Siobhán de Buitléar

Siobhán de Buitléar is Michael Agnew’s wife, but the novel presents her almost entirely through traces: a name inscribed in a book, a euphemistic report of illness, and Cushla Lavery’s recognition that Michael’s domestic life has another woman at its center. The distance between Siobhán’s absence from the scenes and the force of her effect on Cushla turns her into more than a biographical detail. Her old schoolbook becomes evidence of a marriage and a private history that Cushla can glimpse but cannot enter.

Identity and the Inscribed Name

Siobhán first appears to Cushla not as a person but as handwriting. During a morning at Michael’s house, Cushla sits among legal texts, box files, and books on a dining table. Among them are Liam O’Flaherty’s Dúil and an Irish dictionary. Inside the book, a name is written in cló gaelach, with Joanna Butler printed beneath Siobhán de Buitléar. The paired names give Cushla an immediate, material clue to a life that Michael has not explained: the Irish form and its printed English counterpart occupy the same page, while the book itself has been kept among the objects of his present household.

Cushla studies the signature’s fussy letter forms, especially its distinctive r, which recalls the handwriting taught by nuns at school from down south. She imagines the former owner as a girl with a careful hand. The impression is specific but limited: the book gives her a hand, a name, and a school-age past, not a voice or a face. The narration preserves that gap rather than filling it with an account of Siobhán’s character or feelings.

A Presence in Michael’s Home

When Cushla asks who Siobhán de Buitléar is, Michael does not answer her question. He turns instead to his effort to learn Irish, hands her a notebook, and explains the difficulty of looking up words as he reads. On the page, he has written dúil with a cluster of possible English meanings—desire, fondness, craving, yearning—and compares the word with the Portuguese Saudade. The exchange makes the book doubly charged: it is both a text Michael is studying and something Cushla has recognized as belonging to his wife.

The movement of the scene sharpens that unease. Michael leaves the room; Cushla returns to the signature and wonders about the girl who once owned the book. She then walks through the house, seeing a drawing of High Street and a photograph of boys in rugby jerseys in which she immediately spots Michael. When he returns wearing an Aran cardigan, their conversation resumes, but the identity of the book’s earlier owner remains unanswered. The house offers Cushla evidence of Michael’s past in pictures and possessions, while his silence prevents that evidence from becoming a shared explanation.

Illness, Euphemism, and Recognition

Later, Gina Lavery reports that Michael Agnew is in very bad form and suggests that his wife must not be well again. Gina calls her Joanna Butler, adopting a brogue as she says the name. Cushla immediately connects it to the inscription: Siobhán is Michael’s wife. The recognition lands as a shock, not as a distant piece of information. Cushla asks whether Gina knows her; Gina says that she once did, but that Siobhán would not be in circulation, using a social euphemism rather than explaining her circumstances.

That exchange supplies only fragments. Siobhán is spoken of as repeatedly unwell, and Gina’s remark implies that she is no longer socially present in the way she once was. The novel does not specify the nature of her illness or establish what her withdrawal means to her. Instead, the guarded wording leaves Cushla—and the reader—with knowledge of a wife who is both central to Michael’s life and largely inaccessible to those discussing her.

The Book as Evidence of the Affair

After the conversation with Gina, Cushla sits at her bedroom window and smokes as a car passes through the rain toward the hills. She imagines that, somewhere along that road, the woman who once signed her name in Irish is with a man who uses her old schoolbooks to make other women want to sleep with him. The thought binds the physical book to Cushla’s affair with Michael. What had seemed like an obscure signature becomes a reminder that the intimacy she shares with him is not detached from his marriage: the very materials through which he approaches desire bear his wife’s name.

Siobhán is therefore shaped by an asymmetry of knowledge. Cushla learns that she is Michael’s wife, sees her name in his home, and hears that she has been unwell; she never meets her in these scenes. Meanwhile, Michael’s silence leaves Cushla to interpret the book, and Gina’s casual euphemism supplies no clear account of Siobhán’s life. The old inscription survives as a quiet counter-presence to the affair: a woman absent from the room, but not erased from the objects and relationships that define it.