So one afternoon, with the place deserted, I slid under the flap that guarded the space behind the counter, and I pressed my hot, flat body wordlessly against his. It was a matter of instinct only. The brittle, swollen feeling in my skin broke and melted away. It was several days before we learned how to kiss.
I took some tins from the shelf, poured a can full of new milk into a bottle that had once contained stout, and corked it firmly. I took my blue cotton frock and the red Sunday dress, wrapped the food in them and secured the bundle with my father’s best funeral tie. We found our separate ways in the dark to the flat rock that lies fallen at the end of the headland to the north of Killogue. The feelings of the week before seemed very strange as we stood and watched each other. I laid my cardigan in the shelter of the slab of rock and lay down on it. After a silence that went on forever Diarmuid lay down with me.
What do you want? ‘The sceptre of his passion’? ‘My deep, throbbing heart’? Descriptions of the sexual act always pain me. I am reminded of a book published by a vanity press in the United States, where the hero puts — no, slides his hand into ‘the cleft of readiness’ and finds ‘the nub of responsiveness.’ And, in fact, that description will do as well as any other. We fooled around, like children. There was no technical consummation, though some pain. We didn’t have a clue, you could say. That was all.
Why bother? We all have had our small, fumbling initiations on dirty sofas or canal walks. Why bother to remember, when it is our business to look for the better things in life, and our duty to forget. (‘A bunch of baby carrots please, and a pound of potatoes, isn’t it a nice day, thank God,’ the last words spoken by this atheist, pervert and hopeless cook.) Sentiment is all very well (wedding cake), even large emotions — so long as they are mature (sound of baby’s first cry, the look of love in paralysed husband’s grateful eyes). But what about passion? Passion is the wrong word. I are speaking of the feeling that hits like a blow to the belly in ordinary places. See that woman in a headscarf stop dead on the footpath, her mouth shaping to form a word. But before she remembers what it is, the image is tucked away, the shopping bag is changed from one hand to the other, and she walks on. What kind of images collect in an old woman’s head?
My moment of passion was a cold one. I woke up just before the dawn, a white light spreading over the bay turning the sea to a frosted blue, and a shivering in my body that scarcely left me intact. Every organ was outlined with a damp pain and I could sense every muscle and bone. I couldn’t feel the ground, or the clothes on my back. I was floating inside my numb skin like the jelly of an oyster, and my shell seemed to have sprouted some extra limbs. They were Diarmuid’s. He lay in my arms asleep, and a perfect, empty, blue freedom was all around. The sun had not yet risen. I was already feverish.
School settled over me like a blanket when you are sick. Up at seven, silence till eight, Mass, breakfast, class. I didn’t want to speak and there was no room for friends. Instead, I showed off to the nuns as though they were the old men in my father’s bar; my hand was permanently up in the air, my poems were read out at assembly.
I was allowed special access to books, and my religion essays were scattered with references to St John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich, even Kierkegaard. You may not think that it is possible, but yes, it is possible to be so clever at sixteen, and then to ignore it. And I was the cleverest of them all. The other girls whispered about escape into town, while I read under the sheets. I thought about Diarmuid, but not for long, there was no relief in it. I decided to become a nun, decided to become a writer, decided finally, to become nothing at all. I lost my faith, in the best male tradition, but did not consider its loss significant. There was something about the nuns that made individual lives seem inconsequential, and I admired them for it. What I wrote, I burned and forgot.
Daddy died the summer I left school — he had only held out for the sake of the fees — and so I was free to turn down my university scholarship, despite Sr Polycarpe’s pleading, and three novenas from my English, biology and maths teachers respectively. I took a flat on the Pembroke Road and a secretarial job. I also took a boy from the office home with me one night and woke up to find that he had fallen in love. We got over the embarrassment with a small wedding, me in a blue suit and pill-box hat, a light veil of netting at the front. When we went to France on our honeymoon, I pretended not to speak French. This is why, I suppose, I am plagued with travel sickness and we spend our holidays now on the Irish coast.
My husband is a good man, and I love him, though not in the usual way. By this I mean that he is kindly, not that he is dull — I have learned to find interest in the expected. I should write about my daughter too, I suppose, except that this confessional mode agitates and bores me. Something, somewhere, marked my life out like this. I make up childhoods to try and explain. Nevertheless, I do not change. I gave birth to a daughter and I did not change.
One morning (a writer’s lie this, like all other ‘realizations’), one morning, it could be said, I looked in the mirror and found that I was middle aged.
Do you understand? I looked in the mirror and found that I was middle aged. The relief was overwhelming. My anonymity was crystallized, my life since Diarmuid was staring me in the face, tepid and blank. Everything had dropped away — I could do anything now. What interests me, I thought, is not life, the incidents that fill it, not images or moments, but this central greyness. I saw that I was ready. It was into this greyness that Felix would drop, like a hard little apple into the ripe ground.
Felix was only a boy that I loved. Will you believe that I did not harm him, that I made him happy? And not only with sweeties. I knew his mother, a proud, vulgar woman, and had shared my pregnancy with her, putting to rest her useless fears about breech births and extra chromosomes. I even (the irony of it!) placed my hand on her tight belly in the seventh month, a gesture that in our semi-detached world belongs to the husband alone. There was the little nugget of Felix, wrapped up in the silt of her body. I sometimes wonder whether I corrupted him then with that touch, whether my voluptas was sent through his transparent limbs, turning them into the clean, radiant flesh that was to possess me before he was fully grown.
In the meantime, I was the woman up the road and my daughter was his friend. They played doctors and nurses on the front porch, I suppose. Recently I dug over their dolls’ graveyard. I took some pleasure in their growing, though grazed knees and the simple, sloppy cruelty of children hold little charm for me. Felix was quiet — even then, you could not tell his arrogance, his animal calm, from the shyness of other small boys. In retrospect, he was probably beautiful, and I kissed him sometimes, as children need to be kissed. (Was I a bad mother? Oh no.) When I regret all those wasted caresses, I comfort myself with the fact that I could not have known. Looking at myself as I was, I can only see what those two children saw, a solid, transparent shape that wasn’t quite flesh, but ‘mother’ — the creature that was wrapped about them like certainty.
When gradually things began to change between them, I did not notice that either, and would have found it tedious if I had. My daughter started slamming doors and stealing lipsticks. One afternoon she came home crying and hid up in her bedroom. I was attacking the hall with the vacuum cleaner, hoping that the noise would disturb the concentration her self-pity seemed to require, when the knock came at the door. There was Felix on the doorstep, a grown boy, with an indifferently guilty look on his face, and his overlarge hands thrust into his pockets. Little Miss Madam opened her bedroom door and shouted down the stairs, ‘You’ve spoilt everything!’