The Collected Stories

gaslight I looked a child.

I went to the bar and stood there. The man didn’t look up from his newspaper. Smithwick’s Ale were words on the labels of bottles: I would ask for a Smithwick’s Ale. All I wanted was to be allowed to remain, to sit down with the beer and to think about my father. If Mr McNamara did not come today he’d come another day. Frances had been right: he should have been written to. I should have written to him myself, to thank my father’s friend for his present.

‘Good evening,’ the barman said.

‘Smithwick’s, please,’ I said as casually as I could. Not knowing how much the drink might be, I placed a ten- shilling note on the bar.

‘Drop of lime in it, sir?’

‘Lime? Oh, yes. Yes, please. Thanks very much.’

‘Choppy kind of day,’ the barman said.

I took the glass and my change, and sat down as far as possible from where the woman was sitting. I sat so that I was facing both the bar and the archway, so that if Mr McNamara came in I’d see him at once. I’d have to leave at six o’clock in order to be safely back for Chapel at seven.

I finished the beer. I took an envelope out of my pocket and drew pieces of holly on the back of it, a simple art-form that Miss Sheil had taught all of us. I took my glass to the bar and asked for another Smithwick’s. The barman had a pale, unhealthy-seeming face, and wire-rimmed glasses, and a very thin neck. ‘You do want the best, don’t you?’ he said in a joky kind of voice, imitating someone. ‘Bird’s Custard,’ he said in the same joky way, ‘and Bird’s Jelly de Luxe.’ My father had mentioned this barman: he was repeating the advertisements of Radio Eireann. ‘You do want the best, don’t you?’ he said again, pushing the glass of beer towards me. By the fire, the woman made a noise, a slight, tired titter of amusement. I laughed myself, politely too.

When I returned to my armchair I found the woman was looking at me. I wondered if she could be a prostitute, alone in a hotel bar like that. A boy at school called Yeats claimed that prostitutes hung about railway stations mostly, and on quays. But there was of course no reason why you shouldn’t come across one in a bar.

Yet she seemed too quietly dressed to be a prostitute. She was wearing a green suit and a green hat, and there was a coat made of some kind of fur draped over a chair near the chair she sat on. She was a dark-haired woman with an oval face. I’d no idea what age she was: somewhere between thirty and forty, I imagined: I wasn’t good at guessing people’s ages.

The Smithwick’s Ale was having an effect on me. I wanted to giggle. How extraordinary it would be, I thought, if a prostitute tried to sell herself to me in my father’s and Mr McNamara’s hotel. After all, there was no reason at all why some prostitutes shouldn’t be quietly dressed, probably the more expensive ones were. I could feel myself smiling, holding back the giggle. Naturally enough, I thought, my father hadn’t mentioned the presence of prostitutes in Fleming’s Hotel. And then I thought that perhaps, if he’d lived, he would have told me one day, when my sisters and my mother weren’t in the room. It was the kind of thing, surely, that fathers did tell sons.

I took the envelope I’d drawn the holly on out of my pocket and read the letter it contained. They were managing, my mother said. Miss Sheil had had a dose of flu, Charlotte and Amelia wanted to breed horses, Frances didn’t know what she wanted to do. His rheumatics were slowing Flannagan down a bit in the garden. Bridget was insisting on sweeping the drawing-room chimney. It’ll be lovely at Christmas, she wrote. So nice being all together again.

The oval-faced woman put on her fur coat, and on her way from the bar she passed close to where I was sitting. She looked down and smiled at me.

‘Hills of the North, rejoice!’ we sang in chapel that night. ‘Valley and lowland, sing!’

I smelt of Smithwick’s Ale. I knew I did because as we’d stood in-line in Cloisters several other boys had remarked on it. As I sang, I knew I was puffing the smell all over everyone else. ‘Like a bloody brewery,’ Gahan Minor said afterwards.

‘… this night,’ intoned the small headmaster nasally, ‘and for ever more.’

‘Amen,’ we all replied.

Saturday night was a pleasant time. After Chapel there were two and a half hours during which you could do more or less what you liked, provided the master on duty knew where you were. You could work in the printing shop or read in the library, or take part in a debate, such as that this school is an outpost of the British Empire, or play billiards or do carpentry, or go to the model-railway club or the music-rooms. At half past nine there was some even freer time, during which the master on duty didn’t have to know where you were. Most boys went for a smoke then.

After Chapel on the Saturday night after I’d visited Fleming’s Hotel I read in the library. I read Jane Eyre, but all the time the oval face of the woman in the hotel kept appearing in my mind. It would stay there for a few seconds and then fade, and then return. Again and again, as I read Jane Eyre, she passed close to my chair in the bar of Fleming’s Hotel, and looked down and smiled at me.

The end of that term came. The Sixth Form and Remove did Macbeth on the last two nights, A. McC. P. Jackson giving what was generally regarded as a fine performance as Banquo. Someone stole the secondhand Penguin I’d bought from Grace Major to read on the train, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? Drumgoole and Montgomery were found conversing in the shower-room in the middle of the night.

On the journey home I was unable to stop thinking about Fleming’s Hotel. A man in the carriage lent me a copy of Barrack Variety, but the jokes didn’t seem funny. It was at moments like these that the truth most harshly mocked me. Ever since I’d found the hotel, ever since the woman had stared at me, it had been a part of every day, and for whole nights in my long, cheerless dormitory I had been unable to sleep. My father’s voice had returned to me there, telling again the stories of his friend, and reminding me of his friend’s opinions. My father had disagreed with my mother in her view that de Valera should not hand over the ports to Churchill, preferring to share the view of his friend. At school and on the train, and most of all when I returned home, the truth made me feel ill, as though I had flu.

That Christmas morning we handed each other our presents, after we’d eaten, still observing my father’s rule. We thought of him then, they in one way, I in another. ‘Oh, my dear, how lovely!’ my mother whispered over some ornament I’d bought her in a Dublin shop. I had thrown the dragon with the green glass eyes far into a lake near the school, unable to understand how my father had ever brought it to the house, or brought bars of chocolate or tins of Jacob’s biscuits. To pass to his children beneath my mother’s eyes the gifts of another woman seemed as awful a sin as any father could commit, yet somehow it was not as great as the sin of sharing with all of us this other woman’s eccentric household, her sister and her sister’s husband, her alcoholic aunt, a maid and a dog.