The Collected Stories

He said it didn’t matter. He had noticed her mother opening the bottom sash in preference to the top one, he added conversationally. It didn’t matter in the least, he said.

‘The top’s stuck with paint,’ Ariadne said.

Mrs Fennerty returned to her place by the fire. Mr Sheehy put on his navy-blue overcoat and his gloves and sat on the chair by the door. Skilfully, with the glass held at an angle, Mrs Fennerty poured out a bottle of stout that had been placed in the fender to warm. On her invitation, accompanied by a warning concerning hasty digestion, Barney occupied the second fireside armchair, feeling too shy to disobey. Mrs Fennerty lit a cigarette. She was a boarder the same as Mr Sheehy, she said. She paid her way, Mrs Lenehan’s mother or not. That was why she sat down in the dining-room with Mr Sheehy and whoever the third boarder happened to be.

‘Are you at Dowding’s?’ She referred to a commercial college that offered courses in accountancy and book- keeping, preparing its students for the bank and brewery examinations.

‘No. Not Dowding’s.’ He explained that he was a medical student.

‘A doctor buries his mistakes. Did you ever hear that one?’ Mrs Fennerty laughed shrilly, and in a sociable way Barney laughed himself. Mr Sheehy remained impassive by the door. Barney wondered why he had taken up a position there, with his coat and gloves on.

‘Six feet under, no questions asked,’ Mrs Fennerty remarked, again laughing noisily.

Dressed to go out, Mrs Lenehan entered the dining-room, and Mr Sheehy’s behaviour was explained. He rose to his feet, and when the pair had gone Mrs Fennerty said:

‘Those two are doing a line. Up to the McKee Barracks every evening. Sheehy wouldn’t part with the price of anything else. Turn round at the barracks, back by the Guards’ Depot. Then he’s down in the kitchen with her. That’s Ned Sheehy for you.’

Barney nodded, not much interested in Mr Sheehy’s courtship of Mrs Lenehan. Nevertheless the subject was pursued. ‘Ned Sheehy has a post with the Hibernian Insurance. That’s how he’d be selling wireless sets to people. He calls in at houses a lot.’

‘I see.’

‘He’s keen on houses all right. It’s the house we’re sitting in he has designs on, not Mrs Lenehan at all.’

‘Oh, I’m sure –’

‘If there’s a man in Dublin that knows his bricks and mortar better than Ned Sheehy give me a gander at him.’

Barney said he didn’t think he could supply the old woman with such a person, and she said that of course he couldn’t. No flies on Ned Sheehy, she said, in spite of what you might think to look at him.

‘She made a mistake the first time and she’ll make another before she’s finished. You could turn that one’s head like the wind would turn a weather-cock.’

Ariadne came in with the Evening Herald and handed it to her grandmother. Barney smiled at her, but she didn’t notice. Mrs Fennerty became engrossed in the newspaper. Barney went upstairs.

In time, he heard footsteps in the room above his, and knew they were Ariadne’s. They crossed the room to the window. The blind was drawn down. Ariadne crossed the room again, back and forth, back and forth. He knew when she took her shoes off.

Handwritten notes clamoured for attention on the green baize of the board beside the porters’ lodge: love letters, brief lines of rejection, relationships terminated, charges of treachery, a stranger’s admiration confessed. The same envelope remained on the baize-covered board for months: R.R. Woodley, it said, but R.R. Woodley either did not exist or had long since ceased to be an undergraduate. It is hard to find myself the way I am, and to be alone with not a soul to turn to: a heart was laid bare within the dust-soiled envelope, its ache revealed to the general curiosity. But other notes, on torn half-sheets of exercise-paper, remained on the green board for only a few hours, disappearing for ever while they were still fresh.

Within their fire-warmed lodge the porters were a suspicious breed of men, well used to attempted circumvention of the law that began where their own rule did. They wore black velvet jockey caps; one carried a mace on ceremonial occasions. They saw to it that bicycles were wheeled through the vast archway they guarded, and that female undergraduates passed in and out during the permitted hours only, that their book was signed when this was necessary. In the archway itself, posters advertised dances and theatrical productions. Eminent visitors were announced. Societies’ account sheets were published. There were reports of missionary work in Africa.

Beyond this entrance, dark facades loomed around a cobbled square. Loops of chain protected tidily shorn lawns. The Chapel stared stolidly at the pillars of the Examination Hall. Gold numerals lightened the blue face of the Dining Hall clock. A campanile rose fussily.

Barney attended the lectures of Bore McGusty and Professor Makepeace-Green and the elderly Dr Posse, who had been in the medical school in his father’s time. Bore McGusty was a long-winded young man, Professor Makepeace-Green a tetchily severe woman, who particularly objected to Slovinski reading the Daily Sketch during her lectures. The students of Barney’s age keenly took notes and paid attention, but the recent shedding of years of discipline by the ex-servicemen left them careless of their academic obligations. ‘Listen,’ Slovinski regularly invited, interrupting Bore McGusty’s dissertation on the functioning of the bile-ducts by playing Beethoven on his teeth.

The medical students favoured certain public houses: the International Bar, Ryan’s in Duke Street, McFadden’s. After an evening’s drinking they danced in the Crystal Ballroom, or sat around pots of tea in the cafe attached to the Green cinema, where the private lives of their mentors were breezily speculated upon, and for the most part scorned. On such occasions Slovinski spoke of his wartime liaisons, and Medlicott retailed the appetites of a baker’s widow, a Mrs Claudia Rigg of Bournemouth. For Barney –years later – this time in his life was as minutely preserved as his childhood at Lisscrea. And always, at the heart of the memory, was Mrs Lenehan’s household in Sinnott Street.

‘You’ve maybe not come across the name Ariadne before,’ Mrs Lenehan said one morning in the hall, adding that she’d found it in a story hi Model Housekeeping. Had a son been born instead of a daughter he’d have been christened Paul, that being a family name on her own side. As soon as she’d seen Ariadne written down she’d settled for it.

Barney liked the name also. He thought it suited Mrs Lenehan’s daughter, whom increasingly he found himself thinking about, particularly during the lectures of Bore McGusty and Professor Makepeace-Green. Ariadne, he soon discovered, didn’t go out to work; her work was in her mother’s house and it was there, during the lectures, that