Images cluster, fragments make up the whole. The first of Barney’s memories is an upturned butter-box – that particular shape, narrower at the bottom. It’s in a corner of the garden where the grass grows high, where there are poppies, and pinks among the stones that edge a flowerbed. A dog pants, its paws stretched out on the grass, its tongue trailing from its mouth. Barney picks the pinks and decorates the dog with them, sticking them into its brindle fur. ‘Oh, you are bold!’ The hem of the skirt is blue, the shoes black. The hat Barney has thrown off is placed again on his head. He has a stick shaped like a finger, bent in the middle. It is hard and shiny and he likes it because of that. The sunshine is hot on his skin. There is a baby’s perspiration.
Barney’s mother died three years after his birth, but even so his childhood was not unhappy. In the garden at Lisscrea there was Charlie Redmond to talk to, and Nuala was in the kitchen.
Lisscrea House, standing by the roadside, was covered with Virginia creeper. There were fields on one side and on the other the Mulpatricks’ cottage. Beyond that was the Edderys’ cottage, and an iron gate which separated it from Walsh’s public house – single-storeyed and whitewashed like the cottages. Opposite, across the road, were the ruins of a square tower, with brambles growing through them. A mile to the west was the Catholic church, behind white railings, with a shrine glorifying the Virgin just inside the gates. All the rooms at Lisscrea were long and narrow, each with a different, flowered wallpaper. In the hall the patients sat on a row of chairs that stretched between the front door and the stairs, waiting silently until Dr Prenderville was ready. Sometimes a man would draw up a cart or a trap outside, or dismount from a bicycle, and the doorbell would jangle urgently. ‘Always listen carefully to what’s said at the door,’ Dr Prenderville instructed Nuala. ‘If I’m out, write a message down.’
When Barney was seven he went to school in Ballinadra, waiting every morning on the road for Kilroy’s cart on its way to Ballinadra creamery with churns of milk. The bread van brought him back in the afternoon, and none of that changed until he was allowed to cycle – on Dr Prenderville’s old B.S.A. with its saddle and handle-bars lowered. ‘
On the Sunday before he made the journey to school on the B.S.A. for the first time Barney found his father listening to the wireless in the drawing-room, a thing he never did on a Sunday morning. Nuala was standing in the doorway with a dishcloth in her hand, listening also. They’d have to buy in tea, she said, because she’d heard it would be short, and Dr Prenderville said they’d have to keep the curtains drawn at night as a protection against being bombed from an aeroplane. Charlie Redmond had told Barney a few days before that the Germans were hard cases. The Germans were in league with the Italians, who ate stuff that looked like string. De Valera, Charlie Redmond said, would keep the country out of things.
The war that began then continued for the duration of Barney’s time at school. Lisscrea was affected by the shortages that Nuala had anticipated; and de Valera did not surrender the will to remain at peace. It was during those years that Barney decided to follow in his father’s and his grandfather’s footsteps and become the doctor at Lisscrea.
‘How’re the digs?’ Rouge Medlicott asked, and the Pole, Slovinski, again beckoned the waitress – not because he required more coffee but because he liked the look of her.
‘Awful,’ Barney said. ‘I’m moving out.’
When he’d arrived in Dublin at the beginning of the term he found he had not been allocated a set of College rooms and had been obliged to settle for unsatisfactory lodgings in Dun Laoghaire. Greyhounds cluttered the stairs of this house, and broke into a general barking on imagined provocation. Two occupied a territory they had made their own beneath the dining-room table, their cold noses forever investigating whatever flesh they could find between the top of Barney’s socks and the turn-ups of his trousers. Rouge Medlicott and Slovinski shared College rooms and at night pursued amorous adventures in O’Connell Street, picking up girls who’d been left in the lurch outside cinemas or ice-cream parlours.
‘Why doesn’t she come to me?’ Slovinski demanded crossly, still waving at the waitress.
‘Because you’re bloody ugly,’ Medlicott replied.
Students filled the cafe. They shouted to one another across plates of iced buns, their books on the floor beside their chairs, their gowns thrown anywhere. Long, trailing scarves in black and white indicated the extroverts of the Boat Club. Scholars were recognized by their earnest eyes, sizars by their poverty. Nigerians didn’t mix. There were tablefuls of engineers and medical practitioners of the future, botanists and historians and linguists, geographers and eager divinity students. Rouge Medlicott and Slovinski were of an older generation, two of the many ex-servicemen of that time. Among these were G.I.s and Canadians and Czechs, a couple of Scots, a solitary Egyptian, and balding Englishmen who talked about Cecil Sharp or played bridge.
‘You meet me tonight,’ Slovinski suggested in a peremptory manner, having at last succeeded in summoning the waitress. ‘What about tonight?’
‘Tonight, sir?’
‘We’ll have oysters in Flynn’s.’
‘Oh God, you’re shocking, sir!’ cried the waitress, hurrying away.
Barney had got to know Slovinski and Rouge Medlicott through sitting next to them in biology lectures. He didn’t think of them as friends exactly, but he enjoyed their company.
Medlicott had acquired his sobriquet because of the colour of his hair, a quiff of which trailed languorously over his forehead. There was a hint of flamboyance in his attire – usually a green velvet suit and waistcoat, a green shirt and a bulky green tie. His shoes were of soft, pale suede. He was English, and notably good-looking. Slovinski was small and bald, and still wore military uniform – a shade of blue – which Medlicott claimed he had bought in a Lost Property office. Slovinski could play part of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on his teeth, with his thumbnails.
‘I heard of digs,’ Medlicott said. ‘Out near the Zoo. That Dutch fellow was after them only he decided to go back to Holland instead.’
It was in this casual way that Barney first came to hear about Sinnott Street, and that evening he went out to inspect the lodgings. A woman with a carefully powdered face and waved black hair opened the door to him. A discreet smear of lipstick coloured her lips, and there was a hint of eye-shadow beneath her myopic seeming eyes. She was wearing a flowered overall, which she removed in the hall. Beneath was a navy-blue skirt and a cream- coloured blouse that had a fox-terrier brooch pinned to it. She folded the overall and placed it on the hall-stand.
