“All right. I’ll have the same as you. I somehow knew I needed an education but I never thought I’d run through one quite as fast as this.”
I got her the drink, poured myself another, and stayed silent. It must have been the drink, for I felt the flat shake with an uncontrollable silent laughter, that I was both taking part in some farce and at the same time watching it from miles far off.
“What’s so funny?” she asked sharply.
“Nothing. You and I. Mavis and the Colonel. The whole setup seems somehow such a huge farce.”
“How do you mean?”
“Nothing much. Sometimes it seems that we’re all being had, by ourselves as much as by others — by the whole setup.”
“Writing that stuff is bound to have an effect on a person,” she’d come and put arms around me. I drew up her blouse and brassière to feel her breasts, warm and full, the nipples erect.
“Did the stuff excite you at all?”
“Of course. That’s what’s disturbing about it.”
“How disturbing?”
“It makes a farce of the whole thing, doesn’t it. It’s nothing got to do with anything. It just makes a farce of people, plays on them, gets them worked up.”
“Like this?”
“This is natural,” she’d put hands inside my shirt, and was running light fingers along my ribs and back. We kissed as I drew up her nipples till she caught her breath. “I just want to feel you. You smell so sweet. I just want to feel your skin, to lie beside you, even if it’s only for a little while.”
In bed she said, “Don’t you know I love you? Don’t you know I’m crazy about you? Don’t you know I think about you all the time? I never fell before but when I did I sure fell hard.”
“You shouldn’t be telling me that.”
“It’s the truth. I love you.”
“The truth’s generally disastrous.”
“I have so much love for you that I believe you will come to share some of it, no matter how hard you try to fight it.”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“If I believed that I don’t know how I could go on.”
“You’d go on. Everybody does. Or mostly everybody.”
As much as from desire to stop the words as from real physical desire, I drew her towards me. Afterwards it was she who said, “That’s far better than talking. It just makes sense in itself.”
“It’s not verbal.”
I broke the long silence that followed, “Are you sure you want to go on this boat trip? I enjoy sleeping with you, being with you, but I don’t love you. If you love me as you say you do you can only get more hurt by going on. Since it’ll have to be broken, it might be better for everybody if we just broke it off now.”
“I don’t know what you wanted to say that for. Unless it’s just wanting to be brutal,” and I could feel her cry.
“No, I don’t want that,” I rocked her. “I wanted the opposite. But are you sure you want that?”
“Does a drowning person want a life raft?”
“I don’t think the situation is as bad as that, but sure, we can go on that boat trip. There’s nothing else to stop it.”
She kissed me, and there was a sense of rest. I knew it well. Two whole weeks were secured and rescued from all that threatened. A small heaven had been won. Within its secure boundaries love somehow might be set on its true course.
“What are you doing tomorrow evening?” she tried to ask with a casualness that only served to highlight her anxiety.
“I have to go to the hospital. It’s a bore but she depends on me now, especially for the brandy. After all, it was she and my uncle who brought me up after my parents vamoosed. So it’s no less than fair.”
“How vamoosed?”
“Dying, I suppose, is a sort of vamoosing, isn’t it? It’s not playing the game.”
“But it’s natural,” she said slowly. “It’s making room for others.”
The chrysanthemums had gone from the bedside when I next went to the hospital. Knowing her, she probably gave the flowers to someone she felt she owed a present to, possibly someone she disliked, maybe to the black-haired nurse. I thought she was watching me to see if I missed the flowers. “Mrs Mulcahy down the ward was saying how nice the flowers were so I gave them to her. You know I can’t stand flowers,” she said.
“How do you feel?” I put the brandy down.
“God and the brandy is all that’s any use now. It’s all I get any value out of. The pain’s still there. I don’t trust this place. I thought the pain was going but it’s back as bad as ever.”
“But you look far better.”
“I don’t feel as bad as when I was in the X-ray, but I don’t feel right. There’s a chance I may be let home. They’re doing some tests. They’ll tell me tomorrow.”
“But that’s great news. That contradicts everything you’ve been saying.”
“Maybe they won’t let me home after all,” she said warily. “Or maybe they’re just letting me home because there’s nothing they can do.”
“They’d not do that,” I said and changed. “I see our black-haired friend is on duty.”
Her swarthy, lovely form was moving between two beds at the far end of the ward.
“That one. She has me still persecuted. I think she must have arranged to be on duty because I had to tell her you were coming in. Whoever has his luck there will find he has more than the full of his arms.”
“I must tell her what you think about her,” I teased.
“You will not,” she put her hand to her mouth as she attempted to laugh it away. “You can do anything you want. You’re all right. But she can take it out on me here. You see she’s moved now so that you’ll have to pass her on your way out.”
Outside her natural attractiveness, the very fact that she was probably available made her more attractive still. We seem repelled as much by the hopeless as by what is too ferociously thrust upon us. Between these two, longing and fearing, we are drawn on.
“I’ll go then, so,” I used the levity as an excuse to leave early without her opposition, “so that I’ll not miss her.”
“You’d not be able,” she laughed.
“The next time I hope you’ll have the good news.”
“Will you be in tomorrow, then?”
“The day after. You’ll hardly be gone home by then?”
“I might never be gone home. Except feet first,” she put her hand again to her mouth as if to take away the words.
As I passed the nurse, she faced me. She was not pretty but more than pretty, handsome and lovely, in her perfect health and young strength. “My aunt says she may be going home soon.”
“She probably will. She’ll know for certain tomorrow.”
“Thanks for looking after her so well.”
“For nothing at all,” she laughed directly.
“I hope I see you soon.”
She didn’t answer. The clear laughing look in her eyes warned me to ignore what she showed me at my own peril.
It was in Kavanagh’s upstairs lounge that we met to arrange the boat trip on the Shannon. She was so energetic with happiness when she came that I could believe she was lit by some inner light, except I knew by this time that all her power came from outside. Walter was thrilled by the idea of the article. The people that owned the boats were falling over backwards to help. Her two friends, the American girls, thought it a wonderful idea and were really dying to meet me.
“Pornography and all?” I asked in more dismay than sarcasm.
“I thought they’d be shocked but it didn’t phase them one bit. They were tickled pink.”
I groaned inwardly at the sea of talk that must have been set rippling by our small dark meetings, and resolved to end it as soon as the boat trip ended. Out of guilt at my own withdrawal, my useless passivity, I made my own poor gesture toward the doomed charade.