‘If they all looked like yourself, Miss, the world would be sweet.’
She feels herself flare. The stillness of the heather. No one would ever know. Only the blackbird and the midges.
‘I’d better let you go on,’ she says, very quietly.
‘If you’re certain, so, Miss … God keep you.’
Sometimes in the evenings he sings melancholy songs in Gaelic, the knowledge of which he is trying to improve in her. He sings with his eyes closed like a whiskied balladeer, rocking himself gently, his arms folded tight, or his hands reaching out to some spectral invisibility summoned or driven away by language. His voice is not strong; his breathing is so pained, and at night it becomes frailer, a wheeze that often makes him tremble, but he knows about timing and drama in a song. He allows the mournful couplets to fall on you like leaves – the pleadings, the entreaties, the dark imprecations.
You have taken the east from me.
You have taken the west from me.
And my fear is great
You have taken great God from me.
‘Come sit on my lap, Molly.’
‘We know where that leads.’
‘Don’t you like where it leads, my little innocent wildcat?’
‘Very sharp now, Mister, and mind you don’t cut yourself.’
He grows stronger, gains weight, hiking ten miles every day, over stony rough country, fording rivers, climbing cliffs. He finds a long-forgotten track that leads through Crone Wood to Powerscourt waterfall. (‘I name it Molly’s Path! Hallelujah.’) He becomes convinced of the existence of a holy well in the valley, goes scouting for it with the aid of his ancient map. But it is his changeling who finds it, pulling back the thorn bush. The water is oily black.
‘Throw a leaf in it for luck, Molly.’
‘More likely I’ll do something else in it.’
‘Holy Moses, but you have the mouth of a harlot.’
‘You like my mouth sometimes. Or so you do be telling me.’
‘Mary O’Neill. I despair of you.’
He comes to her one evening while they are walking in the pinewood, asking with his hands and his eyes. Unfasten your dress, love. Think it no sin. A stag bounds from a copse, its hairtrigger hearing startled by her whispers as she comes.
She washes her hair in the sandy waters of Considine’s Lake. The dirt of the city seems to sweat itself out. It is as though a layer of her skin has been removed.
He reads Racine, Pierre Loti, translates Shakespeare’s 130th sonnet into Irish – or tries to, abandoning the attempt after a day. ‘No good writer can ever be translated,’ he says, and she teases him for making excuses. He quaffs the sweet country milk a quart at a time, sometimes with a capful of whiskey ‘for luck’, as the fishermen on Aranmore taught him. The taste of Wicklow buttermilk has him moaning with pleasure. ‘Oh, you simply must try it, Molly. They drank it on Olympus.’ It trickles through his beard and he laps at himself like a dog, laughing all the while, or sighing. He eats hungrily, with great relish, often without speaking, mopping at his plate with his bread.
There comes a day of golden sumptuousness, the shifting breezes scented with wild rosemary. Every blade of snipegrass can be heard as it grows or is mown into sweet-smelling death. Larks and blue linnets arise from the furrows as she walks to the streamlet in the morning. Within, she feels the pulse and run of her blood, the calendar of the body, its flow.
There is a fish among the osiers, a small silver trout, and she knows she could grasp it if that was her desire and kiss its lipless mouth before releasing it. If you do such a thing, the fish will speak a blessing, telling the name of your true-love and the name of your husband. If it utters only one name you will be the happy girl indeed.
He glances up, dazed with reading; gives a drowsy, abashed smile.
‘Would there be e’er a drain o’ tay itself for a Christian tongue?’
‘Wusha, Misther, but there would, and I wettin it now in a minute.’
‘May the shadow of you never grow shorter.’
It has become part of their love talk, this mockery of his lines. They speak to one another like characters in one of his plays. His smile is like the sparkling of sun on dark water. Something in being mocked by her delights him.
She rises earlier, in the quarter-light, at the first reddening of the mountain, so as to make the days last longer. To walk the wet fields through the wakening birdsong is to feel the marriage of joy and sadness, the black miracles of the trees. A tinker comes daily with buttermilk and apples. Breakfast often lasts an hour.
To stir in sleep beside him. To know he is there. The warm male aroma and the rhythm of his breathing, and the moon making shadows of the oak boughs. But close to dawn one morning he flails awake from a nightmare.
‘I dreamed I had lost you. My father was there.’
‘Your father?’
‘I think so. Sweet Christ.’
One day, having lain together, they laze on in the heatherbeds looking up at the corncrakes they have frightened off with their cries. The scent of bog myrtle and lavender and willowherb. There is sweet sleepiness in him at such moments; he is like a tender boy. He tells her his imaginings of New York.
‘We shall go there when I recover. They would adore you in America. You would conquer whole cities. They live very freely. They are like every people who have rid themselves of aristocracies: obsessed by the differences between the classes. They love beauty and bravery. I do not understand them. They are the most magnificent people in the world.’
He cuts his hand while shortening firewood; she bathes it, dresses it. He covers her pillowslip with wild asphodels from the heath. He carves her name in an alder.
There comes a rainy afternoon when he kisses her breasts for what feels a whole hour, until she begs him, with profane murmurs, to go further. Then her hands gripping hard to the rungs of the bedstead; she had never imagined a man’s mouth could be so gentle. Afterwards she does not want to look at him, feels opened, revealed. There is a quietness after the storm.
He reaches and takes from her hair a length of broken wheatgrass.
‘A penny for your thoughts, my brown-eyes.’
‘Have you been with many girls, John?’
‘Not many. A few in France.’
‘Did you love them?’
‘I thought so. There was one I thought I loved.’
She pushes him and he laughs again, running the blade of wheat across her wet nipples, then kissing her hair and face.
‘You smell of strawberry leaves,’ he whispers. ‘I adore you. My little succulence.’
‘I’ll strawberry you in a minute. Tell me about her, so. My rival.’
‘Oh it was all very long ago. There were differences of religion.’
‘She was Catholic?’
‘No. She was a Plymouth Brethren. She was a neighbour of ours in Kingstown.’
‘Did she break your poor heart?’
He pauses a long time before replying. ‘I was younger. I suppose I thought so. I was a very different person then. But none of it matters any more. My little elf.’
Atkinson’s Gazetteer to Great Britain
including Ireland
For Amblers, Ramblers & Cavers
At nights, while he is working, she reads in his guidebook, the spine of which is cracked and the mouldering pages loose. He has underscored many lines – whole passages sometimes. She ponders them for what they might reveal of him.
The bosom of Wicklow affords the inner man a plethora of delights, her natives being amenably charming to the visitor, possessing the pleasing, happy countenances of those of Her Majesty’s contented subjects encountered in the Empire’s sunnier climes.
He begins writing a novel set in a hospital, sorting notes, shaping scenes. She hears him mumbling to his characters the way he sometimes speaks to her: nagging, cajoling, begging them to come to him. ‘Whore’s bastard, come out!’ he bawls so hard that the rooks go clattering from the thatch. As though the w
ords are midges around him and his task is to grasp a particular one of them. She pictures him in a swarm of language.
He reads her a drafted chapter as she soaks in the old beatencopper bathtub, the water reeking deliciously of turf. She tells him it isn’t good. He knows, he says. That night they watch a gorse fire spreading across Lugnaquilla, red and golden flames, jags of purple sparks, tiny black figures hurrying through the glow with pitchforks, billhooks and scythes.
‘Oh, I shall be gone for the afternoon. You shall have a little peace. I said I would lunch with Yeats. He is visiting at Powerscourt. It will be tedious but it has to be faced.’
‘You didn’t tell me before.’
‘It slipped my mind, I am sorry.’
‘Should I come with you? Would you mind? It would be nice to have an outing.’
‘Yeats …’ he pauses, ‘does not know quite the extent of our friendship. As I think you are aware. I had been meaning to apprise him. He is rather old-fashioned sometimes. Curiously so.’
‘Couldn’t we say it was a coincidence? You met me in Annamoe. I was visiting a friend who was sick.’
‘Oh, the conversation would bore you. You know how Yeats drones on. Rather too much for the white man to bear. I shall escape by five at the latest.’
‘But it’s only gone nine in the morning. What am I to do the whole day?’
‘I shall be back before dark. Unless you wish me not to go.’
‘Of course you must go if you gave your word to Mr Yeats.’
‘Your tone of voice surprises me. I have upset you, I think.’
By midnight he has not returned. The night is full of sounds. The last candle in the cabin burns low. A wind buffets up, and the haw near the window begins a bleak insistent tap on the glass. The bedding reeks of his soap, of the unguent for his chest. The candle gutters out with a last jig of shadows. The smell of molten wax haunts the room.
In the small hours she arises, suddenly maddened by thirst, and goes dazedly to the ewer by the window. The tiny yellow globe of a storm lantern in the distance.
‘John?’ she calls out. The light stops moving. And somehow she knows it isn’t his.
She slams and bars the door. Realises she is shaking. Watches as the lantern-light approaches through the blue gloom, hears the trudge of heavy footsteps, the low male voices. Three – maybe four-it is hard to be certain. Boots on the gravel. Coughs.
‘I was frightened half to death. Why wouldn’t I and the heart put across me! And you sitting up at Powerscourt on your sweet Fanny Brown.’
‘They were probably only poachers. Or gamekeepers, perhaps.’ He gives his soft, eluding laugh and peers away towards the lake. ‘They are often the same thing, of course. Especially in Wicklow. I am sorry you were alarmed. My little sparrow.’
It is only later, at the back of the cabin, that they see the freshly whitewashed words.
EVICTORS GET OUT OR BE GOT
‘So they have come,’ he says quietly. ‘We were too happy.’
‘But – what do they mean, John? What call had they to go writing that?’
He regards the distant Sugarloaf, the bitterns wheeling and hooting. For what seems a long time he offers no response, and when finally he speaks it is as though something new has happened to him or a discomfiting light has been shone into his eyes by someone he can’t quite see. ‘There were incidents in the past. On my family’s estate. I wish to say no more about the matter.’
‘But not evictions, surely?’
He seems to be ageing as you watch him.
‘John? Not evictions? Why can’t you look at me?’
‘They refused to pay their arrears. What could we do for it? There were agitators among them of the very worst sort. Revolutionaries, seditionists, call them what you will. My brother – he is the land agent – attempted to find common ground. He is a good man, my brother. He sought the common ground. But they acted like stubborn children, refusing all compromise. It was a wretched bloody business and I am very thoroughly sick of it.’
‘How many?’
‘Can that matter?’
She looks at him closely.
‘I think seven.’
‘Seven people?’
‘Seven families. Or eight.’
‘But John – that could be forty people. You put them out on the road?’
‘I put them nowhere. I put them nowhere! I was living in Paris, I knew nothing of the matter and neither was I asked an opinion.’
‘And had you been?’
‘They refused to assist themselves, to take the slightest responsibility –’
She continues, riding over him. ‘Had you been?’
‘Some of them had paid no rent in fifteen years. Why do you look at me like that? I was living in Paris. What is it in these people that must always crave trouble? One despairs of whatever it is that must always inflame in this godforsaken sewer of a country.’
‘If by these people you mean the poor –’
‘That is not what I meant.’
‘Are their families to starve?’
‘Is mine?’
‘You are ridiculous. Do you know that? Why play the village idiot?’
‘Is my mother to go hungry? That income is all she has. Will you help me fetch some water, Molly? I will wash that filth away.’
‘John –’
‘I did not make the world, Molly. Neither did you. I am going to the lake. For water.’
An old peasant woman appears in the lane with a ram on a string and a creel of black turf on her shoulder. She looks like the Comanche chieftain on the cover of his almanac. She begs a smoke of his pipe. She has a son in Illinois.
He tries to speak to her in Gaelic, of local legend, folkways, the place names of rural north Wicklow. Has she memories of the Famine? Has she people in England? She does not understand what he is saying. When he explains that he is speaking Irish, she regards him amiably enough, as one might smile on an arch child who has asked an inconvenient question. There was a professor from Germany here in the Glen last summer, and scarves of the blessed Gaelic flowing out of his mouth (God be good to Your Honour but you never heard the likes) with a notebook the size of the Protestant Bible and a huntsman’s feather cawpeen on his head. And he traipsing up the bogs with the book in his oxter and he asking th’aul bogmen for legends. And they scratching themselves in their waterboots beyond in the river and your man shouting down to them about Vikings. Tormented he’d have you. Had you stories of saints? Had you ever shtuck a pig? Were you Christian at all, like? Faith, but he would fairly ask you what you do be having for breakfast in the morning, things a peeler wouldn’t ask you this ploughboy would ask, and the hunger and th’emigration and all th’auld sorrows and he wishing to be writing them in his book. And saving your presence, only who would be reading that? If a body could read. Which wasn’t likely here in the Glen. And devil the hunger nor a soul ever knew that a book of this world could sate, sir. In’t there misery enough now, don’t you think, in the world, without adding to it by writing it down, sir? We must laugh at the devil, sir, in’t that the only way? Laugh, and the devil does be frit. But this German professor or whatever else he was, God keep him alive, sir, and no disrespect to His Honour, but he’d nearly be disappointed no one belonging to you never got drownded nor got the belly kicked off him be a redcoat. Away with him to Germany and little to show. Nobody around here could remember nothing.
‘Silly-headed old wagon.’
‘Droleen, please.’
‘It’s in the Bedlam asylum should be the likes of herself. I don’t know why you go talking to them at all.’
‘They interest me. The people. They are like the ancient Greeks.’
‘They are like my sanctified arse.’
‘I wish you would not speak in that uncouth manner.’
‘Did you see the maggoty beard on her? She was worse than the ram. Like a sow staring into a swill barrel.’
‘I said I wish you would not speak in that uncouth ma
nner, Molly.’
‘Oh do you, My Lord? Well I’m awfully worried.’
‘Nevertheless. Why do you conduct yourself like that when you know it hurts me? The poor woman has done you no harm. Your attitude unnerved her.’
He is whittling a lump of oak he found in the bog.
‘There is something troubling you, I think.’
‘No, John. I am tired.’
‘What is it?’
‘Well, since you ask – Could we not be married?’
He thumbs at a nodule of candle grease on the tabletop, takes a long, slow breath, like a tenor about to commence an aria. ‘I am impatient too. But there are various impediments, as you know. We shall have to show forbearance a while more.’
‘How much of a while more? Till we are old and grey, is it? Is it swither and dither till we’ve not a tooth left between us?’
‘My health is fragile since the surgery. You know this very well.’
‘That fragile it couldn’t stand a blessing and a sprinkle of confetti?’
‘I have not the means to support a wife. Surely you can see this.’
‘I am worn out telling you it need not matter.’
‘It would obviously matter to me, though. As a man, it would matter. And what would people say if it were seen that I could not maintain my wife? The gossips would have a carnival. As you know.’
She rises quickly from the bench and busies herself at the old dresser where the plates and tableware are kept.
‘In any case, what is marriage but the final admission that one’s parents were right? It is the dreariest way imaginable for society to regulate the natural impulse.’
‘The natural impulse?’
‘Well, what would you call it?’
‘I have heard it called many things. One of them is love, John.’
‘Ah yes – love. The dressmaker’s friend.’
She looks at him and drops a heavy stack of delft on the flagstones, where some pieces smash and others roll about, and a platter cracks cleanly into three. The jags are blue and white, like broken bits of the sky. Something in the chimney gives a scuttle.