‘I suppose I’ll go to Dublin.’
The remark was not accompanied by one of his glancing smiles; he gave no sign whatsoever that he’d touched upon a fascinating topic. No one knew why he spent weekends occasionally in Dublin, and a certain curiosity had gathered round the mystery of these visits. There was some secret which he kept, which he had not even confided to her husband in his lifetime. He came back melancholy was all her husband had ever reported, and once or twice with bloodshot eyes, as if he had spent the time drinking.
‘Though I’d rather not end up in Dublin,’ he added now. ‘To tell you the full truth, Mrs O’Neill, it’s not a city I entirely care for.’
She bent the remains of her cigarette in half, extinguishing it on the ashtray. She stood up, thinking it odd that he’d said Dublin wasn’t somewhere he cared for since he visited it so regularly.
‘The toy factory was a favourite of my husband’s. It saddened him to see it decline.’
‘It had its heyday.’
‘Yes, it had its day.’
She went, walking with him from the office, through a shed full of unassembled terriers on wheels. The white cut-out bodies with a brown spot around the tail, the brown heads, the little platforms that carried the wheels, the wheels themselves: all these dislocated parts lay about in stacks, seeming unwanted. No one was working in the shed.
He walked with her through other deserted areas, out on to the gravel forecourt that stretched in a semicircle around the front of the small factory. A man loaded wired cartons on to a lorry. They were still meeting orders in England, Agnew told her. The paint shop was as active as ever, three girls on full time.
He held his hand out, his sallow features illuminated by another smile. His palm was cool, his grip gentle. He asked her not to worry about him. He assured her he’d be all right.
There were gusts of laughter in the clubhouse. Dessie Fitzfynne had told a Kerry joke, concerning eight Kerry gardai and a cow. Dolores Fitzfynne, who’d just gone round in eighty-two and wanted to talk about that instead, requested that he shouldn’t tell another. Sweetman was talking about horses, arranging something about going to the Curragh. Sweetman loved getting parties together to go racing or to Lansdowne Road, or for a weekend down in Kelly’s at Rosslare. Paunchy and rubicund, Flanagan kept saying it was his turn and what did anyone want?
‘I heard the factory’s winding up,’ the solicitor, Butler-Regan, remarked in his rowdy voice and she nodded, suddenly feeling dismal. She had forgotten about the toy factory while she’d been on the golf-course, going round in ninety-one, taking three to get out of the rough at the eighth. She’d been playing with Dessie Fitzfynne, opposing Dolores and Flanagan. They’d been beaten, of course.
It was silly to feel dismal just because the facts of commerce dictated the closure of an unprofitable concern. As both Cathal and Agnew had intimated, the end had been a matter of anticipation for years. Only sentiment had prevented such a decision in the lifetime of her husband.
‘Ah well, there you are,’ Butler-Regan said noisily. ‘’Tis better let it go, Norah.’
Flanagan handed her another gin and French even though she hadn’t asked for one. Overhearing the reference to the toy factory, he said:
‘I hear Agnew’s wondering what to do with himself.’
‘The bold Agnew!’ Butler-Regan laughed. He, too, was paunchy and rubicund. He added, laughing again, shouting through this laughter: ‘Oh, Master Agnew’ll fall on his feet, I’d say.’
They all liked Agnew even though he was so different. He was an easy companion for half an hour or so if you happened to run into him in the bar of the Commercial Hotel; he was always willing to drop into conversation with you on the street. He had digs with the Misses McShane in a house called St Kevin’s, where he was regularly to be seen tending the front garden, behind silver-painted railings set in a low concrete wall. He also walked the Misses McShane’s dog, Mandy, about the town, and on Sundays he attended the Protestant church unless he happened to be in Dublin.
‘We’d all miss Agnew,’ Flanagan said. ‘That wild Protestant man.’ He laughed, making much the same explosive sound that the solicitor did. Did any of them realize, she wondered, that Agnew’s quickstep put them all to shame every December?
‘Oh, wild is right,’ Butler-Regan agreed. ‘Wasn’t he in the city again a week ago?’
The two men laughed in unison, the burst of noise causing Rita Flanagan to glance sharply across the bar to ascertain if her husband was already drunk. In dog’s-tooth skirt and soft fawn golfing-jacket, Mrs O’Neill wondered what any of them would think if they knew that, quite involuntarily as she stood there, she had again begun to speculate on the possibility of not remaining for ever the widow she presently was. She sipped her gin and French, not taking part in a conversation about Sweetman’s outing to the Curragh. In the same involuntary manner she found herself following a thread of thought that led her back to her wedding-day. The O’Neills had insisted on paying for the reception, since her own family were not well-to-do. Old Canon Kenny – neither old nor a canon then – had conducted the service, assisted by a curate called Colquhoun, who had later left the priesthood. They had gone to Bray for their honeymoon and on their first night in the International Hotel she had been jittery. She hadn’t known how it should be, whether she should simply take her clothes off or wait for him to say something, whether or not there was going to be preliminary kissing. She’d gone as red as anything after they’d come up from the restaurant. ‘I think that waiter knew,’ she’d whispered on the stairs, not noticing there was a maid just behind them. He’d been jittery too, and in the end it was she who inaugurated the kissing and in fact had taken his tie off. What on earth would it be like being in a bedroom in Bray with Agnew? There was fat on her shoulders now, which hadn’t been there before, and naturally her thighs and her hips were no longer the same. Her body had been forgotten in that particular way for many years before her husband’s death, almost since the birth of Siobhan. They had come to occupy separate bedrooms in Arcangelo House, having reached the decision that Cathal and the three girls were enough. At first, when it was safe to do so, she had visited the other bedroom, but the habit had dwindled and then ceased. Would it be a form of unfaithfulness to resume it in different circumstances now? It wasn’t easy to guess how such things stood at fifty-nine.
Corkin, the widower of the woman who’d been a drear, approached her with the usual sorrowful look in his eyes, as if he still mourned the wife who had played neither bridge nor golf. The eyes themselves, lurking in their despondent wateriness behind spectacles, had pinkish rims and were the only feature you noticed in Corkin’s flat face, except possibly his teeth, which moved uncomfortably in his jaw when he ate. He was eating now, chewing crisps from a transparent Tayto bag. His hair was like smooth lead; his limbs jutted from his clothes. There was no doubt whatsoever that Corkin, the manager of a butter business, was looking for a housekeeper in the form of a second wife. There was always a nudge or two in the clubhouse when he approached Mrs O’Neill for a chat.
