school report.
The headmaster, a square, bald man with a head that might have been carved from oak, a man who wore rimless spectacles and whose name was Angusthorpe, discovered when he arrived at the Slieve Gashal Hotel in the summer of 1968 that in the intervening year a tragedy had occurred. It had become the custom of Mr Angusthorpe to book his fortnight’s holiday by saying simply to Mr Doyle: ‘Till next year then,’ an anticipation that Mr Doyle would translate into commercial terms, reserving the same room for the headmaster and his wife in twelve months’ time. No letters changed hands during the year, no confirmation of the booking was ever necessary: Mr Angusthorpe and his wife arrived each summer after the trials of the school term, knowing that their room would be waiting for them, with sweet-peas in a vase in the window, and Mr Doyle full of welcome in the hall. ‘He died in Woolworth’s in Galway,’ said Mr Doyle’s son in the summer of 1968. ‘He was buying a shirt at the time.’
Afterwards, Mr Angusthorpe said to his wife that when Mr Doyle’s son spoke those words he knew that nothing was ever going to be the same again. Mr Doyle’s son, known locally as Scut Doyle, went on speaking while the headmaster and his small wife, grey-haired, and bespectacled also, stood in the hall. He told them that he had inherited the Slieve Gashal and that for all his adult life he had been employed in the accounts department of a paper-mill in Dublin. ‘I thought at first I’d sell the place up,’ he informed the Angusthorpes, ‘and then I thought maybe I’d attempt to make a go of it. “Will we have a shot at it?” I said to the wife, and, God bless her, she said why wouldn’t I?’ While he spoke, the subject of his last remarks appeared behind him in the hall, a woman whose appearance did not at all impress Mr Angusthorpe. She was pale-faced and fat and, so Mr Angusthorpe afterwards suggested to his wife, sullen. She stood silently by her husband, whose appearance did not impress Mr Angusthorpe either, since the new proprietor of the Slieve Gashal, a man with shaking hands and a cocky grin, did not appear to have shaved himself that day. ‘One or other of them, if not both,’ said Mr Angusthorpe afterwards, ‘smelt of drink.’
The Angusthorpes were led to their room by a girl whose age Mr Angusthorpe estimated to be thirteen. ‘What’s become of Joseph?’ he asked her as they mounted the stairs, referring to an old porter who had always in the past been spick-and-span in a uniform, but the child seemed not to understand the question, for she offered it no reply. In the room there were no sweet-peas, and although they had entered by a door that was familiar to them, the room itself was greatly altered: it was, to begin with, only half the size it had been before. ‘Great heavens!’ exclaimed Mr Angusthorpe, striking a wall with his fist and finding it to be a partition. ‘He had the carpenters in,’ the child said.
Mr Angusthorpe, in a natural fury, descended the stairs and shouted in the hall. ‘Mr Doyle!’ he called out in his peremptory headmaster’s voice. ‘Mr Doyle! Mr Doyle!’
Doyle emerged from the back regions of the hotel, with a cigarette in his mouth. There were feathers on his clothes, and he held in his right hand a half-plucked chicken. In explanation he said that he had been giving his wife a hand. She was not herself, he confided to Mr Angusthorpe, on account of it being her bad time of the month.
‘Our room,’ protested Mr Angusthorpe. ‘We can’t possibly sleep in a tiny space like that. You’ve cut the room in half, Mr Doyle.’
Doyle nodded. All the bedrooms in the hotel, he told Mr Angusthorpe, had been divided, since they were uneconomical otherwise. He had spent four hundred and ten pounds having new doorways made and putting on new wallpaper. He began to go into the details of this expense, plucking feathers from the chicken as he stood there. Mr Angusthorpe coldly remarked that he had not booked a room in which you couldn’t swing a cat.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ interrupted Doyle. ‘You booked a room a year ago: you did not reserve a specific room. D’you know what I mean, Mr Angusthorpe? I have no note that you specified with my father to have the exact room again.’
‘It was an understood thing between us –’
‘My father unfortunately died.’
Mr Angusthorpe regarded the man, disliking him intensely. It occurred to him that he had never in his life carried on a conversation with a hotel proprietor who held in his right hand a half-plucked chicken and whose clothes had feathers on them. His inclination was to turn on his heel and march with his wife from the unsatisfactory hotel, telling, if need be, this unprepossessing individual to go to hell. Mr Angusthorpe thought of doing that, but then he wondered where he and his wife could go. Hotels in the area were notoriously full at this time of year, in the middle of the fishing season.
‘I must get on with this for the dinner,’ said Doyle, ‘or the wife will be having me guts for garters.’ He winked at Mr Angusthorpe, flicking a quantity of cigarette ash from the pale flesh of the chicken. He left Mr Angusthorpe standing there.
The child had remained with Mrs Angusthorpe while the headmaster had sought an explanation downstairs. She had stood silently by the door until Mrs Angusthorpe, fearing a violent reaction on the part of her husband if he discovered the child present when he returned, suggested that she should go away. But the child had taken no notice of that and Mrs Angusthorpe, being unable to think of anything else to say, had asked her at what time of year old Mr Doyle had died. ‘The funeral was ten miles long, missus,’ replied the child. ‘Me father wasn’t sober till the Monday.’ Mr Angusthorpe, returning, asked the child sharply why she was lingering and the child explained that she was waiting to be tipped. Mr Angusthorpe gave her a threepenny-piece.
In the partitioned room, which now had a pink wallpaper on the walls and an elaborate frieze from which flowers of different colours cascaded down the four corners, the Angusthorpes surveyed their predicament. Mr Angusthorpe told his wife the details of his interview with Doyle, and when he had talked for twenty minutes he came more definitely to the conclusion that the best thing they could do would be to remain for the moment. The rivers could hardly have altered, he was thinking, and that the hotel was now more than inadequate was a consequence that would affect his wife more than it would affect him. In the past she had been wont to spend her days going for a brief walk in the morning and returning to the pleasant little dining-room for a solitary lunch, and then sleeping or reading until it was time for a cup of tea, after which she would again take a brief walk. She was usually sitting by the fire in the lounge when he returned from his day’s excursion. Perhaps all that would be less attractive now, Mr Angusthorpe thought, but there was little he could do about it and it was naturally only fair that they should at least remain for a day or two.
That night the dinner was well below the standard of the dinners they had in the past enjoyed in the Slieve Gashal. Mrs Angusthorpe was unable to consume her soup because there were quite large pieces of bone and gristle in it. The headmaster laughed over his prawn cocktail because, he said, it tasted of absolutely nothing at all. He had recovered from his initial shock and was now determined that the hotel must be regarded as a joke. He eyed his wife’s plate of untouched soup, saying it was better to make the best of things. Chicken and potatoes and mashed turnip were placed before them by a nervous woman in the uniform of a waitress. Turnip made Mrs Angusthorpe sick in the stomach, even the sight of it: at another time in their life her husband might have remembered and ordered the vegetable from the table, but what he was more intent upon now was discovering if the Slieve Gashal still possessed a passable hock, which surprisingly it did. After a few glasses, he said:
