Seven

Gerry was back in Bray. He had not let Anna know, feeling rather sheepish about it, but she had contacted him and quizzed him.

‘Yeah, well, it seems like I’m back home,’ he said. ‘We’re going to give it another go.’

‘I’m glad to hear that,’ Anna said. ‘I think it’s the best thing, by far, for everyone.’

This was her true opinion. Gerry and Olwen’s marriage was important to her, but not Gerry’s or Olwen’s individual happiness. She herself would like to achieve great personal happiness, but she seldom considered that other people might nurture similar ambitions. Contentment and routine were what ordinary people, people like Gerry and Olwen, wanted in life.

This is what she must have believed. But she didn’t formulate it. Anna formulated no beliefs whatsoever. She was vaguely agnostic, vaguely socialist, vaguely capitalist, vaguely materialistic, vaguely spiritual. The only thing she really believed in was her ambition to be a successful writer, by which she meant some sort of mixture of famous, bestselling and good. But she had never considered why she wrote or why she wanted to write a ‘good’ book, or what good such a book could do for its readers. Such questions – questions regarding the meaning of literature, or of writing – were never discussed in her literary circles. Similarly, questions as to the meaning of life were never discussed in her social or family circles. You wanted to live a successful, bestselling sort of life, just as the writers wanted to produce a successful and bestselling book. While waiting for success, you made the best of what you had. Anna also believed that when she was a bestselling, successful author, she would also be perfectly happy. The two ambitions were intertwined, were, in fact, one and the same.

Anna took it for granted that Gerry would never be a successful painter, as she understood it, or a successful civil servant, for that matter; in fact, she took it for granted that he would never achieve a successful life. What he believed about these things she had no idea.

He was a lot less talkative than usual. She divined that he was in an ambivalent frame of mind. He had probably become accustomed to the flat in town in the few weeks he had spent there. He had always wanted to live in town, close to the hub of things. Not having to spend two hours commuting every day would have been a relief, too, for anyone.

‘Yeah.’ His voice was flat. ‘See you around.’

‘Goodbye, Gerry,’ she said. Not a word of thanks for her help in saving his marriage. That’s the fate of the peacemaker, as often as not.

Anna’s work on the book was progressing favourably. Having a master plan was useful; the words flowed out to fill the structure she had built to contain them, like water filling a jug, and as far as she could judge she was writing well. Her judgement was based on the feeling of ease with which she wrote and the sense of achievement she experienced every day when she clocked up a thousand, sometimes two thousand, words by lunchtime. She did not reread, as yet, knowing that that might break the flow and discourage her.

There was one disheartening aspect of the work: time. The book would contain about two hundred thousand words, and would take ages to complete. Even if she wrote a thousand a day, that meant two hundred days – a year almost, if you took weekends and holidays off – before a first draft appeared. Could J.K.R. be so slow? She seemed to churn them out every year. Or perhaps it was every two years? And they were enormous volumes. That’s what the kids wanted: fantasy by the ton.

Sally is walking on the beach one lovely morning. The sun sparkles like the points of sharp swords on the summer sea. Three white guillemots [check are they white?] fly overhead, leading Sally onwards, onwards.

The beach grows longer and longer as she walks. It is completely deserted. Not a single other human being is on it although this is the hottest day of the year so far. The hottest day Sally remembers, and the brightest. She is not worried by the loneliness of the beach – the high cliffs seem friendly, the cries of the seabirds sound happy.

She sees a seal nosing its way along the line of the tide, keeping pace with her as she walks. This makes her feel even happier.

And then suddenly, on the horizon, a ship appears.

It is not like any ship Sally has ever seen before – it is not a sailing ship, it is not a yacht, it is not a steamer, it is not a cruiser. It is not a Viking longboat, like the one down on the Liffey. But it is a white, bouncing, glorious tub, shaped like a balloon, not a ship. And it is rolling and bouncing, jumping in towards her …

Sally is taken away on this strange ship. There are all kinds of magical fantasy people on board – this needed development. She had sketched them in without giving them much thought. A merry sea captain, based on the father of Pippi Longstocking. Indeed, Sally began to get Pippi Longstocking characteristics as soon as her father had been filched from the books of the great Swedish writer. Anna would have to go back and make sure some of those qualities were in place, or hinted at, earlier on. Also, there were a talking duck and a dolphin and a duchess.

They sailed on the seas and did strange things. Then Sally’s tour of the world began. First she became attached to a family living in a mountain village somewhere in Norway. She was going to visit Lapland, then Russia, then other places. The novel was to be a tour of the world in about the year 1000, although Anna was careful not to be too specific about the year. In a later chapter Sally might move into another age, into the future, but Anna had not made up her mind about that. The future would be hard to imagine in any way that had not been imagined before. Even beginning to think about it gave Anna a headache.

Was it any good?

Anna did not like feedback on work in progress. Her membership of a writers’ group was a joke, since she hated reading her work to her fellow members and told herself that she was not particularly interested in their opinion of it anyway. In fact, although she never admitted it to herself, she did not want to hear that her work was bad before it was even finished. Or to sense that they thought it was bad, because they seldom criticised anything openly. Even if the stuff were terrible, nobody ever said so, but let its author go right on labouring on it, ringing the changes on material that had no potential whatsoever for improvement, wasting their time. So you had to read their true opinion between the encouraging lines: in the body language, facial expressions, or, more often, in the silences. Someone would read a piece that was essentially useless. A small chorus of voices would whisper that this adjective was excellent, that there were too many adjectives there – the critique often focused on use of adjectives, probably because they were harmless; even the most sensitive soul would not be offended at the suggestion that they should consider removing the word ‘innocent’ or ‘beautiful’ – for these were the kind of adjectives most frowned upon – from their work. Often this advice about adjectives was given when the secret opinion of most people was that the entire work should be scrapped because no amount of fiddling with adjectives or adverbs or anything else would ever render it anything other than awful. No amount of fiddling would disguise the truth that the writer had nothing new to say. ‘It is awful; stop doing it’: this was the useful piece of criticism that you could simply not give. True, there would be one or two women who sat in utter silence: this was the most damning indictment any work could receive. But usually a kind soul would dash in to fill the dreadful silence with some mild comment: ‘I’m not sure about the word “tender” in the last paragraph’, or ‘Do you think “sad” is right for that line?’

It wasn’t, in Anna’s opinion, the kind of critique that was very useful, so although she was a faithful attender of her writing group, she kept her novel to herself for the time being. When she was at the group, she read a poem. Most people in the group liked poems. They were short.

All of this meant that Sally and the Ship of Dreams had still not been seen by any eyes other than her own. With her other books, not showing them to people had not bothered her. But this one was going to be so exceptionally long and demanding that she would welcome a second opinion before going too far.

Just in case.

A second opinion from someone she trusted and whose opinion she valued.

Lilian.

And Lilian was pleased to be asked. ‘Of course I’ll read it,’ she said. ‘And I’ll give you my honest opinion. You can email it to me.’

‘I can send you a print-out,’ Anna offered.

‘Not at all,’ said Lilian. ‘Just pop it into an email. I’ll print it out on Jack’s printer in the office.’

Jack being her husband.

The weather was still unseasonably mild – as Anna opened the car door, on her way to collect Rory from school, she recalled saying these words to herself last year too, in October. The weather was often unseasonably mild these days. She looked out at the sea. It trundled in towards her, navy blue, the waves choppy like prancing puppies and trimmed with white foam. Down on the beach they would be roaring in, she could tell, pulling in heaps of seaweed and pebbles, pulling out clay from the cliffs, pulling out the land on which she lived. Global warming, coastal erosion: these were terms that had in the past while become commonplace, everyday concepts. But they were not taken seriously by anyone. Anna, living on a cliff-top, did not take them seriously. Even global warming was something, she felt, that was somebody else’s problem. It was as if she did not really live on the globe. She had a good house in Killiney, which was utterly safe. The globe, with all its problems, was where other people lived.

The cars were parked thickly along the road on which Rory’s school was built. Anna found a place three or four roads away, got a parking ticket for half an hour, and walked briskly along the leafy roads, with their graceful old red-brick houses, to the school, a modern concrete block out of kilter with its surroundings. Mothers and fathers and grandparents, childminders, gathered at the gate or on the footpath. Anna saw someone she liked and stood beside her. Monica. Monica was the mother of a boy called Ultan the Artist, so called because he was good at drawing. He looked artistic, too, even at the age of eight, because he had a long thin plait of hair emerging from his short back and sides. He could have been teased for this unconventional hairstyle but he was not. The other children had a capacity for acceptance. They did not want to have a plait themselves, but they valued it as a part of Ultan. This, Anna felt, was as indicative as anything of the ethos you got in a school like this, a middle-class, liberal school in south Dublin – a tolerant, civilised place.

Monica was an artist herself, so Anna felt they had something in common, although Monica was a single mother who lived in a rented flat somewhere in the hinterland of Dún Laoghaire, and Anna was what she was. Monica painted, like her son, and was a more successful artist than Anna. Her name appeared in the pages of the newspapers fairly often; she exhibited in one of the most prestigious small galleries, Pink and Green, and did very well. That she could not afford to buy a house or a flat of her own was startling - Monica had not revealed that she owned a cottage in the Pyrenees, where she and Ultan went the second school was over, on the 1st of July every year.

‘Amazing weather, isn’t it?’ was Anna’s unoriginal opening gambit.

‘I love it,’ said Monica. ‘If this is global warming, why complain?’

They looked at the bright blue sky and the dark blue sea.

‘Oh yes,’ Anna sighed. ‘How’s Ultan?’

‘Seems to be grand!’ said Monica. ‘He doesn’t like the new teacher much but he’s getting used to her.’

‘Oh?’ Rory hadn’t expressed any concerns about this year’s teacher.

‘She’s very nice, I think. But she’s a bit young and inexperienced. I don’t think she knows what to make of Ultan.’

‘I haven’t talked to her at all,’ Anna said. The new teacher smiled all the time with a big cheerful smile and wore black jeans and a black jumper, with silver hoop earrings. She had long wiry black hair tied up in a ponytail. A gypsy look. Anna assumed a teacher who looked like that would be excellent.

‘She means well, but Ultan is mildly dyslexic, as you know, and she doesn’t seem to really believe that, even though I’ve told her. She keeps marking his spellings as if he were not dyslexic – and she’s a devil for spellings, they learn twenty new words a week and have these tests on Friday.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Anna. This was not news to her. Rory had won prizes for getting them all right, which had pleased him and his parents very much.

‘She gives out prizes. Ultan hates it because he never gets one of the prizes. He’s getting disgruntled … I don’t know what to do about it.’

‘You’ll have to talk to her again,’ said Anna. ‘She mustn’t have taken it in, the first time.’

Monica shuffled her foot on the pavement. She was wearing green shoes with polka dots on them, Anna noticed. Monica travelled a lot, in connection with her work, and collected clothes as if they were works of art, although today she was wearing the jeans and anorak that most of the mothers and minders and grandmothers wore.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘It’s all I can do.’ She looked seriously worried. So worried that Anna patted her on the back, in a comradely way. This was one of the things that happened: someone was immersed in their own worries, and she could not get in there and do anything about it. Rory loved the new teacher and the spelling tests and the prizes (a bar of chocolate, always the same kind, plain Cadbury’s Milk – the teacher believed in consistency). It was impossible for her to empathise with Monica. She was sorry for her and Ultan, but she would not want to change the system to suit him, when it suited Rory so well.

Monica changed the subject to something banal, a news story about a politician who had been killed in a car crash in Moscow. The change was pointed. The conversation continued awkwardly. Anna was relieved when the school door opened and the children poured out into the yard in a babbling stream of bright colours; there was no uniform at this school and they vied with one another for the clearest, lightest, most childlike colours. These were young children from the first classes, and their faces were mildly anxious as they surveyed the gathering of adults at the gate, until they located their own adult, whoever it happened to be. Rory found Anna easily. He always did. No matter where she stood, and even though she did not come every day to collect him, he could pinpoint her in the crowd within seconds. He ran towards her.

She had to suppress her very strong desire to pick him up and hug him. He would hate to be hugged here at the school gate, although he was still physically affectionate in private.

‘Hi!’ she said, turning to say goodbye to Monica. But Monica had already disappeared, somehow. Anna could not see where she had gone. ‘How was your day?’

‘ok,’ he said.

They began to walk away. ‘I’m parked down that way,’ she pointed. ‘It’s a bit of a walk, I’m afraid. I couldn’t find anywhere nearer.’

‘Aw, Mom!’ he said. ‘Have you got any food?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Are you hungry?’

He nodded in the affirmative.

‘Can you wait till we get home?’

‘I’m starving. I couldn’t eat my lunch.’

‘Why?’

‘Someone stole it.’

Anna looked at him sharply. ‘Who?’

He shook his head. ‘Someone. It wasn’t there at lunch time.’

‘You mean, someone took it out of your schoolbag?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘We could go to the shop and get you something now if you like,’ she said. He wasn’t allowed sweets or crisps except on Saturdays, but she would make an exception if he were hungry.

‘ok,’ he said.

They walked away from the car and down another road to where a small shop, the Midway, was located. It was the kind of shop that hardly existed any more in Dublin, a little local place selling sweets and bread and milk, newspapers, fruit. A bell rang when you opened the white entrance door and a woman with glasses and a pink nylon overall looked up and smiled, as if aware that she represented a world that was past.

They bought crisps, a can of Coke, two bars of chocolate, all of Rory’s choosing. He was slow and careful in his choices, spending a long time deliberating over the chocolate in particular. Finally he was satisfied and they left. He ate the crisps as they went back to the car.

‘You’re not being bullied, are you?’ she asked.

Rory didn’t reply.

‘You can tell me,’ she said. ‘It’s all right. I won’t tell anyone else if you don’t want me to.’

He took out one of the bars of chocolate and began to tear off the paper wrapper, and eat it. But he remained silent.

‘We can talk about it some other time,’ she said.

‘ok,’ he said, his mouth full.

They had reached the car at this stage and she drove home.

Rory did not eat when he got home. ‘Too much chocolate!’ said Anna, giving him a hug. He returned it warmly and grinned. Anna left him cuddling the cat, under Luz Mar’s supervision. He did not look like a child who was being bullied, or disturbed in any way, she told herself, as she set off on a long walk. She preferred walking to going to the gym, although she occasionally did that too. The afternoon was lovely now, warm and sunny with a deep mellow light. Autumn leaves were heaped in drifts at the sides of the narrow footpaths. She crunched through them, along the winding roads, each one hemmed in with high grey stone walls that characterised her area. Behind the walls were houses but you would hardly realise that, as you walked along. It was a strange area, with all these grim walls, but that had come to symbolise not just home, but a precious home, a lovely area, to Anna, and she liked the greyness, especially now when the leaves added colour to it.

She did not walk to the sea today, one of her usual routes, but instead went inland and upwards, to the hill. It was not a high hill, but it was still a real hill, covered with furze and heather. At the top there was an obelisk, a monument to Queen Victoria, who had visited here in the nineteenth century, and a great view of the whole of Dublin, the Wicklow mountains, the bay, the Irish Sea, was to be had. She stood there surveying it all, smelling the salt water, the strange tang of brambles. Her earlier worry about Rory and his lunch was forgotten. Everything was forgotten, for this moment, when, exhilarated by the walk and climb, she absorbed the beauty of her surroundings. She would have loved to stay there for a long time and soak all that in, deeper and deeper. She would have loved to wallow in the silence, hardly broken by the murmur of the waves, the muted cry of the seagulls. But she knew she could not. It would not work. It made her happy to see it, but it would not make her happier to stay there for hours, basking in the beauty. Once, when she had been a teenager, she had believed that it must be so, that if a view impressed her deeply, that if she stayed with it for long enough, that impression would go deeper and deeper into her soul, that some extraordinary happiness would be hers, if only she persevered. What had she thought the world was? A place of infinite possibility, infinite mystery. But now she knew better. She knew happiness was something that one caught in small quantities, and often abruptly, when one was not expecting it. She knew it was to be enjoyed in moderation, like the pleasure of eating something delicious. Eating more and more of it would not increase the pleasure. And if she stood on top of the hill, now that she was so much older, staring and staring, she would get bored and cold and annoyed, not transported to some divine ecstasy.

That is what had happened to her, as she grew older. She had lost her capacity for losing herself in nothingness. So back she went, back to the world that she thought was real, winding down and down the hill and the castellated roads until she was right back in her own kitchen.

Luz Mar was going out, so Anna would mind Rory for the rest of the day and evening.

He said he had finished his homework, and wanted to watch television. Anna had once believed she would ban television, that she would not have a television in her house. But she had never managed to do that, and now Rory spent nearly all his free time in front of it. She worried that he would grow up uneducated, ordinary, his head full of junk. But she could do nothing to stop him. Besides, she watched quite a lot of television herself, although she did not like to admit it to her literary friends.

Alex came home at six, earlier than usual. He was elated, she could see as soon as he came into the house. His skin glowed, as if he had been out in the fresh air, and he walked with a bounce.

She kissed him briefly. ‘Hi,’ she said.

A few years ago she would have commented on how he looked, she would have asked him what had happened to make him so pleased with himself. But she had lost the habit of intimacy with him. They co-existed now, rather than shared a life. She was not sure how this had happened.

‘How are you?’ He sat down at the kitchen table.

This alarmed her slightly, since he never did that. Usually when he came in, he greeted her and then went to his study, emerging for the evening meal. It was not companionable but it saved her from having to make forced conversation with him. Now he was there, waiting for her to talk. She was chopping onions, preparing the curry they would have for dinner, a meal Rory would eat.

‘Oh fine,’ she said. ‘Nothing much happened. Went for a walk. Picked up Rory.’ She considered telling him about the stolen lunch and decided not to bother. It was not the sort of detail that interested him.

‘I have very good news,’ he said.

She smiled and looked at him expectantly. But not too expectantly. Sometimes he said things like that and the good news would turn out to be something fairly insignificant – he had got a letter from some important busybody, congratulating him on his performance at a meeting, or he had got a new secretary, or something that was of marginal interest to anybody other than himself.

‘I sold the place in Cork for forty million,’ he said.

‘That sounds like a lot,’ she said.

‘It cost me five million six years ago. So it is a lot,’ he said proudly.

‘Congratulations!’ She kissed him, thinking that she should feel more elation, or jubilation, or admiration. Forty million was a lot of money. Anna had had no money when she was growing up. But somehow the figure meant nothing to her, because they didn’t need it. It was extra, that was all. ‘That’s fantastic.’

He appreciated it much more than she did, patting himself on the back for his own astuteness, although he knew luck had been involved, and good timing.

‘We should celebrate.’

‘Of course!’ she said. ‘What would you like to do?’

‘It calls for a real celebration.’ He looked at her meaningfully, and she tried not to look away. What did he mean? Opening a bottle of champagne would hardly count as a real celebration. Would he want to go out to eat? With just her or with other people, with Rory?

‘Shall we go out to somewhere really nice?’

‘I think we should go for a weekend to somewhere really nice … some good hotel. You pick.’

‘ok,’ she said. ‘Next weekend?’

‘We can’t leave it for longer … otherwise the feeling will go stale. And tonight we should eat out.’

‘ok,’ she said flatly. She had been looking forward to spending a night in front of the television. ‘I’ll ring René’s,’ she said.

She gave Rory his dinner and phoned for a baby-sitter; Rory was not pleased, since he liked to be baby-sat by Luz Mar, if Anna had to go out. She pacified him by promising to take him to the zoo in a few days’ time.

She bathed and dressed carefully, even though she felt tired and did not feel particularly elated. So Alex had made a good deal. He had often made good sales before, but nothing on this scale. About thirty million after tax. It was much more than the lottery, she told herself, trying to understand what it might mean. But she couldn’t. Probably it would mean very little, apart from this dinner and the weekend, wherever it was. Alex would invest the money in some other property, hoping to make another huge profit in a few years’ time. They had everything they needed, everything they wanted – what more could they want? The house was as fine as they could have, almost … there was always something better, needless to say. She would not have minded an old country manor. When a professional couple had bought Lissadell a few years back, a purchase that had attracted much publicity, Anna had thought that she would like to live in just such a house, huge, old, celebrated, a house with a history, a house that had been described in the poetry of the greatest Irish poet.

She would have liked dozens of rooms and acres of land, horses, chickens, all that. It would have represented a change from this suburban lifestyle. It would bring her real life into the realm of the fairy tale, which was, perhaps, where she had always unconsciously sought. But she knew it would not work. Alex had to be in town, for work. Rory was happy in his school, and in his suburb, and so was she; she liked to be able to go to the literary events in town, the plays and exhibitions, and she liked to shop. If they had a big house in the country, they would have needed a town house too, just as the landed gentry always had. And that would be too much, somehow.

There was nothing to buy with Alex’s wealth. After a certain level had been reached, no more was needed. She did not really understand why he continued to work and slave, accumulating more and more property, when he must have known it was unnecessary. Still, she enjoyed the security of knowing there was so much money in their bank accounts, that Rory would have his own apartment or house as soon as he was old enough to want it, that financial worries would never be theirs. She had been an ordinary lower middle-class child, living with just enough to get by, and so she appreciated the security, the luxury that Alex’s money could buy for her and her child.

‘Beautiful!’ Alex said, when she came down, carefully made up, dressed in an old 1920s silken suit, which she had bought at a vintage shop. ‘It’s new, isn’t it?’ He wouldn’t notice that it was vintage, that she had discovered it, as if it were a hidden treasure, buried in a rack of clothes in a little old street in the city centre.

She nodded, ‘Yes, it’s new.’

Alex was neat as always, in a dark blue suit and white shirt. He always wore almost exactly the same outfit, for work or prestigious social occasions, the only kind of social occasion he considered worthwhile devoting time to.

‘You are so beautiful!’ He kissed her as they left to step into the taxi. The high stone walls of their road, a winding lane of a road, seemed to move closer to the sides of the car, threateningly. The radio was playing loud music. She was glad she did not have to talk.

The taxi dropped them at the end of the lane on which the restaurant was situated, discreetly tucked out of view of the crowds. The weather had changed. It was raining and Anna had forgotten to take an umbrella. She pulled up her coat collar as they ran along the dark lane. She tripped over a man who lay on the ground wrapped in a sleeping bag and almost lost her footing.

‘God,’ said Alex. ‘Couldn’t you sleep in a porch like everyone else?’

The man grunted. Anna felt unreasonably angry at Alex. To show that she did not share his intolerance she reached into her pocket but there was nothing there. She glanced at the man, trying to indicate that she was not his enemy. But he wasn’t looking at either her or Alex. Instead, to her astonishment, he was reading a book; he wore round, wiry spectacles. Although every second doorway in Dublin was stuffed with a sleeping man in a sleeping bag, she had never before noticed one of them doing this ordinary thing that everyone who slept at home in a bed did: reading. She began to open her bag. Alex grabbed her elbow and said, ‘Come on!’ in a sharp voice. ‘But …’ she began. Then she shrugged and allowed herself to be guided, or pushed, into the restaurant.

It was almost full when they got there. The lobby had that cluttered, cosy charm that the lobbies of these places always had. Anna longed to sink into the deep red sofa, set beside a roaring fire, where she could put her irritation at Alex out of her mind. The room smelt comfortably of pleasant things: a suggestion of burning turf, fresh carnations, and roasting meat. But a waiter in a black suit ushered them immediately into the dining room and brought them to a table in the middle of the floor, where everyone would see them. Anna took this as a compliment to her appearance, but the waiter had been instructed that Alex was a regular customer and a rich man, even though nobody ever recognised him. So there they sat in the midst of a cross-section of Dublin’s wealthiest and most celebrated personalities. Without bothering to look very closely, Anna recognised two government Ministers, the presenter of one of the most popular television programmes, and the owner of a chain of supermarkets in the room. There were no writers, actors, artists – you would not expect them in a place like this, unless they were brought along as the guests of someone who was a success in a more lucrative walk of life than art.

The room buzzed with conversation, laughter, energy. In sharp contrast to the old-fashioned, rather oppressive decor of the place – white tablecloths, heavy silver, a restaurant in a dress suit – the atmosphere was light and relaxed, due to the utter confidence of its customers. They were enjoying themselves, secure in the knowledge that the food would be perfect and that only their peers shared the room with them. This restaurant was so exclusive that it did not even allow itself to be reviewed in the newspapers or magazines. Unless you were in the know, you would never have heard of it.

Anna loved it for its liveliness, as well as for its food, although she found the surroundings in other ways unpleasant. Particularly irritating was the ‘silver service’, which they insisted upon - perhaps it was some sort of rule for restaurants with two or three Michelin stars, or whatever it was they had. Two waiters carried their starters on huge silver-topped plates, whipped off the covers with a dramatic flourish at exactly the same moment, and deposited in front of them the big white plates with their little mounds of salad and prawn, two fat prawns to be exact, for her, and pâté de foie gras for him. It was more ceremonious than Mass.

‘Mm, delicious,’ she said, as she bit into her prawn.

She raised her glass of wine and said, ‘Congratulations!’ to Alex, for the third or fourth time.

He touched glasses with her and bowed his head slightly. He belonged to another age, she thought. It was a thought she had often had. Once, it had been one of the characteristics that had attracted her to him, his gentlemanly aura, his whiff of the early nineteenth century. All men still looked and dressed like Beau Brummell, up to a point, not having changed their style in any essential way for about two hundred years. But Alex looked as if that style had been created specially for him.

‘How is your book coming along?’ he asked. Her reward for paying a compliment to his work was this rare question.

‘Well, it’s coming along.’ She knew he had very little interest in it, but she had to talk about something. ‘It’s going to be very long, so it’s a bit disheartening knowing that I’m still only about fifteen per cent of the way through it after four months’ work.’

‘Why does it have to be so long?’

‘It’s the genre. It’s a fantasy novel, with its own complex world, like the Narnia books, or Philip Pullman’s.’ She did not want to mention Harry Potter, the real inspiration for the book, for some reason.

Alex was perplexed. He had never heard of Philip Pullman, and he recalled that the Narnia books, which he had not much liked as a child, were not actually particularly long. ‘Like the Harry Potter books?’ he said. Alex liked them. He had read a few aloud to Rory. He had found them much less irritating than the Narnia stuff.

‘Yes, that sort of thing. It’s not that it’s like the Harry Potter books.’ Was this true? ‘It’s historical. It’s about a modern child in Dublin who travels in time, to various eras in history.’ Which was a bit like Sophie’s World, it occurred to her. Strange. She knew that Harry Potter was an influence, but now, all of a sudden, she realised that Sophie’s World, a book she had enjoyed very much, was an unconscious one. In fact, her book was much more like Sophie’s World than it was like Harry Potter. The influences of which the author is unaware are much more pernicious than those of which she is fully conscious. Well, with luck nobody else would notice – it was years since Sophie’s World had been published.

She finished her prawns, her second prawn. Alex had eaten his pâté in two bites and now the waiters came and carried off their empty plates.

‘Sounds very interesting,’ said Alex.

‘So far the heroine has visited Dalkey Island, in the age of the Vikings, and travelled to Iceland and Norway,’ Anna went on brightly. ‘Next she is going to go to America, just at the time of Columbus’s arrival there. And so on. And she will travel into the future as well.’ She hoped. If she could think of anything interesting to write about the future. She should probably keep the future for a future volume – volume two or three maybe.

Alex wasn’t listening. He nodded, but she could tell he had not heard anything she had said for a few minutes. This was one of his habits. No matter how hard he tried – and he had been trying tonight – he could not maintain interest in her, or in anyone, for more than a minute or two. Then he became bored and reverted to his own thoughts. More than most, he lived in a world of his own.

They both did this for the next five minutes or so, focusing on their food. Anna, mildly dismayed as she often was at Alex’s tendency to become bored with small talk and switch off, even though he seldom replaced it with any other kind of talk, managed to become philosophical about this as she dealt with her risotto. The problem with Alex, she reasoned, was that he was just too masculine. Masculine men could not understand any point of view except their own. Single-minded, they had developed blinkered vision millions of years ago to sharpen their hunting skills. Alex was a hunter supreme, even if what he was hunting was money rather than elks or bears. Empathising with other human beings was simply not a skill he needed for his life’s work, and try as he did to pretend he was interested in them, he was too honest to keep up the pretence for long – not even as long as it took to eat a celebratory dinner with his wife.

She had not expected Alex to be like that when she married him. Then, he had been in love with her. He adored her, he could not bear to spend an evening apart from her. It had been ridiculous, the extent to which he was in love with her. Then, she had been the object of the hunt, so he focused exclusively on her. But even though she knew the intensity could not last, she had not expected it to be replaced with near apathy.

And she had not been in love with him in the same mad way that he was with her. That hadn’t bothered her much – she could see that his emotion was exceptional, over the top, and felt that hers was at the more normal end of the spectrum. She hadn’t felt that she was capable of the obsessive, intense love Alex had had for her, at the beginning. Demeaning, it had been, too, that sort of love, like an addiction to some toxic substance – although it was shorter lived than most chemical addictions. That sort of love had seemed to her something she was as well off without. She loved Alex. She liked him and respected him, and they got on well in bed together too. Marrying him had been the right thing to do.

Now, ten years later, she still liked him, and he liked her. But they slept together more and more rarely, and they had nothing to talk about. Was that what marriage was like for everyone? How could you really know? People lied about these things as a matter of course, to themselves and to their friends. You knew it because many couples seemed to be perfectly content, living even an idyllic life together. Then, out of the blue, they were splitting up, and other people gossiped and said, yes, it had been coming for a long time.

There was one subject Alex and Anna could both talk about, with almost equal interest: Rory. But she wanted to keep him for dessert, so she raised general topics: the new railway bridge in Killiney, which was spectacularly beautiful and which locals were dubbing Xanadu; the fate of the government’s new master plan on Dublin transport, which promised the sun, moon and stars, and which nobody believed would ever be implemented – Anna said this quite loudly, noticing, suddenly, that the Minister was in the room. She talked about their next city break, the one they would go on to celebrate the sale of the property. Seville, they thought, would be right. They hadn’t been there, and it was close enough to make a weekend trip feasible.

Anna cheered up, thinking of that. She and Alex got on better on their holidays than they did at home, because on holiday he tended to become interested in his surroundings, whereas at home they meant nothing to him.

The evening sped by quickly enough, the fuss over the serving of the various courses and the pleasure of eating helped the time to pass. They did not have a lively conversation, but neither did they lapse into a prolonged silence, like so many married couples eating celebratory dinners.

She was standing up to leave when she spotted Vincy Erikson. That journalist from the book launch. She recognised him immediately. He was at a table at the edge of the room, behind her chair, which was why she had not seen him before.

What was he doing in a place like this?

He waved and she smiled. Alex had gone to the cloakroom. Vincy came across the room and said hello, and quickly kissed Anna on the cheek. She was taken aback. Everyone kissed on the cheek these days, some of them once, some of them twice, some even three times, like people in Spain or somewhere. It was the new handshake. Still, she was not usually kissed by people who had met her only once before in their lives.

‘This is a pleasant surprise,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said, confused, for some reason.

They smiled uneasily at one another. His long hair was as wild as ever, and he had not put on a tie, even in deference to this restaurant. His jacket, though, gave him a dressed-up look. Velvet. She thought velvet on men was a bit fishy, but on him it looked fine.

‘I am here with the owner of the newspaper,’ he said, as if he knew an explanation of his presence in this restaurant was required. ‘It’s a sort of business meeting.’

‘We’re celebrating a success of Alex’s,’ Anna said, not wanting to go into the details.

It didn’t matter what they said. The words were like wrapping paper, enclosing secret messages. Anna sensed she was learning a new language, a code of signs and tones. She had to read under the English words another text, a message for her eyes only.

‘Yes,’ he said, his eyes meeting hers, twinkling. ‘That’s wonderful. I will be at the opening of Hamlet in the Abbey on Wednesday night. Will you be there?’

‘Maybe,’ said Anna, looking at him questioningly. He did not take his eyes off her face. She did not have a ticket to the opening on Wednesday night but she knew she could get one.

Alex came back then, and she introduced them. Alex said hello briskly and paid no attention to Vincy. He was ready to go home. Anna would have liked to linger and chat, but there was no point in delaying Alex. Regretfully, she said goodnight to Vincy. He inclined his head slightly, and did not kiss her this time.

On the way up the lane to the taxi, which had been ordered, Anna stooped and put a note under the sleeping bag of the man with the book – he was still there but now was tucked up in his bag, his head invisible, just like any of the other hundreds of sleepers all over Dublin. She gave him ten euro – about five times the amount she usually gave, hiding the sum with her hand. Now she glowed with generosity, tucking under the edge of the sleeping bag the rusty-tinted note. The man – the man without a name or a label, a man who defied classification, the hobo or the homeless man or the tramp or whatever he was – seemed to be asleep. She could just as well have ignored him and saved herself ten euro, she thought, regretfully. But as she and Alex walked away a thin white hand emerged from the bag, took the note and slipped it into his book, and a pair of glasses peeped over the rim of the sleeping bag and watched her going up the shady alley to the bright light of the street.