Academy Street by Mary Costello Page A

every day.’
    Anne Beckett’s wedding drew near. They had grown close, and Tess longed to pour out
her feelings for Anne’s cousin, but the dread, and the prospect of shame, if she
had misread the signs and imagined it all, prevented her. She contrived to steer
conversation towards topics in which his name might arise, but was struck dumb when
it did. One night in August, Anne was writing her wedding invitations at the kitchen
table, stacking them into a neat pile for posting. Checking names off her list.
    ‘Donal Brennan, my cousin, can’t come, but David is definitely coming—he was afraid
he mightn’t make it. He thinks he’ll be shipping out in October.’
    Her heart took fright. ‘Has he been drafted?’ She had thought the draft applied only
to American citizens.
    ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think he just signed up for the Air Force. He’s
being sent to a base in New Jersey in the next few weeks…’ She thought for a second.
‘I doubt he’ll be flying planes. Maybe paperwork or something.’
    A while later, after Anne had gone to bed, she found his invitation in the pile and
memorised the address.
    He was not in the church for the ceremony, or outside on the sunny street where the
guests overflowed afterwards. The reception was held in a hotel forty minutes out
of the city. When she saw him at the table, seated three places from her in a suit
and shirt and tie, and when he looked up and their eyes met, she knew that, for all
the times she had remembered him, he had remembered her too. She watched his hands
bringing the fork, the glass, to his lips. She saw his wrists and the fine hairs
under the cuff of his sleeve and thought of his skin, warm and smooth under the shirt,
and she had to look away. She ate little and genteelly, a new refinement arriving
of its own accord, as if every limb and organ and nerve was in obeisance, moved to
honour the beloved.
    ‘I thought you were a lawyer. Why are you joining the Air Force?’ They were on the
terrace. She was flushed from the wine. The light was fading and night-lights were
coming up on the lawn. She took the cigarette he offered and bent to his lighter’s
flame.
    ‘I am a lawyer. Anyone can enlist if they’re under twenty-five—which I am, just about—so
long as they pass the medical.’ She frowned. ‘So you’re not being drafted. It’s your
own choice to go.’
    He did not answer immediately. She thought of the TV images, helicopters, a burning
monk, the words Saigon, Viet Cong.
    ‘Yes, it’s my own choice.’
    He looked out across the lawn, into the twilight. In the silence that ensued she
arrived at a complete understanding of him. Recalling this moment later she could
not say how she had come to this understanding, only that she had, she had fathomed
something deep in him. It was more than fellow feeling. It was as if she had perceived
all the joy and fear and pain that had ever entered his heart, and he had let her.
For an instant he had let her love him. Her eyes began to fill with tears. It was
not with sorrow for his going that she wept, but with a new and gentle longing, a
wish that he would get all he had ever wanted. She had an urge to take his tender
feeble hand and cover it with her own. She saw him, a small boy again, at the burning
tree, standing on a street gazing after buses.
    All evening they moved in and out of each other’s orbit. She was a little drunk.
When the tables were cleared and the band started up, he did not seek her out but
waited an hour, until she had grown almost distraught. Finally, she was in his arms,
being wafted across the floor. She looked up at his face, inhaled the sweetness of
whiskey on his breath. A line from a poem dangled just beyond her consciousness,
but she could not pluck down the first word.
    ‘I dreamt about you,’ he said.
    At the bar they could not peel their eyes from each other. Around them, the beat
of the music, people dancing. Ice cubes tinkled and sparkled in their glasses.