message, certain that there were words to soften her treachery and then discovering that there were not. In time she ceased also, weary of the useless effort.
Regret passes without words between them; they smile a shrugging smile. If vain Ralph de Courcy had chosen their girlish passion as a memorial to himself he might have chosen as well this rendezvous for their middle age, a waspish cathedral to reflect a waspish triumph. Yet his triumph seems hollow now, robbed by time of its drama and the heady confusions of an accidental cruelty. Death’s hostage he had been, a ghost who had offered them a sleight of hand because he hadn’t the strength for love. They only smile again before they part.
At thirty-three Justin Condon was a salesman of women’s undergarments, regularly traversing five counties with his samples and his order book in a Ford Fiesta. He had obediently accepted this role, agreeing when his father had suggested it to him. His father in his day had been a commercial traveller also and every Friday Justin returned to the house his father had returned to, arriving at much the same hour and occupying a room he had in childhood shared with his three brothers. His mother and his father still lived in the house, in the Dublin suburb of Terenure, and were puzzled by their youngest son because he was so unlike their other children, both physically and in other ways. His dark-haired head was neat; remote, abstracted eyes made a spherical, ordinary face seem almost mysterious. At weekends Justin took long walks on his own, all the way from Terenure to the city, to St Stephen’s Green, where he sat on a seat or strolled among the flowerbeds, to Herbert Park, where he lay in the sunshine on the grass: people had seen him and remarked upon it. He had never in his life been known to listen to the commentary on a hurling match or a Gaelic match, let alone attend such an event. When he was younger he had come back one Friday with a greyhound, an animal he had proceeded to rear as a pet, apparently not realizing that such creatures had been placed in the world for the purpose of racing one another. ‘Ah, poor Justin’s the queer old flute,’ his father had more than once privately owned in McCauley’s public house. His mother wished he’d get married.
Justin’s reason for remaining in his parents’ house had not been shared with them, although it was a simple one: he considered that any other dwelling would be of a temporary nature and not worth the nuisance of moving to because one day he would leave, not just the suburb of Terenure but Dublin, and Ireland, for ever. He would leave his samples in the Ford Fiesta; he would leave the Ford Fiesta in a lay-by. He was not truly a purveyor of garments in imitation silk, his destiny was not the eternal entering of drapers’ shops. He would escape as others had escaped before him; James Joyce he thought of particularly in this respect, and Gauguin. He liked the photograph of James Joyce in the broad-brimmed black hat, with the black coat reaching to his ankles; Gauguin had been a businessman. When Joyce had left Ireland he’d had to borrow a pair of boots. Later he’d tried to sell tweed to the Italians.
Dwelling on such matters, Justin watched the light of a May morning from a bed in Co. Waterford. There wasn’t much to see: streaks of brightness along the edges of the drawn curtains, the ceiling of the bedroom mistily illuminated through rosy fabric. A man called Fahy, travelling in fertilizers, had assured him that when he stayed in this house he occupied the bed of Mrs Keane, its widowed landlady. When Garda Bevan, who lodged on a more permanent basis in the house, drank his eleven o’clock Bournville and stated his intention of retiring for the night, Fahy would rise from the kitchen table also, saying he’d had a long day. He would mount the stairs a few paces behind Garda Bevan and in full view of the policeman would enter the bedroom known as the ‘overnight room’ because it was set aside by Mrs Keane for her casual trade among commercial travellers. Garda Bevan, long since retired from the force, a lifelong bachelor, was a moral presence in Mrs Keane’s house, a man who could be relied upon by Father Grennan or Father Reedy, selflessly working behind the scenes for the Pioneer cause and organizing the tug of war at the Nore Fete every Whit. Fahy said he gave him a quarter of an hour and then listened on the landing to the depth of his snoring. He smoked a final cigarette in the overnight bedroom, taking a good ten minutes over it, before listening again at the panels of Garda Bevan’s door. If the rhythm of sleep had not altered, he made his way to the bed of Mrs Keane.
Justin supposed it was true. With some precision, Fahy had described the body of the widow, a woman of fifteen stone and in her sixty-first year. The hair that was grey about her head sprouted blackly and abundantly, according to the traveller in fertilizers, on other areas of her. Buttocks and stomach were vast; Hail Marys were repeated after sinning.
In the overnight room Justin imagined without pleasure the scenes Fahy described. Fahy was a little runt of a Dublin man, married with five or six children, always sticking his elbow into you to make a point. Sometimes in his ramblings he mentioned Thomasina Durcan, the dentist, who was the only other lodger in Mrs Keane’s house. She had a great notion of Justin, Fahy insisted, the implication being that Justin could easily arrive at the same arrangement with Thomasina Durcan as he himself had arrived at with Mrs Keane. No man was an island was a repeated observation of Fahy’s.
Justin rose in order to break his train of thought, and crossed to the window. He drew back the curtains and stood in his pyjamas looking out at the line of houses across the street. No blind had yet been released, no curtain or shutter opened. A cat crept along the grey pavement, interested in the empty bottles outside each door. The houses themselves were colourwashed in pink or cream, in yellow, grey or blue, their hall doors painted in some contrasting shade, or grained. The street was wide, with lampposts between every second house, and a single visible telegraph pole. Just visible also, where the street met another as it curved away to the left, was Hayes’s shop, which traded in newspapers, tobacco and confectionery. The sight of it, with its hanging
Inhaling, he slipped out of his pyjamas and dressed himself in shirt and trousers, preparatory to making his way to Mrs Keane’s bathroom. Still intent on keeping Fahy’s reports and innuendoes at bay, he dwelt upon his earliest memory, which was the leg of a chair. That same chair was still in the house in Terenure and he often found himself looking at it, his eye travelling down one particular leg, to the rings cut into the timber, the varnish worn partially away. With three brothers and three sisters, he had grown up the baby of the family, surrounded by people who shouted more than he did, who were for ever arguing and snatching. At school the textbooks were inkstained and dirty, the blackboards so pitted you could hardly read the chalk marks on them, the desk-tops slashed with messages and initials. ‘Come here and I’ll show you,’ Shay McNamara used to whisper; and forcibly he’d insist, no choice about it, on displaying the promise of his sexuality. Ikey Breen had been paid a threepenny piece by a woman under cover of darkness in the Stella cinema. All Riordan’s jokes had to do with excrement.
Justin shaved in Mrs Keane’s bathroom, hurrying to finish before Garda Bevan came rattling at the door. Long before he began to go to school he remembered his father driving away from the house in Terenure on a Monday morning. His father had taught him how to strike a match, and would let him hold it over the tobacco in his pipe while he sucked at the smoke, making a bubbling noise. His father used to take him on to his knee and ask him if he’d been a good boy, but Justin always had to turn his head away because of the whiff on his father’s breath. The stench of stout, his mother said it was, bottle after bottle of stout that made the whole house stink like a brewery. He associated his father particularly with Sundays, with leading the family into Mass, with saying he was starving on the walk home. Sunday dinner was different from ordinary dinner, always meat and a pudding. Afterwards his father had his bath, with the door of the bathroom open so that he could listen to whatever sporting commentary there was on the radio. Justin’s sisters were forbidden to go upstairs at this time in ease they’d catch a glimpse from the landing. His brothers roller-skated in the yard.
Justin washed the remains of the shaving foam from his face. It was on a Sunday that his Aunt Roche had first put a record on her gramophone: John Count McCormack singing ‘The Rose of Tralee’. After that he had begun to visit her sitting-room regularly, a room full of ferns in pots and framed embroideries. It was she and Father Finn
