“We fell,” he said, “didn’t we?”
“Yes, George,” she answers, “we fell.”
“How far did we fall?”
“Till we hit the sand-dunes, George, and until you hit me.”
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and reached out to touch her metal mask. “Did I do that?”
“It was my fault, Georgie, all mine. We fell, like Icarus, like Lucifer.”
“No,” he said, “we fell like Adam and Eve.”
“Theirs wasn’t an actual fall, George, it was more like a fall from grace.”
She said this but she could see the theme was going to stick. Adam and Eve. They alone, among their peers, were of the fallen. They had fallen, moreover, together and ravaged each other’s bodies in the falling. George, whose brief existence had heretofore been lived in the shadow of others, now had his legend, his fall, had tumbled from the Maiden’s Tower with Nina Hardy, had punctured her maiden’s body with his.
T
HE EMBERS ARE
dying in the public house and Janie is on her fourth hot whiskey, cloves, sugar and a slice of lemon.
“His voice had dropped by the time he came out, down to something like a furry baritone, he had grown, sprouted, lengthened, broadened, he was too big for the bed, uncomfortable to sleep beside, and his size gave him a strange, misshapen dignity if there can be such a thing. And at school he’d fallen back so far, grown to the size where he could no longer fit in the desk, where Miss Cannon could no longer thump him, preposterous it would have been anyway, his hands could have crushed the ruler.
“I don’t know who decided he shouldn’t return, Da, Ma, or George himself, but he got a job anyway in Keiling’s farm, so walking home from school we’d see him, you remember, moving down the potato drills in a line with the labourers over from Scotland and the patients from Portrane. He’d give the bulk of his wages to Ma for my education and whatever he was let keep for himself he’d spend on clothes to imitate yours and Vaseline to slick his hair back and impress Nina. Yes, yours, don’t tell me you don’t remember, he could never wear them but he tried, did he try. Even down to the hair which he tried to grow like yours but it rose from his head like a brush which he tried to keep down with more Vaseline. So it grew uncomfortable, didn’t it, we can’t really deny it, Gregory. I was the scholarship girl, he was the day-labourer, you and Nina were the ideal that could never be matched. On his days off, hanging round your front gates or outside the shellfish plant, bouncing flat stones across the river, in his best clothes, waiting for a glimpse of Nina. I’d tell him, George, don’t let on to be so eager, but he would never understand, thought urgency and ardour would
get
him—what, I often wondered, it couldn’t have been romantic affection, even he would have recognised that as ridiculous— no, it felt more like a return, a need to go back to those childhood moments, when the differences between the four of us were or seemed to be, for some few magical years, non-existent.
“He thought, if you will allow me to be so psychoanalytical, that the more like you he was, the closer it would draw him to her. And I thought, if you will allow me to be so bold and forward, the more like her I was, the closer it would draw you to me. So ours was a not uncommon delusion then, given we were both a little bit in love with both of you, but in his case taken to uncommon extremes. Though whether he ever got as close as I did to you on that afternoon my father took the lot off to the Laytown Races, and I crept with you into their bedroom to listen to the rain drumming on the metal roof, to examine the intimacy of my own undergarments, I cannot tell. Do you remember the rain, Gregory, do you remember the sound of that rain?”
And it’s raining when they leave the pub, a soft winter wash of it, mottling his coat, which he holds over her with his left arm while he searches for the car keys with his right. The wet dodgem cars with their smiling faces glisten in the amber streetlights and remind him of how much alcohol he has consumed.
“Show me the house, Gregory,” she says.
“I don’t think that’s wise,”.he says, still fumbling for the keys, as if waiting for the rain to sober him up.
“All proper now, love, are we? No, don’t worry about Eros, Gregory, she’s long gone to sleep, but I would dearly like to see inside, like to find out how much it reminds me of her. We’re visiting old ghosts, aren’t we? Waking the sleeping dogs.”
“What sleeping dogs?” he asks.
“The ones that lie.”
“You mean,” he says, as he starts the car and the lights illuminate the rain–swept golf-course, “we are emptying cupboards of their skeletons.”
“Yes,” she says, “all the old cliches. Old haunts with their sleeping dogs and their skeletoned cupboards and their stones unturned.”
She falls silent as the golf-course passes and the river comes into view She closes her eyes briefly around Mornington and through Drogheda she snores, wistfully, it seems to him, and she wakes again as the yellow headlights graze the gates, as the wheels sough off the dampened gravel. The rain is heavy now and turns them into diffuse wraiths as they huddle from the car to the kitchen door.
“I loved this house,” Janie says, once over the threshold, “and everything in it, but wouldn’t you if you came from a river-pilot’s cottage with a red oxide roof and slept four to the bed till it became dangerous for the virtue of all concerned.” She takes Gregory’s arm as the door closes. “With a roof that played percussion when it rained. I got to know rain in all its varied moods, my love, as I studied my Latin on the kitchen table.
Amo amas,
I love a lass,” she says as she stretches up, tipsily, her heels in their frayed stockings coming clear of the black lip of her shoe. She kisses him, close to the corner of his mouth. She leaves her lips close to his cheek and whispers, “So can you pinpoint the moment when it all went wrong, Gregory? When my dear brother began to lose his marbles, when your sister became his chosen obsession, when that summer play became a winter frost?”
“We grew up,” says Gregory, pulling away from her, “and maybe that was all.”
“But isn’t that the problem? We didn’t. I suspect we just pretended.” She leads him by the arm through the kitchen door, into the dark hallway, her head lying crooked on his shoulder. “Where do you work now, Gregory?”
“In Soho,” he says.
“Aha,” she whispers, “what an adult-sounding place.” She walks him through the hallway, through the half-open living room door. “And I suppose it is regrettable, Gregory, truly regrettable, this state of adulthood.”
“You’re not making sense,” he answers.
“But I am,” she says, “and I’ll show you. Take off my coat.” And he obeys her, without question, undoes the buttons on the damp maroon cloak she’s wearing.
“Carry me.” She drapes her arms around his shoulders and he assumes her “weight. “My brother carried you,” she says, “carried you to safety across a burning desert.”
“I don’t remember,” he says. “I was wounded, unconscious.”
“But he does,” she says. “At least he did once, because he told me. He assumed your weight the way an adult would a child’s, left you unconscious of his gargantuan efforts and gave you life again. So lift me, Gregory, I’m nearing fifty and want to be a child again. And that’s not lifting, you need one hand crooked below the knee to make me . . .”
“To make you what?” he asks, and his arm comes down and one knee crooks round it.
“To make me weightless,” she says, “childlike and weightless.” She is in his arms now and he is swaying with her weight in the marginal light coming through the French windows.
“He said you called for your mother when he thought it was the end. So he answered you and carried on, like any mother would.”
“And I remember this couch,” she murmurs, as he rests her on it. “I am drunk now, and I remember the velvet feel of this couch, the grassy smell of it, the dramas I imagined from it. There was a ghost, wasn’t there, to observe our comings and goings? What did we call her?”
He slides to the floor and rests his head against her knee. “Hester,” he says, as she strokes his cheek with her open palm.
“Yes, Hester. I was never quite au fait with Hester. What was the story? She died in childhood? Or of a broken heart? Or both, why not both, what a way to go”
“The story changed,” says Gregory, “as we did.”
“Of course. She was the doll, wasn’t she, then the woman in white. Are you a child yet?” she asks, and strokes his lip with her finger.
“I’m getting close,” says Gregory.
“Then do you remember that day George saw her by the old manhole in the field by the river? I had pretended of course, pretended to see her, and do you know why I had pretended?”
“Why,” Gregory asks, as he must.
“Because I would have pretended anything to get into your world. And not just your world, but that magic circle between yourself and your sister Nina. That state of need, of belonging, of grace. So if I must see a ghost to gain admittance, well then, I’ve seen a ghost. But with Georgie, it was sadly different. We found him with a blade in his hands, what kind of blade, a secateurs it was, savaging a piece of wood. Pale and shaking. ‘Georgie,’ I said, what’s wrong? You look as if you’ve seen Hester.’ The cliche, you see.
“ ‘I have,’ he tells me.
“ ‘Was she wearing white?’ I asked him.
“ ‘No,’ he says, ‘she was wearing black.’
“ ‘George,’ I said, ‘you’ve cut yourself
“ ‘No,’ he said, ‘I cut her.’
“And I wiped his hands, and sure enough, the skin was uncut. ‘So whose blood is it then?’ I asked him, and he answered, ‘Hers.’”
She presses his head between her open knees, into the folds of her skirt. “Are we children yet, Gregory, have we banished the spectre of adulthood?”
“We can’t,” he replies.
“But you do remember, you were there. We took him by the hand down to the river, me, you and Nina, and swung on the rope your father had tied to the overhanging branch of the chestnut tree. And when you pushed me I’d turn on the swing back and see him staring at the water, still gouging at the wood, and I knew something was wrong even then. There was a space between his gaze and what he looked at, and maybe I knew then that that space might never be filled. And I’m sorry, but I’ve drunk too much and I’m getting—what’s the word? Maudlin. Is the word maudlin, Gregory?”
“Reflective would be kinder,” he murmurs.
“Let me sleep here, Gregory, leave me on the couch and I’ll be gone in the morning.”
She closes her eyes and lays her head on the brown velvet covering. And as he rises he seems almost disappointed. He takes off her shoes, lifts her legs and bends them underneath her.
“A blanket,” she whispers, “would be nice.”
~
She walked out of the hospital, into the pale circle of cement that circled round the circle of green, with George on her arm, she with her somewhat new face and George with his new stare. Because he stared now, stared at a space in advance of the object he should have seen. There was an object parked on the circle that he should have stared at, yet he seemed not to notice it at all. It was a motor-car, and her father was proudly standing by its open door, his head encased in a motoring cap with earflaps like an airman.
“I thought Henry Ford should take us home,” he said, cranking the engine into juddering life, “instead of Garibaldi.”
George kept his eyes fixed on the swinging door, and once he was inside, on the parallax of the hospital gates as they slid by the windscreen. The sun was strong that day, and left severe dark shadows, the windows of the shops on Shop Street were white with light and the tide on the mudflats of Mozambique were meandering strips of silver.
“No more jumping either, George, from any height bigger than your own,” her father shouted over the din in his kind voice; he couldn’t help being kind.
“We didn’t jump,” said George pedantically, “we fell.”
“Well, no more falling then, because one is as bad as the other, isn’t it?”
The cottage with the red roof came into view beyond her father’s silhouetted head in the front of the car, the flat hot sea behind it. A gaggle of children ran forward to greet the new motor, Janie leaning at the door behind them, her arms crossed. As the children crawled over the steaming bonnet, Nina walked with George’s hand in hers and deposited it in Janie’s.
“Georgie,” Janie said, “you’re back in time for tea.” She used that bright voice that people use to intimate normality where it is noticeable only by its absence. And now he stared at the car, when it was leaving, at her face in the back window, barely visible through the running heads that followed in its pursuit. He let Janie draw him backwards into the house, his face still turned in the car’s direction, now vanishing behind its sulphurous cloud.
And he became Nina’s shadow for the rest of the summer. He would be there in the damp grass outside her window when she woke in the morning, would follow her and Gregory to the tennis-courts, collect the balls they missed and bounce them dutifully back towards them. When they swam out to the raft in the middle of the river’s mouth, he would be the guardian of their clothes, against wind, rain and whatever prying hands might happen along. After a while the stare retreated, became a secret hiding-place from which he looked occasionally, but on those occasions she would always see it and know it was for her, and her alone. He reverted to his role of their willing clown, but was too big for it now—when she lathered his lips in lipstick, the effect was grotesque and unlovely, no matter how they tried to laugh it off. She would walk alone along the line of the tide and see his figure on the dunes behind, keeping pace, like some lonely Quasimodo.
“Are you the guardian of my virtue, George?” she would ask him, outside the gates, finding him still behind her.
“No,” he would say, then with a strange dignity, “but I am your friend.”
“There are times,” she would tell him, “when we need to be without our friends.”
“I understand,” he said, the haystacks gleaming behind him in the late August sunset, “but she doesn’t.”
“And who would she be?”
“You know,” he said. “Hester.”