‘I used to swim off these rocks once. I liked going in off the rocks because I’ve always hated getting sand between my toes. Those lower rocks get covered at full tide. You can see the tidal line by the colour.’
‘Don’t you swim any more?’
‘I haven’t in years.’
‘If I had a costume I wouldn’t mind going in.’
‘I think you’d find it cold.’
She told him of how she used to go out to the ocean at the Hamptons with her father, her four brothers, their black sheep Uncle John who had made a fortune in scrap metal and was extremely lecherous. She laughed as she recounted one of Uncle John’s adventures with an English lady.
When they reached the end of the Wall, they went down to the Strand, but it was so crowded that they had to pick their way through. They moved out to where there were fewer people along the tide’s edge. It was there that she decided to wade in the water, and he offered to hold her sandals. As he walked with her sandals, a phrase came without warning from the book he had been reading in Webb’s: ‘What is he doing with his life, we say: and our judgement makes up for the failure to realize sympathetically the natural process of living.’ He must indeed be atrophied if a casual phrase could have more presence for him than this beautiful young woman, and the sea, and the day. The dark blue mass of Howth faced the motionless ships on the horizon, seemed to be even pushing them back.
‘Oh, it’s cold.’ She shivered as she came out of the water, and reached for her sandals.
‘Even in heatwaves the sea is cold in Ireland. That’s Howth ahead — where Maud Gonne waited at the station as Pallas Athena.’ He reached for his role as tourist guide.
‘I know that line,’ she said and quoted the verse. ‘Has all that gone from Dublin?’
‘In what way?’
‘Are there … poets … still?’
‘Are there poets?’ he laughed out loud. ‘They say the standing army of poets never falls below ten thousand in this unfortunate country.’
‘Why unfortunate?’ she said quickly.
‘They create no wealth. They are greedy and demanding. They hold themselves in very high opinion. Ten centuries ago there was a national convocation, an attempt to limit their powers and numbers.’
‘Wasn’t it called Drum something?’
‘Drum Ceat,’ he added, made uneasy by his own attack.
‘But don’t you feel that they have a function — beyond wealth?’ she pursued.
‘What function?’
‘That they sing the tired rowers to the hidden shore?’
‘Not in the numbers we possess here, one singing down the other. But maybe I’m unkind. There are a few.’
‘Are these poets to be seen?’
‘They can’t even be hidden. Tomorrow evening I could show you some of the pubs they frequent. Would you like that?’
‘I’d like that very much,’ she said, and took his hand. A whole day was secured. The crowds hadn’t started to head home yet, and they travelled back to the city on a nearly empty bus.
‘What will you do for the rest of the evening?’
‘There’s some work I may look at. And you? What will you do?’
‘I think I’ll rest. Unpack, read a bit.’ She smiled as she raised her hand.
He walked slowly back, everything changed by the petty confrontation in Webb’s, the return to the flat, the telegram in the hallway. If he had not come back, she would be in Dundalk by now, and he would be thinking about finding a hotel for the night somewhere round Rathdrum. In the flat, he went through notes that he had made in preparation for a meeting he had with the Minister the coming week. They concerned an obscure section of the Industries Act. Though they were notes he had made himself he found them extremely tedious, and there came on him a restlessness like that which sometimes heralds illness. He felt like going out to a cinema or bar, but knew that what he really wanted to do was to ring Mary Kelleher. If he had learned anything over the years it was the habit of discipline. Tomorrow would bring itself. He would wait for it if necessary with his mind resolutely fixed on its own blankness, as a person prays after fervour has died.
‘Section 13, paragraph 4, states clearly that in the event of confrontation or disagreement …’ he began to write.
The dress of forest green she was wearing when she came down to the lobby the next evening caught his breath; it was shirtwaisted, belling out. A blue ribbon hung casually from her fair hair behind.
‘You look marvellous.’
The Sunday streets were empty, and the stones gave out a dull heat. They walked slowly, loitering at some shop windows. The doors of all the bars were open, O’Neills and the International and the Olde Stand, but they were mostly empty within. There was a sense of a cool dark waiting in Mooney’s, a barman arranging ashtrays on the marble. They ordered an assortment of sandwiches. It was pleasant to sit in the comparative darkness, and eat and sip and watch the street, and to hear in the silence footsteps going up and down Grafton Street.
It was into this quiet flow of the evening that the poet came, a large man, agitated, without jacket, the shirt open, his thumbs hooked in braces that held up a pair of sagging trousers, a brown hat pushed far back on his head. Coughing harshly and pushing the chair around, he sat at the next table.
‘Don’t look around,’ McDonough leaned forward to say.
‘Why?’
‘He’ll join us if we catch his eye.’
‘Who is he?’
‘A poet.’
‘He doesn’t look like one.’
‘That should be in his favour. All the younger clerks that work in my place nowadays look like poets. He is the best we have. He’s the star of the place across the road. He’s practically resident there. He must have been thrown out.’
The potboy in his short white coat came over to the poet’s table and waited impassively for the order.
‘A Powers,’ the order came in a hoarse, rhythmical voice. ‘A large Powers and a pint of Bass.’
There was more sharp coughing, a scraping of feet, a sigh, muttering, a word that could have been a prayer or a curse. His agitated presence had more the sound of a crowd than the single person sitting in a chair. After the potboy brought the drinks and was paid, the poet swung one leg vigorously over the other, and with folded arms faced away towards the empty doorway. Then, as suddenly, he was standing in front of them. He had his hand out. There were coins in the hand.
‘McDonough,’ he called hoarsely, thrusting his palm forward. ‘Will you get me a packet of Ci-tanes from across the road?’ He mispronounced the brand of French cigarettes so violently that his meaning was far from clear.
‘You mean the cigarettes?’
‘Ci-tanes,’ he called hoarsely again. ‘French fags. Twenty. I’m giving you the money.’
‘Why don’t you get them here?’
‘They don’t have them here.’
‘Why don’t you hop across yourself?’
‘I’m barred,’ he said dramatically. ‘They’re a crowd of ignorant, bloody apes over there.’
‘All right. I’ll get them for you.’ He took the coins but instead of rising and crossing the road he called the potboy.
‘Would you cross the road for twenty Gitanes for me, Jimmy? I’d cross myself but I’m with company,’ and he added a large tip of his own to the coins the poet had handed over.