“Of course, since your rights mean nothing to you, it’s no sacrifice for you to give them up,” she said bitterly.
“I never pretended it was any other way,” I answered.
These parties were the only nights I didn’t see her, but even so they were no holiday. Hardly able to believe I was escaping so lightly, I felt I had the whole frail month in my hands, to be guided as delicately as possible towards the airport. From these functions she brought back trophies. A large clock with a scroll of names, an ornate silver tray, an ice bucket. Amalgamated Waterways gave her a cheque.
“There were speeches about my courage, how I was throwing mundane security over in order to seek fame and fortune. That I made them all seem small. If only they knew the truth,” she said, and I did not answer. Even within the boundaries of the four weeks, I was aware of possibilities within myself for doing something wild and stupid. Troubled by my own confusions in meeting her at the idiotically beribboned almond tree, I started to take down books in the room, unconsciously searching for some general light, as I’d gone out for allies at the first news. It was an ungenerous attitude, but my position was hardly aristocratic. I eventually found a sentence which brought me to a sudden stop: “Everybody must feel that a man who hates any person hates that person the more for troubling him with expressions of love; or, at least, it adds to hatred the sting of disgust.” I wrote it down, and kept it about my person like a scapular, as if the general expressions of the confused and covered feelings could licence and control them.
The last week we met at the almond tree at nine-thirty instead of eight. She was clearing out the room she’d lived in for more than twenty years and packing. She’d booked her ticket to London on an afternoon flight so that Jonathan could meet her. They’d arranged to go from the airport to the flat and then to his favourite restaurant for dinner.
“It’s only fair that I pay for that ticket.”
“I accept that,” she said gravely. “In fact, I want you to collect it. It’s booked in O’Connell Street but you can pick it up at any Aer Lingus place.”
“Why have I to collect it? Why can’t someone else do it, as long as I pay for it?”
“I don’t know. I just want you to.”
I didn’t know either, unless the ticket was a sort of personal receipt she had to have for the whole bitter business.
“Did you get it yourself?” were the first words when I handed her the ticket, the words weighed with a significance out of all proportion.
“I got it my very self. The girl who wrote it out had blonde hair, blue eyes and a Mayo accent. She was very pretty.”
“It’s all right for you. You haven’t to uproot yourself and go to London.”
“I was prepared to, but I thought it was just a simple air ticket that’s in question.”
“Thanks,” she said sharply, and thrust it in her handbag.
Between making love that night she cried, and I kept touching the verbal scapular that was part of my mind by now. As I walked her a last time down to the taxi rank at the end of Malahide Road she said, “I know that you’ve suffered as well as I have. We could have taken the easy way out of it and we didn’t and I think we’re both the better people for it.”
“I don’t know,” I touched my scapular a last time.
“And you’ll keep that promise. You’ll come and see me in London.”
“I’ll come. That’s if you want me.”
“I’ll want you,” she kissed me passionately. “Whether I’ll be able to afford you is the only thing in question.”
When I had loved, it had been the uncertainty, the immanence of No that raised the love to fever, when teeth chattered and its own heat made the body cold: “I cannot live without her.”
“I cannot live. …” If she’d said Yes, would not the fever have retired back into the flesh, to be absorbed in the dull blessed normal beat?
And was the note of No not higher and more clear because it was the ultimate note to all the days of love — for the good, the beautiful, the brave, the wise — no matter what brief pang of joy their Yes might bring?
If she had loved me that way — she who was now with child — had not that love been made desperate by my being its hopeless and still centre? Now she had the child. Was that not another Yes, a turning back within the normal beat?
I too had heard the hooves of the tribe galloping down on us. We had not kept within its laws.
I watched the clock. Her plane took off at three-forty. When hen the minute hand touched eight the plane taking her to London would sail heavily into the blue sky. It had flown. A cloud of dust on the road, the motor climbing the last half-mile, and then suddenly below, in a blue flash: the white houses, the masts of the tied-up fleet, the creamy haze of the sea.
As slowly as the hand had come to the eight, it as quickly raced to nine, ten.… It was four o’clock, and moving fast. I felt foolish in my excitement.
The whole city was restored to me, islanded in the idleness and ease of timeless Sunday mornings, church bells stroking the air and the drowning of it in wild medleys, the whole day given back to me because I had lost it.
When the red-bricked Georgian house had been converted into flats the entrance wasn’t changed at all except to put in an aluminium panel of electric buttons. They’d left one laurel, the ragged lawn, three granite steps, the old roses pinned with rusted staples to the wall, a heavy black knocker; and the letters for all the flats spilled through the brass flap onto the hall floor each morning and early afternoon. There was a dull click after they’d all been pushed through. Whoever was first down put them on the half-circular glass table with iron legs under the St Brigid’s cross. The nervous girl who worked on the radio was always the first one down in the morning. She must have watched for the postman from her window and left her room as soon as he’d come through the gate for she generally reached the door at the exact moment the letters were pushed through the brass flap. If he’d any delay in sorting the letters she used to have to wait in the hall, and I hated catching her apologetic, embarrassed smile whenever I’d found her waiting, the noises of the postman uncomfortably present on the other side of the door.
The letter-box became the focus of my precarious happiness, precarious because it was so fragile. When the afternoon post fell to the floor and there was no letter from London I felt released into another whole free day. When three days went by and there was still no letter I began to feel sometimes as if it had been a very vivid, bad dream. It might turn out, like the dream, not to be real, but I was still getting no work done. So I decided to secure my freedom for at least several more days by making the visit I had promised to my aunt and uncle and had been putting off for long.
I slept in my uncle’s room. “I’ll not get up for a while yet but why don’t you put on the light,” I said the first morning as I heard him fumble for the clothes he’d let drop on the floor going to bed.
“There’s no need. It’s just a matter of trousers and shirt,” he refused.
Home on school holidays I used to sleep in this room. Early in the morning I’d start to chatter with him, chattering like old starlings in the rafters my aunt had called it, and it must have been boring for him, but he’d never checked me, no more than he’d turn on the light now to find his clothes or draw the blind.
“I’ll go out to the mill around quitting time,” I said as I heard him pause before leaving the room.
“Whenever suits you. If I was you I wouldn’t start getting up or anything for long yet. You might as well lie back and take it easy when you have the chance.”
I heard steps in the hallway, the click of the lock, a car starting outside, the lock shut, my aunt’s slippers shushing back up the hallway. Cyril was on his way to work. Each morning my uncle must have timed his getting up to avoid Cyril. (Say it again, say it over, people do not find it easy to face one another.) When I heard my uncle leave, I too rose. As I sleepily drew the blinds the empty tarred square met me with a shock, the row of old railwaymen’s cottages beyond. There used to be a footpath to that station along the high cut-stone wall, two carriages and a van waiting to be towed to Dromod; beyond the darkness of the engine sheds, the long elephant’s trunk of piping from the water tank, the maze of rails, and the three stunted fir trees. It was said they never grew because of the poison of the coal smoke though they had blackened cones that dropped between the sleepers and onto the carriage roofs. Now it was level and empty: a tarred square, the cottages, a filling station. I felt like Pirandello and his wife rolled into one, the beginning of all that’s new, the continuance of everything old. What she saw, which wasn’t there, seemed more real to him than what he saw, which had the disadvantage of being there. The dancehall where I had met my first love was gone. We were waltzing in the sky.