Mrs. Duggan is in her window, as always, having a smoke and trawling the street for anything of value. Lena catches her eye and nods, and Mrs. Duggan arches an eyebrow at her. When Lena knocks at the door, there’s no movement inside, but after a moment a heavy, slow voice calls, “Well, in you come, so.”
The house smells like Noreen’s cleaning, with a thick undercurrent of something sweaty and sweet. The front room is cluttered with old brown furniture, ruffly porcelain objects, and framed photos of popes from a while back. Mrs. Duggan is settled deep into her armchair, overflowing onto the arms. She’s wearing a purple dress and battered fleece slippers; her hair, dyed a shiny black, is pulled back in a tight bun. She has the air of something geological, like the house was built around her because no one was willing to move her.
“Well, would you look at that, now,” she says, inspecting Lena with amused, hooded eyes. “Lena Dunne paying me a visit. ’Tis strange times around here, all right.”
Mrs. Duggan is one of the reasons Lena never had children. She’s a dense, ripe fermentation of all the things about Ardnakelty that Lena wanted to leave behind. In the end Lena made her own terms with the place, but she was never willing to give a child into its hands.
“I’m after making blackberry jam,” Lena says. “I brought you a jar.”
“I’d eat that,” Mrs. Duggan says. She leans forward, grunting with effort, to take the jam from Lena and examine it. “That’d go nice with a bitta soda bread. I’ll have Noreen make some tonight.” She finds space for the jar on the small table at her elbow, amid tea mugs and ashtrays and playing cards and biscuits and tissues, and gives Lena a glance. “Are you pitying your sister, now, running around making soda bread for an old woman in this heat?”
“Noreen has what she wanted,” Lena says. “I’ve no reason to pity her.”
“Most of us get what we wanted,” Mrs. Duggan agrees. “For better or worse. Sit you down.” She nods to the chair on the other side of the window. “Like you got yourself that American fella up at O’Shea’s place. How’s he turning out?”
“He suits me,” Lena says. “And it looks like I suit him.”
“I knew you’d have him,” Mrs. Duggan says. “The first time I saw him walk past that window, I made a wee bet with myself: Lena Dunne’ll take him. I had a glass of sherry on the strength of it, when I heard I was right. Are you going to keep him?”
“I don’t plan ahead,” Lena says.
Mrs. Duggan gives her a cynical look. “You’re too old to be coming out with that foolishness, trying to sound like some featherheaded young one. O’ course you plan ahead. You’re right not to marry him yet. Let him keep on feeling like you’re a fling a while longer. They like that, at his age. It makes them think the wildness isn’t gone outa them.” She takes a last deep drag off her cigarette and mashes it out. “Out with it, now. What d’you want?”
Lena says, “You’ll have heard about Johnny Reddy and his Englishman looking for gold.”
“Sure, the dogs in the street have heard about that.”
“Was there ever any word of gold here, before this?”
Mrs. Duggan leans back in her chair and laughs, a deep, throbbing wheeze that sets all her folds moving in slow tectonic rolls.
“I was wondering when someone would think to ask me that,” she says. “I’d a wee bet on with myself, who it’d be. I was wrong. No glass of sherry for me tonight.”
Lena doesn’t ask who she was betting on. She’s giving Mrs. Duggan no more satisfaction than she has to. She waits.
“Didja ask Noreen?”
“If Noreen had ever heard anything, I’d know already.”
Mrs. Duggan nods, her nostrils flaring a little with contempt. “That one can’t hold her piss. Why are you bothering asking me, if her ladyship’s got nothing to give you?”
“Things get lost,” Lena says. “There mighta been someone thirty or forty or fifty years ago that knew about the gold, that’s dead now. And Noreen doesn’t get as deep as you did. If anyone knows, it’d be you.”
“It would, all right. You won’t flatter me by telling me what I already know.”
“I wasn’t aiming to flatter you,” Lena says. “I’m telling you why I’m here.”
Mrs. Duggan nods. She takes another cigarette from her packet, fumbling a bit with swollen fingers, and lights it.
“My Dessie’s down at the river now,” she says, “with a loada the other lads. Helping the English fella take out the gold they put in. Is your fella with them?”
“I’d say he is, yeah.”
“Like a buncha wee boys,” Mrs. Duggan says, “grubbing about in the muck, delighted with themselves.” She sits and smokes, her eyes moving over Lena’s face. “Here’s what I’d loveta know,” she says. “Why’d you go kissing Johnny Reddy when you were engaged to Sean Dunne?”
Lena has refused to blink for Mrs. Duggan for a long time. She says, “Johnny was a fine thing, back then. All of us fancied him.”
Mrs. Duggan snorts. “What would you want with a little scutter like that, when you’d a fine fella of your own? Sean was twice the man Johnny is.”
“He was, all right,” Lena says. “But there’s plenty of girls that fancy a last fling before they settle down. Plenty of lads, as well.”
“That’s God’s own truth,” Mrs. Duggan acknowledges, with a private smile. “Plenty. But you were never a slut. You always thought you were too great to follow the rules, but that’s not the way it took you. If you’da wanted a last fling, you’da gone off backpacking round Australia.”
She’s right, and Lena doesn’t like that. “That woulda been better crack, all right,” she says. “But Johnny was quicker and cheaper.”
Mrs. Duggan merely shakes her head again and waits, watching Lena and smoking. She looks amused.
Lena has a flash of the kind of naked powerlessness she hasn’t felt in decades. This woman and this place are both so obdurately, monumentally what they are, down to bedrock, that it feels insane to go trying to outwit them. Their vastness allows her no space to maneuver, or even to breathe. For one sharp instant she remembers this feeling, teetering on mindless panic, and Johnny’s hand sliding up her back.
“If Sean had found out,” she says, “he mighta broke it off. And then I’da gone off to college.”
Mrs. Duggan leans back in her armchair and laughs again. The sound goes on for a long time. “Would you look at that, now,” she says, when she’s taken her full enjoyment from it. “That’s what it was all along: the bold Helena wanted more than the likes of poor aul’ Seaneen Dunne and poor wee Ardnakelty could offer her. And you were hoping I’d do your dirty work for you.”
“Not hoping,” Lena says. “I wanted Sean, or else I’da done my own dirty work. I just felt like rolling the dice, just the once.”
“You thought you were awful smart,” Mrs. Duggan says. “But I won’t be used.”
“I wasn’t thinking of you,” Lena says. “I didn’t even know you’d find out. I was just thinking of anyone that happened to pass by.”
“You knew,” Mrs. Duggan says. “I hear things. But I’ll have my will with them, not yours or anyone’s.”
Lena is done; she’s paid her fee. She says, “You’ll have heard whether there’s gold out there or not, so.”
Mrs. Duggan nods, accepting the transaction. She blows out smoke and watches it curl against the windowpanes.
“In all my days,” she says, “I never once heard a whisper about any gold. People are saying aul’ Mick Feeney knew and kept it to himself, but there’s been times when Mick Feeney woulda given me anything he had in exchange for what he wanted offa me, and he never said a word about that. I’ve known every Feeney around for eighty year now, and if any one of them had a notion of any gold, I’ll ate this ashtray.” She puts out her cigarette, pressing down hard, and watches Lena. “I can’t tell you if there’s gold out there, but I can tell you no one ever thought there was, not till Johnny and his Englishman came in here talking big. What d’you think of that?”