Abbey is not the first woman to cause him grief. Sophie was Dermot’s undoing. She’d walked into his classroom late, after the bell. The other students were settling into their seats, but Sophie, unsure of where to sit, had turned to her professor and smiled conspiratorially. Dermot had never seen her before but he was struck instantly. Dark red hair curled down her back against a light blue cardigan. She had almond-shaped eyes and alabaster skin, although later he would find faint freckles, a dozen or so, across the bridge of her nose, two over her left eye. Her books were held up against her chest that first
day but Dermot was aware of the swell of her breasts behind them, watched as she turned on her heels and walked over to the last desk, far right and front row. Dermot cleared his throat and took off his suit jacket, scratched the back of his neck, flexed it until it cracked. “I’m Professor Fay and you are in The History of Mediaeval Churches: sponsorship and political bias. Today I will introduce you to Justinian and his great church at Ravenna.” The notebooks opened and the students’ heads went down. It was the first day of the semester, Fall 1979. Her books still closed, Sophie watched him. He noticed her gaze and looked away.
Juno and The Paycock
followed. Sophie was in the Trinity production of the O’Casey play, and although Dermot didn’t make much time for the theatre he dragged Michael Dunne along to the opening night. Michael had started teaching at Trinity that year and was still trying to find his place in the melee. Dermot took to him because they were both outsiders, Michael coming from London and Dermot an Irish Catholic, an anomaly at the Protestant university. In a way it was he, more than Michael, who stood out, and he knew it. Dermot had found his way back to Ireland through a recommendation by Professor Lasalle at The Paris University. Lasalle was an authority on European mediaeval studies and he thought Dermot was doing ground-breaking work with his dissertation. Whether or not Lasalle pulled favours to get Dermot a teaching position Dermot would never know. But he was grateful. Lasalle was a dismissive man who rarely made time for even the brightest of his students and the fact that he took an interest in Dermot, that he made sure he received scholarships and bursaries,
amazed Dermot. Although, in a way, it was hard going back to Dublin. The best work Dermot ever did, the study of the Táin remscéla, he did while living in Paris.
Midway through the play, “Mary” crossed the stage, came closer to her mother. Sophie as Mary was unintentionally comical. She sighed before starting across, the square heels of her shoes clunking on the wood slats.
“I never said to him what I shouldn’t say, I’m sure of that!” She exclaimed everything.
Mrs. Boyle, the mother, asked slyly, “How are you sure of it?”
Dermot liked the actress who played the mother—she was understated, familiar, like his own mother.
“Because I love him with all my heart and soul, Mother.” Sophie was feigning tears now. Dermot knew the director, picked him out of the middle of the house, could see by the way he leaned forward in his chair that he didn’t think it was going well.
“Why, I don’t know,” Sophie as Mary continued, “I often thought to myself that he wasn’t the man poor Jerry was, but I couldn’t help loving him, all the same.” Her make-up at this range, fifth row, was pasty. Dermot studied the other cast members’ make-up during a period of awkward pause. Someone had forgotten a line. The actors shifted or swayed on the spot. There was a giggle from the audience, near the back row.
Sophie had asked Dermot to come see her. She’d even brought two tickets to class. “For your girlfriend?” she’d said before taking her seat, crossing her legs under the desk.
She wasn’t very good, but after the performance the crowd smothered her, especially the young men. One of them, a blond fellow, kissed her on the lips before placing his hand on her back and guiding her through the crowd.
“Well Mr. Dunne, what did you think of the actress who played Mary?”
“Lovely, though a bit perplexed at times, like she’d forgotten a line, or rather,” Michael said, “that she didn’t understand it as it came out of her mouth.”
They were on Westland Row and the rain had started. The sidewalks were slick.
“Professor Fay,” said a voice. Then, louder, as he was about to step onto the street, “Dermot.” He turned and there stood Sophie, flushed from running, even her chest red and patchy above the white scoop of her neckline. Dermot had a desire to place his hand there, it looked so warm.
“Thank-you for coming. I saw you—” and she turned towards Michael, looking embarrassed. Up close Michael could see she was only seventeen, maybe eighteen. On stage she’d seemed older. When Dermot failed to say anything, to introduce her to Michael, Sophie started to back away, saying, “Thank-you, anyway, for coming,” before turning distractedly to her cohort, the blond man who’d followed her out.
It can be a matter of weeks, of hours, of a small, almost extractable, part of a life. Dermot can trace it backwards and forwards: what went right, what went wrong, and how after all his messing about, he arrived here, on a thin mattress set up on blocks that acted as a bed frame, in a cottage that leaned and yowled in the wind. Outside the white beam rakes a long
branch across the window. Dermot smells Abbey’s pillow again but there is nothing so he bunches it under his arm as if it is her body, the slope of her shoulders just under his hand.
How do you earn your fate, Dermot wonders. He’d studied hard with Lasalle, the Gallic bull of a man tutoring him, demanding he know four languages. That attention had made all the difference, that and the presentation he gave at Paris University on the Táin manuscript, the handshake afterwards. All his success can be traced to that moment and the months he’d spent in the National Library before it. Now Dermot can pinpoint every turn he’s made, every room he’s entered that has changed him.
Two months into Sophie’s third year at Trinity, she came to Dermot’s office and invited him out to dinner so they could talk about her paper on The Battle of Ros na Rig. They went to a cafe on O’Connell. He drank tea and moved his whitefish and peas around on his plate, watched her sip at her soup. When Sophie talked about her childhood, Dermot only half listened; her feet were moving near his under the table. They paid the bill before either had finished their meal. Undressing her that evening in his flat, he undid the thin gold-cross necklace she wore, grabbing the clasp with his thick fingers, trying again and again to unfasten it.
“Are you sure?” he’d asked, his lips under her chin. And she nodded, undid his trousers for him, laughing at his worn grey briefs, running her hands over the light brown hair of his inner thigh. And then there was nothing, as if she’d dropped off the face of the planet, as if it was all to be regretted. For a week she missed class. So he waited. And that, if anything, is
the thin sliver of time Dermot would take back, extract like a tumour. That first time, and also the second, when she showed up at his flat in Rathmines, walked into the bedroom, walked right past him without so much as an explanation. Later in the evening she said she might love him. Maybe. Always had. The bed springs so loud they’d thrown pillows on the floor, had started again down there, Sophie scraping her knees bloody on the short pile of the carpet. She’d left right afterwards, said she didn’t want the girls in her dorm to talk. She stood for five minutes inside his closed door looking out the window until she was sure no one would see her cross out onto the street. And then they met every few days. The whole affair went on for no more than three weeks, and it was always on her terms. When he thinks about it now it seems as if that was the whole point of the exercise—that she wanted to be in charge of him, call on him when she wanted, demand he touch her in a certain way, create a desire in him that would make him helpless. To know in the way that women need to know, that she could break him. Hardly any of their time was spent talking, though he did help her with her logography paper for another class. He went to the library with her and left a pile of books on a desk for her to peruse: Soothill’s syllabaries from the 1880s, Brown’s
Historical Scripts
. He tore small bits of paper out of his notebook to mark the relevant pages. The two of them had circled the stacks like children playing a game. That term Dermot was busy trying to finish his own projects; he was feeling pressure from the department to publish. He’d started to spend his evenings with Michael, talking about a catalog of oral histories from Inishbofin. He
wanted to compare the written recensions of myths with the ways they were told on the Island today, hoped it would evolve into a decent paper.
There was a fragility about Sophie that Dermot sees now, when he thinks about their time together. It was as intangible as a look or a gesture, as if she was outside of her self watching her life unfold. It was in the way she always seemed to be playing at something.
Dermot knows he didn’t love her, he knew it then and he knows it now. When she slipped a note under his office door saying she was pregnant he didn’t believe her.
“I am,” she said through the crack of her dorm door.
“Let me in.” He was furious, afraid of being spotted.
“I can’t.”
And it occurred to him there might be a man in there, so he pushed the door open with his fist and it hit the wall. Sophie’s luggage was open on the bed, her school books were stacked on the table under the window, there were piles of notes in the trash bin.
“You’ll get an abortion.”
“How?”
She was crying. Dermot looked behind him. A student walked past in the hallway, glanced in. Dermot met her eyes then closed the door and turned to Sophie. A sinking feeling, a going-under, for the both of them.
The Unfenced Country
IT’S been three days and only half of the posts along the north border of the fence are up. The air is damp and heavy and there’s a low mist along the east end of the field. The digger, when Sean went to get it at the back of the house, was covered in dew. Now he wishes he’d brought a jacket, though the work will warm him up once he gets into it. Mary has decided to stay at home with their mom, helping her bake a cake for Nuala’s birthday. Sean had told them he wouldn’t be back for dinner and his mother gave out to him, saying Nuala would notice he was missing, that his sister would only turn eighteen once. When he left, he noticed a bag of balloons and party hats on the table.
Sean starts in after the last upright post. He measures the twelve feet, jams the blades of the digger into the ground. Hits stone. Dermot told him it would be all right to move farther down, that it would take a year to shovel out every field stone he came across, so Sean jams the digger’s blades into the ground to the right of the stone and they cut through; the grass coming up in a clump.
The finer points of fence building are still a mystery to Sean. He knows he has to do the posts and that the wire will follow but he isn’t sure if he should wire the first length of the fence or wait until all the posts are in. Dermot hasn’t offered much instruction and now that things are underway, Sean doesn’t want to ask his father. He’s always expected Sean to simply
know
, assumes that he should be able to figure out how to build a fence using logic. Assumes he can make friends without trying, that when he leaves the house he does it because he has places to go. Even when Sean was struggling in school, when the midterms came back Cs and Ds, his father believed that Sean could rally himself to get As at the end of the year if he just applied himself. And Sean did apply himself but the grades didn’t change.
By noon Sean has put in a dozen more posts. The sun comes out from behind the clouds and Flagon follows not long after. She watches Sean for a bit until Dermot whistles and she goes running. On the other side of the low stone wall, one of Fitch’s cows eyes Sean warily and butts her head in his direction. In another hour or two Sean will be far enough along that he’ll be able to see Cassiopeia and Cygnus laid out in the grass. He put them there last winter, was out until two in the morning doing it. That night he’d imagined Fitch was wandering out in the field, had told himself over and over again that it was the acid, that if he focused he could figure out exactly what was happening. Dead leaves in the trees flapped like crow’s wings. The moon gnashed its teeth. The field suddenly reft—there was a hole in the middle of it and Sean was falling in, thinking that if Fitch really was there, then
maybe the old man could save him. But he was alone and the hole was getting wider. Like a night without stars. Like the black of an eye. Sean going in. It was two in the morning before he was seeing straight again. He went home, climbed the tree next to the house, crawled into his room through the second-storey window. His younger brother Kevin woke up when the ladder to the upper bunk hit the metal bed frame. Ten minutes later his mother was at the door, flicking the light on, saying, “Good of you to come home.”
Last week, after a visit to Éinde’s, Sean had added Lyra. He’d stopped at the church to see if Clancy had dropped anything and ended up in the field at midnight planting six small rocks above the swan’s head. One of these days he figures Fitch will be out walking in the field for real, and he’ll catch Sean stumbling around, talking to the constellations underfoot. And maybe that’s why Sean has chosen this field—Fitch would be like someone out of the old books, boxing him on the ear and scaring the shit out of him, not liking anything about Sean at all, and saying so. Spitting it out in a string of insults, not keeping it to himself like Sean’s father.
Holding a post upright with one hand, Sean scoops the earth back into the hole with the other. He lets go for a second to see if it balances and it does. As he packs the dirt firmly in around the post, Sean starts thinking about the fence, not so much about building it, but why. Dermot had said he might rent out the field to a sheep farmer or that he might buy some sheep of his own. Sean figures he’s bluffing. There’s something about the old man he can’t put a finger on. And it doesn’t have anything to do with what was said about him at home, the
gossip as his mother packed lunch boxes at the counter and his father made tea. “Fay, you remember, the professor who—” His mother had stopped there, smiling over at Sean, waiting for him to leave the room so she could continue. But Sean had already heard it from Clancy, whose parents had lived here long enough to remember Dermot moving in. No, there was a reason Fay had gone in for the fence and it wasn’t the big English guy bullying him. He was getting ready to sell. Sean was sure of it. Maybe he was tired of it all, the talk, the village, the bungalows. Or maybe he was simply moving on.