‘I’m off,’ May said, and Barney walked with her to her bus stop, not properly listening while she told him that a girl who would enter a motor-car as easily as that would come to an unsavoury end. ‘I’ll look out for you in the Crystal,’ she promised before they parted.
On the journey back to Sinnott Street Barney was accompanied by an impression, as from a fantasy, of May’s plump body, breasts pressed against his chest, a knee touching one of his, the moist warmth of her palm. Such physical intimacy was not the kind he had ever associated with Ariadne, but as he approached his lodgings he knew he could not let the night pass without the greater reality of seeing her face, without – even for an instant – being again in her company.
When he arrived at Mrs Lenehan’s house he continued to ascend the stairs after he’d reached the landing off which his room lay. Any moment a light might come on, he thought; any moment he would stand exposed and have to pretend he had made a mistake. But the darkness continued, and he switched on no lights himself. Softly, he turned the handle of the door above his, and closed it, standing with his back to the panels. He could see nothing, but so close did the unspoken relationship feel that he half expected to hear his name whispered. That did not happen; he could not hear even the sound of breathing. He remained where he stood, prepared to do so for however many hours might pass before streaks of light showed on either side of the window blinds. He gazed; at where he knew the bed must be, confirmed in this conjecture by the creeping twilight. He waited, with all the passion he possessed pressed into a longing to glimpse the features he had come to love. He would go at once then. One day, in some happy future, he would tell Ariadne of this night of adoration.
But as the room took form – the wardrobe, the bed, the wash-stand, the chest of drawers – he sensed, even before he could discern more than these outlines, that he was alone. No sleeping face rewarded his patience, no dark hair lay on the pillow. The window blinds were not drawn down. The bed was orderly, and covered. The room was tidy, as though abandoned.
Before the arrival of Professor Makepeace-Green the following morning, the episode in the alleyway and Slovinski’s swift spiriting away of the willowy woman from the dance-hall floor were retailed. Barney was commiserated with because he had failed to take his chances. Rouge Medlicott and Slovinski, and several other ex-servicemen, gave him advice as to amorous advancement in the future. His preoccupied mood went unnoticed.
That evening, it was the old woman who told him. When he remarked upon Ariadne’s absence in the dining-room she said their future needs in this respect would be attended to by a maid called Biddy whom Mrs Lenehan was in the process of employing. When he asked her where Ariadne had gone she said that Ariadne had always been religious.
‘Religious?’
‘Ariadne’s working in the kitchen of the convent.’
Mr Sheehy came into the dining-room and removed his navy-blue overcoat and his tan gloves. A few minutes later Mrs Lenehan placed the plates of fried food in front of her lodgers, and then returned with the metal teapot. Mr Sheehy spoke of the houses he had visited during the day, in his capacity as agent for the Hibernian Insurance Company. Mrs Lenehan put her mother’s bottle of stout to warm in the fender.
‘Is Ariadne not going to live here any more?’ Barney asked Mrs Fennerty when Mr Sheehy and Mrs Lenehan had gone out for their walk to the McKee Barracks.
‘I’d say she’ll stop in the convent now. Ariadne always liked that convent.’
‘I know.’
Mrs Fennerty lit her evening cigarette. It was to be expected, she said. It was not a surprise.
‘That she should go there?’
‘After you took Ariadne out, Barney. You follow what I mean?’
He said he didn’t. She nodded, fresh thoughts agreeing with what she had already stated. She poured her stout. She had never called him Barney before.
‘It’s called going out, Barney. Even if it’s nothing very much.’
‘Yes, but what’s that to do with her working in the convent?’
‘She didn’t tell you about Lenehan? She didn’t mention her father, Barney?’
‘Yes, she did.’
‘She didn’t tell you he took his life?’ The old woman crossed herself, her gesture as swift as it always was when she made it. She continued to pour her stout, expertly draining it down the side of the glass.
‘No, she didn’t tell me that.’
‘When Ariadne was ten years old her father took his life in an upstairs room.’
‘Why did he do that, Mrs Fennerty?’
‘He was not a man I ever liked.’ Again she paused, as though to dwell privately upon her aversion to her late son-in-law. ‘Shame is the state Ariadne lives in.’
‘Shame?’
‘Can you remember when you were ten, Barney?’
He nodded. It was something they had in common, he’d said to Ariadne, that for both of them a parent had died. Any child had affection for a father, Mrs Fennerty was saying.
‘Why did Mr Lenehan take his life?’
Mrs Fennerty did not reply. She sipped her stout. She stared into the glow of the fire, then threw her cigarette end into it. She said Mr Lenehan had feared arrest.
‘Arrest?’ he repeated, stupidly.
‘There was an incident on a tram.’ Again the old woman blessed herself. Her jauntiness had left her. She repeated what she’d told him the first evening he sat with her: that her daughter was a fool where men were concerned. ‘At that time people looked at Ariadne on the street. When the girls at the convent shunned her the nuns were nice to her. She’s never forgotten that.’
‘What kind of an incident, Mrs Fennerty?’
‘A child on a tram. They have expressions for that kind of thing. I don’t even like to know them.’
He felt cold, even though he was close to the fire. It was as though he had been told, not of the death of Ariadne’s father but of her own. He wished he had taken her arm when they went for their walk. He wished she’d said yes when he’d suggested they should have tea in a cinema café. Not so long ago he hadn’t even known she existed, yet now he couldn’t imagine not loving her.
‘It would have been no good, Barney.’
He asked her what she meant, but she didn’t answer. He knew anyway. It would have been no good because what seemed like a marvel of strangeness in Ariadne was damage wrought by shame. She had sensed his love, and fear had come, possibly revulsion. She would have hated it if he’d taken her arm, even if he’d danced with her, as he had with May.
‘Ariadne’ll stay there always now,’ the old woman said, sipping more of her stout. Delicately, she wiped a smear of foam from her lips. It was a silver lining that there’d been the convent kitchen to go to, that the same nuns were there to be good to her.
‘She’d still be here if I hadn’t taken the room.’
‘You were the first young man, Barney. You couldn’t be held to blame.’
When Barney returned to Dublin from Lisscrea at the beginning of his second term he found, unexpectedly, that he had been allocated College rooms. He explained that in Sinnott Street, and Mrs Lenehan said it couldn’t be helped. ‘Mr Sheehy and myself are getting married,’ she added in the hall.
Barney said he was glad, which was not untrue. Mr Sheehy had been drawn towards a woman’s property; for her part, Mrs Lenehan needed more than a man could offer her on walks to the McKee Barracks. Mrs Lenehan had survived the past; she had not been damaged; second time round, she had settled for Mr Sheehy.
In the dining-room he said goodbye to Mrs Fennerty. There was a new young clerk in Ned Sheehy’s office who was looking for digs, she said. He would take the vacant room, it wouldn’t be empty for long. A student called Browder had moved into Ariadne’s a week or so after her going. It hadn’t been empty for long either.