Distinctly in my head her voice again said: Don't.
The boy with the curls came back, now wearing tight jeans and a shiny tight green shirt. He was called Sonny. Wally left him in charge of the bar and waddled off to his quarters, his dressing-gown billowing behind him. Sonny poured a generous measure of crème de menthe into a tumbler and filled it up with ice cubes, then perched himself on the stool, squirming his narrow little nates, and examined me without much enthusiasm. You're new, he said, making it sound like an accusation. No I'm not, I said, you are, and I smirked, pleased with myself. He made a wide-eyed face. Well excuse me, he said, I'm sure. Wally came back, dressed and coiffed and reeking of pomade. I had another double. My face was growing taut, it felt like a mud mask. I had reached that stage of inebriation where everything was settling into another version of reality. It seemed not drunkenness, but a form of enlightenment, almost a sobering-up. A crowd of theatre people came in, prancing and squawking. They looked at my appearance and then at each other, brimming with merriment. Talk about rough trade, one said, and Sonny tittered. And I thought, that's what I'll do, I'll get one of them to take me home and hide me, Lady Macbeth there with the mascara and the blood-red nails, or that laughing fellow in the harlequin shirt – why not? Yes, that's what I should do, I should live henceforth among actors, practise among them, study their craft, the grand gesture and the fine nuance. Perhaps in time I would learn to play my part sufficiently well, with enough conviction, to take my place among the others, the naturals, those people on the bus, and all the rest of them.
It was only when Charlie French came in that I realised it was for him I had been waiting. Good old Charlie. My heart flooded with fondness, I felt like embracing him. He was in his chalkstripes, carrying a battered, important-looking briefcase. Although he had seen me three days ago he tried at first not to know me. Or perhaps he really didn't recognise me, in my dishevelled, wild-eyed state. He said he had thought I was going down to Coolgrange. I said I had been there, and he asked after my mother. I told him about her stroke. I laid it on a bit, I think – I may even have shed a tear. He nodded, looking past my left ear and jingling the coins in his trouser pocket. There was a pause, during which I snuffled and sighed. So, he said brightly, you're off on your travels again, are you? I shrugged. His car's broke down, isn't it, Wally said, and expelled an unpleasant little chuckle. Charlie assumed a sympathetic frown. Is that right? he said slowly, with a dreamy lack of emphasis. The crowd of actors behind us suddenly shrieked, so piercingly that glasses chimed, but he might not have heard them, he did not even blink. He had perfected a pose for places and occasions such as this, by which he managed to be at once here and not here. He stood very straight, his black brogues planted firmly together and his briefcase leaning against his leg, with one fist on the bar – oh, I can see him! – and the other hand holding his whiskey glass suspended halfway to his lips, just as if he had stumbled in here by mistake and was too much the gentleman to cut and run before partaking of a snifter and exchanging a few civilities with the frantic denizens of the place. He could maintain this air of being just about to leave throughout a whole night's drinking. Oh yes, Charlie could act them all into a cocked hat.
The more I drank the fonder I became of him, especially as he kept paying for gins as fast as I could drink them. But it was not just that. I was – I am – genuinely fond of him, I think I have said so already. Did I mention that he got me my job at the Institute? We had kept in touch during my years in college – or at least he had kept in touch with me. He liked to think of himself as the wise old family friend watching over with an avuncular eye the brilliant only son of the house. He took me out for treats. There were teas at the Hibernian, the odd jaunt to the Curragh, the dinner at Jammet's every year on my birthday. They never quite worked, these occasions, they smacked too much of contrivance. I was always afraid that someone would see me with him, and while I squirmed and scowled he would sink into a state of restless melancholy. When we were ready to part there would be a sudden burst of hearty chatter which was nothing but relief badly disguised, then we would each turn and slink away guiltily. Yet he was not deterred, and the day after my return with Daphne from America he took me for a drink in the Shelbourne and suggested that, as he put it, I might like to give the chaps at the Institute a hand. I was still feeling groggy – we had made a hideous winter crossing, on what was hardly more than a tramp steamer – and he was so diffident, and employed such elaborate depreciations, that it was a while before I realised he was offering me a job. The work, he assured me hurriedly, would be right up my street – hardly work at all, and to such as I, he fancied, more a form of play – the money was decent, the prospects were limitless. I knew at once, of course, from his suppliant, doggy manner, that all this was at my mother's prompting. Well, he said, showing his big yellow teeth in a strained smile, what do you think? First I was annoyed, then amused. I thought: why not?
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.