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.
“That bastard McKenzie knew I wanted to be away early. He made me go right back over the last two letters. You could feel his breathing as he pushed up to me to point out the errors,” Mavis declares as she flings off her coat.
“It’s perfectly ridiculous, darling, and all your own fault. I’ve always said you should give up that filthy job and come to work for me full time.”
“I know what working full time for you would mean. It’d mean I’d never be off the job.”
“I can’t think of anything more delightful,” the Colonel beams. “We’ve still almost three hours to the flight time. What would you like to have, darling? A g-and-t?”
“With plenty of ice,” she says kicking her shoes off and stretching full length on the wine-coloured chaise longue. She has on a black wrap-around leather skirt and a white cotton blouse buttoned up the front and fringed with pale ruffles.
He lets his fingers dangle a moment among the ruffles and she smiles and blows him a low kiss but says firmly, “Make the drinks first.”
When he comes back with the drinks he sits beside her on the chaise longue. “We’ll have time for a little old something before going to the airport.”
“I could do with a good screw myself.”
As he sips at the drink, “It is my great pleasure,” he slowly undoes the small white buttons of the blouse,
and slips the catch at the back so that the ripe breasts fall.
Seeing his trousers bulge, she finishes the gin, reaches over and draws down the zip. She has to loosen the belt though before she can pull ‘my old and trusty friend’ free. The Colonel shivers as she strokes him lightly along the helmet, lifts it to her mouth. Uncontrollably he loosens the ties of the skirt, pushes the leather aside to feast his eyes on the pale silk and softer, paler skin. With trembling fingers he undoes the small buttons, and the mound of soft hair, his pussy, his Venus mound, breathes free between the rich thighs.
“Why don’t we go into the bedroom, I’m tired,” she says.
He picks her up like a feather and carries her into the room, feeling as if he could carry her without hands on the very strength of his bayonet of blue Toledo.
“I want to see that gorgeous soft mound on high,” he says and lifts up her buttocks and draws down a pillow beneath, and feasts on the soft raised mound, the pink of the inside lips under the hair. When she puts her arms round his shoulders the stiff pink nipples are pulled up like thumbs, and he stoops and takes them turn and turn about in his teeth and draws them up till she moans. Slowly he opens the lips in the soft mound on the pillows, smears them in their own juice, and slowly moves the helmet up and down in the shallows of the mound. As he pulls up the nipples in his teeth, moving slowly on the pillow between the thighs now thrown wide, she cries, “Harder, hurt me, do anything you want with me, I’m crazy for it.”
She moans as she feels him go deeper within her, swollen and sliding on the oil seeping out from the walls. “O Jesus,” she cries as she feels it searching deeper within her, driving faster and faster.
“Fuck me, Ο fuck me, Ο my Jesus,” he feels her nails dig into his back as the hot seed spurts deliciously free, beating into her. And when they are quiet he says, “You must let me,” and his bald head goes between her thighs on the pillow, his rough tongue parting the lips to lap at the juices, then to tease the clitoris till she starts to go crazy again.
“I have to shower,” she says firmly, as much to herself as to him. “We haven’t all that much time.” “We’ll shower together,” he lifts her and carries her into the bathroom. She wraps her thighs round his hips as the iron-hard rod slips again within her. Once he pulls the switchcord they can be seen in all the walled mirrors, and she watches herself move at the hips, over and back on the rod, feeling it hard and enormous within her. “We have to hurry,” she says. Then, slowly, pressed back against the steamed mirror, she feels the remorseless throb within her, and gripping him tighter she opens and closes to suck each pulse until she shouts out, “O Jesus,” as she feels the melting into her own pulsing go deeper and deeper, as gradually the world returns to the delicious scalding water showering down on them.
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.