I had relinquished hope by then and was trudging up the road to the station on my way to take the last train home. So dispirited was I that I did not so much as cast a glance at the Beach Hotel as I passed by. She came towards me from the direction of the station with the sun at her back, a moving silhouette outlined in burning gold. She was wearing sandals, and her short-sleeved dress with the flower pattern—it was the dress I recognised first—and her hair was pinned back in a way that made her seem very young, a bare-legged girl slapping along in her sandals, swinging a shopping bag. At first she, too, I saw, could not believe the evidence of her eyes, and stopped on the path and stared in astonishment and dawning alarm. This was not at all the way I had imagined us meeting. What was I doing here, she demanded—was there something wrong? I did not know what to say. I had been right about the sunburn: there was a pink flush on her forehead and in the hollow of her throat, and a few freckles were sprinkled very fetchingly across the saddle of her nose.
She tilted her head and was regarding me with a sharp, sidewise stare, her eyes narrowed and her mouth set. The look of fright that had come into her face at the sight of me was turning now into a frown of suspicion and angry reproach. I could see her urgently calculating in her mind the dimensions of the problem that my sudden, shocking appearance here had presented her with. At any moment one of her children might walk out at the hotel gate not a hundred yards down the road and see the two of us there, and then what? In return I eyed her sulkily, kicking with my toe at a crack in the pavement. I was disappointed—more, I was disillusioned, bitterly so. Yes, I had given her a shock; yes, there was a danger we might be spotted and unable to account for ourselves; but what of her repeated affirmations of love for me, that love that was supposed to be careless of all convention? What of the heedless passion that had led her to lie down with me in her laundry room on an April afternoon, that had sent her prancing naked through the summer woods, and for the sake of which she was willing to park the station wagon at the side of a public road in broad daylight and scramble into the back seat and without preamble hike her skirt up to her waist and draw me peremptorily down upon her, her bucking boy? Her eyes now had taken on a harried look, and she kept glancing past me down the road towards the hotel and pressing the tip of her tongue back and forth along her lower lip. Something, I saw, would have to be done, and done quickly, to draw her attention away from herself and all she might lose and turn it back on me. I let my shoulders droop and lowered my gaze in chastened fashion—oh, yes, an actor in the making—and in a voice that had the merest hint of a sob in it I told her that I had come to Rossmore because I had not known what else to do, since I could not have borne to be away from her another day, another hour. She peered at me for a long moment, startled by the seeming intensity of my words, and then smiled, in that delighted, slow, blurry way of hers. ‘Aren’t you a terrible fellow?’ she murmured, her voice thickening, and she shook her head, and was mine again.
We went together back the way she had come, passing by the station, and having crossed the little humpbacked bridge we were at once in the countryside. Where had she been, I wanted to know, where had she come from? She laughed. She had been in town, all day. She showed me her bulging shopping bag. ‘They haven’t a thing in that place,’ she said, jerking her head disdainfully backwards in the direction of the Beach Hotel, ‘only sausages and spuds, spuds and sausages, every damned day.’ So she had gone up this morning, and come back, now, on the train? Yes, and she had been idling, like me, wandering about the town for hours, wondering where I might be, when all the time I was here! She laughed again, to see my chagrined scowl. We were walking along by the side of the road. The sun was in our eyes, and the evening light had turned to tarnished gold. Long grasses leaned out from the ditch and slapped at us lazily and left their dust on our legs. A wispy white mist was forming ankle-deep over the fields, and cattle stood on invisible hoofs and watched us as we went past, their lower jaws moving sideways and up in that mechanical, bored way. Summer, and the silence of evening, and my love by my side.
If she had come on the train, I said, what about Mr Gray—where was he? He was stuck in town, she said, and would catch the late mail train. Stuck in town. I thought of Miss Flushing’s blonde waves and high-set waist and those two big damply glistening front teeth of hers. Should I say something, should I let fall a hint of what I thought I knew of Mr Gray’s guilty secret? Not yet. And when I eventually did tell her, some time afterwards, how she laughed—‘Oh, God, I think I’ve wet myself!’—clapping her hands and shrieking. She knew her husband better than I did.
We stopped at a bend of the road, in the purple-brown shade of a stand of rustling trees, and I kissed her. Have I said she was taller than I was, by an inch or so? I was still a growing lad, after all; hard to think of that. Her sunburned skin was plushly hot against my lips, slightly swollen, delicately adhesive, more like a secret inner lining than an outer skin. Of all the kisses we exchanged, that is the one I recall most sharply, simply for the strangeness of it, I suppose, for it was strange to be standing up like that, under trees, at dusk on an otherwise unremarkable summer evening. Though we too were innocent, in our way, and that is strange, too. I see us as in one of those old rustic woodcuts, the youthful swain and his freckled Flora chastely embracing in a shady arbour under tangled honeysuckle and dew-sweet eglantine. All a fancy, you see, all a dream. When the kiss was done we each took a step back, cleared our throats, and turned together and walked on in decorous silence. We were holding hands, and I, the aspiring gallant, was carrying her shopping bag. What were we to do now? It was growing late, and I had missed the last train. What if someone who knew us were to come driving along and see us there, strolling hand in hand between those misty fields so late in the day, a beardless boy, a married woman, and yet a pair of lovers, plainly? I pictured it, the car swerving wildly and the driver’s disbelieving look over the wheel, his mouth opening to exclaim. Mrs Gray began to tell me how when she was small her father used to take her out on evenings such as this to gather mushrooms, but then broke off and became pensive. I tried to see her as a girl, picking her way barefoot through the mist-white meadows, with a basket on her arm, and the man, her father, going ahead of her, bespectacled, whiskered and waistcoated, like the fathers in fairy tales. For me she could have no past that was not a fable, for had I not invented her, conjured her out of nothing but the mad desires of my heart?
She said she would go back and fetch the station wagon and drive me home. But how would she manage it, I wanted to know, how would she get away?—for I had begun at last to weigh the perils of our predicament. Oh, she said, she would think of some story or other. Or had I, she enquired, a better plan to suggest? I did not like her sarcastic tone and did as I so often did and set to sulking. She laughed, and said I was a big baby, and drew me to her with both arms and gave me what was half a hug and half a shake. Then she pushed me away again, and brought out her lipstick and made herself a new mouth, pouting, and sucking in her lips until it looked as if she had no teeth and making faint smacking sounds. I was to wait by the railway bridge, she said, and she would come back and pick me up there. I should keep an eye out in case Mr Gray’s train arrived in the meantime. What, I asked, was I supposed to do if it did? ‘Hide behind the ditch,’ she said drily, ‘unless you want to explain to him how you happened to be hanging about here at this hour of the night.’