‘I wish I could eat and drink you.’
‘Then I’d be gone.’ She pushed him loose with her palms. They both rose and dressed quickly.
‘I’ll leave you home. It’s too late for you to go alone.’ Lately she had seemed to want to assert their separateness after each lovemaking.
‘All right. I don’t mind,’ she said, a seeming challenge in her eyes.
‘Besides I want to.’ He leaned to kiss her on the side of the throat as she drew on her jacket. They stole down the stairs, and outside he held the door firmly until the catch clicked quietly behind them. The fading moonlight was weak on the leaves of the single laurel in the front garden, and he grew uneasy at the apparent reluctance with which she seemed to give him her gloved hand on the pavement, with the way she hurried, their separate footsteps loud in the silence of the sleeping suburbs.
They’d met just after broken love affairs, and had drifted casually into going out together two or three evenings every week. They went to cinemas or dancehalls or restaurants, to the races at Leopardstown or the Park, making no demands on one another, sharing only one another’s pleasures, making love together as on this night in his student’s room.
Sensing her hard separateness in their separate footsteps as they walked towards her home in the sleeping suburbs, he began to feel that by now there should be more between them than this sensual ease. Till now, for him, the luxury of this ease had been perfect. This uncomplicated pleasure seemed the very fullness of life, seemed all that life could yearn towards. Yet it could not go on for ever. There comes a point in all living things when they must change or die, and maybe they had passed that point already without noticing. He had already lost her while longing to draw closer.
‘When will we meet again?’ he asked her as usual at the gate before she went in.
‘When do you want?’
‘Saturday, at eight, outside the Metropole.’
‘Saturday — at eight, then,’ she agreed.
There was no need to seek for more. His anxiety had been groundless. Wednesdays and Saturdays were always given. No matter how hard the week was he had always Saturdays and Wednesdays to look forward to: he could lean upon their sensual ease and luxury as reliably as upon a drug. Now that Saturday was once more promised his life was perfectly arranged. With all the casualness of the self-satisfied male, he kissed her goodnight and it caused her to look sharply at him before she went in, but he noticed nothing. He waited until he heard the latch click and then went whistling home through the empty silent streets just beginning to grow light.
That next Saturday he stayed alone in the room, studying by the light of a bulb fixed on a Chianti bottle, the texts and diagrams spread out on newspaper that shielded his arms from the cold of the marble top that had once been a washstand, the faded velvet curtain drawn on the garden and hot day outside, on cries of the ice-cream wagons, on the long queues within the city for buses to the sea, the sea of Dollymount, the swimmers going in off the rocks, pleasures sharpened a hundredfold by the drawn curtain. Finally, late in the afternoon, when he discovered that he had just reached the bottom of a page without taking in a single sentence, he left the room and went down to the front. At the corner shop he bought an orange and sat on a bench. The sea lay dazzling in the heat out past the Bull and Howth Head. An old couple and a terrier with a newspaper in his mouth went past him as he peeled the orange. Music came from a transistor somewhere. Exams should be held in winter, he thought tiredly, for he seemed to be looking at the people walking past him, sitting on benches or on the grass as if through plate glass.
Still, at eight o’clock she would come to him, out of the milling crowds about the Metropole, her long limbs burning nakedly beneath the swinging folds of the brown dress, the face that came towards him and then drew back as she laughed, and he would begin to live again. He had all that forgetting to go towards, the losing of the day in all the sweetness of her night. He rose, threw the orange peel into a wire basket, and walked back to the room. He imagined he must have been working for about an hour when he heard the heavy knocker of the front door. When he looked at his watch he found that he had been working already for more than two hours.
He listened as the front door opened, and heard voices — the landlord’s, probably the vegetable man or the coal man — but went quite still as steps came up the stairs towards the door of the room, the landlord’s step because of the heavy breathing. A knock came on the door, and the fat, little old landlord put his head in, stains of egg yolk on his lapels. ‘A visitor for you,’ he whispered and winked.
She stood below in the hallway beside the dark bentwood coat-rack, her legs crossed as if for a casual photo, arms folded, a tense smile fixed on her face, her hair brushed high. She had never come to the house on her own before.
‘Thanks,’ she said to the landlord when he came down.
‘Won’t you come up?’ he called from the head of the stairs.
The landlord made a face and winked again as she climbed.
‘I’m sorry coming like this,’ she said.
‘That doesn’t matter,’ he said as he closed the door. ‘I was just about to get ready to go to meet you. This way we can have even more time together.’
‘It’s not that,’ she said quickly. ‘I came round to see if you’d mind putting the evening off.’
‘Is there something wrong?’
‘No. It’s just that Margaret has come up of a sudden from the country.’
‘Your friend from school days?’
‘Yes. She hardly ever comes up. And I thought you wouldn’t mind giving the evening up so that we could go out together.’
‘Did she not tell you she was coming up?’ The whole long-looked-forward- to balm of the evening was threatened by this whim.
‘No. She came on a chance. Someone was coming up and offered her a lift.’
‘And she expects you to drop everything?’
‘She doesn’t expect anything.’ She met his annoyance with her own.
‘All I can say is that you must care very little about the evening if you can change it that quickly.’
‘Well, if you’re that huffed about it we can go through with the evening. I didn’t think you’d mind.’
‘Where is this Margaret?’
‘She’s outside. Why do you want to know?’
‘I suppose I should pay my respects and let the pair of you away.’
‘Don’t put yourself out.’
‘It’ll be a pleasure,’ but then his anger broke before he opened the door. ‘If that’s all our going out means to you we might as well forget the whole thing.’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked.
‘We might as well break the whole thing off,’ he said less certainly.
‘That can be easily arranged.’
The door was open and they both came downstairs in silent anger.
Outside, Margaret was leaning against the railing by the bus stop. She was a large country girl, with a mane of black hair and broad athlete’s shoulders. The three made polite, awkward conversation that did not cover over the tenseness till the bus came.
‘I hope you have a nice evening,’ he said as they boarded the bus.
‘That’s what we intend.’ Her lovely face was unflinching, but Margaret waved. He watched them take a seat together on the lower deck and waited to see if they would look back, but they did not.
Rattling coins, he went towards the telephone box at the end of the road to ring round to see if any of his friends were free for the evening.