“We spent much of our childhood here, doctor,” she said, “didn’t we, George?”
“We did, Ma’am,” said George obediently.
“It’s Nina, George, not Ma’am,” she said, adding, as an afterthought, “if you please. George came from the cottages over there. The river divided us, right George?”
“Yes,” he said, “the river,” dealing with the problem posed by her given name by omitting it entirely.
“There was a swing there, wasn’t there George, on that branch of the chestnut.” George stared at the branch and reached his hand up to touch the decades-old scar on the bark. “And I thought,” she said, “all things being equal, if everything works out as planned, that George would use Dan Turnbull’s cottage. You remember Dan’s cottage, George?”
“Do I ever,” said George.
“Well, maybe you can take us to it.”
He walked, like a child again, along the barely etched path in the grass above the riverbank. There was a tangle of blackberry bushes then, at the bend in the river, and the copse of ash and elder behind it. The woods seemed impassable, but like a child still, he found his old way through it, pushing aside overgrown brambles, breaking off a stick to beat them back, a Hernando Cortez in an imagined Mexican jungle scything his way to an El Dorado, which, when the brambles gave way to clearance with empty cider cans underfoot, turned out to be the peeling, once-whitewashed front of a two-roomed cottage.
“Dan’s,” said George.
“Yes,” said Nina, “this was Dan’s. Could be yours George, if you want it.”
“Let us not be hasty,” murmured the psychiatrist.
“No,” said Nina, “we will by no means rush. I thought he could start by getting it in shape, three or four hours a day maybe, someone could drive him here, doctor, maybe even you, take him home again at night. And if he makes progress he could begin on the garden, and if the miracle happens, make this cottage his home. There’ll be works here, an architect, a building supervisor, he’ll never be alone. And when the house is ready, if I can be as bold as to look forward that far, I will have a gardener and George will have, what is the phrase? A life. Yes that’s it, George will have a life.” She turned to him and took his hand again. “Would you like a life, George?”
And George smiled, his huge hand closing around hers, and whispered, using, she happily noted, her name for the first time.
“Nina,” he said, “what larks.”
They emerged into the driver’s view again as they had left it, she first, her right arm angled behind her, the hand lost in George’s enormous fist, who followed like a child. They stopped by the bonnet of the black Ford.
“Please give it some thought,” she said to the doctor in the white coat, her hand still engaged by the hulk the driver of the black Ford had deduced to be his patient. He noted that the skin of the hand matched the skin of the face and was missing one finger. The pinky.
“My first impressions,” the doctor replied, “are more than favourable.”
“I shall await then,” she said, “your second.” She withdrew her hand from the patient, shook the doctor’s. And she raised her pert body on the soles of her black bootees, placed a kiss on the patient’s left cheek.
“Goodbye, George.”
She moved towards the car. The driver leapt from his seat, almost hit her with the opening door. And as he opened the rear door he thought he saw a tear in the hulk’s cornflower-blue eyes.
S
HE THREW MONEY
at the house and the house, as if anxious to assume the shape that pleased her most, responded. The interior was stripped bare within a month, the wiring replaced, the forecourt filled itself with bathroom fittings, tongue-and-groove pine, floorboards, kitchen sinks, window-sashes. A Portakabin for the architect and foreman was trundled on to the front lawn, the copse of trees around Dan Turnbull’s cottage was tidied, the rhododendron and the ash cut back. The cottage itself was clean within a month, new-painted, a radio installed in the corner opposite the fireplace, a sofa improvised from the rear seat of an old Cortina car placed next to it. She came again in January; a different driver, waiting for her by the arrivals desk in Dublin airport, led her towards an identical black Ford car. She stayed another week in the Neptune Hotel, greeted George each morning on his arrival from Portrane, said goodbye to him each evening as the doctor took him home. But the word home was inadmissible to him, since his real home, now, seemed to be here.
She walked with him through Flanagan’s on the Dublin road, and chose lawnmowers, spades, clippers and secateurs, and gave him as his first task the renovation of the glasshouse. She left word with the site foreman to supervise his duties, keep him supplied with whatever tools he needed, and by her next visit, in March, the renovation of the glasshouse was complete.
As the chirping of skylarks over the unkempt grasses was drowned in the dull bass throbbing of earth-movers, the sound of a JCB reversing, the thump of kango hammers, George, in what was very much like a homecoming ceremony, was installed in Dan Turnbull’s cottage. He then took his place among the hard-hats, the drivers of heavy machinery, the plumbers, elec-tricians and carpenters as the house’s archivist, the keeper of its memories, the guardian of its restoration, the inheritor of its soul. He relished any responsibility, embraced it like a long lost cousin, began consulting with the works manager on the restoration, remembered every detail of how it was and how it once more could be.
Dr. Hannon observed this with a wry sense of failure, and expressed himself one Monday afternoon to Nina, watching George at work among the tomato plants in the re-paned glasshouse, shocked at the futility of the years spent in the St Ita’s wards.
“Is it a comment,” he asked her, “on the uselessness of psychiatry? Three months here has undone what ten years there could never undo.”
“Perhaps,” said Nina, “it’s simpler than you think.”
“How?” he asked.
“Perhaps,” she replied gently, “he’s happy.”
Though whether happiness was the word for such undivided concentration, such relentlessly meticulous care for the utterly inessential, was a question they neglected to ask each other. He was content, definitely, to spend hours with a spliced rope, two sections of an old garden seat and two nuts and bolts.
“What are they for, George?” she asked as he riveted them together with thin strips of metal.
“You’ll see,” he said.
And she did see, on the morning she finally left the Neptune Hotel for London, having long tired of the room with its odours of damp, the evening walks on the windblown sand. The works were in good hands, George was in good hands, the house would now define itself at a pace she could hardly influence. And what she saw was this: George, grown to ten times the height he was when he first sat on it, pushing the new-made, empty swing over the empty river, a swing that was an almost perfect copy of the old.
T
HREE YEARS LATER
, George woke with the dawn, as always. He boiled some water on the gas-ring in the tiny kitchen. He heard the purring of wood-pigeon outside, the clucking of a stonechat, the irregular chatter of wagtails and sparrows. He took a piece of yesterday’s batch bread in his hands while waiting for the water to boil and bent low under the jamb of the kitchen door, went through to the front one, edged it open with his foot. He tossed crumbs of white bread around the stunted rhododendron bushes and waited with the benign patience of a latter-day St Francis till the birds revealed themselves. When the first wagtail came he clucked his tongue off his teeth in symbiotic approval of its jabbing beak, its jerking feathers. A flurry of sparrows came next and he broke more bread and threw it towards them, watching them retreat and advance with each offering. He heard the mechanical thrum of wings off foliage and glimpsed the plumage of a cock-pheasant making a plumb line through the dark green, leaving a trail of broken sunlight in its wake.
Then the kettle sang. He turned from this breakfast of birds without a second thought, bowed low under the entrance to the kitchen, dropped a teabag in a smudged cup and poured the water. He took a bottle of yesterday’s milk from the battered fridge, watching the white milk turn the black tea brown. The swirl of milk in the oak-coloured liquid had for him the same intensity of interest as the jabbing, chirruping beaks outside. He looked around his dwelling then, and if there was gratitude for his new circumstances, he gave little sign of it. All phenomena seemed equally worthy of his attention. He lifted the spent teabag from the cup with a spoon and dropped it in the rubbishbin beneath the gas-ring.
Then he walked, cup in hand, through the low kitchen doorway, through the more generous confines of the front door, past the pruned and stunted rhododendrons, through the copse of trees—ash, elder, birch—to the reconstituted glasshouse.
He had replaced each pane, had hand-sanded the frames of rusting metal, painted them then with a red oxide and a white primer. He had re-erected the tracery of hanging wires that would support the tomato plants when they eventually deigned to grow. He was bringing into being a past that he remembered, a state of enchantment or grace he dimly apprehended, though not with any sense of joy, wonder, hurry, but with a methodical concentration that would have done a three-year-old child proud. The tomato plants were tiny as yet, their stems needed to be threaded to the hanging wires so as to gain enough purchase to grow upwards. George finished his tea then in one gulp, entered the humid interior of glass and streaming sunshine, applied his large scarred hands to the delicate green stems.
Around eleven, he was digging, near the roots of the old apple tree, the one with the large, bowed branches, each year bent permanently with the weight of an abundance of fruit that nobody wanted. The apples stayed till they fell off and small shrivelled frozen remnants clattered round his spade as he dug. The earth was frozen too, of course, he would have needed a kango hammer to really shift it, but he persisted. One root had overgrown and was protruding from the grass like a buried elbow. He had tripped continually on the triangle of bark and was determined to set it right.
Once a task was begun he plied it slowly and methodically to its conclusion, as if the task at hand was the issue, not the end result. So he dug, and by twelve o’clock he had opened a rough solid circle, half a foot down into the open earth. One old tin can, a horse-shoe, three coins from the turn of the century. Each demanded a pause and a cigarette, an examination by those unreadable eyes, then a careful setting aside, among the solid spadefuls of discarded earth.
So it was almost lunchtime when he saw it. The remains of a hem, with the fragments of lace still intact upon it, the cloth about it half-decayed. He edged his spade around it carefully, following the hem further into the frozen ground. He recognised the lace immediately, how could he not? It was Nina’s shawl, that he’d threaded through his fingers so often and so long ago. He bent now and held it just so, and felt it disintegrate further under his gardener’s fingers. He cut into the cold crumbling earth beneath it and raised this bundle from the past on his spade, laid
it to
one side among the dampening grass. A line from their play in the glasshouse sang into his brain, he wondered how he’d remembered it, and once it was there he couldn’t get rid of it. And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe and then from hour to hour we rot and rot. From the fool in the forest, he remembered, but he couldn’t remember the end. The cloth had glints of the peacock blue surviving the patina of clay or was it mould. Mould, he thought, like the furred surface of ancient meat, and the lines kept singing in his head, we ripe and rot.
The sun above him was well advanced and the grass was steaming gently with the melting hoar-frost. He gripped the hem and pulled it through one finger and thumb and the shawl turned in the wet grass. He felt a hard circular ball inside the hem, like a ball-bearing. He pulled the stitches apart and removed a rust-coloured bead from inside the cloth. He rubbed it between his tobacco-stained fingers and saw the shimmering texture emerge beneath, which he only gradually recognised as pearl.
We ripe and rot, the lines sang in his head again and he still couldn’t remember the end. But he remembered the day by the Boyne before the conflagration when he had opened the oyster with his army knife. He untwined the hem further then, as if it was a bow, tied by Nina long ago, concealing further riches inside. And the hem unwound and the shawl turned further and revealed whatever riches it had hidden, in the crumbling earth on the melting grass. Fragments of seashell, he thought at first, or the remains of crabclaws. He remembered the* crunch of packed shells beneath his feet outside the shellfish factory and rubbed one fragment in his fingers and saw the whitened texture of bone.
The bones of a small animal, he thought then, a rabbit, a stoat, a kitten and he tried to remember a pet that Nina would have treasured as she treasured her doll Hester, or as she had treasured this bundle, to wrap it so carefully in her shawl, with the pearl he had given her. But he could remember no pet, the only loved, tiny object being the doll, with its puritan bib and smock. Yet Hester had been given to the waters, he recalled, and waked with orangeade and biscuits in a china teaset. He tried to imagine what Nina would wrap with such protective care in her shawl that had been peacock blue, that had the pearl inwoven, what she would swaddle like an infant and bury here beneath the apple tree. And the word infant then sang in his brain with the words ripe and rot, and he would have buried all three words then, infant, ripe and rot, in the earth here the way Nina must have buried her shawl when he was on that transport was it, moving towards the seething bullets or on the burning hill with Gregory dragging him or on the corpse-riddled beach, maybe, burying his own finger. But he couldn’t bury words, no more than he could drive them from his singing brain and so he stood and paced, as if to escape them, he walked from the apple tree to the glasshouse, but there was no escape, they were inside him the way those tiny, barely formed bones on the rotting shawl were once inside Nina. And he remembered the whole line then, of the fool in the forest. And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe and then from hour to hour we rot and rot and thereby hangs a tale.