If the court pleases, I shall skim lightly over this period of my life. It is a time that is still a source of vague unease in my mind, I cannot say why, exactly. I have the feeling of having done something ridiculous by taking that job. It was unworthy of me, of course, of my talent, but that is not the whole source of my sense of humiliation. Perhaps that was the moment in my life at which – but what am I saying, there are no moments, I've said that already. There is just the ceaseless, slow, demented drift of things. If I had any lingering doubts of that the Institute extinguished them finally. It was housed in a great grey stone building from the last century which always reminded me, with its sheer flanks, its buttresses and curlicues and blackened smokestacks, of a grand, antiquated ocean liner. No one knew what exactly it was we were expected to achieve. We did statistical surveys, and produced thick reports bristling with graphs and flow-charts and complex appendices, which the government received with grave words of praise and then promptly forgot about. The director was a large, frantic man who sucked fiercely on an enormous black pipe and had a tic in one eye and tufts of hair sprouting from his ears. He plunged about the place, always on his way elsewhere. All queries and requests he greeted with a harsh, doomed laugh. Try that on the Minister! he would cry over his shoulder as he strode off, emitting thick gusts of smoke and sparks in his wake. Inevitably there was a high incidence of looniness among the staff. Finding themselves with no fixed duties, people embarked furtively on projects of their own. There was an economist, a tall, emaciated person with a greenish face and unruly hair, who was devising a foolproof system for betting on the horses. He offered one day to let me in on it, clutching my wrist in a trembling claw and hissing urgently into my ear, but then something happened, I don't know what, he grew suspicious, and in the end would not speak to me, and avoided me in the corridors. This was awkward, for he was one of a select band of savants with whom I had to treat in order to gain access to the computer. This machine was at the centre of all our activities. Time on it was strictly rationed, and to get an uninterrupted hour at it was a rare privilege. It ran all day and through the night, whirring and crunching in its vast white room in the basement. At night it was tended by a mysterious and sinister trio, a war criminal, I think, and two strange boys, one with a damaged face. Three years I spent there. I was not violently unhappy. I just felt, and feel, as I say, a little ridiculous, a little embarrassed. And I never quite forgave Charlie French.
It was late when we left the pub. The night was made of glass. I was very drunk. Charlie helped me along. He was worrying about his briefcase, and clutched it tightly under his arm. Every few yards I had to stop and tell him how good he was. No, I said, holding up a hand commandingly, no, I want to say it, you're a good man, Charles, a good man. I wept copiously, of course, and retched drily a few times. It was all a sort of glorious, grief-stricken, staggering rapture. I remembered that Charlie lived with his mother, and wept for that, too. But how is she, I shouted sorrowfully, tell me, Charlie, how is she, that sainted woman? He would not answer, pretended not to hear, but I kept at it and at last he shook his head irritably and said, She's dead! I tried to embrace him, but he walked away from me. We came upon a hole in the street with a cordon of red and white plastic ribbon around it. The ribbon shivered and clicked in the breeze. It's where the bomb in the car went off yesterday, Charlie said. Yesterday! I laughed and laughed, and knelt on the road at the edge of the hole, laughing, with my face in my hands. Yesterday, the last day of the old world. Wait, Charlie said, I'll get a taxi. He went off, and I knelt there, rocking back and forth and crooning softly, as if I were a child I was holding in my arms. I was tired. It had been a long day. I had come far.
I woke in splintered sunlight with a shriek fading in my ears. Big sagging bed, brown walls, a smell of damp. I thought I must be at Coolgrange, in my parents' room. For a moment I lay without moving, staring at sliding waterlights on the ceiling. Then I remembered, and I shut my eyes tight and hid my head in my arms. The darkness drummed. I got up and dragged myself to the window, and stood amazed at the blue innocence of sea and sky. Far out in the bay white sailboats were tacking into the wind. Below the window was a little stone harbour, and beyond that the curve of the coast road. An enormous seagull appeared and flung itself on flailing pinions at the glass, shrieking. They must think you are Mammy, Charlie said behind me. He was standing in the doorway. He wore a soiled apron, and held a frying-pan in his hand. The gulls, he said, she used to feed them. At his back a white, impenetrable glare. This was the world I must live in from now on, in this searing, inescapable light. I looked at myself and found I was naked.
I sat in the vast kitchen, under a vast, grimy window, and watched Charlie making breakfast in a cloud of fat-smoke. He did not look too good in daylight, he was hollow and grey, with flakes of dried shaving soap on his jaw and bruised bags under his phlegm-coloured eyes. Besides the apron he wore a woollen cardigan over a soiled string vest, and sagging flannel trousers. Used to wait till I was gone, he said, then throw the food out the window. He shook his head and laughed. A terrible woman, he said, terrible. He brought a plate of rashers and fried bread and a swimming egg and set it down in front of me. There, he said, only thing for a sore head. I looked up at him quickly. A sore head? Had I blurted something out to him last night, some drunken confession? But no, Charlie would not make that kind of joke. He went back to the stove and lit a cigarette, fumbling with the matches.
Look, Charlie, I said, I may as well tell you, I've got into a bit of a scrape.
I thought at first he had not heard me. He went slack, and a dreamy vacancy came over him, his mouth open and drooping a little on one side and his eyebrows mildly lifted. Then I realised that he was being tactful. Well, if he didn't want to know, that was all right. But I wish to have it in the record, m'lud, that I would have told him, if he had been prepared to listen. As it was I merely let a silence pass, and then asked if I might borrow a razor, and perhaps a shirt and tie. Of course, he said, of course, but he would not look me in the eye. In fact, he had not looked at me at all since I got up, but edged around me with averted gaze, busying himself with the teapot and the pan, as if afraid that if he paused some awful awkward thing would arise which he would not know how to deal with. He suspected something, I suppose. He was no fool. (Or not a great fool, anyway.) But I think too it was simply that he did not quite know how to accommodate my presence. He fidgeted, moving things about, putting things away in drawers and cupboards and then taking them out again, murmuring to himself distractedly. People did not come often to this house. Some of the weepy regard I had felt for him last night returned. He seemed almost maternal, in his apron and his old felt slippers. He would take care of me. I gulped my tea and gloomed at my untouched fry congealing on its plate. A car-horn tooted outside, and Charlie with an exclamation whipped off his apron and hurried out of the kitchen. I listened to him blundering about the house. In a surprisingly short time he appeared again, in his suit, with his briefcase under his arm, and sporting a raffish little hat that made him look like a harassed bookie. Where are you based, he said, frowning at a spot beside my left shoulder, Coolgrange, or -? I said nothing, only looked at him appealingly, and he said, Ah, and nodded slowly, and slowly withdrew. Suddenly, though, I did not want him to go – alone, I would be alone! – and I rushed after him and made him come back and tell me how the stove worked, and where to find a key, and what to say if the milkman called. He was puzzled by my vehemence, I could see, and faintly alarmed. I followed him into the hall, and was still talking to him as he backed out the front-door, nodding at me warily, with a fixed smile, as if I were – ha! I was going to say, a dangerous criminal. I scampered up the stairs to the bedroom, and watched as he came out on the footpath below, a clownishly foreshortened figure in his hat and his baggy suit. A large black car was waiting at the kerb, its twin exhaust pipes discreetly puffing a pale-blue mist. The driver, a burly, dark-suited fellow with no neck, hopped out smartly and held open the rear door. Charlie looked up at the window where I stood, and the driver followed his glance. I saw myself as they would see me, a blurred face floating behind the glass, blear-eyed, unshaven, the very picture of a fugitive. The car slid away smoothly and passed along the harbour road and turned a corner and was gone. I did not stir. I wanted to stay like this, with my forehead against the glass and the summer day all out there before me. How quaint it all seemed, the white-tipped sea, and the white and pink houses, and the blurred headland in the distance, quaint and happy, like a little toy world laid out in a shop window. I closed my eyes, and again that fragment of memory swam up out of the depths – the doorway, and the darkened room, and the sense of something imminent – but this time it seemed to be not my own past I was remembering.