Part Two

—1—

‘France!’ said the woman on the bus coming in from the airport. ‘Merciful Jesus, I was there once meself. I’ve never known a people with worse smelling breath than that lot. And the food they’d give ya! It wouldn’t be worth feedin’ to the dogs. Me husband and I had to stay three days there in Paris once. I thought we’d never get out of it—ugh!’

I smiled what I hoped was a supremely condescending smile. The woman didn’t even seem to notice. She just went on and on like that. Everything reduced to an irritation. You could hear her—Rome, Athens, Africa: Merciful Jesus! The sweat, the heat, the noise, the smell. Something. She began to irritate me. I hadn’t liked France that much either. But I’d never thought of saying so.

We’d left school. Before Valerie could come to Dublin, the local doctor had cast an eye on her; she gave him encouragement and in horror and haste her mother sent her off to Italy. She taught English to the children of a Count, slept with Italian writers and Hungarian refugees. She also learnt how to de-hair her legs with beeswax.

I sat at home. I got my exam results. They were neither brilliant nor disastrous.

Whenever my father noticed I was around he would say, ‘We must get you into the history faculty, Liz,’ and then go back to his study. He was writing an exhaustive history of the time of the Fir Bolg in Ireland.

I went into town and met school friends for coffee and we talked about boys and our bodies and clothes. I read books, intermittently and haphazardly. I made myself things to wear. Days passed by. Pleasantly or unpleasantly? I can’t really remember. Nobody had ever said things like, ‘Things only happen if you make them happen.’ So I suppose I was just waiting for something to happen to me.

At school our plan had been to be free. Free of our parents, free of petty restrictions. We hadn’t thought: To be free you have to have money, to have money you had to have a job. The nuns hadn’t told us that. I could chant Caesar’s battles; I could recite the ‘Ode to the West Wind’ without pause. That was all.

This Saturday afternoon in October a friend of my stepmother’s came to the house. She considered herself to be the Jolly type, going round her friends’ houses giving them loud, healthy advice on dropped wombs and apple jelly.

She settled herself into one of the armchairs with a cup of tea and a cigarette. You could always tell she’d been there by the cigarette butts ringed with lipstick she left crushed in the ashtray. Mary was on the edge of her chair. Anxious to appear jolly and healthy enough.

‘So, what is our Eliza doing these days?’ She looked at me, then Mary. I hated being called Eliza. For a minute I felt like pushing her damned stupid hat down over her eyes.

I said, ‘Oh nothing much.’

‘And plans for the future?’ she asked, beady. You must have plans for the future. Everyone has. Tomorrow for instance. Come along then. Brace up. That’s the sort of look she’d give you.

I said, ‘I’m going to the University.’ Usually that kept them quiet for a bit. ‘Very nice dear,’ they’d say and almost pat you on the head. This one said, ‘But Elizabeth darling, enrolments were closed a week ago.’

Panic. Clear your throat. ‘Ehm … well my father said …’

‘But I’m afraid your father is wrong, dear.’ (Dare you contradict him you silly old bag? But she was winning. Mary was almost falling off her chair in a concentration of concern.)

‘I know, Mary,’ said this awful woman. ‘Why not send her to France for six months? I’ve sent three of my girls there and they’ve all had a very good time. I know just the family who would take her on as an au pair.’ And so they arranged it. They might have been discussing the difficulties of bringing up pedigree dogs—this kennel, or that, now which do you think?

Four weeks later I was heading for Paris in a camel-hair coat, clutching a barn brack (a present for Madame and Monsieur). Coming down the steps off the aeroplane I chucked the brack over the side. A little, dark, French mechanic caught up with me just at the customs gate, the battered cake in his oily hands: ‘C’est a vous Mademoiselle?’—all smiles and delighted with himself. I stuffed it in the bin in the ladies’ lav.

Paris, I thought, was the most awful place in the world. After two weeks I made friends with another Irish girl, also an au pair. We used to meet in the Avenue Royale and fill ourselves up with French bread, sandwiches and water—the coffee was too expensive. Anyway, this girl said, it makes you sterile, barren.

At the beginning I remember just being hungry most of the time. Madame ate very little because of her figure and Monsieur ate lunch at a café near his work and just snacked on salami or cheese in the evening. I used to pray for the children to not finish their food, and then gobble it while Madame wasn’t looking.

At night I’d lie awake and think of roast beef and gravy and potatoes and two veg, and compose letters of my tortures to my father. I never actually wrote them.

The Dumonts, the couple for whom I worked, were a young middle-class couple with two children, a flat in Montparnasse, and a fixed income. M. Dumont was a dentist. He left the flat at 7.00 a.m. and returned at 7.30 p.m. Madame was a housewife. She kept their flat chic and bijou like their friends’ flats, and amused her lovers.

While I took the baby Dumont, Pierre, for what were supposed to be long walks in the park, but were in fact trips to the cafés in the Avenue Royale, and while M. Dumont was being un bon dentiste, Madame Dumont was rolling round her marital bed with one of her lovers. Alternatively they rolled on the living room floor on a blonde rug, which her husband had brought her from somewhere exotic.

I came home early from our walk one day. Baby Pierre had a bloody nose, having careered, pushchair and all, into a lamppost. There were Madame and her current lover on the floor; there was I with Pierre bawling in his pushchair. I stood looking foolishly down at them, and they looked up at me: Madame straight, the lover over his shoulder. Then Madame made a marvellous French ‘pprT sound and they gathered their bodies up like puppets and took them into the bedroom.

I was horrified. Fascinated. Amazed.

Madame became very sweet to me. She stopped shouting at me in great torrents of French. She couldn’t do enough for Leetle Irish. She gave me her clothes that she was bored with, silk scarves and beautifully tailored tweed skirts. She said I must have my hair bobbed so I would look like a French mam’selle. My ears felt naked and cold afterwards. She said, I looked almost chic. ‘Presque.’

Madame always looked chic. It was an art, she said, a timeless art of French women. I had never met anyone so totally materialistic; she was sophisticated sin incarnate. I tried to copy her.

Monsieur was very gentle towards her, particularly when they had friends in. They would dress up, Madame like a radiant peacock; they would touch each other’s hands across the table, and click their eyes together. Their friends, who also had lovers, said the Dumonts were a beautiful couple, so in love.

Madame never imparted any other knowledge or experience of l’amour to me. I was too shy to ask. Was it age difference, or just jealousy? That glint in a woman’s eye when men are around—like with my boy.

The boy was blonde. He was the same height as me and had green eyes. It was the combination of blonde and green that made you look at him. He looked back with those quite unblinking green eyes.

We started having coffees together. My evening off we had more coffees together. He said his father was a film director; he made underground films. (Underground? Underground where? How? He laughed at you then till his green eyes went into hard slits like a cat’s.) He said he was a writer: he wrote poems and was also writing a novel. A novel about the philosophy of humanism and the atomic bomb.

He wrote you a poem. Your French wasn’t quite good enough. You took it home to the flat. You and M. Dumont carefully translated it. A vicarious pleasure—such a thing to say to a little girl! Madame gave you a funny look. Monsieur said, ‘You must meet some of our younger friends. We will have a party.’

You thought: Things are definitely looking up; I have a boyfriend and now we’re going to have a party.

The blonde boy and Helen, an Irish girl, came to the party. The blonde boy was called Henri. He wore blue jeans and a black polo-neck sweater. He had a habit of holding his head on one side when he was listening to someone.

He was listening to Madame Dumont. You could see the light and shade on the bones of her back; her smooth, brown, French back. Her little black dress with its deep V showed off her back so nicely—the light and shade on it.

What was she saying? He was laughing. He laughed so seldomly. Talked so little. A real listener. You’d thought it was just to you. Madame was gesticulating. Now he was saying something. Madame was laughing. She touched his cheek lightly with her hand, gently, protectively.

Monsieur was talking to a slim girl with long hair, like a madonna. I felt frantic. Everyone cheating everyone else. Smiling, glinting, touching each other up, preparing ... it’s horrible. A teacher from the Sorbonne, where I went to improve my awful schoolgirl French, was saying something about Victor Hugo and bath plugs and on and on and on.

Madame came over to her husband—must keep an eye on him, a little bit for you, a little bit for me, and then we’re happy, quits, right?

She was leading Henri by the hand. ‘But your friend is so charming, Elizabeth,’ she said to me, looking at him. Too charming. You longed for the roof of the sky to fall in and the whole circus to be over. No more talking, no more laughing, no more knives.

Henri found you outside the door sitting on the stairway. He lit you both up cigarettes, and you sipped brandy from his glass. You were bright. He said, ‘Oh but that Madame of yours is a coquette.’ You were brighter. You could see his eyes, liquid, in the darkness.

Music was coming from the room now. He said, ‘Where is your bedroom?’ You told him. He got up and took your hand. ‘Let’s go.’ You were surprised, but you went. You were terrified Madame would come in and find you: ‘Qu’est-ce qui passe …?’ You were on the bed, your mouths sucking each other. He was kissing you all over and his hands were pushing your breasts and one minute he got a bit rough because you seemed to pull away. He was quite quick.

Afterwards you lay very quietly. You looked at his blonde head on your shoulder.

After a bit you said, ‘Does that mean I’m not a virgin any more?’ He jumped up and said, ‘What? What?’—frightened-sounding, and angry. ‘What do you mean? What is this you are saying?’ He reached out for a cigarette and you had one too and you wanted him to lie down again. You told him then about Valerie and how she had shown you how to break the seal on ‘our honeypots’, as she said. It was so you wouldn’t be embarrassed by it later. He laughed then and he looked like a little boy with his fair hair and his clear eyes and together you finished his brandy and he said, ‘Now you must sleep.’

When I woke up he was gone. The bed was crumpled. A sad bed. A used bed. I made it up. That was the last time I saw him. Afterwards he had made love with Madame, and what’s more, she told me.

Paris became doubly lonely after that. A big draughty city. Everyone shouting. I spent two precious francs on a guide to the Louvre. I didn’t get further than the hallway. I thought, If I had a dog even, let alone a man, a boyfriend, just something to come round with me, then it wouldn’t be so bad. I walked with Pierre in his pushcart from the flat, to the park, to the café, and back. I thought, at least people can’t laugh at me; I look as if I’m doing something.

Helen and I went a few times to these ‘multinational discotheques’. All the boys seemed to assume that all au pairs were whores; we assumed they were all sex maniacs. They were strained evenings, sitting in the discotheques with the multinationals, burping over Coca-Cola. One came home feeling dissatisfied and exhausted.

I tried to feel guilty. ‘I’ve committed a mortal sin,’ I’d say to myself. ‘If I die I’ll go to hell for ever, and ever.’ I went along to Notre Dame in my soberest clothes. I knelt in the most uncomfortable place I could find. I went to confession. I had to shout out my sin because the priest was old and deaf and my French wasn’t so good. My voice must have ricocheted round the domed walls: ‘J’ai avais faire I’amour avec un mauvais garçon.’ The priest kept saying, ‘Comment?’ in this wheezy, cranky voice. Finally, he said to say three Hail Marys and be more careful in future. I never knew whether he understood or not. Would I go to another priest? Helen said, ‘Stop being such a guilty Catholic.’

I didn’t realize I had stopped being a Catholic until a woman with painted red nails and black hair asked me if I was a ‘proper’ Catholic still. This was at one of the Dumonts’ parties. In France, she said, everyone was a Catholic in name but none of them went to church or believed in sins or any of that. I said, ‘Yes,’ then, ‘No,’ then said, ‘Well no, I suppose I’m not really.’ The lady shrieked with laughter and went off to tell about the Irish girl who couldn’t make up her mind whether she was a Catholic or not.

I got up very early one Sunday and took Pierre and the other child to Mass. The whole church seemed vast and cold, with the priest and a few old people attending—tiny, dusty figures acting out a forgotten ritual. I went home feeling reduced, smaller somehow. Something that had taken up so much time and emotion had gone quite dead.

I wrote a letter to a priest at home. I said, ‘I’ve lost The Faith.’ He wrote back a long and impassioned letter about the pagan French, how sophistication was an evil thing, and that I was to come home soon to Ireland and bathe my soul in the pure waters of Irish Catholicism and bask in the faith of my fathers. There were pages of it.

No thunderbolts came from the sky. I didn’t even dream about it. I felt slightly embarrassed when, a year later, a spotty and earnest lecturer at the University, a visitor from Oxford, asked me to delineate the theological traumas I had been through upon giving up my religion. He kept on about it, thinking my reply of ‘None’ was Irish modesty.

A visit from the priest, and a letter from me, happened upon my parents’ doorstep the same day. The priest said he thought I should be brought home. I said I wanted to come home. The priest said I was having religious difficulties. I said Madame Dumont had a lover. Mary sent me an air ticket by return of post. Madame followed me round whining for the last week. I never had the nerve to slap her face. I just thought: Keep calm, it will soon be over.

—2—

I came back from Paris able to speak French slightly better than when I left; no longer a virgin, no longer a Catholic.

Mary kept saying, ‘Oh dear, it must have been terrible for you.’ She was referring to Madame being a loose woman. I said, ‘Yes, it was terrible.’ My father said, ‘Well now, it’s nice to have you back.’ That was at dinner the first night home. I was a stranger, sitting down eating roast chicken and potatoes and carrots with these two other strangers. They never asked me about Paris or Madame after that. Just a few questions the first night: Did you go sight-seeing much? What did you do in the evenings? Is butter really fifteen shillings a pound in Paris? Then we didn’t talk about it any more.

A few days later the priest called round. Mary left us alone in the dining room. We sat on the stiff dining chairs; he laid his hands and arms awkwardly on the table like legs of lamb.

‘Well now my dear child, tell me about it.’ His head was slightly lowered, almost as if he were in the confessional. I felt an urge to splay it all out before him: me, Henri, Madame, her husband, my loneliness, my confusion, and the hurt, because somebody must explain the stupid brutality of that boy, of life.

I said, ‘I just don’t believe any longer, Father.’ The rest I kept to myself. You mustn’t frighten people, mustn’t upset them. All the priest wanted to know is why you no longer wanted to go to church. You must tell him. Simple things. Rituals.

The priest said, ‘Elizabeth—you don’t mind if I call you Elizabeth?—we all of us go through great periods of doubt. Even the Pope himself has to wrestle with the Devil.’ He said, ‘We must be patient. God will return to us. God is testing us.’ I’d heard it all before. I kept quiet. It will be over sooner that way.

What if you said, ‘I loved someone, Father. I wanted to touch him. We touched each other and loved. Everyone needs that, Father. But then he left … he didn’t even say goodbye’? You were beginning to sound like a cliché. The songs, the pop songs that almost made you cry: I’m just a lonely girl, lonely and blue.

But I said nothing to the priest. Just ‘Yes Father’ and ‘No Father’ and ‘Certainly Father’. He said I must come to confession and then receive Holy Communion. I started at that. Communion! And me with a mortal sin. I forgotten I’d given up believing. Even still.

Mary was solicitous. I felt vaguely important—a mortal sinner at eighteen. I went to Mass with her and she watched me through her hands. I cried once during High Mass because the sound of the organ was like someone in pain and I was feeling wobbly because I had my period. I thought, Soon I’ll tell them all that I’ve stopped believing; meantime it’s better to be kind and just tag along.

The priest came round every so often with books on saints’ lives, and then even some modern books about people who looked after drunks and layabouts and wiped up their sick and never shouted at them. The priest said, ‘There are a million ways to serve God.’ I thought of Madame saying, ‘There are a million ways of making love.’ I thought: Millions and millions of ways and how is it I can’t see one?

Mary said, ‘Something will turn up, not to worry,’ and took me round to her friends’ houses for coffee. The coffee seemed awful after Paris. Mary said, ‘Oh mind out now with your high falutin’ ways.’ That was the last I said about coffee.

Mary’s friends asked politely about France and one of them had once been to the Mediterranean and she showed us colour photos of her holiday. The photos had gone liver-coloured with age.

When they’d asked a few questions about Paris they started talking about their babies, or their insides (did every woman over the age of thirty-five have something wrong with her womb?) and then their husbands. They talked about their husbands’ appetites or how difficult it was to get them to change their socks. They never said things like, ‘He thinks capitalism a terrible thing,’ or, ‘He’s very excited by the space race to the moon.’ The French women used to do that; Madame and her friends would swap their husband’s heads. These women swapped their feet, or their indigestion.

Valerie came back from Italy. She rang up one evening. I sat in my coat, cigarette in hand, and her voice was coming down the line, small and funny. She said, ‘I’ve loads to tell you.’ Then we couldn’t think of anything to say so we said we’d meet for lunch the next day. Valerie suggested lunch—it sounded very sophisticated. Before it’d been just for coffees.

We had lunch in this café where all the au pairs that come to Dublin eat. I pitied them for a bit, remembering what it had been like, but as soon as you no longer feel the pain of it yourself you almost think other people are stupid to complain.

Valerie had had her hair dyed blonde in Italy and then gone skiing and the sun had turned it bright orange. She looked like one of those dolls—their hair green, or any sort of colour. She’d put on weight but it suited her; her hips filled up her skirt and they didn’t look frumpish or flabby, they just looked like big wide hips. She wore a tan sweater with a scooped neck and a string of beads: plastic, she said, but they looked like amber. She tossed her head. Men looked at her. You could see her laughing right into their faces.

She talked about the men she’d been to bed with. The little one with the habit of pulling his nose, who turned out to be married with five children and a wife in Sicily. The wife had come, flaming with anger, to collect him. The tall aesthetic one who talked about love and politics and played ‘The Red Flag’ at six in the morning and the concierge came running out into the courtyard, shouting. There was the passionate one who was once taken to hospital stuck stiff to the woman he was making love to because her husband had come in halfway through and she’d clammed up with the shock of it.

I wondered why she left—all those men, why come back to Ireland? She was quick to see I was becoming skeptical. ‘Tell me about yourself. What was Gay Paree like then? Go on, tell it all.’

All. I told about Henri. I told about our making love. I didn’t tell about his creeping off to Madame’s bedroom. I said, I crept off to Monsieur’s bedroom. I said Monsieur and I had a passionate affair. I had Monsieur and I leaping at each other like mad beasts whenever Madame’s back was turned.

Valerie said, ‘Jaysus, I know. Once you get a taste for it you can’t stop.’ I almost laughed then but choked into the coffee cup, ‘Mmm.’

It was a taste for loneliness, but a new kind of taste. Not the loneliness of being home, being ten or twelve or fifteen. That was quiet and formal and stretched, how the sea on a dull day stretches to the horizon, stiff and flat. Not even the loneliness of school, of lying in your bed, of wondering when would life start with all the love and roses and linked arms. No, quite a new taste. Of being taken and held and touched. Of being left. Forbidden tastes—like Eve in the Garden of Eden. A beautiful, beautiful fruit. She tastes it. Aha! Down they come on her. Out you go my dear, this minute, the wilderness awaits you ...

Valerie had a job in a boutique just down the road. She said to come down with her and have a look around. The boutique was run by this girl with very straight black hair and clear skin. She wore a long dress, a sort of elongated t-shirt. You could see her hipbones under the dress. Valerie introduced us and the girl gave a quick up-down look. Too tall? Or short? Or fat? Or thin? She had her dresses to sell and the bodies had to fit them. Not, as you might think, the other way around.

This girl must have been only three or four years older than us. Yet, she was hard—her face was a mask, a beautiful, made-up, polished mask, but the mask had also become her face. She said, ‘Make us a cup of coffee, Val, before we re-open.’ Valerie was in awe of her, you could see that. She lit up a cigarette and then walked over to one of these tree-type hat stands where the clothes were hanging on big red and purple hangers. ‘Try this on,’ she said to me. She handed me a long red dress, the back criss-cross tied like tennis shoes or a German sausage.

I went into one of these changing cubicles. My head stuck out over the top. My hands were sticky. I was sure I’d mark the dress, ruin it. I came out. The girl came over and stood me in front of a mirror. This way, that way, pulling, fluffing my hair out, smoothing the dress over my behind, tucking it up under my bosoms. Unembarrassed, I could have been a dressmaker’s dummy, the way this girl touched me, unashamedly.

She stood back. ‘Have you ever tried modelling?’

‘No,’ I said, giggling. Me, a model?

‘You should,’ she said. She didn’t notice the giggle. ‘You’ve got a good figure; with a bit of training I think you’d make a very good model. Off and on we need someone to model our stuff—we have sort of fashion show happenings in the street to advertise our wares.’

I looked at myself in the mirror. A white face, black hair. Green eyes. ‘A real colleen,’ one of the teachers at school had said, and had made me Caitlin Ni Houlihan in her history play.

The coffee was ready. I took the dress off. The girl was rearranging things in the window. She’d forgotten? Valerie and I drank our coffee. Valerie grinning—she’d introduced me, she was part of it.

I said I must go. The girl said, ‘Bye now.’ Obviously she’d forgotten. She was pinning back a jersey dress on a plaster model in the tiny window.

I didn’t get home till late that afternoon. My father said he wanted to talk to me in his study. When I was small I used to go and sit in his study. He had a big oaken desk and I used to climb under the arch where your knees were supposed to go and sit there while he worked. I can still hear his pen squeaking across the paper over my head. That was before he remarried. By then I was too big to sit in there anyway.

‘Elizabeth, my dear child’ he started. It was going to be serious. Elizabeth, my dear child. He said, ‘Your stepmother and I are worried about you. Spending so much time in your room, or mooning about the house. It’s not good, you know, at your age.’ One hand was resting on his desk, on top of a manuscript. Mary must have said, ‘I think you should talk to Elizabeth.’ He’d never have thought of it himself.

I took a cigarette out of my bag and lit it. He looked surprised. He knew so little about me really. I’d been smoking for four weeks, ever since I came back from Paris. He hadn’t noticed.

He looked at his desk and then at me. What had Mary said to him? He said, ‘I think you should get a job really. Just to get you out of the house a bit. I’ve been talking to some people at the College.’

So they’d arranged it already. I felt bitter, and then I didn’t mind. Why not? Perhaps a job would be better than hanging around here. College? I might meet some people, make friends.

‘You should be getting around a bit, making friends, meeting people. You’re only young once.’ He made eighteen sound like a heart condition. He said, ‘We could set off together in the mornings—like proper workers.’ That was the bargain then. The two of you.

‘What sort of job might I do?’ I liked the thought of us setting off together in the mornings in his little grey Fiat.

The people at the College said I could have a job as a filing clerk in the library. My pay would be five pounds, ten shillings a week and I could eat lunch in the college canteen.

The library was run by a woman called Miss Gore-Browne. ‘Browne with an E’ she’d say whenever she spelled her name for anyone. She wore long tweed skirts and her bosom sagged inside heavy cardigans. Mary said she was ‘aristocracy come down in the world’. She had BO and her bedsitter in Sandymount was filled with heavy dark furniture—all she could save from the auction of her family’s country seat in Sligo. Miss Gore-Browne knew every book in the library. The students would think up really obscure volumes to ask her about and she’d be striding across the library and picking it out, whistling a zzz through her teeth.

I hated the students. It was like a club, their College. They’d smell an outsider by instinct. The students with their easygoing ways and their long hair and their freedom—they’d cut you dead as quick as look at you if you weren’t one yourself. Walking across the quadrangle became a torture; I was always waiting to slip on the cobblestones, or for my knickers to fall down, or something. The students would be there, waiting. I sat in the office next door to the library and kept the index up to date and licked envelopes and made tea and sometimes read books that came in.

I only ate in the canteen once. I sat by myself at a table and ate off a tin tray. Irish stew, jelly and cream, coffee and a cake. We’d all gone shuff-shuffling up the line, picking out things from under glass covers, like well-trained animals: pick, pick. Some of the girls just had crackers and cheese and milk, others went overboard and grasped things and pushed their way to the tables to sit down and you could almost see their faces flat into the dish, gobbling.

Girls always seemed to be like that, either picking or stuffing.

I thought the meal would never be over. The canteen was very hot and the students were all shouting at each other across tables and banging their trays down. I felt the weight of my hand lifting the food up and my mouth opening and closing on it. The noise of chewing it and then swallowing it in lumps. I went through every piece. Getting up and walking out was going to be the hardest part. I knocked my bag against this boy’s head as I was leaving—’Look out will you,’ he said, turning, and I ran up the stairs and out of the College and down to the river and thought, I’ll never go back there, never.

After that I went down to the river every lunchtime. I’d lean over the parapet and always expect to see something horrible floating just below the surface. The river was like a murderer.

I thought I was very tragic. I thought if somebody tall and handsome and brave came up to me I’d tell him how sad I was. I’d tell them about Jack Hickey and about Henri, the blonde boy. I’d be mysterious. I’d say, ‘It all began with my father you know...’

I’d go for walks and look at men and women together. I’d think some of those women were so damn ugly, and how did they do it? All of them with men linking their arms.

A boyfriend. Somebody to go to the pictures with. Somebody to walk through College with and show those students. Somebody to say you’re this or you’re that. Somebody to hold you.

How to go about it? Stand on the Metal Bridge with a sign round your neck: Please I need a friend? Pass a note to one of the students saying that you’d sleep with him? How do you get a boyfriend?

—3—

My father’s study at the College looked out on the old Irish houses of Parliament and down a wide street with four lanes of traffic and tall buildings on either side. Sometimes the buildings could be friendly, showing you their gothic tops or ornate, balconied attics. Other times they would threaten to crush you down flat.

I used to sit in the study if I was early back from my lunch hour walk. If he was there we’d make coffee with the electric kettle Mary had given him, he’d read The Irish Times and I might just look out the window, or read a magazine that I’d bought at the bookstand across the road.

It was a Friday. I’d got paid before lunch. The brown envelope was in my coat pocket. I’d bought one pound’s worth of magazines. Mary would say I was crazy. I would say, ‘What’s the point of earning money if you can’t spend it on the things you like?’ She’d say, ‘Some people have no consideration.’

I was looking at this magazine. There was a photo of a group of American teenagers who’d gone into the Himalayas to pray and meditate with an Indian guru. They were all staring straight out of the picture. You’d think people who were praying and fasting would be very disinterested in their physical appearance, but not these Americans. You could see the strain on the girls’ faces and their very washed and brushed hair with maybe a flower pinned at one side. The men held their faces very carefully too, looking out. Mary would say, ‘Oh those hippies, they’re disgusting.’ But it wasn’t that. They were so frightened, so strained, just like girls at a party or dance, terrified not to look acceptable.

There was a knock on the door. I said, ‘Come in,’ and the door swung open and there was a man with thick curly black hair and a red scarf round his neck, carrying a sheaf of files and papers. Not a student? A lecturer?

‘Hello,’ he said, and swung the door to behind him. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you but I’ve come looking for the Prof who knows all about these Fir Bolg men.’

I said, ‘Professor O’Sullivan will be back at 2.30 p.m.’ I was sitting at my father’s desk. I put my arms over the magazine so this man wouldn’t see it.

‘His secretary, are you?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said, ‘his daughter.’ That should quiet him down, I thought.

‘Aha,’ and he sat down on the sofa where Father’s manuscripts and students’ essays were piled up. He started looking through them. I thought: The cheek.

‘Instead of sitting in this stuffy little office why not come out for a drink with me while we wait for your father?’ he said. ‘My name’s Colin.’ And he gave me a broad smile as if I wouldn’t, obviously, refuse. I didn’t refuse.

We walked across the quadrangle. I felt sorry for the poor girls on their own.

Colin walked very fast. He linked my arm crossing the road. He was one of those people who made everything a we-together situation very quickly if he liked you.

The pub we went into had these paintings of hunting scenes all round the walls. The paintings were in pastel colours with pale horses, pale horsemen, and a sick-looking fox with a huge tail and huge eyes. The bar stools and chairs were covered in chintz. The bar was full of people, mostly men, shouting at one another, standing less than a foot away from each other’s faces and shouting.

I said I’d have a gin and tonic. Colin said, ‘Go on, be a devil, have something more exotic.’ I said, ‘Okay, Benedictine.’ It was all I could think of. Mary had been given a bottle for Christmas and kept it in the sideboard.

Colin said he was a television producer. He was working on a series of historical programmes—that’s why he wanted to see the Professor, my father. He was The Expert on the Fir Bolg.

He said television work was quite fun but got boring like any other job. I was half listening. I was thinking: I’ll become his girlfriend and become famous on television.

‘And what do you do, sad eyes?’ he said.

I flicked my eyes (were they sad eyes?) and said, ‘I’m working in the library—but just as a filler-in.’

‘A filler-in for what?’ he said.

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘Before taking First Arts next year. I’ve just come back from Paris, so I can’t enrol till September.’ An inspiration, that one.

‘A proper little blue stocking?’ he said and was grinning and I felt myself suddenly a bit colder inside. But then we had three more drinks and he walked me back to the library and I felt like dancing across the quadrangle and the cobblestones were like springs to my feet and anything, anything was possible. At about four o’clock I had five cups of tea and then I went home. I told Miss Gore-Browne I was feeling sick—my first hangover.

After that he came and collected me for lunch one day and I was only wishing the students could see me getting into his little sports car. We went to this dark restaurant. Dark restaurants seemed the nicest places in the world in the middle of bright winter days. I could have stayed forever with the warm feeling from the wine and the darkness and the waiters like moths, hovering.

We went to the theatre and he kissed me and said I was his favourite lady. A favourite among how many? I thought, but didn’t say anything, and jumped on the thought and buried it. We had dinner after the theatre and he listened and it was almost like God listening: ‘Tell me exactly what the problem is, and we’ll solve it.’

He drove home and the city was quiet and the roads opened up like long carpets of moonlight for us. We kissed in the car outside the house and I was kissing him and kissing him, and then he pulled back a little and he pinched my nose between his thumb and finger and said, ‘It will all come to you soon enough, one day.’ I wanted to say ‘Take me and keep me and let me live with you and in you and …’ On the front steps he gave me a formal kiss on the cheek and said, ‘We mustn’t keep the Professor’s daughter out too late, must we?’ and then he was jumping down the steps and gone.

I went in and made myself a cup of tea and sat for a while in the kitchen and thought if I were with him, with him all the time I wouldn’t have to worry any more about not doing anything. I would just be.

One night he came to dinner to talk to Father about the Fir Bolgs. He’d sketched out a script and Father was checking it. He arrived very sober and in a dark suit with pinstripes—a gangster’s suit from Chicago. He had a wide, salmon-pink tie. He called Father ‘Sir’.

I’d spent the whole day changing the furniture round in the house. I was pinning up an Aubrey Beardsley poster in the hallway and Mary said, ‘Take that down at once,’ and I burst into tears and said she was an old witch.

The zip got stuck in my favourite dress and I got red in the face and got a whiff of sweat smell from under my arm and rushed back into the bathroom and lashed talc under my arms and cursed Mary for not allowing me to have deodorant. She said it gave people cancer.

I put on some eye make-up. Some brown stick and some mascara. Some of Mary’s powder on my nose and chin. Some scent —a drop behind each knee, a drop behind each ear, a drop between the breasts. Those, said the magazine, are the erogenous zones—the places for perfume.

During dinner I said, the words bumping out, ‘One of the distinctive physical characteristics of the Fir Bolg was their Mediterranean features. Dark, flashing eyes.’ Father looked over and said, ‘Well now, I didn’t know you knew anything about the Fir Bolg, Lizzie.’ I blushed hot, even in my eyes, and said, ‘Oh, a teacher told us that at school.’ I’d read it that afternoon in one of Father’s books.

When he was going I stood between my parents at the door. Colin shook hands with each of us. I wanted to run down the path after him, hug him. He turned and gave a wave at the gate.

‘Interesting young man,’ my father said. I looked at him. It was the first time I thought his judgement imperfect.

—4—

I was waiting for the phone to ring. I kept picking it up to listen to the purring sound to make sure it was working. I rang the operator. In a crackly voice—could he ring me as I thought maybe our phone was out of order? I put the phone down. It rang.

‘Operator here, Miss, your phone seems bang on.’ I put the phone down. Got up and lit a cigarette. Mary came through the hall. ‘Aren’t you getting cold sitting there?’ A pause, then, ‘Try not to smoke so many cigarettes, Elizabeth, it makes you look so old.’ Old is it? I thought, I’m as old as the caves in Kerry. I’m as old as pain.

The phone rang. I ran and picked it up, heart beating, thudding. It was the operator. ‘Suppose you wouldn’t like to come out for a pint some night, darling?’ he said, his voice honeyed. ‘Oh God,’ I said and slammed down the phone.

Why doesn’t he ring? Oh why, why, why?

Why don’t I ring him? What would I say? ‘Hello Colin, it’s me, Lizzie, you remember me? How are things? I just thought I’d ring you and see how you were, you know.’

You know. I couldn’t ring him. Why? You just can’t. Girls wait to be rung. Unless they’re whores or something. Those are the rules. If he wanted to see you he’d ring. If he didn’t, he didn’t. Maybe he was sick. Lying alone in his flat, quietly dying. I didn’t even know where he lived. Maybe a stench was coming from under his doorway. Milk bottles and papers piled outside. Maybe he’d be found, bloated and green, like that dead seal we once found washed up by the sea.

I’d just ring him and see if he was all right. I didn’t know his number. I’d get it from the switchboard girl at the television station.

I got the number. I said I was a concerned friend, just back from Paris. The girl said, ‘We’re not supposed to, you know.’ I said, ‘I know, but it is rather urgent.’

I rang. His voice answered. He didn’t sound dying. He sounded fine. I listened to him for a bit saying, ‘Hello, Hello,’ then more angrily, ‘Look, who is this?’ Then I put the phone down.

I went up to the bathroom. My hands were trembling. My mouth tasted awful with the cigarettes. I looked at myself in the mirror. I made faces—faces like we used to make at school. ‘You’re horrible, horrible, I hate you, you’re a fool, a flea-bitten eejit …’

I watched the tears popping out and coming down and then this girl’s face awash in the mirror, swishing and crumpling.

I thought to my face in the mirror, What’s wrong with me? Do I smell? Have bad breath? Am I so uninteresting? So awful?

I thought of Colin in the car. ‘We mustn’t keep the Professor’s daughter out too late.’ I thought, It’s this damn house. Nobody would want to come here; it’s like a morgue. Father locked in his study with his bloody books, Mary and her bloody friends. I thought, I’ll get a flat. I’ll go and live on my own in a flat. That should be better.

—5—

‘Love,’ said the carrot-haired student lying across my bed, ‘Love is a compromised battleground. The young hurtle about on it clashing their fine, strong weapons and shouting war cries at each other. Only the old come slowly, carrion-picking over the fields, proclaiming vanished victories.’

‘Aha,’ I said.

‘So what about truth then?’ I said. First Love, then Truth.

‘Truth,’ said this student, ‘truth is all the grey bits in between the things we hate and love most. Truth is the stubbing of your toe on the way to the bathroom to commit suicide.’

I got up to make coffee. We could go on like this for hours.

This is really living, I thought. My own flat, a student dropping in in the evening talking about Love and Truth.

Mary and my father hadn’t seemed too surprised when I said I wanted to move into a flat of my own. Mary’s jolly friend had said to her, ‘Oh it’s all the rage for young people nowadays.’ That had been enough to convince her. Mary always made decisions like that; she’d hear somebody saying something on Woman’s Hour on the BBC, or read an article in a magazine, or her friend would say, ‘It’s all the rage,’ Mary would say, All right.

I found the flat through the students’ accommodation officer at College. The student who had it had to go back to England. Her mother was dying. The rent was two pounds, ten a week. Father said he’d pay it. The College gave me a raise. That gave me six pounds, ten a week to live on.

Mary gave me a desk and an old electric kettle and made curtains for the main room. My first Sunday there she and Father came for tea. I made queen cakes and we were all rather embarrassed. Mary kept saying, ‘Well now, you look real comfy here.’

The first few weeks in the flat had been quite frightening. Evenings seemed incredibly long. I used to sit at the window and watch people walking along the canal: men with dogs, stiff men chucking their dogs’ leads and uttering curt orders to them—some men can’t leave their dogs alone; old-age pensioners who’d sit on benches for hours, transfixed by the weight of the years they’d lived and the few still to go, terrified of sputtering out—you’d want to shout out to them: Get up, dance, make love, booze, go out with a bang!—but they’d just sit there with their frozen faces. As soon as spring started into summer the children would come. Skinny, white-ribbed children with skinny dogs, all of them shouting and barking and the kids jumping into the dirty canal water. The kids would whistle and shout ‘Hello there young one’ if you went out. They were really old kids, workers’ kids.

In February, I met this student. He came into the library office one day to explain to Miss Gore-Browne why he hadn’t

returned a particular book yet. She was out. He came back the next day and asked if I would like a cup of coffee. We started going round together, to the film society and the drama society. Things like that. I used to tell myself I quite liked him and listened to him attentively. Really I think I felt he was better than nothing, so I must have pitied him too.

This was a Saturday. I was making coffee and looking out the window at the canal. From so high you couldn’t see the old bicycle frames and tin cans sticking in the muddy edges.

I shouted through, ‘The canal is like a sleeping prostitute, all gaudy and gay and well-used.’

I looked round the door to see how he was reacting. ‘Umh?’ he said. He was squeezing a pimple.

Even that didn’t deter. ‘Life,’ I said to myself, ‘is a mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous.’ That term we all spoke in clichés.

The student’s name was lan, only he spelt it lain, to be different. I felt sorry for him thinking that one ‘i’ made him different. lain was English. His mother was a writer for slick magazines and his father was a financier of something or other. They were terribly rich. They had a house in County Cork where they used to spend a couple of months a year, in winter, so’s the father could hunt.

I was planning to go to bed with lain. I didn’t find him all that attractive, I just thought, Well he’s someone I could go to bed with. It was a sort of revenge. He liked me more than I liked him. Before it had been the other way round. I used to link his arm sometimes in the street, hoping Colin would pass by and see us. I hadn’t seen Colin for six weeks, or heard from him.

Iain’s mother had come up to Dublin. We met her in the Shelbourne Hotel for coffee. She said I should come down to their house in Cork for a Hunt Ball. She said I must come down. She took me over. Iain said, ‘You’ll hate it,’ but she’d taken him over long ago.

I was met off the Dublin train by lain and his father. lain had gone ahead. His father said in this loud braying voice, ‘Aha! So here’s the famed Miss O’Sullivan.’ Everyone on the platform looked round. Then he clicked up porters to carry my weekend case. He was always clicking at people—clicking at porters, and waiters, and servants. I wondered did he click at his wife in bed when he wanted to make love to her.

Valerie once went to bed with a man who kept saying ‘Just a little more to the left … no, a little to the right now.’ She said it was as if he were teeing up on a golf course. She said, ‘I suppose you’re aiming for a hole in one.’ He didn’t think it funny.

This family house was like an art gallery. The house was completely unlived-in, untouched. It existed apart, quite separately from its inhabitants. It was a house on display, showing itself

discreetly and keeping its essence completely to itself. I was given a bedroom with a bathroom attached. The bathroom had two plaster busts of someone who looked like Caesar in a picture in our Latin books, and four gilt-edged mirrors. The mirrors watched, elegant and mocking, while I bathed, pouring half a bottle of foaming bubbly in on top, pretending I was Sophia Loren or somebody.

lain’s two sisters were over on holiday from London. In London they worked for advertising agencies. They tore around Cork in their father’s Jaguar looking for antiques and laughing at the Irish. ‘The Irish,’ they’d say. ‘Aren’t they extraordinary!’, making a ‘straw’ sound in the middle of ‘extraordinary’, and then they’d shriek with laughter.

The night of the Hunt Ball one of them came into my bedroom when I was dressing and said, ‘We’re going soon, you’d better hurry up and get out of that dressing gown.’ I said, ‘It’s not a dressing gown, it’s my dress.’ Mary had lent it to me for the occasion. She said I’d be the Toast of County Cork in it. lain’s sister said, ‘You’d better borrow one of my dresses,’ flinging open her wardrobe and saying, ‘Now, take anything you want,’ then turning back the cupboard door showing me shelves of make-up and perfumes and saying, ‘Borrow anything you want from here as well. But hurry up.’

I picked a long green and purple silk dress that hissed when I walked. Everyone said, ‘You look marvellous.’

Iain and his father wore red hunting jackets because they were a hunting family. The father was once a Master. The sisters both had boyfriends over from London as well and they wore black velvet jackets and floppy silk cravats. Iain said you couldn’t be seen dead in a monkey suit.

There were about two hundred people at the ball. The men were all in dinner jackets, the women in long silks and satins, with powdered faces and bright bloody lips and small earrings.

Down each side of the ballroom there was a long table covered in heavy white linen cloths and laid out with glasses and hundreds of knives and forks. The polished dance floor was in the middle and at the top end, seated up on a stage, was the band, ‘The Starlight’; they were all from Cork.

It was hard to imagine how clean and stately the ballroom had looked when about four hours later men and women had put on paper hats and were dancing round and round the floor, the women clinging to the men as if they were drowning. The women’s faces were no longer bright and bloody; they looked as if they’d been punched. The men were red in the face and clapping each other on the backs and the women on their behinds, saying ‘Tallyho there, tallyho.’ You’d have thought all these very respectable middle-class people in Cork with neat detached homes and clean children had gone quite mad.

Everyone drank champagne and it flowed up behind my head, and made my eyes alternately loose and tight. Iain said I didn’t seem to be enjoying it; his face looked quite mean suddenly. I thought, ‘He’s getting his own back because he likes me more than I do him.’ Then this girl from College with blonde curly hair came up and asked lain to dance, and off they went. I thought, Of course I’m enjoying it. I’m just rather frightened.

I wished Colin were there. He’d laugh at them; he’d say, ‘Quick, look at this woman over here with the duck’s disease,’ and point to a woman with a very low-slung bottom, or he’d say, ‘How about old Head-the-Ball?’ and that would be a Major or someone. He’d make you feel a spectator and you wouldn’t be scared of Iain’s sisters or his mother or the clicking father any more.

But Colin wasn’t there. He was off somewhere. Off with beautiful girls. You’d seen them at College and at the television station. Girls with their legs brazen and long and their hair

uncombed and tossed and their eyes looking and challenging, ready to go to bed with the men just for the hell of it.

One of the sisters’ boyfriends leaned over and said, ‘Men prefer blondes,’ and gave me a wink, and said I looked a million miles away, and could he have the immense pleasure of the next dance. We danced then for quite a long time and he kissed my neck and said he was sure that beneath my cool exterior a passionate woman was trying to get out. I said, ‘Oh really.’ His remark annoyed me.

Then one of the sisters threw a chop bone at an old boyfriend across the room because she was a bit drunk and very loud, and the chop bone hit one of the waiters. The waiter picked up a glass of champagne and emptied it over her head. She screamed and Iain’s father and a friend jumped up and grabbed the waiter by his elbows and frogmarched him out of the room. The waiter was grinning—he must have waited a long time for the pleasure. Everyone was very shocked—‘The cheek of the bloody man!’ They almost said ‘native’. I thought, Up the Irish and the waiter, and damn the lot of you.

On the way out we had our pictures taken by an enterprising man who’d turned up at two in the morning with a Polaroid camera and a duffle coat. I still have the picture somewhere. Everyone is leaning slightly to one side with smiles stretched over their strained faces. One of the girls has a long wine stain down the front of her dress.

When we got home from the dance we all had a whiskey in the big echoing drawing room. Everyone was quieter. I wasn’t frightened any more. The parents went up to bed and one of the sisters put on a record. lain and I started dancing. He had a spot on the back of his neck. He said, ‘Let’s go and make some coffee.’ We went outside and he pushed me up against the wall and started kissing me, wet kisses. That went on for a while then I got bored. Finally I said I was going up to bed. My head was beginning to hurt. Everything smelt of smoke: my hair, my clothes; my mouth tasted of it. I went in and ran a bath in the bathroom with the mirrors and the busts of Caesar. I turned the lights off and got in. It was like a midnight swim, the water holding you up and knowing it could so easily suck you down—deceptive, velvet water.

I wrapped one of the big towels round me and went back and lay on my bed. The bath and the whiskey. Warm inside and out.

The door opened with a slice of light. lain came in. He was wearing silk pyjamas. They made me laugh. ‘Shh’, he whispered. He sat on the edge of the bed. He had two cups of coffee. We lit up cigarettes. The kissing downstairs seemed a long time ago. A regrettable time. I wished lain would go. He got into bed beside me. He said he was cold. We finished our coffee in silence.

Iain’s thing was like a cold, raw sausage. I was holding it in my hand and hoping it would stiffen for him. We were sort of rolling round in the bed. Like people trying to get comfortable. lain was kissing me and saying, ‘I love you,’ and my head had suddenly cleared like the sky on a spring day—one minute there are clouds, the next the wind whishes through and everything is quite clear and washed. I was thinking of seagulls. Somewhere I’d read that they have to nap and beat their wings and sit screaming at each other for hours in order to make themselves sufficiently excited to manage sexual intercourse.

After about an hour I told Iain he’d better go. What would his mother say if she came in in the morning?—it would be worse than finding him in bed with the maid. So we didn’t see so much of each other when we got back to Dublin.

—6—

The girl in Valerie’s boutique had forgotten me. ‘I tried on a red dress one day,’ I said, ‘And you said I should take up modelling.’ The girl was busy; a new consignment of clothes had just arrived. She said, ‘Just a minute then.’ It was lunchtime. The boutique was closed. Valerie made us all some coffee. I thought, Why did I come? She probably says that to everyone.

I told Valerie about the dance in County Cork. She said, ‘It sounds really brutal.’ I said it was that, brutal. She said, ‘How’s the old love life then?’ and flipped her eyes at me. I said, ‘So so.’ I said this madly rich Englishman was desperately in love with me, but. ‘But what?’ said Valerie. ‘Oh I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I find him rather boring.’ I hadn’t seen lain for a week; he was the rich Englishman.

It was a Saturday morning. The canal was silky from the sun. I was sitting in the flat and reading an article in a magazine about a model in London. She said she made a hundred pounds per photographic session. There were pictures of her in smart restaurants with Italian-looking men; there were pictures of her in very clean, pretty bras and pants making her face up at a beautiful dressing table with a broderie anglaise frill; there were pictures of her doing her modelling, lips pushed forward, hand on her hip, head thrown back, hair blowing. The girl said, ‘Modelling can really change your life. You don’t have to be beautiful to do it—just know how to make the best of yourself.’

I thought of that girl in the boutique. She said I should try modelling. If it changed my life it was worth trying then, wasn’t it? I put on my best clothes and walked down to the boutique to ask her what I should do. Here I was and she couldn’t remember me.

She was standing in the middle of piles of clothes, coffee in one hand, pencil in the other. ‘Ah yes, now I remember—the hamstrung.’ ‘The what?’ I said. ‘The hamstrung,’ said the girl, ‘we nicknamed the dress that because of the lacing.’ I said, ‘It reminded me of tennis shoes.’ She didn’t say anything; she just looked at me as if to say, For heaven’s sake, look what the cat’s brought in.

I thought, There’s many a slip … and I thought of a nun at school who used to say it: ‘There’s many a slip ‘twixt cup and the lip.’ I asked her once what it meant. She said, ‘For instance, if a man were jumping off a bridge, committing suicide, between the decision to jump and the long fall down to when he hit the water, he might change his mind. He might decide he didn’t want to die after all. Of course,’ said this nun, ‘Of course it would be too late for the body to be saved but never too late for the soul. We can be sure that the good God would forgive such a man—even at the last minute.’ I was haunted by that man for weeks afterwards. I could see his tortured, grey face and him plummeting like a knife to the cold river saying, ‘Oh no, no, no ... ’

The girl said ‘Yes.’ She was looking through a notebook. ‘Here it is.’ She handed me a black card with gold lettering. The lettering said Suzanna’s School of Charm. It gave an address and a telephone number. I looked at the card. I said ‘Thank you very much.’ I looked at the card again, then at Valerie, then at the girl. The girl broke out laughing; the sound came out like a vase cracking. ‘You really are a little greenhorn aren’t you?’ she said. ‘If you want to be a model, kiddo, then you’ve got to take a modelling course. This card is the card of a modelling school. Maybe they’ll accept you.’ She was savage and sad, this girl; she’d laugh at you then give you a hand up again.

She said she knew Suzanna, the girl who ran the modelling school. She’d ring her up and make an appointment for me. I said, ‘Yes, thank you, yes.’ I wished and wished I hadn’t started this whole damn business. I wished I’d gone shopping with Mary, or walking, or anything.

The girl spoke to Suzanna. She said a young dolly friend of hers wanted to try a bit of modelling; she said, ‘Yes, she’s not bad, a bit gauche but a good figure, long legs … yes, okay, fine, tutty bye now … byeee.’

I was to go over right away. I walked out into the street and started towards this School of Charm. When I looked at that model girl that morning I said to myself, If I looked like that I’d be both irresistible and invulnerable. Colin would be bound to find me irresistible. I would walk into him one day with my sexy hips and haughty face and wham he would go, flat on his knees and say, ‘I adore you’ and so on. There’s another thing: I want to be richer, not rolling in money, but have money enough to be able to walk into the smartest shops and not feel I have to buy something because the sales girls would think I was poor. If I were a model, making a hundred pounds per photographic session, things would definitely improve. I mean, if I knew that a hundred pounds an hour was actually what I was worth, it would give me a lot of confidence. I’d look at all those damn girls in the College and think, Well I’m worth so much and that’s that.

Suzanna sat behind a pale cream-coloured desk wearing pale cream-coloured clothes, her thick curly hair foaming round her face. It was just a question of knowing how to make the best of yourself.

I filled in a form. I didn’t know my height, or weight, or waist, or hips or bust. I always bought 34b bras and mostly they fitted. She had a little pair of scales in her office. Off with the shoes and overcoat and onto the scales. ‘Mmh,’—she wasn’t pleased—‘You’ll have to lose about a stone,’ she said. ‘Cut out bread, potatoes and sweet things.’ She measured my bust and waist and hips. She put me up against the wall and registered my height. It all went neatly into the form. She said, ‘Come back next Saturday morning for some photographic tests—let’s hope you’ll have lost a bit of that puppy fat by then, mmh?’ Her phone rang. I was dismissed. I gathered up my shoes, my coat, my bag, my magazine. I went out into the street.

I stood for a minute—weighed and measured, charted and taped. You were a definable, defined, material substance. You had limits. You lived in the limit of your human skin; it weighed down onto the ground. You were rooted to the ground by that weight. You were limited by your edges to other edges. You were isolated and totally imprisoned. You wanted to scream.

I went into a bookshop and bought a book on ‘How to Slim the Easy Way’. It measured out cupful after cupful of carrot and cabbage and mince and fillet steak and double cream, by calorific value. It had pictures too. Your life stretched before you in cups, white delft cups like the ones at school, full of raw and protein foods.

By the next Saturday I’d lost five pounds. ‘Good,’ said Suzanna, ‘you look better already. Don’t you feel better?’ I said I did. I felt awful. The book gave a diet of poached eggs and tomatoes; it was the cheapest diet they listed. The others were king prawns without olive oil dressing, or fillet steak without peperone sauce. The poached eggs sat in my tummy gaseous with reproach.

I was brought into another room. There were five other girls there—potential models.

The make-up expert, Miss Gilligan, came in. ‘All make-up, false eyelashes, wigs, etcetera, off please. Then line up along this wall.’ She might have been one of those Nazi women. Giggling we stripped and scrubbed and lined up. We smiled at each other and sized each other up. Miss Gilligan walked along the line looking at each one of us. She stopped by a tall girl beside me; Trrrp, trrrp, she went and whipped the girl’s eyelashes off—’I thought we said all falsies off, dear?’ The girl wept. Miss Gilligan took notes.

The poise expert, Miss O’Halloran, came in. She had a pretty clown’s face, funny-sad. She asked each of us to walk up and down the room. Then to stoop and pretend to pick something up off the floor. Then to sit down. We each thought the other awful.

The photographer came in. He was introduced to us. He was called Tom. He had a very humble-looking face which meant he was probably very arrogant. He called us ‘ducky’ as he got to know us better. He was Suzanna’s lover.

The course was to take four weeks—a crash course. It was to cost forty pounds. We were to arrive at the School at 8.00 a.m., we would bring our lunches with us, we would be free to go at 5.00 p.m.; however, most evenings we would have some sort of talk from a former model or beautician or health expert. The course would not, of course, make us professional models, but it would be a start. ‘The start is the thing in this game, as in any other game,’ said Suzanna. Suzanna’s school was also an agency; that is, once we’d finished the course, our photograph, name, bust, waist, hips, height, weight and ‘personality’ would be filed in a large album that Suzanna kept on her desk. Then the men from the advertising agencies would come in and thumb through the albums trying to match their product, to our faces, to somebody else’s catchline. We all bravely smiled and pouted out from the celluloid scrap book, asking to be bought.

I went to the College and asked Miss Gore-Browne for my holidays. She agreed. I asked Mary to lend me forty pounds. She agreed. Mary was delighted; she said, ‘Come round and let us see the developments.’

Each day was broken up into three sessions: Poise and Personality session; Deportment and General Health session; Make-up and Dress session. Each teacher shared a common technique; the technique was to make us thoroughly and shamefully aware of our long-neglected, weedy, overgrown bodies; of our undernourished, undercleansed, under-toned skin; of our sloppy walk; our unhandy methods; our ungraceful gestures; our unshaven legs and hairy armpits; of our broken nails and rough hands, and on and on until we broke down and handed our bodies over to them to re-make. We wondered how we had survived so long in such ignorance of the tasks of beautiful women.

‘My God!’ Miss Gilligan, the make-up expert, would say, peering at your skin. ‘My God!’ You would cringe and cower and think, ‘Christ, what has she seen?’ She’d stand back for a minute, run her fingers through her hair. Then peer down again. This was obviously a Most Difficult Case. You would feel awful. A failure. A failure as a woman. Your skin was a pig’s back. Oh dear God, I’m sorry for not having nicer skin.

She would give you a last minute reprieve. ‘With the greatest care and attention,’ she would say, ‘I think we can just about salvage this skin.’ You would want to fling yourself at her feet, kiss them, say ‘Thank you, thank you.’

She would say that the three rules for the face are these: cleanse, tone and nourish; cleanse, tone and nourish; cleanse, tone and nourish—you’d chant them going home in the bus, and walking down the street, and up the stairs to your flat: cleanse, tone and nourish.

The poise expert, Miss O’Halloran, made us act out charades of how to behave in certain situations. ‘The model girl’s artifices do not stop at her face and physical appearance,’ Miss O’Halloran would say. ‘Oh no. Being a model is a way of life.’ (A way of life? A way to change your life? A million, million ways?)

Miss O’Halloran’s favourite charade was called ‘Going to the Restaurant’. There were two actors: the Escort, and his Escortee, the Little Lady.

The Escort would stand looking at his (her) watch, evening paper tucked under his arm, whistling gently. Some minutes would pass. A benevolent smile would be fixed on the Escort’s face. Ten minutes. ‘Tsch, tsch. Women are such battery creatures,’ the beaming gentleman would say.

Then. With a trot and a skip, in would come the Little Lady. Smiling and waving and ‘Oh Lord, am I ever so late?’ He would say, ‘Of course not.’

The Escort would suggest a place to go and eat. The Little Lady would tremulously and immediately agree, ‘Oh, that would be soopa!’ The Escort would hail a cab.

The Escort would open and close all doors, the Little Lady would swish through. At one stage she would turn and show us the contents of her neat little bag—waterproof cosmetic case, comb, atomizer, spare nylons, and a little cash—just in case.

The Little Lady would behave like a little dumb idiot the whole time, allowing the Escort to lead her to a table, pull out her chair, choose her food, order it for her, order the wine, and order the conversation. If the Escort said, ‘The moon is made of cream caramel, lightly spiced with caraway seeds,’ the Little Lady would open her wide eyes wider and say, ‘Oh really?’

The Escort would, of course, pay for everything. That’s what Escorts are for.

Our lives became circumspect, structured. Entering a room was not simply a question of opening the door and walking in; it entailed Creating a Presence, Moving with Ease and Dignity, and so on. Leaving a room was almost as difficult; it meant getting out of the door without turning your back, or your Presence, on the company.

Miss O’Halloran said to us: ‘Now girls, remember what Samuel Goldwyn, that doyen and genius of Hollywood, used to say to his women—beautiful women: “Ladies, if you want to be devastating use all the arts of sophistication available, but remain demure.” You must learn to seduce and make the victim think he’s enjoying it.’

The four weeks went by in a frenzy of bashing of fatty flesh to break down fatty tissue, twirling ankles in the air, twisting necks, swivelling eyes, scraping skins down and dressing them up, entering and exiting. Becoming models. (I read a book one night that said, ‘We cry and we enter—that’s life. We cry and we exit—that’s death.’ I thought it pretty stupid. The main thing was all the crying in between.)

One girl couldn’t take the pace. She left, white-faced, with her cosmetic case tucked under her arm.

‘Smile,’ said the photographer. ‘Come on then, ducky, give us a nice big smile.’ We learnt how to smile, pout, look frightened, look lustful, look baby-doll. Smiling was the most important of all. Right round the school there were pictures of girls smiling; not the kind of smiles we’d done before—I’m-going-to-burst-with-laughter-any-minute. No. Dimpled smiles, coy smiles, wide smiles, sexy smiles.

Knowing smiles were the only taboo kind. Knowing anything, worse still showing it, was pretty taboo. All you had to know was how to sell yourself. In fact the agency would do that for you.

The first job the agency got for me was doing a simple fashion show for the Irish Countrywomen’s Association. They were having a dinner and the new secretary had thought a little fashion parade would be ‘good fun for the girls’. The ‘girls’ were mostly in their forties and had worn the same things since they were in their thirties.

Suzanna sent myself and another girl called Trish to do the show. Trish had quite a plain face but sensational legs. Sunbeam had once asked her to model their stockings at the Dublin Spring Show. She’d been sitting up on this display stand with all the hosiery and woollen goods, and only her legs were visible through this sort of cardboard laurel wreath affair. She had to sit there for four hours every day with her legs on display. She said it was suffocating behind the curtain. One day a big farmer from Kerry came up to the stand. She could hear him having an argument about the legs with another farmer. Were they real or were they not? ‘Yirra get on outta that,’ said the farmer and grabbed at Trish’s legs. He knocked her off her stool, the curtain fell down, the laurel wreath fell down and there was Trish amidst the debris saying ‘Ya big bloody eejit’ to the farmer who was puce with the shock already. Trish had a terrible temper if she wanted to use it.

Well. The first job for me was a bit of a disaster. Trish was quite calm and walked up and down the little stage in tweed skirts and smiled at the women. I was terribly nervous and couldn’t remember what I was supposed to say about each costume and tore one of the dresses. The women were very polite and clapped at the end of it and said we must have the dinner with them. One of them said we were like ‘young fillies, graceful young fillies with your long legs and shining manes’. The other women looked embarrassed beside her.

We spent the night in a bed and breakfast place. Fifteen bob each. Our room had four beds: one double, three single, and five china chamber pots.

After that things got better.

—7—

The discotheque had only been open a week. The jet set still felt obliged to be there. Next week, next month, it would be somewhere else. Everyone knew everyone else. Everyone sat around in their expensive clothes, eating expensive food, unable to hear a word anyone was saying because of the pop music which was blaring out of two enormous speakers and filling the blackness of the tiny rooms. Everyone was laughing big bright orange laughs and thinking, Wow, we’re having a great time, really great. That’s if they thought at all.

Suddenly I saw Colin. He was sitting the far side of the floor to us with a girl. I felt my face going hot. The man I was with was going on and on about some ‘terrible orgy’ he’d been to the night before and what I’d missed and blah, blah, blah.

I said, ‘Excuse me just a minute.’ I got up and walked slowly over to Colin’s table. I said ‘Hello’ and ‘How are you’ quite loudly to some people nearby and bent over their table; then I saw him looking. I pretended to be so surprised—‘Well, fancy meeting you here, Colin!’ (You’ll never know how I waited and hurt and plotted. I’m a friendly friend, pleased, of course, to see you.)

Colin had half got up. ‘Well Liz, I say, ehm, this is…’

I said, ‘Oh, so this is the latest?’ and smiled at the girl. Oh the innocence of innocent women—let them all suffer, why should I care? Colin said the girl’s name and he introduced me as an old friend and you could see him looking and thinking, She’s looking pretty good. I said, ‘Anyway, don’t let me interrupt you,’ with an emphasis on interrupt. ‘Here’s my card—drop in sometime, when you feel like it.’ I handed him a card. Suzanna had told us to have some made; it looked more professional. Mine had ‘Liz’ written in long spidery letters and then my address and the address of the agency at the bottom.

David, the man I was with, was sulky when I got back. ‘Who was that?’ he said.

I felt like glass, like spun sugar—I felt I could shout, or never say anything again.

I said, ‘Oh, just an old friend. Two old friends.’ Simple. David said the food was getting cold. I said, ‘Who cares about the bloody old food?’ He whined, ‘Oh Lizzie, I don’t know what’s got into you tonight.’ ‘So far,’ I said, ‘nothing.’ David groaned. His mother had told him, among a million other things, that Nice Girls were never vulgar. David’s mother didn’t really think there were such creatures as Nice Girls, at least not nice enough for her little David. She would let you know as soon as you met her.

David weighed fifteen stone. He was a property speculator. He bought his suits in London and wore wide silk ties and a red carnation on special occasions. He had this wide and very soft face. A face like a crab’s, white, with beady eyes well out to the side.

David and I had met at a party Suzanna gave at the school and agency. We’d often go to dinner after parties. He was always putting his hand on my knee under the table.

David was the first person, of my own age group, whom I met who’d made a lot of money. He was fantastically vulgar with his money, always trying to impress people with it. It made him almost vulnerable. He would buy me presents and send round great wobbling bunches of flowers with stiff little messages on them. At first I used to feel guilty about all the presents. Trish said, ‘Don’t be such a bloody idiot—if he weren’t spending it on you he’d be spending it on somebody else, so what’s the difference? Anyway, he probably regards it as an investment—“fifteen dinners in the Shelbourne and then will you come to bed with me?”’ Trish could be tough as nails. Trish said, ‘Oh bugger off, I came up the hard way.’

If I smiled and laughed at David he would say, ‘Happy Girl’; if I went mopey he’d say, ‘Who’s a Lonely Heart today?’ and put his arm around me. It was nice to have someone who said those things just to you—somebody watching your emotions and saying yes or no. He used to say ‘You’re my dark Rosaleen Liz’ and ‘I love you.’ It was comforting.

He wanted me to come and live with him, even though he was terrified his mother might find out. He was thirty-five. He’d only moved out of home the year before. I said no. I wasn’t quite sure why. I said yes, I’d go to bed with him. He used to like us to go to bed together on Saturdays and then spend Sunday at his flat. It was very regular.

One night we came in very late. David was quite drunk; we’d been at a champagne party. He put on a black silky slip of mine. He stuck a carnation in his hair. He started prancing in front of the mirror. The slip was made of this stretch nylon and it was pulled across his chest with hair coming out through the cleavage. We were both roaring laughing. Then he threw himself on the bed and said, ‘Come and sit on top of me.’ He’d gone very quiet. I was quiet too, frightened (if the nuns could see me now), and I was sitting astride him and he had his eyes closed and was moaning.

I’d nearly laugh out loud sometimes watching David with his friends talking business. Serious, and jaw, jaw. I’d think of him in that damn slip and wonder, are they like that? And everything would seem just a tiny veneer of manners and clothes over this mad chaos.

I can’t remember what we all talked about. None of David’s friends ever read books. They had jobs in advertising, or marketing, or property firms. ‘Life,’ they’d say, ‘is a Big Joke.’ If you didn’t laugh 90 per cent of the time you were with them they’d think you were dying of heartbreak or something. They’d sit in pubs, their bottoms filling onto the seats and stretched into their trousers. They’d shout at the barman for more drinks and slap their fat, tight thighs. At Easter they’d go to the races and stand round in the beer tent going, Ha ha. They’d go to hotels and restaurants with their girlfriends and the girlfriends would laugh as well, but dropping their eyes and watching. They’d all say goodnight to each other, shouting ‘Goodnight’ across the street and slamming their car doors, still laughing.

The girlfriends all pretended to be bosom pals. You couldn’t even go to the loo on your own without one of them rushing in after you. It was all giggles and ‘That’s a beautiful dress you have on’ and behind that hate. I hate you and damn your dress and your sexy figure and your smile.

We were supposed to meet for coffees the day after and scheme and chatter and talk about who wore what, and who was sleeping with whom, and go and have our hair done together. We were The Girls. The boyfriends would say to us, all indulgence and fat grins, ‘And where have you girls been?’, like you would ask children. We didn’t trust each other for one minute; all the time we were looking and watching with big smiles stuck over our faces.

It was a spring and summer of a new life. It was modelling bras and a new soap powder and clothes at the boutique. Suzanna said I didn’t work hard enough at it. She meant I didn’t sleep with all the right people and go to all the right places. She said, ‘You’ll never get to the top unless you give your whole self to it.’

The world opened up a bit and there were lots more people suddenly and things to be done and places to go to, this place or that, wherever the fancy took you. You were buying clothes and painting the flat and going to dinner parties and discotheques.

The world opened up a bit but closed a bit as well. I saw this scientific picture. It was about white mice. Scientists were studying the white mice to see if it could tell them something about human beings. The mice lived in connecting cages. If a male mouse, say, saw some female mouse that he really fancied he could go running through this little connecting door and find her in the next one. The horrible part about it was he couldn’t get out again. He could never get back to his original cage—only on to another one, and another one. I hated that feeling—forfeiting one experience for another. So. The world opened a bit and closed a bit.

At night when it was dark and you were the only one awake you’d think about your life, your young life, and about your looks. Mostly about your looks.

We were the little dancers on the stage; puppets dressed in the shortest skirts and the deepest décolletés and the tightest jeans. We danced and danced to please and flatter and titivate and charm. The hand that pushed and pulled us might jerk us right off the stage or drop us, so we had to keep going. We danced till our limbs ached and our faces felt stiff and all the time we were wondering, Am I okay? Does he really fancy me? Is my bosom sexier than hers? Is my bottom too flat? Are my eyes nice? Have I passed the test again? Am I okay, okay, okay?

Modelling had helped you in that way. The other girls would say, ‘Oh for God’s sake, no need to get so upset,’ and you learnt from them how to be a bit blasé and walk with your bosom stuck out and your hips moving. You knew you, for the moment, were part of the crowd. You knew you were good looking by their standards at least. You could walk into restaurants and bars and parties and keep your face blank and your head blank and know men were looking at you, and you thought, Fine, just fine.

You didn’t know what you were yourself. You’d stopped thinking, worrying about that.

—8—

Colin rang the agency and left a message for me: ‘Old friend coming to see you. Tuesday at seven.’ I thought, I knew he’d come, but I hadn’t known at all. I went out and bought these very tight black trousers that I’d seen in Valerie’s place.

The first thing he said when he came into the flat was, ‘So, the Professor’s daughter grows up, tunes in, and turns on.’ He was laughing, his eyes taking in the flat, the furniture, me. You could see he was thinking, Well she’s doing okay for herself anyway.

I poured us a drink—a large whiskey for him, an orange juice for me. I put on a record; my hand was wobbling. Bach’s concerto fluted out into the room. Colin was sitting on an old chesterfield sofa that David and I had bought down at the quays. Chesterfield sofas were all the rage.

We both said, ‘Well’ together and then laughed, little pools of silence eddying and sucking between floating conversation. I thought, Don’t panic, relax. I thought, You’re a woman in her flat, surrounded by her possessions. I thought, There’s you and there’s Colin and you’re having a conversation. That is all.

Valerie used to tell us at school that when somebody really intimidates you, you should think of them sitting on the lav; she said once you think of somebody on the lav they won’t scare you any more. We used to work it on the nuns.

Colin was saying, ‘Well I suppose you’re making pots of money now—since you’ve taken up the modelling business.’ I told him I didn’t do all modelling. I’d kept the job in the library part time (security?); I said, ‘The photographer I work with is a queer; well not really a queer but completely asexual.’ I hadn’t even thought of it before. Why did I say it? Colin said something about girls liking queers because they don’t feel threatened by them. Wrong again, this one would burn the eyes out of you with jealousy, envy.

I asked him how the Fir Bolgs were. He said fine. His programmes were due to start in the autumn schedule. He’d had some trouble with the Civil War sections. Too many people still alive from that period, all with different points of view. I thought of a big garbage can with everyone picking and picking.

He said, ‘You weren’t very nice to that girl the other night.’

‘Me? Not nice? Oh, how?’ (How can a Nice Girl not be nice?)

‘It doesn’t matter.’

I said, ‘Well of course it does.’ We smiled. Almost conspirators.

He said we should go on a pub crawl round the docks area. Where the workers drink. ‘I think you should see how the other half lives,’ he said, ‘for a wee change.’ That night I was not noticing sarcasm.

The phone rang. It was David, wanting to come round. ‘I’m tired, going to have an early night,’ I said. ‘No, I’m going to bed almost immediately. No please don’t come David, I’d honestly prefer to be on my own—yes, honestly. Yes. I’ll give you a tinkle tomorrow at the office. Bye now, byeee.’

Colin was laughing, his hand over his mouth. ‘So that’s how it’s done!—the Brush Off?’

‘I am tired,’ I said. Pompous. Damn David. Damn him blind.

We walked down along the canal. Colin left his car parked outside the flat. It was cold. In winter you could feel the air cracking and stiffening with the cold. This summer air was calm, but still cold. The sky was very high and suspended, as if it might blow off.

Colin said, ‘Your nose is pink,’ and then said, ‘Don’t worry, it makes you look less like you’ve just walked out of a magazine.’

That was always the pattern with him from then on. Making remarks about your nose being red, or that colour looking poxy on you, and then he’d laugh and link your arm and say, ‘C’mon then Lizzie, I was only joking.’ You’d say, ‘Mmm’, and give a little laugh, but stay wondering inside.

We went to this pub on the quays where a sailor had been knifed the night before. One of the Dockers told Colin. It was called ‘The Twilight’. It was bright like a dentist’s room. The walls were yellow with cardboard pictures hung around of ships balanced on huge seas. Bottles were piled like Skittles behind the barman’s head.

They were all men except for two women with dyed hair in the snug. The women were drinking half pints and smoking cigarettes. One had her slippers on. The men wore donkey jackets. They put their hands right round their pints of Guinness and looked down into their glasses when they drank.

Colin was greeted by the barman with a wink: ‘A pint I suppose, is it, Mr Dempsey.’ The barman knew him. ‘An’ what will it be for the lady?’ he said. Colin said ‘A half pint’ before I’d time to say anything. I said, ‘I don’t drink Guinness, actually.’ A few of the men near us turned round. They looked at me, then Colin. ‘Bejay, Colin, and how’s the head, uh?’ They were slapping hands and saying, ‘Jaysus, now, and how’s things?’ Colin said, ‘Grand.’ Then he put his arm around me and said, ‘And this is Elizabeth O’Sullivan.’ He paused. ‘A model,’ he said.

One of the men said, ‘A what?’ and there was a big shout of laughter. They all nodded their heads and some of them shook hands with me. Colin said, ‘I thought I’d bring her down to see how the other half lives.’ The men laughed again. ‘Pearl amongst swine,’ said one of them, and grinned at me.

We went to three more pubs. I was drinking Bacardi and Coke. Colin said, ‘Oh the real Dublin bourgey drink.’

I said, ‘I don’t understand.’

‘The drink for all the clean-living ladies out to live it up and find men for themselves.’

In each pub Colin knew people. He was talking and laughing and buying drinks and introducing me, then linking arms, we’d be away to the next one. He said that in the first pub I looked as if I thought the men were going to bite me.

In the third pub I asked where the ladies’ was. The barman said, ‘The wha’?’ ‘The Ladies’,’ I said, ‘you know—the loo.’

This woman who was sitting in a corner in a crumpled tweed coat was called over. The barman had a whispered conversation with her. She said, ‘Come with me, love.’ We went up the back stairs of the pub and along a thin draughty corridor. She opened the fourth door on the left. ‘In there love,’ she said, ‘I’ll wait for ya.’

At first I couldn’t see anything, just this empty room with a bed, bare boards, and the moonlight falling coldly in. Then the moonlight showed up this china chamber pot, right in the middle of the floor. I squatted over it. The pee wouldn’t come for ages. It was like school—having to pee for the infirmary nun into a jar and the pee not coming for ages. You’d been bursting to go a minute before.

Colin said he was hungry. It was eleven o’clock. I was feeling this light, tight sensation all over. I started singing as we were walking back—a song from school—‘Shine out great sun and brin-i-i-ing the day-a-a-a-ay.’ It was a song for four parts and swept up and down like a swollen river, rising and falling. Colin was laughing and saying, ‘More, more’ and clapping his hands in the middle of the street. People looked at us and we chanted on.

We came to this café. Colin said, ‘And now for some déjeuner.’ He ordered bacon and eggs, twice, bread and tea, twice. I thought ‘I’ll diet tomorrow.’ He said, ‘Now stop worrying about your figure. You’re beautiful.’ He kissed the back of my hand and then turned it over and looked at the palm and started reading it. ‘A long life … ever so long Missus … a fine, tall handsome stranger … but oh what’s this? Oh my, my.’ I said, ‘Stop. Please, stop.’

The café was full of people. There was a jukebox and these two scrubbers were standing in front of it. ‘Scrubbers’ is slang for factory girls. They were chewing gum and wiggling, and slapping their mouths open and shut with the gum in time to the music.

The floor of the café was covered in red tiles, all broken. Black and slimy where the cement floor showed through. There were cigarette burns on the plastic tops of the tables and all over the floor, like a disease.

On the counter there was a Perspex display box. Inside were slices of apple tart and cream crackers and angel cakes laid out on white paper doilies as if they’d been quietly left to expire. On the wall there was a big blackboard. It said: liver sausages, beans and chips 4/6d, tonight’s speciality. Bread and tea were a shilling extra. Colin said he hadn’t seen the board changed in a year.

You could eat either sitting up at the counter or down at a table. Men sat up at the counter and ogled the three women who ran the place. The biggest one was called Dolly. She had bright yellow hair, and the hairs stuck one by one out of this pink scalp, like a doll’s. Colin said, ‘She used to be a tart, but got a bit old for it.’ Dolly would just say, Oh neow when the men passed remarks at her. Colin said she was as strong as a horse. One night she’d chucked a man out into the street because he’d got a bit uppity.

Then an oldish man came in, reeling, his clothes torn, a greasy hat on his head. He sat down near the two scrubbers and was dribbling and watching them. Suddenly two men came over, took him by one arm each and ran him out through the door. They came in again a few seconds later, fags in the corners of their mouths still, slapping their sleeves.

I was getting up, saying, ‘Colin, we must help that poor old man, what are they doing to him?’ Colin pulled me down. ‘He was jacking himself off in front of the girls, you dope.’

Outside the café Colin tossed a coin. ‘Heads my place, tails it’s yours.’ It was tails. I panicked. I thought of somebody in a play who said, ‘The first step to wisdom is to stop. Whatever it is, stop it. Then maybe you’ll find out.’

I said, ‘Hang on a minute.’ I thought, This isn’t what I’d planned at all. I hadn’t planned anything.

We walked back to my flat. Quieter. Colin lit a small fire when we got in. He poured us each a whiskey. He said, ‘Drink up.’ I went and quickly had a glass of milk in the kitchen. In the bathroom I sprayed on some deodorant, under the arms, between the legs. A drop of Gold Spot on the tongue. A touch of powder on the slightly shiny nose and chin—‘danger areas, girls,’ Miss Gilligan had said.

On your body there were erogenous zones and danger areas and areas of temptation and your private parts, like a survey map. They were all mixed up together and their values kept changing as you grew up. Your private parts were your personal bank account. You kept them for bartering with husbands or lovers —depending on whether you were a Catholic or not.

The nuns had said, ‘Oh, the body is the source of many temptations,’ but then when you grew up a bit people would say, ‘Oh, the body is the source of all pleasure.’ It was confusing. The pleasure and the temptations were tangled together.

I thought, I don’t look too bad, considering.’

The fire came up slowly. Colin had put in three fire lighters and then stacked the sticks like a wigwam round them and then briquettes round the sticks. I put on a record. I thought, Everything is just right: music, a fire, a little drink, Colin. I thought, Let it stay. Stay for ever.

‘You’ve grown up so much since I last met you,’ Colin said. ‘You look harder.’ I thought, He doesn’t like me. I knew it all along. Thinks I’m hard—am I hard? I don’t feel hard inside.

He said, ‘I’ve been thinking about you quite a bit you know. Since we last met.’

‘Why didn’t you ring me up and find out if I was thinking of you?’ I said, brazen.

‘I thought you were still living at home.’

‘So?’

‘So I didn’t want to get involved and end up chastely kissing you goodnight on your father’s doorstep every evening, terrified you were half an hour late.’

‘How did that stop you seeing me?’

‘Well you were hot for it, too, weren’t you?’ He gestured. ‘Going out to cinemas and theatres every night isn’t my idea of a relationship.’

You were hot for it, too. That had stopped me dead. You weren’t supposed to say things like that—hot for it, like a bitch on heat. You certainly weren’t supposed to say it like that. Spoiled, all spoiled.

Colin was talking again. Gently now, calming. ‘Don’t be hurt, we can be really good together Liz, you know that.’ He was stroking my arm and his hand was touching my ear under my hair. ‘I’d like to make love to you, right here in front of the fire.’

I got up. I thought, Oh, a little faint, Oh, inside myself. I said, ‘That’s a bit sudden, isn’t it?’ I thought, For God’s sake your voice is going to break any minute.

Colin was patting the carpet beside him, tap, tap, and smiling. I was thinking, Fool, fool, you must make him work harder, you can’t just throw yourself at him, remember the rules, relax, smile, pretend it’s all in a day’s work, you’re only doing it for kicks—right?

‘That’s my girl,’ Colin was saying, ‘That’s my girl,’ and putting his drink down and pulling me down beside him and pushing me back and his mouth coming down and his eyes, covering, covering …

Then you were on the floor and it was like coming out from under an anaesthetic, one minute thinking Oh come into me, fill me, touch me, and then wondering if your hair would get burnt in the fire, getting the smell of the damn paraffin from the fire lighters; Colin’s hands working up and down—he was like wire, his body like live wire between you, and you thought of all the women all over the world opening their legs like double doors for their men, opening and opening, and then you were wanting every hole in your body stopped up: your eyes, your mouth, your ears, your nose, and the gap between your thighs widening like a crack in an earth tremor, and you wanting deep, deep right inside and outside to let the whole world rattle the doors and rant and rave.

—9—

Colin left a note pinned to the bedsheet; it said he’d ring me during the day and tell me when he finished work and we’d go out for dinner together that evening. It said ‘You were fantastic.’ There was a drawing of a little man with a smiling face and a huge penis. Colin was always drawing things.

I went out and bought flowers. It was a public holiday. I sat on the bridge by the canal. I smiled at an old man whose coat was fastened with a pin-—I thought, Oh the poor old people, how awful it must be to be old. But it made it even better to be young.

Oh bodies, I thought, who would have thought bodies could be like this? People noticed and looked. It’s always like that—when you are dancing inside they’ll look and appreciate and when you’ve been skulking and cringing along they almost bark at you as you pass by. Or is that all just in your head?

I had lunch with Valerie and told her I’d fallen in love. She said, ‘Good luck, but be careful.’ I laughed in her face with my strong, hot love.

At five o’clock Colin rang. His voice so different over the telephone. He said would I mind if he came round for a bath, my flat was nearer to town. The flowers went into the bathroom and bath oil and clean towels and I was shy, washing him and looking at his hair curling, wet on his neck and then we were both in the bath and throwing water and shouting and before we went out the woman below came up and said, ‘I’d like ye to know me ceiling is wringing wet’ and gave a poisonous look and Colin said, ‘Well how about wringing it dry Missus?’ and we leant against the door bursting laughing.

We went out to dinner. The restaurant had a special table for us with a candle and a little bowl of heather in the middle and the waiters knew Colin and one of them had a face like an owl and dry hands. He said he’d been a waiter since he was thirteen.

During dinner I don’t remember what he said. What I said. I remember his eyes, his brown-black eyes and this feeling of him all over me, all through me, touching his hand and feeling the touch spreading all over me. Rocking in his eyes and becoming beautiful and golden in the watchfulness of his eyes.

He said, ‘Come to Galway with me for the weekend.’ We were having liqueurs and cigars. He said, ‘I’ve got to do a recording of traditional music in Spiddal.’ He said we’d stay the night in a hotel in Galway, on the company’s expenses; that I could come out and watch the recording session; that we could go down on the train and have lunch and a bottle of wine; that it might be quite fun. I was saying, ‘Yes, yes I’d love to do that.’

I was thinking I’d write Suzanna a note saying my father was ill and to cancel any appointments for me for the weekend, and I’d write Miss Gore-Browne a note saying I was ill. And I’d write David a note saying I was going to visit an aunt in the country.

Colin was saying, ‘It’s simple—just follow your desires and to hell with what other people think of you. They can’t eat you.’ We composed them each a small note, enough to be going on with. Keep them at bay with white paper.

Suzanna would say—did say—‘Well why jeopardize your career? You could be a very good model, you know, but you can’t just run off whenever you want to and have dirty weekends in Galway.’ I thought, Career, job, money, they’re not important. I’ll think about all that later.

That second night we went to Colin’s flat. He said, ‘We’ll make love in three different places, three different nights. Variety is the spice of love.’

We were quieter then. He wanted the light on and he leaned on one elbow looking and barely touching and he kept his eyes open and he said, ‘It’s beautiful to see you come.’ I felt frightened almost, exposed.

The following afternoon he picked me up in a taxi. He introduced me to Jilly, his production assistant, and Bill Summers, the cameraman. The rest of the crew was in Galway already. I wondered if he had slept with Jilly. She was tall and heavy with bad skin and curly brown hair; she was attractive in a defiant sort of way that said ‘Look I know I don’t look like a fashion model, but if you want me you can have me—and I won’t thank you for it.’

On the train the three of them talked about the recording session and how it must look and sound authentic and none of this Begorra and Bejaysus stuff. Every so often Colin would squeeze my hand and say, ‘Are you all right there Missus?’ and I would be, then.

We booked into the Great Southern Hotel. Colin was booked in a single room, so he asked the porter for a double; he said his wife had come down with him. The man said, ‘Oh yes, certainly sir, no trouble at all sir.’ Colin signed ‘Mr and Mrs Dempsey, Seapoint, Co. Dublin,’ in the book.

We went up to our bedroom and he closed the door and pulled me against him and both of us fell onto the bed and we made love just like that, dressed. He had to rush out then to join the others and he was very excited and he said, ‘It’s almost like being a teenager, screwing like that, with your togs on,’ and he gave me the name of the pub where they’d be doing the recording and said, ‘Have a bath and a change and take a taxi down when you’re ready.’

I nearly didn’t go. I wanted to stay in the bedroom, to get into bed, to pull the sheets and blankets up, to keep it now, to keep it like now for ever.

Laughing sometimes you’d be frightened to stop and frightened to go on. A hand might come out of the sky and shout, ‘Idiot!’ and a huge thumb would squash you flat like a fly on the ground.

The next morning Colin said, ‘You must come and live with me when we go back to Dublin.’ I said, ‘Yes, I will.’

He’d woken me up by making love to me and he said, ‘I love you, come and live with me, you must come and live with me.’ He was like that. He’d make it a very we-together situation if he liked you. I just thought, Yes, I’ll go. I felt as if I’d been waiting a long time. Preparing.

We had breakfast in bed and we made love again and we had baths and we stood holding each other and I said, ‘I’m frightened to go out into the world again.’ And he held me tight against him and was saying, ‘Poor scared dicky-bird, I’ll protect you from the world.’ And I believed him.

We moved my clothes and things into his flat the following week. It was out by the sea and you could hear that blue splashing sound day and night and the air was salty. Colin paid my landlord three weeks’ rent in lieu of notice. I would have tried to creep out, or been terribly embarrassed; he’d just say, ‘Okay what’s the problem?’ and solve it.

At the beginning we spent most of our time in bed. I was shy with him. With David it had been different. I felt I was the one with the power: the loved, not the lover. But now, now I was melting, and dissolving, and wondering.

Wondering about bodies. You couldn’t believe their differences and their samenesses. A familiarity and then a yawning gulf of strangeness. Sometimes I lay back very still when we made love. I used to think of trying to avoid my stepmother’s kisses when I was a child, of hating the English nun who was always trying to touch me. Yet here I was lying back allowing Colin make these fantastic intrusions into my body and into me. Sometimes one, sometimes both.

Sometimes you couldn’t believe it, the things he would do with your body. There were times when he came in without touching, his face closed like a fist; you were completely separated and yet so stuck together, his eyes closed, your eyes open, him pulling and pulling until he finished and went to sleep—it was like a blind man trying to grasp something, desperately.

The first time he wanted me to kneel up and let him come in from behind I was saying, ‘Ah no’ and turning to him and he got very angry and said, ‘Oh all right’ and flung me back and thrusted himself in and in and threw himself off finally into a chasm of sleep and I lay awake, tears pouring down my face.

I remember saying, ‘I love you’ and wanting something more unique to say to him and Colin saying, ‘Nobody’s unique for Christ’s sake.’

I’d feel terrified sometimes when we were together—nobody is allowed to feel so happy, so stretched into every corner of your skin that you’ll burst. It can’t last. Somebody will prick the edges.

I asked Colin one night whether he thought that for every high in life there had to be a low, for every smile a groan, a see-saw? I thought my voice sounded rather dramatic and silly but the question was serious.

He said, ‘Is that what the nuns told you?’ He laughed. I don’t know, is that what they told us? But hasn’t everyone else told us, ever since? The way they looked at us if we sang and held each other’s arm and kissed suddenly in the middle of a grey, windy street? Haven’t their eyes said it? Oh you’II get what’s coming to you—their faces cocked, waiting for you to trip and fall. One pays, and one pays, and one pays, they would say.

Colin would say, ‘Grab what you can. You’ve got a short breathing space between the helplessness of childhood and the hopelessness of old age. On either side there’s a blank. Grab what you can, while you can.’

The best thing was going out together. Going to cinemas, to theatres, to restaurants. Holding on to him with the pavements creaming out for us and the houses friendly. At weekends we’d drive up to Glendalough with a bottle of wine and a picnic. We’d go and visit his friends who lived in a big old house in Enniskerry. They were a sort of commune. They all smoked pot and didn’t take much notice of anyone new arriving. You felt rather silly and didn’t know whether to sit or stand or what. You were starving and were scared to ask about food.

One night we met David and he was with a fat girl called Margaret who’d been in the year below me at school. She wore two sets of lipstick, one over the other; it made her lips look cracked, like an old painting. David looked at Colin with his crab’s eyes and you almost expected him to go scuttling off sideways, back to his table. He had a tragic look on his face and you didn’t even feel sorry for him. You were that arrogant in your love. Colin said he didn’t understand how you could bear to go round with ‘that lot’. I said, ‘What lot?’ He said, ‘The get-rich-quick-boys from Foxrock.’ I couldn’t think of anything to say.

Colin was preparing a series of programmes on traditional singers and musicians all over Ireland. Sometimes he’d let me come with him. They’d be making films in old, dark pubs, and there’d be old men with eyes like rock pools, full of shadows, and young men with thick wrists sticking out of their jackets, and women, their eyes closed, listening to the weird winding tunes that were about the people’s sorrows.

I’d sit and watch Colin working and think: How easily he does things. How sure he is. I’d never felt sure like that. I felt all my sureness from modelling had been just a fraud. It just showed you how to cover up, to make up, to fake up, and be something you weren’t.

Colin had so many friends it was amazing. He said it was working in television; you met new people all the time. I’d think, Yes and you meet new girls all the time too, but wouldn’t say it. That would be the kind of remark that would drive him mad. ‘Yes, I like women,’ he’d say, ‘I love them.’ He’d look at you with those black-brown eyes and then burst out laughing, and you’d laugh too.

He laughed when you told him about school. He’d say, ‘Tell me the story of the night you pierced your ears again.’ He said, ‘For fuck’s sake, those bloody nuns are terrible, the things they’d tell you.’ He said Catholicism left you with a mark for life; you could never really enjoy yourself.

He’d gone to day school until he was fifteen and then his mother had died and his father had taken to drink and Colin had to leave school and look after him. He was earning ten pounds a week as copy boy in one of the newspapers; the basic was six pounds ten but he used to do overtime. His father drank most of the wages. Plus his pension. His father had a Republican pension from the Civil War, and another from the bank.

Colin’s mother was the daughter of an English officer whose father had been stationed in Ireland. She was a very beautiful girl and all the men were after her. She met Colin’s father when he had carried her brother home one night, dead drunk. She’d answered the door in her nightdress and helped carry the drunken brother upstairs. Her family said she was throwing herself away on a ‘dirty little Republican’ when she said she was going to marry him. They cut her off without a penny. She didn’t mind. They went on their honeymoon to Killarney.

When she was thirty-five she got multiple sclerosis. Bit by bit her body collapsed around her. It took five years. Colin said that she was like a vegetable in the end. He left home. He couldn’t bear it. He said he’d have killed himself if he’d been the victim. I said, ‘That’s easy enough to say now.’ He said, ‘No. I mean it. I’d never inflict myself on people like that …’ His voice was like a mangle—a grinding, choking voice. He almost hated her for staying alive.

One night he cried.

We’d been to a party. This friend of Colin’s had been talking to me all evening. He was also working in television. He was very serious. He was a left-wing socialist, he said, and he talked about the class structure in Cork and I didn’t really understand what he was saying but he had a lovely voice, like a cello’s voice.

He said, ‘I don’t believe in going to bed with women unless I think I can convert them to socialism.’ I thought that was very brave—stupid, but brave too. I pictured him in a night cap and striped nightshirt, holding a candle; sitting up all night, freezing on the edge of the bed talking about the Rights of Man.

Colin said, ‘Bloody rubbish, he’ll go to bed with anything in a skirt.’ He said, ‘What was old randy pants talking to you about anyway?’

I said, ‘About classes in County Cork.’

Colin burst out laughing. I said, ‘What are you laughing at?’ We were sitting up in bed having a drink and a cigarette and talking about the party.

He said, ‘And what would you know about the class structure in County Cork, may I ask?’

I said, ‘Well there’s nothing to stop me learning is there? Even if I didn’t know before.’

We started arguing then and Colin said I was stupid, that I was pretentious. I didn’t know what pretentious meant except from the way he said it: Pretentious little whore. I said, ‘I’m not a whore.’ He said, ‘Well you got into bed with me quick enough, didn’t you? Could hardly wait to get your little panties off, could you?’

He went on like that and I started crying and I was saying, ‘I’m not a little whore,’ and not knowing why not, and he was shouting, ‘Well why spend the whole night flashing it at your left-wing socialist?’

Then I shouted at him, ‘What, What, Whaaat?’ and I couldn’t believe he was jealous and he turned over and buried his head in the pillow and tears were sobbing out and he said, ‘Love me, oh love me,’ and I held on to him until he fell asleep.

I could feel a howling starting somewhere in a wilderness inside me. It was the mad man, the lunatic in the painting; the road rushing towards him and those elongated, tortured hands, holding the edges of his howling head together.

—10—

It was about six in the evening. It had been a dry, high-skied day. Colin had been at the studio since seven that morning, editing. He shouted through the letterbox for help to carry in some gear from the car.

I helped him in with the stuff: two new loudspeakers for the stereo and a box of records he’d bought at an auction. He started fiddling round with the equipment.

I thought: I won’t say anything for a bit. I’ll just be friendly and sweet. There’s nothing men hate more than a naggy woman; women who pick on them for nothing. I’ll pour him a drink, and myself another drink (a small one) and we’ll sit down and talk about his day. Look at the sea. Decide what we’ll do tonight. Perhaps we should go out somewhere for dinner. Relax. I’ll ask him afterwards in bed. That will be best. When we’re warm in bed. Now I’ll just act completely normal, as if nothing has happened.

‘Colin’—the words came bumping out, involuntarily—‘where were you last night?’ It had started. Too soon, too harsh, too sudden.

‘Uh?’ His back was turned to me and he was bending over the speakers, fitting them.

‘I said, how did your meeting go last night? You must have been quite late. I didn’t hear you come in.’ I’d heard. I’d lain awake in bed, stiff. He’d gone to sleep almost immediately. It was after one o’clock. He left for work at six-thirty that morning.

I got up and lit a cigarette. Be calm, go easy, shut up. Colin will explain. He’ll explain everything.

Colin turned round and stood up. ‘Now what the hell is the matter with you?’ He walked towards me, put his hand out. ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

I laughed. A quick prism of a laugh, all angles and sharp lights. I turned and ran upstairs shouting in an uprush of tears, ‘Bloody meeting indeed.’

I sat in front of the dressing table and looked in the mirror. Watching the tears streaking mascara rivulets down my cheeks. I thought of the nun telling us St Peter had two deep scars down his face from crying so much after he’d betrayed Jesus and got him crucified. The thing is once you start crying it’s easier to start again the next time; you can go on indefinitely into madness, crossing deep streams of tears all the time, the world’s tears.

Colin came in. He sat beside me on the stool and put his arm round me and then put his hand on my forehead. Like you would with a sick person. I took his hand in mine and bit it. It was bony, like biting a chicken’s leg. I dropped it and screamed. He spun round. His hand felt flat; it cracked like India rubber against my face. He was shouting, ‘You’re hysterical’ and going, crack, crack—across my face.

I was shouting through tears, ‘Well why do you go out with little tarts and tell me you’re at meetings? I saw you last night, I saw you going into the pub with a woman,’ and saying it made it even worse; it was a turning, a twisting, a reality said and done, done first, then said.

Colin got up and said, ‘If you’re going to start prying on me, accusing me, then you can just piss off out of my life.’ He was white-faced, his hands clenched. The words came out black and poisonous. Each one separately. Like sheep’s shit.

‘I’m not accusing, I’m not,’ I said. ‘I just want to know. I just don’t understand what’s going on, that’s all.’ I got up and took two steps towards him and he turned his back so I was just holding his back and saying, ‘Please, please, I’m sorry, I didn’t want to make a scene, I’ve just been so miserable all day …’

‘I’m going out,’ he said. He walked out of the room and down the stairs. He slammed the door. He slammed his car door. I could hear the engine right up the hill, the noise like a scar in the evening.

I lay down on the bed and cried until I was shaking all over. Until my face dissolved and my head expanded and I quaked. I gripped the pillow and when I stopped I’d torn it apart.

I got up and went into the bathroom. My face was red and purple and white. I made it smile at itself. It was a grotesque, frightened face with mad eyes. I bathed it. I mended it with powder and make-up and mascara. It was a clown’s face, the pain bare under the layers of paint. It was a face that called out for annihilation. There was no way of doing it.

I went downstairs and poured another drink. And lit another cigarette. And thought, What do other people do in the same situation? Nobody had ever been in the same situation. They would have told you.

I went over and over the scene. Oh, but I’d botched it. I’d acted like a damn dried-up wife. I’d accused, I’d cried, I’d screamed, I’d said, ‘Where were you?’ And Colin was free, he was a free man, I must never say, Where were you? as if I’d a right to know.

Jesus, I didn’t mean to. I just wanted to know. I had a right to know hadn’t I? No. You can only know what he wants to tell. Maybe he would have told—said, ‘Oh I went out for a drink last night with the boss’s wife while he was finishing the programme.’

Why? Am I not enough for him? Maybe I was not clever enough; I was always talking about clothes and things. Should I have been reading more? I thought, I should learn about television—talk to him about it.

I wished I’d never gone out with Valerie to that damn film. If I hadn’t gone out I wouldn’t have seen Colin with that girl. I wouldn’t have known. It would have been better not to have known, not to know, wouldn’t it? Or would it? Now, every time he went out I’d think he’s with her. Every time he was out of the house I’d be squirming.

He’d probably been doing it for weeks. I was so blind with my idea of him I just wouldn’t see. He’s been sleeping with her probably as well. Rushing from home—a quick jab on the way to work. God, I could just see it.

Last night with Valerie I pretended it didn’t matter. We’d gone on a schoolgirls’ giggly outing for a change, without men; buses and peanuts, eyeing fellas in the interval. We were coming home, sitting on the upstairs section of the bus. We saw him walking arm in arm into the pub by the television station with this girl. Valerie said, ‘Oh look, there’s Colin,’ and then looked at me, horrified. I’d looked out and laughed. I just saw their backs going in the door and I said, ‘Oh he’s a free man you know’ and I hoped she’d think I was very sophisticated and blasé. Ah yes, Colin, my love. Colin with another … free … free to hate as much as he wanted and hurt as much as we were capable; that’s what I was thinking by the following evening.

Damn him for doing it, oh God damn him. Why? We’d been so happy together. We were. We went everywhere together. Everyone said what a couple we were. All those nights I waited up for him in the gallery, watching him finish a show, thinking, That’s Colin, he’s mine, I love him.

I gave up the job in the library at College so I could be with Colin the mornings he was off work. We made breakfast and then made love afterwards and went into town. I hadn’t even done modelling for weeks now. He never said anything much but I could see he didn’t like me spending all that time with photographers, and pictures in magazines and stuff; he said it was like having a share in a bit of public property.

I didn’t mind not working, not modelling. I wanted to live for Colin. I used to say to him, ‘I’ll die for you Colin.’ He’d laugh and say, ‘Much better to live for me Liz—what would I do with a beautiful corpse?’

What would I do? I had no money now. No flat. Nothing. I couldn’t go home—they’d never really wanted me there. I couldn’t just run in and say Look after me. They’d laugh, or be puzzled.

Please Colin come back, please. I’ll do anything you want, anything. You can go out every night with anyone you like. I’ll swear I’ll never ask questions again. I’ll just be here, waiting. Please, please.

The doorbell rang. Valerie. ‘My God—what’s the matter? You look in a right bloody mess.’ I clutched at her. ‘Oh Val, Colin’s gone.’ Saying it, shouting it, convincing myself, an echo: gone, gone, gone.

Valerie poured drinks and lit cigarettes. ‘Ballast for disaster,’ she said. She said, ‘You’re a right bloody fool. It’s he who should be crying, not you. Get a grip on yourself. Damn men, they’re all the same, want their cake and eat it, and want to be approved of for doing it as well. Give him a good kick if I were you. You can’t let people use you like that.’

I kept saying, ‘Oh but I want him back.’ I was defending Colin. Valerie was saying, ‘Ye gods and little fishes, he’ll come back won’t he? This is his flat isn’t it? He’s not going to abandon all his stuff for a start now is he?’ Valerie talked on. She talked with the conviction someone has when analyzing somebody else’s problem.

She said, ‘The thing with men is never to show that you care. Oh you can be nice to them, and have a good time with them, but go mooney-eyed at them and you’ve had it. Kaput.’

Valerie said she had three fellas on the hook, different nights, different moods, different men. She said, ‘It’s time women started getting their own back a bit.’ I said, ‘I bit him on the hand.’ We both laughed a bit crazily.

At midnight Valerie had to go to meet one of the three fellas. She said, ‘For pity’s sake Liz, don’t let him get you down.’ She made a face and squeezed my arm. ‘Don’t let him rule your bloody life.’

After she’d gone I walked round the living room for a bit. I opened the windows that looked out over the sea. I turned off the lights. The tide was coming in. Thousands of silvered ghosts chatting towards the shore, shifting and circling and hesitating but always moving forward. The air was thick with the smell of seaweed, a brown-yellow smell that slipped past your head and into the room, pushing into every corner. I thought, I’ll just be sitting here calmly when Colin comes back. I’ll say, ‘Oh hello there,’ as if nothing had happened. Bleakly I decided: Valerie’s right, I mustn’t let him rule my life.

I waited an hour. Another hour. The whiskey didn’t seem to be having any effect—on me who got drunk on two glasses of wine! I thought, I can move around, I could hold a perfectly lucid conversation. I’ve got this slice round the top of my head which is crystal clear.

Where is Colin?

The hours gathered up like humps once they were over. Like black rocks. The minutes that made them up were mocking dancers, stretching and twanging sharp shut like elastic bands.

If I went out for a walk down to the sea then he may have come back and wondered where I’d gone. He may have gone off again. He may have thought I’d left. I must stay. The furniture was mocking me. The house was. Everything was. The moon was white with the joke of the whole thing. Why me? Why?

I felt my jeans being dragged off. It was Colin. I’d fallen asleep on the sofa. He was pulling at my clothes. His breath was thick with smells. He was saying, ‘Fucking clothes’ and trying to pull them off. I half sat up and pulled the rest of them off and I got down on the floor and wrapped the rug round the two of us and we made love like animals, sucking at each other as if we’d die of thirst.

—11—

‘All I said was, “I think I’d like to go to College,“ or do something, anyway.’

‘You’re crazy Liz, what the hell do you want to go to College for?’

We were sitting up in bed; at least I was sitting up. Colin was lying down. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. I’d been thinking about the College business for days. College, somewhere to go every day. The books I’d read, the people I’d meet, the thoughts I’d have. Something.

‘Isn’t my baby happy here?’ Colin put his head on my stomach. ‘Isn’t my Lizzie happy with her man?’ He started stroking my legs and rubbing his head up and down on my belly.

I put my hand on his head. I said, ‘Of course I’m happy. I just thought, well, I’m not sure, but I thought … Colin wait a minute... I thought …’

—12—

‘We’ll go to Paris for a holiday. How would you like that Liz?’ We were sitting up again. ‘You’re just bored with Dublin I think. I’ve got to go to a film festival in France in four weeks’ time. We’ll meet up in Paris on the way back and have a holiday—d’ya like that Liz?’

I said, ‘Yes. I’d like that.’ I meant it too. But I also felt something had gone wrong. I’d given in too easily. It was always like that.

Maybe when we came back from Paris we would be able to talk about the College thing again. Colin was probably right anyway: I just needed a break. I’d never have the discipline to go to College, I supposed. I was too stupid as well. I mean, half the books that Colin had here were double Dutch to me: Iron in the Soul by Jean Paul Sartre—I tried reading it once but it was just words which seemed as though they’d been thrown at the page.

I couldn’t make them string together.

That thing with the girl had been a shock too. For a week we’d been strangers to each other. Locked in the flat, viciousness of suspicion, watching each other.

Then we began to talk again. Snows freeze over green fields and black streams gush below. Everything looks like a blanket of white but underneath it’s growing, and seething, and hot.

Colin said that he loved me, but that he must always feel free to have affairs with other women besides me. Not, he said, that he was having, or planning, an affair with that girl. No, that was just a friendly drink. He was calm. He made crying and hysteria and shouting seem ludicrous.

He said, ‘I’m not blackmailing you, or bargaining with you, but if you want to stay then you’ll have to give me freedom to move as I want to, that is all.’ Perhaps I said yes too readily. He said I should go out more.

The day after we’d talked about me going to College I dropped Colin at the television studios and took the car on into town. He’d given me a cheque for fifty pounds. He said, ‘Get a facial or whatever you call it, and something new to wear.’

I went along to Suzanna’s. She said, ‘Long time no see,’ and, ‘When are you going to do some more work?’ and ‘You’re not married or anything are you?’ She kept up questions like that all the time she was cleaning and patting and toning. And although she only half expected an answer she was listening all the time too.

I rang David from Suzanna’s office. Colin was going to be working all day. I thought, David will cheer me up. Anyway, David’s an old friend. Colin knows him. It’s all quite straightforward.

‘You’re looking beautiful,’ David said, ‘I’ve missed you.’

‘Oh come on now,’ I laughed, ‘Don’t look sad, you’re supposed to be cheering me up, remember?’

David was pleased too. The other men in the bar were looking at us. At me. Sideways looks over their glasses, through their conversations, pretending not to really look at all, but wondering what it would take to lay you, peeling you off layer by layer, and barking at their wives when they got home.

We had drinks first. Campari cocktails. David hailed a couple of friends. He talked about his work. He kept saying, ‘How are you?’ but he really meant, ‘How am I? Ask me, how am I?’

We went to this fish restaurant for lunch. It was a beautiful restaurant. There were white linen tablecloths that came down to the ground and then shorter, smaller, yellow linen squares that just covered the tabletops. There were heavy silver fish knives which slipped into the golden soft fish like a thieves. The waiters were dignified guardians of heaven. Slowly, slowly, they introduced you to all the delights that they were in charge of. ‘A little more wine Madam? Perhaps a lightly tossed salad? Some cheese maybe? And a cigar for the gentleman … yes.’

They were mostly men who ate in this restaurant. In suits. Expensive suits. They were all very quiet. Nobody got rowdy or drunk or clicked their fingers at the waiters. Even David’s lot were quiet if they come here. They came humbly, to worship.

‘What would you do if I jumped on the bar and stripped?’ I looked at David, laughing, the wine like white glass in my head. ‘Oh Elizabeth,’ David said.

I thought, I’ll do it. I’ll give them all a good fright. I’ll strip and then walk out into the street, starkers—that will give them something to think about. I thought, Something, anything ... I was in that sort of mood. The world smothering me.

‘What are you thinking about?’ David gave my hand a squeeze. His was moist.

‘I’m thinking how horrible I was to you. I used you,’ I said. I thought: Did I though? Didn’t he use me too? Taking me round because I looked like the right shape, and the right size, and didn’t do anything too out of the ordinary?

‘You could pay me back a little,’ David said, squeezing my hand again. ‘You could stay with me for the afternoon. We’ll go and take a room in the Shelbourne.’ He rushed the words. You could see it was the first time he’d dared proposition a woman like that.

We didn’t say anything for a bit. His hand was sitting over mine on the table. The waiter smiled—thought we were lovers. I thought, Okay, I’ll go with him to the Shelbourne. I’ll go like a proper tart.

A hotel room in the middle of the afternoon—Jesus!

The man at the reception desk had a face like a wasp, bunched-forward eyes and eyebrows and nose all in one. He said, ‘Mr and Mrs …?’ and paused. I wished I hadn’t come. ‘Luggage, sir?’, and he paused. This man dropped in a pause each time he asked a question—Fill that if you can, you clowns.

The room was right at the end of this carpeted passage. The carpet was so thick; you felt as though you had cotton wool in your ears. Sounds were different. Muffled.

David picked up the phone and rang for two double whiskies. ‘No, better make it a bottle of whiskey, Jameson, and some water.’ I looked out the window onto the street below. There were all these people in their coats and trousers and dresses shopping and going home, eating the food and wearing out the clothes and then coming back and shopping again. The closed circles of our lives. I thought, I’ll open the window and scream, I’ll say, ‘Drop your shopping, lift up your skirts and live.’ I imagined their little saucer faces turning up. Shock. Surprise. I thought, I’ll have to do something. This is awful.

David came over. He put his arms round me, crossed across my front, a hand round each breast. He put his nose in my hair, snuffling. ‘Oh baby, my baby.’

There was a knock at the door. The waiter: ‘Excuse me sir, your whiskey.’ Your room, your whiskey, your tart, your money … Sir.

The waiter left. I said, looking in my bag for a cigarette, ‘Look David, I’m sorry, but I can’t really go to bed with you. I mean it wouldn’t be fair on Colin. Or you.’ David winced at that last bit. He handed me a whiskey. ‘Have a little drink anyway.’ His face was crumpled-looking. A foetus face. We had two large whiskies. I turned on the radio above the bed. It was Johnny Cash. ‘I find it very, very easy to be true; I find myself alone when each day’s through; Yes I’ll admit that I’m a fool for you; Because you’re mine I’ll toe the line …’ Something like that. I began humming to it. We used to sing it at school and long for someone to be a fool for, somebody to toe the line for.

The whiskey was changing the room, making it warmer. The corners were softening. The bed stopped looking like a coffin. David was sitting in the chair with a smile on his face, his hand circling my ankle; I was rocking in time to the music, sitting on the bed … la la da dee da.

‘I’ll give you three hundred pounds it you will sleep with me.’ David’s voice was absurd. His eyes were small. His face pinched. He pulled out his cheque book and made out the cheque. I thought, This isn’t happening. It’s a joke. David is joking. We’re just having a little drink and talking about some things.

‘Will you?’ His face was red, pleading. I thought, David you mustn’t plead like that. I wanted to tell him. It made me feel awful. I thought, Okay, I’ll do it. If he wants it so badly then I’ll do it. It was almost as if my body didn’t belong to me. I sometimes felt that.

We got out of our clothes, hurriedly, David trembling. I started shivering all over. The sheets were so cold. So clean. We covered our bodies with the sheets. David was saying, ‘Oh Liz’—and I felt so cold. I thought: I’m the moon. I’m one eye, one silver eye, that’s as cold as metal. I concentrated on keeping my head up, straight. I thought, If I don’t move, if my head doesn’t look at what’s going on down there it will be as if it hasn’t happened.

David rolled off. Dry. Exhausted. I felt a surge of pity for him. Sorry. I felt disgust. I thought I want to get out of there, quick. I wanted the flat, the sea, Colin. I was putting on my clothes, rubbing between my legs with this scratchy white towel with ‘Hotel Shelbourne’ printed on it in flowery writing. I turned round to him before I left. I put my hand on his head. I said, ‘I’m sorry David, so sorry’ and then ran out, down the corridor, down the stairs, across the hallway—the man at the desk said in his wasp’s voice, ‘Anything wrong Madam?’ ‘Piss off,’ I shouted, running out. I thought, For Christ’s sake, what’s the matter with me?

—13—

I drove from the hotel out to home. Family home, not our flat (Colin’s flat really).

I was thinking of something I’d read in a magazine about murderers always returning to the scene of their crime and I was wondering whether that was why I wanted to go back and abase myself in front of David, and whether that was why I wanted to go home. I was thinking, Does everyone feel this sense of having committed a crime? Not all the time, but having sometimes a very strong sense of guilt, an awareness of at some stage being, perhaps billions of years ago, party to something horrible. It remains as a little deformity inside you.

I was thinking about Father and about Mary. I thought, ‘They never touched me very much as a child.’ I was surprised at that. I’d never thought of it before. Suddenly I could feel the lack of their hands around me.

There was another article I read in the same magazine that talked about murderers. This one talked about people’s spines shrivelling if they are not touched enough. They used the word touch to mean both physical and spiritual touching. They said that every human being needs a certain amount of touching to remain healthy; it is as vital as food, they said. You could touch somebody emotionally, according to this article, by just saying ‘Good morning’ to them in a friendly sort of way, or you could make their spine shrivel by ignoring their smile at a bus stop. An amazing article.

Father opened the door. He said, ‘My Lizzie! You’re a woman already.’ He stood still with his hand on the door, looking at me. I said, ‘A surprise visit—and a flying one—from your prodigal daughter.’ I kissed him on the cheek.

Mary heard the voices from the kitchen. She came out, her hands covered in flour. She must have been baking bread. She walked up and we stood in the hall.

She lifted her hands to show me the flour and that she couldn’t hug me and she smiled; there was a tiny silence, like a gasp; then we all said something together.

Mary said, ‘Come into the living room. We’re just going to have tea.’ She was shy. Almost as if I were a stranger. I was a strang-er. She said, ‘Mmm very smart,’ and made me turn around so she could see my dress, but she wasn’t sure about it. It was a smock. You could see she thought they were just for pregnant women.

Mary brought in tea. The cherry tree in the garden had silken branches of deep ochre. The windows were open onto the garden. The zing of the cars from the main road and the garden smells came through.

We talked about events. Occurrences. About Father’s book which was with the publishers. About the flu Mary had had. About the people who’d moved in next door. Father looked a lot older than a month before when I’d seen him in town. I hadn’t been to this house for seven months. Quite a feat, given the nearness of it. But then distances are always to do with love, or lack of it, seldom with space.

Father wanted to know why I gave up the job in College: ‘I thought you liked it so much?’

I said, ‘I get plenty of money from modelling you know. You can earn up to one hundred pounds for just one session.’ They didn’t like that. You could see they were thinking: that kind of money just means badness. At least Mary was thinking that—to Father it was probably meaningless.

‘I’m going to Paris for a week,’ I said. ‘For a holiday.’

Mary smiled. ‘Oh that will be nice for you.’ She said it flatly. Modelling and Paris and one hundred pounds—what would she tell her friends when they asked, ‘And how’s our Elizabeth doing these days?’—the competition for your kids’ careers—Is my one better than yours?—and all hidden under smiles of concern and interest.

‘I’m going with a group of friends,’ I said. ‘Some people from the television station.’ That would be something to tell them—wouldn’t it?

I told them I’d moved flats, that I was sharing with a girlfriend who had a flat out by the sea. I said we lived with the sound of the sea in our heads, day and night.

I wanted to say clever things. To say: ‘Look, I’m okay, and I made it, and who would have thought it?’ Things like that. I wanted to say sad things as well: ‘Why didn’t you touch me more when I was a child? Why did you never love me?’

I wanted to say, ‘You’ve changed and I’ve changed, and we’ve changed in spite of each other, but we could still perhaps learn to know, even to like.’

I wanted to say, ‘I’m living with Colin, the young man who was making the film about the history of Ireland. I’m a grown-up woman now, I’m not a virgin any more, I don’t go to Mass any more, I even sleep with men in the middle of the afternoon, and for money, and last week I got so drunk I conked out.’

I wanted to say, ‘Tell me what you’re most afraid of. Tell me your very favourite thing in the whole world.’ I wanted to try to tell them why I didn’t, couldn’t, come round more often ... all sorts of things. It was too late or too early.

We talked about the weather. We talked about the price of food and how everything was going up these days. Father talked about the state of the country and Mary said, ‘I don’t know what the world is coming to.’ We were very solemn, each in a chintz chair, slapping phrases like plasters over each other’s words, or wounds, the one hiding the other.

I excused myself and went upstairs to the bathroom. The house looked so small—a doll’s house. I went into my bedroom and lay down on the bed. Mary had left my room as if I was about to come back from school for the long holidays, or home from a trip abroad. There were posters of pop stars with marble eyes and shiny, every-day-washed hair and pink lips; there was another poster on ‘Exercising your way to Beauty’ and a course for twenty-eight weeks; there were two dolls sitting on the mantelpiece, their plastic legs stuck straight out in front of them, their blue-flecked eyes unwinking.

I thought, You change and you change and you change, but all the time you carry the corpse of your younger self inside you. Your body gets bigger and fuller and riper, then smaller and thinner and drier, yet all the time there’s yourself and the thrust of what you really wanted to be, buried inside you.

I went into the bathroom. Automatically I started making up my face. A bit of powder, a bit of mascara.

Something fell out of my bag onto the floor. I picked it up. It was David’s cheque. He must have stuffed it into the bag before I left. I suddenly wanted to laugh. How would I have explained that one to Colin? Oh just a little gift from an old admirer, darling.

It was one of those days when each event cancels out the one that went before. You live without responsibility. You feel a little melancholy, but it’s a friendly melancholy. You can afford to laugh at your own ludicrousness.

I crumpled the cheque up into a ball and flushed it down the loo. The water tank coughed and sneezed and shook its shoulders and then righted itself and then quietened down to refilling. A busy, soothing sound. The cheque came bobbing up again in the bowl. Buoyant, Bank of Ireland paper.

I fished the cheque out and wrapped it in some toilet paper and put it into the special zipper pocket inside the lining of my bag. When I’d bought the bag it carried a tag advertising the zipper pocket as ‘A secret pouch for the Mysterious Lady’. I’d never used it before. I thought, I’ll burn the cheque when I get back to the flat.

I told Mary and my father that I had to go. I said I was being taken out to dinner by that young man who was making a film about the history of Ireland. I wanted them to hear his name again, to be reminded of him, to know of his link with me. We said goodbye at the door. I said that Mary must come and have lunch with me one day, in town. I was into the car, and waving, and starting the engine, and then gone.

I belted the car down the road. I thought, I’m a balloon. If anything hits me it will just bounce off. I thought, It’s only four o’clock in the afternoon and I’m a changed person since this morning. I’ve had my face changed, and my body changed, and my childhood changed.

I sang in the car. I sang Johnny Cash. I felt my body. Every edge and surface of it. I felt how it touched the air. I thought of it replacing a body of air, like Archimedes getting into his bath and replacing a body shape of water. It was about the only piece of our science course I could remember.

Colin said I was stupid. I didn’t think I was. I felt things. I thought, If you were stupid you wouldn’t feel things—or not very much. I thought that once you felt things then the rest was just going to college or something like that.

Colin and his friends talked about things the whole time. They sat around pouring thick brown gravy of talk into each other. For hours. I liked listening to them. Sometimes I felt like saying, ‘Colin, couldn’t we just go to bed now?’ But I knew Colin would kill me if I said that. I once said I couldn’t understand Jean Paul Sartre; that it was all just words. Colin looked at me. They all stopped talking. Colin said, ‘For God’s sake, Elizabeth.’ He said it like a curse.

Colin was very good to me though. Giving me that cheque this morning for instance. Cheque, I thought, cheque. Poor David and his damn cheque. I hoped he’d left the hotel by now. It seemed like years ago. Imagine pleading like that. Will you do it for three hundred pounds?

I couldn’t imagine Colin pleading. He wasn’t that sort of person. At work he really shouted at the men in the studio but they didn’t seem to mind. They all went down to the pub later and drank. Colin liked really rough pubs. He said, ‘That’s where the Real People are.’ He said I was a terrible snob, but I just didn’t know what to say to those people.

Another thing he did was to read comics. He and these two friends, they’d rush down to the newsagent on Fridays to get their comics: ‘Dangerman!’ and ‘Batman!’ and they lined up with the poor kids and they bought about six comics each and the kids just bought one. They had their money ready in pennies and halfpennies. Colin and his friends paid with pounds.

Colin said, ‘Comics are part of our culture; they’re indicative.’ I thought they were just for kids. I thought culture meant art galleries and Tolstoy and things like that—heavy, polished, difficult things.

Colin could be difficult. He could be hard. His eyes could go like diamonds. His face would shut down. He’d go on like that if his father came round. His father lived in a room in Blessington Street. He came round to beg money and maybe he just wanted to be talked to as well. Once he wept and held on to Colin’s knees. I’ve sometimes sat for a whole morning, giving him coffee and cigarettes, while he was shaking and dribbling and waiting for Colin to come. Colin said I shouldn’t let him in. But he cries through the letterbox.

Colin said, ‘I’m not his bloody nursemaid. If the old bastard wants to drink himself to death then let him.’ I thought, That’s an awful thing to say about your own father. Colin said, ‘And a lot you know about it dear.’

Colin drank a lot too. Not when he was working; he’d never drink when he’s working. But at night. Sometimes he’d get so drunk it was frightening. He’d become a different person. Cruel. He wouldn’t let me talk about it afterwards. Once he said, ‘Like father, like son.’ He threw a chair through the window and was shouting and I burst into tears. He was like a mad person. He punched me in the face; he said, ‘Shut up your bloody caterwauling.’ I had to tell people I’d fallen down the steps. They all smiled: Tsch, tsch. They knew.

I’d come to the railway crossing. It was 4.30 p.m. I thought, I’ll cross the railway. I’ll go and sit on the sand for a little bit.

The sea was grey. It was like a whale. Wet, solid and grey. Every so often it shifted. The sand was wettish. The grains stuck like wet salt when you tried to let them run through your fingers. The sun had sort of diluted itself throughout the sky. The sun leaked a pale yellow into the whole, sodden sky.

I thought, I’m hardly ever on my own. I was often alone in the flat in the sense that there wasn’t another person around: Colin had gone to work and I was there alone, but I put on records very loud, I did my exercises, I gave myself home facials, or hair conditioners, or I cooked something for our lunch. I never stopped. I never sat down and said, ‘Now, just think.’

I picked up this book once in the house of one of Colin’s friends. It said (or said something like) this: ‘Think of a grey wall. Think of a completely grey wall covering your mind. Think of all your thoughts imprisoned behind that wall, unable to get out. Look at the wall in your mind. Let yourself be blank, blank. Then slowly watch as thoughts present themselves to you.’ This was to do with relaxation or something. The book was to exercise the mind in ways of thought.

I sat looking at the sea. I thought, That’s my grey wall. I tried to think blank, blank. Did the wall have bricks? No. My hair tickled my face. The sand was cold. I thought: I’ll walk along and think of a blank wall.

I thought of Colin and me. Always. I was always thinking of Colin and me. Is it love? I don’t know. People say it’s love when you think of the other person the whole time.

I thought, This is me. This is Elizabeth O’Sullivan, walking along Sandymount Strand. I thought: I’m twenty. I thought: People die when they’re twenty. The following year they vote. They can be hanged when they’re eighteen. They can get married when they’re sixteen. In England the upper classes send their boys to boarding school when they’re eight. They put their names down for public schools the day after they’re born.

All those different ages.

I thought: I’m twenty and I’ve done nothing. I thought, That’s very melodramatic. I’m three years away from school. All those years and I’ve done nothing. I thought, Who am I? Twenty, and I’m nothing. But I have Colin, haven’t I? If Colin decides he likes that girl with the long hair in the pub—what am I then?

Valerie said there are plenty more where they come from. Meaning men. I thought of Valerie in big Wellington boots, fishing in the Atlantic with a huge fishing rod, for men.

I thought: Well if Colin leaves there’s always David. I could go to David and throw myself on his mercy. I could say, ‘David, David, forgive me. I’ve been so awful, so unfaithful, such a harlot, forgive me David.’

I could get married to David. Everybody gets married. Eventually. Colin said, ‘Why the hell get married? Particularly in Ireland.’ David and I could be married and live in a house. We’d give dinner parties. I’d shop in town. I’d probably have a lover. It might be Colin. Everybody in Foxrock had lovers. So.

I thought: You’re tired. You need a holiday. Colin is right. All you need is a rest. You’re twenty and you’ve got what you wanted, right? You’ve got Colin, you’ve got your flat together, well his flat, but you’re living there; you’ve got everything.

Haven’t you?

You felt scared. Scared he’d leave you? He ruined everything by going out with that girl; but that’s stupid. All these men have affairs. Anyway he said it was nothing. He said, ‘I suppose it’s all right if I have a drink with a friend?’ He said it in this very sarcastic voice. You said, ‘Yes of course, it’s just …’ ‘Just what?’ he said. You said, ‘Oh nothing.’

You went to bed with people, like David. Why? You lived with Colin, you felt you needed his reassurance. You wanted him saying, Yes, and No, and I like that, or I don’t. You knew what it was like to be on your own. Even if Colin was angry or cross at least he was there. He’d take you round, show you things, laugh with you. A hand to stretch out to in the middle of the night. Someone to smile at during the ghastly party. A person to write letters to: foolish, intimate things.

I thought about going to bed with people and how that had changed, coming from school where I’d lived with the nuns’ puritanism and the threat and danger of sex; and then sleeping with people and finding the heavens didn’t fall on you, like the nuns said, or open up for you, like the magazines said. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. There was nothing magical. Growing up, I read somewhere, is when you stop having recourse to moods and masturbation.

But you were young still, weren’t you? No need to worry. No need to worry about your life, you’d lots of time yet to think about it — to think about what you were going to do. Anyway lots of women didn’t have jobs, or careers, or anything. Why should you? Colin said, ‘It’s petit bourgeois conformism to want a job.’ He said, ‘Are you scared of living your life from minute to minute? Of not having schedules, timetables, targets?’

I was sure Colin was right. You just needed a rest. Still you thought, What’s the matter with me?

—14—

‘Do you want to go to the party, or not?’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’

‘Do you?’

‘Couldn’t we just stay in and be together on our own for a change, just for once?’

‘We’ve been asked to go. A few minutes ago you were madly enthusiastic.’

‘It’s just ... I don’t know . . . it’s just we never seem to talk to each other at parties. I don’t quite know how to put it . . .’

‘You don’t go to parties to talk to each other, stupid. You go to meet people.’

‘Oh yes, we all know why you go to parties — to meet girls.’

‘So we’re back on that one again. You’re becoming like a bloody, nagging wife, Elizabeth.’

‘Darling, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be awful, it’s just . . .’

‘Look. All I want to know is whether you want to go to the fucking party or not, uh?’

‘Yes. Yes, I’ll come to the party.’

—15—

I still think, that damned party.

It began with the argument: would we go, or wouldn’t we. Colin said he had been stuck all day in the bloody editing room and now he wanted some fun. I wanted to stay in and talk to him. So many things happen and you fear you’ll lose them by tomorrow, feelings, tentative feelings. Then I said the thing about him wanting to go just to meet girls. There are times when you want peace and you want to sit at home in old jeans and watch television, or at least that’s what you think might help. Something. I get tired of the battles outside. Colin said, ‘You want us to end up arthritic and snivelling over a coal fire, locked into endless, old-age boredom.’ The kind of thing you couldn’t answer.

I started getting dressed. Colin came up and watched me. He was very fussy about my clothes. He came shopping with me; he said, ‘Well seeing that you dress for the delectation of men, they should be the best judges of what looks good on you.’ I used to like it when he came shopping.

Now he was in one of those moods. Drinking. A bottle of whiskey in one hand, he lay on the bed and talked about work, and how those ‘fucking morons of production assistants could never read a studio script right, even if you shoved it under their bloody noses.’ You’d have to watch him. He might easily hurt you—a sort of Catherine wheel spinning off thousands of sparks: the fairy princess might get burnt up.

He was laughing and telling me about a girl he went to bed with once who had false teeth. He couldn’t get an erection, seeing this girl with her lips napping together like a fish’s and remembering the teeth quietly floating in milky liquid in the bathroom. Completely de-sexed him. She’d got a disease of the gums when she was a kid and her teeth had all fallen out.

She’d said she took them out because some people found it more disconcerting if they heard a clicking noise halfway through. The clicking false teeth make when you’re eating or doing something strenuous, she said.

I went to bed once with this friend of Colin’s with smelly teeth; you’d have thought it would have been his breath that smelt but his teeth were so yellow and ancient, I’m sure it must have been them. His name was John; he was a poet or something. Everyone said he was very good. It was at a party and Colin had been talking to a girl for hours and John was rolling joints and giving me the eye, and I’d thought, What the hell, anything goes.

It was pretty sordid really. Colin was chatting up this girl, and then John said, ‘Oh come on,’ and ‘Don’t be such a frigid Brigid.’ I started watching for Colin and hoping he’d come out and then I’d smile at John and pretend to be listening to him, and Colin could damn well see that I was fine without him, but eventually John and I ended up in a bedroom upstairs on a pile of coats and anoraks. He didn’t take off his clothes and I just closed my eyes against the smell of his teeth. Colin had never even noticed that I’d left the room.

I was thinking, The thing is, you can never trust women. A man has just got to smile at them and they’re falling over him. I mean, Colin was one of those men that liked women. He liked the whole business of sex and flirting and stuff. You could see the women responding. Some of them envied you and said, ‘You’re lucky.’ In a way you thought you were—such a good, sexy catch. Nobody wanted a guy that nobody else was going to fancy; there’d have to be something wrong with him. But then you knew yourself, easy come and easy go, and that’s how you were, into bed the first night he asked you, and if everyone else was like that there was nothing to prevent him, was there?

A woman would never think like that about a man. She’d never say: Oh he’s a good type, or a bad type, depending on how long the gap between the time they met and the time they went to bed together. A woman would think: This is a special man, who is making this very special and exclusive gesture towards me. She wouldn’t be able to bear it if she thought the man could just as easily have screwed the little dark girl over in the corner.

Colin was saying, ‘There’s a girl I want you to meet tonight, she’s called Mary.’

I’d always hated that name. Mary. It was weighted with religion and stupidity and prejudices. My stepmother’s name.

Colin said, ‘She’s Ruth’s latest protégée—disarmingly honest.’ I wanted to go to the party even less.

Ruth was a lady producer in television. It was she who was giving the party. She produced ‘special’ programmes. Heavies. She and Colin had an affair about two years ago which was how he’d become a director. He’d been designing the studio sets for a programme Ruth was producing and they’d started sleeping together. Ruth thought Colin’s mind was wasted on graphic design work. She got him onto this directors’ course. Colin said they were always more interested in each other’s minds than each other’s bodies. I said, Mmm. We used to laugh about him sleeping his way to the top in television, just like a starlet in Hollywood or a secretary in the BBC.

All the time I was dressing, I had a feeling about this party —that something awful was going to happen. Something. I wanted to kiss Colin, to say, ‘You’ll never hurt me, will you?’, and couldn’t, and knew that he would, some day.

The party was the beginning of the end, or the other way round, depending on how you remembered it.

So it was at this party that I first met Mary. I was with Angus, a friend of Colin’s, who was married to a girl called Miriam and they both slept with everyone and anyone. Angus and I were talking to each other and pretending to be interested and interesting, and Ruth had taken Colin off to meet some Italian

journalist who was preparing a script for a film on the ‘Death of Dublin’.

A girl came up and said, ‘Hello, I’m Mary. Colin has told me about you.’ (I hate it when people say that.) She wore old blue jeans and a t-shirt. She spoke straight out, like a man, and shook hands. She said she’d just come back from two years in France where she’d started off selling copies of the New York Herald Tribune and ended up singing in cafés, and in France, she said, everyone shakes hands the whole time.

Angus, randy Angus, was widening his eyes at her and she wasn’t even bothering. She was talking to me, and I was looking round for a man to latch on to. She was asking me what I did and I said, ‘I just am.’ Men usually thought that interesting, to just be, (‘so delightfully unplebeian,’ as Angus would say). She just gave this odd look.

I said, ‘Colin says it’s simply petit bourgeois conformism to want to work.’ She burst out laughing, and said, ‘God, some men are incredible.’ I wasn’t sure what she meant but I didn’t like her, and her damned open-ended laugh.

We talked about various things and then Angus asked me to dance and he put his hand on my bottom and I cuddled up to him and both of us knew it would come to nothing. Then the Italian journalist came over and said he’d like to use me in his film, and Colin and I were to have dinner with him the following night.

The Italian was all smouldering eyes and tight Italian shirt and trousers and knowing, sexy looks. He and Mary started talking about Dublin—Mary had been brought up in the Coombe by a grandmother and that is one of the oldest parts of Dublin left so she promised to take this Italian around.

I looked round but couldn’t see Colin. I presumed he’d gone to the loo or something. The Italian journalist took a bottle of whiskey out from under his jacket and I went off to the kitchen to get cups and some water.

Ruth’s house was a bungalow. It looked out over Bray. She bought it cheap from an American playwright who had it specially designed for himself and was going to live in it, and write, and be inspired by Ireland; he only lasted a month and went off shouting it was the ‘most Goddawful country in the world’, and, ‘the women—Jesus H. Christ!’

All the rooms in the house opened into each other. The kitchen was in the centre of the house with the guest room off one end and the living room off the other. This was to allow guests to fix themselves drinks or food or whatever without tramping through the family’s area. The door to the guest room was slightly open. The light was off. There was some sort of noise, somebody in there. I listened for a minute and then realized there were two people in there. The bed was creaking and I could hear a girl going, Ooh, mmm, ahh—the private moans of love. Odd to hear them; usually you make them yourself so you don’t think of them as existing separately from the physical feeling of making love. I walked over to close the door feeling knowing, indulgent.

The light from the kitchen made a narrow yellow path into the room. I could make out two figures thrashing on the bed.

I stopped dead.

My hand was on the door handle. Black hands coming over my face, my eyes, my consciousness, spinning … spinning …

It was Colin on the bed. Colin and some woman.

I closed the door. Turned round. Went back to the sink. Gripping the cold steel sink, the cold wet hard feeling drove into my bones, like a kid in a comic who’s just been hit on the head with a mallet, the spinning stars and bolts, and then turning and out of the kitchen door and scrabbling among a pile for my coat, and the car keys, and keeping my back to the people in the other room—thinking like a child, If I don’t look, they won’t see me. Then my whole body turning electric, my head transparent, and thinking, If anyone touches me I’ll disintegrate, dissolve; and picking up the coat and saying to myself, Be calm, be white calm, but go, go quickly before the disintegration. Don’t scream, don’t make a fuss, just go; soon they’ll all be laughing at you, soon, but not now, don’t wait, get out before their faces follow you, laughing, laughing, laughing …

I was running down the road to the car. It was like those awful dreams when your heart pounds and you run and run and run but your legs have turned to liquid plastic and they squodge onto the pavements and stick and your arms are outstretched and something awful is following you and you know you’ll never make it round the corner.

I heard footsteps following. I got to the car. Tried to get the keys in. Stuffing them in. Which are the bloody, bloody keys, oh God help me find the keys and then—

A hand on my shoulder. I turn round. It was Mary.

‘What’s happened to you?’ she was saying. ‘I saw you charging out the door. What’s the matter?’ and I was screaming, ‘Just go away and leave me alone—everyone go away.’ There wasn’t anyone else. Just Mary.

I was shouting and crying and thinking I must go, now, now, now.

Mary was saying, ‘Wait a minute, you can’t drive a car in that condition,’ and then she was holding me and I had my head down on her shoulder and tears were pouring out and she was just holding and saying ‘Okay now, okay,’ and I was wanting to drain my whole self out through my eyes, a hot liquid, let it pour and pour and then I’d no longer be, I’d just be a flowing stream, and Mary just held on to me and gradually I began to ease down again.

I pulled up straight. Sniffing, wiping my face. All I could think of again was running, going.

‘Have a cigarette,’ Mary said and pulled out a packet and lit one for herself and held up the light to me and my hands were shaking so much I could hardly hold the cigarette. She didn’t look at me. We stood there in the moonlight, smoking, and then she said, ‘Walk a little bit. It’s often better if you walk.’ So we started walking up the road and then I could feel the pain creeping back again and the tears coming up and this terrible confusion in my head and had to stop and I couldn’t remember what I was saying except something like ‘Help me, help me,’ and I was holding on to her.

We must have been out there for half an hour. I told Mary I’d seen Colin screwing this other girl. I didn’t know, yet, who it was. I hated that word, screwing. I said, ‘Screw, screw, screw the lot of you,’ and the anger and tears and hurt were all jumbled up again.

She said, ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t walk away, run away from it. I’d go back to the party, go into the room and say, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ I laughed at that, a cracked laugh with tears floating all around it, but the thought of walking into the midst of their passion was too much. I said, ‘You must be crazy.’

We were standing in the roadway having this weird conversation. Mary was saying, ‘Are you scared? Are you scared what might happen if you went back?’

‘I’m not scared at all,’ I said. I was thinking then, ‘Why doesn’t she leave me alone?’ I said, ‘The point is that we believe in free love; if Colin wants to go and sleep with another woman, then he can. I’ve no right to stop him. I don’t own him after all, I mean we’re both free people.’

‘Then why are you crying?’ Mary said. ‘If you have it all so well worked out, why cry?’

‘I’m crying because I’m tired. I’ve had ... I don’t know. I’m just so nervy all the time…’ Stop, I thought. Stop telling this woman. She’ll only laugh at you later. They were all the same. They’d listen to you and say There, there, and then off to bed with your man if they got half a chance. They really liked it if they thought they’d comforted you beforehand. Made it spicier.

Mary was saying, ‘Oh poor, bloody women. Always eating their hearts out trying to be cooler and more sophisticated than the doll next door and cracking up in the process.’

I said, ‘I’m not cracking up,’ and my voice sounded exactly as if I was.

Mary took my arm and said, ‘Come back in and have a drink. Maybe if you say Boo! to the monster he’ll turn out to have feet of clay.’

I was just going to say, very snotty, ‘Look I don’t need your advice thank you,’ or something like that, and then I thought, ‘Well why not? It’s better than going home to that flat and waiting for Colin to come in. Why not indeed?’ So the two of

us started walking back to the nightmare party.

By the time we’d returned, the party faces had slipped a bit. The girls were getting tipsy. Girls always seem to get tipsy quicker than men, but then they don’t get that evil, black drunk men get sometimes.

Girls just open their faces; their faces grow greasy and their pores open up and their eyes go smaller, swimmier, and their mouths bigger and they look up at men and you’d think some of them were just asking to be smashed.

Mary went off to get some drinks and I thought, Please let her stay with me and not go off with some guy. Please.

Angus came over. ‘Having little girly chats in the loo then?’ he said, a stupid, drunken smile on his face.

‘Oh Angus, piss off,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you just leave me alone.’ Angus looked. His eyes went black, like pinheads in his big white face. Then he smiled, ‘Oh dear, cranky tonight, are we darling?’ I said, ‘Fuck you Angus.’ I said it quietly first, just mouthing the words, tasting them. Then I said it louder. I said it and saw the party faces turning, turning—Who is this? I said, ‘Fuck you Angus.’ Angus turned on his heel and walked away. I could hear my voice; it went up to the ceiling like a hard blot and then came down again; it went round and round the room, laughing.

That was the first time I ever said, ‘Fuck you’ to anybody. In public. I was standing on my own, watching the faces and bodies, and it was like looking through the end of a telescope—they’d all gone distorted and tiny.

Mary said, ‘Have a drink.’

We sat down on a sofa. Luckily I had one of those faces that didn’t show up all blotchy and red after tears; it just went sort of whiter and thinner. I was shaking again. Mary said ‘What happened?’ I told her I’d shouted at Angus. She just said, ‘About time too.’ Some of the people looked at us sitting there but by that stage I didn’t care.

Mary started talking about what she did in the telly. Something about Light Entertainment shows, she kept saying ‘LE’—that was what they called Light Entertainment. I wasn’t listening very much. I was drinking and wondering what I was going to do when Colin came out. I thought, I’ll go in like Mary says. I’ll just walk in and say, ‘May I inquire what you two animals are up to?’ I thought, That will sound laughable. Colin will just laugh. They’ll both laugh. They’ll be clutching each other, clutching breasts and penises and hair and saying, ‘Ha, ha, do go away little girl, nobody really wants you here, just go back to the nursery and play with your toys—there’s a good girl.’

I was beginning to get drunk. Systematically. I was thinking of forests inside my head. Dark forests where the trees met overhead and you ran and ran and never got out. I was thinking of a clown at a circus once, when I was a kid. His face all white with big red tears painted down his cheek. He used to ask us to come and sit on his knee and he’d tickle the girls, and his hands were like iron, tickling. After the show once he put his hand up my knickers behind a caravan and I went white inside and ran and never told anyone. I was thinking of rivers. I was thinking of a lake in Glendalough that had a hard, flat, grey face. It was held up on a rack between three mountains. It never moved. Just this flat, grey, face looking up at the sky. I was thinking of Father and Mary sitting in that house with the stiff-legged, unblinking dolls waiting and watching upstairs. I was thinking of Colin and why did I stay with him, why? And thinking it was because of definition, something to do with being told to do this and do that, a reassurance.

Ruth and a man joined us. He was an artist. He had a very long face. Long like a horse’s, and his lips were rubbery, they moved separately, up and down. He was saying, ‘I’d like to paint you some day, you’ve a beautiful face, a beautiful Irish face with all that black hair and those green-brown eyes and that marvellous white skin … mmm.’ I thought, any minute now he’s going to lick me, like an ice cream.

We were sitting on the floor. He passed round a joint. Ruth was very drunk; she was saying, ‘Marshall McLuhan will replace Jesus in the spiritual consciousness of Western civilization.’ She was looking at the artist as she was saying it. He would just say, ‘Yeah, sure Ruthy.’ He wasn’t interested in her, much. He was getting into himself on the pot. Going very quiet, still.

Mary didn’t smoke. She said, ‘I’m part of the Booze Culture,’ and Ruth and this artist (I can’t remember his name) just looked at her with their eyes glassy, and you could see they were thinking, Who is this creep refusing to play the game? I was thinking, God how is it that human beings can sometimes be so awful to each other? Colin would say, That is the morbidity induced by too much gin.

I was looking around the room at all the girls and thinking of this story I was told once about a French king who dressed up all these dolls in the latest French fashions, high couture, and sent them round the world at vast expense to show what the latest Parisian designs were. I thought, That’s what we women are like. I told Ruth and Mary and the artist about the French king. I said, ‘Don’t you think that’s what we’re like—fashion dolls?’ The artist said, ‘Weird, absolutely far round.’

Somebody put on some music. There were only about twenty people left. No Colin. I thought, They’re asleep in there by now, must be. Couldn’t still be going. Asleep in each other’s arms. Sweaty and warm. Her damn eyes. Did she keep her eyes open during it?

Angus came over and asked Mary to dance. She went off and I nearly panicked. I wanted to scream out. I thought, Keep dancing, that’s the main thing.

Somebody put on ‘Zorba the Greek’. The sounds were long, like hunting horns over fields and fields of land—long, streaming sounds.

I could feel the music as if it were being played through me. The artist got up and started to dance; he was saying, ‘Dance, lovely lady, dance.’ His voice was like a snake’s: Dance, dance. We started dancing to each other, our bodies touching and moving and whirling in great curves of light and sound to the music, and he was lifting me up on a table, a low round table, and dancing round the table, the music was going faster then, the drums were in my head, and I was the music …

I was wearing this silk shirt and silk trousers, and I was lifting the shirt and feeling the air on my belly, and the shifting of my skin and I felt I was part of the centre of the earth, I was life, and I was pulling the shirt further and then unbuttoning it and the artist was dancing, his head rolling on his shoulders; he was saying, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ and I could see more people watching, and they were all dancing round the table, sighing and moving, and the music was slowing again and I was undoing the zip on my trousers and letting them fall, fall …

… and my hands went up to my breasts and I was dancing just in my pants and the music was going faster, faster, and the people were going, Ahh, ahh, and I was swirling now, drunk; my body was gold, it was water, it was the moon melting under the sun, and dancing and dancing, and the artist was touching and hands were stretching out and touching, and touching, and I thought, I’ll dance for you all, I’ll dance for the pain and the sorrow and …

Colin’s face at the kitchen door. Colin’s white face. Colin running. Colin shouting. Hitting the artist in his beard and a little mess of teeth and blood. Colin purple in the face. Colin shouting, ‘Get down Elizabeth, get down.’ Colin ripping his jacket off wrapping it round me, wrapping and rough, like I was never going to be opened again. Mary’s face. Smiling. Mary saying, ‘See you round kiddo,’ or something like that.