I know Charlie insists that he did not meet me in Wally's pub, that he never went near the place, but all I am prepared to admit is the possibility that it was not on that particular night that I saw him there. I remember the moment with perfect clarity, the queers whispering, and Wally polishing a glass with a practised and inimitably contemptuous wrist-action, and I sitting at the bar with a bumper of gin in my fist and my old pigskin suitcase at my feet, and Charlie pausing there in his chalkstripes and his scuffed shoes, a forgetful Eumaeus, smiling uneasily and eyeing me with vague surmise. All the same, it is possible that my memory has conflated two separate occasions. It is possible. What more can I say? I hope, Charles, this concession will soothe, even if only a little, your sense of injury.
People think me heartless, but I am not. I have much sympathy for Charlie French. I caused him great distress, no doubt of that. I humiliated him before the world. What pain that must have been, for a man such as Charlie. He behaved very well about it. He behaved beautifully, in fact. On that last, appalling, and appallingly comic occasion, when I was being led out in handcuffs, he looked at me not accusingly, but with a sort of sadness. He almost smiled. And I was grateful. He is a source of guilt and annoyance to me now, but he was my friend, and -
He was my friend. Such a simple phrase, and yet how affecting. I don't think I have ever used it before. When I wrote it down I had to pause, startled. Something welled up in my throat, as if I might be about to, yes, to weep. What is happening to me? Is this what they mean by rehabilitation? Perhaps I shall leave here a reformed character, after all.
Poor Charlie did not recognise me at first, and was distinctly uneasy, I could see, at being addressed in this place, in this familiar fashion, by a person who seemed to him a stranger. I was enjoying myself, it was like being in disguise. I offered to buy him a drink, but he declined, with elaborate politeness. He had aged. He was in his early sixties, but he looked older. He was stooped, and had a little egg-shaped paunch, and his ashen cheeks were inlaid with a filigree of broken veins. Yet he gave an impression of, what shall I call it, of equilibrium, which seemed new to him. It was as if he were at last filling out exactly his allotted space. When I knew him he had been a smalltime dealer in pictures and antiques. Now he had presence, it was almost an air of imperium, all the more marked amid the gaudy trappings of Wally's bar. It's true, there was still that familiar expression in his eye, at once mischievous and sheepish, but I had to look hard to find it. He began to edge away from me, still queasily smiling, but then he in turn must have caught something familiar in my eye, and he knew me at last. Relieved, he gave a breathy laugh and glanced around the bar. That I did remember, that glance, as if he had just discovered his flies were open and was looking to see if anyone had noticed. Freddie! he said. Well well! He lit a cigarette with a not altogether steady hand, and released a great whoosh of smoke towards the ceiling. I was trying to recall when it was I had first met him. He used to come down to Coolgrange when my father was alive and hang about the house looking furtive and apologetic. They had been young together, he and my parents, in their cups they would reminisce about hunt balls before the war, and dashing up to Dublin for the Show, and all the rest of it. I listened to this stuff with boundless contempt, curling an adolescent's villous lip. They sounded like actors flogging away at some tired old drawing-room comedy, projecting wildly, my mother especially, with her scarlet fingernails and metallic perm and that cracked, gin-and-smoke voice of hers. But to be fair to Charles, I do not think he really subscribed to this fantasy of the dear dead days. He could not ignore the tiny trill of hysteria that made my mother's goitrous throat vibrate, nor the way my father looked at her sometimes, poised on the edge of his chair, tense as a whippet, pop-eyed and pale, with an expression of incredulous loathing. When they got going like this, the two of them, they forgot everything else, their son, their friend, everything, locked together in a kind of macabre trance. This meant that Charlie and I were often thrown into each other's company. He treated me tentatively, as if I were something that might blow up in his face at any moment. I was very fierce in those days, brimming with impatience and scorn. We must have been a peculiar pair, yet we got on, at some deep level. Perhaps I seemed to him the son he would never have, perhaps he seemed to me the father I had never had. (This is another idea put forward by my counsel. I don't know how you think of them, Maolseachlainn.) What was I saying? Charlie. He took me to the races one day, when I was a boy. He was all kitted out for the occasion, in tweeds and brown brogues and a little trilby hat tipped at a raffish angle over one eye. He even had a pair of binoculars, though he did not seem to be able to get them properly in focus. He looked the part, except for a certain stifled something in his manner that made it seem all the time as if he were about to break down in helpless giggles at himself and his pretensions. I was fifteen or sixteen. In the drinks marquee he turned to me blandly and asked what I would have, Irish or Scotch -and brought me home in the evening loudly and truculently drunk. My father was furious, my mother laughed. Charlie maintained an unruffled silence, pretending nothing was amiss, and slipped me a fiver as I was stumbling off to bed.
Ah Charles, I am sorry, truly I am.
Now, as if he too were remembering that other time, he insisted on buying a drink, and pursed his lips disapprovingly when I asked for gin. He was a whiskey man, himself. It was part of his disguise, like the striped suit and the worn-down, handmade shoes, and that wonderful, winged helmet of hair, now silvered all over, which, so my mother liked to say, had destined him for greatness. He had always managed to avoid his destiny, however. I asked him what he was doing these days. Oh, he said, I'm running a gallery. And he glanced about him with an abstracted, wondering smile, as if he were himself surprised at such a notion. I nodded. So that was what had bucked him up, what had given him that self-sufficient air. I saw him in some dusty room, a forgotten backwater, with a few murky pictures on the wall, and a frosty spinster for a secretary who bickered with him over tea money and gave him a tie wrapped in tissue-paper every Christmas. Poor Charlie, forced to take himself seriously at last, with a business to take care of, and painters after him for their money. Here, I said, let me, and peeled a note from my rapidly dwindling wad and slapped it on the bar.
To be candid, however, I was thinking of asking him for a loan. What prevented me was – well, there will be laughter in court, I know, but the fact is I felt it would be in bad taste. It is not that I am squeamish about these matters, in my time I have touched sadder cases than Charlie for a float, but there was something in the present circumstances that held me back. We might indeed have been a father and son – not my father, of course, and certainly not this son – meeting by chance in a brothel. Constrained, sad, obscurely ashamed, we blustered and bluffed, knocking our glasses together and toasting the good old days. But it was no use, in a little while we faltered, and fell gloomily silent. Then suddenly Charlie looked at me, with what was almost a flash of pain, and in a low, impassioned voice said, Freddie, what have you done to yourself? At once abashed, he leaned away from me in a panic, desperately grinning, and puffed a covering cloud of smoke. First I was furious, and then depressed. Really, I was not in the mood for this kind of thing. I glanced at the clock behind the bar and, purposely misunderstanding him, said yes, it was true, it had been a long day, I was overdoing it, and I finished my drink and shook his hand and took up my bag and left.
There it was again, in another form, the same question: why, Freddie, why are you living like this? I brooded on it next morning on the way to Coolgrange. The day looked as I felt, grey and flat and heavy. The bus plunged laboriously down the narrow country roads, pitching and wallowing, with a dull zip and roar that seemed the sound of my own blood beating in my brain. The myriad possibilities of the past lay behind me, a strew of wreckage. Was there, in all that, one particular shard – a decision reached, a road taken, a signpost followed – that would show me just how I had come to my present state? No, of course not. My journey, like everyone else's, even yours, your honour, had not been a thing of signposts and decisive marching, but drift only, a kind of slow subsidence, my shoulders bowing down under the gradual accumulation of all the things I had not done. Yet I can see that to someone like Charlie, watching from the ground, I must have seemed a creature of fable scaling the far peaks, rising higher and ever higher, leaping at last from the pinnacle into marvellous, fiery flight, my head wreathed in flames. But I am not Euphorion. I am not even his father.