“Hasn’t she bloomed, Sister Catherine?”
“I think so,” said Sister Catherine, shy as ever.
“We place our seedlings in your green hands and you bring them to flower.”
Sister Catherine blushed and her small hands retreated into her voluminous sleeves. “We do our best,” she said uncertainly.
“Her brother hopes the Royal Irish will make a man of him.”
Sister Catherine saw Nina’s eyes look downwards, like sinking moths. “He’s enlisted, then,” she said.
“And maybe his absence will make a lady of her?”
“I’m still a girl, mother,” said Nina.
“Yes, love, of course. My little Nina.”
She heard the sound long before she saw it. A dull throbbing in the summer fields, like a distant rumble of thunder unwilling to explode properly. Then she saw the puff of smoke as the sound grew louder, edging its way through the hedgerows, as if a toy train was busily puffing its way through the fuchsia. The sun glinted off a helmet and the thing appeared on the Drogheda Road, with a sidecar attached, leaving a trail of grey exhaust, both wheels raising dust from the summer-hardened surface, heading towards the gates at the speed of a horse on a steady canter. She ran from the upstairs window, down the oak staircase, and when she made it to the front door saw it trundling down the avenue towards her, more slowly now. Its balance seemed suspect, weighted to one side, the bulk of the driver threatening to crush the diminutive sidecar to the left. Then it reached her, shuddered to a halt and the driver pulled off goggles and helmet and revealed himself to be George, in khaki.
“She’s pulling to the left,” he shouted at the figure of Gregory, behind him, emerging from the sidecar.
“Then counterbalance her. Lean to the right.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You have to call him sir?” asked Nina, walking down the steps.
“No,” said George, “He’s in the ranks like me. Shilling a day.”
“Then why the sir?”
“Because he looks like a sir. Even in a private’s uniform.”
“Will you take sir and me for a ride, then?”
“On the pillion or the sidecar, Nina?” George asked her. “It’s up to you.”
“Don’t you have to call me Ma’am?”
“No, Ma’am.”
“The pillion, then, Private George,” she said. “We’ll leave sir to the comfort of his sidecar.”
And he did look like a sir, she thought, as she moved to the motorbike. George took her hand, first removing his wing-shaped leather glove. Is everything to be different now, she wondered, gloves, goggles, titles, cognomens. Then she sat her bum on the pillion, tucking her dress beneath her, and felt George’s iron back underneath the khaki greatcoat and realised some things would always be the same.
“Brace yourself, Nina,” he muttered. He raised his body and brought all of his weight down on the kick-starter and the thing roared to trembling life. “And here we go, hold tight,” he said, and she felt it kick into movement, swaying slowly towards the gateway, through it, gaining speed along the riverside.
Speed seemed to complement them, to define them. Departure was best, she thought, with no thought of arrival, maybe they were destined for flight. And this, she realised, was far more interesting than the horse. The horse was all sweat, strain, effort and exertion. This was the future, a mechanised roar, a trembling of metal, a rattling of constituent parts, a ballistic and a balletic trajectory, utterly new, roaring through the old dusty fuchsia hedges, her arms wrapped round him for safety, into some possibility of a future. They reached Drogheda in no time, roared down the empty dock road, about-turned at the bridge and headed north towards Clogherhead. George sped through one-street villages, past a marquee festooned with conscription posters, into the harbour with the smell of wet mackerel on the drying air. There was a grey frigate visible on the horizon heading for Carlingford Lough. It looked to Nina like a child’s drawing on an innocently drawn seascape, the only barely alive, threatening aspect to it being the smokestack which uncurled from the funnel, into a billowing, internally expanding black cloud.
“You didn’t have to join,” said Nina, staring at the glistening, slapping mackerel in the fishing-boat below.
“No,” said George, “but if I didn’t join I would have had to keep snagging turnips.”
There was a long-toothed conger eel twisting among the mackerel. A fisherman speared it with a gaff hook, chopped its tail off and then its head.
“I can’t imagine a war,” she said, watching the black blood spout over the ship’s deck, on to the mackerel below. “Can you, Gregory?”
“No,” he said, “it’s not my job is it, to imagine a war.”
His voice sounded adult to her, but when she turned and looked at his face, it seemed as young as ever.
“And who will look after you, Gregory, when you’re fighting this war?”
“Will you look after me, George?”
“I’ll look out for you. Don’t know I can look after you. Never fought a war.”
“Look out for each other,” said Nina, taking them both by the arms. There was a cold breeze now, coming in from the sea. “Will you promise me you’ll both come back?”
They ate grilled mackerel, a halfpenny each, down by the boats. Her question was rhetorical, or must have been, since neither of them answered. Gregory talked of the itching of his boots, the discomfort of his khaki trousers, George of the distributor cap on the motorbike engine. Gregory said the fight was for civilisation, George said he had heard it was for Poor Catholic Belgium and Nina found it hard to visualise any of it. It was as if there was a black pit in her facility for daydreaming, her imagination, and they were both descending into it, rapidly, on a motorcycle and sidecar.
When they tired of the pier and the sight of gasping mackerel, they mounted it again, George spurred it into action and they took a circuitous route home. He wanted to show them the tomb of the woman of the river.
They reached it at sunset and the motorcycle headlights threw a cone of sulphurous light on to the low circular hill and the phosphorescent cows in the field beyond. Gregory was out first, lifted her gallantly by the waist and deposited her on the soft earth. George lit a cigarette and laid his chin on his crossed hands over the handlebars and the softly purring engine. She took Gregory’s hand and walked towards the low hill at the dim end of the cone of light, surrounded by the oddly illumined Hereford cows. Their white patches gleamed against their patches of brown, vanishing into the gloom beyond, the last rays of the evening sun glancing around their nodding heads. Gregory’s long thin fingers seemed an extension of hers.
“He’s smitten,” he said, “and that’s why he’s going.”
“So it’s not the King’s shilling?” she asked.
“No,” he said, “it’s you, love.”
“Love,” she said, “you called me love, that’s not allowed.”
“With you then, Nina,” he said.
“But he’s Touchstone,” she told him, “and a Touchstone smitten by a Rosalind is a dramatic absurdity.”
“In a comedy,” said Gregory. “Maybe not in a tragedy.”
“Tragedy or comedy, Rosalind still loves Orlando.”
The yellow light on Gregory’s hair shimmered and she heard the low rumble behind her and realised George was gunning the motorbike slowly forwards, following.
“Are you talking about me?” he asked.
“No,” said Gregory, “we were talking about the difference between comedy and tragedy. People laugh in one and cry in the other.”
“And people live in one,” said George, “and die in the other.”
“So let’s make sure,” she said, “we make ours a comedy.”
“What does that mean?” asked George.
“It means you both come back.”
The round hill was now up against them and he spun his front wheel slowly, raking the arc of white over the patchy grass, the few bare thorn trees, a goat with raised horns staring back at them from what seemed to be the perfect arc of the hillside. And then she saw them. Two cantilevered blocks of stone supporting a transept on top, the circular whorls etched in them that seemed, in the harsh contrast of the headlights, to have been carved yesterday.
“What are they?” she asked.
“The entrance,” said George behind her.
“The entrance to what?”
“To her tomb.”
She walked through the grass which was dampening by now. A cow shuffled to her left, into the cone of light and out again. The goat stared from above, as if hypnotised. George moved the bike behind her till it illuminated a gloomy passageway, beyond the standing stones, inside the perfect hill.
“Whose tomb, George?”
“You know.”
“Tell me again.”
“The woman of the river.”
“Boinn.”
“We boil our tea in there, when it rains.”
“So this is Keiling’s farm?”
“Part of it. The vegetable part. Turnips, parsnips, potatoes.”
She tightened her hold on Gregory’s fingers, to draw him in. But he disengaged them.
“Coward,” she whispered.
“No,” he said. “I don’t belong in there.”
The stone passageway gleamed in the headlights, the whorled carvings on each side as if scratched by a giant child. Like George, she thought. Beyond it, a circular gloom. She walked inside and saw her huge shadow dancing ahead of her. Another shadow gained on hers and she felt his breath on her neck.
“So you belong after all,” she said and took his hand, and was shocked for a moment at the strength of it until she realised it was George’s. He held her hand hard, as if expecting a withdrawal.
“So Touchstone eats his vittles here?” she asked him, beginning again.
“When the rain comes down, when the potato drills turn into a swamp, when it’s hardly worth continuing. Which seems like every day. I sit here,” he said, “and think of you.”
They had reached a perfect half-circle, like a stone colander.
“Where,” she asked. “Where do you sit?”
“Here,” he told her and reached out for her in the dark, lifted her bodily and placed her on a stone with a small seat-like indentation.
“I can’t fit,” she said, “and if I can’t, I don’t see how you could.”
“They were smaller then,” he said.
“P or Q Celts?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know about Celts.”
“There’s one,” she said, “who doesn’t care about her P’s and Q’s.” She could see a woman, carved into the stone wall, her grinning face upturned and her knees pulled apart, her hands between them. “Is she doing what I think she’s doing?”
“What do you think she’s doing?” George asked, and there was a new tenderness in his voice.
“Touching herself,” she said, and drew her knees together.
“Why would she be doing that?” he asked.
“She’s an ancient Irish goddess and has a well between her legs.”
He withdrew his hand from her and she could see the large shape moving backwards.
“Don’t go yet,” she said.
“A well?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, “a well that gives birth to a river.” And she reached out and felt his calloused hand and drew it towards her.
“That still doesn’t tell me why she’s . . .” He stopped, as if he didn’t have the words for the stone hands on the wall carving.
“Maybe,” she said, and could feel the large hand on her knee now, “she has to help the river on its journey.”
“How so?” he asked, breathing hard.
“To make the water flow,” she said.
She could feel his hand, unstoppably travelling towards her now, and she opened her knees again and put her own hand over his and helped him on his journey. Why she was doing this she wasn’t sure, she wasn’t sure of anything, only that he and her half-brother would be gone soon to a darkness she couldn’t imagine, and the impulse felt strong, larger than her, larger than the woman on the wall who seemed to move her hands as George moved his and whose knee trembled as her knee trembled and it didn’t feel like stone, far from it, it felt like water, a trickle of it first and then a slow moving river that bent as she bent and shifted as she shifted, and shifting, that was the word she’d heard for it, did you shift him, yes I shifted and he shifted me. And he must have shifted her because the woman was nowhere to be seen, only the circular stone whorls of the ceiling, she was on the cold floor, George was above her and she gave a soft cry like the one the owl gave in the barn that night, among the upper hayricks.
She closed her eyes then and it was like sleeping, but it was not sleep, for she felt him moving from her and could hear his boots, scraping softly off the stone floor. Soon the scraping stopped and another scraping began, by the entrance.
“Sheila-na-gig,” he said.
She heard the voice, echoing in the cold, delicious ancientness of the tomb. She turned her head and saw Gregory walking towards her, silhouetted by the headlights near the entrance.
“Sheila what?” she asked softly. She drew her knees to her chin and adjusted her clothing. There was a damp patch near her bum.
He raised his arm so the shadow of his finger fell on the stone carving behind her. It traced the open mouthed head, the spread knees, the clutching hands.
“Sheila-na-gig. It’s a Celtic goddess. Disgraceful, don’t you think?”
“Is it?”
“But then what would I know. I’m not a Celt.”
“Where’s George?” she asked, rising.
“Isn’t he in here?”
“No. He left.”
“Well, he didn’t come out. I waited, you see. I waited for a long time, till my absence seemed beyond the bounds of . . . delicacy . . .”
“Is there another way out?” she asked. She smoothed her dress with her hands.
“But then is there anything delicate about Touchstone?”
“George,” she said. “His name is George.”
“And did you resolve the issue?” he asked. “Is it to be comedy or tragedy?”
Then the light shivered on them both and the motorcycle outside the tomb roared into life.
“There must be,” she said, “another way out.”
The light wheeled off them as the motorcycle turned, positioning its rear towards them as they exited. She noted the whorls of its tracks in the grass like the whorls in the stone lintel of the entrance. George sat with his back towards them, patiently, keeping the engine alive. She chose the sidecar for the journey home, leaving the pillion and the comfort of George’s waist to Gregory. They said little and the goat bleated from the top of the hill, as if to emphasise their silence.