Normally she would not take in boarders, she explained, but the house was too large, really, for herself and her mother and her daughter, just the three of them. A pity to have rooms and not use them, a pity to have them empty. The trouble was that smaller houses were usually not in districts she cared for. She led the way upstairs while still speaking about the house and household. ‘It’s a residence that’s been in the Lenehan family for three generations,’ she said. ‘That’s another consideration.’
The door of a room on the second floor was opened. ‘Fusty,’ Mrs Lenehan said, and crossed to the window. The bed was narrow, the bedstead of ornamental iron. There was a wash-stand with an enamel basin on it and a shaving mirror above it on the wall. There was a wardrobe, a chest of drawers, two holy pictures, and a chair. Patterned, worn linoleum partially covered the floor, leaving a darkly varnished surround. There were net curtains and a blind.
‘The bathroom and W.C. are off the landing below,’ Mrs Lenehan said. In Mr Lenehan’s childhood there were two maids and a cook in this house, she went on, and in her own day there’d always been a single maid at least, and a scrubbing woman once a fortnight. Now you couldn’t get a servant for love nor money. She noticed Barney glancing at the fireplace, which contained an arrangement of red tissue paper. She said that in the old days there’d have been a fire laid in the grate every morning and coal blazing cheerfully every evening. Now, of course, that was out of the question. ‘Thirty shillings would be fair, would it? Breakfast and six p.m. tea, the extra meal on a Sunday.’
Barney said he thought thirty shillings was a reasonable rent for what was offered.
‘Of a Friday evening, Mr Prenderville. In advance would be fair, I think.’
‘Yes, it would.’
‘Best to have a clear arrangement, I always say. No chance for mis-understandings.’
Two days later Barney moved in. When he’d unpacked his suitcases and was waiting for the gong which Mrs Lenehan had told him would sound at six O’clock there was a knock on his door. ‘I’m Ariadne,’ Mrs Lenehan’s daughter said, standing in the doorway with a bar of yellow soap in her hand. ‘My mother said give you this.’ She was dark-haired, about the same age as Barney. The rather long mauve dress she wore was trimmed with black, and snowy-white beads were looped several times around her neck. Her lips were painted, her hands and wrists delicately slender. Large brown eyes surveyed Barney frankly and with curiosity.
‘Thanks very much,’ he said, taking the bar of soap from her.
She nodded vaguely, seeming to be no longer interested in him. Quietly she closed the door, and he listened to her footfall on the stairs. As light as gossamer, he said to himself. He was aware of a pleasurable sensation, a tingling on the skin of his head. The girl had brought to the room a whiff of perfume, and it remained after she’d gone. Barney wanted to close the window to keep it with him, but he also wanted just to stand there.
The sounding of the gong roused him from this pleasant reverie. He had never much cared for the appearance of the girls – women sometimes – whom Medlicott and Slovinski admired in cafes or on the streets. Ariadne was different. There was an old-fashioned air about her, and an unusualness. As well, Barney considered her beautiful.
‘Fennerty’s the name,’ a small, jaunty old woman said in the dining-room. Wiry white hair grew tidily on a flat-looking head; eyes like beads peered at Barney. ‘Fennerty’s the name,’ she repeated. ‘Mrs Lenehan’s mother.’
Barney told her who he was. The last occupant of his room had been employed in Clery’s bed-linen department, she replied, a youth called Con Malley from Carlow. Now that someone had replaced him, the house would again be full. There had been difficulty in regularly extracting the rent from Con Malley. ‘Mrs Lenehan won’t tolerate anything less than promptness,’ the old woman warned.
A man of about fifty, wearing a navy-blue belted overcoat and tan gloves, entered the dining-room. ‘How’re you, Mr Sheehy?’ Mrs Fennerty inquired.
Divesting himself of his coat and gloves and placing them on the seat of a chair by the door, the man replied that he wasn’t so good. He had a sharply receding chin, with features that had a receding look about them also, and closely clipped hair, nondescript as to colour. The removal of his coat revealed a brown pin-striped suit, with the corner of a handerkerchief peeping from the top pocket, and a tiny badge, hardly noticeable, in the left lapel. This proclaimed Mr Sheehy’s teetotalism, the emblem of the Pioneer movement.
‘I had a bad debt,’ Mr Sheehy said, sitting down at the table. Mrs Fennerty vacated a sagging armchair by the fire and took her place also. Ariadne entered with a laden tray, and placed plates of fried food in front of the three diners. Mrs Fennerty said the thick Yorkshire Relish had been finished the evening before, and when Ariadne returned to the dining-room a minute or so later with a metal teapot she brought a bottle of Yorkshire Relish as well. Neither she nor her mother joined the others at the dining-table.
‘Did you know Mattie Higgins?’ Mr Sheehy inquired of Mrs Fennerty. When he spoke he kept his teeth trapped behind his lips, as though nervous of their exposure. ‘I sold him a wireless set. Three pounds fifteen. I had the price agreed with him, only when I brought it round all he had was a five-pound note. “I’ll have that broken into tonight,” he said. “Come back in the morning.” Only didn’t he die that night in his bed?’
Swiftly, the old woman crossed herself. ‘You got caught with that one,’ she said.
‘I was round there at eight o’clock this morning, only the place was in the hands of five big daughters. When I mentioned the wireless they ate the face off of me. A good Pye wireless gone west.’
Mrs Fennerty, still consuming her food, glanced across the room at the radio on the dumb-waiter in a corner. ‘Is it a Pye Mrs Lenehan has?’
‘It is.’
‘I heard the Pye’s the best.’
‘I told that to the daughters. The one I sold him had only a few fag burns on the cabinet. The five of them laughed at me.’
‘I know the type.’
‘Five fat vultures, and your man still warming the bed.’
‘Strumpets.’
The rest of the meal was taken in a silence that wasn’t broken until Ariadne came to clear the table. ‘I meant to have told you,’ she remarked to Barney. ‘Your window gets stuck at the top.’
