The Collected Stories

called them, clinging to the periphery of life because that was where they felt safe, both of them a little destroyed.

They went on discussing the people they’d just left, wondering if some fresh drama had broken out, another explosion in the landscape of marriage that Marcus Stire had likened to a minefield. Finishing their drinks, they agreed that he’d certainly tell them if it had. They talked about him for a moment, and then the subject of the party drifted away from them and they talked of other things. Malcolm told her what was happening in Edwin Drood, because it was a book she would never read. His voice continued while they left the Red Rover and walked across the common, back to their house. It was odd, she reflected as she listened to it, that companionship had developed in their middle age, when luckier people made of their marriages such tales of woe.

The Paradise Lounge

On her high stool by the bar the old woman was as still as a statue. Perhaps her face is expressionless, Beatrice thought, because in repose it does not betray the extent of her years. The face itself was lavishly made up, eyes and mouth, rouge softening the wrinkles, a dusting of perfumed powder. The chin was held more than a little high, at an angle that tightened the loops of flesh beneath it. Grey hair was short beneath a black cloche hat that suggested a fashion of the past, as did the tight black skirt and black velvet coat. Eighty she’d be, Beatrice deduced, or eighty-two or - three.

‘We can surely enjoy ourselves,’ Beatrice’s friend said, interrupting her scrutiny of the old woman. ‘Surely we can, Bea?’

She turned her head. The closeness of his brick-coloured flesh and of the smile in his eyes caused her lips to tremble. She appeared to smile also, but what might have been taken for pleasure was a checking of her tears.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course.’

They were married, though not to one another. Beatrice’s friend, casually dressed for a summer weekend, was in early middle age, no longer slim yet far from bulky. Beatrice was thirty-two, petite and black-haired in a blue denim dress. Sunglasses disguised her deep-rust eyes, which was how - a long time ago now – her father had described them. She had wanted to be an actress then.

‘It’s best,’ her friend said, repeating the brief statement for what might have been the hundredth time since they had settled into his car earlier that afternoon. The affair was over, the threat to their families averted. They had come away to say goodbye.

‘Yes, I know it’s best,’ she said, a repetition also.

At the bar the old woman slowly raised a hand to her hat and touched it delicately with her fingers. Slowly the hand descended, and then lifted her cocktail glass. Her scarlet mouth was not quite misshapen, but age had harshly scored what once had been a perfect outline, lips pressed together like a rosebud on its side. Failure, Beatrice thought as casually she observed all this: in the end the affair was a failure. She didn’t even love him any more, and long ago he’d ceased to love her. It was euphemism to call it saying goodbye: they were having a dirty weekend, there was nothing left to lift it higher than that.

‘I’m sorry we couldn’t manage longer,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry about Glen-garriff.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Even so.’

She ceased to watch the old woman at the bar. She smiled at him, again disguising tears but also wanting him to know that there were no hard feelings, for why on earth should there be?

‘After all, we’ve been to Glengarriff,’ she said, a joke because on the one occasion they’d visited the place they had nearly been discovered in their deceptions. She’d used her sister as an excuse for her absences from home: for a long time now her sister had been genuinely unwell in a farmhouse in Go. Meath, a house that fortunately for Beatrice’s purpose didn’t have a telephone.

‘I’ll never forget you,’ he said, his large tanned hand suddenly on one of hers, the vein throbbing in his forehead. A line of freckles ran down beside the vein, five smudges on the redbrick skin. In winter you hardly noticed them.

‘Nor I you.’

‘Darling old Bea,’ he said, as if they were back at the beginning.

The bar was a dim, square lounge with a scattering of small tables, one of which they occupied. Ashtrays advertised Guinness, beer-mats Heineken. Sunlight touched the darkened glass in one of two windows, drawing from it a glow that was not unlike the amber gleam of whiskey. Behind the bar itself the rows of bottles, spirits upside down above their global measures, glittered pleasantly as a centrepiece, their reflections gaudy in a cluttered mirror. The floor had a patterned carpet, further patterned with cigarette burns and a diversity of stains. The Paradise Lounge the bar had been titled in a moment of hyperbole by the grandfather of the present proprietor, a sign still proclaiming as much on the door that opened from the hotel’s mahogany hall. Beatrice’s friend had hesitated, for the place seemed hardly promising: Keegan’s Railway Hotel in a town neither of them knew. They might have driven on, but he was tired and the sun had been in his eyes. ‘It’s all right,’ she had reassured him.

He took their glasses to the bar and had to ring a bell because the man in charge had disappeared ten minutes ago. ‘Nice evening,’ he said to the old woman on the bar-stool, and she managed to indicate agreement without moving a muscle of her carefully held head. ‘We’ll have the same again,’ he said to the barman, who apologized for his absence, saying he’d been mending a tap.

Left on her own, Beatrice sighed a little and took off her sunglasses. There was no need for this farewell, no need to see him for the last time in his pyjamas or to sit across a table from him at dinner and at breakfast, making conversation that once had come naturally. ‘A final fling’, he’d put it, and she’d thought of someone beating a cracked drum, trying to extract a sound that wasn’t there any more. How could it have come to this? The Paradise Lounge of Keegan’s Railway Hotel, Saturday night in a hilly provincial town, litter caught in the railings of the Christian Brothers’: how could this be the end of what they once had had? Saying goodbye to her, he was just somebody else’s husband: the lover had slipped away.

‘Well, it’s a terrible bloody tap we have,’ the barman was saying. ‘Come hell or high water, I can’t get a washer into it.’

‘It can be a difficult job.’

‘You could come in and say that to the wife for me, sir.’