In the same recovery of amazement, I watched Kate’s beauty against the power of the ocean as we walked afterwards on the shore, traced the fading initials on the wood of the cannon pointed out to sea, watched the early morning golfers move over the fairways, and saw the children come out with their buckets and beach balls, watched by their parents from the edge of the rocks.
‘We can have all this and more,’ the waves whispered.
IX
As it was a hot Sunday, I knew that relatives or people I had known would come to the sea and if I hung about the hotels or front I was certain to meet them.
‘I think I’ll steer clear of the ocean for the next five or six hours,’ I said to her at lunch, and explained why.
‘What do you care? Are you too shy?’ she asked sharply.
‘It’d be stupid to be shy at my age. It’s just too hard to make talk, for them and me.’
When she was silent I said, ‘You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.’
‘Where’ll you go?’
‘I’ll take a book or something over to that old roofless church you can barely see in the far distance.’
‘I guess I’ll come — that’s if you have no objection,’ she said.
‘I’ll only be glad.’
As we walked I pointed to the stream of cars going slowly down to the sea. The roofless church was two miles from the hotel. At first, close to the hotel, we had come across some half-circles of tents in the hollows, then odd single tents, and soon there was nothing but the rough sea grass and sand and rabbit warrens. Some small birds flew out of the ivy rooted in the old walls of the church, and we sat among the faceless stones, close to a big clump of sea thistle. Far away the beach was crowded with small dark figures within the coastguard flags.
‘In America,’ she said, looking at the lighthouse, ‘they have a bell to warn ships. On a wet misty evening it’s eerie to hear it toll, like lost is the wanderer.’
‘It must be,’ I repeated. I felt I should say something more about it but there was nothing I could say.
We began to read but the tension between us increased rather than lessened. I saw the white tinsel of the sea thistle, the old church, the slopes of Knocknarea, the endless pounding of the ocean mingled with bird and distant child cries, the sun hot on the old stones, the very day in its suspension, and thought if there was not this tension between us, if only we could touch or kiss we could have all this and more, the whole day and sea and sky and far beyond.
‘This country depresses me so much it makes me mad,’ she said suddenly.
‘Why?’ I looked up slowly.
‘Everybody comes to the beach and just sits around. In America they’d be doing handstands, playing volleyball, riding the surf. Forgive me, but I had to say something.’
‘I don’t mind at all.’
‘That’s part of the trouble. You should mind.’
‘I don’t mind.’ I thought that if we were Barnaby and Bartleby we could hardly be further apart.
‘Kate,’ I said suddenly, ‘why can’t we be lovers?’
‘No.’ She shook her head and smiled.
‘You’re free now. We could have so much more together and if nothing came of it we’d have very little to lose.’
‘No, I don’t think of you that way. I couldn’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘No. I’m sorry.’ She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t think of us that way.’
I thought bitterly of what she said — like Nora Moran’s workmen I had been brought up a different way, that was all — but asked, ‘You mean you can’t think of us as ever being together?’
‘I’m very fond of you but I could never think of us in that way. I think we’re far too alike.’
‘I had to ask.’ I conceded I had lost. She did not want me the way some people cannot eat shellfish or certain meats. There was once a robin who sang against the church bells striking midnight thinking that the yellow street lamps in the road below were tokens of the day.
Hours later, in the tiredness of the evening, spaces now on the hill between the cars leaving the beach for the day, she said gently, ‘I hope it’ll make no difference between us.’
‘It won’t.’
‘I think we can have far more as we are. What’s between us is only a beginning.’
‘I don’t think so but it seems it’s the way it must be.’
X
The next day was wet, a mist that closed in from the sea so that the church was barely visible from the hotel, but though the rain was soft as a caress on the face it wet one through. I played billiards all that morning in a bar down on the front and then rang Jimmy. I arranged to meet him in Sligo.
‘I’m going to Sligo. Would you like to come?’ I asked her over lunch.
‘Why?’
‘Jimmy and his girl are going to the cinema and he asked if we’d like to go with them and have a drink afterwards.’
‘Like two happy couples?’
‘Well, you don’t have to come,’ I said, and we began to talk about Nora Moran. The more we talked the more I felt how much more honest was Nora’s brutal egotism set against our pale lives here by the sea.
‘If Nora has ears to hear they must be burning now,’ she laughed when we had ended.
We went to our rooms to read. Outside the window the road shone black with rain. Through the mist it was as if fine threads of rain were being teased slowly down. We did not meet till the flat gong that hung in the hallway rang for tea.
‘You haven’t changed your mind?’ I asked cautiously.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I want you to do something for me. I want you not to go to Sligo.’
‘But I can’t not go. I promised Jimmy.’
‘You can call him up.’
‘There’s no phone in the digs and he’s left work by now.’
She was eating so slowly that I began to fear I would miss the bus if I waited for her.
‘I’m sorry. I have to go,’ I said as I rose.
‘Do you have to go so soon?’
‘The bus’ll be outside in five minutes or so.’
To my puzzlement she laid her knife and fork side by side on the plate, rose, took her raincoat from the bentwood stand in the hall, and came out with me into the rain. In uncomfortable silence we watched the bus pass down, waited for it to turn at the cannon and come back, the waves crashing incessantly on the shore beyond the soft, endlessly drifting veils of rain.
‘Are you sure you won’t change your mind and come?’ I asked as I heard the bus.
‘No.’ She shook her head. As the veiled yellow sidelights showed in the rain she suddenly tugged my sleeve and said earnestly, ‘I want you to do this for me. I want you not to get on the bus.’
‘Is there any good reason?’ I demanded. Only a beloved could ask so much, so capriciously. Did she want all this as well as the voices, without any of the burden of love or work?
‘Just that I want you not to.’
‘I can’t not go,’ I said, ‘but what I’ll do is get the next bus back. I’ll be back within an hour. Maybe we’ll go out for a drink then,’ and pressing her arm climbed into the bus. As soon as I paid the conductor I looked back. Already the bus had changed gear to climb the hill and I could not see through the rain and misted windows whether she was still standing there or had gone back into the hotel. I stirred uneasily, feeling that I had left some hurt behind. Yet what she had demanded had been unreasonable; but far more insistently than reason, or the grinding of the bus, came, ‘If you had loved her you would have stayed.’ But all of life turns away from its own eventual hopelessness, leaving insomnia and night to lovers and the dying.
I had come far in time since first I travelled on this bus. Surprised as a boy by the conductor’s outstretched hand, I had reached up and shaken it. The whole bus had rocked with laughter and one man cheered. ‘It’s the fare now I’d be looking for,’ and though he had smiled the conductor had been as embarrassed and confused as I had been.