Annie Dunne (30 page)

The summer is more truly over when he comes. We stand the children on the flagstones of the kitchen. I am wondering what degree of an inch we have added to their sizes, with our stews and our milk and our eggs.

It is dark in the afternoon, there is more than a touch of autumn in the day, in the wind, in the darkening greens and browns of the land about.

In the corner of my eye, Sarah takes out some object from her cardigan, and kneels to the little girl. I am surprised by the sight. She leans forward and whispers something to her. The little girl nods solemnly and takes whatever it is, and places it in her own pink cardigan. I wonder what it might be. And later I ask Sarah, when they are gone, but she will not say. I ask the question and she shakes her head, neither yes nor no, just shakes it, and says nothing. I realize then it must be something she cannot mention, or speak about, for fear of lessening its force. And then I am strangely happy for the girl, whether with good reason I do not know, and no doubt will never know.

Up comes his sharp little car before I have the thought and gumption to measure them at the wall. Never mind, it will do another time. I have taken their city coats out of mothballs and never a moth has been at them, but that they are like new, like the very first day of summer that they arrived. It is as if time had no degree, no width, no measure. All our joy of these children is spent and gone, and like the miser without money we have now nothing to hoard and count, and I feel it darkly. When he comes in with his long red beard and his green woollen suit, his brown tie the same colour as old heather, his yellow shirt, I am afflicted, just as I knew I would be, by the most grievous sorrow. But it is not my place to be sorrowful before this occasion. I smile and shake my nephew’s elegant hand. He does not kiss me as of yore. Once he would run the length of the tiled path in Morehampton Terrace just to embrace me, gripping my lower legs with his little arms. Now he shakes my hand.

‘Hello, chaps,’ he says to the children.

‘Hello, hello, hello, hello!’ says his little son.

‘Well,’ he says, ‘you have a proper Wicklow accent now,’ and he laughs, as if a proper Wicklow accent might be a doubtful thing enough. I wonder how does the kitchen look to him, he so citified, so strange. Does he think it pitiably rural, plain and mean? The stains of dampness rising in the grimy walls must offend him. You cannot clean those stains, they are like the very stains of things that happen, no wily cloth will wipe them. The little boy is all delight, but the little girl not quite so much so. She is smiling but I recognise the signal of restraint, like a pony poorly broken faced with some rare task.

Their father stands foursquare now in the room, as present as a tiger. He seems so good, so strong, so young. But something passes across my mind, some shadow of the fate of this man’s little sister Beatrice long ago, something to do with that, the guilt of it in him, the hurt unassuaged, and wedded to that, the oranges, the smell of oranges, the little boy kneeling at the shrine of his sister. That is a frightening thought. I know it is her hesitation has given rise to it. And is it a thought I should tell to him, to anyone? Is there some urgent message I should give? I do not know, the thought spins on the pool, spins and spins. Should I take him aside and tell him what I saw, at least, at least?

I am beginning to feel ill, actually ill. My stomach is cold and fiery at the same time. Could it still be possible, despite what Matt has said, that he is in effect a culprit, to use my father’s word? The death of his sister, such a weight of guilty sorrow, has it done something to him, turned the course of the stream underground, so some necessary well in him is dry? He has suddenly all the aspect of a stranger, an interloper, a wolf. It is my task to protect her, she has been left in my care. Even in these last few moments, while she stands in the confines of this kitchen, she is my calf, my lamb. And who will protect her if Matt is wrong, and she is taken away from here? Assaulted, assaulted, said Maud in the bed, all those years ago. Assaulted, we echoed, assaulted! In my mind’s eye I see again that wolfish man leap through the air on Kingstown pier.

She stands there, as if caught between two worlds. I feel some deep terror strike into my breast. My knees are sore with a kind of seeping poison. I feel old, wild, greatly at fault. I adore the boy, I adored him from the start. There is no great task in that. But she, she I have put in the second place of my affections. I know I have done that. Because she is a girl, but why, but why? Was I not myself a girl, one of three girls? Do I set so small a store on that? Why, why? I am staring at her. I could not describe the terror that I feel. I want to run out of the house and over hedges. It is as if I have never seen her before, never set eyes on her, proper eyes. Her mother is so strange, indifferent. She will never have the grace to help her. What am I to do? If I believed that Trevor had done anything to her, brought fear and hurt to her, what would I do? Wouldn’t I have to kill him, to slay him with my hands, to prevent her being taken away by him? All her slim bones, her muscles, her slightness, her girlish knees, overwhelm me. I have been blind, evil, my mind is old and dark. I have not looked into her, seen her, cherished her, held her enough, talked to her, and now all my chance of rescue, her rescue and my own, is gone, is slipping away. If she has been violated then I must do a great thing, I must break out of all chains of love and family, of sense and ease, and become a thing of pure rage, like a bull coming in to cover, unbelievably strong and still as he was in ancient days, I must rise up and be another Annie, of impossible strength and motherly grace, and protect this girl, even if it must be by murder and destruction of all former days and loves.

Now the girl goes forward after all and hugs his knees.

It is such a relief, I almost cry out. Trevor looks over at me - perhaps I did make a noise - and smiles. Such a beneficent, graceful, charming smile. The girl has attached herself to his green trousers, her head down. But any fool can see the relief and ease in her little body. It is done so naturally, no one could suspect anything but that her hesitation was the normal reticence of a girl, a reticence born of love. It would be unnatural and hysterical to think anything else. Of this I am now certain. The boy was right, and Matt too - their father loves them. I cannot in honesty doubt it. I am so grateful to Matt for his sense, his knowledge. And the innocent knowledge of the boy! Thank God!

Now my old love for this man, when he was a little boy himself, returns like a blow. I am happy for him and miserable for myself! But should I still say something? No, I cannot. It might bring the boy into disrepute with his own father.
The least said the soonest mended. Let sleeping dogs lie.
I can almost hear my father’s voice.

My thoughts are spinning now, spinning. Everything quickens in pace, like the gallop of a river in flood. Oh, he gathers them you might say clumsily in his arms and lifts them both bodily from the house. It is very strange. It is like the tinkers, like a theft of rope. Soon he sets them in the tidy car. All sensible thoughts flown from my head, I rush forth, my very clothes feeling like weights of lead, as if I am being fished at the bottom of the sea. I bang against the window glass at the rear of the car like a big, clumsy moth, I blow them kisses. But they are already in their new world, the world of their father. Soon they will be flown across the Irish sea in those silver aeroplanes, up in the sky like tubes of cigars. They will be torn from our tiny world, our miniature place, this yard in Kelsha without adornment. Will they remember anything of these days? Will they hold in their hearts the love I have for them, or will it all pass away like all the things of childhood? Will they ever understand my sorrow, oh maybe when they are grown themselves, here at the high gates of the mountains, where Keadeen breaks into the fiery bloom of heather, leaving all husbandry behind, and the Glen of Imail stretches wild and ruinous as a land laid waste by wars?

A cold, long siege, the winter coming, it will be, I expect. It is no wonder soldiers did not fight in that season, a fact to which my father often alluded, being almost a fighting man himself, without the weapons.

Well, there is no army quartered here, it is only myself and Sarah. But her presence will unknot the coming winds, and shake out the winter like a cloth both plain and rich.

We are like two spiders, in a dark corner of the world, things of no true importance, I am sure. But even the spider leaves a trace, a broken web blowing on the breeze. It does not need the notice of man. In its own manner it makes its simple statement, it writes its simple sentence and is gone.

It is the two of us here now, in Kelsha, myself and Sarah, as pensive as daffodils.

Someday, no doubt, all that we know will be gone, just as my father’s world in its own time passed away, never to be savoured again. This Kelsha yard, henhouse, calf byre, hay barn, horse byre and milking shed, all will be levelled in the end.
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair,
said Shelley for Ozymandias, on a broken stone in an empty land of dust.

Even the halves of songs I know, our way of talking, our very work and ways of work, will be forgotten. Now I understand it has always been so, a fact which seemed to heal my father’s wound, and now my own. I think in the end he understood it too, and gained his salvation from that new courage he found, to go naked and unadorned into the next world. Even great kingdoms - Ireland, England herself—are subject to this law. How could this simple yard in Kelsha be exempt?

There is nothing in our lives that is important. Everything will be removed by that Great Fall.

But, although it will be winter soon, the wind of friendship will blow eternally from the south. And even after we have gone, something of that friendship will surely linger hereabouts. We will survive in the creak of a broken gate, the whistle of a bird, the perpetual folding and unfolding of the blossom of my crab-apple tree, a thousand little scraps of crinoline fiercely crushed and fiercely released.

Like the spider, although we will decay, something of us ever after will remain.

How does one hold on to a world that no longer exists? Playwright and novelist Sebastian Barry explores this question in a poignant and exquisitely told story of innocence, loss, and reconciliation. Set in a rural section of Ireland known as Kelsha, “a distant place, over the mountains from everywhere,”
Annie Dunne
tells the story of Annie and her cousin Sarah, aging unmarried women who live according to folkways that were already vanishing during the late 1950s when the novel takes place. Their great friendship is their most valuable possession, but Annie—hunchbacked and bitter over the way the rest of her family has treated her—lives in constant fear that it could be taken away. Quiet and intensely personal,
Annie Dunne
is both a story about and a meditation on the means by which we accommodate a world too big to understand. “Oh, what a mix of things the world is,” Annie reflects, “what a flood of cream, turning and turning in the butter churn of things, but that never comes to butter.”

One summer Annie’s grandniece and grandnephew come to stay with her and Sarah. That same summer, a local handyman, Billy Kerr, begins to court Sarah and becomes more of a presence in the two women’s lives. Through Annie’s eyes we see the rhythms of their rural life—drawing water from the well, slaughtering chickens, harnessing their one pony—as well as the ways the encroaching modern world, in the person of Billy, threatens to change it. We also see her guarded hope for a second chance, in the form of the children, to make peace with the new times. The old ways are revealed through Annie’s thoughts of her grandfather, a stern, “unseeing” man whose memory Annie reveres. But her grandfather’s work, as a policeman for the English, is a clue to Annie’s alienation from her proud Irish neighbors. As the novel—and Sarah’s relationship with Billy—develops, this seemingly simple rural tale unfolds into a historical and romantic drama, with lonely Annie Dunne at the center of a fast-changing world. Annie’s struggle to maintain the world just as it was highlights the book’s broader theme of the collision between history and individual lives that plays out in even the remotest corners of the globe.