The Cuckoo-spit

Drenched with light under the midsummer moon, the fields were as large as the fields of the sky. Hedges and ditches dissolved in mist, and down by the river the thorn-bushes floated loose like several branches. Tall trees in the middle of the fields streamed on the air, rooted by long, dragging shadows.

Vera stood at the French door, and then the night was so bright she ventured a little way down the garden path. It was a strange night. All that was real and erect had become unreal. The unreal alone had shape. And when close beside her in the long grass a beast stirred, it was only by its shadow she could see where it lay. Unnerved, she turned back to the house. The house, too, had an insubstantial air, its white gable merging in the white of the sky. But on the bright ground its shadow fell black as iron.

It was when she reached the edge of this shadow that the young man stepped out and startled her.

‘I thought you saw me,’ he said defensively. ‘The night is so bright. I saw you. I was watching you as I was coming across the fields.’ Then his voice changed. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked anxiously.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said. His concern had already made nonsense of her fright. And in the strong light pouring down she could see him as plain as day, a young man with a kind face, his thin cheekbones splattered with large, flaky freckles. Their eyes met, and they smiled at each other, surprised and happy. ‘I ought to know you, I am sure,’ she said, since it was late and he wore no coat.

‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘I’m only down here sometimes in summer. I come to stay with an uncle of mine who lives across the river.’

‘Oh, I know him. Tim Hynes? At least, I know him by name. I never actually met him. My husband used to talk a lot about him.’

‘I know,’ the young man nodded. ‘Tim was very upset by his death. So, of course, was everyone,’ he added hastily.

‘Your uncle more than most, though. I was told he took it very badly. There was something, wasn’t there, about his losing interest in the election – not voting at all?’

‘That’s right. He more or less gave up politics after that.’

‘I remember I got a wonderful letter from him at the time.’

‘Tim?’ He raised his eyebrows.

Remembering the old man’s spelling, Vera herself laughed.

‘I never forgot it. Something he said in it. He said it might have been difficult, even for a man like Richard, to save his soul in Dáil Éireann.’

‘That’s like a thing he’d say, all right, but I think it could have been to comfort you. Tim had no doubt whatever about the stature of the man we’d lost in your husband.’

The plural pronoun caught her attention. ‘Are you interested in politics, too?’ she asked, but she was hardly heeding his reply, she was so surprised at the sudden lessening of her interest in him. All the same, I ought to ask him into the house, she thought, if only for his uncle’s sake. Or was it too late?

‘Oh, it’s far too late,’ he said. ‘I didn’t intend to call. I was out for a walk, and I’d crossed over the bridge in the village and was going along the bank of the river below here when I saw that the windows were all lighted. To tell you the truth, I came up closer just out of curiosity. I was always fascinated by this house. Then I saw the French door open. Somehow or other, I got a strange feeling that the house was empty. So I came up and I was about to knock when I realised the odd situation I had got myself into, and I didn’t know what to do. I was just standing there when I saw you coming back. Do you do that often, go out and leave the door open?’

She turned and looked over her shoulder to where the open door let out a stream of golden light that cut its own shape on the shape of the shadow. ‘I wasn’t far away,’ she said vaguely.

‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘And it was a lovely night for a walk.’

It annoyed her that, having been worried at the start, he was so easily satisfied about her safety. ‘I shouldn’t have left the door open all the same,’ she said, ‘but I only meant to walk a little way, just up and down the garden path.’

‘I know!’ he said. ‘The usual thing! You were tempted to go further.’

Again she was irritated by his readiness to put his own interpretation on the situation. ‘As a matter of fact, there was nothing usual about it,’ she said. ‘This is the first time since my husband died that I’ve set foot outside the house after dark alone, except in the car, of course.’

‘I don’t understand,’ he said quietly. ‘What could there possibly be to fear in the heart of the country?’

‘That was what Richard used to say. But I wasn’t brought up in the country, and that makes a difference. Even when he was alive, I was nervous out-of-doors after dark.’ She laughed. ‘I’ll tell you something that happened one night. We kept a few hens. They were supposed to be my affair. The henhouse was over there.’ She pointed to a small triangular field near the house, a small field bounded on three sides by a wood. ‘I was always forgetting to shut them up at night, and we often had to go out late and do it, but once it was the middle of the night when I woke up and thought of them, and I had to wake Richard, and we had to put on our coats and go out to them.’

‘Couldn’t he have gone alone?’

‘Of course not. They were my hens. It wouldn’t have been fair to let him go alone.’

He shook his head. ‘He must have been a very patient man.’

‘But it was a night just like this,’ she cried.

Immediately, with her words the night seemed to press closer, lapping them round, not just with its mist and moonlight but with its summer smells of new-mown hay and sweet white clover. ‘We didn’t go back to the house at all,’ she said, remembering that other night with quick and vivid pain. ‘We stayed out for ages.’ But suddenly she had an uneasy feeling that she was giving something away about that night, or about herself, or Richard.

There was a little silence.

‘Is he long dead?’

‘Four years this summer,’ she said, and turned her face away, although she felt his sympathy would not be so easily stemmed.

‘You must miss him very much,’ he said. ‘I was thinking that as I was walking in the fields, and looking at the house. I was wondering how you were able to go on living here without him.’ But he must have felt tactless, or impertinent, because he looked away from her, out over the fields. ‘It’s very beautiful here, of course,’ he added quickly.

‘Tonight, yes,’ she granted. ‘This is a night in a thousand,’ but she gave a cold glance over the moonlit stretches of which he spoke with such unconcern. Did he not know that there were other nights, when those fields could wear a different aspect?

But he missed the glance she’d given over the lonely fields and turned back to her. ‘I suppose the more beautiful it is, the more lonely it must be for you.’

She looked into his face. ‘I got over the worst of it long ago,’ she said harshly. ‘Do you know what I was thinking? I was thinking that there is, after all, a kind of peace at last when you face up to life’s defeats. It’s not a question of getting stronger, as people think, or being better able to bear things; it’s that you get weaker and stop trying. I think I couldn’t bear anything now, even happiness.’ She paused. That was true, she thought, and yet she felt she had expressed herself inadequately. ‘It’s just that I’ve got old, I suppose,’ she said more simply.

‘Don’t be silly,’ he said, but lightly, carelessly.

She sighed. ‘All the same,’ she said, ‘there is a strange peace about knowing that the best in life is gone forever.’

‘You mean love?’

She nodded. ‘And youth,’ she said, but she thought she saw doubt in his eyes. ‘Aren’t they the one thing?’

She was startled by the haggard look that came over his face. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I hope not. God knows I’ve never had much of either.’

‘What do you mean? What age are you, anyway?’ But before he could answer she realised that she didn’t even know his name. ‘You didn’t tell me your name,’ she said.

‘Fergus,’ he said, giving no surname.

He must be Tim’s brother’s child, she thought, and again at the thought of her old neighbour across the river she felt she ought to insist on his coming inside, no matter the hour.

‘Oh, no, no,’ he said, actually beginning to move away. ‘I’m afraid to think how late it must be now.’

‘Well, perhaps you’ll come again,’ she said formally, but she knew that in this invitation, generosity was not on her side. It was nice to see that he thought otherwise.

‘That’s very kind of you, Mrs Traske,’ he said warmly. ‘I’d like very much to come.’ His pleasure was so genuine it added to hers, yet a ridiculous ache had gone through her when he used her surname, although anything else would have been unthinkable from a strange young man, a man years younger than her. Even if they got to know each other well, and he were to call again, and again, she could not imagine that he would call her Vera, ever. It was a name she had never liked. And lately she’d liked it less. At this moment, it seemed utterly unsuitable to her: a name for a young girl. It even seemed to have a strangely venal quality. But he was saying something, and she had to listen.

‘I was only saying that I don’t suppose you approve of calling people by their first names on a first meeting,’ he said.

Taken aback by the way their thoughts had run so close together, she hesitated. ‘Well, it doesn’t give much chance for measuring one’s progress with people, does it?’

‘I never thought of that,’ he said, and he looked at her, delightedly. ‘I must remember that.’ Again he seemed about to go, but again he stopped. ‘I correct examination papers at this time of year. I may get word any day from my landlady in Dublin to say that they have arrived. I’ll have to go back at once then. Would it matter, would you mind, if I came fairly soon? Very soon perhaps?’

‘Whenever you like. I’m always here,’ she said, and then they said good night, and he walked away.

As she went into the house, she wondered if he would come again. She hoped he would; it was a pleasant encounter. And she kept on thinking about it as she went around the house, fastening the windows and locking the door. Even when she went upstairs, she stood for a while at the open window, looking out and going over scraps of their conversation. Some of the things she had said now seemed affected. Had she lost the knack of small talk? In particular, she thought of what she had said about happiness, and not being able now to bear it. That was so absurd, but surely he understood that she meant a certain kind of happiness, possible only to the young. Indeed, it might well be that it was when one let go all hope of ever knowing it again that the heart was emptied and ready for simpler relationships, those without ties, without pain. But when she put out the light and turned back the white counterpane, breaking the skin of light on it, she felt vaguely depressed. Would there not always be something purposeless in such attachments?

Did she expect him to come again? Certainly not the very next evening. And so early. Only a short time before, she was in the garden, weeding and staking plants, working away, without noticing the day had ended. It was by the light of a big yellow moon that she was trying to see what she was doing. It was so low a moon, so close to the ground, and it shed so gold a light that, like the sun, it gilded everything. Unlike the moon of late night, it did not take all colour from the earth but left a flush of purple in the big roses and peonies, and a glow of yellow in their glossy stamens. Yet it was night. The birds were silent; a stillness had settled over the farm. Nervously, she gathered together the rake, the hoe and the spade, but she didn’t wait to put them in the tool shed. She hurried towards the house. In the doorway she delayed for a moment. There was a peculiar quality abroad. Was it expectancy? It’s in the night, though, and not in me, she thought, but just then, like a high wind falling, the expectancy died down as a step sounded on the gravel.

‘You didn’t think I’d come so soon, did you?’ Fergus said, smiling. ‘It’s even more marvellous than last night, though, and I thought of you not liking to go out at night alone. But you were going out?’

‘No. Going in,’ she said.

‘Good. I’m glad I came. Get something to put over your shoulders. Hurry!’

In spite of her surprise, she didn’t hesitate. ‘I’ll only be a minute,’ she said, ‘Won’t you come in while you’re waiting?’

He shook his head. ‘Houses weren’t built for nights like this.’

When she came out, he was standing clear of the shadows of the house, in the full light. ‘I was telling my uncle about you,’ he said when she joined him. ‘He wasn’t in bed when I got back last night. He sends you his regards. In fact, he sent you several messages, so many I’m sure I’ve forgotten the half of them.’ He smiled at her. ‘No matter, you can take them as given; they were all compliments and good wishes. And now,’ he said, surveying the view and taking her arm casually, ‘which way will we go? Down by the river? Or is the grass too high?’

‘We can follow the cowpaths.’

‘Oh, but the cattle go in single file, and we want to talk,’ he said, and he linked her more closely. It made her uncomfortable, but she knew that when they crossed over the wooden fence around the house and went into the field in front of it, they would have to unlink. He realised it, too, after a few steps. ‘It’s like wading through water, isn’t it?’ he said, amazed as the high grass weighted down their feet. ‘Does it never get eaten down? The place seemed heavily stocked to me as I came along here.’

‘It would take all the cattle in Ireland to graze it down at this time of year,’ she said carelessly.

He turned to her with an earnestness that was touching.

‘You had courage to keep it when you are so nervous here,’ he said. ‘Any other woman would have sold it and gone back to the city.’

‘That never once entered my mind,’ she said, remembering how from the first she was aware of the security she drew from this piece of ground. But she saw by his face that he thought she had kept it for the sake of the past.

‘I must tell you something,’ he said. ‘I nearly wrote you a letter last night after I went away from here. Would you have thought it very odd? The only reason I did not was because I’d have had to come back with it, and I thought that a footstep during the night might frighten you.’

‘It would have frightened the wits out of me,’ she said quickly. She did not ask what he would have said in the letter.

‘I knew it would,’ he said. ‘I’m glad I did not do it. Anyway, I think that you know without my saying it how much meeting you meant to me.’

‘It was nice for me to meet you, too,’ she said politely.

‘There is nothing rarer in the world than happiness,’ he said then.

‘Happiness? Whose happiness are you talking about’ she asked sharply.

‘Yours,’ he said deliberately. ‘I know what you’re thinking, but there is a kind of happiness that is indestructible; it lives on no matter what comes after. At least, that was how it seemed to me listening to you talking last evening.’

‘But we were only talking for such a little while,’ she protested.

‘No matter,’ he said. ‘Anyway, last night was not the first time I’d seen you. I used to study down by the river long ago, on our side, and I used to see you and your husband walking together in the fields. You used to go with him to count the cattle, didn’t you?’

‘Yes. I always went with him,’ she said absently, because her mind was going back over the previous evening.

‘How I used to envy your companionship,’ he said. They had reached the river bank and they had to walk slowly, because the ground was dented and uneven from where the cattle in wet weather had cut up the sod, which now was hard as rock. ‘Not that I have much experience,’ he went on, ‘but of the marriages I’ve seen at close quarters, not many were like yours. They weren’t failures, either; I suppose they were happy enough in a way.’ He hesitated. ‘Only it wouldn’t be my way,’ he said flatly.

‘And what would be your way?’ she asked laughingly.

‘Well, that’s just it,’ he said. ‘That’s what I wanted to try to tell you in the letter. You see, I didn’t have any clear idea of what I would want from marriage. I only knew what I wouldn’t want, until last night, listening to you.’

‘I don’t understand?’ she cried nervously, but she did remember that at one moment the night before she had felt uneasy. Had he formed some impression of his own at that moment? If so, she would probably be powerless now to alter it. Distantly, she turned away and looked down into the river. ‘Supposing the impression I gave you was wrong,’ she said. ‘Supposing I falsified it.’ When he said nothing, she turned and looked at him and she saw he was bewildered. Filled with remorse, she put out her hand to him. ‘It wasn’t false,’ she said quickly, ‘but that was one of the things I used to dread after his death, that the past would become altered in my mind, and that he would be made into something that he wasn’t.’

‘Not by you, though?’

‘No. By others, but it might have come to the same thing in the end. You cannot imagine how awful it was in those first months, having to listen to people talking about him, going on and on about him, mostly his family, of course, but my own people were nearly as bad, and friends and neighbours. Everybody. And all the time they were getting him more and more out of focus for me. He was – but you’ve heard your uncle talk about him, so you’ll know what I’m going to say – he was nearly perfect, guileless. He knew only candour, the kind of person who’d make you doubt the doctrine of original sin. But to listen to his family you’d think he was a man of marble. They diminished him. Instead of adding to him, they diminished him. Can you understand that? I used to think, immediately, that that was the way they would speak of him whatever he’d been; the dead are always whitewashed. And he didn’t need it. In the end, instead of listening to them, I used to sit trying to think of something about him that I didn’t like.’

‘Did you?’

‘Well, we used to quarrel when we were first married, but in all fairness to him it was usually my fault, although it always ended with his taking the blame. Not to be noble or anything like that, but just to stop us from arguing, which he hated; to get us back to being happy again. He used to say it didn’t matter what happened, I’d always blame him anyway, so it might as well be first as last. Well, one evening a few weeks after his death, I was visiting his people and listening to the same old rigmarole about him, and I got into a kind of a panic. Soon I wouldn’t be properly able to remember him at all; I thought I’d lose hold of what he was really like. I was so unhappy. And when I went out to the car and left it was a miserable evening outside. It was raining, for one thing, and the canvas roof of the car was leaking. I wouldn’t have minded that, only just at the loneliest and darkest part of the road I got a puncture. Well! I got out and I stood there in the rain and it seemed the last straw. But suddenly, instead of pitying myself, I felt the most violent rage sweep over me. Towards him, Richard. If only I could have confronted him at that moment, there’d be no doubt of what I’d have said. “Why did you die, anyway?” I’d have shouted. “Why didn’t you take better care of yourself and not leave me in this mess?” And then—’

‘Don’t tell me. I know what happened next,’ Fergus said. ‘You had him back again, just as he always was, unchanged, amused at you.’

‘Yes. And I began to laugh, there in the rain.’

There was silence for a few minutes. ‘Tell me,’ he said then. ‘What did you do about the puncture?’

‘Oh, that!’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I forget. What with one thing or another, in those days I was nearly always in that sort of situation. Such things were the commonplaces of my existence. I suppose another car came along, or I called at some cottage, or perhaps I walked to the nearest village. I can’t remember.’

‘Things must have been hard for you in the beginning,’ he said gently. ‘But you managed very well.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said deprecatingly. ‘Some things were hard in the beginning, but other things only got hard long afterwards. I’ll tell you a strange thing, though, if you’re interested. I don’t think I fully realised until recently, but in my heart I did blame Richard all along, not for dying, but for being what he was, for leaving a void that no one less than him could fill.’

They walked along a few more paces. ‘Is that why you didn’t marry again?’ he said. ‘It seems such a pity.’

‘For me?’

‘Well, for you, too, of course, but I wasn’t thinking of you. I was thinking of how much you have to give.’ But as he spoke he seemed to lose confidence in what he was saying. ‘I suppose giving isn’t enough, though,’ he finished uncertainly.

Sadly, she shook her head. ‘And yet it was a poor kind of faithfulness really, wasn’t it?’

‘It’s the only kind there is, I think,’ he said. ‘Do you know something?’ he added impetuously. ‘When I was walking home last night, I was thinking about your husband, and I envied him.’

‘A dead man?’

‘It’s not as absurd as it may seem. I feel certain that I’ll never have one quarter of the happiness he had.’

‘But you’re so young!’ she cried. ‘How can you tell what’s ahead?’

He looked away. ‘It isn’t a question of age. You know that. It’s temperament perhaps or maybe it’s merely chance.’ He looked back at her. ‘It’s not that I haven’t a normal capacity for love, either. The truth is that I have to be crazily involved or not at all. And I’ve never seen that kind of thing last for long. That was why, knowing what companions you were, it meant so much to me, last night, to see that you’d never lost that other quality either. Do you realise when I knew?’ He faltered before the cold look she gave him, but then he rushed on. ‘It was when you told me about the time you stayed out all night.’

‘Except I didn’t say that,’ she said crossly. ‘Not exactly anyway,’ she added, but she knew how rightly he had interpreted her vague words about that night.

‘Forgive me,’ he said gently. ‘It was from your face and from the love of your voice I knew what you meant. And I was certain then of how you spent that night. You see I never really thought that kind of love could last so long. Illicit love perhaps but not married love.’

Uncomfortable, she walked a little faster so that she out-distanced him by a few steps.

‘I was right, wasn’t I?’ he called softly.

‘Yes,’ she said at last. What was the use, now, of denying those dead hours? She sighed and waited for him. ‘I suppose you’d like to be married,’ she said, surprising herself by her words.

He answered more lightheartedly than she expected. ‘To the right person,’ he said. ‘You’d have been just right for me!’

It was because he said it so lightly and because she was oppressed by what had gone before that she, too, spoke lightheartedly. ‘Oh, don’t relegate me to the past like that!’ she said. ‘Why not say I’m a premonition of someone to come.’

His face clouded. ‘I wouldn’t say there’d be two of you in one lifetime,’ he said, and there was a note in his voice that was new and harsh, and, frightened by it, she was about to suggest that they turn back, when, wheeling around, he himself suggested it. ‘We’d better go back,’ he said. ‘Anyway, the moon has gone behind a cloud.’

‘Has it?’ Her eyes had been upon a small field of old meadow, along the headland of which they were passing. It was so neglected that the big white daisies in it met head to head and gave it an unbroken sheen of white that in the dark was like the lustre of the moon. ‘Just look at those daisies!’ she cried, pointing to them. ‘The place is getting so neglected. I’ll have to plough up that piece of ground and lay it down to new grass. There is so much that is neglected.’

‘Nonsense, I never noticed any neglect,’ he said so aggressively that, in order not to be annoyed, she had to tell herself that he was speaking, after all, in her defence.

‘You haven’t seen the place by day,’ she said quietly.

‘I see it every day,’ he said. ‘There isn’t a bit of it I can’t see from the other bank of the river. I saw you outside this morning, didn’t I?’

‘Did you?’ It confused her to think of being seen without knowing it, by anyone. She was glad that they were nearly back. They had been walking faster on the return than when they set out, and already they had reached the wooden paling in front of the house. ‘You’ll come inside this time, I hope, and have some coffee?’

‘We’d better see what time it is first,’ he said. ‘Tim was horrified at how late I stayed last night.’ Raising his arm, he was trying to see his watch, as if, she thought irrelevantly, as if with that upraised arm he was trying to ward off a blow.

‘Wait! There’s a light in the porch,’ she said. ‘It can be switched on from outside.’ But the switch was almost impossible to find among the tangled and overgrown creepers. ‘There’s neglect for you,’ she said as she plunged her arm deep into the leaves. ‘The roses are almost smothered,’ she said sadly. Yet when she found the switch and the light went on, the big white roses lolloped outward towards them. On long, neglected stems, blown and beautiful, they hung face down. Impulsively, he reached out and took one between the palms of his hands, tenderly, as if it were the body of a small bird. ‘Would you like one?’ she asked, and she tried to break a stem, but it was difficult because the sappy fibres frayed before they severed.

He took it from her, pleased. And then he gave an exclamation. ‘Oh, look at what’s on it. A cuckoo-spit.’

‘How disgusting. Throw it away,’ she said. ‘I’ll get you another one.’

But he put his hand protectively about it. ‘Why did you say that?’ he asked. ‘I was only amazed that a cuckoo should come so close to the house.’ Then he saw his mistake from her face before he went any further. ‘I forgot,’ he said, embarrassed. ‘They never do come close, isn’t that so?’

‘Never!’ She smiled. ‘They’re never seen at all. At least I’ve never met anyone who saw one.’

‘That’s right. I should have known,’ he said.

She saw at once that he was humiliated by his mistake, and she wanted desperately to make him feel better. ‘When I was a child,’ she said quickly, ‘I didn’t know a cuckoo was a bird at all, but a sound, like an echo.’

He didn’t smile. He was looking down at the rose. On the stem, in the cleft between it and the acle of a leaf, there was a white blob, as if of spittle. ‘What is it, anyway?’ he asked. ‘I’ve often seen it before.’

‘Give it to me,’ she said quietly, stretching out her hand. With the tip of her finger, she flicked the blob of white stuff on to the back of her other hand. ‘Look,’ she said, as the frothy secretion began to thin away, beads of moisture winking out, one by one, until, slowly and weakly on its unformed legs, a pale sickly-yellow aphis crawled out across her skin. ‘That’s what it is,’ she said, but at the feel of it on her flesh she shuddered, and shook it violently from her.

‘You shouldn’t have touched it.’ Throwing down the rose, he pulled out a handkerchief and took her hand, and began carefully to wipe it all over. ‘It always seemed so beautiful,’ he said regretfully, ‘a sign of summer.’

‘Ah, well, it is a sign of summer,’ she said, but her mind was not really on what she was saying, because although he’d wiped away all trace of the spit, he still held her hand carelessly in his. Unused for so long to the feel of another’s flesh she felt her cheeks flush. She was affected almost as strongly by his touch as by the feel of the plant louse. Shuddering again, she drew her hand away.

‘You’re cold?’ he said.

Cold? Was it possible you could be so near to another person and so unaware of what went on within them? ‘You must be cold, too,’ she said. ‘Come in and we’ll have a hot drink.’

‘We stayed out too long,’ he said, bending down and picking up his rose. ‘Next time we must manage better.’

There was evidently no question of his not calling again.

‘I hope you enjoyed the walk,’ he said easily, and then, as he was about to turn away, he looked directly at her. ‘Good night, Vera.’ He strode off down the drive.

She looked after him. Why had she enjoyed it so intensely? That was the question.

When she went inside, she attended absently to what had to be done before going upstairs for the night. Then, upstairs at last, she again went to the window and looked out. The moon, free of clouds, once more cast its lustre over everything. And, standing there, looking out, she remembered the times as a girl, before she was married, when she stood at an open window on a night like this, her heart torn by a longing to share the feelings that welled up in her. Yet later, when she had Richard there was not a single night that she had gone to the window for as much as a glance at what was outside. Always, no matter what the weather, day or the night, there was him blocking out all else. This view before her now, she had only really seen it after his death. Then, oh then its insistent beauty began to torment her. But not with the same emotion. And she thought of something Fergus had said. He was wrong. A time came when giving was enough. She stared over the moonlit fields and the high cobbled sky. And she knew what she wanted. She wanted to reach out and gather all that beauty up and shove it into his arms. To give it away and be done with it, she thought. And afterwards not ever to have to look out at it again.

Next morning, she wakened late. Downstairs there was a loud knocking on the door. It was a grey day with a mist over the river and in the fields cattle looked dark, as if they swam in the waters of a fabulous sea. The knocking came again more urgently, and she sprang out of bed and went to the window. Below, standing back from the door, she saw him just under her window, looking up. ‘Oh, just a minute. I’ll come right down,’ she called down, pulling back instinctively.

‘Don’t come down!’ he called up. ‘I can’t wait. I haven’t a minute.’

‘You have to go back?’ This time in spite of the cold glare of day, she leaned out.

‘The exam papers came,’ he said. ‘When I went back to Tim’s place last night, there was a message saying they’d arrived. I have to get back. To get them finished in time, I’ll have to start on them at once.’ He turned his head as if to listen. ‘Is that the bus?’ he cried, dismayed. ‘I shouldn’t have come. I’ll miss it. But I wanted to tell you I was going, in case you’d be looking out for me tonight.’

That he had any notion of coming that night, the third night in a row, took her by surprise. That he could have thought she might have been expecting him left her speechless.

‘I’ll have to go!’ he cried, but he put his hand to his ear. ‘It’s not the bus,’ he said, and he relaxed. ‘I didn’t think the papers would come for a few days more. The exam was only last week. But the sooner they come, the sooner I’ll get paid.’

Depressed already by the day and by its cold light upon her unprepared face, and, of course, by his going, this glimpse of his unknown life was too much to endure. There was something so altogether offhand about this their last conversation that when in the distance she did hear the bus, she was not sorry. ‘Listen!’ she said. ‘Here it is. The bus is coming this time.’

‘It can’t be.’ He listened intently. It was. At once all his offhandedness left him. ‘What I really wanted is if you ever come up to Dublin.’ The sound of the bus was louder and nearer. ‘If you ever do come, and if you could spare the time, I needn’t tell you I’d love to meet you. Perhaps you’d let me give you a cup of tea somewhere.’ But as he was looking nervously over his shoulder, the bus was getting nearer.

As for her, there was no time to dissimulate her pleasure. ‘I often go!’ she cried. ‘And I’d be pleased to meet you.’ But just then she thought of a way in which she could trim the truth a little. ‘I was only thinking last night, after you’d gone, that I ought perhaps to give you the names of a few people in Dublin, friends of my husband’s on whom you might call. People with some political influence, I mean, if you are serious about a political career.’

‘I am,’ he cried. ‘Write out a list and bring it up to me. That’s great.’ Satisfied that she was coming, he hardly saw the necessity of fixing a day, and was turning away when he realised the need. ‘When?’ he cried.

‘And where?’ she cried, leaning out across the sill.

‘How about Tuesday next? Or is that too soon?’

There was no time to think. ‘Tuesday,’ she agreed. ‘But where? How about meeting in Stephen’s Green? We can decide afterward where to go.’

It was settled.

Or was it?

‘What will happen if it isn’t a fine day?’ he cried.

‘Oh, it will be fine,’ she cried recklessly. ‘You’ll see.’

It rained, after all, on Tuesday. At first, she wasn’t going to go to Dublin at all, but she was too unsettled to stay at home. She’d go up for a few hours anyway, she decided. And then, shortly before four o’clock, unexpectedly the rain cleared. As she parked her car on the side of the Green, she could see through the railings that the park was almost deserted. Uncertainly, she went in through a side gate. She felt better when she saw the paths were already drying out and from the wet branches overhead small birds, plump and round, were everywhere dropping to the ground like apples. On the grass starlings and sparrows ran about like children, as if for once the earth was sweeter than the sky. Would he come? Would he think it too wet? Dispirited, she walked along the vacant paths till she came to the shallow lake in the centre. And there, by the lakeside, standing under a tree, she saw him.

It was, she thought, the suddenness of seeing him that made her heart leap; only that. The next moment, a line from an old mortuary card came involuntarily to her mind. The card had been given to her by an old nun at the time of Richard’s death, and her own pallid belief in a life beyond the grave had been quenched entirely by its facile promise: Oh, the joy to see you come. But now the words rushed back to her, ready and apt. I shouldn’t be here, she thought with terror. It was too late, though. He had seen her.

‘You came?’ he cried.

‘Didn’t you know I would?’

‘It was raining.’

‘It stopped, though.’ They began to walk along the side of the shallow cemented lake. ‘You must have known I’d come when you yourself came,’ she said.

‘I only hoped. Can we ever be sure of anything?’

‘Of some things, surely,’ she said, to gain time and think what she should do. There must be no more of these meetings. That was certain. But surely she could at least enjoy this afternoon? What harm could there be in it, except for her? And then only if she gave way to barren longings that might set the past at naught. She took a sidelong look at him. He seemed so happy. What did it matter what she felt, as long as no one knew. As long as he didn’t know! And he was concerned with the trivia of their conversation.

‘I suppose you mean friendship?’ he said. ‘But can there be friendship between a man and a woman?’

It was such a young question, it endeared him still more to her. She and Richard used to talk like that long ago. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But I remember reading somewhere that there are only two valid relationships, blood and passion.’

He was staring down at the cinder path under their feet as they paced along. ‘It’s an interesting thought, isn’t it?’ he said. Then he looked up at her. ‘What about us, though?’

Disconcerted, she gave a shrug. ‘Oh, we don’t come into any category at all,’ she said, ‘except, wait a minute, I have something for you. I’d forgotten. It justifies our association.’ Opening her handbag, she took out the piece of paper on which she had written a list of names. ‘Here are the people on whom I thought you should call.’

‘Oh, thanks,’ he said, but he took it from her absently, and without looking at it he shoved it carelessly into the outer pocket of his jacket.

‘Hadn’t you better put it in your wallet? I went to a lot of trouble looking up some of these addresses. And, by the way, I put a mark beside the names of a few people to whom I thought I ought to introduce you personally.’

‘You mean go with me?’ He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out the paper again, smoothing it and looking at it this time with interest. ‘That’s different,’ he said enthusiastically, but to her dismay the next minute he rolled it into a ball and tossed it into a wire basket for waste paper that was fastened to a tree. ‘That means you’ll have to come up to town again. For the whole day next time, so we don’t need the list.’ He smiled happily. ‘Let’s go up this way,’ he said, pointing to a narrow path that ran over a humped bridge, low and covered with ivy. The bridge was little more than a decoration, for under it the water was utterly still. They stopped and were looking over the parapet.

‘The water isn’t flowing at all,’ she said. It was dusty and stippled with pollen from an overhanging lime tree.

He didn’t look. ‘What did you mean by saying we don’t come into any category?’ he asked. ‘Is that an obscure reference to my age?’

‘No, to mine,’ she said, and when he laughed she thought she had distracted him.

She hadn’t. ‘I knew that was what you meant,’ he said. With a stony expression he looked down into the water. ‘Vera,’ he said quietly, ‘listen to me. Never once since the first night I met you have I ever felt you were a day older than me.’

‘That’s nothing,’ she said sadly. ‘I never felt you were a day younger than me. But facts are facts.’ She straightened up and spoke flatly. ‘I always seem to be more attracted to people younger than me than to my own contemporaries, at least since Richard died. I was beginning to think that my heart was like a clock that had stopped at the age he was when he died, and that it was him I was looking for, over and over again, wherever I went, whenever I was in a strange place, or when I met new people.’

‘And wasn’t it?’

‘I don’t think so. I think it was myself I was trying to find, the person I was before I married him. When he died, I knew I had to get back to being that other person again, just as he, when he was dying, had to get back to being the kind of person he was before he met me. Standing beside him in those last few minutes, I felt he was trying to drag himself free of me. Can you understand that? Does it make any sense to you?’

‘I think so,’ he said gravely. ‘And it would explain what I said, that from the first you seemed so young to me. It was because you were making a new beginning. I felt it at once, although I knew you must be older than me, in years, I mean.’

Vera shook her head. ‘Not years. Decades,’ she said.

‘Oh Vera!’ he cried, exasperated. ‘Don’t exaggerate.’

But she wasn’t going to concede anything. ‘It might as well be centuries,’ she said bitterly.

He turned and faced her. ‘No,’ he said gravely. ‘Two people reaching out improbably towards each other; not impossibly.’ Impulsively, he took her hand. ‘Vera, what are we going to do?’

The first thing to do, she knew, was snatch back her hand, but someone was passing, and she could not let them be seen struggling. Instead, she looked down at her hand in his. This is the closest we’ll ever be to each other, she thought. Then, when the person had passed, she pulled her hand free.

‘This is crazy!’ she cried. ‘What are we saying? I thought it was bad enough that I—’ Realising what she was about to admit, she turned away abruptly. ‘It’s just crazy, that’s all. I shouldn’t have come,’ she said childishly. ‘I knew the minute I saw you. I was going to turn and run back to the car, only you looked up and saw me and it was too late.’

‘Yes, it was too late,’ he said. ‘It was too late the first night of all.’

‘Oh, no!’ she cried. ‘Not from the beginning?’ It was essential she be able to blame herself, to claim complicity in letting it go on, for the course it took, for the walks, the late hours, the intimacy of their conversation. Otherwise, there would be an inevitability implied that she could not face. There would be helplessness as well as hopelessness. The tears rushed into her eyes.

‘Vera, don’t be upset,’ he said. ‘This may be unlooked for, but you must know it’s not unprecedented?’

‘I know nothing.’ She dried her eyes. ‘I’ve heard things, of course. I’ve read things. Elderly housemaids jumping out of closets at little boys.’

‘Vera. Shut up. Do you hear me! Shut up.’ He raised his hand and she thought he was going to hit her. ‘The question is what are we going to do?’

‘We must put an end to things, that’s all!’

‘And end? At the beginning? You can’t mean that?’

‘What else can we do?’

‘I don’t know, not at this moment,’ he said, ‘but surely to God whatever we’ve found in each other, something we both know is rare, surely that’s not to be thrown away, not before we’ve got anything out of it,’ he said, almost pettishly.

‘What is there to be got out of it, only pain and heartache?’

‘For which of us?’ There was a pathetic eagerness in his voice.

She shook her head. ‘Does that matter?’

‘I suppose not,’ he agreed miserably, and yet instead of resignation he had a stubborn look, and he caught at her hand again. ‘Isn’t pain the price of most things?’ he cried. ‘You’re too ready to give up, Vera. I meant what I said a while ago. There are precedents for this. We aren’t the first people in the world to be in this particular plight. I’ve heard of this kind of thing, and read about it. It always seemed very beautiful.’

She interrupted him. ‘No, it is unnatural!’

‘Oh, Vera,’ he said wearily. ‘Why are you so bitter? I was only trying to say that it was something altogether outside my experience.’

‘And mine.’

‘All right,’ he said, ‘but isn’t everything outside our experience until it comes into it? There was a friend of my own, a close friend, too, in my first year in college, and he was in love with a woman years older than him, fourteen years, I think. They did their best to break away from each other, but in the end they got married.’

She pulled away from him roughly. ‘Married?’ she repeated hysterically. ‘Anyway,’ she said callously, ‘what is fourteen years?’

He was arrested by that. ‘What age are you anyway, Vera?’

‘What age are you?’ she demanded, but she didn’t really want to know. ‘Don’t tell me,’ she cried, taking her hand away. She knew it was worse than she’d thought. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said hopelessly. ‘Let’s leave things as they are, and not show them up to be altogether farcical.’ He said nothing, but she saw him wince. He reached out idly and picked an ivy leaf from the parapet and dropped it into the pond below, where it lay flat on the stagnant water.

It seemed a chance for her to say what had to be said. ‘We must stop seeing each other. At least by design,’ she added, having caught sight of his face.

‘I see,’ he said. He stood up. ‘And you dismissed friendship, as far as I remember, didn’t you?’ he said.

She shrugged. ‘This isn’t friendship.’ She glanced at the sky. ‘It’s going to rain again,’ she said dully.

As she spoke, a drop of rain fell singly and heavily on to the sleeve of her blouse, and as the stroke of the hammer brings the spark to iron, the heavy drop brought her flesh to the linen. She looked down, and then she saw that he was staring, too. Without a word said, the air began to throb, and it was with love, with love and nothing less. Her eyes filled with tears. ‘It may be rare, love, I mean,’ she said, turning aside, unable to look at him anymore, ‘but where there is love, everything is so easy. Friendship is so exacting. Perhaps that’s why they can never exist together at the same time. And why they never, never, can be substituted for each other. Let me tell you something,’ she said quickly and urgently, although as she said them the words seemed to echo in her mind and she remembered the disastrous effect of the other incident she’d told him on the first night of all. But she went on. ‘One evening last summer, and I was staying with friends in Howth. After dinner, we went out on the cliff, and I asked something I’d always wanted to know. I asked why the lights across the bay were always twinkling. But I was told they weren’t twinkling; they were steady. It was the level of the air in between that was uneven. Do you see?’ she said sadly. ‘It’s the same with us.’

‘I see,’ he said for the second time, and he threw down another leaf on to the water. Then he straightened up. For a moment, she thought everything was ended. ‘Where is your car?’ he asked. But nothing was ended. ‘We can’t settle this here,’ he said. ‘I’m coming down to the farm with you. We’ll have to have a long talk.’ He paused. ‘Unless you could stay the night in town?’

‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly do that,’ she cried.

‘Well then, I’ll come down,’ he said.

‘And stay with Tim?’ She was distractedly looking in her pockets for the keys of the car. They were going out of the park gates into the street. But when she looked at him, she saw that he was staring strangely at her.

‘Where else?’ he asked.

‘Oh, I know there is nowhere else,’ she said, but she felt the ground was slipping from under her as if she were the one who was young and inexperienced, even endangered. But it was only that she was out of practice in a game where every word, every gesture counted for ten. ‘I only meant that your uncle might think it odd for you to go down unexpectedly.’

‘I never go any other way,’ he said. ‘Are you sure that’s what you meant?’

‘And if it wasn’t?’ she asked, startled at the chancy note in her voice. ‘What would be the gain?’

‘If we got rid of the tension that has built up between us, we might salvage something,’ he said, but there was a trace of despondency in his voice again.

‘There might be nothing to salvage,’ she said. ‘And supposing the bonds only tightened?’

‘Would you care?’ he asked.

‘Not then. But I care now, while I’m still able to care.’

‘Tell me one thing. For whose sake would you care, your own or mine?’

She looked away from him, over the street into which they had entered. ‘Not for either of our sakes, I think,’ she said. She nodded at the people in the street hurrying by in all directions. ‘For them, perhaps.’

‘Don’t be nonsensical,’ he said, and as they reached the car he caught the handle of the door. ‘I’ll come down. And you must let me stay the night, Vera. Just to talk.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s a bit bright to go down yet, though, isn’t it? We ought to wait till it’s darker, in case it would get about that I was down.’

‘And stayed with me?’

He nodded.

For a minute, she let herself dwell on the thought of having him in the house with her, under the same roof, however separate in all else. ‘I’d have to drive you up again very early before it was light, wouldn’t I?’

‘You could go to bed for a while,’ he said. ‘I’d call you.’

She knew then that they fully understood each other. They got into the car.

‘There’s just one thing I have to do before I can go,’ he said. ‘I have to call at Hume Street to collect another lot of exam papers. Can we stop there? I won’t keep you a minute.’

She started the car.

‘You didn’t really think that you could walk out of my life like that?’ he asked as they drove along. ‘I feel certain that no matter what happens you’ll never altogether leave it.’

She said nothing, and in a few minutes they had reached Hume Street. Before he got out of the car, he looked at her. ‘There’s something I want to say now, before we go any further,’ he said. ‘No matter what happens, I want you to promise me that if you ever want me for anything, you’ll tell me. Will you promise that?’

‘Why do you want me to promise now?’ she asked, she leaned across him and opened the door. ‘Never mind. I promise,’ she said quickly. Then, knowing he must have guessed what she had in mind to do, she waited till he went up the steps and she drove away.

It was nearly a year later. She had not seen him in the time between, nor did she expect to, when late one afternoon there was the sound of a car at the door. ‘Well?’ she said weakly when she opened it and saw him standing there.

Like the first time of all, they looked at each other, and this time, too, the look was one of surprise, but not a happy surprise.

‘How are you?’ he asked. There was a keen edge to his voice. ‘I didn’t need to ask,’ he added quickly.

‘And you?’ she asked. He looked well.

‘I wasn’t going to call at all,’ he said then. ‘But I changed my mind.’ He paused.

It saddened her to see him ill at ease, standing so stiffly. Why did he come, she wondered. ‘You were anxious about me? Is that it?’ she asked laughingly, thinking that by making light of it she would dispel the shadow of what had been between them. But she saw at once she had only brought it back. In a moment, the old atmosphere of intimacy was recreated, and yet it was not the same, or anything like the same.

‘It was because of the old man I called,’ he said dully. ‘He thought it odd that I hadn’t come over to see you. I’ve been down here for two weeks.’

‘Ah, well,’ she said, ‘he didn’t understand.’

He looked at her intently. ‘I’m not so sure about that,’ he said. ‘I didn’t tell you something he said last year, one of the nights I went back late. He gave me a queer look. ‘If you were better favoured,’ he said, ‘you’d be putting ideas into my silly old head.’

‘I’m not so sure.’ They were still standing in the doorway. ‘May I stay awhile?’ he asked.

Almost imperceptibly, she hesitated, but he noticed it. ‘You were not going out, were you?’ he asked.

‘I was going out,’ she said reluctantly.

‘Must you?’

‘I’m afraid I must.’

He seemed really surprised. ‘Will you be long? Could I come back later? As a matter of fact, I have to go to Dublin for an hour or two. I only intended calling for a minute.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I could be back in two and a half hours. Where were you going, anyway?’

‘Today is Richard’s anniversary,’ she said, still more reluctantly. ‘I was going to the cemetery. Normally I never go near it, only I got word to say the headstone has slipped, and that it must be seen to at once, in case it falls altogether. It would break, or do damage to other graves. I have to go and see what is to be done, and make arrangements about it.’

‘Oh, I see,’ he said. ‘But it can’t be all that urgent, surely? Isn’t this a bad day to go in any case? Or do you usually go on his anniversary?’

‘I told you I never go. Never, never. This is purely a coincidence.’

‘Well, then. You certainly shouldn’t go today. Besides it’s getting late. Put it off to another day.’

‘I think I ought to go this afternoon,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind, really.’ Suddenly an idea struck her. ‘It would make it a lot easier if there was someone with me. I don’t suppose—’ She paused, and for a minute she thought he had not seen any connection between him and her unfinished sentence.

But he had. ‘Of course I’ll go. There should be someone with you. You certainly should not go alone. Don’t think of it. Leave it till tomorrow or the next day, and I’ll go with you gladly. Better still, I’ll go without you and see what’s to be done. It’s not a job for a woman anyway. Where is he buried, by the way?’

‘Kildare.’

‘So far?’

‘It’s not so far from here, only a few minutes.’

‘I’d probably be going from Dublin, but no matter. Put it out of your head now, and I’ll take care of it.’

‘You couldn’t come this afternoon?’

‘With you?’

‘With me, of course. I know it must sound superstitious, but I hate to think of getting word about it today of all days, and not going, not wanting to go.’

‘Rubbish!’ he said easily. ‘Anyway, it’s my affair now.’

‘You couldn’t possibly come now?’ she persisted. ‘Why do you have to go back to Dublin? Is it urgent?’

‘Oh, it’s not exactly urgent, but I’d like to go. I’ve arranged to give a driving lesson to someone. It need only take half an hour, but I promised to do it. A half an hour would be plenty; that’s why I said I’d come back if you agreed to it, but of course the light would be gone by then, for the other job, I mean.’

She was listening very attentively. ‘Is it a girl?’ she asked quietly.

‘You know it’s not a girl.’

‘Why not? I only asked because if it was a girl I’d know you couldn’t possibly break your word.’

He stared. ‘You wouldn’t mind?’

‘It would be natural,’ she said.

‘Was that your remedy? Another man?’

She didn’t bother to reply to that. ‘Well, if it’s not a girl, who is it?’ she asked flatly.

‘It’s just a fellow who works in the Department of Education. It’s through him I get the exam papers to correct.’

‘Couldn’t you get in touch with him?’

‘He’s not on the phone.’

She pondered this. ‘You could send him a telegram.’

‘He wouldn’t get it in time.’

‘He’d get it afterwards, and he’d understand, surely?’

‘I don’t know if he would. And anyway, I couldn’t leave him up there in the park, hanging around waiting for me, thinking every minute I was coming and afraid to go away.’

She gave a short laugh.

‘I suppose you think that if it was last summer I’d have gone with you no matter what!’ he said.

‘Oh, no!’ she cried. ‘Last summer I wouldn’t have let you come. I wouldn’t have needed you. It would have been enough to know you’d have come if you could.’ Her coat was lying across the hall table. She took it up. ‘I must go,’ she said simply.

‘So you were right,’ he said, blocking her way. ‘We salvaged nothing.’

She put on her coat. Then she looked into his face. ‘Don’t blame me for being right,’ she said. ‘I sometimes think love has nothing to do with people at all.’ Her voice was tired. ‘It’s like the weather. But isn’t it strange that a love that was so unrealised should have—’

‘—given such joy?’ he asked quietly.

‘Yes, yes,’ she said. Then she closed the door behind them. ‘And such pain.’

‘Oh, Vera, Vera,’ he said.

‘Goodbye,’ she said.

Goodbye.