He muttered something, and for the first time sounded disagreeable. There was some kind of complaint, a protest about his continuing lack of means, and then: ‘The avenue ... the gates...’
A fragment from a poem? I wondered. Sometimes in Damian’s conversation words stand isolated and out of context, as though they do not belong in conversation at all.
‘The house,’ I began.
‘Oh, not the house as it was.’
Claire’s spaniels sniffed about for rabbits. As we stood there, the September sun felt hot. Damian believes in the impossible and when we were younger occasionally inspired me with his optimism: that nothing could be easier than poaching salmon, that a bookie or a publican would accept an IOU, that Bettina Nowd had the love-light in her eyes. It was an endearing quality then; I wasn’t so sure about its being one that had endearingly endured. I felt uneasy about this talk of coming back. During the companionship of our youth there had never been an attempt to borrow money, since there was none to lend; nor was advantage taken of small politenesses, since politeness was not then readily on offer. The threat of a neighbour with a fly-by-night’s presumptions was just a little alarming.
‘Who owns it now?’ he asked, and I told him: the son of the builder who had stripped the roof of its lead.
The cawing of rooks and the occasional bark of the dogs were the only sounds. It had always been quiet at Doul; that tall, beautiful woman floating about from room to room or picking the last of the mulberries; bees in the honeysuckle.
‘What?’ I said, again unable to catch Damian’s murmur. Still moody, he did not directly reply, but seemed to say that the Muse would not be silent here.
I had ceased to practise on my sixtieth birthday, feeling the time had come, although previously I had imagined I could go on more or less for ever, as my father had in this same house, to his dying day. ‘What’ll it be like?’ Damian used to ponder when we were young, the world for him an excitement to investigate after a small, familiar town in south-west Ireland. Both of us, of course, knew what it would be like for me: we knew my father’s house, its comfortably crowded rooms, its pleasant garden; we knew the narrow main street, the shopkeepers, priests and beggars, the condensed-milk factory, the burnt-out cinema, the sleepy courthouse, the bright new hospital, the old asylum, the prison. But neither of us could conjecture a single thing about what lay ahead for Damian.
‘It’s all right, is it?’ Damian asked me on the way back from Doul that day, his mood gregarious again, suddenly so, as if he had remembered who I was. ‘Doing nothing these days is all right?’
‘Yes, it’s all right.’
In fact, it was more than that: all sorts of things were easier in retirement. People weren’t patients any more. Met by chance on the street, they conversed with less embarrassment; while privately I registered that Raynaud’s was at work or that Frolich’s syndrome would not now be reversed. In ordinary chat, awkward secrets were not shared with me; more likely I was shown an adolescent’s face and then reminded I’d been the first to see it as an infant’s; or informed of athletic achievements in children who had grown up, or of success in other ways, and weddings that were planned. Worries were held back, not coinage for me now, as bad backs weren’t, or stitched wounds or blood pressure, the smell of sickness in small back bedrooms.
‘Yes, it’s fine,’ I said in the bar of Traynor’s Hotel. ‘And you?’ I added. ‘Nowadays, Damian?’
Again he became morose. He shrugged and did not answer. He stared at the back of a man who was standing at the bar, at the torn seam of a jacket. Then he said:
‘I used to think about Doul. Wherever I was, I’d come back to that.’
From his tone, those thoughts about the place of his youth had been a comfort, occurring - the implication was - at times of distress or melancholy. Then Damian said, as if in response to a question I had not asked:
‘Well yes, an inspiration.’
He had finished the whiskey in his glass. I went to the bar, and while the drinks I ordered were poured I was asked by Mr Traynor about our son, now a doctor in New South Wales, and about Joanna, who had returned to the town six months ago to work in the prison. ‘You’d be delighted she’s back here,’ Mr Traynor conjectured, and I agreed, although pointing out that sooner or later she would move away again. I smiled, shrugging that away, my mind not on the conversation. Could Doul have been a poet’s inspiration for all these years? I wondered. Was that the meaning I was supposed to find in what had been so vaguely stated?
‘I thought I recognized him,’ Mr Traynor next remarked, his voice kept low, after I had answered his query about who Damian was. ‘How’re you doing these times?’ he called out, and Damian called back that none of us was getting younger.
‘God, that’s the truth in it,’ Mr Traynor agreed, wagging his head in a pretence that this hadn’t occurred to him before.
I picked up my change and made my way back to the table where we sat.
‘Nothing grand,’ Damian said, as if my absence hadn’t interrupted what we’d been saying. ‘Any little hovel that could be knocked together. There are things ...’ He let the sentence trail away. ‘I have the time now.’
I sipped my drink, disguising amusement: all his life Damian had had time. He ran through time, spending it as a spendthrift, wallowing in idleness. Perhaps poets always did, perhaps it was the way they had to live; I didn’t know.
‘Stuff accumulates,’ Damian confided, ‘unsaid. Oh, it’s just a thought,’ he added, and I concluded, with considerable relief, that this was probably the last we’d hear of his morning’s whim. After all, there was no sign whatsoever of his being in possession of the necessary funds to build the modest dwelling he spoke of, and personal loans could be resisted. ‘Silly old Damian,’ Claire murmured when I told her, with the indulgent smile that talk of Damian always drew from her.
Then, quite suddenly, everything was different. Perhaps in the same moment - at dinner two days later - Claire and I were aware that our daughter was being charmed all over again by the man she had once picked out as the man she would like to marry. To this day, I can hear their two voices in my dining-room, and Damian laughing while Claire and I were numbed into silence. To this day I can see the bright flush in Joanna’s cheeks.
‘And are you settled, Joanna?’ Damian asked. ‘Here?’
‘For the time being,’ Joanna said.
The prison is two miles outside the town, a conglomeration of stark grey buildings behind high grey walls, which occasionally I have visited during an epidemic. Ad sum ard labor, a waggish inmate has carved on a sundial he made for the governor, a tag that is a talking point when visitors are led around. Joanna has worked in prisons in Dublin and in England; she came here because from conversations she has had with me she was aware that rehabilitation - which is her territory - wasn’t being much bothered with. It was a challenge that here on the doorstep of the town she was born and grew up in were circumstances that professionally outraged her.
‘I remember sharing a railway carriage with a man who’d just been released from gaol,’ Damian said. ‘He robbed garages.’
In Joanna’s view a spell in prison was the offer of another chance for the offender, a time to come to terms with the world and with oneself. She was an optimist; you had to be, she insisted.
‘Lonely wayside garages,’ Damian said. ‘A child working the pumps.’
‘Did he say -’
‘All he said was that he didn’t intend to get caught the next time.’
Beneath these exchanges there was something else, a tremor that was shared; a tick answered another tick, fingers touched although a dinner table separated them. I pushed my knife and fork together; and Claire said something that nobody heard and went to the kitchen.
Joanna is small and dark-haired, and pretty. She has had admirers, a proposal of marriage from a map-maker, a longish affair with an ornithologist, but her passionate devotion to her work has always seemed to make her draw back when
there was pressure that a relationship should be allowed the assumption of permanence. It was as though she protected her own dedication, as though she believed she would experience a disloyalty in herself if she in any way devoted less time and energy to her work. Recidivists, penitents, old lags, one-time defaulters, drug pushers, muggers, burglars, rapists: these were her lovers. She found the good in them, and yet, when telling us about them, did not demand that we should too. It has never been her way to lecture, or stridently to insist, and often people are surprised at the intensity of her involvement, at the steel beneath so soft a surface. Neither Claire nor I ever say so, but there is something in our daughter that is remarkable.
Across the dinner table that evening she became demure. There was obedience in her glance, and respect for every ordinary word our visitor uttered, as though she would blindly have acted as he dictated should his next words express a desire. I followed Claire into the kitchen, carrying plates and dishes. ‘I always wanted to,’ Joanna was saying, drawn out by Damian in a way that was not usual in his conversation. ‘I never thought of doing anything else.’
We didn’t speak, Claire and I, in the kitchen. We didn’t even look at one another. It was our fault; we had permitted this stroke of fate to stake its claim. The suitable admirers - the dark-haired map-maker, the ornithologist, and others - were not what a retriever of lost causes, a daily champion of down-and-outs, had ever wanted. In the dining-room the voices chatted on, and in the kitchen we felt invaded by them, Claire and I, she tumbling raspberries into a blue glass bowl, I spooning coffee into the filter. ‘I remember hearing you’d been born,’ Damian was saying in the dining-room when we returned.
It was I who had told him. I delivered Joanna myself; Claire and I heard her first cry in the same moment. ‘A girl,’ I said when Damian arrived six months later for one of his visits, and we drank my whiskey on a bitter January night. ‘How nice to have a daughter!’ he murmured when we gazed down at the cot by Claire’s bedside. And he was right: it was nice having a girl as well as a boy, nice being a family. Even then, two different personalities were apparent: our son’s easy-going, rarely ruffled, Joanna’s confident. At five and six, long-legged and determined, she won the races she ran because insistently she believed she could. Oh no, she wouldn’t, she asserted when it was pointed out that she would tire of looking after the unattractive terrier she rescued after tinkers left it behind. And for years, until the creature died in old age, she did look after it.
‘It was snowing outside,’ Damian reminisced in the dining-room. ’Black Bush was what we drank, Joanna, the night your father and I wet the baby’s head.’
His fingernails were rimmed: ash from the cigarettes he was smoking, as he always does, between courses. Once upon a time, years ago, he affected a cigarette-holder. He had sold it, he told Claire when she asked, and we guessed it had been another gift from a woman, sold when the affair was over.
‘Raspberries, Damian?’ Claire offered.
He smiled his acceptance. He placed his cigarette, still burning, on a side plate, and poured cream on the fruit. I wondered if children had been born to him; I hadn’t wondered that before. I imagined, as I often had, his public-house life in London, some places he could not enter because of debts, late-night disagreements turning sour. I had a feeling that his travels
- so often mentioned - had always been of brief duration, that London was where he had mostly belonged, in seedy circumstances. I imagined lodgings, rent unpaid, possessions pawned. How often had there been flits in the small hours? Were small dishonesties a poet’s right? And yet, I thought as well, he was our friend and almost always had been. He’d cheered our lives.
‘Damian’s tired of London,’ Joanna said. ‘He’s going to live at Doul again.’
In the night, believing me to be asleep, Claire wept. I whispered, trying to console her. We didn’t say to one another that shock came into this, that we must allow a little time to calm us. We lay there, remembering that not much longer than twenty-four hours ago Claire had said our friend was the tonic we needed. On all his visits we’d never been dismayed to see him, and he couldn’t help being older now, less handsome than he had been, his grubbiness more noticeable. He was, at heart, as he had always been. It was unfair to say he wasn’t, just because he had cast a spell in our house. We’d always known about those spells. We’d read between the lines, we hadn’t been misled.
Marriage was what we dreaded, although neither of us used the word. It was not because Damian had so often confessed he liked to marry that our melancholy threw up this stark prediction; it was because Joanna was Joanna. We might be wrong, we felt each other thinking; a tawdry love affair might be enough. But we did not believe it and neither of us suggested the consolation of this lesser pain. Nor did we remind one another that Joanna, all her life, had been attracted by the difficult, nor did we share it with one another when in the dark we were more certainly aware that there had been no challenge in her relationship with the map-maker or the ornithologist, or with any of her suitable admirers. Perhaps, that night, we knew our daughter a little better, and perhaps we loved her just a little more. She would succeed where other women had failed: already we could hear her offering this, already we sensed her not believing that the failure could lie anywhere but with those other women. ‘I’m going to marry Damian,’ the childish silliness brightly echoed, and with it our amusement.
Had he come to us this time with a purpose? Claire asked when she ceased to weep. Did he intend our daughter to earn his living for him, to tend him in the place of his childhood, cosseting his old man’s frailties? Had his future lit up suddenly on a London street, the years ahead radiant as a jewel in his imagination? ‘I’ll tell them,’ had our daughter said already, planning to sit us down, to pour out drinks in celebration? She would break the news that was not news, and we’d embrace her, not pointing out that Damian couldn’t help destroying his achievements. And she would hurry to him when he next appeared and they would stand together as lovers do. We could not foretell the details after that, and quite suddenly the form the relationship might take in time hardly seemed to matter any more: enough of it was there already. ‘Are we being punished?’ Claire asked, and I didn’t know if we were or not, or why we should be punished, or what our sin was.
We didn’t want that night to end. We didn’t want to feel, again, the excitement that had crept into our house, that passed us by and was not ours. It was not in Damian’s nature to halt an adventure that was already under way, not in his nature to acquire from nowhere the decency that would forbid it to proceed. His bedroom would not be empty when morning came, the small suitcase gone, a note left on his bedside table. ‘Remember the others?’ Claire whispered in the dark, and I knew whom she meant without having to think - the daughter of the Bishop of Killaloe, the widow from upstate New York, the Englishwoman in Venice, and other nameless women mentioned by our friend in passing.
Ill-suited, we said, when we learned that the first of his marriages had fallen apart, and were too busy in those busy days to be more than sorry. We had hardly wondered about the fate of the bishop’s daughter, and not at all about the American widow, except to say to one another that it was typical of Damian to make the same mistake twice. And when the Englishwoman left him it was a joke. Old reprobate, we said. Incorrigible.
The first streaks of dawn came flickering in, the birds began. We lay there silent, not trusting ourselves to comment on this past that the present had thrown up. The bishop’s daughter - younger than Joanna was now - smiled in her wedding dress, and I felt again the warm touch of her cheek when I kissed it, and heard her reply to my good wishes, her shy voice saying she was happier than she deserved to be. And a face from a photograph we’d once been shown was the oval face of the American, dark hair, dark eyes, lips slightly parted. And the face of the Englishwoman was just a guess, a face contorted in a quarrel, made bitter with cold tears. The shadows of other men’s wives, of lovely women, girls charmed, clamoure
d for attention, breaking from their shadows, taking form. Old reprobate.
‘I think I’ll go and talk to her.’ Claire’s voice was hushed in the twilight, but she didn’t move, and I knew that already she had changed her mind; talking would make everything worse. Eighty-one, Claire said: he would be eighty-one when Joanna was forty-eight.
I didn’t calculate. It didn’t matter. I thought we might quarrel, that tiredness might bring something like that on, but we didn’t. We didn’t round on each other, blaming in order to shed guilt, bickering as we might have once, when upsets engendered edginess. We didn’t because ours are the dog days of marriage and there aren’t enough left to waste: dangerous ground has long ago been charted and is avoided now. There was no point in saying, either, that the damage we already sensed would become entertainment for other people, as damage had for us.
‘I’ll make tea,’ I said, and descended the stairs softly as I always do at this early hour so as not to wake our daughter. Some time today Damian and I might again call in at Traynor’s; I might, in sickening humility, ask for mercy. I heard my own voice doing so, but the sound was false, wrong in all sorts of ways; I knew I wouldn’t say a thing. To ensure that our daughter had a roof over her head I would lend whatever was necessary. A bungalow would replace the fallen house at Doul.
The Irish Times was half pushed through the letter-box; I slipped it out. I brought the tray back to our bedroom, with gingersnap biscuits on a plate because we like them in the early morning. We read the paper. We didn’t say much else.
Later that morning Joanna hurried through cornflakes and a slice of toast. Her car started, reversed, then dashed away. Damian appeared and we sat outside in the September sunshine; Claire made fresh coffee. It was too late to hate him. It was too late to deny that we’d been grateful when our stay-at-home smugness had been enlivened by the tales of his adventures, or to ask him if he knew how life had turned out for the women who had loved him. Instead we conversed inconsequentially.
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