could not be: the boarding-school in the Dublin mountains, a renowned Protestant monument, had been my father’s chosen destiny for me and that was that. If he hadn’t died, leaving home might perhaps have been more painful, but the death had brought with it practical complications and troubles, mainly concerned with the running of the granary and the mill: going away to school was slight compared with all that, or so my mother convinced me.
The headmaster of the renowned school was a small, red-skinned English cleric. With other new boys, I had tea with him and his wife in the drawing-room some days after term began. We ate small ham-paste sandwiches and Battenburg cake. The headmaster’s wife, a cold woman in grey, asked me what I intended to do – ‘in life’, as she put it. I said I’d run a granary and a mill at Curransbridge; she didn’t seem interested. The headmaster told us he was in
Miss Sheil had not prepared me well. ‘Dear boy, whoever taught you French?’ a man with a pipe asked me, and did not stay to hear my answer. ‘Your Latin, really!’ another man exclaimed, and the man who taught me mathematics warned me never to set my sights on a profession that involved an understanding of figures. I sat in the back row of the class with other boys who had been ill-prepared for the renowned school.
I don’t know when it was – a year, perhaps, or eighteen months after my first term – that I developed an inquisitiveness about my father. Had he, I wondered, been as bad at everything as I was? Had some other man with a pipe scorned his inadequacy when it came to French? Had he felt, as I did, a kind of desperation when faced with algebra? You’d
I asked my mother these questions, and other questions like them. But my mother was vague in her replies and said she believed, although perhaps she was wrong, that my father had not been good at mathematics. She laughed when I asked the questions. She told me to do my best.
But the more I thought about the future, and about myself in terms of the man whose place I was to take, the more curious I became about him. In the holidays my mother and I still went on our walks together, through the garden and then into the fields that stretched behind it, along the banks of the river that flowed through Curransbridge. But my mother spoke less and less about my father because increasingly there was less to say, except with repetition. I imagined the huge square in Venice and the cathedral and the bands playing outside the cafes. I imagined hundreds of other scenes, her own varied memories of their relationship and their marriage. We often walked in silence now, or I talked more myself, drawing her into a world of cross-country runs, and odorous changing-rooms, and the small headmaster’s repeated claim that the food we ate had a high calorific value. School was ordinarily dreary: I told her how we smoked wartime American cigarettes in mud huts specially constructed for the purpose and how we relished the bizarre when, now and again, it broke the monotony. There was a master called Mr Dingle, whose practice it was to inquire of new boys the colour and nature of their mother’s night-dresses. In the oak-panelled dining-hall that smelt of mince and the butter that generations had flicked on to the ceiling, Mr Dingle’s eye would glaze as he sat at the end of a Junior House table while one boy after another fuelled him with the stuff of fantasies. On occasions when parents visited the school he would observe through cigarette smoke the mothers of these new boys, stripping them of their skirts and blouses in favour of the night-clothes that their sons had described for him. There was another master, known as Nipper Achen, who was reputed to take a sensual interest in the sheep that roamed the mountainsides, and a boy called Testane-Hackett who was possessed of the conviction that he was the second son of God. In the dining-hall a gaunt black-clad figure, a butler called Toland, hovered about the high table where the headmaster and the prefects sat, assisted by a maid, said to be his daughter, who was known to us as the Bicycle. There was Fisher Major, who never washed, and Strapping, who disastrously attempted to treat some kind of foot ailment with mild acid. My mother listened appreciatively, and I often saw in her eyes the same look that had been there at breakfast-time when my father spoke of Fleming’s Hotel and Mr McNamara. ‘How like him you are!’ she now and again murmured, smiling at me.
At Curransbridge I stood in his office above the mill, a tiny room now occupied by the man my mother had chosen to look after things, a Mr Myers. In the house I rooted through the belongings he’d left behind; I stared at photographs of him. With Flannagan and my sisters I flew the kite he’d bought me that last time he’d been to Dublin. I polished the small brass dragon that his bar-room companion had given him to give to me. ‘It’s the boy’s birthday,’ I imagined him saying in the brown bar of Fleming’s Hotel, and I imagined the slow movement of Mr McNamara’s hand as he drew the dragon from his pocket. It was inevitable, I suppose, that sooner or later I should seek out Fleming’s Hotel.
‘An uncle,’ I said to the small headmaster. ‘Passing through Dublin, sir.’
‘Passing? Passing?’ He had a Home Counties accent and a hard nasal intonation. ‘Passing?’ he said again, giving the word an extra vowel sound.
‘On his way to Galway, sir. He’s in the RAF, sir. I think he’d like to see me, sir, because my father –’
‘Ah, yes, yes. Back in time for Chapel, please.’
It was a narrow, four-storey building in a terrace with others, a bleak-looking stone facade. The white woodwork of the windows needed a coat of paint, the glass portico over the entrance doors had a dusty look. It was on this dusty glass that the name
I wheeled the bicycle away from the shop and came, at the end of the street, to a canal. Slowly I ate the pear, and then I took my red-and-green school cap from my head and wheeled my bicycle slowly back to Fleming’s Hotel. I pushed open one of the entrance doors and for a split second I heard my father’s voice again, describing what I now saw: the smokiness of the low-ceilinged hall, a coal fire burning, and a high reception counter with the hotel’s register open on it, and a brass bell beside the register. There were brown leather armchairs in the hall and a brown leather bench running along one wall. Gas lamps were lit but even so, and in spite of the fact that it was four o’clock in the afternoon, the hall was dim. It was empty of other people and quiet. A tall grandfather clock ticked, the fire occasionally hissed. There was a smell of some kind of soup. It was the nicest, most comfortable hall I’d ever been in.
Beyond it, I could see another coal fire, through an archway. That was the bar where they used to sit, where for all I knew Mr McNamara was sitting now. I imagined my father crossing the hall as I crossed it myself. The bar was the same as the hall, with the same kind of leather chairs, and a leather bench and gas lamps and a low ceiling. There were net curtains pulled across the two windows, and one wall was taken up with a counter, with bottles on shelves behind it, and leather-topped stools in front of it. There was a woman sitting by the fire drinking orange-coloured liquid from a small glass. Behind the bar a man in a white jacket was reading the
I paused in the archway that divided the bar from the hall. I was under age. I had no right to take a further step and I didn’t know what to do or to say if I did. I didn’t know what drink to order. I didn’t know if in the dim
