‘John Michael went over,’ he said.
‘Yes, he did. A while back.’
‘He’s settled so.’
‘He hasn’t the right papers,’ Fina said.
She watched while the butter was spread on a slice of bread, and sugar sprinkled over it. It wouldn’t take long to set the kitchen to rights. It wouldn’t take long to paint over the dingy ceiling, to take up the linoleum from the floor and burn it, to wash every cup and knife and fork, to scrub the grease from the wooden tabletop, to fix the taps that were hanging from the wall, to replace the filthy armchair.
‘You were never here before,’ the old man said, and led her upstairs to dank bedrooms, an image of Our Lady on the wall opposite each bed. A forgotten cat rushed, hissing, from a windowsill. Electric wire hung crookedly from a fallen-in ceiling, mould was grey on the faded flowers of wallpaper. Downstairs, ivy crept over panes of glass.
A digger would take out those rocks, Fina thought, surveying the fields. Half a day it would take with a digger. John Michael’s uncle said they’d be welcome if it was something they’d consider. When the wedding would be over, he said, when they’d have gathered themselves together.
‘It’s different why you’d go into exile these days,’ Bat Quinn said in the half-and-half. ‘A different approach you’d have to it.’
You made a choice for yourself now. The way the country was doing well, you could stay where you were or you could travel off. A different thing altogether from the old days, when you had no choice at all.
‘Yes,’ Fina said.
*
I went over to see the farm, she wrote. No way we wouldn’t be able to get it up and going. He’d be no trouble to us. Her mother finished the wedding dress. Fina imagined John Michael, any day now, walking in with the red holdall they’d bought together in Kinard. They’d bought her own at the same time, the same colour and size. She imagined going back with him to Scally’s and explaining to Scally that they wouldn’t want it now. John Michael would be better at that than she’d be.
Fina’s feelings bewildered her. She kept hoping that out of the blue the phone would ring and John Michael would say it was all right, that he’d wangled a work permit, that the boss he was working for had put a word in, that there’d been a further amnesty. But then another while would pass and there’d be no hope at all. John Michael would walk in and she’d be shy of him, the way she’d never been. She imagined herself on the farm as she used to imagine herself in the room John Michael had described, the silence of the fields instead of the noise on the streets and the yellow cabs flashing by. When she wondered if she still loved John Michael, she told herself not to be a fool. He was right when he said that it was loving one another that mattered. But then the confusion began again.
No phone call came. We’ll sort things out when I’m back, another letter said. We’ll have it done before the wedding. The banns had long ago been called. The half-and-half would be closed for the day. People had been invited to the house. If she had a number, she would telephone herself, Fina thought, not that she’d say anything about how she felt. She woke up in the middle of one night feeling afraid. In the dark she knew she didn’t love John Michael.
It’s only I’m ruining everything for you, she wrote when there was hardly time for him to receive the letter before he’d have to set out. I have it on my mind, John Michael. Alone on the strand, she had decided on that way of putting things. Five days later, two before he was due back, John Michael phoned. He’d got her letter, he said, and then he said he loved her.
‘I always will, Fina.’
He could telclass="underline" she heard it in his voice. Always quick on the uptake, always receptive of her emotions, even in a letter, even on the long-distance telephone, he knew more than she did herself.
‘I don’t know what it is,’ she said.
‘You’re uncertain.’
She began to say it wasn’t that, but she stumbled and hesitated. She wanted to cry.
‘You have to be guided by yourself, Fina. You’re doubtful about the wedding.’
She said what she had in her letter, that she was ruining things for him. ‘It wouldn’t be right to wait until you got here.’
‘Better to wait all the same,’ he said. ‘It’s not long.’
‘I don’t want you to come.’
‘You don’t love me, Fina?’
He asked that again when she didn’t reply.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
*
John Michael did not come back. For Fina, the pain lasted for the empty weeks that followed the day that had been set for the wedding, and then for all the summer. September was balmy, thirty days of a clear blue sky, the days gently slipping away as they shortened. In October a year had passed since the death of John Michael’s mother. By October John Michael’s scant letters didn’t come any more.
‘I’d say he’d walk in in the time ahead,’ Bat Quinn said on a night his intake had exceeded what he allowed himself. Squinting blearily up at Fina, he added, as if the two observations somehow belonged together: ‘Haven’t you the delicate way with you, pouring that stout, girl?’
‘Oh, I have all right.’
Bat Quinn was right. It was likely enough that in the time ahead, when John Michael had made his money, he would return, to look about him and remember.
‘An amnesty’ll bring him,’ Bat Quinn said, heaving himself off his stool to lead the exodus from the bar. ‘Good night to you so, girl.’
She was better at pouring the stout than her father was, even though he’d been at it for longer. Her hands were steadier, not yet roughened. She had the delicacy of the young, she’d heard her mother say when the disappointment about John Michael had become known.
‘Good night, Fina,’ the men called out, one after another before they left, and when the last of them had gone she bolted the door and urged her father to go upstairs to bed. She cleared up the glasses and knocked the contents of the ashtrays into a bowl. She wondered if they were sorry for her, Bat Quinn and the men John Michael had fished with, her mother and her father. Did they think of her as trapped among them, thrown there by the tide of circumstances, alone because she had misunderstood the nature of her love?
They could not know she had come to realize that she was less alone than if she were with John Michael now. The long companionship, their future planned, their passion and their embraces, were marked in memory with a poignancy from which the sting had been drawn. It was America they had loved, and loved too much. It was America that had enlivened love’s fantasies, America that had enriched their delight in one another. He’d say that too if he came back when he’d made his money. They would walk again on the strand, neither of them mentioning the fragility of love, or the disaster that had been averted when they were young.
On the Streets
Arthurs ordered liver and peas and mashed potatoes in Strode Street. When it came, the liver didn’t taste good. A skin of fat was beginning to congeal on the surface of the gravy where the potato hadn’t soaked it up. The bright green peas were more or less all right.
He was a dark-haired man in his mid-fifties, with a widow’s peak and lean features that matched his spare frame, bony wrists protruding from frayed white cuffs. He wore a black suit, its black trousers being a requirement for a breakfast waiter beneath a trim white jacket.
‘You want a pot of tea with that?’ the elderly woman who had brought him his plate of liver enquired. She came back to his table to ask him that, her only customer at this time in the afternoon.