“It’s just as bad without it,” I had time to tell him as Moran pushed towards us at the end of the bar, a large florid man in thornproof tweeds.
“I see you’re inflaming the people again. You better not get them too riz or they’ll turn wicked on yez,” it sounded so well polished that it was hardly the first time it had been put to use. “I was just on my way,” I said, and with apologetic clasps on arms I left before there was time for protest. “I’ll finish that for you in a few days.”
I stood and breathed freely a few moments in the rainwashed air outside, and then moved towards the lighted dancehall. As I drew near I saw three girls with overcoats and long dresses get out of a taxi and go in ahead of me through the swing doors.
The womb and the grave.… The christening party becomes the funeral, the shudder that makes us flesh becomes the shudder that makes us meat. They say that it is the religious instinct that makes us seek the relationships and laws in things. And in between there is time and work, as passing time, and killing time, and lessening time that’d lessen anyhow, such as this going to the dance.
There was a small queue in front of the ticket window when I went through the doors, the three girls in long dresses who had just got out of the taxi at its end. An even longer queue had formed by the time I was able to buy a ticket and a porter brought out a small easel and a pale red House Full placard, and left the placard one side of the easel, ready for putting up.
With the ticket I climbed the heavily carpeted stairs, running into another queue half-way up, which only moved every minute or so at a time, four or five steps, like disembarking from a ship. A man at the head of the stairs in full evening dress was the cause of this last queue, his black hair slicked back from handsome, regular features that had all the marks of an ex-boxer. As he tore each ticket in two, handing a half back, stabbing the half he kept on to a piece of wire, he stared into the faces like the plainclothes policeman beyond the barriers stare when a watch is being kept on the ports.
In the cloakroom a man was carefully hiding a bald patch with a comb and side of the hand. He was concentrating so hard that he did not even notice when I excused myself to get past him to the towels.
The band was playing to an empty floor, slowly, a foxtrot, the brushes caressing the drums. The four steps up from the bar left the dance floor just below eye-level. I sat in the bar, watched its pale maple on which some silver dust was scattered lie empty in the low light. After a while a blue dress swung past, followed by a steel-like trouser leg, the first couple started to dance.
None of the tables were completely free. I sat by the windows across from a young man with dark red hair and a winning smile who had already several empty glasses in front of him.
“You’re enjoying yourself,” I said to the red-headed man who was little more than a boy but looked more aged because of a weathered face. The hands were scarred and the nails broken.
“Just getting up some old courage,” he was too involved with his anxiety or fear to want to talk and we just smiled and nodded back into our separate silences. Far below in O’Connell Street toy cars were streaming past, and most of the small figures on the pavements seemed somehow comic in their fixed determination to get to wherever they were going. I saw the boxer in evening dress leave the head of the stairs. The House Full notice must have gone up on the easel below. It was no longer possible to see onto the dance floor, the space at the head of the steps packed with men, and men on the steps below struggled to push through. Everywhere now there was the sense of the fair and the hunt and the racecourse, the heavy excitement of preying and vulnerable flesh, though who were the hunters and who the prey was never clear, in an opening or closing field one could easily turn into the other; and, since there were not many young people here, there must have been few in the dancehall who at one time or another hadn’t been both, and early as it was in the evening, if we could scent past habits and tobacco and alcohol, in all the gathering staleness, there must be already, here or there, in some corners, the sharp smell of fresh blood on the evening’s first arrowheads.
The redhead and I rose at the same time from the table which was immediately seized by the waiter for a large party of five or six couples who started to move vacant chairs away from half-filled tables.
“I suppose we better be making a start,” the man smiled apologetically.
“I suppose if we’re ever going to,” I smiled back in the same way as we allowed the tables to part us, making our separate ways towards the dance floor.
Way had to be pushed through the men crowded in the entrance at the top of the short steps. The women stood away to the left of the bandstand, between the tables, some of them spilling onto the floor. It is not true that we meet our destiny in man or woman, it is those we meet who become our destiny. On the irreversible way, many who loved and married met in this cattle light.
I went towards her, the light blue dress falling loosely on the shoulders, the dark hair pinned tightly back to show the clean, strong features. She seemed not to be with anyone, and she moved nervously in the first steps of the dance.
“Did you come on your own?”
“Judy was to come with me. She works in the office with me, but she got a sore throat at the last minute. And I had the tickets. So I said — to hell — I’ll come on my own,” she explained.
“What sort of office do you work in?”
“The bank, the Northern Bank. It’s boring but as my uncle used to say it’s secure, and you can’t beat security.”
She was not as young as she’d looked in the light across the dance floor, there was grey in the dark hair, but she was, if anything, more handsome. The body was lean and strong against my hand.
“And do you come here often?”
“O boy, are you kidding? Some real weirdoes come to this place. The last person I was dancing with asked me if I slept with people.”
“And what did you answer?”
“I was too shocked to answer and then I was angry. And then he asked me again, quite brazen-faced. And when I didn’t answer he just walked off and left me standing in the middle of the dance floor.”
“Not many people are young here,” I said.
“I’m not young. I’m thirty-eight,” she answered as if she’d been challenged.
“It wasn’t that kind of age I was thinking of,” I said.
All around us on the maple the old youngsters danced. The stained skin did not show in the blue light, but paunches did, bald heads, white hair, tiredness. People do not grow old. Age happens to us, like collisions, that is all. And usually we drive on. We do not feel old or ridiculous as we pursue what we have always pursued. Tonight, as any night, if we could anchor ourselves in the ideal greasy warm wetness of the human fork, we’d be more than happy. We’d dream that we were flying.
“What do you do?”
“I write a bit,” I said.
“What do you write?” she asked breathlessly.
“Just for a syndicate,” I said cautiously. “It’s a sort of advertising.”
“That’s funny,” she said. “I write too. It’s not much, but I write nearly a whole magazine, it’s called Waterways. It’s the magazine of the Amalgamated Waterways Association, old dears and buffs who meet twice a year. Walter — he’s my friend — he’s the editor, but he’s so lazy I wind up writing nearly the whole of every issue. You should see us the last two nights before we put it to bed — it’s a panic. Luckily, it only comes out every two months,” she was laughing and unaware that she was bumping some of the couples on the crowded floor.