I could tell that he had suffered and changed. ‘Do you have anyone here?’
‘Yes. There was so much choice in Dublin. But here, if you get anything you have to hold on to it. There are so few women here.’ He sounded as if he was already apologizing. She was a dark pretty girl but she never spoke a word when we met. I noticed that only when alone with Jimmy did she grow animated.
‘And you, have you anybody?’ he asked.
‘No. There’s an American girl, but there’s nothing sexual. We’re just friends,’ and when I saw that he didn’t believe me I added, ‘There’s a slight chance she may still come down.’
The Blue Anchor was filling. All of the men nodded to Jimmy and many of them joined us with their pints. When an old fisherman came, Jack Kelly, place was made for him in the centre of the party beside Jimmy. It turned out that they were all members of the newly formed Pint Drinkers’ Association. Jack Kelly was the President and Jimmy was both Secretary and Treasurer. The publicans of the town had got together and fixed a minimum price for the pint, a few pence higher than what had been charged previously. The Pint Drinkers’ Association had been formed to fight this rise. They canvassed bars and pledged that the Pint Drinkers would drink only at those bars that kept to the old price. There cannot have been great solidarity among the publicans, for already six, including the Blue Anchor, which had become the Association’s headquarters, had agreed to return to the old price. When I paid the fee Jimmy wrote my name down in a child’s blue exercise book and Jack Kelly silently witnessed it. Soon afterwards we left the Blue Anchor and began a round of the bars that had gone back to the old price.
Time went by without being noticed in the days that followed: watching the boats in the harbour, leaning on the bridge of Sligo, the white foam churning under the weir, a weed or fish swaying lazily to the current; reading the morning paper on a windowsill or bar stool; the sea at Rosses and Strandhill. Often in the evenings we played handball at the harbour alley, and though our hands were swollen and all our muscles ached, again it was as if the years had fallen away and we were striking the small rubber inside the netting-wire of our old school, the cabbage stumps in the black clay of the garden between the alley and orchard. Afterwards we would meet in the Blue Anchor, from where we could set out on our nightly round of the bars that had agreed to keep the pint at its old price. As their number was growing steadily, it made for thirsty work.
‘It’s catching on like wildfire,’ I said to Jimmy as we lurched away from the last bar one evening, voluble with six or seven pints.
‘I’ll wait and see,’ Jimmy said. ‘It’ll probably be like everything else here. It’ll catch on for a while, then fall away.’
At this time Jimmy began to miss three evenings every week now that the Association, as he put it, was on a firm footing. He took his girl to the cinema or went dancing, and this disturbed Jack Kelly.
‘Jimmy’s beginning to show the white flag,’ he complained. ‘He’s missing again this evening. Watch my word. The leg-irons will be coming up soon.’
VII
These days might have stretched into weeks but for a card I sent to Kate O’Mara. I wrote that I was happy at the sea and that if she changed her mind and wished to join me to just write. Instead, she telegrammed that she was coming on the early train the next day. I booked two single rooms in a small hotel at Strandhill and Jimmy and I met her off the train. She was wearing sandals, and had on a sleeveless dress of blue denim, and dark glasses.
‘Jimmy’s an old friend. I thought we’d all have a glass and some sandwiches,’ I said when she seemed puzzled by Jimmy’s presence.
‘I had lunch on the train.’
‘That doesn’t matter. You can have a drink,’ Jimmy said as we took her bags.
‘I’m afraid I’m not a big drinker,’ she laughed nervously.
‘What’ll you have?’ I asked her in a bar down from the station, quiet with three porters discussing the racing page as they finished their lunch hour.
‘I’ll take a chance,’ she grew more easy. ‘Can I have an Irish coffee?’
All our attempts at speech were awkward and soon Jimmy made a show of examining his watch and rose. ‘Some of the population has to work,’ he grinned ruefully.
‘I’ll come in tomorrow or the next day,’ I said.
‘I’ll keep any letters for you, then,’ he said.
‘How do you feel?’ I asked when we were alone.
She took up the story of her broken affair. She hadn’t been able to work or read and she began to go to the Green, sitting behind dark glasses in one of the canvas deck-chairs placed in a half-circle round the fountain in hot weather; and she just sat there watching the people pass or remembering her life in New York, and gradually was growing calm when one day Nora Moran found her and took her down the country. The day seemed to have been an exact replica of the day I had spent there.
‘The workmen were so servile with her,’ Kate complained.
‘They don’t mind that. It’s their way,’ I said.
‘But American workmen would never be like that.’
‘Listen, won’t we miss the bus?’ An edge had crept into the talk.
‘You don’t want to hear about Nora?’
‘I do, but you should know that Nora needs a fresh person every day, the way some people need a bottle of whiskey.’
‘If she wasn’t around she was on the phone. A few nights ago, as she was going on about herself, I put the phone down. When I picked it up again, there was Nora still talking. She hadn’t noticed that I hadn’t been listening.’
‘You don’t have to worry now,’ I gripped her shoulders. ‘You’re here now.’
‘I can’t tell you how happy I am to be here,’ she said as we went to the bus. The bus dropped us at the church across from the hotel. A large taciturn man, Costello, had us sign our names in the register and then showed us to our rooms on separate floors.
VIII
The eight o’clock bells woke me the next morning. It was a Sunday and we came downstairs almost together. She had on a black lace scarf and leather gloves and a missal with a simple gold cross.
‘Are you going to Mass before having breakfast?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’ She laughed a light girlish laugh.
‘I’ll come too,’ I said, and since she was looking at me in surprise I added, ‘It makes a good impression round here,’ as we walked across and joined other worshippers on the white gravel between the rows of escallonia that led to the church door. I remembered her saying once, ‘I’m a bad Catholic but I am one because if I wasn’t I couldn’t bear all the thinking I’d have to do’; and for me, as I knelt by her side in the church or stood or sat, it was more like wandering in endless corridors of lost mornings than being present in this actual church and day, the church I’d grown up in, with wings to the left and right of the altar and the cypress and evergreen still in the windows.
‘We’ll have you reconverted soon,’ she said playfully as she sprinkled holy water in my direction as we left by the porch door.
‘Once you’ve lost it you can’t go back. I think the whole point is not being able to imagine being anything else. Once you can, you’re gone.’
‘In that sense I’m not one either.’
‘I think we should have breakfast.’ We hurried quickly past the people shaking hands at the gate.
In spite of what I said, Sunday was suddenly new again for me. The first bell for Second Mass was more than an hour away and we had already done our duty. As children we would have changed out of our stiff Sunday suits and shoes, and the day was still before us, for football or pitch-and-toss or the river, the whole day stretching before us in such a long, amazing prospect of pleasure that we were almost loath to begin it.