Cushla and Michael begin an affair

Cushla and Michael begin an affair in a sequence that moves from sociable invitation to furtive physical intimacy, while making clear that desire does not give them equal freedom. What begins around Michael’s Irish conversation evenings becomes a kiss, then encounters arranged at his convenience. Cushla’s attraction is vivid and bodily, but she also recognizes the limits imposed by his marriage and by the brief, concealed form the relationship takes.

From invitation to intimacy

Michael first draws Cushla toward his circle by asking whether she has considered coming to the Irish nights. He has just discussed The Black Prince, which Cushla bought partly in the hope that reading it would keep her from obsessing about him. His remarks about the novel’s Shakespeare references and complicated relationships make their conversation feel literary and lightly comic; the invitation that follows turns it toward the possibility of a more personal connection.

That invitation does not seem wholly innocent to Cushla. Remembering Gerry Devlin’s remark about Michael exoticising the natives, she wonders whether Michael and his friends treat Irishness as something they can play at once a fortnight. She notices Michael’s face colouring and his flustered clarification that he means Irish conversation nights. The awkwardness leaves her with the sense that he may be asking her out, and she agrees. Her consent is small and tentative, but it allows the relationship to move out of speculation and into a shared arrangement.

When Michael asks her to come with him next time, Cushla says she will. He asks how to say that in Irish; she answers with the phrase meaning that she will come. He takes her hand and presses his thumb against her wrist, where a blister has swollen from a burn. The gesture joins flirtation to care: Michael recalls that she was embarrassed when he ran water over the burn, while Cushla admits that she felt foolish and worries that his friends must think her pathetic. Their closeness develops through such modest exchanges before either can make it secure or public.

The first kiss and its qualification

Cushla anticipates the kiss, yet its awkwardness surprises her. Their teeth knock together and Michael’s chin scrapes her; rather than recoiling, she feels tenderness and kisses him gently in response, as if soothing him. The scene makes the beginning of their physical relationship neither polished nor assured. Its intimacy is registered through contact and embarrassment, not through a declaration that settles what they are to one another.

Afterward Michael withdraws his hand and rubs it across his face before telling her that his circumstances are complicated. He acknowledges how hackneyed the explanation sounds and says that he will not always be able to get away. Cushla asks whether he will be able to come sometimes. Michael says yes. That exchange establishes the terms of the affair at its outset: he offers intermittent access, and Cushla recognizes the restriction even as she accepts it. His marriage is not spelled out in this first explanation, but later scenes make clear that the complications include a wife.

Meetings on Michael’s terms

The practical imbalance becomes more explicit when Michael telephones just before seven on Good Friday, while Cushla is finishing a fish-finger sandwich for Gina Lavery. He is at dinner and says he will be at the flat by ten, asking Cushla to come and see him. She agrees, but feels resentment almost as soon as the answer leaves her mouth. She understands that he is unlikely to give her more: their meetings are arranged only an hour or two ahead, and may take place in lay-bys or at his friends’ house under pretexts that do not convince her.

Cushla’s response to Michael’s wife reveals another strain in the arrangement. She briefly thinks of the woman, but guilt about what the affair is doing to her does not take hold. Instead, Cushla imagines her rival through a changeable inventory of unattractive features, as though trying on paper-doll imperfections. The images are not knowledge of the wife; they are Cushla’s defensive invention, summoned because the wife stands between her and Michael. The passage distinguishes the actual obstacle from the fantasy Cushla uses to soften its force.

At Michael’s flat, Cushla checks her face before leaving the car and walks toward him as he waits in the doorway. He pulls her inside and closes the door with his foot. The scene makes concealment concrete: the private interior is separated from the outside by a quickly shut door, and the meeting follows Michael’s call and timetable. In his bedroom, Cushla registers the unromantic particulars—Victorian furniture, books and newspapers, an ashtray, a beige tasselled lamp, and a paisley sleeve protruding from beneath a pillow. She recognizes that, had she not arrived, he would have been changing into his pyjamas; because she has come, he is unzipping her boots. The contrast places the affair within ordinary domestic surroundings rather than a space wholly remade for romance.

Cushla wakes beside him with his hand on her hip, moves it gently, and gets out of bed to dress. Alone in the bathroom, she encounters the aftermath in the mirror: mascara on her cheekbones, a scuffed chin, and static-charged hair. She washes her hands and smells Michael on them. The sensory detail registers intimacy as something that remains on her body after she has left his bed, while the solitary bathroom scene returns her to the practical work of putting herself back together.

Desire, secrecy, and the affair’s shape

A later encounter sharpens the relation between Cushla’s desire and Michael’s control of its circumstances. She washes her hands insistently at home, scrubbing until the grey-brown water runs clear. When Gina asks what has made her so dirty, Cushla responds with irritation and recalls that Michael drove her to a derelict farmhouse. There he pulled her from the passenger seat and pressed her palms against the roof of his car. Cushla is unsure whether she enjoyed that act, but knows that she loved the way Michael looked at her immediately before he moved her underwear aside and had sex with her.

The contrast between uncertainty and certainty matters. Cushla does not claim uncomplicated pleasure in every part of the encounter; what she identifies most firmly is the force of Michael’s look and her desire for him. Yet the meeting’s secrecy, its remote setting, and her return to a house where Gina notices the dirt on her hands place the affair inside a life she cannot simply leave behind. The affair begins not as a mutual promise of a shared future, but as a repeated crossing between private encounters and ordinary obligations.

Across these early scenes, physical gestures carry what the couple cannot settle in speech: a thumb against a blister, an awkward kiss, a hand removed from Cushla’s hip, the closing of a door. Michael’s admission that he cannot always get away anticipates the structure the affair assumes, while Cushla’s resentment shows that she can perceive its cost without withdrawing from it. Their intimacy is real, but access to it remains limited and largely organized around his availability.