‘A baby?’ I repeated stupidly. I could barely fathom it. It seemed such a bizarre undertaking. This was no time to be thinking of other human beings.
Tears sprang to Faye’s eyes, and she shook her head in wonderment as if she could barely fathom it either. ‘A baby, yes!’ She opened her arms and held me in her embrace, the joy radiating out of her.
‘God, I’m so happy for you, Faye.’
She paused in the doorway of the workshop to take one last look at us. ‘Write,’ she said before she left. And then she was gone. Just like that. It was over so quickly. Her husband was waiting below on Front Square. We sat in silence listening to her descending footsteps, then the front door clicked shut behind her.
The three of us watched as her husband carried her suitcase in one hand and placed the other on her shoulder. You know her husband beats her, don’t you? He was a big mucker type in a maroon jumper, a Tadhg or a Mossy or a Micky Joe, and seemed a few years older than his gentle, pretty wife, though it might have been just that he was a proper grown-up. Someone had to keep the country running. I hardly knew her, I realised as Faye disappeared under the Arch. And now I never would.
‘Well, that’s that then,’ said Antonia. ‘Back to the real world, I suppose.’
Guinevere walked slowly around the workshop. ‘Look at this place,’ she said. ‘It’s like an empty theatre set.’ She rested her hands on the back of Glynn’s chair, then stooped to open his side drawer, her train of thought momentarily arrested — all our trains of thought momentarily arrested — by simple curiosity. What was in the drawer? How had it never occurred to us to look? All the months we’d sat there.
Inside was a map of Dublin. Guinevere flicked through it before replacing it and pushing the drawer shut again. She moved on, trailing her fingertip along our old desks. ‘It’s so sad to think we’ll never sit in this room together again. I can barely believe it.’
‘I’m leaving Dublin too,’ I announced. Suddenly, everything seemed so final. It had been final for a long time, but it only hit me then.
Guinevere stopped walking and looked up. ‘Oh?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing for us in this country. It’s never going to change. It’s never going to get better. The sow that eats her farrow. I’m off in two weeks. Will you come, Guinevere?’
‘Listen to him!’ said Antonia, as if I’d lost my wits.
Guinevere laughed. ‘What, leave the country with you?’
‘It’s going to get worse here. Any fool can see that. There’ll never be any money, there’ll never be any jobs, there’ll never be any future. We have to get out fast if we want a chance at life. Come with me, Guinevere.’
‘Where to?’ she asked softly, ‘Leeds?’
It wasn’t an outright refusal. I crossed the room and clasped her hand. ‘We’ll go to Paris like Beckett and Joyce.’
Guinevere peeled my hands from hers to peer at the jagged purple scar where the metal pin had been inserted. ‘Iron Nails Ran In,’ she said.
‘I’m being serious. Say yes.’
She lowered her head to avoid my eye. ‘Declan, I have to go now. I only came to say goodbye to Faye.’
‘Be there in two weeks. Meet me outside Front Arch this time two weeks.’ I checked my watch. ‘Three p.m., Wednesday a fortnight. Please.’
She picked up her bag and smiled apologetically before leaving. ‘Goodbye, you two,’ she said.
‘You idiot,’ Antonia scoffed as soon as Guinevere was gone. Fuckhead, she had called me. ‘Don’t you realise that if there ever was money in this country, no writer could afford to live here? Glynn would’ve starved before he even got started. Our literary tradition would perish. You better pray it doesn’t change.’
‘With all due respect, Antonia, I didn’t invite you. I invited Guinevere.’
I instantly regretted the harshness of my tone. There was no call for it, not any more. Antonia dropped her chin onto her chest, where she kept it for some moments. ‘You’re right,’ she said eventually. ‘You’re absolutely right. Don’t let me spoil it for you. Don’t let anybody spoil it for you.’
I frowned at what I assumed was more sarcasm. Antonia reached up and cupped my head with her hands and tilted it down to kiss my forehead, allowing her lips to briefly rest there before angling my face to look into hers. She imparted something of great import and clearly meant every last word of it, the urgency with which her eyes searched mine. All I heard was seashell sounds. Her cool hands covered my ears. This I am sure was intentional. It permitted her the temporary freedom to say what she had to say. Antonia had no freedom in her life. She had never been carefree.
When she had finished speaking, she briskly and tightly embraced me, her brooch jabbing my chest. Then she released me and walked away, click-clack, down the wooden stairs in her high heels. She left the building, and I watched from the window until she disappeared through the passageway between the 1937 Reading Room and the Colonnades. She did not look back. I never saw Antonia again. I never saw Aisling again. I never saw Faye again. I sat down at the workshop desk in my old chair and remained in House Eight for the rest of the afternoon and much of the evening, thinking, thinking, furiously thinking, until it was almost dark.
There is so much that I have left out.
*
It was mid-May before I got around to saying goodbye to Glynn. I came upon him in a reflective mood.
It was one of those days that fills you with aching nostalgia for the summer that has not yet been. Such days in the past would have found me paralysed with regret. Regret for what, exactly, it is difficult to put into words. Regret for all the things that should have been happening in my life, but never would. I felt no regret that day as I walked through the broad leafy squares of Trinity. The lawns were scattered with bare-armed girls lost in books. I was new to the sense of completion which engulfed me that afternoon, new to the awareness that a distinct period in my life had come to a close, an era so discrete that already I could see it as a finite entity, a car wreckage some yards back on the road behind me, from which I had escaped unscathed. This knowledge had been hard enough won all the same.
Glynn was in his office in the English Department. It smelled of books and sun-warmed carpet tiles.
‘It’s yourself,’ he said when he opened the door. ‘Come in, come in, sit down.’ He lifted a stack of books from the spare seat to make way for me. The black eye Aisling mentioned had faded without trace, as if that whole hellish night had been a figment of our imagination.
Glynn made a point of shutting his red notebook and removing it from my reach. He stationed his fountain pen on top of it like a sentry, though I had not the slightest interest in trying to steal a glimpse at whatever was written there. Those days were over. He raised his glasses and peered at me across the desk. ‘Your hand is out of the plaster, I see.’
I held it up and flexed my fingers. ‘It is. Good as new.’
‘The walls had better watch out!’ The amusement Glynn derived from this witticism revealed the gap where his front tooth had once been. We contemplated each other’s battle wounds for a moment.
‘So anyway,’ I said, ‘I’m moving to Paris.’
‘Go ‘way. When?’
‘Tonight.’ My rucksack was propped against the wall outside his door.
Glynn raised his eyebrows at this information and nodded thoughtfully for a long old time. It was good to speak to him like that, finally. Like adults, with restraint and without rancour, as if we were talking about people we had once known. Which, I suppose, we were.
‘Tell us: are you still writing about that Flynn fecker?’