Gone by Martin Roper

We fight with generosity, each insisting the other has more need or claim to the kettle, the print, the vacuum cleaner, the shared desk. Our generosity is in truth anything but. I use generosity to show her it is ending because of her selfish needs and partly to assuage my own guilt over the affairs that she has not discovered (I learned once one affair is started the language of deceit is the easiest language of all to speak). I want then to show myself to be her moral superior. When it ends, it is me who leaves the house. It is, after all, her home. It is hard for her middle-class ego to bear the idea of throwing the working-class sweetheart out onto the street. This is why it is me who speaks the words that bring our end, words spoken not out of courage, but desperation.
    The division of friends. It hits me like a tree falling that the friends I have were made through Ursula. Some people make an effort to stay in touch with me but finally their allegiance asserts itself in an unringing telephone. Ursula wants to settle. Settle. A word carrying the weight of unborn children.
    My father is reading something out of the paper about Northern Ireland, repeating what he always repeats. Should get a chainsaw and divide North and South and let them float off into the Atlantic. I stop listening to him and realise how much I am losing in Dublin: the late nights in bed together reading favourite worst passages from the books Ursula was reviewing, the walks on Dalkey hill, playing with the cats, pruning roses, sitting in a pub on a Saturday night, planning. All these things weaken my resolve and I telephone Ursula the day before I am due to leave for New York again. She agrees to meet me in Caviston’s.
    She laughs at the change in my ordering—I am always awkward in ordering, feeling I might be asked to leave before I even get to the table. But now I call the waitress over and ask for some water before I even order. The sophisticate. To my surprise the waitress brings the water. I question the waitress about the menu and I do it not to impress Ursula (although I would have if it made any difference) but because anger is the only thing that pushes me to assertion. We order wine but I can hardly drink it because of my nerves and I blurt out that we should try again, here or even in New York. Before she opens her mouth I know what she will say. I can see it in her eyes, see her reach for the words that will not hurt, and when she does say no, when she explains that whatever it was that bonded us is gone, and she feels nothing for me, not even anger, when she says these words I hardly hear her. I am riveted by her face. Her expression is one I have never known. She has a calmness and resoluteness that makes her a stranger. It is the face of a person in complete control. The pain I see in her eyes is not for the loss of what we once had but rather for the humiliating position I have put myself in, and the hopelessly awkward position I have put her in, sitting here in front of this well-chosen meal. She is far beyond me. The worst aspect of the evening is listening to her soften the blow and at the same time thread carefully so she will say nothing to offer any encouragement. Her tone is laden with the kindness offered a stranger who has tripped and fallen in the street.
    I curse myself for not waiting until the end of the meal. Now, we have to go through the farce of eating as if nothing has happened. I consider leaving, but pride keeps me in my seat. I even order dessert and joke with the waitress. Ursula tells me stories about the newspaper, stories about petty journalists and pettier editors. She has discovered that Wheatley, whose work we both detest, had indeed slept her way into the job. There would have been a time when that outraged Ursula but I can tell from her voice that it shocks her no more. Why do people begin to become the people you want them to be when it’s too late? She tells me too, in the only intimate