The Gathering Read Online Free PDF

He grabs Ada, in other words, just at the moment that she turns to go.
    But Ada does not know Charlie yet. Ada Merriman stands in the foyer of the Belvedere Hotel and looks at Lamb Nugent, while outside, Charlie Spillane cruises into Great Denmark Street, towards the wife he has not yet met. He is about to pull in at the door of the Belvedere Hotel, he is nearly there, when the spire of the Findlater’s Church puts him in mind of something, and he roars off to the The Hut in Phibsboro, to see a man about a dog.
    Nugent cocks an ear after the escaping motor. There is a pause as the engine fades, and then the silence starts to spread. It seeps into the foyer of the Belvedere; the distant rustle of streets turning over from day into evening, as the night deepens and the drinking begins–elsewhere. As women shush their babies, and men ease their feet out of boots, and girls who have been working all evening wash themselves in distant rooms and check a scrap of mirror, before going out to work again.

    On the other side of the room, Ada’s breathing is so shallow and mild she might be an angel occupying, for the moment, the figure of a doll. Her throat is a pillar, as the poet might say, and her lips are sculpted shut in the light.
    A spent coal slips in the grate with a whispering ‘chink’.
    Here come the dead.
    They hunker around the walls and edge towards the last heat of the fire: Nugent’s sister Lizzy; his mother, who does not like being dead at all. Nugent’s ghosts twitter, soft and unassuaged, while Ada’s make no sound at all.
    Why is that?
    She is an orphan. Of course.
    A face appears at the front-door glass, and pushes open the door. A quick, pokey little face, with a beard. It looks around, and withdraws. The dead are scattered, but after a moment they start to return and, as though Ada can not bear it, she rises swiftly and walks over to the desk, where she rings the bell.
    Ding ding!
    They are standing beside each other–at last!–Ada and Nugent at the desk, and she is amused by it. The freedom and the ease of her is insult and provocation to Nugent–poor Nugent, who feels the eighteen inches between them more keenly than any other measure of air. Who would push any part of himself into any part of her and find relief in it. Who might put his hands into her belly, to feel the heat and slither of her insides.
    Do not mock.
    ‘This much,’ he wants to say. ‘I already love you this much.’
    ‘Hello. Hello in there.’
    The concierge swims out from the darkness of his back room.
    ‘Do you have such a thing for the jarvey as a hot rum? For the man outside?’ She turns to Nugent and says, ‘I don’t know why I do it for him, he’s never there when you’re looking. Only to stop him sneaking off I suppose.’
    Then she walks back towards her chair by the door. She is only nineteen after all. And he is only twenty-three.
    ‘I have a friend who owns a car,’ he says, all of a sudden.
    ‘Do you?’ She stops; interested and pert.
    ‘He should be here any minute, he should be here by now.’
    ‘I’d love a go in a car,’ says Ada. ‘I’d be mad for a go in a car.’
    And she swivels about to sit in her chair.
    Oh for a rope to pull it from under her–Nugent skidding across the room to catch her in his arms. They could kiss in black and white, she turning away for the caption:
    Stop!!
    Because it is not only Lent, but spring. How else would you have it? Ada Merriman is beautiful and Lamb Nugent is no better than he should be, and this is all we need to know–that when she walked in through the door, and sat with such quiet grace on that little oval-backed chair, he saw a life in which no one owed anyone a thing. Not a jot.

    A car pulls up outside. Nugent hears the engine’s throbbing and the look he gives to Ada turns to one of pain and farewell–as if their situation were in some way impossible. But it is not impossible, and the alarm that flares between them now is just another kind of