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His status, however, is not just a matter of the theories promoted in his published work. He marched with the miners and was kicked by a policeman. This is a matter of record, captured by a BBC cameraman. And when he appeared on late-night arts programmes – for this was the beginning of his career as a minor television personality – he extended the academic debate into the public issues of the day, claiming, as he is now, that there is no distinction between critical and political practice.
He is known to have turned down a chair at Oxford, where he started his career as an undergraduate, and although some of his colleagues have hinted – privately, to one or two favoured students – that Steve’s preference is to be as close as possible to the television studios, that he may even, at this moment, be turning his attention to Irish literature because, in the current political climate when ideology is felt to be a handicap, Ireland is the flavour of the month and an issue on which righteous indignation might still be expressed, many here prefer to believe that he rejected Oxford on the grounds of élitism.
He is a star turn, and they are as mesmerised by his personal style as by what he has to say: the leather jacket, the desert boots, the motorcycle helmet on the desk, while the satchel that holds his papers is thrown casually onto the floor. And it isn’t as though the style has been cultivated to compensate for deficiencies in appearance, as is all too evidently the case with one or two of the younger lecturers. His black hair, brushed back from his face, is thick and only slightly greying, his mouth is full, red and sensual, his eyes, behind the wire-framed glasses, large, dark and – well, yes, brooding, as one or two of the girls concede to each other, cliché though it is.
The mind of Phoebe Metcalfe is as likely as not to be preoccupied with such matters, so her friends are surprised when, instead of a note to that effect – enlivened, as her communications usually are, with a little drawing of a smiling face and other icons expressive of good cheer – she makes an intervention that shows she has been attending to the substance of Steve’s argument. He has just delivered his thoughts on the question of national character.
‘I must make clear, right at the outset,’ he has said, ‘that I don’t want any of the texts that we’ll be reading explained by a woolly reference to national character, as though that’s a fixed and mysterious essence that we all more or less understand. The Irish have suffered more than most from the stereotypes that other people have imposed on them. Like all national stereotypes, they tell us more about the prejudices of those who use them than about the Irish themselves.’
He sounds genuinely indignant, and one or two remember that Steve is Jewish, which might account for his fellow feeling with another racially stereotyped group. He removes his glasses to massage the bridge of his nose and in that pause of temporary sightlessness he fails to see Phoebe, who is already bobbing excitedly up and down in her chair. His sight restored, Steve returns to his argument.
‘We’ve already had a contribution to that effect, of course. We used to see the Irish as commercially backward and God-fearing, one or both due to some flaw in the national character. Now, the Republic at any rate is an economic model for the rest of Europe and one of its coolest holiday destinations. Meanwhile, revelations of child abuse have undermined the hold of the Church in less than a generation. So, characteristics that once seemed fixed are vulnerable to changing circumstances.’
Phoebe finally explodes: ‘Oh, but the Irish are special and, like, different?’
Steve has been intermittently aware of her throughout the session, although so far he has restrained himself from showing annoyance. There is a general air of noise and bustle about her that suggests, to his trained eye, someone with poor concentration. Her chair seems to scrape every time she moves, which is a good deal more often than others find necessary. She has spent most of the class so far trying, and rejecting, a series of pens that are kept in an enormous carpet bag; and each time one is replaced by another, the bag is dragged from floor to lap and back again. And in the gaps allowed by her fidgeting, she has made a series of attempts – all, so far, unsuccessful – to engage the girl next to her in whispered conversation. Now, however, all her efforts are concentrated on developing her argument.
‘I mean, we all, like, know that the Irish are spiritual and charming and fantastic story-tellers, which is why they’re such brilliant writers? Why is that a stereotype? It’s, like, common sense? And if we need a reason for it, surely it’s because they’re Celts? And the Celts are amazingly imaginative and sensitive. And surely they have an oral tradition? You know what I mean?’
While she’s speaking, the ripples of amusement throughout the room suggest that her views are known and affectionately tolerated. Steve takes in her long, crinkly red hair, pale freckled face and light blue eyes. She could be Irish or, since her accent – English public school overlaid by London demotic – doesn’t suggest that, of Irish descent. Whatever her racial identity, however, she favours a Camden Market ethnicity in dress. A sheepskin Afghan coat, which must take real dedication to wear on such a close, muggy day, is slung over the back of her chair, while a flowing Indian print dress, decorated with quantities of beads, scarves and silver bangles, covers her soft, full figure.
Steve’s own particular brand of Irish romance (though it’s a term he’s reluctant to use), rooted as it is in historical reality, makes him particularly hostile to the one so aptly embodied in this flabby, messily eclectic girl.
‘It’s as well Phoebe doesn’t realise she’s just made his point for him,’ Nick says to Pete. ‘She’s told him pretty much everything he needs to know about her.’
‘He’s wondering whether he’s got an alien in the class,’ Pete whispers back. ‘Phoebe will challenge his rationalism, if anybody can.’
What’s challenging Steve about Phoebe, however, is the niggling sense that he knows her from a different context. Then he remembers the scene under the chestnut tree and places her as the Dionysian figure in the summer dress, with the wreath of daisies in her hair, holding the jug of Pimm’s. The picturesque stillness of that moment, snatched from time and larger circumstance, evaporates in the human reality of this girl, who is mouthing clichés as though nobody has thought of them before.
When he replies, he ignores Phoebe and addresses the group more generally. ‘The Celtic origins of Ireland were so distorted and sentimentalised in the nineteenth century that they exist for us as myth rather than useful historical reality.’
While he is speaking, however, he thinks of the other girl, who claimed his attention for herself, not as an element in a larger picture, beautiful in any setting, her face enlivened more by thought than by the occasion. He glances quickly round the room, to see if she, too, is there, and as his eyes come to rest on her, the girl next to Phoebe, who has been keeping her head down, resisting her companion’s attempts to distract her, looks up. She is unmistakably the girl in the black jeans and white T-shirt.
His eyes meet hers and, at this closer range, he sees their clear, dark blue, set in a small face of perfect symmetry. He notices, as he did before, a remarkable self-possession; that she is unusual in being able to look at another person without smiling. She seems to him complete and apart, isolated from the commonplace reality around her. The difference between her and Phoebe is so marked, the one so grossly material, the other light and ethereal, that they could belong to different species. Before she lowers her eyes he tries to read their expression but finds it unfathomable.
Steve’s total disengagement is broken abruptly by another student, a fierce-looking girl with many-studded ears. ‘Could I take us back to a point you made just a minute ago – about child abuse among priests weakening the power of the Catholic Church? I’d say that you were taking too rosy a view of modern Ireland in implying that all that – the power of the Church and of patriarchy generally – is now in the past when Irish women are still denied the right to abortion.’ Emma Leigh is a notable feminist, women’s officer in the union and scourge of any lecturer who fails to give due prominence to the female perspective.
Startled out of his reverie Steve, who prides himself on his sharpness and speed in argument, finds it difficult to adjust to the change in topic. When his brain clears, he is immediately irritated by the stridency of this young woman, so different from the stillness and quiet of the other, whom he has been contemplating with such pleasure. That doesn’t stop her being right, of course. All his life he has been a champion of women’s rights, but her intervention suddenly seems like a meaningless cliché when set against his own recent experience of Ireland.
Forcing himself to look at Emma, who is sitting back in her chair – smirking with satisfaction, it seems to him, at having landed a punch – he says, ‘I don’t think that’s an issue that can be discussed without considering the full complexity of modern Ireland.’
His manner is dismissive, one that he perfected early in his career for crushing older colleagues, who were forced, often against their better judgement, to concede that he knew more than they did. Emma, although silenced for now, doesn’t conceal her outrage, and may well prove a tougher opponent than the likes of Rowe. And although most of the group are relieved by this reprieve from Emma’s agenda, which has been known to dominate entire sessions, some see that Steve has been wrong-footed, that in failing to give modest support to Emma’s views, he has violated his own known principles. Are they to take it that he is always right, even when he is wrong?
Smiling now, as though aware that he has lost ground, Steve says, ‘I suggest that we turn aside from these general observations, seductive though they are, and look at the first text on your syllabus, Swift’s Modest Proposal, published in 1729 – or, to give it its full title, A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of poor People inIreland, from being a Burden to their Parents or Country; and for making them beneficial to the Public. All beginnings are arbitrary, of course, but for me Swift marks the start of an authentic tradition of Irish writing in English.’
On the subject of Swift, their first writer, and Swift’s famous essay, their first text, Steve becomes particularly animated. When Pete asks whether Swift, a member of the Protestant Ascendancy, was ‘really’ Irish, Steve replies, ‘It’s difficult to say what he “really” was, just as it isn’t always easy to decide what he “really” thought, because he occupied some kind of boundary between competing versions of reality. On the one hand he was an Anglican clergyman who tried to gain preference in London, to be close to the centre of power. On the other, his experience of Ireland made him an increasingly robust critic of English policy there. Like a number of Anglo-Irish writers – Beckett, Wilde, Yeats – he was a master of assumed identities and used them to destabilise the reader’s sense of reality within the text.’
Some of these contradictions belong to Steve too: he craves to be at the centre, where the action is, yet has made his reputation by championing the marginal and silenced. Unlike Swift, who was born in Ireland, he has no claim to an Irish identity, yet speaks as though he alone can get beyond the disfiguring stereotypes to an understanding of the ‘real’ Ireland, even though he rejects the validity of such a concept on theoretical grounds.
There follows a brief discussion on whether Swift was mad – Phoebe remembers a television programme to that effect – and on his persistent use of irony, ably led by Nick Bailey, who shows welcome signs of intelligence. As Nick is speaking, Steve recognises him, and his friend Pete, as members of the group under the chestnut tree, and tries to resist the temptation to speculate on their relationship with ‘his’ girl, who still hasn’t spoken, though she smiles when Pete takes over from Nick the lead in discussion.
‘I really like the way he softens you up,’ says Pete. ‘The voice or speaker or whatever he is goes on about how sorry he is for the Irish and how they can’t feed their children and there’s no work for them, and he’s come up with a solution for making the children useful.’
Steve nods. ‘“Sound and useful members of the Commonwealth” is the ideal proposed.’
‘Right,’ says Pete. ‘And you think he’s going to come up with some kind of light, clean industry – children did work at this time, didn’t they? – maybe with some kind of government investment, and instead he suggests that as soon as they’re a year old, and won’t be, like, breast-fed any more, Irish babies should be eaten.’
‘Why babies?’ Steve asks.
‘Well, I suppose you wouldn’t fancy them when they’re any older,’ Pete replies. ‘He says that fourteen-year-old boys would be a bit stringy.’
When the laughter has died down, a girl Steve hasn’t noticed before – small, with dark, curly hair and, Steve thinks, what children’s books used to describe as a ‘merry’ look, the kind of girl who is usually the heroine’s confidante – takes the audacious step of topping Pete’s remark: ‘But at least they’d be organic.’
Instead of just laughing with the rest, Pete beams his appreciation at Annie Price, whose remark will be remembered as one of the highlights of the course. Their paths haven’t crossed much before, but each recognises in the other a kindred spirit and their partnership will be one of the success stories of the year.
Then, just as Steve thinks that the class will be over before ‘his’ girl has spoken, she intervenes in a way that alters the course of the discussion.
‘Surely we’re outraged because babies are so vulnerable,’ she says, and as she speaks two little spots of colour rise to her cheeks. There is an awkward sincerity about her, as though it requires effort for her to speak so publicly, but she’s been driven to it by her concern for babies. Steve notices none of this, however, or that the self-possession he’s attributed to her isn’t total. What is electrifying is her accent, which is immediately identifiable as Northern Irish; and Steve, who is the least superstitious of men, has the strange and elating sense that fate has intervened on his behalf.
What he’d really like to do is end the session now, take her off and find out everything about her, but instead he nods enthusiastically and says, ‘It is outrageous, of course, you’re right to remind us of that, and the more so because it’s shockingly funny. I’m sorry, you didn’t introduce yourself…’
‘Nora. Nora Doyle,’ the girl says, looking at him levelly without smiling.
There is a suspended moment of silence throughout the room as they observe Steve’s reaction. It’s known that Steve is writing a book about Joyce, and that Joyce’s wife, Nora, was the model for Molly Bloom. And although barely a handful of them have read Ulysses, more have read Molly Bloom’s notorious soliloquy, whose scatological preoccupations couldn’t be further from what they know of the demure and reserved Nora Doyle.
Steve acknowledges the connection with a raised eyebrow and a smile. ‘It’s good to have an Irish member of the class. You must be sure to keep us all on our toes.’
At this point Emma weighs in with the claim that no woman would write about the eating of babies, even with satirical intent. And while Steve could point out that such unfounded assertions are inappropriate in academic discourse, he privately acknowledges that, outside this rarefied field, she’s probably right, and lets it ride, hoping that indulging her in this instance will go some way to placating her.
‘Killing babies is about the most transgressive of all human acts,’ says Nick, ‘but surely the whole point of this piece is that the Irish are described as though they’re animals, of a different species, and it’s a small step from that to see them as a saleable, and edible, commodity.’
‘That’s right,’ says Steve, oblivious of his own recent, private relegation of Phoebe to a different species from Nora. ‘What’s interesting is that the speaker seems initially to be complicit in the way the English, or the Protestant Ascendancy, view the Irish, but then manages to turn the argument against them by taking their attitude to its logical conclusion. He’s saying, in effect, that you might as well be eating them for all the effort you’re making to keep them alive. And, of course, history tells us – I’m thinking here of the Holocaust or apartheid – that the persistent use of animal imagery creates a climate where those others can be treated in any way that the ruling hegemony sees fit.’
Then, just when he’s on the point of dismissing them, Nora speaks again, but this time she is almost playful; he wonders whether she is teasing him. ‘I hope we shan’t be seeing the Irish as victims of the English all the time,’ she says.
Steve is surprised, forced to confront the unwelcome possibility that, despite her name, she might be Protestant. ‘Unfortunately that has been the history of the two countries.’
‘Just as long as we acknowledge that the process we’ve just been discussing isn’t all in one direction. It’s true that the Irish haven’t had the opportunity to oppress the English, but they might take a certain comfort in seeing them as animals.’ Then before he has framed a reply, she says, ‘I don’t suppose that the IRA bomber sees – or saw, if the peace process holds – his victims as human beings with the same capacity for suffering as himself.’
Relieved, Steve says, ‘None of us would argue with that, although we still have a responsibility to investigate the cause of the violence.’
As he finishes speaking, he gives a nod of dismissal, turns away from the class and walks over to the window. He is not quite as absorbed in his own thoughts as he seems: he is aware of his students packing up their bags, pulling on jackets and forming into groups as they drift out of the room. He turns to face Nora as she, too, makes her way between the seats.
‘I just wanted to repeat what I said earlier,’ he said, ‘that it’s good to have an authentically Irish member of the class. At least, I assume you’re the only one, unless there are others who are keeping their heads down.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ she says, attentive but not smiling. Steve realises that, although he has seen her smile, she hasn’t yet smiled at him, and wonders how long he’ll have to wait for that. ‘I’ve come into contact with most people in the group, but not everybody. And there are what you might call the London Irish, like Nick.’
‘We don’t get a large number of Irish students here, though there are a few. May I ask what brought you?’
‘Oh, this and that. You know.’
‘You thought you’d spread your wings?’
‘Something like that.’
This is much harder work for Steve than the class he’s just given, but he persists none the less. ‘Well, we’re honoured. These are exciting times in Northern Ireland. You must feel you’re missing out.’
‘You mean with the Assembly and all?’
‘Well, yes. You are in favour of what’s going on?’
Nora hesitates briefly and, when she speaks, chooses her words with care: ‘My family’s Catholic. On the whole, Catholics are more likely to support the Good Friday Agreement.’
Steve smiles his relief, although he is puzzled by the form her reply takes, as though she is at pains to give as little information as is consistent with candour. ‘I thought as much. Your name, I suppose. It tends to be something of a giveaway in Ireland.’
‘Well. Certainly according to Seamus Heaney it does, though I’ve never been stopped by an RUC man.’
‘No, I suppose not. Young women aren’t usually thought to pose the same kind of threat as young men.’ Finding nothing else to say, and uncomfortable at her reluctance to volunteer any information about herself – a rare characteristic in his experience of young people – Steve releases her. ‘Well, I’ll see you next week.’
He watches her leave the room and notices that Phoebe Metcalfe is just outside the door, waiting for her. Not for the first time he wonders at the friendships formed by students and remembers some of the people he has had to avoid since Oxford. He gives them time to move on – he wouldn’t put it past Phoebe to waylay him and offer him her views on the little people – before picking up his helmet and satchel and leaving.
Half an hour later, Phoebe, Nora and Nick are seated at a Formica table in Marco and Gianna’s, the local Italian coffee bar. Usually Pete would be with them, but when last seen he had given them a distracted wave as he chatted up Annie Price. They are all drinking cappuccinos, and Phoebe, having declared herself to be ‘sinking’ with hunger, is eating a large cinnamon Danish that her friends have declined to share.
‘So, what did he want?’ Phoebe asks Nora, not for the first time, but now that they’re seated Nora can hardly evade the question. Phoebe’s learned from experience that Nora will give away as little as possible without appearing eccentric, and so attracting an even more unwelcome degree of attention; persistent questioning usually produces some result, however grudging.
Nora takes time to form her reply. Her manner, as so often, suggests someone much older. ‘He wanted to make sure that I was a Catholic.’
Phoebe’s round face, pink now from the coffee and the steaminess of the atmosphere, puckers in bewilderment. With Nick and Nora she often seems like a child, puzzling out the ways of the adult world. ‘But why? He doesn’t strike me as someone who cares about religion. Is he going to ask all of us? Is that allowed?’
‘It’s because he doesn’t want the embarrassment, some way into the term, of finding out that he has a wicked Ulster Protestant in his midst,’ explains Nick.
‘But why does it matter?’
‘Because it would be politically compromising for him to single out Nora as a favoured student, then find that she was on the wrong side.’
‘But what does politics have to do with religion?’ Phoebe asks, but before either of them can answer, says, ‘On second thoughts, don’t bother. I wish he’d stop banging on about it, whatever. I thought this was meant to be a literature course.’
‘Everything is political for Steve, but when he comes to Ireland he happens to be right.’
Nick is watching Nora as he says this, but she is staring absently into the remains of her cappuccino. Like Steve, he has given some thought to the nature of Nora’s friendship with Phoebe, and thinks he has arrived at a partial explanation. Phoebe, for all her questions, is fundamentally incurious. As on this occasion, she dismisses any information that is incompatible with her worldview. He judges that this suits Nora well. In the year he’s known her she’s been persistently evasive about her background – remarkably so, given that her accent immediately identifies her as coming from one of the few parts of the United Kingdom that impinges on everybody’s consciousness.
She is sometimes eager, as she was in today’s class, to express a view on Ireland, often with the implied suggestion that the English fail to understand it, then seems to regret drawing attention to herself. Always her opinions on Ireland are cast in strictly impersonal terms, as though she has arrived at an opinion through studying the subject rather than as a result of experience. As far as he can remember, she has never volunteered an anecdote about her childhood or parents, the kind of stuff that’s common currency among students who, in the early days of friendship, like to define and establish who they are. When such occasions arise, and members of a group try to outdo each other with stories of an outrageous parent or eccentric upbringing (for everything is exaggerated in the interests of glamour), Nora falls silent, or turns the conversation, or makes an excuse to leave. It’s as though she’s afraid of being found out.
There is some discussion between them about whether Nora can’t or won’t talk about herself. Pete has always subscribed to the view that Nora doesn’t choose to talk, that she preserves her mystery so that they (the men particularly) can project their fantasies on to her. If she were known to have had a conventional middle-class background, albeit in a different place, she would be like the rest of them, apart from her extraordinary looks, of course.
Nick isn’t so sure. Within the limits she has set herself, Nora is often touchingly eager to please, almost too compliant to other people’s wishes – a characteristic that Phoebe has been quick to spot and ready to exploit. He thinks that Nora is genuinely inhibited, but by what he hasn’t yet decided. Privately – because in a gossipy environment like a university where any hint of the glamorous, subversive or criminal is immediately seized upon and enlarged – he’s speculated about an IRA connection. It’s difficult to imagine Nora actively involved, but her conformity to the role of model citizen and outstanding student – like him, she gained a first in her first-year exams – would be the perfect cover.
On the other hand, the revulsion she sometimes expresses against terrorism could be genuine. Sometimes he thinks that her adaptability, her unwillingness to impose her will, might indicate that she’s been a victim of aggression; that she’s used to keeping her head down. Whatever the cause, it’s thought that she never goes home and, as far as he knows, she spent the entire summer working in a hotel in Devon, presumably to help pay her way through college.
He wonders what it would be like to have a relationship with her. The idea certainly appeals, but she seems to be as inhibited about sex as about everything else, and Nick is so used to girls who leave no room to doubt their willingness that he’s not sure how he would begin to break down her reserve.
Putting aside for the moment thoughts about that particular reserve, Nick decides to chance his luck with a direct question about Ireland. ‘So tell me, Nora, how, in your opinion as an insider, did Steve tackle the Irish question?’
She turns her head judiciously to one side, exactly as she might, he thinks, if she were marshalling an argument for an essay or a class presentation. It occurs to him for the first time that, although she never draws attention to her successes, she is most at ease with academic discourse, as though she has developed that side of her character at the expense of the rest.
‘He talks a lot about stereotypes, and how they tell us nothing about the country, only about the prejudices of those who subscribe to them, but he has all the prejudices about the Irish of the liberal London intelligentsia – how we’re all victims and it’s all the fault of empire, as though there’s no such thing as personal responsibility and morality. Irish Catholics are all angels, and all the others are now animals. He’s just turned the traditional model on its head.’
He wants to ask her, ‘Then what, for Christ’s sake, is the reality, or your reality?’ but knowing that will get him nowhere, says, ‘In his own way, Steve’s an old romantic. He may subscribe to a cool, post-structuralist approach, but you could see that he fancies himself as a bit of a Swift – an outsider who uses his mordant wit and superior intelligence to see further and deeper than an insider.’
‘I don’t think he’s at all romantic,’ says Phoebe. ‘I’d heard so much about him that I was expecting something more…’ Unable to find the word she wants, she lifts her arms, then drops them to express her disappointment, only just missing, in their cramped surroundings, the empty cups and plate on the table. ‘I thought he was a bit of a cold fish.’
‘So what was he like – close up and personal, I mean?’ asks Nick.
‘He looked older,’ Nora says. ‘Tired, as though a couple of hours’ work had exhausted him.’
‘I suppose he’s getting on a bit. It’s hard for ageing rebels like him to know what to do with themselves, with younger generations yapping at their heels. Do they go back on everything they’ve believed in, like those Old Labour people trying to look comfortable in a New Labour government? Or do they find a new cause for themselves? I guess that’s why he’s taken on Ireland. At the moment it’s sexier than Marxism, but I’d say he’s a bit of a latecomer to the game. Wouldn’t you, Nora?’
Nora merely shrugs, as though she’s reached the limit with this particular conversation. What she doesn’t say is that, throughout the session, Steve kept reminding her of her father. She doesn’t say it because she hasn’t yet found a way to talk about home, and to explain the resemblance she would have to tell her entire family history.
Ballypierce (#ulink_c209da3b-1559-5cf1-a634-6a7608655bf3)
Nora’s earliest precise memory is of a day shortly before the birth of her brother. She remembers that the baby’s imminence hung in the air that afternoon, charging the atmosphere and releasing in her father a restless energy. Always a boastful man, his pride in himself, and in her, seemed to know no bounds. And while she is sure, without having a clear memory of them, that there were other, similar occasions before that afternoon, she knows that there were none afterwards. This, she thinks, is why she remembers the afternoon so clearly, that it marked the end of an era: with Felix’s birth, another, altogether different, phase in their lives began.
She remembers sitting on the counter in her father’s shop, surrounded by a group of admiring men. The pretext for her being there was that her mother needed to rest. Her father had come home for lunch, as he was in the habit of doing when it was just the three of them, leaving in charge one of the succession of young women that he had working for him. His routine was sufficiently established for people to know not to take in their prescriptions over the dinner hour, when many of the other shops, which couldn’t afford extra help, closed. Her mother had told him that the midwife had called, that her blood pressure was up again and she needed rest.
‘Will I take the wee girl back with me, Bernie?’ he had asked.
‘Since when have you needed my permission?’ her mother had replied.
It was acknowledged between the three of them that she and her father were a team, and while her mother boasted of this to her acquaintance – the degree of interest that Gerald took in his four-year-old daughter was sufficiently unusual to arouse the envy of other women – her resentment at being excluded sometimes surfaced at home. Nora was hoping that the baby would be a boy, not for herself or her father, who were perfectly content, but for her mother. She and the baby boy would then form another self-contained team and the family would be perfectly balanced.
So Gerald took her back with him and she spent the first hour or so sitting at a little desk that Gerald had rigged up for her in the corner, drawing and doing a few sums that he had set her. Really, this was only marking time until a sufficient crowd had gathered, mostly other shopkeepers who had left their wives, now released from kitchen duties, in charge while they slipped out for half an hour.
Without understanding at that point precisely why, she knew that it was a mark of her father’s importance that his shop acted as a magnet for men with time on their hands during the slow, early-afternoon hours before the schools were out. Ballypierce was a largely nationalist town where incomes were low and trade rarely buoyant. But Gerald, who had grown up and gone to school with many of the other traders, was a great man among them, a pharmacist who had gone to Belfast to study. They could leave their shops, but he had to stay at his post to make up prescriptions, apart from the hour dedicated to lunch, when he insisted on a home-cooked meal. He was one of the few whose family didn’t live above the shop, having chosen instead a new bungalow, built to architect’s specifications on a hill at the edge of the town with a view over the valley. The flat above the shop was let so he was a landlord in addition to his professional status.
People might not have jobs but they still became ill and needed medicines that the Health Service funded so, whatever else was happening, the Doyles were always comfortable. And Gerald, instead of joining the Protestants at the golf course or sailing club, as he was entitled to, had stayed one of them, always ready for good craic, always pleased to see an old friend who dropped in. By comparison with others in the town, his shop was like a palace, with large plate-glass windows on both sides of the door, all the fittings built to the highest standards, always sweetly smelling from the soaps and perfumes and ladies’ cosmetics, and gleamingly clean, because Gerald insisted on the highest standards of hygiene and had been known to sack a girl whose hair always looked unwashed. And when the party was under way, Gerald would send his assistant into the little kitchenette to make them all cups of tea.
That afternoon Nora was lifted on to the counter, the one with the little room behind it where Gerald made up his prescriptions. She was wearing a navy blue smocked Viyella dress with matching tights – Gerald had requested that Bernie change her before they left – and her hair was tied back into a tight ponytail. When Gerald had started this routine, as soon as she could walk and talk and had no need of nappies, she would recite a few nursery rhymes or count to a specified number, but since he had taught her to read she was always required to show off her current level of attainment. That afternoon she read from a simplified picture-book version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
‘You’re a great girl, so you are,’ said Malachy McGready, the greengrocer. ‘It’s no wonder your daddy’s so proud of you. But if he gives you books like this to read, you’ll start to think you’re a wee Brit. You won’t find many Susans and Edmunds around here.’
Gerald gave a satisfied little smirk, having come prepared for just this rebuke. ‘Don’t you know who C. S. Lewis was?’ he asked. ‘Your man was born in Belfast and ended up a professor at Oxford.’
This was greeted with smiles all round, not so much that one of their own (they were by no means convinced that a man who wrote like this could be so described) had achieved so much in the wider world but because Gerald had outmanoeuvred them yet again. These afternoon gatherings, whether Nora was present or not, were not so much exchanges between equals, as enactments and affirmations of Gerald Doyle’s superiority, and if he had ever been caught out or bettered, they would have felt keen disappointment. Malachy’s scepticism was, none the less, a necessary component of the drama.
‘Is that what you’re after for the little lady here – for her to be a professor at Oxford? What’s wrong with Queen’s, or Trinity, if she must leave home?’
‘I want the best for her, and she deserves it. And if when the time comes the best is still Oxford, then we’ll have to make the sacrifice.’ As he spoke, Gerald looked down fondly at Nora, who sat swinging her legs and munching a biscuit.