In the Middle of the Fields

by Mary Lavin

  ‘That’s right. I should have known,’ he said.

  She saw at once that he was humiliated by his mistake, and she wanted desperately to make him feel better. ‘When I was a child,’ she said quickly, ‘I didn’t know a cuckoo was a bird at all, but a sound, like an echo.’

  He didn’t smile. He was looking down at the rose. On the stem, in the cleft between it and the acle of a leaf, there was a white blob, as if of spittle. ‘What is it, anyway?’ he asked. ‘I’ve often seen it before.’

  ‘Give it to me,’ she said quietly, stretching out her hand. With the tip of her finger, she flicked the blob of white stuff on to the back of her other hand. ‘Look,’ she said, as the frothy secretion began to thin away, beads of moisture winking out, one by one, until, slowly and weakly on its unformed legs, a pale sickly-yellow aphis crawled out across her skin. ‘That’s what it is,’ she said, but at the feel of it on her flesh she shuddered, and shook it violently from her.

  ‘You shouldn’t have touched it.’ Throwing down the rose, he pulled out a handkerchief and took her hand, and began carefully to wipe it all over. ‘It always seemed so beautiful,’ he said regretfully, ‘a sign of summer.’

  ‘Ah, well, it is a sign of summer,’ she said, but her mind was not really on what she was saying, because although he’d wiped away all trace of the spit, he still held her hand carelessly in his. Unused for so long to the feel of another’s flesh she felt her cheeks flush. She was affected almost as strongly by his touch as by the feel of the plant louse. Shuddering again, she drew her hand away.

  ‘You’re cold?’ he said.

  Cold? Was it possible you could be so near to another person and so unaware of what went on within them? ‘You must be cold, too,’ she said. ‘Come in and we’ll have a hot drink.’

  ‘We stayed out too long,’ he said, bending down and picking up his rose. ‘Next time we must manage better.’

  There was evidently no question of his not calling again.

  ‘I hope you enjoyed the walk,’ he said easily, and then, as he was about to turn away, he looked directly at her. ‘Good night, Vera.’ He strode off down the drive.

  She looked after him. Why had she enjoyed it so intensely? That was the question.

  When she went inside, she attended absently to what had to be done before going upstairs for the night. Then, upstairs at last, she again went to the window and looked out. The moon, free of clouds, once more cast its lustre over everything. And, standing there, looking out, she remembered the times as a girl, before she was married, when she stood at an open window on a night like this, her heart torn by a longing to share the feelings that welled up in her. Yet later, when she had Richard there was not a single night that she had gone to the window for as much as a glance at what was outside. Always, no matter what the weather, day or the night, there was him blocking out all else. This view before her now, she had only really seen it after his death. Then, oh then its insistent beauty began to torment her. But not with the same emotion. And she thought of something Fergus had said. He was wrong. A time came when giving was enough. She stared over the moonlit fields and the high cobbled sky. And she knew what she wanted. She wanted to reach out and gather all that beauty up and shove it into his arms. To give it away and be done with it, she thought. And afterwards not ever to have to look out at it again.

  Next morning, she wakened late. Downstairs there was a loud knocking on the door. It was a grey day with a mist over the river and in the fields cattle looked dark, as if they swam in the waters of a fabulous sea. The knocking came again more urgently, and she sprang out of bed and went to the window. Below, standing back from the door, she saw him just under her window, looking up. ‘Oh, just a minute. I’ll come right down,’ she called down, pulling back instinctively.

  ‘Don’t come down!’ he called up. ‘I can’t wait. I haven’t a minute.’

  ‘You have to go back?’ This time in spite of the cold glare of day, she leaned out.

  ‘The exam papers came,’ he said. ‘When I went back to Tim’s place last night, there was a message saying they’d arrived. I have to get back. To get them finished in time, I’ll have to start on them at once.’ He turned his head as if to listen. ‘Is that the bus?’ he cried, dismayed. ‘I shouldn’t have come. I’ll miss it. But I wanted to tell you I was going, in case you’d be looking out for me tonight.’

  That he had any notion of coming that night, the third night in a row, took her by surprise. That he could have thought she might have been expecting him left her speechless.

  ‘I’ll have to go!’ he cried, but he put his hand to his ear. ‘It’s not the bus,’ he said, and he relaxed. ‘I didn’t think the papers would come for a few days more. The exam was only last week. But the sooner they come, the sooner I’ll get paid.’

  Depressed already by the day and by its cold light upon her unprepared face, and, of course, by his going, this glimpse of his unknown life was too much to endure. There was something so altogether offhand about this their last conversation that when in the distance she did hear the bus, she was not sorry. ‘Listen!’ she said. ‘Here it is. The bus is coming this time.’

  ‘It can’t be.’ He listened intently. It was. At once all his offhandedness left him. ‘What I really wanted is if you ever come up to Dublin.’ The sound of the bus was louder and nearer. ‘If you ever do come, and if you could spare the time, I needn’t tell you I’d love to meet you. Perhaps you’d let me give you a cup of tea somewhere.’ But as he was looking nervously over his shoulder, the bus was getting nearer.

  As for her, there was no time to dissimulate her pleasure. ‘I often go!’ she cried. ‘And I’d be pleased to meet you.’ But just then she thought of a way in which she could trim the truth a little. ‘I was only thinking last night, after you’d gone, that I ought perhaps to give you the names of a few people in Dublin, friends of my husband’s on whom you might call. People with some political influence, I mean, if you are serious about a political career.’

  ‘I am,’ he cried. ‘Write out a list and bring it up to me. That’s great.’ Satisfied that she was coming, he hardly saw the necessity of fixing a day, and was turning away when he realised the need. ‘When?’ he cried.

  ‘And where?’ she cried, leaning out across the sill.

  ‘How about Tuesday next? Or is that too soon?’

  There was no time to think. ‘Tuesday,’ she agreed. ‘But where? How about meeting in Stephen’s Green? We can decide afterward where to go.’

  It was settled.

  Or was it?

  ‘What will happen if it isn’t a fine day?’ he cried.

  ‘Oh, it will be fine,’ she cried recklessly. ‘You’ll see.’

  It rained, after all, on Tuesday. At first, she wasn’t going to go to Dublin at all, but she was too unsettled to stay at home. She’d go up for a few hours anyway, she decided. And then, shortly before four o’clock, unexpectedly the rain cleared. As she parked her car on the side of the Green, she could see through the railings that the park was almost deserted. Uncertainly, she went in through a side gate. She felt better when she saw the paths were already drying out and from the wet branches overhead small birds, plump and round, were everywhere dropping to the ground like apples. On the grass starlings and sparrows ran about like children, as if for once the earth was sweeter than the sky. Would he come? Would he think it too wet? Dispirited, she walked along the vacant paths till she came to the shallow lake in the centre. And there, by the lakeside, standing under a tree, she saw him.

  It was, she thought, the suddenness of seeing him that made her heart leap; only that. The next moment, a line from an old mortuary card came involuntarily to her mind. The card had been given to her by an old nun at the time of Richard’s death, and her own pallid belief in a life beyond the grave had been quenched entirely by its facile promise: Oh, the joy to see you come.
But now the words rushed back to her, ready and apt. I shouldn’t be here, she thought with terror. It was too late, though. He had seen her.

  ‘You came?’ he cried.

  ‘Didn’t you know I would?’

  ‘It was raining.’

  ‘It stopped, though.’ They began to walk along the side of the shallow cemented lake. ‘You must have known I’d come when you yourself came,’ she said.

  ‘I only hoped. Can we ever be sure of anything?’

  ‘Of some things, surely,’ she said, to gain time and think what she should do. There must be no more of these meetings. That was certain. But surely she could at least enjoy this afternoon? What harm could there be in it, except for her? And then only if she gave way to barren longings that might set the past at naught. She took a sidelong look at him. He seemed so happy. What did it matter what she felt, as long as no one knew. As long as he didn’t know! And he was concerned with the trivia of their conversation.

  ‘I suppose you mean friendship?’ he said. ‘But can there be friendship between a man and a woman?’

  It was such a young question, it endeared him still more to her. She and Richard used to talk like that long ago. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But I remember reading somewhere that there are only two valid relationships, blood and passion.’

  He was staring down at the cinder path under their feet as they paced along. ‘It’s an interesting thought, isn’t it?’ he said. Then he looked up at her. ‘What about us, though?’

  Disconcerted, she gave a shrug. ‘Oh, we don’t come into any category at all,’ she said, ‘except, wait a minute, I have something for you. I’d forgotten. It justifies our association.’ Opening her handbag, she took out the piece of paper on which she had written a list of names. ‘Here are the people on whom I thought you should call.’

  ‘Oh, thanks,’ he said, but he took it from her absently, and without looking at it he shoved it carelessly into the outer pocket of his jacket.

  ‘Hadn’t you better put it in your wallet? I went to a lot of trouble looking up some of these addresses. And, by the way, I put a mark beside the names of a few people to whom I thought I ought to introduce you personally.’

  ‘You mean go with me?’ He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out the paper again, smoothing it and looking at it this time with interest. ‘That’s different,’ he said enthusiastically, but to her dismay the next minute he rolled it into a ball and tossed it into a wire basket for waste paper that was fastened to a tree. ‘That means you’ll have to come up to town again. For the whole day next time, so we don’t need the list.’ He smiled happily. ‘Let’s go up this way,’ he said, pointing to a narrow path that ran over a humped bridge, low and covered with ivy. The bridge was little more than a decoration, for under it the water was utterly still. They stopped and were looking over the parapet.

  ‘The water isn’t flowing at all,’ she said. It was dusty and stippled with pollen from an overhanging lime tree.

  He didn’t look. ‘What did you mean by saying we don’t come into any category?’ he asked. ‘Is that an obscure reference to my age?’

  ‘No, to mine,’ she said, and when he laughed she thought she had distracted him.

  She hadn’t. ‘I knew that was what you meant,’ he said. With a stony expression he looked down into the water. ‘Vera,’ he said quietly, ‘listen to me. Never once since the first night I met you have I ever felt you were a day older than me.’

  ‘That’s nothing,’ she said sadly. ‘I never felt you were a day younger than me. But facts are facts.’ She straightened up and spoke flatly. ‘I always seem to be more attracted to people younger than me than to my own contemporaries, at least since Richard died. I was beginning to think that my heart was like a clock that had stopped at the age he was when he died, and that it was him I was looking for, over and over again, wherever I went, whenever I was in a strange place, or when I met new people.’

  ‘And wasn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I think it was myself I was trying to find, the person I was before I married him. When he died, I knew I had to get back to being that other person again, just as he, when he was dying, had to get back to being the kind of person he was before he met me. Standing beside him in those last few minutes, I felt he was trying to drag himself free of me. Can you understand that? Does it make any sense to you?’

  ‘I think so,’ he said gravely. ‘And it would explain what I said, that from the first you seemed so young to me. It was because you were making a new beginning. I felt it at once, although I knew you must be older than me, in years, I mean.’

  Vera shook her head. ‘Not years. Decades,’ she said.

  ‘Oh Vera!’ he cried, exasperated. ‘Don’t exaggerate.’

  But she wasn’t going to concede anything. ‘It might as well be centuries,’ she said bitterly.

  He turned and faced her. ‘No,’ he said gravely. ‘Two people reaching out improbably towards each other; not impossibly.’ Impulsively, he took her hand. ‘Vera, what are we going to do?’

  The first thing to do, she knew, was snatch back her hand, but someone was passing, and she could not let them be seen struggling. Instead, she looked down at her hand in his. This is the closest we’ll ever be to each other, she thought. Then, when the person had passed, she pulled her hand free.

  ‘This is crazy!’ she cried. ‘What are we saying? I thought it was bad enough that I—’ Realising what she was about to admit, she turned away abruptly. ‘It’s just crazy, that’s all. I shouldn’t have come,’ she said childishly. ‘I knew the minute I saw you. I was going to turn and run back to the car, only you looked up and saw me and it was too late.’

  ‘Yes, it was too late,’ he said. ‘It was too late the first night of all.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ she cried. ‘Not from the beginning?’ It was essential she be able to blame herself, to claim complicity in letting it go on, for the course it took, for the walks, the late hours, the intimacy of their conversation. Otherwise, there would be an inevitability implied that she could not face. There would be helplessness as well as hopelessness. The tears rushed into her eyes.

  ‘Vera, don’t be upset,’ he said. ‘This may be unlooked for, but you must know it’s not unprecedented?’

  ‘I know nothing.’ She dried her eyes. ‘I’ve heard things, of course. I’ve read things. Elderly housemaids jumping out of closets at little boys.’

  ‘Vera. Shut up. Do you hear me! Shut up.’ He raised his hand and she thought he was going to hit her. ‘The question is what are we going to do?’

  ‘We must put an end to things, that’s all!’

  ‘And end? At the beginning? You can’t mean that?’

  ‘What else can we do?’

  ‘I don’t know, not at this moment,’ he said, ‘but surely to God whatever we’ve found in each other, something we both know is rare, surely that’s not to be thrown away, not before we’ve got anything out of it,’ he said, almost pettishly.

  ‘What is there to be got out of it, only pain and heartache?’

  ‘For which of us?’ There was a pathetic eagerness in his voice.

  She shook her head. ‘Does that matter?’

  ‘I suppose not,’ he agreed miserably, and yet instead of resignation he had a stubborn look, and he caught at her hand again. ‘Isn’t pain the price of most things?’ he cried. ‘You’re too ready to give up, Vera. I meant what I said a while ago. There are precedents for this. We aren’t the first people in the world to be in this particular plight. I’ve heard of this kind of thing, and read about it. It always seemed very beautiful.’

  She interrupted him. ‘No, it is unnatural!’

  ‘Oh, Vera,’ he said wearily. ‘Why are you so bitter? I was only trying to say that it was something altogether outside my experience.’

  ‘An
d mine.’

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘but isn’t everything outside our experience until it comes into it? There was a friend of my own, a close friend, too, in my first year in college, and he was in love with a woman years older than him, fourteen years, I think. They did their best to break away from each other, but in the end they got married.’

  She pulled away from him roughly. ‘Married?’ she repeated hysterically. ‘Anyway,’ she said callously, ‘what is fourteen years?’

  He was arrested by that. ‘What age are you anyway, Vera?’

  ‘What age are you?’ she demanded, but she didn’t really want to know. ‘Don’t tell me,’ she cried, taking her hand away. She knew it was worse than she’d thought. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said hopelessly. ‘Let’s leave things as they are, and not show them up to be altogether farcical.’ He said nothing, but she saw him wince. He reached out idly and picked an ivy leaf from the parapet and dropped it into the pond below, where it lay flat on the stagnant water.

  It seemed a chance for her to say what had to be said. ‘We must stop seeing each other. At least by design,’ she added, having caught sight of his face.

  ‘I see,’ he said. He stood up. ‘And you dismissed friendship, as far as I remember, didn’t you?’ he said.

  She shrugged. ‘This isn’t friendship.’ She glanced at the sky. ‘It’s going to rain again,’ she said dully.

  As she spoke, a drop of rain fell singly and heavily on to the sleeve of her blouse, and as the stroke of the hammer brings the spark to iron, the heavy drop brought her flesh to the linen. She looked down, and then she saw that he was staring, too. Without a word said, the air began to throb, and it was with love, with love and nothing less. Her eyes filled with tears. ‘It may be rare, love, I mean,’ she said, turning aside, unable to look at him anymore, ‘but where there is love, everything is so easy. Friendship is so exacting. Perhaps that’s why they can never exist together at the same time. And why they never, never, can be substituted for each other. Let me tell you something,’ she said quickly and urgently, although as she said them the words seemed to echo in her mind and she remembered the disastrous effect of the other incident she’d told him on the first night of all. But she went on. ‘One evening last summer, and I was staying with friends in Howth. After dinner, we went out on the cliff, and I asked something I’d always wanted to know. I asked why the lights across the bay were always twinkling. But I was told they weren’t twinkling; they were steady. It was the level of the air in between that was uneven. Do you see?’ she said sadly. ‘It’s the same with us.’