The Ballroom

by Anna Hope

  ‘All right,’ said Clem, and began to read.

  Dear Ella,

  I have not known how to begin this letter and so I begin by saying that I feel badly that I and the other men are outside in this weather while you and the women are not.

  There is a flower in here as you can see. They are wild these flowers and do not grow in the beds that are tended and clipped so carefully growing instead in the grass that will be cut to make hay. They make a great display in the fields so that the fields seem almost to be made of gold. Yesterday Daniel Riley who is somewhat of a friend of mine (you will know him I think a strong brown-haired fellow – his skin covered with ink) took off his shoes in the morning. He unlaced his boots and put his bare feet on the grass and laughed as he did it – he has a laugh that would burn the hairs from your head if you caught it sideways – and I followed him and did the same.

  The feeling made me think of when I was a boy when I walked with my boots tucked under my arms to save them from the road.

  We walked with our boots in our hands and our feet in the dew. The attendants did nothing. They are lazy in this heat I think. Soon it will be time for the first cutting of the hay. It grows high already and is as I said gold. Though there are other colours too but the gold is the best of it. I think they are most beautiful just before they fall.

  I will stop now and send you best wishes

  John

  His words coloured the air. She wanted to hear them again, more slowly this time. Wanted to imagine her own hot feet bootless in the damp green of the dew. But Clem was already folding the paper up.

  ‘Open your palm.’ Clem put the tight square of the letter back in there. ‘Now.’ She clasped Ella’s hand into a fist. ‘Which one is John?’

  ‘He’s … Irish. He … dances well.’

  ‘My goodness.’ Clem let go of her hand. ‘You’re a dark horse.’ She became thoughtful. ‘He is a good dancer,’ she said quietly, ‘but who would have thought he could write like that?’

  A burning started up in Ella then, deep at the base of her spine, and her eyes raked Clem’s face, but then she remembered the doctor, and the way Clem looked at him, the way her face turned red when he spoke to her, and the burning eased. ‘Clem?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Will you help me?’

  ‘Help you what?’

  ‘To write back?’

  ‘Yes.’ Clem’s eyes were alive with mischief. ‘Oh yes. I should think I could manage that.’

  John

  THE MOWER – A strange, ungainly contraption – was harnessed to two of the shire horses. A farmer clambered up to ride on the saddle, and the machine bumped off across the ground, its blades turning behind it. The riot of colour that the meadow had become – buttercups and cornflowers and poppies – was felled in seconds, and the men followed behind with their rakes. John moved along the swathes, spreading the cut grasses across the field to dry.

  He had been a fool.

  It was not the writing of the letter. That was all right, or all right enough once he had begun it. It had taken a few attempts – a few crossings out and wasting of the paper he had pulled from the back of books – but once he had managed to begin, it came easily enough. No, it was not the letter. It was the delivering of it that had been madness.

  What can you see? he had asked her – as though it were the easiest thing in the world for him to go where he pleased. As though he were the postman himself.

  And yet her face when he had said he would. Startled, as though astonished anyone would do such a thing for her.

  And foolish or not, he was bound to it then.

  He had done it when a break was called. Had to ask Dan the way, who raised his eyebrows and told him, a path through the wood, then a secluded lane, and then the stand of trees that edged the playing fields.

  From there you see the women’s side.

  And John had taken the path, and hiding behind a great sycamore, lungs raw from the running, had seen the women’s wing for the first time – the mirror image of his own, stretching three hundred feet or so wide. Somehow he had done it: had found the trees she spoke of, found her framed in her window, managed to slide the letter through the tiny gap, deliver it into her hand, run back without being seen.

  Ten minutes. No more. But it was there still, the feel of the running in his lungs and limbs. The shock of it.

  The foolishness.

  As he raked the grass, he saw there had not been enough rain after all. What greenness was in it gave itself up quickly to the sun, and what remained was thin and brittle. The horses would not eat well this year. He said the names of the grasses in his head – the thick fronds of féar caorach, the stumped cat’s tails of féar capaill, and féar garbh, with its reddish feathers – but still his mind would not calm.

  There was this business of the flower. He should never have put it in there. He was a fool for that too. If a man gave a woman a flower it meant he was courting her, and he was not courting her and did not wish to be mistaken for one who was.

  It only took a day for one side of the grass to dry, and then it was turned and given a day for the other, before being shovelled into the small humps of cockeens, and once they were fully dry, the men were set to building haycocks. John and Dan worked together. They were fast and knew what to do, how to build the field cocks tall and wide, the height and a half of a man; how to twist and draw the sugans, the hayropes, to secure them, weighting the fragrant loads with heavy stones in case a wind should come. But no wind came. The days were dry and breathless.

  He gave himself to his work, and his mind quietened.

  He was at home here, out on the land; had made the same movements since he was a boy, in him so deep they were a natural thing. Had stood in fields in sun and wind and rain, hands chapped and callused from the scythe and the ropes. In Ireland, he would have checked the sky continually for the clouds that came from the sea, but there was no need to do so here. The ground was parched and the cows were fretful, their udders hanging slack. The air filled with the sweet burnt smell of the mown fields.

  The heat grew, and the mower unearthed things that had been hiding in the long grass. You had to be quick, to save what needed saving: a shilling piece, flashing briefly in the afternoon sun, a thrush’s nest full with five pale-blue eggs. Creatures fled in all directions from the machine – mice and snakes and rabbits and rats. But most of them sheltered in the diminishing patches of grass, and when the last patch was left, the farmers let their dogs free. The terriers ran squealing and yapping in delight, emerging bloody-muzzled and crazed with killing.

  Once, in the hot, still afternoon he came upon a creature that had not run in time, a hare with a slashed belly, wild eyes staring as its body panted with fear. John knelt by the dying animal, its hot entrails splayed on the ground. He stroked it briefly with his fingertip and then he broke its neck.

  There were plenty of men out here now – every man that could be useful, it seemed – and as he and Dan worked, forking hay or throwing and lashing the ropes, Dan cast glances over the other men, juggling names: ‘The one who thinks he’s Jack the Ripper, the one with the hobble, the fat one from the fitters’ ward … they’ll be good pullers, chavo, what do you say?’

  ‘Aye,’ said John. ‘Good enough.’

  A Sports Day was coming. Coronation Day. The men were set to pull a rope against the male staff, a tug of war. Dan had already anointed himself the general of this war and talked of little else. When he had done with his lists, he sang, sea songs, shanties, to help with the pull:

  Well they call me hanging Johnny,

  How-way, boys, how-way,

  Well I never hanged nobody,

  And it’s hang, boys, hang.

  Well first I hanged me mother

  Away, boys, away

  Me sister and me brother,

  And it’s hang, boys, hang.

  One long afternoon Brandt appeared, darker since last they met. Face burnt from the sun. ‘So this is where
they keep you then. Cunt.’

  The attendant’s eyes were yellow slits against the light. Violence hummed about him like bees in the still air.

  ‘A gyppo and a cunt.’ Brandt stepped up and poked their haycock with his stick, shaking hay over the ground, but the pile was steady and did not fall.

  John wiped the sweat from his brow.

  ‘Oi, gyppo,’ Brandt called to Dan. ‘I hear you’ve been saying you’re going to win this tug of war.’

  Dan grinned. ‘I think that’s right. That’s what I reckon. Pull you ladies over just like that.’ He snapped his fingers.

  ‘That’s not what I heard. I heard they’re only doing it so they’ll be something to laugh at.’

  ‘Mio Capitane?’ Dan turned to John. ‘Why don’t we show this cartso what we can do with a rope?’

  So John tossed the heavy hay rope in a clean arc over to Dan, who caught it with one hand and pulled it taut, securing it with a stone.

  Brandt turned, spat on the ground. ‘I told you you’d pay.’ He lifted his stick towards John. ‘And you will. You too, gyppo.’

  Dan whistled through his teeth as he watched him go.

  ‘We’ll get the bastard, chavo,’ he said, coming to stand beside John. ‘Just wait. What does he think? He thinks gyppos and trampers and Irish don’t know how to work ropes? He’ll see.’ He shouted after Brandt now: ‘He’ll see what we can do with a rope all right.’

  Friday came.

  In the ballroom, he took his place and watched for her, restless in his skin.

  Every so often he could not help but cast his glance towards her, and when he did he saw that there was a high colour to her cheek. That she moved, perhaps, with a touch more grace than she had before. And as he watched her dance with other men, there was a hunger on him that was painful and new.

  When the heat of the evening and the heat of the dancing was at its height, he made his way towards her. Her face was flushed with sweat and in the candlelight seemed to shine. He felt a shifting inside him at the sight of her, something falling, finding a new place.

  When they danced, he could see only the white strip of her parting and the paleness of her forehead beneath. He caught the sharp-sweet scent of her as they moved. He wanted to ask if the letter had pleased her. If it had been the sort of thing she wished to hear. But he felt raw, his body become an unwieldy thing. Now it was he who was clumsy, he who forgot the steps.

  She said nothing to him, and he did not speak, only felt a growing disappointment, and as the music faded he released his grip.

  ‘Here,’ she said, lifting her face to his. With a fugitive smile, she tugged a folded piece of paper from her sleeve, and in a quick, darting movement, pressed it in his palm.

  He opened it in the ward, when there was only the small lamp burning over where the attendant slept.

  To John,

  Thank you for your letter. I liked to hear it.

  When I look out at the green, I wish I were outside too. But I do not wish to be outside and come back in here at night. I wish for freedom, only.

  It is true that people act strangely in this heat. But I wish they acted stranger still. When you are a woman, and you work in the laundry, no one lets you take off your boots. You keep everything on and you keep your boots on till you go to sleep, when your feet are swollen and they hurt.

  I think there are rules for the men and rules for the women in here.

  Yours,

  Ella

  He folded it back and placed it in his pocket, from where he took it and read it several times that day. One thing was a relief – it did not sound like the letter of a woman who had been courted, and for this he was glad.

  Still.

  He would have liked to have known what she thought of the flower.

  One late afternoon, when the sun was slanting sideways over the field, John uncovered a feather in amongst the hay, deep blue and white.

  He knew which bird it came from, a fáinleog, a swallow. And he knew what it meant all right; it meant his father, and a broken promise, and everything that came after.

  He thought of his father now, of the closeness he had felt to him as a boy, when he would sit with him at the front of the cart, on trips to the coast to collect seaweed and sand for their fields. Crossing the blue rush of rivers on to the sea. Scouring the shore by his side, pulling at the knotty wrack and moss and slimy weed. His father singing while they worked, Irish songs, full of words that were forbidden at school, where speaking in Irish got you beaten. Sleeping on the shore beside the mules and the sound of the waves.

  Then, one evening in spring, when the fields of the farm had been harrowed and raked and spread with the green weed, his father calling him over, telling him he was leaving.

  ‘To England. And you’ll be glad that I do. And if the weather is too good there and the hay does not thrive, I’ll be back. But you won’t want that, because there’ll be nothing for the shop and nothing for your mother or your sisters, and nothing for the pigs, and you’ll end up on the roads, or I will. So pray for showers and rain, and then there will be work and plenty of it.’

  His father took him outside and pointed to the sky, which was full of birds, small ones with forked tails. ‘D’ye see them? The fáinleog? They fly a long way. And they come back. Every year they come back. And that’s what I’ll do. But you must look after the farm while I’m gone.’

  John stared round at the low, thatched farmhouse, the uneven yard, the outhouses, the land stretching away to the bog where the turf was cut.

  ‘Say it.’ His father gripped him. ‘Say you promise. I want to hear you say it.’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘In Irish. Say it in Irish, lad.’

  ‘Gellaim duit.’

  He watched his father leave, along with a large group of men, all with their sharpened scythe blades glinting in the pale spring sun. All of them walking out to take the boat to Liverpool. And it seemed to John his father was part of a great army of men, and he was proud of him, and his father lifted his hat and waved as he walked away.

  When the summer ended, John watched for his father’s return. On his knees, cutting turf from the patch at the back of the cottage. Cleaning out the pigs. Sitting with his back against the gnarled and knotted tree at the front when the work was done, he stared and stared at the bend in the road.

  The other men returned, but his father was not with them.

  Some of those men came and stood in the cottage with his mother and put their hands on her arms and murmured things John could not quite hear.

  His mother wept and hunched and dressed in black. The priest came and they knelt, he and his mother and sisters, saying rosaries for his father’s soul. There was no body to wake, but the neighbours all came and took their snuff, and the men stood about and touched him on the shoulder.

  ‘You’re the man now, you’re the man all right, you’ll be looking after the place. You’ll be looking after your mother now.’

  But he did not believe his father was dead.

  He watched for him still. He sat amongst the roots of the gnarled oak and stared at the road, until the fáinleog were long gone and the air was pinched and frost crusted the blackened grass.

  As he grew, he kept his promise, but came to hate the weight of it. Often, he imagined slipping into Confession, the darkened grille, the priest’s sour breath: ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I want to torch it all.’

  He walked out his hate, and he could walk far, twenty miles a day in the summertime: passing barefoot women, turf on their backs, children running after them. Past fields of black earth bounded by loose stone walls, where great drifts of sheep blocked the roads.

  Sometimes, in the middle of nowhere much at all, when all that was around him was heather and bog and mountains, he turned the corner and there was a group of people, backs bent, breaking stones.

  Plenty of young men were amongst them, some of whom he vaguely recognized from the dances in Claremorris, or faces in the
crowd at the horse fairs. A ganger moving up and down them, shouting, making them hurry. And his father’s voice echoed in his head: ‘You’ll end up on the roads, or I will.’

  But he saw beauty too, as he walked: saw the gorse, singing yellow after the rains. Felt a tugging that was happiness and sadness mixed together and made from the light and dark and the morning and moving and all of it rising inside him. Sometimes there were women, or girls, standing in their doorways, staring out. He saw them and felt he understood their loneliness and their wanting.

  Once he approached one, walked right up to her and asked for a glass of milk.

  ‘I’ve such a drought on me.’

  She was beautiful, standing just in her petticoat and shawl. She fetched a cup for him and waited while he drank, her pulse keeping time at her neck, her feet bare on the earth floor. He imagined her taking him inside the cottage, lying on the bed. Giving her pleasure in the darkness. Spilling the things he had seen into her ear. How the beauty of life and the world struck him like a fever sometimes, but how it was all mixed up and mangled with the hate. But he said and did none of those things, only, when he had drunk down the milk, handed the cup back, thanked her and walked on.

  He kept on the road until he reached the sea, staring at the place where the horizon blurred and the west carried on to America.

  Beyond.

  He could get there on a boat, from Ballina, from Sligo, but you needed money. The best way to get there would be Liverpool first – he had heard there was plenty of work in the docks there – and save the money for the passage.

  And so that was what he wished for, standing at the place where the land gave way to the sea. But when he had wished it, he always turned back. He had promised his father he would.

  Until his mother died and the men clustered around him, their voices a low, insistent swarm. ‘It’s your farm now, John Mulligan; you’ll be after marrying now.’ Their daughters staring at him over the coffin. The sour-milk smother of them, and all the time his feet itching to take him back on the road. He had to hold himself in his chair to keep from jumping out of it. Kept taking pinches of the snuff laid out beside his mother’s coffin, his foot rattling on the floor.