The drinks were paid for, the transaction terminated. Further gin and Martini were poured into the old woman’s glass, and Beatrice watched again while like a zombie the old woman lit a cigarette.
Miss Doheny her name was: though beautiful once, she had never married. Every Saturday evening she met the Meldrums in the Paradise Lounge, where they spent a few hours going through the week that had passed, exchanging gossip and commenting on the world. Miss Doheny was always early and would sit up at the bar for twenty minutes on her own, having the extra couple of drinks that, for her, were always necessary. Before the Meldrums arrived she would make her way to a table in a corner, for that was where Mrs Meldrum liked to be.
It wasn’t usual that other people were in the bar then. Occasionally it filled up later but at six o’clock, before her friends arrived, she nearly always had it to herself. Francis Keegan – the hotel’s inheritor, who also acted as barman – spent a lot of time out in the back somewhere, attending to this or that. It didn’t matter because after their initial greeting of one another, and a few remarks about the weather, there wasn’t much conversation that Miss Doheny and he had to exchange. She enjoyed sitting up at the bar on her own, glancing at the reflections in the long mirror behind the bottles, provided the reflections were never of herself. On the other hand it was a pleasant enough diversion, having visitors.
Miss Doheny, who had looked twice at Beatrice and once at her companion, guessed at their wrong-doing. Tail-ends of conversation had drifted across the lounge, no effort being made to lower voices since more often than not the old turn out to be deaf. They were people from Dublin whose relationship was not that recorded in Francis Keegan’s register in the hall. Without much comment, modern life permitted their sin; the light-brown motor-car parked in front of the hotel made their self-indulgence a simple matter.
How different it had been, Miss Doheny reflected, in 1933! Correctly she estimated that that would have been the year when she herself was the age the dark-haired girl was now. In 1933 adultery and divorce and light-brown motor-cars had belonged more in America and England, read about and alien to what already was being called the Irish way of life. ‘Catholic Ireland,’ Father Cully used to say. ‘Decent Catholic Ireland.’ The term was vague and yet had meaning: the emergent nation, seeking pillars on which to build itself, had plumped for holiness and the Irish language – natural choices in the circumstances. ‘A certain class of woman,’ old Father Cully used to say, ‘constitutes an abhorrence.’ The painted women of Clancy’s Picture House – sound introduced in 1936 – were creatures who carried a terrible warning. Jezebel women, Father Cully called them, adding that the picture house should never have been permitted to exist. In his grave for a quarter of a century, he would hardly have believed his senses if he’d walked into the Paradise Lounge in Keegan’s Railway Hotel to discover two adulterers, and one of his flock who had failed to heed his castigation of painted women. Yet for thirty-five years Miss Doheny had strolled through the town on Saturday evenings to this same lounge, past the statue of the 1798 rebel, down the sharp incline of Castle Street. On Sundays she covered the same ground again, on the way to and from Mass. Neither rain nor cold prevented her from making the journey to the Church of the Resurrection or to the hotel, and illness did not often afflict her. That she had become more painted as the years piled up seemed to Miss Doheny to be natural in the circumstances.
In the Paradise Lounge she felt particularly at home. In spring and summer the Meldrums brought plants for her, or bunches of chives or parsley, sometimes flowers. Not because she wished to balance the gesture with one of her own but because it simply pleased her to do so she brought for them a pot of jam if she had just made some, or pieces of shortbread. At Christmas, more formally, they exchanged gifts of a different kind. At Christmas the lounge was decorated by Francis Keegan, as was the hall of the hotel and the dining-room. Once a year, in April, a dance was held in the dining-room, in connection with a local point-to-point, and it was said in the town that Francis Keegan made enough in the bar during the course of that long night to last him for the next twelve months. The hotel ticked over from April to April, the Paradise Lounge becoming quite brisk with business when an occasional function was held in the dining-room, though never achieving the abandoned spending that distinguished the night of the point-to-point. Commercial travellers sometimes stayed briefly, taking pot-luck with Mrs Keegan’s cooking, which at the best of times was modest in ambition and achievement. After dinner these men would sit on one of the high stools in the Paradise Lounge, conversing with Francis Keegan and drinking bottles of stout. Mrs Keegan would sometimes put in a late appearance and sip a glass of gin and water. She was a woman of slatternly appearance, with loose grey hair and slippers. Her husband complemented her in style and manner, his purplish complexion reflecting a dedication to the wares he traded in across his bar. They were an undemanding couple, charitable in their opinions, regarded as unfortunate in the town since their union had not produced children. Because of that, Keegan’s Railway Hotel was nearing the end of its days as a family concern and in a sense it was fitting that that should be so, for the railway that gave it its title had been closed in 1951.
How I envy her! Miss Doheny thought. How fortunate she is to find herself in these easy times, not condemned because she loves a man! It seemed right to Miss Doheny that a real love affair was taking place in the Paradise Lounge and that no one questioned it. Francis Keegan knew perfectly well that the couple were not man and wife: the strictures of old Father Cully were as fusty by now as neglected mice droppings. The holiness that had accompanied the birth of a nation had at last begun to shed its first tight skirt: liberation, Miss Doheny said to herself, marvelling over the word.
They walked about the town because it was too soon for dinner. Many shops were still open, greengrocers anxious to rid themselves of cabbage that had been limp for days and could not yet again be offered for sale after the weekend, chemists and sweetshops. Kevin Croady, Your Best for Hi-Fi, had arranged a loudspeaker in a window above his premises: Saturday-night music blared forth, punk harmonies and a tenor rendering of ‘Kelly the Boy from Killann’. All tastes were catered for.
The streets were narrow, the traffic congested. Women picked over the greengrocers’ offerings, having waited until this hour because prices would be reduced. Newly shaved men slipped into the public houses, youths and girls loitered outside Redmond’s Cafe and on the steps of the 1798 statue. Two dogs half-heartedly fought outside the Bank of Ireland.
The visitors to the town inquired where the castle was, and then made their way up Castle Hill. ‘Opposite Castle Motors,’ the child they’d asked had said, and there it was: an ivy-covered ruin, more like the remains of a cowshed. Corrugated iron sealed off an archway, its torn bill-posters advertising Calor Gas and a rock group, Duffy’s Circus and Fine Gael, and the annual point-to-point that kept Keegan’s Railway Hotel going. Houses had been demolished in this deserted area, concrete replacements only just begun. The graveyard of the Protestant church was unkempt;
‘Not exactly camera fodder,’ he said with his easy laugh. ‘A bloody disgrace, some of these towns are.’
‘The people don’t notice, I suppose.’
‘They should maybe wake themselves up.’
The first time he’d seen her, he’d afterwards said, he had heard himself whispering that it was she he should have married. They’d sat together, talking over after-dinner coffee in someone else’s house. He’d told her, lightly, that he was in the Irish rope business, almost making a joke of it because that was his way. A week later his car had drawn up beside her in Rathgar Road, where she’d lived since her marriage. ‘I thought I recognized you,’ he said, afterwards confessing that he’d looked up her husband’s name in the telephone directory. ‘Come in for a drink,’ she invited, and of course he had. Her two children had been there, her husband had come in.
They made their way back to the town, she taking his arm as they descended the steep hill they’d climbed. A
