On the mottled worktop in the kitchen the meat is where Mrs Lethwes left it, the fat partly cut away, the knife still separating it from one of the chops. The potatoes she scraped earlier in the day are in a saucepan of cold water, the peas she shelled in another. Often, in the evenings, it is like that in the kitchen when her husband returns to their house. He is gentle when he carries her, as he always is.
Marrying Damian
‘I’m going to marry Damian,’ Joanna said.
Claire wasn’t paying attention. She smiled and nodded, intent on unravelling a ball of garden twine that had become tangled. I said:
‘Well, that’s nice, of course. But Damian’s married already.’
It didn’t matter, Joanna said, and repeated her resolve. Joanna was five at the time.
Twenty-two years later Damian stood on the wild grass, among the corn-flowers and the echiums and the lavatera, under the cricket-bat willow that had been a two-foot shrub when Joanna made her announcement. He was wearing blue sunglasses and a powder-blue suit that looked new. In contrast, his tie – its maroon and gold stripes seeming to indicate membership of some club to which almost certainly Damian did not belong - was lank, and the collar of his shirt was frayed. We hadn’t been expecting him; we hadn’t heard from Damian for years. Since the spring of 1985, Claire later calculated, the year of his second divorce, from an American widow in upstate New York. After that there was an Englishwoman who lived in Venice, about whom we were never told very much. When Joanna had declared her childhood intention Damian had been still married to the only one of his three wives Claire and I actually knew: a slender, pretty girl, the daughter of the Bishop of Killaloe. We had known her since the wedding; I’d been Damian’s best man.
I was actually asleep when Damian walked into our garden all those years later, and I think Claire was too. We were lolling in deck-chairs, Claire’s spaniels stretched out under hers, avoiding the afternoon sun.
‘Yes,’ Damian said. ‘It’s Damian.’
We were surprised, but perhaps not much: turning up out of the blue had always been his habit. He never telephoned first or intimated his intention by letter or on a postcard. Over the years he had arrived in all seasons and at varying times of day, once rousing us at two o’clock in the morning. Invariably he brought with him details of a personal disaster which had left him with the need to borrow a little money. These loans were not paid back; even as he accepted them he made no pretence that they would be.
‘Damian.’ Claire hugged him, laughing, playfully demanding to know what he was doing in that awful suit. I asked him where he’d been and he said oh, a lot of places – Vancouver, Oregon, Spain. Claire made him sit down, saying she was going to make some tea, inviting him to stay a while. He was the tonic we needed, Claire said, for she’s always afraid that we’ll slump into dullness unless we’re careful. A woman, somewhere, had given him the suit: we both guessed that.
‘I wasn’t all that well in Spain,’ Damian said. ‘Some kind of sunstroke.’
We are the same age, Damian and I, not young any more; that day, as we sat together in the garden, we were sixty and a bit, Claire five years younger. She’s tall and slim, and I can’t believe she’ll ever be anything but elegant, but of course I know I may be wrong. When we married she came to live in the country town I’ve always known, acquiring an extra identity as the doctor’s wife and the receptionist at the practice, as the mother of a daughter and a son, the organizer of a playgroup, the woman who first taught the illiterate of the town to read.
Damian, at the first opportunity, fled this neighbourhood. On his return to it the time before this one he had carried – clearly an affectation - a silver-topped cane, which was abandoned now, no doubt because it drew attention to its own necessity, and Damian inclines towards vanity. Although he sat down briskly in the chair Claire had vacated for him, the protest of a joint caused him, for a single instant, to wince. His light, fair hair is grey in places now, and I don’t suppose he cares for that either, or that his teeth have shrivelled and become discoloured, nor that the freckles on the backs of his hands form blobs where they have spread into one another, or that the skin of his forehead is as dry as old vellum. But that day there was nothing about his eyes to suggest a coming to terms with a future destined to be different from the past, no hint of a hesitation about what should or should not be undertaken: in that sense Damian remains young.
Even as a boy his features were gaunt, giving the impression then of undernourishment. He was angular, but without any of the awkwardness sometimes associated with that quality. In spite of whatever trouble he was having with a joint, he could still, I noticed that day, tidy himself away with natural ease. As always at the beginning of a visit, he was good-humoured; moodiness – sometimes a snappish response to questions, or silence – was apt to set in later.
If, in terms of having a profession, Damian is anything, he is a poet, although in all the time I’ve known him he has never shown me more than a verse or two. Years ago someone told us that he once had a coterie of admirers and was still, in certain quarters, considered to possess ‘a voice’ that should be more widely heard. A volume entitled Slow Death of a Pigeon – its contents sparse, Claire and I always assumed, for nothing about Damian suggests he is profligate with his talent – appears to represent all he has so far chosen for posterity. In time we would receive a copy of Slow Death of a Pigeon, he promised on one of his visits, but none arrived.
‘Well, yes, it was that. Something like it,’ he was saying, slightly laughing, when I returned with another deck-chair after Claire had brought out the tea things. He had repeated all he’d told me about his sunstroke and the lack of anything of interest in Vancouver. Yes, he was confessing now, a relationship with a woman had featured in his more recent travels, had somehow been the reason for them. There was no confirmation that the powder-blue suit had been a gift. Damian wouldn’t have considered that of interest.
‘I thought I’d maybe die,’ he said, returning to the subject of his sunstroke, but when I asked him what he’d taken for it, what treatment there had been, he was vague.
‘Bloody visions,’ he said instead. ‘Goya stuff.’ In any case, he confidently pronounced, Spain was overrated.
Had the woman been Spanish? I wondered, and thought of dancers, white teeth and a rosebud that was red, black skirts swirling, red ribbons in black hair. I have doctor colleagues who farm a bit, who let the wind blow away the mixture of triviality and death that now and again makes our consulting rooms melancholy places. Others collect rare books, make cabinets, involve themselves in politics, allow gardening or some sport to become a way of life to skulk in. For me, Damian’s infrequent visits, and wondering about him in between, were such a diversion. Not as efficacious as afternoons on a tractor or searching out a Cuala Press edition of Yeats, but then by nature I’m lazy.
‘A chapter closed?’ Claire was saying.
‘Should never have been opened.’
Later, in the kitchen, I decanted the wine and Claire said the lamb would be enough, with extra potatoes and courgettes. We heard Joanna’s car and then her voice exclaiming in surprise and Damian greeting her.
I carried a tray of drinks to the garden. Damian’s small black suitcase, familiar to us for many years, was still on the grass beside his deck-chair. I can see it now.
The visit followed a familiar pattern. In the small suitcase there were shirts and underclothes and socks in need of laundering; and when they had been through the washing-machine most of them were seen to be in need of repair. Damian, besides, was penniless; and there was the request that if anyone telephoned him – which was, he said, unlikely since, strictly speaking, no one knew his whereabouts – his presence in our house should be denied.