The Beach Encounter — Ulysses

The summer evening folded down on Sandymount, the last of the sun on Howth and on the rocks, and from the church by the shore the men's temperance retreat sent out the litany of Mary, star of the sea. Three girls had the nook they always used. Cissy Caffrey and Edy Boardman had the baby in the pushcar, and Cissy's twin brothers, Tommy and Jacky, not yet four, in sailor suits marked H. M. S. Belleisle, were knocking down each other's sandcastles. Cissy was the one who could get a dose of castor oil into a child. Edy was the one with the short sight and the sharper tongue. The third sat a little apart. In the story she told of herself she was as fair a specimen of Irish girlhood as anyone could wish, more a Giltrap than a MacDowell, her brows and her electric blue blouse taken from the papers that told a girl how to be looked at. She would be twenty-two in November. She had dressed in case someone might be out. The someone was Reggy Wylie, the protestant boy with the bicycle who used to turn at the lamp with his hands off the bars, and whose father now kept him in of an evening to study for an exhibition. Edy had already put her nose out of joint by naming Gerty as Tommy's sweetheart. Gerty laughed, because she knew it was only that the boy was cooling, a lovers' quarrel, and because she had a better story ready. Reggy had once kissed the end of her nose at a party and run for the refreshments. He was too young. The man she wanted was older, quiet, strong, his hair a little grey, a man who had not found his ideal and would take her in sickness and in health. She would light his fire, turn the spoon one way only, and have the photograph of grandpapa Giltrap's dog Garryowen on the wall of a house with chintz covers. He would hug her before he went to business. If her own father had taken the pledge, she might have been rolling in her carriage. She had seen him lift his hand in the house. She loved him still when he sang, and she had gone into town for his Catesby's cork lino letters when the gout kept him from Mr Dignam's funeral. A good daughter, she told herself, a second mother, the girl who turned off the gas at the main.

The twins' ball came down the strand and stopped under her skirt. They laughed when she missed the kick. She lifted the skirt just enough, just enough for them to see she could, and sent it flying, and the flush came up because the gentleman in black on the rocks had been looking. Until then the glances had been casual. Now, under the brim of the hat she had trimmed herself from Clery's sales, she looked back, and the face seemed the saddest she had ever seen. He was in mourning. He had a pale intellectual look, a foreigner, the image of Martin Harvey the matinee idol if you allowed for the moustache. The incense came from the open window, spiritual vessel, mystical rose, and Father Hughes had told them that no one who implored the Virgin was ever abandoned. Gerty decided the look had meaning. If he had suffered, if he had even been a sinner, she cared not. If he was a protestant or a methodist she could convert him, so long as he loved her for herself alone. She thought of Father Conroy's confession box, and of the time she had crimsoned there and he had told her not to be troubled, because that was the voice of nature and no sin. Cissy ran after the twins with her petticoat flying, and Gerty swung her buckled shoe in time with the Tantum ergo and felt, by the irritation at her stays, that her own time was coming on, as it had when she cut her hair for the new moon. Edy offered a penny for her thoughts. Gerty said she was only wondering if it was late. Cissy ran to the gentleman, her uncle Peter for the joke, to ask the time. Gerty watched him take his hand out of his pocket and play with the watchchain before he could answer. He was very sorry. His watch had stopped. He thought it must be after eight, because the sun was down. Cissy came back with her tongue out and said uncle's waterworks were out of order. Edy asked, in her quiet way, if Gerty was heartbroken about her best boy throwing her over. It cut. Gerty laughed and said she could throw her cap at who she liked, because it was leap year. They could put that in their pipe. She had one shortcoming, from a fall coming down Dalkey hill, and she always tried to conceal it. With that hidden, she told herself, she need fear no competition. The others packed the buckets. She passed off the baby's ruined bib as the benediction bell. A bat left the belfry. The lamplighter would soon be lighting the lamp where Reggy used to turn his wheel. For Gerty had her dreams that no one knew of.

Cissy called her down the strand. The lights over the trees were the bazaar fireworks. Gerty would not be at their beck. She could see from where she was. They left her, and she read the face opposite as white-hot passion, silent as the grave, a man of inflexible honour who could be trusted to the death. She leaned back to look up, caught her knee in her hands, and let him see her legs, and the blue garters she had put on for luck, and the white knickers above them, because there was no one to look but him, and because Bertha Supple had once told her in dead secret what a gentleman lodger did that was not very nice, and this was altogether different, a cry of love, and besides there was absolution so long as you did not do the other thing before you were married. A Roman candle went up over the trees. She leaned farther. A rocket sprang, and went bang, and everyone cried O, and it gushed a stream of gold threads and greeny stars, and then all of it melted in the grey air. She glanced at him, a little glance of shy reproach, and he coloured like a girl. He was Leopold Bloom. He sat with his head bowed. For a moment longer she was still the girl who could forgive him, and the bat was the only creature that might tell. Cissy whistled that they were going. Gerty waved a scrap of scented wadding without letting him see the trick, rose, smiled as if she forgave him, and walked slowly down the uneven strand, with care, because of the seaweed and the stones, and because of the thing she had always concealed. Tight boots, he wondered. No. She's lame. That was why she had been left while the others sprinted. He was glad he had not known it when she was on show. A defect was ten times worse in a woman. She was a hot little devil all the same.

He set his wet shirt right and felt the cold after. You had to get rid of it some way. They went home to bread and milk and night prayers, and if you saw them as they were you would spoil it. They needed the stage, the costume, the music. He thought her near her month, which made them ticklish, and he wondered why all women did not keep the one moon, Molly and Milly sometimes together and sometimes not. The letter was still safe. He was glad he had not spent the morning on Martha's silly threat to punish him, and glad of the cider behind the wall when he came out of Dignam's, because otherwise he could not have managed this. His watch had stopped at half past four. Dust, perhaps. Or was that just when he, when she. Yes. He did. Into her. She did. Done. The strand was empty enough now for the other thoughts, Howth gone quiet, a long day of Martha and the bath and the funeral, Nannetti's boat already near Holyhead, an advertisement still to nail, petticoats for Molly, and whether he would go to Belfast. He would not. Let him. He was tired to move. A piece of paper on the sand was not a letter. With his stick he vexed the sand and began a message, in case she came back. I. Then AM. A. There was no room, and the tide would take it, and a tramp would walk on it in the morning. He rubbed the letters out with his boot. Nothing grows in sand. All fades. He flung the stick and it stuck where he had not aimed. They would never meet again. But it was lovely. Goodbye, dear. Thanks. She had made him feel so young. He leaned back with his mouth open and his boot sanded sideways, meaning to close his eyes for a moment and not to sleep. Far in the grey a bell chimed. In the priest's house, where Canon O'Hanlon and Father Conroy and Father Hughes were at their tea and their mutton chops, the little clock she had once noticed brought its bird out and called cuckoo across the strand, three times, nothing like the story she had told of herself.