Our supposed leader was Miss Joyce, who had been working as a civil servant in the department since its foundation forty-five years earlier in 1921. She was sixty-three years old and, like my late adoptive mother Maude, was a compulsive smoker, favoring Chesterfield Regulars (Red), which she imported from the United States in boxes of one hundred at a time and stored in an elegantly carved wooden box on her desk with an illustration of the King of Siam on the lid. Although our office was not much given to personal memorabilia, she kept two posters pinned to the wall beside her in defense of her addiction. The first showed Rita Hayworth in a pinstriped blazer and white blouse, her voluminous red hair tumbling down around her shoulders, professing that “ALL MY FRIENDS KNOW THAT CHESTERFIELD IS MY BRAND” while holding an unlit cigarette in her left hand and staring off into the distance, where Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin were presumably pleasuring themselves in anticipation of erotic adventures to come. The second, slightly peeling at the edges and with a noticeable lipstick stain on the subject’s face, portrayed Ronald Reagan seated behind a desk that was covered in cigarette boxes, a Chesterfield hanging jauntily from the Gipper’s mouth. “I’M SENDING CHESTERFIELDS TO ALL MY FRIENDS. THAT’S THE MERRIEST CHRISTMAS ANY SMOKER CAN HAVE—CHESTERFIELD MILDNESS PLUS NO UNPLEASANT AFTER-TASTE” it said, and sure enough he appeared to be wrapping boxes in festive paper for the likes of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, who, I’m sure, were only thrilled to receive them.
Miss Joyce sat in the corner to my right, the section of the room that got the best light, while in the corner to my left sat Miss Ambrosia, an incredibly vacuous and highly unfocused young woman of about twenty-five who liked to shock me by flirting outrageously and regularly recounting her multitudinous sexual exploits. She generally had at least five men on the go, everyone from barmen to dance-hall entrepreneurs, show jumpers to pretenders to the Russian throne, and had no shame in juggling them like some nymphomaniacal circus act. Every month without fail there would be a day where she would be found weeping at her desk, claiming that she had “spoiled herself” and that no man would ever want her now, but usually by teatime she would sit up suddenly, make a rush to the Ladies’ toilets and return wearing a relieved expression, informing us that her Auntie Jemima had come to visit for a few days and she’d never been so happy to see her. This baffled me and on one occasion I inquired as to where her Auntie Jemima lived, for she seemed to make it her business to be in Dublin every month for a few days. My colleagues burst out laughing and Miss Joyce remarked that she too had once had an Auntie Jemima but that she had last visited during the Second World War and she didn’t miss her one little bit.
The final member of our group, Mr. Denby-Denby, sat directly across from me and more often than not, when I looked up, I found him watching me with the intensity of a serial killer deciding how best to disembowel his victim. He was a rather flamboyant fellow in his mid fifties who wore colorful waistcoats and matching bow ties and, in speech and manner, conformed to the traditional stereotype of the homosexual, although, of course, he would never have admitted to such an orientation. He wore his hair in a bouffant style and it was a curious shade of sickly yellow, more a chartreuse than anything else, although his eyebrows were closer to maize. Every so often, with the same regularity as the visits of Miss Ambrosia’s Auntie Jemima, he would come into work with his hair brighter than ever, practically luminescent, and we three would stare at it, trying not to laugh, and he would look back defiantly, daring us to say a word. I almost fell off my seat in amazement one afternoon when he mentioned the existence of a Mrs. Denby-Denby in Blackrock and a gaggle of little Denby-Denbys—nine of them! Nine!—whom he and his wife had produced with astonishing regularity from the mid 1930s into the late 1940s. The possibility of him engaging in coitus with a woman took me by surprise but the fact that he had done it on at least nine occasions—nine!—was almost too much for my mind to take in. It gave me hope for my own future.
“Here he comes,” said Mr. Denby-Denby, sitting erect in his chair as I strolled through the door that fine spring morning debuting a new jacket I had recently purchased in anticipation of the good weather. “Twenty-one years old and never been kissed. Do you know who you remind me of, Mr. Avery? Botticelli’s St. Sebastian, that’s who. Have you ever seen it? You must have. Have you, Miss Joyce? Hangs in the State Museum in Berlin. Stripped down to his skivvies and with half a dozen arrows poking out of his body. Absolutely divine. There’s a lesser version by Il Sodoma but we won’t speak of that.”
I threw him an irritated look, my first of the day, and sat at my desk, unspooling the copy of the Irish Times that awaited me every morning and turning the pages for anything that might have relevance to our work. From the first day I had arrived in the department, I had resented Mr. Denby-Denby’s presence, for although he was even more deeply closeted than I, his willingness to make little secret of his true sexual orientation both embarrassed and confused me.
“Look at those lips, Miss Joyce,” he continued, putting a hand to his heart and fluttering it above his fuchsia waistcoat as if he was about to pass out in the throes of desire. “Like soft pillows. The type you, Miss Ambrosia, probably dream of buying in Switzer’s if you can save up enough money.”
“Why would I need to buy pillows, Mr. Denby-Denby?” asked Miss Ambrosia. “Sure as often as not my head’s lying on someone else’s.”
“Oh, get her!” cried Mr. Denby-Denby, and I rolled my eyes. In the office next door there were three quiet gentlemen, Mr. Westlicott Sr., his son Mr. Westlicott, and his grandson Mr. Westlicott Jr., a family triumvirate who observed the same formality of address as we did, calling each other “Mr. Westlicott” at all times, and I rather hoped that someone in there would retire or get run over by a bus so I could transfer into their company. And perhaps one or other of them might adopt me and I could be a Mr. Westlicott too; I was sure to have more success with adoption the second time around than I’d had the first.
“Less tittle-tattle, please, and more work,” said Miss Joyce, lighting up a Chesterfield (Red), but no one paid any attention.
“So tell us, Mr. Avery,” said Mr. Denby-Denby, leaning forward now, his elbows on the table, his head balanced on his hands. “What mischief did you get up to over the weekend? Where does a handsome young puppy go these days when he’s straining at the leash?”
“Actually, I went to a rugby match with my friend Julian,” I replied, doing my best to assert my rugged masculinity. “And on Sunday I stayed home and read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”
“Oh, I don’t read books,” said Mr. Denby-Denby, waving this remark away as if I had expressed an eccentric interest in Middle Eastern symbolism or the origins of trigonometry.
“I’m reading Edna O’Brien,” said Miss Ambrosia, lowering her voice lest any of the Mr. Westlicotts overheard her and reported her for vulgarity. “She’s pure filth.”
“Don’t let the Minister hear you say that,” said Miss Joyce, blowing a perfect O of smoke from her lips. It was impossible not to stare as it rose toward the light fitting and slowly evaporated into the air before sneaking its way in to pollute our lungs. “You know what he thinks about women who write. He won’t have them on the curriculum.”
“He doesn’t like women who read either,” said Miss Ambrosia. “He told me that reading gives women ideas.”
“It does,” said Miss Joyce, nodding her head fiercely. “I’m in full agreement with the Minister on that. My life would have been a lot easier if I had been allowed to stay illiterate but Daddy insisted that I learn to read. He was a very modern man, was Daddy.”
“I absolutely adore Edna O’Brien,” declared Mr. Denby-Denby, throwing his hands in the air in excitement. “If I wasn’t a happily married man, I could get lost in that woman’s body for years at a time. I declare before God and all that is good and holy that a more handsome woman was never bred from these shores.”