‘Please, Verity. Please, now…’
‘He can’t bring himself to be unkind to his wife. He couldn’t be bad to a woman if he tried. I promise you, he’s a remarkable man.’
He began to expostulate but changed his mind. Everything he tried to say, even everything he felt, seemed clumsy. She stared beyond him, through the smoke from her cigarette, causing him to feel a stranger. Her silliness in love had made her carelessly harsh, selfish and insensitive because she had to think so much about herself. In a daughter who was not naturally silly, who had been gentle as a child, these qualities were painful to observe. Once she could have imagined what it was like for him to hear her refer so casually to dirty weekends; now she didn’t care if that hurt him or not. It was insulting to expect him to accept that the man was remarkable. It dismissed his intellect and his sense.
‘It was ridiculous,’ she said eventually, ‘to give up my flat.’
He made some protest when she asked the waiter for the bill, but she didn’t listen, paying the bill instead. He felt exhausted. He had sat in this very café with a woman who was dead; the man his daughter spoke of was still alive. It almost seemed the other way round. He would not have claimed a great deal for the marriage there had been: two people rubbing along, forgiving each other for this and that, one left alone to miss the nourishment of affection. Yet when the coffin had slipped away behind the beige curtain his grief had been unbearable and had remained so afterwards, for weeks and months, each day a hell.
‘I’m sorry for being a nuisance,’ she said before they rose from the table, and he wanted to explain to her that melancholy would have become too much if he allowed a city and its holiday memories to defeat him, that memories were insidious. But he didn’t say anything because he knew she would not listen to him properly. She could not help thinking badly of him; the harshness that had been bred in her prevented the allowances that old age demanded. Nor could he, because of anger, make allowances for her.
‘Hi!’ one of the Americans whom he’d thought it might be quite nice to know called out. They had finished their ice-creams and were preparing to leave also. All of them smiled but it was Verity, not he, who returned their greeting.
‘It’s I who should be sorry,’ he said on the Zattere. He’d been more gently treated than she: you knew where you were with death, in no way was it a confidence trick. He began to say that but changed his mind, knowing she would not wish to hear.
‘Heavens, how cold it has become!’ She hurried through the gathering fog, and so did he. The conversation was over, its loose ends hanging; each knew they would never be picked up. ‘Buona notte,’ the smart receptionist, all in green now, murmured in the hall of the pensione, and they bade her good-night in their different ways.
They lifted their keys from the rack beside the stairs and stepped over the sleeping cat on the bottom step. On the first-floor landing they said good-night, were briefly awkward because of what had passed between them, then entered their separate rooms. Slowly he prepared himself for bed, slowly undressing, slowly washing, folding his clothes with an old man’s care. She sat by her window, staring at the lights across the water, until the fog thickened and there was nothing left to see.
The Wedding in the Garden
Ever since Dervla was nine the people of the hotel had fascinated her. Its proprietor, Mr Congreve, wore clothes that had a clerical sombreness about them, though they were of a lighter hue than Father Mahony’s stern black. Mr Congreve was a smiling man with a quiet face, apparently not in the least put out by reports in the town that his wife, in allying herself with a hotel proprietor, had married beneath her. Ladylike and elegant, she appeared not to regret her choice. Mrs Congreve favoured in her dresses a distinctive blend of greens and blues, her stylishness combining with the hotel proprietor’s tranquil presence to lend the couple a quality that was unique in the town. Their children, two girls and an older boy, were imbued with this through the accident of their birth, and so were different from the town’s other children in ways that might be termed superficial. ‘Breeding,’ Dervla’s father used to say, ‘The Congreves have great breeding in them,’
She herself, when she was nine, was fair-haired and skinny, with a graze always healing on one knee or the other because she had a way of tripping on her shoelaces. ‘Ah, will you tie up those things!’ her mother used to shout at her: her mother, big-faced and red, blinking through the steam that rose from a bucket of water. Her brothers and sisters had all left the house in Thomas MacDonagh Street by the time Dervla was nine; they’d left the town and the district, two of them in America even, one in London. Dervla was more than just the baby of the family: she was an afterthought, catching everyone unawares, born when her mother was forty-two. ‘Chance had a hand in that one,’ her father liked to pronounce, regarding her affectionately, as if pleased by this intervention of fate. When his brother from Leitrim visited the house in Thomas MacDonagh Street the statement was made often, being of family interest. ‘If her mother didn’t possess the strength of an ox,’ Dervla’s father liked to add, ‘God knows how the end of it would have been.’ And Dervla’s Leitrim uncle, refreshing himself with a bottle of stout, would yet again wag his head in admiration and wonder at his sister-in-law’s robust constitution. He was employed on the roads up in Leitrim and only came to the town on a Sunday, drawn to it by a hurling match. Dervla’s father was employed by O’Mara the builder.
Even after she went to work in the Royal Hotel and came to know the family, her first image of them remained: the Congreves in their motorcar, an old Renault as she afterwards established, its canvas hood folded back, slowly making the journey to the Protestant church on a sunny Sunday morning. St Peter’s Church was at one end of the town, the Royal Hotel at the other. It had, before its days as an hotel, apparently been owned by Mrs Congreve’s family, and then people in the grocery business had bought it and had not lived there, people who had nothing to do with the town, who were not well known. After that Mr Congreve had made an offer with, so it was said, his wife’s money.
The motor-car in the sunlight crept down Draper’s Street, the bell of St Peter’s Church still monotonously chiming. The boy – no older than Dervla herself – sat between his sisters in the back; Mr Congreve turned his head and said something to his wife. Daddy Phelan, outside Mrs Ryan’s bar, saluted them in his wild way; Mrs Congreve waved back at him. The boy wore a grey flannel suit, the girls had fawn-coloured coats and tiny bows in their pigtails. The motor-car passed from view, and a moment later the bell ceased to chime.
Christopher couldn’t remember the first time he’d been aware of her. All he knew was that she worked in the kitchen of the hotel, walking out from the town every day. Playing with Molly and Margery-Jane in the shrubberies of the garden, he had noticed now and again a solitary figure in a black coat, with a headscarf. He didn’t know her name or what her face was like. ‘Count to ten, Chris,’ Margery-Jane would shrilly insist. ‘You’re not counting to ten!’ Some game, rules now forgotten, some private family game they had invented themselves, stalking one another among the bamboos and the mahonias, Molly creeping on her hands and knees, not making a sound, Margery-Jane unable to control her excited breathing. The girl passed through the yard near by, a child as they were, but they paid her no attention.
A year or so later Mary, the elderly maid whose particular realm was the dining-room, instructed her in the clearing of a table. ‘Dervla,’ his mother said when the older waitress had led her away with cutlery and’ plates piled on to her tray. ‘Her name is Dervla.’ After that she was always in the dining-room at mealtimes.
It was then, too, that she began to come to the hotel on a bicycle, her day longer now, arriving before breakfast, cycling home again in the late evening. Once there was talk about her living there, but nothing had come of that. Christopher didn’t know where she did live, had never once noticed Thomas MacDonagh Street in his wanderings about the town. Returning from boarding-school in Dublin, he had
taken to going for walks, along the quay of the river where the sawmills were, through the lanes behind Brabazon’s Brewery. He preferred to be alone at that time of his growing up, finding the company of his sisters too chattery. The river wound away through fields and sometimes a dog from the lanes or the cottages near the electricity plant would follow him. There was one in particular, a short-tailed terrier, its smooth white coat soiled and uncared for, ears and head flashed with black. There was a mongrel sheepdog also, an animal that ceased its customary cringing as soon as it gained the freedom of the fields. When he returned to the town these animals no longer followed him, but were occasionally involved in fights with other dogs, as though their excursion into the country had turned them into aliens who were no longer to be trusted. He went on alone then, through darkening afternoons or spitting rain, lingering by the shops that sold fruit and confectionery. There’d been a time when he and Margery-Jane and Molly had come to these shops with their pocket-money, for Peggy’s Leg or pink bon-bons. More affluent now, he bought Our Boys and Film Fun and saved up for the Wide World.
His sisters had been born in the Royal Hotel, but he – before his father owned the place – in Dublin, where his parents had then lived. He did not remember Dublin: the hotel had become his world. It was a white building, set back a little from the street, pillars and steps prefacing its entrance doors. Its plain façade was decorated with a yellow AA sign and a blue RIAC one; in spring tulips bloomed in window-boxes on the downstairs windowsills. The words Royal Hotel were painted in black on this white façade and repeated in smaller letters above the pillared porch. At the back, beyond the yard and the garden, there was a row of garages and an entrance to them from Old Lane. The hotel’s four employees came and went this way, Mrs O’Connor the cook, whatever maids there were, and Artie the boots. There was a stone-flagged hallway with doors off it to the kitchen and the larders and the scullery, and one to the passage that led to the back staircase. It was a dim hallway, with moisture sometimes on its grey-distempered walls, a dimness that was repeated in the passage that led to the back staircase and on the staircase itself. Upstairs there was a particular smell, of polish and old soup, with a tang of porter drifting up from the bar. The first-floor landing – a sideboard stretching along one wall, leather armchairs by the windows, occasional tables piled with magazines, a gold-framed mirror above the fireplace – was the heart of the hotel. Off it were the better bedrooms and a billiard-room where the YMCA held a competition every March; above it there was a less impressive landing, little more than a corridor. On the ground floor the dining-room had glass swing-doors, twelve tables with white tablecloths, always set for dinner. The family occupied a corner one between the fire and the dumb-waiter, with its array of silver-plated sugar castors and salt and pepper and mustard containers, bottles of Yorkshire Relish, thick and thin, mint sauce in cut-glass jugs, and Worcester sauce, and jam and marmalade.
When Christopher was younger, before he went away to school, he and Margery-Jane and Molly used to play hide-and-seek in the small, cold bedrooms at the top of the house, skulking in the shadows on the uncarpeted stairs that led to the attics. Occasionally, if a visitor was staying in the hotel, their father would call up to them to make less noise, but this didn’t happen often because a visitor was usually only in the hotel at night. They were mainly senior commercial travellers who stayed at the Royal, representatives of Wills or Horton’s or Drummond’s Seeds, once a year the Urney man; younger representatives lodged more modestly. Insurance men stayed at the hotel, and bank inspectors had been known to spend a fortnight or three weeks. Bord na Mona men came and went, and once in a while there was an English couple or a couple from the North, touring or on their honeymoon. When Miss Gilligan, who taught leatherwork at the technical college, first came to the town she spent nearly a month in the Royal before being satisfied with the lodging she was offered. Artie the boots, grey-haired but still in his forties, worked in the garden and the yard, disposed of empty bottles from the bar and often served there. Old Mary served there too, and at a busy time, which only rarely occurred, Mrs O’Connor would come up from the kitchen to assist. Dr Molloy drank at the Royal, and Hogarty the surveyor, and the agent at the Bank of Ireland, Mr McKibbin, and a few of the other bank men in the town. The bar was a quiet place, though, compared with the town’s public houses; voices were never raised.
The main hall of the hotel was quiet also, except for the ticking of the grandfather clock and its chiming. There was the same agreeable smell there, of soup and polish, and porter from the bar. A barometer hung beneath a salmon in a glass case, notices of point-to-point races and the Dublin Spring Show and the Horse Show hung from hooks among coloured prints of Punchestown. The wooden floor was covered almost completely with faded rugs, and the upper half of the door to the bar was composed of frosted glass with a border of shamrocks. There were plants in brass pots on either side of a wide staircase with a greenish carpet, threadbare in parts.
‘Your inheritance one day,’ Christopher’s father said.
It was very grand, Dervla considered, to have your initials on a green trunk, and on a wooden box with metal brackets fixed to its edges. These containers stood in the back hall, with a suitcase, at the beginning of each term, before they were taken to the railway station. They stood there again when Christopher returned, before Artie helped him to carry them upstairs. On his first day back from school there was always a great fuss. His sisters became very excited, a special meal was prepared, Mr Congreve would light cigarette after cigarette, standing in front of the fire on the first-floor landing, listening to Christopher’s tale of the long journey from Dublin. He always arrived in the evening, sometimes as late as seven o’clock but usually about half past five. In the dining-room when the family had supper he would say he was famished and tell his sisters how disgraceful the food at the school was, the turnips only half mashed, the potatoes with bits of clay still clinging to their skins, and a custard pudding called Yellow Peril. His mother, laughing at him, would say he shouldn’t exaggerate, and his father would ask him about the rugby he had played, or the cricket. ‘Like the game of tennis it would be,’ Artie told her when Dervla asked him what cricket was. ‘The way they’d wear the same type of clothing for it.’ Miss Gillespie, the matron, was a tartar and Willie the furnace man’s assistant told stories that couldn’t be repeated. Dervla imagined the big grey house with a curving avenue leading up to it, and bells always ringing, and morning assemblies, and the march through cloisters to the chapel, which so often she had heard described. She imagined the boys in their grey suits kneeling down to say their prayers, and the ice on the inside of the windows on cold days. The chemistry master had blown his hair off, it was reported once in the dining-room, and Dervla thought of Mr Jerety who made up the prescriptions in the Medical Hall. Mr Jerety had no hair either, except for a little at the sides of his head.
Dervla managed the dining-room on her own now. Mary had become too rheumaticky to make the journey at any speed from the kitchen and found it difficult to lift the heavier plates from the table. She helped Mrs O’Connor with the baking instead, kneading dough on the marble slab at the side table in the kitchen, making pastry and preparing vegetables. It took her half a day, Dervla had heard Mr Congreve say, to mount the stairs to her bedroom at the top of the hotel, and the other half to descend it. He was fond of her, and would try to make her rest by the fire on the first-floor landing but she never did: ‘Sure, if I sat down there, sir, I’d maybe never get up again.’ It was unseemly, Dervla had heard old Mary saying in the kitchen, for an employee to be occupying an armchair in the place where the visitors and the family sat. Mr Congreve was devil-may-care about matters like that, but what would a visitor say if he came out of his bedroom and found a uniformed maid in an armchair? What would Byrne from Horton’s say, or Boylan the insurance man?
In the dining-room, when she’d learnt how everything should be, ‘the formalities’, as Mr Congreve put it, Dervla didn’t f
ind her duties difficult. She was swift on her feet, as it was necessary to be, in case the food got cold. She could stack a tray with dishes and plates so economically that two journeys to the kitchen became one. She was careful at listening to what the visitors ordered and without writing anything down was able to relay the message to the kitchen. The family were never given a choice.
Often Christopher found himself glancing up from the food Dervla placed in front of him, to follow with his eyes her progress across the dining-room, the movement of her hips beneath her black dress, her legs clad in stockings that were black also. Once he addressed her in the backyard. He spoke softly, just behind her in the yard. It was dark, after seven, an evening in early March when a bitter wind was blowing. ‘I’ll walk with you, Dervla,’ he said.
She wheeled her bicycle in Old Lane and they walked in silence except that once he remarked upon the coldness of the weather and she said she disliked rain more. When they reached the end of the lane he went one way and she the other.
‘Hullo, Dervla,’ he said one afternoon in the garden. It was late in August. He was lying on a rug among the hydrangeas, reading. She had passed without noticing that he was there; she returned some minutes later with a bunch of parsley. It was then that he addressed her. He smiled, trying to find a different intonation, trying to make his greeting softer, less ordinary than usual. He wanted her to sit down on the brown checked rug, to enjoy the sun for a while, but of course that was impossible. He had wanted to wheel her bicycle for her that evening, as he would have done had she been another girl, Hazel Warren or Annie Warren, the coal merchant’s daughters, or a girl he’d never even spoken to, someone’s cousin, who used to visit the town every Christmas. But it hadn’t seemed natural in any way at all to wheel the bicycle of the dining-room maid, any more than it would have been to ask a kitchen maid at school where she came from or if she had brothers and sisters.