An Tigh Bocht

We have begun a life in Dalkey and now panic grips me. Bath Avenue is still not sold and I promised I would stay until the sale comes through. I am falling in love with this new place. We have slipped into working on the house and it’s work we know well. We laugh about learning from old mistakes (meaning tiling and dry rot). We don’t talk about ourselves, falling into bed each night too tired for sex to be a problem anymore.

The estate agent phones to say we have an offer on Bath Avenue, five thousand under our minimum and Ursula says take it. Just tell her now. Just say it’s over. This is it. We go out to celebrate and I say nothing.

We are driving home from A Dry White Season, a film about a white man’s attempt to end apartheid in South Africa. He succeeds a little but dies in the attempt. I start to cry behind the wheel of the car. Ursula asks me to pull over. I am embarrassed that she is seeing me crying, and I keep driving. Through my convulsions I tell her how unbearable life is, that Ruth is dead and dead goes on and on, that people kill each other for absurd reasons. I laugh at how hollow words sound. We are stopped at a traffic light on the Blackrock Road and I tell her what I have want to tell her for a long time, that it is over and we cannot go on, that whatever has happened is irreparable. I am stunned with my own words, now that the house on Bath Avenue is sold and we are moving into Dalkey; now that all the horror of what we have been through is finished. Yes, she says and with her yes we are buoyed with relief and begin to talk like old friends, talk as if we are a mature couple looking back on a younger, more naïve pair. We are talking about different people, old selves, dead love battered and choked with the pull of life. She tells me she wants to have a child, has wanted to for some time now, but could not bring herself to say it. It had come on her out of the blue and frightened her.

The unspoken drove us apart. From the moment we met we had both passionately agreed there would be no children. I sensed it before she did. It was in her poems. Female loss. Female strength. Female rage. Emptiness. Nesting. Writing perhaps is a way of asking the questions when the answers are already breathing. It’s easy to see now the reason why we didn’t discuss it. It was a problem that had no room for compromise. By her thirty-second birthday she was silently frantic.

Children. You never know what it’s going to be like, they say. You have no idea how your life changes. Everything revolves around them. How tired I grow of all the talk. I have listened to people all my life tell me how lucky I am to have the freedom of not having them. What an endless burden it is having them always. They have no idea, these parents, the endless burden in not having children. I am sick of the used wrapping of people’s lives strewn on the floor. Sometimes it’s as if the only choice is whether or not to have children.

My mind was soaking up the things I would miss: the clematis had not flowered the first year I planted it. It had almost died that first winter but it hung weakly to the trellis, and I was certain it would bloom this year. The roses, too, were slow in catching, and had to be protected from Vomit and Willy who loved their soil. Love is buried in many ways.

We fight one night over who cooks dinner and she yells that it’s her damn house and I look at her with a coldness, an aloofness that is new to me. I feel no compassion for her. I walk to my father’s house and move in with him.

I pack what is clearly mine and stack the white boxes in a corner of the garage in Dalkey. My greatest concern is that the books will curdle in the dampness. We argue over who owns what. It is not a selfish battle. We fight with generosity, each insisting the other has more need or claim to the kettle, the print, the vacuum cleaner, the shared desk. Our generosity is in truth anything but. I use generosity to show her it is ending because of her selfish needs and partly to assuage my own guilt over the affairs that she has not discovered (I learned once one affair is started the language of deceit is the easiest language of all to speak). I want then to show myself to be her moral superior. When it ends, it is me who leaves the house. It is, after all, her home. It is hard for her middle-class ego to bear the idea of throwing the working-class sweetheart out onto the street. This is why it is me who speaks the words that bring our end, words spoken not out of courage, but desperation.

The division of friends. It hits me like a tree falling that the friends I have were made through Ursula. Some people make an effort to stay in touch with me but finally their allegiance asserts itself in an unringing telephone. Ursula wants to settle. Settle. A word carrying the weight of unborn children.

My father is reading something out of the paper about Northern Ireland, repeating what he always repeats. Should get a chainsaw and divide North and South and let them float off into the Atlantic. I stop listening to him and realise how much I am losing in Dublin: the late nights in bed together reading favourite worst passages from the books Ursula was reviewing, the walks on Dalkey hill, playing with the cats, pruning roses, sitting in a pub on a Saturday night, planning. All these things weaken my resolve and I telephone Ursula the day before I am due to leave for New York again. She agrees to meet me in Caviston’s.

She laughs at the change in my ordering—I am always awkward in ordering, feeling I might be asked to leave before I even get to the table. But now I call the waitress over and ask for some water before I even order. The sophisticate. To my surprise the waitress brings the water. I question the waitress about the menu and I do it not to impress Ursula (although I would have if it made any difference) but because anger is the only thing that pushes me to assertion. We order wine but I can hardly drink it because of my nerves and I blurt out that we should try again, here or even in New York. Before she opens her mouth I know what she will say. I can see it in her eyes, see her reach for the words that will not hurt, and when she does say no, when she explains that whatever it was that bonded us is gone, and she feels nothing for me, not even anger, when she says these words I hardly hear her. I am riveted by her face. Her expression is one I have never known. She has a calmness and resoluteness that makes her a stranger. It is the face of a person in complete control. The pain I see in her eyes is not for the loss of what we once had but rather for the humiliating position I have put myself in, and the hopelessly awkward position I have put her in, sitting here in front of this well-chosen meal. She is far beyond me. The worst aspect of the evening is listening to her soften the blow and at the same time thread carefully so she will say nothing to offer any encouragement. Her tone is laden with the kindness offered a stranger who has tripped and fallen in the street.

I curse myself for not waiting until the end of the meal. Now, we have to go through the farce of eating as if nothing has happened. I consider leaving, but pride keeps me in my seat. I even order dessert and joke with the waitress. Ursula tells me stories about the newspaper, stories about petty journalists and pettier editors. She has discovered that Wheatley, whose work we both detest, had indeed slept her way into the job. There would have been a time when that outraged Ursula but I can tell from her voice that it shocks her no more. Why do people begin to become the people you want them to be when it’s too late? She tells me too, in the only intimate moment she shares, that she still wants a child. She was shopping last week, she says, and she saw a beautiful child in a pram and she could understand how women are moved to steal babies. We finish our tea and step out into separate nights.

She offers me a lift back into town but I decline. She offers again and I say yes, still not wanting to appear hurt. As we drive in along the coast road I look across the strand at Sandymount, at a late-night rider cantering along the sand near the edge of the ebbing tide, and beyond the Strand there is Dollymount beach where my father took Ruth and me with soggy tomato sandwiches when we were children, all of it fading now under the darkening sky, and as the city grows closer I force myself not to look in the direction of Bath Avenue as we head for the North-side. She is making conversation and I try to enter into it but am tired. Words separate us now. Words weave in and out like cordons. It takes forever to say anything that matters. Words are big and clumsy with us; they spill out failures. The things that have shaped our lives. The white trousers she wore that evening. The slope of her breasts beneath the blouse as she talked about Winnicot. I am tired of Dublin, of trying to make sense of my life here, tired of Ruth’s death, and as we cross the Liffey together for the last time it sinks into me that she is right: it is over. I am tired of her. I look at her hand on the steering wheel. If she were a colour she would be beige. I smile to myself at the cold boredom I feel towards her. For the first time in our life together, I let myself feel indignant in her presence and I think of a last parting shot. I think of all the times I did not retaliate in arguments and now I want her to remember the last words I will ever utter to her. I will cut her down just as I am getting out of the car and then close the door before she has a chance to answer. She pulls up outside my father’s house and she turns off the engine. I look at her. Maybe she too has a parting shot. But it is not in me to do it. I can almost hear Ruth whisper: Not worth it. No bitterness. Go the other road.

I will go back to New York. I will find something there. Something will happen. I haven’t let go of Ursula but I will. One day I will show her the indifference she feels for me now.

*   *   *

I cannot even remember the sound of my sister’s voice. It is gone. Her voice has become a huge silence. I loved her laughter but I can only remember that her laugh provoked laughter in me. Her sweet contagious music is gone. There is only the photograph of her gesticulating with the fork and the roaring silence of the page in front of me. The rest is words hobbling after indistinct memories. The true nightmare of death is forgetting. I forget Ruth, she who I believe I loved more than anyone. Knowing that I have forgotten much of what Ruth was, knowing I too will be forgotten. This is the face of survival. It does away with the fallacy of a pure, everlasting love between human beings. But there was the evening in the kitchen in the flat in Dun Laoghaire. I was sitting trying to meditate and wanting Ruth with me, wanting her back. The sound of the fridge in the corner was distracting me and I had almost decided to give up. Relaxed, open concentration alluded me. I got up, unplugged the fridge, and the room fell into silence. I looked out the window at two crows fighting with each other at the end of the garden. The sound of their squawking audible, even behind the glass. My mind cleared and there was nothing—that splendid moment that is akin to the hiatus that stretches between orgasm and sleep. Orgasm, that release from the self, and meditation the enclosure of the self. Ruth was there, before me. Her essence. A calmness as if nothing else existed. The same sensation of watching a film where an actor leaves the room and the camera doesn’t follow and yet the essence lingers in the full stillness of the moment. I felt her presence grow, then, and I felt happiness emanate from her and dumb fear gripped me in my gut and she was gone. I sat there, sweating and feeling as if there was a shard of ice stuck in my stomach. Sins became harder to live with.

I became intensely infatuated with the women I slept with while I was with Ursula, but I knew it was not love. I thought it was passionate lovemaking but it was nothing as calculated as that. I was getting over the problem I had had for years with her. I was trying to satisfy that pent-up sexual hunger that could not be satisfied. The heat of the sex was the one area of life where I was not acting. It was a desire to live, as if my own life was running out quickly, the way Ruth’s had. I heard a psychologist on the radio talk about near-death experiences and how these makes people change, how they reassess their lives, improve them. She was talking theory. That’s the problem with psychologists and priests. It’s always theory. Some evenings on the way home from work, or from the hospital, I would slip my seat belt off and drive faster and faster, imagining that it would be all over shortly. There was no fear in me of death, only a fear of the endless pain. But I would think of Ruth hearing of the news of my death and I would slow down and go and visit one of the women who I knew would have me. I poured all of myself into these women, all the longing and ache of life. As I lay in bed, I could tell they knew they were soothing what was locked inside me and I was embarrassed. I would never fall asleep until I was certain the woman was as drained as I was, sure she had come no matter how much sleep pulled me. I needed the mutual exhaustion. I had no expectations of these women, and, more importantly, they had none of me. There were no expectations at all except the pleasure of the moment. Until Holfy.