Dublin 4 (10 page)

‘Yes I know,’ Carmel agreed.

‘So anyway it went on from there … could she guide me around Dublin a bit? We had lunch at the National Gallery … we went in and out of the place that’s giving her the exhibition, we went – oh, God knows where … I kept her occupied during the days, and I faded out a bit at night because I knew she’d be meeting your man after work. On Wednesday she asked me would I like to meet him. I said no.’

‘Wednesday,’ Carmel said softly to herself.

‘Yes. I said no way did I want to get involved in peoples’ private lives. That was the night she told me that she had been invited here and she was worried sick, she couldn’t think why … She said she didn’t want to come and hurt you.’

‘No. No, indeed,’ said Carmel.

‘So she said she didn’t know how to get out of it, the Man wouldn’t hear of her refusing. I said the married man wanted to get a kick out of seeing you both together. She went quite white over it all … “He wouldn’t want that,” she said. “I don’t know, it gives some fellows a real charge,” I said, “seeing the
two women there and knowing they’ve screwed both of them.”’

‘Really?’ Carmel said.

Joe laughed. ‘That’s what she said too. Anyway, it upset her. And she said he wasn’t like that. Well then, he shouldn’t force you to come to the dinner, I said. It’s being a real voyeur, isn’t it, having the both of you there?’

Joe paused for a gulp of his coffee.

‘Then I said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if he forced the wife to ask you to dinner, after all why would the wife ask you? If she doesn’t know about you and him it’s an odd thing she should suddenly decide to pick you of all the people in Dublin and if she
does
know it’s even odder.” She said that’s what she’d been thinking herself. She’s just an ordinary woman you know, Carmel, just an ordinary female with a slow brain ticking through and working things out … she’s no Mata Hari.’

‘I know,’ said Carmel.

‘So I said then, and the others are his friends really, maybe they’re all in on it, they know about you and him, don’t they?’ Joe leaned over. ‘So that was part one over, she really believed he was setting her up, she was so convinced. I don’t know what kind of an evening they had that night, but it didn’t last long. He was out of there in an hour.’

‘Yes, he was home very bad-tempered and very early on Wednesday,’ Carmel said, smiling.

‘So Thursday I ring her and say come on, I’ll buy you lunch and no gloomy chat, because isn’t it a small world, I’ve just run into my old friends the Murrays and ha ha isn’t Dublin a village? I now know who the mystery bank manager is, it’s Dermot Murray. I didn’t know he knew you … She’s amazed.

‘“Oho,” I say, “can’t keep a secret in this town. No, really, isn’t it a scream, I knew brother Charlie years ago, long before he went to Australia or anything, and I remember Carmel, and Carmel was walking out with Dermot Murray, a lowly bank clerk then …” Oh she’s all upset, she can’t believe it, it’s too much. I say stop all that fussing and fretting, I’ll buy you a big lunch. I keep saying it’s a scream …’

Carmel smiled.

‘I arrive and collect her. She’s been crying, she’s so ashamed, she wouldn’t have dreamed of telling me all those intimate things if there was a chance I’d have known anyone … but I was a stranger in town and outside, someone who went away years ago … I kept laughing, the odds against it must be millions to one, forget it, anyway wasn’t it all for the best? Because now that I knew that it was Carmel and Dermot I could say definitely that they weren’t the kind of people who would be involved in anything sordid. Everyone had spoken very well of Dermot, and poor Carmel had always been very nice.’

‘Poor Carmel,’ Carmel said, smiling still.

‘You asked me to play it for all I could,’ Joe said.

‘I know. Go on.’

‘It took a lot of coaxing to get her back where she was. I reminded her of all the indiscretions I had told her, about being gay, about Henry. I told her that nobody in Ireland knew that about me, that we each knew secrets about the other. We shook hands over lunch. I felt a real shit.’

‘Joe, go on.’

‘She left more cheerful. I rang her yesterday morning and asked could I come by for coffee. I told her that I had heard at the hotel a man talking to a friend. I described David perfectly … he’s not hard to describe from what you told me.’

‘There’s only one David,’ said Carmel.

‘Yes, well she identified him, and oh I wove a long tale. It could have been something else entirely, but it did sound as if it could have been Dermot he was talking about … I kept pretending that it might have been imagination but she saw it wasn’t. She knew that if I had heard him talking like that it must be Dermot, and Dermot must indeed have told David that she was coming to the party and wasn’t it all very risqué.’

Joe looked at Carmel. ‘She cried a lot, she cried and cried. I felt very sorry for her.’

‘I cried a lot. I cried for four months the first time, the time he went off with that Sophie.’

‘But she has nobody to comfort her.’

‘I had nobody to comfort me.’

‘You had a psychiatrist.’

‘Great help.’

‘He cured you, didn’t he?’

‘No he didn’t, he asked me to ask myself was my marriage with Dermot so important that I should save it at all costs. What the hell does he know about marriage and importance, and all costs? What else is there for me but to be married to Dermot? There
is
nothing else. It’s not a choice between this and something else, it’s this or nothing.’

‘You’re fine, you could live on your own. You don’t need him. I can’t see what you want him around for. He hasn’t been any good to you for years, he hasn’t been kind or a friend. You haven’t wanted any of the things he wanted. Why didn’t you let him go then, or indeed now?’

‘You don’t understand. It’s different for … er … Gays, it’s not the same.’

‘Hell, it’s not the same, of course it’s not the same. I love Henry, Henry loves me. One day one of us will stop loving the other. Hopefully we’ll split and go our own ways … but the worst is to stay together bitching.’

‘But your world, it’s so different … so totally different … I couldn’t do that.’

‘Well you didn’t. And you’ve won.’

‘I have, haven’t I?’

‘Yes … it’s all fixed up. I told her this morning that I’d been asked here, that I’d be here for moral support if she wanted to come. She said no, she didn’t
want to make a fool of herself in front of everyone. She’ll tell you tonight at the exhibition that she can’t come after all. She says she’ll do it gently, she knows you are just as much a pawn as she is …’

‘Good, good.’

‘And she’s not going to tell him at all. She’s going to leave him stew, let him think what he likes.’

‘Suppose he runs after her, suppose he won’t let her go?’

‘I think she’ll make it clear to him. Anyway, she’s already set up some other friends to go out with. She says she’s sorry for you because you’re a timid sort of person and you’d been planning this for a month … she’s afraid that the whole thing will be a damp squib …’

‘That’s very nice of her.’

‘It is actually, Carmel, she’s a very nice person.’

‘So you keep saying, but I’m a very nice person. I’m an extremely nice person, and very few people ever realise that.’

‘I realise it. I’ve always realised it,’ Joe said.

‘Yes,’ Carmel said.

‘I’d have done this for no money, you were always good to me.’

‘I sent you money because I have it, you don’t. It seemed only fair that your week should be subsidised …’

‘You were always a brick, Carmel. Always. I’d have had no life if it weren’t for you.’

There was a silence. In the gleaming kitchen they sat and remembered the other kitchen, the kitchen where Carmel’s brother Charlie and Joe had stood scarlet-faced in front of Carmel’s father. Words that had never been used in that house were used that evening. Threats of ruin were made. Joe would be prosecuted, he would spend years and years in gaol, the whole world would know about his unnatural habits, his vile seduction of innocent schoolboys … an act so shameful not even the animal kingdom would tolerate it, and Charlie might grow up warped as a result. Joe’s father who worked as the gardener would be sacked, and the man would never work again. He would be informed this night of his son’s activities.

It was then that Carmel had found her voice. She was five years older than Charlie, she was twenty-two. She had been a quiet girl, her father had not even noticed her in the kitchen so great had been his rage.

‘It was Charlie’s fault, Dad,’ she had said in a level voice. ‘Charlie’s been queer for two years. He’s had relationships with a lot of boys, I can tell you their names.’ There had been a silence which seemed to last for an hour. ‘I don’t like unfairness. Joe Daly has done nothing that Charlie didn’t encourage. Why should his father be sacked, why should he be disgraced, why should Charlie get away with it, Dad, because Mr Daly is a gardener and you’re a Company Director?’

It was unanswerable.

Charlie went to Australia shortly afterwards. Mr Daly was never told, and Joe Daly got a little assistance from Charlie’s father indirectly, so that he could go to a technical school and do English and commerce and book-keeping. During that time he wrote the odd article for evening papers, and Carmel had seen him casually around Dublin. He had sent her a wedding present when she married Dermot two years after the distressing events in the kitchen. It was a beautiful cut glass vase, nicer than anything she had got from any of her father’s friends, or any of Dermot’s side. It would be on the dining-table tonight, with late summer roses in it.

*   *   *

‘So will I leave you to rest and think over it all?’ Joe said.

‘I
wish
you thought I’d done the right thing,’ she said.

‘You know what I think. I think you should have given him away. I really do. There are other lives.’

‘Not for fifty-year-old women there aren’t.’

‘I know what you mean, but there are. Anyway, there you go.’

‘Why are you so fed up with me?’

‘Carmel, I’m not fed up with you. I owed you, I’d do anything for you anytime, I told you that and I meant it. You asked me one favour. You’ve paid me
handsomely for it. I’ve done it, but I don’t have to approve of it.’

‘Oh, Joe, I thought you’d understand.’

‘You see, it’s the total reverse of all that happened, years ago. Then you did something brave just … well … just so that the right thing should be done …’

‘But this is the right thing! She’s young, she’ll find somebody else, a proper person, not a married man … not somebody else’s husband …’

‘No, you see this time you’ve arranged it so that the truth is hidden, lost … She thinks that Dermot is setting her up, she thinks he’s having a laugh at her, that he wanted her to come to the party as some kind of macho thing. Dermot thinks that she’s let him down, promised to go through with it and then thrown him over unexpectedly. Neither believes that the other is actually honest.’

Carmel stood up. ‘I know it’s complicated. That psychiatrist said to me, you know, the first time, that there’s no such thing as absolute right and absolute wrong. He also said that we can’t control other people’s lives, we must only take responsibility for our own. I decided what I wanted to do with mine, and I did it. That’s the way I see it. I don’t see it as meddling or playing God or anything.’

Joe stood up too. ‘No, whatever else it is, I don’t think it’s playing God,’ he said.

And he slipped quietly out of the house, making sure that he wasn’t observed, because he wasn’t
meant to be a great friend of Carmel’s, he was only a casual friend whom they had met luckily again, and his last job was to make sure that the dinner party was great fun.

They said you should get the evening papers at lunch-time and as soon as you got a smell of a flat that would suit you were to rush out and sit on the step at the head of the queue. You shouldn’t take any notice of the words ‘After six o’clock’. If you got there at six o’clock and the ad had sounded any way reasonable then you’d find a line trailing down the road. Finding a good flat in Dublin at a price you could afford was like finding gold in the gold rush.

The other way was by personal contact; if you knew someone who knew someone who was leaving a place that often worked. But if you had only just arrived in Dublin there was no chance of any personal contact, nobody to tell you that their bedsit would be vacant at the end of the month. No, it was a matter of staying in a hostel and searching.

Jo had been to Dublin a dozen times when she was a child; she had been up for a match, or for a school outing, or the time that Da was in the Chest Hospital
and everyone had been crying in case he wouldn’t get better. Most of her friends had been up to Dublin much more often; they talked about places they had gone to in a familiar way, and assumed that she knew what they were talking about.

‘You
must
know the Dandelion Market. Let me see, you come out of the Zhivago and you go in a straight line to your right, keep going and you pass O’Donoghues and the whole of Stephen’s Green, and you don’t turn right down Grafton Street. Now do you know where it is?’