2

The appalling accounts of stabbings and suicides he reads about nearly every day in the newspapers must have worked themselves into Doc Clifford’s sleeping life, because he wakes one morning from a strange dream and, staring into the darkness, tries to understand the language of the night.

Over forty years before, Clifford, a medical doctor, moved into Auburn, along with his wife, who was expecting their first child; they lived next door to La Salle and became familiar with the Brothers’ comings and goings. At Christmas they exchanged gifts of brandy or whiskey.

Gradually, when the fog in his head clears, his dream takes shape. He is at his old university before it became the National Concert Hall, strolling by the stalls during Freshers’ Week, when a weird sight stops him in his tracks. In one of the stalls, black plastic cutouts of human shapes are swinging from a clothesline. He calls to one of the students, hooked up to an iPod; the student is wiggling and rocking in his private world.

‘What are they?’ Clifford asks.

‘What?’ the student snaps, removing an earpiece. Frowning, he looks up to where Clifford is pointing. ‘Oh,’ he shrugs, ‘they’re just guys who topped themselves this year. And I’ll be with them soon.’ He replaces the earpiece.

Clifford grabs the student’s arm: ‘No, you mustn’t. Talk to me.’ The student breaks loose and runs away, leaving Doc Clifford holding the student’s detached arm in the jacket sleeve. ‘What’s the point?’ the student calls back.

Clifford reaches out and presses the light button on the bedside clock. Six-thirty. Another half-hour to doze. Banishing the frightening images, he is drifting off again when he is surprised by a sound like thunder, and shouting that comes crashing in on his drowsy state. His two cocker spaniels are yelping in their kennel. At first he thinks it’s another dream until he sits up in the bed and switches on the lamp.

The rattle of gears reverberates in a powerful engine; a throttle is opening up, followed by the crack and crush of foliage, so close it could knock the house down. By force of habit he glances across at his dead wife’s bed, empty except for his dressing gown where he’d thrown it the night before, as he always does. Through a chink in the heavy curtains he can make out the bulk of a jcb reversing and turning, causing powerful head-lights to sweep over the grounds and the gable wall of La Salle, with its long lunette window.

Wide awake now, he recalls a chance meeting at the auction with the new owners of La Salle, Philip Lalor and his wife, Samantha, who, she tells Clifford, since her college days has never been known as anything else but Sam. With bird-like movements of her head, she was alert to every shade of change in the room, so that their conversation seemed a distraction to her. When the sale began, she was the one – not Philip – who kept outbidding the others, although, he – head and shoulders above her – whispered now and again in her ear.

A few evenings later, while calling in to say goodbye to the Brothers, Clifford stood back when a shining black suv pulled into the grounds. ‘Here come your new neighbours,’ the Brother said while Sam, Ray-Bans perched on her blonde hair, was parking beside the flowerbed of Celtic Cross design. Philip, lean as a greyhound, stepped out on the passenger side and, with an open stride, came around to introduce himself. He had an eager handshake.

Their chat was fitful: the difficulties of moving house, parting with neighbours, and getting used to new surroundings. Their teenagers, Dylan and Zara, hop down from the car along with two golden labradors who bound ahead of them. As the kids are making for the front of the house, Philip calls them back, smiling an apology for their lack of courtesy. They endure an introduction – Zara showing her mouth brace when she grins; Dylan in black, with a mop of hair that hangs over his sulky looks.

After a while, Sam begins to fiddle with a measuring tape: a plain signal for Clifford to renew his good wishes, and start to move off just as her BlackBerry rings. She dives into her handbag.

‘No!’ she flares up. ‘No, I will not settle for that, and if you can’t do it, then I’ll instruct my architect to look elsewhere.’

‘Ned,’ the Brother calls to Clifford, ‘let me walk with you to the gate … No shortage here,’ he says out of the side of his mouth; ‘they haven’t sold their house in Raheny yet. Of course, he’s getting plenty of cheap money. A banker – lending managers, they’re called – and herself is in advertising.’ He chuckles. ‘They’re doing all right. Still what – mid-forties?’

‘In or around.’

Clifford switches off the bedside lamp and opens the curtains. The jcb is shunting and jerking – the headlights sweeping through the bare branches of the trees that line the party hedge, catching the sheen on the ruthless teeth of the digger as they sink into the spot where the Brothers had nursed colour out of the earth each spring.

Just as he is about to disconnect the alarm system under the stairs, his eye falls on his stethoscope and blood pressure sphyg on the wide hall stand where he had left them after returning from his day’s work in the clinic. ‘Gets me out of the house,’ he jokes to his golfing friends at Robin Hill. The clinic in the village had been his until one of his sons took it over, extended the bungalow out into the back garden, and engaged two other doctors – a physiotherapist and a part-time dietician. It suits him to do one day a week: he can keep in contact with patients he has looked after for donkey’s years.

After retirement he planned to go on a world tour: a dream shared with his wife. Then she discovered a lump under her arm one morning in the shower, and dismissed it as a cyst. So, apart from the visits of his sons and their families, and golf at Robin Hill, he is alone for the first time in his life. And fearing that he might go to seed – like some of his patients have done after such an upset – he came out of retirement to do locum two days a week: one for his son in the village, the other down in Greystones.

The rising smell of the coffee he has left to brew and the bread he has popped in the toaster revive him while he is stirring porridge. And, following the habit of a lifetime, he lays his diary on the table as he sits down to breakfast. Routine complaints of the previous day cross the screen of his memory: an ingrown toenail, children with coughs, a student worried about a sexually transmitted disease, a young woman looking for the morning-after pill. And the dreaded blood test that might show a positive reading.

While having breakfast, the sharp teeth sinking into the ground take over Clifford’s head. In his mind’s eye, he pictures one of the Brothers, through the hedge, putting all his bulk on the spade, bending, then raising and shaking out the brittle earth: a ritual that begins each year after St Patrick’s Day.

As dawn is breaking over The Sleeping Giant, he takes a cup of coffee to his study and looks across at La Salle. Seagulls are dipping and diving around the jcb in search of an early breakfast. The practised hands of the digger operator work the levers; the bucket rises into the air with a scoop of earth, shunting out of the way the statue of the Virgin Mary and causing it to tilt forward. The next time the teeth don’t miss: the statue is hoisted in the metal bucket and is dumped with a thud on the lorry parked alongside. One arm has broken off, leaving a bare rod reaching out for deliverance. With a tip of his shovel against the side of the lorry, a man, trampling all over the Celtic Cross flowerbed, signals to the driver, and the lorry moves off slowly towards the avenue. The statue sways like a drunk as it disappears around the curve of the driveway.

For generations, the Virgin Mary had become the landmark Auburn people gave to their visitors: ‘When you see the statue at the front of a big old Georgian house, you’re nearly there; we’re just around the corner.’

Clifford’s wife, while giving directions to house guests over the phone, might say, in a moment of mischief: ‘We’re next door to the monks’ goddess.’ Though a lukewarm Catholic – a pavilion member, as she used to describe herself – ever since a priest refused her absolution because she was on the birth control pill – she would have been sorry to see the goddess destroyed.

Thoughts of his wife bring back a memory that has been haunting him since she passed away – the evening he returned from his practice to find her asleep in an armchair with an empty bottle on the low table, and a broken wine glass on the carpet. When he woke her with an offer of coffee, she rounded on him: ‘You’ve a brass neck to lecture me about my drinking habits after you fucking that nurse. Get away from me!’

Over the past two years since her death, he has been holding fast to a routine: locum days, golf days, and visits from his two sons and their families at the weekend. But at times such as this when they would rake over the latest news, he catches himself planning a blow-by-blow account for when she returns to the house, or when they next drive down to the Marine Hotel for a coffee.

He closes his diary and sets off on his morning walk which begins on the path around the side of the house, along The Nuns’ Walk, then up to the summit of Cooper’s Hill, and finally around to the village for the newspaper.

The jcb engine is idling as he hurries by the back of La Salle. A man in a hard hat is shouting into a mobile phone.

‘I need them two fuckers down at the convent in Carlow bright and early tomorrow, to clear out the place. Do you get me, boss?’

Clifford slows his steps.

‘No, I’m tellin you, I need that chapel cleared out by Wednesday. We’re convertin it into a restaurant. The chippies are after me, so move your arse.’

Raindrops cling to the fuchsia branches; across the bay, The Sleeping Giant is shrouded in mist, but the dogs are delighted with themselves – running ahead and sniffing interesting nooks in the hedgerows.

As he drives to Greystones, his mind wanders from one patient to the next: those who cannot sleep, or who want something to calm their nerves. The women cry and tell him their deepest fears: ‘Do you think, doctor, that our savings will be lost? Or the house?’

‘Ah well, it’s not that bad.’

‘But they’re saying that those banks – Fannie Mae and the other one – ours could go the same way in a year or two.’

‘As far as I know, that’s a problem that’s confined to America, those sub-prime loans.’

‘I hope you’re right. So will you give me something to help – you know – with the sleeping.’

Right through the spring, the Polish workers arrive before dawn at La Salle. Then, all day, until after dark, they shatter the well-bred air of Auburn with the grating sound of concrete saws and the pounding of hammers; pick-up trucks, encrusted with dried cement, are pulling in with fresh lengths of timber, double-glazed windows or Valentia slate. Filling the air with the acrid smell of diesel, the trucks carry off the wooden panels that were used to divide bedrooms when the Brothers were at full strength. The builders winkle out the crest of the Blessed Jean Christophe, founder of La Compagnie de Jésus from over the door, and fill the imprint with plaster, so that by Easter no trace is left, apart from the name of the house, which Sam and Philip consider sufficiently European to retain.

As soon as the Poles have laid cobblestone paving at the front of the house, and built a fountain with a copper statue of Aphrodite where the Virgin Mary once stood, the Lalors move in. Now and again they come across Clifford when they too are walking their dogs up Cooper’s Hill, or pacing the harbour wall of a Sunday morning. And they fit into the habit of Auburn where people weave their own social network around one of the schools or the sailing or golf clubs. On weekdays, the newcomers rarely lay eyes on one another except to pass by in their suvs with darkened windows, or soft top Mercs, and when they meet at parties or at the tennis club, they are ‘busy, busy, busy’, and carry their BlackBerrys everywhere. In addition, the women are run off their feet helping Belvedere College or Goldsmith Park with the latest African project.

On one such walk around the Head when the gorse was saffron, and the coconut-scented air had well and truly broken the back of winter, Clifford runs into Philip and Sam as he is emerging from Moss Lane. Sam is excited about the house-warming they are planning for June, ‘but we’re not in barbecue weather yet’.

‘No. Not for another while. Still a bit of frost at night.’

Their dogs are exploring each other and trotting on ahead. As on previous occasions, Sam is openly demonstrative with her husband: idly picking petals off the gorse and holding up a handful for him to inhale the perfume, and full of enthusiasm about inviting the neighbours over for a barbecue.

When Clifford continues on his way, however, Sam picks at an old sore. Will the women of Auburn, who have had fountains in the back garden since they were children and grandfathers who had clothing shops in North Earl Street, detect that she is not really one of them?