Collected Stories (61 page)

“You see, Una,” he said in his earnest paternal way, “it's no good telling me what you think of Jimmy now. You're just at a dead end with him. You'll think differently when you're married, because you'll change and he'll change as well.”

“As much as all that?” she cried in mock alarm.

“Pretty much,” he replied gravely. “And it won't be all for the better, of course. It may even be for the worse.”

“And all after one night?” she went on in the same
gamine
tone.

“Not after one night, Una,” he replied reproachfully. “Maybe not till a good many nights—and days. You're making too much of the night altogether.”

“Denis, am I an old maid?”

“No, dear,” he went on, refusing to be interrupted. “The way I see it, girls like you with plenty of life, if you're not married by the time you're thirty, you start exaggerating because your mind's gone off in one direction and your body in another. You talk far too much about sex. That's because you should be enjoying it instead. And that's why I think Jimmy and you quarrel as you do. You have to get your mind and body working together, the way they did when you were a kid.”

He was a very unusual man, she decided; he talked in a solemn, silky, almost clerical tone, with a touch of mysticism, yet here he was at the same time making love to her, and the inconsistency gave it all a sort of fairy-tale quality.

When she reached home, Joan talked severely to her. She and her husband were very fond of Denis and were now convinced that Una was leading him on, amusing herself with him. Here she was, running away from a most desirable young man to whom she should have been married years before, and running round with a married man who was lonely, disappointed, and poor and had to work in a small job in a government office to provide the alimony he had to pay because of a previous indiscretion. Someone was going to be hurt, and it wasn't she.

Una had a good deal of conscientiousness as well as natural good sense, and instead of quarrelling with Joan she thanked her and promised to behave better. The more she thought of it, the more she saw Joan was right, and that she had only been flirting with Denis, quite regardless of the consequences to him. She was also rather flattered at the idea that it was she and not Denis who was doing the flirting.

Next evening, she gave the same sales-talk to Denis with a slight change of emphasis. With great frankness she pointed out his irresponsibility and lack of regard for the future of his children. He listened to her quietly with bowed head until she mentioned the children, and then he flashed her a quick, angry look and said: “Let the kids out of it, Una, please.” She was so satisfied with her own maturity of judgment that she rang up Jimmy and told him gaily that she had had a proposition from a married man with two children.

“Some people have all the luck,” he replied darkly.

“Why?” she asked in surprise. “What's wrong with the flappers?”

“Not biting this weather,” he said.

Next morning she woke with a slight feeling of discomfort. When she thought about it she realized that it was caused by Denis's look when she spoke to him of his children. Something about the look suggested that he must think her not only a coquette but a hypocrite as well. She rang him up to invite him for a walk. Now that she had the situation in hand, she saw no reason why they should not be friends and regretted the words that might have caused him pain.

At midnight she found herself in bed with him, lying in a most extraordinary position, which made her giggle to herself, and realized that Joan's warning had not been superfluous. What a dozen men with ten times his attraction had failed to do, he had managed without the slightest difficulty. At one he was fast asleep and snoring in the little single bed under the window. She rose, dressed, and looked for a long time at the innocent round red face with the mouth slightly open and said aloud in a scandalized tone: “His mistress.” Then she looked at herself in the mirror and frowned. She tiptoed out of the room, closed the front door quietly behind her, and was startled by the echo of her own footsteps from the other side of the square, like those of the secondary personality who had taken her place and was now returning furtively from her midnight adultery. “Adultery,” she added in the same hushed voice. She felt very solemn and wanted the quiet of her own room, where she could meditate on the strangeness of her own conduct without being disturbed by his snores or the touch of his body. She was alarmed and disillusioned: alarmed that she had deliberately behaved in such an irrational and shocking way, and disillusioned because it had produced no effect on her. If this was what was supposed to change people's characters, they must be considerably more susceptible than she was.

When she woke, it was with a full sense of the possible consequences and she flew into a panic. She decided that she would marry Jimmy at once. She had now reached a stage where she could not trust herself without being married. She rang him up to tell him she was returning next day. He sounded relieved and she felt relieved herself, as though she were escaping from a great danger. She went into town and spent a lot of money on a really beautiful pullover for him. This and the crowds in the sunlight in Stephen's Green reassured her and covered up the memory of those stealthy echoing footsteps in the dark and silent square.

They reassured her so much that at last she could see no point in rushing home. After all, it was a new experience, something that people generally agreed was essential to the character, and the least she could do was to give it a chance. She returned to Denis's to cook dinner for him that evening. This, too, was an experience that she wanted to have, just to see what marriage to him would have been like. He seemed touched by the sight of her, making a muck of his clean kitchen. “Eh, girl,” he said fondly, “you look a different woman in that apron. You look quite beautiful.” She felt it. She was much happier this way than without her clothes. Denis was not a good lover as Jimmy was; he never made her feel exalted as Jimmy did; but he did make her feel comfortable, as though they had been married for years. And what impressed her most was that she had no more sense of guilt than if they had been married. It struck her that in a girl of such strict principles, a girl who never coddled herself but set off to early Mass, winter and summer, this was most remarkable and must mean something, if only she knew what.

Instead of going home in a hurry, she spent an extra week in Dublin, visiting museums and galleries and going on excursions with Denis. She ceased to be embarrassed by his baldness and his baggy trousers. She realized that, wherever they went, there was always about him an air of quiet distinction which marked him out. Poor but intelligent, he knew every object of interest within twenty miles of the city. It was a revelation to see it in his company.

At the station, when she threw her arms about his neck, the Sheehys exchanged glances of alarm. They had known something was happening, but not this. She kept her tears for the train. Then, after it had passed Maryboro, and Dublin was well behind, she cheered herself with the thought of her return, and was her old gay self when her father met her.

It was pleasant and restful to slip back into the familiar routine of evenings with Jimmy, the walks out the Lee Road and the visits to the pictures, but even the pullover did not entirely wipe out her feelings of guilt, so she tried to make it up to him in other ways. She felt unusually mature and motherly, and capable at last of coping with his moods. For the first time, thanks to Denis, she realized how many of their quarrels had been caused by her own unsettled state, and resolved that they must not fall back into the same pattern. She even made discoveries about Jimmy. He wasn't an easy man to understand because he didn't understand himself. He was touchy about orthodoxy because he wasn't happy with it himself. There was a critical side of Jimmy which he never gave rein to. So when he had what he considered a trying day and needed sympathy, she let him put his head on her lap and stroked his hair while he moaned about his intolerable existence. When he frowned at one of her hasty conclusions, she withdrew it immediately. It was really quite easy, though she had never realized it until Denis made it plain to her; a mere matter of technique that never really impinged upon her own freedom of judgment, and she wondered at the crises she had needlessly provoked because of such trifles. Jimmy noticed the change in her and said suspiciously that her holiday seemed to have done her good.

“I suppose it's really that fellow, O'Brien,” he growled, “with the—how many is it?—five children.”

“Some day I'm afraid I'll have to confess everything, love,” she replied with a mocking grin, and hugged herself at the thought of how little poor Jimmy knew. As she walked through the main streets, exchanging gossip with her friends, she seemed to hear echoing footsteps in the silent square, romantic now and far away, and thought what her friends would say if only they knew. Una MacDermott! You're not serious. Her poor father would drop dead.

Then one night she and Jimmy had a thundering row. It began quite innocently, in an argument about a current political scandal, something about a distillery. Political scandals always seemed to involve a distillery or two. Jimmy would not admit that there was any scandal at all, and finally, in a rage, Una stamped out, swearing that she would never speak to him again; that he didn't know what manliness was. By the time she reached home it had dawned on her that the old pattern had reasserted itself exactly as before. And this time it definitely wasn't only her unsettled state. Jimmy was unsettled too, and it was only too plain that he took the wrong side and stuck to it because in life he had taken the wrong side and was unable to detach himself from it. But it wasn't to be supposed that he would find a feminine equivalent of Denis or even listen to her if he did.

“Steady up, girl!” she told herself. “Somebody in this establishment has to have a sense of responsibility.”

Before she went to bed she rang up Jimmy and proposed going to Glengarriff for the weekend. It was a favorite haunt of theirs. She was syrupy, as though she had forgotten all about their quarrel, and Jimmy was sour as though he had no intention of allowing her to forget, but he said in a weary tone that if she really wanted to go so badly, he didn't mind. When Jimmy's orthodoxy was challenged he seemed to revert to the age of twelve.

However, the trip down put him in better humor, as it always did, and when they walked along the village street and watched the moon rising over Cab Du, he was in high spirits. While the ripples broke the moon's reflection in the water till it looked like a great tree of leaves, they lingered over the wall, chatting to the boatmen of the first arrivals among the summer visitors.

When he said good-night to her in her room, she pulled his head down to hers and asked in a low voice: “Aren't you going to stay with me, Jimmy?” He grew very red. “Are you sure you want me to?” he replied. For answer, she turned her back on him and pulled her frock over her head. He still stood there, embarrassed and silent, till she embraced him. She felt in control of the situation again. All the nonsense between them was over. She would soon force him to admit the connection between his smugness and his celibacy. And as a lover there was no comparison between him and Denis. There never had been. Jimmy wasn't only a lover; he was a sweetheart whom she had known for years, whose ways she understood and whose honesty she trusted. She felt a pleasure with him she had never felt with Denis, and when they lay quietly, listening to the ripples on the beach and watching the moonlight streak about the blind, she patted his leg and explained in whispers what imbeciles they had been and how close they had gone to wrecking their relationship. Jimmy agreed drowsily.

Next morning he got up and dressed before the maids were about, and Una sat cross-legged on the bed, watching him in admiration. He raised the blind, and she noticed his unusual gravity as he stared over the bay.

“What's the day going to be like?” she asked brightly.

“I wasn't looking,” he replied in a faraway voice without looking round. “I was thinking that perhaps we'd better get married as soon as we can. Don't you think so?”

The proposal did not upset her so much as the funereal tone in which it was spoken.

“Oh,” she replied blithely but with a sinking heart, “do you think so?”

He leaned his shoulder against the window frame, and the morning light caught his handsome, big-boned, gloomy face and brought out the deep vertical lines between his eyes.

“We don't have to rush into it,” he said. “Your people wouldn't like it. Neither would mine.”

“I dare say not,” she said doubtfully, and then gazed anxiously at him. “You're not disappointed, are you?”

He turned a penetrating look on her. “Aren't you?”

“Me?” she cried, between astonishment and laughter. “Good Lord, no! I think it's marvellous.”

“Perhaps disappointment is the wrong word,” he said in the same faraway voice, and nodded over his shoulder towards the door. “But we don't want much more of this.”

“You mean it's—furtive?”

“Oh, and wrong,” he said wearily.

“Wrong?”

By way of reply, he shrugged his shoulders with the broken-down air he wore after a bad day at the office. Translated, it meant: “If you can't see that!”

“Well, it's better than fighting, isn't it?” she asked wistfully. “We know one another long enough, anyway.”

“That only makes it worse,” he said coldly. “Having stuck it so long, we should have been able to stick it a bit longer. After all, we're not just out for a good time.”

He sounded as though he were explaining the policy of his paper. At any other time his tone would have set her at his throat, but now she winced. It was true enough. Their squabbles and misunderstandings had been merely part of the normal behavior of two grown people who contemplated a lifetime of each other's society and were sensitive to the trifles that threatened their happiness. There had been nothing wrong with them but her own misinterpretation. She sprang out of bed and threw her arms round him.