When we were children, Damian and I had played together at Doul, the grey, half-derelict house where his Aunt Una had brought him up. Doul is no longer there, having been sold to a builder for the lead of its roof, and later razed to the ground. Damian’s Aunt Una had drunk herself to death in a caravan. I was actually there when her head jerked suddenly to one side on the pillow, the visible indication of her demise. She’d been, in our childhood, a vague presence in that old house and its lost garden, tall and handsome yet somehow like a ghost of someone else: it was said that she was Damian’s mother. People who remembered her advent, with an infant, in the neighbourhood, said the house had been bought for her by the man who’d made her pregnant, buying her silence also.
I learned all that later. When Damian and I were eight his Aunt Una was known to me as his aunt and there was never a reason, afterwards, to doubt that she was. He and I were sent away to different schools – the seducer from the past said to have obliged in this way, also, where Damian’s boarding fees were concerned – but our friendship none the less continued. Damian – like a scarecrow sometimes because it was never noticed by his Aunt Una that he grew out of his clothes – was easy company, hard to dislike, an antidote to the provincial respectability I grew up in. We wandered about the countryside; we hung about point-to-points; when we were older we went to Friday dance-halls if one of us had money; we dreamed of romance with Bettina Nowd, clerk in the Munster and Leinster Bank. Abruptly, our ways parted, and remained so for a long time: when Damian, at nineteen, left the neighbourhood he did not return for fourteen years, by which time his Aunt Una was dead and her house gone. It was said he hadn’t written to her, or communicated in any way during that time, which was surprising because he was always fond of her. But as I heard nothing from him either it’s perhaps less odd than it seems. For Damian, perhaps, the vacuum of people’s absence cannot be filled by any other means. During that fourteen years he and I met only once, at Killaloe at the first of his weddings.
‘You know, I’d like to see Doul again,’ he said the day after he’d appeared in his powder-blue suit. So we went there, where there was nothing to see, not even the caravan his Aunt Una died in. Beneath the brambles that grew everywhere, and the great swathes of nettles, there might have been remains of some kind, but if there were the naked eye could not discern them. When we walked on a bit there were the walls of the kitchen garden, ivy-clad in places, fallen away in others.
‘You couldn’t build Doul again,’ I pointed out when he said he’d like to. ‘Not without a fortune, Damian.’
He muttered something, and for the first time sounded disagreeable. There was some kind of complaint, a protest about his continuing lack of means, and then: ‘The avenue . . . the gates . . .’
A fragment from a poem? I wondered. Sometimes in Damian’s conversation words stand isolated and out of context, as though they do not belong in conversation at all.
‘The house,’ I began.
‘Oh, not the house as it was.’
Claire’s spaniels sniffed about for rabbits. As we stood there, the September sun felt hot. Damian believes in the impossible and when we were younger occasionally inspired me with his optimism: that nothing could be easier than poaching salmon, that a bookie or a publican would accept an IOU, that Bettina Nowd had the love-light in her eyes. It was an endearing quality then; I wasn’t so sure about its being one that had endearingly endured. I felt uneasy about this talk of coming back. During the companionship of our youth there had never been an attempt to borrow money, since there was none to lend; nor was advantage taken of small politenesses, since politeness was not then readily on offer. The threat of a neighbour with a fly-by-night’s presumptions was just a little alarming.
‘Who owns it now?’ he asked, and I told him: the son of the builder who had stripped the roof of its lead.
The cawing of rooks and the occasional bark of the dogs were the only sounds. It had always been quiet at Doul; that tall, beautiful woman floating about from room to room or picking the last of the mulberries; bees in the honeysuckle.
‘What?’ I said, again unable to catch Damian’s murmur. Still moody, he did not directly reply, but seemed to say that the Muse would not be silent here.
I had ceased to practise on my sixtieth birthday, feeling the time had come, although previously I had imagined I could go on more or less for ever, as my father had in this same house, to his dying day. ‘What’ll it be like?’ Damian used to ponder when we were young, the world for him an excitement to investigate after a small, familiar town in south-west Ireland. Both of us, of course, knew what it would be like for me: we knew my father’s house, its comfortably crowded rooms, its pleasant garden; we knew the narrow main street, the shopkeepers, priests and beggars, the condensed-milk factory, the burnt-out cinema, the sleepy courthouse, the bright new hospital, the old asylum, the prison. But neither of us could conjecture a single thing about what lay ahead for Damian.
‘It’s all right, is it?’ Damian asked me on the way back from Doul that day, his mood gregarious again, suddenly so, as if he had remembered who I was. ‘Doing nothing these days is all right?’
‘Yes, it’s all right.’
In fact, it was more than that: all sorts of things were easier in retirement. People weren’t patients any more. Met by chance on the street, they conversed with less embarrassment; while privately I registered that Raynaud’s was at work or that Frolich’s syndrome would not now be reversed. In ordinary chat, awkward secrets were not shared with me; more likely I was shown an adolescent’s face and then reminded I’d been the first to see it as an infant’s; or informed of athletic achievements in children who had grown up, or of success in other ways, and weddings that were planned. Worries were held back, not coinage for me now, as bad backs weren’t, or stitched wounds or blood pressure, the smell of sickness in small back bedrooms.
‘Yes, it’s fine,’ I said in the bar of Traynor’s Hotel. ‘And you?’ I added. ‘Nowadays, Damian?’
Again he became morose. He shrugged and did not answer. He stared at the back of a man who was standing at the bar, at the torn seam of a jacket. Then he said:
‘I used to think about Doul. Wherever I was, I’d come back to that.’
From his tone, those thoughts about the place of his youth had been a comfort, occurring – the implication was – at times of distress or melancholy. Then Damian said, as if in response to a question I had not asked:
‘Well yes, an inspiration.’
He had finished the whiskey in his glass. I went to the bar, and while the drinks I ordered were poured I was asked by Mr Traynor about our son, now a doctor in New South Wales, and about Joanna, who had returned to the town six months ago to work in the prison. ‘You’d be delighted she’s back here,’ Mr Traynor conjectured, and I agreed, although pointing out that sooner or later she would move away again. I smiled, shrugging that away, my mind not on the conversation. Could Doul have been a poet’s inspiration for all these years? I wondered. Was that the meaning I was supposed to find in what had been so vaguely stated?
‘I thought I recognized him,’ Mr Traynor next remarked, his voice kept low, after I had answered his query about who Damian was. ‘How’re you doing these times?’ he called out, and Damian called back that none of us was getting younger.
‘God, that’s the truth in it,’ Mr Traynor agreed, wagging his head in a pretence that this hadn’t occurred to him before.
I picked up my change and made my way back to the table where we sat.