‘I’d often tell a patient what had happened to me.’
‘But you’ve no hard feelings today? You were badly used by the fellow, yet –’
‘Ah, it’s long ago now, sir.’
Heffernan and FitzPatrick saw the Professor on to a bus and, according to FitzPatrick, he was quivering with pleasure. He clambered into a seat, delightedly talking to himself, not noticing when they waved from the pavement. They entered a convenient public house and ordered pints of stout.
‘Did you put her up to it?’ FitzPatrick inquired.
‘The thing about that one, she’d do anything for a scrap of the ready. Didn’t you ever notice that about her? She’s a right old miser.’
It was that that Heffernan had recognized when first he’d paid a visit to Mrs Maginn’s kitchen: the old maid was possessed of a meanness that had become obsessional with her. She spent no money whatsoever, and was clearly keen to add to what she had greedily accumulated. He had paid her a pound to repeat the story he had instructed her in.
‘Didn’t she say it well? Oh, top of the bill, I’d say she was.’
‘You’d be sorry for old Flacks.’
‘Oh, the devil take bloody Mr Flacks.’
Some months went by. Heffernan no longer visited the kitchen in Donnybrook, and he spoke hardly at all of Professor Flacks. In his lazy way FitzPatrick assumed that the falsehoods which had been perpetrated were the be-all and end-all of the affair, that Heffernan’s pride – now clearly revealed to him – had somehow been satisfied. But then, one summer’s afternoon while the two idled in Stephen’s Green in the hope of picking up girls, Heffernan said: ‘There’s a thing on we might go to next Friday.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Mr Flacks performing. The Society of the Friends of James Joyce.’
It was a public lecture, one of several that were to be delivered during a week devoted by the Society to the life and work of the author who was its
On the appointed evening FitzPatrick accompanied his friend to Professor Flacks’s lecture, his premonitions suggesting that the occasion was certain to be tedious. He had no idea what Heffernan was up to, and wasn’t prepared to devote energy to speculating. With a bit of luck, he hoped, he’d be able to have a sleep.
Before the main event a woman from the University of Washington spoke briefly about Joyce’s use of misprints; a bearded German read a version of ‘The Holy Office’ that had only recently been discovered. Then the tweeded figure of Professor Flacks rose. He sipped at a tumbler of water, and spoke for almost an hour about the model for the servant girl in the story, ‘Two Gallants’. His discovery of that same elderly servant, now employed in a house in Donnybrook, engendered in his audience a whisper of excitement that remained alive while he spoke, and exploded into applause when he finished. A light flush enlivened the paleness of his face as he sat down. It was, as Heffernan remarked to his dozy companion, the old man’s finest hour.
It was then that FitzPatrick first became uneasy. The packed lecture-hall had accepted as fact all that had been stated, yet none of it was true. Notes had been taken, questions were now being asked. A voice just behind the two students exclaimed that this remarkable discovery was worth coming two thousand miles to hear about. Mental pictures of James Joyce in a dentist’s waiting-room flashed about the hall. North Frederick Street would be visited tomorrow, if not tonight.
‘I’d only like to ask,’ Heffernan shouted above the hubbub, ‘if I may, a simple little question.’ He was on his feet. He had caught the attention of Professor Flacks, who was smiling benignly at him. ‘I’d only like to inquire,’ Heffernan continued, ‘if that whole thing couldn’t be a lot of baloney.’
‘Baloney?’ a foreign voice repeated.
‘Baloney?’ said Professor Flacks.
The buzz of interest hadn’t died down. Nobody was much interested in the questions that were being asked except the people who were asking them. A woman near to FitzPatrick said it was extraordinarily moving that the ill-used servant girl, who had been so tellingly presented as an off-stage character by Joyce, should bear no grudge all these years later.
‘What I mean, Professor Flacks,’ said Heffernan, ‘is I don’t think James Joyce ever attended a dentist in North Frederick Street. What I’m suggesting to you, sir, is that the source of your information was only looking for a bit of limelight.’
FitzPatrick later described to me the expression that entered Professor Flacks’s eyes. ‘A lost kind of look,’ he said, ‘as though someone had poked the living daylights out of him.’ The old man stared at Heffernan, frowning, not comprehending at first. His relationship with this student had been quite different since the night of the visit to Mrs Maginn’s kitchen: it had been distinguished by a new friendliness, and what had seemed like mutual respect.
‘Professor Flacks and myself,’ continued Heffernan, ‘heard the old lady together. Only I formed the impression that she was making the entire matter up. I thought, sir, you’d formed that opinion also.’
‘Oh, but surely now, Mr Heffernan, the woman wouldn’t do that.’
‘There was never a dentist by the name of O’Riordan that practised in North Frederick Street, sir. That’s a fact that can easily be checked.’
Heffernan sat down. An uneasy silence gripped the lecture-hall. Eyes turned upon Professor Flacks. Weakly, with a hoarseness in his voice, he said: ‘But why, Mr Heffernan, would she have made all that up? A woman of that class would hardly have read the story, she’d hardly have known –’
‘It’s an unfortunate thing, sir,’ interrupted Heffernan, standing up again, ‘but that old one would do anything for a single pound note. She’s of a miserly nature. I think what has happened,’ He went on, his tone changing as
