I related my background countless times in the space of a couple of hours. I said over and over again, ‘My name is Rachel. I’m twenty-seven. I’m not an anorexic, but thank you for asking, naturally I’m flattered. No, I haven’t always been this tall, I was slightly shorter the day I was born. I’ve lived in New York for the past two and a half years. I was in Prague before that…’
‘Where’s Prague?’ John Joe asked. ‘Is it in Tipperary?’
‘Jeee-zus.’ Clarence sucked his teeth and shook his head in disgust. ‘Did you hear him? “Is it in Tipperary?” You big thick.
‘Doesn’t everyone know,’ he added, ‘that it’s in Sligo.’
I was sorry I’d let slip that I’d once lived in Prague because at the mention of it everyone always became excited and it was no different in the Cloisters. Say to anyone, anywhere, ‘I’ve lived in Prague,’ and brace yourself to be asked questions. Three questions. The. Same. Three. Questions. Always, It was unbearable. Whenever I came home from Prague on my holidays, I was a woman on the edge, tensed against hearing The Three Questions one more time. In the end what I wanted to do was, anytime Prague was mentioned, to circulate a photocopied sheet of paper, that said ‘One: yes, you’re right, Prague is beautiful. Two: no, actually, the shops are much better now, you can get most things that you can get over here. Although not Kerrygold, of course, ha ha ha.’ (The Kerrygold question was the one that really, really annoyed me. And if it wasn’t Kerrygold it was Barrys tea.) ‘Three: yes, you really should get there before the Yanks have the place taken over.’
Talking about Prague always reminded me of what a philistine I was. I was ashamed that, even though Prague was beautiful and atmospheric, I hadn’t been comfortable there. Too wholesome, outdoorsy and undebauched for me. If there had been slightly less of the weekend skiing and hill walking and a bit more of the staying out till dawn in a succession of clubs, I might have liked it more.
As I was being quizzed by Eddie, the man with the bright red face, about the price of everything in Prague, the good-looking man came into the dining-room.
‘Here’s Christy,’ shouted a man with a luxuriant head of black hair and a huge Stalin moustache that strangely enough was grey. He pronounced it ‘Chreeeeeeeeesty’ thus letting me know that he was a salt-of-the-earth, dyed-in-the-wool, born-and-bread-and-butthered (as he would have said) Dublin man. Christy sat down a couple of places away from me. This threw me into such excited confusion that I lost my conversational thread and told Eddie that beer was much dearer in Prague than in Ireland. Which, of course, it wasn’t. He looked very surprised, and stepped up his interrogation.
‘Vodka?’ he demanded.
‘What about it?’
‘Dearer or cheaper?’
‘Cheaper.’
‘Whiskey?’
‘Dearer.’
‘Bacardi?’
‘Ah… cheaper, I think.’
‘But why would Bacardi be cheaper and whiskey be dearer?’ he demanded.
I just ummed and ahhed vaguely. I was too busy giving Christy a thorough, if sidelong examination. I had been right. He was good-looking. Even outside the Cloisters he would be. He had blue eyes that burned with brightness and pale colour, as if he’d been swimming in over-chlorinated water.
A little voice protested that it still preferred Luke, but I immediately silenced it. I intended to fancy this Christy whether I liked it or not. I was desperate to wipe out the hurt that Luke had caused and what better way than to become fixated on someone else? It was just random good fortune that Christy was so attractive I couldn’t take my eye off him. (I could only spare one because Eddie was such a demanding conversationalist.)
I stared sidelong at Christy as he talked energetically to the Stalin-moustache man. Christy had my favourite type of mouth, a Dave Allen one.
(Dave Allen was a dissipated raconteur whom I used to watch in the late seventies. My father regularly entertains people, i.e. bores them comatose, by telling them about how I used to scream my head off to be allowed to stay up to watch Dave Allen on telly.)
(I was twenty-five.)
(I was only joking about that last bit.)
Anyway, a Dave Allen mouth is a great thing on a man. It’s an unusual mouth, because it looks as if it’s slightly too big for the face that it belongs to. But in a highly appealing way. A quirky mouth, whose corners turn up or down as if they have a life of their own. People blessed with Dave Allen mouths always look slightly wry.
I continued giving Chris the discreet once over. Even his hair was nice. Wheat-coloured, and cut well.
Despite his mobile, quirky mouth, he looked like a man, one you could depend on. Not one that you could depend on to not ring you, the other kind of dependable, the ‘I’ll get you out of a burning building’ kind.
I thought he was gorgeous, except, of course, for his height. When he stood up to reach the teapot from further along the table, I saw that he wasn’t much taller than me. Which was a disappointment, but one I was familiar with.
But despite that, there was some very pleasing body action going on. He was thin. Not in a pale, concave, weedy, toast-rack-for-ribs, baguettes-for-thighs kind of way. Lean would be a better word to describe him. His sleeves were shoved up and he had strong-looking forearms that I wanted to touch. And he had great legs. They were a tiny bit shorter than would be considered ideal. Which was fine by me. If I thought a man was good-looking, the addition of shortish legs pushed him into the realm of very sexy. I wasn’t sure why. It might have had something to do with an indication of sturdiness.
Or the suggestion of a thick willy. Even though I knew I was supposed to love them, I wasn’t wild about men with very long legs. They were the caviar of the leg world. In other words, I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Men with lanky legs often put me in mind of giraffes and ballerinas and general effeminatry.
Christy was in no way effeminate.
I suddenly understood why they’d always made such a song and dance about Corpus Christy at Mass. Now that I’d experienced it first-hand, I certainly wouldn’t ever again have any objections getting on my knees for it… but that was enough of that kind of talk. With a pang of loneliness, I realized that I missed Brigit, I missed Luke, I missed having someone to talk dirty with.
I wrenched my mind away from Luke and back to Christy and his body.