‘At least be civil,’ the man said to Mrs Matara.
They were two of the most unpleasant people Attridge had ever come across. It was a pity the man hadn’t died. He’d run to fat and was oily, there was a shower of dandruff on his jacket. You could see his stomach straining his shirt, one of the shirt-buttons had actually given way.
‘Well, thank you,’ Mrs Matara said, approaching Attridge with her right hand held out. She said it gracelessly, as a duty. The same hand had struck him on the face and later had slipped for comfort into one of his. It was hard and cold when he shook it, with the same fleshless feel as before. ‘We still have a secret,’ Mrs Matara said. She smiled at him in her dutiful way, without displaying interest in him.
The man had opened the hall door of the flat. He stood by it, smiling also, anxious for Attridge to go.
‘This afternoon’s a secret,’ Mrs Matara murmured, dropping her eyes in a girlish pretence. ‘All this,’ she said, indicating her friend. ‘I’m sorry I hit you.’
‘Hit him?’
‘When we were upset. Downstairs. I hit him.’ She giggled, apparently unable to help herself.
‘Great God!’ The man giggled also.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Attridge said.
But it did matter. The secret she spoke of wasn’t worth having because it was sordid and nothing else. It was hardly the kind of thing he’d wish to mull over in private, and certainly not the kind he’d wish to tell Mrs Harcourt-Egan or anyone else. Yet the other story might even have reached his ex-wife, it was not impossible. He imagined her hearing it, and her amazement that a man whom she’d once likened to dust had in the cause of compassion falsified the circumstances of a death. He couldn’t imagine the man his ex-wife had married doing such a thing, or Mrs Matara’s husband, or the dandruffy man who now stood by the door of the flat. Such men would have been frightened out of their wits.
‘Goodbye,’ she said.
‘Goodbye,’ the man said, smiling at the door.
Attridge wanted to say something. He wanted to linger for a moment longer and to mention his ex-wife. He wanted to tell them what he had never told another soul, that his ex-wife had done terrible things to him. He disliked all Jewish people, he wanted to say, because of his ex-wife and her lack of understanding. Marriage repelled him because of her. It was she who had made him vicious-tongued. It was she who had embittered him.
He looked from one face to the other. They would not understand and they would not be capable of making an effort, as he had when faced with the woman’s predicament. He had always been a little on the cold side, he knew that well. But his ex-wife might have drawn on the other aspects of his nature and dispelled the coldness. Instead of displaying all that impatience, she might have cosseted him and accepted his complications. The love she sought would have come in its own good time, as sympathy and compassion had eventually come that afternoon. Warmth was buried deep in some people, he wanted to say to the two faces in the hall, but he knew that, like his ex-wife, the faces would not understand.
As he went he heard the click of the door behind him and imagined a hushed giggling in the hall. He would be feeling like a prince if the man had really died.
Teresa’s Wedding
The remains of the wedding-cake were on top of the piano in Swanton’s lounge-bar, beneath a framed advertisement for Power’s whiskey. Chas Flynn, the best man, had opened two packets of confetti: it lay thickly on the remains of the wedding-cake, on the surface of the bar and the piano, on the table and the two small chairs that the lounge-bar contained, and on the tattered green-and-red linoleum.
The wedding guests, themselves covered in confetti, stood in groups. Father Hogan, who had conducted the service in the Church of the Immaculate Conception, stood with Mrs Atty, the mother of the bride, and Mrs Cornish, the mother of the bridegroom, and Mrs Tracy, a sister of Mrs Atty’s.
Mrs Tracy was the stoutest of the three women, a farmer’s widow who lived eight miles from the town. In spite of the jubilant nature of the occasion, she was dressed in black, a colour she had affected since the death of her husband three years ago. Mrs Atty, bespectacled, with her grey hair in a bun, wore a flowered dress – small yellow-and-blue blooms that blended easily with the confetti. Mrs Cornish was in pink, with a pink hat. Father Hogan, a big red-complexioned man, held a tumbler containing whiskey and water in equal measures; his companions sipped Winter’s Tale sherry.
Artie Cornish, the bridegroom, drank stout with his friends Eddie Boland and Chas Flynn, who worked in the town’s bacon factory, and Screw Doyle, so called because he served behind the counter in McQuaid’s hardware shop. Artie, who worked in a shop himself – Driscoll’s Provisions and Bar – was a freckled man of twenty-eight, six years older than his bride. He was heavily built, his bulk encased now in a suit of navy-blue serge, similar to the suits that all the other men were wearing that morning in Swanton’s lounge-bar. In the opinion of Mr Driscoll, his employer, he was a conscientious shopman, with a good memory for where commodities were kept on the shelves. Customers occasionally found him slow.
The fathers of the bride and bridegroom, Mr Atty and Mr Cornish, were talking about greyhounds, keeping close to the bar. They shared a feeling of unease, caused by being in the lounge-bar of Swanton’s, with women present, on a Saturday morning. ‘Bring us two more big ones,’ Mr Cornish requested of Kevin, a youth behind the bar, hoping that this addition to his consumption of whiskey would relax matters. They wore white carnations in the buttonholes of their suits, and stiff white collars which were reddening their necks. Unknown to one another, they shared the same thought: a wish that the bride and groom would soon decide to bring the occasion to an end by going to prepare themselves for their journey to Cork on the half-one bus. Mr Atty and Mr Cornish, bald-headed men of fifty-three and fifty-five, had it in mind to spend the remainder of the day in Swanton’s lounge-bar, celebrating in their particular way the union of their children.
The bride, who had been Teresa Atty and was now Teresa Cornish, had a round, pretty face and black, pretty hair, and was a month and a half pregnant. She stood in the corner of the lounge with her friends, Philomena Morrissey and Kitty Roche, both of whom had been bridesmaids. All three of them were attired in their wedding finery, dresses they had feverishly worked on to get finished in time for the wedding. They planned to alter the dresses and have them dyed so that later on they could go to parties in them, even though parties were rare in the town.
‘I hope you’ll be happy, Teresa,’ Kitty Roche whispered: ‘I hope you’ll be all right.’ She couldn’t help giggling, even though she didn’t want to. She giggled because she’d drunk a glass of gin and Kia-Ora orange, which Screw Doyle had said would steady her. She’d been nervous in the church. She’d tripped twice on the walk down the aisle.
‘You’ll be marrying yourself one of these days,’ Teresa whispered, her cheeks still glowing after the excitement of the ceremony. ‘I hope you’ll be happy too, Kit.’
But Kitty Roche, who was asthmatic, did not believe she’d ever marry. She’d be like Miss Levis, the Protestant woman on the Cork road, who’d never got married because of tuberculosis. Or old Hannah Flood, who had a bad hip. And it wasn’t just that no one would want to be saddled with a diseased wife: there was also the fact that the asthma caused a recurrent skin complaint on her face and neck and hands.
Teresa and Philomena drank glasses of Babycham, and Kitty drank Kia-Ora with water instead of gin in it. They’d known each other all their lives. They’d been to the Presentation Nuns together, they’d taken First Communion together. Even when they’d left the Nuns, when Teresa had gone to work in the Medical Hall and Kitty Roche and Philomena in Keane’s drapery, they’d continued to see each other almost every day.