The Shelter of Neighbours (21 page)

The change in her relationship with Paddy did not alter this. After the walk on the pier, she knew something had happened to her. She had thought about Paddy quite a lot before, but in an idle, controlled way: she could daydream about him at will, when she had nothing better to do, almost as if he were a book she could open when her day's work was done, and close again as soon as more urgent considerations beckoned. Now she found herself filled with a glow of emotion no matter where she was or what she was doing; a pleasurable excitement shimmered not far under the surface of every single thing she was doing, bubbled in her veins, as if her blood had been injected with some lightening, fizzy substance, as if the air she breathed were transformed.
Light
,
bubble
,
crystal
. These were the words for what was happening to her. Walking on air, people said. And she felt light as air, translucent as one of the new green leaves in the hedges. Since the whole of nature seemed to share in this lightness and newness, the fresh-looking waves and the new crop of grass, the tiny bright leaves on the brown fuchsia bushes, she felt that she was part of the world around her, the world of nature, as she had never felt before. She could have been a leaf, or a blade of grass, or even a calf or a bird or a lamb. Even a fish, swirling in the cold blue ocean.

She worked as hard as before. But sometimes she could not keep herself seated. Her physical energy got the better of her, rushed through her like an electric shock and forced her to abandon her sedentary ways and go for a long run along the lanes. Her mother watched these bouts with some foreboding, but said, ‘I suppose you need some exercise.' Often she added, ‘As long as it doesn't interfere too much.' Polly smiled. She smiled at everyone now, even her mother, and could not care less what anyone said to her. She transcended it all. She was superior, blessed, different, special, and none of the trivial irritants of life had the slightest influence on her.

The Leaving would be fine. She knew it. There was less than a month to go. If she did not open a book from now till the exam, she would probably still do very well.

Paddy and she met every day after school. They walked on the pier or they walked on the streets. Within days, the entire school population within a thirty-mile radius knew they were ‘going together'. That meant it was a matter of a few more days till the adults got wind of it; some blabbing girl would be sure to mention it to her mother. But it did not mean that Polly's parents would find out, unless some malicious person, some mischief-maker, decided that they should. In this community all normal adults would know that the last thing that Polly's parents wanted was that their daughter should be a having a relationship with a boy, especially a boy like Paddy. All normal parents would protect Polly and Paddy, and leave her parents, who were not popular, in the dark.

This is what happened.

After about a week of walking around in a state of increasing physical excitement, Paddy steered Polly to the town park, the known courting spot for schoolchildren. It was a walled park, secreted in the middle of the town, behind rows of houses and shops on all sides, and had a sheltered, enclosed atmosphere, very unusual in this place of exposed bare coasts, windy hills. Also, it was full of high trees, sycamores and elms and flowering cherries; the sheltering town allowed them to thrive here, whereas in the valley where Polly lived hardly a single tree would grow. They sat under an elm in the corner of the park and kissed, their first long kiss, so longed for that it stunned both of them. Paddy apparently had not kissed the girl he had been connected with the previous summer – Polly did not think he could have, because his experience of this seemed to match hers so exactly. That is, he was surprised by the powerfulness of the experience, by the delight it gave him, and at the same time it seemed the most natural thing in the world. He and she kissed as if they had never done anything else. You had to learn how to do almost everything else, even the most basic physical functions, but sex, apparently, you did not have to learn. Your body knew precisely what to do, without having a single lesson. At least, if you were like Polly and Paddy.

They had missed the school bus.

Every single child on that bus would know precisely why they had missed it.

Polly was
ok
. She had a phone in the house, and her father had a car. She telephoned from the kiosk on the square; for once the old phone was not out of order. She told her father she had been delayed in the science lab, finishing an experiment, and he came to pick her up. Paddy had to set out on foot, hoping he would manage to hitch a lift.

From then on they had to be careful about time.

The Leaving started. Polly sat in the school hall, at a brown desk, and read the pink examination papers. Nothing in them was a surprise; the traps they had been told to watch for had not been set, as far as she could see. The predictability of the whole examination had been the most surprising thing, and it was also vaguely disappointing. She had been given dire warnings. You must read the entire course. You never know what will come up. But when it came to the crunch, you did know. She felt cheated.

Paddy did not. In the boys' school, the examination technique was more refined. They knew exactly how much they had to do, and did not do a jot more. After every paper, Paddy was able to calculate exactly what marks he had got – A in Irish, C in English, A in chemistry. Polly breathed deeply, superstitious. How could he be so sure? Wasn't he tempting fate? The results were, according to her way of thinking, as mysterious and unforeseeable as any aspect of the future. That there was a direct link between the work she had done and the results she was afraid to believe now, although she must have believed it when she was studying. She wanted the exam to be a lottery. That was the attitude of the girls in the girls' school, whereas the boys regarded it as something much less like a game of bingo and much more like a field to be ploughed. Such a sense of control was essential for schoolboys, whose main ambition and duty was to win football matches. Pretending the Leaving was some mystical rite of passage, a mysterious test of intellectual prowess, was a luxury they could not afford.

Polly never found out if Paddy's calculations were correct, but she won the lottery. Straight A's. Three separate scholarships. Money flung at her from the county council, the Department of Education, the university. Her mother must have been so pleased. But no, she was not. She could not have cared less.

Her mother is sitting in front of the television watching a soap, when Polly comes into the room. She has not bothered to get up, but the door is open. It is still safe to leave the door on the latch, then, in this place. Polly walks in and says, ‘Hello! Hello!' There is no response whatsoever. Her mother continues to watch
tv
and does not even turn around.

She tries again. ‘Hello,' Polly says. ‘It's me, Polly.' She speaks Irish; although she has not spoken it in thirty years, as soon as she set foot in the valley it emerged from her mouth automatically. She repeats her greeting and calls herself Póilín, which does seem unnatural.

Nothing happens. So Polly goes and puts her hand on her mother's shoulder. Her mother turns. She does not seem at all surprised. Her poise has not deserted her. She smiles, so that her whole face lights up. She reaches towards Polly and Polly prepares for an embrace. But it does not come. Instead, her mother shakes her hand. She shakes hands and Polly feels a sudden giggle rising in her throat. The gesture seems so ridiculous. Her mother's hand, though, is very warm and Polly remembers that they were always like that; to feel those on your hand, on your forehead, had always been an intense comfort and a pleasure.

‘Póilín!' she says. ‘Póilín!'

She is deaf. Suddenly Polly realises this. She is deaf and apparently her sight is poor also; thick glasses occlude her eyes.

‘I decided to come back,' Polly says slowly, looking closely at her mother. She has aged terribly. Of course. Her hair is white and sparse, she is wearing those horrible goggle-like glasses, her face is wrinkled with deep, shadowy ridges, the kind black-and-white photographers love, like the cracks of a river delta. But when she smiles, her face is still recognisably her face, whatever the essence of it was – its sweetness, its primness – has not changed. That same expression of polite surprise, the head tilted in a manner both coquettish and disapproving, the same poise. The same superiority.

The surroundings have not changed at all, in one sense, and in another, the house looks totally unfamiliar.

Polly had regarded their bungalow, which was the very first bungalow in this valley, as an extension of her mother, elegant and superior, better than any other house for miles around. But now she sees it is shoddy and lacks any vestige of style, as the old, derided houses do not. The floor is covered with green linoleum, with brown-grey patches in front of the range and near the door. The cupboards are painted cream; the table her mother is sitting at is red Formica. There is a kitchen cabinet, also cream, with red trimmings, against the wall. Nothing has been changed. Outside, the garden is overgrown with shrubs – ginger-coloured fuchsia and olearia block out the light in the kitchen. The grass is not knee high but it looks rough and unweeded. A solitary, crazy bramble taps against the window pane.

‘Your father is dead,' her mother says.

‘I know.' Polly has to talk, although talk will mean nothing to her mother. Can she lip-read? Probably not, with those glasses. ‘I heard.'

‘And I'm deaf,' her mother says, without rancour. ‘In case you didn't notice. I can't hear a thing you're saying. Are you speaking Irish? It's all the same to me what you speak.'

After the examinations, as June was drawing to a close, there was licence. Released from school, work, examinations, young people were given leeway to enjoy life. They were, for a while, expected to act their age, to explode with fun and vitality and youthfulness, by sharp contrast with what had been expected of them just weeks ago. The rules changed completely; studious, quiet types were out of fashion now and the correct thing to be was wild and exuberant. Polly's mother loosened the reins.

‘Enjoy yourself!' she said. Her mother was weeding vegetable beds, hunting slugs from the lettuce, freeing the cabbage and parsley and onions from choking bindweed. ‘Have a good time!'

It was, Polly knew, an order. Well, she would obey it, though not in the way her mother imagined.

An advantage of summer was that there was a bus twice a day, linking the valley to the town. In the new dispensation, Polly was able to take this bus every day, and could spend hours away from home. All her mother required to know was when she would return (on the last bus – there was not much choice about this). Occasionally, Polly mentioned that she was going swimming with her friends, and occasionally she was.

Most of the time she spent with Paddy. He was going to work in the fish factory, but had postponed this for two weeks. He was fishing at this time, for salmon, but usually the fishing expeditions took place during the night, leaving him free to be with Polly during the day.

They avoided the town as much as possible. There was still about their relationship a furtive air, since Polly had not told her parents about it, and as it progressed it seemed increasingly impossible to imagine confiding in them. It was no longer just her belief that her parents regarded all boys as out of bounds, indeed seemed to believe that any sort of relationship between the sexes was essentially wrong, and, what was worse, in extremely bad taste. It was not just that Paddy was everything her mother would abhor: English-speaking, poor, a fisherman, a member of a family which had turned its back on every value that she held dear. It was more that the nature of her relationship with Paddy had become, literally, unspeakable. Polly could not describe it in any words she knew, in any language, and her connection with her mother was, it seemed to her, only by means of words, the formulae Polly selected from her rich store of clichés to dish out, sparingly, to keep her mother at bay.

She got off the bus in the main street, outside the pub that served as a bus stop. Everyone got off there, and usually there were several neighbours to be nodded to, as well as some tourists – young people from Dublin or America, usually, backpackers with long, floating, hippy clothes, long curtains of hair, flowers in their hair. (Polly's dress was beginning to be modelled on what they wore, although she could not obtain the right things here, and in these hot days she wore a purple scarf tied over the top of her head and under her hair at the back.) She walked down towards the central part of town, just like everyone else, and usually bought some bread and cheese, and cans of minerals, at a small grocery before continuing to the end of town and turning up the road that led to the hills. This was a narrow road, winding between a few farmhouses and a few bungalows, then rising until it passed through the mountain range far above the town. The road was always busy with tourist cars passing, and that was why Paddy and Polly went there. When she met Paddy, they hitched a lift. All cars were going to the mountain pass. There was a carpark there, with a viewing point, where all visitors stopped and looked at the valley on the other side of the gap, and took photographs. Local people hardly ever visited this place.

At the viewing park, Paddy and Polly said goodbye to whoever had given them the lift – a German woman travelling with her son, joking and eating chocolates; a lonely man from Boston who had come to Ireland to play golf – and said they were going for a walk. The visitors usually smiled indulgently and waved goodbye, and Polly could see that they did what she could not imagine anyone in the valley doing – they approved of her and Paddy; they were looking at them and thinking, this is a handsome young couple, authentic Irish folk, in love, how delightful. She knew these people from America and England and Germany viewed her and Paddy as components in the landscape, partly, like the sheep, and also as ambassadors from the universal land of youth, the land of love.