The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore Page B

stopped. And then, at the end of the avenue, hurrying, came Shaun, his hair sticking up like a fuzz of wet feathers on his head. He looked surprised to see her standing on the steps, as though she were waiting for him.
    ‘Well, Shaun, what luck,’ his mother said. ‘Just in time to see Miss Hearne to her bus stop.’
    ‘O, please don’t bother. I’m perfectly all right.”
    ‘Not at all,’ he said politely. ‘Just wait a second till I leave these books in the hall. I’ll be with you in a jiffy.’
     
    They set off together, she bizarre and faltering in her crimson raincoat and her waxeIx flowered red hat; he embarrassed and uneasy, trying to find a subject of conversation. At the end of the avenue they stood under the harsh orange glare of the
    street light, urging the coming of the bus with hopeful remarks. ‘Is that one?’ ‘No.’
    ‘I thought it was.’
    ‘I did too.’
    ‘They never come when you want them, do they?’ ‘Maybe that’s one now?’
    They made little half turns, turning back towards each other, nervous, awkward, hoping for it to end. This is the way with men, she thought, always like this. They don’t seem to want to be alone with me, it’s as if they’re trying to get away. O, I know he’s only a boy and I remember him as a baby I knit little woollen bootees for, but he’s a man, a man like all the others. And he wants to get rid of me, to run offand do whatever men do when there aren’t women around to hold them down. All like this, afraid to pair with me. Except James Madden? No, he wasn’t, just a little bit at the end of Mass, maybe, shuffling his feet. But then he asked me to go out. He asked me out. He wanted to stay, he was afraid I’d run away. James Madden, a man’s man. She looked at Shaun’s young unfinished face. A boy, a baby boy.
    Then the bus came rushing over the top of the road, a double-decker, a huge box on wheels, running down over the grey belt of wet road with the little driver sitting up straight against the glass in its flat face. It stopped, squishing its huge tyres and Shaun stepped off the pavement and held her arm as she went up beside the ticket-punching conductor. And he turned to say, as always:
    ‘Thank you very much, Shaun dear. And be sure to thank your dear mother for me.’ And the bell jangled, the driver started. The bus whirled off, to the last stop, the lonely room, the lonely nright.
     
    CHAPTER 6.
    LENEHAN.
    Ah, but you want to see the codology that’s goin’ on these days in my digs, yon big streel of a Yank I told you about and that ould blether of a Miss Hearne, the new one that just moved in, I tell you, you never seen the like of it, one ould fraud suck-in’ up to the other and the pair of them canoodling, it would turn your stomach. No, nothing like that, the pair of there’s past it and I don’t think the Yankee Doodle has that in mind at all. And as for her, she never had it nor never will, if you ask me. No, the geg of it is, as I was tellin’ you, it’s one ould fraud matched up against the other. She’s a real Castle Catholic type, very refained, the grand lady with her rings and bangles and her la-di-da. And this ould Yank, he wouldn’t look me in the face after the tellin’ off I give him, a fine Catholic, a bloody Orangeman at heart he is, but anyway, he thinks she has a bit of cash put away, you can see it the way he’s suckin’ up to her and she the same of him. And the best joke of it is, it’s my bet and I’d lay a bottle of Jameson on it, neither one of them has a five-pound note to their name. He took her out to the pictures the other night and yesterday, when I was coming out of Mullen’s after wetting my thirst, who should i see but the pair of them, strollin’ along like young love. I folleyed them just for the crack of it, and you shoulda heard him givin’ of[” steam about the glories of the States, you’d think he was John D. Rockefeller, and her right back at him, as good as she got, about