‘You couldn’t help it.’
‘Of course I could have helped it.’
Without wanting to, she imagined them in the hotel he spoke of. She imagined them having a meal, sitting opposite each other at a table, and a waiter placing plates in front of them. She imagined them in their bedroom, a grimy room with a lace curtain drawn across the lower part of the single window and a wash-basin in a corner. The bedroom had featured in a film she’d seen, and Sarah Spence was even like the actress who had played the part of a shopgirl. She stood there in her underclothes just as the shopgirl had, awkwardly waiting while he smiled his love at her. ‘Then let not winter’s ragged hand deface,’ he whispered, ‘In thee thy summer, ere thou be distilled. Oh Sarah, love.’ He took the underclothes from her body, as the actor in the film had, all the time whispering sonnets.
‘It was messy and horrible,’ he said. ‘That’s how it ended, Jenny.’
‘I don’t care how it ended. I’d go with you anywhere. I’d go to a thousand hotels.’
‘No, no, Jenny.’
‘I love you terribly.’
She wept, still standing there. He got down from the stool in front of his desk and came and put his arms about her, telling her to cry. He said that tears were good, not bad. He made her sit down at a desk and then he sat down beside her. His love affair with Sarah Spence sounded romantic, he said, and because of its romantic sheen girls fell in love with him. They fell in love with the unhappiness they sensed in him. He found it hard to stop them.
‘I should move away from here,’ he said, ‘but I can’t bring myself to do it. Because she’ll always come back to see her family and whenever she does I can catch a glimpse of her.’
It was the same as she felt about him, like the glimpse that day in the International Stores. It was the same as Chinny Martin hanging about outside Harper’s. And yet of course it wasn’t the same as Chinny Martin. How could it possibly be? Chinny Martin was stupid and unprepossessing and ordinary.
‘I’d be better to you,’ she cried out in sudden desperation, unable to prevent herself. Clumsily she put a hand on his shoulder, and clumsily took it away again. ‘I would wait for ever,’ she said, sobbing, knowing she looked ugly.
He waited for her to calm down. He stood up and after a moment so did she. She walked with him from the classroom, down the corridor and out of the door that led to the. car park.
‘You can’t just leave,’ he said, ‘a wife and four children. It was hard to explain that to Sarah. She hates me now.’
He unlocked the driver’s door of the Ford Escort. He smiled at her. He said:
‘There’s no one else I can talk to about her. Except girls like you. You mustn’t feel embarrassed in class, Jenny.’
He drove away, not offering her a lift, which he might have done, for their direction was the same. She didn’t in the least look like Sarah Spence: he’d probably said the same thing to all the others, the infatuated girls he could talk to about the girl he loved. The little scenes in the classroom, the tears, the talk: all that brought him closer to Sarah Spence. The love of a girl he didn’t care about warmed him, as Chinny Martin’s love had warmed her too, even though Chinny Martin was ridiculous.
She walked across the car park, imagining him driving back to his gate-lodge with Sarah Spence alive again in his mind, loving her more than ever. ‘Jenny,’ the voice of Chinny Martin called out, coming from nowhere.
He was there, standing by his Yamaha, beside a car. She shook her head at him, and began to run. At home she would sit and eat in the kitchen with her parents, who wouldn’t be any different. She would escape and lie on her bed in her small neat bedroom, longing to be where she’d never be now, beside him in his car, or on a train, or anywhere. ‘Jenny,’ the voice of Chinny Martin called out again, silly with his silly love.
The rectory was in County Wexford, eight miles from Enniscorthy. It was a handsome eighteenth-century house, with Virginia creeper covering three sides and a tangled garden full of buddleia and struggling japonica which had always been too much for its incumbents. It stood alone, seeming lonely even, approximately at the centre of the country parish it served. Its church – St Michael’s Church of Ireland – was two miles away, in the village of Boharbawn.
For twenty-six years the Morans had lived there, not wishing to live anywhere else. Canon Moran had never been an ambitious man; his wife, Frances, had found contentment easy to attain in her lifetime. Their four girls had been born in the rectory, and had become a happy family there. They were grown up now, Frances’s death was still recent: like the rectory itself, its remaining occupant was alone in the countryside. The death had occurred in the spring of the year, and the summer had somehow been bearable. The clergyman’s eldest daughter had spent May and part of June at the rectory with her children. Another one had brought her family for most of August, and a third was to bring her newly married husband in the winter. At Christmas nearly all of them would gather at the rectory and some would come at Easter. But that September, as the days drew in, the season was melancholy.
Then, one Tuesday morning, Slattery brought a letter from Canon Moran’s youngest daughter. There were two other letters as well, in unsealed buff envelopes which meant that they were either bills or receipts. Frail and grey-haired in his elderliness, Canon Moran had been wondering if he should give the lawn in front of the house a last cut when he heard the approach of Slattery’s van. The lawn-mower was the kind that had to be pushed, and in the spring the job was always easier if the grass had been cropped close at the end of the previous summer.
‘Isn’t that a great bit of weather, Canon?’ Slattery remarked, winding down the window of the van and passing out the three envelopes. ‘We’re set for a while, would you say?’
‘I hope so, certainly.’
‘Ah, we surely are, sir.’
The conversation continued for a few moments longer, as it did whenever Slattery came to the rectory. The postman was young and easy-going, not long the successor to old Mr O’Brien, who’d been making the round on a bicycle when the Morans first came to the rectory in 1952. Mr O’Brien used to talk about his garden; Slattery talked about fishing, and often brought a share of his catch to the rectory.
