Next, she hit on the idea of making real landscape the basis for abstract arrangements of colour and design. She had Daniel translate the local place names into English for her, so that she could use them as titles for her paintings. Thus the Poll Caol became the Narrow Pool; the Poll Gorm, the Blue Pool; and Poll Mhary, Mary’s Pool.

  Her dealer told her that one client whose opinion he respected had described her paintings as ‘fucking good’, but even that did not please her for long. She wanted art critics to write about her, and the cognoscenti to talk about her at their dinner parties. If only she could exhibit, even in a modest way, everything else would follow, she said. At times he could not help feeling a stab of envy. His stories weren’t selling. But for the pittance he made from working for the neighbours, Sharon would be the only breadwinner in the house.

  Curiously, their most stinging rows were not about money but Emily. Sharon said that she was backward and did not say much. When he insisted that Emily had no need to talk, that she was happy playing with her doll, she said that he was confusing happiness with doziness. Luckily, whenever she went to Dublin, he had Emily all to himself for two days. In the summer she loved making daisy-chains and putting fairy thimbles on her fingers. In winter she would talk at length to Annie, her doll. As a baby, she was quiet. She slept a lot and rarely cried. Slow to learn reading, she would take a picture-book and pretend to read a story he had told her the previous day. She seemed to think that the story was in the pictures rather than the text, and nothing would convince her that she wasn’t right. She was just ten months old when he first saw her. He fell in love with her immediately. He did not know who the father was. Sharon didn’t say and he thought it best not to enquire.

  Footsteps in the yard alerted him. Tom Barron entered with a mug of water and a slice of bread. He placed the mug on the floor and removed the gag with a grunt.

  ‘I’m worried about Sharon, and I know she must be worried about me,’ he said.

  ‘You needn’t worry about her. She’s gone to Dublin to sell her paintings.’

  ‘And what about Emily?’

  ‘She’s with Daniel and Sheila. She couldn’t be in better hands.’

  ‘Has no one reported me missing? Has no one organised a search for me?’

  ‘The police are looking for you everywhere except here. They’re keeping a watch on all the ports. You needn’t worry. They won’t find you as long as you stay with me.’

  ‘That’s what I want to talk to you about. How long are you going to hold me prisoner?’

  ‘Until you tell the truth, however long it takes.’

  ‘Well, you said it. I suppose you expect me to last forever without food and water.’ His voice was thick. Croaking sounds rather than words emerged from his constricted throat.

  ‘It isn’t my choice. Whether you want to live or die is entirely up to you.’

  He looked at Tom and realised from his stare that he was no longer the man he once knew.

  ‘I’ll make a concession. I’ll have a cup of water,’ he said. ‘Just to show you I’m not as wrong-headed as you think.’

  ‘It will make no difference. What I want from you is the truth.’

  Tom held the mug to his lips and he drank slowly at first and then greedily.

  ‘Water is sacred,’ Tom said. ‘There’s neither life nor truth without it. Now will you tell me what really happened the night Paddy Canty was murdered?’

  There was no hope of a settlement with Tom in his present mood. His mind was set on what he kept calling ‘a true confession’. As he put the gag back on, Nick noticed the vacant look in his eyes. He was a changed man, no longer conscious of the consequences of his actions. To put it simply, his mind was not his own.

  Alone once more, he counted the carbonised rafters for the umpteenth time. The whitewashed walls were stained by soot and what Tom called ‘down rain’ from the leaking roof. Less than a month ago he had helped Tom thatch the south side. Tom was friendly and chatty then. He’d told him that when his father built the present house, the old house had become the barn. Sometimes Tom referred to it as the barn, but more often than not he still called it ‘the old house’. It had been a lovely day, the day of the thatching, and Nancy had cooked them a lovely meal. Now he realised that he did not appreciate it fully at the time. If only he could relive that day, he would no longer take it for granted.

  He tried to stretch his legs, but no matter how he turned he felt uncomfortable. He was weak and cold and his legs and arms ached. His stomach threatened to cave in, leaving nothing behind except bone and empty skin. He closed his eyes, longing for the oblivion of sleep. He had lain awake for most of the night. Whenever he slept, he dreamed that he was being pursued by a tiger, and no matter how fast he ran, the tiger remained at his heels. Then as he was about to reach the house, the tiger leaped on his back and brought him down. He expected to be eaten, but the tiger merely licked his face. Its whiskers tickled his nostrils and his head was buried in its fur. The smell of cat’s piss was suffocating. He woke shivering in a cold sweat. He did not know how long he could last out. Perhaps he should tell Tom Barron the truth.

  Tom was once a decent and generous man. He had invited him out in his boat along with some of the others to fish lobsters several times, and he used to give him leftover crab claws to take home. The first time he went out was in June. As he left the house at half-past five, he thought he had never seen a morning so clear and calm. While they were hauling the last of the creels, Tom pointed to a white beach between the rocks where a fox was trotting along the drift-line, hoping to find a dead seabird washed ashore. He was a lovely fox with a long bushy tail that almost trailed the ground, and now and again he would pause to sniff at something just like a dog. He had the whole beach to himself, and they watched him as he trotted out of sight among the rocks.

  ‘He’s enjoying the peace and quiet,’ Tom said. ‘You’d know by his easy gimp that he isn’t used to being disturbed.’

  ‘He is monarch of all he surveys,’ Cormac said.

  ‘His right there is none to dispute,’ Marcus Quinn agreed. They both had obviously learnt the same poem at school.

  It was a magical moment that he would never forget. Feeling that he had been granted an incomparable insight into what it is to be a fox, he was so absorbed in the idea of ‘foxness’ that he resolved to write a story when he got home. He listened to his three companions as each told a story about their encounters with an animal that was more cunning and resourceful than any human being. In each story the fox was endowed with almost supernatural qualities, and when Cormac asked him if he had a fox story, he told them Aesop’s fable about the fox that lost its tail.

  ‘That isn’t a true story.’ Cormac shook his head.

  ‘It’s more like a parable,’ Marcus said.

  ‘A good story is a story you can tell again and again,’ Cormac complained.

  ‘That’s right,’ Marcus agreed. ‘It doesn’t teach a lesson. It’s just a story and nothing else.’

  He was left pondering this truth, if truth it was, for the rest of the day. He’d been out with Tom Barron in his boat many times since then, but he never saw the fox again. It was as if he had received a unique and unrepeatable revelation. It had been such a perfect morning, and perfect mornings were few. He would always remember the two pink clouds in the east, hanging motionless like torn curtains above the hills. All that seemed to have happened a billion years ago when the earth itself was young. On that morning he had given all his attention to the fox. If he had paid more attention to his neighbours, he might have written better stories. They lived on stories and for stories. Their whole conversation was made up of stories: stories about people alive and dead, about people they’d known and people their parents had known. The stories had been handed down. They had been moulded and polished by endless retelling, and time had given them an unquestionable authenticity.

  The only story that seemed to have no established form was the story of Agent Cox’s disappearance in the latter half of the last century. The local landlord shared his time between Belfast and London, rarely visiting his estate except for the salmon fishing. He left the running of his affairs to his agent Max Cox, who quickly got a name for cruelty, arrogance and greed. According to the local lore, his sudden disappearance in August 1863 occasioned a widespread search of the area that lasted into October. But in spite of the search, no body was ever found. Even Cox’s horse had vanished without trace. Everyone seemed to have his own pet theory. Muiris said that he had gone for a swim because the day was hot and that he must have been eaten by a shark. Tom Barron was of the opinion that, suitably, he had drowned in the whirlpool at the base of Bud a’ Diabhail. Cormac claimed that his death was an act of divine vengeance for having raped a young girl from Leaca and for having evicted her father for being in arrears with his rent. Marcus said that, more than likely, he had been taken by a mermaid who sympathised with the local girl he’d wronged.

  What he could not understand was why everyone had a different story. He went to Belfast to check old copies of the Belfast Telegraph and discovered that local folklore was spectacularly inaccurate. Cox vanished in April 1881, not August 1863. His clothes were found on a lonely beach on the far side of the Tor Mór, and his horse was found shoeless with neither bridle nor saddle at the foot of Slieve League about twelve miles away. The only fact that folklore and the Belfast Telegraph agreed on was that his body had never been found.

  The question that occurred to him now was whether the stories he’d been told were genuine folklore, or whether the people who told them were trying to mislead him. Perhaps the different versions of the story were meant to serve as a smokescreen to put outsiders off the scent. As a consequence of history, Leaca was an enclosed community. But why should they wish to mislead an outsider eighty years later? Surely he was being pathologically suspicious, imagining the worst. Daniel was the only man whose story was unlike all the others. He alone had said that Agent Cox had been murdered for his crime and his body buried deep in a bog.

  He must have dozed off. He woke to hear a voice in the yard, Nancy calling, ‘Chook, chook, chook,’ to the hens. It was late afternoon. She was giving them the potatoes left over from dinner mixed with a handful of oatmeal. What would he not give for tea, boiled eggs, soda bread, and butter? To get them he would have to throw in the towel. He could last over a week without food. Tom was bound to get rattled before then. When he reached that point, he would gladly believe any story that would get him off the hook. But why wait till then? What if he should encourage him to get rattled by pretending to be dying? Tomorrow morning he would demand to see the priest and ask for what they called extreme unction.

  17

  There was no sound in the kitchen, apart from the whispering of the rain outside and the clacking of Nancy’s knitting needles. She was sitting in the chimney corner, turning the heel of a sock, while Tom was seated by the window, reading yesterday’s Irish News, which Daniel had given him earlier in the day.

  ‘Listen to this,’ he said. ‘Northern Ireland police have been alerted in case Ambrose should try to cross the border in order to escape to Scotland or England. All ports in the Republic are already under surveillance.’

  ‘That must please you.’ Nancy scratched her head with the point of a knitting needle.

  ‘Why should it please me?’

  ‘Because no one has thought of looking here in Leaca.’

  ‘When the police get a bee in their bonnets, they can think of nothing but the bee.’

  ‘Isn’t that you down to the ground now? You think Ambrose is guilty, and nothing else matters. Where will it end? That’s what I’d like to know.’

  ‘It will end when he tells me the truth.’

  ‘I think you’re mad, Tom. The poor boy is out there in the barn in this cold weather. He can’t live on water alone for much longer.’

  ‘You can live on water for a fortnight. Remember the sailor who came ashore during the war? He had a barrel of water and nothing else.’

  ‘That was in the height of summer. He was on a raft, and he had the best of chocolate. I had some of it myself, and so did you. It was very good chocolate.’

  ‘Well, I’ll offer Ambrose some chocolate and we’ll see if he’s tempted to eat it.’

  ‘Ambrose is every bit as stubborn as you. If he’s innocent, he won’t give in.’

  ‘All right, we’ll put him to the test. Give me a bar of chocolate and I’ll take it out to him.’

  ‘Where would I get chocolate? You’re only saying it to annoy me.… But maybe you’ll listen to Jim. I wrote to him yesterday and asked him to come home.’

  ‘Why did you go and do a thing like that now?’

  ‘He said he’d come home to give you a hand with the turf-cutting, remember?’

  ‘That isn’t why you wrote to him.’

  ‘While he’s here, maybe he’ll talk to you about that young boy out there.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have done it, Nancy. I have enough on my mind as it is.’

  ‘I’ll put on the kettle and make the tea now. You could offer some to Ambrose. It might warm him up, and it might show him you’re not a savage, but a human being.’

  He put down the paper and watched as she filled the kettle from the water bucket. He put on his cap and took the mug of hot tea from her. It was still raining heavily as he crossed the yard. Ambrose, who was lying with his back to the door, moaned as he approached.

  ‘Here, I’ve brought you some hot tea instead of cold water. It will warm you up.’

  Ambrose moaned again as he removed the gag. His eyes were closed and he looked pale and pinched.

  ‘Here, drink this.’

  ‘I don’t want tea. I want to see a priest.’

  ‘What can the priest do for you? You’re not a Catholic, are you?’

  ‘There’s no vicar in the parish. A Catholic priest is the next best thing.’

  ‘You can confess to me, if it’s confession that’s on your mind.’

  ‘I feel terrible. I’m dying, can’t you see?! I want the last rites. Only a priest can give me those.’

  ‘You’re very religious all of a sudden. Maybe you’d like to go to Mass on Sunday as well.’

  ‘Can’t you see I’m dying?’ He grimaced and moaned again.

  ‘How do you know you’re dying?’

  ‘When your turn comes, you’ll know as well. And I hope you won’t need to convince anyone, because you won’t have the energy to do it.’ He turned away and closed his eyes.

  He was afraid to put the gag back on. He closed the door and bolted it. He was badly shaken, worried in case Ambrose might be telling the truth for a change. He really didn’t know what to do.

  ‘Well, did he drink the tea?’ Nancy asked.

  ‘No, he wants to see the priest. He’s pretending to be dying but he doesn’t fool me.’

  ‘Have you lost your wits, Tom? He probably is dying, and I won’t allow you to have it on your conscience. It’s freezing cold out there. We’ll take him into the house and put him in Jim’s room. He’ll have a proper bed, and we’ll kill the black hen that isn’t laying.’

  ‘You’ll kill Ambrose if you give him too much to eat all at once. The doctor would only allow the sailor thin gruel and milk for three whole days.’

  ‘We’ll give him the soup, then. I’ll make it good and thick. We’ll have to look after him till he gets strong again.’

  ‘This is crazy, Nancy. It doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘It makes sense to me. Go out now and bring him in. I’ll put a fire in Jim’s room and make it comfortable and warm.’

  Reluctantly, he admitted to himself that she was right. It would be terrible if anything should happen to him. He would never be able to disagree with her again.

  * * *

  He was shivering when Tom brought him in. Tom undid the shackles and they put him to bed straight away. She gave him hot milk to drink and afterwards a little gruel on a spoon. Curiously, he wasn’t ravenous. At first he seemed reluctant to eat anything. It was like feeding a baby. She had to force the spoon between his teeth. She lit a fire in Jim’s bedroom and got Tom to kill the black hen and hang her up in the henhouse to let the blood drain away. She would pluck and clean her and cook her for tomorrow’s dinner. It was best not to give him too much to eat all at once.

  She sat knitting by the bedside in order to keep an eye on him and in case he needed anything. At first Tom was worried that he was only pretending, but he had come to accept that he was seriously ill. He was sleeping now, facing the wall with his back to her. She could hear his breathing which was the breathing of someone who was feverish. She leant over the bed and felt his forehead. As she had expected, it was moist and hot. He had a temperature. She would have to look in on him from time to time during the night.

  He was muttering something to himself, she couldn’t make out what. It was something about a tiger. He was obviously raving. He wasn’t making much sense, poor boy. She put aside her knitting and said two decades of the rosary to herself. Coming up to bedtime, he opened his eyes and looked round him in alarm. He tried to raise himself in the bed but he fell back helplessly again.

  ‘Where am I?’ he asked hoarsely.

  ‘You’re in Jim’s room. Don’t worry now, you’ll be all right in a day or two.’

  ‘I want to talk to Sharon. She must be worried stiff.’

  ‘You can’t talk to her yet. It’s too dangerous. The guards are looking for you everywhere, I’m afraid.’

  ‘But I can’t stay here.’

  ‘You’ll have to stay till you get your strength back. Would you like me to make you another hot drink?’

  ‘Yes, that would be good.’

 

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