John McGahern - The Collected Stories

‘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 doctors 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.

I

The shark stank far as the house, above it the screech of the sea birds; it’d stink until the birds had picked the bones clean, when the skeleton would begin to break up in the sun. The man reluctantly closed the door and went back to making coffee. He liked to stare out the door to the sea over coffee in the mornings. After he made the coffee he put the pot with bread and honey and a bowl of fruit on the table in the centre of the red-tiled floor. The windows on the sea were shuttered, light coming from the two windows looking out on the mountain at the back and a small side window above the empty concrete pool without. He was about to say that breakfast was ready when he saw the woman examining the scar under her eye in the small silver-framed mirror. Her whole body stiffened with intensity as she examined it. He cursed under his breath and waited.

‘It makes me look forty.’ He heard the slow sobs. He lifted and replaced a spoon but knew it was useless to say anything.

‘If we get the divorce I’ll sue you for this,’ she said with uncontrolled ferocity in a heavy foreign accent. She was small but beautifully proportioned, with straight wheaten hair that hung to her shoulders.

‘It wasn’t all my fault.’ He lifted the spoon again.

‘You were drunk.’

‘I had four cervezas .’

‘You were drunk. As you’re always drunk except some hours in the mornings.’

‘If you hadn’t loosened that rope to put in the cheese it wouldn’t have happened.’

He’d bought a fifteen-litre jar of red wine in Vera, it was cheaper there than in the local shops, and had roped it in the wooden box behind the Vespa. When he was drinking at the bar, she’d loosened the rope to put some extra cheese and crystallized almonds in the box. He hadn’t noticed the loose rope round the wickerwork of the jar when leaving; it had made no difference on the tar but the last mile was a rutted dirt-track. The Vespa had to be ridden on the shoulders of the road not much wider than the width of the wheels. Drowsy with the beer and the fierce heat, he drove automatically until he found the wheels losing their grip in the dust on the edge of the shoulder. When he tried to pull out to the firm centre of the shoulder the fifteen litres started to swing loose, swinging the wheels further into the loose dust.

There was all the time in the world to switch off the engine so that the wheels wouldn’t spin and to tell her to hold his body as soon as he knew he was about to crash, and he remembered the happiness of the certainty that nothing he could do would avert the crash. Shielded by his body she would have been unhurt, but her face came across his shoulder to strike the driving-mirror. Above him on the road she’d cried out at the blood on his face. It was her own blood flowing from the mirror’s gash below her eye.

‘I’m ugly, ugly, ugly,’ she cried now.

‘The doctor said the scar’d heal and it doesn’t make you ugly.’

‘You want to kill me. Once it was Iris.’ She ignored what he’d said and started to examine two thin barely visible scars down her cheek in the mirror. ‘She tore me with her nails when she wanted to kill me. Both of you want to kill me.’

‘All children fight.’

‘Jesus,’ she swore. ‘You even want to take her side. You want to pretend that nothing happened. Jesus, Jesus.’

‘No.’ The man raised his voice, angry now. ‘I know all children fight. That they’re animals. And I do know I didn’t want to kill you.’

‘Everything I say for do you criticize. Always you take the others’ side.’ She was again close to crying.

‘Earlier it starts in the morning and earlier,’ he said about the fighting.

‘Who was its cause? If we ever get a divorce …’

‘O Jesus Christ,’ the man broke in, he clasped his head between his hands, and then steps sounded on the hard red sandstone that led from the house to the dirt-track. The woman at once moved out of sight to a part of the L-shape of the room where the cooker was, whispering fiercely, ‘Don’t open the door yet,’ and began quickly drying her face, powdering, drawing the brush frantically through her wheaten hair. He made a noise with the chair to let whoever was outside know he was coming as she whispered, ‘Not yet. Do I look all right?’

‘You look fine.’

The man moved with exaggerated slowness to the door. Outside in the sun-hat and flowered shirt and shorts stood Mr McGregor with an empty biscuit tin and a bunch of yellow roses.

‘I thought your wife might like these,’ he proffered the yellow roses, ‘and that you might find this useful for bread or something.’

He was their nearest neighbour, a timber millionaire who’d built the red villa with its private beach a few hundred metres up the road for his retirement, and now lived with his two servants and roses there. Even his children wouldn’t come to him on visits because of his miserliness. He got round the villages in a battered red Renault, but once a month the grey Rolls was taken out of the garage for him to drive to the bank in Murcia. Money and roses seemed to be his only passions, and out of loneliness he often came to them with roses and something like the empty biscuit tin which otherwise he’d have to throw away.