by Jane Arbor
‘You would not, but it’s a good Irish one—Bridget Haire. You’ll remember Mr. William, Shawn? Miss Haire is his niece.’
‘Mr. William’s niece, is it?’ Shawn appeared to measure Bridget, then cocked an enquiring eye at Dion. ‘Mr. William’s niece and—your lady, Mr. Dion?’
There was a tiny pause. Then Dion tucked a hand lightly beneath the crook of Bridget’s elbow and replied, ‘Yes, Shawn. My lady—for to-day. Meanwhile, where is your bride?’
‘Arrah, her sisters have her this minute, doing something to her dress. I haven’t been let near her this half-hour, and all of us with our tongues dry, the way we’re waiting to drink her health.’
‘Your Glenna comes of a large family, doesn’t she?’ asked Dion.
‘Ah, she does so. One that was put down with the left hand—six of them in it, and all girls.’
‘ “Put down with the left hand?” ’ Puzzled, Bridget looked at Dion, who explained that it was an old Irish belief that eggs set beneath the broody hen with the left hand would produce pullets and with the right, only cockerels.
‘I must tell Jenny that,’ laughed Bridget. ‘Does it work?’
‘There’s probably a law of averages which sees that it does—in time,’ he laughed back as Shawn brought forward his bride, a round-faced girl for whom Bridget could find only the description ‘milk-fed,’ her complexion was so delicately rose-flushed and her eyes so swimmingly blue.
When her health was to be drunk Dion warned Bridget that the drinks would be pretty strong, so she chose the innocence of claret cup which, however, her first few sips told her had been laced with something a good deal more potent than claret. Dion advised, ‘If you can’t manage it all, that aspidistra behind you looks thirsty.’ So, furtively and laughing conspiratorially, they gave the unfortunate plant a good libation from her glass and she was enabled to set it down empty.
When the thin notes of a fiddle struck up there was to be dancing. But under cover of the applause for this Dion took Bridget by the hand and they quietly slipped away.
Outside they paused for great gulps of fresh air and took to the road again side by side.
Bridget sighed happily, ‘Oh, that was fun! I suppose the party will go on for hours yet? But what about the bride and groom—they didn’t seem at all anxious to get away?’
‘They aren’t planning to.’
‘No honeymoon?’
‘A honeymoon at harvest-time? Shawn’s Glenna would probably regard the suggestion with suspicion and refuse to go! No, the only difference will be that to-morrow morning she’ll be feeding Shawn’s hens instead of her mother’s, and Shawn won’t be at the mercy of Widow Twigg’s cooking any more. The poor fellow has fed on nothing but bean soup and salt pork for years.’
‘Was that Widow Twigg sitting in the chimney-corner?’
‘It was—with her pipe and her glass of whiskey at her side. She goes in to “do” for Shawn when she feels like it, but she lives alone in this next cabin ahead, and it’s thought round about that she’s a witch.’
‘Oh no—not in the nineteen-seventies!’ protested Bridget.
‘Believe it or not, it’s true. I could show you a dozen people in Tullabor who wouldn’t pass this way late at night for fear of what they might see or hear. The clank of ghostly chains could be the least of it, but a sight of the devil himself rounding up the farmyard stock might be the most, and there are few of our neighbours who’d risk it!’
The road was climbing now between pine and spruce and towering hornbeams, and Dion said they would come suddenly upon their first sight of the lough a hundred feet or so above it. He suggested they should stay there to rest and eat their lunch in the shade of the trees, going down later to follow the lake-edge round.
The scene, when they came upon it, brought a gasp of pleasure to Bridget’s lips. The lough lay in a perfect natural basin of the hills. Its waters were shadowed and a little sinister beneath the thickly-wooded, unscaleable heights on its far side, but were smiling and still immediately below the gentler slopes on which she and Dion stood. On that far side over-hanging foliage in many shades of green dipped towards the water; on their own side the trees, more openly spaced and terraced, stepped down to a wide, shingly level where, Dion said, the wild birds coming in from the Arctic to winter would later gather.
The mossy turf beneath the trees was inviting, and the gnarled, exposed tree-roots formed natural armchairs to lean against. Dion led the way to one which he said he had always thought was like a Victorian love-seat. They sat, half back-to-back, against the curve of the trunk, their shoulders almost touching and sharing a huge arch of root as arm-rest. There Dion took out his pipe, but did not smoke when Bridget claimed that she was ravenous and was going to unpack their lunch straight away.
When they had lunched Dion slid from his place and went to lie on the slope below Bridget’s feet. She remained where she was, clasping her knees with her hands, gazing dreamily through half-shut eyes at the shimmer of sunlight on the waters of the lough, determined not to spoil the golden day with the jealousy of, Has Tara shared this place with him? Will she again?
Presently she chuckled, ‘I wonder if the aspidistra has wilted yet?’
‘More likely that your drink will have stimulated it to unheard-of growth!’
‘Well, I do remember that at school there were plants on the dining-table which used to get our surplus mutton broth and which certainly seemed to flourish like—like green bay trees.’
‘Perhaps they were green bay trees?’ offered Dion lazily.
‘They weren’t. They were hart’s-tongue ferns, pushing through the soil like tight green snails...’
‘Personally I’ve yet to meet a tight snail!’
‘Oh, you know what I mean...!’ They both laughed and Dion said suddenly, ‘Tell more about your being a little girl at school. Did your plaits stick out, and did you wear one of those hideous tunics?’
‘No, a blouse and skirt. But my hair was always short.’
‘Did you go to boarding-school?’
‘No. To day-school in London.’
‘Well, I don’t believe you ever poured away your mutton broth. You drank it up as you should, because I picture you as a pattern of a child.’
‘I wasn’t by any means. What makes you think so?’
Dion rolled over to prop his chin on his hands, surveying her appraisingly. ‘Probably,’ he said slowly, ‘because I can’t imagine you other than as cool and contained and as very, very sure as you are now. You’ve never known what it is to be blown hither and thither by sheer impulse, have you?’
Bridget thought, But Tara has, and I suppose it’s inevitable that in his eyes I compare unfavourably with her! Aloud she said ruefully, ‘You make me sound depressingly prim. But perhaps it’s that I had to grow up too soon...’
‘Tell me...’ Dion urged.
‘Well, my parents died while Jenny and I were still in our teens; Jenny was delicate and had always been awfully young for her age, and I soon found that she looked to me to make every decision for us both. Then she was ill, and there arose the necessity of making a living for us both as well.’
‘And it was the chance of that—of seeing a living ahead—which alone brought you back to Eire after you’d decided against it? You wouldn’t have wanted to come if you hadn’t got the Cion Eigel job?’
‘I wanted to, yes—’
‘Why did you want to?’ The question cut in with eager insistence.
Bridget explained, ‘I saw that it—our coming to live in Tullabor—would be ideal for Jenny, of course.’ (Had there been another reason even by the end of that first day? Had there?)
‘Oh—for Jenny. I see.’ Dion’s tone had flattened, dulled a little. But he went on, ‘And you haven’t regretted the decision since?’
‘No, never. It’s going to be the making of Jenny’s health—she’s so much better already. And I think the children are happy with us.’
Dion had begun to pluck at the
short grass in which he lay. Intent upon his task, he asked, ‘I really meant, you’re glad—for yourself?’
Before he looked up, awaiting her reply, there was an instant of time in which she could glance down unseen at his tousled auburn head, at the dear familiarity of his face. An instant in which, for the rich experience of having known him, she willingly accepted the bitter-sweet of loving him unasked. With a little unconscious squaring of her shoulders she said, ‘Very glad for myself too.’
There was a flat silence that seemed longer than it probably was. Then Dion sat up, brushing grass from his fingers with an air of finality. Cryptically he said, ‘All right. I suppose I had my mouth well open for that particular hook. Not your fault that I found it...’ and began to ram tobacco into his pipe.
As often happened now, tension that was enormously personal had come upon them unawares. Bridget, casting about in an effort to lighten it, asked him to tell her about his own boyhood.
‘I didn’t have a home of my own for even as long as you and Jenny did,’ he said. He sketched the story briefly. He had been left as a baby of two with his father when his mother had gone to America with another man. His mother had died since and his father had died when he was six. By that time his father had been forced by circumstances to put him into the full care of a monastery school, though he was not a Catholic. The priests had cared for him without question of payment and one of them, ‘a modern St. Francis of Assisi,’ commented Dion, had first instilled in him the passionate interest in nature which he had since been able to make his lifework. He had begun by contributing some detailed nature observations to a scientific paper when he was sixteen and only a year or two later had begun to make a living from his articles, popular nature lectures and books.
‘It wasn’t until later that you met—Tara?’ It was no good. By asking Dion to talk of the past she had invited Tara to shadow even the happiness of this day. For Tara was part of Dion’s story...
‘Tara?’ she heard him saying. ‘No, not until much later. She’d been at school until then. She just came upon me one day. Her hair was like a black cloud on her shoulders and there was so little of her that she seemed hardly there at all. She asked me what I was doing. It was a child’s question that hadn’t the breath of impertinence to it, and when I told her we began to talk, though there was a strange, fey quality about her that made it like holding a conversation with one of the Little People. After that she often came along. It was an odd thing between us from the beginning—separate from anything else in my life or in hers. She had dreams that she had to tell to someone, and I, who’d had them too at her age, understood the need that was on her, I suppose...’
‘And yet she didn’t tell you when she fell in love with your friend or that she meant to leave home and—and everything!’ Bridget could not keep resentment for him out of her tone.
‘No, that was something she didn’t bring to me. But how did you know of it?’
‘Mrs. Steven told me that they had blamed you unjustly, and Tara explained that by saying she hadn’t wanted you to be hurt.’
‘As if she had the power to regulate the degree of it, or as if all the water that’s flowed under the bridges since hadn’t washed away the bitterness that was in me then! But she was not to know that, of course...’
By that, Bridget thought, he means that, loving Tara, he has long since forgiven her. She said nothing in reply and watched him as he stood up, dismissing any further discussion of what lay between him and Tara now.
He gathered their things and packed them. ‘Let’s go down to the lough now,’ he said and held out both his hands to pull her to her feet.
She allowed him to help her but withdrew her own hands at once, being only too aware of the flow of the dangerous magnetism in his touch which, yielded to, could betray her pride utterly. He asked, ‘Ready?’ and slung his camera across his shoulders, only to dip his head beneath its strap to take it off again. He barred her way with his hand.
‘No—stay there,’ he ordered. ‘There—with the sunlight dappling through the trees on to your face. I’ve never taken a photograph of you yet.’
Obediently she stayed while he leapt agilely several yards down the slope before turning to get his range and focus. He took several snapshots, then beckoned, ‘All right. Come down now. Or shall I come up for you?’
She shook her head. ‘No, I can manage.’
‘Then mind the tree-roots. They’re a bit tricky...’
The warning came too late. The only possible progress down to where he stood was at a half-run and when her feet began to slide over the treacherous glassiness of the exposed roots she lost control of her balance and was forced to hurtle on. Dion saw what was happening and side-stepped into her path with outstretched arms. She had no choice. To save herself she must run into them...
She felt his hands close about her shoulders, felt the rocklike strength of his whole body steadying her. Her reason had time to assert, He had to be there for me. There was nothing else he could do! But suddenly there was no reason that could explain away the sudden tightening of his hold even after he must have known that she was surefooted and mistress of her balance once more.
She stiffened, wanting—yet not wanting—to draw back. But his arms were like iron about her and his eyes compelled hers in a still, endless glance. Then deliberately and without hurry he bent to set his mouth to hers.
There was no time for surprise—only a blurred, bewildered interval during which she knew herself to be upon the edge of surrender to the strange compulsion which had locked them together. Then, afraid of herself, she thrust back. For a further moment he held her against her will, but released her at sight of the gesture with which she laid the back of her hand across her lips as if to guard them against him. She could not tell him that for her it was her only way of keeping, of sealing in the sweetness of his kiss.
They still stood very close. But now they were wary and separate in a way which, Bridget felt, had nothing to do with distance.
Dion’s voice rasped, ‘I apologise. You didn’t want that to happen, did you?’
‘No, I didn’t...’ (The very ache of having longed for it was a guilty betrayal of Tara!) She heard him saying, ‘All right. It was my fault. Tell yourself, will you, that it said nothing that you need to remember shamefully? Just that chance happened to make it too easy and I—took the chance, quite against your will?’
He must know what she was feeling about Tara, was shouldering her guilt while not denying his own. Oddly, she was glad that he acknowledged that they had both wronged Tara. It was a common male impulse, she knew, to kiss lightly and to forget as easily. But somehow she did not want it to be one of his.
He said, ‘Let’s get on down, shall we?’ and held out his hand to her. She put her fingers into his, felt him grasp them in one tight, convulsive grip. Then again they were just two people hand-in-hand for the mutual convenience of negotiating the slope towards the lough. But for Bridget the memory of the stolen sweetness lingered.
They hid whatever reserves they had, and friendly talk came easily again. Dion related anecdotes about the birds he had watched, and Bridget asked him what he hoped to be able to record when he went out to the Aran Islands later on. About the lough itself there were as yet no early winter visitors, but there were some mallard ducks and teal and a young family of grebe taking many parental duckings before they were willing to dive.
The path Dion and Bridget took in the late afternoon led at the water’s edge to the narrowing neck of the lough which they crossed by a bridge, after which their homeward road took them sharply down to the reaches of their own river which they then followed back to Tullabor. When they arrived home they had walked fully the twenty miles Dion had promised. But Bridget was surprised to find that she could have tackled even more.
Jenny was not there to greet them and the children said that she had gone out for a walk by herself. ‘She wouldn’t take us because she said she might go too far,’ explained Pegeen,
while Minna mourned, ‘She went ages and ages ago. We could have taken our tea!’ Bridget sighed. Jenny’s solitary walks were becoming a disturbing feature of her withdrawal; she rarely now wanted either Bridget or the children to go with her. The children had not yet learnt to be hurt by it. But Bridget had.
Jenny had not come back by the time she had bathed and changed and was ready for supper. When Dion came down he offered to go to meet Jenny, and though Bridget demurred that they didn’t know the way she had taken he said, ‘I’ll try the lane anyway. I need the exercise!’
‘After twenty miles already?’ laughed Bridget to his vanishing back. She told Kate they would wait a little for supper, but when after some time neither Dion nor Jenny had returned, she thought they had better have it without them.
Kate queried, ‘Are Mr. Dion and Miss Jenny not coming for theirs then?’
‘They can have it later. They’re not in yet, and it’s nearly the children’s bedtime,’ explained Bridget.
Kate looked her surprise. ‘In, is it? And are they not here this long time?’
‘Are they? I didn’t know!’
‘Well, maybe I haven’t the hairsbreadth of the truth when I say they’re in. But they’re away up behind the hen-house in deep talk. Will I be hunting them to come and eat this minute?’
‘Yes—no, don’t. They’ll come when they’re ready. Mr. Dion knew we were just going to sit down when he left.’ Bridget bit her lip, knowing that her relief that nothing had happened to Jenny had given place to a foreboding she could not explain. She was tempted to leave the table and go out herself. But the children would think that strange when she had just asked Kate not to go. So she served them and ate her own supper and was grateful when Kate offered to see the little girls to bed for her.
Restlessly she wandered into the playroom and stood before Jenny’s piano, idly picking out a few notes while she tried to analyse her apprehension. Why was she afraid? What was she afraid of? Jenny had been out for hours, certainly. But no harm had come to her. And if she and Dion had suddenly found a subject of absorbing interest to discuss in the garden what had that to do with her?
