John McGahern - Creatures of the Earth - New and Selected Stories

‘We don’t save very much, do we?’

‘At the rate the money goes in the pubs we might as well throw our hat at it. Why did you ask?’

‘Because’, it was not easy to answer then, when I had to think, ‘I like being with you.’

‘Why, why’, she asked, ‘did you tell that stupid story about the umbrellas?’

‘It happened, didn’t it? And we never make love without an umbrella. It reminded me of you.’

‘Such rubbish,’ she said angrily. ‘The sea and sand and a hot beach at night, needing only a single sheet, that’d make some sense, but an umbrella?’

It was the approach of summer and it was the false confidence it brings that undid me. It rained less. One bright moonlit night I asked her to hold the umbrella.

‘For what?’

She was so fierce that I pretended it’d been a joke.

‘I don’t see much of a joke standing like a fool holding an umbrella to the blessed moonlight,’ she said.

We made love awkwardly, the umbrella lying in the dry leaves, but I was angry that she wouldn’t fall in with my wish, and another night when she asked, ‘Where are you going on your holidays?’ I lied that I didn’t know. ‘I’ll go home if I haven’t enough money. And you?’ I asked. She didn’t answer. I saw she resented that I’d made no effort to include her in the holiday. Sun and sand and sea, I thought maliciously, and decided to break free from her. Summer was coming and the world full of possibilities. I did not lead her under the trees behind the church, but left after kissing her lightly, ‘Goodnight.’ Instead of arranging to meet as usual at the radiators, I said, ‘I’ll ring you during the week.’ Her look of anger and hatred elated me. ‘Ring if you want,’ she said as she angrily closed the door.

I was so clownishly elated that I threw the umbrella high in the air and laughing loudly caught it coming down, and there was the exhilaration of staying free those first days; but it soon palled. In the empty room trying to read, while the trains went by at the end of the garden with its two apple trees and one pear, I began to realize I’d fallen more into the habit of her than I’d known. Not wanting to have to see the umbrella I put it behind the wardrobe, but it seemed to be more present than ever there; and often the longing for her lips, her body, grew, close to sickness, and eventually dragged me to the telephone.

‘I didn’t expect to hear from you after this time,’ she said.

‘I was ill.’

She was ominously silent as if she knew it for the lie that it was.

‘I wondered if we could meet?’

‘If you want,’ she answered. ‘When?’

‘What about tonight?’

‘I cannot but tomorrow night is all right.’

‘At eight, then, at the radiators?’

‘Say, at Wynn’s Hotel instead.’

The imagination, quickened by distance and uncertainty, found it hard to wait till the eight of the next day, but when the bus drew in, and she was already waiting, the mind slipped back into its old complacency.

‘Where’d you like to go?’

‘Some place quiet. Where we can talk,’ she said.

Crossing the bridge, past where the band had played the first day we met, the Liffey was still in the summer evening.

‘I missed you a great deal.’ I tried to draw close, her hands were white gloved.

‘What was your sickness?’

‘Some kind of flu.’

She was hard and separate as we walked. It was one of the new lounge bars she picked. It had piped music and red cushions. The bar was empty, the barman polishing glasses. He brought the Guinness and sweet sherry to the table.

‘What did you want to say?’ I asked when the barman had returned to polishing the glasses.

‘That I’ve thought about it and that our going out is a waste of time. It’s a waste of your time and mine.’

It was as if a bandage had been torn from an open wound.

‘But why?’

‘It will come to nothing.’

‘You’ve got someone else, then?’

‘That’s got nothing to do with it.’

‘But why, then?’

‘I don’t love you.’

‘But we’ve had many happy evenings together.’

‘Yes, but it’s not enough.’

‘I thought that after a time we would get married.’ I would grovel on the earth or anything to keep her then. Little by little my life had fallen into her keeping, it was only in the loss I had come to know it, life without her, the pain of the loss of my own life without the oblivion the dead have, all longing changed to die out of my own life on her lips, in her thighs, since it was only through her it lived.

‘It wouldn’t work,’ she said, and, sure of her power, ‘All those wasted evenings under that old umbrella. And that moonlit night you tried to get me to hold it up like some eejit. What did you take me for?’

‘I meant no harm and couldn’t we try to make a new start?’

‘No. There should be something magical about getting married. We know too much about each other. There’s nothing more to discover.’

‘You mean … our bodies?’

‘Yes.’

She moved to go and I was desperate.

‘Will you have one more drink?’

‘No, I don’t really want.’

‘Can we not meet just once more?’

‘No.’ She rose to go. ‘It’d only uselessly prolong it and come to the same thing in the end.’

‘Are you so sure? If there was just one more chance?’

‘No. And there’s no need for you to see me to the bus. You can finish your drink.’

‘I don’t want to,’ and followed her through the swing-door.

At the stop in front of the Bank of Ireland I tried one last time. ‘Can I not see you home this last night?’

‘No, it’s easier this way.’

‘You’re meeting someone else, then?’

‘No.’

It was clean as a knife. I watched her climb on the bus, fumble in her handbag, take the fare from a small purse, open her hand to the conductor as the bus turned the corner. I watched to see if she’d look back, if she’d give any sign, but she did not. All my love and life had gone and I had to wait till it was gone to know it.

I then realized I’d left the umbrella in the pub, and started to return slowly for it. I went through the swing-door, took the umbrella from where it leaned against the red cushion, raised it and said, ‘Just left this behind,’ to the barman’s silent inquiry, as if the performance of each small act would numb the pain.

I got to no southern sea or city that summer. The body I’d tried to escape from became my only thought. In the late evening after pub-close, I’d stop in terror at the thought of what hands were fondling her body, and would, if I had power, have made all casual sex a capital offence. On the street I’d see a coat or dress she used to wear, especially a cheap blue dress with white dots, zipped at the back, that was fashionable that summer, and with beating heart would push through the crowds till I was level with the face that wore the dress, but the face was never her face.

I often rang her, pleading, and one lunch hour she consented to see me when I said I was desperate. We walked aimlessly through streets of the lunch hour, and I’d to hold back tears as I thanked her for kindness, though when she’d given me all her evenings and body I’d hardly noticed. The same night after pub-close I went — driven by the urge that brings people back to the rooms where they once lived and no longer live — and stood out of the street lamps under the trees where so often we had stood, in the hope that some meaning of my life or love would come, but the night only hardened about the growing absurdity of a man standing under an umbrella beneath the drip from the green leaves of the trees.

Through my love it was the experience of my own future death I was passing through, for the life of the desperate equals the anxiety of death, and before time had replaced all its bandages I found relief in movement, in getting on buses and riding to the terminus; and one day at Killester I heard the conductor say to the driver as they sat downstairs through their ten-minute rest, ‘Jasus, this country is going to the dogs entirely. There’s a gent up there who looks normal enough who must umpteen times this last year have come out here to nowhere and back,’ and as I listened I felt like a patient after a long illness when the doctor says, ‘You can start getting up tomorrow,’ and I gripped the black umbrella with an almost fierce determination to be as I was before, unknowingly happy under the trees, and the umbrella, in the wet evenings that are the normal weather of this city.