When All Is Said(33)

‘What is it you want?’ I asked of it, as I closed my eyes for my final few hours’ sleep with Sadie by my side.

I learned a new word the next day: Numismatics. There now. That’s what the man in the antiques shop in Dublin told me was the name for the study of coins. I found this place on the corner of Sackville Row. Barringers, I think it was called. I looked it up in the Yellow Pages. Decided to take a trip, to kill a couple of birds with the one stone, as I needed to throw an eye over the few acres up Sword’s direction.

‘Edward VIII,’ I said, sitting down in front of a man, no older than myself but with a stomach, the bulk of which could have fed a small village, ‘there were sovereigns made. Do you know about them?’

‘Ah, you mean, “the coinage that never was” as they called it in the papers of the day, how could one not?’

By the time I left, William Shaw had not only confirmed the existence and approximate value of the coins but that there was a rumour of a seventh, made more valuable because of its original intended purpose – Wallis Simpson. I didn’t bring it with me of course, didn’t want to start some kind of panic. It lay at home, back in our dressing-table drawer.

‘There is of course no way to be sure if that one exists. Unless it turns up, that is. The other six are all accounted for at this point,’ he told me, with that wide smile of his. He was a pleasant man in a place I hadn’t expected it. I had prepared myself for snobbery and coolness. In the end it was me who’d played that role, while he had been nothing but decent and charming.

‘Who could put a price on that one?’ he said, after I enquired about the value of this possible seventh. ‘A six-figure sum is a given. You see, what will happen is, if it appears, public interest will start to rise, and who knows what price it might fetch by the time the hammer falls. Are you a coins man yourself, Mr…?’

‘Rogers. No, no interest at all. I’m more of a cow man,’ I said.

I took my leave and thanked him for his time.



* * *



I never told Sadie the truth of that night with Emily in the hotel. Never told Thomas’s story. She would have insisted I give the coin back there and then, and that was not my plan. To be honest I wasn’t sure what I would do. In one way it felt like me and the Dollards were quits, having paid royally, if you’ll excuse the pun, for the price of the coin by buying into the hotel and giving the money to a more deserving Dollard. But then again that blasted thing that I hadn’t given a second thought to for years began to niggle at me.

And then one day I was sat in my car thinking over all Emily had told me again, looking down over Molly’s hill as I called it. I had a few places I found myself when I was in need of some quiet time: nooks and crannies or open spaces, where the silence cured me, bringing a bit of peace to my weary head – Molly’s hill was the most beautiful of them. Its rich green fields dipped down into a forested valley below. I sat above in the car on the road, watching Molly move among the grass, running and laughing or sometimes walking and singing. It was her favourite place to find me. In one sitting, I could see her at different stages of her life, as a youngster galloping about or as a pensive teenager sitting among the growth, barely visible, lost in her worries or as a mother herself running after my grandchild. At some stage she would always stop to wave up to me. It was my favourite part. That day, however, no wave came. Instead she sat in the long grass and turned in my direction, holding her arm to her forehead to block out the sun to look at me.

‘But it’s not yours, Daddy,’ she said. A whisper in my ear, it was. Plain and simple. Her words had drifted up to me on the breeze that curved the grass in my direction.

‘It’s not theirs either, as it goes,’ I replied. But, it was no use. My daughter, as always, knew right from wrong.

‘But it still has one last job to do,’ came her final words on the matter. She smiled then rose and moved on, far down deep into the valley, until I could not see her any more.





Chapter Four



8.35 p.m.

Third Toast: to Noreen

Bottle of stout

There’s just me and Svetlana alone again. She’s taking the glasses out of the dishwasher. The clinking breaks the silence of us. Emily has gone to sort out proceedings below at the dinner. I’m getting a bit peckish myself.

‘Any chance of a toasted special, Svetlana?’

‘A toasted what?’

‘Special?’

She looks at me like I’ve just asked for it in Irish. ‘They’ll know what it is in the kitchen.’

‘I check,’ she says, looking a little bothered by it all and leaving through the bar door.

It’s back to just me and my reflection. Really, I wish it wasn’t there. Reminding me this night’s not even half over. Giving me that ‘Do you really think you’re up to this, Big Man?’ stare. I ignore him. What the feck does he know anyway?

‘They say yes, but twenty minutes.’ Svetlana returns to lay her elbows on the counter in front of me, like she’s worked here for years. ‘They do dinner now so very busy. OK? I order?’

‘Order away. And while you’re at it, I’ll have another of your finest bottles of stout.’

Stout of course always reminds me of Tony but it was my father who got me drinking the stuff in the first place. He wasn’t a big drinker, mind. The odd time he’d bring home a bottle if he felt his day deserved it. Even more rare was the occasion of a drink taken in a bar. Never this one, of course, even if it had been operating back then, my father would never have crossed its threshold. Hartigan’s, that was his watering hole.