The gathering - By Anne Enright Page 0,34

immoral about the mind’s eye.)

Anyway, the finger-stall was on her finger and I was called up to the top room and, ‘Come here,’ she said, looking over her shoulder and lifting her skirt a little, at the back. ‘Do me up.’ And she turned her leg to me for the side view.

Her thigh was surprisingly little. It had an inky map of broken veins in a cluster, above the sag of her stocking, which was folded at the top to a thick orange band. Little white tabs dangled on concertinaed ribbon, from a place I could not see, or did not want to see, and it took me ages to realise what she was asking me to do. I had to crouch by the Gothic panels of her corset, and tether it to the stockings that were waiting beneath. I remember the soft clench of the rubber snaps around nylon that would not stay still, and the cool of her leg, and the sour smell of her respectability. And I imagined that every man who called to the door knew about these secret gaps between her clothes; the amazing two-leggedness of her, and the tight vault of her corset, all open to the air below.

And perhaps they did.

So when Frank Duff arrived at the door, I thought he was after her too.

‘Just a little something, Ada. No, I insist! Just a little something small.’

Frank Duff that is, who was the actual head of the actual Legion of Mary, a religious organisation dedicated, in 1967, to inanity and the making of tea.

‘God bless now. Happy Christmas to all your brood.’ And he ran a loving hand down my cheek, catching my chin lightly, letting it go.

Mr Nugent coming later with the box of jellied fruit. Ignoring Ada and talking to the children instead. It was Christmas: it was our day.

In fact, Frank Duff spent his early years rescuing prostitutes off the streets of Dublin. This is what he was doing in 1925–this dotey, clever man–he was organising missions; he was talking girls out of the brothels, and buying off their madams, and taking them on retreats. This was the Legion of Mary’s first, great work. In the Lent of 1925, when Ada met Charlie, Frank Duff was saying a lot more than his prayers.

This I discovered, as I chased him through the college library stacks, working on an essay for my final college assessment, which I called (with no sense of irony, I think), ‘Paying for Sex in the Irish Free State’. Because I was suddenly certain of many things. Including the fact that people fucked, that was one of the things they did: men fucked women–it did not happen the other way around–and this surprising mechanism was to change, not just my future, which was narrowing even as I looked at it, but also the wide and finished world of my past.

So I imagined for a while that Ada was one of Duff’s mended whores. She was not a blowsy whore, of course–she was an orphan. She was barely a whore at all. She was a poor girl, who turned her face to the wall as the coins clinked on to the bedside table, and the dark shape of a man left the room.

Let us stick with this. A satin slip, with the lace a little torn. A picture of the Virgin put in a drawer, until he goes. A romance of falling. And shivering in the doctor’s waiting room, clutching your wool coat at the neck, where the button has gone. A dusty, middle-class fantasy, of crinkled stockings, and TB, and hunkering to wash over a basin on the floor.

So there are priests in the front lounge of the Belvedere Hotel that evening in Lent: and a madam, and our man with the Milk Tray, Frank Duff. They are buying the madam off. Quietly. They are closing her down.

Outside, Ada and Nugent listen, and then forget to listen to the thin line of talk that trickles out of the front lounge. For a moment at least, they merely sit across from each other–the man from the Legion and the little seamstress-whore. What odds? She is beautiful. And he is no better than he should be. The city is quiet and the hotel is quiet, and there is no one here to tell Lamb Nugent that he will sit in this woman’s good, front room for the rest of his life, holding out his little china cup for More tea,