The Collected Stories

‘You walked across the dining-room at breakfast,’ said Mrs Angusthorpe. ‘An instinct warned me then that you’d made an error.’

‘I haven’t made an error. I’ve told you, Mrs Angusthorpe –’

‘Time will erode the polish of politeness. One day soon you’ll see amusement in his eyes when you offer an opinion.’

‘Please stop, Mrs Angusthorpe. I must go away if you continue like this –’

‘ “This man’s a bore,” you’ll suddenly say to yourself, and look at him amazed.’

‘Mrs Angusthorpe –’

‘Amazed that you could ever have let it happen.’

‘Oh God, please stop,’ cried Daphne, tears coming suddenly from her eyes, her hands rushing to her cheeks.

‘Don’t be a silly girl,’ whispered Mrs Angusthorpe, grasping the arm of her companion and tightening her fingers on it until Daphne felt pain. She thought as she felt it that Mrs Angusthorpe was a poisonous woman. She struggled to keep back further tears, she tried to wrench her arm away.

‘I’ll tell the man Doyle to order you a car,’ said Mrs Angusthorpe. ‘It’ll take you into Galway. I’ll lend you money, Mrs Jackson. By one o’clock tonight you could be sitting in your bed at home, eating from a tray that your mother brought you. A divorce will come through and one day you’ll meet a man who’ll love you with a tenderness.’

‘My husband loves me, Mrs Angusthorpe –’

‘Your husband should marry a woman who’s keen on horses or golf, a woman who might take a whip to him, being ten years older than himself. My dear, you’re like me: you’re a delicate person.’

‘Please let go my arm. You’ve no right to talk to me like this –’

‘He is my husband’s creature, my husband moulded him. The best head boy he’d ever known, he said to me.’

Daphne, calmer now, did not say anything. She felt the pressure on her arm being removed. She stared ahead of her, at a round mat on the table that advertised Celebration Ale. Without wishing to and perhaps, she thought, because she was so upset, she saw herself suddenly as Mrs Angusthorpe had suggested, sitting up in her own bedroom with a tray of food on her knees and her mother standing beside her, saying it was all right. ‘I suddenly realized,’ she heard herself saying. ‘He took me to this awful hotel, where his old headmaster was. He gave me wine and whiskey, and then in bed I thought I might be sick.’ Her mother replied to her, telling her that it wasn’t a disgrace, and her father came in later and told her not to worry. It was better not to be unhappy, her father said: it was better to have courage now.

‘Let me tell Doyle to order a car at once.’ Mrs Angusthorpe was on her feet, eagerness in her eyes and voice. Her cheeks were flushed from sherry and excitement.

‘You’re quite outrageous,’ said Daphne Jackson.

She left the bar and in the hall Doyle again desired her as she passed. He spoke to her, telling her he’d already ordered a few more bottles of that sherry so that she and Mrs Angusthorpe could sip a little as often as they liked. It was sherry, he repeated, that was very popular in the locality. She nodded and mounted the stairs, not hearing much of what he said, feeling that as she pushed one leg in front of the other her whole body would open and tears would gush from everywhere. Why did she have to put up with talk like that on the first morning of her honeymoon? Why had he casually gone out fishing with his old headmaster? Why had he brought her to this terrible place and then made her drink so that the tension would leave her body? She sobbed on the stairs, causing Doyle to frown and feel concerned for her.

‘Are you all right?’ Jackson Major asked, standing in the doorway of their room, looking to where she sat, by the window. He closed the door and went to her. ‘You’ve been all right?’ he said.

She nodded, smiling a little. She spoke in a low voice: she said she thought it possible that conversations might be heard through the partition wall. She pointed to the wall she spoke of. ‘It’s only a partition,’ she said.

He touched it and agreed, but gave it as his opinion that little could be heard through it since they themselves had not heard the people on the other side of it. Partitions nowadays, he pronounced, were constructed always of soundproof material.

‘Let’s have a drink before lunch,’ she said.

In the hour that had elapsed since she had left Mrs Angusthorpe in the bar she had changed her stockings and her dress. She had washed her face in cold water and had put lipstick and powder on it. She had brushed her suede shoes with a rubber brush.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’ll have a little drink.’

He kissed her. On the way downstairs he told her about the morning’s fishing and the conversations he had had with his old headmaster. Not asking her what she’d like, he ordered both of them gin and tonic in the bar.

‘I know her better than you do, sir,’ Doyle said, bringing her a glass of sherry, but Jackson Major didn’t appear to realize what had happened, being still engrossed in the retailing of the conversations he had had with his old headmaster.

‘I want to leave this hotel,’ she said. ‘At once, darling, after lunch.’

‘Daphne –’

‘I do.’

She didn’t say that Mrs Angusthorpe had urged her to leave him, nor that the Angusthorpes had lain awake during the night, hearing what there was to hear. She simply said she didn’t at all like the idea of spending her honeymoon in a hotel which also contained his late headmaster and the headmaster’s wife. ‘They remember you as a boy,’ she said. ‘For some reason it makes me edgy. And anyway it’s such a nasty hotel.’

She leaned back after that speech, glad that she’d been able to make it as she’d planned to make it. They would move on after lunch, paying whatever money must necessarily be paid. They would find a pleasant room in a pleasant hotel and the tension inside her would gradually relax. In the Hurlingham Club she had made this tall man look at her when he spoke to her, she had made him regard her and find her attractive, as she found him. They had said to one another that they had fallen in love, he had asked her to marry him, and she had happily agreed: there was nothing the matter.

‘My dear, it would be quite impossible,’ he said.

‘Impossible?’

‘At this time of year, in the middle of the season? Hotel rooms are gold dust, my dear. Angusthorpe was saying as much. His wife’s a good sort, you know –’

‘I want to leave here.’

He laughed good-humouredly. He gestured with his hands, suggesting his helplessness.

‘I cannot stay here,’ she said.

‘You’re tired, Daphne.’

‘I cannot stay here for a fortnight with the Angusthorpes. She’s a woman who goes on all the time; there’s something the matter with her. While you go fishing –’

‘Darling, I had to go this morning. I felt it polite to go. If you like, I’ll not go out again at all.’

‘I’ve told you what I’d like.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ He turned away from her. She said:

‘I thought you would say yes at once.’

‘How the hell can I say yes when we’ve booked a room for the next fortnight and we’re duty-bound to pay for it? Do you really think we can just walk up to that man and say we don’t like his hotel and the people he has staying here?’

‘We could make some excuse. We could pretend –’

‘Pretend? Pretend, Daphne?’

‘Some illness. We could say my mother’s ill,’ she hurriedly said. ‘Or some aunt who doesn’t even exist. We could hire a car and drive around the coast –’

‘Daphne –’

‘Why not?’

‘For a start, I haven’t my driving licence with me.’

‘I have.’

‘I doubt it, Daphne.’

She thought, and then she agreed that she hadn’t. ‘We could go to Dublin,’ she said with a fresh burst of urgency. ‘Dublin’s a lovely place, people say. We could stay in Dublin and –’

‘My dear, this is a tourist country. Millions of tourists come here every summer. Do you really believe we’d find decent accommodation in Dublin in the middle of the season?’

‘It wouldn’t have to be decent. Some little clean hotel –’

‘Added to which, Daphne, I must honestly tell you that I have no wish to go gallivanting on my honeymoon. Nor do I care for the notion of telling lies about the illness of people who are not ill, or do not even exist.’

‘I’ll tell the lies. I’ll talk to Mr Doyle directly after lunch. I’ll talk to him now.’ She stood up. He shook his head, reaching for the hand that was nearer to him.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

Slowly she sat down again.

‘Oh, darling,’ she said.

‘We must be sensible, Daphne. We can’t just go gallivanting off –’

‘Why do you keep on about gallivanting? What’s it matter whether we’re gallivanting or not so long as we’re enjoying ourselves?’

‘Daphne –’

‘I’m asking you to do something to please me.’

Jackson Major, about to reply, changed his mind. He smiled at his bride. After a pause, he said:

‘If you really want to, Daphne –’

‘Well, I do. I think perhaps it’ll be awkward here with the Angusthorpes. And it’s not what we expected.’

‘It’s just a question,’ said Jackson Major, ‘of what we could possibly do. I’ve asked for my mail to be forwarded here and, as I say, I really believe it would be a case of out of the frying pan into nothing at all. It might prove horribly difficult.’

She closed her eyes and sat for a moment in silence. Then she opened them and, being unable to think of anything else to say, she said:

‘I’m sorry.’

He sighed, shrugging his shoulders slightly. He took her hand again. ‘You do see, darling?’ Before she could reply he added: ‘I’m sorry I was angry with you. I didn’t mean to be: I’m very sorry.’

He kissed her on the cheek that was near to him. He took her hand. ‘Now tell me,’ he said, ‘about everything that’s worrying you.’

She repeated, without more detail, what she had said already, but this time the sentences she spoke did not sound like complaints. He listened to her, sitting back and not interrupting, and then they conversed about all she had said. He agreed that it was a pity about the hotel and explained to her that what had happened, apparently, was that the old proprietor had died during the previous year. It was unfortunate too, he quite agreed, that the Angusthorpes should be here at the same time as they were because it would, of course, have been so much nicer to have been on their own. If she was worried about the partition in their room he would ask that their room should be changed for another one. He hadn’t known when she’d mentioned the partition before that it was the Angusthorpes who were on the other side of it. It would be better, really, not to be in the next room to the Angusthorpes since Angusthorpe had once been his headmaster, and he was certain that Doyle would understand a thing like that and agree to change them over, even if it meant greasing Doyle’s palm. ‘I imagine he’d fall in with anything,’ said Jackson Major, ‘for a bob or two.’

They finished their drinks and she followed him to the dining-room. There were no thoughts in her mind: no voice, neither her own nor Mrs Angusthorpe’s, spoke. For a reason she could not understand and didn’t want to bother to understand, the tension within her had snapped and was no longer there. The desire she had felt for tears when she’d walked away from Mrs Angusthorpe was far from her now; she felt a weariness, as though an ordeal was over and she had survived it. She didn’t know why she felt like that. All she knew was that he had listened to her: he had been patient and understanding, allowing her to say everything that was in her mind and then being reassuring. It was not his fault that the hotel had turned out so unfortunately. Nor was it his fault that a bullying old man had sought him out as a fishing companion. He couldn’t help it if his desire for her brought out a clumsiness in him. He was a man, she thought: he was not the same as she was: she must meet him half-way. He had said he was sorry for being angry with her.

In the hall they met the Angusthorpes on their way to the dining-room also.

‘I’m sorry if I upset you,’ Mrs Angusthorpe said to her, touching her arm to hold her back for a moment. ‘I’m afraid my temper ran away with me.’

The two men went ahead, involved in a new conversation. ‘We might try that little tributary this afternoon,’ the headmaster was suggesting.

‘I sat there afterwards, seeing how horrid it must have been for you,’ Mrs Angusthorpe said. ‘I was only angry at the prospect of an unpleasant fortnight. I took it out on you.’

‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘One should keep one’s anger to oneself. I feel embarrassed now,’ said Mrs Angusthorpe. ‘I’m not the sort of person –’

‘Please don’t worry,’ murmured Daphne, trying hard to keep the tiredness that possessed her out of her voice. She could sleep, she was thinking, for a week.

‘I don’t know why I talked like that.’

‘You were angry –’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Angusthorpe.

She stood still, not looking at Daphne and seeming not to wish to enter the dining-room. Some people went by, talking and laughing. Mr Gorman, the solicitor from Dublin, addressed her, but she did not acknowledge his greeting.

‘I think we must go in now, Mrs Angusthorpe,’ Daphne said.

In her weariness she smiled at Mrs Angusthorpe, suddenly sorry for her because she had so wretched a marriage that it caused her to become emotional with strangers.

‘It was just,’ said Mrs Angusthorpe, pausing uncertainly in the middle of her sentence and then continuing, ‘I felt that perhaps I should say something. I felt, Mrs Jackson –’

‘Let’s just forget it,’ interrupted Daphne, sensing with alarm that Mrs Angusthorpe was about to begin all over again, in spite of her protestations.

‘What?’

‘I think we must forget it all.’

Daphne smiled again, to reassure the woman who’d been outrageous because her temper had run away with her. She wanted to tell her that just now in the bar she herself had had a small outburst and that in the end she had seen the absurdity of certain suggestions she had made. She wanted to say that her husband had asked her what the matter was and then had said he was sorry. She wanted to explain, presumptuously perhaps, that there must be give and take in marriage, that a bed of roses was something that couldn’t be shared. She wanted to say that the tension she’d felt was no longer there, but she couldn’t find the energy for saying it.

‘Forget it?’ said Mrs Angusthorpe. ‘Yes, I suppose so. There are things that shouldn’t be talked about.’

‘It’s not that really,’ objected Daphne softly. ‘It’s just that I think you jumped to a lot of wrong conclusions.’

‘I had an instinct,’ began Mrs Angusthorpe with all her previous eagerness and urgency. ‘I saw you at breakfast-time, an innocent girl. I couldn’t help remembering.’

‘It’s different for us,’ said Daphne, feeling embarrassed to have to converse again in this intimate vein. ‘At heart my husband’s patient with me. And understanding too: he listens to me.’

‘Of course,’ agreed Mrs Angusthorpe, slowly nodding her head and moving at last towards the dining-room.

The Mark-2 Wife

Standing alone at the Lowhrs’ party, Anna Mackintosh thought about her husband Edward, establishing him clearly for this purpose in her mind’s eye. He was a thin man, forty-one years of age, with fair hair that was often untidy. In the seventeen years they’d been married he had changed very little: he was still nervous with other people, and smiled in the same abashed way, and his face was still almost boyish. She believed she had failed him because he had wished for children and she had not been able to supply any. She had, over the years, developed a nervous condition about this fact and in the end, quite some time ago now, she had consulted a psychiatrist, a Dr Abbatt, at Edward’s pleading.

In the Lowhrs’ rich drawing-room, its walls and ceiling gleaming with a metallic surface of ersatz gold, Anna listened to dance music coming from a tape-recorder and continued to think about her husband. In a moment he would be at the party too, since they had agreed to meet there, although by now it was three-quarters of an hour later than the time he had stipulated. The Lowhrs were people he knew in a business way, and he had said he thought it wise that he and Anna should attend this gathering of theirs. She had never met them before, which made it more difficult for her, having to wait about, not knowing a soul in the room. When she thought about it she felt hard done by, for although Edward was kind to her and always had been, it was far from considerate to be as late as this. Because of her nervous condition she felt afraid and had developed a sickness in her stomach. She looked at her watch and sighed.

People arrived, some of them kissing the Lowhrs, others nodding and smiling. Two dark-skinned maids carried trays of drinks among the guests, offering them graciously and murmuring thanks when a glass was accepted. ‘I’ll be there by half past nine,’ Edward had said that morning. ‘If you don’t turn up till ten you won’t have to be alone at all.’ He had kissed her after that, and had left the house. I’ll wear the blue, she thought, for she liked the colour better than any other: it suggested serenity to her, and the idea of serenity, especially as a quality in herself, was something she valued. She had said as much to Dr Abbatt, who had agreed that serenity was something that should be important in her life.

An elderly couple, tall twig-like creatures of seventy-five, a General Ritchie and his wife, observed the lone state of Anna Mackintosh and reacted in different ways. ‘That woman seems out of things,’ said Mrs Ritchie. ‘We should go and talk to her.’

But the General suggested that there was something the matter with this woman who was on her own. ‘Now, don’t let’s get involved,’ he rather tetchily begged. ‘In any case she doesn’t look in the mood for chat.’

His wife shook her head. ‘Our name is Ritchie,’ she said to Anna, and Anna, who had been looking at the whisky in her glass, lifted her head and saw a thin old woman who was as straight as a needle, and behind her a man who was thin also but who stooped a bit and seemed to be cross. ‘He’s an old soldier,’ said Mrs Ritchie. ‘A general that was.’

Strands of white hair trailed across the pale dome of the old man’s head. He had sharp eyes, like a terrier’s, and a grey moustache. ‘It’s not a party I care to be at,’ he muttered, holding out a bony hand. ‘My wife’s the one for this.’

Anna said who she was and added that her husband was late and that she didn’t know the Lowhrs.

‘We thought it might be something like that,’ said Mrs Ritchie. ‘We don’t know anyone either, but at least we have one another to talk to.’ The Lowhrs, she added, were an awfully nice, generous couple.

‘We met them on a train in Switzerland,’ the General murmured quietly.

Anna glanced across the crowded room at the people they spoke of. The Lowhrs were wholly different in appearance from the Ritchies. They were small and excessively fat, and they both wore glasses and smiled a lot. Like jolly gnomes, she thought.

‘My husband knows them in a business way,’ she said. She looked again at her watch: the time was half past ten. There was a silence, and then Mrs Ritchie said:

‘They invited us to two other parties in the past. It’s very kind, for we don’t give parties ourselves any more. We live a quiet sort of life now.’ She went on talking, saying among other things that it was pleasant to see the younger set at play. When she stopped, the General added:

‘The Lowhrs feel sorry for us, actually.’

‘They’re very kind,’ his wife repeated.

Anna had been aware of a feeling of uneasiness the moment she’d entered the golden room, and had Edward ‘been with her she’d have wanted to say that they should turn round and go away again. The uneasiness had increased whenever she’d noted the time, and for some reason these old people for whom the Lowhrs were sorry had added to it even more. She would certainly talk this over with Dr Abbatt, she decided, and then, quite absurdly, she felt an urge to telephone Dr Abbatt and tell him at once about the feeling she had. She closed her eyes, thinking that she would keep them like that for only the slightest moment so that the Ritchies wouldn’t notice and think it odd. While they were still closed she heard Mrs Ritchie say:

‘Are you all right, Mrs Mackintosh?’

She opened her eyes and saw that General Ritchie and his wife were examining her face with interest. She imagined them wondering about her, a woman of forty whose husband was an hour late. They’d be thinking, she thought, that the absent husband didn’t have much of a feeling for his wife to be as careless as that. And yet, they’d probably think, he must have had a feeling for her once since he had married her in the first place.

‘It’s just,’ said Mrs Ritchie, ‘that I had the notion you were going to faint.’

The voice of Petula Clark came powerfully from the tape-recorder. At one end of the room people were beginning to dance in a casual way, some still holding their glasses in their hands.

‘The heat could have affected you,’ said the General, bending forward so that his words would reach her.

Anna shook her head. She tried to smile, but the smile failed to materialize. She said:

‘I never faint, actually.’

She could feel a part of herself attempting to bar from her mind the entry of unwelcome thoughts. Hastily she said, unable to think of anything better:

‘My husband’s really frightfully late.’

‘You know,’ said General Ritchie, ‘it seems to me we met your husband here.’ He turned to his wife. ‘A fair-haired man – he said his name was Mackintosh. Is your husband fair, Mrs Mackintosh?’

‘Of course,’ cried Mrs Ritchie. ‘Awfully nice.’

Anna said that Edward was fair. Mrs Ritchie smiled at her husband and handed him her empty glass. He reached out for Anna’s. She said:

‘Whisky, please. By itself.’

‘He’s probably held up in bloody traffic,’ said the General before moving off.

‘Yes, probably that,’ Mrs Ritchie said. ‘I do remember him well, you know.’

‘Edward did come here before. I had a cold.’

‘Completely charming. We said so afterwards.’

One of the dark-skinned maids paused with a tray of drinks. Mrs Ritchie explained that her husband was fetching some. ‘Thank you, madam,’ said the dark-skinned maid, and the General returned.

‘It isn’t the traffic,’ Anna said rather suddenly and loudly. ‘Edward’s not held up like that at all.’

The Ritchies sipped their drinks. They can sense I’m going to be a nuisance, Anna thought. ‘I’m afraid it’ll be boring,’ he had said. ‘We’ll slip away at eleven and have dinner in Charlotte Street.’ She heard him saying it now, quite distinctly. She saw him smiling at her.

‘I get nervous about things,’ she said to the Ritchies. ‘I worry unnecessarily. I try not to.’

Mrs Ritchie inclined her head in a sympathetic manner; the General coughed. There was a silence and then Mrs Ritchie spoke about episodes in their past. Anna looked at her watch and saw that it was five to eleven. ‘Oh God,’ she said.

The Ritchies asked her again if she was all right. She began to say she was but she faltered before the sentence was complete, and in that moment she gave up the struggle. What was the point, she thought, of exhausting oneself being polite and making idle conversation when all the time one was in a frightful state?

‘He’s going to be married again,’ she said quietly and evenly. ‘His Mark-2 wife.’

She felt better at once. The sickness left her stomach; she drank a little whisky and found its harsh taste a comfort.

‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry,’ said Mrs Ritchie.

Anna had often dreamed of the girl. She had seen her, dressed all in purple, with slim hips and a purple bow in her black hair. She had seen the two of them together in a speedboat, the beautiful young creature laughing her head off like a figure in an advertisement. She had talked for many hours to Dr Abbatt about her, and Dr Abbatt had made the point that the girl was simply an obsession. ‘It’s just a little nonsense,’ he had said to her kindly, more than once. Anna knew in her calmer moments that it was just a little nonsense, for Edward was always kind and had never ceased to say he loved her. But in bad moments she argued against that conclusion, reminding herself that other kind men who said they loved their wives often made off with something new. Her own marriage being childless would make the whole operation simpler.

‘I hadn’t thought it would happen at a party,’ Anna said to the Ritchies. ‘Edward has always been decent and considerate. I imagined he would tell me quietly at home, and comfort me. I imagined he would be decent to the end.’

‘You and your husband are not yet separated then?’ Mrs Ritchie inquired.

‘This is the way it is happening,’ Anna repeated. ‘D’you understand? Edward is delayed by his Mark-2 wife because she insists on delaying him. She’s demanding that he should make his decision and afterwards that he and she should come to tell me, so that I won’t have to wait any more. You understand,’ she repeated, looking closely from one face to the other, ‘that this isn’t Edward’s doing?’

‘But, Mrs Mackintosh –’

‘I have a woman’s intuition about it. I have felt my woman’s intuition at work since the moment I entered this room. I know precisely what’s going to happen.’

Often, ever since the obsession had begun, she had wondered if she had any rights at all. Had she rights in the matter, she had asked herself, since she was running to fat and could supply no children? The girl would repeatedly give birth and everyone would be happy, for birth was a happy business. She had suggested to Dr Abbatt that she probably hadn’t any rights, and for once he had spoken to her sternly. She said it now to the Ritchies, because it didn’t seem to matter any more what words were spoken. On other occasions, when she was at home, Edward had been late and she had sat and waited for him, pretending it was a natural thing for him to be late. And when he arrived her fears had seemed absurd.

‘You understand?’ she said to the Ritchies.

The Ritchies nodded their thin heads, the General embarrassed, his wife concerned. They waited for Anna to speak. She said:

‘The Lowhrs will feel sorry for me, as they do for you. “This poor woman,” they’ll cry, “left in the lurch at our party! What a ghastly thing!” I should go home, you know, but I haven’t even the courage for that.’

‘Could we help at all?’ asked Mrs Ritchie.

‘You’ve been married all this time and not come asunder. Have you had children, Mrs Ritchie?’

Mrs Ritchie replied that she had had two boys and a girl. They were well grown up by now, she explained, and among them had provided her and the General with a dozen grandchildren.

‘What did you think of my husband?’

‘Charming, Mrs Mackintosh, as I said.’

‘Not the sort of man who’d mess a thing like this up? You thought the opposite, I’m sure: that with bad news to break he’d choose the moment elegantly. Once he would have.’

‘I don’t understand,’ protested Mrs Ritchie gently, and the General lent his support to that with a gesture.

‘Look at me,’ said Anna. ‘I’ve worn well enough. Neither I nor Edward would deny it. A few lines and flushes, fatter and coarser. No one can escape all that. Did you never feel like a change, General?’

‘A change?’

‘I have to be rational. I have to say that it’s no reflection on me. D’you understand that?’

‘Of course it’s no reflection.’

‘It’s like gadgets in shops. You buy a gadget and you develop an affection for it, having decided on it in the first place because you thought it was attractive. But all of a sudden there are newer and better gadgets in the shops. More up-to-date models.’ She paused. She found a handkerchief and blew her nose. She said:

‘You must excuse me: I am not myself tonight.’

‘You mustn’t get upset. Please don’t,’ Mrs Ritchie said.

Anna drank all the whisky in her glass and lifted another glass from a passing tray. ‘There are too many people in this room,’ she complained. ‘There’s not enough ventilation. It’s ideal for tragedy.’

Mrs Ritchie shook her head. She put her hand on Anna’s arm. ‘Would you like us to go home with you and see you safely in?’

‘I have to stay here.’

‘Mrs Mackintosh, your husband would never act like that.’

‘People in love are cruel. They think of themselves: why should they bother to honour the feelings of a discarded wife?’

‘Oh, come now,’ said Mrs Ritchie.

At that moment a bald man came up to Anna and took her glass from her hand and led her, without a word, on to the dancing area. As he danced with her, she thought that something else might have happened. Edward was not with anyone, she said to herself: Edward was dead. A telephone had rung in the Lowhrs’ house and a voice had said that, en route to their party, a man had dropped dead on the pavement. A maid had taken the message and, not quite understanding it, had done nothing about it.

‘I think we should definitely go home now,’ General Ritchie said to his wife. ‘We could be back for A Book at Bedtime’

‘We cannot leave her as easily as that. Just look at the poor creature.’

‘That woman is utterly no concern of ours.’

‘Just look at her.’

The General sighed and swore and did as he was bidden.

‘My husband was meant to turn up,’ Anna said to the bald man. ‘I’ve just thought he may have died.’ She laughed to indicate that she did not really believe this, in case the man became upset. But the man seemed not to be interested. She could feel his lips playing with a strand of her hair. Death, she thought, she could have accepted.

Anna could see the Ritchies watching her. Their faces were grave, but it came to her suddenly that the gravity was artificial. What, after all, was she to them that they should bother? She was a wretched woman at a party, a woman in a state, who was making an unnecessary fuss because her husband was about to give her her marching orders. Had the Ritchies been mocking her, she wondered, he quite directly, she in some special, subtle way of her own?

‘Do you know those people I was talking to?’ she said to her partner, but with a portion of her hair still in his mouth he made no effort at reply. Passing near to her, she noticed the thick, square fingers of Mr Lowhr embedded in the flesh of his wife’s shoulder. The couple danced by, seeing her and smiling, and it seemed to Anna that their smiles were as empty as the Ritchies’ sympathy.

‘My husband is leaving me for a younger woman,’ she said to the bald man, a statement that caused him to shrug. He had pressed himself close to her, his knees on her thighs, forcing her legs this way and that. His hands were low on her body now, advancing on her buttocks. He was eating her hair.

‘I’m sorry,’ Anna said. ‘I’d rather you didn’t do that.’

He released her where they stood and smiled agreeably: she could see pieces of her hair on his teeth. He walked away, and she turned and went in the opposite direction.

‘We’re really most concerned,’ said Mrs Ritchie. She and her husband were standing where Anna had left them, as though waiting for her. General Ritchie held out her glass to her.

‘Why should you be concerned? That bald man ate my hair. That’s what people do to used-up women like me. They eat your hair and force their bodies on you. You know, General.’

‘Certainly, I don’t. Not in the least.’

‘That man knew all about me. D’you think he’d have taken his liberties if he hadn’t? A man like that can guess.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Mrs Ritchie firmly. She stared hard at Anna, endeavouring to impress upon her the errors in her logic.

‘If you want to know, that man’s a drunk,’ said the General. ‘He was far gone when he arrived here and he’s more so now.’

‘Why are you saying that?’ Anna cried shrilly. ‘Why are you telling me lies and mocking me?’

‘Lies?’ demanded the General, snapping the word out. ‘Lies?’

‘My dear, we’re not mocking you,’ murmured Mrs Ritchie.

‘You and those Lowhrs and everyone else, God knows. The big event at this party is that Edward Mackintosh will reject his wife for another.’

‘Oh now, Mrs Mackintosh –’

‘Second marriages are often happier, you know. No reason why they shouldn’t be.’

‘We would like to help if we could,’ Mrs Ritchie said.

‘Help? In God’s name, how can I be helped? How can two elderly strangers help me when my husband gives me up? What kind of help? Would you give me money – an income, say? Or offer me some other husband? Would you come to visit me and talk to me so that I shouldn’t be lonely? Or strike down my husband, General, to show your disapproval? Would you scratch out the little girl’s eyes for me, Mrs Ritchie? Would you slap her brazen face?’

‘We simply thought we might help in some way,’ Mrs Ritchie said. ‘Just because we’re old and pretty useless doesn’t mean we can’t make an effort.’

‘We are all God’s creatures, you are saying. We should offer aid to one another at every opportunity, when marriages get broken and decent husbands are made cruel. Hold my hands then, and let us wait for Edward and his Mark-2 wife. Let’s all three speak together and tell them what we think.’

She held out her hands, but the Ritchies did not take them.

‘We don’t mean to mock you, as you seem to think,’ the General said. ‘I must insist on that, madam.’

‘You’re mocking me with your talk about helping. The world is not like that. You like to listen to me for my entertainment value: I’m a good bit of gossip for you. I’m a woman going on about her husband and then getting insulted by a man and seeing the Lowhrs smiling over it. Tell your little grandchildren that some time.’

Mrs Ritchie said that the Lowhrs, she was sure, had not smiled at any predicament that Anna had found herself in, and the General impatiently repeated that the man was drunk.

‘The Lowhrs smiled,’ Anna said, ‘and you have mocked me too. Though perhaps you don’t even know it.’

As she pushed a passage through the people, she felt the sweat running on her face and her body. There was a fog of smoke in the room by now, and the voices of the people, struggling to be heard above the music, were louder than before. The man she had danced with was sitting in a corner with his shoes off, and a woman in a crimson dress was trying to persuade him to put them on again. At the door of the room she found Mr Lowhr. ‘Shall we dance?’ he said.

She shook her head, feeling calmer all of a sudden. Mr Lowhr suggested a drink.

‘May I telephone?’ she said. ‘Quietly somewhere?’

‘Upstairs,’ said Mr Lowhr, smiling immensely at her. ‘Up two flights, the door ahead of you: a tiny guest-room. Take a glass with you.’

She nodded, saying she’d like a little whisky.

‘Let me give you a tip,’ Mr Lowhr said as he poured her some from a nearby bottle. ‘Always buy Haig whisky. It’s distilled by a special method.’

‘You’re never going so soon?’ said Mrs Lowhr, appearing at her husband’s side.

‘Just to telephone,’ said Mr Lowhr. He held out his hand with the glass of whisky in it. Anna took it, and as she did so she caught a glimpse of the Ritchies watching her from the other end of the room. Her calmness vanished. The Lowhrs, she noticed, were looking at her too, and smiling. She wanted to ask them why they were smiling, but she knew if she did that they’d simply make some polite reply. Instead she said:

‘You shouldn’t expose your guests to men who eat hair. Even unimportant guests.’

She turned her back on them and passed from the room. She crossed the hall, sensing that she was being watched. ‘Mrs Mackintosh,’ Mr Lowhr called after her.

His plumpness filled the doorway. He hovered, seeming uncertain about pursuing her, His face was bewildered and apparently upset.

‘Has something disagreeable happened?’ he said in a low voice across the distance between them.

‘You saw. You and your wife thought fit to laugh, Mr Lowhr.’

‘I do assure you, Mrs Mackintosh, I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘It’s fascinating, I suppose. Your friends the Ritchies find it fascinating too.’

‘Look here, Mrs Mackintosh –’

‘Oh, don’t blame them. They’ve nothing left but to watch and mock, at an age like that. The point is, there’s a lot of hypocrisy going on tonight. ‘She nodded at Mr Lowhr to emphasize that last remark, and then went swiftly upstairs.

‘I imagine the woman’s gone off home,’ the General said. ‘I dare say her husband’s drinking in a pub.’

‘I worried once,’ replied Mrs Ritchie, speaking quietly, for she didn’t wish the confidence to be heard by others. ‘That female, Mrs Flyte.’

The General roared with laughter. ‘Trixie Flyte,’ he shouted. ‘Good God, she was a free-for-all!’

‘Oh, do be quiet.’

‘Dear girl, you didn’t ever think –’

‘I didn’t know what to think, if you want to know.’

Greatly amused, the General seized what he hoped would be his final drink. He placed it behind a green plant on a table. ‘Shall we dance one dance,’ he said, ‘just to amuse them? And then when I’ve had that drink to revive me we can thankfully make our way.’

But he found himself talking to nobody, for when he had turned from his wife to secrete his drink she had moved away. He followed her to where she was questioning Mrs Lowhr.

‘Some little tiff,’ Mrs Lowhr was saying as he approached.

‘Hardly a tiff,’ corrected Mrs Ritchie. ‘The woman’s terribly upset.’ She turned to her husband, obliging him to speak.

‘Upset,’ he said.

‘Oh, there now,’ cried Mrs Lowhr, taking each of the Ritchies by an arm. ‘Why don’t you take the floor and forget it?’

They both of them recognized from her tone that she was thinking the elderly exaggerated things and didn’t always understand the ways of marriage in the modern world. The General especially resented the insinuation. He said:

‘Has the woman gone away?’

‘She’s upstairs telephoning. Some silly chap upset her apparently, during a dance. That’s all it is, you know.’

‘You’ve got the wrong end of the stick entirely,’ said the General angrily, ‘and you’re trying to say we have. The woman believes her husband may arrive here with the girl he’s chosen as his second wife.’

‘But that’s ridiculous!’ cried Mrs Lowhr with a tinkling laugh.

‘It is what the woman thinks,’ said the General loudly, ‘whether it’s ridiculous or not.’ More quietly, Mrs Ritchie added:

‘She thinks she has a powerful intuition when all it is is a disease.’

‘I’m cross with this Mrs Mackintosh for upsetting you two dear people!’ cried Mrs Lowhr with a shrillness that matched her roundness and her glasses. ‘I really and truly am.’

A big man came up as she spoke and lifted her into his arms, preparatory to dancing with her. ‘What could anyone do?’ she called back at the Ritchies as the man rotated her away. ‘What can you do for a nervy woman like that?’

There was dark wallpaper on the walls of the room: black and brown with little smears of muted yellow. The curtains matched it; so did the bedspread on the low single bed, and the covering on the padded headboard. The Carpet ran from wall to wall and was black and thick. There was a narrow wardrobe with a door of padded black leather and brass studs and an ornamental brass handle. The dressing-table and the stool in front of it reflected this general motif in different ways. Two shelves, part of the bed, attached to it on either side of the pillows, served as bedside tables: on each there was a lamp, and on one of them a white telephone.

As Anna closed and locked the door, she felt that in a dream she had been in a dark room in a house where there was a party, waiting for Edward to bring her terrible news. She drank a little whisky and moved towards the telephone. She dialled a number and when a voice answered her call she said:

‘Dr Abbatt? It’s Anna Mackintosh.’

His voice, as always, was so soft she could hardly hear it. ‘Ah, Mrs Mackintosh,’ he said.

‘I want to talk to you.’

‘Of course, Mrs Mackintosh, of course. Tell me now.’

‘I’m at a party given by people called Lowhr. Edward was to be here but he didn’t turn up. I was all alone and then two old people like scarecrows talked to me. They said their name was Ritchie. And a man ate my hair when we were dancing. The Lowhrs smiled at that.’

‘I see. Yes?’

‘I’m in a room at the top of the house. I’ve locked the door.’

‘Tell me about the room, Mrs Mackintosh.’

‘There’s black leather on the wardrobe and the dressing-table. Curtains and things match. Dr Abbatt?’

‘Yes?’

‘The Ritchies are people who injure other people, I think. Intentionally or unintentionally, it never matters.’

‘They are strangers to you, these Ritchies?’

‘They attempted to mock me. People know at this party, Dr Abbatt; they sense what’s going to happen because of how I look.’

Watching for her to come downstairs, the Ritchies stood in the hall and talked to one another.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Mrs Ritchie. ‘I know it would be nicer to go home.’

‘What can we do, old sticks like us? We know not a thing about such women. It’s quite absurd.’

‘The woman’s on my mind, dear. And on yours too. You know it.’

‘I think she’ll be more on our minds if we come across her again. She’ll turn nasty, I’ll tell you that.’

‘Yes, but it would please me to wait a little.’

‘To be insulted,’ said the General.

‘Oh, do stop being so cross, dear.’

‘The woman’s a stranger to us. She should regulate her life and have done with it. She has no right to bother people.’

‘She is a human being in great distress. No, don’t say anything, please, if it isn’t pleasant.’

The General went into a sulk, and at the end of it he said grudgingly:

‘Trixie Flyte was nothing.’

‘Oh, I know. Trixie Flyte is dead and done for years ago. I didn’t worry like this woman if that’s what’s on your mind.’

‘It wasn’t,’ lied the General. ‘The woman worries ridiculously.’

‘I think, you know, we may yet be of use to her: I have a feeling about that.’

‘For God’s sake, leave the feelings to her. We’ve had enough of that for one day.’

‘As I said to her, we’re not entirely useless. No one ever can be.’

‘You feel you’re being attacked again, Mrs Mackintosh. Are you calm? You haven’t been drinking too much?’

‘A little.’

‘I see.’

‘I am being replaced by a younger person.’

‘You say you’re in a bedroom. Is it possible for you to lie on the bed and talk to me at the same time? Would it be comfortable?’

Anna placed the receiver on the bed and settled herself. She picked it up again and said:

‘If he died, there would be a funeral and I’d never forget his kindness to me. I can’t do that if he has another wife.’

‘We have actually been over this ground,’ said Dr Abbatt more softly than ever. ‘But we can of course go over it again.’

‘Any time, you said.’

‘Of course.’

‘What has happened is perfectly simple. Edward is with the girl. He is about to arrive here to tell me to clear off. She’s insisting on that. It’s not Edward, you know.’

‘Mrs Mackintosh, I’m going to speak firmly now. We’ve agreed between us that there’s no young girl in your husband’s life. You have an obsession, Mrs Mackintosh, about the fact that you have never had children and that men sometimes marry twice –’

‘There’s such a thing as the Mark-2 wife!’ Anna cried. ‘You know there is. A girl of nineteen who’ll delightedly give birth to Edward’s sons.’

‘No, no –’

‘I had imagined Edward telling me. I had imagined him pushing back his hair and lighting a cigarette in his untidy way. “I’m terribly sorry,” he would say, and leave me nothing to add to that. Instead it’s like this: a nightmare.’

‘It is not a nightmare, Mrs Mackintosh.’

‘This party is a nightmare. People are vultures here.’

‘Mrs Mackintosh, I must tell you that I believe you’re seeing the people at this party in a most exaggerated light.’

‘A man –’

‘A man nibbled your hair. Worse things can happen. This is not a nightmare, Mrs Mackintosh. Your husband has been delayed. Husbands are always being delayed. D’you see? You and I and your husband are all together trying to rid you of this perfectly normal obsession you’ve developed. We mustn’t complicate matters, now must we?’

‘I didn’t run away, Dr Abbatt. I said to myself I mustn’t run away from this party. I must wait and face whatever was to happen. You told me to face things.’

‘I didn’t tell you, my dear. We agreed between us. We talked it out, the difficulty about facing things, and we saw the wisdom of it. Now I want you to go back to the party and wait for your husband.’

‘He’s more than two hours late.’

‘My dear Mrs Mackintosh, an hour or so is absolutely nothing these days. Now listen to me please.’

She listened to the soft voice as it reminded her of all that between them they had agreed. Dr Abbatt went over the ground, from the time she had first consulted him to the present moment. He charted her obsession until it seemed once again, as he said, a perfectly normal thing for a woman of forty to have.

After she had said goodbye, Anna sat on the bed feeling very calm. She had read the message behind Dr Abbatt’s words: that it was ridiculous, her perpetually going on in this lunatic manner. She had come to a party and in no time at all she’d been behaving in a way that was, she supposed, mildly crazy. It always happened, she knew, and it would as long as the trouble remained: in her mind, when she began to worry, everything became jumbled and unreal, turning her into an impossible person. How could Edward, for heaven’s sake, be expected to live with her fears and her suppositions? Edward would crack as others would, tormented by an impossible person. He’d become an alcoholic or he’d have some love affair with a woman just as old as she was, and the irony of that would be too great. She knew, as she sat there, that she couldn’t help herself and that as long as she lived with Edward she wouldn’t be able to do any better. ‘I have lost touch with reality,’ she said. ‘I shall let him go, as a bird is released. In my state how can I have rights?’

She left the room and slowly descended the stairs. There were framed prints of old motor-cars on the wall and she paused now and again to examine one, emphasizing to herself her own continued calmness. She was thinking that she’d get herself a job. She might even tell Edward that Dr Abbatt had suggested their marriage should end since she wasn’t able to live with her thoughts any more. She’d insist on a divorce at once. She didn’t mind the thought of it now, because of course it would be different: she was doing what she guessed Dr Abbatt had been willing her to do for quite a long time really: she was taking matters into her own hands, she was acting positively – rejecting, not being rejected herself. Her marriage was ending cleanly and correctly.

She found her coat and thanked the dark-skinned maid who held it for her. Edward was probably at the party by now, but in the new circumstances that was neither here nor there. She’d go home in a taxi and pack a suitcase and then telephone for another taxi. She’d leave a note for Edward and go to a hotel, without telling him where.

‘Good-night,’ she said to the maid. She stepped towards the hall door as the maid opened it for her, and as she did so she felt a hand touch her shoulder. ‘No, Edward,’ she said. ‘I must go now.’ But when she turned she saw that the hand belonged to Mrs Ritchie. Behind her, looking tired, stood the General. For a moment there was a silence. Then Anna, speaking to both of them, said:

‘I’m extremely sorry. Please forgive me.’

‘We were worried about you,’ said Mrs Ritchie. ‘Will you be all right, my dear?’

‘The fear is worse than the reality, Mrs Ritchie. I can no longer live with the fear.’

‘We understand.’

‘It’s strange,’ Anna said, passing through the doorway and standing at the top of the steps that led to the street. ‘Strange, coming to a party like this, given by people I didn’t know and meeting you and being so rude. Please don’t tell me if my husband is here or not. It doesn’t concern me now. I’m quite calm.’

The Ritchies watched her descend the steps and call out to a passing taxi-cab. They watched the taxi drive away.

‘Calm!’ said General Ritchie.

‘She’s still in a state, poor thing,’ agreed his wife. ‘I do feel sorry.’

They stood on the steps of the Lowhrs’ house, thinking about the brief glance they had had of another person’s life, bewildered by it and saddened, for they themselves, though often edgy on the surface, had had a happy marriage.

‘At least she’s standing on her own feet now,’ Mrs Ritchie said. ‘I think it’ll save her.’

A taxi drew up at the house and the Ritchies watched it, thinking for a moment that Anna Mackintosh, weak in her resolve, had returned in search of her husband. But it was a man who emerged and ran up the steps in a manner which suggested that, like the man who had earlier misbehaved on the dance-floor, he was not entirely sober. He passed the Ritchies and entered the house. ‘That is Edward Mackintosh,’ said Mrs Ritchie.

The girl who was paying the taxi-driver paused in what she was doing to see where her companion had dashed away to and observed two thin figures staring at her from the lighted doorway, murmuring to one another.

‘Cruel,’ said the General. ‘The woman said so: we must give her that.’

‘He’s a kind man,’ replied Mrs Ritchie. ‘He’ll listen to us.’

‘To us, for heaven’s sake?’

‘We have a thing to do, as I said we might have.’

‘The woman has gone. I’m not saying I’m not sorry for her –’

‘And who shall ask for mercy for the woman, since she cannot ask herself? There is a little to be saved, you know: she has made a gesture, poor thing. It must be honoured.’

‘My dear, we don’t know these people; we met the woman quite in passing.’

The girl came up the steps, settling her purse into its right place in her handbag. She smiled at the Ritchies, and they thought that the smile had a hint of triumph about it, as though it was her first smile since the victory that Anna Mackintosh had said some girl was winning that night.

‘Even if he’d listen,’ muttered the General when the girl had passed by, ‘I doubt that she would.’

‘It’s just that a little time should be allowed to go by,’ his wife reminded him. ‘That’s all that’s required. Until the woman’s found her feet again and feels she has a voice in her own life.’

‘We’re interfering,’ said the General, and his wife said nothing. They looked at one another, remembering vividly the dread in Anna Mackintosh’s face and the confusion that all her conversation had revealed.

The General shook his head. ‘We are hardly the happiest choice,’ he said, in a gentler mood at last, ‘but I dare say we must try.’

He closed the door of the house and they paused for a moment in the hall, talking again of the woman who had told them her troubles. They drew a little strength from that, and felt armed to face once more the Lowhrs’ noisy party. Together they moved towards it and through it, in search of a man they had met once before on a similar occasion. ‘We are sorry for interfering,’ they would quietly say; and making it seem as natural as they could, they would ask him to honour, above all else and in spite of love, the gesture of a woman who no longer interested him.

‘A tall order,’ protested the General, pausing in his forward motion, doubtful again.

‘When the wrong people do things,’ replied his wife, ‘it sometimes works.’ She pulled him on until they stood before Edward Mackintosh and the girl he’d chosen as his Mark-2 wife. They smiled at Edward Mackintosh and shook hands with him, and then there was a silence before the General said that it was odd, in a way, what they had to request.

An Evening with John Joe Dempsey

In Keogh’s one evening Mr Lynch talked about the Piccadilly tarts, and John Joe Dempsey on his fifteenth birthday closed his eyes and travelled into a world he did not know. ‘Big and little,’ said Mr Lynch, ‘winking their eyes at you and enticing you up to them. Wetting their lips,’ said Mr Lynch, ‘with the ends of their tongues.’

John Joe Dempsey had walked through the small town that darkening autumn evening, from the far end of North Street where he and his mother lived, past the cement building that was the Coliseum cinema, past Kelly’s Atlantic Hotel and a number of shops that were now closed for the day. ‘Go to Keogh’s like a good boy,’ his mother had requested, for as well as refreshments and stimulants Keogh’s public house sold a variety of groceries: it was for a pound of rashers that Mrs Dempsey had sent her son.

‘Who is there?’ Mr Lynch had called out from the licensed area of the premises, hearing John Joe rapping with a coin to draw attention to his presence. A wooden partition with panes of glass in the top half of it rose to a height of eight feet between the grocery and the bar. ‘I’m here for rashers,’ John Joe explained through the pebbly glass. ‘Isn’t it a stormy evening, Mr Lynch? I’m fifteen today, Mr Lynch.’

There was a silence before a door in the partition opened and Mr Lynch appeared. ‘Fifteen?’ he said. ‘Step in here, boy, and have a bottle of stout.’

John Joe protested that he was too young to drink a bottle of stout and then said that his mother required the rashers immediately. ‘Mrs Keogh’s gone out to Confession,’ Mr Lynch said. ‘I’m in charge till her ladyship returns.’

John Joe, knowing that Mr Lynch would not be prepared to set the bacon machine in action, stepped into the bar to await the return of Mrs Keogh, and Mr Lynch darted behind the counter for two bottles of stout. Having opened and poured them, he began about the Piccadilly tarts.

‘You’ve got to an age,’ Mr Lynch said, ‘when you would have to be advised. Did you ever think in terms of emigration to England?’

‘I did not, Mr Lynch.’

‘I would say you were right to leave it alone, John Joe. Is that the first bottle of stout you ever had?’

‘It is, Mr Lynch.’

‘A bottle of stout is an acquired taste. You have to have had a dozen bottles or maybe more before you do get an urge for it. With the other matter it’s different.’

Mr Lynch, now a large, fresh-faced man of fifty-five who was never seen without a brown hat on his head, had fought for the British Army during the Second World War, which was why one day in 1947 he had found himself, with companions, in Piccadilly Circus. As he listened, John Joe recalled that he’d heard boys at the Christian Brothers’ referring to some special story that Mr Lynch confidentially told to those whom he believed would benefit from it. He had heard boys sniggering over this story, but he had never sought to discover its content, not knowing it had to do with Piccadilly tarts.

‘There was a fellow by the name of Baker,’ said Mr Lynch, ‘who’d been telling us that he knew the ropes. Baker was a London man. He knew the places, he was saying, where he could find the glory girls, but when it came to the point of the matter, John Joe, we hardly needed a guide.’

Because, explained Mr Lynch, the tarts were everywhere. They stood in the doorways of shops showing off the stature of their legs. Some would speak to you, Mr Lynch said, addressing you fondly and stating their availability. Some had their bosoms cocked out so that maybe they’d strike a passing soldier and entice him away from his companions. ‘I’m telling you this, John Joe, on account of your daddy being dead. Are you fancying that stout?’

John Joe nodded his head. Thirteen years ago his father had fallen to his death from a scaffold, having been by trade a builder. John Joe could not remember him, although he knew what he had looked like from a photograph that was always on view on the kitchen dresser. He had often wondered what it would be like to have that bulky man about the house, and more often still he listened to his mother talking about him. But John Joe didn’t think about his father now, in spite of Mr Lynch’s reference to him: keen to hear more about the women of Piccadilly, he asked what had happened when Mr Lynch and his companions finished examining them in the doorways.

‘I saw terrible things in Belgium,’ replied Mr Lynch meditatively. ‘I saw a Belgian woman held down on the floor while four men satisfied themselves on her. No woman could be the same after that. Combat brings out the brute in a man.’

‘Isn’t it shocking what they’d do, Mr Lynch? Wouldn’t it make you sick?’

‘If your daddy was alive today, he would be telling you a thing or two in order to prepare you for your manhood and the temptations in another country. Your mother wouldn’t know how to tackle a matter like that, nor would Father Ryan, nor the Christian Brothers. Your daddy might have sat you down in this bar and given you your first bottle of stout. He might have told you about the facts of life.’

‘Did one of the glory girls entice yourself, Mr Lynch?’

‘Listen to me, John Joe.’ Mr Lynch regarded his companion through small blue eyes, both of which were slightly bloodshot. He lit a cigarette and drew on it before continuing. Then he said: ‘Baker had the soldiers worked up with his talk of the glory girls taking off their togs. He used to describe the motion of their haunches. He used to lie there at night in the dug-out describing the private areas of the women’s bodies. When the time came we went out with Baker and Baker went up to the third one he saw and said could the six of us make arrangements with her? He was keen to strike a bargain because we had only limited means on account of having remained in a public house for four hours. Myself included, we were in an intoxicated condition.’

‘What happened, Mr Lynch?’

‘I would not have agreed to an arrangement like that if it hadn’t been for drink. I was a virgin boy, John Joe. Like yourself.’

‘I’m that way, certainly, Mr Lynch.’

‘We marched in behind the glory girl, down a side street. “Bedad, you’re fine men,” she said. We had bottles of beer in our pockets. “We’ll drink that first,” she said, “before we get down to business.” ’

John Joe laughed. He lifted the glass of stout to his lips and took a mouthful in a nonchalant manner, as though he’d been drinking stout for half a lifetime and couldn’t do without it.

‘Aren’t you the hard man, Mr Lynch!’ he said.

‘You’ve got the wrong end of the stick,’ replied Mr Lynch sharply. ‘What happened was, I had a vision on the street. Amn’t I saying to you those girls are no good to any man? I had a vision of the Virgin when we were walking along.’

‘How d’you mean, Mr Lynch?’

‘There was a little statue of the Holy Mother in my bedroom at home, a little special one my mother gave me at the occasion of my First Communion. It came into my mind, John Joe, when the six of us were with the glory girl. As soon as the glory girl said we’d drink the beer before we got down to business I saw the statue of the Holy Mother, as clear as if it was in front of me.’

John Joe, who had been anticipating an account of the soldiers’ pleasuring, displayed disappointment. Mr Lynch shook his head at him.

‘I was telling you a moral story,’ he said reprovingly. ‘The facts of life is one thing, John Joe, but keep away from dirty women.’

John Joe was a slight youth, pale of visage, as his father had been, and with large, awkward hands that bulged in his trouser pockets. He had no friends at the Christian Brothers’ School he attended, being regarded there, because of his private nature and lack of interest in either scholastic or sporting matters, as something of an oddity – an opinion that was strengthened by his association with an old, simple-minded dwarf called Quigley, with whom he was regularly to be seen collecting minnows in a jam jar or walking along the country roads. In class at the Christian Brothers’ John Joe would drift into a meditative state and could not easily be reached. ‘Where’ve you gone, boy?’ Brother Leahy would whisper, standing above him. His fingers would reach out for a twist of John Joe’s scalp, and John Joe would rise from the ground with the Brother’s thumb and forefinger tightening the short hairs of his neck, yet seeming not to feel the pain. It was only when the other hand of Brother Leahy gripped one of his ears that he would return to the classroom with a cry of anguish, and the boys and Brother Leahy would laugh. ‘What’ll we make of you?’ Brother Leahy would murmur, returning to the blackboard while John Joe rubbed his head and his ear.

‘There is many a time in the years afterwards,’ said Mr Lynch ponderously, ‘when I have gone through in my mind that moment in my life. I was tempted in bad company: I was two minutes off damnation.’

‘I see what you mean, Mr Lynch.’

‘When I came back to West Cork my mother asked me was I all right. Well, I was, I said. “I had a bad dream about you,” my mother said. “I had a dream one night your legs were on fire.” She looked at my legs, John Joe, and to tell you the truth of it she made me slip down my britches. “There’s no harm there,” she said. ‘Twas only afterwards I worked it out: she had that dream in the very minute I was standing on the street seeing the vision in my brain. What my mother dreamed, John Joe, was that I was licked by the flames of Hell. She was warned that time, and from her dream she sent out a message that I was to receive a visit from the little statue. I’m an older man now, John Joe, but that’s an account I tell to every boy in this town that hasn’t got a father. That little story is an introduction to life and manhood. Did you enjoy the stout?’

‘The stout’s great stuff, Mr Lynch.’

‘No drink you can take, John Joe, will injure you the way a dirty woman would. You might go to twenty million Confessions and you wouldn’t relieve your heart and soul of a dirty woman. I didn’t marry myself, out of shame for the memory of listening to Baker making that bargain. Will we have another bottle?’

John Joe, wishing to hear in further detail the bargain that Baker had made, said he could do with another drop. Mr Lynch directed him to a crate behind the counter. ‘You’re acquiring the taste,’ he said.

John Joe opened and poured the bottles. Mr Lynch offered him a cigarette, which he accepted. In the Coliseum cinema he had seen Piccadilly Circus, and in one particular film there had been Piccadilly tarts, just as Mr Lynch described, loitering in doorways provocatively. As always, coming out of the Coliseum, it had been a little strange to find himself again among small shops that sold clothes and hardware and meat, among vegetable shops and tiny confectioners’ and tobacconists’ and public houses. For a few minutes after the Coliseum’s programme was over the three streets of the town were busy with people going home, walking or riding on bicycles, or driving cars to distant farms, or going towards the chip-shop. When he was alone, John Joe usually leaned against the window of a shop to watch the activity before returning home himself; when his mother accompanied him to the pictures they naturally went home at once, his mother chatting on about the film they’d seen.

‘The simple thing is, John Joe, keep a certain type of thought out of your mind.’

‘Thought, Mr Lynch?’

‘Of a certain order.’

‘Ah, yes. Ah, definitely, Mr Lynch. A young fellow has no time for that class of thing.’

‘Live a healthy life.’

‘That’s what I’m saying, Mr Lynch.’

‘If I hadn’t had a certain type of thought I wouldn’t have found myself on the street that night. It was Baker who called them the glory girls. It’s a peculiar way of referring to the sort they are.’

‘Excuse me, Mr Lynch, but what kind of an age would they be?’

‘They were all ages, boy. There were nippers and a few more of them had wrinkles on the flesh of their faces. There were some who must have weighed fourteen stone and others you could put in your pocket.’

‘And was the one Baker made the bargain with a big one or a little one?’

‘She was medium-sized, boy.’

‘And had she black hair, Mr Lynch?’

‘As black as your boot. She had a hat on her head that was a disgrace to the nation, and black gloves on her hands. She was carrying a little umbrella.’

‘And, Mr Lynch, when your comrades met up with you again, did they tell you a thing at all?’

Mr Lynch lifted the glass to his lips. He filled his mouth with stout and savoured the liquid before allowing it to pass into his stomach. He turned his small eyes on the youth and regarded him in silence.

‘You have pimples on your chin,’ said Mr Lynch in the end. ‘I hope you’re living a clean life, now.’

‘A healthy life, Mr Lynch.’

‘It is a question your daddy would ask you. You know what I mean? There’s some lads can’t leave it alone.’

‘They go mad in the end, Mr Lynch.’

‘There was fellows in the British Army that couldn’t leave it alone.’

‘They’re a heathen crowd, Mr Lynch. Isn’t there terrible reports in the British papers?’

‘The body is God-given. There’s no need to abuse it.’

‘I’ve never done that thing, Mr Lynch.’

‘I couldn’t repeat,’ said Mr Lynch, ‘what the glory girl said when I walked away.’

John Joe, whose classroom meditations led him towards the naked bodies of women whom he had seen only clothed and whose conversations with the town’s idiot, Quigley, were of an obscene nature, said it was understandable that Mr Lynch could not repeat what the girl had said to him. A girl like that, he added, wasn’t fit to be encountered by a decent man.

‘Go behind the counter,’ said Mr Lynch, ‘and lift out two more bottles.’

John Joe walked to the crate of stout bottles. ‘I looked in at a window one time,’ Quigley had said to him, ‘and I saw Mrs Nugent resisting her husband. Nugent took no notice of her at all; he had the clothes from her body like you’d shell a pod of peas.’

‘I don’t think Baker lived,’ said Mr Lynch. ‘He’d be dead of disease.’

‘I feel sick to think of Baker, Mr Lynch.’

‘He was like an animal.’

All the women of the town – and most especially Mrs Taggart, the wife of a postman – John Joe had kept company with in his imagination. Mrs Taggart was a well-built woman, a foot taller than himself, a woman with whom he had seen himself walking in the fields on the Ballydehob road. She had found him alone and had said that she was crossing the fields to where her husband had fallen into a bog-hole, and would he be able to come with her? She had a heavy, chunky face and a wide neck on which the fat lay in encircling folds, like a fleshy necklace. Her hair was grey and black, done up in hairpins. ‘I was only codding you,’ she said when they reached the side of a secluded hillock. ‘You’re a good-looking fellow, Dempsey.’ On the side of the hillock, beneath a tree, Mrs Taggart commenced to rid herself of her outer garments, remarking that it was hot. ‘Slip out of that little jersey,’ she urged. ‘Wouldn’t it bake you today?’ Sitting beside him in her underclothes, Mrs Taggart asked him if he liked sunbathing. She drew her petticoat up so that the sun might reach the tops of her legs. She asked him to put his hand on one of her legs so that he could feel the muscles; she was a strong woman, she said, and added that the strongest muscles she possessed were the muscles of her stomach. ‘Wait till I show you,’ said Mrs Taggart.

On other occasions he found himself placed differently with Mrs Taggart: once, his mother had sent him round to her house to inquire if she had any eggs for sale and after she had put a dozen eggs in a basket Mrs Taggart asked him if he’d take a look at a thorn in the back of her leg. Another time he was passing her house and he heard her crying out for help. When he went inside he discovered that she had jammed the door of the bathroom and couldn’t get out. He managed to release the door and when he entered the bathroom he discovered that Mrs Taggart was standing up in the bath, seeming to have forgotten that she hadn’t her clothes on.

Mrs Keefe, the wife of a railway official, another statuesque woman, featured as regularly in John Joe’s imagination, as did a Mrs O’Brien, a Mrs Summers, and a Mrs Power. Mrs Power kept a bread-shop, and a very pleasant way of passing the time when Brother Leahy was talking was to walk into Mrs Power’s shop and hear her saying that she’d have to slip into the bakery for a small pan loaf and would he like to accompany her? Mrs Power wore a green overall with a belt that was tied in a knot at the front. In the bakery, while they were chatting, she would attempt to untie the belt but always found it difficult. ‘Can you aid me?’ Mrs Power would ask and John Joe would endeavour to loose the knot that lay tight against Mrs Power’s stout stomach. ‘Where’ve you gone, boy?’ Brother Leahy’s voice would whisper over and over again like a familiar incantation and John Joe would suddenly shout, realizing he was in pain.

‘It was the end of the war,’ said Mr Lynch. ‘The following morning myself and a gang of the other lads got a train up to Liverpool, and then we crossed back to Dublin. There was a priest on the train and I spoke to him about the whole thing. Every man was made like that, he said to me, only I was lucky to be rescued in the nick of time. If I’d have taken his name I’d have sent him the information about my mother’s dream. I think that would have interested him, John Joe. Wouldn’t you think so?’

‘Ah, it would of course.’

‘Isn’t it a great story, John Joe?’

‘It is, Mr Lynch.’

‘Don’t forget it ever, boy. No man is clear of temptations. You don’t have to go to Britain to get temptations.’

‘I understand you, Mr Lynch.’

Quigley had said that one night he looked through a window and saw the Protestant clergyman, the Reverend Johnson, lying on the floor with his wife. There was another time, he said, that he observed Hickey the chemist being coaxed from an armchair by certain activities on the part of Mrs Hickey. Quigley had climbed up on the roof of a shed and had seen Mrs Sweeney being helped out of her stockings by Sweeney, the builder and decorator. Quigley’s voice might continue for an hour and a half, for there was hardly a man and his wife in the town whom he didn’t claim to have observed in intimate circumstances. John Joe did not ever ask how, when there was no convenient shed to climb on to, the dwarf managed to make his way to so many exposed upstairs windows. Such a question would have been wholly irrelevant.

At Mass, when John Joe saw the calves of women’s legs stuck out from the kneeling position, he experienced an excitement that later bred new fantasies within him. ‘That Mrs Moore,’ he would say to the old dwarf, and the dwarf would reply that one night in February he had observed Mrs Moore preparing herself for the return of her husband from a County Council meeting in Cork. From the powdered body of Mrs Moore, as described by Quigley, John Joe would move to an image that included himself. He saw himself pushing open the hall door of the Moores’ house, having been sent to the house with a message from his mother, and hearing Mrs Moore’s voice calling out, asking him to come upstairs. He stood on a landing and Mrs Moore came to him with a red coat wrapped round her to cover herself up. He could smell the powder on her body; the coat kept slipping from her shoulders. ‘I have some magazines for your mother,’ she said. ‘They’re inside the bedroom.’ He went and sat on the bed while she collected a pile of magazines. She sat beside him then, drawing his attention to a story here and there that might be of particular interest to his mother. Her knee was pressed against his, and in a moment she put her arm round his shoulders and said he was a good-looking lad. The red coat fell back on to the bed when Mrs Moore took one of John Joe’s large hands and placed it on her stomach. She then suggested, the evening being hot, that he should take off his jersey and his shirt.

Mrs Keogh, the owner of the public house, had featured also in John Joe’s imagination and in the conversation of the old dwarf. Quigley had seen her, he said, a week before her husband died, hitting her husband with a length of wire because he would not oblige her with his attentions. ‘Come down to the cellar,’ said Mrs Keogh while Brother Leahy scribbled on the blackboard. ‘Come down to the cellar, John Joe, and help me with a barrel.’ He descended the cellar steps in front of her and when he looked back he saw her legs under her dark mourning skirt. ‘I’m lost these days,’ she said, ‘since Mr Keogh went on.’ They moved the barrel together and then Mrs Keogh said it was hot work and it would be better if they took off their jerseys. ‘Haven’t you the lovely arms!’ she said as they rolled the barrel from one corner of the cellar to another. ‘Will we lie down here for a rest?’

‘We’ll chance another bottle,’ suggested Mr Lynch. ‘Is it going down you all right?’

‘My mother’ll be waiting for the rashers, Mr Lynch.’

‘No rasher can be cut, boy, till Mrs Keogh returns. You could slice your hand off on an old machine like that.’

‘We’ll have one more so.’

At the Christian Brothers’, jokes were passed about that concerned grisly developments in the beds of freshly wedded couples, or centred around heroes who carried by chance strings of sausages in their pockets and committed unfortunate errors when it came to cutting one off for the pan. Such yarns, succeeding generally, failed with John Joe, for they seemed to him to be lacking in quality.

‘How’s your mammy?’ Mr Lynch asked, watching John Joe pouring the stout.

‘Ah, she’s all right. I’m only worried she’s waiting on the rashers –’

‘There’s honour due to a mother.’

John Joe nodded. He held the glass at an angle to receive the dark, foaming liquid, as Mr Lynch had shown him. Mr Lynch’s mother, now seventy-nine, was still alive. They lived together in a house which Mr Lynch left every morning in order to work in the office of a meal business and which he left every evening in order to drink bottles of stout in Keogh’s. The bachelor state of Mr Lynch was one which John Joe wondered if he himself would one day share. Certainly, he saw little attraction in the notion of marriage, apart from the immediate physical advantage. Yet Mr Lynch’s life did not seem enviable either. Often on Sunday afternoons he observed the meal clerk walking slowly with his mother on his arm, seeming as lost in gloom as the married men who walked beside women pushing prams. Quigley, a bachelor also, was a happier man than Mr Lynch. He lived in what amounted to a shed at the bottom of his niece’s garden. Food was carried to him, but there were few, with the exception of John Joe, who lingered in his company. On Sundays, a day which John Joe, like Mr Lynch, spent with his mother, Quigley walked alone.

‘When’ll you be leaving the Brothers?’ Mr Lynch asked.

‘In June.’

‘And you’ll be looking out for employment, John Joe?’

‘I was thinking I’d go into the sawmills.’

Mr Lynch nodded approvingly. ‘There’s a good future in the sawmills,’ he said. ‘Is the job fixed up?’

‘Not yet, Mr Lynch. They might give me a trial.’

Mr Lynch nodded again, and for a moment the two sat in silence. John Joe could see from the thoughtful way Mr Lynch was regarding his stout that there was something on his mind. Hoping to hear more about the Piccadilly tarts, John Joe patiently waited.

‘If your daddy was alive,’ said Mr Lynch eventually, ‘he might mention this to you, boy.’

He drank more stout and wiped the foam from his lips with the back of his hand. ‘I often see you out with Quigley. Is it a good thing to be spending your hours with a performer like that? Quigley’s away in the head.’

‘You’d be sorry for the poor creature, Mr Lynch.’

Mr Lynch said there was no need to feel sorry for Quigley, since that was the way Quigley was made. He lit another cigarette. He said:

‘Maybe they would say to themselves up at the sawmills that you were the same way as Quigley. If he keeps company with Quigley, they might say, aren’t they two of a kind?’

‘Ah, I don’t think they’d bother themselves, Mr Lynch. Sure, if you do the work well what would they have to complain of?’

‘Has the manager up there seen you out with Quigley and the jam jars?’

‘I don’t know, Mr Lynch.’

‘Everything I’m saying to you is for your own good in the future. Do you understand that? If I were in your shoes I’d let Quigley look after himself.’

For years his mother had been saying the same to him. Brother Leahy had drawn him aside one day and had pointed out that an elderly dwarf wasn’t a suitable companion for a young lad, especially since the dwarf was not sane. ‘I see you took no notice of me,’ Brother Leahy said six months later. ‘Tell me this, young fellow-me-lad, what kind of a conversation do you have with old Quigley?’ They talked, John Joe said, about trees and the flowers in the hedgerows. He liked to listen to Quigley, he said, because Quigley had acquired a knowledge of such matters. ‘Don’t tell me lies,’ snapped Brother Leahy, and did not say anything else.

Mrs Keogh returned from Confession. She came breathlessly into the bar, with pink cheeks, her ungloved hands the colour of meat. She was a woman of advanced middle age, a rotund woman who approached the proportions that John Joe most admired. She wore spectacles and had grey hair that was now a bit windswept. Her hat had blown off on the street, she said: she’d nearly gone mad trying to catch it. ‘Glory be to God,’ she cried when she saw John Joe. ‘What’s that fellow doing with a bottle of stout?’

‘We had a man-to-man talk,’ explained Mr Lynch. ‘I started him off on the pleasures of the bottle.’

‘Are you mad?’ shouted Mrs Keogh with a loud laugh. ‘He’s under age.’

‘I came for rashers,’ said John Joe. ‘A pound of green rashers, Mrs Keogh. The middle cut.’

‘You’re a shocking man,’ said Mrs Keogh to Mr Lynch. She threw off her coat and hat. ‘Will you pour me a bottle,’ she asked, ‘while I attend to this lad? Finish up that now, Mr Dempsey.’

She laughed again. She went away and they heard from the grocery the sound of the bacon machine.

John Joe finished his stout and stood up.

‘Good-night, Mr Lynch.’

‘Remember about Quigley like a good fellow. When the day will come that you’ll want to find a girl to marry, she might be saying you were the same type as Quigley. D’you understand me, John Joe?’

‘I do, Mr Lynch.’

He passed through the door in the partition and watched Mrs Keogh slicing the bacon. He imagined her, as Quigley had said he’d seen her, belabouring her late husband with a length of wire. He imagined her as he had seen her himself, taking off her jersey because it was hot in the cellar, and then unzipping her green tweed skirt.

‘I’ve sliced it thin,’ she said. ‘It tastes better thin, I think.’

‘It does surely, Mrs Keogh.’

‘Are you better after your stout? Don’t go telling your mammy now.’ Mrs Keogh laughed again, revealing long, crowded teeth. She weighed the bacon and wrapped it, munching a small piece of lean. ‘If there’s parsley in your mammy’s garden,’ she advised, ‘chew a bit to get the smell of the stout away, in case she’d be cross with Mr Lynch. Or a teaspoon of tea-leaves.’

‘There’s no parsley, Mrs Keogh.’

‘Wait till I get you the tea then.’

She opened a packet of tea and poured some on to the palm of his hand. She told him to chew it slowly and thoroughly and to let the leaves get into all the crevices of his mouth. She fastened the packet again, saying that no one would miss the little she’d taken from it. ‘Four and two for the rashers,’ she said.

He paid the money, with his mouth full of dry tea-leaves. He imagined Mrs Keogh leaning on her elbows on the counter and asking him if he had a kiss for her at all, calling him Mr Dempsey. He imagined her face stuck out towards his and her mouth open, displaying the big teeth, and her tongue damping her lips as the tongues of the Piccadilly tarts did, according to Mr Lynch. With the dryness in his own mouth and a gathering uneasiness in his stomach, his lips would go out to hers and he would taste her saliva.

‘Good-night so, Mrs Keogh.’

‘Good-night, Mr Dempsey. Tell your mother I was asking for her.’

He left the public house. The wind which had dislodged Mrs Keogh’s hat felt fresh and cold on his face. The pink wash on a house across the street seemed pinker than it had seemed before, the ground moved beneath his feet, the street lighting seemed brighter. Youths and girls stood outside the illuminated windows of the small sweet-shops, waiting for the Coliseum to open. Four farmers left Regan’s public house and mounted four bicycles and rode away, talking loudly. Your Murphy Dealer announced a large coloured sign in the window of a radio shop. Two boys he had known at school came out of a shop eating biscuits from a paper bag. ‘How’re you, John Joe?’ one of them said. ‘How’s Quigley these days?’ They had left the school now: one of them worked in Kilmartin’s the hardware’s, the other in the Courthouse. They were wearing blue serge suits; their hair had been combed with care, and greased to remain tidy. They would go to the Coliseum, John Joe guessed, and sit behind two girls, giggling and whispering during the programme. Afterwards they would follow the girls for a little while, pretending to have no interest in them; they would buy chips in the chip-shop before they went home.

Thursday, Friday, Saturday, announced the sign outside the Coliseum: His Girl Friday. As John Joe read them, the heavy black letters shifted, moving about on green paper that flapped in the wind, fixed with drawing-pins to an unpainted board. Mr Dunne, the owner of the grey Coliseum, arrived on his bicycle and unlocked his property. Sunday Only: Spencer Tracy in Boom Town. In spite of the sickness in his stomach and the unpleasant taste of tea-leaves in his mouth, John Joe felt happy and was aware of an inclination to loiter for a long time outside the cinema instead of returning to his mother.

‘It’s great tonight, John Joe,’ Mr Dunne said. ‘Are you coming in?’

John Joe shook his head. ‘I have to bring rashers home to my mother,’ he said. He saw Mrs Dunne approaching with a torch, for the small cinema was a family business. Every night and twice on Sundays, Mr Dunne sold the tickets while his wife showed the customers to their seats. ‘I looked in a window one time,’ Quigley had said, ‘and she was trying to put on her underclothes. Dunne was standing in his socks.’

A man and a girl came out of a sweet-shop next to the cinema, the girl with a box of Urney chocolates in her hand. She was thanking the man for them, saying they were lovely. ‘It’s a great show tonight, John Joe,’ Mrs Dunne said, repeating the statement of her husband, repeating what she and he said every day of their lives. John Joe wagged his head at her. It looked a great show definitely, he said. He imagined her putting on her underclothes. He imagined her one night, unable because of a cold to show the customers to their seats, remaining at home in bed while her husband managed as best he could. ‘I made a bit of bread for Mrs Dunne,’ his mother said. ‘Will you carry it down to her, John Joe?’ He rang the bell and waited until she came to the door with a coat over her night-dress. He handed her the bread wrapped in creased brown paper and she asked him to step into the hall out of the wind. ‘Will you take a bottle, John Joe?’ Mrs Dunne said. He followed her into the kitchen, where she poured them each a glass of stout. ‘Isn’t it shocking hot in here?’ she said. She took off her coat and sat at the kitchen table in her night-dress. ‘You’re a fine young fellow,’ she said, touching his hand with her fingers.

John Joe walked on, past Blackburn’s the draper’s and Kelly’s Atlantic Hotel. A number of men were idling outside the entrance to the bar, smoking cigarettes, one of them leaning on a bicycle. ‘There’s a dance in Clonakilty,’ a tall man said. ‘Will we drive over to that?’ The others took no notice of this suggestion. They were talking about the price of turkeys.

‘How’re you, John Joe?’ shouted a red-haired youth who worked in the sawmills. ‘Quigley was looking for you.’

‘I was up in Keogh’s for my mother.’

‘You’re a decent man,’ said the youth from the sawmills, going into the bar of Kelly’s Hotel.

At the far end of North Street, near the small house where he lived with his mother, he saw Quigley waiting for him. Once he had gone to the Coliseum with Quigley, telling his mother he was going with Kinsella, the boy who occupied the desk next to his at the Christian Brothers’. The occasion, the first and only time that Quigley had visited the Coliseum, had not been a success. Quigley hadn’t understood what was happening and had become frightened. He’d begun to mutter and kick the seats in front of him. ‘Take him off out of here,’ Mr Dunne had whispered, flashing his wife’s torch. ‘He’ll bring the house down.’ They had left the cinema after only a few minutes and had gone instead to the chip-shop.

‘I looked in a window last night,’ said Quigley now, hurrying to his friend’s side, ‘and, God, I saw a great thing.’

‘I was drinking stout with Mr Lynch in Keogh’s,’ said John Joe. He might tell Quigley about the glory girls that Mr Lynch had advised him against, and about Baker who had struck a bargain with one of them, but it wouldn’t be any use because Quigley never listened. No one held a conversation with Quigley: Quigley just talked.

‘It was one o’clock in the morning,’ said Quigley. His voice continued while John Joe opened the door of his mother’s house and closed it behind him. Quigley would wait for him in the street and later on they’d perhaps go down to the chip-shop together.

‘John Joe, where’ve you been?’ demanded his mother, coming into the narrow hall from the kitchen. Her face was red from sitting too close to the range, her eyes had anger in them. ‘What kept you, John Joe?’

‘Mrs Keogh was at Confession.’

‘What’s that on your teeth?’

‘What?’

‘You’ve got dirt on your teeth.’

‘I’ll brush them then.’

He handed her the rashers. They went together to the kitchen, which was a small, low room with a flagged floor and a dresser that reached to the ceiling. On this, among plates and dishes, was the framed photograph of John Joe’s father.

‘Were you out with Quigley?’ she asked, not believing that Mrs Keogh had kept him waiting for more than an hour.

He shook his head, brushing his teeth at the sink. His back was to her, and he imagined her distrustfully regarding him, her dark eyes gleaming with a kind of jealousy, her small wiry body poised as if to spring on any lie he should utter. Often he felt when he spoke to her that for her the words came physically from his lips, that they were things she could examine after he’d ejected them, in order to assess their truth.

‘I talked to Mr Lynch,’ he said. ‘He was looking after the shop.’

‘Is his mother well?’

‘He didn’t say.’

‘He’s very good to her.’

She unwrapped the bacon and dropped four rashers on to a pan that was warming on the range. John Joe sat down at the kitchen table. The feeling of euphoria that had possessed him outside the Coliseum was with him no longer; the floor was steady beneath his chair.

‘They’re good rashers,’ his mother said.

‘Mrs Keogh cut them thin.’

‘They’re best thin. They have a nicer taste.’

‘Mrs Keogh said that.’

‘What did Mr Lynch say to you? Didn’t he mention the old mother?’

‘He was talking about the war he was in.’

‘It nearly broke her heart when he went to join it.’

‘It was funny all right.’

‘We were a neutral country.’

Mr Lynch would be still sitting in the bar of Keogh’s. Every night of his life he sat there with his hat on his head, drinking bottles of stout. Other men would come into the bar and he would discuss matters with them and with Mrs Keogh. He would be drunk at the end of the evening. John Joe wondered if he chewed tea so that the smell of the stout would not be detected by his mother when he returned to her. He would return and tell her some lies about where he had been. He had joined the British Army in order to get away from her for a time, only she’d reached out to him from a dream.

‘Lay the table, John Joe.’

He put a knife and a fork for each of them on the table, and found butter and salt and pepper. His mother cut four pieces of griddle bread and placed them to fry on the pan. ‘I looked in a window one time,’ said the voice of Quigley, ‘and Mrs Sullivan was caressing Sullivan’s legs.’

‘We’re hours late with the tea,’ his mother said. ‘Are you starving, pet?’

‘Ah, I am, definitely.’

‘I have nice fresh eggs for you.’

It was difficult for her sometimes to make ends meet. He knew it was, yet neither of them had ever said anything. When he went to work in the sawmills it would naturally be easier, with a sum each week to add to the pension.

She fried the eggs, two for him and one for herself. He watched her basting them in her expert way, intent upon what she was doing. Her anger was gone, now that he was safely in the kitchen, waiting for the food she cooked. Mr Lynch would have had his tea earlier in the evening, before he went down to Keogh’s. ‘I’m going out for a long walk,’ he probably said to his mother, every evening after he’d wiped the egg from around his mouth.

‘Did he tell you an experience he had in the war?’ his mother asked, placing the plate of rashers, eggs and fried bread in front of him. She poured boiling water into a brown enamel teapot and left it on the range to draw.

‘He told me about a time they were attacked by the Germans,’ John Joe said. ‘Mr Lynch was nearly killed.’

‘She thought he’d never come back.’

‘Oh, he came back all right.’

‘He’s very good to her now.’

When Brother Leahy twisted the short hairs on his neck and asked him what he’d been dreaming about he usually said he’d been working something out in his mind, like a long-division sum. Once he said he’d been trying to translate a sentence into Irish, and another time he’d said he’d been solving a puzzle that had appeared in the Sunday Independent. Recalling Brother Leahy’s face, he ate the fried food. His mother repeated that the eggs were fresh. She poured him a cup of tea.

‘Have you homework to do?’

He shook his head, silently registering that lie, knowing that there was homework to be done, but wishing instead to accompany Quigley to the chip-shop.

‘Then we can listen to the wireless,’ she said.

‘I thought maybe I’d go out for a walk.’

Again the anger appeared in her eyes. Her mouth tightened, she laid down her knife and fork.

‘I thought you’d stop in, John Joe,’ she said, ‘on your birthday.’

‘Ah, well now –’

‘I have a little surprise for you.’

She was telling him lies, he thought, just as he had told her lies. She began to eat again, and he could see in her face a reflection of the busyness that had developed in her mind. What could she find to produce as a surprise? She had given him that morning a green shirt that she knew he’d like because he liked the colour. There was a cake that she’d made, some of which they’d have when they’d eaten what was in front of them now. He knew about this birthday cake because he had watched her decorating it with hundreds and thousands: she couldn’t suddenly say it was a surprise.

‘When I’ve washed the dishes,’ she said, ‘we’ll listen to the wireless and we’ll look at that little thing I have.’

‘All right,’ he said.

He buttered bread and put a little sugar on the butter, which was a mixture he liked. She brought the cake to the table and cut them each a slice. She said she thought the margarine you got nowadays was not as good as margarine in the past. She turned the wireless on. A woman was singing.

‘Try the cake now,’ she said. ‘You’re growing up, John Joe.’

‘Fifteen.’

‘I know, pet.’

Only Quigley told the truth, he thought. Only Quigley was honest and straightforward and said what was in his mind. Other people told Quigley to keep that kind of talk to himself because they knew it was the truth, because they knew they wanted to think the thoughts that Quigley thought. ‘I looked in a window,’ Quigley had said to him when he was nine years old, the first time he had spoken to him, ‘I saw a man and woman without their clothes on.’ Brother Leahy would wish to imagine as Quigley imagined, and as John Joe imagined too. And what did Mr Lynch think about when he walked in gloom with his mother on a Sunday? Did he dream of the medium-sized glory girl he had turned away from because his mother had sent him a Virgin Mary from her dreams? Mr Lynch was not an honest man. It was a lie when he said that shame had kept him from marrying. It was his mother who prevented that, with her dreams of legs on fire and her First Communion statues. Mr Lynch had chosen the easiest course: bachelors might be gloomy on occasion, but they were untroubled men in some respects, just as men who kept away from the glory girls were.

‘Isn’t it nice cake?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘This time next year you’ll be in the sawmills.’

‘I will.’

‘It’s good there’s work for you.’

‘Yes.’

They ate the two pieces of cake and then she cleared away the dishes and put them in the sink. He sat on a chair by the range. The men who’d been loitering outside Kelly’s Hotel might have driven over to Clonakilty by now, he thought. They’d be dancing with girls and later they’d go back to their wives and say they’d been somewhere else, playing cards together in Kelly’s maybe. Within the grey cement of the Coliseum the girl who’d been given the box of chocolates would be eating them, and the man who was with her would be wanting to put his hands on her.

Why couldn’t he say to his mother that he’d drunk three bottles of stout in Keogh’s? Why couldn’t he say he could see the naked body of Mrs Taggart? Why hadn’t he said to Mr Lynch that he should tell the truth about what was in his mind, like Quigley told the truth? Mr Lynch spent his life returning to the scenes that obsessed him, to the Belgian woman on the ground and the tarts of Piccadilly Circus. Yet he spoke of them only to fatherless boys, because it was the only excuse for mentioning them that he’d been able to think up.

‘I have this for you,’ she said.

She held towards him an old fountain pen that had belonged to his father, a pen he had seen before. She had taken it from a drawer of the dresser, where it was always kept.

‘I thought you could have it on your fifteenth birthday,’ she said.

He took it from her, a black-and-white pen that hadn’t been filled with ink for thirteen years. In the drawer of the dresser there was a pipe of his father’s, and a tie-pin and a bunch of keys and a pair of bicycle clips. She had washed and dried the dishes, he guessed, racking her mind to think of something she might offer him as the surprise she’d invented. The pen was the most suitable thing; she could hardly offer him the bicycle clips.

‘Wait till I get you the ink,’ she said, ‘and you can try it out.’ From the wireless came the voice of a man advertising household products. ‘Ryan’s Towel Soap’, urged the voice gently. ‘No better cleanser.’

He filled the pen from the bottle of ink she handed him. He sat down at the kitchen table again and tried the nib out on the piece of brown paper that Mrs Keogh had wrapped round the rashers and which his mother had neatly folded away for further use.

‘Isn’t it great it works still?’ she said. ‘It must be a good pen.’

It’s hot in here, he wrote. Wouldn’t you take off your jersey?

‘That’s a funny thing to write,’ his mother said.

‘It came into my head.’

They didn’t like him being with Quigley because they knew what Quigley talked about when he spoke the truth. They were jealous because there was no pretence between Quigley and himself. Even though it was only Quigley who talked, there was an understanding between them: being with Quigley was like being alone.

‘I want you to promise me a thing,’ she said, ‘now that you’re fifteen.’

He put the cap on the pen and bundled up the paper that had contained the rashers. He opened the top of the range and dropped the paper into it. She would ask him to promise not to hang about with the town’s idiot any more. He was a big boy now, he was big enough to own his father’s fountain pen, and it wasn’t right that he should be going out getting minnows in a jam jar with an elderly affected creature. It would go against his chances in the sawmills.

He listened to her saying what he had anticipated she would say. She went on talking, telling him about his father and the goodness there had been in his father before he fell from the scaffold. She took from the dresser the framed photograph that was so familiar to him and she put it into his hands, telling him to look closely at it. It would have made no difference, he thought, if his father had lived. His father would have been like the others; if ever he’d have dared to mention the nakedness of Mrs Taggart his father would have beaten him with a belt.

‘I am asking you for his sake,’ she said, ‘as much as for my own and for yours, John Joe.’

He didn’t understand what she meant by that, and he didn’t inquire. He would say what she wished to hear him say, and he would keep his promise to her because it would be the easiest thing to do. Quigley wasn’t hard to push away, you could tell him to get away like you’d tell a dog. It was funny that they should think that it would make much difference to him now, at this stage, not having Quigley to listen to.

‘All right,’ he said.

‘You’re a good boy, John Joe. Do you like the pen?’

‘It’s a lovely pen.’

‘You might write better with that one.’

She turned up the volume of the wireless and together they sat by the range, listening to the music. To live in a shed like Quigley did would not be too bad: to have his food carried down through a garden by a niece, to go about the town in that special way, alone with his thoughts. Quigley did not have to pretend to the niece who fed him. He didn’t have to say he’d been for a walk when he’d been drinking in Keogh’s, or that he’d been playing cards with men when he’d been dancing in Clonakilty. Quigley didn’t have to chew tea and keep quiet. Quigley talked; he said the words he wanted to say. Quigley was lucky being how he was.

‘I will go to bed now,’ he said eventually.

They said good-night to one another, and he climbed the stairs to his room. She would rouse him in good time, she called after him. ‘Have a good sleep,’ she said.

He closed the door of his room and looked with affection at his bed, for in the end there was only that. It was a bed that, sagging, held him in its centre and wrapped him warmly. There was ornamental brass-work at the head but not at the foot, and on the web of interlocking wire the hair mattress was thin. John Joe shed his clothes, shedding also the small town and his mother and Mr Lynch and the fact that he, on his fifteenth birthday, had drunk his first stout and had chewed tea. He entered his iron bed and the face of Mr Lynch passed from his mind and the voices of boys telling stories about freshly married couples faded away also. No one said to him now that he must not keep company with a crazed dwarf. In his iron bed, staring into the darkness, he made of the town what he wished to make of it, knowing that he would not be drawn away from his dreams by the tormenting fingers of a Christian Brother. In his iron bed he heard again only the voice of the town’s idiot and then that voice, too, was there no more. He travelled alone, visiting in his way the women of the town, adored and adoring, more alive in his bed than ever he was at the Christian Brothers’ School, or in the grey Coliseum, or in the chip-shop, or Keogh’s public house, or his mother’s kitchen, more alive than ever he would be at the sawmills. In his bed he entered a paradise: it was grand being alone.

Kinkies

‘Look,’ said Mr Belhatchet in the office one Thursday afternoon, ‘want you back in Trilby Mews.’

‘Me, Mr Belhatchet?’

‘Whole stack new designs. Sort them out.’

A year ago, when Eleanor had applied for the position at Sweetawear, he’d walked into Mr Syatt’s office, a young man with a dark bush of hair. She’d been expecting someone much older, about the age of Mr Syatt himself: Mr Belhatchet, a smiling, graceful figure, was in his mid-twenties. ‘Happy to know you,’ he’d said in an American manner but without any trace of an American accent. He’d been sharply dressed, in a dark grey suit that contained both a blue and a white pinstripe. He wore a discreetly jewelled ring on the little finger of his left hand. ‘Mr Belhatchet,’ Mr Syatt had explained, ‘will be your immediate boss. Sweetawear, of which he is in command, is one small part of our whole organization. There is, as well, Lisney and Company, Harraps, Tass and Prady Designs, Swiftway Designs, Dress-U, etcetera, etcetera.’ There was a canteen in the basement, Mr Syatt had added; the Christmas bonus was notably generous. Mr Syatt spoke in a precise, rather old-fashioned manner, punctuating his sentences carefully. ‘Use these?’ Mr Belhatchet had more casually offered, holding out a packet of Greek cigarettes, and she, wearing that day a high-necked blouse frilled with lace, had smilingly replied that she didn’t smoke.

‘All righty, Eleanor?’ pursued Mr Belhatchet a year later, referring to his suggestion that she should help him sort out dress designs in Trilby Mews. ‘Okayie?’

‘Yes, of course, Mr Belhatchet.’

Trilby Mews was where Mr Belhatchet lived. He’d often mentioned it and Eleanor had often imagined it, seeing his flat and the mews itself as being rather glamorous. Occasionally he telephoned from there, saying he was in bed or in the bath. He couldn’t bear a room that did not contain a telephone.

They left the office at a quarter past six, having finished off what work there was. Eleanor was wearing a pale blue suit in tweed so fine that it might have been linen, and a pale blue blouse. Around her neck there was a double row of small cultured pearls. Her shoes, in darker blue, were square-toed, as current fashion decreed.

That evening she was due to attend the night-school where, once a week, she learned Spanish. It wouldn’t matter missing a class because she never had in the past. Several of the other girls missed classes regularly and it never seemed to matter much. They’d be surprised not to see her all the same.

In the taxi Mr Belhatchet lit a Greek cigarette and remarked that he was exhausted. He’d had an exhausting week, she agreed, which was true, because he’d had to fly to Rome in order to look at designs, and then to Germany. In the taxi he said he’d spent all of Tuesday night examining the Italian designs, discussing them with Signor Martelli.

‘Dog’s Head,’ he suddenly ordered the taxi-driver, and the taxi-driver, who appeared to know Mr Belhatchet personally, nodded.

‘Join us, Bill?’ Mr Belhatchet invited as he paid the fare, but the taxi-driver, addressing Mr Belhatchet with equal familiarity, declined to do so on the grounds that the delay would cost him some trade.

‘Two gin, tonic,’ Mr Belhatchet ordered in the Dog’s Head. ‘Large, Dorrie,’ he said to the plump barmaid. ‘How keeping?’

The barmaid smiled at Eleanor even though the bar was full and she was busy. She was keeping well, she told Mr Belhatchet, whom she addressed, as the taxi-driver had, as Andy.

A Mr Logan, who taught golf at the night-school, had asked Eleanor to have a drink a few times and he’d taken her to a place that wasn’t unlike the Dog’s Head. She’d quite liked Mr Logan at first, even though he was nearly thirty years older than she was. On the third occasion he’d held her hand as they sat in a corner of a lounge bar, stroking the back of it. He’d confessed then that he was married – to a woman who’d once dropped, deliberately, a seven-pound weight on his foot. He wanted to leave her, he said, and had then suggested that Eleanor might like to accompany him to Bury St Edmunds the following Saturday. They could stay in a hotel called the Queen’s Arms, he suggested, which he’d often stayed in before and which was comfortable and quiet, with excellent food. Eleanor declined, and had since only seen Mr Logan hurrying through the corridors of the night-school. He hadn’t invited her to have another drink with him.

Mr Belhatchet consumed his gin and tonic very quickly. He spoke to a few people in the bar and at one point, while speaking to a man with a moustache, he put his arm round Eleanor’s shoulders and said that Eleanor was his secretary. He didn’t introduce her to any of the others, and he didn’t reveal her name to the man with the moustache.

‘Feel better,’ he said when he’d finished his drink. He looked at hers and she drank the remainder of it as quickly as she could, finding it difficult because the ice made her teeth cold. She wanted to say to Mr Belhatchet that she was just an ordinary girl – in case, later on, there should be any misunderstanding. But although she formed a sentence to that effect and commenced to utter it, Mr Belhatchet didn’t appear to be interested.

‘I just thought–’ she said, smiling.

‘You’re fantastic,’ said Mr Belhatchet.

They walked to Trilby Mews, Mr Belhatchet addressing familiarly a newsvendor on the way. The flat was much as she had imagined it, a small, luxuriously furnished apartment with green blinds half drawn against the glare of the evening sun. The sitting-room was full of small pieces of Victorian furniture and there was a large sofa in purple velvet, fashionably buttoned. The walls were covered with framed pictures, but in the green gloom Eleanor couldn’t see what any of them were of.

‘Want loo?’ suggested Mr Belhatchet, leading her down a short passage, the walls of which also bore framed pictures that couldn’t be properly seen. ‘’Nother drink,’ he said, opening the lavatory door and ushering her into it. She said she’d better not have another drink, not really if she was to keep a clear head. She laughed while she spoke, realizing that her head was far from clear already. ‘Fix you one,’ said Mr Belhatchet, closing the door on her.

The lavatory had a telephone in a nook in the wall and the seat was covered in brown-and-white fur. There were framed picture postcards on the walls, seaside cards with suggestive messages. They didn’t seem the kind of thing that should be so expensively framed, Eleanor considered, and was surprised to see them there, especially in such numbers. One or two, she noticed, were in German.

‘Same ’gain,’ said Mr Belhatchet in the sitting-room. ‘Sit yourself, Ellie.’

She couldn’t see the designs he’d spoken of: she’d imagined they’d be spread all over the place, propped up on chairs, even on the walls, because that was the way he liked to surround himself with designs when he was making a selection in the office. She couldn’t even see a pile anywhere, but she put this down to the gloom that pervaded the sitting-room. It surprised her, though, that he’d addressed her as Ellie, which he’d never done before. Nobody, in fact, had ever called her Ellie before.

‘Know Nick’s?’ asked Mr Belhatchet. ‘Nick’s Diner? Okayie?’

He smiled at her, blowing out Greek cigarette smoke.

‘What about the designs?’ she asked, smiling at him also.

‘Eat first,’ he said, and he picked up a green telephone and dialled a number. ‘Belhatchet,’ he said. ‘Andy. Table two, nine-thirty. All righty?’

She said it was very kind of him to invite her to dinner, thinking that it couldn’t be more than half past seven and that for almost two hours apparently they were going to sit in Trilby Mews drinking gin and tonic. She hoped it was going to be all right.

Besides Mr Logan, many men – most of them much younger than Mr Logan – had taken Eleanor out. One, called Robert, had repeatedly driven her in his yellow sportscar to a country club on the London–Guildford road called The Spurs. At half past three one morning he’d suggested that they should walk in the wood behind the country club: Eleanor had declined. Earlier that evening he’d said he loved her, but he never even telephoned her again, not after she declined to walk in the woods with him.

Other men spoke of love to her also. They kissed her and pressed themselves against her. Occasionally she felt the warm tip of a tongue exploring one of her ears and she was naturally obliged to wriggle away from it, hastily putting on lipstick as a sign that the interlude was over. She was beautiful, they said, men she met at the night-school or men employed in Sweetawear or Lisney and Company or Dress-U. But when she resisted their ultimate advances they didn’t again say she was beautiful; more often than not they didn’t say anything further to her at all. She’d explained a few times that she didn’t want to anticipate marriage because she believed that marriage was special. But when it came to the point, although stating that they loved her, not one of them proposed marriage to her. Not that any of them had ever been right, which was something she felt most strongly after they’d made their ultimate advances.

‘Use grass?’ inquired Mr Belhatchet and for a moment, because of his economical manner of speech, she didn’t know what he was talking about: use grass for what? she wondered, and shook her head.

‘Mind?’ asked Mr Belhatchet, breaking open a fresh cigarette and poking what looked like another kind of tobacco among the leaves that were already there. He fiddled around for some time, adding and taking away, and then placed the untidy-looking cigarette between his lips. She asked again about the designs, but he didn’t seem to hear her.

Eleanor didn’t enjoy the next two hours, sipping at her drink while Mr Belhatchet smoked and drank and asked her a series of economically framed questions about herself. Later, while they waited for a taxi, he said he felt marvellous. He put his arm round her shoulders and told her that the first day he saw her he’d thought she was fabulous.

‘Fabulous,’ he said in Nick’s Diner, referring to a bowl of crudités that had been placed in front of them. He asked her then if she liked him, smiling at her again, smoking another Greek cigarette.

‘Well, of course, Mr Belhatchet.’

‘Andy. What like ’bout me?’

‘Well –’

‘Ha, ha, ha,’ said Mr Belhatchet, hitting the table with the palm of his left hand. He was smiling so much now that the smile seemed to Eleanor to be unnatural. Nevertheless, she tried to keep smiling herself. None of the girls at Sweetawear had ever told her that there was anything the matter with Mr Belhatchet. She’d never thought herself that there might be something the matter with him: apart from his mode of speech he’d always seemed totally normal. His mother had set him up in Sweetawear, people said, occasionally adding that he’d certainly made a go of it.

‘Fabulous,’ said Mr Belhatchet when a waiter served them with fillet steak encased in pastry.

They drank a red wine that she liked the taste of. She said, making conversation, that it was a lovely restaurant, and when he didn’t reply she said it was the best restaurant she’d ever been in.

‘Fabulous,’ said Mr Belhatchet.

At eleven o’clock she suggested that perhaps they should return to Trilby Mews to examine the designs. She knew, even while she spoke, that she shouldn’t be going anywhere that night with Mr Belhatchet. She knew that if he was anyone else she’d have smiled and said she must go home now because she had to get up in the morning. But Mr Belhatchet, being her office boss, was different. It was all going to be much harder with Mr Belhatchet.

‘Age you now, Ellie?’ he asked in the taxi, and she told him she’d become twenty-seven the previous Tuesday, while he’d been in Rome.

‘Lovely,’ he said. ‘Fabulous.’

He was still smiling and she thought he must be drunk except that his speech was in no way slurred.

‘It’s really so late,’ she said as the taxi paused in traffic. ‘Perhaps we should leave the designs for tonight, Mr Belhatchet?’

‘Andy.’

‘Perhaps, Andy –’

‘Take morning off, Ellie.’

As they entered the flat he asked her again if she’d like to use the lavatory and reminded her where it was. While she was in there the telephone in the nook beside her rang, causing her to jump. It rang for only a moment, before he picked up one of the other extensions. When she entered the sitting-room he was speaking into the receiver, apparently to Signor Martelli in Rome. ‘Fabulous,’ he was saying. ‘No, truly.’

He’d turned several lights on and pulled the green blinds fully down. The pictures that crowded the walls were more conventional than those in the lavatory, reproductions of drawings mainly, limbs and bones and heads scattered over a single sheet, all of them belonging to the past.

‘’vederci,’ said Mr Belhatchet, replacing his green telephone.

In the room there was no pile of designs and she said to herself that in a moment Mr Belhatchet would make a suggestion. She would deal with it as best she could; if the worst came to the worst she would naturally have to leave Sweetawear.

‘Fancy drop brandy?’ offered Mr Belhatchet.

‘Thanks awfully, but I really think I’d better –’

‘Just get designs,’ he said, leaving the sitting-room.

He returned with a stack of designs which he arrayed around the room just as he would have done in the office. He asked her to assess them while he poured both of them some orange juice.

‘Oh, lovely,’ she said, because she really felt like orange juice.

The designs were of trouser-suits, a selection of ideas from four different designers. One would be chosen in the end and Sweetawear would manufacture it on a large scale and in a variety of colours.

‘Fancy that,’ he said, returning with the orange juice and pointing at a drawing with the point of his right foot.

‘Yes. And that, the waistcoat effect.’

‘Right.’

She sipped her juice and he sipped his. They discussed the designs in detail, taking into consideration the fact that some would obviously be more economical to mass-produce than others. They whittled them down to three, taking about half an hour over that. He’d come to a final decision, he said, some time tomorrow, and the way he said it made her think that he’d come to it on his own, and that his choice might even be one of the rejected designs.

She sat down on the buttoned sofa, feeling suddenly strange, wondering if she’d drunk too much. Mr Belhatchet, she saw, had pushed a few of the designs off an embroidered arm-chair and was sitting down also. He had taken the jacket of his suit off and was slowly loosening his tie.

‘Okayie?’ he inquired, and leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

She stood up. The floor was peculiar beneath her feet, seeming closer to her, as though her feet had become directly attached to her knees. It moved, like the deck of a ship. She sat down again.

‘Fantastic,’ said Mr Belhatchet.

‘I’m afraid I’ve had a little too much to drink.’

‘God, those days,’ said Mr Belhatchet. ‘Never ’gain. Know something, Ellie?’

‘Mr Belhatchet –’

‘Mother loved me, Ellie. Like I was her sweetheart, Mother loved me.’

‘Mr Belhatchet, what’s happening?’

She heard her own voice, as shrill as a bird’s, in the bright, crowded room. She didn’t want to move from the sofa. She wanted to put her feet up but she felt she might not be able to move them and was frightened to try in case she couldn’t. She closed her eyes and felt herself moving upwards, floating in the room, with a kaleidoscope in each eyelid. ‘Mr Belhatchet!’ she cried out. ‘Mr Belhatchet! Mr Belhatchet!’

She opened her eyes and saw that he had risen from his chair and was standing above her. He was smiling; his face was different.

‘I feel,’ she cried, but he interrupted her before she could say what she felt.

‘Love,’ he murmured.

He lifted her legs and placed them on the sofa. He took her shoes off and then returned to the chair he’d occupied before.

‘You made us drunk,’ she heard her own voice crying, shrill again, shrieking almost in the room. Yet in another way she felt quite tranquil.

‘We’re going high,’ he murmured. ‘All righty? We had it in our orange juice.’

She cried out again with part of her. She was floating above the room, she said. The colours of the trouser-suits that were all around her were vivid. They came at her garishly from the paper; the drawn heads of the girls were strange, like real people. The purple of the buttoned sofa was vivid also, and the green of the blinds. All over the walls the pictures of limbs and bones were like glass cases containing what the pictures contained, startling on a soft background. Bottles gleamed, and silver here and there, and brass. There was polished ebony in the room, and ivory.

‘You’re riding high, Ellie,’ Mr Belhatchet said and his voice seemed a long way away, although when she looked at him he seemed nearer and more beautiful than before. He was insane, she thought: there was beauty in his insanity. She never wanted to leave the vivid room above which and through which she floated, depending on the moment. She closed her eyes and there were coloured orchids.

Eleanor slept, or seemed to sleep, and all through her dreams Mr Belhatchet’s voice came to her, speaking about his mother. At the same time she herself was back at school, at Springfield Comprehensive, where Miss Whitehead was teaching Class 2 French. The clothes of Miss Whitehead were beautiful and the hairs on her face were as beautiful as the hair on her head, and the odour of her breath was sweet.

‘Mother died,’ said Mr Belhatchet. ‘She left me, Ellie.’

He talked about a house. His voice described a house situated among hills, a large house, remote and rich, with an exotic garden where his mother walked in a white dress, wearing dark glasses because of the sunshine.

‘She left me the little business,’ he said. ‘The pretty little business. Flair: she had flair, Ellie.’

He said he could remember being in his mother’s womb. She’d taught him to remember, he said. They read novels together. His mother’s hand took his and stroked the flesh of her arm with it.

He took off his shirt and sat in the embroidered chair with the upper half of his body naked. His feet, she saw, were naked also.

‘I loved her too,’ he said. ‘She’s back with me now. I can taste, her milk, Ellie.’

He was like a god in the embroidered chair, his bushy hair wild on his head, his pale flesh gleaming. His eyes seemed far back in his skull, gazing at her from the depths of caverns. Time did not seem to be passing.

In the house among the hills there were parties, he said, and afterwards quiet servants gathered glasses from the lawns. Cars moved on gravel early in the morning, driving away. Couples were found asleep beneath trees.

She wanted to take some of her own clothes off as Mr Belhatchet had, but her arms were heavy and in time, she guessed, he would take them off for her and that would be beautiful too. His eyes were a rare blue, his flesh was like the flesh of flowers. The room was saturated with colours that were different now, subtly changing: the colours of the trouser-suits and the purple of the sofa and the coloured threads of the embroidered chair and the green blinds and telephone. The colours were liquid in the room, gently flowing, one into another. People stood on banks of foliage, people at Mrs Belhatchet’s parties. Mrs Belhatchet stood with her son.

She would like to have children, Eleanor said; she would like to be married. She’d noticed a house once, in Gwendolyn Avenue in Putney, not far from where her bed-sitting-room was: she described it, saying she’d once dreamed she lived there, married to a man with delicate hands.

‘I love you,’ she said, knowing that she was speaking to that man, a man she had always imagined, who would marry her in a church and take her afterwards to Biarritz for a honeymoon.

‘I love you,’ she said again, with her eyes closed. ‘I’ve waited all my life.’

She wanted him to come to her, to lie beside her on the sofa and gently to take her clothes off. In the room they would anticipate marriage because marriage was certain between them, because there was perfection in their relationship, because in every detail and in every way they understood each other. They were part of one another; only death could part them now.

‘Come to me,’ she said with her eyes still closed. ‘Oh, come to me now.’

‘Mother,’ he said.

‘No, no –’

‘Up here you can be anyone, Ellie. Up here where everything is as we wish it.’

He went on speaking, but she couldn’t hear what he said, and it didn’t matter. She murmured, but she didn’t hear her own words either. And then, a long time later it seemed, she heard a voice more clearly.

‘The truth is in this room,’ Mr Belhatchet was saying. ‘I couldn’t ravish anyone, Mother.’

She opened her eyes and saw Mr Belhatchet with his bushy hair, still looking like a god.

‘My friend,’ she said, closing her eyes again.

She spoke of her bed-sitting-room in East Putney and the posters she’d bought to decorate its walls, and the two lamps with pretty jade-coloured shades that she’d bought in the British Home Stores. She’d said to her landlady that she was determined to make a home of her bed-sitting-room and the landlady said that that sounded a first-class idea. Her landlady gave her a brass gong she didn’t want.

In the room their two voices spoke together.

‘I put my arms around her,’ he said. ‘With my arms around her and hers round me, it is beautiful.’

‘It is beautiful here,’ she said. ‘The foliage, the leaves. It is beautiful in the garden of your mother’s house.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘I am waiting here for a tender man who wouldn’t ever hurt me.’

‘That’s beautiful too,’ he said. ‘Your clothes are beautiful. Your blue clothes and the pearls at your neck, and your shoes. We are happy in this present moment.’

‘Yes.’

‘We have floated away.’

They ceased to speak. Time, of which as they dreamed and imagined neither of them was aware, passed normally in the room. At half past six Eleanor, still feeling happy but by now more in control of her limbs, slowly pushed herself from the sofa and stood up. The floor swayed less beneath her feet; the colours in the room, though vivid still, were less so than they had been. Mr Belhatchet was asleep.

Eleanor went to the lavatory and when she returned to the sitting-room she did not lie down on the sofa again. She stood instead in the centre of the room, gazing around it, at Mr Belhatchet with bare feet and a bare chest, asleep in his embroidered chair, at the designs of trouser-suits and the pictures of limbs and bones. ‘Mother,’ murmured Mr Belhatchet in his sleep, in a voice that was a whisper.

She left the flat, moving slowly and gently closing the door behind her. She descended the stairs and stepped out into Trilby Mews, into fresh early-morning air.

Police Constable Edwin Lloyd found Eleanor an hour later. She was lying on the pavement outside a betting-shop in Garrad Street, W.1. He saw the still body from a distance and hurried towards it, believing he had a death on his hands. ‘I fell down,’ Eleanor explained as he helped her to rise again. ‘I’m tired.’

‘Drugs,’ said Police Constable Lloyd in Garrad Street police station, and another officer, a desk sergeant, sighed. ‘Cup of tea, miss?’ Constable Lloyd offered. ‘Nice hot tea?’

A middle-aged policewoman searched Eleanor’s clothing in case there were further drugs on her person.

‘Pretty thing like you,’ the woman said. ‘Shame, dear.’

They brought her tea and Eleanor drank it, spilling some over her pale blue suit because her hands were shaking. Constable Lloyd, returning to his beat, paused by the door.

‘Will she be OK?’ he asked, and his two colleagues said that they considered she would be.

In the police station the colours were harsh and ugly, not at all like the colours there’d been in Mr Belhatchet’s flat. And the faces of the desk sergeant and the policewoman were unpleasant also: the pores of their skin were large, like the cells of a honeycomb. There was something the matter with their mouths and their hands, and the uniforms they wore, and the place they occupied. The wooden seat was uncomfortable, the pages of a book in front of the desk sergeant were torn and grubby, the air stank of stale cigarette smoke. The man and the woman were regarding her as skeletons might, their teeth bared at her, their fingers predatory, like animals’ claws. She hated their eyes. She couldn’t drink the tea they’d given her because it caused nausea in her stomach.

The noise in the room, a distant fuzziness, was her voice. It spoke of what her mind was full of: Mrs Belhatchet and her son in the garden he had described. Servants collected glasses that were broken and jagged; their hands had blood on them. Couples were found dead beneath trees. The garden was all as ugly as the room she was in now, as dirty and as unpleasant.

And then it was different. In the garden they came at her, Mr Logan of the night-school, Robert in his yellow sportscar, and all the others. The touch of their hands was hard, like metal; she moaned in distress at their nakedness. They laughed because of that, pressing her apart, grunting with the passion of beasts. Through blood she screamed, and the voices of the men said that her tortured face was ecstasy to them. They longed for her cries of pain. They longed to wrap her in the filth of their sweat.

Their voices ceased and she heard the fuzziness again, and then it ceased also.

‘Eh now,’ murmured the desk sergeant soothingly.

‘I can’t help it,’ she said, weeping. ‘I’m frightened of it, and disgusted. I can’t help it; I don’t know why I’m like this.’

‘Just drink your tea and stop quiet, dear,’ the policewoman suggested. ‘Best to stop quiet, dear.’

Eleanor shook her head and for a moment her vision was blurred. She closed her eyes and forgot where she was. She opened them and found that her vision had cleared: she saw that she was in a grimy police station with two ugly people. Tea was spilt over her suit and there were drops of tea on her shoes. Her office boss had given her a drug in orange juice: she had experienced certain dreams and fantasies and had conducted with him a formless conversation. She’d never be able to return to the offices of Sweetawear.

‘He floats away,’ she heard a voice crying out and realized that it was her own. ‘He lies there entranced, floating away from his fear and his disgust. “The truth’s in this room,” he says – when what he means is the opposite. Poor wretched thing!’

She wept and the policewoman went to her and tried to help her, but Eleanor struck at her, shrieking obscenities. ‘Everywhere there’s ugliness,’ she cried. ‘His mother loved him with a perverted passion. He floats away from that.’

Tears fell from her eyes, dripping on to her clothes and on to the floor by her feet. She wanted to be dead, she whispered, to float away for ever from the groping hands. She wanted to be dead, she said again.

They took her to a cell; she went with them quietly. She lay down and slept immediately, and the desk sergeant and the policewoman returned to their duties. ‘Worse than drink,’ the woman said. ‘The filth that comes out of them; worse than a navvy.’

‘She’s hooked, you know,’ the desk sergeant remarked. ‘She’s hooked on that floating business. That floating away.’

The policewoman sighed and nodded. They sounded like two of a kind, she commented: the girl and the chap she’d been with.

‘Kinkies,’ said the desk sergeant. ‘Extraordinary, people getting like that.’

‘Bloody disgraceful,’ said the policewoman.

Going Home

‘Mulligatawny soup,’ Carruthers said in the dining-car. ‘Roast beef, roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, mixed vegetables.’

‘And madam?’ murmured the waiter.

Miss Fanshawe said she’d have the same. The waiter thanked her. Carruthers said:

‘Miss Fanshawe’ll take a medium dry sherry. Pale ale for me, please.’

The waiter paused. He glanced at Miss Fanshawe, shaping his lips.

‘I’m sixteen and a half,’ Carruthers said. ‘Oh, and a bottle of Beaune. 1962.’

It was the highlight of every term and every holiday for Carruthers, coming like a no man’s land between the two: the journey with Miss Fanshawe to their different homes. Not once had she officially complained, either to his mother or to the school. She wouldn’t do that; it wasn’t in Miss Fanshawe to complain officially. And as for him, he couldn’t help himself.

‘Always Beaune on a train,’ he said now, ‘because of all the burgundies it travels happiest.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ the waiter said.

‘Thank you, old chap.’

The waiter went, moving swiftly in the empty dining-car. The train slowed and then gathered speed again. The fields it passed through were bright with sunshine; the water of a stream glittered in the distance.

‘You shouldn’t lie about your age,’ Miss Fanshawe reproved, smiling to show she hadn’t been upset by the lie. But lies like that, she explained, could get a waiter into trouble.

Carruthers, a sharp-faced boy of thirteen, laughed a familiar harsh laugh. He said he didn’t like the waiter, a remark that Miss Fanshawe ignored.

‘What weather!’ she remarked instead. ‘Just look at those weeping willows!’ She hadn’t ever noticed them before, she added, but Carruthers contradicted that, reminding her that she had often before remarked on those weeping willows. She smiled, with false vagueness in her face, slightly shaking her head. ‘Perhaps it’s just that everything looks so different this lovely summer. What will you do, Carruthers? Your mother took you to Greece last year, didn’t she? It’s almost a shame to leave England, I always think, when the weather’s like this. So green in the long warm days –’

‘Miss Fanshawe, why are you pretending nothing has happened?’

‘Happened? My dear, what has happened?’

Carruthers laughed again, and looked through the window at cows resting in the shade of an oak tree. He said, still watching the cows, craning his neck to keep them in view:

‘Your mind is thinking about what has happened and all the time you’re attempting to make ridiculous conversation about the long warm days. Your heart is beating fast, Miss Fanshawe; your hands are trembling. There are two little dabs of red high up on your cheeks, just beneath your spectacles. There’s a pink flush all over your neck. If you were alone, Miss Fanshawe, you’d be crying your heart out.’

Miss Fanshawe, who was thirty-eight, fair-haired and untouched by beauty, said that she hadn’t the foggiest idea what Carruthers was talking about. He shook his head, implying that she lied. He said:

‘Why are we being served by a man whom neither of us likes when we should be served by someone else? Just look at those weeping willows, you say.’

‘Don’t be silly, Carruthers.’

‘What has become, Miss Fanshawe, of the other waiter?’

‘Now please don’t start any nonsense. I’m tired and –’

‘It was he who gave me a taste for pale ale, d’you remember that? In your company, Miss Fanshawe, on this train. It was he who told us that Beaune travels best. Have a cig, Miss Fanshawe?’

‘No, and I wish you wouldn’t either.’

‘Actually Mrs Carruthers allows me the odd smoke these days. Ever since my thirteenth birthday, May the 26th. How can she stop me, she says, when day and night she’s at it like a factory chimney herself?’

‘Your birthday’s May the 26th? I never knew. Mine’s two days later.’ She spoke hastily, and with an eagerness that was as false as the vague expression her face had borne a moment ago.

‘Gemini, Miss Fanshawe.’

‘Yes: Gemini. Queen Victoria –’

‘The sign of passion. Here comes the interloper.’

The waiter placed sherry before Miss Fanshawe and beer in front of Carruthers. He murmured deferentially, inclining his head.

‘We’ve just been saying,’ Carruthers remarked, ‘that you’re a new one on this line.’

‘Newish, sir. A month – no, tell a lie, three weeks yesterday.’

‘We knew your predecessor.’

‘Oh yes, sir.?’

‘He used to say this line was as dead as a doornail. Actually, he enjoyed not having anything to do. Remember, Miss Fanshawe?’

Miss Fanshawe shook her head. She sipped her sherry, hoping the waiter would have the sense to go away. Carruthers said:

‘In all the time Miss Fanshawe and I have been travelling together there hasn’t been a solitary soul besides ourselves in this dining-car.’

The waiter said it hardly surprised him. You didn’t get many, he agreed, and added, smoothing the tablecloth, that it would just be a minute before the soup was ready.

‘Your predecessor,’ Carruthers said, ‘was a most extraordinary man.’

‘Oh yes, sir?’

‘He had the gift of tongues. He was covered in freckles.’

‘I see, sir.’

‘Miss Fanshawe here had a passion for him.’

The waiter laughed. He lingered for a moment and then, since Carruthers was silent, went away.

‘Now look here, Carruthers,’ Miss Fanshawe began.

‘Don’t you think Mrs Carruthers is the most vulgar woman you’ve ever met?’

‘I wasn’t thinking of your mother. I will not have you talk like this to the waiter. Please now.’

‘She wears a scent called “In Love”, by Norman Hartnell. A woman of fifty, as thin as fuse wire. My God!’

‘Your mother –’

‘My mother doesn’t concern you – oh, I agree. Still you don’t want to deliver me to the female smelling of drink and tobacco smoke. I always brush my teeth in the lavatory, you know. For your sake, Miss Fanshawe.’

‘Please don’t engage the waiter in conversation. And please don’t tell lies about the waiter who was here before. It’s ridiculous the way you go on –’

‘You’re tired, Miss Fanshawe.’

‘I’m always tired at the end of term.’

‘That waiter used to say –’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, stop about that waiter!’

‘I’m sorry.’ He seemed to mean it, but she knew he didn’t. And even when he spoke again, when his voice was softer, she knew that he was still pretending. ‘What shall we talk about?’ he asked, and with a weary cheerfulness she reminded him that she’d wondered what he was going to do in the holidays. He didn’t reply. His head was bent. She knew that he was smiling.

‘I’ll walk beside her,’ he said. ‘In Rimini and Venice. In Zürich maybe. By Lake Lugano. Or the Black Sea. New faces will greet her in an American Bar in Copenhagen. Or near the Spanish Steps – in Babbington’s English Tea-Rooms. Or in Bandol or Cassis, the Ritz, the Hotel Excelsior in old Madrid. What shall we talk about, Miss Fanshawe?’

‘You could tell me more. Last year in Greece –’

‘I remember once we talked about guinea-pigs. I told you how I killed a guinea-pig that Mrs Carruthers gave me. Another time we talked about Rider Minor. D’you remember that?’

‘Yes, but let’s not –’

‘McGullam was unpleasant to Rider Minor in the changing-room. McGullam and Travers went after Rider Minor with a little piece of wood.’

‘You told me, Carruthers.’

He laughed.

‘When I first arrived at Ashleigh Court the only person who spoke to me was Rider Minor. And of course the Sergeant-Major. The Sergeant-Major told me never to take to cigs. He described the lungs of a friend of his.’

‘He was quite right.’

‘Yes, he was. Cigs can give you a nasty disease.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t smoke.’

‘I like your hat.’

‘Soup, madam,’ the waiter murmured. ‘Sir.’

‘Don’t you like Miss Fanshawe’s hat?’ Carruthers smiled, pointing at Miss Fanshawe, and when the waiter said that the hat was very nice Carruthers asked him his name.

Miss Fanshawe dipped a spoon into her soup. The waiter offered her a roll. His name, he said, was Atkins.

‘Are you wondering about us, Mr Atkins?’

‘Sir?’

‘Everyone has a natural curiosity, you know.’

‘I see a lot of people in my work, sir.’

‘Miss Fanshawe’s an undermatron at Ashleigh Court Preparatory School for Boys. They use her disgracefully at the end of term – patching up clothes so that the mothers won’t complain, packing trunks, sorting out laundry. From dawn till midnight Miss Fanshawe’s on the trot. That’s why she’s tired.’

Miss Fanshawe laughed. ‘Take no notice of him,’ she said. She broke her roll and buttered a piece of it. She pointed at wheat ripening in a field. The harvest would be good this year, she said.

‘At the end of each term,’ Carruthers went on, ‘she has to sit with me on this train because we travel in the same direction. I’m out of her authority really, since the term is over. Still, she has to keep an eye.’

The waiter, busy with the wine, said he understood. He raised his eyebrows at Miss Fanshawe and winked, but she did not encourage this, pretending not to notice it.

‘Imagine, Mr Atkins,’ Carruthers said, ‘a country house in the mock Tudor style, with bits built on to it: a rackety old gymn and an art-room, and changing-rooms that smell of perspiration. There are a hundred and three boys at Ashleigh Court, in narrow iron beds with blue rugs on them, which Miss Fanshawe has to see are all kept tidy. She does other things as well: she wears a white overall and gives out medicines. She pours out cocoa in the dining-hall and at eleven o’clock every morning she hands each boy four petit beurre biscuits. She isn’t allowed to say Grace. It has to be a master who says Grace: “For what we’re about to receive…” Or the Reverend T. L. Edwards, who owns and runs the place, T.L.E., known to generations as a pervert. He pays boys, actually.’

The waiter, having meticulously removed a covering of red foil from the top of the wine bottle, wiped the cork with a napkin before attempting to draw it. He glanced quickly at Miss Fanshawe to see if he could catch her eye in order to put her at her ease with an understanding gesture, but she appeared to be wholly engaged with her soup.

‘The Reverend Edwards is a law unto himself,’ Carruthers said. ‘Your predecessor was intrigued by him.’

‘Please take no notice of him.’ She tried to sound bracing, looking up suddenly and smiling at the waiter.

‘The headmaster accompanied you on the train, did he, sir?’

‘No, no, no, no. The Reverend Edwards was never on this train in his life. No, it was simply that your predecessor was interested in life at Ashleigh Court. He would stand there happily listening while we told him the details: you could say he was fascinated.’

At this Miss Fanshawe made a noise that was somewhere between a laugh and a denial.

‘You could pour the Beaune now, Mr Atkins,’ Carruthers suggested.

The waiter did so, pausing for a moment, in doubt as to which of the two he should offer a little of the wine to taste. Carruthers nodded to him, indicating that it should be he. The waiter complied and when Carruthers had given his approval he filled both their glasses and lifted from before them their empty soup-plates.

‘I’ve asked you not to behave like that,’ she said when the waiter had gone.

‘Like what, Miss Fanshawe?’

‘You know, Carruthers.’

‘The waiter and I were having a general conversation. As before, Miss Fanshawe, with the other waiter. Don’t you remember? Don’t you remember my telling him how I took forty of Hornsby’s football cards? And drank the Communion wine in the Reverend’s cupboard?’

‘I don’t believe –’

‘And I’ll tell you another thing. I excused myself into Rider Minor’s gum-boots.’

‘Please leave the waiter alone. Please let’s have no scenes this time, Carruthers.’

‘There weren’t scenes with the other waiter. He enjoyed everything we said to him. You could see him quite clearly trying to visualize Ashleigh Court, and Mrs Carruthers in her awful clothes.’

‘He visualized nothing of the sort. You gave him drink that I had to pay for. He was obliged to listen to your fantasies.’

‘He enjoyed our conversation, Miss Fanshawe. Why is it that people like you and I are so unpopular?’

She didn’t answer, but sighed instead. He would go on and on, she knew; and there was nothing she could do. She always meant not to protest, but when it came to the point she found it hard to sit silent, mile after mile.

‘You know what I mean, Miss Fanshawe? At Ashleigh Court they say you have an awkward way of walking. And I’ve got no charm: I think that’s why they don’t much like me. But how for God’s sake could any child of Mrs Carruthers have charm?’

‘Please don’t speak of your mother like that –’

‘And yet men fancy her. Awful men arrive at weekends, as keen for sex as the Reverend Edwards is. “Your mother’s a most elegant woman,” a hard-eyed lecher remarked to me last summer, in the Palm Court of a Greek hotel.’

‘Don’t drink too much of that wine. The last time –’

‘ “You’re staggering,” she said the last time. I told her I had flu. She’s beautiful, I dare say, in her thin way. D’you think she’s beautiful?’

‘Yes, she is.’

‘She has men all over the place. Love flows like honey while you make do with waiters on a train.’

‘Oh, don’t be so silly, Carruthers.’

‘She snaps her fingers and people come to comfort her with lust. A woman like that’s never alone. While you –’

‘Will you please stop talking about me!’

‘You have a heart in your breast like anyone else, Miss Fanshawe.’

The waiter, arriving again, coughed. He leaned across the table and placed a warmed plate in front of Miss Fanshawe and a similar one in front of Carruthers. There was a silence while he offered Miss Fanshawe a silver-plated platter with slices of roast beef on it and square pieces of Yorkshire pudding. In the silence she selected what she wanted, a small portion, for her appetite on journeys with Carruthers was never great. Carruthers took the rest. The waiter offered vegetables.

‘Miss Fanshawe ironed that blouse at a quarter to five this morning,’ Carruthers said. ‘She’d have ironed it last night if she hadn’t been so tired.’

‘A taste more carrots, sir?’

‘I don’t like carrots, Mr Atkins.’

‘Peas, sir?’

‘Thank you. She got up from her small bed, Mr Atkins, and her feet were chilly on the linoleum. She shivered, Mr Atkins, as she slipped her night-dress off. She stood there naked, thinking of another person. What became of your predecessor?’

‘I don’t know, sir. I never knew the man at all. All right for you, madam?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘He used to go back to the kitchen, Mr Atkins, and tell the cook that the couple from Ashleigh Court were on the train again. He’d lean against the sink while the cook poked about among his pieces of meat, trying to find us something to eat. Your predecessor would suck at the butt of a cig and occasionally he’d lift a can of beer to his lips. When the cook asked him what the matter was he’d say it was fascinating, a place like Ashleigh Court with boys running about in grey uniforms and an undermatron watching her life go by.’

‘Excuse me, sir.’

The waiter went. Carruthers said:

‘ “She makes her own clothes,” the other waiter told the cook. “She couldn’t give a dinner party the way the young lad’s mother could. She couldn’t chat to this person and that, moving about among décolletée women and outshining every one of them.” Why is she an undermatron at Ashleigh Court Preparatory School for Boys, owned and run by the Reverend T.L. Edwards, known to generations as a pervert?’

Miss Fanshawe, with an effort, laughed. ‘Because she’s qualified for nothing else,’ she lightly said.

‘I think that freckled waiter was sacked because he interfered with the passengers. “Vegetables?” he suggested, and before he could help himself he put the dish of cauliflowers on the table and put his arms around a woman. “All tickets please,” cried the ticket-collector and then he saw the waiter and the woman on the floor. You can’t run a railway company like that.’

‘Carruthers –’

‘Was it something like that, Miss Fanshawe? D’you think?’

‘Of course it wasn’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you’ve just made it up. The man was a perfectly ordinary waiter on this train.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘Of course it is.’

‘I love this train, Miss Fanshawe.’

‘It’s a perfectly ordinary –’

‘Of course it isn’t.’

Carruthers laughed gaily, waiting for the waiter to come back, eating in silence until it was time again for their plates to be cleared away.

‘Trifle, madam?’ the waiter said. ‘Cheese and biscuits?’

‘Just coffee, please.’

‘Sit down, why don’t you, Mr Atkins? Join us for a while.’

‘Ah no, sir, no.’

‘Miss Fanshawe and I don’t have to keep up appearances on your train. D’you understand that? We’ve been keeping up appearances for three long months at Ashleigh Court and it’s time we stopped. Shall I tell you about my mother, Mr Atkins?’

‘Your mother, sir?’

‘Carruthers –’

‘In 1960, when I was three, my father left her for another woman: she found it hard to bear. She had a lover at the time, a Mr Dalacourt, but even so she found it hard to forgive my father for taking himself off.’

‘I see, sir.’

‘It was my father’s intention that I should accompany him to his new life with the other woman, but when it came to the point the other woman decided against that. Why should she be burdened with my mother’s child? she wanted to know: you can see her argument, Mr Atkins.’

‘I must be getting on now, sir.’

‘So my father arranged to pay my mother an annual sum, in return for which she agreed to give me house room. I go with her when she goes on holiday to a smart resort. My father’s a thing of the past. What d’you think of all that, Mr Atkins? Can you visualize Mrs Carruthers at a resort? She’s not at all like Miss Fanshawe.’

‘I’m sure she’s not –’

‘Not at all.’

‘Please let go my sleeve, sir.’

‘We want you to sit down.’

‘It’s not my place, sir, to sit down with the passengers in the dining-car.’

‘We want to ask you if you think it’s fair that Mrs Carruthers should round up all the men she wants while Miss Fanshawe has only the furtive memory of a waiter on a train, a man who came to a sticky end, God knows.’

‘Stop it!’ cried Miss Fanshawe. ‘Stop it! Stop it! Let go his jacket and let him go away –’

‘I have things to do, sir.’

‘He smelt of fried eggs, a smell that still comes back to her at night.’

‘You’re damaging my jacket. I must ask you to release me at once.’

‘Are you married, Mr Atkins?’

‘Carruthers!’ Her face was crimson and her neck blotched with a flushing that Carruthers had seen before. ‘Carruthers, for heaven’s sake behave yourself!’

‘The Reverend Edwards isn’t married, as you might guess, Mr Atkins.’

The waiter tried to pull his sleeve out of Carruthers’ grasp, panting a little from embarrassment and from the effort. ‘Let go my jacket!’ he shouted. ‘Will you let me go!’

Carruthers laughed, but did not release his grasp. There was a sound of ripping as the jacket tore.

‘Miss Fanshawe’ll stitch it for you,’ Carruthers said at once, and added more sharply when the waiter raised a hand to strike him: ‘Don’t do that, please. Don’t threaten a passenger, Mr Atkins.’

‘You’ve ruined this jacket. You bloody little –’

‘Don’t use language in front of the lady.’ He spoke quietly, and to a stranger entering the dining-car at that moment it might have seemed that the waiter was in the wrong, that the torn sleeve of his jacket was the just result of some attempted insolence on his part.

‘You’re mad,’ the waiter shouted at Carruthers, his face red and sweating in his anger. ‘That child’s a raving lunatic,’ he shouted as noisily at Miss Fanshawe.

Carruthers was humming a hymn. ‘Lord, dismiss us,’ he softly sang, ‘with Thy blessing.’

‘Put any expenses on my bill,’ whispered Miss Fanshawe. ‘I’m very sorry.’

‘Ashleigh Court’ll pay,’ Carruthers said, not smiling now, his face all of a sudden as sombre as the faces of the other two.

No one spoke again in the dining-car. The waiter brought coffee, and later presented a bill.

The train stopped at a small station. Three people got out as Miss Fanshawe and Carruthers moved down the corridor to their compartment. They walked in silence, Miss Fanshawe in front of Carruthers, he drawing his right hand along the glass of the windows. There’d been an elderly man in their compartment when they’d left it: to Miss Fanshawe’s relief he was no longer there. Carruthers slid the door across. She found her book and opened it at once.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said when she’d read a page.

She turned the page, not looking up, not speaking.

‘I’m sorry I tormented you,’ he said after another pause.

She still did not look up, but spoke while moving her eyes along a line of print. ‘You’re always sorry,’ she said.

Her face and neck were still hot. Her fingers tightly held the paperbacked volume. She felt taut and rigid, as though the unpleasantness in the dining-car had coiled some part of her up. On other journeys she’d experienced a similar feeling, though never as unnervingly as she experienced it now. He had never before torn a waiter’s clothing.

‘Miss Fanshawe?’

‘I want to read.’

‘I’m not going back to Ashleigh Court.’

She went on reading and then, when he’d repeated the statement, she slowly raised her head. She looked at him and thought, as she always did when she looked at him, that he was in need of care. There was a barrenness in his sharp face; his eyes reflected the tang of a bitter truth.

‘I took the Reverend Edwards’ cigarette-lighter. He’s told me he won’t have me back.’

‘That isn’t true, Carruthers –’

‘At half past eleven yesterday morning I walked into the Reverend’s study and lifted it from his desk. Unfortunately he met me on the way out. Ashleigh Court, he said, was no place for a thief.’

‘But why? Why did you do such a silly thing?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know why I do a lot of things. I don’t know why I pretend you were in love with a waiter. This is the last horrid journey for you, Miss Fanshawe.’

‘So you won’t be coming back –’

‘The first time I met you I was crying in a dormitory. D’you remember that? Do you, Miss Fanshawe?’

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘ “Are you missing your mummy?” you asked me, and I said no. I was crying because I’d thought I’d like Ashleigh Court. I’d thought it would be heaven, a place without Mrs Carruthers. I didn’t say that; not then.’

‘No.’

‘You brought me to your room and gave me liquorice allsorts. You made me blow my nose. You told me not to cry because the other boys would laugh at me. And yet I went on crying.’

In the fields men were making hay. Children in one field waved at the passing train. The last horrid journey, she thought; she would never see the sharp face again, nor the bitterness reflected in the eyes. He’d wept, as others occasionally had to; she’d been, for a moment, a mother to him. His own mother didn’t like him, he’d later said – on a journey – because his features reminded her of his father’s features.

‘I don’t know why I’m so unpleasant, Miss Fanshawe. The Reverend stared at me last night and said he had a feeling in his bones that I’d end up badly. He said I was a useless sort of person, a boy he couldn’t ever rely on. I’d let him down, he said, thieving and lying like a common criminal. “I’m chalking you up as a failure for Ashleigh,” he said. “I never had much faith in you, Carruthers.” ’

‘He’s a most revolting man.’ She said it without meaning to, and yet the words came easily from her. She said it because it didn’t matter any more, because he wasn’t going to return to Ashleigh Court to repeat her words.

‘You were kind to me that first day,’ Carruthers said. ‘I liked that holy picture in your room. You told me to look at it, I remember. Your white overall made a noise when you walked.’

She wanted to say that once she had told lies too, that at St Monica’s School for Girls she’d said the King, the late George VI, had spoken to her when she stood in the crowd. She wanted to say that she’d stolen two rubbers from Elsie Grantham and poured ink all over the face of a clock, and had never been found out.

She closed her eyes, longing to speak, longing above all things in the world to fill the compartment with the words that had begun, since he’d told her, to pound in her brain. All he’d ever done on the train was to speak a kind of truth about his mother and the school, to speak in their no man’s land, as now and then he’d called it. Tormenting her was incidental; she knew it was. Tormenting her was just by chance, a thing that happened.

His face was like a flint. No love had ever smoothed his face, and while she looked at it she felt, unbearably now, the urge to speak as he had spoken, so many times. He smiled at her. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The Reverend’s a most revolting man.’

‘I’m thirty-eight,’ she said and saw him nod as though, precisely, he’d guessed her age a long time ago. ‘Tonight we’ll sit together in the bungalow by the sea where my parents live and they’ll ask me about the term at Ashleigh. “Begin at the beginning, Dora,” my mother’ll say and my father’ll set his deaf-aid. “The first day? What happened the first day, Dora?” And I shall tell them. “Speak up,” they’ll say, and in a louder voice I’ll tell them about the new boys, and the new members of staff. Tomorrow night I’ll tell some more, and on and on until the holidays and the term are over. “Wherever are you going?” my mother’ll say when I want to go out for a walk. “Funny time,” she’ll say, “to go for a walk.” No matter what time it is.’

He turned his head away, gazing through the window as earlier she had gazed through the window of the dining-car, in awkwardness.

‘I didn’t fall in love with a freckled waiter,’ he heard her say, ‘but God knows the freckled waiter would have done.’

He looked at her again. ‘I didn’t mean, Miss Fanshawe –’

‘If he had suddenly murmured while offering me the vegetables I’d have closed my eyes with joy. To be desired, to be desired in any way at all…’

‘Miss Fanshawe –’

‘Born beneath Gemini, the sign of passion, you said. Yet who wants to know about passion in the heart of an ugly undermatron? Different for your mother, Carruthers: your mother might weep and tear away her hair, and others would weep in pity because of all her beauty. D’you see, Carruthers? D’you understand me?’

‘No, Miss Fanshawe. No, I don’t think I do. I’m not as –’

‘There was a time one Christmas, after a party in the staff-room, when a man who taught algebra took me up to a loft, the place where the Wolf Cubs meet. We lay down on an old tent, and then suddenly this man was sick. That was in 1954. I didn’t tell them that in the bungalow: I’ve never told them the truth. I’ll not say tonight, eating cooked ham and salad, that the boy I travelled with created a scene in the dining-car, or that I was obliged to pay for damage to a waiter’s clothes.’

‘Shall we read now, Miss Fanshawe?’

‘How can we read, for God’s sake, when we have other things to say? What was it like, d’you think, on all the journeys to see you so unhappy? Yes, you’ll probably go to the bad. He’s right: you have the look of a boy who’ll end like that. The unhappy often do.’

‘Unhappy, Miss Fanshawe? Do I seem unhappy?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, tell the truth! The truth’s been there between us on all our journeys. We’ve looked at one another and seen it, over and over again.’

‘Miss Fanshawe, I don’t understand you. I promise you, I don’t understand –’

‘How could I ever say in that bungalow that the algebra teacher laid me down on a tent and then was sick? Yet I can say it now to you, a thing I’ve never told another soul.’

The door slid open and a woman wearing a blue hat, a smiling, red-faced woman, asked if the vacant seats were taken. In a voice that amazed Carruthers further Miss Fanshawe told her to go away.

‘Well, really!’ said the woman.

‘Leave us in peace, for God’s sake!’ shrieked Miss Fanshawe, and the woman, her smile all gone, backed into the corridor. Miss Fanshawe rose and shut the door again.

‘It’s different in that bungalow by the sea,’ she then quite quietly remarked, as though no red-faced woman had backed away astonished. ‘Not like an American Bar in Copenhagen or the Hotel Excelsior in Madrid. Along the walls the coloured geese stretch out their necks, the brass is polished and in its place. Inch by inch oppression fills the air. On the chintz covers in the sitting-room there’s a pattern of small wild roses, the stair-carpet’s full of fading lupins. To W.J. Fanshawe on the occasion of his retirement, says the plaque on the clock on the sitting-room mantelpiece, from his friends in the Prudential. The clock has a gold-coloured face and four black pillars of ersatz material: it hasn’t chimed since 1958. At night, not far away, the sea tumbles about, seeming too real to be true. The seagulls shriek when I walk on the beach, and when I look at them I think they’re crying out with happiness.’

He began to speak, only to speak her name, for there was nothing else he could think of to say. He changed his mind and said nothing at all.

‘Who would take me from it now? Who, Carruthers? What freckled waiter or teacher of algebra? What assistant in a shop, what bank-clerk, postman, salesman of cosmetics? They see a figure walking in the wind, discs of thick glass on her eyes, breasts as flat as paper. Her movement’s awkward, they say, and when she’s close enough they raise their hats and turn away: they mean no harm.’

‘I see,’ he said.

‘In the bungalow I’m frightened of both of them: all my life I’ve been afraid of them. When I was small and wasn’t pretty they made the best of things, and longed that I should be clever instead. “Read to us, Dora,” my father would say, rubbing his hands together when he came in from his office. And I would try to read. “Spell merchant” my father would urge as though his life depended upon it, and the letters would become jumbled in my mind. Can you see it, Carruthers, a child with glasses and an awkward way of walking and two angry figures, like vultures, unforgiving? They’d exchange a glance, turning their eyes away from me as though in shame. “Not bright,” they’d think. “Not bright, to make up for the other.” ’

‘How horrid, Miss Fanshawe.’

‘No, no. After all, was it nice for them that their single child should be a gawky creature who blushed when people spoke? How could they help themselves, any more than your mother can?’

‘Still, my mother –’

‘ “Going to the pictures?” he said the last time I was home. “What on earth are you doing that for?” And then she got the newspaper which gave the programme that was showing. “Tarzan and the Apemen”, she read out. “My dear, at your age!” I wanted to sit in the dark for an hour or two, not having to talk about the term at Ashleigh Court. But how could I say that to them? I felt the redness coming in my face. “For children surely,” my father said, “a film like that.” And then he laughed. “Dora’s made a mistake,” my mother explained, and she laughed too.’

‘And did you go, Miss Fanshawe?’

‘Go?’

‘To Tarzan and the Apemen?’

‘No, I didn’t go. I don’t possess courage like that: as soon as I enter the door of the bungalow I can feel their disappointment and I’m terrified all over again. I’ve thought of not going back but I haven’t even the courage for that: they’ve sucked everything out of me. D’you understand?’

‘Well –’

‘Why is God so cruel that we leave the ugly school and travel together to a greater ugliness when we could travel to something nice?’

‘Nice, Miss Fanshawe? Nice?’

‘You know what I mean, Carruthers.’

He shook his head. Again he turned it away from her, looking at the window, wretchedly now.

‘Of course you do,’ her voice said, ‘if you think about it.’

‘I really –’

‘Funny our birthdays being close together!’ Her mood was gayer suddenly. He turned to look at her and saw she was smiling. He smiled also.

‘I’ve dreamed this train went on for ever,’ she said, ‘on and on until at last you stopped engaging passengers and waiters in fantastic conversation. “I’m better now,” you said, and then you went to sleep. And when you woke I gave you liquorice allsorts. “I understand,” I said: “it doesn’t matter.” ’

‘I know I’ve been very bad to you, Miss Fanshawe. I’m sorry –’

‘I’ve dreamed of us together in my parents’ bungalow, of my parents dead and buried and your thin mother gone too, and Ashleigh Court a thing of the nightmare past. I’ve seen us walking over the beaches together, you growing up, me cooking for you and mending your clothes and knitting you pullovers. I’ve brought you fresh brown eggs and made you apple dumplings. I’ve watched you smile over crispy chops.’

‘Miss Fanshawe –’

‘I’m telling you about a dream in which ordinary things are marvellous. Tea tastes nicer and the green of the grass is a fresher green than you’ve ever noticed before, and the air is rosy, and happiness runs about. I would take you to a cinema on a Saturday afternoon and we would buy chips on the way home and no one would mind. We’d sit by the fire and say whatever we liked to one another. And you would no longer steal things or tell lies, because you’d have no need to. Nor would you mock an unpretty undermatron.’

‘Miss Fanshawe, I – I’m feeling tired. I think I’d like to read.’

‘Why should they have a child and then destroy it? Why should your mother not love you because your face is like your father’s face?’

‘My mother –’

‘Your mother’s a disgrace,’ she cried in sudden, new emotion. ‘What life is it for a child to drag around hotels and lovers, a piece of extra luggage, alone, unloved?’

‘It’s not too bad. I get quite used to it –’

‘Why can He not strike them dead?’ she whispered. ‘Why can’t He make it possible? By some small miracle, surely to God?’

He wasn’t looking at her. He heard her weeping and listened to the sound, not knowing what to do.

‘You’re a sorrowful mess, Carruthers,’ she whispered. ‘Yet you need not be.’

‘Please. Please, Miss Fanshawe –’

‘You’d be a different kind of person and so would I. You’d have my love, I’d care about the damage that’s been done to you. You wouldn’t come to a bad end: I’d see to that.’

He didn’t want to turn his head again. He didn’t want to see her, but in spite of that he found himself looking at her. She, too, was gazing at him, tears streaming on her cheeks. He spoke slowly and with as much firmness as he could gather together.

‘What you’re saying doesn’t make any sense, Miss Fanshawe.’

‘The waiter said that you were mad. Am I crazy too? Can people go mad like that, for a little while, on a train? Out of loneliness and locked-up love? Or desperation?’

‘I’m sure it has nothing to do with madness, Miss Fanshawe –’

‘The sand blows on to my face, and sometimes into my eyes. In my bedroom I shake it from my sandals. I murmur in the sitting-room. “Really, Dora,” my mother says, and my father sucks his breath in. On Sunday mornings we walk to church, all three of us. I go again, on my own, to Evensong: I find that nice. And yet I’m glad when it’s time to go back to Ashleigh Court. Are you ever glad, Carruthers?’

‘Sometimes I have been. But not always. Not always at all. I –’

‘ “Let’s go for a stroll,” the algebra teacher said. His clothes were stained with beer. “Let’s go up there,” he said. “It’s nice up there.” And in the pitch dark we climbed to the loft where the Wolf Cubs meet. He lit his cigarette-lighter and spread the tent out. I don’t mind what happens, I thought. Anything is better than nothing happening all my life. And then the man was sick.’

‘You told me that, Miss Fanshawe.’

‘ “You’re getting fat,” my mother might have said. “Look at Dora, Dad, getting fat.” And I would try to laugh. “A drunk has made me pregnant,” I might have whispered in the bungalow, suddenly finding the courage for it. And they would look at me and see that I was happy, and I would kneel by my bed and pour my thanks out to God, every night of my life, while waiting for my child.’ She paused and gave a little laugh. ‘They are waiting for us, those people, Carruthers.’

‘Yes.’

‘The clock on the mantelpiece still will not chime. “Cocoa,” my mother’ll say at half past nine. And when they die it’ll be too late.’

He could feel the train slowing, and sighed within him, a gesture of thanksgiving. In a moment he would walk away from her: he would never see her again. It didn’t matter what had taken place, because he wouldn’t ever see her again. It didn’t matter, all she had said, or all he had earlier said himself.

He felt sick in his stomach after the beer and the wine and the images she’d created of a life with her in a seaside bungalow. The food she’d raved about would be appalling; she’d never let him smoke. And yet, in the compartment now, while they were still alone, he was unable to prevent himself from feeling sorry for her. She was right when she spoke of her craziness: she wasn’t quite sane beneath the surface, she was all twisted up and unwell.

‘I’d better go and brush my teeth,’ he said. He rose and lifted his overnight case from the rack.

‘Don’t go,’ she whispered.

His hand, within the suitcase, had already grasped a blue sponge-bag. He released it and closed the case. He stood, not wishing to sit down again. She didn’t speak. She wasn’t looking at him now.

‘Will you be all right, Miss Fanshawe?’ he said at last, and repeated the question when she didn’t reply. ‘Miss Fanshawe?’

‘I’m sorry you’re not coming back to Ashleigh, Carruthers. I hope you have a pleasant holiday abroad.’

‘Miss Fanshawe, will you –’

‘I’ll stay in England, as I always do.’

‘We’ll be there in a moment,’ he said.

‘I hope you won’t go to the bad, Carruthers.’

They passed by houses now; the backs of houses, suburban gardens. Posters advertised beer and cigarettes and furniture. Geo. Small. Seeds, one said.

‘I hope not, too,’ he said.

‘Your mother’s on the platform. Where she always stands.’

‘Goodbye, Miss Fanshawe.’

‘Goodbye, Carruthers. Goodbye.’

Porters stood waiting. Mail-bags were on a trolley. A voice called out, speaking of the train they were on.

She didn’t look at him. She wouldn’t lift her head: he knew the tears were pouring on her cheeks now, more than before, and he wanted to say, again, that he was sorry. He shivered standing in the doorway, looking at her, and then he closed the door and went away.

She saw his mother greet him, smiling, in red as always she was. They went together to collect his luggage from the van, out of her sight, and when the train pulled away from the station she saw them once again, the mother speaking and Carruthers just as he always was, laughing his harsh laugh.

A Choice of Butchers

The upper landing of our house had brown linoleum on it and outside each of the bedroom doors there was a small black mat. From this square landing with its three mats and its window overlooking the backyard there rose a flight of uncarpeted steps that led to the attic room where Bridget, who was our maid, slept. The stairs that descended to the lower landing, where the bathroom and lavatory were and where my mother and father slept, were carpeted with a pattern of red flowers which continued down wards to a hall that also had brown linoleum on its floor. There was a hall-stand in the hall and beside it a high green plant in a brass pot, and a figure of the Holy Mother on a table, all by itself. The walls of the landings, and of the hall and the staircase, were papered gloomily in an oatmeal shade that had no pattern, only a pebbly roughness that was fashionable in my childhood in our West Cork town. On this hung two brown pictures, one of oxen dragging a plough over rough ground at sunrise, the other of a farmer leading a working horse towards a farmyard at the end of the day. It was against a background of the oatmeal shade and the oxen in the dawn that I, through the rails of the banisters on the upper landing, saw my father kissing Bridget at the end of one summer holiday.

I had come from my room on that warm September evening to watch for Henry Dukelow, who came up every night to say good-night to me. I had knelt down by the banisters, with my face against them, pressing hard so that I might be marked, so that Mr Dukelow would laugh when he saw me. ‘God, you’re tip-top,’ my father said in a whisper that travelled easily up to me, and then he put his arms round her shoulders and roughly hugged her, with his lips pressed on to her lips.

I was seven years of age, the afterthought of the family, as my father called me. My brothers and sisters were all grown up, but I didn’t feel then, not yet, that my parents had given so much to them that there wasn’t a lot left to give me. Once upon a time they had all been a family like any other family: the children in turn had left home, and then, when my mother should have been resting and my father finding life less demanding, I had arrived. I did not ever doubt my parents’ concern for me, but for the six months that he was in our house I felt that Mr Dukelow loved me as much as they did. ‘Say good-night to him for me,’ I often heard my mother calling out to him as he mounted the stairs to tell me my night-time story, and I grew up thinking of my mother as a tired person because that was what she was. Her hair was going grey and her face bore a fatigued look: Mr Dukelow said she probably didn’t sleep well. There were a lot of people who didn’t sleep well, he told me, sitting on my bed one night when I was seven, and I remember he went on talking about that until I must have fallen asleep myself.

Mr Dukelow, who occupied the room next to mine, taught me to play marbles on the rough surface of our backyard. He made me an aeroplane out of heavy pieces of wood he found lying about, and he explained to me that although a star could fall through the sky it would never land on the earth. He told me stories about Columbus and Vasco da Gama, and about the great emperors of Europe and the Battle of the Yellow Ford. He had a good memory for what had interested him at school, but he had forgotten as easily the rest: he had been a poor scholar, he said. He told me the plots of films he’d seen and of a play called Paddy the Next Best Thing. He spoke very quietly and he always answered my questions: a small man, as thin as a willow, bony and pale-faced and supposed to be delicate, different from my father. He was fifty-seven; my father was fifty-nine.

In the middle of the night that my father kissed Bridget Mr Dukelow came to my room again. He switched the light on and stood there in grey-striped pyjamas that were badly torn.

‘I could hear you crying,’ he said. ‘What’s the trouble with you?’

He wore spectacles with fine wire rims, and all his face seemed to have gone into his nose, which was thin and tapering. His greased hair was black, his hands were like a skeleton’s. The first night Mr Dukelow arrived in our house my father brought him into the kitchen, where my mother was reading the Irish Press at the table and Bridget was darning one of her black stockings. ‘I’ve employed this man,’ my father said, and as he stepped to one side of the doorway the bent figure of Mr Dukelow appeared suddenly and silently, and my father gestured in the manner of a ringmaster introducing a circus act. Mr Dukelow was carrying a cardboard suitcase that had too many clothes in it. I remember seeing the flannel material of a shirt protruding, for the case was not fastened as it was meant to be.

‘What are you crying for?’ he asked me on that later occasion. ‘What’s up with you?’

‘Go away, Mr Dukelow.’

A frown appeared on his white forehead. He went away, leaving the light on, and he returned within a minute carrying a packet of cigarettes and a cigarette-lighter. He always smoked Craven A, claiming that they were manufactured from a superior kind of tobacco. He lit one and sat on my bed. He talked, as often he did, about the moment of his arrival at our house and how he had paused for a moment outside it.

Looking at our house from the street, you saw the brown hall door, its paintwork grained to make it seem like mahogany. There was a brass knocker and a letter-box that every morning except Sunday were cleaned with Brasso by Bridget. To the right of the hall door, and dwarfing it, were the windows of my father’s butcher shop, with its sides of mutton hanging from hooks, tripe on a white enamel dish, and beef and sausages and mince and suet.

Afterwards, when he became my friend, Mr Dukelow said that he had stood on the street outside the shop, having just got off the Bantry bus. With his suitcase weighing him down, he had gazed at the windows, wondering about the shop and the house, and about my father. He had not come all the way from Bantry but from a house in the hills somewhere, where he had been employed as some kind of manservant. He had walked to a crossroads and had stood there waiting for the bus: there had been dust on his shoes that night when first he came into our kitchen. ‘I looked at the meat in the window,’ he told me afterwards, ‘and I thought I’d rather go away again.’ But my father, expecting him, had come out of the shop and had told him to come on in. My father was a big man; beside Mr Dukelow he looked like a giant.

Mr Dukelow sat on my bed, smoking his Craven A. He began to talk about the advertisement my father had placed in the Cork Examiner for an assistant. He repeated the words my father had employed in the advertisement and he said he’d been nervous even to look at them. ‘I had no qualifications,’ Mr Dukelow said. ‘I was afraid.’

That night, six months before, there’d been that kind of fear in his face. ‘Sit down, Mr Dukelow,’ my mother had said. ‘Have you had your tea?’ He shook hands with my mother and myself and with Bridget, making a great thing of it, covering up his shyness. He said he’d had tea, although he confessed to me afterwards that he hadn’t. ‘You’ll take a cup, anyway,’ my mother offered, ‘and a piece of fruit-cake I made?’ Bridget took a kettle from the range and poured boiling water into a teapot to warm it. ‘Errah, maybe he wants something stronger,’ my father said, giving a great gusty laugh. ‘Will we go down to Neenan’s, Henry?’ But my mother insisted that, first of all, before strong drink was taken, before even Mr Dukelow was led to his room, he should have a cup of tea and a slice of fruit-cake. ‘He’s hardly inside the door,’ she said chidingly to my father, ‘before you’re lifting him out again.’ My father, who laughed easily, laughed again. ‘Doesn’t he have to get to know the people of the town?’ he demanded. ‘It’s a great little town,’ he informed Mr Dukelow. ‘There’s tip-top business here.’ My father had only six fingers and one thumb: being a clumsy man, he had lost the others at different moments, when engaged in his trade. When he had no fingers left he would retire, he used to say, and he would laugh in his roaring way, and add that the sight of a butcher with no fingers would be more than customers could tolerate.

‘I often think back,’ said Mr Dukelow, ‘to the kindness of your mother that first time.’

‘He kissed Bridget in the hall,’ I said. ‘He said she was looking great.’

‘Ah, no.’

‘I saw him through the banisters.’

‘Is it a nightmare you had? Will I get your mammy up?’

I said it wasn’t a nightmare I had had: I said I didn’t want my mother. My mother was sleeping beside him in their bed and she didn’t know that he’d been kissing the maid.

‘She’d go away,’ I said. ‘My mother would go away.’

‘Ah no, no.’

‘He was kissing Bridget.’

Once, saying good-night to me, Mr Dukelow had unexpectedly given me a kiss, but it was a kiss that wasn’t at all like the kiss I had observed in the hall. Mr Dukelow had kissed me because my mother was too tired to climb the stairs; he had kissed me in case I felt neglected. Another time, just as unexpectedly, he had taken a florin from his waistcoat pocket and had put it under my pillow, telling me to buy sweets with it. ‘Where d’you get that from?’ my father had demanded the next day, and when I told him he hit the side of his leg with his fist, becoming angry in a way that puzzled me. Afterwards I heard him shouting at my mother that Henry Dukelow had given me a two-bob bit and had she anything to say to that? My father was sometimes so peculiar in his behaviour that I couldn’t make him out. My mother’s quietness was always more noticeable when he was present; I loved her for her quietness.

‘He had a few jars in tonight.’

‘Was he drunk, Mr Dukelow?’

‘I think he was.’

‘My mother –’

‘Will I tell you a story?’

‘No, no.’

I imagined Bridget, as I had been imagining her while I lay awake, thinking to herself that she’d give my mother her marching orders. I imagined, suddenly, my mother doing Bridget’s work in the kitchen and Bridget standing at the door watching her. She was a plump girl, red-cheeked, with black curly hair. She had fat arms and legs, and she wasn’t as tall as my mother. She must have been about twenty-five at the time; Mr Dukelow had told me that my mother was fifty-one. Bridget used to bring me the green glass balls that fishermen use for floating their nets, because she lived by the sea and often found them washed up on the strand. She didn’t tell me stories like Mr Dukelow did, but sometimes she’d read to me out of one of the romances she borrowed from a library that the nuns ran. All the books had brown paper covers on them to keep them from getting dirty, with the titles written in ink on the front. I couldn’t remember a time that Bridget hadn’t been in the house, with those brown-covered volumes, cycling back from her Sunday afternoon off with fish and vegetables in a basket. I had always liked her, but she was different from my mother: I was fonder of my mother.

‘If my mother died,’ I said, ‘he would be married to Bridget. She didn’t mind it when he kissed her.’

Mr Dukelow shook his head. She might have been taken unawares, he pointed out: she might have minded it and not been able to protest owing to surprise. Maybe she’d protested, he suggested, after I’d run back to bed.

‘She’s going out with the porter in the Munster and Leinster Bank,’ he said. ‘She’s keen on that fellow.’

‘My father’s got more money.’

‘Don’t worry about your father now. A little thing like that can happen and that’s the end of it. Your father’s a decent man.’

It was typical of Mr Dukelow to say that my father was a decent man, even though he knew my father didn’t like him. In the shop Mr Dukelow outclassed him: after he’d recovered from his initial nervousness, he’d become neater with the meat than my father was, and it was impossible to imagine Mr Dukelow banging through his thin fingers with the cleaver, or letting a knife slip into his flesh. My father said Mr Dukelow had a lot to learn, but it was my father really who had a lot to learn, since he hadn’t been able to learn properly in the first place. Once, a woman called Mrs Tighe had returned a piece of meat to the shop, complaining that it had a smell. ‘Will you watch that, Henry?’ my father expostulated after Mrs Tighe had left the shop, but Mrs Tighe hadn’t said it was Mr Dukelow who had sold her the meat. I was there myself at the time and I knew from the expression on Mr Dukelow’s face that it was my father who had sold the bad meat to Mrs Tighe. ‘Any stuff like that,’ my father said to him, ‘mince up in the machine.’ I could see Mr Dukelow deciding that he intended to do no such thing: it would go against his sensitivity to mince up odorous meat, not because of the dishonesty of the action but because he had become a more prideful butcher than my father, even though he was only an assistant. Mr Dukelow would throw such a piece of meat away, hiding it beneath offal so that my father couldn’t accuse him of wasting anything.

In my bedroom, which had a yellow distemper on the walls and a chest of drawers painted white, with a cupboard and wash-stand to match, Mr Dukelow told me not to worry. There was a little crucifix on the wall above my bed, placed there by my mother, and there was a sacred picture opposite the bed so that I could see the face of Our Lady from where I lay. ‘Say a prayer,’ urged Mr Dukelow, indicating with a thin hand the two reminders of my Faith. ‘I would address St Agnes on a question like that.’

Slowly he selected and lit another cigarette. ‘Your father’s a decent man,’ he repeated, and then he must have gone away because when I woke up the light had been switched off. It was half past seven and the first thing I thought was that the day was the last day of the summer holidays. Then I remembered my father kissing Bridget and Mr Dukelow talking to me in the night.

We all had our breakfast together in the kitchen, my mother at one end of the table, my father at the other, Bridget next to me, and Mr Dukelow opposite us. We always sat like that, for all meals, but what I hadn’t paid any attention to before was that Bridget was next to my father.

‘Two dozen chops,’ he said, sitting there with blood on his hands. ‘Did I tell you that, Henry? To go over to Mrs Ashe in the hotel.’

‘I’ll cut them so,’ promised Mr Dukelow in his quiet way.

My father laughed. ‘Errah, man, haven’t I cut them myself?’ He laughed again. He watched while Bridget knelt down to open the iron door of the oven. ‘There’s nothing like cutting chops,’ he said, ‘to give you an appetite for your breakfast, Bridget.’

My eyes were on a piece of fried bread on my plate. I didn’t lift them, but I could feel Mr Dukelow looking at me. He knew I felt jealous because my father had addressed Bridget instead of my mother. I was jealous on my mother’s behalf, because she couldn’t be jealous herself, because she didn’t know. Mr Dukelow sensed everything, as though there was an extra dimension to him. The chops for Mrs Ashe would have been more elegantly cut if he had cut them himself; they’d have been more cleverly cut, with less waste and in half the time.

‘Ah, that’s great,’ said my father as Bridget placed a plate of rashers and sausages in front of him. She sat down quietly beside me. Neither she nor my mother had said anything since I’d entered the kitchen.

‘Is there no potato-cakes?’ my father demanded, and my mother said she’d be making fresh ones today.

‘The last ones were lumpy.’

‘A little,’ agreed my mother. ‘There were a few little lumps.’

He held his knife and fork awkwardly because of the injuries to his hands. Often he put too much on his fork and pieces of bacon would fall off. Mr Dukelow, when he was eating, had a certain style.

‘Well, mister-me-buck,’ said my father, addressing me, ‘it’s the final day of your holidays,’

‘Yes.’

‘When I was the age you are I had to do work in my holidays. I was delivering meat at six and a half years.’

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t the times change, Bridget?’

Bridget said that times did change. My father asked Mr Dukelow if he had worked during the holidays as a child and Mr Dukelow replied that he had worked in the fields in the summertime, weeding, harvesting potatoes and making hay.

‘They have an easy time of it these days,’ my father pronounced. He had addressed all of us except my mother. He pushed his cup towards Bridget and she passed it to my mother for more tea.

‘An easy time of it,’ repeated my father.

I could see him eyeing Mr Dukelow’s hands as if he was thinking to himself that they didn’t look as if they would be much use for harvesting potatoes. And I thought to myself that my father was wrong in this estimation: Mr Dukelow would collect the potatoes speedily, having dug them himself in a methodical way; he would toss them into sacks with a flick of the wrist, a craftsman even in that.

The postman, called Mr Dicey, who was small and inquisitive and had squinting eyes, came into the kitchen from the yard. When he had a letter for the household he delivered it in this manner, while we sat at breakfast. He would stand while the letter was opened, drinking a cup of tea.

‘That’s a fine morning,’ said Mr Dicey. ‘We’ll have a fine day of it.’

‘Unless it rains.’ My father laughed until he was red in the face, and then abruptly ceased because no one was laughing with him. ‘How’re you, Dicey?’ he more calmly inquired.

‘I have an ache in my back,’ replied Mr Dicey, handing my mother a letter.

Mr Dukelow nodded at him, greeting him in that way. Sometimes Mr Dukelow was so quiet in the kitchen that my father asked him if there was something awry with him.

‘I was saying to the bucko here,’ said my father, ‘that when I was his age I used to deliver meat from the shop. Haven’t times changed, Dicey?’

‘They have not remained the same,’ agreed Mr Dicey. ‘You could not expect it.’

Bridget handed him a cup of tea. He stirred sugar into it, remarking to Bridget that he’d seen her out last night. It was said that Mr Dicey’s curiosity was so great that he often steamed open a letter and delivered it a day late. He was interested in everyone in the town and was keen to know of fresh developments in people’s lives.

‘You didn’t see me at all,’ he said to Bridget. He paused, drinking his tea. ‘You were engaged at the same time,’ he said, ‘with another person.’

‘Oh, Bridie has her admirers all right,’ said my father.

‘From the Munster and Leinster Bank.’ Mr Dicey laughed. ‘There’s a letter from your daughter,’ he said to my mother. ‘I know her little round-shaped writing.’

My mother, concerned with the letter, nodded.

‘Bridie could claim the best,’ said my father.

I looked at him and saw that he was glancing down the length of the table at my mother.

‘Bridie could claim the best,’ he repeated in a notably loud voice. ‘Wouldn’t you say that, Dicey? Isn’t she a great-looking girl?’

‘She is, of course,’ said Mr Dicey. ‘Why wouldn’t she be?’

‘It’s a wonder she never claimed Henry Dukelow.’ My father coughed and laughed. ‘Amn’t I right she could claim the best, Henry? Couldn’t Bridie have any husband she put her eye on?’

‘I’ll carry over the chops to Mrs Ashe,’ said Mr Dukelow, getting up from the table.

My father laughed. ‘Henry Dukelow wouldn’t be interested,’ he said. ‘D’you understand me, Dicey?’

‘Oh, now, why wouldn’t Henry be interested?’ inquired Mr Dicey, interested himself.

Mr Dukelow washed his hands at the sink. He dried them on a towel that hung on the back of the kitchen door, a special towel that only he and my father used.