Portobello Notebook (6 page)

He didn’t know what he felt except anxiety, and that it was better than Jane’s party. The Christ Church bells were striking midnight as he crossed the river, and a few minutes later the guard stopped under the arch. Now they hadn’t so much talk. The guard asked about his evening, but when Justin told him of the art exhibition and the party, he was silent. When Justin asked him about his night’s duty, he didn’t reply. His heavy face stared at the road ahead, he drove at sixty on the straight stretch by the canal. When they came to the town, he stopped in the main street and said slowly, ‘Will you walk the rest?’ His face had a dark smile as Justin hesitated, a scowl as he got out. It was three in the morning when he reached the school, but he felt so frightened and elated that he sat up playing records on Mr Porter’s old gramophone in the staff room until dawn.

AS NATURALLY
as he had come to learn the boys’ names, now he knew the people in the cottages and farmhouses that had seemed so strange a year before. When he saw wild birds flock above the road he knew that Rose was out walking, throwing stale bread along the verge. Colonel Browne stopped his van whenever he saw him, and rolled down his window to talk. In the pub at closing time he was invited into the kitchen to drink whiskey with the old parish priest. He learned that the woman Rose lived with was her illegitimate daughter, that Colonel Browne’s wife suffered from her nerves. He was settling deeper in this place. One autumn evening the headmaster took him to a Harvest Thanksgiving in a tiny church, filled with the scent of vegetables and fruit and ripe wheat sheaves, where an old man with a white moustache scraped the hymn music on a violin. Driving home through blowing drifts of golden beech leaves, the headmaster gave a fatherly smile and said, ‘I always wanted to be able to share all this with someone.’ Justin didn’t return the smile. Suddenly he wanted to be able to share all this with someone else.

GEORGE MARRIED JOY
and moved to a cottage in the school grounds, where they invited him one evening to meet their pastor. But when they knelt down after tea – under a poker-work plaque that said, ‘Cooking lasts, kissing don’t!’ – and prayed for Justin’s salvation, he felt that it was a place where he would not be easy again.

Tom too was finding his own way. He asked Justin to go with him to a Fianna Fáil rally in the town, where a minister spoke to the crowd from a platform. When Tom heckled with a question, a woman struck them both on the shoulders with an umbrella, the minister looked down with studied sadness and asked was this what Ireland had come to? The crowd shouted, ‘Communists!’ A
guard escorted them to the end of the Main Street, and told them not to return. Tom was excited, talking of his father, who had been in the Communist Party, as they walked the long road back to the school. Justin felt he was listening to Mr Porter calling Latin verbs from the classroom. He understood, but it meant nothing to him.

Even Mr Porter left the school one Friday evening to visit Dublin. When he came back on Sunday night he was so drunk that he couldn’t teach for the rest of the week. The smell from his bedroom, of old flesh sweating out whiskey and nicotine, carried into the corridor; each time Justin passed it, his dread of wasting his life there returned.

AGAIN THE DAYS
grew short, but he borrowed Mike Reilly’s old hunter more often in the evenings, galloping up and down the same few fields until he sweated like the horse. From there he could see across the silent countryside to the lake. He was twenty-four; next year he would be twenty-five. He took to riding along the back roads, and one day found a stables where there was more land to gallop on, the demesne of an almost derelict mansion, which Bernie, a local woman, now owned. She was small, fat and
handsome
, lame from a fall, always in old riding breeches so torn that strips of the yellow leather lining flapped between her legs as she walked. When she saw that he could ride well enough not to be in danger, she left him alone.

As soon as he mounted, the horse ran alongside a wall so closely that his arm was scraped raw. Next, the horse galloped under low branches of a tree, but he was in the saddles still. Finally the horse walked into a pond and stood there, belly-deep. The water was mirror-calm again when another horse appeared, going back to the yard. Justin’s horse followed. That was how he met Geraldine.

She had a slight limp, he noticed when she dismounted. They
talked as they unsaddled and rubbed their horses down. She lived in the town; she came out once a week to learn how to ride. Then they each paid Bernie their ten shillings and said goodbye.

Two years of work and meals and sleep had calmed him. The school had become a big family, with the same gossip, laughter, aspirations and rows. The headmaster asked sixth-form boys to breakfast, as if he were a university tutor and they were the gilded youth who would run the country one day. When a boy pocketed the silver teaspoons and sold them in the town, a dark thrill ran through the school. When Lettie the maid inherited a fortune from a distant cousin, the whole school – even Mr Porter – rejoiced, and was sad when she had gone. Justin realized how happy he was in this small place, and wanted more than ever to share it with someone else.

WHEN HE RETURNED
next week to the riding school, Geraldine was there. They rode out together under the stable-yard arch and down the avenue. Again the chestnut leaves were darkening, the light-green chestnut shells had filled. When her horse shied at a blown piece of paper they slowed to a walk, talking as the road led them around the big lake and up the slopes on the other side. She said her father was a bank manager; she had grown up in a dozen market towns. He said that explained her accent, which seemed to belong to no particular place. She asked where he lived, and he said he taught in the Protestant school. She described one of the schools she had been to, with small glass booths like telephone boxes in which they had practised the violin. He asked was her father in the Bank of Ireland, she said he was, and Justin said they had met. The road went over the slopes and down into flat land that turned to bog. When they came to a long stony shallow lake, as jagged-pointed at either end as the Neolithic flint knife he had
found, they dismounted, and explored a ruined house. She had heard that a nobleman had ended his days there. He had heard from Colonel Browne that the nobleman had been disgraced. It was almost dark as they rode back along the bog road, so they trotted again, then cantered, and as the horses neared home they galloped hard. She was as flushed and excited as he when they arrived. While they unsaddled and rubbed their horses down, he asked would she like to go out with him some night. She agreed. As she looked up at him and the stable’s cobwebbed light bulb showed her smile, he kissed her suddenly. Then he hurried away to the ramshackle house to give his ten shillings to Bernie.

HE WAS ANXIOUS
now, but was restless in the school. When the local rector invited George and Joy, Tom and him to dinner in the glebe house, he was glad to go out. The clergyman was lame – so many people there were lame – and minded like a child by his wife. They had an adopted son, who had grown up, gone away and never returned – the schoolboys said – so they couldn’t mention that. They sat at a small oval table in a dining room painted dark green, talking about the school and looking out the window at a big yew tree when a silence fell. When dinner was over the rector’s wife said to Joy, ‘We’ll leave the men to talk.’ They stood as the two women left the room, then the rector took a bottle of Sandeman port from the sideboard and they sat down. The yew tree faded into darkness as the rector told stories of his own school. He asked them a question that a master had asked him in Scripture class: ‘What did Saint Paul find when he went into the desert?’ George stared out at the dark, as if searching the Scriptures, frowned and gave up. Then the rector gave his old master’s answer: ‘He found no water.’ George’s bewildered face made Justin laugh, which turned out to be in order, for the rector explained that it was a joke, which
made Justin laugh more, and then he was out of control, whimpering like one of the boys in class until he had to leave the room. As they went back to the school, Tom said, ‘What a limited life,’ and Justin thought again of his coming test.

WHEN HE WENT
to the riding school on his next half-day,
Geraldine
wasn’t there. He rode for an hour about the ruined park, testing his courage by jumping the trunk of a fallen tree, then returned to the yard. As he dismounted, she appeared from a stable, leading her horse, and he asked suddenly would she like to go out with him next Saturday? She said she would, then she rode out under the arch, ducking her head as usual, though the arch was twelve feet high.

The staff room was empty on Saturday evening, except for old Mr Porter, who looked at Justin’s new black cord jacket, grey trousers, polished black shoes, white shirt and dark blue tie, then his teeth shifted into a smile. ‘You’re all dressed up.’

‘I asked a girl out to dinner.’

‘Good lad. Where are you going to take her?’

‘There’s a new restaurant. It’s called The Road House.’

‘How’ll you get there?’

‘George is lending me his car.’

‘That was nice of him,’ Mr Porter said, and his teeth made another smile.

The lonely boys gathered, clapping his back as he crossed the high-walled yard, waving as he drove down the avenue and rattled over the cattle grid. When he called to the bank house, Geraldine’s mother led him upstairs to their rooms. She was tall and thin with a stiff anxious look, as if someone had a finger in her back. Her husband gave Justin a drink, had another himself and talked about golf. A sister of Geraldine’s, pretty but sharp-faced, talked to him
about Dublin. Then Geraldine appeared, looking so beautiful that he became afraid, and then he was alone with her in George’s car driving to The Road House, wondering what they could talk about.

He couldn’t ask what she did, in case she did nothing, which might have something to do with her limp. He couldn’t talk about his year abroad, in case that led to explaining why he had returned. They were silent as they sat at a window table with a view of the new main road. Her fair hair was brushed shining; her pale cheeks were as bright. She wore a dress open at the collar, showing the slightest parting of white breasts. He looked over her shoulder at the speeding cars, half-wishing he was in one of them; but all that was of his own making was here, scattered in the countryside he could see beyond the road, where he had begun to live again.

He asked for wine and drank a glass, then talked about the school: how the boys were often hungry and stole potatoes to cook in the fields; how Mr Porter had come back from the city one night so drunk that he couldn’t walk up the avenue, until George had taken his arm and said that another man had climbed a hill once, though he had fallen three times.

Geraldine said that she didn’t like wine. She blushed and said that she liked music, but knew only the elements; she and her mother belonged to the local music society. Last summer they had sung in Wicklow, where they had found beautiful shells scattered along the shore. But between each run of conversation he heard their silence, as loud as the conversation from the tables all around. He drank so much wine that he had to excuse himself. The two doors were marked Him and Hers. When he got back to the table, she had finished eating. It was so early when they got back to the town that he suggested they go for a walk.

Sam Hutchinson, who worked in the big drapery shop and came out to the school every Sunday to play the harmonium at
Evensong, said Hello to him. A woman smiled and said Hello to her. They walked up the long main street, stopping to look in each shop window. In the windows’ reflection he saw in her face the same imploring wish to talk as in his own. They walked as far as the canal bridge and looked down at the still water. She said that her father had said this was the exact centre of the country, what was called the Spine, so the water flowed from there both to the east and west. He couldn’t think of any reply. It was dark when they walked back down the main street, so they couldn’t see the shop windows, and couldn’t be seen. As they approached the bank they stood into the stationery shop doorway between two bay windows covered with amber cellophane, and they kissed goodbye. Somehow her tongue met his and then they put their arms around each other, swaying forwards and back.

HE DIDN’T KNOW
what to do next, and now he noticed his new loneliness. It was worst on Sundays, when the Protestants went home after church. The Catholics went to the pub after Mass, then home to dinner and then to a Gaelic football match. Their crowded cars roared down the small roads, and there was silence again. When he went to the pub it was empty except for the landlord, sitting on a bench with Mike Reilly’s daughter, a girl of fifteen. When Justin noticed that they were holding hands, he looked away. But it encouraged him. Then an excuse to do nothing came: there was a teachers’ strike. In his firm way Tom explained the union’s demands to the headmaster. The headmaster closed the school.

Justin went back to the city, to sleep in his old bedroom, and after one night it seemed as if he had never left. His mother still wrote weekly letters to his aunt in the country, and still dreaded that she might come to stay. His father listened on the phone to his sister who drank until his face was grey. His brothers went to the
end of the garden and talked business as they drove golf balls into a net. His aunt came up for a week from the country; his mother withdrew to the kitchen and cooked big meals. When his aunt went into the kitchen to help, there were disagreements that became fantastic rows. One evening when the doorbell rang and his aunt tried to answer. His mother stopped her, and when his aunt insisted, his mother stood between her and the door. Looking at them locked in silent wrestling, he saw the confusion of courage and kindness, pettiness and timidity in which he had been reared. There was
something
in that tangle he loved and hated and needed, that imprisoned him still. When Tom phoned a few days later and said he was going to London until the strike was over, Justin was eager to go too.