‘We can go in on the half-seven train. We’ll have to try for a lift back. Don’t dawdle in the dining-room.’
At school Hubert had been thought of as ‘wild’, a reputation he had to some extent inherited from his father’s renown at the same school twenty-five years before. For his own part, it was not that he was constantly in breach of the rules, but rather that he tended to go his own way. Short of funds, which regularly he was, he had been known to sell his clothes. The suit of ‘sober colouring’ which we were permitted to wear on weekend exeats, and for Chapel on Sunday evenings, with either a school, House or Colours tie, he sold in a Dublin secondhand-clothes shop and, never known to go out on exeats himself, managed for Sunday Chapel with the black serge jacket and trousers that was our normal everyday wear. He sold his bicycle to Ossie Richpatrick for eleven shillings, and a suitcase for eightpence. ‘I don’t understand why that should be,’ Hubert had a way of saying in class, voicing what the rest of us felt but didn’t always have the courage to say. He didn’t mind not understanding; he didn’t mind arguing with the Chaplain about the existence of the Deity; he didn’t mind leaving an entire meal untouched and afterwards being harangued by the duty prefect for what was considered to be a form of insolence. But, most of all, what marked Hubert with the characteristics of a personality that was unusual were the stories he repeated about his relationship with his grandfather, which was not a happy one. Mr Plunkett’s strictures and appearance were endlessly laid before us, a figure emerging of a tetchy elder statesman, wing-collared and humourless, steeped in the Christian morality of the previous century. Mr Plunkett said grace at mealtimes, much as it was said at school, only continuing for longer; he talked importantly of the managerial position he had reached, after a lifetime of devotion and toil, in Guinness’s brewery. ‘Never himself touches a drop of the stuff, you understand. Having been an abstainer since the age of seven or something. A clerky figure even as a child.’ Since Hubert’s reports allowed Mrs Plunkett so slight a place in the household, and Lily none at all, his home life sounded spiky and rather cold. At the beginning of each term he was always the first to arrive back at school, and had once returned a week early, claiming to have misread the commencing date on the previous term’s report.
‘O?, let’s go,’ he said when a gong sounded, and we swiftly descended the stairs, Hubert setting the pace. I caught a brief glimpse of a door opening and of a girl. In the hall Hubert struck the gong again as he passed.
‘No need for that,’ his grandmother gently reprimanded in the dining-room. ‘We are all present and correct.’
The girl smiled at me, so shyly that I was made to feel shy myself. In the absence of her husband Mrs Plunkett said grace while we stood with our hands resting on the backs of our chairs. ‘We are quite a houseful now,’ she chattily remarked as she sat down. ‘Pamela, please pass that salad along to our visitor.’
‘Yes, of course.’
Pamela blushed as she spoke, her eyes flittering for a moment in my direction. Hubert, silent beside me, was relishing her discomfiture: I knew that, I could feel it. He and I and his cousin were aware that we had not met; the old woman imagined we had.
‘I hope you are a salad-eater.’ Mrs Plunkett smiled at me. ‘Hubert does not much go in for salad. I’m not sure why.’
‘Because Hubert doesn’t like the taste,’ Hubert replied. ‘Lettuce does not seem to him to taste at all. The skin of tomatoes catches in his throat. Chives hang about on his breath. Radishes are nasty little things. And so on.’
His cousin laughed. She was a pretty girl, with dark bobbed hair and blue eyes: I didn’t, that evening, notice much else about her except that she was wearing a pale pink dress with white buttons down the front. She became even prettier when she smiled, a dimple appearing in one of her cheeks, her nose wrinkling in a way that became her.
‘Well, that’s most interesting,’ Mrs Plunkett said, a little stiffly, when Hubert ceased to talk about his dislikes.
There was corned beef with the salad. Hubert buttered two slices of brown bread to make a sandwich of his, and all the time he was preparing this his grandmother watched him. She did so uncomfortably, in an odd, dutiful kind of way, and I received the impression that she would have preferred not to. It was what her husband would have done, I suddenly realized: as if guided by his silent presence in an upstairs room she was honourably obeying him, keeping faith with his wishes. Mustard was spread on the corned beef, pepper was sprinkled. Mrs Plunkett made no comment. The slow movements of Hubert’s knife, a faint whispering under his breath of one of the songs Frank Sinatra had sung, contributed to the considerable unease of both Hubert’s cousin and myself. Pamela reddened when she accidentally knocked the little silver spoon out of the salt cellar.
‘You’re not in a public house, Hubert,’ Mrs Plunkett said when he lifted the sandwich to his mouth. ‘Pamela, please pour the tea.’
Hubert ignored the reference to a public house. ‘Don’t dawdle,’ he reminded me. ‘If we miss the seven-thirty we’ll have to cadge a lift and that takes ages.’
Pamela poured the tea. Mrs Plunkett cut her lettuce into fine shreds. She added salad cream, meticulously mixing everything up. She said eventually:
‘Are you going in to Dublin?’
‘We’re going dancing,’ Hubert said. ‘The Four Provinces Ballroom in Harcourt Street. Music tonight by Ken Mackintosh.’
‘I don’t think I’ve heard of Mr Mackintosh.’
‘Celebrity spot, the Inkspots.’
‘Inkspots?’
‘They sing songs.’
On a large round breadboard beside Mrs Plunkett there were several kinds of bread, which she cut very slowly with a battered breadsaw. On the table there was plum jam and raspberry jam, and the honeycomb we had bought from Mrs Hanrahan. There was a fruitcake and a coffee cake, biscuits and shortbread, and when we’d finished our corned beef Lily came in and added to this array a plate of eclairs. She lifted away the plates and dishes we’d finished with. Mrs Plunkett thanked her.
‘Mrs Hanrahan said she picked that honeycomb out for you,’ Hubert said.
‘Well, that was most kind of her.’
‘She’s lonely since Hanrahan died. She’d talk the legs off you.’
