Lantern Slides Page 16

  “Is that so?” he claims to have said, telling everyone at the table of his naïveté, but meaning it for Miss Lawless in particular. He added that one label was the same as another to him, and he knew a fellow in England, a foreman who worked on a building site, and so he sent the tie over for a duplicate to be bought. After a couple of weeks, back it came with its companion in a regal box, and, Christ, wasn’t it forty-eight pounds fifty pence. A shocker altogether, as everyone agreed, and the other men now began to stare at the tie with incomprehension. Sinead and Dot looked at each other quite piqued, and Sinead announced that the ladies would like a bit of stimulating conversation—they had not come to a party to be treated like ornaments, as was the case with most women in Ireland. She added that though they were treated like pieces of china at a party, they were frequently “knocked about” at home.

  “Bollocks,” Dr. Fitz said, and by the way he picked up a bottle of wine it appeared he might brain Sinead with it. His cheeks were getting flushed and he proceeded to loosen his tie.

  “So set us an agenda,” Mr. Gogarty, the aggrieved divorcé, said, also nettled by Sinead’s remark. For some unfortunate reason, divorce was pounced upon as a subject, so the table became even more heated, with men and women shouting each other down. The men insisted that divorce was wrong, because of the way children suffer, while the women claimed vociferously that children suffered anyhow, because their fathers were always in the boozer or in the backs of motorcars necking with younger women. Mrs. Vaughan was the sole female voice who took issue with the other women, adding that young girls nowadays were tramps in the way they dressed and the way they behaved.

  “How do you know how we behave?” Sinead said tartly.

  “What’s right is right,” Eileen Vaughan said, pushing her plate away contemptuously and applying herself to cutting bread into infinitesimal pieces, which she did not touch.

  * * *

  MUCH AGAINST THE ADVICE of Dr. Fitz, Sinead began to tell how she, as a young girl not yet thirty-five, had been the victim of a modern Irish marriage and it was “the pits.” She recalled coming into her own building one evening and actually finding the chain drawn on her door, then ringing the bell but receiving no answer, having to go to the apartment below and ask a neighbor to shelter her for the night, ringing the telephone number but not receiving an answer, and a few days later learning that the person he had had in the bedroom when he put the chain on was a call girl. When she tackled him about it, he said that he needed comfort because she had gone out and he was not sure if she was coming back.

  “It’s bloody ridiculous the way women have to kowtow,” she said directly to Eileen Vaughan, who looked like a weasel ready to hiss. Dr. Fitz began to fume, fearing above all else that the next thing Sinead would treat them to was an account of her husband’s suicide, of the amount of pills he took in that hotel in the North, and of Dr. Fitz being called, because he happened to be there on a fishing holiday. Worse, she would treat them to the long rigmarole about her miscarriage and her husband beating her brutally. He was right. She was off on her favorite target. The four days in the labour ward, other women screaming and groaning, but to some avail, since they did not lose their babies. Then the bit about her husband coming to collect her, her imagining a treat—lunch out, maybe, or coffee and biscuits in that smart pub off Grafton Street—but instead their going out the sea road, her heartening at the thought of a walk along the strand, with the dunes on one side and the sea on the other, returning to the spot where they had courted, as an appeasement, a reward for all that she had been through. Hardly had they taken twenty paces along that littered seashore when he began to beat her up. Sinead became more hysterical as she described it, more dramatic—herself on the ground, her husband kicking her, first in silence, then his beginning to shout, to ask why had she lost the child, why had she been so bloody careless. His child—his, his. “You’re mad,” she recounted having said to him, and then told of standing up and feeling battered inside and out.

  Bill the Barrow Boy leaned across the table and tried to stop her, but the other men turned from her in dismay and towards Dr. Fitz, who was appraising the nose of a red wine that had just been brought in dome-shaped decanters. On the surface, the wine had a violet hue. The main course was also being served. It was duck with roast potatoes and applesauce, which, as Mr. Gogarty said, was far preferable to steak on a spring evening. The light had faded, and in the dining room, what with the balloons, the waving wings of yellow candle flame, and the high-pitched voices, the atmosphere was fervid. Many were popping streamers from the little toy pistols that were on their side plates, and these coloured wisps of straw, weaving and wandering from table to table, shoulder to shoulder, formed a web, uniting them in a carnival chain.

  “Now, what is the difference between Northside girls and Southside girls?” Mr. Gogarty asked with pride.

  Answers were proffered, but in the end Mr. Gogarty was pleased to tell them they were all dullards. “Northside girls have real jewellery and fake orgasms,” he said, and laughed loudly, while Eileen Vaughan repeatedly blessed herself and, as if it were a maggot, lifted the streamer that joined her to Mr. Gogarty.

  Mr. Conroy, in order to bring harmony back to the proceedings, recounted the morning’s walk that he and Miss Lawless had taken, gloated over what a sight it had been, what refreshment, the air so bracing, not a ruffle on the sea, the sand so white—or, as he said, white as saltpetre, to quote Miss Lawless.

  Yes, Miss Lawless had asked him to take her there, but it was not so much to retrace her steps as to find them for the first time. Twenty-five years had gone by since that momentous occasion on the dunes. It was there she had surrendered herself to a man that she likened to Peter Abelard. He was tall and blond, with a stiff, almost wooden body—a sternness and yet a seducer’s charm. The first time Miss Lawless had sighted him was in a newspaper office where she had gone to deliver a piece that she had written for a competition. Readers had been asked to describe a day by the sea. She could not remember precisely how she had described it then, but today, when she walked there with Mr. Conroy, she saw patches of sea like diagonals of stained glass, the colours deepening as the water swerved from the shore to the Hill of Howth far beyond. Mr. Conroy had said that if she waited a week or two more the rhododendrons would be in bloom over in Howth and they could go there for an excursion. She knew, just as Mr. Conroy knew, that the red rhododendrons he conjured up were mostly in the mind—talismans transfused with memory. On the walk, Mr. Conroy often stopped in his tracks to draw breath, said he was getting on a bit and was easily winded, then pointed to his elastic stockings and spoke of varicose veins. But in telling the story to the guests at the table he spoke only of a glorious walk where they linked and strode together.

  Yes, the traces of her and Abelard were there, because of course he had cropped up again in her mind. On the evening when she had first met him, when she took her little essay to the newspaper office, she had had a premonitory feeling that something was going to happen between them, just as this evening, sitting at that table, she felt that something was pending. She remembered clearly how Abelard had taken her essay, asked her where she worked, and how he diligently wrote down her address and her telephone number—as a formality, but from the way he smiled at her she knew that he had some personal interest. When her piece was featured in the paper as having placed first in the competition, the editor had got her name wrong, so the flush of her winning was a little dimmed. But Peter Abelard pursued her. They began to meet. She tasted her first gin-and-tonic and thought not much of it, but afterwards there was a floaty feeling inside her stomach, and then she took off her gloves and touched his hand and was not ashamed. One night they met far earlier than was usual for them, took a bus out to the sea, got off at Dollymount, walked over a bit of footbridge and then down a road and into the labyrinth and secrecy of the dunes, with the high swags of coarse grass and the sandy mounds serving as beds. It was there among those dunes that she gave
herself to this Abelard. Although she knew she had, she could not remember it; it was like something experienced in a blur. It appalled her that she had in a sense detached herself at one of the more poignant and crucial moments in her whole life. Nor could she remember much of the hotel where they went later on, except that it was a dingy place near the railway station, and that the bathroom was out on the landing and, having no nightdress or dressing gown, she had to put Abelard’s blazer on when she went out of the room. They were near and not near. He would embrace her but he did not want to know anything about her. She wanted dearly to tell him that this was the first time, although he must have known.

  It was not long after that that he introduced her to his wife at some party, and his wife, maybe sensing that she was the type of girl her husband might like, or else feeling extremely lonely, invited her to come to their house for an evening, because her husband was going away to England on a job. She could remember clearly her visit to that house, and three children in ragged pajamas refusing to go to bed. Then, later, her sitting downstairs in the big drafty kitchen with his wife, eating mashed potatoes and sausages and thinking what a lonely house it was, now the rowdiness had died down. They drank quite a lot of whiskey, and while they were drinking and talking about the mysticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins the telephone rang, and so great was the wife’s excitement and alacrity that in jumping up from the table she turned her ankle and knocked over a lamp but still raced. She knew or hoped that the phone call would be from her husband, and indeed it was. She told him how their youngest son had bellowed his daddy’s name all over the garden, bellowed for him to come home, and that at that very moment she and Miss Lawless were having a chinwag. Miss Lawless had wanted to confess her wrong there and then to this woman, but she baulked. Instead, they continued to ramble and drink a bit, and later she kicked off her shoes and asked if by any chance she could sleep on the sofa. In the very early morning when she wakened, she saw the garden through the long uncurtained window, saw clothes on a line and a tree with tiny shrunken apples that looked as if they had some sort of disease, some blight.

  The secret affair with her Abelard ended, and in a welter of choked emotion Miss Lawless spent half a week’s earnings—she worked in a shop and was paid very little—purchasing a book of poems for him, a secondhand book. So determined was she to be discreet, and so certain was she that the good God would reward her for her discretion and her sense of sacrifice, that she slipped a little greeting card not into the book itself but between the brown paper cover and the frittered binding of the book. She felt sure that he would remove that cover and find the greeting, that he would be touched and immediately restored to her. He would come to the shop where she worked, he would whisk her away, maybe even take her to a restaurant. The lines she had copied onto the card were from one of James Stephens’s poems:

  And we will talk, until

  Talk is a trouble, too,

  Out on the side of the hill;

  And nothing is left to do,

  But an eye to look into an eye;

  And a hand in a hand to slip;

  And a sigh to answer a sigh;

  And a lip to find out a lip!

  As it happened, her Abelard did not find that note for many years, but when he did find it he wrote to tell her, saying also that he had lately been dreaming of her, and that in one dream he cherished they were at the races together, and he wished he had never wakened from it. She had not answered that letter. She did not know exactly what to say. She believed that someday she might bump into him and then the right words would come.

  Today, as she and Mr. Conroy walked along the strand, she had in fact asked him how her Abelard was, and was a little disappointed to hear that he was almost blind now, and that he walked with a stick. Unthinkable. Much as Miss Lawless wanted to see him, she did not at all like the idea of meeting a blind man with a stick. Mr. Conroy, who knew that she had had this fling, kept suggesting that she phone him. “Or I’ll phone him for you,” he said.

  She said she would think it over. In another part of her mind she actually just wanted to find the spot where she had lain, as if finding the spot would redeem the years.

  * * *

  “DOLLYMOUNT IS IDEAL for courting couples,” Mr. Gogarty said, as if reading her thoughts, yet winking at Mr. Conroy, thereby implying they both had caroused there.

  “I declare to God,” said Mr. Conroy, “I was with a girl out there at about one in the morning not so long ago when a geezer tapped the window of the car and asked me for the right time. The pair of us jumped out of our skins and I told the blasted Peeping Tom where to go.”

  “End of a lovely…” Mr. Gogarty said, but did not finish the sentence, because of ladies being present. Eileen Vaughan suddenly exploded, thumped her husband, and said that never in her life had she been subjected to such smut.

  “Ah, the Meat Baron,” Dr. Fitz said, ignoring the tirade and pointing to a tall, bulky man who had come into the room. He was wearing a light suit and a very jazzy tie.

  “Hawaiian,” Mr. Gogarty said with a slight sneer, declaring how money betrays itself on a man’s puss.

  The Meat Baron looked around smiling, realizing that he was being alluded to. Dr. Fitz told Miss Lawless that the man had a great brain—a brain that could be used for music or mathematics, could have succeeded at anything, but that it happened to be meat he got started on, because of going down to the knacker’s yard as a young lad and buying hooves to make rosary beads with. Dr. Fitz said that his admiration for self-made men was boundless; he said it showed real originality; he said that people who had inherited money were often scoundrels, drifters, or drug addicts. Money, he attested, could either forge character or weaken it. He calculated that, now that the Meat Baron had arrived, and including the other various tycoons already present, there was easily billions of pounds’ worth of money up for grabs in that room—enough money to support a Third World country. Bill the Barrow Boy leaned across and said that he would not want that kind of big money, that those people who had their own yachts and their own jets often came a cropper—went out in the morning in one of these yachts or one of these jets and by noon were in a Black Maria, stripped of every personal belonging even down to their Rolexes. The Meat Baron stopped for a moment, looked down at the uneaten duck on Dr. Fitz’s plate, and said, “She’ll never fly over Loch Dan again,” and laughed. Dot the Florist pulled him by the sleeve, but he was already walking on and did not notice.

  Dot had a plan of her own that night. She had vowed that before the night was over she would dance with one of the rich men, whichever one didn’t have his wife with him. The bank was foreclosing on her. The little flower shop that she had opened a year before was still a treasure garden as far as she was concerned, but the novelty had gone and people went back to buying dull things like carnations and evergreen plants. Where else, she asked herself bitterly, would they find mallows and phlox and Canterbury bells; where else were birds’ eggs and moss and miniature roses tucked into rush baskets; where else were the jugs of sweet peas like suspended butterflies? Where, but in her shop that was really half a shop? The other half was a newsagent’s, and she could hear the ringing of their cash register all day long, while with her it was a question of people coming in and asking if she had any cheap flowers. It had been such a success in the beginning: she was written up, photographed in her little jalopy bedecked with boughs and branches, coming from the market. But now—that very afternoon, in fact—a cow of a woman had arrived in a jeep and bought half the shop, for next to nothing, asking if she could have a guarantee that these were not refrigerated flowers, that they would not wilt once she got them in her drawing room.

  Dot eyed the Meat Baron; she had met him before, and felt that with enough vodka she could perhaps lure him. She would have to do it. Otherwise it was a FOR RENT sign above the door, with the newsagent taking over the whole place. Galling. Galling. Some would say she was lucky to be there, that she was there only because of being
a friend of Betty’s daughter. But she believed she was still dishy, and an asset at any party. A Gypsy who had come to her shop had told her to make the most of her Mediterranean looks. When the time came for the ladies’ choice, she would ask the Meat Baron up.

  * * *

  “AH, THE ARMS OF MORPHEUS,” Mr. Conroy said, nudging Miss Lawless as they both looked at Mr. Vaughan, who had fallen fast asleep, his head on the table. Mr. Conroy then began to whisper to Miss Lawless, describing Mr. Vaughan’s ghastly life. His wife hid packets of biscuits so that he could not find them; she put his dinner on a tray at six o’clock promptly each evening and left it there even if he was not home for days, so that the poor man had cold boiled potatoes and tough meat most of the time. Mr. Vaughan, like many an Irishman, as Mr. Conroy conceded, had an eye for the ladies, and had met this beautiful lady—English, mark you—at Leopardstown races and assisted her, it seems, in stepping over a puddle. As a result, he repaired with her to the trainers’ bar, and as a further result coaxed her to pay a visit in the fullness of time to a rural hotel in the South of Ireland. The English lady turned up with two suitcases, was given a suite, and later in the evening was visited by Mr. Vaughan, who spent two nights with her, wining and dining her in the suite, having the occasional drive to the seaside with her to get a blow of air, and having cocktails galore and even the little farewell gift of a Waterford rose bowl from the hotel boutique. Mr. Vaughan naturally told the manager to send the damages to him, as he would pay the bill at the end of the month, when his wages came through. Mr. Vaughan was a dealer in motorcars and was paid monthly. It was in his capacity as salesman that he had first met Betty—sold her a sports car. The manager, a religious man and a teetotaller, condoned the illicit weekend, chiefly on the ground of Mr. Vaughan’s being married, as everyone knew, to a harridan.