‘Good-night, Bridie,’ Dano Ryan said.
‘Good-night, Dano,’ she said.
She walked across the gravel towards her bicycle, hearing Mr Maloney, somewhere behind her, repeating that no matter how you looked at it the cement factory would be a great thing for Kilmalough. She heard the bang of a car door and knew it was Mr Swanton banging the door of Mr Maloney’s car because he always gave it the same loud bang. Two other doors banged as she reached her bicycle and then the engine started up and the headlights went on. She touched the two tyres of the bicycle to make certain she hadn’t a puncture. The wheels of Mr Maloney’s car traversed the gravel and were silent when they reached the road.
‘Good-night, Bridie,’ someone called, and she replied, pushing her bicycle towards the road.
‘Will I ride a little way with you?’ Bowser Egan asked.
They rode together and when they arrived at the hill for which it was necessary to dismount she looked back and saw in the distance the four coloured bulbs that decorated the façade of the Ballroom of Romance. As she watched, the lights went out, and she imagined Mr Dwyer pulling the metal grid across the front of his property and locking the two padlocks that secured it. His wife would be waiting with the evening’s takings, sitting in the front of their car.
‘D’you know what it is, Bridie,’ said Bowser Egan, ‘you were never looking better than tonight.’ He took from a pocket of his suit the small bottle of whiskey he had. He uncorked it and drank some and then handed it to her. She took it and drank. ‘Sure, why wouldn’t you?’ he said, surprised to see her drinking because she never had in his company before. It was an unpleasant taste, she considered, a taste she’d experienced only twice before, when she’d taken whiskey as a remedy for toothache. ‘What harm would it do you?’ Bowser Egan said as she raised the bottle again to her lips. He reached out a hand for it, though, suddenly concerned lest she should consume a greater share than he wished her to.
She watched him drinking more expertly than she had. He would always be drinking, she thought. He’d be lazy and useless, sitting in the kitchen with the Irish Press. He’d waste money buying a secondhand motor-car in order to drive into the town to go to the public houses on fair-days.
‘She’s shook these days,’ he said, referring to his mother. ‘She’ll hardly last two years, I’m thinking.’ He threw the empty whiskey bottle into the ditch and lit a cigarette. They pushed their bicycles. He said:
‘When she goes, Bridie, I’ll sell the bloody place up. I’ll sell the pigs and the whole damn one and twopence worth.’ He paused in order to raise the cigarette to his lips. He drew in smoke and exhaled it. ‘With the cash that I’ll get I could improve some place else, Bridie.’
They reached a gate on the left-hand side of the road and automatically they pushed their bicycles towards it and leaned them against it. He climbed over the gate into the field and she climbed after him. ‘Will we sit down here, Bridie?’ he said, offering the suggestion as one that had just occurred to him, as though they’d entered the field for some other purpose.
‘We could improve a place like your own one,’ he said, putting his right arm around her shoulders. ‘Have you a kiss in you, Bridie?’ He kissed her, exerting pressure with his teeth. When his mother died he would sell his farm and spend the money in the town. After that he would think of getting married because he’d have nowhere to go, because he’d want a fire to sit at and a woman to cook food for him. He kissed her again, his lips hot, the sweat on his cheeks sticking to her. ‘God, you’re great at kissing,’ he said.
She rose, saying it was time to go, and they climbed over the gate again. ‘There’s nothing like a Saturday,’ he said. ‘Good-night to you so, Bridie.’
He mounted his bicycle and rode down the hill, and she pushed hers to the top and then mounted it also. She rode through the night as on Saturday nights for years she had ridden and never would ride again because she’d reached a certain age. She would wait now and in time Bowser Egan would seek her out because his mother would have died. Her father would probably have died also by then. She would marry Bowser Egan because it would be lonesome being by herself in the farmhouse.
A Happy Family
On the evening of Thursday, May 24th 1962, I returned home in the usual way. I remember sitting in the number 73 bus, thinking of the day as I had spent it and thinking of the house I was about to enter. It was a fine evening, warm and mellow, the air heavy with the smell of London. The bus crossed Hammersmith Bridge, moving quite quickly towards the leafy avenues beyond. The houses of the suburbs were gayer in that evening’s sunshine, pleasanter abodes than often they seemed.
‘Hullo,’ I said in the hall of ours, speaking to my daughter Lisa, a child of one, who happened to be loitering there. She was wearing her nightdress, and she didn’t look sleepy. ‘Aren’t you going to bed?’ I said, and Lisa looked at me as if she had forgotten that I was closely related to her. I could hear Anna and Christopher in the bathroom, talking loudly and rapidly, and I could hear Elizabeth’s voice urging them to wash themselves properly and be quick about it. ‘She’s fourteen stone, Miss MacAdam is,’ Christopher was saying. ‘Isn’t she, Anna?’ Miss MacAdam was a woman who taught at their school, a woman about whom we had come to know a lot. ‘She can’t swim,’ said Anna.
Looking back now, such exchanges come easily to my mind. Bits of conversations float to the surface without much of a continuing pattern and without any significance that I can see. I suppose we were a happy family: someone examining us might possibly have written that down on a report sheet, the way these things are done. Yet what I recall most vividly now when I think of us as a family are images and occasions that for Elizabeth and me were neither happy nor unhappy. I remember animals at the Zoo coming forward for the offerings of our children, smelling of confinement rather than the jungle, seeming fierce and hard done by. I remember birthday parties on warm afternoons, the figures of children moving swiftly from the garden to the house, creatures who might have been bored, with paper hats on their heads or in their hands, seeking adventure in forbidden rooms. I remember dawdling walks, arguments that came to involve all of us, and other days when everything went well.
I used to leave the house at half past eight every morning, and often during the day I imagined what my wife’s day must be like. She told me, of course. She told me about how ill-tempered our children had been, or how tractable; about how the time had passed in other ways, whom she had met and spoken to, who had come to tea or whom she had visited. I imagined her in summer having lunch in the garden when it was warm, dozing afterwards and being woken up by Lisa. In turn, she would ask me how the hours had gone for me and I would say a thing or two about their passing, about the people who had filled them. ‘Miss Madden is leaving us,’ I can hear myself saying. ‘Off to Buenos Aires for some reason.’ In my memory of this, I seem to be repeating the information. ‘Off to Buenos Aires,’ I appear to be saying. ‘Off to Buenos Aires. Miss Madden.’ And a little later I am saying it again, adding that Miss Madden would be missed. Elizabeth’s head is nodding, agreeing that that will indeed be so. ‘I fell asleep in the garden,’ Elizabeth is murmuring in this small vision. ‘Lisa woke me up.’
My wife was pretty when I married her, and as the years passed it seemed to me that she took on a greater beauty. I believed that this was some reflection of her contentment, and she may even have believed it herself. Had she suddenly said otherwise, I’d have been puzzled; as puzzled as I was, and as she was, on the evening of May 24th, when she told me about Mr Higgs. She sat before me then, sipping at a glass of sherry that I’d poured her and remembering all the details: all that Mr Higgs had said and all that she had said in reply.