Chapter 15

On the second Monday of January, it was with some relief that James placed the key in the door of his constituency office. The room smelt stale and even though outside the air was cold and heavy with damp he opened the two large windows that overlooked the pier. His office occupied the bottom floor of one of the oldest buildings in the town, and the smell of age was embedded in the walls and the plaster cornicing and the old fireplace that seemed to heave dead air into the room every time so much as a breeze passed over. Still, it was a handsome, well-proportioned room, and he’d had the old wooden floors carpeted recently to lend some warmth to the place. James placed the bundle of newspapers he was carrying on his desk and hung the new blue overcoat Izzy had bought him for Christmas over the back of his chair. He walked to the door to retrieve the post he’d stepped over on his way in. His back was not what it used to be and he had to get down on one knee. He swiped the envelopes together and just then the door swung open and almost knocked him sideways.

‘Jesus, James, I’m sorry,’ Cassie said, poking her head through the door.

‘Hello, Cassie,’ he said. He struggled to his feet and tossed the post onto her desk. If there was one thing he could set his watch by, it was that his secretary would be five minutes late every single day. He’d mentioned it to her a few times but it wasn’t an argument he wanted to get into on their first day back at work. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m great, James,’ she said. ‘I was well looked after at Christmas.’ She held up a new handbag.

‘Oh, you’re spoiled is what you are,’ he said. And he knew too that not so long ago her parents had bought her a car so that she could make the ten-minute drive from the family home to work each morning, and really with so few impediments it was impossible for James to fathom why she couldn’t be on time. But again, he told himself to drop this argument. He’d had trouble holding on to secretaries in the past and Cassie had been with him for nearly three years. Her father was a skipper on one of the boats who’d begged James to take her on after she left secretarial college. He liked the idea of someone untested coming into the office so they could be trained up to work the way he wanted rather than bringing notions with them from other places. It was an undemanding job. She had to handle his correspondence, do some basic bookkeeping. If James was in Dublin all she had to do was answer the phone. In the early days he’d had an open-door policy. But he had ones coming in to tell him that their neighbour was parking in their spot or that the binmen had forgotten to collect their rubbish. Now Thursday mornings were the only time of the week when people were allowed to come by without an appointment. Other than that, they needed to make arrangements through Cassie. He felt like she could do with reminding sometimes that she had a nice, clean job in an office when she could just as easily have ended up working in one of the fish factories.

‘How was your Christmas?’ Cassie asked.

‘Christmas was a success, Cassie,’ he said, and really that was the only way he could think to describe it. There had been no fights was what he meant. They’d come close when on St Stephen’s Day Izzy sat down at the kitchen table with a pile of winter-sun brochures and began to read the descriptions of the hotels out loud to him. He could be doing with a holiday, she’d said, after all the stress he’d been under, and he’d told her that there’d be no holiday for him until July at the earliest. If she wanted to go away with her sister for a week, she was welcome to. And he’d retreated to the sitting room then before she could think of a retort. All over the Christmas period he’d managed not to shout at Niall, even though Niall’s bottom lip was set quivering over the slightest upset and the sight of it angered him. And although there had been no significant altercations between Orla and Izzy, the threat had been ever present. A sense of peace had descended over the house when Orla had returned to school the night before.

But he had not enjoyed it. That was what it boiled down to in the end. Not that he had ever really cared about Christmas. It was a sentimental season and he was simply not a sentimental person. Yet he was aware that there was some pleasure he was supposed to have gleaned from it – having his family around him, the rest and relaxation, the indulgence of it all. He had felt tired all the time and then some nights he had been unable to sleep. He had always been a prodigious sleeper – it was one of his gifts. It had infuriated Izzy that even at times of great difficulty in their marriage, he had been able to drift off to sleep with such ease. But now all the concerns that usually occupied him during the day crowded in on him at night. He lay awake, keeping sentry over them. He worried that he’d left the handbrake off the car, forgotten to pay the electricity bill, that Niall was sleeping with his electric blanket on, or that his indigestion was some pernicious disease eating away at him. He’d decided that in the new year he would go to Doctor D’Arcy and ask him for a sleeping tablet of some kind. But then he’d thought that all he probably needed was to get back to work. Besides, on a recent visit Doctor D’Arcy had suggested he might be overworked and that his problems were ‘more in his head’ – that was how he’d put it. And when doctors started saying things like that you were only a few questions away from being offered different kinds of tablets. Telling him that he was having trouble sleeping would only inspire him further. And then there’d be two of them in the house on tablets and Izzy wouldn’t be able to accept that at all. She’d say he was just looking for attention.

A cold air rolled in from the fireplace and the newspapers on his desk rustled.

‘Will you shut those windows now please, Cassie,’ James said, putting on his glasses and picking up the first newspaper on the pile. ‘And while you’re at it, you could kind of de-Christmas the place.’

‘What do you mean de-Christmas the place?’ she asked.

This had been a bone of contention between them. She’d wanted to hang decorations and he’d objected.

‘Well, you know, you could throw out the cards.’

‘Aye, that’ll take all of two minutes,’ she said.

James perused the cover of a week-old Irish Times. The newspapers were always thin on real news this time of year and any political stories were about the machinations in the newly formed government. James had read most of them already but he wanted to skim through to make sure he’d missed nothing. Roles were changing hands so often. You could be an ordinary member of government one day and be made a minister the next. You had to keep your wits about you. Izzy liked to say that he couldn’t see farther than the end of his own nose. His wife often said cruel things like this. It seemed strange to him that she could say whatever she wanted and he was expected to remain calm, but on the rare occasions when he did respond in anger she was so instantaneously wounded. If he had tried to explain the unfairness of this to her, she would have said, ‘Ah, it’s a pity about you.’ Anyway, James didn’t see how he could be such a short-sighted underachiever when he’d left school at fourteen with no qualifications whatsoever and was now an elected member of government – even if he hadn’t been made a minister.

And he would be nursing that wound for a while. It was hard not to take it as a personal slight. He’d received no warning that the decision wouldn’t go in his favour. Before he knew it, he was shaking hands with the new minister, congratulating him on his appointment. It wasn’t that the man had more experience – James outstripped him on every front except his family name. And it didn’t seem to matter that a few years previously a newspaper exposé revealed he’d put some of the renovations for his house on his tax return. James had kept quiet about other people’s misdemeanours – in this regard at least he knew how to play the game – but for his own part, he had never so much as asked for a parking ticket to be quashed. When you came from nothing, you could be held to a higher standard. But he was beginning to wonder where all this good behaviour had got him.

Cassie placed a mug of tea in front of him.

‘Thank you, Cassie,’ he said.

‘There’s not much going on down there today.’

He looked up from his newspaper to see Cassie standing at the window staring down at the pier.

‘Oh, they’ll not be going anywhere for a while yet,’ James said.

Most of the fleet was still tied up. The sea and the sky were of the same dark, even grey today, the low winter sun trying to break through the cloud hunkering at the lighthouse. The wind was up and the water churned and despite their size, these great hulking vessels seemed to roll in the tide. James watched the ropes that tethered them to the pier, slacken and tighten, slacken and tighten, and he felt his stomach lurch.

These boats were like cruise ships compared to the one he’d gone to sea in. Two years he’d spent rolling around in a seven-berth trawler called the Assaro, where nausea sent him diving below deck and into his bunk, which he discovered was the worst place to escape seasickness. But the other men said they’d make a man out of him yet. He was indignant at the suggestion that there was something lacking in his character and complained about the poor pay they received, about the dangerous conditions they worked in. And one night they received a mayday call from a boat with four men on board that was taking in water off Rathlin Head. The swell was so great that they couldn’t get anywhere near them. All they could do was watch as little by little the boat was pulled under, until finally it was like the depths of the sea opened up and sucked it down with its last breath. A sheet of white foam sluiced gently over its absence.

He found another job as soon as he could and took up a position as foreman at the fisheries co-op shortly after getting married. And he continued to complain. Fishermen were getting a bad deal and James organised a strike until a regulation was put in place for a minimum price on the sale of the fish. When the next elections for local council came around, he was encouraged to stand. He feigned reluctance but won easily and when he ran for Dáil Éireann the first time, he lost, but made it in on his second attempt a few years later. There he was able to lobby the European Parliament and effect serious change that meant fishermen could catch more, earn more, work in safer conditions. And those around him grew richer and richer. And this was what Izzy meant, what she was constantly lamenting, that James’s narrow thinking had limited them in this regard. But he had a house and two cars and a daughter in a private school. He enjoyed a holiday in the sun every year. He had more than he’d ever expected to have. It was Izzy who was never satisfied. It was the only thing he really disliked about her. Even the cruel jibes he could live with because the thing about his wife was that she was funny, and when that wit was directed elsewhere it made him laugh. But she was grasping, and she made a very good job of counting other people’s money. According to Izzy, everyone had more than they did. And it did seem to James, when he looked around him, that every one of his contemporaries had become a millionaire except him. And what was more, he had helped them to do it.

‘What will I do with these?’ Cassie asked.

She was standing in front of him with a small cardboard box half full with Christmas cards.

‘How many did we print?’ he asked.

‘Two hundred.’

‘And how many did we send?’

‘Around a hundred.’

‘Ah, shite – that was a waste of money. Could they be reused for something?’

‘No. They’re Christmas cards. And they have 1994 printed on them.’

‘OK. Well, throw most of them away and keep a few for the archive.’

‘What archive?’ she said.

‘Cassie, where do you file old documents?’

There was a knock on the door and Cassie placed the box on his desk and went to answer it. One of the cards was taped to the outside of the box. It was a photo taken last summer at the annual dinner held by the Ardglas Fisherman’s Organisation. President Mary Robinson had attended and she was standing in the front row of the photograph. Surrounding her were the boat owners of the town and their wives, and Izzy and James. His wife was wearing a black dress with pearl earrings and a pearl necklace. Her fair hair was held back by a black velvet Alice band. She was sitting with her legs crossed and her hands clasped around her knee. The fact that his wife was attractive, and admired by other men, and always looked the part when they attended official functions was something he took pride in, and he liked to think that he expressed this admiration to Izzy as often as he could. He tried to remember if they had fought that night.

‘Happy New Year to you,’ Cassie said to the tall man with his head bowed standing in the doorway. He was taking an inordinate amount of time wiping his feet on the mat and allowing cold air to blow into the office. James stood up and saw it was Shaun Crowley, and his irritation turned to curiosity.

‘Hello, Shaun, how are you?’ James said.

‘Will I make tea?’ Cassie asked.

Shaun was moving slowly across the room, patting the pockets of his coat and looking around the floor like he’d lost something.

‘Well, I’ll have another cup anyway. Shaun?’

‘I won’t be stopping long,’ he said.

‘Well, take a seat.’ James gestured to the chair opposite him. ‘What can I do you for? How did you get on this Christmas?’

Shaun dropped heavily into the chair and sat back, slouching and loose-limbed. He removed his glasses case from the pocket of his wax jacket, took out a tiny white cloth, and began to clean his glasses with great concentration. James noticed that the hem of his trousers was about an inch too short so you could see the dark hairs on his legs just above the bands of his red socks. He wore expensive handmade shoes, the leather dull for want of a good polish. His flannel shirt was unbuttoned to his chest, where his white vest was visible, and yet more hair sprouted.

Cassie placed another cup of tea on his desk and James watched Shaun cast a suspicious eye at her, not neglecting the cleaning of his glasses for a second.

‘Cassie – will you go over to Doherty’s and get today’s papers, please?’ James asked.

She nodded, took her coat from the stand and her keys from her desk, and left the office.

‘Now, Shaun – to what do I owe the pleasure?’ James had his elbows on the leather panel of his desk, his hands joined just below his chin.

Shaun placed his glasses back on his face and it was as though the gift of sight renewed his vigour. He blinked a few times, taking in his surroundings. And then he stood up and strode to the window with some purpose. He held his hands behind his back and stared down at the pier, shaking his head a few times.