‘That’s a medical fact. The unfortunate woman is incapable of mothering children.’
‘I think you’re drunk. One after another you’ve had. I thought it a moment ago when you got maudlin about your schooldays. Annabella’s told me a thing or two, you know.’
‘She hasn’t told you about the cats she’s going to spring on you. She hasn’t told you she can’t give birth. She hasn’t told you she gets so bored her face turns white with fury. It’s best not to be around then, Lairdman. Take my tip on that.’
‘She’s told me you can’t stay sober. She’s told me you’ve been warned off every racecourse in Ireland.’
‘I don’t go racing, Lairdman, and apart from occasions like this I hardly drink at all. A lot less than our mutual friend, I can promise you that.’
‘You have been unable to give Annabella children. She’s sorry for you, she doesn’t blame you.’
‘Annabella was never sorry for anyone in her life.’
‘Now look here, Boland –’
‘Look nowhere, man. I’ve had twelve years of the woman. I’m obliging you by stepping aside. But there’s no need for this talk of divorce, Lairdman, in England or anywhere else. I’m just telling you that. She’ll come and live with you in your seven-room flat; she’ll live in any house you care to buy, but if you wait till kingdom come you’ll not find children trotting along. All you’ll have is two Siamese cats clawing the skin off you.’
‘You’re being despicable, Boland.’
‘I’m telling you the truth.’
‘You seem to have forgotten that Annabella and myself have talked about all this. She knew you’d take it hard. She knew there’d be bitterness. Well, I understand that. I’ve said I’m sorry.’
‘You’re a mean little blockboard man, Lairdman. You belong with your head held down in a lavatory bowl. Were you wringing wet when they let go of you? I’d love to have seen it, Lairdman.’
‘Will you keep your damn voice down? And will you stop trying to pick a quarrel? I came out this morning in good faith. I’m aware of the delicacy of the thing, and I’m not saying I’ve been a saint. But I’ll not stand here and be insulted. And I’ll not hear Annabella insulted.’
‘I think Dead Smith became a vet.’
‘I don’t care what he became.’
Abruptly, Lairdman was gone. Boland didn’t turn his head, or otherwise acknowledge his departure. He examined the row of bottles behind the bar, and in a moment he lit a fresh cigarette.
For half an hour he remained on his own where his usurper had left him. All he could think of was Lairdman as he remembered him, a boy who was pointed out because of what two bullies had done to him. The old cokeman, McArdle, used to laugh over the incident. Sometimes, when the classroom radiator wasn’t hot enough, the boarders would go down to McArdle’s cokehole and sit around his furnace. He’d tell them obscene stories, all of them to do with the matron and cook, or else he told them about Lairdman. The more Boland thought about it all the more clearly he remembered Lairdman: not much different in appearance, the same trap of a mouth, a propelling pencil and a fountain pen clipped into the pocket of his jacket. He had a bicycle, Boland could remember, a new one that had perhaps replaced an older one, a Golden Eagle. ‘Oh, we met at a party Phyllis gave,’ she had said, but there was no way of knowing how much truth there was in that, presumably none.
Boland ate his lunch in the dining-room of the hotel, among people he did not know, who gave the impression of lunching there regularly. He didn’t have to say he’d take nothing to drink because the waitress didn’t ask him. There was water in a glass jug on the table; he’d be all right for the journey home, he decided.
‘The cod,’ he ordered. ‘Yes, I’ll have the cod. And the cream of celery.’
He remembered a time when the thirteen boarders had smashed a window in an outhouse that no longer had a purpose. Most of the window-panes were broken already, the roof had long ago tumbled in, and one of the walls was so badly split that it had begun to disintegrate. It was forbidden for any boy to enter this small, crumbling building, and the boarders had not done so. They had stood twenty or so yards away throwing stones at the remaining window-panes, as they might have thrown stones at a cockshot. They had meant no harm, and did not realize that an outhouse which was so badly damaged already might be worthy of preservation. Ceremoniously the following morning the Belted Earl had taken his cane to them in the presence of the assembled day boys. Lairdman would have been watching, Boland reflected as he ate his soup: Lairdman might have brought it up just as he himself had brought up the other matter, but of course that wasn’t Lairdman’s way. Lairdman considered himself a sophisticate; even in the days of his Golden Eagle he would have considered himself that.
Boland crumbled the bread on his side plate, picking up bits of it between mouthfuls of soup. He saw himself, one day in the future, entering the silence of his house. He saw himself on a summer evening pushing open the french windows of the drawing-room and going out into the garden, strolling among its fuchsia bushes and apple trees. He’d known the house all his life; he’d actually been born in it. Opposite O’Connor Motors, it was the last one in the town, yellow-washed and ordinary, but a house he loved.
‘Did you say the fish, sir?’ the waitress inquired.
‘Yes, I did.’
He’d been married in Dublin, she being the daughter of a Dublin wine merchant. The old man was still alive and so was her mother. ‘You’ve taken on a handful,’ the old man once had said, but he’d said it playfully because in those days Annabella had been a handful to delight in. What they thought of her now Boland had no idea.
‘The plate’s hot, sir,’ the waitress warned.
‘Thanks very much.’
People who’d known him in his childhood had been delighted when he brought her to live among them. They’d stopped him on the street and said he was lucky. They were happy for him: he’d come back from Dublin with a crown of jewels, which was how they saw it. And yet those same people would be delighted when she left. The terrible frustration that possessed her – the denial of children through some mischance within her – turned beauty into wanton eccentricity. It was that that had happened, nothing else.
Slowly he ate his cod, with parsley sauce and cabbage and potatoes. Nobody would mention it much; they’d know what had happened and they’d say to one another that one day, probably, he’d marry again. He wondered if
