EXPECTATION OF LIFE

When Shiela Hennessey married Jim Gaffney, a man twenty years older
than herself, we were all pleased and rather surprised. By that time
we were sure she wouldn’t marry at all. Her father had been a small
builder, and one of the town jokers put it down to a hereditary
distaste for contracts.

Besides, she had been keeping company with Matt Sheridan off and on
for ten years. Matt, who was a quiet chap, let on to be interested
only in the bit of money her father had left her, but he was really
very much in love with her, and, to give her her due, she had been as
much in love with him as time and other young men permitted. Shiela
had to a pronounced extent the feminine weakness for second
strings. Suddenly she would scare off the prospect of a long life with
a pleasant, quiet man like Matt, and for six months or so would run a
tearing line with some young fellow from the College. At first Matt
resented this, but later he either grew resigned or developed the only
technique for handling it, because he turned it all into a great joke,
and called her young man of the moment “the spare wheel.”

And she really did get something out of those romances. A fellow
called Magennis left her with a sound appreciation of Jane Austen and
Bach, while another, Jack Mortimer who was unhappy at home, taught her
to admire Henry James and persuaded her that she had a father
fixation. But all of them were pretty unsuitable, and Matt in his
quite determined way knew that if only he could sit tight and give no
sign of jealousy, and encourage her to analyse their characters, she
would eventually be bound to analyse herself out of love altogether,
Until the next time, of course, but he had the hope that one of these
days she would tire of her experiments and turn to him for good. At
the same time, like the rest of us he realized that she might not
marry at all. She was just the type of pious, well-courted,
dissatified girl who as often as not ends up in a convent, but he was
in no hurry and was prepared to take a chance.

And no doubt, unless she had done this, she would have married him
eventually, only that she fell violently in love with Jim Gaffney. Jim
was a man in his early fifties, small and stout and good natured. He
was a widower with a grown son in Dublin, a little business on the
Grand Parade, and a queer old house on Fair Hill, and as if these
weren’t drawbacks enough for anyone, he was a man of no religious
beliefs worth mentioning.

According to Sheila’s own story, which was as likely as not to be
true, it was she who had to do all the courting and she who had to
propose. It seemed that Jim had the Gaffney expectation of life worked
out over three generations, and according to this he had only eight
years to go, so that even when she did propose, he practically refused
her.

“And what are you going to do with yourself when the eight years are
up?” asked Matt when she broke the news to him.

“I haven’t even thought about it, Matt,” she said. “All I know is that
eight years with Jim would be more to me than a lifetime with anyone
else.”

“Oh, well,” he said with a bitter little smile, “I suppose you and I
had better say good-bye.”

“But you will stay friends with me, Matt?” she asked anxiously.

“I will not, Shiela,” he replied with sudden violence. “The less I see
of you from this onwards, the better pleased I’ll be.”

“You’re not really as bitter as that with me?” she said, in distress.

“I don’t know whether I am or not,” he said flatly. “I just don’t want
to be mixed up with you after this. To tell you the truth, I don’t
believe you give a damn for this fellow.”

“But I do, Matt. Why do you think I’m marrying him?”

“I think you’re marrying him because you’re hopelessly spoiled and
neurotic, and ready for any silly adventure. What does your mother say
to it?”

“Mummy will get used to Jim in time.”

“Excuse my saying so, Shiela, but your mother will do nothing of the
sort. If your father was alive he’d beat the hell out of you before he
let you do it. Is it marry someone of his own age? Talk sense! By the
time you’re forty he’ll be a doddering old man. How can it end in
anything but trouble?”

“Matt, I don’t care what it ends in. That’s my look-out. All I want is
for you and Jim to be friends.”

It wasn’t so much that Shiela wanted them to be friends as that she
wanted to preserve her claim on Matt. Women are like that. They hate
to let one man go even when they have sworn life-long fidelity to
another.

“I have no desire to be friends,” said Matt angrily. “I’ve wasted
enough of my life on you as it is.”

“I wish you wouldn’t say things like that, Matt,” she said, beginning
to sniff. “I know I’m queer. I suppose I’m not normal. Jack Mortimer
always said I had a father fixation, but what can I do about that? I
know you think I just strung you along all these years, but you’re
wrong about that. I cared more for you than I did for all the others,
and you know it. And if it wasn’t for Jim I’d marry you now sooner
than anybody.”

“Oh, if it wasn’t for Jim,” he said mockingly. “If it wasn’t Jim it
would be somebody else, and I’m tired of it. It’s all very well being
patient, Shiela, but a man reaches the point where he has to protect
himself, even if it hurts him or someone else. I’ve reached it.”

And she knew he had, and that she had no hope of holding on to him. A
man who had stuck to her for all those years, and through all her
vagaries, was not the sort to be summoned back by a whim. Parting with
him was more of a wrench than she had anticipated.

II She was radiantly happy through the brief honeymoon in France. She
had always been fascinated and repelled by sex, and on their first
night on the boat, Jim, instead of making violent love to her as a
younger man might have done, sat on his bunk and made her listen to a
long lecture on the subject, which she found more interesting than any
love-making; and before they had been married a week, she was making
the difficult adjustments for herself and without shock.

As a companion, Jim was excellent, because he was ready to be pleased
with everything from urinals to cathedrals; he got as much pleasure
from small things as big ones, and it put her in good humour just to
see the way he enjoyed himself. He would sit in the sunlight outside a
café, a bulky man with a red face and white hair, enthusing over his
pastries and coffee and the spectacle of good-looking well-dressed
people going by. Whenb his face clouded, it was only because he had
remembered the folly of those who would not be happy when they could.

“And the whores at home won’t even learn to make a cup of coffee!” he
would declare bitterly.

The only times he got mad were when Shiela, tall and tangential, moved
too fast for him and he had to shuffle after her on his tender feet,
swinging his arms close to his chest like a runner, or when she
suddenly changed her mind at a crossing and left him in the middle of
traffic to run forward and back, alarmed and swearing. In his rage he
shouted and shook his fist at the taxi-drivers, and they shouted back
at him without his even knowing what they said. At times like these he
even shouted at Shiela, and she promised in the future to wait for
him, but she didn’t. She was a born fidget, and when he left her
somewhere to go to one of his beloved urinals, she drifted on to the
nearest shop-window, and he lost her. Because all the French he knew
came from the North Monastery, and French policemen only looked
astonished when they heard it, and because he could never remember the
name of his hotel, he was plunged in despair once a day.

It was a great relief to him to get back to Fair Hill, put his feet on
the mantelpiece, and study in books the places he had been. Shiela,
too, came to understand how good a marriage could be, with the
inhibitions of a lifetime breaking down and new and more complicated
ones taking their place. Their life was exceedingly quiet. Each
evening Jim came puffing up the hill from town under a mountain of
pullovers, scarves, and coats, saying that the damn height was getting
too much for him, and that they’d have to—have to—have to get a house
in town. Then he changed into old trousers and slippers, and lovingly
poured himself a glass of whiskey, the whiskey care- fully measured
against the light as it had been any time in twenty years. He knew to
a drop the amount of spirits it needed to give him the feeling of a
proper drink with- out slugging himself. Only a man with a steady hand
could know how much was good for him. Moderation was the secret.

After supper he put his feet on the mantelpiece and told her the day’s
news from town. About nine they had a cup of tea, and, if the night
was fine, took a short ramble over the hill to get the view of the
illuminated city below. As Shiela had learned, by this time Jim was
usually at the top of his form, and it had become unsafe for anyone to
suggest a house in town. Fair Hill had again become the perfect place
of residence. The tension of the day completely gone, he had his bath
and pottered about the stiff, ungainly old house in his pyjama
trousers, scratching himself in elaborate patterns and roaring with
laughter at his own jokes. |

“Who the hell said I had a father fixation?” Shiela asked
indignantly. “I didn’t marry my father; I married my baby.”

All the same, she knew he wasn’t all that simple. Paddy, his son,
lived in Dublin, and though Shiela suspected that he was somewhat of a
disappointment to Jim, she could never get a really coherent account
of him from Jim. It was the same with his first marriage. He scarcely
spoke of it, except once in a while to say “Margaret used to think” or
“a friend of Margaret’s”—bubbles rising to the surface of a pool whose
depths she could not see, though she suspected the shadow that covered
it. Nor was he much more informative about less intimate matters. If
he disliked people, he disliked talking of them, and if he liked them,
he only wished to say conventional things in their praise. As a
student of Jane Austen and Henry James, Shiela wanted to plumb things
to their depths, and sometimes it made her very angry that he would
not argue with her. It suggested that he did not take her seriously.

“What is it about Kitty O’Malley that makes her get in with all those
extraordinary men?” she would ask. “Is it a reaction against her
mother?”

“Begor, I don’t know, girl,” he would say, staring at her over his
reading glasses, as though he were a simple-minded man to whom such
difficult problems never occurred.

“And I suppose you never bothered to ask yourself,” she would retort
angrily. “You prefer to know people superficially.”

“Ah, well, I’m a superficial sort of chap,” he would reply with a
benign smile, but she had the furious feeling that he was only
laughing at her. Because once, when she did set out deliberately to
madden him by sneering at his conventionality, he lost his temper and
snapped: “Superficially is a damn good way to know people.” And this,
as she realized, wasn’t what he meant either. She suspected that,
whereas her plumbing of the depths meant that she was continually
changing planes in her relations with people, moving rapidly from
aloofness to intimacy and back, enthusing and suspecting, he
considered only the characteristics that could be handled consistently
on one plane. And though his approach was by its nature inaccurate,
she had to admit that it worked, because in the plumbing business you
never really knew where you were with anyone.

They had other causes of disagreement, though at first these were
comic rather than alarming. Religion was one; it was something of an
obsession with Shiela, but on the only occasion when she got him to
Mass, he sighed, as he did when she took him to the pictures, and said
mournfully as they left the church: “Those fellows haven’t changed in
thirty years.” He seemed to think that religion should be subject to
the general improvement in conditions of living. When she pressed him
about what he thought improvements would be, it turned out that he
thought churches should be used for lectures and concerts. She did not
lose hope of converting him, even on his death-bed, though she
realized that it would have to be effected entirely by the power of
prayer, since precept and example were equally lost on him.

Besides this there was the subject of his health. In spite of his
girth and weight, she felt sure he wasn’t strong. It seemed to her
that the climb from the city each evening was becoming too much for
him. He puffed too much, and in the mornings he had an uproarious
cough, which he turned into a performance. She nagged him to give up
the pipe and the whiskey or to see a doctor, but he would do
neither. She surprised him by bringing the doctor to him during one of
his bronchial attacks, and the doctor backed her up by advising him to
give up smoking and drinking and to take things easily. Jim laughed as
if this were a good joke, and went on behaving in precisely the same
way. “Moderation is the secret,” he said as he measured his whiskey
against the light. “The steady hand.” She was beginning to realize
that he was a man of singular obstinacy, and to doubt whether, if he
went on in this way, she would have him even for the eight years that
the Gaffney expectation of life promised him.

Besides, he was untidy and casual about money, and this was one of the
things about which Shiela was meticulous.

“It’s not that I want anything for myself,” she explained with
conscious virtue. “It’s just that I’d like to know where I stand if
anything happens to you. I’ll guarantee Paddy won’t be long finding
out.”

“Oh, begor, you mightn’t be far wrong,” he said with a great guffaw.

Yet he did nothing about it. Beyond the fact that he hated to be in
debt, he did not seem to care what happened to his money, and it lay
there in the bank, doing no good to anyone. He had not made a will,
and when she tried to get him to do so, he only passed it off with a
joke.

Still refusing to be beaten, she invited his solicitor to supper, but,
whatever understanding the two men had reached, they suddenly started
to giggle hysterically when she broached the matter, and everything
she said after that only threw them into fresh roars of laughter. Jim
actually had tears in his eyes, and he was not a man who laughed
inordinately on other occasions.

It was the same about insurance. Once more, it was not so much that
she wanted provision for herself, but to a girl who always carried an
identification card in her handbag in case of accidents it seemed the
height of imprudence to have no insurance at all, even to pay for the
funeral. Besides—and this was a matter that worried her somewhat—the
Gaffney grave was full, and it was necessary to buy a new plot for
herself and Jim. He made no protest at the identification card she had
slipped in his wallet, instructing the finder of the body to
communicate at once with herself, though she knew he produced this
regularly in the shop for the entertainment of his friends, but he
would have nothing to say to insurance. He was opposed to it, because
money was continuously decreasing in value and insurance was merely
paying good money for bad. He told her of a tombstone he had seen in a
West Cork cemetery with an inscription that ran: “Here Lie the Remains
of Elizabeth Martin who.” “Poor Elizabeth Martin Who!” he
guffawed. “To make sure she had the right sort of tombstone, she had
it made herself, and the whoors who came after her couldn’t make head
or tail of the inscription. See what insurance does for
you. ... Anyway, you little bitch,” he growled good-humouredly, “what
the hell do you always want to be burying me for? Suppose I bury you
for a change?”

“At any rate, if you do, you’ll find my affairs in order,” Shiela
replied proudly.

III She had sent postcards to Matt from France, hoping he might make
things up, but when they returned to Cork she found that he had taken
a job in the Midlands, and later it was reported that he was walking
out with a shopkeeper’s daughter who had a substantial fortune. A year
later she heard of his engagement and wrote to congratulate him. He
replied promptly and without rancour to say that the report was
premature, and that he was returning to a new job in Cork. Things had
apparently not gone too well between himself and the shopkeeper’s
daughter.

Shiela was overjoyed when at last he called on them in Fair Hill, the
same old Matt, slow and staid, modest and intelligent and full of
quiet irony. Obviously he was glad to be back in Cork, bad as it
was. The Midlands were too tame, even for him.

Then Shiela had her great idea. Kitty O’Malley was the old friend of
Jim’s whose chequered career Shiela had tried to analyse. She was a
gentle girl with an extraordinary ability for getting herself
entangled with unsuitable men. There had already been a married man,
who had not liked to let her know he was married for fear of hurting
her feelings, a mental patient, and a pathological liar, who had got
himself engaged to two other girls because he just could not stop
inventing personalities for himself. As a result, Kitty had a slightly
bewildered air, because she felt (as Shiela did) that there must be
something in her which attracted such people, though she couldn’t
imagine what it was.

Shiela saw it all quite clearly, problem and solution, on the very
first evening Matt called.

“Do you know that I have the perfect wife for you?” she said.

“Is that so?” asked Matt with amusement. “Who’s she?”

“A girl called O’Malley, a friend of Jim’s. She’s a grand girl, isn’t
she, Jim?”

“Grand girl,” agreed Jim.

“But can she support me in the style I’m accustomed tor” asked Matt
who persisted in his pretence of being mercenary.

“Not like your shopkeeper’s daughter, I’m afraid.”

“And you think she’d have me?”

“Oh, certain, if only you’ll let me handle her. If she’s left to
herself, she’ll choose an alcoholic or something. She’s shy, and shy
girls never get to be courted by anything less dynamic than a mental
case. She’ll never go out of her way to catch you, so you’d better
leave all that to me.”

Shiela had great fun, organizing meetings of her two sedate friends,
but to her great surprise Jim rapidly grew bored and angry with the
whole thing. After Matt and Kitty had been three times to Fair Hill
and he had been twice to supper with them, he struck. This time Shiela
had arranged that they were all to go to the pictures together, and
Jim lost his temper with her. Like all good-natured men, when he was
angry he became immoderate and unjust.

“Go with them yourself!” he shouted. “What the hell do you want mixing
yourself up in it at all for? If they can’t do their own courting, let
them live single.”

She was downcast, and went to the bedroom to weep. Soon after, he
tiptoed into the room and took her hand, talking about everything
except the subject on her mind. After ten minutes he rose and peered
out of the low window at the view of the city he had loved from
boyhood. “What the hell do they want building houses here for and then
not giving you a decent view?” he asked in chagrin. All the same, she
knew he knew she was jealous. It was all very well arranging a match
between Matt and Kitty, but she hated the thought of their going out
together and talking of her the way she talked of them. If only Jim
had been her own age, she would not have cared much what they said of
her, but he was by comparison an old man and might die any day,
leaving her alone and without her spare wheel. She could even
anticipate how it would happen. She was very good at anticipating
things, and she had noticed how in the middle of the night Jim’s face
smoothed out into that of a handsome boy, and she knew that this was
the face he would wear when he was dead. He would lie like that in
this very room, with a rosary bead he could no longer resent between
his transparent fingers, and Matt, in that gentle firm way of his,
would take charge of everything for her. He would take her in his arms
to comfort her, and each would know it had come too late. So, though
she did wish him to have Kitty if he could not have her, she did not
want them to be too much together in her absence and hoped they might
not be too precipitate. Anything might happen Jim; they were both
young—only thirty or so—and it would not hurt them to wait.

When they did marry six months later, neither Matt nor Kitty knew the
generosity that had inspired her, or the pain it had caused her. She
suspected that Jim knew, though he said no more about it than he did
about all the other things that touched him closely.

Yet he made it worse for her by his terrible inability to tidy up his
affairs. All that winter he was ill, and dragged himself to the shop
and back, and for three weeks he lay in bed, choking—as usual, with a
pipe that gave him horrible spasms of coughing. It was not only that
he had a weak chest; he had a weak heart as well, and one day the
bronchitis would put too much tension on the over-strained heart. But
instead of looking after himself or making a will or insuring himself,
or doing any of the things one would expect a sickly old man with a
young wife to do, he spent his time in bed, wrapped in woollies and
shawls, poring over house-plans. He had occupied his father’s
unmanageable house on Fair Hill for twenty years without ever wishing
to change it, but now he seemed to have got a new lease of life. He
wanted to get rid of the basement and have one of the back rooms
turned into a modern kitchen, with the dining-room opening off it.

Shiela was alarmed at the thought of such an outlay on a house she had
no intention of occupying after his death. It was inconvenient enough
to live in with him, but impossibly lonely for a woman living alone,
and she knew that no other man, unless he had Jim’s awkward tastes,
would even consider living there. Besides, she could not imagine
herself living on in any house that reminded her of her loss. That,
too, she could anticipate—his favourite view, his chair, his piperack,
emptied of his presence—and knew she could never bear it.

“But you said yourself it was hell working in that kitchen,” he
protested. “And it’s awful to have to eat there. It gives you the
creeps if you have to go down there after dark.”

“But the money, Jim, the money!” she protested irritably.

“We have the money, girl,” he said. “That’s what you keep on saying
yourself. It’s lying there in the bank, doing no good to anybody.”

“We might be glad of it one of these days,” said Shiela. “And if we
had to sell the house, we’d never get back what we spent. It’s too
inconvenient.”

“Who the hell said I wanted it back?” he snorted. “I want a place I
can have some comfort in. Anyway, why would we sell it?”

This was something she did not like to say, though he knew what was on
her mind, for after a moment he gave a wicked little grin and raised a
warning forefinger at her.

“We’ll make the one job of it,” he whispered. “We’ll build the kitchen
and buy the grave at the same time.”

“It’s no joking matter, Jim.”

He only threw back his head and roared in his childish way.

“And we’ll buy the bloody tombstone and have it inscribed. ‘Sacred to
the Memory of James Gaffney, beloved husband of Shiela Gaffney Who.’ I
declare to my God, well have people writing books on the Whos. The
first family in Cork to take out insurance.”

She tried to get him to compromise on an upstairs kitchen of an
inexpensive kind, a shed with a gas oven in it, but he wouldn’t even
listen to her advice.

“Now, mind what I’m telling you, girl,” he said, lecturing her as he
had done on the first night of their marriage, “there’s some maggot of
meanness in all Irish people. They could halve their work and double
their pleasure, but they’d sooner have it in the bank. Christ, they’d
put themselves in a safe deposit if only they’d keep. Every winter of
their lives shivering with the cold; running out to the haggard the
wickedest night God sent; dying in hundreds and leaving the food for
the flies in summer—all sooner than put the money into the one
business that ever gives you a certain return: living! Look at that
bloody city down there, full of perishing old misers!”

“But, Jim,” she cried in dismay, “you’re not thinking of putting in
heating?”

“And why the hell wouldn’t I put in heating? Who keeps on complaining
about the cold?”

“And a fridge?”

“Why not, I say? You’re the one that likes ice-cream.”

“Ah, Jim, don’t go on like that! You know we haven’t enough money to
pay for the kitchen as it is.”

“Then we’ll get it. You just decide what you want, and I’ll see about
the money.”

By the following summer Jim, who was behaving as though he would never
die, was planning to get rid of the old improvised bathroom downstairs
and install a new one of the most expensive kind off their bedroom.

“Jim,” she said desperately, “I tell you we cannot afford it.”

“Then we’ll borrow it,” he replied placidly. “We can’t afford to get
penumonia in that damned old outhouse either. Look at the walls!
They’re dripping wet. Anyway, now we have security to borrow on.”

But she hated the very thought of getting into debt. It wasn’t that
she didn’t appreciate the fine new kitchen with a corner window that
looked over the hill and up the valley of the river, or was not glad
of the refrigerator and the heating, and it was certainly not that she
wished Jim to die, because she worried herself into a frenzy trying to
make sure he looked after himself and took the pills that were
supposed to relieve the strain on his heart. No, if only someone could
have assured her once for all that Jim would live to be eighty, she
could have resigned herself to getting in debt for the sake of the new
bathroom. But it was the nagging feeling that he had such a short time
to live, and would die leaving everything in a mess of debt and
extravagance as it was now, that robbed her of any pleasure she might
feel.

She could not help contrasting themselves and the Sheridans. Matt had
everything in order. It was true that he did not carry any regular
identification card, but this, as she knew, was due more to modesty
than irresponsibility. Matt would have felt self-conscious about
instructing a totally unknown person as to what to do with his
body. But he did have as much insurance as he could afford, and his
will was made. Nothing serious was left unprovided for. Shiela could
not help feeling that Kitty owed her a lot, and Kitty was inclined to
feel the same. For a girl with such a spotty career, it was a joy to
be married to someone as normal as Matt.

Not that Shiela found so much to complain of in Jim, apart from the
one monstrous fact that he was too set in his ways. She saw that no
matter how dearly you loved a man of that age or how good and clever
he might be, it was still a mistake, because there was nothing you
could do with him, nothing you could even modify. She did not notice
that Jim’s friends thought he was different, or if she did she never
ascribed it to her own influence. A girl who could not get him to do a
simple thing like giving up smoking could not realize that she might
have changed him in matters of more importance to himself. For we do
not change people through the things in them that we would wish to
change, but through the things that they themselves wish to
change. What she had given Jim, though she did not recognize it, was
precisely the thing whose consequences she deplored, the desire to
live and be happy.

Then came the tragedy of Kitty’s death after the birth of her second
child. Matt and the children came to stay with them in Fair Hill until
Matt’s mother could close up her own home and come to keep house for
him. Jim was deeply shocked by the whole business. He had always been
exceedingly fond of Kitty, and he went so far as to advise Matt not to
make any permanent arrangement with his mother but to marry again as
soon as he could. But Matt, as he told Shiela on the side, had no
intention of marrying again, and, though he did not say as much, she
knew that he would never remarry—at least until she was free
herself. And at once she was seized with impatience because everything
in life seemed to happen out of sequence, as if a mad projectionist
had charge of the film, and young and necessary people like Kitty died
while old men like Jim with weak hearts and ailing chests dragged on,
drinking and smoking, wheezing and coughing, and defying God and their
doctors by planning new homes for themselves.

Sometimes she was even horrified at the thoughts that came into her
mind. There were days when she hated Jim, and snapped and mocked at
him until she realized that her behaviour was becoming monstrous. Then
she went to some church and, kneeling in a dark corner, covered her
face with her hands and prayed. Even if Jim believed in nothing, she
did, and she prayed that she might be enlightened about the causes of
her anger and discontent. For, however she tried, she could find in
herself no real hostility to Jim. She felt that if she were called
upon to do it, she could suffer anything on his behalf. Yet at the
same time she was tormented by the spectacle of Matt, patient and
uncomplaining, the way he looked and the way he spoke, and his
terrible need of her, and had hysterical fits of impatience with Jim,
older and rougher but still smiling affectionately at her as if he
really understood the torments she was enduring. Perhaps he had some
suspicion of them. Once when he came into the bedroom and saw her
weeping on the bed, he grabbed her hand and hissed furiously: “Why
can’t you try to live more in the present?”

It astonished her so much that she ceased weeping and even tried to
get him to explain himself. But on matters that concerned himself and
her, Jim was rarely lucid or even coherent, and she was left to think
the matter out for herself. It was an idea she could not grasp. It was
the present she was living in, and it was the present she hated. It
was he who lived in the future, a future he would never enjoy. He
tried to curb himself because he now realized how upset she became at
his plans, but they proved too much for him, and because he thought
the front room was too dark and depressing with its one tall window,
he had a big picture window put in so that they could enjoy the
wonderful view of the city, and a little terrace built outside where
they could sit and have their coffee on fine summer evenings. She
watched it all listlessly because she knew it was only for a year or
two, and meanwhile Matt was eating his heart out in a little house by
the river in Tivoli, waiting for Jim to die so that he could realize
his life’s dream.

Then, to her astonishment, she fell ill and began to suspect that it
might be serious. It even became clear to her that she might not be
going to live. She was not really afraid of something for which she
had prepared herself for years by trying to live in the presence of
God, but she was both bewildered and terrified at the way in which it
threatened to make a mockery of her life and Matt’s. It was the mad
projectionist again, and again he seemed to have got the reels mixed
up till the story became meaningless. Who was this white-faced brave
little woman who cracked jokes with the doctors when they tried to
encourage her about the future? Surely, she had no part in the
scenario.

She went to hospital in the College Road, and each day Jim came and
sat with her, talking about trifles till the nuns drove him away. He
had shut up the house on Fair Hill and taken a room near the hospital
so as to be close to her. She had never seen a human being so anxious
and unhappy, and it diverted her in her own pain to make fun of
him. She even flirted with him as she had not done since the days of
their courtship, affecting to believe that she had trapped him into
accepting her. But when Matt came to see her the very sight of him
filled her with nausea. How on earth could she ever have thought of
marrying that gentle, devoted, intelligent man! All she now wanted
health for was to return to Fair Hill and all the little improvements
that Jim had effected for their happiness. She could be so contented,
sitting on the terrace or behind the picture window looking down at
the city with its spires and towers and bridges that sent up to them
such a strange, dissociated medley of sound. But as the days went by
she realized with her clear penetrating intelligence that this was a
happiness she had rejected, and which now she would never be permitted
to know. All that her experience could teach her was its value.

“Jim,” she said the day before she died, as she laid her hand in his,
“I’d like you to know that there never was anybody only you.”

“Why?” he asked, trying to keep the anguish out of his face. “Did you
think I believed it?”

“I gave you cause enough,” she said regretfully. “I could never make
up my mind, only once, and then I couldn’t stick by it. I want you to
promise me if I don’t come back that you’ll marry again. You’re the
sort who can’t be happy without someone to plan for.”

“Won’t you ever give up living in the future?” he asked with a
reproachful smile, and then raised her hand and kissed it.

It was their last conversation. He did not marry again, even for her
sake, though in public at least he did not give the impression of a
man broken down by grief. On the contrary, he remained cheerful and
thriving for the rest of his days. Matt, who was made of different
stuff, did not easily forgive him his callousness.


(1955)
Source: Domestic Relations 1957