John McGahern - The Collected Stories

Hours later, in the tiredness of the evening, spaces now on the hill between the cars leaving the beach for the day, she said gently, ‘I hope it’ll make no difference between us.’

‘It won’t.’

‘I think we can have far more as we are. What’s between us is only a beginning.’

‘I don’t think so but it seems it’s the way it must be.’

X

The next day was wet, a mist that closed in from the sea so that the church was barely visible from the hotel, but though the rain was soft as a caress on the face it wet one through. I played billiards all that morning in a bar down on the front and then rang Jimmy. I arranged to meet him in Sligo.

‘I’m going to Sligo. Would you like to come?’ I asked her over lunch.

‘Why?’

‘Jimmy and his girl are going to the cinema and he asked if we’d like to go with them and have a drink afterwards.’

‘Like two happy couples?’

‘Well, you don’t have to come,’ I said, and we began to talk about Nora Moran. The more we talked the more I felt how much more honest was Nora’s brutal egotism set against our pale lives here by the sea.

‘If Nora has ears to hear they must be burning now,’ she laughed when we had ended.

We went to our rooms to read. Outside the window the road shone black with rain. Through the mist it was as if fine threads of rain were being teased slowly down. We did not meet till the flat gong that hung in the hallway rang for tea.

‘You haven’t changed your mind?’ I asked cautiously.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I want you to do something for me. I want you not to go to Sligo.’

‘But I can’t not go. I promised Jimmy.’

‘You can call him up.’

‘There’s no phone in the digs and he’s left work by now.’

She was eating so slowly that I began to fear I would miss the bus if I waited for her.

‘I’m sorry. I have to go,’ I said as I rose.

‘Do you have to go so soon?’

‘The bus’ll be outside in five minutes or so.’

To my puzzlement she laid her knife and fork side by side on the plate, rose, took her raincoat from the bentwood stand in the hall, and came out with me into the rain. In uncomfortable silence we watched the bus pass down, waited for it to turn at the cannon and come back, the waves crashing incessantly on the shore beyond the soft, endlessly drifting veils of rain.

‘Are you sure you won’t change your mind and come?’ I asked as I heard the bus.

‘No.’ She shook her head. As the veiled yellow sidelights showed in the rain she suddenly tugged my sleeve and said earnestly, ‘I want you to do this for me. I want you not to get on the bus.’

‘Is there any good reason?’ I demanded. Only a beloved could ask so much, so capriciously. Did she want all this as well as the voices, without any of the burden of love or work?

‘Just that I want you not to.’

‘I can’t not go,’ I said, ‘but what I’ll do is get the next bus back. I’ll be back within an hour. Maybe we’ll go out for a drink then,’ and pressing her arm climbed into the bus. As soon as I paid the conductor I looked back. Already the bus had changed gear to climb the hill and I could not see through the rain and misted windows whether she was still standing there or had gone back into the hotel. I stirred uneasily, feeling that I had left some hurt behind. Yet what she had demanded had been unreasonable; but far more insistently than reason, or the grinding of the bus, came, ‘If you had loved her you would have stayed.’ But all of life turns away from its own eventual hopelessness, leaving insomnia and night to lovers and the dying.

I had come far in time since first I travelled on this bus. Surprised as a boy by the conductor’s outstretched hand, I had reached up and shaken it. The whole bus had rocked with laughter and one man cheered. ‘It’s the fare now I’d be looking for,’ and though he had smiled the conductor had been as embarrassed and confused as I had been.

As much through the light of years as through this wet evening the bus seemed to move. It was an August evening. We were going home at the end of another summer holiday. When the bus stopped at the Central, Michael Henry got on. His clothes hung about him and the only sign of his old jauntiness was the green teal’s feather in the felt hat. After years in America he had come home, bought a shop and farm, married, had children. We kept an account in his shop and every Christmas he gave us a bottle of Redbreast and a tin of Jacob’s figrolls.

‘How is it, Michael, that you seem to be going home and we’ve never met in all this time at the sea?’ my father asked.

‘I guess it’s because I just came down yesterday,’ Michael Henry said as he put his small leather case in the overhead rack.

‘How is it you’re going home so soon?’

‘I guess I thought the sea might do me some good but I only felt worse last night. I don’t believe in shelling out good money to a hotel when you can be just as badly off at home. America teaches you those things.’

He sat the whole way home with my father. They talked of America and the war in Europe. Not many weeks later, in scarlet and white, I was to follow the priest round Michael Henry’s coffin as he blessed it with holy water from the brass jar in my hands.

And suddenly the dead man climbing on the bus, the living girl asking me not to go to Sligo in the rain outside the hotel, I on the bus to Sligo to collect some letters, Barnaby and Bartleby, even now in their Dublin doorways patiently watching the day fade, all seemed to be equally awash in time and indistinguishable, the same mute human presence beneath the unchanging sky, and for one moment I could not see how anyone could wish another pain. We were all waiting in the doorways.

XI

I went straight from the bus station to the Blue Anchor. I got letters that had come for me from Jimmy, saw some of the Pint Drinkers. They were planning to take two barrels of stout out to Strandhill in a van one of these evenings, dig for clams and have a party on the shore. Already it was a world I could no longer join. As we made our excuses for leaving, I to get the next bus back to Strandhill, Jimmy to meet his girl outside the cinema, Jack clapped us affectionately on the shoulders and said, ‘Soon the pint days will be over. They’ll have the leg-irons on yous in no time now.’

‘Some other time we must make an evening of it,’ Jimmy and his girl said as I left them at the cinema.

‘Some other time,’ I echoed but already my anxiety was returning. The rain was heavier now and the drops fell like small yellow stones into the headlights of the bus. I hurried across the wet sand outside the hotel, and when I did not find her downstairs climbed to her room. I saw Costello’s eyes follow me with open suspicion. When I knocked on her door there was no answer.

‘Are you in, Kate?’ I called softly. Then I heard her low sobbing.

‘I’ve just come back on the bus. I wondered if you’d like to come out for a drink?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘I came back in the hope you’d come out. Are you sure you won’t come?’

‘No, thanks. I want to be alone.’

Slowly I retraced my steps down the narrow creaking corridor. There was nothing I could do but wait for morning.

XII

With a reluctance to face what the morning might bring in the light of the evening before, I was late in coming down. The first thing that met my eyes was her luggage in the hallway. She was leaving.

‘I see Miss O’Mara decided to leave today after all,’ I tried to say as casually as possible to Costello, who seemed to be as much on guard over the bags as in his usual place in the office.

‘She told me to tell you that she’s settled her account and is leaving,’ he said in a tone which seemed to convey that I must have given her some good reason to leave with such suddenness.