Phoebe Quirke has asked St.John Strafford to a picnic. It’s not the best weather for a picnic. It’s October, the days are cool, and the sky is usually partly sunny. They have been awkward lovers; partly because Phobe is diffident and Strafford is taciturn. They have made love three times, and now Phoebe is pregnant, and she has instigated the picnic to inform him.
They meet at Sandycove, a popular beach in suburban Dublin. Phoebe has packed some Carr’s biscuits, Gorgonzola cheese, apples, two bananas, chocolate biscuits, and a bottle of white wine. Ironically,
She says it’s not a feast, but Strafford says, not meaning it, “Splendid.”
She picked up a handful of sand and made a funnel of her fist and let it pour out, back to its own. Silt. Then a last trickle. So dry, everything so dry, the sand, the grass—when had it rained last?“I had an ulterior motive in suggesting this,” she said.
He did not look at her.
“In suggesting what?”
“This—the picnic.”
“Ah.”
There was no end to the inflections, all of them uninterpretable, with which he could color that word.
“You can almost see it in capital letters, can’t you,” she said. “An Ulterior Motive.”
He went on looking steadily out to sea. He did not likethe sound of this. Some primordial instinct, of warning and alarm, was stirring within him.
She sighed, impatiently, it seemed.
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
If he says Ah again, I’ll hit him, she told herself
See: John Banville. The Drowned (2024)
Image: Postcard of Sandycover looking toward the Martello Tower.