‘You must be joking. You’d think boring one poor woman in a lifetime would be enough.’
‘He’s gone about it in a curious way. He’s put an ad in the papers.’
‘An ad!’ Suddenly my uncle became convulsed with laughter and was hardly able to get words out. ‘Did he get … replies?’
‘Bundles. He’s been interviewing them.’
‘Bundles … God help us all. This is too much.’
‘Apparently, he’s just found someone. A schoolteacher in her forties.’
‘Have you seen this person?’
‘Not yet. I’m supposed to see her soon.’
‘My God, if you hang round long enough you see everything.’
My uncle combed his fingers through his long greying hair. He was a distinguished man and his confidence and energy could be intimidating. ‘At least, if he does get married, it’ll get him off your back.’
‘He’s all right,’ I replied defensively. ‘I’m well used to him by now.’
I met Miss McCabe in the lobby of the Ormond Hotel, a lobby that could have been little different to the many lobbies he had waited in behind a copy of the Roscommon Herald. They sat in front of me, very stiffly and properly, like two well-dressed, well-behaved children seeking adult approval. She was small and frail and nervous, a nervousness that extended, I suspected, well beyond the awkwardness and unease of the whole contrived meeting. There was something about her — a waif-like sense of decency — that was at once appealing and troubling. Though old, she was like a girl, in love with being in love a whole life long without ever settling on any single demanding presence until this late backward glance fell on my bereft but seeking father.
‘Well, what was your impression?’ he asked me when we were alone.
‘I think Miss McCabe is a decent, good person,’ I said uncomfortably.
‘You have … no objections, then?’
‘None.’
We had been here a week. I had seen Miss McCabe three or four times casually. She looked open-eyed and happy. She stayed in the Seaview Hotel beside the salt baths on the ocean front and went for walks along the shore with my father. They had lunches and teas together. Tonight she was coming to the house for the first time. In all his years in the world my father had never learned to cook, and I offered to take care of the dinner.
She wore a long blue printed dress, silver shoes, and silver pendants, like thin elongated pears, hung from her ears. Though she praised the food she hardly ate at all and took only a few sips from the wine glass. My father spoke of schools and curricula and how necessary it was to get to the sea each August to rid oneself of staleness before starting back into the new school year, and her eyes shone as she followed every heavy word.
‘You couldn’t be more right. The sea will always be wonderful,’ she said.
It seemed to discomfort my father, as if her words belonged more to the sea and air than to his own rooted presence.
‘What do you think?’ he asked predictably when he returned from leaving her back to the Seaview.
‘I think she is a very gentle person.’
‘Do you think she has her feet on the ground?’
‘I think you are very lucky to have found her,’ I said. The way he looked at me told me he was far from convinced that he had been lucky.
The next morning he looked at me in a more dissatisfied manner still when a girl came from the Seaview to report that Miss McCabe had a mild turn during the night. A doctor had seen her. She was recovering and resting in the hotel and wanted to see my father. The look on his face told me that he was more than certain now that she was not near rooted enough.
‘Will you come with me?’ he asked.
‘It is yourself she wants to see.’
When he got back from the hotel he was agitated. ‘She’s all right,’ he said. ‘She had a mild heart attack. She still thinks we’ll get engaged at the end of the month.’
‘I thought that was the idea.’
‘It was. If everything went well,’ he said with emphasis.
‘Did you try to discuss it with her?’
‘I tried. I wasn’t able. All she thinks of is our future. Her head is full of plans.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Clear out,’ he said. ‘There is no other way.’
As if all the irons were suddenly being truly struck and were flowing from all directions to the heart of the green, I saw that my father had started to run like the poor rabbit. He would have been better off if he could have tried to understand something, even though it would get him off nothing. Miss McCabe was not alone in her situation.
‘Where’ll you go to?’ I asked.
‘Home, of course. What are you going to do?’
‘I’ll stay here a while longer. I might go to Dublin in a few days.’
‘What if you run into her and she asks about me?’
‘I’ll tell her you had to go home. How soon are you going?’
‘As soon as I get the stuff into the boot of the car.’
Because I was ashamed of him I carried everything he wanted out to the car.
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he said as he prepared to drive away.
‘No. I don’t mind.’
I watched the car climb the hill. When it had gone out of sight I had the clear vision again of hundreds of irons being all cleanly struck and flowing from every direction into the very heart of the green.
All night the rabbit must have raced from warren to warren, the stoat on its trail. Plumper rabbits had crossed the stoat’s path but it would not be deflected; it had marked down this one rabbit to kill. No matter how fast the rabbit raced, the stoat was still on its trail, and at last the rabbit sat down in terror and waited for the stoat to slither up and cut the vein behind the ear. I had heard it crying as the stoat was drinking its blood.
Doorways
I
There are times when we see the small events we look forward to — a visit, a wedding, a new day — as having no existence but in the expectation. They are to be, they will happen, and before they do they almost are not: minute replicas of the expectation that we call the rest of our life.
I used to panic when I saw my life that way, it brought the blind and overmastering desire to escape, and the religious life had seemed for long the one way out: to resign this life, to take on the habit of unchanging death-like days, the sweet passion; and when death came it could hold no terror. I had already died in life.
I no longer panic when I see that way: nature, having started to lose interest in me, is now content to let me drift away, and no longer jabs me so sharply that I must lose myself in life before it is too late.
And I have found Barnaby and Bartleby. All day and every day they are in the doorways of Abbey Street. I call them Barnaby and Bartleby but I do not know their names. They must have some shelter to go to for they disappear from the doorways about eight in winter, an hour later in the summer. I have never seen them leave. They seem to be there one moment and gone the next. I have never watched them go. I feel it would be an intrusion to draw too close and that they mightn’t leave if watched. The early morning is the one time they are busy, searching the bins with total concentration before the garbage trucks come by. They never search the same bin together or stand in the same doorway. Only in freezing weather do they come close, just inside the door of the public lavatory, and even there they keep the red coinslot weighing machine between them, their backs to the wall, above their heads the black arrow pointing to the urinal stalls within.
They seem to change doorways every two hours or so and always to the same doorway at the same time. I thought at first they might be following the sun but then noticed they still changed whether the sun was in or out. They wear long overcoats, tightly belted, with pleats at the back, that had been in fashion about fifteen years before. Often I want to ask them why have they picked on this way to get through life, but outside the certainty of not being answered I soon see it as an idle question and turn away. They never answer strangers who ask about the times of the buses out of Abbey Street. They have their different ways, too, of not answering. Bartleby, the younger and smaller, just moves his boots and averts his face sideways and down; but Barnaby stares steadily over his steel-rimmed spectacles into his interlocutor’s eyes. Otherwise, they seem to take a calm and level interest in everything that goes on outside their doorway. They must be completely law abiding, for the police hardly glance at them as they pass on patrol.