I counted what I had written.
The Colonel and Mavis have had carnal knowledge of one another six times, fucked one another six times, not counting the time in the Colonel’s flat before leaving for the airport. They show no signs of tiredness though Mavis sleeps late while the Colonel goes out to buy wine and fruit for the room, has a Campari and soda at a sidewalk café, and buys a spray of mimosa — my only extravagance — on the way back to the hotel room. As he sniffs it he promises to improve its scent with the even more delicious scent between Mavis’s lovely waking thighs, “my honey”.
I was tired and flushed, my flesh excited again by the play of Mavis and the Colonel in the mind’s eye. How could it be otherwise? The words had to be mixed with my own blood. How could the dried blood of the words be turned back into blood unless they had once been bound by living blood? “Nonsense, rubbish, blackpudding, pig’s blood,” Maloney had countered not so long ago in the Palace. “That’s poetry talk. And you know what I think of that nowadays. Our average reader — and the average is king and queen of circulation — is already so inflamed that he or she would get a rise out of a green tree in Gethsemane.”
One more long day’s work and he’ll have his Majorcan story and I’ll be free for a whole week. I was tired enough to be grateful that I hadn’t to think what to do for the evening, that it was already decided: I had to meet her at eight in the upstairs lounge of the Green Goose. The memory of the accidental night was already vague enough for me to be curious again, and having driven Mavis and the Colonel from feat to feat I had grown inflamed enough myself to want to lie down with any warm body.
The Green Goose was grey and concrete and had a painted green bird on an iron sign in the forecourt of the car park that seemed to rattle its sense of not belonging in every sudden gust. It had been built twenty years before to serve the lower-middle-class roads and drives and avenues of brown-tiled semis all around it, and had aged like them into an ugly mildness. The upstairs lounge was heavily carpeted with blue peacock’s eyes, and green and red peacocks stared from the wallpaper. A whole generation of young marrieds must have grown tired of the flap of nappies on lines and summer lawnmowers under those same unalterable eyes.
It was too early for the couples. There were just a few men with evening papers who had not quite made it from their offices to their front doors. I bought a drink at the counter and took it to one of the corner tables.
She came at exactly five minutes after eight on the bar clock, wearing an elegant tweed costume, its collar and cuffs edged with dark fur. She walked quickly towards me, chin raised, smiling so hard that her dimples seemed to rise and fall. Her strong body was perfectly formed, the features clear and handsome. She would have been beautiful, I thought, except for this flurry of blue forget-me-nots she seemed to send quivering out with every step.
“Ο boy,” she said as she sat down. “I was afraid you mightn’t be here.”
“Of course I’d be here.”
“I thought coming up the stairs that you mightn’t be here. I thought so much about you the last days you cannot know,” her eyes shone with an overdose of sincerity.
“What will you have to drink?” I asked.
She was so filled with the momentous moment that I felt like going on my knees in gratitude for those small blessed ordinary handrails of speech.
“Would a gin and tonic be all right?”
“I’m sure I can get you that.”
She started to arrange her handbag, to take off her gloves.
Though she wore a hard-working smile, when I got back with the drinks she was quiet compared with her attack of an entrance. She had crossed her fine legs and was smoking.
“I hope it’s all right,” I said as I put her drink down.
“It’s fine. It’s just wonderful to be here. I don’t know what’s happening but I’ve hardly been able to think of anything else but you since the last night.”
“It’s nice to see you,” I raised my glass.
“It’s wonderful to be here and to see you. It’s one of those days everything had to be done two or three times over at the bank. I just couldn’t wait for five to come and the day to be over and to get out and to come here.”
“You got home all right the last night?”
“Sure,” she laughed. “I took off my shoes and carried them in and nobody heard me come in. Even my door on the landing was ajar. My aunt noticed that I yawned all through breakfast, that was all. I felt tired but I didn’t feel any guilt or anything and everybody seemed happier than usual. The milkman who always has a joke with me in the morning, though I’m mostly running, caught the tail of the long red scarf and shook it and asked me if I was in love. But the day was sure hard to get through. After lunch I could hardly keep my eyes open, and the letters just kept coming and coming. I went straight home and fell into bed and must have slept sixteen hours straight. I had the most wonderful dreams. You were in the best of them. And when I woke I didn’t feel a shred of guilt. I just felt relaxed and wonderful. Don’t you want to hear about any of the dreams you were in?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not much interested in dreams. I’m more interested in the day.”
“Many say that you can learn a great deal about the day from dreams and the night.”
“I think the best way to learn about the day is from the day,” I had grown restless.
“Why don’t you relax? You make me feel as if I was sitting in the dog’s chair.”
“How do you mean?”
“You know when you come into a kitchen and there’s a dog that’s used to sitting in a chair you happen to take by accident. All the time you’re sitting there you feel him agitatedly circling the chair.”
It was so sharp I slowed. “I can see you write,” I said. “I’m sorry if I was restless. I’m afraid I was just feeling the need of another drink. What’ll you have?”
“I’ll pass,” she placed her hand over her glass. “I can’t drink at that pace. You sure can shift that stuff.”
“It loosens you up. But don’t worry. It’ll slow, as soon as the first injection starts to work.”
The tension had gone when I came back from the bar. She was working, farther off. People are usually more charming when they are farther off. Perhaps she’d realized her own danger while I was getting the drink — that she had pushed too close. Such foresight makes the longest hells.
I too had a reversal of feeling while I was away. We hardly knew one another and we were already hating. This evening was a gift we’d never hold again. We were a man and woman travelling through it together. We’d never pass this way again. We might as well make some joy of it.
“Tell me about Amalgamated Waterways, this paper you write for,” and she grew excited as she told. The magazine was small but had fantastic growth potential. There was no country in Europe that had so much water and space per head of population as ours — in Germany, for instance, you had to wait for someone to die in order to get boat space — and it was just beginning to be recognized as the great natural resource it is, like oil or coal. There was this great scheme, which the Troubles had postponed, to connect the waterways of the Shannon and the Erne by reopening the disused canals of Cavan and Leitrim which had once been connected through the lakes. The North and South would join in friendship. “An embrace of water,” she said.