Maeve comes back with the brown ogee covered with sea-water in the bucket. It is a sea-mat and I tell her its name. She contorts and says it is horrible. It is about the size of a child’s hand, an elliptical mound covered with spiky hairs. I carry it over to you and you open one eye. I say, ‘Look.’ Your mother becomes curious and says, ‘What is it?’ I show it to you, winking with the eye farthest from her but you don’t get the allusion because you too ask, ‘What is it?’ I tell you it is a sea mat. Maeve goes off waving her spade in the air.
I have disturbed you because you sit up on your towel, gathering your knees up to your chest. I catch your eye and it holds for infinitesmally longer than as if you were just looking. You rise and come over to me and stoop to look in the bucket. I see the whiteness deep between your breasts. Leaning over, your hands on your knees, you raise just your eyes and look at me from between the hanging of your hair. I pretend to talk, watching your mother, who turns away. You squat by the bucket opening your thighs towards me and purse your mouth. You say, ‘It is hot,’ and smile, then go maddeningly back to lie on your towel.
I reach over into your basket. There is an assortment of children’s clothes, your underwear bundled secretly, a squash-bottle, sun-tan lotion and at last – my jotter and biro. It is a small jotter, the pages held by a wire spiral across the top. I watch you lying in front of me shining with oil. When you lie your breasts almost disappear. There are some hairs peeping at your crotch. Others, lower, have been coyly shaved. On the inside of your right foot is the dark varicose patch which came up after the third baby.
I begin to write what we should, at that minute, be doing. I have never written pornography before and I feel a conspicuous bump appearing in my bathing trunks. I laugh and cross my legs and continue writing. As I come to the end of the second page I have got the couple (with our own names) as far as the hotel room. They begin to strip and caress. I look up and your mother is looking straight at me. She smiles and I smile back at her. She knows I write for a living. I am working. I have just peeled your pants beneath your knees. I proceed to make us do the most fantastical things. My mind is pages ahead of my pen. I can hardly write quickly enough.
At five pages the deed is done and I tear the pages off from the spiral and hand them to you. You turn over and begin to read.
This flurry of movement must have stirred your mother because she comes across to the basket and scrabbles at the bottom for a packet of mints. She sits beside me on the rock, offers me one which I refuse, then pops one into her mouth. For the first time on the holiday she has overcome her shyness to talk to me on her own. She talks of how much she is enjoying herself. The holiday, she says, is taking her out of herself. Her hair is steel-grey darkening at the roots. After your father’s death left her on her own we knew that she should get away. I have found her a woman who hides her emotion as much as she can. The most she would allow herself was to tell us how, several times, when she got up in the morning she had put two eggs in the pot. It’s the length of the day, she says, that gets her. I knew she was terrified at first in the dining room but now she is getting used to it and even criticises the slowness of the service. She has struck up an aquaintance with an old priest whom she met in the sitting-room. He walks the beach at low tide, always wearing his hat and carries a rolled Pakamac in one hand.
I look at you and you are still reading the pages. You lean on your elbows, your shoulders high and, I see, shaking with laughter. When you are finished you fold the pages smaller and smaller, then turn on your back and close your eyes without so much as a look in our direction.
Your mother decides to go to the water’s edge to see the children. She walks with arms folded, unused to having nothing to carry. I go over to you. Without opening your eyes you tell me I am filthy, whispered even though your mother is fifty yards away. You tell me to burn it, tearing it up would not be safe enough. I feel annoyed that you haven’t taken it in the spirit in which it was given. I unfold the pages and begin to read it again. The bump reinstates itself. I laugh at some of my artistic attempts – ‘the chittering noise of the venetian blinds’, ‘luminous pulsing tide’ – I put the pages in my trousers pocket on the rock.
Suddenly Anne comes running. Her mouth is open and screaming. Someone has thrown sand in her face. You sit upright, your voice incredulous that such a thing should happen to your child. Anne, standing, comes to your shoulder. You wrap your arms round her nakedness and call her ‘Lamb’ and ‘Angel’ but the child still cries. You take a tissue from your bag and lick one corner of it and begin to wipe the sticking sand from round her eyes. I watch your face as you do this. Intent, skilful, a beautiful face focused on other-than-me. This, the mother of my children. Your tongue licks out again wetting the tissue. The crying goes on and you begin to scold lightly giving the child enough confidence to stop. ‘A big girl like you?’ You take the child’s cleaned face into the softness of your neck and the tears subside. From the basket miraculously you produce a mint and then you are both away walking, you stooping at the waist to laugh on a level with your child’s face.
You stand talking to your mother where the glare of the sand and the sea meet. You are much taller than she. You come back to me covering half the distance in a stiff-legged run. When you reach the rock you point your feet and begin pulling on your jeans. I ask where you are going. You smile at me out of the head hole of your T-shirt, your midriff bare and say that we are going back to the hotel.
‘Mammy will be along with the children in an hour or so.’
‘What did you tell her?’
‘I told her you were dying for a drink before tea.’
We walk quickly back to the hotel. At first we have an arm around each other’s waist but it is awkward, like a three-legged race, so we break and just hold hands. In the hotel room there are no venetian blinds but the white net curtains belly and fold in the breeze of the open window. It is hot enough to lie on the coverlet.
It has that special smell by the sea-side and afterwards in the bar as we sit, slaked from the waist down, I tell you so. You smile and we await the return of your mother and our children.
ANODYNE
JAMES DELARGY SAT in the corner at the small table with the one place-setting which the girl had indicated. She set the typed menu in its plastic casing in front of him and went off to lean against the side-board. There was a typing error, a percentage mark between ‘19’ and ‘July’. He propped the menu against the silver milk jug, dented and worn through to the yellow brass. When the waitress came back he ordered a mixed grill. She had a nice face when she smiled. The table cloth was white starched linen, clean except for one small stain with tomato seeds embedded in it. He picked up a knife and scraped the seeds from the cloth.
Three elderly priests or Christian Brothers came in, men with thin collars, and sat at a table in an alcove. At least one of them must be interesting, thought James. The eldest one with white hair looked a bit like Auden – his face all cracked and wrinkled. But he had been sadly disappointed in priests before. Not all of them were well read. His mixed grill came.
‘Do you do this all year round?’ James asked her.
‘Ach no, just for the summer,’ she said. Her accent was pleasant and lilting.
‘Are you a student?’ he asked.
‘Are you daft? Me, a student. I can hardly add two and two.’
‘Oh I see.’
‘There is no work around here in the winter. I go to Scotland to the factories. There is plenty of work there.’ As she went back to the kitchen James noticed that her legs were very thick and that half an inch of her slip was showing beneath her black dress.
After tea he took a raincoat and walked out to explore the town. It wasn’t much more than one street with a few smaller ones running off it. Most of the shop windows were full of holiday trinkets and picture postcards. He called in the biggest of these to see if there were any books. He had been foolish enough not to bring anything with him and the only reading he coul
d get at the station had been Howards End. It had been a long time since he had read it. The shop was dark, hung about with Aran sweaters and bales of Irish tweed. There was a glass counter full of gnomes and shamrock-covered ashtrays. A rack of postcards that swung round. Against the back of the shop was a small book shelf. He moved to it and began to read the titles on the spines of the books. A girl of about eight came out of the curtain covered kitchen.
‘Yes?’ she said.
‘I’m just looking.’ The girl stood on as if he wasn’t to be trusted. There was nothing but Dennis Wheatleys and Agatha Christies, science fiction and love paperbacks. There was another copy of Howards End and he smiled to himself. The only thing he could get was a Hemingway. He paid the girl who waited till he was out of the shop before she went back into the kitchen.
He walked the length of the beach but was stopped by a large triangular outcrop of rock jutting into the sea. He sat down and watched the water come sluicing in, higher and higher up the beach until it was at his feet. He liked what he had seen of the place – not bad for having been picked at random. The only place the doctor had told him to avoid was the place his mother had brought him for the past twenty years. He said there would be too many memories. ‘Go away – get yourself a nice girl. Fall in love and then come back and see me.’ The doctor said what he had to do was not to forget, but to use discretion and reason in remembering her. He must begin to build a new life for himself which his mother would have no part in. He must begin to see himself as an adult. He had protested that nursing his mother through that last terrible year would make an adult of anybody. Teaching through the day, sitting up most of the night, putting her on the commode, feeding her, caring for her, watching death insinuate itself into her face. Her nose sharpened like a pencil, her mouth caved in without her teeth those last four days she took to die. The only time he cried was the night she died. It was her total helplessness, hardly able to grip his hand, her sagging jaw, her total lack of dignity as she grunted and gasped for each breath. He thought of her as she was when he was a child and he crushed her slack yellow head against his cheek and cried. He tried to remember the name of the character in Camus’ book who went to the pictures the day his mother died. Later he killed an Arab. But he couldn’t remember – even now as he sat on the rock he couldn’t remember. He was feeling too hot again and he bent to the sea at his feet and splashed his sweating forehead with water. A wave came in and covered his shoes.
He saw that soon the sea would cut him off so he moved back across the beach. The water, flecked and layered with black and gold and yellow reminded him of some of the Impressionists.
Back at the hotel he went up to his room to unpack his things. His room had a small bay window with curtains hung across the spine of the D, a wardrobe, a dressing table with rosette handles, one of which came off in his hand when he pulled it. The drawer was floored with a page of The Donegal Democrat. Stooped over he read a report of a Gaelic match and laughed at the flowery parochial style. He’d had better compositions from his own lads. The carpet was threadbare and nosed its way into an old fireplace blocked by another page of newspaper. In one corner was a wash-hand basin which gulped and gurgled when anybody else in the house used theirs. High up on the wall was a black picture hook.
He packed what clothes he had neatly into the drawer. A fly bizzed at the bay window. He looked round for something to kill it with but could find nothing so he opened the window and shooed it out with his hand. If his mother had been there she’d have dealt with it in her own way. She hated flies. Her love of cleanliness was so surgical that she couldn’t bear one in the room with her. One day when he was cleaning out the fire he went to the bin with ashes and found his only copy of Death in Venice lying on top of the potato peelings and bacon rinds. He picked it up and walked back into the house holding the book between his finger and thumb.
‘Mother,’ he yelled. ‘Did you throw my Death in Venice in the bin?’ He held up the book.
‘I don’t know. I might have.’
‘In under God, why?’
‘I killed a fly with it.’
James looked closely at the cover. There was a small red splash.
‘Why do you kill flies with my books?’
‘It must have been the nearest thing to hand at the time.’ She shuddered. ‘Horrible big buzzer.’
‘Why don’t you use the paper?’ She didn’t answer. ‘Mother, sometimes you are incredible.’
‘Such a fuss over an old paperback,’ she muttered.
‘It’s Death in Venice.’
‘It’s all germs now.’
‘I swear if you do it again, I’ll leave. Get a flat of my own somewhere.’ He walked out and wiped the cover with a damp cloth dipped in disinfectant. How many times had she done that? There were so many of his books missing even though he had made a firm rule never to lend them. Maybe that’s where they were going. Into the bin. His mother had been hard to stick at times. He must stop thinking about her. Again he was feeling too hot. He filled the wash basin. The water was yellow-brown. It must be the turf. Small streams all over the bogs, ‘glue-gold’ was the colour of them. Invariably Hopkins found the right word. He splashed the cold water into his face.
There were other times when she was unforgettable, when he thought her the most beautiful woman in the world. He could sit and listen to her all night when she was entertaining guests. She talked to and questioned them with such quiet concern. She talked to them as if she loved them, as if she had singled them out from the common herd.
Many nights when they were on their own she would sit with one leg beneath her, always embroidering, and talk of her own girlhood. Of the big house in which she had lived, her mother’s dress hissing on the hallway, the place full of Italians visiting from the Dublin Opera, of silver soup tureens, of nannies and cooks and servants. Late in life when, as she said herself, nobody else would take her, she fell for a whiskey traveller who was a Catholic. Her family disowned her. He was a handsome man and his oval photograph, with his Bismarck moustache and butterfly collar still hung on the wall beside her bed. Then, she said, he became his own best customer.
A thing that he could never understand about her was that she loved books but didn’t respect them. She told him of an anthology of poetry she’d been given and of how each day she would go a long walk she would tear out several pages to take with her, being too lazy, she said, to cart the whole book about the countryside. He felt a lump in his throat and a hotness in his eyes as he thought of the neverness of her. He would never see her again. He must buy a hat tomorrow if it was warm and sunny. His bald spot became intolerably tender if he got it sunburned.
During tea he studied the faces around the dining room. He decided that he would have to make the effort to be sociable. On his way out he went to the table where the Brothers sat in the alcove.
‘Excuse me, could I buy you a drink after your meal?’ The biggest of the three raised his hands and laughed.
‘Ah no thank you very much but we don’t drink.’ He had the flattest of Dublin accents. The others nodded in agreement. James bowed slightly and could think of nothing more to say. He went out into the bar himself. He was no good at this sort of thing. His mother had always made the approaches. She had an unerring instinct for choosing the right people. You could see them warming to her immediately as she began to talk. The Brothers would never have refused her if she had asked them. But would she have asked them? Probably not, with her instinct.
James ordered a beer. There was a man sitting reading a book at the far side of the bar. He had the book flat on his knees so that the cover was hidden. James took his drink and sat at the table next to him. He sipped his beer. The man read on, not looking up.
‘Do you read much?’ James asked.
‘No. Not at all. Holidays mostly. Sometimes at night I’ll read a bit if I can’t get to sleep. It helps put me over.’
‘Yes,’ said James. ‘What’s the book?’ The man showed him the co
ver. It was an American sex novel. A picture of a blonde in her slip with one foot on a chair so that you could see her stocking tops and the v of her lace panties.
‘It was all I could get down here,’ he said. ‘Are you on holiday?’
James nodded and swallowed his beer.
‘Will you have another?’ said the man half rising out of his seat.
‘No. No thanks, I must be off,’ James answered quickly. ‘How long are you staying?’
‘Another week,’ said the man.
‘Then I’ll see you around.’
As James moved past the bar, the manager put his head round the door and said in an undertone to the barman, ‘John, you’ll not forget the bottle of Powers for the Brothers’ room.’
James walked out of town but the landscape was the same as far as the eye could see. A scatter of grey one-storey houses against the grey-green of the poor land. Networks of low stone walls fenced fields which were full of rocks themselves. He turned back seeing no variety and went back to his room to read Hemingway. At eleven he took his sleeping pill and fell asleep almost immediately. The last thing he saw was the picture hook above the mantelpiece, caught in a shaft of light from the street where the curtains did not quite meet.
‘Cheapskates,’ he thought, a favourite word of his mother’s.
The next day he walked along the beach close to the water’s edge. The tide was out and he discovered that he could walk past the rocks which had stopped him the previous night. After about a mile he came to another high projection of rock topped by tufted grass with a ravine at its centre. Round the corner of the rock he saw a girl. He ducked back then peeped out again to watch her. She was sitting on a rock drawing. Her long legs were bare and half folded under her. Her hair was yellow. He hesitated a moment then decided to walk past her to get a better look. He walked casually, his hands behind his back, looking out to sea and when he came level with her he glanced round. She smiled at him, guilty of her sketch book.
Collected Stories Page 10