“Mammy says the noises kept her awake,” Henry insisted, his eyes rolling in his head as they tried to latch onto something that might restore his view on the world. “Mammy doesn’t like being kept awake. Mammy needs her sleep.”
“Were you kept awake yourself, Henry?” asked Albert from where he was lying on the sofa reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the unfortunate young man jumped in surprise, turning his head in the direction of the voice. Perhaps he’d been unaware that someone else was even in the room.
“When Mammy is awake, I am awake,” he replied, offended now, as if we had accused him of being a bad son. “She’s a martyr to the hemorrhoids. When they’re acting up, neither of us can get a wink.”
The noises in question were, most likely, not of my making at all but of Albert’s, who was something of a lady’s man and rarely went a week without bringing a girl home for what he called a bit of “slap and tickle, how’s your father, say no more,” which was torturous for me because his headboard was loosely fitted on the other side of the wall to my own and this meant that when he was riding a girl the endless banging would keep me awake, just as Mrs. Hogan’s piles prevented her from sleeping. I had a bit of a crush on Albert too, which didn’t help, but this was more a consequence of our daily proximity than anything else, for he wasn’t particularly good-looking.
I left the flat every morning at half past seven to make my way toward the Department of Education on Marlborough Street, stopping only for a cup of tea and a fruit scone along the way, and was usually at my desk on the first floor by a quarter past eight. I had been working there for almost three years by now—ever since leaving Belvedere College in a blaze of mediocrity—thanks in part to the good offices of my adoptive father’s third and now-estranged wife—this was how we determined I should refer to her in conversation—Angela, who had been a popular figure at the department until her marriage to Charles when, as the law dictated, she was forced into retirement.
Things had ended badly between the pair less than a year after their wedding when, in an act of uncharacteristic generosity, Charles had invited me to accompany them to the South of France for two weeks’ holiday. I had met Angela only once in advance of the trip but from the moment we arrived in Nice we got along famously; so well, in fact, that I woke one morning to find her climbing into bed next to me, naked as the day she was born, and as I was naked too the entire scene turned into something of a West End farce. I cried out in surprise and, upon hearing the door open, ran headlong to the comfort of the wardrobe until Charles wrenched the doors open to find me cowering inside.
“The funny thing is, Cyril,” he said in his most withering tone as I sat curled in the corner, my hands modestly covering my groin, “I’d have a lot more respect for you if I came in here and you were taking her up the Khyber Pass. But no, that’s just never going to be you, is it? You just run and hide. A real Avery would never do that.”
I said nothing, which seemed to disappoint him even more, and he turned his fury on Angela, who was still lying in bed, the sheet fallen to her waist exposing her breasts. She seemed bored with the whole scenario and was rotating one finger around her left nipple in an insouciant manner while whistling “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” discordantly. An argument ensued, too tedious to recount, and the upshot was that on their return to Dublin they went their separate ways and an application was made in the London courts for a speedy divorce. (Charles had had the foresight to marry in England in anticipation of such an eventuality. His track record with marriage, after all, was not exemplary.) In the meantime, however, as I was lazing around and not doing very much with my time, Angela tried to make amends for embarrassing me by putting in a word on my behalf with her former employers. I received a phone call inviting me in for an interview, which came as something of a surprise as she had neglected to tell me, and without ever thinking for a moment that I would like to be a civil servant, I woke up one morning and that’s exactly what I was.
The work itself was incredibly boring and my colleagues a little irritating, the engines of their days fueled by personal and political gossip. The office I worked in was large with a high ceiling, an old stone fireplace in the center of one wall and a portrait of the Minister, relieved of two of his chins, hanging above it. A desk was positioned in each of the four corners, their occupants facing the center of the floor, where a single table stood, supposedly for departmental meetings but, in reality, rarely used.