In a draughty old house near Birr, with one sock in my pocket

DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:I WAS TAUGHT philosophy by an old professor who was bald, and smoked Dunhill cigarettes, and lived in an old house. Sometimes he threw parties, and his drawing room would fill up with girls in gorgeous dresses. He was a man so melancholic that he wept every time he thought about the train that moved across Russia in the snow, carrying Anna Karenina back to Moscow.

He drank alone in a local bar, and would sometimes put his arms on the counter and lay his head on them, as if he were fed up with the world, and exhausted by philosophical questions, and needed just to rest there for a few moments, before consuming his pint.

One night the barman tried to shake him, after 10 minutes, and he fell off the stool because he was already dead. The barman shouted at him and called his name, but the silence in the professor’s ear would never again be broken.

I thought of him last week, as I drove away from a friend who lives in a big house near Birr.

I always feel a bit uneasy in those big houses that sit far off from the main roads, hidden discreetly behind beech and chestnut trees; glebe houses enclosed by high walls, and surrounded by paddocks and lush meadows.

In the 19th century, bedrooms were not designed en-suite, and the floorboards on the landing usually creaked, and it’s not fashionable nowadays to leave chamber pots beneath the beds.

Not that I needed one. After lashings of wine I slept like a log on a king-size mattress, covered with an old eiderdown and giant pillows with lace on the edges, and rugs that might have come from Afghanistan when Kipling was a boy. A wardrobe of polished walnut stood at the foot of the bed, with a long mirror on the front piece, and two side compartments as enormous as the confession boxes in Cavan Cathedral.

The following morning was the first of May, and a cherry tree outside my window was in full bloom, and I could hear the master of the house mooching about on the landing, and the other guests chirping away as they jaunted down the staircase.

But I was still in my room, because I couldn’t find one of my socks.

Eventually I abandoned the search, and went down to the dining room hoping that no one would notice the naked feet in my shoes.

I had put the other sock in my pocket, for I thought that I could offer a good excuse for having left both off, rather than go about in public with just one missing, which might appear childish.

“Where’s your socks?” my host inquired, as I walked in.

His mind had long ago contracted, as a consequence of his excessive interest in the local newspapers, and his temper had been recently soured by his wife’s untimely death, so I had no wish to be frivolous with him.

“The fairies,” I suggested, earnestly. “It’s the first of May.”

“Fairies?”

“Yes,” I said. “Fairies – those little spirits that scatter their tenderness across the universe.”

He was neither amused nor satisfied by that answer, but he returned to his porridge without further comment.

When I got back to my room to pack my bag, I made a last desperate search in unlikely places, but without success.

As I drove away he was standing at the front door, and he saluted like a lonely old soldier. I think he realises that his magnificent house will soon become his last enclosure, as he waddles about the draughty corridors with a walking aid and faces into the shadows.

That’s when I remembered my old philosophy teacher, who was masculine to his toenails and unspeakably lonely. There are few things in the world as sad as an old man without a companion, unless it is the sight of a man who relies on a companion all his life, only to find himself alone at the end.

In the rear-view mirror I saw my host examining the ropey branches of a climbing rosebush that his wife had tended for decades. Perhaps it was the fairies that banished my black cotton sock into thin air, and perhaps they too will enfold him in tenderness, and be the lace on the edge of his pillow, at the end of his days.