The marriage of Michael Agnew and Joanna Agnew

Michael Agnew and Joanna Agnew’s marriage is revealed in fragments, through Cushla Lavery’s encounters with the family and Michael’s account of life at home. The fragments resist a single verdict: public appearances frame Joanna as Michael’s wife and the great love of his life, while private disclosures describe alcoholism, depression, hospital treatment, and an affair Michael refuses to name as one. Their son Dermot Agnew appears at the hinge between those accounts, first as a voice calling for his father and later as a young man carrying Michael’s coffin.

Marriage in the Shadow of the Affair

The marriage enters the story partly through a telling act of disguise. In Dublin, Cushla books a hotel room as being for Mr and Mrs Lavery, although Michael is the man she is expecting. The borrowed marital identity gives their clandestine meeting the outward form of a couple’s shared room; it does not make Michael’s actual marriage disappear. Instead, it places Cushla’s relationship with him alongside the established family life he maintains elsewhere.

That family life interrupts Cushla’s intimacy with Michael even at a distance. During a phone call, she hears footsteps and a young man calling for his father; the line then goes dead. The voice is Dermot’s, and its warm-sounding call gives Cushla a glimpse of Michael in his role as a father. She imagines the household around him, but those possibilities remain her conjecture rather than confirmed facts. What she can hear is the son’s uncomplicated-seeming address, a small domestic sound that contrasts with the secrecy governing her own relationship with Michael.

Joanna Seen and Described

Cushla and her mother, Gina Lavery, encounter Michael’s family at a restaurant. As they are leaving, Gina recognizes Michael and he rises to take her hands. When Gina takes Cushla’s hand and places it in Joanna’s, Michael winces. The gesture abruptly connects the two women whose lives his secrecy has kept apart, and his reaction registers the discomfort of that contact without explaining it away.

Cushla had imagined Joanna as tiny, nervy, or plain; the woman she meets is instead beautiful, with a heart-shaped face, straight auburn hair cut to her chin, and an expensive camel-coloured dress. Cushla also notices a bruise with a small puncture at its centre on the back of Joanna’s hand. The visible mark suggests recent medical treatment, but Cushla does not know its cause at that moment. Joanna’s grip feels desperate to her, at once sincere and painful to receive. Joanna tells Cushla that she remembers her as a little girl and says she resembles her father. The meeting gives Cushla not an abstract rival but a person whose vulnerability and composure coexist.

Afterward, Gina tells Cushla that Joanna had studied law until Michael got her pregnant. That account is Gina’s, not an independently confirmed explanation of Joanna’s past. Its bluntness contrasts with the encounter itself: Joanna’s law studies and motherhood are reduced to a story about Michael’s effect on her, while Cushla’s brief experience of her is shaped by her face, her grip, and the mark on her hand.

Michael’s Account of Life at Home

Michael later tells Cushla that Joanna is an alcoholic and is being treated for depression. He says that he sometimes comes home to find her curled on the floor, and that she was admitted to hospital for another course of electric shocks more than a month earlier. He adds that treatment sometimes leaves her well enough to do things. These disclosures give the injury Cushla noticed a possible medical context, but the text does not establish that the mark came from a particular treatment. Michael’s account also describes illness as recurrent: hospitalization and treatment are part of a continuing situation, not a simple resolution.

Their circumstances shape the opportunity for Michael and Cushla to meet. Cushla asks whether she was able to see him so often because Joanna was in hospital and Dermot was at school; Michael answers yes. He says their son has finished his A levels and that he has brought his wife and son out for lunch. The family outing and the private affair occupy the same account of Michael’s life, without being reconciled into an explanation that removes the deception.

When Cushla asks how many women there have been, Michael answers three, then clarifies that she is not included. He says he does not consider what they have an affair and calls it different. The distinction is his own, and the episode leaves it unresolved: Michael acknowledges other relationships while reserving a special category for Cushla, even as the marriage and family he describes remain central facts of his life.

Public Memory and the Funeral

At Michael’s funeral, Joanna’s marriage to him is publicly narrated by the minister. The eulogy recalls Michael’s rugby as a youth, his selection for Ireland Schoolboys, and the promising career ended by injury; it also praises his academic record, passion for the arts, and commitment to equality and justice. It names his pride in Dermot and his great love for Joanna. The ceremony offers a formal account of the husband and father, one Cushla must hear while knowing the private history Michael disclosed to her.

The funeral makes that account physically visible. Dermot, in a new suit, is only a few feet away as the coffin is carried down the aisle; he looks too young to Cushla to be bearing his father’s body. Joanna is supported between two women, her legs buckling, and later clings to her son beside the hearse. Her distress does not settle the question of what their marriage was, but it prevents the public declaration of love from reading as mere ceremonial language. The marriage remains difficult to reduce either to Michael’s affair or to the eulogy: the novel places betrayal, illness, family attachment, and grief in the same frame, without claiming that any one of them cancels the others.