The Rachel Incident

The last section of the novel traces The Importance of Enduring Friendship as Rachel and James move apart from each other, emotionally and physically, into a more balanced sustainable friendship. While the last few chapters condense a lot of James’s and Rachel’s early adulthood, O’Donoghue shows that what happened on Shandon Street was the catalyst for everything after it. Significantly, this is also the section where James and Rachel finally emigrate separately and no longer live together in the cottage. Though their close friendship has allowed each of them a space to grow and experiment, it also became suffocating at times, as their codependency interfered with their growth. For this friendship to survive into adulthood and allow them to experience other kinds of healthy relationships, it needed to evolve past the phase of constant togetherness. Though both characters express fear about being apart, they find a new balance in supporting one another as they pursue separate lives. Their closeness in 2022 proves that they have found a way to make their friendship not only intimate but enduring.

James’s final phase of Experimentation as a Means of Self-Exploration leads him to leave the British Isles to find a place that will allow him to build an identity independent of his working-class origins. In addition to the recession, another reason James chooses to emigrate is the UK’s class-conscious society. He recognizes that London will not be far enough from Ireland to transcend the barriers he faces, and that even in England people will know that he was not raised in a middle-class family. He tells Rachel that her accent and university degree will insulate her from some of the struggles that he faces. Though she is angered by this idea, especially since her parents no longer have money, she later admits that James is right: “After I moved to London, I found that my accent, my good manners and my vague ability to reference Trollope helped build a picture for my English peers that became more than the sum of its parts” (252). She has a “nice Irish voice” and is more readily accepted into society than someone from James’s working-class background might be (252). For both Rachel and James, relocation to new cities enables them to experiment with adult identities not available to them in Ireland, but for James, he must travel farther from home.

Rachel settles into her adult career and a kind of peace with her past and her insecurities. Where she once felt self-conscious about her body, she now takes Carey’s Wonder Woman comparison to heart. She sees herself as an “imposing, sexy sort of tall girl” instead of someone awkward and unlovable (262). When she and Carey reunite, their relationship is no longer characterized by The Intensity of First Love, but a more comfortable affection. She compares their kiss to finding a favorite pair of old boots. While it might seem unromantic to compare love to footwear, Rachel understands that the delight and surprise is finding something from your past that still fits and feels comfortable. Their love was not “vanished by […] carelessness” (275), but deliberately resurrected into something more stable. Both she and Carey have finally answered their own questions about who they are as people, and after finding themselves on their own, they are ready to begin a real relationship. For all the romance of first love, Rachel has learned that lasting love is more satisfying.

Lasting love, in Rachel’s words, requires “making it work” (289). On Shandon Street, she saw Byrne and James together and cried, thinking that they were somehow succeeding in a relationship when she and Carey could not. However, she now thinks that “that wasn’t making it work. Whatever came after was. Whatever Deenie and Dr. Byrne did or said or promised in the long marriage that followed me and James. A story I won’t ever know” (289). Deenie and Byrne have created an unconventional partnership that has lasted a long time. But Rachel also knows about making it work herself. She and Carey have rekindled their youthful love affair, and it has matured into something stable and lasting. She and James have also made their friendship work, weathering long distances and the fights about the Harrington-Byrnes. When Deenie asks Rachel for the truth about what happened those years earlier, Rachel recognizes that it is not her place to tell the story. Instead, she puts Deenie in contact with James, allowing them to make their own set of amends. In doing so, she also emphasizes that James is still her best friend and that she feels love and pride when she thinks of him.