‘Ah well, there you are,’ Butler-Regan said noisily. ‘’Tis better let it go, Norah.’
Flanagan handed her another gin and French even though she hadn’t asked for one. Overhearing the reference to the toy factory, he said:
‘I hear Agnew’s wondering what to do with himself.’
‘The bold Agnew!’ Butler-Regan laughed. He, too, was paunchy and rubicund. He added, laughing again, shouting through this laughter: ‘Oh, Master Agnew’ll fall on his feet, I’d say.’
They all liked Agnew even though he was so different. He was an easy companion for half an hour or so if you happened to run into him in the bar of the Commercial Hotel; he was always willing to drop into conversation with you on the street. He had digs with the Misses McShane in a house called St Kevin’s, where he was regularly to be seen tending the front garden, behind silver-painted railings set in a low concrete wall. He also walked the Misses McShane’s dog, Mandy, about the town, and on Sundays he attended the Protestant church unless he happened to be in Dublin.
‘We’d all miss Agnew,’ Flanagan said. ‘That wild Protestant man.’ He laughed, making much the same explosive sound that the solicitor did. Did any of them realize, she wondered, that Agnew’s quickstep put them all to shame every December?
‘Oh, wild is right,’ Butler-Regan agreed. ‘Wasn’t he in the city again a week ago?’
The two men laughed in unison, the burst of noise causing Rita Flanagan to glance sharply across the bar to ascertain if her husband was already drunk. In dog’s-tooth skirt and soft fawn golfing-jacket, Mrs O’Neill wondered what any of them would think if they knew that, quite involuntarily as she stood there, she had again begun to speculate on the possibility of not remaining for ever the widow she presently was. She sipped her gin and French, not taking part in a conversation about Sweetman’s outing to the Curragh. In the same involuntary manner she found herself following a thread of thought that led her back to her wedding-day. The O’Neills had insisted on paying for the reception, since her own family were not well-to-do. Old Canon Kenny – neither old nor a canon then – had conducted the service, assisted by a curate called Colquhoun, who had later left the priesthood. They had gone to Bray for their honeymoon and on their first night in the International Hotel she had been jittery. She hadn’t known how it should be, whether she should simply take her clothes off or wait for him to say something, whether or not there was going to be preliminary kissing. She’d gone as red as anything after they’d come up from the restaurant. ‘I think that waiter knew,’ she’d whispered on the stairs, not noticing there was a maid just behind them. He’d been jittery too, and in the end it was she who inaugurated the kissing and in fact had taken his tie off. What on earth would it be like being in a bedroom in Bray with Agnew? There was fat on her shoulders now, which hadn’t been there before, and naturally her thighs and her hips were no longer the same. Her body had been forgotten in that particular way for many years before her husband’s death, almost since the birth of Siobhan. They had come to occupy separate bedrooms in Arcangelo House, having reached the decision that Cathal and the three girls were enough. At first, when it was safe to do so, she had visited the other bedroom, but the habit had dwindled and then ceased. Would it be a form of unfaithfulness to resume it in different circumstances now? It wasn’t easy to guess how such things stood at fifty-nine.
Corkin, the widower of the woman who’d been a drear, approached her with the usual sorrowful look in his eyes, as if he still mourned the wife who had played neither bridge nor golf. The eyes themselves, lurking in their despondent wateriness behind spectacles, had pinkish rims and were the only feature you noticed in Corkin’s flat face, except possibly his teeth, which moved uncomfortably in his jaw when he ate. He was eating now, chewing crisps from a transparent Tayto bag. His hair was like smooth lead; his limbs jutted from his clothes. There was no doubt whatsoever that Corkin, the manager of a butter business, was looking for a housekeeper in the form of a second wife. There was always a nudge or two in the clubhouse when he approached Mrs O’Neill for a chat.
‘Ah, didn’t I have a terrible round? Did you see me in front of you, Norah? Wasn’t I shocking?’
She denied that. She hadn’t noticed his misfortunes, she said, which indeed she hadn’t. She might have added that the butter manager couldn’t be shocking if he tried for the rest of his life.
‘I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ he said. ‘Would you be interested in a bunch of delphiniums from the garden, Norah?’
She drank more gin and French. She had plenty of delphiniums at Arcangelo House, she replied, though it was very good of him to offer her more.
‘Or the asparagus fern? D’you grow that stuff?’
‘I grow asparagus all right. Only I eat it before the fern comes.’
‘Ah well, why wouldn’t you, Norah,’
Sweetman, at the bar, was sweating like an animal. No woman in her senses would want to marry Sweetman. His trouble with perspiration ironically denied his name, and the caginess Dolores Fitzfynne claimed for him would hardly have been easy to live with. He had a tendency towards forgetfulness when his round came up in the clubhouse and, according to Dolores, the parties he organized for race-meetings or Lansdowne Road were done so to his own pecuniary advantage. ‘Too mingy with himself to look sideways at a woman,’ Dolores had said, and probably she was right. He was a surveyor with the county council; and if he gave you a lift in his car he had a way of mentioning the high price of petrol.
She watched Sweetman while Corkin continued in his tedious manner, offering her marigold plants. It had surprised her when Agnew had said he’d never in his life played golf. She’d thought afterwards that he would probably have been good. He had the look of someone who had been athletic in his time. His dancing suggested ball sense, she didn’t know why.
‘To tell you the honest truth, I don’t much care for marigolds.’
‘The wife loved them. Give Mrs Corkin a box of marigolds arid she’d be pricking them out till Kingdom come.’
He wagged his head; she nodded hers. She allowed a silence to develop in the hope that he’d go away. He said eventually:
‘D’you ever watch that thing they have, Dynasty is it called?’
‘I watched it the odd time.
‘Will you tell me this, Norah: where do they get the stories?’
‘I suppose they invent them.’
‘Isn’t America the shocking place though?’
‘I have a daughter there.’
‘Ah, sure, of course you have.’
At the bar Butler-Regan looked as though he might sing. Very occasionally he did, striking the bar rhythmically with his fist, trying to make people join in. The club secretary, Dr Walsh, had had to speak to him, explaining that it wasn’t usual to sing in a golf club, even adding that he didn’t think it quite the thing for a solicitor to sing anywhere. But Butler-Regan had done so again, and had again to be warned. It was said that his wife, who like the late Mrs Corkin played neither bridge nor golf, had a terrible time with him.
‘Does your girl ever remark on the Dynasty thing to you?’ Corkin was inquiring. ‘I mean, if it might be accurate?’
‘Siobhan has never mentioned Dynasty.’
‘Well, isn’t that extraordinary?’
Ten minutes later the drinking in the clubhouse broke up and Mrs O’Neill drove back to Arcangelo House. She made scrambled egg and watched a film about drug-running on the television. The police of several nations pursued a foursome of gangsters and finally ran the ringleader to earth in Los Angeles. She dozed off, and when she woke up a priest with a Cork accent was talking about the feast of Corpus Christi. She listened to him until he’d finished and then turned the television off.