As much through the light of years as through this wet evening the bus seemed to move. It was an August evening. We were going home at the end of another summer holiday. When the bus stopped at the Central, Michael Henry got on. His clothes hung about him and the only sign of his old jauntiness was the green teal’s feather in the felt hat. After years in America he had come home, bought a shop and farm, married, had children. We kept an account in his shop and every Christmas he gave us a bottle of Redbreast and a tin of Jacob’s figrolls.
‘How is it, Michael, that you seem to be going home and we’ve never met in all this time at the sea?’ my father asked.
‘I guess it’s because I just came down yesterday,’ Michael Henry said as he put his small leather case in the overhead rack.
‘How is it you’re going home so soon?’
‘I guess I thought the sea might do me some good but I only felt worse last night. I don’t believe in shelling out good money to a hotel when you can be just as badly off at home. America teaches you those things.’
He sat the whole way home with my father. They talked of America and the war in Europe. Not many weeks later, in scarlet and white, I was to follow the priest round Michael Henry’s coffin as he blessed it with holy water from the brass jar in my hands.
And suddenly the dead man climbing on the bus, the living girl asking me not to go to Sligo in the rain outside the hotel, I on the bus to Sligo to collect some letters, Barnaby and Bartleby, even now in their Dublin doorways patiently watching the day fade, all seemed to be equally awash in time and indistinguishable, the same mute human presence beneath the unchanging sky, and for one moment I could not see how anyone could wish another pain. We were all waiting in the doorways.
XI
I went straight from the bus station to the Blue Anchor. I got letters that had come for me from Jimmy, saw some of the Pint Drinkers. They were planning to take two barrels of stout out to Strandhill in a van one of these evenings, dig for clams and have a party on the shore. Already it was a world I could no longer join. As we made our excuses for leaving, I to get the next bus back to Strandhill, Jimmy to meet his girl outside the cinema, Jack clapped us affectionately on the shoulders and said, ‘Soon the pint days will be over. They’ll have the leg-irons on yous in no time now.’
‘Some other time we must make an evening of it,’ Jimmy and his girl said as I left them at the cinema.
‘Some other time,’ I echoed but already my anxiety was returning. The rain was heavier now and the drops fell like small yellow stones into the headlights of the bus. I hurried across the wet sand outside the hotel, and when I did not find her downstairs climbed to her room. I saw Costello’s eyes follow me with open suspicion. When I knocked on her door there was no answer.
‘Are you in, Kate?’ I called softly. Then I heard her low sobbing.
‘I’ve just come back on the bus. I wondered if you’d like to come out for a drink?’
‘No, thanks.’
‘I came back in the hope you’d come out. Are you sure you won’t come?’
‘No, thanks. I want to be alone.’
Slowly I retraced my steps down the narrow creaking corridor. There was nothing I could do but wait for morning.
XII
With a reluctance to face what the morning might bring in the light of the evening before, I was late in coming down. The first thing that met my eyes was her luggage in the hallway. She was leaving.
‘I see Miss O’Mara decided to leave today after all,’ I tried to say as casually as possible to Costello, who seemed to be as much on guard over the bags as in his usual place in the office.
‘She told me to tell you that she’s settled her account and is leaving,’ he said in a tone which seemed to convey that I must have given her some good reason to leave with such suddenness.
She had had breakfast, and as I ate mine it grew clear that even outside the discomfort of remaining in Costello’s hostility I had no longer any reason to stay, not indeed that there seemed any reason ever to have come. A kind of anger against her for giving me no warning hardened my decision to leave at once. There was only one way she could leave, on the eleven o’clock bus, and I would leave with her on the same bus.
‘I’d like to have the bill. I’m leaving,’ I said to Costello, and as I was now meeting his aggression with aggression he did not trouble to answer. After pretending to consult some records, he presented me with the bill for the whole week. Hostile as I felt, I was forced to smile. ‘But I’ve been here only four days.’
‘You booked for a week.’
‘Well, in that case, keep the room open for me.’ I counted out what he had demanded. ‘I’ll probably come back tomorrow,’ at which he exploded: ‘No. Your type is not wanted again here,’ and he slid the difference towards me.
The tide must be far out I thought as I sat and listened to the pounding of the sea while waiting for the bus to turn at the cannon. It was a clear, fresh morning after the rain, only a few tattered shreds of white cloud in the blue sky. She did not come out until the bus was almost due. She was tense and looked as if she hadn’t slept and was afraid when she saw me. Costello carried her bags, and as they prepared to wait together at a separate distance I decided to join them.
‘I decided to leave too,’ I said, and she then turned to Costello: ‘You needn’t wait any longer, Mr Costello. I’ll be fine now. And are you sure you won’t take something?’ And when he refused for what was obviously the second time he shook her hand warmly and went in. Even then she might not have spoken if I had not said, ‘You should have let me know. It gave me no chance at all.’
‘Does it matter so much?’
‘No, not that much. But why make it more difficult than it has to be?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I had to do it this way. I couldn’t do it any other way. I didn’t mean for you to leave at all.’
The bus was coming. As it was empty the conductor told us to take our bags on the bus, and we dumped them on the front seat. The waves seemed to pound louder than ever behind us above the creaky running of the bus.
‘Did he charge you for the whole week?’ I asked.
‘I offered but he wouldn’t take it.’
‘The brute.’ I smiled. ‘He tried to charge me.’
I wanted to ask her about the evening before, about all that had gone before since we had first met at Nora Moran’s, but I knew it was all hopeless, and I was blinded by no passion; I had not even that grace: at most it had been a seed, thrown on poor ground, half wishing it might come to something, in the wrong time of year. As if my silence was itself a question, she said as the bus came into Sligo, ‘I can’t explain anything that happened. I’ll tell you some day but I can’t now.’
‘It’s all right. Don’t worry about it.’ We were back in the safety of the phrases that mean nothing. ‘Anything worth explaining generally can’t be explained anyhow.’
‘We’ll say goodbye here,’ she said when we got off the bus. ‘I’m sorry but I want to be alone.’
‘Where’ll you go?’
‘To the hotel.’ She motioned with her head. ‘I’ll get the two o’clock train. I hope you’ll ring me when you get to Dublin. I won’t be this way then.’
I turned away but saw her climb the steps, the glass door open and the doorman take her bags, a flash of light as the door closed. She would have a salad and a glass of wine and coffee, feel the expensive linen and smile at the waiter’s smiles. She would be almost back in her own world before her train left, as I was almost back in mine.