“Working together must be fun,” I said lamely.
“It is,” she replied. “On the days he can bear to be edited.”
She rolled her eyes slightly, and then smiled to confirm this was all in good fun.
“Well, I’ll see you later,” she said. “It was nice to finally meet you.”
The “finally” rang out between us, deadly little aftershocks of a natural disaster. I took a step backwards and she left the shop. It was four o’clock. The launch was to start at six thirty. I would host it while James worked the front till for the late-night shoppers.
Deenie wanted to figure out whether I was the kind of girl who has ill-advised but unrequited crushes on her professors, or the kind of girl who orchestrated bookshop launches in order to seduce them. I don’t think she found an answer. I was odd and tall and I was not skinny. I was nothing at all like her. But maybe, she must have figured, he was approaching his mid-life crisis and maybe part of that was wanting an ingenue that reminded him mostly of himself.
If she did find an answer that day, I don’t know what her plan was. I don’t think she would have threatened me. She was, before anything else, an extremely kind person.
7
WHEN YOU’RE YOUNG you tend to live in absolutes. In my head, there were only two ways for the book launch to go. Either it was going to be abysmal and a profound humiliation or it was going to be the best book launch in the history of small, un-catered events.
The truth was, as always, somewhere in-between. It rained badly all afternoon, which mentally made me cut at least ten people from the guest list. We sold a few copies that day, the table we dedicated to the book having conferred a sense of importance on it, and we were sure to tell everyone who bought a copy that the author would be doing a reading that evening. Ben, having gotten over his disappointment that the book was not by Dr. Gillian McKeith, was starting to talk about the night as a “trial run” for other launches, and was talking enthusiastically about developing a “relationship” with Deenie and her publishing house. He went out to buy crisps from the big Tesco in an attempt to cement this relationship. He refused to call them crisps. He would only call them “refreshments.”
I didn’t talk to James much that day, which I was grateful for. I knew he would make a lot of jokes about this being “the big night,” and I didn’t want to tell him that the plan was never really on. I wanted us all to pretend that this was a normal event for a local author and that life would quietly resume afterwards.
Dr. Byrne came in just after six. He was wearing a dark grey sports jacket and a pair of tan brogues, and both were splattered with rain. He looked handsome and wilted, like a tough flower that was gallantly surviving despite over-watering. I realised then how much my crush had developed, even though I had decided to do nothing about it. I admired Dr. Byrne when he was my fiery, huge professor. He made me feel better about studying English literature in a recession, because he was a professor who acted like professors in films acted. He added heft to the grand pointlessness of mooning over set texts. But over the last few weeks, my hero worship had crusted over into something more knobbly, more textured. He had been so happy to believe me about the pre-orders. I wanted to protect him against the world’s many disappointments, guard him with my body like I would a baby or a small dog.
On top of all that, he was the only man I’d met who made me feel petite, and to feel protective over someone who physically towers over you is a hell of a drug.
“Oh my God,” James said, when he saw him across the shop. “I bet he’s hung like a chandelier.”
“Shut up.”
“Do you have clean knickers on?” he prodded. “You don’t have your under-the-bridge-troll knickers?”
“I’m not discussing this here.”
“No one holidays at the swamp.”
“James!”
“I’m just saying.”
It was the kind of thing we found hysterically funny at home but James would sometimes drag into public life, where I was still trying to be Bookshop Girl. I wanted to be caught in a beam of sunlight looking elegant and melancholy, possibly writing a poem at the same time. I tried this for years and it took me until my mid-twenties to realise that it’s strictly for short women.
But all the same, I was wearing nice knickers.
I approached Dr. Byrne from the side, as if not to spook a horse, and he had a wide, nervous smile for me. He smelled like rain and cigarettes.
“Hello,” I said. “You just missed your wife.”
“When?” he answered.
“Oh…two hours ago.” I bumbled around. “She seems nice.”
He merely nodded, and I thought: What right do I have to tell this grown man that his wife is nice?
“We’re really excited about tonight,” I went on. “Everyone at the shop.”
James came over, proof that other people worked there. “Hello,” he said. “Can I just say, your book is fantastic. I started reading it on my lunch. I’m already on chapter two. Unreal.”
Fred Byrne smiled gratefully. “Really?”
“Yes. And I’m a useless reader. But, like, I grew up in England, and they get taught none of this stuff over there. It’s all the Empire this, the Empire that, no one would be able to hold their knife and fork if the Empire hadn’t taught them to.”
“Quite right,” Dr. Byrne said, his lecture-hall confidence starting to come back to him. “And when did you move here?”
“Nineteen ninety-seven. My mum married a farmer.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Fermoy.”
“Ah.”
“I know. Don’t worry about it. I have nothing good to say about Fermoy either.”
“It’s not so bad.”
“Nowhere’s too bad if you have a DVD player in your room.”
“God, if only we had that when my family moved to Canada.”
With every word spoken I felt like I was becoming more and more invisible.
“You lived in Canada?” I asked, my voice oddly strangled.
“For a few years,” he said, and at that moment Ben came over with a bowl of refreshments.
About thirty people came, in the end. Twenty-two of them were friends, family or work colleagues of the Harrington-Byrnes. The rest were drifters, or people sheltering from the rain. I delivered a short, burbling introduction that was adapted from the press release that was written by his wife. Afterwards Dr. Byrne read the introduction from his book, and I remember feeling that his writing was nowhere near as compelling as he was. The book teetered between big statements designed to provoke a headline in the culture section of The Irish Times （“in all Irish art, whether it’s Yeats or The Corrs, the long shadow of the famine still lingers”） and long, drifting asides about how the Irish were not just literally starved but continue to be starved by the British on a soul-level. Dr. Byrne almost sounded like he thought the famine was a good thing. He seemed to think most worthwhile books and paintings sprung out of the potato blight, and I wondered if Deenie ever told him to calm it down a little.
I’ve wondered how The Hibernian Post might have covered such a book, or whether we would cover it at all. Since being made editor I’ve thought about whether Dr. Byrne would reach out with subsequent books, and what I would say if he did. I think I would have run a review, slipped it in on the weekend edition, five hundred words long and written by yours truly. I think I would have been generous, used phrases like “tour de force,” and justified it to myself by saying that there was a much bigger market for cultural reflections on Irish oppression now. We’re feeling confident the last few years, and open to hearing about the ways we were wronged.