Journeying through late September sunshine, Charlotte wept in a corner of her compartment. He respected Madame Langevin too much to betray her in the way her sister betrayed the husband she’d once chosen. Nor was he a man to cause his children pain in order to gratify a selfishness in himself. She knew all that, and in turn respected him. Her resignation was melancholy on that train journey, but with the balm of passing time it became more bearable.
‘You’re miles away, Charlotte,’ young men would later amusedly accuse, and she’d apologize, already back at Massuery. Listening to the young men’s chatter, she descended again the wide staircase, and walked in the woods. Such memories made it easier when with embarrassed gaucheness the young men seized her hand, or kissed her. When proposals came, her private reply was to see the white car waiting for her in the Place de la Paix, while aloud she apologized to whoever had got it into his head that she was free to love him.
‘These’ll ring the changes,’ the man who has commissioned the new prints says. When a business-room or the bedrooms of a hotel are repainted he always likes to have fresh curtains and fresh prints as well; it’s something that’s expected. In six months’ time, he says, he may be ready for another contribution from her. ‘That’s something to be thinking about, my love.’ He always calls her that. He has mahogany-coloured hair with a spring in it; the stubble on his chin and neck grows so slightly and so softly that he hardly has to shave. ‘We’ll send a cheque,’ he says.
Charlotte thanks him. There are other such men, and women too, who remember her when they want something new and unexacting for their décor. They admire her prints more than Charlotte does herself; for her the prints are by the way. What matters more is the certainty of her faith: even without thinking she knows that time, for her lover also, has failed to absorb the passion that was not allowed. For all the years that have passed she has thought of him as that; and dwelling on the nature of love during all that time she has long ago concluded that it’s a mystery, appearing to come from nowhere, no rhyme nor reason to it. The truth will not yield: why did so unsuitably, so cruelly almost, two people love?
Daylight hasn’t properly penetrated the December drabness. Fog shrouds the streets; the pavements are dampened by it. Busy with their assets and takeovers, the men of the business-rooms have probably never noticed the prints that hang there. ‘How charming that is!’ a woman, half-dressed in a hotel bedroom, may have remarked after the scurry of afternoon love or in some idle moment during a weekend’s deceit.
Charlotte sits for a while in the corner of a bar, her green portfolio empty beside her. No one else, except two barmen, are there so early in the day. She sips with pleasure the glass of red wine that has been brought to her; she lights a cigarette and with slow deliberation drops the spent match into the discoloured plastic ashtray in front of her. Then idly, on the cover of her folder, she sketches a funeral procession, sombre between two lines of plane trees. When eventually he sees it the man with the mahogany hair will display no curiosity, for he never does; in the rooms destined for her funeral scene no one will wonder either.
She finishes her wine and catches the eye of the taller barman. He brings her another glass. She remembers her father being angry, and her mother frowning in bewilderment. She never told them what she might have; but her father was angry because she had no ambition, because one young man after another was so summarily rejected. ‘You’re alone so,’ her mother sadly observed. Charlotte did not attempt to explain, for how could happily married people understand that such flimsiness could become the heart of a human existence? Ambitions in this direction or that, and would-be husbands keenly persuading, seemed empty of seriousness, ludicrous almost, compared with what she had.
She has never seen Monsieur Langevin’s handwriting, but imagines it is large and sloping, a little like Guy’s was. She knows she’ll never see it, for the thoughts that occur to her from time to time leave no illusions behind them: no letter will ever inform her that Madame Langevin, a month or so ago, was thrown from her horse – as once, unable to help herself, she dreamed. The funeral is not a hope, only another image from her printmaker’s stock. Why should an honourable deception end in romance? Rewards for decency are not duly handed out.
Their love affair, for her, is there among the memories of a summer, with the people of a household, the town she visited, Guy saying she will return, the sound of the gravel raked, the early-morning smell of coffee. For Monsieur Langevin, the deception is lived with every day, pain blinked away, words bitten back. For both of them, the pattern of their lives has formed around a moment in an afternoon. It is not often so, her lover tells her in yet another silent conversation. He, too, is grateful.
In Love with Ariadne
Images cluster, fragments make up the whole. The first of Barney’s memories is an upturned butter-box – that particular shape, narrower at the bottom. It’s in a corner of the garden where the grass grows high, where there are poppies, and pinks among the stones that edge a flowerbed. A dog pants, its paws stretched out on the grass, its tongue trailing from its mouth. Barney picks the pinks and decorates the dog with them, sticking them into its brindle fur. ‘Oh, you are bold!’ The hem of the skirt is blue, the shoes black. The hat Barney has thrown off is placed again on his head. He has a stick shaped like a finger, bent in the middle. It is hard and shiny and he likes it because of that. The sunshine is hot on his skin. There is a baby’s perspiration.
Barney’s mother died three years after his birth, but even so his childhood was not unhappy. In the garden at Lisscrea there was Charlie Redmond to talk to, and Nuala was in the kitchen. Dr G. T. Prenderville the brass plate on the wall by the hall door said, and all over the neighbourhood Barney’s father was known for his patience and his kindness – a big man in a tweed suit, his greying hair brushed straight back, his forehead tanned, a watch-chain looped across his waistcoat. Charlie Redmond made up doggerel, and twice a day came to the kitchen for cups of tea, leaving behind him a basket of peas, or beetroot, or whatever was in season. Because of the slanderous nature of his doggerel, Nuala called him a holy terror.
Lisscrea House, standing by the roadside, was covered with Virginia creeper. There were fields on one side and on the other the Mulpatricks’ cottage. Beyond that was the Edderys’ cottage, and an iron gate which separated it from Walsh’s public house – single-storeyed and whitewashed like the cottages. Opposite, across the road, were the ruins of a square tower, with brambles growing through them. A mile to the west was the Catholic church, behind white railings, with a shrine glorifying the Virgin just inside the gates. All the rooms at Lisscrea were long and narrow, each with a different, flowered wallpaper. In the hall the patients sat on a row of chairs that stretched between the front door and the stairs, waiting silently until Dr Prenderville was ready. Sometimes a man would draw up a cart or a trap outside, or dismount from a bicycle, and the doorbell would jangle urgently. ‘Always listen carefully to what’s said at the door,’ Dr Prenderville instructed Nuala. ‘If I’m out, write a message down.’
When Barney was seven he went to school in Ballinadra, waiting every morning on the road for Kilroy’s cart on its way to Ballinadra creamery with churns of milk. The bread van brought him back in the afternoon, and none of that changed until he was allowed to cycle – on Dr Prenderville’s old B.S.A. with its saddle and handle-bars lowered. ‘Up the airy mountain,’ Miss Bone’s thin voice enunciated in the schoolroom. Her features were pale, and slight; her fingers stained red with ink. There goes Miss Bone, Charlie Redmond’s cruel doggerel recorded. She’s always alone. Miss Bone was tender-hearted and said to be in love with Mr Gargan, the school’s headmaster, a married man. Quod erat demonstrandum, Mr Gargan regularly repeated in gravelly tones.