“He did not recognize the man but his mood turned quickly sombre as he moved to the front door. An experienced publican is an educated reader of mood’s nuance. It wasn’t Death, by any chance, that stood there?” Fiction by Kevin Barry.
He hadn’t noticed the voices at first. In the endless stretch of the afternoon he entered the pub through the side door with a soft hushed aspect as if broaching a place of burial. It was late March by now, the clocks about to change, and the first heat of the year was intimated when he raised the blinds a few inches to allow the sunlight through. He did so as to show the place up. The effect of the light was to insinuate life. The motes of dust in the sunbeams were life.
Waught had lived until he was two days shy of ninety. He had been some-and-fifty years dying. Waught had been a man for the low tables rather than a barside perch—an antisocial man who needed people. From the passageway, he looked back now toward the barroom, toward the lost voices. The five empty tables were lit in the afternoon glare. Continuing on, he entered with an apologetic air the realm of the Ladies’. He opened the window above the sink and sprayed the one toilet with Dettol.
As he reëntered the barroom, three slow knocks sounded on the front door, followed by two rapid ones, as if a code were being employed. He went to the window and looked under the blind and saw a blocky man in late middle age faced to consider the bay, the Stags, the equinoctial sky. He did not recognize the man but his mood turned quickly sombre as he moved to the front door. An experienced publican is an educated reader of mood’s nuance.
The greatest mystery is how others perceive us. The pub had been a respectable premises always and he could not have imagined that the family was other than well regarded. But he realized, too, that the charge of snobbery is often an astonishment to those so arraigned. He must concede that it had been. It was many years since Godfrey had haunted the premises, had across the low tables roamed a humorous gaze. Godfrey had been a Church of Ireland farmer from the Ox Mountains transplanted by a peculiar marriage to the North Mayo plain—from beyond the place himself, he could see it more clearly. True enough that his father had been a careful man. Growing up in the house of such a man you could hear yourself thinking.
“Would I eat? I don’t know would I eat. Would you throw on a sandwich for me anyhow? I’m not sayin’ I’d eat it. Though it might steady the ship a small while.”
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