After meeting the herdsmen, and the two farmhands, we opened the big white house and went through it room by room. Nora’s paintings hung on the walls alongside paintings her father had purchased, many of them valuable. When pressed by Nora I said that I had no faith in my judgement, not having been brought up with pictures, but that I liked everything in the house. Late in the evening I made a log fire in the dining-room while Nora made cheese and tomato sandwiches. We had sandwiches with a half-bottle of red wine Nora brought from the cellar.
‘Do you miss not being married, Nora?’ I asked so as not to appear too passive.
‘No. My life is too full for me to be married, but sometimes I wish I had someone, a young man making his way in the world, an academic, or young artist. I’d set him up close to me. We’d make no demands on one another. All I’d ask is that between certain hours I could come to him if I was tired.’ She looked at me so steadily that I began to feel uneasy, and changed the subject to her paintings.
Afterwards, I took nothing in of the long river of words. I took care to make only the barest responses. By the time we left even they were not necessary. I was glad of the darkness as we drove back to the city, both of us keeping our eyes fixed on the empty floodlit roads. The black hands of an orange clockface on a steeple were fixed at twelve-ten as we reached the outskirts of the city.
‘Do you mind if I drop round to Mother before leaving you off?’ she said. ‘I never feel easy without saying goodnight to Mother.’
‘I don’t mind at all.’
We crossed a cattle grid into the courtyard of a luxury block of flats and Nora drove round to the side.
Suddenly, without switching the engine off, she started to blow the horn. She blew until a fragile woman in a nightdress appeared in the groundfloor window. ‘Goodnight, Mother.’ Nora rolled down the window and waved and blew the horn again. The old mother waved feebly back.
‘It costs a fortune to keep Mother in that place but she’s never satisfied. She’s never without some complaint. My father was too proud to admit it but his marriage was the one real failure in his life. She was never in his style.’
‘It’ll be all right if you let me out here, Nora. I’d be glad of the few minutes’ walk,’ I said as she drove me to the Green.
We grimaced and waved goodnight to one another like any special pair of monkeys. I was numbed by the day. I was probably numbed anyhow. I hadn’t even resentment of my own passivity. Barnaby and Bartleby were far closer to my style than any of this day had been.
As soon as I thought of them in their doorways, the sound of my own footsteps in the empty silence of a sleeping city seemed to take on a kind of healing.
V
If anything, I now took an even keener interest in Barnaby and Bartleby. Barnaby’s sallow face behind the steel rims did not change as the winter gave way to a hot early summer, but Bartleby positively bloomed in the doorways and even in his rigidly belted overcoat he looked as tanned as if he had just come from the seaside.
Later, Barnaby began to sport a plastic yellow cap, such as girl bicyclists wear in rain, and to make sudden gestures. I put it down to the irritation of the heat. It was enough to suggest that I go on holiday. Instead of going abroad I had a sudden desire to go to the sea that I had gone to as a child. I wrote to Jimmy McDermott in Sligo. We had grown up together, gone to our first dances there, taken girls we had met at the dances in harmless summers to Dollymount and Howth; and before the time came for us to drift naturally apart he was transferred to Sligo. I wrote to him to ask if he could find me a cheap room in Sligo for the summer. He wrote back that there was room in his own place and that he would be glad if I came. About the same time Kate O’Mara told me that her affair had ended.
‘What happened?’
‘He got married. There were even pictures in the papers, confetti and buttonhole carnations,’ she said with self-mocking bitterness. ‘He’d the gall to come round and tell me about it, saying sanctimoniously how things would never have worked out between us anyhow. Practically asked my blessing.’
‘And what did you do?’
‘I told him to go to hell.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘How do you feel now?’
‘My vanity took a hammering. I guess I’m not used to rejection.’
‘You should have gone out with me instead. We might be married now.’
‘Thanks,’ she laughed, ‘but that could never be.’
I told her I was going on holiday for the summer, to Sligo. ‘Maybe you might like to come down later,’ I said.
‘I doubt it. I have to work. I’ve done hardly any work.’
‘I’ll write you. You may change your mind.’
Her face was very pale and strained as she waved goodbye to me.
VI
Jimmy met me at Sligo Station. He had put on weight and I could see the light through his thinning hair, but the way the porters and the drivers playing cards at the taxi rank hailed him he was as popular here as he had been everywhere. Soon, walking with him and remembering the part of our lives that had been passed together, it was like walking in a continuance of days that had suffered no interruption.
‘I hope getting the digs didn’t put you to a great deal of trouble,’ I said.
‘No. The old birds were pleased as punch. Ordinarily it’s full, but this time they’ve always rooms because of people gone on holidays.’
The ‘old birds’ were two sisters in their fifties who owned the big stone house down by the harbour where Jimmy had digs and where I had come on holiday. A brother who was a Monsignor in California had bought it for them. I had never seen before walls so completely laden with cribs and religious pictures. There was the usual smell of digs, of cooking and feet and sweat, the sharp scent of HP sauce, the brown bottle on every lino-covered table.
‘They’re religious mad but they’re good sorts and they won’t bother you. They have to cook for more than thirty,’ Jimmy said after he had introduced me and showed me to my room, mockingly sprinkling holy water from a font between the feet of a large statue of the Virgin as he left. There were at least thirty men at tea that evening. Out of the aggressive bantering and horseplay as they ate, fear and insecurity and hatred of one another showed like a familiar face.
‘It’s the usual,’ Jimmy said when I mentioned it to him afterwards as we walked to the pub to talk. He was excited and greedy for news of the city. He even asked about Barnaby and Bartleby. ‘The gents of Abbey Street’.
‘Why do you remember them?’
‘I don’t know. I never paid them any attention when I was there. It’s only since I came here that I started to think about them.’
‘But why?’
‘I suppose,’ he said slowly, ‘they highlight what we’re all at.’
‘Do you miss the city, then?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose. In a way my life ended when I left it. When I was there it still seemed to have possibilities, but now I know it’s all fixed.’
‘And that girl — was it Mary Jo?’ I named a dark, swarthy girl, extraordinarily attractive rather than goodlooking.
‘The Crystal, National, Metropole, Clerys.’ He repeated the names of the ballrooms they had gone to together. ‘She went to England.’
‘Why didn’t you keep her?’
‘Maybe it wasn’t on. There seemed to be so much time then that there was no hurry. I went to London to try to see her but she was working at Littlewoods and had shacked up with a married Englishman.’