Too much intimacy can destroy a relationship – and a pair of thermal long johns can cause almost as much trouble

THERE WAS a time when underwear didn’t bother me. I could wear any old vest, T-shirt or string top that was lying around on the floor. I would walk the summer lanes with as much bare skin exposed as was decent, and at night I never wore pyjamas.

I slept in sleeping bags, in confined spaces, with other boys, behind couches, in the back of old vans, or in tiny tents. I embraced the world with cocky enthusiasm, and even at night I swaggered, when I got up to pee, moving about in the moonlight with the elegance of an untamed wolf. Or so I supposed.

But there was no wolf in me – just someone who wanted to belong, and as boys we all belonged to each other, like a pack of hyenas. Life was never lonely back then, and I could not have imagined the labyrinth of solitude that a middle-aged man can stumble into, as he mooches about Dunnes Stores, trying to find pyjamas and thermal long johns.

Which is why I went to Cafe le Monde to comfort myself with a big bun, and then noticed Daniella, a tall, sallow-skinned Italian woman who studies art and design, speaks six languages, and has remarkable eyes, which she decorates with lashings of eyeliner. She was weeping into her coffee because she could not find a watch to send to her father for his birthday.

“Surely there are lots of lovely watches in Mullingar?”

“Yes,” she agreed, “but not the Rolex I am looking for.”

“A Rolex would be very expensive,” I said. “Perhaps you should buy something cheaper.”

“Of course it is expensive,” she said with indignation, “but he is my father.”

She wanted to know what was in my bag. I thought that would be too much information for a young lady. “Groceries,” I lied.

She picked up the bag and laughed when she saw the long johns, and the paisley pyjamas.

It’s a long time ago since I lived in Italy, without any pyjamas, in the first sweep of a love affair, when the cicadas sang in the dark and the nights were heavy with the fragrance of lavender from the garden outside the window.

I had an urge to share this memory with Daniella but, as they say in Cavan, too much intimacy can destroy a good relationship.

It was in Italy that I first learned how women fall in love with their ears. Luigi, an old patriarch in a white shirt and sunglasses, explained it to me, in the garden, as his mother, 100 years old, sat on the balcony knitting scarves for her grandchildren.

“Are you suggesting,” I asked, “that when a woman looks in a mirror, and sees her bejewelled ears, she becomes . . . transfixed?”

“No,” he said. “I mean that women are seduced by what you say, not by how you look. They listen. To a woman, you must always say a beautiful thing – and mean it.”

Daniella said that her friend Gianni had opened a new restaurant in town, Mamma’s Pasta Papa’s Pizza, where the flower shop used to be, on Grove Street. She said a few of her friends were going there on Saturday evening, and suggested I join them. I think the long johns worried her.

“You need to get out more,” she said.

In fact I had been out the previous night, in Roscommon, and nearly perished in a BB because I forgot to take pyjamas with me.

The guesthouse was old, with wood panels along the corridors, and the bedroom wallpaper was cream, with small blue stencils depicting harmony in rustic life – a jolly dog, and a boy and girl at the well.

A similar wallpaper adorned my bedroom as a child. I used to wake in the mornings and tear strips off it as I contemplated another day stuck in front of my teacher’s angry little beetroot face.

On Saturday evening I went to the restaurant. Daniella’s friends ate pasta, drank wine and sang songs. Even mamma and papa were at the table, with a grandchild who clutched his birthday balloon as he devoured a chocolate pizza. Papa whispered something in his wife’s ear – something beautiful and truthful, I suppose, because she smiled and gazed at him with affection.

Then he looked at me and smiled, as if he too knew that time was passing.