The love affair between Cushla Lavery and Michael Agnew

The love affair between Cushla Lavery and Michael Agnew is a secret intimacy whose tenderness develops alongside an imbalance Cushla cannot ignore: Michael is married, has a family, and appears to have had other affairs. Their closeness gives Cushla moments of happiness and reciprocal declaration, but also leaves her waiting, concealing the relationship, and questioning what place she holds in his life. Michael’s shooting ends their relationship, while Gerry Devlin’s later recollection shows that its secrecy had not made it invisible.

Attraction and Recognition

An invitation from Michael brings the relationship to a small but revealing hesitation. Cushla considers the effort of getting dressed up without appearing to have done so and the excuse she would need to give Gina Lavery. She tells Michael she is tired and needs a quiet night after a strange day. Her refusal does not establish a lack of feeling; it shows that seeing him requires arrangements beyond the meeting itself, including managing the appearance of her private life at home.

The attraction becomes explicit in a conversation about a book by Iris Murdoch. Cushla explains that she bought it to take her mind off Michael, then jokes that he asked to see what she was reading and judged her more favorably because of her choice. Michael responds that he liked her before the book. When Cushla asks for specifics, he recalls several occasions: the cross on her forehead when she entered the pub, her refusal to look away after catching him watching her in a mirror, and her manner at the Lyric, where she stood by a ledge trying to seem unconcerned. He also says he especially liked seeing her cry when he mentioned her father, and declares his love. Cushla warns him that such a declaration must be meant; Michael affirms it and expects her to answer in kind. The exchange makes the affair more than an unspoken attraction, but the detailed inventory is Michael’s account of what drew him to her, not proof that their circumstances have become equal.

Intimacy and Unequal Circumstances

The affair’s emotional intimacy does not remove the status that troubles Cushla. She recognizes that Michael’s friends may see her as a woman he picked up in a pub, and describes herself as his affair partner because he is married. She calls their position ridiculous, though she also acknowledges that she cannot help being angry about it. Her description makes the relationship’s social arrangement part of the intimacy itself: she is close to Michael, but knows that other people could reduce her to a concealed or secondary presence in his life.

A hotel-room encounter offers a contrasting picture of closeness. Michael opens a window; they undress each other slowly, and he asks whether Cushla is happy as they lie down. She says she is. Yet the thought attached to that answer is not uncomplicated ease: the following day she will be at home with her mother, waiting by the phone. Cushla’s happiness is real, but so is the waiting that follows their time together. The scene holds these conditions together rather than presenting intimacy as an escape from them.

Pattern, Doubt, and Choice

Cushla’s understanding changes when she considers the signs that Michael has had other affairs. She recalls the dry questioning at the Lyric, where Penny asked how she and Michael knew each other, and the mild amusement with which his other friends accepted her. In retrospect, Cushla sees a sequence in Michael’s invitations and access: he showed her where he lived after a month, gave her his number after two, and a key after three. He could leave her waiting for days, then return and draw her back with a trip to Dublin or an afternoon in his flat. The pattern changes the meaning of gestures that had seemed like a steady progression toward closeness. Cushla is not only hurt that she was not the first; she fears she will not be the last.

That realization also unsettles the account she had made of Michael’s marriage to Joanna Agnew. Cushla had treated Joanna as an irritant and believed Michael was trapped in an unhappy marriage. Now she recognizes how convenient that belief had been for her. The affair had allowed her to imagine Michael’s marriage as a condition that explained his unavailability, while keeping Joanna’s own presence at a distance. Cushla’s reassessment does not erase her attachment; it exposes the assumptions that had helped her live with it.

When Michael asks whether she wants to stop seeing him, Cushla says she does not. His warning that the relationship will be hell unless she can overlook his circumstances makes the choice plain without resolving its cost. Cushla continues not because the circumstances have changed, but because she cannot bring herself to end the affair. Her attachment and her clear recognition of its limits coexist.

Ending and Retrospective Knowledge

Michael Agnew is shot dead. When Cushla hears the news, she turns to mechanical tasks behind the bar, washing and stacking tankards while the people around her speak. She leaves the bar and walks out toward the esplanade. Her movements and withdrawal register the immediate force of the loss, while the narration does not turn the killing into a resolution of the problems that shaped the affair. His death instead makes their future together impossible before Cushla has found any way to settle what the relationship meant or what she could expect from him.

Gerry Devlin later tells Cushla that he suspected the relationship. He remembers seeing her stand close to Michael at the Lyric and noticing that Michael was unhappy when Gerry joined them in the pub before the pictures. Gerry had been reluctant to interrupt what he witnessed, and asks whether Cushla loved Michael. The exchange reveals that the affair had been privately managed, not wholly unseen. Its ending leaves Cushla with both the loss of Michael and a belated conversation in which another person names the closeness she had not acknowledged to him.