‘Ah, didn’t I have a terrible round? Did you see me in front of you, Norah? Wasn’t I shocking?’
She denied that. She hadn’t noticed his misfortunes, she said, which indeed she hadn’t. She might have added that the butter manager couldn’t be shocking if he tried for the rest of his life.
‘I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ he said. ‘Would you be interested in a bunch of delphiniums from the garden, Norah?’
She drank more gin and French. She had plenty of delphiniums at Arcangelo House, she replied, though it was very good of him to offer her more.
‘Or the asparagus fern? D’you grow that stuff?’
‘I grow asparagus all right. Only I eat it before the fern comes.’
‘Ah well, why wouldn’t you, Norah,’
Sweetman, at the bar, was sweating like an animal. No woman in her senses would want to marry Sweetman. His trouble with perspiration ironically denied his name, and the caginess Dolores Fitzfynne claimed for him would hardly have been easy to live with. He had a tendency towards forgetfulness when his round came up in the clubhouse and, according to Dolores, the parties he organized for race-meetings or Lansdowne Road were done so to his own pecuniary advantage. ‘Too mingy with himself to look sideways at a woman,’ Dolores had said, and probably she was right. He was a surveyor with the county council; and if he gave you a lift in his car he had a way of mentioning the high price of petrol.
She watched Sweetman while Corkin continued in his tedious manner, offering her marigold plants. It had surprised her when Agnew had said he’d never in his life played golf. She’d thought afterwards that he would probably have been good. He had the look of someone who had been athletic in his time. His dancing suggested ball sense, she didn’t know why.
‘To tell you the honest truth, I don’t much care for marigolds.’
‘The wife loved them. Give Mrs Corkin a box of marigolds arid she’d be pricking them out till Kingdom come.’
He wagged his head; she nodded hers. She allowed a silence to develop in the hope that he’d go away. He said eventually:
‘D’you ever watch that thing they have,
‘I watched it the odd time.
‘Will you tell me this, Norah: where do they get the stories?’
‘I suppose they invent them.’
‘Isn’t America the shocking place though?’
‘I have a daughter there.’
‘Ah, sure, of course you have.’
At the bar Butler-Regan looked as though he might sing. Very occasionally he did, striking the bar rhythmically with his fist, trying to make people join in. The club secretary, Dr Walsh, had had to speak to him, explaining that it wasn’t usual to sing in a golf club, even adding that he didn’t think it quite the thing for a solicitor to sing anywhere. But Butler-Regan had done so again, and had again to be warned. It was said that his wife, who like the late Mrs Corkin played neither bridge nor golf, had a terrible time with him.
‘Does your girl ever remark on the
‘Siobhan has never mentioned
‘Well, isn’t that extraordinary?’
Ten minutes later the drinking in the clubhouse broke up and Mrs O’Neill drove back to Arcangelo House. She made scrambled egg and watched a film about drug-running on the television. The police of several nations pursued a foursome of gangsters and finally ran the ringleader to earth in Los Angeles. She dozed off, and when she woke up a priest with a Cork accent was talking about the feast of Corpus Christi. She listened to him until he’d finished and then turned the television off.
In her bedroom she did something she had not done for ten years at least: before she slipped into her night- dress she paused in front of the long looking-glass of her wardrobe and surveyed her naked body. It was most certainly no longer her best feature, she said to herself, remembering it when she was a child, standing up in the bath to be dried. She remembered being naked at last in the bedroom of the International Hotel in Bray, and the awkward voluptuousness that had followed. The bearing of four children, her fondness for sweet things, the insidious nips of gin in the clubhouse – in combination they had taken a toll, making clothes as necessary as all that meticulous care with make-up and hair. The first time she’d been pregnant, with Cathal, she had looked at herself in this same looking-glass, assuring herself that the enormous swelling would simply go away, as indeed it had. But nothing would go away now. Flesh hung loosely, marked with pink imprints of straps or elastic. If she slimmed herself to the bone there would be scrawny, empty skin, loops and pockets, hollows as ugly as the bulges. She drew her night-dress over her head and a pattern of pink roses in tight little bunches hid what she preferred not to see, transforming her again into a handsome woman.
Agnew had sensitive skin, yet could not resist the quality of finely woven tweed. He chose the sober colours, the greys and browns and inconspicuous greens. He bought his Donegal tweed in Kevin and Howlin’s in Dublin and had the suits made up by a tailor in Rathmines. Because of his sensitive skin he had the trousers lined.
Agnew had never worn these suits to his office in the toy factory, for they did not seem to him to be sufficiently matter-of-fact for business. He wore them at weekends, when he went to church and on Sunday afternoons when he drove out to Rathfarran and walked around the cliffs, ending up in Lynch’s Bar down by the strand, where by arrangement he took his Sunday supper. He wore them also on the weekends when he went to Dublin.
He would miss the cliffs and the strand, he reflected at breakfast one morning, a few weeks after his visit from Mrs O’Neill. He would miss the toy factory too, of course, and the people he had come to know in a passing kind of way, without intimacy or closeness but yet agreeably. In the snug, overcrowded dining-room of the terraced house called St Kevin’s he broke a piece of toast in half and poured himself more tea. He had been fortunate in St Kevin’s, fortunate because he was the only lodger and because the Misses McShane had never
