Cold spring, p.16
Cold Spring, page 16
‘And I’ll make you a nice bowl of stirabout as well. If you need anything else, just let me know.’
When she went back to the kitchen, she found Tom reading Old Moore with the smoky oil lamp at his elbow. His steel-rimmed spectacles were tight against the bridge of his nose. They made him look like Pope Pius himself. At times he behaved like a pope, but she knew better than to agree with everything he said. It was just as well that she had the sense to stand up to him, because he’d get into big trouble if left to do everything his own way.
‘He’s awake at last,’ she said.
‘I’ll go in and talk to him. Make him see sense.’
‘No, you won’t. You’ll only frighten him. We need to look after him till he’s well again.’
‘Did he say anything?’
‘He asked for Sharon but I told him he couldn’t see her yet.’
‘What if he tries to escape?’
‘He’s too weak to escape. In his present state he wouldn’t get from here to the door.’
* * *
He had surfaced from suffocating darkness, from the bottom of a slimy well. No one had come to help him. He had climbed up painfully, from one slippery foothold to the next. At first he thought he wouldn’t make it. If he had lost faith in himself for a single moment and slipped back down, he would have ended up in the coils of the python at the bottom. And from the python there was no escape.
Compared with the mattress in the barn, the bed was warm and soft. She had lit a fire. He could smell the turf smoke from where he lay. They’d obviously been worried in case he wouldn’t pull through. To tell the truth, he felt terrible, and it had come on so suddenly. He hadn’t realised how weak he was till he tried to get out of bed. He would have to take things easy, bide his time till his strength returned.
On the way up towards the light he’d had visions, visions of the past, the same nagging images over and over again. His coldly indifferent stepfather, his snobbish Aunt Betty, Hugh Gardiner, the preposterous manager of the advertising firm he worked for in Berkeley Square.
‘Good morning, Ambrose. Have you used Pear’s soap? Lovely day for a Guinness. Nothing like a good slogan, eh. Look sharp, feel sharp. Look sharp, think sharp: that’s my philosophy, Ambrose. I think up my best slogans in the bath.’ Gardiner was a self-infatuated twit. He saw everyone else as a passenger who would never pay his way.
Nancy came in with a mug of hot milk. Slowly, he pulled himself up in the bed and she put the pillows to his back for support.
‘You’ll feel better after you’ve drunk this. I’ll make soup for you tomorrow. We killed a hen that wasn’t laying. She never laid an egg all year.’
‘Chicken soup! I wouldn’t mind a drumstick as well. And the wishbone. Don’t forget to keep the wishbone for me, will you?’
‘You mustn’t eat too much all at once. A little at a time till you get your strength back. You’re feeling better already, I can tell.’
He thought it best not to appear too perky. He put down the mug and closed his eyes.
‘The milk will make you heavy. You’ll sleep now.’
He sank down in the bed and turned to the wall. She put her hand on his forehead but he did not open his eyes. When he woke, he was alone. The fire had died down in the grate, and the little red oil lamp was burning on the mantelpiece. It was almost three in the morning. He hauled himself up in the bed and swung his legs out over the side. When he tried to stand up, he felt dizzy. He gripped the bedstead, and kneeling down, drew the enamel po out from under the bed. The effort of stooping made him sweat. He went down on his knees and held the po with both hands as he urinated into it. The yellow water came in a slow trickle. It was so strong-smelling that it made his nostrils twitch. He breathed a sigh of relief when the trickle finally stopped.
He lay on his back and tried not to think, because thinking kept him awake. It would take him at least a week to recover his strength. By then Sharon would have given up all hope. She would go back to Dublin because there she could count on friends. She needed regular release from her inner demons; she wouldn’t last long without a man. The obvious candidate was Flynn. He was a man for all women. Sixty or sixteen, he made no academic distinctions. He had made a pass at her more than once before. Sharon was the kind of woman who invited passes. She was chatty and carefree. At least that was the impression she liked to give. Once you got to know her, she was a congeries of contradictions. On her own she was given to brooding. She mulled over every inconsequential comment, imagining slights where none was intended. She was not the easiest of women. Still, he couldn’t conceive of life without her. They’d been together for four years now, and for most of the time they were happy. They fought like weasels and made love like tigers. Well, perhaps not quite like tigers. He’d read somewhere that tigers can mate over a hundred times in two days while the female is receptive. Tigers didn’t spend too much time over it, though. Twenty seconds flat, whereas Sharon was a skilled practitioner of procrastination, who expected an equal degree of stamina from her man. She could last all night, and then she’d fall asleep utterly exhausted. She’d be talking to him one minute and snoring in his ear the next.
She was a lively conversationalist. They talked about everything that came to mind, everything except Flynn. She’d known him before they met. He’d seen them kissing at a party, and for all he knew it hadn’t stopped there. In the early days he used to keep an eye on Flynn, just in case. One night he was standing under a tree in the park opposite the house where she lived, waiting to see if Flynn would appear. After a while he realised that a man was lurking in the shadows about twenty yards to the left. He was tall and thin with a flat cap. For a moment he imagined he was seeing his own ghost. The dark, brooding figure stood for over an hour inside the railings of the park, gazing up at the lighted window on the second floor. He himself stood looking at the man’s back until finally, as the headlights of a passing car caught his profile, he knew the man was Flynn. How could he have been so stupid? Going across to the no-longer-mysterious figure, he asked him for a light, though he knew Flynn didn’t smoke. He looked put out. The great Casanova caught gazing at a woman’s window like a lovesick schoolboy. He never told Sharon. How could he? The things that vexed and haunted him would only diminish him in her eyes if she knew. Certain things troubled him deeply. His suspicion that Flynn was Emily’s natural father was one of these.
When they moved to Leaca, he got partial relief from the demon. Flynn was no longer on his mind twenty-four hours a day, but he would break the even flow of his thoughts whenever Sharon went to Dublin. On her return he would ask her if she’d met him and invariably she’d say she hadn’t. That would not satisfy him, however. For weeks his mind would return to Flynn whenever he was alone, fishing from a rock, sitting on a cliff top, or walking on the hill behind the house. At times there was no escaping the demon, and now he had returned with a vengeance. Somehow or other he would have to make his way to Dublin, because wherever Flynn was, there he would find Sharon.
In the early days he had tried to avoid Flynn, seeing him as one of those frauds who boned up on art in order to flatter women artists. In moments of extreme self-doubt he saw him as an implacable enemy. Now he knew better. Flynn was his inchoate self, and as such a fitting subject for investigation. He must be pursued, questioned, and pinned down as a lepidopterist might pin a white or red admiral to a piece of cardboard. After all, it was possible that Mr Hyde knew things and had things to say that only Dr Jekyll could construe.
What he could not understand was the nature of her relationship with Flynn. In a perfect world perhaps she would have chosen him, or perhaps she realised that he was not a man who could sustain a one-to-one relationship for long. His appetite was for novelty and variety. As Brendan Hurley put it, he gave as much thought to a change of women as other men give to a change of socks. Sharon had an instinctive understanding of these things. She would never be content to be seen as one among many. She must always be the one and only. As she said one morning over breakfast, ‘I’m the only artist in Leaca. It’s a small thing, I suppose, but it’s something.’
The only artist in Leaca. It set her apart from everyone else. She didn’t talk to people because there was no point. They wouldn’t understand her anyway, she said. In spite of that, he wouldn’t have described her as stuck up. She just wasn’t interested in other people. At least not in the way he himself was. She could tell him who had an interesting face, but she had no interest in the mind or experience that had made it so. She found the neighbours’ stories tedious whereas he found in them a reflection of a world he sensed all around him but could only discern vaguely in the blur of half-light. He was the man who hung back on the edge of the crowd, an observer rather than a participant. Sharon was neither. She did not observe and she refused to participate. She closed her eyes and invented a world of her own.
‘Tell me, What’s wrong with me?’ she once demanded in the blistering heat of a post-coital argument.
‘You’ve got the wrong mind in the right body,’ he said, to be awkward.
‘And you’ve got the right mind in the wrong body. That’s why you’re a writer; it’s your snivelling way of getting even with the world. If you could fill my eye as a man, you’d never write another word. I’m your only Muse. You need me for your art more than I need you for mine.’ They were the most hurtful words he’d ever had from her. She could be a right bitch at times.
One Sunday last September he took her to Daniel’s to listen to the All Ireland Football Final, which was being played for the first time in the Polo Grounds, New York. Daniel owned the only wireless in Leaca, and all the men of Leaca had gathered to listen. Muiris was there with his good ear close to the set, and so were Paddy Canty, Tom Barron, Cormac, Marcus, Neil Durkin and Red Miller. Sharon and Sheila, the only two women, sat on opposite sides of the fire while the men gathered round the table as if proximity to the source of the sound would bring them closer to the scene of the action. Cavan was playing Kerry, and Kerry was red-hot favourite. Michael O’Hehir was giving the commentary, and what an impassioned commentary it turned out to be. It was the most exciting match he’d ever heard broadcast. Kerry soon built up an eight-point lead, but two of their goals were disallowed and frees given instead. Muiris was rooting for Kerry, while everyone else was shouting for Cavan. In the second half the tide turned, and Cavan forged ahead. Muiris lost his cool. He would whack his stick against his boot every time Mick Higgins, Tony Tighe or some other Cavan player got the ball. It went to extra time, and Michael O’Hehir had to plead with the powers above to allow the programme to overrun. It was the greatest match ever. When the final whistle blew on a Cavan victory, Muiris got to his feet and declared that Kerry had been robbed.
‘Give us a fair referee, and we’ll play you again,’ he had said, storming out of the kitchen.
There was general hilarity at his departure. The post mortem that followed lasted longer than the game itself. Cormac said that if Kerry had travelled to New York by air, they would have won. It was the sea journey, not the referee, that banjaxed them. As usual, Marcus agreed with Cormac. He said that Cavan had got over the plane journey in two days and had a whole week to train in New York while Kerry were being sick on the high seas.
Sharon said on the way home that they’d all lost whatever common sense they were born with. She said it was her first Gaelic football match and her last. Yet the following day she drew a sketch of the gathering with the wireless in the centre of the table surrounded by faces that pressed against each other and against the set. The faces were distorted with unspoken passion and the ears closest to the set seemed bigger than the ear on the other side of each head.
‘It’s a winner,’ he told her. ‘You should take it further. You mustn’t leave it there.’
She spent a week working on it, almost non-stop. She called the finished oil painting simply ‘Football’, and curiously all the heads that crowded into the square canvas seemed to have taken on the shape of a ball.
‘It isn’t the game we listened to,’ he said. ‘It’s every Gaelic football match ever broadcast.’
That was Sharon. She wasn’t a recorder of the particular. She was a maker. Yet her painting lacked the stamp of true originality. It reminded him of a mural by Diego Rivera, so crowded with faces that it threatened to burst its frame. Sharon would never become a great artist because her gaze wasn’t steady enough to meet the truth that looked her in the eye. He did not blame himself for omitting to tell her so. Instead he blamed her for being the kind of artist who could not bear to hear it.
Among her saving graces was her wicked sense of humour. She simply couldn’t get over the business of Red Miller’s lamb, a white-faced ewe lamb that Miller gave to his wife as a peace offering after a row. Madge kept her lamb in the field below the house, a fenced field that was proof against her husband’s ram, and she watched her pet grow into a lovely ewe. When the ewe was eighteen months old, she gave birth to a ram lamb in the month of September, which caused a stir among the neighbours. It was known for ewes to lamb as late as July but no one had ever heard of a ewe giving birth in September. Red Miller had withdrawn his ram from his out-grazed flock the previous December, and anyway there was no sign that a ram had broken through the fenced field where the pet ewe had been grazing. For a week or more the ewe and her lamb were at the centre of all discussion in Leaca. Cormac said that only the ewe knew the answer and that she was making no comment. Daniel said that it was a case of virgin birth, that it proved beyond doubt that parthenogenesis was not a fiction. Muiris was more down to earth. He took one look at the ram lamb and declared that he was the spitting image of Red Miller himself. When Sharon heard about Muiris’s comment, she was beside herself with glee. She drew a sketch of a lamb with a big fleshy nose that bore a remarkable resemblance to Red Miller’s. On seeing the sketch, Muiris gave one of the silent laughs for which he was famous. His jaw trembled soundlessly, and he told her that on no account must she show it to Red Miller. After that Muiris could do no wrong in Sharon’s eyes. She used to say that he was the only man in Leaca who shared her sense of humour and appreciated the nature of her artistic gift.
Thinking about Sharon was not conducive to sleep. He lay on his back with his arms by his side and deliberately recalled the tranquillity of the day he’d had his first sight of Leaca. They’d arrived in the lower glen on a June afternoon and followed the road as it climbed between bare hills of rock, scree and heather. The road entered a pass between two mountains and curled in a wide loop to run along the shore of a narrow lough. He was giving his whole attention to the placid water, when suddenly they came upon a little hamlet overlooking a stony beach. Beyond the beach lay the sea, and beyond the sea lay Newfoundland.
‘This is our new-found land,’ he said to Sharon. ‘Here we’ll find peace. It’s a little haven, if not a little heaven.’
‘It’s wild and beautiful,’ she said. ‘But is there anything to eat apart from heather and rushes?’
He must have dropped off. Nancy woke him with a cup of tea at eight.
‘Did you sleep?’ she asked.
‘Off and on. I feel very weak.’ He thought it best to let her know that he was still far from well.
‘You’re looking better. Much better. I’ll bring you your stirabout in a minute. We’ll be having chicken for supper. It will be a welcome change from salt fish. It gives me terrible heartburn, so it does.’
It was good porridge, neither too thin nor too thick, and he ate it slowly with milk and sugar. Already he could feel his strength returning. Soon he would be able to escape.
18
When Jim Barron got his mother’s letter, he had to read between the lines. She didn’t say why she wanted to see him, but he could tell that it wasn’t just the turf-cutting that was bothering her.
‘Daddy is unhappy,’ she wrote. ‘He isn’t himself these days. He has too many things on his mind.’ He had never known his father to be weighed down by life’s burdens. He was a solid, no-nonsense man who devoted himself entirely to farming and fishing. Perhaps he was worried about his health, but that was unlikely. He never suffered from anything more serious than an occasional bout of sciatica and now and again the common cold.
He always enjoyed his trips home. Leaca was one of the few places on God’s earth that never seemed to change, because any change that did occur was too gradual to be perceptible. Old people died, of course, but life went on as before. The only evidence of the twentieth century was Daniel’s car and wireless.
Paddy Canty had died since he was home last. It was a shocking business. Even now he found it difficult to believe that such a thing could have happened in Leaca. Paddy occupied a special position in the local folklore. When he was a young man, a neighbour who was too ill to go to Ardara fair asked him to go in his place and sell a springer cow on his behalf. Paddy sold the heifer and gratefully pocketed the money. He had never been in possession of such a tidy sum before. He walked to Derry and took the first boat to America. Six months later he sent double the price of the heifer to his neighbour, and from then on he sent him three dollars every Christmas as further interest. When the neighbour was on his deathbed, he said that the heifer had been the making of him.
‘If I had days to live,’ he added, ‘I’d die a dollar millionaire.’ From then on, Paddy was seen as a man who could do no wrong. He was as honest as St Patrick and as steady as St Peter himself.
Jim was fond of Paddy. He had begun compiling a book of his stories and sayings. Now he would have to cast his net wider and make it into a book about the vanishing life of Leaca. He would call it Mountain Men. It would be a record of the life and culture of a dying community—dying because once this generation of farmers and fishermen had gone, there would be no one left to take their place. He should have come home to Paddy’s wake and funeral but he had been delving into a scandal involving a cabinet minister at the time, and his editor advised him not to take his eye off the ball. A journalist’s life was like that. Always up against time, tide, and editors whose appetite for stories about sexual irregularity knew no bounds. Now he had taken a whole week off as part of his annual holiday. He would spend the days with his father on the bog. After a sedentary winter the exercise would do him good. He was looking forward to talking to the neighbours again, particularly Muiris who was now the oldest man in Leaca. He wasn’t as easygoing as Paddy. He was proud and touchy and given to bragging, but he knew how to tell a story and he had some interesting stories to tell.
