She would have met him at the airport, they would have had dinner, and if their evenings remained the same as when I used to meet them together they would now be having drinks in some bar. As the train came slowly into Amiens Street, I suddenly wanted to find them, to see us all together. They were not in any of the Grafton Street bars, and I was on the point of giving up the impulse — with gratitude that I hadn’t been able to satisfy it — when I found them in a hotel lounge by the river. They were sitting at the counter, picking at a bowl of salted peanuts between their drinks. He seemed glad to see me, getting off his stool, ‘I was just saying here how long it is since we last saw you,’ in his remorseless slow voice, as if my coming might lighten an already heavy-hanging evening. He was so friendly that I could easily have asked him how his interview had gone, amid the profusion of my lies, forgetting that I wasn’t supposed to know.
‘I’ve just come from London. We’ve had dinner at the airport.’ He began to tell me all that I already knew.
‘And will you take this job?’ I asked after he had told me at length about the weekend, without any attempt to select between details, other than to put the whole lot in.
‘It’s all arranged. It’ll be in the papers tomorrow. I leave in three weeks’ time,’ he said.
‘Congratulations,’ I proffered uneasily. ‘But do you have any regrets about leaving?’
‘No. None whatever. I’ve done my marching stint and speeching stint. Let the young do that now. It’s my time to sit back. There comes a time of life when your grapefruit in the morning is important.’
‘And will her ladyship go with you?’
‘I’ll see how the land lies first, and then she’ll follow. And by the way,’ he began to shake with laughter and gripped my arm so that it hurt, ‘don’t you think to get up to anything with her while I’m gone.’
‘Now that you’ve put it into my head I might try my hand.’ I looked for danger but he was only enjoying his own joke, shaking with laughter as he rose from the bar stool. ‘I better spend a penny on the strength of that.’
‘That — was — mean,’ she said without looking up.
‘I suppose it was. I couldn’t help it.’
‘You knew we’d be around.’
‘Will you see me tomorrow?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Anyhow, I’ll be there.’
‘How did your weekend in the country go?’ she asked sarcastically.
‘It went as usual, nothing but the usual,’ I echoed her own sarcasm.
McCredy was still laughing when he came back. ‘I’ve just been thinking that you two should be the young couple and me the uncle, and if you do decide to get up to something you must ask Uncle’s dispensation first,’ and he clapped me on the back.
‘Well, I better start by asking now,’ I said quickly in case my dismay would show, and he let out a bellow of helpless laughter. He must have been drinking, for he put his arms round both of us, ‘I just love you two young people,’ and tears of laughter slipped from his eyes. ‘Hi, barman, give us another round before I die.’
I sat inside the partition in Gaffneys the next evening as on all other evenings, the barman as usual polishing glasses, nobody but the two of us in the bar.
‘Your friend seems a bit later than usual this evening,’ he said.
‘I don’t think she’ll come this evening,’ I said, and he looked at me inquiringly. ‘She went down the country for the weekend. She was doubtful if she’d get back.’
‘I hope there’s nothing wrong …’
‘No. Her mother is old. You know the way.’ I was making for the safety of the roomy clichés.
‘That’s the sadness. You don’t know whether to look after them or your own life.’
Before any pain of her absence could begin to hang about the opening and closing doors as the early evening drinkers bustled in, I got up and left; and yet her absence was certainly less painful than the responsibility of a life together. But what then of love? Love flies out the window, I had heard them say.
‘She’ll not come now,’ I said.
‘No. It doesn’t seem,’ he said as he took my glass with a glance in which suspicion equalled exasperation.
We did not meet till several weeks later. We met in Grafton Street, close to where we had met the first night. A little nervously she agreed to come for a drink with me. She looked quite beautiful, a collar of dark fur pinned to her raincoat.
‘Jerry’s in Sierra Leone now,’ she said when I brought the drinks.
‘I know. I read it in the papers.’
‘He rang me last night,’ she said. ‘He was in the house of a friend — a judge. I could hear music in the background. I think they were a bit tight. The judge insisted he speak to me too. He had an Oxford accent. Very posh but apparently he’s as black as the ace of spades,’ she laughed. I could see that she treasured the wasteful call more than if it had been a gift of brilliant stones.
She began to tell me about Sierra Leone, its swamps and markets, the avocado and pineapple and cacao and banana trees, its crocodile-infested rivers. Jerry lived in a white-columned house with pillars on a hillside above the sea, and he had been given a chauffeur-driven Mercedes. She laughed when she told me that a native bride had to spend the first nine months of her marriage indoors so that she grew light-skinned.
‘Will you be joining Jerry soon?’ I asked.
‘Soon. He knows enough people high up now to arrange it. They’re getting the papers in order.’
‘I don’t suppose you’ll come home with me tonight, then?’
‘No.’ There wasn’t a hint of hesitation in the answer; difficulty and distance were obviously great restorers of the moral order. ‘You must let me take you to dinner, then, before you leave. As old friends. No strings attached,’ I smoothed. ‘That’ll be nice,’ she said.
Out in Grafton Street we parted as easily as two leaves sent spinning apart by any sudden gust. All things begin in dreams, and it must be wonderful to have your mind full of a whole country like Sierra Leone before you go there and risk discovering that it might be your life.
Nothing seems ever to end except ourselves. On the eve of her departure for Sierra Leone, another telegram came from the country. There was nothing mysterious about it this time. Rose had died.
The overnight bag, the ticket, the train …
The iron gate under the yew was open and the blinds of the stone house at the end of the gravel were drawn. Her flower garden, inside the wooden gate in the low whitethorn hedge just before the house, had been freshly weeded and the coarse grass had been cut with shears. Who would tend the flowers now? I shook hands with everybody in the still house, including my father, who did not rise from the converted car chair.
I heard them go over and over what happened, as if by going over and over it they would return it to the everyday. ‘Rose got up, put on the fire, left the breakfast ready, and went to let out the chickens. She had her hand on the latch coming in, when he heard this thump, and there she was lying, the door half-open.’ And they were succeeding. They had to. She had too much of the day.
I went into the room to look on her face. The face was over too. If she had been happy or unhappy it did not show now. Would she have been happier with another? Who knows the person another will find their happiness or unhappiness with? Enough to say that weighed in this scale it makes little difference or every difference.