Cold spring, p.12
Cold Spring, page 12
‘You’re taking too much on yourself, Tom. You’re not the law, you have no authority. I know you mean well, but in the eyes of the law you’re just like any ordinary man.’
‘If I were any ordinary man, I’d take him to the barracks. That’s the easy way out.’
‘Can’t you see it’s the right way, Tom?’
‘The right way was never the easy way. If it was, we’d all be saints.’
‘I know in my heart you’re wrong, Tom. Listen to me for once and let him go.’
He didn’t like being what she called ‘headstrong’. On most things they’d always seen eye to eye. He watched as she took a tablespoon from the dresser and lifted the egg from the saucepan. She put the egg in an eggcup and placed it beside the buttered bread on a plate. He found the sequence of simple actions reassuring; it seemed to confirm that it was just another ordinary day.
‘My mind’s adrift,’ she said. ‘I clean forgot to make his tea. Maybe you should take him the egg before it gets cold.’
‘Don’t worry. A cold egg is as good as a warm one. I was often glad of a cold egg cutting turf on the bog.’
Ambrose gave him a sullen look as he entered. Obviously, he had come to realise that this wasn’t just a game.
‘I’ve brought your breakfast. We’ll talk after you’ve eaten.’
‘It isn’t breakfast I need but a doctor. My head feels split down the middle. I think I may be suffering from brain damage.’
‘Is that why you can’t tell the truth?’
‘I’m serious. I need a doctor right away.’
‘You know I can’t get you a doctor. When you’ve eaten, I’ll have a look at your head myself.’
‘You’re not a doctor. You know nothing about concussion. If anything happens to me, you’ll be had up for manslaughter or worse.’
‘Pipe down and eat your breakfast.’
‘How can I eat bound hand and foot?’
‘That’s no problem. I’ll feed you like a baby.’
‘I won’t be spoon-fed. I’m going on hunger strike till you release me.’
‘Stubbornness will get you nowhere. You’ll come round in time, don’t worry. There’s nothing like an empty stomach to make a man see someone else’s point of view.’
As he put the gag back on, he felt the scalp with his fingertips. The skin wasn’t broken. As far as he could judge, there was nothing the matter with him that time wouldn’t cure on its own. He closed the door with a bang, driving the bolt home with the full force of his arm.
‘He’s being awkward,’ he told Nancy. ‘He’s refusing to eat.’
‘He isn’t being awkward, Tom, he’s being clever. He knows that if he goes on hunger strike, you’ll have to release him because you wouldn’t want a death on your conscience.’
‘If he thinks I’m a softie, he’s in for a surprise.’
‘He’s cleverer than you are. Mark my words, he’ll get the better of you, Tom.’
‘You must have a very poor opinion of me, so.’
‘No, I don’t. I just always know when you’re going too far.’
He spent the rest of the morning on the hill. His mind wasn’t on the sheep, however. He could only think about Nancy and what she had said. He respected her opinion. He didn’t like having to disagree with her, but in the circumstances there was nothing else he could do. After a while his thoughts turned to Ambrose. He was proving awkward but he’d soon find out that the man he was dealing with was no daw. The refusal to eat was something he hadn’t foreseen. Ambrose was just trying it on, of course. He was used to going hungry, but he’d soon cave in when the pangs got keen. In the meantime he’d keep a watchful eye on him. There was no hurry. Unlike Ambrose, he could afford to play a waiting game.
On the way home he met Sharon at the end of the lane.
‘You haven’t seen Nick by any chance?’ she said.
‘He isn’t on the hill. If he were, I’d have seen him.’
‘He got up early. He hasn’t been back for breakfast. If you see him, perhaps you could tell him that Red Miller was looking for him. He was supposed to be giving him a hand with the turf-cutting today.’
‘I’ll do that,’ he said. ‘It’s a busy time of year. I could do with a helping hand myself.’
She smiled as she turned away. She was good-looking but nervous. She kept touching her hair and glancing upwards as she talked, which made him feel uneasy. Daniel said she was never at ease except in front of her easel. Daniel knew about painting. He said she was a better artist than Ambrose was a writer; that he was only good for pinching other people’s ideas. They were an odd couple. Neil Durkin, who was their nearest neighbour, said they fought some nights like Kilkenny cats.
14
Tom Barron was a sound man. He was Nick’s favourite neighbour. Talking to him had helped clear Sharon’s mind, not because of anything he’d said but because of the way he had of talking. It wasn’t an intimate way of saying things; it was long distance, as if an ocean lay between him and you. Earlier, she had felt confused and uncertain. Now she could see what must be done. She had missed him from the bed around three, and she must have lain awake for at least an hour, wondering where he’d gone. Then she fell asleep again and didn’t wake till after seven. When he still hadn’t come back, she became worried. It was the second time he’d left the house in the middle of the night.
The first time was the night Paddy Canty was murdered. On that occasion he came back two hours later, barely able to talk. The following day he swore black and blue that he’d had nothing to do with the murder, and she had given him the benefit of the doubt. Now she wasn’t so sure. There was only one explanation for his disappearance. He had obviously done a bunk, having realised that the law was closing in on him. Red Miller had been enquiring about him. Soon word would get around that he’d absconded, and she would be in trouble for not having reported him missing. She took Emily by the hand and went over to Daniel Burke’s.
‘You haven’t seen Nick by any chance?’ she said.
‘Not since yesterday. He said he’d be working for Red Miller today.’
‘Well, he isn’t with Miller. I was wondering where he could have gone. You see, he hasn’t been home all day.’
‘Didn’t he say where he was going?’ Daniel asked.
‘He was missing from the bed when I woke this morning. We had a row last night, I’m afraid. At first I thought he’d gone off in a huff and that he’d be back after an hour or two when he’d simmered down. It’s now nearly six and he still hasn’t turned up.’
‘Maybe you should tell the guards.’
‘Well, I don’t want to do anything stupid. He left in a huff once before when we were living in Dublin, but he came back the following day.’
‘Leave it till tomorrow, then. If he doesn’t turn up in the meantime, I’ll run you down to the barracks in the morning.’
That night she went to bed without bolting the door, thinking he might come back. She woke up in the middle of the night and put over her hand out of habit, but his half of the bed was cold. The possibility that he might not be coming back hit her like a fist in the face.
* * *
It had been a long night. It was freezing in the barn. The cold had seeped through his body to the very marrow of his bones. He felt terrible. His head was on fire, and his arms and legs screamed out in protest against the ropes that bound them. He could live with physical pain. What he could not endure was not knowing what Sharon was doing, where she was, what she was thinking and what her next move might be. If only they hadn’t had that row. Now she would jump to the wrong conclusion and think he’d walked out on her. Of course, it wasn’t their first row. She was short-tempered and so was he. Their past relationship had been punctuated by rows, most of them over silly things like whether she should go to Dublin on her own. He had offered to go with her more than once, but she always said he’d only be in the way. She was going to Dublin to sell her paintings, and that was something she preferred to do on her own. She didn’t need a minder. She was well able to look after herself.
It wasn’t that simple. She’d be seeing Paul Flynn, and he knew and she knew that Flynn still had his eye on her. Flynn fancied himself as a ladies’ man, and Sharon might be tempted to please him for the sake of an editorial mention. Flynn was good-looking and amusing. He liked a drink and so did Sharon. Once, when Nick told her to be on her guard, she said, ‘What do you take me for, a schoolgirl?’ That started it. She refused to speak to him for two whole days.
They’d had good times together in Dublin, living in a cheap flat in Sandymount with a window at the back looking out on the Dodder. They had one bicycle between them; they went everywhere and did everything together. Their great friend in those days was Brendan Hurley, who was teaching maths and physics at Trinity while he put the finishing touches to his PhD thesis. Brendan lived with his sister in Ballsbridge, a short walk from their flat. They used to meet in Crowe’s and then take a bus to the quays. Brendan was an omnivorous reader, and because of his scientific background he had things to say about art and literature that would never have occurred to a student of the humanities. Sharon said that he had a highly original mind; that his only fault was his emotional dependence on his sister Delma. He told her that he’d never marry, and that he shared a flat with Delma because she never made any demands that he could not satisfy.
One evening Brendan introduced them to a journalist called Paul Flynn, who worked for the Irish Press. Flynn was young and carefree, an inventive conversationalist who was never short of a bob or two. He had a well-stocked mind. He talked to Nick about literature and to Sharon about art. Sharon said that he was a good man to know. Soon she was looking up to him as a kind of mentor. She invited him to the flat to look at her paintings and discussed with him what she was planning to do next. It was Flynn who said that as an artist what she needed was exposure to ‘the elemental experience’ and that the best place to find it was on the west coast of Ireland. He himself had spent a summer in a place called Leaca learning Irish as a boy. It was a summer he would never forget.
‘You really must go,’ he said. ‘It will be the making of you as an artist, and I’m sure Nick will find some useful raw material as well.’ Why did Flynn suggest Leaca if he had his eye on her? Perhaps he was trying to cover up for something. He himself had no objection to trying out Leaca, even though the suggestion had come from Flynn.
As things turned out, he took to the people like a duck to water. It was Sharon who found them heavy going. After the first week she said that she had no idea what Flynn could have been thinking of, that he’d deliberately given them a wrong steer. Nick knew better than to believe her. She never went to Dublin without getting in touch with Flynn. He was her art guru and father confessor. For all he knew Flynn could be consoling her now. He disliked having to think about him. Flynn was an unknown territory, like the dark side of the moon.
He rolled onto his back and tried to do some stretching exercises. Thinking about Sharon and Flynn would get him nowhere. The infuriating thing about her was that she saw herself as his superior. She was convinced that his stories did not sell because they were no good.
‘The bones are there but where’s the meat?’ was how she’d put it. ‘Every good writer has an argument and a characteristic point of view. When you think of Thomas Hardy, you think of the malevolence of fate; and when you think of Jane Austen, you think of an ironic wit.’
When he told her that what she called ‘argument’ was for journalists, polemicists and other simple souls, she accused him of vanity and wrong-headedness. He realised then that they would never see eye to eye on any literary matter. What irritated him above all else was that she had picked up the word ‘argument’ from Flynn. Quite possibly, they had discussed him behind his back on her last visit to Dublin. But what could you expect from someone whose favourite modern writer was George Orwell and whose favourite modern novel was Animal Farm? She tended to like books whose essence could be expressed in one short sentence. It was all a matter of ‘reduction’, she said, comparing the process to a cook ‘reducing’ the gravy. He suspected that she had picked up that idea from Flynn as well. He had told her that she and Flynn were both misguided dilettanti. Any story that was worth telling would resist all attempts at what she called ‘reduction’. A good story could not be paraphrased without doing for its subtlety and complexity. You read it. You dwelt on it. You didn’t try to convert it into something that it was not. He felt strongly about that. A story, he told her, was not a substance to be reduced by chemical process to a simpler form. Naturally, she did not understand. She would never be happy in Leaca, a place of stories, for that very reason. She was forever complaining about what she called the ‘emptiness’, whereas for him it was the ideal place in which to write a book about nothing, what Flaubert called un livre sur rien. She would never understand that in Leaca nothing wasn’t nothing; the crooked timber of humanity lay all around. He had come into his own, he felt, and all Sharon could think of was going to Dublin to meet art critics at parties. Thinking about her would only make him angry. Instead he should be thinking about what to say to Tom Barron.
Tom wasn’t like Muiris. He was the kind of man who would strive to do what was right. Quite obviously, he was convinced that he had murdered Paddy Canty. Somehow or other he would have to convince him of his innocence. There was one solid fact he could rely on. Tom had a sense of proportion. In pursuit of his objective, he would only go so far. By now he would be worried about his captive’s decision to refuse food and water. He would know that no one could survive more than three or four days without a drink. So it would be a matter of who gave in first. For him the test would be one of physical endurance; for Tom it was primarily moral. The outcome was difficult to call, if only because it was possible to endure moral discomfort for longer than enervating physical agony. But more than likely, Tom would be under pressure from Nancy who would be bound to tell him he’d gone too far. After all he hadn’t broken into the house. The worst that could be said against him was that he had been acting suspiciously, and he had given a convincing explanation of how that had come about. He would stick to his story. Stories were part of the oral culture of Leaca, stories about neighbours alive and neighbours dead. People were used to telling and hearing the same stories over and over again. Tom Barron would not expect him to change his story. One of the features of a good story was that it became more real with each retelling.
He was probably being alarmist, thinking in terms of a prolonged ordeal. Tom might well release him before nightfall. Nancy would give him dinner and he would agree to say no more about the matter. Nancy was an inspired cook, given the limited ingredients at her disposal. She once gave him a dinner of bacon and fried cabbage that he would never forget. After making his peace with Tom he would go home and make peace with Sharon. Everything would return to normal, no questions asked.
He wasn’t looking forward to working again with Red Miller, who was rough, ready and irascible. Besides, his wife was no cook. A month or two after their arrival in Leaca he’d spent two days helping him earth up his potatoes. They turned out to be the hardest two days of his life. Red Miller gave him an old spade with a short, worn-out blade and asked him to dig what he called the sheughs between the ridges while he himself did the earthing-up with a shovel. Miller worked like a demon, forcing Nick, who was on the ridge ahead of him, to work like a demon as well. Towards evening it turned to rain, but Red Miller took no notice. By dusk they were both soaking wet. Then Nick struck a hidden rock and broke the shaft of the spade. Red Miller wasn’t best pleased.
‘That was my grandfather’s spade,’ he said, ‘and he was given it by his father. With a bit of care it would have seen me out as well.’
‘The wood was decayed where it joined the metal. There, you can see for yourself.’
‘I have a good mind to dock a shilling from your pay.’
‘If you do, I’ll never work for you again. The wood was rotten. It wasn’t my fault.’
‘That’s what I like, a man who’ll stand up for himself. Sure, I was only coddin’. I’ll put a new shaft in her the next wet day. We’ll eat now. There’s nothing like a full belly after a good day’s work.’
Nick didn’t disagree. He felt disconsolate in his wet clothes. When they reached the house, Miller took two bottles of stout from the dresser. He poured one into a tumbler, which he handed to Nick, while he himself drank straight from the bottle.
‘I like stout. When you drink it quickly from the bottle, the gas makes you burp, and if you’re lucky, it will sting your nostrils and maybe bring a tear to your eye as well.’
Nick watched as Miller’s wife busied herself about the kitchen, moving things unnecessarily and making a lot of noise. A big black pot hung over the turf fire and now and again the lid would lift as a spurt of steam escaped.
‘Is supper nearly ready, Madge?’ Red Miller asked. ‘I could eat an ox, so I could.’
‘It isn’t ox you’ll be getting but stirabout,’ she said with a tilt of the head.
‘Nothing better,’ Red Miller burped. ‘It’s good for the bowels, it keeps you regular. They say a man could live on stirabout and nothing else.’
Madge put two small bowls and two spoons on the bare table. Between the bowls, she placed a jug of milk. Next she poured porridge from the pot into a large mixing bowl and placed it on the table next to the jug. Red Miller sat at the head of the table and motioned to Nick to take the only other chair. Madge sat alone on a creepie stool by the fire and began eating straight from the pot.
Red Miller was a noisy eater. He slurped and grunted, while rivulets of milk ran down his chin. The porridge
was yellow and grainy like sand, but at least the milk was good.
