‘You’re miles away, Charlotte,’ young men would later amusedly accuse, and she’d apologize, already back at Massuery. Listening to the young men’s chatter, she descended again the wide staircase, and walked in the woods. Such memories made it easier when with embarrassed gaucheness the young men seized her hand, or kissed her. When proposals came, her private reply was to see the white car waiting for her in the Place de la Paix, while aloud she apologized to whoever had got it into his head that she was free to love him.
‘These’ll ring the changes,’ the man who has commissioned the new prints says. When a business-room or the bedrooms of a hotel are repainted he always likes to have fresh curtains and fresh prints as well; it’s something that’s expected. In six months’ time, he says, he may be ready for another contribution from her. ‘That’s something to be thinking about, my love.’ He always calls her that. He has mahogany-coloured hair with a spring in it; the stubble on his chin and neck grows so slightly and so softly that he hardly has to shave. ‘We’ll send a cheque,’ he says.
Charlotte thanks him. There are other such men, and women too, who remember her when they want something new and unexacting for their décor. They admire her prints more than Charlotte does herself; for her the prints are by the way. What matters more is the certainty of her faith: even without thinking she knows that time, for her lover also, has failed to absorb the passion that was not allowed. For all the years that have passed she has thought of him as that; and dwelling on the nature of love during all that time she has long ago concluded that it’s a mystery, appearing to come from nowhere, no rhyme nor reason to it. The truth will not yield: why did so unsuitably, so cruelly almost, two people love?
Daylight hasn’t properly penetrated the December drabness. Fog shrouds the streets; the pavements are dampened by it. Busy with their assets and takeovers, the men of the business-rooms have probably never noticed the prints that hang there. ‘How charming that is!’ a woman, half-dressed in a hotel bedroom, may have remarked after the scurry of afternoon love or in some idle moment during a weekend’s deceit.
Charlotte sits for a while in the corner of a bar, her green portfolio empty beside her. No one else, except two barmen, are there so early in the day. She sips with pleasure the glass of red wine that has been brought to her; she lights a cigarette and with slow deliberation drops the spent match into the discoloured plastic ashtray in front of her. Then idly, on the cover of her folder, she sketches a funeral procession, sombre between two lines of plane trees. When eventually he sees it the man with the mahogany hair will display no curiosity, for he never does; in the rooms destined for her funeral scene no one will wonder either.
She finishes her wine and catches the eye of the taller barman. He brings her another glass. She remembers her father being angry, and her mother frowning in bewilderment. She never told them what she might have; but her father was angry because she had no ambition, because one young man after another was so summarily rejected. ‘You’re alone so,’ her mother sadly observed. Charlotte did not attempt to explain, for how could happily married people understand that such flimsiness could become the heart of a human existence? Ambitions in this direction or that, and would-be husbands keenly persuading, seemed empty of seriousness, ludicrous almost, compared with what she had.
She has never seen Monsieur Langevin’s handwriting, but imagines it is large and sloping, a little like Guy’s was. She knows she’ll never see it, for the thoughts that occur to her from time to time leave no illusions behind them: no letter will ever inform her that Madame Langevin, a month or so ago, was thrown from her horse – as once, unable to help herself, she dreamed. The funeral is not a hope, only another image from her printmaker’s stock. Why should an honourable deception end in romance? Rewards for decency are not duly handed out.
Their love affair, for her, is there among the memories of a summer, with the people of a household, the town she visited, Guy saying she will return, the sound of the gravel raked, the early-morning smell of coffee. For Monsieur Langevin, the deception is lived with every day, pain blinked away, words bitten back. For both of them, the pattern of their lives has formed around a moment in an afternoon. It is not often so, her lover tells her in yet another silent conversation. He, too, is grateful.
In Love with Ariadne
Images cluster, fragments make up the whole. The first of Barney’s memories is an upturned butter-box – that particular shape, narrower at the bottom. It’s in a corner of the garden where the grass grows high, where there are poppies, and pinks among the stones that edge a flowerbed. A dog pants, its paws stretched out on the grass, its tongue trailing from its mouth. Barney picks the pinks and decorates the dog with them, sticking them into its brindle fur. ‘Oh, you are bold!’ The hem of the skirt is blue, the shoes black. The hat Barney has thrown off is placed again on his head. He has a stick shaped like a finger, bent in the middle. It is hard and shiny and he likes it because of that. The sunshine is hot on his skin. There is a baby’s perspiration.
Barney’s mother died three years after his birth, but even so his childhood was not unhappy. In the garden at Lisscrea there was Charlie Redmond to talk to, and Nuala was in the kitchen. Dr G. T. Prenderville the brass plate on the wall by the hall door said, and all over the neighbourhood Barney’s father was known for his patience and his kindness – a big man in a tweed suit, his greying hair brushed straight back, his forehead tanned, a watch-chain looped across his waistcoat. Charlie Redmond made up doggerel, and twice a day came to the kitchen for cups of tea, leaving behind him a basket of peas, or beetroot, or whatever was in season. Because of the slanderous nature of his doggerel, Nuala called him a holy terror.
Lisscrea House, standing by the roadside, was covered with Virginia creeper. There were fields on one side and on the other the Mulpatricks’ cottage. Beyond that was the Edderys’ cottage, and an iron gate which separated it from Walsh’s public house – single-storeyed and whitewashed like the cottages. Opposite, across the road, were the ruins of a square tower, with brambles growing through them. A mile to the west was the Catholic church, behind white railings, with a shrine glorifying the Virgin just inside the gates. All the rooms at Lisscrea were long and narrow, each with a different, flowered wallpaper. In the hall the patients sat on a row of chairs that stretched between the front door and the stairs, waiting silently until Dr Prenderville was ready. Sometimes a man would draw up a cart or a trap outside, or dismount from a bicycle, and the doorbell would jangle urgently. ‘Always listen carefully to what’s said at the door,’ Dr Prenderville instructed Nuala. ‘If I’m out, write a message down.’
When Barney was seven he went to school in Ballinadra, waiting every morning on the road for Kilroy’s cart on its way to Ballinadra creamery with churns of milk. The bread van brought him back in the afternoon, and none of that changed until he was allowed to cycle – on Dr Prenderville’s old B.S.A. with its saddle and handle-bars lowered. ‘Up the airy mountain,’ Miss Bone’s thin voice enunciated in the schoolroom. Her features were pale, and slight; her fingers stained red with ink. There goes Miss Bone, Charlie Redmond’s cruel doggerel recorded. She’s always alone. Miss Bone was tender-hearted and said to be in love with Mr Gargan, the school’s headmaster, a married man. Quod erat demonstrandum, Mr Gargan regularly repeated in gravelly tones.
On the Sunday before he made the journey to school on the B.S.A. for the first time Barney found his father listening to the wireless in the drawing-room, a thing he never did on a Sunday morning. Nuala was standing in the doorway with a dishcloth in her hand, listening also. They’d have to buy in tea, she said, because she’d heard it would be short, and Dr Prenderville said they’d have to keep the curtains drawn at night as a protection against being bombed from an aeroplane. Charlie Redmond had told Barney a few days before that the Germans were hard cases. The Germans were in league with the Italians, who ate stuff that looked like string. De Valera, Charlie Redmond said, would keep the country out of things.
The war that began then continued for the duration of Barney’s time at school. Lisscrea was affected by the shortages that Nuala had anticipated; and de Valera did not surrender the will to remain at peace. It was during those years that Barney decided to follow in his father’s and his grandfather’s footsteps and become the doctor at Lisscrea.
‘How’re the digs?’ Rouge Medlicott asked, and the Pole, Slovinski, again beckoned the waitress – not because he required more coffee but because he liked the look of her.
‘Awful,’ Barney said. ‘I’m moving out.’
When he’d arrived in Dublin at the beginning of the term he found he had not been allocated a set of College rooms and had been obliged to settle for unsatisfactory lodgings in Dún Laoghaire. Greyhounds cluttered the stairs of this house, and broke into a general barking on imagined provocation. Two occupied a territory they had made their own beneath the dining-room table, their cold noses forever investigating whatever flesh they could find between the top of Barney’s socks and the turn-ups of his trousers. Rouge Medlicott and Slovinski shared College rooms and at night pursued amorous adventures in O’Connell Street, picking up girls who’d been left in the lurch outside cinemas or ice-cream parlours.
‘Why doesn’t she come to me?’ Slovinski demanded crossly, still waving at the waitress.
‘Because you’re bloody ugly,’ Medlicott replied.
Students filled the café. They shouted to one another across plates of iced buns, their books on the floor beside their chairs, their gowns thrown anywhere. Long, trailing scarves in black and white indicated the extroverts of the Boat Club. Scholars were recognized by their earnest eyes, sizars by their poverty. Nigerians didn’t mix. There were tablefuls of engineers and medical practitioners of the future, botanists and historians and linguists, geographers and eager divinity students. Rouge Medlicott and Slovinski were of an older generation, two of the many ex-servicemen of that time. Among these were G.I.s and Canadians and Czechs, a couple of Scots, a solitary Egyptian, and balding Englishmen who talked about Cecil Sharp or played bridge.
‘You meet me tonight,’ Slovinski suggested in a peremptory manner, having at last succeeded in summoning the waitress. ‘What about tonight?’
‘Tonight, sir?’
‘We’ll have oysters in Flynn’s.’
‘Oh God, you’re shocking, sir!’ cried the waitress, hurrying away.
Barney had got to know Slovinski and Rouge Medlicott through sitting next to them in biology lectures. He didn’t think of them as friends exactly, but he enjoyed their company.
Medlicott had acquired his sobriquet because of the colour of his hair, a quiff of which trailed languorously over his forehead. There was a hint of flamboyance in his attire – usually a green velvet suit and waistcoat, a green shirt and a bulky green tie. His shoes were of soft, pale suede. He was English, and notably good-looking. Slovinski was small and bald, and still wore military uniform – a shade of blue – which Medlicott claimed he had bought in a Lost Property office. Slovinski could play part of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on his teeth, with his thumbnails.
‘I heard of digs,’ Medlicott said. ‘Out near the Zoo. That Dutch fellow was after them only he decided to go back to Holland instead.’
It was in this casual way that Barney first came to hear about Sinnott Street, and that evening he went out to inspect the lodgings. A woman with a carefully powdered face and waved black hair opened the door to him. A discreet smear of lipstick coloured her lips, and there was a hint of eye-shadow beneath her myopic seeming eyes. She was wearing a flowered overall, which she removed in the hall. Beneath was a navy-blue skirt and a cream-coloured blouse that had a fox-terrier brooch pinned to it. She folded the overall and placed it on the hall-stand. Normally she would not take in boarders, she explained, but the house was too large, really, for herself and her mother and her daughter, just the three of them. A pity to have rooms and not use them, a pity to have them empty. The trouble was that smaller houses were usually not in districts she cared for. She led the way upstairs while still speaking about the house and household. ‘It’s a residence that’s been in the Lenehan family for three generations,’ she said. ‘That’s another consideration.’
The door of a room on the second floor was opened. ‘Fusty,’ Mrs Lenehan said, and crossed to the window. The bed was narrow, the bedstead of ornamental iron. There was a wash-stand with an enamel basin on it and a shaving mirror above it on the wall. There was a wardrobe, a chest of drawers, two holy pictures, and a chair. Patterned, worn linoleum partially covered the floor, leaving a darkly varnished surround. There were net curtains and a blind.
‘The bathroom and W.C. are off the landing below,’ Mrs Lenehan said. In Mr Lenehan’s childhood there were two maids and a cook in this house, she went on, and in her own day there’d always been a single maid at least, and a scrubbing woman once a fortnight. Now you couldn’t get a servant for love nor money. She noticed Barney glancing at the fireplace, which contained an arrangement of red tissue paper. She said that in the old days there’d have been a fire laid in the grate every morning and coal blazing cheerfully every evening. Now, of course, that was out of the question. ‘Thirty shillings would be fair, would it? Breakfast and six p.m. tea, the extra meal on a Sunday.’
Barney said he thought thirty shillings was a reasonable rent for what was offered.
‘Of a Friday evening, Mr Prenderville. In advance would be fair, I think.’
‘Yes, it would.’
‘Best to have a clear arrangement, I always say. No chance for mis-understandings.’
Two days later Barney moved in. When he’d unpacked his suitcases and was waiting for the gong which Mrs Lenehan had told him would sound at six O’clock there was a knock on his door. ‘I’m Ariadne,’ Mrs Lenehan’s daughter said, standing in the doorway with a bar of yellow soap in her hand. ‘My mother said give you this.’ She was dark-haired, about the same age as Barney. The rather long mauve dress she wore was trimmed with black, and snowy-white beads were looped several times around her neck. Her lips were painted, her hands and wrists delicately slender. Large brown eyes surveyed Barney frankly and with curiosity.
‘Thanks very much,’ he said, taking the bar of soap from her.
She nodded vaguely, seeming to be no longer interested in him. Quietly she closed the door, and he listened to her footfall on the stairs. As light as gossamer, he said to himself. He was aware of a pleasurable sensation, a tingling on the skin of his head. The girl had brought to the room a whiff of perfume, and it remained after she’d gone. Barney wanted to close the window to keep it with him, but he also wanted just to stand there.
The sounding of the gong roused him from this pleasant reverie. He had never much cared for the appearance of the girls – women sometimes – whom Medlicott and Slovinski admired in cafés or on the streets. Ariadne was different. There was an old-fashioned air about her, and an unusualness. As well, Barney considered her beautiful.
‘Fennerty’s the name,’ a small, jaunty old woman said in the dining-room. Wiry white hair grew tidily on a flat-looking head; eyes like beads peered at Barney. ‘Fennerty’s the name,’ she repeated. ‘Mrs Lenehan’s mother.’
Barney told her who he was. The last occupant of his room had been employed in Clery’s bed-linen department, she replied, a youth called Con Malley from Carlow. Now that someone had replaced him, the house would again be full. There had been difficulty in regularly extracting the rent from Con Malley. ‘Mrs Lenehan won’t tolerate anything less than promptness,’ the old woman warned.
A man of about fifty, wearing a navy-blue belted overcoat and tan gloves, entered the dining-room. ‘How’re you, Mr Sheehy?’ Mrs Fennerty inquired.
Divesting himself of his coat and gloves and placing them on the seat of a chair by the door, the man replied that he wasn’t so good. He had a sharply receding chin, with features that had a receding look about them also, and closely clipped hair, nondescript as to colour. The
removal of his coat revealed a brown pin-striped suit, with the corner of a handerkerchief peeping from the top pocket, and a tiny badge, hardly noticeable, in the left lapel. This proclaimed Mr Sheehy’s teetotalism, the emblem of the Pioneer movement.
‘I had a bad debt,’ Mr Sheehy said, sitting down at the table. Mrs Fennerty vacated a sagging armchair by the fire and took her place also. Ariadne entered with a laden tray, and placed plates of fried food in front of the three diners. Mrs Fennerty said the thick Yorkshire Relish had been finished the evening before, and when Ariadne returned to the dining-room a minute or so later with a metal teapot she brought a bottle of Yorkshire Relish as well. Neither she nor her mother joined the others at the dining-table.
‘Did you know Mattie Higgins?’ Mr Sheehy inquired of Mrs Fennerty. When he spoke he kept his teeth trapped behind his lips, as though nervous of their exposure. ‘I sold him a wireless set. Three pounds fifteen. I had the price agreed with him, only when I brought it round all he had was a five-pound note. “I’ll have that broken into tonight,” he said. “Come back in the morning.” Only didn’t he die that night in his bed?’
Swiftly, the old woman crossed herself. ‘You got caught with that one,’ she said.
‘I was round there at eight o’clock this morning, only the place was in the hands of five big daughters. When I mentioned the wireless they ate the face off of me. A good Pye wireless gone west.’
Mrs Fennerty, still consuming her food, glanced across the room at the radio on the dumb-waiter in a corner. ‘Is it a Pye Mrs Lenehan has?’
‘It is.’
‘I heard the Pye’s the best.’
‘I told that to the daughters. The one I sold him had only a few fag burns on the cabinet. The five of them laughed at me.’
‘I know the type.’
‘Five fat vultures, and your man still warming the bed.’
The Collected Stories Page 159