He wagged his head and smiled. But in a serious voice he said he hoped she didn’t pay too much for the cakes, and she explained that she didn’t.
It was odd the way Maureen Finnegan and all the others, even the Bull, had suspected the tidy settlement there’d been. It would be ridiculous, now, ever to look after him in his flat.
‘I hate to lose poor Tom’s money for him.’
‘Won’t Amazon Girl win?’
‘Never a hope.’
Women in brightly coloured dresses passed by as Cecilia’s father paused for a moment by a bookmaker’s stand to examine the offered odds. He ran a hand over his jaw, considering. A woman with red hair and sunglasses came up. She said it was good to see him and then passed on.
‘We’ll take a small little flutter on Gillian’s, Choice,’ he finally said. ‘D’you like the sound of that, Cecilia?’
She said she did. She put some of the money he had given her on the horse and waited for him while he transacted with another bookmaker. He approached a third one with Tom’s pound for Amazon Girl. It was a habit of his to bet with different bookmakers.
‘That red-haired woman’s from Carlow,’ he said as they set off to their vantage point. ‘The widow of the county surveyor.’
‘Yes,’ she said, not caring much about the red-haired woman.
‘Gillian’s Choice is the one with the golden hoops,’ he said. ‘Poor Tom’s old nag is the grey one.’
The horses went under starter’s orders and then, abruptly, were off. In the usual surprisingly short space of time the race was over.
‘What did I tell you?’ He laughed down at her as they went to collect the winnings from their two different bookmakers. He had won more than three hundred pounds, she fourteen and sixpence. They always counted at the end; they never lost when they went together. He said she brought him luck, but she knew it was the other way round.
‘You’ll find your way to the bus, Cecilia?’
‘Yes, I will. Thanks very much.’
He nodded. He kissed her in his awkward way and then disappeared into the crowd, as he always seemed to do when they parted. It was standing about in the sun, she thought, that caused him to have so many freckles. She imagined him at other race-courses, idling between races without her, sunning himself while considering a race-card. She imagined him in his flat in Waterloo Road and wondered if he ever cried.
She walked slowly away, the money clenched in her hand because the rosebud dress had no pockets. He did cry, she thought: on the Saturdays when they met, when he was on his own again. It was easy to imagine him because she wanted to cry herself, because on all their occasions in the future there would be the doubt. Neither of them would ever really know what being together meant, downstairs at Fitzgerald’s or anywhere else.
The man, naked himself, slowly removed the woman’s clothes: a striped red-and-black dress, a petticoat, stockings, further underclothes. In an armchair he took the woman on to his knees, nuzzling her neck with his mouth.
A second man entered the room and divested himself of his clothes. A second woman, in a grey skirt and jersey, was divested of hers. The four sprawled together on the armchair and the floor. Complex sexual union took place.
The film ended; a square of bright light replaced the sexual antics on the sheet of cartridge paper which Mulvihill had attached to the back of his drawing-office door. He switched on a green-shaded desk light, removed the cartridge paper and the drawing-pins that had held it in place. Packing away his projector in the bottom drawer of his filing-cabinet, he hummed beneath his breath an old tune from his childhood, ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’. The projector and Mulvihill’s films were naturally kept under lock and key. Some of his films he could project at home and often did so; others he did not feel he could. ‘Whatever are you doing, dear?’ his sister some- times called through the door of the garden shed where now and again he did a bit of carpentry, and of course it would be terrible if ever she discovered the stuff. So every Friday evening, when everyone else had left the Ygnis and Ygnis building – and before the West Indian cleaners arrived in the corridor where his office was – Mulvihill locked the door and turned the lights out. He’d been doing it for years.
He was a man with glasses, middle-aged, of medium height, neither fat nor thin. Given to wearing Harris tweed jackets and looking not unlike an advertisement for the Four Square tobacco he smoked, he travelled every day to the centre of London from the suburb of Purley, where his relationship with his slightly older sister was cemented by the presence in their lives of a Scotch terrier called Pasco. By trade Mulvihill was a designer of labels – labels for soup-tins and coffee in plastic packets, for seed-packets and sachets of shampoo. The drawing-office he shared with a Hungarian display artist called Wilkinski reflected the work of both of them. The walls were covered with enlarged versions of designs that had in the past been used to assist in the selling of a variety of products; cardboard point-of-sale material stood on all the office’s surfaces except the two sloping drawing- boards, each with its green-shaded light. Paintbrushes and pencils filled jam jars, different-coloured papers were stored in a corner. In different colours also, sheaves of cellophane hung from bulldog-clips. Tins of Cow paper adhesive were everywhere.
Being at the ordinary end of things, neither Mulvihill nor Wilkinski created the Ygnis and Ygnis glamour that appeared on the television screen and in the colour supplements: their labels and display material were merely echoes of people made marvellous with a red aperitif on the way to their lips, of women enriched by the lather of a scented soap, and men invigorated by the smooth operation of a razor-blade. From Ygnis and Ygnis came images lined always with a promise, of happiness or ecstasy. Girls stood aloof by castle walls, beautiful in silk. Children laughed as they played, full of the beans that did them good. Ygnis and Ygnis was of the present, but the past was never forgotten: the hot days of summer before the worst of the wars, brown bread and jam, and faded flowered dresses. The future was simple with plain white furniture and stainless steel and Japanese titbits. In the world of wonders that was Ygnis and Ygnis’s, empresses ate Turkish Delight and men raced speedboats. For ever and for ever there was falling in love.
Mulvihill took his mackintosh from a peg on the wall, and picked up the two short pieces of timber he’d purchased during the lunch hour and with which, that weekend, he hoped to repair a bookcase. He didn’t light his pipe, although while watching ‘Confessions of a Housewife’ he had filled it with Four Square, ready to ignite it in the lift. ‘Evening, Violet,’ he said to the big West Indian lady who was just beginning to clean the offices of the corridor. He listened for a moment while she continued what she had been telling him last Friday, about a
