She was wearing a beautiful suit, the colour of oatmeal, the narrow skirt slit from the knee. The long gold hair of her student days was drawn tightly into a neat bun at the back.
‘You look different but as beautiful as ever,’ I said. ‘I thought you’d be married by now.’
‘And do you still go home every summer?’ she countered, perhaps out of confusion.
‘It doesn’t seem as if I’ll ever break that bad habit.’
We had coffee in Bewley’s — the scent of the roasting beans blowing through the vents out on to Grafton Street for ever mixed with the memory of that morning — and we went on to spend the whole idle day together until she laughingly and firmly returned my first hesitant kiss; and it was she who silenced my even more fumbled offer of marriage several weeks later. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be married. But we can move in together and see how it goes. If it doesn’t turn out well we can split and there’ll be no bitterness.’
And it was she who found the flat in Hume Street, on the top floor of one of those old Georgian houses in off the Green, within walking distance of both our places of work. There was extraordinary peace and loveliness in those first weeks together that I will always link with those high-ceilinged rooms — the eager rush of excitement I felt as I left the office at the end of the day; the lingering in the streets to buy some offering of flowers or fruit or wine or a bowl and, once, one copper pan; and then rushing up the stairs to call her name, the emptiness of those same rooms when I’d find she hadn’t got home yet.
‘Why are we so happy?’ I would ask.
‘Don’t worry it,’ she always said, and sealed my lips with a touch.
That early summer we drove down one weekend to the small town in Kilkenny where she had grown up, and above her father’s bakery we slept in separate rooms. That Sunday a whole stream of relatives — aunts, cousins, two uncles, with trains of children — kept arriving at the house. Word had gone out and they had plainly come to look me over. This brought the tension between herself and her schoolteacher mother into open quarrel late that evening after dinner. Her father sat with me in the front room, cautiously kind, sipping whiskey as we measured each careful cliché, listening to the quarrel slow and rise and crack in the far-off kitchen. I found the sense of comfort and space charming for a while, but by the time we left I too was beginning to find the small town claustrophobic.
‘Unfortunately the best part of these visits is always the leaving,’ she said as we drove away. ‘After a while away you’re lured into thinking that the next time will somehow be different, but it never is.’
‘Wait — wait until you see my place. Then you may well think differently. At least your crowd made an effort. And your father is a nice man.’
‘And yet you keep going back to the old place?’
‘That’s true. I have to face that now. That way I don’t feel guilty. I don’t feel anything.’
I knew myself too well. There was more caution than any love or charity in my habitual going home. It was unattractive and it had been learned in the bitter school of my father. I would fall into no guilt, and I was already fast outwearing him. For a time, it seemed, I could outstare the one eye of nature.
I had even waited for love, if love this was; for it was happiness such as I had never known.
‘You see, I waited long enough for you,’ I said as we drove away from her Kilkenny town. ‘I hope I can keep you now.’
‘If it wasn’t me it would be some other. My mother will never understand that. I might as well say I waited long enough for you.’
The visit we made to my father some weeks later quickly turned to a far worse disaster than I could have envisaged. I saw him watch us as I got out of the car to open the iron gate under the yew, but instead of coming out to greet us he withdrew into the shadows of the hallway. It was my stepmother, Rose, who came out to the car when we both got out and were opening the small garden gate. We had to follow her smiles and trills of speech all the way into the kitchen to find my father, who was seated in the car chair, and he did not rise to take our hands.
After a lunch that was silent, in spite of several shuttlecocks of speech Rose tried to keep in the air, he said as he took his hat from the sill, ‘I want to ask you about these walnuts,’ and I followed him out into the fields. The mock orange was in blossom, and it was where the mock orange stood out from the clump of egg bushes that he turned suddenly and said, ‘What age is your intended? She looks well on her way to forty.’
‘She’s the same age as I am,’ I said blankly. I could hardly think, caught between the shock and pure amazement.
‘I don’t believe it,’ he said.
‘You don’t have to, but we were in the same class at university.’ I turned away.
Walking with her in the same field close to the mock orange tree late that evening, I said, ‘Do you know what my father said to me?’
‘No,’ she said happily. ‘But from what I’ve seen I don’t think anything will surprise me.’
‘We were walking just here,’ I began, and repeated what he’d said. When I saw her go still and pale I knew I should not have spoken.
‘He said I look close to forty,’ she repeated. ‘I have to get out of this place.’
‘Stay this one night,’ I begged. ‘It’s late now. We’d have to stay in a hotel. It’d be making it into too big a production. You don’t ever have to come back again if you don’t want to, but stay the night. It’ll be easier.’
‘I’ll not want to come back,’ she said as she agreed to see out this one night.
‘But why do you think he said it?’ I asked her later when we were both quiet, sitting on a wall at the end of the Big Meadow, watching the shadows of the evening deepen between the beeches, putting off the time when we’d have to go into the house, not unlike two grown children.
‘Is there any doubt? Out of simple hatred. There’s no living with that kind of hatred.’
‘We’ll leave first thing in the morning,’ I promised.
‘And why did you,’ she asked, tickling my throat with a blade of ryegrass, ‘say I was, if anything, too beautiful?’
‘Because it’s true. It makes you public and it’s harder to live naturally. You live in too many eyes — in envy or confusion or even simple admiration, it’s all the same. I think it makes it harder to live luckily.’
‘But it gives you many advantages.’
‘If you make use of those advantages, you’re drawn even deeper in. And of course I’m afraid it’ll attract people who’ll try to steal you from me.’
‘That won’t happen.’ She laughed. She’d recovered all her natural good spirits. ‘And now I suppose we better go in and face the ogre. We have to do it sooner or later and it’s getting chilly.’
My father tried to be charming when we went in, but there was a false heartiness in the voice that made clear that it grew out of no well-meaning. He felt he’d lost ground, and was now trying to recover it far too quickly. Using silence and politeness like a single weapon, we refused to be drawn in; and when pressed to stay the next morning, we said unequivocally that we had to get back. Except for one summer when I went to work in England, the summer my father married Rose, I had always gone home to help at the hay; and after I entered the civil service I was able to arrange holidays so that they fell around haytime. They had come to depend on me and I liked the work. My father had never forgiven me for taking my chance to go to university. He had wanted me to stay at home to work the land. I had always fought his need to turn my refusal into betrayal, and by going home each summer I felt I was affirming that the great betrayal was not mine but nature’s own.