I watched the sun cross and recross the carriages as the train came in between the pillars, lighting the grey roofs; and then hands began to draw down windows, doors flew open, and the first figures met the platform with a jolt, and started to run.

By the time the carriages themselves had jolted to a stop the platform was already black. When eventually I saw his small round figure far down the platform, childishly looking around, the raincoat over his arm, “A wise man always carries his coat on a good day”, I turned back to the bookstall one side of the gate, and started to spin the paperback stand. He had need of all his own space, without interference from my eyes, as he came up the long platform. He was the last of the passengers to come through the gate. As he did, I went forward and offered to take his coat.

“It’s no weight,” he said as we shook hands.

“You decided not to take the car?”

“Why should I take the car—when you can sit back and the train’ll take you. Then the other fella has to do the driving.”

“Which would you prefer—to go straight to the hospital or have something to eat first?”

“Maybe we might be as well to have something to eat,” there was suddenly unease and apprehension in the eyes as they searched mine.

We had beef sandwiches with a bottle of stout in a bar across the road from the station. We sat at a table just inside the door, out of range of the television high in the corner which was showing horses being led round a parade ring before the start of some race.

“Well,” he cleared his throat. “How is the patient?” in a voice that would have been equally suited to asking me if I thought the Great Wall of China was likely to be around for long more.

“She’s not getting any better. She’s not well.”

“Well, when do you think there might be a change for the better?”

“I don’t know if there’ll be a change for the better.”

He took a sip of the stout, but this time he hurried his words, the voice shaking, “You mean that the writing could be more or less on the wall?”

“I’m afraid that’s what it more or less is.”

We sat in silence, drank and ate in silence. On the small screen a jockey in blue and yellow silks, a whip tucked under his arm, crossed to the centre of the ring and smartly touched his cap to a man in a top-hat, binoculars on his chest.

“Jim must be head beetler at the mill today,” I changed. As a boy Jim had come to work for him at the saw mill. He still looked on him as a boy, though only careful scrutiny could tell which of them was the older man now. They’d grown to look like one another, to take on the same grey, ageless look, into which neither happiness nor unhappiness entered—just a calm and even going about their narrow and strong lives.

“You should have heard him,” he brightened and began to chuckle, easy again back in the familiar corridor. “You’d think the sky was about to fall because he had to be on his own for the one day. And all that has to be sawn is a few scrubs of beeches. And they’re left ready.”

“Is there any sign of Cyril coming up?” I asked about my aunt’s husband, his brother-in-law.

“He didn’t say. He’s good for nothing anyhow.”

“What’s he up to now?”

“They say he’s foolin’ round with other women. He’s drinking lots.”

“Maybe it’s just as well he doesn’t come up.” I remembered her agitation the one time he did come. Her medical card had been clipped to the foot of the bed and it had her age written on it. Torn between terror of her husband discovering her true age and the doctors checking the card on their rounds, she tried to alter the figures but had only succeeded in drawing attention to the poor attempt. In the end, she had to unclip the card and hide it in the bed during his visit. Probably sometime late at night she had hung it back in its place. I winced as I thought of her lying there waiting to put the card back. It was the only time he’d come to visit her through the long illness.

“What do you think we should bring her out?” my uncle asked.

“Whatever you’d like.”

“I know but you’d be better than me at knowing those sort of things.”

“Bring her brandy then.”

“She was never one for anything but a sip of altar wine or a sherry or two at a wedding, and then only if she had to,” there was alarm in his eyes. The drink was one of the great greasers of the slope we’d slide down anyhow.

“I bring her brandy all the time. It seems she mistrusts the medicines and pills. She drinks brandy to kill the pain.”

“How much will we bring?”

“We’ll bring her a bottle each. That way she’ll be all right for a few days.”

The sun was so brutal after coming out of the dark of the bar that we stood on the pavement a moment blinded, the bottles parcelled in brown paper in our hands, the glass of cars glittering as they passed.

“We’ll get a taxi. There’s no use fooling with the buses at this hour,” I said.

“That makes sense,” he echoed. He’d put himself completely in my hands and shambled by my side towards the taxi rank outside the station, the raincoat over his arm, hand gripping the brandy bottle. Only once did he speak on the way to the hospital, to remark on the stink of the Liffey as we crossed Butt Bridge. “The city would sometimes make you want to throw up,” he said.

There was a long corridor from the lift down to the ward but we were in her eyes immediately we got out of the lift. She must have watched that small space outside the lift with the excitement of a hunter ever since the train had got in. I saw her lean towards her locker as we came up the corridor, frantically checking her hair and features in a small mirror. It would have been easier to walk down that corridor if we hadn’t to pretend that we didn’t know she’d seen us yet, imprisoned and awkward in the enforced deceit, as sometimes it is difficult to do some simple thing while being watched, and I was thinking we’d be better walking backwards down the ward when suddenly she waved to us and smiled, her theatricality betraying that she’d been already all too aware of our arrival. Now that we found ourselves in this switched-on light we began to grin and nod with equal grotesqueness.

“We brought you this,” my uncle betrayed his nervousness by putting the bottle down at once, and it alarmed her.

“What is this?”

“It’s not flowers anyhow,” I tried to joke. “It’s far better. And I brought another. It’s brandy.”

“I don’t know what on earth yous want bringing the two bottles for. You’d think it was Sticks McCabe yous were coming in to see.”

“Poor Sticks, be Jesus,” my uncle chuckled automatically, but before she’d time to light on him I said, “Nobody thinks you’re Sticks. I’ve already told how you take a little against the pain.”

“It’s a good job there’s somebody to tell him something.”

“It’s you that’s touchy,” I said.

“Nobody meant a thing,” my uncle said cautiously, and she was mollified.

“I just take it for the pain. I don’t trust those pills they give you. They’re hardly gone down when you can feel them spreading the cold in you as well.”

With that, my uncle began to slowly clear his throat, filling the hospital ward with the rude health of a tree of crows, and pitching his voice on to the firm security of high ground said, “By the way, Cyril sent you his best. He said he’s terrible busy but he’ll be up as soon as he’s ever able.”

“Poor Cyril,” she said dreamily, going inward and protective, all criticism gone. “I know he’s run off his feet. You must tell him that no matter what comes he mustn’t worry. That I’ll be all right,” and I saw my uncle turn his face away to hide any true feelings that might show.

The visit was as predictably on its way as a train or plane journey that had begun. My uncle had looked to it with apprehension. I who had made the journey often in the past months and knew it would go this way could not have said to him, “It’ll be all right. Nothing will happen. It’ll be the same as everything. We’ll get through it.”

Now that it was taking place it amounted to the nothing that was the rest of our life when it too was taking place. It would become part of our life again in the memory. In both the apprehension and the memory it was doomed to live far more vividly than in the taking place. Nature had ordered things well in that we hardly lived our lives at all. Our last conscious moment was the moment when our passing nonexistence and our final one would marry. It seemed felicitous that our going out of life should be as similarly arranged as our coming in. And I was ashamed of the violence of the reflections my own emotional idleness during the visit had brought on: the dead of heart can afford to be violent.

“You were great to come up,” my aunt was saying to my uncle now that the visit was ending.

“It was great to see you,” he shook hands. “I’ll be able to tell them all that you’ll be home in no time.”

“And you? Won’t you be in soon?” she asked me anxiously.

“I’ll be in the day after tomorrow.”

“God bless you both,” I heard her say.

He was diminished and silent as he came out, the raincoat over his arm, and as soon as we got a little way down the tarmacadam from the hospital he put his huge fists to his face and turned away. When I saw the body convulse with sobbing I moved across the road out of way of the traffic and started to move a white lawnblock about on the grass with my shoe as I waited.

She used to abuse him for trailing sawdust into the house on his boots. I could see him sitting at the head of the table, close to the black-leaded Stanley, hungry, while she carried over a plate of fried eggs and bacon and sausage.

“Look at the dirty sawdust all over the floor. You’d think you were still in a field,” I could hear her complain as she put down the plate. “Some people put sawdust down to clean floors,” he’d say half-heartedly, his mouth already full. “O they do, do they, on clean floors! And it’d be fresh sawdust, not soaked in dirt and oil and carried in on boots.” He’d be happy to let the last word go with her in the peaceful sounds of his knife and fork on the plate. These chidings, and his acceptance of them, were but tokens of the total security they felt with one another. Nothing threatened. Everything was known. Within its protective ivy frightening affection must have grown. He must be about two or three years older than she, I was remembering, when I saw him straighten and turn, wiping his hand across his eyes. They’d lived together twenty years before she married. And five years after she had married he was still living with herself and Cyril.

“Would you have a handkerchief on you there?” he asked.

I gave him a white handkerchief. I saw how discoloured the back of his hands were with scars. He moistened the handkerchief as he wiped his face and eyes.

“Is it all right now?” he asked, dabbing at his eyes.

“There’s just a streak there to the side,” I showed him and he wiped it clear. “You’re fine now.”

His tiredness was gone. He looked completely refreshed, even happy.

“Is there anything you’d like to do?” I asked.

“The train goes at six?” He wanted to hear it again.

“That gives you almost three hours. Is there anything you’d like to do before then?”

“What about you? You may have to go about your own business now.”

“I have the day off. Don’t worry about me.”

“I brought these few addresses with me,” he drew a crumpled piece of paper from his breast pocket. “They’re saw factors. There’s a few parts I could do with and there’s no use asking them for anything over the phone,” the voice was suddenly so swollen with the charming self-importance of a child that all I could do was smile.

“We have plenty of time,” I said. “We have so much time that we’re as well to go round the corner and wait for a bus. A bus will take us in at this time almost as quick as any taxi.”

There are many who grow so swollen with the importance of their function that they can hardly stoop to do it, but there was no such danger with my uncle. In him all was one.

The factor’s office was a flat-roofed prefab, out beside the gasworks, islanded by disused arteries and locks of the canal which once joined it with the mouth of the river. We crossed it by a footbridge, water pouring through leaks in the great wooden gates. The smell of rotting waterweed mixed with the pervasive sulphur everywhere. Inside, the office was lit by a naked bulb screwed to the ceiling. A rodent-like little man looked up from behind the high plywood counter.

“We’re lookin’ for spares,” my uncle boomed.

“We only supply the trade here, sir.”

“We are the trade,” my uncle pulled some billheads from his pocket. “Mr McKenzie knows us well.” Mr McKenzie was the chairman of the company and was certaintly as unaware of my uncle’s existence as he was of his small red-haired clerk behind the counter who was now turning the billheads over in his hands. Suddenly he opened a door to his right and called, “Hi, Jimmy,” and when Jimmy appeared he looked as if he might be a brother of the small man behind the counter. He handed him the billheads and said, “These gentlemen are looking for spares.” When they opened the counter leaf we followed Jimmy into a large warehouse. It was lit by the same naked bulb that lit the office. The floor was soft and earthen but all along the walls the parts were neatly arranged on shelves. The saws and larger parts were stacked in the centre of the floor. It was what I imagined a wine cellar might be or a place where mushrooms might be grown. For a while, with affection as well as some amusement, I watched my uncle flower in the dankness of the warehouse, examining parts, displaying his knowledge, even going so far as to lecture the patient Jimmy; and when I lost interest I hung about in the boredom of childhood until my uncle was through. When he was, Jimmy carried the parts out to the office. He and the clerk made up the bill from a price list in a plastic folder, parcelled the parts, and my uncle paid from an enormous wad of notes he pulled from his trouser pocket. The evening sun seemed as harsh and blinding when we came out as it had been when we’d left the pub to go to see my aunt in the hospital.

“It’s a great ease for me to have those,” he said when I took the parcel to carry. “You can imagine the writing and telephoning you’d have. And do you think you’d have a chance of getting anything? You’d be as well idle. It was there under their noses and they couldn’t see it unless you took them by the hand. You’d often wonder if there’s anybody in this country that knows anything. Is there long before the train goes?” “An hour,” I checked on the watch. “Is there anything you’d like to do before then?” it was his turn to ask now. He was positively expansive.

“We might as well get close to the station first. We can have a drink or a cup of tea, whichever you’d prefer.”

“We might as well have a drink for ourselves. It’s not every day of our lives that we have an outing.”

We had the drink in the corner bar at the traffic lights across from the station. We had more than forty minutes left. He insisted on buying large whiskeys. He grimaced as the first gulp went down but put the glass firmly on the table.

“Does this city business bring you in much money?” he asked with all the confidence he’d won at the factor’s warehouse.

“It brings in enough,” I answered but when I saw his disappointment named in or around what I earned.

“That’s money, all right,” he was impressed and asked apprehensively, “Do you ever think the day might come when you’d think of selling up the place at home?” about the house and farm I had inherited from my parents.

“No. There’ll never be any chance of that.”

“I tauld them,” he said in triumph. “Though they’re that land-mad they’d not believe you. ‘He’ll hardly be keeping on that place now that he’s in Dublin and you’ll be sure to remind him not to sell without telling me first. Him and me are the best of friends and he knows I’d see him right,’” he mimicked. “I told them they’d have more chance of jumping in the river than you selling.”

“There’s no danger of me selling,” I reassured him.

“I know. Selling a place like that is like selling your life. You’d never know when you’d want to go back to it. And it’ll not move unless you move.”

“That’s true,” I raised my glass.

“And that girl you used bring down in the summer, do you still see her?”

“No. I haven’t seen her for almost a year.”

“That must be a great relief to you.”

“No.” I was forced to laugh outright. “On the contrary, I loved her.”

“I know. We all have to make those noises.”

“I wanted to marry her and she wouldn’t marry me. That was all there was to it,” I said between laughter and an old catch of pain.

“I know, but isn’t a relief to you now that she didn’t take you at your word? You’d be in a nice fix now if she had. Your aunt had you married off the minute you appeared on the doorstep with the girl, but I’ve seen too much come and go. And I know you’re no fool.”

“It wasn’t that way at all,” I said.

“I know it’s not easy to own up to it, but if you talk to the wall this weather—am I right or wrong—will the wall answer back?”

“No, I don’t suppose it will.”

“Now you see the light!”

I saw the light. The wall would not talk back, and it was perfect and it was dull, better not to have lived at all.

If my love had married me it might all by this time have dwindled to a similar dullness, but at least by now we would know the quality of that dullness, having tried to live in love. Now we would never know at all.

My uncle saw his own state as the ideal, and it should be the goal of others to strive to reach its perfect height. For me to disturb its geometry with any different perspective would be a failure of understanding and affection.

The long black hand of the pub clock jerked past six.

“Will you have one for the road?” I asked, adding, “A small one?” When I saw his hesitation, “We have nearly twenty minutes yet.”

“You must want me to go rolling home. The train’ll be travelling on its roof,” he laughed.

“Well, you shouldn’t have any if you don’t want.”

“I don’t want,” he said.

“I don’t suppose you’d ever think of retiring from the mill and taking it easy,” I said.

“I haven’t seen anybody retire yet but they were six feet under before they knew where they were or if they weren’t they’d be as well off if they were—drooping about the place with one hand as long as the other. You’re a burden to yourself and everybody else once you stop working.”

“You’ve enough money?” I said to keep the conversation going. I knew him to be a comparatively rich man, having several times over what his modest needs would require.

“Nobody has enough money,” he countered vigorously. “Money is life. And once you stop earning it soon gallops away.”

When we got up to go to the train he found his feet were hurting. “When you’re not used to the concrete it takes it out of you,” and we went very slowly across to the station. I carried the parcel of spare parts but he kept the raincoat. For a time, as we waited on the platform and talked about the difficulty of getting spare parts down the country and how nobody in the city knew more or less one thing from another, I thought that he wasn’t going to mention the real purpose of his visit at all; but then I saw his face pucker painfully, as if it could no longer avoid a darkness too deep for him, and he said abruptly, “If she wants for anything get it for her. I’ll see it right. There’s no use expecting anything from Cyril. And there’s no scarcity of money on this side.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll see to her. I’m not short of money either.”

“Sure, I know that,” he took my hand. “You’ll be down soon?”

“As soon as I can.”

I watched him go down the platform to the carriages, small and indestructible with his parcel and raincoat, “My uncle, you will live forever.” I murmured the prayer with a force all the greater because I knew it could not be answered.

The last of the sun still mingled in the evening rush hour outside the station. All day my life had been away, in easy attendance on the lives of others, and I did not relish its burden back, the evening stretching ahead like a long and empty room. It must surely be possible to be out of our life for the whole of our life if we could tell what life is other than this painful becoming of ourselves.

I saw a bus idle up to the distant traffic lights which were on red, and I had time to get to the next stop. It was too far off to make out its number. Like spinning a coin or wheel I’d let the number of the bus decide the evening. If it turned out to be the fifty-four-A I’d get on and go back to the room and do the work I’d been putting off; if it was any of the other buses I’d turn back into the city and squander the evening. With a calmness now that I was within the rules of a game I stood at the stop and waited. The lights changed. With a grinding of gears the bus drew closer. It was a fifty-four-A. I put out a hand and it stopped and I got on.

There was no sound when I opened the door of the house and let it close. Nor was there sound other than the creaking of the old stairs as I climbed to the landing. I paused before going into the room but the house seemed to be completely still. I closed the door and stood in the room. Always the room was still.

The long velvet curtain that was drawn on the half-open window stirred only faintly. A coal fire was set ready to light in the grate. The bed with damaged brass bells stood in the corner and shelves of books lined the walls. Books as well were piled untidily on the white mantel above the coal grate, on the bare dressing table. Beside the wardrobe a table lamp made out of a Chianti bottle lit the marble tabletop that had been a washstand once, lit the typewriter that rested on a page of old newspaper on the marble, lit an untouched ream of white pages beside it. I reflected as I always did with some satisfaction after an absence that the poor light of day hardly ever got into this room.

I washed and changed, combed my hair, and washed my hands again a last time before going over to the typewriter on the marble, and started to leaf through what I had written.

We used to robe in scarlet and white how many years before. Through the small window of the sacristy the sanded footpath lay empty and still between the laurels and back wall of the church, above us the plain tongued boards of the ceiling. It seemed always hushed there, motors and voices and the scrape-drag of feet muffled by the church and tall graveyard trees. Kneelers were no longer being let down on the flagstones. The wine and water and hand linen had been taken out onto the altar. The incessant coughing told that the church was full. The robed priest stood still in front of the covered chalice on the table, and we formed into line at the door as the last bell began to ring. When it ceased the priest lifted the chalice, and we bowed together to the cross, our hearts beating. And then the sacristy door opened on to the side of the altar and all the faces grew out of a dark mass of cloth out beyond the rail. We began to walk, the priest with the covered chalice following behind.

Among what rank weeds are ceremonies remembered, are continued. I read what I had written, to take it up. My characters were not even people. They were athletes. I did not even give them names. Maloney, who was paying me to write, effectively named them. “Above all the imagination requires distance,” he declared. “It can’t function close up. We’d risk turning our readers off if there was a hint that it might be a favourite uncle or niece they imagined doing these godawful things with”; and so Colonel Grimshaw got his name and his young partner on the high wire joined him as Mavis Carmichael.

This weekend the Colonel and Mavis were away to Majorca.

“Write it like a story. Write it like a life, but with none of life’s unseemly infirmities,” Maloney was fond of declaring. “Write it like two ball players crunching into the tackle. Only feather it a little with down and lace.”

Mavis had come straight from the typing pool where she was working to the Colonel’s flat.

 

I am tired and flushed as I get up from the typewriter. Nothing ever holds together unless it is mixed with some of one’s own blood. I am not able to read what I’ve written. Will others be inflamed by the reading, if there is flesh to inflame, as I was by the poor writing? Is my flush the flesh of others, are my words to be their worlds? And what then of the soul, set on its blind solitary course among the stars, the heart that leaps up to suffer, the mind that thinks itself free and knows it is not—in this doomed marriage with the body whose one instinct is to survive and plunder and arrogantly reproduce itself along the way?

I am impatient for the jostle of the bar, the cigarette smoke, the shouted orders, the long, first dark cool swallow of stout, the cream against the lips, and afterwards the brushing of the drumbeat as I climb the stained carpeted stairs to the dancehall.

I check myself in the mirror but I am already well groomed enough, except for a dying flush, for both the bar and the dance, and with a shudder of relief I go out, leaving the light burning beside the typewriter and pages on the still marble.

As soon as I came through the swing door I saw him against the smoked oak panel at the far end of the bar, his pint on the narrow ledge, puffing on a pipe and staring meditatively into space. Space mustn’t have been all that absorbing for he woke and began to greet me with over-active flourishes while I was still feet away. He was in his all-tweed outfit, long overcoat and matching suit, gold watch-chain crossing the waistcoat which had wide lapels. The small hat was tweed as well, “English country”, and much the same colour as the coat and suit, a dead briar brown. The bow-tie was discreetly florid and the highly polished oxblood boots positively shone.

“Ahoy, old boy,” he mimicked an English accent quite unsuccessfully. “What’s it to be?”

“A pint.”

“Another pint when you have the time there, Jimmy,” he called to the barman in his own voice.

“A Colonel Sinclair lived down the street from us. Every morning he’d come down for his Times and ten Kerry Blues. ‘Times and a packet of dogs,’ he’d shout as soon as he’d come through the door. ‘Times and a packet of dogs.’”

I wondered if his imitation English accent or the ordering of the pint had triggered the story. “You look ridiculous in that gear.”

“Tweeds are in, old boy,” he was not at a moment’s loss. “And besides, your good Harris, well treated, will last forever, unlike its masters.”

“You’ll get like Grimshaw,” I countered poorly.

“I wouldn’t mind a bit being the old Colonel. Very exhilarating, I should say. Except I have hardly his constitution. No matter. One of the reasons of art’s supremacy is just because of the very limitations of life. There will be no art in heaven. You should know that, old boy, you university types. Did you bring the family jewels along?”

“As usual,” I handed him the pages.

“Up to your usual high standard, no doubt,” he flipped through the pages. “Ireland wanking is Ireland free. Not only wanking but free. Not only free but wanking as well.”

It tripped out easily, like the well-worn shoe that it was; but once he began to read he was silent.

He, too, had ambitions to be a poet once, in the small midland town where we first met, he a reporter on the local Echo, I just out of university, a temporary teacher of English at the Convent Secondary School. Such as he and I who worked in the town but were not from it were known as runners, and all runners of any standing lodged at Dempsey’s Commercial Hotel—Maloney, myself, a solicitor, four women teachers, men and women who worked in the banks, a poultry instructress, the manager of the flour mill, and the whole of the A. I. station, its five inseminators and the two office girls.

All spring and summer Maloney had gone out with Maureen Doherty, a local postman’s daughter who worked in Dr Gannon’s office. Sometimes they came to the tennis club but more often they went for long solitary walks into the country or along the wooded bank of the river. Maloney seemed always to walk a few feet ahead of the girl, lecturing on the books he’d got her to read, quoting reams of deadening verse.

“Nothing sweetens pedagogy like a little sex. Nothing sweetens sex like a little pedagogy,” Newman, the manager of the flour mill, nodded his sage head in Dempsey’s. “Except usually it ends disastrously with the pupil coming of age.”

Maureen was blonde and small and exceedingly pretty. Tiring of his strenuous self-absorption she threw Maloney over for a young vet who came to town that August and who had also taken up lodgings in Dempsey’s. Humiliated and numbed Maloney went completely into his shell that autumn, spending all his evenings in his room and it was even rumoured that he was writing a novel. Down at the Echo office his rows with Kelly the editor increased in ferocity whenever Kelly insisted on removing some of the “rocks” or “jawbreakers” Maloney was fond of using in his column, which were clearly acts of aggression against his readers, whom he despised and was fond of describing as “the local pheasantry, crap merchants and bull-shitters”.

And then one evening, drawing up to Christmas, he rounded us all up after the hotel tea—bank clerks, teachers, the solicitor, the poultry instructress, old Newman of the flour mill, the artificial inseminators, even the young vet, whose VW was seldom seen in the evening without a happy-looking Maureen Doherty, and shepherded us upstairs to the big lounge where he had already a fire lighted. With much nudging, low giggles, scraping of chairs and feet he read his poem, in rhyming couplets, of lost love, seemingly oblivious of the blatant discourtesies. And no matter how loud they might scrape or cough no one could boast of having escaped the reading. When he finished, everybody applauded, relieved that love’s labours at last had ended.

Warmed by the applause he explained that there were two kinds of poets. One, having written the poem, would comment no further, insisting that the poem speak for itself out of its own clarity or mystery. While he respected the position he did not number himself among that persuasion. He was someone who was prepared to analyse every line or syllable, and he had no hesitation in admitting that the source of the poem was frankly autobiographical. He had been in love, had failed in love, and out of the loss had grown the poem.

He warned against the confusion between art and life. Art was art because it was not nature. Life was a series of accidents. Art was a vision of the law. Rarely did the accident conform to the Idea or Vision, so it had to be invented or made anew so that it conformed to the Vision. In short, it was life seen through a personality. Which brought us to the joyous triumph of all art. For, though life might be intolerable or sad, the very fact of being able to bring it within the law made it a cause for joy and celebration. Or, to put it more crudely, though in this particular autobiographical case the girl was lost, it was through the particular loss that the poem had been won.

Afterwards, impervious to laughter or ribaldry, he insisted on buying his whole audience a drink, even forcing the young vet who tried to make protestations that he had to be away to stay. With the same imperviousness, Maloney began his first pornographic paper, defied the obsolete censorship laws in much the same way as he defied the sense of embarrassment provoked by poetry at Dempsey’s—by simply remaining oblivious of it—and made it a success against all predictions. And he’d gone on from there to become the rich and fairly powerful man he now was. I suspected he paid me the higher rate he did as much out of affection for the old times as out of any belief that I could manufacture those sexual gymnastics any better than any of the several other hacks he hired.

I ordered two more pints, placing the fresh pint beside his unfinished one on the ledge. He made small notes or changes as he read and I knew they’d all be improvements. Time was suspended as I watched him. I watched his face register the world of the words, Colonel Grimshaw and Mavis Carmichael. It is a chastening sight to watch somebody totally absorbed in a world you yourself have made.

“It’s good. As always. That’s what’ll juice them up. There’s just these few changes.”

He got curious pleasure from the changes, almost standing back to admire the line of the sentences, like someone admiring the true line of a wall he has just straightened.

“Nobody can stand anybody else, of course. You’re one person who really knows that, aren’t you? You just have to have someone you like stay in your house for a few days to find that out. It’s all got to do with room. But we can all stand a lot of the Colonel and Mavis,” and he began to tell me what to do in the next story. The couple should be split up in Majorca. Mavis should be given a bullfighter and the Colonel a brown-skinned Arab girl of fifteen or sixteen.

“You should write it yourself.”

“No. I’m too busy. And I wouldn’t manage it right,” he handed me a brown envelope.

“Thanks,” I could feel the notes in it as I took it.

“By the way, I’m expecting Moran any minute,” he named the most powerful newspaper man in the city. “You don’t mind meeting him?”

“Of course not. Why should I?” I was determined at once to deprive Maloney of his pleasure. One of his few new pleasures since becoming rich was to spring someone powerful or famous on his ordinary company and to stand back and observe.

“You should have seen her crawl to impress him, indecent ambition suddenly all over the place,” he’d remark as if remembering a good wine. “One moment his feathers were all preened and the next completely drooped. It was like the effect a pike might have on a shoal of perch,” I remembered hearing him boast.

“You don’t seem very impressed. Or are you just hiding it?” he berated me now.

“I’m too old. And I know you too well. Besides, I have to go in a few minutes.”

“Where are you going to now? You seem to be always going some place.”

“To a dance. To the Metropole.”

“All the young whores and the rich baldies.”

“Do you want to come?”

“I have to go home after I see Moran. Dada has to say good-good night, tuck the hush-a-baby in, go to safe-safe sleep, or Mama will spank-spank,” he mimicked before adding sharply, “You seem to have escaped all that crack?”

“It’s just as bad without it,” I had time to tell him as Moran pushed towards us at the end of the bar, a large florid man in thornproof tweeds.

“I see you’re inflaming the people again. You better not get them too riz or they’ll turn wicked on yez,” it sounded so well polished that it was hardly the first time it had been put to use. “I was just on my way,” I said, and with apologetic clasps on arms I left before there was time for protest. “I’ll finish that for you in a few days.”

I stood and breathed freely a few moments in the rainwashed air outside, and then moved towards the lighted dancehall. As I drew near I saw three girls with overcoats and long dresses get out of a taxi and go in ahead of me through the swing doors.

The womb and the grave.… The christening party becomes the funeral, the shudder that makes us flesh becomes the shudder that makes us meat. They say that it is the religious instinct that makes us seek the relationships and laws in things. And in between there is time and work, as passing time, and killing time, and lessening time that’d lessen anyhow, such as this going to the dance.

There was a small queue in front of the ticket window when I went through the doors, the three girls in long dresses who had just got out of the taxi at its end. An even longer queue had formed by the time I was able to buy a ticket and a porter brought out a small easel and a pale red House Full placard, and left the placard one side of the easel, ready for putting up.

With the ticket I climbed the heavily carpeted stairs, running into another queue half-way up, which only moved every minute or so at a time, four or five steps, like disembarking from a ship. A man at the head of the stairs in full evening dress was the cause of this last queue, his black hair slicked back from handsome, regular features that had all the marks of an ex-boxer. As he tore each ticket in two, handing a half back, stabbing the half he kept on to a piece of wire, he stared into the faces like the plainclothes policeman beyond the barriers stare when a watch is being kept on the ports.

In the cloakroom a man was carefully hiding a bald patch with a comb and side of the hand. He was concentrating so hard that he did not even notice when I excused myself to get past him to the towels.

The band was playing to an empty floor, slowly, a foxtrot, the brushes caressing the drums. The four steps up from the bar left the dance floor just below eye-level. I sat in the bar, watched its pale maple on which some silver dust was scattered lie empty in the low light. After a while a blue dress swung past, followed by a steel-like trouser leg, the first couple started to dance.

None of the tables were completely free. I sat by the windows across from a young man with dark red hair and a winning smile who had already several empty glasses in front of him.

“You’re enjoying yourself,” I said to the red-headed man who was little more than a boy but looked more aged because of a weathered face. The hands were scarred and the nails broken.

“Just getting up some old courage,” he was too involved with his anxiety or fear to want to talk and we just smiled and nodded back into our separate silences. Far below in O’Connell Street toy cars were streaming past, and most of the small figures on the pavements seemed somehow comic in their fixed determination to get to wherever they were going. I saw the boxer in evening dress leave the head of the stairs. The House Full notice must have gone up on the easel below. It was no longer possible to see onto the dance floor, the space at the head of the steps packed with men, and men on the steps below struggled to push through. Everywhere now there was the sense of the fair and the hunt and the racecourse, the heavy excitement of preying and vulnerable flesh, though who were the hunters and who the prey was never clear, in an opening or closing field one could easily turn into the other; and, since there were not many young people here, there must have been few in the dancehall who at one time or another hadn’t been both, and early as it was in the evening, if we could scent past habits and tobacco and alcohol, in all the gathering staleness, there must be already, here or there, in some corners, the sharp smell of fresh blood on the evening’s first arrowheads.

The redhead and I rose at the same time from the table which was immediately seized by the waiter for a large party of five or six couples who started to move vacant chairs away from half-filled tables.

“I suppose we better be making a start,” the man smiled apologetically.

“I suppose if we’re ever going to,” I smiled back in the same way as we allowed the tables to part us, making our separate ways towards the dance floor.

Way had to be pushed through the men crowded in the entrance at the top of the short steps. The women stood away to the left of the bandstand, between the tables, some of them spilling onto the floor. It is not true that we meet our destiny in man or woman, it is those we meet who become our destiny. On the irreversible way, many who loved and married met in this cattle light.

I went towards her, the light blue dress falling loosely on the shoulders, the dark hair pinned tightly back to show the clean, strong features. She seemed not to be with anyone, and she moved nervously in the first steps of the dance.

“Did you come on your own?”

“Judy was to come with me. She works in the office with me, but she got a sore throat at the last minute. And I had the tickets. So I said—to hell—I’ll come on my own,” she explained.

“What sort of office do you work in?”

“The bank, the Northern Bank. It’s boring but as my uncle used to say it’s secure, and you can’t beat security.”

She was not as young as she’d looked in the light across the dance floor, there was grey in the dark hair, but she was, if anything, more handsome. The body was lean and strong against my hand.

“And do you come here often?”

“O boy, are you kidding? Some real weirdoes come to this place. The last person I was dancing with asked me if I slept with people.”

“And what did you answer?”

“I was too shocked to answer and then I was angry. And then he asked me again, quite brazen-faced. And when I didn’t answer he just walked off and left me standing in the middle of the dance floor.”

“Not many people are young here,” I said.

“I’m not young. I’m thirty-eight,” she answered as if she’d been challenged.

“It wasn’t that kind of age I was thinking of,” I said.

All around us on the maple the old youngsters danced. The stained skin did not show in the blue light, but paunches did, bald heads, white hair, tiredness. People do not grow old. Age happens to us, like collisions, that is all. And usually we drive on. We do not feel old or ridiculous as we pursue what we have always pursued. Tonight, as any night, if we could anchor ourselves in the ideal greasy warm wetness of the human fork, we’d be more than happy. We’d dream that we were flying.

“What do you do?”

“I write a bit,” I said.

“What do you write?” she asked breathlessly.

“Just for a syndicate,” I said cautiously. “It’s a sort of advertising.”

“That’s funny,” she said. “I write too. It’s not much, but I write nearly a whole magazine, it’s called Waterways. It’s the magazine of the Amalgamated Waterways Association, old dears and buffs who meet twice a year. Walter—he’s my friend —he’s the editor, but he’s so lazy I wind up writing nearly the whole of every issue. You should see us the last two nights before we put it to bed—it’s a panic. Luckily, it only comes out every two months,” she was laughing and unaware that she was bumping some of the couples on the crowded floor.

“Do they pay you for this?”

“A little, but they don’t have any money, just enough for a small salary for poor Walter, who’d work for nothing if he had to, he’s that crazy about all rivers and lakes and even half filled-in canals. What I get, though, is plenty of trips and cruises.”

Enough similar tags had been cast into the air to mark us off for one another, like a dab of dye on the markings of mallards.

“Why don’t you come and have a drink with me?” I asked, and when she hesitated, “It’d be easier and more pleasant for us to talk than in this bump-around.…”

For the first time she looked at me sharply, stepping instinctively back, taking stock of the whole. One of the few laws of the cattle light was that if you came off the floor with someone for a drink the sexual had been allowed in.

“All right,” she said suddenly, without qualification.

The bar was jammed downstairs and when I found the waiter I’d had earlier he told me that there were some tables free at the far side of the upstairs balcony and that he’d bring the drinks there. “Bring large ones. Gins and tonics,” I told him.

I pushed ahead of her through the crowd downstairs and then followed her through the women crushed together on the stairs outside the ladies’ cloakroom. She had a magnificent strong figure beneath the light blue woollen dress, and when she turned her fine features, seeing the empty tables across the balcony, and smiled, “It’s a wonder they’ve not been taken,” she looked astonishingly beautiful, a wonderful healthy animal.

“Some prefer the milling downstairs. As well, they probably don’t know that it’s empty up here.”

We got a table where we could lean against the balcony rail and watch. A fine dust was rising from the floor as well as the thick curls of tobacco smoke. The drummer had taken his jacket off and was sweating profusely as he launched into a solo. The waiter came with the drinks. He spooned in the ice from a jug he carried on the metal tray.

“Will you be wanting anything else, sir?” he asked.

“Bring the same again in a while. You might as well take for both now,” there’d be no need to think again of the drinks.

“Do you live in a flat…?” I asked when we lifted the drinks.

“No. I live in my aunt’s house. I’ve lived there since I was six. Three of her daughters live there as well, my cousins. It is a house of women,” she spoke excitedly.

“How do you happen to be there?”

“It’s a long story. I have one sister but she’s married to a solicitor down the country, where we come from. My father was a small builder. He struggled all his life, and when he was just beginning to do well—we had a bungalow in Clontarf—and mother and he could afford to go out together in the evening, they were coming from a dinner-dance in the Shelbourne, driving, and somehow missed the turn below Burgh Quay, and went into the Liffey. My sister and I were too young to know much about what happened except the bustle. We were shared out between two different aunts. The aunt and uncle I was given to already had eight children of their own. It was much stricter there than with my poor parents. My uncle taught chemistry. He was the Professor, a light of Maria Duce. He certainly wouldn’t approve of this place,” she was looking down on the dancers below. It was a slow waltz. Some of the couples were so wrapped round one another on the floor that except for the drapery of clothes they might be dancing in coitus.

“No, if he was like that I can’t imagine he’d approve of it,” I said idly.

The waiter came with the other tray of drinks.

“I don’t think I’ll be able for all this. Already I’m feeling a little tipsy,” she said.

“Pour me what you don’t want,” and having established the intimacy we clinked our glasses.

“It killed my uncle having to retire,” she went on.

“Is he long dead?”

“Two years. He suffered a terrible death. One Sunday I came into the room and found him crying. ‘Josephine,’ he said. ‘I never thought anybody could go through this pain and still believe there is a God.’”

“Where are all his sons now?”

“They’re scattered all round the country. They’re all in professions. I guess they all got out of the house as fast as they could. Just the women stayed.”

“It’s odd that there wasn’t even the ceremonial black sheep,” these idle words mattered and did not matter. They mattered only in the light of where they led to.

“Johnny was for a while. There were some terrible scenes over his drinking. But he qualified. Now he makes more money than any of them but he never lost his old gaiety. You’d like Johnny.”

“Why don’t we dance?”

“I’d like to dance,” she rose from the table.

We danced close. At first she held nervously and suspiciously back, but when I didn’t press her she came naturally close. I could feel her hair brush my face. A hot, fierce burning ache—the Colonel and my Mavis again—grew to bathe in this warm living flesh beneath my hands. Across her shoulder I saw the gleam of a man’s wristwatch as his hand crossed a neat pair of buttocks beneath their shimmering silk. And then our lips met.

“And are your aunt and cousins home this night?” I asked.

“They’re sound asleep by now,” she said.

“Why don’t you come back to my place, then? We can have a quiet drink and talk.”

“That’s fine,” she hesitated, and then added nervously, and too brightly, “We can talk far better there.”

I waited for her in the downstairs bar, at the head of the stairs. The tired waiters were cleaning up but still serving drinks to what were now very drunken tables. It was the hour they usually cheated most. The bouncer in evening dress who had earlier taken our tickets was patrolling between the tables, his hands clasped behind his back. He’d pause where the petting at the tables was too heavy or where there were disputes over change. When he spoke his whole body went completely still, his lips barely moving. Beside me there was a solitary man at one of the small tables trying to shake salt from an empty saltshaker into a glass of tomato juice or Bloody Mary, growing visibly frustrated.

She had on an expensive brown leather coat and matching handbag when she came back, her walk intense and concentrated on anything or everything except what she was doing, like a man concentrated on the far trees while striking the golf ball at his feet; and she wa s smiling unnaturally hard.

“You look much younger than I thought,” she said suddenly as we went down the stairs, her arm now in mine.

“I’m not young. I’m thirty,” I said.

“That makes me ancient at thirty-eight.”

“You don’t look it. Anyhow after you leave twenty, age doesn’t make much difference,” I heard the phoney unction in my voice that I’d heard in others declaring that money counts for little in this life.

To escape any more of such conversation I put my arm firmly round her on the stairs: to hold this beautiful body, to enter it, to know it, to glory in the knowing, was age enough, or seemed no mortal age. Catching my desire, she looked at me, and we kissed. It was cold when we went through the swing doors but there was a line of taxis waiting for the end of the dance and we got into the first car.

The light from the Chianti bottle was shining so calmly on the typewriter and white pages on the marble when we came into the room that it jolted me far more sharply than the cold outside the dancehall. I took the leather coat and hung it on the back of the door. “You have a lovely place,” she looked along the shelves of books and then went to the typewriter, touching the keys without pressing them deep enough to move the bar. I grew aware of the large bed in the room as I put a match to the fire in the grate.

“Is this what you write?” she asked.

“That’s it. It’s poor stuff. Sometime I’ll show it to you. When you show me your pieces,” I took the page away from her, the Colonel and Mavis might prove a rough overture. “What’ll you have to drink?”

“What are you having?”

“A whiskey. I feel cold.”

“A small one for me—a very small one, then.”

I heard the pieces of coal shift in the grate as the fire caught. I was grateful for the whiskey burning its way down into the tension.

“Is it all right to put off the light?” I asked. “Soon the flames will be bright.”

“It’s nice to sit and watch the fire,” she said and I turned off the light on the typewriter and marble. The flames bounced off the ceiling and walls, came to rest on the spines of the books, flashed again on the marble. We sat in front of the fire, and when I put my arm round her she returned my kiss, over and back on the mouth; but when I slid my hand beneath her dress she reacted so quickly that the whiskey spilled. Suddenly we were both standing, facing one another in front of the fire.

“Boy, you don’t move half fast,” she said.

“What did you expect?”

“You hardly know me.”

“That’s right.”

“You couldn’t love me or even care for me in this length of time.”

“Love has nothing got to do with it. I’m attracted to you.”

“You’ve.… ” She paused, embarrassed.

“Slept with people without being in love with them? Yes I have.”

“At least you’re honest about it.”

“That’s no virtue. There’s no way I can make you sleep with me if you don’t want to.”

“I’m sorry about the whiskey,” she said.

“That doesn’t matter. There’s more. Will you have some?”

“I’ll have a little,” she held out her glass. We drank in silence. The fire had completely caught, the coals glowing, a steady, flickering flame dancing everywhere about the room.

“O why not,” she said suddenly, and I felt no trace of triumph, only an odd sadness. “I want it too.”

“Are you sure? We don’t have to do anything,” I said, but our kissing spoke a different language, and without a word we started to slide out of our clothes. I was first in the bed and waited for her. For one moment I saw her stand as if to record or reflect, the flames flickering on the vulnerability of the pale slip with lace along the breasts, and then she slipped out of the rest of her things, and came to me.

“It’s wonderful just to lie and bathe in another’s body. You have a very beautiful body,” I heard my own words hang like an advertisement in the peace of the firelight, the flames leaping and flaming on the brass bells of the bed, on book spines and walls and ceilings.

She was excited and yet drawing away in her nervousness.

“Is it safe?” I asked her in the play.

“It’s the end of the month. I’m afraid I’m as regular as old clockwork.”

“I won’t hurt you,” I said.

“Be careful,” she answered. “It only happened once before,” and she guided me within, wincing whenever I touched the partly broken hymen.

Within her there was this instant of rest, the glory and the awe, that one was as close as ever man could be to the presence of the mystery, and live, the caged bird in its moment of pure rest before it was about to be loosed into blinding light; and then the body was clamouring in the rough health of the instinct, “This is what I needed. This-is-what-I-need-ed.” And we were more apart than before we had come together, the burden of responsibility suddenly in the room, and no way to turn to shift it or apportion it or to get rid of it.

“I’m sorry I hurt you.”

“No, you were very gentle. You see, it only happened to me once before.”

“When?” I was glad of this sudden opening to escape.

“Last summer. I have this friend Bridgie. She’s a teacher. And she has this flat at Howth that I take over from her when she goes away on the long school holidays. It’s just up from the harbour. Every Thursday evening I’d go down to buy fish off the boats when they’d come in. It was a Saturday it happened. It was awful. The man was a journalist and he was married.”

“Had he anything to do with Amalgamated Waterways?”

“No, he wasn’t from Waterways, in fact he’s quite famous but I don’t want to bring his name into it.

“A band was playing on the front that evening, where the grass and beds of flowers are, just before you get to the pier wall. He had come out to see me.

“We listened to the band. It was the Blanchardston Fife and Drum. They were playing ’Johnny I hardly Knew You’. There was the lovely smell of the sea mixed with cut grass and some of the children were playing in their bare feet. It’s funny how clear you remember everything just because something awful is about to happen to you. Then we walked out to the very end of the wall where the small lighthouse is. We just stood there and breathed the sea air and watched the boats tack in and out of the harbour, some of them nearly colliding, till it started to get cold. We went into the Abbey on our way back. We had a plate of prawns and brown bread. He had stout and I had cider and we bought both evening papers from a small dirty-faced newsboy who came in. I have an almost total blackout about everything that happened as soon as we went back to the flat. Anyhow, we found ourselves in bed together. He was very gentle, it hardly hurt at all, but afterwards, Ο boy, that’s when the trouble started, that’s where it ended.

“There was I feeling all these emotions: So this is what it was like. It has really happened after all these years, I was no longer a girl, I wasn’t a virgin any more, I must be a woman now at last at thirty-seven.”

“That was just last summer, so?” I asked.

“That’s right. It was the Saturday of the first week in August.”

“What happened then?”

“O boy, that’s when it happened. There was I with all these jumbled, mixed-up emotions racing all round in me, I had waited for this moment all my life, and now it had happened, I had given myself to a man. And he reached across and looked at his watch and turned on the transistor, ‘The racing results will be coming on in a minute,’ he said, and I couldn’t believe it. He got up, put on his clothes, pulled back the curtain. I saw him sitting in his shirtsleeves in the armchair, just socks on his feet, ticking off the results on the racing page as they were announced. I started to cry, stuffing the bedclothes to my face so that he wouldn’t hear. And then when I heard the time signal for the news and saw him still sitting without the slightest movement in the chair, I stopped the crying, and I asked him what he was thinking. If he had made any reference to what had happened, just the barest word, I think it would have been all right, but you know what he said, all that he said was, I can still hardly believe it, ‘I’ve just missed the crossed treble by a whisker,’ it seems funny now but it sure wasn’t funny at the time. I’d never felt so humiliated in all my life. Can you believe it, ‘I’ve just missed the crossed treble by a whisker.’ Then he heard me, and came over, but it was too late. I could never have anything to do with him again. It just made everything seem so ridiculous.”

“You’ve never been with anybody else before tonight?”

“No. And I feel fine. I don’t feel guilty or anything.”

It was a long way from Colonel Grimshaw and Mavis, but there was Howth, the sea and the sunlight, masts of the fleet in the evening sun when they went down to the harbour. There was the band playing on the grass. Time stood still in the Abbey Tavern for an hour. And just before the racing results came over the air, her seal had been broken.

“I wish I had taken you back to the room that evening,” I stirred with desire. “I wouldn’t have said that I had missed the crossed treble by a whisker.”

“I wish you had too. You don’t think I’m too old for you?” there seemed to be tears on her face.

“No. It has nothing to do with it.”

We played, cumbersomely: and yet, when her breathing grew heavy, and my fingers smeared the rich oil along the lips above the half-shattered hymen, I, sure in the knowledge that she could hardly turn back from her pleasure, might be a poor Colonel Grimshaw, and she, excited and awkward by my side, might be his Mavis.

When I heard her catch towards her pleasure I rose above her and she opened eagerly for me, guiding me within her. The Colonel should drive and shaft now and she be full of his thunder, but I lingered instead in the warmth, kissed her in case I would come and die.

We were man and we were woman. We were both the tree and the summer. There was no yearning toward nor falling away. We were one. It was as if we were, then, those four other people, now gone out of time, who had snatched the two of us into time. For a moment again we possessed their power and their glory anew, pushing out of mind all graveclothes. We had climbed to the crown of life, and this was all, all the world, and even as we surged towards it, it was already slipping further and further away from one’s grasp, and we were stranded again on our own bare lives.

“Six or seven hours ago we didn’t even know of one another’s existence,” she said.

“That’s right.”

“And you don’t think you love me even a little?”

“No. Love has nothing to do with it. How do you feel now?”

“I feel great. I don’t feel guilty at all or anything. Only I’m afraid I’m beginning to grow fond of you. Do you think you might grow fond of me?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think you can programme those things.”

“And, you’ve done this with several?”

“With a few,” I was growing irritated.

“Without loving them?”

“I loved one woman but love has nothing got to do with this. I don’t think it is important now. It was blind. That was all.”

“Who was she?”

“She doesn’t matter now. Some other time I’ll tell you.”

The coal fire had almost died, throwing up the last weak flickers. In a tear in the curtain I could see the grey light outside.

“Will your aunt and cousins not notice that you are out so late?”

“I’ll say that I was at a late-night party. I suppose though I should be making a move.”

“I think it’s close to morning. What I’ll do is walk you to a taxi. There’s no telephone to call from. And there’s always a car in the rank at the bottom of Malahide Road.”

“I don’t feel guilty or anything. I feel great. What is it but what’s natural,” she repeated as she dressed. “How do you feel?”

“I feel fine,” I said.

When she went out to the bathroom and I turned on the light the room seemed incredibly small and lonely and undamaged, like a country railway station in the first or last light.

“Are you ready?” I asked.

By way of answer she kissed me and we went out of the house in the early morning stillness. We walked in silence down the road empty except for a milkman and his boy delivering bottles from a float, the whine of the electric motor starting between the houses and the rattle of the bottles intensifying the silence.

“I suppose this is the usual. Now that it’s over it’s just goodbye,” she said as we drew towards the end of the road.

“No. I was hoping we’d meet again.”

“When?”

“What about next Wednesday?”

“What’ll you be doing before then?”

“I have some writing to do. And there’s this aunt of mine who’s in hospital who I have to go to see.”

“Where will we meet, then?”

“Do you know the Green Goose?” and when she nodded I said, “We’ll meet up in the lounge at eight o’clock.”

We kissed again as I held the door of the taxi open, the stale scents of the night mixed with fresh powder or perfume. I gave the taxi man the address and told him I wanted to pay him now. He looked cold and disgruntled in a great swaddling of an overcoat and counted out the pile of silver I gave him, only acknowledging it when he reached the tip. As the taxi turned in the empty road, the traffic lights on red, I saw her waving in the rear window in much the same exaggerated way as she had walked towards me at the head of the dancehall stairs.

After the sharp night air the room smelled of stale alcohol and perfume and sweat. I tried to open the window but it had been shut for too long and I was afraid the cord might break and wake people in the other rooms. I washed the glasses, bathed my face in the cold water, and when I drew back the crumpled pile of sweat-sodden clothes there were blood stains on the sheet. I shuddered involuntarily as the mind traced it back, and the grappling of the hours before stirred uneasily and did not seem to want to grow old.

I sipped at the coffee in the upstairs lounge of Kavanagh’s the next evening, the two Marietta biscuits on the rim of the saucer, unable to free myself from the unease of the haphazard night, and I concentrated on the barman wrapping the bottle of brandy I had to take to my aunt in the hospital, thinking energy is everything, for without energy there can be no anything, no love and no quality of love.

For long I had limped by without energy, accepting what I’d been given, taking what I could get—deprived of any idea outside the immediate need of the day. Once the sensual beat had carried me on, careless of reason. Now I wanted to pause and turn and pause and stare and pause and idiotically smile. Colonel Grimshaw mounts his Mavis Carmichael and her ever-ready juices grease his ever-seeking bayonet, both rapturous as they hold the ever-rising tide of the seed on the edge of spurting free. They are in Majorca now. Blood dries on woollen sheets in Dublin, salt and water unable to sponge it completely clear.

The barman searched for my eyes as he twisted the brown paper round the neck of the bottle and putting it on the counter called, “Now.”

“It could pass for Lourdes water,” I said as I counted out the money.

“Aye,” he laughed agreeably as he rang up the price and said apologetically as he handed me the change, “only it’s an awful lot dearer.”

“There’s nothing going down except ourselves.”

I walked the hundred yards to the taxi rank at the bottom of the road. Two taxi men were playing cards on the stone drinking trough, their cars waiting by the curb. When I gave the name of the hospital, one of the men motioned towards the first car but I stood—“There’s no rush”—to follow the short game to its close. When we pulled away into the green of the traffic lights I saw her face as she waved in the back of the turning cab of the night before, and wanted to turn away from it. Then I gripped the brandy bottle and sat back and listened to the ticking of the meter as the taxi took me like some privileged invalid through the fever of the city in its rush hour. When we turned in at the hospital gates, with its two white globes on the piers, the city gave way to trees and soft fields, and suddenly in the middle of the fields the concrete and glass block of the hospital rose like some rock to which we must crawl to die on when the blessed cover of these ordinary days is all stripped away.

I caught her sleeping lightly, some late sun on the pillows from the high windows facing home. Her hair had grown so thin that if I was to smooth her brow I felt the fingers would move back through the hair without disturbing the roots, and the last traces of gender seemed to have slipped completely away from the face. I touched the bedclothes above her feet and she was shocked to see me when she woke.

“I don’t know how I dozed off. I was expecting you.”

“It’s good to see you.”

Under cover of little trills and gestures, she made up her face, snapping a final glance at it in a small blue compact mirror before acknowledging the bottle of brandy.

“God bless you for bringing it. I never needed it more. Last night I wouldn’t have got a wink of sleep without it.”

“Do you want some now?”

“Are there any of those nurses looking?”

“No.”

I cursed the barman’s zeal as I unwrapped it, unscrewed the top, took a glass from the plastic-topped locker where both bottles from two days before were hidden away empty. I poured it slowly, waiting for her to call enough, but she let it rise to the brim.

“I don’t trust those pills. They give you those pills to get rid of you. I know it costs a lot but I’ll never forget it to you. It’s the only thing that does any good for the pain now.”

“Shush! Don’t you want it now?”

“Is there anyone looking?”

“She’s several beds away.”

Turning towards the windows, she covered over the glass, covering the dark little act with a small bird’s wing, and I winced as I heard her swallow, all that raw brandy burning its way down. Catching her guilt, I stirred uneasily at the foot of the bed, watching the nurse’s long back bending over a patient, five beds away. The nearer beds were all encircled by their visitors. As soon as she finished I took the glass and filled it with water, but not quickly enough. She started to cough violently into the bedclothes. I put a hand to her back and held the water to her lips, saying silently, “Drink, for the love of God,” as the nurse looked enquiringly in our direction. The coughing eased as she took some water. I nodded to the nurse that everything was all right and breathed easily when she turned back to her patient. I handed my aunt the blue packet of peppermints.

“In this place they have noses like whippets,” she said.

“Maybe you shouldn’t drink so much and so quickly.”

“It’s easier to get it done while you’re here. It’s all that does any good any more. I can feel it killing the old pain already,” and reaching for control returned my scold with one of her own. “You should have known better than to bring in those two bottles with your uncle. You must know by now what he’s like. He was never able to take anything up right. He’ll have it rooted in his head now that I’m well on the way to being another Sticks McCabe, when you know I only take it for the old pain.”

The three-thirty bus is climbing Seltan Hill on a hot July day. As it passes the monument of the stone soldier with his stone rifle at the top of Seltan, Sticks McCabe, drunk, rises from his seat and shouts, “Respect the memory of the dead. Everybody stand to attention,” before falling backwards, bringing down a suitcase from the rack as he falls. Jimmy the conductor does not smile as he returns Sticks to his seat and crutches, making sure he has not hurt himself, and puts the suitcase disdainfully back in the rack. A boy on a motorcycle looks back to see why the bus has stopped on Seltan as he whizzes past towards Mohill.

“He’ll not think that,” I said and she hadn’t even noticed that I’d been away in a more permanent day than this the day of the ward. “I told him you only took the brandy for the pain,” God knows where she had been since, in what different permament, impermanent day.

“You’d never know what he’d think but as long as he doesn’t go and tell poor Cyril. Cyril has enough to worry about. Where did he go after he left?”

“We went down the docks. He wanted some parts for the saws.”

“Of course he went and hauled you down the docks, as if you hadn’t a thing in the world else to do. All he thinks about is those old saws. There’ll be plenty of saws when he’s gone,” and then the tone dropped. “Do you think will I ever get out of this place?”

“Of course you’ll get out. You’ll be out and around in no time. But you’ll have to be patient. You’ll have to wait till they have you better.”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I think they have you in here just to get rid of you,” but her eyes searched mine eagerly, pleading for her words to be denied.

“That’s just rubbishy talk. The brandy may be doing as much harm as good.”

“Say nothing against the brandy,” and I shifted uneasily as she began again to thank me profusely.

It was cut short by the nurse’s arrival at the bedside. I made way for her and she asked, “Which of you has been boozing?” as she put light, tidying touches to the bedclothes.

“I’m afraid I have,” I answered.

“Maybe you both have,” there was far more a hint of challenge and even laughter behind the counter than any rebuke.

“It’s not allowed in here.”

“There are many things not allowed in here but they still go on.”

She lingered, but when nothing more was said she asked professionally, “Are you all right?”

“If I was all right I wouldn’t be in here,” my aunt said belligerently.

The nurse left quietly and authoritatively, without the slightest response to the attempt at a joke.

“Who is she?” I asked.

“Nurse Brady,” my aunt was more than willing to tell. “She’s an awful ticket. Pure man-mad. Sings and dances in the ward.”

“Why didn’t you introduce us?”

“She’d like nothing better. The unfortunate that gets her will have his work cut out.”

I spent the next minutes trying to talk myself out of having to come in for the next few days. I pleaded work, saying I’d fallen days behind in the work.

“But you’ll come on the Tuesday,” she said.

“I’ll come on the Tuesday,” I said as we kissed.

The tall, black-haired nurse was waiting at the end of the ward as I passed out.

“I hope I’ll see you soon,” I said as much out of simple attraction as to counter what I’d thought of as my aunt’s rudeness.

“Why don’t you come in to see us the next time,” she laughed. “Auntie is well enough taken care of.”

“Auntie is well enough taken care of. Why don’t you come in to see us the next time?” echoed all the next morning as I tried to get to the typewriter.

I’d shaved, dressed, lit the fire, washed my hands several times, scraped fingernails, had cups of coffee … and each time I tried to move I’d hear, “Why don’t you come in to see us the next time? Why-don’t-you-come-in?”

I saw the ridiculous white cap pinned to the curly black hair growing thick and close to the skull, her strong legs planted apart, her laugh, its confident affirmation of itself against everything vulnerable and receding and dying.

To ring her. To go out with her into the evening, turning it into adventure, accepting whatever it brought; turning it into a great vital kick against all the usual evenings that seemed to fall like invisible dust.… But—there was still this work to do, this typewriter on the old marble of the washstand to get to.

If she came out with me and if the evening did not turn out well, and I was too old not to know its likely outcome, how would I be rid of her, having to risk running into her every time I went in with the brandy to the hospital. Caution and cowardice were getting me closer to the typewriter. It was the same caution that never allowed me to indulge in more than a passing nod or word with any of the other people who lived in this same house.

I sat and typed frivolously, like dabbing toes above steaming water: “There was a man and a woman. Their names were Mavis Carmichael and Colonel Grimshaw. They lived happily, if it could be said that they lived at all,” and I x-ed it out and put a fresh page in the typewriter, and then started to work, the worm at last spinning its silken tent.

Several hours and blackened pages later I got up from the typewriter for the day when the barely audible turning of a key sounded from one of the upstairs rooms after a loud banging of the front door. I thought it could be only two or three o’clock and yet it must have been close to six if one of the office girls had got home. It had just gone six. Seldom is it given, but when it is it is the greatest consolation of the spinning, time passing—sizeable portions of time—without being noticed. Is it a promise of a happy eternity or just another irony, the realization of the unawareness. We feel that we have been freed of the burden of time passing, and the happiness is in the feeling and not in the blind forgetful play among the words.

I counted what I had written.

The Colonel and Mavis have had carnal knowledge of one another six times, fucked one another six times, not counting the time in the Colonel’s flat before leaving for the airport. They show no signs of tiredness though Mavis sleeps late while the Colonel goes out to buy wine and fruit for the room, has a Campari and soda at a sidewalk café, and buys a spray of mimosa—my only extravagance—on the way back to the hotel room. As he sniffs it he promises to improve its scent with the even more delicious scent between Mavis’s lovely waking thighs, “my honey”.

I was tired and flushed, my flesh excited again by the play of Mavis and the Colonel in the mind’s eye. How could it be otherwise? The words had to be mixed with my own blood. How could the dried blood of the words be turned back into blood unless they had once been bound by living blood? “Nonsense, rubbish, blackpudding, pig’s blood,” Maloney had countered not so long ago in the Palace. “That’s poetry talk. And you know what I think of that nowadays. Our average reader —and the average is king and queen of circulation—is already so inflamed that he or she would get a rise out of a green tree in Gethsemane.”

One more long day’s work and he’ll have his Majorcan story and I’ll be free for a whole week. I was tired enough to be grateful that I hadn’t to think what to do for the evening, that it was already decided: I had to meet her at eight in the upstairs lounge of the Green Goose. The memory of the accidental night was already vague enough for me to be curious again, and having driven Mavis and the Colonel from feat to feat I had grown inflamed enough myself to want to lie down with any warm body.

The Green Goose was grey and concrete and had a painted green bird on an iron sign in the forecourt of the car park that seemed to rattle its sense of not belonging in every sudden gust. It had been built twenty years before to serve the lower-middle-class roads and drives and avenues of brown-tiled semis all around it, and had aged like them into an ugly mildness. The upstairs lounge was heavily carpeted with blue peacock’s eyes, and green and red peacocks stared from the wallpaper. A whole generation of young marrieds must have grown tired of the flap of nappies on lines and summer lawnmowers under those same unalterable eyes.

It was too early for the couples. There were just a few men with evening papers who had not quite made it from their offices to their front doors. I bought a drink at the counter and took it to one of the corner tables.

She came at exactly five minutes after eight on the bar clock, wearing an elegant tweed costume, its collar and cuffs edged with dark fur. She walked quickly towards me, chin raised, smiling so hard that her dimples seemed to rise and fall. Her strong body was perfectly formed, the features clear and handsome. She would have been beautiful, I thought, except for this flurry of blue forget-me-nots she seemed to send quivering out with every step.

“Ο boy,” she said as she sat down. “I was afraid you mightn’t be here.”

“Of course I’d be here.”

“I thought coming up the stairs that you mightn’t be here. I thought so much about you the last days you cannot know,” her eyes shone with an overdose of sincerity.

“What will you have to drink?” I asked.

She was so filled with the momentous moment that I felt like going on my knees in gratitude for those small blessed ordinary handrails of speech.

“Would a gin and tonic be all right?”

“I’m sure I can get you that.”

She started to arrange her handbag, to take off her gloves.

Though she wore a hard-working smile, when I got back with the drinks she was quiet compared with her attack of an entrance. She had crossed her fine legs and was smoking.

“I hope it’s all right,” I said as I put her drink down.

“It’s fine. It’s just wonderful to be here. I don’t know what’s happening but I’ve hardly been able to think of anything else but you since the last night.”

“It’s nice to see you,” I raised my glass.

“It’s wonderful to be here and to see you. It’s one of those days everything had to be done two or three times over at the bank. I just couldn’t wait for five to come and the day to be over and to get out and to come here.”

“You got home all right the last night?”

“Sure,” she laughed. “I took off my shoes and carried them in and nobody heard me come in. Even my door on the landing was ajar. My aunt noticed that I yawned all through breakfast, that was all. I felt tired but I didn’t feel any guilt or anything and everybody seemed happier than usual. The milkman who always has a joke with me in the morning, though I’m mostly running, caught the tail of the long red scarf and shook it and asked me if I was in love. But the day was sure hard to get through. After lunch I could hardly keep my eyes open, and the letters just kept coming and coming. I went straight home and fell into bed and must have slept sixteen hours straight. I had the most wonderful dreams. You were in the best of them. And when I woke I didn’t feel a shred of guilt. I just felt relaxed and wonderful. Don’t you want to hear about any of the dreams you were in?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not much interested in dreams. I’m more interested in the day.”

“Many say that you can learn a great deal about the day from dreams and the night.”

“I think the best way to learn about the day is from the day,” I had grown restless.

“Why don’t you relax? You make me feel as if I was sitting in the dog’s chair.”

“How do you mean?”

“You know when you come into a kitchen and there’s a dog that’s used to sitting in a chair you happen to take by accident. All the time you’re sitting there you feel him agitatedly circling the chair.”

It was so sharp I slowed. “I can see you write,” I said. “I’m sorry if I was restless. I’m afraid I was just feeling the need of another drink. What’ll you have?”

“I’ll pass,” she placed her hand over her glass. “I can’t drink at that pace. You sure can shift that stuff.”

“It loosens you up. But don’t worry. It’ll slow, as soon as the first injection starts to work.”

The tension had gone when I came back from the bar. She was working, farther off. People are usually more charming when they are farther off. Perhaps she’d realized her own danger while I was getting the drink—that she had pushed too close. Such foresight makes the longest hells.

I too had a reversal of feeling while I was away. We hardly knew one another and we were already hating. This evening was a gift we’d never hold again. We were a man and woman travelling through it together. We’d never pass this way again. We might as well make some joy of it.

“Tell me about Amalgamated Waterways, this paper you write for,” and she grew excited as she told. The magazine was small but had fantastic growth potential. There was no country in Europe that had so much water and space per head of population as ours—in Germany, for instance, you had to wait for someone to die in order to get boat space—and it was just beginning to be recognized as the great natural resource it is, like oil or coal. There was this great scheme, which the Troubles had postponed, to connect the waterways of the Shannon and the Erne by reopening the disused canals of Cavan and Leitrim which had once been connected through the lakes. The North and South would join in friendship. “An embrace of water,” she said.

“Or a watery embrace.”

“Seriously, it’d open hundreds of miles of water, from Limerick to Letterkenny, and it’d only cost a fraction of what the bombings and killings do, and stop the bombings and the killings. It’s our editor’s great cause, poor Walter’s. You’d like Walter. He gets paid too little and works far too hard and he worries, how he worries, and never more than whenever we try to give him a raise. It’s arranged that when we get a little bigger I’ll give up this boring bank job and go to work full time as his assistant, and he worries about that too. We could afford it almost now but he won’t agree. And everybody agrees the paper needs more zip. But you, how did you start?”

“I was a teacher. And then I got into this advertising agency. My work was to put out trade magazines for five or six of our accounts, which meant you had to write or rewrite them from cover to cover. I once wrote a whole number of Our Boys. It was dog’s work and I gave it up. Now I just freelance. I didn’t need all that money anyhow.”

“You get a great deal of money in those agencies?”

“A good deal. If they had paid less I’d probably be still stuck there.”

“I get hardly any money but there are perks and trips. One of them is that I can have a houseboat on the Shannon for completely free anytime outside the high season. Maybe we could go some weekend together before too long?”

“That sounds like fun.”

“It’s more than that. The boats aren’t like old boats. They have hi-fi, central heating, fridges, push-button starters. They’re like hotels out on water, and all that lovely quiet water.…”

The couples had started to come in, the lounge to grow noisy and smoky. The barmen seemed to know each couple, and there were smiles and nods and a few words before each first order. With the red and green peacocks on the walls and the blue eyes of the carpet it must have made them feel as if they were getting away from it all when they came here.

“What’ll we do?” I asked. “Will we get another drink or will we leave?”

“I’d rather leave. I can’t stand all this noise and smugness.”

I could see that she thought she was well above this suburban herd, a dangerous thought for anybody in case they happened to wind up in it.

“What would you like to do? Would you like to come back to my place?” I asked lamely because of my uncertainty. It passed for shyness or diffidence.

“Why not? I’d like that,” she said brightly and took my arm as we went out.

We took off our clothes in total silence. As I covertly watched her in this dumb show it struck me how terrible and beautiful was the bending of the back, the lifted knee, at once consenting and awkwardly pleading, before prostration, to be wrecked in nature’s own renewal. I reached and took a condom from an open drawer and drew it on as silently as I could under cover of slipping out of underclothes. We lay together in waiting silence, and when I moved against her she asked tensely, “What are you wearing?” She must have felt the rubber against the skin or noticed me draw it on as I undressed.

“A condom. Why?”

“I just couldn’t with that.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It’s unnatural. It turns the whole thing into a kind of farce.”

“I was just wearing it for you,” I lied.

“How wearing it for me?”

“You have more to lose. What if you got pregnant?”

“I don’t know. It’d seem more natural. It’d seem far less of a farce. At least something would be going on.”

You can bet your life something would be going on, I thought, but said, “If you don’t want it that way there’s no way you have to have it that way,” and pulled away the rubber and threw it to one side. Both of us heard the light plop on to floor.

Just like the nights of old, bollock to bollock naked, but I said nothing as she snuggled close in gratitude, her full woman’s body voluptuous.

“I couldn’t do it that way. It’d make it all feel just like mutton.”

I thought of those little light pale bags in which cooked olives and herrings were sold.

“It’s all right. It’s gone now. Seriously,” I was the more withdrawn now, “what would you do if you did get pregnant?”

“I don’t know. I suppose I’d go somewhere with my poor baby if the man didn’t marry me. The whole family’d be shocked,” she laughed. “Outraged.”

“If I got you pregnant I wouldn’t marry you.”

“Why do this, then?”

“It’s a need—like food or drink.”

“You could come to love me.”

“I don’t think so. I like you. I desire you.…”

“Even if I didn’t love someone to begin with, and I was doing this, I know I’d come to love after a time. I’d have to,” she said as if willing it.

“Maybe we’re talking too much,” without even touching I could feel the wetness between her legs.

“We’re talking far too much love,” she breathed.

“We don’t have to do it all the way. We can have this deliciousness of skin and.…”

“Now you are talking too much, love. I want to feel you completely inside me. And don’t worry. I’m as regular as clockwork and it’s only two days off.”

If it’s raw meat you want, raw meat you’ll get, I thought as she said, “Easy,” and as I went through like any fish feeling the triumph of breasting the hard slimy top of the weir I needed that sense of triumph to dull anxiety. Maybe it could not go easily and proudly through, I tried to lull myself, if it was weighted and made clumsy with the condom.

The moment is always the same and always new, the instinct so strong it cancels memory. To lie still in the moment, in the very heart of flesh, the place of beginning and end, to snatch it out of time, to move still in all stillness of flesh, to taste that trembling moment again, to hold it, to know it, and to let it go, the small bird that you held, its heart hammering in the cup of the hands, flown into the air.

“Now. Ο my God,” I heard her call as it flew.

“You are beautiful,” I said as we lay in sweat, our hearts hammering down.

“Wait,” she said as I stirred.

Death must sometimes come the same way, the tension leaving the body, in pain and not in this sweetness and pride, but a last time, the circle completed, never having to come back to catch the flying moment that was always the same, always on the wing.

“O boy,” she said. “That is what I seem to have been needing for ages without knowing it. I don’t feel any guilt or anything. I feel just wonderful.”

“How come you sometimes have a touch of an American accent?” I asked tenderly, now that she was stretched out, relaxing above me.

“There is, of course, the movies. I must have spent half my life at the pictures. My two best friends are Americans, Janey and Betty. They work at the embassy and they’re at Waterways too. They’re both crazy about Ireland. And they’re the only ones I’ve told about us, about the fairly big differences in our ages.…”

“What do they think?”

“They’re all for it. They say no one pays any attention to that kind of difference in the States. In fact, they drove me to the Green Goose this evening. I wanted them to come in for a minute but they said they’d meet you another time.”

“Would you like a drink?” I asked as the old fear of being enmeshed returned. “You can have almost anything.”

“I’d love a glass of white wine, if that’s possible.”

I poured it in the light of the open door of the fridge and got a very large whiskey for myself.

“What are you drinking?” she asked.

“Whiskey.”

“It’s just wonderful to have all this time and ease,” she said.

“Your good health,” I drank.

“Do many people live in this house? I didn’t realize it was as big as it is till I came in tonight.”

“There are ten flats. It’s an old house. It was converted about five years ago.”

“What kind of people live here?”

“Much the same as I, mostly single. Once they marry they don’t seem to stay long. Civil servants, school teachers, there’s a girl who works on the radio, a solicitor, an accountant, that kind of person. I’m afraid I don’t know much more about them.”

“Aren’t you ever curious?”

“Of course I am but I make sure to restrain myself. We meet on the stairs. Sometimes they run out of salt or sugar, mostly the girls, or they cut their hands washing up. It’s all very polite.”

“I’m afraid I wouldn’t be long here till I’d know everybody. Do you ever wish you could go into another flat and sit and talk?”

“No. Because I’d be afraid they’d come into mine. And bore hell out of me. There are times when you can’t stand even the best company in the world. Why I avoid getting involved with anybody here is that I know myself too well. This place suits me. If I got involved with someone and they turned out boring or bothersome. I’d not get out in time—because I can’t stand the tension that sets up—and I’d wind up having to do something violent like leaving the house altogether.”

“You sound a very unsocial person,” she laughed, “but I don’t think you’re unsocial at all.”

You’re the sort of person who needs a woman, I thought I saw behind the words; you’re the sort of person who’s ripe for plucking. And I’m the one for the job. “I don’t know what sort of person I am,” I said and took her in my arms.

There was no need of caution any more. If the seed was going to its source it had already gone.

The night was set for drinking. Whether we would drink more or not, the day was already useless and hungover. Pour the bottle out.

And so we took our bodies till the sweet mystery of the wine turned to the glass of vinegar we flinched from lifting in the fuddled light. And we towelled our dank bodies and walked to the taxi rank at the bottom of Malahide Road.

“When will we meet again?” she nuzzled close to me and shivered in the cold light.

“In three days’ time, say.”

“All that length of time?”

“There’s this aunt I have to go in to see. And the next evening I have to bring stuff into the paper. That’s the two evenings in between gone.”

“Come with me in the taxi, then.”

“What’s the use?” I was reluctant.

“I want you to,” she pressed her lips on mine.

The house she lived in was in a tree-lined road, detached and prosperous, surrounded by gardens. She seemed to want me to see it, even in this impoverished light, and I got out of the taxi and walked her to the gate.

“I’ll see you in three days,” I said.

“In three days,” she raised her lips a last time. There were no lights on in the house.

She left off from fumbling in her handbag to wave to the taxi as it came out of a turn on the empty road. I waved back and saw her lift a key cautiously towards the lock. I watched to see if she’d take off her shoes but the taxi had taken me out of sight before the door opened.

“I’ll get out anywhere here,” I said to the driver soon after we had left the road. I needed to walk.

I ended the Majorcan holiday with a simple ringing of the changes Maloney had asked for: the Colonel with Mavis; Mavis and the bullfighter Carlos; the Colonel and Carlos’ sixteen-year-old girl friend Juanita —all four of them in delicious, unending revel—cunt and tongue and tit and rod and sperm. At the end of the story they all take a taxi together to the airport, addresses are exchanged, promises made. I had finished so early in the day that I decided to walk the five miles across the city to the hospital but it was still an hour too early when I got there. I bought an evening paper, read it over a hot whiskey in the pub closest to the hospital and got the bottle of brandy there too. It was night when I came out, starlit, with frost. I paused at how beautiful the chrysanthemums were—rust, yellow, pink—under the naked bulb hanging from the canvas of the flower stall in the cold-steel light. I knew she’d hardly like the flowers but on impulse bought her a bunch because of their amazing beauty in the frost. On many frozen evenings such as this she and I used to go to Lenten Devotions, down the hill and to the left up Church Street, and stand at the back of the cold, near-empty church.

“God bless you,” she said as I put the brandy down. “I wouldn’t take it off you but I know you have plenty of money, but I’ll never forget it,” and I saw her eyes fasten on the chrysanthemums in disapproval. “What did you want to go bringing in those old flowers for?”

“I was just passing them and I thought they looked nice.”

“They’re a waste. And I’m not likely to get married again,” she began to laugh, but painfully, catching at the laughs. “And I’d hardly be here if I wasn’t trying to put off the other thing.”

“Ah, but look, all the people around you have flowers.”

“They’re from the city,” she said. “A good head of lettuce or a string of onions would give me more joy than all the flowers in the world.”

I thought of her own garden beside the little creosoted wooden gate off where the railway siding used to be, blooming with good things for the table. “You look far better, and I don’t think it’s just in my eyes.”

She did look better. Though I knew it was of little use. All sorts of clover and sweet grasses glowed here and there on even the steepest slopes. They were not meant to be clutched at.

“Maybe because they’ve stopped that old deep X-ray. It used to make me feel horrible. I don’t trust any of those drugs and gadgets. But what can you do? When you’re here you have to put up with whatever they want to do to you.”

“Do you ever hear from Cyril or Michael?” I asked.

“No, it’d never occur to them that there was such a thing as a pen or paper. They’d not write,” and she started to chuckle. “But there was someone asking for you. She has me persecuted about you. It’s that blackheaded nurse that jumps around.”

“Well, tell her I was asking for her. She’s a fine looking girl.”

“I will not. There’s nothing more sets your teeth on edge when you’re down as someone going around showing the joys of spring.”

“Would you like a little brandy now?”

“No thanks. I can do without it for a while. The pain’s been not so bad. I’ll keep it till I need it.”

Through the window above the bed I could see the clear sky of frost, pierced with stars, and the reflection of all the lights of the city beyond the bare trees, and beside them this woman’s fierce desire to live, and in the long ward, all the little groups about, the same desire in each bed, small shining jewels in an infinite unfathomable band. Everywhere there was a joy that was part of weeping.

Suddenly I felt my eyes blind. I had been taken completely by surprise. There was the need, too, to give thanks and praise; and no one to turn to. So that she wouldn’t see my disturbance, I pretended to fix the brandy bottle more carefully out of sight in the locker.

“I suppose I might as well be going now. Before they put me out.”

“What hurry’s on you? Ah, but wait, tell me the truth now, do you think will I ever get out of this old place?”

“Of course you’ll get out but you’ll have to have patience.”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I think I never will.”

“There’s the bell for the visitors,” I said.

“You can still stay on a few minutes.”

“It’s great to see you better,” I couldn’t bear to stay.

“You’ll be in? I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“I’ll be in the day after tomorrow,” and I saw her relax and then ease to let me go as soon as she had the promise. And now that she was willing to let me go I was ashamed of my haste to be away, and wanted to stay.

The next day I put aside for what I liked doing best. I did nothing, the nothing of walking crowded streets in the heart of the city, looking at faces, going into chance bars to rest, eating lunch and dinner alone in cheap, crowded restaurants.

And without any desire for meaning, in the same way as I had been surprised at her bedside, I sometimes felt meaning in this crowded solitude. That all had a purpose, that it had to have, the people coming and going, the ships tied up along the North Wall, the changing delicate lights and ripples of the river, the cranes and building, lights of shops, and the sky through a blue haze of smoke and frost. And then it slipped away, and I found myself walking with a light and eager step to nowhere among others, in a meaningless haze of goodwill and general benediction and shuffle, everything fragmented again.

And then came the quiet or the tiredness that said that if that was the way it was it too had to be accepted, and when night fell it was possible to go home with the easy conscience of a sport’s reporter writing, “No play was possible today at Lords because of rain.”

I tried to write a new story. I thought if I got another story done before Maloney started to ask for it I would give myself several free days, but I wasn’t able to write. It must have been that I had got used to deadlines. I went early to Kavanagh’s to meet her and had drunk two pints by the time she came.

“It’s good to see you,” she bent to kiss me as she started to unbutton her jacket.

“What’ll you have?”

“I’ll have a gin and tonic—to celebrate,” she said mysteriously.

“To celebrate what?” I asked when I brought the drinks back from the bar.

“You see, silly, there was no reason to be worried. I told you I was regular as could be. It must have been all that exercise.”

“I’m glad. I’ll drink to that.”

I must have been worried for I felt a weight lift, as money suddenly come upon that had been feared lost. The evening brightened. Having realized the fear in being set free, I resolved never to put it at risk again. And I thought of how many times this celebration must have taken place, people made light-hearted as we by the same tidings. For this time we had no bills of pleasure to pay. We were not caged in any nightmare of the future.

“We’ve never met any place except in these old pubs,” she said suddenly. “Why don’t we start going to different places?”

“What sort of different places?”

“There’s the cinema,” and she named a picture that was playing on the quays that had received much praise. “Or we could go to the Park next Saturday, to the races.”

At the mention of the Park, I remembered the days at the races I’d often gone to with her I had loved, and I drew back as if I knew instinctively what she was seeking: if we could meet people that either she or I knew it would give our relationship some social significance, drag it out of these dark pubs for christening.

“No. I don’t feel like going to any of those places. But why don’t you go?” and I saw it fall like a blow. She made no attempt to conceal it.

“O boy! That sure puts me in my place,” and there were tears in her eyes.

“I don’t want to put you in your place.”

“But you did. Don’t you understand that those places don’t have an interest for me in themselves but are places that I want to go to with you?”

“There’s no future for you in that—for either of us. You’ll only get hurt. That’s the way you fall in love.”

“That’s all the music I need to hear. Maybe I’m hurt all I can be hurt already. I don’t know why you have to be so twisted and awkward. Especially with the news I had I thought we’d just have a nice pleasant evening.”

“There’s plenty of places we can go together.”

“Where?” she put her hand on my knee, smiling through her tears.

“We could go down the country,” I said awkwardly. “And stay in some nice hotel for a weekend.”

“I have a far better idea,” she was laughing now. “And it won’t cost a thing. I was going to mention it when all the silly fighting started. We can take a boat, one of the new cruisers, out on the Shannon for a weekend. They’ve been pushing us for weeks to do an article. In fact, Walter was saying that someone will have to do the article in the next few weeks. Why don’t we do it the weekend after next? That’ll give time to fix everything. Those cruisers are as comfortable as a hotel and far more fun. Why don’t we?”

“All right. That’s agreed, then.”

“It’ll be great fun. And I can do the article. Poor Walter will even be happy for a day or two,” and in a glow of enthusiasm she started to describe the part of the river that we’d take.

“I suppose we won’t bother going back to my place,” I said when the pub closed.

“Why?” she said in alarm, having obviously taken it for granted that we would.

“I thought you mightn’t want to because of the time of the month.”

“No. That doesn’t matter. We can talk there. And I can hold you, can’t I?”

We went by a side lane which cut the distance back by half, along a row that was once fishermen’s cottages, and then in the sparse lights by ragged elder bushes and rows of dumped cars. I took her jacket when we got to the flat, stirred up the almost dead fire, and put some wood on, and asked if she wanted anything to drink. I was waiting to see what she wanted to do. She said she’d prefer not to drink, just to take a glass of water, but for me to go ahead; and then suddenly, lifting the page in the typewriter, asked if she could read what I’d written.

“Sure. I have to warn you that it’s anything but edifying, but it pays. It’s pornography. No. What’s in the typewriter is only doodling. You can read this story. It’s set in Majorca. It’s finished but I haven’t given it in yet,” and I handed her the story and a large glass of water. I poured myself a whiskey and sat in front on the fire. She sat on the bed, under the arc of the lamp, her glass on the marble.

“This isn’t half hot,” she said after half a page, in the same tone as she’d said “Boy, you don’t move half fast” when I first tried to touch her in the room.

“You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to.”

“I want to.”

“That stuff might be hot for Dublin but it’s old hat in pornography by now. The new pornography has polar bears, bum frigging, pythons, decapitators, sword swallowers.”

“It sure seems hot enough to me.”

“Do you really want to finish it?” She nodded. “I’ll shut up, so, until you finish.”

Warmed by the whiskey, watching the fire catch, I felt time suspended as she read. If God there was, he must enjoy himself hugely, feeling all his creatures absorbed in his creation; but this was even better. It was as if another god had visited your creation and had got totally involved in it, had fallen for it. Some gods somewhere must be shaking huge sides with laughter.

“That’s something,” she said when she finished.

“What did you think of old Grimshaw and Mavis?”

“O I don’t know. I’m shocked. I suppose what shocked me most of all was to think you wrote it.”

“But you know the stuff is around. That it’s sold in shops. That people buy it.”

“Yes, but somehow one doesn’t think it has anything to do with oneself. It’s for others. So it’s quite shocking to come as close to it as this,” she tapped the pages.

“Would you like a drink?”

“All right. I’ll have the same as you. I somehow knew I needed an education but I never thought I’d run through one quite as fast as this.”

I got her the drink, poured myself another, and stayed silent. It must have been the drink, for I felt the flat shake with an uncontrollable silent laughter, that I was both taking part in some farce and at the same time watching it from miles far off.

“What’s so funny?” she asked sharply.

“Nothing. You and I. Mavis and the Colonel. The whole setup seems somehow such a huge farce.”

“How do you mean?”

“Nothing much. Sometimes it seems that we’re all being had, by ourselves as much as by others—by the whole setup.”

“Writing that stuff is bound to have an effect on a person,” she’d come and put arms around me. I drew up her blouse and brassière to feel her breasts, warm and full, the nipples erect.

“Did the stuff excite you at all?”

“Of course. That’s what’s disturbing about it.”

“How disturbing?”

“It makes a farce of the whole thing, doesn’t it. It’s nothing got to do with anything. It just makes a farce of people, plays on them, gets them worked up.”

“Like this?”

“This is natural,” she’d put hands inside my shirt, and was running light fingers along my ribs and back. We kissed as I drew up her nipples till she caught her breath. “I just want to feel you. You smell so sweet. I just want to feel your skin, to lie beside you, even if it’s only for a little while.”

In bed she said, “Don’t you know I love you? Don’t you know I’m crazy about you? Don’t you know I think about you all the time? I never fell before but when I did I sure fell hard.”

“You shouldn’t be telling me that.”

“It’s the truth. I love you.”

“The truth’s generally disastrous.”

“I have so much love for you that I believe you will come to share some of it, no matter how hard you try to fight it.”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“If I believed that I don’t know how I could go on.”

“You’d go on. Everybody does. Or mostly everybody.”

As much as from desire to stop the words as from real physical desire, I drew her towards me. Afterwards it was she who said, “That’s far better than talking. It just makes sense in itself.”

“It’s not verbal.”

I broke the long silence that followed, “Are you sure you want to go on this boat trip? I enjoy sleeping with you, being with you, but I don’t love you. If you love me as you say you do you can only get more hurt by going on. Since it’ll have to be broken, it might be better for everybody if we just broke it off now.”

“I don’t know what you wanted to say that for. Unless it’s just wanting to be brutal,” and I could feel her cry.

“No, I don’t want that,” I rocked her. “I wanted the opposite. But are you sure you want that?”

“Does a drowning person want a life raft?”

“I don’t think the situation is as bad as that, but sure, we can go on that boat trip. There’s nothing else to stop it.”

She kissed me, and there was a sense of rest. I knew it well. Two whole weeks were secured and rescued from all that threatened. A small heaven had been won. Within its secure boundaries love somehow might be set on its true course.

“What are you doing tomorrow evening?” she tried to ask with a casualness that only served to highlight her anxiety.

“I have to go to the hospital. It’s a bore but she depends on me now, especially for the brandy. After all, it was she and my uncle who brought me up after my parents vamoosed. So it’s no less than fair.”

“How vamoosed?”

“Dying, I suppose, is a sort of vamoosing, isn’t it? It’s not playing the game.”

“But it’s natural,” she said slowly. “It’s making room for others.”

The chrysanthemums had gone from the bedside when I next went to the hospital. Knowing her, she probably gave the flowers to someone she felt she owed a present to, possibly someone she disliked, maybe to the black-haired nurse. I thought she was watching me to see if I missed the flowers. “Mrs Mulcahy down the ward was saying how nice the flowers were so I gave them to her. You know I can’t stand flowers,” she said.

“How do you feel?” I put the brandy down.

“God and the brandy is all that’s any use now. It’s all I get any value out of. The pain’s still there. I don’t trust this place. I thought the pain was going but it’s back as bad as ever.”

“But you look far better.”

“I don’t feel as bad as when I was in the X-ray, but I don’t feel right. There’s a chance I may be let home. They’re doing some tests. They’ll tell me tomorrow.”

“But that’s great news. That contradicts everything you’ve been saying.”

“Maybe they won’t let me home after all,” she said warily. “Or maybe they’re just letting me home because there’s nothing they can do.”

“They’d not do that,” I said and changed. “I see our black-haired friend is on duty.”

Her swarthy, lovely form was moving between two beds at the far end of the ward.

“That one. She has me still persecuted. I think she must have arranged to be on duty because I had to tell her you were coming in. Whoever has his luck there will find he has more than the full of his arms.”

“I must tell her what you think about her,” I teased.

“You will not,” she put her hand to her mouth as she attempted to laugh it away. “You can do anything you want. You’re all right. But she can take it out on me here. You see she’s moved now so that you’ll have to pass her on your way out.”

Outside her natural attractiveness, the very fact that she was probably available made her more attractive still. We seem repelled as much by the hopeless as by what is too ferociously thrust upon us. Between these two, longing and fearing, we are drawn on.

“I’ll go then, so,” I used the levity as an excuse to leave early without her opposition, “so that I’ll not miss her.”

“You’d not be able,” she laughed.

“The next time I hope you’ll have the good news.”

“Will you be in tomorrow, then?”

“The day after. You’ll hardly be gone home by then?”

“I might never be gone home. Except feet first,” she put her hand again to her mouth as if to take away the words.

As I passed the nurse, she faced me. She was not pretty but more than pretty, handsome and lovely, in her perfect health and young strength. “My aunt says she may be going home soon.”

“She probably will. She’ll know for certain tomorrow.”

“Thanks for looking after her so well.”

“For nothing at all,” she laughed directly.

“I hope I see you soon.”

She didn’t answer. The clear laughing look in her eyes warned me to ignore what she showed me at my own peril.

It was in Kavanagh’s upstairs lounge that we met to arrange the boat trip on the Shannon. She was so energetic with happiness when she came that I could believe she was lit by some inner light, except I knew by this time that all her power came from outside. Walter was thrilled by the idea of the article. The people that owned the boats were falling over backwards to help. Her two friends, the American girls, thought it a wonderful idea and were really dying to meet me.

“Pornography and all?” I asked in more dismay than sarcasm.

“I thought they’d be shocked but it didn’t phase them one bit. They were tickled pink.”

I groaned inwardly at the sea of talk that must have been set rippling by our small dark meetings, and resolved to end it as soon as the boat trip ended. Out of guilt at my own withdrawal, my useless passivity, I made my own poor gesture toward the doomed charade.

“I’ll be able to get a car,” I said. “I’ll drive you down to the boat.”

“You’ll drive us down.”

“That’s what I meant.”

“Betty and Janey said they’d be glad to lend us their car for the weekend.”

“No, I can borrow a car or van from the paper. I used to have a car of my own but I didn’t have enough use for it.”

“I’d have a car,” she said, “if I could afford it. I think a car is a wonderful extension of your life. It’s almost as good as a third arm.”

“Will you have a last drink?” I asked towards closing time. “We’ll not go back to my place tonight.”

It was like pulling the trigger of a gun that had been following the movement of a bird settling in high branches, pulled as much out of the tiredness of following it among the branches as any desire of killing.

“Why?” she demanded.

It’d serve as a rehearsal for finishing it, I thought, a sounding out, though plain sense said that the only way to finish it was by finishing it now, and I flinched from that.

“There’s a lot of trouble,” I explained. “My aunt has taken a turn for the worse. My uncle is coming up. I’ll have to shepherd him around. And I have all this work to do.”

Maloney was fond of saying that every good lie must be flavoured with a little truth, as whiskey with water.

“He won’t be up tonight, will he?”

“No, but there’s things I have to do before he comes.”

“When will we meet, then?” she didn’t question it further.

“Say, Saturday night.”

“All that length of time. It’s almost time for the boat trip then.”

“We’ll have all that weekend on the boat and I just want to be free this whole week. Since you complain of these pubs, we’ll do anything you want to do on Saturday,” I said by way of appeasement.

She thought for a while and then said without hesitation, “I know what I’d like to do,” she was suddenly aglow. “I’ll come to your place and cook you a meal.”

“My place is a mess as far as cooking goes. I’ll take you out for a meal. Any place you want.”

“No. I have this feeling you’re not looking after yourself properly. I want to cook you a good meal. I’ll get the food but I’ll leave the wine to you.”

I tried to protest but I saw that she had her mind made up. “What kind of wine will I get? Red or white?” I backed down.

“Red. Get red wine,” it seemed she had the meal already half planned.

My aunt was sitting up in bed, combed and made-up when I brought her in the bottle of brandy the next evening. She looked excited and happy.

“I’m going home,” she said, though it wasn’t necessary to say it. “You’ll not have to waste your money bringing in the old brandy any more but God bless you for it. I don’t know what I’d have done without it.”

“How are you going?”

“I rang last night. Your uncle is coming up for me tomorrow. He’s taking the big car. He wants you to ring him tonight.”

“Why isn’t Cyril coming?” I asked her sharply.

“Poor Cyril is far too busy,” she answered with equal sharpness, intolerant of the question.

My uncle was far the busier, but all the foolish sweetness of her late love was for Cyril and pardoned everything he did before turning it to praise. My uncle’s hard-working, decent life counted for nothing by its side, his refusal to be anything but his own man just another woeful example of bad manners and general inconsiderateness. Facts were just left carelessly around by other people in order to trip you up. “He’s certainly as busy as Cyril,” I said carefully, but she flushed with anger.

“You never liked Cyril. Of course you’d take your uncle’s side, what else could I expect?”

“Liking has nothing to do with it, just plain facts.”

“It’s no wonder poor Cyril always complained the both of you ganged up on him.”

“I’m very fond of my uncle but that has nothing got to do with it.”

“Oh has it not? If you were to strip off those city manners you’d find that both of you are the exact same breed. What passes for quiet is stubbornness and you’re both thick as ditches.”

“It’s useful,” I started to say, but then was appalled to find myself in the middle of a quarrel. These were the first unkind words we’d had all the time she’d been in the hospital, and she was going home tomorow. “I’ll see you tomorrow and I’ll ring him this evening,” I changed, but she didn’t answer. After a few steps I wanted to turn back to say that I was sorry, but by then I saw that she was crying.

“O, aye,” my uncle said when I told him my aunt had asked me to telephone. “You know I’m going up tomorrow?”

“I know that.”

“Well, I was wonderin’ if you’d meet me somewhere out of the city. I don’t like driving the big car in the city.”

“I’ll meet you at Maynooth, then. Would eleven be all right?”

“Eleven would be fine. Say, at the gates of the priests’ factory,” it was one of his few jokes. “Is everything all right?”

“Everything’s fine. How are you keeping yourself?”

“Couldn’t be better,” he said. “And there’d be no use complaining anyhow if it wasn’t.”

I took the bus out to Maynooth the next morning, and was waiting for him at the seminary gates when the “big car” pulled up ten or fifteen minutes after eleven, a black V8, old and heavy enough to have come out of any of several gangster movies. Among other things, he kept it on the principle that, since driving was so careless in Ireland, someone was bound to hit him sooner later and when that happened “The other fella wasn’t going to come out looking for a light.” Since he took it out so seldom, the fact that it swallowed petrol was a small price to pay for such insulated misanthropy. He left the engine running and moved over to let me take the wheel.

“It’s a great ease for me that you’re taking her in,” he shuffled in his pocket and took out a box of small cigars. “There was a time I used to take trucks three times a week through to the docks but not any more with this traffic.”

“She running beautifully,” I said, and it was a pleasure to feel her roll, solid and stately.

“There’s no plastic in this old bus. They made them to last in those days.”

As we drew in towards the city, I saw people nudge and smile at us. I smiled back and was glad my uncle didn’t notice. It would not have pleased him that the big car had now reached the status of an antique.

“Well, how is the patient?” he had to ask at long last.

“I’m afraid I ran into trouble with her last night.”

“What sort of trouble?” he asked apprehensively.

“It was nothing. I got a bit annoyed when she said poor Cyril was too busy to come up for her and told you were far busier. It was just a puff. It’ll be all over but you’re as well to know about it.”

“The only time poor Cyril gets busy these days is on the high stool,” he chuckled. “But you couldn’t tell that woman that. And you should hear the pity he has for himself, you’d think it was him that should be in the hospital, especially if there’s a woman near to listen, and you know there’s no use talking to a woman once her mind’s made up. Trying to talk to a woman with her mind made up is like trying to turn back a pig in a wide meadow: they’ll always go past you.”

“I was sorry I got into it. It was no time for crossing her,” I said.

“Is she not coming home cured, then?”

“I don’t know. I doubt it.”

“Why are they sending her out, so?”

“Maybe there’s nothing more they can do for her,” and I was glad not to have to watch his face.

“Will you go in for her?” he asked when I parked at the hospital. “I’d sooner sit out here in the car. And there’s nothing much I can do in there anyhow.” And when I looked towards him he had already looked away.

“I thought yous were never coming,” she was all waiting, her cases by the armchair at the entrance to the ward.

“We’re hardly late at all.”

“Once you know you’re going you can’t wait to get away. Where’s your uncle?”

“He’s waiting out at the car.”

“That’s just like him. Let you haul out all the cases,” she started to complain.

He was standing outside the V8, the boot up, the back door open,

“Will you look at him, standing there, like a railway porter,” I saw now that she was just complaining out of happiness and relief to be entering again into the familiar. He hid his nervousness by busily stacking the cases in the boot, and then settling her among the rugs and pillows in the back, she making noises of protestation. “Well, it’s great to see you better and going home,” he let rumble out as the car rolled away from the hospital.

“Maybe I’m not well at all.”

“Ah well, Mary, you never missed! You were always a great one for having both ends. Sure, you’re even looking well,” and though she grumbled on I saw that the tiny scold had reassured her.

At Maynooth I left them. “There’ll be a bus back in any minute. I don’t want you to wait.”

“You’ll be down soon?” my uncle said as we shook hands.

“Promise,” she said as I kissed her. “And thanks for everything and God bless you.”

“I promise. If you don’t go now you’ll soon find yourself driving into the sun.” I shut the door but she continued waving from the back window as the big car nosed out into the traffic.

I took the story in Friday evening to the Elbow Inn. Every Friday evening the people from the paper met there just after work. I took the story in instead of posting it because I wanted to borrow a car or van for the river trip.

Maloney had his back to the counter when I came in, pulling on a cigar. Around him there were three or four different conversations going but they all formed a single and distinct whole from the rest of the bar, and people were continually circulating between the points of conversation. There was a tradition of wit on those Fridays which resulted in a killing and artificial tedium. Though they put out pornographic papers it would be difficult to tell them from any bank or insurance party except that their dress was perhaps that bit more attractively careless. Some of the girls said “Hello, stranger” to me between the smiles and handshakes but it had as much significance as “yours sincerely”. Maloney bought me a drink and I gave him the story.

“I don’t suppose you’ll like it,” I said carelessly.

“If he doesn’t like it he doesn’t have to publish it,” one of the girls who was with him laughed.

“Even if we didn’t like it there’s a special place for odd-ball stuff our regulars come in with from time to time,” Maloney countered quickly, and started to slip through it. As he did I asked the girl where she intended to go on her summer holiday. Maloney interrupted tepid talk about the Aran Islands to say in his mock pompous voice, “It breaks no new ground but it’s up to your usual high, traditional standard and of course there’s the usual spunk, old boy. Where do you intend to exercise the Colonel and our good Mavis next?”

“I thought of a trip in a cruiser up the Shannon.”

“Excellent idea. Spend your holiday discovering Ireland. Support home industry. I’m all for that, old boy.”

“In fact, I’ve got an invite on one of those trips and I want to borrow a car for next weekend. It’s all the paper will have to contribute to the field work.”

“Very in-ter-est-ing. Do you have a Mavis to take along to your Colonel?”

“Sure,” I tried to cut the joking short. “She’s seventy-nine and after every time we do it we have to search between the sheets for her false teeth. What about the car?”

“Hi, John,” he called across to a young bald-headed man in a blue duffle coat, “What cars are free next Friday?”

“There’s a few, I’d take the black Beetle if I was him.”

“The Black Beetle, then,” I said and Maloney nodded gravely.

“What can I get you to drink before I go?” I offered, but it was refused, and I made the final arrangements for picking up the Volkswagen late afternoon of the next Friday.

There was a time I’d have hung on in the pub, afraid of missing something if I left, afraid of being mocked as soon as I left. But now I knew it didn’t matter, and anyhow it could not be controlled. There was always a time when you’d have to leave.

I spent the Saturday she was to come to cook dinner cleaning the kitchen. Then I got the fire to light and went out and bought the red wine.

She came with a large cane basket. The way she returned my kiss left no doubt as to how she planned for the evening to end. There was fresh rain on her face, and as we kissed I had no chance of curbing my own desire. Suddenly I wanted nothing but to sleep with her.

“I’ll show you the kitchen. Then I’ll set the table and draw the wine and leave you to the cooking. I’d only get in your way. All that can be said about the kitchen is that it’s elemental.”

“It has all that I need. And it’s even clean,” she said.

“I tried to clean it but I’m afraid it’s not all that clean.”

“It’s just lovely,” she raised herself on her toes to be kissed again.

She unpacked the parcels from the basket: two steaks, a head of lettuce, mushrooms, three different kinds of cheeses, four apples.

“You see, I kept it simple.”

“It looks delicious. There’s fruit here as well. What’ll you have?”

“I’ll have a sherry.”

After I poured a glass of sherry, I said, “I’ll leave the bottle out. Is there anything else before I leave?”

“Yes. A kiss. And a radio. I like to play the radio while I cook.”

I took the transistor in from the other room, and the kiss was so prolonged that I put my hands beneath her clothes, moving them freely. It was she who broke loose. “I suppose I better make a start,” her face flushed. I wanted to say, “Why don’t we before you start?” but left the room.

I set the table, poured out a large whiskey, threw some more wood on the fire and stood leaning against the mantel sipping the whiskey while noises of utensils and smells of cooking came through the radio music from the kitchen. The evening was on its way like a life. There was no use kicking against it now. It had to be plundered like a meal.

“Everything’s ready,” she called from the kitchen. The smell of the grilled steaks was delicious. “We’ll just have the steaks with the mushrooms and we can have the salad at the same time,” she handed me the salad bowl. “There’s just one thing missing,” she cried out. “No candles!”

“There are candles somewhere,” I said and found an old packet among the liquor bottles. When she lit the candles and fixed them in their own wax in ashtrays round the room, she switched off the light. There was hardly need of candles because of the leaping fire which flashed on glass and metal and made the plates glow white.

When I praised the meat she said, “I got it from Janey and Betty’s butcher. They told me he’s expensive but that you can always be certain of him. When I mentioned their names he put down the piece he was going to give me and went back and searched among the hanging pieces in the cold room.”

“So they too knew about the meal,” I said and she felt it as a rebuke for she didn’t answer. This was how quarrels usually began, and I stopped. When it had mattered to me I was never able to stop.

“Did you ever eat by candlelight before?” she asked. “It’s such a lovely light.”

“No,” I lied instantly. “The candles are here since the last blackout.”

“They certainly look it,” everything was running easily again. The candles hadn’t been used since She and I were here before going into the country, the last night we spent here together. The pain of that night still wavered in their flames, but wearily. It was over.

I helped her clear away the plates and we started to kiss after the cheese was brought out.

This time I said, “Why don’t we give the meal a rest? Come back to it.…”

“Why not?”

Between the sheets she said, “I feel marvellous. I don’t know what I was doing all those years, making the nine Fridays, going to the Sodality, out on the streets with the Legion of Mary, always in for nine when my uncle was saying the Rosary. I must have been crazy. Everybody must have been crazy. I was wasting my life and now I am doing what is natural. I don’t feel dirty or sinful or anything. I just feel that I have a great deal of lost living to make up for.”

“Sex is only a small part of living,” I said warily.

“Yes, but what is it without it? I’m crazy about you,” she raised herself so that her body shone above me before she bent to kiss. “I thought of nothing else all week. I wanted the week to run to Saturday night. I’d find my fingers reaching out, and I’d wonder what they were reaching for, and then I’d realize they were reaching for your skin.”

I drew her towards me, “This time we can take all the time in the world,” and when it was over, all the grossness of the food and wine seemed drained away and a peace that was almost purity seemed to settle on what a few moments before had been muscular and wild.

I put more wood on the fire when we rose and drew the cork of another bottle of wine. She lit the candles that had been blown out. They wavered on the half-filled wine glasses, on the Brie and Stilton and Cheddar and water biscuits on the wooden platter.

“This girl,” she said with a pause that I knew to be the pain of jealousy, “this girl, the girl you were in love with, who was she?”

I looked at her, how vulnerable and open the face was. She was going to hurt herself by searching about in a life that no longer existed, that she had been unaware of when it was going on. Crazy as it was, she was determined to cause herself that pain.

“We met much like we met—like most of Ireland meets—at a dance. We went casually out for a year. At first she did most of the running, and when she tired I took up the pursuit. It’s a usual enough pattern. The more I pushed myself on her the more tiresome I became to her, and that speeded up her withdrawal, which made her ten times as attractive. I felt I couldn’t live without her. Which made me ten times as tiresome. I was ill, lovesick, mad. If she’d finished it then it might have been easier, but who knows. She kept the thing going, interested in my madness, which was after all about her, and we can all do with an awful lot of ourselves. I think it nearly turned into a farce in the end.”

“I don’t know how you can call it a farce. It sounds horrible. What’s worst about it is that I wish I had her chance.”

“Marriage to a madman is hardly a recipe for domestic bliss. Because of her interest in this madness about herself I think she nearly fell in love with me. If she’d done that then it’d have been the farce.”

“Isn’t that what you’d want? Isn’t that what everybody wants, two people in love at the same time.”

“It doesn’t work that way. If she had fallen in love with me I think it would have soon cured me of my madness. No world can afford to have all its inmates mad at the same time.”

“You seem to have it all figured out. If I didn’t believe there wasn’t some happiness I don’t know how I’d be able to go on.”

“You would,” I said. “Anyhow it all got too much. She drew the line.”

“I don’t see what’s funny about something as horrible as that. All the sex writing must twist and blind you to everything about love, make it just pure cynical.”

“On the contrary. It clears it out of the way. You learn it has nothing to do with love or living. It’s like sport. Except it’s between the sheets instead of in the gym.”

“Was she younger than you?” she was still biting into herself.

“She was, a few years. Why don’t we go to bed?”

The pain made her look tired and older. “Let’s clear up,” she said. “I hate waking up to a dirty kitchen.”

After we tidied up I fell into a drugged sleep and woke with the splitting headache of a hangover. Later in the morning she asked, “Since it’s Sunday why don’t we spend the day together?”

“I’d love to but I have to work,” and I walked her part of the way to where she lived. It was one of those spring mornings, the sun thawing the white frost out of the front gardens, and people with prayerbooks were going and coming between the Masses.

“Look. We’ll have the whole of next weekend together,” I said as we parted. “What’ll you do for the day?”

“I think I’ll go to Mass like the other people,” she said.

We drove in the stream of traffic out of the city the next weekend. It didn’t build any speed till it got past Lucan, and even there we found ourselves continually shut in behind slow trucks and milk tankers.

“Ireland will soon be as jammed up as everywhere else. That’s what’s wonderful about the rivers and lakes. They’re empty. Isn’t it exciting to be spending the whole weekend away from people?”

“People are all right,” I said morosely.

“There’re towns and villages that we can put in at. That’s what’s wonderful about the Shannon. You have a choice. You can be with people or get away and there’re pubs up lanes or a few fields from the river. There’s one in particular that we must visit in a village past Carrick, the man is fat and lovely and he’s always in good humour.”

After Kinnegad the road emptied and we drove steadily and fast. Outside Longford a great walled estate with old woods stretched away to the left and children from a tinker encampment threw a stone that grazed the windscreen. In the distance, between rows of poplars, the steel strip of the Shannon started to flash.

“There it is—the Shannon River,” she greeted excitedly. “They said they’d meet us in the first bar on the right. That’s it. Over there. The Shannon Pot.”

We had hardly time to look around the big lounge, a large pike preserved in a lighted glass case above the bar, the only sign of a connection with water, when a man in a well-cut worsted suit came up to us and enquired, “Would you be the people from the magazine?” When we told him we were he shook hands in the old courtly way, standing far back and bowing. “Mr Smith, the man who owns the boats, asked me to apologize for him. He meant to be here himself but was called to England the day before yesterday on sudden business, but he said all the information was here in these brochures, and if there was anything else you needed to know for the article to just leave word and he’d phone it in as soon as ever he got back. I’m supposed to see,” he smiled, “that you lack for nothing on the voyage. I’m known everywhere as Michael. And how was your journey down—good?”

“It was easy. We drove down,” I said.

He then introduced us to the barman, a young man in shirtsleeves.

“What about something warm after the journey? The evening is fine but it’s chill enough,” and we all had hot whiskeys. We had hardly touched them when another round appeared without a word, and then another. We started to protest but Michael waved our protest aside as if it was an appreciated but thoroughly unnecessary form of politeness. “We better see the boat first,” I had to say firmly, “then we can come back here.”

“The boat’s just across the road. There’s nothing to it,” he said and led us out.

The boat was across the road, a large white boat with several berths. It had a fridge, a gas stove, central heating and a hi-fi system. The Shannon, dark and swollen, raced past its sides. Night was starting to fall.

“There’s nothing to these boats,” he said and switched on the engine. It purred like a good car, the Fibreglass not vibrating at all once it was running. “And there’s the gears—neutral, forward, neutral, reverse. There’s the anchor. And that’s the story. They’re as simple as a child’s toy. And still you’d grow horses’ ears with some of the things people manage to do to them. They crash them into bridges, get stuck in mudbanks, hit navigation signs, foul the propeller up with nylons, fall overboard. I’ll tell you something for nothing: anything that can be done your human being will do it. One thing you have to give to the Germans though is that they leave the boats shining. They spend the whole of the last day scrubbing up. But do you think your Irishman would scrub up? Not to save his life. Your Irishman is a pig,” he said. Only for the speech I’d not have noticed that he was by no means sober. “I’ve used this type of boat before, Michael,” she interrupted the flow. “They’re a lovely job. But—this shouldn’t have been done. The fridge is full, there’s wine, a bottle of whiskey.…”

“Mr Smith wanted everything to be right for yous. Mr Smith is a gentleman.”

Outside the misted windows the Shannon raced. When I wiped the port window clear the gleam of the water was barely discernible in the last lights.

“What’ll we do?” I asked. “Will we make a start or stay?”

“I’d hoped to make Carrick tonight,” she said.

“I think it’s too late. I think we should stay here tonight and leave at daybreak.”

“It’s the best thing ye can do,” Michael chorused.

I unscrewed the cap from the whiskey bottle in the fridge and poured three whiskeys.

“We’ll just have one drink here with Michael and then we’ll go and get the things out of the car. What kind of man is Mr Smith?’ I asked by way of conversation.

“A gentleman. The English are a great people to spend money. They’re pure innocent. But your Irishman’s a huar. The huar’d fleece you and boast about it to your face. Your Irishman is still in an emerging form of life.” The whiskey was large enough to have lasted a half-hour but he finished it in two gulps. When I poured him another drink he finished it too. Then, in case he’d settle in the boat for the rest of the evening, I suggested we should go back and have a last drink in the pub.

“I’ll stay,” she said as we went to leave. “I’ll check out the things on the boat, see what we need for the night, and I’ll join you later.”

“There’s no beating an intelligent woman,” Michael said as we climbed out of the boat.

“Do you live far from here?” I asked him over the whiskey and chaser I bought him in the bar.

“I’ve a few acres with some steers a mile or two out the road. There’s an auld galvanized thing on the place, and it does for the summer, the hay and that, but in the winter I live on one or other of the boats. It’s in the winter we do up the boats for the summer.”

“Who looks after the cattle?”

“A neighbour. I let him graze a few of his own on it and that keeps him happy. Before the boats started up I used to work here and there at carpentry. The wife was easy-going. She always gave me my head,” he joked since it was plain he had no wife at all.

It was with great difficulty he was prevented from buying her a large brandy when she joined us though she only wanted a soft drink. Afterwards he told us stories, all of them fluent. We only got away early by saying that in order to do the article we had to be on the move at first light. He caught both our hands at the wrist, murmuring, “Good people, good people. The best,” and making us promise several times to see him as soon as we got back. He got unsteadily to his feet to wave, “God bless,” as we went out. We got our things out of the car and went across to the boat.

“Well, that was a bit of local colour to start off with.”

“He was nice enough,” she said, “but he’s spoiled with the tourists.”

I was uneasy when she came into my arms in the boat. There was the pure pleasure of her body in the warmth, the sense of the race of water outside, the gentle resting movements of the boat, but I did not want to enter her.

“Why?” she protested.

“It’s just too dangerous.”

“According to the calendar I am back into the safe days.”

“It’s too risky.”

I felt her stiffen and recoil as I came outside and when I tried to touch her she angrily drew away, “You may be skilful but it’s not skilfulness I need. I would put a little warmth and naturalness and trust ahead of a thousand manuals but obviously that doesn’t rate very high in your book,” and she crossed to the other bunk. I could feel her anger in the close darkness but fought back the desire to appease it. I listened to the simple, swift flow of the water. All over the countryside dogs were barking, the barking starting up at different points, going silent, and then taken up again from a different point, like so many footnotes growing out of a simple text. Suddenly there was a loud banging of car doors, revving engines, horns, indistinct shouts in the night. The bars were closing. I must have been close to sleep for I did not notice her till she was kneeling by the bunk, her lips on mine.

“I’m sorry, love,” she said, “Let’s not do anything to spoil the trip.”

I took her in my arms. “I should be the sorry one. I want to but I’m afraid. In fact, there’s nothing I want more.”

“Goodnight, love. I’ve set the alarm for five.”

“Goodnight,” I said. “I hope you sleep well. You have a hard day tomorrow getting the article together.”

We got the boat away before it was quite light and the early morning mist didn’t look like rising. In the white mist and cold of morning, the boat beating steadily up the centre of the still water, the dead wheaten reeds on either side, occasional cattle and horses and the ghostly shapes of tree trunks and half-branches along the banks, there was a feeling of a dream, souls crossing to some other world. But the grey stone of the bridge of Garrick came solidly towards us out of the mist around eight. We tied the boat up, had a breakfast of fried eggs and bacon and scalding tea in a café by the bridge that had just opened. Afterwards we separated. She went about her business of collecting material for the article. I walked for an hour about the town, bought newspapers, and went back to read them on the boat. Nobody came by until she got back.

“I’m sorry,” she said as she climbed down into the boat.

“I was just reading the papers. Did you get everything you wanted?”

“Everything,” she flipped through notes and showed them like a trophy. “The people were wonderful. In fact, if anything, they were just too co-operative,” she jumped about like a girl. “We’re still ahead of time. In not much more than an hour we’ll be in that village I told you about.”

The wind had risen, blowing the mist away. The fields along the banks were all flooded, the river defined only by its two narrow lines of dead reeds. After about two miles we came out into a large lake, the waves rocking the boat; but when I turned the power up the boat, big enough to be comfortable on the sea, smashed through the waves. It was exciting to feel its chopping power. All this time she worked on her notes in the cabin. On the far side of the lake we joined the river again, passing between a black navigation sign and a red, the banks flooded for miles, the distance between the lines of reeds growing narrow. Soon, across the flooded fields the village came into view, goal posts upright in a football field, smoke rising from a few houses or shops scattered at random round a big bald ugly barn of a church.

“It’s certainly not much to look at,” I said when she came out of the cabin.

“But the fat man is lovely. That’s his bar next to the church, with the smoke rising from the chimneys.”

We tied up the boat at the small stone pier with four metal bollards that made an arm with the stone bridge, flooded fields and woods, another lake shining in the three eyes of its arches in the next distance. We walked to the bar, the village scattered round a single field, no two shops or houses together, all standing away from one another at angles and distances of irreconcilable disagreements.

“Probably half of them aren’t talking,” she laughed. “The fat man says he’d go mad with the boredom except for the boats.”

Because of the talk of his fatness I did not find the man all that fat: he had limp thinning hair, a pleasant red face, and he wore a striped butcher’s apron, the formality of any apron unusual in these villages. Two hatted men nodded drunkenly at the corner of the counter. The man knew her at once, seemed delighted to see her, saying only that she was early this year. He made up delicious ham sandwiches, offered us a choice of coffee or white wine, and refused money for either the coffee or sandwiches. While we ate he sat with us on a heavy ecclesiastical bench that must have come out of some old church. She had several questions to ask him about the river and the trade from the boats, and she wrote down most of his answers. When they’d finished she read back to him what he’d said. While they worked I tried to follow the whispers of the hatted pair at the counter who continually cast spying glances our way but all that came clear from the words and half-phrases was one hoarse whisper, “That’s the answer. Get up early. And you’ll win them all. You’ll bate the whole effin’ lot of them if you get up early.”

All day I’d been seeing a far more attractive person than the woman I had known up till then. For the first time I was seeing her work, and she shone in the distance its discipline made.

We had shared nothing but pleasure, and no two people’s pleasure can be the same at the same time for long, the screw turned tighter till it had to be forced on the wrong threads. If we’d shared some work instead of pleasure would it have made any difference? It didn’t matter, it was ending now, and ending on an older note, one withdrawing before becoming enmeshed in the other, intolerant of all chains but those forged in its own pain.

“What are you thinking?” she asked as we went back down to the boat.

“I was thinking how well you work. That you make notes, write everything down. It’s not that usual. You’d be surprised how many try to get by on that old amateurish flair.”

“I’m grateful for that,” she said gravely.

We hugged the black navigation signs after going through the bridge, a series of barrels between pans set on stone piers. We went faster when we came out into the lake, two small islands to the left, one wooded, the other of pale rocks ringed with reeds, and on the shore a great beech avenue waited for spring as it ran to ruined coach houses. The river was so narrow where it entered the lake that we’d to slow the boat down again to a crawl. The woods were to the left and we could see far into them where a red sun was slipping down between the trunks. The flooded fields were so close beyond the right bank of reeds that we had to move very slowly.

The man was waiting for us at the lock house. It was so long since a boat had gone through that I’d to help turn the wheels that operated the gates while she took the boat up through the lock. For a while it seemed the handle wouldn’t turn but then it gave with a grinding of cog-wheels. When the boat had gone through the lock she joined the lock-keeper to ask him some things for her article, and I went back to the boat. With the water pouring like glass over the wall, then foaming out into the black water where it went still, a broken-down boat-house away in the shallows, the man and woman intent in conversation on the solid arm of the lock gate, and the trees and water held in frost as the light started to fail, the evening seemed so beautiful that it was hard to believe it was real. There had been so many interpretations of beauty as such an evening and scene that it had grown abstract and unreal.

When she joined me again in the boat she closed the notebook triumphantly. “That’s it. All I have to do now is write it. I’ve at least twice as much as I need.”

In ten minutes we were letting the anchor down in a half-moon of a bay, sheltered by old woods. “We must come together sometime in the summer,” she said. “In the summer the whole bay is choked with water-lilies.”

She took lamb chops out of the fridge and I uncorked two bottles of red wine. “I feel we’ve earned this meal,” she said as we kissed. Before she put the chops under the grill she gave herself a quick sponge bath at the other end of the boat and changed into a lovely, clinging brown wool dress. Except for the grey hair and heavy breasts, the naked back was so trim and taut that it might have been the back of a young girl.

“Do you not want to know who I was here with the last time?” she asked.

“Who?” I asked, thinking as I watched her move in perfect ease in half nakedness close to me how far we’d come in bodily intimacy in the few short weeks since the first dancehall night.

“Certainly no man. Those two American girls, Betty and Janey. But it’s far better with a man, especially with you,” she laughed.

I was ravenous even before the meat started grilling, and as soon as I’d eaten, with the early morning on the river, all the raw air of the day, and the red wine, I began to yawn.

“Sleepy?”

“I’m almost dead out.”

“We’ll leave the washing-up till tomorrow.”

It seemed inevitable, it could not be put off now or avoided, and the feeling grew that it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but the tiredness and the desire.

“Are you sure it’s all right?” I made a last fainthearted protest as she came naked into my arms, my body taut with desire.

The next day both of us were grateful for the boat. Getting it back down the river kept us separate and busy.

“What’ll we do about Michael?” she asked in Carrick. “We hardly need another session.”

“We’ll have one drink with him and tell him we must get away.”

When next we met she had given in the written article.

“Walter’s delighted with it. It’s going into the next issue.” I read it in the upstairs lounge of the Green Goose, while she sipped nervously at her drink, and watched my face greedily. It read quickly, was full of useful things for anybody going on the river, and almost off-handedly caught something of the very withdrawnness of inland waters.

“It’s no wonder Walter is pleased,” I handed her back the typescript, and we went back to the flat that evening.

“I can’t see you this weekend,” I said close to morning, before she could press me for a meeting. “My aunt is out of hospital. I have to go down to see her.”

“I might as well go down the country too,” she said. “My sister has adopted a second child. I’ve been promising for a long time to go down to see her. I’d only spend the whole weekend moping if I stayed in Dublin. When will we meet when you get back?”

“Wednesday,” I was determined to finish the whole affair. “We can meet in the Green Goose at eight on the Wednesday.”

“I don’t like the pub,” she said.

“We can just meet there and go some place else if we want to after.”

“How is the pain? You’re looking far better than in the hospital,” I lied uneasily to my aunt when I went down to see them that weekend.

“The pain’s there. I don’t know if it’ll go. I just pray. And I take the brandy. It’s all that does any good.”

“I brought two bottles. They’re two different brands.”

“Thanks,” she said. “Will you have a small drop with me?”

While we were drinking she went into the cold pantry where I remembered rabbits and game birds hanging before roasting, and I heard her drink on her own. She brought out a plate of lamb chops. After the secret drink she was relaxed and started to prepare me a meal. While I was eating, the hall door opened and she went still to listen. “It’s Cyril,” she whispered, and started to tidy away the glasses. “Say nothing about the brandy. He’s against taking the brandy for the pain. He says I should take the pills instead.”

I listened to his feet come up the hallway. The loose brass knob of the door rattled as it opened. The handsome face had coarsened but the hairline was the same, oiled and parted in the centre. He’d been drinking.

“Well, if it’s not our friend from the city, eating like a king,” he said sarcastically.

“Cyril,” she warned sharply but he ignored her.

The silver cups and medals of his footballing days shone on the dark sideboard, in the small coffin-like mirrors. I got up from the table.

“I didn’t mean to disturb you,” he said. “I meant for you to go on eating.”

“You didn’t disturb me,” I said.

I saw her eyes plead: be easy with him, he doesn’t know what he does, be easy with me.

“And did you find your aunt that loves you so dearly all right?”

“She seems improved.”

“She seems improved. She’s improved when she’s half-crazed with brandy. Nobody will tell the truth. It’s pills she should be taking not the brandy. They’re far better than the brandy and a damned sight cheaper. You might see that I’ve even taken to a little drinking myself.”

“I can see that,” I said, and for a moment it looked as if he was about to hit me.

I thought I might see her cower by the stove, but instead she stood at her full height, all her thought for him. “Cyril’s upset that it’s taking me so long to get better, when we just have to be patient,” she said as if she was straightening his tie.

“I have to go to see the boss,” I said. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

“We’ll see you in an hour, so,” they both said, his aggression gone.

She followed me to the door, “Don’t mind what he said. Cyril doesn’t mean what he says. It just flashes out. And you’ll not forget to come back?” she seized me by the arm.

“I’ll be back,” I said as we quickly kissed.

She mumbled something like. “God bless you,” as I walked quickly towards the car.

The mill was four or five miles outside the town, towards the mountains. All the woods that had once surrounded the mill had been cut down. The new woods on the lower slopes of the mountains hadn’t matured yet, so most of the timber had to be brought in. As I drew close to the mill I saw my uncle high on the back of a big truck, unloading pine trunks with a lift, the iron fingers jerking down to fasten about the trunks before swinging them free. As I drew closer I could feel the spring of years of sawdust beneath my feet and the sharp sweet smell of fresh resin. My uncle waved to me but continued unloading the truck. Away at the mill proper—a large crude shed of timber and galvanized iron—I saw Jim getting a trunk into position on the rollers. From one of the smaller sheds came the harsh, brutal clanging sound of a saw sharpening.

Having unloaded all the pine trunks and turned the engine off, my uncle stretched out his hand. “You’re welcome,” as slow and confident here as he was dwarfed in the city.

“Things are going well,” I gestured toward the sheds and saws.

“Well, not too bad. The price of timber keeps going up, but that doesn’t bother us. We just shove up our prices as well, we’re not behind in that,” he laughed. “Are you down for long?”

“Just for a few hours. I have to be back.”

“And you’ve seen the patient?”

“I’ve just come from there. Cyril has a few over the top.”

“I never see him any other way. I was thinking if things get much worse I might even move out to your place?”

“You don’t have to ask me that. You can move any time you want.”

“I know that,” he said with feeling.

“Would you be able to manage?”

“The house is in perfect shape. I could move in tomorrow as far as the house goes.”

“How’d you manage the cooking for yourself?”

“I’d not cook,” he started to laugh. “There are restaurants in the town. What do you think I did when your aunt was in the hospital? I got all my meals in Caffrey’s. Any fool can get a bit of breakfast for himself!”

“Why don’t you move, then?”

“Well, I wouldn’t like to just now,” he said awkwardly. “Your aunt might think I was moving out on her. Are you going out to take a look at your own place at all?”

“I suppose I might as well. John Hart still has the grass?”

He nodded, “John Hart is all right. If you put it up for bidding you might get a few more pounds, but someone might come and eat the heart out of it. You’ll be down soon again?” he had work to do.

“If I go to see the place I’ll not have time to see her, and I promised her that I’d go back. But will you just tell her that I ran out of time—that I’ll be down again very soon.”

“I’ll tell her,” he nodded. “You might as well go over and have a few words with Jim before you go or we’d never hear the end of it. He’s not been in the best of humour this weather either.”

“Well, how are things in the big smoke?” Jim greeted.

“The same as usual,” I said, and we talked that way.

“I suppose you’ll want to be off,” he was the first to change. “Your uncle will have been glad to see you. He’s not been in the best of humour lately.”

I drove straight out to the house. There were several signs of recent fires having been lit all through the house. New firebricks had been put in the grate of the Stanley cooker in the kitchen and the stone floor had been swept. Except for flaking paint on the wall it looked as if it had been prepared for someone to move in.

I had so lost connection with the house and fields that I felt I was walking through a graveyard. For the first time I thought that except for my uncle I’d be glad to sell it.

I felt easier outside in the fields, the crowns of the lime trees, the glint of water through the moss-grown orchard, and the mountains beyond. In the fields down by the lake I met John Hart. He had a cattle cane and hat and collar and tie. He obviously did no other work except look after dry cattle now.

At the end of the formal pleasantries he started to complain of the lack of young people in the countryside.

“The only person I see regular around is your uncle, more than I used ever see him. Only last week I was passing the house, after cattle just like I am now, and I saw smoke and happened to look in. And there he was, sitting in the rocking chair, looking into the big fire. He never even noticed me at the window.”

As I took leave of John Hart and what he told me, I thought how sure and well people act in their instinct. Sensing an approaching death, my uncle was already beating himself a path to a new door.

I went early to the Green Goose and waited for her beneath the red and green peacocks’ eyes.

She looked harassed when she came, as if she hadn’t been sleeping much.

“How did your weekend go?” I asked when I’d got drinks.

“It was awful. I suppose the worst was nothing had changed. My sister has her two children. She is happy. Now that she is, her husband’s handicap will fall by two strokes. In the evening Father Paul came in from the Augustinians. He was so glad to see me. He joked about me getting married soon, that I must hurry, since he wanted to be the priest at the wedding. We drank too much sherry. And suddenly we both found ourselves crying in front of the fire. He asked me if I had someone I was interested in and I told him about you. I told him that you didn’t love me,” there were tears in her eyes.

“It sounds pretty grim.”

“What right have you to say that?”

“No right. And I’m sorry. It’s what I want to talk about.”

“This is all I need tonight!”

“We only know each other a few weeks, and things are happening far too fast for me. I’m fond of you,” I could hear the lie slithering on the surface of thin ice. “But I’m not in love with you. I want us to call a halt, for a time anyhow, to these regular meetings.”

“I see you have it all worked out, just like one of your plots.”

“I haven’t it all worked out, but I want to give it a rest. We’ll drop it for a month or so and see how we feel then. And for that time both of us are free.”

“But I love you.…”

“If you love me, then surely you can do that much for a month.”

“You’re letting nothing through and you can really swing them.”

“Swing what?”

“Reasons. Figures. You have it all figured out, haven’t you? There’s hardly need to even talk.”

“I want to rest it for a month,” I said doggedly.

“It’ll be no different in a month.”

“We’ll see.”

“I feel I have enough love for the both of us to begin with. It’s that horrible stuff you’re writing that has you all twisted and unnatural. I’d care so much for you. There’s so many other decent natural things you could do.”

“I suppose I could run a health food shop or a launch on the Shannon River,” I said angrily.

“You don’t understand. I love you. I only want the best for you.”

“Well then, the best for me is that we agree not to see one another for a month.”

“I don’t suppose there’s any use suggesting that we go back to your place and talk about it.”

“No. There’s no use. You know what that’ll lead to, and we’ll be only deeper and deeper in.”

“There was a time when you were anxious enough for that,” it was her turn to be angry.

“We both were. I’ll get a taxi for you or I’ll walk you home. Whichever you prefer.”

“Walk me home,” she said.

“I’m grateful, even flattered by your love. But you can’t do the loving for the both of us,” I said to her at the gate.

“O boy,” she said bitterly. “I waited long enough to sure pick a winner,” and I shook her hand and left before she began to cry.

I too had stood mutilated by another gate, believing that I could not live without my love; but we endure, as the first creature leaving water endured, having first tried to turn back from the empty land. Having drunk from the infernal glass we call love and knowing we have lived our death, we turn to love another way, in the ordered calm of each thing counted and loved for its impending loss. We learn to smile.

There was no smiling, nothing but apprehension when a telegram came several days later. Please ring me, and it gave her office number. The worst rose easily enough to mind, that maybe this time nothing as simple as a death was in question. A life might have started. I rang her from the kiosk at the bottom of the road. As the girl on the switchboard tried to get her I could hear the clatter of typewriters.

“I got your telegram,” I said.

“Thank God you rang. I didn’t know what to do.”

“Is something wrong?”

After a long pause she breathed, “There sure is.”

“Are there many people that can overhear you?”

“The whole office—thirty or forty.”

“Is it that you’re … late?”

“Right.”

“How long?”

“Five days.”

“I’ll meet you after work, then. You get out at five?”

“I can leave just before.”

“Meet me at five, then. At the Liffey Bookshop. Round the corner from O’Connell Street, facing the river.”

“I know it,” she said. “I’ll be there at five.”

I was fingering through the boxes of second-hand books displayed outside when she came, taking in nothing but the discoloured spines, once red and grey and blue and brown.

For once she said nothing, swallowing slightly. There were tear-stains on her face, and I feared she was about to start to cry again. “We’ll cross to the river. That way we’ll get out of the rush,” I said, the pavement round us starting to swarm. We began to walk slowly away from the city, out towards Kingsbridge.

“It’s so good to see you,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do. Yesterday evening I must have walked seventeen times by your place, but I was afraid to go in. I’m sorry,” she wiped away tears with her handkerchief.

“There’s no need to cry. I’m not running out on you. If you’re pregnant, then we’re in this together.”

She leaned across and kissed me, “I knew you were a good person. Deep down I knew I could trust you. I didn’t know what I’d do after that last evening. I couldn’t get through to you at all. It was like speaking to a stranger. You seemed determined to let nothing past you. And then I was late. You can imagine what I felt then, and I’ve always been regular as clockwork. It was like one nightmare followed by another. I thought I was going crazy. I think I would have too, except deep down, somehow, I knew I could trust you.”

“Anyhow I’m here. Is it all right if we walk out towards Kingsbridge, just to get away from this crazy rush hour? We’ll have to talk things out.”

“Anywhere you want,” she took my arm.

Her face had completely cleared, and she was smiling now through brimming eyes. It was as if she’d put all her money on red and the wheel had just stopped and red had won. Below the rounded granite of the wall, the Liffey lay at low tide, two ungainly swans paddling about among the noisy gulls on a mudbank beneath the trickle from an effluent. The small plane trees in their irons along the path were putting out the first leaves.

“We won’t have a white wedding,” she said. “White is to signify virginity, and I’m hardly a virgin. One person who’ll be thrilled is Father Paul, the Augustinian I told you about who came in when I was down with my sister. He’s known me since I was a little girl. When he left there were tears in his eyes, and he put his two hands on my shoulders, it seems now he must have sensed or known something, for he said I was made for loving and children. One day soon he’d have to see me married. He’ll marry us. You’ll like him, and I know he’ll like you. I won’t need to get any clothes. The plain blue costume will do. And that grey suit of yours will be fine, with the wine tie. We won’t have more than half a dozen people each, and we’ll go to a good restaurant, Bernardoes or Quo Vadis, not to an hotel. I suppose I’ll have to have my sister and her husband, and poor Walter from the magazine, he’ll be so surprised, and the two American girls, Betty and Janey. We won’t have a Protestant family. I’m not so old that I can’t have two or three more children yet.”

A cold sweat broke out over me as I traced my own place in her words: the grey suit, the church, her friend the boozy priest, her doting face above me, “This is what I need,” as I place the gold ring on mother’s finger, and afterwards the prawns, the long-stemmed wine glasses, the toasts, each cliché echoing its own applause, the laughter, “We are no common crowd.…”

At each bus stop she released my arm as we walked on the concrete high above the filthy river and seized it again as soon we got past each queue. If I had got my love pregnant she would have walked beside me in this same misery, and I, released from suffering, would have no hint of it in my gross triumph. I, too, busy with my sudden reprieve, would be making similarly hurried arrangements for the funeral of her singleness.

At Kingsbridge we crossed from the river pavement and went into Phoenix Park. “No Protestant family”, four long summers swelling by my side, and the lawnmower and conversations across the new back gardens.

“You’d get a job. There are several jobs you’d get. And you’d not have to write pornography any more. I can see it’s affecting you for the worse in every way. And I’d get a whopping great gratuity from the bank after all these years that’ll keep us till you get a job, even until the child is born. The only demand I’d make is that you give up Mavis—what’sher-name—Carmichael? Otherwise I’d be a compliant wife, an old-fashioned wife.”

We sat on a green bench deep in the Park. It was beautiful. The daffodils and narcissi were out and the first small hearts of the leaves. In the far distance beyond the white railing men on horses were lining up before the start of a polo match.

“We have to talk,” I said.

“I love you so much. All this I feel can have only happened for the best. I know we’ll be very happy. I’ll make you happy.”

“The first thing we have to find out is—are you pregnant or not?” I had to say it brutally for it to get through.

“I’ve never missed before.”

“That’s no way to be certain. You’ll have to take a test.”

“What sort of test?”

“A urine test. We’ll have to get a sample of your urine first thing in the morning, and have it analysed. They inject it into an animal and if it comes out positive then you’re pregnant.”

“You seem to know an awful lot about this. As if you’ve been through it all before.”

“I haven’t. You don’t have to be through everything to know about it. It’s just one of the side benefits of writing pornography, you have to know all the facts, even the ones you don’t use.”

“Won’t we get married, even if I’m not pregnant?” she suddenly said.

“Are you crazy?” it was the first time I looked her full in the face. “I’m not running out. And I will marry you—if I have to, if there’s no other way out. But the first thing you have to do is to take the test.”

“O boy, Ο boy, I sure picked a winner.”

I turned away and dug nails into my hands. If she said Ο boy once more I wasn’t sure I’d be able to hold myself in check.

“We might as well go for a drink or something to eat,” I said, and we both rose from the bench. The polo game was now on, the horses with their white-breeched riders racing backwards and forwards beyond the paling. A car with a school of motoring sign went slowly past, a young woman tensely upright at the wheel, the instructor slumped by her side.

“Stout and a sandwich would suit me better than a proper meal. What about you?” I didn’t feel like eating at all.

“Anything. Anything you like. I know everything is all right now,” she took my arm.

We walked further out, as far as the Angler’s Rest, facing the Park Wall. They served beef and cheese sandwiches.

“Last Sunday was the worst day. I hadn’t heard from you, and I hadn’t yet got up enough courage to send you the telegram. I went out to Betty and Janey’s place for lunch. Afterwards we sat around and read all the Sunday papers. There was this article in the Observer, about unmarried girls in England who’d got pregnant … did you see it?”

“No.”

“Many of them were Irish, and there was this peach of an Irishman too, who got his English girl friend pregnant. When she told him she was, do you know what he said—it’s hardly believable—‘You can keep your baggage here, then, in this heathen country. I’m heading back for the auld sod.’ I must have turned beetroot. I felt Betty and Janey could see through me as I read. I left the flat as soon as I could. They wanted to drive me but I said I needed to walk. As soon as I got out of sight of the flat I turned and went down to the sea. I stood on the rocks and thought I’m one of those girls now. I couldn’t believe it. I watched the waves come into the rocks. There was one big ship far out. And I wanted to walk out into the water, and farther and farther out until the waves would cover me.”

“Anyhow, you sent the telegram and you’re here.”

“We might as well go back to your place. We have nothing to lose now,” she said later, at the end of the evening in which nothing had been resolved, everything having grown, if anything, more blurred, fear and shame and dismay and revulsion following one another like the revolving lights that coloured the darkness for the slower dances in the ballroom where we’d first met.

“We’ll not go back tonight. We might as well make certain whether you’re pregnant or not. I’ll find out about the test. And I’ll meet you after work tomorrow evening, same as we met this evening.”

She was probably right—there was nothing to lose now. I had been careless and stupid, and stupidity is the one thing you’re certain to be punished for, we’d been told it often enough; and here I was being scrupulous in the eye of the disaster, when it was certainly far too late to make a difference.

“I could sure do with some loving tonight,” the pleasure was now free that had been so dearly paid for.

“We’ll leave it for tonight,” I felt sick. “We’ll make certain first.”

“It’s not very long since you were eager enough.”

“There’s nothing I’d like more,” and except to be free altogether it was true, to take this strong woman’s body and enter into it in rage. Nature has many weathers for drawing us within her gates.

“Then what have we to lose?”

“We’ll find out first,” and she began to cry.

“Look,” I rocked her. “We’re in this together. I’m not running out on you or anything. We’ll find out first. And then we’ll see where we’ll go.”

“I’m sorry,” she was smiling through her tears. “I’m happy now. I somehow know everything’ll be all right now.”

“We’ll get a taxi.”

Sleepless, as when I’d been in love, images came to plague me, and they would not leave me. What were once the images of loss became the images that enmesh and fester round a life.

There was a semi-detached house at the head of one of the roads around the Green Goose, shrubbery just beginning to appear above the front garden walls, two iron gates, concrete to the garage door. The roof was red-tiled and the walls were pebble-dashed. A lighted bell above the letter box went ding-dong. Behind the house, on either side of a thin concrete footpath, the long, competing back gardens ran to the glass-topped wall: a piece of lawn, some roses, a cabbage patch, rhubarb, cold frames for early lettuce, raspberry canes that needed cutting back, two apple trees that every year brought vandals. The narrow kitchen was up a step from the back garden, the formica-topped breakfast table, the radio, the clock, the whirring fridge. A carpeted room wasn’t far away. There was a solid table and chairs for compulsory entertaining, some books on shelves, a drinks cabinet, a tiled fireplace, a TV set. Upstairs two cupids kept blissful watch above the double bed and waiting carry-cot. The curtains that hid the road were hung and frilled. Swelling by my side she’d yawn Ο boy before she’d kiss and drill. And proudly, stretching towards the line and beaming benediction on the whole setup, she’d hang out her brand-washed flags as good as any.

When I had cried I cannot live without you, I had cried against the loss of a dream, and believed it was worse than death, since it could not find oblivion. I had thought no suffering could be worse. I was wrong.

I had gone in and suffered, when it was clear my love could not be returned, like the loss of my own life in the other. This now was worse. The Other would now happily lose her life in me and I would live the nightmare. It would be worse than loss. It would be a lived loss, and many must have been caught this way and made to live it.

I called up Peter White, a doctor, a friend from university. We had met fairly frequently for a few years after graduating, to go to pubs and the theatre and once to a rugby international against Scotland at Murrayfield. I had been at his wedding, and afterwards the meetings naturally dwindled, and then stopped. Calling him up out of the past was like calling up a ghost. There are more awkwardnesses than with a total stranger because of the dead barrier of memory.

He seemed pleased enough to hear from me. I suppose there is always excitement—even when it is unpleasant—when the pall of everyday is torn away.

“I’m afraid it does me no credit,” I explained. “I’m looking for something. And I didn’t know who else to turn to.…”

“What is it?”

“Well, it’s not money!” I prevaricated.

“We could even manage a little of that,” his easy ironical laugh brought easy idle evenings vividly back, mockingly now.

“I may well be in trouble, may well have got a woman pregnant.”

“How did you manage that?”

“Are there two ways?” I countered defensively. “I hate asking you this, but how do you go about getting this test done —to know for certain.”

“I can take care of that for you.”

“But I don’t want that.”

“It’s no trouble. I can get it done at the hospital,” and he gave instructions for getting the urine sample and we arranged to meet late the next evening in O’Neill’s of Suffolk Street when I’d bring him the sample. Often we conceal our motives from ourselves. I had rung him instead of ringing any anonymous doctor because I was now looking for allies.

Spring was late, and when it came it was more like early summer. Fairview Park was full of flowers and young men, their trousers tucked into socks, kicking footballs under the greening trees, using their cast-off clothes to mark the goals. I had played with them once. They were mostly apprentice barmen on their day off. Corporation workmen started to assemble scaffolding and ladders and then to paint the bandstand. As I went to meet her, the faintest tang of the spring tides was getting through the city dump and the car fumes. Because of the angle at which I saw the world, the good weather was getting on my nerves.

“It’s very simple,” I explained to her when we met that evening in the Green Goose. “You take the urine sample first thing in the morning. All you have to be careful of is that the container is sterilized.”

“It’s as simple as that?”

“As simple as that.”

The edge had nothing to do with the simple test. It just focused on it because it was nearest, as edges do.

“Life is very simple for you, isn’t it?”

“No, but some things in it are. It’s bad enough without complicating the simple things.”

“How complicated?” she challenged angrily.

“The test will tell me for certain whether you’re pregnant or not. If you’re not, then there’s no trouble.”

“There’s a test for love and life as well?”

“There’s generally no need. They’re too obvious.”

“So a test will tell me what I already know full well?”

“No. It’s only fifty-fifty at the most you’re pregnant,” edge was meeting edge. “Stress can cause you to miss. Disturbance can. The very idea that you might be pregnant can. Only the test will tell us for certain.”

“Where did you learn all this?”

“The doctor. He’s agreed to do it,” I was blind now. “Ease up. I don’t even have to be here. You wouldn’t use contraceptives. You said you were sure it was safe. All you did was lie on your back and get pregnant.”

“And you had nothing got to do with it?”

“Sure I had. I was stupid. And I’m paying for it now by being here.”

We’d been drawn so much into the heat of the quarrel that it had been forgotten that a few early evening people were around us in the Goose. It was when she began to cry that I noticed they were all staring our way.

“If you don’t stop you’ll get us into trouble here. Why don’t we go?”

“All right. We’ll go,” she said, and as we left I thought I heard a shout behind us from one of the tables, but I did not look back.

Out in the car park, the metal goose hanging still on its arm in the calm and lovely evening, I said, “I’m sorry. Would you like to go some other place? Would you like to go and eat a decent meal, with wine?”

“I’m sorry too,” she was smiling when she dried her eyes. “What I’d like to do is go back to your place. We can talk in peace there.”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to go to a decent restaurant?”

“I’m certain,” she said and took my arm. “And don’t worry, love. I know everything is going to work out fine.”

“How do you make out that?” I asked.

“Because,” she said, “because both of us are good people.”

Peter White was waiting for me at the bar and I handed him the sample as soon as we met, “Just to get it over with.”

“I’ll take care of it,” he put it in his pocket. “It’s no trouble. I’ll have the result in two days’ time. By the way, Mary sent her regards, and asked if you could come to dinner on Saturday. I should have the result for you by then.”

“I’ll be glad to but there’s no need. Is there any way I can pay you?”

“No. I’m a sort of big wheel now, a consultant. I can get it done at the hospital. I’m only sorry that you should be in this fix.” His clothes were careful, as I suppose they had always been, but expensive too.

“I’m sorry it’s over this we should meet,” I began, but his directness saved me embarrassment.

“What’ll you do if she is pregnant?”

“Do you really think there’s a fifty-fifty chance she’s not?” I couldn’t resist clutching at the straw.

“At least that, but then there’s no problem. What’ll you do if it turns out that she is?”

“I suppose I’ll have to marry her.”

“Why?”

“It’s the last thing I want to do, but I can’t very well ditch her.”

“Where did you meet?”

“At a dance.”

“Did you make her any promises?”

“None. We only met a little over a month ago. If she wanted to do it, fair enough, I wanted to too, that was all there was to it. She wouldn’t allow contraceptives but she always said it was safe. It didn’t turn out that way.”

“Whether she knew it or not she wanted to get pregnant. Why would you marry her?”

“She wants me to. She says she loves me. And she’s worked at this bank for twenty years. She gets so much of a marriage gratuity for every year she’s worked, so it’s quite large. She’d get that much money if I married her. She doesn’t get a penny if she just has to resign.”

“But have you any fondness for her? Has the marriage any chance of working out?”

“None. I’d only marry her till the child came. Then I’d leave.”

“Why marry then?”

“That way it’d seem I was the bastard. She’d get protection. I’d take the rap. It’s the only condition I’d marry on, that I’d be free to leave as soon as it was over.”

“Then you must be a younger man than I think you are. You don’t marry people on conditions. You either marry them or you don’t marry them. What’s wrong with the situation now, from her point of view, is that it’s outside the law. By marrying her you put it inside and she’s protected in all sorts of ways.”

“What’d stop me from walking out?”

“You’d be walking out on a new wife, a child. You’d be walking out on the law. It’d be a far greater mess all round. She may agree to it now but will she agree to it then?”

“What’s to happen to her?”

“I think you have to help her in every way you can, but that stops far short of marrying her.”

“You think then I won’t have to marry her?” it was like grasping for pure joy.

“Unless you want to get yourself into a far greater mess.”

I was set free. The wild inner hope had been given solid sanction from outside. All things are relative. I could not have known such happiness if I had not lived for days with the nightmare. I was so happy that I was careless that my rich prize was won from her ruin.

“We’ll have another drink.”

“What do you do now? Are you still with that agency?” he asked.

“No. I gave that up. I write pornography.”

“You write pornography?” his clean-cut features, boyish still beneath the straight black hair, mirrored all the shades between incredulity and amazement.

“That way I don’t have to go into the agency. I don’t get all that much money but I get paid enough.”

“This is too rich. You’re getting elderly girls pregnant and writing pornography. It’s too much,” his bellow of helpless laughter attracted attention all around the bar. “What is the pornography like?”

“It’s heartless and it’s mindless and it’s a lie. I’m stuck with it and I’m sick of it, a cold anvil that has to be beaten,” I began.

“Anyhow we’ll see you for dinner Saturday, though we may well have to fumigate the place afterwards,” he said as we parted.

“What did you do for the evening?” I asked her when we met.

“I just moped,” she answered. “There was a time when everything was certain. I knew exactly where I was going, everything I was doing. Everything had a purpose then, but since I met you everything gets more and more mixed-up.”

“I gave the doctor the sample. We should know for certain by Saturday.”

“What’ll we know for certain?”

“Whether you’re pregnant or not.”

“I know I am.”

“If you’re not,” I said determinedly, “we’ll go out and celebrate. We’ll have the biggest, most expensive, drunkennest meal in Dublin,” and, I thought silently, we’ll get to hell out of one another’s lives for ever.

“What’ll we do then?”

“We’ll both be free.”

“And what if the test is positive?”

“There’s no use thinking about that now. We’ll know soon enough.”

“I don’t see what’s wrong with getting married. I know we’d be happy.”

What was her meat was my poison. The trouble with the old clichés was that they were all true and turned up for their renewal.

“We’ll have to face into that in two days’ time.”

“But will we be married?”

“If we have to,” I said quickly. “I won’t be able to see you tomorrow evening. I have to have dinner with this doctor and his wife tomorrow evening.”

“I’ll go to dinner with Betty and Janey then. They rang today to see if I’d have dinner at their place. I told them I’d wait till I saw you. I think they must know that something’s wrong.”

“Did you tell them anything?”

“No. I was going to but I didn’t. Will we go back tonight?”

“We’ll wait till Sunday. We’ll know for certain what we’ve let ourselves in for.”

“I can do with Sunday coming. I find my hands all the time stretching out for you. I could do with holding your body for the whole of a whole week.”

I brought champagne and whiskey and a sheaf of yellow roses to the dinner.

“What did you want to bring all this for?” Peter White asked sharply in the hallway.

“I feel it’s the least I could bring. Turning up on such an errand after all these years.”

“To pay your way?” he said sarcastically.

“Something like that.”

“Well, thanks, but it’s too much. I’m afraid it has no influence on your news though. The test was positive.”

I waited, empty, feeling it sink like a stone to the bottom of the emptiness, come up again like mud.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“That means she’s pregnant?”

“The test has a two per cent margin of error, but if I were you I’d take it that she is pregnant.”

“Somehow I never had much hope that it’d turn out any other way.”

His wife came in. She had on a white apron with a recipe for steak au poivre in black print across the front. She seemed prettier than when they’d married. We shook hands and she praised the roses.

“Did you tell?” she asked Peter.

“The news is bad,” I answered for him. “It’s a mess.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s going to be a problem.”

“We’ll have plenty of time to go into it at dinner. What’ll we have to drink?”

She had a dry sherry. He and I had whiskey. A log fire blazed behind the wire screen over the white marble fireplace. Persian rugs were scattered about the polished wood of the floor. Three places were set at the head of the long table, silver candlesticks down its centre. The heavy velvet curtains drawn the whole length of one wall gave a feeling that all the unpleasantness of the world lay arctic wastes away outside.

“It’s quite lovely,” I said. “It speaks of comfort and money.”

“Is it that vulgar?” he fenced.

“It’s not vulgar at all. It’s lovely, as money is. It gives me the feeling of luxury and protection.”

“Peter is still defensive,” she smiled. “He feels like that about everything in life, that he shouldn’t have it, but I’m quite used to it.”

She withdrew and came back ten minutes later with three bowls of mushroom soup, on which sprigs of parsley floated. When the bowls were gathered away she carried in a roast chicken on a platter.

“It was a lot of work,” I said to her.

“A girl comes in. Kitty. I let her home early this evening.”

“Don’t laugh,” Peter said, switching on an electric carving knife. “I feel ridiculous with this thing but it works.”

“What do you think it’s best to do?” I began as soon as we’d started to eat. I was anxious not to put it off for any longer. It was as if I knew that my fate in the sad business would be decided here most favourably. She looked towards him but he kept his eyes on his plate. “You have to think of the woman and more especially the child,” she said.

“I’m prepared to marry her if there’s no other way out.”

“That’s not on,” he said, “since you’re only prepared to marry her and then leave her. You’d only be walking out on a far greater mess.”

“Why would he leave her?”

“Because I couldn’t stand living with her. I’d marry her only so that I’d be seen to take the blame for the whole business.”

“But you must have been fond of her in order for what has happened to happen?”

“No. I wanted to sleep with her.”

“To do that you must have given her something to go on?”

“I never told her that I loved her or promised her anything. I suppose it’s the only saving feature now.”

“For God’s sake,” he said. “You don’t have to love someone or even to be fond of them to want to fuck with them!”

Her very silence was a rebuke as she rearranged her knife and fork.

“What does she want?” she pursued.

“She wants to marry me.”

“Does she know that you don’t love her?”

“She doesn’t mind that. She says she has enough love for the both of us.”

He groaned but she ignored it. “Why weren’t contraceptives used?”

“She said they weren’t natural, that they turned the whole thing into a farce. Every time she said it was safe according to the calendar. It didn’t turn out that way.”

“She was using the Boles Method, no doubt. There’s a fool of a gynaecologist in the hospital, a staunch Catholic, and a great Boles man. In this last experiment more women got pregnant using the Boles Method than no method at all. The woman obviously wanted to get pregnant. I see it every day in the hospital. Time running out? Get pregnant, and it’ll be taken care of. Bored with life? Get pregnant, and it’ll stir things up. Not getting enough attention? Get pregnant, and it’ll bring an overdose of attention. Hit me now with the child in my arms,” he laughed jeeringly.

“The girl or woman probably didn’t get pregnant deliberately. She’ll suffer for it now anyhow,” his wife said.

“If you can tell where instinct ends and consciousness begins you’ll make all our fortunes. Here. Hold on to your seat belts,” he said as he set the carving knife whirring. “I’ll carve you a second helping of instinct any day of the week,” and he poured what was left of the Moselle.

“All this riding of hobby horses isn’t getting us anywhere,” she said calmly.

“Right,” he said. “She can have an abortion.”

“Not here,” she reminded.

“London’s only an hour away. There’s a good clinic in Woodford. She can be back at work in three days. It’s expensive. That’s all.”

“She’d never agree to it,” I said.

“You can’t force her to have an abortion,” his wife said. “It’s probably her last chance to have a child at her age. If she were to have an abortion it’s very unlikely she’d be able to conceive again afterwards.”

“Then, if she won’t agree to the abortion, she can have the child and put it up for adoption.”

“What if she didn’t want to have it adopted once she had it?”

“You’d have to cross that bridge when you reach it. She’d be pleasing herself then, wouldn’t she? She’d be on on her own after that point. But up to there, to my mind, you’ll have to give her all the help you can.”

“Dublin is too small a place for her to have the child, with her kind of family,” I probed.

“It probably is. London would probably be the easiest place all round, but again that’s for her to decide.”

“Is marriage completely out?” she asked.

“If abortion is out for her, marriage is out for him,” he said.

“It sounds horribly logical.” I didn’t care to see it so brutally.

“Life isn’t simply a logical business,” she said.

“No,” he said. “It’s not logical, but it’d be a damned sight worse without some attempt to make sense of it.”

When we rose, she said that Kitty would clear the table in the morning. He and I had large brandies. She had nothing.

By the time I left I no longer felt the vulnerable single person that has to take on suffering and death. We upholster ourselves.

She looked at me when we met under Clery’s clock on the Sunday. “It’s bad news,” I said. “The test was positive. It’s almost certain that you’re pregnant.”

“Now we’re really in it,” she said without seeming to realize anything of the words, and stood silent, as if gathering the knowledge within her, the way I’d seen her stand as if to collect herself before getting into bed for the first time, the way I must have stood when I first heard the test was positive.

“The doctor and his wife were very good. They’ll give us all the help they can. They said the first thing to consider is an abortion. They can arrange it, perfectly legally.”

“Would you agree to that?” she asked indignantly.

“Of course I would but it’s not my decision. You have to decide that.”

“To take a small life, and have it killed. Of course we’d get off scot-free. But how could we live with ourselves again?”

“That wouldn’t bother me. It’s not my decision though.”

“I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t live with myself if I did that.”

“Well then, if an abortion is out marriage is even more out.”

“Why?”

“I’d be only marrying you because you’re pregnant.”

“Those sort of marriages are often the happiest. I know at least three.”

“This couldn’t. I’d only marry to cover for you.”

“You’d change when you saw the child.”

“No. I wouldn’t change. I’d leave as soon as you had the child. We talked about it. They said that if I was certain the marriage had no chance—and I am certain it hasn’t—it’d only be a far bigger mess when it happened than if we never married.”

“Of course, they’re your friends,” she said bitterly.

“In a sense, they are, but I think they’d have said the same to any couple. It comes down to whether the marriage has a chance or not. The child makes no difference.”

“The child, of course, has no rights?”

“It will have, but that has nothing to do with it. The marriage is between you and me. If it’s not going to work without the child it won’t work with the child.”

“Do these people know our ages?”

“They do and they think that’s not important either, if everything else is all right.”

“I know those sort of people. They live in their comfortable houses. They have planned families. They have everything figured out; and yet they die.”

“We all die.”

“You have everything figured out too.”

“It may be bad enough with thinking but it’d be a damned sight worse just following your nose,” I heard my own voice echo Peter White’s.

“Stop it,” she said. “Stop it or I’ll scream.”

We’d crossed the bridge, and turned down Burgh Quay. Rows of people waited for buses the other side of the quay but the river path was empty. Below us the Liffey at low tide lay oily and still in the warm evening. I stood beside the granite wall and waited. Her distress was so great that it hid her beauty, as it would ugliness, had she been ugly. For a wild moment I wanted to say, “I was only testing you. Don’t worry. Well get married,” but the moment went.

“O boy,” she said without looking at me. “I sure picked a winner.”

“What do you want?”

“Stop it. I’m not ready for that. Not yet.”

“Will we go for a drink?”

We crossed to the Silver Swan. She went straight to the Ladies. I bought treble gins and brought them to the farthest corner of the bar. She seemed to be gone a long time but did not look any more composed when she came back. The lights of the Silver Swan were so blessedly low that it wasn’t possible to tell whether she’d been crying or not. She let me pour the tonic up to the rim of the glass. We sat for a long time in that silence.

“Why couldn’t we be married?” the calmness of the voice took me by surprise.

“I’d only marry you to cover up till the child was born. We’d be only getting deeper and deeper in. The marriage would have no chance of lasting. It’s better to face up to that now rather than go through a sort of charade.”

“You might change, especially when we’d have the child. I couldn’t see you walking out on the child.”

“No. I’d not change.”

“How do you know you wouldn’t? You’re not giving anything a chance.”

“You’ll just have to take my word for it.”

“If we get married, I’d at least get that gratuity out of the bank. I hate to think of them being able to hang on to all that money just because I walked out without getting married.”

“The divorce or separation would soon eat up the gratuity and it’d be a far worse mess.”

“You sound more like a lawyer than a person,” I felt the calm go. “At least if we got married I’d have the child.”

“You can have the child anyhow. No one can stop you. Since I am supposed to be a lawyer, why can’t there be an abortion?”

“How would you get an abortion?” she challenged.

“It’s very simple. You’d fly to London. There’s a first-class clinic in Woodford. The doctor can arrange it. It’s a simple, fairly painless operation. If you had to, or wanted to, you could be back at work in three days.”

“And live with that for the rest of your life? Thanks. Ο thanks.”

“You asked,” the tension gnawed and went on gnawing.

“I asked? I asked for a lot of things.”

It was as if silence was turned like a lock and the key forgotten about. We sat in that silence for what seemed like hours. Once I got up and went to the Mens and got two more gins at the counter on my way back, but that didn’t disturb the silence. Sometimes the tension wandered off into a sensuous mindlessness but then would startlingly snap back.

“I suppose we’d be better back in the room,” she said as if it was now her room too.

“I suppose we couldn’t be any worse off there.”

We walked in the warm spring evening. Three hours had passed since we had met. That the curtains in the room were drawn as always seemed to mock us, the light lit above the Chianti bottle on the marble.

“It’s the same as ever,” she said looking round.

“It’s always the same,” I said.

“Somehow it shouldn’t be the same,” she said.

“Would you like a drink?” and when she shook her head I asked, “Do you mind if I have one?” and when she didn’t answer I poured myself a large whiskey and started to drink it quickly.

It was then that she came into my arms. “Kiss me. Comfort me. I’m going to need a lot of comforting.”

As I rocked her I said, “We’ll find some decent way out. You can depend on that. It’ll not be as bad as it seems now.”

“Why don’t we go to bed,” she said. “We’ve certainly earned it. We have nothing to lose now. Nothing.”

When I turned out the light we both seemed to undress with abstracted slowness. There was no feverish slipping of knots and buttons and buckle and hooks but rather a sad fumbling with them before reluctantly letting them fall loose.

I felt her sobbing before I touched her shoulders, and when she came into my arms she shook there in an uncontrolled fit of sobbing. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry but I can’t help it.”

“It’s all right. No one will bother us here. Don’t worry about it,” and when she quietened we began to kiss, laughing nervously when I dried the tears with the corner of the sheet.

“That is what I need,” she breathed. “That is what I need. It is not talk I need but loving.” I was silent. “I don’t know why this happened to us. We’re both good people,” she took up.

“It happened too soon, before we knew one another. We were unlucky.”

“I’ll have to resign,” she said. “It’s going to be a hard road. I hate to think of them getting away with all that money after all these years.”

“Where do you think you’ll want to go?”

“To London. I always wanted to go to London. Two years ago a man called Jonathan wanted me to go. He owns magazines. I nearly resigned and went to work for him on a Water¬ ways magazine there. I little thought then that this’d be the way I’d be going,” she began to cry.

“I can go with you,” I said. “I could get some job there, or even keep writing the old stuff. I could stay with you till the child was born.”

“What would we do then?”

“We’d get the child adopted.”

“As simple as that. To go through all that and then just turn round and give the child away?”

“That way the child would have a secure home.”

“Listen,” she said. “There’s going to be enough hard times in the days ahead. What I need now is loving not talking or thinking. I’m going to need a great deal of loving to face into the days ahead. And you have no idea how much you’re loved. And I know how hard these days have been for you as well,” she said as she drew me back into her arms.

My aunt came for a checkup at this time. She came on the train. I met her on the platform but when I took her bag at the carriage door she was impatient. “They wanted to drive me up, when it’s just for a few old tests. If you heeded them, they’d have you in a wheelchair before long. You’d never be able to start making your own way again.”

“There’s no use pushing it though,” I was dismayed at how ill she looked, yet as she walked she seemed to walk ahead of me. She had on the lovely old brown tweed with fur at the throat that I remembered in happier days.

“You’re just as bad as your uncle and Cyril,” she scolded.

“I’m not that bad,” I said. “How do you feel? You look great anyhow.”

“All I feel is that it’s very cold, as if this year may never take up,” and it made me even more careful. It was a warm day for early summer.

“What would you like to do—go out to the hospital now or wait for a bit?”

“We’ll be out in the hospital soon enough. It’s long since we had a chat,” and I took her across the road to the solid comfort of the North Star Hotel. She wanted brandy.

“Are you sure it won’t interfere with the tests?” my voice had no authority in its policeman’s role.

“Bad luck to the tests,” she said. “They’re only a matter of going through the rigmarole.”

“And there’s no chance they’ll try to keep you in?”

“No. They said I’d be able to go home the day after tomorrow. I have to be home because of the garden.” She began to tell about her garden. She’d got James Prior to rotavate it. It had been a wilderness of weeds, not having been broken for the two previous years. She’d sown beans and peas, lettuce, carrots, parsnips, Early York cabbages, parsley, shallots, beet, even marrows. The netting wire had to be fixed because of the rabbits. The garden had been part of the old railway. Every fine afternoon she walked the half-mile down the disused line. Cyril collected her with the car on his way home from work.

“I feel I get well there, just rooting about among the plants. You never feel the time pass. And every day there’s something new. Around dinner-time you find yourself getting anxious about the rain. And you forget about the pain, unless it’s playing you up horrible bad. I hadn’t my foot in the train this morning when it started.”

“I was thinking that something good must have happened when I saw you get off the train, you looked so much better.”

She wanted another brandy and she joked about the black-haired girl, asking if I had anybody now.

“Not really anybody,” I said.

“I know what that means,” she laughed.

“I may have to go to London,” I said.

“What would you want to go to that old place for?”

“The crowd I work for want me to go.”

“You don’t have to go?”

“It’d be hard not to. They want me to go for a year or so.”

“You don’t have to go anywhere, if you don’t want to. Isn’t it almost time you came home? Your own place is lying there. And whose for the old mill—bad luck to it—except yourself?”

“I couldn’t afford to go home, unless you give me some of those houses you have,” I changed to tease. Over the years she’d acquired seven or eight houses in the town, and as she didn’t believe in cash was always on the lookout for more. They were let out as flats and a few shops and were jealously guarded for her beloved Cyril. She coloured like a young girl.

“Bad luck to you, but haven’t you more than enough—without thinking of my poor shacks.”

“They’d come in very handy,” I laughed. “Will you tell me this now, am I right or wrong, is there anybody who has enough?” I mimicked my uncle, “There’s only the one class of people that has enough, and there’s no prizes for telling where they are—they’re all in the graveyard.”

“Bad luck to both of you,” she laughed into the last of her brandy. “Ye might look different but the pair of yous are the same thick old blocks.”

We took a taxi to the hospital and I left her there.

When I went in to see her the next evening all the tests had been taken and she was ready to go home.

“Did they tell you anything?” I asked.

“No. It’ll take them a while. They’re sending the results to the doctor.”

When I looked at her racked flesh, the few wisps of hair left on the crown of her head, I saw that it was little more than pure spirit she was living on; and from several random words I gathered that the place in eternity she most hungered for was a half-mile down the abandoned railway among the growing things in the garden.

“You’ll come down soon,” she said. “And you’ll try to get out of going to that old London if you can.”

“I’ll be down soon—whether I have to go or not,” I promised.

On the pretext of my aunt’s visit, I hadn’t seen her for two whole days. The readiness with which she agreed to the break took me by surprise, but we were to meet in Wynn’s Hotel late that night. I waited for an hour before she came. She was very carefully groomed, even glamorous, and in seeming high spirits.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m a bit dizzy from the last two days. I saw poor Walter at the magazine. And then I spent yesterday evening with Betty and Janey. I rang Jonathan in London from their place and he insisted on ringing me back tonight. We must have talked for an hour. He’s flying in tomorrow. I’m meeting him at the Hibernian.”

“Would you like something to drink? There’s just about time for you to have one.”

“I’d like a long drink. A lager,” and when I called the waiter he pointedly checked the hotel clock with his watch.

“Who’s Jonathan? Is he the one who wanted you to go to London two years ago?”

“He is English, with handlebars. He’s very charming. Married to this crazy wife who’s been in and out of hospitals for years. He’s a director of a company which publishes several magazines and trade papers, including the British version of the Waterways magazine. Several times he’s asked me to marry him. He’s been in love with me for years. It was he who wanted me to give up the job in the bank two years back and go to London.”

She too had gone out in search of allies. There was a sense of gangs forming, their pressure upon all guilt.

“Maybe you’ll marry this Jonathan?”

“Are you crazy? If I couldn’t marry him two years ago how could I marry him now? And he’s too old. He’s in his fifties.”

“How was Walter?”

“Poor Walter was so upset. His wife was pregnant when they married. He asked me if you’d ever said you loved me. You’ll have to thank me. I took your side. Walter was so indignant at first but I swung him round. In the end he agreed that you weren’t behaving badly, all things considered.”

“What about Janey and Betty?”

“They think you’re crazy. ‘That guy will regret not marrying you all the days of his life.’”

“Did you tell them the whole story?”

“Sure. They partly guessed it already. They still think you’re crazy. Did you see your aunt?”

“She’s going home tomorrow.”

“How is she?”

“She’s very poor. I think it can be only a matter of weeks. I think she is dying.”

“One person going out of life,” I winced as she said it, “and another person coming into life. I suppose that’s the story.”

“That’s the story. What’ll we do next?”

“Jonathan warned me not to make a move until I saw him tomorrow in the Hibernian but it seems simple enough. I’ll have to give in my month’s notice to the bank though it galls me to think of them getting away with that gratuity money. But nobody thinks giving up the bank is a big deal. They said I should have got out of it years ago but my aunt won’t think that; she’ll be horrified at giving up all that security and a pension at sixty-five,” she laughed.

“What will you tell her?”

“I’ll tell her I’m going to London to seek my fame and fortune. That it didn’t look as if I’ll be married now. And that I want to try a writing career. That the bank was a dead-end job. She knows that the magazine has been my real interest for years. She’s always giving out about it.”

“Is that what you intend to try in London?”

“Jonathan more or less said he could get me a job in one or other of the papers, that there was always something or other coming up. You know I almost gave up the bank to go two years ago but I got cold feet at the last minute.”

“Will we go?” I asked as the porter cleared away the glasses.

“At least we’ve nothing to fear going back to your place now. We’re not trying to get anything on the cheap and easy. We’re facing up to everything,” she took my arm.

It was strange how rapidly things were taking shape, almost independently of us. We’d give up our lives here, go to London, live there until the child was born. Our lives could hardly be the same again. For years they had stayed the same. Now they were being rushed into some new and frightening shape.

After perfunctory desire, the body that many must have yearned for lay nonexistent by my side. I was going to have months and months and months to get to know it.

“We could have played it safe and had our fun and been just plain selfish like many others,” she said.

“We were stupid.”

“I can’t believe that. We weren’t just calculating people. Mean and calculating is worse than being foolish.”

“Nothing is worse than being stupid.”

“Maybe we were foolish but we are good people and I know everything is going to work out.”

“We were selfish and greedy and stupid,” I could hear the quarrel starting.

“I can’t believe that. There are several ways out for us even yet and we’re not taking any easy way out,” I could hear her resentment, but the last thing I wanted was a quarrel, and fought down my growing anger.

Unable to read or work, and unused to having evenings free, I rang Maloney the day she was to have dinner with Jonathan. “Would you like to come into the Elbow or would you prefer a teat-a-teat? Very rarely we get the opportunity these days, old boy.”

“A tête-à-tête, then,” I said.

“I have somebody to see but I’ll cancel. Meet me in the bar of the Wicklow and we’ll treat ourselves to a good dinner somewhere. We deserve a good dinner. A teat-a-teat is as good as a cheek to cheek,” he refused to stay checked.

He had on a beautifully cut dark pinstripe, hand-tailored black shoes, plain tie, a wine kerchief falling nonchalantly from the breast pocket; but his true talent was that no matter what he wore he always managed to look equally ridiculous. He was in one of his very generous moods.

“Everything’s on the company tonight,” he said when I asked him what he wanted to drink. “We’ll put everything on the card and forget about it. The fruits of lust. The individual is dead. And God is dead and everything is a fiddle,” he crowed. “Did you bring any of old Grimshaw’s spunk along to pave the way?”

“I haven’t been able to write anything. I’m fed up with the stuff.”

“We’re all fed up, old boy, except we can’t afford to be fed up. We must never show the flag. We must give ourselves and everybody around us a true enthusiasm for living. We must flog enthusiasm. It’s the coming thing.”

“I may have to go to London,” I said.

“It’s a very good city.”

“I’m not joking. I may have to go there for a year or so.”

“Are you trying to ransom me for more money or what? You can’t write and now you must go to London. You’re an artist, old boy. We’ll miss your physical presence among us. But we’ll be philosophical. One of the few advantages of the artist is that he can set up his business wherever he happens to be or, putting it more simply, he can live anywhere he writes. London should be fine. A stimulus. But why, why have you to go into exile since your whole life and work is an embodiment of the idea of exile?”

“I’ve got this woman pregnant. She won’t have an abortion. She insists on going through with the whole thing. And I’ll have to go to London with her,” I spoke as quickly as I was able so that he couldn’t break in.

“Most unprofessional, I am pained to have to say,” he spoke with exaggerated slowness. “Art is not life because it is not nature. If you spring a leak anywhere the whole boat may go down. You better not go and take up the idea of getting Miss Mavis Carmichael pregnant or you may well find that you’ve got yourself out of a job. Where did this unfortunate accident occur?”

“On the Shannon, I think.”

“Going in for mythological stuff as well? Compound everything. This won’t do. This won’t do at all. And now you’re off to London, modern style, the illegitimate father present at the birth. Very good.”

“There was a time I thought I’d have to marry the woman and stay here.”

“And why didn’t you, old boy? That’s how I got married—but I was in love. My wife was going to ditch me but then found she was pregnant and married me; then on our wedding night she discovered it was a false alarm, that she wasn’t pregnant at all. Afterwards we laboured and laboured in vain until she decided to go to the doctor. Whatever he did, whatever rearranging he did, I couldn’t hang up my trousers on the foot of the bed after that but she was away. There are lessons no doubt in all these things for those who care to observe them. Well, why didn’t you follow father’s good example, even in the eye of rejection, to the altar?”

“It was luckily decided that it wasn’t a very good idea. Since I was only willing to marry her in order to leave her.”

We moved from the bar to the restaurant. The wine waiter had a crest of embroidered grapes on his jacket. Maloney gave him a severe inspection as he took the wine list, but it had much the same effect as that of a tailor appraising a potential customer for a new suit, and it ended with the waiter choosing the wines.

“There’s no disaster in life that can’t be turned to someone’s advantage,” he was irrepressible. “Martin Luther King, you may remember, had a dream. I just have a plan but we’ll fill the inner man while I outline it.”

We had avocado with prawns, lamb cutlets with spinach, and cheese. The waiter picked a Château Margaux and Maloney ordered a second bottle to go with the cheese before we finished the first. Afterwards he insisted on moving back to the bar for brandies.

“You may remember in the Echo days when Maureen Doherty ditched me and I wrote that poem,” he began.

“How could I forget it?”

“I was undismayed. I’ve always been undismayed. Many women have ditched me but I knew sooner or later one of them would leave it too late and get caught jumping out of the house shouting Fire! It’s exactly of course what happened. And then after one of those rows with that fool Kelly down at the Echo I was even a bigger bloody fool and handed in my notice. Kelly accepted it with alacrity and I went off to Paris to be a poet. That cured me. A black man said to me that Paris was the one place where there was no racial discrimination, that everybody got treated equally badly there. I lived in a garret, of course, off the rue Buci. There were three hundred and sixty-nine steps up to it, the wood worn away in the centre of the steps. That’s what you mean by centuries of feet. The bloody house was built by Henry the Fourth in 1603. The windows were in the roof, glass in blacksmith’s frames. I stuffed the frames with newspaper to keep the draughts out. Very cold days were spent in cafés with a book and a beer and coffee, the waiters clearing the table and trying to rout you out of it every hour or so; but you could look out through the glass at the rain and people passing and the red flop of the canvas and the deer and partridges hung across in the game butchers—and—have visions. My most frequent vision was that of an enormous tray of roast beef and browned potatoes back in Ireland. In hot weather the garret was like a glasshouse. Couldn’t live in it then either. I used to go and sit in the Luxembourg. How well I remember the trained pears in their plastic bags. I have so many heart-shaking memories. Life is a great teacher if you can extricate yourself for a few moments every few years or so from the middle of its great bog.

“It was in the Luxembourg I got my plan. I used to hate the Parisian brats, going for rides on the ponies round the fountain, the overalled little man coming behind with the litter cart on bicycle wheels, cleaning up the pony shit off the sacred gravel. Then they put up a notice. Only old people or people with children were to be allowed into the park. That finally pissed me off with Paris and poetry and I swore never to return except with my plan.

“I had almost given it up entirely but your lechery may have saved the day. This is it. I’ll get a pram made in the shape of a coffin, miniature handles, crucifix, brown varnish, the lid at an angle of forty-five degrees to keep out the rain, a white handgrip for pushing, big wheels and small wheels.

“You’ll go to London, and see the baby off the assembly line like any modern father. The three of us—why, the four of us—will go to Paris, put the baby into the morality play of a pram, and go for our evening stroll in the gardens. Isn’t that a stroke of genius? Of course I’ll pay for the party. Or the firm will. At one go I’ll be going back to Paris, putting my plan into action, and keeping my word. Isn’t the whole idea a poem in itself, a mobile poem, a life poem, an action poem?” In his excitement he slapped me on the back.

“I thought your Echo days were done with.”

“I have no talent for writing. You know that. My talent is for management. It’d drive them mad to be confronted with the logical end of the activity, all these fat smug Parisian pigeons standing around and sitting at cafés. They’ll be incensed. They’ll turn on us in a fury. We’ll be in all the newspapers.”

“Maybe they’d only smile? Or it could become the new fashion in prams.”

“It’d be striking too near the roots for that. It’d be too close to reality for that. Reality is a great stick for beating the people. They can’t stand it, we’re told, but everybody appears very vague about what it is.”

“It’d be closer to a farce, if you ask me, which is exactly what the woman would call it. She’d never agree to it.”

“But I’d pay for it. We’d have a week in Paris as well. We’d eat in the Coupole. We’d go to the Closerie des Lilas. We’d blow it at Lipp’s and the Vendôme.”

“She’d never agree to it, you can be sure. That’s how I got into this fucking position in the first place. She’d say it was turning the whole thing into a farce, that it wasn’t natural, that it wasn’t the way life should be. If she wouldn’t agree to putting a nosebag on the old penis she’d hardly agree to putting the baby in the coffin.” And he was quiet. He took a pickled onion from the counter, showed all his front teeth, cut it in two, ostentatiously chewed it, and then washed it down with a big swallow of brandy.

“Well, old boy, you’re crusading off to London, then. You’ll be in illegitimate attendance while another white hope of the human race comes squawking into the world. And in the meantime you’ll forward me your artistic endeavours.”

“If that’s all right with you.”

“Perfectly all right. Even Queen Victoria saw that the artist could move at ease in all levels of society, and thereby endanger the whole social structure.”

“It’s very good of you.”

“Forget it, old boy. If she could do nothing about it, neither I’m sure can I, though I’m a queen of sorts too. And since I can’t have my Paris idea I want the Shannon written up, and written up well. I’ll pay well over the odds for it. You’ll need the money in London. I wouldn’t mind spending a few months in London myself, watching over a future clown flashing out into the world,” he said dreamily.

“You mean Mavis and the Colonel on the Shannon?”

“What else?” he almost roared. “Do you think my readers would want an account of two incompetent nincompoops like yourself and this fool of a woman? My readers want icing and sugar, not loaves of bread. And be careful not to let life in. Life for art is about as healthy as fresh air is for a deep-sea diver.”

She was in a high state of excitement when we met the next evening, full of her dinner at the Hibernian with Jonathan. I couldn’t resist feeling that she was having the time of her life.

“Jonathan was waiting for me in the foyer. In his pinstripe and flowing bow, silver hair, he looked extraordinarily distinguished, like an ambassador or something. The table had red roses. We had oysters, Dover sole, cheese, and we drank too much. Jonathan had an enormous cigar the waiter cut for him, with his brandy. And then, suddenly, both of us started to cry, in the middle of the full restaurant.’ It’s such a pity, love, that it’s not our child. We’d be married. We’d have a whole wonderful life together,’ he said. ‘Who’d think two years ago when I pressed you to come to London that we’d be sitting here like this. Life deals us strange cards.’

“He was wonderful. He’s making everything so easy. His wife is in hospital again and he lives alone in this enormous house in Kensington. And do you know what he’s going to do? He’s going to do up the whole basement part of the house as a separate flat, and I can live there till the child is born. He says, too, that there’ll be no trouble getting me a job on one of the several magazines, that I needn’t confine myself to Water¬ ways, that if I can write about waterways I can write about theatres, London restaurants or parks. Once I get the hang of it it’ll all be the same thing. It’s like a dream come true.”

“Where is he now?”

“He came to see me but he’s using the visit to do some business as well. We’re having a nightcap later in the hotel after he’s seen his guests off. And I’m having lunch with him at the airport tomorrow just before he flies off. We’re going to write the letter of resignation together.”

“I can see little place for me in London in such a new setup,” I ventured cautiously.

“That’s what Jonathan says. He says that if we’re not to be married that it doesn’t make any sense being together, that we’d only get deeper and deeper involved with each other, that it’d make a separation worse.”

I waited in silence, hardly daring to believe. What I’d longed for seemed to be falling like ripe fruit into my hands.

“Jonathan says that you’d be far more help to me by staying here. You could help me with money, with everything, all the help you can give now, if we’re not to be married.’”

I felt like a badger must feel among blackthorns when someone inadvertently opens the teeth of the trap. I was afraid to go free in case by moving at all it might prove not true.

“You have a whole month to think about it. But what Jonathan says seems to make sense,” I made the first cautious move, staring down in amazement at the bared teeth of the loose trap. I could go free.

“Jonathan and I wrote out the letter of resignation at the airport, in the upstairs lounge. We laughed a great deal over the words beg or wish or desire or state. And then he just dictated it straight and I took it down. Then we went and posted it. As it dropped I said, ‘There goes my future. All those years with so much being contributed each year towards my marriage gratuity.’ We were both too nervous for lunch, but Jonathan insisted on buying a bottle of champagne. It’s strange how coincidences happen. It was his birthday. I had never known when his birthday was before. He’s fifty-seven. ‘To London Airport. I’ll be waiting for you there. You may seem old to your young man but you look awfully young and pretty to me,’ he said.”

“You are beautiful and young.”

“I sure picked a winner, didn’t I?”

“We both had bad luck.”

“How?”

“Everything happened too soon,” I said. “We never had a chance. What did you do after you left the airport?”

“Well then, I caught myself rushing back to the bank. I’d got the morning off and then after sending in my resignation I was worried and rushing back. Are you crazy, I said to myself. You’ve worked for them for over twenty years, and you’ve got not a thing out of it, and now you’re rushing back, when even if you were caught trying to burn the building it’d take at least a month to fire you. It was hard to get used to, so I turned back for home. I knew I’d find my aunt alone at home and I wanted to get the whole thing over with. It was only when I was near the house that I had second thoughts and I wished I had gone straight back to the bank from the airport.