Portobello Notebook by Adrian Kenny Page B

grown an inch. In his school there had been a tree whose bark had grown about an iron paling post until only the tip showed. If he had grown at all, he had grown like that, embracing his limitations.
     
    IN THE EVENING they brought him out to an Italian restaurant where they ordered a pizza for three, as big as the small table. Like his wife, his daughter was vegetarian, and when he noticed the slices of salami he said as usual, ‘I’ll eat them.’
    ‘It’s all right.’ She lowered her head, embarrassed again, and murmured, ‘I’m eating meat now.’
    ‘I’m glad.’
    Her boyfriend smiled. ‘We were wondering how we’d be able to keep up the lies for a week.’
    ‘It’s strange.’ He looked at her. ‘You’re just the age I was when I came here.’
    She listened patiently as he reminisced over the red wine. He had thought then that he could leave his past behind. For a short while he had felt like a snake sloughing its old skin. Then he had realized he had no new skin. He had cracked up and gone home.
    His daughter smiled too. ‘Welcome back.’
    The New York he remembered was remote from the city theywalked through. Times Square was smaller, duller, than the neon jungle where he had lingered. Central Park was bigger and brighter, different from the glittering menacing place he had hurried past at night. In time he had learned to face the panics and elations of those days, and they had flown. Now they were like the sparrows, lovely and ridiculous, squabbling in the ivy below his hotel windows.
    He was yanked back from his memories next day. They were in a shop, enjoying the pleasure of dithering between bottles of French wine and half-gallon jars of Californian at wonderful low prices, when his daughter’s phone rang. It was his wife, calling from Ireland to say that their old friend Eileen had died. His daughter crying was suddenly like a child again; and her boyfriend, even as he comforted her. The evening meal in their Manhattan flat became an Irish wake as they drank and talked of Eileen: the Christmas Day they had brought her to a family party, where she had grown bored and stood outside the front door, ringing the bell until they left … Eileen was the last of the artists’ wives. It was fitting they had heard of her death in a wine shop. Wilful, intelligent , a chain-smoking, drinking Irish Catholic, she had shown him the way into a wider world at home. He decided to cut his holiday short, change his ticket and go back for her funeral.
     
    IT LEFT HIM one last day in New York. With his daughter and her boyfriend he visited the Met Museum, watched them walk hand in hand slowly, eagerly past two thousand years of masterpieces, as if admiring a wonderful landscape from a train. That was when he thought of Joe, an old friend now living in New York. Back at the hotel he looked him up in the phone book, hesitated, then called, and in a moment heard a voice direct from the past. It hadn’t changed. Joe invited him to lunch, gave directions to his apartment in the aloof, smiling voice he remembered from school. Hisdaughter gave him a map, and the sort of advice he had once given her, and then he set off on his own.
    Eileen had been old, her death was natural. It was so long since he had met Joe that their meeting could mean little now. He strolled peacefully in the sunlight, sitting here and there to pass the time. In Union Square two stoned buskers, one with a drum, the other wearing a brown cloak and a plastic horned Viking helmet, pranced about the grass. A gay type cried, ‘Horny bitch!’ and he smiled. What had frightened him once, at best amused him now. Two sunbathing girls sat up and laughed as the buskers circled them in an obscene dance. He wandered on, down as far as Canal Street, allowing himself to get lost, asking directions and finding his way again. This was the life he had aimed at, fallen short of, and which his daughter was embracing now. He felt no bitterness. His life had grown in