“I loved him very much,” said Liam, in an uncharacteristic show of emotion on his part that was clearly directed more at me than his friend.
“Kick-off,” said Jimmy, nodding toward the screen, where the ball was now in play and both sides were moving around the pitch, starting tentatively enough. A few of the customers at the bar were roaring encouragement at the players but it seemed a little early for anyone to be getting too dramatic and after a few minutes they quieted down.
“So how do you pair know each other?” I asked, and Liam shook his head as if he couldn’t be bothered to reply to such a tedious question, leaving Jimmy to answer.
“We’re in Trinity together,” he said.
“Are you studying History of Art too?”
“Jesus, no. I’m studying Business. Some of us want to make money, Cyril. I want a big house, a fast car and a Jacuzzi full of revolting birds.”
“Do you mean revolving?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah. That. Do you wanna know what my big goal in life is?”
“Wait till you hear this,” said Liam.
“Go on so.”
“I want to buy a house on Vico Road next to Bono.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Why not? Can you imagine the parties we’d be having? I’d be looking over the fence and saying, Here, Bono, ya ponce, why don’t you and Madonna and Bruce and Kylie come over here and we’ll all jump in the Jacuzzi and have an oul’ laugh? And Bono will be like, Give us five minutes, Jimmy, and we’ll all be over. Do you know Salman Rushdie used to live in the shed at the end of Bono’s garden?”
“I didn’t,” I said. “Is that true?”
“That’s what I heard. During the…what do you call it?”
“The fatwa?”
“That’s the one. Oul’ Salman was down in the shed with the lawnmower writing his books and oul’ Bono was up in the house cleaning his sunglasses, and I suppose they got together once in a while for a game of chess or whatever.”
The Italians got a shot on target and the place erupted in dismay and then relief when it cleared the top of the goal. Watching the two boys react in the exact same way that everyone else in the pub did, I wondered whether they might have more in common than I realized, for in the short space of our acquaintance they seemed completely different types to me.
“I wouldn’t have thought there’d be too much fraternization between the business lads and the arts lads,” I said finally.
“Why not?” asked Liam, looking at me as if he could scarcely imagine a more idiotic remark.
“Different types of people, I suppose.”
“I don’t see why.”
“We’re only friends because your son here stole a girlfriend from me and then some wanker from Sociology stole her off him,” said Jimmy. “And we bonded, as they say, over our mutual indignation.”
“Fair enough,” I said, laughing.
“Sociology students are the worst,” he continued. “Bunch of fuckin’ knobs. What kind of plank wants to become a sociologist anyway? It doesn’t even mean anything. What the fuck are you supposed to do with a Sociology degree?”
“He didn’t steal her off me,” said Liam grumpily. “And I didn’t steal her off you. She’s a twenty-year-old woman, not a piece of chattel.”
“She’s a slutbag is what she is,” said Jimmy, shaking his head. “A dirty little slutbag who’s working her way through the lads in Trinity like shit through a goose.” He seemed more incensed over the break-up than Liam did and I wondered whether this was typical of my son’s approach to girls. I didn’t want him to be as useless with relationships as I had been at the same age but nor did I want him to be as cavalier as his uncle. As role models, I felt that both Julian and I had failed him.
Liam and I hadn’t met in the immediate wake of Julian’s death, which probably should have been how we entered each other’s lives. And although I could hardly be held accountable under the circumstances, I regretted that I hadn’t been able to fulfill his uncle’s last wish of me—that I would be the one to call Alice and tell her that her brother had died. I would have done it as soon as Bastiaan and I had got back to our apartment that night but of course we never made it there, and around the time that I was being rushed into surgery, a nervous Garda was arriving at the house on Dartmouth Square to deliver the news himself. When I emerged from my coma a few weeks later to find Ignac sitting by my bed ready to deliver bad news of his own—that Bastiaan was not only dead but that his body had been returned to Holland, where Arjan and Edda had given him a private burial without me—I could scarcely give any thought to my promise, so consumed was I by depression and grief. Ironically, around the same time, Ignac broke up with Emily, whose lack of compassion in the face of a family tragedy had been enough to turn him off her once and for all. Every cloud, as they say.
In the end, I waited several years, until I had recuperated, until the trial had come to an end, until I had returned to Dublin, to contact Alice, writing her a long letter to explain how sorry I was for the way that I had treated her all those years before. I told her how circumstances had found me in the same place as Julian in New York during the last week of his life and how I had been with him when he died. I wasn’t sure if this would provide any comfort to her but I hoped that it would. And then, finally, I mentioned that, perhaps without meaning to, Julian had let slip to me that our one night of intimacy had resulted in a child. I understood why she’d never told me, I said, but I would like to meet our son if she agreed.
Not surprisingly, it took her several weeks to reply. The letter I eventually received sounded as if it had been written and rewritten many times before she’d committed to a final draft, and the tone in which she wrote was one of utter detachment, as if it had taken a great effort on her part even to remember who I was, which was, of course, impossible considering we were technically still married and had a child together. She told me that Liam had asked about me over the years, that he’d shown a natural interest in the identity of his father, and that she’d told him the truth: that I had left her on our wedding day, humiliating her in front of all her friends and family, but that she had said nothing to him about what she called my “tendencies.” I didn’t want to inflict that on him, she wrote. It was hard enough for him growing up without a father without his having to deal with that too.
She added that she was uncertain about my meeting him and would prefer to discuss the matter in person, and so one Wednesday evening after work, anxious and uncertain how the encounter might go, I met my wife of nearly twenty years in the Duke public house, laying eyes on her for the first time since our wedding day.
“There you are at last,” she said when she walked in, fifteen minutes late, and found me sitting in the corner with a pint of lager and a copy of that day’s Irish Times. “I thought you said you’d be back down in a few minutes?”