Emerald Magic_ Great Tales of Irish Fantasy - Andrew M. Greeley [80]
The Commons is an elegant and excellent little restaurant in the basement of Newman Hall, site of the original Catholic University and unhappy home for several years of both John Henry Newman and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Just across the street on the Green is the marble bust of your man who wrote the dirty books. On that particular Sunday evening the diners were refined and polished disciples of the Celtic Tiger who had for the most part come downstairs after Mass in the chapel. No one would confuse the Sunday night crowd in The Commons with a crowd in a soup kitchen, not that there were any such in the city by the black pool anymore, or a pub on Sean MacDermott Street.
These discreet haute bourgeoisie would never stare at anyone. Quite the contrary—when someone appeared who might merit a stare, they would lower their eyes, much as novices of both genders had been taught to do in an earlier form of Irish Catholicism.
Yet when the last two couples entered the dining room, everyone else violated the behavior code of their culture and stared, particularly at the two women. They were, truth be told with the usual sigh, well worth staring at. The woman in the first couple was tall and statuesque, with burning red hair piled on top of her head. She wore a form-fitting white cocktail dress, sustained in place by thin straps on her shoulders. Her husband was even taller, silver hair, searing blue eyes, devilishly handsome in a flawless dinner jacket and a blue cummerbund. Someone very important whom you knew you had seen recently on the telly. But you couldn’t quite remember his name.
They were followed in five minutes by a second couple, even more striking. The man was black, very tall, and with a diamond in one of his earlobes and a scarlet cummerbund as though he were a cardinal. By the solid build of him, an athlete, again someone you’d seen on the telly, maybe in a film (pronounced the correct way “filum”) in which he was the leader of the good ones.His consort was the most striking of the four, snow-white hair flowing to her shoulders, arctic blue eyes that took in everyone in the room in a quick blink, flawless buttermilk skin on which rested a pale gold pendant, a strapless pastel blue gown that clung to her full-figured body, and a faint smile that suggested that she was in charge. She might have stepped out of a Celtic revival painting of Irish antiquity.
As the other diners returned to their conversations and focused their eyes on the salad and the hock in their glasses, they wondered in whispers who the four were and, most important, how old they were. They were not children or adolescents or even young urban professionals. They had reached a certain age, probably between forty-five and sixty, but had the time and the money to take care of themselves. They were bushed and smoothed and shaped—exercise and diet and cosmetics and well-fitted bras and support garments and certain kinds of reconstructive surgery, aristocrats of one sort or the other, probably not Irish even if they spoke to the maitre d’ in the finest upper-class Dublin English—finest English in the world, it is often said.
When seated at the table they began to talk a foreign language, magical in its soft and melodic hum, not The Irish, not anything remotely like The Irish, yet somehow peaceful and reassuring like The Irish as it was spoken on the far reaches of the Gaeltacht where the waters from Newfoundland washed up on the sands.
The men among the other diners tried their best to keep their eyes off the two women, a challenging task. The women diners noted with some curiosity that the formalities when the two couples met, the kisses and the handshakes, were a bit strained, almost artificial, as though there might have been a difficult history among them and some doubt that the future would not be equally difficult. It was, one woman who worked for the foreign office thought, not unlike the preliminaries of a meeting about the next