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ludicrous thong and danced around a pole every night.
       It was silly. Just mainly silly and a bit sad, really.
       And the music sometimes would do your head in.
       But the tips were enormous, and the bouncers were great and there was always a taxi home at 3 a.m. and God, why not?
       I told Geraldine that it was a gambling club, and I was a croupier taking in the money, and that the law said she was too young to come in, and that was fine. And then one night of course, wouldn't you know, Harriet Lynch's father and some friends were there and recognized me. They nearly dropped dead.
       I went to their table to have a drink and said very sweetly that everyone earned their living and took their pleasures in an entirely individual way and I didn't see any need to inform Harriet Lynch's mother or daughters back in Rossmore of the nature of these business trips to Dublin. They got the message and Keno told me afterwards that I was the brightest girl he ever had in his stable. I didn't like the word stable. I felt we were all like performing prancing horses or something. But I did like Keno. A lot. He was very respectful to us all and he was doing all this because he had a very poor family who needed support back in Morocco. He would really like to have been a poet but there was no money in poetry. His little sisters and brothers wouldn't have had an education if he were busy writing verses so he had this club instead.
       I understood so well.
       Sometimes we'd have a coffee, Keno and myself—my friends from college thought he was gorgeous. He always talked about poetry so they thought he was some kind of student. He never told any actual lies, I noticed, but he never told the whole truth either.
       But I wasn't going to criticize him for that, I didn't want him to tell my friends from the BA honors group that he knew me from my dancing nearly naked five nights a week in his club.
       He was the same with Geraldine, who was now also at university, and mercifully having too good a time to want to investigate my so-called life as a croupier in a casino. I didn't fancy Keno and he didn't fancy me, but we often talked about love and marriage and what it might be like. He was cynical that any romance ever really lasted. His business experience told him so much the contrary.
       He said he would like children and in fact he had a child, a daughter in Marrakesh. But she was being brought up by her grandmother. Her mother was an exotic dancer in one of his clubs there. That was the first time I knew he had any other establishments than the one where I worked in Dublin.
       But I said nothing and never brought the matter up again.
       "You're a great girl, Clare," he said to me often. "A real star."
       "I was a gold star at school," I explained, and he thought that was very endearing.
       "Little Gold-Star Clare! Give up this nonsense of becoming a teacher and manage my club for me instead," he begged.
       But I told him that in fact when I did become a teacher I'd actually give up the club. Too much danger that the pupils' fathers might see me!
    "Well, as you said yourself, they shouldn't be there," he laughed.
       He came to my graduation and sat at the conferring ceremonies with Geraldine. I smiled as I took my parchment in my hand. If they knew that the girl with the First Class honors was a topless dancer . . . Only Keno knew and he was clapping loudest of all.
       A year later I was a full-fledged teacher with my diploma and I got into exactly the kind of school I wanted to. I took Keno out to lunch to say good-bye. He didn't believe it when I told him what I was going to be earning. For me it was plenty.
       Geraldine had won a scholarship, I had my savings and hardly any outgoings.
       I thanked him from the bottom of my heart for having made it all possible. He was dark and moody-looking, and he said I was ungrateful.
       "Over the years, Keno, if there's anything