Boland had said to himself over and over again that Lairdman was welcome to her. He looked ahead to an easy widower’s life, the house she had filled with her perversities and falsehoods for the last twelve years as silent as a peaceful sleep. He would clear out the memories of her because naturally she wouldn’t do that herself – the hoarded magazines, the empty medicine bottles, the clothes she had no further use for, the cosmetics she’d pitched into the corners of cupboards, the curtains and chair-covers clawed by her cats. He would get Molloy in to paint out the rooms. He would cook his own meals, and Mrs Coughlan would still come every morning. Mrs Coughlan wouldn’t be exactly sorry to see the back of her, either.
‘I don’t know why,’ Lairdman said, ‘you keep going on about your schooldays.’
‘Let me get you a decent drink before you go. Bring us two big ones,’ he called out to the barman, who was listening to an anecdote the man in the gaberdine coat was retailing at the far end of the bar.
‘No, really,’ Lairdman protested. ‘Really now.’
‘Oh, go on, man. We’re both in need of it.’
Lairdman had buttoned his black overcoat and drawn on a pair of black leather gloves. Finger by finger he drew one of the gloves off again. Boland could feel him thinking that, for the sake of the woman who loved him, he must humour the cuckold.
‘It takes it out of you,’ Boland said. ‘An emotional thing like this. Good luck to you.’
They drank, Lairdman seeming awkward now because of what had been said. He looked a bit like a priest, Boland thought, the black attire and the way he wore it. He tried to imagine the pair of them abroad, sitting down together in a French restaurant, Lairdman being pernickety about a plate of food he didn’t like the look of. It didn’t make sense, all this stuff about a devastating sense of humour.
‘I only mentioned the school,’ Boland said, ‘because it was the other thing we had in common.’
‘As a matter of fact, I’m a governor up there now.’
‘Ah, go on!’
‘That’s why I said we’d maybe send the children there.’
‘Well, doesn’t that beat the band!’
‘I’m pleased myself. I’m pleased they asked me.’
‘Sure, anyone would be.’
Stupid he might be, Boland thought, but he was cute as well, the way he’d managed not to make a comment on the Roche and Dead Smith business. Cuteness was the one thing you could never get away from in Dublin. Cute as weasels they were.
‘You don’t remember it?’ he prompted.
‘What’s that?’
‘The lavatory thing.’
‘Look here, Boland –’
‘I’ve offended you. I didn’t mean that at all.’
‘Of course you haven’t offended me. It’s just that I see no point in harping on things like that.’
‘We’ll talk of something else.’
‘Actually, I’m a bit on the late side.’
The second glove was again drawn on, the buttons of the smooth black overcoat checked to see that all was well for the street. The glove was taken off again when Lairdman remembered there’d have to be a handshake.
‘Thanks for everything,’ he said.
For the second time, Boland surprised himself by being unable to leave well alone. He wondered if it was the whiskey; the long drive and then the whiskey on top of an empty stomach because of course there hadn’t been anything in the house for his breakfast when he’d gone to look, not even a slice of bread. ‘I’ll come down and do you scrambled eggs and a few rashers,’ she’d said the night before. ‘You’ll need something inside you before you set off.’
‘I’m interested in what you say about sending your children there,’ was what he heard himself saying. ‘Would these be your and Annabella’s children you have in mind?’
Lairdman looked at him as if he’d gone out of his senses. His narrow mouth gaped in bewilderment. Boland didn’t know if he was trying to smile or if some kind of rictus had set in.
‘What other children are there?’ Lairdman shook his head, still perplexed. He held his hand out, but Boland did not take it.
‘I thought those might be the children you had in mind,’ he said.
‘I don’t follow what you’re saying.’
‘She can’t have children, Lairdman.’
‘Ah now, look here –’
‘That’s a medical fact. The unfortunate woman is incapable of mothering children.’
‘I think you’re drunk. One after another you’ve had. I thought it a moment ago when you got maudlin about your schooldays. Annabella’s told me a thing or two, you know.’
‘She hasn’t told you about the cats she’s going to spring on you. She hasn’t told you she can’t give birth. She hasn’t told you she gets so bored her face turns white with fury. It’s best not to be around then, Lairdman. Take my tip on that.’
‘She’s told me you can’t stay sober. She’s told me you’ve been warned off every racecourse in Ireland.’
‘I don’t go racing, Lairdman, and apart from occasions like this I hardly drink at all. A lot less than our mutual friend, I can promise you that.’
‘You have been unable to give Annabella children. She’s sorry for you, she doesn’t blame you.’
‘Annabella was never sorry for anyone in her life.’
‘Now look here, Boland –’
‘Look nowhere, man. I’ve had twelve years of the woman. I’m obliging you by stepping aside. But there’s no need for this talk of divorce, Lairdman, in England or anywhere else. I’m just telling you that. She’ll come and live with you in your seven-room flat; she’ll live in any house you care to buy, but if you wait till kingdom come you’ll not find children trotting along. All you’ll have is two Siamese cats clawing the skin off you.’
‘You’re being despicable, Boland.’
‘I’m telling you the truth.’
‘You seem to have forgotten that Annabella and myself have talked about all this. She knew you’d take it hard. She knew there’d be bitterness. Well, I understand that. I’ve said I’m sorry.’
‘You’re a mean little blockboard man, Lairdman. You belong with your head held down in a lavatory bowl. Were you wringing wet when they let go of you? I’d love to have seen it, Lairdman.’
‘Will you keep your damn voice down? And will you stop trying to pick a quarrel? I came out this morning in good faith. I’m aware of the delicacy of the thing, and I’m not saying I’ve been a saint. But I’ll not stand here and be insulted. And I’ll not hear Annabella insulted.’
‘I think Dead Smith became a vet.’
‘I don’t care what he became.’
Abruptly, Lairdman was gone. Boland didn’t turn his head, or otherwise acknowledge his departure. He examined the row of bottles behind the bar, and in a moment he lit a fresh cigarette.
For half an hour he remained on his own where his usurper had left him. All he could think of was Lairdman as he remembered him, a boy who was pointed out because of what two bullies had done to him. The old cokeman, McArdle, used to laugh over the incident. Sometimes, when the classroom radiator wasn’t hot enough, the boarders would go down to McArdle’s cokehole and sit around his furnace. He’d tell them obscene stories, all of them to do with the matron and cook, or else he told them about Lairdman. The more Boland thought about it all the more clearly he remembered Lairdman: not much different in appearance, the same trap of a mouth, a propelling pencil and a fountain pen clipped into the pocket of his jacket. He had a bicycle, Boland could remember, a new one that had perhaps replaced an older one, a Golden Eagle. ‘Oh, we met at a party Phyllis gave,’ she had said, but there was no way of knowing how much truth there was in that, presumably none.
Boland ate his lunch in the dining-room of the hotel, among people he did not know, who gave the impression of lunching there regularly. He didn’t have to say he’d take nothing to drink because the waitress didn’t ask him. There was water in a glass jug on the table
; he’d be all right for the journey home, he decided.
‘The cod,’ he ordered. ‘Yes, I’ll have the cod. And the cream of celery.’
He remembered a time when the thirteen boarders had smashed a window in an outhouse that no longer had a purpose. Most of the window-panes were broken already, the roof had long ago tumbled in, and one of the walls was so badly split that it had begun to disintegrate. It was forbidden for any boy to enter this small, crumbling building, and the boarders had not done so. They had stood twenty or so yards away throwing stones at the remaining window-panes, as they might have thrown stones at a cockshot. They had meant no harm, and did not realize that an outhouse which was so badly damaged already might be worthy of preservation. Ceremoniously the following morning the Belted Earl had taken his cane to them in the presence of the assembled day boys. Lairdman would have been watching, Boland reflected as he ate his soup: Lairdman might have brought it up just as he himself had brought up the other matter, but of course that wasn’t Lairdman’s way. Lairdman considered himself a sophisticate; even in the days of his Golden Eagle he would have considered himself that.
Boland crumbled the bread on his side plate, picking up bits of it between mouthfuls of soup. He saw himself, one day in the future, entering the silence of his house. He saw himself on a summer evening pushing open the french windows of the drawing-room and going out into the garden, strolling among its fuchsia bushes and apple trees. He’d known the house all his life; he’d actually been born in it. Opposite O’Connor Motors, it was the last one in the town, yellow-washed and ordinary, but a house he loved.
‘Did you say the fish, sir?’ the waitress inquired.
‘Yes, I did.’
He’d been married in Dublin, she being the daughter of a Dublin wine merchant. The old man was still alive and so was her mother. ‘You’ve taken on a handful,’ the old man once had said, but he’d said it playfully because in those days Annabella had been a handful to delight in. What they thought of her now Boland had no idea.
‘The plate’s hot, sir,’ the waitress warned.
‘Thanks very much.’
People who’d known him in his childhood had been delighted when he brought her to live among them. They’d stopped him on the street and said he was lucky. They were happy for him: he’d come back from Dublin with a crown of jewels, which was how they saw it. And yet those same people would be delighted when she left. The terrible frustration that possessed her – the denial of children through some mischance within her – turned beauty into wanton eccentricity. It was that that had happened, nothing else.
Slowly he ate his cod, with parsley sauce and cabbage and potatoes. Nobody would mention it much; they’d know what had happened and they’d say to one another that one day, probably, he’d marry again. He wondered if he would. He’d spoken airily of divorce to Lairdman, but in truth he knew nothing of divorce in Ireland these days. A marriage should wither away, he somehow felt, it should rot and die; it didn’t seem quite like a cancer, to be swiftly cut out.
He ordered apple tart and cream, and later coffee came. He was glad it was all over: the purpose of his visit to Dublin had been to set a seal on everything that had happened, and in the encounter that had taken place the seal had at some point been set. The air had been cleared, he had accepted the truth it had been necessary to hear from someone else besides his wife. When first she’d told him he’d wondered if she could possibly be making it all up, and he’d wondered it since. Even while he’d waited in Buswell’s bar he’d said to himself he wouldn’t be surprised if no one turned up.
On the way to the car park two tinker children begged from him. He knew it wasn’t coppers they were after, but his wallet or whatever else they could get their fingers on. One held out a cardboard box, the other pressed close to him, with a rug folded over her hands. He’d seen the trick before; Dublin was like that now. ‘Go on, along with you,’ he ordered them as harshly as he could.
It was because there hadn’t been enough for her to do: he thought that as he eased the car through the heavy city traffic. And from the very start she hadn’t taken to provincial life. A childless woman in a provincial town had all the time in the world to study its limitations. She had changed the furniture around, and had chosen the wallpapers that her Siamese cats had later damaged. But she’d resisted bridge and tennis, and had deplored the absence of even a cinema café. He’d thought he’d understood; so well used to the limitations himself, he was nevertheless aware that the society he had plunged her into was hardly scintillating. He’d driven her as often as he could to Dublin, before she’d taken to going on her own to visit Phyllis. For years he’d known she wasn’t happy, but until she told him he’d never suspected she’d become involved with a man.
He stopped in Mullingar and had a cup of tea. The Dublin evening papers had arrived before him. He read in the Herald that the Italian government had been successfully re-formed after the Achille Lauro incident; the dollar was slipping again; a meat-processing plant was to close in Cork. He dawdled over the paper, not wanting to go home. Lairdman would have telephoned her by now. ‘Why don’t you drive up this afternoon?’ he might have said. Maybe she had been packing all day, knowing the encounter was only a formality. ‘He won’t stand in the way,’ Lairdman would have said. ‘He’ll even supply grounds.’ There’d be nothing to keep her, now that all three of them knew where they stood, and it was the kind of thing she’d do, pack up and go when she’d got him out of the way.
A coal fire was burning in the café. A rare welcome these days, he remarked to the woman who’d served him, and pulled a chair up close to it. ‘I’d take another cup of tea,’ he said.
The little white Volkswagen he’d bought her might be on the road to Dublin already. She wouldn’t leave a note because she wouldn’t consider it necessary. If the Volkswagen passed by now she would be puzzled at not meeting him on the road; she’d never notice his own car parked outside the café.
‘Ah well, you’d need a fire,’ the woman said, returning with his tea. ‘A shocking foggy old month we’re having.’
‘I’ve known better certainly.’
He drove on after he’d had a third cup of tea, keeping an eye out for the Volkswagen. Would she greet him with a touch on the horn? Or would he greet her? He didn’t know if he would. Better to wait for the moment.
But over the next fifty or so miles there was no sign of his wife’s car. And of course, he told himself, there was no reason why there should be: it was pure conjecture that she’d depart that afternoon, and the amount she had to pack made it unlikely that she could manage to do so in a day. For the next few miles he speculated on how, otherwise, her departure would be. Would Lairdman drive down to assist her? That had not been agreed upon or even touched upon as a possibility: he would instantly put his foot down if it was suggested. Would Phyllis arrive to help her? He would naturally have no objection to that. Certainly, the more he thought about it, the less likely was it that she could be capable of completing the move on her own. She had a way of calling on other people when something difficult had to be undertaken. He imagined her sitting on the second step of the stairs, chattering on the telephone. ‘Would you ever…?’ she had a way of beginning her demands and her requests.
His headlights caught the familiar sign, in English and Irish, indicating that the town which was his home was the next one. He turned the radio on. ‘Dancing in the dark’, a sensual female voice lilted, reminding him of the world he supposed his wife and Lairdman belonged to; the thrill of illicit love, tête-à-tête dancing, as the song implied. ‘Poor Annabella’, he said aloud, while the music still played. Poor girl, ever to have got herself married to the inheritor of a country-town bakery. Lucky, in all fairness, that cocky little Lairdman had turned up. The music continued, and he imagined them running towards one another along an empty street, like lovers in a film. He imagined their embrace, and then their shared smile before they embraced again. As the dull third party, not even a vill
ain, he had no further part to play.
But as Boland reached the first few houses on this side of the town he knew that none of that was right. Not only had the white Volkswagen not conveyed her to Lairdman in his absence, it would not do so tomorrow or the next day, or next week. It would not do so next month, or after Christmas, or in February, or in the spring: it would not ever do so. It hadn’t mattered reminding Lairdman of the ignominy he had suffered as a boy; it hadn’t mattered reminding him that she was a liar, or insulting him by calling him mean. All that abuse was conventional in the circumstances, an expected element in the man-to-man confrontation, the courage for it engendered by an intake of John Jameson. Yet something had impelled him to go further: little men like Lairdman always wanted children. ‘That’s a total lie,’ she’d have said already on the telephone, and Lairdman would have soothed her. But soothing wasn’t going to be enough for either of them.
Boland turned the radio off. He drew the car up outside Donovan’s public house and sat for a moment, swinging the keys between his thumb and forefinger before going in and ordering a bottle of Smithwick’s with lime. At the bar he greeted men he knew and stood with them drinking, listening to talk of racehorses and politics. They drifted away when a few more drinks had been taken but Boland remained there for a long time, wondering why he hadn’t been able to let Lairdman take her from him.
Honeymoon in Tramore
They stayed in a boarding-house, St Agnes’s, run by a Mrs Hurley. ‘You have it written all over you!’ this woman said when she opened the door to them. She eyed a speck of confetti on the lapel of his navy-blue suit and then glanced briefly at the rounding of Kitty’s stomach. It was the summer of 1948, a warm afternoon in July.
Mrs Hurley was a middle-aged landlady in a brown coat, who apologized for the Wellington boots she was wearing: she’d been brushing down the yard. Her fingernails were enamelled a vivid shade of pink, her hair was contained by a tidy blue hairnet which partially disguised an arrangement of pins and curling papers. They would be very happy in St Agnes’s, she said; they’d have the place to themselves because there was no one else stopping in the house at the moment. When they were carrying their two suitcases upstairs she said that marriage was a God-given institution and added that her husband went to Mass every morning of his life, on his way to work with the county council. ‘Your tea’ll be on the table at six on the dot,’ she said.
The Collected Stories Page 155