by Tom Phelan
Not long after her first few encounters with Matthias, Sarah was out at the early-morning stables holding Jackdempsey by the bridle while Matt saddled the horse and cinched the leather girth into its big buckle, Jackdempsey not needing to be held at all.
Then, one morning at the sink, while trying to keep my eyes away from the kitchen window, out comes Sarah with her mother’s quiet old mare, Timahoe. Sarah was wearing riding trousers. I stood there astonished, mouth open, jealousy fanning itself into flames as big as the ones on Easter-candle wicks. Sarah brought the horse over to the saddling stile, climbed the three steps and gently placed herself onto Timahoe’s back. The second her far foot went into the stirrup, Sarah trotted off with Jackdempsey following, and Matt’s long, untrimmed hair floated on the gentle wind.
My once-upon-a-time prince had ridden off with the princess, and the scullery maid was left holding a bucket of dirty water. What could I do? Red hot tears came out of me, ran down my face. I made a loud sigh of despair. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I stiffened like I would if I felt something crawling across my face in the bed in the dark.
“Kitty, Kitty, Kitty.” It was Missus Hodgkins. She moved her hand around my upper back, what I’d often seen her doing to calm a frightened animal. “What is causing you terrible pain is giving me great hope.”
I didn’t turn around, didn’t want her to see my twisted face.
“Kitty, I’m going to say this even though I don’t think you’ll hear me; at this time, neither Sarah nor Matthias is capable of what you are afraid is happening. They are two very damaged people.” Her hand lightly circled around from my waist to my shoulders. “I think you’ll agree that since Matthias came back to work, Sarah has shown the first signs of coming out of herself. You yourself have said Matthias is holding his ground, holding on to the few forward steps he’s taken. Kitty, please try to hold on, please try not to say anything that will stop them from helping each other. It’s hard. I’m not the one in love with Matthias, but I do love my daughter and I want her back every bit as much as you want Matthias. She’s all I’ve got left, Kitty. The jealousy will flare up in you, I know, but I’m asking you not to put words on it for Matthias or Sarah to hear. Please come to me, I beg you, please come to me and tell me whenever you think you’re going to explode. Don’t go to them, please. Please, Kitty.” She stayed there touching my back for a long while. I couldn’t turn around to reassure her because I did not think I could hold my tongue after seeing Matt and Sarah riding off together into the fields of Enderly. Missus Hodgkins went away.
Since she’d come home from the War, Sarah had worn clothes that gave her the look of a VAD: dark green wool skirt far below the knees, lighter green blouse tucked into the top of her skirt, narrow black belt around her waist. She kept her hair enclosed in a green knitted cap. The top strings of the veil went over her ears with the knot tucked under the cap and the bottom strings tied in a bow at the nape of her neck. She had fourteen veils, two for each day, all white and shaped like the Vicks-soaked masks the VADs used to kill the smell of gangrene and spilled stomachs.
When May came around, Sarah was out on the farm more than she’d ever been since coming home. Besides spending all that time, silent or talkative, with Matthias, she had started giving me shy little waves of her hand, the kind small children give when they’re told by their parents to wave goodbye. I wondered if my jealousy was obvious to her and if she was trying to reassure me, telling me she hadn’t any designs on Matt, or maybe even thanking me for the loan of my Matthias.
Then for the first time Missus Hodgkins asked Sarah to do something, asked her to take the four-o’clock tea out to Matthias in the fields. But that was my job. I was angry. I was ashamed of being angry. Sweet Jesus! And Missus Hodgkins’s nose was stuck to the window when Sarah walked down the yard toward the Back Gate, the black cloth bag with its bottle of sweet milky tea, a mug, and the jam-and-butter sandwich. When Missus Hodgkins finally unstuck her nose, she came into the kitchen where I was rolling out the makings of the next day’s brown bread.
“Kitty, I’m beginning to hope too much,” she said. “I’m setting myself up all over again to be completely despaired. I just have to keep telling myself that she’s never going to be a hundred percent.”
For Missus Hodgkins’s sake, I made a huge effort. “Six months ago you never thought she’d get this far,” I said. “Another six months and she’ll be talking to you and maybe me.” Making a bigger effort, I said, “Matt told me yesterday that Sarah made a little joke a while ago.”
And then, of course, I had to tell her about the mare foaling and Sarah with the tea at two in the morning and the little joke about the monkey’s tail and Missus Hodgkins went around the house saying, “It won’t be long now, said the monkey when the train ran over its tail,” and sometimes saying, “It won’t be long now,” like it was a prayer.
When Sarah arrived in the Back Batens with the four-o’clock tea, Matt was at the far end of the field coming toward her on the metal roller. Where he had already rolled the young barley, the field was striped in straight, eight-foot swaths of dark and light green. The horse Matt was driving, Ballyadams, saw Sarah first, cocked his ears forward, and softly snickered. The horse and Sarah had known each other since he was a foal—Sarah had dried him when he was born. Now she stood in the horse’s path, and when Matt brought him to a stop beside her, she stroked his neck. With long lips smacking as he sniffed in expectation of something sweet, the horse nuzzled her in the chest and belly. Sarah was good with horses, even the bad-tempered ones that laid their ears back and showed their teeth to everyone else. And as she scratched around the butt of his ear, the horse raised his head in pleasure, and in passing Sarah’s face his smacking lips caught the veil and took it clean off her face. Sarah cried out and turned away, dropping the four-o’clock tea and covering her face with her hands. But Matthias had seen her face, had seen the same face Con had been in love with. He saw no scars, no disfigurement. He got out of his seat and stood on the iron frame of the roller.
Sarah kept her back to him, held her hands to her face as she looked around desperately for the veil. She snatched it out of the horse’s mouth and ran to the field gate, trying to tie on the veil as she fled. Matthias leapt down from the shafts of the roller and shouted, “Sarah!”
Sarah kept running. Matthias followed. He caught up with her as she was trying to undo the gate-latch with one hand while keeping the veil pressed against her face with the other.
“Go away.”
She could not undo the latch. She whirled around on Matthias and, with hands and crumpled veil spread over her face, screeched at him to go away. Matthias threw his arms around her like the Christian in the Colosseum throwing a net over a lion in the picture in the penny catechism, and Sarah hid her face in his shoulder and she kicked his shins and struggled in his arms like a turkey with its legs tied for weighing upside down at Christmas time. When she became quiet enough to hear him, Matthias said, “I told you lies too, Sarah. We told lies to each other.”
“We stood like that for a quarter of an hour,” Matthias told me the next Sunday at Knockmullen Castle. “Just the two of us in the ten-acre field with Ballyadams grazing the sweet spring grass on the headland after pulling the roller over the four-o’clock tea bag. The rattling bit in the rings was the only sound except for the excitement of small birds building their nests.” I couldn’t have cared less about rattling bits or building birds; Matthias had no idea how I was burning on the inside while he told me about Sarah and himself. All I could see was the intimacy between them. I thought of Missus Hodgkins’s hopes and my more noble self reminded me that the two of them were recovering invalids, were helping each other in ways that only they themselves could.
At last Sarah spoke, sounding like she had six inches of scarf in her mouth because she would not take her face out of Matt’s shoulder. “I didn’t tell lies,” she said. Matthias ignored Sarah’s protest and talked about the lies he himself had
told. “I told you lies about Con,” he said. “He didn’t get killed in no man’s land. I killed him, Sarah.” He felt her body tensing “like the first spasm of a man having a fit.” Then he told her the whole story about Con making his way to Field Marshall Haig and about Knifey in the cellar in Ocean Villas, and about the letter from Billy Simkins and how Mammy and Daddy and Missus Hodgkins and me and now Sarah were the only ones who knew what had really happened to Con. And Sarah cried.
“And she cried and cried and cried,” Matthias told me, as we leaned on the ivied walls that I had walked around twelve years ago, a century ago. Despite my crossness, I turned to Matt, put my hand on his upper arm. “I cried too,” he said, “and do you know who I cried for, Kitty? For Mammy and Daddy and the girls in the fire. I never cried for them before, and here I was, what, thirteen years and one war later, crying for them for the first time.”
Eighty-seven feet up in the air, on the only remaining floor of Knockmullen Castle, we stared across the miles of flat land. With its roof gone these hundreds of years, the floor was covered with grass; stunted whitethorns, too sickly ever to produce haws, grew near the walls. It was a warm Sunday afternoon, and there wasn’t a stir in the countryside, no farmers in the fields, no wind in the bushy hedges, only grazing cattle spotting the distant fields, barely moving in the rich grass of spring, no flies out yet to be swished away with annoyed tails. I pulled on Matt’s arm and turned him until he was looking at me. I laid the side of my face on his chest and put my arms around his middle. It was a long time before we sank down onto the grass, and after terrible clumsy fumbling, we made love for the first time, and I have always wondered, did I do it to assure myself that Matt was still mine and not Sarah’s?
Matthias Wrenn
At the gate of the Back Batens in the shadow of the grove of pine trees, we cried for Con, wetting each other with tears. When we stood away, separated, Sarah’s hands fluttered to her face. With her fingertips, she touched her cheeks and nose and neck and forehead and ears and hair. She took off her knitted cap. Even as she stepped over to the shallow dry drain that surrounded the field, she kept her hands out in front like a man in the dark afraid of walking into the edge of an open door. She stepped down and sat in the rich green grass on the bank scattered with long-stemmed dandelions and foxtail, the dark grove of pine trees at her back. When she put her elbows on her knees, she finally lowered her hands.
Sarah was pale, her hair short and hacked as if she’d cut it without looking in a mirror. Her face was thin, but she was still the lovely Sarah she had been before the War. All she needed was a little weathering, a little eating and a few months of hair-growing. The one big difference was in her eyes; they did not sparkle like they had when Lionel and Con and her father were still alive, when the boundaries of her world had been Enderly and her boarding school in Dublin.
I sat down near her.
“I did tell you lies, Matt,” she began. “The five VADs in the fire that night were Vera, Eleanor, Flora, Jane, and Izzy. All the casualties had been moved out on the trains that day, and we were organizing the place; we were always organizing the place whenever the War took a rest. A falling flare started the fire, and bottles of ether and the wells of the oil lamps exploded and made the whole thing worse. I was coming out of the latrine about twenty yards away and, in a second, the whole tent became a soaring flame. It was the screams—that was the worst part; the high-pitched screams. Four of them stumbled out, all on fire like their hair and clothes had been splashed with flames. I was transfixed, paralysed by the horror of it, standing there looking at them falling down over each other.
“And I stayed transfixed while their flames were beaten out by people swinging coats and towels. People were pouring out of the dark, out of the other Red Cross tents, and all running around in circles and shouting. The four of them lay there like bits of burnt wood still smoking. I don’t remember the next few hours, but at some point before morning I ended up in the tent where they’d been brought. The four who’d come out of the flames were still alive, blackened lumps that had been their heads sticking out at the end of the white sheets. I couldn’t tell one from the other: no hair; cheeks and lips and noses and ears gone; eyes blinded; rows of teeth all the way back to the molars bare and clenched; the neck skin black and as fragile as what’s left when you burn a page of a book.
“Their internal organs were still going strong. Their breath made whistling noises through the holes in their faces. A nurse came and stood beside me and she said, ‘We’re waiting for them to die.’ I said to the nurse, ‘I’m not waiting.’ She must have thought I was leaving, and she went away. All the Red Cross dressing stations were laid out exactly the same so that anyone new could walk in and know where everything was stored. I filled a syringe with morphine four times, and one after the other stuck the needle through the sheets into their bellies. The very second I’d done the last one, before I’d even pulled the syringe back out, two orderlies came and took me by the elbows. They had been watching, glad I was doing what they were afraid to do. They took me out of there and brought me to another tent a long way away. About a month later I was in Pine Haven wearing the veil. But Pine Haven did nothing for me. I was as daft coming out of the place as I was going in. The only good thing about my nineteen months there was that I knitted the jersey for Con.”
Sarah became silent because she was trying not to cry. She took the crumpled veil out her coat pocket and pressed it into her eyes.
“Con told me one time my eyes were full of diamonds. That’s why I knitted the jersey in diamond shapes, to tell him that I remembered what he’d said, that I’d heard what he’d said in the garden that day when he was thinning the strawberries and I was going to the wedding. Poor Con. If only the two of us had known how much we thought of each other during the War.”
She couldn’t go on. She lowered her face onto her knees and wept, put her hands under her knees and pressed herself into her thighs, brought her finger-laced hands to the back of her head, elbows down each side of her knees, bawled like a calf, shuddered like a fish out of water, threw her head back until she could see the tops of the pine trees behind her, and opened her throat to the anguish welling up, erupting from her insides.
What does a man do when a woman cries? When anyone cries? What did I do when a man roared in pain in no man’s land, cried for his mother?
I touched Sarah’s shoulder and she fell over onto me, fell face first onto my thigh. I rubbed her back very gently like I’d touch a horse’s rump so he wouldn’t lash out with a killing hoof. Then my other hand was on her hair. Then I was humming and gliding my hand between her shoulder blades and letting her chopped hair slip through my fingers and I thought of diamonds and Con and I was glad he’d known that the tender feelings he’d had for a girl had been recognized and reciprocated. He had kept from me the secret of the pattern of Sarah’s jersey. I was glad for Con.
Sarah cried herself out and remained on my thigh for a long time. I thought she might have fallen asleep, but when I looked down, her eyes were open and gazing on the long grass three feet away on the other side of the dry drain. She sat up and touched her face with the damp veil.
“I suppose I had a relationship with Con the same as he had with me: two young people in love with each other, but neither telling the other and neither knowing. It would have been romantic but it would have never gone anywhere—there was too much social and religious stuff between us.” She looked at me. “Even if we never told each other, the romance was there and, as things turned out, it never had to be destroyed on the rocks of reality.”
We sat again without words for a long time until Sarah began to flatten her veil out on her thigh. She brought it to her face and tied the strings at the back. “It’s going to take me a bit longer to walk around without this. I’m forever afraid something bad is going to happen to my face, and I’ve persuaded myself that the veil keeps me safe.”
Kitty Hatchel
“Not beside her, Kitty;
near her. And Kitty,” Matthias said and paused as if what he wanted to say next was hard to say. He put his arm across my shoulders. “There must have been times when I talked too much about Sarah.” And, quickly, I thought, how right you are, Matthias. But I held my tongue. I was too happy for Missus Hodgkins.
It was on the Bridge that he told me about Sarah and the fire and how the veil might be coming off soon. I was so happy for the happiness Missus Hodgkins was going to have that my jealousy went puff. I wanted to run to Enderly, go to Sarah, beg her to take off the veil this very minute and go to her mother, let her mother know there was still the possibility of grandchildren who would play away and sing away and squeal away and laugh away from Enderly the grief laid down by a faraway war, by young death and old death. I wanted to fly to Enderly and put my arms around Missus Hodgkins and tell her there was going to be a miracle, that her own Sarah was almost home from the War, and that when she finally arrived, she would be every bit as beautiful as she had ever been, every bit as sane. I wanted to tell her that children would come back to Enderly and that she would be there to hear them and hold them. Oh, Missus Hodgkins, if only I’d had wings on my feet that night, nothing would have stopped me from flying to you and stopping your pain at that very moment. But I had to wait, we all had to wait, until Sarah went to you herself.
And then, where else but on the Bridge in the same few minutes, did my own Matthias give a sign that he too was almost home. As he did on every Tuesday evening since he’d moved into the foreman’s cottage, he came home with me to see Daddy and Mammy. As usual, when we got to the top of the Bridge, we got off the bikes and leaned over the parapet to view the kingdom of our childhood.
Matthias pointed to three bored roach roughing up the surface of the Canal for scooting water striders. “There were times I thought I’d never see the Canal again,” he started. “Con said it was full of sanctifying grace—sanctifying grace as smooth as mercury in a glass and as warm as custard on apple cake in winter.” Matt paused and stared at the roach. I had learned not to push Matt when he paused in his speech; he would continue in his own good time.
