again at the bridge table.
Cecilia’s father would sit there, slowly eating oysters. Cecilia would tell him about school and about her half-brothers, and of course she’d have to mention her mother because it was impossible to have a conversation without doing that. She’d mention Ronan also, but because of her father’s attitude to her stepfather this was never an embarrassment.
‘Aren’t they good today?’ Tom, the waiter at Fitzgerald’s, would remark, always at the same moment, when placing in front of Cecilia’s father his second pint of stout.
‘Great, Tom,’ her father would unhesitatingly reply, and then Tom would ask Cecilia how her bit of steak was and if the chips were crisp. He’d mention the name of a racehorse and Cecilia’s father would give his opinion of it, drawing a swift breath of disapproval or thoughtfully pursing his lips.
These occasions in Fitzgerald’s Oyster Bar – downstairs at the counter – were like a thread of similar beads that ran through Cecilia’s childhood, never afterwards to be forgotten. Dublin in the 1940s was a different city from the city it later became; she’d been different herself. Cecilia was five when her father first took her to Fitzgerald’s, the year after her parents were divorced.
‘And tell me,’ he said some time later, when she was growing up a bit, ‘have you an idea at all about what you’ll do with yourself?’
‘When I leave school, d’you mean?’
‘Well, there’s no hurry, I’m not saying there is. Still and all, you’re nearly thirteen these days.’
‘In June.’
‘Ah, I know it’s June, Cecilia.’ He laughed, with his glass half-way to his lips. He looked at her over the rim, his light-blue eyes twinkling in a way she was fond of. He was a burly man with a brown bald head and freckles on the back of his hands and all over his forehead and his nose.
‘I don’t know what I’ll do,’ she said.
‘Some fellow’ll snap you up. Don’t worry about that.’ He swallowed another oyster and wiped his mouth with his napkin. ‘How’s your mother?’
‘She’s fine.’
He never spoke disparagingly of her mother, nor she of him. When Cecilia was younger he used to drive up the short avenue of the house in Chapelizod in his old sloping-backed Morris, and Cecilia would always be ready for him. Her mother would say hullo to him and they’d have a little chat, and if Ronan opened the door or happened to be in the garden her father would ask him how he was, as though nothing untoward had ever occurred between them. Cecilia couldn’t understand any of it, but mistily there was the memory of her father living in the house in Chapelizod, and fragments from that time had lodged in her recollection. By the fire in the dining- room he read her a story she had now forgotten. ‘Your jersey’s inside out,’ he said to her mother and then he laughed because it was April Fools’ Day. Her father and Ronan had run a furniture-making business together, two large workshops in Chapelizod, not far from the house.
‘Lucky,’ he said in Fitzgerald’s. ‘Any fellow you’d accept.’
She blushed. At school a few of her friends talked of getting married, but in a way that wasn’t serious. Maureen Finnegan was in love with James Stewart, Betsy Bloom with a boy called George O’Malley: silly, really, it all was.
‘The hard case,’ a man in a thick overcoat said to her father, pausing on his way to the other end of the bar. ‘Would I chance money on Persian Gulf?’
Cecilia’s father shook his head and the man, accepting this verdict, nodded his. He winked at Cecilia in the way her father’s friends sometimes did after such an exchange, an acknowledgement of her father’s race-track wisdom. When he had gone her father told her that he was a very decent person who had come down in the world due to heavy drinking. Her father often had such titbits to impart and when he did so his tone was matter- of-fact, neither malicious nor pitying. In return, Cecilia would relate another fact or two about school, about Miss O’Shaughnessy or Mr Horan or the way Maureen Finnegan went on about James Stewart. Her father always listened attentively.
He hadn’t married again. He lived on his own in a flat in Waterloo Road, his income accumulating from a variety of sources, several of them to do with horse-racing. He’d explained that to her when she’d asked him once about this, wondering if he went to an office every day. She had never been to his flat, but he had described it to her because she’d wondered about that too.
‘We’ll take the trifle?’ he suggested, the only alternative offered by Fitzgerald’s being something called Bonanza Cream, over which Tom the waiter had years ago strenuously shaken his head.
‘Yes, please,’ she said.
When they’d finished it her father had a glass of whiskey and Cecilia another orange soda, and then he lit the third of his afternoon’s cigarettes. They never had lunch upstairs at Fitzgerald’s, where the restaurant proper was. ‘Now come and I’ll show you,’ her father had offered a year or so ago, and they had stared through a glass door that had the word
‘Bedad, isn’t her ladyship growing up,’ Tom said when her father had finished his whiskey and they both stood up. ‘Sure, it’s hardly a day ago she was a chiseler.’
‘Hardly a day,’ Cecilia’s father agreed, and Cecilia blushed again, glancing down at her wrists because she didn’t know where else to look. She didn’t like her wrists. They were the thinnest in Class Three, which was a fact she knew because a week ago one of the boys had measured everyone’s wrists with a piece of string. She didn’t like the black hair that hung down on either side of her face because it wasn’t curly like her mother’s. She didn’t like her eyes and she didn’t like the shape of her mouth, but the boy who had measured her wrists said she was the prettiest girl in Class Three. Other people said that too.
‘She’s a credit to yourself, sir,’ Tom said, scooping up notes and coins from the bar. ‘Thanks very much.’
