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

‘No. All he talked about was the Cuban business. Apparently, they were just as scared. They stayed up drinking all night in the hotel. He just had a terrible hangover.’

That evening we went to my room, and she was, in a calm and quiet way, completely free with her body, offering it as a gift, completely open. With the firelight leaping on the walls of the locked room, I said, ‘There is no Cuba now. It is the first time, you and I,’ but in my desire was too quick; ‘I should have been able to wait,’ but she took my face between her hands and drew it down. ‘Don’t worry. There will come a time soon enough when you won’t have that trouble.’

‘How did you first meet Jerry?’ I asked to cover the silence.

‘My father was mixed up in politics in a small way and he was friendly with Jerry; and then my father died while I was at the convent in Eccles Street. Jerry seemed to do most of the arranging at the funeral, and it seemed natural for him to take me out on those halfdays and Sundays that we were given free.’

‘Did you know of his reputation?’

‘Everybody did. It made him dangerous and attractive. And one Saturday halfday we went to this flat in an attic off Baggot Street. He must have borrowed it for the occasion for I’ve never been in it since. I was foolish. I knew so little. I just thought you lay in bed with a man and that was all that happened. I remember it was raining. The flat was right in the roof and there was the loud drumming of rain all the time. That’s how it began. And it’s gone on from there ever since.’

She drew me towards her, in the full openness of desire, but she quickly rose. ‘I have to hurry. I have to meet Jerry at nine’; and the pattern of her thieving had been set.

Often when I saw her dress to leave, combing her hair in the big cane armchair, drawing lipstick across her rich curving lips in the looking glass, I felt that she had come with stolen silver to the room. We had dined with the silver, and now that the meal was ended she was wiping and shining the silver anew, replacing it in the black jewel case to be taken out and used again in Jerry’s bed or at his table, doubly soiled; and when I complained she said angrily, ‘What about it? He doesn’t know.’

‘At least you and Jerry aren’t fouling up anybody.’

‘What about his wife? You seem very moral all of a sudden.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to,’ I apologized, but already the bloom had gone from the first careless fruits, and we felt the responsibility enter softly, but definitely, as any burden.

‘Why can’t you stay another hour?’

‘I know what’d happen in one of those hours,’ she said spiritedly, but the tone was affectionate and dreamy, perhaps with the desire for children. ‘I’d get pregnant as hell.’

‘What should we do?’

‘Maybe we should tell Jerry,’ she said. It was my turn to be alarmed.

‘What would we tell him?’

The days of Jerry’s profligacy were over. Not only had he grown jealous but violent. Not long before, hearing that she had been seen in a bar with a man and not being able to find her, he had taken a razor and slashed the dresses in her wardrobe to ribbons.

‘We could tell him everything,’ she said without conviction. ‘That we want to be together.’

‘He’d go berserk. You know that.’

‘He’s often said that the one thing he feels guilty about is having taken my young life. That we should have met when both of us were young.’

‘That doesn’t mean he’ll think me the ideal man for the job,’ I said. ‘They say the world would be a better place if we looked at ourselves objectively and subjectively at others, but that’s never the way the ball bounces.’

‘Well, what are we to do?’

‘By telling Jerry about us, you’re just using one relationship to break up another. I think you should leave Jerry. Tell him that you just want to start up a life of your own.’

‘But he’ll know that there’s someone.’

‘That’s his problem. You don’t have to tell him. We can stay apart for a while. And then take up without any fear, like two free people.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said as she put on her coat. ‘And then, after all that, if I found that you didn’t want me, I’d be in a nice fix.’

‘There’d be no fear of that. Where are you going tonight?’

‘There’s a dinner that a younger branch of the Party is giving. It’s all right for me to go. They think it rather dashing of Jerry to appear with a young woman.’

‘I’m not so sure. Young people don’t like to see themselves caricatured either.’

‘Anyhow I’m going,’ she said.

‘Will it be five in Gaffneys tomorrow?’

‘At five, then,’ I heard as the door opened and softly closed.

‘Does Jerry suspect at all?’ I asked her again another evening over Gaffneys’ small coal fire.

‘No. Not at all. Odd that he often was suspicious when nothing at all was going on and now that there is he suspects nothing. Only the other day he was asking about you. He was wondering what had become of you. It seemed so long since we had seen you last.’

Our easy thieving that was hardly loving, anxiety curbed by caution, appetite so luxuriously satisfied that it could not give way to the dreaming that draws us close to danger, was wearing itself naturally away when a different relationship was made alarmingly possible. Jerry was suddenly offered a lucrative contract to found a new radio/television network in Sierra Leone, and he was thinking of accepting. Ireland as a small nation with a history of oppression was suddenly becoming useful in the Third World.

‘He goes to London the weekend after next for the interview and he’ll almost certainly take it.’

‘That means the end of his political career here.’

‘There’s not much further he can get here. It gives him prestige, a different platform, and a lot of cash.’

‘How do you fit into this?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Does he want to take you with him?’

‘He’ll go out on his own first, but he says that as soon as he’s settled there and sees the state of play that he wants me to follow him.’

‘What’ll you do?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said in a voice that implied that I was now part of these considerations.

Slane was a lovely old village in the English style close to Dublin. One Sunday we had lunch at the one hotel, more like a village inn than a hotel, plain wooden tables and chairs, the walls and fireplaces simple black and white, iron scrapers on the steps outside the entrance. She had suggested that we go there the weekend Jerry was on interview in London. The country weekend, the walks along the wooded banks of the river, coming back to the hotel with sharp appetites to have one drink in the bar and then to linger over lunch, in the knowledge that we had the whole long curtained afternoon spread before us, was dream enough. But was it to be that simple? Did we know one another outside the carnal pleasures we shared, and were we prepared to spend our lives together in the good or nightmare they might bring? It was growing clearer that she wasn’t sure of me and that I wasn’t sure. So when the telegram came from the country I was almost glad of the usual drama and mysteriousness.

‘Then that’s goodbye to our poor weekend.’ She handed me back the telegram in Gaffneys.

‘It’s only one weekend,’ I protested. ‘We’ll have as many as we want once Jerry goes.’

‘You remember when I wanted to tell Jerry that we were in love and you wouldn’t have it? You said we didn’t know one another well enough, and then when we can have two whole days together you get this telegram. How are we ever going to get to know one another except by being together?’