“How is he anyway?” she asked me. “Are you still in touch?”
“Oh yes,” I said, quick to assert our ongoing alliance. “He’s still my best friend. And he’s very well, thanks for asking. He’s in Europe at the moment but he sends me the occasional postcard. I’ll see him when he gets back. We phone each other sometimes too. I have his parents’ phone number here, look.” I took out my address book and flicked through to the Ws, displaying the Dartmouth Square address that had once been mine. “He has my number too. And if he can’t get me he always leaves a message with my flatmate and he passes it on.”
“Settle down, Cyril,” she said, frowning a little. “It was just a question.”
“Sorry,” I replied, feeling a little embarrassed by my enthusiasm.
“He got over it then?” she asked.
“Got over what?”
“The kidnapping, of course.”
“Oh yes. He’s never been the type to let something like that get him down.”
“And the loss of a toe, finger and ear?”
“He still has nine of each. Well, not nine ears obviously. He only has one ear left but it’s more than some people have, I suppose.”
“Who?” she asked, frowning at me. “Who has less ears than that?”
I thought about it. No one sprang to mind. “His father only has one ear too,” I said. “They have that in common at least. The IRA shot one of them off a few months before the kidnapping,”
“They’re a terrible shower, the IRA,” she said. “I hope you don’t have anything to do with them, Cyril Avery?”
“I do not,” I said, shaking my head quickly. “I don’t have any interest in things like that. I’m not political at all.”
“I suppose he walks with a limp, does he?”
“Who?”
“Julian. And him with only nine toes. I suppose he walks with a limp?”
“I don’t think so,” I said, uncertain whether he did or not. “If he does, I’ve never spotted it. To be honest, the only thing that really bothers him is the ear. Obviously his hearing is only half as good as it could be and he looks a bit odd without it, but he grew his hair long and it covers the right-hand side of his head, so no one really notices. He still looks amazing.”
Mary-Margaret gave a little shudder. “The directors of the Bank of Ireland don’t allow any of their male employees to wear their hair long,” she said. “And I don’t blame them. It looks a bit too Nancy-boy for me. And I prefer a man with two ears. One ear wouldn’t be my standard at all.”
I nodded and glanced around the café for the nearest fire exit and to my horror caught the eye of a student priest sitting with two older priests a few seats away from us, drinking a Coca-Cola and eating an Eccles cake. I recognized him from the back row of the Metropole Cinema where I had sat next to him during a screening of A Man for All Seasons a few nights earlier. He’d placed his overcoat on his lap and I’d given him a hand-job in the dark. The smell of it after he came was only rancid and people had started to turn around and stare at us, so we had no choice but to make a run for it just as Richard Rich was taking the stand to betray Thomas More. We both flushed red as we saw each other and turned away.
“What’s the matter with you?” asked Mary-Margaret. “All the blood has rushed to your face.”
“I have a bit of a cold,” I told her. “The fever comes and goes.”
“Don’t be giving me any of your germs,” she said. “I don’t want to come down with anything. I have my job to think of.”
“I don’t think it’s catching,” I said, taking a sip from my coffee. “I was very sorry to hear about Bridget, by the way,” I told her. “You must have been very upset.”
“Well,” she said in a firm voice, putting her cup down and looking directly at me. “Naturally, I was very sorry to hear that she had died and the circumstances were, of course, appalling but the truth is that I had cut my ties with her sometime before.”
“Oh right,” I said. “Did you have a falling-out of some sort?”
“Let’s just say that we were very different types.” She hesitated for a moment but then seemed to throw caution to the wind. “The truth is, Cyril, Bridget Simpson was a tarty piece and I didn’t care to be around that sort of element anymore. I lost track of the number of men with whom she had relations. I said to her, Bridget, I said, if you don’t clean up your act, you’ll meet a terrible end, but she didn’t listen to me. She said that life was for living and that I was too uptight. Me! Uptight! Can you imagine it? Sure I only live for a good laugh. Anyway, it was when she started involving herself with married men that I said enough was enough. I put my foot down and told her that I would have nothing more to do with her if she carried on with that sort of malarkey. The next thing I heard she’d been killed in a car crash in Clonmel.”
“I heard it was Clontarf,” I said.
“Well, one of the Clons. I went to her funeral, of course, and lit a candle for her. I told her poor mother that she should take comfort in the fact that Bridget had taught us all a great lesson. That if you live a dissolute life, then you can expect to meet a horrible death.”
“And how did she take that?”
“The poor woman was so grief-stricken she couldn’t say a word. She just stared at me in shock. She probably blamed herself for bringing her daughter up without any sense of decency.”
“Or maybe she thought you were being a little insensitive?” I suggested.
“No, I don’t think it was that at all,” she said, appearing baffled by this remark. “Read your Bible, Cyril Avery. It’s all in there.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes and I noticed the student priest standing up and making his way toward the doors, throwing an anxious look in my direction as he fled. For a moment, I felt a certain sympathy for him and, just as quickly, I felt it for myself too. Then I wondered whether he was signaling that he was off to the pictures and if he was, how quickly I could escape Bewley’s Café and follow him.
“Can I ask you a question, Cyril?” asked Mary-Margaret, and I looked back at her, trying to stifle a yawn. I wondered why I hadn’t just gone back to the office after the interview and avoided all of this.
“You can,” I said.
“Where do you go to Mass?”
“Where do I go to Mass?”
“Well, you have two ears on you anyway even if your pal doesn’t. Yes, where do you go to Mass?”
I opened my mouth in surprise, searched for an answer, couldn’t find one and so closed it again. The truth was that I never went to Mass. The last time I had been in a church was seven years earlier when I’d killed a priest by telling him all the perverted thoughts that went through my head.
“Mass,” I repeated, hedging for time. “Are you a big Mass-goer yourself then?”
“Of course I am,” she said, frowning so hard that her forehead divided into five distinct lines, like the staff on a piece of sheet music. “What do you take me for? I go to Baggot Street every day. They do a lovely Mass there. Have you ever been to the church on Baggot Street?”