The Collected Stories

  ‘Yes. They were different,’ I agreed. For some reason she resented the story.

  In the rain we made love again, she the more fierce, and after the seed spilled she said, ‘Wait,’ and moving on a dying penis, under the unsteady umbrella in her hands, she trembled towards an inarticulate cry of pleasure, and as we walked into the street lamp I asked, we had so fallen into the habit of each other, ‘Would you think we should ever get married?’ ‘Kiss me.’ She leaned across the steel between us. ‘Do you think we should?’ I repeated. ‘What would it mean to you?’ she asked.

  What I had were longings or fears rather than any meanings. To go with her on the train to Thurles on a Friday evening in summer and walk the three miles to her house from the station. To be woken the next morning by the sheepdog barking the postman to the door and have tea and brown bread and butter in a kitchen with the cool of brown flagstones and full of the smell of recent baking.

  Or: fear of a housing estate in Clontarf, escape to the Yacht Sunday mornings to read the papers in peace over pints, come home dazed in the midday light of the sea front to the Sunday roast with a peace offering of sweets. Afterwards in the drowse of food and drink to be woken by, ‘You promised to take us out for the day, Daddy,’ until you backed the hire-purchased Volkswagen out the gateway and drove to Howth and stared out at the sea through the gathering condensation on the semicircles the wipers made on the windshield, and quelled quarrels and cries of the bored children in the back seat.

  I decided not to tell her either of these pictures as they might seem foolish to her.

  ‘We’d have to save if we were to think about it,’ I heard her voice.

  ‘We don’t save very much, do we?’

  ‘At the rate the money goes in the pubs we might as well throw our hat at it. Why did you ask?’

  ‘Because’, it was not easy to answer then, when I had to think, ‘I like being with you.’

  ‘Why, why,’ she asked, ‘did you tell that stupid story about the umbrellas?’

  ‘It happened, didn’t it? And we never make love without an umbrella. It reminded me of you.’

  ‘Such rubbish,’ she said angrily. ‘The sea and sand and a hot beach at night, needing only a single sheet, that’d make some sense, but an umbrella?’

  It was the approach of summer and it was the false confidence it brings that undid me. It rained less. One bright moonlit night I asked her to hold the umbrella.

  ‘For what?’

  She was so fierce that I pretended it’d been a joke.

  ‘I don’t see much of a joke standing like a fool holding an umbrella to the blessed moonlight,’ she said.

  We made love awkwardly, the umbrella lying in the dry leaves, but I was angry that she wouldn’t fall in with my wish, and another night when she asked, ‘Where are you going on your holidays?’ I lied that I didn’t know. ‘I’ll go home if I haven’t enough money. And you?’ I asked. She didn’t answer. I saw she resented that I’d made no effort to include her in the holiday. Sun and sand and sea, I thought maliciously, and decided to break free from her. Summer was coming and the world full of possibilities. I did not lead her under the trees behind the church, but left after kissing her lightly, ‘Goodnight.’ Instead of arranging to meet as usual at the radiators, I said, ‘I’ll ring you during the week.’ Her look of anger and hatred elated me. ‘Ring if you want,’ she said as she angrily closed the door.

  I was so clownishly elated that I threw the umbrella high in the air and laughing loudly caught it coming down, and there was the exhilaration of staying free those first days; but it soon palled. In the empty room trying to read, while the trains went by at the end of the garden with its two apple trees and one pear, I began to realize I’d fallen more into the habit of her than I’d known. Not wanting to have to see the umbrella I put it behind the wardrobe, but it seemed to be more present than ever there; and often the longing for her lips, her body, grew, close to sickness, and eventually dragged me to the telephone.

  ‘I didn’t expect to hear from you after this time,’ she said.

  ‘I was ill.’

  She was ominously silent as if she knew it for the lie that it was.

  ‘I wondered if we could meet?’

  ‘If you want,’ she answered. ‘When?’

  ‘What about tonight?’

  ‘I cannot but tomorrow night is all right.’

  ‘At eight, then, at the radiators?’

  ‘Say, at Wynn’s Hotel instead.’

  The imagination, quickened by distance and uncertainty, found it hard to wait till the eight of the next day, but when the bus drew in, and she was already waiting, the mind slipped back into its old complacency.

  ‘Where’d you like to go?’

  ‘Some place quiet. Where we can talk,’ she said.

  Crossing the bridge, past where the band had played the first day we met, the Liffey was still in the summer evening.

  ‘I missed you a great deal.’ I tried to draw close, her hands were white gloved.

  ‘What was your sickness?’

  ‘Some kind of flu.’

  She was hard and separate as we walked. It was one of the new lounge bars she picked. It had piped music and red cushions. The bar was empty, the barman polishing glasses. He brought the Guinness and sweet sherry to the table.

  ‘What did you want to say?’ I asked when the barman had returned to polishing the glasses.

  ‘That I’ve thought about it and that our going out is a waste of time. It’s a waste of your time and mine.’

  It was as if a bandage had been torn from an open wound.

  ‘But why?’

  ‘It will come to nothing.’

  ‘You’ve got someone else, then?’

  ‘That’s got nothing to do with it.’

  ‘But why, then?’

  ‘I don’t love you.’

  ‘But we’ve had many happy evenings together.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s not enough.’

  ‘I thought that after a time we would get married.’ I would grovel on the earth or anything to keep her then. Little by little my life had fallen into her keeping, it was only in the loss I had come to know it, life without her, the pain of the loss of my own life without the oblivion the dead have, all longing changed to die out of my own life on her lips, in her thighs, since it was only through her it lived.

  ‘It wouldn’t work,’ she said, and, sure of her power, ‘All those wasted evenings under that old umbrella. And that moonlit night you tried to get me to hold it up like some eejit. What did you take me for?’

  ‘I meant no harm and couldn’t we try to make a new start?’

  ‘No. There should be something magical about getting married. We know too much about each other. There’s nothing more to discover.’

  ‘You mean … our bodies?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She moved to go and I was desperate.

  ‘Will you have one more drink?’

  ‘No, I don’t really want.’

  ‘Can we not meet just once more?’

  ‘No.’ She rose to go. ‘It’d only uselessly prolong it and come to the same thing in the end.’

  ‘Are you so sure? If there was just one more chance?’

  ‘No. And there’s no need for you to see me to the bus. You can finish your drink.’

  ‘I don’t want to,’ and followed her through the swing-door.

  At the stop in front of the Bank of Ireland I tried one last time. ‘Can I not see you home this last night?’

  ‘No, it’s easier this way.’

  ‘You’re meeting someone else, then?’

  ‘No.’

  It was clean as a knife. I watched her climb on the bus, fumble in her handbag, take the fare from a small purse, open her hand to the conductor as the bus turned the corner. I watched to see if she’d look back, if she’d give any sign, but she did not. All my love and life had gone and I had to wait till it was gone to know it.

  I then realized I’d lef
t the umbrella in the pub, and started to return slowly for it. I went through the swing-door, took the umbrella from where it leaned against the red cushion, raised it and said, ‘Just left this behind,’ to the barman’s silent inquiry, as if the performance of each small act would numb the pain.

  I got to no southern sea or city that summer. The body I’d tried to escape from became my only thought. In the late evening after pub-close, I’d stop in terror at the thought of what hands were fondling her body, and would, if I had power, have made all casual sex a capital offence. On the street I’d see a coat or dress she used to wear, especially a cheap blue dress with white dots, zipped at the back, that was fashionable that summer, and with beating heart would push through the crowds till I was level with the face that wore the dress, but the face was never her face.

  I often rang her, pleading, and one lunch hour she consented to see me when I said I was desperate. We walked aimlessly through streets of the lunch hour, and I’d to hold back tears as I thanked her for kindness, though when she’d given me all her evenings and body I’d hardly noticed. The same night after pub-close I went – driven by the urge that brings people back to the rooms where they once lived and no longer live – and stood out of the street lamps under the trees where so often we had stood, in the hope that some meaning of my life or love would come, but the night only hardened about the growing absurdity of a man standing under an umbrella beneath the drip from the green leaves of the trees.

  Through my love it was the experience of my own future death I was passing through, for the life of the desperate equals the anxiety of death, and before time had replaced all its bandages I found relief in movement, in getting on buses and riding to the terminus; and one day at Killester I heard the conductor say to the driver as they sat downstairs through their ten-minute rest, ‘Jasus, this country is going to the dogs entirely. There’s a gent up there who looks normal enough who must umpteen times this last year have come out here to nowhere and back,’ and as I listened I felt like a patient after a long illness when the doctors says, ‘You can start getting up tomorrow,’ and I gripped the black umbrella with an almost fierce determination to be as I was before, unknowingly happy under the trees, and the umbrella, in the wet evenings that are the normal weather of this city.

  Peaches

  I

  The shark stank far as the house, above it the screech of the sea birds; it’d stink until the birds had picked the bones clean, when the skeleton would begin to break up in the sun. The man reluctantly closed the door and went back to making coffee. He liked to stare out the door to the sea over coffee in the mornings. After he made the coffee he put the pot with bread and honey and a bowl of fruit on the table in the centre of the red-tiled floor. The windows on the sea were shuttered, light coming from the two windows looking out on the mountain at the back and a small side window above the empty concrete pool without. He was about to say that breakfast was ready when he saw the woman examining the scar under her eye in the small silver-framed mirror. Her whole body stiffened with intensity as she examined it. He cursed under his breath and waited.

  ‘It makes me look forty.’ He heard the slow sobs. He lifted and replaced a spoon but knew it was useless to say anything.

  ‘If we get the divorce I’ll sue you for this,’ she said with uncontrolled ferocity in a heavy foreign accent. She was small but beautifully proportioned, with straight wheaten hair that hung to her shoulders.

  ‘It wasn’t all my fault.’ He lifted the spoon again.

  ‘You were drunk.’

  ‘I had four cervezas.’

  ‘You were drunk. As you’re always drunk except some hours in the mornings.’

  ‘If you hadn’t loosened that rope to put in the cheese it wouldn’t have happened.’

  He’d bought a fifteen-litre jar of red wine in Vera, it was cheaper there than in the local shops, and had roped it in the wooden box behind the Vespa. When he was drinking at the bar, she’d loosened the rope to put some extra cheese and crystallized almonds in the box. He hadn’t noticed the loose rope round the wickerwork of the jar when leaving; it had made no difference on the tar but the last mile was a rutted dirt-track. The Vespa had to be ridden on the shoulders of the road not much wider than the width of the wheels. Drowsy with the beer and the fierce heat, he drove automatically until he found the wheels losing their grip in the dust on the edge of the shoulder. When he tried to pull out to the firm centre of the shoulder the fifteen litres started to swing loose, swinging the wheels further into the loose dust.

  There was all the time in the world to switch off the engine so that the wheels wouldn’t spin and to tell her to hold his body as soon as he knew he was about to crash, and he remembered the happiness of the certainty that nothing he could do would avert the crash. Shielded by his body she would have been unhurt, but her face came across his shoulder to strike the driving-mirror. Above him on the road she’d cried out at the blood on his face. It was her own blood flowing from the mirror’s gash below her eye.

  ‘I’m ugly, ugly, ugly,’ she cried now.

  ‘The doctor said the scar’d heal and it doesn’t make you ugly.’

  ‘You want to kill me. Once it was Iris.’ She ignored what he’d said and started to examine two thin barely visible scars down her cheek in the mirror. ‘She tore me with her nails when she wanted to kill me. Both of you want to kill me.’

  ‘All children fight.’

  ‘Jesus,’ she swore. ‘You even want to take her side. You want to pretend that nothing happened. Jesus, Jesus.’

  ‘No.’ The man raised his voice, angry now. ‘I know all children fight. That they’re animals. And I do know I didn’t want to kill you.’

  ‘Everything I say for do you criticize. Always you take the others’ side.’ She was again close to crying.

  ‘Earlier it starts in the morning and earlier,’ he said about the fighting.

  ‘Who was its cause? If we ever get a divorce …’

  ‘O Jesus Christ,’ the man broke in, he clasped his head between his hands, and then steps sounded on the hard red sandstone that led from the house to the dirt-track. The woman at once moved out of sight to a part of the L-shape of the room where the cooker was, whispering fiercely, ‘Don’t open the door yet,’ and began quickly drying her face, powdering, drawing the brush frantically through her wheaten hair. He made a noise with the chair to let whoever was outside know he was coming as she whispered, ‘Not yet. Do I look all right?’

  ‘You look fine.’

  The man moved with exaggerated slowness to the door. Outside in the sun-hat and flowered shirt and shorts stood Mr McGregor with an empty biscuit tin and a bunch of yellow roses.

  ‘I thought your wife might like these,’ he proffered the yellow roses, ‘and that you might find this useful for bread or something.’

  He was their nearest neighbour, a timber millionaire who’d built the red villa with its private beach a few hundred metres up the road for his retirement, and now lived with his two servants and roses there. Even his children wouldn’t come to him on visits because of his miserliness. He got round the villages in a battered red Renault, but once a month the grey Rolls was taken out of the garage for him to drive to the bank in Murcia. Money and roses seemed to be his only passions, and out of loneliness he often came to them with roses and something like the empty biscuit tin which otherwise he’d have to throw away.

  ‘Would you like to have some coffee?’ the man asked when his wife had accepted the roses.

  Over the tepid coffee they listened for an hour to the state of his garden, the cost of water, and the precariousness of the world’s monetary system.

  When he’d gone they examined the empty biscuit box. Huntley and Palmer figrolls it had once held, and suddenly they both started to laugh at once. The woman came into the man’s arms and lifted her mouth to be kissed.

  ‘We won’t fight, will we?’

  ‘I don’t want to fight.’

  ‘Don’t w
orry about the eyes. We’ll never have the divorce?’

  ‘Never.’

  She started to clear the dishes from the table, humming happily as she did. ‘It’s bad to fight. It’s good to be brisk. Do you know who loves you?’

  He said, ‘I think you’re very beautiful,’ glad of a respite he knew wouldn’t last for long.

  II

  ‘Why did we come here to this shocking country in the first place?’ the woman accused.

  ‘It was cheap and there was sea and sun and we thought it would be a good place to work,’ he enumerated defensively.

  ‘And you know how much work has been done?’

  ‘Yes. None.’

  ‘We could have stayed in hotels as cheaply as it costs to rent here. Neither of us wanted to leave Barcelona when we did. But because those phoney painter bastards had to have a taxi because of their baby you came when you did. They wanted you to come to get you to pay half of their taxi fare. When we could have travelled slowly and cheaply we had that terrible fourteen-hour drive, with the baby slobbering and crying.’

  He remembered the scent of orange blossom coming through the open window, small dark shapes of the orange trees outside the path of the headlights and Norman, the painter, saying, ‘Smell the orange blossom, sweetie, isn’t it marvellous, isn’t it marvellous to be here in Spain?’; and then turning back to yell into the darkness of the taxi, ‘For Christ’s sake, sweetie, can’t you get him to shut up for one minute?’

  ‘Yes. It was horrible but we were dependent on them for the language,’ the man said.

  ‘We would have managed.’ The woman enunciated each word separately, in slow derision.

  ‘They put us up after the crash,’ the man said.

  ‘Yes, but even you insisted on leaving, with him strutting naked round our beds with an erection, going on about the marvels of nudity and bringing those awful paintings up for us to see when we had no choice but to look at them.’

  ‘We’ve finished with those people.’

  ‘They practically had to shit all over you before you did anything.’