by John Boyne
“Sorry, Cyril,” he said, looking at me with something approaching pity. “You seem like a nice fella but you’re just not my type.”
I sobered up almost immediately. I had never, ever been rejected and was dumbfounded that my advances should be rebuffed. In those days, homosexuals took what they could, where they could and were glad of it. Attraction was considered a bonus but never a requirement. When I woke late the next afternoon, the memory slowly returning to me like a ghastly nightmare that wouldn’t go away, I was horrified by what I had done. I considered handing in my notice immediately at RTÉ but it had taken too long for me to find a job that paid enough to allow me to live alone and the idea of going back to sharing with someone was unbearable. And so I pretended that it had never happened and in the three years since then had done my best to avoid him. But it was impossible to shake the knowledge that whenever he looked at me he understood me better than anyone else alive.
“So let me get this straight,” said Martin, looking toward me and Julian. “You two have known each other since your school days, is that right?”
“We shared a room for six years,” said Julian.
“I bet Cyril loved that,” said Nick, and I threw him a filthy glance.
“Although, actually, we first met when we were seven,” I pointed out, wanting to stress just how long we had been in each other’s lives. “His father came to my house to meet with my adoptive father and I found Julian lurking in the hallway.”
“Cyril always tells me that,” said Julian. “I don’t remember it.”
“Well I do,” I said quietly.
“I remember some lad when I was that age asking whether we could show each other our cocks but Cyril claims that wasn’t him.”
The three lads spluttered over their pints and Nick put a hand to his face. I could see his shoulders shuddering with laughter. I didn’t bother to repudiate it again.
“And you’re the best man?” asked Stephen, when the teasing died down.
“I am,” said Julian.
“How’s the speech coming along?”
“It’s almost there. I hope no one’s too sensitive. It’s a bit blue at times.”
“Ah, Julian,” I said, pulling a face. “I asked you to keep it clean.”
“Don’t worry, it’s mild enough,” he said, grinning at me. “Alice would kill me if I said anything out of order. So here’s to Cyril anyway,” he added, lifting his pint, and the others did too. “A lifelong friend and, twenty-four hours from now, my brother-in-law. My sister’s a very lucky woman.”
“She must have done something wonderful in a previous life,” added Nick as he clinked his glass against mine.
Alice
Although Alice’s and my paths had crossed occasionally over the years, our romantic relationship had only begun some eighteen months earlier at a party to mark Julian’s departure to South America for a six-month trek across the Andes. This was probably his most infamous escapade, as it involved traveling with his girlfriends at the time, a pair of Finnish twins by the names of Emmi and Peppi who, he claimed, had been conjoined at birth and were only separated by an American surgeon when they were four years old. It was true that whenever I looked at them they seemed to be leaning toward each other at a slightly unnatural angle.
Only two years my junior, Alice had matured from a somewhat awkward adolescence into an incredibly beautiful young woman, a female version of Julian himself, sharing the fine cheekbones and deep-blue eyes that had first drawn my adoptive father Charles to their mother Elizabeth, rather than the bulbous nose and amphibian-like eyes that they might have inherited from Max. She did not, however, share her brother’s promiscuous ways, having spent seven years dating a young medical student named Fergus, a relationship that had come to an end on the morning of their wedding when he telephoned just as she and Max were leaving Dartmouth Square for the church to tell her that he couldn’t go through with it. Cold feet was his predictable and boring explanation and within a few days he had disappeared off to Madagascar where, it was said, he was still working as a junior doctor in a leprosy clinic. I remember running into Julian by chance a few days later on Grafton Street and can still recall the distressed expression on his face as he told me what had happened. He loved his sister deeply and the notion of someone hurting her was unbearable for him.
“Don’t feel you have to sit with me, Cyril,” said Alice as we looked over toward the corner of the bar where Julian was seated like the meat in a Finnish sandwich while a group of his friends ogled them enviously, longing for a bite. “If you’d rather go over there with the boys, I’m perfectly content with my book.”
“They’re all strangers to me,” I said. “Where did he find them anyway? They look like the cast of Hair.”
“I think they’re what are commonly referred to as socialites,” she said, her voice dripping with disdain. “The dictionary definition would be a bunch of self-regarding, narcissistic, physically attractive but intellectually hollow individuals whose parents have so much money that they don’t need to do a day’s work themselves. Instead, they go from party to party, desperate to be seen, while gradually corroding from the inside out, like a spent battery, due to their lack of ambition, insight or wit.”
“You’re not a fan then?” I asked, and she just shrugged. “Still, it sounds like more fun than getting up at seven o’clock every morning and traipsing across the city to sit behind a desk for eight hours. What are you reading anyway?” I asked, noticing the corner of a book poking out from her bag, and she reached down to retrieve a copy of John McGahern’s The Dark. “Isn’t that banned?”
“I believe it is, yes,” she said. “What’s your point?”
“I don’t have one, really. What’s it about?”
“A boy and his abusive father. I should give it to Julian to read.”
I said nothing. If there was any serious tension between her brother and father, I had never heard about it before.
“So tell me, Cyril,” she said. “Are you still working in the civil service?”
“Oh no,” I said. “I left there a long time ago. It wasn’t for me. I work for RTÉ now.”
“That must be exciting.”
“It has its moments,” I lied. “And what about you? Do you work?”
“I believe I do but Max would say differently.” As I waited for her to continue, it struck me that she, like me, called her father by his Christian name. “I’ve been researching and writing a PhD in English Literature at UCD for the last few years. I wanted to go to Trinity but the Archbishop wouldn’t let me.”
“Did you ask him?”
“I did,” she said. “I went all the way to the palace in Drumcondra and knocked on the front door, bold as brass. His housekeeper wanted to kick me out into the gutter, of course, because I was wearing a dress that exposed my shoulders, but he invited me in and I made my request in person. He seemed to think that I was a bit odd for wanting a career at all. He told me that if I put as much effort into finding a husband as I did into my studies I’d have a home, a family and three children by now.”
“What a charmer,” I said, laughing despite myself. “And what did you say?”
“I told him that when your fiancé leaves you on the morning of your wedding while two hundred of your friends and family are waiting for you in a church half a mile away, then marriage isn’t necessarily the first thing on your mind.”
“Ah,” I said, looking down at my shoes uneasily. “I suppose not.”
“He said I was a lovely girl, though,” she added with a smile, “so I have that going in my favor at least. Anyway, as it turns out I’m glad that I ended up in UCD. I’ve made some good friends there. I’ll finish my degree in about a year’s time and the department has already offered me a teaching position for the following semester. I could be a professor in about five years if I keep my head down and don’t lose my focus.”
“And is that what you want?” I asked her. “To spend your life in academia?�
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“It is,” she said, looking around and wincing at the raucous noise coming from Julian’s friends. “I sometimes feel as if I wasn’t supposed to live among people at all. As if I would be happier on a little island somewhere, all alone with my books and some writing material for company. I could grow my own food and never have to speak to a soul. I look at him sometimes,” she added, nodding toward her brother, “and it’s as if we were born with two life-forces between us but he got all of his share and half of mine too.”
She didn’t say this with any resentment or self-pity—it was clear to me from the look on her face that she adored him as much as I did—and I felt an instant kinship with her. Her idea of a safe haven appealed to me too. A place I could go, simply to be left alone.
“Do you think that’s because of…well, what happened?” I asked. “Your desire to remove yourself from the world, I mean.”
“Because of what Fergus did to me?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t think so,” she said. “I was a rather solitary child and that didn’t change much as I grew older. Although it didn’t help, of course. That kind of humiliation is almost never visited upon a person. Did you know that Max insisted on the reception going ahead afterward?”
“What?” I said, uncertain whether she was joking or not.
“It’s true,” she continued. “He said that the wedding had cost him a fortune already and he wasn’t going to allow that amount of money to go to waste. So he dragged me off to the hotel in the Daimler that he’d booked for me and Fergus, and when we got out, the staff were all lined up along the red carpet. I could see some of them looking at us wondering why has that young woman married a man old enough to be her father and the rest thinking that was the reason I had such a miserable expression on my face. There was a champagne reception, where I had to go from person to person, thanking them for coming and apologizing on Fergus’s behalf, and then I was made to sit at the head table while the guests ate and drank to their hearts’ content. Max even made a speech, if you can believe it. He read it from a piece of paper and didn’t change a word, because apparently he’d spent days on it. This is the happiest day of my life, he said. Alice deserves this. I’ve never seen a happier bride. It went on and on like that. It was almost comical.”
“But why on earth did you go through with it?” I asked. “Why didn’t you just go home? Or, you know, jump on a flight to Mars or someplace?”
“Well, I was a bit shell-shocked, I suppose. I didn’t know what else to do. I loved Fergus, you see. Very much. And of course, I’d never been jilted on my wedding day before,” she added, smiling a little, “which meant I wasn’t sure what the etiquette of the situation was. So I just did what I was told.”
“Fucking Max,” I said, surprising both of us by my use of a word that I rarely employed.
“Fucking Fergus,” replied Alice.
“Fucking both of them. What do you think, should we have a couple more of these fucking drinks?”
“Fuck yes,” she said, and I grinned as I stood up to make my way to the bar.
“You’ll miss him, I suppose?” said Alice when I returned with two large glasses of wine. “Six months is a long time.”
“I will,” I said. “He’s my best friend.”
“Mine too,” she said. “So what does that make us?”
“Rivals?” I suggested, and she laughed. I was drawn to her; there was no question about that. Not physically but emotionally. Temperamentally. For the first time in my life, I felt content to be seated in the company of a girl while Julian was somewhere else in the room. My eyes were not being constantly pulled in his direction, nor was I feeling jealous that others were dominating his time. It was an entirely new sensation for me and one that I rather enjoyed.
“Have you seen anyone famous out at RTÉ?” she asked me after a brief silence, during which I had racked my brain for something witty to say and come up short.
“Paul McCartney was there once,” I said.
“Oh I love Paul McCartney! I saw the Beatles when they played the Adelphi in 1963. I even went to the Gresham Hotel afterward and pretended I was a guest so that I could get in to see them.”
“Did it work?”
“No. Biggest disappointment of my life.” She hesitated and then smiled at me. “Well, you know, that is until the obvious. Can I tell you something, Cyril?”
“Of course,” I said.
“It’s about my PhD,” she said. “The thing is, I’m writing it on your mother’s books.”
“Really?” I said, raising an eyebrow.
“Yes. Does that make you uncomfortable?”
“No,” I said. “But you should probably know, Maude was my adoptive mother, not my birth mother.”
“Yes, I know that,” she said. “Where did they get you from anyway? Were you found on the doorstep one day? Or did you just wash in on the tide at Dun Laoghaire pier?”
“The family legend has it that a little hunchbacked Redemptorist nun brought me to them,” I told her. “They wanted a child, or they said that they did, and here was a child.”
“And your birth parents? Have you ever tracked them down?”
“I’ve never even tried. I’m not that interested, to be honest.”
“Why not?” she asked. “Are you angry at them?”
“No, not at all,” I told her. “I had a reasonably happy childhood, which is rather strange in retrospect, as neither Charles nor Maude showed any particular interest in me at all. But they didn’t beat me or starve me or anything like that. I wasn’t a Dickensian orphan, if you know what I mean. And as for my birth mother, well I daresay she did what she had to do. I assume she was unmarried, that’s where adopted babies usually come from, isn’t it? No, I don’t feel any anger at all. What’s the point?”
“That’s good to hear. There’s nothing more tedious than a grown man blaming his parents, birth or otherwise, for all the things that have gone wrong in his life.”
“You’re assuming that things have gone wrong in my life.”
“There’s something in your face that tells me that you’re not happy. Oh I’m sorry, that’s a very personal remark. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“No, it’s fine,” I said, although I felt a little crestfallen that she could read me so well.
“Anyway, Fergus was quite like that. Always blaming other people for issues that were his own to solve. It was one of the few things that I didn’t like about him, if I’m honest.”
“So are you still angry at him?” I asked, conscious that this too was a deeply personal question but it balanced out what she had said to me.
“Oh I hate him,” she said, and I noticed a flush of color come into her cheeks and the manner in which the fingers of her left hand dug into her palm, as if she wanted something to take away her pain. “I absolutely detest him. Afterward, I didn’t feel very much at all for a week or two. I suppose I was in shock. But then the fury rose and it hasn’t subsided since. Sometimes I find it difficult to control. I think it was around the time that everyone stopped asking me whether I was all right, when lives went back to how they had been before. Had he been in Dublin I might well have gone over there, broken down his door and stabbed him as he slept. Fortunately for him, he was in Madagascar with his lepers.”
I snorted some of my drink through my nose and had to retrieve my handkerchief from my pocket to wipe my face. “Sorry,” I said, unable to stop laughing. “It’s just the way you put it. I’m not mocking you.”
“It’s fine,” she said, laughing now too, and I could see that it did her good to make light of it. “It is quite comical when you think of it. I mean if he’d left me for Jane Fonda then that would be one thing. But for a bunch of lepers? I didn’t even know that there were lepers anymore. I only knew what they were because Max’s favorite film is Ben-Hur and I’ve been forced to watch it with him numerous times.”
“Well, it was his loss,” I said.
&n
bsp; “Oh don’t patronize me,” she snapped, turning serious again. “People always say that, you see, but they’re wrong. It wasn’t his loss. It was mine. I loved him.” She hesitated for a moment and then repeated the phrase, with added emphasis on the crucial word. “And I still miss him, despite everything. I just wish he’d been honest with me, that’s all. If he’d told me a few days before that he didn’t love me enough to marry me, if we could have just sat down and discussed things, then even if he’d still wanted to call it all off, it would have been difficult but at least I could have been part of the decision. I wouldn’t have had to suffer such deep humiliation. But the manner in which he left me? Simply telephoning when I was already in my dress to tell me about his ridiculous ‘cold feet’? What sort of man does that? And what sort of woman does it make me that if he walked in here right now I’d probably throw myself into his arms?”
“I’m sorry that happened to you, Alice,” I said. “No one should have to endure such cruelty.”
“Fortunately for me,” she said, looking down and wiping her eyes, where the tears were threatening to break over the banks of her eyelids, “I had your mother to console me. Your adoptive mother, that is. I simply threw myself into my work. Her work. I’ve lived and breathed Maude Avery since then and in her books I’ve found great solace. She was a wonderful writer.”
“She was,” I said. I had at least read most of her novels by then.
“It’s as if she understood completely the condition of loneliness and how it undermines us all, forcing us to make choices that we know are wrong for us. With each successive novel, she explores the theme even more deeply. It’s extraordinary. Did you read Malleson’s biography of her?”