might be, when all the time I was here! She laughed again, to see my chagrined scowl. We were walking along by the side of the road. The sun was in our eyes, and the evening light had turned to tarnished gold. Long grasses leaned out from the ditch and slapped at us lazily and left their dust on our legs. A wispy white mist was forming ankle-deep over the fields, and cattle stood on invisible hoofs and watched us as we went past, their lower jaws moving sideways and up in that mechanical, bored way. Summer, and the silence of evening, and my love by my side.
If she had come on the train, I said, what about Mr Gray—where was he? He was stuck in town, she said, and would catch the late mail train.
We stopped at a bend of the road, in the purple-brown shade of a stand of rustling trees, and I kissed her. Have I said she was taller than I was, by an inch or so? I was still a growing lad, after all; hard to think of that. Her sunburned skin was plushly hot against my lips, slightly swollen, delicately adhesive, more like a secret inner lining than an outer skin. Of all the kisses we exchanged, that is the one I recall most sharply, simply for the strangeness of it, I suppose, for it was strange to be standing up like that, under trees, at dusk on an otherwise unremarkable summer evening. Though we too were innocent, in our way, and that is strange, too. I see us as in one of those old rustic woodcuts, the youthful swain and his freckled Flora chastely embracing in a shady arbour under tangled honeysuckle and dew-sweet eglantine. All a fancy, you see, all a dream. When the kiss was done we each took a step back, cleared our throats, and turned together and walked on in decorous silence. We were holding hands, and I, the aspiring gallant, was carrying her shopping bag. What were we to do now? It was growing late, and I had missed the last train. What if someone who knew us were to come driving along and see us there, strolling hand in hand between those misty fields so late in the day, a beardless boy, a married woman, and yet a pair of lovers, plainly? I pictured it, the car swerving wildly and the driver’s disbelieving look over the wheel, his mouth opening to exclaim. Mrs Gray began to tell me how when she was small her father used to take her out on evenings such as this to gather mushrooms, but then broke off and became pensive. I tried to see her as a girl, picking her way barefoot through the mist-white meadows, with a basket on her arm, and the man, her father, going ahead of her, bespectacled, whiskered and waistcoated, like the fathers in fairy tales. For me she could have no past that was not a fable, for had I not invented her, conjured her out of nothing but the mad desires of my heart?
She said she would go back and fetch the station wagon and drive me home. But how would she manage it, I wanted to know, how would she get away?—for I had begun at last to weigh the perils of our predicament. Oh, she said, she would think of some story or other. Or had I, she enquired, a better plan to suggest? I did not like her sarcastic tone and did as I so often did and set to sulking. She laughed, and said I was a big baby, and drew me to her with both arms and gave me what was half a hug and half a shake. Then she pushed me away again, and brought out her lipstick and made herself a new mouth, pouting, and sucking in her lips until it looked as if she had no teeth and making faint smacking sounds. I was to wait by the railway bridge, she said, and she would come back and pick me up there. I should keep an eye out in case Mr Gray’s train arrived in the meantime. What, I asked, was I supposed to do if it did? ‘Hide behind the ditch,’ she said drily, ‘unless you want to explain to him how you happened to be hanging about here at this hour of the night.’
She took the shopping bag from me and went off. I watched her dimmening figure waver away through the twilight, over the bridge, and disappear, slipping like a shadow through a gap between two worlds, hers and mine. Why in so many of my memories of her is she walking away from me? I had not asked her what she had bought in town. I had not cared to know, but now I pictured her as in one of those brightly coloured cheery advertisements of the day, freckled and tanned in her summer frock, attended by Billy and Kitty, the two of them gazing up at her with rosy cheeks propped on their fists, grinning and eager, their eyes bright as buttons, as she produces from the cornucopia of her bag all manner of comestible delights—biscuits and bonbons, cobs of corn, sliced pans in wax- paper wrappers, oranges the size of bowling balls, a squamous pineapple with its gay topknot—while in the background Mr Gray, husband, father, only provider of all this abundance, looks up from his newspaper and smiles indulgently, modest, dependable, square-jawed Mr Gray. Their world, never to be mine. The summer was ending.
I went and sat on a stile. Below me the rail lines shone in the day’s last light, and in the station master’s office a wireless set inserted its needle of buzzing sound into the silence. Night came on, diffusing the purple-grey gloam that passes for darkness at that time of year. Now a light went on in the waiting-room window, and moths wove drunken, zigzag patterns under a buzzing lamp at the end of the platform. Behind me in the fields a corncrake began insistently to shake its wooden rattle. There were bats out, too, I could sense them flickering here and there above me in the indigo air, their wings making a tiny sound like that of tissue paper being surreptitiously folded. Presently a huge, fat-faced moon the colour of honey hoisted itself up out of somewhere and goggled down at me, mirthful and knowing. And shooting stars!—when is the last time you saw a shooting star? By now Mrs Gray had been gone a worryingly long time. Had something happened, had she been waylaid? Maybe she would not be able to come back for me at all. I was growing chilled, and hungry, too, and I thought mournfully of home, my mother in the kitchen, in her chair by the window, reading a detective story from the library, her glasses on the end of her nose, one ear-piece repaired with sticking-plaster, licking her thumb to turn the pages and blinking sleepily. But maybe she would not be reading, maybe she would be standing by the window, peering out worriedly into the dark, wondering why I was abroad so late, and where I could be, and what doing.
The arm of the railway signal below the bridge came down with a jerk and a clack, startling me, and the signal light had turned from red to green, and away off in the distance I could see the light of the approaching mail train. Mr Gray would shortly arrive, would step down to the platform, with his briefcase, and a rolled newspaper under his arm, and stand a moment, peering about and blinking, as if he were not sure he was in the right place. What should I do? Should I try to divert him? But as Mrs Gray had sensibly said, what excuse could I offer for being there, alone, so late at night, cold and shivering? Then the station wagon appeared over the crest of the hill. One of its headlamps was permanently askew, so that the lights had a comically wall-eyed, groping glare. It drew up and stopped by the stile. The window on the driver’s side was open and Mrs Gray was smoking a cigarette. She glanced past me at the light of the approaching train that was as big now and as yellow as the moon. ‘Jeepers,’ she said, ‘just in time, eh?’ I got in beside her. The leather seat felt cold and clammy. She reached out a hand and touched my cheek. ‘Poor you,’ she said, ‘your teeth are chattering.’ She gouged at the gears and in a burst of tyre-smoke we shot off into the night.
She said she was sorry she had been so long away. Kitty had not wanted to go to bed, and Billy had been out somewhere with his friends and she had felt she must wait for him to come back. His friends, I thought, oh, yes, his new friends that he had lost no time in making. She began to tell me about an old man staying at the hotel who haunted the beach all day spying on girls changing into their swimsuits. As she spoke she made large, hooping gestures with the cigarette, as if it were a stick of chalk and the air a blackboard, and laughed whinnyingly down her nose, seeming not to have a worry in the world, which annoyed me, of course. She still had her window open and as we sped through the moonlit landscape the night kept snapping up at her elbow, and her hair shivered in the wind and the stuff of her dress at her shoulder rippled and slapped. I told her how I had met Billy, and his friends. I had been saving up that piece of news. She was silent for a long time, thinking. Then she shrugged, and said he had been out all day, that she had hardly seen him since morning. I was not interested in any of this. I asked if we might stop somewhere, by the side of the road, or up a lane. She looked at me sidelong and shook her head, pretending to be shocked. ‘Do you ever,’ she asked, ‘think of anything else?’ But she did stop.
Later, when we got to town, she drew up at the far end of my street. The house, I saw, was dark. My mother must have gone to bed, after all—what should I think of that? Mrs Gray said I had better go in, yet I lingered. Beyond the windscreen the moonlight was carving the street into a jumble of sharp-edged cubes and cones, and everything seemed covered in a thin, smooth coating of silver-grey dust. Another shooting star, and then another. Mrs Gray was silent now. Was she thinking of her children? Was she wondering what she would say to her husband when she returned, what explanation she would offer for her absence? Would he be waiting up for her, sitting in the dark on the glassed-in veranda, drumming his fingers, his spectacle lenses shining accusingly? At length she sighed and drew herself up in the seat with a weary wriggle, and patted me on the knee and said again that it was very late and that I should go in. She did not kiss me goodnight. I said I would come down to Rossmore another day, but she made a line of her lips and gave her head a quick small shake, keeping her eyes on the
