John McGahern - The Collected Stories

There was a stillness in the bar such as I had never known. People looked up from their drinks as each fresh newsflash came on the set high in the corner, and it was with visible relief that they bent down again to the darkness of their pints.

‘It’s a real tester for that old chestnut about the Jesuit when he was asked what he’d do if he was playing cards at five minutes to midnight and was suddenly told that the world was going to end at midnight,’ I said as I took our drinks to the table in one of the far corners of the bar, out of sight of the screen.

‘And what would he do?’

‘He’d continue playing cards, of course, to show that all things are equal. It’s only love that matters.’

‘That’s a fine old farce.’ She lifted her glass.

‘It’s strange, how I’ve always wanted to ask you out, and that it should happen this way. I always thought you very beautiful.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘You were with Jerry.’

‘You should still have told me. I don’t think Jerry ever minded the niceties very much when he was after a woman,’ she laughed, and then added softly, ‘Actually, I thought you disliked me.’

‘Anyhow, we’re here this night.’

‘I know, but it’s somehow hard to believe it.’

It was the stillness that was unreal, the comfortable sitting in chairs with drinks in our hands, the ships leaving a white wake behind them on the screen. We were in the condemned cell waiting for reprieve or execution, except that this time the whole world was the cell. There was nothing we could do. The withering would happen as simply as the turning on or off of a light bulb.

Her hair shone dark blue in the light. Her skin had the bloom of ripe fruit. The white teeth glittered when she smiled. We had struggled towards the best years; now they waited for us, and all was to be laid waste as we were about to enter into them. In the freedom of the fear I moved my face close to hers. Our lips met. I put my hand on hers.

‘Is Jerry coming back tonight?’

‘No.’

‘Can I stay with you tonight?’

‘If you want that.’ Her lips touched my face again.

‘It’s all I could wish for — except, maybe, a better time.’

‘Why don’t we go, then?’ she said softly.

We walked by the Green, closed and hushed within its railings, not talking much. When she said, ‘I wonder what they’re doing in the Pentagon as we walk these steps by the Green?’ it seemed more part of the silence than any speech.

‘It’s probably just as well we can’t know.’

‘I hope they do something. It’d be such a waste. All this to go, and us too.’

‘We’d be enough.’

There was a bicycle against the wall of the hallway when she turned the key, and it somehow made the stairs and lino-covered hallway more bare.

‘It’s the man’s upstairs.’ She nodded towards the bicycle. ‘He works on the buses.’

The flat was small and untidy.

‘I had always imagined Jerry kept you in more style,’ I said idly.

‘He doesn’t keep me. I pay for this place. He always wanted me to move, but I would never give up my own place,’ she said sharply, but she could not be harsh for long, and began to laugh. ‘Anyhow he always leaves before morning. He has his breakfast in the other house’; and she switched off the light on the disordered bed and chairs and came into my arms. The night had been so tense and sudden that we had no desire except to lie in one another’s arms, and as we kissed a last time before turning to seek our sleep she whispered, ‘If you want me during the night, don’t be afraid to wake me up.’

The Russian ships had stopped and were lying off Cuba, the radio told us as she made coffee on the small gas stove beside the sink in the corner of the room the next morning. The danger seemed about to pass. Again the world breathed, and it looked foolish to have believed it had ever been threatened.

Jerry was coming back from Cork that evening, and we agreed as we kissed to let this day go by without meeting but to meet at five the next day in Gaffneys of Fairview.

The bicycle had gone from the hallway by the time I left. The morning met me as other damp cold Dublin mornings, the world almost restored already to the everyday. The rich uses we dreamed last night when it was threatened that we would put it to if spared were now forgotten, when again it lay all about us in such tedious abundance.

‘Did Jerry notice or suspect anything?’ I asked over the coal fire in Gaffneys when we met, both of us shy in our first meeting as separate persons after the intimacy of flesh.

‘No. All he talked about was the Cuban business. Apparently, they were just as scared. They stayed up drinking all night in the hotel. He just had a terrible hangover.’

That evening we went to my room, and she was, in a calm and quiet way, completely free with her body, offering it as a gift, completely open. With the firelight leaping on the walls of the locked room, I said, ‘There is no Cuba now. It is the first time, you and I,’ but in my desire was too quick; ‘I should have been able to wait,’ but she took my face between her hands and drew it down. ‘Don’t worry. There will come a time soon enough when you won’t have that trouble.’

‘How did you first meet Jerry?’ I asked to cover the silence.

‘My father was mixed up in politics in a small way and he was friendly with Jerry; and then my father died while I was at the convent in Eccles Street. Jerry seemed to do most of the arranging at the funeral, and it seemed natural for him to take me out on those halfdays and Sundays that we were given free.’

‘Did you know of his reputation?’

‘Everybody did. It made him dangerous and attractive. And one Saturday halfday we went to this flat in an attic off Baggot Street. He must have borrowed it for the occasion for I’ve never been in it since. I was foolish. I knew so little. I just thought you lay in bed with a man and that was all that happened. I remember it was raining. The flat was right in the roof and there was the loud drumming of rain all the time. That’s how it began. And it’s gone on from there ever since.’

She drew me towards her, in the full openness of desire, but she quickly rose. ‘I have to hurry. I have to meet Jerry at nine’; and the pattern of her thieving had been set.

Often when I saw her dress to leave, combing her hair in the big cane armchair, drawing lipstick across her rich curving lips in the looking glass, I felt that she had come with stolen silver to the room. We had dined with the silver, and now that the meal was ended she was wiping and shining the silver anew, replacing it in the black jewel case to be taken out and used again in Jerry’s bed or at his table, doubly soiled; and when I complained she said angrily, ‘What about it? He doesn’t know.’

‘At least you and Jerry aren’t fouling up anybody.’

‘What about his wife? You seem very moral all of a sudden.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to,’ I apologized, but already the bloom had gone from the first careless fruits, and we felt the responsibility enter softly, but definitely, as any burden.

‘Why can’t you stay another hour?’

‘I know what’d happen in one of those hours,’ she said spiritedly, but the tone was affectionate and dreamy, perhaps with the desire for children. ‘I’d get pregnant as hell.’

‘What should we do?’

‘Maybe we should tell Jerry,’ she said. It was my turn to be alarmed.

‘What would we tell him?’

The days of Jerry’s profligacy were over. Not only had he grown jealous but violent. Not long before, hearing that she had been seen in a bar with a man and not being able to find her, he had taken a razor and slashed the dresses in her wardrobe to ribbons.