‘I didn’t realise Professor Glynn wore a hearing aid,’ I mentioned. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. It was that, or sit in silence.
‘Not any more he doesn’t, apparently. The man isn’t prepared to listen to us any longer. He made that perfectly clear when he chucked the dirty little contraption into the bushes. A metaphorical act, I suppose you would call it.’ Antonia gazed over my shoulder to see who else was in the room. No one took her fancy, and she returned her attention to me. ‘What’s all this fuss between you and Lady Guinevere? Break her heart, did we?’
‘Oh,’ I said. That.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That.’
‘What about you and Professor Glynn?’
Antonia shrugged and knocked back her glass of wine. He had called her Grendel behind her back a few weeks ago. ‘Where’s Grendel gotten too?’ he’d asked in the pub, and we’d burst into laughter. Well, only I had burst into laughter — the girls had looked at the floor — but the point was, we all knew who he meant. Just one of our number fit that description. I’d felt sorry for Antonia then, and stopped laughing. I’m sure she’d have appreciated my pity.
‘I suppose we have to make allowances for Professor Glynn,’ I said. ‘In his condition,’ I added.
Antonia topped up my glass and refilled hers, emptied it, refilled it again. ‘Jesus Christ, you make him sound like he’s ancient.’
‘Professor Glynn is ancient.’
‘He’s fifty-six.’
‘Exactly.’
Too late I realised my colossal blunder. Age was a delicate matter amongst women who were past it. Antonia’s mouth momentarily lost its footing, but it quickly regained its balance and she threw some more wine into it. ‘So fifty-six is ancient now, is it, Declan?’ She beamed that tight smile of hers across the table at me. Ping.
‘I suppose it’s not that old.’ My father was dead at fifty-two. ‘It’s not that old at all, really, when you think about it.’
‘How old do you think I am?’
‘You told us how old you are.’
‘Yes, but how old do you think I am? Do you think I am old?’
‘No. Of course not.’
‘Liar.’
She bent over to pick up her handbag, clipping the wine bottle with an elbow. It toppled over, and a broad ruby stain surged across the white linen towards me. I lurched to escape its path. This was an overreaction on my part. The tablecloth absorbed the spillage. I set the bottle upright. ‘Sorry,’ I said, though I wasn’t the one who had knocked it. I threw a napkin down to conceal the stain, as if it were somehow shameful, which it somehow was. ‘Shit, I’m really sorry.’
Antonia signalled to the waiter for a replacement bottle. ‘Doesn’t matter. It was nearly empty.’
The second bottle arrived. The waiter uncorked it and poured. ‘I don’t have the money to pay for this,’ I said quietly when he was gone.
‘I know. I will pay for it.’ She stubbed out her cigarette. ‘I will pay for it,’ she repeated grimly. There is always a price.
The use of portent and double meaning featured prominently in Antonia’s prose, as did the persistently bitter tone, imprinting itself on every word that flowed from her pen, as ingrained as her accent. I shifted uncomfortably in my chair and kicked her handbag a third time. ‘Sorry,’ I said again.
‘For God’s sake, stop apologising.’ She excused herself to the bathroom, taking her handbag with her.
She was gone a long time. She was gone for so long, in fact, that I wondered whether she’d done a runner, leaving me with a bill she knew I couldn’t pay. A master of plot twists and revenge tragedies. It was her sheer deviousness that gave her short stories their bite. I could all but hear her laughing down Grafton Street as she click-clacked away from the scene of the crime.
I was almost surprised when she returned to the table, her face freshly powdered, her mouth painted in, the lipstick so bright it drained the colour from her skin. ‘What?’ she said when she caught me taking it in.
‘Nothing.’
‘What?’ she said again. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘Nothing. You look tired, that’s all.’
Antonia shook her head in disbelief and finished off another glass of wine. ‘Christ, you really know how to make a woman feel good about herself, don’t you?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said before I could help myself.
She slammed the empty glass down on the table. ‘Stop fucking apologising. I am not a charity case.’ She lit another cigarette. ‘Why do you hate me?’ she suddenly demanded. This, out of nowhere.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Even the way you look at me. You make this face. You’re making it now.’
‘I don’t hate you, Antonia.’ I was stunned that she cared what I thought of her. Stunned she was aware I even had an opinion.
‘I’m not the only one to have noticed. The others agree with me.’
‘You’ve been discussing this with the others?’ Guinevere had lost her temper over it once. ‘Stop talking about her,’ she had snapped. ‘You’re always talking about her, Declan. Haven’t you noticed that? You never stop bitching about Antonia. Why can’t you just leave her alone? You don’t like her, she doesn’t like you, so just forget about it.’
‘She doesn’t like me?’ I had probed. ‘Did she actually say that? Were those her exact words?’ etc. Fuckhead, she had called me. Guinevere cursed and warned me to drop the subject.
Antonia allowed her head to loll forward into her hands. It was a display worthy of Aisling. I had never seen her this drunk before. She seemed to be laughing, but I couldn’t say for certain. I was confronted with the neat white strip of scalp along her parting and was surprised to note that she appeared to be a natural blonde. I had expected grey. ‘I used to be a looker in my day,’ she said apropos of nothing, her voice muffled under her hair.
‘I don’t doubt it.’
I couldn’t imagine Antonia young. I categorically couldn’t see it. There was no ghost of lapsed girlhood in her, no inner child, the opposite of Glynn, who lacked an inner adult. She’d have been one of those prim little children he’d written about, no child at all but a miniature adult, silently making note of all that took place in the grown-up world, Mummy’s little double agent.
‘No really, Declan, I used to be considered something of a beauty. The boys were all after me. Shame I didn’t have the good sense to see it at the time. And now look at me.’
Aw Jesus. She caved in on herself before my horrified eyes like a rotten roof, like a collapsed grave, like a — oh God, she reached across the table for my hand. The desperation with which she seized my wrist was dreadful. She was going to cry. She was crying. She deteriorated into a sack of shuddering bones. I don’t know why women, with all their intuition, persist in believing that displays of vulnerability will stimulate the protective instinct in a man. All they provoke is the desire to run. Glynn has written illuminatingly on the subject more than once. You stupid bitch, he had called her. Antonia’s weeping, intended to draw me instead repelled me, but she couldn’t see my reaction through her tears.
‘You’re still a beauty,’ I said, and clamped a hand to her shoulder, a dog giving the paw. ‘You’re still a … a looker.’ That word. So dated. It only made things worse. I stared at my hand, fastened to her shoulder like a lump of meat, and wondered how to retract it without exacerbating the situation. Poor Grendel. She angrily shrugged my hand off, God bless her, and knocked back the red wine, what was left of it. A thin black line had formed on her lips, a ridge of high-tide seaweed.