It was partly anger that kept him awake, anger and resentment. They had not been in the butt half an hour before the duck began flighting, mallard, wigeon, teal, pintail, great numbers of them, and Boyle set up a fusillade, a firework display, an artillery battle, that must have been heard five miles off at least in this deathly calm air. Every shot made Meagher wretched, and by the time the movement was over and he had searched out a good score of birds he was in such a state of nervous indignation that he almost cried out, ‘You invite me to shoot and without a word of warning to expose me to this sort of thing – you have no consideration at all.’
The only words that actually passed were Boyle’s. He said, ‘I think it is over: in any case it is too dark to see. I cannot wait to get at the geese. Good night to you, now.’ No jocular or commiserating reference to the few ineffectual half-hearted shots that Meagher had let off: tact, that was the lay, a tact so obvious that it was, if not a studied offence, then at least most unfriendly.
Their acquaintance ran back a considerable way, so far that Meagher could say of Boyle, ‘We are old friends: I have known him for years,’ but it had never really matured: there was too little in the way of candid interchange, too much reserve for that. Meagher admired Boyle’s undeniable style, his offhand way with people, and his occasional lavish generosity; but he had few illusions; he knew that Boyle liked to have a companion – he had no girl, no permanent judy, preferring temporary drabs of the lowest kind – and as Meagher was generally available so he was the most frequently chosen. Then again he knew that although Boyle could talk freely about Stockhausen, Schwitters, Brecht, he was virtually illiterate: none of the things that interested Meagher concerned Boyle in the least: he would see the National Library, the Gallery and the Abbey go up in flames with cheerful indifference. Occasionally a wild, unpredictable gaiety would come over him and then he would lay aside his reserve, horsing around in Mother Daly’s like a boy; but on the whole he was elusive – there was no coming close to him at all – and rather than friendship between them there was a kind of exasperated love on Meagher’s side alone, a love not only for Boyle’s thoroughbred grace, his elegance, his ability to cope with guns, rods, horses, waiters and girls, but also for his vulnerability. Boyle was a man who had to be on top: he had to excel in every field. Humiliation would destroy him – if a girl were to turn him down or if he were to scrape a bus as he shot his car one-handed through the whirlpool of College Green he would be undone. In some fields – in talk – Meagher could protect him; and to protect such a creature was a privilege, an infinite superiority. Boyle walked a perpetual tightrope, and although up until now he had never stumbled badly to Meagher’s knowledge he was continually in danger of doing so, in danger deliberately created by himself. Blazing away as though he owned creation on preserved land stuffed with keepers: a perfect example.
As though he owned creation … he must own quite a share of it, however. How much nobody knew, but certainly more than most of their circle, certainly very much more than Meagher, who lived by expedients – small journalism, a little reviewing, the occasional grant. Once he had taken Meagher and a couple of dreadful little bus-stop tarts to a house behind Enniskerry, letting himself in with his key: half had been ruined so long ago that trees grew twenty feet out of it, but the rest was deeply comfortable, though dusty – carpets, huge leather chairs, mahogany – and the drive was kept up. He also had a tower in the County Clare, where he fished: but many of them claimed to have towers in the County Clare and what really impressed them was this visible car, the sight of him coming out of the Kildare Street Club, and his beautiful cigarette-case, made of gold. The car might be uninsured, the tower a myth, but the case was there all the time.
Money: that was the great trouble. When they went out, who picked up the restaurant bill? Who paid for the drinks, the petrol, the tickets? Usually Boyle was delicate, but he had a sadistic streak in him and sometimes he could make Meagher feel all the difference between a man with fifty pounds in his pocket and one with a packet of pawn-tickets done up with an elastic band. There were times when instead of offering a lift, a dinner-jacket, a loan, he would compel Meagher to make the direct request; once or twice he had casually borrowed one of Meagher’s precious pounds and had forgotten to repay. Odd little meannesses too, such as disappearing for a moment and coming back with a freshly-lit cigarette. No doubt they arose from a dislike of being sponged on, of being manipulated; and fellows like Clancy were shameless at sponging.
Yet in spite of all this they laughed at many of the same things; they enjoyed the same films; they could be companionable enough; they had fun; and surely, said Meagher, fundamentally Boyle had a liking for him, and respected his parts.
The liking was not apparent on either side at this moment, however. Something seemed to have happened to their relationship during the night, as though Meagher’s resentment and silent injurious expressions had conveyed themselves into the other’s sleeping mind; or as though Boyle had reflected upon Meagher’s ‘I do not mind poaching but …’ and had filled in the gap, or upon his ignominious performance with the gun (Meagher was a countryman only by theory). While for his part Meagher could not see why he made all this coil about a mere dilettante, a sciolist, a dabbler. ‘I am far more intelligent than he is, far better educated,’ he reflected, plucking straw and rushes from his clothes. ‘He may have a bodily, an animal intelligence – he is good at killing things – but surely to God a man is above a brute. He has read nothing at all.’
Here Boyle finished buckling his thigh-boots and walked out of the butt, leaving the game-bag for Meagher to carry: in the reeds outside he lit a cigarette, and at the smell of the returning waft Meagher’s stomach gave an avid craving heave. He remembered not only that his packet was empty but that he had had neither dinner nor tea. To be sure, Boyle had eaten nothing either; but Boyle was well padded, whereas Meagher, who lived by his wits, was painfully thin. The gap of a meal told on him at once.
‘Perhaps that is why I am feeling so very brittle all over,’ he thought. ‘That and two sleepless nights. And I dare say I have a cold coming on – to lie out all night in the wet, what a notion! – a bad go of flu.’
He followed Boyle through the reeds: they walked without speaking to one another, as though there were an acknowledged breach. Through the reeds round the lake and out on the far side; and here, stretching infinitely far beyond them, was the landscape of a dream, perfectly silent, perfectly still; the whole bog, with every rush and clump of grass upon it, was white with hoar-frost, and it gleamed gently in a suffused shadowless light that came dropping from the frozen air together with minute crystals of ice: no visible source for the light, no stars, no moon, only this high luminous mist. A world before the creation. An enormous flatness with no details in it, for the impression of light was illusory and at any distance everything merged into uncertainty; there was no one object that could be seized and defined apart from the sea-wall away to their left, the single firm line in this universal vagueness, a line that ran curving away for ever.
Boyle was screwing himself up to see his watch, to make the hands show in the darkness of his bosom. ‘Just hold my gun, will you?’ he said. A beautiful short-barrelled hammerless ejector, lighter by far than the old-fashioned brown keeper’s gun allotted to Meagher.
‘Can you make out the time?’ asked Meagher, and to his shame he heard a placating note in his voice.
Boyle did not answer directly. In a cold impersonal tone he said, ‘Only two hours to go. We shall have to step out if – oh for Christ’s sake don’t hold your gun like that, you silly whore! Don’t you know you must never point your gun at anything you don’t mean to kill?’
Meagher was on the edge of crying out that it was not pointed, that it was not loaded; but the shocking brutality of the assault, quite outside their habitual intercourse, choked back his lies and he followed Boyle in silence.
Two hours, he had said. Surely they had been walking more than two hours? The
night seemed a hundred years old. The sea-wall was unchanged, the one firm thread in a shifting interminable dream; it stretched before and behind, a broad ten-foot earthwork with sluices here and there and every few hundred yards a set of posts, startlingly upright in a world so flat, like black exclamation marks signalling danger: each one might be an armed keeper. The idea of running away from a keeper, of labouring over the bog with a gun pointing at his back, was horrible to Meagher: and who could tell what Boyle might do, in such an encounter out here at the far end of the world with no one to see? He was a deeply bloody man. ‘A whore, a pillar of ignorance,’ said Meagher.
But although the sea-wall was still the same it no longer ran through the same country: now they had primaeval saltings on their left hand and the deep mud of a tidal river, while on the right the sweet-water marsh shone and glittered with creeping water. A landscape even more inhuman, desolate and unearthly than before: vaster too, for now an increase in the light had brought the indeterminate sea into its farther rim. The falling aerial crystals had turned to penetrating wet, but so far this had not affected the whiteness of the ground. The frost still struck upwards.
The mud seemed deeper underfoot, however – it had long since filled Meagher’s inadequate shoes; and certainly his sick hunger and abject craving for tobacco had grown immeasurably. He felt even more brittle and his lack of sleep had got into his redrimmed bleared watering eyes, so that when he concentrated on a post it flickered and even waved its arms; his sense of smell and his hearing had become unnaturally sharp. He heard the whistle of a flight of duck before Boyle, as they passed high overhead. These must be the first birds of the dawn-flighting; so surely the day could not be very far off, and release from this nightmarish entertainment?
Certainly there was more light, even if it was only the rising of the moon; but at the next set of posts this did not prevent him from catching his leg in the barbed wire slung between them. He gave a strong kick to be free of it: the wire broke from the post and snarled right round his leg, the barbs running deep. It nearly had him down: he staggered on one foot, his loaded gun swinging in an arc, pointing now at Boyle’s head, now at his loins as he walked steadily on. Meagher recovered his balance, laid down the gun, laid down the game-bag (it weighed forty pounds), and knelt to wrestle with the wire. Wet with drizzle and mud, his numbed hands merely fumbled, and in a sudden flare of anger and resentment he tore at the wire with all his force. It was no good. He was still held fast, ignominiously kneeling there with the mud soaking into his knees; and in a sudden collapse of spirit he crouched against the post, watching Boyle stride away. He knew Boyle was aware – it was a conscious back – and he knew Boyle would not turn unless he were called upon for help.
Meagher did nothing until he saw the small leap of a flame: Boyle had lit a cigarette and was waiting for him. Meagher forced his mind to be cold, followed the pattern of the barbs and disentangled them one by one, tearing the cloth as he did so. He picked up the bag and followed, limping: as he got under way so the glow of the cigarette moved on.
Long before he caught up, the cord of the bag was biting into his shoulder again and the weight of the gun was a torment: he was wet through and through; he was full of yellow rancour and spleen; but with something of the cunning of fever he said ‘I shall keep up with him: even Boyle has not the face to smoke without offering me one if I am right by him – a guest, for all love!’
He could feel the paper cylinder between his two fingers and his thumb, the glowing end sheltered in his palm from the drizzle, the deep inhalation, the yielding of the tube at the very end, the red arc and the hiss as he threw it into the water.
Still the old night faded and little by little the marsh came to life – heart-broken cries as dim birds fleeted away; rails grunting and squealing in a reed-bed; far over the devilish yell of a vixen. ‘Do come along,’ said Boyle once or twice. ‘We shall never get there in time.’
A little while after they had passed a patch of black quaking bog with a dead bullock in the middle, its peeling horns and part of its head showing above the mud, a brace of teal sprung from a flash of water to the right of the wall, rising fast, almost vertically. Boyle missed them right and left. He walked on, saying nothing, faster than ever; and Meagher could tell from the set of his back that he was bitterly crossed.
‘Do come on,’ he said again, and now the light was spreading fast from the east, showing the white carcass of a boat on the far bank of the river. ‘All I ask is a couple of shots at the geese. Just one pitiful shot; and we shall not get even that at this pace.’
On, faster still: Meagher did not give a damn in hell for the geese or the prospect of shooting at them, but Boyle’s failure had revived his spirits a little and he walked along with his resentment somewhat appeased. Yet at the same time the sense of unreality – this unearthly landscape, his own light-headed fatigue – grew on him: his mind wandered off to other places and times, to odd, disconnected fantasies of triumph, and when he returned to the present he found he had dropped behind. He also found that his anger was dead: weary tolerance had replaced indignation.
Boyle had left the sea-wall some way before the point where it turned right-handed, and he was making his way cautiously through the mud towards a plank that led to a dense screen of reeds. Meagher did notice a soft gabbling in the distance, but it meant nothing to him. He only saw that by going straight along the wall he would avoid the mud and come to the bridge as soon as Boyle, thus making up for lost time. He did not catch Boyle’s backward signal – the flash of his hand he would have used to a dog – and he hurried along with a sudden quick softening and a resolution to ask Boyle openly for a cigarette, to accept the humiliation of doing so, to gratify him. This was to be an offering, a reconciliation, and he called out ‘Boyle, I say, Boyle.’ As he called he saw the furious gesture and ducked; but it was too late. There was a monstrous threshing of wings on the far side of the reeds and the geese, hundreds, even thousands of geese, lifted high out of range.
As if he were alone Boyle walked on through the screen, taking no precautions now, and he went along the edge of the turlough where the smell of geese lay heavy, looking at the droppings and feathers: after some time he emerged, much farther round the bend, and came back along the wall. Meagher ran to meet him: his apologies died in his throat at the look, not of intense dislike or anger nor even fury but of utter contempt. A frigid, objective, dismissing contempt like a blow, breaking even the most rudimentary social contract. And while Meagher was uttering the few words he could force out, Boyle’s eyes wandered off, bored, uninterested: he reached for his case, opened it – it gleamed like a chalice inside – deliberately chose and lit a cigarette.
Beside them, lower than the wall itself, a huge pale-blue bird came gliding through the frozen air, shadowless over the white ground, never moving its wings: behind and a little higher came its mate, even larger, dark and forbidding. They turned their heads to look at the men but they never deviated from their course; and as they flew a silence spread over the marsh – duck and small birds had been stirring; now they were mute. Not a sound, not a movement. Meagher’s sense of the world was so altered that he saw them with no surprise: in this universe huge pale sinister birds might very well pass within handsreach.
Boyle’s gaze followed them, and then as he turned to go he glanced at Meagher again, noticed that he was still speaking, moved his mouth into a civil, well-bred rictus, and walked off.
Meagher walked along behind him: the distress of this look, so much more fundamental than the rough words at their setting-out, combined with the unreality of the scene, with the monstrous birds, the silence, the unbelievable final severing of their relationship and with his own state of physical wretchedness to shake him so that he hardly knew what he was at.
He walked on a mile, close at heel, the general pain separating into its various components. Rage predominated, and the extreme of humiliation – ultimate humiliation: the rage made him tremble; it knotted hi
s throat and his stomach. The expression on his very pale face was strange to him, like a mask imposed from outside. Yet he still thought he was indulging in fantasy when he said ‘But it is you are the fool, Boyle, to go out no one knows where with a man you humiliate: it is you are the fool to put a gun in his hands and turn your back on him and walk where he can push you down into the slime for ever, you whore.’ And even when he had the brown gun up and quivering behind Boyle’s head it still seemed only unreal show and mime, part of the abiding nightmare all round; but his finger curled on the trigger and squeezed as he cried ‘Like that!’ and the gun shot out an orange flame.
The unexpected bang and the recoil quite stunned him: it was not until the slow smoke cleared that he saw Boyle in the water, motionless now. Meagher slid down the wall and stood up to his knees, straddling the body and bowed as though to heave it out. Blood flowed from the shattered head, pouring and turning like smoke in the water, and through the eddies rose an enormous eel.
Silence returned: only the raucous panting of his animal breath. Then from far away on the motionless air over the bog came a sound. He looked up – the sky had turned pale – but there was nothing above him. The sound grew stronger, a rhythmic singing beat, and turning his appalled staring face still higher he saw three swans. The first light of the sun touched them from below and they flashed pure against the blue, flying straight and fast from the north with their long necks stretched out before them. The rhythm changed a little, sighing and poignant: changed still more, and as they passed high overhead their wings sang in unison, bearing his spirit away and far, far away.
The Lemon
A MAN who lives alone grows strange: and I have been solitary now, how long? Some years at least.
It is the peace he has, the room to develop. Most people are bound to observances; the clock if they are employed, the routine of a life in all events; but a man alone can live to himself, lie three days abed, work through the night, sit motionless for hours, think in the way he likes. He grows unlike the others; for a man must think to grow, and thought is a slow process, a cumulative thing that grows: you must not check it. But meals, visitors, and hot and cold, set hours, do check it. They dissipate the cloud, the haze inside which your mind can turn. The solitary man grows strange; but it is the strangeness of an adult among children.