he addressed the assembly, ‘is that a student the Professor failed in an examination took a chance to get his own back. Our friend Jas Joyce,’ he added, ‘would definitely have relished that.’
In misery Professor Flacks lifted the tumbler of water to his lips, his eyes cast down. You could sense him thinking, FitzPatrick reported, that he was a fool and he had been shown to be a fool. You could sense him thinking that he suddenly appeared to be unreliable, asinine and ridiculous. In front of the people who mattered to him most of all he had been exposed as a fraud he did not feel himself to be. Never again could he hold his head up among the Friends of James Joyce. Within twenty-four hours his students would know what had occurred.
An embarrassed shuffling broke out in the lecture-hall. People murmured and began to make their way into the aisles. FitzPatrick recalled the occasion in Mrs Maginn’s kitchen, the two elderly puppets on the end of Heffernan’s string, the fig-rolls and the tea. He recalled the maid’s voice retailing the story that he, because he knew Heffernan so well, had doubted with each word that was uttered. He felt guilty that he hadn’t sought the old man out and told him it wasn’t true. He glanced through the throng in the lecture-hall at the lone figure in porridgy tweeds, and unhappily reflected that suicide had been known to follow such wretched disgrace. Outside the lecture-hall he told Heffernan to go to hell when a drink in Anne Street was suggested – a remark for which Heffernan never forgave him.
‘I mean,’ FitzPatrick said as we sat in College Park a long time later, ‘how could anyone be as petty? When all the poor old fellow ever said to him was “I see you are still with us?” ’
I made some kind of reply. Professor Flacks had died a natural death a year after the delivery of his lecture on ‘Two Gallants’. Earlier in his life he had not, as Heffernan had claimed, driven a wife and two sisters mad: he’d been an only child, the obituary said in the
We went on talking about him, FitzPatrick and I, as we watched the cricket in College Park. We spoke of his playful sarcasm and how so vehemently it had affected Heffernan’s pride. We marvelled over the love that had caused a girl in a story to steal, and over the miserliness that had persuaded an old woman to be party to a trick. FitzPatrick touched upon his own inordinate laziness, finding a place for that also in our cobweb of human frailty.
My father was a great horseman. My mother was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. I was taken to watch my father jumping as a member of the military team in Linvik when I was five years old. The team did not win that afternoon but my father’s performance was faultless and he himself received a personal award. I remember the applause and his saluting, and my mother’s fingers tightening; on my arm. ‘Oh, how deserved that is!’ she whispered, and when my father joined us later you could see that he was proud. He smelt of horses and of leather, as he always did when he’d been jumping: to this day, I can evoke that smell at will.
That is the most vivid memory of that early time in my childhood. We drove away from the stadium and then there was my first dinner in a restaurant, my mother and father on either side of me, red roses in a vase, a candle burning in a wooden candlestick that was painted blue and green. ‘One day,’ my father predicted, anticipating that in time I, too, would be a member of the military team. Already I was promising: so he insisted when he watched me cantering with my mother along the grassy path beside the birch woods. In the restaurant they touched their wine-glasses and my father requested the waiter to pour me just a little wine so that on this particular occasion I might have my first taste of it. Johan my father called the waiter, while I wondered which feature it was that in particular made my mother’s beauty so remarkable. One moment it seemed to be the candlelight gleaming on her pale hair, the next the blue of her eyes, and then her lips and the tiny wrinkle on her forehead, and then the graceful way she held her head. My father’s hand reached across the tablecloth for one of hers, and there that memory ceases.
There is another one. In his surgery Dr Edlund probed my eyes with the beam of a torch that was as slim as a pencil. The disc of his stethoscope lingered on my back and chest, my reflexes were tested, my throat examined, my blood gathered in a capsule, the cavities of my body sounded. And afterwards, when weeks had passed, it was declared that I was not strong. Tiredness in future was to be avoided; I must canter more gently; becoming hot was not good. ‘He will be different from what we imagined,’ my father said. ‘That is all.’ I did not, then, sense the disappointment in his voice.
It was because of my delicate constitution that my mother first took me to San Pietro al Mare, initiating a summer regime that was to continue throughout my childhood. We went by train and because of my delicate constitution more time was devoted to the journey than might otherwise have been considered necessary. A night was spent in Hamburg, at the Hotel Kronberg, then by day and night we went slowly on, the air noticeably warmer each time we stopped at a station. A final night was spent at Milan, at the Hotel Belvedere. We arrived at San Pietro al Mare in the early afternoon.
I think, that first evening, my mother was a little nervous. She addressed the hotel staff in English and was apprehensive lest she was not correctly understood. In the restaurant, at dinner, she spoke very slowly to the waiter and I did not entirely follow what was said because I did not yet understand much English. But the waiter, who was extremely rapid in all he did –flicking open our napkins and expertly covering our knees with them, running his finger down the menu to make a suggestion, noting my mother’s order on his pad – did not once request her to repeat a word. When he had gone my mother asked me if I felt tired, but I was not in the least. From the moment the train had begun to slow down for San Pietro I’d felt exhilarated. I was supposed not to carry heavy luggage but I had done so none the less, assisting the porter at the station to pack our suitcases into the taxi while my mother was at the
At dinner I said I had never been in such an exotic place. The dining-room where we sat was more elegant and gracious, and a great deal larger, than the restaurant my father had taken us to on the evening of his triumph with the military team. I had never before seen so many people dining at the same time, many of them in evening dress. Spirit stoves burned at each table. Glass doors which stretched from the ceiling to the floor were thrown wide open to a terrace with a decorated balustrade – coloured medallions set among its brief, grey pillars. Beyond that the garden of the Villa Parco was spread with flowers that were quite unfamiliar to me: burgeoning shrubs of oleander and bougainvillaea, and trees called smoke trees, so my mother said. In the hotel I loved the sound of Italian, the mysterious words and phrases the chambermaids and the waiters called out to one another. And I loved the hesitant English of my mother.
The next morning – and every morning after that – my mother and I bathed among the rocks because Dr Edlund had prescribed as advantageous the exercise of unhurried swimming. We took the lift that descended to the bathing place from the hotel garden and afterwards we lay for a short time in the sun, covered with protecting creams, before walking to a cafe for an
