Love - Hardcover

Doyle, Roddy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1984880454 ISBN 13: 9781984880451

Verlag: Viking Pr, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

Two old friends reconnect in Dublin for a dramatic, revealing evening of drinking and storytelling in this winning new novel from the author of the Booker Prize winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

One summer's evening, two men meet up in a Dublin restaurant.

Drinking pals back in their youth, now married and with grown up children, their lives have taken seemingly similar paths. But Joe has a secret he needs to tell Davy, and Davy has a sorrow he wants to keep from Joe. Both are not the men they used to be.

Joe has left his wife and family for another woman, Jessica. Davy knows her too, or should - she was the girl of their dreams four decades earlier, the girl with the cello in George's pub. As Joe's story unfolds across Dublin - pint after pint, pub after pub - so too do the memories of what eventually drove Davy from Ireland: his first encounter with Faye, the lively woman who would become his wife; his father's somber disapproval; the pained spaces left behind when a parent dies.

As the two friends try to reconcile their versions of the past over the course of one night, Love offers a delightfully comic yet moving portrait of the many forms love can take throughout our lives.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Roddy Doyle was born in Dublin in 1958. He is the author of ten acclaimed novels, including The Commitments, The Van (a finalist for the Booker Prize), Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (winner of the Booker Prize), The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, A Star Called Henry, The Guts and, most recently, Smile. Doyle has also written several collections of stories, as well as Two Pints, Two More Pints, and Two for the Road, and several works for children and young adults including the Rover novels. He lives in Dublin.

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He knew it was her, he told me.  He told me this a year after he saw her.  Exactly a year, he said. 

-Exactly a year?

-That’s what I said, Davy.  A year ago – yesterday.

-You remember the date?

-I do, yeah.

-Jesus, Joe.

He saw her at the end of a corridor and he knew.  Immediately.  She was exactly the same.  Even from that far off.  Even though she was only a shape, a dark, slim shape – a silhouette – in the centre of the late afternoon light that filled the glass door behind her.

-She was never slim, I said.

He shrugged.

-I don’t even know what slim means, really, he said.

He smiled.

-Same here, I said. 

-I just said it, he said. –The word.  She was a tall shape – instead.

-Okay.

-Not a roundy shape.

-She’s aged well, I said. –That what you’re telling me.

-I am, he said. –And she has.

-Where was the corridor? I asked him.

-The school, he said.

-What school?

-The school, he said again.

-We didn’t know her in school, I said.

I knew he didn’t mean the school we’d both gone to.  We’d known each other that long.  I’d said it – that we hadn’t known her in school – to try to get him to be himself.  To give back an answer that would get us laughing.  He was the funny one.

-My kids’ school, he said.

-Hang on, I said. –It was a parent-teacher meeting?

-The woman of your dreams stepped out of the sun and into a parent-teacher meeting?

-Yep.

-Thirty years after the last time you saw her, I said. –More, actually.  Way more.  Thirty-six or seven years.

-Yeah, he said. –That’s it, more or less.  What did you say there?  That she stepped out of the sun. 

-I think so, yeah.

-Well, that’s it, he said  -That’s what happened.  She did. 

I didn’t live in Ireland.  I went over to Dublin three or four times a year, to see my father.  I used to bring my family but in more recent years I’d travelled alone.  The kids were grown up and gone and my wife, Faye, didn’t like flying, and she wasn’t keen on the drive to Holyhead and the ferry. 

-Your dad never liked me, so he didn’t. 

-He did.

-He did not, she said. -He thought I was a slut.  He said it, sure.

-He didn’t say that.

-More or less, he did.  You told me that, yourself, remember.  I’m not making it up.  He never liked me, so I won’t be going around pretending I like him.  I hate that house.  It’s miserable. 

-She kissed me, Joe said now.

-In the school?

The man I knew – I thought I knew; I used to know – would have answered, ‘No, in the arse,’ or something like that.

-Yes, he said. –She remembered me. 

I didn’t know Joe well. 

I used to. 

We left school for good on the same day.  He got work; I went to college, to UCD.  He had money, wages – a salary.  I had none until after I’d graduated.  But we kept in touch.  We both lived at home, a ten-minute walk from each other.  We listened to records in my house about once a week, in the front room.  He bought most of the records; mine was the house where we could blast them out.  We played them so loud we could put our hands on the window glass and feel the song we were hearing.  My mother was dead and my father didn’t seem to mind.  He told me years later he just wanted to see me happy.  He endured the noise – the Pistols, Ian Dury, the Clash, Elvis Costello – because he thought it made me happy.  I’d have been happy if he’d hammered at the wall with a shoe or his fist and told me to turn it fuckin’ down.  I’d have been happy if I’d felt I had to fight him. 

We went drinking, myself and Joe, when I had the money.  At Christmas and in October, when I came back from working in West Germany and London, before I had to spend the money I’d earned on books and bus fares.  We’d get quickly drunk and roar. I rushed straight into anger.  I thumped things, and myself.  I let myself go, glimpsed the man I could become.  I pulled back, and copied Joe.  He drank, I drank.  He laughed, I laughed.  I roared when he roared.

-She remembered you?

-Yeah, he said. –She did.  Immediately.  Like I said. 

I looked at him again.  I could see why she’d have recognised him.  The boy – the young man – was still there.  His head was the same shape.  He’d worn glasses back then and he still did – or, he did again – the same kind of black-framed glasses.  He still had his hair.  It was grey now, most of it, but it had never been very dark.  He’d put on weight but not much, and none of it around his face and neck. 

-Where were you? I asked him.

-In the school, he said. –I told you.

-Where, though?

-Outside the maths room, he said. –Waiting.

-For your turn with the teacher.

-Yeah, he said. –There were four or five people – mostly mothers – ahead of me.  And I’d no one else to see – I’d seen all the others.  We divided the list.

-Hang on, I said. –Trish was there as well?

Trish was his wife.

-Yeah, he said. –She was somewhere else.  Queueing up for another teacher. 

-You kissed the love of your life while Trish was in the building?

-Big building, he said. –It’s a fuckin’ school – in fairness.

That was more like the man I thought I knew.  The man I’d  wanted to be.

-You kissed her, I said.

-She kissed me.

-Where was Trish, exactly?

-Exactly, Davy?  Exactly?  Is this a murder investigation? 

-Okay.

-For fuck sake, Davy.

-Okay – sorry.  Go on. 

-The home economics room, he said. –Or wordwork.   Somewhere else.  We took four teachers each, to get it over with as quickly as possible.  Even at that, it took all afternoon.  It’s the only chance the teachers get to talk to adults.  So, they fuckin’ grab it.  I was lucky.

-How come?

-I got to meet the maths teacher, he said. –A gobshite, by the way.  But I was outside his door.  I just happened to be there.
           
-And she walked in while you were waiting.
           
-Right place, right time.  Yeah.  Like I said – I was lucky. 
           
-One of your kids does home economics and woodwork?
           
-What?
           
-You said home economics or woodwork.  Trish was in one of those rooms. 
           
-You’re being Columbo again, Davy.
           
-Lay off. 
           
-I just meant –...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Viking Pr
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1984880454
• ISBN 13: 9781984880451
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 327
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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