The Collected Stories (29 page)

Rattling coins, he went towards the telephone box at the end of the road to ring round to see if any of his friends were free for the evening.

They did not meet again till two Saturdays later, at the Metropole, as usual at eight. She had a floppy blue hat and dark glasses. Her summer dress was sleeveless, and she had a race card in her long gloved hands.

‘You must have just come from the races.’

‘I was at the Park. I even won some money.’ She smiled her old roguish smile.

‘You must be hungry, then. Why don’t we go somewhere nice to eat?’

‘That’s fine with me,’ she said with all her mocking brightness. ‘I can take you – this evening – with the winnings.’

‘If that suits you. I have money too.’

‘You took long enough in calling,’ she said with a flash of real resentment.

‘It didn’t seem to make much difference to you. It’d be nice if I was wrong. That’s how it seemed.’

‘Where are we going?’ She stopped; that they were adversaries now was in the open.

‘To Bernardo’s. We always had good times there. Even coming from the races you look very beautiful,’ he said by way of appeasement.

The restaurant was just beginning to fill. The blindman was playing the piano at its end, his white stick leaning against the dark varnish. They ate in tenseness and mostly silence, the piano thumping away. Now that he was about to lose her she had never looked so beautiful.

‘You’re not eating much,’ she said when she saw him struggle with the veal.

‘It must be the damned exam,’ he said. ‘It’s starting next week. And, after all, I wasn’t at the races.’

‘That’s true,’ she laughed.

‘I’m sorry about the ridiculous fuss I made a few weeks back,’ he said openly.

‘It’s all right. It’s all over now.’

‘Do you think you’ll be able to come back with me this evening?’
For a wild sensual moment he hoped everything would suddenly be as it had been before.

‘Is it for – the usual?’ she asked slowly.

‘I suppose.’

‘No.’ She shook her head.

‘Why?’

‘I don’t see any point. Do you?’

‘We’ve often … many times before.’

‘We’ve gone on that way for too long,’ she said.

‘But I love you. And I thought – when things are more settled – we might be married.’

‘No.’ She was looking at him with affection and trying to speak softly and slowly. ‘You must know that the only time things are settled, if they are ever settled, is
now.
And I’ve had some hard thinking to do since that last evening. You were quite right to be angry. If I was seriously interested in you I’d not have broken the date for someone coming casually to town. There was a time I thought I was getting involved with you, but then you didn’t seem interested, and women are practical. I’m very fond of you, and we’ve had good times, and maybe the good times just went on for too long, when we just should have had a romp, and let it go.’ She spoke as if their life together already belonged to a life that was over.

‘Is there no hope, no hope at all, that it might change?’ he asked with nothing more than an echo of desperation.

Through the sensual caresses, laughter, evenings of pleasure, the instinct had been beginning to assemble a dream, a hope; soon, little by little, without knowing, he would have woken to find that he had fallen in love. We assemble a love as we assemble our life and grow so absorbed in the assembling that we wake in terror at the knowledge that all that we have built is terminal, that, in our pain, we must undo it again.

There had been that moment too that might have been grasped, and had not, and love had died – she had admitted as much. It would have led on to what? To happiness, for a while, or the absence of this present sense of loss, or to some other sense of loss …

He thought he saw that moment, as well that moment now as any other: an evening in O’Connell Street, a Saturday evening like
any other, full of the excitement of the herding. She had taken his arm.

‘My young sister is to be engaged tomorrow. Why don’t we drive up? There’s to be a party. And afterwards we could have the weekend on our own,’ and when he answered, ‘It’s the one weekend I can’t,’ and started to explain, he saw the sudden glow go from her face; an impoverishment of calculation replaced it that had made him momentarily afraid. Anyhow, it was all evening now. That crossroad at which they had actually separated had been passed long before in the day.

‘No,’ she said gently. ‘And you’d not be so reckless if I’d said yes. We were both more in love with the idea of falling in love.’

‘Still it’s no fun walking round the world on your own.’

‘It’s not so bad as being with someone you can’t stand after the pleasure has worn off,’ she said as if she were looking past the evening.

‘I give up,’ he said and called for the bill.

‘Ring me sometime,’ she said as she got on the bus outside.

‘Right, then.’ He waved and knew neither of them would. They had played at a game of life, and had not fallen, and were now as indifferent to one another, outside the memory of pleasure, as if they were both already dead to one another. If they were not together in the evening how could they ever have been so in the morning …

And if she had come to him instead of leaving him, those limbs would never reach whomever they were going to …

And why should we wish the darkness harm, it is our element; or curse the darkness because we are doomed to love in it, and die …

And those that move along the edges can see it so until they fall.

‘What does your friend do for a living?’ the man asked the blonde woman in front of him after Marion, an enormous ungainly girl, had gone to the Ladies in Bernardo’s.

‘She’s not a friend. In fact, she’s more than a friend. She’s a client. A star. A pop star.’ The woman smiled as she drew slowly on her cigarette. ‘You’re behind the times. You see, I’m here to bring you up to date.’

‘But how can she be a pop star?’

‘You mean because she’s ugly? That doesn’t matter. That helps. The public’s tired of long, pale, beautiful slenders. Ugliness and energy – that’s what’s wanted now, and she has a good voice. She can belt them out.’

‘Does she have men friends and all that?’

‘As many as she wants. Proposals. Everything a woman’s supposed to want.’

‘She’s certainly not what you’d call beautiful.’

‘Publicity makes her beautiful. It moves her closer to the sun. In fact, it is the sun and still has its worshippers.’

‘It doesn’t make her so to me,’ the man said doggedly, ‘though I think you are beautiful.’

‘What
is
it anyhow? A good clothes rack or flesh rack? I don’t know.’

‘Whatever it is, you have it.’ He changed. ‘It doesn’t look as if Peter will come back now.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Peter isn’t trustworthy. I wish they’d let the blindman go home,’ she said as he struck up another number on the piano.

‘I suppose, for them, it’s the hopeful hours.’ The man referred to the large noisy table in the centre of the restaurant. They had come from a party and bribed the blindman to play on after he had risen at midnight to catch his usual garage bus to Inchicore.

‘Do you have anything to do with Peter?’

‘How?’ she asked sharply.

‘Sleep with him?’

She laughed. ‘I’ve never even thought of Peter that way. He’s a contact. In the trade,’ and without warning she leaned across the table and placed the burning tip of the cigarette against the back of the man’s hand.

‘What did you do that for?’ he asked angrily.

‘I felt like it. I suppose I should be sorry.’

‘No,’ he changed. ‘Not if you come home with me.’

‘To sleep with you?’ she parodied.

‘That would be best of all but it’s not important. We can spend the morning together,’ he said eagerly.

‘All right.’ She nodded.

They were both uneasy after the agreement. They had left one level and had not entered any other.

‘Do you think I should go to see if anything’s the matter with Marion?’

‘Maybe. Wait a little,’ he said.

Marion was pale when she came back. ‘I’m afraid I’m not used to the wine,’ she apologized.

‘I’m sorry, but we can go now. Do you think you’ll be all right?’

‘I’ll be fine,’ she said.

‘Anyhow, you’ll both see Peter tomorrow. He said he’d definitely be at the reception.’

The last thing their eyes rested on before they went through the door the Italian manager was holding open was the blindman’s cane leaning against the side of the piano.

‘Do you think they’ll make the poor man play all night?’ she asked.

‘He seems satisfied. I even heard them arranging for a taxi to take him home. I suppose we too should be thinking of a taxi.’

‘I’d rather walk, if that’s all right.’

They walked slowly towards the hotel. The night was fine but without moon or stars. Just before they got to the hotel, the man shook hands with Marion, and the two women walked together to the hotel door. They stood a while in conversation there before the star went in and the blonde woman turned back towards the man.

‘It always makes me uncomfortable. Being part of the couple, leaving the single person alone,’ he said.

‘The single person is usually glad to be left alone.’

‘I know that but it doesn’t stop the feeling.’ He had the same feeling passing hospitals late at night.

‘Anyhow, you’ve had your wish. We’re together,’ the woman said, and they kissed for the first time. They crossed to the taxi rank facing the railings of the Green, and they did not speak in the taxi. What hung between them might be brutal and powerful, but it was as frail as the flesh out of which it grew, for any endurance. They had chosen one another because of the empty night, and the wrong words might betray them early, making one hateful to the other; but even the right words, if there were right words, had not the power to force it. It had to grow or wither like a plant or flower. What they needed most was patience, luck, and that twice-difficult thing, to be lucky in one another, and at the same time, and to be able to wait for that time.

‘Will I switch on the light?’ he asked her as he let her into the flat.

‘Whatever you like.’

‘Then I’d rather not.’

After they had kissed he said, ‘There’s my room and the spare room. I don’t mind if you think it too soon and use the spare room.’

‘Wait,’ she said softly, and her arms leaned heavily round his shoulders, as if she had forgotten him, and was going over her life to see if she could gather it into this one place. Suddenly she felt him trembling. She pulled him towards her.

‘Do you bring many people back like this?’ she asked close to morning, almost proprietorially.

‘No. Not for ages.’

‘Why?’

‘First you have to find a person who’ll consent,’ he half joked. ‘And there’s not much use after a while unless there seems a chance of something more.’

‘Of what?’

‘Of it going on, I suppose.’

There was a silence in which a moth blundering about the half-darkness overhead was too audible.

‘And you, have you men?’ he asked awkwardly.

‘No. Until recently I had one man.’

‘What happened?’

‘Nothing. He was married. The man in question had a quite awful dilemma, and he suffered, how he suffered, especially with me. You see, he was torn between his wife and me, and he could not make up his mind. Women are, I think, more primal than men. They don’t bother too much about who pays the bill as long as they get what they want. So I gave him an ultimatum. And when he still couldn’t make up his mind I left him. That must sound pretty poor stuff.’

‘No. It sounds true.’

That hard as porcelain singleness of women, seeming sometimes to take pleasure in cruelty, was a part of the beauty.

‘Would you like to be married?’

‘Yes. And you?’

‘I suppose I would.’

‘You know that speech about those who are married or kind to their friends. They become olives, pomegranate, mulberry, flowers, precious stones, eminent stars.’

‘I’d rather stay as I am,’ she laughed.

‘I suppose it is all in life.’ He drew her towards him.

‘We didn’t choose it any more than those before us or those who may come after us.’

When they rose and washed in the flat in all its daylight, it seemed as if it was not only a new day but the beginning of a new life. The pictures, the plates, the table in its stolidity seemed to have been set askew by the accidental night, to want new shapes, to look comical in their old places. The books on the wall seemed to belong to an old relative to whom one did not even owe a responsibility of affection. Gaily one could pick or discard among them, choosing only those useful to the new. For, like a plant, the old outer leaves would have to lie withered for new green shoots to push upwards at the heart.

‘What are you thinking?’

‘Nothing much. Of another morning. A Paris morning, opening shutters, a water truck was going past, and behind came four Algerians with long-handled brooms.’

‘Were you alone or with someone?’ He was ashamed of the first pang of irrational jealousy.

‘Actually, I was alone. I suppose one usually is those mornings.’ Her gravity, much like a small child’s, took all the light to itself.

They had come from four separate people, two men and two women, lying together in two separate nights; and those two nights were joined in the night they had left, had grown into the morning.

She was not garlanded by farms or orchards, by any house by the sea, by neither judges nor philosophers. She stood as she was, belonging to the morning, as they both hoped to belong to the evening. They could not possess the morning, no more than they could disagree with it or go against its joy.

She was wearing what she wore at the dinner while the blindman played, a dress of blue denim, buttoned down the front, and on her stockingless feet were thonged sandals.

‘What are you going to do today?’

‘I have to go to the hotel and then to the reception. I suppose we’ll see the busy Peter there. After that I’m free. And you?’

‘I’m free all day.’