

### THE FOURTH MAN

PHILIP MATTHEWS

Copyright Philip Matthews 2014

Smashwords Edition

ISBN 9781311401595

EPISODES

I

1 Apple

2 Friday Afternoon

3 Passion

4 Edge

II

5 Dancing in the Dark

6 Bona Festa

7 In the Land of the Prodigal

8 Return

III

9 Snow

10 True Love

11 Masque

12 Strict Neutrality

IV

13 Inertia

14 Chance Meeting

15 Űber etwas, űber irgend etwas

16 Rehearsals

PART ONE

1 THE APPLE

The tiff that was the cause of the fight between Jimmy Sullivan and Richard Butler occurred quite suddenly during one of their childish games. Antipathies in their natures predisposed them to it.

But by the time Gussie Hanrahan had found a quiet spot in the lane behind Richard's house and had arranged the rules of the fight, both had forgotten the reason for it. The result was that while Gussie performed his role as referee with gusto – as leader, by age, of the group of boys he was used to assuming it during times of conflict – Richard stood to one side of him, arms slack by his side, faintly embarrassed by the prospect of action, for it was his nature to be passionate of mind and word and, beyond necessity, thoroughly inactive in the world. Jimmy, who faced Richard from Gussie's right side, managed to put a good face on it, a ferocious one; for though he was more puzzled than embarrassed by the prospect of a fight, a memory of the emotion of the tiff remained in him to give authority to his grimace and flexed arms.

The remaining boys in the group stood in a semicircle, with the wall to complete the rough ring, and displayed various degrees of interest in the proceedings.

Just when Gussie thought he had worked everyone, including himself, up to the proper pitch, Richard's younger brother appeared at the backdoor to their house and in all innocence shouted to tell him that mother was home. By reaction Richard made his excuses and ran the short distance to the door and up the garden to the house. His mother had just laid down a large shopping bag and was smiling in relief. In the matter of fact voice she used with the two boys, which mingled mockery and pleasure, she complained lightly of the weight of the bag and wondered why they didn't arrange to come and meet her and help her with it. As she had made this suggestion many times before the boys merely smiled, their eyes flickering from her face to the bag on the table. She caught these glances, and laughed. She produced two large red apples and handed one to each of them. Richard took his and bit into it immediately, his hand tremoring with tension. A warm feeling of anticipation flushed his body as the thought struck him that now his mother was home from her shopping, tea would soon be ready. But then his father should be home and they would sit around the table together, as they did every evening.
He heard Gussie's impatient voice calling him. He quickly thanked his mother for the apple and dashed up the garden path. She automatically called after him to care he didn't dirty himself. His brother chose to sit on the grass in the garden and eat his apple in the sunshine.
Almost half the apple was eaten by the time he rejoined his friends. Jimmy was still stanced, ready for the fight. Gussie grasped Richard's shoulder impatiently and squared him up against Jimmy. Seeing the apple, he pulled it from his hand and told him to fight now. Then he released Richard, stood back and shouted 'Go!'

Jimmy hit Richard one panicky punch low down in the solar plexus. Richard's eyes glazed as he staggered back to the wall. Jimmy stood watching him, hoping the fight was over and he had won. Some of the audience complained that the punch had been a foul and appealed to Gussie to do something about it.

But Gussie was busy gorging the apple. (Except for the core, for he believed that apple seeds were poisonous.)

He took one final look of satisfaction as the butt before throwing it away. As he licked the last of the juice from his lips he took note of the situation and cried 'Foul!' then he announced it was time for tea and led the gang up the lane in the general directions of their homes.

2 FRIDAY AFTERNOON

Brother Desmond made a quick flourish, of relief, on the board with the chalk as he scratched the figure two: the last piece finally unravelled from the jigsaw of the equation for the benefit of his pupils. Then he turned on his heels and walked quickly to the window and looked out. The day had remained calm and bright: early spring. On the third floor of the new wing: Dublin stretched away below him to the west, a grey waste of low slate roofs extending as far as the reddish bulk of the brewery. Very few trees were to be seen, but luckily those few were directly below, bordering the playground: plane trees, squat in this temperate climate, buds clearly seen at this height.

Brother Desmond sighed. The city still puzzled him, even after twelve years. Perhaps it really frightened him.

He spun on his heels, soutane swishing through the air. Some of the boys had finished copying the equation into their exercise books and were gazing docilely before them. Brother Desmond scanned the forty boys. When he came to the big, straw-headed boy at the back, he paused. Instinct told him that this strong, gangling youth would very soon become rebellious. He could see it growing in his eyes as a kind of terror.

It was the age they were at: twelve going on thirteen. Brother Desmond didn't know why. At least, he didn't think he did. He could not remember himself at that age. Living in the country had perhaps made a difference. What he remembered most clearly from his teens were the evenings on the playing fields, a hurly in his aching hands, staring at the bright sky with the euphoria of exhaustion.

And then there was Corrigan. Nothing but the foulest filth issued from that slack, reptilian mouth of his. With him there would be trouble of another sort. Already he had had to move him three times since Christmas. He couldn't punish him, for he couldn't draw attention to the boy's peculiarities. He had spoken to Brother Robinson, the Head Brother, about him, and had been told to try to understand the lad's tastes. Understand? Tastes? That hadn't helped at all.

Most of the boys had finished copying the equation by now. Brother Desmond glanced across at the electric clock over the door. Five to three. He would wait one more minute. He knew who would be the last in finishing: Purcell. Grime ingrained into his neck and his skin glazed as a result of an unhealthy diet. His stupidity was a goad, though Brother Desmond knew it was really apathy. Twice already this term he had thrashed him, stung beyond endurance by the youth's inability to answer even the most elementary question.

He turned back to the window and gazed up at the puffs of cloud approaching from the southwest. Against his will, the desire for the open country surged in him. Dark woods and bright meadows: the lowing of the milch cows in the evening light. Sometimes the structures of the abstract knowledge he imparted day after day escaped him and he was left hollow and vertiginous. Then he would remember his father's voice out in the byre, encouraging the cows or bullying the dog, and he would crave the simplicity of childhood.

'Now.' He spoke the word to the world at large beyond the high window, though intending it to draw his class's attention. All but a few had transcribed the equation. He went to the board and began to rub out the figures, starting at the top and working his way slowly down. He was conscious of both punishing the slower boys and yet of teasing them. He did not have to look around to know that they were now scribbling feverishly. Charitably, he left x = 2 untouched.

He turned to the class and buried his hands in the folds of his soutane. 'Now,' he said in his baritone southern accent. 'For Monday do the first six questions on page twenty six. The example I have given will show you how they are to be done.'

Higgins, one of the seen-to-be-bright boys occupying the front desks, immediately raised his hand and piped ingratiatingly: 'Please, Brother, could you go over it again? I don't fully understand it.'

Brother Desmond gave him the hard eye. 'What don't you understand?' he said, unwillingly warming to the boy. When Higgins opened his mouth to speak, his eyes bright because of the attention he was receiving, Brother Desmond cut him off by saying: 'Well, go up to the board and do the first question.'

Higgins blanched, but then he manfully took hold of himself and carried the thick algebra book to the board. Fussy, conscious of being in everyone's sight, he picked a fresh stick of chalk from the runnel under the board. To the unbounded delight of the class it broke as he laboriously wrote the first figure. However, he solved the problem without any trouble, which didn't surprise Brother Desmond.

'Sit down, Higgins.' The boy slipped happily back to his desk.

It was ten past three.

'Open your history books.' He went to his desk and lifted out a pile of exercise books, ignoring the scramble as the class searched schoolbag, case, even paper bag, for the appropriate book. He sat down, watching them sternly, and waited until quiet had settled once again on the room.

'O'Callaghan,' he barked suddenly. A red-headed boy with a long freckled face started and leaped to his feet.

'Yes, Brother?'

'When was the battle of the Yellow Ford fought?'

O'Callaghan blushed a bright crimson and began to twist his fingers. Everyone in the class knew why the question had been asked. Every period began with this tension as corrected work was given back. They knew there could be some very grim post-mortems.

The boy gulped and tugged the lapel of his blazer. '1593?' It was a question. He had written 1596 in the test on Wednesday.

'Butler,' Brother Desmond snapped. 'Tell him.'

Butler wasn't paying attention. He had been gazing out the window. Nevertheless, he got slowly to his feet and said in a dry voice, while yet half erect: '1598.'

Brother Desmond was aggrieved that Butler knew the answer. It was a kind of victory for him.

'Right. Sit down, both of you.'

O'Callaghan disappeared as though a trapdoor had been sprung under him.

Brother Desmond stared at his class for a while, then he spoke sarcastically, for he was as weary as they:

'For Irishmen, you know precious little about the most tragic period of your history. Most of you, and not only O'Callaghan, got the dates wrong. One of you, who remains nameless, even included the massacre of Drogheda in the wars of the Ulster Princes.' He paused. 'It is not good enough. I think I would be justified in punishing three quarters of you for the slovenly work done on Wednesday. Instead, I give you fair warning that I will set a paper on the same subject on Monday and that I expect you all to write perfect answers. Do you understand?' Forty heads nodded. 'You have the weekend to study your books... Remember, I will make no allowance.' He paused again, letting his words sink in. He felt the rising tension in the room. They know what to expect, he thought with a certain finality.

'The sooner you understand that the man who does not know his nation's history cannot claim his place among his people the better.'

He brought his open hands down on to his desk with hollow thuds.

'Now, move up three to a desk and I will read the chapter to you.'

The cloud of apprehension evaporated as quickly as it had formed. The boys at the back came forward and squeezed into the front desks, so that the class crowded up close to him.

Half-three. Fifteen minutes to go.

A flash of movement caught his eyes. Caden and his sweets.

Brother Desmond opened his dog-eared history book and looked down at the woodcut of Hugh O'Neill:

Tomorrow they played the Brothers of O'Connells on the playing fields at Dolphin's Barn. He could hear the hard leather ball strike the ash and hear the cries thin and urgent in the open under the bright spring sky.

3 PASSION

The three of us had been away, rambling, talking and poking about, not quite sure of the object of our escapade, through a wood at the edge of the city on one of those long summer evenings when the sun sets over a period of hours in a blaze of white light.

They were evenings of grace, when the inhabitants of the city – well, my parents, at any rate – would sit out in their gardens and enjoy the relief of the cool air and the security of a cloudless sky, it being a rare thing. Though if the flies became too much of a nuisance, or my mother grew apprehensive of the bees that buzzed very audibly among the roses and chrysanthemums, they would go indoors and sit in the front of the house, where the sun never shone at all, and watch the bright sky with greater ease.

But for my part, I was in my early teens then, I could not be easy. As an evening such as this came on, and the compress of the heat of the day was dissipated, I would become restless. Something in the outside world seemed to call to me and I would well up inside and go to meet it.

It was usual for the three of us, Ben Scott, Tommy Hagan and myself, to venture out of the old suburb in which we lived and make our way through Harold's Cross and Terenure, our eyes always on the mountains before us, at least mine were, until we came to this wood, when, realising the impossibility of reaching the foothills in the time we had available, we would decide to wander through it. The evenings, long as they were, were not endless.

But the mountains were always my secret objective. I knew that there, high in the clear air, I would find peace. Tommy, as I had come to recognise, would go where-ever he was led; he would always desire for himself what others desired for him. He would go far in the world, and he did, for he could take a hint like nobody else I knew. Ben, on the other hand, was a different case. He was older than Tommy or I, going on seventeen at the time of this particular incident, and much taller; almost a different species in fact. Where Tommy and I were slim and brown headed, he was heavy boned and blond, with a pink, pockmarked face. And where his expression was one of strained attention, accentuated by a slight cast in his right eye, Tommy's was one of watchfulness, knowing already in his fourteen years that most of the important things occur on the edge of vision, where the masks begin to dissolve. My expression, if photographs of the time are of any use, seems to have been one of apprehension, a form of watchfulness also, although defensive and lacking in ingenuity.

Tommy had joined my class at school a year previously, coming with his family to Dublin from somewhere in Munster, his father, a civil servant, having been promoted.

We came out of the wood and stood at the edge of a rough meadow that sloped down to a ruined boundary wall. It had been part of an estate once upon a time. We stood there, bits of stick in our hands, which we had used to slice through the lower branches of the trees, staring non-plussed at the evening, realising perhaps that it was almost at an end and that our duty, or so it appeared to us in our disappointment, had been done and that we could go home and look forward to tomorrow as a new day.

It was Tommy – of course – who spotted the girls. They were sitting in a corner of the meadow, close to the wall, their heads barely showing above the tall grass. And once he had told us, our attention was riveted to the spot where they lay. The evening turned about and the light which had been fading flared and intensified on our eyes as we peered down towards them, so that we were obliged to squint. Ben took two steps ahead into the long grass and halted, gazing down. Then he turned and beckoned us abruptly with his hand, his face deeply shadowed in the light, his eyes glistening and odd, the cast no doubt creating this impression. Tommy moved quickly enough, but I hesitated. Behind Ben's authoritative gesture I sensed bravado. He had lost his mother six years before and it was said that his family had become wild as a result, his older brothers being the example to prove this observation. Ben, the mother's favourite, was thought to be more restrained and considerate – hence the reason for his being allowed to be my friend. But I had always doubted the sincerity of his consideration, sensing that it sprang from helplessness; for why else would a youth of his age seek friends among us who were nearly three years his junior. I was afraid of him, because of his helplessness: he was also more inclined to discuss things with Tommy than with me, because, as he said a number of times, I looked at him too intently while he spoke. Perhaps he was conscious of the cast in his eye; perhaps he thought I indulged him, as my parents did. He never realise that I was afraid of him and was trying hard to anticipate him, though what I was to expect I didn't know, much less what to do in defence.

Ben set off down the meadow, making a great deal of noise, followed by Tommy, who picked his way carefully through the flattened grass in his wake. Throwing my piece of stick away, I trailed behind, looking about me, wondering what had happened to the evening – everything had been thrust at a distance and had become strangely merciless. The sky was greatly enlarged, the colours drained from it so as to leave only the harsh white light.

Ahead of me, Ben called to the girls in a casual voice that tried to embrace. One of the girls squealed, and I knew instinctively that they had seen us coming out of the wood and were lying there waiting for us. Why had they not stood up and come forward to meet us, I wondered, or at least moved away? We had never approached girls before in this manner, though we had often passed groups of girls in the wood or the public park nearby, when we had given them no more than a searching glance. Besides, what sort of girls were they to sit alone like this in the dusk?

When I reached the spot where they sat, Ben was standing over them, pushing his stick into the ground and pulling it out with effort, his large hands embracing the top of the stick. Tommy stood a little to one side of him. He rested his stick on the ground, holding it with one hand while the other was jammed in his trouser pocket.

Ben was laughing, his nose high in the air as he averted his face, hoping no doubt that they would not see the cast. The girls too were laughing, plucking at the long grass as they did. Tommy smiled, and smiled.

For my part, I was terrified by the sight of them. They were so restless: laughing, fidgeting and pulling unconsciously at the grass. One of them, seeing me, pointed at me and cried:

'Here he comes, Paddy Last!' and shrieked with laughter, in which the three remaining girls joined.

'Paddy Last,' Ben repeated, his mouth twisting slightly as he grinned.

Tommy bent forward, Ben blocked his vision, and smiled, his eyes twinkling.

'And what are four girls doing sitting in a lonely place like this?' Ben asked rhetorically.

'We're waiting for the last bus,' the oldest girl replied.

The four girls screamed with laughter and made eyes at each other. Ben, imitating his religious teacher, smiled a smile at the horizon before looking directly at the girl who had spoken.

'Where do you live?' he asked her, this time speaking in his normal voice, though it was edged with strain.

'What do you want to know for?' the girl retorted, speaking to him alone and scrutinising him. Ben continued to watch her, but did not reply. He clenched his stick, which was stuck deep in the soil.

Finally, with a toss of her lank, dark hair, the girl replied, 'Kimmage.'

Ben sighed and pulled the stick out of the ground. Then he went and sat beside her, his legs crossed under him. Tommy, moving with alacrity, hunkered down in such a position as not to align himself with anybody, girl or boy.

I remained standing, looking at the girl who was nearest to me. In awe I saw that she was gazing up at me. Though I was sure she was older than me, sixteen or seventeen, she did not seem much taller than me. She had a thin face, pale, with a small pointed nose above compressed lips. Her eyes were a dull blue and wore a dazed expression. She had on a hand-knitted cardigan of green wool that was faded in comparison with the translucence of the olive green buttons that held it fastened about her. The collar of her dress was turned out over the cardigan; it emerged again at her waist and was spread out over her legs and feet. Though it was freshly washed, it had not been ironed.

Timidly I sat down beside her and said 'Hello' lamely.

She nodded to me, biting her lower lip as she did. She was pulling frantically at the grass beside her.

In the small space of time between joining the group and sitting down with them, the world had taken several more violent turns before me. In the twilight the landscape had finally come to rest at an immense distance from me, even the white light had ebbed appreciably; but most of all I felt as though I was suspended naked in a place as dark as it was light, for the darkness was pierced by light, and the brightness throbbed with shadow. And I was glad of it, content with it, for all I had to do now was reach out and touch the hand that rested on the grass beside me, and things would remain as they were and I would not be frightened. But the hand jerked away when I touched it. I said something which I knew instinctively would reassure her, though what the words were I did not know. Again I grasped the hand, and this time it remained in mine, quiet and unmoving, as I wanted it to be. Then I squeezed the hand, and feeling the response, hesitant as it was, I was filled with peace.

When I focused back on to the world, I saw that Ben was lying over the girl he was with, kissing her. She had her hand in his hair; the other was out of sight, trapped by her side, I assumed, by the weight of his body. His stick lay to one side, where he had tossed it.

Tommy was hunkered down, leaning on his stick, facing the two remaining girls, who talked quietly together. He appeared to be unmoved by it all.

Suddenly Ben's girl pulled away from him and sat up. She looked at him for what seemed a long time, amused by his confusion. Then she pushed his arm away and stood up and brushed her dress down.

'Home, girls,' she said loudly, 'we're keeping these children from their beds.'

In the twilight her face seemed drawn and worn: she must have been in her twenties. When she turned I could see that the back of her dress was hopelessly creased; it struck me as being absurd that a girl could dress like that in public. I wanted to laugh at her, but the sight of Ben's face stopped me. What pain there was in it!

I released the hand of the girl beside me. Mutely, she scrambled to her feet and joined the other girl. I was vaguely embarrassed to see her standing there, separated from me.

As the girls moved away through the grass, the big girl shouted back: 'Mind you go straight home to your mammies now. And don't get lost in the dark.'

Two of the girls linked her on either side, the remaining girl, the one I had sat with, linked the girl on the right. Abreast, they marched through the grass towards the boundary wall, singing at the top of their voices.

We watched them go, at least I did, and I'm sure Ben did, for he was so attentive as he looked in their direction and rubbed his lips together. I suspect Tommy watched us, or the sky; but whatever he did for those five minutes, he did not look after those girls as we did. After all, what was the use?

When they had finally disappeared, through a gap in the wall, and their singing had become a murmur, Ben turned to Tommy and said:

'That was a change, eh, Tommy?'

He clapped him on the shoulder.

'Well, it's getting late, we'd better head off home.'

Tommy smiled at Ben, who was looking about for his stick, and then smiled at me. But I, being aware of the moistness of my hand, glared back at him. I wanted no conspiracy with him.

When the stick had been found we set off in file through the grass, Ben leading, with Tommy immediately behind him, angling away from the direction the girls had taken. We climbed over the wall at a point where it had been reduced in height by a fall and landed in the public park.

Ben paused for a moment to look about him, tapping the side of his shoe as he did. Back and forth his eyes swivelled: I guessed he was looking for the girls. Naively, I thought he was living in hope. I was: but it had very little to do now with that slip of a girl.

Just then a cyclist came whizzing along the path, head down, pumping with all his might on the pedals. Ben chose this moment to resume walking. I shouted to the world at large to look out. (Where was Tommy?) The cyclist looked up. Seeing Ben in his path, he swerved away on to the grass, one foot dragging along the ground. Ben leaped back, raising his stick in fright. The cyclist arced back on to the asphalt, braking his slithering machine furiously.

'Watch were you're going,' Ben bellowed after him and swore violently.

The cyclist managed to stop. He placed his two feet on the ground and looked back at us.

'You blind bastard,' Ben raged, 'you nearly killed me.' His pink cheeks deepened in colour, showing up more clearly the pockmarks high on his cheeks.

The cyclist dismounted, pushing the bicycle onto the grass and laid it on its side. Then he turned to face the approaching Ben.

'You should keep your eyes open,' the cyclist said dully, peering into Ben's eyes. He was slightly taller than Ben, and older, but slimmer.

They stood facing each other, both squinting in the poor light. Tommy, quick off the mark as usual, sidled up to Ben and stood at his side. He placed his hands behind his back and allowed the stick to dangle. I hung back. I could find no entry into what was happening; and even with my limited appreciation, I was not going to join Ben and Tommy in fighting this stranger, with such little cause.

The cyclist bent down slowly, not taking his eyes off Ben – he ignored Tommy – and pulled out his bicycle clips and slipped them into his pocket. Ben broke his gaze and stood back, and began tugging his jacket off. The cyclist went over to his bicycle, stripped off his jacket, folded it and laid it across the saddle. When Ben had his jacket off, Tommy was beside him, his arm outstretched to receive it.

Incredulously, I realised what was happening. I still stood some distance away, barely able to see the contestants. Tommy came across to me and said, 'You keep an eye on that other boy'. He narrowed his eyes meaningfully, completely in control. Before I could reply, he had returned to the fighters.

Not knowing any better, I went and took my place beside the bicycle. The owner threw a glance at me, but I must have seemed harmless to him, for he returned his attention to the business of rolling up his sleeves. Ben, his arms hanging loosely at his sides, waited for him.

For fifteen minutes they stood up to each other, punching and slapping and whirling about on the grass. They fought at first without a sound. Soaked in perspiration, their hair was splayed across their faces. Ben's shirt was torn at the armpit, while his opponent had lost some buttons when Ben had clutched at him on one occasion to keep his balance. The right eye of the cyclist was swollen and already darkening, but he had bloodied Ben's nose. Towards the end, Ben, sensing victory, began to cry out as he struck his opponent. It was an animal cry, beginning with a grunt and becoming a loud sigh as his fist struck home. The cyclist remained silent as he fought back.

Finally, Ben charged in and pummelled the cyclist, who was forced to retreat. He tripped and fell back, his head striking the ground. As he lay dazed, Ben leaped forward and stood over him, his two fists bunched and jerking as his muscles throbbed. Looking down at the figure he straddled, he whimpered and then jammed his lips together. All at once he opened his fists and walked away towards Tommy and his jacket.

Assuming it was my duty, I ran forward to help the cyclist to his feet, intending to administer to him as best I could. But he was on his feet before I reached him, rubbing his knuckles and gazing up at the sky, as if he was experiencing the first tremors of pain.

Ben came back, his jacket gripped in his left hand. In silence, he extended his right. The cyclist gravely took it and they shook hands.

Passing me on his way to his machine, the cyclist nodded. I nodded in return, realising as I did what had been required of me: I should have brought his jacket to him.

Ben was standing on his own. There was no sign of Tommy.

'I shouldn't have beaten him like that,' he said.

I realised with shock that he was crying. His eyes shone with tears as he spoke, snuffling the blood in his nose.

'I shouldn't have done that to him. But I just couldn't help it.'

Now I know why Tommy had gone off. As I saw it, he had little use for such passions; not where he was going, anyway.

4 EDGE

The consensus of the group was that they should go round by road to the hostel in Glenmalure. Only Richard so far had not agreed.

There was still the clatter of breakfast-making, coughing, a grudged, chilled shuffling. The gas-rings used for cooking had done little to warm the air in the long bare room. The atmosphere was testy: habitual comforts were missed. It would be counted a good weekend afterwards by most, but at the moment many asked, privately, why they had volunteered to put themselves out like this.

'It'll be like a tomb...There's turf there?'

'And paraffin...Last week.'

In any case Julie was warden: she had to get there early. There would be others coming over, from Imaal and Valleymount. She had to be there. You couldn't expect people to sit around in the snow waiting for her, hungry and exposed.

No one was arguing with them, still they gave one another good reasons for going by road rather than over the mountain. Richard cleared up after his breakfast and went into the dormitory to pack his ruck. The curtains were still drawn, the air not warm but close and soporific.

'Bloody freezing.'

Someone lay under a pile of blankets on one of the lower bunks.

Richard drew the curtains with deliberate abruptness.

'It's almost ten.'

'Oh bloody hell.'

When he returned to the kitchen with his pack, he was asked, 'Aren't you coming round by the road, Dick?'

Richard dropped the ruck by the door. It was only then that he saw that the sun was shining into the room. The light was yellow. He snatched a shallow breath, the better to push through his own torpor. He opened the door.

'Hey! Shut the door for God's sake!'

Derry Bawn scintillated above the forest. The snow at his feet was crystalline in the sunlight. The sky was brittle pale blue. It hurt his eyes. The sharp cold pinched his dry unshaven face.

'Dick...'

But the air was like chilled wine: clear and biting, without flavour or scent.

'Some of them aren't ready yet...Shay is only coming out now.'

Barry was rubbing his eyes with his red meaty hand. Alcohol had weakened them. Paraig was in shirt-sleeves, shivering.

The ridge above ran clear to the west against the sky, an unbroken gleam of crystal.

Julie came out into the light. Richard breathed in deeply for the first time. The heaviness across his face was a barrier: his eyes were still warm with sleep.

'Aren't you coming along the road with us, Dick?'

She felt as he did, Richard could sense: they all did. Inwardly, there was an intensity: the clear cold air and brilliant slopes heightened some part of them. It rose up and up, wanting to expand without limit. It was like a long, long scream – of terror, of joy: a terrible joy that rose up without end, striving for goodness knows what.

Richard heard it in his own voice: 'No. I'll go over.' It was there at least – his face was still pinched – a low but precise timbre. He felt he was wrapping himself around these words with such a powerful intention. He was momentarily on the other side of the torpor: he could walk a thousand miles today.

'Oh...On your own?'

He put his boot down on to the snow beyond the door. It crunched with a finite precision. He had entered that world. It was simple: flat blue sky, crystal slopes, flaring buttery sun. He locked into it, and then felt what was left over in himself – what was not simple.

'Yes.' His voice was still precise: but it had an overtone of assertion now. It was the complex part of him that was torpid. It was a jumble, known to be an entity only through its desire for expansion. The assertion was made on behalf of that desire: Richard realised he had become hostage to the desire of his complexity.

Julie heard the assertion too. She knew there was no point in attempting to match it. 'Be careful, Dick.' She was chagrined by the simplicity of the frozen world. It was an unnecessary challenge: it excluded so much.

'Excuse me...Are you going up there? May I come with you?'

Heavy handknit polo-neck, corduroys, embellished brogues. Richard looked at the camera hanging at his breast.

'I want to photograph the deer in the snow.'

'They'll be down in the forest.'

'Oh...' Fondling the taut strap. 'There'll be other animals.'

The camera is the motive, Richard saw.

'Sure...Are you ready?'

'Just get my anorak and bag.'

Richard stepped out on to the virgin snow. The torpor was gone. Already he saw the mountains through the eyes of the youngster. The camera and the animals that might be photographed short-circuited joy and terror and the rest of the jumble. The mountains became picturesque.

'I'm ready.'

'Let's go then.'

Richard led the way down past the hotel and along the lower lake, under the trees, working up a good pace. The youngster drove himself to keep up, head down in concentration. Out in the sun again, on the path beside the upper lake, Richard pulled up the sleeves of his jumper and shirt, rolling their ends back under to keep them above his elbows.

'Don't you feel the cold?'

'There's no wind.' On his own or with the usual group, Richard would not have rolled up his sleeves. He had done it because, thanks to the camera, the mountains were picturesque. He wanted to fill the limits of that.

'Maybe I should take my anorak off?'

'Would you feel warm enough?' Richard glanced at the camera.

The youngster caught the glance. He looked at the sheer slope on the other side of the lake. The jutting pines were blue-green against the snow.

Richard saw him subside within his zipped-up anorak, his brown corduroys and shining brogues. The picturesqueness now had its boundary in the youngster. Richard was outside that boundary. The mountains were irrelevant: the desire in him was suddenly expanded, the jumble gone.

'What's your name? Mine is Dick Butler.'

'Tony...Tony Hackett..'

'Well, let's go, Tony. You might get something to photograph up there.' Richard pointed towards the bare ridge beyond the lake, etched against the pallid sky.

Above that ridge there was another ridge. Its remoteness accentuated by the long narrow valley that led up to it. The snow was blinding. Tony looked up the broad slope of Lugduff to the left, but Richard said, 'We'll go up the valley. You might see something here.'

The slope was unbroken white, a desert. Tony nodded and followed Richard along the valley floor, beside a stream.

Richard knew that the slope was the direct route over, but he abhorred the idea of traversing that plane: it would re-immerse him in the picturesque. He preferred to work towards the high ridge: it reduced the world to a line, to an edge.

At the very top he heard Tony suck in his breath. His eyes were wide, with both wonder and fear. The world was mountain-peak after peak, all white, silent, still and remote. The camera clicked a few times. Tony stared again, this time puzzled.

'It's hard to catch with a camera, isn't it?' Richard said. Tony was trying to restore the picturesque. 'They'll look like eggs.'

Tony nodded. 'There's no depth.'

Richard unslung his ruck and took out a bar of Bournville. He broke off half and offered it to Tony.

'I have my lunch here...Thanks all the same.'

He took out some tins.

'You should keep those till this evening. The food will make you lethargic. Do you have any chocolate?'

Tony took out a paper bag. There were sweets, bars of Milk Tray, Kit-Kat. Richard extracted a bar of Milk Tray.

'Eat that – while you walk. It's too cold to sit about. Come on.'

Richard walked on. Tony hurriedly repacked his haversack and ran after him. The few minutes alone among the bare mountains had worked on him. He feared the attenuation. Breathlessly he asked:

'Where are we?'

'That's Conavalla over there. We'll go up there. To its right is Table Mountain. The Glen of Imaal is below it. Behind you – over there – that's Tonelagee. Then Mullaghcleevaun – Moanbane. You can see Kippure beyond, where they've put the television transmitter.'

'What's that over there?'

'Lugnaquilla.'

'That's the highest one, isn't it?'

'Yes. It doesn't look it?'

'No.'

'It's just a big lump of granite from here.'

Tony stared at Lugnaquilla, the highest mountain, then he relaxed. The remoteness was gone, and with it his fear of the attenuation.

'Don't chew the chocolate. Let it dissolve in your mouth.'

'Don't you feel hungry?'

'No. You let your stomach close up. That way you stay fresh.'

'There's a ton of stuff here.'

'You haven't climbed before?'

'No – my father gave me the camera for Christmas.'

'You shouldn't bring tins. Too heavy.'

'My mother...' Tony snorted maliciously.

On Conavalla, Tony shouted:

'Look! There's someone else. Over there.'

Richard studied the distant figure striding rapidly across the snow, climbing the long slope of Lugnaquilla.

'Conor McNally.'

'You know him?'

Richard smiled. 'I'd know his walk anywhere.'

'Where's he going?'

'Up on to Lug. But it's a bit late in the day for that. I suppose he can't resist – he loves these hills.' Richard turned away. 'Come on. We'll go back towards Lugduff. You might find something to photograph there.'

They came upon the tracks of a fox, which Tony photographed. Richard spotted a hare bounding down towards Glendalough. He pointed it out to Tony. Later, they heard deer barking in the distance.

'Can we go over there, Dick?'

'They're down in the forest above Glendalough. You'd never find them in there.'

'You'd never know.'

Richard shrugged and led the way towards Mullacor. When Tony saw the extent of the forest, he sighed with disappointment.

'Come on, we'd better think of going down.'

He led Tony back towards Lugduff, sighting from time to time at Lugnaquilla. They worked slowly along the shoulder. Tony hitched the straps, of his haversack and camera, with increasing frequency as he tired. By the time they reached the point at which Richard said, 'Down here', the day was ebbing and a powdery light was flaring above the col between Glenmalure and the Glen of Imaal.

Sensing Tony's growing dejection, Richard said:

'This will bring us down near a foot-bridge over the river. The hostel is beside it.'

In the dusk, what had been remote now began to seem alien. The gloomy mountains were withdrawing into themselves.

Richard saw Tony's compressed mouth and realised he had never seen true night before.

'The night is always like this, Tony. Everywhere.'

The slope became steeper. Richard was tempted to forewarn Tony, to share it with him, but he knew it would serve no purpose. Instead, he said casually:

'Follow in my footsteps, Tony. Don't try to see things more clearly. Let your eyes relax. Let your body follow the evidence of your eyes directly. Don't interfere consciously. Don't think about it.'

Richard kept to the steep slope as much as he could, avoiding the temptation of the level protrusions. He couldn't judge whether the snow covered a rock or a bush of gorse.

'Walk crabwise, Tony. On the sides of your boots. That's it. Change sides. Regularly but not too often. Follow my footsteps.'

Then it was dark. The snow was phosphorescent. It created a warm sensation.

The slope was becoming more littered with protrusions. Richard felt himself grow numb and spread out.

Don't think.

In the starlight Richard's eyes began to discern the difference between the snow covering rocks and the snow covering bushes.

He began to tread the rocks and skirt the bushes. He concentrated only on maintaining an even pace, so Tony too would become mesmerised by his feet.

Now he leaned back, feeling his way steadily down the slope. Stepping on to rocks, he worked his way back off them at an angle, back towards the slope. His track twisted back and forth, like a serpent, but he felt Tony follow closely, as though following the radiation of his presence rather than the intricate details of his footprints.

Then the bush became more dense. Snow flurried against Richard's arms and face. Thorns snagged his clothes. The ground could no longer be seen.

'Dick...'

Richard became conscious of the silence. His name marked the silence by its absence. Then he became aware that he was negotiating a steep slope in the snow at night.

The world turned, vertiginous.

But his feet went on finding their way.

'Sing, Tony.' If one of them slipped. 'Out loud, Tony.'

'What? What will I sing?'

'Anything at all. A pop song. Anything.'

Tony mumbled drily, stricken.

'Louder...louder!'

'She loves you, yea yea yea. She loves you, yea yea yea...'

The singing filled up the silence. The world became the square inches around Richard's boots. Outside that, there was a terrible void.

Tony sang Danny Boy. Richard accompanied his boots, twisting and turning from rock to slope to rock, pressing between the bushes, avoiding the thorns as best he could. Tony followed closely, singing hoarsely, voice breaking, always out of key.

A light flashed below.

'Look, Dick! A light!'

'Diiiiick!'

The call was faint, its echo fainter.

'Keep singing!'

'Okay, Dick. A paaale moon was riiiising upooon the greeee...'

There were fewer rocks now. The slope was less steep. Soon the bushes would thin.

The light was steady below, shining in their direction.

Their tracks were less twisted now. Richard deliberately slowed his pace. The temptation to run was very great. They would trip out of exhaustion long before they reached the valley floor.

He cleared the bushes. The snow was like milk below.

'Diiiick!'

'Yeeeooooh!'

The torch swung and lit them. Richard waved.

'Okay, Tony. You don't have to sing anymore – if you don't want to.'

The beam of light was unsteady at that distance, but it lit the ground before him.

He was no longer leaning backwards. The muscles up the back of his thighs were clenched.

He rolled down his sleeves.

Tony came down to his side, his arm grazing Richard's.

'The hostel is there. Not far beyond the torch.'

Tony nodded, a tired but trusting gesture.

The snow, frozen again, crunched under their feet.

'Was it dangerous, Dick?'

'Nothing happened.'

Tony looked up behind him.

'Is that why the others wouldn't come over this way?'

'No. They would have crossed further down the valley.'

Tony studied Richard, seeing him for the first time. He wondered what Richard had been doing.

'What were they afraid of, then?'

Richard smiled tautly. 'What do you think, Tony?'

PART TWO

5 DANCING IN THE DARK

Jane said, 'You won!' she said it with uncharacteristic elation. As an expression of radical triumph, Richard felt it should have been more assured, more exultant. 'You won,' she repeated, as though subliminally aware of Richard's reservation. 'You beat her, Richard.'

Walking towards the sea-wall in the midsummer dawn, Richard glanced at Jane beside him. She was excited: but a compressed excitement, veiled behind her quick intelligence.

She spoke as an observer, Richard suddenly realised. She praised his victory; she did not express the benefit such a fundamental clash ought to have brought her. The displacement made him uneasy. He had no sense of victory: but Jane ought to be more deeply affected by what she regarded as a defeat of her mother.

They sat side by side on the sea-wall, looking across Bull Island towards Howth Head, where the sun was rising. The waves of excitement radiating from Jane were the more intense because they originated in her intellect rather than in her emotions. She held his hand in her habitual deliberate way, but she was nonetheless self-absorbed – still, Richard now saw, working her way through the implications of the night-long clash. Watching the fiery line of the horizon, Richard attempted to follow her mind.

After thirty minutes he had become aware that Jane's mother was dominating the working of the ouija board. Then he saw her naked, released by alcohol or some drug, dominating Jane, her stout friend and her nineteen years old brother. He had set out to thwart her for their sakes. They did not seem conscious of how they were being subordinated and restricted by the purely egotistical desire of Mrs Blake. At first, he simply diverted the pointer to an adjacent letter in an arbitrary manner. Mrs Blake became aware of the new control over the movements on the board, but it took her some time to pinpoint Richard. She did so only when she realised that he was no longer shunting the pointer arbitrarily. His finger controlled its movements, but he no longer controlled his finger. He heard Mrs Blake hiss, and looked up to find her glaring at him with round enraged eyes.

Even so soon after the event, Richard could not remember clearly what had happened then. Mrs Blake had carped at him behind the pretence of continuing to play her game with Jane, Sheila and Edward, trying to intimidate him while hiding her own desire from them. Richard couldn't remember what questions were asked or what answers were given. But there must have been some sense in them, because it was only when Mrs Blake drove the pointer right off the board that they realised something was wrong.

Sheila went home then; Edward went into the kitchen. Richard, though possessed by the antagonism, had answered Jane's mother with assured clarity, identifying himself with the truth of his own insight. Then Richard was in the kitchen talking to Edward, drinking tea, a more muted and competitive antagonism between them: a resentment on Edward's part; in Richard a desire to pierce the more pervasive feeling shared by the whole family, a sullen, dark brooding over a past wrong that turned them inwards, downwards and backwards. Then Mrs Blake again, in the bare untidy kitchen, rancour without name or reason. Edward over by the sink, fiddling with unwashed cutlery...And Jane?

Richard had averted his eyes from the risen sun without knowing it...Jane?

Oh God, Jane!

He jumped down off the wall onto the compact tidal sand.

'Come on,' he said. Jane jumped and Richard caught her in his arms. Holding her, he was aroused suddenly by the intensity in them both. Barriers fell away within him; he felt the spaciousness of the morning.

Jane thought he was exultant too. She said, 'She had it coming to her, Richard.' She squeezed him in her precise way. Her eyes were precise too: sincere but deliberate. 'You did it. I knew you could do it, Richard.'

It was a statement of appreciation. It contained gratitude for what he had done to her mother, but it was merely an objective summation.

Oh Jane! In his spaciousness, Richard crushed Jane within his arms, trying to transmit his deep spirit to her. Then he released her and looked down into her eyes. His heart expanded: it shone in his eyes.

Jane! Jane!

She returned his gaze, caressing the nape of his neck with her fingertips.

It exploded in him: 'I love you, Jane. I do.'

She smiled, the bliss modified by her consciousness of the gestures. Then she pressed her cheek to his.

'And I love you, Richard.'

Yet his expansion found no echo in her. He held her, the after-shock of his declaration throbbing in him, but stiffly, feeling that her responses were not sufficient to meet his own release.

As though waiting for this instant, Jane pulled her head back and looked at him reachingly.

'Richard. Richard,' she said, drawing his full attention to her. Richard felt his searching expression become expectation of revelation as he looked into her eyes. Their precise expression of her intellectual control added an intensity to his expectation. He gasped at the beauty he saw in her eyes.

'I want to have your children, Richard.'

Her eyes remained precise, underlining the sincerity she projected in her voice.

Children! It cut through everything in him, putting a name, a motivation, a future on his expansion.

'Oh Jane, Jane...' Richard's heart was full: there was substance in it now.

His own mind leaped and he said:

'We must go away, Jane.'

His expansion took her up now. He was conscious that he would always have some reason for whatever he would do in the future.

Then he realised that he could do anything he wished.

He kissed Jane, hugged her, held her, a unity in him: here now in the dawn and in the substantial future before him.

When Pauline recrossed her legs he heard the familiar low rasp of the meshes as her nylons slid one over the other. By association, Richard sensed the solidity of her, the immediate presence that was rooted in her body of flesh and bone and blood.

Pauline sensed his response. She ducked her head, her permed hair bobbing neatly. The fingers that held the cigarette bent, her curved painted nails coming to point back towards her breasts as just that particular angle.

Richard reached for his glass on the low table. He drank the stout, then felt his arm press hers as he lowered the glass to his lap.

The toes of her suspended foot came up. He gazed at the bright shine of the tip of her shoe.

The sexual tension in him reached its crisis: could it grow outwards or must it be curbed and dissipated within? Then, as always at this point, he remembered that it was Pauline who had created this specific situation in the beginning, and who had accepted it on their first night out by simply opening her thighs when he touched her knees.

The crisis past, Richard breathed deeply and looked at Pauline with hazed euphoria. She laughed: her dark blue eyes dancing, her rounded cheeks dimpling, her mouth open, red and moist.

Richard laughed with her, as happy as she was, as content to wait. Then, responding to the limitation of the moment, he looked around the crowded cellar lounge. In the low red light, the flushed skin, the rounded bodies, the play of gesture were familiar. He saw it all clearly from behind the screen of his euphoria. He could read the meaning of every sign there, how a glass was held, the disposition of a body, the colour of a blouse, the fingers clutching an earlobe. He could understand the whole room because it was part of the limitation of the moment.

Pauline's voice came to him behind the screen: 'What do you see, Dick?' Her voice was expectant: Richard was to break the spell of the place. Then they would leave.

Aware of her arm against his and her thigh against his, Richard gestured with his head: 'There...Do you see how that girl sits?'

'With the red hair?'

'Yes...That's her boyfriend beside her, on her left. She sits with her body angled so that her head is towards him.'

'Yes...' Pauline nodded, her eyes keen in the dim light.

'The fellow facing her is her boyfriend's friend. See how her body is presented to him. She points her hip at him and has crossed her legs so that he can see the line of her thigh. Wait...When she puts her glass down. Watch...She lays her arm along the curve of her hip and thigh, and spreads her fingers a little over the roundness of her thigh.'

'And?' Richard felt Pauline's thigh press his as she leaned forward.

'She leaves her breasts clear...'

'Uhh...yes.' Pauline's fingers clutched at his knee. She grasped the danger there at once. 'Her boyfriend...'

'He can't see. She forces him back in his seat.'

'The other fellow...He's watching her.'

'He's not conscious of it...Ha, Pauline,' Richard turned to look at her, smiling. 'Neither is she.'

He felt Pauline's body start beside him.

'No?' Her eyes widened, surprised yet ready to laugh, expecting Richard to find a joke there.

Richard paused, his eyes quizzical. Mirth bubbled on Pauline's lips. She gazed at him, waiting. Suddenly she frowned slightly, as though a shock rippled through her. At the same time she realised that the scene he had described was not funny.

Pauline uncrossed her legs and Richard stood up.

Out in Grafton Street, Richard stretched himself and said, 'Let's walk out.'

Pauline kept her face mobile as she watched him. 'I'll pay the taxi, if you like.'

Richard looked up at the twilit sky. 'It's not that. It's midsummer.' He looked at her, smiling to reassure her. 'The sun doesn't set this time of year. Wait till you see'.

They walked out, Pauline linking his arm, leaning slightly against him. Richard, euphoric still and full of the evening, talked easily, not listening to himself. He felt Pauline's weight against him, from shoulder down to his hip, and felt the mass of her breast on his arm. Gradually the roads became empty of traffic and silent. Pauline's heels clicked on the pavements. Richard rubbed leaves between his palms, sniffed them and offered them to Pauline to sniff also. The sun set and the residual midsummer glow remained, moving around the northern arc towards the east.

Richard's talk petered out, like a charge run down. They walked in silence, Pauline's heels clicking, Richard absently smoothing leaves between his fingers. He became aware of Pauline's contentment, her here-and-now satisfaction with an adequacy that was sufficient in itself. By reaction, he felt his own expectation and his certainty of fulfilment. He glanced at Pauline, seeing the familiar shape of her, from her tidy hair and characteristic nose, to her particular style of clothes, formal rather than fashionable, and the sharpness of her patent-leather shoes. Pauline caught his glance and turned to him, laughing, her eyes dancing. He moved towards her, feeling their union of adequacy and expectation, of contentment and fulfilment. But when he embraced her, he felt a nameless anxiety invade him, so that instead of expressing affection and contentment, his embrace became a demand for closure and reassurance.

Pauline was surprised by the urgency of his embrace. She squeezed him once, then lifted her head and sought his eyes. For the first time, Richard saw her from the outside. He saw that mirth was her chosen persona, and saw also what he had known from the beginning, when it had been a virtue, that he could not be dependent upon her. He could depend upon her, as she depended upon him, but there was, because of the nature of their mutual dependence, a strict limit beyond which she would not help him.

Pauline stepped away, her eyes twinkling, watching him.

He stared back, sensing the apprehension in her. But he realised that this apprehension was abiding, and that it was overlaid by a... He couldn't put a name on it, because it seemed so many things. Confidence, defensiveness, an assertion, an understanding of something utterly beyond him... Then he saw her more clearly and sensed her acceptance of something. And the hurt that underlay that acceptance.

Pauline moved in some small way and it hit Richard: it wasn't that she wouldn't help him beyond a certain point, she couldn't help him, no more than she could help herself.

The anxiety rose in Richard again. To keep outside the vastness of the mood, he projected himself back within the limits of his relationship with Pauline. But relief was momentary only. The limit Pauline had placed on their relationship could include only part of him. The limit existed because she had a history of her own; there was an event in her past which defined her whole life. What she aroused in him and satisfied frankly had its origins in that event. Because of all this, Richard realised, he was also defined for Pauline by this event.

Pauline tilted her head to one side, appraising him with her twinkling mobile eyes. She thinks she know what I'm thinking, Richard thought. Pauline looked very happy at that moment, though it was a helpless kind of happiness, that might not last and which she was grasping fully for its present value.

Then she smiled. It was fatalistic, the other side of acceptance: she was encouraging Richard.

Why had she created the desire in him? Why had she chosen him to bind with this gift?

Richard smiled back, feeling the anxiety recede as the consciousness of her gift drew him back within her orbit.

She had done it because of something in him that corresponded to the origins of her history: an event in his life that made them equals.

He nodded his head in understanding. Pauline reached for him and said: 'I'm dying for a cup of tea. We don't have far to go now.'

When he asked himself what the event in his life was, the anxiety loomed again. In the face of that, he could do nothing else but press her arm in against his side and say insinuatingly: 'Let's hope your mother is asleep tonight.'

Pauline turned to him in a compulsive way and exploded in mirth. She broke from his grasp and threw her arms heavily about his neck, pressing herself to him, letting his arms around her take the whole burden of her body.

In the lull, before conversation took the place of the music, Jane chanted: 'Why don't they all fa-fa-fade away.' Then, without incongruity, she took up the backing refrain: 'Talk-ing 'bout my gen-eration.' Turning to Richard, abstracted bliss on her face, she repeated, imitated the song itself: 'Talkinngg about my gen-eraaa-shuuun...Myy gerer-ashuun.' She shook her head, as though wondering at her own silliness.

Richard moved in his own bliss, feeling her presence beside him, light with the proudfulness of his own happiness.

'I like that song, Richard,' Jane said to him confidingly, deliberate within her own abandonment. Illustrating, she sang to him: 'Why don't they all fu-fu...' laughing again, the keen, deep desire surfacing in this dark room, the hum of conversation rising in the background.

Richard read volumes in what she said. He saw the whole dark bloc she gestured towards in her abstraction. The specifics of the bloc rose before him, the parts he knew named but the part that haunted Jane unnamed. Buoyed by her presence, he faced the bloc and then in his imagination turned his back on it and faced the future. It was clear blue, pure possibility for him.

He touched Jane's slim, so-precise hand with his finger-tips, feeling it to be an ample gesture, redolent with the promise of so much for his whole sense of his own existence.

The amplifier squawked. The voice boomed in the bass-bias, though it wasn't loud. Then the music started again, drowning the voices around him. The first notes of the tenor saxophone thrilled Richard. He gestured on Jane's hand with his finger-tips and she turned back towards the dark square of the dance-floor.

Light and shadow played across Jane's face as they turned and turned. He felt in the way she held him, not too close and not too far away, the measured balance that gave him a sense of his whole rhythmic self as well as the sense of what she was for him. His bliss merged with hers at every point, but nothing in their individual selves had to be abandoned or ignored. She moved her head, looking at the dancers nearby, abstracted, turning and turning to the music. He delighted in the awareness that informed the movement of her head, the steadiness of her eyes and mouth.

Suddenly, the music, the rhythm, Jane, himself, and their future rolled up into a single ball of pure unadulterated happiness. He sighed deeply, drawing Jane to him, instinctively maintaining the balance between them and the third thing, the promise. She moved her arms around his shoulders and neck, fondling the hairs on his nape, her chin pressing into the soft niche below his collar bone. His pure happiness expanded and expanded until, the appetite satisfied or the ball drained, it began to slacken and the dim room take on shape again. As it slackened, so Jane drew back, and when it had finally melted away, she turned and led them off the floor to a table away from the band.

Jane had to peer slightly to see Richard. The air of silliness was gone. 'Where will we go, Richard? We have no money.'

The power of her promise was such that, even deflated, he did not lose confidence. 'Away,' he said evenly, to show her that confidence.

'Don't be silly, Richard.' Jane spoke in a tone that did not challenge his confidence. She wanted to draw his attention to her own concern. 'Away where?'

'Anywhere.' He looked at her, not smiling, wanting her to trust him.

'How would we live?'

Richard saw that she was looking downwards, not backwards as he first suspected. 'We'll work.' But she should look forwards, so he added: 'To start with, anyway.'

Jane frowned and Richard saw for the first time that for him there seemed to be another future beyond the future she had given him. There was something after the 'to start with'.

'England?' Jane asked. Richard felt she was caught in something, but he couldn't name it.

'Yes. England.' And 'to start with' echoed there too.

'Daddy is in Leeds. I could stay with him.' She looked at him, and Richard felt he was the circumference to her centre. 'Could you find work there?'

'Why not?' Richard added the tone of confidence to his voice this time. He saw by the way she looked vacantly out towards the dance-floor that she had committed herself to leaving Dublin. At least that. He sat back, letting her look away and think.

He knew what he would say next, when the time came. It would be crucial. Her father supported his family in Dublin. But she was prepared to leave her mother now.

Jane turned back to him. With a stab of sympathy, he reminded himself that she was only seventeen. He leaned forward, prepared to press her up to his own level of emotional awareness: 'Jane.'

But she said, her voice a little lost, the consciousness of her commitment steadying her: 'When will we go?'

He embraced her with his sympathy, feeling the strength of his three years' seniority and his willingness to face all the possibilities their being together brought. 'I have to give a month's notice.' He searched her face, to bring her out to him. But she seemed lost in her awareness of what they were deciding. 'I'll give it tomorrow.'

Now she looked at him, searching his eyes. She saw what she wanted to see, yet to Richard's surprise and, more tenuously, to his delight, she accepted what he offered, as though as a matter of course, while remaining unmoved. He was glad she accepted it, because it was all he could give her at present for the inevitability of her situation. He was delighted she was unmoved because the situation he sympathised with was one that must be overcome.

'I'll write to daddy tomorrow.' She touched his cheek and stood up. She swayed, then quickly expanded her awareness to her body and her surroundings.

Richard leaped up. 'Are you alright?' In her calming gestures he read the state of her emotions. They compressed and compressed her.

'The gin was stronger than I expected.'

'It's too strong...' he gestured towards her head, alert to the overload on the word 'gin'. Her mother drank gin. And it was the first time Jane and he had been in a pub together. 'Let's go then. The air outside...' His words failed again as he sensed the simplicity of the emotion that pressed her. Though it was powerful and weighed heavily on her, he didn't want to fragment it into specifics or cause her to concentrate on only one contributing factor. For good or bad, he believed it should work through it as a whole.

Outside in George's Street, Jane said, when Richard turned to the left: 'No, Richard. Mother won't let you into the house again.'

Richard smiled wryly. 'I expected that. I was only going to walk you into town so you could get a taxi.'

Jane seemed to be searching the deserted street. Around her mouth was uncharacteristically slack. She swayed again, and just as quickly brought it under control. Richard took her hand.

'Can we go up to your house?'

'Sure.' Richard reactively stepped closer to her in his delight at the prospect of spending more time with her. 'Will we get a taxi – or do you want to walk?'

'Walk.' She turned to the right, leaning on his hand. 'Richard...'

Richard put his arm around her shoulder. He saw that she couldn't let it out. He spoke to get her attention, 'Jane.' When she looked up he saw that she was miserable behind her habitual light. Richard bent to her and spoke fervently: 'It's alright, Jane.' He squeezed her shoulder and buried his face in her hair. 'It's alright.' His feeling was like an agony. Something was wrenching and wrenching his heart. 'Oh, I love you, Jane. I love you.'

Jane swooned into his embrace, her cheek against his chest. Concerned about her as the wrenching eased, Richard strained his eyes downwards to look at her. Her stare was stony. There was no light. The wrenching returned, but now it was as though it had been turned over. The agony was cold, implacable, immovable. He felt it push in between them.

Jane looked up. 'Will we go now? It's chilly. I've practically nothing on me.' She looked down at the short party dress and her bare legs.

Richard had to moisten his mouth before he could speak. 'Maybe you should go home, Jane.' His only concern now was for her. There was something they had together, even if cold implacability was part of it. He was suddenly terrified in case some small trivial thing, like a chill, should destroy it. Jane was as fragile as a glass rose for him just then.

'No.' And the light was in her eyes again. She looked at him. The light in her was fanned by a sudden surge of conviction: 'I want to stay with you, Richard.'

Richard's heart somersaulted again. He took her hand and began walking. The future he had lived with for a week now shrank until it was defined by the bend in the road a hundred yards away. But that was enough for him at this moment.

Pauline suddenly said, though it was obvious to Richard that she had waited for the right moment to say it: 'She was a virgin. That's why she was shy – of the other fellow, I mean.'

She had surrendered her woollen jacket because of the warmth of the evening. She felt exposed in white blouse, wine cotton skirt, wine shoes and tan nylons. Richard could see that from how she held her arms, stiffly, elbows jutting slightly. She was an indoor person, a rosy light, rosy glow on her cheeks, body over-warm and lubricious.

Richard caught the implication of what she had said. 'Do you think so?' He had suggested taking a walk, because of the heat, rather than going to their usual haunt. Without the alcohol and the intimacy of the cellar lounge, there was no euphoria. Instead, there was an edgy conflict in him, a temptation to be wilful. 'I thought she didn't want to know what was going on.' He looked at Pauline. She, too, was edgy. But she was passive before it, not wilful. Richard realised that her strength, and power, lay in her acceptance. 'She seemed the sort of girl whose virginity lies between her ears.'

Pauline started, her eyes dilating. Her acceptance was her capacity to start over again at every moment. She would not be hurt by his decision to go away, Richard realised. She would be returned to the original hurt. She would start out again from there. 'It depends on what she wants.'

Richard felt his complex of conflicts cross the complex in Pauline. The word 'wants' nagged him. It would be better if Pauline spoke about needs. But 'needs' created a new ambiguity; one that included him too. The word touched depths he could not cope with. He vented the stress by humming a tune. The words sang in his mind: 'your debutante knows what you need, but I know what you waaant.' The insinuation in the words triggered an ever-widening vista of his will acting on the outside world. But it did not take long for this sphere to become an horizon of profound frustration.

Richard looked up at the high twilit sky. He felt vulnerable: but immediately he was suffused with pleasure. It wiped out the conflict in him. What was external to him was not his space: he had his own space now. His will was strong there.

This was the moment to tell Pauline. But he found himself saying instead: 'What do you think she wants, then?'

Pauline looked at him, her eyes bright so that nothing could be read in them. Then she laughed suddenly and said: 'I don't know!' Richard heard the gap that told him she was being rhetorical.

Richard waited, conscious of his warm body moving with unaccustomed ease in the warm air. He realised that this consciousness of warmth arose because of the gap he had heard in Pauline's voice.

In the mounting silence, Pauline relented and offered: 'She wants to keep her virginity for the man she marries.'

Richard heard the gap again. It was arousing him. And it was arousing Pauline too. The gap opened the way to the heart of Pauline: to her deepest wish.

Into the gap, Richard said: 'That's not what I meant. She doesn't want at all. She's been reared not to want sexual pleasure.'

The word 'need' rose again in his mind. But it evoked the idea of passivity, which was irrelevant here. Richard ignored it.

'But the signals she was sending the other fellow, Dick?'

'She'd be shocked if you told her about that.' He looked into Pauline's eyes. 'She didn't know what she was doing.'

Pauline stopped and faced Richard. 'She wanted him anyway.'

Richard stopped, looking absently from Pauline's eyes to her hair and back again. 'How do you know?'

'The way she showed herself off!' Richard had never seen Pauline so vehement. 'It was in her, Dick. She's crazy about him!'

'So that all the other fellow had to do was seduce her?' The word 'seduce' was the wrong word, but Richard wanted to throw the source of Pauline's sudden passion into relief. He pressed on: 'Anyway, he didn't seem to notice what she was up to.'

She laughed again, her eyes wide open, as though pushing back at Richard: 'That's what you think!'

Richard turned away to deflect her, sensing he could no longer hide from her his awareness of what they were talking about. He looked at a distant tree outlined against the bronze sky. Then he nodded and looked at her. He asked, already knowing the answer: 'Why didn't he take her up on it?'

Pauline jerked her head forward. 'He will.' Her earnest tone showed Richard that she was trying one last time to draw him out into the open.

Richard made his own clinching move, relying on his intuition: 'What about her boyfriend?'

The gap in her suddenly closed. The flicker of reproach in her eyes told Richard that his intuition had been right. He walked on slowly, so that Pauline could catch up quickly.

Now was the moment. As she came abreast and looked at him in order to regain contact, Richard said: 'I'm planning to go away, Pauline.'

The act of walking allowed her to brace herself without visible effort, but Richard saw it in the way she held her head. When she spoke, her eyes were again the bright masks: 'Why?'

Richard faltered in his step, surprised. He had not expected her to ask that question: 'When?' and 'Where to?', yes, but not 'Why?' At once he realised he could not answer the question for her.

Pauline walked beside him, watching him, waiting. Then she asked again, pressing him: 'Why?'

A plausible answer would not form in Richard's mind. He had no intention of telling her the actual circumstances that had led to his decision. In any case, that wouldn't answer her question.

Pauline opened her handbag, still walking, and took out a newspaper clipping. She gave it to Richard, saying matter-of-factly. 'I meant to give it to you last week. I forgot.'

The clipping looked older than a week to Richard. He stopped to read it under a street lamp:

BODY OF MISSING CLIMBER FOUND

The body of Conor McNally(23) of Terenure, reported lost in the Wicklow Mountains last January, was discovered yesterday by a local farmer among rocks at the foot of Lugnaquilla. Gardaí said the remains were identified by the youth hostelling card found on the body. An inquest will be held in Dublin tomorrow.

'How old is this?' Richard asked sharply. He felt what seemed by now an abiding anxiety come into a new, definite focus. He saw Conor walking up the side of the snow-clad mountain, and imagined his up-tilted head, the depth of his habitual calm.

'When did you decide to go away?' Pauline retorted, her eyes filled with her mirth.

Then relief came to Richard as a broad composure, like a wide river at night. There was nothing new in the report. Conor's death had already had its effect on him. What had been working on him for the last six months was some part of himself, set in motion by Conor's death. The relief he felt was part of that too,

Richard smiled at Pauline to make peace with her. When she smiled in return, the mirth in her face, he said, to stop her trying to cajole him again, 'There's someone else, isn't there?'

She bit her lip like a spoiled little girl and nodded. Her acceptance made frankness possible: that was why she seemed wilful now.

'And he wants to marry you?'

Again she nodded. This time in the repeated gesture Richard saw that her frankness acted as a mask: it covered the deeper hurt. Then he saw in its entirety the façade she had created for him. Her mirth, her sexual openness, like her frankness now, were signs of an abandonment in her, an enslavement to her acceptance of that past event.

Pauline spoke to his back: 'I felt you wouldn't, Dick.' She paused and Richard caught a glimpse of what lay beyond the façade. It was some kind of mistake, a failure of understanding: her own mistake, no one else's. It was a mistake she was condemned to repeat over and over again: that was what her acceptance amounted to. 'Dick...' He turned to her. She seemed isolated from him now, her limitation giving her a rounded, tender quality. 'We clicked.' Her mirth came back, now that they were in contact again. She laughed, 'I couldn't resist it, Dick!'

Richard nodded for her sake. On the other level, he saw the question for him beyond the façade Pauline had created: Why had Conor gone up Lug so late in the day? He was surprised by that question. It was not about death, as he had all along feared.

He put his arm around Pauline and turned her about, back towards the city centre. She pressed into him, moving her head to catch his eyes: 'You couldn't resist it either, sure you couldn't?'

The façade came back. But that was all it was. He hadn't breached the façade, Richard realised: Pauline had done it by holding the clipping back. He was relieved he had not gone that far. He might never have learned the truth about his own anxiety.

He laughed along with her mirth as he drew her to begin walking.

On the slope above the trees they had a view of the western peaks of the mountains. In the clear air they were like sentinels. But to Richard now their watch was either pointless or profound in a tenuous, wearying way.

Jane shielded her eyes against the sunlight, studying the mountains, and asked: 'Which one did he die on?'

Richard hunkered down beside her, bringing his head level with hers. He was aware of the warmth the closeness raised in him. He pointed at the high granite ridge that formed the horizon to the south. 'Beyond that. You can't see it from here.'

'How could it happen, Richard? You said he was the most experienced walker among you.'

'He was, Jane. And he was tireless.' He sat down and looked at her profile. Her short blue corduroy skirt had ridden up on her thighs. Her white legs seemed part of the heather on which they lay. Richard was surprised by that recognition: Jane wasn't at ease in this open country. Then he understood that he was making her a part of this familiar heathery world. He was giving her slim white body a home here.

She turned to draw his attention back to her, to her awareness of him. Richard smiled blissfully at her. Jane frowned slightly, sensing something in Richard but not understanding it.

Her consciousness could not give her body a home, Richard realised.

'I love you, Jane.' It was so simple to say, so unified, that Richard knew he could repeat it over and over for the rest of his life, like a litany.

He saw the effect of his words on her. They shaped her; yet they made her apprehensive. They gave her something she could not look at, that she could not hope for or accommodate with any finality. But it was there, there.

Richard knew that if he repeated the words so soon again she would be overwhelmed. Joyfully, he withdrew their pressure and their threat. He must leave her free of that power. He must give her time to grow, nourished and protected by his love.

Jane relaxed and moved all of her body slightly. 'What happened, then?'

'The ridge he followed narrows near the summit. There are cliffs on either side. He must have gone too close to the edge and fallen into one of the Prisons.'

She nodded and looked south again. Richard knew she was concentrating on how he had spoken. She looked back at him, her eyes steady but alive with what she was surmising. 'Is that why you don't climb anymore?'

He touched her insight, loving the delicacy of the contact: 'Because Conor died up there, you mean?'

Instantly her eyes were alert to him, studying what was evident in his eyes. 'What, then, Richard?'

The way opened. He could tell her. He was at once pent up, heart-full: 'Conor walked these mountains as though on a pilgrimage, Jane.' She nodded and he saw his own light go into her directly for the first time. 'It's as though he had to walk a certain number of miles first. He was always tireless and always calm.' He saw that she understood the word 'calm' fully, as he did now. After a pause, he continued: 'He looked for something outside him, Jane. He wanted to give himself up.' When she nodded, Richard knew that Conor's death had receded into the past: it was Conor's own death. Now there was only Jane and himself.

'And you?'

Richard declined to talk about himself alone yet. 'It's not outside us, Jane. We must build it up in ourselves.' Jane's eyes glazed, becoming mirrors were they had been beams, showing Richard her withdrawal. But Richard had expected that: he had the greater understanding here. Otherwise, how could he come to love her? He spoke softly now, lingering on the sounds he made: 'Coming out on the bus this morning, Jane, I realised what I should do with my life.' The reference to himself eased the pressure on Jane. Her eyes became intelligent again. 'I thought of all the things I might do. But they all seemed to close in around me. They seemed to stop up something in me. Except one thing, Jane.' He paused, holding her eyes with his. 'The best way to do it is by writing.'

The formulation surprised him. It surprised Jane too. She frowned again, and Richard felt her withdraw into her own thoughts. In the silence, he saw that what he had said and how he had said it went beyond her in a simple, obvious way. But he had been talking about himself, as she had asked him to do.

Suddenly she asked in an objective tone, 'You're not afraid?'

The image of fear in Richard's mind then was of a dark hole behind him. He knew the image had been prompted by Jane's tone of voice. Looking for his own image of fear, he saw instead the image of himself pressing forward on a white slope. He knew that was his reaction to the idea of fear: it was the strength of his will.

When he returned his attention to Jane, he realised that they had drifted even further apart. When he spoke, he knew that what he was saying was a judgement on their future together: 'I've no intention of throwing my life away, Jane.' What made his love for her possible also made his decision a necessity: he could not have come to love her if he had not been moving towards the decision to... He saw his fear clearly. It was the fear of delusion: why Conor had climbed so late in the day.

Jane's thighs seemed far away, like white marble embedded in the green earth. He caressed her cool smooth thigh. The way Jane's hand hovered above his showed Richard her helplessness. Her body became an object to her whenever he touched her – that he saw now: he made her conscious of it. 'Jane.' She heard his voice as an object too, something coming from outside the arena of her consciousness: it distracted her from what preoccupied her intelligence. Yet his love cut through all of that. He gripped her thigh, while knowing that this was her worst fear with him, that he would finally demand too much of her. But his love for her must cut through even that. She was the projection of both his fear and his weapon against that fear. She embodied both the temptation of self-abandonment and his intention to build himself to withstand that temptation.

He lifted his hand from her thigh and touched her hand. 'It's alright, Jane.' The reassurance released her to herself. Richard felt himself deflate. But he was content for the moment: he had told her everything. Everything.

When Jane turned her body to face him, he knew she had something to tell him: 'Sheila is coming to Leeds with me, Richard. Mother asked her.'

Richard nodded. The prospect of going away returned, now with a new density, as though he was about to enter a tunnel. But the tunnel was there anyway: that's what starting out is like. He got to his feet and stretched. 'Do you mind?'

Jane shrugged. 'She'll stay for a few weeks only. Daddy is out most of the time.' When she looked up, Richard saw in her expression how much she was still in her family. But it was too soon to expect otherwise. He turned away and looked at the mountains.

But they just waited, as they always did.

Richard sighed as the melancholy swept over him: what alternative do I give her anyway?

He watched Jane get to her feet, brush down her skirt and pick up the matching blue corduroy jacket. Seen from aside like this, Richard recognised how unconscious her bodily movements were: Jane did not finally care about herself. The emptiness he saw in her found a bleak echo in himself: Does she really want me to love her at all?

Jane turned to him, waiting to go. She seemed small and distant against the green expanse of the slope.

But he had to love her in any case. It was his love that had made his decision possible: it was the bridge between his fear and his decision to struggle against it.

He saw for the first time what he had undertaken to do.

6 BONA FESTA

Richard started with the shock of awakening. Screwing up his eyes against the blue glare of the tent, he twisted himself on to his back. In the moment of innocence between sleeping and awakening his mind sought to retrieve the calm oblivion with its half-sense of dreams and thoughts, while the sounds of the morning intruded themselves as unidentified noises, solidly demanding his attention and labelling. Nearby a voice called out in French: ascending and broadening freely into the clear coolness of the morning. Grasshoppers rattled in the grass. A bird called, a wind shivered the walls of the tent. The voice called again – a woman's voice. Two voice replied in ragged accord: 'Oui, Maman!' A mother's voice, warm and intimate. One of the other voices laughed shrilly. A girl's. Spain!

The seal was broken.

He unzipped his sleeping bag and sat up. Along the opposite of the tent lay Michael Johnson, his harsh face still-smooth in sleep. He lay twisted in his bag, his face cast upwards like a defiant Captive who had yielded to sleep alone.

Outside the tent Richard dressed discreetly and hurriedly. When he had finished, he bent down to the flap and shouted roughly:

'Right, Michael, rise and shine. There's another day in it.'

Michael stiffened and awoke. He smiled.

'Good morning, Irish twit.'

Richard waved his hand in reply and moved away.

Michael lifted his stiff back by means of his elbow and settled it flat on the mattress. He raised his arms towards the apex of the tent and stretched and yawned. For him the profit of the moment was the peace and serenity that lay in his mind. Through habit he reached out for his cigarettes, extracted one and lit it. His mind right out to his eyes was smothered by its effect – chaos and displeasure filled him and produced a feeling of gnawing incompleteness. He arose from his couch without grace and shuffled out into the early sun, carrying his stiff back like a weight that pressed his head forward and forced his arms away from their natural line along his body, to hang forward and outsplayed.

Richard was hunched against the side of the car in front of a small stove on which lay a saucepan of water. He was absorbed in some vague pleasant mood and watched with mesmerised attention the commonplace phenomenon of water being boiled. At the moment the surface trembled slightly and popped small bubbles. Michael leaned on the bonnet of the car. 'Tea nearly ready?' he asked in a sardonic tone. The sagging of the car on its springs broke Richard's reverie. He looked up at his friend.

'Obviously not,' he replied defensively, and to redress the balance he asked, 'How is your head? You were very drunk last night.'

'How about no post-mortems on last night,' the other replied. But it was too strained and too easily lost in the morning air to make any impression on Richard. He returned his attention to the pot of water, the surface of which was more agitated now and the bubbles rising in hurried strings and bursting with greater force.

When they had drunk tea they drove down to the coast. Michael drove, holding firmly the steering wheel. He was filled with the freshness of a new day and pleasure at the prospect of driving. Richard sat beside him and mused over the dark mantle of the pine woods that covered the small hills inland. So far he had not looked seawards, as that would bring Michael into his line of vision and cause the embarrassment of their looking at each other without anything to say. Michael shifted his back against the seat. It was beginning to pain him again: the slow nagging pain deep in the bones of his spine that could easily be put out of mind when active but which returned to his consciousness as a curse when he relaxed. He called to Richard above the hum of the motor and the clashing of the tires against the small stones on the road and said in a crisp voice: 'We'll go down to the hotel and see Desanova. Remember? I told you about him. I've known him for years. We can have breakfast there as well. It'll be a bit more civilised than usual for us.'

He looked quickly in Richard's direction. Richard responded and looked towards him and nodded in agreement. Then he looked beyond him to the sea. The sea, with the sparkle of the early sun, pleased him, as did the cork-oaks that dotted the slopes of the sea-edged hills. Out on the sea a ship, a small tanker, ploughed its black hulk, leaving a trail of confused water.

'Look, Michael,' he said, pointing. 'The commerce of the seas. Men earning their keep out there.'

Michael followed the line of the finger, grunted, and looked back to the road ahead.

'Don't be so depressing,' he said in a testy voice. 'We're on holiday here and should be enjoying ourselves. That sort of thing is back there.' He nodded in the general direction of home.

'But it's the first sign we've had in the last fortnight that they do that sort of thing here. You see, they don't only run hotels and restaurants.'

'Oh, shut up.'

The car rushed around a long curve and picked up speed on the downhill gradient. A valley opened out below them to the left, running like a great gash towards the sea. 'Stand by,' called Michael in a sea-captain's voice. The car swung sharply to the right. Richard was thrown towards the door. His face passive, he allowed his body yield to the pressure. Michael, gripping the wheel firmly, judged the sweep of the car through the bend and, on the moment, accelerated. The car surged ahead towards the sea.

Richard straightened himself in his seat with great self-possession.

'That was a small one,' Michael said above the whine of the engine. 'The next bend is tighter.' He sat rigid and alive behind the wheel; his hair flopped on his forehead and his blue eyes gleamed with private exhilaration. 'There's the hotel now. Right on the water's edge.' The tension of anticipation had pursed his lips.

'Where?' Richard asked, turning to look down at the coast.

Three white cubes lay by the sea, pulsing with light: tidy and inert. Clustered alongside them were the houses of the village. On the sea small boats rested at anchor, or moved, chugging about with little leaps on the waves. Further out, a skier and his boat left two angles of wash, one within the other. The sunlight made all colours sharp and hard-edged.

'It's a very neat hotel,' Richard said carefully.

'One of the best appointed along this part of the coast,' Michael replied with emphasis.

'Very neat,' Richard confirmed.

Michael braked savagely and turned right into the bend. Again Richard surrendered to the dictates of the car's motion and lay against the door. Michael braked again and changed gear, double-clutching with swift, practised movements. He pulled on the big wheel, turning the car into the following left bend. Richard was lifted away from the door. He was filled with dull inertia: a droplet trickled coldly from his armpit. Michael's face was concentrated as he guided the car, wheels slipping, through the bend. Again, at the right moment, he accelerated out into the straight. He raised his hands to the roof in exultation. 'That was a beauty!' he shouted.

Richard, fighting the torpor of his inactivity, lit a cigarette as they entered the narrow street of the village.

After parking the car opposite the hotel, they agreed to stroll over to the sea-wall before eating. Except for one of the villagers and a small group of tourists, the village seemed dead. The row of houses and cottages were set in the shade beneath the cliff, their windows and doors gaping, like useless idols. They sat on the harbour wall and studied the high and square bulk of the hotel front. It was sectioned into squares of open suntraps, one for each room. here and there people sat absorbing the hot dry rays.

The sun on Michael's back warmed his ache, suffusing it with heat and producing a desirous discomfort. He braced his arms against the stone, gripping it with outstretched fingers. Richard sat beside him with his arms folded across his chest, studying the large anchor set upright nearby as a pagan symbol. For Michael the sun was a curious dream, desired through months and rain in Yorkshire; to Richard it was a novelty of the holiday, strangely harsh and unyielding in the eternal blue of the sky.

Michael hoisted himself to his feet. Turning his body at the waist towards Richard, he said, 'Well? Shall we breakfast?'

They walked across the carpark towards the glass doors of the hotel. Within, they could see people looking out at their approach, or perhaps out to sea at the skier, whose boat disturbed the air with its high-pitched whine.

'It's a dreadful box, Michael,' Richard said almost coyly.

'That may be so to your aesthetic mind, but it is still the finest hotel hereabouts.'

'What do you get? One room, one bath, one suntrap?'

'You're envious. These people have worked for the pleasure and comfort of this place.'

Richard started slightly and wondered.

'No,' he said. 'If I had sufficient money to afford this place, I would hire a small house or at least select a place with more character than this.'

Michael stopped and said sharply: 'You may do what you like with your money, but don't criticise these people for choosing this place. It's better than our grotty tent.'

'I don't, Michael. But I doubt the value of their choice.'

Michael replied angrily: 'My parents brought me here several years ago after my operations. I enjoyed it and I was treated kindly by the guests who were here at the time.'

Richard acknowledged these remarks silently and walked on. He felt graceless and troubled.

Inside, the hotel was cool and dark. Through the high windows they could see the sea and cliffs, a silent panorama which, without the attendant heat, gleamed with a brilliance that was near to bursting beyond limits in its intensity. In the foyer people sat about in casually arranged chairs. They drank and talked quietly, hardly moving. Michael continued through the foyer to the bar and asked the serving girl: 'Where is Señor Desanova? I would like to see him.'

When the girl had nodded and disappeared through a door behind the counter, Michael half-turned his torso towards Richard, who dawdled a few feet from the counter. He smiled. 'What will you have for breakfast? Coffee? Roll?' Richard answered 'Yes, yes' quickly to rid himself of Michael's invitation to join him in a partnership of familiarity.

The girl returned and began speaking volubly in staccato Spanish. The two visitors stood and listened with respect. As she spoke, the concerted gaze of the two upset her. Her eyes looked from side to side, over their heads and down to their waists. Her flow of words came slowly to a broken halt. Richard leaned forward and said gently, 'We don't understand one blessed word.' He though quickly, then said with irony: 'Yo no comprendo.'

The girl turned and ran back through the door.

Michael smiled at Richard, and he in return said, 'I still don't like the damned place.'

Michael swore kindly at him.

With a bustle Señor Desanova entered, beaming broadly at the two young men who had put his maid to flight. He rubbed his hands together, palm over back, around and around.

'Ah, gentlemen. Can I help you? My girl, she does not understand the English. I apologise for her.'

Michael leaned forward stiffly over the counter. 'Señor Desanova, do you remember me? Michael Johnson? I was here with my parents some years ago.' Richard withdrew to study the rolls stacked in a glass case at the end of the bar. Michael explained the circumstances of their previous meeting to the hotel owner. At last he burst out in an exclamation of memory.

'Of course, Señor Johnson, now I remember you,' he said loudly and smote his brow with his palm. 'It was silly of me not to remember. But I have so many people coming here every year, you understand, and you must give me time to bring your face to my mind.'

They shook hands and both simultaneously became aware of Richard standing nearby, watching them without expression.

'Richard, come over and I will introduce you to Señor Desanova.'

Richard shook the warm, moist hand.

'Do you come from the same part of England as Señor Johnson.'

'No,' Richard replied. 'I come from Ireland, from Dublin. But I live in London now.'

'Ah, the Irish. I do not have many coming here. But I have met some in Barcelona. A very warm and generous people.'

Richard bowed slightly in acknowledgement. Desanova raised his hands to shoulder height and smiled broadly. A silence followed.

'Señor Desanova,' Michael said, as if coming out of a trance. 'May we have some breakfast.'

'Why of course, certainly.' He turned and clapped his hands. 'Maria!'

The young girl reappeared. As Desanova spoke, she eyed the two young men with apprehension. He took her by the arm and led her to the counter.

'You will have coffee and rolls? Yes?'

Maria fled to the rear of the hotel clutching and order in her hand. Desanova insisted that while they waited for the food they should each have a brandy.

'I see you have enlarged the hotel,' Michael said after he had tasted the brandy.

'Sí. I have built two blocks, one at each side.' He spoke in a rush, pointing in opposite directions. 'Business, you know, has increased. More people drive to Spain now, and here, along this part of the coast' – he waved an arm in the direction – 'has become very popular.'

Richard looked about him at the residents. They had come from tense, crowded Northern cities to rest. They sat poised, well dressed, well nourished, as if awaiting something: something that would justify all the effort of living. Was it, he thought, because of his youth or out of envy that he thought that of them?

He turned to the hotel owner.

'Señor, you get state aid, of course, for these extensions.'

Desanova started with surprise. 'Sí, but they are very small.' He suddenly became impassioned. 'What we give to Madrid in taxes is very great, but we receive little in return. We, in these hotels along the coast' – again he waved his hands – 'we make much money for Spain. We pay taxes, much money in taxes, but what do we get in return...?' he paused and reflected, then continued more quietly, appealing to both Michael and Richard. 'Spain is a large family of races, and we have a saying that the family is supported by two of its sons, the Basques and we, the Catalans.'

Maria reappeared carrying a large tray covered by a napkin.

'Ah, gentlemen, your breakfast.' He escorted them to a table in lounge, followed closely by Maria. As she set out the food and coffee, Desanova shook hands with his two guests and wished them 'Adios' and departed.

'Michael, will you be mother?' Richard asked when they were seated. 'The pot is closer to you.'

While pouring the coffee, Michael said in undertones: 'You shouldn't have set him off like that.'

'Like what?' Richard asked in surprise.

'About central government and taxation. They haven't forgotten what happened in the Civil War. They don't like Franco's regime. And Franco won't let them forget him.'

Richard felt the inertia invade him: the weight of history.

'The Catalans have always been good businessmen and traders,' he said heavily, 'since the time of the Carthaginians. In the Middle Ages they had independence for a while and actually controlled the western Mediterranean.' Though Michael was listening to him, Richard was talking to himself, seeking to rationalise the weight on him. 'But that was the time of Aragon, when kings ruled in Saragossa and the traders lived in Barcelona.' He smiled a quick smile of relief at Michael. 'I bet they complained about taxes even then.'

He lifted his cup to his mouth. Discovering it to be empty, he reached over for the coffee pot. But Michael intervened and poured coffee for him, bidden by an obscure guilt for Richard's sensitivity.

The sun reached its zenith on time, and then began its gradual descent to the Pyrenees. The sky was vast and brittle, full of brightness that reflected on land and sea. The sea slapped and shifted aimlessly, breaking the light into a million refractions. But beneath the surface all was cool: green and silent.

Richard's head bobbed up into the surface. Fixing his position, he swam towards the sailing dinghy, his body surging through the wavecrests. When close to the boat he called out:

'Ship ahoy! Permission to come aboard.'

'Go and feed the fishes,' Michael called in an easy voice.

'What?' shouted Richard, trying to shake the water from his ears.

Grinning, Michael made a rude sign and pointed to the shore: 'Swim back. You're too clumsy for this art of sailing.'

Richard trod water and turned in the direction of the shore. Through the waves he could see the distant outline of the coastal slopes and the villas set on them like sugar cubes, squat and inert. Embraced by the warm freedom of the sea, he felt a tingle of fear at the sight of those definite shapes which remained unmoved by the heat and sun.

'Stand by for boarding party,' he called.

With sudden energy he dived beneath the green surface and swam frog-like under the keel. Surfacing directly under Michael, he reached up and gripped him about the waist and pulled him back into the water. Then he scrambled aboard. When Michael surfaced, spitting water and screwing up his eyes, he leered at him. Michael threshed water and shook his head violently. Richard, seeing the pain in his eyes, reached out and pulled him aboard.

When he had helped him into the boat, Richard ran up the sail. The wind caught it and set the spar swinging from side to side. He grabbed it and tried to secure it to one side and then to the other side of the boat.

'Not that way, for God's sake,' Michael shouted. 'Set the boat's head first.' He pulled himself up and edged down the boat. Taking the rope, he guided the boat about till it faced the shore. Setting the sail at the desired angle, he tied it down. 'That's how it's done,' he said with satisfaction. Richard smiled with ironic contrition and insisted that he 'skippered' the boat while Michael rested.

Once ashore, they returned the dinghy to its owner and walked up the crowded beach to a café. They sat on the veranda overlooking the beach and ordered wine and bread. Michael, who sat with his back to the sun, leaned forward and placed his elbows on the table.

'You needn't have been so solicitous in the boat,' he said harshly. 'It was the sudden shock of the water that caused the pain.'

'What else could I have done?' Richard replied in annoyance. 'You were obviously in agony.'

'Even so, I could have managed it alone.'

'Surely if I needed help and you gave it,' Richard's voice was hard and he pronounced each word precisely, 'I would have the sense to realise that you had helped me from your own good judgement and would be accordingly grateful.'

'Gratitude!' Michael hissed with suppressed anger, keeping his voice low in self-conscious regard for the people seated nearby. 'Don't be so damned conceited. What help would you need from me anyway.'

Richard shrugged his shoulders. 'It's supposed to be a part of friendship that one helps the other without keeping a balance sheet.' He slumped in his chair. 'Now, for heaven's sake, let's stop this arguing – it's far too hot.'

In silence both looked down on the beach, at people with brown skins and others with burnt red skins, who were moving about, sitting down, going into the water or coming out of it. The heat was heavy and tiresome – the blazing heat of noon being maintained now by the lowering sun. Two young women with white skins, newcomers to the beach, looked in their direction a few times. But, because of the heat or perhaps the constant nervous attention they received from their escort, an effeminate Cockney who wore a garish jockey's cap, any interest that had been aroused evaporated. Later, Michael drew Richard's attention to a child playing in the sand. The child was digging a hole. Scooping the sand into his small bucket, he carried it patiently to a spot six feet away and emptied it on a growing mound. Though the mound was growing, the projected hole had not deepened appreciably, as sand trickled continuously into it.

'I wonder what he's doing?' Richard mused distantly. 'Digging a hole or building a mountain?'

'Simply passing the time, I expect,' Michael replied, smiling.

Richard threw his head back to ease a tension: 'Maybe. But building mountains seems to be easier than digging holes.'

Michael stretched his arms, jerking his eyes off the labouring child. Then he consulted his watch: 'I think it's time we went back, Dick, and had a rest before dinner.'

They collected their swimming gear and shirts and walked through the cool café into the street. When they reached the car, Michael said, 'Hang on, I want to check that front spring.' He lowered himself awkwardly to the ground and pulled his head beneath the car. Richard got into the car and absently took an old and ragged book from the glove compartment. He flicked through the pages, reading small pieces here and there, with no apparent object. Michael clambered to his feet and gave a thumbs-up. Getting into the car, he said, 'It's keeping together. We might not have to do that welding job, after all.'

'I hope not,' Richard replied. 'I don't fancy scrambling around the engine, holding parts together for you.'

Michael laughed. 'It would do you good to use your hands for a change.'

By way of reply, Richard opened the book and said, 'Listen to this:

As in all the Bagur beaches, the seriousness of nature, the lack of picturesqueness, the ever-present sea, produce on the beach an atmosphere of solitude and remoteness.

Michael wrenched the ignition key.

'Ballocks,' he said flatly.

A group of English holidaymakers passed them in the direction of the beach. Some carried skis, and a tall venerable middle aged man moved among them, checking names off a list.

'Hallo,' Michael said suddenly. 'I know that girl.' He pointed to one of the group. 'They must be staying hereabouts as usual. Hold on, I must talk to her.'

He switched off the motor and got out of the car. Walking towards the group, he called, 'Deborah, I say, Deborah.' A girl turned in surprise. Her face lighted in recognition. She waved and cried, 'Michael, Michael Johnson! Are you down here too?' She detached herself from the group and came to meet him. Instinctively, they shook hands. As they spoke Michael shuffled his feet, put one arm akimbo and stroked the flank of his nose. The girl allowed her arms to dangle loosely at her sides, but her head jutted as she spoke.

Richard watched them for a moment, then returned to his book. He did not look up until Michael sat back in behind the wheel. 'Right,' he said, elated, 'everything is arranged for tonight. No more wandering about the province looking for fun.'

He started the engine and put the car in gear.

'Where?' Richard asked.

'I said we would go over to Tamariu tonight,' Michael replied as he drove out on to the road.

'Well, a fitting object for the end of our odyssey,' Richard said ironically.

They drove easily up towards Bagur. The sun had sunk behind the line of coastal hills and the shady coolness gave a calm relief to the evening. Michael hummed as he drove and Richard read from his book, flipping from page to page.

'Listen to this,' he said suddenly, raising the book:

The littoral is a succession of entrances and exits, of bays and points, of corners and minute capes of a continuous diversity. This sinuosity of the coast seen against the mountains whole – and this view is best appreciated above all from the sea going out for a half mile – is of suggestive vivacity.

'What on earth are you reading?' Michael asked. 'It goes on and on.'

'A chap called Pla. He lived in the last century.'

'He obviously had plenty of time on his hands,'

They breasted a ridge. Before them the sun was settling down into the Pyrenees. Banks of cloud hung between the high peaks and filled the valleys below them. The plains of Spain stretched from the mountains to the foot of the ridge: bronze-misted with little shadow-black poplars in lines here and there. To their right the sea was calm and pastel, with the currents around the islets a deeper hue. The immense mystical world before them put them in awe. Both were silenced, caught between the rational and the sentimental, by this fabled Spain in all its sublime splendour. The instincts of both measured the evening's effect and, for a moment, held the balance between the glory and the poignancy it effected in them. Then Michael spoke, his voice husky with emotion:

'You see, Richard, why we all come here. We must have some of this now and again.'

Richard felt the sadness. But his response was disturbed by the noise and vibration of the car. He was suffused with a kind of intense anger.

'Joy,' he said shortly, 'is what we should feel.'

The road dipped down into the next valley and they were carried down into the shadow again. With relief both relaxed; one to his reading, the other to his driving.

'Richard,' Michael said after a short while. Richard looked up. 'Surely something like that makes the holiday worth while? I mean, the beauty of the country itself should satisfy.'

'What?' Richard said. 'Like a painting? And after viewing it, you stroke your girl's hand and go off for a drink.'

'No, no. not like that,' Michael replied quickly. 'I mean that it should satisfy completely.'

'Here, like this, you mean.' Richard pointed to the book on his knees. He read:

The sky, first ochre, then purple, then carmine, is lit up by a great mass of smoke, blood red and dramatic. The distant mountains, at first covered with the thinnest of veils, takes on all the shades of blue and purple. From the wide and fruitful plain, the smoke of the land and the evaporation of the waters, seem to rise gently to the heavens.

Richard closed the book. 'You see? Tremulous amid the blood and smoke. That's sublimation, not liberation.'

They crossed the narrow valley and began climbing towards Bagur through terraced fields set like gigantic steps up to the city. They entered the sad, stony city and crawled through the narrow streets. Everything was grey: the streets, the faceless churches and gaping houses – a foreign place filled with foreign lives and foreign habits. It reminded Richard of Connaught towns. Michael saw streets and people and felt the returning ache in his bones.

'Will you close up your window, please, Richard? It's getting chilly.'

They parked the large red Fiat in the carpark opposite the police barracks in Palafrugell. While awaiting Michael, who was locking and testing the doors, Richard leaned his weight on the front of the car. He springs sighed under the pressure. Stepping back and rubbing his hands with his handkerchief, he asked Michael if the faulty spring would hold out for the journey back to England. Michael replied that he thought it would. He completed his task and joined Richard at the front of the car. They had showered and changed after an hour's rest at the campsite. Michael wore an electric blue shirt and white slacks; Richard, a beige cotton shirt and fawn trousers. As they walked from the carpark Richard complained of the poor quality of Michael's razor, saying how his face stung in the night air. Michael was amused by the complain and replied facetiously.

Before them, across the street, was the police barracks, its face impassive, the few windows let into it barred thickly. The massive doors were open wide and they could see into the badly lit courtyard. Two policemen entered the yard through a door at the rear and walked towards the street. In reaction, Michael walked on, followed closely by Richard. Going down the sloping street, they leaned back slightly to arrange their centres of gravity for the best comfort. Michael reminded Richard that there were two police forces in Spain: the local or provincial force and the Federales. He said that the local chaps were decent enough, settled in the area and dealing usually with misdemeanours. The Federales, on the other hand, were drafted in to handle the greater crimes against the state and keep a finger on the local pulse. He asked Richard if he remembered the incident reported last week when six striking workers had been shot in the south of the country. Richard remembered and cast a curious glance back at the building. The two policemen were lounging against the door jambs. One of them hitched his belt and resettled his holster on his thighs. The other took a final draw of his cigarette and casually flicked it into the middle of the road. Mollified, they walked on.

An old peasant came towards them, leading a donkey and a cart. Richard called 'Buenos noches' in an amiable voice, but it was lost in the abrasive racket made by the large wheels on the gritty road. The old man noticed Richard looking at him and after surveying him quickly returned his eyes to the ground before him.

They crossed a road and entered a more narrow street. Small shops lined the right side and threw shafts of light on to the roadway. Michael offered Richard a cigarette and lit it for him. Three girls, native of the town, passed by, laughing together and utterly ignoring them. Michael remarked on the loneliness of the male when separated from his loved one and suggested a practical remedy for such loneliness. Richard wondered if such loneliness was of the Spirit or the Flesh. Michael replied that it was both, but that the callings of the flesh were stronger than the aspirations of the spirit; but it had been the object of his upbringing and education that he should control such callings, that the spirit was in all ways superior to the flesh. Richard asked him if he believed that. No, he was told, but I am unfortunately conditioned to such a belief. They passed the shops and walked on into the gloom of a street faced on both sides with dark houses. Richard questioned him again. Do you find copulation a traumatic experience? Michael replied that he did, and, he continued, that coupled with a sense of inferiority because of my ailment, the most ordinary advance to a girl can become a source of anguish. A pity, Richard said sympathetically. Do you feel then that your loved one back in Yorkshire keeps you on sufferance alone? Michael tensed his free hand until his fingers were stiffly splayed. Looking down at them, he said, Yes, yes, I believe that.

They turned another corner. The lights of the town centre glowed in the night sky before them. Michael threw away the butt of his cigarette. And you, he asked, which do you believe is the stronger. Life corrupts and the spirit renews, Richard replied, but living is a thing of beauty. Therefore we carry on living and try to keep abreast of the corruption. That, Michael said, smells of your religion. Richard laughed outright at this – his laughter became a shout that resounded in the dim streets about and finally produced a hollow echo somewhere in the darkness to their right.

At the end of the street lay their destination, a restaurant. They stood without in the pouring light, offering each other first entrance in the style of old-time gentlemen. Richard, seeing the nonsense of this impasse, took the fore and entered. Tantalised by the smell of food in the hot air, they walked down the broad entry, past the huge chicken spit, where dozens of carcasses turned and turned, crackling and spitting, over a charcoal fire. The eating room proper was a bedlam of noises: the clashing of cutlery, shouted orders in Catalan, a cacophony of divers tongues. Muted and polite, they edged their way through the diners, apologising for the disturbance they created. Seated at last at a table to the rear of the room, they allowed their moods adapt to the atmosphere. The adobéd walls and wattled ceilings reflected the light of the guttering fat candles distributed about the tables. The nets, cork-floats, leather harness and gutting knives which hung on the walls underlined the smell of seafood and wine.

While Michael looked out for the waitress, Richard gazed about absorbing the milieu. A private and petite group of French, one of them a woman of great beauty with spiteful eyes, sat close by eating in silence, as though overawed by the bustle and noise about them. Beyond, in a corner, three Germans huddled, one of them demonstrating his method of spearing fish underwater. Their eyes were bright and zealous. Beside them an English family ate: their children shouting and calling for more of this and more of that. Their parents answered self-consciously, constantly looking about to see if their conduct was noticed. Michael called his attention to the wine, which he had poured. While reaching for his glass, Richard saw with surprise that his arm was brown and veined. A feeling of physical and mental wellbeing suffused him. An eagerness for night-life flowed through him: a subjective energy which comes to a man when there is no sun to humble him or to make absurd his egoism; when all light is human light and comfort light, made by man for man's comfort. He raised his glass in toast to Michael and drank. The rough wine stung their tongues with vinegar sharpness and flowed, by sensation, into their veins.

Throughout the meal Michael talked, as if freed from some constraint that had lain on his during the physical activity of the day. He de-shelled his prawns, cut his meat, drank his measure of wine and bobbed his head to his fork as he talked. Initially, while reminiscing on his previous holiday in Spain, he spoke shyly, watching Richard's face carefully to gauge his reactions. He related the practicalities of the holiday first: the operations and the need for convalescence; the comfort and convenience of the hotel; the cheer he received from the guests; the heat of the sun and the pleasure and release it had given him; the quick uplift in morale and the indulgence of his parents. Then, glad to have done with these preliminaries, he gradually introduced what he considered the essence of his memory – his mood at the time, and the girl. He reassembled images of the girl, Deborah, as she had been then, and their time together. Carried on by his emotion, he recalled incidents and his reactions to them; he talked around the essence, unable to break out of orbit towards it. His sense of oppression grew and all at once he became aware of his outflowing and in panic at the thought of his folly went silent.

Richard looked at him nonplussed, chewing slowly on a morsel of meat. Resourcefully he smiled and shrugged his shoulders very slightly. Catching sight of the French party, he remarked on the beauty of the woman in their company. Michael turned to look. The woman had her wine glass raised to her lips. Seeing his gaze, she arched her brows and quizzed him with her eyes. Michael turned away abashed, and relieved.

A child's voice shouted in pain and anger. The English father was drawing himself back across the table, his arm still upraised. His son howled and threw things on the floor, his other hand clutching the side of his head. His mother called on him to quieten and, in a changed tone, rebuked her husband. The diners looked at the scene: some with disgust, others with annoyance, a few with relish. Except for the Germans. They were silent, each looking down at the area of table immediately before him.

Richard suggested that they leave.

During the walk to the central plaza, Michael talked of a secret of his. The wine and the warmth of the restaurant had eased his pain to the extent that he was unaware of it now. He said he would like to settle in this part of the country. He knew of a small house, situated in the valley above Sa Riera, which he could rent. For a living he would instruct tourists in the handling of sailing boats, hoping to earn enough money in the summer to tide him over the winter. Richard nodded constantly as the plan was unfolded. When Michael finished, he asked if he would not find the very conservative society repressive; that having once settled here he would find liberal amusements, similar to those of Yorkshire, hard to find. Michael dismissed this immediately, and said that the quiet rhythm of life in Sa Riera would absolve him of the need for such trivia. Richard shrugged his shoulders. He could not picture Michael's projected life: but, he wondered, would the change be an achievement or a compensation.

The square was crowded, filled with the hubbub of voices. Waiters hurried through the concentration of tables, chairs and people, carrying loaded trays aloft. Michael pointed out that most of the congregation sat, or contrived to sit, facing a particular side of the square. On that side, in front of a large café, chairs were arranged in rows, on which lay various musical instruments. Richard asked a man close by, in irregular school Spanish, what was to be expected. The man maintained his native reserve and simply pointed to a coloured notice tacked to the trunk of a tree. The notice proclaimed the opening of the Festival Primavera, which would continue for a week. He drew Michael's attention to it, and said, with a smile, that the Irish celebrate the beginning of spring in the depths of winter, and lo! The Spanish celebrate it in the middle of summer. Michael, busy looking around for a vacant table, only half heard. Discovering that none was available, he swore. Richard said no matter, and led the way to the nearest bar.

Inside, they chose stools that gave them a view of the bandstand and ordered coffee and brandy. A waiter rushed in bearing a tray filled with glasses and crockery. After shouting his orders to the barmaid, he wiped his face with a convenient cloth and began talking, complaining of the heat and the pressure of work. The barmaid jeered him, throwing her arm out in his direction as though to present him as a lazy old fool. Rebuked, he quietened and stood leaning against the bar and stared vacantly at the ceiling. As Richard counted out pesetas to pay for the drinks, a boy ran in shouting at the top of his voice. Richard lost his concentration and dropped the coins remaining in his hand on to the counter. A very red-faced woman was carried in. The waiter jumped away from the bar and told the two locals carrying her where she was to be placed. An old peasant sitting at the back of the room cried, Huh, Inglés, and laughing, fanned his face with mock-fussiness. The waiter turned and spoke sharply to him, but when others joined in the laughter he returned his attention to the fainted woman, who had by now been seated, and began slapping the back of her hand, saying soothingly, Al right, ladee. Michael watched the scene with increasing distaste. Turning, he offered to buy Richard one more drink before they got to hell out of the town. When he had paid for the drinks he began talking again, picking up the threads of his earlier monologues. His voice was harder and more guttural now. Once, when he looked at him to add force to some point he had made, Richard was surprised by the fierce dogged stare of his eyes. A ragged applause came from the square. Richard looked out and saw the musicians file out of the café opposite and take their places among the arranged chairs. Are you listening to me, Michael asked peevishly. Richard said he was and turned his attention to him. A trickle of perspiration eased its way out from Michael's hairline and rolled over his forehead. Richard finally murmured, Take it easy, and braced himself for the reaction. But Michael deflated and nodded in agreement.

Outside in the square, a shrill instrument piped a series of notes, and, in reply, the band began playing, taking the series for a theme. Richard nodded to Michael to come out into the open. Without waiting for a reply, he left the bar. Here and there around the square, where there was room, circles of dancers had formed. They danced gravely, their bodies swaying in rhythm to the steps of the dance.

Within the circle of sycamores the audience sat at rest, watching the dancing. The splayed branches caught the light of the street lamps and created a magical roof. The buildings that lined the squares were the walls, lit by their own various lighting. The square was successfully enclosed away from the night.

Michael drove fast and recklessly, braced over the wheel as if drawing strength from it. Richard, through habit, looked out blankly on to the dark countryside.

After a while Michael sat back and said gruffly, 'I thought you were keen on coming to this place in Tamariu.'

'An hour won't make much difference. It will go on till five in the morning. They usually do.'

'That's not the point. We came here for fun and games. Instead, you want to watch the natives dancing, like some bloody tourist.'

He drove into a bend. The tyres screeched on the gravel, causing the car to tremble and buck. Michael made a panic adjustment to the wheel. The car swerved slightly and sped out of the turn.

'That was dangerous,' Richard said with deliberate calm. 'Try to be a bit more careful. Don't forget you've been drinking.'

'Oh, for Christ's sake! Can't a man have a little fun,' Michael shouted, his voice pitched with strain.

Trees and bushes rushed by in the headlights. Richard's eyes were heated and moist and, consequently, he could no longer judge the line of the road. He looked across at Michael, in whose hands and skill he must put judgement. Michael drove with an intention. His face, illuminated by the dashboard light, was masked by his cold preoccupation with his object.

Another bend. Again the car bucked in the struggle of conflicting forces. A pair of headlights suddenly shone in their faces: a small French car apparently skipped into sight. While its occupants looked at them, shocked and mesmerised, Richard experienced an instant of submission to the events and returned their stares helplessly. Michael muttered to himself and swung the wheel, first one way and then the other. The car mounted the verge, showering stones against the underside with a fierce clatter. As the other car swept past, the whine of its motor audible for a second, the driver glanced over in vague admonishment. Michael pulled back on to the road and completed the turn without reducing speed.

Richard was suddenly aware that Michael wasn't driving anywhere in space: he was driving something out of himself. Nothing would happen for him tonight, except what had happened on previous nights: he would get drunk and angry. He ran at death, but was too good at his expression to kill himself. His expression eased his pain, but did not absolve him from it. And the easing gave him pleasure.

Michael self-consciously broke the silence.

'That was close. Did you get a fright?'

'I don't know. It wasn't real enough.'

But the moment of danger had given him insight.

'Not real enough? It was for me. You're being the intellectual again, trying to be profound.'

He was laughing good-naturedly, with condescension.

'I don't know about that. You were actively involved in the crisis, while I was passive. You experienced the fear that is part of responsibility. I had the submission of the powerless.'

'Nonsense. You were as much involved as I was. You are in the car with me. You simply don't want to admit to being afraid.'

'I assure you, Michael, that I would rather be in fear of my fate than in submission to it.'

'There was no need to fear,' Michael said sharply. 'I had everything under control.'

They rumbled and tumbled easily down the curving road into the village. At Richard's suggestion they went to a bar on the promenade, the night being cool and silent, to have a drink before entering the clamour of the nightclub. The atmosphere so affected Richard that he would not leave when Michael stood up and drained his glass. Exasperated, he cursed him for his moodiness and walked off. Richard sat in apparent meditation, though, in fact, his mind was a blank. Behind him a large Spanish family, comprising three generations, were grouped about a number of tables. Their conversation was desultory and intimate, interspersed by easy laughter. The children ran among them, running to whosoever called to them, to be fondled and hugged in simple affection. The patriarch, a baby on his knee, presided complacently over the gathering. Any utterance he chose to make from time to time was received with respect and usually answered by one of his older sons. Richard listened to the unintelligible language as if listening to music and allowed its gentle mood to relax him.

Four policemen walked on to the promenade from the village. They came two by two: in front, local police, who smoked and chatted; behind were two Federales, who, being conscious of their duty, were grim. As they passed the bar the family fell silent. Richard felt the hackles rise at the sight of their weapons. When they had walked on a few yards, one of the sons said something and spat. The old man rebuked him and addressed the group in a louder voice, commanding all of them to be silent.

Richard finished his drink and walked across the promenade and down to the beach.

Richard entered the nightclub and stood in the doorway, blinking dazedly in the light and noise. Michael saw him with a start and raised his glass to him.

'Ho, my wild Irish dreamer! Have you communed with your god?' He looked down his body insolently. 'Your feet are wet. Have you been swimming again?'

Richard looked down at his dark-stained shoes and trousers. He replied mildly in a bantering voice: 'It was warm and the sea was cool.'

Michael turned to his companion at the bar. As he spoke the loudness of his voice drew the attention of others.

'This is my holiday partner – Richard, from Dublin in Ireland.' He laughed, almost falling off the stool as he did. 'Listen. We had a near thing on the way down here. We almost hit a car on a bend and in avoiding it almost ran off the road. When I asked him if he had been frightened, he said it wasn't real enough!'

Richard leaned between Michael and his drinking companion and called the barman.

'Well? What do you think of that?' Michael asked, thrusting his head forward so as to look into Richard's face.

Richard pulled back. The insistent tone tensed him.

'I've already answered that,' he said simply.

'Don't loose your cool, whatever you do. Otherwise you'll make a fool of yourself.'

Richard turned away and caught sight of a girl coming towards them. 'Watch out, here comes your girlfriend,' he said quickly.

'This is your friend, Michael, isn't it?' she said with deliberate politeness, turning to Richard.

'Yes. It is he, at last.' Michael was suddenly adrift, unable to focus himself.

But he introduced them. Deborah beckoned to another girl, who stood in the background.

'Richard, this is Sandra. She wanted to meet you.'

Michael cut between the three. His voice was slurred and abstracted: 'He's been swimming in the sea. That's what kept him.'

The girls looked at Richard with new interest.

'How lovely,' Sandra said loudly. 'It must be beautiful on the beach at this time of night.'

Richard smiled reflectively. The floating joy had carried him out over the phosphorescent sea. Joy welled in him again like swelling and poised at their peak. The gentle tension held him, thrilled him...

'Spain,' he said, gesturing with his hands.

Michael was moved to speak, 'Will we all have a drink?' As he spoke he reached out and clutched Deborah's wrist. She pulled away in distaste and then walked off. Sandra stood uncertain, until Richard said, 'Don't go. We can sit over by the window presently.' Michael brought the drinks and handed them from the counter without ceremony. Then he returned to talk to his companion beside him.

Richard paused, then took Sandra by the arm and guided her through the crowd to the window seat. The moon had risen. Though they could not see it, its light illuminated the low slopes beyond the road outside.

'Have you known Michael before?' Richard asked.

'Yes. I met him when he was here before.'

'You mean you come here every year?'

'Yes, we do. That is, my parents and I,' she replied. Looking out the window, she continued, 'It's so beautiful here. These warm nights and the long hot days. It's enchanting just to lie about and do nothing but doze and soak up the sun.'

Richard stroked the side of his glass. 'Has Michael changed very much since you last knew him?'

'He has become very hard, and bitter. He is very sensitive, you know. When he was here before he was almost in love with Deborah. But tonight he cut her cold. She was quite hurt by it.'

'So is he, I think.'

She looked at him quickly. 'Oh, I never realised that. He tried to take her away from her friends when she introduced him. He made no attempt to be friendly towards them.'

'He may have had the wrong idea about tonight. He expected a lot on the strength of his last time here.'

Sandra made no reply. She continued looking out the window. To distract her from her mood, Richard asked, 'Have you seen the dancing in Palafrugell?'

She brightened immediately. 'The Sardanas? Isn't it a wonderful spectacle?' she said with feeling. 'I first saw it three years ago. And it has started again? We must see it tomorrow night.'

'I won't be here then. We're leaving tomorrow.'

'I didn't mean... Are you going home tomorrow? What a pity. You must be sad to leave. You give me the impression that you really love Spain.'

'I'm afraid it's something of a novelty,' he said. 'But I would have liked to see that dancing again.'

'I would have included you in the party,' she said seriously. 'But you had little time for us today. What were you reading? Whatever it was must have been interesting, because you were so engrossed in it.'

Richard watched her as she spoke. She was tall and well-fleshed, a comfortably reared girl with her childhood still close to her. Her face was round and plump, her fair hair lying salt-matted on her shoulders. In his joyousness she scintillated in the fact that she was young and alive.

She had returned to looking at the moonlight on the slope outside. Now she started and looked at him.

'Why are you watching me like that?'

Richard felt the resonance in him. It affected the timbre of his voice, making it gay: 'You're a woman. You should be complimented.'

She lowered her eyes as though to renounce that responsibility. Richard lifted her face gently.

'Tell me about the Sardanas, Sandra,' he said winningly. 'I would like to hear your impressions of the dance.'

She brightened again. 'Well, first let me recite you a short poem about the dance. I'm sure you'll like it.'

She paused and pursed her lips in concentration.

La Sardana es la dansa mes bella  
De totes les dances que es fan y es desfan.  
Es mobil magnifica a nella,  
Que amb mida y amb pause valenta oscillant.

She smiled and shook her hair.

'Do you understand it?' she asked brightly.

'Most of it. My Spanish is a mixture of school learning and overheard conversation.'

Sandra looked out the window as she spoke about the dance. She stroked the wood of the sill with strong, puffy fingers. It was no objective description: the images she produced took complete command of her mind. Richard was not affected by her emotion, but he felt he understood it. It was not innocence; it was a rebirth of innocence.

When she had finished, she suddenly asked: 'Did Michael enjoy the dancing? I don't think he saw it before. He was too sick to stay up late.'

'I don't think so. He was too impatient to get down here.'

Reminded of Michael's existence, Richard looked around to where he had left him. But he had moved to a table and was now in deep conversation, making vague descriptive gestures with his hands. To Richard's surprise, he was speaking to two of the Germans who had been in the restaurant earlier in the evening.

'It's a pity he and Deborah argued as they did,' Sandra lamented, letting her earlier mood run. 'They would be so much happier now otherwise.'

But Richard moved against the sentiment: 'I don't know how Deborah is feeling, but Michael might be happier at the moment than you think.'

Then he straightened in his seat and touched her lightly on the cheek. 'Don't worry yourself about them. I'm sure they're old enough to fend for themselves.' He spoke caressingly, more to draw attention to himself than to impart information.

She nuzzled her face against his touch. 'Tell me,' she asked intimately. 'Did you really walk through the waves?'

'Yes I really did,' Richard replied with the same intimacy, bringing his face close to hers. 'I did it for joy... Freude.'

She drew her head back, laughing suddenly. Richard laughed with her. He took her hand from the sill and squeezed it. Sandra sighed, as though in regret, and looked up at him. Her eyes were moist and they glistened in the light. Generous eyes, Richard saw, all young. Pure receptiveness. He felt an upsurge of desire for her. She squeezed his hand in return with earnest appeal.

'Would you like to walk on the beach?' Richard asked.

Without replying, Sandra stood up and walked towards the door.

Outside, the change in atmosphere, from the smells and noise of the club to the sweet silence of the night, made them quiet and self-conscious. They walked side by side, without touching, down the gentle gradient towards the sea. Richard gazed up at the stars, identifying the familiar constellations, attempting to grasp the reality of his changed latitude in the changed inclination of the stars. But the presence of the warm body beside him made it too difficult. Sandra hummed some vague melody. 'They're beautiful, aren't they,' Richard said, pointing up. She paused to look up. Richard, walking a little behind, reached forwards and grasped her hips. She stopped and seemed to wait. Richard's head hammered with the combined effects of alcohol, nicotine and desire. He drew her back to him and pressed his face into her hair. Sandra responded by turning her face to him, her mouth slack and gaping. Their kiss was too rough at first and Sandra pulled back. But then they rejoined for the sheer pleasure of it. Her desire leapt in her and she pressed back against Richard.

When they parted, both shaking with the force of their passion, Sandra looked at him with a mixture of irony and regret. She put her fingers on his lips and said ambiguously:

'Bastard.'

Then she threw her arms about his neck. Richard had a fleeting feeling of pity for her, but it passed and was replaced by one of eagerness.

They crossed the promenade on to the beach. The family had gone. Nothing was left but the street lights and some pieces of paper that waffled weakly in the night wind.

When Richard returned he saw that Michael was slumped in his chair. He was trying very hard to pour coke into a glass of white rum. The bottle shook in his hand, jarring against the rim of the glass, which set his teeth on edge and tingled along his diseased spine. But he had to do it. He could not drink the rum on its own: it should be mixed with coke. The two Germans sat opposite him and encouraged him along in their own language, and Michael now and again looked over at them and smiled in gratitude. The eyes of the Germans were alive and bright with the force of life.

Richard's eyes were hollowed and dark and his face raw about his mouth and cheeks. He took the bottle from Michael's hand. As he poured the liquid his hand shook slightly, but he held the bottle high over the glass and allowed the coke splash and froth. This completed, he made a small bow to the Germans and raised the glass and drank.

'Hoi! That's my drink. You can't do that,' Michael shouted, coming out of his stupor. 'Oh, it's you.' He looked closely at Richard. 'Did you get it?'

Richard replaced the glass and bent down to Michael.

'Are you ready?' he said with residual gaiety.

'Am I ready? No, I'm not. I'm going to sit here all night and talk to my friends.' He indicated the two Germans. 'They at least had the decency to talk to me while you went off with that female.'

'It's after four and the sun is rising,' Richard said, looking over at the Germans. 'Come on, the night is over.'

'No. Leave me alone. I don't want to go.'

'Very well. Will you give me the car keys then? I'll come and collect you in the morning.'

Michael fumbled in his pockets. When he found the keys, he handed them over with a look of defiance.

'Don't kill yourself in it,' he said. As Richard walked towards the street he called after him: 'And don't forget, motorcars are real: they're made of steel.'

Seated behind the wheel, Richard plugged the key into the ignition and sat back. The array of knobs and instruments, the smell of burnt oil and dust, the familiar smell of their presence and the memories all these inspired, of racing and bumping down through England and France, of the torpor at the end of a day's driving, and, finally, the prospect of making the return journey beginning that day, filled him with a loathing for the machine.

He lit a cigarette and closed his eyes, content to sit there until the morning proper, when he would fetch Michael from where-ever he found to sleep off the drink.

But before he had finished the cigarette, Michael came down the avenue. He called out Richard's name in a sing-song voice and stumbled on the gravely surface. When he reached the car he tapped on the window and said, too loudly, 'I thought you were going back to the campsite.'

Richard got out of the car.

'I didn't feel like driving it.'

Michael looked at him askance.

'Were you afraid of it?' His eyes were puffed, but the blankness was gone. 'Give me the keys.'

'They're in the ignition,' Richard said. He walked around the car, raising his voice. 'I had a revulsion for the whole machine.'

Michael shrugged stiffly and then clambered awkwardly into the driving seat. As Richard got in beside him, he asked: 'Are you sure you weren't afraid?'

'Yes, I'm quite sure,' Richard said sharply, feeling the mood of the car close about him. 'Why should I be ashamed of admitting it if it were true?'

Michael switched the key. 'Nothing, nothing,' he said insinuatingly. 'I just wondered.'

He drove slowly up to Palafrugell and around the now empty square; then out along the road to Bagur. The sun was risen a few degrees above the sea and its light cleared the land of night.

'It's a beautiful country, Richard,' Michael said as they crossed one of the many ridges on the road. 'I'm sorry we're leaving it tomorrow...Or rather, today.'

Richard mumbled in reply. On the point of sleep, his head throbbed with the emotion of memories.

7 IN THE LAND OF THE PRODIGAL

Claire Burke came to London shortly after Christmas. 'A change of scenery' she told her friends in Dublin with the bravado that characterised her then. She took a position in a bank, but discovering that it lacked the status she expected, she left. Various types of work followed and status, as satisfied self-respect, didn't seem important so long as she kept to herself.

She shared a large roomy flat on the corner of a square not far from Earls Court tube station with an Australian draughtswoman and two English nurses. She found their reserve striking at first, it served as a topic in letters to family and friends, but she soon learned to accept it and even to respond to it in like manner.

But outside the flat she 'talked to everyone', as she told her mother. She struck up acquaintances with many people, regardless of age, race or class, and though she made no friends she found them all 'very interesting'.

Under these circumstances, her strong face came to express a capacity for enduring the inertia of the individual life coupled with its disavowal in a secretive piety. This expression, together with her red hair, indifferently kept though usually tidy, and her flat blue eyes, reminded many of an Irish woman writer then living in London.

Within the fog of this temporising life she managed to come in contact with Richard Butler. While he had been resident in a less impenetrable London for two years, he lived what was for her a frighteningly anonymous life as editor and writer of a small literary-cum-political magazine. She found him shabby, distracted and naively passionate. More disturbing was his habit when they met of insisting that she choose what to do and where to go. But she never would choose, for though she often stood on her dignity to curb him, she really wanted to be led, in order that she might retain some element of caprice.

The great expedition during this first part of their intimacy was to Greenwich. The journey down the river, the city crouched in concrete confusion along the banks, the roll of the water a medium for freedom and gaiety, released them from their individual Londons and prepared them for the wistful serenity of the observatory on the ancient hill. For Richard, with Claire a captive audience, the day became an extended and much digressed essay on the beauty of earlier civilisations, reaching back to the dawn of human activity. Though it was a humid day of early summer, with the trees only now achieving their limp fullness of foliage, their mood was autumnal, chilled and symmetrical. They had moments of delight, especially Claire; moments of quiet, when they paced side by side in silence; moments of strange, heart-twisting melancholy, when they were driven apart only to be reunited in tender, speechless, moist-eyed affection. The day ended in a quiet restaurant, the gratification of hunger a metaphor for their discovered love.

That evening Richard was convinced he had plumbed the depths of woman, for he had glimpsed in Claire a black, bottomless pool of existence that could never be ruffled.

Claire, for her part, realised that Richard did not really like women.

In July, it was now hot and sticky in the city and she had taken to dressing in a casual, indifferent manner, Claire chanced to meet Catherine Hackett, a girl she had known at school in the convent on the Green. Catherine was about two years younger than Claire and there had been a short-lived friendship between them when Catherine had been fourteen and Claire sixteen, the latter something of a heroine, someone to be flattered, but also to be studied carefully. It had been short-lived because there had been little to learn about Claire, or else because she was extraordinarily close.

Against Claire's diffused greeting, full of hesitancies, Catherine was direct and blandly social, almost at times peremptory. It was she who suggested a coffee in a nearby shop: Claire agreed, an expression of surprise and vaguely condescending amusement on her face, the latter springing from memories of Catherine at school. Over coffee Catherine did most of the talking. Only a month in London, she was like a terrier finally let off the leash, after having long been teased with the prospect of this freedom. Already she had made a circle of friends, she described some of them at length with dispassion, and had established a steady relationship with a Dublin man who was half her age again older than her. She was reticent about this man, but without losing the rhythm of her monologue. Addresses were exchanged and then Catherine was gone and Claire was surprised to feel first an emptiness before the flat colours and the inconsequent bustle of the coffee shop rushed in upon her to fill the vacuum and oppress her.

Claire made only a passing remark to Richard about meeting Catherine, and he smiled and nodded and let it pass. Catherine again burst upon the scene a few days later when she visited Claire at her flat. With her pacing up and down behind the enormous sofa drawn up before the fireplace, her hands skimming over its rough fabric, the large room became remote and staid, and Claire realised with a pleasing resignation how much she took the adjuncts to her life for granted. She sat all the while, watching Catherine pace and listening to her, feeling herself expand to pure amorphousness to fill the space of the room. Catherine seemed distant, like the flickering of a light far away, and it was pleasant to be hypnotised in this way by another person, to feel herself being lived by someone else. It was a relief to trust someone like this, for everything became peaceful and opaque: she had no wishes for herself and yet the wishes of others for her were rendered impotent in this silencing universe.

Then Catherine was gone again and the room and its furnishings became stark and implacable. Trembling inwardly, she had to drag herself off to bed, where she lay for hours rigid like a newly-trapped animal, outwardly plumply furred but as taut as a trigger within. Dreamlessly, sleep finally took her and released her.

Richard was present at their next meeting and after an initial sharp exchange of leading questions and witty answers, both Richard and Catherine seemed to call a truce and accept each other on appearance. Claire was surprised, and then bewildered, by the incident itself, by their intense probing reaction to each other, and soon felt in some way left outside of the undercurrent that came to exist between them in their mutual forbearance. That evening limped along, reduced to banality, in which none of the three could get to grips with any topic, and ended in a trough of sullenness. However, an invitation to Claire from Catherine to spend the weekend with her and her man, still unnamed, was necessarily extended to Richard, who couldn't help overhearing.

Catherine's arrangement that they drive down with them on Friday evening was accepted by Claire. Richard then discovered that he could not make it and would have to follow by train on Saturday morning. It occurred to him to ask Claire to stay over and travel with him, but instinct told him that she would rather go with Catherine. He was not put out by this.

Friday evening was one of those replete evenings of the Home Counties in summer, when the sun settles on a day well worth the trouble and effort. But Claire felt that there was a superfluity in this scene. She compared it with Dublin landscapes, where the presence of the mountains and the sea contrasted inescapably with the human endeavour of the city and the day dies on a primitive gyre. This sense of the superfluous made her uneasy, for taken on its own terms it made her life seem futile. Claire had never experienced this before, and Catherine was more than willing to go into details, dwelling most of all on the fact that this region had enjoyed over a thousand years of continuous peace and well-being, which when compared with the history of any region of Ireland – or of Europe for that matter – was unique.

The driver of the car, a plump silent man, was a source of embarrassment to both girls. Claire had expected someone different, Catherine had led her to expect it. Catherine was quick to sense the disappointment, and she felt the need to draw in her horns until Claire had regained her composure. The stream of comment issuing from Catherine, twisted about in her seat to face Claire in the back, served well to cover up the feeling of betrayal.

It was dark when the silent man, George Hallion, who had by now been reabsorbed by the girls, unlocked the front door of the cottage. With the ground-floor rooms flooded with white electric light, and while Catherine took meat from the freezer and drew water for coffee, he stood in the centre of the lounge, his arms now folded across his chest, now restless at his sides, and spoke to Claire:

'I had terrible trouble with the pipes, you know. They were ancient. Ancient! They hammered when the pipes were closed and hummed when they were open. Then I had to fight with the local council to get them to connect me with the sewage they laid on for those new houses across the road. I had all the pipes ripped out, every one of them – luckily they were external – but even so there was a terrible mess. A terrible mess. When I finally persuaded the council to extend the sewer, I decided to put the plumbing in properly. Then I discovered the dry rot. Floors, ceilings were all rotten. Rotten! Even the oak beams in here. So all that had to come out. I had a fire burning in the back for three days solid. Three days! Then the first joist that was put in knocked lumps out of the wall. It must have been about three hundred years old. I tapped it with a hammer and then cemented all the holes and gaps. You wouldn't believe the amount of work I put into this place. Or the money. I got the place cheap but I'm sure I've spent as much again fixing it up. If I had known what the place was like in the beginning I wouldn't have bought it. Never! There are plenty of good bargains all over the south-east!'

George was in business in a modest way. Of a long line of entrepreneurs, he was bred to a philosophy of precarious independence.

'It's lovely,' Claire said. There was a faint smile of amusement on her lips. 'It was well worth the trouble.'

Then Catherine brought in the coffee and George slipped out to fetch a bottle of whisky from the car.

'Do you like the place?' Catherine asked.

'I've just told George that it was well worth the trouble. I think it's lovely.'

'Trouble? What trouble?'

'Fixing the plumbing and floors.'

'He didn't tell me about that.'

'It's not important.'

Catherine stiffened. 'All the same, he should have told me.'

When George returned he said that he had never thought of telling her; he didn't think she would have been interested.

Then they sat, Catherine and George drinking whisky, and Claire, who didn't trust alcohol, contented herself with coffee. Catherine spoke and held the attention of the other two without much difficulty: perhaps because she was in fact thinking aloud, an action that both revealed her private self and yet also involved them as she used their past actions and words to illustrate her discourse, made both Claire and George an entranced audience. She could be thrillingly insistent, pausing to repeat a significant point, seemingly finding new insights there, and her feeling for pace and rhythm buoyed them up and swept them along as they sensed the creative success in her struggle between content and rhetoric. Her thin face was a mask of many faces; her thin body a tense accumulator of passions: sculptured, she would have been an abstract figure as many-faceted as a diamond, with all the subtle fire of a thing created under high pressure from muddy amorphous clay.

George did not come in to Catherine as he usually did when they stayed in the cottage and she lay awake for a while, bright and thoughtless, and then rose up and went into Claire. Her manner amused Claire's slack, now sated, powers of attention.

Catherine inhaled her cigarette with exaggerated force, 'Do you miss Richard?'

Claire smiled, shaking her head, and parried, 'Should I?'

'How do I know?' Catherine replied sharply. 'Don't you love him?'

'What is love?'

It was beginning to annoy Catherine again, as it used to at school, that when she wanted to, Claire could maintain a distance between them.

'You're still a virgin, aren't you?'

Claire paused, choosing between evasion and admission, then said:

'Yes.'

'How is that? I thought you were more attractive to men than I am.'

Surprised, and gratified, Claire said:

'Do you really think so?'

'Of course. You're turgid. Men like that. It makes them feel they are children again.'

'What does turgid mean?'

'Swollen, full... Expanded.'

'Am I really like that?'

'Yes!' This with impatience. 'Don't you know what you are like?'

'I can never decide.'

'Decide? You don't decide, Claire, you discover it in what you do and the way you do it.'

'Oh.' Claire increased the distance between them.

'I thought you were intelligent.'

Claire laughed and so broke the spell. Catherine leaned over her and stared at her. Claire smelled whisky and tobacco.

'You're not stupid. I'm sure of that.' Catherine seemed to be arguing with herself. Then she caught Claire's shoulder through the bedclothes and squeezed it. 'What are hoping for, Claire?'

Claire's eyes dilated and lost focus. 'I hope for nothing. Can't I be left alone with myself?' She clutched Catherine's wrist.

Catherine released her hold and stood erect.

'I don't understand you, do you know that? What does the likes of Richard find in you?'

Claire stared at her, wide-eyed and tense, no longer hearing her.

Catherine left. Alone in the dark Claire knew that she should be afraid of Catherine. But she wasn't. She knew that she should have admitted to fear a long time ago, but she had managed to evade it all this time. Because of this, shame had long since become interwoven with the fear.

Richard arrived at about eleven in the morning, walking up the short path from the road with a disgruntled expression on his face. Claire watched him from the window and he greeted her with:

'The taxi from Didcot cost me two pounds.'

She laughed at his aggrieved tone and so Richard gripped her arms and squeezed them till her face contorted with pain and she pleaded with him to let her go. He did and then they kissed.

George was formal and asked him if he liked the surrounding countryside. Catherine stood in the door appraising the three of them.

'It was bloody murder getting here,' Richard said cheerfully.

George was placid and logical:

'You should have come down with us last night.'

The girls sensed the antipathy immediately.

Richard asked Claire and then Catherine for food. He had been up since seven. Claire didn't move; Catherine grimaced and went and scrambled some eggs. When he had eaten, he stated that he had consulted a map and intended walking the ridge that lay about a mile to the south. Claire bubbled with laughter, as though this was the most absurd thing in the world, and refused point blank to go with him. George said 'No' and left it at that, though a trace of resentment could be detected in his voice. But Catherine was willing.

George offered Claire a game of tennis in the garden and she accepted, but only because everyone else was determined to be active.

Richard and Catherine walked for over an hour in silence. Catherine had recognised before now that Richard was of that brand of Irishman for whom everything had its opposite and contradiction, who knew that one of the elements in a dualism should be preferable to the other, but who could find no way of separating it from its antithesis. He was no audience: he was a critic, for whom encounter was a confrontation that produced exhaustion and an experience similar to that of hearing cymbals crashing at close range. (Damn him, she thought.)

Richard, for his part, thought that Catherine was too ruthless and that she exposed herself too much in the process.

Nevertheless, there was naturally an impulsive sympathy, a wary respect, between them. And both hated the barriers each felt forced to erect against the other.

But the day brooded on them as they walked along the ridge towards the west, and they brooded on the day. The landscapes were at first serene and relieving, but as the business of tramping along the rough trackway wearied them, all those trees and fields below them in the broad shallow valleys became monotonous and inert. In a deeply frustrating way, the countryside came to seem dead. And this unnerved Catherine. She felt herself draw closer to Richard's company. She took his hand and his manner softened, as though to accommodate her.

By the time they reached Richard's objective both were exhausted, their minds numbed. Richard stood at the top of the slope and stared down at the oblique and from that angle unrecognisable Uffington White Horse. He had a memory of an aerial photograph of the site. But Catherine hadn't. She didn't know what she was looking at or what she was supposed to see. Realising how she had been led, she was at first angry. But there was a mystery in it, standing before something she didn't understand. Richard had brought her; she had submitted to his judgement and leadership. Whether she liked it or not, she felt grateful to him.

Having stared down at the patches of bare chalk among the short, very green grass for some time, savouring this relief of gratitude, she turned and glanced askance at Richard. He appeared to be in a trance, staring down with a grim, tight expression. Then his face lit up in a way that frightened her and he laughed aloud. She thought he was being ironic, with all the harsh, inward-turned malice of his kind. Then she saw how revealing the laugh was. There was mockery and the release of pent-up forces in it as mystery was dissolved.

The laugh cut into her.

She turned and walked away from him, back up the slope. She quaked inside and shivers shot up and down her spine. She bit her lip till it hurt and the aftermath of pain was a thrill of release. Her body vibrated in tune with this sensation of release and she had to stop and concentrate on not losing her balance. She stood in the one spot for what seemed a long time, shoulders bowed, her hand clenched against her belly and her eyes tightly shut.

When it had passed and she felt drained and lucid, she looked up and saw that Richard was watching her. She saw that he understood. If he were to come over to her...

Then everything was transparent and she couldn't see Richard, or anything else.

She discovered she was crying...

The tennis game was long ended and George and Claire sat at lunch in the spacious kitchen when Catherine and Richard arrived back. George was crouched over his plate while Claire sat away from him at the far end of the table, picking at her food.

'We walked to the White Horse,' Catherine announced loudly as soon as she crossed the threshold.

George raised his head, coughed as though he had not spoken for some time, and said:

'Oh yes? Did you? I meant to take you down to see it. It's only a few miles along the road, you know.' He glanced at Richard. 'But I didn't think you were interested in that sort of thing.'

'If you had taken the trouble to ask me...' Catherine's voice was sharp and confident.

'You could have said something. How was I to know? How am I to know what you like if you don't tell me?'

'I didn't know it existed until Richard showed it to me.'

George looked at Richard again, then at Claire. Catherine glanced at Claire, shrugged her shoulders, and went and piled salad from the bowl and gave it to Richard.

The meal was eaten in silence. Afterwards Catherine said she would go and lie down for an hour or so, saying 'Whoops, I'm exhausted after that walk – Richard fairly steams along when he gets going,' which struck both Claire and George as being uncharacteristic of her. Neither could put a finger on it, but there was an unusual sense of spaciousness and acceptance in it.

Ten minutes later George got up from the table, his coffee hardly touched, and said that he too would rest upstairs. At the door he turned to Richard and Claire and waved his hands in the air. About to say something, he gulped and sighed 'You know.'

Richard followed Claire out into the garden and lay down beside her on the grass in the sun. They stretched out without touching and dozed until Claire said:

'Do you know what George said about me?'

'No. What?'

'He said I have a man's head on a woman's body.'

Richard lazily turned his head to her, smiling:

'Did he then?'

'I wonder what he meant. Do you think I have a man's mind?'

'I've never thought of you like that. What caused him to say it?'

'I don't know. We played one set and I got fed up. It was far too warm for running around like that. I threw my racquet in a corner and went inside.'

'Maybe it was your wilfulness.'

'Yes. It might have been something like that.' She paused, screwing her face against the sunlight. 'But what about Catherine? Don't you think she is very intellectual?'

'After a fashion. But she's a woman in spite of herself, in any case.'

Claire's face was suddenly uneasy: 'I don't know what you mean.'

'I'll explain it some other time if you really want to know. Right now it's too warm.'

Then they heard Catherine's voice, piercing and querulous. Her voice was suddenly cut off.

In the ensuing silence the hum of the summer's day seemed to fill up the world. Claire sighed audibly. She rolled over until she lay against Richard. Very soon she was sleeping gently.

Catherine stayed in her room that evening but George, Richard and Claire drove over to Wantage, the nearest town, for a drink. The two men became interested in the game of billiards that some of the locals were playing. They left Claire sitting up at the bar – she turned her nose up at the suggestion that she come and watch also. Richard caught George looking over at her several times. His curiosity was casual yet furtive, almost habitual. Then he leaned in Richard's direction, until their shoulders touched, and squinting in a gesture of confidence he said:

'I like robust women.'

Richard stared at him. George was forced to expand:

'Take Claire now. She's a fine woman.' He looked over at her, inviting Richard to do the same. Richard's continued stare stopped him at this point.

They returned their attention to the game of billiards. Once Richard had mastered the rules of the game he lost interest. As he turned to go and join Claire George spoke out of the corner of his mouth, an edge of malice in his tone:

'But you know, Richard old son, she's far too pally. She's one of these modern types. She doesn't want to be a woman.'

The drive back was made in silence. Going up to his room, George stopped in the door and said:

'You know, you two, you have the run of the house. You know what I mean?' he didn't wait for their reply. 'Anyway, do what you like.' He grimaced violently and left them.

'What do you make of that?' Richard asked.

Claire made a moue. 'He's drunk.'

Richard went and looked out the window at the intense rural darkness.

'We should have gone back to London this evening,' he said.

'Why? Aren't you enjoying yourself?'

'Not much. It's dull here.'

'Oh Dick!' There was exasperation in her voice. But Richard heard something else, a plea that seemed to say 'Be happy! Be happy at any price. Be happy, if only for my sake.'

'I thought you were happy today. You seemed to enjoy your walk with Catherine.'

'You should have come.'

'Oh, it was too hot.'

'Yes, I suppose it was. But it's not often we get out of London.'

'Perhaps. But anyway, you certainly made Catherine's day.'

'What do you mean?'

'I've never seen her so open as she was when she came back from that tramp.'

'I didn't do anything special.'

'But you know she likes you. You arouse her curiosity.'

'I don't particularly like her, if you want to know. She can't be trusted.'

'That's Catherine.'

'She looks for attention so as to escape from herself.'

'Attention? My God, but you can be coldminded at times, Dick.'

Richard came away from the window.

'I'm going up.'

'Goodnight then.'

Lying in bed, he heard her moving about downstairs. The disembodied sounds were witnesses to her existence. Richard remembered George's comments. They drew attention to her in a new, objective way. In seeing her reposed, he realised that he should try now to make love to her. The insight carried with it the poignancy of regret.

He heard her on the stairs. Then in the short corridor, her steps hollow on the thinly carpeted floor. She knocked and came into his room, whispering 'Are you still awake?'

'Yes.'

She came and sat on the side of the bed. She appeared to be self-possessed and serious.

'I just wanted to tell you that you are not coldminded.'

'That's alright. Maybe it seems different to you. As a woman, I mean. To me she wants attention and praise. I suppose you would say she wanted to be loved.'

'Yes. As a child wants love.'

'But she's not a child.'

'But she's very vulnerable, don't you see that?'

'Yes, I do. That's what makes her so passionate.'

Claire laughed, a reflective laugh. She murmured the word 'passion', as though she thought the key to Catherine lay there.

Richard suddenly saw Claire as he had not seen her before: right down into her core. There he saw what she wanted of him: she wanted him to make her perfectly happy. Then he felt he was being sucked into her, into her existence of blood and muscle and cells. He felt as though his own body was being matched with hers, cell for cell. The yearning this aroused was intense and yet not sexual. The call came from within her, not from within herself – it came from the deep unruffled part of her.

'You call it passion,' Claire said, as though nothing had happened. 'I call it utter selfishness.'

'Isn't passion selfish?'

Claire moved with a start.

'But she wants too much from the world and in the end she will get nothing.'

Now it hit him: 'And yet you envy her, don't you?'

'Yes. In a way. She's much more alive than I am.'

'She's just a different type of person.'

'No! Not in this way. She's always been able to stir herself into action.'

'She takes chances.'

'If you call it that.'

'But she never wins.'

'Never? I like to think she does.'

'When? Like this afternoon, when George forced himself on her?'

'Is that what happened?' He felt her shudder.

'Didn't you know that?'

'No. I didn't give it much thought... That's terrible. I didn't think George could be like that.'

'Well he is.'

Claire began plucking at the bedspread. 'Why did he do that?' Her curiosity was genuine.

'Women like Catherine won't make rules. They want it to be the first time every time.'

'You make her out to be a whore of some kind.'

'No, not a whore. They make the most elaborate rules.'

'They don't. They're lost women.'

'I won't argue with you. It's too late.'

Claire went still. 'Poor Catherine. She really has the most awful life, hasn't she?'

'Perhaps that depends on what she wants.'

'And what about me, Dick?' She paused, her voice shaking with sudden self-pity. 'Why do you bother with me? I give you nothing at all.'

He laid his hand on her arm, feeling the warm flesh give way to his pressure.

'But I don't,' she insisted.

He pulled her arm and she sank down beside him. She was shaking all over. He kissed her brow, feeling very alone with her.

When she whispered 'Please don't' Richard murmured 'I know, I know' and she calmed and let herself go slack against him, clinging to him. He felt the shape of her against him through the bedclothes. Now that she was close to him he saw beyond the image of repose to the terrible otherness of her: closest, she seemed furthest away. In this insight he saw also his own aloneness, and the terrible helplessness of it.

When he tried to break out of this knowledge, his passion became the abstraction of a force applied elsewhere, and in its stunning obliquity Claire became expansive as a dark bubble waiting to enclose him in its own image.

Claire lay passive at first, her body smooth and cold, rigid in an agony of shame and fear. Then she saw it all quite clearly. There was no going back from this point: this was what she had sought, even though she had never admitted it to herself. But she could not see how she could go on from this point either: she could never accommodate this other world Richard was bringing her. Instead she felt as though she was stepping aside and leaving this grotesque business to do with her body, and her passions, to Richard.

Released, her arms embraced Richard, and she felt the cold sear in her body, the desperate outburst shame had dammed for so long. She saw their frantic tussle, its blind secularity, and turned inwards towards the peace and obscurity of her silencing universe. But it was no longer there. Stepping sideways had not done the damage, the knowledge she could not avoid had.

She discovered she had made a profound mistake. She no longer had any excuse, and crying was futile now, when it was too late.

Someone had fooled her.

8 RETURN

It was the off-season: eight-thirty in the evening in the great concourse of Euston Station, London.

The intended traveller, of average height and build, with brown hair straggled out over the collar of his jacket, gripped a new blue suitcase in his hand. His face was pale, the skin puckered about his eyes. He was gazing up at the electronic departure board above the platform.

His earlier feelings of eagerness and anticipation, that had consumed him during the tube ride across the city, were now fading. Instead, he became uneasy. Apparently there were really no heroics in taking a train home to Dublin: besides, the station was almost deserted, and an empty Euston Station is an insult to the homegoing Irishman.

He reckoned he had twenty minutes to spare before he need take his seat on the train. Time enough for a drink. He had heard all the stories about drinking from Euston to Dun Laoghaire – but never before had he felt less like drinking than he did now. One drink at least he would have, if only as a gesture to tradition.

During the short walk across the concourse to the bar he experienced a curious sensation. It was as though something inside him melted and ran down his spine. And unused to this sensation as he was, he was immediately aware of the feelings that lay behind it. Interrogated, these feelings at once gave up the insight that to a child affection and family relations were pre-literate, impossible to express in words, because of the complexity inherent in simplicity, but absolute in the experiencing of them. In this knowledge the child became, not the father, but the teacher of the man. He showed that what had been vertical could become horizontal; what had been the straight line of ambition could once again become the spatial, emotional thing called life.

It was with a strange trepidation the Richard Butler approached the bar counter and excused his way through the drinkers, most of whom seemed to be passing the time before boarding the same train as he.

While waiting for his drink to be served he noticed a man of his own age who was crouched in the centre of the room, one hand in his jacket pocket, the other poised before him on a level with his chin, who swivelled his eyes from side to side sizing up the drinkers. He was dressed in a greasy grey suit, the trouser-ends suspended two or three inches above his ankles. A soiled white shirt was open to his waist, exposing a dark hairy chest. His hair, jet-black and straight, hung down on his forehead. Catching sight of Richard watching him, he shambled over and grinned, showing brilliant white teeth. He made gestures with two fingers as his mouth to mime smoking. His eyes were bright with cleverness and trickery. There was a joke in all this, Richard thought, raising his brows. He took a cigarette box from his pocket, opened it and extracted two cigarettes. The man took one of them, his smile broader now. Richard gestured that he was to take the second cigarette also. The man hesitated, sensing some trap. Richard gestured again.

'Two?' the man asked carefully.

Richard nodded. 'Keep it for later,' he said. 'Have it before you go to bed.'

What bed? He thought as he finished speaking.

The man looked narrowly at Richard, then he took the second cigarette. He overtly placed it with care in the top pocket of his suit.

'You're a great man,' he said, grinning again.

'That's alright now,' Richard said to conclude.

The man turned to stand at right angles to Richard.

'We're not all poor, thank God,' he said, eyeing the crowd at the bar.

'Thank God we're not,' Richard said firmly.

'A match. I can't even afford a match,' the man said.

Richard produced a box and gave the man a dozen or so matches. 'There now,' he said simply.

'You're a great man,' the man said, putting the matches away. He put the cigarette between his lips. He waited expectantly, looking from Richard's face to the box of matches in his hand.

Richard struck a match and lit the man's cigarette. He puffed vigorously, inhaling deeply with obvious pleasure, and exhaled a great cloud of smoke. Then he insisted on shaking Richard's hand, saying over and over what a great man he was.

Richard suspected a joke somewhere.

Left alone, Richard paid for his drink and stood at the bar sipping the whiskey. The minutes ticked by to the accompaniment of the chatter and laughter of the bar. He was struck by the note of relief among the motley dressed crowd: he had expected excitement, a holiday mood, but it was as though they were leaving a prison.

He drained his glass and turned to leave. The begging man, now drinking a hurriedly poured bottle of stout over at the far side of the room, caught Richard's eye. Grinning, he mimed smoking with his two fingers and nodded his head as though to encourage Richard. Richard cut the air sharply with the edge of his hand and quickened his step.

The train wasn't crowded, but what passengers there were had spread themselves thinly over the length of the train, with one, or sometimes two, to a compartment. Richard hauled his suitcase the length of the train looking for a compartment that was empty – for he too, as if by instinct, wanted to be alone. In the end he had to compromise. He could not find an empty compartment. He settled for one that was empty of people but which contained two large, strong suitcases, one on the floor, the second jammed precariously on the overhead rack.

He sat by the door of the compartment, allowing the absent owner of the cases the right to the seat by the window. The train soon after jerked into motion. With the journey started, Richard felt at peace, knowing that he was in the hands of others. It drew across the complicated points outside the station, clattering, and gathered speed. Soon the suburbs of London were flashing by, the dull, metallic amber lights damping whatever character and beauty the Victorian houses might have.

As the full meaning of what was happening came home to him he experienced an instant's elation, but at once its place was taken by unease. He did not know why he should feel uneasy, unless some memory pricked him. He lit a cigarette and tried to regain his equilibrium within the habitual actions of smoking. Then the compartment was too warm: then he thought he was too close to the engine – he could imagine the strain on the carriage, caught as it was between the pull of the huge electric unit and the resistance of the trailing carriages.

The train had by now cleared the city and its surrounding dormitory towns and was racing through the countryside. Villages and farms, their lights dotting the night on either side of him, seemed chock-a-block on the land. The population of England, crowded on to its part of the island, was foreign to him and he felt a defensive contempt for the existences he passed so quickly in the night.

The whirr of the wheels on the continuous-weld track began to calm him. He took a book from his case and settled more deeply into his seat. But it was difficult to read as the pulseless sound about him reduced the significance of the words. Wearily, he put the book down and gazed across the compartment and out the window. In time he began to doze. His last thought before he fell asleep was one of contempt for himself: he was so Irish.

He was awakened by the return of the owner of the two cases, who slid the compartment door open savagely and tripped over Richard's outstretched feet. He looked down at Richard with exaggerated force, apparently unable to decide whether he should be aggressive or merely malicious. He was thick-set and middle-aged, with a large wart at the corner of his left eye. His face was red, his eyes narrowed by folds of flesh. He was also drunk, with the tension of the loner who is an habitual drinker. He glared at Richard for some time; then without a word he went and sat by the window, on the opposite side to Richard. For a few minutes he fumbled about lighting a cigarette and darting hard looks out the window from time to time, as though the task was beyond him and someone else was to blame. It struck Richard that he was acting. At last, while puffing the cigarette, the man spoke, though with apparent reluctance, for he continued to look out the window.

'Going across for a holiday?' His voice was gruff, with a southern accent.

Richard stiffened at the note of belligerence. Here was loneliness grown to self-sufficiency that produced a bluntness born of curiosity that lacked sympathy.

'Yes,' Richard replied, though he was not. He had made the most convenient answer because he did not feel beholden to do otherwise.

The man looked at him sharply, suspicious of mockery.

'What part of London are you in?' he asked.

What part? Richard asked himself quickly. Somewhere general make it.

'Camden Town,' he replied, though it was not true.

'I know it. A lot of Greeks there, and Irish.' The man grinned tightly, as though he had successfully tested Richard.

Silence. The train was slowing, passing through the outer suburbs of some town. The man looked out the window.

'Crewe,' he said simply, obviously familiar with the route. 'We change engines here.'

He looked quickly at Richard, to see how he was taking this stream of information.

Richard took his cue.

'Why?' he asked.

'Why what?'

'Why change engines?'

'Because...because this is the end of the electrified line. They'll put a diesel engine on now.'

Richard said 'I see' and felt everything go rushing into the vacuum that followed. He looked at his watch. He must have been asleep for over two hours.

The man stretched his legs out before him and yawned. His expression was much kindlier now.

'You come from Dublin, don't you,' he said, looking directly at Richard.

'Yes. Born and bred,' Richard replied lightly.

The man laughed shortly, coughing moistly. He rubbed his chin with a large red hand and Richard could hear the rough sandpapery sound caused by his stubble.

The stationary train jerked slightly as the diesel engine was shunted into place and coupled up. Two uniformed porters slouched by along the platform, their night-faces smooth, with merry, boozy eyes. The platform was large and deserted: a lighted oasis in this limbo of night and strange places.

Imperceptibly at first, the train began to move, gliding away from the light and out into the darkness once more. Now it beat a tattoo on the rails, the beat becoming more staccato as the train picked up speed.

The man spoke again.

'Won't be long now. A quick run across Wales and we're there.' There was confidence in his voice, as if Richard was at last being admitted into a secret world.

Richard wondered what he should say now. He did not want the tenuous link between them to collapse again.

'I'm afraid I don't know the line at all,' he said, setting himself behind a small rampart of formality, the better to be seen.

'No? How long have you been away then?' the man said, his voice freer. 'It must have been a couple of years at least, judging by your accent?'

Richard started at this. Accent?

'Three years.'

'And did you not go home on holiday in that time at all?' The man was shaking his head.

'No.'

The man continued to shake his head.

'What about your Mammy? Didn't she write to ask you to come for a holiday?'

'I suppose she did, but she didn't insist on it.'

The man shook his head more slowly and seemed sad. But when he glanced up, Richard was surprised to see that his expression was one of incredulity.

'Sure I've been in London for twenty years and I go home twice a year, and sometimes three times,' he said with open admission.

Again Richard sensed a slackening of the tension between them. The man was begging too many questions; he must divert the conversation.

'Do you always travel by boat?' he asked, getting behind his rampart again.

'I do.'

The man was staring out the window. Richard could see his face reflected in the glass. His eyes were screwed up as he tried to organise some statement in his mind.

'It's easy-going, you see. You can take your time and...and have a drink and a chat. I flew only the once, that was when the Mammy died, and I flew over to Cork.' He shuddered in memory. 'Sure there was no peace at all, going here and then there, waiting for hours. And I was stuck in this little seat by a small round window where I could see the wing jumping up and down.'

Richard nodded sympathetically.

'Then why don't you take to boat to Cork or Rosslare, so you would have less travelling to do?' he asked when the man had slumped back into silence, the outburst having apparently exhausted him.

'Ah, I've always come this way,' the man said. 'Breakfast and a wash in Dublin, then the train from Kingsbridge in the afternoon. I get there time enough.'

Richard felt he was butting again into private worlds. But before he could speak, the man spoke out again, this time waving his hand as though to brush away some obstruction.

'There's only the old man and the sister there now, and damned little peace with the two of them fighting all the time.'

Before he could stop himself, Richard blurted out, logically enough:

'Then why do you bother to go?'

This brought the man up sharply. He looked at Richard full in the eye. He looked at him fiercely for half a minute, his mouth pursed and his cheeks puffed out as if ready to shout. Then his brows twitched and his eyes slid away to gaze at Richard's chest.

Richard felt the tension between them slacken and finally die. He sat back in his seat and lit a cigarette.

The train was hurtling through the night: a driver sat up front, unflinching and probably unthinking, as this monster charged from point A to point B. For no good reason Richard had a thought: man must be sober in his relations with machines.

The thought chilled him through and through.

The man, from his corner of the compartment, said to the night, though presumably it was meant for Richard's ears:

'Jesus.'

At Holyhead there was unreality. Behind the harbour the town slept, its gables, spires and roofs ghastly against the night sky in the amber street lights. The boat, floodlit by white light, towered over the train and the station. In the rush from train to boat, beneath the glare of the lights, the boat was reduced to gangplanks and much-repainted steel hull plates. Porters, men of the night and cheerful, huddled here and there in heavy black overcoats with collars turned up against the sea-chill.

The first class lounge had an unreal, temporary air – the furniture and colours too solid; one knew it was a ship, for here was the usual trick of too much solidity to lull the traveller into believing that ships were as stable as land.

Richard was surprised to find the bar open and the barman eager to serve him. He pushed his suitcase behind some chairs and went and bought himself a drink.

Few people were in the lounge: they had travelled up on the earlier train. As Richard had seen throughout the journey, and as he himself had done – or tried to do – these people huddled by themselves, a drink of one kind or another before them on small circular tables. One, a small tubby man, sat away in a corner, a pipe in his mouth. He gazed steadily before him. Two other occupants were women, both nearing middle age, with stout figures and round homely faces. No one seemed particularly sad or anxious. Among them there seemed an acceptance of inertia and patience, as if these were the real conditions of human life.

Richard sat at peace. His mind took advantage of this state and wandered away from his body and along the tenuous chain of memory. It fretted through time, settling here and there as it had done at Euston Station. This time, however, it produced a memory from the greatest distance. He was a child, with the complete existence of the preoccupied child, showing his mother a shell he had found on the seashore. She sat on a canvas chair, a floppy white hat on her head. It was really his hat, he knew, but it had fallen from his head so often as he played on the sand that his mother, having picked it up for the hundredth time, finally placed it on her own head. He held the white shell in his little hand towards her, his face twisted to the left and his eyes screwed up against the glare of the declining sun. She smiled, gazing at the shell. He could see that the sun made her drowsy, but still he insisted that she admire the shell he had brought her. Behind her the land was flat and green, with erect trees away on the skyline. At last she reached out and took the shell from him and put it in the pocket of her dress. Contented, he ran away to play again, down across the soft sand on to the firmer tidal sand and so towards the sea's edge, all the time looking back to the spot where he thought his mother sat. When he reached the sea, he looked carefully in that direction, his eyes screwed up against the sunlight, but could not see her. Instead, he saw only sand dunes and summer chalets and the trees beyond the beach, on the skyline.

Richard was awakened by the arrival of a group of four, three men and a woman. While they arranged chairs around a table, one of the men, bearded and comfortably ascetic-looking, talked in a loud slurred voice. He seemed to be trying to resume an interrupted monologue. He was saying:

'I live in the imagination, you see.' The other two men, having sat down, bent their heads forward in mute attention. The woman had already composed herself in her chair, her two hands lightly clasped on her knees. 'In this world,' he continued, holding his chair, 'there is only one state worth our attention...and that is the imagination.' He sat down and leaned forward towards the two men. 'I work. Yes, I must work. I have to do that. But when it's done, I am free to enter my imagination.' One of the men tried to speak, but the bearded man raised his hand to stop him. 'Why, when I was in hospital that time.' He turned now to the woman. 'Remember, Ann? They carried out test after test and couldn't find anything wrong with me.' He turned his attention to the two men. 'Well, in that three weeks I read all the plays of Shaw.' With this last sentence his voice changed. As with the delivery of the final conclusive proof of an argument, he delivered this sentence harshly and with pride. The stout man, who had earlier tried to interrupt him, nodded his head, murmuring, 'Shaw. Yes, yes.'

The third man stood up. He was dapper, with a gleaming high forehead. 'Drink, drink,' he cried.

The stout man raised the beer-can he had been holding and said, 'Ask them if they have this brand.'

The bearded man said he would have a whiskey.

When the dapper man asked the woman what she would have, the bearded man laughed loudly and said, 'What? Another one? You've had four already. You'll have us all under the table.'

The dapper man grinned, swaying slightly, and said to the woman, 'Irish. Have an Irish.' He half-turned towards the bar and the waiting barman. 'They'll have Irish on this boat, surely.'

The bearded man suddenly shouted, 'Yes, we're leaving Sassenachland at last!' and while the dapper man walked unsteadily to the bar, he continued impulsively: 'Those English! I never know how to take them. They're so damned literal I mean, I'm good at my work, even if I say so myself. Yet they give me the feeling that I'm so...so...thick...' This last word was blurted out as if freshly conceived in his mind. He screwed up his face. It was apparent that he had intended using some other word, perhaps one with a finer meaning.

The dapper man at the bar called to him, asking him for help in carrying the drink.

While away at the bar, where he got into conversation with the barman, the stout man leaned forward to the woman. She had sat gazing at the bearded man while he spoke, but the stout man had watched her. Now he said something to her and put two fingers lightly on her cheek. She smiled stiffly, shaking her head, and raised her hand to the spot. The stout man grasped her hand gently, almost unconsciously, and continued talking. His voice was bass and thickened by drink, the words coming gutturally. She watched him sceptically as he spoke, the scepticism acting as a barrier to his specific proposal, though judging from the continuous dilation of her eyes, his words affected her as a general possibility.

When the drinks were brought by the two other man, and even after they had sat down, the stout man went on talking to her. The dapper man tried to draw her attention to the glass he was holding out to her. He cleared his throat, the glass wavering in his hand. Catching her eyes, he thrust the glass into her hand and apologised for it being Scotch. Using the entry gained, he began talking to her. It was his idea to sing a song. He hummed, paused to explain the tale it had to tell, but each attempt he made to sing failed as his voice went flat. She laughed at him, tossing her dark hair.

The bearded man, who had been watching the dapper man with a sarcastic expression, now took the opportunity the pause in the gallantries offered and suggested to the stout man that they come and visit him at his home in Skerries while they were in Dublin. The stout man said he wanted plenty of warning before they descended on his peace and quiet. The bearded man said loudly, 'Jesus, it would take too long to arrange like that. We haven't the rest of eternity.' He wanted to meet the stout man's wife and children. Hearing this, the woman asked him how many children he had. 'Four' was the reply. She smiled sweetly at him.

The dapper man stood up and gripped the back of his chair. He was definitely going to sing a song about the Earl of Clare. The bearded man rejected this with a wave of his hand.

'Sing one of our own,' he cried. 'We'll never be our own men so long as we take any notice of them.'

The dapper man looked up, surprised and puzzled by his vehemence. The bearded man sat upright and addressed the whole group.

'Listen. I'll tell you something. During the war I was a captain in the Western Desert, under Monty. One night, during a booze-up in the mess, one of the English officers, one of the old order, said that the Irish were the greatest fighting men in the world. At this, another officer, also English, mind you, disagreed and said that for his money the Gurkhas were the best. Then they all started arguing about the merits of their particular favourites. Of course I was left out of this and I went on drinking to one side, listening to them, until I got browned off with it all. When the first chance came, I stepped into the circle and asked them, "What about your own bloody soldiers, the English?" They all to a man dismissed them as worse than useless. Needless to say I was pretty pissed by then, and angry. "Then what's all the bull about the British Empire," I shouted, "if the English didn't conquer it?" One of the senior officers patted me on the shoulder and said gently, "Don't you see, old man. We let them do it." There you are! They let them do it!' He shook his head. 'What do you make of that?'

The dapper man laughed and said it was damned funny. The stout man sat silent, head down.

Suddenly everyone noticed that the ship was moving away from the dock. The dapper man cheered. A pulse of vibration throbbed the floor under their feet. The dapper man was told to sit down before he fell down. This he did. They fell silent, save for short comments passed from time to time.

Richard had watched all this as though he was watching a play. He felt excluded from the group, as though they were aliens. To him they were stage Irish.

However, he noticed the interest taken in them by one of the lone women. She had been to the bar and as she waited to be served she had turned to watch them. When the stout man had taken the woman's hand her eyes had narrowed intently. Back in her seat, quite close to Richard, she continued to stare at them until the two men returned from the bar and interrupted them, when she resumed her contemplation of the glass before her, listening.

Once she had turned and looked at Richard, to see if the drama had the same interest for him. He had smiled. It had been easy to smile because their respective personalities had been united in the third, the drama they both watched.

Now, with the stage silent as though between acts, she lost interest and sat with her hands pushed deep into the pockets of the heavy tartan jacket she wore, her chin resting on her breast.

Richard went to buy another drink. The combined effects of the alcohol, the removal of responsibility for himself, especially now that he was at sea, and the loud conversation of the group, had thrust him out of himself. The energy, and the consequent impression of size, of the men finally touched him, stirring within him a desire for this freedom of action and expression. The coquetry of the woman had moved him. It too stirred a memory. But she had baffled him. Being an outsider watching on, she had been open and vulnerable to him. This had excited him. But he had also experienced a strong desire to protect her, though seeing no object from which she needed protection, for she could obviously handle the stout man, had made him want to create an enemy. This is what baffled him. In looking for an enemy, he had found himself.

Returning with his drink, the ship was rolling slightly as it turned towards the harbour mouth and he had to walk slowly and carefully, he glanced at the lone woman out of sudden curiosity. She sensed him and looked up. She looked at him blankly, her eyes shining moistly with the effect of the drink. Her mouth was small, he noticed, the lips compressed and down drawn. As he passed he looked at her again, but she did not look up. The sight of her bowed head and her strong black hair, which was streaked with grey, gave him a curious excitement.

When he sat down, he was overcome by a feeling of desolation. He was angry with himself for no apparent reason. And in attempting to escape this anger he discovered there was no refuge for his mind. Irritated, he gulped his drink.

The ship was rolling more violently now as it passed through the harbour mouth. A steward ducked his head around the door, looked about him and then disappeared. Once the ship reached the open sea beyond the harbour it wallowed deeply and rose in a great heave against both wind and sea.

'Holy God,' the dapper man shouted. 'A bloody storm.'

'Sit down,' the bearded man said impatiently. 'It's only the currents along the coast. She'll settle in a few minutes.'

The stout man stood up, pushing back his chair, and ran his fingers through his untidy hair. He was dejected.

'Have another drink,' he said tonelessly.

He leaned over the woman, bringing his face close to hers, and asked her if she wanted a Scotch. When she nodded, the bearded man shouted across that if she had another one of those she would definitely be sick. The stout man turned and glared at him, then shuffled heavily to the bar.

The dapper man, who had been dozing in his chair, the curt order to sit down having annoyed him, now looked up. He was obviously passing over the threshold in the stages of intoxication from the drowning of consciousness into the stage where instinct took over and the man is wakened for his final fling. He staggered to his feet, feeling behind him for the back of the chair. He was going to sing. He smiled vacantly at the woman, who was sitting with her arms folded, her face tensed. He began to sing She moves through the fair in a quavering voice that was guided by a desire for a real musical quality that was not there. The bearded man, his nose twisted in contempt, joined in, bellowing hoarsely at first by way of comment on the other's singing. But as they progressed through the song and reached its emotional climax, his tenor voice broke loose from the constraint that accompanying the dapper man demanded and swiftly surged to his own level, bell-like, and shivered sweetly at the peak of one long-held note.

'There now, there now,' he said when he had ended, embarrassed and proud, pawing the empty air before him and throwing glances about the lounge.

The stout man applauded from the bar. The barman behind him grinned broadly, glad that his customers were enjoying themselves.

The woman looked at him with a look that amounted to hostility.

Hearing the singing persuaded Richard to accept the group as real people. The pleasure he felt reminded him of something.

The boat began to wallow and roll once more, this time with greater violence. The dapper man, who had remained standing, was thrown to one side. His grip on the chair slipped away in the sudden shock and he fell heavily against the woman. She jerked her head back in fright and put her two hands to her mouth. The stout man, suddenly agile, rushed from the bar to help the fallen man to his seat. The woman stood up, fighting to retain her balance against the lurching of the boat. The bearded man asked her where she was going. She glanced quickly at him, her eyes sightless with nausea, and walked out of the lounge, supporting herself by holding the backs of chairs.

The stout man turned to the other two men and said, 'Someone should go with her to the cabin. You never know, she might fall and hurt herself, considering the state she's in.'

The bearded man, who had watched her going without moving and who could see down part of the corridor outside, said, 'No need. She'll look after herself.'

The stout man made as though to follow her. There was a querulous and ambiguous tone in his voice as he said, 'One of us will be a gentleman, at least. I'll go and see if she is alright.'

'I tell you there is no need. She's gone to the jacks to puke up her dinner and drink,' the bearded man said. He was shaking with anger.

The stout man turned and sat down, murmuring, 'I was only trying to do the best for her.'

After a moment's silence the dapper man began talking to the bearded man, who sat primly with pursed lips. He talked incoherently, gulping constantly, trying to console the other.

The stout man drank beer from a can and stared moodily at the floor, his head nodding. Finally he spoke.

'Someone should go to see if she's alright. After all, she's been a long time away.'

The bearded man looked at him with passion.

'I told you there was no need. Besides, you should mind your own business.'

He stood up abruptly. 'I'll go and do it myself.'

When he had gone, the stout man leaned forward to the dapper man and said, 'An unfortunate couple.'

The dapper waved his hand at him.

'You don't know the half of it,' he said and continued in a lower tone. 'Sure they don't...you know... Ah, he's a strange one.' Having left unsaid what he had intending saying and hoping the hint would suffice, he went on, 'They fight something terrible, you know. But let you interfere and they'll both go for you like two hounds at a hare.'

The stout man was shaking his head.

'Fair play to everyone, I say, but I don't like to see anyone unhappy. God knows, life's short enough without fighting into the bargain.'

He shook his head dismally. 'I don't like to see anyone unhappy, I tell you.'

The dapper man nodded in sympathy with this sentiment. Then he brightened, straightening his shoulders.

'Will you have one more drink before turning in,' he asked.

'Aye, I will.' The stout man was still overcome with mortification.

As the dapper man went to the bar the stout man began humming to himself. He lay his head against the back of his chair, and slowly the humming formed itself into a song:

The bells of hell  
Go ting-a-ling-a-ling  
Go ting-a-ling-a-ling  
Go ting-a-ling-a-ling  
The bells of hell  
Go ting-a-ling-a-ling  
For you but not for me.

O Death where is  
Thy sting-a-ling-a-ling  
Thy sting-a-ling-a-ling  
Thy sting-a-ling-a-ling  
O Death where is  
Thy sting-a-ling-a-ling  
Or grave thy victory.

The dapper watched the stout man singing for a while, at first quizzically, then a look of cuteness crossed his face. He whispered to the barman, to cancel the order he had made, and quietly left the lounge.

As the stout man came to the end of his song he nestled down more snugly in the chair and folded his arms over his paunch. Within a short time he was snoring, indifferent to the rolling of the boat.

The lone woman near Richard stood up and lifted her jacket more comfortably on her shoulders. She glanced in Richard's direction. He had been watching her from the instant she stood up. She smiled at him. Richard smiled in return.

'Grand lively lads,' she said, nodding in the direction of the sleeping man.

'Yes,' Richard replied guardedly. He couldn't be sure whether she was joking or not.

'It's a rough night,' she continued amiably, brushing down her skirt. 'I wonder if any sleep could be got on a night like this.'

'He did,' Richard replied, glancing towards the snoring figure. He thought she might still be joking.

'It's cold here for sleeping,' she stated.

Richard grinned. 'It will have to do.'

The woman darted him a side glance.

'It will then, right enough,' she said. She bent down and picked up her large handbag.

'Goodnight then,' she said, moving away towards the door.

'Goodnight,' Richard replied. He suddenly realised that she had been deadly serious. To let her know that he knew, he called after her, 'Sleep well.'

She paused at the door and turned her head. Richard smiled. She left the lounge.

With the exception of the sleeping man and himself, the lounge was now empty, everyone else having gone below. Perhaps because of the lack of distraction, the ship's rolling was now more noticeable. Richard felt a slight surge of nausea. He lay back in his chair and relaxed his body, allowing it to roll in sympathy with the ship. As he dozed he remembered sharply what the woman had offered. A stronger wave of nausea passed over him. Then he slept, troubled, and dreamed again of playing by the seashore. But this time he couldn't be sure whether he had the seashell or not, or if he was supposed to be looking for it on the wet sand that edged the sea.

When he awoke the sea was calmer. He felt cold. The stout man still slept, his nose raised in the air. He stood up and stretched, feeling uncomfortably stiff. Then he decided to go on deck for a few minutes' air.

The area that composed the leeward deck was defined at one end by a stout wire fence, separating the first class from the second, and at the other end by a gangway leading up to the bridge, from which passengers were prohibited. He crossed to the rail and saw lights low on the sea forward of the ship.

Dublin. He felt cold, hungry and soiled. A piercingly cold wind eddied about him.

Dublin. The dull taste on his mouth and the dryness of his throat put him off smoking.

Dublin. Dublin. He regretted having left London – after all, he had been reasonably comfortable there.

Dublin. Dublin. Dublin. He was shivering continuously now.

DUBLIN!

The face of the beggar at Euston station sprang into his mind, grinning.

Dublin. He was lonely and desolate.

He went and huddled on a bench.

When the sky had lightened, a blue-purple light distinguishing the low racing clouds, and the sea could be seen, greasy and rolling, Richard took to pacing the deck to warm himself. Later he met a Galwayman who shivered in his shirtsleeves and held a tray with two cups of tea and two plates of buttered toast on it. The Galwayman said good morning and complained of the cold.

'Did you ever see such a night as last night?' he continued, his white skin blue against the mass of wiry black hair.

'No. it was rough,' Richard replied, resenting the intrusion.

'The wife was sick all night,' the Galwayman said, 'and I thought I was the great one looking after her, until I got sick myself.'

'I must have been the only one aboard who wasn't sick,' Richard replied, eyeing the tea.

The Galwayman raised the tray.

'Will you have one of these?' he asked.

'What about you and your wife?'

'She won't touch it. You can take the toast too. Neither of us want any of it.'

Richard lifted a cup from the tray and gulped down half of the hot tea. Nothing had ever tasted so sweet. He felt his body come to life.

When he had drained the cup he put it back on the tray. The Galwayman was staring out to sea. Richard took out his cigarettes.

'Will you have one of these?' he offered.

The Galwayman flinched.

'God, even the thought of it makes me feel sick.'

Feeling the warmth of the tea radiating his body, Richard lit a cigarette.

'Have the second cup,' the Galwayman urged, raising the tray again. 'It'll only go to waste.'

'Are you sure?' Richard asked.

'Sure. Take it. I don't want it.'

Richard drank the second cup more slowly, savouring its warmth and flavour.

'Going over on holiday?' he asked the Galwayman between sips.

The Galwayman grinned and nodded.

'Train to Galway?' Richard asked, suddenly curious to know how the man felt about landing in Ireland.

'No. The car's in the hold.'

'Tricky. Slinging it, I mean.'

'Ach. They're well used to it.'

Richard nodded in comprehension.

'Like London?' Richard asked, growing amazed, and delighted, at his own curiosity.

'Not much. But when you're married and have a couple of kids, you can't move around so easily,' the Galwayman said pensively.

'Would you not think of moving back to Ireland then? I hear it's a boom country now,' Richard said in a man-to-man voice. This is what comes of curiosity, he thought.

The Galwayman looked at him with caution.

'Aye, I've thought of that. But it'd cost a lot of money.'

'No more than London does, I'm sure,' Richard said.

'The wife wants to. She takes the children over for the summer every year.'

'And do you look after yourself then?' Richard asked, more and more amazed at his curiosity.

'I do,' the Galwayman said in a surprised tone.

Richard drained the cup.

'Thanks for the tea. It was very kind of you,' he said.

'Ha, don't think of it,' the Galwayman said. 'Sure it would have gone to waste.'

They stood together then, watching the sea in silence. Some gulls flew about above the ship. The Kish light came into sight close by.

'Nearly there,' Richard said.

'Aye,' the Galwayman replied. He paused, then he asked delicately, 'From Dublin?'

'Yes.'

'You've been away a long time,' the Galwayman stated.

'Three years.'

'It's your accent, you see,' the Galwayman said with even greater delicacy. 'I thought you'd been away a long time.'

Silence. The Kish light flashed strongly at them.

'Looking forward to seeing your people, are you?' the Galwayman asked, looking intently at the Kish light.

'I suppose so,' Richard said, suddenly daunted.

'They'll be glad to see you,' the Galwayman said, turning towards the entrance to the cabins. 'It's a great country in the end.'

Richard looked at him, wondering if he was joking.

'Goodbye now,' the Galwayman said. 'I'm going down now to see if the wife is any better. She was sick something terrible last night.'

When he had gone, Richard braved the wind and walked around to the front of the ship and looked across at the land. The amber-lit ring of the coast roads defined the city, with Howth Head to the right and the mountains to the left. He caught his breath when he saw the mountains – purple, with cloud in long streams down their flanks.

He hadn't thought it all still existed. The solidity of it all stunned him.

He wanted to cry out and embrace the hills, as if they were his mother.

PART THREE

9 SNOW

In the morning room a young woman moved about preparing breakfast. It was a long rectangular room with two windows facing each other in the shorter walls. In one, facing south, through which the early sun shone, Muckish mountain was framed, half in the red light of the sun and half black and sombre in shade. The second window looked down across the lowering valley to the mudflats and out beyond to the sea, which was edged by the hills that lined the much-indented lough. The young woman moved with unconscious grace, fully occupied with her task of preparation. A silence lay on the room, clear and fresh: the silence accentuated by the guttering frizzle of frying bacon from the adjoining kitchen.

The front door opened. There was a bustle of clothing and the pace of footsteps down the short hall. The young woman paused in her work and turned expectantly towards the opening door.

'Morning, sir,' she said with quiet gay irony.

Richard's face, puckered and red above his beard, smiled a lop-sided smile.

'Morning, bean-a-tigh,' he replied. Speaking the words seemed to loosen him from some fixed state of mind, to open him again to the conscious human world. He crossed the room to the fire, placed his hands close over it and rubbed them firmly together.

'I'm ravenous, Mags,' he said, turning his head to her. 'What chance some food?'

'Almost ready,' she replied. She came over and stood close to him without touching.' Did you enjoy your walk?'

'I walked up the valley there,' he said. 'There was not a sinner soul on the roads, except for one old woman working in a farmyard, who watched me with curiosity as I passed. She seemed rather taken aback when I wished her good morning. She obviously took me for a half-witted visitor out walking at that hour of the day.'

Margaret laughed, her gaiety bubbling up and shining in her eyes. She put her arm around his waist and reached and kissed him lightly on the beard.

'Come on,' Richard said, drawing back. 'This won't get the breakfast ready.'

'That was just a little kiss to start the day,' she said, pouting slightly.

While she continued preparing the meal, Richard crossed to the south window and looked out at the mountain. The sunlight had whitened, allowing the countryside to show its own colours. The way I have come, he thought, and tried to place himself in the view. Too soon after the event. He had been down a small road surrounded by trees, standing on a narrow bridge and looking down at a stream that gurgled and splashed. At its edges grass swayed in the water, and in comparison to the damp odorous grass further up on the banks it seemed washed and pure. The sharpness of the air made it difficult for his pinched and tingling nose to breathe, and the saliva on his tight lips wet the tip of his cigarette. It became such a damp miserable squib, the paper blackened and smouldering, that he finally threw it away in disgust. Looking at it lying in the grass, the thin blue smoke that rose from it wavering in the light wind, he felt soiled and poor. Even now, standing in the warm room, he experienced a desire to spit out the acrid taste that lay on his tongue. He turned away in disconsolation.

He crossed the room and sat in an easy chair by the fire. The emanations of warmth made him drowsy. Margaret entered carrying tableware. As she laid the table the contact of delft and cutlery made ringing melodious sounds through the silence. He watched her as she worked. Her slim body was bent forward over the table, causing her hair to fall in black waves about her face. Through his aimless thoughts came the awakening sensations of confusion. Today again the indecisions of yesterday and the revisions of last week slip away. Each morning he must gather them together, note them and try to form new decisions. At times like this confusion was his only link with his immediate past.

Sensing his eyes on her, Margaret turned to him. As she did she put up her hand and drew the waves of hair back off her face. She smiled, questioning his gaze. Her face was one thing, her beauty another. Her face was at times angular and severe, especially when drawn and tired, except for the roundness of the jawbone, which gave the impression of childishness. Margaret's beauty was her joy in life, her own sense of beauty that created an aura of light, a subtle sparkling that flowed out from her eyes. These eyes, dark and opaque, even now drew from him what every woman wanted – submission. Margaret called to him: 'Breakfast is ready.'

While they ate, Margaret's father came in and joined them. He rubbed his hands briskly together and looked from Richard to Margaret.

'Good morning,' he greeted them. 'That's a fine morning.' His eyes had a strong evenness that neither dared nor retreated.

'Morning, Daddy,' Margaret said and leaned over and kissed him lightly on the cheek.

'Yes,' Richard replied. 'And a fine morning for walking.'

'I heard you getting up. Did you meet anyone on the road?'

'Only an old woman in a farmyard. I think she thought me mad.'

Joseph Stewart laughed.

'Aye. She would. Only visitors go out walking like that on a holiday.'

'Daddy,' Margaret interjected. 'There was a blackbird in the garden this morning. That means we'll have snow, doesn't it?'

'Aye, cutty, and it's cold enough for it.'

'They've had snow in the south and in England,' Richard said. 'But Scotland seems to have escaped it. I doubt if it will snow here.'

'But it always snows in Donegal at Christmas,' Margaret insisted. 'And it's always so beautiful when it does.'

Joseph looked with good humour at the couple.

'Well,' he said deliberately, 'Old John Gallagher, who lives up by Muckish, hopes it won't. He says his sheep have wandered far up the mountain and he'll have the devil's job getting them in. But he thinks it will snow. He feels it in his bones.'

After the meal Richard sat with Joseph by the fire drinking whiskey. Margaret was in the adjoining room washing the breakfast things and singing absently to herself.

'How is your father?' Richard asked.

'Sinking slowly. It won't be long now,' Joseph replied.

'Can't the doctor do something for him? Injections or drugs?'

'He's a tired old man,' Joseph said, staring into the fire. 'He's had a good life and now he's tired.'

'Surely a man who loved life as your father did would have fought to remain alive.'

Joseph looked up at him with barely concealed irony in his eyes. Good God, Richard thought, I spoke as if he was already dead.

Margaret entered the room.

'I've washed up everything. Now I must go up and clean the bedrooms.'

Her feet made dull thuds on the stairs.

'She's had a lot to do over Christmas,' Joseph said, 'with her mother away in London. She'll be glad to get back to Dublin tomorrow and have a rest.'

Richard smiled.

'If you ask me, she's enjoying herself,' he said. 'It gives her a sense of responsibility and something to talk about.'

'Aye. She never could be easy,' Joseph replied. 'Always cleaning this or that. She used to drive her mother mad.'

He finished his drink and stood up.

'Tell Margaret that I've gone up to Rows to see my father,' he said. 'Tell her I won't be back until this evening.'

'Right. Take care, there was ice on the roads when I was out.'

When he had left Richard sat back in his chair. The whiskey lay heavy in his stomach and his head throbbed warmly with the first waves of intoxication. The whine of a starter cut the silence; Joseph's car coughed and revved. Richard turned his head away. There was a click of gears, the engine revved again and the car moved away, taking its sound with it. Peace settled again like a warm transparent shroud about him and the room. Unused to such complete absence of sound, Richard tensed. His body lay inert and heavy like the furniture; its potential, in having no object, was reduced to a state of tense expectancy.

Then an image in his mind: a white house, symmetrical, with two wings and a body, spread out above an arc of forest. Rows. High up on Ards peninsula and overlooking the sea, gamely facing the surrounding hills, refusing to nestle in some hollow with carefully planted trees and pretend to merge with its surroundings. And an old man who danced at a wedding, showing how it was done in his day. The short movements stating the step and answering the rhythms with the greatest economy, jerking his arms by his side and hitching his shoulders in an almost threatening manner, the ancient manliness of the music and dance being expressed by his virile vigour. Now his time was up. This, Richard could not accept.

Joseph sat by the bed with his three brothers. Four sons, four children looking at a large man with white hair who gripped the pillow with his left hand. They noted the loss of colour in the extremities of his face and in his hand. They were at a loss for words or thoughts, so instead they prayed.

Margaret stood at the window watching a blackbird that sang. It was perched on a rose bush, the flowers of last summer brown decayed remains on its branches.

Richard watched her. A living force, he thought. A joyful energetic force that had momentarily sated itself.

'Have you finished your housewifely duties?' he asked.

She crossed the room and sat down opposite him.

'Yes, at last,' she said, 'For all the help you gave me.'

It irritated him that she should attempt to involve him in her work.

'Your father has gone to Rows,' he said, his voice harder and without warmth. 'He said he would be back later in the evening.'

'Will he be here for dinner?' she asked, a little agitated.

'I don't know,' Richard replied sharply. 'I've told you what he said and that's all I know.'

She looked at him quickly; her eyes glinted with incipient anger. Abruptly she turned away. She reached beneath her chair and drew up her handbag. From it she took a bottle of white lotion. She poured some into the palm of her hand.

'Did he say how grandfather was?' she asked impersonally.

'Sinking slowly.'

He watched her as she patted the lotion onto the back of her hand. Then she rubbed it in, massaging it down the ridges of the bones towards her wrist. Neat, habitual movements: graceful and personal.

'Why doesn't the doctor do something?' he said. 'You said yesterday that his heart was still strong.'

'He's old and tired, and he feels his time has come,' she replied. She formed her fingers into a bracelet about her wrist and turned her arm back and forth within this ring.

'How long has he been ill?' Richard asked.

'He took to his bed about three weeks ago. He said he felt dizzy and didn't want to eat. He's lain there ever since.'

'Has anybody tried to feed him?'

'Oh yes. Uncle Jim fed him glucose and brandy.' She smiled. 'Since last week he's refused the glucose, but not the brandy.' She rubbed the lotion on to her other hand and wrist. 'On Christmas Eve he woke up and blessed himself. Then he gripped the pillow and asked to be left alone in peace. Daddy says he hasn't moved since then.'

She screwed the cap back on to the bottle and placed it on the floor beside her. Next she took from her bag a small tube, squeezed some brown liquid into her palm and began stroking it on to her face. Richard was taken aback by her apparent unconcern. She had closed her eyes, and leaning back her head she smoothed the cream over her eyelids.

'Sure the doctors...' Richard began.

'Dick, grandfather is dying.' There was reverence and acceptance in her voice. She opened her eyes and looked at him. 'And there is nothing you or I can do for him.'

She suddenly pointed out the window.

'Look!' she said eagerly. 'See how those dark clouds are gathering about the top of Muckish. It will snow today.'

Richard shook himself in annoyance.

'Oh, damn your snow. There are some things more important than snow.'

Margaret laughed.

'Poor Dick. He doesn't like the snow.'

Later in the day, after dinner, Margaret's brother, James, arrived. Richard and he greeted one another with reserve and shook hands. They had met only twice previously in the year that Richard had known Margaret. Neither tried to contrive his standing with the other to a forced friendship, and consequently they regarded each other with a respect that was the product of unfamiliarity and based on their different affections for Margaret.

James was tall and strong and, like Margaret he had black wiry hair that poised over his forehead like a wave. His movements were economical and neat. Richard, watching him greet his sister, was reminded of their father and how he also moved with the same neatness and sureness as if to avoid upsetting some fine balance between himself and a much more powerful and unpredictable force. Richard looked out at the mountain. Once again the natural colours had been overwhelmed by the sun's light, which cast a bronze mantle on the land and emphasised the brilliance of the steely blue sky.

Seeing that brother and sister were in conversation, Richard allowed the mood of the evening to enter him and lying back in his chair, he luxuriated in the pleasing shadows and sounds that were there. The sounds organised themselves as music: carefully, he played through the last movement of Beethoven's Choral Symphony.

In Rows, on top of the hill, Joseph Stewart beckoned to his brother, Jim, and pointed to the light-switch. The redness of the sun haunted the room, covering everything with a still bronze. When the small lamp by the bed had been lighted, Joseph took the bottle and glass from the table and poured a measure. He crossed to the bed and gently shook the old man's hand. After a moment he opened his eyes and stared blankly at his son as it from a great distance. Joseph raised the glass into father's sight and attempted to lift his head. The rheumy eyes stared unmoved. Helplessly, Joseph placed the glass on the table and retreated to his chair.

'Dick! Dick! Wake up!'

The music faded from Richard's mind as he sat upright.

'James has brought a message from Daddy,' Margaret told him.

Richard turned his sleepy eyes to James.

'The doctor says that granddad is very ill,' James said. 'He says that if he survives tonight, he would survive tomorrow night.'

'But if he survives tonight...' Richard began in puzzlement.

'It's just our way of putting it,' James said quickly.

They took their evening meal seated about the fire, balancing plates on their knees. Margaret again wished for snow. Her brother indulgently assured her that she would have it. Richard, however, insisted that the snow-front was moving down a trough to the south-east of Donegal and therefore it would not snow. Moreover, he concluded, the sky was clear.

There was a noise at the door.

'I'll answer it,' Richard said, carefully placing his plate on the floor beside his chair. 'I'm nearest to the door.'

Opening it, he peered out into the lane. It was quiet and dark. Puzzled, he returned and reported.

'It must have been the wind,' he said in explanation.

As he sat down he heard a noise at the top of the stairs. He froze, half crouched above his chair, and looked quickly at the other two. Open-eyed, they sat stock-still. The hair on Richard's neck bristled.

'I'll go and check,' he said evenly. 'There might be a window open.'

Crossing the room he remembered that there had been no wind of any strength that day. He checked all the rooms and found nothing unusual. His hands were clammy and his spine tingled: gently and persistently. Back downstairs he assured Margaret and James that they were the only people in the house.

There was another sound, this time directly overhead.

'That's Daddy's room,' Margaret said with satisfaction.

Richard's nerve endings opened and reached out and probed every corner and niche of the house, while his mind frantically sought for reasons. Even the noise was unidentifiable.

James looked at Margaret. His eyes showed strong reaction which settled into acceptance of some realised knowledge when Margaret nodded slightly. Richard noted absently that neither of them was afraid.

'Grandfather is dead,' Margaret announced, and James agreed.

Nonsense, Richard thought. But he looked at his watch: seven forty five, he noted mentally.

'Do you remember, James, when Mammy's mother died,' Margaret said. 'We heard noises – three raps like the ones tonight – and she sat down here, where I'm sitting, and cried.'

Richard shook himself and moved from his frozen position in the centre of the room.

'I'll go and check again,' he said.

Upstairs, his eyes wide in wariness, he passed from room to room. Deep in his mind he expected something new and hitherto beyond his experience to happen, and he steeled himself for what he might find. Except for a sensation, like a weak current of electricity, passing along his spine, there was nothing. Everything seemed in its place in the half-light that reflected into the rooms from the light on the stairs. He went to a window and stared over in the direction of Rows, now unseen in the dark. What had happened there, he wondered. He was suddenly aware of the powerful force the Stewarts negotiated. The empty rural night had a density that was both terrifying and yet comforting.

Then it was gone from him.

Margaret looked up at him as he entered the room. She seemed excited but relieved.

'He must be dead,' she said.

'Beyond me,' Richard replied. He shivered. 'Let's go up to the village and have a drink.' The room seemed to be closing in on him.

While they waited for Margaret, James watched Richard with amusement.

'There are still things in this world that we don't understand, Richard,' he said carefully.

'Quite,' Richard said, shivering again.

At about ten someone brought news of the old man's death. He had died peacefully.

At what time did he die?

'I'm sure I don't know. Earlier in the evening, I suppose.'

The drink eased Richard's shocked nerves. He left James and Margaret to talk together and let his mind probe into the mystery. He laboured over the incident, trying to find causes, until he tingled with fear. He remembered his feeling of rejection that morning and realised that he was excluded from understanding though not from experiencing some things.

He had to be content with that solution.

Shortly afterwards, Joseph Stewart stepped into the bar. His shoulders were slack and his face pale and drawn. Richard saw two persons contending in him: a man who had witnessed an old man die a justifiable death, and a son who had seen his father die.

'You've heard, have ye?' he said. 'Daddy is dead.'

Richard realised that the second force had won. He felt a great sympathy for him and his loss.

James stood up and crossed to stand beside his father.

'You'll have a wee drop, father?'

'Aye, I will.'

While James went to the bar, his father sat between Richard and Margaret. Out of respect for the bereavement, Richard refrained from asking the question that buzzed around in his head. Margaret eventually asked it instead.

'At what time did he die, Daddy?'

'I can't remember,' he replied evenly. 'The first time I saw a clock after his death, it was nine o'clock.'

'We heard three raps in the house this evening,' she said without ceremony.

Joseph looked quickly at Richard and saw the curiosity in his eyes.

'Ah sure, there are always noises in old houses like ours,' he said carefully.

'Richard heard them too,' she persisted. 'Didn't you, Dick? First at the door, then at the head of the stairs, and finally in your room.'

'And when did you hear these noises?' Joseph asked Richard.

'At about a quarter to eight,' he replied.

'Well, now, the death was later than that, I'm sure of it.'

James returned and handed his father a glass almost full with whiskey. The father looked up at him and then turned to Richard again.

'There are always noises in these old houses, do ye know. And I suppose you were all keyed up after sitting all day in the house,' he said. 'I think it was just your imagination. Isn't that right, James?'

James said he supposed that was true.

'But we all heard the noises,' Margaret said firmly.

Richard reached and gripped her arm lightly.

'It's all right, Margaret. It's not very important,' he said soothingly.

Joseph stood up and hitched his coat about his shoulders.

'Will ye all have another drink?' he asked. 'I have to go back and arrange things.'

At last Richard found the key to the mystery.

'Tell me, Mr Stewart,' he asked, speaking carefully. 'Were you actually present when your father died?'

'No,' Joseph answered quietly. 'I was in the bathroom, do you know, and when I came back he was gone.'

Margaret and Richard stood in the garden behind the house. Though the gloom of the night they could see the pinpoints of lights strung unevenly around the lough. Richard pointed in the direction of Rows.

'It's uncanny,' he said. 'I just don't know what to make of it.'

'You don't mind father trying to cover up the incident of the noises?'

'No, of course not.'

'He thought you might make fun of his ways.'

'I'm obviously less open to these influences than your father is. He's lived all his life among them.'

Margaret reached and kissed him.

'I'll make tea for us. Don't stay out her too long. It's very cold.'

Alone, Richard lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. He looked at it in amusement: the beginner of my daily troubles, he thought. In Dublin such a mood at that morning's would have produced a secure disgust, and the knowledge that if life was bad in one place, it would be no better anywhere else. The anchor and comfort of the place must at least balance with that which had to be endured.

Something light fell on his nose. Another dropped gently on to his eyelid.

Good God!

Snow.

10 TRUE LOVE

Another car edged into the sandy drive. Its driver peered through the heavy rain, looking for a space among the cars already lined against the boundary fence that surrounded the house. In the doorway Elsa waited. She had been elected by the literary society to prepare the house for their annual party. Though the previous year's affair had been voted a success, the society had chosen to ignore the hotel in which it had been held. Instead, they arranged that this year's celebration would take place in a holiday house, belonging to the parents of one of the founder members of the society, in a seaside resort north of Dublin called Portrane. The reason for this change of venue reads thus in the minutes of the relevant meeting: That the affair would not have to end at a given time and would take place in an atmosphere of the utmost informality and conviviality.

Elsa greeted the occupants of the car as they ran to the porch. Her accent was flat. People unfamiliar with Dublin would call it a typical Dublin accent. But those of Dublin would note the sluggish, nasal quality in her speech and think otherwise. She was a German, resident in the city since the end of the war. She was also efficient and hardworking, and the more lackadaisical members had been only too glad to vote her the privilege of making all the preparations for the night. She had spent the day cleaning out the house, which had been closed since the previous summer, sweeping sand and crushed seashell out into the drive, removing long-wilted brown flowers and dusting the furniture. But though she had sprayed the rooms with a floral air freshener, not merely once, but four and even five times in some rooms, the place still smelled of decayed flowers and seasalt. Grains of sand, impossible to remove since the first season of the house's existence, grated underfoot.

John Walsh came bustling down the hall. He greeted the newcomers absently, pointing out to them the two cloakrooms and telling them to go into the large room on their right when they had taken off their coats. He then confused them by saying that they could also go into the room at the end of the hall, as some people had gathered there, but, he continued, the record player is in the large room. He edged past them in the confined space, still pointing and repeating himself, and came up to the front door, where he said to Elsa, 'Elsa, Elsa, has Dick come yet?'

Elsa looked out into the night and then turned back to John.

'I haven't seen him yet. Perhaps he has come in without my seeing him.'

John looked at his watch, then settled his glasses more firmly on his nose.

'It's almost eleven and he's not here yet. He's the president. He should have been here to welcome the members. Elsa, did he tell you how he intended getting out here?'

Elsa remained impassive in the face of his agitation.

'No. But he may have come by train. He might be sheltering up at the station.'

'That's it. I remember now. He said he might come out by train or by car. But Margaret was against using the car, because of the drinking. Then he said he wasn't sure how he would get out. Lord, he should have taken a lift from someone, then we'd know where he was.'

'There's a car coming down the track,' Elsa said.

'Where? Where? He might be in this one.'

The car lumbered across the wet sand and stopped in front of the house. A middle-aged women got out and literally ran around behind the car to the porch. Mary Higgins, a widow and a lively woman, called greetings to John and Elsa. As she passed them she shouted back to the car,

'Mind how you park it, Pat.'

'Yes, Ma,' came the tired answer.

'And don't get wet coming in,' she continued and ducked out of view down the hall.

The rear doors of the car swung open. John recognised the figure and rushed forward.

'Stephen, have you seen Dick Butler? It's after eleven and he's not here yet.'

Stephen turned his sad eyes to John. He was tall and lightly bearded and carried his knowledge and the confusion of his knowledge like a heavy weight that sagged his shoulders and lengthened his face.

'He's down in a pub by the station with his girlfriend. That teacher – what's his name – Paul something or other, will bring him up in his car.'

'Thank God for that. We've been expecting him since nine.'

They walked together over to Elsa. Stephen and Elsa greeted each other. Behind them stood the other passenger in the car, who had shared the back seat with Stephen, a young man with a pale, tense face and quick, secretive eyes. He was a furtive devourer of books and reckoned to be inarticulate.

John called out in a tenor voice that could not shout to know if anyone had brought records and if so would they please give them to him. He explained to the unheeding gathering that Tony Hackett and his sister, Catherine, had brought a record player, that they had it going now and intended playing records. He also told them that he himself had bought a record in Eason's. Holding it above his head, he told them it was by Tom Jones and called She's a Lady. He explained that he had heard it on the radio yesterday morning while dressing and had so liked it that he had gone into the city this morning especially to buy it.

Tony Hackett came to his side. He was smiling at John's speech.

'John, John,' he said urgently in his ear.

John turned to him and said brightly, 'I was telling them about the record player, Tony. But devil the bit of notice they're taking.'

'I know,' Tony replied. He often found it impossible to attract John's attention and used the device of appearing to absorb and understand everything that John said to him, while in reality he was only trying to get a word in edgeways. 'But listen, we're putting on a record of some band music, so don't worry.'

John interrupted him. 'I bought this record this morning, it's called...'

'I know, John. We'll put it on afterwards.'

'But I was going to put it on now.' For a second his face was blank, then it suddenly brightened again. 'It's very sexy. Tom Jones has a very strong voice.'

Music burst upon them: a brassy rendition of American Patrol. Some people began to dance, almost in reaction to the sound, and the din of conversation rose in competition. Catherine Hackett came over to them. Her long hair swung on her shoulders as she moved. She was laughing.

'That young chap,' she pointed to the corner by the fire – it was the silent bookworm, who sat on a stool and stared at the record player. 'He saw me holding our record of Beethoven's concertos and thought I was going to put it on. You should have seen him jump when the music started.'

She was now fully developed at twenty one and still with a strong feeling for life. But since returning to her cramped and highly regulated family, this feeling only sometimes found expression. More often it was frustrated, so that release, when it occurred, was explosive.

John chided her for her cruelty.

'Oh, for goodness sake, John,' she said, the passion in her voice silencing him. 'He'll get over it.'

Then she saw someone in the crowd and moved away, calling, 'Margaret, you've got her at last.'

Tony also saw her.

'John, I think the president has arrived.'

'Where is he?' he looked at his watch. 'Half eleven. I'll kill him for being late.'

Richard Butler came through the crowd.

'Good evening,' he said, looking about him. 'We seem to have a good crowd, I see. Are there as many as expected?' He was holding a glass in one hand and a bottle of stout in the other.

'We expected you long before now, Dick,' John said severely. 'What delayed you?'

'Oh. We were down in some pub. Didn't someone tell you?' He turned to Tony. 'What happened to you? I thought you were taking the train out.'

'We missed it, so we took a bus as far as Swords and John came over and collected us.'

'Just as well. The train was miserable.' His eyes were red and strained. He had been drinking all evening, John supposed.

Stephen came over.

'You took a long time getting here, Dick,' he said.

Richard laughed. 'They're not too fussy about the time. The place is still open.'

John started to move away. 'I'm going to help Elsa with the food. It's a shame the way we've left everything to her.' He turned to Richard. 'Don't you stray. You have a speech to give.'

Richard nodded and began pouring the Guinness into the glass. When he had done it, he held the bottle away from him, trying to find a place to put it. Margaret appeared from nowhere and took it from him.

'Don't drink too much,' she said, half teasingly.

He shook his head in habitual annoyance.

'Don't you know we're at a party?'

She smiled bravely at him and put the bottle on a nearby table. Meanwhile, Richard took Tony by the elbow and suggested they tour the house. It didn't take long, the house was modest, and they ended up on the porch. The sea-smells were strong here and with them their memories of childhood holidays by the sea. They talked about those days, making much play of the winter's night around them. Tony was relatively complacent, his memories of Renvyle were part of an unbroken continuum of experience in which his life was comfortable, regular, whole. Richard couldn't avoid an element of bitterness. He felt that his life by comparison was broken and that he looked back on his summers in Rush across a pile of negating memories. But they complemented each other: one with the desire for experience, the other for the effacement of experience.

Margaret came up behind them.

'The meal is ready, Dick. Are you coming in?'

'We'll be right in.' he watched her as she walked away. To Tony he said, 'Margaret. It's an unsuitable name. It's so clumsy on such a slip of beauty. Surely she should have a two syllable name, an iambic foot, that would stress the effect of her beauty. Unstress for her, stress for her beauty.'

Tony looked sideways at him, frowned and then smiled.

'You don't agree?' Richard asked.

'Margaret is a human being, Dick,' Tony said softly.

'Come on, Tony. Humanity in a person is an assumption, an unknown quality. We seek symbols for personality – beauty, goodness, intelligence, and the like. Margaret's is beauty.'

Tony frowned again, and then asked teasingly, 'What's my symbol?'

'The Age of Reason, on wheels.'

Tony grimaced and walked down the hall. Richard followed.

'And what's yours?' Tony asked over his shoulder.

'I don't know. I'm stuck with my own humanity, unproven.'

Tony turned and stared hard at him and looked as though about to speak. But Richard forestalled him.

'Perhaps truth, as something I must keep close to,' Seeing the scepticism in Tony's face as they entered the room, Richard continued, 'Of course, that is true for all of us subjectively.'

John Walsh saw them at once and cried out, 'At last, our president, Richard Butler.' He stood up in an old-fashioned way to greet him.

Most of the crowd at the party were in the room, eating chicken and salad from paper plates. Some waved their plastic forks, others cried out, almost in mockery, 'Hear, hear.' Richard spoke across the room to John, 'Should I address them as "Ladies and Gentlemen"?'

There was some doubtful laughter.

'Say whatever you want,' John replied, suddenly testy.

Michael Delahunty, whose father owned the house, called from the back of the room,

'Call us "fellow members".'

'Now, none of that socialism here,' Tony said behind Richard.

Richard turned to him, 'Surely you mean democracy?'

Tony laughed out.

'Now, none of that social democracy here,' he corrected.

Richard asked Elsa, when she brought food to him, to give him a bottle of stout. There was some fuss as he sought a place to put his plate and glass. Margaret came over.

'How are we going to get home?'

'I don't know, dear, but I'm sure something will be arranged.'

'I hope so. It's still raining heavily.'

John overheard them. 'Are you going home tonight, Dick? Some of us are staying over till morning.'

'We'll walk home, won't we, Mags? Oh, but I forgot. You wouldn't wear your boots.'

'I couldn't wear boots coming to a party.'

John was listening with an absentminded look on his face.

'Of course you could. We wouldn't mind. Come whatever way you like,' he concluded generously. He peered at her with wide-open eyes. Margaret instinctively shrank back. Richard was amused by John's stilted mannerisms. He was proud of his unIrish origins, claiming descent from Palatine farmers settled in County Limerick. But he had an ascetic Irish face, supplemented by the traditional Irish problems: Church, Mother, and static ideas.

'Are you going to sing tonight, John?' Margaret asked him.

'No, no. I'm hoarse with the talking. I've been shouting and bawling trying to organise this place while you were down in that pub.'

'That's a pity.'

Elsa came up and said, 'Will you say your few words, Dick, so we can get the plates cleared away.'

Richard stepped forward and the room gradually quietened. The silence clouded his mind and he felt the effect of the alcohol.

'I can't for the life of me be formal,' he began. 'The very idea of holding the annual get-together of a city literary society in the depths of the country in February unnerves me. However, we are, as I said, a literary society and therefore eccentric enough to do it. Those of you from Dublin may feel some nostalgia for the summer in a place like this. I'm sure Elsa,' he bowed to her, 'has cleaned the house out thoroughly, but even so there is still sand on the floor and the smell of the sea in the atmosphere of the place.'

He was rambling, he knew, and he thought hard for a subject. Seeing Stephen McArdle looking at him gave him his idea.

'I have been your president for the last three months, but I have attended many meetings over the last year and have witnessed this dichotomy: that some of you are well established in life, for whom literature is a source of entertainment and interest – it is essentially a hobby. But the younger members tend to take their reading more seriously, trying to find there a philosophy for their future life.'

He looked about the room to stress this point. His head was fogged and he craved a cigarette.

'Now, though our society is of little social consequence outside of its members, and those with ambition don't stay very long with us, we have enjoyed our weekly meetings and from all appearances we will continue to do so for a long time to come.'

He had withdrawn himself a great distance from his voice.

'But the dichotomy I mentioned, it will also be with us. Recently, one of the younger members read a fine and intelligent paper on the philosophy of Existentialism. It puzzled all of us because of its obscure words and references. The younger members remained puzzled, but the older members greeted it with derision.' Richard paused, staring at the ring of faces before him. 'This greatly troubled the author.'

He took out a box of cigarettes and extracted one. His audience moved restlessly.

'That's all. Thank you.'

Some clapped, but most seemed surprised by the abrupt ending.

John came over.

'What were you going on about at all, Dick?'

Richard laughed to release tension. 'I don't honestly know myself.' But he did know, and he knew that he did.

Tom Jones burst on them, telling them that she's a lady. John became excited and told everybody nearby that he had bought it and asked them if they thought it was a good record. The Widow Higgins asked Tony if he would dance with her. He replied with mock diffidence and led her graciously on to the floor. John asked Richard and Margaret if Margaret would dance with him. In no time the room was jammed with dancing couples, who created a terrific din.

Richard decided he would drink another bottle of stout. Edging down the room, he saw the silent bookworm sitting with a stout young girl, whose face was alive with a hesitant, smiling eagerness. He was caressing her white arm and whispering in her ear. As Richard passed them she leaned sideways and brushed her ear along his lips. An emotion heaved itself in Richard's heart, an emotion that had long been dormant. His will pushed it down again. While he poured the stout, the record came to an end. He discovered he was closest to the record player and so decided he would change the record. He put on a ballad, in which a girl sang of her lover who had left her to go to the city.

Stephen was seated in the corner between the table and the fire, staring morosely at the flames.

'Here, Stephen, have a drink,' Richard said and gave him the newly poured stout.

He took up another bottle and searched for a glass. Finding one, he poured the Guinness, not caring that the glass had been used by someone else.

'You needn't have defended me like that in your speech,' Stephen said.

'I wasn't just defending you, Stephen. I was trying to get something out of my system.'

'Did it work?'

'Of course not. How could you upset these people with things they don't understand or care about?'

Stephen shrugged. Richard noticed how the firelight flickered and darted on and about him. His face was haggard. How could he absorb knowledge, Richard thought, when he is eternally tired? He remembered that Stephen had planned to tour the continent last summer. He had talked about it to him, asking his advice. Richard had told him what he knew of the places Stephen intended visiting. Then, when everyone thought he was in Paris or Italy, Tony had run into him in Grafton Street. Both had been embarrassed. Afterwards Tony had shown contempt for what he called Stephen's failure. John, Catherine and Margaret had expressed pity. Richard had asked him why he hadn't gone. His father had been ill, Stephen had said, and he had to help out in their shop. Richard had accepted this, not questioning it. If it were true, it was adequate justification; if it were false, then Stephen would carry the burden of it within himself, quietly and privately.

But beyond these considerations, Richard suspected that Stephen was a masochist, nursing perhaps a deep religious guilt.

John Walsh hurried down the room towards them.

'Dick, Margaret is looking for you. I'm going to put Tom Jones on again. I think he's a hit here tonight.'

The crowd had thinned. The bookworm and the stout girl – Richard remembered her name, May – were kissing, wrapped in an awkward embrace. Again that vague emotion stirred in him. As he walked across the room he discovered to his surprise that he was swaying. Margaret and Catherine were in a corner talking. Tony had his arms about the shoulders of the widow, kissing her on the lips. His eyes were open. Richard smiled: he was sure Tony was studying himself kissing the woman. But Mary Higgins gripped her man convulsively, extracting what juices she could from him. Her son, Pat, was stretched out on a sofa, dozing.

Richard went down the hall on to the porch. The rain had stopped. He crossed the garden at the back of the house to the fence that separated the house from the public beach. Below him, the waves frothed in the seaward wind, producing long curving lines of phosphorescent milk that fell with calm sound on to the wet sand. He pissed out through the fence on to the sand. A new freshness arose in him, created by an emptying bladder, a clean wind and the regular pulse of the ghostly sea. For an instant he was enmeshed in these things, sustained by them. There was clarity, peace. For an instant he longed to believe in something absolute. But then his mind responded to the impulse by repeating: a clean mind is a scrubbed mind, regardless of how it is effaced. Unhappiness he could accept, but dissatisfaction was intolerable.

Margaret came across the garden, calling his name. He answered quietly.

'I thought you were sick or something.'

'No, dear. I see the waves upon the shore, like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown. See.'

She stood beside him and looked out to sea. Her face was white in the frame of black hair. Her throat, and the two lines of muscle that angled down to her breast and produced a hollow of shadow, were subtly lit and shaded like a rare miniature of ivory. He was inspired to kiss her, but realising it would involve him in a chain of reactions too soon, he simply said:

'It's cold out here. Come along in.'

They met Elsa at the door. She was on her way home. Her tasks were finished, she told them, and tomorrow, she looked at her watch, or rather today, was Sunday and she had her children to prepare for Mass and Communion. They waved her goodbye as she drove out on to the track.

Inside, the air was heavy and smelled of stale food and drink. John was unsteady on his feet as he stood with his back to the fire. He was calling for attention.

'I'm going to give a small recitation,' he called hoarsely.

Tony was sitting with the widow in the gloom of a corner. Both were agitated. The young couple were still embraced, pressed cheek to cheek, and the bookworm's lips moved constantly at her ear. Stephen sat in the corner, his feet stretched out to the fire. Beside him sat Michael Delahunty, who listened to him; he was crouched forward to Stephen's mouth. Stephen looked over his head at the breastwork.

Richard stepped forward.

'John, I'll listen to you.'

This caused some people to look up and pay attention. John smiled and composed himself, then spoke slowly:

A lesbian lass from Khartoum  
Took a nancy boy up to her room,  
She said, Let's get this right,  
Ere we switch off the light,  
We do what and with which and to whom?

He came down through the laughter to Richard. He was elated.

'I used to do that at parties. It works every time.'

Catherine marched into the room. She was followed by Pat, the widow's son.

'Good God,' Richard ejaculated. 'Him?'

She looked back and wrinkled her nose.

'He is pretty awful,' she admitted.

Pat yawned hugely and looked about for his mother. Not seeing her, he went and lay on the sofa. They noticed then that Tony and the widow had disappeared.

Catherine went away, taking Margaret with her. Richard invited John to have a drink with him in the back room.

The house was quiet. Sitting facing each other across a card table, they drank and talked. John was outlining his projects and ambitions for the Society to Richard, who listened and nodded, while drawing his finger through the froth of his stout. His head was heavy and John's words seemed to come from a great distance.

'We must arrange outings during the summer, Dick. Create a greater interest for the members – you know, we must keep at them to take a bigger part in the running of the Society.'

It was John's acquired vocation, the organisation and running of the Society, but all words, only words, thousands of them, spreading out in a great cloud of confusion around John.

Stephen came into the room, ducking his head instinctively in the doorway,

'Any stout left?' he asked gently.

John delved into a corner and produced a bottle, which he opened and handed to him.

'By the way, Dick,' John suddenly said, 'some of the members took exception to your remarks tonight. They wondered what right you had to make statements like that about them. I told you before that it's only a social club.'

'Stephen,' Richard asked. 'How did you feel after that meeting?'

'It didn't matter much. I just wrote pages of stuff on the subject. It wasn't very well organised. You can't blame them for not understanding.' Even the glass in his hand seemed to much for him to support.

'Well, you looked pretty down after it.'

'Yes, that's it,' John said quickly. 'I've just told you, Dick. We must organise these things better than we have done in the past.'

Tony stepped through the doorway. He was smiling broadly.

'There you all are,' he said expansively. 'Any stout left?'

'Enjoy yourself?' Richard asked, his voice pitched in irony.

Tony raised his hand before his face and rubbed his thumb across his finger tips.

'It was very fine. Her emotion was particular and organised to set ends.'

'She's old enough to be your mother,' John said in disgust.

Tony replied dispassionately. 'It happens all the times in the best books. Besides, young girls are so disorganised in their emotions that they can be very trying.'

Stephen smiled wanly and Richard laughed loudly.

'The happy ending to a happy book,' he said.

John snorted and turned on Richard.

'Trust you. Even that piece you wrote for the magazine ended with sex. So much of today's literature has sex, sex, and nothing but sex in it. They're not true writers at all, only dirty-minded scribblers.'

'There was nothing explicit in it. You thought it was "poetical" at the time.'

John ignored what Richard said. 'Literature should be beyond all that.'

'Whatever else, Michael Delahunty and a friend of his roused up two girls by getting them to read it.'

Just then the house erupted into music, Irish dance music. Catherine shouted from the big room, calling for men to dance with her. There was sudden activity as John, then Tony and Stephen made for the door. Richard knelt and searched for a bottle of stout. He could hear feet scraping and hammering the floorboards and the ringing exultations of wild dancing yells. He changed his mind about the drink and decided he must join in, but by the time he got to the door the record ended and silence settled again on the house. He heard the mutter of words coming from one of the bedrooms. Curious, he went to the door of the bedroom. It was ajar and surrendering to the temptation he peeped in. The bookworm and the stout girl were lying side by side on the narrow bed, pressed close together. The whiteness of her body was startling and she smiled blissfully, eyes lightly closed, and listened to his measured speech.

Richard started back into the hall. He was as though transfixed by the emotion that finally heaved through to recognition. He stared down the hall and out into the night.

Margaret came out of the big room.

'Dick, what are you doing out in the hall? Listen, Mrs Higgins has offered us a lift home.' She came closer to him. 'Why are you so sad?'

'I'm not sad.'

'Your eyes are all bright and warm.'

She put her arms on his shoulders. Her eyes were moist with love.

'Dick, Dick,' she whispered in sudden passion. She was so close that he could feel her warm breath on his neck. 'You look so sad and loving. How beautiful you are like that. Oh dearest,' she hugged him tightly. 'We'll be home in less than an hour.'

She put her arm about his waist and drew him into the big room.

While they waited for the widow and her son to find their coats, the bookworm entered. He rubbed his eyes and yawned. The stout girl followed on his heels. Her face was very slack and her plump arms hung limply at her sides. They sat together by the fire, both silent. Richard couldn't take his eyes off them. Margaret noticed this.

'Why are you staring at them? Do you know them?'

'No reason. They remind me of something, that's all.'

'Remind you of what?'

'Nothing, nothing. Just a memory.'

Sitting together in the back of the car, Margaret snuggled in close to Richard. She stroked his hands, which he had entwined in his lap. Mrs Higgins laughed a lot and repeated over and over how much she had enjoyed herself. It was raining again and it drummed on the roof and hissed beneath the wheels.

Margaret looked up at Richard's face. It was lit in the flash of the streetlamps then hidden. Lit and unlit. Passive and white. She followed the line of one eyebrow with a finger and then crossed the bridge of his nose on to the other brow; then down his nose, with its bump that made it cruel-looking – like a Norman, she thought. His lips were pursed and attractive: she put her fingers lightly on them. He jerked his head away. In one of his thinking moods. Daren't touch him when he's like that, stuck away with his thoughts. He rarely told her what he thought about. Still, most men were like that: the thing was to ignore them while it passed. Catherine called it their 'periods'. She said their minds are like wombs, only more confused their ours. She stroked his fingers. But when he's warm and relaxed, he's the best man in the world. His eyes an hour ago. A feeling of love and contentment filled her body. Love, she whispered, love.

In the flat he refused tea and began to undress immediately. She was delighted. As he bent to pull his trousers over his feet she lay across his back and kissed his neck.

'I love you,' she whispered.

He turned to her slowly, his trousers in his hand. She was shocked to see how cold and remote his eyes were.

'What's wrong? I love you. What more can I say?' She was suddenly very near to tears.

'Say nothing. Best policy for now.'

'What was is it you remembered at the party?'

'Nothing that would concern you.' He had his back to her and she could hear the rapid clicks as he wound his watch.

'Tell me. I have a right to know.'

'Well, if you must.' He was intense with restraint. 'That young couple you noticed me watching – the one they call the bookworm and the girl, May – they reminded me of a girl I knew some years ago. I was in love with her, but it didn't work out.'

She was derisive.

'Is that all? Sure, that happens to everyone.'

'Perhaps. But I suffer only my own experience. And as I discovered this evening, it's impossible to escape such an experience.'

'Don't be silly. It was only teenage romance.'

'Again perhaps. I did believe then that I loved her, though I am not sure now what the word means. Even so, who can take her place, now that she is a dream in my mind?'

'But it happened so long ago. You were younger and more innocent then. Why should it interfere with you so?'

He had settled himself down in the bed and lay looking up at the ceiling.

'Because out of it all there are three or four incidents remaining in my memory that will never be surpassed for as long as I live.'

She felt her stomach turn over.

He was fast asleep.

She watched him as she would study a painting: as a medium for unlocking her mind. She who had held herself for the day she would meet the man she truly loved. How many had she refused, without turning a hair? Coupled now with a man she could love wholeheartedly, but who could not, or would not, love her completely. She crossed to the window. Rain teemed down on the Gothic spire opposite. He was fascinated by that spire in moonlight. She looked over at him: she had been so sure of him, that it was he who spoke to her, when all the time it was only half of him, or quarter, or only a tiny fraction that she knew and felt. No. She must get him to tell the whole story. It was sure to be sentimental. But that wouldn't really solve the whole problem. It wasn't only that girl that was the cause. She nodded slowly to herself in understanding. She remembered she had once told him that she hoped he would die before her, because men are lost and useless when they have to carry burdens like that. And that she was sure was love: the willingness to carry the whole burden of the other.

It was true love.

11 MASQUE

By the time Richard had led Margaret through the market, waiting while she bought this and that item she needed and stoically endured her pleas to come and look at various things which took her fancy in shop-windows, he was fairly gasping for a drink and determined to ignore her demand to return home now because she was hungry. The large rectilinear parcel, containing two newly framed antique maps, jammed edgeways in the door of the pub. Margaret, coming unheeding behind him, hit against him and almost tipped the vegetables out on to the pavement.

'For God's sake, Dick, can't you look where you're going?' she said in exasperation, giving him a withering look that was designed to make him feel as if eight years old and not more than two feet tall.

Richard, being used to this, ignored her and concentrated instead on getting himself and his parcel through the stiffly sprung door. Once inside and having found an empty table, he gratefully laid down his burden, relaxed, stretched his arms and finally rubbed his hands in anticipation.

'Well, what will you have, Mags?' he asked. 'A half pint of something?' He wanted her to take something alcoholic so she would relax, knowing that if she didn't there would be a cold war between them by the time he had finished his first pint.

'I'll just have a bitter lemon,' she replied. Seeing his frown of dissatisfaction, she continued: 'I'm not having anything stronger on an empty stomach. You can if you want, it's your idea to come in here. I want to eat.'

By the time he had drunk the first pint, he knew that a second could only improve his sense of wellbeing, and that regardless of Margaret's mute censure. She drank frugally of her beverage, ignoring Richard and gazing about at the patrons with disdain. But he had been over this course enough times in their three years together to know the outcome and to know it wasn't worth worrying about. Margaret would grumble for a while afterwards until she felt she had appeased her outraged self-respect. Meanwhile she would tap her foot, reduce the crowd in the bar to its proper moral stature and fall back on her dignity, upon which she would stand. Richard sighed gently and groped for his cigarettes. Three years together; two years of literary endeavour for him, and two years of growing rectitude for her. As he became immersed in his work, she seemed to retreat into the security of her childhood values, learned in the depths of Donegal and hardly suited to life in London.

He drained his glass and rhetorically asked Margaret if she would have another drink.

'Are you going to have more?' she feigned. 'Are you not hungry?'

Ignoring this, he took his glass and went to the crowded bar. Behind the counter three barmaids scurried to and fro, filling glasses, decapping bottles and operating the cash register, all of which, when added to the calls of the drinkers, created a cacophony that stimulated Richard's freshly addled senses. As a bird will respond to human music which, though art, must seem to the bird to be an unearthly clamour, so Richard began to whistle. He softly whistled the theme from the opening movement of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet, all the while trying to catch a barmaid's eye. At last a youth pocketed his change, took up his filled glasses and moved away, leaving a space free at the bar. Richard quickly sidled around the seated figure who had blocked his access and immediately found a barmaid awaiting his command. The seated figure turned to Richard and said:

'I wasn't going to move for you.'

Richard realised that he must have been whistling directly into the fellow's ear. Contrite and good-humoured, he said:

'Did my whistling annoy you? I didn't intend it to.'

'I know there shouldn't be seats at a bar like this, especially a crowded one, but I got tired walking back and forward for a drink from over there.' He pointed vaguely to the back of the bar.

As Richard paid for his drink, he replied:

'I wasn't trying to hassle you, as the Americans say, by whistling. I've had the piece in my head all morning threatening to break into song at the slightest chance.'

The seated stranger laughed at Richard's indulgence and seemed to find relief in it from his own self.

'What is the piece? It's half familiar, though, with respect, I don't think you render it too accurately.'

'I dare say I don't. It sounds far more agreeable inside my head than when I whistle it,' Richard replied, finding himself taking the role of wit in the face of the more literal-minded English, a role he had become used to assuming. 'However, it's from the first movement of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet. Do you know it?'

'Mozart...Mozart...?' the stranger said, obviously trying to recall something, though not the piece Richard had mentioned. His face cleared and he said: 'Mozart. I bought a record of his recently for my daughter... a popular piece...'

Richard was amazed to see the man's lips suddenly pucker, as if he were on the point of crying. Even his eyes, blue, clear and apparently steady, became baleful. As he continued to grope for the words he wanted, his eyes settled on Richard's face and assumed an expression of pleading, the expression that precludes intimacy with lonely people. The stranger turned his head away and gulped some beer from his glass. Refreshed and recollected, he said:

'You must know it. It was played everywhere for weeks. It goes on and on.' He laughed suddenly. 'On and on, like all Mozart, the same piece of music over and over. It's absolutely marvellous, you just sit back and enjoy it.'

Partially relieved, Richard took a sup of his beer and said:

'Was it Symphony number forty? I know that was all the rage last summer. Though it sounds a damn sight different in the original.'

'That must have been it,' the other said. 'Well, as you seem familiar with classical music, can you tell me what this is.' And he began to hum some notes.

After listening for a minute, in which the melody was hummed four or five times, the stranger all the time gazing earnestly into his face, Richard shook his head and said:

'I give up. Tell me what it is.'

'It's from Carmen. I'm surprised you don't know it. I thought everyone knew that.'

Richard took another sup of his beer and thought: Oh hell. He turned to Margaret and smiled. She eyed him sternly. The stranger, who Richard judged to be about fifty, was intoning to his glass, 'If music be the food of love...'

'Listen,' Richard said. 'I must go back to my girlfriend. Will you come across and join us?'

When the stranger sat down and introduced himself to Margaret, which he did with a grace that surprised Richard, as Robert Emmet, she laughed out loud, her manner totally changed, sure she was being fooled.

'But call me Bob,' he said to her, his voice a tone or two lower. He looked at Richard, grinning, happy to have caused a minor sensation. When he sensed Margaret's curiosity take precedence over her amusement, he explained:

'It's a Yorkshire name: O-T-T, not E-T. I know he's one of your patriots. In fact Ian Paisley told me that he was the greatest of them.'

'Hardly,' Richard said. 'A man who marches into the stronghold of his enemies with a handful of followers, and then makes an impassioned speech before being sentenced to death, the greatest patriot? A pretty suicidal patriotism, isn't it?'

When Bob heard this, he figuratively ducked his head and drank his beer. But Margaret's interest had been taken and she began to question him. She put on her distant manner, to lull the chap while she probed him unmercifully. Richard, seeing things looked well for another half an hour or so, interrupted them and asked Bob what he would have. He wasn't surprised when Margaret said she too would 'have something'.

'Tell me, Richard, can you guess what I do?' Bob asked him when he returned with the drink.

'Not for the life of me,' Richard replied cheerfully.

'Well try anyway, otherwise there'll be no fun in it.'

'Bob, I haven't a clue what you are. You could be anything from a truck driver to a company director for all I know – they all dress pretty much the same nowadays.'

Bob was crestfallen. He told them in a quiet, winded voice:

'A painter.'

Richard said to himself: Oh Christ.

Margaret became newly interested.

'What do you paint?' she asked.

'The sea, the sea. In all its moods and colours.'

'All the time?' Richard asked sceptically.

Again Bob ducked his head figuratively, and switched facets of his personality.

'What do you do?' he asked Richard.

'I write. At the moment I'm writing the history of the bicycle in Ireland, carrying on the work of another Irishman, Flann O'Brien.'

Both Margaret and Bob looked at him: the former with surprise, the latter with near joy.

'Is that what you are?' Bob cried. And rushed on: 'Even when I was in Art School, all those years ago, what I really wanted to do was write!'

Bob had gripped Richard's arm; now in his excitement he was shaking it vigorously, while Richard grinned.

'Whose style do you copy?' Bob asked.

'Nobody's really. The stuff seems to have it's own style.'

'Do you like Hemingway? His short stories?' Here he gave what was almost an exultant cry. 'How he could catch mood... Just the right word in the right place... I'm sure I could do a story if I put my mind to it.'

'Do you know someone who would publish it?' Richard asked, a hint of dryness in his voice.

Bob turned to Margaret. Again his eyes brightened as he spoke to her.

'What do you do?'

'I'm the breadwinner... Well, so far anyway,' she replied. She looked sideways at Richard, as if to create the intimacy such a reply needed.

A bell sounded from the direction of the bar. Bob leapt up, looking at his watch, saying:

'It's almost closing time. Will you have another drink?'

When he returned with the drinks, Bob asked Richard and Margaret if they intended going anywhere in particular when they left the pub.

'Because if you are not, I hope you'll come with me... I enjoy your company... There's a club up in the city that I know, where we can have our fill.'

Margaret wasn't sure, she had this bag of shopping, and she was hungry... Richard said 'Yes', it was a long time since he had immersed himself in an open-ended booze-up.

Walking through the afternoon crowds of Brixton, Bob seemed to frisk about. One moment beside them, shooting off comments on the state of things, on the immigrants who jostled about them, on the negroes... Until he asked Richard:

'Who is it the British look to for civilisation?'

Then before Richard could reply, he was separated and forced ahead, to be shunted like driftwood into a shop arcade. When Richard and Margaret breasted him, he said:

'Well? Do you know?'

'I don't follow you. Surely they would look to themselves by now.' He had to shout to be heard over the clamour.

Bob shook his head, overjoyed.

'No, you don't understand,' he said, his blue eyes twinkling. 'The Phoenicians.'

Richard tried hard to collect his scattered wits.

'I thought you meant who they look to nowadays,' he said.

'No, who brought them the first contact with civilisation...'

A large negro bore down on them, scattering Bob once more. His head bobbed about in front of them. Margaret smiled at Richard, a semblance of pity in it. She was beginning to enjoy herself; she was being entertained. The discontinuities stimulated Richard. He had a growing desire for boisterous disorder.

They regrouped as they descended the steps into the Tube station. Bob was livid with enjoyment.

'You see, the Phoenicians gave them saffron...they wore it on their faces as a cosmetic. The Britons like it, so they traded it to them...'

On the escalator Bob said, speaking over Margaret's head (she was between them, with Richard first and lowest):

'It's taken from the crocus, which grows in Poland. The Phoenicians had civilisation, they appreciated colours.'

Seated in the train, his lips puckered, his eyes baleful, like a stricken Madonna, he commented:

'They brought civilisation in peace, unlike the Romans, who brought war.'

The hollow rumbling of the train gave Richard the excuse to shout, something he desired to do in order to release his feelings.

'For goodness sake, Bob, you're telling us only part truths. If the Phoenicians did not attempt to conquer the Britons, it was because it was unnecessary or impossible. They did, after all, conquer parts of the Mediterranean, and with the necessary bloodshed. The attitude of the Phoenicians to the Britons would be similar to that of the British in the nineteenth century to a small and economically unimportant tribe in New Guinea or Polynesia.'

Bob listened to this in silence, letting his head sway limply to the motion of the train. Margaret surveyed the half dozen people in the carriage. The conversation did not interest her: she was hungry again, but she was patient.

'Yes, yes,' Bob said wearily. 'But the colour, saffron, was the symbol of our earliest civilisations. It lifted those tribes by giving them joy and pride in themselves.'

In Leicester Square Richard delayed them while he tried to purchase a copy of the Irish Times, explaining, by the way, as he left them standing outside the Tube station, that he always made a point of buying Saturday's edition when in town. He liked to know what was happening on the literary and political scenes. He mentioned names, but his voice was drowned in the roar of traffic. When he returned without a copy, they were sold out, he insisted on having something to eat. Margaret, looking at the eating houses in sight, turned up her nose and asked Bob if they could get food in his club. He said no, and began apologising in advance for the patrons and the condition of the place. Margaret looked doubtful; the wind chilled her. What on earth was she doing in this part of the city when she should be cooking lunch and cleaning out the flat? Richard laughed and took the other two by the arm and, after asking Bob the way to the 'trough', led them up a side street past second-hand book shops and strip clubs.

In the club, which was really a convenience for those who wished to continue their drinking during the late afternoon, when other licensed premised were closed, the three of them sat about a formica-topped table at the back of the room, away from the hubbub at the counter. Margaret said she was cold, and when little notice was taken of her complaint, the two men realising that little could be done about it, she sat upright in her chair with a stiff smile, intending to suffer it, as if it was the common lot of womankind. Bob threw his luggage on the floor beside him: a windcheater (Navy Stores: £2.00); a newspaper (Daily Telegraph: 4p); a worn kit bag (NV); a paperback (A Man Could Stand Up, Ford Madox Ford: 2½p, Brixton Market); and a wrapper containing the remains of a sandwich (West Kensington, the previous evening; Liability). Richard placed his rectilinear parcel carefully against the legs of his chair, with a stern warning to Margaret to be careful and not to kick against it, as it was adjacent to her feet. Margaret put her bag of shopping standing upright on the floor near her chair: value of foodstuffs: £1.25 approx., plus four black buttons (to replace the three remaining on her tartan coat): 2½p: Brixton Market.

'Oh the prints,' Richard said in reply to Bob's query. 'Just two I picked up cheap and decided to have framed. One of Dublin and one of the British Isles, both eighteenth century.' He demurred at Bob's request to open the package so he could see them, saying it wasn't worth it.

While Margaret sat with her set smile, Bob pointed out to Richard some of the better known members of the club. A tall man dressed in heathery tweeds who gripped the bar and nodded his head stiffly as he listened to his interlocutor. He was very intelligent and had an important position in the university nearby. Bob wanted to take him over and introduce him, but the sight of the man trying to put his glass to his mouth made him reluctant. A very fat woman dressed in blue, French, who sat at the bar and held court before two men of small stature. She constantly patted one of the men on the cheek and only interrupted it to pinch his chin. 'The Small Fellow' at the end of the counter: underworld and had been missing from the club for three months. 'This Chap Here' looking foolishly at the floor – Scottish, be off to the West End when the pubs open. Doubtful activities. The Manageress, Irish and a 'Fine Woman'.

It was now Richard's turn to buy the drinks. The stout woman said, 'Helloo'. Richard smiled uncertainly, fascinated by the mountain of flesh. The two men looked sharply at him and then at the table where Bob and Margaret sat in conversation. As the two men relaxed, secure, Richard was repelled by the heavy perfume that surrounded the woman like an aura of decay. The price of the drink shocked him, which the smile of common citizenship of the manageress did nothing to soften.

On his return, Bob condemned a certain Irish television personality for prompting a certain Irish writer to swear on British television, thus showing the unfortunate man's personality in public and hastening hid destruction. Richard offered Bob cigarette. Bob, as he took it, said he had that from the man's wife. Richard asked him if he knew such-and-such, a well known Irish writer. Bob said no, but wondered if Richard was acquainted with thinga-me-jig, the equally well-known Irish writer. No, Richard wasn't. Margaret mentioned an Irish sculptor. Bob was gulping his drink and held his hand up to her, the cigarette transfixing his fingers. He shook his head as he sucked the last essence of beer off his teeth. When this was completed he confirmed his negative answer, but, on the other hand, he knew what's-his-name, who had done that church. Or was he an architect, he wondered.

And then Bob had it. Why didn't Richard write a story based on their meeting and subsequent adventures. He could use Hemingway as a model. Richard shook his head. Too arbitrary, he said, both subject matter and stylist. But Bob insisted. After all, he said, a writer should be capable of turning any incident he heard or experienced into an entertaining piece of prose. Richard, while shaking his head to clear the mist of alcohol which was embracing it, replied that he could see neither scheme or idea in the events of the day. He then suggested that Bob write it, as his introduction to the world of letters. Bob's face puckered at this, and Richard, bravado aroused by the drink and becoming careless of his self-regard, slapped himself on the knee and said: 'Ah, that baleful look again! You look like a wretched spaniel.' At which Bob smiled a graceful feminine smile of deprecation. 'Do it,' Richard insisted, 'and show it to me next week.' Bob hid his head figuratively and noticing that their glasses were empty, stood up and insisted on buying another round. This time he asked Margaret particularly to have something special, outside the usual run. She, having fallen into that mood of female self-regard, needed a few seconds in which to regain her more public composure. In the end, after some disjointed dialogue, she agreed to take some Danish beer, which Bob assured her was the nicest tasting beer available. Before getting her to accept the lager, Bob had suggested she take sherry or wine or whisky instead. But she tossed her head in horror and said, 'At this time of day?' She kept in mind the fact that a meal needed cooking and rooms needed cleaning, and that she must keep herself in fit condition for these tasks.

While Bob was away, she leaned over to Richard and said:

'I don't like this place. It's dirty. And look at that awful woman there, look at the carry-on of her. Can't we finish up now and go home. What time is it?'

'Twenty to five.'

'Is it that late? Oh Dick, the day's gone and I've nothing done.'

Richard was annoyed. The unusual course of events had thrown his groatsworth of knowledge of the female psyche into disorder, and he felt himself faced with the superficial mannerism of female revolt, without his secret knowledge to guide him through the storm.

'Patience,' he said limply, waving his hand between them.

When Bob returned, she smiled sweetly at him, as if she was guilty of some misdemeanour. Bob placed the drink before her with some ceremony. Then he asked Richard if he would come and help him carry the other drinks over, as he felt a little unsteady. While walking to the counter, Bob explained that he had been drinking all morning, and that without recovering from the previous night's binge. He newly filled glasses stood at the French woman's elbow. Manful, because of his relative youth, Richard edged around the two small-sized worshippers to grasp them. The woman said to Bob, in her loud voice:

'I'll give you the gamaroosh, my friend. I'd love to – you're such a baby of a man.'

Bob looked apologetically at the two courtiers, and gabbled in his throat.

'I've seen you in here before: slinking about the place like a lost puppy,' she continued. She reached majestically and chucked his chin.

Bob looked at her balefully. Richard, who was standing in the background, a glass gripped in each hand, laughed joyously. The scene tickled his fancy, the cruelty of it. As Richard moved away, Bob, catching sight of him, did likewise.

When they had resettled at the table and had taken a sup of their drinks, Richard gave a great horse-laugh in memory of the incident. Margaret looked at him in puzzlement. Bob hung his head. Richard told her.

'What's the gamaroosh?'

The two men disagreed as to what it was, Bob thought it was for the satisfaction of the woman; Richard, for the satisfaction of the man. Margaret was disgusted, and said so. She gave the French woman a venomous look. By coincidence, the French woman was looking in their direction. She waved. Bob literally squirmed.

'Are you married?' Margaret asked, wishing now to be sure of the type of company she was keeping.

'I was. She died fifteen years ago.'

'Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. You must be very lonely.'

'He has a daughter,' Richard interjected.

'Then it's not so bad,' she said. 'It's awful to be lonely in this world.'

'She's married,' Bob said. 'Married to an engineer and lives abroad.'

Margaret, her maternal feelings now aroused, said,

'Then you must be lonely.'

This seemed to make Bob feel lonely. His head sagged. Richard watched this with disgust.

'Damn it all,' he said in exasperation. 'Who the hell isn't lonely? And no amount of mothering will resolve it. A man must seek his own resolution elsewhere. In philosophy, for instance.'

'No, not philosophy,' Bob said at once. 'Love.'

Richard, now well soaked, was in a fit condition to enter the lists.

'No. Thought and understanding,' he said grandiloquently. 'What you want to do is escape from yourself, to lose identity in something else.'

'The Romance,' Bob replied forcefully. 'The Wisdom of the Emotions. To Become Part with Everything.'

Richard took a large gulp of his drink and set off. The Intellect: Logos: Man as the Inheritor of the Earth, of the Stars, of the Universe, in fast of All that Man could Grasp: The Great Thoughts: The Past: History.

Here Bob interrupted him. He had been sitting watching with his mouth agape, not really listening but responding to the emotions of the words. No, he said. Love: At Oneness: Peace: Art: The Sea and its Motions: Colour (Here he said, as an aside to his main theme, that Richard in terms of one colour, most likely grey, the colour of brain tissue.): Here and Now.

Richard mentioned the Great Flux: Becoming: Essence (He said here that Existence could not conceive of itself without first conceiving of Essence, because otherwise there would be nothing to talk about: we would be as the beasts of the field.): Heraclitus.

Bob, getting a word in edgeways, said: Being: Robert Emmet...

Richard went further: the Mystery of the Universe: the Soul nourished before Time in the Cradle of the Universe, awaiting its Great Destiny which had been Foreordained.

Bob responded, not to be outdone: the Mystery of the Sea; of Colour; of Form: the Sinuosity of Shape: the Malleability of Matter: the Mistiness of Reality.

Richard sat upright in his chair, charged with the awful responsibility for man, while Bob leaned forward, his eyes bright and kindly, filled with hope and willingness-to-please.

Margaret said, in a lull:

'You're making fools of yourselves. Everybody is watching you.'

She looked at her watch.

'Do you know what time it is, Dick? It's a quarter past six.'

Bob started and said.

'The pubs will be open. Let's go to one of them. The drink will be cheaper there.'

Richard agreed and finished off his drink in one long gulp. As they left, their respective bundles held untidily in their grasps, the French woman, who now had five men about her, called:

'Au revoir.'

The evening air revived them. The larger world of London invigorated them. They made a course roughly for Leicester Square.

'Will we have something to eat?' Richard said. 'I'm starving.'

At his elbow Margaret said:

'It's about time you thought of that. I've been sitting in that place for the last three hours dying of the hunger.'

They entered the first restaurant they came to. They took a table by the window and Margaret immediately pointed to the aquarium, especially the black fish the resembled a trout, in general form if not size. The fish flicked its tail and was gone into a clump of green plants. A waiter came, and he and Bob had great difficulty finding a convenient place for his belongings. Then Margaret and Bob had a curry each. The waiter, yellow skinned and pretty, blinked, poised to obey their commands, if only they would be clear as to what they wanted. Richard took a menu and immediately grasped that they were in an Indian, not a Chinese, restaurant. The waiter gave a dazzling smile when he heard Richard say:

'It's an Indian place, not Chinese.'

Bob nodded, puzzled. Margaret turned up her nose and said they should go – she didn't like Indian food. Bob obligingly agreed and half rose. Richard said he was quite comfortable, that the dishes were tempting. Relieved, the waiter finally got their orders and departed with alacrity to see to them. Bob fumbled in his pockets and produced cigarettes. His eyes were moist, their blueness piercing and cold. As Richard accepted a cigarette and Margaret, for the hundredth time, politely and patiently declined, Bob said:

'You must write a story of this day. Think of all that has been said by us.'

'No,' Richard replied, thinking with a chill in his spine what it would be like to make head or tail of the adventure. 'If you think it is important, you should do it yourself.'

'I would certainly like to. But you are supposed to be the writer.'

The waiter returned with soup for Richard. While he drank, Margaret turned her attention to the aquarium. The black fish had returned and swam lazily back and forth, his tail flicking in little darts. Bob gazed at Margaret. He had reached that stage in his drinking where he needed to pause and rest himself in coyness with a woman: to let his personality float in freedom, its boundaries set only by the caprice of the woman. Margaret, noticing his gaze, responded in her true Donegal way: her eyes said, Well?

Richard, finished his soup, wiped his mouth and sniffed the spicy odours that hung in the air about him. Momentarily satisfied, he turned to Bob, his eyes bright and moist, his brain sweetly addled, and said:

'You must invite us to your place to see some of your work. We might even buy a painting, that is, if we can afford your prices.'

Bob hung his head. His mouth puckered.

'I haven't pained in four years,' he said. 'I simply can't do it anymore.'

Margaret and Richard were non-plussed. Margaret thought of her untidy rooms, sure in her heart that Richard was to blame for the wasted day, what with his nonsense about writing and philosophy. Richard gazed at a group of middle class Indians nearby: a middle aged couple, an older woman – obviously the mother of one of them, and three children. The man seemed prematurely grey; his wife had a look of self-justified satisfaction on her face, she marshalled her children efficiently; the children were clean and well-dressed, but with veiled eyes. Further away, a youth with red, rough skin and dressed in a bright red shirt, open at he neck, spooned soup into his mouth while he read Weekend. Two waiters lounged by the cash register, talking in their native tongue, perfectly at home in the place. For the first time he noticed the music: sitar and tabla: distant and melancholy, mysterious, the circle turning and turning in cycles of vast lengths of time – he slipped down unguarding into the ring of time, uncared for, uncaring, helpless, fluid, female...

Bob was trying to gather up his belongings, as he did he mumbled:

'I can't wait any longer here... Having to sit about in places like this... I'm going...'

When Richard said 'Wait' he paused, and seemed about to resume his seat, but as if he had decided anew, he went back to collecting his things.

'Hell, Bob,' Richard said, infected by Bob's mood but his voice indifferent. 'Can't you suffer the mere rituals of living? When we have enjoyed our food, we'll go and enjoy some more drink.'

Bob paused at the door, his things clutched untidily against his breast. He nodded his head quickly in farewell. He looked utterly vulnerable, a lost child. Then he was gone.

Eating his kebab, Richard said it was terrific: he was sure there was garlic in it, and it amazed him that he could eat it, for he had a revulsion for it.

'I must ask the waiter if he can get me the recipe,' he said to Margaret. 'I'll make it some evening as a surprise.'

Margaret was picking at her food. It wasn't her familiar Chinese curry and she didn't like it: too greasy.

'Poor man,' she said. 'He's lonely in the world.'

'He'll get by.'

'Don't be so hard,' she said, suddenly angry. 'You act as if you are some kind of god, far above all this.'

'And don't you go pitying him. It's degrading.'

Then Richard noticed that Bob had dropped his book. He picked it up. On the inside of the front cover was written: R.A. Emmott, and his address in Norbury. Below that were a group of letters: S-L--A-E and C------/MARKET, and below that, written in a less formal script, as if written in excitement: COVERED MARKET. The other word Richard knew: SELFSAME. He had worked it out this morning while waiting for Margaret and listening to Mozart. But the other clue had eluded him.

'Has he forgotten his book?' Margaret asked.

'Yes.'

She reached for her handbag.

'Well, I'm finished. I'm going to clean up. Will you be ready when I come back.'

'No. we'll have coffee first.'

As she stood up from the table, Margaret said:

'The day's wasted. Look at the time. And you're not a bit worried.'

When she had gone, the waiter approached Richard.

'Will there be anything else?' he asked, poised to obey.

'Coffee for two,' Richard said, absently opening the book at chapter one. 'Oh, and can you give me the recipe for the kebab you served me? It was delicious...'

He was laughing at the opening paragraph of the story. He was delighted and happy:

'...of being a part of the supernatural paraphernalia of inscrutable Destiny...'

12 STRICT NEUTRALITY

Margaret and I have been together for five years now. In that time we have lived in Dublin, London, and for a short time in Paris. We sometimes live together, like husband and wife, and sometimes apart, meeting like lovers on street-corners or in public houses in the evening. We once thought to try North America, but the effort required to amass sufficient capital and to clear ourselves with the immigration, health and security departments of several governments led to so much stress and argument that we finally gave up the idea. I would like to try Paris again; Margaret, Greece and the sun.

At the moment we are living in London, sharing a small flat out in Streatham. I don't much like the place – too suburban – and I would prefer to be in Belsize Park again, but Margaret has this hankering after the security of quiet tree-lined streets and anonymous but tidy semis.

It is now July and we have come to a small village in county Donegal, in the far north-west tip of Ireland, to spend a week or so with Margaret's people. It is quiet, perhaps too quiet. I gave up dreaming of the peace of the countryside many years ago, and no longer does my heart clamour at the sight of well-arranged trees, mountains, rivers, etc. However, objectively speaking, the scenery is good in this part of the world. From Margaret's bedroom (naturally she and I have separate rooms here) I can see the sea and the purple hills of the peninsula. The strands are golden at low tide: the colour fits in well with the blues and purples of the land, sea and sky. From the window of my room I can see the mountain that rises from the front door to a height of over two thousand feet, an impressive height as Irish mountains go. It is quite friendly in the sunlight of a summer's day and I have often been tempted to climb it – I have even plotted my route. But the stories I hear about it – mists, sudden squalls, pockets of bog – always dampen my enthusiasm.

The village is quiet: four pubs, two petrol stations, two shops and about a score of houses, all straggled along a mile of road. This is my third holiday here and so far I have been in one pub, one shop and two houses, one that of Margaret's parents, the other that of a relation. (The rest of her relations farm in various parts of the surrounding townlands.) I have never had sufficient reason to visit the remaining three pubs or the other shop. The villagers nod to me along the road, knowing by now who I am and probably a lot more besides. I respond in like manner; on earlier visits I often made a fool of myself by overdoing the greetings, treating them like mandarins. I have actually spoken to very few of them; only in the evenings, drinking in the pub, have I crossed the subtle line that separates outsider and local, and then only to find myself adrift among the impenetrable and yet highly tendentious mutterings of sheep farmers deep in their drink. I suspect I am being mocked, but what can I do? I chose to enter their society.

The house is quiet these days. Six children were reared here and the atmosphere remembers them with a deep dusty pensiveness. I bow to this and go gently. There is no doubt that there were hard times in the early years: I feel the weight of an enduring patience, a view of the world that does not rise above the practical effort to secure simple basic ends. I grow tired of it at times, for I have not the patience nor will to submit to it. Yet it is hard to escape it. The surrounding countryside, beautiful, as I have said, partakes of this endurance and compounds it by the fact that it has existed for millions of years. I silently cry out at times, whether in frustration and spite, or perverse worship, I do not know, and comfort myself with the belief that a man's life is mercifully short. All the same, I have tried to evade this concrete sense of inertia. Often I have taken myself off alone to walk the lough, walking hard and long until my mind is numb and at rest, kicking stones and cutting at the hedges as I go. It is a foolish gesture, this walking, for I merely unite myself with the natural state and I awake hours later feeling I have lost some superior spark, be it human intelligence or mere wilfulness.

It is early morning as I write this. My body aches and my head pounds. Four cigarettes since rising have not helped an acid stomach. I dare not go down to make tea for fear of disturbing the still-sleeping family.

Last night Margaret's father came home as usual from the farm he manages for a religious community. We ate together, and afterwards he pulled on a pair of heavy boots and announced his intention of footing turf on his acre of bog. He looked tired and I felt vaguely curious and so I volunteered to help him. Margaret and her parents showed surprise at this and stared at me with provocative condescension. I reacted and insisted upon helping, forcing myself against my better judgement to be modest and willing to do my utmost. This seemed to relieve them of any responsibility for what might happen to me and on this silent understanding Margaret's father agreed to let me accompany him. I went upstairs, changed into older clothes and heavy shoes, and hopped into the car beside him.

He drove along narrow rutted boreens, climbing around the flank of the mountain to a remote hanging valley. He parked the car at the end of the metalled road and we walked along a stony track for over a mile, then followed a path that led between worked bogland, mucky sods of turf and pools of ruffled water abounding, until we reached a working no different from all the others we had passed. He threw off his jacket and jumped down from the bank into the trench. He sank until water welled up over the toes of his boots. With mixed feelings of duty and bravado, I followed him. He led me to the end of the trench and showed me but once how to foot turf so that the wind could pass between the sods and so dry them. I nodded and set to the job with a will that was essentially charitable. I was not doing this for myself and therein entered the element of play. I took care to pile the sods with a certain elegance, for I liked the balance and dignity of the simple structure.

Time passed. The wind gusted and the sun sank in the west. It was really very pleasant. Then I looked up. Joseph Stewart was about ten feet ahead of me, his body bent throbbing with effort as he expertly threw sod upon sod. I said loudly that it was a beautiful evening, wanting to break the silence. He threw me one look and resumed his labour.

Now, this quick glance was reserved, very reserved, but in it was a reproach so overwhelming that I started as though he had struck me. This reproach was not righteous, it did not presume on some expectation – rather it originated in a deep well of experience, called necessity. It was an expression no words could articulate; it could not be justified, proven or exploited. It came to me, it touched me, and then it went away. I looked about me – I wanted desperately to joke, to find reason to laugh out. The mountain was unchanged, as was the ridge opposite: the wind swept me and sunlight fell on me – yet I realised that I was merely accidental within their order. I did not stand in a bog, did not see mountains, did not feel the sun or the wind: they were simply a series of accidents and collisions that implied nothing whatever about my personal existence.

I was thoroughly alone then. I shrank away and saw the enormity of my helplessness. I looked at Joseph in panic. He was four yards away now, labouring with an even intention over those sodden sods. I didn't pity him – what would be the point of such a pretension? I saw him for what he was and loved him in my need for his company. Fuelled by this love, I groped towards him, eagerly footing the four yards of wet resisting turf. I did not think as I laboured, nevertheless thoughts came to me. I was ahead of the world. I was free. In my freedom I sought the company of others. My body came to be racked with pain and my smoke-stained lungs were unceasingly stabbed by the force of my breathing. I went towards Joseph Stewart – proud of myself as I drew closer...

He had a name for every ridge and outcrop on the mountain – animals and birds. The bog had features for him – faces and curious statuary. The sky heralded a good day on the morrow.

We had a few drinks together afterwards before going home, resting against the high counter and talking easily

Margaret and I return to London tomorrow. I am relieved. There is more human life in a city and, after all, I am a city man.

I will rest today because every muscle in my body aches. I overdid it last night. In the light of this morning it seems a foolish thing to have done. But it has taught me that my foolishness has been even greater than that.

I hear Margaret's father on the stairs.

I will have some tea now.

PART FOUR

13 INERTIA

'I still can't get over the energy you have,' John Walsh said, his eyes wide behind his glasses.

Richard Butler half smiled, half grimaced in reply to the rather obvious remark. In response to the enthusiasm which lay behind the remark, Richard felt flattered, knowing the other's impulsiveness. But at the same time he felt cheated to think that John characterised him in this way, because it did nothing to reassure him in the face of the ambiguity of this 'energy'.

'You drive up here from London, sit down and gulp a cup of coffee, and then jump and begin pacing about the room, wondering what's next,' John went on, his eyes enlarging even further behind the lenses, his face lengthening in his peculiar smile. 'It's amazing.'

Richard while listening had paused by the window. He gazed out at the buildings that composed the western part of the university campus and at the countryside beyond, running away into Cheshire. He stood with his hands clasped behind him, hidden beneath the vented flap of his jacket. His face was flared in the light of the closing evening. Round, handsome, with incipient jowls, his face was heavy and lined by habitual tension. His green eyes gazed attentively at the squat concrete structures, drowning now in the richness of the sunset. His lips were pursed, mouthing forward as if to place a kiss. They were ripe and sensual, though their sensuality was more subjective sensation than outward expression.

John Walsh had sat on in the tubular steel chair by the cluttered desk after speaking, waiting with expectancy for Richard's reply. One hand clutched the arm of the chair while the other rested lightly on his chest, slim knuckled fingers outspread and bent. The face that seemed to pop out of the black, wrinkled sweater, like the head of an ostrich from its plumage, was long and thin, with clear tanned skin stretched on prominent, though shapely, bones. The brow was high and slender, half shadowed by a wave of wiry brown hair. His lips were thin and naïve, unformed by self-awareness. The brown eyes that goggled behind the thickish lens set the mark of startled enthusiasm that dominated all his activities.

The protracted silence came to agitate him. Leaning forward in his chair, he said, 'You really haven't come to see me again so soon, have you? I mean, my life and studies are not so particularly attractive to you. They wouldn't bring you back here a month after your last visit.' Still Richard remained silent, gazing out the window. 'Admittedly there were some interesting people to meet the last time, and you had your little romance into the bargain. But things are quieter this weekend. Most of the students are away on Easter vacation.'

At last Richard turned away from the window. His face vanished in the dusty gloom of the room.

'How is Bahrsan? Is he here?' he asked.

'Yes, he's here. And he's as well as can be expected. You know he's up to his eyes in work, preparing his thesis.'

Richard crossed the room to the bookcase. Idly, he picked up a tattered volume of Walter Scott and flipped over the pages, drawing his head back to avoid the dust and musty smell he released.

'Can we go and see him?' he asked.

'Yes, yes, of course we can,' John said quickly. 'He'll be glad to see you, I'm sure. He's very cut off here.'

Suddenly he was all activity. He jumped to his feet and hurried to the bed and pulled his shoes from under it. As he slipped them on he talked in fits and starts: short bursts of speech that hopped from subject to subject. He pulled an old frayed leather jacket from the wardrobe, the metal hanger falling with a clatter to the floor. Then he sought his keys, talking on and on. Richard had replaced the book and stood watching John, pinned down, as it were, by the sudden confusion of words and action. When at last he had found his keys and stuffed them in his pocket, he turned to Richard and asked, 'Are you ready?' Richard nodded. John opened the door, allowed the other to exit, and then carefully locked up. They walked down a short corridor and out into the twilight. As they followed a downward sloping path through a lawn bordered by tall beeches, the night seemed to close in and breathe about them, as if by having removed the distractions of colour and form, it could now allow the pulse of the world to be sensed.

They walked in silence for some minutes. John was some two or three inches taller than Richard, but the latter's bulky figure and slightly hunched shoulders gave the impression of greater density and force. Then, as if remembering a last piece of news, John turned his head in askance and said:

'Oh, did you hear that Catherine Hackett is getting married in the autumn? Tony says they're well matched. But from what I've heard he's a steady sort of man, a solicitor, with his head screwed on right.'

Richard shrugged his shoulders and said indifferently, 'Oh.' Then in response to John's continued gaze he said, 'Well perhaps they are. Who knows?'

John suddenly darted his head at Richard. 'But you know she used to fancy you. I thought you two would be well matched.'

Richard laughed in a settled way, as though his response to this was typical: 'But I don't have the prospects a solicitor might have, especially a steady one.'

John looked away, suddenly testy. 'That's because you don't bother,' he said with barely concealed censure.

'Anyway,' Richard said to end the discussion,' I hope she'll be happy.'

They crossed the ageometric area of macadam bounded by the library, church and students' union, and open on the uneven fourth side to a small hill on which a radio dish was situated. It was full darkness now, and the area was lit by high sodium lights. Few people were to be seen. The library and the church were unlit, and except for the low rumble of the nearby motorway, the silence was intense. While John walked with swinging arms, silent now, having abandoned any attempt at conversation, Richard felt anonymous and isolated. Used to being always surrounded by people, each hidden by his share of convention, this gaunt silent place seemed to beckon to him, as if to say that here he could do as he wished and nobody would be the wiser. They passed between two blocks then and walked towards a door set in a wall, went through it and across a garden into a two-storied building.

Bahrsan smiled broadly when he saw Richard and John, and swung the door open wide to admit them. His glasses lay, thrown down on a sheet of foolscap beside an open book on his desk. The air in the room was warm and heavy with an obscure sweet perfume. Richard shook hands with the Turk, noting automatically the moist warmth of his hand and the loose palpy grip. Throwing out his arm to embrace the room in its sweep, Bahrsan invited them to sit. Richard chose to sit on the bed. John stood on the threshold, one hand adjusting his glasses, as Bahrsan occupied himself with greeting Richard. Then, as the Turk turned to him, he jerked his head quickly and sat on a chair beside the door. The other, seeing this, waved his hand weakly in the air, as if to confirm John's choice, but also as if in weak admonishment. Slightly bowed, he went and sat in the swivel chair by the desk and sprawled his legs out before him.

'So you have returned to visit us again, Richard?' he said. 'What you find attractive in us, I don't know. We are like monks, locked away in our cells, there to study our books without apparent purpose.' He pointed wearily at the bookcase that occupied the wall from the desk to the door.

John spoke suddenly and dispassionately. 'I've already asked him that, and got no answer. Except that we come and see you.'

Richard remained silent, gazing at the bookcase before him. There were two shelves, and he could read the titles and authors on the spines of the books, the room was so narrow. The top shelf held volumes on Plato, ranging from academic tomes to slim popular works in paperback. On the lower shelf were books on Locke and the German Idealists. In the corner of this shelf, beside the desk, a half dozen novels lay in a stack, their paper and gum spines cracked and creased. Above the bookcase a photograph of a blond nude girl was taped to the wall.

Richard became aware that the other two were watching him, awaiting his reply.

'If it doesn't seem to arrogant, I came out of curiosity,' he said, smiling. 'I came to see if it was true that I have missed something through not going to university. You see, I don't think I will ever go now.' He glanced at John. 'I think I have become too impatient with my life now.'

Bahrsan sat forward, intent on Richard. 'Yes, you have life, Richard. Your impatience proves it.' He gestured at John and himself. 'We have surrendered it. Instead, we try to understand it as you and those like you make life.'

Richard stretched on the bed, raising his feet from the floor. Again he felt that tension in him when faced with acquiescence.

'How is your thesis coming along?' he asked.

Bahrsan tapped first the sheet of foolscap on the desk, then a drawer of the desk, and said, 'So far so good. But it is very difficult. Especially working alone.' He turned to John. 'I haven't seen you for nearly four weeks. Have you dropped the idea of working together?'

John started in his chair and sat up straighter.

'No, no, nothing like that. I suppose I got tied up in something or other, and thought it better to work alone.'

'Working together disciplined us,' Bahrsan said sadly. Then, intent on explaining, he turned to Richard. 'John used to come here each day, or I would go to his room, and work. It served to reinforce the atmosphere and reassure us.'

Though he had not been in the room for long, Richard decided he must get out to someplace where he could move as he spoke or listened.

'Can we continue this over in the Union? This room is too close for me. Do you mind?'

John nodded his head. He, too, was glad to escape. Bahrsan stood up immediately, excused himself and left the room. As soon as the door closed, John leaned forward and hissed,

'He's so possessive, Dick. When he's studying with you, he never gives you a moment's peace. He's always talking about his studies or complaining of loneliness, which sets him off about Turkey and its social system. He can's do the work before him without dragging the whole of his life into it.' He paused, and then repeated, as if to himself: 'He's so possessive.'

'Can't you see he's lonely here, John? Can you imagine how foreign this country must seem to him?'

'I've never bothered him with mine. We're foreigners too, but we don't make a song and dance about living here.'

'Foreigners? By the time you and I had finished school we knew as much about England and its history and literature as we did of Ireland's. So long as we don't get too nationalistic, we won't see too much difference between the two countries.'

John nodded his head and quietened. Richard's bluntness always quietened him, but never convinced him. He believed Richard's reasoning served expediency rather than truth and that it was a result of his need for action. He nodded, this time to himself, waiting for Bahrsan's return, and watched Richard, who peered at the nude, his lips pursed in concentration. What Richard lacked, he thought once again, is a private life. Unlike himself, who was protected by a reserve, a warm feeling of greater control and restraint, Richard always pointed his attention to the world outside, as though there was some secret to be learned there. But he was lost there. Nobody needed him to turn his attention to a person and see the inner world there. He lacked any sort of spiritual identity.

Bahrsan re-entered the room, wearing a brown corduroy suit, his black hair brushed till it shone like coal. By the time John had awakened from his reverie, Richard and Bahrsan were already walking down the corridor. Hurriedly he jumped up and followed, surprised to find himself suddenly straining within himself and feeling pathetic.

Outside, he came abreast of them, to walk alongside Richard. Though the air was warm enough for the two Irishmen to feel no discomfort, Bahrsan was shivering slightly. He had his hands dug into his trousers' pockets, his jacket buttoned up, and his form bent, as if to reduce his exposure to the night.

'Have you heard from your family lately?' John asked Richard in a quick, shrill voice.

'Not since I saw you last. As I've told you, I think they feel that I have rejected them and their world. I suppose they feel now that I wouldn't be interested in the local news, seeing as how I'm out in the greater world.' He laughed with a gentle irony.

'But don't you miss them? It was a shock to them that you simply dropped everything as you did.' He paused. His voice took on a probing quality again. 'You hurt Margaret terribly, you know.'

Richard nodded. 'Yes. We should have ended it sooner.'

John was testy in an abstract way. 'But what about love? I thought you loved her. After all, you seemed to us to be planning to marry.'

'It was becoming too restrictive, John. We wanted different things from life.' He said this as a simple statement. After a pause he went on in a louder voice, so loud that Bahrsan looked up at them from his musings. 'Anyway, who said anything about love? When have you ever seen love that wasn't destroyed by compromise? Have you ever seen lovers who know each other?'

'You're a disappointed man, Dick,' John said with feeling, shaking his head. 'And you're becoming bitter. Not to believe in love is to die.'

'Perhaps. But it's a belief that's beyond evidence,' Richard said, sensing once again the immense void that lay between them. John, on one hand, accepting and believing; while he on the other was the sceptic, caught between the desire to believe and the knowledge that he could never submit to believing. And once again, brought to this knowledge, he felt the old plummeting of unease that made him so restless. He felt that his life served someone or something else's purpose, without his ever understanding what that purpose was. And yet he felt stronger than that someone or something, more actual, capable of destroying it, not physically, but with his doubts and growing bitterness. But he knew that if he were to destroy it, he would have to destroy himself after his moment of release, for he did not think that he would be able to face the great void that he would create. With the completion of this familiar line of reasoning, he felt the old rush of feeling for everything around him that amounted to love and the will to defend and protect everything.

'Yes, belief without evidence,' he repeated in a abstract tone. 'It's like religion in that it demands faith. But unfortunately, love is always put to the test, unlike religion. Unlike religion, too, there is nothing beyond the beloved to bolster one's faith in love. That puts an impossible burden on human beings, John.'

John made a sound in his throat, as though clearing it, and said firmly, as though instructing a schoolboy: 'You must simply believe it, Dick.'

They came out on to the area of macadam, having walked down between the church and the library, and crossed in the direction of the students' Union.

Bahrsan who had been listening to their conversation, suddenly said in an oblique way? 'Love? We only love that which is unobtainable.' There was a deep resignation in his voice.

Richard looked at him briefly, appreciating what he had said. Then, drawn to it, he looked over at the open side of the square, at the low hill outlined against the night sky that glowed softly with stars, and a the snub inert mass of the radio dish, which now resembled, from that angle, a gigantic figure praying with outstretched arms.

Again he felt isolated and tempted.

'Will Peter Yorke be here, do you think?' he asked John.

John pondered, and then replied: 'I don't know. I haven't seen him for some time now. You know, he disappears from here from time to time to stay with a crowd down in the village.'

Richard nodded. 'I wanted to see him.'

John turned and looked at him sharply. 'Why? What interest have you in poetry? You rather patronised him the last time, though I expect he didn't mind that so much.' He paused, suddenly realising why Richard had made his second visit. His voice became edged with cunning, knowing he was going to unsettle Richard. 'Now I know. You've come to see that girl, Grace, the one you spent the night with. Isn't that it?'

Richard was suddenly oppressed by the place. John's insight had deflated the expectancy that had buoyed him. He was taken with a crushing sense of inertia and in reaction he looked around, wanting to get out of the university, to lose himself in the group of towns below.

'No. no,' John cried, stopping and pointing at Richard. 'There's more to it than that. You've come to look at your handiwork, to see how Peter has reacted to your taking his girl from him.' His voice softened, and again became edged with cunning, filled with a sense of its own cleverness. 'But don't you know that he has dozens of girls, especially among the younger students? I expect he wasn't put out by your need for a Sabine.'

As they entered the Union and ascended the stairs to the bar, John, resenting Richard's silence, said, 'We'll see, we'll see.'

Except for a few groups of students huddled around tables about the room, the bar was deserted. Through the plate glass windows which composed the wall of the room on their right, the tower of the library and the twin squat nipple-like spires of the church reflected the sodium light of the square like shivered pale memorials.

With a strong sense of obscure courtesy, Bahrsan insisted on buying the drinks. When he had gone off to the bar, their drinks firmly memorised, John said to Richard:

'Well, I don't see Peter here, nor that girl. And if you do want to find them, God knows where they are tonight.'

Richard sat down in a deliberate way. He was surprised by his calmness. There was, he felt, a great space about him. He was further surprised to discover that he had achieved this calm space by means of an abandonment of himself.

'Why don't you sit down, John?'

In the pub in the old part of Stoke, Peter Yorke played skittles with Bahrsan, who knew next to nothing about the game, while Peter was an expert who played with keen concentration and self-effacing asides to the Turk, to ease his discomfort at being beaten so consistently. Richard sat with John and some other students about a small fire, talking in a casual way. The untidy old woman who ran the place laid her huge breasts on the bar and watched Peter's game avidly, returning his many kindnesses to her with this worship. The air in the room was sweet with drink smells, musty and ancient, matching the atmosphere of the locality in its superseded brownness.

Grace Athena Saunders sat back in the corner, between the fireplace and the window, watching the room. She shivered still, though they had been here for almost an hour, unable to warm over the prickly sensation of the rain which had come on during their walk from the university. Her brown hair was cut in a fringe above her rounded brow. Her eyes, also brown, gazed fixedly at the scene before her. They were controlled by some tension within, rather than held by any interesting activity in the room itself, for they started cat-like when they perceived any movement at the outer range of vision and sought to nail the movement down and bring it under her control. Her lips were small and slightly agap and moist with cider. Her body was hidden in the folds of a shapeless white cardigan and long draped skirt, except for her arms, which gave a clue to her body. They were small-boned, the flesh smooth and rounded with almost hairless sallow skin. The hands grasping the pint glass were firm and attractive, for they conveyed a sense of practicality and precision that with purpose could give pleasure to another. Though she was small, not more than five feet two in height, she did not give the impression of petiteness: she was too short and sturdy, almost aggressive, in her manner. Instead she was as supple as a cat, but with a will-power that was a product of a self-consciousness that left her straining between what she ought to be and what she wished to be.

She focused her eyes on Peter, who was about to swing the ball, which was suspended by a chain from a pole on the edge of the table, looking at his frail figure as it braced for the shot. His withered left arm was clutched in against his breast like the leg of a newly-born bird, held there for protection as a useless but loved object, while the tensed fingers of his good hand swayed the ball to and fro as he prepared to take the shot. Then she switched her eyes to the group nearby, who bent their heads forwards towards the fire in conversation. Except for the visitor, who had laid his head back against the mantleshelf and swallowed from time to time, in boredom or tension, she couldn't tell which. His clothes stood out significantly against the motleyness of the others. There was a flair in it, an agreeable self-awareness that showed discipline with colour but also a cheerful liking for it. She felt vaguely relieved while looking at him. She felt that though he might be toughened by his life in London, there were many parts of his mind untouched by study and unmarked by cynicism, which enclosed the minds of most of those she knew, except perhaps Peter. He would have a tremendous capacity for tenderness, she thought: he could be caught unawares by a woman.

She drained her glass and asked: 'Whose round is it?'

One of the students jumped up, his face turned like a surprised spaniel's.

'Mine, I think,' Richard said, raising his hand to the student. He thought for a moment, trying to remember the order of buyers. 'Yes. It's mine.'

He stood up and asked the students what they wanted. He did it with a seriousness that was either mocking or intended to maintain a neutrality between his world and theirs, except towards his fellow Irishman, John, with whom he was instead light and bantering. Last of all, he turned to Grace and extended his hand for her glass. The hand, she saw, was clean, fleshed and sure. Keeping her head down, she thrust the glass at him and said:

'Cider. Draught.' And then inadvertently: 'My fourth so far.'

He took the glass and moved away to the bar, returning twice to take the other glasses.

At that moment Peter cried, 'Howzatt!' and grinning, he touched Bahrsan lightly on the arm. The latter shrugged and smiled, grateful to have it over and done with. Peter then turned and walked to the fireplace.

'Will you have a game, John?' he asked. As he spoke he resettled his crippled arm to his breast. It had not moved, but it was his habit to balance it lightly in his good hand for a moment and then press it back into its usual crooked position.

John peered at him through his glasses, his head started forward. 'Oh no. The last time I played it I almost killed myself with the swings I put on the ball.'

Grace, watching his movements, especially the nervous clutching at his spectacles, could well believe it. But more than that, she felt a tiny revulsion at his willingness to please, to be of service. It was so sincere. Were all the Irish so naïve, so eager to invade another person with their personalities, as if to transfer responsibility, as would a child?

Richard began carrying the filled glasses across. Seeing that Peter and Bahrsan had joined the group, he asked them if they would have a drink. Bahrsan nodded quickly in reply. Peter smiled, thought, then nodded. Grace thought that by the tone of his voice, Richard was being patronising. The picture of the two of them standing facing each other reinforced the suspicion. While Richard was attractively dressed, Peter wore his old tweed jacket, a little large, rumpled slacks, and an indifferently coloured knitted scarf wrapped many times about his neck, the ends dangling below his waist. But Peter smiled, and seemed to have a genuine affection for Richard.

When all the drinks had been passed around, Richard insisted that Peter take his seat, if only because he was tired sitting and Peter had been on his feet since they came in. Peter, as considerate as ever, declined at first; but as Richard insisted, he finally accepted. Grace watched Richard as he stood behind the chairs, looking first at the rustic print over the fireplace, then turning to the bar, to study the bottles and advertisements, some of which were pre-war. In comparison to the students, he seemed far more mature and balanced. He did not gaze idly at the trappings of the room, but seemed to absorb the details, as though comparing them with others he had seen elsewhere. More than that, as she continued to study him, he seemed greatly aware of them, almost affected by them. Her skin prickled as she realised how sensual was his concentration, how much for the moment he was intent and lost in his surroundings. She was taken by his innocence, and again became aware of his potential for tenderness.

'Richard,' she said matter-of-factly, not moving from her semi-reclined position on the chair. He started at hearing his name called. As he turned his head, Grace continued, 'Have you ever played skittles?'

'Never,' he replied, looking at her fully for the first time since they had been introduced two hours previously. He had then only looked at her superficially, giving her due attention, no more. Now he saw what he wished to see: the untidy clothes, and the affectation in them, for he considered that only the most pitiable of the students looked natural in them. Beyond that he noticed how compressed her lips seemed to be, and the masculine hold she had on her glass. Her eyes stared at him firmly, but glazing from time to time. Having spent the previous five minutes studying fixed, inanimate objects, the sight of her vulnerability and, he sensed, her recession from him, made him feel suddenly stronger. But knowing that he could make no advance to her, he experienced a rush of feeling that softened him towards her.

'Shall we play? I'll show you, though it's easy to play it,' Grace said, rising from her chair and flicking the folds of her long skirt forward. 'But first let me get some more of this.' She raised her glass before his eyes.

'No,' Richard said quickly. 'I'll get the drink. You go and prepare the board.'

Both had a sudden feeling of comradeship, as though they were preparing for guests.

Richard stood head and shoulders over Grace as she leaned forward over the table, holding the small black ball, and explained how he should swing it. As he listened, standing close to her, he became aware of something lacking: she had no scent, no body odour, nothing. It caused her reality to recede from him into the inertness of a statue. She poised the ball and swung it. The chain vibrated as the ball curved out and then back sharply to strike the pins squarely, knocking six of them over.

'There,' she said. 'Swing it outwards, so as to put it among the pins.' She looked up at him, her face lacking the usual female feint of helplessness when dealing with kinetics. 'But if you wish to strike the outer pins, you must swing the ball back to your left.' She paused, aimed and swung it gently, rhythmically. The ball grazed the corner pin without knocking it and completed its swing by wrapping round the metal pole. 'Missed,' she said, suddenly serious. She shrugged her shoulders, keeping her face turned away from Richard.

'I should be able to pick it up quickly enough,' he said quickly. 'It seems to be a judgement of instinct that's needed more than anything else. Let's play a few games and see how I get on.' He recognised the doggedness in her, the moral seriousness of intent that made her nation so miserable and self-pitying at times.

She set up the nine pins in three rows of three and offered Richard first swing. His playing was irregular, a good swing would make him boisterous, so that he would ruin the following swing. He laughed a lot, taking his jacket off after ten minutes and loosening his tie. Grace played with concentration, carefully calculating each swing, and easily won the first game. While Richard set up the pins for the second game, Grace went and brought more drink. The second game was closer. Richard was more sure of his aim, but not feeling competitive he still played half-heartedly. Grace studied her game closely and played consistently.

During this game, as Richard stood back and watched Grace prepare a swing, Peter appeared at his side.

'Are you enjoying it?' he asked. 'I don't suppose you have played it before. It's hardly known south of here.'

Richard smiled, flushed. 'Yes, it's interesting,' he replied.

'Well, if you are up to it, I'll give you a game when you two are finished.'

'Right, if I'm up to it.'

He stepped up to the table, Grace having completed her turn. As he set up the pins and then crouched to swing the ball, he could not help noticing how Peter and Grace stood apart from each other, as if strangers, though he had been told by John that they were lovers. Grace was watching him intently. He took more care this time and pleaded a little to fortune to help him. Eight of the pins went crashing and spinning off the pedestal. Grace gave a cheer and clapped her hands, while Peter said: 'Jolly good.'

Nevertheless, Grace won the game and Peter, having got Richard's agreement to play one game, went off to buy another round of drinks. Grace remained beside Richard, her head bowed, swaying slightly.

'You played well,' she said, her voice muffled. 'But you could do better if you tried harder.'

'I'm sorry I couldn't take it seriously enough. But I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.'

She nodded, her fringe tapping against her forehead. Quickly and with sudden nervousness, she put her glass to her lips and gulped down the cider. She seemed to become smaller before his eyes, and harder, her flesh becoming an armour and taking on a sheen. The politeness of his answer appeared to oppress her as she turned away the pleasantry of it. He looked over her head to gaze down the room. Peter talked with the old woman, who listened intently, her small blue eyes sparkling like little moist stones. The group at the fire were huddled in conversation. He looked down at Grace again, aware of a new unease that cut him off from the others gathered in the room.

Peter returned and handed Richard his drink. His face was pleasant, long, and pointed at the chin. A sparse growth of hair covered his upper lip and straggled down the sides of his face. His eyes were kind, pained but without bitterness.

When Richard's first ball knocked over seven pins, Peter said, 'Jolly good.' His second swing missed the remaining pins, the third clipped one and it toppled over reluctantly. Peter nodded at this and said again, 'Jolly good.' Then with his first swing he knocked over all the pins. Richard could appreciate Bahrsan's glum face. Peter smiled modestly, as though to apologise for his skill. Richard noticed that Grace had returned to her seat in the corner. Dismissing her from his mind, he settled down to play more carefully than before, and though his first swing was good enough to knock over six or seven pins, he could not eliminate the trembling in the chain to aim more accurately. Peter swung it cleanly each time, the chain taut as it described a hyperbola, and usually managed to level the board. When he realised that Richard was playing within his limits and allowing him to show his mastery, he stopped making consoling remarks. Richard on his part sensed that Peter would not play this game if he was not master of it, and that his modesty and willingness to cheer his opponent served to allay his own misery at being so good at the game and yet unable and, he guessed, unwilling to test himself.

Peter won, reaching the required number of points while Richard still needed twenty. Relieved, Peter took him by the arm and drew him to the fire.

'Did he win?' John asked, looking up and resettling his glasses on his nose.

'Of course. The man is an expert.'

Peter raised his hand in deprecation.

'No, it was not a fair game. If Richard had more practice he would be as good as me.'

'It would need more patience than I have to practice that much,' Richard said, laughing, his face flushing with momentary impatience.

Peter smiled and clasped his useless hand in the palm of his good one as though to warm it, for it was like a piece of white porcelain compared to the dusty ruddiness of the hand that held it. Richard was embarrassed to see the hurt in the poet's eyes. He turned to the others in reaction. They looked at him with resentment, even John. Just then, like a guardian angel, the old woman rapped on the counter with an empty bottle, calling as she did, 'Time, young gen'lmen. Time.'

She shuffled around the counter and switched off the light above the skittle table.

The students drained their glasses as though they had been waiting for this moment and stood up, pushing back their chairs. They to a man looked in Peter's direction, and when he nodded, began to drift towards the street door. Peter was talking to Bahrsan and John. Together, the three of them followed. Richard drained his glass and went to the back of the bar to the toilet. One of the students, a tall red-headed one with a long shaggy beard, came in from the street and pulled Grace by the arm. She raised her head, nodding sleepily, and squinted up at him. Then she lifted her glass to her mouth and bit on it, making a resounding cracking sound. Then she drank, embracing the glass with both hands. When it was empty, she held it before her for a few seconds before opening her hands.

Richard heard the glass smash as he re-entered the bar. He saw Grace pull her arm from the red-haired student's grasp and lean forward. The student bent over her. Richard walked smartly up the bar towards the street door, intent upon ignoring them. The student, hearing Richard's approach, turned and looked towards him, his eyes wide and wary. Richard returned the look, his lips curling involuntarily.

In the brown gloom of the street, Peter was clutching John's arm as he spoke to him. John's head was bent in his direction, nodding repeatedly in excitement. The other students huddled nearby. Bahrsan stood alone, standing beneath a street-light, hands in his pockets and head sunk into his body against the chill of the air. As Richard came up to Peter and John, he said loudly:

'Why the hell didn't we drive down here? Must we walk back along that muddy footpath, Peter? Because if we do, our clothes will be ruined.'

Peter smiled widely. 'Don't worry, Richard, we'll walk back by the road. It won't take long. It's only a mile or so.'

Grace and the red-haired student joined them. Richard glanced at her quickly, but she kept her head down. Richard thought she looked pathetic. He felt a sudden flow of feeling for her smallness, her bent form and her vulnerability. He wanted to make her laugh, to pull her out of her dogged seriousness and away from the influences that seemed to weigh her down. He wanted her to be clear and gay and quick – Good God, he thought, she can't be more than twenty one or two.'

'Will you come back with us, Richard?' Peter asked gently, watching Richard watching Grace. 'We're going to read some Hardy.' He paused. 'I'm sure you'll enjoy it.'

Distracted, Richard nodded.

Peter made some sound, like a calling to order, and started up the street with John and Bahrsan. The students fell into a ragged column behind him. Richard paused, his feeling for Grace holding him still. She was standing near him, deserted now even by the red-haired student. She looked up at him. Then she walked to his side and put her arm within his. He looked down at her. She was like a nineteenth century work-girl, even her hand was grimy. A sharp sensation of desire and pathos passed from him like a charge into her, and met with resignation and submission, and wilfulness. She turned her head to him and smiled, a wan and flicker of a smile that betrayed her feeling of triumph, small and deeply hidden in her as it was, where she did not have to face it or rationalise and project it into a future for meaning. Richard felt a cold wind about his heart, his past receded from his, swallowed into the vortex caused by the suddenness of events.

A hundred yards away, Peter turned and looked back at them. His face was flat and calm in the dim light and Richard saw the acknowledgement and loss there.

'We'll have to take a taxi,' Grace said in a practical tone.

'Why? Can't you walk the distance to the university?'

'I don't live at the uni. I live in a cottage in a village near Crewe.'

They walked together until they came to a telephone box, where Richard rang for a taxi. It soon arrived, its sides emblazoned with the company's name and telephone number like an American cab. It was absurd. The driver spoke a pure local dialect, the car was small and cramped. Richard allowed himself to relax as it sped along the quiet narrow roads. Grace was slumped against him, holding his arm tightly. She began to hiccup. Suddenly she gripped his arm urgently and called to the driver to stop. Groping, she found the door, opened it and tumbled out, her dress caught about her legs. She stood in the centre of the road, breathing deeply and swaying. Alarmed, Richard clambered out and caught her by the shoulders.

'Are you alright?' he asked.

'Oh, oh.' Her eyes were screwed tight. 'We must walk from here. I can't stay in that car.'

Richard explained to the driver that they would walk the rest of the way, adding that they had not very far to go. He paid the fare. The driver, who had the butt of a hand-rolled cigarette in his mouth, unlit and stained with his saliva, looked at Richard, then at Grace, and back again to Richard, his brows arching. His eyes mocked Richard.

Grace was fumbling in her bag when he returned to her.

'Cigarettes,' she said, her voice now more controlled.

Richard searched her bag and found them. The taxi, having turned, passed them going in the direction of the towns. Its gentle hum faded into the silence of the night. The match scraped loudly against the sandpaper of the matchbox and flared, causing both to start back. Grace inhaled deeply and expelled the smoke in a long ebbing sigh, which seemed to Richard to be uncharacteristic of her, for the sound was languid and complete. He touched her arm and said:

'How do you feel now?'

She slid her arm around him without replying and held herself tight against him. In the silence Richard could hear the cigarette crackle and hiss behind him. He felt powerful and complete then, and could afford tenderness. At first he held her small still body against him as he would a child's – protectively, with a desire for constancy and harmony, and gazed half-consciously at the dark countryside, the shapes of the trees and hedges outlined against a purple, star-massed sky. Then an uneasiness moved him to think of her as a woman and to desire her. She stiffened her body then, and slowly she drew away from him.

He stared down at her, a small vulnerable pulse, and felt the rise of a huge temptation to let go, to do something that would be complete and final. It seemed at first to be a response to her vulnerability, then to the silent, living night, then again to her. But Grace could not carry the burden of his overwhelming desire to let go and so it faded, leaving him vibrant with a gentle joy that was, he quickly recognised, only a compensation. Then his earlier feeling returned. He sensed a comradeship with her. He could not pity her, he had no resources in him for pity. He could only feel sympathy with her. As he touched her elbow gently to attract her attention, he felt larger and more expanded than he had for years.

Grace looked up at him when she felt his touch and saw the bright warmth in his eyes. It looked foolish. To her reduced range of feeling and to her mind that sought for conscious equilibrium, the vacuity of uncensored expression of emotion was naïve and threatening. She was afraid he would laugh or cry, or go swinging her about. Grimly she nodded to herself and took his arm and drew him to begin walking.

It took them half an hour to walk to the cottage. To break the silence between them Richard tried to express an emotion by commenting on the night and its silences. He compared it with the noise and light of the city. Grace remained silent, apparently not listening, until he began to reminisce on his childhood. Here she looked up at him, her eyes beseeching him. Confronted by the directness of her attention, he felt shy, fearing she was more than merely curious. He spoke haltingly and generally, making sure to relate concrete memories and opinions, and not slide away to the emotions of memories. He was suddenly aware of her independence, and that her condition as he saw it was not a call for assistance or pity: it was the result of the singularity of her. The condition of her life, her doggedness, her way of dressing, her drinking, all were Grace Saunders. She was the only person present: nothing gay and shining and laughing could ever come out of her. Somehow, she had never been innocent: she could not change. And watching her face as she listened to his memories uncoil for her, he could see the greedy light in her eyes. She was devouring his purposely simple anecdotes. Did she believe they were real, he wondered, or does she accept them for the fictions, the partial truths they were? He was momentarily repelled by her. Her greedy humourless eyes seemed to eat him up without any inclination to share in the joke of it all.

The cottage was on the edge of the village. A short driveway led up to a dilapidated garage at the side of the house and a path ran from it at right angles to the front door. It was modest, with smooth, dull white plastered walls and a slate roof. Grace led him around to the back of the house to a door sheltered by a small wooden porch. She fumbled for some time looking for the key, first under the doormat, then on the ledges of the small windows flanking the door. As she searched she explained that her two friends had gone away for the weekend and had hidden the key for her, if she decided to return before they did. She found it tucked into a corner of one of the ledges. They entered a long shabby room with an open staircase ascending on their left. Before them at the end of the room was a small black fireplace, a large ancient sofa facing it. To the right were a sink, a cooker and a cupboard, the sink piled high with crockery. Old dark beams crossed the ceiling in parallel lines.

Grace motioned in the direction of the fireplace and sofa, while she went and filled the kettle. There was a small guttering fire in the grate with the ashy debris of its day's consumption lying in the hearth. Feeling the damp chill of the house, Richard asked her if he should stoke it up.

'If you want to,' she replied, her back to him as she put the kettle on the cooker.

He found firelighters in a paper bag of coal lying nearby and broke them and set the pieces among the half consumed coals. When their lazy greasy flames began to spread and glint on the facets of the coals, he stood up and surveyed the room. He felt dizzy, because he had crouched for so long. The drabness of the room filled him with a sense of lethargy. Grace had left the house. He could hear her calling names in the garden. When she reappeared she carried two cats in her arms and three more ran about her feet, trying to brush against her.

'Five cats?' Richard asked in surprise.

'There should be six. I don't know where Thomas has got to.' She put the cats on the floor. 'But I'll leave the door ajar for him.'

She emptied a pint of milk into a large bowl on the floor, and stood watching with satisfaction as the cats rushed forward and began lapping the milk.

'The fire is lighting,' Richard said. 'I used some firelighters I found.'

She nodded, continuing to watch the cats.

'These rooms are damp, you know,' Richard continued, looking about him as if to prove he had made some obscure tests to arrive at this conclusion. 'You should be careful, or else you'll catch pneumonia or something.'

Again she nodded. She left the cats and took the kettle off the cooker and poured water into two cups. Richard watched her speculatively. The breach of tenderness was sealing off and desire was growing again. He saw that he desired her because she was a woman, not because she was Grace Saunders. The image of her preoccupation with coffee-making made her vulnerable in its simplicity and commonness. It was any woman anywhere, and he was everyman, and the ritual softened the edges of their individual and unknown selves. And he could not help making her innocent now that he had a definite and tangible purpose for her. She came towards him with a cup in each hand, the steam rising and condensing quickly in the cold air. She thrust one cup at him and sat on the edge of the sofa and huddled forward towards the fire, her cup at her lips and the steam warming her face.

'John told me you were a writer,' she said in a muffled voice.

Richard sipped the coffee and then made a sound. 'I write, anyway.'

She darted a glance at him and he knew he had suddenly disappeared for her. But she remained practical.

'He loaned us some of your stories. Peter liked them. He thought you very brave. He says you keep denying yourself.'

Richard sipped the coffee again, uncomfortably self-conscious. 'That depends on which stories he's read.'

She looked at him more deliberately this time. But he realised then that she wasn't interested in his writings. It was provoking another line of thought.

'But I said that all artists do that.' She looked back to the fire. 'All artists are free.'

The regret in her voice was so uncharacteristic of her that Richard bent slightly to look at her more closely. Her eyes were moist.

'Everyone is free, Grace,' he said softly but with emphasis. 'But only artists, as you call them, and criminals and saints know it.'

Grace clenched the rim of the cup between her teeth and stared hard into the fire. Then she said with a tremor of annoyance:

'No, you misunderstand me, Richard. Only artists are free. The rest of us are...sinners.'

The last word seemed to surprise her and make her more angry. Richard sat down beside her and lay back, wanting to avoid her subjective anger. Grace turned to look at him, preparing to speak again. But when she saw that he had cut himself off from her, she clamped her lips together and looked back into the fire.

Richard let himself drift as a way of avoiding the lines of abstract thought which the word 'sinners' stimulated. Then he found himself thinking of his childhood again, then of his parents. Freed of dependence on them, he saw how accidental was their parenthood, their motherhood and their fatherhood. There was pathos in their self-limitation: his childhood happiness and security, seen from his present position, had not been worth their efforts, even though it was valuable to him.

'Richard,' Grace said beside him. 'Do you know that John had a visitation from his mother? She even spoke to him, calling his name.'

He broke from his reverie and its regret.

'She died nearly six years ago... He was very attached to her, I know.'

'Did she really come to him?' Her voice was touched with eagerness.

'I don't know. It may have been an hallucination. He's under great strain here and he's lonely... But he was very close to her, as I've said.'

'Imagination? Only that?' The smooth skin of her face puckered about the eyes and mouth. It frightened her a little.

'Do you believe in God?' she asked, recovering some of her eagerness.

Richard looked at her, startled by her effrontery.

'God?' He thought for a while. 'Let me put it this way. I've a feeling of always being observed and that every action is recorded, or anyway, significant... I'm not religious, if that is what you imply. I think everything that happens can be known.'

Grace showed some satisfaction when she heard this.

'You're a Roman Catholic?' she asked.

'I suppose so, though it's years since I practised it.'

She nodded. 'Then why can't you accept that John's mother did appear to him? If the universe is as complete as you believe it, then she must be somewhere in it.'

'No. that's too mystical. There's no reason for believing that she is anywhere now that she is dead, other than in John's mind and memory.'

'Pah,' Grace said, turning her face away. 'You Irish never answer the questions you're asked.'

Richard laughed at her petulance. He put his arm around her shoulder and drew her to him. She lay stiffly against him, like a dispossessed waif, her cottage damp and untidy and distant. The iron re-entered her. The glimpse she had again of Richard's naivety had given her a moment's ease. But his laughter had cut her, forcing her back into herself. She saw that his tenderness and amiability were general, not particular. He would be tender towards any woman, she needed only to arouse his pity. The grip of his hand on her shoulder suddenly frightened her. Those clean, healthy fingers were strong and steady: they clamped her down. She realised that he could kill her, without meaning to. He was too strong and uncontrolled. While nerving herself to break from his grip, she thought of Peter. He had looked back at them as they left. No more than that. She was alone with Richard.

She resolved to be practical.

'Richard,' she said softly but firmly to convey confidence and purpose. As she spoke, she lifted his arm off her.

Richard bent his head to her, smiling, and kissed her lips. His lips were thick, but their sensitivity surprised Grace. She suffered it, knowing that his hand had dropped away from her. Then, when she thought he had had enough, she broke away from him and stood up. Her lips trembled.

'I want to see if Thomas has come in.'

She went to the door and looked back once at Richard's form before going out. In the small garden, bounded by high bushes, she called the cat's name softly, feeling herself to be distracted, even fussy. As she vented her feelings on the name 'Thomas', she felt a thrill run along her body. She had had pleasure from his kiss. She panicked and called the cat more urgently.

'There are six cats in here.' Richard was standing in the doorway. He had taken his jacket off and stood with his hands jammed in his trouser pockets. 'You should have counted them before you went out.'

Grace was uncertain. The chill of the night made her shiver.

'Come in,' Richard said easily, 'or you'll catch your death in that wet grass.'

She stepped through the uncut grass, her head bent. When she reached the door, Richard took her gently by the shoulders and said:

'You silly girl. You should have counted them first.'

'I was suddenly worried about him.'

He bent down to her face. She caught the whiff of him – part shaving scent, part perspiration – she had a vision of his energy. It went pulse pulse in him, and never ceased. How many men were like him, she wondered. Pumping and thudding, half kindness, half brutality.

'Come in. It's late. You should go to bed and sleep off all the drink you've had tonight. As they say, tomorrow is another day.'

He led her across the room by the arm. He had placed his jacket neatly over the back of the sofa. Now he gripped his tie at the knot and with one clean swoop pulled it loose and broke the knot with practised fingers.

'Give me a blanket and I'll sleep on the sofa here, before the fire. I'll pile on some more coal so it'll keep until morning.'

Grace opened a door to the right of the fireplace and went into the front room, her bedroom. The front door of the cottage opened into this room, but she had sealed it off and put a trunk before it. She picked her way through the debris of four years' residence to the bed. Most of the bedclothes were on the floor, where they had fallen that morning. She lit a candle and placed it on the chair by the head of the bed. The room flickered into vision. Shadows loomed up on the walls. Her own shadow was cast up on the wardrobe and seemed to dominate her. Sketches of fantastic and grotesque figures, men and animals, with grossly enlarged heads and feet, hung about the dark-painted walls. On the mantleshelf, above the bed, were some volumes, small tarnished caskets, and bottles of pills and tonics. Blank and perplexed, she made up the bed, conscious of the wrinkled sheets and soiled pillow. She could hear Richard moving about next door. He was pacing the room restlessly. With quick movements she laid the blankets and tucked them in. Her mind was affright. Practicality had gone to the wind. She steeled herself as she listened to Richard's paces. He was humming softly to himself. Her reserve and suspicion of feelings were still protecting her. She undressed quickly, throwing her skirt and cardigan on to a nearby chair. She shivered in the cold air. Still he paced. He could lie down, she pleaded to herself. She took her night-dress from where it hung on the headboard and slipped into it. Icily it fell down her body like a shower of cold water. Her body was suspended below her, half numb. Self-conscious, she felt her stomach tighten. She was completely distracted now, shivering uncontrollably. She touched one of her breasts, quickly, softly.

'Grace,' Richard called from the other room. Hearing no reply, he called again, 'Grace.'

It was the first time he had called her name.

'What is it?' she asked, her voice broken.

'The blanket. Where is the blanket?'

Silence. Richard resumed his pacing. He disliked the room, it was far too untidy. But he liked the beams of oak. Obviously, he thought, they had built the newer frontage about an older skeleton. The open staircase was dull oaken too. At the door leading to the garden he turned and walked back towards Grace's room. The cats had disposed themselves about the place. Some were foraging under the sink and one had settled down on some clothes on a chair under the stairs, its form rounded and sleek. Two lay before the fire, silently watching the flames. Passing, he picked up a book from the desk under the side window. Sociology. Must belong to one of the other girls, he mused. At the end of the beat he looked at the door to Grace's room, partially open. It was silent in her room. Had she gone to bed, he wondered, and forgotten about the blanket? He tensed. He desired her: that was the truth. He turned and walked with measured threads down the room. She had stiffened against him each time he had touched her. He couldn't force her. He had sympathy with her, for something in common was shared by them. But he sensed that they were suspended at the moment in polarity. He had liked her earnestness, her habit of constantly creating purpose. If she could be gay, she would be so petite, he thought, charming and quick. Then he remembered her claustrophobia and her frigidity, and angrily he flung the book across the room. It hit the wall and fell on to the stairs. The cats looked about quickly, tensing, and watched the spot where the book had fallen, expectant. When he turned at the garden door Grace was standing in front of the fire in a long night-dress, her hands limply by her sides and empty.

'Don't sleep out here,' she said simply. 'It will be too cold by morning. Come inside.' She knew there were empty beds upstairs.

In his mind Richard saw Peter smiling, his childlike arm clutched to his chest.

Grace had already clambered into bed when Richard entered the room. She lay with her face towards the wall, into the dark. Richard undressed slowly, having found a place to hang his clothes. He looked about him as he did, noting with pursed disapproving lips the sketches and the untidiness. Grace turned in the bed when she heard the soft lapping sound of his feet, and saw his stark white monkish body and the quick illusion of his pendulating sex among the clutch of dark hair. She fell away, dreading him. He surged down beside her, grunting as he felt the shock of cold. She hated his eagerness and his childish noises as he rummaged like a dog to make himself comfortable.

He lay on his back, his arms bent under his head, looking at the flickering shadows on the ceiling. When he spoke, his voice was rich in his throat in the half light and echoed distantly in the corners of the room.

'Grace, are you going to sleep?'

She stirred and rolled on to her back. She was dull with self-pity. 'Not yet,' she replied with resignation.

'Do you believe in God? You seemed to attach some importance to the question when you asked it earlier on.'

'Not really.' She paused. 'I honestly don't know. Sometimes I try to, but then everything seems so distant and mocking. Other times it comes in a flash that there is. Something I see or a feeling I have.'

'Did you think I did, because I was raised as a Catholic?'

'Yes... I thought all Roman Catholics believed in God, especially the Irish.'

Richard laughed easily, almost merrily. He was a different person to Grace now. She felt a comradeship with him, as though he were her husband.

'Superstition,' he said. 'You're confusing superstition with belief.'

'Is there a difference?' She was bracing to argue this.

'Not essentially. Belief as rationalisation seems to obscure the terror to which superstition is the response.'

'But what about the complete universe you spoke of earlier, and the someone who watches all the actions in it? Is that not the same as believing in God?'

'Of course not,' he said sharply.

Grace stiffened. She was surprised by his seriousness.

'Then how are they different?'

Lulled by the night and by his repose, Richard spoke to the ceiling.

'Let me put it this way, as I see it. The universe of things and actions is inert, it goes on and on as it is. But what stands against it is individual consciousness. To such a consciousness the universe is an accident, and the life of the individual is also an accident. By accident I mean that the individual can find no adequate cause or causes to explain the existence of the universe or the self. It is the awareness of these accidents that produces the freedom of the individual. You see, freedom is an aspect of consciousness, and a matter of awareness.'

Grace shifted and Richard rolled over to face her.

'Look, if this is too pedantic, say so. I'm only saying it because otherwise we'll be arguing in circles all night.'

Grace's eyes were wary in the candlelight. But she shook her head for him to go on.

'OK, then,' Richard said to her. 'There are two – well, levels, here. The act of knowing is always complete, because it is part of consciousness, not of the object of knowing. But because it is a complete act, the object of knowing always appears as complete in consciousness.' He paused, staring at Grace. 'But on another level the words or concepts used to express acts of knowing also appear to be complete, because they are believed to partake of the act of knowing itself. That's probably why people nowadays believe that freedom lies in the expression of knowledge. But this kind of completeness is illusory. For instance, take the word "universe". It is used to refer to something complete, like the contents of the perceived environment. But it is impossible for any person or group to list all those contents.' Richard shook himself, self-conscious. 'Freedom then lies between the unavoidable act of knowing and the consciousness of the impossibility of saying what you know...'

'But what about God?' Grace asked with sudden impatience.

'God is the big all-inclusive word or concept.' His smile seemed a smirk or a sneer. 'So it is the greatest illusion.'

Grace suddenly grabbed his hand. 'But people believe in God!' she said angrily.

At once sublime, Richard laughed softly. 'And belief is the rationalisation of terror.'

Grace tried sarcasm: 'You had better tell me now what the terror is.'

Feeling too confines by her coldness, Richard rolled away. 'Freedom, of course.' He turned back to her, conscious of taunting her. 'Putting it metaphorically, freedom is the dark pit into which we are continuously falling.' Something dropped away from him, but he sounded resentful: 'Is that good enough for you?'

Grace rolled on to her back with a deliberate abrupt movement. She stared at the shadow-play on the ceiling, then said: 'Then freedom is not the truth. It can be rejected.'

Richard laughed in a yelp and rolled over and kissed her. His delight made her cold again and she pushed him away without trying to make her actions seem as something else.

He stared down at her, laughing at her.

'Would you like to be a Catholic?'

She started and stared at him in a speculative way, appreciating his power of intuition, feeling at the same time a new exposure to him.

'Sometimes. But not your intellectual church. I'm attracted to the mystery of it.'

'And the authority,' he said, guessing immediately.

'I suppose so.' It was true, she realised. Seen thus objectively, the idea horrified her. But it was true.

Richard fell back on the bed, laughing and replete. In the following silence the candle guttered, throwing shadows in splurges up the wall and ceiling. Richard saw the hours of darkness that were before him. He put gentle pressure on the hand that still gripped his. Grace's fingers responded, brushing lightly along his palm. Thinking of what they had said, he murmured ruefully, to bring her closer:

'I suppose we all seek power in one way or the other.'

And it worked. Grace felt all the tightness in her flow. She seemed to wilt down against his side and he felt her small smooth form press him. His desire flared.

Grace realised she had walked into a trap. She had desired the tenderness he seemed to offer so as to obtain temporary relief. But she had equated tenderness with softness, with sentimentality. Now she knew it was bait. It was part of him essentially, not something he gave to others in need out of charity. How cold, she thought, how cold he is.

And she had submitted to it.

He turned and faced her. The bed shook and grated and she felt the bedclothes pull over her shoulders and tighten on her. Drawing up her night-dress, he embraced her, gently but firmly, and stroked her smooth back. She could feel his swelling penis nod against her thigh. Abruptly she darted forward her head and gripped her teeth into his neck, just below the ear. She lay now half under him, her head buried by him in the blackest darkness she had ever known. A warm salt taste tanged her mouth. Convulsively she ate him. She had never felt so free. She had never approved so much in her life any action as she did this one of eating him... But then he entered her and...

'Will I have a baby?' were her first words as she came back to herself, panting and licking her teeth. Richard rolled away, taking away the moist, hot compress under which she had been submerged.

'No, don't worry, you won't,' he replied, equally breathless. He was rubbing his face and chest with the sheet. 'It's rarely so complete the first time. Besides, you jumped away at the moment.'

'Oh.' She was disappointed. She had thought that this blind compulsive operation must yield a baby.

'Why do you ask?' Richard asked, staring at her. 'Do you want a baby?'

'I thought...' Her voice trailed away, confused. Did she want a baby? As she realised she did, the whole moment passed away and her head cleared.

Richard was lying beside her gazing at the ceiling, his arms above the covers. He seemed at peace, but abstracted away from her. Grace suddenly yearned for him to come closer. She was afraid. She wanted him to reveal himself to her and approve, with her, of their act together. But he remained away, contented with himself. The residual peace was dissolving, and in its place the fear became horror.

'Are you a virgin?' Richard asked softly.

'No,' she replied matter-of-factly, controlling herself.

'The thought just struck me that you might be. You're such a strange mixture of daring and retreating.'

What horrified her most was that she had been so unthinking. She felt as though she had failed to clear her action with some higher ruling authority. She had acted on impulse, and in doing so had submitted totally to this man beside her, who was a stranger. She had forgotten herself – she had abandoned herself. And yet, she realised, fascinated by the knowledge, she had acted.

Richard turned to her again and touched her nipple with a finger.

'Well?' he asked lightly, almost gaily.

She looked at him closely, wondering if he had abandoned himself too. If he had, then he had not killed her. She realised that that amazed her.

Now she felt radiation from her breast. She knew this time that the tension growing in her was an indication of her readiness to submit again.

'Well?' he asked again. 'Do you feel good?'

'Oh.' She realised his intention and allowed herself to relax. 'Yes, I do. But I can hardly remember what happened.'

He laughed. Her tone had been ironic and brave. He liked that in her.

'Is that important? Your body knew.'

'Well, bully for my body,' she bantered, grateful to hear him speak so openly. 'But what about me?'

He fondled her breast, communicating his well-being to her. 'You are your body. This is sex, not school.'

She moved her body against the thrill he was passing into her, more aware of that than his words. Between her thighs was damp and chilled.

'You've soaked me,' she said.

'A million babies.'

'Poor things.'

'Names?'

'What?'

'How would we name them all?'

'I don't know... Yes, I do... Paul one, Paul two and so on.'

Richard laughed. 'Paul?'

'Well, Richard if you like.'

'Would they all be boys, do you think?'

'I don't know.'

'Do men make boys, and do women make girls out of boys then?'

'I don't know,' she replied, suddenly chilling. 'What peculiar things you think of.'

She put her fingers on his lips.

'Now hush.'

Everything is alright then, she thought: he approves. She touched his sex where it lolled across his thigh. The frizzled hair tickled her hand.

She had a sudden sense of possessing him. He was naïve. She slid her hand over the lumps of his testicles and gripped them tightly. He stiffened, sighing hissingly through his teeth.

'Am I hurting you?'

'No. it's nice. I feel you very deeply now.'

'Peter hated me to touch his balls,' she said dispassionately. 'They hurted.'

Richard heard the cold possessive woman in her. He knew she was commenting to herself on her property, comparing one piece with another.

'Do you often have sex?' he asked, slipping behind her coldness.

'Hardly ever now. A year ago, yes. It hurts him, he says.'

'How long have you known him?'

'About two years.' She paused. When she continued, her voice was withdrawn. 'Just think, we were both in this university for two years without knowing of one another's existence. We probably passed each other every day without knowing it...But that's hardly possible. I would have noticed his arm immediately.'

'And did he satisfy you two years ago, when you first met?'

Satisfy, she thought: what does he mean?

'Satisfy me?' she said. 'Yes. As I wanted to be satisfied.'

'Love.' It was a statement, though Grace understood it as a question.

'Yes. Love.'

There was no triumph as Richard had expected. It was reflective. He could not imagine her innocent even then.

'Why did you ask in that tone?' she said. 'Weren't you ever in love?'

'Like that? Of course.'

So final, she thought. He'll say now that he's grown out of it.

But he didn't. He asked: 'You're still in love with him?'

She heard the questioning, but couldn't decide if he spoke out of curiosity or jealousy.

'I don't know, Richard,' she said forthrightly, allowing the question to move in her. 'I was to stand by him while he wrote his poetry and help him.'

She squeezed his gonads again until Richard gasped and clutched her arm.

'We had a purpose in life,' she said more loudly, fighting resignation. 'He's weak and needs looking after... His arm is so withered.'

'You only pity him,' Richard said harshly.

'No, no,' she pleaded. 'He needs me.'

'You don't know what a man is, or what he wants, if you think he wants to be treated as a misfortunate child.'

Something snapped in Grace. The whole world rolled away from her and in its place loomed a feeling, a desire. She welled up to it. The tears were like hot needles on her tired eyes. The feeling taunted her, remaining just beyond the reach of her straining awareness. She fell back into the forbidden past of her childhood, hunting that which eluded her. Her secret charity sought her father, her dream man – goodness striving for wholeness in the man who conceived her in a unique act, his one ball shot up into her stunted singularity...

Richard held her firmly, sure of his resources of strength, whispering, 'There now, there now'. He brushed her hair from about her ears. His sympathy with her reached out after her, trying to draw her back.

But she returned herself. Slowly she quietened, sobbing less and less. Richard held her still, rocking her gently as if she were a child. But it was only a gesture now: she had escaped him.

He got out of bed when she pulled away from him and padded over to where he had laid his clothes and returned with his handkerchief. The candle was guttering spasmodically, almost burnt down. The room about him was barren. Clothes, textbooks and bric-a-brac lay about on the odd pieces of furniture. Grace propped herself up on the pillow and wiped her face with the handkerchief. The bed was rumpled, the sheets creased in a million ways. Beside her was the hollow in the mattress that he had occupied for the last few hours.

He could not face up to climbing in beside her again. He walked around the room, absently looking at things. From the far corner, over by the trunk, he asked:

'Do you have any of his poetry here?'

Grace was lying on her back now, staring at the ceiling. She had pulled her night-dress down.

'Are you interested in his poetry?'

'I want to see what it is like.'

'There are some on the trunk beside you. They're typed on blue paper.'

He caught sight of a corner of blue paper sticking out from under a pile of lecture notes. He drew it out and brought it over to the bed. Sitting on the edge, his back to Grace, he recited the lines he found there.

'I've never heard it recited before,' Grace said, as if out of nowhere, with a note of hesitation.

Richard still strained to meet the mood of the poem, to find it worthy of Grace's tears. The elegiac Romantic quality of the imagery chimed, but the cadence was all wrong. It was as though Peter had one foot in a 'poetical' world and one in a contemporary reality that was totally prosaic.

'Did he write this for you?'

'No.'

'Some other girl?'

'I don't think so.'

'Do you think it is good?'

Grace looked at him. 'I can't remember it.'

'You mean you don't care about it at all?'

'Oh, how can I read them!' she flared. 'It's his business to be a poet. It's mine to look after him.'

Richard carefully folded the sheet in two and placed it beside the candle on the chair.

Grace spoke as though from a distance: 'What do you think of it?'

Richard paused, searching. The mood of the poem hung on the air in the memory of his own voice reciting. It was a definite force.

'I'm not sure how to evaluate modern poetry.' He looked at her, trying to be sincere. 'Most of it is prosy, you know. The only difference that I can see between what I do and their poetry is condensation. The horizon – the reality – is the same.'

Grace looked at him with contempt, hating what she saw as his egotism. 'But do you like it, Richard?'

He rubbed his hands, looking down at his genitals. The tension in the room was suddenly ferocious.

'I don't...' he shook his head, feeling passion as he broke through his puzzlement. 'I'm indifferent to it,' he said coldly.

Grace stared at him with hate. Then the hate evaporated and was replaced by a childish vulnerability.

'He believes in it,' she said shakily.

The passion seized Richard again. 'Of course he does,' he heard himself saying. 'It's a matter of intention. The poet is valued nowadays for what he aims to do, not for what he produces.' He turned and bent towards her. 'Do you see, Grace? It is the poet that counts, not the poetry. The poet dares to constitute himself as a poet. Like Yeats, for instance.'

The candle flickered, its light increasingly more yellow. Instinctively looking up, Richard saw that two grotesques on the opposite was seemed to form themselves into a death mask, grinning obscenely. Then he distinctly heard a voice say in a generous tone:

'Jolly good.'

Peter Yorke was standing at the wall, above a table. He held his baby-fingers in his good hand and laughed contentedly. His face was worn and white, his mouth open grinning and moist. His eyes sparkled as indifferently as gems, like seeds of innocence, taunting and bright with hysteria. Frightfully, Richard thought they were the Devil's eyes, but immediately he knew they were not. They were all too human. They were every human being's eyes, expressing the truth everyone knew. Peter laughed again and hiked up his hand on his breast to make it more comfortable.

'Jolly good.'

And was gone.

'What are you staring at?' Grace repeated.

'Eh? Oh nothing...I think,' Richard said distractedly, standing up. He went across the room. The current along his spine grew stronger. He nodded and turned back to Grace.

'I had a vision of Peter telling me that it was "Jolly good".'

Grace raised her brows.

'What was jolly good? Oh, you're as bad as that other Irishman, John.'

'No. I know I only imagined it.' Richard's voice faltered on the last two words. Then he abandoned himself and said: 'In any case, what if it was real?' He sat on the edge of the bed. 'You remember he came to watch us playing skittles? Well, he said "Jolly good" when I swung that good shot. It must have stuck in my mind afterwards.' He looked back at the wall with a regret for the passing of the passion. 'He said it to encourage me.'

'You're overtired,' Grace said, too drained to care much. 'Come into bed or you'll catch a cold.'

He got in beside her. Then the candle gave a last flare of yellow light and went out. A smell of wax wafted over them. Richard shivered as a huge chill ran down his body. He experienced again the feeling of regret. The passion had consumed him. But did Peter know that all expression, even the highest art, only served as reminders? All knowledge in defining something positive also defined something that it was not. With an element of certainty, Richard looked at that which was not, the pit. He could do it without much fear because it was Peter in his poem who revealed it for him this time, not himself.

I am nothing, he said in his mind. For an instant it was true. Then curiosity grew.

Grace stirred beside him.

'You're awake?' she asked softly.

Grace had also been thinking. Her head was clearer now that the alcohol had run through her system. She had been thinking of Peter and their early days together in a mood of acceptance. She had vowed herself to him and she would stand by him, doing what she could for him. That resolve had given her satisfaction and a return of purpose.

Even so, the darkness weighed upon her, prickling her in a way she didn't like. She felt haunted by an emotion more immediate than her feeling for Peter. The impulsive urge that had made her ask Richard if he had given her a baby awoke in her a possibility. It might not happen again that she would have the chance she had now. Spontaneity was its own moral justification.

And Richard was strong and energetic.

'Are you sleepy?' she asked.

'Not particularly.' In the dark, he felt no distance between them.

'Is your neck sore?'

'How? Where?'

She groped around the side of his face and neck and felt the small punctures on his skin.

'There. I bit you.'

He jerked his head away in reaction to the sting of the wounds.

'And I never felt a thing. You're a cat, Grace.'

She stroked the area about the wound, her fingers moving surely and lightly, knowing it would arouse him. She shifted closer to him, feeling the heat of his penis in her groin.

'It was nice to bite and bite. You could take it,' she murmured, expressing a cold and secret voluptuousness that was her abandonment. She could eat him up, consume him.

But Richard moved with the earlier sympathy to think that he could love her. She was sure and purposeful, taking command of that part of him that was beyond his reach.

In the morning she cried when Richard left to return to the university. She was convulsed by the knowledge that the night and its secrets was over.

Richard was deeply moved again and he promised to come again soon.

When the barman set about putting up the shutters of the bar, the three of them, John, Bahrsan and Richard, emptied their glasses with mixed feelings: of relief, glad that the evening together was at an end; of regret, because there was no more drink and they had to go out into the night. Together they walked slowly down the stairs and out into the night. They were a relaxed trio then, their various moods soothed by alcohol. About them was peace, the few students who had been in the bar already dispersed to their quarters. They strolled across the square and back along the pathways they had come.

At the point where their ways parted, Bahrsan drew Richard aside with a diffident, confiding gesture. John glanced at them and walked on, hands by his side, head thrown back so that the light of the lamps glinted on his glasses. Bahrsan asked Richard if he would come back to his flat for coffee. He explained that not being used to drink, he inevitably became lonely because of the feeling of helplessness it created. Richard tried to be as decent as he could about it as he turned down the offer.

Unable to bring himself to leave Richard, Bahrsan began speaking. Richard, compromised by the other's sincerity, remained and listened, making conventional comments whenever necessary. Finally, after trying very hard to explain what he was attempting to do in his thesis, putting Plato on Locke or Locke on Plato, Bahrsan grasped Richard by the elbow and said:

'I envy you, Richard. You are a happy man.'

He saw that Richard's face was set and pursed, as though resolved on some purpose. He admired the energy of the man and his effectiveness, having seen him sweep Peter's girlfriend off her feet the last time he was here. He wished for himself such energy and resolve, rather than his impotent struggle for a synthesis of thought.

Richard snorted a laugh, looking up at the dark sky.

'I think you are a lucky man, Richard,' Bahrsan continued in a pedagogic tone, shaking Richard's as though to stress his point. 'You get what you want because you limit your ambition. You are happy and that is good.'

A wave of pity rose in him as he said this. He wanted Richard to admit all this so that he could go off to his bed with the thought that he had been in the company of a happy man, that such a being existed. But more deeply, as he knew but was not at that moment acknowledging, he wanted to hear that ambition had a limit.

Richard looked at the Turk, seeing the confusion of loneliness, sexuality and intellectual presumption. He looked about at the night, savouring it in his awareness of the other's ardent gaze. Then he looked at Bahrsan again, feeling a massive complacency and satisfaction. He saw there the superstition of the intellectual: the belief that the pursuit of knowledge of itself was worthy of the suffering it engendered.

Yet Richard nodded his head in assent and said:

'Well, who knows? You might be right, Bahrsan.'

He drew his arm away from the other's grasp and began to walk away into the dark.

Bahrsan lifted his face in gratitude and smiled farewell. Then he set off along the path towards the gate in the wall, his hands thrust deep in his pockets.

Richard walked along the road from the university to the village. The early sun glared silently down on to the open country to the left that lay, quilt-like, spread out to the horizon and Wales. On a small hill to the right stood the church, its spire soaring above the headstones scattered about the slopes of the hill. The few red-bricked houses of the village seemed to cluster beneath this aspiring finger, as if to make sure of being included in its appeal to the heavens. He reached the public road and crossed to the tiny island in the middle that surrounded a tall spreading oak. He paused while traffic passed, heading for the six towns below. Immediately before him was the village inn, its doors wide open. He decided to have a quick drink. It would loosen him up, for the last twenty four hours lay on his head like a compress of cotton wool, something he was unused to and which made him feel strangely defensive. The road cleared, and with a hop, step and jump he landed at the door of the pub.

The pub had an atmosphere of contentment. At the back of the room darts were being thrown. Just inside the door on the right old men played dominoes, placing them down in a line with their stumpy fingers. A group of students sat about a table in the middle of the room. As he walked the few paces to the counter, almost everyone turned to look at him, as though to recognise him and claim him for their own. But he being a stranger, they quickly returned to their recreations. He ordered whisky and paid for it. The liquid fired his throat and he winced as its cold fury slid down to his stomach. The shock was such as to transform his mood in a subtle way. He remained standing at the bar, one hand resting beside his glass on the counter. Behind him the voices of the locals murmured, rising from time to time to a Richard burr. The sluggishness left him, his world broadened, exposing places and thoughts and people that composed his life until that moment. He pictured quickly and with a start of feeling his childhood world. The house and the neighbourhood of his childhood now seemed meaner. But they also seemed hidden, brooding on a time completely gone now. The inner and outer of that world dismayed him: he could not bring them together. He remembered his parents then, younger, complete and important to him, a happy focus. Teachers in soutanes and tight, odorous suits. Even neighbours, so many of them dead or old or grown up and like him departed from there. Their features were fixed now forever in a point of view, an uncritical and bitter memory stamped in his mind. But that was because he saw them from the outside across a great chasm, and because his feelings in response to these images were feelings that couldn't help see the vulnerability of innocence, of lack of consciousness, and recognise there the terrors of insecurity and exposure that surrounded his childhood. He had been so at risk: but only now did he see that. He could see it now because he had finally turned away from the past.

He drank again. It brought him back to his present, in this country pub.

The whisky was clouding his consciousness. The present seemed to lose focus. He realised he had been bathing in the stunning light of innocence even while he viewed it with bitterness. In the fading of that innocence he felt his grip on the present weaken. That frightened him, until he reminded himself that his present was in any case momentarily in abeyance. The act of writing seemed from this point of view a strangely dishonest act. Yes, he could see that clearly. Abstractly, he portrayed it for himself and for others as the act of a self-aware and constitutionally isolated individual consciousness, addressing perhaps other isolated individuals. Here he posited the act of writing as a gesture of self-realisation against the background of a silencing void. But was that true or just a bit of self-glorification? From the historical point of view, writing appeared to be a reaction to something he could not control. Isolation was either wilful or unavoidable: a vanity of self-pity or something truly terrifying. Loneliness was either a posture of monstrous egotism or a fundamental condition of man that could not be faced without risking suicide or madness as the destruction of consciousness itself.

He drank again, tremoring.

Concentrate on the act of writing, he told himself. With that he saw it as something that did grow from reaction. It was a reaction to a society that had threatened to drown his identity and turned him into a ritual that bridged an animal routine from birth to death. That routine constantly pushed the hope of human realisation into a future that seemed never to approach, as those people were either helpless before that ever-present hope or else afraid of it. What he had done was to break away from that treadmill, to seek the truth at least about himself at least. And one thing he had discovered was that while the hope was ever-present, the possibility of realisation was also ever-present. It had to be.

Then suddenly he didn't know what he was trying to think about. He watched the barman come and glance at him and his drink. He was pot-bellied and dour, his face tanned and slack, with a receding hairline and a domed smooth brow. He had an air of animal satisfaction: so long as his needs of bed, board and habits were attended to he would remain passively content. Richard felt an unreasoning hostility towards the man and felt tempted to shake the man's complacency. But in his anger he suddenly realised, as though it had crept in behind the distraction of anger, that his writing was inessential, that it was a distraction in the way the barman's needs were distractions.

The feeling of helplessness was total. He would have cried except that his thoughts were abstractions with the distance of theory. So he questioned his helplessness. At once he understood. Men have the pride and energy to do something worthwhile. But they have nothing worthwhile to do. Human activity is therefore driven by necessity or a reactive wilfulness.

He drained his glass. Putting it back on the counter he nodded to the barman with a comradeship the barman would not recognise. He went out into the sun.

The cars dashing past were inconsequential. He heard the hubbub behind him in the bar, the clink of glasses, a sudden laugh. Richard clenched his fists tightly, his arms trembling with tension at his sides. Oh God, he thought with a real anguish, how much I love!

But instead of crying, he returned self-consciously to thinking. We do everything for each other, whether we like it or not, whether it is exploitation or servility. Behind everything, all the honesty and dishonesty, the sincerity and the cheating, we are always approaching one another. What is that if it is not love? Left alone, any of us would simply die.

Fully projected out of himself, he looked around to see that the sun was now quite high in an almost cloudless sky, shining with the same steady permanence on the countryside. A breeze gusted from the south-west, chilly and sharp, a spring wind. Richard turned down by the pub and took the narrow road that led to the students' residences. The university was hidden in a hollow and further sheltered by trees. Close by, the church towered, the white stained headstones strewn about it, evidence of generations. He walked past a ploughed field, the earth brown and moist, the walls of the furrows glazed where the plough had pressed. Before him a wooded knoll rose, the pines cold-green and austere, glancing away the sunlight. The cluster of modern buildings came into sight. In his projection, Richard had the sensation of stepping lightly, as though his presence was only a gesture on his part and the surrounding countryside an arrangement of two dimensional props. He wasn't fooled by the necessity of its presence.

He turned down an inclining track, passed the carpark and entered a courtyard between the apartment blocks. In some of the windows students gazed out. They watched him, the only active human within their view. Richard pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket and read the address on it, written in John's careless hand. He walked towards the block ahead of him and entered the foyer.

Richard could hear music on the other side of the door. He paused, his hand poised at the bell, feeling himself being shaped by the sound. It was rock music, peculiarly elastic in tone, as if the musicians wished to remove the emphasis from the blues beat. He pressed the bell. At once someone shouted 'Come in.'

Pushing the door open, Richard was confronted by the red-haired student, whose hand was raised to open the door. Peter Yorke was leaning against the radiator by the window across the room, his shrunken arm resting across his thighs. He held a slim volume in his good hand. Behind the red-haired student Grace was bent over an untidy cooker.

'Hello,' Peter said warmly. 'We heard you were here for the weekend.'

The red-haired student stepped away slowly, then turned and walked to the window, to stand beside Peter. Grace looked up at Richard, pushing the fringe of hair from her eyes as she did.

'I thought I'd drop by and see you,' Richard said lamely. The music was too loud, it unnerved him. He looked intently at Grace, seeking some sign of recognition.

'Well, glad to see you again.' Peter was jovial, there was no trace of malice or embarrassment. 'Have you been down to play skittles? No? You should have got in touch with me yesterday. I would have gone down with you and played a game. You have a definite talent for it.'

While Peter spoke, Richard continued to look down at Grace. Her small brown face, oval and smooth like a child's, was turned to him. But her eyes were like moist pebbles, abstracted, as they sighted on him. Then they dropped to the ground, having shown no reaction to his presence. Dumbfounded, Richard turned to Peter.

'No, I haven't played it again. Just a quiet visit to John this time,' he said not sure what he was saying to cover up his turmoil.

'Ah I see. How is he? I haven't seen him for – how long is it? – times seems to fly – almost three weeks. Exams, you see. We have our finals soon.'

Grasping at the straw, so as to stop himself turning and leaving the room, Richard said, 'What will you do afterwards? Teach?'

'Oh, I don't know yet. First of all I shall rest at home.'

'Ah yes. You'd need to rest.'

The record came to an end and silence crept into the room on the tail of the arm's automatic return to rest.

In the silence, Richard said to Grace:

'What will you do for the summer, Grace?'

It was pointed. It would give her a chance to speak.

She looked at him in an unfocused way. Then her eyes were startled for an instant, then they lost expression again. She seemed to be drugged.

'I'm not sure yet. I'll probably spend it with Peter.' She spoke impersonally, as though it was a question she had answered many times.

Peter spoke to her, his voice loud in the silence and a little strained.

'Probably? Are you thinking of going to your mother? After all that has happened?'

The red-haired student moved away from this exchange and hunkered down before a rack of records. Grace seemed distressed. She threw a pleading glance at Peter.

'No. no. it's not that.' She touched her forehead in a gesture of self-reassurance. 'Of course I'll spend it with you. Where else would I go?'

Peter pursed his lips and nodded. He looked at Richard.

'There,' he said with sudden irony. 'Two months sunning in County Durham before anything else.'

The red-haired student slid a record from its cover and went to the record player.

Richard looked at Peter and then at Grace. He was numb with shock. Yet he was not surprised.

At the door, Richard said:

'By the way, I read...' The music blared and drowned his words. Peter looked at the red-haired student with annoyance. Then he came over to Richard, lifting his withered arm to his chest as he walked.

'I can't hear you in here, Richard,' he said close to the latter's ear. 'Let's go into the hall.'

He closed the door. The silence was like a mercy.

Richard turned to face towards the stairs, to signal that he was not staying long.

'I said that I read one of your poems, Peter,' he said, weary at having to repeat himself.

Peter bent towards him, his head bobbing as though to catch every word that Richard uttered. But when Richard said no more, he spoke himself, his eyes rising to meet Richard's.

'So Grace told me.'

Richard glanced back towards the closed door in reaction to hearing Peter speak her name.

Peter started to walk towards the stairs, his lips pursed as though considering whether he should break a barrier or not. Richard followed him, feeling a tension rise between them.

At the head of the stairs, Peter grasped Richard's elbow with diffidence. He suddenly looked very frail.

'Grace is not well, Richard.' He looked into Richard's eyes again. 'That's why she's so distant.'

When Peter clasped his lips together and looked away, Richard decided to push through the barrier of unfamiliarity too.

'What is it? Is it serious?' He realised he was responding to Peter's concern, not his own.

'Vertigo.' Peter looked ready to cry. 'It's a bad attack this time. She's on all sorts of drugs.'

Peter was looking at his baby fingers. They were flexing in a spasmodic way, as though they had a life of their own.

'She said you had some kind of vision, Richard. She doesn't remember it very clearly.'

Richard felt the space left for him to speak, to tell Peter about it. Remembering it, he remembered the lesson of it. He put his hand on Peter's shoulder, feeling the thinness of it, and shook him playfully, laughing.

'You know what the Irish are like for seeing ghosts, Peter.'

Peter laughed too. The tension between them dissolved.

'Do you write poetry, Richard?' Peter suddenly asked into the ease between them.

Richard resisted the intimacy, remembering the vision or whatever it was. 'No, I don't, Peter.'

'Why not?' Peter asked, showing a doggedness similar to Grace's. 'I've read some of your stories, and I've wondered why you don't write poetry.'

Richard wanted to laugh again, but he couldn't find the right perspective for laughter. He let the words flow out of himself:

'I choose not to, Peter.'

But Peter wasn't satisfied. He waited, seeming to presume on some past intimacy. Richard was forced to expand.

'I don't believe I could find words to bear the weight. Any poem I would write would seem a lie. Do you understand that, Peter?'

'But your stories, Richard. How can you write those?'

Now Richard did laugh, gently.

'Ah, Peter, I can maintain the surface there. There are more words to spread out, like a net.'

Peter nodded in a professional way.

'Why do you write, Peter?' Richard took up the reciprocation available to him.

'Because I want to.' He looked at Richard with an intent expression. 'I believe in poetry. It's...' Suddenly silent, Peter lifted his wasted arm in his good hand and seemed to weigh it.

Richard gave an aimless chuckle and shrugged his shoulders. He turned and put his hand on the stair-rail.

'I'll keep an eye out in London for a book of your poems, Peter.'

The poet looked gaunt. He obviously wanted to say something more. When Richard made as if to go, he said, blurting it out:

'Writing is a serious business, Richard.'

Richard threw his head back, resenting the admonishment. Then he laughed easily, seeing the nature of his own commitment, and said, knowing the irony and trickery of his retort:

'Sure Peter. But it's also a first-class pain in the arse.'

He waved farewell, not looking back.

He felt very relieved.

John stood by the car, dressed as usual in his greasy black sweater and leather jacket. Richard turned the ignition key. The engine burst into life.

'Will you make a good teacher, John?' Richard asked, looking up from checking the petrol gauge.

'Yes, yes. It's not what you teach that counts. It's how you teach it,' John replied with determined enthusiasm. 'Remember, I did a lot of amateur dramatics while I was in the Bank. I'll make it interesting for them.'

As he put the car in gear, Richard remembered that John's mother had been a teacher.

'Do that, John,' he said, looking up and letting in the clutch. As the car moved, he called, 'Look me up if you are ever in London. Take care.'

When he got to the motorway, he crossed to the fast lane and pushed his speed up to eighty five. A high-pitched squeal filled the interior of the car. He shot along, untouched by the elements outside, feeling a great force welling up inside him.

14 CHANCE MEETING

The meeting was very casual. He was turning the corner into a narrow street near the Luxembourg Gardens, hurrying through the chilly streets to a nearby Metro station, having completed some small piece of business. She was turning away from gazing into the window of a dress shop, just one of the many she had inspected during a stroll that afternoon. Their eyes met, crossed, and returned to meet once again. She was dark, with a long sloping Cretan face – features recorded on the walls of Knossos – and simply, though attractively dressed. He was very pale, as befits the North in late autumn, with sharp, attentive eyes, and a concentrated, forceful walk.

She paused in the act of turning away from the shop window and seemed to hesitate, as though drawn back to reconsider a possible purchase among the display; then she raised her hand up towards her face, towards her mouth – lips and nails painted the same brilliant hue of red – but stopped when the hand was breast-high, and raised her plucked brows in his direction.

He was passing on, his mind digesting the image of her, filing it, comparing it to other images of other women picked up that day, last week, all his life – it was by now a habit – commenting upon her strange, singular beauty while yet knowing she was not beautiful, that her face was too stark, too lacking in the placid smoothness of the Northern beauty – it reminded him of the sharp diet of the Mediterranean peasant, something monotonous and eternal, something that only compassion could comprehend: black olives, white bread and red, grapey wine. He caught her appeal just as she slid from his sight and the decision to stop, to turn and re-approach her, took a fraction of a second: a space of time in which he tested a number of personalities – the passer-by, the man-in-a-hurry-somewhere, the virile-man-confronted-by-an-attractive-woman. He stopped walking, turned, and discovered he was looking at her back, at her delayed action of turning to face him and make the request she wished to make. He saw her plump calf twist away, her green shoe pivot on its heel, her full skirt tremble and fill and swing, her slim shoulders under the bistre-rich jacket change in perspective and then reveal the slight swell of her small breasts. Her face came towards him, starkly attractive, a speculation of beauty and its temptations, her eyes brown and impassive, her crimson lips changing shape, filling, broadening, then silkily drawing apart – the hint of saliva along the inner borders of the lipstick.

She came closer to him: he felt like encircling her, like walking around and around her – let her eyes follow him, expressionless, impassive – let him put his own feelings into them; let her lips move as they did now, soundlessly mouthing words that did not fall on his ears, that did not awaken his mind – let him put words on them, meanings that would be meaningless to her. But she came forward with a card in her hand. She raised it gently to his eyes, and her eyes narrowed and asked him to read.

Yet he felt himself go towards her, growing larger, growing more potent, more embracing, reckless – free... He took the card she offered him – the scarlet nails were short and carefully shaped, the cuticles trimmed and even – and while he read the card he went down after the retreating fingers, hungry for them, for their soft touch...

She retired from him while he read the card, one leg thrust out, her body poised on the heel of the other. He read the card with a fury, knowing that she was examining him, that she would see the flat colouring of the Northerner, pallid skin, the yellowed eyes, the light, undistinguished hair. It would be poor food indeed when compared with the rich organic servings of her land! How could the presumption of a straining will, the sheer egomania, compare with the lithe, disarming grace and ritual of her people, of her kind and blood?

He read the card and realised that it was the address of an hotel near the Opera. He raised his eyes to her: green, objective, appropriating her with the sacrilege of presumption; and met the calm, mediating brown of hers. He spoke – harshly, he thought; she replied in French, a touch of the comic in her face. He filled the space left by the comedy, growing larger, ever larger, but becoming attenuated in will and growing larger in service of her. He thought for her, reasoned for her, persuading himself on her behalf.

Her face flickered with complacency: she watched him impassively, knowing full well what he was doing for her.

He described the route to the Metro station; then he walked with her to the Metro station, keeping close to her, but taking care not to touch her. She stood by him in the station as he showed her the route on the plan of the Metro system. She stood too close to him, her jacket several times grazed his hand, as he bade farewell to her, so that he offered, and then presumed to do it, to escort her to her hotel.

They sat side by side in the train. His two hands rested rather brutishly on his knees, he could do nothing else with them; she composed her plump hands in her lap, all ten scarlet nails in full view. Frequently he glanced at her from the corner of his eye, at first submitting to the resistance of her bistre outfit, but soon he grew bold or more in need (really, it was because he thought he was unseen) and saw through the fabrics to her flesh and her body, to the brown starkness of it, to its enduring physicality, but also to its responses and surrenders; he saw it then in the completeness of its activities, and was ashamed. He withdrew his gaze and speculations from its truth, and contented himself instead with the public display of her hands.

In the street outside the hotel, she took his hand in hers and led him through the crowded foyer, she oblivious to everything, natural in her natural needs; he not there, but retired to another purpose more respectable, where intention could be sincere.

In her room, she embraced him once and then sat him on the bed and went into the tiny bathroom. He heard the surge of flushing water and she returned, smoothing her dress, and sat by him. She placed her hand in his with complete equanimity.

He looked at the hand in his own open palm, feeling himself grow rigid: the hand was small and dark, folded along its length, within the square of his pink palm. He wanted to talk to her, to regain some conventional mode with her, for the shock of being taken to this room had been too much, if only because he had not planned for it, and he needed to regain some command of her, through the object-making trick of conversation. He would have asked her about her life and used it to project her into a past, so that he might know her away from the immediacy of this moment in the hotel room and then bring the image forward to join them on the bed and protect him from the solid and silent vision of her now, her hand lying in his, her strange face upon him, lit by the naked light of her most natural need. She was shameless. He would prefer her not to see his own desire, for that would expose him totally.

She sat patiently beside him for many minutes; her hand moved a few times in his, but caused no reaction; and then she withdrew it and stood and walked across the room. She stopped at the door, in the light of his vision, and literally posed herself before him. His face was set and stern, he was not himself; his cheeks were flushed, his eyes seemed to bulge, as though with the force of will they tried desperately to reduce the world outside to being their object. She didn't pity him: presumption deserves no pity – let it be its own hell. Unable to satisfy her, cut off from her pity, he became as inert as a rock, as natural and as final, and she felt her body sag with disappointment. She sagged with her body, slipping down into a new pleasure, the pleasure of future possibility, not of some future act that replaced her present disappointment and compensated for it but of pure anticipation and faith in her own being and its future.

He saw that her position by the door was an invitation to leave, that she was releasing him, and the thought of it pushed him to a crisis. Now he felt shame: he was going to fail – he was going to fail himself. He rehearsed the possibility of rising and approaching her, of re-engaging with her; though he tried, he could not tie the new beginning on to the earlier rupture: it involved a request, really a submission on his part – there was something he would have to admit and he did not want to admit it: he did not want his failure made public between them, for he believed that a past wrong could never be righted, that experience in time laid down layers of memory, as a sea lays layers of sediment on its bed, and to pretend that one layer could be connected with another was insincere and committed the impiety of connecting good with evil. He saw her sag and saw the light go from her sloping face; one leg buckled forward and her knee dented the gentle flow of her skirt; he saw the hand rise slowly until the scarlet tips touched her throat. He filled with tenderness for her and it embraced her forlorn figure, the down-turned, hooded eyes, the sensitive hand, the kink of her knee in the skirt. He saw her now, the might-have-been; she was intensely beautiful – because she was beyond him – and she was chaste and cool. The tenderness grew fierce and began to masquerade as love; but love could not find its object and so he began to pity her; and his pity found an object and he came to see that he could serve her. He shook as he rose to his feet and went to her.

She watched him come towards her. His eyes were bright and moist, as though with love; but she felt no response to him, so she knew he didn't desire her. He came close to her and paused, staring at her face. She returned his gaze, knowing that her disappointment showed as a gentle chiding. He didn't realise that the moment was past, that she had passed on to the future, there patiently to await the opportunity. He took her hand from her throat and kissed it. The act was reverent and she felt the laughter rise in her breast: Pitre! Pitre! – the word sang in her head. But when he dropped on to his knees before her and wrapped his arms about her hips and laid his face into her groin, she was shocked: it was a grievous wrong, she was no longer a woman; he divided her, part chaste virgin, a mental thing, and part an object for his service, a part that was no longer her own. She shuddered when she saw the savagery of it.

He was abject and serious before her, wanting only to serve her, to abolish his own will and submit entirely to her dispositions. (That his wish to abolish his will was false he knew deep down; he knew well that it was his will that guided him, but it was necessary that he disown it, for then it would be a better agent on his behalf.) He kissed her hand and the contact with her was so powerful – it blazed his mind with the knowledge that he was in command, for he took the hand and he kissed it: it had not been offered, the kiss had not been accepted – that he felt compelled to take a greater hold on her. He slipped to his knees and threw his arms about her and pressed his face into her body, feeling his mind and body grow icy with love for his own success. The shudder was transmitted to him through his face: he knew he had won.

She refused at first to go with him to the bed, but agreed when it became obvious that he would take her there by the door. He aroused her, but that was never at issue, she had known from the first moment that this was possible, and aroused, she submitted. She did not submit to him, she submitted to the act that joined them, to the ritual of lovemaking; but he did not realise this; he believed she submitted to him, to his masculine will and force, and he acted accordingly, feeling that he had the freedom of her, of her being. He was not intentionally cruel, nevertheless she experienced pain; he liked her cries and her sudden thrashings, they replaced her potential love for him, now gone; his use of her was a survey of the possible gratifications to be gained from a woman's body – he would not believe it was a search, for she was not an end in herself.

Afterwards he went to the nearest Metro station and took a train to his hotel. He fell on his bed and cried. For the next week he felt as though he was dead.

Afterwards she didn't cry, but she grieved, not for her mistreated body, but for loss of innocence. The next day she made the long journey home to Marseilles, the grief tearing her heart out.

15 ÜBER ETWAS, ÜBER IRGEND ETWAS

His fellow workers in the Mannheim plastics factory called him 'Valsch'. He was an Irishman from County Limerick, who had recently completed his studies for a degree in English Literature at an English university. He was in his early thirties, and whether he had decided to throw up his career in a Dublin bank after fifteen years service in order to improve himself or had reacted to what he might have felt to be the growing barrenness of his life, no one was sure. He was unmarried, though not without his reminiscences of 'timely escapes' from the clutches of a number of Irishwomen bent on matrimony and children.

John Walsh's fellow workers were, with the exception of the chargehands, immigrant labour imported from Turkey and Portugal. They had very little German and no English. John had some German, Grundstufe and Hoch, which he used sparingly and with trepidation.

These swarthy workers, naive but cunning within their own societies, were cheerful or melancholy by turns during working hours, their frame of mind determined by the pettiest incidents. But in one thing they were unanimous: 'Valsch' afforded them endless amusement. His tendency to adopt poses and attitudes best suited to humouring them, he was shy of their bustle and tactile familiarity, made him appear a clown in their eyes. John walked a tightrope of inspired social tact between pits of appeasement and malice, and they responded like a good audience, half aware that John buoyed them up just above the realities of envy and outrage, and contempt.

In the evenings they parted company and went their own ways: the Turks and Portuguese to their hostels, John to walk in the city, to explore, to calm his unease. His studies were completed and what followed from a total of six years of effort, five years of correspondence courses and a final year's residence, lay within the scope of the formalities of an examining body and the entrants board of a Catholic teacher training college near London. Consequently he had nothing to think about, but a lot to worry about, an irrational but compulsive preoccupation with matters he could neither control nor decide.

He discovered bars, clubs and brothels. He patronised swank and grub indiscriminately, and found one big blond whore to whom he returned regularly, having no reason for this choice but experiencing however a mindless gratification on her ample moist consoling flesh.

Between these visits he continued to haunt the town with his silent gaunt form and penetrating stare. He absorbed the names over shops and factories, cars parked outside suburban homes, the alien pedestrians; he heard the trains rumbling, going off into the darkness of Germany, the cars and trams, the rapid, flat dialect of the natives, and the laughter of those at home in familiar surroundings.

Then one night one of the Mannheim girls was sufficiently attracted to him for him to offer to buy her a drink. He made a serious attempt to speak his German. The girls, brunette, nonchalant but genetically purposeful, laughed frankly and bared his penis under the table and masturbated him briskly, all the while clinking glasses with him and shouting 'Prosit!' He walked with her afterwards, the arm he laid over her firm shoulders tremoring. She pressed him with her hip and dawdled with him in a doorway, her blouse open for him, until a car pulled up at the kerb, its horn tooting. She tapped John's cheek, her eyes so bright, and ran towards the rear door that was swung open for her. John distinctly heard the driver shout to whoever sat beside him:

'Über etwas!'

That night he walked for hours through the dark, silencing streets, feeling released and anxious, until he came upon the railway station in the early hours of the morning. Here he fell in with a group of hippies, two Americans, one French and five Germans: five men and three girls. They took him with them to a cellar where more hippies lay about listening to rock music and smoking. The small backroom, separated by a dull-red curtain, disappointed him: several of the brighter hippies sat on the floor talking in a mixture of German and American slang. He was invited to join them, but John preferred the blurring of the senses that the music imposed. In any case, they gave him a joint and a light.

With the exception of an occasional 'Hi' from the Americans, as an invitation to group, he was left to himself. He puffed a few times on the joint before it went out and then threw it away. He felt brittle and nauseated for a while after afterwards.

At sunrise, about four in the morning, a fat middle-aged man came through a door that John had not noticed and threw the lot out. It took him a half hour to do so, but his tolerance pointed to repeated experiences of this ritual.

Discovering that nobody had a home to go to, John tagged along with them as far as the station. An American talked to him non-stop about Vietnam, addressing him as 'Man'. Intimidated, John tried to follow his monologue, all the time overwhelmed by the brilliant clarity with which he saw his surroundings.

At the station the sight of so many down-and-outs, of all ages and races, brought him to his senses. He ran away.

Towards the end of his stay in Mannheim, John began to extend the range of his excursions. He went by train to Karlsruhe and Bonn, and once crossed the frontier to visit Nancy. But his favourite jaunt was to Heidelberg, to the famous university town of wide streets and gardens and, as it was that year, grey wet skies. He drank beer in the student taverns, amongst the tourists, and strolled about the campus, hands deep in his pockets, eyes swivelling over the dark buildings.

One Sunday evening he took a roundabout route from the station to his room and came upon a small dingy tavern. When ordering his second glass of beer, he suddenly recognised the barmaid as the brunette he had met weeks before. He stared at her. With his third glass she looked at him in a significant way. John stayed at the bar and tried to talk to her in his broken German. The Gastwirtin came up then and was introduced as her father. He spoke English well, with a slight northern accent. As he remarked, and in a way that indicated that he often remarked, things hadn't been the same since the British troops left.

A three-way conversation ensued, in reality between John and the daughter, whose name was Rutta, with the father translating when necessary. But as John spoke to Rutta, and Rutta responded in her practical way, the father seemed to intrude himself between them. The conversation continued in an offhand manner, made difficult by the language barrier and the fact that the father's blunt body stiffened and filled the spaces between the words.

John went to his room and thought about Rutta. Later that night he dreamed of her. In the factory on the following day his preoccupation with Rutta dampened the spirits of his fellow workers. He went that evening to the tavern and sat at a table at the back of the room and watched Rutta. Tuesday and Wednesday likewise in the factory and the tavern. In the factory, malice and anger; in the tavern, mounting desperation and significant looks. Thursday evening he asked her to come out with him. She shook her said and said, 'Nein, nein. Mein Vater'. She threw a frightened glance towards the backroom of the tavern. She tried to explain, but John could not understand.

On Friday his fellow workers dropped all pretence and cursed him roundly in Turkish and Portuguese. They would have beaten him up if things warranted that, but John, when it finally came to it that day, was even more wretched than they to their way of thinking. Even so, the chargehand came and dismissed him on the spot, pointing a stubby finger.

On Friday evening Rutta slipped him a small square of cardboard on which was written: Morgen abend, 2O30, beim Bahnhof.

John arrived at the station at eight feeling extremely tense. This tension reached its first peak at eight-thirty and then sagged as the minutes passed and Rutta did not appear. At nine-thirty the dull ache across the back of his skull became intolerable and he had to decide on a course of action.

He walked quickly to the tavern and discovered it in darkness. Above the silent bar, he saw Rutta silhouetted against the drawn blind in what was obviously her room. John shook with excitement at seeing this apparition. He guessed why she had not come, and that she was not to blame. He whistled softly, but his mouth was too dry. He moistened his mouth and began to sing instead. The silhouette moved. He recognised the air, it was The Rose of Tralee. The blind was lifted and Rutta's face was pressed against the window for an instant. She shook her head violently. John saw that she was crying. He continued singing, afraid to break his last tenuous line with her. She stood erect before the window and fumbled at her waist. John's singing faltered and he became weak at the knees, fascinated to see her pull her blouse up over her head.

Then she turned at an angle and unhooked her bra. She cupped her breasts in her hands and stood there, head thrown back, hearing John sing and knowing he saw her.

John was close to the point of ejaculation when a second silhouette suddenly entered the frame of the window. This was shorter and stockier. It grasped Rutta's shoulder and jerked her away from the window. John sang more loudly. Rutta reappeared at the window, her breasts quivering as she fought to break her father's grasp. This brought John to his climax, and the shock of it threw him to his knees.

From that position he saw the father embrace his daughter and finally drag her away from the window.

Still on his knees, head bowed and silence all around him, John was surprised to find calm in himself in place of the habitual clamour. He grasped at this calm, sinking into it. Then a totally irrelevant thought came to him:

Was Rutta the same girl?

He instantly dismissed the thought and sought the calm again. But then he saw her breasts again and the thought return in a more frightening form:

Was Rutta the same girl as... who?

Then he knew he would never escape this moment. All he could do was to return home. But to... who?

There was no one there.

Like a prayer, John breathed, 'Oh, Mamma.'

16 REHEARSALS

The two of them stood apart from the crowded and noisy red room, one on either side of the unlit gasfire, which was surmounted by an alcove faced with copper sheet, both turned slightly away from the room and in towards this alcove. They did not look at each other, though they were obviously aware of each other's presence. Reluctant friends, spancelled by habits of companionship? I had never seen either before.

I asked the older of the two. She must have been in her mid-twenties – her body had that mature fullness, her face that rather fixed handsomeness. She started when I spoke to her and looked at me with unapproachable disdain, yet she condescended to dance with me. I had been about to change my expression from polite interest to one of So-what?-I-was-only-doing-you-a-favour when she decided to accept my offer, and I quickly replaced both with an ironic, if mildly self-protective, curiosity. She took two steps away from the fireplace and began to wave her arms and kick her feet out. I remained a respectable distance from her, waving my arms and kicking my feet out, and watched her while giving both of us time to settle down together in this ritual of dance. Her breasts were full under the blue silk-like dress and they swung nicely to the rhythm of the rest of her body. My eyes remained there and I became agreeably enthralled by them.

She danced, as did most of the people at the party, with a certain inward concentration. She did not even once glance at me. I watched her breasts swing and tremble, and felt nice.

When the record came to an end, and I realised she was not going to run back to her station by the fire, I stepped closer to her and said 'Enjoying yourself?' I could have answered this question for myself without troubling her, but I had to say something, something neutral and uncontroversial. I am too worn down by these parties by now to play the role of hero-as-an-original-man. She did no more than throw me one silencing glance and return to gazing at some obscure segment of the wallpaper on the opposite wall. I didn't mind. I stood close to her and looked down at her shoulders and chest, and at the upper reaches of her breasts. By straining my eyes I could see a couple of inches down into her cleavage, but I did that only once and then returned to studying her shoulders. Not obviously stimulating, perhaps, but they had a nice shape to them: fleshy, lightly tanned and freckled. They smelled nice, too.

She had taken trouble with her dress and toilet. This raised my enthralment a notch. However, I was cool, hoping for nothing; I simply enjoyed the sight and knowledge of her.

A new record was put on, this time in slow tempo, and I let her make the first move. If she had wanted to jig and swing to it I would have submitted gracefully. However, she turned and stanced herself before me, arms out, just waiting for me to take her in my arms. I did so coolly, not hurrying it, and laid a limp arm about her waist and took her slightly moist palm in against mine. She did not once look at me during this manoeuvre, which was a pity, for now I was dancing with a stranger when a friend, even a one-look-and-one-smile friend, would have been preferable. So. Our steps were elementary, lift right, lift left, and so on. I held her hand out from her hip, putting a little tension into it so as to put a little tension into our dancing, if it could be called that. She remained inert, moving around with a certain amount of rhythm, but if I had been a tailor's dummy it would have made no difference to her. No matter. As usual, I made the most of it. Her cheek was close, so I studied it. Her make-up was heavy, an assortment of creams layered on with some expertise, a number of subtle shades of pink/red were discernible before one reached the opacity of the undercoats and her skin. I could make out the light down that covered her cheek and trailed down from her hair on her neck and forehead. Her eyes had been given a lot of attention. Mascaras and shadow, brows trimmed and darkened – the white of her eye was brilliant marble by contrast, a surprisingly pleasing contrast at that distance. And her iris was hazel, with reaches of green and flecks of yellow, a full-scale world of its own, tremulous in reaction to the lights and atmosphere of the room, contracting and expanding as though a heart alive. Then the eye rolled and her pupil lit upon me and I saw an elongated version of my own head in it. Which means she looked at me looking at her. I lifted my head back and focused upon the wall nearby, seeing at the edge of my vision her brown dark hair. The record came to an end.

I kept my arm about her waist and she did not struggle to escape its patronage. In fact, her hand rested on my shoulder. It was a non-plus moment. I wanted to kiss her brow. Not because I was violently in love with her all of a sudden, nor because I had reached the peak of some burning desire for her body equally as suddenly. No, because it was a reflex. A habit. She was attractive and kissable, so why not? However, I didn't. Instead, I let my eyes drop down her body. The dress reached just below her knees and hung in such a way as to cover her legs and ankles from this angle.

I record a fact: it wasn't important at that moment. There was enough to see as it was without needing the supplementary delights of her legs. Her breasts were full, as I have said; from this angle they filled my vision, full, round and ample, and, I was sure, very soft. They were lightly protected, for her nipples were embossed on the fabric of her dress.

Another record, again slow. We took our places in each other's arms again and recommenced our two-step shuffle. We danced, and the pale wallpaper, tinted red by the lamps of the room, slid past my eves. In an instant, between two steps, I was cold and depressed. To save myself, I tightened my embrace of her waist. What were another girl's breasts, regardless of how full, how soft they were, among so many girl's breasts, some full and soft? What was another girl? another rehearsal of some well-worn mystery of sex? when there had been many girls, many rehearsals. What new thing could be discovered at another party? when all the new things had been revealed during the first dozen or so parties. It was a small, quick plunge of depression and it passed quickly. I tightened my embrace of her waist and nothing happened, except that now and again her breasts grazed my chest. This had happened before, many times, so there was nothing to go wild about. Her breasts grazed my shirt front and if I had wanted to concentrate enough perhaps I could have separated the minor impression of her nipples within the major impression of her breasts. But why bother? I knew without having to concentrate that hidden within the soft resistance and then the trembling waver there was another encounter, this time pluckier because the flesh was more alive and assertive. I thought this and knew then that I was not going to evade the depression that easily. It returned with the knowledge that though the images of her breast and nipple were true, they were neither real nor moving. Something else would have to be done. And the easiest thing to do is to change. So I contemplated a drink and a cigarette. I was comforted.

Suddenly then, her style of dancing changed. She came closer to me, her arm about my shoulder reeling me in and closing about my neck. She loosed my hand and wrapped her now free arm across my back. Her breasts crushed against me, soft but now amorphous. Her belly and groin confronted mine.

Why this change? I didn't know, except that perhaps the caressing of her breasts had caused her to lose control of herself. I didn't think too much about it. I laid my freed hand across her back and returned her hugs to encourage her to continue them. She did. Her mouth turned and opened upon my neck. Her hair fell across my face. Her hand in my hair. And here the mystery began again and I was ever young, like the first time, at some long forgotten party for teenagers, my arms around a slimmer girl: delighted arms, blessed body, a generous acknowledgement of what was granted by us both to both – a cleaner hinterland, more trusting, oh more loving for being more innocent. I caressed the back presented to my hands and pressed the breasts in against my chest the more to please her and myself: in time I reached her buttocks and skated over them speculatively, liking their projection: this was reflex, but none the worse for that: touch her buttocks and her groin pressed mine; press her back and so squash further her breasts – and she encouraged this my pressing and gouging her own breasts of her own accord against my manly, bonehard chest. Paroxysm. I traced her cleavage down and she came in against me as though we were mated... Then the record was over and she was away, head down, and back with her friend, standing on her side of the fire. As though nothing had happened.

I trembled all the way down the short hall into the kitchen. I poured some gin into a glass and splashed in tonic. No ice. I drank the sweet concoction with little pleasure. The trembling subsided and I poured more gin and tonic. If the dance had lasted another five seconds I would have spilled. I was glad it hadn't and I hadn't. Is there anything more useless than a walking-wank with a one-dance-girl? Is there anything as bitter? I lit a cigarette and very soon I was quite elated. What had happened wasn't all that unusual. A shy girl suddenly tearing loose. A kind of panic: trying to escape the unavoidable by rushing it to its conclusion. She had nearly succeeded. I realised then that I had reacted to my depression by doing the same thing. I had brought her close to me so I too could get over the top as quickly and as cleanly as possible and get it over with before the deja vu and the regret got there first. Better a bad ejaculation than being lost in time. I poured myself another drink. Yet it hadn't ended like that. And another thing: the compulsion to force a hurried climax betrayed an underlying desire to make love in a more amiable and extended manner. Yes, she was very desirable.

Time to rejoin the party.

The two of them still stood apart from the crowded and noisy red room. One on either side of the unlit gasfire. Each turned slightly away from the room and in towards the copper-faced alcove. I lit a cigarette. The younger girl looked no more than eighteen. She expressed a clean nubility and an unsure mixture of smugness and grace. They were an intriguing couple. What did it imply? Something sinister? The girl I had danced with stood with one knee bent forward, so that it left its imprint on her dress. Significant? What coursed in her blood? Had she not recovered as quickly as me? One hand rested, fingers splayed, on the wall beside the alcove; the other hung loosely at her side. The fingers, however, were bent and pressed together. Another sign? This was her left hand and on the third finger a slim band of gold. Ah. I was piqued. I became somewhat abstracted, buoyed up by a nostalgia for what might have been. The rise and fall of her breasts, the delicate shading about them creating perspective and allowing me to envisage their depth as well as their contour.

The slight concavity of her back above the swell of her buttocks. I tingled in memory: it was poetic, and in the poetry the pain of regret...

Suddenly, the two of them ran from the room. Surprise, surprise. Both threw me glances as they ran. Both, you will note. Surprise. Surprise? If it was, it was also comical.

Who, I wondered, is protecting who? They ran, and the room was darker and duller for their absence. And it was further darkened by the appearance of a young man with a sallow face and long lank black hair in the centre of the room, among the few couples that danced. He searched the room with every indication of panic and potential violence. A husband or a serious boyfriend. And drunk. One and one makes two. A missing wife or girlfriend. And a searching husband or boyfriend. Let him search. He was a husband and he searched for his wife in the blue silk-like dress. That much I guessed. The Teenager was much too smug to deserve this chap on her tail. He looked at everybody, including me, but found no spoor. Helplessly, he hurried from the room. I was not necessarily curious, but I decided I would go and pour myself another drink. Before I had reached the door I heard the shouts, the general rumpus of enforced restraint, and a bottle or two crash.

The kitchen was in emotional disorder. Most people present were wide-eyed. The lank-haired husband was saying, tensely and almost in entreaty (he was back to the wall, one hand flat against it, finger-joints white, shapely nails begrimed): 'Paula Nicholson!' as though this explained everything, his panic, his bad manners, his utter futility. Sandra, whose house and party it was, stood opposite him: a slim, athletic figure with pretty blond hair. She did not wait for her husband to come and protect her (he was in the front room talking to Paul and Jill Macmahon). Instead, she threw out an arm, as though throwing down the gauntlet of I-dare-you-and-I'll-kick-your-balls-in and said with great precision: 'I don't know where she is'. He repeated 'Paula Nicholson' a few times and Sandra replied 'I don't know where she is' in response and then both of them seemed to deflate. If it had been a play or a film I would have laughed at this point. But it wasn't and I didn't. It was fairly real and therefore it could bite. And I had a part, a small part offstage, I knew what he was after better than Sandra, for instance, did. Perhaps better than he did himself.

By now Mr Nicholson had levered himself away from the wall and was approaching the company in the room with an air of generalised menace. Just then, Sandra's husband, Simon, came into the room. Being taller than anyone else and physical to boot, he managed to bring the room to some kind of order. The lank-haired Mr Nicholson explained himself and Sandra explained something and Simon listened patiently to both of them. Patience is his finest point. He immediately ordered a search of the house, and even led Mr Nicholson up the stairs to the bedrooms. If it had been the police, with or without a warrant, he would not have acted with more alacrity. Some followed the two of them. I did not. Nor did Sandra. She saw me and came over. Her smile was bright, glazed. She pushed her hair off her forehead, a habit of hers when she is excited:

'Christ, he was ready to wreck the place.'

I nodded in acknowledgement and looked over her shoulder to see if the bottle of gin had survived. It had. Two bottles of Algerian red lay in pieces, their contents like weak blood on the imitation parquet flooring. I reached over for it as Sandra continued: 'How on earth did he get in? I gave strict instructions that no gate-crashers were to be let in. I told Simon before that this would happen if he didn't keep an eye on the door. Anyone could slip in as someone went out.' I found the tonic easily enough and splashed some in on top of the gin. Sandra and I had escaped once from a party up the road and slipped in through this front door. We had celebrated the novelty of its being her first time with a man other than Simon on the floor of the front room, where I had danced with Mrs Nicholson. It had been a bright beginning but it had not lasted long. Sandra is a truly wilful person. Simon had known about it from the start; when it was over between Sandra and I he had called to see me. With a pathetic diffidence he had explained patiently that it was not my fault. He had not told me whose fault he thought it was and I had not asked him.

Sandra continued talking and I nodded now and again. She didn't seem to notice that I wasn't listening to her; perhaps she did and chose not to show it. She wore a pair of wellcut blue denim overalls and a rather coy shirt of cherry pink cotton. She exuded good physical condition, her skin is perfect, her figure is perfect: yet she knows she cannot hold a man's attention for more than a minute.

Simon and Mr Nicholson returned with three or four other men in the rear. It was an all-male search party. And it was without success. Mr Nicholson was contrite but his panic was so great that he could not command either good manners or a little grace: he shouted something and barged out through the body of the search party and soon we all hear the front door slam.

That slam is like the prick of a pin to a balloon: the party deflates. Goodbye, enthralling party. A few more gins and I will be away to my bed. I pour the first of these gins. Simon has taken Sandra away. I know other faces in the room, but I feel no desire to socialise. I drink the gin down in one swallow and I am suddenly faced with a vacuum. I stand on its brink. This is not depression: this is a more pervasive feeling, boredom. I tell myself that I am bored, as I have done many times before, and as usual nothing happens. The word 'boredom' does not kill boredom. I don't honestly know what boredom is. Apathy? Ennui? Well-worn despair?

I pour the second of my last gins as I think this. For one thing the future has disappeared and nothing has taken its place. I will sleep this night and tomorrow read the papers and supplements; I will eat at one and at seven and then go out for the evening. The future is there alright, but I have already lived it. Lived it five hundred times. I light a cigarette. The flavour is so familiar. I look at the cigarette. Very sweet Virginia: plain and strong. I look and see it very clearly: the clean white paper cylinder, the gold lettering. I smell the burning tobacco. Suddenly I love the cigarette. I drink some gin and tonic. I love the gin and tonic; love the imitation crystal glass that contains it. I love the rather chintzy kitchen, with its bright purposeful homeliness. I expand and love the world. My throat tightens. This love hurts: I'm alive again and back in time. Through excess is the way home. You may not believe it, but I live a life that runs constantly to excess.

I pour my last gin. I had intended drinking four, but three will be sufficient. I want to move. I want to get into my car and drive through this well-worn suburb to my flat. I want to drive through the quiet streets, through the ghastly amber light, under the trees (it is summer) and past the modest semis.

I want to move, to move with the world I love.

I finish my last gin and tonic. I was ready for the world now...

I wasn't. Not quite. My bladder called...

I mounted the stairs two at a time...

As endings go, it was good. Mounting the stairs two at a time... An ending in the minor key: relief, a poetic bliss of sorts. Answering the minor call of nature before the major call...

The bathroom was occupied. I pushed heavily against the door before I realised this. 'Just a sec,' called a muffled voice, someone bent over, or crouched on the pot. It was Sandra. 'Who is it?' she said next, sounding less muffled, less bent over or crouched. I heard the rustle of clothing. 'It's me, Richard.' I am always Richard to Sandra; as Pete is Peter and Madge is Margaret. 'Are you in a hurry?' Afraid of what replying 'no' might walk me into, I said 'Yes'. 'Just a sec,' she repeated, 'I'm almost finished.' She sounded carefree. Perhaps she feels more secure in her own bathroom. Then the latch was drawn. I waited for the door to open. It didn't. 'It's open,' Sandra invited. Nothing loath, I slipped in. The bathroom is fairly small: a bath to the left, the bowl in the right corner and a washbasin towards the door. Sandra was struggling with the straps of her overalls in front of the basin. Hot water gushed into the basin. Obviously she was trying to do two jobs at once. Except that she was fouled up in one of them. She looked up and smiled a public sort of smile: we were not in the bathroom and her clothes were not undone: it was all something else, somewhere else. 'Will you help me with these straps, Richard?' She asked me in a voice she would use to ask the help of a stranger, say to open the door of her car at the supermarket. I helped her. Our hair mingled twice and I had to wrench forcefully a couple of times to get the straps down to the buttons on the bib. Buttoning them, the backs of my hands lay against her small breasts: back of left hand upon right breast and right on left. It was nice, but not that nice, they might have been plastic coated foam rubber. She watched me with a cocky smile. Dressed, she thanked me and turned her attention to the gushing tap. I went to the bowl, thinking it the best place to wait until she had finished her ablution. She had forgotten to flush the bowl. A thin stool and a few pieces of floating shit betrayed a dry run. The single piece of tissue was hardly creased and was marked with nothing more than a light brown stain. I flushed it all away into the sewers. I waited then. The water still gushed behind me. Then Sandra interrupted my peace, for bathrooms are peaceful places, with: 'You know you were dancing with her.' 'Who?' I asked absently. 'That man's wife.' I turned to her. She had been watching me: but she was not embarrassed about not having flushed her crap away. I was merely an attendant in her home. 'Oh,' I replied, my eyebrows lifting. It expressed everything or nothing. She turned the tap off and lifted a nice clean towel from the rail beside the basin. She watched herself drying her own hands. 'I thought he would go for me in the kitchen.' She said this reflectively, she could have been talking about a dream. She looked at me: 'The way his eyes stared. I thought he would foam at the mouth or something. He might be an epileptic, you never know.' Something crossed my mind, a suspicion. 'Do you know her? His wife, I mean.' 'Oh, yes. She cleans for me.' Surprise, surprise. What had Sandra been planning? 'I thought she would bring her husband. It seemed a good idea at the time to invite her.' Nothing sinister, after all. Now she looked at herself in the mirror. 'You go ahead, Richard. Don't mind me.' She smiled at me in the mirror: 'After all, I'm a married woman. You won't shock me.' She said this as though we had never fucked. However, I obeyed her and unzipped. My piddle spurted against the side of the bowl and hissed down into the reservoir of water. With the clearing of my bladder came the clearing of my head. I felt reasonably good and remembered my mood downstairs. 'It's funny you've never married, Richard. You can easily afford it now.' Sandra was now brushing her hair. It struck me suddenly that she might be stalling. A thought crossed my mind: Does she want me to fuck her here in the bathroom? Surely not. We'd had our fling years ago. Besides, her overall thing was almost a chastity belt. 'Uh huh,' I said noncommittally. 'You must be in your middle thirties now.' 'Uh huh.' I heard her put the comb down, then she was at my side. I was in the process of shaking the last few drops from my penis. She looked down at it. 'You're an absolute scoundrel,' she said calmly. It looks like affectionate abuse on paper. It wasn't: it was arch, Imitation Victorian. Calmly, I stuffed my penis away and zipped up, asking: 'Why?' 'The way you led that woman on. Honestly, there were others down there who are more your sort.' I flushed the bowl with sudden fury. She was smirking when I turned to her. I said: 'Who for instance? You?' It wasn't a good counterstroke. She should have been prepared for it. To my deep satisfaction, she wasn't. She threw her head and marched out of the bathroom. I let her go. I could make up later. I ran my hands under the cold water and splashed some on my face. I dried myself. The gin had made me slow and I didn't like that. I should have anticipated her. But it was impossible to explain what had happened during that dance with the woman in blue. It would seem as though I was making excuses for myself. It was too complicated. I dipped into depression. Too late and too much drink for thoughts like this. I made for the door: the easiest thing to do is to change. I had one foot on the stairs: the front door was open below and I could see the sterile glow of the street-lighting, when:

'Excuse me.'

'Yes?' I said politely before turning. Not knowing what would happen next, I was neutral. It was Teenager. 'You're the one who danced with Paula.' It was a flat statement delivered in Neo-Cockney, the sort suburban Cockneys who have been through school speak. I made my 'Uh huh' speech. 'I thought you were,' she said with satisfaction. 'I saw you come up the stairs.' She came into the light on the landing. She looked tired: way past her bedtime. 'Will you come in here. I want you to help me.' Indeed, I thought. Her self-possession was comical, otherwise it would have been presumptuous. I followed her into the spare bedroom. On the bed sat or lay the woman in blue: Mrs Paula Nicholson. She propped her head on her right hand, her elbow resting between the pillow and the headboard; her legs were drawn up under her bottom – the nylon stocking about her knees ready to burst apart under the pressure, and her left hand was buried between her thighs. Her breasts trembled as the rest of her shook with sobs. I noticed her breasts immediately: they were my introduction to her, the part I knew best. Teenager came and stood beside me and imitated my study of her. 'She's been like this since we came up here.' 'What's wrong with her?' I asked clinically. 'I don't know. She won't tell me,' Teenager said disarmingly. 'I thought she might tell you.' Well, wise old adult that I am, I sent Teenager downstairs to fetch some water. I explained something about fresh water and tank water. Away she went, eager to do my bidding. Then I sat down beside the woman in blue. I shook her shoulder gently. Her flesh was hot and it quivered violently at my touch. She turned a bruised-looking face to me, eyes red, mascara all down her cheeks: the layers of translucent cosmetic had long been ruined. 'Hi,' I said, a little out of character: 'Remember me?' I thought it best to get over this potentially traumatic memory first. She bit her lower lip and nodded. 'Mind if I smoke?' I asked conversationally. She pulled her hand from between her thighs and signalled that I could go ahead. I lit a cigarette. As I did I prepared my opening gambit (Right, tell me all about it./What's the matter then?) but she saved me the trouble by blurting out: 'He'll beat me. He'll beat me, I know it.' The important point about this statement is that I had no answer for it, except perhaps an incredulous stare. She began to repeat it, but I stopped her by asking: 'Why didn't he come with you?, This produced results: 'I didn't tell him about it. I wanted to come on my own, see, and enjoy myself. I asked Angie to come so we could have an adventure. Angie has never been to a party like this before and she said she would enjoy it too. He went out to play football and I knew he would drink with his mates afterwards and I thought we would be back before he got home. I didn't know the party wouldn't get going till nearly twelve o'clock and I couldn't pull myself away without having just one dance or something to make the night worthwhile. And then he came in like a madman and I knew he would beat me if he found me here. He would beat me in front of all these nice people. I was ashamed and we ran up here and hid under the bed and waited till he was gone. I don't know how he found out we were here. Angie's Mom must have told him. Maybe she was worried too, because I told her that Angie would be home before twelve.' She looked up at me. She seemed relieved by this confession. Her sobbing subsided. I said: 'Has he beaten you before?' 'Oh yes, but it wasn't anything serious. This is the first time I've lied to him. He'll murder me for that, because he's straight.' I felt pity for her. A distant, because strange, and awesome. because intense, pity. It frightened me. I checked myself and said: 'Look, you fix yourself up and I'll take the two of you home. I don't know how you'll pacify him, but we'll think of something.' I remembered Teenager and the water. She should have been back long before now. I opened the door and discovered her bent before it, hands on her knees and her mouth open. She had no water. She jumped back and looked at me with defiance. I went to the bathroom and filled the tooth-glass, ignoring my earlier distinction between fresh and tank water. Teenager followed me in. 'Will he beat her?' she asked me, more eager curiosity than concern in her voice. 'I don't know,' I replied curtly. I should have shown anger or disapproval, but I couldn't. Her naivety charmed me. I brought the water to Paula and she gulped it down. Then she sat on the edge of the bed, wringing her hands and staring at the floor. 'Fix yourself,' I reminded her. She threw me one look and ran her fingers through her hair. I turned to Teenager and told her to help her. She leaped to obey me and in a second it was as though I wasn't in the room: they began to bicker at once about what should be done. Paula wanted to replace her make-up and Angie wanted her to go and wash the whole lot off. Still bickering, Paula applied cream and lipstick; then she suddenly broke off doing this and agreed with Angie. She went into the bathroom. Angie made as though to follow her, then she stopped and glanced at me and came back. She waited until the door of the bathroom closed before saying: 'She liked you. She thinks you're sexy.' This was frankly said. I smiled. However, to business: 'Why did she come without him? She must have known there would be trouble.' Angie flopped down on the bed and patted that I was to follow suit. I did so. She composed her hands in her lap, wrinkled her young face and then turned to me. 'She didn't think of that. She could only think of the fun she was going to have here. When the party was over and she had to go home again was like the end of the world to her, not worth worrying about.' 'But,' I interjected, 'She couldn't have enjoyed herself. She danced only once as far as I know.' And I couldn't help adding: 'You must have had a worse time. You never got to dance at all.' She paused before replying: 'Oh, I thought it was interesting. Anyway, I thought you would dance with me next.' She threw me a very sweet look as she said the latter. 'How can you be so sure?' I bantered. 'Because I'm young and not married.' I smiled openly: 'That's no guarantee.' She was suddenly crestfallen, and she fought against it: 'But you would have. You're no different than the other men.' Now I was surprised. Had I been wrong about her? 'How do you mean?' 'Oh,' she flounced, 'men are always asking me to go to bed with them.' I had asked for that. Nevertheless, I stuck it out: 'And do you?' She gave me a long theatrical look: 'What do you think?' Then she looked clever and superior: 'I wouldn't give them the satisfaction.' I decided not to pursue the subject. We were getting on to thin ice: I didn't know how serious she was trying not to be. I sat back and lit another cigarette. Angie mistook this for rebuff. She turned quickly to me and said: 'But you are nice.' I was in again with a chance in her own private tragi-comedy. 'Thank you,' I said too-stiffly. I did feel rebuffed. This was getting too deep. But I wasn't to escape so easily. She stood up and stanced herself with parted legs before me. 'Look at me,' she said with a mixture of defiance and entreaty. 'I saw you look at Paula downstairs as though you would like to eat her.' She made sure she was in the light and that I could see her clearly – when:

Paula came back. She looked ungainly. All arse and tits. She had washed her face and combed her hair. She looked less of a disaster area now and more of a woman fat and old before her years. I said: 'Feeling better?' She smiled wanly and nodded. 'Don't worry,' I continued, 'we'll think of something.' I stood up and told Paula to sit on the bed. Then I turned quickly on Angie, still poised in the centre of the room, and told her, with affectionate brusqueness, to run and wash her face. She put her hand to her face in surprise and ran out. I sat beside Paula and offered her a cigarette, which she accepted in silence. I lit it for her. I waited until she had exhaled her first lungful of smoke before speaking: 'How many children have you?' She replied glumly: 'Four.' I had always thought that children were a source of happiness for women. 'Are you not happy?' I asked her tenderly. She looked at me as though I had broken into a foreign language. I returned her stare. Her eyes were very red. 'I had the first one when I was seventeen.' This was meant to explain something. She had spoken with a mixture of emotions: resentment, pain, ingratitude, but also with pride and satisfaction. I think she meant it to explain everything. I suddenly saw her stools: bumper, moist, steaming; in a word, generous. 'Did you enjoy yourself at all tonight?' I asked her. She was disarmingly shy: 'Yes.' Then she was defiant: 'I did.' She looked me in the eye in a provocative way. 'Really?' I countered. She tossed her head as though to defy me further: 'Yes, I got enough... I was tensed up, see?' I lowered my eyes. I did not want her to see my blush. 'Will you go to more parties?' I said. She laughed: an atavistic laugh. 'Yes!' No more than that. It seems unconvincing on paper. In actuality it wasn't: her whole body expressed it. I felt it wash over me. I put my hand on her fine knee and said: 'I'll tell Mrs Amesbury.' She patted my hand; it wasn't encouragement – it was charity. 'Don't you dare. She wouldn't have me in to clean if she thought that.' I squeezed her knee and she smiled at me and pressed down on my hand. My breath caught. I moved my hand slowly up her thigh and her hand remained resting on mine, though not in any way hindering me. It sank down between her thighs and she jerked convulsively and sobbed. I stared at her heaving breasts – then:

Angie came back. She marched in with a set face and said offhandedly: 'Don't mind me.' I was sure she had been listening at the door again. I minded her. I pulled my hand away and Paula's face lost that bland, doting expression. I pulled myself together. I had difficulty in hiding my erection when I stood up. 'Well,' I said breezily, 'are we ready?' I caught Angie's glance at Paula: she was jealous, violently so. And what was worse, Paula recognised it and smiled sweetly in return. I hadn't thought of jealousy, but thinking of it now I realised it explained a lot of their behaviour in the bedroom. I got out of the room and hurried down the stairs. In the hall Sandra stopped me: 'Richard, I thought you had gone hours ago.' She seemed friendly. Over her shoulder I saw Simon and the Macmahons, and a few others, sitting around the now lit gasfire. They were drinking coffee and listening to Simon and Garfunkel. 'I'm dropping some people off,' I said by way of apology or explanation: not knowing which was required at this moment. Everyone heard Paula come down those stairs. Sandra looked up. 'Why, Paula,' she said in her most public voice, 'I thought you had gone absolutely ages ago.' She paused before continuing: 'Your husband was looking for you, you know. He was terribly upset. I've never seen such a worried man.' Paula came down into the hall, followed by a murderous looking Angie. 'He'll get over it,' Paula said loudly, damning accent and volume. It came straight from the shoulder and Sandra got it between the eyes. Paula pushed her head over Sandra's shoulder and called into the cosy room: 'Goodnight, everybody. Great party, Mr Amesbury.' Simon was on his feet, considerate and physical. He came to the door with us – Sandra had disappeared. While Angie walked with me to the car, Paula stayed for a moment to talk with Simon and we heard both of them laughing, loudly. The laughter broke upon the sleeping street like the instant of creation. I could picture Simon's growing flush. There would be war in the Amesbury household on the subject of Paula's continued employment as cleaner. Then she came out on to the pavement, still laughing, waving to Simon. She was chuckling as she got in beside me. Angie gave a long theatrical sigh of boredom.

It wasn't far to the council estate. Paula had quietened as we neared her home, but she didn't lose heart. I stopped outside on the road. 'Let's all go up and try to explain to your husband what happened,' I volunteered. Paula wrenched at the unfamiliar door-handle, saying: 'Billy won't listen to anything we have to say. I lied to him and that's that.' 'No matter,' I insisted, 'we'll all go up.' Then Angie in the back muttered: 'Not me. I don't want to have to fight him off.' I decided to be firm with her: 'OK. You go home and I'll walk Paula home.' We got out of the car. Angie hesitated, threw one killing look at Paula and went off down a path towards a block of the flats. Paula glanced at me, to see how I had reacted to Angie, then she smiled and shrugged. We walked in silence down the same path, under the harsh sodium lights the council had provided. She was quiet now, obviously beginning to steel herself for the coming trouble. I could do little to protect her. I don't think she either expected or wanted me to do anything. We passed the first block and then came to some trees. It was quiet, with only a few lights on in the flats. I remarked on the rather stark beauty of the trees in the white light of the sodium lamps. Paula stopped walking and grasped my arm. 'What's wrong?' I asked, my voice betraying tension. 'It's not that,' she said. 'Come in here.' She pointed towards the trees. Once in the dark of the little grove, she said: 'Kiss me.' She spoke with urgency rather than passion. 'But shouldn't you go in?' I asked. 'It's late, you know.' She caught my hand. 'Don't you want to?' she asked, suddenly querulous. I stepped closer to her. She lifted my hand and pressed it fitfully against her breasts. They were as soft as I had imagined them to be. So were her lips. Her mouth was huge, her tongue very ticklish and wet. She seemed to struggle, then she broke away. She caught me by the shoulders and stared up at me. When she had finally caught my eye, she said almost in desperation: 'Do it to me, please.' I squeezed her breasts and her face crumpled as she sighed loudly. I did not believe then that I was either the true cause or true object of her intense desire. Nevertheless, her desire had a pattern that was familiar to me, and it was this I responded to. Perhaps unavoidably, she became an object of my service. Her eyes were closed and her mouth hung open. When I lifted her dress, she immediately bent and pulled/pushed her panties and stockings down and pulled them over her foot. She leaned back against a tree, bent her knees apart and held up her dress to further facilitate me. I was mechanical in unzipping and pushing my own clothes down. It was awkward at first, until she thrust forward and lifted her body, then I entered her: ample, well-worn, much fucked from early years, four children, and very moist. It was this realisation which prompted me to let go. Though it didn't last very long, our passions were furious and utterly abandoned.

Afterwards, she quickly pulled up her stockings and panties and settled them upon her with a complicated twist and push of her hips. Then she kissed me clumsily and said in a low voice: 'Thanks. That was lovely.' She was abstracted. I don't think she knew who she was speaking to.

She giggled a lot between the trees and the stairs that led up to her flat. 'Better be hung for a sheep as a lamb' was the motto. She repeated it often. At the foot of the stairs I said: 'Will he beat you?' I was uneasy for her, though less now than earlier. 'Not now he won't,' she said, seemingly returning to earth. I was puzzled. Had she been leading me along with some obscure scheme? 'He'll be asleep,' she explained. 'The light's out. I'll sleep on the settee.' 'Won't he have locked you out?' 'No. He took the bolt off so I wouldn't hear him coming in when he's drunk.' The last thing I did before she went was to shake her hand. It was a complicated gesture – as wise as I could be at four in the morning.

I felt muzzy and slightly self-conscious as I walked down the path to my car. I had a nagging feeling that I had left something behind. Perhaps it was shame, but I thought then that it was regret. It wasn't that I felt guilty for leading Paula on, for being the cause of her troubles. I wasn't. It was because I saw, though perhaps not for the first time, that our passions are ultimately not our own.

Anyway, I also saw that the sky was light in the east. Day had come.

...It was four in the morning: the start of a bright Sunday.

The story should have ended there for sure: night-thoughts ending with the greeting of a new day, a kind of protective wrapping for the reader.

But it didn't...

Angie sat on my car, swinging her legs, looking up at the bright new day with confident expectation. The sun always rises...

I had had time to look at her in the bedroom before Paula returned from the bathroom (Angie had been right: I hadn't paid much attention to her downstairs). I have not hitherto mentioned this because there was no reason to. The two things most obvious about her are (1) her unusually spherical breasts and (2) how badly she dressed. The skirt she wore was far too tight on her hips (the zip at the back was broken and didn't fasten fully, exposing a diamond of mud coloured panties) and hung unevenly. It looked as though it had been hastily run up, using material that had been woven on a home-made loom by either a blind or crippled person. It colour was indeterminate: either a blue of sorts or a purple of sorts. The blouse was as bad: again too tight (bare flesh between the buttons down the front), made of a cheap nylon fabric that had been washed to a shade of dull white with a hint of pale blue. The bra that showed plainly through it was all humps and bumps and too small for its purpose. She wore no make-up except a clashing (clashing with what?) lipstick. She had obviously raked her hair, which was sun-bleach in colour, once or twice – while cleaning her teeth or something. Don't misunderstand me: this is not an example of Welfare State poverty. These people no longer know what poverty is – neither do they know what richness is. It was an example of Welfare State indifference; an evasion of social pride and self-respect, and that for better or worse. She was not a pretty sight, but she did look tremendously fit and sane. And sceptical, keeping some kinds of personal truths to herself. She was not sexy, but she looked as though she could undertake it as a practical activity without doing anything foolish. So. She was a private person; a suburban person.

She waved a careless hand offhandedly: 'You took your time.' It was matter-of-fact: but it betrayed a remnant of her earlier jealousy.

I didn't play: I was oblique: 'I thought you had gone home.' I left her out there on her own.

'I changed my mind. I don't feel like going home.'

I rattled my keys. 'Well, I'm off. It's after four.'

She tilted her head: 'Enjoy yourself?' Yes, the jealousy was still there. It rankled against her will. I nodded with studied complacence: I would give her nothing.

This annoyed her: 'Did you get what you wanted?' I had a suspicion that she had been watching.

'Paula did,' I said levelly, challenging her eyes. It stung. By rights she should go home now. She slipped off the car and murmured, 'Oh'. She sounded as though she was deeply puzzled by something.

I opened the door and got in behind the wheel. Before I had the key in the ignition she was in beside me. She sat quite still for at least a half minute, her hands in her lap, her eyes straight ahead. I should have spoken then, but I didn't.

She looked over at me: 'Take me to your flat.' She suddenly stretched her hands above her head, pressing them against the roof. Her blouse underwent terrific strain.

I knew that her request, or instruction, promised nothing. Jealousy was prompting her. Anyway, I was tired. 'No. You go home. Your parents will be worried about you.'

She shook her head with instant annoyance and slid lower in the seat. She lifted her left foot on to the shelf under the glove compartment. 'They don't know,' she said wearily, as though my remark about her parents betrayed my stupidity. Her knee was level with my eye, bare and white. Her skirt slid slowly back up her thigh. Two more inches and I would have seen the crotch of her mud yellow panties. My penis, stiff and sticky with Paula, moved. Angie, as I have said, wasn't sexy as such, she didn't ordinarily make appeals of this sort. She was direct and very physical. Her bare legs were real, were themselves in a daunting way: they could not be turned into something else.

'Come on now, Angie. The party's over.' It was the first time I had called her by name and she noticed it:

'What's your name?' She said this while continuing to gaze straight ahead.

'Richard. But you can call me Dick, if you wish.'

'No. I'll call you Richard. You're more of a Richard than a Dick.' She looked at me in triumph. Was this how she gained her victories? Where Paula gave you her breasts to reduce you, did Angie subvert your whole ego? Did one seek only the appropriate means for release while the other sought the whole man?

Angie returned to looking out the windscreen. She had a pronounced face: stubby nose, regular, hard-looking lips, and steady blue eyes. But she was not a subtle girl.

'And your proper name is Angela?'

'Yeah.' Toughly said. Then relinquishing: 'Angela O'Brien. But I don't like it.'

'What if I called you Angela?' I teased, my way of matching her toughness.

She threw her eyes to the roof. 'Just like you.' She was flattered. How easily she was flattered. Her need for attention made her more human.

'Now, Angela, will you go home.' I tried to sound firm and final. The sun was almost up. The red sky just above the line of chestnut trees on the edge of the estate was turning to pure fire. The street had a clean, fresh quality that I was not used to seeing. It struck me that each day began like this.

Angie had taken her foot down. Was this an experiment that had failed? I suddenly doubted it. She didn't seem that self-conscious of her body.

'Let me go home with you,' she asked face to face. 'I won't be a nuisance, honest. I want to talk to you. I know I can talk to you.'

'But it's so late. Look, the sun is up.'

She glanced in that direction and dismissed it with a twist of her nose. Then she turned and grasped my hand:

'Please! I won't stay long. You needn't drive me back.'

Her hand was dry and strong. She won some kind of victory. Yet it wasn't jealousy that drove her. I relented and said dispassionately, while switching on the engine:

'Alright. But remember, this is your idea.'

She sat upright and clasped her hands about her knee:

'Don't worry. I can look after myself.'

Indeed. She was trying to have it all her own way. First she pleads with me to take her to my flat, then she warns me off rape!

I put the car in gear and moved off as quietly as possible:

My flat is modest, by any standards, with little more than the necessities in it.

Angie put her hands on her hips, looked around, nodding and beginning to smile:

'Nice' was all she said. But it was appreciative. While I switched the kettle on she went into the other rooms. We met back in the sitting room.

She waved one hand at me. She smiled in a way that I can only describe as intimate. 'It is really good, Richard.' She said this as though it was a hard-earned judgement. 'I never guessed it would be like this. It's so...so simple.'

I motioned that she should sit where-ever she wished. She chose a straight-backed chair by the table. 'What did you expect?' I asked.

She waved that hand again: 'Oh, you know. Lousy furniture, bits of this and that. You know, sentimental.'

She looked at me with intimacy: 'I must tell you this, Richard. When I first saw you I thought you were queer.'

'Why?'

'The way you seemed apart from everybody at the party. As though you were different from them all.'

I was defensive. We were, after all, strangers.

'I'm not different.'

'Oh, you are,' she shouted, unexpectedly boisterous. Was she trying to programme me again? 'You're modest and you're independent!'

Independence, perhaps. But modesty?

'Hardly modest, Angie.'

'Oh, you are! That's why I thought you were queer. Because you were so patient with Paula.'

The kettle! I hurried into the kitchen. It was boiling. I asked Angie whether she wanted tea or coffee.

'Whatever you are making for yourself,' she sang in reply.

I made tea.

'Are you hungry?' I called. I waited for her to answer, but she came into the kitchen. 'Are you hungry?' I asked her again.

'What have you got?'

'Bread, cheese.' I opened the fridge. 'Eggs? Some bacon. Tomatoes.'

She came over to the fridge. 'Let me fix something.'

I fell back. 'Do you want any thing?' she asked me.

'Some cheese and tomato.'

She busied herself. Efficiently. In no time at all she had some sandwiches prepared. I poured the tea.

'Oh good. You made tea. I don't like coffee.'

We went back to the sitting room. She resumed her seat by the table and I sat opposite. It was difficult to eat much: I would have preferred sleep to food. Angie ate everything before her. When she had finished, she said:

'You know he'll beat her.'

'You mean Paula?'

'Yes.'

'How do you know?'

'He does it regularly, she says. I think she actually likes it. That's why she got into such a state tonight.'

'But she said he would be asleep.'

'She was only trying to stop you worrying about her. He'll still be up. He's crazy about her.'

'Why then did she do it?'

'She wanted to enjoy herself, as she said. And she did enjoy herself. You made her night for her. And because she enjoyed herself and was happy, she knew she would be punished.'

I must have looked shocked, for she went on:

'They're all like that. The minute they're happy they get guilty and expect to be punished. Funny thing is, they are usually punished in some way or other.'

'That's nonsense. You're being morbid.'

'Don't you believe that?'

'No, of course not.'

'Are you ever happy?'

'Yes, I am.'

She went to get the teapot. I looked out the window. The rays of the sun fell on the chimney pots of the houses on the other side of the avenue. Everything was very quiet.

The beauty of the morning didn't distract me. It seemed little more than a silent still image. Even so, studying that image released something in me: in contrast to the morning scene, I was aware of the constant movement within myself.

Angie came back. She poured tea for both of us.

'Are you happy, Angie?'

She didn't answer. I watched her walk out with the teapot and come back and sit down. Her face was grim.

'No,' she said shortly.

'Are you afraid of being punished?'

'I don't know. I don't know why they're always punished.' She looked at me with a peculiar dogged intentness and I knew she was going to confess something private. 'I just don't have the nerve, Richard.'

'Nerve?' I prompted. I knew what she meant.

'Yes. I can't let go. Not the way Paula does. She takes it both ways. But I want everything to be peaceful. I don't want to be touched by people and things, because you never get to the bottom of them.'

I finished my tea. The sun was still shining on the chimneys. It was beginning to touch the roofs. I realised that one can be very aware of the movement of the sun when it is rising.

'You're like that too, Richard, aren't you?' Angie's voice was tender, but it seemed a weakness in her, a pose. From her, it was an appeal of the wrong kind. It let in more of life than she could safely handle. She was trying to wrap the two of us in a cocoon of rational passivity. That's what she meant by 'talk': she wanted to kill life with words. But she didn't seem to realise that she was also trapping life in the cocoon with us.

So I said: 'Angie, you're always letting go. You're just refusing to acknowledge that.'

She didn't like that. It frightened her. She shook her head with a kind of intimidating authority. 'No. I don't do what Paula and her likes do.'

'No. Not like that. But look, you punish yourself even so. Look at how you dress.'

She did. Then she took up her cup and drank, to cover her self-consciousness. When she had drunk, she said 'Yeah' into the cup with a tone of contempt that showed her refusal to be convinced.

I stood up. The talk was ended. 'Come on. I'll drive you home.'

She looked at me in surprise. 'Not yet. I've only just got here.'

I glanced at my watch. Five fifteen. 'I want to get to bed.'

'Look,' she said directly to me. 'You go in and I'll let myself out when I'm ready. I told you I'd walk home, didn't I?'

I felt too weary to argue with her. I rubbed my chin and waited in silence.

'Look,' she said again, just as forthrightly. 'Would you like me to go in with you? Go to bed with you, I mean.'

Once she said that I wasn't surprised. But it was hard to know what was motivating her: jealousy, loneliness, or a means to go on talking.

'I thought you didn't give satisfaction,' I said, my teasing sounding malicious.

She showed no reaction to this. Instead, she was totally preoccupied and serious, as though something else was on her mind. But she said: 'I didn't mean it that way. I was talking about the guys who hang around the estate. You're different, I've told you that. I can talk with you. Really talk, I mean. I wouldn't mind it with you.'

Her passivity made her a sexual object, of course, and I responded to that. But that's always a chimera. But she was being different to her usual self, that much was true. So I said:

'You're still jealous of Paula, aren't you?'

It worked. She flared: 'That fat old bitch!' Then she quietened and said insinuatingly: 'How could you fancy an old bag like that, Richard?'

I suppose there were deeper motives, but that was enough. Anyway, my bladder was full after the tea. As a parting shot, I asked:

'You know why Paula gets punished, Angie?'

She didn't like talking about her. 'I suppose you've got some religious reason about sex,' she threw at me, gesturing that she wasn't really interested.

'Goodness, no. Though she might have. Well, superstition anyway. No. It's her selfishness. She steals her gratification from others.'

'But he's crazy about her!' she shouted.

I stepped back towards the door. 'Crazy about what, Angie? Her tits? Her cosmetics? Or the children?' I went to the door. My bladder was insistent. 'Here's another thing, Angie. Is she crazy about him?'

I darted to the bathroom. Pissing, my head cleared. I didn't think of what I had just said, nor did I anticipate her reaction, as I had planned to do. Instead I suddenly realised what happiness is. Everyone knows what happiness is. The difficulty lies in saying what it is. But like love, it is a form of active identification. I mean something which is done rather than thought. I had been happy earlier in the night. And from the quiet centre of my bathroom in the early hours of Sunday morning, I realised that I am in fact a happy person. But I don't have to think about it, it just is. Then I saw that it is also like passion, in that it is recognised only when it is past. That's when you do think about it, because that's the only way to experience it, in memory. So, like love and passion, happiness is transcendent. Then everything went clunk and everything was in place. I had to make a note of it immediately. It may not be true, but it was a crest of insight.

I flushed away my piss.

Angie was poking about my few books on the shelf beside the fireplace. She was bent over and her skirt was drawn tightly across her buttocks, the diamond of mud coloured cloth stretched into a new and irregular shape. The backs of her knees were blue.

She heard me come in and turned, a book in her hand.

'Hey, Richard, is this you? Richard Butler?'

I glanced at the spine. 'Yes.'

She seemed amazed. She began to flip through it, reading passages.

I searched the drawer of my desk, not sure which notebook to use. It didn't seem a story insight and I'm not a philosopher. I decided to put it into my old red diary, into which I sometimes put those profound thoughts which are both too personal and far less profound on second reading.

'Is this where you write?' Angie was standing beside me. She picked up a pencil and I grabbed it from her.

'Leave that alone.'

I found a pen. She leaned over, watching me write:

Transcendence: a state/mood/passion which consciousness of can radically affect. Love. Passion. Happiness. Perhaps there's only one constant/ pervasive state (etc) and many words which touch it at different points. Do words then fragment the whole? Yes, yes. But I write. Why? Return to the whole – can't lose consciousness why?

Angie jumped back when I straightened up. I knew she would like nothing better than dive into that notebook, the whole drawer.

But it's all around her as it is. It's the word she wants, like everyone.

'Are you a virgin, Angie?' It's quantum physics. But so what, if it's true. She answered without hesitation: 'No.' Then she said, 'Is it important?' I nearly missed that, because I was thinking that either knowledge is a tissue of illusions or else there was truth in it. Anyway, I finally caught what she had said and replied, 'No. I just wondered.'

She came closer. She was still buzzing and holding the book. 'It was one of the kids in the block.' She looked down. I concentrated on her: she wanted to confess again.

'He said I was too cold and dry.'

Suddenly I got it. To Angie I said as I went back to the desk: 'Take your clothes off.' Instinct told me to say this. She has to be allowed to maintain her autonomy: she must be allowed do things her own way as far as possible.

I got the notebook again. The pen was beside it:

Consciousness is human: it is always there, even in madness. Transcendence is 'wider'? than human: it must be allowed its place.

Therefore(!) consciousness must become transcendent.

Enough of that, I thought. The words are running away with themselves.

When I turned I caught my breath.

Angie has a superb body. I stared, naturally. I was right to tell her to undress. She seemed very relieved to be nude.

She looked down herself momentarily unsure and self-conscious. Then she looked at me: 'Now you.'

Of course. My penis was semi-erect. Her eyes on it reminded me. 'I must wash myself.'

She walked over, loosening as she did, letting her hands fall by her sides. 'Don't bother. I don't mind.'

'I do.' I let her put her arms about me and press herself against me. Then I released myself and went into the bathroom. She followed me in. She watched me for a while, arms folded under her breasts.

'I didn't realise you were passionate, Richard.' She said this as though she was slowly releasing herself to something that could be dangerous.

Then she went and sat on the bowl. Her piss hissed and spluttered.

'You've a nice soft body,' she said behind and below me.

I glanced down. She put her hand out in a careful way and stroked my bottom, pulling gently on the hair. I dried myself. The sight of her drying herself, slightly bent and opened, prompted me to turn suddenly and embrace her. I caught her by surprise and she tipped back, frightened, clinging to me and arching her body. But then she regained her balance and laughed and hugged me with not too surprising strength.

My desire calmed somewhat and we broke apart and went into the bedroom. She glanced at me once and I saw a curious elation in her, as though she had finally found something. She went to the bed, stopped, then came back to me, her eyes bright, and said directly to me: 'Can I read your book, Richard?' She pulled up her shoulders in a kind of exultation: 'I'd love to read everything you've written!'

I heard the word 'talk' again. She went to the bed again and this time she bent to pull back the clothes. It was a dutiful act, as though she was alone. But the urge came on me again and I reached my hand between her legs and grabbed her sex. I must have hurt her, though it wasn't just that, for she spun on me with blazing eyes. 'Don't do that!' she said in a childish, long-suffering way. She glared at me, her hands across her breasts and groin. She was fighting fear with a cold counter-passion.

I stepped back. 'What are you afraid of? You can always go home, as I've told you.'

'It's not that,' she said abstractly. Under the cover of the words she went around the bed and got in on that side. 'Don't sneak up on me like that, Richard. I don't like it.'

I sat on this side of the bed. 'There's only one way to do it, Angie.'

She lay down and covered herself, only her head showing.

She seemed to be thinking. Tired, I began to feel chilly. I got in beside her. She didn't move when my body touched hers.

'That's the way you were like with Paula.' She paused. 'Like dogs.'

It was so apt that it made me laugh. Laughing, I felt all the kinks in me loosen.

When I looked, I saw that she was puzzled by my laughter. So I said, just to remind her: 'You were jealous of her.'

She was coldly livid in response. She rolled and dropped down on me, pinning me with her weight. Glaring at me, she shouted: 'Oh, fuck you, Richard Butler. I wasn't jealous of what that tart could do. I was jealous that you preferred her to me!'

She was right. But it was still only female rivalry. So I said, hearing it echo as a kind of fundamental question:

'Why me, Angie?'

She caught my ears and pinned them back, shouting into my face: 'Because you're different, that's why!'

She was hurting me and I was losing my temper. I said, 'I'm not,' and to prove it I reared up and threw her over. Before she could get over her surprise, I lay on her and spread her arms. She resisted me at first, then she relented with a sobbing sigh. I straddled her, looking down at her body and face. She was passive, fearful and resentful. I finally saw what she wanted.

I got off her and sat up in the bed. Like most people, she saw that sex and violence intersected. Those were the two ways. That's what she meant by punishment. Angie wanted a third way, what she called 'talk'. Words instead of actions.

I went into the sitting room and took out the notebook again. I read what I had written earlier. Now I added:

A transcendent consciousness would be impossible. Consciousness arises in difference – it couldn't be both sameness and difference.

I paused, feeling both the brightness of insight and the dissolution of the earlier synthesis.

Between the transcendent and consciousness lies the world of action, that is, difference. If it was to be argued that union could be achieved by the abandonment of action, this might also lead to the loss of consciousness.

I could see the next step, but I don't like philosophy. It goes in circles. I went back to the bedroom, taking the notebook and pen with me.

Angie lay as I had left her, the blankets across her legs. I drew the curtains on the brightening sunlight. I crossed and looked down at her. She was silent now, waiting to see what I would do next.

She has a beautiful body: perfectly proportioned and with alabaster skin. But what good is it to her if it only arouses proprietary desire? Even so, I said with a deliberate wry humour:

'You have a beautiful body, Angie.'

I bent and kissed her tight dry lips.

'Try to be happy.' I got into bed beside her and pulled up the clothes. In the notebook I wrote:

So only transcendence is possible – love happiness passion. But how to escape consciousness????

I dropped it on the floor, aware that I was back where I started. I turned away from Angie and snuggled down, feeling drowsiness coming with the growing warmth.

Then Angie turned and snuggled in against me.

It was delightful to feel her perfect body warm my back.

But I couldn't tell her that. I had to trust her to know it.

I sighed contentedly. It had been a long night.

We slept.

##

The Fourth Man is the first volume of the Kingswood Black Books Tetralogy, which is an account of the life of Richard Butler, an Irish writer.

The full title list is as follows:

Volume One: The Fourth Man

Volume Two: Lupita

Volume Three: Crow Station

Volume Four: Solomon's Dream

All these novels are available for download on this site.

This tetralogy is the second Subcycle of a larger cycle of novels called Dark Liberation. A short Introduction to Dark Liberation is available for download on this site. Most of the novels of this cycle will be published here.
