All the Seas of the World

A girl sits at a window in Dublin with two letters in her lap and a boat leaving tonight. The story is Eveline, four pages of James Joyce's Dubliners, and John Banville begins it the way most of us finish it: heartbroken for her. He counts what she is running from, and what Frank the sailor is actually offering, and it is worse than you remember. Then he goes back to the ending and reads it again, and the story you thought you knew turns into a different story. The sentence that gives this episode its title is where it happens.