The Private Wound

by Nicholas Blake

  “Don’t fence with me, young man. You’re impertinent.” His face lost its tension gradually. The beautiful voice took on a note of appeal. “Dominic. You don’t mind if I call you Dominic? Will you swear to me you haven’t”—the pale face flushed—“you’ve no carnal knowledge of—no intention of—”

  “Father, if you believe I have designs on Mrs. Leeson, you should warn her husband against me. Shouldn’t you?”

  He was silent a little. Suddenly I hated myself for these paltry evasions, and realised too how coarse I was becoming. Nostalgie de la boue. Harriet had been bringing out of me a brute I’d never realised was there. Yet even to think like this was a betrayal of her. I felt doubly ashamed.

  “It is not so easy,” Father Bresnihan muttered. “You three going about together, going to the bar over there. Do you realise, but for that the people would have drummed you out of the town weeks ago? Do you realise, they think of you as under his protection?”

  It was certainly a novel thought to me, and a disconcerting one. “But surely you aren’t afraid of Flurry? Why don’t you talk to him?”

  “Maybe I am. But I’m much more afraid for him. For his soul. And yours, Dominic.”

  I liked and respected the man so much. I felt a curious need to comfort him. But all I could say was, “I’m just thinking how utterly inconceivable this conversation would be in an English village street.”

  He smiled, but faintly. At that moment Kevin Leeson hurried out of his store. “There’s an urgent message for you, Father. Come to my telephone.”

  As I drove off, two lines of verse slid into my mind—

  There’s a witness, an eye,

  Nor will charms blind that eye …

  If the Garda did make any investigation, nothing came of it. For a week or so, things went on very much as before. In the evenings, I was often at the Colooney bar with Harriet and Flurry. I don’t know whether Father Bresnihan had exaggerated in the heat of the moment, but I was certainly not aware of any hostility on the part of the Charlottestown people. It was an unpalatable thing to think of the man I was cuckolding as my protector: but by this time any sense of decency, any compunction I might have had, were swept away by my passion for Harriet. To the Charlottestown folk, Flurry—I began to see it—was a kind of mascot: a reminder of the great days, with the renown of his past deeds still thick about him. I could only look upon him as a ruin, a mouldering folly on some estate, its reason for existence gone. I could not dislike him, for he had the brash, hearty charm of many Irishmen, but I could not take him seriously. I remember once, when Harriet and I were ragging about in the drawing-room at Lissawn, Flurry encouraging me to put her across my knee and give her a good welting—how it struck me that we were like two mice playing with impunity in front of an old, paralysed grey cat.

  I do not expect this sort of thing to commend itself to the reader. I am trying to tell the truth about this extraordinary relationship, so far as I can get at it across the long stretch of time. It had become clear to me by now that this ashen-faced, lumbering man was either impotent or largely exhausted by his wife’s demands. And this led me into a deep-seated contempt for him—the contempt of a young animal for an old one which has lost its power. I had never tried to get to know him any better: what was there to know in this empty husk? And that, as it turned out, was a great mistake.

  Harriet and I became more and more unguarded in our behaviour. I remember thinking—it is the nastiest point of my confession—that in our outrageousness lay our safety: Flurry could not possibly suspect us when we were so open in front of him—when we played so innocently before his eyes.

  She herself did have certain compunctions. Though Flurry was away from time to time, only once did Harriet let me make love to her in Lissawn House. Flurry was in Dublin that night, and Harry a bit drunk. It was raining lightly: we could not go out to our usual place. She took me up to their bedroom—it was the first time I had seen it. That is the night of which I have the most vivid picture: the picture of Harriet standing naked by the window—the hour-glass figure shining in the moonlight, the groove of her spine, the dark, dark red gleam of her hair; and the river talking in its sleep below.

  Oh, that was a famous night. How many times we made love, I daren’t think. “Hurt me!” she kept crying. I drove my fingers into her body, punched it, pulled her head back by the hair over the side of the bed. She bit me viciously like a fox. She exulted in it all. When we were both exhausted, she whispered, “I feel like a cat that’s had a saucer of cream”; and then, “I’ll be black and blue to-morrow. I bruise so easily.” I remembered that, as I walked back to the cottage at dawn, in a daze and feeling as if the marrow had been drained out of my bones.

  Those bruises she showed me at our first picnic. She said Flurry had been knocking her about. But perhaps they were love-bruises. Flurry’s. Flurry’s? Some other man’s then. So Harry was a liar. All right, Harry’s a liar: what do I care? …

  One evening at the end of June, having some shopping to do in Charlottestown, I looked in at Kevin’s house to give him a cheque for my rent. Maire Leeson received me, told me her husband would soon be back, apologised—too profusely—for looking so dishevelled: she’d just finished baking. She took me into the chilly drawing-room, pressed me to have tea or a glass of sherry. I chose the latter. She bustled out, returning with a decanter of what proved to be the same sherry as I had drunk with Father Bresnihan. She asked me how my book was getting on. In fact it had recently got stuck: in the turmoil of my affair with Harriet, my characters had become more and more unreal, uncompulsive.

  I told Maire the novel was not going so well. She asked a number of intelligent questions, and I found myself liking her and enjoying the discussion. I became aware how much I’d been unconsciously missing this kind of civilised talk the last two months: Harriet and Flurry never mentioned literature, and never evinced the slightest interest in my own books. Nor was Maire nearly so straitlaced as I had supposed. We got on to Emma Bovary, for instance, and she talked about it first from a literary not a moral point of view. But then she began comparing the situation of Emma in the provincial France of her day with that of a hypothetical equivalent in provincial Ireland now. Was she trying out the ground? Was I being manipulated?

  After several glasses of sherry, I felt the qualms of a mild summer diarrhoea I’d been suffering from. I asked Maire if I could go to the lavatory (I almost put up my hand, so school-mistressy did she appear.) Maire blushed, led me through Kevin’s study to a door leading out of it, said she must go up and put the younger children to bed. Would I come back to the drawing-room? Kevin was expected any moment.

  I had only just sat down when I heard the study door open. Two people entered. I heard Kevin’s voice and one I did not recognise. It was slightly embarrassing, the idea of emerging from the loo into a business conference. Kevin and the other man, just audible through the thin deal door, were talking mostly in Irish, but now and then they broke into English.

  “Force is no good at all,” the other man said. “You’d be wasting your time. You should contact—” and then a name I could not catch.

  I pulled the plug. When I went out into the study, only Kevin was there. I apologised for the intrusion: Maire had shown me into his lavatory.

  “I certainly didn’t mean to overhear—”

  Kevin looked at me in a measuring way. “Overhear?” He had suddenly grown rather formidable.

  “—your business discussion. Anyway, no harm’s done. I don’t understand Irish.”

  “You don’t?” he asked neutrally. “Of course you don’t. Why should you?”

  When I’m nervous, I tend to babble. “I quite agree about the use of force, though. I’m against it.”

  “Are you now?” Kevin’s curiously opaque expression changed. “Well, no harm done at all, as you say. C’mon in and have another drink. Maire’ll look after you till I come back. I just have to pop out and see a fella for a minute or two. You’ll have supper with us. No
, I’ll take no denying.”

  He led me back to the drawing-room. Maire had put the children to bed and was writing a letter.

  “Give Mr. Eyre a drink, dear. I’ll be back in two shakes. Then we can have supper, and maybe a song or two.”

  It turned out, after my little contretemps, a very pleasant evening. Kevin had a useful baritone voice, and I sang a few songs myself, ending up with “Oft in the stilly night” I made rather a hash of this; the whiskey Kevin had plied me with made it difficult to phrase properly that deceptively simple, long-breathed song.

  There was something very endearing about Irish hospitality, I thought as I drove back, a little muzzy, to the cottage: spontaneous, take-us-as-you-find-us, yet with an agreeable touch of the ceremonious too—a sense of breaking bread with friends.

  I left the car on the patch of grass beside the cottage. I flung open the door and entered. There was a disturbance in the air behind me. The next instant I felt a dreadful blow. My head seemed to burst open, then everything disintegrated.

  Chapter 6

  I became aware of an intense pain, as if a creature inside my head was trying to batter its way out. I tried to put up my hands and contain it or let it out: but my hands would not move. Somewhere in the background there was another pulsing noise, its beat desynchronised with the beating in my head.

  To move my head caused me agony as if jagged lightning struck through it, so for some time I stayed quite still. I must have a monstrous hangover. But then, assembling my mind piece by piece I put together its last experience—the evening at Kevin Leeson’s, the return to my cottage, the blow.

  How long all this took, I do not know. But at last I got my eyes open and with difficulty focused them on the nearest object. It was leather. I was slumped on the back seat of a car, which presently proved to be my own car. A wave of nausea engulfed me, and I wanted to vomit. This made me aware that my mouth was stopped—by some kind of gag. I recollected cases of people suffocating in their own vomit, and kept still again, trying to control my heaving stomach.

  After a while it was better. My eyes began exploring again, out to the steering wheel, the instrument board, the windscreen, and then beyond it. Like a baby, I had to compose the sense-data of my world into a coherent picture.

  Sand, rooks, waves, a sky lightening with dawn. The picture seemed familiar. It was. Piecing it all laboriously together, I discovered that I was on the back seat of my car, and the car was stationary on the strand where Harriet and I had had our first picnic. The day was breaking, the de-synchronised pulsing I had heard in my head was the sound of waves thumping on the strand. My hands were tied behind my back.

  For a time I sat, content to know myself alive. Someone had clobbered me the night before, put me in my car and driven me out here. Why? Why this elaborate set-up? If murder had been intended, surely there were more effectual methods than dumping me on a strand where, lonely though it was, someone would sooner or later see the car and investigate? My assailant could not have thought his blow had killed me, or he would not have taken the trouble to gag me and tie my hands.

  A warning, then? The third warning to “lay off it”? I felt again the disagreeable lurch of the heart which comes from realising that one is a target for some anonymous hostility.

  It took a little time, in my muzzy condition, before I discovered that this slight lurching movement was not subjective at all. The car itself was moving, now and then, settling down little by little into the sand. Each time the relationship between its windscreen and the line of breakers beyond was subtly altered. And now I realised that the car had been dumped in that shallow concavity on the strand which I had been warned against. If it is quicksand, I thought stupidly, it’s very slow quicksand.

  But soon I noticed that the sea-line had come appreciably nearer. The tide was making. In half an hour, perhaps, it would pour into the depression. This might, for all I knew, stimulate the sluggish quicksand into greater activity. Or the sea might enter the car—yes, the window beside me was half open—and drown me without waiting for help from the treacherous sand.

  “The cruel, crawling, hungry foam.” I watched the line of breakers, hypnotised.

  What goes on in one’s mind when one watches the visible, ineluctable approach of death? I remember nothing but a suffocating panic. In stories, the prospective victim always finds some sharp edge on which he can saw through the rope that binds his hands behind him. I threshed about on the back seat, out of my mind with terror, but no sharp edge presented itself in the well-padded interior. I fought to loosen the grip of the rope on my hands, but there was no give in it. I managed to crawl over the front seat (the car had only two doors) and get my fingers on the handles; both doors were locked. I tried to chew through the plaster which clamped my mouth shut. Hopeless. I levered myself back on to the rear-seat. All I could do was to scream silently inside myself.

  The car lurched and settled again. The sea was moving in faster to the kill—only fifty yards away now. It lay between me and the little grassy cliff out there where Harriet and I had first kissed. My mouth was sore; tears were rolling down my cheeks.

  Desperately I fought myself—to accept what was coming, to die like a human being, not like a trapped beast: to die—not with dignity, that would be impossible—but at least with a little courage. I ought to make my peace with God, whatever that might mean. But I had no courage left, and composure was beyond me. All I could manage was a kind of fatalism, which quietened me a little as I watched the approaching waves.

  So intensely were my eyes riveted to them that I did not at first take in the voice which was hailing me.

  “Is there anyone there?”

  I looked to my left. A black figure was running clumsily across the strand. When he got nearer, I saw it was Father Bresnihan. I leant my head towards the half-open window, nodding frantically at him. He came to the edge of the depression, recognised me, made a reassuring gesture, then moved towards me across the innocent face of the sand. I could see his feet sinking in at each step, but he got through to the car. Its running board must have been level with the sand now. He stood on it, tried the door, then leant in at the back and wound the window full open.

  “It’s all right, Dominic. I’ll have you out in a minute.”

  Somehow he got his hands under my arms and with a tremendous effort of hoisting and pulling, dragged me out through the window. His strength was amazing. I fell flat on my face at his feet.

  “Get up!” he cried urgently. “Can you walk?”

  I discovered I could. My legs had not been tied. Supported by the Father, I dragged my way through the yielding sand on to firmer ground. There, taking a sizeable penknife from his pocket he sawed through the rope which bound my hands.

  “Your wrists’ll hurt a bit,” he said, chafing them hard to restore the circulation. Then, with a decisive movement, he tore the plaster from off my mouth. I tried to mumble my thanks.

  “Not a word. By the mercy of God, I saw you in time. C’mon, the strand’ll soon be covered. My car’s at the bottom of the lane. Can you walk that far?”

  “Someone hit me on the head last night, and—”

  “That can wait. C’mon now.” Father Bresnihan pocketed his penknife, and carrying the severed rope, helped me to the landward edge of the strand. We forded the river there, and got into the car. He drove off straight away. On the way back to Charlottestown, he told me that he’d been up all night in a cottage on the hillside, comforting the widow of the man whose funeral cortège I had seen: she was now mortally ill herself.

  I tried again to express my thanks. Extreme peril, if one survives it, makes one babble. Father Bresnihan cut me short. “It was providential, as you say.” He looked at me sidelong. “I hope you’ll profit by it. Providence may not give you another chance, Dominic.” Well, he had every right to moralise. “I’ll stop at Sean’s garage to see if he can do anything about your car. A team of horses might drag it out yet, after the tide’s gone down. That bit isn’t
the true quicksand, or you’d not be here now.”

  I thought the Father might improve the hour by reference to spiritual quicksands, but he forbore.

  He put me to bed in his own house. After the doctor had examined my head, and told me I would live, I sank into a deep sleep. I must have slept round the clock; the next thing I knew was Kathleen, the housekeeper, waking me with a breakfast tray. “It’s a soft day, Mr. Eyre. I hope you’re feeling better now. The Father says will you get up by midday if you’re able for it. The Garda Siocthana’d like to be having a word with you.…”

  A soft day it was, but only climatically. When I walked into the little garden at the back to try out my legs—they appeared to be in working order—I felt the fine Irish rain, which always seems to have been poured through holes, infinitesimal in diameter, of the rose of a celestial watering can; threads of rain, all but invisible, which alight on one’s face with the touch of spider-web filaments.

  I came in soon. A pot of coffee awaited me in the study. I had not finished my cup when Father Bresnihan entered, a man in a suit of green thorn-proof tweed behind him, and made the introductions. It was my first meeting with Superintendent Concannon. He had a square-ish head, a pale and rather ascetic face (he might well have been an intellectual, a Maynooth-bred priest or professor, I thought), and a manner almost deferential.

  After a few civilities, he told me they’d managed to get my car hauled out of the sand yesterday. It had been thoroughly examined, and Sean was now at work on it, to try and make it serviceable again.

  “I take it you found no fingerprints.”

  “There’s quite a few, on the parts the sea didn’t cover. You had a narrow escape, Mr. Eyre.”

  I noticed Concannon’s habit of tilting his voice up at the end of a sentence, giving to a statement the effect of a half-concealed question.

  “You’ve had trouble before, the Father tells me. Did you inform the police?”

  “Yes. After the last episode, I had a talk with the sergeant here. He doesn’t seem to have got anywhere though.”