from that of Texas emptiness, or that of the Scots Highland, where he and Claire had once toured. The desolation here was intimate. Domes of stone-littered grass formed a high horizon, under roiling clouds with brackish centers. There was little color in anything; he had expected greener grass, bluer sky. The landscape wore the dull chastened colors of the people in the towns. It was a shy, unassuming sort of desolation. “I suppose,” Allenson said, to break the silence of their laborious walking, “all this was once full of farms.”
“I haven’t seen a single hovel,” Vivian said, with a querulousness he blamed on her back.
“Some of these heaps of stone — it’s hard to tell if a man or God, so to speak, put them there.” Jeananne had been a liberated Baptist, Claire a practicing Episcopalian. Vivian was from a determinedly unchurched family of ex- Catholic scientists whose treeless Christmases and thankless Thanksgivings Allenson found chilling. Strange, he thought as he walked along, he had never had a Jewish wife, though Jewish women had been his best lovers — the warmest, the cleverest.
“It said in the guidebook that even up in the hills you could see the green places left by the old potato patches but I haven’t seen a single one,” Vivian complained.
Time passed wordlessly, since he declined to answer. He hadn’t written the guidebook. The soles of their feet slithered and scratched.
Allenson cleared his throat and said, “You can see why Beckett wrote the way he did.” He had lost track of how long their forward-plodding silence had stretched; his voice felt rusty. “There’s an amazing amount of nothingness in the Irish landscape.” On cue, a gap in the clouds sent a silvery light scudding across the tops of the dull hills slowly drawing closer.
“I know this isn’t the road,” Vivian said. “We haven’t seen a sign, a house, a car, anything.” She sounded near tears.
“But we’ve seen sheep,” he said, with an enthusiasm that was becoming cruel. “Hundreds of them.”
It was true. Paler than boulders but no less opaque, scattered sheep populated the wide fields that unrolled on both sides of the road. With their rectangular purple pupils the animals stared in profile at the couple. Sometimes an especially buoyant ram, his chest powdered a startling turquoise or magenta color, dashed back among the ewes at the approach of these human intruders. Single strands of barbed wire reinforced the stone walls and rotting fences of an older pastoral-ism. Only these wires, and the pine poles bearing wires overhead, testified that twentieth-century people had been here before them. The land dipped and crested; each new rise revealed more sheep, more road. A cloud with an especially large leaden center darkened this lunar landscape and rained a few drops; by the time Vivian had put up their umbrella, the sprinkle had passed. Allenson looked around for a rainbow, but it eluded his vision, like the leprechauns promised yesterday at Moll’s Gap, in the droll roadside sign LEPRECHAUN CROSSING.
“Where is that second right turn?” Vivian asked. “Give me back the map.”
“The map tells us nothing,” he said. “The way it’s drawn it looks like we’re walking around a city block.”
“I knew this was the wrong road, I don’t know why I let you talk me into it. We’ve gone miles. My back is killing me, damn you. I hate these bossy, clunky running shoes.”
“You picked them out,” he reminded her. “And they were far from cheap.” Trying to recover a little kindness, Allenson went on, “The total walk is four and a half miles. Americans have lost all sense of how long a mile is. They think it’s a minute of sitting in a car.” Or less, Jeaneanne were driving, her skirt tucked up to air her crotch.
“Don’t be so pedantic,” Vivian told him. “I hate men. They grab the map out of your hands and never ask directions and then refuse to admit they’re lost.”
“Whom, my dear, would we have asked directions of? We haven’t seen a soul. The last soul we saw was your cow-eyed pal at the hotel. I can hear them now, talking to the police. ‘Ah, the American couple,’ he’ll be saying. ‘She a mere raven-haired colleen, and he a grizzly old fella. They were headin’ for the McGillycuddy Reeks, wi’ scarcely a cup of poteen or a pig’s plump knuckle in their knapsacks.’”
“Not funny,” she said, in a new, on-the-edge voice. Without his noticing it, she had become frantic. There was a silvery light in her dark eyes, tears. “I can’t walk another step,” she announced. “I can’t and I won’t.”
“Here,” he said, pointing out a convenient large stone in the wall at the side of the road. “Rest a bit.”
She sat and repeated, as if proudly, “I will not go another step. I can’t, George. I’m in agony.” She flipped back her bandanna with a decisive gesture, but the effect was not the same as Jeaneanne’s gold-streaked hair whipping back in the convertible. Vivian looked old, worn. Lamed.
“What do you want me to do? Walk back and bring the car?” He meant the offer to be absurd, but she didn’t reject it, merely thinned her lips and stared at him angrily, defiantly.
“You’ve got us lost and won’t admit it. I’m not walking another step.”
He pictured it, her never moving. Her body would weaken and die within a week; her skin and bones would be washed by the weather and blend into the earth like the corpse of a stillborn lamb. Only the sheep would witness it. Only the sheep were watching them now, with the sides of their heads. Allenson turned his own head away, gazing up the road, so Vivian wouldn’t see the calm mercilessness in his face.
“Darling, look,” he said, after a moment. “Way up the road, see the way the line of telephone poles turns? I bet that’s the second right turn. We’re on the map!”
“I don’t see anything turning,” Vivian said, but in a voice that wanted to be persuaded.
“Just under the silhouette of the second little hill. Follow the road with your eyes, darling.” Allenson was feeling abnormally tall, as if his vision of Vivian stuck in the Irish landscape forever had a centrifugal force, spilling him outward, into a fresh future, toward yet another wife. What would she be like, this fourth Mrs. Allenson? Jewish, with a rapid, humorous tongue and heavy hips and clattering bracelets on her sweetly hairy forearms? Black, a stately fashion model whom he would rescue from her cocaine habit? A little Japanese, silken and fiery within her kimono? Or perhaps one of his old mistresses, whom he couldn’t marry at the time, but whose love had never lessened and who was miraculously unaged? Still, in a kind of social inertia, he kept pleading with Vivian. “If there’s no right turn up there, then you can sit down on a rock and I’ll walk back for the car.”
“How can you walk back?” she despairingly asked. “It’ll take forever.”
“I won’t walk, I’ll run,” he promised. “I’ll trot.”
“You’ll have a heart attack.”
“What do you care? One male killer less in the world. One less splash of testosterone.” Death, the thought of either of their deaths, felt exalting, in this green-gray landscape emptied by famine and English savagery. British soldiers, he had read, would break the roof-beams of the starving natives’ cottages and ignite the thatch.
“I care,” Vivian said. She sounded subdued. Seated on her stone, she looked prim and hopeful, a wallflower waiting to be asked to dance.
He asked, “How’s your back?”
“I’ll stand and see,” she said.
Her figure, he noticed when she stood, had broadened since he first knew her — thicker in the waist and ankles, chunky like her aggravating shoes. And developing a bad back besides. As if she were hurrying to catch up to him in the aging process. She took a few experimental steps, on the narrow macadam road built, it seemed, solely for the Allensons’ pilgrimage.
“Let’s go,” she said combatively. She added, “I’m doing this just to prove you’re wrong.”
But he was right. The road branched; the thinner piece of it continued straight, over the little hill, and the thicker turned right, with the wooden power poles. Parallel to the rocky crests on the left, with a view of valley on the right, the road went up and down in an animated, diverting way, and took them past houses now and then, and small plowed areas to vary the stony pastures. “You think those are potato patches?” he asked. He felt sheepish, wondered how many of his murderous thoughts she had read. His vision of her sitting there, as good as a corpse, kept widening its rings in his mind, like a stone dropped in black water. The momentary ecstasy of a stone smartly applied to her skull, or a piece of flint sharp as a knife whipped across her throat — had these visions been his, back in that Biblical wilderness?
Now, on the higher, winding road, a car passed them, and then another. It was Sunday morning, and unsmiling country families were driving to mass. Their faces were less friendly than those of the shop-keepers in Kenmare; no waves were offered, or invitations to ride. Once, on a blind curve, the couple had to jump to the grassy shoulder to avoid being hit. Vivian seemed quite agile, in the pinch.
“How’s your poor back holding up? he asked. “Your sneakers still pushing your hips around?”
“I’m better,” she said, “when I don’t think about it.”
