“The kitchen door was open and she was in the garden, her rubber gloves on, at her roses. She asked me if I had a headache or something and I decided to bungle it through.’ No, Aunt Josephine, I took the day off. I’ve been offered a job on a magazine in London and I’ve resigned from the bank. Don’t worry: I’m not going at once. It takes a month for the resignation to take effect and I’m sure I can withdraw it at any time before then.’ You should have seen her face. ‘Have you thought about the pension you’ll lose?’ were the first words when she found her voice. ‘How will you manage all on your own in a place like London?’ So the story is out—I’m going to London to seek fame and fortune.”

Angrily she intercepted my glance towards her body. “No,” she said. “The two per cent chance of error is gone. I practically didn’t make it to the bathroom this morning. Early morning sickness.”

“What do you want to do now?” I asked.

“I want to go back to your place,” she said. “I know it may sound exciting, going to London—but I know, I know I’ll hardly be in London before I start missing you. The fame and fortune is all a lie. It’s going to be a hard summer and a longer autumn and winter. And I’ll not have you. I’m going to need a lot of loving in the next month to get me through all that length of time without you.”

“It seems I’m not going to London after all,” I said to Maloney. We met in the bar of the Clarence. He had insisted that we start to meet regularly since I was soon going to be away for at least the most of nine months, and he had picked the Clarence as out of the way and suitably grey.

For the hot day he wore baggy flannels, an expensively ragged corduroy jacket, and his buttoned-down shirt was open enough to display a wealth of grey hair on the chest.

“A false alarm,” he chortled. “Following in my own august footsteps.”

“No such luck,” I said.

“You’re going to do a skunk, then?” he looked at me in admiration, and started to laugh, a secretive high-pitched laugh, “I always thought you were one of those priested types, a lot in the head but not much on the ground. That you’d do the decent, follow your conscience, even if it meant tearing your balls off, but apparently I was wrong,” he shouted.

“No,” I ignored what he’d said. “She knows this rich Englishman with a house in Kensington, a crazy wife, several companies. He’s been an admirer of her for years. It’s just poured out in the wash. He’s already flown in from London and out again. They had dinner in the Hibernian, and he’s taking charge of the whole business. She’s going to live in the basement of his Kensington house and he’s getting her a job writing for one of his magazines. Naturally he doesn’t want me to go with her to London.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? This broad must be good looking. I thought she was just an ordinary turkey, a bit dim as to the facts of life.”

“She’s very good looking and this Englishman is old. I can hardly believe my luck. It’s almost too good. I hope she marries him. If she’d marry him it’d take care of the whole mess in one beautiful stroke.”

“I detect a disgusting note of self-congratulation,” he changed. “And it won’t do. It won’t do at all. You’ve behaved stupidly, even by your own admission. You’ve got this woman into a frightful mess. In your conceit you refuse to marry her though she is a beauty, a far cry from your own appearance. And your bad behaviour and general situation is making us feel good. It’s making us all feel very good.”

“How?”

“How can you ask such a question? Your behaviour has dropped the moral averages to zero overnight. It makes some of our own reprehensible past acts practically beatific. We’re disgusted with you.”

“Anyhow you won’t want the Shannon River thing written now.”

“That’s what you think. I want every word of it. And I want both history and myth respected. There are too many people up to their elbows in myth without the slightest respect for history.”

“Why don’t you let up?”

“Would you if you’d just lost a Paris trip and was barely consoled by looking forward to a few nice saunters round Soho and found that even that was pulled out from under your feet because a friend wasn’t being asked to pay his bills?” “You’re too much,” I said.

“I know I am,” he beamed suddenly. “I work very hard at it.” In four weeks she would go to London. Jonathan would meet her at the airport and take her to the basement flat in Kensington. In seven to eight months she would give birth to the child. It was still all that time off, time enough for something to change it back, time enough for it to never happen. Vague and fragile as that sense was, it was enough to blur the sharpness, keep it farther off.

 “I’m going to need a lot of loving to get me through all that length of time in London,” she said again. “And since you’re always muddled as to where we’ll meet,” she laughed, “We’ll decide the meeting places for the next four weeks tonight.”

There was no point meeting in the middle of town, she’d have to be there to say her own farewells, the goodbyes being prepared for her at Amalgamated Waterways and the bank, and she wanted as much as possible to keep our lives separate from them. So on wet evenings or on evenings when there was a threat of rain we’d meet in Gaffney’s bar. And if it was fine we’d meet half-way in Calderwood Avenue. She was in high energetic spirits that evening, insisting on counting the small almond and cherry trees in Calderwood. There were two hundred and forty-nine trees in the avenue. She wore a blue ribbon that was too young for her and took it off and tied it round the one hundredth and twenty-fifth tree.

“People will think we’re crazy,” she said as she took my arm to walk back to the room. One evening out of the four weeks we had to meet in Gaffney’s but we saw the blue silk ribbon round the bole of the one hundredth and twenty-fifth almond tree so regularly that we did not notice it fade and grow ragged in the dust and sun.

There is not much difference between seeing someone every evening who is to go to London in four weeks and going to hospital every evening to see someone who is dying, except that we can measure more accurately, and hence control it, a departure for London and imagine more easily what will happen when it’s reached. And each evening as I went to meet her I did not think there was much difference (except in the quality of affection) from going in to see my aunt in the hospital and meeting at the ribboned almond tree, except my male body in its cloth covering replaced the brandy bottle in its brown parcel.

She was always on time. Walking towards her down the long avenue of cherries and almonds proved far worse than walking into my aunt’s awareness down the hospital corridor during those first visits. As soon as she’d see me come her walk would change, as if a band had suddenly struck up, and she’d start to smile and wave. If I waved in answer, there’d follow an excruciating few minutes of waving, smiling, walking up to the beribboned tree.

“Right on the dot,” she’d say as she kissed. I tried coming a few minutes late but as soon as she’d see me along the line of almonds she’d take off towards me waving, smiling, walking. “You’re late,” she’d say. “The ribbon is half-way, a symbol of equality.” I started to come early, examining the parched grass around the roots of the almond tree as she came waving, smiling down the line.

“I guess that grass must be awfully interesting,” she said as her high heels clicked close.

“I’m not much good at waving,” I said.

“That is, I suppose, a tick-off for me. I can do nothing right.”

“Why should it be? I’m just not good at it, that’s all. It may well be what they call a character defect.”

Once or twice we went to suburban cinemas but in good weather we cooled our thirst in pubs, walking sometimes afterwards some miles out to the sea in the lovely evenings; and always we went back to the room.

“I need all the loving I can get to see me through the months in London,” it sounded as if she was working hard at getting a suntan against the winter. Her body was as sleek and beautiful as when we’d met. Morbidly I’d let my fingers trail along her stomach but there was no sign of swelling. The only pleasure was in staying outside oneself, watching the instinct that had constructed this prison suffer its own exhaustion within its walls and instead of bounding with refreshed curiosity to some new boundary of sense, having to take off its coat, and wield a painful pick. In this bright early summer weather it was always daylight when she left.

Sometimes we touched danger. “Jonathan rang today,” she said, and when I didn’t reply asked sharply, “Are you not curious what he had to say?”

“What did he say?”

“He said if his wife will agree to a divorce we might be married. Have you nothing to say to that?”

“I can’t very well object to Jonathan marrying you.”

“He says that if we got married he’s willing to accept the child as his own, but that you’ll have to sign over all your rights to the child. Will you do that? It means you can never lay eyes on the child again in your life,” she continued angrily.

“I’ll be glad to do that.”

“Have you no curiosity about the child?”

“None.”

“I don’t know, there must be something wrong with you, something missing. I don’t know whether you picked it up writing that pornography stuff or not but there’s a lack of feeling that makes me feel sorry for you. Often I sincerely pity you.”

“I can’t do much about that,” I avoided.

“O boy I sure picked a winner.”

Another evening she asked, “Do you play tennis?”

“No, I’ve never played. Why?”

“I used to be a fairly good player. This is the first spring I haven’t played though it must be five or six years since I was on the club team. Anyhow they heard I was going to London and they’re giving a dance and presentation. Would you like to come to the dance?”

“I think I better stay out of everything. It’d only mix things up, especially with Jonathan in it now.”

“What has he got to do with you?”

“You said yourself you’d want the child to appear completely Jonathan’s. And since that’s the case I would like to keep out of it as much as possible. That makes sense, doesn’t it? “and she was silent for a long time.

“Of course, since your rights mean nothing to you, it’s no sacrifice for you to give them up,” she said bitterly.

“I never pretended it was any other way,” I answered.

These parties were the only nights I didn’t see her, but even so they were no holiday. Hardly able to believe I was escaping so lightly, I felt I had the whole frail month in my hands, to be guided as delicately as possible towards the airport. From these functions she brought back trophies. A large clock with a scroll of names, an ornate silver tray, an ice bucket. Amalgamated Waterways gave her a cheque.

“There were speeches about my courage, how I was throwing mundane security over in order to seek fame and fortune. That I made them all seem small. If only they knew the truth,” she said, and I did not answer. Even within the boundaries of the four weeks, I was aware of possibilities within myself for doing something wild and stupid. Troubled by my own confusions in meeting her at the idiotically beribboned almond tree, I started to take down books in the room, unconsciously searching for some general light, as I’d gone out for allies at the first news. It was an ungenerous attitude, but my position was hardly aristocratic. I eventually found a sentence which brought me to a sudden stop: “Everybody must feel that a man who hates any person hates that person the more for troubling him with expressions of love; or, at least, it adds to hatred the sting of disgust.” I wrote it down, and kept it about my person like a scapular, as if the general expressions of the confused and covered feelings could licence and control them.

The last week we met at the almond tree at nine-thirty instead of eight. She was clearing out the room she’d lived in for more than twenty years and packing. She’d booked her ticket to London on an afternoon flight so that Jonathan could meet her. They’d arranged to go from the airport to the flat and then to his favourite restaurant for dinner.

“It’s only fair that I pay for that ticket.”

“I accept that,” she said gravely. “In fact, I want you to collect it. It’s booked in O’Connell Street but you can pick it up at any Aer Lingus place.”

“Why have I to collect it? Why can’t someone else do it, as long as I pay for it?”

“I don’t know. I just want you to.”

I didn’t know either, unless the ticket was a sort of personal receipt she had to have for the whole bitter business.

“Did you get it yourself?” were the first words when I handed her the ticket, the words weighed with a significance out of all proportion.

“I got it my very self. The girl who wrote it out had blonde hair, blue eyes and a Mayo accent. She was very pretty.”

“It’s all right for you. You haven’t to uproot yourself and go to London.”

“I was prepared to, but I thought it was just a simple air ticket that’s in question.”

“Thanks,” she said sharply, and thrust it in her handbag.

Between making love that night she cried, and I kept touching the verbal scapular that was part of my mind by now. As I walked her a last time down to the taxi rank at the end of Malahide Road she said, “I know that you’ve suffered as well as I have. We could have taken the easy way out of it and we didn’t and I think we’re both the better people for it.”

“I don’t know,” I touched my scapular a last time.

“And you’ll keep that promise. You’ll come and see me in London.”

“I’ll come. That’s if you want me.”

“I’ll want you,” she kissed me passionately. “Whether I’ll be able to afford you is the only thing in question.”

When I had loved, it had been the uncertainty, the immanence of No that raised the love to fever, when teeth chattered and its own heat made the body cold: “I cannot live without her.”

“I cannot live. …” If she’d said Yes, would not the fever have retired back into the flesh, to be absorbed in the dull blessed normal beat?

And was the note of No not higher and more clear because it was the ultimate note to all the days of love—for the good, the beautiful, the brave, the wise—no matter what brief pang of joy their Yes might bring?

If she had loved me that way—she who was now with child —had not that love been made desperate by my being its hopeless and still centre? Now she had the child. Was that not another Yes, a turning back within the normal beat?

I too had heard the hooves of the tribe galloping down on us. We had not kept within its laws.

I watched the clock. Her plane took off at three-forty. When hen the minute hand touched eight the plane taking her to London would sail heavily into the blue sky. It had flown. A cloud of dust on the road, the motor climbing the last half-mile, and then suddenly below, in a blue flash: the white houses, the masts of the tied-up fleet, the creamy haze of the sea.

As slowly as the hand had come to the eight, it as quickly raced to nine, ten.… It was four o’clock, and moving fast. I felt foolish in my excitement.

The whole city was restored to me, islanded in the idleness and ease of timeless Sunday mornings, church bells stroking the air and the drowning of it in wild medleys, the whole day given back to me because I had lost it.

 When the red-bricked Georgian house had been converted into flats the entrance wasn’t changed at all except to put in an aluminium panel of electric buttons. They’d left one laurel, the ragged lawn, three granite steps, the old roses pinned with rusted staples to the wall, a heavy black knocker; and the letters for all the flats spilled through the brass flap onto the hall floor each morning and early afternoon. There was a dull click after they’d all been pushed through. Whoever was first down put them on the half-circular glass table with iron legs under the St Brigid’s cross. The nervous girl who worked on the radio was always the first one down in the morning. She must have watched for the postman from her window and left her room as soon as he’d come through the gate for she generally reached the door at the exact moment the letters were pushed through the brass flap. If he’d any delay in sorting the letters she used to have to wait in the hall, and I hated catching her apologetic, embarrassed smile whenever I’d found her waiting, the noises of the postman uncomfortably present on the other side of the door.

The letter-box became the focus of my precarious happiness, precarious because it was so fragile. When the afternoon post fell to the floor and there was no letter from London I felt released into another whole free day. When three days went by and there was still no letter I began to feel sometimes as if it had been a very vivid, bad dream. It might turn out, like the dream, not to be real, but I was still getting no work done. So I decided to secure my freedom for at least several more days by making the visit I had promised to my aunt and uncle and had been putting off for long.

I slept in my uncle’s room. “I’ll not get up for a while yet but why don’t you put on the light,” I said the first morning as I heard him fumble for the clothes he’d let drop on the floor going to bed.

“There’s no need. It’s just a matter of trousers and shirt,” he refused.

Home on school holidays I used to sleep in this room. Early in the morning I’d start to chatter with him, chattering like old starlings in the rafters my aunt had called it, and it must have been boring for him, but he’d never checked me, no more than he’d turn on the light now to find his clothes or draw the blind.

“I’ll go out to the mill around quitting time,” I said as I heard him pause before leaving the room.

“Whenever suits you. If I was you I wouldn’t start getting up or anything for long yet. You might as well lie back and take it easy when you have the chance.”

I heard steps in the hallway, the click of the lock, a car starting outside, the lock shut, my aunt’s slippers shushing back up the hallway. Cyril was on his way to work. Each morning my uncle must have timed his getting up to avoid Cyril. (Say it again, say it over, people do not find it easy to face one another.) When I heard my uncle leave, I too rose. As I sleepily drew the blinds the empty tarred square met me with a shock, the row of old railwaymen’s cottages beyond. There used to be a footpath to that station along the high cut-stone wall, two carriages and a van waiting to be towed to Dromod; beyond the darkness of the engine sheds, the long elephant’s trunk of piping from the water tank, the maze of rails, and the three stunted fir trees. It was said they never grew because of the poison of the coal smoke though they had blackened cones that dropped between the sleepers and onto the carriage roofs. Now it was level and empty: a tarred square, the cottages, a filling station. I felt like Pirandello and his wife rolled into one, the beginning of all that’s new, the continuance of everything old. What she saw, which wasn’t there, seemed more real to him than what he saw, which had the disadvantage of being there. The dancehall where I had met my first love was gone. We were waltzing in the sky.

This room had not changed, and neither had the bathroom, full of the smell of oranges and pink Jaffa papers speared on a nail above the toilet roll. The stairs with the strips of bicycle tyre nailed to the edge of the steps hadn’t changed, and the black-leaded Stanley—an antique now with its claw feet and running board—was used to fry rashers and egg and sausages. I ate them under the curtained spy window. My aunt used to be able to observe people in her first shop from behind that yellowed lace curtain, before she began to buy shops. Nothing had changed in the early morning except the smell of the brandy. The creamy blossoms of the elder half hid the coal shed still through the outer window out the back yard.

“I hope you don’t think too hard of the brandy,” to my dismay she brought the bottle out and sat with me at the breakfast table. By bringing it out so openly she was drawing me into the guilty maze.

“No, why should I?”

“It’s a great relief to drink with someone in the open. Cyril and your uncle won’t understand anything about it at all.”

“Cyril drinks enough himself to understand,” I said.

“He only drinks because he’s upset. He feels I’m far too long sick now.”

“He must have been upset the greater part of his life, so.”

“Ah, you’re all too hard on Cyril,” she complained. “The world’s hard enough.”

“I didn’t mean that,” I said, “and I have nothing but praise for drink. It’s like a change of country; only it’d be awful to become an old soak.” What I said I believed, but there was no need to say so much. My instinct was to create room, to get out of the responsibility she had so suddenly thrust upon me. The blind instinct had run ahead of any seeing, of sympathy or fairness. I was learning to protect myself so fast now that I’d soon have a whole landscape of the moon to move around in.

“If you were like me,” she laughed with a mixture of wry bitterness and pure amusement, “you’d not care what they called you, an old soak or a young soak, as long as you got relief. The country that I find myself in most of the time now, God forgive me, isn’t fit for living in.”

“Why don’t you try the pills?”

“Ah, you’ve never taken those pills. They’re not like natural pills. You can feel them spreading themselves around in you. They’re killing you. That’s what they’re doing. After you take them you feel you’re walking round in a big dead empty glove.”

She poured me a glass. It was hateful in the morning, when the day was fresh, but I drank it. Later I found myself walking with her down the railway to the garden. Except for the beaten path, where the line had run, it was choked with enormous weeds, especially great pulpy thistles.

“The rails went to Scotland and the North,” she said. “I heard they cut them up and sold them as posts for haysheds.”

We went through a wooden gate made strong by the thin wire used to bind fruit crates, and down steps cut into the embankment. The garden was bordered by high banks on either side, covered with the same rank thistles of the railway, and below was an old hedge of whitethorn studded with several green oak and ash trees and one big sycamore. The clay was dark and loose, in neat drills: onions, carrots, parsnips, beet, peas and beans, the black and white miracle of the flower out, long green splashes of lettuce.

“It’s a fine garden,” I said. She’d already begun to weed.

“I do a bit every day. That way it never gets out of hand. There’s no rush and push. And you can watch it for the bugs. Some of them would sweep you out of it in a day.”

I weeded with her, hating the dry clay on fingers. The garden held no interest for me. I’d never watch it grow.

“That’s all I ask,” she drew up her back, and as I watched her I knew she’d be back in hospital before the fruits were gathered, and that it’d be the last garden she’d watch grow. “You think it’d not be much to ask. Just to get a bit better. Not to have to leave the garden—I hate to think of it running wild again—though Cyril complains it’s nothing but trouble. To just go on. It doesn’t seem much to ask. To let things stay as they are. To go on.”

“But you will.”

“Sometimes I don’t know.”

When I felt sure she wouldn’t notice emotion in my voice I said, “There are some fine trees in the hedge.”

“Yes,” she said with spirit. “Your uncle made one great offer of help when I started the garden. He offered to cut down the trees.”

“He would.”

“I told him he’d be run if I caught him near them. But they must house a million midges. Some evenings they’d ate you alive.”

She was tough. There was nothing but to salute that proud hardness with a perfect silence. She stood at the foot of the garden, under a far outriding branch of the oak, her ravished face and few wisps of hair turned away from the searching light, and she said in a voice matter-of-fact enough to be running through a tenant’s contract, “I don’t know. It’s only after years that you get some shape on things, and then after all that you have to leave. It’s comical. You want to go on and you can’t.”

“I think you’ll be all right, that you’ll get better, but there does come a time—for everybody, for us all,” my own voice sounded so awkward and solemn that I felt bells should mock the still air.

“I know that,” she said and we started to move slowly towards the gate. “But somehow deep down you can never feel it’s going to happen to yourself. In your case somehow you feel the great exception will be made.”

“If you can say that, there can’t be too much wrong with you,” I said.

When we went back to the house we finished the bottle of brandy. Then she said she was going to bed, before anybody could come back. She washed the glasses and put away the empty bottle before she climbed the stairs. And I drove out to the saw mill.

Neither Jim nor my uncle noticed me get out of the car and walk up to the mill. They were in the middle of a quarrel. I had watched these quarrels so often that it was like standing in front of a TV shop window and watching an old familiar movie. They stood with their backs to one another, beside two saws, both idling over; and each vigorous insult was addressed to a point high in the roof of the shed, the very farthest point from the person the insult was intended for. The intervals between the insults were lengthy. Each word seemed taken up, weighed and tested, and then the contemptuous answer would be fired furiously towards the farthest rafters. Their expressions did not change when they noticed my presence on the mound of sawdust. They dropped the quarrel with as much emotion as they might show when putting down a heavy, cumbersome tool they had grown tired using, and came towards me with outstretched hands, both smiling.

We three stood there, not talking, occasional words let drop into the silence like pebbles into still water, allowed to sink and bubble with neither more nor less attention than that given to the preceding and following silence; and when it seemed that an appropriate amount of such silence had been observed Jim walked away towards the big saw without a word.

“You seem to be using a fairly strong aftershave?” my uncle asked, having caught the smell of the brandy.

“It’s brandy. I had a glass in the house with her. I don’t like it very much this time of day.”

“I know that,” he said with an understanding patronage that irritated me. “But what’ll happen to her, at the rate she’s going? What’ll be the end of it?”

“What’ll be the end of any of us?” I was ashamed of my own sharpness when I saw him wince. Then he coughed, a cautious clearing cough, like sending exploratory noises out into the field before risking any compromising words. “You didn’t run into Cyril at all?”

“No. How is he?”

“Worse. He’s a pure dose. I’d move out long ago but it’d not be right with the way she is now.”

Jim had started sawing. In the safety of the piercing scream, the sweet sudden scent of fresh resin, I asked, “What was yourself and Jim arguing about?”

“O that,” he shook with laughter. “He took in some contract timber.”

“What’s that?”

“We don’t do it any more except we know the people. A fella might have a few good trees he’d want sawed, to save him buying timber, and we used to give him a price. A lot of that stuff came from trees they used to plant round houses, beech mostly, and you’d never know what you’d run into, nails by the no time, handles of buckets, links of chains.”

“They could be dangerous,” I said.

“They’d go through you like fucking bullets except they’re mostly rotten. They’ve been hammered in years ago and the wood has grown over them. I saw them ruin more saws than you can name,” he was relaxed, holding forth.

“What’s this got to do with the argument between Jim and yourself?”

“He took in a few big oaks for this fella that he knows. And I was going to use the big saws.”

“Are the oaks all right?”

“Of course they are. But you have to make a stand sometime round here or you’d wind up taking orders. There’s no giving of orders as it is.”

“I can’t see you taking orders,” I said.

“You can never be too sure of that,” he shook with the laughter of pure pleasure as he wiped his eyes with the back of the enormous scarred hands. “To make sure of that, you have to keep sitting upon the other fella every chance you get.”

I hung about until they closed the mill, and after that it gradually grew plain that he was loathe to go into the house in case he’d meet Cyril or even possibly my aunt.

“What’ll she say if we don’t go in?” I asked.

“We’ll ring her. We’ll have our tea in the town. And we can ring her from there, from the restaurant. I’ll say we have to go out to your place.”

“You don’t need to change or anything?”

“Not at all. Nobody cares round here. I’ll just throw off these overalls.”

He rung her from the restaurant. “She gave out,” he reported afterwards. “But they’re both there. Leave them that way. That way they’re only an annoyance to themselves.”

We had the usual restaurant meal, lamb chops, liver, bacon, fried tomatoes, and an egg, with a big pot of tea and plenty of brown or white bread. Afterwards we drove out to my place.

In all sorts of circuitous ways he detailed the several advantages I’d get from leaving the city and starting up the farm. “After all, the city is more a young man’s place,” he must have repeated several times. That, and teasing out the evening until he was certain that my aunt and Cyril were in bed, took care of the whole charming and childish evening.

I was happy there for five such days, islanded and cut off from the brass letter-box. Three letters waiting on the half-circular glass table with a London postmark were the first things I saw on entering the hallway. My island holiday was over.

Jonathan had met her at the airport. They had taken a taxi to his Kensington house. The flat was a little beauty, two rooms, a kitchen, bathroom, with all mod cons, including an automatic washing machine and drier, which would come in so useful later on. They had drinks upstairs in the lovely long reception room she had known from before. The windows were open. It was much warmer in London than in Dublin. In another few weeks, Jonathan said, they’d be able to sit out and have drinks on the lawn.

Then they took a taxi to Jonathan’s favourite restaurant. The table was piled with flowers. And yet she felt depressed. She missed me dreadfully. Didn’t I know how greatly I was loved, though I seemed to do my very best to avoid seeing it? But she was grateful to Jonathan. She did not know that such a genuinely selfless and good person existed in the world. If only Jonathan was me, and I was Jonathan.… but she still believed that everything that happened was basically good, because both of us were good people. She still believed that, no matter how it seemed to other people.

She was already working on a magazine. The magazine’s office was close to Covent Garden. She took a bus into the Strand and walked from there. The people all helped her and were very nice, but it was child’s play compared to all the scrivening she’d done for practically nothing for poor Walter and Waterways, She ate such rich meals at the different restaurants with Jonathan in the evening that at lunch time she just walked around and had fruit she bought in Museum Street and a cup of coffee in a little Italian place next door to the fruit shop. The morning sickness had stopped but she was hungry all the time. I could guess what that meant. She was sure it was going to be a boy and exactly like me.

Next, she was cooking dinner for Jonathan and herself. That must remind me of something. They had avocado pear, sirloin, an endive salad, and a special dusty bottle of Burgundy Jonathan had brought up from the cellar for the occasion, several cheeses and an Armagnac to finish. Compared with what she’d been used to, her own basement kitchen was luxurious but Jonathan’s kitchen made her feel more like an airline pilot than a plain cook. There were so many knobs and panels! Jonathan said she was a fine cook and Jonathan’s wife had a fantastic library of cook books. Now she cooked for Jonathan and herself every evening he hadn’t a meeting and they’d only go out to restaurants weekends. Jonathan had also got fantastic reports about her as a writer. Everybody on the magazine was pleased with her. Disaster was turning into a dream.

They were wise, the people on the magazine, I thought; she might become the owner’s wife. There must be many who have cursed themselves for not seeing that some young secretary would one day be the wife. Ο most common apotheosis, the sexual: and the most common ruin: poison of the sweet mouth.

I replied gravely to these letters. There was an early heat wave in Dublin, a stream of people passed out towards the sea in the evenings, many of them on old bicycles. My life was boring. I wasn’t writing but soon I’d have to earn money. I’d been down the country. My aunt was growing worse, but fighting hard to live. If pure desire could make a person live, she would live, I wrote.

It was hot in London too, the place beginning to crowd with tourists. Jonathan hated the tourists. Even a simple stroll in Kensington Gardens on a Sunday morning turned into a tirade against the tourists. Jonathan was so funny when he got angry, with his shiny head and handlebar moustaches, so small when he shook. At times she couldn’t resist pulling the moustaches. That morning they had a lovely quiet drink in a local but she didn’t have alcohol any more. It didn’t agree with her and anyhow it was bad for the baby. They didn’t want to have a fully fledged one-week-old alcoholic on their hands.

What she couldn’t get over was the number of men who’d asked her out, and one or two had even made passes. It was so sad. She wondered what they’d feel if they knew the truth. Jonathan said she looked amazing, and she did feel good, but in Dublin that sort of attention hadn’t been paid to her for years. Was I not jealous at all?

She couldn’t describe how grateful she was to Jonathan. She wouldn’t have believed before this all happened that such a purely good person existed in the world. He’d suffered for years with his crazy wife and he’d never had what’s called a normal happy life. The only snake in their Eden now was that Jonathan’s wife might discharge herself from the institution and find her in the house. Since she’d come to the house she’d started to read the wife’s leters. He’d asked her to. One of the forms the madness took was crazy, irrational jealousy. They could only hope and pray she’d not discharge herself.

My aunt was taken back to the hospital, this time by ambulance.

“Bad luck to it,” she said when I went in to see her. “I’m here to cause you trouble once again. They talked me into giving this X-ray treatment a last try. Somehow I feel I’d be as well off in Lourdes.”

“You can’t talk that way. What’ll happen to the garden?”

“Cyril said he’d look after it and he meant it but I also know he’ll forget,” she laughed. “What I did was give Peter McCabe, a brother of poor Sticks’, some money. He’ll look after it on the quiet.”

“How is the saw mill?”

“Bad luck to the saw mill. You’d swear it was the centre of the universe. Nothing will happen to the same saw mill, and more’s the pity. He couldn’t even hide how pleased he was when he didn’t have to drive me up.”

“He’s all right. I’m fond of him.”

“Oh yes, he’ll never be stuck for someone to stand up for him, the big haveril, as long as he has you, and if you don’t watch out you’ll wind up just like him, a selfish old bachelor.”

I half expected her to go through motions of protest when I put down the bottle of brandy but instead she seized it like a lifeline, “God bless you. I knew you’d not forget it.”

In London, all prayers were being more than answered. More and more belief in heaven grew. Even though she’d been foolish and had been left vulnerable there was someone who was looking after them up there, for she was no longer alone. Just when they were afraid Jonathan’s wife would discharge herself, find her installed in the basement, and let all hell loose, what happened, but in a crazy fit, didn’t she jump from the hospital window and kill herself. After all these years Jonathan was now free.

Jonathan was now pressing his proposal of marriage more fiercely and wanted to adopt the child as his own so that she and the child would inherit all that he owned. For this he demanded, and rightly demanded, that I should give up all rights, which would make us more strangers than if we’d never met. If I changed my mind afterwards and attempted to approach either her or the child, I’d be arrested at once.

I could hardly believe my luck. Not only did my deep hope seem likely to be answered but to be given the force of the law to boot. At one stroke all the connection would be wiped out. It would be as if nothing had ever happened. We had held the body brute in our instinct, let the seed beat in the warm darkness, and were still free. I’d be glad to sign whatever was demanded. My own resolution stood and I felt that she’d be very foolish not to marry Jonathan. I was sorry for the poor part I had played in the sad business and wished her happiness.

I didn’t hear anything for days and began to write “The Colonel and Mavis Take a Trip on the Shannon”. I went in and out of the hospital with the bottle of brandy each evening like a man attending daily Mass. I started to see Maloney again.

“This woman, apparently, is to be married in London,” I told him.

“This isn’t right,” he said. “You shouldn’t get off like this. The averages should have come down instead of going up. And who is the ass who’s about to bear your burden into Jerusalem?”

“He’s the rich man I told you about who came from London to see her here. She’s been living in the basement of his house in Kensington. He also owns newspapers.”

“Nobody owns newspapers any more.”

“Well, he’s on boards, has shares. It may be magazines and newspapers. Already she has a job on a women’s paper off the Strand.”

“What’s his name?”

“Jonathan.”

“What’s his proper name?”

“I don’t know. That’s all I’ve ever known him as.”

“I could find out,” he threatened.

“Why?”

“That sort of person is always useful to know. There may be a take-over. We may need to expand. You should start to cultivate him, old man, now that, if I may be so crude, you have a foot, a heartbeat, in the door.”

“I don’t know his name, you’ll have to take my word for it. She’s known him for years, probably through Amalgamated Waterways, but she’s never volunteered much about him to me other than that his name is Jonathan, and I’ve never wanted to know more.”

“Could it be Jonathan Martin?” he whistled. “He has a few small business things here. He looks like something between a walrus and a very small elephant but he certainly has the do-re-mi. If that’s who’s in question, she’s doing more than well for herself. But why this rush of marrying? Because she’s pregnant?”

“His wife has just jumped out of a window. That leaves him free after years.”

“So that’s it? I couldn’t imagine a guy with that much power being let run round for long. He’d attract loads of broads, all mad about his moral and spiritual welfare of course. Anything that’d help them into an ocelot coat and a Rolls Royce.”

“It’s all due to God. God arranged for the woman to jump out the window at the right moment,” I made the mistake of laughing.

“And God has arranged that you’re going to write ‘Mavis and the Colonel Take a Tip on the Shannon,” he glowered when I started to laugh. “I hate cheap laughs at the Divine.”

“I’ve started it. You’ll have it in a few days.”

“Good. Very good. All this, you realize, has far more interesting possibilities. But I’m a philosopher. I’m content with small morsels. A small morsel is my nugget of gold,” he bared his teeth at me.

When I had no word for a long time I began to think they might be married. The last I’d heard was that she’d gone with Jonathan to his wife’s cremation in Golders Green. She’d hated it, the dreadful music, the coffin moving on silent gliss till it disappeared behind the flap, a poor man behind the flap, directing the coffin to the ovens. There was a floral wreath in the figure of eight on top of the coffin and they’d to hold it so that the flap didn’t sweep it off.

It was the bone dust you took home after the bones were raked from the oven after it had been put in a drum they called a pulverizer. Our own custom of lowering the coffin with ropes into freshly dug graves was like a bunch of wild primroses compared to this ghoulish wreath of arum lilies. The organ especially turned the whole thing into a farce.

I wondered if they’d married in a church or a registry office, but mostly I marvelled at my luck. Other than never to have met, never to have slept together, for that fatal seed never to have swum, it could hardly have turned out better. But had they married? If they had they probably had gone on a glamorous honeymoon, a cruise perhaps. Circumstances being what they were, I could hardly expect a having-a-wonderful-time card, while each evening I went in with the brandy to the hospital, and wrote the story.

e, and placed him in the shelter of the boat-house, leaving the unfinished bo

I drove them up through the white mist over the river in the morning, half-remembered cattle and tree trunks and half branches on the ghostly banks. There were two flaxen-haired boys and a willow of a girl in from the country at the Bush Hotel. They took the girl up the river with them to the village, and left her with the fat man. “I could sleep for a month,” the fat man said, he’d go back to Carrick that evening on a paper run. It had been easy, the old technique, morsel leading to juicy morsel, to lying down to several solid meals.

They went alone through the lake, the beauty of the glass wall of water touching Mavis. “It’d be nice to have a summer place on the hill up there overlooking the Weir.”

“Yes, but you’d get tired. There’s nothing more tiring than so-called beauty. It saps energy because it’s an idea. You’d never know what you’d pick up off the boats. And we’d have the insurance of ourselves if the fishing turned out to be poor,” he put his arm round her shoulders as they went through the locks and kissed.

As I brought them naked into one another’s arms a last time —“straight and affectionate”—the boat at anchor in the arms of the wooded bay, I felt sick enough to want to turn away from what I saw, to shout at them to stop. The old plays were not wrong: there are single moments of weakness when our whole life can be changed to nightmare, set in a sweet flutter so faint that we are uncertain if it touched us at all in passing; but already we had fallen. I remembered how grateful the two of us had been the next day for the boat after that cursed night. The business of having to take it back down the river had kept us from getting on each other’s nerves. And now Maloney had his story.

I had a second drink while waiting for him to finish reading in the Elbow. He read it standing at the counter. He didn’t touch his drink but stayed completely silent till he’d finished.

“It doesn’t quite phosphoresce with your usual glow, but it’s all right. We’ll publish it. Anyhow the Shannon makes a change from Madagascar. You’re a younger version of the Colonel of course?”

“Whatever you think.”

“And your lady in London is a vintage Mavis? Did she pull you off against the dashboard of the company Beetle on your way down? I liked that. It was one of the better touches.”

“No. She didn’t. I wish she had. It would have been safer on the dashboard.”

“Your yokel who introduced you to the boats sounds authentic. He couldn’t have been invented. He’s the very heart and soul in person of my dear friends, the plain people of Ireland. You’ll please answer me that. Was he invented or drawn from life?”

“He can be found any day round Roosky.”

“Thanks. I could tell. He was treated a bit harshly, but I’m glad to see our pair were kind. In Merriman’s effort it was done with less kindness but very much more gusto. Anyhow we’re not in that untranslatable league. The boat was real?”

“Yes. It was a boat like that, and the morning was misty.”

“The willow of a girl at the Bush is much more down our readers’ usual line. Except they’ll be disappointed you didn’t follow up the fat man on his paper run. Licked lips must have gone dry. But the accident or miracle of life did take place while the boat was stationary. As you put it, in the arms of the bay?”

“Yes. That’s your pound of flesh. That’s where I think it happened. Now why don’t you let go?”

“Because I find it very in-ter-est-ing. I can see how you’ve fallen between two schools. You should have written it as plain biography, with copious, boring footnotes. That way no one would doubt you. No one has the faintest idea as to why we exist but everybody is mad for every sort of info about other existences. That way they can enjoy their own—safely. You can’t beat life for that sort of thing. They get someone else to do their living and their dying for them, there’s no way they have to do it for themselves. And the first thing you have to convince them of is that it happened. Then you can tell them anything. Contrary to the sceptical view, your human being is mad to believe, to be convinced, especially that everything is going to turn out well in the end.”

“O for God’s sake, I didn’t write the bloody thing to furnish a text for a lecture.”

“You need a lecture. You’ve got off scot-free. This big sugar-daddy is taking on your growing burden. You’ve sullied the Shannon and you’re still out there laughing, back at square one, ready to start all over again. You need a lecture all right. You need several lectures,” he concluded.

The sense of getting off free was short-lived, dispelled by a short, plain note the next morning. No honeymoon had taken place.

“I am not going to be married, which—going by the tone of your last letter—can, I know, be little relief to you. I could not bring myself to marry Jonathan. Since I couldn’t, it was only proper that I move from his house and give up the job on the magazine, which, I found, wasn’t really a job at all, but something he created for me.

“I have found a cheap flat in North London and I’ll have no difficulty finding another job, nothing glamorous, some obscure place that will see out the remaining time. I have money and you are not to worry in any way. I’ll write you a long account as soon as I am completely settled. Jonathan’s conduct in all this was exemplary. He put no pressure of any kind on me other than to marry him but once I knew I couldn’t bring myself to do it I couldn’t go on staying in his house or keep the job.

“You can imagine what a few weeks these have been and you’ll never know how greatly loved you are. I don’t know, but when it came to the crunch I just couldn’t imagine holding Jonathan in my arms after your dear lovely self, and the idea just became increasingly funny. But, boy, I didn’t feel like laughing at all when he turned up with this other woman. I knew it was crazy but I just felt hopping mad.”

I was dismayed and furious and downhearted.

“You’ll be glad to learn I don’t need lectures now. This woman isn’t marrying,” I informed Maloney.

“I’m delighted,” he crowed.

“Why?”

“It lets you off too easily of course. Too soft an umbrella. If she’d married him, you’d have been two-nil up on the night. Now it’s even-steven. You’re right out there in the firing line once more. I thought the game was closed. Now it’s an on-going thing again. It’s interesting. It’s getting very interesting.”

I bought a round of drinks. He wasn’t able to contain his curiosity for long. “Why did this lady throw up the chance of fortune and respectability? Or did she just dally with it in her lap too long?”

“I don’t see what’s so funny about it,” I said, and he went into convulsions.

“Give us some water to dilute this,” he said to the barman when he’d recovered.

“Why?” he pressed. “Why didn’t she marry her tycoon? She might have done us all a good turn.”

“It’s a sore point. Apparently she was so taken with my physique that the idea of doing it with this Englishman wasn’t entertainable. It was just funny.”

“A good definition of the funny, if I may say so. Tension set off by the realization of the difference between what should be possible and what is in fact impossible. The idea of seeing one take place in the other.”

I stayed silent. There was no stopping him now.

“Our national poet was shrewder in sexual and other matters than most people give him credit for. ‘Isn’t it amazing,’ he once intoned, ‘the survival of the virginity of the soul in spite of sexual intercourse.’ This bird may have opened up her oyster to you, but she’s no Moll Flanders. Like our friend Yeats she’s more of a spiritualist. She believes in the continuing virginity of the individual, in spite of all the evidence around to the contrary. Yes,” he said, “I’ll have another look at our Shannon story. Knowing that real people are involved gives the spice of pornography a very satisfying solidity. It might even phosphoresce a little more this time.”

In a long letter she described how the idyll with Jonathan ended.

They’d been very happy for some days after the cremation. She’d cooked dinner most evenings upstairs and they’d stayed at home, sometimes going for a short stroll in the area before separating for the night.

“‘We’re going out tonight,’ he’d warned me mysteriously that morning, and it was to his favourite restaurant we went, the red roses as usual on the table. He was in wonderful spirits, joking with the waiters, and he ordered champagne.

“‘No, my dear. It’s not my birthday and I was never one for beating round the bush. As you know I’ve been in love with you for years but it took your sad business to bring us together. You always said you couldn’t marry me while my wife was alive because of your Catholic faith. The other business—Gwen’s death—has left me free after all these years. If you haven’t already guessed it, I’m asking you to marry me.’

“‘When?’

“‘Now if possible. Perhaps not right now or even tomorrow but very soon, soon as we can get a licence.’

“‘We’ll have to wait.’

“‘No, dear. We don’t have to go through the church ceremony now if that doesn’t suit you but we’ll wait for the child as man and wife, living together. The child will be brought up as if it were our child.’

“‘I’ll have to think about this.’

“‘You have a few days, a week, no more than a week. I hope though you’ll make up your mind before the week. You see, my love, I’m fifty-eight. I have no illusions and even less time. At most I have twelve years, ten, eight, maybe even less. Foolish or not, I want to spend those years as a happy, normal married man. I don’t expect to be given happiness but I’m prepared to work at it. And I know we can make a success, with luck maybe a great success.’ I was right up against it. I was very fond of Jonathan, but somehow I never thought of sleeping with him, of waking up with those funny handlebars every morning. And what clinched it, if it needed clinching, was that I could no more give up hope of seeing you again than giving up my own life, which I’d have had to do, if I’d married Jonathan.

“He was very nice when I told him that I couldn’t, and then the very next Sunday he brought a tall Englishwoman, closer to his age than mine, and I saw he was behaving exactly towards her as he used to me; and there was no doubt but that she intended to marry him.

“I moved out at once. The place I found is in a tradesmen’s terrace, a house close to a football ground, and I’ve the upstairs, two rooms, a small kitchen.

“I’ve got a job, much like the job I had in the bank, if anything less glamorous, a firm that hires out scaffolding and ladders to small builders, and it’s only ten minutes on the bus, a half-hour’s walk from the flat.

“And now, after all this, I want to see you, to see you in London, to feast my eyes on you, my love, come soon.”

I wrote that I was sorry she didn’t take Jonathan’s offer but that was her business. My mind hadn’t changed and wouldn’t change, so that in practical terms she had to leave me out of all considerations of her life, except to lend her what help I could throughout the pregnancy. I’d go to London to see her but only to see if I could be of any help and to keep a promise. It sounded a priggish letter when I read it through but I sent it.

My aunt had grown dependent on the brandy, and I gave her warnings that I’d be away in London for some days. I was worried about what would happen if she couldn’t get her daily portion of oblivion.

“Will you be all right?” I asked for the umpteenth time when I went in to see her the evening before I was to leave for London, and when she was as vague as ever I pressed, “You know you don’t have to worry about me. I know you only take the brandy for the pain. If you need some, how will you manage while I’m away?”

For a moment she bridled at the question but then she said, “God bless you for asking. There’s a man comes round the ward in the morning with newspapers and fruit and that. If I want it, he gets it for me,” and with that she drew a big wad of notes from beneath her pillow and handed them to me.

“What’s that for?” I asked in amazement.

“You’re going to London, aren’t you? You’ll need money in London.”

“But I’ve enough money.”

“I know but all that brandy you’ve brought me in for so long doesn’t grow on the bushes. I just want you to know I know that. Take it. If you don’t need it, spend it for me.”

I took it, and little thought I’d see my aunt again before I got back from London.

I got the bus into O’Connell Street from the hospital. There, I went to the Elbow to see if I’d meet up with Maloney. He wasn’t there nor was there anybody from the paper. I had a slow pint of beer at the counter and then went back into O’Connell Street to mix with the jostling crowds in the summer evening.

The next day I’d take the boat to London to see her. A crowd of girls, their little flounces of laughter brushing out to the sharp clatter of high heels, got out of a taxi and went in through the swing doors towards the dancehall where we’d met. I started to follow them, not singling any out, just following their singing excitement. I fell in behind them in the queue, not caring to follow their speech too precisely, some words falling about pilots in Dublin Airport, knowing it would drag them down to some uncommon commonplace. I bought a ticket after they had left the window, one girl paying for the whole bevy. The pale red House Full placard was on its easel but faced to the wall. The ex-boxer in evening dress tore the ticket in two at the head of the stairs, searching our faces as he handed us one half of the ticket back, sticking the half he kept on a piece of wire, his handsome battered face expressionless.

I got a beer and sat at one of the tables, watching trousered and nyloned legs swish past the four steps. When it was no longer possible to see the dance floor I finished the beer and pushed my way through, the men crowding together at the top of the steps.

There was an interval between dances. The women were away to the left, standing between the tables off the floor, some sitting farther back. One whole corner was crowded, spilling on to the floor, blazing with skin and colourful cloth and glittering bits of metal and glass, the best stand in the market. She’d blazed there a few months before and I’d walked towards her and asked her to dance. Now she was in London. All that waste, too wasteful to each, a pall of sadness.

A waltz was called. I’d to move farther in off the floor, to the strip of carpet along the entrances, as the men around me crossed to the women. Soon I found myself standing alone on the floor. I stood there in the fascination of watching bodies, a miracle of shape in a profusion of different shapes and colours and still all the same shape, and all in the tawdriness and splendour of the self and many; I stood there as one might stand watching light on water, but it was more amazing.

The dance ended. Some of the dancers paired off. Others returned to their single places. Another dance was called, a slow foxtrot, a ladies’ choice, and suddenly a dark swarthy girl was standing in front of me and said, “Cheer up!”

I followed her onto the floor saying, “I didn’t think I looked that miserable; in fact I was having a good time,” when I suddenly saw that the girl I was about to dance with was the black-haired nurse from the hospital.

“You looked as if you were thinking,” she said. “Everybody looks miserable when they are thinking. Did you not see me?”

“No. I only recognized you just now.”

“You see, you weren’t paying attention. If you were paying attention you’d have seen me. Well, here we are at last.”

“I wanted to ask you out.”

“Well, why didn’t you?”

“It’s not easy, with people there. I was in the hospital this evening. I’ve been in most evenings in the last weeks. And I haven’t seen you.”

“I work another ward now.”

She danced with easy freedom, ripe and slack, but soon the floor was so crowded that we had to stand, just moving our bodies to the music. Whenever our eyes met she laughed. She had on a blue dress of shiny material and her shoulders were bare. I could feel her thighs against mine as we moved to the music and the bones between the thighs. Her whole body was soft and free, open.

“Will you come for a drink with me?”

“You don’t have to invite me for a drink because I used to nurse your aunt.”

“I know that.”

“Or because I asked you to dance,” she laughed.

“Not for that either,” I said and our lips met, she sealing the acceptance by closing her eyes and moving her lips over and back on mine. I put both arms round her and drew her closer. I stumbled as we moved off the floor but her arm held me. Arm in arm we went down to the bar and the waiter got us a window table.

“Here’s to your health,” the toast held a twisted echo of another not so long ago evening. A taunt, a warning.

“And to yours,” she touched my glass.

Below, in the orange light of the street, the small dark figures hurried. The cars streamed past. Beyond was the bridge and the faint black glitter of the Liffey.

She’d grown up on a farm outside Monasterevin, an only girl with eight brothers. She’d never been treated differently from the boys, being let drive the tractor, work the milking machines, fight and kick football with them in the river meadow, two uprights crossed with fishing twine.

“Maybe that’s why my aunt thinks you’re a bit of a wildcap.”

“Does she think of me that way?” she was taken aback by the careless springing of this picture of herself in another’s eyes.

“Just a remark I happened to remember. Apparently, one day you danced in the ward.”

“Maybe it is because of having grown up with boys that I’m such a poor hypocrite. I can’t stand women who are lady-like and fragile, never sniffing at a fact of life, while they’d carve you up in small pieces without batting an eyelid.”

“I don’t know, hypocrisy has its place. You can only do without it at your peril.”

“Well to hell with it, then,” she laughed.

We danced body to body in the dark huddle of bodies, enmeshed in their own blood heat and moving slowly to the dull beat across the crammed floor. My hands went over the shimmer of the dress, sleek as a second skin. Now and again we kissed. In a sudden jolt against her the roused seed started to pulse. I looked at her face to see if she showed any signs of noticing but the eyes were closed against my shoulder, the body moving slowly to the music in its own drugged sleep.

“Will I be able to leave you home?”

“All the buses to the hospital will have gone already.”

“We’ll get a taxi.”

“It’s nice to have money.” she smiled. “I’m just qualified one year now.”

“That must leave you not much more than twenty.”

“No. I had to repeat a couple of the exams. I’m twenty-three.”

“It seems very young to me. I’m thirty.”

“Thirty is a good age for a man.”

She had on a herring-bone coat with a grey fur collar when she came from the cloakroom. She took my hand as we went down the stairs. There were several taxis drawn up for the people coming out of the dancehall, and we got into the fifth or sixth. The night was warm and there was a full moon above O’Connell Street.

“St Mark’s Hospital,” I said and she added, “The nurses’ home, in past the hospital. At the back.”

“Picked up a fare outside the Metropole,” he said into the crackle of his radio. “Going to the nurses’ home of St Mark’s Hospital.”

“Will you be on all night?” I asked the driver when he put the receiver down.

“I don’t come off till five,” he said.

She leaned towards me and I slipped my hand across her shoulder and began to fondle her breasts. The cool night air came in the taxi’s open window.

“Do you think will my aunt live long?” even as I said the words they sounded incongruous, and I felt her go tense.

“She’ll hardly get better now. Hardly anybody in there gets better. They get respites. That’s all. The ward she’s in is terminal though she doesn’t know that.”

“I’m sorry for asking. It slipped out.”

“I don’t mind. That’s the depressing part of a cancer hospital. No one really gets better in our hospital. Even the wards not classed terminal are. You begin to feel it’s your fault. I’ll look for another place as soon as I have my year done.”

“That hospital is one place to avoid at all cost. Two of my pals went in there. They’re both dead,” the driver showed us he’d been listening.

“I suppose all hospitals are places to stay out of,” I said to break the uneasy silence.

“If you’re well,” he said. “But you’re more than glad of them once you’re sick enough.”

The taxi turned in the hospital gates, went past her window, the moonlight pale on the concrete framing the dark squares of glass. The wheel had many sections. She had reached that turn where she’d to lie beneath the window, stupefied by brandy and pain, dulling the sounds of the whole wheel of her life staggering to a stop. I was going past that same window in a taxi, a young woman by my side, my hand on her warm breast. I shivered as I thought how one day my wheel would turn into her section, and I would lie beneath that window while a man and woman as we were now went past into the young excitement of a life that might seem without end in this light of the moon.

An old sweet scent rushed through the taxi window as soon as we passed beyond the hospital, so familiar that I started, and yet I could not place or find its name, it so surrounded the summers of my life, lay everywhere round my feet; not woodbine, not mint, not wild rose.…

“They were cutting it today. I was on night duty last night and was trying to get to sleep but couldn’t with the mower rattling past the window,” she gave the name. Of course, it was hay.

“It’d remind you of the country,” the driver added as he turned in a half circle in front of a big building set in trees, and stopped.

It was new-cut meadow turning to hay, and when we got out on the tarmac, long fallen rows stretched and turned palely everywhere between the white hospital and home.

“Don’t be so quiet,” she tousled my hair as we went in.

I followed her through a hall and down a corridor. The first room she went into sounded empty but as soon as she pressed the light switch a dishevelled couple sat bolt upright on a sofa to face our eyes. I could feel her low chuckle as she said, “Sorry,” and put the room again into darkness. The same thing happened at the second door she tried. The third room was empty, a large room with coffee tables strewn with newspapers and magazines, several armchairs and sofas and a big television set.

“We’ll leave the light on,” she said. “That way we run less risk of being bothered.”

We sat on a tasselled grey sofa facing the blank TV set, our backs partly turned to the door. When we started to kiss and play she put no restraint on my hands, and when I put fingers beneath the elastic she raised her back for me to draw it down, moved her knees sideways, and her feet were already out of her shoes. There was a rug on the arm of the sofa that she reached for and spread over us.

We heard doors of other rooms being tried from time to time, the sound of the light switch go on and off. The same footsteps would pause outside our door but did not come in. Only once was the door opened a foot or so and as quickly closed.

“Have you brothers and sisters?” she asked.

“No.”

“Would you like to be married?” her directness took me by surprise.

“I suppose I would but I don’t know. Would you?” I was surprised and unsure what she meant.

“Of course I would. To have my own husband and child and house and garden and saucepans and pets. All that.”

“Why are you so sure?”

“It’s far more fun, isn’t it?”

“What if you found yourself married to a boring man?”

“I wouldn’t marry a boring man. And I don’t find all that many men are boring. Usually the very attractive ones are married, but that’s a different thing. It’s women I find who are mostly boring and small and spiteful.”

“What would you do if you found yourself pregnant?” I asked tensely.

“You mean if I weren’t married?”

“Yes.”

“I’d want to get married.”

“And if the man was already married or wouldn’t marry you for some reason.”

“I’d throw myself in the Liffey,” she drew herself up in unfeigned alarm. “What are you laughing at?”

“You wouldn’t. You’re too young and healthy. And beautifully normal. Anyhow the man would be sure to marry you. I’d want to marry you.”

Suddenly she pinned my shoulders to the sofa and we started to roll. She was unusually swift and strong, “I give up,” I laughed, and then she loosed herself again to my hands. Afterwards she said suddenly, “Would you like to see your aunt?”

“Why?”

“The nurse on night duty on the ward is a friend. It might be fun to walk across the meadow to see her.”

“But what would my aunt say if she saw me there?”

“She’ll not see you. The lights’ll all be off. You’ve come often enough in to see her in the day but I’m sure you never thought you’d be in to see her in the middle of the night with a wild nurse,” she drew me by the hand.

A heavy summer’s dew lay on the fallen swards and our shoes left bright tracks across the meadow. The grey of day was beginning to be mixed with the moonlight, but the sweet fragrance of the new hay was everywhere. She searched among a bunch of keys after we’d crossed the meadow and opened a door down concrete steps between bare tubular steel railings, “It’s the back way,” she whispered, “where the laundry and that comes out.”

We climbed bare concrete stairs and went through swing doors. Suddenly we were in a long hall with beds on either side. I asked her if it was the ward and she nodded. I hadn’t recognized it, always having come to it from the other side. The ward was in darkness, except for the lines of moonlight, and the blue light beside the night nurse sitting behind the glass at the other end. My heart was beating as I counted the beds from the other end to discover where my aunt was lying. As I drew near to that bed I stopped and caught her.

“She may see us.”

“No. Even if she were awake she’d think it was a change of nurses.”

“I’m not going any further.” I could feel my heart pounding. “You go on to your friend. I’ll just stay here.”

In the dim light, I stood and listened to the far roar of the night traffic through the city. I thought I heard a moan or few words of prayer in the night but could not be certain because of my pounding heart. All were women in this ward and they all had cancer. It was like being in the middle of a maternity ward in the night, and all those women were waiting to give birth, to their own death. I counted the beds again to the right of the door. Her bed must be the bed two beds away. I searched for the heap of bed clothes. I thought I saw them move. People have a second sense? What if she sensed me there? The two girls were smiling in the blue light behind the glass and beckoning me forward. They were like what, like roses, I did not know, among pain, ignorant of all pain, like girls, like blue roses. They sank into chairs, laughing as I shook my head. When they started to call me again, still laughing, I turned away, and did not turn back till I heard them come towards me. I felt like kissing the other girl instead of shaking her hand, kissing them both, laughing and crying. Almost not knowing what I was doing, I followed her out into the night, and there was the sharp sound of the lock turning.

“Bridie was delighted to see us. It broke up the night for ner. Often you’d long for an emergency at night though it’d mean more work. The night goes quicker then. You should have come into the office. The office is soundproof and Bridie wanted to meet you.”

“I was afraid.”

“You never thought you’d be coming in to see your aunt in the middle of the night, did you?” she laughed roguishly and I seized her in a long kiss, her body almost completely naked beneath the dress. When I released her she picked up two big fistfuls of hay and putting them up to her face pretended to be advancing slowly on me from behind a barrier of hay. When she was very close, with a sudden movement, she piled the hay all over my hair and face, and started to run. I clawed the hay free and as soon as I caught her we both went down into the wet grass. I could single out stale sweat now and perfume and ammonia smells mixed with scent of the new hay. When we rolled over and lay still on the ground it was amazing to see the moon so large and still, becalmed above the trees and out in the depths of the sky. We rose without a word and went in.

She went straight ahead after going through the door of the home, this time down a narrow straight corridor. She opened a door very quietly, and we were more in a cell than a room, white walls, a radiator, a narrow bed, a dressing table and wardrobe, and on the wall above the head of the bed a plain black crucifix.

“This is my room,” she whispered and put her fingers to her lips. “The walls are paper thin.”

There were photos of football teams on the dressing table and she lifted them, pointing out several players, “My brothers.” More than half the players in one of the photos seemed to be her brothers. I lifted another photo, that of a handsome grey-haired man and herself, both in evening dress.

“He’s very handsome. Is he your father?”

“No,” she laughed. “He’s the married man.”

“Let me stay a half-hour. Let me hold you in my arms.”

“The walls are worse than paper.”

“I’ll be quieter than if you were here on your own.”

“But it’s practically morning.”

“I don’t care. I promise to go in half an hour,” and with a smile and almost resignedly she turned off the light.

The curtain wasn’t drawn and I held her when she’d slipped out of her clothes to caress and worship her body in the soft yellow light. She was soft and amazingly beautiful, yet rugged as a young animal. I followed her as quietly as I’d promised into the narrow bed, and hardly daring to breathe held her in my arms.

This body was the shelter of the self. Like all walls and shelters it would age and break and let the enemy in. But holding it now was like holding glory, and having held it once was to hold it—no matter how broken and conquered—in glory still, and with the more terrible tenderness.

“We met on a poor night,” I whispered.

“Why?”

“I have to go to London in the morning,” and when she looked at me as if I was lying, “I know it sounds like an excuse but it’s true. You can even ask my aunt if you don’t believe me.”

“How long will you be?”

“A week or so. I can’t be certain. I’ll ring you when I get back.”

She took my mouth in a long kiss, sealing her whole body to mine.

“I suppose it’s not safe?” I said.

“It’s never safe.”

“There’s no use risking spoiling it, then.”

“The next time I’ll have precautions,” and she went below the sheets, the peace that flooded out a perfect calm, the even moonlight only a thin tattered shadow.

“You don’t resent I’m not a virgin?” she whispered as we kissed after phoning a taxi.

“I’m too old for that. Why should I? Why should you be idle while waiting for my white horse that might never gallop even close.”

“I’m glad,” she kissed me again. “You’d be surprised how many resent it.”

“Their box of tools are the only ones fitted for the job, is that it?” and she caught me beneath the arm with her nails as she laughed.

As soon as the taxi arrived, men suddenly appeared from all directions, wanting to know if they could share my taxi into town. I told them they’d have to ask the taxi man.

“This is more like a brothel than a nurses’ home,” I said as I bade her goodbye.

“I know,” she held my face a moment in her hands. “Don’t say it too loud. There have been complaints.”

Three men shared the taxi into town. One was very extrovert and sat in the front seat beside the driver.

“You’re new,” he said. “Welcome to the club.”

“Thanks.”

He picked up no hint of sarcasm as he went on to give his name, offered his hand as if he wore a bishop’s ring, and said he was the sauce chef in the Shelbourne.

“What’s your name and what do you do?” he asked as if I were lagging with my information.

I told him my name and that I was working in the advertising business.

“Doing what?”

“Writing ads.”

That appeared to satisfy him and he introduced me to the other two men. One was a plumber. The other worked as a clerk in the Customs House.

“Do you know the name of the nurse you were with?” he asked.

“I don’t think so, and by the way you’re leaving out somebody,” I said.

“Who?” he bridled.

“The driver. You never introduced me to the driver.”

“O that doesn’t matter,” the driver said, the car going very fast through the empty early morning streets. “My name is Paddy Murphy. I’m a Knight of the Realm,” he said. “And you, you’re going to Cabra West?” he said to the sauce chef as if he knew him from a previous run.

It was too late to go to bed by the time I got back to the flat. I washed, had several cups of coffee, packed and got the train to the boat.

I’d get into London between five and six. I hadn’t to see her till lunch of the next day though I was supposed to ring if I got in earlier. I’d have the whole evening to rest and walk round streets.

I stood at the rail, feeling the warm wind on my face as the boat chugged out of the bay. Passing Howth in the distance, and wondering by this time whether or not to go to the bar, I felt a silken cloth in my pocket. When I pulled it out and saw what it was I hid it quickly in my fist. I looked around. No one was close or watching. It was as white as any of the gulls following the boat. The whole tender strange night was gathered round the softness of the texture. Keeping it would be like trying to hoard the night.

I opened my hand and the breeze took it. Two gulls dived towards it as it flew past the stern, where a fresh breeze lifted it again, and suddenly it was swallowed up in the raucous crowd of gulls following the boat.

As she was on the Northern Line we arranged to meet outside the ticket gate of Leicester Square Station. She saw me while she was still on the escalator, and started to wave. The wave seemed less certain of itself than when she used to come towards me down the cherry and almond avenue. Instead of waving to that drumming inner music—I’m walking and everything is beautiful—it seemed to hesitate: It’s all a bit confusing but boy I sure am keeping on trying. She was dressed in a tweed costume and she wore a pale blouse.

“You sure are one sight for sore eyes,” she kissed and kissed me again, her eyes brimming, a blast of dead air driven up from below by an incoming train.

“Would you like to have a drink? Or would you like to go and have lunch now?”

“Wait. Wait a minute. I need to get used to you. You don’t know how much I’ve missed you. I need to drink you in for some several quiet minutes.”

“We have all day. We can go round the corner to a pub.”

“I’d rather go and eat,” she said. “I’m sorry. I felt hungry all of a sudden coming in on the tube. There’s the two of us now. I’m sorry,” she said again as she took my arm. “You can’t imagine how much I’ve been looking forward to seeing you.”

“You look very well,” I said though I thought she looked nervous and tired.

“I don’t know. I find it hard to sleep. Last night I couldn’t sleep but that was the excitement.”

“Does the place you work at close on a Saturday?” I asked as we walked into Soho.

“The yard is open till twelve, but the office is shut. Wild horses wouldn’t drag me to work while you’re in town anyhow, and I’ve arranged to take as many days off next week as I need. Will you be able to stay the whole week?”

“No. I may even have to go back tomorrow morning. I’m expecting a message. My aunt is dying. I was going to put off coming but I didn’t want to change it.”

“Thank God you didn’t change it. But you may be able to stay the week?”

“It’s unlikely. If there’s no message for me, I’ll have to ring them. It’s unlikely I’ll be able to stay longer than a day or two.”

“Where are you expecting the message?”

“At the hotel.”

“You should have given my place.”

“I didn’t like to. Anyhow it’s done now.”

After pausing at the placards outside of a few expensive restaurants we picked a modestly priced Italian place in Old Compton Street. It had glass-topped tables, and a black and white blowup of the Bay of Naples along the whole length of one wall.

“I got spoiled with Jonathan,” she said as she looked through the menu. “We went out to all those expensive restaurants. And never looked at the price of anything. I’ll have minestrone.”

“You certainly can have anything you want on this menu. I wouldn’t worry about prices today.”

“I want minestrone, and after that I’ll have the veal and spinach. You don’t know what a pleasure it is to be sitting opposite you.”

“What happened between Jonathan and yourself?”

“O boy,” she said. “O boy, that’s a story.”

The waiter brought the minestrone and a carafe of red wine. I finished a glass of red wine while she ate the minestrone. I wasn’t hungry enough to begin with anything. I blamed it on the travelling. I asked the waiter to suggest something light, and he advised lamb cooked with rosemary. I drank a second glass of wine while waiting for the lamb to come while she told me about the magazine and Jonathan’s friends.

“It was a real eye-opener. Just because I was close to Jonathan I could influence what happened to movies and books and plays, give space to actors. I sure didn’t think the world was run that way.”

“What other way did you expect?” I was finding it difficult to curb my irritability in the face of the stream of words. “Who runs anything but people? Since God gave the Ten Commandments he’s stayed out of it.”

“I soon learned that. I thought things were run on lines of good and bad, according to some vague law or other. Virtue was rewarded, vice was punished. My eyes were certainly opened. I sure had some catching up to do,” and she went on to tell me incidents which I found hard to follow not knowing the people involved.

“But Jonathan himself was all right, wasn’t he?”

“I’m still fond of him. And basically he’s a good person. He got a raw deal I suppose. But when the chips were down he turned out to be very much the businessman too, ruthless and self-centred.”

“Isn’t everybody?”

“I can’t believe that. I couldn’t go on if I believed that.”

“But he had a point, didn’t he? He wanted to marry you. You wouldn’t marry him.”

“Well, he never showed that side of himself. He was always the gallant knight,” she said heatedly. “Roses and meals and wine and tears. And suddenly it was either-or. And it wasn’t a fair position.”

“But you seemed happy when you wrote to me about the wife’s suicide, the time you were afraid she’d come home and cause trouble if she found you in the basement.”

“He became a different person after that. He even made a pass at me. I had to use all my strength to resist him. And he said he was staying the whole night in the basement, so it would be as easy to sleep with him as not since I couldn’t make up my own sweet mind. And he said horrible things about you.”

“This all happened after the suicide?”

“A few days. Ο boy, will I ever forget that funeral service out in Golders Green. Apparently she used to gamble a lot. And she owned a racehorse once. And eight was her lucky number. This enormous floral wreath in the figure of eight—it must have cost the earth—went through the flap with the coffin. She’d put it in the will. They’d to hold it so that the flap didn’t sweep it off.”

“But why didn’t you marry him? The child would be secure. You were fond of him.”

“You weren’t very concerned about the child.”

“That’s true, but I didn’t claim to be, though that’s no virtue. You said we should have been married because of the child, that the child was more important than either of us. What then was so different in this case? According to that logic shouldn’t you have married Jonathan for the child’s sake?”

“You sound more like a lawyer than a person,” there were bitter tears in her eyes. “Everything was different. You were the child’s father. The child was conceived in love, on my part anyhow. Jonathan was old, older even than his years. It was a last clutching at life. For the advantages I might get, I’d have to give him my life. You may be fond of an old person but when they try to be young, you find you can’t help despising them. And I’d have to make love to Jonathan, like you and I used to make love, and no matter what you say there was nothing sinful or mean or ugly about our lovemaking. It was pure and healthy and natural. How could I make love to an old man, with the memory of that, and at the same time the child of those memories growing within me. Even if I married Jonathan I’d have to give up all hope of ever seeing you again, and there was no way I was ever going to do that.”

“You sounded quite determined about it when you wrote to me.”

“No, love. I was hoping it’d have the opposite effect on you. I suppose none of this has the slightest effect on you?”

“Of course it has. It’s an awful mess to have got into in the first place. If you’d married Jonathan it would have cleared it up, only from my point of view, granted. Now it’s just a mess again.”

“I can’t take that. I know it’ll work out all right. I know that nothing but good will come of it. Because both of us are good people. We didn’t try to dodge anything. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t a good person.”

“Tell me more.”

“Do you still write that stuff?”

“It’s all I get paid for.”

“But you have some money from your family.”

“Not enough to live on,” I said abruptly, closing the conversation. “What are you going to do now?”

“I’ll keep this job till the child comes. It’s very boring but it makes no demands and it pays quite well. One good thing that this upheaval taught me is how valueless our prized security is. I can get a far more exciting job here with my skills than that boring job back at the bank. I’d never have had the courage to find that out except for what happened.”

“What are you going to do with the child?”

“That’s the six marker.”

“Marriage is now out,” the way she reacted I saw she hadn’t by any means given it up. “It’s out.”

“That may change with the child. It’ll be your child. People long for children.”

“It won’t change with the child,” I said brutally. “It won’t change.”

“You can never tell those things.”

“You’ll have to take my word for it. It’s out. Completely out. And there are only two other ways left now.”

“What?”

“Adoption. Give the child to two parents looking for a child. That way it’ll be as if the child were born into a normal home.”

“It’s all right for you to say that. That way your little mistake will have been farmed out, got rid of. You hadn’t to leave Dublin. You don’t have to carry the child around in your body all these months, cry over it, worry over it. And then after all that just hand it over to somebody else as if it were a postal parcel. And then spend the rest of your life wondering: where is it now, what’s happening to it, is it happy.…”

“Well, the alternative is simple. You keep the child. And once you do that you’re on your own. You’ll never see me again.”

“I don’t know how you can say that.”

“I’m fed up listening to you prate about the child’s good. The child must come first, but apparently only when it happens to coincide with your own wishes. Two parents can bring up a child better than one. There’s nothing special about our seed.”

“Stop it, stop it,” she said.

“All right. I’ll pay. And we can have a brandy in the pub.”

“I need a brandy. And to think I wasn’t able to sleep last night with looking forward to this lunch.”

There was a bar a few doors down from the view of the Bay of Naples with its several sailboats and we had the drinks standing at a counter girdled by a thin brass rail. She took a brandy but I changed to a pint of bitter. As I came out of the Mens I was able to look at her for the first time. There were still no apparent signs of her pregnancy. She was a strong handsome woman, younger looking than her thirty-eight years. Years of regular hours and church-going had worked wonders of preservation on natural good looks.

“Do you know what I want you to do? I want you to come with me to Jonathan’s place. No, we don’t have to go in or anything, in fact we couldn’t,” she was in extreme good spirits again when I joined her. “But I just want you to see it. We can get the bus. We can just walk past the gate. It’s no more than twelve minutes away on the bus.”

“But why?”

“I just want you to see it. It won’t take long.”

“Whatever you say,” I was anxious to avoid the tension of the restaurant at any cost. It had been the same argument as we had had several times in Dublin and we’d never reached anywhere except the same impasse, and never would. “I’m in your hands for the rest of the day,” I said.

We left the pub like any pair of lovers in the centre of London for the day, and I caught her hand as we raced to get to the stop on Shaftesbury Avenue before a six bus which was stopping at traffic lights.

We got off a few stops after Harrods and walked. There was a feeling of decorum and quiet about the roads, of ordered, sheltered lives. The houses were rich and white, with balconies and black railings, and they all had basements.

“It’s only three doors away,” she’d grown very nervous. “If there are signs of anybody in the house we’ll just walk straight past.”

There was a magnolia tree on the bare front lawn, an elegant grey door, and the basement was down steps. It didn’t look as if there was anybody in the house.

“They must be in the country for the week-end,” she said. “When I left, the lawn was white with magnolia blossom. They must have vacuumed them up.”

“Who’s they?” I asked.

“Jonathan and his wife. Did I not tell you he’s married? The woman is a widow, has money too. It’s she who has the cottage in the country. Clutching at a late life.”

“Come on. You never know, there might be somebody in the house.”

“I’d love to just get one look into the basement.”

“No. I’m moving on if you are. It’s not right,” I was afraid someone might open the door and enquire what we wanted or—worse—invite us in.

“I suppose it was just foolish of me to want to see if the basement has been changed.”

“Why did you want to see the house at all?”

“I don’t know. I just wanted you to see it. Often I used to wish it was just us two who were in the house. But I was very grateful for that basement when I came to London first. What do you think of it?”

“I think it’s a fine house,” I said.

I had a beer in the small local at the corner of the road, where she and Jonathan used to have a drink on Sunday mornings after walking in the gardens. Then we took the underground to Finsbury Park. Her flat was just seven bus stops from the station.

Cars were parked bumper to bumper on both sides of the road we turned into, the long rows of glass glittering each time the sun shone out of hurrying white clouds.

“There must be a home game,” she said. “We’re just a few minutes away from the Spurs ground. Both my landlords are fanatic Spurs followers,” and as if to support what she’d said a huge roar went up close by, followed by a deafening rhythmic pounding of feet on hollow boards, broken by a huge groan that led off into sharp definitive clapping. The whole little terrace was grey, the brick dark from smoke or soot, tradesmen’s houses of the nineteenth century, each house with a name plaque between the two upper windows in the shape of a cough lozenge. “Ivanhoe” was the barely legible name I made out as she searched for her key. A black and a grey cat met us in the narrow hallway.

“We have the house to ourselves. My landlords are on the Costa Brava. I’m looking after the cats for them. You should have heard all the feeding instructions I got before they left. The cats are their children,” she stroked the cats in the hallway but they did not follow us up the stairs. I listened to the baying of the crowd: indignation, polite appreciation, anxiety, relief, abuse, anger, smug satisfaction.

“I’m hardly ever here on a Saturday. I do my shopping and laundry round this time every Saturday.”

The flat looked as if it had been furnished from several junk rooms. There was a gas cooker, a gas fire, a circular table, armchairs of different shapes and colours, a corduroy sofa, a narrow bed against the wall. There was lino on the floors but what nearly broke my heart was the bowl of tulips, the fresh cheese biscuits, the unopened bottle of whiskey and the bottles of red and white wine, and even packs of stout.

“You have gone to far too much trouble,” I said into her shining eyes. “How did you come on this place?”

“I saw it in the paper. And the two men liked me. They thought I had a bit of class. Though they’re men they’re really married. George is all shoulders, masculine, deep voice. And Terry is the dreamy, flitty one, very so-so. They must have taken a whole case of suntan lotion to the Costa Brava. They’d make you die. I’m going to come back with a really sexy tan,’ Terry said. ‘And I’ll hold George’s hand when we go out to shop’!”

“Do they know you’re pregnant?”

“No.”

“Do you think you will have any trouble when they find out?”

“No. I don’t think so. They’re very nice. The house couldn’t be more quiet. And it’s cheap. I even save money now. Except they might want to adopt the baby, when they find out I’m pregnant, that’s the only trouble I can foresee. It’s the one thing in their line that poor Terry can’t do.”

She’d poured me a large glass of whiskey and sipped at a little white wine herself, sitting cross-legged on the floor.

“Does your family know anything yet?”

“No. And I don’t intend to tell them. If they did find out, they’d hold their big middle-class conference. A course of action would be decided on. And they’d arrive en masse to take over the show. I’d be whisked home or into a convent or something. Boy, would they be thrown. Nothing like this ever happened in the family before.”

“You won’t tell them, then?”

“Not until it’s over, if even then. As far as they’re concerned I’m on an artistic jag, seeking fame and fortune in the environs of Fleet Street.”

Her eyes shining, brimming with tears but smiling through them, she moved towards me over lino, a child rolling an orange across the floor. She leaned her face against my knees and when I put my arms round her I felt the sobbing.

“It means so much to me you’re here,” she said. I stroked her hair and rocked her quietly, glad of the burning whiskey numbing a confusion of feeling. Smiling apprehensively up at me through tears as if afraid of my reaction, she started to undo buttons, and then she took my penis in her mouth. Excited, I let my hands run beneath her blouse, teasing and globing the full breasts.

“We might as well go to bed,” I said as an enormous roar that sounded as if a home goal had just been scored rolled through the shabby room.

“You see, you can only notice for certain without clothes,” she said, but in the narrow bed she pushed me away, crying out angrily that I was using her to induce a miscarriage, “That is what you want anyhow.”

“If you think that, come on top,” I pulled her on top of me. “You can control everything. The bed is too narrow.”

“I’m sorry. I’m just nervous.”

A sudden swelling roar from the crowd reached a pitch when it seemed it must sweep to triumph, but with a groan it fell back, scattered in neat handclapping. My hands went over her shoulders, her back, her buttocks, her sweating: and I willed all sense down to living in her wetness like in a wound.

When it was over, feet stamping impatiently from the ground on the hollow boards, she said, “Sometimes I lie in this bed and just cry and think how did I ever get myself into this. And other times I’m just so happy that I don’t want to go to sleep. I think of the young life growing within me. I think how amazing it is. I’m giving another person the gift of life, of the sky and the sea and summer and the crowded streets of cities, everything that Man or God has made. And I can’t get over what a miracle of a gift it is to be able to give to anybody, what a gift it is to give, not only a whole garden in the evening but everything, can you imagine it, everything, just everything?” She raised herself above me on one arm so that her breasts and fine shoulders shone. What sounded like a final roar went up from the crowd, and then a general round of applause for what could have been teams leaving the field, broken by the odd coltish boo. “How can you deny that it’s wonderful?”

“Nobody can. No more than they can quarrel with the sea or the morning.”

“What’s wrong with you, then?”

“Nothing. I happen to think the opposite is true as well. It’s horrible as well as wonderful.”

“But that doesn’t matter. There’s nothing to be done about it.”

“It’s still the truth. I’d find it depressing if a place couldn’t be found for it on the committee.”

“Who knows the truth?”

“Nobody. The cowardly fall short of it, bravura tries to go beyond it, but they are recognizable limits and balances. We mightn’t be able to live with it but we can’t block it out either.”

“O boy, here we go again.”

“And it certainly doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere.”

“And I love you. I often cried out for you. Now I’m being selfish. I want to eat and drink you.”

I thought nobody could tell anybody that, and I listened to the loud street. Footsteps were hurrying past. Feverish discussions or arguments, tired and contented voices went past. Gar doors banged. Motors started. And then the clip-clop of a police horse came slowly down the street.

“What are you listening to, love?”

“A horse. It must be a police horse.”

“They’re always around on match Saturdays. That’s the crowd going home. They always make that much of a racket. You’d hardly get moving in the streets around here now and the buses are all packed. Especially when they’ve lost, they’d trample you down.”

The horse went past. Soon afterwards several horses trotted past the windows.

“There’re going back to the barracks,” she said. “This is the way they go back every Saturday. All this useless information comes from the masculine landlord, George,” she said. “I’m sorry. I was nervous the last time. Come on top of me.”

“We can lie sideways.”

“No. Come on top of me. I want to feel you.” I waited while she searched, and when I felt her panting reach for a thread just out of reach, and fall back with a catch of the breath, I let it be over. I poured whiskey and grew more and more restless, disturbed by the preparations for my coming, the flowers, the cheese biscuits, the alcohol, and God knows what else was hidden out of sight. They shone all the more disturbingly out because of the poorness of the room, the hopelessness of the whole venture, like primroses in a jam jar on a grave of someone who had worn the ragged jacket of the earth for all his days before donning the final uniform of king and beggar.

“What time do the pubs open?”

“I don’t know. I was thinking I’d start to make us something to eat a little later,” it was exactly what I feared.

“I think they must be open now,” I seemed to remember that they were always open just a little time after the matches ended and then the classified evening papers would come in. “I’d love a pint of English bitter. And it’d be fun to check on the result of the match. My guess is that the home team must have won.”

As I said it, I realized it was uncomfortably close to the note of, “I’ve just missed the crossed treble by a whisker,” that tolled the passing of her virginity, but all she said was, “I’ll be dressed in a few minutes.”

“Take as long as you like. The sun is out. We can walk.”

I drank another whiskey as I waited.

“Kiss me,” she said when she appeared.

“I hope you don’t mind the whiskey.”

“Maybe we can come back and eat later?”

“Sure. Or we can eat out.”

“If we weren’t coming back I’d feed the cats now.”

“Feed the cats, then. That way you don’t have to worry about it. We have more choices that way.”

As I listened to her feeding the cats downstairs, I poured another whiskey, mentally taking leave of the room, all the preparations for my coming pointing the frail accusing fingers at me of all rejected poor endeavour. If I could possibly avoid it, I promised, I’d never set foot in that room again.

A brief sun was out and we walked to the pub, an enormous coaching inn close to the station. Its solid lovely structure had been battered by several puzzling decorational assaults and there was a bandstand at the back. I brought the pint of bitter, an orange and two evening papers to the table beside the bandstand.

“Spurs won. Two to one. They got the winning goal in the last quarter. That last great roar that went up must have been for the winner.”

She smiled a nervous smile that seemed to say that she was happy because I seemed happy. We swapped the thin sheets. I got another pint of bitter from the bar but she had enough orange. She took a packet of crisps. We had exhausted the papers by that. A pretty woman somewhere in her thirties came round wiping the tables, and hearing our accents spoke to us.

“What part do you come from? Are you on holiday or living here?” She was from Dublin and worked weekends in the bar when a group played.

I offered her a drink. She had a lager and lime and sat with us. Though she was paid from six o’clock it was often eight before she had any work, and she was blinded with work from then till closing time. The best part of the night was when they sat behind the counter with a nightcap after the washing and cleaning was done, she told us.

She had a story. For all her prettiness her mouth was thin and bitter and she kept tugging nervously at the finger that would have worn a wedding ring.

She’d a clerk-typist’s position in Guinness’s Brewery in Dublin. She emphasized it as a position rather than a job. In those days if you got into Guinness’s you were secure for life. It was harder to get into than into the civil service or a bank, and she’d already got her first promotion when she met this man, an Englishman, an engineer, who was over installing some new plant in the brewery. She married him, left her job, came with him to London, where they had two children, two boys, and then, after seven years, discovered that the man she thought of as her husband all those years had been married to another woman, who he was seeing all that time, when she thought he was away on jobs. She still got angry when the lies she’d swallowed hook, line and sinker came back to her. She’d left him, of course, at once. It all poured out one night he’d had too much to drink. No, she didn’t think she’d ever marry again, once burned ten times shy. She’d a good job now in the Westminster Bank, and the weekends she worked in the pub made that little difference of presents and extra luxuries for her two boys.

I was delighted with the story and bought her two more lagers and lime, encouraging her to elaborate, as Maloney’s words came back to me, “It makes us all feel good. It makes us all feel very good.” Compared to the despicable wretch this woman had the misfortune to meet up with, my own questionable conduct appeared positively exemplary. She only left us when the musicians came in and began to take the wraps off their instruments.

“I suppose we should go before the crowd starts to come in,” the pub was already filling.

“That’s if you can bear to miss another slice of that woman’s life,” the angry answer came.

“She seemed to want to talk.”

“You encouraged her, went on buying her drinks, when we had only this amount of precious time for ourselves.” It was precisely that same precious time that I had been anxious to avoid.

“Her story was sort of interesting, it was kind of a version of ours, but far worse. She seemed decent enough and I was thinking that if you were feeling low or anything you could drop in. She’s Irish. Having gone through that herself, she’d know what you are going through here in London.” A sudden flushed stare from behind two rows of bottles along the counter mirrors told me I was already well on the way to being fuddled as we left the bar.

“That’s all I’d need if I was low,” she said with angry contempt. “Go into that bar and listen to her story. That’s what’d cheer me up. Boy, isn’t that just the holy grail I’ve been looking for all this time. Come in and listen to a tale of woe that’ll cancel your own woe out.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean any harm. I meant it all for the best. What would you like to do now?”

“Why don’t we go back to the flat? I’ll cook us dinner there. There’s plenty of wine and drink.”

“I don’t want you cooking. I want to take you out for dinner tonight. It’d be fun. It’s Saturday night too.”

“All right. We’ll go out to dinner then,” she smiled and we kissed. “I need to clear my ears after that woman’s story. I guess that was just about all I needed.”

“Will we go back into town and eat in Soho?”

“Everywhere’ll be crowded tonight. I’d rather stay round here. There’s a little French place round the corner, run by a fat Breton, who’s cook and waiter and everything. I was there once. It’s a bit on the expensive side though.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

It could have been a hairdresser’s window, except for the lobster pot and a piece of torn netting with rectangular cork floats and lead sinks. Inside, four of the eight or ten tables were full. The man was very fat, in a chef’s hat and apron, arms bared, and he was sweating profusely. I was still not hungry and ordered a steak tartare as an excuse to drink. I then pressed her to eat as much as she was able. There was much laughter as the chef helped her to order. When she did, he brought us a carafe of wine, and we drank as we watched him cook. I ordered a second carafe when he brought our dishes.

As soon as I got out of the restaurant I staggered but covered up by thanking her profusely, “It was a wonderful meal and wonderful place. You have a real nose for restaurants.”

I was drunk, but with the drunk’s cunning of very limited, mostly negative ambitions: one, not to go back to the flat; two, not to have any serious discussion, which was easily achieved at this stage; three, to make trebly certain of avoiding serious discussions if there was any further need to be certain by going on drinking.

“I’m dying for a pint of bitter. Why don’t we go back into that pub? It’s the nearest and we don’t have to see that woman. The pub is enormous and she works the tables at the far end. We can just have a drink near the door. It must be almost closing time,”

The place was packed. Heads crowded together above the counter. A horn shrilled above frantic drums. There were glasses everywhere, cigarette smoke, flushed faces, the dark warm wood, grapes on the stained ceiling; but there were far too many faces to think of even catching a glimpse of the blonde Dublin woman among the dancers and tables around the bandstand in the distant crush and smoke. There was a table near the door where we could rest our glasses while we stood. The bitter tasted warm. There was no possibility of speech except in carefully thought-out monosyllabic shouts. The yellow bitter in its thin pint glass with the imperial stamp looked beautiful. I smiled and raised my glass and shouted, “Good health.” Across the counter between rings of smoke I watched a girl weave her bare arms in a dance, cracking her fingers above her head, the black dress so tightly sewn that her breasts looked crushed. As in a light dream on the edge of waking, faces floated close out of the smoke, seemed to smile, and drift far back only to draw near again.

“You seem to be having a wonderful time,” she shouted in my ear.

“I am,” I shouted back. “And you?” Before her wan smile could take on meaning, it drifted off into the noise and smoke and came back changed.

The summer air, the clean streetlights, their unreal clarity shook me when I stepped outside, and the harsh words, “You’re drunk.”

“I’m tipsy. How can a man know he’s drunk and still be drunk, know he’s a fool and still be a fool, be a thief. I must be drunk.”

“You’re tipsy, then. You’re far too tipsy to go back to the hotel. You can sleep the night in the flat. The short walk back there would even do you good.”

“I can’t,” I hiccuped, leaning against the outside wall of the pub, the car park and the forecourt crowded. Limited Plan Number One (not to go back to the flat) came floating silently to my aid, waving its delicate legs like a deep-sea diver approaching a submerged wreck.

“You wouldn’t have to sleep with me. I’ll sleep on the floor,” she said.

“I’d want to sleep with you. And it’s me that should sleep on the floor, but I can’t. I have to go to the hotel.”

“You can go in the morning.”

“No, I’m as well to go now. I’m well able to. I have to see if any message has come for me.”

“I’ll come with you, so,” she took me by the arm.

“I’ll be able to manage,” but she ignored it.

I stumbled on the stairs, but I was conscious enough on the journey to be grateful for the grace of complete avoidance of everything that my condition conferred, and at the hotel the note was waiting that I had arranged to be there. I gave her the note to read in the lobby. I had to go back the next day. It was not so urgent, I said, that I’d have to take a plane. I could go on the nightboat and train. That way we could have most of the day together. We kissed and I saw her to the door after she said she’d call for me at eleven the next morning. I got my key off the porter and I saw him take his eyes from whatever he was reading to watch my feet attempt the first few steps of the stairs.

I was awake but hardly daring to move with pain when she burst into the room the next morning. By the way she looked around I knew she’d been hurting herself with the fear that I might have some girl with me in the room.

“Is it eleven yet?”

“No. I’m early but when the man in the hall said you were in the room I thought I might as well come up rather than walk around till eleven.”

“That made sense. I feel horrible.”

“I don’t know what you wanted to go and drink so much for. Do you want me to go out and get you something for your head?”

“No. I might as well suffer it out now since I was so stupid. I’ll get up.”

Downstairs I paid for the room, and the man took in my bag behind the desk. The sun was out in Bloomsbury, the walls whitened with its light, and it hurt like hell. I was forced to laugh at the pain. We bought newspapers at the corner of Tottenham Court Road, crossed Oxford Street, and found an empty bench in Soho Square, and started to leaf in silence through the pages. Down in the bushes on the Greek Street side of the square a parliament of winos seemed to be in session. From time to time coins were collected on the grass, and one of their number left to return some minutes later with a quart of cider, which was passed around. To spin out this day like an invalid till the late train left Euston suited me well. When a person is both tired and ill they make few social mistakes. They make nothing.

“How do you feel now, love?” she leaned towards me after we’d been two hours or so on the bench and we kissed.

“Things are looking up. And you?”

“I feel a bit tired,” and she broke a long silence, “What are you thinking, love?”

“I was trying to figure out why those winos get all het up from time to time. And talk and jump about and wave. And they all just seem to sit down again.”

“Maybe that’s when something important comes up.”

“But what?”

“The price of cider? Who knows!”

After one o’clock we drifted down into a small pub that had flowers and bowls of nuts and a bald landlord leaned a shirt-sleeved arm on the counter. We had two drinks, stayed till it closed at two, and went back to the Italian restaurant we’d been to the day before. We teased out slow hours there with red wine and light dishes.

“It’s going to be a long, long winter. I should be in hospital by Christmas. The child is going to be a Christmas child. The worst will be the autumn. Some of my cousins will be in London for conferences. I’ll have to see them and it won’t be easy to hide my condition.”

“You can pretend you have to be out of town on some trumped-up business or other.”

“Not all the time. Tom, the engineer, the boy I used play with, has written with his dates already. He’ll be here in late October and staying at the Strand Palace. Boy, if I was out of town for that he’d not be long smelling a rat. He’d soon put two and three together.”

In the slow drip of her anxiety there was the temptation: let us get married, let us face out this horrible mess together, but a mere glimpse of the way she’d rise and warm to it was enough to kill it unspoken.

“You should have married Jonathan.”

“I should have done a lot of things and didn’t. There’s no use going over that now. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

“Was Jonathan much hurt when you wouldn’t?”

“I suppose he was. I think he was in love with me for years. For years he’d been trying to get me to give up the job in the bank and come to London. We used often to talk about that, the irony of how it happened when it did happen, getting pregnant. I suppose his vanity was hurt too, but what was shocking was how businesslike he was about it. I saw him for the first time in his true colours then,” she said bitterly. “For all the champagne and tears and roses, people to him were just ciphers. He was brutal and domineering as well as sentimental but above all everything had a price.”

“Strange, out of all the ups and downs how starkly simple everything is now.”

“How?” she said sharply.

“You’ll have the child at Christmas. You’ll either keep it or adopt it.”

“It might be even simpler than that. I’m not that young for it to be all that simple, having a first child.”

I wanted to say, it’s not true that the old have shorter lives than the young. Many did not even get as far as us, no one has any rights in that line; but we had been in these waters before. They were choppy and disagreeable and led nowhere. It was almost five when we stepped out of the restaurant onto Old Compton Street.

“The train goes soon after eight. Will we break up here? I just have time to get my bag out of the hotel and make my way to Euston.”

“I’ll see you off,” she said. “Otherwise I’d just go back to the house and mope and cry. All I’d think of is that the train is leaving in such and such a time and every five minutes I’d check the clock.”

We sat in the late sun for half an hour in Soho Square. Some of the winos we had watched that morning were asleep, but others were still moving the bottle. One of the women dressed in a blue military overcoat seemed particularly angry. She muttered to herself and then took fits of shaking some of the men sleeping on the grass awake, talking to them in rapid bursts. All of them seemed to listen carefully to whatever she said and then to fall back to sleep.

After that we picked up the bag at the hotel and walked to Euston. We had an hour to wait and sat in the station bar.

“Can I give you money? I have plenty of money.”

“No. I’m even saving money. When I have to stop work I may need some and I’ll ask you then.”

“Whenever you want, but maybe you should take some now, just in case.”

“No. But I’m grateful. Will you come to London soon?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to do much good, does it, it’s outside the main problem now. You remember how in the beginning when both of us thought to come to London together, and live here till the child was born, it was decided that it wasn’t a good idea. And visiting seems to me even worse. It stirs things up, leaves everything exactly the same, so it’s worse than nothing. But I’ll come if you need me.”

“It’s going to be a hard time, but somehow deep down I know it’ll be all right.”

We kissed at the barrier and when I turned round before getting into the carriage she was still at the barrier. I waved and she started to wave back wildly.

It won’t be all right. Nothing will be all right. And it’ll end badly, I said to myself but had to admit that it was a very poor way of thinking. The train was set for Ireland. I started thinking of my mother to the carriage roll. There are women in whom the maternal instinct is so obdurate that they will break wrists and ankles in order to stay needed.

My mother, too, may have been such, if the old calendars were anything to go by: but then you could assert almost anything from those ranks of crossed out days, including, certainly, an impatience to get life over with.

The calendars were in a large bundle of papers, tied with yellowed twine. I got them when I was given formal possession of my parents’ estate in the room above Delehunty’s office, my aunt in another of the green leather armchairs with the row of brass studs, Delehunty’s easy beefsteak face across the roll-top desk, behind him an ancient Bible on the wooden mantel above the fireplace.

They were very ordinary calendars, with scenic views such as shops give out at Christmas. Encrusted around many of the dates were faded notes in some private shorthand that I found impossible to decipher and every date was covered with the same large bold X. Seven years were crossed out this way. The X’s stopped on the nineteenth of May, ten days before her death, around the time I’d been taken from the farmhouse to my aunt’s place in the town. I sensed that God, having veiled the earth in darkness and seen all nature to restoring sleep, could hardly have closed down each day with much greater sense of personal control than the march of my mother’s X’s across the years seemed to proclaim. Maybe I had been lucky in my mother’s death. Before she could get those X’s properly to work on me she’d been taken away. And was I now acting out the same circle in reverse—leaving her in London with her growing burden?

I had been lucky in my aunt and uncle. They’d let me grow easy, and I’d escaped the misfortune of being the centre of anybody’s “interest” till I crossed the dance floor, the cursed circle coming round again, that madness of passion that I had focused on “my love” now focused on me, her cry strengthened with the child’s cry, the happy gods secure as ever in their laughter.

If they let me grow easy, I was letting her die as easily.

I did not go into the hospital till I was four days back in Dublin, since I’d said I’d be a week away.

I wrote more Mavis and the Colonel stories for Maloney. I did not go out at all, ignored day and night and conventional meal times, using alcohol and hot baths in place of exercise when I felt I needed to sleep. “A good bottle of port every day equals a four-mile walk,” a British general had said. I used a well-tried formula I always used when I had catching-up to do, not unlike a cooking recipe: a description of Venice out of a guidebook, like a sprinkling of dried parsley; at Eastbourne the four leaves of the hotel door revolved on their own hinges while outside the brass band thumped and groaned “Bank Holiday”, as the Colonel once again went up his Queen. It all went to cast a thin veil of a logical process over the main purchase, the shaft and clutch, the oiled walls opening to take the fat white spunk, closing with a painful catch of ecstasy as once again it surged straight home. I did not read any of the stories till I had all I wanted done. I had to read them with my own blood, sometimes changing the order of the words until they seemed to sing or cough or groan, supplying the personal salt without which suspicion could not be lulled. Ο rock the cradle with your own dark hands till sleep would come or lust would rise.

And out of this counterfeited rocking of lust sometimes the silken piece of white cloth became a texture again to my fingers before I had let the breeze take it out among the cloud of gulls, and I wanted to take her again in my arms in the cold of a room beneath the black crucifix. When it came to ringing her or not, I did not want to be born again. I had no doubt that I had enough of “life” for some time more.

This became a real problem only when I’d finished and worked through the reading of all the stories and wanted to go to the hospital again. What if I should meet her in the ward? I was back now and I had not rung her as I’d promised.

I bought two bottles of brandy and took the bus to the hospital. It was an incredible evening, a clear sky, and in the hospital grounds all was greenness. The new-cut grass we’d walked over a week before was now in bales, standing on their ends and leaning together in abstract groups of five in the clean field between the hospital and the home on the edge of the farther trees.

I walked mechanically in, went up in the lift, trying to keep the ghostly, wonderful, horrible birth and death of night out of mind, the sea breeze that took it like a whisper from my fingers, and let it die there among the gulls. I wouldn’t meet her. If I met her I could always lie.

Getting out of the lift and walking towards my aunt became in spite of every effort the guilt of stealing towards her by the facing way of the meadow in moonlight and the garbage stairs, up the corridor from where I was walking towards, the blue night-light on, and the solid green swing doors at the farthest end were the palest green. What had I learned from that clandestine night? The nothing that we always learn when we sink to learn something of ourselves or life from a poor other —our own shameful shallowness. We can no more learn from another than we can do their death for them or have them do ours. We have to go inland, in the solitude that is both pain and joy, and there make our own truth, and even if that proves nothing too, we have still that hard joy of having gone the hard and only way there is to go, we have not backed away or staggered to one side, but gone on and on and on even when there was nothing, knowing there was nothing on any other way. We had gone too deep inland to think that a different physique or climate would change anything. We were outside change because we were change. All the doctrines that we had learned by heart and could not understand and fretted over became laughingly clear. To find we had to lose: the road away became the road back. And what company we met with on the road, we who no longer sought company, at what fires and walls did we sit. Our wits were sharpened. All the time we had to change our ways. We listened to everything with attention, to others singing of their failures and their luck, for we now had our road. All, all were travelling. Nobody would arrive. The adventure would never be over even when we were over. It would go on and on, even as it had gone on before it had been passed on to us.

And the dark-haired girl, and the woman with child in London, the dying woman I was standing beside, propped upright on the pillow, lapsed into light and worried sleep, what of them? The answer was in the vulgarity of the question. What of yourself?

The sound of putting the bottles down on the locker top woke her.

“God bless you,” she rubbed her eyes. “I must have dozed off. It’s great to see you. I thought you might be in yesterday, but then I wasn’t sure when you’d get back from London.”

“I got back yesterday.”

“That black-haired one was in, to ask about you.”

“Did she say anything?”

“No. She’s too clever for that, but I can see she’s after you, bad luck to her.”

“Why?” that I was grateful for her tact of silence only increased the unease I felt.

“Because I know what women do, because I know she’s after you.”

“Everybody it seems must be after somebody. Look at yourself and Cyril.”

“Cyril’s all right. I had a letter from him,” she laughed. “Knowing him, putting the few words together, must have been worse than turning a potato pit. Though he said nothing, I can see himself and your uncle are managing poorly. The next thing you’ll find is that they’ve been fighting. I’ll have to go home.”

There were a few tests more, she told me, and no matter what the results were she was going home at the weekend. I promised that I’d come in in two days time. I was too afraid to linger and yet I found myself leaving with regret, walking slowly out past the reception desk, looking across the clean field towards the home—for what could be nothing but sight of her dark hair.

Maloney was alone when I handed him the stories at the Elbow. He wore dark glasses and the face looked heavy from alcohol or tiredness behind the darkness.

“That clears me, brings me up to date. There’s nothing experimental, just the usual,” he took the manuscripts and put them in his pocket without a word.

“No buffaloes? no rhinoceros? no tower of ivory? no fool’s gold?” he yawned.

“No. Nothing but the usual.”

“A pity.’ We are nothing if not advanced,’ Miss Florence Farr, the future Lady Brandon, said as far back as 1894. It should have caught on by now, don’t you think? The usual appears to me as a diehard form of backsliding. Have you ever noticed that a person is perfectly tuned socially when tired to death?” he yawned as he changed.

“Sure. There’s less of you, so you’re easier for people to stand, more occupied staying alive than expressing yourself. Others don’t impinge on you as much then either. For your own safety you have to follow what’s going on, and because of your tiredness you make only the barest gestures. It works like a charm. You create room for people. You control everything, controlling nothing. You never make a mistake because you both exist and don’t exist. It’s quite perfect.”

“That sounds as if I should have said it.”

“What has you so tired?”

“Drink and girls or girls and drink. And youth ending. I could not get girls when I needed girls. Now I can get them when I’m no longer able for them. There must be a moral. You can’t thrash the tide back with mere sticks, not even with the pure spirit. And you’ve been to London?”

“That’s right.”

“And you’ve visited your responsibilities?”

“That’s right.”

“And you’ve comforted them in the traditional manner?” he attacked.

“It happened but I didn’t want it to happen.”

“Of course you didn’t but it still felt good, the finger in the butter dish, the heart doing its duty with the penis still in the right place.”

“What are you to do when someone crawls across a carpet to you on her hands and knees?” he had rattled me.

“Give her a sermon. Put your arms round her like a brother, and put them no lower than any proper brother. Tell her that you’ve both entertained Satan in the past, but now you’re both going to banish Satan together and join the Lord. Then take her to church. That’s what churches are for.”

“Well you’ve got your stories,” I changed for the last time.

“What’s she going to do?” he ignored what I’d said as he too rose.

“She’s going to have the baby in London.”

“What is she going to do then?”

“She’ll either keep it or have it adopted.”

“What do you think she’ll do?”

“Keep it.”

“What’ll you do?”

“I’m out of it.”

“That’s what you may think, but keep praying, and staying out. Tomorrow I’ll be a reformed character,” he tapped the manuscript. “I’ll read this and clear all cheques.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Good luck.”

“God bless,” he smiled, which exasperated me too late, for he’d disappeared when I turned around.

I had now visited my aunt so often and so regularly in the hospital that the visits had come to resemble those she was so well used to among relatives on Sundays in the country. Cars pull up outside. Apologies and cautious smiles ease themselves out of front seats. A child slams a back door. Having first discerned who has landed from the cover of the back of the living-room, smiles of surprise and delight are wreathed into shape on the doorstep of the porch. Little runs and thrills and pats and chortles go to answer one another, till all hesitant discordant notes are lost in the sweet medley of hypocrisy. Tea is made. After tea, with folded arms, outside on a good day, the men discuss their present plans for rebuilding Troy with suitably measured gestures. The visit ends as it began, relief breaking through the trills of thanks and promises and small playful scolds, “And now, be sure and don’t let it be as long until you come again. We’ll think bad of you. Now it’s your turn to visit us next time, you’ve been just promising for far too long.” And then each family settles down to a solid hour of criticism of the other, the boring visit ended. It is the way we define and reassert ourselves, rejecting those foreign bodies as we sharpen and restore our sense of self.

That my visits were growing similarly tedious to my aunt I could tell by her elaborate greeting. As I left, I could tell by her eyes that there was much about my person and presence that earned her disfavour. She too was a crowd. I, too, would get scorched as soon as I left.

But when she said, “I’m going out of this old place tomorrow,” both of us could settle down to enjoy the visit, to renew pleasure that had gone stale because of the relief that it was ending. If we found it growing tedious we had only to glance beyond it towards our approaching freedom. We could be patient and virtuous because limits had been set.

My own ease in this luxury was soon cut short by noticing that the dark-haired girl was on duty at the far end of the ward. She was propping a woman’s back with pillows when I noticed her.

All my attention was now focused completely on her for what remained of the visit, each move she made between the beds, and to cover my agitation I tried to summon false energy to keep a line of prattle going with my aunt; but all my attention was on the dark hair above the uniform and I was constantly losing track of what I was meaning to say. My aunt did not even trouble to hide her amusement, and the source of my confusion was drawing closer, six beds away, five, four.

“I’ll be in to see you early tomorrow,” I said to my aunt, casting all dignity aside, trusting to instant flight, forgetting my aunt was going home first thing tmorrow morning, and she burst out laughing as I seized her hand before making my escape. “O my God,” she wiped tears away with her knuckles, laughter obviously cancelling any pain she may have been feeling. “Bad luck to these women. I thought I’d never live to see the day.”

My last glimpse as I left was dark hair, bent over a young girl’s pillow two beds away as I started to walk up the long corridor, the lift an awful long way off, so many steps for the rigid mechanical doll-step of a walk, all I could muster. I had not gone far when the clear words rang out behind me, full of rage and hurt, “You never come in to see us now. You just come in to see Auntie.”

Appalled, I tried to continue walking.

“You never come in to see us now. You just come in to see Auntie.”

It was a long way to walk, to keep walking, she standing there behind me, my aunt’s laughter probably intercepted by this sudden violence, wondering with some trepidation how it would turn out. And then the natural fear, not to look back, to keep walking to the lift, to escape, to leave rage and mockery behind like a fired gun, suddenly went so far in flight that it stopped: this is absurd, this is ridiculous, if you don’t face it now it’ll rankle forever; and I turned and walked towards where she stood, her hands on her hips, rigid.

“I’m sorry. I’ll explain it. Can I meet you?”

“I suppose that’s possible, if you’d want that.”

“I do. When are you off work?”

“At eight”

“I’ll ring you at eight-thirty at the home.”

“If you want that,” she was close to tears.

“I do. I’ll ring. I hope we’ll be able to meet.”

The cool was all the more cool since it was just barely being held, a shiver of a cord could break it, but it carried me back to my aunt’s bed.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was upset. I forgot you were going home tomorrow, but I’ll be down within a week.”

“O you’re a sly one,” she said laughing, for the whole muffled comedy was now so extreme that it didn’t matter what words were said. “O my God, bad luck to you anyway. I never thought I’d live to see the day. You’re a crowned pair. Bad luck to both of yez.”

When I got out of the hospital I felt myself trembling, feeling the whole naked humiliation of life that we mostly manage to keep at bay with all those weapons that can only be praised.

I rang at the exact time I said I would and she must have been waiting by the phones in the hallway for she picked it up on the second ring.

“Will you meet me?”

“For what?”

“Nothing. Just to meet. I can hardly blame you after today if you don’t want to.”

“You know you don’t have to meet me?”

“I know that. I’m asking if you’ll meet me.”

“When?”

“Tonight. In an hour’s time in O’Connell Street?”

“Where?”

“Under Clery’s clock at nine-thirty,” and she put the phone down without affirming whether she’d be there or not.

I would have waited until half-nine or so if she hadn’t come but she came into the space beneath the clock at ten past.

She wore a grey herring-bone suit with a plastic brooch on the collar, a brown butterfly. She was not, I suppose, what is generally called beautiful, but she looked beautiful to me, young and healthy and strong, the face open and uncomplicated beneath its crown of shining black hair, a young woman rooted in her only life.

“I’m sorry about today,” I said.

“I’m sorry too. I was ashamed I shouted after you,” she said but there was no plea as there was in my apology, just a plain admission.

“Would you like to come for a drink or go somewhere else?”

“I’d like to go to the pictures,” she said.

We went to the Carleton, where The World of Harold Lloyd was showing. She sat stiffly by my side in the back seats, staring studiously at the screen, and not until the turkey got loose in the bus did she begin to laugh. When I risked my arm around her, she stiffened again, and I withdrew it. I had found an aggressive and unpleasant note in my own laughter, laughing in defiance of her silence rather than at anything on the screen. Once I was silent her laughter seemed to grow.

“Did you like it?” I asked as we went out into the unreality of the night street.

“It was great fun,” she said.

She said she didn’t want a drink or coffee because if we did we’d miss the bus, and the difference of the few minutes wasn’t worth the taxi fare. When I asked if I could come with her on the bus she answered, “If you want to.”

We walked in silence from the bus into the hospital grounds, past the hospital. The silence didn’t change when we went into the same lighted room with the TV set and couches and armchairs and sat on the same couch where she’d let me take away the white piece of cloth that had gone out among the gulls. When I moved towards her I felt both her hands against my chest.

“That’s all that you’re after, isn’t it?”

“No. It’s not all but it’s certainly part of it. Will you come out with me again?” I rose.

“Maybe you’d be better off just coming in to see Auntie?”

“That’s not fair,” I said. “Anyhow my aunt is going home tomorrow. What about next week? Next Tuesday? Will you let me take you out to a meal? I want to tell you something.”

“Why can’t you tell it now?”

“I don’t want to. It’d take too long.”

Though it lingered on the lips the kiss she allowed me was too wary to hint at any future, remember any past.

She looked lovely when I met her outside the Trocadero on Tuesday and I told her so. There is no better climate than separateness for loveliness to grow.

There was so much pretty confusion and smiling and choosing what to eat that the waiter helped her choose.

“What do you think of the place?”

“It’s expensive,” she said.

“Not compared with some other places,” I tried to think of what places she must have eaten in with the older man in the photograph. I thought of soda bread and tea and a hotel beside the river in Ballina.

“It is to me,” she said. “What were you to tell me?”

“We’ll wait until we get the wine.” When the wine came I said, “Do you remember that night when we met at the dance and I asked you what you’d do if you got pregnant?” and she blushed. “I didn’t believe you when you said you’d throw yourself in the Liffey,” I continued.

“I would take pills or something. I couldn’t face into my family that way. I couldn’t.”

“You’d think that till it happened. I was going to tell you that night and I didn’t. I’ve got someone pregnant.”

“Are you going to marry her?” she coloured even more than before.

“No.”

“And what’s she going to do?”

“She’s going to have the child. In London. In a few months.”

“What’ll she do then?”

“Keep the child or have it adopted.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Nothing. I thought it better to tell you. That’s why I didn’t ring you. There was trouble enough without dragging you in.”

“Why didn’t you marry her?”

“I thought that’s what I’d have to do when it happened first. But then it grew clear that I’d only marry her to leave her. When that was certain there didn’t seem much point.”

“But why?”

“I couldn’t stand her.”

“But you slept with her?” she seemed genuinely shocked.

“She was good looking. That’s not living with someone, setting up house with them, marrying them.”

“But you must have told her something.”

“I told her that I wanted to sleep with her and that that was as much as ever it would be. It saved me in a way, but I don’t find much credit in that either. If someone wants to sleep with you, you have very little to lose by being straight, even brutally straight. They’ll trick it out in some way to make it acceptable. And I had nothing to lose. I didn’t care whether she slept with me or not.”

“It sounds very hard,” she said.

“It’s what I wanted to tell you,” I ended. “That’s why I didn’t ring you up when I got back from London. The night we met at that dance was a wonderful night for me. But I’m not free, at least not until after this child comes into the world. I didn’t think there was any point trying to inveigle you into my mess. That’s why I didn’t ring, why I bolted when I discovered you in the ward.”

“What’ll happen to the child?”

“I don’t know. I hope she’ll have it adopted but I doubt if she will.”

“What’ll you do if she keeps it?”

“I’ll be even more out of it then. I wanted her to have an abortion.”

“I don’t blame her for not having that.”

“Anyhow you know the whole story now. And it’s no pretty story.”

She was silent for a long time, hardly picking at the chicken on her plate. I had seen women pause in much the same way on the edge of the first lovemaking, as if weighing the land before trusting to or turning back from the water; and if they trust to it, that water too must soon become the land.

“You’ve seen this woman in London?”

“That’s why I went.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. What she wants I can’t give her. What I want she can’t give me.”

“What do you want?”

“That it might never have happened.”

“But it has happened.”

“Well then as close to that as I can get.”

“What is that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I suppose it’s called to extricate oneself as best one can.”

“What does she want?”

“She wants the child. She wants me. She wants everything.”

“What’ll she get?”

“I suppose she’ll get the child.”

“And you? What’ll you get?”

“As little as possible I hope. Now, would you have jumped in the Liffey if it had happened to you?”

“I wouldn’t have let it happen,” she said with such determination that I had to smile.

“Well, now that you’ve been warned will you come out with me again?”

“I’ll have to think about it,” she said.

The next time we met she came sheathed in a green wool dress and I took her to meet Maloney. I suppose I took her to see Maloney to show her that it was not just that one thing I was after. I was showing her into that part of my life that was made up of other people. Maloney was very charming.

“What are you, a beautiful healthy apple, doing in this den, with this degenerate,” he moved his arm floridly around the Elbow after kissing her hand. “You’ll get eaten by people with bad teeth.”

“Better to be eaten than to go bad,” she smiled as she risked speech. It would also have been a risk to remain silent, but she couldn’t have known that.

“Very good,” he pretended to stand back to inspect her. “V-e-r-y good. Better to be eaten than to go bad. Maybe just a little bit too good. Now tell me, what’s your opinion of the emancipated woman? I am most anxious to have a straight-from-the-shoulder-no-holds-barred opinion of the emancipated woman.”

“I don’t know what an emancipated woman is. Maybe I am an emancipated woman.”

“Quite right, my dear. I was beginning to fear for you for a minute, only a minute, remember. Not to know is to be happy. Who’d want to leave that child’s country to struggle with space and time and the seven-league boots of human rights. I’ll tell you. Only a fool would want to leave that country.”

“A person generally doesn’t have a choice,” I put in. “It just happens to them.”

“Shut up,” he said. “You’ve eaten the apple. And now you’re addressing yourself to this beautiful fresh girl. Don’t believe a word he tells you. He works for me. I never believe a word he tells me. He’s a wastrel and a corrupter with a priest’s face.”

When we left she said, “He’s a nice man. But he’s tired.”

“Why do you think he’s tired?”

“He tries very hard, doesn’t he? It’s as if he’s always racing to keep up with some idea of himself that he never quite catches.”

“That’s almost too clever,” I said. “He started with the idea that he was a poet. That nearly finishes everybody off. He’d have been intolerable if he’d ever become whatever idea it was. He’s just barely tolerable as he is.”

She came with me to the room.

“What do you think of it?” I had so fallen under the influence of her charm that I was looking to see everything through her eyes.

“It needs cleaning and the letting in of some light, but it’s not my room. It must suit you,” and then she continued in a musing voice. “It’s here that it happened?”

“No.”

“But you must have slept with her—and maybe others—here?”

“Every room has its story. Many stories.”

I felt a rush of desire, as much to cancel all those acts and that one suffocating consequence as desire for her fresh body.

“It’s strange,” she said as we kissed, “I suppose I should feel the opposite but I feel excited.”

“I suppose we should leave it.”

“We should. What are you laughing at?”

“A foolish phrase. A phrase that talks about the continuing virginity of the soul in spite of sexual intercourse. Our virginity seems well restored in spite of that first night when we walked across the meadow to see my aunt.”

“Have you heard anything about her?” she asked.

“No. I was supposed to go down but I didn’t. I suppose she can hardly last out much longer?”

“I was looking at her chart. I shouldn’t be telling you this. In fact I could get into trouble for just reading it. But one night I took it out. The amazing thing is that she’s still alive. With her history she should have been dead about six months ago.”

“She has this fierce will to live. I don’t understand it.”

“Life is very sweet.”

“I suppose it depends on how you’re situated in it. It can be sweet,” these were the sort of conversations that made me wince but I still fell into.

“Just to see the day and the sky and the night seems to me amazing. I can’t imagine anybody wanting to let that go.”

“But aren’t some of the people you nurse tired of it?”

“Some but not very many.”

It was very cold when we went outside but a bus came almost at once, and we separated. The summer had already gone. I shivered involuntarily, I who loved winters, because of what this winter might bring.

A steady stream of letters now flowed from London, and any doubts or hesitations about my ungenerous reluctance to partake in this festival of goodness and renewal that the letters proclaimed was completely quenched by the undoubting tone of the same letters. The child would come at Christmas, and all would be well, she wanted to reassure me as to that, because both of us were good people, and it would come out that way, she knew it, no matter what the world might think. Not that things were easy. She had grown larger. She had got away with it when she’d met her cousin at the Strand Palace but only just. She’d bandaged herself tightly and several times during dinner had almost passed out. “Are you sure you’re all right?” her cousin had kept asking and she had pleaded migraine. What was worse was his jollity in the early evening, hand on her knee, “Now tell me what is it really like to be a citizen of the big smoke?” She had got through it, and she didn’t think she’d aroused suspicion, but she’d not take that risk again. Anyhow her condition was obvious now.

And she often found herself crying. She’d put out hands for me and found them empty, but even in the darkest valleys she knew we were travelling towards the sun. The angels were watching above us with outspread wings. Example followed example to prove it.

The two homosexuals did not take kindly to her pregnancy. She saw their suspicions and told them. They were decent enough about it but they asked her to find another room as soon as she could. They’d explained that for them a great part of the charm of their present setup was its short-circuiting of the mother and the womb. It brought memories of suffocation. Ο boy, it was a queer world, and there sure were some queer people in it, she sang, but the angels were there too, she couldn’t go on except for the angels.

And the angels were still there. She’d met this Irish couple, the Kavanaghs, who had four children, and a large Victorian house they’d bought cheap near the Archway, and they had renovated it themselves. He drove a tower crane on the buildings and she was a nurse in the Highgate Hospital. Because of the children the wife worked nights. The house was so big that they had spare rooms even with the four children. They knew our story and they felt that we had done the right thing. The very sound of the word abortion made Michael angry. And she was able to be of real use to Nora Kavanagh. She made Michael and the children’s supper whenever Nora was working nights. She got the children out for school and let Nora early to bed when she got home, “They were dying off like flies last night,” Nora’d say some mornings and she’d babysit any time Michael and Nora wanted to go out. Often they’d bring back beers and the three of them would sit and talk in front of the TV. She knew I’d like the Kavanaghs and they thought I’d acted well in the whole business and wanted to meet me. She felt completely taken care of. She loved the children and the house. She’d said to Michael that she’d be willing to change places with their sheepdog if it meant being able to stay on in the house and they’d both collapsed laughing. She’d difficulty getting them to take the small rent and they gave it back and more in presents. They wanted her to give up her job at the Tottenham yard but the work was so easy that she’d keep it on up to the last.

She felt as if she was in a train. The doors were locked and it was moving fast. All the faces about her in the carriage were happy and smiling. The train had passed all the early stations and was now racing through the night. In a very short time it’d stop. She’d get out at Christmas to the child and she knew the angels would be watching.

The first plan was to have the child in the house. Then it was decided that it was safer, because of her age, to have the child in the hospital. Michael’s wife was able to arrange a bed in a semi-private ward in her own hospital.

She gave up work in the Tottenham yard two weeks before Christmas and asked for the money I’d earlier offered. Papers arrived for me to sign. The train was still beautifully on course, all the doors locked, though it now seemed probable that it would carry past Christmas and possibly into the New Year. Would I come to London for Christmas? London was the most exciting place in the world at Christmas.

While these letters brought me near a winter that was happening elsewhere, her bells for good cheer were for me a simple cause of gloom. I met the black-haired girl casually, but often saw her coats and dresses, now so familiar to me, in a crowd. They had become the envelopes of a quiet love.

“It’s bloody awful,” I complained at the end of a week in which not a day had gone by without a letter of glad tidings from London.

“There’s nothing you can do about it,” she said.

“I suppose it’s just vanity on my part. You imagine you control your life, and then something comes along like this and blows it wide open.”

“It is vanity.”

“To realize that doesn’t seem to make it any better.”

“You seem to me to have behaved well. What are you to do? Marry the woman, for God’s sake?”

“O, I behaved well enough, all right. I know that. But I behaved well as much out of cowardice as anything else. It’s safer to behave well. It’s more protection than behaving badly.”

“Well, it’s done now,” she said, and at the bus stop where we usually parted, she said, “You might as well leave me back tonight.”

“Are you sure?”

“Are you sure?” she smiled, and without thinking I closed my grip on her arm.

As we went between the two lighted globes above the hospital gates I felt invaded by a fragility, a spiritual lightness that had nothing to do with the hospital or dark in the hospital. I had no sense at all of the misery and suffering and even exaltation that may have been going on in that darkened ward. The same fragility I had felt entering rooms of strange people at their ease or walking up to the door of a building the morning of taking up a new job. I was entering a new life. I was being questioned, and I had no longer the power to turn away, nor the confidence to say yes, only that I could try and try with all that I knew, the rash heart given its rashness, but given it by watchfulness and care, knowing they could not know where it might lead but determined to be its shadow everywhere.

It seems we must be beaten twice, by the love that we inflict and then by the infliction of being loved, before we have the humility to look and take whatever agreeable plant that we have never seen before, because of it being all around our feet, and take it and watch it grow, choosing the lesser truth because it’s all that we’ll ever know.

We went straight to her room, more cell than room, the black cross on its white bare wall, careful even of our breathing between its paper walls.

In the morning when I rang for the taxi I was about to turn to her to say that the hospital seemed to have fewer night visitors in winter, when down the corridor doors started to open softly and footsteps come towards us. We kissed quickly and I could feel her laugh by my side as we heard, “Can we share the taxi into the city?” I had seen none of the sharers before, the sauce chef was not there, and we drove into the sleeping city in a drowsed silence.

I was too tired to read or work the next day, but did not want to sleep, as if by sleeping I’d consign the night casually to some section of animal desire, like any night, as if it was necessary to keep a wilful vigil. In spite of this, I must have fallen asleep in the cane chair, for I was startled by the bell. I had no idea what time it was. The fire had gone out.

A telegram, I thought as I went downstairs. From London or the country. A birth or death or, I stirred guiltily, a death in giving birth, but when I opened the door it was my uncle who was standing there.

“It was the last ring I was going to give,” he said petulantly. “I thought there was no one in. I was just about to powder off with myself.”

“Is she gone or what?” I asked too quickly out of surprise.

“No, but it’d be a blessing for the poor thing if she was. She’s back in the hospital. She collapsed. I’d to come up in the ambulance,” he was undismayed.

“Is she conscious?”

“She is,” he said but I could tell by his answer that he did not know the meaning of the word.

“Has she her senses about her?”

“Not at all. She’s just collapsed. She never moved or spoke a word all the way up. She’s like a dead person but she’s not dead.”

I grew aware that we were standing all that time in the doorway, “Come in.” As we climbed the stairs I saw that he was practically immobile between self-importance and self-pity.

“You haven’t been down,” he accused. “That woman was expecting you a lot of the time.”

“I’m sorry. I meant to, several times, but I didn’t.”

“There’s been big changes.”

“What changes?”

“Well, I bought a place,” he announced.

“What place?”

“McKennas.” I shuffled through the local names until I came on a big farmhouse with orchards and sheds between the saw mill and the town.

“But that’s a farm. What do you want with land?”

“Won’t it make money even if it was only left lying there?” he began to laugh, which continued after I asked how much he’d paid for it. “Guess,” he chuckled and I knew I’d have to draw out the game to the last trick, and settled on a figure I knew to be too high but not outrageously so.

“You must be joking,” he laughed with pure pleasure.

“You mean to say you had to pay more than that?”

“You must be daft. Not half it.”

After we’d tortuously reached the right figure, which I’d to tell him was so low he should have been up for swindling, he wiped tears of pleasure away with the backs of fists.

“That’ll do you,” he laughed as he scolded. “That’s enough.”

“You must admit you got it cheap.”

“Well, it wasn’t too dear. I’ll admit that much. I could have made a profit on it since anyhow.”

“You know you were welcome to use my house. In fact I was hoping that you would. It needs living in.”

“I know that but sure you’ll live in it yourself. It’s coming to the time when I believe if a man hasn’t his own house he has nothing.”

His own state had always been the ideal state, the proper centre of aspiration for everyman.

“I thought you weren’t going to leave while she was ill,” I reminded him.

“Well, I haven’t left yet.”

“Does she know that you bought the place?”

He grimaced with hurt as he told, “She said I was a fierce eejit, that at my age a one-roomed hut close to a church would be more in my line. But then she’s sick. That woman hasn’t been herself for a long time. She’s not been minding her business for ages. And things has been going from bad to worse between me and Cyril.”

“What happened?”

“Well, it got so bad, one evening he had the drink to do the talking for him and he was going on about me being in the place and not paying, when I always paid far more than I took. Anyhow I took the key out of my pocket and threw it on the floor.’ Pick it up,’ I said, ‘and only one of us will walk out that door.’ After that,” he chuckled blackly, “It was about time I thought of looking for my own place.”

“Why didn’t Cyril come with her?”

“Why didn’t Cyril do a lot of things? Cyril’ll not stir himself now, as long as there’s anybody in the world left able to move.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“I’m going to go home on the train. I want you to ring for Jim to meet me off the train. He can take the big car or the truck. If he’s not around someone will get word to him. Then you better go in to see if that woman has come round,” he was all orders.

“What happened to her?”

“She just fell. At the top of the stairs. She was lucky she didn’t roll down. She was supposed to go into hospital a few days before that and didn’t. Lucky the ambulance was there and able to take her, I came with her in the ambulance.”

“Have you eaten?”

“No. I haven’t had a bite. I’m starved.”

We had a mixed grill in the North Star across from the station, and I saw him to the train, using the fact that I’d to phone ahead for Jim to meet him in order to avoid the awkwardness of those minutes that wait for the train to go.

“I don’t suppose it’ll be long until I have to be down now,” I referred to the impending funeral.

“No,” he said confidently, as if some certainty was a matter of rejoicing. “It won’t be long, but you will go in to see her?”

“I’ll go in as soon as I make the call,” and he was satisfied, making a careless gesture of dismissal. How confident and full of well-being he was compared to the small shaken figure that had got off the train that sunny day in early spring to visit her in the hospital. Death had been well reduced from beauty as well as terror. It happened to people who were foolish enough to cease minding their business.

He had exaggerated her state. I thought I’d find her in a coma but she was completely conscious though very weak.

“Is your uncle gone home?” was her only question and when I nodded she smiled before she let her face fall. She recovered her strength so rapidly in the next few days that I thought I’d resume the normal visits. I took her in a bottle of brandy.

“God bless you but I don’t need that any more. It’s cost you enough already, all those old bottles.”

“There’s lots more bottles,” I protested.

“No. I’m taking the pills. You don’t need anything while you’re taking the pills.”

“I thought you didn’t trust the pills,” with every fumbling sentence I was losing ground in the face of her calm.

“I trust the pills good enough—for what I have to do. When you take them you don’t feel anything. In a few days I’ll be out of this old place. I won’t be coming back. I’ve fought long enough and hard enough and it’s beaten me, bad luck to it,” she even laughed.

“You can’t say that.”

“I can say that because it’s the bitter truth and I’ve earned it. I’m not worried. I was just thinking that there’s already far more people that I’ve been close to in my lifetime on the other side than on this side now. There’s some good stories now I’ll have to tell them. I’m afraid there’s many a laugh we’ll have to have over most of the stories,” her eyes were shining. “I’ll have to start looking to see if that uncle of yours can be given extra space up there as soon as I arrive, for no doubt he’ll want to bring that bloody old saw mill with him, not to talk of this doting farm he’s just bought.”

I’d to turn away, “I’ll be in early tomorrow.”

“You might as well ring your uncle. To tell him to come up for me the day after tomorrow. That I’m going home,” I heard her add. “Anyhow we can settle it tomorrow.”

I hate tears, hate that impotent rage against the whole fated end of life they turn to, and when I fought them back I was embarrassed by the bottle of brandy still in my hands, like a coat I’d been given to hold by someone who had forgotten to come back.

Two days later I helped her into the big car outside the hospital and drove her and my uncle out of the city. She was practically gay, harassing my uncle’s stolidity with sharp wit. He was well insulated against all suffering, wearing a coat of embarrassed righteousness far thicker than his black crombie which seemed to proclaim, “You see the compromising sort of situations people who insist on being stupid, who do not mind their business force you into.” As before, at Maynooth I left them to get the bus back into the city. As I kissed her frailty our silence seemed to acknowledge that we’d never see one another again. Her coldness shook me, her perfect mastery. It was if he she’d completely taken leave of life, and any movement back was just another useless chore, and everything—me, my uncle, I doubted if Cyril could even light her eyes now—had become boringly equal.

“My aunt was in the hospital and is gone home,” I told her when we met, unable to keep from touching her black hair.

“I know. Some of the doctors were annoyed that she was brought to us when she collapsed. She should have been taken to a local hospital. There’s nothing we can do for her any more.”

“She has money. You know what influence is in a small place. They’d think the Dublin hospital would be better, and she’d have to go to the best. Anyhow she’ll not be back. It’s all neat enough. There’s only two telegrams to wait for now. A birth and a death.”

“Maybe she’ll not send word about the child.”

“You think she might land on the doorstep?”

“No. That she’d think her own interests would be best served by staying separate. That she could do anything she wants with the child.”

“She’ll be able to do that anyhow.”

I gave her the letters to read. She read them, but very reluctantly.

“What do you think of her and the whole business?” I asked.

“What does it matter what I think? No matter what I think it’s useless,” she refused to be drawn.

The telegram came five days after Christmas, announcing the birth. I just waited.

A rapturous letter followed. She had had a dangerous and difficult confinement, but the child was worth it all. The child was beautiful. All his little features were replicas of my own, except the ears. We can’t all be perfect, she quoted from her favourite movie. I should hear him crow.

I wrote restating my old position in what I thought were the clearest possible terms, which she described as brutal and hurtful.

All right, we could give up the child for adoption, but on these conditions. I’d have to come to London and live at Kavanagh’s and take care of the child for a whole week. Feed it, change it, wash it. She’d move out for that time. If, at the end of the week, I could be heartless enough to give it away for ever, then she’d consent to the adoption, but there was no other way she’d consent.

I just repeated my position, saying whether I took care of the child for a day or a month could make no difference.

The next letter did not come by return and was more cautious. Would I come to London?

I hesitated for some days before writing that I would go to London. I’d see her to talk about what she intended to do, but under no circumstance would I agree to see the child. It had the echo of negotiating a deal of sale. I might be prepared to go ten thousand but under no circumstances would I consider fifteen or anything close to it.

I took the plane with the feeling of being flushed from one city to the other, that there should be a chain to pull. I rang her from London Airport.

“It’s great to hear your voice,” she said. “If you’d rung a half-hour earlier you’d have heard the little man crowing. But he’s sound asleep again. You’ll have to wait till you get here. Where are you ringing from?”

“The airport.”

“Why don’t you get the tube? It’s quicker at this time. I’ll meet you outside Archway Station. And we can walk here.”

“I’m not going to the house.”

“But you’re expected. Everybody’s looking forward to meeting you. There’s food and drink. Michael and Nora have been talking about little else but meeting you for days.”

“I’m sorry but I’m not going to the house,” I found myself trembling with nervousness. “I don’t intend to see the child.”

When she was silent I said, “I’m keeping to my end of the bargain. Meet me at ten in The Bell at the bottom of Fleet Street. That’s if you want to meet me.”

“But everybody’s expecting you. And don’t you want to see your child at least once?”

“No. And I’m sorry. Meet me at ten in The Bell if you want to meet me.”

As I’d plenty of time, I walked from Cromwell Road across London to the pub. Walking in a city where a great deal of time has been spent is like walking with several half-tangible, fugitive images that make up your disappearing life. There had been snow and there was packed ice along the edges of the pavement. I loved the glow of the night-lights. If one could be free of this clinging burden of tension it would be a lovely place to walk in, asking nothing but to be free to walk and look and see, hunch shoulders against the cold. Except I was too old not to know that it was by virtue of this very tension that it took on the apparel of happiness.

She came through the door on Fleet Street just before ten, with a man in his forties, red hair thinning, his powerful body managing to look awkward and ill at ease in his blue suit and shirt and tie. He was plainly Irish, from a line of men who had been performing feats of strength to the amazement of an infantile countryside for the past hundred years, adrift in London now, pressing buttons on a tower crane, and I knew at once he was Michael Kavanagh.

“I wanted to come on my own,” she said in a low pleading voice, “but Michael insisted on driving me. He’s been wanting to meet you for a long time.”

“That’s fine with me. I’m glad to meet you,” and he reluctantly gave me his hand. That he was raging with uneasiness showed in his every movement.

“What’ll you have to drink?”

“A light and bitter,” he said and she had a glass of lager.

With the warm brown wood of the bar, the white mantles hanging from the gas lamps, the governor in his long shirtsleeves behind the solid counter, it could have been a very pleasant place to talk and drink.

“Well, what are you going to do?” Kavanagh was going to sort me out quickly.

“I don’t know,” I said and watched him finish the pint, order another round from the bar. She was worn and looked as if she’d been through a severe illness. The grey in her hair showed much more. I found myself completely indifferent to her, as if we’d both journeyed out past touching. Kavanagh drank the second pint more slowly.

“How do you mean you don’t know?” he pursued.

“What is there to do now? Either the child is adopted or kept.”

“And it’s no concern of yours, like?”

“It is some concern.”

“Some concern… after all you’ve put this poor girl through. It’d make stones bleed.”

“I’d prefer if the child could be adopted. That way it’d have two proper parents.…”

“I couldn’t give the child away. I don’t know how anybody that even saw him could give him away,” she said. But I hardly looked at her. It was with Kavanagh I’d have to contend.

“Well, you better come back to the house and see your good handiwork anyhow. That’s all the girl says that she wants. Many a man would go on his bended knees at the very thought that such a girl should even think of marrying him. And all she wants from you is to go back to the house for an hour. That’s all she says she wants. And if that’s the way you are, in my humble opinion, she’s well rid of you.”

“Come back with us to the house,” she put her hand on my arm. “That’s all I ask. If you want you can walk out of the house after that, and be as free as you want to be.”

“I’m not going back to the house. And I’m not seeing the child.”

“What did you come to London for, then? Why didn’t you skulk with the rest of the craw thumpers back in good old holy Ireland that never puts a foot wrong?”

“I’m leaving,” I said. Time had been called several minutes before. And we were attracting the governor’s eye. Twice he had come out from behind the counter and lifted our glasses.

“Goodnight. Thanks,” I said to him and turned to go out by the back way, towards St Brides. I had just let the door swing when Kavanagh caught me and pulled me against the wall, “Are you coming or not?”

“No,” I pushed against his arms but it was like pushing against trees.

“Are you coming or not?” and he started to shake me. I had no fear, feeling apologetic in the face of my own coldness, having the bad taste to remember a Civil War joke, “Who’re you for?” the man with the gun was asking the drunk outside the pub: “I’m for yous.”

“Are you coming or not?”

“No.”

“Well, you’ll be took,” he started to drag me. At that, strength came to me, and I managed to free one arm, and strike and kick. Then I was spun completely free, and I could feel the blows come so fast that I could not be certain where they were coming from, and the hardness of the wall. I must have been falling, for the last I remember was striking out at her as she came towards me with outstretched hands. I must have lost consciousness for moments only, for they were quarrelling nearby when I woke. “What did you want to do that for?” she was crying. “You’ve gone and ruined everything.”

“Leave him there and to hell with him. To hell with both of you and all stupid women.”

I was at the bottom of steps. Quickly I pulled off shoes, and rose, holding the shoes in my hand, and stole round by the church.

“He’s gone,” I heard, and I tried to hurry but I wasn’t able.

There was a deep doorway in a lane somewhere off the church whose gates hadn’t been locked across and I went in and sat on the innermost steps.

I heard them searching for me but they never came quite my way. Only once did they get close enough for me to hear their voices and then I couldn’t be sure of the words, “I told you he’s done a skunk. He was only faking being hurt. There’s no need to worry over that gentleman. I’m telling you that cunt will take good care of himself.”

Soon there was no one near, the spasmodic jerky sound of the distant night traffic, some aeroplanes, their landing lights flashing as they came in over the Thames. I felt the cold and it was painful to move my lips and my face seemed numb, one eye was closed; and I was extraordinarily happy, the whole night and its lights and sounds passing in an amazing clarity that was yet completely calm, as if a beautiful incision had been made that separated me from the world and still left me at pure ease in its still centre. I could walk except for a dragging foot, but I hesitated to feel my ribs and face. When I did manage to bring myself to look closely by the light of a streetamp in a barber’s window, I knew I’d have to be very careful not to run into any policeman on the beat.

A milk bar saw me through till morning. I sat in a corner with a newspaper and let the coffee go cold. Using the newspaper as a screen I was able to examine my face in a far mirror but wouldn’t have recognized it except by moving my hands and the newspaper’s angle. The one cut that would need stitches was across the upper lip where the blow had cut it right across against the teeth. For a while everything had that same ethereal clarity, but that went too, in tiredness and stiffness and some pain. As soon as it was light I took a taxi to the airport. At such times, it is a great blessing to have money. It was now extremely painful for me to make the slightest facial movement. One or two people did make gestures towards my appearance in the airport that made me laugh, but the laughing too was painful so that I had to turn and lean against the wall.

Now it was a luxury to be flushed from one end to the other and I got a taxi to a doctor who stitched the lip. He thought there were no bones broken but wanted me to go for X-rays. He said he thought it’d be three weeks or so before I was presentable.

My luck seemed to be holding. There was no telegram waiting for me on the glass-topped table when I got in.

She has lived so long, I thought, let her live for three weeks more. I thought I’d never make the last steps of the stairs once I saw the door. I had just the one simple, fixed idea—to crawl to the bed and sleep. There is nothing that can stand against an overwhelming desire for sleep. It is as strong as death.

I slept late, but my aunt did not wait for my appearance to heal.

Mrs O’Doherty died at four, the telegram said.

I knew by the formality of the name that my uncle had sent the telegram. I watched the coarse paper start to shake in my hand and tried to say, backing away from the emotion I could not fight down, that I had known for a long time she would not get better, and it would be like her to pick this most inconvenient time to go, when my appearance was guaranteed to cause general mirth and head-wagging all over the small countryside: “Did you see the appearance of your man carrying the coffin? He was a sight”; but still emotion kept rising treacherously: her sturdy independence, her caustic laugh, her anger and her kindness, her person, the body of all life, growing, fighting, joying, weeping, falling, and now gone; and suddenly it beat me. I broke, and far off I could hear the wildness in my crying. Guard the human person well even in all its meanness, in its open hand, spite, venom, horror, beauty —profane sacredness, horrible contradiction.

I was so disturbed I needed to tell some person and walked to the end of the road and rang Maloney. I was surprised by my own matter-of-factness as I told him that I’d be out of the city for some days because of my aunt’s death. He received the news with formal gravity. He even asked me her name and where she was likely to be buried.

When I rang my uncle I could tell even on the phone that he was practically unable to move with the sense of his own importance in the importance of the occasion. He insisted that he meet me off the train and when I glimpsed him as the train pulled into the small station he had taken up the most prominent position on the platform, iron-clad in the security of his role.

“Well,” he was coming comfortably towards me with some profundity like She’s gone or an equally swollen silence, when my appearance brought him to a quick check. First I saw disbelief, then outrage, and in a voice that clearly accused me of having done it all to embarrass him, he said, “I take it that the other fella is at least dead.”

“I’m sorry,” I found the laughing painful but couldn’t stop it.

“Well what’s happened?” he cleared his throat, his face an exaggerated version of hurt, and I decided not to lie. His focus was now so sharp that he’d probably be able to tell if I was lying.

“I got beaten up,” I said.

“Tell me more news,” he interposed sarcastically. “You’ll be a wonderful addition for the next few days. You might even make the papers.”

“Anybody can get beaten up. Somebody just turned on me. It wasn’t my fault. There wasn’t even a fight,” but I saw the question did not go from his eyes but held steady. “Yes, there was a woman mixed up in it. It hurts like hell to have to talk.”

“You’ll never learn sense,” he said.

He had brought the big car to the station. After about a mile of silence I said, “It’s done now and I’m sorry. I was hoping she wouldn’t go so soon. The question is what am I to say?”

“Say what?”

“How it happened. I don’t suppose I should tell the truth.”

“Are you joking?” the way he said it I knew all was well. That great institution, the family, was closing ranks.

“Well, what will I say?”

“Didn’t you go to school long enough to think something up?”

“It’s not all that easy when yourself is at the centre of the trouble.”

“Well, why don’t you say”—he cleared his throat, sounding like a sudden change of faulty gears—“Why can’t you say you were in a car crash?”

“Will they believe it though?”

“What do you care whether they believe it or not? As long as they have no way of finding out!”

There were several cars in front of the house. Inside the house all the doors were open.

“I’m sorry,” I shook Cyril’s hand in the hallway.

“I know that.”

“I’m sorry to look like this. I was in a car crash.”

“You’re sure you’re able to be up?” he asked.

“I’m all right. It just looks bad.”

Several people shook my hand, “I’m sorry for the trouble.”

“I know that indeed,” the response had been fashioned for me long years ago. I climbed the stairs to her room. There were four people sitting about the bed on chairs, two women and two men. I knelt at the foot of the bed. I looked at her face, her form beneath the raised sheet, the beads twined through her fingers. What a little heap of grey flesh the many coloured leaping flame burns down to. The two men were drinking whiskey with a chaser of beer. There was port or sherry in the women’s glasses. One of the men was remembering her when she first came to the town as a young girl to work in Maguire’s shop, and how young she was still when she opened her first shop, in this very house, above which she was now lying. They mustn’t have been used to ashtrays, for one of the men pushed his cigarette end into the neck of the beer bottle between his feet where it began to hiss. When I rose from my knees the four people shook my hands and one of the men offered me his chair which I was able to refuse.

My uncle was waiting for me at the foot of the stairs, clearing his throat before saying loudly, “We better go now and see that man about the car insurance.” Some people stopped me to shake my hands as I followed him out in an uncaring numbness.

“She looks good,” he said as we got into the big car.

“Who laid her out?” and he named two women.

“They did a nice job. What men do we have to see about the insurance?”

“No man,” he laughed. “It was an excuse to get you out. Haven’t you been in a car crash! We won’t need to go back now till the removal. And I thought we might as well dawnder out to my place. That’s where you’ll be staying tonight. There’s a room made up.”

“What happened in the end?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you in a minute,” he said as he suddenly turned up the avenue to his new house. “I’ll tell you in the house.”

It was a big slated nineteenth-century farmhouse, five front windows and a solid hall door looking confidently down on the road. We drove round by the cobbled back and parked in the yard, which was completely enclosed by out offices, their red iron roofs dull with rain. It was very warm in the kitchen, and the first thing he did was to shake down the Stanley and pile in more coal. Blue and white mugs hung from hooks on the deal dresser, and an oilcloth in blue and white squares covered the big deal table. Wedding and baptism photos, even one ordination group, hung with the religious pictures around the tall walls. I found it very lovely.

His old face was as excited as a boy’s as he searched my battered face to see his excitement mirrored.

“Well, what do you think?” his voice was nervous.

“I think it’s lovely.”

“I threw in a few extra hundred and they agreed to leave everything as it was. Tables, chairs, beds, dresser—everything.”

“You got away with murder.”

“I’d say, safely—with two murders. You wouldn’t be started till you’d see a thousand pounds in this room, and there are ten rooms.”

“Some woman must have been fond of blue,” I said.

“What do I care what they were fond of?” he chuckled so deep he shook, “It’s ours now!”

I had to turn away because the laughing hurt. He thought I was laughing with him, and he was partly right; for he showed me the rest of the house in such an extravagance of delight that the tears streamed down his face.

“What have you done with the land?”

“It’s stocked, with bullocks. They don’t need much minding.”

“Well, tell me what happened?” I said in an old armchair one side of the Stanley.

“What’ll you have first?”

“I’m all right.”

“You’ll have to have something. It’s your first time in the house.”

“Whiskey, then.”

He opened a cupboard across from the dresser. “Are you sure you wouldn’t sooner something different?” to show that the cupboard was bursting with drinks. The same bottles would probably be there at the same level next Christmas.

“No. Just whiskey,” and he poured me a large tumblerful, turning his back to pour only the minutest nip for himself.

“Well, tell me what happened?” I said, the whiskey making the inside of my mouth smart like hell.

“Well, Cyril will never forget it,” he began powerfully. “She left him everything. And I don’t begrudge him a penny. In the end he earned it, down to the last farthing.”

“How?”

“Well, as soon as she got home she sent for Delehunty and made her will. They spent a long time making it and then she sent for me. She told me straight out that she was leaving everything to Cyril. She’d have left me something but she said she knew I had enough,” his voice thickened and grew hesitant. He had obviously been hurt.

“And you have, of course. You have more than enough.”

“O I told her that. And in no uncertain terms. And I told her as far as I was concerned she could fire her money and houses out into the street, for all I cared.”

“She can’t have taken too kindly to that.”

“No,” he crowed. “She told me to shut up, that she always knew I was an eejit. I told her whether I was an eejit or not she’d never find me giving my money to strangers. She mentioned you, that she was thankful, and all that, and that she’d thought of you, but that you were young and had an education as well as your own place.”

“So Cyril got everything. I’m not surprised.”

“Wait,” he laughed. “The best is on its way. She then sent for Cyril. She told him that she was leaving him everything but that it was on condition he never tried to see her again. He had only bothered with her when she was well and wanting something off her. He hadn’t come near her since she’d got badly sick. And now she didn’t want him at the end.”

“How did you find out this?”

“The poor fella was so upset that he came out here and cried it all out.”

“What did you say?”

“What do you expect? I told him of course that the woman wasn’t in her right mind,” he chuckled. “When it was about the only time she was in her right mind lately.”

“Who took care of her?”

“The nurse was in. And she didn’t even want the nurse. There was an invitation too to a wedding, far out cousins of ours from the mountains, the Meehans. One of the girls was getting married. She sent them a present. But she said that she’d not be at the wedding, that she had a much harder thing to do, and that she wished them as much joy and fun from the wedding as they could get, for one day they’d have to do the same hard thing that she had to do now.”

“Did you see her again?”

“Yesterday morning. I went in to tell her that I had given the Meehans the present, when who did I meet scrubbing the stairs but those two Donnelly sisters. One of them is a friend of Cyril’s. Did you ever notice that when things are rightly bad there’ll always be some stupid woman to be found who’ll have started scrubbing or tidying?”

“What did you do?”

“I ran them.”

“Did she have any idea of this?”

“Not at all. If she was even half right they wouldn’t get within a mile of the place. The nurse was there when I went in and the room was in half darkness. I thought at first that she was talking to the nurse, but then I saw she wasn’t talking to the nurse at all. Her voice was so low that it was hard to hear it, but I think she was talking to your mother, God rest her. Whatever it was it must have been funny for she seemed to be laughing a great deal or it was like as if she was laughing.”

“Was she talking all the time?”

“No. She’d talk and then go quiet as if listening. It’s in those times that she’d start to laugh. Then she’d start up talking again. I suppose the poor thing was going out of her mind in the finish.”

“Did you say anything?”

“No. The nurse told me there was no use. In about five hours after that she went.”

“I’ll miss her. But with the way she was it was an ease.”

“We’ll all miss her. But things have been going wrong with her for a long time. I don’t think they were ever right since the day she married. That was the real turning point.”

“I suppose you’ll close down for the whole of the week?”

“For the whole week, are you joking! There’s enough gone wrong without us going the same way. Jim too was thinking we mightn’t start up for the week but he got a land. We’ll be starting first thing the morning after the funeral.”

Before we left, he shook down the Stanley again and heaped in more coal. “Coal is the only thing that gets up a real heat. I bought five tons back there. Wood is all right but only for getting the fire going. You’ll find the place will be roasting when we get back.”

“You were very lucky to get this place,” I felt I had to praise it again.

“It’s only once in a lifetime a place like this comes on the market. And the man and the money was waiting. Wouldn’t I be in a nice fix now if I’d gone on depending on other people?”

“The man with the money,” I echoed to tease. “I’ll be round with the hat any one of these days.”

“That’ll do you now,” he shook with pleasure. “That’ll do you now.”

The house was so crowded when we got back that it was hard to get through the hallway and I was so tired that I no longer cared how my appearance was taken, but enquiries had been made, and the car crash was in general circulation. People sympathized with me over the accident in the same tone as over my aunt’s death.

Then a murmur ran through the house that the hearse was outside, and all except the close relatives, and a few people asked to stay, filtered silently out, some glancing furtively back as they went. The coffin was brought in, eased up the narrow stairs, lifted across the banister, turned sideways in the door, put on chairs alongside the bed. There was no priest in the house, and the only four people in the room were the undertaker, his assistant, myself, my uncle.

“Is there any more that wants to come up?” the undertaker asked, and I marvelled at the tact that omitted to look on her a last time in the world.

When there was no answer he asked in a whisper, “Does Cyril want to come up?”

My uncle went out on the stairs, and in some silent, mysterious way the question was conveyed down below. When my uncle came back to the room he said, “No. He doesn’t want,” in a voice clear with self-righteousness.

“I suppose we can begin,” the undertaker said and looked around, “Let one of the women come up.”

For what? startled across my mind when the undertaker said again, “Let some of the women come up to see that everything is done right,” as if he’d heard my silent enquiry. Was the division between men and women so great, the simple facts of sex so tabernacled, that a woman had to be chaperoned between deathbed and coffin? In the same mysterious way as word had been conveyed to Cyril it went down to the “women” and none of them wanted to come up.

“It’s all right. We can go ahead,” the undertaker said. He drew back the sheet. Silently we took hold of her and lifted her from the bed. Her lightness amazed me, like a starved bird. The undertaker arranged her head on the small pillow, and looked at us in turn, and when we nodded he put the lid in place, turning the silver screws that were in the shapes of crosses. There was a brown stain in the centre of the snow-white undersheet where she had lain.

The superstitious, the poetic, the religious are all made safe within the social, given a tangible form. The darkness is pushed out. All things become interrelated. We learn sequence and precedence, grown anxious about our own position in the scheme, shutting out the larger anxiety of the darkness. There’s nothing can be done about it. There’s good form and bad form. All is outside.

At heartsease we can roll about in laughter at all divergences from the scheme of the world. We master the darkness with ceremonies: of delight at being taken from the darkness into this light, of regret on the inevitable leaving of the light, hope as founded on the social and as firm as the theological rock.

“It is nothing. It’s not what we struggled towards in all the days and nights of longing. We better look at it again in case we’ve missed something we find at the end of each arrival. But then many see that they’ve arrived in the longing of eyes that used to be their own.”

“It’s always this way,” an old voice says. “Everything. Sex, money, houses. Death will be the same way too, except this time you won’t even realize it. You will be nothing.”

“Since it’s this way it’s still better to pretend. It makes it easier, for yourself and others. And it’s kinder.”

“But I don’t need kindness.”

“You will,” a ghostly voice said. “You will. We all will before we’ll need nothing.”

Outside, the large crowd waited across the road for the coffin to come out of the blinded house. They had already parked their cars and would follow the slow hearse the hundred yards or so on foot to the church where the old and some women and children had already taken their places. The crowd stood on the tarmac where the stone wall once ran to the railway gates, the three blackened and malformed fir trees, the two carriages and the square guard’s van waiting to go to Drum-shambo. Behind the mourners, the large water-pipe that looked like an elephant’s trunk was missing from the sky. Those images of day that greeted her every morning when she went out to lift the shutters from the shop windows had proved even more impermanent than she.

My uncle asked me to drive the big car at the funeral.

“I can only see properly out of one eye.”

“It’ll be still better than my two. I can’t manage slow driving, and we’ll be right behind the hearse. It’s the distance between that beats me.”

“All right,” I was secretly glad to have the driving. I was in more pain now than the day after the beating, and was glad of anything that forced me to concentrate elsewhere. My uncle handed me the car keys as soon as we left the house, “You might as well get the feel of it now,” to drive to the church for the High Mass. The hearse was parked in front of the church gates, its carriage door raised like an open mouth; and I parked the big car behind it. The first thing I noticed as I got out was Maloney standing on the tallest step between the gate and door. He was dressed all in black, and the wide-brimmed black hat made him look more like an ageing danceband personality than a mourner. I detached myself from my uncle to go to meet him. “What are you doing here?”

“Paying my last respects.”

“How did you know about the Mass?”

“I read the papers. And ye put it in de papers. And I’m pleased to see that you’re properly turned out for the occasion. Yes,” he grinned from ear to ear beneath the big hat, mimicking a Negro blues accent, “very pleased, to see you formally turned out for the occasion, in black and blue.”

“This is all we need,” I said before I realized that my uncle was standing close, and I introduced them.

“I’ve put up at the Commercial,” he said, gesturing to the hotel just across the road from the church.

“I’ll see you there later, then,” I saw that my uncle was impatient at the interruption.

After the High Mass she was wheeled from the altar on a shining new trolley not unlike the trolleys used to gather in trays and used dishes in big wayside cafeterias, and we carried her on shoulders down the steps to the open back of the hearse. The hearse crawled slowly through the small town, stopped for a few moments outside the blinded house, but as soon as it passed the town-sign it gathered speed. Soon we were climbing into the mountains, passing abandoned houses, their roofs fallen in, water trickling from the steep sides onto the road, the brown of sulphur on the rocks. We drove immediately behind Cyril’s car; and as we climbed, the coffin, in its glass case, seemed to rise continually in air above us.

“It’s a big funeral,” my uncle said with satisfaction as he looked back on a whole mile-long stretch of road below us still covered with cars. “That Mr Maloney that was at the church,” he cleared his throat. “He’s a friend of yours?”

“I do work for him.”

“Writing work?”

“That’s right. What do you think of him?”

“Seemed a bit overdressed for the part,” he probed cautiously.

“He’s all right. He likes to make a bit of a splash. It’s a way of getting attention.”

“I could see that end of it,” he said.

When we got out of the car onto the hard gravel of the road the whole air felt rainwashed. The slopes were bare. And the urgent, rapid sound of racing water ran between the scrape of shoes on gravel, the haphazard banging of car doors, the subdued murmur of voices. We carried her round to the back of the small church, bare as the slopes on which it stood. On the rain-eaten slab of limestone above the open grave I was able to make out my mother and father’s names and my grandmother’s name, Rose; but you would need a nail or a knife to follow the illegible lines of the other impressions they were that eaten away. Through the silence of the prayers a robin sang against the race of water somewhere in the bare bushes. After the decade of the Rosary I was waiting for the shovels to start filling in the clay when the undertaker unrolled a green mat of butcher’s grass and placed it over the grave. They’d fill in the grave as soon as the churchyard was empty, some barbarous notion of kindness.

Standing around and shaking hands afterwards in the graveyard I introduced Maloney to Cyril, who had been weeping during the prayers; and Cyril seemed as impressed as my uncle had been resolutely unimpressed, and invited Maloney back to the house. Five or six cars drove together back to the house.

“When are you going back to Dublin?” I asked Maloney in the house.

“Whenever you want. I can offer you a lift.”

“Would tomorrow morning be too late for you? My uncle sort of expects me to stay that long.”

“Not at all, dear boy. I’d like to look over the town. It reminds me of our old Echo days. I’d like to view the quality of the local blooms, the small-town Helens. I have a room in the Commercial. We can leave round lunchtime.”

“Earlier than that.”

“Whenever you want. I’m at your service.”

Cyril heard us and came over. He’d bought a headstone and wanted us to see it before we left in the morning. Apprehensively he included my uncle in the invitation, but it was brutally refused. “Some people still have to work. The mill will be going tomorrow.”

“It’s marble,” Cyril said. “It’s the best that money could get.”

My uncle turned his back. It was crossing and recrossing my mind that the headstone must have been ordered while my aunt was still alive.

“We’re being invited to an unveiling,” Maloney reminded me coolly.

“All right. I’ll be glad to see it,” I agreed, and Cyril arranged to collect us in the hotel at ten. I was almost as impatient as my uncle to get out of the house. As we left, I saw Maloney’s head bent low to Cyril’s, in an exaggeration of listening.

“Where are we going?” I asked my uncle as I handed him back the car keys.

“I suppose we better go out to my place and make tea or something. If we went to a restaurant it’d be all over town that we didn’t want to eat anything in the house.”

“Or weren’t given anything?”

“Or weren’t given anything,” his laugh was a harsher echo.

He wanted to show me his fields and stock. Perhaps because of my affection, I took pleasure in his pure pleasure, and I didn’t have to talk at all. Then he insisted we go over to my place, pointing out things in need of repair or change, past the point when I no longer listened.

“You should stock that land yourself,” he said later in the evening. “You shouldn’t let it any more when this letting runs out.” He’d forgotten that till he’d stocked his own land he was against all stocking. “Nothing but trouble,” he used to declare. “It’s a full-time job. Don’t say anything more.”

“Who’d look after it for me?” I asked tiredly.

“I would—until you’d come yourself. Who’s for my place after me but yourself? With everything running well there’d be no stronger men than us round here.”

I rose when I heard his alarm go the next morning. He was making breakfast when I got down, rigged out in boots and overalls for the mill.

“You’ll think over what I said last night?” he pressed as we ate.

“Sure.”

“And you’ll be down soon?”

“Or you’ll be up,” I said without thinking.

“No, I won’t be up. Not if I can possibly help it,” he half laughed. There were certain places and people to stay clear of, such as hospitals and undertakers.

“All right. I’ll be down,” I said.

Maloney was at breakfast when I went into the Commercial. He probably had a hangover. He was in a sour mood.

“How did you find the local blooms?” I asked.

“This isn’t Grenoble and I’m not Stendhal’s uncle. Have some coffee? Tell me how you got your decorations.”

“She had the child. I went to see her in London. She had a protector who beat me up.”

“And your aunt inconveniently died next day?”

“Right.”

“Did this gentleman give any reason for beating you up?”

“He said that I had had my fun and I should pay for it.”

“I agree with him. And don’t think you’re washed clean by the beating. Don’t imagine you’ve been washed in the blood of the lamb or any of those cathartic theories. Don’t try to slip out in any of those ways. I know you.”

“Haven’t I done enough?”

“By no means. We can’t have people running round the country with their flies open and all male members at the ready. I’m glad you got beaten up. You’ll get beaten up many times. You deserve to get beaten up.”

“Why?”

“Because,” he used his spoon to point, “you behaved stupidly. People should always get punished for behaving stupidly and they generally do. I always did,” and suddenly he shouted, “Here comes the happy widower. All dressed for the unveiling. He’s not behaving stupidly,” and he let go a long deep groan that could have passed for a poor imitation of a donkey’s bray. From the groan and the over-elaborate greeting—florid to the point of insult—I guessed he’d passed the rest of the funeral drinking with Cyril. Cyril noticed nothing. He was clearly impressed with Maloney and greeted us both with extreme affability, exuding the self-satisfaction and sense of anticipation of a man about to show off a racehorse or a girl that he felt reflected flatteringly on himself.

Cyril led us towards the red shop front with its wire grille and as he pushed open the door a warning bell rang. It was a shop I’d loved, and though it had been enlarged, the essential feel of it had hardly changed at all. The long solid counter with its brass measuring yard ran past the wood and smoked glass that partitioned off the bar near its end. Neat rows of boxes stood in line: seeds, nails, bolts, door handles, fishing hooks, a special offer of cartridge. Tools leaned all around the walls. Buckets, Wellingtons, bridles hung from the ceiling. A rotavator and a shining copper spraying machine stood side by side in the centre of the floor. The old foreman recognized us and came over. Cyril introduced Maloney, “Mr Maloney … down from Dublin … for the funeral,” in an impressed-with-himself-being-impressed hush of voice.

“I thought those days were gone,” Maloney picked up the copper spraying machine by its leather straps.

“You’d be surprised at how many of our customers haven’t managed to fit in with the new way of going about things,” Brady, the old foreman, said. “But there’s no doubt those days are gone. I suppose ten years at most. But we’ll stock them as long as there’s a demand and they can be got.”

We moved through the partition into the bar. It was very small, two wooden stools at the counter, bare benches around the walls, one table at the back. It was no place for drinking sessions but rather for having a sobering drink while waiting for a large order to be put together in the shop or settling bills or ordering a tombstone or coffin. The door of the bar opened on to another shop and a farther yard where the plastic wreaths were kept and graveclothes and coffins and tombstones and the two hearses.

“Whiskey,” Maloney said.

“Whiskey,” I said.

“Three whiskeys,” Cyril ordered, but Brady nodded to the young girl that the drinks were on the house. I noticed they served Bovril and coffee and fresh sandwiches as well. Black coffee bubbled in a jug beside a tray of sandwiches from which green leaves of lettuce bulged.

“Your good health,” Maloney toasted the foreman with suitable gravity. “This is certainly the old style.”

“You have to give the people something back,” the foreman smiled. “It’s not even good business to be taking all the time.”

“Is Mr Comiskey about?” Cyril asked.

“He’s in his office. He’s expecting you. But there’s no hurry. Anytime. Enjoy your drinks whatever ye do. I’ll show ye up to him after a while.”

“Do you still make coffins or do you just order them?” I asked.

“Order them,” he answered. “No more than the poor spraying machine the days of making your own coffins is gone. There was a time you just nailed a few deal boards together and that was that. In the thirties, none of yous would remember, when I started here, people couldn’t afford to even have the coffins painted. The few bare boards was wrapped in a black sheet and carried to the church and grave covered with the sheet so no one could see the lack of paint or handles. Now it’s the opposite: oak and walnut, brass and silver. It’ll be gold handles next. People have to be kept back from spending money now. And it all goes down into the ground anyhow. And who can tell the man that wore the ragged jacket?” he quoted expansively.

“Still, I suppose they’re expressing their feelings,” I said in deference to Cyril’s increasing discomfort during the speech.

“People are anxious to do the best they can,” Cyril added. Maloney, who had his arms folded, unbuttoned himself enough to take out his spectacles, polish them, put them on, inspect Cyril as if he was some rare botanical specimen for a long minute. Then he went through the same silent show while returning the spectacles to their pocket.

“Apparently it’s a sight all together in America,” the foreman went on. “The boss was out at a conference in Los Angeles a few months back. Apparently they’ve gone wild there. The sky’s the limit. Apparently the whole talk at the conference was how to interest people again in the plainer type of burial.”

“Thanks very much,” Maloney put down his glass firmly. “Having thus regaled ourselves we may as well see—is it Mr Comiskey?—about the rest of our business,” but if he thought he could march to the office, see the marble slab, and get out, he was wrong. When we opened the bar door two coffins stood on iron trestles and beside them a pair of sleek hearses. The names were already on the nameplates. One had yesterday’s date as the date of death; but the second had the day’s date. The person, James Malone, had been alive a few hours before. I had never thought of history as so recent. On the shelves were plastic wreaths, and flat brown boxes which must have held the graveclothes.

“They’re just ready to go out,” the foreman said when he saw us linger.

“I didn’t know you could get the information on the nameplate so quickly,” I gestured to the day’s date.

“It only takes a few minutes. Getting the spelling right is the main thing. Sometimes they don’t even have their own names spelled right, but when it’s pointed out to them that it’s wrong by someone else, they’re apt to storm in and kick up one unholy fuss. By that time, of course, the coffin is in the ground. It doesn’t happen often. We either know the person or can check. But we always keep the slip they give us just in case.”

“This man must have died since midnight?”

“I can answer that in fact,” the foreman said proudly. “I took the order myself just after opening the shop. He died at six o’clock this morning; ah, a quiet inoffensive little man, you’d often see him round the town with a hat, very fond of a pint.”

“You see,” I said to Maloney. “This is as good as your Paris venture. And it’s not made up either.” I thought I heard him curse, but my ribs and jaw gave warning not to laugh.

“Ah yes,” Cyril said sententiously, standing between the pair of coffins and their waiting hearses. “Ah yes, when you think of it, life’s a shaky venture,” and they did hurt, even more so when I saw Maloney glower at him as if to eat him up, before the foreman led us up the wooden stairs, showed us into the office and withdrew.

Comiskey came out from behind the desk to shake our hands. He had on a worsted blue suit, shiny at the back and elbows, a Pioneer Pin, and an array of fountain pens and biros across the breast pocket to the lapel. His silky brown hair was combed back. It was not that he was very fat, but that the rich covering of flesh, sleek as any of his hearses, seemed to shake inside the cloth, and there was a permanent blush of raw beefsteak on both cheeks.

“We finished everything for you, Cyril, last thing yesterday evening,” he said in a tone that managed to be both authoritative and familiar. In a slow jog he led us down the stairs, rubbing his hands and talking as he went. He led us away from the hearses and out into a big yard. He paused at an enormous slab of black marble. “There we are,” Comiskey stood to one side.

Beside my aunt’s name and dates in gold on the marble was the silhouette of a fashionable young woman. On the base of the marble, in gold too, was Cyril’s family name, o’doherty. I looked at Maloney but he lifted his eyes briefly to the sky and then fixed them intently on the points of his shoes.

“It’s very nice,” I said to break the growing tension of the silence. “It must have cost a lot of money.”

“We tried to do the best we could,” Cyril said, again in his hushed voice. “She was a fine person. Her generosity to me was abundant. She left me everything she had.”

“It’s the best,” Comiskey said, “It’ll look very nice,” and if his foreman had all day to discourse he plainly hadn’t, and he led us back to the bar, “These gentlemen will have a drink on the house,” he said in a lordly way to the girl, shook our hands, and left us. We had whiskeys again.

“Her generosity to me was abundant.” I marvelled at the phrase as I looked at Cyril’s handsome, dull face and wondered if he’d bought it with the marble.

“What are you going to do with the old limestone?” I asked.

“Well,” he said ponderously, “I gave it a good deal of thought, and I didn’t like to have to remove it, but there comes a time, just the same as with old houses, when you can’t do them up any more. You’re throwing good money after bad. You’re far better to start from the ground up again. I think the marble will be no insult.”

“Quite right,” Maloney chorused with alarming fierceness.

The rain had already half eaten many of the names: Rose, Jimmy, Bridie.… Soon the limestone would not be able to give them even that worn space. They would be scattered to the mountain air they once breathed. It would be a purer silence.

“You’ll have one more drink on me,” Cyril pressed.

“No,” I said. “We have to be back.”

“We’re late,” Maloney added. We shook hands with the foreman on our way out, with Cyril outside the door.

“You’ll be very welcome any time you’re down,” he said in the first generous flush of his new estate.

“He’s your uncle-in-law,” Maloney said before Cyril was even out of earshot.

“That’s right.”

“Well your uncle-in-law is an eejit.”

“I concur.”

“And by the way that was a cheap crack about the Paris business, and like all cheap cracks full of a little truth, helping it up into a bigger lie. Nobody would pay the slightest attention to you wheeling a baby around in a coffin in this misfortunate country. They’d think you couldn’t afford a pram,” he said fiercely. “Look at today—isn’t the whole country going around in its coffin! But show them a man and a woman making love —and worst of all enjoying it—and the streets are full of ‘Fathers of eleven’, ‘Disgusted’ and the rest of them. Haven’t I been fighting it for the past several years, and giving hacks like you employment into the bargain. But what’ll work here won’t necessarily work elsewhere and vice-fucking-versa. That’s why I’m not giving up my Paris idea. Every country has their own half-baked version of it and they wave it around like their little flags. It’s coffins here. It’s class in England. It’s something stupid or fucking other everywhere.”

“That’s a speech for this time of morning!” I said sarcastically.

“But is it any wonder that the lowest common denominator rules,” he ignored. “There’s hardly any fixed people around at any given time. They’re all either dead or growing up or growing down or standing like your Early York out in the back garden.”

“What are we to do now?”

“Oh you’re all right. You’re our Renaissance man, a true sophist. Inflaming people and fathering children which you later disown. Let me tell you this, sir. We’re not letting you off the hook. You’ve lowered the moral average all around. And you’re making us all feel good.”

“Will we go to the car?”

“The car’s here,” he pointed to a shining new car across the road that I hadn’t seen him with before.

“We’ll go,” I said. “We’ll go by the saw mill. It’s the shortest way.”

I could hear the singing of the saws above the purring motor before we reached the mill. Maloney let the car go slow so that we had a clear sight of the mill for several seconds.

My uncle was at the big saw, an enormous trunk of beech on the rollers. You could only see him when the saw was still. Once he set it screaming he was hidden by its streaming dust. Jim was farther back but he was not sawing. He seemed to be setting up or oiling one of the minor saws.

After the strain of greedy watching, knowing it would all be soon lost from sight, I was partly grateful when the thick whitethorns shut it out; and I had no wish to stop or to go back. It would only idly prolong what had to be ended and my uncle had even more need of his own space than when he’d come up the long platform, the raincoat over his arm, to see her that first day in hospital. Today was after all the formal beginning of his new life without her, a marrying of it to the old. He’d fill it now for the forever that it was.

“There’s one man who knows he’s going everywhere by staying put,” Maloney said. It was impossible to tell from the tone whether it was intended as a cosmic joke or a simple breath of admiration.

“I’m thinking of proposing marriage to a woman and coming back here,” I said suddenly.

“You’re what?” Maloney swung the wheel so violently that I had to shout to watch the road. “You’re returning? So that the cattle can have the privilege of saying loo to you. You can start to see God in the bushes, not to speak of a bank manager. All that caper?”

“I don’t know. There comes a time when you either run amok completely or try to make a go of it. I’m going to try to make a go of it.”

“Embedded first in the warm womb, of course, and then hold hands and listen to the dawn choir. Ο sweet suffering Switzerland. We must talk about it. There’s a good hotel in Kells, if I can be seen with you so close to Dublin. Your outer aspects reflect accurately what must be an appalling inner moral condition. I don’t like people starting to do things I was doing ten years ago. Anyhow she may well turn you down.”

“It won’t matter.”

“How do you mean it won’t matter? Has this beating softened your brain as well?”

“The life has to be lived afterwards anyhow, no matter what the answer. Won’t it be even more difficult if the answer is yes?”

“What if she does say No?” he shouted.

“The world won’t stop. There’d be a chance of a real adventure lost. I’d be sorry,” and I was beginning to be sorry I had spoken.

“O you’re some lover, I tell you. But fortunately I know you. Blacken day with night. Tell the nodding plants they’ll grow just as well in shade as sun. It’s all in the sweet quality of the mind, so forget the fucking circumstances, brother.”

The rain had started, the powerful wipers sweeping it imperiously aside as soon as it spotted the shining arcs, sweeping and sweeping.

“You’d have seen me if you had been paying attention,” she’d once said to me, the night she came towards me across the floor of the Metropole. By not attending, by thinking any one thing was as worth doing as any other, by sleeping with anybody who’d agree, I had been the cause of as much pain and confusion and evil as if I had actively set out to do it. I had not attended properly. I had found the energy to choose too painful. Broken in love, I had turned back, let the light of imagination almost out. Now my hands were ice.

We had to leave the road of reason because we needed to go farther. Not to have a reason is a greater reason still to follow the instinct for the true, to follow it with all the force we have, in all the seeing and the final blindness.

“Have you gone dumb or is there nothing you have left to say for yourself or what?” Maloney had taken his eyes off the road to look me full in the face. His scant white hair spilled out from under the wide rim of the black hat. He looked definitely more danceband now than funeral. I gritted my teeth to try to stop the fit of laughter because it hurt so much, but the very pain was making it all the more impossible to stop.

What I wanted to say was that I had a fierce need to pray, for myself, Maloney, my uncle, the girl, the whole shoot. The prayers could not be answered, but prayers that cannot be answered need to be the more completely said, being their own beginning as well as end.

What I did say was, “Why don’t you watch the road?”

“I’ve been watching the bloody road all my life, and it tells me nothing. Yoo-hoo, Road!” he suddenly shouted. “You see! It doesn’t answer. It just speeds past. Yoo-hoo, Road!”

“It might get us there if you did.”

“It’ll get us there anyhow. Yoo-hoo, Road! Yoo-hoo, Road!” he was shouting, driving very fast.

I tried to say something back but couldn’t. And in the silence a fragment of another day seemed to linger amid the sweeping wipers, and grow: the small round figure of my uncle getting out of the train away down the platform, childishly looking around, the raincoat over his arm, at the beginning of the journey—if beginning it ever had—that had brought each to where we were, in the now and the forever.

“Yoo-hoo, Road. Yoo-hoo, Road. Yoo-hoo, Road. Yoo-hoo.…”