He was yellower than usual. Were we aware at the time of just how yellow he was? To a degree, perhaps, in the back of our minds. He had never exactly radiated rude health. It was only when I came upon an old photograph taken around that period that I grasped the full extent of his discolouration. There we were, the six of us, sitting around a pub table. Not that pub, not that night. Don’t know who held the camera. Some passing drunk — picture’s crooked. How young we looked, with the exception of Glynn. Astonishing, that we missed the ogre in the corner, the memento mori, the ghoul, his arms thrown genially around us, smiling for the dickybird, on the brink of expiration. It brings a lump to my throat. Four of us are flushed as pink from booze as Glynn is drained yellow. Aisling’s skin is so powdery white that the snow-glare practically blots her features out. She is two heavily kohled eyes staring out from an all but mouthless face. It was as if the camera had recorded not our likenesses, but our auras.
Glynn swirled his pint and knocked back the dregs. ‘Latin me that, me Trinity scholar,’ he concluded. A smattering of buff matter clung to his lapel. Something glinted at the base of his leg — a thin metal strip. I pretended to tie my shoelace to get a closer look. There was a smell of polyester trouser down there.
It was a staple. I sat up again. Professor Glynn had stapled his hem. Marjorie had turfed him out. It only dawned on me then. The group had probably known all along. That’s why he was living in the dive on Bachelors Walk. Not for research purposes. Marjorie had sent him packing. That wasn’t her name, by the way. Her name was a fine one: sophisticated, elegant, proclaimed in italics on the dedication page of his eight novels — no to, no for, just the six letters of her name, a cry directly from the heart. Marjorie was the name we assigned to her. It was the name she deserved, we decided — or they decided, rather — the girls. Marjorie or Mavis or Gladys. Gladys Glynn. They didn’t like sharing him with other women.
Glynn stood up to absent himself. ‘I’m off to write a novel,’ he announced. ‘Back in a tick.’ He only had the one joke. We watched him lumber towards the men’s toilets, ungainly as a bear.
‘At least he’s writing again,’ Faye offered, forever seeking the silver lining. Was that the night Aisling told me her husband beat her? You know her husband beats her, don’t you? It must have been that night. I can’t tell them apart any more, especially those long diabolical ones.
‘Yeah,’ said Guinevere, ‘you heard what he said about Blake.’
Aisling mumbled something in response. She used to do that a lot — just mumble, forgetting that the outside world was a full remove away and that she was therefore required to project. There were times, I think, when all she could hear were the sloshing sounds inside her own head.
‘Would you care to repeat that?’ Antonia demanded. This was her first line of defence: undermining her opponents using their own words, leaving them wondering what they’d let slip to inadvertently indict themselves. Her ex-husband was a senior counsel.
Aisling repeated herself so clearly and carefully this time that there was no mistaking it. ‘I said, “He didn’t say Blake”.’
Antonia folded her arms. ‘So what did he say?’ Ever the sneering tone which, for all her brains, she never managed to connect to the world’s overwhelmingly negative reaction to her.
Aisling mumbled again, her facial muscles as limp as an arm that had been slept on.
‘Sorry?’
Aisling got to her feet and stood over Antonia. ‘Glynn said “Fake”!’ she yelled. A hush descended on the pub. We were going to get thrown out.
Aisling collapsed back into her seat in a lolling slump, an unattended puppet. Her chin rested on her chest as if her neck were broken, revealing a stripe of light hair along her parting. Underneath the mad make-up, the mourning weeds, the black dye, she could have been a Guinevere.
Glynn returned to the table and set down a clutch of whiskey tumblers on a tray. He doled them out with the matter-of-fact efficiency of an Irish mammy, mindful to demonstrate that favouritism was not in practice and that complaints would not be entertained. You could tell he’d grown up in a large family. ‘There’s no names on them,’ he asserted, his Arklow accent that bit thicker than usual. None of us had eaten, but we didn’t let that stop us.
‘The problem with the contemporary novel,’ he told us as he resumed his seat at the head of the table, having apparently given it some thought at the urinal, ‘is that beginnings are more important than endings. This is because advances are calculated on the basis of the first thirty pages, and readers rarely get beyond the first thirty pages anyway.’ He glared at each of us in turn in case this was an avenue we were contemplating ourselves and seemed disappointed when no one challenged him.
He went on to expound his theory regarding the inverse proportion between literary output and humility. Some writers published more because they had less humility, he argued. Those clowns who were prolific had no shame at all. He cited his main contemporary as proof of this phenomenon — twenty-one novels and counting. Those who barely published at all any more had let their natural God-given modesty get the better of them. Glynn rolled his eyes mournfully at his tumbler at this point. It was an insidious attempt to solicit sympathy from the women, and it worked. ‘But Professor Glynn!’ Faye interjected, as he was hoping she might, ‘Don’t be so humble — your work is wonderful.’
His sleeping-tablet habit was escalating. He was up to three a night by then but was never quite asleep at night, and never quite awake in the morning. This, I got from Aisling, who had sprung back to life and was muttering animatedly into my ear, the magnifying glass around her neck revolving in her hands like a small planet on a wooden axis. ‘Could the sleeping tablets possibly explain his demonic visions?’ she asked me. They were more vivid than ever now. Aisling seemed to think, after ransacking Glynn’s office together, that I would understand what she was talking about. I most certainly did not.
‘He’s seeing demons?’ I repeated incredulously, interrupting her flow.
Aisling looked panicked. ‘Shh, he’ll hear you.’
I glanced at Glynn. He was deep in sparring conversation with Antonia. (‘What bright spark allowed women into Trinity anyway?’ he grunted. ‘Who on earth admitted the Catholics?’ she countered.)
‘Is that what he told you, though? That he’s seeing demons?’
Aisling nodded.
I shrugged and drained my glass. ‘Well, he must have been speaking metaphorically, that’s all I can say.’
‘You were talking about them too. Belsabub and Sattan.’
‘I was talking about medieval English mystery plays.’
‘But you saw the drawings in his red notebook.’
‘They were just doodles.’
‘You don’t understand, Declan,’ Aisling insisted. ‘I recognised them. I recognised the demons in the red notebook. I’ve seen them too, the very same faces. They aren’t doodles: they’re portraits.’
Demons. Even the word. Glynn shouldn’t have burdened Aisling with that guff. Of all of us, she was the one who least needed reminding that a powerful imagination was as much a curse as a gift, that the world could tip into chaos without warning, and that it didn’t get any easier with age. Her world view was fragile, and Glynn abused his position in his endless, ruthless search for an audience, knowing — what with her being the most impressionable — that Aisling would also prove the most receptive. And the least critical. Aisling or Faye. They wouldn’t be up to the like of him.