“They certainly look it,” everything was running easily again. The candles hadn’t been used since She and I were here before going into the country, the last night we spent here together. The pain of that night still wavered in their flames, but wearily. It was over.
I helped her clear away the plates and we started to kiss after the cheese was brought out.
This time I said, “Why don’t we give the meal a rest? Come back to it.…”
“Why not?”
Between the sheets she said, “I feel marvellous. I don’t know what I was doing all those years, making the nine Fridays, going to the Sodality, out on the streets with the Legion of Mary, always in for nine when my uncle was saying the Rosary. I must have been crazy. Everybody must have been crazy. I was wasting my life and now I am doing what is natural. I don’t feel dirty or sinful or anything. I just feel that I have a great deal of lost living to make up for.”
“Sex is only a small part of living,” I said warily.
“Yes, but what is it without it? I’m crazy about you,” she raised herself so that her body shone above me before she bent to kiss. “I thought of nothing else all week. I wanted the week to run to Saturday night. I’d find my fingers reaching out, and I’d wonder what they were reaching for, and then I’d realize they were reaching for your skin.”
I drew her towards me, “This time we can take all the time in the world,” and when it was over, all the grossness of the food and wine seemed drained away and a peace that was almost purity seemed to settle on what a few moments before had been muscular and wild.
I put more wood on the fire when we rose and drew the cork of another bottle of wine. She lit the candles that had been blown out. They wavered on the half-filled wine glasses, on the Brie and Stilton and Cheddar and water biscuits on the wooden platter.
“This girl,” she said with a pause that I knew to be the pain of jealousy, “this girl, the girl you were in love with, who was she?”
I looked at her, how vulnerable and open the face was. She was going to hurt herself by searching about in a life that no longer existed, that she had been unaware of when it was going on. Crazy as it was, she was determined to cause herself that pain.
“We met much like we met — like most of Ireland meets — at a dance. We went casually out for a year. At first she did most of the running, and when she tired I took up the pursuit. It’s a usual enough pattern. The more I pushed myself on her the more tiresome I became to her, and that speeded up her withdrawal, which made her ten times as attractive. I felt I couldn’t live without her. Which made me ten times as tiresome. I was ill, lovesick, mad. If she’d finished it then it might have been easier, but who knows. She kept the thing going, interested in my madness, which was after all about her, and we can all do with an awful lot of ourselves. I think it nearly turned into a farce in the end.”
“I don’t know how you can call it a farce. It sounds horrible. What’s worst about it is that I wish I had her chance.”
“Marriage to a madman is hardly a recipe for domestic bliss. Because of her interest in this madness about herself I think she nearly fell in love with me. If she’d done that then it’d have been the farce.”
“Isn’t that what you’d want? Isn’t that what everybody wants, two people in love at the same time.”
“It doesn’t work that way. If she had fallen in love with me I think it would have soon cured me of my madness. No world can afford to have all its inmates mad at the same time.”
“You seem to have it all figured out. If I didn’t believe there wasn’t some happiness I don’t know how I’d be able to go on.”
“You would,” I said. “Anyhow it all got too much. She drew the line.”
“I don’t see what’s funny about something as horrible as that. All the sex writing must twist and blind you to everything about love, make it just pure cynical.”
“On the contrary. It clears it out of the way. You learn it has nothing to do with love or living. It’s like sport. Except it’s between the sheets instead of in the gym.”
“Was she younger than you?” she was still biting into herself.
“She was, a few years. Why don’t we go to bed?”
The pain made her look tired and older. “Let’s clear up,” she said. “I hate waking up to a dirty kitchen.”
After we tidied up I fell into a drugged sleep and woke with the splitting headache of a hangover. Later in the morning she asked, “Since it’s Sunday why don’t we spend the day together?”
“I’d love to but I have to work,” and I walked her part of the way to where she lived. It was one of those spring mornings, the sun thawing the white frost out of the front gardens, and people with prayerbooks were going and coming between the Masses.
“Look. We’ll have the whole of next weekend together,” I said as we parted. “What’ll you do for the day?”
“I think I’ll go to Mass like the other people,” she said.
We drove in the stream of traffic out of the city the next weekend. It didn’t build any speed till it got past Lucan, and even there we found ourselves continually shut in behind slow trucks and milk tankers.
“Ireland will soon be as jammed up as everywhere else. That’s what’s wonderful about the rivers and lakes. They’re empty. Isn’t it exciting to be spending the whole weekend away from people?”
“People are all right,” I said morosely.
“There’re towns and villages that we can put in at. That’s what’s wonderful about the Shannon. You have a choice. You can be with people or get away and there’re pubs up lanes or a few fields from the river. There’s one in particular that we must visit in a village past Carrick, the man is fat and lovely and he’s always in good humour.”
After Kinnegad the road emptied and we drove steadily and fast. Outside Longford a great walled estate with old woods stretched away to the left and children from a tinker encampment threw a stone that grazed the windscreen. In the distance, between rows of poplars, the steel strip of the Shannon started to flash.
“There it is — the Shannon River,” she greeted excitedly. “They said they’d meet us in the first bar on the right. That’s it. Over there. The Shannon Pot.”
We had hardly time to look around the big lounge, a large pike preserved in a lighted glass case above the bar, the only sign of a connection with water, when a man in a well-cut worsted suit came up to us and enquired, “Would you be the people from the magazine?” When we told him we were he shook hands in the old courtly way, standing far back and bowing. “Mr Smith, the man who owns the boats, asked me to apologize for him. He meant to be here himself but was called to England the day before yesterday on sudden business, but he said all the information was here in these brochures, and if there was anything else you needed to know for the article to just leave word and he’d phone it in as soon as ever he got back. I’m supposed to see,” he smiled, “that you lack for nothing on the voyage. I’m known everywhere as Michael. And how was your journey down — good?”
“It was easy. We drove down,” I said.
He then introduced us to the barman, a young man in shirtsleeves.
“What about something warm after the journey? The evening is fine but it’s chill enough,” and we all had hot whiskeys. We had hardly touched them when another round appeared without a word, and then another. We started to protest but Michael waved our protest aside as if it was an appreciated but thoroughly unnecessary form of politeness. “We better see the boat first,” I had to say firmly, “then we can come back here.”
“The boat’s just across the road. There’s nothing to it,” he said and led us out.
The boat was across the road, a large white boat with several berths. It had a fridge, a gas stove, central heating and a hi-fi system. The Shannon, dark and swollen, raced past its sides. Night was starting to fall.