Twelve

Tuesday. Vincy and Anna were meeting for lunch in the café of the National Gallery, where she knew she was almost certain to bump into some of her acquaintances. This, she felt, meant that the meeting was above board in every way. There was nothing covert about it. Everyone could see them. Friends of hers would be there. They would see them and realise that Vincy and Anna were acquaintances. Probably they might imagine that they were discussing something professional - media coverage of her next book, or something like that, although of course Vincy would have absolutely nothing to do with media coverage of hers or anyone’s book, ever, and although her book was so far from completion that no coverage would be necessary for at least two years, even if all went well.

She did not bother mentioning to Alex that she was having lunch with Vincy. There was no special reason for that, she did not usually inform him of her arrangements during the day. He had more important things to think about.

As soon as she reached the restaurant she wished she had chosen another. It was not at all because she recognised a few people straight away, but because of the crowds, and because you had to join a queue and serve yourself. When she was with a woman friend, this didn’t bother her at all. They queued and talked, examining the contents of the big trays of food with interest, and chatting about other things as animatedly as if they had been sitting down waiting for service. But with Vincy it might be harder, to stand in the queue for ten minutes, it might be awkward.

She was first, which she did not like. She did not join the end of the queue, as she would have done had she been meeting an ordinary friend, but stood in the vast white hall near the gallery shop. She pretended to look at the things in the window – books and reproductions of paintings that hung on the walls in the gallery – while keeping an eye on the doorway.

She had to wait for almost ten minutes. After five, she began to wonder if he had forgotten, or if he had decided not to keep the appointment, although rationally she knew that could not possibly be the case. She knew this, partly because she trusted him, partly because she trusted the sincerity of his feelings for her, and most of all because her social position vis-à-vis his was such that he could not possibly afford to be rude to her, in case it reverberated in some obscure way on his career or social standing.

Eventually he arrived, rushing in the door and up the wide steps to where she stood, dressed in a red coat that she had chosen because it would look well against the white background of the building.

‘I’m really sorry,’ he said breathlessly. His face was pink and he smelt of rain. There were drops of water in his hair, and the rain had frizzed it so it stood out like a bush. ‘I got held up in traffic.’

As soon as he looked at her with his magical eyes all her annoyance vanished. She felt happy and excited. Something was happening to her. At last.

Nothing mattered.

The queuing was not a problem. The queuing was fine. She didn’t notice it, one way or the other. Somehow she was focused only on what they were talking about.

He could do that. He could make a person focus, even a person who was usually as scattered, as fragmented, as Anna was.

He could make her focus on him, although she did not admit that, as yet.

Vincy wanted to know about what she had been doing – now she told him about the weekend in Seville, once they were face to face it was easy to tell him. It was easy to talk about Alex. About Rory. About the novel. Vincy seemed to know about all these people and projects already, and to be intensely interested in them. He asked questions and listened to the answers, really listened, as they snaked along by the old brick wall, as she chose, quite randomly, from the big selection of dishes on offer. ‘Which salads would you like?’ asked the waitress, with a strong Mandarin intonation that made her words difficult to understand. It was always hard to pick them from the bewildering array and now the need to select three salads seemed ludicrous. What did it matter? Disbelieving, Anna pointed at green salad, potato salad, and beetroot. When she had pointed to it, she knew the beetroot was a mistake, it would discolour her teeth. But what did she care?

Vincy selected with more deliberation, as if the contents of his lunch still mattered to him. (Lamb meatballs provençale, he took, and flageolet beans, potato salad, Waldorf salad.) She took this in with amusement. How odd that he cared about flageolet beans, at a time like this.

Eventually they had procured their food and were seated at a table for two in a quiet corner of the enormous, high room, which, with its hard surfaces and clinical colours, was more like a large hall, perhaps in a rich convent, than a restaurant. A place where everyone was easily visible to everyone else. A lemon tree, which sprouted from a patch of pebbles near their table, created an illusion of shelter, but provided none. Many eyes seemed to glance at them, half-recognising Vincy, probably.

Most people glanced at them and looked away quickly, feeling intrusive, or annoyed. Lovers – maybe they looked like lovers? They did not look right, they did not belong in this lunchtime place, which was packed with women from civil service offices cheerfully analysing their colleagues, and with friends catching up on news of family illnesses, children’s successes in school.

Anna did not notice what she was eating, although she did eat it, even the beetroot, and it did discolour her teeth. She hardly noticed what they talked about, although they did talk, effortlessly, constantly. She did not see her surroundings. She just saw Vincy, his bright, lively eyes; his expression, which managed to be both kind and sharp at the same time. She just talked to him.

Most of the conversation was about Anna. It was as if he were carrying out an interview, finding out as much as he could about her in the hour at his disposal. Where were you born? Where did you go to school? What did you parents do? Your childhood home, where did you go on holidays, your friends, your brothers and sisters …

All these details, the story of Anna’s life, were news to him, good news, interesting news. She had never told it. She had never been asked to. Alex picked it up as he went along – he knew her mother and father and where they lived now, he didn’t need to know where she had lived when she was three, where she had been born. Holles Street. Her mother had brought her home to her father’s house, in Monkstown, for some reason. They lived there for three years, with Anna’s grandparents …

He wanted to hear her story. Can anyone pay you a greater compliment?

Time flew by.

It seemed incredible to Anna that the hour was over, the plates empty, all the diners pushing back their chairs and leaving. That anything so miraculous could finish, just like any other hour or any other event, seemed more ludicrous than the beetroot salad or the queue for the cash register or the lemon tree growing from a plate of pebbles in the middle of a room.

But Vincy was standing up, glancing at his watch, pulling his raincoat from the back of his chair and shoving his arms into the sleeves, awkwardly, as if it had been an ordinary lunch, and now it was time to get back to work.

She wanted to cry. She felt like a child who has been called in when the play is at its most intense, when she wants the day to go on and on forever.

But he was saying he wanted to see her again.

Tomorrow.

Too soon, a voice warned her. Too … soon.

But without checking her diary, she said yes. She had no idea how she could do it. Not here, they both thought, simultaneously. He would text her with a venue when he thought of somewhere suitable for both of them.

Outside the school gate she chatted with great animation to Ultan’s mother about furniture: Monica had been buying chairs and wanted to discuss this interesting topic with someone.

‘You’d think it would be simple until you start looking,’ she said. ‘But I’ve spent days wandering up and down Capel Street, into Temple Bar, around that bit of town behind the Gaiety where there are nice little shops … and now I think I have to go out to Blanchardstown or somewhere far along the M50 before making up my mind.’

Anna, who had not bought chairs for at least seven years, had plenty to say on this subject. She laughed and joked; the excitement in her voice was apparent to herself, although she hardly paid any attention to what she was saying. She felt that she had been wound up like a clockwork doll, and was behaving in a way that was different from her usual pattern. Instead of being grave and reserved, she was extrovert and excessively, noisily, cheerful.

It surprised her that Monica did not seem to notice that there was a difference in her, accepting this transformed version of Anna for the normal one.

When Rory came out of school, he was downcast. He would not talk.

Anna’s high spirits sank. She held his hand as they walked to the car. The sun had gone in and it had turned into a grey, cold day. The gardens smelt of winter, of damp rotted leaves, that morbid smell. Below the suburban roads, the sea swelled, dark and ominous.

‘Won’t you tell me what happened?’ she asked desperately.

He shook his head.

‘Did somebody steal your lunch again?’ she asked.

He shook his head again. In fact the lunch-stealing episode had not been repeated after the first time and Anna wondered if he had imagined the whole thing.

‘Would you like some chocolate?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said immediately, but in a gloomy little voice.

He ate the chocolate in silence. Anna drove down from the small road where she had parked on to the main seafront road, wondering again at the volatility of moods. One moment she was full of joy. Then a small thing, like Rory’s silence, had the power to bring her back to earth, down to the petty worries of everyday life.

He did not tell her until they were at home, sitting in the kitchen, eating his snack, what was wrong. And it was trivial. Not a case of school-yard bullying, nothing like that. The teacher had told him his spelling was bad. He had missed five out of ten on the list they had today. Usually he got them all correct.

‘I didn’t do them. Luz Mar didn’t do them with me when you were away,’ he said, making her feel guilty.

‘Couldn’t you do them yourself?’ she asked exasperatedly.

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t do them myself.’

Then he became silent again, and sulked for another half an hour.

Anna wrote the next morning. It was the first time in almost a week that she had got a chance to attend to her novel. She found it difficult to remember what was going on in it, and had to spend a long time re-reading what she had written, even though she had a rule that forbade her to re-read until her first draft was completed. But this morning she could barely remember the characters’ names, much less what they had been doing, so it was necessary. The re-reading on this occasion had a positive effect, however. The written chapters seemed good to her. Lilian had been right. There was a rhythm in the work, Sally and the other characters were living, breathing people, even though they were engaged in adventures that were totally incredible.

That was the secret of good fantasy literature; if you put real people in impossible situations, readers could suspend disbelief and fall for the fantasy. Why they wanted to do that she did not quite know. But obviously they did, and had from time immemorial. Maybe it encouraged their faith in the limitless potential of human beings? Or of animals – Anna had introduced talking animals to her novel, with some trepidation, since she departed from her template when she put in the first anthropomorphised creature, a dog. Soon there were talking cats, rabbits, tigers, fish. There are no talking animals in Harry Potter, but once she started, there was no going back. If a dog can talk in a book, then all the other animals have to talk too, it seemed to her.

In spite of her misgivings about the animals – the draft she had sent to Lilian had not included them – she still felt confident that this novel would be a success, and was determined to finish it soon and get it out.

So she wrote assiduously. For about an hour.

At ten she stopped writing. Her morning’s work was over; she had written about a hundred words, just a couple of lines. But she had to stop, because now it was time to get ready for lunch.

She proceeded to take off her clothes and to try on others. She found it very hard to make up her mind what to wear – some things would be too dressy or too deliberate, and would put him off. Others were just not attractive enough. Yesterday she had given little thought to what she was wearing, but today she was as worried about it as a teenage girl going on a date.

Time went by.

Anna returned to her computer. Vincy texted the name and address of a pub she had never heard of, in Rathcormac, a place she had never visited and which had for her only its bad reputation, a place name synonymous with drug barons and gangland crime. But although she was about to head off into unknown territory, dangerous territory, telling nobody around her where she was going, her euphoric mood did not change. Vincy was not going to murder her at lunchtime. He had chosen the place because it was secret, because it was as unlike the National Gallery as any place could be. And probably more romantic too. So Anna moved happily in and out of her wardrobe, looking at herself from a variety of angles in the long mirrors on the doors. Finally she ended up wearing exactly what she had had on to begin with, with the addition of a silver pendant, and black boots replacing the trainers. Her make-up she had to do in a hurry.

‘Bye, Ludmilla,’ she called, as she opened the door.

She could see Ludmilla standing at the front window, looking at her, probably wondering what was going on, as she reversed her jeep down the drive and out into the road, narrowly avoiding a collision with a Mercedes, which was speeding along at about seventy miles an hour.

Rathcormac was far away, but traffic was light on the M50 and she reached it in about half an hour. The village, once she located it, was surprisingly pleasant, not at all what the news bulletins would lead you to expect. No drug barons. No drug addicts even, that she could see. Not even anyone sleeping in a doorway. There was an old church and a round tower at one end of the street. Who could imagine that a suburb like this, in the wild west of Dublin, could boast medieval ruins?

The pub was called the Tower. Outside, it was covered with pink stucco and decorated with a huge, richly coloured picture of a round tower; inside was dark and cosy like a cave, plentifully supplied with little snugs, in one of which they could sit in privacy.

‘What an interesting place!’ she said.

Vincy looked surprised. ‘I’m really sorry to drag you all the way out here,’ he said. ‘But I’m on a job – there was a murder down the road last night. I’m interviewing neighbours, snooping around.’

‘Oh!’ said Anna. So there were murders going on, just as she suspected. It was gratifying, in a way, to know that. ‘I didn’t listen to the news. I thought you had chosen it for some other reason.’

He looked at the dark red banquette, the shiny black wooden table, and sniffed the roast beef and chips that scented the air. ‘Here?’ He smiled. ‘Do you think I’d bring you to a place like this by choice?’

‘I like it,’ she said.

He reached out and took her hand, as if he could not help himself. Like a woman who is drowning, she grasped it and held it for as long as she dared. It was warm and dry, large, enclosing hers completely. She did not gasp or smile or say anything. She held his hand.