The Collected Stories (35 page)

‘It’s an affront to expect someone to lug this thing round for two whole days.’

‘What harm is it?’ his wife made the mistake of saying. ‘He’s not a very happy person.’

‘What do you know about his happiness or unhappiness?’

‘He sweats a kind of unhappiness. He’s bald and huge and not much more than thirty.’

‘I never heard such rubbish. He’s probably in some good hotel down in Wicklow at this very moment, relaxing with a gin and tonic, watching the sun set from a deck-chair, regaling this boy with poetry or love or some other obscenity. I’m not carrying the fat ponce’s suitcase a yard farther,’ and he flung it from him, the suitcase sliding to a violent stop against the ledge of the area railing without breaking open.

‘I’ll carry it.’ His wife went and picked up the case, but Mulvey was already striding ahead.

‘When we were first together I used to hate these rows. I used to be ill afterwards, but Paddy taught me that there was nothing bad about them. He taught me that fights shouldn’t be taken too seriously. They often clear the air. They’re just another form of expression,’ she confided.

‘I hate rowing.’

‘I used to feel that way!’

This, I thought, was a true waste. If she was with me now we could be by the sea.

But we’d gone to the sea four Sundays before, to Dollymount.
She’d been silent and withdrawn all that day. I was afraid to challenge her mood, too anxious just to have her near. She said we’d go over to the sandhills on the edge of the links, away from the wall and the crowded beach. She seemed to be searching for a particular place among the sandhills, and when she found it smiled that familiar roguish smile I hadn’t seen for months and took a photo from her handbag.

‘Willie Moran took the photo on this very spot,’ she said. ‘Do you recognize it at all?’

Willie Moran was a young solicitor she’d gone out with. She’d wanted to marry him. It had ended a few months before we met. After it ended she hadn’t been able to live alone and had gone back to an older sister’s house.

I used to be jealous of Willie Moran but by now even that had been burned away. I just thought him a fool for not marrying her, wished that I’d been he. I handed her back the photo. ‘You look beautiful in it.’

‘You see, it was afterwards it was taken. I’m well tousled.’ She laughed and drew me down. She wanted to make love there. There seemed to be no one passing. We covered ourselves with a white raincoat.

Her mood changed as quickly again as soon as we rose. She wanted to end the day, to separate.

‘We could go to one of the cinemas in O’Connell Street or to eat somewhere.’ I would offer anything.

‘No. Not this evening. I just want to have an early night. I’ve a kind of headache.’

It was then she pointed out that she’d lost an earring in the sandhills, one of a pair of silver pendants I’d given her for her birthday.

As soon as she left me I retracked my way back into the sandhills. Our shapes were still where we had lain in the loose sand. With a pocket comb I came on the pendant where the sand and long white grass met. I was happy, only too anxious to believe that it augured well, that it was a sign that the whole course of the affair had turned towards an impossible happiness. ‘We will be happy. We’ll be happy. It will turn out all right now.’ It was a dream of paradise.

But all the finding of the pendant did was to hold off this hell for four whole weeks. It was strange to think that but for coming on the
simple earring in the sand, this day, this unendurable day, would have fallen four weeks ago. She had said so.

The Harcourt Street lights brought Mulvey’s enraged stride to a stop. He turned and came back towards us. ‘If I can’t carry it, it’s an even worse form of humiliation to have to watch my wife carry it. Throw it there,’ and when she protested he took it from her and threw it down.

‘I’ll carry it,’ I said. It was so light it could be empty, but when I swung it I felt things move within the leather.

‘What business is it of yours?’ he demanded.

‘None. But I don’t want to leave it behind on the street.’

‘You take it too seriously.’ He brightened. ‘It wouldn’t be left behind.’

‘I don’t mind carrying it at all,’ I said.

‘Do you know what colour of sky that is?’ He pointed above the roofs of Harcourt Street.

‘It’s blue,’ I said. ‘A blue sky.’

‘It’s not a blue sky, but it goes without saying that blue is what it would be called by everybody in this sloppy country.
Agate
is the exact word. There are many blues. That is an agate sky.’

‘How do you know it’s agate?’

‘A painter I used to knock around with taught me the different colours.’

‘It’s a beautiful word,’ I said.

‘It’s the
right
word,’ he replied.

‘I’ve just noticed what a lovely evening it is,’ Claire Mulvey said wistfully. ‘There’s just the faintest hint of autumn.’

‘The last time we met I seem to remember you saying that Halloran was all right,’ I said. ‘You said he was a sensitive person.’

‘Oh, I was just making him up,’ Mulvey laughed, breaking as quickly into jocular good humour as he had into anger. ‘You don’t have to take what I say about people so solemnly. People need a great deal of making up. I don’t see how they’d be tolerable otherwise. Everybody does it. You’ll learn that soon enough.’

The light seemed to glow in a gentle fullness on the bullet-scarred stone of the College of Surgeons. Stephen’s Green looked full of peace within its green railings. There was a smoky blue in the air that warned of autumn. Claire Mulvey had been silent for several minutes.
Her face was beautiful in its tiredness, her thoughts plainly elsewhere.

‘We have to be thankful for this good weather while it lasts,’ she said when we reached the bar. ‘It’s lovely to see the doors of the bars open so late in the summer.’

Halloran was not in the bar. We counted out the money and found we’d enough for one round but not for a second. Mulvey bought the drinks and took them to a table near the door. We could see the whole way across the street to the closed shoeshop.

‘Where’s that case?’ Mulvey said in an exasperation of waiting. ‘We’ve been lugging it around for so long we might as well see what we’ve been lugging around.’

‘What does it matter? He left it with us,’ Claire Mulvey pleaded. ‘And he may come at any minute.’

The opposition seemed to drive Mulvey on. When the lock held, he lifted the suitcase to his knees and, holding it just below the level of the table, took a nail file from his pocket.

‘Don’t open it,’ his wife pleaded. ‘He left it locked. It’s like opening someone’s letters.’

Suddenly the lock sprung beneath the probing of the small file, and he opened it slowly, keeping one eye on the door. An assortment of women’s underclothes lay in the bottom of the case, all black: a slip, a brassière, panties, long nylon stockings, a pair of red shoes; and beneath, a small Roman missal, its ribbons of white and green and yellow and red hanging from the edges.
In Latin and English for every day in the year.

I thought he’d make a joke of it, call to have a bucket of water in readiness when Halloran appeared with the boy. ‘This is just too much,’ he said, and closed the suitcase, probing again with the nail file till the catch locked.

‘It wasn’t right to open it,’ Claire Mulvey said.

‘Of course it was right. Now we know what we’re really dealing with. Plain, dull, unimaginative perversity. Imagine the ponce dressing himself up in that gear. It’s too much.’

‘It mightn’t be his,’ she protested.

‘Of course it’s his. Whose else could it be!’

Eamonn Kelly came in. He’d met Halloran and the boy in Baggot Street that morning after Mass. He said that he’d be here at six and had given him money to buy us drinks till he came. We all asked for
pints. I went to help Eamonn Kelly bring the drinks from the counter.

‘Did you get home all right last night?’ I asked as we waited on the pulling of the pints.

‘Would I be here if I hadn’t?’ he retorted. I didn’t answer. I brought the drinks back to the table.

‘Well, at least this is a move in the right direction,’ Mulvey said as he raised his glass to his lips. I felt leaden with tiredness, the actual bar close to the enamelled memories of the morning. Everything around me looked like that dishevelled lilac bush, those milk bottles, granite steps …

The state was so close to dreaming that I stared in disbelief when I saw the first thistledown, its thin, pale parachute drifting so slowly across the open doorway that it seemed to move more in water than in air. A second came soon after the first had crossed out of sight, moving in the same unhurried way. A third. A fourth. There were three of the delicate parachutes moving together, at the same dreamlike pace across the doorway.

‘Do you see the thistles?’ I said. ‘It’s strange to see them in the middle of Grafton Street.’

‘There are backyards and dumps around Grafton Street too. You only see the fronts,’ Mulvey said. ‘Yes. There’s plenty of dumps.’

Several more arrived and passed on in the same slow dream. There was always one or several in the doorway. When at last there were none it seemed strange, but then one would appear when they seemed quite stopped, move slowly across, but the intervals were lengthening.

‘They seem to be coming from the direction of Duke Street,’ Claire Mulvey said. ‘There are no gardens or dumps that I can think of there.’

‘You think that because you can’t see any. There are dumps and yards and gardens, and everything bloody people do, but they’re at the back.’

‘They may have come from even farther away,’ I said. ‘I wonder how far they can travel.’

‘It’d be easy to look it up,’ Mulvey said. ‘That’s what books are for.’

‘They can’t come on many easy seed-beds in the environs of Grafton Street.’

‘There’s a dump near Mercer’s. And there’s another in Castle Street.’ Mulvey started to laugh at some private joke. ‘And nature will have provided her usual hundredfold overkill. For the hundred that fall on stone or pavement one will find its dump and grow up into a proud thistle and produce thousands of fresh new thistledowns.’

‘Hazlitt,’ Eamonn Kelly ventured.

‘Hazlitt’s far too refined,’ Mulvey said. ‘Just old boring rural Ireland strikes again. Even its principal city has one foot in a manure heap.’ The discussion had put Mulvey in extraordinary good humour.

Halloran and the boy appeared. Halloran was larger than I remembered, bald, wearing a dishevelled pinstripe suit, sweating profusely. He started to explain something in a very agitated manner even before he got to our table. The boy followed behind like a small dog, his black hair cropped very close to his skull, quiet and looking around, seemingly unafraid. As he came towards the table, a single thistledown appeared, and seemed to hang for a still moment beyond his shoulder in the doorway. A hand reached out, the small fresh hand of a girl or boy, but before it had time to close, the last pale parachute moved on out of sight as if breathed on by the hand’s own movement.

Lightly as they, we must have drifted to the dancehall a summer ago. The late daylight had shone through the glass dome above the dancefloor, strong as the light of the ballroom, the red and blue lights that started to sweep the floor as soon as the waltz began.

She’d been standing with a large blonde girl on the edge of the dancefloor. I could not take my eyes from her black hair, the pale curve of her throat. A man crossed to the pair of girls: it was the blonde girl he asked to dance.

I followed him across the ballroom and, as soon as I touched her elbow, she turned and came with me on to the floor.

‘Do you like waltzes?’ were the first words she spoke as we began to dance.

She did not speak again. As we kept turning to the music, we moved through the circle where the glass dome was still letting in daylight, and kept on after we’d passed the last of the pillars hung with the wire baskets of flowers, out beyond the draped curtains, until we seemed to be turning in nothing but air beneath the sky, a sky that was neither agate nor blue, just the anonymous sky of any and every day above our lives as we set out.

‘Do you think it will be late when Cronin tumbles in?’ Ryan asked sleepily.

‘It won’t be early. He went to a dance with O’Reilly and the two women.’

Pale light from the street lamp just outside the window shone on the varnished ceiling boards of the room. Cronin would have to cross the room to get to his bed by the window.

‘I don’t mind if he comes in near morning. What I hate is just to have got to sleep and then get woke up,’ Ryan said.

‘You can be sure he’ll wake us up. He’s bound to have some story to get off his chest.’

Ryan was large and gentle and worked as an inseminator at the A.I. station in the town, as did Cronin. The three of us shared this small room in the roof of the Bridge Restaurant. O’Reilly was the only other lodger Mrs McKinney kept, but he had a room of his own downstairs. He was the site engineer on the construction of the new bridge.

‘What do you think will happen between O’Reilly and Rachael when the bridge is finished?’

I was startled when Ryan spoke. The intervals of silence before we fell asleep seemed always deeper than sleep. ‘I don’t know. They’ve been going out a good while together. Maybe they’ll be married … What do you think?’

‘I don’t know. He’s had a good few other women here and there in the last few months. I doubt if he wants to get hitched.’

‘She’d have no trouble finding someone else.’

She had been the queen of one beauty competition the summer before and runner-up in another. She was fair-haired and tall.

‘She mightn’t want that,’ Ryan said. ‘The Bachelors’ Ball will be interesting on Friday night. Why don’t you change your mind and come? The dress suits are arriving on the bus Friday evening. All we’d have to do is ring in your measurements.’

‘No. I’ll not go. You know I’d go but I want to have the money for Christmas.’

An old bicycle went rattling down the hill and across the bridge, a voice shouting out,
‘Fàg à bealach.’