Saints and Sinners (17 page)

She consulted her watch, regularly putting it to her ear to listen for the almost imperceptible ticking. A bellicose man at a center table kept calling out every other minute, to voice his complaints, addressing each of the passing waitresses as "serving person, serving person."

"An oddball ... comes every day ... lives alone somewhere in Ranelagh," the manageress said, and hastened to his table, removing the cup and the saucer that was slopped with tea and speaking to him pleasantly.

People came and went, some consciously overreserved, but from one table loud guffaws and peals of laughter at the richness of their jokes. She debated whether she should look in the two bars and the Saddle Room, but the truth was that she did not feel confident enough to wend her way past those boisterous people. The heat in the room was now quite oppressive and a mobile phone rang repeatedly from the depths of someone's handbag. The pianist, sensible to the fact that he was being ignored, ran his hands along the keyboard with a flourish, then stood holding those selfsame hands out, as for a requiem.

All of a sudden and unnervingly, she pictured her own hallway, with the storage heater about to come on and the radio playing full blast in the kitchen, a deliberate ploy, as there had been several break-ins in the town of late. The bellicose man was reading a newspaper, when suddenly he bashed his hand through the center pages, shouting, as obviously he had read something that infuriated him. His face was moist with rage, and his ears, which were a blazing red, stuck out from his head as he looked around for an opponent to argue with. It was not at that precise moment that she admitted to herself that the poet was not coming. It was fifteen minutes later.

A little girl wearing a tam-o'-shanter came across and asked if she would care to buy a raffle ticket for an extension to be built at their school. As she wrote her address on the counterfoil, in case she came in first, second, or third, the little girl rattled off the prizes, which were all of a culinary nature. As she walked off, her parents waved their gratitude, and at that precise moment Miss Gilhooley put her arms back into the sleeves of her tweed coat and rose with as much composure as she could muster.

She paid at the cash register near the arched entrance and asked for the tip to be left on her table, as she dreaded the embarrassment of encountering the manageress, who was bound to be sympathetic.

Pat-the-Porter met her beaming. He had the booklet, the very last one, staff always swiping them, but he had it for her to take home as a souvenir. She mentioned the poet's name.

"Our Laureate," he said, misquoting a line about a sod of earth rolling over on its back from the thrust of the plow.

"We had a ... rendezvous," she said, smarting at the pretentiousness of the word, and for a moment he was lost in perplexity, then drew her aside and in a low confidential voice began to mutter, "Look ...it's like this ... I know the man ... I can vouch for his honor ... he comes here all the time with them bowsies ... the bar-stool poets as I call them ... and he sits like a man in a trance. He'd have every intention of meeting you ... he'd want it. I can just see it ... him shaving ... putting on a clean shirt and tie, getting the good overcoat and setting out ... coming as far as the corner by Wolfe Tone and all of a sudden ... balking it."

"But why, why would he balk it?"

"Shy, shyness ... the shyest man I ever came across. I'll bet you he's walking the street now, or maybe on a bench by the canal, reproaching himself for his blasted boorishness ... his defection."

It was left like that.

He steered her through the revolving doors and watched her go down the street. She held herself well, but there was a hurt look to her back.

The air in the bus was freezing, passengers not nearly so buoyant or talkative as they had been on the way down in the morning. She was glad no one had sat next to her. In the various towns through which they passed, Paud, the young driver, drove with caution, because he had been stopped several times by the sergeant, but once onto the country roads he was reckless—the bus trundled, raising slush out of the ruts, grazing the hedges, and twice coming to a skidding halt when a vehicle met them from the opposite side. Passengers were flung forward and afterwards there were irate calls to him. "For feck's sake, cool it, cool it."

The dark seemed to get deeper and darker and the land itself swallowed within a primeval loneliness. She had been dozing on and off, when suddenly she came awake with a start. What an awful dream and where had it come from? She had been drinking the hot blood that spurted from the throat of a wounded animal, a wolf, she reckoned. It was in a strange forest, the trunks of the trees massive and covered with white fleshy toadstools, a forest that was already receding from her mind, but the taste of blood lingered in her mouth. The horror. The horror. Was this the true her, a she-wolf drinking blood?

Looking around, she sought in vain for deliverance, then wiped the window and saw that they were passing the low white building that had once been a creamery and was about twenty miles from home.

Home, the small town that so cried out for novelty that a few fairy lights, since Christmastime, still dangled from the lower branches of the big chestnut tree in the market square—home to the loamy land and the brown-black lakes fed from bog water, home to the rooks convening and prattling at evening time in the churchyard grounds, and home to the intangible white mist. Her face pressed to the window, she said aloud the name of the man she had so loved, a name that had not passed her lips in almost twenty years, and all of a sudden she was crying, soft, warm, melting tears, and she pictured the poet, that lonely, clumsy man, walking the streets in Dublin or, as Pat-the-Porter said, sitting on a bench staring into greenish canal water. She knew then, and with a cold conviction, the love, the desolation, that goes into the making of a poem.

"Welcome to Mullaghair ... and all in one piece," the grinning Paud said with Olympian pride.

People were slow to get down as the steps were slippery and so was the pavement, the good-nights were cursory, and everyone, including her, drew up the collars of their coats, to guard against the biting wind.

IN THE DREAM, there is a kidney-shaped enamel spittoon, milk-white, and a gleaming metal razor such as old-fashioned barbers use. My mother's hand is on the razor and then her face comes into view, swimming as it were towards me, pale, pear-shaped, about to mete out its punishment, to cut the tongue out of me. Then with a glidingness the dream is over and I waken shaking, having escaped death not for the first time. In dream my mother and I are enemies, whereas in life we were so attached we could almost be called lovers. Yes, lovers insofar as I believed that the universe resided in her being.

She was the hub of the house, the rooms took on a life when she was in them and a death when she was

absent. She was real mother and archetypal mother. Her fingers and her nails smelt of food—meal for hens and chickens, gruel for the calves, and bread for us—whereas her body smelt of myriad things, depending on whether she was happy or unhappy, and the most pleasant was a lingering smell of a perfume from the cotton wad that she sometimes tucked under her brassiere. At Christmastime it was a smell of fruitcake soaked with grog and the sugary smell of white icing, stiff as starch, which she applied with the rapture of an artist.

Anything that had wonder attached to it was inevitably transposed onto her. For instance, when in the classroom one learnt that our vast choppy lakes had the remains of cities buried beneath them, it seemed that in her, too, there were buried worlds. At Mass, when the priest turned the key of the gold-crested tabernacle door, I had the profane thought that he was turning a key in her chest. As if reading my mind, she would pass her prayer book to me, solemn words in Latin, a language that neither of us was very conversant in.

We lived for a time in such a symbiosis that there might never have been a husband or other children, except that there were. We all sat at the same fire, ate the same food, and when a gift of a box of chocolates arrived looked with longing at a picture on the back, choosing our favorites in our minds. That box might not be opened for a year. Life was frugal and unpredictable, the harvests and the ripening hay subject to the hazards of rain and ruin. Hovering over us there was always the specter of debt. Yet in our house there were touches of grandeur—silver cloches that resembled the helmets of medieval knights stationed along the bog-oak sideboard, and mirrors encrusted with cupids kissing and cuddling. In drawers upstairs were folds of silk from the time when she worked long before, in the silk department of a department store in Brooklyn, the name of which ranked second only to Heaven. On Sundays for Mass, she would hurriedly don her good clothes that had been acquired in those times, or later, castoffs sent by relatives, voile dresses cut on the bias that seemed to sway over a body, over hers. I would beg of her to re-don them in the evening so that we could go for a walk, and in summer at least enjoy the evening intoxication of stock in other people's gardens.

We had an orchard, plowed fields, and meadows. Somehow I thought that a garden would be a prelude to happiness. The only flowers I had occasion to study were those painted on china cups and plates, splotches of gentian in cavities of moss, and on the wallpaper tinted rosebuds so compact, so lifelike, one felt that one could squeeze or crush them. Those walks bordered on enchantment, what with neighbors in some sudden comradery, greeting us profusely, and always, irrationally, the added possibility that we might walk out of our old sad existence. She was beautiful. She had beautiful hair, brown with bronzed glimmers in it, and blue-blue eyes that held within them an infinite capacity for stricture. To chastise one she did not have to speak—her eyes did it with a piercing gaze. But when she approved of something, everything seemed to soften and the gaze, intensely blue, was like seeing a stained-glass window melt.

On those walks she invariably spoke of visitors who were bound to come in the summer and the dainty dishes she would prepare for them. There was a host of recipes she had not yet tried. Sometimes her shoes hurt and we had to sit on a wall while she rolled down her stockings and mashed and massaged her poor reddened toes. Once, a man that we scarcely knew came and sat down beside us. He wore a torn flannel shirt and spoke in a wild voice, kept asking us "Any news ...any news?" She laughed over it afterwards and said he was a bostoon. I secretly thought she would have liked a city life, a rarefied life, where she could wear those good clothes and her Sunday court shoes with their stout buckles. Yet at heart she was a country woman, and as she got older the fields, the bog, her dogs, and her fowl became more important to her, were her companions once I had left. I had always promised not to leave. I promised it aloud to her and alone to myself as I looked at the silver knights on the sideboard and the about-to-burst rosebuds m the wallpaper.

Our house had quarrels in it, quarrels about money, about drinking, about recklessness, but not content with real fear she also had to summon up the unknown and the supernatural. A frog jumped into the fire one night and she believed it was the augury for the sudden and accidental death of a neighbor. Likewise a panel of colored glass above a vestibule door broke again and again, and she insisted that it was not wind or storm but a message from beyond. One evening, sitting in the kitchen in some dread, she conceived the thought that a man, a stranger, had come and stood outside the window preparing to shoot us. We moved to the side of the window and sat on two kitchen chairs, barely breathing, waiting for our executioner. We sat there till morning, when her husband, who had been gone for days, appeared unslept, half-drunk, and vexed at having to return to us. She and I were mendicants together—cooking, making beds, folding sheets, doing all the normal things in the so-called normal times, and in opposite times cowering out of doors, under trees, our teeth chattering in mad musical shudder. We were inseparable.