By the by, what would I have done in all this affair without the solace of drink and its deadening effect? I seem to have got over those days in a series of quaking lunges from one brief state of drunken equilibrium to another, like a fugitive fleeing across a zigzag of slimed stepping-stones. Even the colours, gin-blue and claret-red, are they not the very emblems of my case, the court-colours of my testimony? Now that I have sobered up forever I look back not only on that time but on all my life as a sort of tipsy but not particularly happy spree, from which I knew I would have to emerge sooner or later, with a bad headache. This, ah yes, this is hangover time with a vengeance.
The rest of that evening, as I recall it, was a succession of distinct, muffled shocks, like falling downstairs slowly in a dream. That was when I learned that my father had kept a mistress. I was first astonished, then indignant. I had been his alibi, his camouflage! While I sat for hours in the back of the car above the yacht club in Dun Laoghaire on Sunday afternoons, he was off fucking his fancy-woman. Penelope was her name – Penelope, for God's sake! Where did they meet, I wanted to know, was there a secret love-nest where he kept her, a bijou little hideaway with roses round the door and a mirror on the bedroom ceiling? Charlie shrugged. Oh, he said, they used to come here. At first I could not take it in. Here? I cried. Here? But what about -? He shrugged again, and gave a sort of grin. Mammy French, it seems, did not mind. On occasion she even had the lovers join her for tea. She and Penelope exchanged knitting patterns. You see, she knew – Charlie said, but stopped, and a spot of colour appeared in the cracked skin over each cheekbone, and he ran a finger quickly around the inside of his shirt collar. I waited. She knew I was fond of your – of Dolly, he said at last. By now I was fairly reeling. Before I could speak he went on to tell me how Binkie Behrens too had been after my mother, how he would invite her and my father to Whitewater and ply my father with drink so he would not notice Binkie's gamy eye and wandering hands. And then my mother would come and tell Charlie all about it, and they would laugh together. Now he shook his head and sighed. Poor Binkie, he said. I sat aghast, lost in wonderment and trying to hold my wine-glass straight. I felt like a child hearing for the first time of the doings of the gods: they crowded in my buzzing head, these tremendous, archaic, flawed figures with their plots and rivalries and impossible loves. Charlie was so matter-of-fact about it all, half wistful and half amused. He spoke mostly as if I were not there, looking up now and then in mild surprise at my squeaks and snorts of astonishment. And you, I said, what about you and my -? I could not put it into words. He gave me a look at once arch and sly. Here, he said, finish the bottle.
I think he told me something more about my mother, but I don't remember what it was. I do remember phoning her later that night, sitting cross-legged in the dark on the floor in the hall, with tears in my eyes and the telephone squatting in my lap like a frog. She seemed immensely far away, a miniature voice booming at me tinily out of a thrumming void. Freddie, she said, you're drunk. She asked why had I not come back, to collect my bag if for nothing else. I wanted to say to her, Mother, how could I go home, now? We were silent for a moment, then she said Daphne had called her, wondering where I was, what I was doing. Daphne! I had not thought of her for days. Through the doorway at the end of the hall I watched Charlie pottering about in the kitchen, rattling the pots and pans and pretending he was not trying to hear what I was saying. I sighed, and the sigh turned into a thin little moan. Ma, I said, I've got myself into such trouble. There was a noise on the line, or maybe it was in my head, like a great rushing of many wings. What? she said, I can't hear you – what? I laughed, and two big tears ran down the sides of my nose. Nothing, I shouted, nothing, forget it! Then I said, Listen, do you know who Penelope is – was – do you know about her? I was shocked at myself. Why did I say such a thing, why did I want to wound her? She was silent for a moment, and then she laughed. That bitch? she said, of course I knew about her. Charlie had come to the doorway, and stood, with a rag in one hand and a plate in the other, watching me. The light was behind him, I could not see his face. There was another pause. You're too hard on yourself, Freddie, my mother said at last, in that reverberant, faraway voice, you make things too hard on yourself. I did not know what she meant. I still don't. I waited a moment, but she said nothing more, and I could not speak. Those were the last words we would ever exchange. I put down the receiver gently, and got to my feet, not without difficulty. One of my knees was asleep. I limped into the kitchen. Charlie was bent over the sink doing the washing-up, with a cigarette dangling from his lip, sleeves rolled, his waistcoat unbuckled at the back. The sky in the window in front of him was a pale shade of indigo, I thought I had never seen anything so lovely in my life.
Charlie, I said, swaying, I need a loan.
I had always been a weeper, but now any hint of kindness could make me blub like a babe. When there and then he sat down at the kitchen table and wrote out a cheque – I have it stilclass="underline" spidery black scrawl, an illegible signature, a stewy thumb-print in one corner – I tried to seize his liver-spotted hand, I think I meant to kiss it. He made a little speech, I don't remember it well. My mother figured in it, Daphne too. I think even Penelope's name was mentioned. I wonder if he was drunk? He kept looming into focus and fading out again, yet I felt this was less an effect of my blurred vision than of a sort of tentativeness on his part. Oh, Charlie, you should have heeded that niggle of suspicion, you should have thrown me out that night, fuddled and defenceless though I was.
The next thing I recall is being on my knees in the lavatory, puking up a ferruginous torrent of wine mixed with fibrous strands of meat and bits of carrot. The look of this stuff gushing out filled me with wonder, as if it were not vomit, but something rich and strange, a dark stream of ore from the deep mine of my innards. Then there is an impression of everything swaying, of glistening darkness and things in it spinning past me, as though I were being whirled round and round slowly on a wobbly carousel made of glass. Next I was lying on my back on the big, disordered bed upstairs, shivering and sweating. There was a light on, and the window was a box of deep, glistening darkness. I fell asleep, and after what seemed a moment woke again with the sun shining in my face. The house was silent around me, but there was a thin, continuous ringing which I seemed to feel rather than hear. The sheets were a sodden tangle. I did not want to move, I felt as fragile as crystal. Even my hair felt breakable, a shock of erect, minute filaments bristling with static. I could hear the blood rushing along my veins, quick and heavy as mercury. My face was swollen and hot, and strangely smooth to the touch: a doll's face. When I closed my eyes a crimson shape pulsed and faded and pulsed again on the inside of my lids, like the repeated after-image of a shell bursting in blackness. When I swallowed, the ringing in my ears changed pitch. I dozed, and dreamed I was adrift in a hot lake. When I woke it was afternoon. The light in the window, dense, calm, unshadowed, was a light shining straight out of the past. My mouth was dry and swollen, my head seemed packed with air. Not since childhood had I known this particular state of voluptuous distress. It was not really illness, more a kind of respite. I lay for a long time, hardly stirring, watching the day change, listening to the little noises of the world. The brazen sunlight slowly faded, and the sky turned from lilac to mauve, and a single star appeared. Then suddenly it was late, and I lay in a sleepy daze in the soft summer darkness and would not have been surprised if my mother had appeared, young and smiling, in a rustle of silk, with a finger to her lips, to say goodnight to me on her way out for the evening. It was not Maman who came, however, but only Charlie, he opened the door cautiously on its wheezy hinges and peered in at me, craning his tortoise neck, and I shut my eyes and he withdrew softly and creaked away down the stairs. And I saw in my mind another doorway, and another darkness – that fragment of memory, not mine, yet again – and waited, hardly breathing, for something or someone to appear. But there was nothing.