‘You never made that much money at it.’
‘I made enough and we were damn glad of it at the time.’
‘Look, it’s throwing good money after bad. Maybe if the price drops again, we can—’
‘Don’t!’ she shouted. ‘You never had any intention of buying that property. You just thought you could placate me with it, dangling it in front of me.’
‘It doesn’t look good for an elected member of government to be going around buying up half the town.’
‘Half the town? Half the town? One shitty-assed shopfront on the main street and you call that half the town? I’m sick of having nothing just so that we don’t look too flash in front of your constituents.’ She folded her arms and turned her face to the window. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t work,’ she said. ‘People still think we have money.’
‘Which is not the case.’
‘And don’t I know it – you’ve made everyone else in this town rich except us.’ They rounded a corner and the waning moon swung back into view. ‘We can afford that property,’ she said. ‘You just don’t want me to have it.’
The car pulled up in front of the hotel.
‘Are you going to spoil another night?’ he asked.
She watched couples gliding up and down the steps of the Paradise Lodge. Brass railings and polished handles glinted beyond the glass-fronted doors of the hotel.
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I won’t embarrass you.’
All through dinner she allowed Tom Heffernan to refill her wineglass and stare at her chest while she glowered across the table at James. She smoked one cigarette after another, the butts piling up in the ashtray in front of her. She’d worn a black satin culottes-suit with a low-cut top and a little bolero jacket she’d thrown off as soon as she sat down. Neat on her top half, and wide at the hip, she’d chosen the outfit to accentuate above and disguise below. James was usually quick to offer her compliments on her appearance but that evening he was barely fit to look her in the eye. And everyone so far at the event had admired the outfit, except her husband, who sat nursing the same whiskey he’d bought when he’d arrived. He had his hand over the mouth of the glass tumbler, rocking it back and forth in that uneasy way of his, as though he lived in dread of someone topping it up.
She’d pushed her loin of beef around the plate, and when the profiteroles arrived, she ignored them and withdrew another cigarette from her pack. While James gave his speech on the importance of business in the local community she looked up at the light fixture, a long cylinder dripping with strings of glass beads. As she stared at the lights shrouded in cigarette smoke, they melted into one and for minutes at a time she could distract herself from her husband’s voice. She listened to the applause and kept her arms folded on the table. There was a great deal of backslapping when James sat down again.
‘Fair play to you,’ Manus Sweeney said. ‘You’re damn right. It’s hard work that saves communities. You can’t be relying on government funding all the time.’
‘Well, Manus, I didn’t want to spell it out up there, but that’s just it. There are people nowadays who want everything for nothing and they’re not willing to work for it.’
There was a lot of nodding and agreement to that and Izzy turned her face away. Seated at the table opposite were Shaun Crowley and Ann Diver. Ann was the only woman and the men were mostly bachelors who had no one to bring to an event like this. Shaun was leaning a conspiratorial ear to the man next to him, and to his right sat Ann, looking like she’d been squeezed onto the end at the last minute. She wore oversized silver earrings, ornate things that dangled almost to her shoulders, and as if she regretted the decision now, she gripped one earlobe, hiding the earring. A waitress at the Harbour View Hotel for years, she was probably more used to serving at these events than attending them, and Izzy told herself to go and chat with her before the night was over. Poor Ann was unlikely to get much in the way of conversation out of Shaun, who was not in the habit of small talk. He was polite enough if you tried to engage him, but he always looked bored out of his mind at these things, sitting there in his shirtsleeves like it would have been too much bother for him to have worn a jacket and tie like every other man.
‘God, he’s an eccentric, that fella, isn’t he?’ Teresa Heffernan whispered to her. ‘All the money he has, you’d think he’d make a bit of an effort, iron his shirt at least.’
Izzy considered this. ‘Well, he has Ann to do it for him now,’ she said.
‘Yeah, but she’s back on the scene.’
‘Who?’
‘Colette.’
‘Is she, indeed.’ Izzy took a drag on her cigarette. ‘Well, she’s never ironed a shirt in her life. Poets don’t iron shirts.’
‘Apparently she showed up at the front desk of the factory today, brazen as anything, and asked to speak to Shaun. She was all of two minutes in his office, and when she come out again, she wasn’t looking too happy.’
‘Maybe she got wind of his new woman.’ And Izzy had struggled to get her head around this recent news, that Ann and Shaun were an item – quiet, homely Ann, who’d been a widow most of her life. Ann and Shaun were closer in age, which made a kind of sense, but otherwise she was as different from Colette as it was possible to be.
‘Word is he won’t let Colette see the kids,’ Teresa said.
‘Ah, now,’ Izzy said. ‘That seems a bit much. Imagine if someone wouldn’t let you see your children?’
Teresa settled back into her chair and tapped the head of ash off her cigarette. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘doesn’t he have his reasons.’
Izzy was about to argue this point when she was distracted by James jabbing his finger onto the surface of the table.
‘My parents were never given a single thing,’ he said. ‘They had to work for every penny.’
‘And were your parents from the town?’ Manus Sweeney asked.
‘They were not,’ Izzy said. ‘They were from some boreen up north of the county. They were probably third cousins.’
There was a silence.
‘Second cousins,’ James said, and everybody laughed, but Izzy recognised the cold glimmer that had entered his eyes.
‘Testing, testing, one two,’ someone said into a microphone. A bass guitar thrummed. There was a clash of cymbals.
‘And I don’t know how you can say that your parents were given nothing,’ Izzy said. ‘Didn’t the council give them the house you grew up in?’
James looked away from her. ‘Well, that’s just it,’ he said. ‘Back then you were given what you were given and you had to just get on with it.’
‘Jesus Christ, when’s the music going to start,’ Izzy said under her breath.
‘People led simple, ordinary lives,’ James went on, ‘and those are the people who I want to help, the people who are willing to go out and work and help themselves.’
She looked at her husband – simple and ordinary. She thought about getting the wine bottle and going to the end of the table and bringing it down over his simple, ordinary head.
