He returned to the hotel and Artie helped him to carry his trunk upstairs. He wished that none of it had ever happened.
Dervla was glad he made no further effort to talk to her, but standing between courses by the dumb-waiter in the dining-room, she often wondered what he was thinking. While the others talked he was at first affected by embarrassment because at mealtimes in the past there had been the thrill of surreptitious glances and forbidden smiles. But after a week or so he became less quiet, joining in the family conversation, and she became the dining-room maid again.
Yet for Dervla the moment of placing his food in front of him was as poignant as ever it had been, and in her private moments she permitted herself the luxury of dwelling in the past. In her bedroom in Thomas MacDonagh Street she closed her eyes and willed into her consciousness the afternoon sunlight of Room 14. Once more she was familiar with the quickening of his heart and the cool touch of his hands. Once more she clung to him, her body huddled into his on the rickety chair in the corner, the faraway cries of Molly and Margery-Jane gently disturbing the silence.
Dervla did not experience bitterness. She was fortunate that the Congreves had been above the pettiness of dismissing her, and when she prayed she gave thanks for that. When more time had gone by she found herself able to confess the sinning that had been so pleasurable in Room 14, and was duly burdened with a penance for both the misdemeanours and her long delay in confessing them. She had feared to lose what there had been through expiation, but the fear had been groundless: only reality had been lost. ‘Young Carroll was asking for you,’ her father reported in a bewildered way, unable to understand her reluctance even to consider Buzzy Carroll’s interest.
Everything was easier when the green trunk and the box with the metal brackets stood in the back hall at the beginning of another term, and when a few more terms had come and gone he greeted her in the hotel as if all she had confessed to was a fantasy. Like his parents, she sensed, he was glad her dismissal had not been necessary, for that would have been unfair. ‘Did my mother speak to you?’ The quiet vehemence there had been in his voice was sweet to remember, but he himself would naturally wish to forget it now: for him, Room 14 must have come to seem like an adventure in indiscretion, as naturally his parents had seen it.
Two summers after he left school Dervla noticed signs in him that painfully echoed the past. An archdeacon’s daughter sometimes had lunch with the family: he couldn’t take his eyes off her. Serving the food and in her position by the dumb-waiter, Dervla watched him listening while the archdeacon’s daughter talked about how she and her parents had moved from one rectory to another and how the furniture hadn’t fitted the new rooms, how there hadn’t been enough stair-carpet. The archdeacon’s daughter was very beautiful. Her dark hair was drawn back from a centre parting; when she smiled a dimple came and went in one cheek only; her skin was like the porcelain of a doll’s skin. Often in the dining-room she talked about her childhood in the seaside backwater where she had once lived. Every morning in summer and autumn she and her father had gone together to the strand to bathe. They piled their clothes up by a breakwater, putting stones on them if there was a wind, and then they would run down the sand to the edge of the sea. A man sometimes passed by on a horse, a retired lighthouse keeper, a lonely, widowed man. Christopher was entranced.
Dervla cleared away the dishes, expertly disposing of chop bones or bits of left-behind fat. Mary had years ago shown her how to flick the table refuse on to a single plate, a different one from the plate you gathered the used knives and forks on to. Doing so now, she too listened to everything the archdeacon’s daughter said. Once upon a time the Pierrots had performed on the strand in August, and Hewitt’s Travelling Fun Fair had come; regularly, June to September, summer visitors filled the promenade boarding-houses, arriving on excursion trains. Garish pictures were painted with coloured powders on the sand, castles and saints and gardens. ‘I loved that place,’ the archdeacon’s daughter said.
Afterwards Dervla watched from an upstairs window, the window in fact of Room 14. The archdeacon’s daughter sat with him in the garden, each of them in a deck-chair, laughing and conversing. They were always laughing: the archdeacon’s daughter would say something and he would throw his head back with appreciation and delight. Long before the engagement was announced Dervla knew that this was the girl who was going to take her place, in his life and in the hotel.
The Archdeacon conducted the service in St Peter’s, and then the guests made their way to the garden of the hotel. That the wedding reception was to be at the hotel was a business arrangement between the Archdeacon and Mr Congreve, for the expenses were to be the former’s, as convention demanded. It was a day in June, a Thursday, in the middle of a heatwave.
Dervla and a new maid with spectacles handed round glasses of champagne. Artie saw to it that people had chairs to sit on if they wished to sit. The archdeacon’s daughter wore a wedding-dress that had a faint shade of blue in it, and a Limerick lace veil. She was kissed by people in the garden, she smiled while helping to cut the wedding cake. Her four bridesmaids, Molly and Margery-Jane among them, kept saying she looked marvellous.
Speeches were made in the sunshine. Dr Molloy made one and so did the best man, Tom Gouvernet, and Mr Congreve. Dr Molloy remembered the day Christopher was born, and Mr Congreve remembered the first time he’d set eyes on the beauty of the Archdeacon’s daughter, and Tom Gouvernet remembered Christopher at school. Other guests remembered other occasions; Christopher said he was the lucky man and kissed the archdeacon’s daughter while people clapped their hands with delight. Tom Gouvernet fell backwards off the edge of a raised bed.
There was an excess of emotion in the garden, an excess of smiles and tears and happiness and love. The champagne glasses were held up endlessly, toast after toast. Christopher’s mother moved among the guests with the plump wife of the archdeacon and the Archdeacon himself, who was as frail as a stalk of straw. In his easy- going way Christopher’s father delighted in the champagne and the sunshine, and the excitement of a party. Mr McKibbin, the bank agent, was there, and Hogarty the surveyor, and an insurance man who happened to be staying at the hotel. There was nothing Mr Congreve liked better than standing about talking to these barroom companions.
‘Thanks, Dervla.’ Taking a glass from her tray, Christopher smiled at her because for ages that had been possible again.
‘It’s a lovely wedding, sir.’
‘Yes, it is.’
He looked at her eyes, and was aware of the demanding steadiness of her gaze. He sensed what she was wondering and wondered it himself: what would have happened if she’d been asked to leave the hotel? He guessed, as she did: they would have shared the resentment and the anger that both of them had separately experienced; defiantly they would have continued to meet in the town; she would have accompanied him on his walks, out into the country and the fields. There would have been talk in the town and scenes in the hotel, their relationship would again have been proscribed. They would have drawn closer to one another, their outraged feelings becoming an element in the forbidden friendship. In the end, together, they would have left the hotel and the town and neither of them would be standing here now. Both their lives would be quite different.
‘You’ll be getting married yourself one of these days, Dervla.’
‘Ah, no no.’
