Claire Kilroy - All Names Have Been Changed

The group resumed their search. Faye poked around with her good hand, finding it difficult to accept that Sylvia could have done such a thing to her and making excuses for the animal. That was Faye all over. Didn’t live in the real world, was unable to assimilate the idea of badness into her outlook. Got it, Antonia finally said without inflection, without her customary air of condescension. Night had fallen by then.

The girls climbed out of the shrubbery to examine their quarry, their skirts wet and clinging to their legs. On the palm of Antonia’s outstretched hand lay a small curled trilobite. ‘It’s his hearing aid!’ I stammered with relief, ‘oh thank God for that!’ but they’d tuned me out again. Faye would have to explain it all to me later, in that patient primary-school-teacher way of hers, and I would sit by her knee, listening and nodding attentively, obedient as a Labrador, as good as gold. I hoped. Go home, Guinevere had told me, you’re only impeding us, and not one of them had contradicted her.

‘I suppose we’d better bring it back to him,’ Aisling said.

Antonia slowly tipped her palm, and Aisling caught the small salmon-pink plastic moulding in her cupped hands. ‘He’s all yours,’ Antonia informed them. ‘Go in there and tie his shoelaces. I’m washing my hands of him. Goodnight.’

She headed for the Nassau Street gate, shoulders thrown back in full Valkyrie mode. I watched her glide across the cobbles, steady as a ship on her stilettos. You could see why Glynn had fallen for her, all the same. No one could deny she had class. ‘You have to admire her sometimes,’ I conceded, turning back to the group, but they had already deserted me.

I caught up with Antonia on the ramp to the Arts Block. She appraised me with an arched eyebrow. ‘Look who it is,’ she said without slowing her pace. Her causticity suited my frame of mind. I was in the mood for her.

‘State of Professor Glynn,’ I offered, believing it was a topic she’d rise to, but Antonia would not be drawn.

‘Glynn is not a professor. That’s an affectation he picked up in the States.’

‘But it says Professor Glynn on his door in the English Department.’

‘No it doesn’t. Go back and check.’

We emerged onto Nassau Street and stood at the kerb, side by side with nothing to say to each other. A convoy of double-decker buses trundled towards us. Antonia was standing too close to the edge. There were so many buses, all of a sudden, that it became farcical. Just as it seemed a gap in the traffic might appear, another came heaving around the corner.

‘Do you want to go for a drink?’ I eventually asked. The screech of bus brakes drowned out my voice.

‘What?’ she shouted over the racket.

‘Can I buy you a drink?’ I shouted back.

The roar of bus engines died down like a drop in the wind, and all was suddenly hushed, as hushed as it had been within the college walls, as if the street itself waited on Antonia’s answer. She appraised me with her arched eyebrow once more.

‘Certainly‚’ she replied when she was good and ready. ‘Certainly, you can buy me a drink, Declan .’ She enunciated my name with pointed scepticism as if, no more than Glynn’s title, she knew it to be a sham. There was something about her cynicism that endeared her to me then. She made herself easy to describe.

She led me to a cellar wine bar just past McGonagles, knowing full well that I could not afford such a place. I could see her smiling away to herself, enjoying my discomfort. She had style, Antonia. Style is everything, Glynn had told us, reeling off the names of the great prose stylists, urging us to devote our lives to them.

‘I’ve never been here before,’ I said after she’d ordered a bottle of Bordeaux. This information was of no interest to Antonia. She did not acknowledge it. They had seated us at a table in the corner. Her lipstick left a waxy cerise print on the rim of her wine glass. This pattern was repeated on the filter of her cigarette, a set of matching tableware. ‘Sorry,’ I said when I accidentally kicked her ankle. I glanced under the table when she registered no annoyance, and saw that it was only her handbag.

‘I didn’t realise Professor Glynn wore a hearing aid,’ I mentioned. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. It was that, or sit in silence.

‘Not any more he doesn’t, apparently. The man isn’t prepared to listen to us any longer. He made that perfectly clear when he chucked the dirty little contraption into the bushes. A metaphorical act, I suppose you would call it.’ Antonia gazed over my shoulder to see who else was in the room. No one took her fancy, and she returned her attention to me. ‘What’s all this fuss between you and Lady Guinevere? Break her heart, did we?’

‘Oh,’ I said. That.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘ That. ’

‘What about you and Professor Glynn?’

Antonia shrugged and knocked back her glass of wine. He had called her Grendel behind her back a few weeks ago. ‘Where’s Grendel gotten too?’ he’d asked in the pub, and we’d burst into laughter. Well, only I had burst into laughter — the girls had looked at the floor — but the point was, we all knew who he meant. Just one of our number fit that description. I’d felt sorry for Antonia then, and stopped laughing. I’m sure she’d have appreciated my pity.

‘I suppose we have to make allowances for Professor Glynn,’ I said. ‘In his condition,’ I added.

Antonia topped up my glass and refilled hers, emptied it, refilled it again. ‘Jesus Christ, you make him sound like he’s ancient.’

‘Professor Glynn is ancient.’

‘He’s fifty-six.’

‘Exactly.’

Too late I realised my colossal blunder. Age was a delicate matter amongst women who were past it. Antonia’s mouth momentarily lost its footing, but it quickly regained its balance and she threw some more wine into it. ‘So fifty-six is ancient now, is it, Declan?’ She beamed that tight smile of hers across the table at me. Ping .

‘I suppose it’s not that old.’ My father was dead at fifty-two. ‘It’s not that old at all, really, when you think about it.’

‘How old do you think I am?’

‘You told us how old you are.’

‘Yes, but how old do you think I am? Do you think I am old ?’

‘No. Of course not.’

‘Liar.’

She bent over to pick up her handbag, clipping the wine bottle with an elbow. It toppled over, and a broad ruby stain surged across the white linen towards me. I lurched to escape its path. This was an overreaction on my part. The tablecloth absorbed the spillage. I set the bottle upright. ‘Sorry,’ I said, though I wasn’t the one who had knocked it. I threw a napkin down to conceal the stain, as if it were somehow shameful, which it somehow was. ‘Shit, I’m really sorry.’

Antonia signalled to the waiter for a replacement bottle. ‘Doesn’t matter. It was nearly empty.’

The second bottle arrived. The waiter uncorked it and poured. ‘I don’t have the money to pay for this,’ I said quietly when he was gone.

‘I know. I will pay for it.’ She stubbed out her cigarette. ‘I will pay for it,’ she repeated grimly. There is always a price .

The use of portent and double meaning featured prominently in Antonia’s prose, as did the persistently bitter tone, imprinting itself on every word that flowed from her pen, as ingrained as her accent. I shifted uncomfortably in my chair and kicked her handbag a third time. ‘Sorry,’ I said again.

‘For God’s sake, stop apologising.’ She excused herself to the bathroom, taking her handbag with her.