9

Ireland’s was a religion of sacraments. Outward signs, the catechism called them, instituted by God to give grace. The most common gestures and materials carried the weight of transcendent meanings; water, bread, fire, oil, signs of the cross all pointed beyond themselves to the eternal, ever-living triune God Himself. Into the service of this rubric even the humble shamrock had been impressed. Signs of the sacred were everywhere and in everything. The idea of sacraments, in other words, was at the heart of that perennial Irish oversensitivity that made too much of too little. If a splash of water on one’s forelock could make the difference between eternities in heaven or hell; if a few mumbled phrases in an archaic tongue could wipe the soul’s slate free of the most grievous sin, then a man and a woman who, out of primitive needs for warmth and consolation, took shelter in each other had no right to complain that the briefest, basest mingling of flesh had been made to mean too much.

Perhaps the Reformation, in rejecting sacraments, had rescued Protestants across the north of Europe from this overloading of the mundane—preferring to make things and acts mean too little than too much—but not in Ireland.

Not, at any rate, if you asked Jane Tyrrell. She did not concern herself with abstract concepts, but she had a signifying mind that habitually saw shadows of the world beyond, not a faerie world or a spirit world, as the peasants had it, but a world in which the substance of things was only barely hinted at by surfaces. But since surfaces were all one had to go by, they were crucial. One could almost say sacred. She might as well have been a Roman Catholic. The implication of that moment, for example, as she sat in the formal front parlor of Lady Gregory’s house in Merrion Square watching Dan Curry build a fire meant far too much to her. But wouldn’t it have to others? How could she ever have explained to Miss Sweeney, Lady Gregory’s aged housekeeper asleep in the garret room, how she’d come to bring him here at this hour? How exactly did she explain it to herself?

At the hotel her father had said she was pale, unwell-looking, and he hadn’t wanted her to leave alone. Of course she was upset. He’d made it seem as if Douglas were dead, and the more he denied it, the more she felt sure of it. It made her think of her mother. She should have been seeing Douglas and Pamela and the babies, but instead she saw her mother in the plain white apron she wore in her garden, the great crop of ripe gooseberries in the basket she cradled, gooseberries for jam that Jane still could not taste without crying. She was buried under an avalanche of the old grief, and the only way out from under it—she couldn’t breathe!—was to leave her father. He had his grief too, but she had finally admitted to herself that she could not ease his pain until she eased her own. It was awful, she knew, but she had to be alone.

But then, as if there were holy ghosts and guardian angels, as the Catholics said, Dan Curry had appeared. The small kindnesses she’d had from him over those months had suddenly, irrationally loomed as the only truly soothing events of her time in Dublin. The books he’d given her, the sonnets he’d recited for her, the boiled-egg lunches he’d arrived with, the rose he’d left once on her desk with the note “You and this flower must be related”—these tokens of his, exactly like sacraments, seemed in memory transcendent, acts that had lifted her into a realm of grace. As quickly as her relief at seeing him had come, it faded when those other men appeared with him in that lobby. She felt the curtain of her old neurasthenia fall between herself and those contending men. They made it seem as if Douglas didn’t matter, her grief didn’t matter; and Dan Curry was one of them. But he’d looked at her with such feeling before leaving, and his message was, The realm of grace is the realm of danger.

And then, like the ghost or angel himself, he’d appeared out of the night rain in the shining street.

Grace, yes, but danger also. That was what she felt. Having on impulse brought him here, she was sure that the wrong words, gestures, and acts would have transcendence enough to destroy her. But she felt at the same time—this was why she’d surrendered to her impulse, why she didn’t regret it even now—that the right ones could save her.

From her vantage she could have taken him for a broad-shouldered servant, so dutifully bent at the fireplace was he. She was touched by the frayed sleeves of his wet coat. He’d been so intent upon his effort to coax the flames that he had not acknowledged her when she entered the parlor carrying the tea tray. She’d moved about the kitchen quietly, as if Miss Sweeney would hear her from four floors away. She sat and was now pouring.

When he stood, watching the flames licking at last up around the logs, she said, “You should take your coat off and hang it there.”

He looked around at her without turning fully.

“To dry it.” Panic rose in her. In the carriage they’d hardly spoken. Everything that had occurred to her to say seemed wrong, and he had been content to sit across from her in silence.

She splashed the tea onto the table, then made it worse stabbing at it with a napkin.

He took his coat off and draped it on the back of an upright chair, drawing it close to the hearth. He watched the fire a moment longer, then, satisfied, faced her.

At once his eyes soothed her, and an easy smile brightened his face as he tugged on the hem of his waistcoat, saying, “A fellow feels underclothed without his coat in such a grand house. I’ve always wondered what these places were like. May I smoke?”

“Of course. Lemon?”

He shook his head, lighting a cigarette. He crossed to her for his tea. Then, saucer and cup in hand, he retreated to the fireplace. He put the saucer on the mantel, flicked his ash into the fire, and sipped his tea. “That’s lovely, thank you.” He stared into the tea as if studying the room’s appointments in the liquid’s black reflection.

But it was Jane’s conceit, not his, to think he was always looking at reflections. She let her eyes drift around the room, trying to see it afresh, the way he must have. If using the black circle of his tea as a reflecting-glass, he’d have been struck first by the decorative plasterwork on the ceiling, an intricate design of fleurs-de-lis, scallop shells, and cupid heads. Would he have considered such rococo display tasteless vanity, as she was herself inclined to? The plasterwork was dingy and badly in need of refurbishing, though Curry showed no sign of having noticed it.

The floor-to-ceiling curtains were drawn, closing out the city. Not even the sound of heavy rain came in. Only one lamp was lit, the green-shaded one on the graceful, fringed-cloth-covered oval table by her settee. It was the light she read by at night, though the light it threw left much of the room in shadows. The fireplace too now threw light, but it was still impossible to make out the details of the various framed objects hanging on the walls. Curry would recognize the Jack Yeats portrait of Lady Gregory. Mr. Yeats had painted it to hang as the centerpiece of his Abbey portraits, but she’d refused to hang it in the theater lobby, saying it would make her feel dead to see her portrait in a public place. The other ill-lit pictures of ancestors and country scenes, faded photographs of children, the original of Lady Gregory’s bookplate, and a gilded Chinese fan would register with Curry only as so much bric-a-brac. As for furniture, in addition to Jane’s own deep-red plush sofa, its end table and artfully arranged matching sofa and table, there were half a dozen upright chairs of various styles angled in such a way as to accommodate one large conversation. Lady Gregory did not entertain in Dublin as she did at Coole Park, but she often had the backers of her theater to tea in this room. On the dark Catalonian refectory table against the wall beside the doorway were piles of playscripts and pamphlets from past years describing Abbey seasons.

“I was under the impression that you’d have been here.” Jane spoke nervously. “Doesn’t Lady Gregory invite the players, her beloved chicks?”

“Oh, I have been here. I’ve been in some of the grandest houses in Dublin. I’ve come up.” He laughed and replaced his cup. “But I’m still the bloke from Henrietta Street, and it always seems like the first time to me.” He looked around the room, now taking it in the way Jane had. “Fifteen of us lived inside a pair of rooms half this size where I grew up.” He said this not with bitterness but with amazement, as if the arrangement of his family’s life had been a physical feat he could not believe in now. As, in a way, he couldn’t. He moved in rooms and circles—a world—his parents, uncle, and siblings would not have believed existed in their own Dublin. As, in a way, it didn’t.

Jane said, “Where I grew up the rooms didn’t matter. What mattered were the sun and the fields and the sea.”

Curry picked up his tea again. “You might have told me that your father was a deputy to Parnell. I assumed your people were Unionists.”

“You might have told me that you’re in Irish politics yourself. A friend to Casement and Pearse? You claim to be a plainspoken man, Dan Curry, but you’ve held back on me.”

“So there we are.”

Jane leaned back against the settee, cup in hand. The curving form of the sofa’s armrest and back, from where Curry stood, called to mind the curve of a woman’s hip. He let his eye fall across her body. She was wearing a printed white cotton dress with a shawl collar that displayed her throat. As always, her locket on its chain hung there. He wondered if it held a man’s picture. “What else haven’t you told me?” But then he was afraid she would read him too accurately and know he was asking about her loves, if she had them. He added, “Politically, what are you?”

“I don’t know what I am. But I know what you are.”

“What?”

“An actor.”

“You make it sound like a failing.”

“I only meant you have the knack for playing what’s given you.”

Curry bristled. “I’m not playing tonight, Jane. Not earlier and not now.”

“No, Dan, you misunderstand me. I admire that you’re an actor. I envy you. I envy everyone at the Abbey. I never met such people before. You live more deeply than the rest of us.”

“But we read the lines others hand us. Isn’t that what you meant? And, of course, it’s true.”

“No, it isn’t true.” Her eyes were locked on him. “You take those lines and transform them. Nothing exists until it passes through you.”

“Like dung through a horse.”

At once Jane blushed and looked away.

Curry’s impulse was to cross to her and apologize, but he checked it. Next thing he’d be on one knee. This was not a night on which he needed to romanticize the profession he’d just abandoned. Hence his ugly remark. But neither did he need to disparage it, much less insult this woman. Sometimes he loathed himself. Instead of going to her, he remained where he was, waiting for her to look at him. Oh Christ, he thought, here was one more woman with whom he’d have gotten so far and no farther. But this one, he knew, would leave him feeling bereft. He envied his friends who didn’t give a tinker’s damn for what was hidden in the corners of their minds. He envied men who could say, Hell, she stopped her taxi for me in the middle of the night. What else was there to know?

He dropped his cigarette in the fire. If he left now he would never see her again. Was he going to spend the rest of his life punishing himself for having fallen short of his first ideal? How long was he going to do this to himself?

Curry forced himself to pick up his teacup again and cross the room. He took a seat on the second sofa, opposite her. He put his teacup down next to hers. The saucers almost kissed. “Jane, all I meant to ask before, when I said, ‘What else haven’t you told me?’ was about your locket. I’ve long admired it. But you’ve never let me see whose picture’s in it.”

Without speaking or looking at him, Jane raised her arms to unclasp the chain behind her neck. The press of cotton stretched across her bosom emphasized her womanliness; he imagined her stepping from her bath, arms like that to pin her hair. He imagined her naked. Curry had never been with a woman in that way, watching her casually while the air dried her skin, while the blush of heat faded in the cool breeze as she toweled herself. This woman was a wholly other creature than the bitter whores, those few, whom he had furtively watched in the shadows of those awful rooms in Talbot Street. Yet the lustful feeling was the same. It shamed him, how he wanted to ravish her as he had those prostitutes. When he saw a flash of her breast inside the collar of her dress, he averted his eyes prudishly, and he felt mortified. What was it the Austrian psycho-doctors spoke of, the Holy Mary complex? Even the scent of her perfume—honeysuckle?—assaulted him. Custody of the senses, they called it in the seminary: what he had just lost.

She offered him the chain, and dangling from it, the locket.

He took it, let the smooth, gold heart rest in his palm, studying it with a detached air that had nothing to do with the agitation he felt. If this was a scene, he’d have focused everything on that object as a method of control. It is her heart, he’d have said to himself, and she gave it to me.

But this was no scene. She’d given it to him so that he could open it. Not her heart, but one of its secrets.

He fumbled at the catch and his counterfeit detachment failed him. He looked up at her anxiously, as if his opening it were not what she’d had in mind. “May I?” When she nodded, he did open it.

And his heart sank.

He saw the small photograph of an impressive-looking man, not her father, his hair dark and slick, sharply parted, his brow strong, his mustache perfectly shaped above a pleasant mouth and chin. Even in that tiny image the patrician features and the inbred air of self-possession made it evident to Curry that this was the sort of man he would never be. Yet it wasn’t resentment he felt, because the photograph also conveyed, somehow, the man’s decency. One sensed his kindness. Curry imagined meeting the man, exchanging a hearty handshake with him, and liking him at once. The thought doubled his chagrin. He imagined strolling the Liffey quays with the bloke as he described the great fun he and Jane—would he call her Janey?—had had as children. They’d have been second or third cousins, and on one of their estates, his father’s or hers, they would have shared a playhouse in which Janey kept her dolls and he his tin soldiers, and it would have been built to scale, down to children’s size, but still larger than the hovels in which their fathers’ tenants lived.

Curry cursed himself for a fool, and now his resentment surfaced, a geyser of it. In all those weeks of seeing her at the Abbey, he’d never seriously entertained the thought that she was spoken for. She hadn’t misled him. On the contrary, in all their encounters she’d been careful, almost reserved. If he had never quite pressed initiatives past the casual or sought to broaden the context of their friendship beyond the Abbey, neither had she. She was less flirtatious, in fact, than Nora Guinan, and Nora was married. So who the hell wouldn’t be confused? Especially when eventually he decided that her reserve was a matter of something else. She simply seemed innocent of the sort of history a man’s photograph in her locket implied, and she always, despite her shyness, made him feel she valued his company more than anyone’s. He’d thought the bond between them, while not erotic precisely, was potentially so. And if he had not just in those weeks been swept by Pádraic Pearse into the great struggle, he’d convinced himself it would have flowered.

She had told him that her mother was deceased; now that he thought of it, one of her few personal revelations. And he had told himself from then on that it was her mother’s image she treasured in the locket. But he was the one with the mother complex. He looked up at her, trying to keep his peevish feelings at bay. What business had she stopping him tonight and bringing him here?

“It’s Douglas,” she said.

Douglas?

“My brother.”

Curry directed his surprise into the act of slowly lowering his head again to look at the tiny picture. He raised the locket for light then, eyeing it the way a jeweler does a gem.

What was he doing to her and to himself by being here? First he’d regarded it as fatal that the locket held the picture of her lover; then, on learning the good news—not lover, only brother—he discovered how much more fatal good news could be. This was Pearse’s point, the one he’d refused to hear. Her brother was a prisoner of the Germans. The Germans, friends to Ireland, to whom he had within the hour agreed to serve as emissary.

Decency required that he say something, but he couldn’t. Any sentence he began on the subject would end as a lie. He could imply nothing of what he’d promised Pearse, not because of his oath, but because she would hate him. At that moment the most important thing in the world, more important than his solemn secret and its hold on his immortal soul, was that she not.

Decency required that he leave.

He snapped the locket shut. “Thank you,” he said, handing it back to her. She took it shyly. Suddenly he felt a rush of sympathy for her, and his urge to leave faded. She wasn’t the object of his desire now, but a shattered girl. “You must be so worried for him.”

“I’m sure he’s dead.”

“Is that why your father came, to tell you?”

“Yes.” When she looked at him now, tears spilled out of her eyes.

And he saw why she’d stopped for him in the street: she couldn’t carry this grief alone. Before that recognition fell all his reasons for pulling back. For the first time he surrendered the center of his own preoccupation to her. Jane needed help. And she was asking for it from him. Jane had been moving through the events of that night like a sleepwalker, thickly aware of things said and done by others, but focused mostly on her dream. It was a dream of Pamela screaming, striking blows, and refusing to believe that Douglas was dead. While she herself stood mutely by refusing to believe he wasn’t. Even in the dream it was a question: Why should she be so certain that the worst had happened? The evidence wasn’t in. “Missing,” her father had said. “In a German camp,” he had said. But to Jane, Douglas was as dead as their mother was. One of the two unmovable margins of her existence—her father was the other—had simply vanished, leaving that side of her exposed. She knew from before that the world from that side—Douglas’s side had been her mother’s side—could do anything it wanted to her.

The world—what an enemy to have. Jane had grown up thinking of it as that broad but limited stretch of grass between the great cliff of Cragside and the embracing Palladian house. The house and cliff were immutable, more reliable to her than any of the ideas—God, Britain, Ireland, the Church—on which others depended for their stability. But if Douglas was gone, the ancient house was gone or the eternal cliff was; half of what protected her was gone. Douglas had stood between her and death. Now she understood why she had panicked after he and Pamela had left Cragside. Even with her father there, she was all too vulnerable; no, more vulnerable than ever. What if he died too? She’d fled to Dublin to find other cliffs and houses, other break walls with which to hold back the swelling indifferent world.

When she looked at Curry she knew her tears would spill, but she didn’t care. “I came to Dublin because I knew he was going to die. I knew it when he went to France.”

Curry wanted to ask, How did you know? But he said nothing. He looked at her steadily to show that he was not afraid of her abject fatalism.

She said, “And when I met you I realized how little I know about everything, and I began to think that I could live without my family if I had to.”

“We all need our families, Jane.” Even as he said this, the sadness of his own situation choked him. His family, even his hard-shell brothers, had utterly rejected him when he’d quit Maynooth. He turned slightly to stare at the fire. After a moment he stood, crossed to it, adjusted the logs, then returned to the sofa opposite Jane. She had composed herself somewhat. He said, “I understand the feeling you have, but you should remember that you don’t know he’s dead.”

“You’re right. I’m going to stay with his wife in London. There’s no point in doing that if I’m just going to drag her down.”

Curry felt a stab of disappointment that she was leaving. But so was he. That wasn’t the point just now. “Not everyone who goes to France gets killed. And if he’s a prisoner, I’m sure that’s safer than being at the Front.”

Jane looked at him incredulously. “But imagine what the Germans do to them.”

Curry shook his head, knowing he should skate away from that, but it was the crux of his own issue. “The Germans are no worse than the British, Jane.” He forced a laugh, determined to lighten their mood. “The Kaiser is King George’s cousin. They went to the same kind of schools and they play by the same rules. One rule is to respect the enemy’s officers. Douglas is an officer, isn’t he?”

Jane nodded.

“An Irish regiment?”

“The Connaught Rangers.”

“Then that’s another point for him. There’s reason to think the Germans will treat the Irish well.”

“Why?”

Curry buried his anxiety in the act of lighting another cigarette. She watched him intently the whole time, waiting for his answer. He shrugged and said as casually as he could, “Because their argument is more with England than with us. The point is, mourn the dead, but pray for the living.”

Jane reached for her tea. She hadn’t prayed for Douglas because she didn’t know how. “Do you pray?”

“Yes. I wanted once to be a priest.”

Jane’s surprise showed.

Curry laughed again. “We’ve known each other how long? And you don’t know that? It’s the most important thing about me. I studied for the priesthood for nine years, from the age of twelve. Then I chucked it.”

“Why is that the most important thing about you?”

He slapped his forehead dramatically. “I keep forgetting you’re a Protestant. A Catholic would never ask me that.”

Jane blushed. Had she been rude? She said helplessly, “I don’t understand.”

“It marks me for a failure. It always will. Which is why I don’t talk about it.”

“Do you mind talking about it now?”

He shook his head no.

“Why didn’t you go through with it?”

“Because . . .” No one had ever asked him this. In case they had, he was always going to say, Three reasons: poverty, chastity, and obedience. But it was unthinkable he should be flippant with her. He said simply, “I couldn’t face a life alone.”

“That’s why I left Cragside. Which in my world, since I’m unmarried, was equally out of the question.”

“A pair of exiles, then?”

She nodded. For the first time that night she smiled. “Curious isn’t it, how marriage features. I was supposed to get married and you weren’t.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Nobody asked me, sir,” she said.

“Go on. The Dublin Horse Show is a parade of men for your picking, Jane.”

“I haven’t been to the horse show for years. My world was Cragside. I was happy there.” Her smile faded and her eyes filled again. “I loved it. I still love it. But it isn’t a place for me anymore.”

“What is?”

“I haven’t got a place, Dan. Unlike you. It’s one of the ways we’re different.”

“Me!” He’d been thinking they were alike.

“You have Ireland.”

“You think I’m Naisi? You think I’m Cuchulain?”

“No, but isn’t that what it means, that you were with Pearse and Casement?”

He eyed her steadily. “Yes, I suppose it does. I won’t be going back to the Abbey, Jane.”

“Dan, you can’t mean that. Isn’t the Abbey for Ireland? You mustn’t leave the Abbey. It needs you.”

“You said you have to go to London to be with your brother’s wife. Events compel you, Jane. It isn’t a question of choosing to go. In certain circumstances one simply goes. It’s the same with me.”

“How do they put it? You’ll be working for Ireland’s freedom?”

“It doesn’t matter how they put it.”

“But what will you be doing? There’s nothing to be done until the war is over. And then Parliament has already passed the law giving us Home Rule. It’s a fait accompli.”

Curry saw now how unthinkable it was to her that England’s war should take second place to anything. “Not if you ask our friends in Ulster or their friends in Parliament. We’d be fools to take Home Rule for granted, Jane.” He veered from his next thought, that Irishmen like her brother had been fools to think of earning Home Rule by joining the British army. It was a typically lame-brained Irish idea, that blood in the dirt could seal an otherwise impossible contract. But how could he say such a thing to her? Or should he just insult her outright by deigning to explain why England would never succeed in defying Carson’s Ulsterites on the issue? The futility—and by now stupidity—of Parnellite dreams of Home Rule were either too obvious or too complicated. Either way, it was irrelevant. He went on abstractly, without conviction, a conversationalist no longer listening to himself, “Maybe Home Rule has been the problem, that so many of us on our side have seemed willing to settle for it all these years, while in the north they’ve refused even to discuss it. Home Rule is Rome Rule, and all that.”

“You mean, we force Ulster into thinking well of Home Rule, which preserves some link with London by beginning to demand absolute independence?”

“That’s one thought.” He laughed. “Or, as Cardinal Newman put it, ‘Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom; / Lead Thou me on!’” He stared at his cigarette, thinking, What delicate distinctions we’re trained to make. The wish for Home Rule is gentlemanly in the south but treason in the north, while one can loyally defy Parliament in the north, but in the south the idea of defiance is obscene. Clearly Jane had yet to think past her father on the question. She hadn’t gathered that the knot was tied more in Belfast now than London, and Belfast was where the British navy’s ships were made. Because a primitive and simple notion of Home Rule had been the outer limit of her father’s ambition for Ireland, and no doubt it was a notion built on the dream of a restored Ascendancy, Home Rule remained the crux of the issue for Jane. He felt obliged to at least indicate that something separated them. “We’re not singing in unison on this one, Jane.”

“I know.”

“Does it matter?”

“No.”

“Nor to me.”

What then? What possibly then? Snuffing his cigarette, Curry said, “Speaking of Newman, not that we were . . .” He managed this as if he’d never been less disconcerted. “. . . As you know he founded the university here. There’s a statue to his memory in the Jesuit Garden, and I went to see it. I passed a caretaker. I knew where I was going, but out of a need to acknowledge him I said, ‘This is the way to Newman’s statue, no?’ John Henry Newman who in the decade since his death emerges as one of the most glorious writers to have graced Dublin since Richard Sheridan and one of the greatest bishops of the Church since Fisher. And the caretaker nods at me from his shovel and says. ‘The convert?’”

Curry laughed hard, remembering how at the time he’d felt obliged not to. But Jane didn’t laugh. Curry grew silent and waited for her to look at him. When she did, she said, “May I say something personal?”

“Of course.”

“I envy you your belief, Dan. I don’t believe in anything.”

“Don’t say that, Jane. It isn’t so.”

She smiled vaguely and fussed shyly with the bow below her collar. “But you said I could say it.”

He panicked that she thought herself chastised, and he wanted to go to her, to take her hand. She seemed so young, so open to be hurt.

She said quietly, “It is so. It’s why I can’t pray for Douglas and why I feel he must be dead. I never could pray for my mother. Where you have your faith, in that place in me I have just emptiness.”

“But you have Christ.”

“Is it so unthinkable to you that I don’t?”

And of course it was. But had he ever discussed such things with Protestants? And wasn’t it a Catholic conviction that Protestants held their thin creed the way they held their teacups, with two fingers only, and not a fist? The faith was for good weather, not bad. But in good weather, who needed it?

Her neck was bent like a swan’s. She was intent now upon smoothing the cloth of her dress across her lap. He sensed that she was incapable of taking delight even in her own loveliness, and suddenly that was what seemed unthinkable. There seemed to be more truth in the hold her beauty had over his senses than there ever could be in her despair. Isn’t despair what the absence of faith amounts to? Curry had been taught that faith was a gift from God, freely given, and that it could be just as freely taken away. “Lead Thou me on!” he repeated to himself. “The night is dark, and I am far from home; / Lead Thou me on!” Once he’d have recited such lines aloud in that circumstance, full of his own flamboyance. But he was full now only of her pain.

“I believe, Lord,” he said quietly. “Help Thou my unbelief.”

Jane looked up sharply; how she hated Bible quoters. “Why do you say that to me?”

“Because I want to help you. That’s a prayer you can say, isn’t it? It’s a prayer of someone whose faith is shaken.”

“But I don’t believe, Dan. I don’t believe at all.”

“You believed in me, Jane, enough to stop your carriage.”

She lowered her eyes as if she regretted that, as if it made her ashamed.

He crossed to her and, as he sat, he put his hands on her shoulders, turning her. The feeling gnawed at him until he called it by its name. “I love you, Jane.” She fell against him, and then her body convulsed as she surrendered at last to the worst grief of her life.

At a certain point they lay absolutely still, stretched on the floor, fully clothed. Curry felt the pressure of her hips. Slowly he raised himself to his knees, then pulled her up after him. In their first burst of passion neither had been aware really of falling from the sofa. Now he craned past her for the lamp and turned it off. The room was washed by the flickering light of the fire, but it was a relative darkness and just what each needed to lay aside an inhibiting modesty.

They undressed in silence, separately, without their eyes meeting.

Curry had no more experience with this than she had. Men helped women to disrobe, he knew, unless they were whores. But her garments were a mystery and she hadn’t looked to him. He was naked before she was, and he stood apart, painfully conscious of his erection. When she stepped out of her shift, it was toward him. Her breasts gleamed and her hips flared around the furrow between her legs. He stared at her while she raised her arms as she had before to undo the locket chain. Her breasts flattened across her chest, but now not under the deceiving cloth, and he felt the pitch of his arousal climbing. She unclasped her hair, and with a quick shake of her head, it poured down over her shoulders.

As she went to him, raising her eyes for a look of confirmation and finding it, the scent of his skin was what moved her, an earthy, unperfumed musk. When he took her into his arms now, brushing her face with his soft beard, she was surprised at his tenderness. He was kissing her, not roughly as he first had, but gently, all across her face and neck, into her hair and down to her breasts. His beard was like feathers, and the sensation was so light, so delicate, so unbearably sweet, she realized she had never felt her own skin as a distinct part of herself before. And the same was true, she saw, of sexual desire; neither had it seemed like hers until now.

Later, after they lay motionless in each other’s arms, he made as if to go. Was he disappointed, embarrassed? He had ejaculated all too quickly, so that her own first experience of real arousal had taken her nowhere. Even Jane knew that lovemaking was meant to be more. Still, that seemed unimportant to her. She held him, but he pulled away. She was sure that he was leaving her.

But a moment later he was above her, brushing wisps of hair away from her face, pulling her upright, turning her so that she faced away. She would always be his, she felt, to move as he willed, to shape.

She did not realize what he was doing until he lowered the locket from above her head, encircling her throat as if it was a prize. He deftly hooked the ends of the golden chain at the nape of her neck. The locket on her bosom was so cold it made her realize how hot his skin had been. His heat inside her, deep and wide, had made her know she was not empty. As she touched the locket, she understood that he had read what was written in her. The sensation—to be at once absolutely exposed and absolutely embraced—filled her with the awe of a lame person healed, one blind made to see. She turned to him.

Curry could never have said to that woman, Let me give you back your brother, yet that was his great wish. He could never have said, Let my love give you faith and hope. He was unworthy for once of words. It had nothing to do with class or politics that he felt unworthy at last of her.

Once more they kissed, and more slowly now, their young bodies having learned, they became one sign to each other again, giving grace.