‘ “My father’s on his own now,” I told him, “so I have given up the flat.” As soon as I had spoken I felt afraid. “We must be together,” is what I thought he’d say. He’d be alarmed and upset, I thought, because I’d broken the pattern of our love affair by causing this hiatus. But all he said was that he understood.’
They’d known, of course, about the wretched affair. Her mother had been depressed by it; so much time passing by, no sign of a resolution in whatever it was, no sign of marriage. Verity had steered all conversation away from it; when the subject was discreetly approached by her mother or her brothers she made it clear that they were trespassing on private property; he himself had made no forays in that direction, it not being his way. Astonishing it was, that she should wish to speak of it now.
‘I didn’t in the least,’ she said, ‘feel sorry for your loneliness. I felt sorry for myself. I couldn’t bear for a moment longer the routine love-making in that convenient flat.’
Feeling himself becoming hot, Mr Unwill removed his glasses and searched in the pockets of his blazer for his handkerchief. He didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. He listened while Verity more or less repeated what she had said already. There had been sixteen years of routine love-making, ever since she was twenty-two. Her love affair had become her life, the routine punctuated by generous gifts and weekends in beautiful cities.
There was a silence. He polished one lens and then the other. He tightened the screws of the hinges with the useful little screwdriver in his penknife. Since the silence continued, eventually he said:
‘If you made an error in coming back to the house it can easily be rectified, old girl.’
‘Surely, I thought, those brief weekends would never be enough? Surely we would have to talk about everything again, now that there was no flat to go to?’ She spoke of the cities where the weekends had been spent: Bruges, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Venice. Bruges had been the first. In Bruges she had assumed, although he had not said so, that he would leave his wife. They had walked through chilly squares, they had sat for hours over dinner in the Hotel Duc du Bourgogne. In Paris, some time later, she had made the same assumption. He did not love his wife; when the children grew up he would leave her. By the time they visited Venice, the children had grown up. ‘Only just grown up,’ she said. ‘The last one only just, that summer.’
He did not say anything; the conversation was beyond his reach. He saw his daughter as an infant, a nurse holding a bundle towards him, the screwed-up face and tiny hands. She’d been a happy child, happy at school, happy with her friends. Young men had hung about the house; she’d gone to tennis-club dances and winter parties. ‘Love’s a disease sometimes,’ her mother had said, angrily, a year or so ago. Her mother had been cross because Verity always smiled so, pretending the happiness that was no longer there, determinedly optimistic. Because of the love affair, her mother had said also, Verity’s beauty had been wasted, seeming to have been uselessly visited upon her.
‘It wasn’t just a dirty weekend, you know, here in Venice. It’s never just that.’
‘Please, Verity. Please, now…’
‘He can’t bring himself to be unkind to his wife. He couldn’t be bad to a woman if he tried. I promise you, he’s a remarkable man.’
He began to expostulate but changed his mind. Everything he tried to say, even everything he felt, seemed clumsy. She stared beyond him, through the smoke from her cigarette, causing him to feel a stranger. Her silliness in love had made her carelessly harsh, selfish and insensitive because she had to think so much about herself. In a daughter who was not naturally silly, who had been gentle as a child, these qualities were painful to observe. Once she could have imagined what it was like for him to hear her refer so casually to dirty weekends; now she didn’t care if that hurt him or not. It was insulting to expect him to accept that the man was remarkable. It dismissed his intellect and his sense.
‘It was ridiculous,’ she said eventually, ‘to give up my flat.’
He made some protest when she asked the waiter for the bill, but she didn’t listen, paying the bill instead. He felt exhausted. He had sat in this very café with a woman who was dead; the man his daughter spoke of was still alive. It almost seemed the other way round. He would not have claimed a great deal for the marriage there had been: two people rubbing along, forgiving each other for this and that, one left alone to miss the nourishment of affection. Yet when the coffin had slipped away behind the beige curtain his grief had been unbearable and had remained so afterwards, for weeks and months, each day a hell.
‘I’m sorry for being a nuisance,’ she said before they rose from the table, and he wanted to explain to her that melancholy would have become too much if he allowed a city and its holiday memories to defeat him, that memories were insidious. But he didn’t say anything because he knew she would not listen to him properly. She could not help thinking badly of him; the harshness that had been bred in her prevented the allowances that old age demanded. Nor could he, because of anger, make allowances for her.
‘Hi!’ one of the Americans whom he’d thought it might be quite nice to know called out. They had finished their ice-creams and were preparing to leave also. All of them smiled but it was Verity, not he, who returned their greeting.
‘It’s I who should be sorry,’ he said on the Zattere. He’d been more gently treated than she: you knew where you were with death, in no way was it a confidence trick. He began to say that but changed his mind, knowing she would not wish to hear.
‘Heavens, how cold it has become!’ She hurried through the gathering fog, and so did he. The conversation was over, its loose ends hanging; each knew they would never be picked up. ‘Buona notte,’ the smart receptionist, all in green now, murmured in the hall of the pensione, and they bade her good-night in their different ways.
They lifted their keys from the rack beside the stairs and stepped over the sleeping cat on the bottom step. On the first-floor landing they said good-night, were briefly awkward because of what had passed between them, then entered their separate rooms. Slowly he prepared himself for bed, slowly undressing, slowly washing, folding his clothes with an old man’s care. She sat by her window, staring at the lights across the water, until the fog thickened and there was nothing left to see.
The Wedding in the Garden
Ever since Dervla was nine the people of the hotel had fascinated her. Its proprietor, Mr Congreve, wore clothes that had a clerical sombreness about them, though they were of a lighter hue than Father Mahony’s stern black. Mr Congreve was a smiling man with a quiet face, apparently not in the least put out by reports in the town that his wife, in allying herself with a hotel proprietor, had married beneath her. Ladylike and elegant, she appeared not to regret her choice. Mrs Congreve favoured in her dresses a distinctive blend of greens and blues, her stylishness combining with the hotel proprietor’s tranquil presence to lend the couple a quality that was unique in the town. Their children, two girls and an older boy, were imbued with this through the accident of their birth, and so were different from the town’s other children in ways that might be termed superficial. ‘Breeding,’ Dervla’s father used to say, ‘The Congreves have great breeding in them,’
She herself, when she was nine, was fair-haired and skinny, with a graze always healing on one knee or the other because she had a way of tripping on her shoelaces. ‘Ah, will you tie up those things!’ her mother used to shout at her: her mother, big-faced and red, blinking through the steam that rose from a bucket of water. Her brothers and sisters had all left the house in Thomas MacDonagh Street by the time Dervla was nine; they’d left the town and the district, two of them in America even, one in London. Dervla was more than just the baby of the family: she was an afterthought, catching everyone unawares, born when her mother was forty-two. ‘Chance had a hand in that one,’ her father liked to pronounce, regarding her affectionately, as if pleased by this intervention of fate. When his brother from Leitrim visited the house in Thomas MacDonagh Street the statement was made often, being of family interest. ‘If her mother didn’t possess the strength of an ox,’ Dervla’s father liked to add, ‘God knows how the end of it would have been.’ And Dervla’s Leitrim uncle, refreshing himself with a bottle of stout, would yet again wag his head in admiration and wonder at his sister-in-law’s robust constitution. He was employed on the roads up in Leitrim and only came to the town on a Sunday, drawn to it by a hurling match. Dervla’s father was employed by O’Mara the builder.