Elizabeth talked on, of the children and of Mr Higgs. I rang up our doctor, and he came, and then a little later my wife was taken from the house. I sat alone with Lisa on my knee until it was time to go and fetch Christopher and Anna.
‘Mummy’s ill,’ I said in the car. ‘She’s had to go away for a little.’ I would tell them the story gradually, and one day perhaps we might visit her and she might still understand who we were. ‘Ill?’ they said. ‘But Mummy’s never ill.’ I stopped the car by our house, thinking that only death could make the house seem so empty, and thinking too that death was easier to understand. We made tea, I remember, the children and I, not saying very much more.
The Grass Widows
The headmaster of a great English public school visited every summer a village in County Galway for the sake of the fishing in a number of nearby rivers. For more than forty years this stern, successful man had brought his wife to the Slieve Gashal Hotel, a place, so he said, he had come to love. A smiling man called Mr Doyle had been for all the headmaster’s experience of the hotel its obliging proprietor: Mr Doyle had related stories to the headmaster late at night in the hotel bar, after the headmaster’s wife had retired to bed; they had discussed together the fruitfulness of the local rivers, although in truth Mr Doyle had never held a rod in his life. ‘You feel another person,’ the headmaster had told generations of his pupils, ‘among blue mountains, in the quiet little hotel.’ On walks through the school grounds with a senior boy on either side of him he had spoken of the soft peace of the riverside and of the unrivalled glory of being alone with one’s mind. He talked to his boys of Mr Doyle and his unassuming ways, and of the little village that was a one-horse place and none the worse for that, and of the good plain food that came from the Slieve Gashal’s kitchen.
To Jackson Major the headmaster enthused during all the year that Jackson Major was head boy of the famous school, and Jackson Major did not ever forget the paradise that then had formed in his mind. ‘I know a place,’ he said to his fiancée long after he had left the school, ‘that’s perfect for our honeymoon.’ He told her about the heathery hills that the headmaster had recalled for him, and the lakes and rivers and the one-horse little village in which, near a bridge, stood the ivy-covered bulk of the Slieve Gashal Hotel. ‘Lovely, darling,’ murmured the bride-to-be of Jackson Major, thinking at the time of a clock in the shape of a human hand that someone had given them and which would naturally have to be changed for something else. She’d been hoping that he would suggest Majorca for their honeymoon, but if he wished to go to this other place she didn’t intend to make a fuss. ‘Idyllic for a honeymoon,’ the headmaster had once remarked to Jackson Major, and Jackson Major had not forgotten. Steady but unimaginative were words that had been written of him on a school report.
The headmaster, a square, bald man with a head that might have been carved from oak, a man who wore rimless spectacles and whose name was Angusthorpe, discovered when he arrived at the Slieve Gashal Hotel in the summer of 1968 that in the intervening year a tragedy had occurred. It had become the custom of Mr Angusthorpe to book his fortnight’s holiday by saying simply to Mr Doyle: ‘Till next year then,’ an anticipation that Mr Doyle would translate into commercial terms, reserving the same room for the headmaster and his wife in twelve months’ time. No letters changed hands during the year, no confirmation of the booking was ever necessary: Mr Angusthorpe and his wife arrived each summer after the trials of the school term, knowing that their room would be waiting for them, with sweet-peas in a vase in the window, and Mr Doyle full of welcome in the hall. ‘He died in Woolworth’s in Galway,’ said Mr Doyle’s son in the summer of 1968. ‘He was buying a shirt at the time.’
Afterwards, Mr Angusthorpe said to his wife that when Mr Doyle’s son spoke those words he knew that nothing was ever going to be the same again. Mr Doyle’s son, known locally as Scut Doyle, went on speaking while the headmaster and his small wife, grey-haired, and bespectacled also, stood in the hall. He told them that he had inherited the Slieve Gashal and that for all his adult life he had been employed in the accounts department of a paper-mill in Dublin. ‘I thought at first I’d sell the place up,’ he informed the Angusthorpes, ‘and then I thought maybe I’d attempt to make a go of it. “Will we have a shot at it?” I said to the wife, and, God bless her, she said why wouldn’t I?’ While he spoke, the subject of his last remarks appeared behind him in the hall, a woman whose appearance did not at all impress Mr Angusthorpe. She was pale-faced and fat and, so Mr Angusthorpe afterwards suggested to his wife, sullen. She stood silently by her husband, whose appearance did not impress Mr Angusthorpe either, since the new proprietor of the Slieve Gashal, a man with shaking hands and a cocky grin, did not appear to have shaved himself that day. ‘One or other of them, if not both,’ said Mr Angusthorpe afterwards, ‘smelt of drink.’
The Angusthorpes were led to their room by a girl whose age Mr Angusthorpe estimated to be thirteen. ‘What’s become of Joseph?’ he asked her as they mounted the stairs, referring to an old porter who had always in the past been spick-and-span in a uniform, but the child seemed not to understand the question, for she offered it no reply. In the room there were no sweet-peas, and although they had entered by a door that was familiar to them, the room itself was greatly altered: it was, to begin with, only half the size it had been before. ‘Great heavens!’ exclaimed Mr Angusthorpe, striking a wall with his fist and finding it to be a partition. ‘He had the carpenters in,’ the child said.
Mr Angusthorpe, in a natural fury, descended the stairs and shouted in the hall. ‘Mr Doyle!’ he called out in his peremptory headmaster’s voice. ‘Mr Doyle! Mr Doyle!’
Doyle emerged from the back regions of the hotel, with a cigarette in his mouth. There were feathers on his clothes, and he held in his right hand a half-plucked chicken. In explanation he said that he had been giving his wife a hand. She was not herself, he confided to Mr Angusthorpe, on account of it being her bad time of the month.
‘Our room,’ protested Mr Angusthorpe. ‘We can’t possibly sleep in a tiny space like that. You’ve cut the room in half, Mr Doyle.’
Doyle nodded. All the bedrooms in the hotel, he told Mr Angusthorpe, had been divided, since they were uneconomical otherwise. He had spent four hundred and ten pounds having new doorways made and putting on new wallpaper. He began to go into the details of this expense, plucking feathers from the chicken as he stood there. Mr Angusthorpe coldly remarked that he had not booked a room in which you couldn’t swing a cat.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ interrupted Doyle. ‘You booked a room a year ago: you did not reserve a specific room. D’you know what I mean, Mr Angusthorpe? I have no note that you specified with my father to have the exact room again.’
‘It was an understood thing between us –’