'If I can say this,' he said now, politely, trying to recover some credibility, 'you don't seem too relaxed.'
'No?' She wore a long, black dress, very plain. He could sense no perfume.
'I mean I can't imagine you'd be nervous about performing.'
She wasn't looking at him. She was still looking at the heads. Huge sets of antlers protruding from bleached fragments of skull, all over three walls, from just above head-height to within a couple of feet of the lavishly moulded ceiling.
'And I guess you aren't the nervous kind, anyway,' he said. 'So ...'
Wherever you sat, the remains of three or four dozen butchered stags were always in view. On the central wooden dais, where she'd sit to sing, she'd probably feel herself constricted by some grisly necklace of bone.
Gross.
'I was just wondering,' she said at last, 'when it must have been clear he wasn't going to go away, 'why people should be proud of being a Celt. Killing things for fun and showing off about it.'
A good work popped up in the American's head, like somebody had flashed him a prompt-card.
'Pantheistic,' he said. 'The old Celts were highly pantheistic. So I'm told.'
'That means they had respect for animals,' she said scornfully. She had a soft Scottish voice but not too much of an accent. 'A bit like your Red Indians.'
'Native Americans.' He smiled. 'To be politically and ethnically correct.' The smile was supposed to say, I may be devilishly attractive, with my untamed curly black hair, this cool white tuxedo, thistle in the buttonhole. But you can trust me. I'm a sincere guy. 'Can I get you another drink?'
'No,' she said. 'No, thank you.'
'I ... ah ...' He hesitated. 'I have a couple of your albums.'
'Oh?' She didn't seem too interested. 'Which ones?'
'Well, uh, my favourite, I guess, is still the one you did with The Philosopher's Stone. That'd be quite some years ago.'
'Oh.' She glanced away, as if looking for someplace else to put herself.
'Uh, I also have your first solo album,' he said quickly. 'How I recognized you. From the sleeve. You haven't changed.'
'Oh, I've changed, believe me. Look, I ...'
'You never did cut your hair, though,' he said, urbanely displaying his knowledge of the album's prime cut.
'What?'
'"Never let them cut your hair,'" he quoted, '"or tell you where ..." Listen, I ... I just wanted to say it's real good to meet you ... Moira. No one said you'd be here. Makes me glad I came after all.'
She said, 'I'm a last-minute replacement. For Rory McBain. He's sick. We have the same agent.'
A flunkey needed to come past with a tray of drinks, and he took the opportunity to manoeuvre her into a corner, unfortunately under two pairs of huge yellowing antlers. He said, 'Listen, that album - with the Stone - it had some magic.'
'He has bronchitis,' Moira said.
'Huh?'
'Rory McBain.'
He smiled. 'See, when I hear you sing, it always sounds to me like...'
'That album,' she said with an air of finality, 'was a mistake. I was too young, too stupid, and I never should have left Matt Castle's band.'
'Huh?'
She shook her head, wide-eyed, like she was waking up.
'Matt Castle?' He had his elbow resting on a wooden ledge below another damned antlered skull.
'He was ... He was just the guy who taught me about traditional music when I was a wee girl. Look, I don't know why I said that, I ...'
Her poise wavered. She looked suddenly confused and vulnerable. Something inside of him melted with pure longing while something else - something less admirable but more instinctive - tensed like a big cat ready to spring. The album cover hadn't lied. Even after all these years, she was sensational.
'Traditional music,' he said, looking into her brown eyes. 'That's interesting, because that's all you do these days, right? You used to write all your own songs, and now you're just performing these traditional folksongs, like you're feeling there's something that old stuff can teach you. Is that this, uh, Matt Castle? His influence?'
'No ... No, Matt was a long time ago, when I was in Manchester. He ... Look, if you don't mind ...'
He was losing her. He couldn't bear it. He tried to hold her eyes, babbling. 'Manchester? That's the North of England? See, why I find that interesting, this guy was telling us at the conference this afternoon, how the English are the least significant people - culturally that is - in these islands. Unlike the Scottish, the Welsh, the Irish, the English are mongrels with no basic ethnic tradition...'
She smiled faintly. 'Look, I'm sorry, I ---'
'See this guy, this Irish professor - McGann, McGuane? - he said there was nothing the English could give us. Best they could do is return what they took, but it's soiled goods. At which point this other guy, this writer .... No, first off it was this Cornish bard, but he didn't make much sense ... then, this writer - Stanton, Stanhope? - he's on his feet, and is he mad ...This guy's face is white. I thought he was gonna charge across the room and bust the first guy, the professor, right in the mouth. He's going, Listen, where I come from we got a more pure, undiluted strain of, uh, heritage, tradition ...than you'll find anywhere in Western Europe. And the guy, this Stanfield, he's from the North ...'
Moira Cairns said, 'I'm sorry, I really do have to make a phone call.'
And she turned and glided out of the doorway, like the girl in the Irish folksong who went away from this guy and mov'd through the fair.
' ...the North of England,' the American said to the stag's head.
This wasn't a new experience for him, but it was certainly rare. You blew it, he told himself, surprised.
She could feel him watching her through the doorway, all the way down the passage.
Was he the one?
She took a breath of cool air. The man was a fanatic. Probably one of those rich New Yorkers bankrolling the IRA. Surely there was some other unattached female he could find to sleep with tonight. Why were fanatics always promiscuous?
And was he the one whose examination she could feel all over her skin, like she was being touched up by hands in clinical rubber gloves?
'Phone?' she said to a butler-type person in the marble-tiled hallway.
'Next to the drawing room, madam, I'll take you.'
'Don't bother yourself, I'll find it.'
Dong.
She'd found herself, for no obvious reason, while this smoothie American was trying to come on to her, hearing the name Matt Castle, then saying it out aloud apropos of nothing ... and then ...