‘Is anything the matter, sir?’ Cecilia eventually inquired, for the suggestion that a death might have occurred still echoed as she stood there.
The headmaster regarded her without severity. The breathy whistling of the marching song began as he reached for a pipe and slowly filled it with tobacco. The whistling ceased. He said:
‘The fees are sometimes a little tardy. The circumstances are unusual, since you are not regularly in touch with your father. But I would be obliged, when next you see him, if you would just say that the fees have of late been tardy.’
A match was struck, the tobacco ignited. Cecilia was not formally dismissed, but the headmaster’s immense hand seized the Sexton Blake adventure story, indicating that the interview was over. It had never occurred to her before that it was her father, not her mother and Ronan, who paid her school fees. Her father had never in his life visited the school, as her mother and Ronan had. It was strange that he should be responsible for the fees, and Cecilia resolved to thank him when next she saw him. It was also embarrassing that they were sometimes late.
‘Ah,’ the Bull said when she had reached the door. ‘You’re – ah – all right, are you? The – ah – family trouble…?’
‘Oh, that’s all over, sir.’
‘So it is. So it is. And everything…?’
‘Everything’s fine, sir.’
‘Good. Good.’
Interest in the divorce had dwindled and might even have dissipated entirely had not the odd behaviour of a boy called Abrahamson begun. Quite out of the blue, about a month after the Saturday on which Cecilia and her father had gone to see Reap the Wild Wind, Abrahamson began to stare at her.
In the big classroom where Mr Horan’s morning assemblies were held his eyes repeatedly darted over her features, and whenever they met in a corridor or by the tennis courts he would glance at her sharply and then glance away again, trying to do so before she noticed. Abrahamson’s father was the solicitor to the furniture-making business and because of that Abrahamson occasionally turned up in the house in Chapelizod. No one else from the school did so, Chapelizod being too distant from the neighbourhoods where most of the school’s sixty-eight pupils lived. Abrahamson was younger than Cecilia, a small olive-skinned boy whom Cecilia had many times entertained in the nursery while his parents sat downstairs, having a drink. He was an only child, self-effacing and anxious not to be a nuisance: when he came to Chapelizod now he obligingly played with Cecilia’s half-brothers, humping them about the garden on his back or acting the unimportant parts in the playlets they composed.
At school he was always called by his surname and was famous for his brains. He was neither popular nor unpopular, content to remain on the perimeter of things. Because of this, Cecilia found it difficult to approach him about his staring, and the cleverness that was reflected in the liquid depths of his eyes induced a certain apprehension. But since his interest in her showed no sign of diminishing she decided she’d have to point out that she found it discomfiting. One showery afternoon, on the way down the shrubbed avenue of the school, she questioned him.
Being taller than the boy and his voice being softly pitched, Cecilia had to bend over him to catch his replies. He had a way of smiling when he spoke – a smile, so everyone said, that had to do with his thoughts rather than with any conversation he happened to be having at the time.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m really sorry, Cecilia. I didn’t know I was doing it.’
‘You’ve been doing it for weeks, Abrahamson.’
He nodded, obligingly accepting the truth of the accusation. And since an explanation was required, he obligingly offered one.
‘It’s just that when you reach a certain age the features of your face aren’t those of a child any more. I read it in a book: a child’s face disguises its real features, but at a certain age the disguise falls off. D’you understand, Cecilia?’
‘No, I don’t. And I don’t know why you’ve picked on me just because of something you read in a book.’
‘It happens to everyone, Cecilia.’
‘You don’t go round staring at everyone.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m terribly sorry, Cecilia.’
Abrahamson stopped and opened the black case in which he carried his school-books. Cecilia thought that in some clever way he was going to produce from it an explanation that made more sense. She waited without pressing the matter. On the avenue boys kicked each other, throwing caps about. Miss O’shaughnessy passed on her motorized bicycle. Mr Horan strode by with his violin.
‘Like one?’ Abrahamson had taken from his case a carton containing two small, garishly iced cakes. ‘Go on, really.’
She took the raspberry-coloured one, after which Abrahamson meticulously closed the carton and returned it to his case. Every day he came to school with two of these cakes, supplied by his mother for consumption during the eleven o’clock break. He sold them to anyone who had a few pence to spare, and if he didn’t sell them at school he did so to a girl in a newsagent’s shop which he passed on his journey home.
‘I don’t want to tell you,’ he said as they walked on. ‘I’m sorry you noticed.’
‘I couldn’t help noticing.’
‘Call it quits now, will we?’ There was the slightest of gestures towards the remains of the cake, sticky in Cecilia’s hand. Abrahamson’s tone was softer than ever, his distant smile an echo from his private world. It was said that he played chess games in his head.
‘I’d like to know, Abrahamson.’
His thin shoulders just perceptibly shifted up and down. He appeared to be stating that Cecilia was foolish to insist, and to be stating as well that if she continued to insist he did not intend to waste time and energy in argument. They had passed through the gates of the school and were standing on the street, waiting for a number 11 bus.
‘It’s odd,’ he said, ‘if you want to know. Your father and all that.’
‘Odd?’
The bus drew up. They mounted to the upper deck. When they sat down Abrahamson stared out of the window. It was as if he had already said everything that was necessary, as if Cecilia should effortlessly be able to deduce the rest. She had to nudge him with her elbow, and then – politely and very swiftly – he glanced at her, silently apologizing for her inability to understand the obvious. A pity, his small face declared, a shame to have to carry this burden of stupidity.
‘When people get divorced,’ he said, carefully spacing the words, ‘there’s always a reason. You’ll observe that in films. Or if you read in the paper about the divorce of, say, William Powell and Carole Lombard. They don’t actually bother with divorce if they only dislike one another.’
The conductor came to take their fares. Again the conversation appeared to have reached its termination.
‘But what on earth’s that got to do with what we’re talking about, Abrahamson?’
‘Wouldn’t there have been a reason why your parents got divorced? Wouldn’t the reason be the man your mother married?’
She nodded vehemently, feeling hot and silly. Abrahamson said:
‘They’d have had a love affair while your father was still around. In the end there would have been the divorce.’
‘I know all that’, Abrahamson.’
‘Well, then.’
Impatiently, she began to protest again but broke off in the middle of a sentence and instead sat there frowning. She sensed that the last two words her companion had uttered contained some further declaration, but was unable to grasp it.
‘Excuse me,’ Abrahamson said, politely, before he went.
‘Aren’t you hungry?’ her mother asked, looking across the lace-trimmed white cloth on the dining-room table. ‘You haven’t been gorging yourself, have you?’