A Long Long Way (38 page)

He didn’t feel suddenly just as bad as he had done to hear his father speaking to him so, because he was approaching Gretta. How could he feel entirely wretched when he was coming near to where she was? Oh, the flood of battle and the tides of grief flowed through him and in him - but just as he traipsed along there under the cathedral railings, and turned down towards her doorway, he couldn’t help but feel rinsed as a dusty tree in rain, he couldn’t help it. When he thought of Gretta in that moment he thought all things could be put aside, put away. He would see the war out and when it was over he and Gretta would - by heavens, he would ask her now, he had been very stupid and tardy, he would ask her now again if she would consent to being his own true one. He was a grown man now, a grown man, and she would see him for what he was, and not mind it to the degree that she would refuse him. For that never would be so.

He moved up her ruined stairs. It was horribly dark because the house was squeezed in against Christ Church, and the windows on each landing looked like those dim paintings in old churches, lurking in the holy, lightless air. It might be Daniel in the lions’ den, or the grave of Judas in the Potter’s Field, you wouldn’t know. He supposed you would need an old candle or something of the sort to have a proper look at things.

The door was always open into the great, fallen room of the long-dead bishops. The rags hung down from the dark ceiling just as always, with its myriad silent instruments in plaster. The families behind the partitions were murmuring and laughing; the glow of candles showed up the pitiful state of the ‘curtains’.

And there was Gretta in her own strange light. Why, of course, Gretta herself was a candle, Gretta herself was a light. Gretta with her fine, white face as lovely as any stage singer’s.

She was feeding a baby at her breast. He didn’t see that immediately, but now that he stopped at the margin of her world, he saw the tiny child, he could even see the full, tight breast where it covered the child’s face. Little hands opened and closed, opened and closed, and Willie could sense in the creature a depth of pleasure. He had lain down with Gretta but oh, so many months before. He was not so much a fool of a soldier that he couldn’t count months.

‘Gretta, Gretta,’ he whispered to alert her, as if she were in danger of a kind, and he must not wake or stir her enemies.

‘Willie Dunne,’ she said, and wafted a thin blanket over her breast and the child’s head.

‘Is the child your own?’ he said, perhaps desperately, because he knew she would not have milk otherwise. She was no wet-nurse, as far as he knew. Unless she had carried a child for him and lost it? Could such awful tragedy have occurred? Is that why she had not written? He would make it up to her a thousand times. Oh, Gretta, my Gretta.

‘Well, it is my child, and my husband’s child, Willie. You won’t make a fuss now? I did write to you, Willie, and you never replied. And things go on as things go on, as my father will say.’

‘You wrote to me to say you wanted to be married?’

‘I wrote to you, Willie, to say I had got that letter from your friend, and how was it so, and all the rest.’

‘What letter from what friend?’ said Willie, feeling as she spoke as if he might have to go back out onto the landing and spew, she’d caught him so sudden. There was fear in his words now, fear worse than the fear of mere warring.

‘I have it over in the drawer. Go and fetch it if you want, Willie. But you will know what it says. And you did not answer my letter. And I knew then you had done what it said. And Willie, whatever I am and whatever we were, I could not feel just the same after that.’

After what?‘ said Willie.

‘Do you want me to say such things? Go and read it for yourself.’

So Willie crossed over to the cheap little stand of drawers.

‘It’s just on the top there. There was no need to hide it. I told my father all and he advised me. He said he had said to you to know your own mind and you didn’t. He said because we lived in these quarters it didn’t mean we had to wait for men that went with whores. Sure Willie, there are whores enough all along Monto and Gardiner Street, you didn’t need to go to Belgium to have one.’

It was just a short letter with the address he would have put himself on it. It was written in long, snaking black scrawls, a curious document. The writer said he felt bound to inform her of the conduct of a certain Private William Dunne known to her, that he had to the writer’s certain knowledge bedded a prostitute of Amiens notorious for disease and the writer felt it was his Christian duty to inform her insofar as he was in possession of such information which weighed heavily on him. It was a mournful duty which he had now performed. It was signed, yours ever, sincerely, A Soldier.

Even if he tried to lie to her now, what good would it do? She was married and she had the child. Even if he had received her letter, what good would it have done? He would have had to lie and would she have believed him, and if he had told the truth would he not have lost her anyhow? He was dizzy now with thoughts. He looked up from the awful letter and looked into her face. His own beloved whom he had rightly lost.

‘I am sorry, Gretta. I am very sorry. And I am very sad to think I’ve lost you. I did go with a poor, ruined girl. And I did confess to a man now gone himself. And I never got any letter from you about it. And I would have walked over the cold deep sea to find you if I thought you knew about it. And if I caused you grief, and hurt your heart, I am so deeply sorry. I couldn’t begin to tell what that war is, Gretta. I was even just thinking as I came down this way that all might be well in the end, because I loved you and we could be married.’

To his astonishment, as he might only recently consider himself a grown man and might therefore know two good things in the world, she was crying. She was crying in that strange grey light of Dublin.

‘You have a good man now, Gretta, to look out for you?’

‘I have, Willie, a very good man. He’s working with the Da. They’re putting in the granite setts all up Sackville Street where they were disturbed by the fighting. My da slipped away from the Curragh camp last year because he said he’d rather be shot for a deserter than live as a British soldier. He needs to know his own mind, Willie, as you know You won’t be telling on him now?’

‘No, no, Gretta. And that’s well and good.’

‘I’m sorry, Willie, too, it turned out like this. I don’t suppose it was such a very terrible thing you did, but at the time it broke my heart to read it. I hope it all goes well for you, Willie. I couldn’t be against you, not you, Willie.’

‘I thank you, Gretta, I do. That is a comfort such as you couldn’t imagine. Your father was right. I didn’t know my own mind.’

He stood there another while. He felt like a ghost, a person returned from some dark regions, no longer a human person. He felt like just wisps and scraps of a person. She was so beautiful sitting there; the child was meek and sleeping now. Gretta smiled at him her old smile, the smile he should have carried everywhere with him, if he was of any worth, and held up as a shield against the wretched temptations of a war. He turned away from that essential, living place, and out again into the glowering town.

He knew he would have to fetch up at some kind of dosshouse for that night, and did accordingly. It was full of . tramps, and wrecked drinkers, and, ominously, other sad soldiers back from the war.

Chapter Twenty

He took the train down to Tinahely the next morning, because he had to do his duty by memory. At Westland Row station under the great canopy of iron and glass, he felt wearier than he ever had in the trenches. Some evil spirit had tricked the youth out of his body. In the night that same spirit had harrowed and raked him, and planted in him mocking seeds of granite and flint. At the centre of his body he thought something had perished. Like an old ash-tree he feared he would slowly hollow out, the rot taking him inwardly ring by blackened ring, until the winter wind came and blew him down.

Dublin was no longer like a city intent on the war. There were few uniforms about of men on furlough. In the streets he had seen troops, right enough, but they were soldiers about other matters, shipped in from England. Walking down Sackville Street, he had viewed the remnants of the uprising, the houses shelled away by the gunboats on the Liffey Where the wide street had been torn up, right enough, there was a gang of men repairing setts, no doubt Gretta’s father and husband among them. But he didn’t look too long that way; he didn’t want to see. The great street had been wounded in a cataclysm; it had erupted, spewing its mortar and stones to the heavens. They could put it all back stone on stone but there were many things that could never be put back.

In the corner of his eye he saw a little clump of boys in one of the side-streets that went down to Marlborough Street. He even saw the throwing arm of one of the boys shifting down in a throw, but he was still surprised and affronted when the stone hit him on the arm. He stooped and picked up the missile and it was a bit of granite from the setts, which a mason had cut with his hammer and bolster to make a piece fit. It was a little extra remnant of the city The boys surged forward and the smallest and bravest of them ran out onto the pavement and launched such a gob of spit at him that he couldn’t duck before it splashed against his cheek. The boys broke into wild laughter.

‘Fucking Tommies, fucking Tommies, fucking Tommies, go home!’

He stopped on the pavement but he didn’t feel inclined to run after them.

‘I am at home, you little bastards,’ he muttered.

Of course, the little laughing group was skittering away down towards the Pro-cathedral. That was the church that stood in for a Catholic cathedral; it wasn’t a cathedral in itself, it was instead of a cathedral. They were going to build a proper cathedral some day. That was where his father went to pray among the other Catholics of Dublin, loyal or not. He had sat there himself every Sunday with his three sisters and his father as trim and polished as a yacht. He could walk in there in his mind and sit down amid the smell of polish and the Italian statues, but in his mind the statues had been taken away and there were no ladies now to polish and scour the floor. Of course, that wasn’t true, he supposed, things would go on a while longer, till another earthquake maybe shook the deep roots of the city, God knew when, and it all fell down. He wondered should he put the bit of stone in his pocket as a keepsake, but then he threw it roughly to the ground. Let it lie there to be thrown at another fool, he thought, another fool passing.

He got out at the little station at Tinahely, which had been put for some reason in an awkward place well below the town, maybe at the whim of a landlord. Maybe even the Fitzwilliams miles away over in Coollattin for at one time their power had stretched everywhere. For this was all country he knew. Not so many miles away lay the old realm of Humewood, where his grandfather had been steward. His grandfather was still alive and he wondered if he should go over to Kiltegan also, where he kept the vigil of old age in one of the lodges of the estate. But he thought, if his father was angry with him, how much angrier would be his grandfather, who had spent his whole life at the head of an army of estate workers, gardeners and farmhands, and was the vicar of the landlord on this earth, and as loyal as a wife. Of course, he was sure his father would have said nothing to him, because the two of them met only at funerals and weddings. In Willie’s own presence the old man had often avowed that his son was a fool, and all his children were fools, but of those fools, James was the biggest of them. And he had put him into the police ‘with the other fools of Ireland’. A fool, and the father of a fool certainly, was Willie’s sad thought.

But the sunlight was easy in the hedges along the path; the rowans were heavy with their bright red berries. As he passed the gates down to Kilcomman church he found himself admiring the lovely trim of granite blocks, the expertise and the rightness of them, and the black gates as suitable as a suit. He wasn’t exactly sure in his memory where the house of the Pasleys was, though he knew it was this side of the town, so he hailed the rector who just at that moment was inserting letters in the postbox, and asked him where the Mount was.

Just up the hill there,‘ said the rector. ’You can see the roofs sticking above the beech trees.‘

‘Thank you very much, sir,’ said Willie.

‘Have you been overseas?’ said the rector.

‘Yes, sir. To Flanders, sir, these last few years.’

‘ Are you going up to talk to the Pasleys?‘

‘I am. Because I knew their son, the captain.’

‘I was afraid you had more bad news. You know the other son’s in France, too?’

‘No, I didn’t know that, sir.’

‘ Ah yes. I am delighted to see you hale and hearty We have lost seventeen men from hereabouts. Very terrible and sad it has been. And what is your name, Private, if I may ask?‘

‘Dunne, sir. William Dunne.’

‘Ah yes,’ said the rector, and Willie by old experience knew how the rector’s brain was whirring, registering the name that would be unlikely to be a Protestant one, though the first name maybe betokened a certain deference to the powers that be. But, to give the man his due, his tone didn’t alter. His own name was written in gold lettering just behind him as it happened, on the black notice that said the name of the church and the rector-in-charge. ‘Well, my friend, you will find them at the top of the hill. I’ll bid you good day and God bless you.’