She opened her purse and tossed a crumpled twenty onto the table with her usual level of disdain. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said, and I was only too happy to oblige. I helped her into her coat and bundled her up the stairs before she got a chance to change her mind.
The cold fresh air of South Anne Street was a salve. A public phone in a row of phone boxes was ringing out. Antonia took my arm, and I escorted her, click-clack, to Dawson Street to put her in a taxi. When one pulled up, I opened the door and stood back gallantly, every inch the gentleman. ‘Get in, get in, for God’s sake,’ she said, gesturing impatiently at the back seat, as if I was holding the whole street up. I hesitated for a second before doing what I was told. I could hardly refuse her. I could hardly refuse her in that state. That is what I tell myself.
25 Castle Rackrent
Her house had a name. I can no longer put my finger on it. Something genteel and Anglo. I would have expected no less of her. I can see the black font in my mind’s eye to this day, but not the word itself, painted in duplicate in block capitals like a trespassing sign, warning me as I passed through her twin gateposts to turn back, turn back, but did I listen? She had me going by then.
In the back of the taxi she had linked my arm as before, and held it for the duration of the journey against the heft of her breast, easing herself towards me, a warm pliant mass, a long thigh pressed to mine, until I felt a longing for her that almost pained me. We travelled in silence. Antonia kept her eyes on the road ahead, but when I glanced at her face I saw the slight smile at the corner of her lips. She was pleased with her night’s work.
She paid for the taxi, and it pulled away, leaving the two of us facing each other across a deserted street. A great, still moon was hanging in the sky, though it was not still at all but hurtling through the glittering wastes faster than I had the wit to understand. That the moon was serene was yet another delusion. Had I thought that, or read it in Glynn? ‘Long way from home, eh soldier?’ Antonia teased. The crunch of gravel on her driveway delineated the point at which the mark had been irrevocably overstepped. I found I couldn’t turn back.
‘Beware of the Dog’ read the sign mounted above the brass letterbox on her lacquered door. Antonia laughed when she caught me looking at it. ‘There is no dog, silly,’ she said, shaking her head at my naivety in falling for that one. She swung the door open and pulled me inside.
I fucked her first on the stairs and then in her bedroom. I fucked her as many times as she wished to be fucked. Neither one of us was willing to admit defeat first, neither one prepared to lose face. She issued instructions and guided me into positions as if this tutoring role were the prerogative and duty of the older woman, as if she had something to teach me, and I had something to learn. If I was considerably rougher with her than I should have been, Antonia did not flinch, but took it on the chin, being the kind of woman who was pathologically unable to admit that you were hurting her, even if it killed her. Two could play at that game.
As the night wore on, I grew progressively more resentful. ‘Fuck,’ I remember crying up to the ceiling in sheer frustration and regret.
‘That’s it,’ she gasped, throwing back her head, displaying her long white neck, which I instinctively placed my hand on, marvelling at its fragility, at how easy it would have been to throttle her. You stupid bitch. Are you happy now? I didn’t really understand the grace of youth until Antonia drained it out of me, tainting it with knowledge of what it was to have lost youth, or to have never possessed it in the first place. It was a party she had watched all her life from the outside. And now the party was over.
Women only fall asleep in your arms in novels. Antonia wanted to talk about her broken marriage, as if it were a subject I could cast light on. What did she think I could possibly say to her? I just kept nodding. She had married too young, she explained. Barely eighteen. Straight out of school. I nodded. She’d subsequently felt she’d missed out on so much. She had never slept with a boy my age when she was a girl my age. Edmund had been so much older than her, you see. I nodded.
‘So that’s why you fucked me. To see what you were missing.’
‘I burgled your bank of youth,’ she smiled. I didn’t think it was funny. ‘Oh don’t be like that,’ she cajoled, marching her fingers up the centre of my chest like a little man. I couldn’t stand childish games in a grown woman and rolled onto my side to get away from her. There was a framed photograph of a blonde girl on her bedside table. I picked it up to change the subject.
‘Is this you?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘that’s my daughter. She lives with Edmund now.’
I didn’t know what to say. It had never occurred to me that Antonia could be a mother. She had never mentioned her child before. I put the photograph back on the table.
A terrible confession followed. It must have been four in the morning by then, no sign of it yet getting bright, no assurance of an end in sight. Antonia had just returned from the bathroom, and she climbed back into bed, shivering with the cold. Her eyes were enormous in the darkness. She rested her head in the crook of my arm. ‘I’ve never slept with anyone other than my husband,’ she said in a small voice. Then she started to cry.
I stroked her hair. Stroked it mechanically, back and forth, a windscreen wiper. It seemed like the right thing to do, but it didn’t feel like the right thing to do. Antonia was too grown up for me to stroke her hair. We would have to sit across from each other in class every Wednesday. ‘We must never tell anyone about this,’ she whispered, glancing up at me.
‘No,’ I agreed vehemently.
She was feeling emotional because she hadn’t slept well last night. At least, I think that’s what she was trying to tell me. She was feeling emotional, she said, she hadn’t slept well last night, but she didn’t use the conjunction ‘because’. I don’t know why she was feeling emotional. I didn’t know what this term ‘feeling emotional’ meant, exactly, as it applied to her. I knew what it meant to me — it meant the desire to punch a wall — but it appeared to denote something altogether different to Antonia, something spongy and discoloured and spreading that would eventually get the better of her, a bruise on an apple. She also seemed to think that I would empathise, maybe even attempt to help. Where did she get such notions? Seeing as she was older than the rest of us, I had taken it for granted that she was better equipped to take care of herself, but it turned out her seniority made her even more vulnerable. The gradient increased as your resources diminished. And me assuming life got easier with every passing year. Me, in fact, counting on it.
‘So you didn’t shag Glynn then?’
‘No, I didn’t shag Glynn, as you so elegantly phrase it.’
‘So why did he call you a stupid bitch?’
Antonia winced at the recollection. ‘Letters,’ she admitted eventually. ‘I sent him some anonymous letters. We had a relationship briefly, but he went back to his wife. I was terribly hurt at the time. He never knew who’d written them until I confessed in the pub that night. Shouldn’t have opened my mouth.’
I stopped stroking her hair and sat up, dislodging her from the crook of my arm. ‘You were the one sending those letters?’
‘Jesus, Declan, doesn’t anyone tell you anything?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘They don’t.’