Tender (21 page)

“Yeah, well.”

“Yeah, well,”
he mimicked her. He flashed her a smile. Catherine stared at it.
Moonfoam and silver,
the guy on the television sang.

M
ichael Doonan was already in the bar of the Central Hotel when Catherine got there, ten minutes before the appointed time. He was sitting on one of the long couches by the fireplace, wearing a brown polo neck and faded jeans, and he was pouring tea from a pot on the low table in front of him. His gray hair was shoulder-length, and though he was bald on top, the tresses were surprisingly thick and full; they also looked freshly groomed. Catherine, who had come racing into the room, intending to set herself up at one of the more private tables in the corner, came to a stop and backtracked a couple of steps, and it was at that moment that he noticed her, and clearly realized who she was; he gave her a cool, appraising nod, and patted the couch cushion. Catherine waved, too eagerly, and lurched forward.

She had spent all morning and all afternoon in the library, frantically trying to extract a set of coherent questions from the dozens of pages of notes she had accumulated. Though the publicist had told her only to concentrate on the latest novel, Catherine had wanted to appear very familiar with Doonan’s work when she met him, and so she had tried, in the week gone by, to cram all of the books, from his debut novel
Cunningham
onwards, and very quickly she had become overwhelmed, and instead of paring back she had piled even more material onto the fire—calling up critical essays on Doonan from the stacks, looking up old interviews with him on the microfilm machines, emailing one of her lecturers, even, to ask his advice (the lecturer had not seemed to take her seriously, sending her a short note warning her not to be too easily charmed by “the great man”)—and by the time she was leaving the library and walking the five minutes to the Central, Catherine had wanted only to run home to Longford and dive into one of the hiding places she had had as a child. Longford had come to mind, probably, because Baggot Street would no longer be the haven it had been with James there; he would have moved into his place on Thomas Street now, and while Catherine would visit him there often, and while he had promised to call on Baggot Street a couple of times a week, it would not be the same. At the end of the visit he would always have to go home, or she would. And so she wanted, now, to hide somewhere she would not have to leave. Somewhere from which she would not be expelled.

“Miss Reilly,” Doonan said, his tone sounding wryly mocking or ironic, and her surname sounding like an accusation, somehow, and Catherine nodded, and sat down too heavily beside him.

“Thank you so much for meeting me,” Catherine said, all in a rush.

He looked surprised; almost, she thought, offended. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Oh, well,” Catherine shook her head, attempting to push her bag under the couch so that the carbuncle of scribbled notes protruding from it might not be so visible, but of course Doonan saw it immediately, and of course immediately understood her reason for hiding it; as his writing made excruciatingly clear, Doonan missed nothing. It was what Catherine had come, over the hours of rereading him, to dread: the prospect of sitting in front of him, in the full glare of those famous powers of perception.

“So you’re in Trinity,” Doonan said, and he gave her a strange, bright smile. His eyes were an arresting deep blue. His nose was heavily pitted, and flushed in the way she knew to suggest heavy drinking, though maybe it was just one of those things that came with age: Doonan was sixty-one.

“Yes,” Catherine said cautiously, conscious of how, in his novels, he seemed to have only scorn for people who went to university, or who devoted themselves to activities even vaguely artistic or intellectual. In a short story, the name of which she could not, right now, remember—her mouth went dry at this realization, as though Doonan had actually demanded its title—a graduate student at Trinity had died a horrible death, alone and pathetic in his bedsit, and the writing had been utterly devoid of sympathy for him. “English and art history,” she added, in an apologetic undertone.

“That must be nice for your parents,” he said, gesturing towards the cup and saucer which had been laid out for her; she nodded to say that yes, she would like some tea.

“I suppose,” she laughed nervously, and Doonan laughed too.

“Well, you’re in it now whether they like it or not, says you,” he said, winking, and he poured her tea.

“No, no, I don’t take milk, thanks,” she said then to his silent query, which was a lie.

Michael Doonan had twice been nominated for the Booker Prize, and had once been described as a Booker winner anyway by a profile in the
Sunday Independent,
an error which had been picked up as fact and repeated by several other journalists. In the photographs which accompanied these articles, he always looked furious, glowering out of the page with his arms folded, which for Catherine, doing her research in the microfilm room this week, had only made the mistakes funnier, and she had intended to ask him about this, but now that he was beside her, with what looked like the same glower crossing his features every couple of minutes, she felt less inclined. She should stick to biography instead, she decided, and so, she asked Doonan the questions to which she already knew the answers, and she fiddled with the
TN
Dictaphone while he recited them.

Doonan had been born above his father’s butcher shop in Glasson, a village in County Westmeath. He had trained as a butcher, and until he was almost forty, he had made his living from the trade. He wrote in the evenings and on Sunday afternoons, and it was the success of
Let Her Go,
in 1978, that allowed him to retire and write full-time. He was married, to Julia, and they lived in a lovely mews house close to the city center, which was lovely, he said, because his “lovely Julia” had made it that way. He was the author of seven novels and two collections of stories. He wrote every day, including Sundays, and he did not see what all this nonsense was about writing being difficult. It was, he said, about putting your arse on the chair and getting on with it. It was, in that respect, the same as any other trade, except that it was in fact much easier, because you were sitting down while you were doing it.

“I interviewed Pat McCabe last month, actually, speaking of butchers,” she said as soon as he had finished telling her his philosophy of writing. “
The Butcher Boy,
you know?” she added, as though it was necessary. “He was gas.”

There was a long pause, during which her heart began a horrible, dread-steeped thumping.

“Mmm,” Doonan said eventually, cracking his knuckles. “I hope you didn’t believe everything Mr. McCabe told you about carcasses.”

“Oh, we didn’t really talk about carcasses,” Catherine said hurriedly. “We talked mainly about writing, actually.”

“And are we going to talk about writing, I wonder?”

“Oh,” Catherine stammered, and he laughed.

“You’re attractive when you blush,” he said, his eyes on her throat. “Do you know that?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Catherine blurted, feeling, now, quite miserable; ostensibly, yes, what Doonan had said had been a compliment, but not really, she knew. Really, he had been letting her know that he saw how flustered she was, and how young and unprepared and incapable of handling this thing properly—and yet, with others she had handled it properly: with McCabe, for instance, she had been completely fine, clear and to the point, and even able to laugh with him, so what was wrong with her now? Why was she not even confident of lifting her teacup, in case her hands would shake so much that she would splash it all over Doonan’s awful, too-tight jeans? Why could she barely even remember the plot of
Engines of Everything
? She did not even trust herself to mention the name of the main character now, in case she got it wrong. Mickey Donovan, he was called, she was almost certain; but what if it was actually Mickey Donaghy? What if it was Mikey, not Mickey? How could she be unclear on something so basic?

And now she was blushing even more furiously, she knew, and Doonan was enjoying the sight of it, even chuckling to himself now, the prick, as he was stirring his second cup of tea, and asking her with his eyes whether she was ready for her second cup too, but no, she hadn’t even touched the first one; why would she, when it had no milk?
Get a grip,
she told herself, gritting her teeth, and she took a deep breath and she looked him in the eye.

“Mr. Doonan. In
Engines of Everything,
you return to a theme which has preoccupied you throughout your career.”

“Getting the damn thing finished, you mean?”

“No, no,” she said. “The theme of self-reliance.”

“Well, I suppose—”

“Well, you see, what I was thinking,” Catherine said, cutting in—at this, he glanced at her in surprise but allowed her to continue—“What made me think about this was actually Whitman’s poetry. You know, Walt Whitman?”

“Yes, I know of Walt Whitman,” Doonan said levelly.

“Well, of course. Well, you see, in ‘Song of Myself,’ he has a line
so
similar to what one of your characters says to the other when they’re breaking up.”

“Does he?”

“Yeah. I’ll find it, I have it here,” Catherine said, and she dug into her bag and riffled through her pages for the place where she had written down his protagonist’s words and underlined them in red pen, adding, beside them, the Whitman line. “See, here,” she said, as she found it, and she thrust her foolscap pages towards Doonan, but thought better of it at the last moment, and took them back to herself. “Leona says, ‘I have this feeling, this fear, and it’s in me, Tommy, and I don’t understand it.’”

“Yes.”

“And the Whitman line is, ‘There is that in me—I do not know what it is—but I know it is in me.’”

There was a silence. Catherine looked at Doonan, and she put the notes back in her bag, which took a couple of moments, but still he did not say anything.

“It just really struck me,” she said excitedly, as she sat back up.

“I can see that.”

“And did you, um—did you think about Whitman at all when you were working on
Engines of Everything
?”

He stared. “Why would I think about Whitman?”

“Oh, no, I mean—” Catherine said, and she stopped. What the hell was she doing? Why was she throwing all of this nonsense at Doonan instead of asking him a simple question? “I suppose you wouldn’t,” she said then. “Necessarily.”

He looked at her for a long moment, then leaned forward to take a sip of his tea. Sitting back, he indicated Catherine’s cup. “That’ll be spoiled on you shortly,” he said. “Drink up.”

“Oh, thanks,” she said, and she took a sip: bitter, and lukewarm. It took effort not to spit it back into the cup.

“Would you prefer a proper drink?” Doonan said, sounding concerned.

“Oh, no. I’m OK.”

“You’re certain?”

She nodded.

“And you like Whitman, do you?”

“Well, I’m doing this course on American poetry—”

“I’m more of a Dickinson man myself,” Doonan said.

“Really?”

He nodded. “I like the way she kept to herself, and then left them word to destroy every scrap of hers that they came across after she was gone. That’s the way to do it.”

“But surely you wouldn’t like that to be done with
your
work?” Catherine heard herself say, and she could almost have shouted with relief: it was actually something amounting to a question.

“Well, it’s out there now, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, yes, I know, I know,” Catherine said. “But I mean, the immortality question, I suppose.”

“Oh, we’re talking about immortality now?”

“Well, if you don’t mind,” said Catherine, vaguely.

“Do I mind immortality?” Doonan mused. He glanced at her. “Would I have someone like you for company, though? There’s the rub.”

“I think your wife might have something to say about that,” Catherine said, with a hectic laugh. Doonan’s expression, intense and unsmiling, did not change.

“Would I, though? Would I have that luck?” he said.

“Oh, now,” Catherine said, managing to laugh, and he liked this, she could see, and a thought occurred to her. “Sex,” she said, knowing instantly that she had blurted the word out too abruptly, too randomly, but if Doonan was taken aback, he gave no sign of it.

“Go on,” he said.

“You write it very well,” Catherine said, in another blurt. “You write it brilliantly.”

“Well, thanks very much,” Doonan murmured. “That’s interesting to hear.”

“I’m just wondering, though, whether it takes a lot of consideration?” Catherine said. “To do that, I mean.”

“Consideration?” Doonan said.

“Yes,” Catherine nodded eagerly. “I mean, if you have to think about it a lot? Or try the scenes out in different ways?” This was not what she had come up with in her notes; what
had
she come up with in her notes? Why had she brought them at all, for Christ’s sake, if they were so unreadable and unusable?

“I mean, do you have to work especially hard at those scenes in your fiction?”

He looked offended. “Do they read like that?”

“Oh, no,” Catherine said quickly. “Not at all.”

“That’s a relief.”

“It’s just, the challenge from self-consciousness that I’m interested in, I suppose,” she said.

He twitched an eyebrow, raised a hand to get the attention of the waitress. “I can see that, darling,” he said.

“Look, it probably wasn’t as bad as you think,” Emmet said half an hour later. He had been at his usual desk in the publications office when she had arrived, still in a state of shock, and one glance had told him all he needed to know about how the interview had gone. He had laughed at her, of course; he had thrown his head back and guffawed, but then he had seemed to register the fact that Catherine was actually upset, and now he was trying to talk her round.

“No,” Catherine said, slamming down the Dictaphone. “It was horrific. It could not have been worse.”

“Well, no, it could have been,” Emmet said. “By the sounds of it.”

“What do you mean?” Catherine said, wretchedly.

“Well, that you could have actually…I mean…” Emmet shrugged, to indicate that he preferred not to say any more.