The Collected Stories (24 page)

‘What if you run into her and she asks about me?’

‘I’ll tell her you had to go home. How soon are you going?’

‘As soon as I get the stuff into the boot of the car.’

Because I was ashamed of him I carried everything he wanted out to the car.

‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he said as he prepared to drive away.

‘No. I don’t mind.’

I watched the car climb the hill. When it had gone out of sight I had the clear vision again of hundreds of irons being all cleanly struck and flowing from every direction into the very heart of the green.

All night the rabbit must have raced from warren to warren, the stoat on its trail. Plumper rabbits had crossed the stoat’s path but it would not be deflected; it had marked down this one rabbit to kill. No matter how fast the rabbit raced, the stoat was still on its trail, and at last the rabbit sat down in terror and waited for the stoat to slither up and cut the vein behind the ear. I had heard it crying as the stoat was drinking its blood.

There are times when we see the small events we look forward to – a visit, a wedding, a new day – as having no existence but in the expectation. They are to be, they will happen, and before they do they almost are not: minute replicas of the expectation that we call the rest of our life.

I used to panic when I saw my life that way, it brought the blind and overmastering desire to escape, and the religious life had seemed for long the one way out: to resign this life, to take on the habit of unchanging death-like days, the sweet passion; and when death came it could hold no terror. I had already died in life.

I no longer panic when I see that way: nature, having started to lose interest in me, is now content to let me drift away, and no longer jabs me so sharply that I must lose myself in life before it is too late.

And I have found Barnaby and Bartleby. All day and every day they are in the doorways of Abbey Street. I call them Barnaby and Bartleby but I do not know their names. They must have some shelter to go to for they disappear from the doorways about eight in winter, an hour later in the summer. I have never seen them leave. They seem to be there one moment and gone the next. I have never watched them go. I feel it would be an intrusion to draw too close and that they mightn’t leave if watched. The early morning is the one time they are busy, searching the bins with total concentration before the garbage trucks come by. They never search the same bin together or stand in the same doorway. Only in freezing weather do they come close, just inside the door of the public lavatory, and even there they keep the red coinslot weighing machine between them, their backs to the wall, above their heads the black arrow pointing to the urinal stalls within.

They seem to change doorways every two hours or so and always to the same doorway at the same time. I thought at first they might be following the sun but then noticed they still changed whether the
sun was in or out. They wear long overcoats, tightly belted, with pleats at the back, that had been in fashion about fifteen years before. Often I want to ask them why have they picked on this way to get through life, but outside the certainty of not being answered I soon see it as an idle question and turn away. They never answer strangers who ask about the times of the buses out of Abbey Street. They have their different ways, too, of not answering. Bartleby, the younger and smaller, just moves his boots and averts his face sideways and down; but Barnaby stares steadily over his steel-rimmed spectacles into his interlocutor’s eyes. Otherwise, they seem to take a calm and level interest in everything that goes on outside their doorway. They must be completely law abiding, for the police hardly glance at them as they pass on patrol.

The same winter that I began to follow Barnaby and Bartleby I met Kate O’Mara. We met at Nora Moran’s.

Nora Moran was a painter who gave parties round people she hoped would buy her paintings or get her grants from foundations to advance her career or self-esteem; in some way they were all intertwined. We used to make fun of Nora. ‘I ran into Nora Moran today. She’s in a bad way. She’s down to her last three houses,’ after listening to her money worries in some coffee shop off the Green for hours as the coffee went cold and the cups were taken away. In our eyes she was a rich and successful woman. Still, we went to her parties, knowing we were being used as butcher’s grass or chopped-down rhododendron branches to cover up the dusty margins of the processional ways in June. We went out of respect for Nora’s early work and, less honourably, because it took a greater energy to stay away once Nora had made up her mind that we should go. As young women were not Nora’s idea of either butcher’s grass or rhododendrons, it was with surprise that I found myself facing a tall and lovely young woman at a party close to Christmas.

‘Hi,’ she said at once. ‘My name is Kate O’Mara.’

‘How do you happen to be at Nora’s?’ I asked as soon as the courtesies were over.

‘I used to work on a magazine in New York,’ she said. ‘The editor is a friend of Nora’s. We did a profile of her last year. When I was
coming to Dublin everybody said I must see her.’

‘You’re here on holiday?’

‘No,’ she said, laughing. ‘I guess you won’t believe it. I came here to write.’

There are so many voices here already, and so little room. Who will hear all the voices, I thought. When I saw Nora Moran coming towards us I asked quickly, ‘Will you let me take you out some evening?’

‘Sure,’ she answered uncertainly, surprised.

I had just time to write down the telephone number before Nora came between us. ‘Well, what are you two getting up to here?’ and when the social laughter ceased, I said, ‘Kate was telling me about this profile of you …’

There was no need to say more. Nora was launched on her favourite subject.

‘Why were you so anxious to keep from Nora that we were going out?’ were the first words Kate asked the following Saturday when we were seated in a restaurant.

‘She’d want to come.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘It’s true. She’d control the whole world if she could,’ and then I asked, looking at her ringless fingers, ‘Were you ever married?’

‘No. Why do you ask?’ The soup spoon paused at her lips.

‘No why. It’s probably stupid. We think of Americans as much married.’

‘My mother would have a fit if she heard that. We’re Catholics from way back. Nuns and priests galore. “No one was ever divorced in
my
family,” my mother is fond of boasting.’

‘Has that anything to do with your coming here?’

‘In a way. The whole family is rotten with nostalgia about Ireland. I said I’d come and see into it once and for all. And it
was
easier to come here. If I said I was going to wicked Paris, there’d be an uproar, but old Dublin is nice, clean. So here I am.’

‘And you look quite lovely,’ I said sincerely.

‘Why don’t we split this? This place isn’t cheap,’ she said when the bill came.

‘This is mine. Another time you can take me if you wish,’ and
when we were outside I said, ‘It’s only a few streets. I’ll walk you home.’

Below the granite steps that led to the Georgian doorway where she had rooms I leaned to kiss her. She did not withdraw, but made it clear that it was no more than a courtesy at the end of the evening.

‘Would you like to come out some other evening?’ I asked awkwardly in the rebuff that was not quite a rebuff.

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘The next time I must take you. When?’

‘Next Saturday?’

She thought for a moment and said, ‘Next Saturday’s fine,’ and waved as she took the key out of her purse.

Aimlessly, like old people grateful for mere human presence, we went out together that winter. Only once did I challenge the sexual restraint.

‘Is there someone that you’re involved with?’ I asked one evening.

‘Yes.’

‘Is it someone in Dublin?’

She named a man I knew, in public relations, whom she had met at Nora Moran’s.

‘He has this dream of an Irish Ireland, free of outside influences, and he’s fiercely anti-American. I get abused all the time,’ she explained.

‘Do you want to marry him?’

‘No,’ she laughed. ‘I’m not quite that crazy.’

‘But you sleep with him?’ I felt deprived and jealous.

‘Yes, but it’s a bad business. He always leaves before morning. Whenever we meet he does all the talking and we only meet whenever he wants. Yet I keep missing him.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said in the face of an openness I was unused to.

‘I’m sorry too but it’s a relief to talk about these things sometimes.’

After that evening she must have suspected my desire or jealousy. Whenever I would ask about her life outside our meetings she would avoid a direct answer and then try to make her life sound humdrum and dull. She always wore her plainest clothes when we met.

I could not help but feel irony when I noticed the light of competition in Nora Moran’s eyes when next we met.

‘We hardly ever see you now,’ she said. ‘I hear you and Kate see a great deal of one another. She’s a very attractive girl.’

‘We see each other very little. People exaggerate. I was going to call you but I always think you’re busy.’

‘Why don’t we drop everything today? I’ve been intending to go down to the farm. We’ll drive down.’

‘I’m free all day.’

There was a mist that promised to break into a fine day as we drove out of the city. Nora had a large heavy car, with warm mahogany panelling, and she drove very fast and badly, continually taking her eyes off the road to search my face for responses.

‘Do you see that beech tree over there, Nora?’ I resorted to saying when we got out into the country. ‘There’s something about its trunk that reminds me of some of the recurring shapes in your work,’ leaning cravenly towards the windscreen to narrow her angle when she would look back. It was a relief when the car lurched into the long gravelled avenue that led to the house.

‘I lose money on it all the time,’ she said as we looked over the rich acres, ‘but it’s the last thing I’d ever sell. My father built up this place from nothing. I like to think he’d approve of everything I’ve done if he were to come back.’

‘Still, it’s a solid investment.’

‘He was fond of saying that. “Never be fool enough to keep your money in cash.” You’d have loved my father,’ she said. ‘He was that sort of a man if he were to take a fork to his soup at a dinner table all the others would take up their forks. “You have us all brainwashed, Mr Moran,” old Michael, the gardener, used to say to him. He was the only one who dared say it, he was with us so long.’

After meeting the herdsmen, and the two farmhands, we opened the big white house and went through it room by room. Nora’s paintings hung on the walls alongside paintings her father had purchased, many of them valuable. When pressed by Nora I said that I had no faith in my judgement, not having been brought up with pictures, but that I liked everything in the house. Late in the evening I made a log fire in the dining-room while Nora made cheese and tomato sandwiches. We had sandwiches with a half-bottle of red wine Nora brought from the cellar.

‘Do you miss not being married, Nora?’ I asked so as not to appear too passive.

‘No. My life is too full for me to be married, but sometimes I wish I had someone, a young man making his way in the world, an academic, or young artist. I’d set him up close to me. We’d make no demands on one another. All I’d ask is that between certain hours I could come to him if I was tired.’ She looked at me so steadily that I began to feel uneasy, and changed the subject to her paintings.

Afterwards, I took nothing in of the long river of words. I took care to make only the barest responses. By the time we left even they were not necessary. I was glad of the darkness as we drove back to the city, both of us keeping our eyes fixed on the empty floodlit roads. The black hands of an orange clockface on a steeple were fixed at twelve-ten as we reached the outskirts of the city.

‘Do you mind if I drop round to Mother before leaving you off?’ she said. ‘I never feel easy without saying goodnight to Mother.’

‘I don’t mind at all.’

We crossed a cattle grid into the courtyard of a luxury block of flats and Nora drove round to the side.

Suddenly, without switching the engine off, she started to blow the horn. She blew until a fragile woman in a nightdress appeared in the groundfloor window. ‘Goodnight, Mother.’ Nora rolled down the window and waved and blew the horn again. The old mother waved feebly back.

‘It costs a fortune to keep Mother in that place but she’s never satisfied. She’s never without some complaint. My father was too proud to admit it but his marriage was the one real failure in his life. She was never in his style.’

‘It’ll be all right if you let me out here, Nora. I’d be glad of the few minutes’ walk,’ I said as she drove me to the Green.

We grimaced and waved goodnight to one another like any special pair of monkeys. I was numbed by the day. I was probably numbed anyhow. I hadn’t even resentment of my own passivity. Barnaby and Bartleby were far closer to my style than any of this day had been.

As soon as I thought of them in their doorways, the sound of my own footsteps in the empty silence of a sleeping city seemed to take on a kind of healing.

If anything, I now took an even keener interest in Barnaby and Bartleby. Barnaby’s sallow face behind the steel rims did not change as the winter gave way to a hot early summer, but Bartleby positively bloomed in the doorways and even in his rigidly belted overcoat he looked as tanned as if he had just come from the seaside.

Later, Barnaby began to sport a plastic yellow cap, such as girl bicyclists wear in rain, and to make sudden gestures. I put it down to the irritation of the heat. It was enough to suggest that I go on holiday. Instead of going abroad I had a sudden desire to go to the sea that I had gone to as a child. I wrote to Jimmy McDermott in Sligo. We had grown up together, gone to our first dances there, taken girls we had met at the dances in harmless summers to Dollymount and Howth; and before the time came for us to drift naturally apart he was transferred to Sligo. I wrote to him to ask if he could find me a cheap room in Sligo for the summer. He wrote back that there was room in his own place and that he would be glad if I came. About the same time Kate O’Mara told me that her affair had ended.