was that in Gerald’s manner of a man who is playing a game so elaborate that his opponent, at the moment of thinking he has caught him out, finds himself the victim of superior strategy. Gerald’s air of victory took no account of his having ignored the drift of Malachy’s argument. Then, with a sudden shift of tactics, he addressed the point that Malachy had been labouring. ‘You want to know why I give Nora stuff like this to read? Because it’s what the children of the ruling classes read, and if you want them to get on in that world, you give them a head start. Rather than have her, at forty, feeling aggrieved at the way the world has treated her, I want her out there with the best of them, showing what can be done.’
A number of them felt mildly rebuked by this, but they would no more have thought of challenging him than they would a geometric theorem or a doctor’s diagnosis. Gerald loved imparting information, surprising people, overturning their expectations; and while he needed a patsy like Malachy in order to shine, none of them was prepared to risk losing his goodwill and, with it, the dim reflection of his glory that touched them as welcome members of his circle. They enjoyed the sense of inclusion that allowed them, later, to say to a wife or customer, ‘Gerald Doyle was saying to me only the other day…’ Besides, they believed, because he had told them, that his was the voice of science, reason and progress, and they were all reluctant to pit themselves against these mysterious forces. If he seemed more than usually pleased with himself that day, they put it down to the imminently expected baby, and were prepared to indulge him.
‘The teachers will have their work cut out when she starts school,’ said Liam Doherty, who owned the best of the nationalist bars. ‘You haven’t left them much to teach her.’
‘It’s a problem, right enough,’ said Gerald. On this particular point, if on no other, he was prepared to acknowledge himself baffled. ‘But there, I almost forgot. I’ve been looking into Shakespeare with her, and her memory’s prodigious. Come on, darling,’ he said to Nora, as he lifted her down from the counter and gestured to his companions to clear a space around her. ‘Show us how you do Shylock.’
Nora composed herself briefly, then stretched our her arms and recited, ‘“I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”’
After the first two short, monosyllabic sentences, this was delivered in the chanting monotone of small children reciting prayers that are beyond their understanding – a style that she had learned not from Gerald or from her mother but at the little nursery she attended in the mornings, where prayers were part of the routine.
Then, after a look of encouragement from her father, she shifted her position, hunching her shoulders into a forward stoop and holding out her right hand in a grasping gesture. ‘O my ducats, O my daughter, O my ducats, O my daughter,’ she growled, with as much depth, intensity and malice as she could muster. When she had finished, she ran over to her father and clutched him round the knees.
Her audience was genuinely speechless, not sure what to make of her performance, for all its precociousness. As was customary, it was Malachy who found a way of expressing their doubts: ‘This Shylock,’ he said tentatively, ‘wasn’t he a fellow?’
Gerald nodded. ‘The Jewish moneylender. The first Jew in literature, when writers weren’t afraid to tell the truth.’
‘She says it bravely,’ said Malachy. ‘I doubt there’s another girl her age who could match her. But were there no girls’ parts you could teach her?’
Gerald nodded slowly. ‘I looked into it, of course, but most of the young girls in his plays are only interested in love and such like and I didn’t want her head filled with that kind of nonsense. Now Portia’s different, of course. I tried her out with the “quality of mercy” speech, but there were words that even she couldn’t get her tongue round, and you have to be careful with a child like this not to tax the brain with more than it can handle.’
There were murmurs of approval for Gerald’s commendable fatherly concern. These he stilled by raising a warning finger. ‘But don’t make any mistake about it,’ he said, ‘They can’t learn soon enough how the world works.’
‘You want her to know about the Jews?’ asked Liam, doubtfully. This struck all of them as an entirely unnecessary lesson. As Irish Catholics, they had never questioned the received wisdom that Jews were treacherous, money-grubbing and only out for themselves. On the other hand, none of them had ever met a Jew, or was likely to do so.
‘I want her to learn something much more useful than that,’ said Gerald, who was, as usual, a step ahead of them. ‘I want her to realise that, not just in this instance but in almost everything you could name, people’s instincts are being suppressed by those who think they know better. Now, take the Jews.’
‘I’d rather not, thank you,’ said Tom O’Neill, the butcher, raising the biggest laugh of the afternoon.
‘Very well, then. Take Shakespeare and the Jews. Now, the English are only too ready to accept what he has to say about England – all that jingoistic nonsense about sceptred isles and brave English soldiers throwing themselves into the breach, without knowing that he was more or less forced to write it, but they don’t want to hear what he says about Jews. And yet the man was ahead of his time. He said – you heard the girl – that they’re not animals, they’re human beings, like the rest of us. They bleed, they laugh and all the rest of it. I’ll go along with that. But – and it’s an important “but” – revenge matters as much to them as food and drink, and they don’t have the same feelings for their flesh and blood as we do. His daughter runs away, and all he can think about are his ducats. But you’re not allowed to say that any more, not in England or the States. No, I just want her to learn to respect the evidence and to be fearless in saying what she knows to be right. That’s all. The Jews are incidental, they’re just an example.’
Signalling that the session was over for the afternoon, he lifted Nora up and held her, legs dangling, face on a level with his, as if he were displaying her. ‘And I want her to know that she’s more precious to her Daddy than anything else in the world, even ducats. Especially ducats.’
There was no doubt that they made an appealing picture – Gerald fresh-faced, well-tended (it was rumoured that he took home some of the lotions and creams from the shop for his own skin, and that he needed a wife at home all the time to iron the shirts that he insisted on wearing, clean, every day), dressed in the finest tweed, linen and leather, a man in the prime of life, and Nora as dainty and delicate as a little fairy.
‘And what if the next one’s a boy?’
‘It’ll make no difference. There isn’t a boy who can match her.’
Nora’s companion memory to what was to be the last occasion when her father took her to the shop with him to demonstrate her cleverness fell within days of the first. The two stand side by side, an end followed by a beginning. Everything about that second day was different, from the moment she woke up and sensed an alteration in the sounds of the house. Still in her pyjamas, she wandered through into the kitchen where her mother would be preparing the breakfast – hers to be eaten at the kitchen table, her father’s to be placed on a tray and carried through to him in the bedroom. Instead of her mother, however, there was Mrs Daly from next door, a woman of late middle age, whose children had grown and left home, moving about and, as she described it, making herself useful.
‘Now, pet, you mustn’t fret,’ she said. ‘Your daddy’s taken your mummy into the hospital, and when she comes home, please, God, she’ll have a new wee brother or sister for you. Now, what would you like for your breakfast? Will I cook you an egg or fry you a rasher?’
Nora sat and spooned cereal into her mouth while Mrs Daly pushed a cloth over the work surfaces in a show of activity. She wondered how her mother felt about having another