The gathering - By Anne Enright Page 0,6
he is very patient, she might look at him, now. If he is very humble, she might state her terms.
Or maybe she won’t. Nothing has been said. No one has moved. It is possible that Nugent is imagining it all–or that I am. Maybe he is a pathetic thing at twenty-three; all hand-wrung tweed cap and Adam’s apple; maybe Ada doesn’t even notice him there across the room.
But this is 1925. A man. A woman. She must know what lies ahead of them now. She knows because she is beautiful. She knows because of all the things that have happened since. She knows because she is my Granny, and when she put her hand on my cheek I felt the nearness of death and was comforted by it. There is nothing as tentative as an old woman’s touch; as loving or as horrible.
Ada was a fantastic woman. I have no other word for her. For the set of her shoulders and the way she trotted off down the street, with her shopping bag flapping at her hip. Her hands were never empty, and you never saw what was in them; whatever was to be folded or washed or moved or wiped. You never noticed her eating either, because she was always listening to you, or talking; the food just disappeared; like it didn’t actually go into a hole in her face. Her manners were perfect, in other words, and contagious. Even when I was eight years old, I knew she had charm.
But how did Nugent know it, before she ever opened her mouth to speak to him? I can only suppose that it did not matter, that there were phases and stages to his attachment (he hated her, after all, before a quarter past seven), each of which he must re-enact in longer cycles–years long, or decades–he must move from love to a kind of sneering, he must be smitten by hatred and touched by desire, he must find a final humility and so begin with love again. Each time around he would know more about her–more about himself perhaps–and nothing he learned would make any difference. By fourteen minutes past seven, they are back just where they began.
But what of love?
Nugent does move now, quite suddenly. He ducks his forehead down and rubs his hairline at the roots. Is it possible that she might love him too? That they return to the moment when she walked in the door, and rise above these petty concerns of exchange and loss?
Ah yes, says the side of Ada’s sad face. And she thinks about love for a while.
Nugent feels it stir in the deep root of his penis; the future, or the beginning of the future. No one interrupts them, now. Someone has strangled the maid in an upstairs room; the puppet concierge is thrown on a chair. There are fourteen feet of carpet between them. Nugent thinks of the swell of his glans easing out from its sack of skin and Ada thinks about love, while the hotel clock slips, and softly grinds, and whirrs into the quarter-hour chimes.
Dee dee de dee dah!
Dah dah de dee dah!
Revived, summoned, the little concierge trots into the gloom of the foyer with a small footstool which he places under a lamp on the wall. He trots out again and comes back with a spill held aloft, its flame made dingy by the last light of day. He stands on the stool to remove the shade, turns on the jet, fumbles the spill and, before it is altogether too late, manages the flame to the gas. It hisses hollow and blue before settling into the yellow-green glow of the mantle, and the light dips and then bounces out into the room. The foyer is sick with the smell of gas, followed by the warm smell of burnt paper, as black flakes scatter from the man’s quick fluttering fingers. He replaces the shade, moves the stool under the next lamp, and leaves.
In his absence, the room pulses darker. And darker again.
He returns. Nugent and Ada both look at him as he completes the ritual of the lamp and stool; his entrances and exits; his ghastly self-importance as he moves around the walls towards the fourth and final lamp, which is above the chair in which Ada sits. He sets the stool beside her feet, as though bowing, and eases himself away again. After a long moment he comes back with the flame he might, but did