Selected Stories

I had ceased to practise on my sixtieth birthday, feeling the time had come, although previously I had imagined I could go on more or less for ever, as my father had in this same house, to his dying day. ‘What’ll it be like?’ Damian used to ponder when we were young, the world for him an excitement to investigate after a small, familiar town in south-west Ireland. Both of us, of course, knew what it would be like for me: we knew my father’s house, its comfortably crowded rooms, its pleasant garden; we knew the narrow main street, the shopkeepers, priests and beggars, the condensed-milk factory, the burnt-out cinema, the sleepy courthouse, the bright new hospital, the old asylum, the prison. But neither of us could conjecture a single thing about what lay ahead for Damian.

‘It’s all right, is it?’ Damian asked me on the way back from Doul that day, his mood gregarious again, suddenly so, as if he had remembered who I was. ‘Doing nothing these days is all right?’

‘Yes, it’s all right.’

In fact, it was more than that: all sorts of things were easier in retirement. People weren’t patients any more. Met by chance on the street, they conversed with less embarrassment; while privately I registered that Raynaud’s was at work or that Frolich’s syndrome would not now be reversed. In ordinary chat, awkward secrets were not shared with me; more likely I was shown an adolescent’s face and then reminded I’d been the first to see it as an infant’s; or informed of athletic achievements in children who had grown up, or of success in other ways, and weddings that were planned. Worries were held back, not coinage for me now, as bad backs weren’t, or stitched wounds or blood pressure, the smell of sickness in small back bedrooms.

‘Yes, it’s fine,’ I said in the bar of Traynor’s Hotel. ‘And you?’ I added. ‘Nowadays, Damian?’

Again he became morose. He shrugged and did not answer. He stared at the back of a man who was standing at the bar, at the torn seam of a jacket. Then he said:

‘I used to think about Doul. Wherever I was, I’d come back to that.’

From his tone, those thoughts about the place of his youth had been a comfort, occurring – the implication was – at times of distress or melancholy. Then Damian said, as if in response to a question I had not asked:

‘Well yes, an inspiration.’

He had finished the whiskey in his glass. I went to the bar, and while the drinks I ordered were poured I was asked by Mr Traynor about our son, now a doctor in New South Wales, and about Joanna, who had returned to the town six months ago to work in the prison. ‘You’d be delighted she’s back here,’ Mr Traynor conjectured, and I agreed, although pointing out that sooner or later she would move away again. I smiled, shrugging that away, my mind not on the conversation. Could Doul have been a poet’s inspiration for all these years? I wondered. Was that the meaning I was supposed to find in what had been so vaguely stated?

‘I thought I recognized him,’ Mr Traynor next remarked, his voice kept low, after I had answered his query about who Damian was. ‘How’re you doing these times?’ he called out, and Damian called back that none of us was getting younger.

‘God, that’s the truth in it,’ Mr Traynor agreed, wagging his head in a pretence that this hadn’t occurred to him before.

I picked up my change and made my way back to the table where we sat.

‘Nothing grand,’ Damian said, as if my absence hadn’t interrupted what we’d been saying. ‘Any little hovel that could be knocked together. There are things . . .’ He let the sentence trail away. ‘I have the time now.’

I sipped my drink, disguising amusement: all his life Damian had had time. He ran through time, spending it as a spendthrift, wallowing in idleness. Perhaps poets always did, perhaps it was the way they had to live; I didn’t know.

‘Stuff accumulates,’ Damian confided, ‘unsaid. Oh, it’s just a thought,’ he added, and I concluded, with considerable relief, that this was probably the last we’d hear of his morning’s whim. After all, there was no sign whatsoever of his being in possession of the necessary funds to build the modest dwelling he spoke of, and personal loans could be resisted. ‘Silly old Damian,’ Claire murmured when I told her, with the indulgent smile that talk of Damian always drew from her.

Then, quite suddenly, everything was different. Perhaps in the same moment – at dinner two days later – Claire and I were aware that our daughter was being charmed all over again by the man she had once picked out as the man she would like to marry. To this day, I can hear their two voices in my dining-room, and Damian laughing while Claire and I were numbed into silence. To this day I can see the bright flush in Joanna’s cheeks.

‘And are you settled, Joanna?’ Damian asked. ‘Here?’

‘For the time being,’ Joanna said.