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

‘Nothing as exciting as medieval poetry. I deal in law, industrial law in particular.’

‘I can imagine that to be quite exciting.’

‘Interesting maybe, but mostly it’s a job — like any other.’

‘Do you live in the city, or outside?’

‘Very near here. I can walk most places, even walk to work.’ And when he saw her hesitate, as if she wanted to ask something and did not think it right, he added, ‘I have a flat. I live by myself there, though I was married once.’

‘Are you divorced? Or am I allowed to ask that?’

‘Of course you are. Divorce isn’t allowed in this country. We are separated. For something like twenty years now we haven’t laid eyes on one another. And you? Do you have a husband or friend?’ he changed the subject.

‘Yes. Someone I met at college, but we have agreed to separate for a time.’

There was no silence or unease. Their interest in one another already far outran their knowledge. She offered to split the bill but he refused.

‘Thanks for the lunch, the company,’ she said as they faced one another outside the restaurant.

‘It was a pleasure,’ and then he hesitated and asked, ‘What are you doing for the afternoon?’ not wanting to see this flow that was between them checked, though he knew to follow it was hardly wise.

‘I was going to check tomorrow’s trains to Dundalk.’

‘We could do that at Westland Row around the corner. I was wondering if you’d be interested in going out to the sea where the world and its mother is in this weather?’

‘I’d love to,’ she said simply.

It was with a certain relief that he paid the taxi at the Bull Wall. Lately the luxury and convenience of a taxi had become for him the privilege of being no longer young, of being cut off from the people he had come from, and this was exasperated by the glowing young woman by his side, her eager responses to each view he pointed out, including the wired-down palms along the front.

‘They look so funny. Why is it done?’

‘It’s simple. So that they will not be blown away in storms. They are not natural to this climate.’

He took off his tie and jacket as they crossed the planks of the wooden bridge, its legs long and stork-like in the retreated tide. The rocks that sloped down to the sea from the Wall were crowded with people, most of them in bathing costumes, reading, listening to transistors, playing cards, staring out to sea, where three tankers appeared to be nailed down in the milky distance. The caps of the stronger swimmers bobbed far out. Others floated on their backs close to the rocks, crawled in sharp bursts, breast-stroked heavily up and down a parallel line, blowing like walruses as they trod water.

‘I used to swim off these rocks once. I liked going in off the rocks because I’ve always hated getting sand between my toes. Those lower rocks get covered at full tide. You can see the tidal line by the colour.’

‘Don’t you swim any more?’

‘I haven’t in years.’

‘If I had a costume I wouldn’t mind going in.’

‘I think you’d find it cold.’

She told him of how she used to go out to the ocean at the Hamptons with her father, her four brothers, their black sheep Uncle John who had made a fortune in scrap metal and was extremely lecherous. She laughed as she recounted one of Uncle John’s adventures with an English lady.

When they reached the end of the Wall, they went down to the Strand, but it was so crowded that they had to pick their way through. They moved out to where there were fewer people along the tide’s edge. It was there that she decided to wade in the water, and he offered to hold her sandals. As he walked with her sandals, a phrase came without warning from the book he had been reading in Webb’s: ‘What is he doing with his life, we say: and our judgement makes up for the failure to realize sympathetically the natural process of living.’ He must indeed be atrophied if a casual phrase could have more presence for him than this beautiful young woman, and the sea, and the day. The dark blue mass of Howth faced the motionless ships on the horizon, seemed to be even pushing them back.

‘Oh, it’s cold.’ She shivered as she came out of the water, and reached for her sandals.

‘Even in heatwaves the sea is cold in Ireland. That’s Howth ahead — where Maud Gonne waited at the station as Pallas Athena.’ He reached for his role as tourist guide.

‘I know that line,’ she said and quoted the verse. ‘Has all that gone from Dublin?’

‘In what way?’

‘Are there … poets … still?’

‘Are there poets?’ he laughed out loud. ‘They say the standing army of poets never falls below ten thousand in this unfortunate country.’

‘Why unfortunate?’ she said quickly.

‘They create no wealth. They are greedy and demanding. They hold themselves in very high opinion. Ten centuries ago

there was a national convocation, an attempt to limit their powers and numbers.’

‘Wasn’t it called Drum something?’

‘ Drum Ceat ,’ he added, made uneasy by his own attack.

‘But don’t you feel that they have a function — beyond wealth?’ she pursued.

‘What function?’

‘That they sing the tired rowers to the hidden shore?’

‘Not in the numbers we possess here, one singing down the other. But maybe I’m unkind. There are a few.’

‘Are these poets to be seen?’

‘They can’t even be hidden. Tomorrow evening I could show you some of the pubs they frequent. Would you like that?’

‘I’d like that very much,’ she said, and took his hand. A whole day was secured. The crowds hadn’t started to head home yet, and they travelled back to the city on a nearly empty bus.

‘What will you do for the rest of the evening?’

‘There’s some work I may look at. And you? What will you do?’

‘I think I’ll rest. Unpack, read a bit.’ She smiled as she raised her hand.

He walked slowly back, everything changed by the petty confrontation in Webb’s, the return to the flat, the telegram in the hallway. If he had not come back, she would be in Dundalk by now, and he would be thinking about finding a hotel for the night somewhere round Rathdrum. In the flat, he went through notes that he had made in preparation for a meeting he had with the Minister the coming week. They concerned an obscure section of the Industries Act. Though they were notes he had made himself he found them extremely tedious, and there came on him a restlessness like that which sometimes heralds illness. He felt like going out to a cinema or bar, but knew that what he really wanted to do was to ring Mary Kelleher. If he had learned anything over the years it was the habit of discipline. Tomorrow would bring itself. He would wait for it if necessary with his mind resolutely fixed on its own blankness, as a person prays after fervour has died.

‘Section 13, paragraph 4, states clearly that in the event of confrontation or disagreement …’ he began to write.

The dress of forest green she was wearing when she came down to the lobby the next evening caught his breath; it was shirt-waisted, belling out. A blue ribbon hung casually from her fair hair behind.

‘You look marvellous.’

The Sunday streets were empty, and the stones gave out a dull heat. They walked slowly, loitering at some shop windows. The doors of all the bars were open, O’Neills and the International and the Olde Stand, but they were mostly empty within. There was a sense of a cool dark waiting in Mooney’s, a barman arranging ashtrays on the marble. They ordered an assortment of sandwiches. It was pleasant to sit in the comparative darkness, and eat and sip and watch the street, and to hear in the silence footsteps going up and down Grafton Street.