The gathering - By Anne Enright Page 0,41

apple drops. He puts on a penny a time with Myrellson of Dame Street, who knows him and forbears. Pride of Arras for the three o’clock, in which Ballystockhard makes all the running, Ada saying, ‘Is that mine, is that mine?’ and Nugent saying, ‘No, it’s not yours.’ All afternoon he watches his luck dribble away, Street Singer, Con Amore, Daisy’s Boss–who is picking these nags? Oh, but they have to back Ellen’s Bean for the Fairyhouse Plate, they just have to, and when the horse comes in second Ada has more sense than to say, ‘What does that mean, “on the nose”?’ Coolcannon falls at the second last and with it all his hopes, and then Ada finally gets lucky on Knocknageena.

Yaroo!

The whole party is, by now, so worn out by the surge and loss of each race, and by the endless waiting in between, that when Ada jumps and lifts her fists, nothing is hidden from any of them. She might stay like that–Ada ascending–frozen in victory, from her clenched hands to the tip of her down-pointed shoes. By the time she hits the ground again it has been settled: one of these men wants her to win, and the other wants her to lose.

And she knows it.

Ada’s horse came first. But it was only a horse–it’s not exactly her fault. So maybe it is her sense of justice that makes her choose Charlie, who is pleased for her, as opposed to Nugent who is insulted by her good luck. But there is no doubt–the choice has been made.

On the trip home, Ellen sings in the front seat; the shreds of her lovely voice coming back to them on the wind, ‘When Other Lips’, ‘I Dreamt I Dwelt’. They understand each other completely, each person in this car. They sit and think what it all means: Charlie has won Ada, Nugent has lost her. And this stirs in them thoughts of other things.

Charlie, for example, is thinking about all the girls he has pushed to the brink of ruin before letting each of them go. He is bidding it all farewell, the ravishing, tawdry, endless tristesse of one woman or another, one woman or another, until a man had to address his member as you might a dribbling dog, ‘Enough, sir! Enough!’

Ellen is thinking that she will never get married.

Nugent is trying to catch last night’s dream, sure that it was telling him that he had lost, already, before he ever tried. It was a dream about his soul, a gap opening in his chest–because the soul is a she–there is a girl flowering inside him, breaking through, there is a hole weeping nectar just above his heart, it is opening to his hand, there–just there–a place where all good things are, as hope and loving-kindness, a place he can find a gorgeous kind of rest, and enter or be entered, over and over again, over and again, finding as he does so, the soul’s own sweet ecstasy, until he wakes to the horror of his blasphemous thoughts and the after-shock of his seed just spent, and waits, in the dark, for the mess to go cold.

I don’t know what Ada was thinking in the car on the way home. She was probably doing the sums in her head, wondering why she had to fall for the one who had a hole in his pocket. But even so she holds out her hand to Charlie and says, ‘Thank you for a lovely drive.’

And to Nugent, ‘Thank you for a lovely day.’

She looks Nugent in the eye. And she knows what he sees. And she doesn’t care.

I do not know why Ada married Charlie when it was Nugent who had her measure. And though you could say that she did not marry Nugent because she did not like him, that is not really enough. We do not always like the people we love–we do not always have that choice.

Maybe that was her mistake. She thought she could choose. She thought she could marry someone she liked and be happy with him, and have happy children. She did not realise that every choice is fatal. For a woman like Ada, every choice is an error, as soon as it is made.

17

ONE DAY, ADA packed a basket and took us to the seaside on the train. Or, I should say, she wrapped a few sandwiches in the waxed paper from the sliced pan, and she put them into her string shopping