John McGahern - The Collected Stories

‘I’ll take a chance,’ she grew more easy. ‘Can I have an Irish coffee?’

All our attempts at speech were awkward and soon Jimmy made a show of examining his watch and rose. ‘Some of the population has to work,’ he grinned ruefully.

‘I’ll come in tomorrow or the next day,’ I said.

‘I’ll keep any letters for you, then,’ he said.

‘How do you feel?’ I asked when we were alone.

She took up the story of her broken affair. She hadn’t been able to work or read and she began to go to the Green, sitting behind dark glasses in one of the canvas deck-chairs placed in a half-circle round the fountain in hot weather; and she just sat there watching the people pass or remembering her life in New York, and gradually was growing calm when one day Nora Moran found her and took her down the country. The day seemed to have been an exact replica of the day I had spent there.

‘The workmen were so servile with her,’ Kate complained.

‘They don’t mind that. It’s their way,’ I said.

‘But American workmen would never be like that.’

‘Listen, won’t we miss the bus?’ An edge had crept into the talk.

‘You don’t want to hear about Nora?’

‘I do, but you should know that Nora needs a fresh person every day, the way some people need a bottle of whiskey.’

‘If she wasn’t around she was on the phone. A few nights ago, as she was going on about herself, I put the phone down. When I picked it up again, there was Nora still talking. She hadn’t noticed that I hadn’t been listening.’

‘You don’t have to worry now,’ I gripped her shoulders. ‘You’re here now.’

‘I can’t tell you how happy I am to be here,’ she said as we went to the bus. The bus dropped us at the church across from the hotel. A large taciturn man, Costello, had us sign our names in the register and then showed us to our rooms on separate floors.

VIII

The eight o’clock bells woke me the next morning. It was a Sunday and we came downstairs almost together. She had on a black lace scarf and leather gloves and a missal with a simple gold cross.

‘Are you going to Mass before having breakfast?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’ She laughed a light girlish laugh.

‘I’ll come too,’ I said, and since she was looking at me in surprise I added, ‘It makes a good impression round here,’ as we walked across and joined other worshippers on the white gravel between the rows of escallonia that led to the church door. I remembered her saying once, ‘I’m a bad Catholic but I am one because if I wasn’t I couldn’t bear all the thinking I’d have to do’; and for me, as I knelt by her side in the church or stood or sat, it was more like wandering in endless corridors of lost mornings than being present in this actual church and day, the church I’d grown up in, with wings to the left and right of the altar and the cypress and evergreen still in the windows.

‘We’ll have you reconverted soon,’ she said playfully as she sprinkled holy water in my direction as we left by the porch door.

‘Once you’ve lost it you can’t go back. I think the whole point is not being able to imagine being anything else. Once you can, you’re gone.’

‘In that sense I’m not one either.’

‘I think we should have breakfast.’ We hurried quickly past the people shaking hands at the gate.

In spite of what I said, Sunday was suddenly new again for me. The first bell for Second Mass was more than an hour away and we had already done our duty. As children we would have changed out of our stiff Sunday suits and shoes, and the day was still before us, for football or pitch-and-toss or the river, the whole day stretching before us in such a long, amazing prospect of pleasure that we were almost loath to begin it.

In the same recovery of amazement, I watched Kate’s beauty against the power of the ocean as we walked afterwards on the shore, traced the fading initials on the wood of the cannon pointed out to sea, watched the early morning golfers move over the fairways, and saw the children come out with their buckets and beach balls, watched by their parents from the edge of the rocks.

‘We can have all this and more,’ the waves whispered.

IX

As it was a hot Sunday, I knew that relatives or people I had known would come to the sea and if I hung about the hotels or front I was certain to meet them.

‘I think I’ll steer clear of the ocean for the next five or six hours,’ I said to her at lunch, and explained why.

‘What do you care? Are you too shy?’ she asked sharply.

‘It’d be stupid to be shy at my age. It’s just too hard to make talk, for them and me.’

When she was silent I said, ‘You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.’

‘Where’ll you go?’

‘I’ll take a book or something over to that old roofless church you can barely see in the far distance.’

‘I guess I’ll come — that’s if you have no objection,’ she said.

‘I’ll only be glad.’

As we walked I pointed to the stream of cars going slowly down to the sea. The roofless church was two miles from the hotel. At first, close to the hotel, we had come across some half-circles of tents in the hollows, then odd single tents, and soon there was nothing but the rough sea grass and sand and rabbit warrens. Some small birds flew out of the ivy rooted in the old walls of the church, and we sat among the faceless stones, close to a big clump of sea thistle. Far away the beach was crowded with small dark figures within the coastguard flags.

‘In America,’ she said, looking at the lighthouse, ‘they have a bell to warn ships. On a wet misty evening it’s eerie to hear it toll, like lost is the wanderer.’

‘It must be,’ I repeated. I felt I should say something more about it but there was nothing I could say.

We began to read but the tension between us increased rather than lessened. I saw the white tinsel of the sea thistle, the old church, the slopes of Knocknarea, the endless pounding of the ocean mingled with bird and distant child cries, the sun hot on the old stones, the very day in its suspension, and thought if there was not this tension between us, if only we could touch or kiss we could have all this and more, the whole day and sea and sky and far beyond.

‘This country depresses me so much it makes me mad,’ she said suddenly.

‘Why?’ I looked up slowly.

‘Everybody comes to the beach and just sits around. In America they’d be doing handstands, playing volleyball, riding the surf. Forgive me, but I had to say something.’

‘I don’t mind at all.’

‘That’s part of the trouble. You should mind.’

‘I don’t mind.’ I thought that if we were Barnaby and Bartleby we could hardly be further apart.

‘Kate,’ I said suddenly, ‘why can’t we be lovers?’

‘No.’ She shook her head and smiled.

‘You’re free now. We could have so much more together and if nothing came of it we’d have very little to lose.’

‘No, I don’t think of you that way. I couldn’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘No. I’m sorry.’ She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t think of us that way.’

I thought bitterly of what she said — like Nora Moran’s workmen I had been brought up a different way, that was all — but asked, ‘You mean you can’t think of us as ever being together?’

‘I’m very fond of you but I could never think of us in that way. I think we’re far too alike.’

‘I had to ask.’ I conceded I had lost. She did not want me the way some people cannot eat shellfish or certain meats. There was once a robin who sang against the church bells striking midnight thinking that the yellow street lamps in the road below were tokens of the day.