I was twenty-six when I met her, on a wet Thursday night in Dublin, the kind of night when the city looks like it has been varnished. The pavements shone under taxi lights, the Liffey was black and restless, and everyone in town seemed to be walking too quickly towards warmth. I had gone into The Long Hall after work with two lads from the office, not because I wanted company but because I did not want to go back to my bedsit in Rathmines and listen to the radiator click like an old man’s jaw.
Her name was Niamh. I remember that before I remember her face, which feels strange now, because I have forgotten so many other things from that time. I remember she had a green scarf twisted around her neck and a laugh that arrived a second before she did, as if it had opened the door for her. She was with a friend who knew one of the lads from my office. That was how it began, as most things begin in Dublin, with someone knowing someone and a table being pulled slightly wider.
I was not looking for love. I was not even looking for a night with anyone. I had come out of a three-year relationship six months earlier and was still carrying myself around like a broken chair, useful enough if nobody leaned on me. My ex had left for London and taken with her a version of the future I had quietly assumed was mine. I told people I was grand. I was always grand then. Men in their twenties can make a whole religion out of being grand.
Niamh was thirty, a primary school teacher from Phibsborough, and she spoke about her class as if they were tiny drunk philosophers. She had opinions about everything, but not the tiresome kind. She loved St Stephen’s Green early in the morning, hated people who stood on the left side of escalators, and said the best chipper in Dublin was the one closest to you at midnight. I did not agree with all of it, but I wanted her to keep talking.
We moved on to Whelan’s because somebody suggested music, though I could not tell you now who played. I only remember the heat of the room and the small collisions of shoulders, the smell of beer and rain drying on coats. At some point the others drifted away. Niamh and I stood near the back, not dancing exactly, more swaying in the permission of the crowd. She leaned towards me to say something about the singer, and her hair brushed my cheek. That was the moment, I think. Not the kiss later outside. Not the taxi. That small accidental touch was when I knew the night had changed shape.
We walked for a while after, because neither of us wanted to be the first to name what was happening. Along George’s Street, past shuttered shops and people laughing too loudly, then towards the river. It had stopped raining but the city was still dripping. On the Ha’penny Bridge she told me she was tired of sensible men. I said I was tired of pretending to be one. It was the kind of thing I would cringe at now, but she smiled as if I had handed her something honest.
She came back to my flat in Rathmines. There is no need to dress it up. It was a one-night stand, though it did not feel cheap or careless. It felt, to my surprise, gentle. We were kind to each other. I remember her bare feet on my cold kitchen tiles while I made tea we never drank. I remember the ridiculous pattern on my duvet and being embarrassed by it. I remember waking before her and seeing her asleep beside me, one hand tucked under her face, completely unguarded. That sight frightened me more than desire ever had.
In the morning, she asked for a pen and wrote her number on the back of an electricity bill. She said I could call her if I wanted. Not when. If. There was no performance in it, no trap, no demand. That made it worse. I walked her to the bus stop near Rathmines Road. She kissed my cheek and told me not to become too sensible. Then she got on the bus and sat upstairs by the window. I stood there like a man in a film, except in films the man runs after the bus. I went home and made toast.
I kept the number. That is the detail that has embarrassed me for twenty years. I did not throw it away. I did not lose it. I folded the bill carefully and put it inside a book I was pretending to read, a copy of Dubliners, because of course it was. For the first week, I took it out every night. I rehearsed what I would say. Something light, something ordinary. I would ask her for coffee. I would ask whether her class had said anything mad that day. I would ask whether she had survived Monday. But I never called.
There was no noble reason. That is what regret teaches you eventually: most of our worst choices are not dramatic. They are small acts of cowardice repeated until they become a life. I was afraid she had seen me too clearly. I was afraid I would like her too much. I was afraid she would not like me enough. I was afraid she would. So I did nothing and called it respecting the casualness of the night.
Weeks passed. Then months. I dated other women. I moved flats, then jobs. I met a kind woman named Sarah and married her when I was thirty-four. We had good years and hard ones, as people do. I did not pine for Niamh every day like some tragic fool staring at rain on glass. That would be too easy a lie. I loved my wife. I built a life. But every so often, something would bring Niamh back with unnecessary sharpness: a green scarf in a crowd, a teacher herding children onto a bus, the song from a pub I could never quite identify.
The marriage ended after nine years, not because of Niamh, though I cannot pretend my habit of staying half-hidden helped. Sarah once told me during an argument that she always felt there was a locked room in me. I denied it at the time, but I knew she was right. Niamh was not the whole room. She was just the first thing I had locked inside it.
For years I made a private ritual of regret. On certain nights, usually after too much wine or after hearing of another friend’s engagement, divorce, baby, illness, I would search her name online. There were always too many Niamhs in Dublin. I found one who ran marathons, one who sold ceramics, one who was a barrister, one who had died far too young and left me cold with guilt until I saw the photo and knew it was not her. I never knew what I wanted from the search. Proof, maybe, that she was happy. Or proof that she had wondered too. I was ashamed of both wishes.
Twenty years after that night, I saw her in the Hugh Lane Gallery. It was a Saturday in February, bright and bitterly cold. I had gone in to get out of the wind more than to look at art. I was fifty-six, with a stiff knee and reading glasses I kept misplacing on my own head. I turned from a painting and there she was, standing a few feet away, reading the small card beside a portrait.
Recognition did not strike like lightning. It rose slowly, like a face appearing in developing fluid. The tilt of her head. The dark hair now threaded with grey. The same green around her neck, though it was a different scarf. I knew before I knew. My stomach went hollow.
I nearly left. Even then, after all that time, my first instinct was escape. That almost made me laugh. Imagine being middle-aged and still obedient to the cowardice of a twenty-six-year-old. I stood there for a minute pretending to study a painting I could not see. Then she turned, and her eyes met mine.
She knew me too. Not instantly, but enough. Her expression shifted from politeness to curiosity, then surprise. She said my name, softly, as if testing whether it still belonged to me.
We went for coffee nearby because neither of us had the imagination to do anything else. We sat by the window and watched people hurry along Parnell Square. At first we spoke like former colleagues, safe and factual. She had stayed in teaching, then moved into training new teachers. She had married a man from Galway, had two sons, separated amicably, and now lived near Drumcondra. I told her about my work, my divorce, my sister’s children, my father’s death. We covered twenty years in twenty minutes and left out everything important.
Eventually I told her I was sorry I never called. The words came out plainly, without the speech I had rehearsed across half my adult life. She looked down at her cup, and for a moment I saw the young woman at the bus stop again. Then she smiled, not cruelly, not sadly, just with the tired kindness people earn by surviving themselves.
She said she had wondered for a while. Not forever. Not even very long, she admitted. A
