‘But surely you’d like to go dancing, Pamela?’
Hubert stood up, half a piece of shortbread in one hand. He jerked his head at me, indicating that I should hurry. Pamela said again that she wanted to wash her hair.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Hubert murmured in the hall. He stifled laughter. ‘I’m bloody certain,’ he said as we hurried through the garden, ‘she remembers Hanrahan. The man made a pass at her.’
In the train he told me when I asked that she was the child of his father’s sister. ‘She comes over every summer from some back-of-beyond rectory in Roscommon.’ He was vague when I asked further questions, or else impatiently brushed them aside. ‘Pam’s dreary,’ was all he said.
‘She doesn’t seem dreary to me.’
‘The old man worships her. Like he did her mother by all accounts.’
In the Four Provinces Ballroom we met girls who were quite different from Hubert’s cousin. Hubert said they came from the slums, though this could not have been true since they were fashionably dressed and had money for soft drinks and cigarettes. Their legs were painted – the liquid stockings of that time – and their features were emphasized with lipstick and mascara. But each one I danced with was either stunted or lumpy, and I kept thinking of Pamela’s slim figure and her pretty face. Her lips, in particular, I remembered.
We danced to ‘As Time Goes By’ and ‘Autumn Leaves’ and ‘Falling in Love with Love’. The Inkspots sang. One of the partners I danced with said: ‘Your friend’s very handsome, isn’t he?’
In the end Hubert picked up two girls who were agreeable to being seen home when the evening came to an end.
Ken Mackintosh and his band began to pack away their instruments. We walked a little way along Harcourt Street and caught a number 11 bus. The girls were nurses. The one allocated to me, being bouncy and talkative, wanted to know what it was like living in a provincial town, as I did, and what my plans were for getting out of it. When I told her she said: ‘Maybe I’ll run into you when you’re a student,’ but her voice wasn’t exactly loaded with pleasurable anticipation. She was wearing a thick, green woollen coat even though it was August. Her face was flat and pale, her lips garish beneath a fresh coating of lipstick. She had to get up at five o’clock every morning, she said, in order to get to the ward on time. The Sister was a tartar.
When we arrived at the girls’ flat Hubert suggested that we might be offered a cup of tea, but the girls would permit us no further than the doorstep of the house. ‘I thought we were away,’ he murmured disconsolately. His father would have got in, he said. They’d have cooked a meal for his father, anything he wanted. We walked to where we hoped to get a lift to Templemairt. Two hours later a lorry driver picked us up.
The next day being a Saturday, Hubert and I went to Phoenix Park races. We missed breakfast and due to pressure of time we missed lunch also – and, in fact, the first race. ‘The old man’ll have been livid,’ Hubert said. ‘You understand he takes in what’s going on?’ Mrs Plunkett and Pamela would have sat waiting for us in the dining-room, he said, then Pamela would have been sent up to see if we were still asleep, and after that Mrs Plunkett would have gone up herself. ‘They’ll have asked Lily and she’ll have told them we’ve hooked it to the races.’ He neither laughed nor smiled, even though he seemed amused. Another two pounds had been borrowed from Lily before we left.
‘He’ll be livid because he’ll think we should have taken Pam with us.’
‘Why don’t you like Pamela?’
Hubert didn’t reply. He said instead: ‘I’d love to have heard Hanrahan putting a proposition to her.’
At school all of it would have sounded different. We’d have laughed – I more than anyone – at the report of the lively builder attempting to seduce Hubert’s cousin. And somehow it would have been funnier because this had occurred in his grandfather’s house, his grandfather being the sort he was. We would have imagined the embarrassment of Hubert’s cousin, and Hanrahan saying what harm was a little kiss. We would have imagined the old man oblivious of it all, and would have laughed because Hubert’s cousin couldn’t bring herself to say anything about it afterwards. Hubert told his stories well.
‘He may not,’ I said, ‘have had a go at her.’
‘He couldn’t leave them alone, that man. I’m going for this Summer Rain thing.’
We stood in the crowd, examining the list of runners. Announcements were made over loudspeakers; all around us people were talking furiously. Men were in shirt-sleeves, women and girls in summer dresses. It was another sunny day.
‘Paddy’s Pride no good?’ I said.
‘Could be.’ But we both put our bets on Summer Rain and to my surprise the horse won at nine to one. ‘Let’s have a drink,’ Hubert said. Without asking me what I wanted he ordered stout at the bar.
We won again with Sarah’s Cottage, lost with Mohaghan Lad and King of Them All. We drank further bottles of stout. ‘Take Gay Girl for a place,’ a man who had dropped into conversation with us in the bar advised. We did so and were again successful. Between us we were now almost seventeen pounds richer than when we started. We watched the last race in high spirits, grasping glasses of stout and urging on a horse called Marino. We hadn’t backed it; we hadn’t backed anything because Hubert said he could tell our luck had come to an end. Marino didn’t win.
‘We’ll have something to eat and then go to the pictures,’ Hubert said.
The grass beneath our feet was littered with discarded race tickets and programmes. The bookmakers were dismantling their stands. Pale evening sunlight slanted over the drifting crowds; voices were more subdued than they had been. I kept thinking of Pamela in the house in Templemairt, of Mrs Plunkett saying grace again in the dining-room, the old man sensing that we weren’t present for yet another meal.
‘What about The Moon and Sixpence?’ Hubert suggested, having bought an Evening Herald as we left the racecourse. ‘George Sanders?’
We ordered two mixed grills at the cinema restaurant, and tea and cakes. We both bought packets of cigarettes. When The Moon and Sixpence came to an end we went to an ice-cream parlour and then we caught a Saturday-night bus that brought us almost as far as Templemairt. We walked the last bit, Hubert talking about Africa. Before we reached the town he said:
‘He disowned my father, you know. When my father got involved with my mother that was the end of that. My mother was a barmaid, you understand.’
I nodded, having been informed of that before. Hubert said:
‘I didn’t know that old man existed until I was told after the funeral. He didn’t even come to it.’
I didn’t say it must have been awful, having both your parents killed at once. We’d often thought so at school and had said it when Hubert wasn’t there. We’d often considered it must have affected him, perhaps made him the way he was – careless, it seemed, of what people thought of him.
‘You should have heard him when he could talk, laying into me because he thinks I’m like my father. A chip off the old block is what he thinks. My father lived on his wits. A con man, you understand.’
Hubert had often told us this also. His father had briefly been a racing correspondent, had managed a night-club, had apparently worked in a bank. But none of these forays into the realm of employment had lasted long; each had been swiftly terminated, either on the grounds of erratic service or for liberties taken with funds. Hubert, at school, had made no bones about his father’s reprehensible tendencies, nor about his mother’s background. On the contrary, he had taken a certain pride in the fact that his father, in later life, had lived up to the reputation he had established when a schoolboy himself. The apes that had escaped from the circus cage at the time of the tragedy had chattered with delight, scampering over the wreckage. His father would have appreciated that, he said.