Whatever Happenened to Molly Bloom?

by Jessica Stirling

  ‘Boylan, Blazes Boylan, man. Don’t say you’ve forgotten me?’

  ‘Ah, yes, of course. Boylan.’ Bloom had shaken his hand limply. ‘How are your sisters?’

  ‘They’re well. And Molly, Mrs Bloom?’

  Soon Bloom and he were drinking in the Bleeding Horse Tavern and, as sure as night follows day, he’d met up with Molly again. The DBC restaurant just round the corner in Dame Street; Bloom, Molly and he together once more, dormant urges stirring. Tea again, Molly and he, Bloom absent. Then, after his big win on the Keogh fight, a splash dinner at his invite, and soon after that, the dance. Walking home by the Tolka in the dark afterwards, he’d squeezed her hand and, thereafter, she and he and Bloom were, all three, entwined.

  He spent an hour organising Molly’s funeral, calling through the open glass-panelled door to Miss Dunne to clear his calendar for Friday. Yes, all of Friday. He telephoned the intimation to both the Journal and the Morning Star in words that conveyed nothing of the circumstances, nothing of the pain and guilt. Then, suddenly drained, he slumped back in his chair.

  When he reached out to switch on the electrical lamp his hand shook. He raised his other hand, the left, and watched it shake too. His knuckles rapped uncontrollably on the desktop, drumming a ragged rhythm. He clamped left hand over right and pressed his forearms to the wood, his brow dappled with cold sweat. For a stark moment he thought he was about to drop dead at his desk.

  ‘What’s wrong, Mr Boylan? You don’t look well.’

  Dull, dumpy Dunne in her baggy blouse and creased black skirt, peered down at him through her horn-rims as if he were a cockroach or a beetle. For a split second he almost expected her to crush him with the heel of her hand. Then, thanks be to God, he was breathing again and the cold sweat was replaced by a flush of embarrassment at being caught in a moment of weakness.

  ‘Shall I fetch you a glass of water?’ his secretary asked.

  ‘Gin,’ he answered. ‘You know where the bottle is.’

  ‘Water would do you more good.’

  ‘Just get me the bloody gin, will you?’

  He watched her pad away, broad bottom registering disapproval. Twenty-eight, or was it -nine? As much a virgin as the day she’d been born, moon-faced Miss Dunne was wedded to her Underwood typewriter, too plain to poke and too valuable to sack.

  He heaved himself to his feet, rolled unsteadily around the desk to the window and gazed down at the street below. Solicitors’ clerks, chaps from the news depot, women released from bondage in the Gas Company offices or the Army & Navy Stores, all bustling home or heading for a snort at the Star & Garter or an early dinner at the Red Bank Oyster bar. The very thought of tackling an oyster right now rendered him queasy.

  When Miss Dunne came up behind him with a tumbler of gin and tap water, he plucked the glass from her thick fingers and took a long, uninterrupted swallow.

  ‘Battley’s want the poster on Renwick Street corner renewed for another three months, beginning on the 7th. What’ll I tell them, Mr Boylan? Is the rental rate the same?’

  ‘Summer rates apply from April.’ He drank another mouthful of watery gin, hardly tasting it. ‘You should know that by now, Miss Dunne.’ Surprised that she’d brought the bottle from the cupboard above the filing cabinet, he held out the tumbler and let her pour him another niggardly inch. ‘Put the quarter’s costing in a letter and I’ll sign it before I go.’

  He turned again to the window and drank once more. The gin tasted better without tap water. He felt his nerves steady, his vigour return. The woman’s reflection hovered in the window glass, motionless, bottle in hand.

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘What is it now?’

  ‘Those letters on your desk …’

  ‘What letters?’

  ‘The typed letters … Martha.’

  Blazes swung round. ‘Have you been prying again?’

  ‘They’re lying open on your desk, Mr Boylan, and they’re typed,’ Miss Dunne said. ‘Do you … do you want me to file them?’

  ‘No, they’re private.’

  Motionless still, the bottle held up like a fisherman’s catch, she asked, ‘Where did you get them, Mr Boylan, those letters?’

  ‘None of your damned business.’ Annoyance was almost as restorative as alcohol. He waved her away. ‘Go on with you, back to your machine.’

  To his amazement, she stood her ground. ‘They’re not yours, are they? I mean, they weren’t sent to you?’

  ‘Of course they’re not mine.’

  ‘Mr Boylan, will you not tell me who he is?’

  ‘Who who is?’

  ‘Henry.’

  My dearest, naughty darling.

  My own, my one true love.

  Blazes experienced another thump below the heart, a sensation unconnected with panic or annoyance or the thought of a salty oyster slipping down the length of his digestive tract. He kept his excitement in check, hidden from his secretary.

  Graciously he said, ‘Tell me, Maureen, why do you ask?’

  ‘I’m just … just curious, Mr Boylan, that’s all.’

  He finished the gin and handed her the glass. Bottle in one hand and tumbler in the other she was powerless to fend him off. He planted a hand on her shoulder and, sticking his big Roman nose into her face, enquired, ‘You’re not Martha, by any chance?’

  Her mouth opened wide enough to show a chalky white tongue and small stained teeth. He could smell onions on her breath and the perfume she sometimes wore, stale now at the day’s end. Her hair was as coarse as horse tail but, for an instant, he wondered what it would look like unpinned and if she, five years his secretary, was really capable of spanking a man’s bare backside while clad in nothing but a pair of lacy French knickers and a sailor’s hat.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, no, no.’

  He rubbed his nose against hers in an Eskimo kiss that knocked her spectacles sideways. He slipped his hand from her shoulder to her breast. ‘Wouldn’t you like to be?’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t you like to be Martha, whoever she is, and spank Henry’s botty?’

  Again: ‘No. No, no.’

  She held her arms out from her sides, balancing tumbler and bottle, and pressed her chest into his hand. If she hadn’t been wrapped in winter woollens he might have felt her spinster’s heart beating against his palm.

  ‘Does reading other people’s mail excite you, Maureen?’

  She shook her head, sending her spectacles slanting across her cheek. With a forefinger, Blazes tipped the spectacles into place on the bridge of her nose and peered through the convex lenses into her dark brown eyes.

  ‘Don’t you fancy it?’ he said. ‘I mean, what Martha says she does to Mr … to Henry? I wonder what he does to her? Do you think he spanks her too? Would you like that, Maureen, to have a man put you across his lap and lift your skirts?’

  ‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘Stop it, please.’

  ‘What a naughty girl you are, Miss Dunne,’ said Blazes, grinning. ‘I can’t tell you who Henry is, or Martha, but I can tell you where to find a bit of that sort of stuff, if that’s your fancy.’

  ‘It’s not,’ she said stiffly, ‘my fancy at all, Mr Boylan.’

  She didn’t sway or ask him to remove his paw from her breast. A twitch behind his fly buttons, nothing serious, nothing rampant; he’d been without intercourse for more than a week now and talking saucy even with dumpty Miss Dunne reminded him of it. He wondered what sort of price she’d be willing to pay to have her answer but, before that thought could take root, pushed her away.

  She was dogged, that he would say for her.

  ‘Where did you find those letters, Mr Boylan?’

  He lied glibly but unimaginatively. ‘I bought them from a fella in a pub for the price of a couple of pints.’

  ‘What was the fella’s name?’

  ‘I don’t remember. I don’t think he mentioned it.’

  ‘What pub was it?’

  ‘Look, that’s enough. I’ve more to do than prattle about dirty lette
rs. If you’re so all-fired curious, you can read them. And if that doesn’t open your eyes to what you’ve been missing, nothing will.’ He stepped to the desk, picked up the top sheet of one of Bloom’s letters and waved it. ‘Here, take it away and read it.’

  ‘You didn’t buy them in any pub, did you?’ Miss Dunne said.

  Temper rising, he said, ‘Are you calling me a liar?’

  Fearing for her job, she backed down. ‘I’m sorry. I’m just not myself these days, Mr Boylan.’

  ‘None of us are, none of us are,’ said Blazes. He held up the letter. ‘To read or not to read, Miss Dunne?’

  ‘I think … no, it’s not for me that sort of thing.’

  ‘Too hot for you, is it?’ said Blazes, anger giving way to complacency. ‘Right-o, right-o. Type up the Battley letter and then you can go home.’

  She held her ground for a few seconds longer. He could read nothing into her expression through the convex lenses that made her brown eyes seem so large and trusting. He felt foolish for even considering that she might be Bloom’s mysterious lover. Surely not even Bloom would be desperate enough as to take up with a woman like Maureen Dunne.

  ‘Will that be all, Mr Boylan?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Blazes. ‘That will be all for now.’

  She placed the gin bottle on the desk, the tumbler too, switched on the electrical lamp and with one last glance at the letters waddled off back to her Underwood.

  SIXTEEN

  Sarah Tolland could not understand why her intended found her father so intimidating. He was and always had been sweet natured, considerate to clerks and servants and patient to a fault with her mother who, Sarah had to admit, could be a little capricious now and then. He doted on her, his daughter, sole product of his loins, and had made it abundantly clear that any man who sought her hand would have to match her in wit and intelligence but if he fulfilled those criteria he would be treated as a surrogate son and drafted into the firm to give it a much-needed boost.

  Roper, at eighty, was well past his prime and he, Alfred Fitzgerald Tolland, while not exactly decrepit, was knocking on somewhat. In a city that housed more lawyers than rats in its sewers, competition for legal business was fierce and stamina and zeal were required to keep the fees rolling in, points made plain – in the nicest possible way, of course – to young Mr Sullivan as soon as Sarah decided that he was the man for her.

  The desk in Poppy Tolland’s chambers was larger than a papal sarcophagus, a great slab of dark mahogany polished to reflect light from the box window or, at this hour of an evening, the glow from the lovely old oil lamp that Mr Tolland still retained, though the building had recently been wired for electricity.

  A lesser man might have used the desk as a prop to power, but that wasn’t Poppy Tolland’s style. He was, in size and shape, no Great Dane, no wolfhound or husky but more like a little fox terrier trained not to hop about and snap, a comparison that went by the board, however, when he donned his robes and squared up to opposing counsel.

  The oil lamp cast reflections not only upon the desk but also on the glass-fronted bookcases that lined the walls, cases filled with calf-bound volumes in which were recorded every jot and tittle of the statutes of English law and the decisions rendered there under. The lamp’s glow also shone in Poppy Tolland’s pince-nez, an affectation intended to make him appear more affable, which, at least in Neville Sullivan’s view, it singularly failed to do.

  ‘Toast,’ said Poppy Tolland, after listening to Neville’s account of events in the coroner’s court. ‘You realise you have him on toast.’

  ‘I didn’t, um, no, I hadn’t quite realised that,’ Neville confessed. ‘I take it you mean Bloom?’

  ‘Heavens, no. Slater.’

  When conducting interviews in his office it was Mr Tolland’s habit to hunch behind his desk and show the client or, in this case his protégé, just the glint of his eye-glasses and a crown of gingery hair. He spoke from behind his hand and you rarely saw his lips move, a habit that made his pronouncements, however prosaic, seem profound.

  ‘The coroner,’ said Mr Tolland, ‘done wrong.’

  ‘Beg pardon?’ said Neville.

  ‘Not to put it too finely, Roland buggered up.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Neville. ‘Really? I mean, really?’

  It was possible that Poppy Tolland allowed himself a dimple of self-satisfaction at this point but if he did it was hidden by his hand. He said, ‘Do you suppose I’d send you into battle armed with nothing but a slingshot and a pebble? Bloom should not be in prison. Indeed, he shouldn’t have been charged in the first place. Any magistrate other than Paddy Mullen would have dismissed the case instanter. Now, can you tell me why?’

  ‘Lack of evidence,’ Neville suggested.

  ‘Forget evidence. Apply your knowledge of the law at its most fundamental level.’

  ‘The arrest?’

  ‘Precisely. Go on.’

  ‘The police from C Division turned up without a medical examiner,’ Neville said, ‘and the detective from G Division, Kinsella, arrived before the coroner. Some time before the coroner according to the logs. Slater took it upon himself to issue an arrest warrant, which he’s qualified to do, of course, but by that time Bloom had been in police custody for the best part of an hour.’

  ‘Doing what, do you suppose? Playing whist?’

  ‘Being questioned before he’d been charged,’ said Neville.

  ‘Or, I suspect, without being cautioned.’

  ‘How can I extract that admission from the policemen, let alone Slater, when I’m not permitted to cross-examine?’

  ‘It’s simple, Neville. Feed your questions through the coroner on behalf of the jury. Didn’t you pull that one today?’

  ‘I did,’ said Neville, surprised. ‘Yes, come to think of it, I did.’

  Poppy Tolland’s head rose and his smile became visible. ‘There you are. Irregularities in the manner of arrest. Questioning before charge and without caution. No medical examiner brought to the scene. Paddy Mullen must have been in a state of torpor not to dismiss or, so a little bird told me, furious at Bloom for doing in a well-built soprano.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have agreed to an adjournment, should I?’

  ‘No, you made the right decision, Neville,’ said Poppy Tolland. ‘Kinsella’s no fool. He knows you’ve high cards in your hand and can play them at any time. He wants our client off stage for a reason and I’m curious as to what that reason may be. Has Bloom requested parole to attend his wife’s funeral?’

  ‘Oddly, no.’

  ‘Does he know he’s entitled to apply?’

  ‘I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t,’ Neville said. ‘I’ve come around to thinking that Mr Bloom is at least one step ahead of us.’

  ‘Has he raised the matter of our fee?’

  ‘I told him what you told me, that there’s no fee for our services in the coroner’s court.’

  ‘Did he seem relieved?’

  ‘He didn’t seem bothered one way or the other.’

  ‘What does he do for a living?’

  ‘Sells advertising for the Journal,’ Neville answered. ‘Rather hand to mouth if you ask me.’

  ‘Yet Mr Bloom appears to have no concerns about money. What, Neville, might that suggest to you?’

  ‘Either a nest egg or a windfall.’

  ‘And what might the nature of that windfall be?’

  Neville stroked his flowing locks for several seconds to encourage inspiration and then, sitting upright, said, ‘Life insurance. A policy on his wife’s death. Good God!’

  ‘Upon which,’ said Mr Tolland, ‘he can make no claim until he walks out of court free and clear of all collusion in her death.’

  ‘If he does stand to profit from her death,’ Neville said, ‘it’s small wonder he won’t plead to manslaughter. Is there anything we can or should do to clarify this situation?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Poppy Tolland. ‘Find the bloody policy and find it bloody quick.’


  Conveniently situated for trams, omnibuses and Abbey Street’s commercial offices, the Sunnyhill Hotel had become an affordable refuge for professional women of a certain age. It currently housed a nest of self-supporting typists who, best efforts notwithstanding, had so far failed to find a man willing to take them on.

  None of the ‘girls’ who gathered in the parlour while waiting for supper to be served would ever see twenty-five again. Spinsters to a man, they weren’t committed to the single life on principle but, like Boylan’s Miss Dunne, had slipped gradually into what might best be described as an illogical state of ever-hopeful resignation.

  Maureen Dunne and her friend, Anne-Marie Blaney, who worked in the head office of the Hibernian Bank, had adjacent rooms on the Sunnyhill’s second floor. They each had a room with a window that looked out on the drying green, each an identical bed, dressing table, wash-stand and chamber pot, for Mr Flaherty, proprietor of the hotel, had purchased the furnishings in a job lot from the now-defunct Harp of Erin Club in Kildare Street.

  It was left to the ladies to decorate the rooms according to taste and wherewithal, to add the feminine touches that softened the general institutional frowziness and made the shabby old place seem like home. Miss Dunne, for instance, had adorned her bedroom with a cheery floral print bedspread from Clery’s basement sale and a baize-covered draught screen that Mr Boylan had found for her to which she’d attached postcards from far-flung places that she knew she would only ever visit in her dreams.

  Miss Blaney, a year or two older than her friend, had settled for Moroccan-stripe curtains and, in lieu of postcards, had strewn the narrow mantelshelf and every spare inch of her dressing table with gewgaws presented to her, usually on parting, by a covey of discerning gentlemen who having sampled the starter had, as it were, no wish to order the entrée.

  It was not that Miss Blaney was ugly or had allowed her figure to run to seed or even that she lacked an aptitude for the easy congress that gentlemen found appealing in a companion. Anne-Marie’s flaw, if such it was, was eagerness, a passionate eagerness that some men found alarming and others positively terrifying. Whatever you desired, Miss Blaney hinted, she was willing to provide, asking nothing in return save a wedding ring and a lifelong commitment to pander to her every whim, an offer that even the sappy lads who drifted in from the country did not consider a bargain, no matter how you sliced the pie.