The Price of Blood

I'd ordered. I had to remind myself that none of them, and nobody else here in this opulent Christmas melee, none of the lush young women or their overweight, red-faced partners in candy-stripe shirts and blazers or the older horsey types in tweed and corduroy and their sleek beige-and-ivory women groomed within an inch of their lives, not one of them had paid a cent for me, and I owed them nothing in return.

I carried my pint across to Miranda. Her party had grabbed banquette seats around a small table. Miranda kissed me on both cheeks, and in the ear farthest from her friends, said, 'Sorry about that earlier. I do want you to find Patrick. I can pay you.'

'I'm already getting paid,' I said. 'But thank you.'

We were cheek to cheek, the room a clamor of laughter and jostling voices. Her bathroom had been full of Chanel No. 5 and I could smell that on her now, but faintly; her own scent overpowered it. Deep salt with a tang like oranges, it had gotten under my skin in her house; now I almost felt like the sole reason I had trailed her here was to breathe it again. She smiled at me, and opened her mouth; she still had lipstick on her teeth and I could see her tongue shift her chewing gum to one side. I laughed, and took a drink of my beer.

'What's so funny?' she said.

'You are,' I said. 'Is there any situation in which you don't chew gum?'

'That would be for you to find out,' she said. 'Mr. Private Investigator.'

The shrewd-looking blonde, who was wearing cream and gold and the slightest hint of leopardskin, said something pointed to the comb-over and he exploded in a fit of convulsive laughter, his hair slipping in a long unruly strand down his face. She looked at him pityingly, like a mother would glance at her obese child when no one else was looking, then raised an appraising gaze, and her glass, to me; I saluted her in the same fashion and we both drank.

'Jackie Tyrrell,' Miranda said quietly. 'It's our works do. The fatso is Sean Proby.'

'The bookie?'

'The father. The son, Jack, runs the day-to-day now. Sean is the figurehead, on TV telling war stories. He was a great comrade of F. X. Tyrrell's. They made a lot of money for each other. Then they fell out.'

'Over what?'

'Whatever came to hand. F.X. falls out with everyone sooner or later. You can be my date, if you like. We're going to the Octagon for supper.'

'Did you not have a date?'

'Are you worried he might show up and want to fight you?'

'I only like fighting in the morning. At least then there's a chance the day might improve.'

'Scaredy-cat.'

'Are Proby and Jackie an item?'

They were cackling with each other on the banquette, hand in hand. Miranda did an eye-rolling silent laugh at my question and shook her head at me.

'Oh dear God no. Sean bats for the other side, darling.'

'Despite being someone's father. This is all getting a bit too sophisticated for me. Why did you go to pieces when you heard Father Vincent Tyrrell's name?'

Jackie Tyrell, who had been giving a very good impression of a drunk, stood bolt upright and apparently sober.

'We can't be late,' she barked in a highly polished accent with a trace of Cork in it. 'Gilles will sulk. What's his name?' This last to Miranda of me.

'Ed Loy,' I said, extending my hand.

'Ed's writing a book,' Miranda announced. 'About horse racing and the Irish.'

'Oh God no,' Jackie Tyrrell said. 'That book gets written every year. It's always a fucking bore. You're not going to be a fucking bore, are you?'

'Compared to you?' I said.

She looked me up and down as if she had been offered me for sale.

'At least he's tall,' she said to Miranda. 'Not a skinny little boy. He's actually like a man, Miranda.'

'Thank you,' I said.

'Don't get smart with me,' Jackie Tyrrell said. 'I'm hungry.'

On his feet now, Sean Proby was pumping my hand up and down and laughing uproariously; the more I tried to retrieve my hand the tighter he held it, and the harder I struggled the louder he laughed; there we were like two clowns in hell until Jackie Tyrrell punched him sharply in the arm and he came to and beamed genially at me, now apparently sober himself.

The Octagon was a converted meeting hall around the corner in a lane off Kildare Street that had been painted white and gussied up with a lot of stained glass and indoor trees hung with fairy lights and gauze. People sat at several different levels on a succession of balconies and mezzanines. The staff were Irish and French and they made a big fuss of Jackie and Miranda; I heard Jackie speaking in immaculate French to Gilles, the maitre d', and Gilles instructing a wine waiter to bring Mrs. Tyrrell 'the usual.' The restaurant was full of the same kind of people who had been in the Shelbourne, and I quickly discovered why: the prices were absurdly high, but the food was very straightforward: onion soup and egg mayonnaise, pork belly and Toulouse sausages, steak frites; none of your two-scallops-on-a-huge-white-plate nonsense. Thus Irish people could indulge their aspirational need to get all fancy and French, and sate their ferocious desire to spend as much money as possible, while getting a huge amount of meat inside them.

Jackie waved a hand at me.

'I'll order, unless you have some particular preference.' She said preference in the sense of 'disease.'

'Go ahead,' I said.

The usual turned out to be two bottles of Sancerre and two bottles of Pinot Noir. Jackie ordered food for us all, and said, 'Just pour,' at the wine waiter.

I was trying to have a quiet word with Miranda, or maybe I was just trying to get as close to her as I physically could; I hadn't had much to drink but I felt like half my brain had shut down, and the other half was focused only on her scented flesh. But Jackie was beady and restless and in need of entertainment.

'You're very tall for a writer,' she said. I shrugged. I was pretty sure that some writers had to be tall, and if so, that I could be one of them.

'How far are you into your book?' she said.

'I'm nearly finished,' I said, wondering why Miranda had gifted me this spurious identity. When I tended bar in Santa Monica, I used to get a lot of writers. Some got paid for it, some were published, some were only writers in the sense that they didn't have a job, or a job they wanted to own up to. And whenever I asked them how they were getting on, they all said they were nearly finished, even the ones who evidently had never written a word and never would. It struck me occasionally that it might have been better to wait until you were finished before you went out to a bar. But then I wasn't a writer. And I had the sense that Jackie Tyrrell knew that.

'Well in that case, it's too late for us to tell you anything, isn't it? You must know it all by now.'

'Well, actually, it's at this stage-when I think I know it all-that's when meeting the experts is really useful. Now I know what questions to ask.'

Jackie drank half a glass of Sancerre in one and stared at me deadpan.

'Ask me then. The questions. Now you know it all. Go on.'

A hush fell around the table, and I could see Sean Proby and Miranda Hart looking excited, as if Jackie Tyrrell were the Queen and she'd just put me on the spot.

'Do you breed, Jackie?' I said.

'Not as a rule, but with you, I'd make an exception,' she said, and blew me a kiss. She sat back and poked Sean Proby in the ribs, and he dutifully exploded with laughter again. I looked at Miranda Hart, who leant in and said quickly and quietly, 'They were at Gowran Park, they've been going since lunchtime.'

The starters came, and we ate in silence. Jackie put her face down and shoveled onion soup and bread into it. At length she resurfaced, flush-cheeked and panting. Little beads of sweat dotted her mysteriously unlined brow, and frosted the tiny soft hairs above her upper lip.

'I don't breed anymore,' she announced. 'I used to look after that side of things for Frank. The Tyrrellscourt