What was I doing, why was I following these people – what enlightenment was I looking for? I did not know, nor care. I was puzzled and happy, like a child who has been allowed to join in an adults' game. I kept at it for hours, criss-crossing the streets and the squares with a drunkard's dazed single-mindedness, as if I were tracing out a huge, intricate sign on the face of the city for someone in the sky to read. I found myself in places I had not known were there, crooked alleyways and sudden, broad, deserted spaces, and dead-end streets under railway bridges where parked cars basked fatly in the evening sun, their toy-coloured roofs agleam. I ate a hamburger in a glass-walled café with moulded plastic chairs and tinfoil ashtrays, where people sat alone and gnawed at their food like frightened children abandoned by their parents. The daylight died slowly, leaving a barred, red and gold sunset smeared on the sky, and as I walked along it was like walking under the surface of a broad, burning river. The evening crowds were out, girls in tight trousers and high heels, and brawny young men with menacing haircuts. In the hot, hazy dusk the streets seemed wider, flattened, somehow, and the cars scudded along, sleek as seals in the sodium glare. I got back late to Charlie's house, footsore, hot and dishevelled, my hat awry, but filled with a mysterious sense of achievement. And that night I dreamed about my father. He was a miniature version of himself, a wizened child with a moustache, dressed in a sailor suit, his pinched little face scrubbed and his hair neatly parted, leading by the hand a great, tall, dark-eyed matron wearing Greek robes and a crown of myrtle, who fixed me with a lewd, forgiving smile.
I have had a shock. My counsel has been to see me today, bringing an extraordinary piece of news. Usually I enjoy our little conferences, in a lugubrious sort of way. We sit at a square table in a small airless room with no windows. The walls are painted filing-cabinet grey. Light from a strip of neon tubing above our heads sifts down upon us like a fine-grained mist. The bulb makes a tiny, continuous buzzing. Maolseachlainn at first is full of energy, rooting in his bag, shuffling his papers, muttering. He is like a big, worried bear. He works at finding things to talk to me about, new aspects of the case, obscure points of law he might bring up, the chances of our getting a sympathetic judge, that sort of thing. He speaks too fast, stumbling over his words as if they were so many stones. Gradually the atmosphere of the place gets in at him, like damp, and he falls silent. He takes off his specs and sits and blinks at me. He has a way of squeezing the bridge of his nose between two fingers and a thumb which is peculiarly endearing. I feel sorry for him. I think he truly does like me. This puzzles him, and, I suspect, disturbs him too. He believes he is letting me down when he runs out of steam like this, but really, there is nothing left to say. We both know I will get life. He cannot understand my equanimity in the face of my fate. I tell him I have taken up Buddhism. He smiles carefully, unsure that it is a joke. I divert him with tales of prison life, fleshing them out with impersonations – I do our governor here very convincingly. When Maolseachlainn laughs there is no sound, only a slow heaving of the shoulders and a stretched, shiny grin.
By the way, what an odd formulation that is: to get life. Words so rarely mean what they mean.
Today I saw straight away he was in a state about something. He kept clawing at the collar of his shirt and clearing his throat, and taking off his half-glasses and putting them back on again. Also there was a smeary look in his eye. He hummed and hawed, and mumbled about the concept of justice, and the discretion of the courts, and other such folderol, I hardly listened to him. He was so mournful and ill at ease, shifting his big backside on the prison chair and looking everywhere except at me, that I could hardly keep from laughing. I pricked up my ears, though, when he started to mutter something about the possibility of my making a guilty plea – and this after all the time and effort he expended at the beginning in convincing me I should plead not guilty. Now when I caught him up on it, rather sharply, I confess, he veered off at once, with an alarmed look. I wonder what he's up to? I should have kept at it, and got it out of him. As a diversionary measure he dived into his briefcase and brought out a copy of my mother's will. I had not yet heard the contents, and was, I need hardly say, keenly interested. Maolseachlainn, I noticed, found this subject not much easier than the previous one. He coughed a lot, and frowned, and read out stuff about gifts and covenants and minor bequests, and was a long time getting to the point. I still cannot credit it. The old bitch has left Coolgrange to that stable-girl, what's-her-name, Joanne. There is some money for Daphne, and for Van's schooling, but for me, nothing. I suppose I should not be surprised, but I am. I was not a good son, but I was the only one she had. Maolseachlainn was watching me with compassion. I'm sorry, he said. I smiled and shrugged, though it was not easy. I wished he would go away now. Oh, I said, it's understandable, after all, that she would make a new will. He said nothing. There was a peculiar silence. Then, almost tenderly, he handed me the document, and I looked at the date. The thing was seven, nearly eight years old. She had cut me out long ago, before ever I came back to disgrace her and the family name. I recalled, with shocking clarity, the way she looked at me that day in the kitchen at Coolgrange, and heard again that cackle of raucous laughter. Well, I'm glad she enjoyed her joke. It's a good one. I find a surprising lack of bitterness in my heart. I am smiling, though probably it seems more as if I am wincing. This is her contribution to the long course of lessons I must learn.
Maolseachlainn stood up, assuming his heartiest manner, as always, in an attempt to disguise his relief at the prospect of getting away. I watched him struggle into his navy-blue overcoat and knot his red woollen muffler around his neck. Sometimes, when he first arrives, his clothes give off little wafts and slivers of the air of outdoors, I snuff them up with surreptitious pleasure, as if they were the most precious of perfumes. What's it like, outside? I said now. He paused, and blinked at me in some alarm. I think he thought I was asking him for an overall picture, as if I might have forgotten what the world looked like. The day, I said, the weather. His brow cleared. He shrugged. Oh, he said, grey, just grey, you know. And I saw it at once, with a pang, the late November afternoon, the dull shine on the wet roads, and the children straggling home from school, and rooks tossing and wheeling high up against ragged clouds, and the tarnished glow in the sky off behind bare, blackened branches. These were the times I used to love, the weather's unconsidered moments, when the vast business of the world just goes on quietly by itself, as if there were no one to notice, or care. I see myself as a boy out there, dawdling along that wet road, kicking a stone ahead of me and dreaming the enormous dream of the future. There was a path, I remember, that cut off through the oak wood a mile or so from home, which I knew must lead to Coolgrange eventually. How green the shadows, and deep the track, how restless the silence seemed, that way. Every time I passed by there, coming up from the cross, I said to myself, Next time, next time. But always when the next time came I was in a rush, or the light was fading, or I was just not in the mood to break new ground, and so I kept to the ordinary route, along the road. In the end I never took that secret path, and now, of course, it is too late.