“What kind were the women?”
“Fine things. Nurses, and girls from Cathal Brugha. They used to live in a hostel in Mountjoy Square. Schweppes Lane was a great place beside the hostel, full of couples after Conarchy’s.”
Over the coffee-cups a pain of jealousy. Schweppes Lane crowded with couples, kissing and touching in the lane’s darkness, where did they put hands, or did they strip clothes against the wall. O’Donnell had been there against the soft flesh of a girl out of Conarchy’s, and you hadn’t, that much pleasure escaped from your life for ever.
“Have you any girl?” O’Donnell asked.
“No. I can’t dance,” you said, though for a moment you were tempted to lie.
“No one can dance. They just shuffle round. It’s a place to pick up girls. If you watch for a dance or two you get the hang of it. Why not come to the Jib’s Dance Thursday night? After that we could hit out to Seapoint.”
The Jib’s Dance was in the Aula Maxima. The coloured poster in the archway had displayed a cloddish couple dancing.
“Do you think would I be able?”
“Of course,” O’Donnell laughed.
The café was closing. At Moon’s Corner you parted. O’Donnell had to cross the river past the University. It was still raining. Eyre Square was lit more with neon than the lamps. You began to touch the wet iron railings with your fingers for no reason as you walked, listened to your feet go on the pavement. You wished you could have walked with O’Donnell, even though you’d have to come back across the sleeping town on your own, and you wished you could find someone to talk any rubbish with when you reached Prospect Hill, anything to avoid the four walls of the room and the electric light on the bed, but it was too late, you had to climb on the stairs creaking under your feet on the bare brown linoleum. When you switched on the light you shivered to see the cream coverlet flood bare with light. You had come to the University, you’d sleep your first night in the town. You thought of Mahoney in another bed in the same night, and that you’d promised to write, it’d pass some of the time, it’d be something to do now.
You wrote to a formula on the glass-covered dressing-table. You’d arrived safely, you’d got digs, you’d seen the town and the University, tomorrow you’d be enrolled. You hoped they were well and that they’d write soon.
You left the letter ready for posting in the morning, and then undressed with a sort of melancholy deliberation. You’d come at last to the University and you’d still to take off your clothes, drape them on the back of the chair. It was the death of the day, and the same habitual actions of the funeral as always, and no matter what happened all days and lives ended this way. Only longing and dream changed.
As you pulled back the corner of the sheets you knelt, mechanically going through the night prayers, what you’d not done for months, sense of the shocking space and silence of the world about your own perishing life in the room lessened by the habitual words and the old smell of camphor from the sheets in which your face was buried.
In the double bed you lay awake for long, listening to cars close and fade, and the fascination of feet you knew nothing about go by on the concrete underneath the window.
29
THE DREAM WAS TORN PIECEMEAL FROM THE UNIVERSITY before the week was over. Everyone wanted as much security and money as they could get.
“What are you doing?” was the conversation under the notices in the archway.
“Dentistry.”
Why?
“It’s about the best. There’s a shortage. You can earn £4,000 a year. The initial cost of the equipment to start out with is the worst, but there’s a lot of hard cash in it after that.”
Will teeth absorb your life?
“No, but you can get interested in anything if you’re at it long enough and if you’ve enough money it can compensate for a lot. If you have to be scraping all the time for money see how long you’ll be happy.”
And money was dream enough to soldier on too. Choice of car and golf club and suburban house, grade A hotels by any sea in summer, brandy and well-dressed flesh.
“Security. Security. Everyone’s after security. And the only gilt-edged security to be had is the kingdom of heaven,” the Reverend Bull Reegan thumping at the old annual retreats in Carrick.
The college had opened. You’d listened to the President’s address, a white-haired Monsignor, saying something about an idea of a university in Gaelic, with many quotations — and no one able to follow.
Classes had commenced, and still you didn’t know what to do. You drifted from one lecture to another, soon you’d have to decide.
“The Association of Scientists estimates that by 1968 the present serious shortage of scientists will have more than doubled. But standards are rising. Last year out of a class of thirty-two no more than fourteen passed their B.Sc. You must have aptitude and be prepared to work. It is no place for the frivolous. But those who qualify can be assured of a well remunerated position.”
The appearance of the lecturer didn’t seem to matter as you left, neither his shape nor features nor the clothes he wore, he was what he said. The University was here. Green oaks lined the boundary wall. Farther out was Galway Bay. Everybody in the world was supposed to be unique.
“Unless you have private incomes the majority of you doing English must know that you’ll wind up teachers if you’re lucky, which has its compensations, though affluence is unlikely to be numbered among them. If there are any among you who have literary ambitions the evidence would seem to point to a dosshouse or a jail as a more likely place of genesis than a University,” and went on to say that nothing interfered so much with his day as the unaesthetic sight of students lounging on the drive when he came in and out.
On the walk as he was laughed at afterwards, you’d heard them say that he had only one real ambition, to drive to Dublin in under three hours, he’d already had several crashes in the attempt.
Though there were one or two who simply spoke about their subject with love, and their quiet excitement was able to come through, one frail grey-haired woman in a botany class, a younger man at mathematics who continually brushed imaginary chalk specks from his gown as he spoke and you came away wanting to learn and share, both were beautiful and young in some way.
Your doubts grew as you wandered, you wanted less and less to stay the more you saw, but it was easier to stay than go. It was clear that there’d be little dream, mostly the toil of lectures, and at night the same swotting and cramming in a room for the exams same as last year. You wondered as you came home by Eglington Street at four if it’d be long till the E.S.B. clerkships were announced, they were based on the Leaving results, you’d entered the same as the others, and the same marks that got the Scholarships were bound to get high there too. If you stayed you’d have to choose some course before the end of this week, this dithering had a limit, you thought it had to be Science. The fees were too high for medicine. Six years was too long a course. Science was three years. A job was certain at its end. Fear close to despair came at the image of failing or getting sick or losing the Scholarship, you’d have to fall back on Mahoney for support. It was frightening.
The night was the night of the Jibs’ Dance in the Aula, a new poster was up in the archway, you’d to meet John O’Donnell inside at nine.
The preparations took over an hour, shaving and washing, clean white shirt and collar out of the case, shining of the shoes, brushing of every speck from the suit, the hair flattened with Brylcream, the teeth brushed, the painful knotting and unknotting of the wine tie before the mirror, diarrhoea of tension.