‘Oh, it’s beautiful!’ Angela cried suddenly, having drunk a little more. She was referring, not to her own situation, but to the fact that Miss Ivygale had wasted half a lifetime on a hopeless love. Feeling happy herself, she wanted Miss Ivygale to feel happy also.
Miss Ivygale did not say anything in reply. She was fifty and Angela was twenty-six: that made a difference where knowing what was beautiful was concerned. The thing about Gordon Spelle was that with the worst possible motives he performed an act of charity for the girls who were his victims. He gave them self-esteem, and memories to fall back on – for the truth was too devious for those closest to it to guess, and too cruel for other people ever to reveal to them. The victims of Gordon Spelle left C.S. & E. in the end because they believed the passion of his love for them put him under a strain, he being married to a wife who was ill. As soon as each had gone he looked around for someone else.
‘And beautiful for you too, my dear,’ Miss Ivygale murmured, thinking that in a way it was, compared with what she had herself. She’d been aware for twenty-three years of being used by the man she loved: self-esteem and memories were better than knowing that, no matter how falsely they came.
‘Let’s have two for the road,’ murmured Miss Ivygale, and ordered further drinks.
Mr McNamara
‘How was he?’ my mother asked on the morning of my thirteenth birthday.
She spoke while pouring tea into my father’s extra-large breakfast cup, the last remaining piece of a flowered set, Ville de Lyon clematis on a leafy ground. My father had a special knife and fork as well, the knife another relic of the past, the fork more ordinary, extra-strong because my father was always breaking forks.
‘Oh, he’s well enough,’ he said on the morning of my thirteenth birthday, while I sat patiently. ‘The old aunt’s kicking up again.’
My mother, passing him his tea, nodded. She remarked that in her opinion Mr McNamara’s aunt should be placed in an asylum, which was what she always said when the subject of Mr McNamara’s aunt, reputedly alcoholic, cropped up.
My mother was tallish and slender, but softly so. There was nothing sharp or angular about my mother, nothing wiry or hard. She had misty blue eyes and she seemed always to be on the point of smiling. My father was even taller, a bulky man with a brown face and a brown forehead stretching back where hair once had been, with heavy brown-backed hands, and eyes the same shade of blue mist as my mother’s. They were gentle with one another in a way that was similar also, and when they disagreed or argued their voices weren’t ever raised. They could be angry with us, but not with one another. They meted out punishments for us jointly, sharing disapproval or disappointment. We felt doubly ashamed when our misdemeanours were uncovered.
‘The train was like a Frigidaire,’ my father said. ‘Two hours late at the halt. Poor Flannagan nearly had pneumonia waiting.’ The whole country had ivy growing over, it, he said, like ivy on a gravestone. Eating bacon and sausages with his special knife and fork, he nodded in agreement with himself. ‘Ivy-clad Ireland,’ he said when his mouth was momentarily empty of food. ‘Anthracite motor-cars, refrigerators on the Great Southern Railway. Another thing, Molly: it’s the opinion in Dublin that six months’ time will see foreign soldiers parading themselves on O’Connell Street. German or English, take your pick, and there’s damn all Dev can do about it.’
My mother smiled at him and sighed. Then, as though to cheer us all up, my father told a story that Mr McNamara had told him, about a coal merchant whom Mr McNamara had apparently known in his youth. The story had to do with the ill-fitting nature of the coal merchant’s artificial teeth, and the loss of the teeth when he’d once been swimming at Ringsend. Whenever my father returned from a meeting with Mr McNamara he brought us back such stories, as well as the current opinion of Mr McNamara on the state of the nation and the likelihood of the nation becoming involved in the war. ‘The opinion in Dublin’ was the opinion of Mr McNamara, as we all knew. Mr McNamara drove a motor-car powered by gas because there wasn’t much petrol to be had. The gas, so my father said, was manufactured by anthracite in a burner stuck on to the back of Mr McNamara’s Ford V-8.
Returning each time from Dublin, my father bore messages and gifts from Mr McNamara, a tin of Jacob’s biscuits or bars of chocolate. He was a man who’d never married and who lived on inherited means, in a house in Palmerston Road, with members of his family – the elderly alcoholic aunt who should have been in an asylum, a sister and a brother-in-law. The sister, now Mrs Matchette, had earlier had theatrical ambitions, but her husband, employed in the National Bank, had persuaded her away from them. My father had never actually met Mr McNamara’s insane aunt or Mrs Matchette or her husband: they lived through Mr McNamara for him, at second hand, and for us they lived through my father, at a further remove. We had a vivid image of all of them, Mrs Matchette thin as a blade of grass, endlessly smoking and playing patience, her husband small and solemn, neatly moustached, with dark neat hair combed straight back from what Mr McNamara had called a ‘squashed forehead’. Mr McNamara himself we imagined as something of a presence: prematurely white-haired, portly, ponderous in speech and motion. Mr McNamara used to frequent the bar of a hotel called Fleming’s, an old-fashioned place where you could get snuff as well as tobacco, and tea, coffee and Bovril as well as alcoholic drinks. It was here that my father met him on his visits to Dublin. It was a comfort to go there, my father said, when his business for the day was done, to sit in a leather chair and listen to the chit-chat of his old companion. The bar would fill with smoke from their Sweet Afton cigarettes, while my father listened to the latest about the people in the house in Palmerston Road, and the dog they had, a spaniel called Wolfe Tone, and a maid called Kate O’Shea, from Skibbereen. There was ritual about it, my father smoking and listening, just as a day or so later he’d smoke and we’d listen ourselves, at breakfast-time in our house in the country.
There were my three sisters and myself: I was the oldest, the only boy. We lived in a house that had been in the family for several generations, three miles from Curransbridge, where the Dublin train halted if anyone wanted it to, and where my father’s granary and mill were. Because of the shortage of petrol, my father used to walk the three miles there and back every day. Sometimes he’d persuade Flannagan, who worked in the garden for us, to collect him in the dog-cart in the evening, and always when he went to Dublin he arranged for Flannagan to meet the train he returned on. In the early hours of the morning I’d sometimes hear the rattle of the dog-cart on the avenue and then the wheels on the gravel outside the front of the house. At breakfast-time the next morning my father would say he was glad to be back again, and kiss my mother with the rest of us. The whole thing occurred once every month or so, the going away in the first place, the small packed suitcase in the hall, my father in his best tweed suit, Flannagan and the dog-cart. And the returning a few days later: breakfast with Mr McNamara, my sister Charlotte used to say.