Margaret in Intermezzo: Desire, Duty, and the Courage to Be Seen

Overview

Margaret Kearns is a woman quietly coming undone. When we meet her in Intermezzo, she is thirty-six years old, separated from her alcoholic husband Ricky, and living in a rented cottage outside a small Irish town. She works backstage at concerts and readings, managing front-of-house logistics with a smile that conceals a private wasteland of loneliness and swallowed resentment. A chance encounter with twenty-two-year-old chess prodigy Ivan Koubek at a simultaneous exhibition upends the careful architecture of her life. Over the following weeks, she falls into an affair that forces her to examine every rule of decency, every family expectation, and every story she has told herself about who she is.

Rooney constructs Margaret as a study in the tension between duty and desire, between the public persona of the reliable, self-sacrificing woman and the private self that yearns for tenderness, touch, and freedom. The novel never allows us to settle on a single judgment: Margaret’s decisions are ethically messy, socially risky, and yet almost unbearably human.

Plot Role

Margaret’s narrative arc intertwines with Ivan’s grieving process after his father’s death. She is not merely a love interest; she is the catalyst that forces Ivan to grow, and in turn, his devotion cracks open the shell she built around herself during her marriage. Structurally, Margaret’s chapters (4, 8, 12, 16) mirror Ivan’s emotional states: tentative hope, stolen happiness, fear of exposure, and finally a hard-won peace. Her presence also ripples outward into the brothers’ reconciliation. When Peter meets Margaret at Ivan’s chess tournament in the final chapter, she becomes a bridge—her quiet dignity signalling that Ivan has built a life Peter can respect.

Motivations and Traits Shown Through Actions

Duty as identity
Margaret has long been the family martyr. She buys her mother a dishwasher, wrangles complicated installation logistics, and silently lords the expense over her siblings—yet she cannot name this resentment aloud. The evidence shows her rehearsing phone conversations, aware that her “essentially dutiful personality” is a trap. This self-awareness makes her later rebellion more explosive.

The hunger for flattery
When Ivan calls her beautiful and says he wants to see her again, Margaret recognizes the pleasure as vanity and immediately condemns herself. Rooney gives us her thought: “the only mouthful of desirable flattery she has tasted in a very long time.” Her willingness to risk shame for this tiny morsel of affirmation reveals how starved she has been. The text distinguishes her private motives from her outward presentation: she knows it is “wrong” but cannot locate a victim other than herself.

Fear of judgment versus moral certainty
Margaret wrestles with the question of whether the relationship is wrong. Ivan insists it is not, and his logic—that no one is being hurt, that their happiness is real—clashes with her internalized social norms. She admits she fears others’ opinions while recognizing that “to fear judgement was not the same thing as believing that the judgement was valid.” This nuance matters: Margaret’s conflict is not between right and wrong but between belonging and authenticity.

Resentment toward those who failed her
After an ugly confrontation with her mother, Margaret inwardly catalogs every instance of disloyalty: her sister Louise borrowing money then going silent when Ricky’s alcoholism became public; even Anna, her dearest friend, who made excuses for Ricky. “Not a word for the shame he brought on Margaret.” This inventory of betrayal fuels her eventual decision to stop protecting people who never protected her. The anger is not petty; it is the accumulated weight of years of being told she was strong enough to bear everything alone.

Chronological Arc

Pre-Ivan life (implied backstory): Margaret endured Ricky’s drinking, public humiliations, and hospital stays. She left him, rented the cottage, and rebuilt a small, “thankless and dutiful” existence. The separation left her financially straitened but emotionally guarded.
The encounter (Chapter 2): At the chess exhibition, she mistakes Ivan for a child prodigy. They share drinks and vulnerable confessions. The sex is tender and eager; Ivan gives her his number. “Her ordinary life has slipped free of its netting,” she thinks—but the netting is not yet broken.
The decision (Chapter 4): After days of anxious debate, she calls Ivan. Waiting for his bus in a poorly lit car park, she imagines the sordid tableau and the gossip it would provoke. Yet she stays. The chapter hinges on the moment she acknowledges she is willing to be seen as humiliating herself for a much younger man. They make love, walk the countryside, and the idyll begins.
Secrecy and strain (Chapters 8-12): Margaret and Ivan construct a hidden world of country walks, shared meals, and intimate conversation about his father and her marriage. She lies to Anna, endures suggestive comments from chess club acquaintances, and feels her two lives pulling apart. The reckoning arrives when her mother, having heard the gossip, brands her “a wild woman” and “a shocking piece of work.”
Breakdown and assertion (Chapter 16): Margaret’s fury crests. Stripping off her rubber gloves after cleaning, she realizes no one will defend her—none of the people she sacrificed for. In that rage, she recognizes that her old life was a performance of strength that others exploited. She allows herself to envision a future with Ivan, however improbable, calling it “the only answer to death.”
Public emergence (Chapter 17): At the chess tournament, Margaret accompanies Ivan. The reunion with Peter, orchestrated with quiet confidence, signals her acceptance of visibility. She no longer hides. The final image is of her walking out to her car, hands in pockets, whistling—a woman exposed but alive, carrying the mess of scandal and love together.

Relationships

Ivan Koubek: The age gap powers the narrative tension, but the relationship itself is depicted as emotionally reciprocal. Ivan offers her a tenderness her marriage lacked, and she offers him the steady attention and physical affection he craves after his father’s death. Their power dynamic is deliberately ambiguous: she worries she is exploiting him; he assures her he is the one likely to be hurt. The text leaves it open, but the mutual care is unmistakable.
Ricky Fitzpatrick: The ex-husband is a ghost that haunts Margaret’s decisions. Her disgust at his public drunkenness and the town’s sympathy for him fuel her later defiance. She refuses to be the long-suffering wife any longer. The evidence shows her seeing him urinating on the street and driving past—a symbolic final rejection.
Anna: The best friend represents the life Margaret might have had: marriage, a baby, settled happiness. Anna disapproves of vanity, so Margaret hides the affair, losing the very friendship that could have offered understanding. The silence between them illustrates the isolating cost of Margaret’s secrecy.
Margaret’s Mother and Siblings: The family serves as the voice of social judgement. Her mother’s hypocrisy—defending Ricky while condemning Margaret’s “vulgar” desire—exposes the double standard around female sexuality. Margaret’s refusal to be shamed into disappearance is the story’s moral hinge.

Key Decisions and Consequences

Calling Ivan a second time. By inviting him to her cottage, Margaret crosses from a one-night stand into a sustained affair. She cannot then retreat without acknowledging the choice as deliberate. This decision commits her to a path of lies that will eventually force the truth into the open.

Telling her mother the truth. Rather than continue lying, Margaret confronts her family with the facts. The result is painful estrangement, but it also liberates her. The cost—loss of familial approval—is paid, and Margaret discovers she can survive it.

Letting go of the martyr role. Throughout the novel, Margaret’s internal monologue revises her self-image. She stops clinging to her own decency as a “rag to clutch at.” This shift is less a single decision than a cumulative reckoning, but its consequence is the person who whistles in the rain, no longer performing strength for ungrateful audiences.

Theme and Symbol Connections

The netting of life. Margaret’s early metaphor—that her ordinary life “has slipped free of its netting”—reappears in Chapter 12, where she revises it: “Life is itself the netting, holding people in place, making sense of things.” The relationship with Ivan does not destroy the net; it reweaves it into a form she can live inside willingly.

Shame and exposure. Margaret’s arc connects to the novel’s broader meditation on mental health and vulnerability. Her fear of being seen as predatory or pathetic mirrors Ivan’s social anxiety and Peter’s suicidal ideation. The car park scene, where she waits in the dark, is a small masterclass in the physical sensation of shame.

Duty and rebellion. Margaret’s dutifulness is the flip side of class and privilege. Her family expects her to manage their emotional and practical needs because she is reliable and female. Her rebellion—choosing a relationship that flouts decorum—reclaims agency that class respectability never offered her.

Age and desire. The age gap intensifies the novel’s exploration of complicated love. Margaret’s experience of desire after years of deadening marriage challenges the idea that middle age demands renunciation. Rooney refuses to sentimentalize or condemn; instead, she tracks the micro-decisions that make such a love possible.

Questions and Answers

1. Why does Margaret hesitate to contact Ivan after their first night together?
Margaret fears that she is acting out of vanity and that the relationship is inherently exploitative because of the age difference. She also dreads public exposure. The text shows her thinking that even the most well-intentioned passer-by would see the “sexual element” as the only explanation for her waiting in a dark car park for a young man. Her hesitation is rooted in internalized social norms, not a clear sense of moral wrongdoing.

2. What does the repeated detail about her mother’s dishwasher reveal about Margaret’s character?
The dishwasher symbolizes Margaret’s entrenched role as the family fixer. She spends disproportionate mental energy on a mundane purchase, resenting her siblings’ indifference while also lording the expense over them. This mixture of dutifulness and silent anger defines the personality she later sheds. It is explicit fact that she recognizes herself as “terrible” for keeping score, yet she cannot stop.

3. How does Margaret’s past with Ricky shape her decisions with Ivan?
Ricky’s alcoholism subjected Margaret to public humiliation and forced her into a performance of stoic endurance. Having played the saint, she now refuses to be the victim again. When Ivan offers genuine tenderness, it feels like a relief she will not deny herself. Her fury at Ricky’s unpunished shame directly fuels her defiance when her mother judges her for the age-gap relationship.

4. What role does Anna play in Margaret’s internal conflict?
Anna embodies the decent, norm-abiding life Margaret might have chosen. Anna’s disapproval of vanity makes Margaret hide the affair, even when she desperately wants to confide. The friendship’s strain highlights the cost of secrecy: Margaret loses the comfort of being known. The text suggests Anna might have understood, but Margaret’s fear of condemnation preempts that possibility.

5. How does Margaret’s self-understanding change by the end of the novel?
Margaret moves from viewing herself as a dutiful martyr to accepting that she is, in her mother’s words, “a wild woman.” She no longer expects anyone to defend her and instead finds freedom in that abandonment. The final image of her leaving the cottage, whistling, thinking “nothing protected, nothing left to be protected anymore,” signals a self that no longer needs to be good on other people’s terms. This is not arrogance but the exhausted triumph of someone who has stopped performing.

For a full picture of how Margaret’s story fits into the novel’s resolution, see our ending explained page. You can also explore the wider themes of sibling estrangement and grief that intersect with her arc.