THE EAST RIVER WAS SOMEWHERE AHEAD. CENTRAL Park at her back, along with cemetery, church, and the hotel where the reception held for Henrietta Feebes’s demise was no doubt currently kicking up a notch. Waiters would be circling with trays aloft holding glasses of wine, business would be discussed in murmured tones, and a piano player no doubt played sad tunes that had people nodding their heads in appreciation. For some, life was nothing but a series of black tie events, while others wore only the final tie that was the hangman’s noose—
Isabelle couldn’t say her thoughts made much sense at that moment, and as she ran, falling into the half-forgotten rhythm of a jog, she had the sense that all around her the world was covered in a greasy smoke. Voices rose in pain from the shadows, the sound of spades hitting dry dirt over and over clanged in a din all about her, somewhere the sound of horses and the roll of heavy wheels in mud, men laughing, women calling from dark alleyways to them, and as Isabelle ran a ghostly monk dogged her footsteps, and there was a discharge of gunshots in the distance, but they sounded olde-worlde and besides, this was the Upper East Side.
She slowed down, her heart rate easing as her eyes adjusted to the real world again, not knowing where she was other than that it was somewhere near the river. She heard the call of gulls and the foghorn cries of barges as they floated past, and she saw that there was a bar across the road with a sign above it that said Annie’s.
She walked to it under the rain and pushed the heavy wood door open and went inside.
The lighting was dim, the way a bar should be lit. There was a long counter with glass bottles on shelves behind it and a solitary barman watching an old-fashioned television set hanging on the wall. There was a pool table no one was playing on just then, a dartboard similarly abandoned, a few low tables and chairs scattered haphazardly across the space, and two or maybe three solitary drinkers sitting in the corners and doing whatever drinking they did alone and without conversation. It was the sort of place that could have been anywhere, in any century, waiting for a stranger to just walk in from the rain.
Isabelle went to the counter and sat down on a stool. The bartender, without looking over and without saying a word, poured her a measure of whiskey and slid the glass across and went back to watching the television. Isabelle knocked back the drink and a flame shot through her and warmed her through, and without thinking she reached for her cigarettes, flicked her lighter and lit one.
‘No smoking,’ the bartender said.
‘Huh?’
‘No smoking.’
‘I had a rough day.’
The bartender shrugged, reached under the counter and came back with a heavy old glass ashtray and plonked it on the bar next to Isabelle’s elbow.
‘Thanks.’
The smoke dribbled blue out of her nostrils. It rose towards the flickering screen of the old television.
‘What are you watching?’ Isabelle said.
The bartender grunted. Isabelle stared – some sort of documentary. The sound was down low. Talking heads. She tried to make out what they were saying. Old men speaking, grey archival footage. An old man came out of a house with a white picket fence, glared at the camera. Soviet defector ‘Gregor’ speaks to PBS.
Isabelle couldn’t hear what he had to say. She lost interest. The bartender grunted, switched off the television abruptly, poured her another drink and slid over a bill.
‘End of shift,’ he said.
He vanished through a door. Isabelle sat staring. A younger man came out of the same door. He went behind the counter, smiled, said, ‘It will stop raining eventually.’ He had a light Irish lilt in his voice.
‘I don’t mind the rain,’ Isabelle said.
‘Jack Doyle,’ the man said, extending his hand. Isabelle took it. Jack’s hand was warm and dry.
‘Isabelle F…’ she said, then stopped. ‘Just Isabelle,’ she said.
He shook her hand, still smiling. He had a nice smile.
‘Isabelle,’ he said. ‘You look like you’ve just come back from a funeral.’
‘I buried my mother today,’ Isabelle said.
‘I’m sorry,’ Jack said.
‘It’s my second one.’
She couldn’t really remember her birth parents’ funeral. She knew she had been there. But the memory was hidden; when she tried to prod for it it flittered away, seeking shelter in some dark corner of her mind. She didn’t know who she was anymore. The past and the present seemed all about her at that moment, entwined, and she knew that once the rain eased she would have to step back out of that dark comforting space of the bar that felt as warm as a womb, and face the question of what to do next – of who to be.
She sipped her whiskey and looked at Jack Doyle and wondered who he was and if he ever felt the same as her. But Jack went around the bar, a bottle in his hand, and vanished to serve the other patrons who were still sitting, silent and wreathed in dark, as though they were merely ghosts having come to Annie’s to haunt Isabelle.
She listened to the rain outside. It eased by degrees, then stopped. Perhaps, she thought, the past and the future were all just a series of stories that kept being told. To be herself she’d have to write her own chapter in a never-ending chain of human lives, as small and compressed as diamonds. She finished her drink, looked in her handbag for cash and found the gold pocket watch, which she had meant to do something with, she was sure of it, when she took it with her that morning to the funeral.
She examined it now, the faded cheap gold, the mechanism that measured out the time of the lives that had carried it until they ran out. She put her finger across the inscription on the base of the watch but it no longer meant much to her, at least not at that moment.
She placed the watch gently on the counter and went outside into the brightening day.