“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 ha
s 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.”