Civil & Strange

by Clair Ni Aonghusa

  “What?” His occasional lapses into innuendo puzzle her. Still, the parries are delivered and withdrawn with the quickness of a blade attack. She thinks he does it for effect. Regardless, she won’t be deflected from what she has to say. “You’re the only one who made me feel welcome, Eddie. Thanks for all the support. The rest of the staff couldn’t muster an identity between them. I’ve never come across such an unresponsive bunch. The atmosphere in the school would scald anyone’s heart. I won’t be pining after them.”

  “Lots of staff all over the country are like that. I’ve never quite understood it myself. Individually most of them are fine people — some couldn’t teach to save their lives, but that’s something you either have or don’t have — but as a group they’re poison. They never rise to anything. There are about two or three of them — if you’d stayed you’d have discovered whom — with some spark. The rest set just like cement.”

  “Maybe they’re the ones who have got it right. Perhaps the only way of going about teaching is to dampen yourself down so that hardly anybody notices you.”

  “I suppose that means you aren’t interested in part-time work next term?”

  She laughs. “After everything that happened? How could I?”

  She offers him another drink but he declines. “I’d better go soon.”

  “Well, I’ll miss you, Eddie,” she says.

  He looks at her in a strange way. “You never gave me any encouragement, Ellen.”

  Again that play on words, that duality. How does one react to such a declaration? “I wanted that transfer, really did want it. I’m even more certain of that since the drama with my mother. But that didn’t mean I wanted the job beyond anything else.”

  He shakes his head. “You didn’t hear me. I said you never —”

  “That’s what I thought you said.” She forces herself to look him straight in the eye. “Look, I don’t know where this is coming from.”

  “From where these things always come. How do you reckon you got so much of my attention?”

  Her impulse is to run away, but there’s no running away. “I’m amazed,” she says. “I thought with you being married and me so involved —”

  “Word is that you and Eugene O’Brien split up.”

  For a moment, she’s so enraged by the efficiency of the local rumor network that she finds it difficult to speak. “You shouldn’t believe all the tittle-tattle you hear, Eddie. You know how inaccurate these stories are. Eugene is the only man I’m interested in.” Her words ebb away. A horrible thickening silence lies between them. He finishes his drink.

  “See how I’ve turned this around,” he says quietly.

  “What?”

  “Had you going there, didn’t I? You were in a pickle.”

  “What are you playing at, Eddie?”

  “Little games. I like games. Ambiguities. Word games. Psychological dilemmas. It’s my hobby.” He smiles quite a malicious smile.

  “Tell me, how would you have reacted if I’d been — I don’t know — flattered — suggestible or susceptible?”

  He puts down his glass and stands up. “Aha,” he says. “There’s the mystery.” He watches her with those oblique eyes and impassive face, his famous inscrutability in place again, that is, if it ever slipped.

  “I’ll never know what to think of you now,” she says at the door.

  “There you have it,” he says brusquely. “Let’s leave it.”

  When he’s gone, she pours herself another whiskey and adds just a little water. Did she unwittingly send out signals? Was he joking, or trying it on? Or did the exchange between them reveal something ominous about him? Would he have proved an arch manipulator, even a bully, if she had ended up working with him?

  Ellen pauses on the top step of the old Protestant graveyard wall, admiring the view of the mountains. It’s July, a warm day, but she has an ache like a stitch in her side. Her walks have become a kind of penance for her, no longer enjoyable because she is miserable, but essential as a means of escaping Kitty’s continued presence in her house. Wincing, she takes the steps and reaches the ground, then stretches up and down in an attempt to dislodge the pain in her side. This gives some relief and she walks toward the bridge, stopping to watch the water surging over a natural weir where salmon return every year. Sometimes she comes across fishermen on the bridge or the banks of the river, but today the place is deserted. The village is over a mile away. At her present rate of progress, it will take hours to reach home.

  When, finally, she makes it to her gate she notices Matt’s car parked on the grass verge that skirts the laneway beside her house. She walks around to the back. As expected, Matt and Kitty are sitting at the kitchen table.

  “We thought we’d have to send out search parties,” Kitty says.

  “I got a dreadful pain in my side.”

  “I’d have picked you up if you rang.”

  “I dropped in to say goodbye,” Matt says. Of late, he has changed his hairstyle and updated his clothes, something Kitty puts down to the influence of Úna, his daughter-in-law.

  “Goodbye? Where are you going?” Matt never goes anywhere.

  “I’m off tomorrow to London for a week. It’s the first time I’ve used the relief scheme for the farm since Colum’s wedding.”

  “And he’s spending a week in Rome in October,” volunteers Kitty.

  “Kitty was suggesting Tuscany, and it looks great in photos, but it’s the eternal city I’m after. I want to see it in the flesh.”

  “God, you’re getting very grand.”

  “Jealousy will get you nowhere, Ellen,” Matt says with a smile. “I don’t know why you haven’t taken off somewhere.”

  “My situation, I expect,” Kitty says. “She’s had her hands full with me.”

  “It must be six or seven weeks, more, since your spell in hospital. When is it you’re going back?” Matt asks, winking at Ellen.

  “Sunday morning. It’s nearly the only time that the roads aren’t packed with traffic.”

  “You’ll fly it. Where’s Eugene, Ellen? Is he on holidays?”

  “He’s in Portugal.”

  “I wonder you didn’t go with him.”

  Ellen swallows hard. Most likely, Matt would be pleased to hear that she hasn’t seen Eugene in a while, and Kitty must suspect the truth, but she can’t bring herself to tell either of them that it’s probably all over with Eugene.

  “He called to visit me a few times,” Kitty says, “but we don’t see that much of him, do we, Ellen?”

  “Well, he’s away at the moment.”

  Matt finishes his cup of coffee and stands up. “That’s it, I’m off. Have to pack up my bits and pieces. Hope you’re doing all the necessary to keep the medics happy, Kitty.”

  “I was doing most of it before my troubles,” Kitty says sharply.

  “No problem then. You know the ropes.”

  “I’ll see you to the gate,” Ellen says.

  “You’ve been putting in long stints with Kitty,” he says when they reach his car.

  “Under the circumstances, and all that.”

  “She’s well ready to be launched now.” He scrutinizes her face. “Everything all right, Ellen?”

  “I’ll be fine once I have the place to myself again. I could do with peace and quiet.”

  “I expect Kitty’s pretty high maintenance.”

  “She has a low boredom threshold. It’s all a bit frantic for me.”

  “Your father used to find her a full-time job. She was always — how to put it? — attention-seeking.” He winks. “She’ll be gone soon. I’ll send you a card from London.”

  “You do that,” she says, waves goodbye, and walks back across the gravel to the open front door.

  Kitty is at the sink washing up. “Matt’s much improved from years ago,” she says. “Of course, when we first knew each other it wasn’t under ideal circumstances.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Neither he nor Julia came to
our wedding, and Julia banned Brendan and me from the house. Your father was the renegade priest and I was the wanton hussy who’d tempted him away from God. It didn’t matter that I met him after he’d left the priesthood.”

  “I remember going to the farm with Dad.”

  “Visits were allowed after a while. I refused to cross the threshold for ages, and we never stayed over. Matt and Brendan had to meet surreptitiously. Your dad would send Matt tickets for a game in Croke Park and they’d go together, or they’d meet up at a hurling match in Thurles. Matt stayed with us once or twice, but it was all hush-hush. Julia mellowed a bit when you arrived on the scene.”

  “Is that why you’re not keen on visiting here?”

  “One of the reasons. I was only twenty-four when you were born, and I was a widow at thirty-three. My parents were dead by that stage, but Julia wouldn’t let Matt invite you down for a holiday. I’d have been lost if Brendan’s cousins hadn’t helped out because I never had enough money to take us on holidays.”

  “No wonder you didn’t want to come down for Julia’s funeral!”

  “I didn’t mind that too much. She and Matt turned up at Brendan’s, and Matt contributed to the cost of the funeral and head-stone. I was very grateful.”

  “Did Dad and Matt get on?”

  Kitty looks to be giving the matter some thought. “They were very different. Matt was more reserved, diffident, more cowed by their mother, I suppose. It was the same when he married Julia. He wasn’t wearing the trousers.”

  “But he bested her a few times,” Ellen says, remembering what Stephen had told her.

  “So you won’t come up with me on Sunday?”

  “No. I’ve a lot of catching up to do here.”

  Kitty throws her a speculative look. “I hate to be a party pooper, darling, but I have to say what’s on my mind,” she says.

  Something in Ellen’s chest dips. She knows what’s coming, but takes a leaf out of Beatrice’s book and says nothing.

  “I know you won’t like it, but I’m going to call things as I see them, sweetheart.” Kitty’s overuse of endearments is always a prequel to one of her self-serving pronouncements. Ellen sits at the table. “Are you listening, Ellen?” she asks sharply.

  “I’m listening.”

  Kitty sits facing her. “It’s hard to know with you. Hear me out, anyway. You’re going to have to face facts. In the first place, coming to live in Ballindoon was a half-baked idea. Your natural setting is Dublin. You’ll never get a job in any school here now. And — don’t bite my head off — the business with Eugene is finished, isn’t it? Amn’t I right?”

  “Go on,” Ellen says resignedly.

  “Haven’t I guessed right?”

  Ellen nods. “We’re going through a bad patch just now.”

  “It’s over.”

  Ellen smiles and shrugs. “Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know, Kitty.”

  “We’ll take it that it is. There’s no reason for you to be here now. Come back to your native city. It’s easier to pick up work there for one thing. Sell this place — you’ll make something on it — and then —”

  “I know what you’re going to say.”

  “If we pool our resources and buy a bigger place, we don’t have to live in each other’s pockets. You put money aside, didn’t you? That’s just devaluing with low interest rates. It makes more sense to invest in property.”

  “Some of it is in that government savings scheme, but that’s neither here nor there.”

  “The big adventure didn’t work out, Ellen. You have to see that.”

  Ellen pushes back her chair to stand up and makes for the kettle. “I’m going to brew some coffee,” she announces. She spoons coffee into a pot, pours hot water over it, and dips the plunger.

  “Well?” Kitty asks. “Really, you’re most infuriating, Ellen. You haven’t answered.”

  “Are you and Christy still close?” Ellen asks tiredly. “That’s not on, you know. It’s almost two years since the separation.”

  “It can’t be that long! But, of course, you’re here the best part of a year. Anyway, forget Christy!” Kitty says with unusual vehemence. “He never once came to see me even though he knew I was sick. He’s a fair-weather friend.”

  Ellen can’t but laugh. “The scales have finally fallen from your eyes,” she says. She leans back against the worktop and sips her coffee. The stitch in her side is back. A band of pain is indenting her brow, and it feels as if there’s too much pressure on her neck. Suddenly she thumps the mug down on the counter. “I can’t do this,” she says.

  “But, but — what?” Kitty asks, bewildered.

  “I have a thumping headache. I’ll burst if I don’t get out of here!” Ellen grabs keys and runs out to her car. She’s almost worried that Kitty will follow, but there’s no sign of her. She reverses, narrowly missing Kitty’s car, and drives out from the laneway. A car nearly collides with hers, and the motorist hoots as she shoots out onto the main street. She’s so full of pains and sensations that she’s half afraid that she’s in danger of suffering a heart attack.

  She drives about in a daze, not terribly sure in which direction she’s going, until she finds herself back outside the old Protestant graveyard. She parks the car, gets out, walks about, and kicks a few pebbles onto the road. The things she finds attractive about the location — its quaintness, English names that are no longer current in the locality on early tombstones, the strange inscriptions, the preponderance of Irish names on twentieth-century gravestones right up to the closing down of the graveyard in the 1940s, and the eerily beautiful setting — serve only to heighten her sense of being at a remove from everything and without a purpose.

  What had she been thinking when she turned Eugene down? Why did she hesitate? How come she got it so wrong? All her dillydallying. It was insulting to him. Christy failed her but it doesn’t follow that Eugene would let her down. All this trying to determine whether people have the natural prerequisites for a role is nonsense. She sees that now. It’s clear that the madness was in rejecting the arrangement suggested by Eugene. She should have gone with that.

  She paces up and down before the wall in front of the graveyard and doesn’t notice a car slow down and stop.

  “Ellen, are you all right?” she hears. It’s Beatrice, her engine running, her driver’s window down.

  “Oh, Beatrice,” wails Ellen.

  Beatrice stops the engine. “I happened to see you when I was passing. Sit in. You look too agitated to be wandering about on your own.”

  “I’m so miserable, Beatrice,” she says when she gets into the car, shivering despite the heat of the day. “How are you?”

  “Not a bother, as it happens. But what’s the matter with you?”

  Ellen pinches the bridge of her nose with the thumb and index finger of her right hand. She looks to be praying or lost in contemplation.

  “Is it Eugene? Is it your mother? What is it?” persists Beatrice.

  “It’s everything, Beatrice.”

  “There’s a rumor doing the rounds that Eugene finished with you. I didn’t dare ask.”

  “A rumor, eh?” Despite her best efforts, Ellen smiles. “As usual, they got it wrong. I finished with him.”

  “You, Ellen. But why?”

  “He asked me to move in with him.” The silence from Beatrice is unnerving, forcing Ellen to take away her hand and open her eyes. “Did you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think?”

  Beatrice clears her throat. “I think I need more information.”

  So Ellen fills her in. “For the first time in my life I’m independent, Beatrice. Eugene happened too quickly. You can’t jump from one man to another. I haven’t had time to enjoy my freedom.”

  “It’s a scheduling problem, is it?”

  “What?”

  “He put pressure on you at the wrong time?”

  “The timing wasn’t good.”

  “And you don’t want to l
ive with him?”

  “I do but not in his house! And I know he needs his workshop.”

  “So it’s geography.”

  “That makes it sound trite. I don’t know if I can be myself if I’m living with him.”

  Beatrice shrugs. “Who are you going to turn into? Would Eugene make you compromise yourself?”

  “No, he wouldn’t. Anyway, it’s academic now, Beatrice. I’d better go home to Kitty. She’s going back on Sunday.”

  “When she’s gone, call up and see me. Don’t get into a rut now,” Beatrice says as Ellen gets out of the car.

  “What do you mean ‘don’t get into a rut’? I’m in one.”

  “You can’t manage life, Ellen. It manages you.”

  “Well, I can try!” Ellen says defiantly. The minute Beatrice has gone she sits back into her car. More than an hour passes before she starts the engine.

  She bypasses her house and heads off — where else but in the direction of Eugene’s place? — and drives into his deserted yard. She jumps out and runs to the side of the house to take in the view. A wind pummels her hair and T-shirt but the air is balmy. She walks around his house looking in through the windows. It’s probably her last opportunity to take a look at what she turned down. She feels physically ill as she takes it all in.

  She notices that she has left the driver door wide open and goes back to close it. Suddenly, Eugene drives his jeep into the yard. She had been so engrossed that she missed the sound of its engine. She stands between the door and seat of her own car, transfixed with embarrassment. He gets out and strolls toward her, and she decides to sit into the car.

  “Ellen?” He’s tanned from his holiday.

  “I thought you were in Portugal,” she stammers.

  “I’m back since yesterday.” He has a quizzical expression on his face.

  “Mum is going home on Sunday. I wasn’t sure — I was going to leave you a note, in case you were about and wanted to say goodbye.”

  “Come in. Have a cup of something.”

  She shakes her head. “I won’t. I’m not feeling so hectic.” It really does feel as if her throat is closing up. “Anyway, if you want — you know — to make your farewells to Kitty.”