‘I thought it mightn’t be a drinking occasion.’
‘I couldn’t face you without a drink in, Lairdman.’
‘I’m sorry about that.’
‘You’ve lifted my wife off me. That isn’t an everyday occurrence, you know.’
‘I’m sorry –’
‘It would be better if you didn’t keep saying that.’
Lairdman, who was in the timber business, acknowledged the rebuke with a sideways wag of his head. The whole thing was awkward, he confessed, he hadn’t slept a wink the night before.
‘You’re a Dubliner, she tells me,’ Boland said, the same politeness to the fore. ‘You make blockboard: there’s money in that, no doubt about it.’
Lairdman was offended. She’d described her husband as clumsy but had added that he wouldn’t hurt a fly. Already, five minutes into the difficult encounter, Lairdman wasn’t so sure about that.
‘I don’t like Dublin,’ Boland continued. ‘I’ll be frank about it. I never have. I’m a small-town man, but of course you’ll know.’
He imagined his wife feeding her lover with information about his provincialism. She liked to tell people things; she talked a great deal. Boland had inherited a bakery in the town he had referred to, one that was quite unconnected with the more renowned Dublin bakery of the same name. A few years ago it had been suggested to him that he should consider retitling his, calling it Ideal Bread and Cakes, or Ovenfresh, in order to avoid confusion, but he saw no need for that, believing, indeed, that if a change should come about it should be made by the Dublin firm.
‘I want to thank you,’ Lairdman said, ‘for taking this so well. Annabella has told me.’
‘I doubt I have an option.’
Lairdman’s lips were notably thin, his mouth a narrow streak that smiled without apparent effort. He smiled a little now, but shook his head to dispel any misconception: he was not gloating, he was not agreeing that his mistress’s husband had no option. Boland was surprised that he didn’t have a little chopped-off moustache, as so many Dublin men had.
‘I thought when we met you might hit me,’ Lairdman said. ‘I remarked that to Annabella, but she said that wasn’t you at all.’
‘No, it isn’t me.’
‘That’s what I mean by taking it well.’
‘All I want to know is what you have in mind. She doesn’t seem to know herself.’
‘In mind?’
‘I’m not protesting at your intentions where my wife is concerned, only asking if you’re thinking of marrying her, only asking if you have some kind of programme. I mean, have you a place up here that’s suitable for her? You’re not a married man, I understand? I’ll have another J.J.,’ Boland called out to the barman.
‘No, I’m not a married man. What we were hoping was that – if you’re agreeable – Annabella could move herself into my place more or less at once. It’s suitable accommodation all right, a seven-room flat in Wellington Road. But in time we’ll get a house.’
‘Thanks,’ Boland said to the barman, paying him more money.
‘That was my turn,’ Lairdman protested, just a little late.
She wouldn’t care for meanness, Boland thought. She’d notice when it began to impinge on her, which in time it would: these things never mattered at first.
‘But marriage?’ he said. ‘It isn’t easy, you know, to marry another man’s wife in Ireland.’
‘Annabella and I would naturally like to be married one day.’
‘That’s what I wanted to put to you. How are you suggesting that a divorce is fixed? You’re not a Catholic, I’m to understand?’
‘No.’
‘No more am I. No more is Annabella. But that hardly matters, one way or another. She’s very vague on divorce. We talked about it for a long time.’
‘I appreciate that. And I appreciated your suggestion that we should meet.’
‘I have grounds for divorce, Lairdman, but a damn bit of use they are to me. A divorce’ll take an age.’
‘It could be hurried up if you had an address in England. If the whole thing could be filed over there we’d be home and dry in no time.’
‘But I haven’t an address in England.’
‘It’s only a thought, Fergus.’
‘So she wasn’t exaggerating when she said you wanted to marry her?’
‘I don’t think I’ve ever known Annabella to exaggerate,’ Lairdman replied stiffly.
Then you don’t know the most important thing about her, Boland confidently reflected – that being that she can’t help telling lies, which you and I would politely refer to as exaggerations. He believed that his wife actually disliked the truth, a rare enough attribute, he imagined, in any human being.
‘I’m surprised you never got married,’ he said, genuinely surprised because in his experience cocky little men like this very often had a glamorous woman in tow. He wondered if his wife’s lover could possibly be a widower: naturally Annabella would not have been reliable about that.
‘I’ve known your wife a long time,’ Lairdman retorted softly, and Boland saw him trying not to let his smile show. ‘As soon as I laid eyes on Annabella I knew she was the only woman who would make sense for me in marriage.’
Boland gazed into his whiskey. He had to be careful about what he said. If he became angry for a moment he was quite likely to ruin everything. The last thing he wanted was that the man should change his mind. He lit a cigarette, again offering the packet to Lairdman, who again shook his head. Conversationally, friendlily, Boland said:
‘Lairdman’s an interesting name – I thought that when she told me.’
‘It’s not Irish. Huguenot maybe, or part of it anyway.’
‘I thought Jewish when she told me.’
‘Oh, undoubtedly a hint of that.’
‘You know the way you’re interested when you’re told about a relationship like that? “What’s his name?” It’s not important, it doesn’t matter in the least. But still you ask it.’
‘I’m sure. I appreciate that.’
When she’d said his name was Lairdman, Boland had remembered the name from his schooldays. Vaguely, he’d guessed that the man she was telling him about was a boy he couldn’t quite place. But knowing the name, he’d recognized in Buswell’s bar the adult features immediately.
‘ “Where did you meet him?” That doesn’t matter either. And yet you ask it.’
‘Annabella and I –’
‘I know, I know.’
At school Lairdman had been notorious for an unexpected reason: his head had been held down a lavatory while his hair was scrubbed with a lavatory brush. Roche and Dead Smith had done it, the kind of thing they tended to do if they suspected uppitiness. Roche and Dead Smith were the bullies of their time, doling out admonitions to new boys who arrived at the school in the summer or winter terms rather than the autumn one, or to boys whose faces they found irritating. Lairdman’s head had been scrubbed with the lavatory brush because he kept his hair tidy with perfumed oil that was offensive to Dead Smith.
‘I think we were at school together,’ Boland said.
Lairdman almost gave a jump, and it was Boland, this time, who disguised his smile. His wife would not have remembered the name of the school in question, not being in the least interested: the coincidence had clearly not been established.
‘I don’t recollect a Boland,’ Lairdman said.
‘I’d have been a little senior to yourself.’ Deliberately, Boland sounded apologetic. ‘But when she said your name I wondered. I was one of the boarders. Up from the country, you know. Terrible bloody place.’
Thirteen boarders there’d been, among nearly a hundred day boys. The day boys used to come noisily up the short, suburban avenue on their bicycles, and later ride noisily away. They were envied because they were returning to warmth and comfort and decent food, because after the weekends they’d talk about how they’d been to the Savoy or the Adelphi or even to the Crystal Ballroom. The boarders in win
ter would crouch around a radiator in one of the classrooms; in summer they’d walk in twos and threes around the playing-fields. The school matron, a Mrs Porter, was also the cook, but regularly burnt both the breakfast porridge and the barley soup she was given to producing as the main source of sustenance in the evening. An old boy of the school, occupying an attic at the top of a flight of uncarpeted stairs that led out of one of the dormitories, was the junior master, but he appeared to have acquired neither privilege nor distinction through that role: he, too, sat by the radiator in the classroom and dreaded the cooking of Mrs Porter. The bachelor headmaster, a boxer in his time – reputed to have been known in ringside circles as the Belted Earl, an obscurely acquired sobriquet that had remained with him – was a Savonarola-like figure in a green suit, sadistically inclined.
‘Oh, I quite liked the place,’ Lairdman said.
‘You were a day boy.’
‘I suppose it made a difference.’
‘Of course it did.’
For the first time Boland felt annoyed. Not only was the man she’d become involved with mean, he was stupid as well. All this stuff about an address in England, all this stuff about giving up a seven-room flat, when if he had an iota of common sense he’d realize you didn’t go buying houses for the likes of Annabella because in no way whatsoever could you rely on her doing what she said she was going to do.
‘I’ve always thought, actually, it supplied a sound education,’ Lairdman was saying.
The awful little Frenchman who couldn’t make himself understood. O’Reilly-Flood, whose method of teaching history was to give the class the textbook to read while he wrote letters. The mathematics man who couldn’t solve the problems he set. The Belted Earl in his foul laboratory, prodding at your ears with the sharp end of a tweezers until you cried out in pain.
‘Oh, a great place,’ Boland agreed. ‘A fine academy.’
‘We’d probably send our children there. If we have boys.’
‘Your children?’
‘You’d have no objection? Lord no, why should you? I’m sorry, that’s a silly thing to say.’
‘I’ll have another,’ Boland requested of the barman. ‘How about your mineral?’
‘No, I’m OK, thanks.’
This time he did not mention, even too late, that he should pay. Instead he looked away, as if wishing to dissociate himself from an over-indulgence in whiskey on an occasion such as this, before it was yet midday. Boland lit another cigarette. So she hadn’t told him? She’d let this poor devil imagine that in no time at all the seven-room flat in Wellington Road wouldn’t be spacious enough to contain the family that would naturally come trotting along once she’d rid herself of her provincial husband. Of course there’d have to be a divorce, and of course it would have to be hurried up: no one wanted a litter of little bastards in a seven-room flat or anywhere else.
‘Good man, yourself,’ he said to the barman when his whiskey came. If he ended up having too much to drink, as indeed might happen, he’d spend the night in the hotel rather than drive back. But it was early yet, and it was surprising what a heavy lunch could do.
‘I’m sorry about that,’ Lairdman repeated, referring again to his slip of the tongue. ‘I wasn’t thinking.’
‘Ah, for heaven’s sake, man!’
Boland briefly touched him, a reassuring tap on the shoulder. He could hear her telling him that the reason for their childless marriage had long ago been established. ‘Poor old fellow,’ she’d probably said, that being her kind of expression. She’d known before their marriage that she couldn’t have children; in a quarrel long after it she’d confessed that she’d known and hadn’t said.
‘Naturally,’ Lairdman blandly continued, ‘we’d like to have a family.’
‘You would of course.’
‘I’m sorry that side of things didn’t go right for you.’
‘I was sorry myself.’
‘The thing is, Fergus, is it OK about the divorce?’
‘Are you saying I should agree to be the guilty party?’
‘It’s the done thing, as a matter of fact.’
‘The done thing?’
‘If you find it distasteful –’
‘Not at all, of course not. I’ll agree to be the guilty party and we’ll work it out from there.’
‘You’re being great, Fergus.’
The way he was talking, Boland thought, he might have been drinking. There were people who became easy-going, who adopted that same kind of tone, even if they’d only been with someone else who was drinking: he’d often heard that but he’d never believed it. A sniff of someone else’s glass, he’d heard, a vapour in the air.
‘D’you remember the cokeman they used to have there? McArdle?’
‘Where was that, Fergus?’
‘At school.’
Lairdman shook his head. He didn’t remember McArdle, he said. He doubted that he’d ever known anyone of that name. ‘A cokeman?’ he repeated. ‘What kind of a cokeman? I don’t think I know the word.’
‘He looked after the furnace. We called him the cokeman.’
‘I never knew that person at all.’
Other people came into the bar. A tall man in a gaberdine overcoat who opened an Irish Times and was poured a glass of stout without having to order it. An elderly woman and two men who appeared to be her sons. A priest who looked around the bar and went away again.
‘You wouldn’t have noticed McArdle because you weren’t a boarder,’ Boland said. ‘When you’re weekends in a place you notice more.’
‘I’m sorry I don’t remember you.’
‘I wouldn’t expect you to.’
She’d be imagining this conversation, Boland suddenly realized. It was she who had suggested this bar for their meeting, speaking as if she knew it and considered it suitable. ‘I think I’ll go up and see Phyllis,’ she used to say, saying it more often as time went by. Phyllis was a friend she had in Terenure, whose own marriage had ended on the rocks and who was suffering from an internal complaint besides. But of course Phyllis had just been a name she’d used, a stalwart friend who would cover up for her if she needed it. For all he knew, Phyllis might never have been married, her internal system might be like iron. ‘Phone me,’ he used to say, and obediently and agreeably his wife would. She’d tell him how Dublin looked and how Phyllis was bearing up. No doubt she’d been sitting on the edge of a bed in the seven-room flat in Wellington Road.
‘It’s really good of you to come all this way,’ Lairdman said with a hint of finality in his voice, an indication that quite soon now the encounter should be brought to an end. ‘I really appreciate it. I’ll ring Annabella this afternoon and tell her we know where we stand. You won’t mind that, Fergus?’
‘Not at all.’
Boland had often interrupted such a telephone conversation. He would walk into the hall and there she’d be, knees drawn up, on the second step of the stairs, the receiver strung through the banisters. She’d be talking quite normally in her slightly high-pitched voice, but when he stepped through the hall door she’d wave a greeting and begin to whisper, the hand that had waved to him now cupped around the mouthpiece. He’d often wondered what she imagined he thought, or if she achieved some tremor of satisfaction from the hushed twilight of this semi-surreptitious carry-on. The trouble with Annabella was that sooner or later everything in the world bored her. ‘Now, I want to hear,’ she would soon be saying to Lairdman, ‘every single thing since the moment you left the house.’ And the poor man would begin a long history about catching a bus and passing through the entrance doors of his blockboard business, how he had said good morning to the typist and listened to the foreman’s complaint concerning a reprehensible employee, how he’d eaten a doughnut with his eleven O’clock coffee, not as good a doughnut as he’d eaten the day before. Later, in a quarrel, she’d fling it all back at him: who on earth wanted to know about his doughnuts? she’d screech at him, her fingers splayed out in the air so that her fre
shly applied crimson nail varnish would evenly dry. She had a way of quarrelling when she was doing her nails, because she found the task irksome and needed some distraction. Yet she’d have felt half undressed if her fingernails weren’t properly painted, or if her make-up wasn’t right or her hair just as she wanted it.
‘I’ll be able to say,’ Lairdman was stating with what appeared to be pride, ‘that there wasn’t an acrimonious word between us. She’ll be pleased about that.’
Boland smiled, nodding agreeably. He couldn’t imagine his wife being pleased since she so rarely was. He wondered what it was in Lairdman that attracted her. She’d said, when he’d asked her, that her lover was fun; he liked to go abroad, she’d said, he appreciated food and painting; he possessed what she called a ‘devastating’ sense of humour. She hadn’t mentioned his sexual prowess, since it wasn’t her habit to talk in that way. ‘Will you be taking those cats?’ Boland had inquired. ‘I don’t want them here.’ Her lover would willingly supply a home for her Siamese cats, she had replied, both of which she called ‘Ciao’. Boland wondered if his successor even knew of their existence.
‘I wonder what became,’ he said, ‘of Roche and Dead Smith?’
He didn’t know why he said it, why he couldn’t have accepted that the business between them was over. He should have shaken hands with Lairdman and left it at that, perhaps saying there were no hard feelings. He would never have to see the man again; once in a while he would feel sorry for the memory of him.
‘Dead Smith?’ Lairdman said.
‘Big eejit with a funny eye. There’s a barrister called Roche now; I often wonder if that’s the same fellow.’
‘I don’t think I remember either of them.’
‘Roche used to go round in a pin-striped blue suit. He looked like one of the masters.’
Lairdman shook his head. ‘I’ll say cheerio, Fergus. Again, my gratitude.’
‘They were the bright sparks who washed your hair in a lavatory bowl.’