later with a registration form. On it were Deborah’s name and signature, and the address of the flat in London. She had stayed one night only in the hotel.

‘Student,’ a girl who had accompanied the clerk from the office said. ‘She search a room in Perugia.’

‘A room?’

‘She ask.’ The girl shrugged. ‘I no have room.’

‘Thank you.’ Oliver smiled at both of them in turn. The clerk called after him in Italian. The girl had given Deborah the name of an agency, not twenty metres away, where rooms were rented to students. ‘Thank you,’ Oliver said again, but did not take the details of the agency. At the café he ordered a cappuccino.

Deborah had enrolled on a course – language or culture, or perhaps a combination. Perugia was famous for its courses; students came from all over the place. Sometimes they spent a year, or even longer, depending on the course they’d chosen. He knew that because now and again he dropped into conversation with one, and in return for a grappa or a cappuccino supplied some local information. Once he’d had lunch with a well-to-do young Iranian who’d clearly been grateful for his company.

‘Ecco, signore!’ The waitress who went off duty at eleven placed his coffee in front of him.

‘Grazie.’

‘Prego, signore.’

He lit a cigarette. Once he’d had a lighter and a silver cigarette case, given to him by a Mrs Dogsmith, whom he’d met in the Giardini Carducci. For a moment he saw again the slim, faintly embossed case, and the initials curling around one another at the bottom left-hand corner of the lighter. He’d sold both of them years ago.

A woman came out of the hotel and paused idly, glancing at the café tables. She was taller than Mrs Dogsmith and a great deal thinner. A widow or divorcee, Oliver guessed, but then a man came out of the hotel and took her arm.

‘Your mother gave you so much,’ Angelica’s irrational chatter lurched at him suddenly. ‘But still you had to steal from her.’

He felt himself broken into, set upon and violated, as he remembered feeling at the time. The unpleasant memory had come because of Deborah, because Deborah’s presence put him in mind of Angelica, naturally enough. More agreeably, he recalled that it was he who’d chosen that name for their daughter. ‘Deborah,’ he’d suggested, and Angelica had not resisted it.

Not wishing to think about Angelica, he watched the waddling movement of a pigeon on the pavement, and then listened to a conversation in Italian between a darkly suited man and his companion, a Woman in a striped tan dress. They were talking about swimwear; the man appeared to be the proprietor of a fashion shop. Young people in a group went by, and Oliver glanced swiftly from face to face, but his daughter was not among them. He ordered another cappuccino because in ten minutes or so the early-morning waitress would be going off duty.

It was a silliness of Angelica’s to say he’d stolen from his mother. He more than anyone had regretted the sad delusions that had beset his mother. It was he who had watched her becoming vague, he who had suffered when she left all she possessed to a Barnardo’s home. Angelica belonged to a later time; she’d hardly known his mother.

Slowly Oliver lit and smoked another cigarette, filling in time while he waited for the new waitress to arrive. As soon as he saw her he crumpled up the little slip that had accompanied his first cup of coffee, and placed on the table the money for the second. But this morning, when he’d gone only a few yards along the street, the waitress came hurrying after him, jabbering in Italian. He smiled and shook his head. She held out the money he’d left.

‘Oh! Mi dispiace!’ he apologized, paying her the extra.

*

‘Deborah.’

She heard her name and turned. A middle-aged man was smiling at her. She smiled back, thinking he was one of the tutors whom she couldn’t place.

‘Don’t you recognize me, Deborah?’

They were in the square. He had risen from the edge of a wooden stage that had been erected for some public meeting. The two girls Deborah was with were curious.

‘My dear,’ the man said, but seventeen years had passed since Deborah had caught her one glimpse of her father that Sunday afternoon. Neither features nor voice were familiar. ‘It’s really you!’ the man said.

Bewildered, Deborah shook her head.

‘I’m Oliver,’ Oliver said. ‘Your father.’

They sat outside, at the nearest café. She didn’t take off her sunglasses. She’d spoken to the girls she’d been with and they’d walked on. She had a class at two, she’d said.

‘Time at least for a coffee,’ Oliver said.

She had a look of him, even though she was more like Angelica. It had been a disappointment, the deduction that she hadn’t come here to seek him out. A disappointment that it was no more than a coincidence, her presence in Perugia.

‘You knew of course?’ he said. ‘You did have my address?’

She shook her head. She’d had no idea. She hadn’t even been aware that he was not in England.

‘But, Deborah, surely Angelica –’

‘No, she never did.’

Their coffee came. The waiter was young and unshaven, not neatly in a uniform like the girls at the café by the hotel. He glanced at Deborah with interest. Oliver thought he heard him making a sound with his lips, but he could not be sure.

‘I often think of you and your mother in that flat.’

Deborah realized he didn’t know Angelica had died, and found it difficult to break the news. She did so clumsily, or so she thought.

‘My God!’ he said.

Deborah dipped a finger into the foam of her coffee. She didn’t like the encounter; she wished it hadn’t taken place. She didn’t like sitting here with a man she didn’t know and didn’t want to know. ‘Apparently he’s my father,’ she’d said to her companions, momentarily enjoying the sophistication; but later, of course, all that would have to be explained.

‘Poor Angelica!’ he said.

Deborah wondered why nobody had warned her. Why hadn’t her grey-suited uncle or one of Angelica’s friends advised against this particular Italian city? Why hadn’t her mother mentioned it?

Presumably they hadn’t warned her because they didn’t know. Her mother hadn’t ever wanted to mention him; it wasn’t Angelica’s way to warn people against people.

‘She used to send me a photograph of you every summer,’ he said. ‘I wondered why none came these last two years. I never guessed.’

She nodded meaninglessly.

‘Why are you learning Italian, Deborah?’

‘I took my degree in the history of art. It’s necessary to improve my Italian now.’

‘You’re taking it up? The history of art?’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘It’s lovely you’re here.’

‘Yes.’

She had chosen Perugia rather than Florence or Rome because the course was better. But if she’d known she wouldn’t have.

‘Not really a coincidence,’ he was saying, very softly. ‘These things never are.’

Just for a moment Deborah felt irritated. What had been the use of Angelica’s being generous, unwilling to malign, bending over backwards to be decent, when this could happen as a result? What was the good of calling a marriage a mistake, and leaving it at that? But the moment passed; irritation with the dead was shameful.

‘Is it far from here, where you live?’ she asked, hoping that it was.

Oliver tore a cheque-stub from his cheque-book and wrote his address on it, then tore out another and drew a map. He wrote down the number of the Betona bus.

‘It’s lovely you’re here,’ he said again, giving his daughter the cheque-stubs. An excitement had begun in him. If he hadn’t been outside the hotel that morning he’d never even have known she was in Perugia. She might have come and gone and he’d have been none the wiser. Angelica had died, the two of them were left; he wouldn’t have known that, either.

‘If you don’t mind,’ he heard his daughter saying and felt she was repeating something he hadn’t heard the first time, ‘I don’t think I’ll visit you.’

‘You’ve been told unpleasant things, Deborah.’

‘No, not at all.’

‘We can be frank, you know.’

Angelica had been like that, he knew it to his cost. In his own case, she had laid down harsh conditions, believing that to be his due. The half-converted house and the monthly transfer of money carried the proviso that he should not come to the flat ever again, that he should not live in England. That wasn’t pleasant, but since it was what she wanted he’d agreed. At least the money hadn’t ceased when the woman died. Oliver smiled, feeling that to be a triumph.

‘Angelica was always jealous. It was jealousy that spoilt things.’

‘I never noticed that in her.’

He smiled again, knowing better. Heaven alone knew what this girl had been told about him, but today, now that she was here and Angelica was not, it didn’t matter.

‘A pity you feel you can’t come out to Betona. The bus fare’s quite a bit, else I’d come in oftener while you’re here.’

‘Actually, to tell the truth, I’d rather we didn’t have to meet.’ Deborah’s tone was matter of fact and sharp. A note of impatience had entered it, reminding Oliver not of his wife, but strangely of his mother.

‘I only come in once a month or so.’ He slid a cigarette from his packet of MS. ‘Angelica tried to keep us apart,’ he said, ‘all these years. She made the most elaborate arrangements.’

Deborah rooted in her handbag and found her own cigarettes and matches. Oliver said he’d have offered her one of his if he’d known she smoked. She said it didn’t matter.

‘I don’t want any of this hassle,’ she said.

‘Hassle, Deborah? A cup of coffee now and again –’

‘Look, honestly, not even that.’

Oliver smiled. It was always better not to argue. He’d never argued with Angelica. It was she who’d done the arguing, working herself up, making it sound as though she were angrily talking to herself. Deborah could easily sleep in the downstairs room; there were early-morning buses to Perugia. They could share the expenses of the household: the arrangement there’d been with the bankrupt man had been perfectly satisfactory.

‘Sorry,’ Deborah said, and to Oliver her voice sounded careless. She blew out smoke, looking over her shoulder, no doubt to see if her friends were still hanging around. He felt a little angry. He might have been just anyone, sitting there. He wanted to remind her that he had given her life.

‘It’s simple at Betona,’ he said instead. ‘I’m not well off. But I don’t think you’d find it dreadful.’

‘I’m sure I wouldn’t. All the same –’

‘Angelica was well off, you know. She never wanted me to be.’

Deborah missed her two o’clock lesson because it was harder than she’d anticipated to get away. She was told about all sorts of things, none of which she’d known about before. The Sunday afternoon she remembered was mentioned. ‘I wasn’t very well then,’ Oliver said. It was after that occasion that a legal agreement had been drawn up: in return for financial assistance Oliver undertook not to come to the flat again, not ever to attempt to see his child. He was given the house near Betona, no more than a shack really. ‘None of it was easy,’ he said. He looked away, as if to hide emotion from her. The photographs he annually received were a legality also, the only one he had insisted on himself. Suddenly he stood up and said he had a bus to catch.

‘It’s understandable,’ he said. ‘Your not wanting to come to Betona. Of course you have your own life.’

He nodded and went away. Deborah watched him disappearing into the crowd that was again collecting, after the afternoon siesta.

Who on earth would have believed that he’d outlive Angelica? Extra-ordinary how things happen; though, perhaps, in a sense, there was a fairness in it. Angelica had said he always had to win. In her unpleasant moods she’d said he had to cheat people, that he could not help himself. As a gambler was in thrall to luck, or a dipsomaniac to drink, his flaw was having to show a gain in everything he did.

On the bus journey back to Betona Oliver did not feel angry when he recalled that side of Angelica, and supposed it was because she was dead. Naturally it was a relief to have the weight of anger lifted after all these years, no point in denying it. The trouble had been it wasn’t easy to understand what she was getting at. When she’d found the three or four pieces among his things, she’d forgotten that they were his as much as his mother’s, and didn’t even try to understand that you couldn’t have told his mother that, she being like she was. Instead Angelica chose to repeat that he hadn’t been able to resist ‘getting the better of his mother. Angelica’s favourite theme was that: what she called his pettiness and his meanness left him cruel. He had often thought she didn’t care what she said; it never mattered how she hurt.

On the bus Angelica’s face lolled about in Oliver’s memory, with his mother’s and – to Oliver’s surprise – his daughter’s. Angelica pleaded about something, tears dripped from the old woman’s cheeks, Deborah simply shook her head. ‘Like cancer in a person’, Angelica said. Yet it was Angelica who had died, he thought again.

Deborah would come. She would come because she was his flesh and blood. One day he’d look down and see her on the path, bringing something with her because he wasn’t well off. Solicitors had drawn up the stipulations that had kept them apart all these years; in ugly legal jargon all of it was written coldly down. When Deborah considered that, she would begin to understand. He’d sensed, before they parted, a shadow of unease: guilt on Angelica’s behalf, which wasn’t surprising in the circumstances.

The thought cheered Oliver considerably. In his house, as he changed his clothes, he reflected that it didn’t really matter, the waitress running after him for the money. In all, over the months that had passed since this waitress had begun to work at the café, he’d probably had twenty, even thirty, second cups of coffee. He knew it didn’t matter because after a little time it hadn’t mattered that the bankrupt man had made a scene, since by then the roof was repaired and the plumbing completed. It hadn’t mattered when Mrs Dogsmith turned nasty, since already she’d given him the lighter and the cigarette case. That was the kind of thing Angelica simply couldn’t understand, any more than she’d understood the confusions of his mother, any more than, probably, she’d understood their daughter. You couldn’t keep flesh and blood apart; you actually weren’t meant to.

In the kitchen Oliver put the kettle on for tea. When it boiled he poured the water on to a tea-bag he’d already used before setting out for Perugia. He carried the glass out to the patio and lit a cigarette. The car seats were too hot to sit on, so he stood, waiting for them to cool. There’d been no reason why she shouldn’t have paid for their coffee since she, after all, had been the cause of their having it. Eighteen thousand lire a cappuccino cost at that particular café, he’d noticed it on the bill.

August Saturday

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

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

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

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

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

‘I didn’t think we would.’

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

‘Of course not.’

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

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

‘No, I wasn’t.’

‘Well, she did. Two days ago.’

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

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

‘Of course I don’t.’

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

‘Tonight, you mean?’

‘When they turn up.’

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

‘Still playing tennis, Grania?’

‘Pretty badly.’

‘You’ve hardly aged, you know.’

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

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

‘You mean tonight?’

‘Yes.’

‘No, that wasn’t said.’

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

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

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

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

‘Hetty died, I hear,’ Desmond said.

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

‘Well, of course.’

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

‘You’re very welcome.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘That might make it worse, actually.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘God, I didn’t know she died.’

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

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

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

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

‘Yes, I remember her.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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