LITMIR.BIZ

       chapter four

       Women on and off the Wall

      She had been waiting and pretending she was not, reading The Use and Abuse of Emergency Legislation in Northern Ireland, but she tired of these games with herself, as they no longer worked: she was waiting. All night; so she designed a reason she had to talk to him with that proficiency that characterized everything she did, and rang herself. No answer. And later, again, with only rugby and snooker and Ulster Newstime on TV—another bomb in the city center. Twice more; she wondered was he off on a tear. She knew it was not her affair. Not her affair. Words were always turning on Constance.

      Finally she replaced the receiver for the last time. Her concoction was only so urgent; it was after midnight, and her excuse had just turned into a pumpkin.

      Farrell kept a small office off the Lisburn Road with no sign on the door. It was a suite of two rooms and a reception area but no secretary, which Constance had long ceased to consider herself. Nowhere, not on his stationery nor on a single card in his wallet, was there a title or the name of an organization.

      Constance Trower had no official position. He had never told her what hours to keep, paid her whatever she asked for, and gave her no itemized responsibilities, which of course meant that she would arrive early and stay late, ask for far too little money in return, and take responsibility for everything.

      He’d bristled at an office, but later liked having another territory, another key. Farrell collected them; rings jangled every suit pocket. (Though he’d forgotten what the keys were to, he wouldn’t throw them out. Farrell placed a high value on access.) “For security reasons” he didn’t keep regular hours himself, though Farrell, like the British government, found “security” a convenient umbrella under which to protect a variety of idiosyncrasies.

      He did not, for example, own a car, instead hiring taxis as far as Derry and Armagh. Yet Constance was convinced he was less terrified of gelly wired to his chassis than of insurance forms. Besides, he liked taxis. He liked making the driver go where he wanted, being conveyed. He liked privacy and scorned petty details like changing buses in Portadown; he deliberately had no sense of direction. Train schedules were an imposition; why, he might not want to go to Dublin then. The only organized transport he did not resist was the airplane. The atmosphere of hurry and importance made up for meeting the timetables, if barely—he liked nothing more than whisking onto international flights with the door closing on his coattails. Airports are the last refuge of urgency in this world.

      His most aggravating “security measure” had to do with his own house—wherever that was. And if he didn’t tell Constance where he lived, he clearly told no one. Farrell admitted parties here had probably found him out, but he was hardly going to make it easy for them by publishing in the directory. Once more, however, the nature of Belfast simply conformed to the nature of Farrell O’Phelan, as if he were not camouflaged for the city but the city for him. He would hardly be holding hoolies on his front yard every June if only he could afford to share his address with his many friends and neighbors, with their children and dogs.

      As for the office, he had no interest in decor—and the number of things Farrell had no interest in by policy could grow irksome if you listed them out—and left the walls to Constance. Her original selection of, she thought, harmless travel posters underestimated the depth of Farrell’s loathing for his island: the rolling hills of Kerry, the thatched byre houses in Tyrone—from which, he claimed, he could “smell the sheep from across the room,” the craggy sprat fishermen of Antrim. (“Look at that face,” he had cried, “twisted with fifty years of spite. You realize he’s not fishing at all—which would be economically useful—but looking out for a boat of Kalashnikov AK-47s for the UDA!”) After two days Farrell had had his fun, and Aer Lingus had to go.

      Those intervening weeks had been frustrating; she wanted to please him. And Farrell did have an aesthetic, even if he wouldn’t dirty his hands with carpet swatches. Whitewells and all that travel had refined him beyond Glengormley—he bought only the best in clothes, gadgets, presents when he remembered (with Constance, once). While the Best Of habit was lazy, the application of an easy rule that spared him individual decisions, inevitably he’d become rather starchy. No help, Farrell had less taste than distaste: he recognized what he didn’t want. Had a Unionist streak in him, Farrell did.

      When they next went to London, then, between setting up his interviews, she scuttled into the Museum Shop at the Tate. She turned her mind off entirely and just went by feel, flipping the racks of prints, art by Braille. What she unrolled back at the hotel surprised her.

      For had anyone asked before the Tate how Farrell’s preferences in art might run, she’d surely have answered the Futurists, full of tumult and flight; the nightmares of Surrealists, trapped in their own heads as he in his—contorted Dalís, absurd Magrittes; or dour Brueghels. She might have made a case for the Middle Ages, with the flat agony of those pigments, the gory, long-suffering crucifixions in which he’d recognize his own face, the plain, self-denying, racked penitence and flesh effacement of his childhood. Or perhaps, recognizing his stodgy side, she’d have said nothing modern—only classics, Da Vincis and Michelangelos, name brands, the way he bought everything, the Best. But none of these presentiments described what she spread on the bed that night.

      Women. Not conflicted character portraits, either, but young, even virginal things, with red cheeks and languid fingers. Simple women, with water. Soft women—Whistler’s The Little White Girl; seaside Seurat; Degas. Shapely, sway-hipped Tissots, splayed nineteenth-century picnics by a pool, languid bites into apples with a demitasse, bustles curved at a pleasure-boat rail. Inshaw’s The Badminton Game, long hair in breeze, shuttlecock midair. April Love, the Lady of Shalott. Round women, drowsy women, beautiful women. And while some were dolorous—Matisse; Ophelia—the girls were never angry or scheming, filled with nothing so demanding as desire. No, these were guileless women, tender, and probably even stupid, not that he would value their stupidity, but what he would want from them had nothing to do with talk. Farrell might slop through every rank backroom in Belfast, but Farrell’s women were innocent.

      When she hung the prints late one night and waited for Farrell to walk in the office that morning, Constance jittered, only pretending to scan papers as he strode pensively from one painting to the next, all nicely framed. He said nothing. He studied each one a long time. He went to his own office and shut the door. He’d not mentioned them then or since, but neither did he insist they come down. And just as she knew to choose them, Constance knew not to bring them up. She was not hurt; he was, a little. The paintings were an intrusion. By accident or instinct she had found his neighborhood. Whistler’s Little White Girl stuck to the wall by his desk like a pin on a map.

      Having phoned until midnight the night before, Constance knew it was ridiculous to feel injured. So he hadn’t rung himself, wouldn’t he see her the next morning? At the office she was unusually efficient—which is to say immeasurably efficient, frightening, perfect—and, as Farrell swept in and out, a little cold. As evening drew he ducked in the loo and reappeared, face washed,

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