“And maybe you don’t,” said Brother Barnabas.
“Don’t what?”
“Exist.”
“How could we not exist?”
“Maybe you’re a dream the Abbot is having right now in the monastery garden. He likes his post-prandial nap. So why don’t you run out of here before he wakes up?”
They ran, past the edge of the field of barley, and could see him penetrating deep inside it to where his scythe lay on the trampled ground, and the last sight they had of him was of the scythe flashing in the sunlight and his cowled head bending, up and down.
“So do we exist, Gregory?” she asked him, when they reached the shore again.
“No,” he said, his bare feet splashing in the water. “Someone else is dreaming of us.”
“Is it a good dream then?”
He took her hand as he walked. “It’s an excellent dream of larks,” he said.
“Larks,” she said. “What larks.”
I dreamed of that Abbot intermittently myself, sleeping in the walled garden of the monastery I never saw, beyond the barley field I did see, a rotund figure on a deckchair beneath a late-flowering cherry, the petals dropping occasionally and landing on his bald napping pate, since his cowl had slipped and was dangling behind him, in the hot, summer, bee-thickened air. He was the repository dreamer in the final circle of dreams, but was asleep himself so couldn’t know it, and if the disturbance crept inside me, the unease I would come to know too well, the vacuity, I would console myself with the possibility that I was after all the dream of that unseen Abbot, and that my vacuity was his.
J
ANIE SLEEPS THE
sleep of nine whiskies or was it ten, and dreams of the September morning she walked up the drive in the pearl-grey uniform of the Siena Convent. George had watched her roll her socks neatly round the edges of her bootees, and upon enquiring had been told that’s the way the Siena girls wear them and what would he know about it anyway. George had agreed he would know little about it, and parted company with her near the gates and made his way towards the potato drills of Keiling’s market-garden. Nina, Janie found when the front door finally opened, had her own socks stretched up above the knee. A debate had ensued as to which style the Siena girls favoured, to which Gregory, dressed in the grey flannels of St. Lawrence’s Grammar School, contributed nothing whatsoever. It was resolved by Mr. Hardy, who proposed an elegant compromise, of the socks being drawn to just below the dimple of the kneecap, the knee, as Ruskin had once observed, being the signature of a young lady’s beauty.
So, George, as he moved among the potato drills with the line of day-labourers on a field above the Baltray Road, watched the trap make its way towards Drogheda, Gregory and Mr. Hardy in the front, Nina and his sister Janie in the back, their knees decorously exposed to the September air. He noted the socks pulled up to just below the kneecap and concluded that was the way the Siena girls must wear them, after all.
And now Janie dreams, of Gregory walking towards the knot of youths beneath the brown castellated facade of his grammar school, with the careful gait of a heron picking its way through mudflats; of the mock-Gothic arch of the Siena Convent entrance, of the sheen of polished maple in the shady corridors, the smell of bleach and lavender, of Sister Annunciata in her white wimple and bonnet, the young novice from Mayo, Sister Camille, who walked them through the gardens holding both of their hands and who seemed as new to these hushed environs as they were themselves. She would squeeze Janie’s hand tighter on some days, Nina’s on others, and spend the next five years in an exquisite dilemma between the affections of both. She would share with Janie her memories of the road from Leenane to Louisburg, the bay with the frothing Atlantic below it, the curling booreen above it that led to her family’s ever-smoking thatched cottage, of the bed that she so sorely missed, crowded at night with her five sisters. She slept now in an iron cot, curtained in blue and white check, with only the visitations of the unseen St. Catherine to console her. She would share with Nina her devotion to the same St. Catherine, the silent ecstasies that came to keep her company, advise her against fast dances, theatrical attendances and romantic novels while curling her fingers round the soft skin beneath her thumb. She would weep real tears before they left, come behind them in the dark corridor on the way to Mass as they passed the warm kitchen, kiss one and then the other, oh rapture, oh delight. And as Janie sleeps she wonders was anything in mature passion quite as good?
And George daydreamed, of Gregory, ofJanie, but most of all of Nina, as he moved with the unwashed day-labourers in an irregular line along the ridged turnip fields. The daydreams almost made bearable the company he kept. Mostly outpatients from the asylum he would one day sleep in himself, they shifted with the unthinking regularity of cattle over the turnip drills, their fingers blackened from the wet earth, their boots gathering mud as they proceeded. The rains came down hard, but not hard enough to stop the work.
It would take the thunder to do that. A great wail rose up from the line of the deranged and Keiling still kept them in check until the lightning flashed, and neither he nor his son could stop the rout. Towards the only shelter there was, the circular mound at the end of the fields, surrounded by a ring of blackthorn trees, where they huddled beneath the bare branches, and George alone ventured towards the grass-covered stone entrance and stepped inside.
A lintel of ancient limestone, the circular gougings etched in lichen, the dark interior illuminated by the intermittent lightning, the thunder-claps gaining on it until they met in concert, three or four minutes of soundful flashes. He saw a figure carved on the stone inside, a woman’s head raised in an unearthly grin, her stone knees apart, her stone hands between them.
And when the thunder and the lightning ceased the others edged away from him, as if he was shadowed by contact with a world they wanted no part of. Which was fine with George, he adopted the mound as his refuge, ate his sandwiches in the interior gloom, watching them boiling tea-caddies beneath the blackthorn trees, silhouetted against the light.
In the spring his labour eased. He was given a shotgun to prowl the new-sown fields and keep them free of crows. He marked his day with the diurnal clopping of Garibaldi’s hooves, bearing Nina to and from the Siena Convent, Drogheda. He waved from the wheat and barley fields, fired ofif a blast at the errant crows in a kind of greeting. He would walk home and as the sun lengthened the days, took to dallying in Mabel Hatch’s barn above her father’s fields, meeting one, two or all three of them there, as if the barn provided common ground between their childhood together and their days now, apart. His muscles were hardened now, his body had all the bulk of the agricultural labourer he was becoming, his blue eyes had retreated behind his wind-scalded, sunburnt skin. But all three of them were equal strangers in the new worlds they had entered, and the strangeness, if anything, increased their mutual bond.
They had a new companion here, a brown owl that flew in occasionally from the golden light outside. And as two summers came and went, the brown owl stayed like a guardian angel, like their childhood ghost, their familiar, and George took to calling her, what else, Hester. “Forget about Hester,” Nina said, “she’s long, long gone.” But no, George insisted, she was the brown owl and the brown owl was her.
The name seemed odd to Nina, like a shard from a world more properly gone, and she realised they needed new words, changed words, for the changed worlds that had grown around them. A whole new language. And late that September, under the tutelage of Sister Annunciata, she suddenly found it.
I
PRAY THEE
, Rosalind, sweet my coz, be merry.
The rehearsals began in the draughty, unused gymnasium, between the hanging ropes and the vaulting horse, dramatic exercise being deemed more suitable than gymnastic for the further education of young Catholic ladies.
Dear Celia, I show more mirth than I am mistress of; and would you yet I were merrier?
Celia was Janie’s, a cipher of kinds, but Rosalind she claimed immediately as her own, more real than Nina was herself, than the ghost that intermittently haunted her. She would stay with her for ever and beyond, the mistress of her moods, consolation of her chosen profession, woman wise, woman heartfelt, woman witty, woman loving, perhaps loved. Through pretence, she realised immediately, Rosalind becomes herself since her own self is too multitudinous for any one expression of it. The girls of the Siena Convent played the boys’ parts and the boys of St Lawrence’s played the girls’, both in their separate universes until a dress rehearsal before Christmas, awaited with as much trepidation as the meeting of the waters, where gender reasserted itself, male became male and female female with nothing in between.
“You are Jacques, all Jacques, make sure it’s yours,” Nina told Gregory. But with his height and his measured diction, they put Orlando in his path. So he rehearsed them both, at home over the kitchen table, on weekends in the dripping glasshouse.
“They say you are a melancholy fellow.”
“I am so; I do love it better than laughing.”
“Rosalind,” she told him, “in an ideal world would love them both. Don’t you think, George?” she asked George who, on his weekends off, they drafted in to play Touchstone and his galaxy of fools.
“A worthy fool, motley’s the only wear.” Dan Turnbull’s old jacket, too big for him and frayed at the elbows, a pair of oil-dosed trousers held up by his old school belt. “Aye, now I am in Arden, more fool I.” His accent was now far thicker than theirs, his hands almost wholly scarred with agricultural blades. He sat behind the dead tomato plants and watched Gregory woo her.
“For now I am in a holiday humour and like enough to consent. What would you say to me now, an I were your very very Rosalind?”
“I would kiss before I spoke.” And she waited to reply until their lips touched.
“Nay, you were better speak first; and when you were gravell’d for lack of matter, you might take occasion to kiss.
“You saw that kiss, George?” she asked.
“I did,” he answered.
“Is it allowed by the presumptions of the drama?”
“Why not,” murmured George, “any fool can kiss.”
“But Rosalind,” said Nina, “pretends to be a beardless youth, who in turn allows the lovestruck Orlando to pretend he is Rosalind. So if Rosalind lets Orlando kiss her, won’t the pretence be unveiled?”
“It depends,” said George, “on what kind of kiss it is.”
“He’s right,” said Nina. “The kiss must be chaste and friendly, like a kiss between two girls.”
“Or boys,” said Gregory, “since Orlando thinks she is a boy.”
“Boys don’t kiss boys,” George offered, bringing the conversation to an odd conclusion.
“Let’s leave the kiss To Be Determined,” said Janie.
“Another question,” asked Nina, her lips still close to Gregory’s, “if Rosalind pretends and Orlando kisses the pretender, who in fact is kissing whom?”
But the kiss stayed, in all its wonderful complexity, observed by George, who lit a cigarette behind the tomato plants. He had acquired the habit suddenly, in his headlong propulsion towards adulthood. He proffered the butt to Gregory, who sucked on it and asked him, “How like you this shepherd’s life, Master Touchstone?”
“Truly shepherd,” he answered, “in respect of itself it is a good life; but in respect that it is a shepherd’s life, it is nought.”
Gregory handed the butt to Nina, who sucked on it too, but coughed.
“In respect that it is solitary, I like it very well,” said George; “but in respect that it is private, it is a very vile life.”
“Then why do you do it, George?” she asked him, unkindly, since she knew the answer already.
“Sir, I am a true labourer,” he answered. “I earn that I eat, get that I wear, owe no man hate, envy no man’s happiness.”
She was swinging beneath the chestnut after school, idly, like a child again, when she saw the freshly-scored lettering on the bark of the trunk. She tried to read as she swung, her head leaning backwards, face to one side. She deciphered one letter, then knew it all. If a hart do lack a hind, let him seek out Rosalind. She turned, and saw the figure of George across the river, with Janie’s copy of the play in his hands, still smoking.
“Did you write it, George?” she called.
“Write what?” he asked.
“That very false gallop of verses.”
“On the tree? Truly, the tree yields bad fruit.”
She swung for a bit and squinted her eyes and watched him, rising and falling, across the river in the fading light. He seemed a child and a man at once, as if he’d bypassed those awkward bits in between. Then his voice, quite soft, broke her reverie.
“There’s someone behind you,” he said.
“Who?” she asked, though she felt she knew what his answer would be.
“He that sweetest rose will find must find love’s prick and Rosalind.”
“So it’s Rosalind now. Not Hester.”
“So it seems,” he said.
“Is she beautiful?” she asked.
“No,” he said, “not any more.”
“How can Rosalind not be beautiful?”
“She was once,” he said and threw his Woodbine in the water, where it sizzled and drifted down towards her.
J
ANIE WAKES, SLOWLY
, the coverlet slipping from her body on to the newly-waxed floor. Her left hand reaches for her cigarette’s before her eyes are open, her right hand scrabbles in her pocket for the box of matches and the crow’s feet round her eyes crinkle with the pain of too much alcohol the night before. Soon a cloud of smoke wreathes round her, to be dispersed in turn by a rasping cough.
She walks through the empty house to the kitchen, where she fills a rusting kettle, lights the gas ring with another match and hears the tread of Gregory’s feet on the stairs behind her. “Have you got tea?” she asks him. “And you may as well tell me now, did I embarrass myself last night?”