The door of the carriage slid open and a steward brought in trays with tea and toast.

‘The invention of history as a recorded subject,’ he continued and flamed another cigarette. ‘We’re all the heirs of Thucydides, we historians, you know. The thing to remember is that at the beginning — and I’m talking about the very beginning, which is to say, let me be accurate, 431 B.C. — Pericles had no intention of offering battle to the Spartans. He knew he had the superior navy, so it was all down to a waiting game. Close the net at sea, block the Gulf of Corinth, Bob’s your uncle. I’m boring you.’

‘On the contrary. Please.’

‘Then came the plague.’ Dick’s young face became grim. ‘Is there any fairness in nature?’

‘Very little,’ I said, ‘yet in the end, nature is all we are left to rely on.’

‘I rest my case,’ Dick said. ‘One third of all the troops died, you know, including Pericles himself. What might have happened had he lived, led on? In that aberration of nature lay the fatal undermining of the Athenian state, although it would take another twenty-seven years to come about. What statesman could have bargained for that? As he lay dying, could Pericles possibly have imagined that in a few short years, the Persians would be funding the Spartan war effort? I mean, even Hippocrates himself could not match Pericles for vision. He was too slow, Hippocrates!’

‘I see.’

‘Thirty-five thousand Athenians killed at Syracuse alone!’ Dick’s eyes rolled in their separate conventions. ‘Are you quite sure you want to sell this property?’

I stared at him. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘It’s just that, as my father explained, the house was Mrs Shaw’s — that is, I should say, the late Mrs Shaw’s — and thus quite separate to the collective Shaw properties, if you understand me, which may well have been why her late father, God rest him, employed my father and not Beagles to represent her, although one can never speak for the dead. And then, in her will — she was a lady for whom my father had the utmost regard — the late Mrs Shaw bequeathed the same property to your goodself alone. And thus I make so bold as to wonder, if you permit, whether this decision of yours to sell is, shall I say, made in the same spirit of being separate from the collective in which it was from the outset designated and subsequently bequeathed.’

Dismay rolled over me in a way for which I had not been prepared.

‘Dick,’ I said, ‘it has been decided.’


In Dublin, we travelled by taxi from the station to Ballsbridge, via the Shelbourne Hotel, where I was booked in. In Ballsbridge, the surveyor was waiting in his car outside the house. My house. I had never seen it before and when I got out felt a great surge of possession and, simultaneously, of loss. It was much bigger than I had imagined, one half of a solid, redbrick duo, with steep granite steps to the front door and graceful bay windows on two floors. Behind iron railings that marked the boundary of the property with the road lay a well-planted front garden. This was my house. Having scarcely seen it, I was now about to sell it.

As we made our way in along the gravel path, the surveyor, whose name was Mr Jennings, leapt ahead opening doors and then generally fretting over whether or not I might like to sit down, as if the journey thus far had exhausted me. I let him and Dick off with their maps and tapes and wandered through the house, thinking of Peppy.

The undersecretary and his family were abroad and the house was in the charge of an elderly but active woman who made me a cup of tea and spoke in warm terms about the old days. She remembered Peppy well, to my surprise, because I had not thought that Peppy had had much connection with the house beyond it being an investment.

‘She used to come up to it a lot when she took it over first,’ the woman said. ‘After the war — the war here, I mean. Whenever she’d come up to Dublin I could tell from her that there’d been trouble.’

‘What kind of trouble?’

‘Oh, the usual kind,’ the woman replied. ‘She’d say to me, “Mrs Bailey, I hate men”. And even though with my poor husband dead I didn’t have a man to love, let alone hate, I knew what she meant, God love her and be merciful to her.’

The house had been Peppy’s refuge from Sibrille, her own house, away from Langley’s and his affairs. I thought of her sitting here, where I now sat, looking out on the garden, day by day recovering her self esteem.

‘Iz?’

Dick Coad’s comical eyes floated around the door.

‘Yes?’

‘Mr Jennings wondered would you do him the honour of allowing him to bring you to afternoon tea in the Shelbourne?’ Dick asked.


Mr Jenning’s car crept along with great discretion.

‘You can hear a watch tick, her engine is that quiet,’ he told me and took out his pocket watch, which I then had to pretend I could hear.

‘She’s a smashing motor altogether,’ Dick remarked from the back. ‘Grand bit of walnut.’

‘A whole tree for every two cars, they say,’ said Mr Jennings happily as we came to Stephen’s Green.

‘You got everything you need, Mr Jennings?’ I enquired.

‘Oh, yes. Lovely house, Mrs Shaw. Great scope to it,’ the surveyor said.

‘Would have stood on the edge of countryside originally,’ Dick said.

‘No doubt,’ said Mr Jennings, making way for a tram. ‘They don’t build them like that any more.’

Swan-tailed waiters served from silver teapots into Wedgwood in the Shelbourne’s heavily draped greenroom. Pages wandered in and out singing messages in falsetto as Mr Jennings told us about his eldest daughter, married to a senior policeman in Nottingham, and how he, Mr Jennings, with Mrs Jennings, had been introduced to the Lord Mayor, and how they had travelled, courtesy of the Lord Mayor, in his Bentley all the way to the boat in Liverpool.

‘Nottingham,’ said Dick, warming up, ‘what did you think of the cathedral?’

‘We didn’t get Mass in Nottingham,’ said Mr Jennings. ‘Some more tea, Mrs Shaw?’

I sat forward. ‘Isn’t that my name?’

I beckoned the page.

‘Mrs Shaw?’

‘I’m Mrs Shaw.’

‘Telephone call, madam.’

I followed him out and down a corridor to a line of little wooden cabins with glass doors. Behind a counter, women in headsets worked tangled, eel-like lines of telephone cables.

‘Hello?’ I said, closing the door to one cabin.

‘Iz?’

‘Who is it?’

‘This is Rosa. Hector told me where you were staying, but…’

‘Hello?’

‘… I don’t want you to be alarmed because I’m sure there’s nothing too badly wrong, but Hector’s got a knock on his head.’

I saw through the glass the women’s speeding hands, arranging, re-arranging.

‘Oh, God. Is he..?’

‘Jack’s brought him to the hospital, they’re keeping him overnight, simply a precaution, I’m sure. We’ve tried to send word to Ronnie.’

There was no telephone in Sibrille.

‘He’s probably out showing land,’ I said. ‘Oh my God. Is he conscious?’

‘He…’ Her voice faded, re-surged. ‘…his eyes.’

‘I’m sorry, I can’t hear! Is Hector conscious?’

The phone seemed dead. I shook it, crazily.

‘Iz? Are you there?’

‘His eyes? What about his eyes?’

‘…fell off Kevin’s pony. You mustn’t be alarmed, my husband…. one of you… ‘

All I could think of was fishermen and eels. ‘But is he conscious?’

‘He was…’

She went into the far distance again. I kicked open the door.

‘She’s gone!’ I cried and the telephone women turned and stared at me.

‘…the doctor said. Iz?’

I was suffocating so much that I could hardly hold the telephone, I said, ‘I’m coming home.’


The last train to Monument had left. Although I wanted to hire a taxi, Mr Jennings would hear none of it. I was too shocked to argue. Dick Coad saw us off, the unfixed pupils of his eyes at large. He had papers to file next morning in the Four Courts, he said, otherwise he too, in the circumstances, would have returned to Monument. He had spent a fruitless fifteen minutes trying to get through to the hospital.

‘I shall say a decade of the rosary,’ he said and I saw my own face reflected in the car’s window, hand to my throat.

‘She’ll have us there in under four hours,’ Mr Jennings said as we met the flat, open countryside. ‘She’s made for a trip like this.’

From the moment he had been born, it had been my greatest dread. Now it was as if I had long foreseen this day, as if my terror, and the fact that I could move my limbs only with difficulty and the clutch in my breast had all been rehearsed.

We stopped for refreshments in a midlands town. Mr Jennings had spoken almost non-stop since our departure, not in an intrusive way, but in a low drone as if a wireless were turned on in another room. His wife was from Belfast, her father had been a minister, there was murder when she married Mr Jennings, a Catholic. They went to India in 1929. He asked the girl behind the till for a receipt for the pot of tea and we resumed our journey.

‘You take life as it comes,’ he said, a repeated theme. ‘You treat it decent and life obliges you, as a rule.’

It was still light as we came in by Deilt. I craved Ronnie. He would be at the hospital, by Hector’s bed, and I would have someone into whose arms I could fall. The hospital, built on the Deilt road, was almost the first building in Monument one came to from the Dublin direction. We swept in around a circular flowerbed to the front doors and, as I got out, I smelt new-mown grass, the first cut of that year. The porter saw me and came out from his desk. My legs were going.