The Past (4 page)

IT BECOMES HIS pattern, and not one that's to be measured in days or hours, but one that has its own rhythm. Every day he walks down
the promenade and the sun is as clear as when he came there first, the sky as clear, the only difference being the gathering coldness of its light. And some days he meets her there, an average of one day out of four, but never with regularity. There would be three days in a row at times, and then not one day for a week. He comes to think of these days as ‘the day' and every day he thinks, ‘Today will be the day.' And yet on the days on which he doesn't meet her he is never disappointed and on the days on which he sees her from above the canvas bathing hut he is pleased but not surprised. He is coming to accept the arbitrary nature of events as if the events themselves are objects of fate, dictated by a rhythm of which he is not master but servant. He surrenders his will to the accidental with the certainty that the pattern it will reveal to him will be greater than any he can impose. He thinks of Bulmer Hobson in Hyde Park, of Lord Kitchener, the Archduke Ferdinand, and of his sleeping pregnant spouse, curled like an esker in the room he has left, and walking along the promenade, anticipating June's fawn coat behind the gaudy canvas, anticipating the texture of sand and of the bark of palms, anticipating the same canvas flapping emptily without her, he feels a remarkable freedom in his total acceptance of whatever chance dictates. And when she is there they will walk, repeat the first day's pattern, reveal no more of themselves than they did then, building instead on the tracts they have discovered, creating new selves daily, as their feet create fresh prints in the same sand. They choose their personalities whimsically, act out small lives while walking. A changed inflexion, a weighted word, an ‘I remember' said with a grimace, a sigh or a smile evokes a type of face, of person and of past. He tells her he is a doctor, that he has studied in the Royal University and has fled
from a burdensome practice in Dublin. He tells her he is a cattle exporter from a family of Dublin merchants, the eldest in the firm, he will feed England on Irish beef for the war's duration. She tells him she is an actress, left here by a repertory company at the end of a bad summer. She tells him she is a governess, sacked by her titled employers because of an affair of the heart. He prefers the second to the first, but he accepts both, just as he accepts the quick movements of her features from liveliness to pallor. There is something blessed he suspects, in the very poverty, the elusiveness of each encounter and of their knowledge of each other. And the only measure of their permanency, of their perhaps having met in some yesterday is the straw mat in the canvas hut which from the first day she has left on the floor of the bathing hut and which no one has yet disturbed. It is like an arrow pointing to their one reality, their lovemaking. And yet it is a mat, the repository of his bliss, his belonging with her to a realm of feeling, beyond which they can never belong. Through that they meet on a plane that is as far removed from the persons they chose as are they from the sand that clings to that mat that hinders their movements. They move and are covered in sand, remove little clothing; it is cold. And each time money changes hands, money, the coinage that makes the exit from the hut more bearable, that leaves them both locked in an embrace, among just sand, sea and canvas, until their next meeting. How will I not die when it ends, they both wonder, and yet when he peels the ritual three notes from his pocketbook and when she crumples them into the pocket of her fawn coat the wonder vanishes.

He is certain that he loves her. He is just as certain that outside the curve of this sea and the soft gloom of this bathing hut his love
has no meaning. She is an event outside time and yet rooted in the most sordid of times, among the most precise objects.

‘Is the war going to end?' she asks.

‘No,' he says, and while beyond this sand the thought would disturb him immeasurably, here it fades like a whisper.

‘I love you,' she says.

‘And I love you,' he repeats. And yet both of them observe scrupulously the proprieties they have established for themselves. And neither feels regret since all regret, every sorrow, was implicit between them from the start.

‘
M
Y MOTHER SAID that seeing both of them again was like seeing ghosts of what they had been—'

LOVE IS THE word Michael thinks of all the time, that unique syllable that takes in tongue, lips and teeth. He says it as he walks, like a hymn to the fall of his steps, he forms it silently with tongue, lips and teeth while taking newspapers from the hall stand, he hums it while reading them in the oak lounge. The syllable carries him off for hours, he sees the sun has leapt suddenly from the lintel of the window to the third pane and wonders what has happened in between. It hisses from a dentist's gas mask, silences itself in the aching stems of the palm trees, laps in the waves coloured with oil that drift in at the farther end of the beach. He hears it in the rise of Una's breathing, in the ‘Ta ra, love' of the fruiterer to a housewife on the prom, on the headstones of the graves he finds where the town ends and the road limps into a stretch of moorland, In Loving Memory Of, on picture postcards, secondhand novels and the slogans of commercial companies. He watches her breathing and hums a popular ditty, ‘I left my love and leaving loved her more', he sees people in their waking lives
dominated by it, is amazed by the tyranny the syllable exercises and each utterance of it leads him to the one place where its utterance is unnecessary—the strand, the bathing hut.

‘STANDING UNDER THE long glass skylight of Pearse Station (it would have been Westland Row then) like ghosts of their former selves—'

AND IT WAS through it that he could tolerate the pain of his wife's pregnancy. He had known for some time that she didn't love him and what was for him worse, that he might never love her. And so he repeated the syllable and garnered from somewhere the inescapable sense of loving that would never leave him and that now reached out to every facet of that holiday town from its slate valley roofs down to its elementary sewerage system that disgorged into the sea somewhere beyond the beach, beyond the spa and beyond the graveyard headstones.

‘WITH THE CHILD between them, the strange spotted light you get on the platform from that crazy corridor of glass, the train still steaming on the tracks, like ghosts of their former selves, come back to the country, to the multitudinous relations, the connections everywhere,
the miniature intimate city where they knew every face and every face knew them, where those who have gone away are immediately judged on what seems to have happened to them. She walked forward, left him holding the Moses basket, kissed my mother and confided to her that she would not have another child—'

THE WIND BELLOWS into the canvas hut and its stripes bloom suddenly, and sag. Una's day is approaching and each of his meetings there lead him towards what seems to be a delusion but what he almost hopes might not be. She is lying flat on the hard sand and he sees his wife's condition implicit in her. He imagines her slim, starved body blooming, he moves his hand over imaginary curves, begins to treat her with elaborate precautions. He insists that she never leap from the promenade to the sand and that she always walk slowly. He wills her sex, her features on to his unborn child; her blanched face, her ash-blonde hair, her peculiar childlike grace, each movement so contained and satisfying. He doesn't doubt for an instant that he will have a daughter.