“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.”
