The Collected Stories by John McGahern

Author:John McGahern [McGahern, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5318-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-01-21T05:00:00+00:00

Gold Watch

It was in Grafton Street we met, aimlessly strolling in one of the lazy lovely Saturday mornings in spring, the week of work over, the weekend still as fresh as the bunch of anemones that seemed the only purchase in her cane shopping basket.

‘What a lovely surprise,’ I said.

I was about to take her hand when a man with an armload of parcels parted us as she was shifting the basket to her other hand, and we withdrew out of the pushing crowds into the comparative quiet of Harry Street. We had not met since we had graduated in the same law class from University College five years before. I had heard she’d become engaged to the medical student she used to knock around with and had gone into private practice down the country, perhaps waiting for him to graduate.

‘Are you up for the weekend or on holiday or what?’ I asked.

‘No. I work here now.’ She named a big firm that specialized in tax law. ‘I felt I needed a change.’

She was wearing a beautiful suit, the colour of oatmeal, the narrow skirt slit from the knee. The long gold hair of her student days was drawn tightly into a neat bun at the back.

‘You look different but as beautiful as ever,’ I said. ‘I thought you’d be married by now.’

‘And do you still go home every summer?’ she countered, perhaps out of confusion.

‘It doesn’t seem as if I’ll ever break that bad habit.’

We had coffee in Bewley’s – the scent of the roasting beans blowing through the vents out on to Grafton Street for ever mixed with the memory of that morning – and we went on to spend the whole idle day together until she laughingly and firmly returned my first hesitant kiss; and it was she who silenced my even more fumbled offer of marriage several weeks later. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be married. But we can move in together and see how it goes. If it doesn’t turn out well we can split and there’ll be no bitterness.’

And it was she who found the flat in Hume Street, on the top floor of one of those old Georgian houses in off the Green, within walking distance of both our places of work. There was extraordinary peace and loveliness in those first weeks together that I will always link with those high-ceilinged rooms – the eager rush of excitement I felt as I left the office at the end of the day; the lingering in the streets to buy some offering of flowers or fruit or wine or a bowl and, once, one copper pan; and then rushing up the stairs to call her name, the emptiness of those same rooms when I’d find she hadn’t got home yet.

‘Why are we so happy?’ I would ask.

‘Don’t worry it,’ she always said, and sealed my lips with a touch.

That early summer we drove down one weekend to the small town in Kilkenny where she had grown up, and above her father’s bakery we slept in separate rooms.

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