Women of Courage (93 page)

‘I have a poem too,’ she said in English. ‘I was reading it today, and thinking of you. Listen: I’ll tell you what I remember. My lover is handsome and strong; he is one in ten thousand. His face is bronzed and smooth - well, yours is smooth, anyway - his hair is wavy, black as a raven. His eyes … were like doves, I think, doves washed in milk, whatever they look like. He is majestic, like the mountains of Lebanon, with their towering cedars. His mouth is sweet to kiss; everything about him enchants me. That is what my lover is like.’ She looked up at him, her dark eyes under the short bobbed hair twinkling in the firelight, her face small and mischievous. ‘There - don’t you like it?

‘Sure, it’s beautiful,’ he said. But he was a little hesitant. He was still disconcerted by the frank delight she took in his body, paralleling, even surpassing, his delight in hers. ‘Where did it come from?’

‘The Bible, of course. It’s the
Song of Songs
.’

‘The Bible? Oh, come on now.’

‘Its true. It’s the song between Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Have you never read it? They must have been lovers like us - except they had a palace, of course.’

‘Yes, well, that’s not my fault.’ He remembered the priest, uneasily. The smells on the staircase and the noise from the other rooms had begun to irritate him tonight as well, besmirching the little cocoon they were trying to make together.

‘No one said it was, silly.’ She bit his buttock with her sharp little teeth, provoking a wrestling match which ended with him sitting astride her on the bed, her wrists pinned down on the pillow by his hands. He watched her breasts rise and fall with the exertion of the fight, and gripped her hips tightly with his thighs to stop her wriggling and throwing him off. She lifted her head and looked down between her breasts at his erection.

‘So you
are
like a cedar of Lebanon,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d taken care of that already.’

‘Not quite.’

And then for a while there was no sound in the room but their breathing, the creaking of the little, unstable bed, and the wild sharp cry that she gave at her climax.

Then someone started hammering on the floor from the room below. It impinged on Catherine’s consciousness gradually. At first she thought it was just the coursing of blood in her ears.

‘What’s that?’ she asked.

‘Ignore it.’ Sean lay exhausted, his face half muffled in the pillow beside her. ‘They’ll give up in a minute.’

He was right. The sound stopped, with an indistinct curse from downstairs. They lay quietly, listening to the crackle of the fire. For the first time Catherine thought of the half-dozen families around them, huddled in their tiny rooms, who had probably listened to the sound of the bed creaking and her cries.

Somehow the beauty of it had gone for both of them. Sean was tired; the failure outside the Lambert Hotel earlier in the evening had made him feel a fool, and now this interference of the neighbours made him feel trapped, hemmed in by pointing fingers who would one day drag him out to prison, or a police bullet in the head.

He got out of bed abruptly, and began to put his clothes on. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

‘It’s past ten o’clock. God knows what they’ll be thinking in that posh house of yours. Anyway, I want to get out of this place. I can’t stand it. I’m going to ask Paddy for a move tomorrow.’

‘Where to? Will you find another room where we can meet?’

‘God knows. I want somewhere cleaner. You’ve no idea what this place is like to wake up to in the mornings. The filth, the smells, the queues for the privy. I hate it.’

‘But you’ll find somewhere where we can meet, Sean?’

‘Sure, I hope so. Most of them have got landladies, though. It might be hard.’

Catherine was astonished. She sat up in bed, her breasts rosy in the firelight. She made no effort to get dressed. Sean pulled on his socks irritably.

She said: ‘What do you mean, Sean? We’ve got to have somewhere to meet.’

A bootlace snapped, and suddenly all Sean’s fears and doubts surfaced at once.
‘Why
have we? Look, Cathy, you may not have thought about this, but I have. It’s a fine thing, but look at it straight. What’s a fellow like me got to give you? Just a grubby room in a tenement, and the chance of being shot any day by the police or army. That’s no good for a girl like you.’

‘Sean …’

‘It’s got to end sometime, hasn’t it? Look what happened to me today. I was supposed to keep watch on a man in a hotel, a really important one, and I spent so much time thinking about you that he just walked away from me in the street. No one knows where he is now. The fellows are starting to talk. They all know I’ve got a girl but if they knew what we really do I think - I don’t think they’d let me stay in the Volunteers.’

Her shock at the outburst robbed her of speech for a while, but anger was not far behind. Anger, and a horrible growing sense of disgust; of a trust that had been betrayed. She had not seen their love as a hindrance to his career, or a subject for discussion with the boys.

‘Why couldn’t you stay?’ she said. ‘Surely they know I support the Republic – isn’t that enough?’

‘It’s not that, Cathy. If I’m to be a soldier, I shouldn’t have a thought for anything else. I shouldn’t really have come tonight, perhaps - I should be out tracking that man. It’s a sort of sin to the movement, to be thinking all the time of a woman; not a sin like the priest said, exactly, but …’

‘What do you mean? What priest?’

‘Father Desmond. I went to confession.’

‘And you told him about me?’

‘Not in so many words. I just said I’d been with a woman.’

‘Oh. Been with a woman! And what did he say?’

‘What do you think, Cathy? That it was a sin. But don’t worry, I walked out of the confessional.’ For a moment Sean’s irritation was past. He grinned, not realizing the damage he had done.

She said: ‘Well, that’s fine then, isn’t it? You bring me here in the night, and in the daytime you go to a priest and tell him all about it. And I suppose he told you I was the scarlet whore.’

Sean had finished dressing. He sat down in the only armchair, and glanced across at her. The intensity of her gaze scared him. For the first time ever he thought of her as a burden. That slim, naked figure in his bed; he might never be rid of her.

‘No, Cathy, he didn’t say that exactly. But the man had a point, you know. It’s a sin for you too. I mean, have you thought what will come of all this? We could never marry, could we? What if there was a child?’

‘
What if
- you ask me that? Sean? You ask me that
now
?’

‘I should have asked it before, I suppose, but …’

‘But what?’

‘But you didn’t seem to worry, so why should I?’

‘And you a student of medicine. So-called. Have you read Knowlton?’

‘Who?’

‘Charles Knowlton.
The Fruits of Philosophy, or the Private Companion of Young Married People.
It’s a book about how to avoid babies.’

For the first time in the conversation Sean was speechless. He simply gaped at her. It reminded her of his reaction to some of the medical lectures, but now she felt contempt, not compassion.

‘I see you haven’t. Well, I have. And I’ve been making use of the advice in it. Just as well, isn’t it?’

He found his voice. ‘What do you do?’

‘I stick a sponge up myself.’

‘My God. Is that - why you didn’t bleed, the first time?’

A faint trace of a smile crossed her face. It was very faint; there was no warmth in it. ‘No. That was an accident on a horse, when I was fifteen. Lucky for you, wasn’t it?’

The whole conversation offended him. It brought them together in a way he didn’t want, not at all. He said: ‘But that - that’s killing life. That’s a sin against God, for sure.’

There was a silence. It went on for some time. Sean’s words hung heavily in the air between them. Then Catherine got out of bed and began to get dressed in front of him. There was nothing provocative about the way she did it. Her nakedness seemed an insult, almost. She was careless about the way she put on her clothes, brisk, matter-of-fact. She ignored him, as though he had been a chair or a stuffed baboon.

When she was dressed she took a comb from her bag and began to push her hair behind her ears with swift smart strokes. Her eyes sparkled in the firelight, but no tears fell. She said: ‘I suppose you, then, have been making love to me all this time in the belief that I would probably get pregnant, and that then you could disown me.’

Certainly he felt shame now. But also a sullen, deep resentment at the way he had been used. No women did that. No women he knew. He had never even heard of a woman doing it.

In a sort of harsh whisper, he said: ‘I never thought of it.’

She turned then and faced him. She had the comb between her teeth, and she was fastening her hair back with a pin. When she had done that, she took the comb out, and said sadly: ‘Sean, Sean, I knew most men were stupid, but truly I never thought it of you.’

For the first time he saw she was crying. He stood up and held out his arms to embrace her. For a moment she let him hold her, but she stood quite still and cold in his arms, shutting him out. Then she brushed him away.

‘Come on. I want to go home.’

For most of the walk home they didn’t speak. It was not a conversation either could have carried on in front of men singing outside pubs, or army lorries cruising the streets. Sean was tired and furious. But near Merrion Square he began again.

‘I suppose you have done this with other men.’

They had been walking side by side, without touching. He had stopped as he spoke, but she walked on briskly, looking straight ahead.

‘Why should you suppose that?’

‘Why else would you have read about it?’

She stopped then, suddenly, so that he almost ran into her.

‘To avoid having babies, that’s why! So that when I did meet the man I wanted, I could really love him, as I have loved you, Sean, without being afraid or worried about what would happen. That’s what I thought. I thought it would be beautiful and it was, Sean, it really was, until tonight. You don’t really love me, though, do you?’

‘It’s not that. I … I’m not sure I should be thinking about that, now with the war on. I’ve got to concentrate on one thing. Anyway, you shouldn’t have done that - what you did. It’s wrong.’

She stared at him with her heart breaking. She thought how she had kissed - almost every part of him. I thought a woman could be free like a man, she thought, but it isn’t so. Not if the man won’t let you.

She said: ‘Sean Brennan, you don’t really like me at all, do you? You just like killing, for your wretched idea of a new Ireland. You didn’t even think about me.’

She waited for an answer, but there was none. So she turned on her heel, and walked away from him alone, into Merrion Square, where the lights of her father’s house were burning brightly.

When Catherine got home she went straight to her bedroom and wept, pressing her face into her pillow to muffle the sound. I was so sure, she thought; sure that he loved me as I did him. Sure that a boy who was fighting for the freedom and future of the country would see how girls can love equally and freely without guilt or shame, just for the beauty of the act itself. And all the time I was nothing for him but a passing pleasure that got out of hand, a distraction from the serious business of killing. He thinks it’s a sin because I made sure we could have no child …

So where the hell is your sin then, Sean
, a voice screamed inside her head. She snatched her pillow and flung it across the room. It knocked a china figurine of a horse off the mantelpiece. Oh no, she thought. She groaned, got up and tried to pick up the pieces; but it was smashed beyond repair. It was a statuette she had had since she was eight; her father had given it to her when Blaze, her first pony, died of the colic. She had cried all night then, too, for many nights; it was then she had learnt the trick of smothering the sound in the pillow, when her parents could bear her grief no longer. Her father had seen the statuette in a shop, and bought it for her because it had almost exactly the same markings as Blaze. She had put a wreath round its neck, and promised to keep it always.

Those were the days when her parents still lived together and seemed to love each other, and she and her brothers talked and laughed together at the same table, and rambled endlessly along the cliffs. Those days were long gone now. If they had continued, perhaps she would never have felt the need to break away, to defy her father, make her own career, and choose a lover from the slums. She could have turned to her parents for love and advice instead of facing betrayal and failure like this on her own.

She swept up the fragments of the broken horse into a small pile by the side of the hearth, crawled back into bed, and turned her face to the wall.

Towards dawn sleep came - the sleep of exhaustion. She dreamed that she was riding her pony across the beach. It was the big wide beach near her home, a beach of white sand five miles long at low tide. The sea was far out, little white breakers curling gently on her right. Flocks of seagulls were paddling around near the sea’s edge. She trotted towards them and they lifted away as they always did, screaming raucously and circling behind her. She kicked the pony to a canter through the shallows, and they went on madly, splashing through the clear inch-high waves that rushed in over the flat hard sand. Far away in the hazy distance was a fisherman, a tiny figure pulling a coracle out of the sea. As she galloped towards him, the warm summer wind blew on her and her clothes flew off, piece by piece, into the air behind where the seagulls snatched them. But although the sun shone on her and in front of her, she was sure there was thunder behind. When she reached the man he turned and looked up at her with Sean’s face, and spat. And then she was past and galloping on in the cold wind, with the sun gone somewhere behind a cloud, and there was a horse behind her. She could hear its hooves drumming and drumming on the sand but she dared not look back. Her pony was tired and beginning to stumble. Each time he stumbled, a leg fell off.