“I believe it is, yes,” she said. “What’s your point?”
“I don’t have one, really. What’s it about?”
“A boy and his abusive father. I should give it to Julian to read.”
I said nothing. If there was any serious tension between her brother and father, I had never heard about it before.
“So tell me, Cyril,” she said. “Are you still working in the civil service?”
“Oh no,” I said. “I left there a long time ago. It wasn’t for me. I work for RTé now.”
“That must be exciting.”
“It has its moments,” I lied. “And what about you? Do you work?”
“I believe I do but Max would say differently.” As I waited for her to continue, it struck me that she, like me, called her father by his Christian name. “I’ve been researching and writing a PhD in English Literature at UCD for the last few years. I wanted to go to Trinity but the Archbishop wouldn’t let me.”
“Did you ask him?”
“I did,” she said. “I went all the way to the palace in Drumcondra and knocked on the front door, bold as brass. His housekeeper wanted to kick me out into the gutter, of course, because I was wearing a dress that exposed my shoulders, but he invited me in and I made my request in person. He seemed to think that I was a bit odd for wanting a career at all. He told me that if I put as much effort into finding a husband as I did into my studies I’d have a home, a family and three children by now.”
“What a charmer,” I said, laughing despite myself. “And what did you say?”
“I told him that when your fiancé leaves you on the morning of your wedding while two hundred of your friends and family are waiting for you in a church half a mile away, then marriage isn’t necessarily the first thing on your mind.”
“Ah,” I said, looking down at my shoes uneasily. “I suppose not.”
“He said I was a lovely girl, though,” she added with a smile, “so I have that going in my favor at least. Anyway, as it turns out I’m glad that I ended up in UCD. I’ve made some good friends there. I’ll finish my degree in about a year’s time and the department has already offered me a teaching position for the following semester. I could be a professor in about five years if I keep my head down and don’t lose my focus.”
“And is that what you want?” I asked her. “To spend your life in academia?”
“It is,” she said, looking around and wincing at the raucous noise coming from Julian’s friends. “I sometimes feel as if I wasn’t supposed to live among people at all. As if I would be happier on a little island somewhere, all alone with my books and some writing material for company. I could grow my own food and never have to speak to a soul. I look at him sometimes,” she added, nodding toward her brother, “and it’s as if we were born with two life-forces between us but he got all of his share and half of mine too.”
She didn’t say this with any resentment or self-pity—it was clear to me from the look on her face that she adored him as much as I did—and I felt an instant kinship with her. Her idea of a safe haven appealed to me too. A place I could go, simply to be left alone.
“Do you think that’s because of…well, what happened?” I asked. “Your desire to remove yourself from the world, I mean.”
“Because of what Fergus did to me?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t think so,” she said. “I was a rather solitary child and that didn’t change much as I grew older. Although it didn’t help, of course. That kind of humiliation is almost never visited upon a person. Did you know that Max insisted on the reception going ahead afterward?”
“What?” I said, uncertain whether she was joking or not.
“It’s true,” she continued. “He said that the wedding had cost him a fortune already and he wasn’t going to allow that amount of money to go to waste. So he dragged me off to the hotel in the Daimler that he’d booked for me and Fergus, and when we got out, the staff were all lined up along the red carpet. I could see some of them looking at us wondering why has that young woman married a man old enough to be her father and the rest thinking that was the reason I had such a miserable expression on my face. There was a champagne reception, where I had to go from person to person, thanking them for coming and apologizing on Fergus’s behalf, and then I was made to sit at the head table while the guests ate and drank to their hearts’ content. Max even made a speech, if you can believe it. He read it from a piece of paper and didn’t change a word, because apparently he’d spent days on it. This is the happiest day of my life, he said. Alice deserves this. I’ve never seen a happier bride. It went on and on like that. It was almost comical.”
“But why on earth did you go through with it?” I asked. “Why didn’t you just go home? Or, you know, jump on a flight to Mars or someplace?”
“Well, I was a bit shell-shocked, I suppose. I didn’t know what else to do. I loved Fergus, you see. Very much. And of course, I’d never been jilted on my wedding day before,” she added, smiling a little, “which meant I wasn’t sure what the etiquette of the situation was. So I just did what I was told.”
“Fucking Max,” I said, surprising both of us by my use of a word that I rarely employed.
“Fucking Fergus,” replied Alice.
“Fucking both of them. What do you think, should we have a couple more of these fucking drinks?”
“Fuck yes,” she said, and I grinned as I stood up to make my way to the bar.
“You’ll miss him, I suppose?” said Alice when I returned with two large glasses of wine. “Six months is a long time.”
“I will,” I said. “He’s my best friend.”
“Mine too,” she said. “So what does that make us?”
“Rivals?” I suggested, and she laughed. I was drawn to her; there was no question about that. Not physically but emotionally. Temperamentally. For the first time in my life, I felt content to be seated in the company of a girl while Julian was somewhere else in the room. My eyes were not being constantly pulled in his direction, nor was I feeling jealous that others were dominating his time. It was an entirely new sensation for me and one that I rather enjoyed.
“Have you seen anyone famous out at RTé?” she asked me after a brief silence, during which I had racked my brain for something witty to say and come up short.
“Paul McCartney was there once,” I said.
“Oh I love Paul McCartney! I saw the Beatles when they played the Adelphi in 1963. I even went to the Gresham Hotel afterward and pretended I was a guest so that I could get in to see them.”
“Did it work?”
“No. Biggest disappointment of my life.” She hesitated and then smiled at me. “Well, you know, that is until the obvious. Can I tell you something, Cyril?”
“Of course,” I said.
“It’s about my PhD,” she said. “The thing is, I’m writing it on your mother’s books.”
“Really?” I said, raising an eyebrow.
“Yes. Does that make you uncomfortable?”