‘I’ve always loved dancing, actually.’
Corkin would have asked for more, and for less. Some hint of man’s pride would have caused him scrupulously to avoid touching a penny of her money, nor would he have wanted to go planting apple trees under her direction. But Corkin would have entered her bedroom and staked his claim there, and she could not have borne that.
‘We’ll be married this time next week,’ he said, ‘Do you realize that?’
‘Unless you decide to take to the hills.’
‘No, I’ll not do that, Norah.’
The Artie Furlong Band, new to the clubhouse this year and already reckoned to be a success, played an old tune she loved, ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’. His step changed easily, he scarcely touched her as he guided her through the other dancers. Sweetman was appalling to dance with because of his perspiration troubles, Dessie Fitzfynne’s knees were always driving themselves into you, Butler-Regan held you far too tight. She’d go on playing bridge and golf after they were married, no reason not to. He’d said he intended to continue exercising the Misses McShane’s spaniel.
‘You’re sure about this?’ he whispered, bending his long face closer to hers, smiling a little. ‘You’re absolutely sure, Norah?’
She remembered thinking how she couldn’t imagine him ever calling her Norah, and how strange his own Christian name had felt when first she’d used it. She would never know him, she was aware of that; nor could he ever fully know her. There would never be the passion of love between them; all that must be done without.
‘I’m sure all right.’
The music ceased. They went to get a drink and were joined immediately by the Fitzfynnes and Rita Flanagan. Thelma came up and said one of the children had spots all over his stomach. Cathal kept his distance.
‘We’re drinking to the happy couple,’ Dessie Fitzfynne shouted, raising his glass. Thelma scuttled away, as if frightened to be seen anywhere near such a toast.
‘Cheers to the both of you,’ Rita Flanagan shrilled, and in another part of the decorated clubhouse Butler- Regan began to sing.
She smiled at the glasses that were raised towards them. ‘That’s very kind of you,’ he said quietly. ‘We’re touched.’
She would have liked to add something, to have sorted out falsity from the truth. He was indeed marrying her for her money. But he, in return, was giving her a role that money could not purchase. Within a week the family would no longer possess her. Cathal’s far-apart eyes would no longer dismiss her as a remnant of the dead.
‘We’re going to have an orchard, you know, where the toy factory is now.’
They looked a bit surprised, at first not quite grasping her meaning and then wondering why she should mention an orchard just then.
‘Our wedding present to one another,’ he explained. ‘Norah’s trees and I shall tend them.’
The band struck up again, drowning the raucous singing of Butler-Regan. Cathal at last approached his mother and asked her to dance, as every year he did on this Christmas occasion. But he did not at last say that he hoped it would work out all right, Agnew and herself in Arcangelo House. She had paid some price, Cathal believed, apart from the financial one. But Cathal, really, was not right and for him, too, she would have liked to sort out falsity from the truth.
‘Well, that is that,’ he said, turning off the television on a Sunday night, after he had returned from Dublin. He lurched a little as he moved towards her, holding out his packet of cigarettes. He had said, before their marriage, that he often became intoxicated in the course of these weekends. He met his friends and they went from place to place, all of them men who enjoyed the company of men. Sometimes, left alone, or unlucky in the new companions he had met, he wandered the quaysides of the city, thinking about the sailors on the ships. On the strand at Rathfarran his face had been averted when he told her this, and when he finished she had not spoken. Dessie Fitzfynne and Sweetman liked men’s company also, she had thought, and so had her husband in his lifetime. But that, of course, was not the same.
‘I don’t think I’ll go back there.’ He swayed, like Flanagan did in drink. ‘God knows, I don’t want to.’
He always said that. He always offered her a cigarette after turning off the Sunday television. A moment later he made the renunciatory statement.
‘It doesn’t matter.’ She tried to smile, imagining him in the public houses he had told her about, his dignified presence mocked by a man who was once particularly his friend, a waiter who no longer liked him.
‘I dread for your sake that someone will find out one of these days. I hadn’t thought of that when we married.’
‘I knew what I was doing. You told me the truth, and you’re honourable for that.’
When he’d told her she had not confessed a truth as well: that clothes and make-up disguised a loss she found it hard to bear. She was haunted by herself, by the beauty that had been there in a hotel in Bray. Lingering in the clubhouse on these Sunday nights, she drank more gin and French than usual, knowing he would be tipsy, too, when he returned. Once they’d fallen asleep in their chairs, and she’d woken up at twenty past three and crept away to bed. He’d seemed like a child, one arm hanging down, fingers resting on the carpet. On the strand at Rathfarran he’d told her he never wanted to go to sleep on these Sunday nights because he hated waking up so. In his bedroom at St Kevin’s, the door locked against indiscreet entrance by one or other of the Misses McShane, he had sat with the whiskey bottle he’d bought for the purpose in Dublin. She’d listened while he’d told her that; concerning herself, there’d been no need to say what she might have said because, being the man he was, he guessed.
They passed together through the hall of Arcangelo House and mounted the stairs to their separate bedrooms. They paused before they parted, offering in their tipsiness a vague, unstated reassurance. Tomorrow none of this would be mentioned; their common ground would not be traversed on a mundane Monday morning. For a moment on the landing outside their bedrooms they spoke of the orchard that would replace the toy factory, and the trees they would watch growing up.
You will not, I believe, find either Lenehan or Corley still parading the streets of Dublin, but often in the early evening a man called Heffernan may be found raising a glass of Paddy in Toner’s public house; and FitzPatrick, on his bicycle, every working day makes the journey across the city, from Ranelagh to the offices of McGibbon, Tait &
