THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE 1 Their friends said that, whenever Jimmy Foley named the day, Una slipped a disc. For five years now they had been keeping company, and three times Una had slipped a disc, or its equivalent. Jimmy blamed Una, who was an only child, and, according to him, spoiled to death by her father. Una blamed Jimmy’s mother, an old lady of great sweetness, who deferred so much to Jimmy that she couldn’t even stay in the same room with him and hear him contradicted. The third time she slipped a disc she went to Dublin to recover. Joan Sheehy was ‘an old school friend, a tall, dark, intense girl, who was very happily married to a Dublin solicitor. They lived with their two children in an old-fashioned house on the strand. As usual, Joan and Una had no opportunity for intimate discussion till Una went to bed. Then Joan came in in her dressing gown; first she sat in the armchair, then on the bed, and finally threw off the dressing gown and slipped into the double bed beside Una. That way they could talk better. They were interrupted by slow and heavy footsteps descending the stairs and Joan sat up with a long-suffering air. ‘Bother that fellow!’ she said. ‘He’s worse to me than a baby.’ Slowly the door opened and Mick Sheehy, a tall man with a dark moustache, stumbled in. He was clutching a pillow as if it were a baby, his pyjamas were dangling about his crotch, and his eyes were closed. Joan jumped up and made room for him. ‘Lie there and keep quiet!’ she said fiercely. I’m not done talking to Una yet.’ ‘What are ye talking about?’ he asked, wedging his shoulder comfortably into Una’s hip. ‘Anything interesting?’ ‘Only about herself and Jimmy.’ ‘Oh, that!’ he said with a noisy yawn and composed himself to sleep again between the pair of them, his hands crossed piously on his stomach. Una, who was a well-read girl, wondered what Joan would say if any Irish writer reported a scene like that. ‘I don’t mind what you say, Una,’ Joan said, pushing her husband rudely against Una. ‘I think it’s high time you stopped making excuses and settled down. My God, girl, you must be thirty, and if you go on like this you won’t get married at all.’ ‘But what’s going to happen if I marry someone like Jimmy that I don’t agree with?’ Una asked indignantly. ‘What has agreeing got to do with it?’ Joan asked. ‘Do you think for an instant I agree with this? Wouldn’t you fight with him?’ ‘Me?’ said Una, looking at him as he lay between them, making funny faces and snoring. ‘God, I’d murder him!’ ‘I want to murder him too,’ said Joan in her intense way, ‘but I love him just the same. Men are like that, Una. You’re too damn critical—honest to God, you are. There was Ned Buckley,’ she went on, ticking the names off on her fingers. ‘You said he had no religion. Mick Doyle had too much religion. He went to Mass every morning and never talked about anything only the lives of the saints.’ ‘Oh, God, Joan, Mick was awful,’ Una said in horror. ‘Do you know I nearly lost my religion over him.’ ‘Never mind your religion, Joan went on remorselessly. ‘We know about that. Then there was Paddy Healy, who had a lovely voice only he drank too much, I forget the rest. Damn it, Una, you had a fair choice. What the hell is wrong with Jimmy?’ ‘You have no idea, girl,’ Una said despondently. ‘Jimmy wouldn’t let you have an opinion of your own. He thinks you shouldn’t even open your mouth about anything except what’s in his silly old paper. It’s easy to see you never had anything to do with a journalist.’ ‘And journalists have nothing to do with it either,’ said Joan. ‘Do you think any man wants you to have an opinion of your own?’ ‘But this is different, Joan,’ Una said positively. ‘They’re all different, girl, said Joan. ‘But Jimmy is different, Joan,’ said Una. ‘I’m sure it’s his mother. She has him ruined.’ ‘And you’re the very one who told me that I was ruining Tommy!’ said Joan. ‘What’s the good of talking? They’re all ruined! There’s something wrong with every man if you look at him long enough. Not that you’d need to look at this lump,’ she added, giving a friendly kick to the sleeping form between them, which grunted with pleasure and threw a hand over her stomach. It clawed at her impatiently till, with a sigh, she pulled her nightdress up, and at once it relaxed and its owner began to snore again. ‘Ah, it’s not like that at all, Joan,’ Una said thoughtfully. ‘Daddy says I attract the wrong sort of man.’ ‘And, in the name of the Almighty God,’ Joan said piously, ‘when did your father ever see the right sort of man for you? Look, I don’t want to interfere between the pair of ye, but surely you’re grown-up enough to realize that your father doesn’t want you to marry at all? Damn it, Una, every fellow that got as much as a squeeze off you, your father got jealous of him. Do you think I didn’t see it? Every boy you ever brought to the house was treated as a tolerable sort of leper. Either his mother came from Blarney Lane or his grand-uncle was in the asylum. And you know, Una, I have to be frank. Sometimes I think you and your old fellow are lick alike. If only you could get rid of your mother, you’d be settled for life. I hate saying it, but, honest to God, you are turning into a proper old maid.’ ‘Ah, no, I’m not, I’m not,’ Una said, trying to look as though she knew things that were lost on her friend. All the same she was scared. The last thing in the world she wanted to be was an old maid, and she was beginning to realize that old maids were not wallflowers at all, but girls who had more charm than was good for them. ‘You see, Joan, what’s wrong with me is indecision,’ she said with an air of great enlightenment. ‘Somehow or other, I can’t make up my mind.’ ‘And you know what happens girls who can’t make up their minds?’ asked Joan. ‘I do, I do,’ Una said glumly. ‘They don’t marry at all.’ ‘Oh, no,’ said Joan. ‘Nothing as comfortable as that. Girls who can’t make up their own minds soon get their minds made up for them. And mark my words, that’s what’s going to happen to you, Una...Sheehy,’ she added with a further friendly kick. ‘Back to bed, boy! Back to bed!’ As Una thought afterwards, Joan could have been prophetic, because the following evening, Denis O’Brien came to supper. Denis was in his middle forties, married and separated, poor and plain. He had a plump, bright, beaming face, a small, dark moustache, a high, bald forehead, a quiet voice and the most insinuating manners. The nicest thing about him was his eyes, which were very gentle, but the least bit mad. He was a lonely man who got little in the way of nourishment except what he provided for himself, which was mainly bacon and eggs, but he was always welcome at the Sheehys. He did not leave till very late, but Una noticed that while Mick drank steadily, Denis only supped at his glass of beer. She liked that little touch of asceticism in him. ‘Isn’t he nice?’ Joan asked in her enthusiastic way when he left. ‘Isn’t he a real pet?” ‘He’s a pity anyway,’ said Una, who didn’t know whether he was a pet or not. ‘Ah, what a pity he is!’ Joan exclaimed. ‘A flat of his own and every doll in the office falling over him.’ ‘Now, that’s only hearsay, Joan,’ Mick said, staring at his wife over his glasses. ‘We know nothing about his private life, and we shouldn’t repeat things we hear...I quite agree with you, Una. He is a pity.’ A couple of evenings later Una heard a knock and found him standing on the doorstep against the glowing strand, hatless, his greying hair very long behind his bald brow, and his trousers, which needed pressing, flapping about his heels. His clothes were cheap, but he wore them with an air of well-bred carelessness that made them seem better than they were. ‘Oh, come in, Denis,’ she said. ‘I’m delighted to see you. I’m all alone and the kids are asleep.’ It wasn’t only that she was bored. She was glad to see him, and afterwards she felt that she might have been a little less flirtatious, but he invited that sort of behaviour. He had the sort of insinuating manner that is a compound of father and elder brother; apparently he kissed girls on sight and without intending much harm, held their hands, patted their shoulders and invited their confidences. In no time at all, Una was holding forth to him about her troubles with Jimmy, and Denis was advising her in the manner of an old family friend. Naturally, he was advising her to marry Jimmy. Everybody seemed to be doing that. In his excitement he got up and stood before the fireplace, the light from the strand catching his round sunburned face and kind, anxious eyes. She could see why the girls in the office would fall for him—a man who took them as seriously as that. He talked in a solemn, unctuous, almost clerical tone, with flashes of what might almost be religious mysticism. Being a very pious girl, Una could not see what mysticism had to do with marriage. What she wanted from marriage was security, the hope that in ten years time she wouldn’t regret her bargain. ‘But, Una, he said, burying his right fist in his left palm, ‘there’s no such thing as security in marriage. You can be friends with a man for twenty years, and when you marry him, you find out things about him you never guessed at. Everybody keeps a bit of himself to himself, even if it’s only something to die with. Sooner or later, you have to take a chance, and it’s better to take it before you get too set in your ways. That’s hell, when you have to smash yourself up again, just to adjust.’ ‘Haven’t you ever regretted taking a chance, Denis?’ she asked pertly. ‘No, dear, I haven’t, he replied without taking offence. ‘My wife represented what I could grasp at that age, and I couldn’t predict —not infallibly that is, he added carefully, as though infallibility were his rule on all other occasions—how either of us would develop. What I mean is that when we separated we weren’t the same people who got married. That’s where the Church goes wrong. People become different, and it’s no use trying to be wise before the event.’ ‘It’s not much use being wise after it,’ she retorted. ‘No, dear, it isn’t,’ he retorted imperturbably, as though nothing she said could interrupt the flow of his gab. ‘That’s true. You have to use your common sense in deducing the line of development you’re both going to follow. You’ve got to ask yourself if a girl or a fellow who’s been sleeping around before you married them is going to change just because of living with you. But you can abuse your common sense just as you can abuse your feelings, you know.’ By now, he was very excited and striding to the door and back, giving her brooding glances. ‘You can put too much responsibility on your common sense as you can put too much responsibility on a boy or girl with an unstable family, and all that happens is that it collapses under it, exactly as a boy or girl will collapse if you ask too much of them. Think of all the women you know who made fools of themselves in their thirties.’ ‘And what about all the men who make fools of themselves in their forties?’ she asked, and that stopped the flow all right. She noticed that when you did stop the flow, he was so pleased that he went off into a roar of laughter that seemed almost as uncontrollable as the sermonizing. There were tears in his eyes as he turned to her and said, ‘Doesn’t Jimmy ever knock you about, Una? That’s what I’d do if you were my girl.’ To Una’s great surprise, Joan Sheehy didn’t seem at all pleased that Denis agreed with her about Una’s marrying. On the contrary, she became as irritable as hell. ‘And do you mean to tell me you talked to Denis about Jimmy? she asked. ‘Oh, only generally, of course,’ said Una. ‘God help you if you go round talking like that about him when ye’re married,’ said Joan. ‘Sheehy would take a gun to me.’ All the same, Una went to the pictures with Denis the following evening and returned to his flat for coffee. She was curious to know where he lived. It was in one of the city squares in a third-floor apartment of two draughty rooms with high windows, the kitchen cut out of the bedroom, and, in a return room upstairs a bathroom that seemed to be connected directly with a cave of the winds. Even from downstairs you could hear the gale roaring up into the lavatory basin. The sitting room wasn’t too bad. It had a big print of Rembrandt’s ‘Golden Helmet’ over the mantelpiece and bookshelves along one wall. Una could see that a lot of them were religious books, a thing she hardly expected. All the same it was pleasant to turn off the light and sit by the window and talk about all the fellows she had. Denis was a good listener, and everything she said moved him to comment and generalization. ‘It’s no good telling me what you think of Jimmy now, Una,’ he said at last. ‘You and Jimmy are at a dead end. You’ve taken it as far as it will go. You’ll think differently when you’re married because then you’ll change again.’ ‘As much as all that?’ she asked in mock alarm. ‘You’ll be surprised,’ he said. ‘And mind,’ he added menacingly, pointing at her, ‘it won’t be all for the better. It may even be for the worse.’ ‘And all after one night?’ she exclaimed in the same tone. ‘Not necessarily after one night,’ he said, rolling over her in his usual infallible way. ‘Maybe not till after a good many nights—and days. You make too much of the nights you know,’ he said, laughing uproariously again as the meaning of her little joke broke in upon his monologue. ‘Damn it all, you can sleep through the nights, girl. It’s the blooming days that get you down.’ ‘Denis, do you think I’m an old maid?’ she asked. ‘No, dear, I don’t,’ he replied, refusing to be put off his new tack. ‘Girls like you, with lots of energy, if you’re not married by the time you’re thirty, start exaggerating things. Your minds have gone off in one direction and your bodies in another. You see, Una, you talk too much about sex. You’ve got sex in the head instead of where it belongs. Where it belongs, it’s not all that important. When you get it in the head it makes everything go cockeyed. That’s why you’re so afraid of committing yourself. That’s why you and Jimmy fight the way you do. You see, your mind and body have to work together, in harmony, the way they did when you were a kid. But when one of the principal bodily functions gets into the head, then they can’t work together.’ Una found him so entertaining that she stayed late and almost ran home. When she reached the strand, Mick had already gone to bed, but Joan was waiting up for her in her dressing gown. She seemed in an unusual state of tension, even for her. ‘Will I get you a glass of hot milk, Una?’ she asked nervously. ‘No, love,’ Una replied with a sly grin. ‘Was there something you wanted to say to me?’ ‘As a matter of fact, there was,’ Joan said tragically, collapsing into a chair. ‘Una, do you think you’re being fair to Denis?’ ‘Aren’t I?’ Una asked in mock surprise, though she knew what was coming. ‘You know that Mick and myself are very fond of him?’ ‘And I know he thinks the world of you,’ Una said firmly. ‘And don’t you think you’re not being fair? Honest now, Una! Aren’t you amusing yourself with him?’ ‘You mean, you think he’s not amusing himself with me?’ Una asked in a gentle parody of her friend’s tone. ‘’Tisn’t alike, Una,’ Joan said nervously, clasping and unclasping her long beautiful hands. ‘You’re young. You have a fellow you’ll probably marry eventually. Denis has nobody.’ Joan shook her head as though she were imitating some bad actress on the movies, which she wasn’t—Joan had been that way from childhood. ‘Una, can you even understand what it means, having nobody—nobody at all in the world? When he’s sick or lonely, this is the only place he can come. He’s not a young man any longer; when he sees his kids it has to be in Mick’s office; he has only a little job in the Corporation, and he’ll never do any better because he’s too proud and honest. He won’t take bribes and he won’t lick boots. And even then he has to pay more than half he earns to that bloody bitch! God forgive me, there are some women Id like to strangle, and that’s one. All I’m saying, Una, is if anyone is going to get hurt, it’s going to be him, not you. And, God damn it, the man has been hurt enough!’ Una was suddenly deeply moved. It was clear that Joan’s lecture was the result of some discussion between Mick and his wife. Mick gave a false impression of sluggishness, but it was clear that he liked Denis. Joan didn’t merely like him; she loved him, and Una didn’t in the least resent the fact that she was as jealous as hell. ‘All right, love,’ she said. ‘I’ll sleep on it.’ ‘And you don’t mind my talking to you?’ ‘I wouldn’t change an iota of you for all the women that were ever born,’ said Una, giving her a kiss, and then Joan began to sniffle and Una had the job of consoling her for what she thought of, no doubt, as an exceedingly sinful attachment. God help us all! Una thought. 3 The more Una thought of it, the more she felt that Joan was right. She had been flirting with Denis, regardless of the consequences to him, though she had to admit that she was humanly flattered by the suggestion that it was she rather than Denis who had been doing the flirting. The following evening she met him coming out from work and they went to sit in Stephen’s Green. She was at her brightest and most eloquent. She admitted that she was becoming too attracted by him, thought she took more blame for this than she felt she deserved. At the same time she could not resist pointing out to him how irresponsible he was, and what little concern he showed for the kids. Up to this he had listened politely, but suddenly it was as if he had pulled down the shutters on her. ‘Let the kids out of it, Una, like a good girl,’ he said. She knew that had been a bad mistake, but at least, her conscience was clear and that night she rang up Jimmy and told him she had been having a violent flirtation with the father of two children. Una never could keep a good thing to herself. ‘Some people have all the luck,’ Jimmy said darkly. ‘Why? What’s wrong with the flappers?’ she asked. ‘Not biting this weather,’ he replied. ‘Maybe I’d better come back,’ she said. ‘Maybe you’d better,’ said Jimmy, and she laughed and said good night. If only Jimmy were always that way there was no one who suited her half as well. But next morning, she woke in a real agony of mind, thinking not of Jimmy but of Denis. She dressed before the window, looking out at the long back gardens of the old houses, and feeling older than they. She was sure she had not been deliberately hypocritical with Denis, but the very thought of what she had said to him about the children, about whom she didn’t give a damn, and the cold way he had cut her off, made her squirm. ‘God!’ she thought desperately. ‘I am becoming an old maid!’ At the same time she wished that she were not so damnably critical of herself: self-knowledge was all right in its own way, but, if you took it too far, it made you feel like a worm. She rang up Denis and arranged to meet him again after work. The explanation, which somehow turned into an apology, was all right, but the consequences were simply awful. At midnight, through no apparent fault of her own, she found herself in bed with him in a single bed in the back room with the kitchen attached. She was lying in a most extraordinary position that made her want to giggle. God, she felt, could never have intended anything as absurd as this. She was angry with Joan who had failed to warn her of her real danger, because what a dozen men with twice his attraction had failed to do, this round-faced, ageing man had done with no great difficulty, and now she was no longer in danger of being an old maid. In fact, the sooner she could find somebody to marry her, the better. What made her still angrier was that Denis seemed to be deeply attached to religious emblems, and there was a crucifix over the bed and a copy of the Imitation on the shelf beside it. It reminded her of a friend of her father’s who, having lost his religion, played ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ on the clarinet. At one o’clock Denis was fast asleep and snoring, and somehow the snoring struck her as far more compromising than anything that had happened before. She rose and dressed hastily, and then stood for a long time, peering down at the round, red, innocent face with the gaping mouth and drooping dark moustache. Then she glanced at herself in the mirror on the dressing table and frowned. Her face, except for a few abrasions, seemed just the same. ‘His mistress,’ she whispered in a horrified tone, and the face in the mirror looked back at her and echoed: ‘His mistress.’ She tiptoed hastily out of the room, took off her shoes to descend the long, dark stairs, closed the great front door almost soundlessly behind her, and was startled by the echo of her own footsteps from the other side of the square. They sounded like those of a secondary personality that had taken her place and was now returning furtively from its midnight adultery. ‘Adultery!’ she added aloud in the same horrified tone, just to make sure that this was what her mind had suggested, and as she reached the canal bridge, she began to run as though she could outstrip the adultery that was stealing up on her. All she wanted was the quiet of her own little back room, where she could meditate on the strangeness of her behaviour, away from Denis’ snores and kicks. She was alarmed and disillusioned; alarmed because a pious girl like herself had suddenly behaved in this irresponsible and irremediable way; disillusioned, because, so far as she could see, it had produced absolutely no effect on her character. If this was what was supposed to change people, she thought, they must be a damn sight more susceptible than she was. But next morning, she woke appalled by her own danger. It was all very well for Joan to worry about Denis, but it wasn’t Denis who had to do the worrying now. He wasn’t the one who was liable to have the baby. ‘Baby’ for some reason sounded in her mind like ‘mistress’ and ‘adultery’; things that didn’t happen to decent girls. Merely because she had begun to behave in this queer way, she decided that the time had come to marry Jimmy, so she rang him up to tell him she was returning. Even to hear his nice Sunday’s Well accent was a relief, so she hurried into town and spent a lot of money on a really beautiful pullover for him. In a wave of self-mockery, she decided that if men only knew what pullovers meant, they wouldn’t wear them at all; but the sheer extravagance of it, and the crowds in the sunlight of Stephen’s Green reassured her and helped to banish the memory of the night, and the stealthy echoing steps in the dark and silent square proclaiming to all who listened ‘Adultery! Adultery!’ 4 She cooked Denis’ dinner that evening in his flat, though how anyone could cook in that cubbyhole off the bedroom was beyond her. But she was a good cook, and she wanted to show off to him. He seemed touched by the sight of her, making a muck of his kitchen, and shambled behind her, begging her not to use three pots when one would do. It looked like the kitchen of a man who used only one pot. But she could see his attitude to her had changed. Now, he was all for her staying on in Dublin as long as possible. ‘The sooner I get back to Cork and marry Jimmy, the better for all parties,’ she said ruefully. ‘You still want to marry Jimmy?’ ‘I thought that was what you were advising me to do,’ she said in mock alarm. ‘Things were different then,’ he said. ‘They were,’ she agreed. ‘They weren’t quite so urgent.’ ‘You know, Una,’ he said, walking restlessly about the room, ‘I think I might be able to get a divorce. I don’t say I could. I might.’ ‘But I thought your wife was a Catholic, Denis.’ ‘Annie is whatever it suits her to be. I never raised the matter with her because, to tell you the truth, I didn’t expect I’d want to marry again.’ ‘Well, even if she’s not, I am,’ said Una. It wasn’t even as if she wanted to marry Denis. Emotionally, she had been taken at a disadvantage, but her judgement was still clear. The sight of all those religious books had reminded her again of the man playing ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ on the clarinet. ‘Even if you did get a divorce, I couldn’t possibly marry you.’ ‘Not in this country. I understand that,’ Denis said, not understanding her at all. ‘But after all, I don’t see why I should have to live here for the rest of my life. I could go to England. Other people have had to do it.’ ‘England!’ Una thought despairingly. He was making it sound worse and worse. It would be bad enough to live with a man you didn’t believe you were married to, but as well as that, to give up her family and friends, and never again be able to walk up the Western Road in the evening light! The very idea of it was punishment enough for any sin she had committed. ‘You don’t know my father, Denis,’ she said. ‘Mind you, he’s broad-minded enough in his own way. I think if I was to tell him what happened between us, he’d only ask me was I able to look after myself, but if I was to marry a divorced man, out the door I’d go. Straight! And after all, you can’t blame him. Damn it, that’s what he believes.’ After that, she refused to repeat her performance of the previous evening. The rational side of her was in control again, and, as she said, it was one thing to make a fool of yourself when you felt free, but a different thing entirely to do it in cold blood when you realized how dependent you were on another man. All the same, when she embraced Denis for the last time at Kingsbridge Station, Joan’s face suddenly went black with rage and even Mick looked a bit embarrassed. It was only too plain that whatever there was between them was no mere holiday flirtation. Una managed to keep from weeping until the train pulled out and then began to sob uncontrollably. In a nice rational mood you could make love-making seem unimportant enough, but it changed your character all right. Suddenly, seeing the look of consternation on the face of a young officer who was sitting opposite her, she began to gigele through her sobs. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It isn’t a death. Only a fellow.’ ‘Oh, is that all?’ he said in relief. ‘In that case you’d better have tea with me.’ ‘I’d love to,’ she sniffled. ‘Just give me time for one more bawl. God, I am an idiot!’ It was pleasant and restful to slip back into the routine of home and Jimmy, though even the pullover did not entirely wipe out her feeling of guilt towards him. It was only then that she really began to notice the change in herself. She felt big and motherly and mature. For the first time she realized. how many of their quarrels had originated in her own unsettled state, and how much better a man he was than she had imagined. At the same time she realized that he was not an easy man to understand because he had so little understanding of himself. He was resentful about any criticism of orthodoxy because he wasn’t really happy with it. There was an objective, critical side to Jimmy that he rarely exposed, and didn’t expose at all except to a passive listener. Jimmy himself noticed the change and said that the holiday seemed to have done her good. ‘Joan always has that effect on me,’ she replied eagerly. ‘Was it Joan or that fellow with the five children—what’s his name?’ ‘Ah, that’s something I’ll have to confess to you one of these days,’ she said with a laugh. ‘There’s more to that than you think, boy.’ It was half joke and wholly earnest, because in fact Denis was never far from her mind. Their queer little love affair was like a dark background of woods that threw every figure that moved against it into startling relief. It was the secrecy that gave it such power. There was no one she could tell, and because of this it lent to everything a quality of dramatic irony. Jimmy’s mother would be knitting and describing some wonderful sermon, or Una would be walking down a hill with her father, and bang! there it would all be again, and again she would be alone with the echoing footsteps in the silent square, now romantic and faraway. Sometimes she wondered if Jimmy had any such dark secret from her, and, deciding he hadn’t, wished for his own sake that he had. But one night they had a thundering row after Jimmy’s mother had gone to bed. Like all their rows it was about nothing—a current political scandal about a distillery—and Una said that political scandals always seemed to be about a distillery or a bacon factory, thus reviving an earlier row, and Jimmy said pompously that she used the word ‘scandal’ with a rare lack of discrimination. Una, who had forgotten how violent their quarrels could be, was appalled as she heard herself shouting at him. She even refused to let him see her home, and said that anyone who accosted her would probably be a pleasant relief. By the time she reached home she saw that the old pattern had re-asserted itself exactly as before, and this time it wasn’t her fault. Whatever she might have done, at least she had straightened herself out about certain things, but Jimmy was as big a mess as ever. He took the wrong side in an argument and stuck by it because in life he had taken the wrong side and couldn’t break free. Immediately, this made her again feel prudent and mature. She looked at her own angry face in the mirror over the fireplace and said authoritatively: ‘Una, girl, someone in this blooming group has to act grown-up.’ So she rang Jimmy up and apologized and proposed that they should go to Glengarriffe for the weekend. He was still hurt, and still sounded like a small boy of twelve, but though he accepted her apology ungraciously, he agreed to go with her. Glengarriffe had always been a great haunt of theirs, and by the time they began to drive between lake and mountain Jimmy was already in high spirits. Whenever he let himself go, he was the best of company; considerate, sly and full of crude schoolboy jokes. After supper at the hotel, they walked down the sea front and watched the moon rise over Cab Dhu. They knew all the boatmen and chatted with them about the latest visitors, and leaned on the sea-wall, watching the moon’s reflection in the bay like a great silver tree of quivering leaves. When Jimmy said goodnight to her in her bedroom she grabbed him tight. ‘Jimmy,’ she asked, ‘aren’t you going to stay?’ ‘Are you sure you want me to?’ he asked with a sombre smile, and she knew the same idea had been in his own mind. ‘That’s right,’ she said reproachfully. ‘Put all the responsibility on the girl! The least you might have done is to let me swoon respectably.’ She turned her back and pulled her frock over her head. When she saw him standing there still, tall, embarrassed and silent, she gave him a playful push on to the bed. She felt in command of the situation again. Denis had been right about that at least. She and Jimmy had come to a dead end, and, by hook or crook, they must break out of it. And with Jimmy it was all so much easier. He wasn’t only someone who attracted her, but someone she loved; someone she had known since her girlhood, whom she trusted and understood. He fell asleep in her arms, but Una remained awake till morning in a daze of happiness and fulfilment. She had seen her duty and done it, and to hell with everybody! Before the maids began their work she waked him and sat cross-legged on the bed, watching him pull on his trousers and socks. It was only when he raised the blind that she noticed his unusual gravity. It was as though the sky must look very dark over the mountains. ‘What’s it like outside, Jimmy?’ she asked. ‘I wasn’t looking,’ he said without glancing at her. ‘It seems all right. I was just thinking we’d probably better get married at once.’ ‘Oh, do you think so?’ she asked. She felt rather let-down. This was not how a lover should sound after a first night with a girl he’d been courting for years. But maybe all Irishmen were like that. To do anything at all with them, you had to seduce them, and then they could hardly wait to make respectable men of themselves again. And yet Jimmy had never looked more attractive. He leaned against the window-frame in his white shirt sleeves, and the morning light caught his big-boned obstinate face and brought out the deep vertical lines between his eyes. ‘We don’t want to have to rush it,’ he said. ‘Your father wouldn’t like that at all. Neither would my mother, I dare say.’ ‘I dare say they wouldn’t,’ Una said coolly. ‘To tell you the truth, I wasn’t thinking of them.’ ‘Unfortunately, I have to think of them.’ ‘Jimmy,’ she cried in consternation, ‘you’re not upset about it, are you?’ ‘Aren’t you?’ he asked in his Sunday’s Well accent, giving her a dark look. ‘Me?’ she said with a laugh. ‘I’m enchanted, of course. I thought I’d never see the day.’ ‘Maybe upset is the wrong word,’ he said pompously, and then nodded towards the bed. ‘But we don’t want any more of this. The contempt in his tone as he said ‘this’ angered her. It reduced it all to a child’s messy game. ‘We haven’t had such a lot of it,’ she said sharply. ‘Do you mean it’s too furtive?’ ‘Oh, yes,’ he said almost with a shudder. ‘And wrong!’ ‘Wrong?’ she repeated angrily. ‘I thought we were supposed to be engaged.’ ‘I don’t see what that has to do with it.’ ‘If you want to know, I don’t think it’s half as wrong as quarrelling over old distilleries,’ she snapped. ‘At any rate, it’s human.’ ‘That only makes it worse,’ he said coldly. ‘We stuck it so long, we could have stuck it a little longer. After all, we’re not just out together for a good time.’ He sounded as though he were explaining the policy of his paper, and at any other time it would have made her really furious. Now, she felt despairingly that he was probably right. Their squabbles and misunderstandings had been part of the normal behaviour of two responsible grown-ups who took marriage seriously. ‘Honestly, Jimmy,’ she said, ‘there are times when I think I’m not right in the head. This is all my fault.’ ‘Oh, no, it isn’t,’ he said, showing what she called his ‘Sunday’s Well’ character. ‘I’m entirely to blame.’ She knew he didn’t mean a word of it, but she liked it just the same. ‘You are not, Jimmy,’ she said flatly. ‘I made you come here deliberately, with that intention. I only wish you’d told me to go to Hell.’ ‘Oh, intentions!’ he said wearily. ‘Do you think I don’t have intentions, too? No, it’s not that. It’s just that things have changed between us, and I don’t seem to be able to talk to you as I used to do.’ ‘But that’s exactly what I felt about you, Jimmy,’ she said. ‘That’s why I felt we had to do something desperate.’ ‘Yes,’ he added bitterly, ‘and it’s all the fault of the damn fellow in Dublin. He’s the one who made you change.’ The suddenness and bitterness of the attack took her by surprise. Then she got out of bed and put her arms on his shoulders. ‘You really think that?’ she asked. ‘I know it, girl,’ he said with tears of rage in his eyes. ‘Well, you’re wrong,’ she said earnestly. ‘I swear you’re wrong. I’m just the same as I always was, and Denis did nothing to me. You do believe that, don’t you? You have to believe that. If you don’t, we’d better chuck it.’ Then, as the falsehood touched the chord of hysteria in her, she began to sob and pull her hair. ‘Oh, I’m just a bloody fool. I do my best—honest to God I do my best—but everything I do goes wrong, God, it’s beastly!’ ‘It isn’t beastly, Una,’ he said. ‘I know you acted for the best. So did I. It’s just that it’s not right for us. We’re not the sort.’ And again she saw it through his eyes, something beautiful that had been irretrievably spoiled by a few hours of boredom and dissatisfaction and could never be the same again because innocence had gone out of it. When Jimmy left her she threw herself on the bed and really bawled. Now, she didn’t know where to turn to or what to do. She had tried everything, and everything had been wrong. And yet she knew she wasn’t worse than other girls. She had sense enough to realize that, as girls went, she was rather better than most. She had acted with the best of intentions out of what she had thought a sense of responsibility. In fact, when it came to good intentions, she was almost tripping over them. And yet she had done worse than any flighty irresponsible girl would have done. She had let herself be seduced by Denis, and seduced Jimmy in her turn. And what was worse, she had lied to Jimmy, lied to him in the most flagrant way. She wasn’t really apologizing for that. Now that Jimmy was out of the room she was very cross with him, but she was crosser still with Denis. She could almost imagine him laughing at her folly. So now she thought she could get along on her own, did she? She thought there was nothing left for her to learn? Like the sorcerer’s apprentice she had learned how to produce magic but not how to control it! It made her so angry that she actually began talking to him as though he were there. ‘All right, you old bastard,’ she muttered vindictively. ‘You started it, with all your old talk. “Everything would be fine once we made the breakthrough.” Well, I made the breakthrough, and where the hell am I? I’m worse off than I was before. What did I do wrong? As you think you’re so smart, maybe you’ll tell me that?’ And suddenly, almost as though he had opened his mouth and replied to her, she knew what she had done wrong, and the very idea of it made her feel sick. She dressed and went downstairs to the telephone. It was on the wall beside the back door, near the kitchen. The back door was open and there were hens strutting by in the early morning light. She had minutes to wait for her call, and she stamped nervously up and down the yard, afraid that at any moment Jimmy would appear, as good-looking as ever, and ask her to go for a swim. In that state she felt she couldn’t even talk to him. Even the memory of the night they had spent together made her feel dirty all over. ‘Prostitution,’ said that queer voice in her head, and she shuddered and wished the phone bell would ring. Suddenly it sounded and she grabbed at it. A meek, sleepy voice answered her. As it expanded into awareness she could almost see that awful bedroom with the kitchen attached and her heart overflowed. In her excitement she began to stutter. ‘Denis, she said, ‘about that divorce business you were mentioning—’ ‘Yes, dear,’ he replied snugly. ‘You didn’t do anything about it, I suppose?’ ‘As a matter of fact, I did, dear,’ he said, coming gradually awake. ‘Why?’ ‘Oh, nothing,’ she said lightly. ‘Only I’ve been thinking about it myself. That it might be the best way, I mean.’ ‘It’s the only way, dear,’ he said in his most infallible tone, and Una almost chuckled at how little he knew. ‘And I’m pretty sure now it’s going to be possible. Gum, it is early, isn’t it? You haven’t been lying awake thinking of it, have you?” ‘Not altogether,’ she said dryly. ‘Where.are you speaking from, Una?’ he asked with concern. ‘Not from home, surely?’ At this she chuckled. It wouldn’t do at all to tell him that she was speaking from a hotel where she’d been spending the night with another man. He mightn’t understand. ‘I’ll see you soon and tell you all about it,’ she said, and when she had hung up, she went briskly down the sea-road in the morning sunlight, singing and not caring much where she went. She would get a cup of tea and a slice of homemade bread in a country cottage, and thank God, that was about all she wanted. All the same she knew perfectly well that she would tell Denis where she had rung from, and why, and knew that though he might be furious for a couple of hours, it would really make no difference. So far as he was concerned, innocence had not gone out of it. Being a pious girl she thanked God for having discovered in time what was wrong with her. In her simple way she had thought she was learning the business of love, and she was, but in a way that no one had told her of. Now she realized that even Denis didn’t know the half of it. Every man and woman is a trade in himself, and however bad a bargain she might have in Denis, Denis was the only trade she knew. More Stories (1954)