“What do you think of the place?”
“It’s expensive,” she said.
“Not compared with some other places,” I tried to think of what places she must have eaten in with the older man in the photograph. I thought of soda bread and tea and a hotel beside the river in Ballina.
“It is to me,” she said. “What were you to tell me?”
“We’ll wait until we get the wine.” When the wine came I said, “Do you remember that night when we met at the dance and I asked you what you’d do if you got pregnant?” and she blushed. “I didn’t believe you when you said you’d throw yourself in the Liffey,” I continued.
“I would take pills or something. I couldn’t face into my family that way. I couldn’t.”
“You’d think that till it happened. I was going to tell you that night and I didn’t. I’ve got someone pregnant.”
“Are you going to marry her?” she coloured even more than before.
“No.”
“And what’s she going to do?”
“She’s going to have the child. In London. In a few months.”
“What’ll she do then?”
“Keep the child or have it adopted.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Nothing. I thought it better to tell you. That’s why I didn’t ring you. There was trouble enough without dragging you in.”
“Why didn’t you marry her?”
“I thought that’s what I’d have to do when it happened first. But then it grew clear that I’d only marry her to leave her. When that was certain there didn’t seem much point.”
“But why?”
“I couldn’t stand her.”
“But you slept with her?” she seemed genuinely shocked.
“She was good looking. That’s not living with someone, setting up house with them, marrying them.”
“But you must have told her something.”
“I told her that I wanted to sleep with her and that that was as much as ever it would be. It saved me in a way, but I don’t find much credit in that either. If someone wants to sleep with you, you have very little to lose by being straight, even brutally straight. They’ll trick it out in some way to make it acceptable. And I had nothing to lose. I didn’t care whether she slept with me or not.”
“It sounds very hard,” she said.
“It’s what I wanted to tell you,” I ended. “That’s why I didn’t ring you up when I got back from London. The night we met at that dance was a wonderful night for me. But I’m not free, at least not until after this child comes into the world. I didn’t think there was any point trying to inveigle you into my mess. That’s why I didn’t ring, why I bolted when I discovered you in the ward.”
“What’ll happen to the child?”
“I don’t know. I hope she’ll have it adopted but I doubt if she will.”
“What’ll you do if she keeps it?”
“I’ll be even more out of it then. I wanted her to have an abortion.”
“I don’t blame her for not having that.”
“Anyhow you know the whole story now. And it’s no pretty story.”
She was silent for a long time, hardly picking at the chicken on her plate. I had seen women pause in much the same way on the edge of the first lovemaking, as if weighing the land before trusting to or turning back from the water; and if they trust to it, that water too must soon become the land.
“You’ve seen this woman in London?”
“That’s why I went.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. What she wants I can’t give her. What I want she can’t give me.”
“What do you want?”
“That it might never have happened.”
“But it has happened.”
“Well then as close to that as I can get.”
“What is that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I suppose it’s called to extricate oneself as best one can.”
“What does she want?”
“She wants the child. She wants me. She wants everything.”
“What’ll she get?”
“I suppose she’ll get the child.”
“And you? What’ll you get?”
“As little as possible I hope. Now, would you have jumped in the Liffey if it had happened to you?”
“I wouldn’t have let it happen,” she said with such determination that I had to smile.
“Well, now that you’ve been warned will you come out with me again?”
“I’ll have to think about it,” she said.
The next time we met she came sheathed in a green wool dress and I took her to meet Maloney. I suppose I took her to see Maloney to show her that it was not just that one thing I was after. I was showing her into that part of my life that was made up of other people. Maloney was very charming.
“What are you, a beautiful healthy apple, doing in this den, with this degenerate,” he moved his arm floridly around the Elbow after kissing her hand. “You’ll get eaten by people with bad teeth.”
“Better to be eaten than to go bad,” she smiled as she risked speech. It would also have been a risk to remain silent, but she couldn’t have known that.
“Very good,” he pretended to stand back to inspect her. “V-e-r-y good. Better to be eaten than to go bad. Maybe just a little bit too good. Now tell me, what’s your opinion of the emancipated woman? I am most anxious to have a straight-from-the-shoulder-no-holds-barred opinion of the emancipated woman.”
“I don’t know what an emancipated woman is. Maybe I am an emancipated woman.”
“Quite right, my dear. I was beginning to fear for you for a minute, only a minute, remember. Not to know is to be happy. Who’d want to leave that child’s country to struggle with space and time and the seven-league boots of human rights. I’ll tell you. Only a fool would want to leave that country.”
“A person generally doesn’t have a choice,” I put in. “It just happens to them.”
“Shut up,” he said. “You’ve eaten the apple. And now you’re addressing yourself to this beautiful fresh girl. Don’t believe a word he tells you. He works for me. I never believe a word he tells me. He’s a wastrel and a corrupter with a priest’s face.”
When we left she said, “He’s a nice man. But he’s tired.”
“Why do you think he’s tired?”
“He tries very hard, doesn’t he? It’s as if he’s always racing to keep up with some idea of himself that he never quite catches.”
“That’s almost too clever,” I said. “He started with the idea that he was a poet. That nearly finishes everybody off. He’d have been intolerable if he’d ever become whatever idea it was. He’s just barely tolerable as he is.”
She came with me to the room.
“What do you think of it?” I had so fallen under the influence of her charm that I was looking to see everything through her eyes.
“It needs cleaning and the letting in of some light, but it’s not my room. It must suit you,” and then she continued in a musing voice. “It’s here that it happened?”
“No.”
“But you must have slept with her—and maybe others—here?”
“Every room has its story. Many stories.”
I felt a rush of desire, as much to cancel all those acts and that one suffocating consequence as desire for her fresh body.
“It’s strange,” she said as we kissed, “I suppose I should feel the opposite but I feel excited.”
“I suppose we should leave it.”
“We should. What are you laughing at?”
“A foolish phrase. A phrase that talks about the continuing virginity of the soul in spite of sexual intercourse. Our virginity seems well restored in spite of that first night when we walked across the meadow to see my aunt.”
“Have you heard anything about her?” she asked.
“No. I was supposed to go down but I didn’t. I suppose she can hardly last out
much longer?”
“I was looking at her chart. I shouldn’t be telling you this. In fact I could get into trouble for just reading it. But one night I took it out. The amazing thing is that she’s still alive. With her history she should have been dead about six months ago.”
“She has this fierce will to live. I don’t understand it.”
“Life is very sweet.”
“I suppose it depends on how you’re situated in it. It can be sweet,” these were the sort of conversations that made me wince but I still fell into.
“Just to see the day and the sky and the night seems to me amazing. I can’t imagine anybody wanting to let that go.”
“But aren’t some of the people you nurse tired of it?”
“Some but not very many.”
It was very cold when we went outside but a bus came almost at once, and we separated. The summer had already gone. I shivered involuntarily, I who loved winters, because of what this winter might bring.
A steady stream of letters now flowed from London, and any doubts or hesitations about my ungenerous reluctance to partake in this festival of goodness and renewal that the letters proclaimed was completely quenched by the undoubting tone of the same letters. The child would come at Christmas, and all would be well, she wanted to reassure me as to that, because both of us were good people, and it would come out that way, she knew it, no matter what the world might think. Not that things were easy. She had grown larger. She had got away with it when she’d met her cousin at the Strand Palace but only just. She’d bandaged herself tightly and several times during dinner had almost passed out. “Are you sure you’re all right?” her cousin had kept asking and she had pleaded migraine. What was worse was his jollity in the early evening, hand on her knee, “Now tell me what is it really like to be a citizen of the big smoke?” She had got through it, and she didn’t think she’d aroused suspicion, but she’d not take that risk again. Anyhow her condition was obvious now.
And she often found herself crying. She’d put out hands for me and found them empty, but even in the darkest valleys she knew we were travelling towards the sun. The angels were watching above us with outspread wings. Example followed example to prove it.
The two homosexuals did not take kindly to her pregnancy. She saw their suspicions and told them. They were decent enough about it but they asked her to find another room as soon as she could. They’d explained that for them a great part of the charm of their present setup was its short-circuiting of the mother and the womb. It brought memories of suffocation. Ο boy, it was a queer world, and there sure were some queer people in it, she sang, but the angels were there too, she couldn’t go on except for the angels.
And the angels were still there. She’d met this Irish couple, the Kavanaghs, who had four children, and a large Victorian house they’d bought cheap near the Archway, and they had renovated it themselves. He drove a tower crane on the buildings and she was a nurse in the Highgate Hospital. Because of the children the wife worked nights. The house was so big that they had spare rooms even with the four children. They knew our story and they felt that we had done the right thing. The very sound of the word abortion made Michael angry. And she was able to be of real use to Nora Kavanagh. She made Michael and the children’s supper whenever Nora was working nights. She got the children out for school and let Nora early to bed when she got home, “They were dying off like flies last night,” Nora’d say some mornings and she’d babysit any time Michael and Nora wanted to go out. Often they’d bring back beers and the three of them would sit and talk in front of the TV. She knew I’d like the Kavanaghs and they thought I’d acted well in the whole business and wanted to meet me. She felt completely taken care of. She loved the children and the house. She’d said to Michael that she’d be willing to change places with their sheepdog if it meant being able to stay on in the house and they’d both collapsed laughing. She’d difficulty getting them to take the small rent and they gave it back and more in presents. They wanted her to give up her job at the Tottenham yard but the work was so easy that she’d keep it on up to the last.
She felt as if she was in a train. The doors were locked and it was moving fast. All the faces about her in the carriage were happy and smiling. The train had passed all the early stations and was now racing through the night. In a very short time it’d stop. She’d get out at Christmas to the child and she knew the angels would be watching.
The first plan was to have the child in the house. Then it was decided that it was safer, because of her age, to have the child in the hospital. Michael’s wife was able to arrange a bed in a semi-private ward in her own hospital.
She gave up work in the Tottenham yard two weeks before Christmas and asked for the money I’d earlier offered. Papers arrived for me to sign. The train was still beautifully on course, all the doors locked, though it now seemed probable that it would carry past Christmas and possibly into the New Year. Would I come to London for Christmas? London was the most exciting place in the world at Christmas.
While these letters brought me near a winter that was happening elsewhere, her bells for good cheer were for me a simple cause of gloom. I met the black-haired girl casually, but often saw her coats and dresses, now so familiar to me, in a crowd. They had become the envelopes of a quiet love.
“It’s bloody awful,” I complained at the end of a week in which not a day had gone by without a letter of glad tidings from London.
“There’s nothing you can do about it,” she said.
“I suppose it’s just vanity on my part. You imagine you control your life, and then something comes along like this and blows it wide open.”
“It is vanity.”
“To realize that doesn’t seem to make it any better.”
“You seem to me to have behaved well. What are you to do? Marry the woman, for God’s sake?”
“O, I behaved well enough, all right. I know that. But I behaved well as much out of cowardice as anything else. It’s safer to behave well. It’s more protection than behaving badly.”
“Well, it’s done now,” she said, and at the bus stop where we usually parted, she said, “You might as well leave me back tonight.”
“Are you sure?”
“Are you sure?” she smiled, and without thinking I closed my grip on her arm.
As we went between the two lighted globes above the hospital gates I felt invaded by a fragility, a spiritual lightness that had nothing to do with the hospital or dark in the hospital. I had no sense at all of the misery and suffering and even exaltation that may have been going on in that darkened ward. The same fragility I had felt entering rooms of strange people at their ease or walking up to the door of a building the morning of taking up a new job. I was entering a new life. I was being questioned, and I had no longer the power to turn away, nor the confidence to say yes, only that I could try and try with all that I knew, the rash heart given its rashness, but given it by watchfulness and care, knowing they could not know where it might lead but determined to be its shadow everywhere.
It seems we must be beaten twice, by the love that we inflict and then by the infliction of being loved, before we have the humility to look and take whatever agreeable plant that we have never seen before, because of it being all around our feet, and take it and watch it grow, choosing the lesser truth because it’s all that we’ll ever know.
We went straight to her room, more cell than room, the black cross on its white bare wall, careful even of our breathing between its paper walls.
In the morning when I rang for the taxi I was about to turn to her to say that the hospital seemed to have fewer night visitors in winter, when down the corridor doors started to open softly and footsteps come towards us. We kissed quickly and I could feel her laugh by my side as we heard, “Can we share the taxi into the city?” I had seen none of the sharers before, the sauce chef was not there, and we drove into the sleeping city in a drowsed silence.
I was too tired to read or work the n
ext day, but did not want to sleep, as if by sleeping I’d consign the night casually to some section of animal desire, like any night, as if it was necessary to keep a wilful vigil. In spite of this, I must have fallen asleep in the cane chair, for I was startled by the bell. I had no idea what time it was. The fire had gone out.
A telegram, I thought as I went downstairs. From London or the country. A birth or death or, I stirred guiltily, a death in giving birth, but when I opened the door it was my uncle who was standing there.
“It was the last ring I was going to give,” he said petulantly. “I thought there was no one in. I was just about to powder off with myself.”
“Is she gone or what?” I asked too quickly out of surprise.
“No, but it’d be a blessing for the poor thing if she was. She’s back in the hospital. She collapsed. I’d to come up in the ambulance,” he was undismayed.
“Is she conscious?”
“She is,” he said but I could tell by his answer that he did not know the meaning of the word.
“Has she her senses about her?”
“Not at all. She’s just collapsed. She never moved or spoke a word all the way up. She’s like a dead person but she’s not dead.”
I grew aware that we were standing all that time in the doorway, “Come in.” As we climbed the stairs I saw that he was practically immobile between self-importance and self-pity.
“You haven’t been down,” he accused. “That woman was expecting you a lot of the time.”
“I’m sorry. I meant to, several times, but I didn’t.”
“There’s been big changes.”
“What changes?”
“Well, I bought a place,” he announced.
“What place?”
“McKennas.” I shuffled through the local names until I came on a big farmhouse with orchards and sheds between the saw mill and the town.
“But that’s a farm. What do you want with land?”
“Won’t it make money even if it was only left lying there?” he began to laugh, which continued after I asked how much he’d paid for it. “Guess,” he chuckled and I knew I’d have to draw out the game to the last trick, and settled on a figure I knew to be too high but not outrageously so.