They did not meet again till two Saturdays later, at the Metropole, as usual at eight. She had a floppy blue hat and dark glasses. Her summer dress was sleeveless, and she had a race card in her long gloved hands.
‘You must have just come from the races.’
‘I was at the Park. I even won some money.’ She smiled her old roguish smile.
‘You must be hungry, then. Why don’t we go somewhere nice to eat?’
‘That’s fine with me,’ she said with all her mocking brightness. ‘I can take you — this evening — with the winnings.’
‘If that suits you. I have money too.’
‘You took long enough in calling,’ she said with a flash of real resentment.
‘It didn’t seem to make much difference to you. It’d be nice if I was wrong. That’s how it seemed.’
‘Where are we going?’ She stopped; that they were adversaries now was in the open.
‘To Bernardo’s. We always had good times there. Even coming from the races you look very beautiful,’ he said by way of appeasement.
The restaurant was just beginning to fill. The blindman was playing the piano at its end, his white stick leaning against the dark varnish. They ate in tenseness and mostly silence, the piano thumping away. Now that he was about to lose her she had never looked so beautiful.
‘You’re not eating much,’ she said when she saw him struggle with the veal.
‘It must be the damned exam,’ he said. ‘It’s starting next week. And, after all, I wasn’t at the races.’
‘That’s true,’ she laughed.
‘I’m sorry about the ridiculous fuss I made a few weeks back,’ he said openly.
‘It’s all right. It’s all over now.’
‘Do you think you’ll be able to come back with me this evening?’ For a wild sensual moment he hoped everything would suddenly be as it had been before.
‘Is it for — the usual?’ she asked slowly.
‘I suppose.’
‘No.’ She shook her head.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t see any point. Do you?’
‘We’ve often … many times before.’
‘We’ve gone on that way for too long,’ she said.
‘But I love you. And I thought — when things are more settled — we might be married.’
‘No.’ She was looking at him with affection and trying to speak softly and slowly. ‘You must know that the only time things are settled, if they are ever settled, is now. And I’ve had some hard thinking to do since that last evening. You were quite right to be angry. If I was seriously interested in you I’d not have broken the date for someone coming casually to town. There was a time I thought I was getting involved with you, but then you didn’t seem interested, and women are practical. I’m very fond of you, and we’ve had good times, and maybe the good times just went on for too long, when we just should have had a romp, and let it go.’ She spoke as if their life together already belonged to a life that was over.
‘Is there no hope, no hope at all, that it might change?’ he asked with nothing more than an echo of desperation.
Through the sensual caresses, laughter, evenings of pleasure, the instinct had been beginning to assemble a dream, a hope; soon, little by little, without knowing, he would have woken to find that he had fallen in love. We assemble a love as we assemble our life and grow so absorbed in the assembling that we wake in terror at the knowledge that all that we have built is terminal, that, in our pain, we must undo it again.
There had been that moment too that might have been grasped, and had not, and love had died — she had admitted as much. It would have led on to what? To happiness, for a while, or the absence of this present sense of loss, or to some other sense of loss …
He thought he saw that moment, as well that moment now as any other: an evening in O’Connell Street, a Saturday evening like any other, full of the excitement of the herding. She had taken his arm.
‘My young sister is to be engaged tomorrow. Why don’t we drive up? There’s to be a party. And afterwards we could have the weekend on our own,’ and when he answered, ‘It’s the one weekend I can’t,’ and started to explain, he saw the sudden glow go from her face; an impoverishment of calculation replaced it that had made him momentarily afraid. Anyhow, it was all evening now. That crossroad at which they had actually separated had been passed long before in the day.
‘No,’ she said gently. ‘And you’d not be so reckless if I’d said yes. We were both more in love with the idea of falling in love.’
‘Still it’s no fun walking round the world on your own.’
‘It’s not so bad as being with someone you can’t stand after the pleasure has worn off,’ she said as if she were looking past the evening.
‘I give up,’ he said and called for the bill.
‘Ring me sometime,’ she said as she got on the bus outside.
‘Right, then.’ He waved and knew neither of them would. They had played at a game of life, and had not fallen, and were now as indifferent to one another, outside the memory of pleasure, as if they were both already dead to one another. If they were not together in the evening how could they ever have been so in the morning …
And if she had come to him instead of leaving him, those limbs would never reach whomever they were going to …
And why should we wish the darkness harm, it is our element; or curse the darkness because we are doomed to love in it, and die …
And those that move along the edges can see it so until they fall.
MORNING
‘What does your friend do for a living?’ the man asked the blonde woman in front of him after Marion, an enormous ungainly girl, had gone to the Ladies in Bernardo’s.
‘She’s not a friend. In fact, she’s more than a friend. She’s a client. A star. A pop star.’ The woman smiled as she drew slowly on her cigarette. ‘You’re behind the times. You see, I’m here to bring you up to date.’
‘But how can she be a pop star?’
‘You mean because she’s ugly? That doesn’t matter. That helps. The public’s tired of long, pale, beautiful slenders. Ugliness and energy — that’s what’s wanted now, and she has a good voice. She can belt them out.’
‘Does she have men friends and all that?’
‘As many as she wants. Proposals. Everything a woman’s supposed to want.’
‘She’s certainly not what you’d call beautiful.’
‘Publicity makes her beautiful. It moves her closer to the sun. In fact, it is the sun and still has its worshippers.’
‘It doesn’t make her so to me,’ the man said doggedly, ‘though I think you are beautiful.’
‘What is it anyhow? A good clothes rack or flesh rack? I don’t know.’
‘Whatever it is, you have it.’ He changed. ‘It doesn’t look as if Peter will come back now.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Peter isn’t trustworthy. I wish they’d let the blindman go home,’ she said as he struck up another number on the piano.
‘I suppose, for them, it’s the hopeful hours.’ The man referred to the large noisy table in the centre of the restaurant. They had come from a party and bribed the blindman to play on after he had risen at midnight to catch his usual garage bus to Inchicore.
‘Do you have anything to do with Peter?’
‘How?’ she asked sharply.
‘Sleep with him?’
She laughed. ‘I’ve never even thought of Peter that way. He’s a contact. In the trade,’ and without warning she leaned across the table and placed the burning tip of the cigarette against the back of the man’s hand.
‘What did you do that for?’ he asked angrily.
‘I felt like it. I suppose I should be sorry.’
‘No,’ he changed. ‘Not if you come home with me.’