by James Hanley
“Up in the clouds,” she thought. “Happiness feeds on itself.”
“Can’t we? I love you,” he said.
“Put out the light, dear. I told you it hurts my eyes,” and he switched off the light. “Be happy now,” she said, holding him.
“I am.”
The weight of the man is upon her, the weight of the prison, the weight of his loss. “Were you really dreaming?” she asked.
“You seemed so far away,” he said, and you looked so peaceful, I watched, I waited for you to open your eyes. Were you dreaming, too?”
“No, dear. I was just lying there. I wasn’t asleep.”
Happiness gnaws again; contentment is a rack. “Sheila!”
“What?”
“I wish I really knew how you feel about me,” he said.
“I sometimes wonder if people really know when they’re happy,” she said, and the tip of her finger was circling his lips.
“Can’t you tell me?”
“No, dear, I can’t,” she said.
“There’s nothing wrong?” he asked. “You did seem so far away from me, I wondered what you were thinking about, I wondered if perhaps you’d changed.”
“There’s nothing wrong. I told you. You’ve just had a nasty dream, dear. I’m not surprised. For God’s sake don’t keep on tormenting yourself. Leave well alone. Be happy when you can. Now be good and go to sleep. I’m tired.”
“I’m sorry, darling.”
Happiness is afraid, is always afraid, and now he sees it lie so close to the cauldron of his fear. “Tell me, Sheila.”
“Tell you what?”
“Open your eyes. Why don’t you open your eyes and look at me? Please.” She opened them. She smiled up at him, she pulled his hair, she laughed.
“There is something,” he said, “I can tell, I can feel it, somehow you’re different.”
“Do go to sleep,” she said. Happiness will not rest, and will not close its eye.
“I’m sure there’s something,” he thought, “it’s something I’ve said, she’s remembered it, something I’ve done. God! I wish I knew. If only she’d say it, just the once. ‘I love you. I love you.’”
She seemed to divine his thoughts. “Can’t you be content. Isn’t this enough?” she asked.
Happiness bends, crawls on its knees. “Yes, I am happy, I am happy.”
“Then go to sleep.”
The darkness had come like a mask, as a relief. She wanted to draw away, but could not, his hand remained anchored in her own. “He doesn’t even understand,” and she wondered how it would be broken, how it would end.
Later she heard his deep breathing and knew him asleep.
She could not sleep. She lay there, motionless, poised again for a journey that had ended suddenly in a shout. She waited, she listened to the silence of this room. And then she was moving again, backwards through the darkness, beyond it, and beyond the sleeping man, back to a day that is greying with age.
“I told Desmond it was the end, and it was the end.” She cannot shut him out; he seems to have travelled far, out of the darkness of Gelton, she has felt him near, she has heard his footsteps behind her, from room to room, up and down stairs, and in this moment as her boat sails she seems to see him standing in this room. Towering and close, looking down, at her, into her. She can see his outstretched arms, hear him say very quietly, without a single note of protest, “Why have you done this to me?”
And behind him there rises up the very feel, and shape, and breath of Gelton, the sprawling city she has turned her back upon, the ugly, rambling house out of which she walked. She sees the man, the house. One of a row of twelve very tall houses, very detached, very redoubtable. These houses seem to have been built to last forever. They lie away in a pleasant backwater of Gelton, and they nest in a pool of silence. Their doors are rarely open, and there is a marked absence of children. There are a few dogs, and these, as if committed to the silence, only occasionally bark. The curtains upon windows hang like icicles. Behind them there seems to lie a locked-in and mysterious life. In the hours of daylight it goes to the ground. The passer-by hardly ever hears a shout, and, much less, a laugh. In this oasis the air is cleaner, the pattern of life stiffly conventional, the respectability intense.
Sheila can see this house very clearly through her shut eyes. She sees herself seated at her husband’s desk. There is a pen in her hand; she is writing a letter; she has torn it up, begun again, stopped, bitten the pen, written another, as she asks herself, “Will this be it, the final one, the one that ends it, that tells him, that opens wide his eyes? She sees herself writing once again, the hand moving more steadily across the page, as though now she knows. Yes, it isn’t difficult, feelings are out, smashed, there are only the words lined up in her mind like soldiers. There is no effort, no inner struggle. Nothing to leap out except the words. And, lying on this bed, far from Gelton, far from her life, she remembers them. She has written the letter, sealed it up, and placed it where he must see it.
“And after that I never gave it another thought, and I went up to my room, and Milly helped me to pack. In ten minutes it was finished, in twenty I was in the bus to the city, and in an hour I was on the ship. In two hours I was in the middle of the sea, and when I looked over the rails there was only the water and the rapidly approaching darkness, and I knew it was over.”
She can feel him in this room, see him, touch him. She can feel his warmth, his anger, his violence, his mute appeal. “Come back to me, Sheila? Won’t you?” If she put out her hand she could touch this man; he is real, he is flesh and blood. He is standing there, arms still outstretched in appeal, as he waits for the answer. The words are alive, warm in her ear. “Another five minutes,” she thought, “and my courage would have gone, I would have backed out, relented. That would have been worse than the decision.”
The man sleeps heavily beside her, but it is another’s breathing that she now hears, as she watches her husband look down, look in. He seems taller, more powerful, more determined.
“There was no other way out,” she told herself. “No other way.”
She talked to him in the dark room. “What a curious mixture you are, but you always were. And yet I actually loved you, headlong, madly, I thought there was nobody like you on the whole earth.”
She sees again the document-strewn desk, the untidy room, she can hear the pen fall to the desk, she can see the letter waiting for him. Ink flows from the nib, washes to the sea. A shore is long, sun-drenched, the man is there, she is at the turn of her life. “I wasn’t the least bit afraid of him, of a new country, a new life. I was young then. And one simply isn’t afraid. I felt as if I’d known him all my life. I was entangled. I just went off with him to this other life. The way he talked to me, I can hear him now, like a father, a priest, a schoolmaster. But he was afraid, yes, and I knew it quickly, he was afraid I’d come with him, afraid I wouldn’t. That long, dream-like walk we had together along the shore, right to the town. How exciting it was, something leapt up in me, as we left the town, as we boarded the boat, and I never once thought of my home, of what I had left behind. And I didn’t care. That first long, long night on the ship, huddled together, lost under overcoats, and then I fell asleep. I remember that also, and I never woke until he touched me on the shoulder, then kissed me and said, ‘This is it.’ And it was.”
The ship is so dark that she cannot see him, she only feels him there, and she presses her head against his shoulder, and shuts her eyes. It is too soon to look. And the bright eyes of a ship seek, and find, and hold to a great stretch of sleeping coastline. It is too soon to ask questions. It is too late to be afraid. She hears the sea tumble, and she opens her eyes, and it is so dark, so silent, that she asks him a single question. “Are we really there?” “Almost” she hears him say.
The sea glows in the blackness. The ship pitches, and her head goes down, a sea comes over, washes to the scuppers, and suddenly the wind changes.
“We’d better change sides aga
in,” he said, making for the lee shelter.
“Yes, I remember that curious night, that long morning, and I remembered wondering how long it would be before the light came. Is Gelton very big?”
“Huge.”
One after another lights twinkle along the shore. “Let’s walk around the deck,” he said. The benches, the hatches, even the dark corners held their groups of silent people. Suddenly she stops dead, and points to the sky.
“What’s that?”
“Gelton,” he said.
The coastline grows, seems to flow towards the ship that now is full of action, full of strange noises. Feet thundered along the decks, the derricks moved and the guy ropes swung idly over hatches, the blocks shrieked; the telegraph rang, a megaphoned voice roared from the quay.
“Hold on to my arm, Sheila.”
“I held on to his arm. That time I did feel afraid, really afraid.”
Sheila turned over on her side, looked towards the open window, out to the darkness, and thought how strange it was, lying there, thinking about it, hearing the shouts, seeing the man again, feeling him so close beside her, as she moved headlong into another life. “How earnest he was. How honest.”
“Are you afraid?” he said.
“I’m not afraid, Desmond.”
“Even now, you can turn back if you wish to.”
“Are you afraid?”
“No, Sheila, why should I be?”
“I don’t know.”
I didn’t.
“You may not like it,” he said.
A father again, my hand is lost in his own huge hand, and bending over me, like a mountain, so concerned, so tender, so warm. “I’m only afraid that it may frighten you,” he said.
“Why?”
“The world is not what you think it is,” he said.
And when I laughed he said, “And not like the long, innocent, lazy Irish days. Gelton is different.”
“D’you want me to go back?” I said.
How he clung to me then. “No. Don’t go. Don’t go. But you will write to your mother?”
“Yes,” I said, and in all that time it was the first occasion that I thought of Mother.
“Everything will be all right. Don’t cry,” he said. Dark on the quay, on the bridge, dark in the city. “And that’s how I came there, that’s how it began.”
She thought of it sadly, with pain, with a certain revulsion. “I can’t believe I’m home again. I can’t believe it.”
She opens her eyes, and there is the room, her room, and the bed, and the man in it, stranger and brother, warm again, living again. She thought of this huge house, she thought of the letter to her father, the cable to her brother; she could see smoke curling high from chimneys, a warmth coming back to it, her home, it had never been anything else. But the moment she closes her eyes she is voyaging again, further back, further in, deeper down.
“How he changed, how jealous he became, how brutal, how unfeeling towards others about whose rights he was always shouting so loudly. How he cringed, crawled, how he sometimes revolted me. Yet he could also make me laugh. And I never could stop loving him. There was something there, at first, something splendid, shining, and such courage, such energy, such splendid faith.”
The letter is open again, she is reading it. “You can never say that I was afraid, that I wasn’t always at your side, and I did strive to share a life with you that was totally strange, and sometimes terrifying. I’d never seen anything like it before, never. It wasn’t my world, but I stayed in it because I loved you, I did, and you know I did. It took me a long time to understand Gelton. I’ll admit that. The longer I lived in it the more I admired you. Sometimes I felt a loneliness in myself that nothing in your whole nature could remove. There were times, and I can say it now, there were times when I found that life disgusting, aimless, sometimes downright stupid. But I accepted the lot because I was in love with you, and perhaps I would be with you to-day but for the child. There is none, there will not be a child, because always you were afraid of it. I never understood, I don’t now. Sometimes I think you were afraid of me. But I couldn’t help being what I was. I am what I am. It was all so different on that first morning in Gelton, wasn’t it? The world was full of banners, and you were carrying them. I shall always remember that first morning in Gelton, always. You were so good, so considerate, so gentle, and my God, I was afraid, you knew I was.” She watched herself real in those days, acting in those days, blind in them.
Arm in arm up a long floating bridge, and on to a road that was dark and narrow, a road that seemed to have no end. Splashes of light, great pools of darkness, more lights, the roar of a train, the struck hooves of a struggling horse, and the sparks, and the shouts, and suddenly a curious noise. A noise like thunder. And they stopped dead. “What’s the matter, Sheila?” he said, and he put down the bag.
“It sounds like thunder,” I said. What is it?”
“Feet.”
“Feet?”
“Men,” he said, “men.”
“What are they doing?”
“Unless they’re bloody fools they’re running,” he said.
“Running? What for? Where to? At this time in the morning?”
“For work,” he said.
“Can I watch?”
“If you want to,” he said, and I knew at once that he didn’t want to watch, didn’t want to wait, only to press on to the mysterious hotel he had mentioned. And he drew me back against the wall, it seemed to be made of solid rock, and was damp, and I remember the water glistening on it, and I remember an enormous gate that at that moment threw itself open, and I watched and wondered. The thunderous noise came on. “What is it, Desmond?” I asked, still bewildered, and he said, “The world.”
I heard the feet more clearly, the men were coming in our direction, lots of men, scores, hundreds, and running, and waving their arms, and flying past us, and I stood out a little in the road to see those hundreds of flying backs, and hear the shouts as they ran, as they stopped, as the silence came, as more shouts struck the air, as the thunder began again, from stone to stone, from gate to gate. In through this one, like a wave, like a thunder in my ears.
“You and you and you.” I remember that, too. The voice that struck into them like whips.
“Enough. That’s all,” I said. “No more. No, no bloody more.”
And a gate moving, a gate closing. The black mass runs away again, into the darkness, along the shining silver ribbon of railway line, through the patches of light, running, and running, as though they must, as though they can never stop.
“What are they doing?” I asked.
“Looking for work,” he said.
“Do they do this every day?” I asked.
“Every day, in the morning, and in the afternoons, and in the night time, and every week and every month, and every bloody year to the end of the world.”
“What are they, Desmond?”
“Dockers,” he said.
“What do they do?”
“Work at the ships.”
And the next morning I heard them again, and the morning after that, and many a night, and then I knew that these men were running against the clock, and against disaster. I remember Desmond leaning to me, and whispering in my ear, “I always think of them as lunatics running through the asylum,” but I only knew the noise of their flying feet, and saw a terrible need nailed to those flying backs.
“You’ll get used to it,” he said. And I got used to it.
The days struck back at her, the moments lived. She saw herself live. “The noise of it, my God, shall I ever forget the first morning I woke up in my own home.”
One road is much like another, one street, one house, one window. One man is like another, one woman, one child. Miles of streets, rivers of roads.
“In one dark morning I had a whole clear picture of Gelton, of my new life. I saw them all, the men and women, and children. I saw the sailors and the ships, and the sea. The factories like for
ests, roads and streets like tunnels to this drawing down, sucking in, unsatisfied sea. I was close to it, and yet in a curious sort of way I was also detached from it. I remember one winter’s day walking through that city as in a dream. The streets were alive with people. Great hordes of them moving down like waves to the places where for one whole day they would drive and hammer, blast and burn, haul and coil, climb and descend, into ships, into foundries and factories, into yards and docks. And the noise, the noise. I can still hear it,” as behind her closed eyes she sees, remembers. Every manner of vehicle on the move. The train roaring over my head, the tooting tugs, the calling sirens, the wailing foghorns, and always the cars and the horses and the lorries, and the running men. How dark that road was, how heavy the air. And yet those swarms seemed to give the whole thing a warmth, a something glowing and feverish. One evening I sat opposite my husband in our first home, and he explained it to me.
“A vast spider’s web. The intricacies of it, the cunning of it. He talked to me of Gelton, of the life in it. What it was all about, what it meant to him. Those running men, that incessant roar, the continuous hammering and blasting, the ocean of energy, the mountain of labour. Quietly sat back in his chair, in the doll-size room.
“It was my first lesson in a new kind of language. A first lesson in survival. It made me think of my home, the well of idleness, the sink of inertia. How far away it seemed to me that evening, whole deserts away. I listened, and I went on listening, and I began to understand the man with whom I had run away, with whom I now shared my life.
“‘In Gelton,’ he said, ‘everybody works. Very hard, you have to. It’s that kind of a city. It’s a nice habit, a useful one. It’s a bad habit to be lazy. You mustn’t be blind, it’s a bad habit to be blind, to be incautious, to be slow, to be behind the clock, to be flat on your back instead of standing on your tiptoes. Fall down the once and others will crawl over you. Get up two minutes late and another man is eating your loaf. Look the wrong way at the man you work for, and at once you are less than a man. Here you fight to work. It’s very different from the land of the long afternoons and the mornings that snore away under the Celtic twilight. When you get your work you hang on to it with your claws, you get a good grip on your luck. Here everything’s chancy, and everything’s final. No doddering, no dreaming aloud. In the morning, when I go off to my work, I always remember those who are behind me, watching me, never letting me out of their sight, and I always see to it that nobody catches up with me. If they did you’d see the picture that I wouldn’t like, and you’d never once get the hang of it. Think of it, Sheila. Only a very few weeks ago you were living a very different kind of life, in a world that hasn’t got any untouchables since they aren’t there to touch, even if you wanted to. After you’ve been here a while you’ll find out the things I found out, though perhaps in a different way. I found it out by accident. How? It hardly matters. I just found out. In Gelton life is in two separate compartments. Us, and the others. The others. The others keep us on the boil, keep stirring, a tremendous stew, and most of it Irish.’