The Death of an Irish Tradition by Bartholomew Gill Read Free Book Online Page B

closer to him.
    A flirt, he wondered? He didn’t think so. “No trouble.” He straightened up and made for the door. “None at all.”
    Already O’Shaughnessy had carried a chair to the farthest corner of the room. His hat still on, he had a newspaper in front of his face. He’d stay like that, seemingly disinterested in the entire proceeding. It was their way, once one of them had established a rapport with an interviewee.
    A Ban Gharda was sitting at a table in back of the two chairs, a stenographic typewriter in front of her.
    When Ward returned, the girl was staring out the window, over the slate rooftops of the Bank of Ireland and Trinity College down at the end of Dame Street, and she didn’t turn to him when he sat.
    Ward only crossed his legs and clasped his hands over his knee. He followed her gaze to the clear patch of sky that was the lightest blue.
    The clouds had begun to break now, almost in two, parting one half from the other so that sunlight slanted through the gap in pinkish shafts that struck north of the city, making the promontory of Howth Head and the golf links on North Bull Island seem very green indeed.
    After a while he said, “It must be hard.”
    She tilted her head slightly, as if listening for something else. “Have you ever lost a…parent, Hugh?” Again the measured words, the slightly absent tone.
    “Both of them.”
    “I’m so sorry. It must have been difficult for you.”
    “At first.”
    “How old were you?”
    “Fifteen.”
    “How did they die?”
    “Smash up.”
    “Brothers and sisters?”
    “All older.”
    “Who raised you?”
    “One of my brothers, although I really didn’t need much raising.”
    She turned to him. “But—fifteen?”
    She had a little spot, like a mole but smaller, up from the right corner of her mouth, on her upper lip, which was a bit protrusive. It seemed to tremble.
    Ward’s eyes followed the line of her long, straight nose to her black and now tear-filled eyes. Under the wide brim of the hat her face was shadowed and again he was taken by the quality of her skin. It was very white but not translucent, like that of so many other fair-skinned people, and it contrasted sharply with the mellow tan on the skin of her neck.
    Ward remembered the questions, the ones he’d found in McGarr’s preliminary report, but they could wait until he had established the proper mood.
    O’Shaughnessy turned a page of the newspaper and shifted his body away from them.
    The stenographer’s hands were poised on the keys of the machine, and she stared straight ahead at the wall, as though in her own world.
    “I knew what I wanted to do,” Ward went on. “I had to carry on. I figured my parents would have wanted it that way…would have wanted me to be as good as I could at what I had chosen.”
    She looked away from him, and her nostrils—thin and of that same clear, white texture—flared and her head quivered. “Being a policeman.” The voice had little relation to the emotion that was expressed on her face.
    “That’s right. In the way that your mother would have wanted you to go on with being a pianist. I understand that you’re going to study in London in the fall.”
    “Perhaps.” She opened a small black purse and removed a handkerchief.
    Ward wondered how long she had had the dress. It seemed new in style, made of some lustrous material he couldn’t place, and it was not the usual sort of black evening dress that the women of his acquaintance had in their wardrobes. He couldn’t guess the occasion on which she might wear such a thing, except for a funeral or while in mourning, and certainly she couldn’t have bought it so early on Saturday morning. And the way she was built—tall and thin but full—he guessed her clothes had to be fitted to her. Even her feet, which were long, were remarkably thin in black patent-leather pumps.
    “It wasn’t your idea, I gather—to study in London.”
    She shook her head and blotted the far corner of