At Curransbridge I stood in his office above the mill, a tiny room now occupied by the man my mother had chosen to look after things, a Mr Myers. In the house I rooted through the belongings he’d left behind; I stared at photographs of him. With Flannagan and my sisters I flew the kite he’d bought me that last time he’d been to Dublin. I polished the small brass dragon that his bar-room companion had given him to give to me. ‘It’s the boy’s birthday,’ I imagined him saying in the brown bar of Fleming’s Hotel, and I imagined the slow movement of Mr McNamara’s hand as he drew the dragon from his pocket. It was inevitable, I suppose, that sooner or later I should seek out Fleming’s Hotel.
‘An uncle,’ I said to the small headmaster. ‘Passing through Dublin, sir.’
‘Passing? Passing?’ He had a Home Counties accent and a hard nasal intonation. ‘Passing?’ he said again, giving the word an extra vowel sound.
‘On his way to Galway, sir. He’s in the RAF, sir. I think he’d like to see me, sir, because my father –’
‘Ah, yes, yes. Back in time for Chapel, please.’
Fleming’s Hotel, it said in the telephone directory, 21 Wheeler Street. As I cycled down from the mountains, I didn’t know what I was going to do when I got there.
It was a narrow, four-storey building in a terrace with others, a bleak-looking stone façade. The white woodwork of the windows needed a coat of paint, the glass portico over the entrance doors had a dusty look. It was on this dusty glass that the name Fleming’s Hotel was picked out in white enamel letters stuck to the glass itself. I cycled past the hotel twice, glancing at the windows – a dozen of them, the four at the top much smaller than the others – and at the entrance doors. No one left or entered. I propped the bicycle against the edge of the pavement some distance away from the hotel, outside what seemed to be the street’s only shop, a greengrocer’s. There were pears in the window. I went in and bought one.
I wheeled the bicycle away from the shop and came, at the end of the street, to a canal. Slowly I ate the pear, and then I took my red-and-green school cap from my head and wheeled my bicycle slowly back to Fleming’s Hotel. I pushed open one of the entrance doors and for a split second I heard my father’s voice again, describing what I now saw: the smokiness of the low-ceilinged hall, a coal fire burning, and a high reception counter with the hotel’s register open on it, and a brass bell beside the register. There were brown leather armchairs in the hall and a brown leather bench running along one wall. Gas lamps were lit but even so, and in spite of the fact that it was four o’clock in the afternoon, the hall was dim. It was empty of other people and quiet. A tall grandfather clock ticked, the fire occasionally hissed. There was a smell of some kind of soup. It was the nicest, most comfortable hall I’d ever been in.
Beyond it, I could see another coal fire, through an archway. That was the bar where they used to sit, where for all I knew Mr McNamara was sitting now. I imagined my father crossing the hall as I crossed it myself. The bar was the same as the hall, with the same kind of leather chairs, and a leather bench and gas lamps and a low ceiling. There were net curtains pulled across the two windows, and one wall was taken up with a counter, with bottles on shelves behind it, and leather-topped stools in front of it. There was a woman sitting by the fire drinking orange-coloured liquid from a small glass. Behind the bar a man in a white jacket was reading the Irish Independent.
I paused in the archway that divided the bar from the hall. I was under age. I had no right to take a further step and I didn’t know what to do or to say if I did. I didn’t know what drink to order. I didn’t know if in the dim gaslight I looked a child.
I went to the bar and stood there. The man didn’t look up from his newspaper. Smithwick’s Ale were words on the labels of bottles: I would ask for a Smithwick’s Ale. All I wanted was to be allowed to remain, to sit down with the beer and to think about my father. If Mr McNamara did not come today he’d come another day. Frances had been right: he should have been written to. I should have written to him myself, to thank my father’s friend for his present.
‘Good evening,’ the barman said.
‘Smithwick’s, please,’ I said as casually as I could. Not knowing how much the drink might be, I placed a ten-shilling note on the bar.
‘Drop of lime in it, sir?’
‘Lime? Oh, yes. Yes, please. Thanks very much.’
‘Choppy kind of day,’ the barman said.
I took the glass and my change, and sat down as far as possible from where the woman was sitting. I sat so that I was facing both the bar and the archway, so that if Mr McNamara came in I’d see him at once. I’d have to leave at six o’clock in order to be safely back for Chapel at seven.
I finished the beer. I took an envelope out of my pocket and drew pieces of holly on the back of it, a simple art-form that Miss Sheil had taught all of us. I took my glass to the bar and asked for another Smithwick’s. The barman had a pale, unhealthy-seeming face, and wire-rimmed glasses, and a very thin neck. ‘You do want the best, don’t you?’ he said in a joky kind of voice, imitating someone. ‘Bird’s Custard,’ he said in the same joky way, ‘and Bird’s Jelly de Luxe.’ My father had mentioned this barman: he was repeating the advertisements of Radio Eireann. ‘You do want the best, don’t you?’ he said again, pushing the glass of beer towards me. By the fire, the woman made a noise, a slight, tired titter of amusement. I laughed myself, politely too.
When I returned to my armchair I found the woman was looking at me. I wondered if she could be a prostitute, alone in a hotel bar like that. A boy at school called Yeats claimed that prostitutes hung about railway stations mostly, and on quays. But there was of course no reason why you shouldn’t come across one in a bar.
Yet she seemed too quietly dressed to be a prostitute. She was wearing a green suit and a green hat, and there was a coat made of some kind of fur draped over a chair near the chair she sat on. She was a dark-haired woman with an oval face. I’d no idea what age she was: somewhere between thirty and forty, I imagined: I wasn’t good at guessing people’s ages.
The Smithwick’s Ale was having an effect on me. I wanted to giggle. How extraordinary it would be, I thought, if a prostitute tried to sell herself to me in my father’s and Mr McNamara’s hotel. After all, there was no reason at all why some prostitutes shouldn’t be quietly dressed, probably the more expensive ones were. I could feel myself smiling, holding back the giggle. Naturally enough, I thought, my father hadn’t mentioned the presence of prostitutes in Fleming’s Hotel. And then I thought that perhaps, if he’d lived, he would have told me one day, when my sisters and my mother weren’t in the room. It was the kind of thing, surely, that fathers did tell sons.
I took the envelope I’d drawn the holly on out of my pocket and read the letter it contained. They were managing, my mother said. Miss Sheil had had a dose of flu, Charlotte and Amelia wanted to breed horses, Frances didn’t know what she wanted to do. His rheumatics were slowing Flannagan down a bit in the garden. Bridget was insisting on sweeping the drawing-room chimney. It’ll be lovely at Christmas, she wrote. So nice being all together again.
The oval-faced woman put on her fur coat, and on her way from the bar she passed close to where I was sitting. She looked down and smiled at me.
‘Hills of the North, rejoice!’ we sang in chapel that night. ‘Valley and lowland, sing!’
I smelt of Smithwick’s Ale. I knew I did because as we’d stood in-line in Cloisters several other boys had remarked on it. As I sang, I knew I was puffing the smell all over everyone else. ‘Like a bloody brewery,’ Gahan Minor said afterwards.