by Mary Lavin
‘Well, perhaps you’ll come again,’ she said formally, but she knew that in this invitation, generosity was not on her side. It was nice to see that he thought otherwise.
‘That’s very kind of you, Mrs Traske,’ he said warmly. ‘I’d like very much to come.’ His pleasure was so genuine it added to hers, yet a ridiculous ache had gone through her when he used her surname, although anything else would have been unthinkable from a strange young man, a man years younger than her. Even if they got to know each other well, and he were to call again, and again, she could not imagine that he would call her Vera, ever. It was a name she had never liked. And lately she’d liked it less. At this moment, it seemed utterly unsuitable to her: a name for a young girl. It even seemed to have a strangely venal quality. But he was saying something, and she had to listen.
‘I was only saying that I don’t suppose you approve of calling people by their first names on a first meeting,’ he said.
Taken aback by the way their thoughts had run so close together, she hesitated. ‘Well, it doesn’t give much chance for measuring one’s progress with people, does it?’
‘I never thought of that,’ he said, and he looked at her, delightedly. ‘I must remember that.’ Again he seemed about to go, but again he stopped. ‘I correct examination papers at this time of year. I may get word any day from my landlady in Dublin to say that they have arrived. I’ll have to go back at once then. Would it matter, would you mind, if I came fairly soon? Very soon perhaps?’
‘Whenever you like. I’m always here,’ she said, and then they said good night, and he walked away.
As she went into the house, she wondered if he would come again. She hoped he would; it was a pleasant encounter. And she kept on thinking about it as she went around the house, fastening the windows and locking the door. Even when she went upstairs, she stood for a while at the open window, looking out and going over scraps of their conversation. Some of the things she had said now seemed affected. Had she lost the knack of small talk? In particular, she thought of what she had said about happiness, and not being able now to bear it. That was so absurd, but surely he understood that she meant a certain kind of happiness, possible only to the young. Indeed, it might well be that it was when one let go all hope of ever knowing it again that the heart was emptied and ready for simpler relationships, those without ties, without pain. But when she put out the light and turned back the white counterpane, breaking the skin of light on it, she felt vaguely depressed. Would there not always be something purposeless in such attachments?
Did she expect him to come again? Certainly not the very next evening. And so early. Only a short time before, she was in the garden, weeding and staking plants, working away, without noticing the day had ended. It was by the light of a big yellow moon that she was trying to see what she was doing. It was so low a moon, so close to the ground, and it shed so gold a light that, like the sun, it gilded everything. Unlike the moon of late night, it did not take all colour from the earth but left a flush of purple in the big roses and peonies, and a glow of yellow in their glossy stamens. Yet it was night. The birds were silent; a stillness had settled over the farm. Nervously, she gathered together the rake, the hoe and the spade, but she didn’t wait to put them in the tool shed. She hurried towards the house. In the doorway she delayed for a moment. There was a peculiar quality abroad. Was it expectancy? It’s in the night, though, and not in me, she thought, but just then, like a high wind falling, the expectancy died down as a step sounded on the gravel.
‘You didn’t think I’d come so soon, did you?’ Fergus said, smiling. ‘It’s even more marvellous than last night, though, and I thought of you not liking to go out at night alone. But you were going out?’
‘No. Going in,’ she said.
‘Good. I’m glad I came. Get something to put over your shoulders. Hurry!’
In spite of her surprise, she didn’t hesitate. ‘I’ll only be a minute,’ she said, ‘Won’t you come in while you’re waiting?’
He shook his head. ‘Houses weren’t built for nights like this.’
When she came out, he was standing clear of the shadows of the house, in the full light. ‘I was telling my uncle about you,’ he said when she joined him. ‘He wasn’t in bed when I got back last night. He sends you his regards. In fact, he sent you several messages, so many I’m sure I’ve forgotten the half of them.’ He smiled at her. ‘No matter, you can take them as given; they were all compliments and good wishes. And now,’ he said, surveying the view and taking her arm casually, ‘which way will we go? Down by the river? Or is the grass too high?’
‘We can follow the cowpaths.’
‘Oh, but the cattle go in single file, and we want to talk,’ he said, and he linked her more closely. It made her uncomfortable, but she knew that when they crossed over the wooden fence around the house and went into the field in front of it, they would have to unlink. He realised it, too, after a few steps. ‘It’s like wading through water, isn’t it?’ he said, amazed as the high grass weighted down their feet. ‘Does it never get eaten down? The place seemed heavily stocked to me as I came along here.’
‘It would take all the cattle in Ireland to graze it down at this time of year,’ she said carelessly.
He turned to her with an earnestness that was touching.
‘You had courage to keep it when you are so nervous here,’ he said. ‘Any other woman would have sold it and gone back to the city.’
‘That never once entered my mind,’ she said, remembering how from the first she was aware of the security she drew from this piece of ground. But she saw by his face that he thought she had kept it for the sake of the past.
‘I must tell you something,’ he said. ‘I nearly wrote you a letter last night after I went away from here. Would you have thought it very odd? The only reason I did not was because I’d have had to come back with it, and I thought that a footstep during the night might frighten you.’
‘It would have frightened the wits out of me,’ she said quickly. She did not ask what he would have said in the letter.
‘I knew it would,’ he said. ‘I’m glad I did not do it. Anyway, I think that you know without my saying it how much meeting you meant to me.’
‘It was nice for me to meet you, too,’ she said politely.
‘There is nothing rarer in the world than happiness,’ he said then.
‘Happiness? Whose happiness are you talking about’ she asked sharply.
‘Yours,’ he said deliberately. ‘I know what you’re thinking, but there is a kind of happiness that is indestructible; it lives on no matter what comes after. At least, that was how it seemed to me listening to you talking last evening.’
‘But we were only talking for such a little while,’ she protested.
‘No matter,’ he said. ‘Anyway, last night was not the first time I’d seen you. I used to study down by the river long ago, on our side, and I used to see you and your husband walking together in the fields. You used to go with him to count the cattle, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. I always went with him,’ she said absently, because her mind was going back over the previous evening.
‘How I used to envy your companionship,’ he said. They had reached the river bank and they had to walk slowly, because the ground was dented and uneven from where the cattle in wet weather had cut up the sod, which now was hard as rock. ‘Not that I have much experience,’ he went on, ‘but of the marriages I’ve seen at close quarters, not many were like yours. They weren’t failures, either; I suppose they were happy enough in a way.’ He hesitated. ‘Only it wouldn’t be my way,’ he said flatly.
‘And what would be your way?’ she asked laughingly.
‘Well, that’s just it,’ he said. ‘That’s what I wanted to try to tell you in the letter. You see, I didn’t have any clear idea of what I would want from marria
ge. I only knew what I wouldn’t want, until last night, listening to you.’
‘I don’t understand?’ she cried nervously, but she did remember that at one moment the night before she had felt uneasy. Had he formed some impression of his own at that moment? If so, she would probably be powerless now to alter it. Distantly, she turned away and looked down into the river. ‘Supposing the impression I gave you was wrong,’ she said. ‘Supposing I falsified it.’ When he said nothing, she turned and looked at him and she saw he was bewildered. Filled with remorse, she put out her hand to him. ‘It wasn’t false,’ she said quickly, ‘but that was one of the things I used to dread after his death, that the past would become altered in my mind, and that he would be made into something that he wasn’t.’
‘Not by you, though?’
‘No. By others, but it might have come to the same thing in the end. You cannot imagine how awful it was in those first months, having to listen to people talking about him, going on and on about him, mostly his family, of course, but my own people were nearly as bad, and friends and neighbours. Everybody. And all the time they were getting him more and more out of focus for me. He was – but you’ve heard your uncle talk about him, so you’ll know what I’m going to say – he was nearly perfect, guileless. He knew only candour, the kind of person who’d make you doubt the doctrine of original sin. But to listen to his family you’d think he was a man of marble. They diminished him. Instead of adding to him, they diminished him. Can you understand that? I used to think, immediately, that that was the way they would speak of him whatever he’d been; the dead are always whitewashed. And he didn’t need it. In the end, instead of listening to them, I used to sit trying to think of something about him that I didn’t like.’
‘Did you?’
‘Well, we used to quarrel when we were first married, but in all fairness to him it was usually my fault, although it always ended with his taking the blame. Not to be noble or anything like that, but just to stop us from arguing, which he hated; to get us back to being happy again. He used to say it didn’t matter what happened, I’d always blame him anyway, so it might as well be first as last. Well, one evening a few weeks after his death, I was visiting his people and listening to the same old rigmarole about him, and I got into a kind of a panic. Soon I wouldn’t be properly able to remember him at all; I thought I’d lose hold of what he was really like. I was so unhappy. And when I went out to the car and left it was a miserable evening outside. It was raining, for one thing, and the canvas roof of the car was leaking. I wouldn’t have minded that, only just at the loneliest and darkest part of the road I got a puncture. Well! I got out and I stood there in the rain and it seemed the last straw. But suddenly, instead of pitying myself, I felt the most violent rage sweep over me. Towards him, Richard. If only I could have confronted him at that moment, there’d be no doubt of what I’d have said. “Why did you die, anyway?” I’d have shouted. “Why didn’t you take better care of yourself and not leave me in this mess?” And then—’
‘Don’t tell me. I know what happened next,’ Fergus said. ‘You had him back again, just as he always was, unchanged, amused at you.’
‘Yes. And I began to laugh, there in the rain.’
There was silence for a few minutes. ‘Tell me,’ he said then. ‘What did you do about the puncture?’
‘Oh, that!’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I forget. What with one thing or another, in those days I was nearly always in that sort of situation. Such things were the commonplaces of my existence. I suppose another car came along, or I called at some cottage, or perhaps I walked to the nearest village. I can’t remember.’
‘Things must have been hard for you in the beginning,’ he said gently. ‘But you managed very well.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said deprecatingly. ‘Some things were hard in the beginning, but other things only got hard long afterwards. I’ll tell you a strange thing, though, if you’re interested. I don’t think I fully realised until recently, but in my heart I did blame Richard all along, not for dying, but for being what he was, for leaving a void that no one less than him could fill.’
They walked along a few more paces. ‘Is that why you didn’t marry again?’ he said. ‘It seems such a pity.’
‘For me?’
‘Well, for you, too, of course, but I wasn’t thinking of you. I was thinking of how much you have to give.’ But as he spoke he seemed to lose confidence in what he was saying. ‘I suppose giving isn’t enough, though,’ he finished uncertainly.
Sadly, she shook her head. ‘And yet it was a poor kind of faithfulness really, wasn’t it?’
‘It’s the only kind there is, I think,’ he said. ‘Do you know something?’ he added impetuously. ‘When I was walking home last night, I was thinking about your husband, and I envied him.’
‘A dead man?’
‘It’s not as absurd as it may seem. I feel certain that I’ll never have one quarter of the happiness he had.’
‘But you’re so young!’ she cried. ‘How can you tell what’s ahead?’
He looked away. ‘It isn’t a question of age. You know that. It’s temperament perhaps or maybe it’s merely chance.’ He looked back at her. ‘It’s not that I haven’t a normal capacity for love, either. The truth is that I have to be crazily involved or not at all. And I’ve never seen that kind of thing last for long. That was why, knowing what companions you were, it meant so much to me, last night, to see that you’d never lost that other quality either. Do you realise when I knew?’ He faltered before the cold look she gave him, but then he rushed on. ‘It was when you told me about the time you stayed out all night.’
‘Except I didn’t say that,’ she said crossly. ‘Not exactly anyway,’ she added, but she knew how rightly he had interpreted her vague words about that night.
‘Forgive me,’ he said gently. ‘It was from your face and from the love of your voice I knew what you meant. And I was certain then of how you spent that night. You see I never really thought that kind of love could last so long. Illicit love perhaps but not married love.’
Uncomfortable, she walked a little faster so that she out-distanced him by a few steps.
‘I was right, wasn’t I?’ he called softly.
‘Yes,’ she said at last. What was the use, now, of denying those dead hours? She sighed and waited for him. ‘I suppose you’d like to be married,’ she said, surprising herself by her words.
He answered more lightheartedly than she expected. ‘To the right person,’ he said. ‘You’d have been just right for me!’
It was because he said it so lightly and because she was oppressed by what had gone before that she, too, spoke lightheartedly. ‘Oh, don’t relegate me to the past like that!’ she said. ‘Why not say I’m a premonition of someone to come.’
His face clouded. ‘I wouldn’t say there’d be two of you in one lifetime,’ he said, and there was a note in his voice that was new and harsh, and, frightened by it, she was about to suggest that they turn back, when, wheeling around, he himself suggested it. ‘We’d better go back,’ he said. ‘Anyway, the moon has gone behind a cloud.’
‘Has it?’ Her eyes had been upon a small field of old meadow, along the headland of which they were passing. It was so neglected that the big white daisies in it met head to head and gave it an unbroken sheen of white that in the dark was like the lustre of the moon. ‘Just look at those daisies!’ she cried, pointing to them. ‘The place is getting so neglected. I’ll have to plough up that piece of ground and lay it down to new grass. There is so much that is neglected.’
‘Nonsense, I never noticed any neglect,’ he said so aggressively that, in order not to be annoyed, she had to tell herself that he was speaking, after all, in her defence.
‘You haven’t seen the place by day,’ she said quietly.
‘I see it every day,’ he said. ‘T
here isn’t a bit of it I can’t see from the other bank of the river. I saw you outside this morning, didn’t I?’
‘Did you?’ It confused her to think of being seen without knowing it, by anyone. She was glad that they were nearly back. They had been walking faster on the return than when they set out, and already they had reached the wooden paling in front of the house. ‘You’ll come inside this time, I hope, and have some coffee?’
‘We’d better see what time it is first,’ he said. ‘Tim was horrified at how late I stayed last night.’ Raising his arm, he was trying to see his watch, as if, she thought irrelevantly, as if with that upraised arm he was trying to ward off a blow.
‘Wait! There’s a light in the porch,’ she said. ‘It can be switched on from outside.’ But the switch was almost impossible to find among the tangled and overgrown creepers. ‘There’s neglect for you,’ she said as she plunged her arm deep into the leaves. ‘The roses are almost smothered,’ she said sadly. Yet when she found the switch and the light went on, the big white roses lolloped outward towards them. On long, neglected stems, blown and beautiful, they hung face down. Impulsively, he reached out and took one between the palms of his hands, tenderly, as if it were the body of a small bird. ‘Would you like one?’ she asked, and she tried to break a stem, but it was difficult because the sappy fibres frayed before they severed.
He took it from her, pleased. And then he gave an exclamation. ‘Oh, look at what’s on it. A cuckoo-spit.’
‘How disgusting. Throw it away,’ she said. ‘I’ll get you another one.’
But he put his hand protectively about it. ‘Why did you say that?’ he asked. ‘I was only amazed that a cuckoo should come so close to the house.’ Then he saw his mistake from her face before he went any further. ‘I forgot,’ he said, embarrassed. ‘They never do come close, isn’t that so?’
‘Never!’ She smiled. ‘They’re never seen at all. At least I’ve never met anyone who saw one.’