The Private Wound

by Nicholas Blake

  Nicholas Blake

  The Private Wound

  To Charles and Sally

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Two

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Epilogue

  A Note on the Author

  “The private wound is deepest”

  The Two Gentlemen of Verona

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  It is time that I told this story. I do not know if I shall ever bring myself to publish it; not because of hurting the people involved—those it could have hurt most are dead; but because it is a sort of confession, and I dislike confessional writing.

  When I remember that marvellous summer of 1939, in the West of Ireland almost thirty years ago, one picture always slips to the front of my mind. I am lying on a bed drenched with our sweat. She is standing by the open window to cool herself in the moonlight. I see again the hour-glass figure, the sloping shoulders, the rather short legs, that disturbing groove of the spine halfway hidden by her dark red hair which the moonlight has turned black. The fuchsia below the window will have turned to gouts of black blood. The river beyond is talking in its sleep. She is naked.

  I suppose it’s because she still nags at my mind, because in a way she demanded so little when she was alive, because she ought to have some little shrine of her own (and without me who will remember her?)—yes, out of mere gratitude that I should tell the story. A story which, for me, began as an idyll, continued into low comedy, and ended in tragedy.

  Not at all Eyre’s sort of story, the readers of my novels would say. Far too romantic. They may be right.

  But it is my story. And I wish it had never happened. I wish to God it had never happened.

  I had just turned thirty. My first two novels having done reasonably well, my publishers had offered me £300 a year for three years to keep me while I got on with the next ones. Together with a small legacy from my grandmother, this would enable me to give up the tutoring job. I wanted to get away, not only from it but from the literary pundits and riff-raff whom it was almost impossible to avoid in London.

  My father had begun his ministry in the Church of Ireland at Tuam Cathedral. When I was still a young child, we moved to England and I had never been back to Ireland since. My father’s death in 1937 set up a slight tremor of piety in me, and I decided to visit Galway, perhaps Mayo and Sligo too, as soon as I could.

  “Piety” is a word which would startle my readers. Christopher Isherwood was my model in those days, and piety is the last motif one would associate with his earlier novels. I saw myself as one of the camera-eye school then: impersonal, sophisticated, ironic. It was certainly a reversal of rôles to find myself, in the West of Ireland, not a camera-eye but an object of intense curiosity to every eye in the place. At any rate, sooner or later a man feels the need to return to his first roots, and with me it happened to happen sooner than with most.

  There was also the war, which even politicians were at last beginning to realise would soon be upon us. I did not want to run away from it. No, that’s not true; I could not run away from it, any more than a rabbit can run from the hypnotising stoat. I just wanted a holiday from fear.

  I could have taken it, decorously, with my fiancée Phyllis, but that she had embarked on a world cruise earlier in the year, with her mother and tycoon father. The latter might have been impressed, very slightly, by the knowledge that I was actually making money out of my last book: but news of it was still, I presumed, chasing him round the globe. Not that I’d written often to Phyllis. An affectionate but so-far-and-no-further girl, whose image a few hundred sea-miles had considerably blurred in my mind.

  It was assumed by all that sooner or later she (and her cash) would become my responsibility. But—I wonder how many others felt the same—the imminence of war was to set up in me a kind of irresponsibility, a potential recklessness far removed from my usual circumspect ways. Somewhere within me, though I little guessed it, was growing a lion which would soon be seeking whom it might devour—or be devoured by. The prey, the carnivore, against all predictable odds, awaited me in a small, dowdy little town in the far West.

  After spending a couple of nights in Dublin, where I managed to pick up a second-hand car, I drove across Ireland, visited Tuam, wandered north to Westport, and then took the road back to Galway Bay: an aimless, restless pilgrimage. I had got a few addresses from agents in Dublin, but the houses they offered proved to be either too large or hopelessly derelict: the roof of one of them, a cottage near Ballinrobe, had actually been removed since it got on the agent’s books. I was in no hurry. The summer was before me, and the Atlantic; and Ireland takes no account of time. I remember feeling fatalistically, as I drove south from Galway city, that I would recognise my destination when I reached it. There would be a Sign.

  I had intended to stop that evening in a hotel at Ennis. But, as I ate my lunchtime sandwiches, I noticed on the map a name which had somehow escaped my notice before. I may have seen it on a signpost but it had rung no bell. Charlottestown. A few months before, I had read that formidable novel by Somerville and Ross, The Real Charlotte. And here I was, less than ten miles from Charlottestown. Was this the Sign? The novel is set in a different part of Ireland: but I felt suddenly an odd pull to the place—not the mild piety which had taken me back to Tuam, my birthplace, but a strong senseless curiosity. Perhaps the Irish in my blood had got to work already, releasing a drop of the superstitiousness which normally I despised.

  When I drove into Charlottestown, I dismissed the whole thing as absurdly fanciful. The place obviously held nothing for me—a typical West-of-Ireland town, one long broad street running up to a cross-road and then down to a river bridge; asses lying about on it; low, mean houses, every second one of which seemed to have a shop window stuffed with unappealing goods, on either side. I suppose it would be picturesque enough to the visitor, but I had seen so many scruffy little towns of this kind on my way here.

  I was about to drive on when I heard an urgent knocking in the engine. An ancient man, leaning against a petrol pump, opened the bonnet, peered and fiddled for a long time, then resumed his coma by the pump.

  “Well, what’s wrong with it?”

  He opened an eye. “The devil knows.”

  “You’d better send for the devil then,” I replied tartly.

  The ancient man’s mouth opened in a toothless grin. Then he crossed himself hastily. “I will not. It’s my cousin you’ll be wanting. I’m after minding the pump for him. It’s great petrol, they say. Will I fill y’ up?”

  “Is your cousin in the garage?” I asked.

  “He is not. He’s after selling a horse at Clifton.”

  “When’ll he be back?”

  “Ten or eleven, please God. He’ll fix ya. Sean’s masterful with the machinery. That’s a lovely motorcar y’ have, and it venturing all the way here from the Big City. It’s a great driver you must be.” The last two sentences were touched off by the chink of money in my pocket. He pointed down the street. “The Colooney Hotel. It’s a lovely hotel. My grand-daughter’s husband’s uncle is the manager. He has a new bar installed only this year. Will I carry your bags?”

  “But—”

  “Be easy. Sean’ll fix it in the morning. First thing, I give you my word. It’d be a desperate thing to drive on with the machinery banging at ya like an Orangeman’s drum.”

  So, willy-nilly,
I was condemned to stay the night in this seedy township. The ancient man carried my bags, and thumped on the door of the Colooney hotel. Nothing happened except the materialisation of a dozen freckled children in the road behind us. He thumped again, then raised his voice in a screeching torrent of Irish. A young girl opened the door, gave us a horrified look, and said, “Holy Mother of God, is it a room he’s wanting?”

  “What else’d the gentleman be wanting, Maeve? Stir yerself now. The best room. The one with a bath. The gentleman is destroyed with dust, making a pilgrimage all the way from the ends of the earth to visit the tomb of his ancestors. And with drouth, maybe,” he added, giving me a bleary wink. Pocketing my shilling, he tottered off—presumably to the newly-installed bar.

  Unexpectedly, the room was clean and quite comfortable. I had seen enough of small hotels on my way here to be quite inured to the atrocious Irish taste in interior decoration—I had little enough use for “taste” myself in those days. Pleasant curtains and bedspread, in a magenta-rose-figured material, clashed with an appalling acid-green carpet. Above the bed was an image of the Virgin Mary.

  I unpacked one suitcase, leaving the other locked with the notes for my novel inside, and sauntered out into the town. The children had moved down the street, and were clambering all over my car. When they saw me, they stared boldly, then scampered off as I came nearer. Unlike an English village in the mid-afternoon, Charlottestown seemed to have its whole population on show: carts trundled past, groups of men leant against the house walls, women were ducking in and out of the squalid little shops, or gossiping with one another across the street.

  One of the shops, just beyond the intersection, was a superior type—a combination of grocer, chemist and wine-merchant, with LEESON’S STORE inscribed above the window in gold letters. As I walked past it, a dark-haired man, youngish but consequential-looking, hurried out, gave me a preoccupied nod, and entered a solid grey-stone house a few doors down over the way. Pursuing this road, which ran at a right-angle to the main one, I found it petered out after a hundred yards into a stony track, with a farmhouse and one of those bleak, narrow Church of Ireland churches facing each other at the road’s end. I had noticed the Catholic church as I drove in, on the eastern edge of the town. I turned back, walked east at the cross-roads, found the post office and mailed to my mother a lurid postcard of a Connemara cottage. Back again three hundred yards, to where Charlottestown ended abruptly in the bridge, a pasture and a bog. That was the length and breadth of it, I thought; a drab village with a pretentious name. Well, if Sean was as masterful with the machinery as his cousin had said, I’d be out of the place to-morrow. I returned to the hotel, followed—so it felt—by every pair of eyes in Charlottestown: as if I was a rajah riding an elephant down Piccadilly.

  It was this sense of foreignness, isolation—of being a one-man raree show—rather than the need for a drink, which drove me into the hotel bar an hour later. The few occupants stared at me before resuming their conversation, in undertones. I ordered a double Jamieson. Presently a red-faced man bustled in.

  “Mr. Eyre? I’m sorry I was out when you came. I’m Desmond Haggerty. I hope Maeve made you welcome.”

  He pumped my hand vigorously. The manager, obviously; the petrol-pump-minder’s grand-daughter’s husband’s uncle.

  “It’s not often we get visitors so early in the season. It’s a terrible thing, having your car break down on you like that. Never mind, your misfortune is our good luck. And Sean will fix it for you, sure he will, Mr. Eyre: he’s a right fella with the machinery. What’re you drinking now?”

  “Well, I—”

  “Not a word. You’re having it with me. Padraig, another Jamieson for Mr. Eyre. The white whiskey, mind, this time. Did y’ ever try Jamieson’s white? You did not? Well now, drink it down. It’s an experience. Slainthe.”

  “Good luck, Mr. Haggerty.”

  “It’s a toilsome bloody journey all the way from Dublin, sure it is. You’d have a right to rest here a while.”

  I explained that I’d been touring round the West for a week.

  “Is that so? And it’s your first visit to these parts?”

  “Yes. But I was born in Tuam.”

  His eyes popped at me. “Were you now? I’ve a cousin is a priest there. Father Ryan. We must have a drink on it. Padraig, set them up all round.”

  He proposed my health again. The other occupants raised their glasses. They nodded at me pleasantly. Why on earth should I have felt them hostile, or suspicious? They’re shy, like animals: strangers have to be sniffed. Warmed by the whiskey, I was already gratified to be accepted into this company. An English rectory, public school, Cambridge, an intellectual’s pursuits—they set up, in me at least, a desire to cross the frontiers, to come to terms with the life of the majority, even to share it. In every highbrow there’s a Common Man screaming to get out, I thought.

  “You live in England now?” Haggerty was asking.

  “Yes. London.”

  “I was there once. A terrible noisy place.”

  “It’ll be noisier when they start bombing us.”

  “You think you’ll have a war, then?”

  “I’m quite certain we shall.”

  “Ah well, God willing, it’ll never happen,” said Haggerty in a rather perfunctory tone. “And what do you do over there, Mr. Eyre? Are you in business, maybe? Or the English Government?”

  “A sort of business. A one-man business, you could call it.” I had no wish to divulge my profession. Be anonymous.

  “A shop is it?”

  “A very closed shop,” I replied lightly.

  Haggerty gave me a look, as if something had dawned upon him; and almost instantly withdrew his eyes, as if to conceal the enlightenment. Had I been able to interpret that look, I’d have saved myself a lot of trouble in the future.

  But at that moment a woman entered the bar, and my attention was diverted.

  I have been trying to recall my first impression of her. The woman wore on her head a cross between a jockey cap and one of those perpetual-student caps, which are in vogue to-day with the young of both sexes, cherry-red in colour. My eye was switched at once to the mop of hair beneath it, cut in a long “page-boy” bob which had been fashionable in England a few years before—dark hair with a gleam of red in it. She moved with a curious, rolling gait (pigeon-toed?), swinging her arms across her body. She wore a bright green, high-necked jersey and a very short skirt, rather like a kilt, of saffron. She was the first woman I had seen in a bar in Ireland, which perhaps accounted for the withdrawal I sensed in its other occupants.

  “How are you, Desmond?” The usual Irish salutation, but not a trace of Irish in her voice, which was creamy in tone, countrified, but in a vaguely West-of-England manner.

  “I’m fine. Is himself with you?”

  “He was. Gone to the loo, I expect.”

  Again I felt that slight frisson among the other drinkers. Then a man came in, a little unsteady of gait—a large, loose, pallid man, with grizzled hair, dressed in corduroy trousers and an indescribably shabby hacking jacket. Everyone greeted him by name. At first I thought they were calling him “Florrie”: then I remembered that Florence with its diminutive “Flurry”, is not an uncommon Christian name for men in Ireland. He went into a huddle with Haggerty, who was now behind the bar. The woman sat down on a high stool near him. She gave me one quick but not shy glance, then took up the whiskey which the barman had poured for her unasked.

  I noticed the large man pass a cheque, somewhat furtively, to Haggerty and receive a few notes. He glanced at me over his shoulder and asked Haggerty a question: I seemed to hear “West Britisher” emerge in the answer—not a term of praise, I knew well enough, in Ireland.

  Though I have never suffered severely from paranoia, I had had one year of bad bullying at school and was still perhaps overquick to feel, or imagine, hostility. But at this moment, I remember, it was not so much hostility I seemed to sense as a personal isolation, like
that of a man who has walked all unwittingly into a group of conspirators—yes, the atmosphere had become, in a way I could not lay a finger on more precisely, conspiratorial: the two men muttering together at the bar, the woman ostentatiously concerned with nothing but her whiskey glass, the fellows on the red-leather benches round the wall appearing, no less ostentatiously, to avoid one another’s eyes.

  The moment passed very quickly. Haggerty and the big man came over to me.

  “Mr. Eyre, I’m sorry to have deserted you. I had a little business with Mr. Leeson. He’d like to meet you.”

  The big man took my hand, in an unexpectedly limp grasp. “Desmond tells me you’re staying in his lousy caravanserai, God help you.”

  “Ah now, Flurry,” protested the manager.

  “You must meet my wife. Harry! Forward!”

  The woman slipped off her stool—a curiously liquid and graceful movement. The hand she gave me was a small one, and I noticed the delicacy of the wrist: she gripped mine firmly. Haggerty had faded away.

  “I’m very pleased to meet you,” she said, with an absurdly artificial punctilio. Her lips were on the thin side; she had used a lot of lipstick on them, not too skilfully. Her eyes were greenish hazel. I realised, with a shock, that she was something of a beauty. I remember getting from this raffish young woman—the discontented droop of her long mouth, the eyes that were set rather too closely together—an impression of some natural force either pent up or run to waste.

  The incongruous couple sat down at my table. Flurry and Harry. Harriet, presumably.

  “Well now, tell us all about yourself.” That was Flurry, boisterous rather than inquisitive.

  “I hardly know where to start. I was born in Tuam, of God-fearing parents. At the age of three—”

  Harry laughed. Her teeth were very small and regular, very white too. She was wearing far too much of some all too pungent perfume. “Don’t pester him, Flurry. He doesn’t have to tell us the story of his life.”