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  ‘You mean “replevy” of course,’ Potter smiled.

  ‘The very word. Stick to the dillisk. Here, have another chew.’

  He felt sure that Crubog was angling for a drink, and he was in no mood to disappoint an engaging octogenarian.’

  ‘Can I buy you a drink,’ he asked, placing his empty glass on the counter.

  ‘Not tonight, sir. In six months’ time maybe, when you know me better.’

  ‘You’ve made an impression on Crubog,’ said Gillespie when the old man had gone. ‘It must be your sporting English manner. Crubog, for all his years, is a bit of a snob. He only takes to visitors with the right tone of voice and the right kind of swagger.’

  ‘I don’t know whether or not I should feel flattered.’

  ‘Are you sufficiently English to wish not to disappoint him?’ Gillespie asked with disarming directness.

  ‘Would it be immodest to say I’m convinced I shan’t?’

  He regretted having said it. Gillespie’s knowing smile told him that his friend had laid a trap for him. Gillespie was like that. After all he was a journalist, cynically convinced of his powers of penetration into other people’s minds. He placed a hand on Gillespie’s sleeve.

  ‘Now I must deal with a matter of greater urgency,’ he said, heading for the back door.

  He went out into the garden and stood in the dark under Roarty’s dead tree, but try as he might he could not urinate. He leaned against the tree and asked himself why he needed to escape, to be for a moment alone. Tears of longing welled up in his eyes. His loneliness was neither of the glen nor the country. He had felt it increasingly since his fortieth birthday, and the cooling of his relationship with Margaret. Though they weren’t married, they had been doing everything together. In the early days she bestowed on him a point of rest from which to confront the world. She had given him form and direction as well as something of the unconsidered gladness of boyhood, and what is more she did it unobtrusively, simply by her presence and conversation.

  Then they never discussed their feelings for each other; they talked mainly of the trifles of daily living, clothing them in a magic that was mutual, making them into symbols from which they drew strength and encouragement. Then out of the blue, Margaret became a vivisectionist. In her passion for analysis, she began tearing their lives apart. One day he realised that their powers of transmutation, his as well as hers, had faded. Trapped in their own forms of inner exploration, they were now wanderers in a once common demesne, having mislaid the flint that lights the annealing fires of life to illuminate the way. Margaret suggested they should try living apart for a year.

  ‘At the end of the year we’ll meet again and see what happens,’ she said.

  ‘Where will you go?’ he asked, thinking she would not have a ready answer.

  ‘I’ll stay with Poppy until I find a place of my own. It isn’t what you think. I just need more space, more time to be myself.’

  ‘You’re looking for something—or somebody,’ he said.

  ‘I shouldn’t like us to fall out. We’ll keep in touch. You’ll always be part of my life.’

  ‘Is it because you want a baby before it’s too late?’

  ‘No, it isn’t that. Try to understand, Ken. I must discover what I can do on my own before I can live happily with anyone else.’

  Margaret was a girl who liked to keep her options open. Though she had left him for her childhood friend Poppy, she felt unable to turn her back on him entirely. She kept phoning him to ask how he was coping, and to tell him about all the interesting things she’d been doing. She saw him as a backstop who’d never let her down.

  One evening a fortnight after she’d left, as he arrived home from the office, she phoned to say that she’d had a brainwave. ‘I simply knew this morning that I must cook you dinner for old times’ sake,’ she added. He told her to come round by all means, that he felt sure she’d find something in the fridge she could cook. He had a bath and put on a fresh shirt, knowing that if he didn’t, she would say he was ‘reverting to type’, the type in question being the male troglodyte. He listened to two Scarlatti sonatas as he waited for her knock, and observed the businesslike way she went straight to the fridge to assess the culinary possibilities of the contents. She was not impressed.

  ‘You’re not looking after yourself, Ken. You’re quietly going to pot.’

  ‘I thought we might order a pizza,’ he said. ‘They deliver within half an hour.’

  ‘I’ll buy you dinner since there’s nothing here worth cooking.’ She came across and adjusted his shirt collar. ‘We’ll go to the Mazzini, and I’ll tell you about all the fun I’ve been having. I had no idea how foolish the world has become.’

  ‘The Mazzini is noisy. You’ll find sausages in the fridge. I’ll help you make the batter. I fancy toad in the hole, and they don’t do it in restaurants.’

  The simplicity of his expectations had an extraordinary effect on her. She laughed as she hugged him and gave him a long and, for Margaret, quite passionate kiss.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘It’s just that I’m too tired to go out.’

  ‘I know what you fancy, and I know how you like it,’ she breathed, touching him lightly. ‘We’ll go to bed and listen to your music. Then I’ll cook your favourite comfort food.’

  He couldn’t help laughing at her effortless familiarity. Still, he knew that she knew what he liked and how he liked it. What he didn’t know and would never know was whether she liked it as well. Sometimes he suspected that in her heart she was just humouring him. At other times he wondered if she enjoyed a sense of patronage and power in knowing him in ways no other woman had ever known him.

  In the bedroom he discovered that she’d come fully equipped. She was wearing the bra and knickers he’d bought her for Valentine’s Day. ‘I thought I’d give you a little thrill,’ she smiled, doing a pirouette to demonstrate the sparkle of her armour. He knew she meant it kindly, that it was her way of being romantic, but he thought it a little patronising, nonetheless. What she would never realise was the wounding power of her frilly darts, which defeated her purpose and left him longing for the comforts of what she called ‘the feminine touch’, which he in his rueful way thought of as the most elusive touch in the long, long history of feminism.

  Her unexpected visit was the first of several, after which he began questioning the purpose of their separation, as she apparently saw it. She seemed intent on keeping a foot in his door while denying him an opportunity to keep a foot in hers. He did not wish to offend her, nor did he wish to sever all ties with her. Since he thought it best to absent himself from her feminine touch for a while, the offer of a year’s secondment in Ireland could not have come at a better time. It would give him a chance to be alone with himself in the field and perhaps discover things he would never discover in an office or in the bustling variety of an overflowing city. He might even find out how to live with a woman without intruding on her hallowed ground; to live with her in such a way that she would not think of deserting him for the cosy reassurances of a childhood friend.

  Margaret’s response to the news of his transfer was predictable. ‘Poor Ken, I don’t envy you,’ she said when he told her that he’d been posted to Donegal. ‘Poppy’s grandmother came from Donegal and spoke an obscure lingo which was neither Irish nor English. You may be understood, but you’ll never understand.’

  He disregarded Margaret’s less than disinterested views, and arrived in Glenkeel determined to make the best of things. He rented a cottage from the fisherman Rory Rua and settled down to a solitary rural life. At first he missed the sexual gratification intrinsic to Margaret’s companionship. He found it difficult to sleep at night. He shivered in bed, though the May weather was mild. Gradually, however, he began to savour the pleasures of self-sufficiency. After coming home in the evening he would make himself a bowl of soup and then, as he waited for a simple meal to cook, listen to chamber music, mainly Bach or Mozart, and drink a S
cotch or two. The bachelor life was not without its benefits, but now and again the loneliness of the mountains would cloud his day. Then he could only look forward to Roarty’s in the evening and a chat with Gimp Gillespie, Cor Mogaill and the others. Margaret still wrote to him but he knew she was unlikely to intrude on him in this most sequestered of outposts.

  Roarty was sharing a joke with Gillespie when he returned to the bar, and there was another Scotch waiting for him on the counter. He felt slightly tipsy, though it was still an hour off closing time, and he knew from experience that the next sixty minutes would slip past before he’d had a chance to grasp even one of them.

  ‘Have you had any good rural rides here?’ Gillespie gave him a serious glance.

  ‘The last time I rode a horse was in a gymkhana competition twenty years ago.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of mares,’ said Gillespie, pouring a too-high bottle of stout with unavailing care. ‘I was thinking of women.’

  ‘Only a journalist could make such an execrable pun.’

  ‘You haven’t answered my question.’

  ‘The answer is no.’

  ‘But there have been women in your life?’

  ‘Enough to satisfy my curiosity.’

  ‘Now you’ve said it. Once a man has satisfied his curiosity, the rest is routine.’

  ‘I’d like to think about that in bed on a cold winter night.’

  ‘I’ve had only one woman in my time, and that was just to see what it was like. I picked her up in a pub in Shepherd’s Bush. An old tart that drank free gin in exchange for a tumble. She must have been sixty, and her reddish hair was so stiff with lacquer that it felt like wire in my fingers. In the bedroom she took off an old pair of stays that hadn’t seen the wash since before I was born.’

  ‘What was it like with stays? Was it erotic or did it put you off women for good?’

  ‘It put me off loose women but not a woman. I’ve been in love with the same woman since I was fourteen, and I’ve never had as much as a kiss off her.’

  ‘Surely no woman is worth such devotion.’

  ‘This woman lit a candle in my mind that will never go out. Thinking about her has kept me warm through colder winters than any you’ve known in London.’

  Gillespie was gazing down into his glass as if reading his past in the physiognomy of the creamy top. His long face seemed to grow longer, his lower lip drooped, and for one disconcerting moment Potter thought that he might weep. His heart went out to him as a fellow sufferer in the misconstructions of the sexes. Gillespie looked up with a melancholy smile. ‘Without her I’d be a sapless stick,’ he said.

  ‘Does she live locally?’

  ‘I see her from a distance at least once a week, at eleven o’clock Mass on Sundays. You’re a different case from me. You’re still footloose, still capable of fancying a rub of more than a single relic.’

  ‘What is this relic you all keep talking about?’

  ‘It’s what you call the leg-over.’

  ‘A bit of the other. Please continue.’

  ‘If you were to have an affair here, what kind would you wish for?’

  ‘Something light-hearted and amusing, something to engage the mind as well as the heart.’

  ‘You mean you want conversation as well as copulation?’

  ‘In a nutshell. I’m over forty, you see, at an age when the demands of the intellect begin to exact their due.’

  ‘Don’t say another word. I’ll have you fixed up before the night is out.’

  He looked at Gillespie to see if he was being serious. Gillespie was drawing on a burnt-down cigarette, one eye closed against the smoke and his right arm resting casually between the bottles on the counter.

  ‘There are three possibilities,’ Gillespie explained. ‘There’s Monica Manus but she’s a man-eater. There’s Biddy Mhór but I’m told her natural juices are dry, and who wants to be bothered with axle-grease? And then there’s Maggie Hession.’

  ‘Who is Maggie Hession?’

  ‘She’s the local nurse and a snappy conversationalist. You did say you wanted conversation.’

  ‘Among other things. But what’s her age?’ Potter asked, beginning to appreciate the humour of his situation.

  ‘She’s barely thirty, ripe for the plucking. When she was a girl of sixteen, she dropped her knickers for a kilted Scotsman who was here on holiday, and no mortal man has had any luck with her since.’

  ‘Maybe she’s waiting for the return of Sandy.’

  ‘I think he hurt her. He was a bull of a man, you see, and she’s only a sliver. Some say he was equipped with a veritable caber.’

  ‘But that doesn’t mean a thing!’

  ‘You’re a strange engineer. It’s a question of volumes, man. You can’t put a quart into a pint pot.’

  ‘Now I know why you’re still a bachelor.’

  ‘Finish your drink. We’ll corner her before bedtime.’

  ‘But it’s nearly eleven!’

  ‘No one here goes to bed before twelve. And if we find her in her night dress, so much the better.’

  It was a lovely night with cool airs and what sounded like recitatives coming up from the sea. They lingered for a moment in the street, listening to the wild rumble of conversation inside and Roarty shouting ‘Time’; hoarse from exertion.

  ‘Roarty is a landlord in a thousand,’ Potter said. ‘In a sense he is wasted here.’

  ‘He’s a spoilt priest, you know. He saw the glory of the Golden City and turned his back on it.’

  ‘This morning he asked me the meaning of “ergonomically designed”.’

  ‘I wonder why he wanted to know that. What on earth did you tell him?’

  ‘Designed for efficiency, to minimise human effort.’

  ‘He must be going to install a newfangled stout dispenser,’ said Gillespie.

  At the crossroads outside the village they turned left onto a fenceless road, and the moonlit mountain before them gleamed with cottage lights. The night was blissfully quiet, except for the deep breathing of cattle in wayside byres, drowned occasionally by the eerie cry of a curlew from the shore. They walked in silence while Potter wondered what on earth he was doing on such an errand. He felt truly happy, replete with the peace of the country and an inviolable sense of detachment. And what pleased him most was that Margaret would be surprised, even horrified, if she could see him. All in all he felt inspired.

  Halfway up the hill Gillespie halted by a blackthorn bush and farted. Potter faced the ditch and waited for his water to come. Holding his insentient penis between his forefinger and thumb, he studied a sky dappled with light cloud; a mackerel sky with patches of empty blue, and at its centre a moon near the full with its rim so bright that he asked himself if such brilliance could be mere reflection. The clouds were so light that you could not see them passing over the moon’s face. They looked as if they’d gone behind the moon while the bottomless blue of the night sky lay behind them both. He watched the moon ride high and fast until it sailed straight into a sea of pure blue, in which it lay for a moment becalmed, suddenly bereft of its halo. Wondering if his imagination was wide enough to encompass the true scope and import of what he’d observed, he suddenly thought again of Margaret. She was standing on a cliff edge by the sea. With his camera he had caught her in profile as she faced into the wind, her long, fair hair streaming behind her. He could never look at that picture without feeling diminished. Her beauty was like the night sky, beyond his earthbound comprehension. Now that she had left him, he was like Gillespie or any ordinary man.

  ‘It takes rain to settle the wind,’ said Gillespie as his water splashed vigorously against a rock, but Potter, buttoning with deep concentration, did not answer.

  ‘Maggie Hession lives in the groin of the hill. You can see her light from here,’ Gillespie pointed.

  ‘I’ve had second thoughts, I’m going no further. She’s bound to tumble to our game.’

  ‘I’ve got a plan. You pretend you’ve sprain
ed your ankle and that you’ve come to have it bandaged.’

  ‘But I haven’t sprained my ankle!’

  ‘How is she to know?’

  ‘She’s a nurse, isn’t she?’

  ‘You’re thinking like a clapped-out bachelor. What you need is another Scotch.’

  ‘I don’t need another Scotch. I’ve already had a skinful.’

  ‘A word of advice then. Surrender to the genius of the country.’

  They’d already reached the laneway that led to the house. They could see the light from the kitchen window cutting cater across the lawn to the untrimmed fuchsia hedge at the end. They stood in the shadow of the gable, making final adjustments to their clothes and expressions, suppressing laughter like two schoolboys.

  ‘This has got to look good,’ said Gillespie. ‘Hop up on my back and I’ll carry you in.’

  ‘What if you should let me fall? You’re not exactly sober.’

  ‘Then she’ll have to bandage both of us.’

  He bent forward and gripped Potter behind the knees, while Potter placed a hand on each of his shoulders.

  ‘Hup!’ said Gillespie, hoisting Potter onto his back.

  ‘If we’re not careful, we’ll be had up for attempted buggery,’ Potter giggled.

  ‘But we’ll plead that it was all in the service of heterosexuality.’

  With a sway and a stagger, Gillespie rounded the corner of the house into the light from the open door, keeping close to the wall in case he should lose his balance.

  ‘I’m on a mission of mercy. No less than a corporal work of mercy,’ Gillespie called from the door.

  ‘Come in, will you, and rest your burden on the settle,’ said a young woman who was knitting by the fire.

  ‘My burden is nothing less than an English gentleman. Nora Hession, Kenneth Potter.’

  She reached up and took Potter’s hand, smiling with small teeth at his obvious discomfort. She wasn’t what he had expected; though younger than Margaret, she was not as good looking. About her mouth and eyes were lines of laughter, or possibly sadness, that gave her face a touch of quiet inwardness and told him that she might be a girl who did not take life easy. He had an impression of extreme fragility, of transparent skin and light bone that demanded to be handled with extreme care. For a moment he wondered if she were recovering from one of those wasting conditions that used to beset talented ladies of the nineteenth century. But no, she was probably more like one of those rare water birds that light once in a wonder on some secluded mountain tarn.