It was Day Eighteen. Estrin sat herself squarely before her dingy morning maté and for once counted up a different calendar. She’d finished her last progesterone supplement four days before the fast, and it hadn’t worked. She had to face the fact that there was one other reason women did not menstruate than that their fat-muscle ratio was so very fierce.
Not that Estrin for a minute believed such an absurdity possible. The fast had obviously upset her chemical balance in every way. It was only from routine caution that she mobilized for the Royal Victoria. Besides, getting the test was something to do. Estrin could no longer manage to cut molding or refinish furniture; she could barely read; a slow walk around the corner would fill her afternoon.
In the courtyard, a forbidding bronze of Queen Victoria brandished a scepter in Estrin’s way, inflating its chins in disapproval that any institution bearing the Queen’s name would harbor that clinic on the third floor.
Inside, Estrin took an obscure pleasure in the place. The Royal was grim. The bright kindergarten daffodils of Farrell’s ward had disturbed her more than these yellowed corridors, for the mindless murals of City lied: they belied the corruption of the body, the horror stories the tower block disguised. City’s demeaning floral optimism painted over tragedy with decor like a great big get-well card for the terminally ill. Estrin preferred to stare ugly mortality in the face. The RVH suggested leeches, nuns, unanesthetized amputation. Its nurses wore buns, its doctors wore spectacles. A place where sickness was still unsightly, from which the healthy fled—why, the Royal Victoria was a real hospital.
The waiting room of the clinic was itself a form of contraception, since ten minutes of reading its posters and you would never have sex again: AIDS: PROTECT YOURSELF; RECOGNIZING HERPES; WOMEN: ARE YOU BEING PHYSICALLY OR MENTALLY ABUSED? CHLAMYDIA: WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW CAN HURT YOU . . . Patients stared straight ahead, hands protecting their laps, seated mute and immobile in every other chair.
Once Estrin delivered her urine sample, she was invited into an office. The woman was nice enough, and wouldn’t charge Estrin, though she shouldn’t have been covered by National Health. She asked about Estrin’s period, and Estrin felt irresponsible admitting she’d missed two. Just give me the fucking results. She did not want to tell this stranger about her “partners” or what she would do if the test was positive when the chances were so ridiculously thin—
But when the results came back Estrin felt calm. She did not say, “You’re kidding,” or ask the nurse to repeat herself. Estrin realized she had known from the start what the answer would be. Through that orgy of mince pies, she had gained enough weight to ovulate. She found she was smiling. Amiably, she allowed them to make a counseling appointment she would not keep. Really, she felt amused.
Leaving the hospital, she stroked her chin. She waved goodbye to Queen Victoria.
For now that the unthinkable had occurred she was impressed. Estrin felt more part of the human race than she had for years. Functionally infertile since fifteen, she was tired of being the exception. And though she had no intention of Francis Hughesing herself beyond two more days, at this moment on Day Nineteen Estrin Lancaster was dying, and she admired that inside this shriveled, moribund host another animal thrived, like lichen on a felled tree, flowers blooming in radioactive Hiroshima—
My relationship to sex is apocalyptic/Most people don’t think of children as the end of the world.
Only now, a block up the Falls, did she think of the father. Estrin’s laugh was not very nice.
She surveyed the prams wheeling along the footpath, so many women younger than herself rustling out of shops with whole families, the eldest old enough to pour petrol bombs. For the first time she felt envious. Fine, the ladies looked plenty haggard—they lived on chips and never had a minute’s peace to themselves. But Estrin had a bit too much peace to herself. And while she’d seen their worlds as tiny, confined to this island and often to a single neighborhood, Estrin’s world was smaller still, a portable universe of one. These women, too, had left the Royal’s third-floor clinic and returned to a husband, of all things, with what they regarded as good news. Estrin recalled all the sappy fifties movies of her childhood, where the woman cries and the man hugs her and gets her a chair and won’t let her carry the groceries. Crap, a load of crap; why, Estrin could not remember one time watching a sit-com where a pregnant woman totters back from a clinic after eating nothing for almost three weeks, dreading calling the father, who is off drinking with a load of paramilitaries on the Antrim coast, the mother not proud but apologetic: Don’t worry, fuck you, I’ll take care of it.
Well, he was good for the abortion anyway, and it would be expensive, entailing a shuttle ticket to London as well as non-resident medical fees. Since in Northern Ireland you could blow eleven Prods in Enniskillen to kingdom come but you couldn’t scrape a tadpole from between your legs—
And wouldn’t the bastard kidnap this misfortune for his own anguish, wouldn’t he coopt her suffering if he could? Well, she wouldn’t allow it. All he would have to do is pay. She would carry her own groceries: herbal tea.
Bitter. Back home, the house a shambles, teacups everywhere, tea, tea, tea, fucking tea . . . No reason this altered the fast. Estrin sat and tried to feel pregnant. With only a few more days, she wanted to know what it was like.
That night the club was humming with the next day’s Border Poll. At the last minute the SDLP had endorsed the referendum—Estrin felt the shadow of O’Phelan cross the club. News of the conference had been hitting the press; even the Green Door had heard of it. MacBride had been winking and nodding up a storm on Ulster Newstime, and it annoyed Estrin to see how he took full credit for the negotiations when she had watched Farrell drag himself out of bed with four hours’ sleep for a full year.
After hours, Estrin lured Malcolm into lingering. He assumed she needed to talk about Duff, but she didn’t bring Shearhoon up at all, instead ambling off on a queer tack about how she had no interest in deluding herself about sacrificing for a whole country, but she could stand to do something once in a while for even one other person besides herself: “I mean, I’m sick to death of lifting weights, but I wouldn’t mind pushing some stranger’s car up a hill. I’m bored with running, but I’d gladly help you move—I’d carry books up three flights of stairs. And I’m fucking tired of skipping dessert to stay thin, but I wouldn’t mind going hungry for a kid—I read Famine the other day, with all these mothers starving so their children could eat and I salivated with envy.”
“Est.” Malcolm took her hand with that paternal softness of his so remarkable in a young boy. “Stop waffling. What’s biting your bum?”
“I’m pregnant.” It was the first time she’d said it out loud. She enjoyed the sound of it.
Malcolm rather enjoyed it, too. “O’Phelan?”
“Aye,” she said, and laughed, catching herself—it was the first time she’d ever said aye. Must be the kid. He was half Irish.
“What’s he say, like?”
“Not much lately. He doesn’t know.”
“You clued me in before the father?”
She sighed. “Tells you something, doesn’t it.”
“Are you going to get married?”
“Oh, Malcolm. All these guns and you people still live in the House at Pooh Corner.”
“You wouldn’t have it on your own?”
“No, Malcolm. I won’t have it, period.”
“Est!” Malcolm drew away. “Bloody hell, that’s a sin!”
“Yes,” she considered. “It may be.” Estrin was interested. She had no previous qualms about abortion. It seems her qualms were only about this one. “Anyway, I’ll have to fly to England. If you could cover for me at the club . . .”
Malcolm didn’t respond.
“Boy, I should write my brother.” She stretched. “Dear Billy: You will be relieved to hear I have finally experienced Real Life. I will promptly slaughter it, but I thought you’d be proud of me, for a day or two.”
They stayed late. He massaged her temples, his touch subtly painful, the wrong fingers.
She walked home; in the last days of the fast, she couldn’t bear the roar of the motorcycle. Her steps were short, an old woman’s. Home, with tea, she stared into the coals of her fire.
(“Are you going to get married?”)
Stop it. He would never. You would never. Estrin apologized to herself: It’s the child. These kids start trying to survive you early; they know they have to fight, even at the size of a pea. And I am tired of fighting. I know you think that’s because I’m a girl. Very well, I am a girl. And fine, I won’t marry or have children. All the same, there’s a waiting in me and there’s the tiredness and there’s all this running, away more than toward, and I don’t see what’s going to get warmer or closer. There is no luxury in my life. There is no leaning or holding, no enclosure, no shore. I can see myself older and I’m scatty. The eccentric aunt who never eats a meal. Thin and scrappy and spilling stories no one cares to hear. Well traveled and full of voices—old voices—Farrell’s in the morning—“This orange juice is gorgeous!”
At 4 a.m. it struck her that, though Farrell had called her often enough at this hour, she had never dared ring him past twelve. This was the last wild night of the conference and he was surely legless, but for once his politics dwarfed—the Real Life filled her with quiet power. So she rang and rang the Antrim Arms and would not stop hassling the bartender and other strangers until they finally roused Farrell O’Phelan himself to the phone.
There is a Chekhov short story called “The Bet.” A facile banker wagers two million rubles that his friend will never succeed in a self-imposed imprisonment for fifteen years. Accepting the challenge, the friend condemns himself to a single room. Years pass. The prisoner spends most of his time reading. Meanwhile, the banker suffers a failing of fortunes, and an idle wager turns ruinous. He appears at the end of the fifteen years in a sweat. His friend has been strictly adhering to the terms of their agreement. So on the last day the banker is astonished to discover an empty cell, and a letter. The document recounts a growing existential disenchantment. In his exile, having read so much philosophy, his friend has grown contemptuous. As an expression of this disdain, he has left his room precisely one day before he could justly collect his money.
Estrin had always liked this story. The letter had been preachy but the gesture pure. She was never quite sure what it meant until the early hours of Day Twenty, cradling her tea.
“Wake up, you willick, or you’ll sleep through till the polls close!”
“I don’t vote.” It was a principle. Farrell slammed down the phone. Christ, the thing never stopped ringing, and hadn’t this place wrung enough from him for three weeks—one party always stomping out and having to be enticed softy-softy back to the table, night after night half the lot soggy with drink before tea, the other half, Sinners and Paisleyites (they had so much in common), scowling in the back of the room sipping pure orange . . . Three solid weeks of a headache smack between the eyes, his sinuses drying in cigarette smoke like flaps of hung haddock, his back creaky from soliciting aggressive short people . . . And it took them a bit, but the crowd had warmed to the performance, the DUP spraying Sinners with Roachguard to eliminate “insects,” sonorous readings of the OED entry on scum pitched against an equally loud appeal for the support of Gaelic football in Irish—bad Irish; the Union Jacks and tricolors sneaked up in the dining room early mornings, the ritual rippings down, the obligatory punch-ups, and then last night, inconceivably, the maudlin singsong around the piano as, unable to agree on “Say Hello to the Provos,” “God Save the Queen,” or “The Pope’s a Darkie,” they finally converged on “Barbara Allen,” with the Sinners, DUP, UUU, and SDLP in four-part harmony, dripping on each other’s shoulders and bawling on the refrain. Now Farrell could rest in peace, because he had obviously seen everything.
But no, MacBride had to harass him, and here it was still pitch-dark—what—eight— Didn’t he go to bed at eight? Ah, p.m. Farrell rolled over. Fine. He’d wondered what he would do today, and now he’d done it. And thank fuck, he had spared himself megaphones pouring MacBride’s syrupy voice down the streets of Antrim. How fitting to spend election day instead sleeping off three liters of white wine.
The sheet wrapped around his legs; Farrell declined to struggle. This was the kind of bondage he could get into: being tied to a bedstead, full stop. Had he ever loved a woman as much as a real feather pillow? Quiet sifted the room like dust. Curtains drawn to the dark, phone jack pulled; Farrell considered seriously if this was the finest moment of his life. Even in the disposal days he had never worked harder than this last year. The conference itself had been a marathon; now it was over. Across the Province votes were cast, and how delightful, whichever way they went, to be able to affect them no more. And for the first time since he was delirious with pneumonia he could not think of a single thing he had to do.
A memory squirmed. He did not know if he’d dreamt this. Yet on the notepad there, a scrawl, E-8, like a chess notation. She did ring, after all. Tea, she said. Never more insistent. Had something to tell him. Jesus God, when these women “had something to say” he suddenly remembered an appointment—in Venezuela! And she couldn’t put it off one bloody day, had to be tomorrow night. With the election party starting that afternoon, he could tell already he’d be late.
Farrell sat up. No, no, no, he did not want this moment to be over. For a hospital, my kingdom for a hospital. Alas, he felt down his chest and inhaled, and it seemed he was in perfect health.
Braced with a shower, in a freshly cleaned suit, Farrell decided to enjoy the evening, what was left of it. Downstairs in the dining room he found a handful of other conferees who, after a devoted session that had lasted through to morning, would not be bullied by their parties to spend election day on knock-ups, shillying pensioners to the polls. Though the kitchen would close for the night in an hour, the table was laid in one stage or another of breakfast. It was the respectful, wry repast of the hungover: jokes were carefully not too funny, mention of alcohol was no go. Gentlemanly speculation over coffee and brown bread: even with the SDLP’s grudging endorsement, the poll’s turnout would be dicey. Shared incredulity that the constitutional nationalists actually swung round on an internal solution. General concession that the Provos would put up a ruckus, that it was best the next few days to avoid central Belfast. Farrell was surprised to discover he liked some of these codgers. The North attracted a different breed of politician than elsewhere. They had character, even if it was bad. He was further surprised that the men liked him, too. As they retired to the lounge, they gave Farrell a tiny standing ovation—pat-pat-pat—not too loud.
Ballot boxes were locked up overnight; counting would start at 9 a.m., so there was no point in heading back to City Hall till morning. The remaining conferees drove home or went back to bed. Farrell, liberated once more from the twenty-four-hour day, which was clearly only for ordinary people, stayed up to flip magazines. How arbitrarily you chopped your life into little pieces of days, weeks, years, when it was really one long uninterrupted sigh. He roamed the empty rooms of the hotel. The Antrim Arms had not begun to recover; and the sight of so much shattered crockery, ties looped over chandeliers, and three-setting political diagrams penned on tablecloths made Farrell encouragingly wistful: he must have had a good time.
Early morning he packed and, with nothing else on, took a walk to the Giant’s Causeway as the sun rose. Stepping the hexagonal stones with the North Channel slapping under the peach horizon, Farrell observed, It’s beautiful, clinically. Magnificent scenery always seemed to exclude him. It confused him. Farrell didn’t know what to do with it. Just like: women.
Ah me. It was not true there was nothing left on the agenda; better get cracking. Farrell hiked back to the hotel, where the manager had put together a hefty bill for damages. Sensing he was making one of his usual mistakes, Farrell wrote out a personal check. A bad habit from that childhood of zero credit/total blame: he paid for things.
It was a brilliant, clear morning. Testing his immunity to scenery, he had the taxi take the coast road. Meanwhile, the X’s began to flutter one by one into the pigeonholes of City Hall. Sometime in mid-afternoon they should have a profile of the results and turnout, and that was when Farrell would pay the call on Angus MacBride he’d looked forward to all year, if not for the last twenty-five.
Day Twenty. Goldenrod sun, light which cast the Falls in the hue of an earlier century. It was hard to tell if the shimmer off the neighborhood was due to the weather, yesterday’s election, or the army, out in force. There was always more energy here with the Saracens plowing up and down, patrols jogging side streets. Their jungle camouflage amused the American, for there were few trees in West Belfast—the bright blotchy green only made the boys stand out. In effect, the soldiers were the trees.
Estrin walked downtown. The waist of her jeans puckered under her belt. She had excellent posture. Shoulderbones poked her leather jacket. Browsing in Waterstone’s, Estrin selected, with care, The Chocolate Book. In Kelly’s, when she ordered coffee and they put milk in it, she had to send it back. When it returned black she couldn’t hack it, but the cup kept her hand warm. Otherwise, she felt startlingly normal, less shaky than for the whole last week. She paged recipes at the bar, determined to find the one concoction with the most butter and chocolate, and finally lit on Truffle Cake, requiring no flour at all.
Estrin shopped through early afternoon. Farrell liked good prawns, and they were hard to find. So was high-quality bittersweet chocolate. But Estrin, having waited twenty days, was patient. She bought expensive Côte de Jura, with a color like the morning’s startling sun; freesia and mums to match; cognac. She took ten minutes in the bakery selecting her exact loaf of bread. The slabs of salmon were the color of steak. In the end, she spent fifty pounds she could hardly spare: part of the fun.
Roisin cleaned. She decided what to wear. She went to the Botanic Gardens and strolled through the Palm House. The extra oxygen lightened her head; the moisture felt kind on her skin. Later she shopped for perfume and new shoes. She called by the caterer’s once more, who was annoyed at so much checking up on a two-person meal. Roisin was impervious to paltry annoyance. For touches, she returned to town for french roast and champagne truffles. She asked the off-license for a fine white wine. They suggested the Côte de Jura. It was dear, so she believed them. And brandy, she said. Champagne! They looked at her like, How drunk does he have to be? I don’t know, she wanted to explain. Very.
It was unlikely Angus would get away from his election party, but in the fantasy they both came. Though apparently a ghastly mistake, in a way she had arranged it. Painful maybe, but enough was enough. Face things. They would each make their bid for her, furious with the other. She would stop them from coming to blows. This isn’t your decision to make, for once, she reproaches them. Men, you never seem to recognize when for once a woman has the power. I choose. And I have chosen. She turns. I love you. The confession would seem brave, but only just before, and then when it came, it would be easy. I have loved you from the first. I think I have loved you when you were only a name to me. I love you in the way we say the weather is fair, or that is a chair: my love is not an opinion but a fact. I love you in the same way I am five foot nine, and I could no more feel otherwise than grow shorter. My love is real as any object, and in this way it is simple and even ordinary. It sits with us beside the wine, stationary and calm, in the way of things. Because my love is not a demand, an assertion, a complaint: it is a fact. And I will love you every day for the rest of my life with this same ordinariness, just as I do laundry and fix lunch—your laundry; your lunch.
By the time Farrell arrived, City Hall was already packed and perking; the stewards were having difficulty keeping out interlopers without passes. Outside, groups clumped around the building according to affiliation, breaking out packs of Harp on park benches. The entrance was looped with cables, and cameras boomed into Farrell’s face as he shouldered through the crowd. Not only the microphones of RTE and the BBC nosed forward, but ABC, NBC. He failed to answer questions posed in Finnish, German, and Italian accents. Inside, the crowds were already impatient with the coffee served in the rotunda; flasks glinted down side halls. MacBride was easy to locate by the ooze of supplicants, that big red beacon of a face beaming the length of the chamber like an overgrown Boy Scout’s.
And little wonder. By noon the votes were largely tabulated in counties Antrim and Down; the big white billboards outside the counting rooms scrawled with the approval of the whole Province. My votes, thought Farrell, and would not, just today, chastise himself for being small. Just: My votes. Inside, Farrell went up to the pigeonholes and stuck his finger through the grid to touch the actual paper. He was waved off. But those are my votes. Mine.
Plenty of hungry hangers-on sucked up to Farrell as well. Yet the attentions felt unpleasant. They were impersonal—to position, inclusion, info. How much would any of these prats have had to say to him in the days of Talisker? He found himself searching the chamber for someone to confide this to. Just as in the distillery, a figure flirted in doorways, with the elusive flicker of someone who was just leaving, or who had decided, with a glance in the room, not to come in after all.
Grocery shopping had never been more voluptuous. For all of yesterday’s diet had felt cruel. While planning to scrape it aside, Estrin was still conscious of starving someone besides herself. She would like very much to feed the child a farewell banquet.
For this rebellion was of a premier order. While the fast had become almost easy and she could see her way clear at this point to Day Fifty-nine, when Francis Hughes had kicked it, Estrin had invited Farrell not for Day Twenty-one, but for Day Twenty. Because Estrin thought she was full of shit. Estrin had decided fasting for three weeks was dorky. It took a form of super-discipline to overthrow herself, an exotic will not to meet a goal but to reject it. She had never taken on a more formidable enemy, the absolute enemy who knows the position of all your troops and even where you are thinking of moving them. Having outflanked an opponent with perfect intelligence (You’re just weak, you can’t make it . . .), Estrin clutched her plastic bags stretching at the handles, the spoils of war. Her exaltation was indescribable. She bought nuts, ice cream, fruit, all for the day before her birthday, a date she could never remember celebrating precisely, and so, after thirty-two years and 364 days, it was about time.
The results of the poll were officially disclosed at 3 p.m. The power-sharing initiative had passed by 70 percent, better than expected, even endorsed in some of the border territories of Armagh. Turnout was hardly brilliant, but they were not suffering large-scale boycotts. In a politic of absolutes, the referendum had been destined to get slapped with SUCCESS or FAILURE and they had squeaked by.
The bomb outside Boots seemed positively celebratory.
MacBride slipped in a few interviews while still lucid; by six his only serious dialogue was with bottles of champagne.
The festivities were in a large rented room of the Europa. Big, square, brown, neon over unstable press-wood tables, the Europa met Angus’s requirements perfectly. On the one hand it had ghastly decor, exorbitant prices, and appalling security; on the other, it was not Whitewells.
“Don’t I deserve at least a glass?”
Angus pip-pipped as he had in Cambridge, and made a show of pouring for his old friend, but one he staged for the lot; Farrell was getting routine bluster, generic congratulation. This amounted to being ignored. Farrell would take care of that.
He retreated to observe. Amazing. MacBride had managed to mop up credit for the whole shebang. But it was my bloody referendum. My idea. I put it across in Westminster. I sold it down South. I won over the SDLP. And wasn’t the conference the same: filched. Look at the news. It was actually being called the MacBride Conference. By election day it had become the MacBride Referendum. A tiny Catholic experience of plantation. And with his typically unconstitutional, two-faced Fenian terrorism, Farrell had exacted his revenge.
Farrell kept running in his head the moment this evening when MacBride would look at him really, for once the two of them in a room talking straight. Farrell could not recall a single discussion with MacBride when they hadn’t, secretly, been talking about something else. The quality of their relationship had grown only more ulterior, and it was wearying.
As the party pickled on and Farrell decided he had earned more than one slainte of champagne, he began putting the impending showdown off. Why, by the time he angled toward Angus again, he was clearly forcing himself, and the glass in his hand was shaking. When he fetched the journal from his overcoat, the cover stuck to his fingers, tacky with sweat. By the time he sidled up to the thief of his referendum, Farrell had faced his disappointment: that he was not enjoying this; that he simply wanted to get it over.
“You’ve a room upstairs?”
“Aye, but not to spirit the likes of you.”
“You had better.”
“There’s trouble?”
“There has been considerable trouble, which you were spared. Take your glass. You’ll need it.”
Grumpily Angus relinquished his limelight and led Farrell up to his room. Angus sat on one of the single beds and slapped his thighs. “Well, now. Let’s make this jiffy.”
Farrell remained standing. “I’ve yet to formally congratulate you.”
“You couldn’t have brought me up here for that.”
“No, I brought you up to congratulate me.”
“Spot on, then. Thumbs up, well done. Can we go? I’ve my eye on one silky slip of a girl worked terrible hard for the SAYS YES campaign; she deserves a reward.”
“I’m pleased you’ve such a panoply of lovelies to toast our success. You won’t miss one.”
“Come again?”
It was not quite the look Farrell was shooting for, so he fired on. “Besides, I only borrowed her. You can have her back if she’ll go.” Farrell’s coolness was a bit overdone. He had played this scene in his head too many times, and now found himself imitating his own images; reality was not measuring up. He tried to remember some of the zingers he’d concocted in the back of taxis. Instead, he was reminded of the pebble dash in Newry, bungling Eastwood’s lines.
“Stuff your fancy footwork, O’Phelan. You’ve something to say?”
Farrell handed him the Fortnight. “I know it’s tedious. But sometimes you should read your own mistress’s poetry.”
Angus scanned the page, then glared up for explanation.
“Surely you recognize the voice. It’s been whispering in the back of the ear since you were sixteen.”
Angus tossed the magazine on the spread. “Why can’t you be a man for once and say flat out you’re bumping my girlfriend?”
“Have been bumping; I am through. The point is, I did it for you—”
“How can you—”
“Hear me out. She was on the verge of leaking your affair. Once the rumor hit the Sunday World, she’d have wrecked you. And SAYS YES. Not just because she’s Catholic, but in case you need reminding, you are a married man.”
“Your head’s cut. Roisin’s no tout.”
“Roisin St. Clair is an attractive but aging woman, childless and unmarried. Face it, in another year or two you’d be through with her yourself. She knew that. But in the future, old boy, try to pick your mistresses with more care. Roisin seems quiet, but she’s scrappy. A tout? She could always pass the tattle off to herself as loyalty to the Republican movement.”
“Roisin doesn’t give a toss about the Republican movement.”
“Aye, but she did about you, MacBride.”
“In which case, how could it be in her vaguest interest to spill? She’s kept her bake tight for two years. Your story’s not holding together, boyo.”
Funny, Farrell thought the same thing. “By the time I got to her she’d concocted some remarkable fancies. All to do with myths of the two communities and that. You’re Protestant; you can divorce. She reasoned if she car-bombed your career, you’d have nothing to lose by leaving your wife.”
“Piffle.”
“Yes,” said Farrell sadly. “You have to admire women sometimes for what they can believe. I’ve urged Roisin to move on from poetry; I’m convinced she has a much greater talent for science fiction.”
“So O’Phelan came to the rescue?”
“I’ll be candid, I’m not sure how much I was motivated by deep personal loyalty. But I would not see the opportunity to sort out this Province glitched because you get an itch in your trousers late afternoons.”
MacBride was finally growing incredulous. “You actually expect me to be grateful!”
“You bloody well should be. It hasn’t been easy, linchpinning a delicate political scaffolding with a man who fingers down every pair of knickers with expandable elastic. Really, Angus, this womanizing has got to stop. I pulled you out this time. But I’m not about to devote myself to seducing your lovers in order to dismantle bombshells in your personal life. My disposal days are over. And this has been particularly sordid fiddle I don’t wish to repeat. So settle down, or even stick to Roisin. I imagine I’ve rendered her relatively harmless.”
“How could she possibly go back to this ugly old bear once she’s sampled the refined wares of Farrell O’Phelan?”
“Well, she seems to have stomached both of us for some time now.”
“How long?” asked Angus warily.
Farrell had an intuition he shouldn’t say, but it felt too delicious, a spade in black dirt, a blade through wormy ground. “This whole last year.”
“You are one stinking wog—”
“I figured you wouldn’t shake my hand. But I expect in the light of day, as Secretary of State, you will see my administrations as more charitable. She’s rather pretty in low light and a nice dress, but not my first choice. And certainly devoted—a little too. Clinging, in fact. Still, no one deserves to be shattered, do they? If I were you, I’d call round to pick up the pieces.”
“I suppose O’Phelan the Fascinating has broken her heart?”
“Yes,” said Farrell simply, and with a glance at his watch reached to let himself out, lest he make it two.
“You’ve always had an exalted sense of your own importance, O’Phelan,” Angus called at his back. “I’ve brought you along for the ride. Yourself, you’ve never more than piddled on the sidelines. Disposed of a bomb or two, put up with Frankie Millar in The Crown. But I could have pulled this off without you, kid. You’ve always missed the ticket here: this game’s all about who your friends are. I’m about the only one you’ve got. Right, for once you joined the proper team. But without me you’re outside the fence—one more unruly football fan.”
The lift shut. Farrell felt dimly depressed. In all, he’d found MacBride’s reaction rather pale.
Even after twenty days, two extra hours were interminable. Her preparations done well before eight, she’d had to cellophane the salmon and put the bread back in its bag. She’d left the shrimp unshelled for casual effect, to seem to go to little trouble, though by now she could have shelled them several times. Estrin decided not to get angry. She would not be manipulated into one more trivial domestic, livid that dinner has been ruined! while the man is out tending to the affairs of the world. So she got depressed instead. The old pictures churned her head: nausea and inattention. She was nervous about digesting her food. She was afraid if she explained about the fast he would only find her potty. And she felt guilty for being pregnant. How quickly she’d assure him she wouldn’t have the child, to prove it wasn’t a ploy.
When the knock came at last, her dread had steeped the kitchen as the smell of boiled cabbage infused so many Irish walls, and she was sure he would scent the reek of her terror. So ethereal this morning in nineteenth-century sunlight, having worked herself to such a pitch whipping cream, whisking chocolate, never licking the bowl, only to sit here three hours with her feet up, now that it was past ten she was half tempted to tell him to go home. The evening no longer felt appropriate; she didn’t even feel hungry; she’d rather go to sleep.
Ordinarily her visions of an event and its nature on arrival clashed so radically that the fantasy could not survive fact: afterward she could not even remember the mock-up. Whatever she imagined, at least she could be sure it would be wrong. So Estrin was startled to open the door to find the dream kick into real life. Right off she was looking at a bad night. He was holding the door frame on either side in order to remain standing. His eyelids drooped. She felt convinced if he’d shown up at eight, this evening would have gone quite differently, but that was idle speculation now.
“Hiya.” The kiss on her cheek felt impersonal. More than three weeks apart, they did not feel quite comfortable with each other. As resort, Estrin fetched a bottle of wine he did not need. She poured two glasses, and held hers up to the candle; Farrell bent behind the glow: golden. Of all the women Farrell had mentioned, Estrin liked Tarja best.
“So, the poll passed,” said Estrin. “Congrats.”
“Aye, thank bloody hell it’s over.” Farrell flopped on the couch, loosening his tie. “I will spare you the regimen I’ve kept these three weeks, though you can guess.”
“Why not,” said Estrin. “I’ve spared you mine.” Estrin twisted her wine, but did not sip. She had promised herself at most one glass, over the night—test the waters. But from even this she hung back. No ceremony? He didn’t know. The glass seemed beautiful but small, both luminous and insufficient, like a promise to be broken. “But you expected it to sail.”
“On the contrary, this election has been on the brink of disaster from the beginning. It has taken constant supervision, like minding a baby with the croup.”
“What would you know about babies with croup?”
“I was one.”
“Still are.”
“Now that was frosty. Are you miffed? I’ve done something?”
“No, Farrell, you’ve done nothing at all. For a month.”
“Haven’t I rung up?”
Estrin felt heavy and wilted, so overwhelmed by a three-week swoon of puked-up tea, the smudge on the footpath of Amelia Street so recently Duff Shearhoon, that plastic cup in the Royal with its tiny potent tablespoon, the ghastly loom of A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union so soon a day in her own, that she felt curiously at a loss for conversation. She threw coal on the fire. He was beginning to miss out on so much of her life there was nowhere to start, nothing to say; they weren’t even close. She looked over at the drunk man on her sofa and tried to remember her affection for him, the way she would sometimes search for a word in Russian she must have learned: lyubov.
She raised her glass. “We should toast. Tomorrow’s my birthday.” Resigned to it meaning nothing to him, she took her small sip of Côte de Jura and so ended a three-week fast twenty-one hours and twenty minutes early, its few calories seeping through the weakest of victory smiles. It drizzled astringently down her throat, and did not taste so different from camomile tea. Wine could not save her, neither muscle tone nor the Soviet Union could save her, and that man slopped on her couch most certainly could not save her, but, oddly, whole-wheat bread would. She rose abruptly from her crouch before the coals. “I’m off to get dinner,” she announced.
“Is it ready? I’m famished. Haven’t eaten all day.”
“You poor thing!” Estrin cried. “It won’t take long.”
In the small kitchen, he was impatient. His long legs were in the way; she had to keep stepping over them. Though she intended a simple meal, Estrin was proud of her cooking and couldn’t resist embellishments; last-minute tasks added up. Dividing her attention between the stove and Farrell, she boiled the dill hollandaise and had to start again. Farrell glowered.
“We should have gone to 44. It’s after eleven. Maybe you should skip it.”
“Tonight,” said Estrin through her teeth, “I am not skipping dinner.”
“This scullery is stifling. Sure you could survive one night without food.”
“No,” she said, “I’m not sure I could.”
“Have you just a can of soup, then?”
“Farrell, when a woman fixes you dinner, it’s supposed to be a favor. Not a problem.”
“Have you just a biscuit, then? My dear?”
She plunked the plate of prawns before him and returned to sautéing mushrooms. When she looked around, he was not only ignoring the Stilton cocktail sauce but was eating the shrimp with the shells on. His expression was stoic and grim: he was hungry. He would eat these shrimp. He would be a good guest. They were positively indigestible, but he would say nothing.
“I can’t stand it!” she declared, turning off all the burners and pulling up a chair. “I’ll shell them if you won’t. Here.” She was messy but swift, and cleaned a heap to keep him happy. So much for leisurely peeling over confidences and wine. She swept up the shells and wondered whether it was best to cry now or later. Later. No amount of surly abuse, disappointment, no, tonight not Farrell O’Phelan himself would keep Estrin from trying to keep something down her throat.
“So how are the plans for Leningrad coming?”
“I’ve thought of Armenia instead. Spitak, or Leninakusk. Earthquake relief.” Estrin’s ears picked up, as if someone else had spoken. She wondered what she would say next.
“Fashionable. Right up your street. Disaster and more sectarianism—Armenians versus Azerbaijanis. But Armenia will hardly be de rigueur by the time you get there. You’ve got to stop arriving places when they’re passé.”
“That’s my thought, I guess. That in a few months no one will give a toss for Armenia, some other catastrophe will be in vogue. But those villages will still need rebuilding, on or off the six o’clock news. I’m a good carpenter. And maybe that’s the test—being willing to do something boring and has-been.”
“The test of what? Your extravagant altruism?”
“I’ve never claimed to be an altruist,” Estrin bristled. “But I do try to avoid being a creep.”
“I am an altruist,” Farrell declared. “One of a brave few. Because I’m an altar boy and a cynic. I dispose of people’s pesky bombs and wash their mingin’ laundry and don’t believe it makes the slightest difference. I am an altruist and I will be the first to tell you that altruists are prats. I am the saint of fu-tile goodness. And I have defiled myself for its sake. I have wallowed in shite for this Province, for a crowd who only deserve to go to hell.”
“Haven’t they?” Estrin interjected, flaking open the salmon under the broiler.
“Och no, all the indignant UDA Methodists and devout, rosary-grubbing Provisionals are in seventh heaven. And when they do each other in, they drift straight to God the Father, smelling like the Anderson McAuley perfume counter. They have beliefs, you see. They are willing to die for their beliefs, and they are so generous with their convictions they’ll let you die for them, too. No, these gombeens are as happy in Ulster as bunnies in a briar patch. It’s me lives in hell on earth. And sure I’ll only burn when it’s done. Because haven’t I delivered my soul up to grot? I have damned myself for gobshites not worth the parings from my toes. That’s what’s wrong with the Christ story, in my opinion. This cod about how he rose and floated up. A real savior goes down. When you take on the sins of the world, you sin, for fuck’s sake! You smear yourself in its excrement like a stinking blanketman in the Kesh! No, my Jesus goes straight to hell. We’ll meet down there, roast bangers, and play bowls. Swap yarns! My Jesus has some stories to tell.”
“Sounds like you do, too,” she said warily, and lured Farrell out of the kitchen by uncorking another bottle of wine. She brought the plates to the living-room table, with candlelight. How curiously, again, the scene was just as she imagined: the salmon red in the middle, its sauce smooth and weedy, the fine beans and baby corn bright and crisp . . . Farrell ignored his plate.
But Estrin pondered hers. She no longer comprehended food, for fasting reveals the secret that you never need to eat, really—see, not a nibble and you’re still strolling streets right as rain. All the signs of a population that eats turn strange: fast-food parlors and groceries alike seem vestiges of a queer if widespread religion whose sham you have uncovered. Loyal to her own vows, however, Estrin partook—gently, in a tiny, well-chewed communion. It did not exactly taste good, but she hadn’t yet run to the loo. And she did not feel guilty. This was the first meal she’d eaten for the last two years and not felt guilty.
“Estrin, my swallow,” Farrell sighed, retiring from his untouched dinner. “I’ve wondered how I might have turned out in another town. This one has eaten me from the center. I feel like one of those shiny apples that deceive you until you take a bite. All around the core mealy and brown. I’m sorry.”
“Farrell,” said Estrin. “What.”
He closed his eyes and ran his fingers through his hair. Rubbing his bleary sockets, he spoke in a blur behind his palms. “For the past year Angus MacBride’s career has been in serious danger. And this must never leave your house. But keeping the whole slop to myself has been like not taking out the rubbish. It begins to smell. Angus has been carrying on with a woman, a Catholic, which doesn’t help. She was talking. She needed to be won from him, and silenced. I did the job.” Farrell emerged from behind his hands. “I believe she’s quite in love with me now. The referendum is passed. And I’m left looking quite the ogre, aren’t I? I feel shabby. I could bathe for hours. I could raise my face to a showerhead and drown.”
Estrin put down her fork. “You mean you’ve been having an affair. Another one.”
“Have I ever.”
“For a year. All the while with me.”
“It hasn’t been easy.”
“You seem to have managed.”
“You’re so cold.”
“What do you expect?”
“A bit of compassion. I am exhausted—”
“You’re always exhausted.”
“When have I ever before asked you for sympathy?”
“Pretty much every time I’ve seen you.”
“You’re disappointing me. So icy. For once I take you into my confidence—”
“Farrell!” Her voice hit a harmonic. “We’ve seen each other for a full year; you sleep in my bed; I’m in love with you; and now you tell me that this entire time you’ve been fucking some other woman and I’m supposed to be sympathetic? Who do you think I am, Mother Teresa? Or just a moron?”
“Someone you are not, obviously.” He drew himself up. “You’re being churlish. And I thought that you of all people might understand—”
“I do understand.” Her voice descended again, deeper than usual. “That’s the trouble. You’re not remorseful at all. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever heard you sound ashamed unless you were apologizing for being nice! You and your ‘futile goodness,’ I sometimes think you had to give up bomb disposal because you figured out that it was useful! Pull off being a dickhead and you’re crowing! Some poor girl in this city is crying her eyes out, and I’m supposed to hold your hand? You should hear yourself, you raise the hair on the back of my neck: I believe she’s quite in love with me. One more heart to throw in the box with the rest, like tin pins for good attendance at confirmation class.”
Farrell went stony. “I don’t wish to discuss this further.”
Estrin cleared the dishes and scraped the food in the garbage. She returned to stab at the fire. “I don’t mean you shouldn’t have told me, but—”
“Your point of view has been duly noted. The issue is closed.”
For a second time that night, unexercised, Estrin’s anger went soft. A wave of weakness crossed her; she dropped a shade paler in her face. Her intestines began to squirm. She was cold, terribly cold, and, though unable to wrest enough calories from either her dinner or the coals, crowded before the grate as if it could offer comfort of a more enduring sort. The truth was, she wasn’t his wife or even his “girlfriend” exactly, and in the obscurity of their relationship he could hide. Had she a claim to legitimacy of any reasonable kind, Estrin might throw things, but under these conditions even to have raised her voice was pushing her luck. How little she had of him. And wasn’t she leaving this country soon enough besides. Why bother to protest. How cleverly he had always managed to keep her helpless. He really was a remarkable man.
For the betrayal was too subtle to name. There is a way of lying that is simply keeping your mouth shut: he had never said he was not messing about, never explained his obligations, but the enormity of the not-said all these months bloated her sitting room, the countless conversations in these same seats when he had swallowed this story with his Chardonnay and spoken instead about censorship of Sinn Feín. Too, there are betrayals to promises specifically not made—had he ever vowed to be faithful, or to tell her when he was not? No, but the issue fell away before the larger betrayal that he had not made these promises.
She talked to the fire about Duff; she felt so far away it was amazing he could hear her without a bullhorn. And how they managed to move from Shearhoon to German concentration camps Estrin would never quite piece together the next day.
It was two in the morning. She did remember at some point mentioning having been to Bergen-Belsen. Farrell responded that he would never visit such a camp because he “couldn’t take it.”
“I bet you couldn’t,” said Estrin, propped at a broken angle in her chair. In the last two hours she had come to think of Farrell as someone she had once known. Her single glass of wine was barely touched. She pictured herself in a pillbox outside an RUC station. The door is locked, the windows bulletproof. The only way to get through is to speak in a tiny microphone in the glass. The sound is bad. There are guns if she wants them. In the glow of a three-grille space heater, Estrin is smoking and reading a magazine. She is a middle-aged man with no family, and will soon drive home and watch television. “You couldn’t take not being an inmate. Auschwitz survivors must destroy you with envy. Christ, you look like one, you’d fit right in. You could not sleep, eat badly, work too hard—a camp with all your favorite pastimes, better than arts and crafts. Couldn’t drink, though. That might prove a problem.”
“Is nothing sacred from the whittle of your sarcasm?”
“No,” she announced. “Nothing.” (Inside the pillbox, it turns out the man is a cripple. He was shot by terrorists and can’t move from the waist down. That’s why they stick him in the guardhouse. But in his immobility, he is free. He used to play sports, but has grown philosophical about not being able to play. At least he doesn’t lose anymore, he jokes. And really he doesn’t mind. He’s happier than he was before. He doesn’t think about women; he’s given them up. He’s impotent. He works crossword puzzles instead. His life is small, regimented, and dull. He knows this, so there will never come a time it hits him over the head. He has no friends; his parents are long dead. He is impervious.)
“I give the Holocaust Special Category Status. I do not loot death camps for good crack. They are the emblem of evil to me. They have changed the nature of the human race. As such, they keep the Troubles in their place.”
“No . . .” Estrin considered. (The man is reading about bottle collecting. He skips all the articles to do with politics. Someone calls through the mike; he keeps his head down. They rap a coin on the glass and he pretends not to hear. His shift is almost over. Pretty soon they go away. He doesn’t feel bad.) “I don’t think the Holocaust changes anything. In my experience, people treat each other like shit all over the world. I suppose they always have. If there’s such a thing as evil, it’s definitely in Northern Ireland.”
“Do you realize—” Farrell leaned forward. “The Nazis gassed one man every four seconds?”
“Yes, Farrell—” Estrin rubbed her forehead.
“Every four seconds!”
She stopped trying to get through. He was rocking back and forth, with his hands between his knees. Fat tears blobbed down the deep lines by his nose. Mucus spidered slowly from his nostrils to the carpet. Every four seconds repeated itself about that often. He was sobbing.
It was a maudlin display that gradually eased the angles Estrin had assumed in her seat, not because he was so winningly disturbed by the fate of his Jewish fellowman, but because he was making a fool of himself. She moved to the couch and put her arm around his shoulder. He crumpled against her and draped around her neck; 155 pounds or no, with Estrin tiny herself now, he was heavy. She reached for a napkin and wiped his nose. She supported his weight as best she could and sifted the curls of his hair. She would never have guessed that tonight of all nights one more time she would end up comforting Farrell O’Phelan. But in acting like an inconceivable idiot, Farrell broke her heart. She made herself forgive him for embarrassing her. Lord, he was drunker than she’d ever seen him. And there he was trailing snot on her favorite shirt, still apparently convinced he was crying over Nazi concentration camps.
(The RUC man has gone home. There is no one in the pillbox. The heater is off. The wind sings through the slats of the microphone.)
That forgiveness was the most she could wring from herself, the bit of succor, water from stone. She had to slip herself out from under his arms and scuttle to the loo. There she shat out all the salmon and green beans and baby corn. It was going to take some doing to get back to food. But at least she didn’t vomit, and it had been so long since she’d moved her bowels that she rather enjoyed the experience.
When Estrin returned Farrell was sniveling into the sofa, between sobs asleep. She studied him at ten paces. After what he’d admitted tonight, she had every right to kick him out. No sane, self-respecting woman would sleep with a man after an evening like this. But he was in no condition to throw on the whims of the world. Besides, eviction would take too much energy. And how many nights were left, really. Would there even be more than one.
She kissed him between the eyes. “Why don’t we go to bed.”
He straightened and wiped his face, glancing around as if remembering where he was. He looked at Estrin with a funny surprise, as if this were the first time all night he’d noticed she was there. “But you wanted to talk to me about something, you said.”
“Let’s wait it.”
“No, no. Go ahead. I’ve nattered all night.”
Estrin looked away. “I need money.”
“How much?”
“A lot, I—I’m leaving, Farrell. Sooner than I thought. I guess I will go to Armenia. I won’t have time to sell the house. So I need enough for an airline ticket. Probably three, four hundred pounds.”
“Oh, aye.” He rustled through his pockets. “Whatever you need. I’ll write you a check.” The signature was so indecipherable she wondered if the bank would honor it.
Estrin dragged Farrell in a fireman’s carry up the stairs, impressed that after all that fasting those thigh muscles still rallied round when she asked.
Farrell went right to sleep, curled on the far side of the bed in his usual position, hands sandwiched under his genitals. Estrin lay straight on the other, staring up, awake. She would at least have liked him to have noticed that she’d dropped so much weight—not to appreciate how svelte she was, but to say, “You’re much too thin,” and sternly force eggs on her in the morning. She could live without his admiration, but she longed for his concern.
Finally she slept, never so much as brushing his arm. And there was no chance of wrangling over eggs at breakfast, for when she woke around nine he was gone.
“Well, well,” Estrin said to the ceiling. “Happy birthday.”