he imagined her. She assisted with the cleaning and the preparation of meals, and the washing-up afterwards. She was often on the stairs with a dust-pan and brush; she polished the brass on the front door. Every morning she set the dining-room fire, and lit it every evening. Once in a while she and her mother cleaned the windows.
Mrs Lenehan occasionally sang while she performed her household tasks. Ariadne didn’t. There was no trace of reluctance in her expression, only a kind of vagueness: she had the look of a saint, Barney found himself thinking once, and the thought remained with him. In the dining-room he was usually the last to finish breakfast, deliberately dawdling. Ariadne came in with a tray and, seeing him still at the table, absorbed the time by damping the fire down with wet slack and picking up the mantelpiece ornaments and dusting them. Her elegant hands were as delicate as the porcelain she attended to, and her clothes never varied: the same shade of mauve combined repeatedly with mourner’s black. ‘Good evening, Mr Prenderville,’ she sometimes whispered in the dusk of the hall, a fleeting figure passing from one closed door to another.
After he’d been in the lodgings a month Barney was familiar with every movement in the room above his. When Ariadne left it and did not return within a few minutes he said to himself that she was washing her hair, which he imagined wrapped in a towel, the way Nuala wrapped hers before she sat down to dry it at the range. He imagined the glow of an electric fire on Ariadne’s long, damp tresses. Staring at a discoloured ceiling, he invaded her privacy, investing every sound she made with his speculations. Would she be sewing or embroidering, as Nuala did in the evening? Nuala pressed flowers between the pages of the medical encyclopaedia in the dining- room at Lisscrea, pansies and primulas she asked Charlie Redmond to bring from the garden. Barney wondered if Ariadne did that also. He guessed the moment when she lay down to sleep, and lay in the darkness himself, accompanying her to oblivion.
He didn’t tell Rouge Medlicott and Slovinski, or anyone else, about Ariadne. In his letters to his father he mentioned Mrs Lenehan and Mrs Fennerty and Mr Sheehy: Ariadne mightn’t have existed. Yet in the noisy cafes and the lecture-halls he continued to feel haunted by her, and wished she was there also. He left the house in Sinnott Street reluctantly each morning, and hurried back to it in the evenings.
‘Ariadne.’
He addressed her on the first-floor landing one Sunday afternoon. His voice was little more than a whisper; they were shadows in the dim afternoon light. ‘Ariadne,’ he said again, delighting, while they were alone, in this repetition of her name.
‘Yes, Mr Prenderville?’
Mrs Lenehan and Mr Sheehy spent Sunday afternoons with Mrs Fennerty in the dining-room, listening to a radio commentary on a hurling or Gaelic football match, the only time the dining-room wireless was ever turned on. When it was over Mr Sheehy and Mrs Lenehan went to the kitchen.
‘Would you like to come for a walk, Ariadne?’
She did not reply at once. He gazed through the gloom, hoping for the gleam of her smile. From the dining- room came the faint sound of the commentator’s rapid, excited voice. Ariadne didn’t smile. She said:
‘This minute, Mr Prenderville?’
‘If you are doing nothing better.’
‘I will put on my coat.’
He thought of her mother and Mr Sheehy as he waited. He didn’t know which direction the McKee Barracks and the Civic Guards’ Depot lay in, but wherever these places were he didn’t want even to see them in the distance. ‘I’m ready,’ Ariadne said, having delayed for no longer than a minute. Barney opened the front door softly, and softly closed it behind them. Damp autumn leaves lay thickly on the pavements, blown into mounds and heaps. When the wind gusted, more slipped from the branches above them and gently descended. Ariadne’s coat was another shade of mauve, matching her headscarf. There’d been no need to leave the house in that secret way, but they had done so nonetheless, without exchanging a look.
‘I love Sunday,’ Ariadne said.
He said he liked the day also. He told her about Sundays at Lisscrea because he didn’t know how else to interest her. His father and he would sit reading in the drawing-room on a winter’s afternoon, or in the garden in the summer. Nuala would bring them tea, and a cake made the day before. His father read books that were sent to him by post from a lending library in Dublin, novels by A.E.W. Mason and E. Phillips Oppenheim and Sapper. Once, laying one down when he had finished it, he changed his mind and handed it to Barney. ‘Try this,’ he said, and after that they shared the books that came by post. Barney was fourteen or fifteen then.
‘Your mother is not there, Mr Prenderville?’
‘My mother died.’
He described Lisscrea to her: the long, narrow rooms of the house, the garden where Charlie Redmond had worked for as long as Barney could remember, the patients in the hall. He mentioned the cottages next to Lisscrea House, and Walsh’s public house, and the ruined tower he could see from his bedroom window. He repeated a piece of Charlie Redmond’s doggerel, and described his prematurely wizened features and Nuala’s countrywoman’s looks. He told Ariadne about school at Ballinadra, the journey on the milk cart when he was small, the return by the bread van in the afternoon, and then the inheriting of his father’s old B.S.A. bicycle. She’d never known a town like Ballinadra, Ariadne said; she only knew Dublin.
‘It isn’t much,’ he said, but she wanted to know, and he tried to make a picture of the place for her: the single street and the square, O’Kevin’s hardware, the grocers’ shops that were bars as well, the statue of Father Mathew.
‘A quiet place,’ Ariadne said.
‘Oh, a grave.’
She nodded solemnly. She could see the house, she said. She knew what he meant by Virginia creeper. She could see his father clearly.
‘What would you have done if I hadn’t suggested a walk?’
‘Stayed in my room.’
‘Doing nothing, Ariadne?’ He spoke lightly, almost teasing her. But she was still solemn and did not smile. Maybe tidying her drawers, she said. She called him Mr Prenderville again, and he asked her not to. ‘My name’s Barney.’
