It was then that FitzPatrick first became uneasy. The packed lecture-hall had accepted as fact all that had been stated, yet none of it was true. Notes had been taken, questions were now being asked. A voice just behind the two students exclaimed that this remarkable discovery was worth coming two thousand miles to hear about. Mental pictures of James Joyce in a dentist’s waiting-room flashed about the hall. North Frederick Street would be visited tomorrow, if not tonight.
‘I’d only like to ask,’ Heffernan shouted above the hubbub, ‘if I may, a simple little question.’ He was on his feet. He had caught the attention of Professor Flacks, who was smiling benignly at him. ‘I’d only like to inquire,’ Heffernan continued, ‘if that whole thing couldn’t be a lot of baloney.’
‘Baloney?’ a foreign voice repeated.
‘Baloney?’ said Professor Flacks.
The buzz of interest hadn’t died down. Nobody was much interested in the questions that were being asked except the people who were asking them. A woman near to FitzPatrick said it was extraordinarily moving that the ill-used servant girl, who had been so tellingly presented as an off-stage character by Joyce, should bear no grudge all these years later.
‘What I mean, Professor Flacks,’ said Heffernan, ‘is I don’t think James Joyce ever attended a dentist in North Frederick Street. What I’m suggesting to you, sir, is that the source of your information was only looking for a bit of limelight.’
FitzPatrick later described to me the expression that entered Professor Flacks’s eyes. ‘A lost kind of look,’ he said, ‘as though someone had poked the living daylights out of him.’ The old man stared at Heffernan, frowning, not comprehending at first. His relationship with this student had been quite different since the night of the visit to Mrs Maginn’s kitchen: it had been distinguished by a new friendliness, and what had seemed like mutual respect.
‘Professor Flacks and myself,’ continued Heffernan, ‘heard the old lady together. Only I formed the impression that she was making the entire matter up. I thought, sir, you’d formed that opinion also.’
‘Oh, but surely now, Mr Heffernan, the woman wouldn’t do that.’
‘There was never a dentist by the name of O’Riordan that practised in North Frederick Street, sir. That’s a fact that can easily be checked.’
Heffernan sat down. An uneasy silence gripped the lecture-hall. Eyes turned upon Professor Flacks. Weakly, with a hoarseness in his voice, he said: ‘But why, Mr Heffernan, would she have made all that up? A woman of that class would hardly have read the story, she’d hardly have known –’
‘It’s an unfortunate thing, sir,’ interrupted Heffernan, standing up again, ‘but that old one would do anything for a single pound note. She’s of a miserly nature. I think what has happened,’ He went on, his tone changing as he addressed the assembly, ‘is that a student the Professor failed in an examination took a chance to get his own back. Our friend Jas Joyce,’ he added, ‘would definitely have relished that.’
In misery Professor Flacks lifted the tumbler of water to his lips, his eyes cast down. You could sense him thinking, FitzPatrick reported, that he was a fool and he had been shown to be a fool. You could sense him thinking that he suddenly appeared to be unreliable, asinine and ridiculous. In front of the people who mattered to him most of all he had been exposed as a fraud he did not feel himself to be. Never again could he hold his head up among the Friends of James Joyce. Within twenty-four hours his students would know what had occurred.
An embarrassed shuffling broke out in the lecture-hall. People murmured and began to make their way into the aisles. FitzPatrick recalled the occasion in Mrs Maginn’s kitchen, the two elderly puppets on the end of Heffernan’s string, the fig-rolls and the tea. He recalled the maid’s voice retailing the story that he, because he knew Heffernan so well, had doubted with each word that was uttered. He felt guilty that he hadn’t sought the old man out and told him it wasn’t true. He glanced through the throng in the lecture-hall at the lone figure in porridgy tweeds, and unhappily reflected that suicide had been known to follow such wretched disgrace. Outside the lecture-hall he told Heffernan to go to hell when a drink in Anne Street was suggested – a remark for which Heffernan never forgave him.
‘I mean,’ FitzPatrick said as we sat in College Park a long time later, ‘how could anyone be as petty? When all the poor old fellow ever said to him was “I see you are still with us?” ’
I made some kind of reply. Professor Flacks had died a natural death a year after the delivery of his lecture on ‘Two Gallants’. Earlier in his life he had not, as Heffernan had claimed, driven a wife and two sisters mad: he’d been an only child, the obituary said in the Irish Times, and a bachelor. It was an awkward kind of obituary, for the gaffe he’d made had become quite famous and was still fresh in Dubliners’ minds.
We went on talking about him, FitzPatrick and I, as we watched the cricket in College Park. We spoke of his playful sarcasm and how so vehemently it had affected Heffernan’s pride. We marvelled over the love that had caused a girl in a story to steal, and over the miserliness that had persuaded an old woman to be party to a trick. FitzPatrick touched upon his own inordinate laziness, finding a place for that also in our cobweb of human frailty.
The Smoke Trees of San Pietro
My father was a great horseman. My mother was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. I was taken to watch my father jumping as a member of the military team in Linvik when I was five years old. The team did not win that afternoon but my father’s performance was faultless and he himself received a personal award. I remember the applause and his saluting, and my mother’s fingers tightening; on my arm. ‘Oh, how deserved that is!’ she whispered, and when my father joined us later you could see that he was proud. He smelt of horses and of leather, as he always did when he’d been jumping: to this day, I can evoke that smell at will.
That is the most vivid memory of that early time in my childhood. We drove away from the stadium and then there was my first dinner in a restaurant, my mother and father on either side of me, red roses in a vase, a candle burning in a wooden candlestick that was painted blue and green. ‘One day,’ my father predicted, anticipating that in time I, too, would be a member of the military team. Already I was promising: so he insisted when he watched me cantering with my mother along the grassy path beside the birch woods. In the restaurant they touched their wine-glasses and my father requested the waiter to pour me just a little wine so that on this particular occasion I might have my first taste of it. Johan my father called the waiter, while I wondered which feature it was that in particular made my mother’s beauty so remarkable. One moment it seemed to be the candlelight gleaming on her pale hair, the next the blue of her eyes, and then her lips and the tiny wrinkle on her forehead, and then the graceful way she held her head. My father’s hand reached across the tablecloth for one of hers, and there that memory ceases.
There is another one. In his surgery Dr Edlund probed my eyes with the beam of a torch that was as slim as a pencil. The disc of his stethoscope lingered on my back and chest, my reflexes were tested, my throat examined, my blood gathered in a capsule, the cavities of my body sounded. And afterwards, when weeks had passed, it was declared that I was not strong. Tiredness in future was to be avoided; I must canter more gently; becoming hot was not good. ‘He will be different from what we imagined,’ my father said. ‘That is all.’ I did not, then, sense the disappointment in his voice.
It was because of my delicate constitution that my mother first took me to San Pietro al Mare, initiating a summer regime that was to continue throughout my childhood. We went by train and because of my delicate constitution more time was devoted to the journey than might otherwise have been considered necessary. A night was spent in Hamburg, at the Hotel Kronberg, then by day and night we went slowly on, the air noticeably warmer each time we stopped at a station. A final night was spent at Milan, at the Hotel Belvedere. We arrived at San Pietro al Mare in the early afte
rnoon.
I think, that first evening, my mother was a little nervous. She addressed the hotel staff in English and was apprehensive lest she was not correctly understood. In the restaurant, at dinner, she spoke very slowly to the waiter and I did not entirely follow what was said because I did not yet understand much English. But the waiter, who was extremely rapid in all he did –flicking open our napkins and expertly covering our knees with them, running his finger down the menu to make a suggestion, noting my mother’s order on his pad – did not once request her to repeat a word. When he had gone my mother asked me if I felt tired, but I was not in the least. From the moment the train had begun to slow down for San Pietro I’d felt exhilarated. I was supposed not to carry heavy luggage but I had done so none the less, assisting the porter at the station to pack our suitcases into the taxi while my mother was at the Cambio. We had driven by palm trees – the first time I had ever seen such trees – and beyond them the sea was a shimmer of blue, just like the sky. Then the taxi turned abruptly, leaving behind the strolling couples on the promenade – the men in white suits, women in beach dresses – and the coloured umbrellas that offered each café table a pool of shade. For a very short time, no more than half a minute perhaps, the taxi climbed a hill which became quite steep and then drew up at the Villa Parco. The palm trees and the promenade were far below, the limpid sea appeared to stretch for ever.
At dinner I said I had never been in such an exotic place. The dining-room where we sat was more elegant and gracious, and a great deal larger, than the restaurant my father had taken us to on the evening of his triumph with the military team. I had never before seen so many people dining at the same time, many of them in evening dress. Spirit stoves burned at each table. Glass doors which stretched from the ceiling to the floor were thrown wide open to a terrace with a decorated balustrade – coloured medallions set among its brief, grey pillars. Beyond that the garden of the Villa Parco was spread with flowers that were quite unfamiliar to me: burgeoning shrubs of oleander and bougainvillaea, and trees called smoke trees, so my mother said. In the hotel I loved the sound of Italian, the mysterious words and phrases the chambermaids and the waiters called out to one another. And I loved the hesitant English of my mother.
The next morning – and every morning after that – my mother and I bathed among the rocks because Dr Edlund had prescribed as advantageous the exercise of unhurried swimming. We took the lift that descended to the bathing place from the hotel garden and afterwards we lay for a short time in the sun, covered with protecting creams, before walking to a café for an albicocca. We watched the people sauntering by, remarking on them when they were unusual. In this connection my mother taught me English words: ‘haughty’, ‘wan’, ‘abstracted’, and made me say in English, ‘Thank you very much’, when the waitress brought our albicocca. Then we would return to the hotel garden where, until lunchtime, my mother read to me from Kidnapped. I drew the faces of the waiters and the hall-porters, and the façade of the Villa Parco, and the white-painted chairs among the smoke trees. A visitor at the hotel would take one of these iron chairs and carry-it to a secluded place and later idly leave it there. Or a tête-à-tête would occur, two of the chairs drawn away in the same manner and then vacated, two empty glasses left on a table. After lunch we rested, then swam again, and again visited the town. ‘We must complete our postcard,’ my mother would say on the way in to dinner or during the meal itself, and afterwards we would do so before dropping the postcard into the letter-box in the hall. Sometimes I made a drawing on it for my father, a caricature of a face or the outline of a shell we’d found, and from my mother there would always be a reference to my health.
That pattern of our holiday, established during our first summer at San Pietro, remained to influence the subsequent years. We always left Linvik on a Tuesday and stayed, en route, at the Hotel Kronberg in Hamburg and the Belvedere in Milan: we always remained for July and August at San Pietro. But on the later occasions there were differences also: my mother was no longer nervous about her English; the staff at the Villa Parco remembered us and welcomed us with increasing warmth; some of the other visitors, familiar from previous years, would greet us when we arrived. This pleased my mother but, for myself, I preferred the novelty of strangers. I liked to watch the laden taxis draw up, the emergence of a man and woman or a family, an elderly person of either sex issuing orders to a younger companion, or the arrival of a solitary figure, always the most interesting from the point of view of speculation. Monsieur Paillez was one of these: he appeared at the Villa Parco for the first time during our third summer, to be assessed by us, and no doubt by other regulars as well, when he strolled down the terrace steps late one afternoon, a thin, tall, dark-haired man in a linen suit. He sat not far from where we were and a moment later a waiter brought him a tray of tea. He smoked while he drank it, taking no interest either in his surroundings or the other people in the garden.
‘A town called Linvik,’ my mother said, and two ladies in the garden listened while she described it. The ladies were Italian, Signora Binelli and her daughter Claudia. They came from Genoa, they told my mother, which was a city renowned for its trade associations and its cuisine. They spoke of formidable grey stone and formidable palaces, stirring in the false impression that the palaces had been carved out of the side of an immense grey mountain. A passenger lift went up and down all day long between the heights of Genoa and its depths, making its passage through the mountain rock. This information the Italian ladies repeated, remarking that the lift was a great deal larger and more powerful than the one that conveyed us from the garden of the Villa Parco to the bathing place. The palaces of Genoa were built of rectangular blocks and decoratively finished, they said, and the earlier imprecision was adjusted in my mind.
Signora Binelli was very stout. She had smooth white skin, very tight, that seemed to labour under as much strain as her silk dresses did. She knew, my mother murmured once as we walked away from the two Italian ladies, not to wear over-bright clothes. There was always some black in them – in the oak leaves that patterned dark maroon or green, behind swirls of blue or brown. The Italians knew about being fat, my mother said.
Signora Binelli’s daughter, Claudia, was not at all like that. She was a film star we were told, and certainly she presented that appearance, many of her fingers displaying jewelled rings, her huge red lips perpetually parted to display a glistening flash of snowy teeth. Her eyes were huge also, shown off to best effect by the dark saucers beneath them. Her clothes were more colourful than Signora Binelli’s, but discreetly so. My mother said Claudia had taste.
‘Buon giorno,’ Monsieur Paillez greeted my mother and these ladies one morning in the garden, inclining his head as he went on his way to the lift. We sat at one of the tables, shaded by its vast blue-and-grey umbrella. Claudia’s swimming bag hung from the arm of her chair; sunglasses obscured her magnificent eyes. A yellow-backed book, Itinerario Svizzero, was on the table beside the ashtray; she smoked a cigarette. Signora Binelli wore a wide-brimmed white hat that protected the skin of her face from the sunshine. The sleeves of her dark dress were buttoned at her wrists; her shoulders and much of her neck were covered.
‘Paillez,’ Signora Binelli said. ‘Is it in France a name to know? Count Paillez?’ Bewildered by these questions, my mother only smiled in reply. Claudia removed the cigarette from between her lips. She did not think Monsieur Paillez was a count, she said. She had not heard that in the hotel.
‘We do not have counts in my country,’ my mother contributed.
‘In Italian we say conte,’ Signora Binelli explained. ‘So also contessa.’
‘I take my swim,’ Claudia said.
My mother said we would take ours soon. In prescribing this form of exercise for me Dr Edlund had reminded my mother that it must not be indulged in while food was in the early stages of digestion: we always permitted two hours at least for my breakfast of tea and brioche to settle itself before I entered the sea. Other
s, I noticed, were not so meticulous about such matters, but I had become used to being different where health was concerned. A day would come, Dr Edlund had confidently assured me, when I would look back on all this mollycoddling with amusement – and with gratitude also, he hastily added, for I would be the stronger for it. He was not telling the truth, as doctors sometimes cannot. My life was confined to childhood, was what he’d told my mother and my father: it would not reach beyond it. ‘We do not speak much of this,’ my father had said in a moment when he did not know I could hear. My grandmother had come to Linvik for a few days: it was she he told, and he’d been wise enough to keep the news from her until her departure was quite imminent. Care and attention saw to it that my childhood continued to advance without mishap, my father said, but even so my grandmother hugged me tearfully before she went, pressing me so tightly into her arms that I thought my end would come there and then. That was some time before my mother and I spent our first summer at San Pietro al Mare. I was eleven the summer Monsieur Paillez arrived at the Villa Parco.
‘Well, we might go now,’ my mother said, and we gathered up our things and descended the slope of the lawn to the lift that took us to the bathing place. Signora Binelli, in search of deeper shade, had moved to a table beneath the trees.
There is very little I have since liked better than swimming among the rocks at San Pietro. The water was of a tranquillity and a clear blueness that made it seem more like a lake than the sea. The rocks were washed white, like smooth, curved bones that blissfully held your body when you lay on them. Two small bathing huts – in blue-and-grey canvas similar to the lawn umbrellas – became a world, my mother’s and mine, safely holding our belongings while we swam or floated.