The Butterfly Cabinet (28 page)

Monday 3 April 1893

These are the borrowing days, wet and cold: the days March stole from April to teach a lesson to the old brindled cow. Edward told me the story: how the cow boasted that the severity of March could not kill her; how March took nine days from April and with its foulest weather slayed and skinned the poor old cow. I laughed when he told me this. I was carrying Harry, our first, and my belly was tight and swollen already and he came round the back of the chair where I had been sitting at breakfast and he leaned over and kissed me in the hollow of my throat where he knew, after months of exploration, I had no resistance, and his hair brushed my cheek and I closed my eyes as he cupped his hand under my stretching stomach. Then the door opened, Julia’s voice before we could even see her, saying it is sure to brighten up, it always does in April; we will go for a walk, a gentle one, and she does not even hear the sound that her shoes make as they crunch over the shattered fragments of a moment that lay scattered everywhere about the room.

These are the pictures that form under my closed eyes when the pain makes a fist that clenches and unclenches inside my head.

Edward writes to say that he heard the new bells at St. Patrick’s Church ring for the first time and it was a charming sound. He says it will not be long now till I hear them too. This is the last night I will spend here. Edward comes for me tomorrow. He seems to be of the opinion that I am going back. He must know that that is not possible, that the time for new beginnings is past. I have a chance, I suppose, to try again, to make a new life with Edward and Florence and the boys. But it feels to me that the time for love is past. Who would believe me now?

I have no mirror, but I do not need one to see all the places where life has touched me: the red welts around my waist where the band of my skirt tightens when I sit; a lobster pinch between my breasts; the dead-skin stretches on my belly; the permanently swollen knuckle of my right-hand thumb where Caesar kicked me once; my body history; my identifying marks. We harm ourselves: the attrition that is life happening, a gradual weathering; a loss of moisture and roundness replaced with cracked skin and folds of flesh. The inevitability of it: why do the old not warn us? Or is that all they do, judging with their eyes while we hear nothing?

The sky is losing light. Night grows up from the ground. From the cobbled yard, it creeps up the walls, thickening, darkening even the lighter of the stones, pools and gathers in the mortar, fills in all the joins and cracks. It completes the boundary wall, stands poised at the top to do battle with its old enemy, the sky, so that it feels like night is not the onset of darkness but the rejoining of masses that have been temporarily separated by the day. A thrush starts up, insistent trill. What possesses a bird to sing at dusk? To ward off the dark? I will never forget how it felt to pass under those walls, to walk through that great door that still had something of the manor house about it; to know that I would not step outside again for a full twelve months.

In the last days, I have noticed a difficulty. I see other people (a warder or an inmate, there are no others) make a gesture or
mouth a phrase that I recognize as my own. Parts of me are being stolen, right in front of my eyes. No one here will acknowledge it, and I am powerless, since to do so myself would surely result in an accusation of madness. Soon there will be nothing left of me but the mask I wear here, and what will become of me then? How can I take it off if there is nothing of me left underneath? I am afraid I have forgotten my face.

This is not my prison. I carry it with me. We devise cages of our own choosing. I will never say, “It was not so bad,” never dilute the fear and the dread and the horror of it, because it was, every bit as bad, and worse. I will never say, “It is over now,” because it will never be over. I will never say, “It is long in the past,” because it is not. It is the hole in the present and in the future, in my every day and in my every day still to come. I will never say, “It is extraordinary what the spirit can endure,” not because that is not true, not because it is not extraordinary what the spirit can endure, but because to speak it, to set it down in words, is to belittle the extraordinary achievement of the spirit.

Just say, you struck out one night across a field, away from lights on a night without moon or stars. Just say, you stayed close to the hedge where the dark pooled under branches and small noises quickened your steps. Just say, you stopped then, and let the night settle on you like a blanket. Imagine if you let the dark seep into your ears, up through your nose and your mouth. Imagine if you let it slide down your throat, down into your chest, let it fill your lungs, fly into your veins and your fingers and toes until it filled all of you, every last inch of you. Who would you be then, standing there, full of the liquid dark? Would it really be so bad? Would it, say, be worse than the dread of it? Could you take it on yourself, all the things that could happen, all the dangers that might befall? Could you do it? Life is fluid. We are the ghosts of all the people we might become, peering forward to try to catch a glimpse of what could be, our future selves staring back at us, at who we might have been, never were.

Last night, a figure walked into my cell, through the locked door, past the foot of the bed and up to my side. It was a woman, I think, darkly dressed, her face cowled in a black hood, but with an impression of pale hair at the edge. I tried to say, “What is it?” but my throat was dry and no words came out. She turned after a moment and walked away, something blue in her hand, a bottle I think. As I struggle to recall it now, it seems to me that she reached down and touched my forehead, made some kind of sign upon my brow, and I thought it was Charlotte grown, come back from some future life to extract an impossible promise from me. I think I made her one, because I woke up saying something, my voice thick with sleep. I cannot be sure that this is what happened. I cannot be sure it happened at all.

All day I’ve been trying to reach for it, what it meant. What comes back to me is Robert Templeton’s superb South American collection, his
morpho
and
prepona
butterflies. I saw them, on loan to the Royal Dublin Society, that time I went to Dublin with Edward. I spent hours gazing on them, struggling to try to describe that agonizing color, even to myself: how it altered when a visitor passed the window and a shadow fell across them; how the texture seemed at once compressed, like so many layers of fine metallized tissue, and at the same time translucent, pearlized markings clearly visible behind. As if the source of the color were hidden somewhere; not pigment but light itself, solid and at the same time vaporous, shifting, like a secret one knew once but can no longer recall, something on the borders of memory, of understanding, of enlightenment, of love. One felt as if one were peering at a ray of phosphorized sunlight through blue water, utterly bewitching and unattainable, a yearning for something one does not understand.

28 FEBRUARY 1969

So, Anna, this is the latest. The Russians and the Americans can put men into space and bring them home safe, and we can’t walk from Belfast to Derry without half killing each other. We’re a backward race, there’s no doubt about it. I don’t think there’ll ever be any saving of us. We’re as bad as each other. The captain says, “There’s green and there’s orange; and there’s places the one can go and the other can’t, and if only people would abide by that, we’d all live peacefully.” So that’s to be the way of it, then. We’re to be like the blacks and the whites in America: as long as we don’t mix, all will be well with us.

What have you brought me? Snowdrops: pearls of spring. It’s true then, the winter’s over.

A year or two after I was born, Mammy told me, the town was overrun by geologists, who got very excited about the things that people had been stepping over for years: tools made of flint, hammer stones, part of the antler of a red deer that had been used as a grubber. The wind had been playing archaeologist, it seemed, and had dug out the sand pits above the Big Strand. And they had decided, the men from the geological section of the British Association, that at one time, centuries before, the river Bann had
emptied into the sea about two miles further inland than it does now. Imagine that, Anna. That means that when you stand on the sand dunes and look over the river to Castlerock, you’re standing on land that was underwater, land that’s been given back by the sea. It makes you wonder how anyone—the master or his father or his grandfather—could have had the nerve to put their name on it. The sea’s just as likely to take a notion of having it back again, and what will it matter then whose name is on the map? Nothing lasts.

Don’t be afraid of what you might have inherited, Anna, of what you are capable of. Have faith in yourself. You are Harriet’s daughter as much as Florence’s and there is no shame in that. If she could, this is what I think your grandmother would say to you. Make friends with the dark in you. It is not your enemy. Open your mouth to it, drink it in, talk it out, know it. It’s as much a part of you as are your nails and your knuckles and your tongue. And you’re not alone with your dark; none of us is. Know this: old Nanny Madd knew you before you knew your own self, before you knew how to be, how to act, how to pretend, and she loved you, for everything you are. That bell you hear, Anna, when it rings for the Angelus, the howl of the sea at night, those sounds that are in your ears are in my ears too. Those vibrations that we haven’t touched or held or owned, but that have traveled through us both, they’re what connects us to this place. They are what gives us the right to stand here and say this is home, this is where we belong, and not be afraid. This is my wish for you: that you’ll never feel dread at the swell of a baby in your belly; that God will always be between you and all harm.

The sea is our constant, Anna. What else is like the sea? When the sun shines on it, it’s the green of the bottle that the ginger wine came in, and when a cloud passes over, it’s the gray slate of the schoolroom, flecked with chalk. There are days when it looks brimful, like it couldn’t hold another drop without spilling over, or like it’s forcing the sky to shrink to make room for it. It’s hard to
believe, from up here, that the sea is liquid—that if you kicked off your shoes and rolled up your stockings and waded in, the whole solid self of you would push that mass of water aside.

I know where I’m going when my time comes. On my way back to my mother’s cottage, I’ll stand on the cliff top and watch a streak of sunlight trace the spine of Binevenagh and dance off the white villas at Castlerock. I’ll fix my eye on the blind eye of the Bishop’s Temple at Mussenden. I’ll be a water-gazer again. I’ll stop at Burnside, and turn and look down the road behind me and wait for the racing sun to catch me up and close my eyes until I feel its heat on my face, and turn back and walk on only when it has begun to chase the clouds on up ahead. I’ll turn my head to better hear the crickets sawing in the long grass and as I walk along I’ll rise wrens warbling out of the hedges. I’ll put my hand on a stone in the wall on the sea walk and I’ll feel the weight of every hand that ever rested there. I’ll smell the smoke that climbed the chimneys. I’ll feel the rain that spat at them, the sea that licked their feet, the wind that wrapped around them, the ice that crept up between the stones. I’ll be home. I know just how it will look.

People said that Bella could see things, things that other people couldn’t. One time, I remember, her man took us out on his boat over to Greencastle. It was a fine September day, with the sun shining and the waves high. When we got across the lough, we had tea from a can and fruitcake and fraughans, and we went for a walk around the village. On the way back again, the wind got up, though the sun was still shining, and when we hit the open water round the Barmouth, the boat began to dip low in the water and then climb high up on the waves. Each time a wave hit, we got a soaking. There was no such thing as a sheltered spot. Bella was at the side, cowering down—not that it was any drier there—and I was standing in the center of the boat, feet planted apart. I could feel the waves as they hit, and the dip and rise under my feet, and I started to feel like it was me that was guiding the boat, the
strength in my legs that was powering it, my feet balancing it on the water; like nothing could harm me. Another wave hit and my mouth filled with salt spray and I laughed and looked over and waved at Bella to come out and enjoy the ride. She was looking toward me with a look of terror on her face. Not terror of me, I was sure of that, and not terror of the sea either. But there was something in her face. God knows what dark angels she saw at my shoulders, willing me on, pushing me toward the bow. Whatever they were, they weren’t strong enough then. My feet were planted, steady, but my mind, my mind was standing on the prow yelling, “More! More!” ready to jump right down into the shock of the cold water, to join whatever was powering that sea, ready to fly to the dead.

Bella believed that the dead moved around within their dead lives. She thought them capable of revisiting the parts of their days they’d lived and the parts they hadn’t. She said the walls between this life and the other were thin, and if there was a need, a wish to make amends, a wish to hear the truth, an urge to forgive, then a way could be found between the two, a way could always be found.

If I hadn’t gone with Alphie to the cellar, if I’d remembered the key and gone back up and brought Charlotte a drink and not forgotten her, there’d be no diary and no story to tell. My whole life I’ve had two lives to live: my own and Charlotte’s. For her, I lay down on the sea and let it carry me and looked up and fell in love with the sky. For her I swallowed my terror. I took off my mother’s turquoise brooch and slipped it under my mattress because I wanted not to be safe for one day and that was the day with Alphie in the cellar. Because of me there was Owen, and then Conor, and because of the mistress, there was Florence and then you, Anna. And now because of all of us, there’s a new life, child of my heart. Charlotte is waiting, Anna. She is here now. Don’t look like that; the good have nothing to fear from the dead. She
wants her life back. She’s owed one, by her mother, and by me. I am father and mother both to her—because of what I know, because of everything I’ve seen and done and never said, never uttered, until now. I can see her kicking. She’s ready.