The Inside Outside Complex

So then, a dusky Sunday afternoon in Bray at a quarter to five o'clock, lighting-up time at 5:15, November first, All Souls' Eve, dedicated to the suffering souls in purgatory, Bertie Bolger, bachelor, aged 41 or so, tubby, ruddy, graying, well known as a dealer in antiques, less well known as a conflator there of, walking briskly along the sea front, head up to the damp breezes, singing in a soldierly basso, "My breast expanding to the ball," turns smartly into the lounge of the Imperial Hotel for a hot toddy.

The room, lofty, widespread, Victorian, gilded, overfurnished, as empty as the ocean, and not warm. The single fire small and smoldering. Bertie presses the bell for service, divests himself of his bowler, his vicuña overcoat, his lengthy scarf striped in black, red, green and white, the colors of Trinity College, Dublin (which he has never attended), sits in a chintzy armchair before the fire, pokes it into a blaze, leans back and is at once invaded by a clear-cut knowledge of what month it is and an uneasy feeling about its date. He might earlier have adverted to both if he had not, during his perambulation, been preoccupied with the problem of how to transform a 20th Century buhl cabinet, now in his possession, into an 18th Century ditto that might plausibly be attributed to the original M. Boulle. This preoccupation had permitted him to glance at but not to observe either the red gasometer by the harbor inflated to its winter zenith or the hay barn beside the dairy beyond the gasometer packed with cubes of hay, or the fuel yard, facing the hay barn beside the dairy beyond the gasometer, heavily stocked with mountainettes of coal, or the many vacancy signs in the lodginghouses along the sea front, or the hoardings on the pagoda below the promenade where his mother, God rest her, had once told him he had been wheeled as a coifed baby in a white pram to hear Mike Nono singing "I do liuke to be besiude the seasiude, I do liuke to be besiude the sea," or, most affectingly of all, if he only heeded them, the exquisite, dying leaves of the hydrangeas in the public gardens, pale green, pale yellow, frost white, spiking the air above once-purple petals that now clink softly in the breeze like tiny sea shells.

He suddenly jerks his head upright, sniffing desolation, looks slowly about the lounge, locates in a corner of it some hydrangeas left standing too long in a brass pot of unchanged water, catapults himself from the chair with a "Jaysus! Five years to the bloody day!," dons his coat, his comforter and his bowler hat and exits rapidly to make inland toward the R.C. church. For days after she died, the house had retained that rank funereal smell. Tomorrow morning a Mass must be said for the repose of his mother's soul, still, maybe--who knows? Only God knows!--suffering in the flames of purgatory.

It is the perfect and pitiless testing date, day and hour for any seaside town in these northern islands. A week or two earlier and there might still have been a few lingering visitors, a ghost of summer's lukewarmth, a calmer sea, its waves unheard and, the hands of the summer time clocks not yet put backward, another hour of daylight. This expiring Sunday, the light is dim, the silence heavy, the town turned in on itself. As he walks through the side avenues between the sea and the main street, past rows of squat bungalows, every garden drooping, past grenadiers of red brick, lace curtained, past ancient cement-faced cottages with sagging roofs, he is informed by every fanlight, oblong or half-moon, blank as night or distantly lit from the recesses behind each front door, that there is some kind of life asleep or snoozing behind number 51, saint Anthony's, Lil-Joe's, Fatima, 59 (odd numbers on this side), The Billows, Swan Lake, 67, Slievemish, Sea View, names in white paint, numbers in adhesive celluloid. Every one of them gives a chuck to the noose of loneliness about his neck. I live in Dublin. I am a guest in a guesthouse. I am Mr. B. I lunch on weekdays at the United Services Club. I dine at the Yacht Club. Good for biz. Bad for Sundays, restaurants shut, homeless. Pray for the soul of Mrs. Mary Bolger, of Tureenlahan, County Tipperary, departed this life five years ago. Into thy hands, O Lord.

On these side avenues, only an odd front window is lit. Their lights flow searingly across little patches of grass called front gardens, privet hedged, Lonicera hedged, mass concrete hedged. Private, Keep off. As he passed one such light, in what a real-estate agent would have called a picture window, he was so shaken by what he saw inside that after he had passed he halted, looked cautiously about him, turned and walked slowly back to peep in again. What had gripped his attention through the unsuspecting window had been a standing lamp in brass with a large pink shade, and beneath its red glow, seated in an armchair with her knees crossed, a bare-armed woman reading a folded magazine, one hand blindly lifting a teacup from a Moorish side table, holding the cup immobile while she concentrated on something that had detained her interest. By the time he had returned, she was sipping from the cup. He watched her lay it down, throw the magazine aside and loop forward on two broad knees to poke the fire. Her arms looked strong. She was full-breasted. She had dark hair. In that instant, B. B. became a voyeur.

The long avenue suddenly sprang its public lights. Startled, he looked up and down the empty perspective. It was too cold for evening strollers. He was aware that he was trembling with fear. He did not know what else he was feeling except that there was nothing sexy to it. To calm himself, he drew back behind the pillar of her garden gate whose name plate caught his eye Lorelei. He again peeped around the side of the pillar. She was dusting her lap with her two palms. She was very dark, a western type, a Spanish-Galway type, a bit heavy. He could not discern the details of the room beyond the circle of light from the pink lamp, and was he glad of this! It made everything more mysterious, removed, suggestive, as if he were watching a scene on a stage. His loneliness left him, his desolation, his longing. He wanted only to be inside there, safe, secure and satisfied.

"Ah, good evening, Bertie!" she cried to the handsome man who entered her room with the calm smile of complete sang-froid. "I am so glad, Bertie, you dropped in on me. Do tell me your news, darling. How is the antique business? Come and warm your poor, dear hands. It is going to be a shivering night. Won't you take off your coat? Tea? No? What about a drink? I know exactly what you want, my pet. I will fix it for you. I have been waiting and waiting for you to come all the livelong day, melting with longing and love."

As he gently closed the door of the cozy little room, she proffered her hand in a queenly manner, whereupon our hero, as was fitting, leaned over it--because you never really do kiss a lady's hand, you merely breathe over it--and watched her eyes asking him to sit opposite her.

The woman rose, took her tea tray and the room was suddenly empty. Her toe hooked the door all but a few inches short of shut. He was just as pleased whether she was in the room or out of it. All he wanted was to be inside her room. As he stared, her naked arm came slowly back into the room between the door and the jamb, groping for the light switch. A plain gold bangle hung from the wrist. The jamb dragged back the shoulder of her blouse so that he saw the dark hair of her armpit. The window went black.

He let out a long, whistling breath like a safety valve and resumed his long perambulation until he saw a similar light streaming from the window of an identical bungalow well ahead of him on the opposite side of the roadway. He padded rapidly toward it. As he reached its identical square cement gate pillars, he halted, looked backward and forward and then guardedly advanced a tortoise nose beyond the edge of the pillar to peep into the room. A pale, dawnlike radiance, softly tasseled, hinted at comfortable shapes, a sofa, small occasional chairs, a pouf, a bookcase, heavy gleams of what could be silver or could be EPNS. Here, too, a few tongues of fire. In the center of the room, a tall, thin, elderly man in a yellow cardigan, but not wearing a jacket or tie, stood so close beside a young girl with a blonde waterfall of hair as to form with her a single unanalyzable shape. He seemed to be speaking. He stroked her smooth poll. They were like a still image out of a silent film. They were presumably doing something simple, natural and intimate. But what? They drew apart abruptly and the girl, while stooping to pick up some shining object from a low table, looked in the same movement straight out through the window. B. B. was so taken by surprise that he could not stir, even when she came close to the window, looked up at the sky, right and left, as if to see if it were raining, turned back, laughed inaudibly, waved the small silver scissors in her hand.

In that instant, at that gesture, sometime after 5:15 on the afternoon of November first, the town darkening, the sky lowering, his life passing, a vast illumination broke like a sunrise upon his soul. At the shut time of the year, all small towns become smaller and smaller, dwindle from out of doors to in of doors; from long beaches, black roads, green fields, wide sun, to kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms, locked doors, drawn blinds, whispers, prayers, muffling blankets, nose-hollowed pillows; from making to mending; to littler and littler things, like this blonde Rapunzel with a scissors and a needle; all ending in daydreaming, and night dreaming, and dreamless sleeping. How pleasant life could be in that declension to a white arm creeping between a door and a jamb, bare but for a circle of gold about a wrist and a worn wedding ring on one heavy finger. But I am outside. When the town is asleep in one another's arms, I will sleep under the walls. No wife. No child. Mr. B.

The head lamps of a motorcar sent (continued on page 142) Inside Outside Complex (continued from page 136) him scurrying down an unlighted lane that may once have led to the mews of tall houses long since leveled to make room for these hundreds of little bungalows. In this abandoned lane, the only window light was one tiny, lofty aperture in the inverted V of a gable rising like a castle out of tall trees. Below it, at eye level, the lane was becoming pitchdark. Above it, a sift of tattered light between mourning clouds. Hissing darkness. A sheaving wind. The elms were spiky, as if the earth's hair were standing on end. He stiffened. A bird's croak? A sleepless nest? A far-off bark? He stared up at the tiny box of light whose inaccessibility was so much part of its incitement that when it went black like a fallen candle, he uttered a "Ha!" of delight. He would never know who had put a finger on the switch of that floating room. A maidservant about to emerge into the town? To go where? To meet whom? A boy's den? An old woman lumbering down the long stairs?

That Monday morning, B. B. was laughing happily at himself. Bertie Bolger, the well-known dealer! The Peeping Tom from Tipperary! That was a queer bloody fit I took! And Jaysus, I forgot all about the mother again: Well, she will have to wait until next year now, though surely to God they'll let her out before then? Anyway, what harm did she ever do bar that snibby way she treated every girl I ever met? If it weren't for her, I might have been married 20 years ago to that Raven girl I met in 1950 in Arklow. And a hot piece she was, too. . . .

The next Sunday evening, he was padding softly around the back roads of Bray. He could not locate the old-man-blonde-girl bungalow. He winked up at the little cube of light. But Lorelei was dark. The next two Sundays it was raining too heavily for prowling. On the fourth Sunday, the window of Lorelei was brilliantly lighted and there she was, plying a large dressmaker's scissors on some colored stuff laid across a gatelegged table under the bare electric bulb whose brightness diminished the ideality of the room, increased the attractions of the dressmaker. Broad cheekbones, like a red Indian; raven hair; the jerky head of a blackbird alert at a drinking pool. He longed to touch one of those fingers, broad at the tip like a little spade. Twice the lights of oncoming cars made him walk swiftly away, bowler hat down on nose, collar up. A third time he fled from light pouring out of the door of the adjacent bungalow and a woman hurrying down its path with her overcoat over her head and shoulders. Loping away fast, he turned in fright to the running feet behind him and saw her coat ends vanish under the suddenly lighted door lamp of Lorelei. Damn! A visitor. Spoiling it all. Yet he came back to his watching post, as mesmerized as a man in a picture gallery who returns again and again to Portrait of Unknown Woman from scores of portraits of identified women in other rooms, unable to tell why this one face made him so happy. The intruder, he found, made no difference to his pleasure.

"Jenny! Isn't that a ring at the door? Who the divil can that be?"

"I bet that will be Mrs. Ennis from next door, she promised to give me a hand with these curtains, you don't mind, darling, do you?"

"Mind! I'm glad you have friends, Molly."

"Ho-ho! I've lots of friends."

"Boyfriends, Katy?"

"Go 'long with you, you ruffian, don't you ever think of anything but the one thing?"

"Can you blame me, with a lovely creature like you to be there teasin' me all day long, don't stir, I'll let her in."

In? To what? There might be a husband and a pack of kids, and at once he had to sell his Portrait of Unknown Woman for the known model, not being the sort of artist who sees a model's face below his window, runs out, drags her in and spends weeks, maybe months, looking for her reality on his canvas.

Every Sunday he kept coming back and back to that appealing, roseate window, until one afternoon, when he saw her again at her tea, watched her for a while, then boldly clanged her black gate wide open, boldly strode up her path, leaped up three steps to the door, rang the bell. A soft rain had begun to sink over the town. The day was gone. A far grumble of waves from the shingle. She opened the door. So close, so solid, so near, so real he could barely recognize her. His silence made her lift her head sideways in three interrogatory jerks. She had a slight squint, which he would later consider one of her most enchanting accomplishments--she might have been looking at another man behind his shoulder. He felt the excitement of the hunter at her vulnerable nearness. He suddenly smelled her. Somebody had told him you can always tell a woman's age by her scent. Chanel--and Weil's Antelope--over 60. Tweed--always a mature woman. Madame Rochas--the 40s. The 30s smell of after-shave lotion: Eau Sauvage, Mustache. Wisps of man scent. The 20s--nothing. She had a heavy smell. Tartly she demanded, "Yes?" Unable to speak, he produced his business card, handed it to her spade fingers. Herbert Bolger / Antiques / 2 Hume Street, Dublin. She laughed at him.

"Mr. Bolger, if you are trying to buy something, I have nothing for you; if you are trying to sell me something, I have even less."

He was on home ground now; they all said that, he expected it, he relied on them to say it. His whole technique of buying depended on his knowing that while it is true that the so-called Big Houses of Ireland have been gleaned by the antique dealers, a lot of Big House people have come down to small discouraged houses like this one, bringing with them, like wartime refugees, their few remaining heirlooms. Her accent, however, was not a Big House accent. It was the accent of a workaday countrywoman. She would have nothing to sell.

"Come, now, Mrs. Eh? Benson? Well, now, Mrs. Benson, you say you have nothing to sell, but in my experience, a lot of people don't know what they have. Only last week, I paid a lady thirty pounds for a silver Georgian saltcellar that she never knew she possessed. You might have much more than you realize."

He must get her alone, inside. He had had no chance to see her figure. Her hair shone like jet beads. Her skin was not a flat white. It was a lovely, rich, ivory skin, as fine as lawn or silk. He felt the rain on the back of his neck and turned up his coat collar. He felt so keyed up by her that if she touched him, his string would break. She was frowning at him incredulously. There was one thing she possessed that she did not know about. Herself.

"Well, it is true that my late husband used to attend auctions. But---"

"Mrs. Benson, may I have just one quick glance at your living room?" She wavered. They always did. He smiled reassuringly. "Just one quick glance. It will take me two minutes."

She looked up at the rain about her door lamp.

"Well? All right, then. But you are wasting your time. I assure you. And I am very busy."

Walking behind her in the narrow hallway, he took her in from calves to head. She was two women, heavy above, lighter below. He liked her long strong legs, the wide shoulders, the action of her lean haunches and the way her head rose above her broad shoulders. Inside, the room was rain dim and hour dim, until she switched on a central 150-watt bulb that drowned the soft pink of the standing lamp, showed the furniture in all its nakedness, exposed all the random marks and signs of a room that had been long lived in. At once he regretted that he had come. He walked to the window and looked out through its small bay up and down the avenue. How appealing it was out there! All those cozy little, dozing little, rosy little bungalows up and down the avenue, and those dark trees comforting the gabled house with (continued on page 184) Inside outside complex(continued from page 112) its one cube of light and, the window being slightly raised above the avenue, he could see the scattered windows of other cozy little houses coming awake all over the town. An hour earlier he might have been able to see the bruise-blue line of the Irish Sea. I could live in any one of those little houses out there, and he turned to look at her uncertainly --like a painter turning from easel to model, from model to easel, wondering which was the concoction and which was the truth.

"Well?" she asked impatiently.

His eye helicoptered over her cheap furniture. Ten seconds sufficed. He looked at her coldly. If he were outside there now on the pavement, looking in at her rosy lamplighting. . . .

"There is," she said defensively, "a mirror."

She opened the leaves of large folding doors in the rear wall, led him into the room beyond them, flooded it with light. An electric sewing machine, patterns askew on the wall, a long deal table strewn with scattered bits of material, a tailoress' wire dummy and, incongruously, over the empty fireplace, a lavish baroque mirror, deeply beveled, sunk in a swarm of golden fruit and flowers, carved wood and molded gesso. Spanish? Italian? It could be English. It might, rarest of all, be Irish. Not a year less than 200 years old. He flung his arms up to it in unrestrained excitement.

"And you said you had nothing! She's a beauty! I'd be delighted to buy this pretty bauble from you."

She sighed at herself in her mirror.

"I did not say I had nothing, Mr. Bolger. I said I had nothing for you. My mirror is not for sale. It was my husband's engagement present to me. He bought it at an auction in an old house in Wexford. It was the only object of any interest in the house, so there were no dealers present. He got it for five pounds."

He darted to it through an envious groan. He talked at her through it.

"Structurally? Fine. A leaf missing here. A rose gone there. Some scoundrel has dotted it here and there with commercial gold paint. And somebody has done worse. Somebody's been cleaning it. Look here and here and here at the white gesso coming through the gold leaf. It could cost a hundred pounds for gold leaf to do it all over again. Have you," he said sharply to her in the mirror, "been cleaning it?"

"I confess I tried. But I stopped when I saw that chalky stuff coming through. I did, honestly."

He considered her avidly in the frame. So appealing in her contrition, a fallen Eve. He turned to her behind him. How strongly built and bold she was! Bold as brass. No question--two women!

"Mrs. Benson, have you any idea what this mirror is worth?"

She hooted at him derisively.

"Three times what you would offer me as a buyer and three times that again for what you would ask as a seller."

To conceal his delight in her toughness, he put on a sad face.

"Lady! Nobody trusts poor old B. B. But you don't know how the game goes. I look at that mirror and I say to myself, 'How long will I wait to get how much for it?' I say, 'Price, one hundred pounds,' and I sell it inside a month. I say, 'Price, two hundred pounds,' and I have to wait six months. Think of my overheads for six months! If I were living in London and I said, 'Price, three hundred pounds,' I'd sell it inside a week. If I lived in New York, I could say, 'Price, fifteen hundred dollars,' and I'd sell it in a day. If I lived on a coral island, it wouldn't be worth two coconuts. That mirror has no absolute value. To you it's priceless because it has memories. I respect you for that, Mrs. Benson. What's life without memories? I'll give you ninety pounds for it."

They were side by side, in her mirror, in her room, in her life. He could see her still smiling at him. Pretending she was sorry she had cleaned it? Putting it on. They do, yen know, they do! And they change, oho, they change. Catch her being sorry for anything. Smiling now like a girl caught in fragrant delight. Listen to this:

"It is not for sale, Mr. Bolger. My memories are not on the market. That is not a mirror. It is a picture. The day my husband bought it, we stood side by side and he said," she laughed at the mirror, " 'We're not a bad-looking pair.' "

He stepped sideward out of her memories, keeping her framed.

"I'll give you a hundred quid for it. I couldn't possibly sell it for more than a hundred and fifty. There aren't that many people in Dublin who know the value of a mirror like yours. The most I can make is twenty-five percent. You are a dressmaker. Don't you count on making twenty-five percent? Where are you from?" he asked, pointing eagerly.

"I'm a Ryan from Tipperary," she laughed, taken by his eagerness, laughing the louder when he cried that he was a Tipp man himself.

"Then you are no true Tipperary woman if you don't make fifty percent! What about it? Tipp to Tipp. A hundred guineas? A hundred and ten guineas? Going, going . . . ?"

"It is not for sale," she said with a clipped finality. "It is my husband's mirror. It is our mirror. It will always be our mirror," and he surrendered to the loyalty she was staring at.

As she closed the door on his departure, there passed between them the smiles of equals who, in other circumstances, might have been friends. He walked away, exhilarated, quite satisfied. He had got rid of his fancy. She had not come up to his dream. He was cured.

The next Sunday afternoon, bowler hat on nose, collar up. scarfed, standing askew behind her pillar, the red lamp glowed for him, would now always glow, above the dark head of Mrs. Benson, widow, hard-pressed dressmaker, born in Tipperary, sipping Indian tea, munching an English biscuit, reading a paperback, her civil respite from tedious labor. How appealing! She has beaten a cozy path of habit and he lusts to have it. to have her, to own her, at least to share her. "I can make antiques, but I can't make age; I could buy the most worn old house in Ireland and would I own one minute of its walls, trees, tones, moss, slates, gravel, rust, lichen, aging?" And he remembered the old lady in a stinking house in Westmeath, filled with 18th Century stuff honeycombed by woodworm, who would not sell him as much as a snuffbox because, "Mr. Bulgey, there is not a pebble in my garden but has its story."

Bray. For sale. Small modern bungalow. Fully furnished. View of sea. Complete with ample widow attached to the front doorknob. Fingerprints alive all over the house. He pushed the gate open, smartly leaped her steps, rang.

A fleck of biscuit clung childishly to her lower lip. Her gray eye, delicately defective, floated beyond his face as disconcertingly as a past thought across present surprise.

"Not you again?" and she laughed lavishly.

"Mrs. B.! I have a proposition."

"Mr. B.! I do not intend to sell you my mirror. Ever!"

"Mrs. B.! I do not want it. What I have to propose will take exactly two ticks. I swear it. And then I fly."

She sighed, looked far, far away. To the night sea?

"For two minutes? Very well. But not one second more!"

She shows him into the living room and, weakening--in the name of hospitality? of Tipperary? of country ways?-- she goes into the recesses of her home for an extra cup. In sole possession of her interior, he looks under the vast umbrella of the dusk, out over the punctured encampment of roofs. Could I live here? Why does this bloody room never look the same from the inside and the outside? Live here? Always? It would be remote. Morning train to Dublin. In the evenings, this, when I had tarted it up a bit, made it as cozy inside as it looks from the outside.

(continued on page 214)Inside Outside complex(continued from page 181)

"My husband," she said, pouring, "always liked China tea. You don't mind?"

"I am very partial to it. It appeals to my aesthetic sense. Jasmine flowers floating. May I ask what your husband used to do?"

"Ken was an assessor for an English insurance company. He was English."

He approved mightily, fingers widespread, chin enthusiastically nodding.

"A fine profession! A very fine profession!"

"So fine," she said wryly, "that he look out a policy on his own life for a bare thousand pounds. And I am now a dressmaker."

"Family?" he asked tenderly.

She smiled softly.

"My daughter, Leslie. She is at a boarding school. I am hoping to send her to the university. What is your proposition?"

Her profile, from being soft as a seaflower, changed to the obtuseness of a death mask. But, frontally, her lower lip caught the light, her eyes were alert, the face hard with character.

"It is a simple little proposition. Your mirror, we agree, is a splendid object, but for your business quite unsuitable. Any woman looking into it can only half see herself. What you need is a great, wide, large, gilt-framed mirror, pinned flat against the wall, clear as crystal, a real professional job, where a lady can see herself from top to toe twirling and turning like a ballet dancer." He smiled mockingly. "Give your clients status." He proceeded earnestly. "Worth another two hundred pounds a year to you. You would be employing two assistants in no time. I happen to have a mirror just like that in my showrooms. I've had it for six years and nobody has wanted it." He paused, smiling from jawbone to jawbone. "I would like you to take it. As a gift."

Shrewdly he watched her turning her teacup between her palms as if she were warming a brandy glass, while she observed him sideward just as shrewdly out of an eye as fully circled as a bird's. At last she smiled, laid down her cup, leaned back and said, "Go on, Mr. B."

"How do you mean, 'Go on'?"

"You have only told me half your proposition. You want something in return?"

He laughed with his throat, teeth, tongue and gullet, enjoying himself hugely.

"Nothing! Not really!"

She laughed as hugely, enjoying him.

"Meaning?"

He rose, walked to the window, now one of those black mirrors that painters use to eliminate color in order to reveal design. The night had blotted out everything except an impression of two or three pale hydrangea leaves wavering outside in the December wind and, inside, himself and a dark lamp shade. The reflection made him happy. He felt that he had already taken up residence here. He turned to the woman looking at him coldly under eyebrows as heavy as two dark mustaches and flew into a rage at her resistance.

"Damn it! Can't you give me credit for wanting to give you something for your own sake?" As quickly, he calmed. The proud animal was staring timidly, humbly, contritely. Or was she having him on again? She could hide anything behind that lovely squint of hers. He demanded abruptly, "Do you ever go into Dublin?"

She glanced at the doors of her workroom.

"I must go there tomorrow morning to buy some linings. Why?"

"Tomorrow I have to deliver a small Regency chest to a lady in Greystones. On my way back, I could call for you here at ten o'clock, drive you into Dublin and show you that big mirror of mine, and you can take it or leave it, as you like." He got up to go. "OK?"

She gave an unwilling assent, but as she opened the front door to let him out, added, "Though I am not at all sure that I entirely understand you, Mr. B."

"Aren't you?" he asked with an impish animation.

"No, I am not!" she said crossly. "Not at all sure."

Halfway across her ten feet of garden, he turned and laughed derisively, "Have a look at the surface of your mirror," and twanged out and was lost in the foggy dusk.

She returned slowly to her studio. She approached her mirror and peered over its surface. Flawless. Not a breath of dust. With one spittled finger, she removed a flyspeck. What did the silly little man mean? Without being aware of what she was doing, she looked at herself, patted her hair in place, smoothened her fringe, arranged the shoulder peaks of her blouse, then, her dark eyebrows floating, her bister eyelids sinking, her back straight, her chin and bosom lifted, she drawled, "I really am afraid, Mr. B., that I still do not at all understand you," and chuckled at the effect. Her jaw shot out, she glared furiously at her double, she silently mouthed the word "Fathead!," seized her scissors and returned energetically to work. She would fix him! Tomorrow morning she would simply let the ten-o'clock train take her to Dublin.

He took her to Dublin, and to lunch, and to her amused satisfaction admitted that there was a second part to his proposition. He sometimes persuaded the owners of better-class country hotels to allow him to leave one or two of his antiques, with his card attached, on view in their public rooms. It could be a Dutch landscape, or a tidy piece of Sheraton or Hepplewhite; free advertisement for him, free decor for them. Would she like to cooperate? "Where on earth," some well-off client would say, "did you get that lovely thing?"--and she would say, "Bolger's Antiques." She was so pleased to have foreseen that there would be some such quid pro quo that she swallowed the bait. So, the next Sunday, though he did not bring his big mirror, he brought a charming Boucher fire screen. The following Sunday, his van was out of order, but he did bring a handsome pair of twisted Georgian candlesticks for her mantelpiece. Every Sunday, except during the Christmas holidays, when he did not care to face her daughter, he brought something --a carved bronze chariot, Empire style, containing a clock, a neat Nelson sideboard, a copper warming pan and a pair of antique dueling pistols, so that they always had something further to discuss over their afternoon tea. It all amused and pleased her until the day came when he produced a pair of (he swore) genuine Tudor curtains for her front window and she could no longer conceal from herself that she was being formally courted and that her living room was being transformed from what it had been four months ago.

The climax came at Easter, when, for Leslie's sake, she weakly allowed him to present her with two plane tickets for a Paris holiday. In addition, he promised to visit her bungalow every day and sleep there every night while she was away. On her return, she found that he had left a comic Welcome Home card on her hall table; that her living room was sweet with mimosa; that he had covered her old-fashioned wallpaper with (he explained) a hand-painted French paper in (she would observe) a pattern of Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe and the Opéra; that he had replaced her old thread-worn carpet-she and Ken had bought it nearly 20 years ago in Clery's in O'Connell Street--with (he alleged) a quali Persian carpet 300 years old; and exchanged her plastic central-electric shade for (he mentioned) a Waterford cluster. In fact, he had got rid of every scrap of her life except her mirror, which now hung over her fireplace, her pink lamp and, she said it to herself, "Me?"

The next Sunday, she let him in, sat opposite him and was just about to say her rehearsed bit of gallows humor--"I am sorry to have to tell you, Bertie, that I don't particularly like your life, may I have mine back again, please?"--when she saw him looking radiantly at her, realized that by accepting so many disguised gifts she had put herself in a false position, and burst into tears of shame and rage. Bertie, whose many years of servitude with his mother had made all female tears seem as ludicrous as a baby's squealing face, laughed boomingly at her, enchanted to see this powerful woman so completely in his power. The experience filled him with such joy that he sank on his knees beside her, flung his arms about her and said, "Maisie, will you marry me?"

She drew back her fist, gave him such a clout on the jaw that he fell on his poll, shouted, "Get up, you worm! And get out!" With hauteur, he went.

She held out against him for six months, though still permitting him to visit her every Sunday for afternoon tea and a chat. In November, without warning, her resistance gave out. Worn down by his persistence? Or her own calculations? By her ambitions for her Leslie? Perhaps by a weariness of the flesh at the prospect of years of dressmaking? Certainly by none of the hopes, dreams, illusions, fears and needs that might have pressed other hard-pressed women into holy wedlock; above all, not by the desires of the flesh--these she had never felt for Bertie Bolger.

He made it a lavish wedding, which she did not dislike; he also made it showy, which she did not like. But she was to find that he did everything to excess, including eating, always defending himself by the plea that if a man or a woman is any good, you cannot have too much of him; a principle that ought to have led him to marry the fat lady in the circus and her to marry Paddy O'Brien, the Irish giant, who was nine feet tall and whose skeleton she said she had once seen preserved in the College of Surgeons. "Is he all swank and bluff?" she wondered. Even on their honeymoon, she discovered that after a day of boasting about his prowess compared with all his competitors, it was ten to one that he would either be crying on her shoulder long past midnight or yelping like a puppy in one of his nightmares, both of which performances (her word) she bore with patience until the morning he dared to give her dogs abuse for being the sole cause of all of them, whereat she ripped him with a kick like a cassowary's. She read an article about exhibitionism. That was him! She read a thriller about a manic-depressive strangler and, peeping cautiously across the pillows, felt that she should never go to bed with him without one of his dueling pistols under her side of the mattress.

Within six months, they both knew that their error was so plenary, so total, so irreducible that it should have been beyond speech--and was not. He said that he felt a prisoner in this bloody bungalow of hers. He said that whenever he stood inside her window (and his Tudor curtains) and looked out at those hundreds of lovely, loving, kindly, warm, glowing, little peaked bungalows outside there, he knew that he had picked the only goddamn one of the whole lot that was totally uninhabitable. She said she had been as free as the wind until he took forcible possession of her property and filled it with his fake junk. He said she was a bully. She told him he was a bluffer. He said, "I thought you had brains, but I've eaten better." She said, "You're a dope and a dreamer!" He said, "You're a dressmaker!" She said, "You don't know from one minute to the next whether you want to be Jesus Christ or Napoleon." He shouted, "Outside the four walls of this bungalow, you're an ignoramus, apart from what little I've been able to teach you." She said, "Outside your business, Bertie Bolger, and that doesn't bear close examination, if I gave you three minutes to tell me all you know, it would be six minutes too much." All of it as meaningless and unjust as every marital quarrel since Adam and Eve began to bawl with one voice, "But you said . . ." and "I know what I said, but you said. . . ." "Yes, and then you said. . . ."

His older, her more recent club acquaintances chewed a clearer cud. At the common table, three or four of them mentioned him one day over lunch. They used their eyebrows as words to describe one of those waxwork effigies that manage somehow or other to get past the little black ball into the most select clubs. Mimes, mimics, fair imitations, plausible impersonations of The Real Thing; a procession of puppets, a march of masks, a covey of cozeners, a levee of liars, chaps for whom conversation always means anecdotes; altruism, alms; discipline, suppression; justice, calling in the police; pleasure, vomiting in the washroom; pride, swank; love, lust; honesty, guilt; religion, fear; patriotism, greed; success, cash. But would any of them say any of this about Bertie? They would look you straight in the top button of your waistcoat and say, without humor, "A white man." And Maisie? "A very nice little wife." Dear Jesus! Is life in all clubs reduced like this to white men and nice little wives? Sometimes to worse. As well as clubbites, there are clubbesses to whom the truth is told between the sheets and by whom it is enlarged, exaggerated, falsified and spread wide. After all, the men had merely kicked the testicles of his reputation; the wives castrated him. They took Maisie's part. A fine, natural countrywoman, they said; honest as the daylight; warm as toast if you did not cross her, and then she could handle her tongue like the tail end of a whip; a woman who carried her liquor like a man; as agile at contract as a trout; could have mothered ten and would never give one to Bertie, whom she let marry her only because she saw he was the sort of weakling who always wants somebody to rely on and did not find out until too late that he was miles away from what every woman wants, which is somebody she can rely on. Their judgment made him seem less than he was, her more. The result of it was that Bertie was soon feeling the cold wind of Dublin's whispering gallery on his neck and had to do something to assert himself unless he was to fall dead under the sting of its icy mockery.

Accordingly, one Sunday afternoon in November, a year after his marriage, he packed two suitcases, called a cab and drove off down the lighted avenue to resume his not-unimportant role in life as the Mr. B. of some lonely sexless guesthouse. It had not, at the end, been her wish. If she had not grown a little fond of him, she did feel sorry for him. Besides, next autumn Leslie would be down on her fingers and up on her toes at the starting line for the university, waiting eagerly for the revolver's flat "Go!"

"This is silly, Bertie!" she had shrugged as they saw the taxi pulling up outside their window. "Husbands and wives always quarrel." He had picked up his two suitcases and looked around the room at his lost illusions, a Prospero leaving for the mainland. "It's nothing unusual," she had said, to comfort him. "It happens," she had pleaded, "in every house. But they carry on."

"You bitch!" he had snarled, making for the door. "You broke my heart. I thought you were perfect."

She need not have winced, knowing well that they had both married for reasons the heart knows nothing of. Nevertheless, hearing the taxi go, she had gone gloomily into her dining room, which must again become her workroom. The 60 pounds that he had agreed to pay her every month, though much more than she had had before they met, would not support two people. Looking about, she noted, with annoyance, that she had never got that big mirror out of him.

So then, a dusky afternoon in Bray, at a quarter to five o'clock, lighting-up time at 5:15, a year later, All Souls' Eve, dedicated to the souls of the dead suffering in the fires of purgatory, Bertie Bolger, benedict and bachelor, aged 44, tubby, ruddy, graying, walking sedately along the sea front, sees ahead of him the Imperial Hotel and stops dead, remembering.

"I wonder!" he wonders and, leaning over the promenade's railing, sky blue with orange knobs, rusting to deatli since the 19th Century, looks down at the damp pebbles of the beach. "How is she doing these days?" and turns inland toward the town.

At this ambiguous hour, few houses in Bray show lighted windows. The season is over, the day silent, landladies once more reckoning their takings, snoozing, thinking of minute repairs, or praying in Liljoe's, Fatima, The Billows, Swan Lake, Sea View. Peering ahead of him, Mr. B. sees, away down the avenue, a calm glow from a window and feels thereat the first, delicate, subcutaneous tingle that he has so often felt in the presence of some desirable object whose value the owner does not know. Nor does he know why those rare lighted windows are so troubling, suggestive, inviting, rejecting, familiar, foreign, like any childhood's nonesuch, griffin, mermaid, unicorn, hippogriff, dragon, centaur, crested castle in the mountains where there grows the golden rose of the world's end. Knowingly, he ignores that first far-off glow, turns from it as from a temptation to sin, turns right, turns left, walks faster and faster as from pursuing danger, until his head begins to swim and his heart to drum-roll at the sight, along the perspective of the familiar avenue, of a lighted roseate window that he knows he knows. As he comes near to Lorelei, he looks carefully around him to be sure that he is not observed by some filthy Paul Pry who might remember him from that year of his so-called marriage. He slows his pace. He slowly stalks the pillar of his wife's house. He peeps inside and straightway has to lean against the pillar to steady himself, feeling his old dream begin to swell and swell, his old disturbance mount, fear and joy invade his blood at the sight of her seated before the fire, placid, self-absorbed, her teacup in her hand, her eyes on her book, the pink glow on her three-quarter face, more than ever appealing, inciting, sealed, bonded, unattainable.

He has neglected her. He owes her restitution. He enters the garden, twangs the gate, mounts the steps, rings the bell, turns to see the dark enfold the town. A scatter of lights. The breathing of the waves. The glow of a bus zooming up Kilruddery Hill a mile away underlighting low clouds, bare trees, passing the Earl of Meath's broken walls, his gateway's squat Egyptian pillars bearing, in raised lettering, the outdated motto of his line, Labor Vita Mea.

"It's Bertie!"

"Hello, Maisie!"

"I'm so glad you dropped in, Bertie. Come in. Take your coat off and draw up to the fire. It's going to be a shivering night. Let me fix you a drink. The usual, I suppose?" Her back to him: "As a matter of fact, I've been expecting you every Sunday. I've been waiting and waiting for you." She laughed. "Or do you expect me to say I've been longing and longing for you since you abandoned me last November?"

He looks out, shading his eyes, sees the window opposite light up. They, too, have a pink lamp shade.

"That," he said, "is the Naughtons' bungalow, isn't it? It looks very cozy. Very nice. I sometimes used to think I'd be happy living there, looking across at you."

She glances at it, handing him the whiskey, and then they sit opposite each other.

"They're all alike, those bungalows. Why did you come today, Bertie?"

"It's our marriage anniversary. I didn't know what gift to send you, so I thought I would just ask. Hello! Your mirror is gone!"

"I had to put it back in my workroom. If you want to give me a present, give me your big mirror."

"Jaysus! I never did give it to you, did I? Next Sunday, I swear! Cross my heart! I'll bring it out without fail. If the van is free."

In this easy way they chatted of this and that, and he went on his way, and he came back the next Sunday, though not with his mirror, and he came every Sunday month after month for tea or a drink. On his fourth visit she produced, for his greater comfort, an old pair of felt slippers he had left behind him, and on the fifth Sunday a pipe of his that she had discovered at the bottom of a drawer. He did not come around Christmas, feeling that Leslie would prefer to be alone with her mother. Instead, he spent it at the Imperial Hotel. In a blue-paper hat? She refused to let him send them both to Paris for Easter, but she did let him send Leslie. For her own Easter present she asked, "Could I possibly have that mirror, Bertie?"--and he promised it, and did not keep his promise, saying that someday she would be sure to give up dressmaking and not need it, and anyway, he was somehow getting attached to the old thing, it would leave a big pale blank on his wall if he gave it away and, after all, she had a mirror of her own, but he promised, nevertheless, that he would give it to her soon. The music of the steam carrousel played on the front, the town became gay, English tourists strolled up and down the lapis-lazuli-and-orange promenade, voices carried, and now and again he went for a swim before calling on her, until imperceptibly it was autumn again, with the rainy light fading at half past four and her rosy window appealing to him to come inside, and in her mirror he would tidy his wind-blown hair and his tie, and look in puzzlement around the room, and speculatively back at her behind him pouring his drink, just as if he were her husband and this were really his home. It was a full year again, and November, and All Souls' Eve, before she saw him drive up outside her gate accompanied by his man Scofield in his pale-blue-and-pink van, marked along its side in Gothic silver lettering Bolger's Antiques. Protruding from it was his big mirror, wrapped in felt and burlap. She greeted it from her steps with a mock cheer that died when Scofield's eye flitted from the mirror to her door, and from door back to mirror, and Bertie did the same, and she did the same, and they all three knew at once that his mirror was too big. Still, they tried, until the three of them, in the garden, were standing in a row looking at themselves in it where it leaned against the tall privet hedge lining the avenue, a cold wind cooling the sweat on their foreheads.

"I suppose," Bertie said, "we could cut the bloody thing up! Or down!"--and, remembering one of those many elegant, useless, disconnected things he had learned at school from the Benedictines, he quoted from the Psalms the words of Christ about the soldiers on Calvary dicing for his garments: "Diviserunt sibi vestimenta mea et super vestem meam miserunt sortem."

"Go on!" he interpreted. "Cut me frigging shirt in bits and play cards for me jacket and me pants," which was the sign for her to lead him gently indoors and make three boiling-hot toddies for their three shivering bones.

He was silent as he drank his first dram, and his second. After the third dram he said, OK, this was it, he would never come here again, moving with her and Scofield to the window to look at his bright defeat leaning against the rampant hedge of privet.

And, behold, it was glowing with the rosiness of the window and the three of them out there looking in at themselves from under the falling darkness and the wilderness of stars over town and sea, a vision so unlikely, disturbing, appealing, inviting, promising, demanding, enlisting that he swept her to him and held her so long, so close, so tight that the next he heard was the pink-and-blue van driving away down the avenue. He turned for reassurance to the gleaming testimony in the garden and cried, "We'll leave it there always! It brightens life! It makes everything more real!"

At which, as well she might, she burst into laughter. "You bloody loon!" she began and stopped, remembering country tales about how, at a certain season of the year, a man or a woman looking into the dark surface of a well may see there not his or her own eyes but the eyes of love staring up.

"If that is what you really want," she said quietly and looked out in awe at them both staring in.