by Jane Arbor
“He almost persuaded me that his need of me would be enough to keep us happy. We’re good friends too and I always shaft be. But it was only in one mad moment of despair of you that I seriously considered it—and then he”—Kate’s smile was wry—“wouldn’t marry me!”
“He wouldn’t? What’s with the fellow? Has he taken all leave of his senses?” marvelled Conor.
“Far from it. He had suddenly realised that he owed it to Aileen’s memory and to himself and even, in a way, to me, to make something of his life under his own steam, as it were. That’s why he is going to America alone and staying indefinitely. And come to that”—Kate flung back the gauntlet—“have you ever let me suspect you—cared anything for me?”
Beneath the heavy brows Conor’s tawny eyes glinted. “There’ve been times,” he allowed. “Times when I was feeling my way in the dark and only walked into the brick wall of your scorn of me for my pains. For instance, didn’t I kiss you once with all the passion there was in me, and where did that get me, will you say?”
“That wasn’t—for love!”
“Shouldn’t that be for me to know best? And what about the day I offered you the Acre and the house I’ll build there? I meant that in the way a cock-wren courts his jenny with the nest he has built himself. But I thought then I had time enough to prove I had more to offer you than Regan had. I boasted as much, if you remember? I said I’d not ask a girl to marry me until I was confident of the answer I wanted, and what was there to tell my fool pride then that at the latter end I’d have no time to spare? That I’d be coming to you today, cap-in-hand and humble, and needing to rush you into saying Yes to me at the dictates of—that?”
As Conor’s forefinger stabbed viciously at his watch-face, Kate’s laugh was a bubble of sheer happiness. She protested shakily, “Oh, Conor, you couldn’t ask anything humbly if you tried! Don’t you realise that if you had had all the time in the world, you would still have rushed me at the latter end, as you call it?”
“But I’d have wooed you properly first.”
“All the same, if I had dared to refuse you, you’d have implied that my head needed examining. When you’ve provided yourself with that long ladder of yours, I doubt if you ever admit the moon’s not to be reached from it, do you?”
“Ah, now you’re throwing my own words in my face! Would you say of me then that I’m the bulldozer type?”
“Fair enough. Father’s word for you was ‘juggernaut’,” Kate dimpled, then grew suddenly grave, her eyes clouding.
For a beat of time Conor searched her face without speaking, Then, a gentle finger and thumb tilting her chin, he urged, “What is it, Kate love? What memory of him hurt you? Was it the rancour that ran between him and me—tell me?”
She shook her head. “No. You were right. In his heart he knew you were both on the same side and he said as much before he died. It was just that I’d remembered how, when he was only half conscious on his last night, he murmured something about your being the man he would choose for me if he could—”
“He said that? Yet you never told me!” Conor accused.
“How could I, when, for all your goodness to Bridie and me, I thought you and I were worlds apart in—anything like this?”
“And I, that I needn’t trouble to shoulder my ladder, the way your compassion for Regan was misleading you! Kate, Kate, the time we’ve squandered and that we mustn’t waste any more! When will you marry me, a thaisge, when?”
A thaisge! So—! Gay again, sure now of a shared love that could weather teasing, Kate mocked, “Soon—perhaps. For I warn you, if you persist in addressing me as your ‘good woman’, I may change my mind!”
“You just try! And ‘my good—’? Sure, I’ve never called you by such a name!” he denied hotly.
“ ‘Woman dear’, then. It’s as bad. And that’s what your small grasp of Gaelic believes a thaisge means, doesn’t it?”
But at that Conor’s huge laugh rang out. “And how you fell for it, Kate, didn’t you?” he chuckled.
“Fell for it? That’s what you told me it meant!”
“I did not, in so many words. I merely asked you how you’d care to hear it meant ‘woman dear’. At which you flared sky-high, though you can’t deny that in a way it does. For if you’re not my woman dear, dear woman, whose are you? However, at the time I thought you might be interested enough to look it up and would come back at me, demanding how I had dared to call you ‘my treasure’. If you had, then make no mistake, I’d have told you—and shown you in no mean fashion. But when you didn’t I had to conclude I’d lost that throw. So how did you find out—and when, woman dear?” he concluded wickedly.
But as Kate began to tell him she broke off, as did all the surrounding clatter and talk, giving way to the impersonal intrusion of the loudspeaker—“Will those passengers holding boarding cards for the flight to Belfast via Dublin please gather at Gate Number Two in readiness to be airborne. No smoking beyond that point. Thank you.”
As the message ended a kind of corporate sigh went round the reception hall. The unconcerned relaxed and sat back; the concerned moved towards the gate in question, and Kate showed Conor her boarding-card. “That means me,” she said unnecessarily.
He nodded. “Kate, must you really go?”
“I’m afraid so. My London boss was so good about giving me long leave that I must go back for a time. Besides, I’m expected by Lady Soames, and I’m hoping to get a few minutes with Bridie during the stop-over at Dublin.”
“Ah, Bridie. And what is she going to say about us?”
Kate laughed. “She’ll fall flat on her face with surprise. I shall have to remind her she once said you were exactly her idea of the ideal brother.”
“Bless her sweet heart! And Regan?”
“I know he’ll be happy for me too.” Kate glanced desperately at the small queue forming at the boarding gate. “Conor darling, I’ll have to go now!” she said.
“You will.” But though he had taken up her hand-luggage he dumped it again and looked about him wildly. “Wouldn’t you suppose,” he demanded, “that even a State airline would consider it had a duty to provide some place where a fellow could part from his girl in private? For I suppose you realise, Kate, that when I kiss you now as I mean to, we’re going to have a full-house audience for the show—d’you mind?”
“Mind? And why should I?” she said as she went into the arms he held wide for her, and lifted her mouth to his.
Haughty and aloof beneath her toque, the dowager stared with an air of having raised invisible lorgnettes. An unoccupied porter rolled his eyes roofward and pursed his lips for an appreciative wolf-whistle. The young mother chided her precocious first-born, “Husheen, will you now, the way they could be hearing you? What’s that? No, it’s not just like the telly—”
The dog, still among those present, looked idly on, scratched once at the bars of his crate, yawned, sighed, then curled round for sleep.
But for the two locked together at centre stage there was no awareness that was not of each other. Blind and deaf to a world beyond the charmed circle of their embrace, they clung all too briefly, their love speaking hungrily in the urgent, leaping rapture of kisses which were at once their agony of parting and their sweet pledge to the future.
Then there was no more time ... A gate clanged open and when it closed, with Kate on one side of it, Conor on the other, even fingertips could not touch.
But through its bare, Conor whispered, “Before you’re back, I’ll be coming to you, a thaisge. And until you come back for good and after, the Lake will still be there.”
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