Tender (23 page)

And when the conversation had finished, Cillian and Liam took their guitars out, and the singing started, and it was after perhaps twenty minutes of their singing that Catherine understood. Cillian was singing, for the most part, though Liam joined in for a few songs, and everybody else did as well, and they were making their way through all the usual things—“Blackbird” and “Hallelujah” and “Suzanne”—and then Cillian had started into a U2 bender—“Pride” and “Bloody Sunday” and “When Love Comes to Town.”

“Oh, enough bloody U2,” Catherine said to James, who was on the floor across from her, smoking some of Cillian’s hash and sitting back against the wall; he had one arm resting on the top of his head, bent at the elbow, and she thought of Florian in the photograph, and she chased the thought of him away. And James laughed, and said something that Catherine could not make out about Bono, and he passed her the joint, and their eyes met, and they were both smiling, and it was just lovely, Catherine thought—it was just the way it should be, with all of the earlier nonsense melted away. And by now, Cillian and Liam had started another song, a song it took her a moment to place, as Liam strummed it into the room, but it was more of the same: the same corny, heartfelt appealing. And she was actually laughing about it, thinking of how she and James would mock its lyrics, its diamonds and its cradles and its graves, when it hit her.

It was a song she had never really listened to before, though she had heard it so many times, heard its hoarse, desperate chorus. It was a song that had always just been there; always just part of the world’s background noise. And now—now, it seemed, it was hers. Because now she was singing it, in her fucked-up mind. James was sitting across from her, whispering to Zoe, and she was here, with its words coursing through her, with its words in the place where her breath was meant to be. Where her sense was meant to be. Her reason.

You
. And
you.
And the guitar chords slamming down like blows; Liam really going at the guitar chords, and Cillian, really pulling the arse out of the lyrics, roaring one word over and over, giving it two syllables, making it roll on, roll over; making of it a haunting.

And
fuck,
Catherine thought, as she watched James, as she watched the smile of him, and the lean of him, and the way his skin looked in this half-light, and the way his eyes looked when they fastened on Cillian and on Liam.

Fuck,
she thought,
you cannot feel this. You cannot feel this for him. You cannot.

B
ut she did.

O
n Monday, she stayed in the library and she worked on her Plath essay. She steered clear of James, telling him that she had to work. She had decided that enough was enough; that if she had to, she would stay away from him for a month, to shake herself out of this madness. Because this could not continue. She could not continue to be this weak. To lose his friendship because of this—unthinkable. And on top of that there was the shame of it, because this was, was it not, the precise thing about which her parents had warned her? And she had sneered at them; she had thought them ignorant and old-fashioned and appalling. So she would talk herself out of it. She would wean herself back to what was normal. And if she could not—but there was, she decided, no
could not
. There was only
should
. The kind of friend she should be. The kind of Catherine; the best, or at least better, version of herself. And yes, it would take work. But she was going to get there, she decided. She was going to get there, and James was going to be waiting for her, her old James, when the business was done.

She had
Birthday Letters
on the desk in front of her. James had given it to her that day after the incident in the bookshop; he had signed it:

On the jacket flap, Ted Hughes looked unkempt, his hair in wild flyaway strands. But dignified, still: a dark tie, a V-neck under a herringbone jacket. His eyes just darkness. His mouth in a half smile.

She knew what she wanted her essay to be about now: she wanted to write about his presence in Plath’s poetry, and her presence in these new ones of his. About autobiography, and how it never showed itself in the work in the lazy way that readers expected it to. She stared at the book’s cover, its abstract reds and yellows and blues. She opened a page at random; “Wuthering Heights.” She pulled it to her. Planted an elbow on each page and pushed her fingers into her hair.

Their trip to the Brontë ruins. The imagined ghost of Emily, and what she would have made of Sylvia’s giddy presence in the house, her huge hope. Her “huge / Mortgage of hope.”

Catherine was there with them. The wet, rotting beams, the stone floors covered with sheep droppings. In her mind’s eye, it was her father’s shed, the shed where he fixed farm machinery now, the shed that had been a home to someone not long ago. The moors she had never seen; but she could imagine them. Could imagine their whirling eddies of harshness and indifference. The winter sky, stern over a couple driven to be tourists in this place which, to them, ought to have been only too familiar—and must have been to one of them, at least, to Ted—and she could see it, Catherine could, the near blackness, the low ceiling, the shadowed corners, the sky leaning low. The stones, and the grass, and the animals looking in.

“Reilly. Where were you this morning?”

Emmet. He was crouching by her desk, holding onto the side, and he was grinning. He was reminding her that there had been a
TN
meeting that morning; Catherine had not bothered to go.

“Forgot about it,” Catherine said, and shrugged. “Did I need to be there?”

He clicked his tongue. “No loyalty.”

“No energy,” she said. “I’m knackered after the weekend.”

“And what were you doing at the weekend?”

“Probably the same thing you were doing,” she said.

“Well, I was trying to convince Derek Galvin to go skinny dipping in the canal. So I hope you weren’t doing that.”

“Skinny dipping with
you?
”

“No!” he said, looking horrified. “By himself. Why would I want to go skinny dipping with Galvin? Jesus Christ.”

“OK.”

“What are you reading?” Emmet said now. He tipped at the book like a cat with a toy. “Sorry,” he said then, quickly, with a wobbly smile.

“Ted Hughes,” Catherine said, unnecessarily, because in the same moment Emmet had reached over, closed the book and pulled it to him; he was examining the cover.

“Oh, yeah, I read something about this lately. Your one was his missus, wasn’t she? Who topped herself?”

“Sylvia Plath.”

“Yeah,” he nodded. “See, I know about poetry.” He opened to the description on the inside jacket flap. “Oh. These are
about
her, are they?” he said, after he’d read for a few seconds.

“Yeah,” Catherine said. “He wrote them for her.”

“For her birthday?”

“Kind of. Every year, like. She’s been dead for thirty-five years now.”

He nodded. “It’s sad, isn’t it? The way she died.”

There was this aspect to him, Catherine had noticed lately: this bluntness and frankness that startled her. These questions or statements he came out with, as unvarnished as a child’s.

“Yeah,” she said. “It was sad.”

He had settled on a page and had begun to read the poem. “9 Willow Street,” she saw.

“It’s about when they went to Boston,” Catherine said. “He was teaching at Harvard.”

“Jesus,” Emmet said, after he had been reading for a few moments. “They sound like a right barrel of laughs, the two of them.” He assumed a deep, plummy voice. “‘I folded / Black wings round you, wings of the blackness / That enclosed me, rocking me, infantile / And enclosed you with me.’ Jesus.” He shuddered.

“He doesn’t sound like that,” Catherine said. “He didn’t go to Gonzaga.”

“Signs are on him,” Emmet said, and he kept going. “‘And your heart / Jumped at your ribs, you gasped for air. / You grabbed for the world, / For straws, for morning coffee, anything / To get airborne.’” He looked at her. “Could he not just make her a fucking coffee?”

“Give me that,” Catherine said, and she snatched the book from him.

“Are they all that melodramatic?”

“Are you going to stay here and torment me all morning?”

“I might,” he said, grinning in response, but he looked distracted. He was looking at her but he was not, she knew, concentrating on what she was saying as she told him now that she was on a deadline with this essay. He nodded, but he was doing the thing she had known other guys to do—it had taken her a while to work it out, but she knew what it was now—which was the thing of letting her talk, encouraging her to talk, even, so that they could use it as an excuse to look at her more closely. He was studying her face now, she knew, instead of listening to her. And he was grinning. And he was cute when he grinned like that, there was no denying it. And he was cute, there was no denying it, when he didn’t grin.

But he wasn’t James. Nobody was James.

“James,” he was saying now, and Catherine stared at him.

“What?”

“Did you see James this weekend?”

And that was another first: blushing at the mention of James’s name; and she blushed harder as she talked about the dinner he had thrown, and she saw Emmet noticing this, and thinking about it, puzzling over it; tracking the blush across her face as it spread.

“And, em,” he said, picking up the book again, “what’s your favorite poem in this?”

“‘Robbing Myself,’” Catherine said immediately. She opened the index and found the page, pushing it towards him. “It’s about Hughes driving to their house in Devon after they’d left it. They’d split up by then, and he was going back to check on his potatoes and apples.”

“His
potatoes?
” Emmet said, incredulously. “What a fucking culchie.”

From across the library, someone shushed them.

“You’re incorrigible,” Catherine said. “I’m not going to let you read it if you’re going to slag it off.”

“No, no,” Emmet said, pulling the book to him. “I’m sorry.”

“It would have been a couple of months before Plath died,” Catherine said. “He says December. The December dusk.”

“‘Over fallen heaven,’” Emmet said. “For snow. That’s good.”

“Yeah,” Catherine nodded. “That’s good.”

He read on. “He likes his potatoes all right,” he said, raising his eyebrows.

“No talking,” Catherine said. She watched him read.

“‘Pigs’ noses,’” Emmet said with a smirk, and she rapped on the table beside him.

“Sorry,” he said, and he kept reading. And she watched him, as he came to the passage where Hughes crept through the house, the silent house, listening to the absence of his family, of his wife and children, feeling like a trespasser, seeing their books, the walnut desk, the Victorian chair he had bought for five shillings—
Love, love, I have hung our cave with roses
—

“Shit,” said Emmet, at the line now, she could see, about Plath’s tears, her last lonely weeks in the house. Did she imagine it, or did he shudder, reading about the house closed up again, tight as a casket, the stained-glass windows glowing? And then Hughes was back on the road again, and Emmet’s eyes were climbing from the bottom of one page to the top of the last, and to the image she loved so much that seeing him read it for the first time, she knew she could not trust herself to speak:

Emmet exhaled long and deeply after he had finished.

“Fuck,” he said. “That’s fairly depressing.”

She laughed. “Yeah.”

“So she wasn’t dead yet?”

“Well, she was when he wrote this.”

“Fuck.” He closed the book again, looked at it in his hand. “Well, nice cover, at least,” he said, and she burst out laughing. He was laughing too, as he looked at her, but she could see that he was confused too, or hurt, even, by her laughter.

“His daughter did that painting,” Catherine said, pointing to the splodges of color, the rusty reds and yellows.

“Did she?” Emmet said. “When she was little?”

Catherine laughed again. “No,” she said, and Emmet looked at her, disbelieving. “When she was an adult. She’s an artist.”

“Fair enough,” Emmet said, puffing out a breath.

“Here,” Catherine said. “Give it to me.”

But it was too late: he had already seen the inscription.

“Oh,” Emmet said. “That’s nice. He has nice handwriting, doesn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

“Mine’s a fucking disaster.”

“I know,” she said. “And so does my mother.”

He looked at her, bewildered for a moment, and then he got her meaning, and he laughed. “So, em,” he said, rocking back on his heels, “is James seeing anyone these days?”

“James?”

He nodded.

“No.” Catherine shook her head firmly. “No. For James it’s not that simple.”

“Oh?”

“No. Not that straightforward.”

“Well,” Emmet said, seeming to cast about for a response. “It’s not straightforward for a lot of people, I suppose.”

Catherine gave a little laugh, a laugh which might suggest that this was a cute idea. “Yeah. But
slightly
more so for James.”

Emmet nodded. The book was in his hands again, turning and turning. He swallowed. “Yeah. I can imagine.”

“Can you?”

He looked at her as though this was a test. “I think so.”

“I don’t know if anyone can imagine it, really,” Catherine said, feeling her throat swell with the importance of the statement. “He’s had some terrible things said to him.”

Emmet frowned. “By who? Not people in college?” He looked almost angry.

“Just people,” she said, shaking her head as though it was something she could not possibly go into. “You know.”

He shook his head now too. “That’s fucking appalling,” he said. “Poor James.” He looked at her. “You’re such a good friend to him,” he said then. “He’s lucky to have you.”

There it was again: the openness, the plainspokenness. Few people she knew would speak like that. Aidan, maybe, but with him it was somehow harsher. It was, with Emmet, the blush that made the difference, but it was also the way he said things. Like he meant them. When he was not joking, he was utterly serious. Was that true of everybody? She tried to think. Maybe. Probably. But no, she did not think it was. She glanced at him. He was not even looking at her, did not even seem interested in, or heedful of, her reaction. He was looking at the Hughes book again. He opened it at random, and quite astonishingly—or maybe it was just the way the spine was now, from her own use of the book—it fell open at “9 Willow Street” again. But he did not look at that poem—which reminded Catherine so much of Baggot Street, so much of the flat, the coziness in which they all lived—but across the page, to the end of another poem. It was “Child’s Park,” she saw; Plath in the park, going nuts at the girls who were pulling up the azalea flowers. Yet more than that. Always more than that.

“‘What happens in the heart simply happens,’” Emmet read. “That’s all right, as poetry goes. That’s at least not as dreary as fuck.”

“Don’t read the rest of it, then,” Catherine said, with a laugh that, she saw, came as a relief to him.

“Here you go,” he said, handing her back the book, and as he did so, his hand touched hers, and he let it stay there for a moment—for just long enough for her to know that he meant something by it. He glanced at her, like a child in trouble, his eyes cautious, the mischief only around the corner, the blush high on his cheeks again. “Right, I have to head off,” he said then, and he stood. “I’ve already missed a meeting with my Politics lecturer, talking to you.”

“Don’t be blaming me, Doyle,” Catherine said.

“I will if I want to,” he grinned, and he walked away.

“What on earth was that about in the library with poor little Emmet Doyle earlier?” Zoe said. They were having lunch outside one of the lecture halls; Catherine had been having a sandwich by herself when Zoe had come up to her.

“Nothing,” Catherine said, shrugging.

“And thanks for letting me know you were going out for lunch. I was waiting for you to come over to me for the last half an hour.” She ripped open her sandwich: chicken and stuffing, the same thing they had every day. “I’m bleedin’
starving
.”