“It sounds pretty grim.”
“What right have you to say that?”
“No right. And I’m sorry. It’s what I want to talk about.”
“This is all I need tonight!”
“We only know each other a few weeks, and things are happening far too fast for me. I’m fond of you,” I could hear the lie slithering on the surface of thin ice. “But I’m not in love with you. I want us to call a halt, for a time anyhow, to these regular meetings.”
“I see you have it all worked out, just like one of your plots.”
“I haven’t it all worked out, but I want to give it a rest. We’ll drop it for a month or so and see how we feel then. And for that time both of us are free.”
“But I love you.…”
“If you love me, then surely you can do that much for a month.”
“You’re letting nothing through and you can really swing them.”
“Swing what?”
“Reasons. Figures. You have it all figured out, haven’t you? There’s hardly need to even talk.”
“I want to rest it for a month,” I said doggedly.
“It’ll be no different in a month.”
“We’ll see.”
“I feel I have enough love for the both of us to begin with. It’s that horrible stuff you’re writing that has you all twisted and unnatural. I’d care so much for you. There’s so many other decent natural things you could do.”
“I suppose I could run a health food shop or a launch on the Shannon River,” I said angrily.
“You don’t understand. I love you. I only want the best for you.”
“Well then, the best for me is that we agree not to see one another for a month.”
“I don’t suppose there’s any use suggesting that we go back to your place and talk about it.”
“No. There’s no use. You know what that’ll lead to, and we’ll be only deeper and deeper in.”
“There was a time when you were anxious enough for that,” it was her turn to be angry.
“We both were. I’ll get a taxi for you or I’ll walk you home. Whichever you prefer.”
“Walk me home,” she said.
“I’m grateful, even flattered by your love. But you can’t do the loving for the both of us,” I said to her at the gate.
“O boy,” she said bitterly. “I waited long enough to sure pick a winner,” and I shook her hand and left before she began to cry.
I too had stood mutilated by another gate, believing that I could not live without my love; but we endure, as the first creature leaving water endured, having first tried to turn back from the empty land. Having drunk from the infernal glass we call love and knowing we have lived our death, we turn to love another way, in the ordered calm of each thing counted and loved for its impending loss. We learn to smile.
There was no smiling, nothing but apprehension when a telegram came several days later. Please ring me, and it gave her office number. The worst rose easily enough to mind, that maybe this time nothing as simple as a death was in question. A life might have started. I rang her from the kiosk at the bottom of the road. As the girl on the switchboard tried to get her I could hear the clatter of typewriters.
“I got your telegram,” I said.
“Thank God you rang. I didn’t know what to do.”
“Is something wrong?”
After a long pause she breathed, “There sure is.”
“Are there many people that can overhear you?”
“The whole office — thirty or forty.”
“Is it that you’re … late?”
“Right.”
“How long?”
“Five days.”
“I’ll meet you after work, then. You get out at five?”
“I can leave just before.”
“Meet me at five, then. At the Liffey Bookshop. Round the corner from O’Connell Street, facing the river.”
“I know it,” she said. “I’ll be there at five.”
I was fingering through the boxes of second-hand books displayed outside when she came, taking in nothing but the discoloured spines, once red and grey and blue and brown.
For once she said nothing, swallowing slightly. There were tear-stains on her face, and I feared she was about to start to cry again. “We’ll cross to the river. That way we’ll get out of the rush,” I said, the pavement round us starting to swarm. We began to walk slowly away from the city, out towards Kingsbridge.
“It’s so good to see you,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do. Yesterday evening I must have walked seventeen times by your place, but I was afraid to go in. I’m sorry,” she wiped away tears with her handkerchief.
“There’s no need to cry. I’m not running out on you. If you’re pregnant, then we’re in this together.”
She leaned across and kissed me, “I knew you were a good person. Deep down I knew I could trust you. I didn’t know what I’d do after that last evening. I couldn’t get through to you at all. It was like speaking to a stranger. You seemed determined to let nothing past you. And then I was late. You can imagine what I felt then, and I’ve always been regular as clockwork. It was like one nightmare followed by another. I thought I was going crazy. I think I would have too, except deep down, somehow, I knew I could trust you.”
“Anyhow I’m here. Is it all right if we walk out towards Kingsbridge, just to get away from this crazy rush hour? We’ll have to talk things out.”
“Anywhere you want,” she took my arm.
Her face had completely cleared, and she was smiling now through brimming eyes. It was as if she’d put all her money on red and the wheel had just stopped and red had won. Below the rounded granite of the wall, the Liffey lay at low tide, two ungainly swans paddling about among the noisy gulls on a mudbank beneath the trickle from an effluent. The small plane trees in their irons along the path were putting out the first leaves.
“We won’t have a white wedding,” she said. “White is to signify virginity, and I’m hardly a virgin. One person who’ll be thrilled is Father Paul, the Augustinian I told you about who came in when I was down with my sister. He’s known me since I was a little girl. When he left there were tears in his eyes, and he put his two hands on my shoulders, it seems now he must have sensed or known something, for he said I was made for loving and children. One day soon he’d have to see me married. He’ll marry us. You’ll like him, and I know he’ll like you. I won’t need to get any clothes. The plain blue costume will do. And that grey suit of yours will be fine, with the wine tie. We won’t have more than half a dozen people each, and we’ll go to a good restaurant, Bernardoes or Quo Vadis, not to an hotel. I suppose I’ll have to have my sister and her husband, and poor Walter from the magazine, he’ll be so surprised, and the two American girls, Betty and Janey. We won’t have a Protestant family. I’m not so old that I can’t have two or three more children yet.”
A cold sweat broke out over me as I traced my own place in her words: the grey suit, the church, her friend the boozy priest, her doting face above me, “This is what I need,” as I place the gold ring on mother’s finger, and afterwards the prawns, the long-stemmed wine glasses, the toasts, each cliché echoing its own applause, the laughter, “We are no common crowd.…”
At each bus stop she released my arm as we walked on the concrete high above the filthy river and seized it again as soon we got past each queue. If I had got my love pregnant she would have walked beside me in this same misery, and I, released from suffering, would have no hint of it in my gross triumph. I, too, busy with my sudden reprieve, would be making similarly hurried arrangements for the funeral of her singleness.