Text Testimonial

"Portrait of a Lady"

The city was a vast emptiness. He stood at the window of Finbar's hotel and looked down at the River Liffey which was mud-brown after days of rain. He closed his eyes and thought about the rooms all around him, empty now in the afternoon, and the long empty corridors of the hotel. He thought of the houses on the long stretches of suburbs going out of the city: Clontarf, Rathmines, Rathgar, the confidence they excluded, the sense of strength and solidity. He thought about the rooms in these houses, empty most of the day and maybe most of the night, and the long back gardens, neat and trimmed, empty too for all of the winter and most of the summer. Defenceless. No one would notice an intruder scaling a wall, flitting across the garden to scale the next wall, a nondescript man checking the house of a sign of life, for alarm systems, and then silently prising a window open, sliding in, carefully crossing the room, opening doors, not making a sound, so alert as to be almost invisible. 


Your mind is like a haunted house. He did not know where the phrase came from, if someone had said it to him, if he had read it somewhere, or if it was a line from a song. No, he thought, it could not be a line from a song. He had stolen these paintings from a house that looked haunted. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but it no longer seemed to. He had stolen the Rembrandt whose reproduction he was looking at now, plus a Gainsborough and two Guardis and a painting by a Dutchman whose name he could not pronounce. The robbery made headlines for days in the papers. He remembered laughing out loud when he read about a gang of international art robbers who had come to Ireland. The robbery had been linked with others which has taken place in recent years on the European mainland. 






excerpt from Finbar's Hotel