19

There was a significant difference in the way I treated my two visitors. I had invited Alice to sleep in the house within twenty-four hours of making her acquaintance. O’Hallaran, on the other hand, never received such an offer. Nor, I think, would he have accepted.

Put simply, he seemed more suited to the outdoor life, and consequently I didn’t question him continuing to live in the tent, rather than in the house. It made sense. He had lived in his tent for thirty years, by his own account. Alice, by contrast, only ever claimed to have slept in her tent occasionally, on trips abroad or excursions or holidays. The rest of the time, she told me, she stayed at her mother’s place in Devon, or with a girlfriend in France, the daughter of Megan’s best friend, Zoë, whom Alice had met through my aunt.

If O’Hallaran had moved in, it would have felt like a crowd to me, accustomed as I was to having the whole house to myself, but the subject never actually arose, since O’Hallaran seemed happy with his nomadic lifestyle, and after sharing an evening meal with us, which he would frequently prepare himself – he was a competent if unadventurous cook – he would take his leave and retire to the tent.

And I continued in my struggle with insomnia, in the armchair in my library, or else stretched out on the sofa in the living room, where I would watch the DVDs from Megan’s collection – Blithe Spirit, The Red Shoes, The Man from Morocco. Sometimes Alice would join me, and we would snuggle up on the sofa together like brother and sister.

The fact that O’Hallaran was made to feel so welcome was largely Alice’s doing. As she had explained to me in the library, on the night of his arrival, she believed that O’Hallaran was bound to possess a better grasp of the tent’s idiosyncrasies than she herself did. If this were so, I asked her, a week after his arrival, following a late night viewing of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, what had she learned?

She seems puzzled by the question. Not offended exactly, but veering that way, put out by the directness of my question. Why did I want to know? For the same reason, I say, as I had wanted to know when he first arrived, namely, that I could not get my head around the fact that both of them appeared to be in possession of the tent, which was indubitably the same tent, and yet neither of them considered it strange that the other person claimed to own the tent.

But I never claimed to own the tent, says Alice. I said it was a gift from Megan, and that I had travelled with it, and that I slept in it. But did I say I owned it? I don’t think so.

You are being disingenuous, I say: you arrived at the house in possession of the tent, and O’Hallaran arrived in exactly the same way three days later. When we first met, you accused me, if I remember rightly, of coming into ‘your home’.

That may be so, she says. I was the temporary resident. But my arrival here was distinct in every way from O’Hallaran’s. His long term residency of the tent makes a crucial difference.

So what have you found out? I say, ignoring her evasions. After all, you spend enough time together in the greenhouse.

 Alice looks at me in a dark way.

Listen, she says. You’re making too much of this. You’re acting as though there were some kind of conspiracy. There is no conspiracy. I don’t understand how the tent works, and I don’t really think that O’Hallaran does either, even after all these years. It’s a mystery. But we … you, are always wanting rational explanations for everything. Why don’t we just go along with it instead? The tent brought you and me together, and now O’Hallaran has joined us. It’s not likely to be a permanent arrangement, if that’s what you’re worried about. O’Hallaran will be moving on. It’s what he does, it’s in his blood. And I will too, I am sure.

Something shifts within me again. I cannot bring myself to look her in the eye. You don’t have to, I say. Move on, I mean. You can stay if you want, for as long as you need.