Everything was different after my father died. My mother and I began to go for walks together, I’d take her arm, and sometimes her hand, knowing she was lonely. She talked about him to me, telling me about their honeymoon in Venice, the huge square where they’d sat drinking chocolate, listening to the bands that played there. She told me about my own birth, and how my father had given her a ring set with amber which he’d bought in Louis Wine’s in Dublin. She would smile at me on our walks and tell me that even though I was only thirteen I was already taking his place. One day the house would be mine, she pointed out, and the granary and the mill. I’d marry, she said, and have children of my own, but I didn’t want even to think about that. I didn’t want to marry; I wanted my mother always to be there with me, going on walks and telling me about the person we all missed so much. We were still a family, my sisters and my mother and myself, Flannagan in the garden, and Bridget. I didn’t want anything to change.
After the death of my father Mr McNamara lived on, though in a different kind of way. The house in Palmerston Road, with Mr McNamara’s aunt drinking in an upstairs room, and the paper-thin Mrs Matchette playing patience instead of being successful in the theatre, and Mr Matchette with his squashed forehead, and Kate O’Shea from Skibbereen, and the spaniel called Wolfe Tone: all of them remained quite vividly alive after my father’s death, as part of our memory of him. Fleming’s Hotel remained also, and all the talk there’d been there of the eccentric household in Palmerston Road. For almost as long as I could remember, and certainly as long as my sisters could remember, our own household had regularly been invaded by the other one, and after my father’s death my sisters and I often recalled specific incidents retailed in Fleming’s Hotel and later at our breakfast table. There’d been the time when Mr McNamara’s aunt had sold the house to a man she’d met outside a public house. And the time when Mrs Matchette appeared to have fallen in love with Garda Molloy, who used to call in at the kitchen for Kate O’Shea every night. And the time the spaniel was run over by a van and didn’t die. All of it was preserved, with Mr McNamara himself, white-haired and portly in the smoke-brown bar of Fleming’s Hotel, where snuff could be bought, and Bovril as well as whiskey.
A few months after the death my mother remarked one breakfast-time that no doubt Mr McNamara had seen the obituary notice in the Irish Times.’ Oh, but you should write,’ my sister Frances cried out in her excitable manner. My mother shook her head. My father and Mr McNamara had been bar-room friends, she pointed out: letters in either direction would not be in order. Charlotte and Amelia agreed with this opinion, but Frances still protested. I couldn’t see that it mattered. ‘He gave us all that chocolate,’ Frances cried, ‘and the biscuits.’ My mother said again that Mr McNamara was not the kind of man to write to about a death, nor the kind who would write himself. The letter that I was to have written thanking him for the dragon was not mentioned. Disliking the writing of letters, I didn’t raise the subject myself.
At the end of that year I was sent to a boarding-school in the Dublin mountains. Miss Sheil continued to come to the house on her Raleigh to teach my sisters, and I’d have far preferred to have remained at home with her. It could not be: the boarding-school in the Dublin mountains, a renowned Protestant monument, had been my father’s chosen destiny for me and that was that. If he hadn’t died, leaving home might perhaps have been more painful, but the death had brought with it practical complications and troubles, mainly concerned with the running of the granary and the milclass="underline" going away to school was slight compared with all that, or so my mother convinced me.
The headmaster of the renowned school was a small, red-skinned English cleric. With other new boys, I had tea with him and his wife in the drawing-room some days after term began. We ate small ham-paste sandwiches and Battenburg cake. The headmaster’s wife, a cold woman in grey, asked me what I intended to do – ‘in life’, as she put it. I said I’d run a granary and a mill at Curransbridge; she didn’t seem interested. The headmaster told us he was in Who’s Who. Otherwise the talk was of the war.
Miss Sheil had not prepared me well. ‘Dear boy, whoever taught you French?’ a man with a pipe asked me, and did not stay to hear my answer. ‘Your Latin, really!’ another man exclaimed, and the man who taught me mathematics warned me never to set my sights on a profession that involved an understanding of figures. I sat in the back row of the class with other boys who had been ill-prepared for the renowned school.
I don’t know when it was – a year, perhaps, or eighteen months after my first term – that I developed an inquisitiveness about my father. Had he, I wondered, been as bad at everything as I was? Had some other man with a pipe scorned his inadequacy when it came to French? Had he felt, as I did, a kind of desperation when faced with algebra? You’d have to know a bit about figures, I used, almost miserably, to say to myself: you’d have to if you hoped to run a granary and a mill. Had he been good at mathematics?
I asked my mother these questions, and other questions like them. But my mother was vague in her replies and said she believed, although perhaps she was wrong, that my father had not been good at mathematics. She laughed when I asked the questions. She told me to do my best.
But the more I thought about the future, and about myself in terms of the man whose place I was to take, the more curious I became about him. In the holidays my mother and I still went on our walks together, through the garden and then into the fields that stretched behind it, along the banks of the river that flowed through Curransbridge. But my mother spoke less and less about my father because increasingly there was less to say, except with repetition. I imagined the huge square in Venice and the cathedral and the bands playing outside the cafés. I imagined hundreds of other scenes, her own varied memories of their relationship and their marriage. We often walked in silence now, or I talked more myself, drawing her into a world of cross-country runs, and odorous changing-rooms, and the small headmaster’s repeated claim that the food we ate had a high calorific value. School was ordinarily dreary: I told her how we smoked wartime American cigarettes in mud huts specially constructed for the purpose and how we relished the bizarre when, now and again, it broke the monotony. There was a master called Mr Dingle, whose practice it was to inquire of new boys the colour and nature of their mother’s night-dresses. In the oak-panelled dining-hall that smelt of mince and the butter that generations had flicked on to the ceiling, Mr Dingle’s eye would glaze as he sat at the end of a Junior House table while one boy after another fuelled him with the stuff of fantasies. On occasions when parents visited the school he would observe through cigarette smoke the mothers of these new boys, stripping them of their skirts and blouses in favour of the night-clothes that their sons had described for him. There was another master, known as Nipper Achen, who was reputed to take a sensual interest in the sheep that roamed the mountainsides, and a boy called Testane-Hackett who was possessed of the conviction that he was the second son of God. In the dining-hall a gaunt black-clad figure, a butler called Toland, hovered about the high table where the headmaster and the prefects sat, assisted by a maid, said to be his daughter, who was known to us as the Bicycle. There was Fisher Major, who never washed, and Strapping, who disastrously attempted to treat some kind of foot ailment with mild acid. My mother listened appreciatively, and I often saw in her eyes the same look that had been there at breakfast-time when my father spoke of Fleming’s Hotel and Mr McNamara. ‘How like him you are!’ she now and again murmured, smiling at me.