Away (7 page)

“We’ve come to pray, Mary.”

Her mind riveted on the young man’s torn collar and the words in her mind building it. Where grew the flax that made the woven threads in plaid, now torn beside the curve of your neck where my fingers are. A corner plastered on a collarbone. Some stitches sewn and soaked with brine. You are gentle, gentle, gentle as the sea you sail. Threads unravelling at your neck.

She saw the priest crouch and assemble his portable altar, but he was far from her. She felt the holy water fill her hair, but it was tepid and useless and ran in futile tracings to her throat. She brought the memory of her hand to the place beneath her jaw to rid herself of it and then saw the moisture glistening on her fingers. The water when she placed it in her mouth was not the moisture she desired.

The priest was saying words in Latin while the other man moved, a brown blur, from corner to corner of the room. The lukewarm water ran between her shoulder blades and across her face, like tears.

“Pater noster … in Deo speramus, Te Deum laudamus.”

She recalled the mole on his left cheek, his eyelashes. She had words somewhere about his eyelashes and their cousins, his perfect brows. She had seen his lashes beat, back and forth, like the fronds of miniature angel’s wings, and then she had seen them hold still.

A terrible sadness poured over her. Where had she gone? Where had she gone? If she were to return, how terrible the loss of this singular enchantment? Her homeland was a city under-water that she’d never seen except when he’d shown her – the spires, the steeples spilling from his open hand.

“No,” she said quietly, and it was the first word she had spoken.

“No,” she said again into the distance of the room.

“Cast off this shadow, Mary,” the priest was saying “that stands between yourself and God.”

He advanced towards her with the large crucifix. Mary saw the young naked man that hung from the cross and reached tentatively to caress the sand waves of his ribs. But it was not Christ that she touched.

“Say a prayer to him, Mary.”

She floated away and turned her face towards the small window and the sea. A rectangle of sun lay on the floor beside the table. Something in Mary decided to step inside the golden light. The priest placed the crucifix carefully on the table and turned towards his friend whose gaze was fixed on the bronze radiance of sun-filled hair. Quinn reached for his breviary and nervously thumbed the pages, searching for further prayers.

Each day since his arrival on the island O’Malley had witnessed this ceremony; the priest stiff and wilful, the girl soft and absent … her eyes partially covered by lashes, her gaze averted, her face impassive. Once he had seen the priest, in desperation, extend his arm as if to strike or embrace her, and the schoolmaster, himself, had instinctively moved forward to prevent the anticipated invasion. Father Quinn’s arm had dropped helplessly back to his side. The men exchanged a quick look of anger, but they never spoke of the incident.

In fact, since their first conversation in O’Malley’s cottage, they rarely discussed the girl at all. Once or twice the priest had asked, “What am I to do?” or “How’s it all to end?” And his friend had replied, “When you convince yourself and her that it’s all nonsense … that and your congregation … that will end it.” But Father Quinn had exclaimed, “Nonsense! And she with that look on her!”

Mostly the two men spent the quiet evenings and their walks to and from Mary’s cabin comparing facts gleaned from their recent reading. Between them they shared the ownership of the
Supplement to Address the Defects of the 5th, 6th and 7th editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica
, purchased from the Sedgewicks at reasonable cost upon the arrival of the eighth edition in their library. There had almost been a quarrel
between the friends when the Supplement became available, O’Malley claiming that he should have it for the little hedge school and Quinn insisting that he needed it to instruct his parishioners – though few of them could read and many of them spoke only Gaelic.

They had finally resolved the argument through joint ownership, and now they were systematically reading the four volumes from A to Z, or, in Quinn’s case, from Z to A, so that they were able to exchange volumes somewhere around the middle of the alphabet. Because they had only the Supplement, there were large gaps in their learning, but they comforted themselves with the idea that, the number of knowable things being infinite, there would always be gaps in their knowledge, and because the body of knowledge was steadily growing it was futile to lust after the eighth edition of the Encyclopaedia since there would soon be a supplement to it as well.

They had recently completed the first half of their reading, had exchanged volumes, and were able now to discuss things together that appeared near the beginning or the end of the alphabet.

A few weeks earlier they had talked about the excellent article on the term “Absentee,” pleased that it had singled out the English landlords of Ireland as the most fitting example of this condition, and pleased also that O’Malley’s own landlords, Osbert and Granville Sedgewick, flatly refused to leave Ireland at all. Tonight, as luck would have it, they had come to the long dissertation on “Beauty,” which they were examining with great enthusiasm, the first half of the alphabet being conveniently housed in the priest’s rooms.

The ideas put forward in several texts on the subject were described in the article. O’Malley, who held with the assertions of a certain Mr. Knight, was shouting now, as he always did when in the heated pursuit of knowledge.

“For God’s sake, Quinn, can’t you understand that there is a kind of beauty that is universal and cannot be caused by association? Singular beauty. It jumps out at you! You’ve never seen its like before! You gasp! You associate it with nothing. It thunders in on you. It is what it is. It’s like nothing else.”

“That is heresy!” exclaimed the priest. “What you are talking about is sensuality and selfish gratification! Beauty should be a reflection of all that we have
learned
is good in the world. Not an independent assault on the senses. Are you telling me … would you say that a harlot can be beautiful? Can that which is wicked be beautiful? Ah no, my friend, it cannot. Can a lie be beautiful? No, of course not … only truth.”

“So, then, if the truth be beautiful and if the truth about a beautiful woman be that she’s a harlot, does not her physical beauty combined with this truth create a larger beauty? This is where your theory leads, Quinn. And now answer me.”

“Why is it that you’re always twisting my words so that I’m not certain where my sentences began?” Father Quinn thumped the calfskin cover of Volume One which lay on the table between them. “I said only that which is
good
can be beautiful. It’s only the Devil that makes us see a wicked woman as beautiful because the Devil clouds the truth, the Devil” – Father Quinn looked up at O’Malley from under bushy, rigid eyebrows – “the Devil clouds the truth through our selfish desire to have our senses gratified. He’s a man of the flesh is the Devil.”

“What about power and danger, then … and the sublime? There is always power and danger in sublimity. And yet you would not call power beautiful. You would not call danger beautiful. I’ve stood on cliffs with you and looked across to other cliffs with you. How beautiful, you’ve said, how sublime.”

“It’s only a manner of speaking.” The priest suddenly looked
old and tired. “And, of course,” he added, “they are God’s creations.”

“So is the harlot God’s creation,” said O’Malley, softly, as if he were thinking of something else.

“That’s where you’re wrong, Brian.” The priest rose to prepare for bed. “She is the creation of something else altogether. I’m not even certain that it’s evil, but it’s not of God’s world and it’s not of God’s creatures.”

As they lay awake on their respective beds, thinking, neither of the men admitted to himself that he had been discussing the woman they visited each day.

On his fourth, unanticipated morning on the island the schoolmaster woke before dawn, restless, and in no mood for further conversation. He had intended, when he planned the visit, to stay only a day, but the weather had turned rough the first night, causing the ferry to rest at the island, and again the second evening, lengthening the same vessel’s stay in Ballycastle. By the time the sea and air became serene, he was caught in the web of the little drama, anxious for an outcome of one form or another, and captivated, more than he knew, by feelings of pity and tenderness for the speechless young girl.

Odd memories of his life before the ideas in books began to direct it circulated through his mind: certain small cities he had constructed in sand as a child, a starlit walk home from Ballycastle on the cliffs after the fair when he was an adolescent, the way he had learned to identify all the ships in Ballycastle harbour and all the small ships he had attempted to make in their image. Where were they now, those fragile constructions of sticks and cloth and string? He recalled the polished clarity of the beach stones under the water where he sailed his toys. He remembered fishing in Lough Crannog – the
flash of a silver trout – the stories his grandfather told him in Irish, a hawthorn tree left standing, still standing in the centre of his father’s field. Spring sowing came back to his mind; the morning chill, the mounds of dark earth, himself, his father, the neighbours bent in silent concentration over their meagre plots.

He moved his legs and shifted the position of his body under the blanket. Light was entering the room. The framed lithograph of the Sacred Heart of Jesus came into focus on the wall and then the sparse furniture of the priest’s kitchen where O’Malley had spent the night. There was a smell of mildew from the priest’s oilskin jacket which hung from a nail on the wall and which was never able to dry fully, and another odour, slightly sour, which emanated from the milk can near the sink. O’Malley realized, with distaste, that little in the priest’s house was fresh; nothing shone with the health and cleanliness of the girl’s hair in the sunlight. He thought of his own rooms; his cottage where a broom had rarely, since his mother’s death, been pushed into its corners, and he knew that the odours here – the smell of a solitary life and celibacy – were familiar to him.

He flung his legs over the side of the bed and reached for the jumper he had tossed on the floor the previous night. He pulled on his boots, buttoned his trousers, and walked out into the morning, heading for the black beach where the miracle or tragedy had taken place. He would look for materials to build toy boats, he decided, try to regain the joy, the freshness. Perhaps a poem might be composed on the view. But, at the back of his mind, unadmitted, was the hope that he might catch a glimpse of the girl swimming or simply gazing out to sea, or maybe he would be able to hear her sing one of her songs.

The beach was empty when he arrived. He forgot the toys completely, sat down heavily, and rested his arms on his knees. It wasn’t long before he began to toss the black stones into the
water, one after another, sadly and at lengthening intervals. Their uniformity annoyed him and he searched for a variant, something larger or sharper with which to attack the surf. His grandfather had said that a handful of nails tossed into the advancing waves could cause the children of the sea to become powerless – temporarily. According to the old man it was the ninth wave that was the most potent, the most dangerous. It would have been the ninth wave, then, that caused the change in the girl. There had been a time – long ago – when O’Malley had believed such things.

He found a bone hairpin as he ran his hands back and forth over the stones behind him. Holding it to the sky, he saw one bright thread of hair trembling in the breeze. Before he began his walk across to the wharf to enquire about the ferry, he wrapped the hair around and around the pin and placed it in the breast pocket of his old cotton shirt. He wondered if he had just missed the girl by a sliver of time.

When he reached the jetty the bell for eleven o’clock mass had begun to ring. The sky had turned dark and the wind was rising in preparation for another storm.

When the ferry was cancelled for the fifth time, Brian O’Malley, suspicious though he was of superstition, saw it as an omen. He could not get off the island, it occurred to him, until this drama with the girl had reached some kind of conclusion. The thought of the children, running free, forgetting their noun declensions, or of his two small fields that would be wanting attention by now, evaporated when he touched the bone hairpin in his breast pocket.

He took to walking, that morning, back and forth across the edge of the bay that made up the harbour. Fishermen watched him, with curiosity, though they themselves had been, and
were capable of being again, as entranced as he. The storm was gathering strength. Curraghs were pulled up on shore. Brian continued his wandering, angrily, everything about him blown by wind. He applied Platonic, and finally, in despair, Cartesian modes of reasoning. He even prayed a little, said a few Aves for deliverance. The rain began. He stood utterly still under the downpour with his head bowed and his fists clenched. There was nothing for it. He was a ruined man. He would have to find some way to marry her.

The low rainclouds blowing in from the sea were obliterating the cliffs of his own landscape. He was soaked through and filled with a sharpness of sensation that made him want to see everything far away in a clear light – not just these stones glistening with rain and shifting under his boots but his own cottage surrounded by its three lakes, the land extending away from it a mile towards the cliffs. The little hedge school and the vast estate of Puffin Court. The gentle uplift of Doonfort, the track to his door. All this he wanted on a clear map, now, knowing that if he were able to arrange her presence there his geography would be changed forever.

Suddenly and inexplicably he remembered his mother and the game she had played with him when he was a boy – a guessing game of question and response centring on the objects in their cabin. “What way are you?” they would ask each other until the accumulated answers brought the solution to the puzzle. Once, when he had been the fire and trying to confuse his mother, he had felt language grow and blossom in his mouth like flowers. “What way are you, Brian?” she had asked, and at the age of eleven he had said, “I am hot and difficult and lie under an open roof. I send my thoughts to the sky. I consume myself but am forever being rebuilt by others. Without me you would starve and freeze and your stories would remain untold.”