John McGahern - The Collected Stories

‘But they are more beautiful. Dog rose, wild woodbine, buttercup, daisy …’

He heard his own protest. It was in a hotel that they used to go to every summer on the Atlantic, a small hotel where you could read after dinner without fear of a rising roar from the bar beginning to outrival the Atlantic by ten o’clock.

‘And, no doubt, the little rose of Scotland, sharp and sweet and breaks the heart,’ he heard his friend quote maliciously. ‘And it’s not the point. The reason that names of flowers must be in Latin is that when flower lovers meet they know what they are talking about, no matter whether they’re French or Greeks or Arabs. They have a universal language.’

‘I prefer the humble names, no matter what you say.’

‘Of course you do. And it’s parochial sentimentalists like yourself who prefer the smooth sowthistle to Sonchus oleraceus that’s the whole cause of your late lamented Mass in Latin disappearing. I have no sympathy with you. You people tire me.’

The memory of that truculent argument dispelled his annoyance, as its simple logic had once taken his breath away, but he was curiously tired after the vividness of the recall. It was only by a sheer act of will, sometimes having to count the words, that he was able to finish his office. ‘I know one thing, Peter Joyce. I know that I know nothing,’ he murmured when he finished. But when he looked at the room about him he could hardly believe it was so empty and dead and dry, the empty chair where she should be sewing, the oaken table with the scattered books, the clock on the mantel. Wildly and aridly he wanted to curse, but his desire to curse was as unfair as life. He had not wanted it.

Then, quietly, he saw that he had a ghost all right, one that he had been walking around with for a long time, a ghost he had not wanted to recognize — his own death. He might as well get to know him well. It would never leave now and had no mortal shape. Absence does not cast a shadow.

All that was there was the white light of the lamp on the open book, on the white marble; the brief sun of God on beechwood, and the sudden light of that glistening snow, and the timeless mourners moving towards the yews on Killeelan Hill almost thirty years ago. It was as good a day as any, if there ever was a good day to go.

Somewhere, outside this room that was an end, he knew that a young man, not unlike he had once been, stood on a granite step and listened to the doorbell ring, smiled as he heard a woman’s footsteps come down the hallway, ran his fingers through his hair, and turned the bottle of white wine he held in his hands completely around as he prepared to enter a pleasant and uncomplicated evening, feeling himself immersed in time without end.

EVENING

‘I must go now.’ She tried to rise from the bed.

‘Stay.’ His arms about her pale shoulders held her back as she pressed upwards with her hands. ‘Let me kiss you there once more.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she laughed and fell back into his arms. ‘I have to go.’ Her body trembled with low laughter as he went beneath the sheet to kiss her; and then they stretched full length against one another, kissing over and back on the mouth, in a last grasping embrace.

‘I wish I could eat and drink you.’

‘Then I’d be gone.’ She pushed him loose with her palms. They both rose and dressed quickly.

‘I’ll leave you home. It’s too late for you to go alone.’ Lately she had seemed to want to assert their separateness after each lovemaking.

‘All right. I don’t mind,’ she said, a seeming challenge in her eyes.

‘Besides I want to.’ He leaned to kiss her on the side of the throat as she drew on her jacket. They stole down the stairs, and outside he held the door firmly until the catch clicked quietly behind them. The fading moonlight was weak on the leaves of the single laurel in the front garden, and he grew uneasy at the apparent reluctance with which she seemed to give him her gloved hand on the pavement, with the way she hurried, their separate footsteps loud in the silence of the sleeping suburbs.

They’d met just after broken love affairs, and had drifted casually into going out together two or three evenings every week. They went to cinemas or dancehalls or restaurants, to the races at Leopardstown or the Park, making no demands on one another, sharing only one another’s pleasures, making love together as on this night in his student’s room.

Sensing her hard separateness in their separate footsteps as they walked towards her home in the sleeping suburbs, he began to feel that by now there should be more between them than this sensual ease. Till now, for him, the luxury of this ease had been perfect. This uncomplicated pleasure seemed the very fullness of life, seemed all that life could yearn towards. Yet it could not go on for ever. There comes a point in all living things when they must change or die, and maybe they had passed that point already without noticing. He had already lost her while longing to draw closer.

‘When will we meet again?’ he asked her as usual at the gate before she went in.

‘When do you want?’

‘Saturday, at eight, outside the Metropole.’

‘Saturday — at eight, then,’ she agreed.

There was no need to seek for more. His anxiety had been groundless. Wednesdays and Saturdays were always given. No matter how hard the week was he had always Saturdays and Wednesdays to look forward to: he could lean upon their sensual ease and luxury as reliably as upon a drug. Now that Saturday was once more promised his life was perfectly arranged. With all the casualness of the self-satisfied male, he kissed her goodnight and it caused her to look sharply at him before she went in, but he noticed nothing. He waited until he heard the latch click and then went whistling home through the empty silent streets just beginning to grow light.

That next Saturday he stayed alone in the room, studying by the light of a bulb fixed on a Chianti bottle, the texts and diagrams spread out on newspaper that shielded his arms from the cold of the marble top that had once been a washstand, the faded velvet curtain drawn on the garden and hot day outside, on cries of the ice-cream wagons, on the long queues within the city for buses to the sea, the sea of Dollymount, the swimmers going in off the rocks, pleasures sharpened a hundredfold by the drawn curtain. Finally, late in the afternoon, when he discovered that he had just reached the bottom of a page without taking in a single sentence, he left the room and went down to the front. At the corner shop he bought an orange and sat on a bench. The sea lay dazzling in the heat out past the Bull and Howth Head. An old couple and a terrier with a newspaper in his mouth went past him as he peeled the orange. Music came from a transistor somewhere. Exams should be held in winter, he thought tiredly, for he seemed to be looking at the people walking past him, sitting on benches or on the grass as if through plate glass.

Still, at eight o’clock she would come to him, out of the milling crowds about the Metropole, her long limbs burning nakedly beneath the swinging folds of the brown dress, the face that came towards him and then drew back as she laughed, and he would begin to live again. He had all that forgetting to go towards, the losing of the day in all the sweetness of her night. He rose, threw the orange peel into a wire basket, and walked back to the room. He imagined he must have been working for about an hour when he heard the heavy knocker of the front door. When he looked at his watch he found that he had been working already for more than two hours.

He listened as the front door opened, and heard voices — the landlord’s, probably the vegetable man or the coal man — but went quite still as steps came up the stairs towards the door of the room, the landlord’s step because of the heavy breathing. A knock came on the door, and the fat, little old landlord put his head in, stains of egg yolk on his lapels. ‘A visitor for you,’ he whispered and winked.