Fifteen

After lunch with John Perry, Leo came back into the city and went to Rathmines to visit the poet who had written about child abuse.

The first black woman Irish-language poet. She had everything, the potential to be a star, Leo’s first real star! Even though her Irish was not one hundred per cent. But then whose was? Nobody, hardly anybody, wrote correct and accurate Irish. Leo corrected the woman’s poetry, corrected the grammatical errors, while leaving the thinness, the flatness, the anglicised syntax, since that was the woman’s style.

Kambele Ngole.

Harder to say than an Irish name, even. But less offensive to the ears of the general populace.

She was round and beautiful, and dressed in flamboyant clothes – lime green and gold seemed to be the predominant colours. Great! Most of his women authors wore nothing but black. Their launches looked like funerals – which in a sense they were, unfortunately. Kambele’s launch, he hoped, would be more like a wedding, fertile with sales and reprints.

A launch. He would have to have a launch, but he would also have to get the book into the shops before Christmas. There was very little time to spare – everything was running late. Could he possibly organise a launch for a week’s time? Yes, of course he could, if he put his mind down to it. And employed a good person to help him.

Kate.

He had never employed anyone to help him before, but this time there were extenuating circumstances. Christmas was coming, and he had a potential success on his hands. The right book at the right time – it didn’t happen often, in his publishing life. He had been lucky with Tristan. A second success in a season would be a real treat, a good Christmas present to himself. A resounding national success would be spectacular – and just what he needed right now.

Kate would be ideal. She would understand. She would know that his interest was purely professional.

He decided that as soon as he got back to his room he would phone her, and then he could run around to her office very quickly, since it was close to where he was staying. Now that he knew Vincy Erikson was having an affair with Anna Kelly Sweeney (Leo always remembered names, even difficult ones – it was a publisher’s knack), telephoning Kate would be much easier. Presumably she knew about this carry-on? Everyone must. They were obviously not very concerned about keeping it a secret.

But he encountered problems. Getting to the B & B took considerably longer than it should have. He took a taxi from Rathmines into town, but it could not get further than Stephen’s Green.

‘De march,’ said the taxi driver, who had been taciturn since Leo had made it clear he was not interested in talking. ‘De siptu march about de ferries; it’s huge. They could’ve waited till Saturday. Woulda caused less disruption to everyone.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Leo, remembering. Irish Ferries, the shipping line, had been in dispute with the unions for months. They had offered redundancy packages to their Irish workers to make way for east Europeans and others who would take a quarter of the wages. Because they sailed the high seas – or even the Irish Sea – the Irish legislature had no control over them, and neither had any other legislature, it seemed. Leo had not quite understood how this worked – you could not buy duty free goods in the air or on sea any more, because everything was in the eu. You could no longer buy a cheap bottle of whiskey on the Irish Sea but you could use slave labour on its waters with impunity. Odd. He should look into it. But at the moment he had more pressing concerns.

‘Dey’ll march from Liberty Hall to de Dáil,’ said the taxi driver. ‘You’d be as well off walking de rest of the way.’

Leo took his advice, paid him, and set off.

It was about one thirty. The streets close to the Green were crowded; lots of people were shopping, it seemed, march or no march. Walking down Grafton Street, he felt himself to be swimming against a tide of humanity. Waves of faces, every kind of face, met him, an endless swarm. But as long as he kept going forwards there was no difficulty in making progress. The bodies, which looked as if they would have to block him, parted, spontaneously, easily, as if in a patterned dance that everyone simply knew. There should have been collisions but there were not – only people trying to traverse the crowd, move from side to side, were bumped into, and glared at. There were no crossings for those who wanted to cross the flow of walkers; they had to do their best to weave through the flow, and usually trod on somebody’s toes. Strange, he thought, that nobody had ever considered putting in pedestrian lights, never realised that walkers constituted a kind of traffic.

The protest march became visible at the bottom of the street. It was snaking around Trinity College, moving along Nassau Street towards Kildare Street and the Dáil. The line stretched as far as he could see in both directions. All the unions and many other groups were represented: seamen’s unions from Wales and France had joined in. There were groups of Polish workers, students, Labour Party groups, community groups. ‘No Slave Labour’ the banners declared.

He continued on his way, which he was able to do. Even when he had to cross the street, the crowd politely made way for him, unlike the Grafton Street shoppers, although one man tried to corner him, shouting cheerfully, ‘Come on, join us!’ All the way down to O’Connell Street and down Eden Quay the line of marchers stretched, singing and shouting in the wintry sunshine. Leo had never seen such a long march in Dublin.

In Kerry this issue had seemed remote and he had hardly registered that it was happening. That Filipino workers on ships on the Irish Sea were being underpaid seemed irrelevant, down there in the country, where the problem of how to get down to the bus without being blown away into the raging Atlantic took precedence over most things at this time of year. Dublin … Dublin seemed far away and pointless, spineless, weak, down there.

It surprised him that the workers of Dublin possessed sufficient idealism and energy to mount such a spectacular protest. Of course, their own futures were at stake, so it wasn’t entirely altruistic. Even so, one had to acknowledge that the trade-union movement seemed to be alive and well. It lifted his heart to see the long march, a line of humanity a mile long taking over the shopping streets in the interests of workers’ rights. Modern people were not as apathetic as he usually believed they were. It was a good omen, the march, he decided.

He had to walk to his B & B, but he walked with an optimistic tread.

Kate was not at the office. He was not answered by a taped recording of her voice, however, but by an actual human voice – Lauren’s.

‘Oh, no,’ she said. Her tone was neutral. ‘She isn’t here at the moment. Maybe I can help you?’

‘It’s … thank you,’ he said sadly. ‘I am a friend of hers.’

Professionalism indeed.

There was a pause. Leo lifted his eyes and looked out his window at the grey railway station. For some reason it looked unaccountably sad and he began to wonder when it had been built. Connolly Station. He did not see James Connolly, strapped into a chair to be executed in front of another grey wall in the stone breakers’ yard or whatever they called the execution ground in Kilmainham (was he mixing it up with Calvary? People did). He saw crowds of soldiers on their way to the Great War. There in front of his eyes he could see them, lines of marching men in their khaki uniforms, heading to Flanders and the Somme. And among the ranks someone odd marched, a woman who looked like a scarecrow, with black straw for hair and a wide red smile. On her head was a black straw hat with a red rose in the brim, a hat only a scarecrow would wear. I had not thought death had undone so many, said Leo to himself, and this scarecrow waved at him, cheerily.

‘Is there something wrong?’ he asked, knowing there was.

‘Kate is on leave,’ Lauren said cautiously but with more warmth. ‘You should contact her family if you are a friend.’

‘All right,’ said Leo. The next question was going to be awkward. ‘Can you give me her parents’ telephone number? We went out together for a while, recently, Kate and I, but I don’t know her family as such.’

There was another pause, quite a long one, but when she spoke again, she gave him the number.

‘Two – eight – seven – six – five – double four.’

‘Oh thanks,’ said Leo.

‘Take care!’ she said, even more warmly.

If Leo had read her voice, its tone would have told him that something bad was about to happen. But he was too distracted to pay attention to Lauren’s tone, to what she was saying between the lines.

Leo took the bus out to the psychiatric hospital in Stillorgan, or the looney bin, as he would have referred to it before this afternoon. He would have preferred to take a taxi but he was too embarrassed to get into one and say ‘John of God’s’, lest the taxi driver think he was crazy. The name, John of God, bristled with unsavoury connotations. John of God he saw as a skeletal, demented creature, a figure painted in dark oils by El Greco, most unsavoury. For Leo, mental illness was one of the most frightening phrases in the English language – he had lived in the shadow of the mental asylum, as it had been known then, in his childhood. His mother used to frighten him with stories about the mad inmates, and warn him to stay away from the high stone walls.

And now he was going to a similar place to visit a woman he was in love with. Or had been in love with until an hour ago, because ever since he telephoned Kate’s family home and her mother had told him, calmly, that she was a patient in this place, in the looney bin, his feelings had been in turmoil.

He waited sadly for the 46A and trundled slowly out the N11.

The evening had turned dark and gloomy, after the sunshine of midday and the glory of the protest march. Night was closing in as he got off the bus and made his way across the motorway to the hospital. It was a big, dark, old building, with wide gardens between it and the motorway. It was not, however, surrounded by the high grey walls, walls like those of a prison or a fortress that surrounded the place in Dundrum, keeping the mad monsters inside and the sane human race out. From here, the mad monsters, the lunatics, would be able to escape quite easily.

Some modern extensions, built mainly of glass, gave the building a rather up-to-date and harmless look. Signs indicating ‘Stress Clinic’ augmented this effect. If Kate were in the Stress Clinic, it would be all right, he thought, clutching at a straw. It was so much nicer to be in a stress clinic than in a mental hospital. Most people had stress in some form or other, if they were alive at all. He had it himself. Right now.

The rather harmless atmosphere, the sense of normality, suggested by this sign prevailed also inside the doors of the hospital. It was more pleasant than most hospitals. Of course, nobody was actually sick here, in the accepted meaning of the word. Just off the rails. So there were no smells of formaldehyde or whatever it was that gave regular hospitals their typical intimidating stink. A tree grew in the lobby, in front of a giant abstract mural, rather colourful. Behind a desk an elderly woman sat, with the unmistakable look of a nun, even though she wore what nuns apparently considered to be ordinary clothes, which were the sort of clothes old schoolteachers wore in the 1950s. Did they have a special shop for them, specialising in old schoolteachers’ grey skirts and blue cardigans, like those shops that sold school uniforms? Or had they kept them in mothballs for fifty years in the attics of convents?

‘I am looking for St Paul’s Ward,’ he said.

‘Which patient?’ she asked, in a neutral rather than a kind voice.

He resented this. ‘Kate Murphy,’ he said, however.

She answered immediately, without checking anything. ‘Room six. Down the corridor, take the lift to the second floor and then turn left.’

He found his way to St Paul’s: not a ward so much as a wide area in which armchairs were clustered here and there around coffee tables. It was decorated with potted plants and reproductions of popular Impressionist pictures with nature motifs. Sunflowers. Starry Night. Water Lilies. Obviously they were attempting to create a welcoming, cheerful environment for the inmates – something they didn’t bother to do in normal hospitals, where by the time you got to the ward you were too sick to care that the corridors were hung with pictures of the crucifixion interspersed with portraits of former surgeons.

Number six was one of several doors along the inside wall of this space, which was fronted with glass on the other side.

He knocked and was admitted.

Kate was not in bed, but sitting in a chair, looking at the television.

He kissed her quickly, eyes averted.

‘Kate!’ He moved away from her and forced himself to look. Clad all in black, she sat in the red plastic chair looking like an insect sleeping in a tomato. She was thinner than before. Even thinner. ‘Kate!’

She did not seem surprised to see him. He assumed that somehow, although he could not think how, she had found out that he was coming.

‘Hello, Leo.’ She smiled and spoke in a perfectly normal tone of voice. ‘How are you?’

She still hadn’t turned off the television. A quiz show was on, very loudly.

He was confused and she seemed very poised – as usual.

‘Fine thanks,’ he said. ‘And you?’

‘Well …’ she shrugged. ‘I suppose I should be telling you what I am doing here!’

‘Only if you feel like it,’ he said.

‘Oh, it’s not a problem.’ She smiled very brightly. ‘I got depressed. And anorexic, a tendency I have.’

‘Yes?’ He had a momentary impulse to take her hand, but he resisted it. ‘I say,’ he said, embarrassed. ‘Could you lower the sound on the television? Slightly hard of hearing.’ He touched his ear apologetically.

‘Oh, sorry, I forgot!’ She zapped it off with the remote control. ‘There!’ She smiled brightly again. ‘Do you watch television much?’

‘Eh, no. Not too much,’ he said. ‘I have a set all right, but mostly I prefer to read.’

‘Me too. I don’t ever watch it at home. But here I can’t read and there’s nothing else to do.’

He looked around the room. It was an ordinary, basic room, pink walls and a large window looking out on bare trees and rooftops. He could see the orange glow of the lights along the Bray Road.

‘I’ve been here for two weeks,’ she said. She smiled, in a rather strange, glassy, way. ‘I’m getting bored.’

‘Is that a good sign?’ he asked.

‘Not really. It just is a very boring place,’ she said. She twisted her hands. Her hair was unkempt and she did not look very clean. No make-up.

‘What do you do all day?’ he asked perfunctorily. They were not going to have an intimate conversation. She was not going to confide in him the reason for her breakdown, whether it had something to do with that Vincy fellow or not. And he was not going to confide in her about his feelings, which were suddenly very ambivalent.

‘I watch television,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing else to do.’

‘Hm.’ He looked around the room again. There were no books, not even one, that he could see. ‘Do you read?’ he asked.

‘I can read,’ she said quickly. He was about to retort but thought better of it. It dawned on him that the medication had affected her responses. ‘But I can’t read in here.’ Tears filled her eyes, to his alarm. He couldn’t cope if she started to cry. ‘I can’t concentrate, because of all the drugs.’

He nodded. ‘You’re on a lot of drugs?’ He sounded as if he were on a lot of drugs himself, it occurred to him.

‘Yes, a lot. Do you read?’

They’d already discussed this.

‘Yes, yes, I do. I read all the time, at home.’

‘Where do you live?’ she asked.

‘What? You know perfectly well …’ he started to say. But then he just answered the question. ‘Down the country. In Kerry.’

‘Kerry is beautiful,’ she said. ‘I’d like to go there sometime. I went on a holiday once when I was a child.’ She paused. ‘I think it was there. Or Derry. There’s a place called Derry?’

‘You must come down to Kerry,’ he said slowly. ‘When you’re better.’ He didn’t mean that she must come down to visit him. ‘When are you getting out?’ he asked.

‘When they decide I’m ok. They come around and talk to me once a week and weigh me. Then make up their minds.’

She looked sad again. She twisted her hands. There was a silence that sat heavily in the little pink room.

‘It’s nice of you to come.’

‘I was in Dublin. I was going to ask you out to dinner.’

She laughed. ‘Dinner!’ she repeated.

He smiled uneasily. ‘Yes.’

‘They spend their whole time trying to get me to eat.’

Leo patted her hand, without moving closer to her. She smelt slightly of bodily smells, sweat, maybe even a faint trace of urine.

‘I haven’t eaten a dinner in months.’ She laughed. Now she was alert and logical. ‘But on Monday they’ll let me down for coffee.’

Leo didn’t know what to make of this. ‘Down for coffee?’ he asked.

‘There’s a café. It’s a treat, and a test. The first step to getting out of here is getting down the stairs for coffee. Then after a week or so, they let you walk in the grounds. And then they let you home on Sunday and so on. That’s their little system.’

‘Hm.’ He thought quickly. Or did not think at all. ‘Well, ok, can I buy you coffee on Monday?’

‘That would be lovely.’ She smiled graciously, like an ordinary woman accepting an invitation to an ordinary date, not like someone who was drugged out of her senses in a lunatic asylum.

The hospital café had a cheerful aspect - it was large with dark tables and chairs, and palm trees in brass pots, like Bewley’s used to be. One glass wall looked out on a terrace thick with potted palms, against a backdrop of bare black trees. In a corner, someone played the piano. The music, which might have been something by Debussy, provided a gentle soothing accompaniment to the hum of voices and the clatter of cups and saucers: that comforting tune. People sat around drinking coffee and eating cakes.

Kate seemed to accept Leo’s presence without question. It was as if they were friends of long standing. There was something odd about the way she queried nothing, but today she was less forgetful than she had been during their first meeting. Already he could read the signs; she was probably on a lower dose, or a different dose, of medication. But although she was much more normal, her conversation was all about the present and focused on life in the hospital. And her health. She didn’t even ask how he was, even though she seemed to know exactly who he was this time.

‘The food is quite good really, but of course I don’t want to eat it. They give me special meals, small portions, and not heavy, but it is very difficult for me to eat.’

She sipped her coffee, which was black. She had gone to some trouble with her appearance. Her hair had been washed and brushed and she was well dressed, in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. In these clothes he could see how thin she had become.

‘I weigh just under six stone,’ she said cheerfully, noticing that he was examining her.

Leo had no idea what a woman like Kate would normally weigh. He knew that he himself weighed thirteen stone and a bit, though, so could grasp that less than half that weight seemed unnatural, even for a woman.

‘They’d like me to be seven before they let me go home, and then I should try to increase to eight or eight and a half. Or nine.’ She shuddered.

He looked at her carefully. He found it hard to understand these details, but she was fascinated by them. ‘Is that what you normally weigh in at?’ he asked.

She shook her head and widened her eyes in mock alarm. ‘I never weigh more than seven and a half stone,’ she said. ‘At least I haven’t for years. I was a fatty when I was fifteen, about ten stone, it was horrific. That’s of course where the whole problem started.’

Debussy, definitely. He couldn’t name it, some lovely interlude. He listened to the clink of spoons on saucers; he looked at the waving palm trees, at the trees’ black limbs stretched like supplicated arms against the evening sky.

‘But as a rule, you’re fine?’

‘Yes.’ She closed her eyes for a second. ‘I am always fine. I like being thin and I can get by, at seven and a half. That’s within my bmi range. I’m small anyway.’

‘And this time …’

‘It was brought on by a crisis.’ She didn’t want to talk about Vincy, so he didn’t bring it up. ‘It’s very relaxing here, but there is nothing to do. They don’t do any therapy at all. You just take the medication, lots of different kinds of medication. Or if you get too bad, they give you ect.’

He started. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. A Beautiful Mind, John Nash thrashing around in his bed. He hadn’t known they still used ect. ‘Have they given you ect?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Just once.’

‘God,’ he said, shaking his head.

‘It’s great,’ she said. ‘It makes a huge difference. It means I’ll be better soon. And when I get out, I will see a therapist who will do cognitive therapy with me, and teach me to be … not to be anorexic.’

Leo came across Anna Kelly Sweeney and Vincy Erikson a few nights later.

He had planned to go back home after meeting Kate for the second time, but, without questioning his decision, he lingered on. He had the excuse of organising the book launch for Kambele Ngole – he was doing it on his own after all. With the help of his laptop he was able to do that easily enough from the B & B. When not visiting Kate, he was busy emailing invitations to people, making phone calls, arranging a caterer. Luckily the place on the Green, or off the Green, where he had held his last launch, was available – it had been decorated for Christmas and looked more cheerful than it had in November.

It was an emailed invitation to another book event that brought him into contact with Anna and Vincy. A novel by Marcus Browne, a young novelist who was highly thought of by everyone, was being launched. The event was being held in the Westbury Hotel, an unusually glamorous venue, testimony to the publishers’ faith in their new boy. He was in fact, Leo thought, one of the few Irish writers under the age of forty who had achieved any recognition, so he could understand the publishers’ optimism. If things went well, a long, successful career could be starting this very night – just as Leo hoped a successful career would start in a few days’ time in St Martin’s Hall.

The whole mezzanine area of the hotel, a vast space full of elegant Louis Quatorze chairs, with crystal chandeliers, a grand piano, palms in brass pots, was in use for the launch. Champagne was served and many of the important literati were present, chattering at the tops of their voices. It could not have been more different from Leo’s launches. The surprising thing was that there could be so much variation in an event that went by the same name. Instead of a handful of embarrassed or proud relations of the writer, here were hordes of people, who, like himself, would not have recognised the writer if they met him on the street, but whose own faces were well known. Leo saw features he knew from the pages of the weekend newspapers, voices he heard on the arts show, names from the spines of paperbacks published by Penguin and Picador and Faber & Faber. John McGann himself, who never came to anything, and was rumoured to be ill, was sitting on one of those gold brocade chairs, a glass of champagne in hand, listening to Deirdre O’Dea, her chestnut hair flowing over her porcelain shoulders. Leo slid across the room to eavesdrop. He had never seen these two people at a book launch before. This was an opportunity not to be missed.

‘I stay in the Shelbourne usually, John,’ Ireland’s leading woman novelist was saying to Ireland’s leading man novelist, in her famously mellifluous tones. ‘But it’s closed for renovations so I’m putting up here for tonight and then I’ll go to my little place down the country for a few days. I love it in the country. I’m a country person, just like you, darling, although I never write a thing while I’m there.’ She drew out the words ‘down the counth-ree’, rolling the consonants around in her mouth and filling the simple phrase with the mixture of poetry and irony that was her hallmark.

‘It’s funny, the places where you can write and where you can’t,’ said the other great Irish novelist in a flat voice.

‘Isn’t it? I write in London. I can write in other places … I do when I go to France sometimes and rent a villa, but in my own little cottage in the country I just can’t. It’s because I am so distracted. I am always needing to get a plumber or a painter or someone to fix the light. There is always something wrong with the house. Is it like that in Tipperary, John, is it?’ She leaned over, unconsciously it seemed, so that he would hear her better.

‘I can fix the light myself,’ said John McGann.

Deirdre O’Dea smiled appreciatively and kissed him, being so close anyway. His face was raw, as if his skin had become very thin, and he looked tired. Leo thought that the rumours of illness were probably correct.

‘That’s what it means to be a man, a real countryman. You can turn your hand to anything.’ She said these things in a dramatic, sensuous, deeply sonorous voice, as if uttering statements of the utmost profundity.

Leo would have liked to eavesdrop for longer, but Deirdre O’Dea glanced up and saw him standing there, his ear cocked. So he looked away hurriedly, pretending not to see her, and scanned the room studiously for other famous people, or for a friendly face. There were plenty of the former but not so many of the latter. None of the Irish language crowd would be here, they weren’t important enough to merit an invitation to a launch like this.

Then someone tapped him on the shoulder.

‘Gerry.’ Leo smiled. ‘How nice to see you.’ Meaning, he would have been pleased to see anyone who would talk to him.

‘What brings you to Dublin?’ Gerry asked.

Leo hesitated. He did not know if it would be tactful to mention Kate. Her parents had been quite open about her mental illness but Gerry might find it embarrassing to have the subject broached. Leo would be embarrassed to be related to someone in a mental hospital. Or he would have been, before now, before he had become accustomed to Kate’s illness, and to the hospital.

‘Oh you know, work mostly,’ he said. ‘A few people to see, the usual. How is life treating you these days?’

‘Great!’ said Gerry, who had already had four glasses of champagne, more than anyone else attending this launch. ‘I’m having an exhibition in the new year, I’ve finally got my show on the road. I’ll send you a card.’

‘You’re still working in the civil service?’ Leo asked.

‘Oh yes, yes,’ Gerry said dismissively. ‘It pays the bills. But I’ve taken a bit of time off. Enough to get this exhibition finished.’

‘Well that’s great. Send me an invite, I’ll come if I can at all.’ said Leo. ‘So how is everyone? Anna?’

Leo looked as sly as Leo ever would.

‘Anna? My sister?’

Leo nodded slowly.

Gerry looked less cheerful all of a sudden. ‘Oh, I haven’t seen her for a while,’ he said.

‘That’s about to be remedied,’ said Leo. ‘She’s just come up the stairs. And that’s Vincy, the big fellow with the Swedish surname, with her, I think.’

Gerry turned to look. Then he said abruptly, ‘I’ve got to talk to someone about a … Look, good to have met you.’ He went to the other end of the room.

Leo smiled to himself, feeling powerful all of a sudden. He had seldom been so nasty, in, as he considered it, a subtle way, although he had often been at the receiving end of such unpleasantness. Although it was contrary to his main moral principle, namely that people should be kind to one another, his dig at Gerry did not make him feel morally defective. It did not make him feel mean. Buoyed up by a new confidence, he made his way towards Anna and Vincy. He would say hello. He would mention Kate’s name just to see how they reacted. Just to annoy them. But when he came close to the head of the stairs, where they had been standing, they had disappeared. He looked around. The crowd had thickened. There were hundreds of people in the room. Anna and Vincy must have got lost in the mêlée very quickly after arriving.

Disconsolately he began to shove back into the crowd. Contrary to his initial impression, he now saw that the room contained dozens of people he knew well enough to talk to. Now, when he didn’t want them, they emerged from the amorphous mass, and greeted him and kept him engaged in trivial conversation.

He found himself pulled into a group of writers whom he hardly knew, although he recognised their faces. ‘Houseman got a huge advance from Secker and Warburg for his latest,’ one of the company said. ‘So they say. He wouldn’t give it to them unless they upped their usual by twenty-five per cent. It’s not that he cares about the money, it’s his way of measuring his literary worth, he says.’

They laughed.

‘Secker and Warburg must have been pissed off. How many did he sell?’

‘I reckon not more than twenty-five thousand. They would have been hoping for a hundred. Thanks to you going and writing a book on the same subject.’ He poked someone – that was Jonathan Bewley, Leo knew him to see – in the chest.

Leo felt so jealous that he had to move off.

How much were those advances? The exact figure was something you never got to know, except in reports in the newspaper, which were undoubtedly inaccurate. A huge advance. Twenty-five per cent more. Did the lucky writer get a million or two million? Or five hundred thousand?

He gave lucky writers an advance of two thousand euro. Some of the really lucky ones got commissions from Bord na Leabhar Gaeilge, but the best of them would get about ten thousand. That there was another literary world, in which literature was big business, was something he had known of but preferred not to think about too much. He had seldom heard a frank discussion where actual figures were named, as he had just this minute. Writers were notoriously coy about revealing how much they earned, probably because, like the writer they were discussing, they knew their literary value would be assessed by a lot of people according to the money they got for their books. Leo had always assumed that there was plenty of exaggeration in the figures occasionally splashed about the newspapers and that writers were happy to allow the people to believe they earned much more than was actually the case. But here were two Irishmen obviously involved in fiction as big business, while the writers he knew were involved in fiction and poetry as … pastime. Amateurs, lucky to get a small publisher, lucky to get even Leo, to take them on.

A woman who had been eavesdropping on the rim of the rich circle raised her eyebrows. ‘Makes you sick,’ she said to Leo. ‘My biggest advance ever was six thousand pounds, and I got that after I was short-listed for a major prize.’ She did not mention what this major prize was, however.

‘Oh?’ Leo looked at her, a tall woman in a sparkling black dress. He had seen her at something. Of course, he had seen everyone here at something. He thought quickly. ‘You must be Lilian Meaney?’ His memory for names, as always, never let him down.

‘Yes, that’s me.’

‘Nice to meet you. I’m Leo Kavanagh. I publish poetry books, in Irish, so the world of the big advance is to me unknown as well.’

‘Oh well’ – she raised her glass to him – ‘we shouldn’t get disheartened. The best writers were poor in their own lifetime.’

That wasn’t strictly true, but Leo knew unsuccessful writers liked to comfort themselves with this belief, which he called the Emily Dickinson Bullshit.

‘What are you working on at the moment?’ Leo asked.

‘A book for young people.’

‘That’s a new departure for you, or am I wrong?’

‘No, you’re right, usually I write for adults.’ Lilian, who had a warm voice and was very appealing in most ways, looked across the room. ‘Listen, there is someone I must say hello to. Lovely to have met you, Leo! Take care.’

‘Goodbye, Lilian,’ he said. ‘By the way, have you seen Anna Kelly Sweeney here?’

‘She’s over there talking to J.K. Rowling. Imagine, they got J.K. Rowling to come to this. I’ve never seen her at anything in Dublin before, have you?’

‘No,’ said Leo impatiently. Like most small publishers, he hated Harry Potter and everything he stood for in the literary world.

He moved towards the small group surrounding the famous writer.

‘Meet J.K. Rowling,’ Anna said, after the greetings were exchanged. She obviously had no idea that Leo had witnessed her passionate exchange with Vincy in the car park of the Tower, and was as cool and poised as ever. Vincy was not in the immediate vicinity.

‘Hello, it’s a pleasure to meet you,’ Leo said politely, to the woman famed for being a book multimillionaire, in the first place, and the creator of Hogwarts, in the second. ‘Do you do magic tricks?’

‘I wish,’ she said. Her hair was long and breezy and she wore a simple mini-dress. She was altogether natural looking and charming.

‘Sorry, people probably say that all the time,’ he said. ‘To you, I mean.’

‘Yes, as a matter of fact they do,’ she said, but without animosity. She looked past him, scanning the room.

‘I suppose it’s just that they feel overawed, meeting the creator of Harry Potter. You are the most famous author in the world, I don’t know what to say. I feel I should bow or something.’

‘Please don’t do that,’ she said. ‘I’d be horribly embarrassed.’

‘What brings you to Dublin?’

‘You obviously didn’t read the invitation very carefully. Or are you crashing the party?’

‘Oh dear! No I am not crashing … I didn’t read it. You know, one doesn’t always, although one should.’

‘I know,’ she said sweetly. ‘You would have found out that I’m launching the book, if you’d bothered.’

‘Well … that explains everything.’ It dawned on him. ‘The crowds, I mean, and the cameras. Is it a book for chil … for young people?’

‘For young and old,’ she said. ‘It transcends genre and generation. Just like mine.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Leo; ‘I mean, yes, of course, great!’

She smiled understandingly. ‘And now I’m going to put on my cloak of invisibility and fly off,’ she said. ‘Lovely to have met you.’ She smiled and was gone.

‘J.K. Rowling!’ said Leo. ‘Phew!’

‘You can’t imagine how I feel,’ said Anna wanly.

‘No, how? Overwhelmed?’

‘My children’s book should be finished but it’s hardly started. And here is that horrible Marcus whatever he is bringing one out, someone who has never written for children in his life, someone who has never talked to a child in his life.’

‘It’s probably terrible,’ said Leo consolingly, forgetting that he no longer liked Anna.

‘No, it’s probably excellent,’ said Anna. ‘Obviously she wouldn’t launch it if it weren’t.’

‘She must think it’s not as excellent as her own, otherwise she wouldn’t come near it,’ said Leo.

‘Well, maybe.’ Anna’s face lightened. ‘Still, it’s frustrating.’

‘So why … how is yours coming along?’ He could guess, since she spent her days running out to grotty pubs with Vincy.

‘It’s not coming along. It’s stuck.’

‘Writer’s block,’ he said, wondering what multitude of sins that phrase had been used to cover. Affairs, nervous breakdowns, murders, no doubt, amongst others.

He could see Vincy coming towards them, then turning and talking to someone else.

‘Oh there’s Vincy,’ said Leo. ‘What a coincidence … and do you know I was just visiting your sister-in-law … is that what she is? Kate Murphy.’

Anna blushed deeply and opened her mouth, but no words came out.

She was saved from having to find some by the fairy godmother figure of J.K. Rowling, who at that moment began her speech. There was no opportunity to pursue the conversation and by the time the speeches were over, Anna had disappeared. Cloaks of invisibility were in fashion, at this launch.