‘D’you remember the cokeman they used to have there? McArdle?’
‘Where was that, Fergus?’
‘At school.’
Lairdman shook his head. He didn’t remember McArdle, he said. He doubted that he’d ever known anyone of that name. ‘A cokeman?’ he repeated. ‘What kind of a cokeman? I don’t think I know the word.’
‘He looked after the furnace. We called him the cokeman.’
‘I never knew that person at all.’
Other people came into the bar. A tall man in a gaberdine overcoat who opened an Irish Times and was poured a glass of stout without having to order it. An elderly woman and two men who appeared to be her sons. A priest who looked around the bar and went away again.
‘You wouldn’t have noticed McArdle because you weren’t a boarder,’ Boland said. ‘When you’re weekends in a place you notice more.’
‘I’m sorry I don’t remember you.’
‘I wouldn’t expect you to.’
She’d be imagining this conversation, Boland suddenly realized. It was she who had suggested this bar for their meeting, speaking as if she knew it and considered it suitable. ‘I think I’ll go up and see Phyllis,’ she used to say, saying it more often as time went by. Phyllis was a friend she had in Terenure, whose own marriage had ended on the rocks and who was suffering from an internal complaint besides. But of course Phyllis had just been a name she’d used, a stalwart friend who would cover up for her if she needed it. For all he knew, Phyllis might never have been married, her internal system might be like iron. ‘Phone me,’ he used to say, and obediently and agreeably his wife would. She’d tell him how Dublin looked and how Phyllis was bearing up. No doubt she’d been sitting on the edge of a bed in the seven-room flat in Wellington Road.
‘It’s really good of you to come all this way,’ Lairdman said with a hint of finality in his voice, an indication that quite soon now the encounter should be brought to an end. ‘I really appreciate it. I’ll ring Annabella this afternoon and tell her we know where we stand. You won’t mind that, Fergus?’
‘Not at all.’
Boland had often interrupted such a telephone conversation. He would walk into the hall and there she’d be, knees drawn up, on the second step of the stairs, the receiver strung through the banisters. She’d be talking quite normally in her slightly high-pitched voice, but when he stepped through the hall door she’d wave a greeting and begin to whisper, the hand that had waved to him now cupped around the mouthpiece. He’d often wondered what she imagined he thought, or if she achieved some tremor of satisfaction from the hushed twilight of this semi-surreptitious carry-on. The trouble with Annabella was that sooner or later everything in the world bored her. ‘Now, I want to hear,’ she would soon be saying to Lairdman, ‘every single thing since the moment you left the house.’ And the poor man would begin a long history about catching a bus and passing through the entrance doors of his blockboard business, how he had said good morning to the typist and listened to the foreman’s complaint concerning a reprehensible employee, how he’d eaten a doughnut with his eleven O’clock coffee, not as good a doughnut as he’d eaten the day before. Later, in a quarrel, she’d fling it all back at him: who on earth wanted to know about his doughnuts? she’d screech at him, her fingers splayed out in the air so that her freshly applied crimson nail varnish would evenly dry. She had a way of quarrelling when she was doing her nails, because she found the task irksome and needed some distraction. Yet she’d have felt half undressed if her fingernails weren’t properly painted, or if her make-up wasn’t right or her hair just as she wanted it.
‘I’ll be able to say,’ Lairdman was stating with what appeared to be pride, ‘that there wasn’t an acrimonious word between us. She’ll be pleased about that.’
Boland smiled, nodding agreeably. He couldn’t imagine his wife being pleased since she so rarely was. He wondered what it was in Lairdman that attracted her. She’d said, when he’d asked her, that her lover was fun; he liked to go abroad, she’d said, he appreciated food and painting; he possessed what she called a ‘devastating’ sense of humour. She hadn’t mentioned his sexual prowess, since it wasn’t her habit to talk in that way. ‘Will you be taking those cats?’ Boland had inquired. ‘I don’t want them here.’ Her lover would willingly supply a home for her Siamese cats, she had replied, both of which she called ‘Ciao’. Boland wondered if his successor even knew of their existence.
‘I wonder what became,’ he said, ‘of Roche and Dead Smith?’
He didn’t know why he said it, why he couldn’t have accepted that the business between them was over. He should have shaken hands with Lairdman and left it at that, perhaps saying there were no hard feelings. He would never have to see the man again; once in a while he would feel sorry for the memory of him.
‘Dead Smith?’ Lairdman said.
‘Big eejit with a funny eye. There’s a barrister called Roche now; I often wonder if that’s the same fellow.’
‘I don’t think I remember either of them.’
‘Roche used to go round in a pin-striped blue suit. He looked like one of the masters.’
Lairdman shook his head. ‘I’ll say cheerio, Fergus. Again, my gratitude.’
‘They were the bright sparks who washed your hair in a lavatory bowl.’
Boland had said to himself over and over again that Lairdman was welcome to her. He looked ahead to an easy widower’s life, the house she had filled with her perversities and falsehoods for the last twelve years as silent as a peaceful sleep. He would clear out the memories of her because naturally she wouldn’t do that herself – the hoarded magazines, the empty medicine bottles, the clothes she had no further use for, the cosmetics she’d pitched into the corners of cupboards, the curtains and chair-covers clawed by her cats. He would get Molloy in to paint out the rooms. He would cook his own meals, and Mrs Coughlan would still come every morning. Mrs Coughlan wouldn’t be exactly sorry to see the back of her, either.
‘I don’t know why,’ Lairdman said, ‘you keep going on about your schooldays.’
‘Let me get you a decent drink before you go. Bring us two big ones,’ he called out to the barman, who was listening to an anecdote the man in the gaberdine coat was retailing at the far end of the bar.
‘No, really,’ Lairdman protested. ‘Really now.’
‘Oh, go on, man. We’re both in need of it.’
Lairdman had buttoned his black overcoat and drawn on a pair of black leather gloves. Finger by finger he drew one of the gloves off again. Boland could feel him thinking that, for the sake of the woman who loved him, he must humour the cuckold.
‘It takes it out of you,’ Boland said. ‘An emotional thing like this. Good luck to you.’
They drank, Lairdman seeming awkward now because of what had been said. He looked a bit like a priest, Boland thought, the black attire and the way he wore it. He tried to imagine the pair of them abroad, sitting down together in a French restaurant, Lairdman being pernickety about a plate of food he didn’t like the look of. It didn’t make sense, all this stuff about a devastating sense of humour.
‘I only mentioned the school,’ Boland said, ‘because it was the other thing we had in common.’
‘As a matter of fact, I’m a governor up there now.’
‘Ah, go on!’
‘That’s why I said we’d maybe send the children there.’
‘Well, doesn’t that beat the band!’
‘I’m pleased myself. I’m pleased they asked me.’
‘Sure, anyone would be.’
Stupid he might be, Boland thought, but he was cute as well, the way he’d managed not to make a comment on the Roche and Dead Smith business. Cuteness was the one thing you could never get away from in Dublin. Cute as weasels they were.