Fourteen

Anna was stepping into a warm pub, as she did almost every day now, every lunchtime. It was not the Tower, but an ordinary pub in the city centre, whose claim to fame was that it had not been renovated or redecorated, not even painted, in about fifty years. Never mind. Before, she had never set foot inside such places and now she loved them. In these pubs, old and shabby or new and brash or picturesque and lovely, she was experiencing every day a very rare treat.

Happiness.

At last it had arrived.

There it was, in this grotty pub, waiting on a bar stool.

Happiness. Of a kind she had given up hope for years ago. Happiness, she had decided, was going to come from success. One day she would write that bestselling book, and then she would be completely happy. In the meantime, she had the satisfaction of her nice husband and her lovely son and her big house, of her friends and the parties and writing groups, of shopping and holidays and restaurants, to keep her going.

But happiness of this kind, she had stopped thinking about. Or had decided was a fairy tale, or so rare that most people would never experience it.

Now, every day it was given to her. In very small parcels, she had to admit, measured temporarily, sometimes in hours, sometimes merely minutes. But those times had a crystalline quality. They gleamed like diamonds stuck in quartz - their setting a smelly pub, usually, or a crowded café.

Talking to him – she was the one who did the talking, mainly – is what the happiness consisted in. Being with him, breathing the same air, feeling the warmth of his body not far from hers, was what she loved.

They hadn’t had sex.

They had kissed.

What a funny thing a kiss is. Everyone was always kissing Anna. Rory, Alex, her friends, her enemies. The cat. And Anna was always kissing them back, human, animal, mineral. She kissed flowers in her garden, she kissed books and letters and photographs.

Kissing Vincy was not, of course, like any of that.

He kissed her in the underground car park at the Blackrock Shopping Centre, beside her Land Rover at the end of a line of parked cars. Nobody could see them. He believed. He kissed her and held her in his arms for a minute. The earth moved. The car park moved. All the cars slid along down to the end of the dark basement and then slid back again. Time stood still. A shopping centre eclipse.

Love.

Lust.

Passion.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

It was time to do more about it.

Vincy asked her to go away for the weekend, to London. He sometimes had to go there for work purposes. But she demurred. It was one thing to have lunch, another to spend the weekend with him. If they went to bed, that would be it. An unabashed admission of adultery. The end of her marriage.

Chaos.

He understood. He did not put her under any pressure. ‘ok,’ he said. ‘When you want to go away for a weekend, we will. Not until then.’

That had made her feel unhappy, briefly. Maybe she wanted to be persuaded?

But once he made up his mind about anything, that was that. He was a very decisive man – a quality he shared with Alex. Once a plan was made, he didn’t like changing it. He did not see the point.

He decided that they would go here or go there, that they would meet every day or every second day. He even named the venues. He was the first man she had ever known who could think of the names of restaurants. Most men, even most women, hesitated as soon as a date was arranged. Where will we go? Usually nobody could remember anywhere, even though they ate out several times a month. Only after much dithering, attempts to recall names, would a venue be selected. But Vincy said, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow in the Blue Corner’, or ‘I’ll be in Doheny & Nesbit’s at one o’clock, is that ok for you?’

Yes, it was ok. All she had to do was acquiesce. None of this was in her control.

And now he never said, ‘I’m going to London on Friday evening. Can you meet me at the check-in desk at five thirty?’ or anything like that. Sex was off the agenda, and it would stay off it, it seemed, until she decided to put it back on.

This should have made Anna perfectly happy. But, curiously, it was one of the aspects of the relationship that kept it from perfection. While the sense of cheating, which should have marred it, had the opposite effect.

After the first few meetings, out in the open, they began to go to secluded venues, where they would be unlikely to bump into acquaintances. Vincy didn’t put it so bluntly, but he suggested the new secret places, and she was much happier in them. Sneaking off to dark venues gave her a sense of security, on the one hand, and heightened her sense of risk-taking and subterfuge, on the other. It was like a game of hide-and-seek for grown-ups. Would they be caught? Or would they reach den – is that what the children called it? – safely?

The Tower, in far-off Rathcormac, with its dark red cushions and hidden snugs, was her favourite spot, but they could not go there every day. So they selected other similar pubs in unlikely suburbs, Ringsend or Sutton, or, as they became more adventurous, Ballymun and Tallaght or Coolock. Into these wild regions they drove, to explore the concrete jungles on the outskirts of the city. The danger they faced from the natives was compensated for by their conviction that they would never be spotted. Nobody they knew would ever go to Ballymun for lunch, or for anything else (unless they were giving a creative writing workshop, or covering a murder for the news).

Anna gradually came to love these places for their own sake. To her they were more exotic than Seville or Stockholm or Barcelona or any of the other cities she was used to popping into for a weekend break; in many respects the great cities of Europe had a lot in common with one another, she told herself. You quickly became familiar with the type of thing on offer: an old town with narrow streets, a new town with wide streets, a cathedral and an art gallery and a bewildering multitude of picturesque restaurants. How much stranger and more exciting were Exit 9, to the Square, or Exit 4, to Ballymun! The little unknown roads that led from these exits to the big social housing estates were little roads to the unknown. The streets of houses, with their carefully tended gardens full of ponds and statues, were, she realised, more full of character, more creative and energetic, than the rich suburb in which she lived, where everyone copied everyone else, and in general where good taste decreed that you could never paint a wall unless you commissioned an interior decorator first, to tell you which shade of white was suitable. These places became much more than that. (She turned a blind eye to the odd neglected garden, to the houses with boarded up windows and broken windows that cropped up on every street.)

The pubs were different from the ones she knew, in the south suburbs of Dublin or the old town centres of Europe. The size of them was in direct contrast to the size of the houses that surrounded them: if the houses were tiny, the pubs were vast. And numerous. In her suburb, exactly the opposite situation prevailed. There was only one pub in the whole district, and it was small and poky, as if the owners accepted that the locals would not be dropping in for a jar in any numbers. Here there was a choice of venues and menus and places to sit. She liked the enormous carvery lunches or thin, toasted sandwiches, the comfortable banquettes, the plucky efforts at individuality - shelves of second-hand books in one, Chinese lanterns in another. She would sink into one of the soft seats and nibble her sandwich, melted cheddar cheese with strong mustard, or a ‘boagie’, a sort of sandwich that seemed to be native to this area; anyway she had never come across one in Killiney, or anywhere in the constituency of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown. Sinking into the plush banquette, sinking into the boagie, she would gaze happily around the vast room.

‘I had thought I was happy before,’ she said to Vincy. ‘But this is different from anything. Do you know what I mean?’

He did. He felt what she felt, precisely. So he said. They were totally united in their experience. And that was another new experience for Anna. How seldom did you share your feelings with another person! Usually you were at odds with them – if it was a man, he was talking, you were half-listening, even if you were interested in one another, even if you half-loved him, you were conscious of difference all the time, conscious that he might be bored, that his thoughts might be elsewhere – much as your own were. There was no dovetailing. Even when she and Alex had sex there was no dovetailing. Far from it.

But with Vincy, in these big, warm, seedy pubs, they were like two halves of an apple fitted together and made whole – a metaphor that would recur to her as the affair progressed.

‘This is the best there is,’ she said to him. They were at either side of a small bistro table out in the middle of the pub. That there was a real danger of discovery lent a frisson to their meeting. Sometimes she was overwhelmed by lust. She felt her face must reveal this to everyone. She felt it must be flushed, bloated even.

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ he said, smiling warningly, touching her knees with his and holding the position. ‘With those eyes. It drives me crazy.’

She slipped off her shoe and rubbed the inside of his calf with her stockinged foot.

They stared at one another in a mixture of amusement and desire.

Passion is so serious, Anna was about to say, but with you it’s funny.

But she didn’t. Because passion can’t be serious if it expresses itself only under a table in a pub.

Vincy withdrew his leg abruptly. This was a habit of his: coming close, then withdrawing. She didn’t understand why he did it but it did not bother her. Becoming familiar with his traits, especially those that seemed to be unique to him, was a pleasure in itself. She was still researching him, exploring his character, finding out: learning to read him. Everything that taught her something new about him delighted her.

Chicken tikka panini on her plate. Three white chrysanthemums on the table. A bright green plate. The sun might have been shining outside but there was artificial light here. A smell of beer and fried food. Many people gobbled their lunch, some gossiping, some silent and alone, reading newspapers. Most people were eating some kind of chunky sandwich, with crisps and coleslaw, and drinking coffee or tea. A lot of them took dessert; she gazed at them, tucking into thick wedges of apple pie with whipped cream, spooning up sweet gobbets of banoffee. Anna had not eaten dessert since she was sixteen.

As she left the pub, she noticed the inevitable beggar close to the doorway, and gave him five euro. Her eyes were on Vincy and she did not look at the man wrapped up in a blue sleeping bag. If she had, she would have seen he was wearing glasses, and reading a thick book. Over the rim of the book he peered with his bespectacled eyes and smiled when he recognised Anna, the woman who gave him such good tips that she was almost worth following around. Although that was not what he was doing. His encounters with her happened quite by chance. Without willing it, he was keeping track of her, though.

Unlike Alex.

He noticed nothing.

Her life was changed utterly and she was changed utterly, but their life together went on exactly as before.

Why? Maybe it was because he worked all the time; even his social life, limited as it was, was an extension of his work. Everything fed into that work – although Anna, and he himself, would have been hard set to describe exactly what that work consisted in. Whatever it was, it was all absorbing, and as a result, he was the most unobservant person Anna had ever known.

But some people in her immediate circle were, like the beggar with the book, more observant.

One of these was Ludmilla.

Ludmilla could have hardly helped noticing that Anna left the house now every second day at about eleven thirty in the morning, whereas previously she had usually stayed in her room until one o’clock. They never had lunch together these days. And even in the large house, where privacy was easily available, it was not hard to observe that before she left, Anna spent a long time preparing herself, washing and making up and selecting her clothes. It was also clear that Anna was both happier and better-looking than ever before.

It did not take Ludmilla long to reach the right conclusion. But it was none of her business and she said nothing, doing her work in exactly the same way as usual and, if anything, making an effort to pretend that everything was just as it had been before.

Luz Mar was less observant. Her main concern was that these days she was asked to collect Rory from school much more frequently than had been the case hitherto, which she found very annoying. She did not notice that Anna was better dressed, or more carefully dressed, than before, or that her complexion was clearer and her eyes brighter. She was nineteen. It would not have occurred to her that her employer could be having a relationship with a man not her husband. All she really noticed was that Anna was more demanding than before. What Anna’s reasons were did not concern Luz Mar and in so far as she gave them any thought, she put it down to work.

Anna still wrote in the mornings. But instead of writing for four hours or more she wrote for one, at the most. The progress of the novel slowed up and the prospect of getting a first draft completed by Christmas receded. The fortunes of Sally interested her less and less as her own life interested her more and more. Most of the time she couldn’t care less about Sally and her adventures. All this work, which had seemed so essential for her, was on the brink of becoming pointless and trivial. By comparison with what she was experiencing, writing about a non-existent, roughly conceived character journeying around an imaginary world seemed like one of life’s more ridiculous activities. Soon she had to force herself to write even for half an hour a day. She would have preferred to go for a walk, or shop for ever more attractive outfits, or do her face, or even talk to Ludmilla as she cleaned the kitchen. Most of all she would have preferred to daydream, to prolong her enjoyment of Vincy when he was not present, to savour every nuance of her love. Vincy, or her idea of Vincy, had taken over that inner part of herself in which Sally existed. He was pushing Sally, and all her other imagined things, to the side, blotting them out.

She forced herself to write out of some loyalty to her old routines. She was afraid that if she stopped she would never start again. The question, why do I do it? which she had never asked herself before, began to pop up in her consciousness more and more often, but as an excuse not to write rather than a question to be answered. By the skin of her teeth, by some miracle of habit, she clung to her unarticulated belief that writing was what identified her. That was a reason for doing it, even if it were not a very profound one. ‘I write’ was the only possible answer to the question ‘And what is it you do?’, an answer that resulted in a somewhat more positive response, usually, than the other one she could give (‘I’m a housewife’).

Neither label really identified her now. She was not a writer; she was not a housewife. She was barely, even, a mother. What she was now was the woman who was in love with Vincy. That was all she was and that was everything in the world. But – although she felt tempted once or twice – it was not something she could reveal when some rude man at a dinner party would ask in an off-hand tone, ‘And what is it you do?’ ‘I am the woman who is in love with Vincent.’

That her true identity was unknown to anyone apart from herself and Vincy was thrilling. She felt like a spy in Russia, a woman with blond hair and a mackintosh living a life of complete falseness, nurturing her true self like a pearl deep inside her body, while living every minute of her days as another human being.

Anna was two distinct people at the same time.

She was a character in her own fiction, and she was also the author of the fiction.

All I think about is him. I go over the conversations we have had, and moments of delight – a kiss in the car one dark night, a close hug in a park, when nobody could see us, when time stood still. Nobody would believe it. Nobody would believe what I feel, it seems like sentimental rubbish, the stuff of the kind of book I couldn’t bring myself to read – if those books are even written these days – and it is the most glorious transcendent thing there is. When they – who? – talk about heavenly bliss, this is what they are talking about – how they transferred the emotion attached to sexual love to a non-existent supernatural being, I cannot fathom, but now I know that that is exactly what they did. Even using the same word ‘love’. Love of God. There is no other happiness.

Thou shalt not have false images before me.

I simply think of his image. His mystery of a face, his quizzical eyes. His picture in my head.

Twenty-four hours a day, she filled her mind with him.

Playing with Rory, eating dinner with Alex, going to things with him or without him, she filled her mind with him.

Writing the increasingly preposterous and boring adventures of Sally, she filled her mind with him.

Sleeping on her wide, four-poster bed, she filled her mind with him.

Dinner with the President.

She filled her mind with him.

It should have been a big day. But – this was the downside of love, then, one of them – it wasn’t. The ordinary little triumphs, the petty pleasures, the minor snobbish thrills, were not to be enjoyed. By comparison with what she felt when she was with Vincy, they were revealed in all their tawdriness. Rubble. Rubbish.

A dark plum dress, velvet. A black cloak. Silver jewellery.

But when she saw her reflection, she recognised immediately that it lacked spirit. Her skin was opaque and dull, and no amount of light-reflecting make-up would disguise its heavy texture. Her eyes were tired and small. Even her stomach bulged. Everything was bloated, thick, swollen. A lead weight of dullness sat in her stomach and polluted her blood.

‘You look gorgeous.’ Alex kissed her on the cheek. The meaninglessness of his compliment irritated her. He was her husband; he should notice that she was bloated, and pasty-faced, that she looked like a potato in plum velvet. His compliments couldn’t be trusted – he always said, possibly always perceived, that she looked the same. What big ears he has, she thought crossly, wondering why she had not cared about this ever before.

The President’s house was pretty, although somehow not as splendid, or big, or special, as Anna would have liked. There was something predictable about it, which was not just a result of having seen parts of it a thousand times before in photographs or on television. It lacked character. Anna had heard or read of various presidents making various renovations, but the sense she got in the house was of a building that had been designed and decorated by the Office of Public Works, in the most neutral and safe style.

In a reception room she had often seen on the television screen, covered in an elaborate, strange green carpet covered with harps and shamrocks, the President received the guests. They lined up and shook her hand, and said a few friendly words. Anna should have anticipated this and prepared something to say in advance, but she hadn’t. Now, as she stood in the queue, she was too distracted by the surroundings to concentrate and come up with some suitable greeting. But she hoped she would be inspired to say something witty and charming and original, something that would make an impression and please the President. When the moment came, what she said was: ‘Thank you very much for inviting us. I am pleased to meet you.’ The only original thing she did was reverse the usual order of these sentences, and that had been done accidentally. To her surprise she felt quite nervous as she stood there, on the leprechaun carpet, shaking the hand of this person who was very familiar and yet a complete stranger. The President had just smiled blandly and stuck out her hand for the next person.

The conversation at dinner was similarly stilted all through the first course - selection of pâtés with Melba toast - and into the second - roast lamb. Alex sat beside her, which was a blessing - she hated dinners where they separated the spouses so that you sat among complete strangers. The conversation at their table sounded lively if you were not actually listening to the words, but hearing them from a distance. Everyone talked and looked animated and engaged, and the babble was continuous. But when you were there, hearing what was said, you knew it was dull and forced, that people were talking only because they felt obliged to, and that not a single person had the slightest interest in anything that was being said even by themselves.

The man opposite Anna was some sort of politician, a very young man who had run for the last county council election but failed to get in. Since he had run in Anna’s constituency, she ought to have recognised him – he talked about the problem of putting up posters containing his photograph (the problem was, they cost three euro a poster, and also that the opposition took them down as soon as your back was turned). But she could not remember having seen his face on a single one of those expensive posters, even though the election had taken place recently enough.

He talked incessantly about all kinds of political issues, himself and his experiences, and about Charlie McGreevy and the Irish representation in the eu and the European Parliament. Anna knew nothing at all about any of this. The woman next to him, dressed in red, a tall woman with very white skin and a mop of black hair, which she had tried to subdue into a sort of chignon but which escaped as time wore on, was able to take up the themes; she seemed conversant with the detail, knew the names of other European members of parliament, and the issues that were pressing just at the moment. Alex also made a few contributions. All the talkers were articulate and informed but the conversation was boring anyway, and Anna sensed that they all knew this but felt obliged to keep talking. Nobody even had the nerve to change the subject. It was as if they were afraid if they did not let the stream of talk, the source of which had been quite arbitrary, the source of which was that young failed politician and his particular interests, the stream would dry up and they would have nothing more to say. The very worst thing that could happen at a dinner like this was to fall into silence.

Which was what Anna did. She could not contribute. Her ignorance appalled her more and more as the sea of facts washed over her. She read the newspaper daily, and she listened to the news at nine o’clock, but she hardly knew the names of any European members of parliament, apart from a few Irish ones – was Dana still over there? She wasn’t even sure. Still less did she know what speeches they had been making, which journalists wrote about them in the papers, or what the big issues for the eu were just at the moment – all that had always seemed indescribably dull to her.

She remembered something when the lamb was being taken away.

‘Emma Jane McFadden,’ she said. She was an mep for Sinn Féin. She thought. ‘She has lost some weight again, hasn’t she?’

This was the only thing Anna could remember that related to the European Parliament. She offered her comment in desperation. But to her astonishment they were all ready to jump on it. The conversation livened up immediately. Everyone – except the young, pudgy politician, who looked annoyed – had a genuine, sometimes passionate, opinion on Emma Jane’s figure. And clothes.

‘No I don’t think so,’ the knowledgeable woman with the black chignon said earnestly. ‘She never managed to shake it off. She doesn’t seem to know that you can exercise even if you are an mep with a baby. Such a pity, she was quite pretty.’

‘That’s how she got her seat,’ the failed county councillor said. Annoyed as he was, he could not refrain from taking part in any conversation. He was quite fat himself and not all that good-looking. ‘They know what they are doing, Sinn Féin, putting up young, beautiful women. They keep doing it.’

The conversation then expanded to discuss the appearances of all the other female politicians. Their hair, figures, their suits, their blouses, their coats, even their shoes or boots were commented upon in detail, and with great delight by everyone. From shoes to relationships and love affairs was almost a natural transition. Inadvertently, the failed county councillor revealed that a particular Minister had recently separated from his wife. There had been an intimation that he had had a relationship with his pr consultant, which he had successfully quashed. Now the people at the table who knew everything let it be known that all the people in the know were well aware that he had been having this affair for years. They then began to talk about other politicians who had had illicit affairs and who had succeeded in keeping them secret from the media, and about others who had not had the luck to succeed.

The table buzzed with animated talk.

Anna found all this fascinating, but also both reassuring and terrifying at the same time.

It was reassuring to find out that having an affair was so commonplace. From the way these people spoke about it, you would get the impression that it was more normal than anything else. It sounded as if everyone who was anyone was having an affair, and that their affairs were common knowledge, if you were in the right circles. There were always secret layers of activity in any society, and it seemed to Anna that she was always one of those who didn’t understand what was going on under the surface of any of them. In school, even, it had been like that. Girls in whose mouths butter would not melt, you would think, were taking drugs in the woods behind the school every afternoon, and indulging in other kinds of debauchery as a matter of course, while turning up to get their five hundred points in the Leaving with their blouses ironed and their stockings straight. Probably all those seemingly devoted couples she knew were devoted because they were maintaining illicit liaisons in their spare time.

On the other hand, it was terrifying to realise that what the participants no doubt believed to be secret and underground was so well known.

She wondered if the particular Minister, who had gone to such pains to deny his affair to the press, realised that a group of his associates would be openly gossiping about it within earshot of the President of Ireland, apparently happily devouring her roast lamb but no doubt keeping her own ear open for titbits such as this? The President probably knew all about everyone’s carrying on, since she was hosting dinners like this every night of the week.

It was most unlikely, though, Anna thought, that the Minister, or any of the other people whose secret liaisons were now amusing twenty diners in Áras an Uachtaráin, were aware of this. He, and they, no doubt believed it was a secret from everyone but him and his lover.

Anna began to wonder if these people knew about her and Vincy. Was the woman in red giving her knowing glances? Scrutinising her to see what she was like? A lot of them would know Vincy, even though nobody knew Anna.

But she dismissed her suspicions quickly, believing she was much too unimportant to be worth their attention. When Alex told them she was a writer, they looked taken aback – the standard reaction. Naturally they had never heard of her. But their faces suggested that they were genuinely surprised to hear that she was not illiterate, since she did not seem to know what the Maastricht Treaty was or which member states had signed up to the European Constitution.

‘Why should you know all about those things?’ Vincy asked. They were in the Tower, so much more comfortable in every way than Áras an Uachtaráin. ‘They don’t know anything about children’s literature, or about any literature. Most of them never read a book.’

‘I’m not so sure about that,’ said Anna.

‘Believe me. They don’t. Not in the sense you mean it. They work in the diplomatic service, or they are civil servants or politicians, and they think they have a God-given right to talk shop morning, noon and night. Ridiculous prats!’ He patted her hand with a paternal gentleness.

‘There are people who read books and who also have a good knowledge of politics,’ said Anna. But who were they? Most of the writers she knew had strong stances on subjects such as George Bush. They hated him. Certain facts about him they knew: he had started a war in Iraq and was engaged in the torture of prisoners in secret locations in Poland and Romania, and in Guantánamo Bay. The rest of their feeling about him was based on opinions, the staunchest of which was that George Bush was stupid. But how much did they really know about any of this? Their conversation was general, not detailed. From one another they picked up particular points of view, or biases. Bush is bad. Blair is silly. Bertie is not so bad, in spite of his northside accent.

‘Yes, maybe,’ said Vincy. ‘Like me. One should know certain things, like who is the Taoiseach, or the Minister for Finance, or the Minister for Foreign Affairs. Do you know that?’

‘Yes,’ said Anna. Though she had to think for a few seconds about the Minister for Foreign Affairs.

‘And what new legislation of importance is being enacted here. And in Europe. But everyone finds out if it really is important – you find out about the euro, about the Common Agricultural Policy, about sanctions to the Third World. Don’t you?’

‘I suppose so.’ The Common Agricultural Policy. Was that what gave rise to sugar mountains and wine lakes? She was far from sure. ‘It is just that at the sort of party I was at last night I never seem to know enough.’ She paused. ‘Actually, I never seem to know anything.’

He smiled and squeezed her hand again – in the Tower, they could hold hands over the table, whereas in the city centre all contact had to be under it. Anna longed to snuggle up in his arms and be kissed and comforted. He was listening to her in a way Alex would never, ever do. This conversation was not one she could have with Alex, because he would consider it so trivial that he could not bring himself to pay attention to it for more than one second, much less listen to all the little details, analyse them, and comment sensibly on them. Vincy was handsome and masculine and authoritative but talking to him was more like talking to a woman than to a man.

‘That’s their fault,’ he said. ‘They are ignorant. I bet they became more respectful when they found out you were a writer, even if they hadn’t heard of you?’

‘No,’ she said rather forlornly. ‘They just looked taken aback at first and then sceptical, like everyone does when they hear that.’

‘You should be more confident,’ he said.

‘I don’t write that much now anyway,’ she said. ‘It is as if I had been writing to attract attention … from you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Not from you personally. But I have heard some writer say that he writes to make people love him. Now that you love me there seems to be less reason for writing.’

‘I’ll be very very very upset if you stop writing because of me,’ Vincy said, frowning at her. ‘You better promise me right now that you’ll do no such thing.’

She smiled and shrugged.

‘Anyway, it doesn’t make any sense. What that fellow said. You write to make people love you. That’s just one of those silly things writers say when they’re being interviewed. They have to say something. Most of it is crap.’ He took her hand and squeezed it firmly.

Then he had to get back to work.

‘Is it that time already?’ Anna asked. It shocked her, how swiftly the lunchtimes sped by. The allotted time was cruelly short. She felt as if she had been bitten by some snarling animal, some sharp-fanged watchdog, when she looked at the clock and realised, once again, that they had to part.

She did not know if Vincy felt the same, and suspected not. He loved being with her but he loved working just as much. That was the difference between them; what that writer had said was not crap, as far as she was concerned. She would rather sit with Vincy, doing nothing more than drinking coffee or watching the folk life in any village pub, than writing her book or doing anything else at all. But Vincy wanted to get back to his desk, to his projects, to his other life.

He knew that she saw things differently. He pressed his knees against hers, for a few seconds, in sympathy, to comfort her. Then they stood up and walked slowly towards the door.

Just as they reached it, Leo Kavanagh walked in. He looked at Anna in recognition and nodded.

‘Oh hello,’ said Anna, alarmed. She knew she had met this small man, with his curly hair and beard, with the tweedy clothes, somewhere before. Glancing at his shoes – big brown walking shoes – his name came to her. ‘Leo!’ The one from the country, who had been interested in Kate.

‘Hello, Mrs Sweeney.’ Leo stared at her and Vincy with undisguised curiosity.

‘So what brings you to these parts?’ Anna asked, as she recalled more about him.

‘Oh, you know,’ said Leo, looking inquisitively at Vincy. ‘I come to Dublin fairly regularly. I’m organising a meeting of my lobby group among other things.’

‘Yes, I’d heard something about that,’ Vincy said. ‘Have you sent out a press release lately?’

‘We do it from time to time,’ Leo said, although they hadn’t this time, so Vincy could not possibly have heard about the meeting. ‘The press doesn’t pay much attention, unfortunately.’

Vincy smiled and nodded. ‘Maybe I can jog some of them. Let me know when you’re doing something, ok?’

At that moment John Perry followed Leo into the pub.

‘I’ll certainly do that,’ Leo said.

‘Great to have met you!’ Vincy said. ‘Take care so.’ And he ushered Anna out the door.

‘Do you think he suspected anything?’ she asked, as they walked across the car park over to Vincy’s car.

‘No, why should he?’ Vincy said carelessly. ‘Get in for a minute, can you?’

At that moment he looked appallingly lonely, as she had never seen him before. Anna got into the car immediately, although not before glancing at the doorway of the pub to make sure Leo wasn’t looking.

Vincy leaned across the handbrake and hugged her tightly, with desperation. They kissed as if their lives depended on it. Now – she did not know why – his need for her was greater than hers for him. He kissed with a recklessness that was out of character. Something – the encounter with Leo? – had transformed him from an urbane sophisticate to a wild, vulnerable thing.

He opened her jacket and blouse, and began to touch her breasts.

‘Not here.’ Anna pulled away. ‘Stop, let’s go somewhere else.’ She looked out at the rows of cars in the grey yard. Is there anything as ugly as a car park? she found herself thinking. It was so bleak, its surfaces so hard and cold, that it offended her.

Vincy settled into his own side of the car, into the driver’s seat.

‘Sorry,’ he said, smoothing his own jacket. ‘I don’t know what came over me. I’m really sorry.’

‘Don’t be sorry,’ said Anna. ‘I mean … not at all. It’s just a sort of public place. We could go somewhere else.’ She looked out again. Two middle-aged women were walking past, their eyes judiciously averted. ‘Almost anywhere else would be better than this.’

‘I wish,’ said Vincy. He glanced at his watch. ‘But … Rory will be home from school, won’t he?’

Luz Mar can look after him, Anna thought.

‘And I need to be getting back. God, I’ve an appointment in fifteen minutes, I’ll have to ring and tell them I’ll be late.’ He pulled his mobile out of his pocket.

‘ok,’ said Anna. ‘So … we’ll go home?’

He looked up from his mobile, puzzled. ‘What? Oh yeah, bye. See you tomorrow?’ He kissed her quickly on the cheek.

She left his car.

All of this Leo and John Perry observed with interest from the window of the pub.