‘I’m sorry we couldn’t manage longer,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry about Glen-garriff.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Even so.’
She ceased to watch the old woman at the bar. She smiled at him, again disguising tears but also wanting him to know that there were no hard feelings, for why on earth should there be?
‘After all, we’ve been to Glengarriff,’ she said, a joke because on the one occasion they’d visited the place they had nearly been discovered in their deceptions. She’d used her sister as an excuse for her absences from home: for a long time now her sister had been genuinely unwell in a farmhouse in Go. Meath, a house that fortunately for Beatrice’s purpose didn’t have a telephone.
‘I’ll never forget you,’ he said, his large tanned hand suddenly on one of hers, the vein throbbing in his forehead. A line of freckles ran down beside the vein, five smudges on the redbrick skin. In winter you hardly noticed them.
‘Nor I you.’
‘Darling old Bea,’ he said, as if they were back at the beginning.
The bar was a dim, square lounge with a scattering of small tables, one of which they occupied. Ashtrays advertised Guinness, beer-mats Heineken. Sunlight touched the darkened glass in one of two windows, drawing from it a glow that was not unlike the amber gleam of whiskey. Behind the bar itself the rows of bottles, spirits upside down above their global measures, glittered pleasantly as a centrepiece, their reflections gaudy in a cluttered mirror. The floor had a patterned carpet, further patterned with cigarette burns and a diversity of stains. The Paradise Lounge the bar had been titled in a moment of hyperbole by the grandfather of the present proprietor, a sign still proclaiming as much on the door that opened from the hotel’s mahogany hall. Beatrice’s friend had hesitated, for the place seemed hardly promising: Keegan’s Railway Hotel in a town neither of them knew. They might have driven on, but he was tired and the sun had been in his eyes. ‘It’s all right,’ she had reassured him.
He took their glasses to the bar and had to ring a bell because the man in charge had disappeared ten minutes ago. ‘Nice evening,’ he said to the old woman on the bar-stool, and she managed to indicate agreement without moving a muscle of her carefully held head. ‘We’ll have the same again,’ he said to the barman, who apologized for his absence, saying he’d been mending a tap.
Left on her own, Beatrice sighed a little and took off her sunglasses. There was no need for this farewell, no need to see him for the last time in his pyjamas or to sit across a table from him at dinner and at breakfast, making conversation that once had come naturally. ‘A final fling’, he’d put it, and she’d thought of someone beating a cracked drum, trying to extract a sound that wasn’t there any more. How could it have come to this? The Paradise Lounge of Keegan’s Railway Hotel, Saturday night in a hilly provincial town, litter caught in the railings of the Christian Brothers’: how could this be the end of what they once had had? Saying goodbye to her, he was just somebody else’s husband: the lover had slipped away.
‘Well, it’s a terrible bloody tap we have,’ the barman was saying. ‘Come hell or high water, I can’t get a washer into it.’
‘It can be a difficult job.’
‘You could come in and say that to the wife for me, sir.’
The drinks were paid for, the transaction terminated. Further gin and Martini were poured into the old woman’s glass, and Beatrice watched again while like a zombie the old woman lit a cigarette.
Miss Doheny her name was: though beautiful once, she had never married. Every Saturday evening she met the Meldrums in the Paradise Lounge, where they spent a few hours going through the week that had passed, exchanging gossip and commenting on the world. Miss Doheny was always early and would sit up at the bar for twenty minutes on her own, having the extra couple of drinks that, for her, were always necessary. Before the Meldrums arrived she would make her way to a table in a corner, for that was where Mrs Meldrum liked to be.
It wasn’t usual that other people were in the bar then. Occasionally it filled up later but at six o’clock, before her friends arrived, she nearly always had it to herself. Francis Keegan – the hotel’s inheritor, who also acted as barman – spent a lot of time out in the back somewhere, attending to this or that. It didn’t matter because after their initial greeting of one another, and a few remarks about the weather, there wasn’t much conversation that Miss Doheny and he had to exchange. She enjoyed sitting up at the bar on her own, glancing at the reflections in the long mirror behind the bottles, provided the reflections were never of herself. On the other hand it was a pleasant enough diversion, having visitors.
Miss Doheny, who had looked twice at Beatrice and once at her companion, guessed at their wrong-doing. Tail-ends of conversation had drifted across the lounge, no effort being made to lower voices since more often than not the old turn out to be deaf. They were people from Dublin whose relationship was not that recorded in Francis Keegan’s register in the hall. Without much comment, modern life permitted their sin; the light-brown motor-car parked in front of the hotel made their self-indulgence a simple matter.
How different it had been, Miss Doheny reflected, in 1933! Correctly she estimated that that would have been the year when she herself was the age the dark-haired girl was now. In 1933 adultery and divorce and light-brown motor-cars had belonged more in America and England, read about and alien to what already was being called the Irish way of life. ‘Catholic Ireland,’ Father Cully used to say. ‘Decent Catholic Ireland.’ The term was vague and yet had meaning: the emergent nation, seeking pillars on which to build itself, had plumped for holiness and the Irish language – natural choices in the circumstances. ‘A certain class of woman,’ old Father Cully used to say, ‘constitutes an abhorrence.’ The painted women of Clancy’s Picture House – sound introduced in 1936 – were creatures who carried a terrible warning. Jezebel women, Father Cully called them, adding that the picture house should never have been permitted to exist. In his grave for a quarter of a century, he would hardly have believed his senses if he’d walked into the Paradise Lounge in Keegan’s Railway Hotel to discover two adulterers, and one of his flock who had failed to heed his castigation of painted women. Yet for thirty-five years Miss Doheny had strolled through the town on Saturday evenings to this same lounge, past the statue of the 1798 rebel, down the sharp incline of Castle Street. On Sundays she covered the same ground again, on the way to and from Mass. Neither rain nor cold prevented her from making the journey to the Church of the Resurrection or to the hotel, and illness did not often afflict her. That she had become more painted as the years piled up seemed to Miss Doheny to be natural in the circumstances.
In the Paradise Lounge she felt particularly at home. In spring and summer the Meldrums brought plants for her, or bunches of chives or parsley, sometimes flowers. Not because she wished to balance the gesture with one of her own but because it simply pleased her to do so she brought for them a pot of jam if she had just made some, or pieces of shortbread. At Christmas, more formally, they exchanged gifts of a different kind. At Christmas the lounge was decorated by Francis Keegan, as was the hall of the hotel and the dining-room. Once a year, in April, a dance was held in the dining-room, in connection with a local point-to-point, and it was said in the town that Francis Keegan made enough in the bar during the course of that long night to last him for the next twelve months. The hotel ticked over from April to April, the Paradise Lounge becoming quite brisk with business when an occasional function was held in the dining-room, though never achieving the abandoned spending that distinguished the night of the point-to-point. Commercial travellers sometimes stayed briefly, taking pot-luck with Mrs Keegan’s cooking, which at the best of times was modest in ambition and achievement. After dinner these men would sit on one of the high stools in the Paradise Lounge, conversing with Francis Keegan and drinking bottles of stout. Mrs Keegan would sometimes put in a late appearance and sip a glass of gin and water. She was a woman of sl
atternly appearance, with loose grey hair and slippers. Her husband complemented her in style and manner, his purplish complexion reflecting a dedication to the wares he traded in across his bar. They were an undemanding couple, charitable in their opinions, regarded as unfortunate in the town since their union had not produced children. Because of that, Keegan’s Railway Hotel was nearing the end of its days as a family concern and in a sense it was fitting that that should be so, for the railway that gave it its title had been closed in 1951.
How I envy her! Miss Doheny thought. How fortunate she is to find herself in these easy times, not condemned because she loves a man! It seemed right to Miss Doheny that a real love affair was taking place in the Paradise Lounge and that no one questioned it. Francis Keegan knew perfectly well that the couple were not man and wife: the strictures of old Father Cully were as fusty by now as neglected mice droppings. The holiness that had accompanied the birth of a nation had at last begun to shed its first tight skirt: liberation, Miss Doheny said to herself, marvelling over the word.
They walked about the town because it was too soon for dinner. Many shops were still open, greengrocers anxious to rid themselves of cabbage that had been limp for days and could not yet again be offered for sale after the weekend, chemists and sweetshops. Kevin Croady, Your Best for Hi-Fi, had arranged a loudspeaker in a window above his premises: Saturday-night music blared forth, punk harmonies and a tenor rendering of ‘Kelly the Boy from Killann’. All tastes were catered for.
The streets were narrow, the traffic congested. Women picked over the greengrocers’ offerings, having waited until this hour because prices would be reduced. Newly shaved men slipped into the public houses, youths and girls loitered outside Redmond’s Café and on the steps of the 1798 statue. Two dogs half-heartedly fought outside the Bank of Ireland.
The visitors to the town inquired where the castle was, and then made their way up Castle Hill. ‘Opposite Castle Motors,’ the child they’d asked had said, and there it was: an ivy-covered ruin, more like the remains of a cowshed. Corrugated iron sealed off an archway, its torn bill-posters advertising Calor Gas and a rock group, Duffy’s Circus and Fine Gael, and the annual point-to-point that kept Keegan’s Railway Hotel going. Houses had been demolished in this deserted area, concrete replacements only just begun. The graveyard of the Protestant church was unkempt; New Premises in Wolfe Tone Street, said a placard in the window of Castle Motors. Litter was everywhere.
‘Not exactly camera fodder,’ he said with his easy laugh. ‘A bloody disgrace, some of these towns are.’
‘The people don’t notice, I suppose.’
‘They should maybe wake themselves up.’
The first time he’d seen her, he’d afterwards said, he had heard himself whispering that it was she he should have married. They’d sat together, talking over after-dinner coffee in someone else’s house. He’d told her, lightly, that he was in the Irish rope business, almost making a joke of it because that was his way. A week later his car had drawn up beside her in Rathgar Road, where she’d lived since her marriage. ‘I thought I recognized you,’ he said, afterwards confessing that he’d looked up her husband’s name in the telephone directory. ‘Come in for a drink,’ she invited, and of course he had. Her two children had been there, her husband had come in.
They made their way back to the town, she taking his arm as they descended the steep hill they’d climbed. A wind had gathered, cooling the evening air.
‘It feels so long ago,’ she said. ‘The greater part of my life appears to have occurred since that day when you first came to the house.’
‘I know, Bea.’
He’d seemed extraordinary and nice, and once when he’d smiled at her she’d found herself looking away. She wasn’t unhappy in her marriage, only bored by the monotony of preparing food and seeing to the house and the children. She had, as well, a reluctant feeling that she wasn’t appreciated, that she hadn’t been properly loved for years.
‘You don’t regret it happened?’ he said, stepping out into the street because the pavement was still crowded outside Redmond’s Café.
She pitched her voice low so that he wouldn’t hear her saying she wasn’t sure. She didn’t want to tell a lie, she wasn’t certain of the truth.
He nodded, assuming her reassurance. Once, of course, he would never have let a mumbled reply slip by.
Miss Doheny had moved from the bar and was sitting at a table with the Meldrums when Beatrice and her friend returned to the Paradise Lounge after dinner. Mrs Meldrum was telling all about the visit last Sunday afternoon of her niece, Kathleen. ‘Stones she’s put on,’ she reported, and then recalled that Kathleen’s newly acquired husband had sat there for three hours hardly saying a word. Making a fortune he was, in the dry-goods business, dull but good-hearted.
Miss Doheny listened. Strangely, her mind was still on the visitors who had returned to the lounge. She’d heard the girl saying that a walk about the town would be nice, and as the Meldrums had entered the lounge an hour or so ago she’d heard the man’s voice in the hall and had guessed they were then on their way to the dining-room. The dinner would not have been good, for Miss Doheny had often heard complaints about the nature of Mrs Keegan’s cooking. And yet the dinner, naturally, would not have mattered in the least.
Mrs Meldrum’s voice continued: Kathleen’s four children by her first marriage were all grown up and off her hands, she was lucky to have married so late in life into a prosperous dry-goods business. Mr Meldrum inclined his head or nodded, but from time to time he would also issue a mild contradiction, setting the facts straight, regulating his wife’s memory. He was a grey-haired man in a tweed jacket, very spare and stooped, his face as sharp as a blade, his grey moustache well cared-for. He smoked while he drank, allowing a precise ten minutes to elapse between the end of one cigarette and the lighting of the next. Mrs Meldrum was smaller than her companions by quite some inches, round and plump, with glasses and a black hat.
The strangers were drinking Drambuie now, Miss Doheny noticed. The man made a joke, probably about the food they’d eaten; the girl smiled. It was difficult to understand why it was that they were so clearly not man and wife. There was a wistfulness in the girl’s face, but the wistfulness said nothing very much. In a surprising way Miss Doheny imagined herself crossing the lounge to where they were. ‘You’re lucky, you know,’ she heard herself saying. ‘Honestly, you’re lucky, child.’ She glanced again in the girl’s direction and for a moment caught her eye. She almost mouthed the words, but changed her mind because as much as possible she liked to keep her face in repose.
Beatrice listened to her companion’s efforts to cheer the occasion up. The town and the hotel – especially the meal they’d just consumed – combined to reflect the mood that the end of the affair had already generated. They were here, Beatrice informed herself again, not really to say goodbye to one another but to commit adultery for the last time. They would enjoy it as they always had, but the enjoyment would not be the same as that inspired by the love there had been. They might not have come, they might more elegantly have said goodbye, yet their presence in a bar ridiculously named the Paradise Lounge seemed suddenly apt. The bedroom where acts of mechanical passion would take place had a dingy wallpaper, its flattened pink soap already used by someone else. Dirty weekend, Beatrice thought again, for stripped of love all that was left was the mess of deception and lies there had been, of theft and this remaining, too ordinary desire. Her sister, slowly dying in the farmhouse, had been a bitter confidante and would never forgive her now. Tonight in a provincial bedroom a manufacturer of rope would have his way with her and she would have her way with him. There would be their nakedness and their mingled sweat.
‘I thought that, steak would walk away,’ he spiritedly was continuing now. ‘Being somebody’s shoe-leather.’
She suddenly felt drunk, and wanted to be drunker. She held her glass toward him. ‘Let’s just drink,’ she said.
She ca
ught the eye of the old woman at the other table and for a moment sensed Miss Doheny’s desire to communicate with her. It puzzled her that an elderly woman whom she did not know should wish to say something, yet she strongly felt that this was so. Then Miss Doheny returned her attention to what the other old woman was saying.
When they’d finished the drinks that Beatrice’s companion had just fetched they moved from the table they were at and sat on two bar-stools, listening to Francis Keegan telling them about the annual liveliness in the hotel on the night of the April point-to-point. Mrs Keegan appeared at his side and recalled an occasion when Willie Kincart had ridden the horse he’d won the last race on into the hall of the hotel and how old Packy Briscoe had imagined he’d caught the d.t.’s when he looked down from the top of the stairs. And there was the story – before Mrs Keegan’s time, as she was swift to point out – when Jack Doyle and Movita had stayed in Keegan’s, when just for the hell of it Jack Doyle had chased a honeymoon couple up Castle Hill, half naked from their bed. After several further drinks, Beatrice began to laugh. She felt much less forlorn now that the faces of Francis Keegan and his wife were beginning to float agreeably in her vision. When she looked at the elderly trio in the corner, the only other people in the lounge, their faces floated also.
The thin old man came to the bar for more drinks and cigarettes. He nodded and smiled at Beatrice; he remarked upon the weather. ‘Mr Meldrum,’ said Francis Keegan by way of introduction. ‘How d’you do,’ Beatrice said.
Her companion yawned and appeared to be suggesting that they should go to bed. Beatrice took no notice. She pushed her glass at Francis Keegan, reaching for her handbag and announcing that it was her round. ‘A drink for everyone,’ she said, aware that when she gestured towards the Keegans and the elderly trio she almost lost her balance. She giggled. ‘Definitely my round,’ she slurred, giggling again.