Selected Stories полностью

Graillis finished what was left of his whiskey. After the accident, when the notice had appeared in the obituary columns of the Irish Times, no lines of condolence had come from the woman whose half-ruined house he had visited. He had thought there might be a note and then had thought it was not appropriate that there should be. She would have thought so too.

He stubbed out his second cigarette. He never smoked at home, continuing not to after he’d found himself alone there, and smoking was forbidden in the branch library, a restriction he insisted upon himself. But in the drawing-room he had sat in so often in the autumn of 1979 and during the winter and spring that followed it, a friendship had developed over cigarettes, touches of lipstick on the cork tips that had accumulated in the ashtray with the goldfinch on it. That settled in his thoughts, still as a photograph, arrested with a clarity that today felt cruel.

He carried his glass back to the bar. He talked for a moment about the weather to the sleek-haired youth before he left. ‘Take care, Mr Graillis,’ the boy called after him, and he said he would.

Driving on, he tried to think of nothing, not of the girl who had become his wife when he was still a junior in the Munster and Leinster Bank, not of the woman he’d got to know when she borrowed novels from his branch library. The landscape he passed through was much the same as the landscape had been before he’d called in at the public house. It didn’t change when a sign in Irish and English indicated the town ahead, only doing so when the town’s outskirts began: the first few bungalows, summer blossom in their trim gardens. Cars with prices on their windscreens crowded Riordan’s forecourt, Your Nissan Dealer a reminder of the franchise. He passed the electricity works and then the rusty green Raleigh sign, the two figures and their bicycles only there in places.

Evening traffic slowed his progress on the town’s main street. He wound down the window beside him and rested his elbow on it. He had intended to go straight to where he lived but changed his mind and instead turned into Cartmill Street, where the branch library was. No traffic disturbed the quiet here. Sometimes boys rattled up and down on their skate-boards, but there were no boys now, and hardly a pedestrian. He parked beneath the lime trees where the walk by the river began and crossed the street to a small building crouched low among the abandoned warehouses that ran the length of Cartmill Street and gave it character, as the lime trees and the river did.

Today he had closed the library at one o’clock, the only weekday it was shut in the afternoon, when some of the main-street shops were also. He turned a key in the deadlock, another in the Yale, then pushed the pale-blue door open. It was a Mr Haverty – failed grocer of Lower North Street, lifelong bachelor, aficionado of Zane Grey among Wild West storytellers – who had nagged the county library service into letting the town have a branch library, who had become, in fact, its first librarian. Since those early days, when he was a borrower himself, Graillis had felt at home in these modest premises, the walls entirely shelves, a narrow counter near the door. He had been the branch library’s most frequent visitor then, and when galloping arthritis made Mr Haverty’s duties increasingly a burden it was Mr Haverty who nominated him as his successor, enticing him away from the superior prospects of the bank. And Graillis said yes before he had a chance to dwell on all the disadvantages. ‘But why on earth?’ the girl he’d married cried out in bewilderment and disappointment. His safe employment had been taken for granted; in time promotion would mean occupancy of a squat grey landmark in the town, the house above the bank, with railings and a grained hall door. She had married into that; books had never been an interest they shared, had never been, for her, a need.

The woman for whom they were had often been noticed by Graillis about the town, coming out of a shop, getting into her car, not the kind of woman he would ever have known. Tall, and beautiful in her way, there was a difference about her, suggested by her composure and her clothes, and she seemed more different still when vaguely she wondered where Mr Haverty was, not knowing he had retired. She smiled when they talked then, and Graillis hadn’t seen her smile before. The next time they talked for longer, and after that more easily. When she asked him which novelists he recommended he introduced her to Proust and Malcolm Lowry, to Forster and Madox Ford, and Mrs Gaskell and Wilkie Collins. He got in another copy of Dubliners for her because the existing copy had been left out in the rain and rendered unintelligible. He drew her attention to Brighton Rock and Tender is the Night. She found Elizabeth Bowen for herself.