He visited the Virgin of the Wayside, always expecting that she might be there. He knelt, and asked for nothing. He spoke only in his thoughts, offering reparation and promising to accept whatever might be visited upon him for associating himself with the mockery of the man the Spaniards had met by chance in Dublin, for mocking the lopsided image on the road, taking fifty euros for a lie. He had looked at them kissing. He had thought about Madonna with her clothes off, not minding that she called herself that.
Once when he was at Pouldearg, Cahal noticed the glisten of what had once been taken for tears on the Virgin’s cheek. He touched the hollow where this moisture had accumulated and raised his dampened finger to his lips. It did not taste of salt, but that made no difference. Driving back, when he went by the dressmaker’s blue cottage she was there in the front garden, weeding her flowerbeds. Even though she didn’t look up, he wanted to go to her and knew that one day he would.
The Room
‘Do you know why you are doing this?’ he asked, and Katherine hesitated, then shook her head, although she did know.
Nine years had almost healed a soreness, each day made a little easier, until the balm of work was taken from her and in her scratchy idleness the healing ceased. She was here because of that, there was no other reason she could think of, but she didn’t say it.
‘And you?’ she asked instead.
He was forthcoming, or sounded so; he’d been attracted by her at a time when he’d brought loneliness upon himself by quarrelling once too often with the wife who had borne his children and had cared for him.
‘I’m sorry about the room,’ he said.
His belongings were piled up, books and cardboard boxes, suitcases open, not yet unpacked. A word-processor had not been plugged in, its flexes trailing on the floor. Clothes on hangers cluttered the back of the door, an anatomical study of an elephant decorated one of the walls, with arrows indicating where certain organs were beneath the leathery skin. This grey picture wasn’t his, he’d said when Katherine asked; it came with the room, which was all he had been able to find in a hurry. A sink was in the same corner as a wash-basin, an electric kettle and a gas-ring on a shelf, a green plastic curtain not drawn across.
‘It’s all a bit more special now that you’re here,’ he said.
When she got up to put on her clothes, Katherine could tell he didn’t want her to go. Yet he, not she, was the one who had to; she could have stayed all afternoon. Buttoning a sleeve of her dress, she remarked that at least she knew now what it felt like to deceive.
‘What it had felt like for Phair,’ she said.
She pulled the edge of the curtain back a little so that the light fell more directly on the room’s single looking-glass. She tidied her hair, still brown, no grey in it yet. Her mother’s hadn’t gone grey at all, and her grandmother’s only when she was very old, which was something Katherine hoped she wouldn’t have to be; she was forty-seven now. Her dark eyes gazed back at her from her reflection, her lipstick smudged, an emptiness in her features that had not to do with the need to renew her makeup. Her beauty was ebbing – but slowly, and there was beauty left.
‘You were curious about that?’ he asked. ‘Deception?’
‘Yes, I was curious.’
‘And shall you be again?’
Still settling the disturbances in her face, Katherine didn’t answer at once. Then she said: ‘If you would like me to.’
Outside, the afternoon was warm, the street where the room was – above a betting shop – seemed brighter and more gracious than Katherine had noticed when she’d walked the length of it earlier. There was an afternoon tranquillity about it in spite of shops and cars. The tables were unoccupied outside the Prince and Dog, hanging baskets of petunias on either side of its regal figure and a Dalmatian with a foot raised. There was a Costa Coffee next to a Prêt à Manger and Katherine crossed to it. ‘Latte,’ she ordered from the girls who were operating the Gaggia machines, and picked out a florentine from the glass case on the counter while she waited for it.
She hardly knew the man she’d slept with. He’d danced with her at a party she’d gone to alone, and then he’d danced with her again, holding her closer, asking her her name and giving his. Phair didn’t accompany her to parties these days and she didn’t go often herself. But she’d known what she intended, going to this one.
The few tables were all taken. She found a stool at the bar that ran along one of the walls. Teenagers’ Curfew! a headline in someone else’s evening paper protested, a note of indignation implied, and for a few moments she wondered what all that was about and then lost interest.
Phair would be quietly at his desk, in shirtsleeves, the blue-flecked shirt she’d ironed the day before yesterday, his crinkly, gingerish hair as it had been that morning when he left the house, his agreeable smile welcoming anyone who approached him. In spite of what had happened nine years ago, Phair had not been made redundant, that useful euphemism for being sacked. That he’d been kept on was a tribute to his success in the past, and of course it wasn’t done to destroy a man when he was down. ‘We should go away,’ she’d said, and remembered saying it now, but he hadn’t wanted to, because running away was something that wasn’t done either. He would have called it running away, in fact he had.
This evening he would tell her about his day, and she would say about hers and would have to lie. And in turn they’d listen while she brought various dishes to the dining-table, and he would pour her wine. None for himself because he didn’t drink any more, unless someone pressed him and then only in order not to seem ungracious. ‘My marriage is breaking up,’ the man who’d made love to her in his temporary accommodation had confided when, as strangers, they had danced together. ‘And yours?’ he’d asked, and she’d hesitated and then said no, not breaking up. There’d never been talk of that. And when they danced the second time, after they’d had a drink together and then a few more, he asked her if she had children and she said she hadn’t. That she was not able to had been known before the marriage and then become part of it – as her employment at the Charter-house Institute had been until six weeks ago, when the Institute had decided to close itself down.
‘Idleness is upsetting,’ she had said while they danced, and had asked the man who held her closer now if he had ever heard of Sharon Ritchie. People often thought they hadn’t and then remembered. He shook his head and the name was still unfamiliar to him when she told him why it might not have been. ‘Sharon Ritchie was murdered,’ she’d said, and wouldn’t have without the few drinks. ‘My husband was accused.’
She blew on the surface of her coffee but it was still too hot. She tipped sugar out of its paper spill into her teaspoon and watched the sugar darkening when the coffee soaked it. She loved the taste of that, as much a pleasure as anything there’d been this afternoon. ‘Oh, suffocated,’ she’d said, when she’d been asked how the person called Sharon Ritchie had died. ‘She was suffocated with a cushion.’ Sharon Ritchie had had a squalid life, living grandly at a good address, visited by many men.
Katherine sat a while longer, staring at the crumbs of her florentine, her coffee drunk. ‘We live with it,’ she had said when they left the party together, he to return to the wife he didn’t get on with, she to the husband whose deceiving of her had ended with a death. Fascinated by what was lived with, an hour ago in the room that was his temporary accommodation her afternoon lover had wanted to know everything.