“Lantern Slides,” by Edna O’Brien

By Edna O’Brien

“Machusla, Machusla, Machusla Macree . . .” Someone would sing that refrain before the night was over; a voice slightly drunk, or maybe very drunk, would send those trenchant lines to all the boisterous hearts who, by midnight, would not be nearly so suave or so self-possessed. At first it did not seem like a song that would be sung there, because this was a smart gathering in a select part of the outskirts of Dublin—full, as Mr. Conroy said, of the hoi polloi.

There were people from the world of politics, the world of theatre, the racing world, and the world of rock music. No rock stars were present, but a well-known manager of one group was there, and, as Mr. Conroy said, maybe one of his besequinned protégés would storm in later on. As Miss Lawless and Mr. Conroy squeezed into the big hall, she saw a melee of people, well togged, waiters wading about with trays and bottles, and, in a big limestone grate, a turf fire blazing. The surround was a bit lugubrious, like a grotto, but this impression was forgotten as the flames spread and swagged into brazen orange banners. In the sitting room, a further galaxy of people—all standing except for a few elderly ladies, who sat on a chintz covered banquette in the middle of the room. Here, too, was a fire, and here the hum of voices that presaged an evening that would be lively, maybe even hectic. The waiters, mostly young men, moved like altar boys among the panting throngs, and so immense was the noise that people asked from time to time how this racket could be quelled, because quelled it would have to be when the moment came, when the summons for silence came.

Reflected in everything around were the signs of prosperity—hunting scenes in big gilt frames, low tables crammed with ornaments, porcelain boxes, veined eggs, and so forth—and the chandeliers seemed to be chattering, so dense and busy and clustered were the shining pendants of glass. The big flower arrangements were all identical—pink and red carnations, as if these were the only flowers to be found. Yet by looking through the window Miss Lawless could see that lilac was just beginning to sprout, and small white egg cups of blossom shivered on jet-black magnolia branches. It was a nippy evening.

Mr. Conroy, as he led her through the throng, beamed. He was the one who pressed her to come, rang up and asked if he might bring her. They had walked earlier that morning on Dollymount Strand, had left their footprints on the sand that Miss Lawless had described as being white as saltpeter. On the walk they had relived several moments of their past. Mr. Conroy had made her laugh and then almost reduced her to tears. She laughed as he described his love life, or, rather, his attempts at a love life—the coaxing and wooing of women, especially women who came up from the country and wanted a bit of an adventure. He spoke glowingly of racing women, who were always good sports. Then, in quieter tones, he talked of his first love, or, as he so gallantly put it, his first shared love, because, as he added, Miss Lawless was the other half of his heart’s desire. Both Miss Lawless and a girl called Nicola had a claim on his heart, though neither of them ever knew it. Mr. Conroy, who worked in a hotel, said it was amazing, unbelievable altogether, the things that happened in a hotel, the little twists of fate, and he went on to describe how one day, returning from a weekend off, he was told there was a lady drinking heavily in Room No. 68. He chastised the barman, said didn’t he know they didn’t approve of female guests drinking in their rooms alone. What he had to do then was ring the housekeeper, and the two of them went up on the pretext that the room was going to be repapered shortly. Lo and behold, whom did he find but the sweetheart he had not laid eyes on for twenty years, who was now back in Dublin because her mother was dying, and who was, as he had to admit to Miss Lawless, blind drunk, her voice slurry and her face puffy.

“And what did you do?” Miss Lawless asked.

“I kissed her, of course,” Mr. Conroy said proudly, and then he painted a picture of this girl as she once was, this model who wore hats and veils and always put her hand out when she was introduced and repeated the person’s name in a coquettish voice. Every man in Dublin had loved her, but she married a banker and emigrated to South Africa. She had come home only for her mother’s funeral, and while she was there had died herself. At her own funeral all her former friends from the fashion world and the entertainment world convened, and, like Mr. Conroy, they were desolated, bemoaning the untimely death of someone who had been so beautiful. Many made mention of her veils, and how she put an arm out when introduced to people and spoke in that unique voice, and all were shaken by the tragedy.

“We must commemorate her,” Mr. Conroy had said, and all those gathered, moved by drink and grief, repeated his words and echoed his sentiments. It was decided that Mr. Conroy would commission a bronze of Nicola to which they would all contribute. Alas, alas, when the bronze was delivered, months later, Mr. Conroy indeed paid for it but did not receive the promised donations. It was, as he said, on his own mantelpiece, for himself alone.

But that was morning and it was night now—heady, breathless night—and Miss Lawless felt that something thrilling would happen to her. She did not feel like the peevish Miss Lawless who had put her stockings on in the hotel bedroom and given a little hiss as she saw a ladder starting from her big toe; and she did not feel like the Miss Lawless who feared that her black dress was a little too dressy because of a horseshoe-shaped diamanté buckle on one side, doing nothing in particular, just brazenly calling attention to itself. She saw now that her dress was perfect and, if anything, she was underdressed. The room was a pageant of fashion, and the combined perfume of the ladies, along with the after-shave of the men, drowned out the smell of carnations—that is, if they had any smell, because, as Miss Lawless reminded herself, shop flowers were not fragrant anymore. Suddenly in her mind she saw old-fashioned climbing roses, their pink buds tight, compact, and herself getting on tiptoe to reach the branch in order to smell them, to devour them. This was followed by a flood of childhood evocations—a painted-cardboard doll’s house with a little swiveled insert for a front door, which could be flicked open with a thumbnail; a biscuit barrel impregnated with the smell of ratafia essence; and a spoon with an enameled picture of the Pope. Somehow the party had begun to trigger in her a host of things, memory upon memory, like hands placed on top of one another in a childhood game.

Meanwhile, coiffured and bejeweled, women looked around for the perfect spot in which to be seen, in which to appoint themselves, and their voices rose in a chorus of conjecture and alarm, repeating the selfsame remark: “What is she going to do? I mean, is Betty going to faint?” Some were affirming that she would faint—those who were her dearest friends adding that they would faint with her, so excruciating was the suspense. They vied with each other as to this orgy of proposed fainting, and Miss Lawless saw bodies heaped on the sumptuous carpet, some in trouser suits with jangles of bracelets, others in rah rah skirts, their gauze frills, like the webbing of old-fashioned tea cozies, grazing their bare thighs, and still others in sedate, pleated costumes.

Mr. Conroy was engaged in a bit of banter with two other men. Dr. Fitz, a bachelor and long-standing friend of Betty’s family, was assuring his two male companions that he had not put on weight because, like most modern men nowadays, he went to a gymnasium. Not only that, and he winked at Miss Lawless as he said this, but a good friend of his, a “widda,” had a Jacuzzi, and he availed himself of that whenever he dropped by.

“Oh, the floozie with the Jacuzzi,” Mr. Conroy said, implying that he knew the widow. He then said that his weight never altered, simply because he never altered his diet, having a grapefruit and a slice of toast in the morning, a salad at lunch, and a collation in the evening. He was one of the few people in the room who did not imbibe. Mr. Gogarty was younger than these two men, lived in London, but hopped back and forth, as he said, to recharge the batteries, and, of course, wouldn’t have missed the party for anything, as Betty was an old friend of his. With a glint in his eye, Mr. Gogarty brought it to the attention of the two other men that the city they lived in was a very dirty city indeed. They did not blanch, knowing this was a preamble to some joke.

“Haven’t we Ballsbridge?” he said, waiting for the gleam on their faces. “And haven’t we Dollymount?” he said, with further relish, hesitating before throwing in Sandymount and Stillorgan. He went on to say that innocent people visited these haunts and never registered their bawdy associations.

“I believe there’s a Carnal Way somewhere,” Dr. Fitz said, not wanting to be lacking in a reply, and he pulled at the shirtsleeve of Bill the Barrow Boy, who stood nearby. Bill knew all these places from his early days selling oranges with his mother.

“She’s here,” “She’s here,” “She’s here,” voices said, and the urgent signal travelled back through the room. Lights were quenched, and those nearest the door kept calling back to those at the rear of the room to “for Christ’s sake, shut up.” Everyone waited, expecting to hear a little applause out in the hall, because it was those people that Betty would encounter first; in fact, the very first person Betty would encounter was the mime artist who had been hired for the occasion. There he was at the doorway, on this bright spring evening wearing a black suit—pale as a gargoyle, moving nothing but one red-painted eyebrow, which he wriggled to amuse the arrivals. Yes, Betty would see him first, and no doubt he would guess that a birthday celebration had been arranged in her absence. She had gone innocently to the races and had intended to come home and have supper in bed, but her friends and family had foxed her and devised this surprise party.

“False alarm!” someone shouted, and the crowd laughed and resumed drinking as the lights were put on again and waiters were summoned more urgently than ever, for people reckoned there would be many more false alarms before the birthday girl showed up.

When Betty did arrive, she took it totally in her stride, walked through the entryway, it seems winked at the waiters, and told one of the staff that the hall fire was smoking. Loud cheers hailed her as she came into the sitting room—a youngish-looking woman with short brown hair and sallow skin, wearing a coral suit and a coral necklace. She stood as an accomplished actress might, her hands reaching out to welcome a group that she certainly had not been expecting. She waited a moment before singling out any one person, but soon friends rushed to her, especially those women who had vowed that they would faint. People were kissing her, handing her presents, others were pulling her to be introduced to this one and that one, including Miss Lawless.

Mr. Conroy said to Miss Lawless that it was a good thing they had taken that walk by Dollymount in the morning, or otherwise he would never have thought of inviting her. She agreed. Seeing her after several years—a little aged, but still glowing—it occurred to Mr. Conroy that maybe there dwelt in some secret crevice of her heart a soft spot for him. He had seen her through love affairs. Once he had taken her to a fortune-teller on the north side of the city, saw her come out crying. Soon after, he had rung up a lover on her behalf, a married man, only to be told by the man’s wife that he did not wish to come to the phone.

He had had to report those uncompromising words to Miss Lawless. “He does not wish to come to the phone,” he had to say, and then witnessed the hour or two of dementia that ensued. To others, she might seem composed, but he sensed that inside a storm raged and all those attachments lingered and burrowed in her.

Suddenly there was a loud call for dinner from the chief waiter, followed by cheers and whistles from waiters and guests alike. All were relieved. A few grumbled jokingly and blamed Betty for having taken so long to arrive. Mr. Gogarty asked where in heaven’s name she could have been from the time the races ended until she got to her own house.

“Mum’s the word,” Dr. Fitz said, but the glint in his eye betrayed his indiscretion. He knew that she had met her husband and had gone with him as his wife to get the trophy that he had won.

The dining room was temptingly lit, and red garlands dipped from the ceiling in loops. The tables were covered with pink cloth and lit with pink candles, and all over the walls there were blown-up snapshots of Betty in a bathing suit and a choker. At the far end of the room there was a dais, where the orchestra already sat and was playing soft, muted music. Balloons floated in the air-blue, yellow, and silver orbs, moving with infinite hesitation. Miss Lawless was seated with the group she had already talked to, and Mr. Conroy introduced her to the remaining few whom she had not met. There were Mr. and Mrs. Vaughan, a girl called Sinead, and Dot the Florist. There was also one empty place. Dot the Florist was wearing a pink cat suit, so tight-fitting that she seemed to be trussed. Mrs. Vaughan—Eileen, who was in a gray angora suit—made not the slightest attempt to be sociable. Mr. Conroy whispered to Miss Lawless that Mr. and Mrs. Vaughan had not spoken for over a year, but that nevertheless Mrs. Vaughan insisted on escorting him everywhere.

“Any windfalls?” Mr. Conroy called across, knowingly, to Mr. Vaughan. It was their code word for asking if Mrs. Vaughan had at all thawed. By his look, Mr. Vaughan seemed to be saying that hostilities were dire. Sinead, who was in a black strapless dress, told her fellow-guests, for no reason, that she was in mourning for her life.

“Cut out the histrionics, Sinead,” Dr. Fitz said, and glowered at her. They were courting, but, as she was quick to tell the present company, he was full of moods. To his chagrin, Bill the Barrow Boy was not seated with his bride, Denise, a thing he could scarcely endure. He allowed himself a moment of misery as he thought of the one blot on their nuptial bliss: Denise did not want a child. Her figure mattered to her too much. “Later on” was what she said. Many’s the time he slipped into the Carmelite chapel off Grafton Street and gave an offering for a votive candle to be lit.

“Isn’t Denise a picture?” he said to the others, and Mr. Conroy seized the moment to remark on Miss Lawless’s beauty, to say that it was a medieval kind of beauty, and that he believed she was a throwback, like that Queen, Maire Ruadh, who lived in a castle at Corcomroe, and who when she had her fill of a lover had him dumped over the casement into the sea.

“Didn’t Yeats set ‘The Dreaming of the Bones’ at Corcomroe?” Mr. Gogarty said, with a certain bookish authority. Bill the Barrow Boy said he wouldn’t know, as he never read a “bike” in his life, he let Denise do all the reading, and assured them that she could read any ordinary book in a sitting.

“Oh, river and stream,” Mr. Conroy said, as plates were placed briskly on the table. Some said it was trout, others said it was salmon. In fact, things became rather heated at one moment, as Dot the Florist insisted it was trout, said she had grown up on a river in Wicklow and knew one kind of fish from another, and Dr. Fitz said that any fool could see it was salmon, its blush diminished by the subtle lighting. Miss Lawless put her fork in it, tasted it, and said somewhat tentatively that, yes, it was salmon in an aspic sauce. Dot the Florist pushed hers away and said she wasn’t hungry and grabbed one of the waiters to ask for a vodka-on-the rocks. Dr. Fitz said it was a crying shame to drink vodka when good table wines were being served, although, he added somewhat ruefully, not as good as they would be if the great man of the house were present. He boasted to Miss Lawless that they had often drunk two thousand pounds’ worth of wine at an intimate dinner party in that very house.

“Now, now,” Sinead called to Dr. Fitz, not wanting the missing—indeed, the vagrant—husband to be given any mention. She was on Betty’s side; Betty was her friend; she made it clear that Betty had poured her heart out to her often, and that she well knew the evenings Betty had supper alone on a tray in her bedroom, like many another jilted woman. Then, fearing that she might have betrayed a friendship, she commented on Betty’s figure and, pointing to the various blown-up photos of Betty all over the room, she asked aloud, “Why would any man leave a beautiful woman like that for a slut!” Why indeed? Dr. Fitz told her to pipe down and not to talk about people she knew nothing about. Yet he was pleased to tell Miss Lawless in confidence one or two things about Betty’s rival, a Danish woman called Clara. Miss Lawless somehow envisaged her as being blond with very long legs, and also as being very assured.

“Not a bit of it,” Dr. Fitz said, and described a woman who was not at all svelte, who wore ordinary clothes, had never gone to a hairdresser or a beauty parlor in her life, and was overweight.

“So why did he run off with her?”

Miss Lawless asked, genuinely mystified.

“She makes him feel good,” Dr. Fitz said, and by the way he gulped a swig of wine he seemed to express a desire for such a woman and not the needful, tempestuous Sinead.

Mr. Vaughan and Mr. Conroy were in a pleasing exchange on the subject of Mr. Conroy’s tie. Nothing pleased Mr. Conroy more than to relate yet again the story of how he came to get such a beautiful tie and what a double-edged gift it was. It had been given to him, he said, by a very generous lady, a rich lady whose baby he was godfather to. One day at the races, the tie was admired by a bloke and Mr. Conroy heard himself saying rather gallantly, “Oh, I’ll get you one, Seamus,” thinking to himself that all he had to do was to go into Switzer’s or Brown Thomas’s and fork out fifteen quid and he’d be in the good offices of this man, Seamus, whom he had reason to want to befriend. Seamus used to do night work in Mr. Conroy’s hotel, but had been summarily dismissed because of incivility. Late at night when guests from overseas arrived, he would tell them to “feck off,” as he was too lazy to get up from the stool and help with a suitcase or open a door. However, the fellow they got to replace him was even worse, and an alcoholic to boot, so they hoped to coax Seamus back. Lo and behold, as he confessed, the next day he scoured the shops, to find there was no tie like it, not even one approaching it. He finally had to ring the rich woman’s secretary—the woman herself was always travelling—only to be told, “Didn’t you know? That’s a very special tie. That’s a Gucci tie.”

“Is that so?” he claims to have said, telling everyone at the table of his naiveté, but meaning it for Miss Lawless in particular. He added that one label was the same as another to him, and he knew a fellow in England, a foreman who worked on a building site, and so he sent the tie over for a duplicate to be bought. After a couple of weeks, back it came with its companion in a regal box, and, Christ, wasn’t it forty-eight pounds fifty pence. A shocker altogether, as everyone agreed, and the other men now began to stare at the tie with incomprehension. Sinead and Dot looked at each other quite piqued, and Sinead announced that the ladies would like a bit of stimulating conversation—they had not come to a party to be treated like ornaments, as was the case with most women in Ireland. She added that though they were treated like pieces of china at a party, they were frequently “knocked about” at home.

“Bollocks,” Dr. Fitz said, and by the way he picked up a bottle of wine it appeared he might brain Sinead with it. His cheeks were getting flushed and he proceeded to loosen his tie.

“So set us an agenda,” Mr. Gogarty, the aggrieved divorcé, said, also nettled by Sinead’s remark. For some unfortunate reason, divorce was pounced upon as a subject, so the table became even more heated, with men and women shouting each other down. The men insisted that divorce was wrong, because of the way children suffer, while the women claimed vociferously that children suffered anyhow, because their fathers were always in the boozer or in the backs of motorcars necking younger women. Mrs. Vaughan was the sole female voice who took issue with the other women, adding that young girls nowadays were tramps in the way they dressed and the way they behaved.

“How do you know how we behave?” Sinead said tartly.

“What’s right is right,” Eileen Vaughan said, pushing her plate away contemptuously and applying herself to cutting bread into infinitesimal pieces, which she did not touch.

Much against the advice of Dr. Fitz, Sinead began to tell how she, as a young girl not yet thirty-five, had been the victim of a modern Irish marriage and it was “the pits.” She recalled coming into her own building one evening and actually finding the chain drawn on her door, then ringing the bell but receiving no answer, having to go to the apartment below and ask a neighbor to shelter her for the night, ringing the telephone number but not receiving an answer, and a few days later learning that the person he had had in the bedroom when he put the chain on was a call girl. When she tackled him about it, she was told that he needed comfort because Sinead had gone out and he was not sure if she was coming back.

“It’s bloody ridiculous the way women have to kowtow,” she said directly to Eileen Vaughan, who looked like a weasel ready to hiss. Dr. Fitz began to fume, fearing above all else that the next thing Sinead would treat them to was an account of her husband’s suicide, of the amount of pills he took in that hotel in the North, and of Dr. Fitz being called, because he happened to be there on a fishing holiday. Worse, she would treat them to the long rigmarole about her miscarriage and her husband beating her brutally. He was right. She was off on her favorite target. The four days in the labor ward, other women screaming and groaning, but to some avail, since they did not lose their babies. Then the bit about her husband coming to collect her, her imagining a treat—lunch out, maybe, or coffee and biscuits in that smart pub off Grafton Street—but instead their going out the sea road, her heartening at the thought of a walk along the strand, with the dunes on one side and the sea on the other, returning to the spot where they had courted, as an appeasement, a reward for all that she had been through. Hardly had they taken twenty paces along that littered seashore when he began to beat her up. Sinead became more hysterical as she described it, more dramatic—herself on the ground, her husband kicking her, first in silence, then his beginning to shout, to ask why had she lost the child, why had she been so bloody careless. His child—his, his. “You’re mad,” she recounted having said to him, and then told of standing up and feeling battered inside and out.

Bill the Barrow Boy leaned across the table and tried to stop her, but the other men turned from her in dismay and toward Dr. Fitz, who was appraising the nose of a red wine that had just been brought in dome-shaped decanters. On the surface, the wine had a violet hue. The main course was also being served. It was duck with roast potatoes and applesauce, which, as Mr. Gogarty said, was far preferable to steak on a spring evening. The light had faded, and in the dining room, what with the balloons, the waving wings of yellow candle flame, and the high-pitched voices, the atmosphere was fervid. Many were popping streamers from the little toy pistols that were on their side plates, and these colored wisps of straw, weaving and wandering from table to table, shoulder to shoulder, formed a web, uniting them in a carnival chain.

“Now, what is the difference between Northside girls and Southside girls?” Mr. Gogarty asked with pride.

Answers were proffered, but in the end Mr. Gogarty was pleased to tell them they were all dullards. “Northside girls have real jewelry and fake orgasms,” he said, and laughed loudly, while Eileen Vaughan repeatedly blessed herself and, as if it were a maggot, lifted the streamer that joined her to Mr. Gogarty.

Mr. Conroy, in order to bring harmony back to the proceedings, recounted the morning’s walk that he and Miss Lawless had taken, gloated over what a sight it had been, what refreshment, the air so bracing, not a ruffle on the sea, the sand so white—or, as he said, white as saltpeter, to quote Miss Lawless.

Yes, Miss Lawless had asked him to take her there, but it was not so much to retrace her steps as to find them for the first time. Twenty-five years had gone by since that momentous occasion on the dunes. It was there she had surrendered herself to a man that she likened to Peter Abelard. He was tall and blond, with a stiff, almost wooden body—a sternness and yet a seducer’s charm. The first time Miss Lawless had sighted him was in a newspaper office where she had gone to deliver a piece that she had written for a competition. Readers had been asked to describe a day by the sea. She could not remember precisely how she had described it then, but today, when she walked there with Mr. Conroy, she saw patches of sea like diagonals of stained glass, the colors deepening as the water swerved from the shore to the Hill of Howth far beyond. Mr. Conroy had said that if she waited a week or two more the rhododendrons would be in bloom over in Howth and they could go there for an excursion. She knew, just as Mr. Conroy knew, that the red rhododendrons he conjured up were mostly in the mind—talismans, globes of memory. On the walk, Mr. Conroy often stopped in his tracks to draw breath, said he was getting on a bit and was easily winded, then pointed to his elastic stockings and spoke of varicose veins. But in telling the story to the guests at the table he spoke only of a glorious walk where they linked and strode together.

Yes, the traces of her and Abelard were there, because of course he had cropped up again in her mind. On the evening when she had first met him, when she took her little essay to the newspaper office, she had had a premonitory feeling that something was going to happen between them, just as this evening, sitting at that table, she felt that something was pending. She remembered clearly how Abelard had taken her essay, asked her where she worked, and how he diligently wrote down her address and her telephone number—as a formality, but from the way he smiled at her she knew that he had some personal interest. When her piece was featured in the paper as having placed first in the competition, the editor had got her name wrong, so the flush of her winning was a little dimmed. But Peter Abelard pursued her. They began to meet. She tasted her first gin-and-tonic and thought not much of it, but afterward there was a floaty feeling inside her stomach, and then she took off her gloves and touched his hand and was not ashamed. One night they met far earlier than was usual for them, took a bus out to the sea, got off at Dollymount, walked over a bit of footbridge and then down a road and into the labyrinth and secrecy of the dunes, with the high swags of coarse grass and the sandy mounds serving as beds. It was there among those dunes that she gave herself to this Abelard. Although she knew she had, she could not remember it; it was like something experienced in a blur. It appalled her that she had in a sense detached herself at one of the more poignant and crucial moments in her whole life. Nor could she remember much of the hotel where they went later on, except that it was a dingy place near the railway station, and that the bathroom was out on the landing and, having no nightdress or dressing gown, she had to put Abelard’s blazer on when she went out of the room. They were near and not near. He would embrace her but he did not want to know anything about her. She wanted dearly to tell him that this was the first time, although he must have known.

It was not long after that that he introduced her to his wife at some party, and his wife, maybe sensing that she was the type of girl her husband might like, or else feeling extremely lonely, invited her to come to their house for an evening, because her husband was going away to England on a job. She could remember clearly her visit to that house, and three children in ragged pajamas refusing to go to bed. Then, later, her sitting downstairs in the big drafty kitchen with his wife, eating mashed potatoes and sausages and thinking what a lonely house it was, now the rowdiness had died down. They drank quite a lot of whiskey, and while they were drinking and talking about the mysticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins the telephone rang, and so great was the wife’s excitement and alacrity that in jumping up from the table she turned her ankle and knocked over a lamp but still raced. She knew or hoped that the phone call would be from her husband, and indeed it was. She told him how their youngest son had bellowed his daddy’s name all over the garden, bellowed for him to come home, and that at that very moment she and Miss Lawless were having a chinwag. Miss Lawless had wanted to confess her wrong there and then to this woman, but she balked. Instead, they continued to ramble and drink a bit, and later she kicked off her shoes and asked if by any chance she could sleep on the sofa. In the very early morning when she wakened, she saw the garden through the long, uncurtained window, saw clothes on a line and a tree with tiny shrunken apples that looked as if they had some sort of disease, some blight.

The secret affair with her Abelard ended, and in a welter of choked emotion Miss Lawless spent half a week’s earnings—she worked in a shop and was paid very little—purchasing a book of poems for him, a second hand book. So determined was she to be discreet, and so certain was she that the good God would reward her for her discretion and her sense of sacrifice, that she slipped a little greeting card not into the book itself but between the brown paper cover and the frittered binding of the book. She felt sure that he would remove that cover and find the greeting, that he would be touched and immediately restored to her. He would come to the shop where she worked, he would whisk her away, maybe even take her to a restaurant. The lines she had copied onto the card were from one of James Stephens’ poems:

And we will talk, until

Talk is a trouble, too,

Out on the side of the hill;

And nothing is left to do,

But an eye to look into an eye;

And a hand in a hand to slip;

And a sigh to answer a sigh;

And a lip to find out a lip!

As it happened, her Abelard did not find that note for many years, but when he did find it he wrote to tell her, saying also that he had lately been dreaming of her, and that in one dream he cherished they were at the races together, and he wished he had never wakened from it. She had not answered that letter. She did not know exactly what to say. She believed that someday she might bump into him and then the right words would come.

Today, as she and Mr. Conroy walked along the strand, she had in fact asked him how her Abelard was, and was a little disappointed to hear that he was almost blind now, and that he walked with a stick. Unthinkable. Much as Miss Lawless wanted to see him, she did not at all like the idea of meeting a blind man with a stick. Mr. Conroy, who knew that she had had this fling, kept suggesting that she phone him. “Or I’ll phone him for you,” he said.

She said she would think it over. In another part of her mind she actually just wanted to find the spot where she had lain, as if finding the spot would redeem the years.

“Dollymount is ideal for courting couples,” Mr. Gogarty said, as if reading her thoughts, yet winking at Mr. Conroy, thereby implying they both had caroused there.

“I declare to God,” said Mr. Conroy, “I was with a girl out there at about one in the morning not so long ago when a geezer tapped the window of the car and asked me for the right time. The pair of us jumped out of our skins and I told the blasted Peeping Tom where to go.”

“End of a lovely . . .” Mr. Gogarty said, but did not finish the sentence, because of ladies being present. Eileen Vaughan suddenly exploded, thumped her husband, and said that never in her life had she been subjected to such smut.

“Ah, the Meat Baron,” Dr. Fitz said, ignoring the tirade and pointing to a tall, bulky man who had come into the room. He was wearing a light suit and a very jazzy tie.

“Hawaiian,” Mr. Gogarty said with a slight sneer, declaring how money betrays itself on a man’s puss.

The Meat Baron looked around smiling, realizing that he was being alluded to. Dr. Fitz told Miss Lawless that the man had a great brain—a brain that could be used for music or mathematics, could have succeeded at anything, but that it happened to be meat he got started on, because of going down to the knacker’s yard as a young lad and buying hooves to make rosary beads with. Dr. Fitz said that his admiration for self-made men was boundless; he said it showed real originality; he said that people who had inherited money were often scoundrels, drifters, or drug addicts. Money, he attested, could either forge character or weaken it. He calculated that, now that the Meat Baron had arrived, and including the other various tycoons already present, there was easily billions of pounds’ worth of money up for grabs in that room—enough money to support a Third World country. Bill the Barrow Boy leaned across and said that he would not want that kind of big money, that those people who had their own yachts and their own jets often came a cropper—went out in the morning in one of these yachts or one of these jets and by noon were in a Black Maria, stripped of every personal belonging even down to their Rolexes. The Meat Baron stopped for a moment, looked down at the uneaten duck on Dr. Fitz’s plate, and said, “She’ll never fly over Loch Dan again,” and laughed. Dot the Florist pulled him by the sleeve, but he was already walking on and did not notice.

Dot had a plan of her own that night. She had vowed that before the night was over she would dance with one of the rich men, whichever one didn’t have his wife with him. The bank was foreclosing on her. The little flower shop that she had opened a year before was still a treasure garden as far as she was concerned, but the novelty had gone and people went back to buying dull things like carnations and evergreen plants. Where else, she asked herself bitterly, would they find mallows and phlox and Canterbury bells; where else were birds’ eggs and moss and miniature roses tucked into rush baskets like nests; where else were the jugs of sweet peas like crushed butterflies? Where, but in her shop that was really half a shop? The other half was a newsagent’s, and she could hear the ringing of their cash register all day long, while with her it was a question of people coming in and asking if she had any cheap flowers. It had been such a success in the beginning: she was written up, photographed in her little jalopy bedecked with boughs and branches, coming from the market. But now—that very afternoon, in fact—a cow of a woman had arrived in a jeep and bought half the shop, for next to nothing, asking if she could have a guarantee that these were not refrigerated flowers, that they would not wilt once she got them in her drawing room.

Dot eyed the Meat Baron; she had met him before, and felt that with enough vodka she could perhaps coax him. She would have to do it. Otherwise it was a “For Rent” sign above the door, with the newsagent taking over the whole place. Galling. Galling. Some would say she was lucky to be there, that she was there only because of being a friend of Betty’s daughter. But she believed she was still dishy, and an asset at any party. A Gypsy who had come to her shop had told her to make the most of her Mediterranean looks. When the time came for the ladies’ choice, she would ask the Meat Baron up.

“Ah, the arms of Morpheus,” Mr. Conroy said, nudging Miss Lawless as they both looked at Mr. Vaughan, who had fallen fast asleep, his head on the table. Mr. Conroy then began to whisper to Miss Lawless, describing Mr. Vaughan’s ghastly life. His wife hid packets of biscuits so that he could not find them; she put his dinner on a tray at six o’clock promptly each evening and left it there even if he was not home for days, so that the poor man had cold boiled potatoes and tough meat most of the time. Mr. Vaughan, like many an Irishman, as Mr. Conroy conceded, had an eye for the ladies, and had met this beautiful lady—English, mark you—at Leopardstown races and assisted her, it seems, in stepping over a puddle. As a result, he repaired with her to the trainers’ bar, and as a further result coaxed her to pay a visit in the fullness of time to a rural hotel in the South of Ireland. The English lady turned up with two suitcases, was given a suite, and later in the evening was visited by Mr. Vaughan, who spent two nights with her, wining and dining her in the suite, having the occasional drive to the seaside with her to get a blow of air, and having cocktails galore and even the little farewell gift of a Waterford rose bowl from the hotel boutique. Mr. Vaughan naturally told the manager to send the damages to him, as he would pay the bill at the end of the month, when his wages came through. Mr. Vaughan was a dealer in motorcars and was paid monthly. It was in his capacity as salesman that he had first met Betty—sold her a sports car. The manager, a religious man and a teetotaller, condoned the illicit weekend, chiefly on the ground of Mr. Vaughan’s being married, as everyone knew, to a harridan.

“No problem,” the manager said, and passed on the instructions to the girl in Accounts, a snibby girl, who at that time was planning to leave the place and go to England to work in a health spa. The time came, and Miss Snib, having paid no attention to the instructions she was given, sent the bill for the wining, the dining, the suite, and the Waterford bowl to the English lady—Miss Beale by name. Miss Beale, it seems, was indeed taken aback at receiving it, and doubly taken aback at the huge amount that had accrued. But being a person who prided herself on her dignity—she worked in the City for a company of financiers—she paid the bill, then put pen to paper and sent Mr. Vaughan a letter that was nicely balanced between umbrage and desire. She expressed mild surprise that he should prove to be so lacking in gentlemanly courtesy, but, being a sport, as she reminded him he had often called her, she had decided that the cost was trifling compared with the pleasure, and she went into some very accurate and fulsome detail about his hairy body on the peach cushions of her flesh, and luxuriated on the tussle waged between these two bodies—their all-night combat, and, as she said, his little black thing getting its way in the end, and then morning, which brought them not fatigue but fresh vigor, fortified as they were by a gigantic breakfast. She was glad to have paid for such a romp, she teasingly said in a postscript; she would pay again for it.

“Mon Dieu” Mr. Conroy said and looked up at the ceiling, where shoals of balloons were on their happy circuit.

The letter did reach Mr. Vaughan safely, and, once over his shock—having rung the bookkeeper at the hotel and made a complaint—and maybe feeling nostalgic for Miss Beale, he put the letter in his suit pocket and went on a bit of a binge. He was away for several days and nights, seeing friends up and down the country, and returned to his own house and his wife, Eileen, a sickly man who had to spend two days in bed, with porridge and cups of weak tea. Unfortunately, when Mr. Vaughan rose to resume work he was in something of a dither, having express word from his boss in Dublin that unless he got moving and got his act together and sold at least one foreign motorcar down in the windy hills of the Shannon Estuary he would be drawing the dole by the following Monday week. Mr. Vaughan dressed hurriedly and set off with the zealousness of a missioner, even on the way composing a short rhyme that would further the sales of the car. There was going to be a display of these cars in a week, and he knew how to get the public interested. The rhyme he invented was borrowed from “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and went something like:

I will arise and go down to Kinsale,

Agog in my brand-new Ford Fiesta;

I will eat fresh oysters there

And in the afternoon have a siesta.

In his haste, Mr. Vaughan forgot to remove various items from the pockets of his other suit, and he was hardly at the crossroads one mile from his house before his wife, Eileen, was reading a description of his prowess, which, after eighteen years, came as a shock to her. She lost no time. She had the letter copied on the new machine in the post office, making sure that she oversaw the copying herself, and soon after all of his friends, plus his family, including his sister the nun, plus Eileen’s family, plus his employers, were party to the ill-fated billet-doux.

Soon after, Mr. Vaughan suffered his first heart attack, going down the steps of a hotel, where he had presided over a sales conference that had boosted his standing—principally, it was rumored, because of his versifying.

While she was listening, Miss Lawless suffered a slight shock. Before her very eyes there appeared a modern-day Abelard. It was eerie. He was wearing a black dress suit and a cream shirt with frills that reached all the way down the front, like jonquils.

The suit seemed to be not of serge or wool but of silk, and the sleeves were wide, like the sleeves of a woman’s kimono. He was blond, with fair skin and blue eyes. The blue was like that glass that has been rinsed again and again and for some reason emanates a private history, a sorrow. He was obviously a man of note, because various people waved, trying to induce him to come and sit at their table, but he just stood and smiled, determined not to be stuck anywhere he did not want to be. “There’s a place here,” Miss Lawless said, but under her breath. She was not usually so flagrant; in fact, she prided herself on her reserve. Betty ran and kissed him, and Miss Lawless experienced a flicker of jealousy as she watched this newcomer squeeze Betty’s cheeks while they laughed over some little private joke they had. Miss Lawless thought that, as he strolled with Betty, he had something of the quality of a panther. She felt that his shoes, which she could not see, were made of suede, or else they were slippers, because he seemed to walk so softly; he padded through that room. Mr. Conroy suddenly referred to him, called him Reggie, and said how he knew him for the pup he was—chasing young girls, his wife hardly cold in the grave. There had been a drowning accident the year before, and this husband was now swanning about in Italian-style clothes, getting sympathy off ladies for his tragedy, leading a game life of it, flying to London twice a week, where, it was rumored, he had a flat.

Dr. Fitz looked up and was not at all pleased at the attention Betty was giving to this Reggie.

“Too much of a blush in that woman’s cheek,” Dr. Fitz said as he looked after them, and then he turned to Miss Lawless to tell her about the day Betty’s husband had left her and how he, he was the one to hold her hand. A party of them were just getting on the jet to go to Spain when the husband—John was his name—suddenly said to Betty, “You go on ahead. I’ve decided it would be better if we lived apart.” Here Dr. Fitz hesitated in order for Miss Lawless to take in the brutal significance of the remark, which indeed she did. He then painted a picture of Betty, the pretty and ever cheerful wife who dressed always as her prominent husband liked her to dress, which was smartly; who rode to hounds at her husband’s wish; who rarely complained if he failed to turn up at a theatre or a concert; who organized lunches, dinners, breakfasts for fifty or more at the last minute; and who even overcame her fear of skiing—all for his sake. Betty, suddenly a husbandless, stranded woman. Dr. Fitz dilated further on the pity of it, the shock the poor woman got, and how she went berserk on the little plane en route, going mad up there in the filtered atmosphere, with the pilot wondering whether he should turn back or keep going or what.

“If I’d had an injection with me,” Dr. Fitz said, lamenting even now how he had set out that day without his doctor’s bag—a thing he had never done since. He described again the plane soaring through the cloudless upper atmosphere, having to undo the buttons of her blouse, having to undo her shoes, holding her down, telling her that the whole thing was a bad dream from which she would one day awaken.

“You two are like a pair at confession,” Sinead called across the table rather tartly. Dr. Fitz went on talking to Miss Lawless, ignoring the gibe. Sinead, who hoped to marry Dr. Fitz, had thought for a few weeks now that she was pregnant, and knew that if she was she would keep it a secret until it was no longer possible to abort. She would then use every trump card of sentiment and religion to make him ashamed of even the word “abortion.” She believed she was doing good by keeping this pregnancy a secret. Marriage would steady him. He still had the schoolboy notion of winning over every new female, which he was now trying to do with Miss Lawless, for which Sinead could happily wring her white neck with its collar of gold. Yes, a baby would settle him, preferably a boy.

Miss Lawless did not look back after Abelard and Betty to see where he was being seated, as that would have been too noticeable. The fact that this stranger was in the room was enough for her and made her think, with a wan smile, how slender, how delicate, people’s dreams are. Suddenly her lips, her fingers, the follicles of her hair began to tingle, and she knew that if she looked into her little tortoiseshell mirror the pupils of her eyes would be dark and glistening. That was how it always was when she admired someone, and she had not seen anyone she admired for a long time. Her excitement was utter.

“Your eyes are like rhinestones,” Mr. Conroy said to her, but he believed it was the general gaiety that made her look like that. As for himself, he was thinking that, with the help of God, he would take her home, and on the way he would suggest that they have another sea breeze; out there, with the dark sea, the misty emptiness, and the Hill of Howth, with its rhododendrons about to burgeon, who knew? He did not think she would go the whole hog, but he felt she would yield to a kiss, and to kiss Miss Lawless was a lifelong dream. Miss Lawless and Nicola had caused him many a sleepless night. He had a pinup of each of them in his mind, constantly, these opposite girls—Nicola so dazzling, with her veils and her husky voice, Nicola so sophisticated, and Miss Lawless so shy and so awkward, with that big crop of hair and a bosom that swelled under her shabby clothes, the man’s dress scarf with the fringing, which she wore for glamour, and her always spouting snatches of poetry to layabouts and drunkards who had only the one interest in her. To kiss her would be the realization of a dream, and, as he thought, maybe a disappointment at that. He well knew that emotions often blur pleasure, especially for a man. He had been married, but had buried his wife some years before. It had not been a happy marriage, and he often thought that an excess of emotions was at the root of it. “Too much love,” he often said to those who sympathized with him on the untimely death.

Sinead, now quite tipsy, was becoming even more miffed with the Doctor for the way he concentrated so utterly on Miss Lawless, and so she piped up and asked him if he loved her.

“Never say soft things to a woman or it will be thrown back at you,” Dr. Fitz shouted. Young Mr. Gogarty had to agree. Mr. Gogarty had his own reason to be disenchanted with the opposite sex. There he was, a divorced man, quite well off, taking women to the theatre, giving them paté-de-foie gras picnics on luxury trains, taking them to Glyndebourne to hear opera, and all he got when he brought them home to their front doors at midnight was a peck.

“Jesus, there’s the queer one,” Dot the Florist said, and they all looked up and saw standing in the doorway a strange creature who looked around, gaped, appearing to be deaf, blind, and listless. The newcomer had cropped hair and was wearing a miniskirt and a big woollen sweater. It was clear she had just come through the open front door, and Mr. Gogarty remarked that it was shocking altogether that no member of the staff had impeded her.

All eyes were on this strange girl, some even supposing that maybe she was invited as part of the entertainment. Miss Lawless felt pity for her. There was something so trusting about her, so simple, as she looked around with her big gray sheeplike eyes, mesmerized by the crowd and the balloons and the orchestra and, now, the huge bowls of pink confection that waitresses were carrying about, along with plates of sugared biscuits that were shaped like thumbs and caramelized at the edges. Why not give her one, Miss Lawless thought.

“It’s a damn shame,” Dr. Fitz said, and castigated those outside who had let her in, because in his opinion she had put a kind of shadow on the room, as if she augured some trouble. Mr. Conroy said they shouldn’t worry unduly, because although the girl looked a bit odd she was no trouble at all; she often called at his hotel for a gaze, especially when any notables came to stay and the red carpet was out. She walked the city all day and half the night, but never begged and never said a brazen thing. He went on to say that it was a tragedy, really, because the girl had come from a good family, and that her aunt had been a certain Madame Georgette, who made corsets and had a shop in Dame Street. It seems that the girl had been orphaned and the Sisters of Charity had taken her in, but that her particular quirk was to keep walking, always walking, as if looking for something. This sent a shiver through Miss Lawless. The strange girl stared into the room intensely and then made as if to move forward to join the party. A waiter stopped her. He was joined by two waitresses, who spoke to her quietly. Then the waiter reached up and took down a big silver kidney-shaped balloon and handed it to her, and she clutched it in her arms as if it were a baby as she moved off.

Once again Dr. Fitz asked them to consider the pluck and individuality of Betty. He said that nobody would believe it, but that he could assure them that that very afternoon Betty had stood beside her errant husband after his horse won and had accepted the trophy with him. He then leaned across and said that he could tell them something that would shake them. She had not only accepted the trophy with her husband but had gone to the champagne bar with him to have a drink.

“You’re not serious,” Mr. Conroy said.

“God strike me dead. I saw them,” Dr. Fitz said, whereupon Sinead tackled him, said she had not known he had been to the races and asked him in an inflamed manner to account for himself. Then it was why hadn’t he taken her, why had he lied, why had he pretended to be doing his hospital rounds when in fact he was drinking and gallivanting. “I’m not putting up with this,” she said, her voice cracking.

“No one’s asking you to,” he said, but by his expression he was saying much else, such as do not humiliate me in front of these people and do not make a fool of yourself.

She was asking loudly if it was with Betty he went to the races, and now it was dawning on her that maybe Betty’s friendship with her was also to be questioned, was another part of the grand deceit. Suddenly, unable to contain herself, she rooted in her crocodile handbag and flourished the first love letter that he had ever written to her. It was on ruled paper and had been folded over many times. The color in his face was beetroot as he reached across and tried to grab the letter from her. They grappled for it, Sinead grasping the greater part of it as she rose and ran through the room crying.

“Ah, it’s the hors d’oeuvres that’s at her,” Bill the Barrow Boy said, meaning the nerves. But he was the one to get up and follow her, because he pitied her on account of the story she had told them about losing that baby. He caught up with her at the doorway and dragged her back onto the dance floor, where people were already dancing. Betty waltzed with the Meat Baron, her head lolling on his shoulder, and Dot the Florist feared that, after all, the Meat Baron might not be the one, that she might have to look elsewhere. Dr. Fitz, feeling that it was necessary to apologize somewhat to the people at the table, said that Sinead had a good heart, and that all the beggars in Grafton Street knew her and chased after her, but that she should never touch drink. To himself he was thinking that, yes, admittedly he had befriended her after her husband’s death, and it was true that he had fallen for that soft swaying bottom of hers and the plait of black shiny hair that she sucked on, but it was also true that she had changed and had got possessive, and now, as far as he was concerned, it was two evenings a week in bed and no questions asked.

All this time, Eileen Vaughan kept looking around the table wondering if at any moment someone would throw a word to her. None of them liked her, she knew that. Hard, hard was what they thought she was. Yet the day her world fell apart, the day she lost her last ounce of faith in her husband, what had she done? She had drawn the curtains in her bedroom, the mauve curtains that she had sewn herself; she had lain on the floor and cried out to her Maker, cursing not the errant husband but herself for being the sour, hard fossil of a woman that she was, for never throwing him a word of kindness, and for not being able to express an endearment except through gruffness. She had prayed with all her heart and soul for a seizure to finish her off, but she just grew thinner and thinner, and tighter and tighter, like a bottle brush.

At that very moment, Miss Lawless was picked up from her chair and swept away from her own group. One of the ladies who had picked her up told her that she was taking her to another table to meet an eligible bachelor. In fact, it was this new Abelard. He did not turn to greet Miss Lawless when she sat down, but she saw immediately that she was right about his eyes—they were a washed blue and they conveyed both coldness and hurt. His voice was very low and when he did turn to address her his manner was detached.

“I suppose you know my whole history,” he said, a little crisply. Miss Lawless lied and said that she did not, and, Dublin being Dublin, he disbelieved her but began anyway to tell her how he had lost his wife less than a year before, and while listening to the story and falling a little under his spell Miss Lawless was also wondering if he was not a cold fish indeed. Although there were shades of her first Abelard, he was a more ruthless man, and she could see that he would be at home in any gathering—had sufficient a smile and sufficient a tan and sufficient savoir-faire to belong anywhere. He recounted, with a candidness that made her shudder, the terrible accident and the celebrated funeral that he himself had arranged. It had happened over a year ago. It was winter, and his wife, who was always restless, had decided to go riding. There had been a heavy storm, and the fields were flooded and many boughs had fallen from the trees, but as soon as the storm lifted she had decided on this outing. He had rung her from his office and she had told him that she was about to set out with her friend. She went and, as he said, never came back. Mystery and conjecture naturally clouded the incident but, he was telling Miss Lawless, as far as he was concerned she and her friend had decided to ford a stream that normally would be shallow but owing to the storm had swelled to the proportions of a sea; that the horses had balked; that one of the riders, her companion, was thrown and his wife had jumped down to try and rescue her. In their heavy gear, both women had been carried away. The horses, meanwhile, crossed the stream and galloped hither and thither over watery fields into other parts of the county and were not traced until nightfall. He said that he knew about it before he was actually told; felt creepy while driving across the wooden bridge that led to his house, going into his house, and finding two of his children watching television with as yet no signs of emergency. Then darkness fell and the groom came into the hallway in a great state to say riderless horses had been seen. It was like a ghost story. He became animated as he described the funeral, the dignitaries that came, a song that a famous singer had composed and sang in the church, and then the fabulous party that he threw afterward. As he was telling her this, Miss Lawless was thinking two opposite things. She thought about how grief sometimes makes people practical and frenetic arrangements keep them from losing their grip; but she also thought that he had dwelt unduly on the party, the dignitaries, and the newly composed song. He told how he had not lost his composure—not once—and how at three in the morning he and a few close friends sat in the den and reminisced.

“Was she dark-haired?” Miss Lawless asked, unthinkingly.

“No. Fair, with freckles,” he said, summoning up a picture of a girl bright as a sunflower. He added that she liked the outdoors and was really a desert girl.

“And what do you feel about her now?” Miss Lawless asked.

“She was a good friend and a good lover,” he said quietly. It sent a chill through Miss Lawless, and yet his features were so fine, his manner so courteous, and his eyes so sensitive that she found a way within herself to excuse him. Leaning very close to her, he said that he liked talking to her and that perhaps if she was staying on in Dublin they might have a drink or a bite. That thrilled her. She believed his resemblance to the other Abelard to be significant and that, whatever happened between them, she would not be detached from it, she would not blot it out, she would hold it dear. She imagined going home with him and sitting in one of his rooms, which she deemed to be enormous, with gray, billowing curtains, like a gauze sea, and their talking quietly but ceaselessly. She wanted him to be human, to be seared by the tragic event. She wanted to peel off his mask; that is, if it was a mask. Now her imaginings were taking a liberty, and she thought that if they kissed, which they might, it would not be a treachery against his dead wife but somehow a remembrance of her, a consecration. She wanted to lie close to him and be aware of him dreaming. Foolish, really. It was the night—hectic, amorous, intoxicating night. She felt the better for it, felt better toward him, toward herself and all those people in the room. She was making her peace with the first Abelard now, because it was true that for these many years she had borne a grudge—angry with him for ignoring the significance of their affair, and with herself for allowing him to. What she thought now was not of the aftermath with that first Abelard but of the excitement and freshness when it was beginning—the shy, breathless feeling they each imparted when they met, realizing secretly that they were bewitched. She suddenly remembered little moments, such as having her hand in his overcoat pocket as they walked down a street, and looking up at the sky that was like navy nap, so soft and deep and dense was it.

Betty’s was the first speech, and it was very witty and plucky. Betty said that being “of a certain age” was not the worst time in a woman’s life, and then she made some light references to previous parties when she was not nearly so spoiled. Taking the cue from Betty, Dr. Fitz walked slowly to the dais and deliberated a bit before speaking. He said that while wanting to wish her well—indeed, wishing her well—he could not forget “the terrible day” when he had been lucky enough to be by her side. Several voices tried to hush him, but he went on, insisting that it was all part of the tapestry of Betty’s life, it proved Betty had guts, and that she could stand there tonight and knock the spots off all the other women in the room. People cheered, and Betty herself put two fingers between her teeth and let out a raunchy whistle. Another family friend recited a poem that he had written, which made several guests squirm. Miss Lawless felt uneasy, too. The speaker, however, seemed very proud of it and grew more and more emotional as he declaimed:

When I look down at the soil in our troubled land,

I see its forty shades of green

And say to myself, Why isn’t our fourth green field

As green as the other three?

A few began to heckle and say it was songs they had come for and not drip stuff. Abelard left the table, but by a signal—indeed, a colluding wink—he indicated to Miss Lawless that he would be back. She assumed that he was going to phone someone and thought that possibly he was canceling an arrangement. Even his absence from the table made her feel lonesome. He had that lit-up quality that gave off a glow even though his manner was cold. Mr. Conroy, seeing her unattended, rushed across the room and asked her if she had had any advances from the playboy. Shaking her head, she asked in turn what the man’s wife had been like. Mr. Conroy described a thinnish woman who drank a bit, and who always seemed to be shivering at parties and having to borrow a jacket from one of the men. Meanwhile, the last verse of the poem was being heard and people were listening with some modicum of courtesy because they knew it was near the end.

But when I look up into the vast azure sky

Irish politics and history recede from my mind,

And in their place the glory of the Creator comes flooding through,

And the sky and the stars give a promise of eternity.

Though the people were still cheering and letting out catcalls, they were also surging onto the floor to make sure that dancing would now continue, and to satisfy them the music was hotting up—in fact, it was deafening. This did not deter Mr. Conroy from telling his rival, who had returned, that he had known Miss Lawless for many years, that he had driven her to beauty spots all over Ireland, and had copied out for her the words of the ballads that were so dear to her heart. Then he embarked on a story about how, a few years before, he had taken her for tea to a renowned hotel in the west. He had gone in search of the proprietress, Tildy, whom he found in the basement, ironing pillow slips. He told her how he had a lady friend upstairs in the lounge and wondered if Tildy could spare a moment to come up and welcome her.

“Oh, Mr. Conroy, I’d love to but I haven’t a minute,” he reported the proprietress as saying, and added that he went away a bit crushed, but hadn’t mentioned it to Miss Lawless; and that later Tildy came up, in a sparkling blue gown, her glasses on a gold cord, and that she looked at Miss Lawless and said in a sort of sarcastic voice, “Who do we have here, who is it?” Miss Lawless could see that Abelard had no interest in the story but was polite enough to suffer it. She felt that each of them intended to take her home, and she wished that it would be Abelard. Yet she could not refuse Mr. Conroy; she had been invited by him. She hoped for some confusion, so that the threesome would be interrupted and Abelard might at least whisper something to her alone.

At that moment, the lights were quenched and the guests treated to a fresh surprise. Miniature trees with tiny lights as thin as buds dropped from the ceiling, so that the room took on the wonder of a forest. The tiny evergreens suggested sleigh rides, the air fresh and piercing with the fall of snow. Then four waiters ceremoniously carried in a gigantic cake. It was iced in pink and decorated with angels, and crenulations surrounding Betty’s name. They placed it in the center of the room, and Betty was led across to cut it, while two eager photographers rushed to capture the moment. The great clock in the hall outside struck midnight, but the pauses between the chimes seemed unnaturally long. Then the dog barked outside—a whole series of yelps, growing fiercer and fiercer, reaching a frothing crescendo, and then suddenly stopping as if overwhelmed. This dog, Tara, had never been known to be silenced by any but its master. If it were a stranger who was now entering, the dog, even on its fetters, would be ungovernable. It must be its master. Who else could it be? Such were the words that people spoke, whether by a look or by expressing them directly.

“It would be awfully inconvenient now if it was John,” Betty said very loudly, the knife still poised in the big cake, the icing beginning to shed from the impact of the blade. And yet everyone hoped that it was John, the wandering Odysseus returned home in search of his Penelope. You could feel the longing in the room, you could touch it—a hundred lantern slides ran through their minds; their longing united them, each rendered innocent by this moment of supreme suspense. It seemed that if the wishes of one were granted, then the wishes of others would be fulfilled in rapid succession.

It was like a spell. Miss Lawless felt it, too—felt prey to a surge of happiness, with Abelard watching her with his lowered eyes, his long fawn eyelashes soft and sleek as a camel’s. It was as if life were just beginning—tender, spectacular, all-embracing life—and she, like everyone, were jumping up to catch it. Catch it. ♦