‘It is spoken, Annie, throughout the districts of the West, and some day it will be spoken again generally in Ireland. Isn’t it our own tongue?’
‘Not that I ever noticed,’ I say.
‘You are surrounded by things you never notice, Annie.’
‘I’ll thank you not to be rude to me in my own house.’
‘I’m sorry, Annie. I wasn’t being rude. I was being blunt, like yourself. You are one of that class of persons that can dish it out, but you can’t receive it.’
‘I can receive it well enough,’ I say, with an eerie calm. ‘What did you want to say to me?’
‘Annie, can we put the loaves in the pot-oven?’ Sarah says. ‘I can smell rain. Did you smell rain, Matthew?’
He lets his easel down and sits at the far edge of the table, and drinks a sip of his tea.
‘It hasn’t rained for two weeks, Sarah,’ he says, agreeably. ‘Do you think it will suddenly rain now?’
‘Go and put the loaves in, Annie,’ she says, ‘anyway.’
‘All right, Sarah,’ I say, and take up the three lumps of dough we have ready, and carry them out on their greasy tray. Outside the yard is a lovely bowl of warm sunlight, sweet and clear. There is about as much chance of rain as there is of gold falling from the sky.
Chapter Twelve
Every second day or so Matt comes to see us, bringing the past with him. That is how it seems to me. I cannot get out of my head all those years of work, raising the three boys in the place of my sister, who lay all the hours above in her bed, in the return of the house. She lay there for years amid the daytime songs of the blackbirds.
At the end of the garden was the monastery wall, and beyond that the monks paced their avenues, with their prayers and their secret thoughts. The huge sycamore opened and closed the doors of the seasons, letting in that miserly Dublin light in winter, doling it out in summer through its million singing leaves.
By the summer of 1950, when myself and the century were surprised to find ourselves fifty years old, the two eldest boys were almost grown - in a measure of time that seemed only the downturn of a sparrow’s wing - lounging in the deck chairs in the back garden, with their outlandish beards, their queerly coloured suits and ties, watching their father fuss over his apple tree, his roses. It was one of those magisterial summers that come once in a decade, in twenty years, when all the rivers of the country run low and the old roads of these backwoods districts turn into whitened ribbons.
Matt was at war with his eldest son. at war with the greenfly. But he set a shining hubcap he had found on the Shelly Banks into the grass, for a birdbath, and he would go up to his studio on the first floor, and sit there for hours, drawing the birds that came to drink. And Maud alone a-bed throughout. What was wrong with her, the doctor could not say. She grew fat and sick and queerly happy there. At night, of course, Matt left us, entering that return bedroom, closing the door.
He had painted country scenes on the panels of his doors downstairs, and in the bathroom he covered the failed, foxed edges of the mirror with tiny, painted flowers. He read Dickens and Shakespeare in the fading light from his garden. He polished his shoes, and brushed his hats, and was grateful for his ironed shirts and trousers. In the deep reaches of the night, when I could not sleep, the eldest boy perhaps out on the town I knew not where, I would set up my ironing in the stove-warm kitchen. Eventually the boy would return, with his wild hair and eyes, exhausted, excited, uneasy. If Matt heard him entering the hall, the clicks of the door betraying him, he would come down all hissing anger and fear. Otherwise I gave the miscreant cocoa in my lair, and looked at the boy’s sleepy face, and wondered what life he was leading. Was there true adventure in it, and was it all bravado, exhaustion and desperation? He was studying to be a sculptor at the College of Art. One day he brought home a beautiful wooden figure of Christ praying, which surprised us all. I had imagined wildness in his work too, scandalous things.
By contrast, his brother, the children’s father, was all early nights and decency and thoughtfulness, making him the apple of Matt’s eye.
I peeled the potatoes in the scullery, made the meals, scrubbed the tables, polished everything that could shine, brushed out everywhere, scoured, seared, ordered the larder under the stairs, killed the mice, banished the spiders, trapped the summer flies on fly paper, washed, dried, ironed, folded the clothes, the sheets and linens, went to my rest as tired as a wolf, as easy in my conscience as a lamb. It was a world for me, a sort of paradise, Elysium. I would lie in my bed thinking of everything, and I would dream of Matt, a strange dream where I opened his bones with a little saw and instead of marrow in them there was quicklime. In that dream then afterwards - how I put him together again I do not know - we would sit together in the dining room, side by side, the sunlight flooding down on our four knees. It was a queer little dream of peace and quietude, in which there was no Maud.
Then suddenly there was no Maud, the poor girl died, Maud died and there were frightening changes. The queen was gone from the heart of the realm, and I had not even known she was queen. Matt and I argued about everything, the very morning of her funeral we argued, when the eldest boy said he would not go. And it was then also in all honesty I noticed that he was in the upshot a tender boy enough, because the reason he would not go was plainly, his love for Maud was too great to bear the clap-trap at the grave.
There was a sea change everywhere in that city household. My paradise was falling to perdition. Matt’s eyes looked hurt and full of hate in the same instant. He would sit at the polished tea table, holding his face in his hands, dropping tears onto the bright wood. The eldest no longer came to sit with me in the kitchen, he stayed out later and later, until, in a great morass of fury between himself and his father, he slouched off to Spain.
Matt taught not just children their painting but also the odd grown-up student, the odd lonely spinster or man with an artistic bent. Someone called Anna started to crop up in his talk, such as it was. ‘Tea with Anna’ was the ominous phrase, in Lipton’s or the Monument Creamery. I watched him go out and come in for a few months. I watched him, feeling more and more like a beaten dog. What had I expected? We were at each other’s throats morning, noon and night. But still, but still and all. Can I confess it? I knew what the love of woman and man was, I had more than a hint of that, because—and I will not ask God to forgive me this, because he made us so—I desired that small, rotund individual of a man.
Ah but, then came his announcement:
‘All right, Annie,’ he says, ‘and you will be as likely glad to hear me say this, considering, but I have asked Anna Smith to marry me, and I think that will mean you finding another berth.’
My marching papers and no mistake, nor no thank you either. Came then sorrow, and grief. I fetched about me, writing to this cousin and that, saying I would be happy to work my way for any bed they could give me, and put the few sixpences I had saved into hens or whatever I might.
At first I had a yearning to stay near the great city, and felt I might, and wrote especially to my cousins, the children of my father’s brother, that kept the huckster’s shop in Townsend Street, hard by Trinity College - their mornings full of fellas in those blue and red scarves, south Dublin kids. One of those children of my uncle had gone to be a priest, and was now, mirabile dictu, auxiliary bishop of Dublin, the Very Reverend Patrick Dunne, Bishop of Nara.
Let me tell a strange thing, but Nara is a district of North Africa, and I do not think the said Patrick ever has been to see his flock, but at any rate, haven’t the bishops divided up the world for themselves like the Roman emperors did before them? I wrote to him too, when I was declined by his siblings in the huckter’s shop, and he said to me that he had a fine housekeeper, was hoping I was keeping well, and please to remember him to Matt, and he would pray for me, and was of the opinion that God would bless me, as a good woman and a hard worker, and he signed himself with the very undignified name of Pat.
So, yes, br
iefly I cursed a prince of the church, and thought of that great palace of his in Haddington Road, and the number of empty bedrooms in it, and I hope the good natives of Nara will forgive me my blasphemous contempt. Finally, finally, I thought of Sarah Cullen in her little farm of seven acres, with six further acres of scrubby woods, and by heavens she wrote the most charming of letters on blue paper with red lines, and I remember it to this day:
Kelsha,
Near Kiltegan,
Near Baltinglass,
County Wicklow
7th September, 1957
Dear Annie,
It is Sunday and I am receiving your letter on Saturday by the Saturday post. Well, Annie, it was only in the summer I was thinking, when you were down in Lathaleer, just wondering and thinking would you ever want to return this way to Wicklow. And here you are now writing and asking, and asking the very thing Iwish myself. Please now without hesitation, do pack your bag and get your ticket for the Wicklow bus, and come to me, because you will receive only the heartiest of welcomes, and be a proper boon to me.
Yours truly,
Sarah
The rescue of Sarah. And well I know the trouble the composition of that letter would have caused her, and the hours she must have spent that Sunday morning framing it in a way she would have liked to have it framed herself, to spare me the proper shame that Matt had put on me.
All these matters his presence brings back like a forceful fire. And now Sarah with her own threat of marriage. I do not understand it, I do not understand the nature of my fate, my ill luck, my true place in the world. It is not enough to be a slave to work. It is not enough to treat those around me with all the respect I can muster, and in Sarah’s case, the love and affection I have for her. His presence in this time of frailty further reduces me with the recollection of past frailty.
And yet I would not forgo his presence. It seems to a part of me like enormous luck to have him in the district—no doubt, no doubt the foolish, fond part of me.
I do not care about Anna and try not to think about her. I lie beside Sarah in the night-time, sweating, in a fashion I never sweat. It is like I am unwell, but I do not feel unwell. I do not understand it. I think I do not want to understand it.
We are having a picnic up by the corn-stand, myself, the children and Matt, him in his tweed suit and polished brogues, all brown and green he is, the colours of the crab-apple. We are not twenty yards of the roofs of the house and outhouses, but we hold our picnic there because the little boy thinks the circle of cut-stones, that indeed do look for all the world like great big stone mushrooms, ten of them in a circle, he thinks they are something to do with picnics, and if not picnics, fairies. The little boy has an interest in fairies, though Matt is not a one to fuel that interest, Matt is practical, citified. No, it is a great-uncle of the boy‘s, a man called Pat O’Hara that was mayor of Sligo in Forty-two, an uncle indeed of the child’s mother, who has told him all about fairies and fairy lore, not to mention the two-headed dog that he saw one night in the lights of his Ford on the Enniscrone road. I know the details of this because the child tells me over and over these matters, and forgets he has told me, and tells me again with all the freshness of a Biblical child recounting miracles, tales of a certain Jesus Christ just passed through his district. The boy loves and even reveres all his relations. I think he thinks we are nearer gods than mortals, it must be so. His grandfather, his mother’s father, in his sailing days, the boy tells me, fetched into Liverpool one journey’s end, took a room in a rundown boarding house, and was awake the whole night with someone sighing in the room, and betimes falling in beside him in the bed, but of course, when he lit his candle, not a soul was there to be seen. And he left that place in the morning, and heard much later that the landlady had murdered her husband, because he was found under the floor of that very room, as dry as the carcass of a mouse. These are the stories of a boy.
I am sitting on the chequered knee-blanket Matt has carried up from his car. I am sitting there, half watching the girl and boy as they climb the old stones. The corn right enough used to be set up on top of them, on a framework of beams, so the rats could not reach the grain while it dried in the natural ovens of summer. Matt is talking to them, now and then brushing stray stalks from his trousers, laughing, talking, shooting the breeze he calls it, and indeed shooting his starched cuffs into the bargain. I suppose he is a dandy of sorts, what the wily local men might call a bucko. He despises the English or rather hates them as the old enemy of his youth, yet in the same breath of fact, isn’t he as close to an Englishman as makes no odds? He is more like the class of character a person might see issuing forth from Humewood in the old days, when there was still money and guests, and the old lady there was not inching quite so into decrepitude, along with her many-roofed mansion. The only thing flourishing there now I imagine is the rot in the roof beams, God help her, though there was a time naturally when pennies to her and her family were like rain in a filthy season, ever descending on them.
Curiously enough, there is a touch of my dream about it, because the sunlight is sitting on my knees through the thin cloth. I have that knee-warm feeling. I have many feelings, I suppose, turning all on the same sixpence. Sunlight, sunlight, there is ease in it, if no future, no guarantee of being there tomorrow. It is a moment of ease, of nice laziness, Matt cavorting now, on his own knees, indifferent to the grass stains, giving horse rides to his niece and nephew. The eggs that Sarah has boiled for us lie in their strange pyramid on the opened handkerchief she had wrapped them in. The sweetened water sits in its heavy earthenware jug, juggling, one might say, the very sunlight on its surface, a little splay of blowing and fading stars. Deep in the warm trees there will be animals, badgers asleep, foxes in their short cuts. Bullfinches, blue-tits, yellow-tits, mere sparrows, cascade at the corners of the picnic, where we have thrown our crumbs. If Matt is happy, the children are delirious.
Eventually, panting and hot, Matt sits down beside me. He chooses a boiled egg and sinks his white teeth into it, white against white, though different whites they are.
‘Papa, Papa, Papa!’ cries the little girl. ‘Don’t sit down!’
‘I must, I must,’ he says. ‘I am dying.’
‘Don’t sit down like Auntie Anne,’ says the boy. ‘Don’t sit down like a grown-up!’
‘Oh, thank you,’ I say.
‘But I must,’ says Matt, ‘or I may die!’
Nothing then for a little. I am tempted, sorely tempted to peer beside me at his knees. Does he feel yet the influence of the sunlight? Is there warmth gathering there?
‘This is one spot in the world,’ he says, ‘where Magritte might find an answer to his paintings.’
‘Who is that, Magritte?’ I say.
He does not even look at me. Why would he bother? I do not actually know what he is talking about. But I remember the rows he had with his eldest son over such strange names, the misery it caused them both, shouting, and doors banging. Although that son was an artist too and should by rights have been of like mind.
Then he says nothing a while, letting the sunlight stew along his clothes. The friendly smell of tweed rises from him. Single flies whine across us, firing off into the woods. That ease beyond price that is in the gift of summer has seeped into my marrow. Co-co-co-rico goes the wood pigeon, the only thing that it ever says, that it never tires of saying.
‘Realism, you see,’ he says, like another normal person might comment on the weather. ‘Ah well.’
He is dark to me really. I’m looking at him. An Irishman of middle years, of later years, a painter, teaching drawing to rascals of boys in the technical school in Ringsend, smiling out at the view. The woods above us are very dark too, despite the brightness of the day. To the best of my knowledge he is not known among artists. Yet he is at ease now, polished, starched, happy somehow. I must remember the strange name. Magritte. So I can talk to him sometime about these matters that preoccupy him. Magritte.
Suddenly, i
n the midst of all that peace, not least this peace between Matt and me, I want to ask about the children, I want to have his views on what I witnessed - to release me from my doubts and intimations, so I am no longer alone with them. Even the night before as I lay in bed, when a person is prey to fears, a strange thought came creeping into my mind. The thought was but a shadow, a hint. Something about Trevor, the little girl, a notion I could not make clear to myself.
‘They do seem happy,’ I say.
‘Oh yes,’ he says.
‘The girl has settled in,’ I say lightly, but inviting, I suppose, a comment.
‘She is happy as a sunbeam. Children that age are always happy.’
I hesitate. The seeds of dandelions bump along in the air. The little boy is puffing at the soft, round heads, laying them waste. One o‘clock, two o’clock, three o‘clock ...
‘Trevor loves them dearly, of course,’ I say.
‘What do you mean, Annie?’ he says, his face coarsened with puzzlement. ‘Trevor adores them.’
‘Yes. Yes, he does.’
He catches something in my tone, or so I imagine. At any rate, he is looking at me now as if I were that two-headed dog on the road to Enniscrone. Now it is him who doesn’t understand me. I am afraid to say anything further, but I must.
‘I caught the little rascals kissing the other day,’ I say, with a false laugh. My cheeks flush.
‘Ah well,’ he says. ‘Did you never practice your kissing as a little girl? I suppose you didn’t.’
Oh, why do you suppose that? Why, Maud and myself practised kissing till our lips were sore, in the privacy of the back scullery in our castle quarters.
‘Kissing!’ he says. ‘Quite natural, quite natural, Annie.’
He is the father of three boys, he must know. The wonderful flavour of the day reasserts itself. It is like Eden, my own father used to say, in the bright dispensations of the summer months. These days that, even as you live through them, seem like memories, caught up as they are in the lost happinesses of other, similar days.