‘Kildare.’
‘Yes.’
‘Heavens I hardly expected to find you. I was expecting it to be the laundry man.’
‘I do apologize calling unbidden upon you like this.’
‘Well dear me, you have. And so you may as well come in. I was only at this very moment in the middle of a message to you.’
‘Mr Arland, you’re limping.’
‘Yes. My hip. Went on me. Just as I was off to see you. Not as fit as you, Kildare, I’m sure. Come. Please don’t expect a palace. Or indeed much more than a hovel.’
Slowly up the stairs. In the musky odours. Laths showing through plaster broken on the walls. Around the landing past a sickly green door, a sign, The Trans World International Engineering Company, half scribbled and printed on a warped piece of cardboard hanging suspended under a rusted thumb tack. High up over the stairwell, a roof skylight throwing down pale gloomy light. On the head and back of this man who so much by his kind words, his example, his advice and warm sympathies, bids me think that there was ahead in one’s life a noble reason to live.
‘Well Kildare, please forgive these conditions to which you are about to be exposed.’
Key stuck in the door. Mr Arland pushing it open. A hand gesturing one in. His room. My god. This is awful. Unmade grey sheets on a narrow bed. A cooking stove. Frying pan full of grease. Clumps of wet turf smouldering in a tiny grate. A lone bare light bulb hanging by its cobwebbed wire from the ceiling. A steamer trunk. Lieut. N. P. Arland, rnvr, in the corner. A warped cupboard, its panels cracked. A shirt by a bottle of milk. Sausages and two eggs next to a hairbrush on his broken dresser. Sheets of paper strewn amid newspapers and books. A gnawed piece of bread.
‘The condition of my room I fear is not exactly what one might expect of an ex naval officer, Kildare. And I do most abjectly apologize. Standing you up. I was coming to meet you. As you see I am still dressed for the occasion. But I fear my hip, when it goes like this, unless rested, only gets worse. As you see here on my College Historical Society notepaper to which I helped myself copiously as an undergraduate, my message to you. A nuisance the time it takes me now to get up and down the stairs. Do. Sit there. Alas the only chair. I’ll park here on the bed. Well dear me. It is good to see you. It is really. I wish it were in more auspicious surroundings.’
‘It is good to see you too. Mr Arland.’
‘Well we’ve got to stop that Mr Arland stuff.’
‘But you have never told me your Christian name.’
‘Alas with good reason, Kildare. And perhaps my middle one will better suit the purpose. My first Christian name being none other than Napoleon. It provokes endless inanities especially in Dublin. So therefore call me Patrick, please. And I shall call you Darcy if I may. Well you’re about two feet taller. And clearly a man of the world. Did you come by taxi.’
‘I walked. By way of Westland Row.’
‘A smattering of one or two decent architectural features, aren’t there, around this area, I think.’
‘Yes. One or two.’
‘Merrion Hall’s not that far away with its Protestant elevations. Does make one realize that there’s hardly a Roman Catholic thing in Dublin to boast about. I mean the church by the station of course. Nice front pillars. Plinths plain at least. Inside, does have one interesting marble plaque to boast about A viscountess who died in Paris in eighteen fifty. A County Meath family. Helps the soul to dwell on these little obscure antiquities. One attempts to cure one’s injured spirit by any means. Ah, but I think the day comes when one has to rue the senseless pleasure in having been a romantic. Graviora quaedam sunt remedia periculis. Translate Kildare. Ah I see it’s hard to change our use of names, isn’t it.’
‘I do not believe there remains a single phrase of Latin left in my head, Mr Arland.’
‘Dear me. Have I also failed as a tutor then. Well in that case, some tea perhaps.’
‘Yes please.’
‘But how are you Kildare. And do tell me. How is Andromeda Park. I hear you have taken over. How is Sexton’s Latin getting on. Or is it Greek nowadays. I did occasionally hear him rattling off the alphabet to himself. And Crooks, how is he.’
Mr Arland, limping and disappearing out the door with his kettle. Returning with a smile. Striking a match. Turning on the gas ring. The blue flames licking out under the blackened aluminium. One does somehow feel it at least encouraging, Mr Arland keeps open his eyes to what is commendable in these streets of some squalor. Perhaps it reassures him he is not entirely removed from the civilised world. But as one tells him of Andromeda Park, a lost nostalgic sadder look grows on his face as he munches a cream cracker.
‘Darcy, do have some brandy in your tea, I’m having it in mine.’
‘Thank you. But Mr Arland. Please do tell me now. How you really are.’
‘Kildare. Complaint is tiresome, you know. But I suppose it’s been a long time since last we parted. Yes. I do put a brave face upon it. And must not bore you with what I’m sure is my transparent dishonesty.’
‘But please, it would so help to know if you are here like this through design or necessity.’
‘Not design Kildare. More necessity. But I simply found I could not work after Clarissa’s death. I don’t suppose there’s any way of ever getting over it. As crushing as her dying by other circumstances would have been, it was doubly so to have been the cause oneself. Just from a glance through a window. And she was. Just innocently dining with someone else. A dreadful disease is jealousy. And what it has done to another out of one’s own selfish pique. Had I only spoken. And not written. It’s so easy to think all women flirts, and their interest in one just their passing fancy. I suppose my letter revealed to her so much past hurt of mine. And then too late to find she loved me as much as I loved her.’
‘You mustn’t talk further about it.’
‘No I mustn’t. Not while I still can’t hold back my tears. I came back here from London. Finding it there just as bleak and just as dark. If you look out the window. That street across there goes under the railway. Beneath the bridge there’s an aperture through which one can peek and see a long series of arches supporting the tracks above. And like one’s life. I’ve had to build each arch to carry one’s burden. And I’ve managed to do that from day to day. Yet I do feel very under the weather sometimes. My steady if small emolument At least allows survival. And occasionally I’m invited to dine on Commons. Rushing there like a hungry animal. To take a sherry in the Fellows’ Common Room. Sit at high table. See the girl’s sweating faces at the serving hatch having lugged up from the deep bowels of the kitchen the great roasts. The litany of grace. Scrape of chairs on the floor as we all sit down. The gowns. The swell of voices as the dishes clatter, the carvers carve and porters rush to serve. Those things keep one from entirely sinking. But I suppose living here is indeed like joining the lighthouse service, which I always said I might do. Keeping the flame going and the reflectors shined. Reading books as the seas pound. Yes, even to reading this strange volume I see you’re casting your surprised eye at. Aptly called Women, Love and Life. Treating as it does of love and beauty. Love and courage. Love and tolerance. There’s so much truth often found in the trite and sentimental. Anyway. Whiles away the solitude.’