Desmond and Una Carty-Carroll, not seeming to notice that it wasn’t where he’d been sitting before.
Mavis’s back was reflected in the Rhett Butler mirror, the V of her black dress plunging deeply down her spine. Her movements, and those of Billy MacGuinness next to her, danced over the features of Clark Gable.
‘He might suit Angela,’ Desmond said. ‘You never know.’
That August afternoon Billy MacGuinness, who was a doctor, had been called away from the club, some complication with a confinement. ‘Damned woman,’ he’d grumbled unfeelingly, predicting an all-night job. ‘Come back to the house, Francie,’ Grania had invited when the tennis came to an end, and it was then that Desmond had noticed the young man attaching his tennis racquet to the crossbar of his bicycle and had issued the same invitation. Desmond had said he’d drive him back to the Prendergasts’ when they’d all had something to eat, and together they lifted his bicycle on to the boot of the car. ‘I’ve something to confess,’ Francie had said in the kitchen, cutting the rinds off rashers of bacon, and Grania knew what it would be because ‘I’ve something to confess’ was a kind of joke among the wives, a time-honoured way of announcing pregnancy. ‘You’re
Billy telephoned while they were still in the kitchen, guessing where Francie was when there’d been no reply from his own number. He’d be late, as he’d predicted. ‘Francie’s pregnant,’ Grania told Desmond while Francie was still on the phone. ‘Don’t tell her I said.’
In the sitting-room they had a few more drinks while in the kitchen the bacon cooked on a glimmer of heat. All of them were still in their tennis clothes and nobody was in a hurry. Francie wasn’t because of the empty evening in front of her. Grania and Desmond weren’t because they’d nothing to do that evening. The young man who was staying with the Prendergasts was like a schoolboy prolonging his leave. The sipping of their gin, the idle conversation – the young man told about the town and the tennis club, told who Angela was, and which the Duddys were: all of it took on the pleasurable feeling of a party happening by chance. Desmond picked up the telephone and rang the Crosbies but Trish said they wouldn’t be able to get a babysitter or else of course they’d come over, love to. Eventually Desmond beat up eggs to scramble and Grania fried potato cakes and soda bread. ‘We’re none of us sober,’ Desmond said, offering a choice of white or red wine as they sat down to eat. Eartha Kitt sang ‘Just an Old-fashioned Girl’.
In the Rhett Butler Room Grania heard the tune again. ‘… and an old-fashioned millionaire’, lisped the cool, sensuous voice, each emphasis strangely accented. They’d danced to it among the furniture, of the sitting-room, Francie and the young man mostly, she and Desmond. ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ Desmond whispered, but she shook her head, refusing to concede that blame came into it. If it did, she might as well say she was sorry herself. ‘I have to get back,’ Francie said. ‘Cook something for Billy.’ Desmond said he’d drop her off on his way to the Prendergasts, but then he changed the record to ‘Love Grows’, and fell asleep as soon as the music began.
Francie didn’t want a lift. She wanted to walk because the air would do her good. ‘D’you trust me?’ Grania asked the young man, and he laughed and said he’d have to because he didn’t have a lamp on his bicycle. She’d hardly spoken to him, had been less aware of him than of Desmond’s apparent liking of him. With strangers Desmond was often like that. ‘What do you do?’ she asked in the car, suddenly shy in spite of all the gin and wine there’d been. He’d held her rather close when he’d danced with her, but she’d noticed he’d held Francie close too. Francie had kissed him goodbye. ‘Well, actually I’ve been working in a pub,’ he said. ‘Before that I made toast in the Marine Hotel in Bournemouth.’
She drove slowly, with extreme caution, through the narrow streets of the town. The public houses were closing; gaggles of men loitered near each, smoking or just standing. Youths thronged the pavement outside the Palm Grove fish-and-chip shop. Beyond the last of its lamp-posts the town straggled away to nothing, solitary cottages and bungalows gave way to fields. ‘I haven’t been to this house before,’ Grania said in a silence that had developed. Her companion had vouchsafed no further information about himself beyond the reference to a pub and making toast in Bournemouth. ‘They’ll be in bed,’ he said now. ‘They go to bed at nine.’
The headlights picked out trunks of trees on the avenue, then urns, and steps leading up to a hall door. White wooden shutters flanked the downstairs windows, the paint peeling, as it was on the iron balustrade of the steps. All of it was swiftly there, then lost: the car lights isolated a rose-bed and a seat on a lawn. ‘I won’t be a minute,’ he said, ‘unshackling this bike.’
She turned the lights off. The last of the August day hadn’t quite gone; a warm duskiness was scented with honeysuckle she could not see when she stepped out of the car. ‘You’ve been awfully good to me,’ he said, unknotting the strings that held the bicycle in place. ‘You and Desmond.’
In the Rhett Butler Room, now rowdy with laughter and raised voices, she didn’t want to look at him again, and yet she couldn’t help herself: waiting for her were the unblinking eyes, the hair brushed back from the sallow forehead, the high cheekbones. Angela would stand at the graveside and afterwards would offer him sympathy. Quilty would be there, Helen wouldn’t bother. ‘I’d say we all need a drink’: Grania could imagine Angela saying that, including Desmond in the invitation, gathering the three men around her. In the dark the bicycle had been wheeled away and propped against the steps. ‘Come in for a minute,’ he’d said, and she’d begun to protest that it was late, even though it wasn’t. ‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ he’d said.
She remembered in the garish hotel dining-room, the flash of his smile in the gloom, and how she’d felt his unblinking eyes caressing her. He reached out for her hand, and in a moment they were in a hall, the electric light turned on, a grandfather clock ticking at the bottom of the stairs. There was a hallstand, and square cream-and- terracotta tiles, brown engravings framed in oak, fish in glass cases. ‘I shall offer you a nightcap,’ he whispered, leading her into a flagged passage and then into a cavernous kitchen. ‘Tullamore Dew is what they have,’ he murmured. ‘Give every man his dew.’ She knew what he intended. She’d known it before they’d turned in at the avenue gates; she’d felt it in the car between them. He poured their drinks and then he kissed her, taking her into his arms as though that were simply a variation of their dancing together. ‘Dearest,’ he murmured, surprising her: she hadn’t guessed that he intended, also, the delicacy of endearments.
Did she, before the car turned in at the avenue gates, decide herself what was to happen? Or was it later, even while still protesting that it was late? Or when he reached up to the high shelf of the dresser for the bottle? At some point she had said to herself: I am going to do this. She knew she had because the words still echoed. ‘How extraordinary!’ he murmured in the kitchen, all his talk as soft as that now. ‘How extraordinary to find you at a tennis club in Ireland!’ Her own arms held him to her; yet for some reason she didn’t want to see his face, not that she found it unattractive.
The empty glasses laid down on the kitchen table, stairs without a carpet, a chest of drawers on a landing, towels in a pile on a chair, the door of his bedroom closing behind them: remembered images were like details from a dream. For a moment the light went on in his room: a pink china jug stood in a basin on a wash-stand, there was a wardrobe, a cigarette packet on the dressing-table, the shirt and trousers he’d changed from into his tennis clothes were thrown on to the floor. Then the light was extinguished and again he embraced her, his fingers already unbuttoning her tennis dress, which no one but Desmond had ever done in that particular way. Before her marriage she’d been kissed, twice, by Billy MacGuinness, and once by a boy who’d left the neighbourhood and gone to Canada. As all the tennis-club wives were when they married, she’d been a virgin. ‘Oh God, Grania!’ she heard him whispering, and her thoughts became worries when she lay, naked, on the covers of his bed. Her father’s face was vivid in her mind, disposing of her with distaste. ‘No, don’t do that, dear,’ her mother used to
