Creatures of the Earth

by John McGahern

  ‘And I was the goodbye, the shake-hands?’

  ‘I didn’t plan it. I was attracted to you. We were free. That’s the way it fell. If I did it after joining, it would be different. It would be a very great sin.’

  ‘Perhaps we could be married?’ he pressed blindly.

  ‘No. You wouldn’t ask so lightly if we could.’

  ‘We wouldn’t have much at first but we would have one another and we could work,’ he pursued.

  ‘No. I’m sorry. I like you very much, but it cannot be. My mind has been made up for a long time.’

  ‘Well, one last time, then,’ he cut her short.

  ‘Hadn’t we the whole night?’

  ‘One last time.’ His hands insisted: and as soon as it was over he was sorry, left with less than if it had never taken place.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  After they had paid downstairs, they did not want to eat in the hotel, though the grill room was serving breakfast. They went to one of the big plastic and chrome places on O’Connell Street. They ate slowly in uneasy silence.

  ‘I hope you’ll forgive me, if there’s anything to forgive,’ she said after a long time.

  ‘I was going to ask the same thing. There’s nothing to forgive. I wanted to see you again, to go on seeing you. I never thought I’d have the luck to meet someone so open … so unafraid.’ He was entangled in his own words before he’d finished.

  ‘I’m not like that at all.’ She laughed as she hadn’t for a long time. ‘I’m a coward. I’m frightened of next week. I’m frightened by most things.’

  ‘Why don’t you take an address that’ll always find me in case you change your mind?’

  ‘I’ll not change.’

  ‘I thought that once too.’

  ‘No. I’ll not. I can’t,’ she said, but he still wrote the address and slipped it in her pocket.

  ‘You can throw it away as soon as I’m out of sight.’

  As they rose he saw that her eyes were filled with tears.

  They now leaned completely on those small acts of ceremony that help us better out of life than any drug. He paid at the cash desk and waited afterwards while she fixed her scarf, smiled ruefully as he stood aside to allow her the inside of the stairs, opened the large swing-door at the bottom of the steps. They walked slowly to the bus stop. At the stop they tried to foretell the evening’s weather by the dark cloudy appearance of the sky towards the west. The only thing that seemed certain was that there’d be more rain. They shook hands as the bus came in. He waited until all the passengers had got on and it had moved away.

  The river out beyond the Custom House, the straight quays, seemed to stretch out in the emptiness after she had gone. In my end is my beginning, he recalled. In my beginning is my end, his and hers, mine and thine. It seemed to stretch out, complete as the emptiness, endless as a wedding ring. He knew it like his own breathing. There might well be nothing, but she was still prepared to live by that one thing, to will it true.

  Thinking of her, he found himself walking eagerly towards the Busarus … but almost as quickly his walking slowed. His steps grew hesitant, as if he was thinking of turning back. He knew that no matter how eagerly he found himself walking in any direction it could only take him to the next day and the next.

  Sierra Leone

  ‘I suppose it won’t be long now till your friend is here,’ the barman said as he held the glass to the light after polishing.

  ‘If it’s not too wet,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a bad evening,’ he yawned, the rain drifting across the bandstand and small trees of Fairview Park to stream down the long window.

  She showed hardly any sign of rain when she came, lifting the scarf from her black hair. ‘You seem to have escaped the wet.’ The barman was all smiles as he greeted her.

  ‘I’m afraid I was a bit extravagant and took a taxi,’ she said in the rapid speech she used when she was nervous or simulating confusion to create an effect.

  ‘What would you like?’

  ‘Would a hot whiskey be too much trouble?’

  ‘No trouble at all.’ The barman smiled and lifted the electric kettle. I moved the table to make room for her in the corner of the varnished partition beside the small coal fire in the grate. There was the sound of water boiling and the scent of cloves and lemon. When I rose to go to the counter for the hot drink, the barman motioned that he would bring it over to the fire.

  ‘The spoon is really to keep the glass from cracking’ – I nodded towards the steaming glass in front of her on the table. It was a poor attempt to acknowledge the intimacy of the favour. For several months I had been frustrating all his attempts to get to know us, for we had picked Gaffneys because it was out of the way and we had to meet like thieves. Dublin was too small a city to give even our names away.

  ‘This has just come.’ I handed her the telegram as soon as the barman had resumed his polishing of the glasses. It was from my father, saying it was urgent I go home at once. She read it without speaking. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose I’ll have to go home.’

  ‘It doesn’t say why.’

  ‘Of course not. He never gives room.’

  ‘Is it likely to be serious?’

  ‘No, but if I don’t go there’s the nagging doubt that it may be.’

  ‘What are you going to do, then?’

  ‘Go, I suppose.’ I looked at her apprehensively.

  ‘Then that’s goodbye to our poor weekend,’ she said.

  We were the same age and had known each other casually for years. I had first met her with Jerry McCredy, a politician in his early fifties, who had a wife and family in the suburbs, and a reputation as a womanizer round the city; but by my time all the other women had disappeared. The black-haired Geraldine was with him everywhere, and he seemed to have fallen in love at last when old, even to the point of endangering his career. I had thought her young and lovely and wasted, but we didn’t meet in any serious way till the night of the Cuban Crisis.

  There was a general fever in the city that night, so quiet as to be almost unreal, the streets and faces hushed. I had been wandering from window to window in the area round Grafton Street. On every television set in the windows the Russian ships were still on course for Cuba. There was a growing air that we were walking in the last quiet evening of the world before it was all consumed by fire. ‘It looks none too good.’ I heard her quick laugh at my side as I stood staring at the ships moving silently across the screen.

  ‘None too good.’ I turned. ‘Are you scared?’

  ‘Of course I’m scared.’

  ‘Do you know it’s the first time we’ve ever met on our own?’ I said. ‘Where’s Jerry?’

  ‘He’s in Cork. At a meeting. One that a loose woman like myself can’t appear at.’ She laughed her quick provocative laugh.

  ‘Why don’t you come for a drink, then?’

  ‘I’d love to. With the way things are I was even thinking of going in for one on my own.’

  There was a stillness in the bar such as I had never known. People looked up from their drinks as each fresh newsflash came on the set high in the corner, and it was with visible relief that they bent down again to the darkness of their pints.

  ‘It’s a real tester for that old chestnut about the Jesuit when he was asked what he’d do if he was playing cards at five minutes to midnight and was suddenly told that the world was going to end at midnight,’ I said as I took our drinks to the table in one of the far corners of the bar, out of sight of the screen.

  ‘And what would he do?’

  ‘He’d continue playing cards, of course, to show that all things are equal. It’s only love that matters.’

  ‘That’s a fine old farce.’ She lifted her glass.

  ‘It’s strange, how I’ve always wanted to ask you out, and that it should happen this way. I always thought you very beautiful.’

 
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘You were with Jerry.’

  ‘You should still have told me. I don’t think Jerry ever minded the niceties very much when he was after a woman,’ she laughed, and then added softly, ‘Actually, I thought you disliked me.’

  ‘Anyhow, we’re here this night.’

  ‘I know, but it’s somehow hard to believe it.’

  It was the stillness that was unreal, the comfortable sitting in chairs with drinks in our hands, the ships leaving a white wake behind them on the screen. We were in the condemned cell waiting for reprieve or execution, except that this time the whole world was the cell. There was nothing we could do. The withering would happen as simply as the turning on or off of a light bulb.

  Her hair shone dark blue in the light. Her skin had the bloom of ripe fruit. The white teeth glittered when she smiled. We had struggled towards the best years; now they waited for us, and all was to be laid waste as we were about to enter into them. In the freedom of the fear I moved my face close to hers. Our lips met. I put my hand on hers.

  ‘Is Jerry coming back tonight?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can I stay with you tonight?’

  ‘If you want that.’ Her lips touched my face again.

  ‘It’s all I could wish for – except, maybe, a better time.’

  ‘Why don’t we go, then?’ she said softly.

  We walked by the Green, closed and hushed within its railings, not talking much. When she said, ‘I wonder what they’re doing in the Pentagon as we walk these steps by the Green?’ it seemed more part of the silence than any speech.

  ‘It’s probably just as well we can’t know.’

  ‘I hope they do something. It’d be such a waste. All this to go, and us too.’

  ‘We’d be enough.’

  There was a bicycle against the wall of the hallway when she turned the key, and it somehow made the stairs and lino-covered hallway more bare.

  ‘It’s the man’s upstairs.’ She nodded towards the bicycle. ‘He works on the buses.’

  The flat was small and untidy.

  ‘I had always imagined Jerry kept you in more style,’ I said idly.

  ‘He doesn’t keep me. I pay for this place. He always wanted me to move, but I would never give up my own place,’ she said sharply, but she could not be harsh for long, and began to laugh. ‘Anyhow he always leaves before morning. He has his breakfast in the other house’; and she switched off the light on the disordered bed and chairs and came into my arms. The night had been so tense and sudden that we had no desire except to lie in one another’s arms, and as we kissed a last time before turning to seek our sleep she whispered, ‘If you want me during the night, don’t be afraid to wake me up.’

  The Russian ships had stopped and were lying off Cuba, the radio told us as she made coffee on the small gas stove beside the sink in the corner of the room the next morning. The danger seemed about to pass. Again the world breathed, and it looked foolish to have believed it had ever been threatened.

  Jerry was coming back from Cork that evening, and we agreed as we kissed to let this day go by without meeting but to meet at five the next day in Gaffneys of Fairview.

  The bicycle had gone from the hallway by the time I left. The morning met me as other damp cold Dublin mornings, the world almost restored already to the everyday. The rich uses we dreamed last night when it was threatened that we would put it to if spared were now forgotten, when again it lay all about us in such tedious abundance.

  ‘Did Jerry notice or suspect anything?’ I asked over the coal fire in Gaffneys when we met, both of us shy in our first meeting as separate persons after the intimacy of flesh.

  ‘No. All he talked about was the Cuban business. Apparently, they were just as scared. They stayed up drinking all night in the hotel. He just had a terrible hangover.’

  That evening we went to my room, and she was, in a calm and quiet way, completely free with her body, offering it as a gift, completely open. With the firelight leaping on the walls of the locked room, I said, ‘There is no Cuba now. It is the first time, you and I,’ but in my desire was too quick; ‘I should have been able to wait,’ but she took my face between her hands and drew it down. ‘Don’t worry. There will come a time soon enough when you won’t have that trouble.’

  ‘How did you first meet Jerry?’ I asked to cover the silence.

  ‘My father was mixed up in politics in a small way and he was friendly with Jerry; and then my father died while I was at the convent in Eccles Street. Jerry seemed to do most of the arranging at the funeral, and it seemed natural for him to take me out on those halfdays and Sundays that we were given free.’

  ‘Did you know of his reputation?’

  ‘Everybody did. It made him dangerous and attractive. And one Saturday halfday we went to this flat in an attic off Baggot Street. He must have borrowed it for the occasion for I’ve never been in it since. I was foolish. I knew so little. I just thought you lay in bed with a man and that was all that happened. I remember it was raining. The flat was right in the roof and there was the loud drumming of rain all the time. That’s how it began. And it’s gone on from there ever since.’

  She drew me towards her, in the full openness of desire, but she quickly rose. ‘I have to hurry. I have to meet Jerry at nine’; and the pattern of her thieving had been set.

  Often when I saw her dress to leave, combing her hair in the big cane armchair, drawing lipstick across her rich curving lips in the looking glass, I felt that she had come with stolen silver to the room. We had dined with the silver, and now that the meal was ended she was wiping and shining the silver anew, replacing it in the black jewel case to be taken out and used again in Jerry’s bed or at his table, doubly soiled; and when I complained she said angrily, ‘What about it? He doesn’t know.’

  ‘At least you and Jerry aren’t fouling up anybody.’

  ‘What about his wife? You seem very moral all of a sudden.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to,’ I apologized, but already the bloom had gone from the first careless fruits, and we felt the responsibility enter softly, but definitely, as any burden.

  ‘Why can’t you stay another hour?’

  ‘I know what’d happen in one of those hours,’ she said spiritedly, but the tone was affectionate and dreamy, perhaps with the desire for children. ‘I’d get pregnant as hell.’

  ‘What should we do?’

  ‘Maybe we should tell Jerry,’ she said. It was my turn to be alarmed.

  ‘What would we tell him?’

  The days of Jerry’s profligacy were over. Not only had he grown jealous but violent. Not long before, hearing that she had been seen in a bar with a man and not being able to find her, he had taken a razor and slashed the dresses in her wardrobe to ribbons.

  ‘We could tell him everything,’ she said without conviction. ‘That we want to be together.’

  ‘He’d go berserk. You know that.’

  ‘He’s often said that the one thing he feels guilty about is having taken my young life. That we should have met when both of us were young.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean he’ll think me the ideal man for the job,’ I said. ‘They say the world would be a better place if we looked at ourselves objectively and subjectively at others, but that’s never the way the ball bounces.’

  ‘Well, what are we to do?’

  ‘By telling Jerry about us, you’re just using one relationship to break up another. I think you should leave Jerry. Tell him that you just want to start up a life of your own.’

  ‘But he’ll know that there’s someone.’

  ‘That’s his problem. You don’t have to tell him. We can stay apart for a while. And then take up without any fear, like two free people.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said as she put on her coat. ‘And then, after all that, if I found that you didn’t want me, I’d be in a nice fix.’

  ‘There’d be no fear of that. Where are you going tonig
ht?’

  ‘There’s a dinner that a younger branch of the Party is giving. It’s all right for me to go. They think it rather dashing of Jerry to appear with a young woman.’

  ‘I’m not so sure. Young people don’t like to see themselves caricatured either.’

  ‘Anyhow I’m going,’ she said.

  ‘Will it be five in Gaffneys tomorrow?’

  ‘At five, then,’ I heard as the door opened and softly closed.

  ‘Does Jerry suspect at all?’ I asked her again another evening over Gaffneys’ small coal fire.

  ‘No. Not at all. Odd that he often was suspicious when nothing at all was going on and now that there is he suspects nothing. Only the other day he was asking about you. He was wondering what had become of you. It seemed so long since we had seen you last.’

  Our easy thieving that was hardly loving, anxiety curbed by caution, appetite so luxuriously satisfied that it could not give way to the dreaming that draws us close to danger, was wearing itself naturally away when a different relationship was made alarmingly possible. Jerry was suddenly offered a lucrative contract to found a new radio/television network in Sierra Leone, and he was thinking of accepting. Ireland as a small nation with a history of oppression was suddenly becoming useful in the Third World.

  ‘He goes to London the weekend after next for the interview and he’ll almost certainly take it.’

  ‘That means the end of his political career here.’

  ‘There’s not much further he can get here. It gives him prestige, a different platform, and a lot of cash.’

  ‘How do you fit into this?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Does he want to take you with him?’

  ‘He’ll go out on his own first, but he says that as soon as he’s settled there and sees the state of play that he wants me to follow him.’

  ‘What’ll you do?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said in a voice that implied that I was now part of these considerations.