As we ate, Seán Proby launched into a boilerplate account of the invention of Steeplechase: how in 1752 Edmund Blake and Cornelius O'Callaghan had raced from Buttevant Church to St. Mary's Church, over jumps, steeple to steeple; how National Hunt, as it was now called, was the true Irish horse racing, involving as it did not just skill and discipline and courage but passion and spirit and a sense of adventure. The flat wasn't racing at all, he sniffed.
Except as a means for bookies to separate punters from their cash, Jackie pointed out. Proby seemed keen to continue with a survey of National Hunt's premier meeting, the Cheltenham Festival, but Jackie reminded him that I was not in fact writing a book and if I had been I would at least have known about bloody Blake and O'Callaghan and bloody Cheltenham and could he stop boring the arse off everyone and eat his dinner like a good little boy.
She then began to talk about her riding school, her tone derogatory of her clients and dismissive of the school's worth.
"No reflection on Miranda, her teaching is second to none; if you want to know your way around a horse that lady is the one to teach you. But honest to God, these spoilt little South Dublin brats, as they zip into the Dundrum Shopping Centre in their '06 reg Mini Coopers Daddy bought them for their seventeenth birthdays, all they care about is shopping and fashion and grooming; riding's an unwelcome distraction from the beauty salon and the shoe shop; the whole thing's wasted on them."
Miranda beamed at her satirically.
"There speaks Jackie Tyrrell, who went to finishing school in Geneva. Dressmaking and deportment and Italian and place setting and flower arrangement."
"Quite right too. Made a real woman of her," Seán Proby said.
"Miranda doesn't agree. About the girls," Jackie said, seemingly reveling in any exchange that approached the condition of a row.
Miranda shrugged wearily: this was evidently something they rehearsed on a regular basis.
"Girls were always interested in hair and makeup and clothes. They just didn't have the money to do anything about it back in our day. Now they do."
"Too much money," Jackie said severely. "Too much money in the wrong hands. What do you think, Ed?"
"I'd always be in favor of wealth redistribution," I said. "The problem is, how to dole it out, and who decides?"
"I decide," Jackie said, and then, straight-faced: "Ed, do you think teenage girls should be taught to ride?"
Miranda and Proby burst out laughing at this, and Jackie Tyrrell shook her head sadly, like a prophet without honor at her own table. Champagne arrived, and we drank a toast to the riding school (in which Seán Proby had some kind of interest) against her protests, and to Christmas. Then Jackie, unprovoked and with no challenger, launched into a long and involved defense of the Irish Revenue Inspectors' tax exemption for the bloodstock industry, inviting my support on the grounds that, as a creative writer, I benefited from a similar dispensation. I tried to remind her that I wasn't, in fact, a writer, but she and Proby were drinking Calvados by now, impervious to any music but their own. Occasionally she would scribble something on a napkin, briefing herself for her rhetorical assault against illusory foes. It was after ten; it felt much later. I offered Miranda a lift home. She was on her feet before I'd finished speaking.
I offered Jackie Tyrrell some money for the dinner, but she forced it back into my hand and pulled me down until we were eye to eye. Her face was fixed in a comedy leer; her breath was a yeasty cloud of alcohol; I thought she was going to kiss me, and didn't see what I could do if she did, but when I looked her in the eye, she fixed me with an unexpectedly clear gaze.
"Call me. We need to talk," she said quietly, urgently, and then pushed me from her and yelled with laughter as if she'd propositioned me. I waved good-bye to Proby from a distance, not wanting to risk giving him my hand again for fear I'd never get it back.
"See you racing!" he bellowed twice as we were leaving.
When we got out into the night, the rain was falling softly. I opened my coat and turned to Miranda Hart to see if she needed it. She snaked her arms inside it and around my neck and pulled my mouth down onto hers and kissed me; she smelled of oranges and salt; when I opened my eyes, all I could see was the shimmer of the streetlights in the rain. I thought for a second they were stars.
"What happened to your gum?" I said.
Her tongue snaked quickly out of her mouth with a little wad of chewing gum on its tip, then vanished again, to be replaced by a smile.
"Come home with me," she said. "And I'll show you how I did it."
She reached up to my mouth and wiped it with her hand. It came away red with her lipstick, and she waved it in front of me and grinned.
As we walked down Merrion Street to my car, amid weaving groups of happy and belligerent and bedraggled drunks, shiny and sodden in the damp night, I straightened the bills Jackie Tyrrell had crushed into my hand and put them in my wallet. Among them, I found her business card. On one side was printed: The Jackie Tyrrell Riding Academy for Girls, Tibradden Road, along with her phone numbers. On the back, in red ink, she had printed:
PATRICK AND LEO RODE TOGETHER
SIX
I saw Miranda Hart to her door and touched her arm and made to leave. She grabbed my hand and pulled me close and kissed me again.
"I can't stay," I said.
"I don't want you to stay all night," she said. "Just long enough."
She held on to me with one hand while she worked the key in the lock. It occurred to me that if I was going to stop sleeping with clients, or with women implicated on some level in the cases I worked, now would be the time to start. But I didn't. What's more, I didn't want to. Miranda Hart dragged me into the darkened living room and pushed me onto the couch and fell on top of me; she was wild and ardent at first; then, after a while, there were tears in her eyes, and she said,
"Maybe this is not such a good idea," and I said,
"Now she tells me," struggling to get the words out, and then,
"Do you want to stop?" and she said,
"Fuck no, do you?" and I said,
"No I don't," and she said,
"Come on then. Come on, come on."
It wasn't how I thought it would be, at once gentler and more passionate; afterward, she cried a little. When she asked me what I wanted to drink, I said, "Gin," and she said, "Good idea." I'd be late for Dave Donnelly, but I couldn't leave, not just yet. What's more, I didn't want to. We sat in the living room, both on the sofa, half dressed, the light from the kitchen bleeding into the dark, reflecting off the glass doors at the other end that gave onto a small garden. I could see her chewing, and shook my head in wonder. Where did she keep it? It was a gift that passed all understanding.
"Sorry about that," she said.
"Sorry about what?" I said.
"You know. The make-up-your-fucking-mind, the tears, the all-round crapness. Being messy. Behaving like a girl. I thought I could just…"
I took her hand and held it.
"We all think we can just…and sometimes we can, and sometimes it doesn't work out that way."
"Just the day, you know? You coming around asking about Patrick…the very day he disappeared. How weird is that?"
"Maybe Father Tyrrell planned it that way."
Something close to a shudder rippled through her body.