Dublin 4 (5 page)

*   *   *

‘Sheila, can I have a quick word with you before you go into the school?’

‘God, you frightened the life out of me, Dermot Murray. I thought you were a guard.’

‘Look, have you a minute? Can we get back into your car?’

‘Half the Sixth years already think you’re propositioning me! What is it, Dermot? Tell me here.’

‘No, it’s nothing to tell. I want to ask you, ask you something.’

Sheila’s heart was leaden.

‘Ask on, but make it quick. That bell rings and I’m like a bolt from the blue in the door.’

‘Does Carmel know about Ruth?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You heard me.’

‘I didn’t. I did
not
hear you. Begin again.’

‘Does Carmel know about Ruth and me?’

‘Ruth? Ruth O’Donnell?’

‘Sheila, stop playing around. I know you know, you know I know you know. All I want to know is does Carmel know?’

‘You’re assuming a great many things. What is there to know? What should I have known? Stop standing there like a guessing game.’

‘Sheila, please, it’s important.’

‘It must be. Why else are you up here in a convent? I haven’t an idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Think, think quickly. I know you’re being a good friend and an old school chum. But think what’s for the best. I don’t just mean the best for me, I mean the best for everyone.’

‘What am I to think about?’

‘Look, I’ve known you for years, Sheila, I’m not a
shit, now am I? I’m a reasonable human being. Would I be up here at this hour of the morning if I was a real bum?’

Every day that Sheila had paused at her car for one moment to search for an exercise book, to write a shopping list, to listen to the last bars of some song on the radio … the bell had shrilled across her consciousness. Why did it not do it today?

‘I can’t help you, Dermot,’ she said. ‘I don’t know anything, I really don’t. I don’t talk about anything, I don’t listen to anything. I’m no help.’

He believed her. Not that she didn’t know about Ruth. He knew she knew about Ruth. But he believed her when she said she couldn’t help him. She didn’t know whether Carmel knew or not. She was as much in the dark as he was.

‘What am I going to do?’ he asked her.

And then the bell shrilled.

*   *   *

‘I just telephoned to ask you more about this party you’re giving,’ Ethel said.

‘I explained it all in the letter,’ said Carmel. ‘You will be able to come? You see I know how busy you all are so I trapped you by choosing the night of Ruth’s exhibition.’

‘Yes, of course we’ll come. You don’t have to trap us. Looking forward to it … I was wondering whether it was a surprise – a birthday surprise for
Dermot or anything. David met him in the club, and I hope he didn’t let anything slip.’

‘No, it’s not Dermot’s birthday. It may well be Ruth’s, I think hers is in October, but no, it doesn’t matter at all. I did tell Dermot I was thinking of having a party, but you know what men are, they never listen. Their minds are elsewhere. Probably just as well that we don’t know where they are half the time, don’t you think?’

Ethel had the uneasy feeling that Carmel was laughing at her. Nonsense, of course, but there was that kind of a feel about the way she spoke.

*   *   *

‘Oh, Dermot, I can’t tell you where she is. She said the whole point was that you and she were having a separation, wasn’t it?’

‘Look, I’ll go down on my knees to you.’

Dermot had never liked Ruth’s younger sister. A know-all, a moraliser and worst of all a contemporary of his daughter Anna’s when they were at UCD.

‘No, I swore I would reveal nothing. Ruth only told me just in case there was any real crisis, about the gallery, you know.’

‘There’s a very big crisis. I can’t tell you how big.’

‘Honestly, Dermot, be fair. Play it by the rules. Just leave her alone, can’t you? It’s only a couple of weeks.’

‘Listen here, smarty pants,’ Dermot had lost any veneer of manners by now. ‘Go into Ruth’s flat, where there will be a letter with a Dublin Four postmark addressed to her. Open it and read it. If you think then that it’s serious enough perhaps you could ring your sister and ask her to ring me. That’s all.’ He stood up to leave the travel agency where she worked.

‘Wait. It’s not some awful sordid thing … some scandal, is it?’ The girl’s lip wrinkled with disgust.

‘It’s only a dinner invitation, but she might want to ring me about it.’

He nearly took the door off the hinges as he left.

*   *   *

Dermot telephoned his office.

‘Oh there you are, Mr Murray,’ the girl on the switch said with relief. ‘It’s not like you to be late. I didn’t know what to do with your calls. We’ve had …’

‘I’m not feeling well today, Margaret. Kindly inform the manager, and ask Miss O’Neill to put someone else on the Foreign Exchange and move her own things to my desk.’

‘But Mr Murray …’

‘I’ll call back later, Margaret. The important thing is that Miss O’Neill sits at my desk. Put any calls for me through to her, she will know how to deal with them.’

‘When will you …?’

‘As I said, I’ll call back later, Margaret. The bank is not going to grind to a halt just because for once the manager isn’t well.’

He hung up and regretted it immediately. The child on the switch didn’t care whether the bank ground to a halt or not. Probably hoped it would if the truth was known. Why had he been so snappy, she was bound to gossip about it too. If only he had just taken thirty more seconds to be soothing and reassuring then it would have passed unnoticed in the minutiae of the day … poor Mr Murray’s not well, must have that bug, oh well, Miss O’Neill’s looking after his work … and that would be that. Now the girl on the switch would be full of indignation … bit my nose off, snapped at me over nothing, all I was doing was asking, what do I bloody care where he is, what he does, he can take a running jump at himself.

Why couldn’t he have had the patience to exchange just two more conventional remarks? He had been so patient, so very patient about everything so far. Why couldn’t he have kept his temper this morning? He frowned at his reflection in the car mirror when he got back into the driving seat. He didn’t like the middle-aged tense man that looked back at him. In his mind’s eye he didn’t see himself that way; in his mind’s eye he saw himself as Ruth’s man, her strong support, the one she ran to when she was exhausted with her work, when she was full of doubts. To the little girl on the switch back at the bank, he was
probably middle-aged Mr Murray, and if she knew about Ruth (which she might well in this village that they called a city) then she would think he was pathetic with his bit on the side, or a louse cheating on his wife.

Dermot didn’t feel like driving anywhere. He got out of the car again and walked until he reached the canal. It was a nice crisp morning. Other people were still in their cars choking with fumes. These must be big executives, the top men, if they could come in to work as late as ten to ten, or was that right? If they were top men maybe they should have been at their desks since seven-thirty? Maybe they were the kind of men who had inherited a family business and who didn’t have to work hard because they were the bosses’ sons. Funny how you saw different sides of society when you stepped off your own little treadmill for a bit.

Two women passed him on the canal path, bright laughing women in headscarfs. One was carrying a huge plastic bag and the other a large stuffed pillowcase; they were on their way to the launderette. They were the kind of women that Carmel would describe as nice poor things. And yet they weren’t nearly as poor as poor Carmel. They were carting their families’ washing off without a look of resentment about them. Carmel might be bending over the controls of a washing machine in her own kitchen but more likely she would just sit and stare
out into the back garden. He had looked at her in off-guard moments over the last few months and this was how she was when in repose. Her face was empty as if she had left it and gone somewhere else.

He had hoped she would find interests, but he realised more and more that this was a vain hope. She had no interests. She had nothing whatsoever that would lift her out of that sad pose. When Anna and James had had the first baby Dermot thought that this would absorb Carmel’s time, a grandchild out in Sandycove. He was certain she would be out there every second day, or encouraging Anna to leave the child in Donnybrook while she went about her business. But Dermot hadn’t understood about modern young mothers like Anna. Cilian first, and then Orla, had just become part of her own life as if they were adults. They were constantly being strapped and unstrapped into car seats. They moved with a battery of educational toys, they were quite self-sufficient wherever they went. Doting grandmothers did not come into the picture at all.

And then of course that strap Bernadette shacked up with that Frank; ‘my flat mate,’ no less, she called him. She hadn’t been much help or support for her mother, had she? Dermot muttered to himself about her. A lot of use it had been paying for her at the College of Art, quite happy to help friends out, to step in and sell things for someone who was stuck.

And friends? Carmel was a great one for talking about the Girls. Where were the girls now when they were needed? That Sheila, the schoolmistress rushing into the convent this morning as if her life depended on it. Great friend she’d be if anyone needed one; ‘I don’t talk, I don’t listen, I don’t know things …’ marvellous! And who else was there? There was Ethel … she and Carmel had got on quite well at one stage. But there as well as anywhere else Carmel hadn’t been able to cope. She had talked and talked about not returning David and Ethel’s hospitality, and not accepting any more of it. Why hadn’t she just said ‘Come around to supper,’ the way Ruth did, the way anyone did … anyone except Carmel.

It was fooling himself really to think she would be happier without him, fooling himself to say she wouldn’t really notice if he left. She would not be able to cope. She couldn’t even muster the politics of solidarity and hate, like that woman they had heard of in Ballsbridge, the wife of the man in the public relations agency. She had been so outraged when he left that she had aligned dozens of women on her side. You could hardly mention the man’s name now without hearing a sibilant hiss, so blackened had it become. No, Carmel would do nothing like that.

Dermot stopped suddenly. Carmel would do nothing. And that was why he could never leave her. She would do nothing at all. For the rest of his life he would come home, tell lies, make up excuses, invent
conferences, be telephoned by mythical clients who had to be seen after hours. And Ruth would do nothing. Ruth would not make a scene, demand that he choose between them, Ruth would confront nobody, insist on no showdowns. This had been the way things were for two whole years … everyone secure in the knowledge that nobody else would do anything; Ruth knowing she would never have to make her mind up about him fully, Carmel knowing that she would never lose him utterly and he knowing that he need never be forced to say ‘I’ll take this one’ or ‘I’ll take that.’

He laughed wryly to himself. It was most people’s idea of a married man’s dream: an unquestioning wife and an unquestioning mistress. But it was a bad dream, he could write a book on what a bad dream it was. You were happy in neither place, you were guilty in both places. The very fact that nobody was making any move made it all the more insoluble. If Carmel had threatened and pleaded, perhaps, if Ruth had issued ultimatums, perhaps.
Perhaps
it might have been better. But nothing ever happened. Until now. Until Ruth had been invited to dinner.

*   *   *

Carmel
must
know, he said to himself for the five hundredth time. She
must
know. And yet the memory of last night had been like a vivid movie running through over and over.

‘Tell me, why have you decided to ask Ruth O’Donnell whom we hardly know, whom you only met twice, to dinner? Carmel, what are you playing at?’

‘I’m not playing at anything except being a better homemaker. She’s nice. Everyone says so.’

‘But why? Tell me, what made you think of a dinner? Why a month away?’

‘To give me time to prepare to get ready. I’m not like all these marvellous women you admire so much who can have the entire golf game round for a six-course meal with no notice. I like to take my time.’

She had looked at him with a round innocent face. She had prattled on about Sheila having called in, about Anna and James driving off to the cottage, about how she wished she could get the Christmas presents months ahead in September when the shops were nice and empty.

Four times he asked her in a roundabout way, four times she had answered him with a level look. She just liked the idea of having people to dinner; why was he finding fault with it? And he never answered that question, not even with a lie.

*   *   *

They went to Mass at eleven o’clock in Donnybrook church and bought the papers outside.

‘Do you need anything from the shops?’ Dermot asked. ‘Ice cream? A pudding?’