“That’s it. It’s poor stuff. Sometime I’ll show it to you. When you show me your pieces,” I took the page away from her, the Colonel and Mavis might prove a rough overture. “What’ll you have to drink?”
“What are you having?”
“A whiskey. I feel cold.”
“A small one for me — a very small one, then.”
I heard the pieces of coal shift in the grate as the fire caught. I was grateful for the whiskey burning its way down into the tension.
“Is it all right to put off the light?” I asked. “Soon the flames will be bright.”
“It’s nice to sit and watch the fire,” she said and I turned off the light on the typewriter and marble. The flames bounced off the ceiling and walls, came to rest on the spines of the books, flashed again on the marble. We sat in front of the fire, and when I put my arm round her she returned my kiss, over and back on the mouth; but when I slid my hand beneath her dress she reacted so quickly that the whiskey spilled. Suddenly we were both standing, facing one another in front of the fire.
“Boy, you don’t move half fast,” she said.
“What did you expect?”
“You hardly know me.”
“That’s right.”
“You couldn’t love me or even care for me in this length of time.”
“Love has nothing got to do with it. I’m attracted to you.”
“You’ve.… ” She paused, embarrassed.
“Slept with people without being in love with them? Yes I have.”
“At least you’re honest about it.”
“That’s no virtue. There’s no way I can make you sleep with me if you don’t want to.”
“I’m sorry about the whiskey,” she said.
“That doesn’t matter. There’s more. Will you have some?”
“I’ll have a little,” she held out her glass. We drank in silence. The fire had completely caught, the coals glowing, a steady, flickering flame dancing everywhere about the room.
“O why not,” she said suddenly, and I felt no trace of triumph, only an odd sadness. “I want it too.”
“Are you sure? We don’t have to do anything,” I said, but our kissing spoke a different language, and without a word we started to slide out of our clothes. I was first in the bed and waited for her. For one moment I saw her stand as if to record or reflect, the flames flickering on the vulnerability of the pale slip with lace along the breasts, and then she slipped out of the rest of her things, and came to me.
“It’s wonderful just to lie and bathe in another’s body. You have a very beautiful body,” I heard my own words hang like an advertisement in the peace of the firelight, the flames leaping and flaming on the brass bells of the bed, on book spines and walls and ceilings.
She was excited and yet drawing away in her nervousness.
“Is it safe?” I asked her in the play.
“It’s the end of the month. I’m afraid I’m as regular as old clockwork.”
“I won’t hurt you,” I said.
“Be careful,” she answered. “It only happened once before,” and she guided me within, wincing whenever I touched the partly broken hymen.
Within her there was this instant of rest, the glory and the awe, that one was as close as ever man could be to the presence of the mystery, and live, the caged bird in its moment of pure rest before it was about to be loosed into blinding light; and then the body was clamouring in the rough health of the instinct, “This is what I needed. This-is-what-I-need-ed.” And we were more apart than before we had come together, the burden of responsibility suddenly in the room, and no way to turn to shift it or apportion it or to get rid of it.
“I’m sorry I hurt you.”
“No, you were very gentle. You see, it only happened to me once before.”
“When?” I was glad of this sudden opening to escape.
“Last summer. I have this friend Bridgie. She’s a teacher. And she has this flat at Howth that I take over from her when she goes away on the long school holidays. It’s just up from the harbour. Every Thursday evening I’d go down to buy fish off the boats when they’d come in. It was a Saturday it happened. It was awful. The man was a journalist and he was married.”
“Had he anything to do with Amalgamated Waterways?”
“No, he wasn’t from Waterways, in fact he’s quite famous but I don’t want to bring his name into it.
“A band was playing on the front that evening, where the grass and beds of flowers are, just before you get to the pier wall. He had come out to see me.
“We listened to the band. It was the Blanchardston Fife and Drum. They were playing ’Johnny I hardly Knew You’. There was the lovely smell of the sea mixed with cut grass and some of the children were playing in their bare feet. It’s funny how clear you remember everything just because something awful is about to happen to you. Then we walked out to the very end of the wall where the small lighthouse is. We just stood there and breathed the sea air and watched the boats tack in and out of the harbour, some of them nearly colliding, till it started to get cold. We went into the Abbey on our way back. We had a plate of prawns and brown bread. He had stout and I had cider and we bought both evening papers from a small dirty-faced newsboy who came in. I have an almost total blackout about everything that happened as soon as we went back to the flat. Anyhow, we found ourselves in bed together. He was very gentle, it hardly hurt at all, but afterwards, Ο boy, that’s when the trouble started, that’s where it ended.
“There was I feeling all these emotions: So this is what it was like. It has really happened after all these years, I was no longer a girl, I wasn’t a virgin any more, I must be a woman now at last at thirty-seven.”
“That was just last summer, so?” I asked.
“That’s right. It was the Saturday of the first week in August.”
“What happened then?”
“O boy, that’s when it happened. There was I with all these jumbled, mixed-up emotions racing all round in me, I had waited for this moment all my life, and now it had happened, I had given myself to a man. And he reached across and looked at his watch and turned on the transistor, ‘The racing results will be coming on in a minute,’ he said, and I couldn’t believe it. He got up, put on his clothes, pulled back the curtain. I saw him sitting in his shirtsleeves in the armchair, just socks on his feet, ticking off the results on the racing page as they were announced. I started to cry, stuffing the bedclothes to my face so that he wouldn’t hear. And then when I heard the time signal for the news and saw him still sitting without the slightest movement in the chair, I stopped the crying, and I asked him what he was thinking. If he had made any reference to what had happened, just the barest word, I think it would have been all right, but you know what he said, all that he said was, I can still hardly believe it, ‘I’ve just missed the crossed treble by a whisker,’ it seems funny now but it sure wasn’t funny at the time. I’d never felt so humiliated in all my life. Can you believe it, ‘I’ve just missed the crossed treble by a whisker.’ Then he heard me, and came over, but it was too late. I could never have anything to do with him again. It just made everything seem so ridiculous.”
“You’ve never been with anybody else before tonight?”
“No. And I feel fine. I don’t feel guilty or anything.”
It was a long way from Colonel Grimshaw and Mavis, but there was Howth, the sea and the sunlight, masts of the fleet in the evening sun when they went down to the harbour. There was the band playing on the grass. Time stood still in the Abbey Tavern for an hour. And just before the racing results came over the air, her seal had been broken.
“I wish I had taken you back to the room that evening,” I stirred with desire. “I wouldn’t have said that I had missed the crossed treble by a whisker.”