4
The Deignans’ house was on top of a hill high over the road and commanded a view of the countryside for miles. The two brothers with Sean and the O’Donnell girls reached it by a long winding boreen that threaded its way uncertainly through little grey rocky fields and walls of unmortared stone which rose against the sky along the edges of the hill like lacework. On their way they met another procession coming down the hill. It was headed by their father and the island woman, arm in arm, and behind came two locals with Dempsey and Red Patrick. All the party except the island woman were well advanced in liquor. That was plain when their father rushed forward to shake them all by the hand and ask them how they were. He said that divil such honourable and kindly people as the people of Carriganassa were to be found in the whole world, and of these there was no one a patch on the O’Donnells; kings and sons of kings as you could see from one look at them. He had only one more call to pay and promised to be at Caheragh’s within a quarter of an hour.
They looked over the Deignans’ half-door. The kitchen was empty. The girls began to titter. They knew the Deignans must have watched them coming from Maurice’s door. The kitchen was a beautiful room; woodwork and furniture, homemade and shapely, were painted a bright red-brown and the painted dresser shone with pretty ware. They entered and looked about them. Nothing was to be heard but the tick of the cheap alarm clock on the dresser. One of the girls began to giggle hysterically. Sean raised his voice.
‘Are ye in or are ye out, bad cess to ye!’
For a moment there was no reply. Then a quick step sounded in the attic and a girl descended the stairs at a run, drawing a black knitted shawl tighter about her shoulders. She was perhaps twenty-eight or thirty, with a narrow face, sharp like a ferret’s, and blue nervous eyes. She entered the kitchen awkwardly sideways, giving the customary greetings but without looking at anyone.
‘A hundred welcomes.… How are ye?…’Tis a fine day.’
The O’Donnell girls giggled again. Nora Deignan looked at them in astonishment, biting nervously at the tassel of her shawl. She had tiny sharp white teeth.
‘What is it, aru?’ she asked.
‘Musha, will you stop your old cimeens,’ boomed Tom, ‘and tell us where’s Cait from you? You don’t think ’twas to see your ugly puss that we came up here?’
‘Cait!’ Nora called in a low voice.
‘What is it?’ another voice replied from upstairs.
‘Damn well you know what it is,’ bellowed Tom, ‘and you cross-eyed expecting us since morning. Will you come down out of that or will I go up and fetch you?’
There was the same hasty step and a second girl descended the stairs. It was only later that Ned was able to realize how beautiful she was. She had the same narrow pointed face as her sister, the same slight features sharpened by a sort of animal instinct, the same blue eyes with their startled brightness; but all seemed to have been differently composed, and her complexion had a transparency as though her whole nature were shining through it. ‘Child of Light, thy limbs are burning through the veil which seems to hide them,’ Ned found himself murmuring. She came on them in the same hostile way, blushing furiously. Tom’s eyes rested on her; soft, bleary, emotional eyes incredibly unlike her own.
‘Have you nothing to say to me, Cait?’ he boomed, and Ned thought his very voice was soft and clouded.
‘Oh, a hundred welcomes.’ Her blue eyes rested for a moment on him with what seemed a fierce candour and penetration and went past him to the open door. Outside a soft rain was beginning to fall; heavy clouds crushed down the grey landscape, which grew clearer as it merged into one common plane; the little grey bumpy fields with the walls of grey unmortared stone that drifted hither and over across them like blown sand, the whitewashed farmhouses lost to the sun sinking back into the brown-grey hillsides.
‘Nothing else, my child?’ he growled, pursing his lips.
‘How are you?’
‘The politeness is suffocating you. Where’s Delia?’
‘Here I am,’ said Delia from the doorway immediately behind him. In her furtive way she had slunk round the house. Her bland impertinence raised a laugh.
‘The reason we called,’ said Tom, clearing his throat, ‘is this young brother of mine that’s looking for a wife.’
Everyone laughed again. Ned knew the oftener a joke was repeated the better they liked it, but for him this particular joke was beginning to wear thin.
‘Leave him take me,’ said Delia with an arch look at Ned who smiled and gazed at the floor.
‘Be quiet, you slut!’ said Tom. ‘There are your two sisters before you.’
‘Even so, I want to go to Dublin.… Would you treat me to lemonade, mister?’ she asked Ned with her impudent smile. ‘This is a rotten hole. I’d go to America if they left me.’
‘America won’t be complete without you,’ said Tom. ‘Now, don’t let me hurry ye, ladies, but my old fellow will be waiting for us in Johnny Kit’s.’
‘Well go along with you,’ said Nora, and the three girls took down three black shawls from inside the door. Some tension seemed to have gone out of the air. They laughed and joked between themselves.
‘Ye’ll get wet,’ said Sean to the two brothers.
‘Cait will make room for me under her shawl,’ said Tom.
‘Indeed I will not,’ she cried, starting back with a laugh.
‘Very shy you’re getting,’ said Sean with a good-natured grin.
‘ ’Tisn’t that at all but she’d sooner the young man,’ said Delia.
‘What’s strange is wonderful,’ said Nora.
Biting her lip with her tiny front teeth, Cait looked angrily at her sisters and Sean, and then began to laugh. She glanced at Ned and smilingly held out her shawl in invitation, though at the same moment angry blushes chased one another across her forehead like squalls across the surface of a lake. The rain was a mild, persistent drizzle and a strong wind was blowing. Everything had darkened and grown lonely and, with his head in the blinding folds of the shawl, which reeked of turf-smoke, Ned felt as if he had dropped out of Time’s pocket.
They waited in Caheragh’s kitchen. The bearded old man sat in one chimney corner and a little bare-legged boy in the other. The dim blue light poured down the wide chimney on their heads in a shower with the delicacy of light on old china, picking out surfaces one rarely saw; and between them the fire burned a bright orange in the great whitewashed hearth with the black, swinging bars and pothook. Outside the rain fell softly, almost soundlessly, beyond the half-door. Delia, her black shawl trailing from her shoulders, leaned over it, acting the part of watcher as in a Greek play. Their father’s fifteen minutes had strung themselves out to an hour and two little barefooted boys had already been sent to hunt him down.
‘Where are they now, Delia?’ one of the O’Donnells would ask.
‘Crossing the fields from Patsy Kit’s.’
‘He wasn’t there so.’
‘He wouldn’t be,’ the old man said. ‘They’ll likely go on to Ned Kit’s now.’
‘That’s where they’re making for,’ said Delia. ‘Up the hill at the far side of the fort.’
‘They’ll find him there,’ the old man said confidently.
Ned felt as though he were still blanketed by the folds of the turf-reeking shawl. Something seemed to have descended on him that filled him with passion and loneliness. He could scarcely take his eyes off Cait. She and Nora sat on the form against the back wall, a composition in black and white, the black shawl drawn tight under the chin, the cowl of it breaking the curve of her dark hair, her shadow on the gleaming wall behind. She did not speak except to answer some question of Tom’s about her brother, but sometimes Ned caught her looking at him with naked eyes. Then she smiled swiftly and secretly and turned her eyes again to the door, sinking back into pensiveness. Pensiveness or vacancy? he wondered. While he gazed at her face with the animal instinctiveness of its over-delicate features it seemed like a mirror in w
hich he saw again the falling rain, the rocks and hills and angry sea.
The first announced by Delia was Red Patrick. After him came the island woman. Each had last seen his father in a different place. Ned chuckled at a sudden vision of his father, eager and impassioned and aflame with drink, stumping with his broken bottom across endless fields through pouring rain with a growing procession behind him. Dempsey was the last to come. He doubted if Tomas would be in a condition to take the boat at all.
‘What matter, aru?’ said Delia across her shoulder. ‘We can find room for the young man.’
‘And where would we put him?’ gaped Nora.
‘He can have Cait’s bed,’ Delia said innocently.
‘Oye, and where would Cait sleep?’ Nora asked and then skitted and covered her face with her shawl. Delia scoffed. The men laughed and Cait, biting her lip furiously, looked at the floor. Again Ned caught her eyes on him and again she laughed and turned away.
Tomas burst in unexpected on them all like a sea-wind that scattered them before him. He wrung Tom’s hand and asked him how he was. He did the same to Ned. Ned replied gravely that he was very well.
In God’s holy name,’ cried his father, waving his arms like a windmill, ‘what are ye all waiting for?’
The tide had fallen. Tomas grabbed an oar and pushed the boat on to a rock. Then he raised the sail and collapsed under it and had to be extricated from its drenching folds, glauming and swearing at Cassidy’s old boat. A little group stood on a naked rock against a grey background of drifting rain. For a long time Ned continued to wave back to the black shawl that was lifted to him. An extraordinary feeling of exultation and loss enveloped him. Huddled up in his overcoat he sat with Dempsey in the stern, not speaking.
‘It was a grand day,’ his father declared, swinging himself to and fro, tugging at his Viking moustache, dragging the peak of his cap farther over his ear. His gestures betrayed a certain lack of rhythmical cohesion; they began and ended abruptly. ‘Dempsey, my darling, wasn’t it a grand day?’
‘ ’Twas a grand day for you,’ shrieked Dempsey as if his throat would burst.
‘ ’Twas, my treasure, ’twas a beautiful day. I got an honourable reception and my sons got an honourable reception.’
By this time he was flat on his belly, one leg completely over the edge of the boat. He reached back a clammy hand to his sons.
‘ ’Twas the best day I ever had,’ he said. ‘I got porter and I got whiskey and I got poteen. I did so, Tom, my calf. Ned, my brightness, I went to seven houses and in every house I got seven drinks and with every drink I got seven welcomes. And your mother’s people are a hand of trumps. It was no slight they put on me at all even if I was nothing but a landless man. No slight, Tom. No slight at all.’
Darkness had fallen, the rain had cleared, the stars came out of a pitch-black sky under which the little tossing, nosing boat seemed lost beyond measure. In all the waste of water nothing could be heard but the splash of the boat’s sides and their father’s voice raised in tipsy song.
The evening was fair and the sunlight was yellow,
I halted, beholding a maiden bright
Coming to me by the edge of the mountain,
Her cheeks had a berry-bright rosy light.
5
Ned was the first to wake. He struck a match and lit the candle. It was time for them to be stirring. It was just after dawn, and at half past nine he must be in his old place in the schoolroom before the rows of pinched little city-faces. He lit a cigarette and closed his eyes. The lurch of the boat was still in his blood, the face of Cait Deignan in his mind, and as if from far away he heard a line of the wild love-song his father had been singing: ‘And we’ll drive the geese at the fall of night.’
He heard his brother mumble something and nudged him. Tom looked big and fat and vulnerable with his fair head rolled sideways and his heavy mouth dribbling on to the sleeve of his pyjamas. Ned slipped quietly out of bed, put on his trousers, and went to the window. He drew the curtains and let in the thin cold daylight. The bay was just visible and perfectly still. Tom began to mumble again in a frightened voice and Ned shook him. He started out of his sleep with a cry of fear, grabbing at the bedclothes. He looked first at Ned, then at the candle and drowsily rubbed his eyes.
‘Did you hear it too?’ he asked.
‘Did I hear what?’ asked Ned with a smile.
‘In the room,’ said Tom.
‘There was nothing in the room,’ replied Ned. ‘You were ramaishing so I woke you up.’
‘Was I? What was I saying?’
‘You were telling no secrets,’ said Ned with a quiet laugh.
‘Hell!’ Tom said in disgust and stretched out his arm for a cigarette. He lit it at the candle flame, his drowsy red face puckered and distraught. ‘I slept rotten.’
‘Oye!’ Ned said quietly, raising his eyebrows. It wasn’t often Tom spoke in that tone. He sat on the edge of the bed, joined his hands, and leaned forward, looking at Tom with wide gentle eyes.
‘Is there anything wrong?’ he asked.
‘Plenty.’
‘You’re not in trouble?’ Ned asked without raising his voice.
‘Not that sort of trouble. The trouble is in myself.’
Ned gave him a look of intense sympathy and understanding. The soft emotional brown eyes were searching him for a judgement. Ned had never felt less like judging him.
‘Ay,’ he said gently and vaguely, his eyes wandering to the other side of the room while his voice took on its accustomed stammer, ‘the trouble is always in ourselves. If we were contented in ourselves the other things wouldn’t matter. I suppose we must only leave it to time. Time settles everything.’
‘Time will settle nothing for me,’ Tom said despairingly. ‘You have something to look forward to. I have nothing. It’s the loneliness of my job that kills you. Even to talk about it would be a relief but there’s no one you can talk to. People come to you with their troubles but there’s no one you can go to with your own.’
Again the challenging glare in the brown eyes and Ned realized with infinite compassion that for years Tom had been living in the same state of suspicion and fear, a man being hunted down by his own nature; and that for years to come he would continue to live in this way, and perhaps never be caught again as he was now.
‘A pity you came down here,’ stammered Ned flatly. ‘A pity we went to Carriganassa. ’Twould be better for both of us if we went somewhere else.’
‘Why don’t you marry her, Ned?’ Tom asked earnestly.
‘Who?’ asked Ned.
‘Cait.’
‘Yesterday,’ said Ned with the shy smile he wore when he confessed something, ‘I nearly wished I could.’
‘But you can, man,’ Tom said eagerly, sitting upon his elbow. Like all men with frustration in their hearts he was full of schemes for others. ‘You could marry her and get a school down here. That’s what I’d do if I was in your place.’
‘No,’ Ned said gravely. ‘We made our choice a long time ago. We can’t go back on it now.’
Then with his hands in his trouser pockets and his head bowed he went out to the kitchen. His mother, the coloured shawl about her head, was blowing the fire. The bedroom door was open and he could see his father in shirt-sleeves kneeling beside the bed, his face raised reverently towards a holy picture, his braces hanging down behind. He unbolted the half-door, went through the garden and out on to the road. There was a magical light on every thing. A boy on a horse rose suddenly against the sky, a startling picture. Through the apple-green light over Carriganassa ran long streaks of crimson, so still they might have been enamelled. Magic, magic, magic! He saw it as in a children’s picture-book with all its colours intolerably bright; something he had outgrown and could never return to, while the world he aspired to was as remote and intangible as it had seemed even in the despair of youth.
It seemed as if only now for the first time was he leaving home; for the first time and fore
ver saying good-bye to it all.
The Majesty of the Law
Old Dan Bride was breaking brosna for the fire when he heard a step on the path. He paused, a bundle of saplings on his knee.
Dan had looked after his mother while the life was in her, and after her death no other woman had crossed his threshold. Signs on it, his house had that look. Almost everything in it he had made with his own hands in his own way. The seats of the chairs were only slices of log, rough and round and thick as the saw had left them, and with the rings still plainly visible through the grime and polish that coarse trouser-bottoms had in the course of long years imparted. Into these Dan had rammed stout knotted ash-boughs that served alike for legs and back. The deal table, bought in a shop, was an inheritance from his mother and a great pride and joy to him though it rocked whenever he touched it. On the wall, unglazed and fly-spotted, hung in mysterious isolation a Marcus Stone print, and beside the door was a calendar with a picture of a racehorse. Over the door hung a gun, old but good, and in excellent condition, and before the fire was stretched an old setter who raised his head expectantly whenever Dan rose or even stirred.
He raised it now as the steps came nearer and when Dan, laying down the bundle of saplings, cleaned his hands thoughtfully on the seat of his trousers, he gave a loud bark, but this expressed no more than a desire to show off his own watchfulness. He was half human and knew people thought he was old and past his prime.
A man’s shadow fell across the oblong of dusty light thrown over the half-door before Dan looked round.
‘Are you alone, Dan?’ asked an apologetic voice.
‘Oh, come in, come in, sergeant, come in and welcome,’ exclaimed the old man, hurrying on rather uncertain feet to the door which the tall policeman opened and pushed in. He stood there, half in sunlight, half in shadow, and seeing him so, you would have realized how dark the interior of the house really was. One side of his red face was turned so as to catch the light, and behind it an ash tree raised its boughs of airy green against the sky. Green fields, broken here and there by clumps of red-brown rock, flowed downhill, and beyond them, stretched all across the horizon, was the sea, flooded and almost transparent with light. The sergeant’s face was fat and fresh, the old man’s face, emerging from the twilight of the kitchen, had the colour of wind and sun, while the features had been so shaped by the struggle with time and the elements that they might as easily have been found impressed upon the surface of a rock.
My Oedipus Complex Page 23
