“Good luck,” Mahoney waved.
“Good-bye. I’ll write tonight.”
The bus crossed the bridge. He watched the familiar names on the lintels before it got out of the town, fleeting memories of days he walked between those shops, and then the country road and the fields through the hedges, and he’d said to watch the fields. Close to Galway there were great fields for mushrooms.
28
“WE DON’T GO IN FOR STUDENTS BUT BECAUSE BROTHER Benedict sent you we can’t see you stuck. You can stay till you get on your feet and have a chance to look around,” Mrs. Ridge said on Prospect Hill. She was large, heavily handsome, white hair tinged with blue and worn in a dead fashion, slowness and assurance in her every movement, the world a fixed and comfortable place.
She asked much about Benedict as she showed you the room. “A very clever man and deep, liked everywhere, if there was more like him in the world it’d be telling,” she praised, brown linoleum under her feet on the stairs and the shining brass rails, one small yellow rug by the bed; cream coverlet, wooden wardrobe and table and chair, must be the same as many rooms, but it was yours, and utterly different. The corridor was bare and clean, smell of wax and soap, pink wrappings of Jaffa oranges on a nail beside the seat in the w.c. When she’d gone you opened your cases, and then gazed down on the passing street, as it went its imponderable way.
You were given a meal in the restaurant downstairs, a Yale key, and you went outside, by the green railings of Eyre Square. You’d a place to stay. You’d money from the Scholarship. You were free. Woolworth’s across the Square was the same as the place in Sligo. A girl with a red scarf walked ahead, you started to follow, fascination of her shape as she moved, the cane shopping-basket swinging at her thigh. One day, one day, one day, you’d have a girl of your own, a world of marvel then. But now the University, one dream that would come to earth this day.
You went, asking when you weren’t sure, across the Corrib, two swans against withering October reeds in the distance, stone buttresses alone in the water, remnants of a railway that crossed the river to Clifden once. You didn’t think. You were excited. You had the University to see.
Then you saw it through the trees past the boathouse. A castle, old stone, and towers, green copper domes.
Seat of learning, the gravity of days, eternal evenings, centre where you’d travel into joys and secrets shut away. The phrases of rhetoric rose the same as prayers. All the nights of sweat had meaning now. And why did it cause this rhetorical reverence or was there anything except the images and these inconsequential phrases.
But it was hard to walk slow. Wrought iron gates with a broken gas-lamp on the pier top. The stone lodge and the chrysanthemums in the beds. A drive of tarmacadam ran past the front of the main building, rows of old chestnuts bordered the football pitch and tennis courts, raw colour of a stack of timber beyond the courts.
It seemed strange to have come, to be standing there on tarmacadam, and looking on, the images. How much of your life would pass here? You might never even leave. A brilliant course of studies, chosen to teach, a gowned professor under the chestnuts. The roots thick as any tree of the Virginia creeper rose to spread and flower red on the stone. The great door with iron bands was open. Notices and letters were tacked on the green boards behind glass. Nobody from your house had ever reached a University before.
Groups stood about. You fell into conversation with a student from Donegal. That night you arranged to go with him to the Savoy. At eight around Moon’s Corner he’d meet you.
Afterwards you wandered about the town, you made sure where Moon’s Corner and the Savoy was. The bustle of the street seemed to rush as water in a tidal movement, and it was strange to try to understand that you were alive and standing in these busy streets. Outside the Skeffington Arms a boy was crying the evening newspapers. By the Claddagh through the Spanish Arch and out on the Long Walk to the sea, Galway Bay. The Dun Aongus was waiting to Aran, a trawler from Rotterdam, the sailors washing its deck with hoses, and the black-headed gulls drifting overhead. Your feet started to tire, you’d walked too much without noticing. The eyes roved, resting for moments on odd objects. Broken fish-boxes and wild grass and the sea, and was it all no more than a catalogue. A sudden flash on the memory, singing of “Galway Bay” under the town clock in Carrick a night after pub close, the drunken voices out of time: and here was where you’d go to the University. You were only hours here yet, and it was not easy to keep hold of the dream, wild grass and sea and broken fish-boxes same as anywhere, this was the University town, but it was more solid concrete and shapes and names with the sea and sky and loneliness than any dream, but at eight you would meet John O’Donnell at Moon’s Corner, it was something to look forward to, it would break the obsession that there was never possibility of possession or realization, only the confusion of all these scattered images.
O’Donnell was already waiting when you reached the corner at eight. A shower had started, the streets black and greasy, reflecting the lamps. O’Donnell said he’d looked up the papers, and that there was a terrific cowboy in the Savoy. He’d seen it before in Dublin but wanted to see it again, and immediately you fell into step, it was marvellous to be going with someone to any picture. You got the cheapest seats, close to the screen, each of you paying for his own. A short, “Jingle Tunes” was running when you entered the dark, people were singing, and O’Donnell was hardly in his seat when he joined them.
On top of Old Smokey
All covered with snow, (everyone together)
I lost my true lover
Came a courtin’ too slow.
O’Donnell was singing, without any self-consciousness in the world. You couldn’t. People were all about. You wished you could join too but it was no use, would it be same as this always, but it was still wonderful to be just there. This was life.
“Come on. Sing up. We used go crazy over this in the Royal in Dublin with Tommy Dando.”
“I can’t. I’m not used.”
And then with relief the cowboy was running, there was silence, the cinema was lost in what was happening on the one screen. There was a feeling of being set free to share in all this running and excitement, the strong righteous man and the noble woman against the hirelings. Out on the wet street afterwards there were several heroes with gun hand crooked and unflinching walk ready to shoot their way through to the world.
“What did you think?” O’Donnell asked.
“It was great,” you managed to say out of the choking after effect of the emotion, all pictures were marvellous, you hadn’t seen enough to compare, people who said one was good and another bad had some secret knowledge.
“It was smashing. Do you want to head home or would you like a cup of coffee?”
“I don’t mind, whatever you’d like.”
“We’ll have a cup.”
You paid when the waitress brought the cups, everything was plastic, the cups and spoons to the green table-top.
“Used you go to the pictures much?” you asked once the cups were stirred.
“In Dublin, always on Sunday afternoon, and other times if there was a girl and any money. That’s when we were in the Albert College.”
“Where used you get the girls?” you were fearful of betray¬ ing your ignorance, the trembling curiosity.
“At the dances. Every Sunday night we were in Conarchy’s. Always more women than men. They say Dublin is the best place in the world for women.”