The Collected Stories

It made it worse when he did that because she knew by the way he touched her that she was wrong: he didn’t realize. He probably thought she’d enjoyed hearing all that stuff about Philip Mulally hanging about after prostitutes and Olive Gramsmith being a slapparat, whatever a slapparat was.

She finished the brandy in her glass and moved with him on to the parquet. What had happened was that the Ryders had had a conversation about all this. They’d said to one another that this was how they wished – since it was the first time – to make a sexual swap. Polly and Gavin were to be of assistance to their friends because a woman in Parker, Hille and Harper had wanted Malcolm to get a divorce and because there’d been other relationships. Malcolm and Sue were approaching all that side of things in a different way now, following the fashion in the outer suburb since the fashion worked wonders with wilting marriages.

‘Estrella babysitting, is she?’ Malcolm asked. ‘All right if you’re late, is she? You’re not going to buzz off, Poll?’

‘Estrella couldn’t come. We had to get a girl from Problem.’

He suggested, as though the arrangement were a natural one and had been practised before, that he should drive her home when she wanted to go. He’d drive the babysitter from Problem home also. ‘Old Gavin won’t want to go,’ he pronounced, trying to make it all sound like part of his duties as host. To Polly it sounded preposterous, but she didn’t say so. She just smiled as she danced with him.

They’d made these plans quite soberly presumably, over breakfast or when there was nothing to watch on television, or in bed at night. They’d discussed the game that people played with car-keys or playing cards, or by drawing lots in other ways. They’d agreed that neither of them cared for the idea of taking a chance. ‘Different,’ Malcolm had probably quite casually said, ‘if we got the Dillards.’ Sue wouldn’t have said anything then. She might have laughed, or got up to make tea if they were watching the television, or turned over and gone to sleep. On some other occasion she might have drifted the conversation towards the subject again and Malcolm would have known that she was interested. They would then have worked out a way of interesting their oldest friends. Dancing with Malcolm, Polly watched while Gavin’s mouth descended to touch the top of Sue’s head. He and Sue were hardly moving on the dance-floor.

‘Well, that’s fixed up then,’ Malcolm said. He didn’t want to dance any more. He wanted to know that it was fixed up, that he could return to his party for an hour or so, with something to look forward to. He would drive her home and Gavin would remain. At half past one or two, when the men threw their car-keys on to the carpet and the blindfolded women each picked one out, Gavin and Sue would simply watch, not taking part. And when everyone went away Gavin and Sue would be alone with all the mess and the empty glasses. And she would be alone with Malcolm.

Polly smiled at him again, hoping he’d take the smile to mean that everything was fixed, because she didn’t want to go on dancing with him. If one of them had said, that night in the Ritz, that for a couple of hours after dinner they should change partners there’d have been a most unpleasant silence.

Malcolm patted her possessively on the hip. He squeezed her forearm and went away, murmuring that people might be short of drink. A man whom she didn’t know, excessively drunk, took her over, informing her that he loved her. As she swayed around the room with him, she wanted to say to Sue and Malcolm and Gavin that yes, they had fallen. Of course Malcolm hadn’t done his best to combat his blubberiness, of course he didn’t make efforts. Malcolm was awful, and Sue was treacherous. When people asked Gavin if he made films why didn’t he ever reply that the films he made were television commercials? She must have fallen herself, for it was clearly in the nature of things, but she couldn’t see how.

‘It’s time we went home, Sue,’ Gavin said.

‘Of course it isn’t, Gavin.’

‘Polly –’

‘You’re nice, Gavin.’

He shook his head. He whispered to her, explaining that Polly wouldn’t ever be a party to what was being suggested. He said that perhaps they could meet some time, for a drink or for lunch. He would like to, he said; he wanted to.

She smiled. That night in the Ritz, she murmured, she hadn’t wanted to be a blooming angel. ‘I wanted you,’ she murmured.

‘That isn’t true.’ He said it harshly. He pushed her away from him, wrenching himself free of her arms. It shocked him that she had gone so far, spoiling the past when there wasn’t any need to. ‘You shouldn’t have said that, Sue.’

‘You’re sentimental.’

He looked around for Polly and saw her dancing with a man who could hardly stand up. Some of the lights in the room had been switched off and the volume of the tape-recorder had been turned down. Simon and Garfunkel were whispering about Mrs Robinson. A woman laughed shrilly, kicking her shoes across the parquet.

Sue wasn’t smiling any more. The face that looked up at him through the gloom was hard and accusing. Lines that weren’t laughter-lines had developed round the eyes: lines of tension and probably fury, Gavin reckoned. He could see her thinking: he had led her on, he had kissed the top of her head. Now he was suggesting lunch some time, dealing out the future to her when the present was what mattered. He felt he’d been rude.

‘I’m sorry, Sue.’

They were standing in the other dancers’ way. He wanted to dance again himself, to feel the warmth of her small body, to feel her hands, and to smell her hair, and to bend down and touch it again with his lips. He turned away and extricated Polly from the grasp of the drunk who had claimed to love her. ‘It’s time to go home,’ he said angrily.

‘You’re never going, old Gavin,’ Malcolm protested in the hall. ‘I’ll run Poll home, you know.’

‘I’ll run her home myself.’

In the car Polly asked what had happened, but he didn’t tell her the truth. He said he’d been rude to Sue because Sue had said something appalling about one of her guests and that for some silly reason he’d taken exception to it.

Polly did not believe him. He was making an excuse, but it didn’t matter. He had rejected the game the Ryders had wanted to play and he had rejected it for her sake. He had stood by her and shown his respect for her, even though he had wanted to play the game himself. In the car she laid her head against the side of his shoulder. She thanked him, without specifying what she was grateful for.

‘I feel terrible about being rude to Sue,’ he said.

He stopped the car outside their house. The light was burning in the sitting-room window. The babysitter would be half asleep. Everything was as it should be.

‘I’d no right to be rude,’ Gavin said, still in the car.

‘Sue’ll understand.’

‘I don’t know that she will.’

She let the silence gather, hoping he’d break it by sighing or saying he’d telephone and apologize tomorrow, or simply saying he’d wait in the car for the babysitter. But he didn’t sigh and he didn’t speak.

‘You could go back,’ she said calmly, in the end, ‘and say you’re sorry. When you’ve driven the babysitter home.’

He didn’t reply. He sat gloomily staring at the steering-wheel. She thought he began to shake his head, but she wasn’t sure. Then he said:

‘Yes, perhaps I should.’

They left the car and walked together on the short paved path that led to their hall door. She said that what she felt like was a cup of tea, and then thought how dull that sounded.

‘Am I dull, Gavin?’ she asked, whispering in case the words somehow carried in to the babysitter. Her calmness deserted her for a moment. ‘Am I?’ she repeated, not whispering any more, not caring about the babysitter.

‘Of course you’re not dull. Darling, of course you aren’t.’

‘Not to want to stay? Not to want to go darting into beds with people?’

‘Oh, don’t be silly, Polly. They’re all dull except you, darling. Every single one of them.’

He put his arms around her and kissed her, and she knew that he believed what he was saying. He believed she hadn’t fallen as he and the Ryders had, that middle age had dealt no awful blows. In a way that seemed true to Polly, for it had often occurred to her that she, more than the other three, had survived the outer suburb. She was aware of pretences but could not pretend herself. She knew every time they walked into the local Tonino’s that the local Tonino’s was just an Italian joke, a sham compared with the reality of the original in Greek Street. She knew the party they’d just been to was a squalid little mess. She knew that when Gavin enthused about a fifteen-second commercial for soap his enthusiasm was no cause for celebration. She knew the suburb for what it was, its Volvos and Vauxhalls, its paved paths in unfenced front gardens, its crescents and avenues and immature trees, and the games its people played.

‘All right, Polly?’ he said, his arms still about her, with tenderness in his voice.

‘Yes, of course.’ She wanted to thank him again, and to explain that she was thanking him because he had respected her feelings and stood by her. She wanted to ask him not to go back and apologize, but she couldn’t bring herself to do that because the request seemed fussy. ‘Yes, of course I’m all right,’ she said.

In the sitting-room the babysitter woke up and reported that the children had been as good as gold. ‘Not a blink out of either of them, Mrs Dillard.’

‘I’ll run you home,’ Gavin said.

‘Oh, it’s miles and miles.’

‘It’s our fault for living in such a godforsaken suburb.’

‘Well, it’s terribly nice of you, sir.’

Polly paid her and asked her again what her name was because she’d forgotten. The girl repeated that it was Hannah McCarthy. She gave Polly her telephone number in case Estrella shouldn’t be available on another occasion. She didn’t at all mind coming out so far, she said.

When they’d gone Polly made tea in the kitchen. She placed the teapot and a cup and saucer on a tray and carried the tray upstairs to their bedroom. She was still the same as she’d always been, they would say to one another, lying there, her husband and her friend. They’d admire her for that, they’d share their guilt and their remorse. But they’d be wrong to say she was the same.

She took her clothes off and got into bed. The outer suburb was what it was, so was the shell of middle age: she didn’t complain because it would be silly to complain when you were fed and clothed and comfortable, when your children were cared for and warm, when you were loved and respected. You couldn’t forever weep with anger, or loudly deplore yourself and other people. You couldn’t hit out with your fists as though you were back at the Misses Hamilton’s nursery school in Putney. You couldn’t forever laugh among the waiters at the Ritz just because it was fun to be there.

In bed she poured herself a cup of tea, telling herself that what had happened tonight – and what was probably happening now – was reasonable and even fair. She had rejected what was distasteful to her, he had stood by her and had respected her feelings: his unfaithfulness seemed his due. In her middle-age calmness that was how she felt. She couldn’t help it.

It was how she had fallen, she said to herself, but all that sounded silly now.

The Death of Peggy Meehan

Like all children, I led a double life. There was the ordinariness of dressing in the morning, putting on shoes and combing hair, stirring a spoon through porridge I didn’t want, and going at ten to nine to the nuns’ elementary school. And there was a world in which only the events I wished for happened, where boredom was not permitted and of which I was both God and King.

In my ordinary life I was the only child of parents who years before my birth had given up hope of ever having me. I remember them best as being different from other parents: they were elderly, it seemed to me, two greyly fussing people with grey hair and faces, in grey clothes, with spectacles. ‘Oh, no, no,’ they murmured regularly, rejecting on my behalf an invitation to tea or to play with some other child. They feared on my behalf the rain and the sea, and walls that might be walked along, and grass because grass was always damp. They rarely missed a service at the Church of the Holy Redeemer.

In the town where we lived, a seaside town thirty miles from Cork, my father was employed as a senior clerk in the offices of Cosgriff and McLoughlin, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths. With him on one side of me and my mother on the other, we walked up and down the brief promenade in winter, while the seagulls shrieked and my father worried in case it was going to rain. We never went for walks through fields or through the heathery wastelands that sloped gently upwards behind the town, or by the river where people said Sir Walter Ralegh had fished. In summer, when the visitors from Cork came, my mother didn’t like to let me near the sands because the sands, she said, were full of fleas. In summer we didn’t walk on the promenade but out along the main Cork road instead, past a house that appeared to me to move. It disappeared for several minutes as we approached it, a trick of nature, I afterwards discovered, caused by the undulations of the landscape. Every July, for a fortnight, we went to stay in Montenotte, high up above Cork city, in a boarding-house run by my mother’s sister, my Aunt Isabella. She, too, had a grey look about her and was religious.

It was here, in my Aunt Isabella’s Montenotte boarding-house, that this story begins: in the summer of 1936, when I was seven. It was a much larger house than the one we lived in ourselves, which was small and narrow and in a terrace. My Aunt Isabella’s was rather grand in its way, a dark place with little unexpected half-landings, and badly lit corridors. It smelt of floor polish and of a mustiness that I have since associated with the religious life, a smell of old cassocks. Everywhere there were statues of the Virgin, and votive lights and black-framed pictures of the Holy Child. The residents were all priests, old and middle-aged and young, eleven of them usually, which was all the house would hold. A few were always away on their holidays when we stayed there in the summer.

In the summer of 1936 we left our own house in the usual way, my father fastening all the windows and the front and back doors and then examining the house from the outside to make sure he’d done the fastening and the locking properly. We walked to the railway station, each of us carrying something, my mother a brown cardboard suitcase and my father a larger one of the same kind. I carried the sandwiches we were to have on the train, and a flask of carefully made tea and three apples, all packed into a sixpenny fish basket.

In the house in Montenotte my Aunt Isabella told us that Canon McGrath and Father Quinn were on holiday, one in Tralee, the other in Galway. She led us to their rooms, Canon McGrath’s for my father and Father Quinn’s for my mother and myself. The familiar trestle-bed was erected at the foot of the bed in my mother’s room. During the course of the year a curate called Father Lalor had repaired it, my aunt said, after it had been used by Canon McGrath’s brother from America, who’d proved too much for the canvas.

‘Ah, aren’t you looking well, Mr Mahon!’ the red-faced and jolly Father Smith said to my father in the dining-room that evening. ‘And isn’t our friend here getting big for himself?’ He laughed loudly, gripping a portion of the back of my neck between a finger and a thumb. Did I know my catechism? he asked me. Was I being good with the nuns in the elementary school? ‘Are you in health yourself, Mrs Mahon?’ he inquired of my mother.

My mother said she was, and the red-faced priest went to join the other priests at the main dining-table. He left behind him a smell that was different from the smell of the house, and I noticed that he had difficulty in pulling the chair out from the table when he was about to sit down. He had to be assisted in this by a new young curate, a Father Parsloe. Father Smith had been drinking stout again, I said to myself.

Sometimes in my aunt’s house there was nothing to do except to watch and to listen. Father Smith used to drink too much stout; Father Magennis, who was so thin you could hardly bear to look at him and whose flesh was the colour of whitewash, was not long for this world; Father Riordon would be a bishop if only he could have tidied himself up a bit; Canon McGrath had once refused to baptize a child; young Father Lalor was going places. For hours on end my Aunt Isabella would murmur to my parents about the priests, telling about the fate of one who had left the boarding-house during the year or supplying background information about a new one. My parents, so faultlessly regular in their church attendance and interested in all religious matters, were naturally pleased to listen. God and the organization of His Church were far more important than my father’s duties in Cosgriff and McLoughlin, or my mother’s housework, or my own desire to go walking through the heathery wastelands that sloped gently upwards behind our town. God and the priests in my Aunt Isabella’s house, and the nuns of the convent elementary school and the priests of the Church of the Holy Redeemer, were at the centre of everything. ‘Maybe it’ll appeal to our friend,’ Father Smith had once said in the dining-room, and I knew that he meant that maybe one day I might be attracted towards the priesthood. My parents had not said anything in reply, but as we ate our tea of sausages and potato-cakes I could feel them thinking that nothing would please them better.

Every year when we stayed with my aunt there was an afternoon when I was left in charge of whichever priests happened to be in, while my parents and my aunt made the journey across the city to visit my father’s brother, who was a priest himself. There was some difficulty about bringing me: I had apparently gone to my uncle’s house as a baby, when my presence had upset him. Years later I overheard my mother whispering to Father Riordon about this, suggesting – or so it seemed – that my father had once been intent on the priestly life but had at the last moment withdrawn. That he should afterwards have fathered a child was apparently an offence to his brother’s feeling of propriety. I had the impression that my uncle was a severe man, who looked severely on my father and my mother and my Aunt Isabella on these visits, and was respected by them for being as he was. All three came back subdued, and that night my mother always prayed for much longer by the side of her bed.

‘Father Parsloe’s going to take you for a walk,’ my Aunt Isabella said on the morning of the 1936 visit. ‘He wants to get to know you.’

You walked all the way down from Montenotte, past the docks, over the river and into the city. The first few times it could have been interesting, but after that it was worse than walking on the concrete promenade at home. I’d have far preferred to have played by myself in my aunt’s overgrown back garden, pretending to be grown up, talking to myself in a secret way, having wicked thoughts. At home and in my aunt’s garden I became a man my father had read about in a newspaper and whom, he’d said, we must all pray for, a thief who broke the windows of jewellers’ shops and lifted out watches and rings. I became Father Smith, drinking too much stout and missing the steps of the stairs. I became Father Magennis and would lie on the weeds at the bottom of the garden or under a table, confessing to gruesome crimes at the moment of death. In my mind I mocked the holiness of my parents and imitated their voices; I mocked the holiness of my Aunt Isabella; I talked back to my parents in a way I never would; I laughed and said disgraceful things about God and the religious life. Blasphemy was exciting.

‘Are you ready so?’ Father Parsloe asked when my parents and my aunt had left for the visit to my uncle. ‘Will we take a bus?’

‘A bus?’

‘Down to the town.’

I’d never in my life done that before. The buses were for going longer distances in. It seemed extraordinary not to walk, the whole point of a walk was to walk.

‘I haven’t any money for the bus,’ I said, and Father Parsloe laughed. On the upper deck he lit a cigarette. He was a slight young man, by far the youngest of the priests in my aunt’s house, with reddish hair and a face that seemed to be on a slant. ‘Will we have tea in Thompson’s?’ he said. ‘Would that be a good thing to do?’

We had tea in Thompson’s café, with buns and cakes and huge meringues such as I’d never tasted before. Father Parsloe smoked fourteen cigarettes and drank all the tea himself. I had three bottles of fizzy orangeade. ‘Will we go to the pictures?’ Father Parsloe said when he’d paid the bill at the cash desk. ‘Will we chance the Pavilion?’

I had never, of course, been to the pictures before. My mother said that the Star Picture House, which was the only one in our town, was full of fleas.

‘One and a half,’ Father Parsloe said at the cash desk in the Pavilion and we were led away into the darkness. THE END it announced on the screen, and when I saw it I thought we were too late. ‘Ah, aren’t we in lovely time?’ Father Parsloe said.

I didn’t understand the film. It was about grown-ups kissing one another, and about an earthquake, and then a motor-car accident in which a woman who’d been kissed a lot was killed. The man who’d kissed her was married to another woman, and when the film ended he was sitting in a room with his wife, looking at her. She kept saying it was all right.

‘God, wasn’t that great?’ Father Parsloe said as we stood in the lavatory of the Pavilion, the kind of lavatory where you stand up, like I’d never been in before. ‘Wasn’t it a good story?’

All the way back to Montenotte I kept remembering it. I kept seeing the face of the woman who’d been killed, and all the bodies lying on the streets after the earthquake, and the man at the end, sitting in a room with his wife. The swaying of the bus made me feel queasy because of the meringues and the orangeade, but I didn’t care.

‘Did you enjoy the afternoon?’ Father Parsloe asked, and I told him I’d never enjoyed anything better. I asked him if the pictures were always as good. He assured me they were.

My parents, however, didn’t seem pleased. My father got hold of a Cork Examiner and looked up the film that was on at the Pavilion and reported that it wasn’t suitable for a child. My mother gave me a bath and examined my clothes for fleas. When Father Parsloe winked at me in the dining-room my parents pretended not to notice him.

That night my mother prayed for her extra long period, after the visit to my uncle. I lay in the dimly lit room, aware that she was kneeling there, but thinking of the film and the way the people had kissed, not like my parents ever kissed. At the convent elementary school there were girls in the higher classes who were pretty, far prettier than my mother. There was one called Claire, with fair hair and a softly freckled face, and another called Peggy Meehan, who was younger and black-haired. I had picked them out because they had spoken to me, asking me my name. I thought them very nice.

I opened my eyes and saw that my mother was rising from her knees. She stood for a moment at the edge of her bed, not smiling, her lips still moving, continuing her prayer. Then she got into bed and put out the light.

I listened to her breathing and heard it become the breathing which people have when they’re asleep, but I couldn’t sleep myself. I lay there, still remembering the film and remembering being in Thompson’s and seeing Father Parsloe lighting one cigarette after another. For some reason, I began to imagine that I was in Thompson’s with Father Parsloe and the two girls from the convent, and that we all went off to the Pavilion together, swinging along the street. ‘Ah, isn’t this the life for us?’ Father Parsloe said as he led us into the darkness, and I told the girls I’d been to the Pavilion before and they said they never had.

I heard eleven o’clock chiming from a nearby church. I heard a stumbling on the stairs and then the laughter of Father Smith, and Father Riordon telling him to be quiet. I heard twelve chiming and half past twelve, and a quarter to one, and one.

After that I didn’t want to sleep. I was standing in a classroom of the convent and Claire was smiling at me. It was nice being with her. I felt warm all over, and happy.

And then I was walking on the sands with Peggy Meehan. We ran, playing a game she’d made up, and then we walked again. She asked if I’d like to go on a picnic with her, next week perhaps.

I didn’t know what to do. I wanted one of the girls to be my friend. I wanted to love one of them, like the people had loved in the film. I wanted to kiss one and be with one, just the two of us. In the darkness of the bedroom they both seemed close and real, closer than my mother, even though I could hear my mother breathing. ‘Come on,’ Peggy Meehan whispered, and then Claire whispered also, saying we’d always be best friends, saying we might run away. It was all wrong that there were two of them, yet both vividly remained. ‘Tuesday,’ Peggy Meehan said. ‘We’ll have the picnic on Tuesday.’

Her father drove us in his car, away from the town, out beyond the heathery wastelands, towards a hillside that was even nicer. But a door of the car, the back door against which Peggy Meehan was leaning, suddenly gave way. On the dust of the road she was as dead as the woman in the film.

‘Poor Peggy,’ Claire said at some later time, even though she hadn’t known Peggy Meehan very well. ‘Poor little Peggy.’ And then she smiled and took my hand and we walked together through the heathery wastelands, in love with one another.

A few days later we left my Aunt Isabella’s house in Montenotte and returned on the train to our seaside town. And a week after that a new term began at the convent elementary school. Peggy Meehan was dead, the Reverend Mother told us, all of us assembled together. She added that there was diphtheria in the town.

I didn’t think about it at first; and I didn’t connect the reality of the death with a fantasy that had been caused by my first visit to a cinema. Some part of my mind may passingly have paused over the coincidence, but that was all. There was the visit to the Pavilion itself to talk about in the convent, and the description of the film, and Father Parsloe’s conversation and the way he’d smoked fourteen cigarettes in Thompson’s. Diphtheria was a terrible disease, my mother said when I told her, and naturally we must all pray for the soul of poor Peggy Meehan.

But as weeks and months went by, I found myself increasingly remembering the story I had told myself on the night of the film, and remembering particularly how Peggy Meehan had fallen from the car, and how she’d looked when she was dead. I said to myself that that had been my wickedest thought, worse than my blasphemies and yet somehow part of them. At night I lay in bed, unable to sleep, trying hopelessly to pray for forgiveness. But no forgiveness came, for there was no respite to the images that recurred, her face in life and then in death, like the face of the woman in the film.

A year later, while lying awake in the same room in my aunt’s boarding-house, I saw her. In the darkness there was a sudden patch of light and in the centre of it she was wearing a sailor-suit that I remembered. Her black plaits hung down her back. She smiled at me and went away. I knew instinctively then, as I watched her and after she’d gone, that the fantasy and the reality were part and parcel: I had caused this death to occur.

Looking back on it now, I can see, of course, that that feeling was a childish one. It was a childish fear, a superstition that occurring to an adult would cause only a shiver of horror. But, as a child, with no one to consult about the matter, I lived with the thought that my will was more potent than I knew. In stories I had learnt of witches and spells and evil spirits, and power locked up in people. In my games I had wickedly denied the religious life, and goodness, and holiness. In my games I had mocked Father Smith, I had pretended that the dying Father Magennis was a criminal. I had pretended to be a criminal myself, a man who broke jewellers’ windows. I had imitated my parents when it said you should honour your father and your mother. I had mocked the holiness of my Aunt Isabella. I had murdered Peggy Meehan because there wasn’t room for her in the story I was telling myself. I was possessed and evil: the nuns had told us about people being like that.

I thought at first I might seek advice from Father Parsloe. I thought of asking him if he remembered the day we’d gone on our outing, and then telling him how, in a story I was telling myself, I’d caused Peggy Meehan to be killed in a car accident like the woman in the film, and how she’d died in reality, of diphtheria. But Father Parsloe had an impatient kind of look about him this year, as if he had worries of his own. So I didn’t tell him and I didn’t tell anyone. I hoped that when we returned to our own house at the end of the stay in Montenotte I wouldn’t see her again, but the very first day we were back I saw her at four o’clock in the afternoon, in the kitchen.

After that she came irregularly, sometimes not for a month and once not for a year. She continued to appear in the same sudden way but in different clothes, and growing up as I was growing up. Once, after I’d left the convent and gone on to the Christian Brother’s, she appeared in the classroom, smiling near the blackboard.

She never spoke. Whether she appeared on the promenade or at school or in my aunt’s house or our house, close to me or at a distance, she communicated only with her smile and with her eyes: I was possessed of the Devil, she came herself from God. In her eyes and her smile there was that simple message, a message which said also that my thoughts were always wicked, that I had never believed properly in God or the Virgin or Jesus who died for us.

I tried to pray. Like my mother, kneeling beside my bed. Like my aunt and her houseful of priests. Like the nuns and Christian Brothers, and other boys and girls of the town. But prayer would not come to me, and I realized that it never had. I had always pretended, going down on my knees at Mass, laughing and blaspheming in my mind. I hated the very thought of prayer. I hated my parents in an unnatural manner, and my Aunt Isabella and the priests in her house. But the dead Peggy Meehan fresh from God’s heaven, was all forgiveness in her patch of light, smiling to rid me of my evil spirit.

She was there at my mother’s funeral, and later at my father’s. Claire, whom I had destroyed her for, married a man employed in the courthouse and became a Mrs Madden, prematurely fat. I naturally didn’t marry anyone myself.

I am forty-six years old now and I live alone in the same seaside town. No one in the town knows why I am solitary. No one could guess that I have lived with a child’s passionate companionship for half a lifetime. Being no longer a child, I naturally no longer believe that I was responsible for the death. In my passing, careless fantasy I wished for it and she, already dead, picked up my living thoughts. I should not have wished for it because in middle age she is a beautiful creature now, more beautiful by far than fat Mrs Madden.

And that is all there is. At forty-six I walk alone on the brief promenade, or by the edge of the sea or on the road to Cork, where the moving house is. I work, as my father worked, in the offices of Cosgriff and McLoughlin. I cook my own food. I sleep alone in a bed that has an iron bedstead. On Sundays I go hypocritically to Mass in the Church of the Holy Redeemer; I go to Confession and do not properly confess; I go to Men’s Confraternity, and to Communion. And all the time she is there, appearing in her patch of light to remind me that she never leaves me. And all the time, on my knees at Mass, or receiving the Body and the Blood, or in my iron bed, I desire her. In the offices of Cosgriff and McLoughlin I dream of her nakedness. When we are old I shall desire her, too, with my shrunken, evil body.

In the town I am a solitary, peculiar man. I have been rendered so, people probably say, by my cloistered upbringing, and probably add that such an upbringing would naturally cultivate a morbid imagination. That may be so, and it doesn’t really matter how things have come about. All I know is that she is more real for me than anything else is in this seaside town or beyond it. I live for her, living hopelessly, for I know I can never possess her as I wish to. I have a carnal desire for a shadow, which in turn is His mockery of me: His fitting punishment for my wickedest thought of all.

Mrs Silly

Michael couldn’t remember a time when his father had been there. There’d always been the flat where he and his mother lived, poky and cluttered even though his mother tried so. Every Saturday his father came to collect him. He remembered a blue car and then a greenish one. The latest one was white, an Alfa-Romeo.

Saturday with his father was the highlight of the week. Unlike his mother’s flat, his father’s house was spacious and nicely carpeted. There was Gillian, his father’s wife, who never seemed in a hurry, who smiled and didn’t waste time. Her smile was cool, which matched the way she dressed. Her voice was quiet and reliable: Michael couldn’t imagine it ever becoming shrill or weepy or furious, or in any other way getting out of control. It was a nice voice, as nice as Gillian herself.

His father and Gillian had two little girls, twins of six, two years younger than Michael. They lived near Cranleigh, in a half-timbered house in pretty wooded countryside. On Saturday mornings the drive from London took over an hour, but Michael never minded and on the way back he usually fell asleep. There was a room in the house that his father and Gillian had made his own, which the twins weren’t allowed to enter in his absence. He had his Triang train circuit there, on a table that had been specially built into the wall for it.

It was in this house, one Saturday afternoon, that Michael’s father brought up the subject of Elton Grange. ‘You’re nearly nine, you know,’ his father said. ‘It’s high time, really, old chap.’

Elton Grange was a preparatory school in Wiltshire, which Michael’s father had gone to himself. He’d mentioned it many times before and so had Michael’s mother, but in Michael’s mind it was a place that belonged to the distant future – with Radley, where his father had gone, also. He certainly knew that he wasn’t going to stay at the primary school in Hammersmith for ever, and had always taken it for granted that he would move away from it when the rest of his class moved, at eleven. He felt, without actually being able to recall the relevant conversation, that his mother had quite definitely implied this. But it didn’t work out like that. ‘You should go in September,’ his father said, and that was that.

‘Oh, darling,’ his mother murmured when the arrangements had all been made. ‘Oh, Michael, I’ll miss you.’

His father would pay the fees and his father would in future give him pocket-money, over and above what his mother gave him. He’d like it at Elton Grange, his father promised. ‘Oh yes, you’ll like it,’ his mother said too.

She was a woman of medium height, five foot four, with a round, plump face and plump arms and legs. There was a soft prettiness about her, about her light-blue eyes and her wide, simple mouth and her fair, rather fluffy hair. Her hands were always warm, as if expressing the warmth of her nature. She wept easily and often said she was silly to weep so. She talked a lot, getting carried away when she didn’t watch herself: for this failing, too, she regularly said she was silly. ‘Mrs Silly’, she used to say when Michael was younger, condemning herself playfully for the two small follies she found it hard to control.

She worked as a secretary for an Indian, a Mr Ashaf, who had an office-stationery business. There was the shop – more of a warehouse, really – with stacks of swivel chairs and filing-cabinets on top of one another and green metal desks, and cartons containing continuation paper and top-copy foolscap and flimsy, and printed invoices. There were other cartons full of envelopes, and packets of paper-clips, drawing-pins and staples. The carbon-paper supplies were kept in the office behind the shop, where Michael’s mother sat in front of a typewriter, typing invoices mainly. Mr Ashaf, a small wiry man, was always on his feet, moving between the shop and the office, keeping an eye on Michael’s mother and on Dolores Welsh who looked after the retail side. Before she’d married, Michael’s mother had been a secretary in the Wedgwood Centre, but returning to work at the time of her divorce she’d found it more convenient to work for Mr Ashaf since his premises were only five minutes away from where she and Michael lived. Mr Ashaf was happy to employ her on the kind of part-time basis that meant she could be at home every afternoon by the time Michael got in from school. During the holidays Mr Ashaf permitted her to take the typewriter to her flat, to come in every morning to collect what work there was and hand over what she’d done the day before. When this arrangement wasn’t convenient, due to the nature of the work, Michael accompanied her to Mr Ashaf’s premises and sat in the office with her or with Dolores Welsh in the shop. Mr Ashaf used occasionally to give him a sweet.

‘Perhaps I’ll change my job,’ Michael’s mother said brightly, a week before he was due to become a boarder at Elton Grange. ‘I could maybe go back to the West End. Nice to have a few more pennies.’ She was cheering herself up – he could tell by the way she looked at him. She packed his belongings carefully, giving him many instructions about looking after himself, about keeping himself warm and changing any clothes that got wet. ‘Oh, darling,’ she said at Paddington on the afternoon of his departure. ‘Oh, darling, I’ll miss you so!’

He would miss her, too. Although his father and Gillian were in every way more fun than his mother, it was his mother he loved. Although she fussed and was a nuisance sometimes, there was always the warmth, the cosiness of climbing into her bed on Sunday mornings or watching Magic Roundabout together. He was too big for Magic Roundabout now, or so he considered, and he rather thought he was too big to go on climbing into her bed. But the memories of all this cosiness had become part of his relationship with her.

She wept as they stood together on the platform. She held him close to her, pressing his head against her breast. ‘Oh, darling!’ she said. ‘Oh, my darling.’

Her tears damped his face. She sniffed and sobbed, whispering that she didn’t know what she’d do. ‘Poor thing!’ someone passing said. She blew her nose. She apologized to Michael, trying to smile. ‘Remember where your envelopes are,’ she said. She’d addressed and stamped a dozen envelopes for him so that he could write to her. She wanted him to write at once, just to say he’d arrived safely.

‘And don’t be homesick now,’ she said, her own voice trembling again. ‘Big boy, Michael.’

The train left her behind. He waved from the corridor window, and she gestured at him, indicating that he shouldn’t lean out. But because of the distances between them he couldn’t understand what the gesture meant. When the train stopped at Reading he found his writing-paper and envelopes in his overnight bag and began to write to her.

At Elton Grange he was in the lowest form, Miss Brooks’s form. Miss Brooks, grey-haired at sixty, was the only woman on the teaching staff. She did not share the men’s common-room but sat instead in the matrons’ room, where she smoked Senior Service cigarettes between lessons. There was pale tobacco-tinged hair on her face, and on Tuesday and Friday afternoons she wore jodhpurs, being in charge of the school’s riding. Brookie she was known as.

The other women at Elton Grange were Sister and the undermatron Miss Trenchard, the headmaster’s wife Mrs Lyng, the lady cook Miss Arland, and the maids. Mrs Lyng was a stout woman, known among the boys as Outsize Dorothy, and Sister was thin and brisk. Miss Trenchard and Miss Arland were both under twenty-three; Miss Arland was pretty and Miss Trenchard wasn’t. Miss Arland went about a lot with the history and geography master, Cocky Marshall, and Miss Trenchard was occasionally seen with the P.T. instructor, a Welshman, who was also in charge of the carpentry shop. Among the older boys Miss Trenchard was sometimes known as Tampax.

Twice a week Michael wrote to his mother, and on Sundays he wrote to his father as well. He told them that the headmaster was known to everyone as A.J.L. and he told them about the rules, how no boy in the three lower forms was permitted to be seen with his hands in his pockets and how no boy was permitted to run through A.J.L.’s garden. He said the food was awful because that was what everyone else said, although he quite liked it really.

At half-term his father and Gillian came. They stayed in the Grand, and Michael had lunch and tea there on the Saturday and on the Sunday, and just lunch on the Monday because they had to leave in the afternoon. He told them about his friends, Carson and Tichbourne, and his father suggested that next half-term Carson and Tichbourne might like to have lunch or tea at the Grand. ‘Or maybe Swagger Browne,’ Michael said. Browne’s people lived in Kenya and his grandmother, with whom he spent the holidays, wasn’t always able to come at half-term. ‘Hard up,’ Michael said.

Tichbourne and Carson were in Michael’s dormitory, and there was one other boy, called Andrews: they were all aged eight. At night, after lights out, they talked about most things: about their families and the houses they lived in and the other schools they’d been at. Carson told about the time he’d put stink-bombs under the chair-legs when people were coming to play bridge, and Andrews about the time he’d been caught, by a policeman, stealing strawberries.

‘What’s it like?’ Andrews asked in the dormitory one night. ‘What’s it like, a divorce?’

‘D’you see your mother?’ Tichbourne asked, and Michael explained that it was his mother he lived with, not his father.

‘Often wondered what it’s like for the kids,’ Andrews said. ‘There’s a woman in our village who’s divorced. She ran off with another bloke, only the next thing was he ran off with someone else.’

‘Who’d your mum run off with?’ Carson asked.

‘No one.’

‘Your dad run off then?’

‘Yes.’

His mother had told him that his father left her because they didn’t get on any more. He hadn’t left her because he knew Gillian. He hadn’t met Gillian for years after that.

‘D’you like her?’ Andrews asked. ‘Gillian?’

‘She’s all right. They’ve got twins now, my dad and Gillian. Girls.’

‘I’d hate it if my mum and dad got divorced,’ Tichbourne said.

‘Mine quarrelled all last holidays,’ Carson said, ‘about having a room decorated.’

‘Can’t stand it when they quarrel,’ Andrews said.

Intrigued by a situation that was strange to them, the other boys often asked after that about the divorce. How badly did people have to quarrel before they decided on one? Was Gillian different from Michael’s mother? Did Michael’s mother hate her? Did she hate his father?

‘They never see one another,’ Michael said. ‘She’s not like Gillian at all.’

At the end of the term the staff put on a show called Staff Laughs. Cocky Marshall was incarcerated all during one sketch in a wooden container that was meant to be a steam bath. Something had gone wrong with it. The steam was too hot and the catch had become jammed. Cocky Marshall was red in the face and nobody knew if he was putting it on or not until the end of the sketch, when he stepped out of the container in his underclothes. Mr Waydelin had to wear a kilt in another sketch and Miss Arland and Miss Trenchard were dressed up in rugby togs, with Cocky Marshall’s and Mr Brine’s scrum caps. The Reverend Green – mathematics and divinity – was enthusiastically applauded in his Mrs Wagstaffe sketch. A.J.L. did his magic, and as a grand finale the whole staff, including Miss Brooks, sang together, arm-in-arm, on the small stage. ‘We’re going home,’ they sang. ‘We’re going home. We’re on the way that leads to home. We’ve seen the good things and the bad and now we’re absolutely mad. We’re g-o-i-n-g home.’ All the boys joined in the chorus, and that night in Michael’s dormitory they ate Crunchie, Galaxy and Mars Bars and didn’t wash their teeth afterwards. At half past twelve the next day Michael’s mother was waiting for him at Paddington.

At home, nothing was different. On Saturdays his father came and drove him away to the house near Cranleigh. His mother talked about Dolores Welsh and Mr Ashaf. She hadn’t returned to work in the West End. It was quite nice really, she said, at Mr Ashaf’s.

Christmas came and went. His father gave him a new Triang locomotive and Gillian gave him a pogo-stick and the twins a magnet and a set of felt pens. His mother decorated the flat and put fairy-lights on a small Christmas tree. She filled his stocking on Christmas Eve when he was asleep and the next day, after they’d had their Christmas dinner, she gave him a football and a glove puppet and a jigsaw of Windsor Castle. He gave her a brooch he’d bought in Woolworth’s. On January 14th he returned to Elton Grange.

Nothing was different at Elton Grange either, except that Cocky Marshall had left. Nobody had known he was going to leave, and some boys said he had been sacked. But others denied that, claiming that he’d gone of his own accord, without giving the required term’s notice. They said A.J.L. was livid.

Three weeks passed, and then one morning Michael received a letter from his father saying that neither he nor Gillian would be able to come at half-term because he had to go to Tunisia on business and wanted to take Gillian with him. He sent some money to make up for the disappointment.

In a letter to his mother, not knowing what to say because nothing much was happening, Michael revealed that his father wouldn’t be there at half-term. Then I shall come, his mother wrote back.

She stayed, not in the Grand, but in a boarding-house called Sans Souci, which had coloured gnomes fishing in a pond in the front garden, and a black gate with one hinge broken. They weren’t able to have lunch there on the Saturday because the woman who ran it, Mrs Malone, didn’t do lunches. They had lunch in the Copper Kettle, and since Mrs Malone didn’t do teas either they had tea in the Copper Kettle as well. They walked around the town between lunch and tea, and after tea they sat together in his mother’s bedroom until it was time to catch the bus back to school.

The next day she said she’d like to see over the school, so he brought her into the chapel, which once had been the gate-lodge, and into the classrooms and the gymnasium and the art-room and the changing-rooms. In the carpentry shop the P.T. instructor was making a cupboard. ‘Who’s that boy?’ his mother whispered, unfortunately just loud enough for the P.T. instructor to hear. He smiled. Swagger Browne, who was standing about doing nothing, giggled.

‘But how could he be a boy?’ Michael asked dismally, leading the way on the cinder path that ran around the cricket pitch. ‘Boys at Elton only go up to thirteen and a half.’

‘Oh dear, of course,’ his mother said. She began to talk of other things. She spoke quickly. Dolores Welsh, she thought, was going to get married, Mr Ashaf had wrenched his arm. She’d spoken to the landlord about the damp that kept coming in the bathroom, but the landlord had said that to cure it would mean a major upheaval for them.

All the time she was speaking, while they walked slowly on the cinder path, he kept thinking about the P.T. instructor, unable to understand how his mother could ever have mistaken him for a boy. It was a cold morning and rather damp, not raining heavily, not even drizzling, but misty in a particularly wetting kind of way. He wondered where they were going to go for lunch, since the woman in the Copper Kettle had said yesterday that the café didn’t open on Sundays.

‘Perhaps we could go and look at the dormitories?’ his mother suggested when they came to the end of the cinder path.

He didn’t want to, but for some reason he felt shy about saying so. If he said he didn’t want to show her the dormitories, she’d ask him why and he wouldn’t know what to say because he didn’t know himself.

‘All right,’ he said.

They walked through the dank mist, back to the school buildings, which were mostly of red brick, some with a straggle of Virginia creeper on them. The new classrooms, presented a year ago by the father of a boy who had left, were of pinker brick than the rest. The old classrooms had been nicer, Michael’s father said: they’d once been the stables.

There were several entrances to the house itself. The main one, approached from the cricket pitch by crossing A.J.L.’s lawns and then crossing a large, almost circular gravel expanse, was grandiose in the early Victorian style. Stone pillars supported a wide gothic arch through which, in a sizeable vestibule, further pillars framed a heavy oak front door. There were croquet mallets and hoops in a wooden box in this vestibule, and deck-chairs and two coloured golfing umbrellas. There was an elaborate wrought-iron scraper and a revolving brush for taking the mud from shoes and boots. On either side of the large hall door there was a round window, composed of circular, lead-encased panes. ‘Well, at least they haven’t got rid of those,’ Michael’s father had said, for these circular windows were a feature that boys who had been to Elton Grange often recalled with affection.

The other entrances to the house were at the back and it was through one of these, leading her in from the quadrangle and the squat new classrooms, past the kitchens and the staff lavatory, that Michael directed his mother on their way to the dormitories. All the other places they’d visited had been outside the house itself – the gymnasium and the changing-rooms were converted outbuildings, the carpentry shop was a wooden shed tucked neatly out of the way beside the garages, the art-room was an old conservatory, and the classroom block stood on its own, forming two sides of the quadrangle.

‘What a nice smell!’ Michael’s mother whispered as they passed the kitchens, as Michael pressed himself against the wall to let Miss Brooks, in her jodhpurs, go by. Miss Brooks was carrying a riding stick and had a cigarette going. She didn’t smile at Michael, nor at Michael’s mother.

They went up the back stairs and Michael hoped they wouldn’t meet anyone else. All the boys, except the ones like Swagger Browne whose people lived abroad, were out with their parents and usually the staff went away at half-term, if they possibly could. But A.J.L. and Outsize Dorothy never went away, nor did Sister, and Miss Trenchard had been there at prayers.

‘How ever do you find your way through all these passages?’ his mother whispered as he led her expertly towards his dormitory. He explained, in a low voice also, that you got used to the passages.

‘Here it is,’ he said, relieved to find that neither Sister nor Miss Trenchard was laying out clean towels. He closed the door behind them. ‘That’s my bed there,’ he said.

He stood against the door with his ear cocked while she went to the bed and looked at it. She turned and smiled at him, her head a little on one side. She opened a locker and looked inside, but he explained that the locker she was looking in was Carson’s. ‘Where’d that nice rug come from?’ she asked, and he said that he’d written to Gillian to say he’d been cold once or twice at night, and she’d sent him the rug immediately. ‘Oh,’ his mother said dispiritedly. ‘Well, that was nice of Gillian,’ she added.

She crossed to one of the windows and looked down over A.J.L.’s lawns to the chestnut trees that surrounded the playing-fields. It really was a beautiful place, she said.

She smiled at him again and he thought, what he’d never thought before, that her clothes were cheap-looking. Gillian’s clothes were clothes you somehow didn’t notice: it didn’t occur to you to think they were cheap-looking or expensive. The women of Elton Grange all dressed differently, Outsize Dorothy in woollen things, Miss Brooks in suits, with a tie, and Sister and Miss Trenchard and Miss Arland always had white coats. The maids wore blue overalls most of the time but sometimes you saw them going home in the evenings in their ordinary clothes, which you never really thought about and certainly you never thought were cheap-looking.

‘Really beautiful,’ she said, still smiling, still at the window. She was wearing a headscarf and a maroon coat and another scarf at her neck. Her handbag was maroon also, but it was old, with something broken on one of the buckles: it was the handbag, he said to himself, that made you think she was cheaply dressed.

He left the door and went to her, taking her arm. He felt ashamed that he’d thought her clothes were cheap-looking. She’d been upset when he’d told her that the rug had been sent by Gillian. She’d been upset and he hadn’t bothered.

‘Oh, Mummy,’ he said.

She hugged him to her, and when he looked up into her face he saw the mark of a tear on one of her cheeks. Her fluffy hair was sticking out a bit beneath the headscarf, her round, plump face was forcing itself to smile.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘Sorry? Darling, there’s no need.’

‘I’m sorry you’re left all alone there, Mummy.’

‘Oh, but I’m not at all. I’ve got the office every day, and one of these days I really will see about going back to the West End. We’ve been awfully busy at the office, actually, masses to do.’

The sympathy he’d showed caused her to talk. Up to now – ever since they’d met the day before – she’d quite deliberately held herself back in this respect, knowing that to chatter on wouldn’t be the thing at all. Yesterday she’d waited until she’d returned to Sans Souci before relaxing. She’d had a nice long chat with Mrs Malone on the landing, which unfortunately had been spoiled by a man in one of Mrs Malone’s upper rooms poking his head out and asking for a bit of peace. ‘Sorry about that,’ she’d heard Mrs Malone saying to him later. ‘Couldn’t really stop her’ – a statement that had spoiled things even more. ‘I’m ever so sorry,’ she’d said quietly to Mrs Malone at breakfast.

‘Let’s go down now,’ Michael said.

But his mother didn’t hear this remark, engaged as she was upon making a series of remarks herself. She was no longer discreetly whispering, but chattering on with even more abandon than she had displayed on Mrs Malone’s stairs the night before. A flush had spread over her cheeks and around her mouth and on the portion of her neck which could be seen above her scarf. Michael could see she was happy.

‘We’ll have to go to Dolores’ wedding,’ she said. ‘On the 8th. The 8th of May, a Thursday I think it is. They’re coming round actually, Dolores and her young chap, Brian Haskins he’s called. Mr Ashaf says he wouldn’t trust him, but actually Dolores is no fool.’

‘Let’s go down now, Mum.’

She said she’d like to see the other dormitories. She’d like to see the senior dormitories, into one of which Michael would eventually be moving. She began to talk about Dolores Welsh and Brian Haskins again and then about Mrs Malone, and then about a woman Michael had never heard of before, a person called Peggy Urch.

He pointed out that the dormitories were called after imperial heroes. His was Drake, others were Ralegh, Nelson, Wellington, Marlborough and Clive. ‘I think I’ll be moving to Nelson,’ Michael said. ‘Or Marlborough. Depends.’ But he knew she wasn’t listening, he knew she hadn’t taken in the fact that the dormitories were named like that. She was talking about Peggy Urch when he led her into Marlborough. Outsize Dorothy was there with Miss Trenchard, taking stuff out of Verschoyle’s locker because Verschoyle had just gone to the sanatorium.

‘Very nice person,’ Michael’s mother was saying. ‘She’s taken on the Redmans’ flat – the one above us, you know.’

It seemed to Michael that his mother didn’t see Outsize Dorothy and Miss Trenchard. It seemed to him for a moment that his mother didn’t quite know where she was.

‘Looking for me?’ Outsize Dorothy said. She smiled and waddled towards them. She looked at Michael, waiting for him to explain who this visitor was. Miss Trenchard looked, too.

‘It’s my mother,’ he said, aware that these words were inept and inelegant.

‘I’m Mrs Lyng,’ Outsize Dorothy said. She held out her hand and Michael’s mother took it.

‘The Matron,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard of you, Mrs Lyng.’

‘Well actually,’ Outsize Dorothy contradicted with a laugh, ‘I’m the headmaster’s wife.’ All the flesh on her body wobbled when she laughed. Tichbourne said he knew for a fact she was twenty stone.

‘What a lovely place you have, Mrs Lyng. I was just saying to Michael. What a view from the windows!’

Outsize Dorothy told Miss Trenchard to go on getting Verschoyle’s things together, in a voice that implied that Miss Trenchard wasn’t paid to stand about doing nothing in the dormitories. All the women staff – the maids and Sister and Miss Arland and Miss Trenchard – hated Outsize Dorothy because she’d expect them, even Sister, to go on rooting in a locker while she talked to a parent. She wouldn’t in a million years say: ‘This is Miss Trenchard, the undermatron.’

‘Oh, I’m afraid we don’t have much time for views at Elton,’ Outsize Dorothy said. She was looking puzzled, and Michael imagined she was thinking that his mother was surely another woman, a thinner, smarter, quieter person. But then Outsize Dorothy wasn’t clever, as she often light-heartedly said herself, and was probably saying to herself that she must be confusing one boy’s mother with another.

‘Dorothy!’ a voice called out, a voice which Michael instantly and to his horror recognized as A.J.L.’s.

‘We had such a view at home!’ Michael’s mother said. ‘Such a gorgeous view!’ She was referring to her own home, a rectory in Somerset somewhere. She’d often told Michael about the rectory and the view, and her parents, both dead now. Her father had received the call to the Church late in life: he’d been in the Customs and Excise before that.

‘Here, dear,’ Outsize Dorothy called out. ‘In Marlborough.’

Michael knew he’d gone red in the face. His stomach felt hot also, the palms of his hands were clammy. He could hear the clatter of the headmaster’s footsteps on the uncarpeted back stairs. He began to pray, asking for something to happen, anything at all, anything God could think of.

His mother was more animated than before. More fluffy hair had slipped out from beneath her headscarf, the flush had spread over a greater area of her face. She was talking about the lack of view from the flat where she and Michael lived in Hammersmith, and about Peggy Urch who’d come to live in the flat directly above them and whose view was better because she could see over the poplars.

‘Hullo,’ A.J.L. said, a stringy, sandy man, the opposite of Outsize Dorothy and in many ways the perfect complement. Tichbourne said he often imagined them naked in bed, A.J.L. winding his stringiness around her explosive bulk.

Hands were shaken again. ‘Having a look round?’ A.J.L. said. ‘Staying at the Grand?’

Michael’s mother said she wasn’t staying at the Grand but at Sans Souci, did he know it? They’d been talking about views, she said, it was lovely to have a room with a view, she hoped Michael wasn’t giving trouble, her husband of course – well, ex-husband now – had been to this school in his time, before going on to Radley. Michael would probably go to Radley too.

‘Well, we hope so,’ A.J.L. said, seizing the back of Michael’s neck. ‘Shown her the new classrooms, eh?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Shown her where we’re going to have our swimming-pool?’

‘Not yet, sir.’

‘Well, then.’

His mother spoke of various diseases Michael had had, measles and whooping cough and chicken-pox, and of diseases he hadn’t had, mumps in particular. Miss Trenchard was like a ghost, all in white, still sorting out the junk in Verschoyle’s locker, not daring to say a word. She was crouched there, with her head inside the locker, listening to everything.

‘Well, we mustn’t keep you,’ A.J.L. said, shaking hands again with Michael’s mother. ‘Always feel free to come.’

There was such finality about these statements, more in the headmaster’s tone than in the words themselves, that Michael’s mother was immediately silent. The statements had a physical effect on her, as though quite violently they had struck her across the face. When she spoke again it was in the whisper she had earlier employed.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m ever so sorry for going on so.’

A.J.L. and Outsize Dorothy laughed, pretending not to understand what she meant. Miss Trenchard would tell Miss Arland. Sister would hear and so would Brookie, and the P.T. instructor would say that this same woman had imagined him to be one of the boys. Mr Waydelin would hear, and Square-jaw Simpson – Cocky Marshall’s successor – and Mr Brine and the Reverend Green.

‘I have enjoyed it,’ Michael’s mother whispered. ‘So nice to meet you.’

He went before her down the back stairs. His face was still red. They passed by the staff lavatory and the kitchens, out on to the concrete quadrangle. It was still misty and cold.

‘I bought things for lunch,’ she said, and for an awful moment he thought that she’d want to eat them somewhere in the school or in the grounds – in the art-room or the cricket pavilion. ‘We could have a picnic in my room,’ she said.

They walked down the short drive, past the chapel that once had been the gate-lodge. They caught a bus after a wait of half an hour, during which she began to talk again, telling him more about Peggy Urch, who reminded her of another friend she’d had once, a Margy Bassett. In her room in Sans Souci she went on talking, spreading out on the bed triangles of cheese, and tomatoes and rolls and biscuits and oranges. They sat in her room when they’d finished, eating Rollo. At six o’clock they caught a bus back to Elton Grange. She wept a little when she said goodbye.

Michael’s mother did not, as it happened, ever arrive at Elton Grange at half-term again. There was no need for her to do so because his father and Gillian were always able to come themselves. For several terms he felt embarrassed in the presence of A.J.L. and Outsize Dorothy and Miss Trenchard, but no one at school mentioned the unfortunate visit, not even Swagger Browne, who had so delightedly overheard her assuming the P.T. instructor to be one of the boys. School continued as before and so did the holidays, Saturdays in Cranleigh and the rest of the week in Hammersmith, news of Mr Ashaf and Dolores Welsh, now Dolores Haskins. Peggy Urch, the woman in the flat upstairs, often came down for a chat.

Often, too, Michael and his mother would sit together in the evenings on the sofa in front of the electric fire. She’d tell him about the rectory in Somerset and her father who had received the call to the Church late in his life, who’d been in the Customs and Excise. She’d tell him about her own childhood, and even about the early days of her marriage. Sometimes she wept a little, hardly at all, and he would take her arm on the sofa and she would smile and laugh. When they sat together on the sofa or went out together, to the cinema, or for a walk by the river or to the teashop called the Maids of Honour near Kew Gardens, Michael felt that he would never want to marry because he’d prefer to be with his mother. Even when she chatted on to some stranger in the Maids of Honour he felt he loved her: everything was different from the time she’d come to Elton Grange because away from Elton Grange things didn’t matter in the same way.

Then something unpleasant threatened. During his last term at Elton Grange Michael was to be confirmed. ‘Oh, but of course I must come,’ his mother said.

It promised to be worse than the previous occasion. After the service you were meant to bring your parents in to tea in the Great Hall and see that they had a cup of tea and sandwiches and cakes. You had to introduce them to the Bishop of Bath and Wells. Michael imagined all that. In bed at night he imagined his father and Gillian looking very smart, his father chatting easily to Mr Brine, Gillian smiling at Outsize Dorothy, and his mother’s hair fluffing out from beneath her headscarf. He imagined his mother and his father and Gillian having to sit together in a pew in chapel, as naturally they’d be expected to, being members of the same party.

‘There’s no need to,’ he said in the flat in Hammersmith. ‘There’s really no need to, Mum.’

She didn’t mention his father and Gillian, although he’d repeatedly said that they’d be there. It was as if she didn’t want to think about them, as if she was deliberately pretending that they’d decided not to attend. She’d stay in Sans Souci again, she said. They’d have a picnic in her room, since the newly confirmed were to be excused school tea on the evening of the service. ‘Dinner at the Grand, old chap,’ his father said. ‘Bring Tichbourne if you want to.’

Michael returned to Elton Grange at the end of the Easter holidays, leaving his mother in a state of high excitement at Paddington Station because she’d be seeing him again within five weeks. He thought he might invent an illness a day or two before the confirmation, or say at the last moment that he had doubts. In fact, he did hint to the Reverend Green that he wasn’t certain about being quite ready for the occasion, but the Reverend Green sharply told him not to be silly. Every time he went down on his knees at the end of a session with the Reverend Green he prayed that God might come to his rescue. But God did not, and all during the night before the confirmation service he lay awake. It wasn’t just because she was weepy and embarrassing, he thought: it was because she dressed in that cheap way, it was because she was common, with a common voice that wasn’t at all like Gillian’s or Mrs Tichbourne’s or Mrs Carson’s or even Outsize Dorothy’s. He couldn’t prevent these thoughts from occurring. Why couldn’t she do something about her fluffy hair? Why did she have to gabble like that? ‘I think I have a temperature,’ he said in the morning, but when Sister took it it was only 98.

Before the service the other candidates waited outside the chapel to greet their parents and godparents, but Michael went into the chapel early and took up a devout position. Through his fingers he saw the Reverend Green lighting the candles and preparing the altar. Occasionally, the Reverend Green glanced at Michael, somewhat suspiciously.

‘Defend, O Lord, this Thy child,’ said the Bishop of Bath and Wells, and when Michael walked back to his seat he kept his head down, not wanting to see his parents and Gillian. They sang Hymn 459. ‘My God, accept,’ sang Michael, ‘my heart this day.’

He walked with Swagger Browne down the aisle, still with his eyes down. ‘Fantastic,’ said Swagger Browne outside the chapel, for want of anything better to say. ‘Bloody fantastic.’ They waited for the congregation to come out.

Michael had godparents, but his father had said that they wouldn’t be able to attend. His godmother had sent him a prayer-book.

‘Well done,’ his father said. ‘Well done, Mike.’

‘What lovely singing!’ Gillian murmured. She was wearing a white dress with a collar that was slightly turned up, and a white wide-rimmed hat. On the gravel outside the chapel she put on dark glasses against the afternoon sun.

‘Your mother’s here somewhere,’ his father said. ‘You’d better see to her, Mike.’ He spoke quietly, with a hand resting for a moment on Michael’s shoulder. ‘We’ll be all right,’ he added.

Michael turned. She was standing alone, as he knew she would be. Unable to prevent himself, he wished she wouldn’t always wear head-scarves. ‘Oh, darling,’ she said.

She took his hands and pulled him towards her. She kissed him, apologizing for the embrace but saying that it was a special occasion. She wished her father were alive, she said.

‘Tea in the Great Hall,’ A.J.L. was booming, and Outsize Dorothy was waddling about in flowered yellow, smiling at the faces of parents and godparents. ‘Do come and have tea,’ she gushed.

‘Oh, I’d love a cup of tea,’ Michael’s mother whispered.

The crowd was moving through the sunshine, suited men, the Reverend Green in his cassock, the Bishop in crimson, women in their garden-party finery. They walked up the short drive from the chapel. They passed through the wide gothic arch that heralded the front door, through the vestibule where the croquet set was tidily in place and the deck-chairs neat against a wall. They entered what A.J.L. had years ago christened the Great Hall, where buttered buns and sandwiches and cakes and sausage-rolls were laid out on trestle tables. Miss Trenchard and Miss Arland were in charge of two silver-plated tea-urns.

‘I’ll get you something to eat,’ Michael said to his mother, leaving her although he knew she didn’t want to be left. ‘Seems no time since I was getting done myself,’ he heard his father saying to A.J.L.

Miss Arland poured a cup of tea for his mother and told him to offer her something to eat. He chose a plate of sausage-rolls. She smiled at him. ‘Don’t go away again,’ she whispered.

But he had to go away again because he couldn’t stand there holding the sausage-rolls. He darted back to the table and left the plate there, taking one for himself. When he returned to his mother she’d been joined by the Reverend Green and the Bishop.

The Bishop shook Michael’s hand and said it had been a very great pleasure to confirm him.

‘My father was in the Church,’ Michael’s mother said, and Michael knew that she wasn’t going to stop now. He watched her struggling to hold the words back, crumbling the pastry of her sausage-roll beneath her fingers. The flush had come into her cheeks, there was a brightness in her eyes. The Bishop’s face was kind: she couldn’t help herself, when kindness like that was there.

‘We really must be moving,’ the Reverend Green said, but the Bishop only smiled, and on and on she went about her father and the call he’d received so late in life. ‘I’m sure you knew him, my lord,’ was one suggestion she made, and the Bishop kindly agreed that he probably had.

‘Mrs Grainer would like to meet the Bishop,’ Outsize Dorothy murmured to the Reverend Green. She looked at Michael’s mother and Michael could see her remembering her and not caring for her.

‘Well, if you’ll excuse us,’ the Reverend Green said, seizing the Bishop’s arm.

‘Oh Michael dear, isn’t that a coincidence!’

There was happiness all over her face, bursting from her eyes, in her smile and her flushed cheeks and her fluffy hair. She turned to Mr and Mrs Tichbourne, who were talking to Mrs Carson, and said the Bishop had known her father, apparently quite well. She hadn’t even been aware that it was to be this particular bishop today, it hadn’t even occurred to her while she’d been at the confirmation service that such a coincidence could be possible. Her father had passed away fifteen years ago, he’d have been a contemporary of the Bishop’s. ‘He was in the Customs and Excise,’ she said, ‘before he received the call.’

They didn’t turn away from her. They listened, putting in a word or two, about coincidences and the niceness of the Bishop. Tichbourne and Carson stood eating sandwiches, offering them to one another. Michael’s face felt like a bonfire.

‘We’ll probably see you later,’ Mr Tichbourne said, eventually edging his wife away. ‘We’re staying at the Grand.’

‘Oh no, I’m at Sans Souci. Couldn’t ever afford the Grand!’ She laughed.

‘Don’t think we know the Sans Souci,’ Mrs Tichbourne said.

‘Darling, I’d love another cup of tea,’ his mother said to Michael, and he went away to get her one, leaving her with Mrs Carson. When he returned she was referring to Peggy Urch.

It was then, while talking to Mrs Carson, that Michael’s mother fell. Afterwards she said that she’d felt something slimy under one of her heels and had moved to rid herself of it. The next thing she knew she was lying on her back on the floor, soaked in tea.

Mrs Carson helped her to her feet. A.J.L. hovered solicitously. Outsize Dorothy picked up the cup and saucer.

‘I’m quite all right,’ Michael’s mother kept repeating. ‘There was something slippy on the floor, I’m quite all right.’

She was led to a chair by A.J.L. ‘I think we’d best call on Sister,’ he said. ‘Just to be sure.’

But she insisted that she was all right, that there was no need to go bothering Sister. She was as white as a sheet.

Michael’s father and Gillian came up to her and said they were sorry. Michael could see Tichbourne and Carson nudging one another, giggling. For a moment he thought of running away, hiding in the attics or something. Half a buttered bun had got stuck to the sleeve of his mother’s maroon coat when she’d fallen. Her left leg was saturated with tea.

‘We’ll drive you into town,’ his father said. ‘Horrible thing to happen.’

‘It’s just my elbow,’ his mother whispered. ‘I came down on my elbow.’

Carson and Tichbourne would imitate it because Carson and Tichbourne imitated everything. They’d stand there, pretending to be holding a cup of tea, and suddenly they’d be lying flat on their backs. ‘I think we’d best call on Sister,’ Carson would say, imitating A.J.L.

His father and Gillian said goodbye to Outsize Dorothy and to A.J.L. His mother, reduced to humble silence again, seemed only to want to get away. In the car she didn’t say anything at all and when they reached Sans Souci she didn’t seem to expect Michael to go in with her. She left the car, whispering her thanks, a little colour gathering in her face again.

That evening Michael had dinner with Gillian and his father in the Grand. Tichbourne was there also, and Carson, and several other boys, all with their parents. ‘I can drive a few of them back,’ his father said, ‘save everyone getting a car out.’ He crossed the dining-room floor and spoke to Mr Tichbourne and Mr Carson and the father of a boy called Mallabedeely. Michael ate minestrone soup and chicken with peas and roast potatoes. Gillian told him what the twins had been up to and said his father was going to have a swimming-pool put in. His father returned to the table and announced that he’d arranged to drive everyone back at nine o’clock.

Eating his chicken, he imagined his mother in Sans Souci, sitting on the edge of the bed, probably having a cry. He imagined her bringing back to London the stuff she’d bought for a picnic in her room. She’d never refer to any of that, she’d never upbraid him for going to the Grand for dinner when she’d wanted him to be with her. She’d consider it just that she should be punished.

As they got into the car, his father said he’d drive round by Sans Souci so that Michael could run in for a minute. ‘We’re meant to be back by a quarter past,’ Michael said quickly. ‘I’ve said goodbye to her,’ he added, which wasn’t quite true.

It would perhaps have been different if Tichbourne and Carson hadn’t been in the car. He’d have gone in and paused with her for a minute because he felt pity for her. But the unattractive façade of Sans Souci, the broken gate of the small front garden and the fishermen gnomes would have caused further nudging and giggling in his father’s white Alfa-Romeo.

‘You’re sure now?’ his father said. ‘I’ll get you there by a quarter past.’

‘No, it’s all right.’

She wouldn’t be expecting him. She wouldn’t even have unpacked the picnic she’d brought.

‘Hey, was that your godmother?’ Tichbourne asked in the dormitory. ‘The one who copped it on the floor?’

He began to shake his head and then he paused and went on shaking it. An aunt, he said, some kind of aunt, he wasn’t sure what the relationship was. He hadn’t thought of saying that before, yet it seemed so simple, and so right and so natural, that a distant aunt should come to a confirmation service and not stay, like everyone else, in the Grand. ‘God, it was funny,’ Carson said, and Tichbourne did his imitation, and Michael laughed with his friends. He was grateful to them for assuming that such a person could not be his mother. A.J.L. and Outsize Dorothy and Miss Trenchard knew she was his mother, and so did the Reverend Green, but for the remainder of his time at Elton Grange none of these people would have cause to refer to the fact in public. And if by chance A.J.L. did happen to say in class tomorrow that he hoped his mother was all right after her fall, Michael would say afterwards that A.J.L. had got it all wrong.

In the dark, he whispered to her in his mind. He said he was sorry, he said he loved her better than anyone.

A Complicated Nature

At a party once Attridge overheard a woman saying he gave her the shivers. ‘Vicious-tongued,’ this woman, a Mrs de Paul, had said. ‘Forked like a serpent’s.’

It was true, and he admitted it to himself without apology, though ‘sharp’ was how he preferred to describe the quality the woman had referred to. He couldn’t help it if his quick eye had a way of rooting out other people’s defects and didn’t particularly bother to search for virtues.

Sharp about other people, he was sharp about himself as well: confessing his own defects, he found his virtues tedious. He was kind and generous to the people he chose as his friends, and took it for granted that he should be. He was a tidy man, but took no credit for that since being tidy was part of his nature. He was meticulous about his dress, and he was cultured, being particularly keen on opera – especially the operas of Wagner – and on Velázquez. He had developed his own good taste, and was proud of the job he had made of it.

A man of fifty, with hair that had greyed and spectacles with fine, colourless rims, he was given to slimming, for the weight he had gained in middle age rounded his face and made it pinker than he cared for: vanity was a weakness in him.

Attridge had once been married. In 1952 his parents had died, his father in February and his mother in November. Attridge had been their only child and had always lived with them. Disliking – or so he then considered – the solitude their death left him in, he married in 1953 a girl called Bernice Golder, but this most unfortunate conjunction had lasted only three months. ‘Nasty dry old thing,’ his ex-wife had screamed at him on their honeymoon in Siena, and he had enraged her further by pointing out that nasty and dry he might be but old he wasn’t. ‘You were never young,’ she had replied more calmly than before. ‘Even as a child you must have been like dust.’ That wasn’t so, he tried to explain; the truth was that he had a complicated nature. But she didn’t listen to him.

Attridge lived alone now, existing comfortably on profits from the shares his parents had left him. He occupied a flat in a block, doing all his own cooking and taking pride in the small dinner parties he gave. His flat was just as his good taste wished it to be. The bathroom was tiled with blue Italian tiles, his bedroom severe and male, the hall warmly rust. His sitting-room, he privately judged, reflected a part of himself that did not come into the open, a mysterious element that even he knew little about and could only guess at. He’d saved up for the Egyptian rugs, scarlet and black and brown, on the waxed oak boards. He’d bought the first one in 1959 and each year subsequently had contrived to put aside his January and July Anglo-American Telegraph dividends until the floor was covered. He’d bought the last one a year ago.

On the walls of the room there was pale blue hessian, a background for his four tiny Velázquez drawings, and for the Toulouse-Lautrec drawing and the Degas, and the two brown charcoal studies, school of Michelangelo. There was a sofa and a sofa-table, authenticated Sheraton, and a Regency table in marble and gold that he had almost made up his mind to get rid of, and some Staffordshire figures. There was drama in the decoration and arrangement of the room, a quite flamboyant drama that Attridge felt was related to the latent element in himself, part of his complicated nature.

‘I’m hopeless in an emergency,’ he said in this room one afternoon, speaking with off-putting asperity into his ivory-coloured telephone. A woman called Mrs Matara, who lived in the flat above his, appeared not to hear him. ‘Something has gone wrong, you see,’ she explained in an upset voice, adding that she’d have to come down. She then abruptly replaced the receiver.

It was an afternoon in late November. It was raining, and already – at half past three – twilight had settled in. From a window of his sitting-room Attridge had been gazing at all this when his telephone rang. He’d been looking at the rain dismally falling and lights going on in other windows and at a man, five storeys down, sweeping sodden leaves from the concrete forecourt of the block of flats. When the phone rang he’d thought it might be his friend, old Mrs Harcourt-Egan. He and Mrs Harcourt-Egan were to go together to Persepolis in a fortnight’s time and there were still some minor arrangements to be made, although the essential booking had naturally been completed long since. It had been a considerable surprise to hear himself addressed by name in a voice he had been quite unable to place. He’d greeted Mrs Matara once or twice in the lift and that was all: she and her husband had moved into the flats only a year ago.

‘I do so apologize,’ Mrs Matara said when he opened the door to her. Against his will he welcomed her into the hall and she, knowing the geography of the flat since it was the same as her own, made for the sitting-room. ‘It’s really terrible of me,’ she said, ‘only I honestly don’t know where to turn.’ She spoke in a rushed and agitated manner, and he sighed as he followed her, resolving to point out when she revealed what her trouble was that Chamberlain, the janitor, was employed to deal with tenants’ difficulties. She was just the kind of woman to make a nuisance of herself with a neighbour, you could tell that by looking at her. It irritated him that he hadn’t sized her up better when he’d met her in the lift.

She was a woman of about the same age as himself, he guessed, small and thin and black-haired, though the hair, he also guessed, was almost certainly dyed. He wondered if she might be Jewish, which would account for her emotional condition: she had a Jewish look, and the name was presumably foreign. Her husband, whom he had also only met in the lift, had a look about the eyes which Attridge now said to himself might well have been developed in the clothing business. Of Austrian origin, he hazarded, or possibly even Polish. Mrs Matara had an accent of some kind, although her English appeared otherwise to be perfect. She was not out of the top drawer, but then people of the Jewish race rarely were. His own ex-wife, Jewish also, had most certainly not been.

Mrs Matara sat on the edge of a chair he had bought for ninety guineas fifteen years ago. It was also certainly Sheraton, a high-back chair with slim arms in inlaid walnut. He’d had it resprung and upholstered and covered in striped pink, four different shades.

‘A really ghastly things’ Mrs Matara said, ‘a terrible thing has happened in my flat, Mr Attridge.’

She’d fused the whole place. She couldn’t turn a tap off. The garbage disposal unit had failed. His ex-wife had made a ridiculous fuss when, because of her own stupidity, she’d broken her electric hair-curling apparatus on their honeymoon. Grotesque she’d looked with the plastic objects in her hair; he’d been relieved that they didn’t work.

‘I really can’t mend anything,’ he said. ‘Chamberlain is there for that, you know.’

She shook her head. She was like a small bird sitting there, a wren or an undersized sparrow. A Jewish sparrow, he said to himself, pleased with this analogy. She had a handkerchief between her fingers, a small piece of material, which she now raised to her face. She touched her eyes with it, one after the other. When she spoke again she said that a man had died in her flat.

‘Good heavens!’

‘It’s terrible!’ Mrs Matara cried. ‘Oh, my God!’

He poured brandy from a Georgian decanter that Mrs Harcourt-Egan had given him three Christmases ago, after their trip to Sicily. She’d given him a pair, in appreciation of what she called his kindness on that holiday. The gesture had been far too generous: the decanters were family heirlooms, and he’d done so little for her in Sicily apart from reading Northanger Abbey aloud when she’d had her stomach upset.

The man, he guessed, was not Mr Matara. No woman would say that a man had died, meaning her husband. Attridge imagined that a window-cleaner had fallen off a step-ladder. Quite clearly, he saw in his mind’s eye a step-ladder standing at a window and the body of a man in white overalls huddled on the ground. He even saw Mrs Matara bending over the body, attempting to establish its condition.

‘Drink it all,’ he said, placing the brandy glass in Mrs Matara’s right hand, hoping as he did so that she wasn’t going to drop it.

She didn’t drop it. She drank the brandy and then, to Attridge’s surprise, held out the glass in a clear request for more.

‘Oh, if only you would,’ she said as he poured it, and he realised that while he’d been pouring the first glass, while his mind had been wandering back to the occasion in Sicily and the gift of the decanters, his guest had made some demand of him.

‘You could say he was a friend,’ Mrs Matara said.

She went on talking. The man who had died had died of a heart attack. The presence of his body in her flat was an embarrassment. She told a story of a love affair that had begun six years ago. She went into details: she had met the man at a party given by people called Morton, the man had been married, what point was there in hurting a dead man’s wife? what point was there in upsetting her own husband, when he need never know? She rose and crossed the room to the brandy decanter. The man, she said, had died in the bed that was her husband’s as well as hers.

‘I wouldn’t have come here – oh God, I wouldn’t have come here if I hadn’t been desperate.’ Her voice was shrill. She was nearly hysterical. The brandy had brought out two patches of brightness in her cheeks. Her eyes were watering again, but she did not now touch them with the handkerchief. The water ran, over the bright patches, trailing mascara and other make-up with it.

‘I sat for hours,’ she cried. ‘Well, it seemed like hours. I sat there looking at him. We were both without a stitch, Mr Attridge.’

‘Good heavens!’

‘I didn’t feel anything at all. I didn’t love him, you know. All I felt was, ‘Oh God, what a thing to happen!’

Attridge poured himself some brandy, feeling the need for it. She reminded him quite strongly of his ex-wife, not just because of the Jewish thing or the nuisance she was making of herself but because of the way she had so casually said they’d been without a stitch. In Siena on their honeymoon his ex-wife had constantly been flaunting her nakedness, striding about their bedroom. ‘The trouble with you,’ she’d said, ‘you like your nudes on canvas.’

‘You could say he was a friend,’ Mrs Matara said again. She wanted him to come with her to her flat. She wanted him to help her dress the man. In the name of humanity, she was suggesting, they should falsify the location of death.

He shook his head, outraged and considerably repelled. The images in his mind were most unpleasant. There was the naked male body, dead on a bed. There was Mrs Matara and himself pulling the man’s clothes on to his body, struggling because rigor mortis was setting in.

‘Oh God, what can I do?’ cried Mrs Marata.

‘I think you should telephone a doctor, Mrs Matara.’

‘Oh, what use is a doctor, for God’s sake? The man’s dead.’

‘It’s usual –’

‘Look, one minute we’re having lunch – an omelette, just as usual, and salad and Pouilly Fuissé – and the next minute the poor man’s dead.’

‘I thought you said –’

‘Oh, you know what I mean. “Lovely, oh darling, lovely,” he said, and then he collapsed. Well, I didn’t know he’d collapsed. I mean, I didn’t know he was dead. He collapsed just like he always collapses. Post-coital –’

‘I’d rather not hear –’

‘Oh, for Jesus’ sake!’ She was shouting. She was on her feet, again approaching the decanter. Her hair had fallen out of the pins that held it and was now dishevelled. Her lipstick was blurred, some of it even smeared her chin. She looked most unattractive, he considered.

‘I cannot help you in this matter, Mrs Matara,’ he said as firmly as he could. ‘I can telephone a doctor –’

‘Will you for God’s sake stop about a doctor!’

‘I cannot assist you with your friend, Mrs Matara.’

‘All I want you to do is to help me put his clothes back on. He’s too heavy, I can’t do it myself –’

‘I’m very sorry, Mrs Matara.’

‘And slip him down here. The lift is only a few yards –’

‘That’s quite impossible.’

She went close to him, with her glass considerably replenished. She pushed her face at his in a way that he considered predatory. He was aware of the smell of her scent, and of another smell that he couldn’t prevent himself from thinking must be the smell of sexual intercourse: he had read of this odour in a book by Ernest Hemingway.

‘My husband and I are a contentedly married couple,’ she said, with her lips so near to his that they almost touched. That man upstairs has a wife who doesn’t know a thing, an innocent woman. Don’t you understand such things, Mr Attridge? Don’t you see what will happen if the dead body of my lover is discovered in my husband’s bed? Can’t you visualize the pain it’ll cause?’

He moved away. It was a long time since he had felt so angry and yet he was determined to control his anger. The woman knew nothing of civilized behaviour or she wouldn’t have come bursting into the privacy of a stranger like this, with preposterous and unlawful suggestions. The woman, for all he knew, was unbalanced.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said in what he hoped was an icy voice. ‘I’m sorry, but for a start I do not see how you and your husband could possibly be a contentedly married couple.’

‘I’m telling you we are. I’m telling you my lover was contentedly married also. Listen, Mr Attridge.’ She approached him again, closing in on him like an animal. ‘Listen, Mr Attridge; we met for physical reasons, once a week at lunchtime. For five years ever since the Mortons’ party, we’ve been meeting once a week, for an omelette and Pouilly Fuissé, and sex. It had nothing to do with our two marriages. But it will now: that woman will see her marriage as a failure now. She’ll mourn it for the rest of her days, when she should be mourning her husband. I’ll be divorced.’

‘You should have thought of that –’

She hit him with her left hand. She hit him on the face, the palm of her hand stinging the pink, plump flesh.

‘Mrs Matara!’

He had meant to shout her name, but instead his protest came from him in a shrill whisper. Since his honeymoon no one had struck him, and he recalled the fear he’d felt when he’d been struck then, in the bedroom in Siena. ‘I could kill you,’ his ex-wife had shouted at him. ‘I’d kill you if you weren’t dead already.’

‘I must ask you to go, Mrs Matara,’ he said in the same shrill whisper. He cleared his throat. ‘At once,’ he said, in a more successful voice.

She shook her head. She said he had no right to tell her what she should have thought of. She was upset as few women can ever be upset: in all decency and humanity it wasn’t fair to say she should have thought of that. She cried out noisily in his sitting-room and he felt that he was in a nightmare. It had all the horror and absurdity and violence of a nightmare: the woman standing in front of him with water coming out of her eyes, drinking his brandy and hitting him.

She spoke softly then, not in her violent way. She placed the brandy glass on the marble surface of the Regency table and stood there with her head down. He knew she was still weeping even though he couldn’t see her face and couldn’t hear any noise coming from her. She whispered that she was sorry.

‘Please forgive me, Mr Attridge. I’m very sorry.’

He nodded, implying that he accepted this apology. It was all very nasty, but for the woman it was naturally an upsetting thing to happen. He imagined, when a little time had passed, telling the story to Mrs Harcourt-Egan and to others, relating how a woman, to all intents and purposes a stranger to him, had telephoned him to say she was in need of assistance and then had come down from her flat with this awful tragedy to relate. He imagined himself describing Mrs Matara, how at first she’d seemed quite smart and then had become dishevelled, how she’d helped herself to his brandy and had suddenly struck him. He imagined Mrs Harcourt-Egan arid others gasping when he said that. He seemed to see his own slight smile as he went on to say that the woman could not be blamed. He heard himself saying that the end of the matter was that Mrs Matara just went away.

But in fact Mrs Matara did not go away. Mrs Matara continued to stand, weeping quietly.

‘I’m sorry too,’ he said, feeling that the words, with the finality he’d slipped into them, would cause her to move to the door of the sitting-room.

‘If you’d just help me,’ she said, with her head still bent. ‘Just to get his clothes on.’

He began to reply. He made a noise in his throat.

‘I can’t manage,’ she said, ‘on my own.’

She raised her head and looked across the room at him. Her face was blotched all over now, with make-up and tears. Her hair had fallen down a little more, and from where he stood Attridge thought he could see quite large areas of grey beneath the black. A rash of some kind, or it might have been flushing, had appeared on her neck.

‘I wouldn’t bother you,’ she said, ‘if I could manage on my own.’ She would have telephoned a friend, she said, except there wouldn’t be time for a friend to get to the block of flats. ‘There’s very little time, you see,’ she said.

It was then, while she spoke those words, that Attridge felt the first hint of excitement. It was the same kind of excitement that he experienced just before the final curtain of Tannhäuser, or whenever, in the Uffizi, he looked upon Lorenzo di Credi’s Annunciation. Mrs Matara was a wretched, unattractive creature who had been conducting a typical hole-in-corner affair and had received her just rewards. It was hard to feel sorry for her, and yet for some reason it was harder not to. The man who had died had got off scot-free, leaving her to face the music miserably on her own. ‘You’re inhuman,’ his ex-wife had said in Siena. ‘You’re incapable of love. Or sympathy, or anything else.’ She’d stood there in her underclothes, taunting him.

‘I’ll manage,’ Mrs Matara said, moving towards the door.

He did not move himself. She’d been so impatient, all the time in Siena. She didn’t even want to sit in the square and watch the people. She’d been lethargic in the cathedral. All she’d ever wanted was to try again in bed. ‘You don’t like women,’ she’d said, sitting up with a glass of Brolio in her hand, smoking a cigarette.

He followed Mrs Matara into the hall, and an image entered his mind of the dead man’s wife. He saw her as Mrs Matara had described her, as an innocent woman who believed herself faithfully loved. He saw her as a woman with fair hair, in a garden, simply dressed. She had borne the children of the man who now lay obscenely dead, she had made a home for him and had entertained his tedious business friends, and now she was destined to suffer. It was a lie to say he didn’t like women, it was absurd to say he was incapable of sympathy.

Once more he felt a hint of excitement. It was a confused feeling now, belonging as much in his body as in his mind. In a dim kind of way he seemed again to be telling the story to Mrs Harcourt-Egan or to someone else. Telling it, his voice was quiet. It spoke of the compassion he had suddenly felt for the small, unattractive Jewish, woman and for another woman, a total stranger whom he’d never even seen. ‘A moment of truth,’ his voice explained to Mrs Harcourt-Egan and others. ‘I could not pass these women by.’

He knew it was true. The excitement he felt had to do with sympathy, and the compassion that had been engendered in it. His complicated nature worked in that way: there had to be drama, like the drama of a man dead in a bed, and the beauty of being unable to pass the women by, as real as the beauty of the Madonna of the Meadow. With her cigarette and her Brolio, his ex-wife wouldn’t have understood that in a million years. In their bedroom in Siena she had expected something ordinary to take place, an act that rats performed.

Never in his entire life had Attridge felt as he felt now. It was the most extraordinary, and for all he knew the most important, occasion in his life. As though watching a play, he saw himself assisting the dead, naked man into his clothes. It would be enough to put his clothes on, no need to move the body from one flat to another, enough to move it from the bedroom. ‘We put it in the lift and left it there,’ his voice said, still telling the story. ‘ “No need,” I said to her, “to involve my flat at all.” She agreed; she had no option. The man became a man who’d had a heart attack in a lift. A travelling salesman, God knows who he was.’

The story was beautiful. It was extravagant and flamboyant, incredible almost, like all good art. Who really believed in the Madonna of the Meadow, until jolted by the genius of Bellini? The Magic Flute was an impossible occasion, until Mozart’s music charged you like an electric current.

‘Yes, Mr Attridge?’

He moved towards her, fearing to speak lest his voice emerged from him in the shrill whisper that had possessed it before. He nodded at Mrs Matara, agreeing in this way to assist her.

Hurrying through the hall and hurrying up the stairs because one flight of stairs was quicker than the lift, he felt the excitement continuing in his body. Actually it would be many months before he could tell Mrs Harcourt-Egan or anyone else about any of it. It seemed, for the moment at least, to be entirely private.

‘What was he?’ he asked on the stairs in a whisper.

‘Was?’

‘Professionally.’ He was impatient, more urgent now than she. ‘Salesman or something, was he?’

She shook her head. Her friend had been a dealer in antiques, she said.

Another Jew, he thought. But he was pleased because the man could have been on his way to see him, since dealers in antiques did sometimes visit him. Mrs Matara might have said to the man, at another party given by the Mortons or anywhere else you liked, that Mr Attridge, a collector of pictures and Staffordshire china, lived in the flat below hers. She could have said to Attridge that she knew a man who might have stuff that would interest him and then the man might have telephoned him, and he’d have said come round one afternoon. And in the lift the man collapsed and died.

She had her latchkey in her hand, about to insert it into the lock of her flat door. Her hand was shaking. Surprising himself, he gripped her arm, preventing her from completing the action with the key.

‘Will you promise me,’ he said, ‘to move away from these flats? As soon as you conveniently can?’

‘Of course, of course! How could I stay?’

‘I’d find it awkward, meeting you about the place, Mrs Matara. Is that a bargain?’

‘Yes, yes.’

She turned the key in the lock. They entered a hall that was of the exact proportions of Attridge’s but different in other ways. It was a most unpleasant hall, he considered, with bell chimes in it, and two oil paintings that appeared to be the work of some emergent African, one being of Negro children playing on crimson sand, the other of a Negro girl with a baby at her breast.

‘Oh, God!’ Mrs Matara cried, turning suddenly, unable to proceed. She pushed herself at him, her sharp head embedding itself in his chest, her hands grasping the jacket of his grey suit.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, dragging his eyes away from the painting of the children on the crimson sand. One of her hands had ceased to grasp his jacket and had fallen into one of his. It was cold and had a fleshless feel.

‘We have to do it,’ he said, and for a second he saw himself again as he would see himself in retrospect: standing with the Jewish woman in her hall, holding her hand to comfort her.

While they still stood there, just as he was about to propel her forward, there was a noise.

‘My God!’ whispered Mrs Matara.

He knew she was thinking that her husband had returned, and he thought the same himself. Her husband had come back sooner than he usually did. He had found a corpse and was about to find his wife holding hands with a neighbour in the hall.

‘Hey!’ a voice said.

‘Oh no!’ cried Mrs Matara, rushing forward into the room that Attridge knew was her sitting-room.

There was the mumble of another voice, and then the sound of Mrs Matara’s tears. It was a man’s voice, but the man was not her husband: the atmosphere which came from the scene wasn’t right for that.

‘There now,’ the other voice was saying in the sitting-room. ‘There now, there now.’

The noise of Mrs Matara’s weeping continued, and the man appeared at the door of the sitting-room. He was fully dressed, a sallow man, tall and black-haired, with a beard. He’d guessed what had happened, he said, as soon as he heard voices in the hall: he’d guessed that Mrs Matara had gone to get help. In an extremely casual way he said he was really quite all right, just a little groggy due to the silly blackout he’d had. Mrs Matara was a customer of his, he explained, he was in the antique business. ‘I just passed out,’ he said. He smiled at Attridge. He’d had a few silly blackouts recently and despite what his doctor said about there being nothing to worry about he’d have to be more careful. Really embarrassing, it was, plopping out in a client’s sitting-room.

Mrs Matara appeared in the sitting-room doorway. She leaned against it, as though requiring its support. She giggled through her tears and the man spoke sharply to her, forgetting she was meant to be his client. He warned her against becoming hysterical.

‘My God, you’d be hysterical,’ Mrs Matara cried, ‘if you’d been through all that kerfuffle.’

‘Now, now –’

‘For Christ’s sake, I thought you were a goner. Didn’t I?’ she cried, addressing Attridge without looking at him and not waiting for him to reply. ‘I rushed downstairs to this man here. I was in a frightful state. Wasn’t I?’

‘Yes.’

‘We were going to put your clothes on and dump you in his flat.’

Attridge shook his head, endeavouring to imply that that was not accurate, that he’d never have agreed to the use of his flat for this purpose. But neither of them was paying any attention to him. The man was looking embarrassed, Mrs Matara was grim.

‘You should damn well have told me if you were having blackouts.’

‘I’m sorry,’ the man said. ‘I’m sorry you were troubled,’ he said to Attridge. ‘Please forgive Mrs Matara.’

‘Forgive you, you mean!’ she cried. ‘Forgive you for being such a damn fool!’

‘Do try to pull yourself together, Miriam.’

‘I tell you, I thought you were dead.’

‘Well, I’m not. I had a little blackout –’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, stop about your wretched blackout!’

The way she said that reminded Attridge very much of his ex-wife. He’d had a headache once, he remembered, and she’d protested in just the same impatient tone of voice, employing almost the same words. She’d married again, of course – a man called Saunders in ICI.

‘At least be civil,’ the man said to Mrs Matara.

They were two of the most unpleasant people Attridge had ever come across. It was a pity the man hadn’t died. He’d run to fat and was oily, there was a shower of dandruff on his jacket. You could see his stomach straining his shirt, one of the shirt-buttons had actually given way.

‘Well, thank you,’ Mrs Matara said, approaching Attridge with her right hand held out. She said it gracelessly, as a duty. The same hand had struck him on the face and later had slipped for comfort into one of his. It was hard and cold when he shook it, with the same fleshless feel as before. ‘We still have a secret,’ Mrs Matara said. She smiled at him in her dutiful way, without displaying interest in him.

The man had opened the hall door of the flat. He stood by it, smiling also, anxious for Attridge to go.

‘This afternoon’s a secret,’ Mrs Matara murmured, dropping her eyes in a girlish pretence. ‘All this,’ she said, indicating her friend. ‘I’m sorry I hit you.’

‘Hit him?’

‘When we were upset. Downstairs. I hit him.’ She giggled, apparently unable to help herself.

‘Great God!’ The man giggled also.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Attridge said.

But it did matter. The secret she spoke of wasn’t worth having because it was sordid and nothing else. It was hardly the kind of thing he’d wish to mull over in private, and certainly not the kind he’d wish to tell Mrs Harcourt-Egan or anyone else. Yet the other story might even have reached his ex-wife, it was not impossible. He imagined her hearing it, and her amazement that a man whom she’d once likened to dust had in the cause of compassion falsified the circumstances of a death. He couldn’t imagine the man his ex-wife had married doing such a thing, or Mrs Matara’s husband, or the dandruffy man who now stood by the door of the flat. Such men would have been frightened out of their wits.

‘Goodbye,’ she said.

‘Goodbye,’ the man said, smiling at the door.

Attridge wanted to say something. He wanted to linger for a moment longer and to mention his ex-wife. He wanted to tell them what he had never told another soul, that his ex-wife had done terrible things to him. He disliked all Jewish people, he wanted to say, because of his ex-wife and her lack of understanding. Marriage repelled him because of her. It was she who had made him vicious-tongued. It was she who had embittered him.

He looked from one face to the other. They would not understand and they would not be capable of making an effort, as he had when faced with the woman’s predicament. He had always been a little on the cold side, he knew that well. But his ex-wife might have drawn on the other aspects of his nature and dispelled the coldness. Instead of displaying all that impatience, she might have cosseted him and accepted his complications. The love she sought would have come in its own good time, as sympathy and compassion had eventually come that afternoon. Warmth was buried deep in some people, he wanted to say to the two faces in the hall, but he knew that, like his ex-wife, the faces would not understand.

As he went he heard the click of the door behind him and imagined a hushed giggling in the hall. He would be feeling like a prince if the man had really died.

Teresa’s Wedding

The remains of the wedding-cake were on top of the piano in Swanton’s lounge-bar, beneath a framed advertisement for Power’s whiskey. Chas Flynn, the best man, had opened two packets of confetti: it lay thickly on the remains of the wedding-cake, on the surface of the bar and the piano, on the table and the two small chairs that the lounge-bar contained, and on the tattered green-and-red linoleum.

The wedding guests, themselves covered in confetti, stood in groups. Father Hogan, who had conducted the service in the Church of the Immaculate Conception, stood with Mrs Atty, the mother of the bride, and Mrs Cornish, the mother of the bridegroom, and Mrs Tracy, a sister of Mrs Atty’s.

Mrs Tracy was the stoutest of the three women, a farmer’s widow who lived eight miles from the town. In spite of the jubilant nature of the occasion, she was dressed in black, a colour she had affected since the death of her husband three years ago. Mrs Atty, bespectacled, with her grey hair in a bun, wore a flowered dress – small yellow-and-blue blooms that blended easily with the confetti. Mrs Cornish was in pink, with a pink hat. Father Hogan, a big red-complexioned man, held a tumbler containing whiskey and water in equal measures; his companions sipped Winter’s Tale sherry.

Artie Cornish, the bridegroom, drank stout with his friends Eddie Boland and Chas Flynn, who worked in the town’s bacon factory, and Screw Doyle, so called because he served behind the counter in McQuaid’s hardware shop. Artie, who worked in a shop himself – Driscoll’s Provisions and Bar – was a freckled man of twenty-eight, six years older than his bride. He was heavily built, his bulk encased now in a suit of navy-blue serge, similar to the suits that all the other men were wearing that morning in Swanton’s lounge-bar. In the opinion of Mr Driscoll, his employer, he was a conscientious shopman, with a good memory for where commodities were kept on the shelves. Customers occasionally found him slow.

The fathers of the bride and bridegroom, Mr Atty and Mr Cornish, were talking about greyhounds, keeping close to the bar. They shared a feeling of unease, caused by being in the lounge-bar of Swanton’s, with women present, on a Saturday morning. ‘Bring us two more big ones,’ Mr Cornish requested of Kevin, a youth behind the bar, hoping that this addition to his consumption of whiskey would relax matters. They wore white carnations in the buttonholes of their suits, and stiff white collars which were reddening their necks. Unknown to one another, they shared the same thought: a wish that the bride and groom would soon decide to bring the occasion to an end by going to prepare themselves for their journey to Cork on the half-one bus. Mr Atty and Mr Cornish, bald-headed men of fifty-three and fifty-five, had it in mind to spend the remainder of the day in Swanton’s lounge-bar, celebrating in their particular way the union of their children.

The bride, who had been Teresa Atty and was now Teresa Cornish, had a round, pretty face and black, pretty hair, and was a month and a half pregnant. She stood in the corner of the lounge with her friends, Philomena Morrissey and Kitty Roche, both of whom had been bridesmaids. All three of them were attired in their wedding finery, dresses they had feverishly worked on to get finished in time for the wedding. They planned to alter the dresses and have them dyed so that later on they could go to parties in them, even though parties were rare in the town.

‘I hope you’ll be happy, Teresa,’ Kitty Roche whispered: ‘I hope you’ll be all right.’ She couldn’t help giggling, even though she didn’t want to. She giggled because she’d drunk a glass of gin and Kia-Ora orange, which Screw Doyle had said would steady her. She’d been nervous in the church. She’d tripped twice on the walk down the aisle.

‘You’ll be marrying yourself one of these days,’ Teresa whispered, her cheeks still glowing after the excitement of the ceremony. ‘I hope you’ll be happy too, Kit.’

But Kitty Roche, who was asthmatic, did not believe she’d ever marry. She’d be like Miss Levis, the Protestant woman on the Cork road, who’d never got married because of tuberculosis. Or old Hannah Flood, who had a bad hip. And it wasn’t just that no one would want to be saddled with a diseased wife: there was also the fact that the asthma caused a recurrent skin complaint on her face and neck and hands.

Teresa and Philomena drank glasses of Babycham, and Kitty drank Kia-Ora with water instead of gin in it. They’d known each other all their lives. They’d been to the Presentation Nuns together, they’d taken First Communion together. Even when they’d left the Nuns, when Teresa had gone to work in the Medical Hall and Kitty Roche and Philomena in Keane’s drapery, they’d continued to see each other almost every day.

‘We’ll think of you, Teresa,’ Philomena said. ‘We’ll pray for you.’ Philomena, plump and pale-haired, had every hope of marrying and had even planned her dress, in light lemony lace, with a Limerick veil. Twice in the last month she’d gone out with Des Foley the vet, and even if he was a few years older than he might be and had a car that smelt of cattle disinfectant, there was more to be said for Des Foley than for many another.

Teresa’s two sisters, much older than Teresa, stood by the piano and the framed Power’s advertisement, between the two windows of the lounge-bar. Agnes, in smart powder-blue, was tall and thin, the older of the two; Loretta, in brown, was small. Their own two marriages, eleven and nine years ago, had been consecrated by Father Hogan in the Church of the Immaculate Conception and celebrated afterwards in this same lounge-bar. Loretta had married a man who was no longer mentioned because he’d gone to England and had never come back. Agnes had married George Tobin, who was at present sitting outside the lounge-bar in a Ford Prefect, in charge of his and Agnes’s three small children. The Tobins lived in Cork now, George being the manager of a shoe-shop there. Loretta lived with her parents, like an unmarried daughter again.

‘Sickens you,’ Agnes said ‘She’s only a kid, marrying a goop like that. She’ll be stuck in this dump of a town for ever.’

Loretta didn’t say anything. It was well known that Agnes’s own marriage had turned out well: George Tobin was a teetotaller and had no interest in either horses or greyhounds. From where she stood Loretta could see him through the window, sitting patiently in the Ford Prefect, reading a comic to his children. Loretta’s marriage had not been consummated.

‘Well, though I’ve said it before I’ll say it again,’ said Father Hogan. ‘It’s a great day for a mother.’

Mrs Atty and Mrs Cornish politely agreed, without speaking. Mrs Tracy smiled.

‘And for an aunt too, Mrs Tracy. Naturally enough.’

Mrs Tracy smiled again. ‘A great day,’ she said.

‘Ah, I’m happy for Teresa,’ Father Hogan said. ‘And for Artie, too, Mrs Cornish; naturally enough. Aren’t they as fine a couple as ever stepped out of this town?’

‘Are they leaving the town?’ Mrs Tracy asked, confusion breaking in her face. ‘I thought Artie was fixed in Driscoll’s.’

‘It’s a manner of speaking, Mrs Tracy,’ Father Hogan explained. ‘It’s a way of putting the thing. When I was marrying them this morning I looked down at their two faces and I said to myself, “Isn’t it great God gave them life?’ ”

The three women looked across the lounge, at Teresa standing with her friends Philomena Morrissey and Kitty Roche, and then at Artie, with Screw Doyle, Eddie Boland and Chas Flynn.

‘He has a great career in front of him in Driscoll’s,’ Father Hogan pronounced. ‘Will Teresa remain on in the Medical Hall, Mrs Atty?’

Mrs Atty replied that her daughter would remain for a while in the Medical Hall. It was Father Hogan who had persuaded Artie of his duty when Artie had hesitated. Mrs Atty and Teresa had gone to him for advice, he’d spoken to Artie and to Mr and Mrs Cornish, and the matter had naturally not been mentioned on either side since.

‘Will I get you another glassful, Father?’ inquired Mrs Tracy, holding out her hand for the priest’s tumbler.

‘Well, it isn’t every day I’m honoured,’ said Father Hogan with his smile, putting the tumbler into Mrs Tracy’s hand.

At the bar Mr Atty and Mr Cornish drank steadily on. In their corner Teresa and her bridesmaids talked about weddings that had taken place in the Church of the Immaculate Conception in the past, how they had stood by the railings of the church when they were children, excited by the finery and the men in serge suits. Teresa’s sisters whispered, Agnes continuing about the inadequacy of the man Teresa had just married. Loretta whispered without actually forming words. She wished her sister wouldn’t go on so because she didn’t want to think about any of it, about what had happened to Teresa, and what would happen to her again tonight, in a hotel in Cork. She’d fainted when it had happened to herself, when he’d come at her like a farm animal. She’d fought like a mad thing.

It was noisier in the lounge-bar than it had been. The voices of the bridegroom’s friends were raised; behind the bar young Kevin had switched on the wireless. ‘Don’t get around much anymore,’ cooed a soft male voice.

‘Bedad, there’ll be no holding you tonight, Artie,’ Eddie Boland whispered thickly into the bridegroom’s ear. He nudged Artie in the stomach with his elbow, spilling some Guinness. He laughed uproariously.

‘We’re following you in two cars,’ Screw Doyle said. ‘We’ll be waiting in the double bed for you.’ Screw Doyle laughed also, striking the floor repeatedly with his left foot, which was a habit of his when excited. At a late hour the night before he’d told Artie that once, after a dance, he’d spent an hour in a field with the girl whom Artie had agreed to marry. ‘I had a great bloody ride of her,’ he’d confided.

‘I’ll have a word with Teresa,’ said Father Hogan, moving away from Teresa’s mother, her aunt and Mrs Cornish. He did not, however, cross the lounge immediately, but paused by the bar, where Mr Cornish and Mr Atty were. He put his empty tumbler on the bar itself, and Mr Atty pushed it towards young Kevin, who at once refilled it.

‘Well, it’s a great day for a father,’ said Father Hogan. ‘Aren’t they a tip-top credit to each other?’

‘Who’s that, Father?’ inquired Mr Cornish, his eyes a little bleary, sweat hanging from his cheeks.

Father Hogan laughed. He put his tumbler on the bar again, and Mr Cornish pushed it towards young Kevin for another refill.

In their corner Philomena confided to Teresa and Kitty Roche that she wouldn’t mind marrying Des Foley the vet. She’d had four glasses of Babycham. If he asked her this minute, she said, she’d probably say yes. ‘Is Chas Flynn nice?’ Kitty Roche asked, squinting across at him.

On the wireless Petula Clark was singing ‘Downtown’. Eddie Boland was whistling ‘Mother Macree’. ‘Listen, Screw,’ Artie said, keeping his voice low although it wasn’t necessary. ‘Is that true? Did you go into a field with Teresa?’

Loretta watched while George Tobin in his Ford Prefect turned a page of the comic he was reading to his children. Her sister’s voice continued in its abuse of the town and its people, in particular the shopman who had got Teresa pregnant. Agnes hated the town and always had. She’d met George Tobin at a dance in Cork and had said to Loretta that in six months’ time she’d be gone from the town for ever. Which was precisely what had happened, except that marriage had made her less nice than she’d been. She’d hated the town in a jolly way once, laughing over it. Now she hardly laughed at all.

‘Look at him,’ she was saying. ‘I doubt he knows how to hold a knife and fork.’

Loretta ceased her observation of her sister’s husband through the window and regarded Artie Cornish instead. She looked away from him immediately because his face, so quickly replacing the face of George Tobin, had caused in her mind a double image which now brutally persisted. She felt a sickness in her stomach, and closed her eyes and prayed. But the double image remained: George Tobin and Artie Cornish coming at her sisters like two farmyard animals and her sisters fighting to get away. ‘Dear Jesus,’ she whispered to herself. ‘Dear Jesus, help me.’

‘Sure it was only a bit of gas,’ Screw Doyle assured Artie. ‘Sure there was no harm done, Artie.’

In no way did Teresa love him. She had been aware of that when Father Hogan had arranged the marriage, and even before that, when she’d told her mother that she thought she was pregnant and had then mentioned Artie Cornish’s name. Artie Cornish was much the same as his friends: you could be walking along a road with Screw Doyle or Artie Cornish and you could hardly tell the difference. There was nothing special about Artie Cornish, except that he always added up the figures twice when he was serving you in Driscoll’s. There was nothing bad about him either, any more than there was anything bad about Eddie Boland or Chas Flynn or even Screw Doyle. She’d said privately to Father Hogan that she didn’t love him or feel anything for him one way or the other: Father Hogan had replied that in the circumstances all that line of talk was irrelevant.

When she was at the Presentation Convent Teresa had imagined her wedding, and even the celebration in this very lounge-bar. She had imagined everything that had happened that morning, and the things that were happening still. She had imagined herself standing with her bridesmaids as she was standing now, her mother and her aunt drinking sherry, Agnes and Loretta being there too, and other people, and music. Only the bridegroom had been mysterious, some faceless, bodiless presence, beyond imagination. From conversations she had had with Philomena and Kitty Roche, and with her sisters, she knew that they had imagined in a similar way. Yet Agnes had settled for George Tobin because George Tobin was employed in Cork and could take her away from the town. Loretta, who had been married for a matter of weeks, was going to become a nun.

Artie ordered more bottles of stout from young Kevin. He didn’t want to catch the half-one bus and have to sit beside her all the way to Cork. He didn’t want to go to the Lee Hotel when they could just as easily have remained in the town, when he could just as easily have gone in to Driscoll’s tomorrow and continued as before. It would have been different if Screw Doyle hadn’t said he’d been in a field with her: you could pretend a bit on the bus, and in the hotel, just to make the whole thing go. You could pretend like you’d been pretending ever since Father Hogan had laid down the law, you could make the best of it like Father Hogan had said.

He handed a bottle of stout to Chas Flynn and one to Screw Doyle and another to Eddie Boland. He’d ask her about it on the bus. He’d repeat what Screw Doyle had said and ask her if it was true. For all he knew the child she was carrying was Screw Doyle’s child and would be born with Screw Doyle’s thin nose, and everyone in the town would know when they looked at it. His mother had told him when he was sixteen never to trust a girl, never to get involved, because he’d be caught in the end. He’d get caught because he was easy-going, because he didn’t possess the smartness of Screw Doyle and some of the others. ‘Sure, you might as well marry Teresa as anyone else,’ his father had said after Father Hogan had called to see them about the matter. His mother had said things would never be the same between them again.

Eddie Boland sat down at the piano and played ‘Mother Macree’, causing Agnes and Loretta to move to the other side of the lounge-bar. In the motor-car outside the Tobin children asked their father what the music was for.

‘God go with you, girl,’ Father Hogan said to Teresa, motioning Kitty Roche and Philomena away. ‘Isn’t it a grand thing that’s happened, Teresa?’ His red-skinned face, with the shiny false teeth so evenly arrayed in it, was close to hers. For a moment she thought he might kiss her, which of course was ridiculous, Father Hogan kissing anyone, even at a wedding celebration.

‘It’s a great day for all of us, girl.’

When she’d told her mother, her mother said it made her feel sick in her stomach. Her father hit her on the side of the face. Agnes came down specially from Cork to try and sort the matter out. It was then that Loretta had first mentioned becoming a nun.

‘I want to say two words,’ said Father Hogan, still standing beside her, but now addressing everyone in the lounge-bar. ‘Come over here alongside us, Artie. Is there a drop in everyone’s glass?’

Artie moved across the lounge-bar, with his glass of stout. Mr Cornish told young Kevin to pour out a few more measures. Eddie Boland stopped playing the piano.

‘It’s only this,’ said Father Hogan. ‘I want us all to lift our glasses to Artie and Teresa. May God go with you, the pair of you,’ he said, lifting his own glass.

‘Health, wealth and happiness,’ proclaimed Mr Cornish from the bar.

‘And an early night,’ shouted Screw Doyle. ‘Don’t forget to draw the curtains, Artie.’

They stood awkwardly, not holding hands, not even touching. Teresa watched while her mother drank the remains of her sherry, and while her aunt drank and Mrs Cornish drank. Agnes’s face was disdainful, a calculated reply to the coarseness of Screw Doyle’s remarks. Loretta was staring ahead of her, concentrating her mind on her novitiate. A quick flush passed over the roughened countenance of Kitty Roche. Philomena laughed, and all the men in the lounge-bar, except Father Hogan, laughed.

‘That’s sufficient of that talk,’ Father Hogan said with contrived severity. ‘May you meet happiness halfway,’ he added, suitably altering his intonation. ‘The pair of you, Artie and Teresa.’

Noise broke out again after that. Father Hogan shook hands with Teresa and then with Artie. He had a funeral at half past two, he said: he’d better go and get his dinner inside him.

‘Goodbye, Father,’ Artie said. ‘Thanks for doing the job.’

‘God bless the pair of you,’ said Father Hogan, and went away.

‘We should be going for the bus,’ Artie said to her. ‘It wouldn’t do to miss the old bus.’

‘No, it wouldn’t.’

‘I’ll see you down there. You’ll have to change your clothes.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll come the way I am.’

‘You’re fine the way you are, Artie.’

He looked at the stout in his glass and didn’t raise his eyes from it when he spoke again. ‘Did Screw Doyle take you into a field, Teresa?’

He hadn’t meant to say it then. It was wrong to come out with it like that, in the lounge-bar, with the wedding-cake still there on the piano, and Teresa still in her wedding-dress, and confetti everywhere. He knew it was wrong even before the words came out; he knew that the stout had angered and befuddled him.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Sorry, Teresa.’

She shook her head. It didn’t matter: it was only to be expected that a man you didn’t love and who didn’t love you would ask a question like that at your wedding celebration.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, he did.’

‘He told me. I thought he was codding. I wanted to know.’

‘It’s your baby, Artie. The other thing was years ago.’

He looked at her. Her face was flushed, her eyes had tears in them.

‘I had too much stout,’ he said.

They stood where Father Hogan had left them, drawn away from their wedding guests. Not knowing where else to look, they looked together at Father Hogan’s black back as he left the lounge-bar, and then at the perspiring, naked heads of Mr Cornish and Mr Atty by the bar.

At least they had no illusions, she thought. Nothing worse could happen than what had happened already, after Father Hogan had laid down the law. She wasn’t going to get a shock like Loretta had got. She wasn’t going to go sour like Agnes had gone when she’d discovered that it wasn’t enough just to marry a man for a purpose, in order to escape from a town. Philomena was convincing herself that she’d fallen in love with an elderly vet, and if she got any encouragement Kitty Roche would convince herself that she was mad about anyone at all.

For a moment as Teresa stood there, the last moment before she left the lounge-bar, she felt that she and Artie might make some kind of marriage together because there was nothing that could be destroyed, no magic or anything else. He could ask her the question he had asked, while she stood there in her wedding-dress: he could ask her and she could truthfully reply, because there was nothing special about the occasion, or the lounge-bar all covered in confetti.

Office Romances

‘Oh no, I couldn’t,’ Angela said in the outer office. ‘Really, Mr Spelle. Thank you, though.’

‘Don’t you drink then, Miss Hosford? Nary a drop at all?’ He laughed at his own way of putting it. He thought of winking at her as he laughed, but decided against it: girls like this were sometimes scared out of their wits by a wink.

‘No, it’s not that, Mr Spelle –’

‘It’s just that it’s a way of getting to know people. Everyone else’ll be down in the Arms, you know.’

Hearing that, she changed her mind and quite eagerly put the grey plastic cover on her Remington International. She’d refused his invitation to have a drink because she’d been flustered when he’d come into the outer office with his right hand poked out for her to shake, introducing himself as Gordon Spelle. He hadn’t said anything about the other people from the office being there: in a matter of seconds he’d made the whole thing sound romantic, a tête-à-tête with a total stranger. Any girl’s reaction would be to say she couldn’t.

‘Won’t be a moment, Mr Spelle,’ she said. She picked up her handbag from the floor beside her chair and walked with it from the office. Behind her, she heard the office silence broken by a soft whistling: Gordon Spelle essaying ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’.

Angela had started at C.S. & E. at half past nine that morning, having been interviewed a month ago by Miss Ivygale, her immediate employer. Miss Ivygale was a slender woman of fifty or thereabouts, her face meticulously made up. Her blue-grey hair was worked on daily by a hairdresser, a Mr Patric, whom twice that day she’d mentioned to Angela, deploring the fact that next March he was planning to leave the Elizabeth Salon. At C.S. & E. Miss Ivygale occupied an inner office that was more luxuriously appointed than the outer one where Angela sat with her filing cabinets and her Remington International. On the window-sill of the outer office Miss Ivygale’s last secretary, whom she referred to as Sue, had left a Busy Lizzie in a blue-glazed pot. There was a calendar that showed Saturdays and Sundays in red, presented by the Michelin Tyre Company.

In a small lavatory Angela examined her face in the mirror over the wash-basin. She sighed at her complexion. Her eyes had a bulgy look because of her contact lenses. The optician had said the bulgy look would go when the lids became used to the contact lenses, but as far as she was concerned it never had. ‘No, no, you’re imagining it, Miss Hosford,’ the optician had said when she’d gone back after a month to complain that the look was still there.

In the lavatory she touched one or two places on her cheeks with Pure Magic and powdered over it. She rubbed lipstick into her lips and then pressed a tissue between them. She ran a comb through her hair, which was fluffed up because she’d washed it the night before: it was her best feature, she considered, a pretty shade, soft and naturally curly.

‘I like your dress, Miss Hosford,’ he said when she returned to the outer office. ‘Fresh as a flower it looks.’ He laughed at his own description of the blue-and-white dress she was wearing. The blue parts were flowers of a kind, he supposed, a type of blue geranium they appeared to be, with blue leaves sprouting out of blue stems. Extraordinary, the tasteless stuff a girl like this would sometimes wear.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘We don’t bother much with surnames at C.S. & E.,’ he told her as they walked along a green-carpeted corridor to a lift. ‘All right to call you Angela, Miss Hosford?’

‘Oh, yes, of course.’

He closed the lift doors. He smiled at her. He was a tall, sleek man who had something the matter with his left eye, a kind of droop in the upper lid and a glazed look in the eye itself, a suggestion of blindness. Another oddness about him, she thought in the lift, was his rather old-fashioned suit. It was a pepper-coloured suit with a waistcoat, cut in an Edwardian style. His manners were old-fashioned too, and the way he spoke had a pedantic air to it that recalled the past: Edwardian again perhaps, she didn’t know. It seemed right that he had whistled ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ rather than a current pop song.

‘I suppose it’s your first job, Angela?’

‘Oh, heavens, no!’

‘I’d say you were twenty.’

‘Twenty-six, actually.’

He laughed. ‘I’m thirty-eight myself.’

They left the lift and walked together through the elegant reception area of C.S. & E. When she’d walked through it for her interview Angela had been reminded of the lounge of a large, new hotel: there were sofas and armchairs covered in white ersatz leather, and steel-framed reproductions of paintings by Paul Klee on rust-coloured walls, and magazines on steel-topped tables. When Angela had come for her interview, and again when she’d arrived at C.S. & E. that morning, there’d been a beautiful black-haired girl sitting at the large reception desk, which was upholstered here and there in the same ersatz leather as the sofas and the armchairs. But at this time of the evening, five to six, the beautiful black-haired girl was not there.

‘I’d really have said it was your first job,’ he said when they reached the street. He smiled at her. ‘Something about you.’

She knew what he meant. She was often taken to be younger than she was, it had something to do with being small: five foot one she was, with thin, small arms that she particularly disliked. And of course there was her complexion, which was a schoolgirl complexion in the real sense, since schoolgirls rather than adults tended to be bothered with pimples. ‘Attack them from inside, Miss Hosford,’ her doctor had advised. ‘Avoid all sweets and chocolate, avoid cakes and biscuits with your coffee. Lots of lemon juice, fresh fruit, salads.’ She ate lots of fruit and salads anyway, just in case she’d get fat, which would have been the last straw. She naturally never ate sweet things.

‘Horrid being new,’ he said. ‘Like your first day at school.’

The street, fashionably situated just off Grosvenor Square, was busy with people impatient to be home: it was a cold night in November, not a night for loitering. Girls in suede boots or platform shoes had turned up the collars of their coats. Some carried bundles of letters which had been signed too late to catch the afternoon dispatch boys. In the harsh artificial light their faces were pale, sometimes garish with make-up: the light drew the worst out of girls who were pretty, and killed the subtleties of carefully chosen lipstick and make-up shades. God alone knew, Angela said to herself, what it did to her. She sighed, experiencing the familiar feeling of her inferiority complex getting the upper hand.

‘Hullo, Gordon,’ a man in a black overcoat said to Gordon Spelle. The man had been walking behind them for some time, while Angela had been listening to Gordon Spelle going on about the first day he’d spent at school. Miserable beyond measure he’d been.

‘God, it’s chilly,’ the man said, dropping into step with them and smiling at Angela.

‘Angela Hosford,’ Gordon Spelle said. ‘She’s come to work for Pam Ivygale.’

‘Oh, Pam, dear Pam!’ the man said. He laughed in much the same way as Gordon Spelle was given to laughing, or so it seemed to Angela. His black overcoat had a little rim of black fur on its collar. His hair was black also. His face in the distorting street-light had a purple tinge, and Angela guessed that in normal circumstances it was a reddish face.

‘Tommy Blyth,’ Gordon Spelle said.

They entered a public house at the corner of a street. It was warm there, and crowded, and quite attractively noisy. Fairy lights were draped on a Christmas tree just inside the door because Christmas was less than six weeks away. Men like Tommy Blyth, in overcoats with furred collars and with reddish faces, were standing by a coal fire with glasses in their hands. One of them had his right arm round the waist of C.S. & E.’s black-haired receptionist.

‘What’s your poison, Angela?’ Gordon Spelle asked, and she said she’d like some sherry.

‘Dry?’

‘Oh, it doesn’t matter – well, medium, actually.’

He didn’t approach the bar but led her into a far corner and sat her down at a table. It was less crowded there and rather dimly lit. He said he wouldn’t be a minute.

People were standing at the bar, animatedly talking. Some of the men had taken off their overcoats. All of them were wearing suits, most of them grey or blue but a few of a more extravagant shade, like Gordon Spelle’s. Occasionally a particular man, older and stouter than his companions, laughed raucously, swaying backwards on his heels. On a bar-stool to this man’s right, in a red wool dress with a chiffon scarf at her throat, sat Miss Ivygale. The red wool coat that had been hanging just inside the outer office door all day hung on the arm of the raucous man: Miss Ivygale, Angela deduced, was intent on staying a while, or at least as long as the man was agreeable to looking after her coat for her. ‘You’ll find it friendly at C.S. & E.,’ Miss Ivygale had said. ‘A generous firm.’ Miss Ivygale looked as though she’d sat on her bar-stool every night for the past twenty-three years, which was the length of time she’d been at C.S. & E.

‘Alec Hemp,’ Gordon Spelle said, indicating the man who had Miss Ivygale’s coat on his arm.

The name occurred on C.S. & E.’s stationery: A. R. Hemp. It was there with other names, all of them in discrete italics, strung out along the bottom of the writing paper that had C.S. & E. and the address at the top: S. P. Bakewell, T. P. Cooke, N. N. E. Govier, A. R. Hemp I. D. Jackson, A. F. Norris, P. Onniman, the directors of the C.S. & E. board.

‘That’s been going on for years,’ Gordon Spelle said. He handed her her sherry and placed on the table in front of him a glass of gin and Britvic orange juice. His droopy eye had closed, as if tired. His other, all on its own, looked a little beady.

‘Sorry?’

‘Pam Ivygale and Alec Hemp.’

‘Oh.’

‘It’s why she never married anyone else.’

‘I see.’

Miss Ivygale’s brisk manner in the office and her efficient probing when she’d interviewed Angela had given the impression that she lived entirely for her work. There was no hint of a private life about Miss Ivygale, and certainly no hint of any love affair beyond a love affair with C.S. & E.

‘Alec,’ Gordon Spelle said, ‘has a wife and four children in Brighton.’

‘I see.’

‘Office romance.’ His droopy eye opened and gazed bleakly at her, contrasting oddly with the busyness of the other eye. He said it was disgraceful that all this should be so, that a woman should be messed up the way Mr Hemp for twenty-three years had messed up Miss Ivygale. Everyone knew, he said, that Alec Hemp had no intention of divorcing his wife: he was stringing Miss Ivygale along. ‘Mind you, though,’ he added, ‘she’s tricky.’

‘She seems very nice –’

‘Oh, Pam’s all right. Now, tell me all about yourself.’

Angela lived in a flat with two other girls, a ground-floor flat in what had once been a private house in Putney. She’d lived there for three years, and before that she’d lived in a similar flat in another part of Putney, and before that in a hostel. Every six or seven weeks she went home for the weekend, to her parents in Exeter, Number 4 Carhampton Road. When she’d qualified as a shorthand typist at the City Commercial College in Exeter the College had found her a position in the offices of a firm that manufactured laminates. Three years later, after some months’ discussion and argument with her parents, she’d moved to London, to the offices of a firm that imported and marketed German wine. From there, she’d moved to the firm called C.S. & E.

‘You can hear it in your voice,’ Gordon Spelle said. ‘Exeter and all that.’

She laughed. ‘I thought I’d lost it.’

‘It’s nice, a touch of the West Countries.’

The laminates firm had been a dull one, or at least a dull one for a girl to work in. But her parents hadn’t understood that. Her parents, whom she liked and respected very much, had been frightened by the idea of her going to London, where there was loose living, so other parents had told them, and drinking and drugs, and girls spending every penny they had on clothes and rarely eating a decent meal. The German-wine firm had turned out to be a dull place for a girl to work in too, or so at least it seemed after a few years. Often, though, while finding it dull, Angela had felt that it suited her. With her poor complexion and her bulging contact lenses and her small, thin arms, it was a place to crouch away in. Besides herself, two elderly women were employed in the office, and there was Mr Franklin and Mr Snyder, elderly also. Economy was practised in the office, the windows seemed always to be dusty, electric lightbulbs were of a low wattage. On the mornings when a new pimple cruelly erupted on her neck or one of her cheeks, Angela had hurried from bus to tube and was glad when she reached the dingy office of the wine firm and lost herself in its shadows. Then a girl in the flat introduced her to Pure Magic, so good at disguising imperfections of the skin. But although it did not, as in an advertisement, change Angela’s life and could do nothing at all for her thin arms, it did enough to draw her from the dinginess of the wine firm. A girl in the flat heard of the vacancy with Miss Ivygale at C.S. & E. and, not feeling like a change herself, persuaded Angela to apply for it. The shared opinion of the girls in the flat was that Angela needed drawing out. They liked her and were sorry for her: no joke at all, they often said to one another, to have an inferiority complex like Angela’s. The inferiority complex caused nerviness in her, one of them diagnosed, and the nerviness caused her bad complexion. In actual fact, her figure and her arms were perfectly all right, and her hair was really pretty the way it curled. Now that she’d at last stopped wearing spectacles she looked quite presentable, even if her eyes did tend to bulge a little.

‘Oh, you’ll like it at C.S. & E.,’ Gordon Spelle said. ‘It’s really friendly, you know. Sincerely so.’

He insisted on buying her another drink and while he was at the bar she wondered when, or if, she was going to meet the people he’d mentioned, the other employees of C.S. & E. Miss Ivygale had narrowed her eyes in her direction and then had looked away, as if she couldn’t quite place her. The black-haired receptionist had naturally not remembered her face when she’d come into the bar with the two men. The only person Gordon Spelle had so far introduced her to was the man called Tommy Blyth, who had joined the group around the fire and was holding the hand of a girl.

‘It’s the C.S. & E. pub,’ Gordon Spelle said when he returned with the drinks. ‘There isn’t a soul here who isn’t on the strength.’ He smiled at her, his bad eye twitching. ‘I like you, you know.’ She smiled back at him, not knowing how to reply. He picked up her left hand and briefly squeezed it.

‘Don’t trust that man, Angela,’ Miss Ivygale said, passing their table on her way to the Ladies. She stroked the back of Gordon Spelle’s neck. ‘Terrible man,’ she said.

Angela was pleased that Miss Ivygale had recognized her and had spoken to her. It occurred to her that her immediate employer was probably shortsighted and had seen no more than the outline of a familiar face when she’d peered across the bar at her.

‘Come on, have a drink with us,’ Miss Ivygale insisted on her way back from the Ladies.

‘Oh, it’s all right, Pam,’ Gordon Spelle said quickly, but Miss Ivygale stood there, waiting for them to get up and accompany her. ‘You watch your step, my boy,’ she said to Gordon Spelle as they all three made their way together. Gordon Spelle told her she was drunk.

‘This is my secretary, Alec,’ Miss Ivygale said at the bar. ‘Replacing Sue. Angela Hosford.’

Mr Hemp shook Angela’s hand. He had folded Miss Ivygale’s red coat and placed it on a bar-stool. He asked Angela what she was drinking and while she was murmuring that she wouldn’t have another one Gordon Spelle said a medium sherry and a gin and Britvic orange for himself. Gordon Spelle was looking cross, Angela noticed. His bad eye closed again. He was glaring at Miss Ivygale with the other one.

‘Cheers, Angela,’ Mr Hemp said. ‘Welcome to C.S. & E.’

‘Thank you, Mr Hemp.’

People were leaving the bar, waving or calling out goodnight to the group she was with. A man paused to say something to Mr Hemp and then stayed to have another drink. By the fire the receptionist and another girl listened while Tommy Blyth told them about car radios, advising which kind to buy if they ever had to.

‘I brought her in here to have a simple drink,’ Gordon Spelle was protesting to Miss Ivygale, unsuccessfully attempting to keep his voice low. ‘So’s the poor girl could meet a few people.’

Miss Ivygale looked at Angela and Angela smiled at her uneasily, embarrassed because they were talking about her. Miss Ivygale didn’t smile back, and it couldn’t have been that Miss Ivygale didn’t see her properly this time because the distance between them was less than a yard.

‘You watch your little step, my boy,’ Miss Ivygale warned again, and this time Gordon Spelle leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. ‘All right, my love?’ he said.

Miss Ivygale ordered Mr Hemp another Bell’s whisky and one for herself, reminding the barman that the measures they were drinking were double measures. ‘What’re you on, Dil?’ she asked the man who was talking to Mr Hemp. ‘No, no, must go,’ he said.

‘Bell’s I think he’s on,’ the barman said, pouring a third large whisky.

‘And a gin and Britvic for Gordon,’ Miss Ivygale said. ‘And a medium sherry.’

‘Oh, really,’ murmured Angela.

‘Nonsense,’ Miss Ivygale said.

In the lavatory Gordon Spelle swore as he urinated. Typical of bloody Pam Ivygale to go nosing in like that. He wouldn’t have brought the girl to the Arms at all if he’d thought Ivygale would be soaked to the gills, hurling abuse about like bloody snowballs. God alone knew what kind of a type the girl thought he was now. Girls like that had a way of thinking you a sexual maniac if you so much as took their arm to cross a street. There’d been one he’d known before who’d come from the same kind of area, Plymouth or Bristol or somewhere. Bigger girl actually, five foot ten she must have been, fattish. ‘Touch of the West Countries’, he’d said when she’d opened her mouth, the first time he’d used the expression. Tamar Dymond she’d been called, messy bloody creature.

Gordon Spelle combed his hair and then decided that his tie needed to be reknotted. He removed his pepper-coloured jacket and his waistcoat and took the tie off, cocking up the collar of his striped blue shirt in order to make the operation easier. His wife, Ruth, would probably be reading a story to the younger of their two children, since she generally did so at about seven o’clock. As he reknotted his tie, he imagined his wife sitting by the child’s bed reading a Topsy and Tim book.

‘Oh, say you’re going to Luton,’ Miss Ivygale said. ‘Tell her it’s all just cropped up in the last fifteen minutes.’

Mr Hemp shook his head. He pointed out that rather often recently he’d telephoned his wife at seven o’clock to say that what had cropped up in the last fifteen minutes was the fact that unexpectedly he had to go to Luton. Mr Hemp had moved away from the man called Dil, closer to Miss Ivygale. They were speaking privately, Mr Hemp in a lower voice than Miss Ivygale. The man called Dil was talking to another man.

Standing by herself and not being spoken to by anyone, Angela was feeling happy. It didn’t matter that no one was speaking to her, or paying her any other kind of attention. She felt warm and friendly, quite happy to be on her own while Gordon Spelle was in the Gents and Mr Hemp and Miss Ivygale talked to each other privately. She liked him, she thought as she stood there: she liked his old-fashioned manners and the way he’d whistled ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, and his sympathy over her being new. She smiled at him when he returned from the Gents. It was all much nicer than the German-wine firm, or the laminates firm.

‘Hullo,’ he said in a whisper, staring at her.

‘It was nice of you to bring me here,’ she said, whispering also.

‘Nice for me, too,’ said Gordon Spelle.

Mr Hemp went away to telephone his wife. The telephone was behind Angela, in a little booth against the wall. The booth was shaped like a sedan chair, except that it didn’t have any shafts to carry it by. Angela had noticed it when she’d been sitting down with Gordon Spelle. She hadn’t known then that it contained a telephone and had wondered at the presence of a sedan chair in a bar. But several times since then people had entered it and each time a light had come on, revealing a telephone and a pile of directories.

‘Because they only told me ten minutes ago,’ Mr Hemp was saying. ‘Because the bloody fools couldn’t make their minds up, if you can call them minds.’

Gordon Spelle squeezed her hand and Angela squeezed back because it seemed a friendly thing to do. She felt sorry for him because he had only one good eye. It was the single defect in his handsome face. It gave him a tired look, and suggested suffering.

‘I wish you’d see it my way,’ Mr Hemp was saying crossly in the sedan chair. ‘God damn it, I don’t want to go to the bloody place.’

‘I really must go,’ Angela murmured, but Gordon Spelle continued to hold her hand. She didn’t want to go. ‘I really must,’ she said again.

In the Terrazza, where the waiters wore striped blue-and-white jerseys and looked like sailors at a regatta, Mr Hemp and Miss Ivygale were well known. So was Gordon Spelle. The striped waiters greeted them affectionately, and a man in a dark suit addressed all three of them by name. He bowed at Angela. ‘How d’you do?’ he said, handing her a menu.

‘Petto di pollo sorpresa,’ Gordon Spelle recommended. ‘Chicken with garlic in it.’

‘Garlic? Oh –’

‘He always has it,’ Miss Ivygale said, pointing with the menu at Gordon Spelle. ‘You’ll be all right, dear.’

‘What’re you having, darling?’ Mr Hemp asked Miss Ivygale. In the taxi on the way to the Terrazza he had sat with his arm around her and once, as though they were in private, he’d kissed her on the mouth, making quite a lot of noise about it. Angela had been embarrassed and so, she imagined, had Gordon Spelle.

‘Gamberone al spiedo,’ Miss Ivygale ordered.

‘Cheers,’ Mr Hemp said, lifting a glass of white wine into the air.

‘I think I’m a bit drunk,’ Angela said to Gordon Spelle and he wagged his head approvingly. Mr Hemp said he was a bit drunk himself, and Miss Ivygale said she was drunk, and Gordon Spelle pointed out that you only live once.

‘Welcome to C.S. & E.,’ Mr Hemp said, lifting his glass again.

The next morning, in the flat in Putney, Angela told her flatmates about the delicious food at the Terrazza and how she couldn’t really remember much else. There’d certainly been a conversation at the restaurant table, and in a taxi afterwards she remembered Gordon Spelle humming and then Gordon Spelle had kissed her. She seemed to remember him saying that he’d always wanted to be a dance-band leader, although she wasn’t sure if she’d got that right. There were other memories of Gordon Spelle in the taxi, which she didn’t relate to her flatmates. There’d been, abruptly, his cold hand on the flesh of one of her thighs, and her surprise that the hand could have got there without her noticing. At another point there’d been his cold hand on the flesh of her stomach. ‘Look, you’re not married or anything?’ she remembered herself saying in sudden alarm. She remembered the noise of Gordon Spelle’s breathing and his tongue penetrating her ear. ‘Married?’ he’d said at some other point, and had laughed.

Feeling unwell but not unhappy, Angela vividly recalled the face and clothes of Gordon Spelle. She recalled his hands, which tapered and were thin, and his sleek hair and droopy eye. She wondered how on earth she was going to face him after what had happened in the taxi, or how she was going to face Miss Ivygale because Miss Ivygale, she faintly remembered, had fallen against a table on their way out of the restaurant, upsetting plates of soup and a bottle of wine. When Angela had tried to help her to stand up again she’d used unpleasant language. Yet the dim memories didn’t worry Angela in any real way, not like her poor complexion sometimes worried her, or her contact lenses. Even though she was feeling unwell, she only wanted to smile that morning. She wanted to write a letter to her parents in Carhampton Road, Exeter, and tell them she’d made a marvellous decision when she’d decided to leave the German-wine business and go to C.S. & E. She should have done it years ago, she wanted to tell them, because everyone at C.S. & E. was so friendly and because you only lived once. She wanted to tell them about Gordon Spelle, who had said in the taxi that he thought he was falling in love with her, which was of course an exaggeration.

She drank half a cup of Nescafè and caught a 37 bus. Sitting beside an Indian on the lower deck, she thought about Gordon Spelle. On the tube to Earl’s Court she thought of him again, and on the Piccadilly line between Earl’s Court and Green Park she went on thinking about him. When she closed her eyes, as she once or twice did, she seemed to be with him in some anonymous place, stroking his face and comforting him because of his bad eye. She walked from the tube station, past the Rootes’ Group car showrooms and Thos Cook’s in Berkeley Street, along Lansdowne Row with its pet shops and card shop and coffee shops, past the Gresham Arms, the C.S. & E. pub. It was a cold morning, but the cold air was pleasant. Pigeons waddled on the pavements, cars drew up at parking-meters. Fresh-faced and shaven, the men of the night before hurried to their offices. She wouldn’t have recognized Tommy Blyth, she thought, or the man called Dil, or even Mr Hemp. Girls in suede boots hurried, also looking different in the morning light. She was being silly, she said to herself in Carlos Place: he probably said that to dozens of girls.

In Angela’s life there had been a few other men. At the age of twelve she had been attracted by a youth who worked in a newsagent’s. She’d liked him because he’d always been ready to chat to her and smile at her, two or three years older he’d been. At fourteen she’d developed a passion for an American actor called Don Ameche whom she’d seen in an old film on television. For several weeks she’d carried with her the memory of his face and had lain in bed at night imagining a life with him in a cliff-top house she’d invented, in California. She’d seen herself and Don Ameche running into the sea together, as he had run with an actress in the film. She’d seen them eating breakfast together, out in the open, on a sunny morning. But Don Ameche, she’d suddenly realized, was sixty or seventy now.

When Angela had first come to London a man who’d briefly been employed in the German-wine business used occasionally to invite her to have a cup of coffee with him at the end of the day, just as Gordon Spelle had invited her to have a drink. But being with this man wasn’t like being with Gordon Spelle: the man was a shabby person who was employed in some lowly capacity, who seemed to Angela, after the third time they’d had coffee together, to be mentally deficient. One Monday morning he didn’t turn up for work, and was never heard of again.

There’d been another man, more briefly, in Angela’s life, a young man called Ted Apwell whom she’d met at a Saturday-night party given by a friend of one of her flatmates. She and Ted Apwell had paired off when the party, more or less at an end, had become uninhibited. At half past three in the morning she’d allowed herself to be driven home by Ted Apwell, knowing that it was to his home rather than hers they were going. He’d taken her clothes off and in a half-hearted, inebriated way had put an end to her virginity, on a hearth-rug in front of a gas-fire. He’d driven her on to her flat, promising – too often, she realized afterwards – that he’d telephone her on Monday. She’d found him hard to forget at first, not because she’d developed any great fondness for him but because of his nakedness and her own on the hearth-rug, the first time all that had happened. There hadn’t, so far, been a second time.

Miss Ivygale did not come in that morning. Angela sat alone in the outer office, with nothing to do because there were no letters to type. A tea-lady arrived at a quarter past ten and poured milky coffee on to two lumps of sugar in a cup she’d earlier placed on Angela’s desk. ‘Pam not in this morning?’ she said, and Angela said no, Miss Ivygale wasn’t.

At ten past twelve Gordon Spelle entered the outer office. ‘Red roses,’ he lilted, ‘for a blue lady. Oh, Mr Florist, please…’ He laughed, standing by the door. He closed the door and crossed to her desk and kissed her. If anyone had asked her in that moment she’d have said that her inferiority complex was a thing of the past. She felt pretty when Gordon Spelle kissed her, not knowing what everyone else knew, that Gordon Spelle was notorious.

They had lunch in a place called the Coffee Bean, more modest than the Terrazza. Gordon Spelle told her about his childhood, which had not been happy. He told her about coming to C.S. & E. nine years ago, and about his earlier ambition to be a dance-band leader. ‘Look,’ he said when they’d drunk a carafe of Sicilian wine. ‘I want to tell you, Angela: I’m actually married.’

She felt a coldness in her stomach, as though ice had somehow become lodged there. The coldness began to hurt her, like indigestion. All the warmth of her body had moved into her face and neck. She hated the flush that had come to her face and neck because she knew it made her look awful.

‘Married?’ she said.

He’d only laughed last night in the taxi, she remembered: he hadn’t actually said he wasn’t married, not that she could swear to it. He’d laughed and given the impression that married was the last thing he was, so that she’d woken up that morning with the firmly established thought that Gordon Spelle, a bachelor, had said he loved her and had embraced her with more passion than she’d ever permitted in another man or youth. In the moments of waking she’d even been aware of thinking that one day she and Gordon Spelle might be married, and had imagined her parents in their best clothes, her father awkward, giving her away. It was all amazing; incredible that Gordon Spelle should have picked her out when all around him, in C.S. & E. and in the other offices, there were beautiful girls.

‘I didn’t dare tell you,’ he said. ‘I tried to, Angela: All last night I tried to, but I couldn’t. In case you’d go away.’

They left the Coffee Bean and walked about Grosvenor Square in bitter November sunshine. Men were tidying the flowerbeds. The people who had hurried from their offices last night and had hurried into them this morning, and out of them for lunch, were hurrying back to them again.

‘I’m in love with you, Angela,’ he said, and again she felt it was incredible. She might be dreaming, she thought, but knew she was not.

They walked hand in hand, and she suddenly remembered Mr Hemp telephoning in the sedan chair, cross and untruthful with his wife. She imagined Gordon Spelle’s wife and saw her as a hard-faced woman who was particular about her house, who didn’t let him smoke in certain rooms, who’d somehow prevented him from becoming a dance-band leader. She seemed to be older than Gordon Spelle, with hair that was quite grey and a face that Angela remembered from a book her father used to read her as a child, the face of a farmyard rat.

‘She’s a bit of an invalid, actually,’ Gordon Spelle said. ‘She isn’t well most of the time and she’s a ball of nerves anyway. She couldn’t stand a separation, Angela, or anything like that: I wouldn’t want to mislead you, Angela, like Alec Hemp –’

‘Oh, Gordon.’

He looked away from her and with his face still averted he said he wasn’t much of a person. It was all wrong, being in love with her like this, with a wife and children at home. He would never want her to go on waiting for him, as Pam Ivygale had waited for twenty-three years.

‘Oh, love,’ she said.

The ice had gone from her stomach, and her face had cooled again. He put his arms around her, one hand on her hair, the other pressing her body into his. He whispered, but she couldn’t hear what he said and the words didn’t seem important. The hurrying people glanced at them, surprised to witness a leisurely embrace, in daylight, on a path in Grosvenor Square.

‘Oh, love,’ she said again.

The cold had brought out the defects on her face: beneath heavily applied make-up he noticed that the skin was pimply and pitted. Affected by the cold also, her eyes were red-rimmed. She reminded him of Gwyneth Birkett, a girl who’d been at C.S. & E. three years ago.

They returned to the office. He released her hand and took her arm instead. He’d see her at half past five, he said in the lift. He kissed her in the lift because there was no one else in it. His mouth was moist and open. No one ever before had kissed her like he did, as though far more than kisses were involved, as though his whole being was passionate for hers. ‘I love you terribly,’ he said.

All afternoon, with no real work to do, she thought about it, continuing to be amazed. It was a mystery, a gorgeous mystery that became more gorgeous the more she surveyed the facts. The facts were gorgeous themselves: nicer, she considered, than any of the other facts of her life. In prettily coloured clothes the girls of C.S. & E. walked the green-carpeted corridors from office to office, their fingernails gleaming, their skins like porcelain, apparently without pores. In their suede boots or their platform shoes they queued for lunchtime tables in the Coffee Bean, or stood at five past six in the warm bar of the Gresham Arms. Their faces were nicer than her face, their bodies more lissom, their legs and arms more suavely elegant. Yet she had been chosen.

She leafed through files, acquainting herself further with the affairs of Miss Ivygale’s office. She examined without interest the carbon copies of letters in buff-coloured folders. The faint, blurred type made no sense to her and the letters themselves seemed as unimportant as the flimsy paper they were duplicated on. In a daydream that was delicious his tapering hands again caressed her. ‘I love you terribly, too,’ she said.

At four o’clock Miss Ivygale arrived. She’d been working all day in her flat, she said, making notes for the letters she now wished to dictate. Her manner was businesslike, she didn’t mention the evening before. ‘Dear Sir,’ she said. ‘Further to yours of the 29th…’

Angela made shorthand notes and then typed Miss Ivygale’s letters. He did not love his wife; he had hinted that he did not love his wife; no one surely could kiss you like that, no one could put his arms around you in the broad daylight in Grosvenor Square, and still love a wife somewhere. She imagined being in a room with him, a room with an electric fire built into the wall, and two chintz-covered armchairs and a sofa covered in the same material, with pictures they had chosen together, and ornaments on the mantelpiece. ‘No, I don’t love her,’ his voice said. ‘Marry me, Angela,’ his voice said.

‘No, no, that’s really badly done,’ Miss Ivygale said. ‘Type it again, please.’

You couldn’t blame Miss Ivygale. Naturally Miss Ivygale was cross, having just had her share of Mr Hemp, one night out of so many empty ones. She smiled at Miss Ivygale when she handed her the retyped letter. Feeling generous and euphoric, she wanted to tell Miss Ivygale that she was still attractive at fifty, but naturally she could not do that.

‘See they catch the post,’ Miss Ivygale sourly ordered, handing her back the letters she’d signed.

‘Yes, yes, of course, Miss Ivygale –’

‘You’ll need to hurry up.’

She took the letters to the dispatch-room in the basement and when she returned to the outer office she found that Miss Ivygale had already left the inner one. She put the grey plastic cover on her Remington International and went to the lavatory to put Pure Magic on her face. ‘I wonder, who’s kissing her now,’ Gordon Spelle was murmuring when she entered the outer office again. ‘I wonder who’s showing her how.’

He put his arms around her. His tongue crept between her teeth, his hands caressed the outline of her buttocks. He led her into Miss Ivygale’s office, an arm around her waist, his lips damply on her right ear. He was whispering something about Miss Ivygale having left for the Gresham Arms and about having to lock the door because the cleaners would be coming round. She heard the door being locked. The light went out and the office was dark except for the glow of the street lamps coming through two uncurtained windows. His mouth was working on hers again, his fingers undid the zip at the side of her skirt. She closed her eyes, saturated by the gorgeousness of the mystery.

Take it easy, he said to himself when he had her on the floor, remembering the way Gwyneth Birkett had suddenly shouted out, in discomfort apparently although at the time he’d assumed it to be pleasure. A Nigerian cleaner had come knocking at the door when she’d shouted out the third or fourth time. ‘Oh, God, I love you,’ he whispered to Angela Hosford.

She had vodka and lime in the Gresham Arms because she felt she needed pulling together and one of the girls in the flat had said that vodka was great for that. It had been very painful on the floor of Miss Ivygale’s office, and not even momentarily pleasurable, not once. It had been less painful the other time, with Ted Apwell on the hearth-rug. She wished it didn’t always have to be on a floor, but even so it didn’t matter – nor did the pain, nor the apprehension about doing it in Miss Ivygale’s office. All the time he’d kept saying he loved her, and as often as she could manage it she’d said she loved him too.

‘Must go,’ he said now with sudden, awful abruptness. He buttoned the jacket of his pepper-coloured suit. He kissed her on the lips, in full view of everyone in the Gresham Arms. She wanted to go with him but felt she shouldn’t because the drink he’d just bought her was scarcely touched. He’d drunk his own gin and Britvic in a couple of gulps.

‘Sorry for being so grumpy,’ Miss Ivygale said.

The Gresham Arms was warm and noisy, but somehow not the same at all. The men who’d been there last night were there again: Tommy Blyth and the man called Dil and all the other men – and the black-haired receptionist and all the other girls. Mr Hemp was not. Mr Hemp was hurrying back to his wife, and so was Gordon Spelle.

‘What’re you drinking?’ Miss Ivygale asked her.

‘Oh no, no. I haven’t even started this one, thanks.’

But Miss Ivygale, whose own glass required refilling, insisted. ‘Sit down, why don’t you?’ Miss Ivygale suggested indicating the bar-stool next to hers. ‘Take off your coat. It’s like a furnace in here.’

Slowly Angela took off her coat. She sat beside her immediate employer, still feeling painful and in other ways aware of what had occurred on Miss Ivygale’s office floor. They drank together and in time they both became a little drunk. Angela felt sorry for Miss Ivygale then, and Miss Ivygale felt sorry for Angela, but neither of them said so. And in the end, when Angela asked Miss Ivygale why it was that Gordon Spelle had picked her out, Miss Ivygale replied that it was because Gordon Spelle loved her. What else could she say? Miss Ivygale asked herself. How could she say that everyone knew that Gordon Spelle chose girls who were unattractive because he believed such girls, deprived of sex for long periods at a time, were an easier bet? Gordon Spelle was notorious, but Miss Ivygale naturally couldn’t say it, any more than she’d been able to say it to Gwyneth Birkett or Tamar Dymorid or Sue, or any of the others.

‘Oh, it’s beautiful!’ Angela cried suddenly, having drunk a little more. She was referring, not to her own situation, but to the fact that Miss Ivygale had wasted half a lifetime on a hopeless love. Feeling happy herself, she wanted Miss Ivygale to feel happy also.

Miss Ivygale did not say anything in reply. She was fifty and Angela was twenty-six: that made a difference where knowing what was beautiful was concerned. The thing about Gordon Spelle was that with the worst possible motives he performed an act of charity for the girls who were his victims. He gave them self-esteem, and memories to fall back on – for the truth was too devious for those closest to it to guess, and too cruel for other people ever to reveal to them. The victims of Gordon Spelle left C.S. & E. in the end because they believed the passion of his love for them put him under a strain, he being married to a wife who was ill. As soon as each had gone he looked around for someone else.

‘And beautiful for you too, my dear,’ Miss Ivygale murmured, thinking that in a way it was, compared with what she had herself. She’d been aware for twenty-three years of being used by the man she loved: self-esteem and memories were better than knowing that, no matter how falsely they came.

‘Let’s have two for the road,’ murmured Miss Ivygale, and ordered further drinks.

Mr McNamara

‘How was he?’ my mother asked on the morning of my thirteenth birthday.

She spoke while pouring tea into my father’s extra-large breakfast cup, the last remaining piece of a flowered set, Ville de Lyon clematis on a leafy ground. My father had a special knife and fork as well, the knife another relic of the past, the fork more ordinary, extra-strong because my father was always breaking forks.

‘Oh, he’s well enough,’ he said on the morning of my thirteenth birthday, while I sat patiently. ‘The old aunt’s kicking up again.’

My mother, passing him his tea, nodded. She remarked that in her opinion Mr McNamara’s aunt should be placed in an asylum, which was what she always said when the subject of Mr McNamara’s aunt, reputedly alcoholic, cropped up.

My mother was tallish and slender, but softly so. There was nothing sharp or angular about my mother, nothing wiry or hard. She had misty blue eyes and she seemed always to be on the point of smiling. My father was even taller, a bulky man with a brown face and a brown forehead stretching back where hair once had been, with heavy brown-backed hands, and eyes the same shade of blue mist as my mother’s. They were gentle with one another in a way that was similar also, and when they disagreed or argued their voices weren’t ever raised. They could be angry with us, but not with one another. They meted out punishments for us jointly, sharing disapproval or disappointment. We felt doubly ashamed when our misdemeanours were uncovered.

‘The train was like a Frigidaire,’ my father said. ‘Two hours late at the halt. Poor Flannagan nearly had pneumonia waiting.’ The whole country had ivy growing over, it, he said, like ivy on a gravestone. Eating bacon and sausages with his special knife and fork, he nodded in agreement with himself. ‘Ivy-clad Ireland,’ he said when his mouth was momentarily empty of food. ‘Anthracite motor-cars, refrigerators on the Great Southern Railway. Another thing, Molly: it’s the opinion in Dublin that six months’ time will see foreign soldiers parading themselves on O’Connell Street. German or English, take your pick, and there’s damn all Dev can do about it.’

My mother smiled at him and sighed. Then, as though to cheer us all up, my father told a story that Mr McNamara had told him, about a coal merchant whom Mr McNamara had apparently known in his youth. The story had to do with the ill-fitting nature of the coal merchant’s artificial teeth, and the loss of the teeth when he’d once been swimming at Ringsend. Whenever my father returned from a meeting with Mr McNamara he brought us back such stories, as well as the current opinion of Mr McNamara on the state of the nation and the likelihood of the nation becoming involved in the war. ‘The opinion in Dublin’ was the opinion of Mr McNamara, as we all knew. Mr McNamara drove a motor-car powered by gas because there wasn’t much petrol to be had. The gas, so my father said, was manufactured by anthracite in a burner stuck on to the back of Mr McNamara’s Ford V-8.

Returning each time from Dublin, my father bore messages and gifts from Mr McNamara, a tin of Jacob’s biscuits or bars of chocolate. He was a man who’d never married and who lived on inherited means, in a house in Palmerston Road, with members of his family – the elderly alcoholic aunt who should have been in an asylum, a sister and a brother-in-law. The sister, now Mrs Matchette, had earlier had theatrical ambitions, but her husband, employed in the National Bank, had persuaded her away from them. My father had never actually met Mr McNamara’s insane aunt or Mrs Matchette or her husband: they lived through Mr McNamara for him, at second hand, and for us they lived through my father, at a further remove. We had a vivid image of all of them, Mrs Matchette thin as a blade of grass, endlessly smoking and playing patience, her husband small and solemn, neatly moustached, with dark neat hair combed straight back from what Mr McNamara had called a ‘squashed forehead’. Mr McNamara himself we imagined as something of a presence: prematurely white-haired, portly, ponderous in speech and motion. Mr McNamara used to frequent the bar of a hotel called Fleming’s, an old-fashioned place where you could get snuff as well as tobacco, and tea, coffee and Bovril as well as alcoholic drinks. It was here that my father met him on his visits to Dublin. It was a comfort to go there, my father said, when his business for the day was done, to sit in a leather chair and listen to the chit-chat of his old companion. The bar would fill with smoke from their Sweet Afton cigarettes, while my father listened to the latest about the people in the house in Palmerston Road, and the dog they had, a spaniel called Wolfe Tone, and a maid called Kate O’Shea, from Skibbereen. There was ritual about it, my father smoking and listening, just as a day or so later he’d smoke and we’d listen ourselves, at breakfast-time in our house in the country.

There were my three sisters and myself: I was the oldest, the only boy. We lived in a house that had been in the family for several generations, three miles from Curransbridge, where the Dublin train halted if anyone wanted it to, and where my father’s granary and mill were. Because of the shortage of petrol, my father used to walk the three miles there and back every day. Sometimes he’d persuade Flannagan, who worked in the garden for us, to collect him in the dog-cart in the evening, and always when he went to Dublin he arranged for Flannagan to meet the train he returned on. In the early hours of the morning I’d sometimes hear the rattle of the dog-cart on the avenue and then the wheels on the gravel outside the front of the house. At breakfast-time the next morning my father would say he was glad to be back again, and kiss my mother with the rest of us. The whole thing occurred once every month or so, the going away in the first place, the small packed suitcase in the hall, my father in his best tweed suit, Flannagan and the dog-cart. And the returning a few days later: breakfast with Mr McNamara, my sister Charlotte used to say.

As a family we belonged to the past. We were Protestants in what had become Catholic Ireland. We’d once been part of an ascendancy, but now it was not so. Now there was the income from the granary and the mill, and the house we lived in: we sold grain and flour, we wielded no power. ‘Proddy-woddy green-guts,’ the Catholic children cried at us in Curransbridge. ‘Catty, Catty, going to Mass,’ we whispered back, ‘riding on the devil’s ass.’ They were as good as we were. It had not always been assumed so, and it sometimes seemed part of all the changing and the shifting of this and that, that Mr McNamara, so honoured in our house, was a Catholic himself. ‘A liberal, tolerant man,’ my father used to say. ‘No trace of the bigot in him.’ In time, my father used to say, religious differences in Ireland wouldn’t exist. The war would sort the whole matter out, even though as yet Ireland wasn’t involved in it. When the war was over, and whether there was involvement or not, there wouldn’t be any patience with religious differences. So, at least, Mr McNamara appeared to argue.

Childhood was all that: my sisters, Charlotte, Amelia and Frances, and my parents gentle with each other, and Flannagan in the garden and Bridget our maid, and the avuncular spirit of Mr McNamara. There was Miss Sheil as well, who arrived every morning on an old Raleigh bicycle, to teach the four of us, since the school at Curransbridge was not highly thought of by my parents.

The house itself was a Georgian rectangle when you looked straight at it, spaciously set against lawns which ran back to the curved brick of the kitchen-garden wall, with a gravel sweep in front, and an avenue running straight as a die for a mile and a half through fields where sheep grazed. My sisters had some world of their own which I knew I could not properly share. Charlotte, the oldest of them, was five years younger than I was, Amelia was six and Frances five.

‘Ah, he was in great form,’ my father said on the morning of my thirteenth birthday. ‘After a day listening to rubbish it’s a pleasure to take a ball of malt with him.’

Frances giggled. When my father called a glass of whiskey a ball of malt Frances always giggled, and besides it was a giggly occasion. All my presents were sitting there on the sideboard, waiting for my father to finish his breakfast and to finish telling us about Mr McNamara. But my father naturally took precedence: after all, he’d been away from the house for three days, he’d been cold and delayed on the train home, and attending to business in Dublin was something he disliked in any case. This time, though, as well as his business and the visit to Fleming’s Hotel to see Mr McNamara, I knew he’d bought the birthday present that he and my mother would jointly give me. Twenty minutes ago he’d walked into the dining-room with the wrapped parcel under his arm. ‘Happy birthday, boy,’ he’d said, placing the parcel on the sideboard beside the other three, from my sisters. It was the tradition in our house – a rule of my father’s – that breakfast must be over and done with, every scrap eaten, before anyone opened a birthday present or a Christmas present.

‘It was McNamara said that,’ my father continued. ‘Ivy-clad Ireland. It’s the neutral condition of us.’

It was my father’s opinion, though not my mother’s, that Ireland should have acceded to Winston Churchill’s desire to man the Irish ports with English soldiers in case the Germans got in there first. Hitler had sent a telegram to de Valera apologizing for the accidental bombing of a creamery, which was a suspicious gesture in itself. Mr McNamara, who also believed that de Valera should hand over the ports to Churchill, said that any gentlemanly gesture on the part of the German Führer was invariably followed by an act of savagery. Mr McNamara, in spite of being a Catholic, was a keen admirer of the House of Windsor and of the English people. There was no aristocracy in the world to touch the English, he used to say, and no people, intent on elegance, succeeded as the English upper classes did. Class-consciousness in England was no bad thing, Mr McNamara used to argue.

My father took from the side pocket of his jacket a small wrapped object. As he did so, my sisters rose from the breakfast table and marched to the sideboard. One by one my presents were placed before me, my parents’ brought from the sideboard by my mother. It was a package about two and a half feet long, a few inches in width. It felt like a bundle of twigs and was in fact the various parts of a box-kite. Charlotte had bought me a book called Dickon the Impossible, Amelia a kaleidoscope. ‘Open mine exceedingly carefully,’ Frances said. I did, and at first I thought it was a pot of jam. It was a goldfish in a jar.

‘From Mr McNamara,’ my father said, pointing at the smallest package. I’d forgotten it, because already the people who normally gave me presents were accounted for. ‘I happened to mention,’ my father said, ‘that today was a certain day.’

It was so heavy that I thought it might be a lead soldier, or a horseman. In fact it was a dragon. It was tiny and complicated, and it appeared to be made of gold, but my father assured me it was brass. It had two green eyes that Frances said were emeralds, and small pieces let into its back which she said looked like rubies. ‘Priceless,’ she whispered jealously. My father laughed and shook his head. The eyes and the pieces in the brass back were glass, he said.

I had never owned so beautiful an object. I watched it being passed from hand to hand around the breakfast table, impatient to feel it again myself. ‘You must write at once to Mr McNamara,’ my mother said. ‘It’s far too generous of him,’ she added, regarding my father with some slight disapproval, as though implying that my father shouldn’t have accepted the gift. He vaguely shook his head, lighting a Sweet Afton. ‘Give me the letter when you’ve done it,’ he said. ‘I have to go up again in a fortnight.’

I showed the dragon to Flannagan, who was thinning beetroot in the garden. I showed it to Bridget, our maid. ‘Aren’t you the lucky young hero?’ Flannagan said, taking the dragon in a soil-caked hand. ‘You’d get a five-pound note for that fellow, anywhere you cared to try.’ Bridget polished it with Brasso for me.

That day I had a chocolate birthday cake, and sardine sandwiches, which were my favourite, and brown bread and greengage jam, a favourite also. After tea all the family watched while my father and I tried to fly the kite, running with it from one end of a lawn to the other. It was Flannagan who got it up for us in the end, and I remember the excitement of the string tugging at my fingers, and Bridget crying out that she’d never seen a thing like that before, wanting to know what it was for. ‘Don’t forget, dear, to write to Mr McNamara first thing in the morning,’ my mother reminded me when she kissed me good-night. I wouldn’t forget, I promised, and didn’t add that of all my presents, including the beautiful green and yellow kite, I liked the dragon best.

But I never did write to Mr McNamara. The reason was that the next day was a grim nightmare of a day, during all of which someone in the house was weeping, and often several of us together. ‘My father, so affectionate towards all of us, was no longer alive.

The war continued and Ireland continued to play no part in it. Further accidental German bombs were dropped and further apologies were sent to de Valera by the German Führer. Winston Churchill continued to fulminate about the ports, but the prophecy of Mr McNamara that foreign soldiers would parade in O’Connell Street did not come true.

Knitting or sewing, my mother listened to the BBC news with a sadness in her eyes, unhappy that elsewhere death was occurring also. It was no help to any of us to be reminded that people in Britain and Europe were dying all the time now, with the same sudden awfulness as my father had.

Everything was different after my father died. My mother and I began to go for walks together, I’d take her arm, and sometimes her hand, knowing she was lonely. She talked about him to me, telling me about their honeymoon in Venice, the huge square where they’d sat drinking chocolate, listening to the bands that played there. She told me about my own birth, and how my father had given her a ring set with amber which he’d bought in Louis Wine’s in Dublin. She would smile at me on our walks and tell me that even though I was only thirteen I was already taking his place. One day the house would be mine, she pointed out, and the granary and the mill. I’d marry, she said, and have children of my own, but I didn’t want even to think about that. I didn’t want to marry; I wanted my mother always to be there with me, going on walks and telling me about the person we all missed so much. We were still a family, my sisters and my mother and myself, Flannagan in the garden, and Bridget. I didn’t want anything to change.

After the death of my father Mr McNamara lived on, though in a different kind of way. The house in Palmerston Road, with Mr McNamara’s aunt drinking in an upstairs room, and the paper-thin Mrs Matchette playing patience instead of being successful in the theatre, and Mr Matchette with his squashed forehead, and Kate O’Shea from Skibbereen, and the spaniel called Wolfe Tone: all of them remained quite vividly alive after my father’s death, as part of our memory of him. Fleming’s Hotel remained also, and all the talk there’d been there of the eccentric household in Palmerston Road. For almost as long as I could remember, and certainly as long as my sisters could remember, our own household had regularly been invaded by the other one, and after my father’s death my sisters and I often recalled specific incidents retailed in Fleming’s Hotel and later at our breakfast table. There’d been the time when Mr McNamara’s aunt had sold the house to a man she’d met outside a public house. And the time when Mrs Matchette appeared to have fallen in love with Garda Molloy, who used to call in at the kitchen for Kate O’Shea every night. And the time the spaniel was run over by a van and didn’t die. All of it was preserved, with Mr McNamara himself, white-haired and portly in the smoke-brown bar of Fleming’s Hotel, where snuff could be bought, and Bovril as well as whiskey.

A few months after the death my mother remarked one breakfast-time that no doubt Mr McNamara had seen the obituary notice in the Irish Times.’ Oh, but you should write,’ my sister Frances cried out in her excitable manner. My mother shook her head. My father and Mr McNamara had been bar-room friends, she pointed out: letters in either direction would not be in order. Charlotte and Amelia agreed with this opinion, but Frances still protested. I couldn’t see that it mattered. ‘He gave us all that chocolate,’ Frances cried, ‘and the biscuits.’ My mother said again that Mr McNamara was not the kind of man to write to about a death, nor the kind who would write himself. The letter that I was to have written thanking him for the dragon was not mentioned. Disliking the writing of letters, I didn’t raise the subject myself.

At the end of that year I was sent to a boarding-school in the Dublin mountains. Miss Sheil continued to come to the house on her Raleigh to teach my sisters, and I’d have far preferred to have remained at home with her. It could not be: the boarding-school in the Dublin mountains, a renowned Protestant monument, had been my father’s chosen destiny for me and that was that. If he hadn’t died, leaving home might perhaps have been more painful, but the death had brought with it practical complications and troubles, mainly concerned with the running of the granary and the mill: going away to school was slight compared with all that, or so my mother convinced me.

The headmaster of the renowned school was a small, red-skinned English cleric. With other new boys, I had tea with him and his wife in the drawing-room some days after term began. We ate small ham-paste sandwiches and Battenburg cake. The headmaster’s wife, a cold woman in grey, asked me what I intended to do – ‘in life’, as she put it. I said I’d run a granary and a mill at Curransbridge; she didn’t seem interested. The headmaster told us he was in Who’s Who. Otherwise the talk was of the war.

Miss Sheil had not prepared me well. ‘Dear boy, whoever taught you French?’ a man with a pipe asked me, and did not stay to hear my answer. ‘Your Latin, really!’ another man exclaimed, and the man who taught me mathematics warned me never to set my sights on a profession that involved an understanding of figures. I sat in the back row of the class with other boys who had been ill-prepared for the renowned school.

I don’t know when it was – a year, perhaps, or eighteen months after my first term – that I developed an inquisitiveness about my father. Had he, I wondered, been as bad at everything as I was? Had some other man with a pipe scorned his inadequacy when it came to French? Had he felt, as I did, a kind of desperation when faced with algebra? You’d have to know a bit about figures, I used, almost miserably, to say to myself: you’d have to if you hoped to run a granary and a mill. Had he been good at mathematics?

I asked my mother these questions, and other questions like them. But my mother was vague in her replies and said she believed, although perhaps she was wrong, that my father had not been good at mathematics. She laughed when I asked the questions. She told me to do my best.

But the more I thought about the future, and about myself in terms of the man whose place I was to take, the more curious I became about him. In the holidays my mother and I still went on our walks together, through the garden and then into the fields that stretched behind it, along the banks of the river that flowed through Curransbridge. But my mother spoke less and less about my father because increasingly there was less to say, except with repetition. I imagined the huge square in Venice and the cathedral and the bands playing outside the cafés. I imagined hundreds of other scenes, her own varied memories of their relationship and their marriage. We often walked in silence now, or I talked more myself, drawing her into a world of cross-country runs, and odorous changing-rooms, and the small headmaster’s repeated claim that the food we ate had a high calorific value. School was ordinarily dreary: I told her how we smoked wartime American cigarettes in mud huts specially constructed for the purpose and how we relished the bizarre when, now and again, it broke the monotony. There was a master called Mr Dingle, whose practice it was to inquire of new boys the colour and nature of their mother’s night-dresses. In the oak-panelled dining-hall that smelt of mince and the butter that generations had flicked on to the ceiling, Mr Dingle’s eye would glaze as he sat at the end of a Junior House table while one boy after another fuelled him with the stuff of fantasies. On occasions when parents visited the school he would observe through cigarette smoke the mothers of these new boys, stripping them of their skirts and blouses in favour of the night-clothes that their sons had described for him. There was another master, known as Nipper Achen, who was reputed to take a sensual interest in the sheep that roamed the mountainsides, and a boy called Testane-Hackett who was possessed of the conviction that he was the second son of God. In the dining-hall a gaunt black-clad figure, a butler called Toland, hovered about the high table where the headmaster and the prefects sat, assisted by a maid, said to be his daughter, who was known to us as the Bicycle. There was Fisher Major, who never washed, and Strapping, who disastrously attempted to treat some kind of foot ailment with mild acid. My mother listened appreciatively, and I often saw in her eyes the same look that had been there at breakfast-time when my father spoke of Fleming’s Hotel and Mr McNamara. ‘How like him you are!’ she now and again murmured, smiling at me.