Saints and Sinners (16 page)

The invitation to meet had come some weeks after Christmas, but the stamps on the envelope had pictures of various snowed-on Santa Clauses, so it seemed that he had deliberately delayed posting it or else it had lain in his coat pocket.

Though frozen when she arrived, one of her cheeks was now scalding from the blaze of the fire and the pile of ash under the grate that was a molten red. She moved her chair back a fraction, as she did not want to be flushed when he arrived. She reckoned on his being late, poets always were. Her bus journey had been long and cheerless, the fields along the way flecked with snow, and in places small mounds of snow lay like hedgehogs crouching inside their own igloos. She had walked briskly from the bus station through the busy streets, strains of music, melodeon and guitar, fraught young mothers wielding their pushchairs, and beggars of various nationalities. She stopped by one older woman because of the little begging bucket, a blue bucket such as a child would take to the seaside with his spade to make a sand castle, and soon regretted her mistake in trying to have a conversation, as the woman had a cleft palate and could scarcely pronounce her own name, which was Mary. A frost, sheer and unblemished, coated the bonnets of the cars that were like sentinels around the grand garden square, and the railings, clad with icy snow, felt damp through the palm of her glove. She stopped a second time to admire a statue of Wolfe Tone, flanked by tall columns of stone, the valorous figure sprung, as it were, from earth, the green of his boots, his jacket, and his torso glinting in the wintry sun.

Though feeling hot she felt too constrained to remove her coat, merely opened the top buttons and let it fall capewise over her shoulders as she gradually eased her arms out of the sleeves. Under no circumstances would she mention the fact that she had written snippets of her own locality, little nothings for which she had received a flurry of rejection slips, polite and useless. There was one literary editor who had befriended her and who believed that one day she might become a Poet and in his tutoring of her became a little smitten. He would take her for a drive each week, to discuss this or that piece of writing, and always on the dashboard there was a packet of toffees or glacier mints for her to take home. Eventually, they drove a distance away to the seaside, whence they would get out of the car and look or listen as the Atlantic waves vented their fury and now and then surprise them with a rogue wave that sent them toppling. One evening at dusk, when she could not see his face, he said that he was happy with the woman to whom he had been married for many years, but that those excursions, the two of them witness to the hungers of the sea and the cry of the seagulls, were dear to him. Though young, she sensed for the first time how inexplicable love was.

She had been in love more than once, gloriously, breathlessly in love, but it was the last attachment that had been the deepest, that was as she believed, ordained. Such happiness. The long walks at weekends, scaling mountains, she would never have done alone. She felt safe and confident next to him, and indeed if she missed her footing, as she often did, he was there to catch her and plant a kiss. Once they were loaned a grand house in County Galway and in the evening went to the pub in the hotel and talked with the beaters and the galleys, and it was there she learnt the yodel used to raise woodcock—"Waayupwaayupwaayup." It became their favorite password. By the open fire she read poetry to him, read from a book of foreign poets with the English translation on the opposite page, and they swore that they would learn languages, that she would learn French and he Spanish and they would compete in their adopted tongues. In one letter she was rash enough to tell him that she would walk water to reach him and he replied in kind. It was reciprocal.

His letter breaking it off was wedged half in and half out of her letterbox. She thought that he was merely postponing a date they had made to meet in Dublin at the end of the month, but she was wrong. He praised her qualities in English and in Irish, and she cursed him for not having had the gumption to tell her in person. She hid it so as to return it to him in due course, but put it somewhere so safely that she could not remember where that safe place was.

"They'll find it, when I'm dead," she said spitefully.

After the initial shock, she felt the magnitude of the loss, and her whole will was directed towards getting him back. She so convinced herself of this that she bought wooden tubs to plant bulbs in the garden and new towels that were stacked in the bathroom, on a stool, waiting for him. They were a pale oatmeal color. She lost friends, having no time for them, and they, for their part, were aghast at how she was letting herself go, hair wild and uncombed, her clothes streel-ish, she who had once been so proud of her appearance. Her boss in the library—a sombrous man—asked if she had had a bereavement, to which she could only reply, Yes, yes. After work she went straight home and locked her door, and before sleep she would wait for his footsteps, thought she heard a friendly tapping on the windowpane. How often did she switch on the light, stare into the empty room, and curse her daft imaginings. She turned to poets as she would to God. Gerard Manley Hopkins was her favorite poet at that time and the line she repeated again and again to herself was "O thou Lord of life, send my roots rain."

Hearing of a psychic in another county who lived on a caravan site, she drove there one Saturday and begged, yes begged, for a reading. How her spirits lifted when the woman described in detail things that had actually happened, a hand-painted scarf which her lover had given her and which he knotted shyly under her chin. It was when they had met by surprise in a hotel, scarcely able to exchange a word, so astonished were they by this coincidence. The psychic then foresaw them setting up house together. It was a cottage by the sea, which they would do up and extend. She drew a picture of their future life together, one or other, whoever got back first of an evening, kneeling to light a fire and praying that the chimney would not smoke, though at first it would, but in time that would clear, once the flue had its generous lining of soot. So real did this become for Miss Gilhooley that she began to furnish the imaginary house, choose wallpapers for various bedrooms, bathroom tiles with mosaics of gold, such as she had seen in a catalog, and she also added a balcony to the main bedroom, where they would stand at night and hear the roaring waves and in the sunny mornings watch the several waterbirds wade gracefully on the soft muddy shore.

Her only sensible action during that wretched time was not to take the pills the doctor insisted that she must take. One evening at dusk she drove to the lake, unscrewed the cap, and dropped the contents into the dark water that was scummed with debris. Many secrets lay hidden in the depths of that lake, condoms, unwanted pups, unwanted kittens sewn into sacks, and incriminating letters. In time, she would bring her own batch of letters, written on sleepless nights, some proud, some craven, all foolish, and assign them to this watery pyre.

She became more and more isolated, but the one person she did not shrink from was Ronan. He was a young man who lived in a caravan on the back avenue of the manor house where Mr. and Mrs. Jamieson lived. In return for being able to park there, he did odd jobs, cleared the woods, sawed timber, walked the greyhounds and lit the fires if the family was home of an evening. Now and then Mrs. Jamieson gave him one of her husband's castoffs, but warned him not to let Sir know, as he was very sentimental about his belongings. Ronan and she made a pilgrimage together, for their special intentions, climbed up a steep mountain in Mayo, on a hot June day, with a busload of people who had been driven from the south. How relieved they both were that there was no one from their own vicinity, no one to spy on them. Often she wondered which of the locals had set upon the idea of torturing her with anonymous calls. They would come at all hours and always concerned Emmet, because Emmet was her lover's name, in honor of the hero Robert Emmet. Emmet, she would be told, had just got engaged to be married, Emmet was dating a dentist, Emmet was seen with a famous actress in Dublin, Emmet was seen in a shower with a brunette in a new spa in Westport. She knew they were lies, and yet to hear his name uttered and in such vile connotations, she longed to speak to him and warn him of these terrible calumnies.

It began to lessen. In her small garden, one Sunday, she saw the stirrings of spring, the leaves of the camellia bush green and glossy, the white buds, tight and tiny as birds' eggs, poised to open. She skimmed the sodden leaves from the rain barrel and, standing there, looking, seeing, feeling the world around her, she realized that it was the commencement of her convalescence. A blackbird had found a luscious morsel of pink worm and was gobbling it, while ceaselessly glancing left and right in case a fellow creature would snatch it away. Then, at the car boot sale, to which she went to pass the time, not one, but three different men smiled at her and she smiled back.

On the night when she gave herself to the minister, she believed, indeed knew, she had turned a corner. In their teens and while he was still a student, the minister and herself had met at a dance hall, had flirted, and later sat in his motorcar, fondling and reciting poetry. She knew from the annual Christmas card down the years that he still remembered her and that he hankered in some way. When they found themselves at the same adult summer school, their joy at being reunited was immense. He was opening the event and she was giving a paper on the occult in Yeats's work. During the formal dinner, to which he had her invited, they exchanged glances, the odd word across the table, and eventually, not without a little detour, they found themselves in the same elevator and thence in his suite, which was so vast they had to grope their way to find a table lamp. Their lovemaking was at least twenty years too late, and they were too shy, lying in that enormous four-poster bed, to laugh about it. At breakfast they were already on their separate ways, he to his manse outside Dublin, and she farther north, to the source of the white mist.

She reestablished friendships, went back to playing whist on Friday evenings, and made a rhubarb jam flavored with ginger, which she distributed among those who had ever been spiteful to her. Only Ronan knew. She saw Ronan, with his sideburns, dreaming of Elvis — of doing gigs in small towns, then graduating to big venues and finally to Dublin and afar. One night they watched a video of Elvis that she had rented, sitting in her front room by a warm fire and drinking red wine from the good glasses. There was Elvis, like a midnight god, in a midnight blue leather jacket and sideburns, wooing the world—Elvis asking a female member of the audience for the loan of her handkerchief to dab his brow, Elvis shivering as he half sang, half spoke, "Are you lonesome tonight?" Ronan later strummed a song that he had written on his guitar, which he hoped would be a sensation at one of these imagin ary gigs.

Oh hollow heart you were so real I put my hand there I could feel Your hollow heart ...

He looked at her, blinking—Ronan blinked out of nerves — and waited. She had to admit that it was not catchy enough and was somewhat bleak. Young people went to gigs to get high, to forget heartbreak and tedium.

"I can't do that ... I can't forget," Ronan said.

"Then don't," Miss Gilhooley replied. But beyond that they did not go.

She came across her lover at a function a few years later, as she was wending her way through a room full of people, to table twenty-four. There was a priest with him and a young girl. She stopped to say hello, not recalling a word of what was said, but she did and would remember how his arm, with a gliding stealth, came around the back of her waist and rested there for an instant, saying, without the words, what now would never be said. She drank somewhat immoderately at table twenty-four and kept repeating a line of Yeats's — "A sweetheart from another life floats there" — much to the bafflement of the people around her.

At home she would mostly quell her desires, but when she went abroad in the summer, they ran amok. In that town on the Mediterranean, in stifling heat, everything quivered, even the knotted gauze scarves that swung from one of the stalls. The chrome of cars and motorcycles seemed to rasp in the heat, and in the jewelers' windows gold chains and gold wedding rings were at melting point. It was a crowded market, with a glut of goods — meats, fish, shellfish, fruits, vegetables, clothing, cutlery, handbags, seersucker skirts the color of cotton candy—the locals knowing exactly what they had come for, steering their way with a certain pique through the loitering and haggling swell of visitors. The sun made its way through the slits in the canvas awnings and beat down mercilessly. A man wearing a faded blue shirt appeared as from nowhere and slid between the milling crowd with a curious, knowing smile. He was dark-skinned, his left jaw showing a strawberry mark, fiercely vivid, as if just slashed. He stood right before her, as if she had willed him there, the encounter so thrilling and so unnerving, his eyes, which were a soft brown, moist and lusting, asking her to say yes. On one arm he carried a willow basket filled with gardenias, the smell so intoxicating, and on the other arm there lay a snake, coiled and inert, its scales iridescent in that hot light. She drew back startled, and he made some barely audible sound in order to reassure her. And yes, she would have said yes, gone down one of the narrow alleys, followed him to wherever he silently bade her, to lie with him. All that stopped her was that her friend Amanda was nearby, trying on different straw hats and beckoning her across. He took the measure of the situation and sauntered off with the ease of a panther.

The poet was late. The tall manageress blamed this lateness on the hopelessness of the train service. She herself had been five hours getting home to her parents the weekend previous.

"Where is home?" Miss Gilhooley asked.

"Northeast Galway" she was told, and tried to imagine the little townlands on the big map in the library hall, their names squeezed together in a cluster. After chatting to Miss Gilhooley, the manageress insisted on bringing one order of afternoon tea, saying that she would bring a second pot of tea when he arrived. She somehow guessed that it was a man. Presently, a banquet was set before Miss Gilhooley. Dainty sandwiches on white and brown bread, warm scones with helpings of clotted cream and raspberry jam, slices of rich fruitcake dense with raisins, currants, candied peel, cherries, and green strips of angelica, and on the very top tier, as a final arpeggio, small gateaux of a sweet lemon flan that trembled as the cake plate was put down. Except that she was not hungry.