The three-thirty bus is climbing Seltan Hill on a hot July day. As it passes the monument of the stone soldier with his stone rifle at the top of Seltan, Sticks McCabe, drunk, rises from his seat and shouts, “Respect the memory of the dead. Everybody stand to attention,” before falling backwards, bringing down a suitcase from the rack as he falls. Jimmy the conductor does not smile as he returns Sticks to his seat and crutches, making sure he has not hurt himself, and puts the suitcase disdainfully back in the rack. A boy on a motorcycle looks back to see why the bus has stopped on Seltan as he whizzes past towards Mohill.
“He’ll not think that,” I said and she hadn’t even noticed that I’d been away in a more permanent day than this the day of the ward. “I told him you only took the brandy for the pain,” God knows where she had been since, in what different permament, impermanent day.
“You’d never know what he’d think but as long as he doesn’t go and tell poor Cyril. Cyril has enough to worry about. Where did he go after he left?”
“We went down the docks. He wanted some parts for the saws.”
“Of course he went and hauled you down the docks, as if you hadn’t a thing in the world else to do. All he thinks about is those old saws. There’ll be plenty of saws when he’s gone,” and then the tone dropped. “Do you think will I ever get out of this place?”
“Of course you’ll get out. You’ll be out and around in no time. But you’ll have to be patient. You’ll have to wait till they have you better.”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I think they have you in here just to get rid of you,” but her eyes searched mine eagerly, pleading for her words to be denied.
“That’s just rubbishy talk. The brandy may be doing as much harm as good.”
“Say nothing against the brandy,” and I shifted uneasily as she began again to thank me profusely.
It was cut short by the nurse’s arrival at the bedside. I made way for her and she asked, “Which of you has been boozing?” as she put light, tidying touches to the bedclothes.
“I’m afraid I have,” I answered.
“Maybe you both have,” there was far more a hint of challenge and even laughter behind the counter than any rebuke.
“It’s not allowed in here.”
“There are many things not allowed in here but they still go on.”
She lingered, but when nothing more was said she asked professionally, “Are you all right?”
“If I was all right I wouldn’t be in here,” my aunt said belligerently.
The nurse left quietly and authoritatively, without the slightest response to the attempt at a joke.
“Who is she?” I asked.
“Nurse Brady,” my aunt was more than willing to tell. “She’s an awful ticket. Pure man-mad. Sings and dances in the ward.”
“Why didn’t you introduce us?”
“She’d like nothing better. The unfortunate that gets her will have his work cut out.”
I spent the next minutes trying to talk myself out of having to come in for the next few days. I pleaded work, saying I’d fallen days behind in the work.
“But you’ll come on the Tuesday,” she said.
“I’ll come on the Tuesday,” I said as we kissed.
The tall, black-haired nurse was waiting at the end of the ward as I passed out.
“I hope I’ll see you soon,” I said as much out of simple attraction as to counter what I’d thought of as my aunt’s rudeness.
“Why don’t you come in to see us the next time,” she laughed. “Auntie is well enough taken care of.”
“Auntie is well enough taken care of. Why don’t you come in to see us the next time?” echoed all the next morning as I tried to get to the typewriter.
I’d shaved, dressed, lit the fire, washed my hands several times, scraped fingernails, had cups of coffee … and each time I tried to move I’d hear, “Why don’t you come in to see us the next time? Why-don’t-you-come-in?”
I saw the ridiculous white cap pinned to the curly black hair growing thick and close to the skull, her strong legs planted apart, her laugh, its confident affirmation of itself against everything vulnerable and receding and dying.
To ring her. To go out with her into the evening, turning it into adventure, accepting whatever it brought; turning it into a great vital kick against all the usual evenings that seemed to fall like invisible dust.… But—there was still this work to do, this typewriter on the old marble of the washstand to get to.
If she came out with me and if the evening did not turn out well, and I was too old not to know its likely outcome, how would I be rid of her, having to risk running into her every time I went in with the brandy to the hospital. Caution and cowardice were getting me closer to the typewriter. It was the same caution that never allowed me to indulge in more than a passing nod or word with any of the other people who lived in this same house.
I sat and typed frivolously, like dabbing toes above steaming
water: “
There was a man and a woman. Their names were
Mavis Carmichael and Colonel Grimshaw. They lived happily,
if it could be said that they lived at all,”
and I x-ed it out and put a fresh page in the typewriter, and then started to work, the worm at last spinning its silken tent.
Several hours and blackened pages later I got up from the typewriter for the day when the barely audible turning of a key sounded from one of the upstairs rooms after a loud banging of the front door. I thought it could be only two or three o’clock and yet it must have been close to six if one of the office girls had got home. It had just gone six. Seldom is it given, but when it is it is the greatest consolation of the spinning, time passing—sizeable portions of time—without being noticed. Is it a promise of a happy eternity or just another irony, the realization of the unawareness. We feel that we have been freed of the burden of time passing, and the happiness is in the feeling and not in the blind forgetful play among the words.
I counted what I had written.
The Colonel and Mavis have had carnal knowledge of one another six times, fucked one another six times, not counting the time in the Colonel’s flat before leaving for the airport. They show no signs of tiredness though Mavis sleeps late while the Colonel goes out to buy wine and fruit for the room, has a Campari and soda at a sidewalk café, and buys a spray of mimosa—my only extravagance—on the way back to the hotel room. As he sniffs it he promises to improve its scent with the even more delicious scent between Mavis’s lovely waking thighs, “my honey”.
I was tired and flushed, my flesh excited again by the play of Mavis and the Colonel in the mind’s eye. How could it be otherwise? The words had to be mixed with my own blood. How could the dried blood of the words be turned back into blood unless they had once been bound by living blood? “Nonsense, rubbish, blackpudding, pig’s blood,” Maloney had countered not so long ago in the Palace. “That’s poetry talk. And
you know what I think of that nowadays. Our average reader —and the average is king and queen of circulation—is already so inflamed that he or she would get a rise out of a green tree in Gethsemane.”
One more long day’s work and he’ll have his Majorcan story and I’ll be free for a whole week. I was tired enough to be grateful that I hadn’t to think what to do for the evening, that it was already decided: I had to meet her at eight in the upstairs lounge of the Green Goose. The memory of the accidental night was already vague enough for me to be curious again, and having driven Mavis and the Colonel from feat to feat I had grown inflamed enough myself to want to lie down with any warm body.
The Green Goose was grey and concrete and had a painted green bird on an iron sign in the forecourt of the car park that seemed to rattle its sense of not belonging in every sudden gust. It had been built twenty years before to serve the lower-middle-class roads and drives and avenues of brown-tiled semis all around it, and had aged like them into an ugly mildness. The upstairs lounge was heavily carpeted with blue peacock’s eyes, and green and red peacocks stared from the wallpaper. A whole generation of young marrieds must have grown tired of the flap of nappies on lines and summer lawnmowers under those same unalterable eyes.
It was too early for the couples. There were just a few men with evening papers who had not quite made it from their offices to their front doors. I bought a drink at the counter and took it to one of the corner tables.
She came at exactly five minutes after eight on the bar clock, wearing an elegant tweed costume, its collar and cuffs edged with dark fur. She walked quickly towards me, chin raised, smiling so hard that her dimples seemed to rise and fall. Her strong body was perfectly formed, the features clear and handsome. She would have been beautiful, I thought, except for this flurry of blue forget-me-nots she seemed to send quivering out with every step.
“Ο boy,” she said as she sat down. “I was afraid you mightn’t be here.”
“Of course I’d be here.”
“I thought coming up the stairs that you mightn’t be here. I thought so much about you the last days you cannot know,” her eyes shone with an overdose of sincerity.
“What will you have to drink?” I asked.
She was so filled with the momentous moment that I felt like going on my knees in gratitude for those small blessed ordinary handrails of speech.
“Would a gin and tonic be all right?”
“I’m sure I can get you that.”
She started to arrange her handbag, to take off her gloves.
Though she wore a hard-working smile, when I got back with the drinks she was quiet compared with her attack of an entrance. She had crossed her fine legs and was smoking.
“I hope it’s all right,” I said as I put her drink down.
“It’s fine. It’s just wonderful to be here. I don’t know what’s happening but I’ve hardly been able to think of anything else but you since the last night.”
“It’s nice to see you,” I raised my glass.
“It’s wonderful to be here and to see you. It’s one of those days everything had to be done two or three times over at the bank. I just couldn’t wait for five to come and the day to be over and to get out and to come here.”
“You got home all right the last night?”
“Sure,” she laughed. “I took off my shoes and carried them in and nobody heard me come in. Even my door on the landing was ajar. My aunt noticed that I yawned all through breakfast, that was all. I felt tired but I didn’t feel any guilt or anything and everybody seemed happier than usual. The milkman who always has a joke with me in the morning, though I’m mostly running, caught the tail of the long red scarf and shook it and asked me if I was in love. But the day was sure hard to get through. After lunch I could hardly keep
my eyes open, and the letters just kept coming and coming. I went straight home and fell into bed and must have slept sixteen hours straight. I had the most wonderful dreams. You were in the best of them. And when I woke I didn’t feel a shred of guilt. I just felt relaxed and wonderful. Don’t you want to hear about any of the dreams you were in?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not much interested in dreams. I’m more interested in the day.”
“Many say that you can learn a great deal about the day from dreams and the night.”
“I think the best way to learn about the day is from the day,” I had grown restless.
“Why don’t you relax? You make me feel as if I was sitting in the dog’s chair.”
“How do you mean?”
“You know when you come into a kitchen and there’s a dog that’s used to sitting in a chair you happen to take by accident. All the time you’re sitting there you feel him agitatedly circling the chair.”
It was so sharp I slowed. “I can see you write,” I said. “I’m sorry if I was restless. I’m afraid I was just feeling the need of another drink. What’ll you have?”
“I’ll pass,” she placed her hand over her glass. “I can’t drink at that pace. You sure can shift that stuff.”
“It loosens you up. But don’t worry. It’ll slow, as soon as the first injection starts to work.”
The tension had gone when I came back from the bar. She was working, farther off. People are usually more charming when they are farther off. Perhaps she’d realized her own danger while I was getting the drink—that she had pushed too close. Such foresight makes the longest hells.
I too had a reversal of feeling while I was away. We hardly knew one another and we were already hating. This evening was a gift we’d never hold again. We were a man and woman
travelling through it together. We’d never pass this way again. We might as well make some joy of it.
“Tell me about Amalgamated Waterways, this paper you write for,” and she grew excited as she told. The magazine was small but had fantastic growth potential. There was no country in Europe that had so much water and space per head of population as ours—in Germany, for instance, you had to wait for someone to die in order to get boat space—and it was just beginning to be recognized as the great natural resource it is, like oil or coal. There was this great scheme, which the Troubles had postponed, to connect the waterways of the Shannon and the Erne by reopening the disused canals of Cavan and Leitrim which had once been connected through the lakes. The North and South would join in friendship. “An embrace of water,” she said.
“Or a watery embrace.”
“Seriously, it’d open hundreds of miles of water, from Limerick to Letterkenny, and it’d only cost a fraction of what the bombings and killings do, and stop the bombings and the killings. It’s our editor’s great cause, poor Walter’s. You’d like Walter. He gets paid too little and works far too hard and he worries, how he worries, and never more than whenever we try to give him a raise. It’s arranged that when we get a little bigger I’ll give up this boring bank job and go to work full time as his assistant, and he worries about that too. We could afford it almost now but he won’t agree. And everybody agrees the paper needs more zip. But you, how did you start?”
“I was a teacher. And then I got into this advertising agency. My work was to put out trade magazines for five or six of our accounts, which meant you had to write or rewrite them from cover to cover. I once wrote a whole number of
Our Boys
. It was dog’s work and I gave it up. Now I just freelance. I didn’t need all that money anyhow.”