Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show (39 page)

When I cornered him at last, down the driveway, near where I’d parked the car, he wouldn’t look at me. Nor would he speak to me.

“Ned, what’s going on? Where’s my mother?”

He kept his head turned away, his face downcast.

“Ned, is she ill?”—of which I’d been afraid.

Now he turned completely away and I assumed the worst.

“Where is she?”

“She’s at her sister’s. There’s nothing wrong with her. But, Ben, get outta here, go on, go on.”

Now I made a great error—or did I? I did what he had suggested; I climbed into the car and drove away. My reasons are perfectly simple—I wanted nothing to interfere with the promise of the day and the crucial appointment that I had to keep that afternoon.

H
ow any young man of my day ever fell in love I simply do not know. Correction: How any young Irishman of my day conducted the business of falling in love remains a mystery. Without language, without knowledge, without schooling—what did we have? Instinct, I suppose, and in my case that’s more or less what I used.

My thoughts as I drove away from our gate don’t show me in a good light. I behaved recklessly; I pursued only my own immediate interests. It was disgraceful. Or was it? The events of that day brought about redemption, even if it did take some time.

Not far from our house, a hill sits high above the river. I know the place very well; I often return. The river bends as it approaches the hill, and through a quirk of geography widens to its broadest point in its one-hundred-mile journey to the sea.

I’ve seen that bend in all weathers—when the sun shines on the flat waters; when the wind feathers the stream; I’ve even been there in snow, but that hasn’t happened often.

That morning I went there too late to see the moment of dawn. In mid- to late February the sun begins to reach the river bend a little before
eight o’clock. It had come up red, meaning rain later. And it had come up wonderfully, slowly coloring the stream and bringing a red-gold tinge to the bare, overhanging branches.

I tried to imagine the day ahead.
Will we walk? Will we talk? Where will my father be?
I felt no pang of guilt about him; instead, an ever-deepening annoyance had settled on me, lit by ever-brighter flashes of anger.
Look at the trouble he has caused
. And then my thoughts returned to Venetia.
Will we hold hands? Will we kiss again?

That was a curious kind of excitement—I haven’t felt it since. Although I was riven and thrilled at the prospect of meeting her—especially as she had been so particular in making the arrangements—I felt patient; I could wait, almost like eyeing a delicious food one has saved for later.

The sunlight came down the river like a miracle. Soon the surface of the water became too bright for the eyes. I got out of the car and stepped forward to the clearest view. Cold, yes, and the morning had some damp in it, but this channel of red light seemed to have leaked through the floorboards of Heaven.

The sun fleshed out the morning, and now I was hungry. I made my plans—food, a newspaper, pace myself through the day until two o’clock. At breakfast in the Royal Hotel, in an empty dining room, I scanned the newspaper, and I know now that I was seeking to establish the size of world events too, and weld them to my own life.

In China, the Japanese were denying a major victory being claimed by the Chinese. Astounding rows were taking place in the German Parliament, where the Chancellor’s denunciations of the Nationalist party “aroused the Nazi deputies to violent outbursts of rage.” In South Africa a man who suffered a fractured skull in a mining blast was able to walk to his doctor’s surgery.

And at home, Mr. Cosgrave, the defeated leader, threatened that if de Valera’s policies went through, “England would come back here with all their force, and immediate and terrible war would be the result.”

I read the newspaper from cover to cover. At half past eleven I left the hotel—150 minutes to go. The barber had opened; my beard hadn’t yet become an issue, too fair-skinned; nevertheless I had a shave and a haircut—that took me to one o’clock.

At just before two o’clock, after an hour along winding roads, some
no bigger than farm lanes, I drove into Charleville and parked around the corner from the house.

Unexpectedly, I found the door closed. When I rapped the satisfying lion’s-head knocker, I heard immediate footsteps. Venetia opened the door wide and gestured me in. She closed the door, bolted it, and put her arms carefully around me. Then she led me by the hand upstairs to the very top floor, to a room I had never seen, a large and airy, bright place shouldered by the sloping mansards of the roof. Outside it had begun to rain.

She took my coat and, as though handling a golden cloak, hung it in a closet. I sat down where she directed, and she lay on a chaise covered in raspberry-pink velvet. She wore a long, loose shift of dove gray, and as I attempted to speak she put her fingers to her lips and indicated that I must say nothing, adding that we should simply look at each other.

All my inner awkwardness disappeared. In her company I felt assured and easy about myself; I’ve never known that feeling with anybody else. To illustrate how composed I was—I never flinched when, after some minutes, she stood, removed her robe, and lay down again on the chaise, completely naked.

With her hands she indicated that I must look at her all I wanted, and she raised herself a little, this way and that. But now you have, I feel sure, recalled how I reported interviews with Sarah, in which she described the relationship with Mr. Anderson.

I didn’t know about that until long after this February day. Not that it would have made a difference, because after many delighted and fascinated minutes of my scrutinizing her, Venetia again rose from the couch and said, “Now it’s your turn.”

Looking back, I marvel at my own boldness. Think of the leap I made—from virginal farm life to this. With no shyness, I undressed. She rose, took each garment from me, folded it, and laid it like a vestment on a chair. I lay down as she had; she looked at me as I had at her; she closed her eyes in delight and pleasure as I had, and opened them again to gaze.

After some length of time—it might have been twenty minutes, it might have been an hour, it might have been three minutes—she rose from the chair in all her glory, took my hand and walked with me to her bed. A wide bed, more like a sultan’s couch, cushions everywhere, and,
on the wall above, a framed portrait of an Elizabethan gentleman with a beard, whom I recognized as William Shakespeare.

We lay down facing each other, and the world as I knew it came to an end and a new world began, the universe I have lived in—to varying degrees—ever since.

The human spirit knows how to suspend matters—some things weigh too heavily to be experienced in full at the time. And shock comes in many forms. I know one old gentleman who told me that he exhibited all the symptoms of stroke the day after his wedding night. The effects of great emotional moments often have to be deferred in order to manage them: grief; success; love.

Did I defer my fullest responses? It wasn’t like that. My deferrings came much later and for different reasons. I took to love like I took to breathing. No angst, no depressed or worried feelings, not a hint of sadness; I was never anything but delighted and happy with Venetia.

It had to be like that; it felt as though we were one person. We clanged together like a couple of magnets and we stayed deeply, deeply united, in every imaginable way from that moment until—well, you shall see.

The rain poured down on the roof, inches above our heads, and made the experience even more delightful—a couple of children hiding from the storm. We scarcely talked, too busy. She took pains to establish how identical we were in experience; I didn’t know how to tell anyway.

The softness of her skin remains my abiding memory—and the shock of how beautiful I found her to look at. Naturally I had seen illustrations of the undraped female form—in art books at home, and in what the boys at school called “nudie pictures” that somebody’s brother had brought home from England.

And the scent from her skin—no picture can convey that. And the stillness—we had silences, and we had sounds. My mind filled with images of hunting.

Here, I wish to stop; I have no words that I want to use; there are some memories that must never be shared; if you rob the nest, the bird won’t come back.

Let’s leave it with Miss Dora Fay’s words. Of my relationship with Venetia, she said to me long, long afterward, “My word, wasn’t it all very complicated and wonderful?”

T
hat evening, as we drove to the show, I found myself in a new experience—clarity. The air seemed clearer; I could see farther, hear more keenly, feel more sensitively. And I could think with a new and powerful brilliance, and in thinking so, I understood what I had been evading since that morning—the farm was gone. Mother, exhausted, fearful, tearful, had handed it over. The mounting anger at my father rose up inside me afresh, and built into a new kind of rage—unfamiliar and very hot. I had enough control to say nothing. Venetia sat beside me in the car, her hand always touching my knee or my arm. We rarely spoke, didn’t want to; anyway, they weren’t quiet cars like today’s models; easy speech was a problem with the wind whistling in everywhere, and the engine roaring like a dragon.

Isn’t it disappointing, when we look in the mirror, that we can’t see instant change? Isn’t it a shame that we have no means or mechanism by which our faces, our eyes can record what has just happened? I’d just had the experience of seeing my mother develop a grayness on the skin of her face—a color that hadn’t been there before.

Yet, I’d have given a lot if, that afternoon, as I looked in the mirror before
leaving the house, I’d seen something of the massive change that I felt had taken place in me. I didn’t and was disappointed.

It feels clichéd, doesn’t it, to discuss a loss of virginity in terms of “becoming a man”? And anyway that’s not how it felt at all. Yes, I was changed profoundly—but it was a change deriving from having found another human being who was the other half of myself. And knowing it at the time, and knowing it would be true for all time. As it has been.

And for her? This is what she said.

“You’re the antidote to the bad parts of my life. I can be as odd as I like and you’ll think me normal.”

I didn’t go to the show that night. She didn’t want me to, didn’t give an explanation, and said, “One day you’ll understand.” I expected to feel hurt; I didn’t want this girl out of my sight, but my compliant nature—as it always had been—accepted her wish, and turned it into something positive.

Instead, I enjoyed waiting, standing outside the hall and listening to the cheering. I could tell who was leaving the stage—or indeed who was onstage—by the force and length of the applause. Oddly, it felt as though her own solo appearances excited people just as much as her stint with Blarney—though the laughter for him hit the highest notes on the night’s scale.

My feelings about Venetia as I stood there, leaning against the venue’s wall? No guilt, no confusion, no anxiety—how could I? I didn’t know enough. The excitement almost drove me. I wanted more, more, more. Part of it was physical, that softness, that comprehensive embrace—I’d never known anything like it; I still haven’t. I wanted to see her every second of every minute, wanted the feel of that skin, the look in those eyes.

Then the abiding emotion arrived, clearing its way through everything else, through the urgency, the desire, the sheer “everything-ness” of the experience—responsibility. That was what I mostly felt, responsible for this woman, this “girl,” as I thought of her. I wanted to care for her, protect her, simply look after her every minute of every day.

It must be the case, mustn’t it, that I learned that behavior. I must have seen it in my father’s life. I’ve already told you how attentive I’d always seen him—the cups of tea, the rescues from depression. Learned behavior—that’s what produced this sense of responsibility. It felt good
too; I felt powerful—even though I didn’t have anything like the language to express it that way.