“Can everyone over here sing?” she whispered, leaning across to Corrigan and Mick.
“Ah, it’s the drink that does it. He’ll be croaking like a rusty gate by morning,” Mick told her, ruining the whole effect.
“Most of those songs were written by people who’d been away from Ireland so long that they forgot what it was like,” Corrigan said.
“Or never been there, more like,” Mick agreed.
“Six months over here, and you’d be writing the same about Pittsburgh,” Corrigan told Evelyn.
They did visit Trinity College, finally, with its stiffly aristocratic frontages of gray, columned stone, staring down over an inner maze of interlocking lawns and cobbled courts. Evelyn was fascinated by the famous Long Room chamber of the Old Library, built in 1724, with its wood paneling, carvings, and gallery, containing hundreds of thousands of volumes going back to medieval times and before. Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, George Berkeley, and Oscar Wilde had been students here, and again, walking among the ceiling-high shelves of cracked leather bindings and yellowing folios, Evelyn found herself reliving images of a time of tastes and sensitivities that had passed—even with the brash intrusion of a gaudily modern gift-and-souvenir shop, underneath on the ground floor.
They shopped in O’Connell Street, had lunch in the open, airy environment—with the sun actually putting in an appearance that day, reassuring the faithful of its existence—of the glass-enclosed mall by Stephen’s Green. They saw Georgian squares and walked over the bridges along the Liffey, jostled through street markets, and took the tour of the Guinness brewery.
And, partly as an aid to working off the effects of a week’s overindulging, they joined the crowd of afternoon strollers walking the best part of a mile out to the lighthouse at the end of Dun Laoghaire pier. The weather that day—Mick said that four seasons a day was the norm in Ireland—was fine and dry, the wind brisk, the sea air bracing.
“I think it’s wonderful,” Evelyn said to Corrigan and Mick. “All these people out walking just for the pleasure of it. It’s more the way things should be. Back home legs are getting to be for emergencies only.”
“Have you seen what the price of gas is here?” Corrigan snorted.
Back at the house, Helen Corrigan showed her the traditional way of making tea, in a pot. “I don’t care what those two say,” Evelyn declared as they set out cups, saucers, sugar, and milk on a tray in the kitchen. “I think they do it to twig me. It’s a side of the humor that I haven’t really figured out yet. But people here still have a charm that you don’t find in many places around the world these days.”
“Ah yes, it’s the charm of them that you have to watch,” Helen replied, smiling faintly as she cut slices of still-unfinished Christmas cake.
“How’s that?”
“People will behave as outrageously as the world will let them. And charm is how they extend the limits. Joe can be one of the worst. But it’s not a lot of good telling you that now, I suppose.”
Finally, Corrigan and Evelyn said their goodbyes and au revoirs to a final gathering of relatives and friends, and loaded their bags into Dermot’s eighties-vintage Rover. Then they left Dun Laoghaire to drive across to Galway on the west coast of Ireland, where, as hoped, Dermot had arranged for them to visit Corrigan’s former professor, Brendan Maguire, at Ballygarven before their return to the States.
Chapter Twenty-two
More rooms with fluorescent lights and pastel walls, racks of electronics, glowing computer screens. Not rooms formed of movable partition-walls and ceiling tiles, but solidly built from stone, with mullioned bay windows, modernized to a laboratory environment. Maguire had installed his research outpost of Trinity in a large old house a little above the town itself, known locally as “The Rectory.”
Maguire himself was a short, rounding, Pickwickian figure with a crescent of ragged white hair fringing a balding head that had taken on the same, post-holidays, pinkish hue as his face. He had a pair of ferocious white eyebrows, and rimless spectacles that tended to sit halfway down a bulbous, purple-veined nose. He was wearing a crumpled tweed jacket of brown-and-tan check with a woven tie, plaid shirt, and baggy gray flannel trousers with turnups that hadn’t been in style in fifteen years. From appearances, Evelyn would have dismissed him as a bumbling rural schoolteacher. Corrigan told her not to be deceived: it was Maguire’s insistence on accurate thinking and old-fashioned rigor that Corrigan had to thank for his later successes in the States.