by John Boyne
“He doesn’t like women who read either,” said Miss Ambrosia. “He told me that reading gives women ideas.”
“It does,” said Miss Joyce, nodding her head fiercely. “I’m in full agreement with the Minister on that. My life would have been a lot easier if I had been allowed to stay illiterate but Daddy insisted that I learn to read. He was a very modern man, was Daddy.”
“I absolutely adore Edna O’Brien,” declared Mr. Denby-Denby, throwing his hands in the air in excitement. “If I wasn’t a happily married man, I could get lost in that woman’s body for years at a time. I declare before God and all that is good and holy that a more handsome woman was never bred from these shores.”
“She left her husband, you know,” said Miss Joyce, pulling a face. “What class of a person does something like that?”
“Good enough for him,” said Miss Ambrosia. “I’m going to leave a husband one day too. I’ve always felt that my second marriage will be much more successful than my first.”
“Well, I think it’s shocking,” said Miss Joyce. “And her with two children to look after.”
“Whenever I look at Edna O’Brien,” continued Mr. Denby-Denby, “I get the impression that she wants to put every man she meets across her knee and give them a good spanking until they show her the proper respect. Oh, to be the bare bottom beneath that alabaster palm!”
Miss Ambrosia spat a little of her tea out and even Miss Joyce allowed herself something approaching a smile.
“But anyway,” he said after a moment, shaking his head to dismiss these ideas. “You were telling us about your weekend, Mr. Avery. Please tell me that it wasn’t all rugby and James Joyce.”
“I could make something up if you like,” I told him, putting down my newspaper and looking across at him.
“Go on so. I’d love to know what sordid little fantasies come to life in that mind of yours. I bet they’d make a Gypsy blush.”
He had me there. If I had actually told him any of the fantasies that kept me awake at nights, the two women might have fainted and he might have leaped across the room in lust. I’d killed a priest, after all, the last time I recounted the things that I wanted to do, and had no desire to have anymore blood on my hands.
“When I was twenty-one,” continued the ridiculous popinjay, looking toward the fireplace and attempting what can only be called a faraway look, “I was out on the town every night of the week. There wasn’t a girl in Dublin who was safe when I was nearby.”
“Really?” asked Miss Ambrosia, turning to him with an expression that mirrored my own.
“Oh I know what you’re thinking, Missy,” said Mr. Denby-Denby. “You look at me now and you think how could that slightly plump man in the autumn of his years, albeit with a magnificent head of blond hair, ever have been attractive to girls of my age but I promise you, if you could have seen me in my youth I was quite the gallant. There was many a girl who threw her cap in the ring for me. Lock up your daughters, that’s what the people of Dublin used to say when they saw Desmond Denby-Denby coming. But those days are gone now, of course. For every aging butterfly, there’s a young caterpillar. You, Mr. Avery, are that young caterpillar. And you must enjoy your larval period, for it will come to an end all too soon.”
“What time does the Minister have to be in the Dáil today?” I asked Miss Joyce, hoping to bring this conversation to an end, and she opened her diary, running a finger down the left-hand side of the page as she tapped the ash from her cigarette into her Princess Grace of Monaco ashtray.
“Eleven o’clock,” she said. “But I have Miss Ambrosia down to accompany him this morning.”
“I can’t,” said Miss Ambrosia, shaking her head.
“Why ever not?” asked Miss Joyce.
“Auntie Jemima.”
“Ah,” said Miss Joyce, and Mr. Denby-Denby rolled his eyes.
“I’ll do it,” I said. “It’s a sunny day. I’d be happy to get out of the office.”
She shrugged. “Well, if you’re certain,” she said. “I’d go myself only I don’t actually want to.”
“Perfect,” I said, smiling. The advantage of accompanying the Minister to the Dáil was a trip in the ministerial car to Leinster House, where I could leave him alone with his cronies and wait until the minute he entered the chamber for his afternoon nap, when I could be out the door and straight to the pictures, followed by a pint or two with Julian in the Palace Bar or Kehoe’s. The perfect day.
“I think I should mention,” said Miss Ambrosia after a rare few minutes of silence when some actual work might have been getting done, “I’m giving serious consideration to having relations with a Jew.”
I was taking a sip from my mug of tea when she said this and nearly spat it across my desk. Miss Joyce raised her eyes to heaven, shook her head and said, “Saints preserve us,” while Mr. Denby-Denby simply clapped his hands and said, “Wonderful news, Miss Ambrosia, there’s nothing more delicious than a little Jew boy. What’s his name anyway? Anshel? Daniel? Eli?”
“Peadar,” said Miss Ambrosia. “Peadar O’Múrchú.”
“Jesus wept,” replied Mr. Denby-Denby. “That’s about as Jewish as Adolf Hitler.”
“Oh for shame!” cried Miss Joyce, slapping a hand down on her desk. “For shame, Mr. Denby-Denby!”
“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” he said, not looking the least bit guilty before turning back to Miss Ambrosia. “Tell us all about him, ducky. What does he do, where does he live, what does he look like, who are his people?”
“He’s an accountant,” said Miss Ambrosia.
“Well of course he is,” said Mr. Denby-Denby, waving this away. “I could have guessed that. They’re all accountants. Or jewelers. Or pawnbrokers.”
“He lives with his mother off Dorset Street. He’s neither tall nor short but he has a lovely head of curly black hair and he’s a great kisser.”
“Sounds divine. I think you should do it, Miss Ambrosia. And I think you should take photographs and bring them in for us all to see. Is he big in the downstairs department, do you think? Cut, of course, but that’s not his fault. That’s parents mutilating a boy before he even has a say in the matter.”
“Ah now, this is getting beyond the beyonds,” said Miss Joyce, raising her voice. “We need to tame the conversation in this office, we really do. If the Minister came in and heard us—”
“He’d see that we were just concerned for Miss Ambrosia and hoping to steer her in the right direction,” said Mr. Denby-Denby. “What do you think, Mr. Avery, should Miss Ambrosia have carnal relations with her curly-haired Jew? A big cock makes all the difference, don’t you think?”
“I really don’t care,” I said, standing up and making my way to the door so no one could see how red my face had gone. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be back in a moment.”
“Where do you think you’re going?” asked Miss Joyce. “You’ve only been here ten minutes.”
“Call of nature,” I said, disappearing down the corridor and into the Gents, which was mercifully empty, and I stepped into a cubicle to pull down my pants and examine myself carefully. The rash had just about cleared up, thankfully. The redness had dissipated and the itching had gone away at last. The cream the doctor had given me had worked a treat. (You must be wary of dirty girls, he had told me as he buried his face in my crotch, using a pencil to lift my flaccid penis from where it hung in disgrace. Dublin is full of dirty girls. Find yourself a nice clean Catholic wife if you can’t control your lust.) I flushed and stepped outside again to wash my hands and there was Mr. Denby-Denby standing by one of the sinks, arms folded, giving me one of those smiles that suggested he could see right through to the depths of my soul, a place even I did not like to visit very often. I glanced at him for a moment, said nothing, and turned on the taps so forcefully that they splashed up on us both.
“Did I see you out and about on Saturday night?” he asked me without any preamble.
“I beg your pardon?” I said.
“Saturday night,” he repeated. “I was taking a walk along the banks of the Grand Canal and happened to pass a little establishment that I’ve heard rumors about over the years. Rumors to the effect that it is a place frequented by gentlemen of a certain perverted disposition.”
“I don’t know what you mean by that,” I said, not looking up at the mirror.
“Mrs. Denby-Denby’s older sister lives on Baggot Street, you see,” he continued. “And I was on my way over to drop off her pension. The poor dear can’t get out anymore. Arthritis,” he added, mouthing the word for no discernible reason. “We’ll say nothing.”
“Well, I don’t know who you think you saw but it certainly wasn’t me. I was out with my friend Julian on Saturday night. I already told you that.”
“No, you said you went to a rugby match with him in the afternoon but that you spent the evening at home reading. I know next to nothing about sporting events but I know that they don’t take place under cover of dark. It’s other things that happen then.”
“Sorry, yes,” I said, growing flustered now. “That’s what I meant. I was at home reading Finnegans Wake.”
“It was Portrait of the Artist earlier. If you’re going to make up a book, Cyril, don’t make one up that no one with even an ounce of sense would bother reading. No, this was almost midnight and—”
“You were bringing your sister-in-law’s pension over at midnight?” I asked.
“She stays up very late. She’s a martyr to the insomnia.”
“Well, you must be mixing me up with someone else,” I said, trying to get past him, but he swept to the left and right like Fred Astaire as he blocked my path.
“What do you want from me, Mr. Denby-Denby?” I asked. “Julian and I went to the game in the afternoon, then we went for a few drinks. Afterward, I went home and spent an hour or two reading.” I hesitated and wondered whether I could get the next phrase out. I’d never said it aloud before. “And then, if you must know, I went out for dinner with my girlfriend.”
“Your wha’?” he asked, raising an eyebrow in amusement. “Your girlfriend, is it? This is the first we’re hearing about that.”
“I don’t like to bring my private life into work,” I replied.
“So what’s her name, this girlfriend of yours?” he asked.
“Mary-Margaret Muffet,” I said.
“Is she a nun?”
“Why would I be dating a nun?” I asked, bewildered.
“I’m joking,” he said, holding his palms out before me and the scent of lavender wafted in my face. “And what does Little Miss Muffet do, if you don’t mind me asking? When she’s not sitting on her tuffet. Or yours.”
“She’s an assistant on the foreign exchange desk at the Bank of Ireland, College Green.”
“Oh, the glamour. Mrs. Denby-Denby worked in the office at Arnott’s when I first met her. I thought that was the height of it but it looks as if you’ve set your sights on banking over trade. You’re like one of those spinsters straight out of Mrs. Gaskell. It won’t make it any easier though, you know.”
“It won’t make what any easier?” I asked.
“Life,” he said with a shrug. “Your life.”
“Can’t you just let me pass?” I asked, looking him in the eye now.
“I only say it because, believe it or not, I care about your welfare,” he said, moving to the side now and following me out the door. “I know it was you that I saw, Cyril. You have a very distinctive gait. And I’m just saying that you need to be very careful, that’s all. The Gardaí have a habit of raiding that establishment when they’re in the mood for a little mindless persecution and if you were to get yourself into trouble, well I don’t need to tell you that your position here at the department would be in the most serious jeopardy. And just think what your mother would say!”
“I don’t have a mother,” I told him, slipping out the side door to the car pool, where I saw the Minister approaching and raised a hand to greet him. As we drove off, I looked back toward the front door of the building and saw Mr. Denby-Denby watching me go with a pitiful expression on his face. From a distance, his hair looked brighter than ever, like a beacon leading a sinking ship to safety.
The Great Shriveling
The circumstances of my reacquaintance with Mary-Margaret Muffet were neither romantic nor propitious. A journalist from the Sunday Press by the name of Terwilliger was writing a weekly series on crimes that had shocked Ireland since the foundation of the State and he wanted to include an article on the kidnapping and mutilation of Julian Woodbead, perhaps the most infamous of all offenses in recent years since it had involved a minor. He found contact details for the four main participants in the drama, excluding the two remaining kidnappers themselves, of course, who had been incarcerated in the ’Joy since 1959, but only Mary-Margaret and I were available to talk to him.
At the time, Julian was traveling through Europe with his latest girlfriend, Suzi, a ghastly piece of high-class ornamentation whom he’d picked up while walking along Carnaby Street in search of a Homburg similar to the one that Al Capone had favored. I had met her only once, when they had come back to Dublin for a weekend to visit Max and Elizabeth. She bit her nails constantly and chewed on pieces of roast beef before spitting the gnarled remains into a see-through bag that she carried with her for just that purpose. She didn’t swallow, she told me, as she was far too committed to her modeling career to risk anything entering her stomach.
“That’s not strictly speaking true,” said Julian with a predictable smirk, and I pretended not to have heard him. Instead, I asked her whether she knew Twiggy and she rolled her eyes.
“Her name,” she said, as if I was the most ignorant creature on the face of the planet, “is Lesley.”
“But do you know her?”
“Of course I know her. We’ve worked together a few times.”
“What’s she like?”
“Pleasant enough, I suppose. Too nice to have any lasting career in this industry. Believe me, Cecil, this time next year no one will remember her name.”
“It’s Cyril,” I said. “And what about the Beatles? Do you know them?”
“John’s a friend,” she replied with a shrug. “Paul isn’t, not anymore, and he knows why. George was my last before Julian.”
“Your last what?” I asked.
“Her last fuck,” said Julian, taking the grisly remains of his girlfriend’s dinner and placing it on the table behind us. “Can you believe it? George Harrison walked in the door just before me!”
I tried not to throw up.
“No, there was someone else,” said Suzi nonchalantly.
“What? Who? I thought I came next.”
“No, you couldn’t do it, remember?”
“Oh yes,” he said, grinning a little. “I forgot.”
“Couldn’t do it?” I asked, intrigued. “Why not?”
“Crabs,” he said with a shrug. “Picked them up from God knows who. Suzi wouldn’t come anywhere near me until I had a clean bill of health.”
“Well of course I wouldn’t,” she said. “What do you take me for?”
“And what about Ringo?” I asked, wanting to move away from Julian’s crabs. “Where do you stand on him?”
“I don’t stand anywhere on him,” she said, waving his name away like an insolent fly that was buzzing around her face. “I’m not sure he’s worth standing on. I mean all he does is play the drums. A trained monkey could do that.”
The conversation continued in this way for sometime—Suzi had strong views on Cilla Black, Mick Jagger, Terence Stamp, Kingsley Amis and the Archbishop of Canterbury, four of whom were former lovers of hers—and by the end of our night out, I disliked her even more than I had disliked the idea of her, which previous to that evening had not even seemed possible to me.
Naturally, I didn’t tell Mr. Terwilliger any of this when he phoned, simply mentioning that Julian was out of the country and uncontactable. He was very di
sappointed—Julian was the star turn after all—and said that this was the second piece of bad news he’d received, for Julian’s former paramour, Bridget Simpson, wasn’t available either.
“She’s probably forgotten all about him anyway,” I said. “I daresay she’s been through quite a few Julians since then.”
“Actually, no,” said the journalist. “Miss Simpson is dead.”
“Dead?” I repeated, sitting up abruptly in my office chair in the same way that Miss Ambrosia did whenever she realized that her Auntie Jemima had come to visit. “How dead? I mean how did she die?”
“She was murdered by her driving instructor. Apparently she wouldn’t play with his gear stick, so he drove the pair of them into a wall out near Clontarf. She died on impact.”
“Jesus,” I said, uncertain how to respond to this. I hadn’t liked her very much but that had been years ago. It seemed like a nasty end.
“So that just leaves you and Miss Muffet,” he said.
“Who?” I asked.
“Mary-Margaret Muffet,” he said, and I could tell that he was reading the name from a piece of paper. “She was your girlfriend at the time, am I right?”
“She was not!” I cried, even more shocked by this insinuation than I had been by the news of Bridget’s death. “I barely knew the girl. She was a friend of Bridget’s, that’s all. I don’t even know how they knew each other. She came along to make up a foursome.”
“Ah right,” he said. “Well, she’s agreed to meet with me. Do you think you’d be able to come along at the same time? It would make more sense if I could get a conversation going between the pair of you, a reminiscence of what happened on the day in question, you know how it is. Otherwise she’ll tell me one thing when I’m talking to her and you’ll say something completely different and the reader won’t know who to believe.”
I wasn’t sure that I wanted to have any part of it but didn’t like the idea of Mary-Margaret, of whom I had only a vague memory, having the spotlight all to herself and making potentially slanderous remarks about Julian to the national press, so I agreed to meet with them. When I arrived on the appointed afternoon, I shook hands with her warily but, to my relief, our joint recollections of that day in 1959 did not differ very much. We told Terwilliger everything we remembered, although Mary-Margaret made it clear that she was unwilling to discuss the surprise involvement of Brendan Behan in the incident for the simple reason that the man was a vulgarian and she wouldn’t like his words to be repeated in a newspaper where impressionable children might stumble upon them.