If she had loved me that way—she who was now with child —had not that love been made desperate by my being its hopeless and still centre? Now she had the child. Was that not another Yes, a turning back within the normal beat?
I too had heard the hooves of the tribe galloping down on us. We had not kept within its laws.
I watched the clock. Her plane took off at three-forty. When hen the minute hand touched eight the plane taking her to London would sail heavily into the blue sky. It had flown. A cloud of dust on the road, the motor climbing the last half-mile, and then suddenly below, in a blue flash: the white houses, the masts of the tied-up fleet, the creamy haze of the sea.
As slowly as the hand had come to the eight, it as quickly raced to nine, ten.… It was four o’clock, and moving fast. I felt foolish in my excitement.
The whole city was restored to me, islanded in the idleness and ease of timeless Sunday mornings, church bells stroking the air and the drowning of it in wild medleys, the whole day given back to me because I had lost it.
When the red-bricked Georgian house had been converted into flats the entrance wasn’t changed at all except to put in an
aluminium panel of electric buttons. They’d left one laurel, the ragged lawn, three granite steps, the old roses pinned with rusted staples to the wall, a heavy black knocker; and the letters for all the flats spilled through the brass flap onto the hall floor each morning and early afternoon. There was a dull click after they’d all been pushed through. Whoever was first down put them on the half-circular glass table with iron legs under the St Brigid’s cross. The nervous girl who worked on the radio was always the first one down in the morning. She must have watched for the postman from her window and left her room as soon as he’d come through the gate for she generally reached the door at the exact moment the letters were pushed through the brass flap. If he’d any delay in sorting the letters she used to have to wait in the hall, and I hated catching her apologetic, embarrassed smile whenever I’d found her waiting, the noises of the postman uncomfortably present on the other side of the door.
The letter-box became the focus of my precarious happiness, precarious because it was so fragile. When the afternoon post fell to the floor and there was no letter from London I felt released into another whole free day. When three days went by and there was still no letter I began to feel sometimes as if it had been a very vivid, bad dream. It might turn out, like the dream, not to be real, but I was still getting no work done. So I decided to secure my freedom for at least several more days by making the visit I had promised to my aunt and uncle and had been putting off for long.
I slept in my uncle’s room. “I’ll not get up for a while yet but why don’t you put on the light,” I said the first morning as I heard him fumble for the clothes he’d let drop on the floor going to bed.
“There’s no need. It’s just a matter of trousers and shirt,” he refused.
Home on school holidays I used to sleep in this room. Early
in the morning I’d start to chatter with him, chattering like old starlings in the rafters my aunt had called it, and it must have been boring for him, but he’d never checked me, no more than he’d turn on the light now to find his clothes or draw the blind.
“I’ll go out to the mill around quitting time,” I said as I heard him pause before leaving the room.
“Whenever suits you. If I was you I wouldn’t start getting up or anything for long yet. You might as well lie back and take it easy when you have the chance.”
I heard steps in the hallway, the click of the lock, a car starting outside, the lock shut, my aunt’s slippers shushing back up the hallway. Cyril was on his way to work. Each morning my uncle must have timed his getting up to avoid Cyril. (Say it again, say it over, people do not find it easy to face one another.) When I heard my uncle leave, I too rose. As I sleepily drew the blinds the empty tarred square met me with a shock, the row of old railwaymen’s cottages beyond. There used to be a footpath to that station along the high cut-stone wall, two carriages and a van waiting to be towed to Dromod; beyond the darkness of the engine sheds, the long elephant’s trunk of piping from the water tank, the maze of rails, and the three stunted fir trees. It was said they never grew because of the poison of the coal smoke though they had blackened cones that dropped between the sleepers and onto the carriage roofs. Now it was level and empty: a tarred square, the cottages, a filling station. I felt like Pirandello and his wife rolled into one, the beginning of all that’s new, the continuance of everything old. What she saw, which wasn’t there, seemed more real to him than what he saw, which had the disadvantage of being there. The dancehall where I had met my first love was gone. We were waltzing in the sky.
This room had not changed, and neither had the bathroom, full of the smell of oranges and pink Jaffa papers speared on a nail above the toilet roll. The stairs with the strips of bicycle tyre nailed to the edge of the steps hadn’t changed, and the
black-leaded Stanley—an antique now with its claw feet and running board—was used to fry rashers and egg and sausages. I ate them under the curtained spy window. My aunt used to be able to observe people in her first shop from behind that yellowed lace curtain, before she began to buy shops. Nothing had changed in the early morning except the smell of the brandy. The creamy blossoms of the elder half hid the coal shed still through the outer window out the back yard.
“I hope you don’t think too hard of the brandy,” to my dismay she brought the bottle out and sat with me at the breakfast table. By bringing it out so openly she was drawing me into the guilty maze.
“No, why should I?”
“It’s a great relief to drink with someone in the open. Cyril and your uncle won’t understand anything about it at all.”
“Cyril drinks enough himself to understand,” I said.
“He only drinks because he’s upset. He feels I’m far too long sick now.”
“He must have been upset the greater part of his life, so.”
“Ah, you’re all too hard on Cyril,” she complained. “The world’s hard enough.”
“I didn’t mean that,” I said, “and I have nothing but praise for drink. It’s like a change of country; only it’d be awful to become an old soak.” What I said I believed, but there was no need to say so much. My instinct was to create room, to get out of the responsibility she had so suddenly thrust upon me. The blind instinct had run ahead of any seeing, of sympathy or fairness. I was learning to protect myself so fast now that I’d soon have a whole landscape of the moon to move around in.
“If you were like me,” she laughed with a mixture of wry bitterness and pure amusement, “you’d not care what they called you, an old soak or a young soak, as long as you got relief. The country that I find myself in most of the time now, God forgive me, isn’t fit for living in.”
“Why don’t you try the pills?”
“Ah, you’ve never taken those pills. They’re not like natural pills. You can feel them spreading themselves around in you. They’re killing you. That’s what they’re doing. After you take them you feel you’re walking round in a big dead empty glove.”
She poured me a glass. It was hateful in the morning, when the day was fresh, but I drank it. Later I found myself walking with her down the railway to the garden. Except for the beaten path, where the line had run, it was choked with enormous weeds, especially great pulpy thistles.
“The rails went to Scotland and the North,” she said. “I heard they cut them up and sold them as posts for haysheds.”
We went through a wooden gate made strong by the thin wire used to bind fruit crates, and down steps cut into the embankment. The garden was bordered by high banks on either side, covered with the same rank thistles of the railway, and below was an old hedge of whitethorn studded with several green oak and ash trees and one big sycamore. The clay was dark and loose, in neat drills: onions, carrots, parsnips, beet, peas and beans, the black and white miracle of the flower out, long green splashes of lettuce.
“It’s a fine garden,” I said. She’d already begun to weed.
“I do a bit every day. That way it never gets out of hand. There’s no rush and push. And you can watch it for the bugs. Some of them would sweep you out of it in a day.”
I weeded with her, hating the dry clay on fingers. The garden held no interest for me. I’d never watch it grow.
“That’s all I ask,” she drew up her back, and as I watched her I knew she’d be back in hospital before the fruits were gathered, and that it’d be the last garden she’d watch grow. “You think it’d not be much to ask. Just to get a bit better. Not to have to leave the garden—I hate to think of it running wild again—though Cyril complains it’s nothing but trouble. To just go on. It doesn’t seem much to ask. To let things stay as they are. To go on.”
“But you will.”
“Sometimes I don’t know.”
When I felt sure she wouldn’t notice emotion in my voice I said, “There are some fine trees in the hedge.”
“Yes,” she said with spirit. “Your uncle made one great offer of help when I started the garden. He offered to cut down the trees.”
“He would.”
“I told him he’d be run if I caught him near them. But they must house a million midges. Some evenings they’d ate you alive.”
She was tough. There was nothing but to salute that proud hardness with a perfect silence. She stood at the foot of the garden, under a far outriding branch of the oak, her ravished face and few wisps of hair turned away from the searching light, and she said in a voice matter-of-fact enough to be running through a tenant’s contract, “I don’t know. It’s only after years that you get some shape on things, and then after all that you have to leave. It’s comical. You want to go on and you can’t.”
“I think you’ll be all right, that you’ll get better, but there does come a time—for everybody, for us all,” my own voice sounded so awkward and solemn that I felt bells should mock the still air.
“I know that,” she said and we started to move slowly towards the gate. “But somehow deep down you can never feel it’s going to happen to yourself. In your case somehow you feel the great exception will be made.”
“If you can say that, there can’t be too much wrong with you,” I said.
When we went back to the house we finished the bottle of brandy. Then she said she was going to bed, before anybody could come back. She washed the glasses and put away the empty bottle before she climbed the stairs. And I drove out to the saw mill.
Neither Jim nor my uncle noticed me get out of the car and walk up to the mill. They were in the middle of a quarrel. I
had watched these quarrels so often that it was like standing in front of a TV shop window and watching an old familiar movie. They stood with their backs to one another, beside two saws, both idling over; and each vigorous insult was addressed to a point high in the roof of the shed, the very farthest point from the person the insult was intended for. The intervals between the insults were lengthy. Each word seemed taken up, weighed and tested, and then the contemptuous answer would be fired furiously towards the farthest rafters. Their expressions did not change when they noticed my presence on the mound of sawdust. They dropped the quarrel with as much emotion as they might show when putting down a heavy, cumbersome tool they had grown tired using, and came towards me with outstretched hands, both smiling.
We three stood there, not talking, occasional words let drop into the silence like pebbles into still water, allowed to sink and bubble with neither more nor less attention than that given to the preceding and following silence; and when it seemed that an appropriate amount of such silence had been observed Jim walked away towards the big saw without a word.
“You seem to be using a fairly strong aftershave?” my uncle asked, having caught the smell of the brandy.
“It’s brandy. I had a glass in the house with her. I don’t like it very much this time of day.”
“I know that,” he said with an understanding patronage that irritated me. “But what’ll happen to her, at the rate she’s going? What’ll be the end of it?”
“What’ll be the end of any of us?” I was ashamed of my own sharpness when I saw him wince. Then he coughed, a cautious clearing cough, like sending exploratory noises out into the field before risking any compromising words. “You didn’t run into Cyril at all?”
“No. How is he?”
“Worse. He’s a pure dose. I’d move out long ago but it’d not be right with the way she is now.”
Jim had started sawing. In the safety of the piercing scream,
the sweet sudden scent of fresh resin, I asked, “What was yourself and Jim arguing about?”
“O that,” he shook with laughter. “He took in some contract timber.”
“What’s that?”
“We don’t do it any more except we know the people. A fella might have a few good trees he’d want sawed, to save him buying timber, and we used to give him a price. A lot of that stuff came from trees they used to plant round houses, beech mostly, and you’d never know what you’d run into, nails by the no time, handles of buckets, links of chains.”
“They could be dangerous,” I said.
“They’d go through you like fucking bullets except they’re mostly rotten. They’ve been hammered in years ago and the wood has grown over them. I saw them ruin more saws than you can name,” he was relaxed, holding forth.
“What’s this got to do with the argument between Jim and yourself?”
“He took in a few big oaks for this fella that he knows. And I was going to use the big saws.”
“Are the oaks all right?”
“Of course they are. But you have to make a stand sometime round here or you’d wind up taking orders. There’s no giving of orders as it is.”
“I can’t see you taking orders,” I said.
“You can never be too sure of that,” he shook with the laughter of pure pleasure as he wiped his eyes with the back of the enormous scarred hands. “To make sure of that, you have to keep sitting upon the other fella every chance you get.”
I hung about until they closed the mill, and after that it gradually grew plain that he was loathe to go into the house in case he’d meet Cyril or even possibly my aunt.